During the Sept. 17 meeting of the FDA advisory panel to recommend whether to approve a third dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine, physicians pointed to data they said confirm the risks of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine don’t outweigh the benefits.
National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Francis Collins said he would be “surprised” if COVID booster shots were not recommended for other Americans in the upcoming weeks even after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) advisory committee on Sept. 17 overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to distribute booster shots of Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID vaccine to the general public.
The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) recommended the agency approve Pfizer’s application for boosters only for people 65 and older and certain high-risk populations.
“It’s encouraging that a panel of experts stood up to political and corporate pressure based on the lack of convincing data for safety and efficacy of boosters.” — Mary Hollandhttps://t.co/hpUBzS2dpp
In a conversation with “Fox News Sunday,” Collins dismissed the FDA’s decision as being subject to change upon further review of the science.
“I think the big news is that they did approve the initiation of boosters,” Collins said, for older and at-risk Americans. “Remember, they’re taking a snapshot of right now, we’re going to see what happens in the coming weeks.”
Collins said it would surprise him if it does not become clear over the next few weeks that the administration of boosters may need to be expanded. “Based on the data we’ve already seen both in the U.S. and in Israel, it’s clear that the waning effectiveness of those vaccines is a reality and we need to respond to it,” Collins said.
Collins said he was not sure whether boosters will be recommended for all — pointing to concerns of risks outweighing benefits for younger people — but he maintained that boosters for people under 65 will be approved.
Two FDA officials and a group of other leading scientists recently assertedthat available evidence does not yet support encouraging COVID booster shots for all Americans.
Fauci on Sunday told ABC’s “This Week” that Biden planned to have booster shots ready as soon as this week, pending FDA approval, because “we wanted to be ready.”
“These are the kind of things that when you make a decision, you don’t snap your finger and it gets rolled out the next day,” Fauci said. “When the FDA makes their final determination and very soon thereafter this coming week, you’re going to see the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices that advises the CDC to perhaps even fine-tune that, so it can be implemented expeditiously.”
Fauci said FDA decisions on booster shots for people vaccinated with Moderna’s or Johnson & Johnson’s vaccines are a few weeks away.
‘COVID Vaccines harm more people than they save,’ physicians tell FDA
During Friday’s meeting, VRBPAC unexpectedly voted against approving boosters for the general population based on a lack of long-term data and stating the risks did not outweigh the benefits.
During the public comment session, numerous experts said data supporting Pfizer’s request for booster doses was inadequate, and several highlighted concerning patterns with data from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System or VAERS — requesting more attention be given to potential signals and reported adverse events.
Dr. Jessica Rose, a viral immunologist and virologist stated she “took it upon herself to become a VAERS analyst who organizes data into comprehensive figures to convey information to the public in both published work and video medium.”
Rose said “safety and efficacy are the cornerstones of the development and administration of biological products meant for human use.” She provided a data bridge showing the probability of an adverse event occurring and the severity of the resulting harm to health of individuals in the design population.
“This is a barsoft that shows the past 10 years of VAERS data plotted against the total number of adverse event reports for all vaccines for the years 2011 to 2020 and for COVID associated products — only for 2021,” Rose said.
“The left barsoft represents all adverse event reports and the right barsoft represents all death adverse event reports,” Rose said. “There’s an over 1000% increase in the total number of adverse events for 2021, and we are not done with 2021. This is highly anomalous on both fronts.”
Rose said:
“The onus is on the public health officials at the FDA, the CDC and policymakers to answer to these anomalies and acknowledge the clear risk signals emerging from VAERS data and to confront the issue of COVID injectable products use/risk. In my opinion [the risks] outweigh any potential benefit associated with these products, especially for children.”
Rose also pointed out that as of Aug. 27, there were 1,500 adverse reactions occurring per million fully injected people, and 1 in 660 individuals are “succumbing to and reporting immunological adverse events associated with the COVID products.” Rose noted adverse events are under-reported and the under-reporting factor was not considered in her data.
Dr. Joseph Fraiman, an emergency medicine physician in New Orleans, revealed during his presentation to the FDA’s safety panel that no clinical evidence exists to disprove claims that the COVID vaccines are harming more people than they save.
Fraiman said he was there to ask for help to reduce vaccine hesitancy, however, in order to do this, large clinical trials that demonstrate vaccines reduce hospitalizations without finding evidence of serious harm are needed.
“I know many think the vaccine-hesitant are dumb or just misinformed, that’s not at all what I’ve seen,” Fraiman said. “In fact, typically, independent of education level, the vaccine-hesitant I’ve met in the ER are more familiar with vaccine studies and more aware of their COVID risks than the vaccinated.”
Fraiman said that without booster trials that are large enough to find a risk reduction in hospitalizations, “we, the medical establishment, cannot call out anti-COVID vaccine activists who publicly claim the vaccine harms more than they save, especially in the young and healthy. The fact that we do not have the clinical evidence to say these activists are wrong should terrify us all.”
