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U.S. Surgeon General Expects Businesses, Universities To Impose Vaccine Mandates As FDA Approves Pfizer

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy predicts there will be more vaccine mandates in the near future. On Sunday, he said he could see universities and businesses imposing vaccine requirements.

This comes as the FDA announced it officially approved the Pfizer vaccine. The Biden administration now forecasts a greater push to get Americans vaccinated.

“Two potential things may happen (following FDA vaccine approval),” Murthy explained. “One is you may see more people coming forward, those who were perhaps on the fence about getting vaccinated, and this may tip them toward doing so. Second, I think you’ll see more universities and workplaces that were considering putting in requirements for vaccines to create safer places to learn and work, you’ll see more of them likely moving forward.”

The U.S. Surgeon General went on to support school districts for requiring teachers and staff to get vaccinated while claiming the move is “reasonable.”

Additionally, the Murthy said booster shots may be needed in order for Americans to be better protected from the coronavirus. He explained that while vaccines currently look like a strong defense against the virus, their effectiveness may not stand strong as health officials get more data.

In the meantime, the Biden administration is gearing up to rollout booster shots beginning September 20.

FDA Approves Pfizer’s COVID Vax

U.S. drug regulators on Monday approved the COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech for people 16 and older, making it the first such shot to receive approval in the country.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said the vaccine, which will be known as Comirnaty, proved effective in a clinical trial of approximately 44,000 people.

The shot was 91 percent effective in preventing COVID-19 infection, regulators said, and was also effective in preventing severe disease and hospitalization.

The agency didn’t immediately respond when asked for more details about the trial.

FDA officials said they also reviewed safety data and determined the vaccine’s known and potential benefits outweigh its known and potential risks, including side effects.

“As the first FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine, the public can be very confident that this vaccine meets the high standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality the FDA requires of an approved product,” Dr. Janet Woodcock, the FDA’s acting commissioner, said in a statement.

“While millions of people have already safely received COVID-19 vaccines, we recognize that for some, the FDA approval of a vaccine may now instill additional confidence to get vaccinated. Today’s milestone puts us one step closer to altering the course of this pandemic in the U.S.,” she added.

The FDA issued emergency use authorization to the Pfizer jab and a COVID-19 vaccine from Moderna in December 2020. Several months later, regulators authorized a shot from Johnson & Johnson. But none until Monday had received approval, which has a higher bar than authorization.

COVID-19 is the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. The COVID-19 pandemic started early last year.

The approval “affirms the efficacy and safety profile of our vaccine at a time when it is urgently needed,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in an emailed statement. “I am hopeful this approval will help increase confidence in our vaccine, as vaccination remains the best tool we have to help protect lives and achieve herd immunity.”

The decision will likely lead to new vaccine mandates, as some officials held off imposing vaccine requirements due to the lack of an approved vaccine.

Approximately 201.4 million Americans have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose as of Aug. 22, according to federal data. Over 204 million Pfizer doses have been administered.

The approval comes as studies show the efficacy of vaccines in preventing CCP virus infection is waning. That prompted a host of officials, including the FDA’s Woodcock, to announce last week that they plan, starting next month, on recommending booster shots, pending FDA authorization. Still, for now, those who get two Moderna or Pfizer shots are considered fully vaccinated.

The approval drew both support and criticism.

“With six months of safety data, the vaccine is still safe, still effective,” Dr. Alok Patel, a pediatric hospitalist in San Francisco, said on ABC News.

President Joe Biden said in a statement that the approval “should give added confidence that this vaccine is safe and effective.”

However, Peter Doshi, the senior editor of the British Medical Journal, said Monday that the FDA should have demanded “controlled studies with long term follow up” before granting the approval.

While the Delta variant of the CCP virus has been blamed for the waning effectiveness, he wrote, it may not be the true cause.

Epoch Times Photo
Syringes with the COVID-19 Pfizer vaccine are pictured ready for use at a mobile clinic in Los Angeles, Calif., on July 9, 2021. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)

Adverse Reactions

While the FDA approved Pfizer’s jab, regulators also said they determined that there are “increased risks” of myocarditis and pericarditis, or heart inflammation, following administration of the shot, particularly within the seven days following the second dose of the two-dose regimen.

