Malone discusses a controversial October 2020 email from National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins to Anthony Fauci in response to the Great Barrington Declaration. In it, Collins called three of the declaration’s authors “fringe” epidemiologists and demanded a “quick and devastating published take down of its premises”. I completely agree this was problematic.

As I have argued elsewhere, 2020 was a time of deep uncertainty about the science surrounding Covid-19 and the appropriate policy response to the pandemic. Collins is not an epidemiologist, and he has no standing to decide what counts as a “fringe” view within that field. As NIH director, his job is to foster dialogue among scientists and acknowledge uncertainty. Instead, he attempted to suppress legitimate debate with petty, ad hominem attacks.

The efforts to censor Malone and McCullough have massively backfired, with both men gaining prominence and publicity from the attempts to shut down their speech. More generally, I strongly disagree with efforts to censor scientists, even if they are incorrect, and no matter the implications of their words, as I believe the harms of censorship far exceed any short-term gains.

One problem, which has been on full display in this controversy, is that censorship may draw more attention to incorrect ideas. Another is that in the middle of any crisis, the answers to many scientific and policy questions will be uncertain. Disagreement on these questions is natural, and attempts to suffocate “harmful” speech run the risk of stifling critical debates, including by silencing third parties who may have important contributions but who fear the professional or reputational consequences of speaking up.

Perhaps the most serious objection to censorship is that the censors themselves are not fit for the task. Censors are unaccountable. They may be biased, misinformed or undereducated. They may lack perspective. In short, they are as fallible as the people they are trying censor. This is especially true in science, where, as history shows us, consensus views can turn out to be false, while controversial or heretical ideas can be vindicated.

Finally, in the modern world, where the censor is so often a giant technology company, there is tremendous potential for abuse. The same tools used to suppress scientific “misinformation” may someday be used to solidify political power and stifle dissent.

Fentanyl overdoses have surged to the leading cause of death for adults between the ages of 18 and 45, according to an analysis of U.S. government data.

Between 2020 and 2021, nearly 79,000 people between 18 and 45 years old — 37,208 in 2020 and 41,587 in 2021 — died of fentanyl overdoses, the data analysis from opioid awareness organization Families Against Fentanyl shows.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that can be deadly even in very small amounts, and other drugs, including heroin, meth and marijuana, can be laced with the dangerous drug. Mexico and China are the primary sources for the flow of fentanyl into the United States, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

Comparatively, between Jan. 1, 2020, and Dec. 15, 2021, there were more than 53,000 COVID-19 deaths among those between the ages of 18 and 49, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Cases of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome and Guillain-Barré syndrome have been reported after receipt of Janssen COVID-19 vaccine.

On December 16, 2021, after reviewing updated vaccine effectiveness and safety data, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices made a preferential recommendation for the use of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines over the Janssen adenoviral-vectored COVID-19 vaccine in all persons aged ≥18 years in the United States.

What are the implications for public health practice?

Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are preferred over the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine for primary and booster vaccination. The Janssen COVID-19 vaccine may be considered in some situations, including for persons with a contraindication to receipt of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.

The government admits the evidence for using masks in schools to reduce spread of Covid is "not conclusive".

The uncertainty is acknowledged in a review used by ministers in England to make their decision to introduce face coverings in classrooms.

The government's own study in the autumn did not provide proof of a statistically significant impact.

The evidence review says other studies have provided mixed results, but taken together suggest they may help.

Headlines downplay the latest evidence as ‘small’ and ‘temporary,’ as if that makes vaccine side effects insignificant to a woman’s overall health.

In 2021, Kirsch was very vocal about the government’s negligence in their failure to promote life-saving treatments and therapeutics. In a post that brought attention to Drs. Fareed and Tyson’s book, Kirsch called out the CDC and NIH for blatantly ignoring this information.

“The entire pandemic response was unnecessary: COVID is very treatable if treated early

“This book shows that we’ve known about effective treatments since March 2020.

“Had the CDC publicized such treatments, it would have made the entire pandemic response completely unnecessary: lockdowns, vaccines, mandates, masking, business closures, etc. Everyone would have gotten natural immunity and the pandemic would have ended with virtually no deaths.

“Tyson and Freed tried contacting the FDA, CDC, and NIH, but nobody would talk to them or return their calls. The same is true today. They are just “too busy” to talk to them. Keeping patients out of the hospital and morgue is not a priority for them.

“The same is true of the mainstream media. The NY Times refused to run op-eds about early treatments and CNN said that they were too busy covering the vaccines and people dying from COVID that they didn’t have the resources to talk about early treatment protocol that would have prevented everything.