Steve Kirsch, founder of the COVID-19 Early Treatment Fund, said he was going to focus on the elephant in the room that “nobody wants to talk about” — that COVID vaccines kill more people than they save.
He said:
“We were led to believe that vaccines are perfectly safe, but this is simply not true. For example, there were four times as many heart attacks in the treatment group in the Pfizer 6-month trial report. That wasn’t bad luck, the VAERS shows heart attacks happen 71 times more often following these vaccines compared to any other vaccine. In all, 20 people died who got the drug — 14 died who got the placebo.”
“If the net all cause mortality from the vaccines is negative, then vaccines, boosters and negatives are all nonsensical,” Kirsch said. “Even if the vaccines had 100% protection, it still means we kill two people to save one life.”
Kirsch said four experts did analyses using completely different non-U.S. data sources, and all of them came up with approximately the same number of excess vaccine-related deaths — about 411 deaths per million doses. “That translates into 150,000 people who have died [from COVID vaccines],” he explained.
Kirsch ended his presentation by discussing Maddie de Garay’s case. De Garay participated in Pfizer’s clinical trial when she was 12 years old and became paralyzed following her first COVID vaccine dose. Kirsch asked the panel why Pfizer didn’t report her injury in their results and wanted to know “why this fraud was not investigated.”
.@SenRonJohnson + former Green Bay Packers Ken Ruettgers held press conference with families who want to "be seen, heard + believed by medical community" after suffering adverse reactions to COVID vaccines.
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) June 29, 2021
Kim Witczak, FDA consumer representative and founder of Woody Matters, a drug safety organization, said, “While boosters may be good for business mRNA vaccines were never designed to stop transmission or eradicate the virus.”
Witczak called out the government for not recognizing natural immunity for vaccine mandates and for the potential of “leaky vaccines” to produce variants.
Dr. Peter Doshi, professor at the University of Maryland and senior editor of The BMJ, asked the committee what problem a third dose is intended to solve. “If this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated, why would a fully vaccinated person need a third dose?” he asked.
Doshi said a third dose, fourth dose or fifth dose might nudge up antibodies, but what clinical difference does this make? It is vital to assess whether there’s a higher risk of harm associated with a third dose and to date, “we are still in the dark,” he said.
Doshi ended with an important question:
“Last week, three medical licensing boards said they could revoke doctors’ medical licenses for providing COVID vaccine misinformation. I’m worried about the chilling effects here. There are clearly many remaining unknowns and science is all about proving unknowns.
“But in the present supercharged climate — and I’ll point out that many members on this committee are certified by these boards — what is the FDA doing so that members can speak freely without fear of reprisal?”
FDA could choose to ignore its safety panel
As STAT reported, the FDA is not required to follow the recommendations of its advisory panel, though it generally does. But if the agency doesn’t, it will raise significant questions of political interference and will pit agency scientists against political officials who signed off on the booster plan.
In an unusual move last month, Biden and top health officials, including Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock and CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, publicly announced a booster shot program would begin the week of Sept. 20, well before the FDA and CDC examined the evidence.
Since then, numerous scientists have expressed skepticism over the need for COVID boosters, including two FDA officials who recently resigned over the issue.
On Thursday, FDA scientists had expressed skepticism about the need for Pfizer COVID vaccine booster shots in a 23-page report released Sept. 15 that called into question the limited data Pfizer had supporting its application for boosters.
U.S. taxpayers have been footing the bill for Chinese military-linked studies for over a decade, a National Pulse investigation has revealed.
Various National Institutes of Health agencies – including Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – have funded over 250 studies authored by researchers at institutions controlled by China’s People’s Liberation Army, The National Pulse can exclusively reveal.
Following a unique investigation into the origins of scientific research papers, the whopping level of collaboration with the Chinese military will further concerns in the United States that the political class has surrendered to the Chinese Communist Party. Last week it emerged that the ranking General in the U.S. Armed Forces agreed to tip off China in advance of a U.S.-led attack.
The unearthed studies, from the National Institutes (NIH) online database, expand upon the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology unearthed by The National Pulse.
U.S. Taxpayers Funding the People’s Liberation Army.
Of 265 studies identified by The National Pulse, the Chinese military entity most frequently appearing on studies funded by the NIH is the Beijing-based PLA General Hospital, a subsidiary of the army’s Joint Logistics Support Force of the Central Military Commission.
A now-deleted informational site about the facility notes it is “the largest comprehensive hospital in the whole army” that is “responsible for the medical and health care tasks of the leaders of the state and the military commission.”
A study – “Kras-Deficient T Cells Attenuate Graft-versus-Host Disease but Retain Graft-versus-Leukemia Activity” – has two researchers from the PLA General Hospital named as authors while noting “this work was supported in part by National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Grant AI079087 (to D.W.).”
Several other hospitals under the PLA’s extensive network – including branches 85, 306, 307, 401,455, and 960 – have seen their researchers listed as authors on studies designated in the NIH database as receiving “research support” from the federal agency.