“The observed risk is higher among males under 40 years of age compared to females and older males. The observed risk is highest in males 12 through 17 years of age. Available data from short-term follow-up suggest that most individuals have had resolution of symptoms. However, some individuals required intensive care support. Information is not yet available about potential long-term health outcomes. The Comirnaty Prescribing Information (pdf) includes a warning about these risks,” the agency said.

The FDA previously added a warning about the heart inflammation to both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which both utilize messenger RNA technology, but still maintains that teenagers should get vaccinated.

In clinical studies of people between the ages of 16 and 55, according to the FDA, the most commonly reported adverse reactions were pain at the injection site (88.6 percent), fatigue (70.1 percent), headache (64.9 percent), muscle pain (45.5 percent), chills (41.5 percent), joint pain (27.5 percent), fever (17.8 percent), and injection site swelling (10.6 percent).

In studies of people 56 years old or older, the most commonly reported adverse reactions were pain at the injection site (78.2 percent), fatigue (56.9 percent), headache, (45.9 percent), muscle pain (32.5 percent), chills (24.8 percent), joint pain (21.5 percent), injection site swelling (11.8 percent), fever (11.5 percent), and injection site redness (10.4 percent).

Approximately 3,079 people have died after receiving the Pfizer jab, according to Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a passive reporting system run jointly by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some 15,268 people have been hospitalized after getting a Pfizer shot, according to VAERS reports. Nearly 3,900 have reportedly suffered a permanent disability.

The system is “not designed to determine if a vaccine caused a health problem, but is especially useful for detecting unusual or unexpected patterns of adverse event reporting that might indicate a possible safety problem with a vaccine,” according to its website.

Anybody can submit reports to the system. Healthcare providers are encouraged to submit reports and vaccine manufacturers are required to report certain adverse events. Federal health officials then review the submissions.

’15 Million Votes Cannot be Accounted For’ in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election

We all know there was funny business during the 2020 election. There is no way 81 million Americans voted for Joe Biden. You’ll never convince me otherwise. The 2020 election was not fair, and Democrats knew how to exploit the COVID crisis to set things in motion. Secretaries of State cannot just change election laws willy nilly. They need the state legislatures to sign off on changes. In Pennsylvania and Michigan, such tweaks were executed without approval from their respective state legislatures for an obvious reason. They were Republican majority bodies. The team gathered to argue the election discrepancies was not good to say the least. The Democrats were able to run out the clock and here we are. So, are you shocked that there are millions of mail-in ballots that are just missing? They’re gone. Around 15 million votes cannot be accounted for. (via Daily Signal):

Almost 15 million mail-in ballots were unaccounted for in the 2020 presidential election, and more than a million more ballots were undeliverable, according to a new study.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative watchdog group on election integrity, released a research brief Wednesday assessing the effect of mass mail-in balloting in an election with a close presidential race in key battleground states such as Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin.

“These figures detail how the 2020 push to mail voting needs to be a one-year experiment,” J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, said in a public statement.

The report found that 1.1 million mail-in ballots were undeliverable for various reasons. Election officials rejected another 560,814 mail-in ballots.

Another 14.7 million mailed ballots met an “unknown” fate, the report says.

Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the presidential race with an Electoral College victory of 306 to 232 after winning Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin by 0.6 percentage points or less.

A Washington Post analysis in February found that flipping fewer than 43,000 votes across those three states could have changed the election outcome. In the nationwide popular vote, Biden received 81,268,924 votes to Trump’s 74,216,154—a margin of 7,052,770 votes.

It goes beyond that. The GOP was incredibly close to winning everything in 2020. We’re less than 100,000 votes from a unified GOP government, a second Trump term, and a raging river of liberal tears. That Washington Post analysis added that the GOP was 32,000 votes shy of retaking the House and only needed a mere 14,000 votes to keep the Senate. Those aren’t massive shifts. Prior to the 2020 election, in the last four, around 28 million votes were lost.

Rev. Jesse Jackson Hospitalized With COVID-19 After Being Fully Vaccinated

Civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson—who is fully vaccinated—and his wife, Jacqueline Jackson, have both been hospitalized with COVID-19, according to a statement on Aug. 21.

