July 27, 2021

USA: New Data Suggests That Fully Vaccinated Individuals Are Not Just Contracting COVID, But Could Be Carrying HIGHER LEVELS Of Virus Than Previously Understood, Facilitating Spread.

CBS News, Sacramento local
written by Julie Watts
Monday July 26, 2021

SACRAMENTO – State workers and health care employees will now be required to show proof of vaccine or get tested for COVID at least once a week.

The governor announced the new guidance today and is urging private employers to “replicate the example.”

This comes as the highly contagious Delta variant is now dominant in the state and COVID rates have skyrocketed in the month since California officially reopened, including breakthrough cases among vaccinated Californians.

A new analysis finds several counties with above-average vaccination rates also have higher COVID case rates, while case rates are falling in counties with below-average vaccination rates.

Statewide data analyzed by the Bay Area News Group found five counties, Los Angeles, San Diego, Alameda, Contra Costa, and San Francisco, have both a higher percentage of people who are fully vaccinated than the state average and a higher average daily case rate.

Compare that to these five counties: Modoc, Glenn, Lassen, Del Norte, and San Benito, which have below-average vaccination rates and decreasing case rates.

However, UCSF infectious disease expert Dr. Phillip Norris clarifies that the data doesn’t mean the vaccine is not working.

He notes, first, the counties referenced with higher vaccination and case rates are more densely populated.

“If there are a lot of people around you’re more likely to bump into one who has COVID,” Norris explained.

He, like other infectious disease experts, warns that vaccinated people may be unknowingly spreading the virus.

Julie: A lot of people think if they’re vaccinated, they can’t transmit. Is that true?

Phillip: So, originally we thought that might be true.

But he says that’s no longer the case, thanks to the Delta variant.

He points to preliminary data from China that indicates the viral load in the nose from the Delta variant may be 1,000 times higher than previous variants.

“If that’s the case, even a little bit in somebody who’s vaccinated could be a lot,” he explains.

Several studies have indicated that vaccines may reduce transmission, but most were based on previous COVID variants. (See here, here and here).

Norris notes that as case rates increase with the Delta variant, more vaccinated and unvaccinated people will get COVID, though data indicates that the rates will likely remain much higher among the unvaccinated.

Consider this: In Los Angeles County last month, vaccinated people made up one out of five new COVID cases.

That means, for every 100,000 people, 10 vaccinated people would test positive compared to 40 unvaccinated people.

Infectious disease experts stress that vaccinated people also have fewer symptoms, are less likely to be hospitalized and are still believed to be less likely to transmit.

However, for those who have immune-compromised people in their life, it’s also important to remember that you can still get COVID and give it to them — even if you’re both vaccinated.
CLICK SCREENSHOTS TO ENLARGE and review data for yourself
I took screenshot data from this CDC webpage link below:
https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex-and-Age/9bhg-hcku
UPDATE 7/27/21 at 11:05pm: Adde info below. UPDATE 7/27/21 at 11:35pm: Added info below ๐Ÿ˜‚ UPDATE 7/27/21 at 11:59pm: Added info below.

Posted by Princess Mononoke at 7:11 PM 0 comments

USA: CDC Required Double Masking For Children Who Attend Summer Camp. Covid Survival Rate For Children Is 99.9997%. Since 1/1/20 Age 0-17 Covid Deaths 337 Pneumonia Deaths 819 Flu Deaths 187


I took screenshot data from this CDC webpage link below:
https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex-and-Age/9bhg-hcku
Reason.com
written by Robby Soave
Tuesday May 4, 2021

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released new guidance to help summer camps mitigate their coronavirus risk. Given that summer camps involve both children and the outdoors—two factors that render COVID-19 significantly less worrisome—and will be opening in the wake of widespread vaccination, one might have expected the CDC to depart from its characteristic over-caution.

Nope: This is among the most restrictive, unrealistic guidance the agency has released during the pandemic. It's more limiting than the CDC's guidance for vaccinated people exercising outside more generally. If followed, summer campers would be miserable, deprived of physical contact, and in considerable danger of overheating. The government has essentially recommended that summer camps treat kids like prisoners.

Here are just some of the restrictions:
  • Everyone at the camp—including staff and every kid over the age of two—must wear masks at all times, unless they are eating or swimming. They should wear two layers of masks, especially when social distancing is difficult, regardless of "whether activities are indoors or outdoors."
  • Campers should be placed in "cohorts," and their interaction with people outside the cohort must be limited.
  • There should always be at least three feet between campers of the same cohort, and six feet between campers of different cohorts. Staff should keep six feet away from campers at all times, whether inside or outside. Distance should be maintained while eating, napping, or riding the bus: The CDC suggests seating kids in alternating rows.
  • The use of physical objects that might be shared among kids—toys, art supplies, electronics—should be limited wherever possible.
  • Camps should not permit close-contact sports and indoor sports, and should require masks regardless.
  • If anyone is curious there are separate restrictions for outdoor gardening.
This is bonkers. First, COVID-19 is not easily transmitted outside, even if people are maskless. Second, all camp staffers will have likely had the opportunity to be vaccinated by the time summer arrives. Third, the campers themselves are not at risk of a negative health outcome: For kids, COVID-19 is probably less hazardous than the flu. (In a typical year, more U.S. kids drown than will have died of COVID-19.)