“Instead of promoting early treatment using repurposed drugs, the CDC instructed people to just stay home and do nothing until they were so sick that they had to go to the hospital. Even after drugs in the Tyson/Fareed protocol like ivermectin and fluvoxamine have been proven time and time again to work in clinical trials and, in the case of ivermectin, published in systematic reviews and meta-analyses, the NIH still fails to acknowledge them rating them NEUTRAL. This means that most doctors will not use them.”

Top U.S. and British scientists reportedly thought that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, likely escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, but some were hesitant to let the debate play out in the media because they were concerned about “international harmony.” //

Dr. Francis Collins, the then-director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), replied to Farrar, writing: “I share your view that a swift convening of experts in a confidence-inspiring framework is needed or the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.”

Another scientist, Dr. Ron Fouchier, a Dutch virologist and Deputy Head of the Erasmus MC Department of Viroscience, responded to Farrar, “Further debate about such accusations would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.” //

David Asher, who led the Trump administration’s investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, told Fox News in May 2021 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was up to “some very hairy stuff with synthetic biology” and that biostatisticians from the U.S. government calculated that the odds of the coronavirus evolving naturally was one-in-13 billion.

Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas, who is also a doctor, who went there on the DARPA report. First, Marshall notes that there were more deaths under Joe Biden than under President Donald Trump. That’s the chart you see behind him in the following video. But then he tells Fauci that 59 percent of Americans didn’t trust him. Fauci replies that that was a real “distortion of reality.”

Next, Marshall hones in on the gain of function research lie. He noted how DARPA rejected a proposal but the NIAID didn’t reject it under Fauci. Marshall asks why had Fauci previously said that they hadn’t funded gain of function research when the report indicated that they had. He also asks if Fauci would commit to providing all the documents on this subject — unredacted — to Congress by the end of this week.

Fauci denies that they had funded the grant, but Marshall says they would have all the supporting information available. Fauci’s response to that is crazy, claiming that Marshall was “backing down from this,” which didn’t match what Marshall had said. Fauci just keeps saying that Marshall is incorrect, so Marshall challenges him to provide all the unredacted information.

while the city DOE says all families who have requested devices for remote learning have gotten them, the parents who are suing in Manhattan Supreme Court say poor kids and those who don’t speak English are still not getting “free and reliable Internet service or reliable, working iPads and laptops.”

“Untold numbers of low-income students, and especially low-income students of color, in New York City have been deprived and continue to be deprived, of the sound basic education that is their right,” the group of anonymous parents claim in the litigation.

Some of the children whose parents are fighting in court did not receive any devices for months into remote learning, according to the court papers. //

A July audit by the City Comptroller’s office found that as of March, the DOE was still reviewing 19,425 student requests for tablets, 16,000 of which dated to 2020, while 3,045 students were mistakenly sent more than one remote learning device.

The city has handed out more than 650,000 Internet enabled devices and more than 27,000 hot spots, and schools have bought more than 400,000 devices, said a DOE spokeswoman who called the city’s distribution of remote learning devices “robust.”

People who receive a second dose of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccination are shown to be well protected against the omicron variant, a South African study found.

Research from the South African Medical Research Council found that levels of protection against COVID-19 rose in the following weeks after receiving the booster, even after the surge of the easily transmissible omicron variant.

After a booster dose was given to those who previously received the J&J vaccine, it was shown to prevent 85 percent of hospitalizations in those who had received the second jab one to two months ago, an increase from 63 percent for those who had got their booster within the past two weeks.

Vaccine effectiveness against hospital admission in South African health care workers who received a homologous booster of Ad26.COV2 during an Omicron COVID19 wave: Preliminary Results of the Sisonke 2 Study //

People who receive a second dose of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccination are shown to be well protected against the omicron variant, a South African study found.

Research from the South African Medical Research Council found that levels of protection against COVID-19 rose in the following weeks after receiving the booster, even after the surge of the easily transmissible omicron variant.

After a booster dose was given to those who previously received the J&J vaccine, it was shown to prevent 85 percent of hospitalizations in those who had received the second jab one to two months ago, an increase from 63 percent for those who had got their booster within the past two weeks.

https://news.yahoo.com/johnson-johnson-booster-offers-strong-125556832.html

Jennifer Rubin, honorary Assistant Press Secretary to the Biden Administration, recently decided that we shouldn’t be focused on the case numbers for COVID-19 anymore and, instead, we need to focus on hospitalizations and deaths. This was reflected in Joe Biden’s admission of defeat again the virus, where he said there is no longer a “federal solution” to the pandemic.

Several folks in the media are slowly making this shift as they have realized that the omicron variant does not appear to discriminate between vaccinated and unvaccinated when it comes to infecting someone. The severity of the cases seems largely dependent on vaccination status, but in all likelihood, we’re going to see omicron become the dominant strain in the U.S. fairly quickly (if it isn’t already).

