Dr. Robert Malone’s Challenges to Re-Written History

Here is an excerpt from THE ATLANTIC:

….The abridged version is that when Malone was a graduate student in biology in the late 1980s at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, he injected genetic material—DNA and RNA—into the cells of mice in hopes of creating a new kind of vaccine. He was the first author on a 1989 paper demonstrating how RNA could be delivered into cells using lipids, which are basically tiny globules of fat, and a co-author on a 1990 Science paper showing that if you inject pure RNA or DNA into mouse muscle cells, it can lead to the transcription of new proteins. If the same approach worked for human cells, the latter paper said in its conclusion, this technology “may provide alternative approaches to vaccine development.”

These two studies do indeed represent seminal work in the field of gene transfer, according to Rein Verbeke, a postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University, in Belgium, and the lead author of a 2019 history of mRNA-vaccine development. (Indeed, Malone’s studies are the first two references in Verbeke’s paper, out of 224 in total.) Verbeke told me he believes that Malone and his co-authors “sparked for the first time the hope that mRNA could have potential as a new drug class,” though he also notes that “the achievement of the mRNA vaccines of today is the accomplishment of a lot of collaborative efforts.”

Malone says he deserves credit for more than just sparking hope. He dropped out of graduate school in 1988, just short of his Ph.D., and went to work at a pharmaceutical company called Vical. Now he claims that both the Salk Institute and Vical profited from his work and essentially prevented him from further pursuing his research. (A Salk Institute spokesperson said that nothing in the institute’s records substantiates Malone’s allegations. The biotech company into which Vical was merged, Brickell, did not respond to requests for comment.) To say that Malone remains bitter over this perceived mistreatment doesn’t do justice to his sense of aggrievement. He calls what happened to him “intellectual rape.”

One target of Malone’s ire, the biochemist Katalin Karikó, has been featured in multiple news stories as an mRNA-vaccine pioneer. CNN called her work “the basis of the Covid-19 vaccine” while a New York Times headline said she had “helped shield the world from the coronavirus.” None of those stories mentioned Malone. “I’ve been written out of the history,” he has said. “It’s all about Kati.” Karikó shared with me an email that Malone sent her in June, accusing her of feeding reporters bogus information and inflating her own accomplishments. “This is not going to end well,” Malone’s message says.

Karikó replied that she hadn’t told anyone that she is the inventor of mRNA vaccines and that “many many scientists” contributed to their success. “I have never claimed more than discovering a way to make RNA less inflammatory,” she wrote to him. She told me that Malone referred to himself in an email as her “mentor” and “coach,” though she says they’ve met in person only once, in 1997, when he invited her to give a talk. It’s Malone, according to Karikó, who has been overstating his accomplishments. There are “hundreds of scientists who contributed more to mRNA vaccines than he did.”

Malone insists that his warning to Karikó that “this is not going to end well” was not intended as a threat. Instead, he says, he was suggesting that her exaggerations would soon be exposed. Malone views Karikó as yet another scientist standing on his shoulders and collecting plaudits that should go to him. Others have been rewarded handsomely for their work on mRNA vaccines, he says. (Karikó is a senior vice president at BioNTech, which partnered with Pfizer to create the first COVID-19 vaccine to be authorized for use last year.) Malone was once forced to declare bankruptcy, though he’s not exactly living on the streets: In addition to being a medical doctor, he has served as a vaccine consultant for pharmaceutical companies.

In any case, it’s clear enough that Malone isn’t singularly responsible for mRNA vaccines. The process of achieving major scientific advancements tends to be more cumulative and complex than the apple-to-the-head stories we usually tell, but this much can be said for sure: Malone was involved in groundbreaking work related to mRNA vaccines before it was cool or profitable; and he and others who believed in the potential of RNA-based vaccines in the 1980s turned out to be world-savingly correct……

Here is an interesting commentary on an ATLANTIC article:

This afternoon, The Atlantic wrote a fair piece titled, “The Vaccine Scientist Spreading Vaccine Misinformation.” The article started out with the author, Tom Bartlett, asking: “Robert Malone claims to have invented mRNA technology. Why is he trying so hard to undermine its use?”

