Taiwan

CDC Admits Tainted Statistics (Plus: Vaccine Updates)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Jump to WHISTLEBLOWER)

NATURAL IMMUNITY BETTER

This is a truncated version of Epoch Times fuller video entitled:

  • “CDC Admits Having No Records of ‘Naturally Immune People’ Transmitting Virus | Facts Matter” (YouTube)

(Facts Matter’s RUMBLE Channel is here)

Natural Immunity Versus Vaccine Immunity (DENNIS PRAGER)

…On August 25, 2021, medRxiv published a “preprint” study by ten Israeli scientists, all associated with an Israeli research institute, Maccabitech, in Tel Aviv. Among the 10 are three MDs, three professors of epidemiology, two professors at the Tel Aviv University School of Public Health and an adjunct researcher at the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Institutes of Health in the United States. The study’s conclusion: “This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity …”

On August 26, 2021, Science, one of the world’s most widely cited science magazines, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, published an article on the Israeli study. Its opening sentence reads: “The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a large Israeli study …”

Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, confirmed the Israel study: “In Israel, vaccinated individuals had 27 times higher risk of symptomatic COVID infection compared to those with natural immunity from prior COVID disease … ”

A Cleveland clinic study came to the same conclusion. Published on June 5, 2021, also on medRxiv, it concluded that “Individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from COVID-19 vaccination … ”

Even before the Israeli and Cleveland Clinic studies, a New York University study comparing vaccine immunity to natural immunity concluded that people who had had COVID-19 were better protected against the virus: “In COVID-19 patients, immune responses were characterized by a highly augmented interferon response which was largely absent in vaccine recipients.”

A Rockefeller University study published on August 24, 2021, concluded, as the Israel study did, that “a natural infection may induce maturation of antibodies with broader activity than a vaccine does.” The study immediately added that getting natural immunity entails contracting COVID-19, and “a natural infection can also kill you.” But that valid warning does not negate its conclusion in favor of natural immunity. Nor does the study warn that getting the vaccine may also induce harmful consequences. To its everlasting shame, that is a taboo subject in America’s medical community despite the fact that the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists over 700,000 cases of suspected injury and more than 17,000 otherwise unexpected deaths temporally associated with COVID-19 vaccines….

SEE MORE:

  • 128 Research Studies Affirm Naturally Acquired Immunity to Covid-19: Documented, Linked, and Quoted (BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE)
  • Covid-19 natural immunity compared to vaccine-induced immunity: The definitive summary (SHARYL ATTKISSON)
  • Top Doctor Says New CDC Study on Natural Immunity Is ‘Highly Flawed’ (TOWNHALL)

New Harvard HCW Study Shows Recovered Immunity Is Far Stronger Than Vaccine Protection

A new study from Harvard (Continued Effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccination among Urban Healthcare Workers during Delta Variant Predominance) tracked vaccinated and unvaccinated Massachusetts healthcare workers and showed 0 infections in 74,557 person-days for previously infected patients compared to 49 infections out of 830,084 person-days for fully vaccinated patients.

In short, if you’ve recovered from COVID, it is completely nonsensical for you to be vaccinated. You have virtually no chance of being re-infected.

Summing it up:

  1. Recovered patients much more protected from re-infection than vaccinated patients
  2. Recovered patients, even if they get COVID, cannot pass it on to anyone else as far as we know (as the CDC was forced to reveal under FOIA from Aaron Siri)
  3. We don’t know if subsequently getting vaccinated after recovering will improve or degrade points 1 or 2

In short, vaccine mandates that don’t exempt those who have recovered are unethical and a danger to the health of society. They are preventing us from getting to “herd immunity” which we can achieve through allowing natural infection and treating with effective early treatment protocols.

The study also concluded that the vaccine efficacy was 76.5% (95% CI: 40.9–90.6%) against Delta. Yet other data shows the vaccines do nothing or make things worse. I didn’t see an obvious flaw in this study regarding that determination. I don’t know if they used different Ct values for vaccinated or unvaccinated. If anyone sees a flaw, please comment below.

