End of the Pandemic
Always question the narrative: 9-11, JFK, Vietnam War, Iraq War, Jan. 6, C-19
The narrative is falling apart, piece by piece
The momentum feels to me like it is accelerating... Here are three important new developments you should be aware of.
Steve Kirsch
There is much more than three things. People are exhausted and tired of playing pandemic and rehashing the same things over and over and over again.
Is the Pandemic Scheduled to End by March 1?
Are we really looking at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic? That might explain the recent dizzying changes in news headlines, and it's the most reasonable alternative for political purposes, as March 1 is a significant day for two very important reasons.
In recent days, the pandemic narrative has undergone a remarkable number of U-turns
January 9, 2022, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky sent out a tweet saying “We must protect people with comorbidities from severe COVID-19,” in other words, focused protection, which is what tens of thousands of doctors have been calling for since the creation of The Great Barrington Declaration in early October 2020
January 10, 2022, Walensky admitted that the COVID shots cannot prevent transmission
The CDC is now saying you should not retest once you’ve recovered from COVID, as the PCR can provide false positives for up to 12 weeks after the infection has been resolved. They’re also cutting the isolation requirement from 10 to just five days — probably because the failing economy is hurting Biden’s approval rating so they need people to work
The narrative is also changing on what makes for a COVID case and how deaths are counted. Walensky recently admitted about 40% of “COVID patients” tested positive but do not have symptoms and are hospitalized for something else. She has also promised to deliver data on how many people have actually died “from” COVID and how many died “with” it
The pressure is now on to prove the Biden administration has made some sort of progress with the pandemic. Biden made a lot of promises, none of which have come to fruition, so now the political establishment is scrounging to come up with some plan that can make them look as though they’re getting somewhere.
The problem is that cases are now exploding, when a successful vaccine campaign should have brought the situation under control. So, they now need a way to minimize the number of cases, whereas before, they used every trick in the book to overcount them,8 in order to scare people into complying with COVID restrictions and getting the jab.
“There seems to be a LOT of sudden momentum surging in the direction of ending the pandemic. If I’m right, we’re going to see even more of this, and pretty quickly, since Biden has to wrap it up in time to declare victory on March 1.” Jeff Childers
Is the Political Pandemic in Its Final Death Throes?
In a January 10, 2022, blog post, Jeff Childers, an attorney, and the president and founder of Childers Law firm, presents a hypothesis for why we might be looking at the end of the pandemic, as the Biden administration has “no reasonable alternative but to wrap this whole thing up in the next 60 days or so.”
“There’s an interesting political dynamic shaping up, a kind of political vice grip that might just be driving federal COVID policy toward authenticity and an end to the pandemic ... a lot of reality has been breaking through lately,” Childers writes.
He points out how a federal judge recently ordered the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to release all the Pfizer COVID jab data that the agency wanted 75 years to release. The bulk of that data is now due March 1, 2022, the day of Biden’s State of the Union address. Childers suspects the Pfizer documents will contain plenty of counternarrative fodder and politically embarrassing details.
Why We’re Seeing a U-Turn in the Narrative Now
Biden needs some good news by his State of the Union address, as it’ll be his last chance to “help move the needle back toward blue,” and the way he can do that is by declaring the pandemic over. He can then claim to be the great liberator who ended the pandemic measures for good.
“If they handle this right, they can give their voting base and sycophantic media agents all the necessary talking points to boost Dem prospects for the midterm elections,” Childers writes.
But to pull off that U-turn with any semblance of credibility, they have to start cutting the case rate now, and that’s precisely what we’re seeing. For example, the CDC recently changed its guidelines so you don’t need to retest after you’ve recovered from COVID, so no more false positives from recovered people.
Florida’s official policy is now to only test high-risk individuals and those who are symptomatic. Childers points out that the left-leaning Sun Sentinel even ran an article highlighting the fact that despite surging case rates, Florida has the lowest COVID death rate in the nation, second only to the sparsely populated Alaska. “What incredibly powerful force could make the Sun Sentinel downplay the pandemic like this?” he asks.
