Oil prices have surged around the world in recent weeks, which will lead to even higher inflation, according to industry experts.
“Rising oil prices have been one of the biggest drivers of inflation,” PVM Oil Associates senior analyst Stephen Brennock said Tuesday, according to CNBC. “And a worsening inflationary situation will act as a drag on the fragile economic recovery and oil consumption. This brings us neatly onto the issue of demand destruction.”
The Brent crude, which is the international benchmark for measuring oil prices, spiked above $80 per barrel Tuesday, marking its highest level in nearly three years, Reuters reported. An analysis from Goldman Sachs concluded that tight global oil supply and higher demand could lead to Brent crude surpassing $90 per barrel by the end of 2021.
“Global oil demand is back to converging to pre-Covid levels led by mobility in Asia, including China, and with the delta Covid impact fading,” the Goldman Sachs analysis said, according to Barron’s.
While rising prices may be good for oil producers, they will hurt consumers in the U.S. and worldwide, the AFP reported. The price of oil is deeply tied to the prices of products across various sectors.
“Rising oil prices add yet further upwards pressure on inflation,” U.K.-based Centre for Economics and Business Research economist Josie Dent told the AFP. “Businesses and households in Europe and the United States (are) set to experience rising costs associated with using oil and energy.”
Consumer economies like the U.S. will ultimately lose outbecause higher energy costs“will eat into the real value of disposable incomes,” Capital Economics analyst Simon MacAdam said, according to the AFP.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve bumped its 2021 inflation projection up to 4.2% during its meeting last week. In June, the central bank said inflation would increase at an annual rate of 3.4% this year.
“Inflation is elevated and will likely remain so in coming months before moderating,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell remarked during a Senate hearing Tuesday. “As the economy continues to reopen and spending rebounds, we are seeing upward pressure on prices, particularly due to supply bottlenecks in some sectors. These effects have been larger and longer lasting than anticipated.”
Mercola Calls Out The Government For Funding the Wuhan Lab Project
Dr. Joseph Mercola responded to his channel’s ban from Youtube Wednesday after Youtube banned vaccine criticism and anti-vaccine content (NATIONAL FILE was previously banned by Youtube). Mercola, whose work can be found at Mercola.com, did not hold back in castigating the globalist authoritarian elites and the pharmaceutical industry.
“The world is becoming increasingly aware of the rampant corruption in the media, and are rising up against tyrannical governments and the pharmaceutical industry that are coordinating this assault on our freedom and civil rights. Anyone who asks questions or challenges the hard sell is immediately censored on social media,” Dr. Mercola stated. Mercola noted that the U.S. federal government funded the bat coronavirus project at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Dr. Anthony Fauci specifically funded it) and Mercola added, “Independent media platforms that defend freedom of speech and the rights of Americans to speak out against the global tyranny will defeat the censorship extremists.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature Monday on Assembly Bill 37 makes California the eighth state in the nation with a law on the books requiring every voter to be mailed a ballot. The new law is part of an evolution of voting in the state over the past two decades, an effort to provide voters more options for when and where to cast their ballots.
“Data shows that sending everyone a ballot in the mail provides voters access. And when voters get ballots in the mail, they vote,” Assemblyman Marc Berman (D-Palo Alto), the bill’s author, said during a Senate committee hearing in July.
The law takes effect in January and will require ballots to be mailed to all voters for statewide elections in June and November. AB 37 also applies to local elections, potentially improving turnout in community contests but also increasing costs, given that vote-by-mail ballots are provided with prepaid postage.
The number of those apprehended crossing the southern border illegally during fiscal year 2021 that ends today exceeds the population of 11 American states.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, so far there have been over 1.5 million encounters of people crossing the southwest border through August.
That number will go up by 200,000 or more when September’s encounters are included, if recent trends continue.
The current tally already exceeds the total populations of 11 states, according to 2019 figures, including Hawaii (population: about 1,416,000), New Hampshire, Maine, Montana, Rhode Island, Delaware, South Dakota, North Dakota, Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming (population: about 579,000).
By comparison, there were just 458,000 encounters in 2020.
CBP Encounters, Southwest Land Border. (Check out those 2021 'single adult' numbers.)
No need to travel to see it 'first hand'… It's right there on the freaking website! pic.twitter.com/7G7q1sbaOn
Last week, 26 Republican governors — including border governors Doug Ducey of Arizona and Greg Abbott of Texas — sent an urgent letter to President Joe Biden seeking a meeting to discuss the border crisis within 15 days.
“As chief executives of our states, we request a meeting with you at The White House to bring an end to the national security crisis created by eight months of unenforced borders,” they wrote.
“The months-long surge in illegal crossings has instigated an international humanitarian crisis, spurred a spike in international criminal activity, and opened the floodgates to human traffickers and drug smugglers endangering public health and safety in our states. A crisis that began at our southern border now extends beyond to every state and requires immediate action before the situation worsens,” the governors added.
NEW 🚨 26 GOP Governors Demand Biden End The Border Crisis
“More fentanyl has been seized this fiscal year than the last three years combined—almost 10,500 pounds of fentanyl when only 2 milligrams prove fatal. This is enough to kill seven times the U.S. population,” they further noted.
The governors argued they are doing what they can to mitigate the situation, but that in the end, it is a federal issue.
‘[O]ur Constitution requires that the President must faithfully execute the immigration laws passed by Congress,” they wrote. “Not only has the federal government created a crisis, it has left our states to deal with challenges that only the federal government has a duty to solve.”
Last week, White House press secretary Jen Psakiaccused Republicans of being more interested in making speeches than solving the border crisis.
“There are a lot of Republicans out there giving speeches about how outraged they are about the situation at the border,” she said at Friday’s news briefing, according to a White House transcript. “Not many who are putting forward solutions or steps that we could take. So we’re a little tired of the speeches,” she said.
.@PressSec Jen Psaki: "There are a lot of Republicans out there giving speeches about how outraged they are about the situation at the border. Not many who are putting forward solutions or steps that we could take. So we're a little tired of the speeches." pic.twitter.com/ujqfcJOrOX
On Biden’s first day in office, he suspended construction of the border wall and ended former President Donald Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy for those seeking asylum in the United States, which Republicans have argued triggered the 21-year high surge in border crossings.
