In my previous column, we took a look at an alarming article by a professor of law from Stanford University that – though it appeared in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine – had nothing whatsoever to do with science.
Instead, it brazenly outlined a scheme to deprive anyone refusing the impending COVID-19 vaccine of their liberty and right to work without running afoul of any “legal challenges on procedural due-process grounds” – or, as they probably like to call it at Standford’s law school, ‘that pesky Fifth Amendment.’
But even putting aside any right you may have to decide which drugs get injected into your body, it’s hard to say whether the idea of forcing us to get vaccinated for COVID-19 is more frightening or nonsensical.
On the frightening side: Two of the leading contenders in the race to produce a vaccine are using experimental technology that artificially stimulates an immune response by… hold on to your seats… genetically altering your cells with RNA from the virus so they start producing proteins from its outer shell. Though it probably won’t be described this way in any ad campaign, it’s tough to see what’s inaccurate about saying mRNA technology works by genetically modifying you into a human-coronavirus hybrid.
Did you know that 2 leading vaccine contenders use a never-before-approved technology to genetically alter your cells so they start making COVID proteins?
Sorry, of course not. Totally forgot you don't matter.
Just role up your sleeve and get in line peasant. pic.twitter.com/7fWEuH42vp— Michael Thau (@MichaelThau) October 9, 2020
Moreover, not only are these potential COVID vaccines being developed with never-before-witnessed haste; mRNA technology has never even been approved for use before. In fact, this will be the first time it’s even been so much as tested in a large-scale clinical trial!
There’s always some risk attending the introduction of any new medication. But put all of this together, and it’s hard to see how the impending COVID-19 vaccine won’t be one of the riskiest if not the riskiest pharmaceutical product ever marketed.
The pharmaceutical companies racing to be the first to develop one certainly seem to agree.
Something else you probably haven’t heard is they’ve managed to get immunity from liability should anything go horribly wrong and you or a member of your family wind up seriously harmed or even killed by the most hastily produced vaccine in history. Doubly distressing since, apart from signaling an alarming lack of confidence in the safety of their own product, it also removes the normal incentives the firms in this record-breaking rush to develop a COVID-19 vaccine have to make sure it’s safe.
Also if anything goes wrong forget about suing.
The firms racing to produce a vaccine in record-breaking time have so much confidence in the safety of their products they’ve gotten immunity from liability.
Not sure why I’m telling you this, tho. Keep forgetting you don’t matter pic.twitter.com/yaplrZaeMZ— Michael Thau (@MichaelThau) October 9, 2020
But to add insult to your inability to sue for injury, the FDA is totally fine with a COVID-19 vaccine that’s only 50% effective. So as many as half the people risking an injection may very well wind up having done so for absolutely no reason.
Which brings us to the nonsensical.
Why on earth would anyone so much as consider getting injected with such a vaccine – let alone be forced to do so by the state as soon as it’s on the market – given that even on the World Health Organization’s latest official numbers, COVID-19 turns out to be no more deadly than the seasonal flu?
But maybe you didn’t hear about this latest entry in the long list of crucial facts the media’s been keeping from you.
Last week, W.H.O. officials estimated that 750 million people have been infected with the virus worldwide. Even ignoring that a lot of countries seem to be using criteria that are massively inflating the virus’s death count just like the U.S., the roughly one million reported deaths worldwide would imply that COVID’s fatality rate is around .13%. That is, it’s the same as the flu’s.
It’s beyond reprehensible that this is being pushed on us for a virus that – even ignoring the ridiculously loose criteria used to count its fatalities – is no more deadly than the flu even on official W.H.O figures. https://t.co/8Uxd4Z8BKB pic.twitter.com/TRMeQIiYkM
— Michael Thau (@MichaelThau) October 9, 2020
Anthony Fauci is one person who should be happy to hear that COVID-19’s fatality rate is around the same as the flu’s, though decidedly less happy you’re finding it out. You see, that’s exactly what Fauci predicted in an article addressed to his fellow experts he published at the New England Journal of Medicine’s website on February 28.
Guess Fauci realized they weren’t dumb enough to fall for the BS about COVID-19 being “at least 10 times more lethal than the flu” he peddled to Congress just 11 days later. In fact, Fauci even explained to his learned peers exactly why the numbers he went on to terrorize us with are total garbage.
The fatality rates he and his buddy W.H.O. director Tedros used to help China scare us into swallowing the disastrous and scientifically preposterous idea of quarantining people who aren’t sick were for reported cases only. So they didn’t include the vast majority of non-fatal “asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases” which, Fauci pointed out, numbered “several times as high.” Taking the likely number of unreported cases into account, he explained, yielded a fatality rate of “approximately .1%,” akin to “a severe seasonal influenza.”