…Same Narrative Switch Seen in Europe
The same sudden switch in narrative can be seen in Europe. Childers continues:
“Yesterday, the Guardian UK ran a story headlined, ‘End mass jabs and live with COVID, says ex-head of vaccine taskforce.’ It says Dr. Clive Dix — former chairman of the UK’s vaccine taskforce — has called for a ‘major rethink’ of the UK’s COVID strategy, in effect reversing the approach of the past two years and returning to a ‘new normality.’
Shocking the cores the oft-maligned authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Dr. Dix — without getting cancelled — said this:
‘We need to analyze whether we use the current booster campaign to ensure the vulnerable are protected, if this is seen to be necessary ... Mass population-based vaccination in the UK should now end.’ Ending mass vaccinations? Suddenly that idea is okay to discuss in the corporate media? Wow.”
Justice Sotomayor Called Out
Perhaps the best example that the narrative is undergoing a radical overhaul, Childers says, is Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor being fact checked and called out as a liar by The Washington Post:
“You’ll recall that Sotomayor confidently told the lawyers during oral argument Friday that ‘100,000’ children were in critical care and on ventilators with Omicron. The lawyers didn’t challenge her even though there aren’t that many total ICU beds in the whole country.
But on Saturday — the next day! — the Washington Post ran an article headlined, ‘Sotomayor’s false claim that ‘over 100,000’ children are in ‘serious condition’ with COVID.’ FALSE CLAIM?? What?? Here’s how the fact-checking article ended:
It’s important for Supreme Court justices to make rulings based on correct data … But Sotomayor during an oral argument offered a figure — 100,000 children in ‘serious condition … many on ventilators’ — that is absurdly high. She earns Four Pinocchios.’ It might be unprecedented for a major liberal newspaper to call out a liberal Justice. What could be going on? ...
There seems to be a LOT of sudden momentum surging in the direction of ending the pandemic. It seems, we’re going to see even more of this, and pretty quickly, since Biden has to wrap it up in time to declare victory on March 1. Which would explain why they pushed the SOTU back a month. They need the time to get the pandemic wrapped up.
The change in narrative is based on political strategy, not science.
Dismantling the American Regulatory State
A government that loses 'consent of the governed' is a government with no mandate to rule.
Thomas Neuburger
…The American Regulatory State
The modern U.S. regulatory state is that part of the government, housed in Executive Branch agencies like the FCC, the FAA, the FDA, the EPA and, yes, OSHA, that regulates in the public interest how businesses must conduct themselves.
The public by and large approves of regulations. Who wants to be killed by spoiled meat, or die in a plane crash because the FAA was privatized and turned into a revenue stream for investors?
On the other hand, businesses by and large hate regulations. It's the regulatory state that prevents even more people from dying in cars like the Ford Pinto or the Chevy Cobalt because the company did a cost-benefit analysis and found that killing passengers was economically preferable to making safer cars. It's the regulatory state, in other words, that stands in the way of increasing corporate profit at the public expense.
The regulatory state can be undermined in two ways. It can be captured and dismantled from within, under-funded and staffed with people who ignore or pervert its legal mandates. Or it can simply be made inoperative, by overturning the Supreme Court decision (called Chevron; see below) that makes it operative in the first place.
We've seen many instances of the first way, starting with Ronald Reagan's perversion of the regulatory regime. We are now witnessing the second.
The ‘Chevron Deference’ and Executive Branch Regulations
The modern regulatory state rests on the Reagan era Supreme Court ruling in Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council. The Chevron decision established the principle that, quoting the New York Times, “the E.P.A. (and any agency) could determine the meaning of an ambiguous term in the law. The rule came to be known as Chevron deference: When Congress uses ambiguous language in a statute, courts must defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of what the words mean.” [emphasis added]
In essence, the Chevron deference allows agencies to interpret regulatory laws in any reasonable way they wish, and gives legal deference to those interpretations. Note that this can work both for and against progressive principles.
…The 1935 Schechter Poultry Decision and the ‘Nondelegation Doctrine’
The right of the Executive Branch to engage in regulation at all has rarely been challenged; note that Chevron turned on an agency's right to interpret congressional language, not the right of the agency to regulate at all.