In a Newsmax interview this week, James Carafano, a national security expert with the Heritage Foundation who rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel during a 25-year Army career, argued that what happened in Del Rio, Texas, this month with a massing of migrants on the border, has now become part of the playbook for illegal entry into the U.S.
“They’ll just throw a camp up on the border, put thousands of people there and then the Biden team will be so anxious to get it off of the news cycle, they’ll just take those people and ship them right into the interior,” Carafano said.
“Look, we’re going to wind up with not millions, but if we keep this up, ten of millions of people coming in,” he predicted.
Carafano argued that the Biden administration really wants open borders, despite anything officials might say to the contrary.
“They’d like to hide that fact as much as possible from the American people, but at the end of the day, when the open-borders people say, ‘Do this,’ they jump,” he said.
The former West Point professor contended that having an open border, in addition to the unsustainable flow of migrants into the U.S., imperils national security.
“The other key thing is, we have a wide open border. It’s more wide open than it was on 9/11,” he said near the end of the interview, pointing out that the terrorist group al Qaida is reconstituting in Afghanistan and looking to hit the U.S. again.
“So it’s all fun and games, my friends,” Carafano said. “It’s all a big laugh until more people die than died on 9/11, and that’s going to happen, if we don’t do something.”
Plans to unite other left-leaning pro-life advocates
Terrisa Bukovinac, a politically progressive atheist, has become widely known in the pro-life movement for working together with conservatives and Christians to protect unborn babies from abortion.
Now, she has plans to unite other left-leaning pro-life advocates under a new organization.
The yet-to-be-named group will bring together “feminists, liberals, bipoc, secularists, lgbtqia folks, their allies, and fetal rights advocates from across the ideological spectrum” in the cause for life, Bukovinac said.
“The unjust killing of the unborn is a violation of our progressive values of equality, nonviolence and nondiscrimination,” she continued.
One of her main goals for the organization is to take back the “radically pro-abortion” Democratic Party, Fox News reports. She pointed to a recent Marist poll that found 58 percent of Democrats support restricting abortion to, at most, the first three months of pregnancy. In contrast, only 27 percent of Democrats align with their party’s platform on the issue, which supports abortions without limits throughout pregnancy.
“The Democratic establishment is completely out of touch with their constituents on the issue of abortion,” Bukovinac said.
On Oct. 1, she and other pro-life progressives plan to announce the name of the new pro-life organization in front of the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C.
“The so-called ‘Women’s March’ plans to host a pro-abortion demonstration the following day which will be countered by this group and others,” Bukovinac said. “Fetal rights advocates include 21 million Democrats, 12 million secularists, and roughly half of women in our nation, who are demanding the expansion of rights to the unborn members of the community being deliberately killed.”
She said people do not have to believe in the Bible or be conservative to be pro-life. Bukovinac said the pro-life position is supported by science and reason, while the pro-abortion position is “anti-progressive” and discriminatory.
She slammed the Planned Parenthood abortion chain and its racist background, including its founders’ association with the Ku Klux Klan, and called President Joe Biden a “traitor” for abandoning his support of pro-life policies like the Hyde Amendment, according to the report.
“The values of equality, non-violence, and nondiscrimination are incompatible with abortion, and to be truly progressive one must be willing to be actively anti-abortion,” she continued. “The expansion of rights to those who are marginalized is what progress is all about.”
Bukovinac said her new organization will be aggressive in their work to protect unborn babies from the oppressive abortion industry.
“We are willing to actually put our bodies in between the oppressor and the oppressed and that will be the nail in the coffin of the abortion industry,” she said.
“Public policymakers have chosen to force a ‘one size fits all’ treatment strategy, resulting in needless illness and death, rather than upholding fundamental concepts of the individualized, personalized approach to patient care which is proven to be safe and more effective.”
QUICK FACTS:
Over 5,000 doctors and scientists from all over the world have signed an open letter rebuking mainstream policymakers and government entities for their “unprecedented assault” on science and medicine in their response to Covid-19.
The doctors accuse world policymakers of making decisions “resulting in needless illness and death.”
“[T]his is not medicine. This is not care,” reads the Declaration. “These policies may actually constitute crimes against humanity.”
The doctors, scientists, researchers, CEOs, and professors who signed the Declaration hail from major universities and institutions such as the Yale Cancer Center, UCLA Medical Center, Baylor University Medical Center, Rutgers, University of Rome, University of Toronto, German Center for Infection Research, University of Washington Medical Center, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, University of Florida Health, University of Missouri HealthCare, University of Auckland, and Columbia University.
Dr. Robert Malone—inventor of the mRNA technology used in the Covid-19 injections—read the letter aloud at the Rome conference (see below).
THE FULL DECLARATION:
We the physicians of the world, united and loyal to the Hippocratic Oath, recognizing the profession of medicine as we know it is at a crossroad, are compelled to declare the following;
WHEREAS, it is our utmost responsibility and duty to uphold and restore the dignity, integrity, art and science of medicine;
WHEREAS, there is an unprecedented assault on our ability to care for our patients;
WHEREAS, public policymakers have chosen to force a “one size fits all” treatment strategy, resulting in needless illness and death, rather than upholding fundamental concepts of the individualized, personalized approach to patient care which is proven to be safe and more effective;
WHEREAS, physicians and other health care providers working on the front lines, utilizing their knowledge of epidemiology, pathophysiology and pharmacology, are often first to identify new, potentially life saving treatments;
WHEREAS, physicians are increasingly being discouraged from engaging in open professional discourse and the exchange of ideas about new and emerging diseases, not only endangering the essence of the medical profession, but more importantly, more tragically, the lives of our patients;
WHEREAS, thousands of physicians are being prevented from providing treatment to their patients, as a result of barriers put up by pharmacies, hospitals, and public health agencies, rendering the vast majority of healthcare providers helpless to protect their patients in the face of disease. Physicians are now advising their patients to simply go home (allowing the virus to replicate) and return when their disease worsens, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary patient deaths, due to failure-to-treat;
WHEREAS, this is not medicine. This is not care. These policies may actually constitute crimes against humanity.