Examples of studies include “Spinal Cord Lateral Hemisection and Asymmetric Behavioral Assessments in Adult Rats,” which lists two researchers from the 960th PLA Hospital under the army’s Joint Logistics Support Force despite receiving funding from the NIH and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
SPINAL CORD STUDY.
Similarly, researchers from the Wuhan General Hospital of China’s PLA – located in the city hosting the lab believed to be the source of COVID-19 – have also co-authored NIH-funded studies.
A 2015 study – “Differences in the distribution, phenotype and gene expression of subretinal microglia/macrophages in C57BL/6N (Crb1 rd8/rd8) versus C57BL6/J (Crb1 wt/wt) mice” – notes that “support for this work was provided by NIH grant 1R01EY022652” in addition to listing a researcher from the Wuhan General Hospital of Guangzhou Military Command as an author.
MACROPHAGE STUDY.
Researchers from PLA-run universities including the Second, Third, and Fourth Military Medical Universities and Third and Fifth PLA Medical Centers also appear on NIH-funded studies.
The findings align with the Chinese Communist Party’s doctrine of Military-Civil Fusion (MCF) as outlined by the U.S. State Department:
Under MCF, the CCP is acquiring the intellectual property, key research, and technological advances of the world’s citizens, researchers, scholars, and private industry in order to advance the CCP’s military aims. […] Its goal is to enable the PRC to develop the most technologically advanced military in the world. As the name suggests, a key part of MCF is the elimination of barriers between China’s civilian research and commercial sectors, and its military and defense industrial sectors. The CCP is implementing this strategy, not just through its own research and development efforts, but also by acquiring and diverting the world’s cutting-edge technologies – including through theft – in order to achieve military dominance.
The National Pulse has previously exposed NIH Director Francis Collins’s advisory role with a controversial, Chinese military-linked genomics firm and his agency’s collaborative agreements with another military-linked entity, the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
The United States Food and Drug Administration contradicted reports on currently purchasing aborted baby parts and raised that they have ceased to do so since 2018 when former President Donald Trump canceled their contracts for it.
According to Life News, the Food and Drug Administration denied allegations that they recently bought aborted baby parts for “humanized mice” experiments. The FDA assured through a released statement last Friday sent to the Daily Caller News Foundation that they have stopped engaging in such contracts for three years now.
Christianity Daily reported last week that Judicial Watch released FDA documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act on its purchase from the California-based Advanced Bioscience Resources of “human fetal heads, organs, and tissue” for its “humanized mice” project. The project uses the aborted parts, which were collected from health care facilities and hospitals, “to humanize the immune system of mice.”
“Since 2018, the FDA has not entered into any contracts for the purchase of human fetal tissue. Prior research involving human fetal tissue accounted for a very small fraction of the FDA’s total research,” the FDA said in the statement.
The FDA also explained that such purchases were “critical to understanding the safety of drugs and vaccines and in which it couldn’t be feasibly achieved through another means.” Fetal tissue, as per the Daily Caller, has been used by the medical profession to arrive at treatments and cures for various ailments including spinal cord injury, eye disease, and Alzheimer’s despite the practice being tagged as unethical since fetal tissue comes from babies who were aborted.
The University of California’s Academic Senate Faculty argued in 2019 against the Trump Administration’s restrictions on fetal tissue research, pointing out that it is a hindrance to biomedical research. The university called the federal restrictions as “political attacks on science and academic freedom that threaten not only UC researchers but also the nation’s prosperity, health, and scientific leadership.”
Data from Congressional scrutiny on the issue show that the Department of Health and Human Services project on “human fetal tissue research from elective abortions” have ceased since June 5, 2019 following the review ordered by Trump a year earlier. Part of the said HHS project was a contract worth $15,900 with Advanced Bioscience Resources to acquire a “single aborted fetus” for $60 from abortion clinics.
ABR was said to resell it at $325 per body part to the HHS, even going as high as $515 per aborted baby head during former President Barack Obama’s Administration. Trump’s order also led to a banning of using fetal tissue for research in July 2019.
However, the ban was reversed in April by HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, who made the announcement in Congress that the National Institute of Health will be allowed to undertake contracts for fetal research and even provide grants for it but did not provide specifics on the new policy.
“We believe that we have to do the research it takes to make sure that we are incorporating innovation and getting all of those types of treatments and therapies out there to the American people,” Becerra announced.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview also last Friday that the documents they obtained from FDA through the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit they filed was “most troubling.”
“I’ve been doing this for 23 years. These documents we’ve gotten from the FDA and our other lawsuit…they are the worst things I’ve ever seen. The most troubling documents I’ve ever seen,” Fitton said.
Fitton also reacted to the DFA justifying their reason of purchasing fetal parts. He raised that the “Frankenstein experiments” would not be supported by most Americans and urged the need for an investigation on it.
“There are few Americans who would support chopping up the remains of unborn human beings for scientific research, using their organs, selling their heads for whatever Frankenstein experiments, the FDA and their researchers want to cook up. It’s barbarism. There should be a criminal investigation to figure out whether the laws against profiteering for fetal organ trafficking were violated as a court suggested they may have been,” Fitton stressed.