Again, we think the article is fair and objective. Unlike Logically.AI, which categorically said Dr. Malone was not the original inventor of the vaccine, Mr. Bartlett credited Dr. Malone for being the first person to “demonstrate how RNA could be delivered into cells using lipids.”

Below is how Mr. Bartlett describes Dr. Malone’s body of work:

“The abridged version is that when Malone was a graduate student in biology in the late 1980s at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, he injected genetic material—DNA and RNA—into the cells of mice in hopes of creating a new kind of vaccine. He was the first author on a 1989 paper demonstrating how RNA could be delivered into cells using lipids, which are basically tiny globules of fat, and a co-author on a 1990 Science paper showing that if you inject pure RNA or DNA into mouse muscle cells, it can lead to the transcription of new proteins. If the same approach worked for human cells, the latter paper said in its conclusion, this technology ‘may provide alternative approaches to vaccine development.’”

Mr. Bartlett’s piece is not really the purpose of this article. The question is, what did Dr. Malone say or do to jeopardize his chances of winning a Nobel Prize? To answer this question, we need to go back to his TV appearance on June 23. During the interview, Dr. Malone stated that he was not discouraging the use of the vaccine that the government is not being transparent with us about what those risks are.

[O]ne of my concerns are that the government is not being transparent with us about what those risks are. And so, I’m of the opinion that people have the right to decide whether to accept a vaccine or not, especially since these are experimental vaccines,” Dr. Malone said, pointing to the fact the vaccines are not formally approved but instead being administered under Emergency Use Authorization.

Dr. Malone added: “This is a fundamental right having to do with clinical research ethics,” he said. “And so, my concern is that I know that there are risks. But we don’t have access to the data, and the data haven’t been captured rigorously enough so that we can accurately assess those risks — and therefore … we don’t really have the information that we need to make a reasonable decision.”

Immediately after the interview, the news about what he said quickly travel across the mainstream media, News York Times, Washington Post, and now, The Atlantic. Since then, Dr. Malone has been under attack.

About a month later, Logically.Ai wrote a piece claiming that Dr. Robert Malone did NOT invent mRNA vaccines. Instead, Logically said: “It is Dr. Katalin Karikó and her collaborator Dr. Drew Weissman who are more commonly credited with laying the groundwork for mRNA vaccines.” Logically is a UK-registered startup founded in 2017 by Lyric Jain. The company provides an all-in-one threat intelligence platform.

Just as Mr. Bartlett said in the Atlantic story, “Whether Malone really came up with mRNA vaccines is a question probably best left to Swedish prize committees, but you could make a case for his involvement.” Which leads us to Dr. Malone’s chances of getting a Nobel prize.

In a tweet this afternoon, Dr. Malone shared a statement from a cellular immunologist Stan Gromkowski who did work on mRNA vaccines in the early 1990s. According to the tweet, Gromkowski said this about Dr. Malone: “He’s fucking up his chances for a Nobel Prize.”

In the same tweet, Dr. Malone added that he was well aware of the potential impact on a possible Nobel. “I made a choice,” he wrote…..

[….]

In the meantime, below are web links from other reliable sources including Wikipedia and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) patent website that show Dr. Malone to be one of the inventors of the mRNA vaccine.

(TECH STARTUPS)

From Malone’s own bio:

This body of work resulted in over 10 patents and numerous publications, yielding about 7000 citations for this work. The paper was the first showing data for DNA and RNA side by side for in-vivo (the first paper for in-vivo DNA):

Direct gene transfer into mouse muscle in vivo. Wolff JA, Malone RW, et al. Science. 1990;247(4949 Pt 1):1465-8. Cited in 4,750 articles, is the result of that work.