NOW THEREFORE, IT IS:
RESOLVED, that the physician-patient relationship must be restored. The very heart of medicine is this relationship, which allows physicians to best understand their patients and their illnesses, to formulate treatments that give the best chance for success, while the patient is an active participant in their care.
RESOLVED, that the political intrusion into the practice of medicine and the physician/patient relationship must end. Physicians, and all health care providers, must be free to practice the art and science of medicine without fear of retribution, censorship, slander, or disciplinary action, including possible loss of licensure and hospital privileges, loss of insurance contracts and interference from government entities and organizations – which further prevent us from caring for patients in need. More than ever, the right and ability to exchange objective scientific findings, which further our understanding of disease, must be protected.
RESOLVED, that physicians must defend their right to prescribe treatment, observing the tenet FIRST, DO NO HARM. Physicians shall not be restricted from prescribing safe and effective treatments. These restrictions continue to cause unnecessary sickness and death. The rights of patients, after being fully informed about the risks and benefits of each option, must be restored to receive those treatments.
RESOLVED, that we invite physicians of the world and all health care providers to join us in this noble cause as we endeavor to restore trust, integrity and professionalism to the practice of medicine.
RESOLVED, that we invite the scientists of the world, who are skilled in biomedical research and uphold the highest ethical and moral standards, to insist on their ability to conduct and publish objective, empirical research without fear of reprisal upon their careers, reputations and livelihoods.
RESOLVED, that we invite patients, who believe in the importance of the physician-patient relationship and the ability to be active participants in their care, to demand access to science-based medical care.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, the undersigned has signed this Declaration as of the date first written.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) questioned America’s political relationship with Australia, calling out its totalitarian clampdown on citizens over Covid-19 restrictions.
Speaking at the International Boatbuilders Exhibition (IBEX) in Tampa on Tuesday, DeSantis, 43, said America should re-examine its alliance with the island continent in light of its suspension of freedom.
DeSantis: “In Australia right now, after a year and a half, they’re still enforcing lockdowns by the military…Is Australia freer than communist China right now?…The fact that’s even a question tells you something has gone dramatically off the rails.”pic.twitter.com/YKQ5yAwg4K
“You know, you guys, look what’s going on in Australia right now,” he said.
“You know, they’re enforcing, after a year and a half, they’re still enforcing lockdowns by the military.”
The land down under is “not a free country at all,” DeSantis said, prompting him to question the nation’s diplomatic ties with the US.
“In fact, I mean, I wonder why we would still have the same diplomatic relations when they’re doing that,” he added.
The Trump-supporting governor, who has banned vaccine passports and face masks in his state, also worried Australia has less freedom than that of communist China.
“Is Australia freer than China, communist China, right now? I don’t know.”
“The fact that that’s even a question tells you something has gone dramatically off the rails with some of this stuff.”
DeSantis began his speech by slamming Dr. Anthony Fauci’s lockdown orders, saying Floridians like being outdoors.
“I can tell you, especially growing up in Florida, this idea that Fauci says, ‘Stay in your house and never leave,’ – that is so disruptive to people’s overall wellbeing. The fact that we had people out fishing, boating, doing all that stuff was much better off for our state and for the people and their individual circumstances.”
In recent months, Australians have found themselves living under tyranny almost on par with that of ruthlessly authoritarian North Korea, as elite bureaucrats send police to crack down on mask offenders and anti-lockdown protesters.
Well done, @VictoriaPolice. Pushing over a 70 year old woman, who posed no physical threat, and spraying her in the face after she hit her head on the ground.
The public deserves a complete and transparent accounting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s safety monitoring, including the results of all interim reports and analyses, whether through an Freedom of Information Act request, Congressional order or some other means.
There are 91x the number of deaths and 276x the number of coagulopathy events reported after COVID-19 vaccination than after flu vaccination.
Safety signals were found for 242 adverse events using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) methodology.
Full transparency of CDC and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) safety monitoring is urgently needed.
On Aug. 30, the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted to recommend Pfizer/BioNTech’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine for people 16 years and older.
In comments I submitted to the committee along with my collaborators, we provided evidence of large safety signals from VAERS, using published CDC methods to analyze the data.
In this article, I describe the safety signals highlighted in our comments, which raise pressing questions about the CDC’s and FDA’s COVID vaccine safety monitoring efforts.
To begin with, there has been an unprecedented increase in the number of adverse event reports to VAERS associated with COVID-19 vaccines. The chart below shows the number of deaths for all other vaccines reported to VAERS annually since the system’s inception in 1990, compared to deaths reported for COVID-19 vaccines, from both domestic and foreign sources.
As of early September, there have been 14,506 deaths reported to VAERS for COVID-19 vaccines, compared to 8,673 for the preceding 30 years for all other vaccines. That is already more than 50 times the annual average — and we still have four months left to go until the end of the year.
It is hard to imagine how anyone can look at these numbers and not be at least a little bit concerned. Yet many people are dismissive, saying the unprecedented number of reports is due to the unprecedented number of vaccinations being administered.
I crunched the numbers, and even after taking into account the total number of vaccinations, the number of reports for COVID vaccines still towers over previous years.
See, for example, Figure 2 below, which shows the number of deaths reported per million vaccine doses from 2010-2020 and for COVID-19 vaccines. That’s nearly 40 deaths reported per million COVID vaccines versus an average of 1.6 for all other vaccines from the previous 10 years.
No matter what I did to the data, or what types of adverse events I looked at, I could not make the big jump in COVID vaccine reports go away.
So why do the CDC and FDA not seem to be concerned about this? I don’t know, but to try to answer that question, we have to take a step back to talk about VAERS and how the CDC uses it to detect safety signals.
VAERS, which is jointly administered by the CDC and FDA, is typical of all reporting systems used to monitor the safety of medicinal products. Although widely used, there are many known limitations with this type of system. Probably the biggest is that it is passive or spontaneous, meaning it relies on the willingness of people and medical professionals to “spontaneously” submit reports. So reporting rates are low and inconsistent.