Summary

This study adds more evidence that recovered immunity >> vaccine immunity. Even if the vaccines were perfectly save, forcing everyone to get vaccinated is both unnecessary and jeopardizes public health.

Even if I ignore all the other data sources and only believe this one small study, it doesn’t change my opinion on the safety of these vaccines. DO NOT GET VACCINATED.

You are always better off getting COVID, getting early treatment as soon as you have symptoms (safer and more effective than any vaccine), and then you are done.

This is what Aaron Rodgers did. He maximized benefits for himself, his teammates, and society. Win-win-win.

But according to people like Jonathan Sarfati, these must all be “one-offs.” (As he responded to me posting the Israeli study in conversation a while back.)

LONG COVID FOLLIES

The quote from Doc Sowell is related directly to the article that follows it.

The difference between survey results and demonstrable realities was also pointed out by the author of Hillbilly Elegy: “In a recent Gallup poll, Southerners and Midwesterners reported the highest rates of church attendance in the country. Yet actual church attendance is much lower in the South.”

Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2018), 23-25

Long Covid Doesn’t Exist, Volume One Zillion

A huge French study shows BELIEVING you had Covid is associated with many later symptoms. But ACTUALLY having had Covid isn’t associated with any (except loss of sense of smell).

…..The researchers also found that almost 60 percent of the people with antibodies HAD NO IDEA THEY HAD EVEN HAD COVID AT ALL. Meanwhile, while more than half the people who said they had had Covid had no antibodies. (Welcome to the plague so severe most halfway healthy adults don’t even know they’ve had it.)

The study strongly suggests that many people are using previous Covid diagnoses – either real or imagined – to help explain away common physical symptoms such as joint pain or cough. It also suggests that actually being infected Covid is far less risky than thinking you have been infected with Covid for many people.

The researchers concluded by explaining that people who claim they have long Covid may need help “to identify cognitive and behavioral mechanisms that may be targeted to relieve the symptoms.” Which is a very polite way of putting the truth.

This study should slow, if not stop, the rush to medicalize long Covid. It is yet more proof that the illness is a group of squishy (if painful and difficult) symptoms looking for a name – and more importantly a billing code.

But so many patients and physicians and public health experts are now invested (in some cases literally) in making long Covid real that the gravy train will likely roll on.

DANGERS from VACCINES

Recent anecdotal examples:

  • (Told to me) Friday (or Thursday… I forget), one of our regular vendors dropped off some material and during our normal conversating he mentioned his nephew (a 40-year old healthy dude) died within days of getting his booster. He got his booster, almost immediately after starting feeling funny. After 2-days he went to the hospital, ended up in coma, and died. Just thought I would share. The entire family blames the booster…. I bet Pfizer won’t.
  • (In comment section below the above) An exercise instructor friend of mine got the booster and within a day experienced respiratory and circulatory distress — and has been in the hospital most of a month and isn’t really improving. Perhaps coincidental. Perhaps something else…?
  • (Private Message) My father in law had a stroke about 15 days after his booster. I’m positive that was the cause
  • My grandma (vaccinated) got covid from the vaccinated and is fighting for her life.

When do the anecdotes become enough?

Taiwan Blocks Second Pfizer Doses For Teens

And they aren’t even CONSIDERING allowing kids 5-11 to get Covid vaccinated at this point

Because of myocarditis.

Rare, mild myocarditis.

Except it’s neither of those things.

Imma say it again: if you let your healthy teen – much less your healthy child – get this vaccine, you are insane.

The public health frenzy to vaccinate kids is the ultimate example of process at all costs, the flywheel spinning ever faster, unmoored from reality.

I believe the children are our future… Because, you know, they are the future.

So why are we subjecting them to even the tiniest smidgen of risk over this illness, which essentially can’t touch them?

[…..]

Or maybe the Taiwanese just hate their kids.

Yeah, if it makes you feel better, you’re welcome to believe that.

Another Major Red Flag About Covid Vaccines And Death (This one coming from data on more than 4 million vaccinated Swedes)

People appear to die at rates 20 percent or more above normal for weeks after receiving their second Covid vaccine dose, according to data from a huge Swedish study.