At least a third could have ‘no jab, no job’ policies by year’s end
A survey conducted by risk management and advisory company Willis Towers Watson has found that more than half of U.S. companies expect to impose COVID vaccine mandates on their employees by the end of the year.
The survey of 1000 companies, employing close to 10 million people, found that 52 percent of employers are planning some form of vaccine mandate for workers.
More than half of U.S. companies are planning to impose COVID-19 vaccine mandates in the workplace by year end, with almost a quarter considering vaccination as a condition for employment, according to a national survey of nearly 1,000 employers https://t.co/iHXC8bkLJApic.twitter.com/wR5IMgAUXW
The figure would be a massive increase on the 21 percent of employers who currently have mandates in place.
The survey also found that almost one-third of employers say they are planning to make full vaccination a requirement to enter the workplace building.
A further 21 percent said could make vaccination a requirement for any new hires, the literal enacting of a ‘no jab, no job’ policy.
The survey also noted that 59 percent of employers are already tracking workers’ vaccination status, with a further 19 percent planning to do so by the end of the year.
Of those already tracking vaccination status, 62 percent require workers to submit proof of vaccination.
The survey also found that “Eight in 10 respondents (80%) require employees to wear masks indoors at any location. Another 13% are planning or considering doing so.”
Willis Towers Watson’s population health leader Dr Jeff Levin-Sherz commented that “We expect even more employers to institute vaccine mandates in the wake of FDA approval of the Pfizer vaccine.”
“We have reached a point in the pandemic where employers that have worked hard to make it easy for employees to get vaccinated are also considering approaches to make it more difficult for employees to remain unvaccinated,” Levin-Scherz added.
As we noted last week, a Quinnipiac poll has found that almost half of Americans (48%) believe that Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates “go too far,” and that a slight majority are in opposition to it.
The latest findings, however, highlight that the government doesn’t even need to be involved for vaccine mandates to become the norm.
It remains to be seen whether resistance will form among private sector workers, as it has among first responders and the military.
Attack is believed to have been carried out by BlackMatter, a successor of Colonial Pipeline hacker DarkSide.
The U.S. grain, pork and chicken supply could be at risk after a ransomware attack on New Cooperative Inc. has forced the Iowa-based agriculture services provider’s systems to go offline.
“Out of an abundance of caution, we have proactively taken our systems offline to contain the threat, and we can confirm it has been successfully contained,” a New Cooperative spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal.
A spokesperson for New Cooperative did not immediately return FOX Business’ request for comment.
🌐 BlackMatter #Ransomware group just ransomed another food critical infrastructure in the US, The ransom demand is 5,900,000$ for now 🚨
Security researchers say the attack was carried out by ransomware group BlackMatter, which has reportedly encrypted New Cooperative’s data and stolen 1,000 gigabytes worth of files, including invoices, research and development documents, and the source code to its soil-mapping technology. The hacking group is asking for a $5.9 million ransom payment in exchange for a tool to decrypt the data.
According to screenshots shared by DarkFeed Threat Intelligence of what appears to be a conversation between BlackMatter and New Cooperative on Sunday, the agriculture group said there would be a “very very public disruption to the grain, pork and chicken supply chain” if it was not able to recover its systems immediately.
BlackMatter, founded in July 2021, claims to have incorporated the “best features” from Russian ransomware group DarkSide, REvil and LockBit, according to Recorded Future.
On its website, BlackMatter advertises the purchase of access to corporate networks in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the U.K. The group targets companies with revenue of $100 million or more that have 500 to 15,000 hosts on their network.
BlackMatter offers a $3,000 to $100,000 price range for network access, as well as the share from the potential ransom amount.
BlackMatter’s website emphasizes that the group does not attack “critical infrastructure,” including hospitals, nuclear power plants, water treatment facilities, oil pipelines and refineries, the defense industry, nonprofit companies, and the government sector.
Though New Cooperative states it is considered critical infrastructure as defined by the Department of Homeland Security, BlackMatter argues that it does not “fall under its rules,” according to the screenshot.
“Everyone will only incur losses. Everything is tied to the commerce, the critical ones mean the vital needs of a person, and you earn money,” the group added before offering to come to an agreement to resolve the situation.
New Cooperative warned BlackMatter that it would have to contact the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and other regulators about the attack.
In additional messages exchanged between the parties shared by Recorded Future’s Dmitry Smilyanets on Twitter, BlackMatter writes “do not threaten us, otherwise you will stay without a decryption,” before threatening to double the price of the ransom payment.
New Cooperative replies that the situation is “pretty much out of our hands,” adding that it “can’t control what regulators and the U.S. government does.”
“The impact of this attack will likely be much worse than the pipeline attack for context,” New Cooperative added, referencing the Colonial Pipeline. “We have no way to control that given the disruption that this has already caused.”
“No one will give you decrypters for free,” BlackMatter replied. “Look for money.”
The entities include energy, water, health care, emergency, chemical, nuclear, communications, government, defense, food, commercial facilities, IT, transportation, dams, manufacturing and financial services.