READ + SHARE my letter to Dr. Kessler, newly named co-chair of Biden’s #COVID-19 Advisory Committee, requesting he immediately fix Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (#VAERS), system that monitors adverse outcomes following vaccination. #TheDefenderhttps://t.co/Jw77i8NrOA
Another limitation is that reports cannot be used reliably to show a causal connection between a vaccine or medication and an adverse event. So what are they good for?
They are used to provide a kind of early warning system. When enough reports accumulate about a particular type of event, those reports produce a safety signal, like an alarm bell. When the alarm rings, it doesn’t mean there is definitely a problem, but it is supposed to alert authorities to a possible problem and prompt further investigation.
In late January, the CDC released a briefing document outlining the agency’s standard operating procedures for ongoing monitoring of VAERS for safety signals from COVID-19 vaccines.
The document lays out plans to produce weekly reports that would highlight any safety signals found across a range of different adverse events. Although those reports have not been made public, we don’t need to rely on the CDC, as VAERS data is publicly available.
To detect safety signals with new vaccines, I took my lead from a study published by CDC researchers who were trying to detect safety signals for the new H1N1 swine flu vaccines introduced in 2009. The researchers compared VAERS reports for H1N1 vaccines to reports for regular flu vaccines.
So I took a similar approach and compared adverse events reported for COVID-19 to events reported for flu vaccines. This comparison makes a lot of sense, as flu vaccines are the only other type of vaccine administered to adults and the elderly in large numbers.
Of course, because the number of flu and COVID-19 vaccines administered is not the same, it makes sense to look at the number of reports per dose administered, something not specified in the CDC briefing document.
Table 1 (below) shows a comparison of VAERS reports for COVID-19 vaccines versus flu vaccines per million doses administered for a range of different event types and age groups.
For each adverse event type, the table shows the COVID-to-Flu ratio, which simply shows how many more events were reported per million doses of COVID-19 vaccines compared to the number per million doses of seasonal influenza vaccines.
The comparison is based on all reports to VAERS following COVID-19 vaccines (from Dec. 15 – Aug. 6) to all reports for all seasonal influenza vaccines from the previous five influenza seasons (from 2015/16 to 2019/20).
Keep in mind that for all the analyses, I excluded all reports that came from people with an indication of a SARS-CoV-2 infection, such as a positive test result or even a suspicion of COVID-19 — so the adverse events can’t be blamed on that.
The first thing to notice is that for every type of adverse event for every age group, there were more reports per million doses of COVID-19 vaccines than for flu vaccines. If you look at the bottom row for all age groups (12 and older), you see that for every million vaccine doses administered, there were 19 times more reports to VAERS for COVID-19 vaccines than for flu vaccines, 28 times more serious events, 91 times more deaths, 3 times more reports of Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), 276 times more reports of coagulopathy; 126 times as many reports of myocardial infarction; and 136 times more reports of myopericarditis.
Also notable is the variation across age groups. For example, death and coagulopathy were more preponderant for older age groups, whereas GBS and myopericarditis were more frequent for younger age groups.
The ratios for myopericarditis put the full significance of these results into perspective, since it is an officially recognized side effect of COVID-19 vaccines, especially among men under age 50. (We used the reporting rates per million vaccine doses from that report, slide 30, to calculate the COVID-to-Flu ratios for myopericarditis, which were slightly smaller than our own calculations.) See for example this FDA press release and the below slide from an Aug. 30 CDC presentation to the ACIP:
caption: Slide from Aug. 30 CDC presentation to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices
While the COVID-to-flu ratio for myopericarditis among 12- to 17-year-olds in Table 1 is in a league of its own at 1251-to-1, the ratio for the 18- to 49-year-olds is 81-to-1, which is well within the range of many of the other ratios in the table — and even smaller than many of them.
Because the CDC has acknowledged that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines can cause myocarditis in this age group, a reporting ratio of at least 81 is like an alarm bell going off to warn us of a potential safety problem. And the much larger ratios for coagulopathy and myocardial infarctions are like a 4-alarm fire.
So why does the CDC seem to be unconcerned about these safety signals? Is it possible they haven’t picked up on them?
Admittedly, comparing reports for COVID versus flu after taking the number of doses into account is not the same exact methodology anticipated in the CDC’s briefing document. Although it is arguably superior for a variety of reasons I won’t get into here, just to be sure I went ahead and did the exact same type of analysis outlined in the briefing document and found unambiguous safety signals.
Before showing the results, I need to explain how it works, but to do that we’ll have to get a bit deep in the weeds.
The method is a well-established pharmacovigilance technique based on calculating what’s known as the “Proportional Reporting Ratio” or PRR. To calculate the PRR, you first have to calculate the proportion of each type of event out of all events reported for that vaccine (COVID-19 and flu).
So for example, we take the number of VAERS reports of myocarditis for COVID-19 vaccines and divide that by the total number of all events reported for COVID-19 vaccines. Then we do the same for flu vaccines.
Then, to get the proportional reporting ratio (PRR), we divide the proportion of reports for a given type of event (like myopericarditis) for COVID-19 vaccines by the proportion for flu vaccines.
If the proportion for COVID-19 vaccines is large relative to the proportion for flu vaccines, that sends a signal alerting us to a potential safety problem. A safety signal is defined as a PRR that is greater than 2, statistically significant (with what’s known as a Chi-square value above 4) and has at least three of that type of event reported for each vaccine.
Table 2 below shows the PRR’s I calculated for several different adverse events across different age groups. All of the PRR’s in bold fit the CDC’s definition of a safety signal. This includes all PRR’s for death, except for the youngest age group, all PRR’s for coagulopathy and myopericarditis, and all PRR’s for myocardial infarction, except for the youngest age group because there were no myocardial infarctions reported for influenza vaccines.
Note that, by default, the PRR method will never detect a safety signal for events that have never been reported for the comparator vaccine — like the zero teenage myocardial infarctions reported for flu vaccines ever compared to 10 for COVID-19 vaccines — which arguably should be seen as an even stronger indication that something is amiss.)