In 1989, research was performed that gave rise to the 10+ groundbreaking patents on mRNA vaccination, all with a priority date of March 3, 1989. This is the same priority date as the Salk Patent application, showing that the two institutions were working together (without Robert’s knowledge). These patents are the first published research on mRNA vaccination. The titles and links to the patents are listed in the documents below. These patents have proof of principle experiments on mRNA vaccines – that clearly document that the invention worked and that these are the first experiments showing this.

Vical was to license the Salk Technology. Instead, they hired Robert’s thesis advisor from the Salk and soon after, the Salk dropped the patent and Vical never pursued a license from the Salk. Due to an employee contract with Vical, this stopped Robert from working in the field commercially for a decade. Vical claimed all the Salk research happened at Vical and sent a cease and desist letter.

Dr. Malone carried on his research into mRNA vaccination during the 1990s, culminating in a mucosal patent that was issued in 2000. He also helped revolutionized the field of cationic liposomes for the use in RNA vaccinations. This work was so far ahead of its time, that only now is the world turning to mucosal mRNA vaccination as a method of immunization. For a listing of some of his work, see the publications at the end of this page.

Scientifically trained at UC Davis, UC San Diego, and at the Salk Institute Molecular Biology and Virology laboratories, Dr. Malone received his medical training at Northwestern University (MD) and Harvard University Medical School (Clinical Research Post Graduate) , and in Pathology at UC Davis, He has almost 100 peer-reviewed publications, and has been an invited speaker at about 50 conferences…..

LIFE SITE notes the removing of Dr. Malone’s bio [contribution] to the mRNA Vaccines:

Dr. Robert Malone, M.D., M.S., discovered RNA transfection and, while he was at the Salk Institute in San Diego in 1988, invented mRNA vaccines. His research was continued the next year at Vical, and between 1988 and 1989, Malone wrote the patent disclosures for mRNA vaccines.  

On June 10, 2021, Dr. Malone joined biologist Bret Weinstein, Ph.D, on the Dark Horse Podcast, where Malone raised numerous safety concerns about the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, both of which use mRNA technology. He warned about future autoimmune issues caused by the spike proteins within the mRNA injections. 

Malone also stated that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was aware that the spike proteins were “biologically active and could travel from the injection site and cause adverse events, and that the spike protein, if biologically active, is very dangerous.”

YouTube swiftly moved to censor clips from the three-hour podcast interview. 

Then, appearing on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight some days later, Dr. Malone issued further warnings about the vaccines, the content of which is contrary to the mainstream media’s promotion of the injections. The mRNA inventor declared that there was still insufficient data for anyone to make an informed decision about receiving the vaccines.  

Malone also warned against the injections being given to young people: “I have a bias that the benefits probably don’t outweigh the risks in that cohort. But, unfortunately, the risk-benefit analysis is not being done.” 

Carlson described Malone as being perhaps “the single most qualified person on planet earth to discuss this subject” given his status as the inventor of the technology behind the injections now being rolled out, and in some cases mandated, to people across the globe.  

However, Malone was not targeted merely by YouTube. Just days after the Dark Horse Podcast was released, the Wikipedia entry for “RNA vaccine” was changed, removing him and his role from the article, and thus potentially removing the weight that his warnings about the technology might convey.  

[…more changes shown at Life Site]

 

Dr. Martin Kulldorf: Vaccine Mandates Damage Vaccine Confidence

Dr. Martin Kulldorf, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, says that vaccine mandates and vaccine passports have done more harm to the public’s trust in vaccines than anti-vaxxers have done in two decades. He says that in order to restore trust in public health, vaccines must be voluntary.

  • [Editor’s Note: which means people have to live with others who choose not to. And much like the Laffer Curve where more tax revenue is brought in with less “mandated” tax confiscation so to would liberty in choice bring more people voluntarily to get a vaccination.]