While the case rate is going up pretty dramatically in a lot of areas around the country, the hospitalization and death rates are not moving up at the same rate, which reinforces the idea that this surge is led by a strain that is not as severe as prior strains. //

case numbers are high in Florida, so while high case numbers aren’t a bad thing for Joe Biden, they apparently are for Republican governors.

Because science, I suppose.

All of the people who are going after Republican governors like DeSantis are doing so largely because they are still caught in the grip of fear over the virus, despite the evidence that the worst of it has passed. We’re at the point now where the virus is probably going to be around forever (like the flu), will have yearly vaccines available to fight it (like the flu), and isn’t a death sentence (like the flu).

Florida’s surgeon general has accused the Biden administration of “actively preventing” the distribution of monoclonal antibody treatments for COVID-19, causing an “immediate and life-threatening shortage of treatment options.”

In a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra on Tuesday, Dr. Joseph Ladapo alleged that HHS had reduced the number of antibodies allocated to the Sunshine State earlier this year “without any advanced notice.” //

​Another monoclonal antibody, GlaxoSmithKline’s Sotrovimab, appears to be more effective against Omicron and continues to be distributed by the federal government. ​But according to Ladapo, none has been allocated from the federal government to Florida, forcing the DeSantis administration to purchase a supply on its own.

Scott Gottlieb, MD
@ScottGottliebMD
Setting aside the question of how the initial estimate was so inaccurate, if CDC’s new estimate of #Omicron prevalence is precise then it suggests that a good portion of the current hospitalizations we’re seeing from Covid may still be driven by Delta infections.
David Lim
@davidalim
CDC's estimate for the prevalence of Omicron last week dropped significantly from 73.2% w/ a 95% prediction interval of 34-94.9% down to 22.5% w/ a 95% prediction interval of 15.4-31.5%.

12/25 estimate is 58.6% with a 95% prediction interval of 41.5-74%. https://twitter.com/ozair_naqvi/status/1473464231190315008
10:17 AM · Dec 28, 2021

For the entirety of the pandemic, Democrats and their media allies have used case numbers to trash red states. It never mattered that New York dwarfed Florida in deaths per capita despite the latter having a far older, more vulnerable population. Ron DeSantis was evil and every new infection was a moral failing, according to the left.

But now that COVID is slamming the Northeast at higher rates than the South’s summer wave, the goalposts have been uprooted and launched into orbit.

As we recognize that covid-19 is not a deadly or even severe disease for the vast majority of responsible Americans, we can stop agonizing over “cases” and focus on those who are hospitalized or at risk of dying.https://t.co/S4OQD7R58u

— Jennifer 'pro-voting' Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) December 28, 2021

His first instinct whenever he is challenged seems to be to lie and deflect all blame. He can never take responsibility for anything. It’s so reflexive with him sometimes the lies are not at all thought out, and so are incredibly obvious.

Biden did just that today when he was confronted by New York Post reporter Steve Nelson on the White House lawn.

Nelson asked about a report in Vanity Fair that Biden had been offered a plan in October by health experts to get 732 million test kits out to Americans before the holiday season hit so that could help reduce the crush of people wanting tests.

The 10-page plan, which Vanity Fair has obtained, would enable the U.S. to finally do what many other countries had already done: Put rapid at-home COVID-19 testing into the hands of average citizens, allowing them to screen themselves in real time and thereby help reduce transmission. The plan called for an estimated 732 million tests per month, a number that would require a major ramp-up of manufacturing capacity. It also recommended, right on the first page, a nationwide “Testing Surge to Prevent Holiday COVID Surge.” //

Steven Nelson
@stevennelson10
'We didn't reject it,' President Biden told me, responding to Vanity Fair report that his administration rejected a holiday #coronavirus testing surge https://vanityfair.com/news/2021/12/the-biden-administration-rejected-an-october-proposal-for-free-rapid-tests-for-the-holidays
12:25 PM · Dec 27, 2021

Um, so where were those 732 million tests for the holidays that just went by if you didn’t reject it? If you’re going to lie, at least make it a more manageable lie, like you were never offered it. With this lie, he just confirmed that there was a plan offered to him. It wasn’t put into play because nobody got the tests before the holidays. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki even acknowledged just before Christmas that they were just working out details now for something to go into effect weeks from now, that they hadn’t even signed contracts for it. But that was only after the media flipped out on them over the past couple of weeks that they even said that.

Biden just can’t stop lying. He can’t even keep track of what he’s saying anymore which is why none of it makes any sense.