The only event that makes up a larger proportion of flu vaccine reports than COVID-19 vaccines is GBS.
Here, too, the PRRs for myopericarditis are instructive. Even though the PRR value for myopericarditis in the youngest age group is off the scale, the values for the 18 to 49 age group is similar to or even lower than the PRR’s for deaths, myocardial infarctions and coagulopathy.
Because the signal for myopericarditis is indicative of an actual, acknowledged safety problem, other signals of similar size might very well be alerting us to actual but unacknowledged problems.
I then went a step further and calculated PRRs for all adverse events submitted to VAERS. I found 242 adverse events that satisfied the definition of a safety signal according to the CDC.
Some of them were minor, like abnormal dreams or vaccination site discomfort. But many of them were very serious and included, in addition to the events shown in Table 2: cardiac arrests; cerebral hemorrhages; cerebrovascular accidents (strokes); renal failure; and vaginal hemorrhages — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg of serious events that show unambiguous safety signals.
An additional 87 types of events didn’t qualify as a safety signal just because they had been reported only once or twice for flu vaccines. An additional 6,159 types of events had never been reported for flu vaccines, despite more than 600 million flu vaccines administered among the age groups I examined.
For these events, it could be argued the safety signal is infinite, since the number of events in the denominator is zero. But instead of raising an alarm, they are by definition considered unworthy of concern.
No matter how I sliced and diced the data, the safety signal for COVID-19 vaccines rang loud and clear. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could miss it. It would be like taking a hike in Arizona and falling into the Grand Canyon because you didn’t see the big hole in the ground.
Some people are dismissive when presented with this evidence. “VAERS data can’t be trusted,” they say. “Anyone can submit a report and some of the reports are fraudulent.”
Yes, anybody can submit a report, and some might be fraudulent. But the CDC hasn’t raised any concerns about this and continues to use VAERS to monitor for safety signals.
A recent study found 67% of VAERS reports were submitted by healthcare workers, and the CDC confirmed that 88% of VAERS myopericarditis reports they examined fit their case definition.
Yes, VAERS is imperfect, but the large majority of reports are legitimate and reliable.
Another objection is that the increase in reporting is artificial. Many people are scared of these new vaccines. Awareness of VAERS is higher than it has ever been. And the government has actively encouraged, and in some cases required, people to report adverse events — so of course VAERS reports are going to increase.
But that doesn’t mean there are really more events. This phenomenon is known as “stimulated reporting.”
Nobody at any of the recent CDC advisory committee meetings raised any concern that VAERS reports were inflated. If the unprecedented increase in VAERS reports was just due to stimulated reporting, CDC researchers tell uswe should expect to see COVID-to-flu ratios and PRRs that are roughly similar across different types of events. So if there was a 20-fold increase in reporting of serious events, say, then there should be a similar increase in other types of events.
A brief glance at Tables 1 and 2 clearly shows this is not the case — the reporting rates vary greatly across different types of events, and also across different age groups for the same event.
This is a huge giveaway that the increase — or at least a large portion of it — is not due to stimulated reporting. Indeed, underreporting is usually a bigger concern with data like VAERS, and there are good reasons to think the true number of adverse events is much larger.
But if the safety signal from VAERS is loud and clear and VAERS reports can be trusted, then how is the CDC not picking up on this? Or are they ignoring it? It’s hard to say.
It might have to do with how the CDC handles signals once they are detected. The agency’s protocols call for a thorough clinical review of events that trigger a safety signal in order to determine if the event could plausibly be caused by the vaccine. If that’s the case, it’s conceivable they found safety signals, but then determined that there was no plausible connection and therefore no cause for concern.
What this means in practice, however, is that if the CDC investigators do not understand how these novel vaccines — which use gene therapy technology and have had only limited use in humans — might cause a particular type of adverse event, the presumption is that there is no plausible connection.
For example, the CDC has declared after reviewing over 7,000 reports of deaths reported in the U.S. as of Sept. 7, they were not able to determine a plausible causal relationship for any of them, except for three due to thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP) from the Janssen vaccine.
But the methods and criteria they use to make these determinations aren’t published anywhere, assuming they even exist. It would be easier to take their word for it if their decision-making process wasn’t hidden behind a veil of secrecy.
And maybe that’s the biggest problem of all: lack of transparency. VAERS reports are public, which is laudable, but what the CDC does with those reports is mostly hidden from view.
For example, the CDC briefing document outlining plans to monitor VAERS speaks of producing some dozen or more tables every week detailing the agency’s search for safety signals. To my knowledge, none of these have ever been made public.
And keep in mind that VAERS isn’t the only data source the CDC uses for safety monitoring. The other main source is the Vaccine Safety Datalink(VSD), which should be more reliable than VAERS because it uses patient medical records from some of the nation’s largest HMO’s.
There are several ongoing COVID-19 vaccine monitoring initiatives that use the VSD, including “COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Evaluation in Pregnant Women and their Infants,” “Mortality and Vaccination with COVID-19 Vaccines,” “COVID-19 Vaccine Safety, Spontaneous Abortion (SAB) and Stillbirth,” and “COVID-19 Vaccine-Mediated Enhanced Disease (VMED) and Vaccine Effectiveness.”
While these monitoring efforts are certainly praiseworthy, of the five that should have already started yielding initial results and interim reports, only partial results from two of them have been presented to the CDC advisory committee or made public in any way.
Where are the others? And how could forcing workers to get vaccinated ever be justified when so much of the evidence regarding their safety is still missing?
A complete and transparent accounting of the CDC’s safety monitoring is urgently needed, including internal communications and the results of all interim reports and analyses, whether through an Freedom of Information Act request, Congressional order or some other means.
The public deserves to know how the CDC reached the conclusion there was no plausible connection between the COVID-19 vaccines and the thousands of deaths they’ve reviewed, and also why they have failed to detect safety signals — or if they have, why they are being ignored.
