Since 2020, public health technocrats and their allies among elected officials have clung to the position that absolutely every person who can possibly get a covid vaccine should get one.
Both the Mayo Clinic website and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, for example, insist that “research has not yet shown” that people who have recovered from covid have any sort of reliable protection. Moreover, the CDC page points to a single study from Kentucky claiming that people with natural immunity are more than twice as likely to contract covid again, compared to people who have been vaccinated.
This narrative is reflected in the fact that the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates are a one-size-fits-all policy insisting that virtually all adults, regardless of whether or not they’ve already had the disease, receive a covid vaccine. The official position is apparently this: nothing except the vaccine can provide any sort of resistance or immunity. So get a vaccine. No exceptions!
The regime has attached itself closely to a vaccinate-everybody-no-matter-what policy, and a sudden u-turn would be politically problematic. So it’s no wonder there’s so little interest in the topic.
Indeed, in a September 10 interview, senior covid technocrat Anthony Fauci claimed that the matter of natural immunity was not even being discussed at government health agencies. Fauci’s response suggested that the facts of natural immunity warranted discussion at some point in the future. But the comment certainly fit the dominant regime narrative nonetheless: the facts of natural immunity don’t matter for now. Everyone should just get vaccinated:
CNN’s Sanjay Gupta asked if people who have already recovered from COVID-19 should still be required to get the vaccine.
“I don’t have a really firm answer for you on that,” [Fauci] said Thursday on CNN. “I think that is something that we need to sit down and discuss seriously.”
Maybe someday they’ll get to talking about it.
But some physicians aren’t as obsessed with pushing vaccine mandates as Anthony Fauci, and the evidence in favor of natural immunity is becoming so undeniable that even mainstream publications are starting to admit it.
In an op-ed for the Washington Post last week, Marty Makary of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine argues that the medical profession has hurt its credibility in pretending that natural immunity is virtually irrelevant to the covid equation. Moreover, the dogmatic “get vaccinated” position constitutes a lack of honesty about the data. Rather, Makary concludes:
[W]e can encourage all Americans to get vaccinated while still being honest about the data. In my clinical experience, I have found patients to be extremely forgiving with evolving data if you are honest and transparent with them. Yet, when asked the common question, “I’ve recovered from covid, is it absolutely essential that I get vaccinated?” many public health officials have put aside the data and responded with a synchronized “yes,” even as studies have shown that reinfections are rare and often asymptomatic or mild when they do occur.
And what are these studies? Makary continues:
More than 15 studies have demonstrated the power of immunity acquired by previously having the virus. A 700,000-person study from Israel two weeks ago found that those who had experienced prior infections were 27 times less likely to get a second symptomatic covid infection than those who were vaccinated. This affirmed a June Cleveland Clinic study of health-care workers (who are often exposed to the virus), in which none who had previously tested positive for the coronavirus got reinfected. The study authors concluded that “individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from covid-19 vaccination.” And in May, a Washington University study found that even a mild covid infection resulted in long-lasting immunity.
The policy bias in favor of vaccines ignores many other facts as well, such as the relative risks of vaccines, especially for the young:
The current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention position about vaccinating children also dismisses the benefits of natural immunity. The Los Angeles County School District recently mandated vaccines for students ages 12 and up who want to learn in person. But young people are less likely to suffer severe or long-lasting symptoms from covid-19 than adults, and have experienced rare heart complications from the vaccines. In Israel, heart inflammation has been observed in between 1 in 3,000 and 1 in 6,000 males age 16 to 24; the CDC has confirmed 854 reports nationally in people age 30 and younger who got the vaccine.
A second dose of the two-shot mRNA vaccine like that produced by Pfizer and Moderna may not even be necessary in children who had covid. Since February, Israel’s Health Ministry has been recommending that anyone, adult or adolescent, who has recovered from covid-19 receive a only single mRNA vaccine dose, instead of two. Even though the risk of severe illness during a reinfection is exceedingly low, some data has demonstrated a slight benefit to one dose in this situation. Other countries use a similar approach. The United States could adopt this strategy now as a reasonable next step in transitioning from an overly rigid to a more flexible vaccine requirement policy. For comparison, the CDC has long recommended that kids do not get the chickenpox vaccine if they had chickenpox infection in the past.
