Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! I hope you’re rested and refreshed from the weekend and ready to face the news cycle. Your roundup includes: Kennedy loses a vaccine lawsuit and somehow wins flu season, as the pediatricians who sued to freeze the CDC’s shot committee discover they’ve frozen their own recommendations; the Wall Street Journal gets handed an exclusive about Chinese satellites helping Iran kill three Americans in Jordan, and we consult the orbital calendar to see what happened to one of those satellites a few days later; and David Petraeus takes a luxury train home from a billionaire’s influence conference in Kiev and learns what “under fire” means to the people on the next track over.
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Like many Americans, you have probably been waiting impatiently, if not obsessively, to find out which types of vaccines will be marketed —sorry, I mean recommended— for your shoulder this year. Good news. Tired of waiting for the CDC to get around to it, a group of progressive medical groups bravely banded together to evaluate shot safety themselves. For public health. You will never believe what they concluded. The New York Times reported it two weeks ago: “Medical Groups Issue Guidance on Covid, Flu and R.S.V. Shots”
The vaccine-industrial complex faces a problem of its own making. It now sells three different annual shots to gullible seniors, medical fetishists, and human pincusions: influenza (including Moderna’s brand-new mRNA version mFLUSIVA), Covid, and RSV. Pharma usually relies on the government (via CDC) to just tell customers to consume product.
That guidance used to come from a “safety and efficacy” review committee with the acronym ACIP, which ran the annual safety review. It was kind of like a six-armed rubber-stamping machine, and most resembled a carnival puppet show everyone had already seen twice that morning.
But after Secretary Kennedy’s HHS appointed certain people to the ACIP committee who were not members of the Great Big Vaccine Club —people who might ask awkward questions like why did all the rats die?— the establishment went a little overboard with their lawsuits. They were a little too successful.
They got a judge to bar the ACIP from meeting at all. Federal judge Brian Murphy found Kennedy’s scientists lacked the judge’s preferred credentials. He said no more meetings until the CDC’s committee was repopulated with Vaccine Club Members, as it should be. (You see, the CDC committee must be independent from the President and the rest of the executive branch, but not independent from the judicial branch. But I digress.)
Oh, how pharma and Democrats laughed and laughed. They won one! On vaccines! Kennedy, they crowed, was stymied. He would have no choice but to cave and install new pharma-approved memb… oh. Secretary Kennedy did not cave. He did not install new, pharma-approved ACIP members. He simply did… nothing.
He just waited, till annual vaccine time came and went.
In other words, the Democrats shot right past a judicial victory and crashed into a prickly briar patch. They thought Kennedy would be crying himself to sleep since the ACIP couldn’t meet. But Kennedy slept like a baby. Thanks to Democrats, they —not Republicans— became responsible for no vaccine recommendations going out this year. (Technically, CDC airily said just go with last year’s flu shot, which of course, is neither updated for this year’s “strain” nor the new mRNA tech. CDC did not issue any Covid or RSV guidance.)
The lab coats tried to punch Kennedy, whiffed, and pulled back a fist holding a political hand grenade with a pulled pin. No mRNA-flu-shot recommendation. Ruh roh.
💉 Well, you didn’t think they’d give up that easily, did you? Lacking an official one, Big Vaccine formed its own ACIP. It has lots of Vaccine Club members, I guess, like the AMA, AAP, and other three-lettered progressive medical groups. (It’s funded by a Walmart fortune heiress.) Laughably, they named their amorphous group the “Vaccine Integrity Project,” and are running it out of —where else?— the University of Minnesota, a state that is now the punchline to every joke about Somali welfare fraud.
This is going to shock you. The Integrity Project carefully reviewed all the scientific literature, deliberated for several minutes, and approved every single vaccine for almost every age and demographic. Whee! Traditional flu vaccine? Check. mRNA version? Check again. RSV and Covid? Absolutely. 6-month-old infants? Check. Pregnant women? Check and double-check. Team Integrity even approved a new RSV monoclonal antibody for newborns under 6 months. Everybody gets one!