From a pandemic standpoint, kids playing together outside is an extremely safe group activity. And again, the vaccines work. They offer almost complete protection for anyone who is worried about getting sick.

David Zweig interviewed several health experts for New York magazine who assailed the guidance as "cruel," "irrational," and little more than "virtue signaling." He writes:
Mark Gorelik, a pediatric immunologist at Columbia University and an expert on MIS-C, the rare COVID-19-related inflammatory syndrome, said, "We know that the risk of outdoor infection is very low. We know risks of children becoming seriously ill or even ill at all is vanishingly small. And most of the vulnerable population is already vaccinated. I am supportive of effective measures to restrain the spread of illness. However, the CDC's recommendations cross the line into excess and are, frankly, senseless. Children cannot be running around outside in 90-degree weather wearing a mask. Period."

An infectious-disease scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci's agency, spoke with me about the CDC guidance on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media. "With staff and parents vaccinated, there is no reason to continue incredibly strict mitigation efforts or put severe limitations on activities," they said. "Charitably," the scientist, who has an expertise in respiratory viruses, continued, "masking kids at camp outdoors is simply virtue signaling. Requiring kids to continuously wear masks at camps, even while outside playing in the heat, when it provides little additional protection is unfair and cruel to our children. Considering that children are at incredibly low risk for developing severe illness, the minimal benefits of mask wearing do not outweigh the substantial costs of discouraging children to be active and their overall health."

The notion that children should wear masks outdoors all day in the heat of July, or that they can’t play any sport that involves physical contact, or put an arm around a friend strikes many experts in infectious diseases, pediatrics, epidemiology, and psychiatry as impractical, of dubious benefit, and punishing in its effects on children.

It has been well documented that kids are at exceedingly low risk of serious illness from COVID-19. For perspective, the CDC estimates that around 600 children died of influenza in the 2017–18 season; during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, 358 pediatric flu deaths were reported. Each year, more than 700 children die from drowning. Through the end of April, 277 have died from COVID-19.
Kids and vaccinated adults do not need to wear masks or adhere to strict social distancing while outside. The guidance should be updated immediately to reflect this reality. Failing that, it should simply be ignored.
UPDATE 7/27/21 at 5:08pm: Added info below. UPDATE 7/27/21 at 6:31pm: Added info below.

Posted by Princess Mononoke at 4:36 PM 0 comments

USA: Emails Between Powerful Teachers Union And Top CDC, Biden Admin Show AFT INFLUENCED STOPPING Full Re-Opening Of In-Person Classrooms Even Suggested Language For CDC Guidance

New York Post
written by Jon Levine
Saturday May 1, 2021

The American Federation of Teachers lobbied the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on, and even suggested language for, the federal agency’s school-reopening guidance released in February.

The powerful teachers union’s full-court press preceded the federal agency putting the brakes on a full re-opening of in-person classrooms, emails between top CDC, AFT and White House officials show.

The emails were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative watchdog group Americans for Public Trust and provided to The Post.

The documents show a flurry of activity between CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, her top advisors and union officials — with Biden brass being looped in at the White House — in the days before the highly-anticipated Feb. 12 announcement on school-reopening guidelines.

“Thank you again for Friday’s rich discussion about forthcoming CDC guidance and for your openness to the suggestions made by our president, Randi Weingarten, and the AFT,” wrote AFT senior director for health issues Kelly Trautner in a Feb 1 email — which described the union as the CDC’s “thought partner.”

“We were able to review a copy of the draft guidance document over the weekend and were able to provide some initial feedback to several staff this morning about possible ways to strengthen the document,” Trautner continued. “… We believe our experiences on the ground can inform and enrich thinking around what is practicable and prudent in future guidance documents.”

Walensky wasn’t on the Feb 1 email, but it was forwarded to her by Carole Johnson, the White House coronavirus testing coordinator. Many emails included Will McIntee, an associate director of public engagement at The White House.

“We are immensely grateful for your genuine desire to earn our confidence and your committment to partnership,” Trautner said in another email to Walensky on Feb 3.

Emails show a call between Walensky and Weingarten — the former boss of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers — was arranged for Feb 7.

The lobbying paid off. In at least two instances, language “suggestions” offered by the union were adopted nearly verbatim into the final text of the CDC document.

With the CDC preparing to write that schools could provide in-person instruction regardless of community spread of the virus, Trautner argued for the inclusion of a line reading “In the event of high community-transmission results from a new variant of SARS-CoV-2, a new update of these guidelines may be necessary.” That language appeared on page 22 of the final CDC guidance.