Democrats Slipping Toward Tyranny (Bonus: Australia)

JUMP TO AUSTRALIA – not by boat

UPDATED TODAY

RED STATE joined the “terror watch list” fray with some video as well. I guess according to Homeland Security, NBC, CNN, YAHOO NEWS, etc, I am on a terror watch list?

Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security just issued a terror threat advisory which is raising some eyebrows.

Listen, as Lester Holt and Pete Williams describe how the “terror threat advisory” isn’t based on any actual threats or plots, but just a lot of “anti-government rhetoric” that includes things like “opposition to COVID measures” like masks and vaccine measures.



From Yahoo News:

“Extremists may seek to exploit the emergence of Covid-19 variants by viewing the potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the United States as a rationale to conduct attacks,” the DHS advisory said, adding that “pandemic-related stressors… may contribute to more violence this year.”

So, if there aren’t any actual plots or threats, what they’re really doing is demonizing free speech, as Tim Young observes, or criticism of government action. That’s a dangerous route to go down. It also suggests that the DHS is surveilling people to some degree on this subject, another troubling thought, and definitely a slippery slope to go down.

They’re also continuing to demonize Trump supporters again, by including them in the advisory that isn’t based on any actual threats, with “claims of election fraud, belief Trump can be reinstated.”

Whether you agree or disagree with those thoughts on Trump or on COVID, you’re allowed those thoughts in our allegedly free society under our Constitution. Are they really classifying being critical of the government as a terrorist threat now? Is dissent now terrorism?

Notice in this CNN take that it isn’t criminal actions but “false narratives” that are mentioned as “dangerous.”

The bulletin is part of a concerted effort by DHS to address the issues that led up to January 6 and the beginning of an effort by the department to educate the public about how these false narratives and conspiracy theories “are not just confusing but dangerous,” according to a source familiar.

You’re not allowed to have those thoughts.

Then the NBC piece notes there are concerns about the 9/11 anniversary and “religious holidays,” without defining what “religious holidays” we’re talking about here. What they’re looking at here, without NBC saying it, I think, is radical Islamic terrorism. That’s what the Yahoo News article on the advisory suggests.

But NBC just didn’t want to put that in the graphic. So, it leaves you wondering: are religious holidays now considered a threat as well?………

ACE of SPADES has a post that got my attention. I will add more of the source as I see fit… but this is an amazing turn. And I doubt they mean the person[s] given awards in Obama’s church or celebrated on the front cover of his church’s magazine (that has a 20,000 person reach).

…..Interesting piece by Peter Wood from a couple of days ago: From 9/11 to 1/6:

As the Taliban move in for the kill in Afghanistan, we once again turn away from the hard questions about how to sustain American pride in the face of people who abhor us and what American values mean if the world meets our ideals with contempt. One answer to these questions is a counsel of capitulation. Let us admit that we are now and always have been a rotten nation made up of hateful, conniving people who only pretended to be good.

That answer has always had a few cynics in its corner, but it has become the presiding doctrine of the American left, a development which is itself one of the defining consequences of 9/11. At some point in the months following the attack, as the momentary sense of national unity cleared, the left began to adopt the ‘we-deserved-it’ narrative. Not everyone was as outspoken as Ward Churchill who called the office workers in the World Trade Towers ‘little Eichmanns’ or the Revd Jeremiah Wright who preached a sermon shortly after 9/11 that said of the attack, ‘America’s chickens are coming home to roost’. But in a quieter way, these ideas took hold. President Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq crystalized the left’s narrative that America’s bellicosity was the problem. We had more to fear from domestic mistreatment of innocent Muslims than we had from Muslims bent on mass murder.

This muddled view has birthed a generation that has nothing but misgivings about American virtue and American power. And it lies in the background of a brand new attempt to sacralize a new date: January 6, 2021.

The irony is that the Democrats’ relentless exaggeration of what happened on January 6, 2021 might succeed in giving us the breakthrough realization of what happened on September 11, 2001. We will see that our leftist elite hates America and fears and despises that broad swath of the American people who reject their betters.