Jackson, 79, received his first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine in January 2021 during a publicized event and urged others to get the vaccine as soon as possible. It isn’t clear if his wife, who is 77, also got the vaccine.

Both are being treated at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, according to a statement from Jackson’s nonprofit group, the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. The organization didn’t provide an update on their status.

“There are no further updates at this time,” the statement said. “We will provide updates as they become available.”

Doctors, the group said, are “currently monitoring the condition of both” and added that “anyone who has been around either of them for the last five or six days should follow” guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) related to testing and social distancing.

COVID-19 is the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

Earlier this year, Jackson underwent surgery after being hospitalized for abdominal pain. In 2017, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a neurological disorder.

“Let us all pray for Rev. and Mrs. Jesse Jackson. They need our sincere and intense prayers. Prayer changes things!!!” MSNBC host Al Sharpton wrote on Twitter.

As Jackson was fully vaccinated, his hospitalization is sure to trigger more questions about the vaccines’ efficacy in light of new COVID-19 variants. Last week, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said during a news conference there is “concerning evidence” that mRNA vaccine protection is “waning” against the so-called Delta strain.

In one study published by the CDC and cited by Walensky, the efficacy against infection has plummeted to 53.1 percent for both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. As a result, Walensky said that due to the waning effectiveness, the federal government is “planning for Americans to receive booster shots starting next month,” saying that their initiative is designed to “stay ahead of this virus.”

But the push to provide booster shots drew significant criticism from the World Health Organization, which said the plan would deprive poorer nations of vaccines. Some scientists and medical researchers who were previously vaccinated wrote on Twitter that they wouldn’t get the booster in light of the CDC announcement.

Earlier this month, one of the chief AstraZeneca vaccine developers, professor Andrew Pollard, said that gaining herd immunity with vaccines is “not a possibility” and that researchers and governments need to instead pivot to treatment methods.

Speaking to the UK Parliament, Pollard said that what the CCP virus “will throw up next is a variant which is perhaps even better at transmitting in vaccinated populations,” saying that this is “even more of a reason not to be making a vaccine program around herd immunity.”

The Epoch Times has contacted the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition for additional comment.

Poll: 65% Of Democrats Support Government Censorship

According to a recent poll, a significant majority of Democrats support government censorship. In Pew Research’s recent censorship poll, 65 percent of Democrats reported they want the government to censor allegedly misleading information online. This shows a 40 percent increase from just three years ago.

The majority of Democrats responded, “the government should take steps to restrict false information, even if it means limiting freedom of information.”

Republicans on the other hand have dropped from 37 percent to 28 percent in support of government censorship. The massive shift by Democrats against free speech indicates Americans are now about evenly split on the issue of state censorship, with just half of all citizens opposing government control of speech.

Biden: Troop extension in Afghanistan beyond Aug. 31 under discussion

President Biden on Sunday left open the possibility of extending U.S. troop deployments in Afghanistan beyond an Aug. 31 deadline if necessary to facilitate the evacuation of American personnel and Afghan allies.

Biden previously said troops would remain in Afghanistan until all Americans were out of the country, though his comments Sunday were the clearest indication yet an extension is under discussion within the administration.

Biden said he remained optimistic that all necessary evacuations could be completed before Aug. 31. But he acknowledged the difficulty of getting tens of thousands of people out of the country as it comes under Taliban rule once again.

It was Biden’s second address in three days updating the nation on the state of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan amid chaotic scenes this week of evacuation efforts in and around the airport in Kabul as U.S. citizens and Afghan allies attempt to flee the country.

“There are discussions going on among us and the military about extending,” Biden said in response to a question about the deadline. “Our hope is we will not have to extend. But there are going to be discussions, I suspect, on how far along we are in the process.”

Biden sought to underscore how the U.S. evacuation effort was ramping up in the face of bipartisan and international criticism about a withdrawal effort that has been marred by reports of Afghan allies fearful of retribution under Taliban rule.

The U.S. has evacuated roughly 25,100 people from Afghanistan over the past week, the White House said Sunday, with nearly 8,000 of those evacuees coming in the last 24 hours.