There were only two limits. The brand-new mRNA flu vaccine is recommended only for people 50 and up, and Covid mRNA shots for kids over two with “underlying conditions.”
💉 The Times failed to point out the main problem with this creative workaround: insurers aren’t required to cover shots approved by a brand-new group with a murky membership roster, even if it does have the word “Integrity” right in its title. Obamacare, for example, ties reimbursements to shots approved by the ACIP, not by the Quality Learing Center of Utmost Integrity.
Behold the very first comment from the article’s comments section, from an 81-year-old retired doctor who actually wants the mRNA flu shot. But he can’t get it anywhere he looks. Sad!
This is encouraging. If true, it sounds like the big chains aren’t even going to bother with Moderna’s new flu shot. Even better, only three people ‘liked’ his post. Another commenter said they did find the mRNA jab, but their pharmacy wanted $270 for it, which was too much to pay for safety.
The ACIP might be judicially enjoined, but I’m giving Kennedy the win on this one. Message: be careful what you ask a progressive judge for.
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That’s a nice spy satellite you have there. It would be a shame if anything happened to it. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Exclusive - U.S. Links Chinese Satellite Imagery to Iranian Strike That Killed Three Troops”
According to ‘U.S. officials’ cited by the Wall Street Journal’s exclusive report, Iran acquired high-resolution images from unnamed Chinese entities before Iran’s July 17th missile strike on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. The missiles hit housing where American troops were sleeping, wounding four soldiers and killing 1st Lt. Tyler Feehan, Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, and Sgt. Angel Rampersad.
Within three days, Iran giddily published remarkably detailed pictures of the damage. This was thoughtful of them, since otherwise American officials might have been forced to wonder whether the twenty-plus damaged buildings had always looked that way.
The unnamed U.S. officials did not identify the allegedly involved Chinese entities, did not accuse Beijing of direct participation, and did not publicly release their evidence. China’s embassy responded by demanding proof and accusing critics of “maliciously linking and smearing other countries.” In diplomatic language, this means: How dare you accuse us of the thing you have not yet proved we did.
Washington had already sanctioned three Chinese satellite companies in May for allegedly making imagery available to Iran. After the deadly July attack, senior American officials raised the new imagery findings directly with Chinese counterparts, although the reporting does not say exactly when that conversation occurred. Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi only days after the strike. When asked afterward whether China had supplied targeting intelligence, Rubio carefully said only that “nothing China did altered in any way the course of the conflict.”
Please notice that this was not the same as saying China did nothing. It was the diplomatic equivalent of your teenager saying the mysterious dent in the Tahoe did not materially alter its highway performance.
So far, this is a grim and tragic espionage story. But then space entered the chat. Let’s connect some dots.
🚀 Just under a week ago, on September 8th, Gizmodo dramatically reported, “Chinese Satellite Breaks Apart in Rare Orbit That Could Hold Debris for Centuries.” China’s six-month-old Yaogan-50 ‘reconnaissance’ satellite had experienced what aerospace professionals call an “anomalous event,” which is a technical phrase meaning the expensive spacecraft is now a large collection of much smaller and less expensive objects.
The U.S. Space Force cataloged at least 43 pieces of the former satellite on September 4th. But that was when the debris was cataloged, not necessarily when Yaogan-50 came down with its acute case of spontaneous disassembly. An independent spacecraft monitoring website, Gunter’s Space Page, placed the Yaogan-50’s breakup around late July and counted at least 47 detected fragments.
Get that? Late July. Coincidentally, on July 20th, President Trump tweeted, “Every time Iran kills an American Soldier they will pay for that killing many times over!”
Let’s consult the official international-diplomacy calendar. On July 17th, an Iranian missile attack —allegedly assisted by Chinese-sourced imagery— killed three Americans. Within three days, Iran published detailed post-strike satellite photographs. Days after the attack, Rubio met Wang and was publicly asked about Chinese targeting help. Senior U.S. officials confronted Chinese counterparts at some point. On July 20, Trump promised revenge. And around late July —days following the base strike— a Chinese military spy satellite in an exotic retrograde orbit abruptly became 47 commemorative diplomatic paperweights traveling several miles per second.