And re March presentation of high case fatality rates as if they indicated random infected person’s chances of dying, Fauci explained selection bias issue in NEJM article & contradicted his “at least 10 times deadlier than flu” spiel. So we know he’s evil. https://t.co/1KwfqCYuVd pic.twitter.com/G62yCjIQc1
— Michael Thau (@MichaelThau) August 25, 2020
But there’s something else that Fauci and CDC Director Robert Redfield both deceived Congress about more recently that makes their hysterical push to get us to take a COVID-19 vaccine even more disturbing. Namely, the fact that dozens of research studies have shown that a lot of us already have immunity from prior contact with common but harmless variant strains of coronavirus.
As I reported a few weeks back, Trump’s COVID-19 advisor, Dr. Scott Atlas explicitly called out Redfield for… well he didn’t put it this way but there’s no way around it… lying to Congress and the American people about how many of us are still susceptible to the virus.
"I think that Dr. Redfield misstated something there. The immunity to the infection is not solely determined by the percent of people who have antibodies."
Scott Atlas smacks down @CDCDirector's testimony saying 90% of the country is still "susceptible" to the coronavirus. pic.twitter.com/LGgtDW1VLm
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) September 23, 2020
Researchers have known since the middle of the last century that, besides antibody-producing B-cells, your body also has a second equally important defense against infections provided by T-cells.
One function of T-cells is to stimulate B-cells to produce antibodies. But T-cells can also fight off a virus even if your immune system doesn’t have the ability to generate antibodies against it by directly attacking and killing infected cells.
As Dr. Atlas explained to the shocked members of the White House press corps:
Immunity to the infection is not solely determined by the percent of people who have antibodies. If you look at the research – and there’s been about 24 papers at least on the immunity from T-cells, a different type of immunity than antibodes – […]the reality is that according to the papers from Sweden, Singapore, and elsewhere, there is crossover immunity highly likely from other infections and there is also T-cell immunity. And the combination of those make the antibodies a small fraction of the people that have immunity. So the answer is no, it is not 90% of people that are susceptible to infection.
Moreover, even if it turns out that immunity from antibodies fades quickly, crossover immunity from T-cells doesn’t. As I reported a couple of months back in a column on some related new research indicating that COVID-19 isn’t very infectious, T-cell immunity to coronaviruses has been shown to last as long as 17 years.
3/ While antibodies against COVID-19 may only last months, T cell immunity can remain protective for years.
In a study of 23 people who survived SARS in 2003, every single one had memory T cells that recognized the SARS virus 17 years later. (Nature)https://t.co/4LCjGcj8u9
— James Todaro, MD (@JamesTodaroMD) August 10, 2020
We’ve known for months that recovering from common cold coronaviruses which pretty much everyone has had can also provide T-cell immunity to COVID-19.
And contrary to Redfield’s reprehensible perjury before Congress, the research shows that, as a result, around half of us were likely immune to COVID-19 even before the virus that’s supposed to cause it ever existed.
5/ In the same study, in 37 persons with no history of SARS or COVID-19 (negative serology and/or samples taken before COVID-19), over 50% had SARS-CoV-2 specific T cells.
This is not surprising because there are at least 4 strains of coronaviruses that cause the “common cold”.
— James Todaro, MD (@JamesTodaroMD) August 10, 2020
7/ This finding was confirmed in yet another study published in Cell in June 2020 showing that 40-60% of unexposed individuals had T cell recognition of SARS-CoV-2.
The authors hypothesized that crossover immunity came from “common cold” coronaviruses.https://t.co/v2boTH9xVa
— James Todaro, MD (@JamesTodaroMD) August 10, 2020
But the relentless push to force us all to rush out and get a COVID-19 vaccine the second one goes on the market is even more disturbing, still.
Just a few weeks back, the unofficial celebrity spokesperson for mass vaccination, Anthony Fauci himself, also tried to deny all the research indicating that half of us have no need for a COVID-19 vaccine because we’re already immune when Rand Paul finally stood up and challenged what can only be described as Fauci’s six-month reign of malignant deception.
2/n
Here is the video of the exchange between Rand Paul and Fauci yesterday. I transcribed Fauci's comments verbatim on NYC and T-Cell immunity. https://t.co/U6uq4r1XVe
— Alex Rodriguez (Parler: @therealarod1984) (@therealarod1984) September 24, 2020
Fauci offered to address Paul’s concerns in private:
I’d like to talk to you about that also. because there was a study that recently came out that pre-existing immunity to coronaviruses that are common cold do not cross react with COVID-19.
As his use of the word “also” suggests, this was a trick Fauci used repeatedly when Rand Paul finally called out the relentless stream of deadly BS he’s inflicted on us since his nightmarish reign began.
America’s answer to Pol Pot kept suggesting that he’d be happy to discuss Paul’s objections alone away from prying eyes. Who knows whether the idea was to bribe, threaten, or schmooze the Senator into backing down. Whatever Fauci’s response was, peasants like us evidently don’t need to hear it and need to just do as we’re told.
Pre-existing T-cell immunity to COVID-19, however, is an established and completely unsurprising fact.
As Dr. Atlas said, there are literally dozens of studies showing it exists. It’s not even clear what lone recent study that allegedly says otherwise Fauci is referring to. In fact, it appears he was simply lying and it doesn’t even exist.