The administration activated the Civil Reserve Air Fleet on Sunday, allowing commercial airliners to assist with getting Americans and Afghan allies and their families relocated.

Biden would not explicitly say the U.S. had expanded the perimeter around the Kabul airport but hinted American forces had taken steps to improve access for those trying to leave the country.

“We have constantly … increased rational access to the airport where more folks can get there more safely,” Biden said, declining to get into specific strategy. “It’s still a dangerous operation, but I don’t want to go into the detail of how we’re doing that.”

Biden has been unwavering in his decision to pull U.S. forces out of Afghanistan after 20 years in the country and has said he has no regrets about how the withdrawal was conducted. He repeatedly laid out his rationale that he would not send another generation of young men and women there with Osama bin Laden dead and al Qaeda diminished.

But new polling has shown that much of the public disapproves of how the withdrawal has played out, with lawmakers in both parties urging the administration get American personnel and Afghan interpreters, female leaders and other vulnerable individuals out of the country.

Biden on Sunday suggested the chaotic images that have dominated the airwaves in recent days would have been unavoidable regardless of timing, but he stressed that any American who wants to come home from Afghanistan will be brought home.

“Let me be clear: The evacuation of thousands of people from Kabul is going to be hard and painful, no matter when it started or when we began,” Biden said. “Would have been true if we had started a month ago or a month from now. There is no way to evacuate this many people without pain and loss and the heartbreaking images you see on television. It’s just a fact. My heart aches for those people you see. We are proving that we can move, though, thousands of people a day out of Kabul.”

Texas Governor Abbott Tests Negative for COVID-19 After Short Illness

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, whose state is engulfed in a fourth COVID surge, said he tested negative for COVID-19 on Saturday after having a “brief and mild” bout with the infection this week.

In video posted on Twitter, the Republican governor, whose office announced four days ago that he had tested positive with the virus, credited the vaccination for his short illness and urged Texans to get vaccinated.

Abbott said he will continue to quarantine at the recommendation of doctors and will continue to work to open infusion centers for antibody therapy treatment across his state.

Abbott’s office on Tuesday said he had the virus but was not experiencing symptoms. He received a monoclonal antibody treatment, it said. It did not give any indication as to when the governor contracted the virus.

Abbott is one of a few Southern governors at the center of the masking debate and has sought to block local officials in the state from mandating the use of nose and mouth coverings to reduce infection by the virus.

The highly infectious Delta variant continues to rampage across Texas and other states with low levels of vaccinations.

Kamala Harris Laughs When Reporter Starts to Ask Her About Americans Trapped in Afghanistan (Video)

Kamala Harris traveled to Southeast Asia to visit Singapore and Vietnam as thousands of Americans are stranded in Afghanistan in a potential hostage situation.

Both Biden and Harris hid from the public for several days as the Taliban took control of Afghanistan.

Kamala Harris walked over to a gaggle of reporters on the tarmac before boarding her flight to Singapore.

Harris laughed when a reporter started to ask her about Americans trapped in Afghanistan.

VIDEO:

It is a bloody and chaotic scene outside of the Kabul airport this weekend thanks to Joe Biden’s botched withdrawal.

On Saturday the Biden administration warned Americans trapped in Afghanistan of potential security threats and not to travel to the Kabul Airport.

Shortly after the US embassy sent out the warning to Americans, the Associated Press received word of a potential ISIS threat against Americans.

The US military is being forced to develop new ways to safely get Americans to Kabul airport.

The Taliban is confiscating US passports and driver’s licenses.

But Kamala Harris’ priority is to travel to Singapore and Vietnam to discuss regional security issues.

Biden Is Lying. We Are Going To Leave Behind Thousands Of Americans In Afghanistan

In Biden’s remarks to the press Friday, he was either openly deceiving the American people or he is completely unaware of conditions in Kabul.

President Joe Biden finally took a few questions from a handful of reporters Friday after delivering remarks on the unfolding disaster in Afghanistan.

What he had to say did not inspire confidence, and in fact seriously calls into question Biden’s connection to reality right now.