The figures are buried in a preprint paper on vaccine effectiveness released last month. The headline finding of the paper was that protection against Covid, including severe cases, plunged after six months.

The researchers did not explicitly examine deaths from all causes – which have risen since the summer in many countries that have highly vaccinated populations.

But on page 32 of the 34-page report, a chart shows that 3,939 of 4.03 million Swedes who received the second dose died less than two weeks later.

[….]

Over a one-year period, that rate of death would translate into an annual mortality rate of about 2.5 percent a year – 1 person in 40 – almost three times the overall Swedish average. In a typical year, about 1 in 115 Swedes dies.

Of course, that huge gap does not account for an important confounding factor: younger people, who have a much lower risk of death, were less likely to be vaccinated.

But Sweden also provides detailed data on overall deaths nationally, making a crude baseline comparison possible…..

We Are Killing Our Kids. Does Anyone Care? (Kids that would have never died from COVID are now dying after getting the vaccine. Will it ever end?)

Recently, Dr. Toby Rogers did a risk-benefit analysis showing we’ll kill 117 kids for every kid we save from COVID with the vaccines aged 5 to 11.

The ratio doesn’t really change if they change the dose, e.g., to a third of the adult dose. It means fewer kids saved and fewer kids killed, but Toby estimates the ratio would be about the same. Whether it is 117 or 10, it doesn’t matter. We will kill a lot more kids than we will ever save with these vaccines.

What Toby predicted is now coming true.

We can’t show it is 117 to 1, but we can show for sure we are killing more kids than we are saving because kids that would have never died before are now dying with COVID, only children with pretty severe health problems would die: we don’t know of a single kid, 5 to 11, who died from COVID who didn’t have some pretty serious health issues before they got COVID.

Those days are now gone. We’re now killing the healthy kids.

The vaccines rolled out for kids 5 to 11 starting on November 7. It is now just 12 days later and we are now killing perfectly healthy kids.

I just got this text: (to the right)

That’s hardly an isolated incident.

These deaths simply are never ever going to reported in the NY Times or on CNN. So you’re never going to hear about them except from alternate media sources like this substack article. So only around 20,000 people will ever see these deaths.

Here’s another example. Another canary in the coal mine.

First time in her 14-year career: seeing an 8 year old with myocarditis

I saw this Tweet from one of my followers. First time in her 14 year career she has ever seen an 8 year old child with myocarditis. Welcome to the “new normal.”

It’s happening for older kids too, not just the youngest. Here’s a video of Ernest Ramirez who lost his only child, his 16-year old son. I’ve talked to Ernest. His son had zero health issues. He got the first dose of Pfizer and just 5 days later his heart had doubled in size and he died of cardiac arrest while in the park. Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the nation’s most respected cardiologists reviewed the autopsy report and determined the vaccine killed the child. But the CDC simply ignores that because the medical examiner who did the autopsy (after a huge amount of pleading by the father) just said his son died of heart failure, not the vaccine.

Please click the image to watch the video, it’s only 2 minutes long:

WEAKENING mRNA VACCINES

More Proof The mRNA Covid Vaccines Don’t Produce Long-Lasting Immunity (If you like a functional T-cell response from your vaccines, Moderna and Pfizer may not be for you. The DNA vaccines might be better. [They could hardly be worse.])

Researchers from Harvard have more bad news for people who received the mRNA Covid vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.

The vaccines produce a markedly weaker T-cell coronavirus response than AstraZeneca’s DNA vaccine, according to a letter the researchers published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The antibodies from the mRNA vaccines also fade far more quickly, though they initially peak at a higher level than those the DNA vaccines cause our bodies to make in response to the spike proteins they produce.

Combined with the disappearing antibodies, the lack of T-cell response helps explain why the mRNA vaccines begin to fail against coronavirus infection just months after the second dose.

T-cells play a crucial part in our response to infection, helping produce a long-term immune response that will last after initial antibodies wane.