To be fair, there is no proof that the United States transformed Yaogan-50 into Yaogan-1-through-47. Nor would there be. That’s the whole point.
🚀 This is not a slip-and-fall-in-Walmart lawsuit. Spooks don’t send preservation letters. Nobody produces the orbital equivalent of Ring-camera footage. In this kind of diplomacy, both governments need room to deny everything —China so it does not have to retaliate, America so China does not have to retaliate, and everybody else so the United Nations can hold a sternly worded meeting about responsible management of space debris without mentioning any particular space behavior.
The message only works when the recipient understands it perfectly and the public cannot prove it. The diplomatic translation is: You made your point. Remember all those midwestern chicken farms and oil refineries that kept mysteriously catching fire during the Biden Administration while we were helping Ukraine target Russia’s oil refineries? It’s like that.
But in this story, we have more dots to connect than we did during the Autopen years, which were mostly a matter of timing. This time, we have a July 17th Iranian strike that killed three Americans using Chinese-sourced imagery, a formal protest, and a mysteriously fragmented spy satellite in “late July,” which could be the hours or days after the Iranians hit our base.
And then —this is the part festooned with red flags— around six weeks later, we have unnamed American officials handing the Wall Street Journal an exclusive about the Chinese imagery.
That was not a random leak from Oscar in Accounting. It was an official leak about highly sensitive intelligence, delivered to America’s premier financial and diplomatic newspaper shortly before Trump was expected to meet Xi. The officials supplied enough detail to establish a causal chain —Chinese imagery, Iranian targeting, dead American soldiers— but withheld the companies’ names, the underlying evidence, and any accusation against Beijing itself.
In other words, they gave the Journal exactly enough information for everyone to connect the dots, while carefully refusing to connect them on official stationery. But why leak it? That kind of leak is not a story: it’s a message. They let the “anomalous event” do the talking.
Maybe the leak and the anomaly were unrelated. Maybe the dates mean nothing. But the officials were sophisticated enough to know online open-source-intelligence influencers can read a calendar. They did not need to draw a red circle around “late July” and add a little arrow saying, LOOK HERE, YOU IDIOTS. They dropped one set of dots. The independent orbital trackers supplied the other set.
If the United States were using Space Force to help send a more efficient form of diplomatic cable, the exchange might have gone something like this:
Old-fashioned diplomacy required embossed stationery, a ceremonial room, twelve deputy ministers, and a communiqué declaring that both sides had enjoyed a “frank and open exchange,” meaning everyone left furious. Modern diplomacy may be more … concise. One country demands evidence. The other country just points upward.
NASA says debris around 800 kilometers up can remain in orbit for centuries, while fragments above 1,000 kilometers may circle Earth for a thousand years or more. Thus, whatever happened, Yaogan-50’s remains will keep delivering the possible message to China’s future governments long after today’s diplomats, generals, and cable-news experts have become archaeological layers.
We’ll never know. The plausible deniability in this story has its own plausible deniability. But I suspect that it is past time to welcome everyone to the space wars. Because nobody will ever declare them.
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It’s also time to check in on the Proxy War, where we find the deep state under fire. Literally. Yesterday, the New York Times reported, “Close Call for Ex-C.I.A. Head as Russia Strikes Ukraine Near Polish Border.” Corporate media is outraged.
This may surprise you —it surprised me— but things in Kiev are so bad now that top European ministers, globalists, and U.S. deep staters recently attended a swanky, billionaire-funded ‘conference’ in the war-torn capital. America’s contribution seems to be disgraced former CIA chief, classified intel leaker, and adulterer David Petraeus, who, in case you were worried, seems to be doing quite well for himself peddling influence around the globe.
But David recently had a difficult travel experience, and it is President Putin’s fault. “This is the act of a truly barbaric leader trying to terrorize Ukrainian civilians,” Petraeus indignantly informed the Times, referring to his now-ruined working vacation to Ukraine. “This was terrifying,” he added, straining to make the point.