Postscript: Since completing this article, I and others submitted comments to the meeting of FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) on Sept. 17, which voted 16 to 2 to not approve a booster dose for people under 65 years old, citing a lack of sufficient safety and efficacy data. However the FDA overruled its advisory committee, as did the CDC after its vaccine safety committee recommended against authorizing a third Pfizer dose for anyone other than people 65 and older, long-term care facility residents and certain people with underlying conditions.
Evangelist Nick Hall, founder of Pulse ministry, witnessed 2,167 people commit their lives to Christ while sharing the gospel on tour with Christian music artists Chris Tomlin, Kari Jobe, and Bethel Music.
Hall took part in the tour from Aug. 13-23 where he saw how God’s love and mercy is transforming lives in amazing ways.
“Being a part of this tour and having the opportunity to share the gospel with so many people was nothing short of miraculous,” he said.
He recalled meeting a young man who had questions about his faith following the recent death of his grandmother.
“Today, I met Jesse backstage right after I got done preaching,” Hall shared on Instagram. “His grandma passed away recently and he shared that it felt he had lost his connection to God that she carried for the family. We discussed faith and he asked some great questions. When he told me he believed he had a 70% chance of going to heaven, I asked if he would like to know how to be 100%. He said yes, and tonight he gave his life to Jesus.”
Hall said, “God answered my daily prayer by sending venue workers, Uber drivers and countless individuals into my path with whom I could pray and share the gospel. Real ministry isn’t what happens on stage, but what happens off it. I believe that God is looking to activate all of us, everyday believers, to share the gospel now.”
While touring with the artists, Hall was also preparing for a major outreach next year called “Together ’22.” The event is scheduled for June 24-25, 2022 in Dallas, TX at The Cotton Bowl Stadium.
“This tour energized me for the future, especially looking to our Together ’22 event at the Cotton Bowl stadium in Dallas next year,” the evangelist said. “We need Jesus. We need each other. Together ’22 is going to be a powerful time of repentance, prayer and worship. This tour was the perfect launchpad and just a glimpse of what God is doing in hearts all around the world.”
Hall, along with members of his ministry, just concluded the evangelism training program, “Pulse 100,” in an effort to find 100 evangelists looking for a platform to share the gospel.
“Through Pulse 100, we are on a mission to identify, train, and equip 100 evangelists and preachers who are committed to serve the Church by sharing the Gospel and equipping the saints,” the website reads.
Hall started Pulse on his college campus in 2006. Since then, he’s seen millions of people impacted by the Gospel and millions more commit their lives to Jesus.
To find out more about Pulse and Together ’22, click here.
The Tesla CEO said that the current US administration is a “little biased or something.”
Tech mogul extraordinaire Elon Musk complained about US President Biden’s attitude towards Tesla Inc. on Tuesday while speaking at the Code Conference in California.
When Musk was asked at the event about mocking Biden in a tweet over the POTUS apparently not acknowledging the Inspiration4, SpaceX’s first non-professional space mission, Musk said that the current administration is “not the friendliest.”
“Biden held this EV summit — didn’t invite Tesla,” he said, reportedly referring to an electric vehicle event that was held at the White House last month. “Invited GM, Ford, Chrysler, and UAW [United Auto Workers Union]. An EV summit at the White House. Didn’t mention Tesla once, and praised GM and Ford for leading the EV revolution.
”Implying that the lack of an invitation was “maybe a little biased or something,” Musk mused about the Biden administration being “not the friendliest.”
“Seems to be controlled by unions,” he remarked.
As the newspaper points out, when White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked by a reporter if Tesla wasn’t invited to the aforementioned EV event because the company employees weren’t unionised, she replied: “These are the three largest employers of the United Auto Workers, so I’ll let you draw your own conclusion.”
Earlier this month, Musk also dropped a snarky remark about Biden when one social media user inquired on Twitter, apparently referring to the Inspiration4 mission: “The president of the United States has refused to even acknowledge the four newest American astronauts who helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars for St. Jude. What’s your theory on why that is?”
Safety Signals for COVID Vaccines Are Loud and Clear. Why Is Nobody Listening?
The public deserves a complete and transparent accounting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s safety monitoring, including the results of all interim reports and analyses, whether through an Freedom of Information Act request, Congressional order or some other means.
Summary:
On Aug. 30, the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted to recommend Pfizer/BioNTech’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine for people 16 years and older.
In comments I submitted to the committee along with my collaborators, we provided evidence of large safety signals from VAERS, using published CDC methods to analyze the data.
In this article, I describe the safety signals highlighted in our comments, which raise pressing questions about the CDC’s and FDA’s COVID vaccine safety monitoring efforts.
To begin with, there has been an unprecedented increase in the number of adverse event reports to VAERS associated with COVID-19 vaccines. The chart below shows the number of deaths for all other vaccines reported to VAERS annually since the system’s inception in 1990, compared to deaths reported for COVID-19 vaccines, from both domestic and foreign sources.
As of early September, there have been 14,506 deaths reported to VAERS for COVID-19 vaccines, compared to 8,673 for the preceding 30 years for all other vaccines. That is already more than 50 times the annual average — and we still have four months left to go until the end of the year.
It is hard to imagine how anyone can look at these numbers and not be at least a little bit concerned. Yet many people are dismissive, saying the unprecedented number of reports is due to the unprecedented number of vaccinations being administered.
I crunched the numbers, and even after taking into account the total number of vaccinations, the number of reports for COVID vaccines still towers over previous years.
See, for example, Figure 2 below, which shows the number of deaths reported per million vaccine doses from 2010-2020 and for COVID-19 vaccines. That’s nearly 40 deaths reported per million COVID vaccines versus an average of 1.6 for all other vaccines from the previous 10 years.
No matter what I did to the data, or what types of adverse events I looked at, I could not make the big jump in COVID vaccine reports go away.
So why do the CDC and FDA not seem to be concerned about this? I don’t know, but to try to answer that question, we have to take a step back to talk about VAERS and how the CDC uses it to detect safety signals.
VAERS, which is jointly administered by the CDC and FDA, is typical of all reporting systems used to monitor the safety of medicinal products. Although widely used, there are many known limitations with this type of system. Probably the biggest is that it is passive or spontaneous, meaning it relies on the willingness of people and medical professionals to “spontaneously” submit reports. So reporting rates are low and inconsistent.