The vaccine-generated antibodies were already known to fade quickly. The researchers confirmed that finding. But they also examined T-cells and found that the mRNA vaccines produced only about 1/7 as strong a CD8+ T-cell response as the AstraZeneca vaccine.

CD8+ T-cells are part of what scientists called the “adaptive” immune system. They attack and kill cells that have been infected with the virus, keeping the virus from multiplying as quickly. They are a crucial part of immunity against reinfection because although they take a while to gain strength when a pathogen first appears, they can spool up more quickly if it reappears months or years later.

The research hints that the DNA vaccines from AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson may remain protective for longer than the mRNA vaccines…..

Pfizer Whistleblowers

Nick Karl, Pfizer Scientist:

  • “When somebody is naturally immune — like they got COVID — they probably have more antibodies against the virus… When you actually get the virus, you’re going to start producing antibodies against multiple pieces of the virus… So, your antibodies are probably better at that point than the [COVID] vaccination.”

Chris Croce, Pfizer Senior Associate Scientist:

  • “You’re protected for longer” if you have natural COVID antibodies compared to the COVID vaccine. “I work for an evil corporation… Our organization is run on COVID money.”

(PROJECT VERITAS)

(I assume this is a whistleblower Democrats don’t like.) BMJ listens to evidence from whistleblower over the Pfizer vaccine trial.

Revelations of poor practices at a contract research company helping to carry out Pfizer’s pivotal covid-19 vaccine trial raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight. (British Medical Journal)

In autumn 2020 Pfizer’s chairman and chief executive, Albert Bourla, released an open letter to the billions of people around the world who were investing their hopes in a safe and effective covid-19 vaccine to end the pandemic. “As I’ve said before, we are operating at the speed of science,” Bourla wrote, explaining to the public when they could expect a Pfizer vaccine to be authorised in the United States.

But, for researchers who were testing Pfizer’s vaccine at several sites in Texas during that autumn, speed may have come at the cost of data integrity and patient safety. A regional director who was employed at the research organisation Ventavia Research Group has told The BMJ that the company falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial. Staff who conducted quality control checks were overwhelmed by the volume of problems they were finding. After repeatedly notifying Ventavia of these problems, the regional director, Brook Jackson, emailed a complaint to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Ventavia fired her later the same day. Jackson has provided The BMJ with dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails.

[…..]

Concerns Raised

In her 25 September email to the FDA Jackson wrote that Ventavia had enrolled more than 1000 participants at three sites. The full trial (registered under NCT04368728) enrolled around 44 000 participants across 153 sites that included numerous commercial companies and academic centres. She then listed a dozen concerns she had witnessed, including:

  • Participants placed in a hallway after injection and not being monitored by clinical staff

  • Lack of timely follow-up of patients who experienced adverse events

  • Protocol deviations not being reported

  • Vaccines not being stored at proper temperatures

  • Mislabelled laboratory specimens, and

  • Targeting of Ventavia staff for reporting these types of problems.

Within hours Jackson received an email from the FDA thanking her for her concerns and notifying her that the FDA could not comment on any investigation that might result. A few days later Jackson received a call from an FDA inspector to discuss her report but was told that no further information could be provided. She heard nothing further in relation to her report.

In Pfizer’s briefing document submitted to an FDA advisory committee meeting held on 10 December 2020 to discuss Pfizer’s application for emergency use authorisation of its covid-19 vaccine, the company made no mention of problems at the Ventavia site. The next day the FDA issued the authorisation of the vaccine.8

In August this year, after the full approval of Pfizer’s vaccine, the FDA published a summary of its inspections of the company’s pivotal trial. Nine of the trial’s 153 sites were inspected. Ventavia’s sites were not listed among the nine, and no inspections of sites where adults were recruited took place in the eight months after the December 2020 emergency authorisation. The FDA’s inspection officer noted: “The data integrity and verification portion of the BIMO [bioresearch monitoring] inspections were limited because the study was ongoing, and the data required for verification and comparison were not yet available to the IND [investigational new drug].”

Other Employees’ Accounts

In recent months Jackson has reconnected with several former Ventavia employees who all left or were fired from the company. One of them was one of the officials who had taken part in the late September meeting. In a text message sent in June the former official apologised, saying that “everything that you complained about was spot on.”