If you’re traveling to Kiev these days, you must do it by train, from Poland. Trying to fly in could leave you looking like a disassembled Chinese spy satellite. Fortunately, the Ukrainians are famous for their luxurious railroad hospitality, and by all accounts, Western politicians enjoy a very dignified travel experience on the level of Animal House on wheels. (Petraeus, it should be noted, has historically done his best work on sleepers.) It’s something to look forward to, and a one-way trip takes about fourteen hours from Warsaw to Kiev, after which you may need some downtime.
Over the weekend, the Ukrainians held an annual security conference called YES (the Yalta European Strategy forum), which hosted some 700 current and former EU ministers, journalists, and notables like Petraeus, former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and former Finnish PM (and party girl) Sanna Marin. Ukrainian billionaire oligarch Victor Pinchuk funds the conference and, presumably, the gift bags.
The foreigners mingle with Ukrainian politicians and make connections, a polite euphemism for a mutually enriching experience. While the agenda includes high-minded, unachievable items like “Peace Through Strength NOW!”, it is really an influence conference, where “networking” is high on the list, and is meant to prepare the foreigners to return to their home countries and advocate better for Ukraine’s interests: “YES connects Ukraine with international partners … and mobilizes international support.”
One could fairly wonder why, given there’s a war on, the Ukrainians don’t go to Poland, rather than the Westerners rolling to and from the capital city, which has been under 24x7 attack for months now. The answer is symbolism. The visitors are bravely doing their part, enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and putting their lives on the line to prove their support for their Ukrainian brothers-in-arms.
Plus, how could the Ukrainians carry all those gift bags to Poland? It has to be in Kiev.
What happened next was another diplomatic message couched in a fireball. As the last luxury train prepared to cross the border from Ukraine into Poland, carrying the worn-out ministers and former CIA chiefs back home for some well-deserved R&R, a Russian drone struck and destroyed a spare locomotive sitting on the tracks right next to David Petraeus’s train. He literally heard it happen.
Predictably, the usual suspects began crying about Russia “targeting” western “dignitaries” (a bit of a stretch in Petraeus’s case), even though none of the delicate politicos were harmed. Still, it’s an easy connection to draw. The trains were in the far Western part of Ukraine, as far from the frontlines as it gets. The strike was perfectly timed and perfectly placed to send a bloodless but clear message.
Moscow said only that it hit rail infrastructure “used to transport military cargoes from European countries.” (I.e., Boris Johnson.)
The Russians knew what they were doing. Not only did it send a message to the attendees —we can get you anytime we want— but it spurred predictable outrage that drew the world’s attention to this absurd, quid-pro-quo influence operation funded by oligarchs.
Everything about the conference is ridiculous, especially the feigned outrage. The Times expects readers to believe that the former CIA director was shocked —shocked!— that a drone hit a nearby train. In a war zone. With a well-known rail campaign underway, and railroad advisories about changing bravery schedules to avoid the constant attacks. Indeed, Russia has destroyed over 200 locomotives since the start of the year.
But somehow, Petraeus —a former general— failed to imagine the possibility. Okay.
The Times is trying to convert the Russians’ explosive message —cut this crap out— into another wearisome Ukraine-victimhood narrative. But I think Moscow gets the points this round. A destroyed locomotive on the next track over from the globalist party train is just as effective as a mysterious satellite implosion.
The ‘dignitaries’ came to Kiev to defy Russian drones. Except, apparently, actual ones. That’s not the right kind of symbolism. That’s different. That’s not the right kind of virtue-signaling symbolism. The Russians were supposed to play along. They didn’t this time.
Message delivered. I think the party train might have reached its final destination. How about you? Let me know what you think in the comments.
Have a magnificent Monday! Come back tomorrow, for another round of insightful and delicious essential news and caffeine-commentary.
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O Yahweh, You are my God;
I will exalt You, I will give thanks to Your name;
For You have worked wonders,
Counsels formed long ago, with perfect faithfulness.
— Isaiah 25:1 LSB
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