“Blanket booster programs are likely to prolong the pandemic, rather than ending it, by diverting supply to countries that already have high levels of vaccination coverage, giving the virus more opportunity to spread and mutate,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a news briefing.

And while we don’t know how many were actually infected on the Carnival Freedom, we do know that the Symphony of the Seas docked several days ago with 48 positive cases, despite 95 percent of the ship being fully vaccinated. Of those who tested positive, 98 percent were fully vaccinated. In other words, there’s no possible way to blame that outbreak on the “unvaccinated.”

Forty-eight positive tests out of thousands of people on board may not sound a lot, but when you do the math as a seven-day rolling average, something common in judging COVID infection rates, that’s actually around the same positivity rate as New York City (800 per 100,000 vs. 1050 per 100,000), which again is seeing record high case numbers.

What this says to me is that vaccine passport systems are completely nonsensical. We’ve known for a long time that everyone spreads COVID-19, and now Omicron is even more transmissible. Given that, you are accomplishing nothing of value by segregating the vaccinated and unvaccinated.

Instead, these vaccine passport schemes are simply meant to punish and shame. There is no reason to stop a person from eating at a restaurant or going to a baseball game because they are unvaccinated. They represent no more of a statistical risk of spreading the coronavirus than the vaccinated person sitting next to them.

Besides, isn’t the entire point of getting fully vaccinated that it supposedly works? And if it works, what does it matter who the vaccinated interact with? None of this makes any logical sense, and again, that’s the point. This is about bending people to the political will of the left, not actually protecting anyone.

Noah Rothman
@NoahCRothman
Wow. “The pandemic is potentially driving another national crisis related to its effects on behavioral health, with people experiencing new or exacerbated behavioral health symptoms or conditions.”
Perspective | The pandemic could drive another national health crisis, GAO warns: covid-19 anxiety
washingtonpost.com //

According to the experts Gueren interviewed for her article, she wrote, and the “limited research we have so far, the COVID-19 pandemic has come with a unique set of factors that can certainly fuel health anxiety in people”—particularly people who are already susceptible to the virus.

Josh Spitalnick, Ph.D., a licensed psychologist and CEO of Anxiety Specialists of Atlanta, told Health:

People who are having real medical and/or physical symptoms and they’re terrified about what they might mean—that’s typically understood as somatic symptom disorder.

And then there are people who worry about just getting a disease — getting COVID, getting cancer, having a stroke—where there’s no real physical or medical symptoms. //

“The worry that we have for health anxiety is productive at the beginning,” said Spitalnick, “which only each person can individually measure, but increasing becomes ‘not healthy.'”

And that place, RedStaters, is exactly where Biden, Fauci, and the Democrat Party want you to live–in the land of the not mentally healthy. Why?

Because people who are afraid of something, particularly irrationally so, are more susceptible to listening to advice about that “something” from “experts” and “leaders” who profess to know what they’re talking about—even when said advice is consistently wrong.

In South Africa, nearly every early case of Omicron was in fully vaccinated people, despite only 23.8% of the population being vaccinated at the time. While that data would suggest that vaccinated people are more likely to be infected with Omicron than the unvaccinated, I stopped short of saying that because it was still very early in the spread of Omicron and the data could change. What was clear, though, was that South Africa was in the midst of an outbreak of a new and more transmissible variant. //

With an astounding 1100% increase in cases, South Africa only had an 8.32% increase in deaths. Again, at the time, South Africa’s vaccination rate was below 25%. Meanwhile, the United States, with more than double the vaccination rate of South Africa, has nearly twice the new caseload and five times the rate of death from COVID than that of South Africa. That data would suggest that being vaccinated makes you more likely to be infected with Omicron than being unvaccinated. //

Now, data from a new study suggests negative effectiveness, that is the very thing Fauci warned as a potential: a higher likelihood of being infected with Omicron than if you had simply been unvaccinated, 90 days after being vaccinated. The study, entitled “Vaccine effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 infection with the Omicron or Delta variants following a two-dose or booster BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 vaccination series: A Danish cohort study,” shows that both mRNA vaccines maintained a better than 50% effectiveness against previous variants of COVID-19, that effectiveness drops to nearly zero 60 days after the vaccine is administered and actually provides a negative response after 90 days. In fact, initial vaccine efficacy against Omicron for both vaccines tested was below that of the effectiveness against Delta after more than 90 days.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.20.21267966v2.full //

When factoring for the confidence interval, both vaccines show a potential of causing negative effectiveness after 30 days, and the data show that only the Pfizer vaccine has results that indicate a positive effect for the first thirty days. Moderna’s vaccine consistently shows the potential of cause in negative results, that is, a higher likelihood of infection, from the date of vaccination forward.