A spokesperson for the FBI said the agency is aware of the attack on New Cooperative, but declined to comment further. A spokesperson for CISA declined to comment.
“You are not going to eat beef in the future — I one hundred percent guarantee it.“
Political commentator and rancher Glenn Beck stresses each of those words at the beginning of his recent video. He explains that in the not too distant future, public land will not be used for cattle grazing, resulting in government-imposed meat shortages. Beck worries that our food supply will be crippled by the globalists, and Americans will no longer have control over what they eat, how it is processed, and what it costs.
Globalist advocates of the New World Order are promoting so-called “sustainability” programs that will raise beef prices so high that only the super-rich will be able to afford it. This is designed to be achieved by outlawing grazing on public land, allowing an oligopoly of meat-packers to squeeze ranchers out of business, and popularizing plant-based meat. It’s the big meat-packers who will make this fake meat, so their profits will continue to skyrocket, sustained under the cover of “climate virtue.”
Veganism is being advanced as the most ethical way to sustain the planet, and to promote human health and animal welfare. But along with that, ranchers and small- and medium-scale beef-packers are being marginalized. The very consumption of meat is being damned. Deploying outright lies, a misguided agenda threatens individual liberty and our freedom to farm, own livestock, control our land, and choose our diet.
The socialist roster of lies about meat-eating must be countered. One of the biggest lies is that veganism protects the environment. But according to Dr. Frank Mitloehner, professor and air quality extension specialist at the University of California, Davis, if the entire population of the U.S. became vegan for a year, emissions would be reduced by a mere 2.6%. He also says advocates of the Green New Deal have been dishonest about the water input assigned to beef. Cattle mostly ingest green water or rainwater. What’s more, they soon release much of that back to earth by urination — which cannot be said of trees.
Another big lie is that beef production causes substantial waste of crops that could be consumed by humans. But it’s not as if beef cattle are mostly fed grain that humans may consume. In fact, 84% of livestock feed is inedible to humans — corn husk, oat straw, almond hulls, soybean skins, and other agricultural waste. In a sense, livestock convert what we cannot eat into what we can — namely, dairy products and beef, both sources of high-quality protein. Forty-eight percent of our protein — and only 24% of our calorie intake — comes from animal sources. American practices add to that nature-driven energy efficiency: with just 6% of the world’s herd, we supply 18% of the world’s beef.
In terms of land use, too, it is livestock that create a beneficial cycle. Two-thirds of our food-producing land is considered marginal: it’s rocky, hilly, or dry or has poor soil. Without ruminants, which upcycle whatever grows on marginal land into nutritious, digestible beef and dairy products, most of our land would go waste. Cattle also produce manure, which accounts for half of all fertilizers used worldwide to grow fruits, vegetables, and grains.
Methane has been much maligned by leftist environmentalists, but it accounts for only 10% of total greenhouse gases in the U.S. Moreover, cows do not add “new” carbon to the atmosphere. The methane they emit ultimately comes from the carbon in the air, which is taken up by grass and plants during photosynthesis. Cattle feeding on the grass and plants send back the same carbon into the atmosphere as methane in their flatus. The slowest part of this cycle is the breakdown of methane into water and carbon dioxide, which takes 10–12 years. After this, plants use carbon dioxide and water again, and the cycle continues.
Wasted food — one-third of all food produced in the world goes to waste — results in far more greenhouse gas production than eating meat. Not only are the energy, water, and other input used to grow the food wasted, but it also rots in landfills, producing methane and other greenhouse gases. Meat and dairy make up only 14% of our food waste, while fruits and vegetables make up 42% and grain 22%. Giving up meat would therefore result in significantly more wasted food and proportionately more greenhouse gases.
In fact, it’s irresponsible to advocate that cutting meat consumption will improve the climate and save the Earth. But ranching and meat-eating have been targeted, though they don’t have any demonstrably significant impact on global temperatures. The attack has been multipronged, via leftists, socialists, environmentalists, and the woke brigade, who have together weaponized a dangerous conflation of politics and bad science. The cui bono, as usual, points ultimately to multinational corporations (MNCs) — in this case, the meat-packing oligopoly.
The inescapable grip of the Big Four beef processors in the U.S. — Cargill, Tyson Foods, JBS, and National Beef Packing Co. — on the system became evident in the last two years. These corporations control 85% of the meat processed in the U.S. In 2019, a Tyson plant in Kansas closed for four months after a fire in August. The next year, the pandemic caused the closure of all plants. And in May of this year, a ransomware attack caused JBS to close all its plants temporarily. In the absence of a market for their cattle, ranchers found cattle prices dropping (about $100 per head), while packers, wholesalers, and retailers were raking it in ($900–1,000) because of the shortage. Between the fire and the start of the pandemic, the difference between the price of live cattle and packed meat rose to a record high, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
How was this oligopoly established? Since the seventies, bigger plants have become more and more profitable because they are able to lower the per-head cost of slaughtering cattle and processing meat. They have bought up smaller plants and put mom-and-pop farms out of business by buying up ranches and large parcels of farmland. Ranchers no longer have many buyers to sell to. Feed shortages and rising feed costs force them to either auction off or cull their cattle. A recent lawsuit charges the Big Four with a “concerted scheme to artificially constrain the supply of beef entering the domestic supply chain” since 2015. The unprecedented result of such concerted subterfuge is that ranchers are losing money, while packers are getting rich.