Two former Ventavia employees spoke to The BMJ anonymously for fear of reprisal and loss of job prospects in the tightly knit research community. Both confirmed broad aspects of Jackson’s complaint. One said that she had worked on over four dozen clinical trials in her career, including many large trials, but had never experienced such a “helter skelter” work environment as with Ventavia on Pfizer’s trial.

“I’ve never had to do what they were asking me to do, ever,” she told The BMJ. “It just seemed like something a little different from normal—the things that were allowed and expected.”

She added that during her time at Ventavia the company expected a federal audit but that this never came.

After Jackson left the company problems persisted at Ventavia, this employee said. In several cases Ventavia lacked enough employees to swab all trial participants who reported covid-like symptoms, to test for infection. Laboratory confirmed symptomatic covid-19 was the trial’s primary endpoint, the employee noted. (An FDA review memorandum released in August this year states that across the full trial swabs were not taken from 477 people with suspected cases of symptomatic covid-19.)

“I don’t think it was good clean data,” the employee said of the data Ventavia generated for the Pfizer trial. “It’s a crazy mess.”

A second employee also described an environment at Ventavia unlike any she had experienced in her 20 years doing research. She told The BMJ that, shortly after Ventavia fired Jackson, Pfizer was notified of problems at Ventavia with the vaccine trial and that an audit took place.

Since Jackson reported problems with Ventavia to the FDA in September 2020, Pfizer has hired Ventavia as a research subcontractor on four other vaccine clinical trials (covid-19 vaccine in children and young adults, pregnant women, and a booster dose, as well an RSV vaccine trial; NCT04816643, NCT04754594, NCT04955626, NCT05035212). The advisory committee for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is set to discuss the covid-19 paediatric vaccine trial on 2 November.

Biden: Emboldening and Arming Our Enemies

Published by Papa Giorgio

My thoughts on the Middle-East have been pretty consistent., in that any hope of a stable area over there had the linchpin as Iraq. I think if we had committed to Iraq in a way we had with Japan and Germany, We would have had a country closer to Kuwait in governing, and headed in a faster pace than Kuwait toward more freedom. Once we pulled out of Iraq rather than continuing our presence there, all surrounding foreign policy was moot. Years and years ago I posted a short statement by KEN JOWITT that is still true today, but our chance to change the Middle-East was set on Iraq, in my opinion.

RELATED POST: Some SOFA/Iraq History (RPT FLASHBACK)

So, what I see Biden doing is both a horrible withdrawal as well as sending a message to our biggest enemies that we are weak. Before I show why I think both China and Russia will make some geo-political land grabs, here is an excellent article via PJ-MEDIA:

I’ve been fatalistic about the future of Afghanistan for so long now that I can barely remember when mission creep made our failure there a certainty.

Afghanistan isn’t a country. It’s a hole in the map where neighboring countries aren’t. Sometimes, a foreign power like Great Britain, the Soviet Union, or the United States will attempt to fill that hole. But as has been proven yet again, the hole labeled “Afghanistan” is essentially bottomless.

Absent occupying foreigners, Afghan localities typically rule themselves (badly) while the strongman-style central government tries to rule from Kabul (even more badly). In this age of renewed Islamic fundamentalism, the strongmen, local and central, were always going to be the meanest and most brutal fundamentalists.

Always.

Routing the Taliban in late 2001 was a necessary and proper response to the 9/11 attacks on this country. But there was never going to be a permanent fix.

Had President George W. Bush pulled us out when he damn well should have, in 2002 or ’03, the result would have been the same as it was on Sunday: a rapid takeover by the Taliban.

Had President Barack Obama pulled us out after killing Osama bin Laden in 2012, same result.

Had President Donald Trump pulled us out last year, yep, same thing.

But it didn’t have to be like this:

Dear God, not like this.

Presidentish Joe Biden told people just like the ones being shed from that cargo plane like so much detritus that he had a plan for getting them out.

He did not.