For example, the president is either lying or completely misinformed when he says that any American who wants to leave Afghanistan will be able to leave, or that any American who wants to get to the airport can get there.

Americans trapped in Kabul right now are saying the opposite. A deluge of news reports coming in from Afghanistan indicate it’s almost impossible to get into the Kabul airport, even for Americans and Afghan with Special Immigrant Visas, for SIVs. There have even been reports, for days now, that some Americans have been beaten at Taliban checkpoints, and that contrary to Biden’s claims, showing a U.S. passport doesn’t guarantee anyone passage to the airport.

Even those who can get to the airport can’t get past the gates because the entire area is in chaos. David Fox, an American man trapped in Kabul with his Afghan wife and son, told ABC News that when he arrived at the airport perimeter, there were perhaps a thousand people, mostly Afghans, trying to get in. U.S. Marines were firing warning shots into the air and throwing flash-bang grenades to keep the crowd at bay.

When he managed to make eye contact with a Marine, Fox said, the soldier shouted at him to leave the area, that it wasn’t safe. “The airport is very dangerous,” Fox told ABC News. “The Americans do not have control of the northern gates.” He added that British troops, “for some reason are not allowing American passport-holders to come in” at the south gate they control.

Asked whether he would authorize U.S. troops to go out into Kabul to get Americans who are unable to get to the airport or who are trapped behind Taliban checkpoints, Biden said, “We know of no circumstance where American citizens have not been able to get to the airport,” and claimed that U.S. officials are in “close contact” with the Taliban, and that, essentially everything is going swimmingly.

But we all know that isn’t true — and we also know that other countries are sending troops out into Kabul to rescue their stranded citizens and bring them to the airport. The United Kingdom this week deployed 900 elite paratroopers into Kabul to rescue some 4,000 U.K. nationals in the city. The soldiers were reportedly told to expect combat with Taliban fighters.

Inside the airport perimeter, conditions are deteriorating. CNN’s Clarissa Ward, who has been reporting from the airport, said yesterday that in an eight-hour span, not a single U.S. evacuation flight had left. The situation she describes is harrowing. Thousands of people, Afghans and Americans and dozens of other nationalities, have gotten into the airport compound, but there is no process or system in place to get people on flights or provide basic necessities for the people who are waiting. What she describes is utter chaos:

Moreoever, so many people are fleeing the country, there is nowhere to process them once they leave. News came Friday that U.S. flights out of Kabul had been halted because the processing center in Doha, Qatar, was overwhelmed.

People inside the U.S. airbase that’s been receiving evacuation flights from Afghanistan described the situation to CBS News as, “pretty much a full-blown humanitarian disaster.”

Biden told reporters he sees “no reason” U.S. troops can’t complete the evacuation of all Americans as well as tens of thousands of Afghans who worked with the U.S. in the next couple of weeks.

Ward, however, said that from what she’s seeing at the airport, that timeline is impossible: “The scale of this mission is now enormous — beyond the scale of any military but even beyond the capacity of the U.S. military and the six or eight thousands troops who are now here… How on earth are you going to evacuate 50,000 people in the next two weeks? It just can’t happen.”

Meanwhile, there seems to be no real plan in place to ensure that Americans can get out. Fox, the American, told ABC News that the State Department emailed Americans in Afghanistan a generic visa document they could use to get to the Kabul airport.

The problem is, the document has no name or serial numbers on it, and was also emailed to thousands of Afghan citizens eligible for special immigrant visa, or SIVs. This generic visa document is now being copied and printed off by the thousands, sold to Afghans trying to get to the airport, essentially rendering it worthless.

“Even the Taliban can’t control two or three thousand people at the Camp Sullivan gate when you have tens of thousands of Afghans who now have this kind of ridiculous, bogus document that the State Department created,” Fox said. “I don’t know how to explain something like this, an idea like this, except for brain worms. I mean it’s absurd. What were they thinking?”

For his part, Biden remains defiant and strangely out of touch. “This is about America leading the world,” he said at the press conference.

No, this is about America blundering on the world stage. If the situation on the ground in Afghanistan remains as it is, we are almost certainly going to leave Americans behind — and not hundreds, but thousands.