THEN CAME THIS: (MORE ADDED AFTER AOS’S EXCERPT)

There are some details at the link above.

At least if you believe the government’s public statements, our intelligence agencies and military totally missed the Taliban’s plans to rapidly take over Afghanistan (along with all that sophisticated military equipment we failed to remove). But they are certainly right about the threats above, don’t you think?

Peter Wood doesn’t think so. He is writing a book.

Random Note:

It was apparently the 500th anniversary of the fall of the Aztecs yesterday. You may recall that the Ethnic Studies folks in California want to revive the Aztec gods to replace the white Christian God, but as woke gods – not as true Aztec gods.

Music

Don’t let them take over your life. Their ideology is not sustainable. 

[….]

Here is the important Tweets linked in the above by JAMES LINDSAY:

ENLARGED PORTIONS:

The POST MILLENNIAL notes a recent Joy Reid show, where, Republicans are referred to as terrorists:

In an interview on The Reidout with Joy Reid this week, author Malcom Nance warned that Q-Anon supporters have taken over the Republican Party and are “preparing for civil war.”

“On August 13th or 14th, just a few days from now, the Q-Anon believers, which is now a substantial portion of the Republican base, believe that Donald Trump will be reinstated as president through some magic that they only understand. When that doesn’t happen, then what?” Reid asked.

“Well, nothing is going to happen here in August,” replied Nance, adding that there is a substantial portion of the “gunslinging conservatives base” that does not support Q-Anon.

[….]

“The Republican Party, you know, I used to joke that they were vanilla ISIS, all of these militia men and everything out there. They were like ISIS, they were like Al Qaeda in the sense that they radicalized online. They would meet together in secret, and they did all of these activities, which were very much like a terrorist insurgency,” said Nance.

Nance continued by saying that the Republican Party “is more like Sinn Féin and the relationship between Sinn Féin, the Irish National Party, and the Irish Republican Army – Provisional Irish Republican Army terrorist group.”….


CANARY IN THE COAL MINE


The entire Paul Watson* video can be found at MOONBATTERY: “Australian Covid Dissident Locked in Lunatic Asylum” — also see MOONBAT’S other recent post: “Australia Degenerates Into Biosecurity Police State” FYI >>>

  • While I like their rants (Paul Watson, Mark Dice, and others) and these commentaries hold much truth in them, I do wish to caution you… he is part of Info Wars/Prison Planet and Summit News network of yahoos, a crazy conspiracy arm of Alex Jones shite. Also, I bet if I talked to him he would reveal some pretty-crazy conspiratorial beliefs that would naturally undermine and be at-odds-with some of his rants. Just to be clear, I do not endorse these people or orgs.

* While I like their rants (Paul Watson, Mark Dice, and others) and these commentaries hold much truth in them, I do wish to caution you… he is part of Info Wars/Prison Planet and Summit News network of yahoos, a crazy conspiracy arm of Alex Jones shite. Also, I bet if I talked to him he would reveal some pretty-crazy conspiratorial beliefs that would naturally undermine and be at-odds-with some of his rants. Just to be clear, I do not endorse these people or orgs.

 

Democrats Leaning Totalitarian More-and-More Every Day

What a great post by PJ-MEDIA!

The Left’s taste for totalitarianism is increasingly obvious. There have been calls from Leftists for the opponents of the still-unapproved vaccines to be shot (with a gun, not a hypodermic needle), or at the very least arrested and imprisoned, and on Thursday AP reported that Biden handlers had discussed “mandating vaccines for interstate travel,” but decided against doing so because “the administration worried that they would be too polarizing for the moment.” For the moment. That means we should watch for this particular trial balloon to be floated again after the establishment media has pounded the American people with fear propaganda for a few more months.