Another limitation is that reports cannot be used reliably to show a causal connection between a vaccine or medication and an adverse event. So what are they good for?
They are used to provide a kind of early warning system. When enough reports accumulate about a particular type of event, those reports produce a safety signal, like an alarm bell. When the alarm rings, it doesn’t mean there is definitely a problem, but it is supposed to alert authorities to a possible problem and prompt further investigation.
In late January, the CDC released a briefing document outlining the agency’s standard operating procedures for ongoing monitoring of VAERS for safety signals from COVID-19 vaccines.
The document lays out plans to produce weekly reports that would highlight any safety signals found across a range of different adverse events. Although those reports have not been made public, we don’t need to rely on the CDC, as VAERS data is publicly available.
To detect safety signals with new vaccines, I took my lead from a study published by CDC researchers who were trying to detect safety signals for the new H1N1 swine flu vaccines introduced in 2009. The researchers compared VAERS reports for H1N1 vaccines to reports for regular flu vaccines.
So I took a similar approach and compared adverse events reported for COVID-19 to events reported for flu vaccines. This comparison makes a lot of sense, as flu vaccines are the only other type of vaccine administered to adults and the elderly in large numbers.
Of course, because the number of flu and COVID-19 vaccines administered is not the same, it makes sense to look at the number of reports per dose administered, something not specified in the CDC briefing document.
Table 1 (below) shows a comparison of VAERS reports for COVID-19 vaccines versus flu vaccines per million doses administered for a range of different event types and age groups.
For each adverse event type, the table shows the COVID-to-Flu ratio, which simply shows how many more events were reported per million doses of COVID-19 vaccines compared to the number per million doses of seasonal influenza vaccines.
The comparison is based on all reports to VAERS following COVID-19 vaccines (from Dec. 15 – Aug. 6) to all reports for all seasonal influenza vaccines from the previous five influenza seasons (from 2015/16 to 2019/20).
Keep in mind that for all the analyses, I excluded all reports that came from people with an indication of a SARS-CoV-2 infection, such as a positive test result or even a suspicion of COVID-19 — so the adverse events can’t be blamed on that.
The first thing to notice is that for every type of adverse event for every age group, there were more reports per million doses of COVID-19 vaccines than for flu vaccines. If you look at the bottom row for all age groups (12 and older), you see that for every million vaccine doses administered, there were 19 times more reports to VAERS for COVID-19 vaccines than for flu vaccines, 28 times more serious events, 91 times more deaths, 3 times more reports of Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), 276 times more reports of coagulopathy; 126 times as many reports of myocardial infarction; and 136 times more reports of myopericarditis.
Also notable is the variation across age groups. For example, death and coagulopathy were more preponderant for older age groups, whereas GBS and myopericarditis were more frequent for younger age groups.
The ratios for myopericarditis put the full significance of these results into perspective, since it is an officially recognized side effect of COVID-19 vaccines, especially among men under age 50. (We used the reporting rates per million vaccine doses from that report, slide 30, to calculate the COVID-to-Flu ratios for myopericarditis, which were slightly smaller than our own calculations.) See for example this FDA press release and the below slide from an Aug. 30 CDC presentation to the ACIP:
caption: Slide from Aug. 30 CDC presentation to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices
While the COVID-to-flu ratio for myopericarditis among 12- to 17-year-olds in Table 1 is in a league of its own at 1251-to-1, the ratio for the 18- to 49-year-olds is 81-to-1, which is well within the range of many of the other ratios in the table — and even smaller than many of them.
Because the CDC has acknowledged that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines can cause myocarditis in this age group, a reporting ratio of at least 81 is like an alarm bell going off to warn us of a potential safety problem. And the much larger ratios for coagulopathy and myocardial infarctions are like a 4-alarm fire.
So why does the CDC seem to be unconcerned about these safety signals? Is it possible they haven’t picked up on them?
Admittedly, comparing reports for COVID versus flu after taking the number of doses into account is not the same exact methodology anticipated in the CDC’s briefing document. Although it is arguably superior for a variety of reasons I won’t get into here, just to be sure I went ahead and did the exact same type of analysis outlined in the briefing document and found unambiguous safety signals.
Before showing the results, I need to explain how it works, but to do that we’ll have to get a bit deep in the weeds.
The method is a well-established pharmacovigilance technique based on calculating what’s known as the “Proportional Reporting Ratio” or PRR. To calculate the PRR, you first have to calculate the proportion of each type of event out of all events reported for that vaccine (COVID-19 and flu).
So for example, we take the number of VAERS reports of myocarditis for COVID-19 vaccines and divide that by the total number of all events reported for COVID-19 vaccines. Then we do the same for flu vaccines.
Then, to get the proportional reporting ratio (PRR), we divide the proportion of reports for a given type of event (like myopericarditis) for COVID-19 vaccines by the proportion for flu vaccines.
If the proportion for COVID-19 vaccines is large relative to the proportion for flu vaccines, that sends a signal alerting us to a potential safety problem. A safety signal is defined as a PRR that is greater than 2, statistically significant (with what’s known as a Chi-square value above 4) and has at least three of that type of event reported for each vaccine.
Table 2 below shows the PRR’s I calculated for several different adverse events across different age groups. All of the PRR’s in bold fit the CDC’s definition of a safety signal. This includes all PRR’s for death, except for the youngest age group, all PRR’s for coagulopathy and myopericarditis, and all PRR’s for myocardial infarction, except for the youngest age group because there were no myocardial infarctions reported for influenza vaccines.
Note that, by default, the PRR method will never detect a safety signal for events that have never been reported for the comparator vaccine — like the zero teenage myocardial infarctions reported for flu vaccines ever compared to 10 for COVID-19 vaccines — which arguably should be seen as an even stronger indication that something is amiss.)
The only event that makes up a larger proportion of flu vaccine reports than COVID-19 vaccines is GBS.