And not unlike the way Big Tobacco has invested heavily in smokeless tobacco products, e-cigarettes, patches, and other direct delivery mechanisms for nicotine, the Big Four have all invested heavily in lab-cultured fake beef. JBS, contending that meat from animals will be a pricey luxury in the future, is planning to set up a global company focused solely on plant-based products. Tyson entered the plant-based meat market in 2019 and plans to expand its share. Their attempt to displace meat, end ranching, and profit nevertheless are insidiously bolstered by a fashionable, leftist-environmentalist lobby that claims the ethical high ground.
A couple of congressional bills may help independent ranchers stay afloat. The first is the Mandatory Country of Origin Labeling (MCOOL) bill, which will ensure that only meat from animals born, raised, and processed in the country will bear a “Product of the USA” label. Meat-packers have been cheating on this for a long time, importing cheap meat to undercut local ranchers. The bill will prevent poor-quality imported beef from being packed and sold as an American product and, according to R-CALF USA, restore $20 billion in lost revenue to the cattle industry. Another bill that will help ranchers is the Processing Revival and Intrastate Mean Exemption Act or PRIME Act, which Congressman Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) has been advocating for. The bill exempts meat sold to in-state consumers and businesses from USDA inspection requirements.
We must fight back on many fronts to be able to choose what we eat and, more importantly, to preserve our constitutional republic and traditions. Henry Kissinger said, “If you control the food supply, you control the people.” American citizens must do everything to prevent MNCs from achieving that control. One small way they can do that is to buy local meat — directly from ranchers, listed by region at USABeef.org.
Voters there never liked his past presidential campaigns, and former President Donald Trump beat him last year 53%-44%.
About the only time that he has not been underwater in polls was after his inauguration, when he had a 47% approval rating in a Des Moines Register poll.
But even those underwhelming results haven’t held, especially after Biden’s disastrous withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and the surging immigration crisis at the border.
And today, the latest Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll has him in worse shape than Trump was at this stage of his presidency.
“Thirty-one percent of Iowans approve of how Biden is handling his job, while 62% disapprove and 7% are not sure,” said the state’s top paper.
“That’s a 12 percentage point drop in approval from June, the last time the question was asked. Biden’s disapproval numbers jumped by 10 points during the same period. In June, 43% approved and 52% disapproved,” it added.
Nationally, Biden is on a very bad slide down and appears to have also lost his momentum on Capitol Hill, where his policy agenda and spending plans are in trouble.
“This is a bad poll for Joe Biden, and it’s playing out in everything that he touches right now,” said Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer.
The 43rd president of the US may now be beloved by the mainstream left, but some anti-war activists, who want to hold him accountable for the invasion of Iraq, continue to target his public appearances.
The latest disruption happened when George W. Bush was delivering a speech in Long Beach, California on Monday evening. A small protest by about 30 members of the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition met him at the location, demanding his arrest for war crimes. The group followed Bush from Beverly Hills, where they picketed his speech on Sunday.
Activist Jeb Sprague said he was briefly detained after disrupting Bush’s Monday talk at Terrace Theater with his message and kicked out of the venue. He said he failed to livestream his protest as he intended due to a technical malfunction.
Fellow activist Mike Prysner was more successful on the previous night, when he interrupted Bush’s speech at the Saban Theater in Beverly Hills with accusations of lying the nation into the Iraq War.
Bush used to be a bogeyman for the US left, loathed for the destructive hawkish policies of his administration. The 2003 invasion followed a relentless PR campaign to rally public support for the planned war on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, based largely on claims that later proved to be false. Those included accusations that Hussein was in league with Al-Qaeda or was prepared to strike Europe with weapons of mass destruction. The war claimed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, became a drain for US resources and sent shockwaves of instability and extremism throughout the Middle East.
Dubya managed to reinvent himself in the eyes of many former critics after Donald Trump emerged as a more convenient target for their hatred. He is now perceived by many as the face of the good old decorous pre-Trump GOP, an opposite number to Joe Biden in a drive for bipartisanship. The liberal media has been reliably gushing about his painting hobby, appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, being buddies with the Obama family and many other episodes in the past few years.
People who preserved their attitude to the former president find this appalling, disturbing and dangerous for the future of the country.
President Joe Biden boasted Tuesday that under his leadership the United States had restored funding to the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) — despite the global organization’s failures during the coronavirus pandemic.
“We are re-engaged at the World Health Organization and working in close partnership with COVAX to deliver life-saving vaccines around the world,” Biden said during his first speech as president to the United Nations General Assembly.
In January, Biden reversed a 2020 decision by former President Donald Trump to withdraw from the organization citing its deference to China during the pandemic.