Even the fact that this idea has been broached should send chills down the spine of everyone who is aware of how totalitarian regimes work. Internal passports are one of their hallmarks, as they enable easy, centralized data collection about the population and its political leanings, along with ready knowledge of each individual’s whereabouts, which is always handy when the time comes for that knock on the door at 3 a.m. At a time when the Democratic leadership is doing everything it can to stir up hysteria about a fictional “insurrection” and talking about acting against a largely chimerical “white supremacist terrorism,” the idea of internal passports should be a matter of serious concern.

On December 27, 1932, the Soviet Union established the “Unified Passport System within the USSR,” severely restricting travel within the country and requiring Soviet citizens to carry passports for travel inside the workers’ paradise, so as to aid in “the removal of persons not engaged in industrial or other socially-useful work from towns and cleansing of towns from hiding kulaks, criminals and other antisocial elements.” “Kulaks” was the Stalin regime’s word for peasants they didn’t find sufficiently enthusiastic for the arrival of Communism; the internal passports were designed to aid in identifying and rooting out such undesirable elements and enemies of the regime.

Victor Davis Hanson recently pointed out that “once the delta variant arrived in force in early summer, earlier government assurances that the vaccinated were now free to resume a normal life lost credibility. Confused and mixed messages followed — simultaneously downplaying and exaggerating the efficacy of the vaccinations.” Yet in the face of this loss of credibility, Biden’s handlers have not eased off on their vaccination push, but have only intensified it. AP noted: “When the pace of vaccinations in the U.S. first began to slow, President Joe Biden backed incentives like million-dollar cash lotteries if that’s what it took to get shots in arms.” Yes, it’s a vaccine so safe, so effective, so widely trusted, that Biden’s handlers were willing to bribe Americans to get it.

The cash lotteries were the carrot; now comes the stick. “In just the past two weeks,” says AP: “Biden has forced millions of federal workers to attest to their vaccination status or face onerous new requirements. He’s met with business leaders at the White House to press them to do the same.” And that’s not remotely all. Biden’s handlers have also “taken steps toward mandating shots for people traveling into the U.S. from overseas.” Much more is coming, “including potential support for school districts imposing rules to prevent spread of the virus over the objection of Republican leaders.”

Yet again employing the Leftist tactic of accusing his enemies of what he is guilty of, Old Joe on Thursday politicized his vaccine push while claiming his foes were the ones doing so: “To the mayors, school superintendents, educators, local leaders, who are standing up to the governors politicizing mask protection for our kids: thank you. Thank God that we have heroes like you, and I stand with you all, and America should as well.”

AP’s Zeke Miller then gives us a paragraph about Old Joe’s strict constitutionalism and magnanimity, saying that “he has refrained from using all his powers to pressure Americans to get vaccinated. He’s held off, for instance, on proposals to require vaccinations for all air travelers or, for that matter, the federal workforce. The result is a precarious balancing act as Biden works to make life more uncomfortable for the unvaccinated without spurring a backlash in a deeply polarized country that would only undermine his public health goals…. Still, while more severe measures — such as mandating vaccines for interstate travel or changing how the federal government reimburses treatment for those who are unvaccinated and become ill with COVID-19 — have been discussed, the administration worried that they would be too polarizing for the moment.”

Wait a minute. He has “refrained from using all his powers”? What powers exactly has he declined to use? What section of the Constitution allows the president of the United States to require vaccinations for all air travelers or internal passports? What part of the Bill of Rights allows the president to take any measures whatsoever to “make life more uncomfortable for the unvaccinated”? If a pandemic justifies this level of federal overreach, what on earth would or could possibly prevent a tyrant from creating one in order to arrogate emergency powers to himself? Is the pandemic now the Left’s Reichstag fire excuse to destroy Americans’ freedom and crush dissent?……….

(READ IT ALL)

 

MORE Media Retractions… and Fact-Checks by NPR??

This first story deals with a story run by CNN via RED STATE… hold for the hilarity of DDS (DeSantis Derangement Syndrome):

wrote earlier about a story that spread far and wide, helped by a CNN report, that four teachers died from COVID within 24 hours in Broward County.