The AFT also demanded special remote work concessions for teachers “who have documented high-risk conditions or who are at increased risk for … COVID-19,” and that similar arrangements should extend to “staff who have a household member” with similar risks. A lengthy provision for that made it into the text of the final guidance.

The final CDC guidance won high praise from the AFT. “Today, the CDC met fear of the pandemic with facts and evidence,” the union said in a Feb 12 press release.

Many others, however, were puzzled and angered by what they saw as the CDC willfully ignoring the science and slow-walking a return to in-person learning even as mounting evidence showed schools were not a primary source of coronavirus infections as long as they followed mitigation strategies.

In a widely viewed CNN interview on Feb 14, anchor Jake Tapper grilled Walensky and demanded to know why the guidelines would allow schools in areas with high coronavirus community spread — know as “red zones” — to opt out of in-person reopening, noting that 99% of US kids fell within those areas, according to a CNN analysis.

“Can you point to any scientific reason for students in the United States not to return to in person classes tomorrow?” Tapper demanded several times.

“If you’re in middle school or high school we would advocate for virtual learning for that group … We really don’t want to bring community disease into the classroom,” Walensky replied, repeatedly refusing to offer a scientific explanation for the reopening avoidance. “We also know that mask breaching is among the reasons that we have transmission within schools when it happens. Somewhere around 60% of students are reliably masking. That has to be universal. So we have work to do.”

Dr. Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco who has written extensively on coronavirus, called the CDC-AFT emails “very, very troubling,”

“What seems strange to me here is there would be this very intimate back and forth including phone calls where this political group gets to help formulate scientific guidance for our major public health organization in the United State,” Gandhi told The Post. “This is not how science-based guidelines should work or be put together.”

The close communication between the union and the feds came despite repeated assurances from CDC and Biden officials that the medical guidelines would “follow the science” and be free of political interference.

“I can assure you that this is free from political meddling,” Walensky said when the guidance was released.

The AFT and its affiliates have long been one of the most reliable and deep pocketed donor constituencies of the Democratic party, dropping almost $20 million to elect party members during the 2020 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The union defended its role in shaping federal COVID policy.

“The AFT represents 1.7 million educators, healthcare professionals and public employees who spent the last 14 months serving on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic. So naturally, we have been in regular touch with the agencies setting policy that affect their work and lives, including the CDC,” said AFT spokeswoman Oriana Korin, adding the union also worked closely with the Trump administration.

The CDC also insisted such conversations are routine.

“As part of long-standing best practices, CDC has traditionally engaged with organizations and groups that are impacted by guidance and recommendations issued by the agency. We do so to ensure our recommendations are feasible to implement and they adequately address the safety and wellbeing of individuals the guidance is aimed to protect. These informative and helpful interactions often result in beneficial feedback that we consider in our final revisions to ensure clarity and usability,” Jason McDonald, a spokesman for Dr. Walensky, told The Post.

McDonald said the agency had worked with a number of other non-governmental parties that would be affected by the guidance and provided them draft copies — including the National Education Association, National Association of School Nurses and National Association of State Boards of Education.

UPDATE 7/27/21 at 2:01pm: Added info below. UPDATE 7/27/21 at 3:00pm: Added info below. UPDATE 7/27/21 at 6:08pm: Added info below.
Oh man, WOW.๐Ÿšจ๐Ÿ‘‡๐Ÿ˜ง
UPDATE 7/27/21 at 11:03pm: Added info below.

Posted by Princess Mononoke at 12:32 PM 0 comments

July 26, 2021

USA: Major Meat Producer JBS Paid $11 MILLION In Bitcoin Ransom To Russian Hackers Who Knocked Out Plants That Process One-Fifth Of America’s Meat Supply. Globalists Now Rehearsing For Cyber Pandemic.

It's not a theory when it's an actually conspiracy. I typed a transcript for you from the video above. Klaus Schwab, Executive Chairman of World Economic Forum said, "We all know but still pay insufficient attention to the frightening scenario of a comprehensive cyber attack. Which would bring to a complete halt to the power supply, transportation, hospital services, our society as a whole. The covid19 crisis would be seen in this respect as A SMALL DISTURBANCE in comparison to a major cyber attack. To use the covid19 crisis as a timely opportunity to reflect on the lessons cyber security community can draw and improve our unpreparedness for a potential cyber attack. (emphasis mine) 

I typed a transcript from the video above. Jeremy Jurgens, Managing Director of World Economic Forum said, "There will be another crisis. It will be more significant aaand you know we need to actually start preparing for that now. When we do see this next crisis, it will be faster than what we've seen with covid. The exponential growth rate will climb much steeper. The impact will be greater AND as a result the economic and social implications will be even more significant. (emphasis mine)

Posted by Princess Mononoke at 3:35 PM 0 comments

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