The nonscientific, ideology-induced blind spot for natural immunity also prompted The BMJ (the journal of the British Medical Association) to note that “[w]hen the vaccine rollout began in mid-December 2020, more than one quarter of Americans—91 million—had been infected with SARS-CoV-2…. As of this May, that proportion had risen to more than a third of the population, including 44% of adults aged 18–59.”
And yet, the authors note this fact doesn’t appear to be a part of any policy discussion at all:
The substantial number of infections, coupled with the increasing scientific evidence that natural immunity was durable, led some medical observers to ask why natural immunity didn’t seem to be factored into decisions about prioritising vaccination.
This problem is reflected in the Biden administration’s drive for booster shots—announced in mid-August—even before there was any clinical research on booster shots at all. Even by mid-September, as one hospital’s chief medical officer put it, “the data is not compelling one way or another.”
But those sorts of details don’t trouble federal “public health” officials, and the Biden administration quickly moved toward pushing booster shots for everyone.
This Is Why There Should Be No Mandatory Medical Treatment
Of course, mandating vaccines—like mandating any medical treatment—would still be immoral even if we could list a dozen studies suggesting boosters are a boon and that natural immunity is no good.
What if there were twenty-five studies “proving” vaccines are better than natural immunity, but only twenty studies “proving” natural immunity is better? Would coercive vaccine mandates then suddenly be justified? Unfortunately, that’s exactly how many advocates for repressive covid policies think the world should work. For these people, policy is just a matter of adding up the number of studies “proving” their side is right, and then claiming this justifies forcing mandatory medications on millions of human beings.
(It never works in reverse, of course. The fact that there’s a lot of evidence—as Makary points out—against vaccines for those who have natural immunity, the dominant narrative is nonetheless that vaccines are “necessary” and “worth it” for everybody, always and everywhere.)
In the real world, however, many medications—including these new vaccines—come with risks that must be weighed against potential benefits. These decisions can only be made at the individual level, where patients must make their own decisions about what substances to put into their own bodies. In other words, blanket policies proclaiming “everyone must receive this medical treatment immediately, or else” contradicts the realities of the uncertainties and varying risk levels that affect individuals. The facts of uncertainty and informed consent were once considered a mainstay of medical ethics—and of any political ideology that actually respects self-determination and basic human rights. Unfortunately, the philosophy of “public health” appears to be uninterested in such trivialities.
At this point, it would be embarrassing for the regime to admit what actual scientific inquiry has shown: that natural immunity is generally superior to receiving the vaccine. The regime doesn’t like to be embarrassed, and neither do the countless doctors and nurses who have long toed the regime’s political line. So expect more of the same.
A lot of government agencies can propel their public-sector employees into high-paying private-sector gigs. Sitting squarely at the top of the list is the Treasury Department.
Why it matters: Treasury has almost unlimited financial power.
Treasury secretaries seen as being friendly to Wall Street — think Robert Rubin, Larry Summers or Tim Geithner — invariably exit to multimillion-dollar salaries in the financial sector. Steven Mnuchin has managed to do even better for himself.
Driving the news: Mnuchin has raised $2.5 billion so far for a private equity fund, including from Saudi Arabia, a country toward whom he was notably friendly while in office. If the fund is structured with a standard 2% management fee, that’s $50 million per year right there for Mnuchin and his colleagues, before they make a single penny from investment returns.
What we’re reading: The New York Times has an in-depth story about how accountants cycle into Treasury, do a tour of duty there that often involves enforcing the law in business-friendly ways, and then cycle straight back out to their own firms “with loftier titles and higher pay.”
The bottom line: As Summers himself says, “the real scandal is not the illegal things people do, rather it’s what is legal.”
Los Angeles County stepped in Tuesday to defend the largely maskless Emmy Awards from complaints that it appeared the star-studded event did not follow proper COVID-19 precautions and, specifically, did not abide by the Los Angeles mask mandate.