“They seem to be very China-centric,” Trump said at the time. “That’s a nice way of saying it, but they seem to be very China-centric, and they seem to err always on the side of China.”
In January 2020, the W.H.O. echoed Chinese propaganda on the virus, saying there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission” even as the virus was savaging China.
Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳. pic.twitter.com/Fnl5P877VG
W.H.O. Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was reportedly “stubborn” and “naive” about praising China even while criticizing the United States for issuing a travel ban on travelers from China in the early days of the pandemic.
The W.H.O. even praised China for their transparency on the coronavirus, even while the Chinese government was actively working to censor information and news about the spread of the virus.
The W.H.O was also reluctant to declare the coronavirus a public health emergency in January and finally a pandemic in March, citing concerns of “unreasonable fear” as a result of acting too quickly.
China continues to flatly reject W.H.O. requests for information about the source of the virus.
MSNBC host Joy Reid racialized the probable homicide of Gabby Petito when she bemoaned Monday the national media attention — including on MSNBC — that Petito’s case has generated since the 22-year-old was reported missing earlier this month.
What did Reid say?
The MSNBC host conceded on her show, “The ReidOut,” that Petito’s family deserved “answers and justice,” but suggested Petito’s case generated national media attention only because she was a young white woman.
“It goes without saying that no family should ever have to endure that kind of pain. And the Petito family certainly deserves answers and justice,” Reid said. “But the way this story has captivated the nation has many wondering, why not the same media attention when people of color go missing?”
“Well, the answer actually has a name: Missing White Woman Syndrome,” Reid continued. “The term coined by the late and great Gwen Ifill to describe the media and public fascination with missing white women like Laci Peterson or Natalee Holloway, while ignoring cases involving missing people of color.”
MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid: Media reporting Gabby Petito’s disappearance/presumed murder is symptom of "Missing White Woman Syndrome." pic.twitter.com/UYAWgaDyYr
Contrary to Reid’s assertion, Petito’s case has gripped the nation not because of her race but because of the extremely odd nature of the case.
The fact that Petito’s fiancé Brian Laundrie, for example, returned to his Florida home without Petito nearly two weeks before she was reported missing and the fact that Petito chronicled the couple’s adventures on social media are driving national interest in the case.
What makes the case even more odd is the encounter Petito and Laundrie had with Utah law enforcement last month after an anonymous 911 caller alerted police to a potential domestic violence situation between the couple. The National Park Service parks ranger who responded to the incident now says that she warned Petito about “toxic” signs in her relationship.
Magnifying interest in the case are the mysterious whereabouts of Laundrie himself. Not only did he refuse to speak with law enforcement, which was his right, but the 23-year-old has been missing for a week. Police are continuing to search for Laundrie in Florida.
If Reid is truly concerned about disproportionate media coverage given to missing white women, perhaps she may consider dedicating some of her prime-time national TV show to sharing the stories of non-white missing persons on a regular basis.
Experts Tell FDA Vaccines ‘Harm More People Than They Save,’ But NIH Director Believes Boosters Will Be Approved in Coming Weeks
During the Sept. 17 meeting of the FDA advisory panel to recommend whether to approve a third dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine, physicians pointed to data they said confirm the risks of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine don’t outweigh the benefits.
National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Francis Collins said he would be “surprised” if COVID booster shots were not recommended for other Americans in the upcoming weeks even after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) advisory committee on Sept. 17 overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to distribute booster shots of Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID vaccine to the general public.
The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) recommended the agency approve Pfizer’s application for boosters only for people 65 and older and certain high-risk populations.
In a conversation with “Fox News Sunday,” Collins dismissed the FDA’s decision as being subject to change upon further review of the science.
“I think the big news is that they did approve the initiation of boosters,” Collins said, for older and at-risk Americans. “Remember, they’re taking a snapshot of right now, we’re going to see what happens in the coming weeks.”
Collins said it would surprise him if it does not become clear over the next few weeks that the administration of boosters may need to be expanded. “Based on the data we’ve already seen both in the U.S. and in Israel, it’s clear that the waning effectiveness of those vaccines is a reality and we need to respond to it,” Collins said.
Collins said he was not sure whether boosters will be recommended for all — pointing to concerns of risks outweighing benefits for younger people — but he maintained that boosters for people under 65 will be approved.
Two FDA officials and a group of other leading scientists recently assertedthat available evidence does not yet support encouraging COVID booster shots for all Americans.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical advisor to President Biden, said the FDA’s final decision on making booster shots available is expected later this week. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is separately expected to weigh in on Pfizer’s booster request.
Fauci on Sunday told ABC’s “This Week” that Biden planned to have booster shots ready as soon as this week, pending FDA approval, because “we wanted to be ready.”
“These are the kind of things that when you make a decision, you don’t snap your finger and it gets rolled out the next day,” Fauci said. “When the FDA makes their final determination and very soon thereafter this coming week, you’re going to see the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices that advises the CDC to perhaps even fine-tune that, so it can be implemented expeditiously.”
Fauci said FDA decisions on booster shots for people vaccinated with Moderna’s or Johnson & Johnson’s vaccines are a few weeks away.