Biden told the world that we had weeks or even months to bring home those Afghans who had put their lives on the line to help our mission.

We did not.

In fact, the Biden administration gave the order that made the rapidity of this weekend’s Taliban takeover inevitable:

THIS is what people around the world will remember: that the United States left our Afghani friends and their families behind to be tortured and then slaughtered….

And the first to act? China… “China likely to recognize Taliban as Afghan rulers with fall of Kabul” (WASHINGTON EXAMINER). China is emboldened with US weakness in the region, the historic collapse of Afghanistan, and the frail puppet installed in Washington DC.

  • On Monday Steve Bannon warned that the US economy will implode if Taiwan falls to the Communist Chinese. According to Bannon he entire American economy centers around the chips, and in particular, the advanced chips designed, made, and manufactured in Taiwan. (GATEWAY PUNDIT)

All this said, I doubt Biden and his VERY progressive team would even bother with unenforced red-lines like Obama.

And then there is this:

The Taliban seized a staggering quantity of American military vehicles, equipment, and weapons when it overran Afghanistan in a week.

President Joe Biden, a Democrat obsessed with gun control, ended up giving billions of dollars of American weapons to the Islamist fanatics who helped perpetrate 9/11.

Only a month ago, Biden was bragging about the terrific quality of the modern “tools, training, and equipment” sent to the Afghan military at the expense of U.S. taxpayers over the past two decades.

Biden scoffed at the notion of an easy Taliban victory on July 8:

Together, with our NATO Allies and partners, we have trained and equipped over three hu- — nearly 300,000 current serving members of the military — of the Afghan National Security Force, and many beyond that who are no longer serving.  Add to that, hundreds of thousands more Afghan National Defense and Security Forces trained over the last two decades.

We provided our Afghan partners with all the tools — let me emphasize: all the tools, training, and equipment of any modern military.  We provided advanced weaponry.  And we’re going to continue to provide funding and equipment.   And we’ll ensure they have the capacity to maintain their air force.

“Do I trust the Taliban?” Biden said in response to a reporter’s question. “No. But I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more competent in terms of conducting war.”…..

AMERICAN MILITARY NEWS has quite a few pics for the visually attentive:

On Friday, the Taliban seized control of Firoz Koh, the provincial capital of Ghor, Afghanistan, marking at least 17 Afghan provincial capitals the Taliban have seized in the span of a week. Videos and photos have surfaced on social media showing the Taliban taking over swaths of U.S.-donated military equipment that the Taliban is using to continue overtaking Afghanistan.

Taliban forces have reportedly captured around 100 U.S.-made Humvees and MaxxPro Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs) as well as U.S. ScanEagle drones left behind and the Kunduz Airport.

The Taliban captured Kunduz Airport on Wednesday and on Thursday, German journalist Julian Röpcke tweeted, “The #Taliban not only seized appr. a hundred US humvees and (MaxxPro) MRAPs at Kunduz airport, but also several US ScanEagle drones. Billions of US tax payer $ going to Islamist extremists, thanks to the administration’s hasty withdrawal without a peace deal or follow up mission…..

[pics of Tweets from article and more]

 

Breaking Video: Crazy Footage Of Plane Crash! (Taipei, Taiwan)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Read more at MSN:

TAIPEI, Taiwan — A Taiwanese commercial flight with 53 passengers aboard clipped a bridge shortly after takeoff and crashed into a river in the island’s capital of Taipei on Wednesday morning.

Taiwan’s Central News Agency said at least 10 people were being taking to safety after the incident but gave no immediate information about the other passengers and crew aboard the TransAsia Airways flight.

Taiwanese media posted pictures of the plane in the water several dozen meters (yards) from the shore in the Keelung River.

CNA said the flight from Taipei to the outlying island of Kinmen lost contact with flight controllers at 10:55 a.m. and the fuselage landed in the Keelung River near the city’s downtown Sungshan airport.

The plane was identified as a French-made twin-engine turboprop ATR 72 with a two-pilot air crew.

The plane’s fuselage was seen half-submerged in the shallow river, with passengers and rescuers standing on the hull and swimming in the water.