L.A. County claimed, in a statement to media addressing the criticism, that because the Emmys are technically a “television production,” they are exempted from the heavy-handed mask mandate, even though the event is primarily an awards banquet.
“The Emmy Award Show is a television production, and persons appearing on the show are considered performers,” the statement said. “All persons appearing on or in the audience of the Emmy Award Show were fully vaccinated against COVID-19.”
“The Emmys reached out to Public Health in advance to share their safety protocols, which exceeded the baseline requirements for television and film productions,” LA County noted. “Careful planning before large events is essential to assure that all health and safety requirements are adequately addressed.”
“Additionally, the department was told that all attendees tested negative for COVID-19 within 48 hours of the event. Similarly, production crews were required to be vaccinated or test negative for the virus twice per week,” Fox News noted.
The group then claimed that a fully vaccinated crowd was “one of the most powerful ways” to achieve COVID-19 safety, regardless of masks, contravening its own recommendations.
“Full vaccination of all attendees is one of the most powerful ways to achieve a safe environment. Testing of event participants and crew and optimizing ventilation are additional powerful tools,” the Department of Health said. “Public Health will continue to review the protocols of future large television production events and prescribe additional safety modifications to mitigate risk of COVID-19 transmission.”
According to the Los Angeles County Public Health website, “EVERYONE*, regardless of vaccination status, must wear a mask” in “all indoor public settings, venues, gatherings, and public and private businesses in Los Angeles County.”
The L.A. County website does not make a specific mention of an exception for film and television productions.
The Emmy Awards, held Sunday in a “tent,” had an entirely vaccinated attendee list, according to organizers, but few, if any celebrities appeared in masks. As The Daily Wire reported on Monday, photographs of the event show only staff, assistants, and media wearing masks on the red carpet. Inside the tent, only some members of the production team appeared masked.
Even actor Seth Rogan made note of the decision to proceed with the maskless event.
“Let me start by saying, there’s way too many of us in this little room. What are we doing? They said this was outdoors. It’s not,” Rogan said. “They lied to us. We’re in a hermetically-sealed tent right now. I would not have come to this. Why is there a roof? It’s more important that we have three chandeliers than that we make sure we don’t kill Eugene Levy tonight. That is what has been decided.”
“This is insane. I went from wiping my groceries to Paul Bettany sneezing in my face. So, that’s a big week! If anyone’s gonna sneeze in my face, Paul, I want it to be you,” he added.
Supervisor Juli Briskman this week dismissed much of the rhetoric surrounding critical race theory as political
Virginia’s Loudoun County Board of Supervisors voted on Tuesday to launch a study about the history of racial discrimination in the county and whether reparations would be appropriate.
County Supervisor Juli Briskman linked her proposal specifically to the county continuing to segregate schools for 14 years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954, which outlawed the practice, FOX 5 in Washington, D.C. reported.
The proposal passed 6-3, with the supervisors who voted against criticizing it for not being specific enough in its goals, according to the Loudoun Times.
Critical Race Theory became a flashpoint in the county over the summer, with protests outside schools, a board meeting that ended in an arrest and a lawsuit brought against the district by a teacher who was suspended for not using transgender pronouns, the Washington Post reported.
“The anti-CRT movement is much more about ‘today’ and what we’re teaching today,” Briskman said, according to FOX 5. “And my Board member initiative is looking back at potential harm that was because we operated segregated schools illegally against the ruling of Brown vs. the Board of Education.”
Briskman dismissed much of the rhetoric surrounding CRT as political.
“I would just encourage our joint commission or whatever committee to come out of this to just ignore the outside noise because what’s happening in Fairfax and us, has little to do with us and in many ways has to do with ‘message testing’ for the 2022 elections and beyond,” she said, according to FOX 5.
Haitian migrants in federal custody have “hijacked” multiple buses during transport rides and forced out drivers in incidents that threaten to stop the U.S. government’s immigration enforcement operations, according to three people familiar with the incidents.
“They’ve been basically overpowering the drivers and they’ve actually hijacked a couple of the buses and driven them down the road a little ways and escaped. This happened multiple times,” a senior federal law enforcement official told the Washington Examiner Tuesday evening.