In a later interview, he criticized Dr. Atlas for informing the American people that Redfield’s testimony to congress was contradicted by dozens of studies as “extraordinarily inappropriate” without naming a single study or any other evidence showing that Dr. Atlas was wrong.
On Fauci’s way of thinking, Redfield had exercised his prerogative to lie to the peasants and Dr. Atlas had despicably sided with the peasants by trying to expose one of their masters’ deception. And, if you think that description is in any way sarcastic, you’re still not getting what’s happening to us.
Fauci doubles down in latest interview stating that studies show that T-cells from healthy donors are not cross-reactive with SARS-CoV-2…
In a 1 hr interview, he is able to cite exactly zero evidence to support his argument despite many T-cell studies showing him to be wrong. https://t.co/7123jO4zsG
— James Todaro, MD (@JamesTodaroMD) September 26, 2020
But it’s telling that Fauci was unwilling to identify this alleged study or answer most of Rand Paul’s other questions about what in God’s name he’s been doing to us these past six months in front of the American people and, instead, requested a private audience with the Senator to assuage his concerns.
It’s hard to imagine anything more disturbing than the main bureaucrats pushing for a rushed-to-market vaccine that may wind up using technology to modify the genetic makeup of our cells also flagrantly lying about how many of us are already immune.
Indeed, it’s disturbing that Fauci and Redfield aren’t behind bars, let alone that they’ve continued to get away with deceitfully pushing one disastrous policy after another on us for months now unhindered.
But, though it scarcely seems possible, the situation is even worse.
You see, when you weren’t looking, Redfield’s CDC quietly asserted that they have blanket authority to:
[A]pprehend, detain, examine, quarantine, isolate, or conditionally release individuals for purposes of preventing communicable disease spread.
Surprise!
Of course, the sweeping powers to which the CDC laid claim seem to license a whole lot more than merely locking you up for refusing a vaccine.
“Purposes of preventing the disease from spreading” is such a broad mandate that you could find yourself deprived of liberty for suspicion of being infected by the virus.
This would be troubling enough were it coming from an agency we had any reason to think could be trusted.
Quite the contrary, however.
Both the CDC and its director, Robert Redfield have spent the last six months feeding us: disinformation, bogus stats, advice that ranged from useless to deadly, and as we’ve seen – just to show they really meant it – the occasional barefaced lie.
Neither the agency nor the man in charge could have possibly shown themselves to be more contemptible or less worthy of our trust. So, the sweeping totalitarian power they’ve claimed over our lives portends a lot worse than just forcing you and your loved ones to incur the risk that attends taking any drug by injecting an utterly pointless and hastily produced experimental vaccine while depriving you of the legal recourse you would normally have should something go terribly wrong.
Tyrannical mayors and governors have already closed down our businesses, shuttered up our churches, locked us in our homes, and forbade appearing in public with our faces uncovered – all for absolutely no legitimate reason and all on the CDC’s say-so.
A few weeks back, a Maryland man was sentenced to a year in jail for hosting a couple of outdoor gatherings at his home against his Governor’s orders.
ICYMI: A Maryland man who threw multiple gatherings of more than 50 people despite the governor's emergency order due to the coronavirus will spend a year in jail https://t.co/rVJHS41IOR
— WJZ | CBS Baltimore (@wjz) September 26, 2020
Half the country hears about his sentence and thinks: The bastard deserved it.
They watch an asthmatic woman in Texas get tasered and dragged away in handcuffs for not pointlessly harming her health by wearing a mask outdoors and think: They should have clubbed the b**** too.
MASK MELEE: Another fan at a middle school football game in Logan, Ohio, captured the moment a woman was handcuffed, Tasered and led away from the field by a school resource officer for refusing to comply with a mask requirement. https://t.co/ygR85XGuc0 pic.twitter.com/xjNYMBQAi1
— World News Tonight (@ABCWorldNews) September 24, 2020
While the rest of us are shocked & appalled for a minute or two after which time we completely forget – as we gradually become accustomed to a totalitarian new normal that, just last year, we would have scoffed at anyone suggesting could ever happen here.
So if you think it’s outlandish to suppose they’ll start hauling people off to “quarantine wards” for suspicion of having COVID-19 or maybe just for calling out any of Redfield or Fauci’s blatant lies about it in too loud a voice, you need to wake up and look at all the dead canaries collecting in front of the coal mine exit before the pile gets too big to claw your way out.
But what makes the CDC’s authoritarian power grab even more alarming is that, though the media didn’t report on it, they nonetheless did do a whole lot of reporting on one small part of the very strange document in which it was announced.
Though most of its roughly 800 words are about those “regulatory updates” codifying the CDC’s sweeping “federal isolation and quarantine authority,” their announcement abruptly veers off into its main subject only after a brief 112-word opening that peddles some arrant nonsense about the 1918 Spanish flu which turned out to be instrumental in grooming us for our future as docile slaves under the boot of a tyrannical Chinese Communist-style all-powerful bureaucracy.
…Continued in the next installment of “COVID-1984″…