Here, too, the PRRs for myopericarditis are instructive. Even though the PRR value for myopericarditis in the youngest age group is off the scale, the values for the 18 to 49 age group is similar to or even lower than the PRR’s for deaths, myocardial infarctions and coagulopathy.
Because the signal for myopericarditis is indicative of an actual, acknowledged safety problem, other signals of similar size might very well be alerting us to actual but unacknowledged problems.
I then went a step further and calculated PRRs for all adverse events submitted to VAERS. I found 242 adverse events that satisfied the definition of a safety signal according to the CDC.
Some of them were minor, like abnormal dreams or vaccination site discomfort. But many of them were very serious and included, in addition to the events shown in Table 2: cardiac arrests; cerebral hemorrhages; cerebrovascular accidents (strokes); renal failure; and vaginal hemorrhages — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg of serious events that show unambiguous safety signals.
An additional 87 types of events didn’t qualify as a safety signal just because they had been reported only once or twice for flu vaccines. An additional 6,159 types of events had never been reported for flu vaccines, despite more than 600 million flu vaccines administered among the age groups I examined.
For these events, it could be argued the safety signal is infinite, since the number of events in the denominator is zero. But instead of raising an alarm, they are by definition considered unworthy of concern.
No matter how I sliced and diced the data, the safety signal for COVID-19 vaccines rang loud and clear. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could miss it. It would be like taking a hike in Arizona and falling into the Grand Canyon because you didn’t see the big hole in the ground.
Some people are dismissive when presented with this evidence. “VAERS data can’t be trusted,” they say. “Anyone can submit a report and some of the reports are fraudulent.”
Yes, anybody can submit a report, and some might be fraudulent. But the CDC hasn’t raised any concerns about this and continues to use VAERS to monitor for safety signals.
A recent study found 67% of VAERS reports were submitted by healthcare workers, and the CDC confirmed that 88% of VAERS myopericarditis reports they examined fit their case definition.
Yes, VAERS is imperfect, but the large majority of reports are legitimate and reliable.
Another objection is that the increase in reporting is artificial. Many people are scared of these new vaccines. Awareness of VAERS is higher than it has ever been. And the government has actively encouraged, and in some cases required, people to report adverse events — so of course VAERS reports are going to increase.
But that doesn’t mean there are really more events. This phenomenon is known as “stimulated reporting.”
Nobody at any of the recent CDC advisory committee meetings raised any concern that VAERS reports were inflated. If the unprecedented increase in VAERS reports was just due to stimulated reporting, CDC researchers tell uswe should expect to see COVID-to-flu ratios and PRRs that are roughly similar across different types of events. So if there was a 20-fold increase in reporting of serious events, say, then there should be a similar increase in other types of events.
A brief glance at Tables 1 and 2 clearly shows this is not the case — the reporting rates vary greatly across different types of events, and also across different age groups for the same event.
This is a huge giveaway that the increase — or at least a large portion of it — is not due to stimulated reporting. Indeed, underreporting is usually a bigger concern with data like VAERS, and there are good reasons to think the true number of adverse events is much larger.
But if the safety signal from VAERS is loud and clear and VAERS reports can be trusted, then how is the CDC not picking up on this? Or are they ignoring it? It’s hard to say.
It might have to do with how the CDC handles signals once they are detected. The agency’s protocols call for a thorough clinical review of events that trigger a safety signal in order to determine if the event could plausibly be caused by the vaccine. If that’s the case, it’s conceivable they found safety signals, but then determined that there was no plausible connection and therefore no cause for concern.
What this means in practice, however, is that if the CDC investigators do not understand how these novel vaccines — which use gene therapy technology and have had only limited use in humans — might cause a particular type of adverse event, the presumption is that there is no plausible connection.
For example, the CDC has declared after reviewing over 7,000 reports of deaths reported in the U.S. as of Sept. 7, they were not able to determine a plausible causal relationship for any of them, except for three due to thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP) from the Janssen vaccine.
But the methods and criteria they use to make these determinations aren’t published anywhere, assuming they even exist. It would be easier to take their word for it if their decision-making process wasn’t hidden behind a veil of secrecy.
And maybe that’s the biggest problem of all: lack of transparency. VAERS reports are public, which is laudable, but what the CDC does with those reports is mostly hidden from view.
For example, the CDC briefing document outlining plans to monitor VAERS speaks of producing some dozen or more tables every week detailing the agency’s search for safety signals. To my knowledge, none of these have ever been made public.
And keep in mind that VAERS isn’t the only data source the CDC uses for safety monitoring. The other main source is the Vaccine Safety Datalink(VSD), which should be more reliable than VAERS because it uses patient medical records from some of the nation’s largest HMO’s.
There are several ongoing COVID-19 vaccine monitoring initiatives that use the VSD, including “COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Evaluation in Pregnant Women and their Infants,” “Mortality and Vaccination with COVID-19 Vaccines,” “COVID-19 Vaccine Safety, Spontaneous Abortion (SAB) and Stillbirth,” and “COVID-19 Vaccine-Mediated Enhanced Disease (VMED) and Vaccine Effectiveness.”
While these monitoring efforts are certainly praiseworthy, of the five that should have already started yielding initial results and interim reports, only partial results from two of them have been presented to the CDC advisory committee or made public in any way.
Where are the others? And how could forcing workers to get vaccinated ever be justified when so much of the evidence regarding their safety is still missing?
A complete and transparent accounting of the CDC’s safety monitoring is urgently needed, including internal communications and the results of all interim reports and analyses, whether through an Freedom of Information Act request, Congressional order or some other means.
The public deserves to know how the CDC reached the conclusion there was no plausible connection between the COVID-19 vaccines and the thousands of deaths they’ve reviewed, and also why they have failed to detect safety signals — or if they have, why they are being ignored.
Postscript: Since completing this article, I and others submitted comments to the meeting of FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) on Sept. 17, which voted 16 to 2 to not approve a booster dose for people under 65 years old, citing a lack of sufficient safety and efficacy data. However the FDA overruled its advisory committee, as did the CDC after its vaccine safety committee recommended against authorizing a third Pfizer dose for anyone other than people 65 and older, long-term care facility residents and certain people with underlying conditions.