The incidents have occurred aboard the boarded-up school buses and commercial coach buses transporting Haitian migrants from the camp beneath the Del Rio-Ciudad Acuna International Bridge to processing centers across the region, as well as from the processing centers to local airports for deportation flights.
“They’re moving the detainees, but they’re not shackled — they’re not restrained in any way. Yesterday some detainees kicked a window out and 22 escaped,” the same official said, referring to an incident on Monday.
“Now they’re going to start doing high-risk escorts,” the official added.
On Monday afternoon,a bus bound for San Antonio, Texas, was taken over during the two-and-a-half-hour trip from the international bridge in Del Rio. The migrants on board had been picked up from the makeshift migrant camp, where thousands are waiting to be taken into custody.
“They did break out of the bus, and they did escape,” a second federal law enforcement official confirmed to the Washington Examiner on Tuesday.
Law enforcement searched for the escapees and recaptured them that evening.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Despite many attempts of the mainstream media to tarnish the relationship between former President Donald Trump and the Christian community, new data actually shows that his presidency has positively influenced Christian faith in America. Contrary to what many commentators say about Trump pushing Americans away from the faith, a recent survey has in fact shown otherwise.
According to a new survey from the Pew Research Center, 29% of White Americans identified as born-again or evangelical Protestants in 2020, a 4% increase from the 25% of White Americans that said so in 2016.
The new survey also found that 6% of White Americans who did not describe themselves as evangelical in 2016 have adopted the identity in 2020, versus 2% of White Americans who identified as born again/evangelical Protestants in 2016 but left the faith by 2020.
The recent survey also showed that 16% of White Americans who did not identify as evangelical Christians in 2016 but expressed support for Trump in 2016 have identified as evangelical in 2020. Only 1% of those who did not support Trump adopted the evangelical identity between 2016 and 2020.
Around 12% of White Americans who did not support Trump stopped identifying as evangelical between 2016 and 2020, a significantly larger amount compared to 7% who supported Trump and left the faith between that time period. Pew said however that the difference fell within the margin of error.
The Pew survey further revealed that 60% of self-identified White evangelical voters were behind Trump in 2016 and 2020, while 18% of them voted for the Republican leader in 2020 despite voting against him in 2016. Only 9% of White evangelical voters refused to vote for Trump in 2020, while the remaining 13% did not vote for Trump in the last two elections.
Despite only measuring whether or not Americans identify as evangelical Christians and not whether they uphold biblical beliefs, the Pew survey appears to be promising for the evangelical Christian community. Fox News asked Billy Graham Evangelistic Association president Franklin Graham whether Trump’s presidency weakened evangelical Christianity. The Samaritan’s Purse president said, “I don’t think the numbers support it, do they?”
Graham, who has been a long-time supporter of Trump, praised the Republican leader’s commitment to protect Christians, specifically his role in saving Andrew Brunson, an American pastor detained in Turkey who was later freed when Trump pressured the regime with sanctions. Graham said that “Trump welcomed people of faith,” describing the Republican president as a “president who is willing to fight for our side.”
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Al Mohler expressed approval of the survey on evangelical Christians during Trump’s presidency. He observed it showed the strength of evangelical Christianity beyond politics, saying that the faith “remains a central and vital force in America.”
Mohler also condemned leftists for creating a narrative that was disproven by the survey. He said, “Cries of evangelical decline are fed by the theological Left and by liberal academics and media sources who are singing the same song they have sung since the 1970s. They hope that by saying evangelicals are in decline that they can make it so.”
Why “Natural Immunity” Is a Political Problem for the Regime
Since 2020, public health technocrats and their allies among elected officials have clung to the position that absolutely every person who can possibly get a covid vaccine should get one.
Both the Mayo Clinic website and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, for example, insist that “research has not yet shown” that people who have recovered from covid have any sort of reliable protection. Moreover, the CDC page points to a single study from Kentucky claiming that people with natural immunity are more than twice as likely to contract covid again, compared to people who have been vaccinated.