CNN then tried to hook it up to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his ban on mandating masks, leaving it up to the parents to decide for their own children.

But as I noted, school hasn’t even started in Broward County, and doesn’t start until August 18. So any teachers who got sick did so while on vacation, on summer break, and it had nothing at all to do with mask mandates, no mask mandates, or the schools.

[….]

The story originally claimed three teachers and a teacher’s assistant had died within 24 hours of COVID.

Now the media is walking back that statement.

Even now, even with this correction, they’re still only citing the teacher’s union president. How do they even know this correction is accurate? How do they know that whole 24 hours thing was accurate? Or that it was “from COVID” and not “with” COVID?….

And in this story from REASON, they note NPR getting in on a correction of the CDC (hat-tip RIGHT SCOOP):

Another CDC data flub distorts delta variant contagiousness. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) claimed the delta variant of COVID-19 is “as transmissible as” chickenpox. It’s not true.

Chickenpox, caused by the varicella-zoster virus, is one of the most contagious diseases we know of. “If one person has it, up to 90% of the people close to that person who are not immune will also become infected,” states the CDC website.

One person infected with chickenpox will infect an average of 10 people when everyone in a population is vulnerable to catching it. (This transmissibility number—referred to as R0—goes down when people have immunity to the disease.)

“The initial COVID-19 strain had an R0 between two and three,” computational biologist Karthik Gangavarapu told NPR. The delta variant has an R0 between six and seven. For chickenpox, the R0 is nine or 10.

How did the CDC conclude that these were equivalent?

For one, the leaked document underestimated the R0 for chickenpox and overestimated the R0 for the delta variant. “The R0 values for delta were preliminary and calculated from data taken from a rather small sample size,” a federal official told NPR. The value for the chickenpox (and other R0s in the slideshow) came from a graphic from The New York Times, which wasn’t completely accurate.

Apparently, the federal agency charged with disseminating COVID-19 data and setting public health policy is taking its cues from a newspaper infographic. Oh my…..

The Texas Tribune Makes Glaring Hospitalization Mistake

This comes via INDEPENDENT CHRONICLE:

The Texas Tribune published an article on Thursday attributing the total number of children hospitalized since the beginning of the pandemic to a period of the last 7 days, and then quickly backtracking when the fallacy was brought to light – a reporting error of over 5,000 cases.

“That’s one heck of a correction,” reporter Steven Dennis tweeted.

[….]

The Tribune stated that the number of children hospitalized during the past week in Texas was over 5,800, when in fact that is the total number of children hospitalized with Covid since the onset of the pandemic.

“And yet that’s still misleading! He first said 5800 in a 7-day period, then said, sorry, it was 783 in a *40 day* period! But he didn’t actually say 40, so it’s easy to skim and think he’s talking about the same length of time,” tweeted one person.

[….]

The Tribune article discusses how more children are flooding into Texas hospitals than ever before, originally saying that Texas had seen over 5,800 children hospitalized with Covid in the past week. 

It turns out that the actual number of children admitted with Covid between July 1 and August 9 – a 40-day period, not a 7-day period as originally stated in the article – in Texas is 783. That gives us about 137 hospitalizations per week if divided evenly between the 40 days. So the number that the Tribune originally reported is 4,100% higher than the correct statistic.  

UPDATE

NEWSBUSTERS notes how wide the lie made it:

….So over five weeks there were 783 children, not 5,800 over one week. Brent Scher, executive editor of the Washington Free Beacon, tweeted on the bad math: “I did the math here. The claim: 828 hospitalizations a day Reality: 19 a day. Only off by about 43x.” No wonder Jen Rubin deleted her tweet!

Skeptics pointed out the slippery language of the Tribune correction. Not “hospitalized with COVID,” but “admitted to Texas hospitals with COVID.” So they was no measurement of how serious their admissions were, for how many days they stayed.