Congress has the inherent right to regulate business activity, but starting in the Roosevelt era, Congress delegated a great deal of that authority to the Executive Branch through legislation by writing general instructions to agencies and asking agencies to implement them. What's under attack by the right wing justices isn't the right of Congress to regulate businesses, it's the right of agencies to interpret its instructions. In essence, right wing justices want Congress to closely specify what regulatory agencies should do, not issue general instructions.
…What Overturning Chevron Would Mean
All of this means one thing. Any Court decision that reverses the current state of jurisprudence — that overturns Chevron and leaves Schechter Poultry in place — affirms Congress as the only body with the authority to issue regulations affecting business activity. When Congress delegates, it must do so specifically, writing the regulations itself.
The effect would be sweeping and immediate. Overturning Chevron means deconstructing the modern regulatory state. It means returning the country, from a regulatory standpoint, to before the New Deal and denying legitimacy to the entirety of Executive Branch regulatory mechanisms.
Needless to say, business leaders in both parties want that deconstruction very very much, and they're working hard to get it.
…The Government's Right to Rule
Which brings us to the heart of this piece, its main point.
What will happen if Chevron is overturned? Part of that answer is, it's anyone's guess — the future is often as hard to predict as the past — but we'd certainly land in completely uncharted territory.
…But another part of the answer is entirely predictable — loss of faith in government itself, and not just government in general — in this government, the one created by the Constitution.
Consider these two factors:
The ultimate powerlessness of the Supreme Court
The fact that Supreme Court justices are appointed for life
When the rebellion that's brewing hot in America reaches the offices of elected officials, they fear for their careers and many of them change their votes. Yet the unelected justices of the Supreme Court have no such vulnerability; they're appointed for life. They might be dissuaded from a shameful decision by massive public protest, but nothing compels that dissuasion. Nothing.
…the already angry rebellion in this country will grow even angrier — rebellion on steroids — and we may well approach the point where the pressure on elected officials to ignore the Court completely will bring the nation to a standstill, or to a kind of modern urban civil war. The kind we're witnessing the start of now, by the way, only instantly far more fractious.
Consider a country in which the Supreme Court issues a ruling, and no one obeys — or those that do are hated?
At that point we won't be in a constitutional crisis, but one much worse — a crisis in which the government, while constitutionally formed, loses the “consent of the governed.”
A government that loses the “consent of the governed” is a government with no mandate to rule. None at all.
…Are our leaders, the elites who run the country “in our name,” willing to risk those consequences? If Chevron is overturned, we will find out.
'270 doctors’ called out Joe Rogan, but the authors of the letter and the vast majority of its signatories are not medical doctors
Only a handful are practicing physicians.
Jordan Schachtel
Are you seeing all of those blaring corporate press headlines targeting Joe Rogan this weekend, reporting on a letter from “270 doctors,” which described the famous podcaster as a “menace to public health”? Well, it turns out that the real arbiters of misinformation are the individuals behind the letter itself, and they are being helped along by a corrupt corporate media that is misreporting the credentials of its signatories.
It was first reported by Rolling Stone, with a story titled, “Doctors Demand Spotify Puts an End to Covid Lies on ‘Joe Rogan Experience’”
Yes, the media and Big Tech want to create the image of a hundreds-strong coalition of medical doctors who are genuinely concerned about Joe Rogan’s conversations on his massive platform.
Twitter even got in on the propaganda campaign against Rogan, adding this “medical experts” letter to their curated headlines section.
Well, I reviewed this open letter, and it turns out that only around 100 of the 270+ signatories to the letter are people with qualified medical degrees. And a large chunk of that 100 or so medical doctors are MDs employed at universities who are not in fact practitioners of medicine.
…The letter denouncing Joe Rogan and pressuring Spotify to censor his speech has all kinds of random signatories. By my count, the letter is signed by over 50 PhD academics, around 60 college professors, 29 nurses, 10 students, 4 medical residents, and even a handful of… science podcasters.
The letter, which uses the word misinformation nine times in five paragraphs, concludes with a call for Spotify to censor Rogan as part of a policy to “moderate misinformation on the platform.”
Notably, there is no information on who or what group is behind the creation and circulation of the open letter. Rivera, the reported lead author of the letter, is associated with the far-left Rockefeller Foundation and The Atlantic, and she is a CNN contributor.