This narrative is reflected in the fact that the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates are a one-size-fits-all policy insisting that virtually all adults, regardless of whether or not they’ve already had the disease, receive a covid vaccine. The official position is apparently this: nothing except the vaccine can provide any sort of resistance or immunity. So get a vaccine. No exceptions!
Health technocrats have repeatedly insisted that “the science” points unambiguously toward everyone receiving a vaccine, even to the point of pushing vaccines for children. All this in spite of the fact the risk to children from covid is far less than the risk a dozen common daily risks, such as riding in an automobile.
The regime has attached itself closely to a vaccinate-everybody-no-matter-what policy, and a sudden u-turn would be politically problematic. So it’s no wonder there’s so little interest in the topic.
Indeed, in a September 10 interview, senior covid technocrat Anthony Fauci claimed that the matter of natural immunity was not even being discussed at government health agencies. Fauci’s response suggested that the facts of natural immunity warranted discussion at some point in the future. But the comment certainly fit the dominant regime narrative nonetheless: the facts of natural immunity don’t matter for now. Everyone should just get vaccinated:
Maybe someday they’ll get to talking about it.
But some physicians aren’t as obsessed with pushing vaccine mandates as Anthony Fauci, and the evidence in favor of natural immunity is becoming so undeniable that even mainstream publications are starting to admit it.
In an op-ed for the Washington Post last week, Marty Makary of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine argues that the medical profession has hurt its credibility in pretending that natural immunity is virtually irrelevant to the covid equation. Moreover, the dogmatic “get vaccinated” position constitutes a lack of honesty about the data. Rather, Makary concludes:
And what are these studies? Makary continues:
The policy bias in favor of vaccines ignores many other facts as well, such as the relative risks of vaccines, especially for the young:
The nonscientific, ideology-induced blind spot for natural immunity also prompted The BMJ (the journal of the British Medical Association) to note that “[w]hen the vaccine rollout began in mid-December 2020, more than one quarter of Americans—91 million—had been infected with SARS-CoV-2…. As of this May, that proportion had risen to more than a third of the population, including 44% of adults aged 18–59.”
And yet, the authors note this fact doesn’t appear to be a part of any policy discussion at all:
This problem is reflected in the Biden administration’s drive for booster shots—announced in mid-August—even before there was any clinical research on booster shots at all. Even by mid-September, as one hospital’s chief medical officer put it, “the data is not compelling one way or another.”
But those sorts of details don’t trouble federal “public health” officials, and the Biden administration quickly moved toward pushing booster shots for everyone.
This Is Why There Should Be No Mandatory Medical Treatment
Of course, mandating vaccines—like mandating any medical treatment—would still be immoral even if we could list a dozen studies suggesting boosters are a boon and that natural immunity is no good.
What if there were twenty-five studies “proving” vaccines are better than natural immunity, but only twenty studies “proving” natural immunity is better? Would coercive vaccine mandates then suddenly be justified? Unfortunately, that’s exactly how many advocates for repressive covid policies think the world should work. For these people, policy is just a matter of adding up the number of studies “proving” their side is right, and then claiming this justifies forcing mandatory medications on millions of human beings.
(It never works in reverse, of course. The fact that there’s a lot of evidence—as Makary points out—against vaccines for those who have natural immunity, the dominant narrative is nonetheless that vaccines are “necessary” and “worth it” for everybody, always and everywhere.)
In the real world, however, many medications—including these new vaccines—come with risks that must be weighed against potential benefits. These decisions can only be made at the individual level, where patients must make their own decisions about what substances to put into their own bodies. In other words, blanket policies proclaiming “everyone must receive this medical treatment immediately, or else” contradicts the realities of the uncertainties and varying risk levels that affect individuals. The facts of uncertainty and informed consent were once considered a mainstay of medical ethics—and of any political ideology that actually respects self-determination and basic human rights. Unfortunately, the philosophy of “public health” appears to be uninterested in such trivialities.
At this point, it would be embarrassing for the regime to admit what actual scientific inquiry has shown: that natural immunity is generally superior to receiving the vaccine. The regime doesn’t like to be embarrassed, and neither do the countless doctors and nurses who have long toed the regime’s political line. So expect more of the same.