Once again, the people who think they represent Science have bungled the actual numbers and massively exaggerated the problem. Creating a viral tweet seems to get ahead of doing basic math.

PS: Rubin wrote an editorial hammering on the same point on the same day that the “MAGA governors” are endangering lives:

The worst perpetrators of this avoidable tragedy are not a few stray crackpots such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.); they are, in fact, among the top contenders for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Not all Republicans are prohibiting mask or vaccine mandates, but all governors who do so — in Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Florida, South Carolina, Texas and Utah — are Republican.

This is certainly not a “pro-life” party. Around the country, Americans in large numbers have figured out what these political hacks are up to: sacrificing the health and lives of Americans at the altar of their political ambition.

The CDC’s/Rochelle Walensky’s Power Grab[s]

Tucker Carlson speaks to the CDC creating laws – whole cloth.

Hat-tip to and more from, ACE OF SPADES:

It’s a pretty righteous rant about the CDC director’s decision to extend the eviction moratorium, and who gave the CDC authority over landlords and the houing market? I agree with Tucker that this is an outrageous overreach, but I have a beef or two with how he’s arguing his case.. The first is that Tucker is presnting it his audience as if it were a new thing, some new form of tyranny that the Biden Administration thought up just now. But this is misleading. What Tucker is describing actually has a name, administrative law, and it’s been going on over a century, informally since the end of the 1900s, and formally with the passage of the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) in 1946.

I don’t think this country’s founders ever envisioned regulations with the force of law being written (enacted) by unelected bureaucrats, but that’s the country we’re living in. This applies to any federal agency, but my favorite whipping boy is the EPA who can come in and designate all or part of your property as a “protected wetland” and too bad about your development plans you were counting on to bring in income for your retirement, but they’re now illegal. Or, worse, you need to spend many thousands of dollars to bring your “wetland” up to EPA specs, otherwise you’ll be subject to heavy fines.

Often with no appeal.

So what about due process? Congress enacted the APA specifically to establish fair administrative law procedures to comply with the constitutional requirements of due process. But I’ve heard enough horror stories to wonder how effective these protections are.

Second, despite Tucker’s protestations of the illegality of this, I’m not sure it will hold up in the long run. We’ve been living with administrative law for decades. Some Republicans have grumbled about it on and off, but, like any other federal program or agency, once it’s in place, it will never go away. It’s now a feature of the landscape. There is, for lack of a better word, “precedence” for this power grab. It’s outrageous that SCOTUS has already ruled against this but they’re going ahead with it anyway, but what the CDC director wants to do is only different in degree, not in kind, from what has gone before. The Biden administration is doing what it can get away with. As Tucker said, who is going to stop them? Mitch McConnell?

There’s a scene in the underappreciated science fiction movie Outland where the beleaguered Federal Marshall O’Neil (Sean Connery) appeals to the people he is trying to protect for help. “What about your men?” one of them asks. “My men?” responds O’Neil. “My men are shit.”

That’s pretty much how I feel about the Republican Party right now.

Banned from Facebook for True Story (Facebook Jail Again)

Some raw thoughts… I think the Russians already had info on Hunter to blackmail the White House with and that may have been the behind the scenes actions that got Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline running again.

So… I was banned from Facebook for 24 hours for a link to this story at the DAILY MAIL (click link to go to DM story):

The NEW YORK POST also has a story with a FOX NEWS video regarding it:

Natural Immunity Better than Vaccinations (#Science)

TEASER

FYI, the following Tweets lead back to this [published] August 12th, 2021 study, Neutralization Of VOCS Including Delta One Year Post Covid-19 Or Vaccine (here is the PDF). Before posting the graphics, what this means to me is that [especially] young people should be allowed to make the choice to become immune naturally. By forcing vaccinations through private sector jobs, state government and federal government jobs, they (those imposing forced vaccinations) are prolonging this virus… all by thinking they are curing it.

SHORT VERSION:

LONGER VERSION:

(Click to Enlarge)


BONUS