‘COVID Vaccines harm more people than they save,’ physicians tell FDA
During Friday’s meeting, VRBPAC unexpectedly voted against approving boosters for the general population based on a lack of long-term data and stating the risks did not outweigh the benefits.
During the public comment session, numerous experts said data supporting Pfizer’s request for booster doses was inadequate, and several highlighted concerning patterns with data from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System or VAERS — requesting more attention be given to potential signals and reported adverse events.
Dr. Jessica Rose, a viral immunologist and virologist stated she “took it upon herself to become a VAERS analyst who organizes data into comprehensive figures to convey information to the public in both published work and video medium.”
Rose said “safety and efficacy are the cornerstones of the development and administration of biological products meant for human use.” She provided a data bridge showing the probability of an adverse event occurring and the severity of the resulting harm to health of individuals in the design population.
“This is a barsoft that shows the past 10 years of VAERS data plotted against the total number of adverse event reports for all vaccines for the years 2011 to 2020 and for COVID associated products — only for 2021,” Rose said.
“The left barsoft represents all adverse event reports and the right barsoft represents all death adverse event reports,” Rose said. “There’s an over 1000% increase in the total number of adverse events for 2021, and we are not done with 2021. This is highly anomalous on both fronts.”
Rose said:
Rose also pointed out that as of Aug. 27, there were 1,500 adverse reactions occurring per million fully injected people, and 1 in 660 individuals are “succumbing to and reporting immunological adverse events associated with the COVID products.” Rose noted adverse events are under-reported and the under-reporting factor was not considered in her data.
Dr. Joseph Fraiman, an emergency medicine physician in New Orleans, revealed during his presentation to the FDA’s safety panel that no clinical evidence exists to disprove claims that the COVID vaccines are harming more people than they save.
Fraiman said he was there to ask for help to reduce vaccine hesitancy, however, in order to do this, large clinical trials that demonstrate vaccines reduce hospitalizations without finding evidence of serious harm are needed.
“I know many think the vaccine-hesitant are dumb or just misinformed, that’s not at all what I’ve seen,” Fraiman said. “In fact, typically, independent of education level, the vaccine-hesitant I’ve met in the ER are more familiar with vaccine studies and more aware of their COVID risks than the vaccinated.”
Fraiman said that without booster trials that are large enough to find a risk reduction in hospitalizations, “we, the medical establishment, cannot call out anti-COVID vaccine activists who publicly claim the vaccine harms more than they save, especially in the young and healthy. The fact that we do not have the clinical evidence to say these activists are wrong should terrify us all.”
Steve Kirsch, founder of the COVID-19 Early Treatment Fund, said he was going to focus on the elephant in the room that “nobody wants to talk about” — that COVID vaccines kill more people than they save.
He said:
“If the net all cause mortality from the vaccines is negative, then vaccines, boosters and negatives are all nonsensical,” Kirsch said. “Even if the vaccines had 100% protection, it still means we kill two people to save one life.”
Kirsch said four experts did analyses using completely different non-U.S. data sources, and all of them came up with approximately the same number of excess vaccine-related deaths — about 411 deaths per million doses. “That translates into 150,000 people who have died [from COVID vaccines],” he explained.
Kirsch ended his presentation by discussing Maddie de Garay’s case. De Garay participated in Pfizer’s clinical trial when she was 12 years old and became paralyzed following her first COVID vaccine dose. Kirsch asked the panel why Pfizer didn’t report her injury in their results and wanted to know “why this fraud was not investigated.”
Kim Witczak, FDA consumer representative and founder of Woody Matters, a drug safety organization, said, “While boosters may be good for business mRNA vaccines were never designed to stop transmission or eradicate the virus.”
Witczak called out the government for not recognizing natural immunity for vaccine mandates and for the potential of “leaky vaccines” to produce variants.
Dr. Peter Doshi, professor at the University of Maryland and senior editor of The BMJ, asked the committee what problem a third dose is intended to solve. “If this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated, why would a fully vaccinated person need a third dose?” he asked.
Doshi said a third dose, fourth dose or fifth dose might nudge up antibodies, but what clinical difference does this make? It is vital to assess whether there’s a higher risk of harm associated with a third dose and to date, “we are still in the dark,” he said.
Doshi ended with an important question:
FDA could choose to ignore its safety panel
As STAT reported, the FDA is not required to follow the recommendations of its advisory panel, though it generally does. But if the agency doesn’t, it will raise significant questions of political interference and will pit agency scientists against political officials who signed off on the booster plan.
In an unusual move last month, Biden and top health officials, including Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock and CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, publicly announced a booster shot program would begin the week of Sept. 20, well before the FDA and CDC examined the evidence.
Since then, numerous scientists have expressed skepticism over the need for COVID boosters, including two FDA officials who recently resigned over the issue.
On Thursday, FDA scientists had expressed skepticism about the need for Pfizer COVID vaccine booster shots in a 23-page report released Sept. 15 that called into question the limited data Pfizer had supporting its application for boosters.