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Follow the Science? How COVID Authoritarians Get It Wrong


Muda69

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Hey, we still in denial that we ruined a year of children’s lives due to school lockdowns and closures in the name of “science?”

I’m finally seeing some lefty media outlets whisper.

Edited by temptation
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FDA Can't Stop Harassing Distillers Who Made Hand Sanitizer During the Pandemic: https://reason.com/2022/08/08/fda-cant-stop-harassing-distillers-who-made-hand-sanitizer-during-the-pandemic/

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One year ago, when distiller Aaron Bergh of Calwise Spirits in Paso Robles, California, donated the last of the hand sanitizer he had produced to address shortages during the early days of the COVID pandemic, he assumed that this unexpected detour in the life of his small business was behind him. Then, in June, he received an unexpected letter from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) informing him that a sample of his sanitizer taken in December 2020 exceeded temporary limits of two impurities and demanding extensive records of his production and distribution.

Bergh isn't the only one. Rebecca Harris, president of the American Craft Spirits Association, says that at least 11 distillers in nine states have received similar letters from the FDA. At primary issue is acetaldehyde, a chemical that occurs naturally in fruits and dairy products, as well as in beer, wine, and spirits. The FDA sets limits on its presence in hand sanitizer at 50 parts per million (ppm). The sample from Bergh's distillery tested at 160 ppm and 167 ppm of acetaldehyde and acetal, respectively.

 

There are valid reasons to limit levels of acetaldehyde in hand sanitizer. The chemical is a potential irritant and is considered a known carcinogen. Yet, it's also one that most of us consume on a regular basis due to its natural occurrence in many foods and drinks; it's also produced in our bodies whenever we have an alcoholic beverage as part of the process of breaking down ethanol. If you've enjoyed a banana or a beer recently, you've consumed acetaldehyde. As with any potentially toxic substance, the risks vary with the level and route of exposure.

The new round of letters from the FDA raises two questions. The first is whether the levels of acetaldehyde in sanitizer produced by distillers rises to levels where they pose a real risk to users. The second is, if there is a genuine risk, why has the agency waited more than 18 months after taking samples to begin acting on the test results, long after the sanitizer was distributed to health care workers and consumers?

There is surprisingly scant research on the first question. In May 2020, noting the demand for emergency ethanol-based sanitizer, Todd Pencarinha and Mark Myers of Altiras Chemicals compiled a report synthesizing existing research on the presence of acetaldehyde in foods and drinks, workplace exposure in the air, and absorption via the skin. They concluded that "hand sanitizer manufactured with ethanol containing 1000 ppm acetaldehyde exposes consumers to a far lower acetaldehyde dose than many common acceptable foods, beverages, and occupational activities, and therefore 1000 ppm is a reasonable limit."

The FDA ultimately settled on a far stricter standard of 50 ppm. This likely reflects the agency's very cautious approach to regulation. The FDA acknowledged in a recall notice from October 2021 that "the exact risk from using hand sanitizer containing benzene, acetaldehyde, or acetal is unknown."

 

Whatever the reasoning, 50 ppm became the standard for distillers contributing to emergency sanitizer production. Distillers I spoke to have no objection to complying with the FDA's standards, but they are frustrated that the agency is raising the issue long after they stopped producing or distributing sanitizer. "They took our samples, we didn't hear from them for a year and a half, we assumed there was no issue," says Jesse Lupo, owner and distiller at Mossy Ledge Spirits in Etna, Maine.

Acetaldehyde and acetal are commonly found in distilled ethanol, although distillers also question whether the long delay between when samples were taken and tested has contributed to the detection of impurities. They raise the possibility that, depending on how the samples were stored, hydrogen peroxide in the sanitizer may have reacted with ethanol to produce higher levels of acetaldehyde than were present at production. Bergh has requested chain of custody information from the FDA, which it has yet to provide.

Distillers do not know whether they will face recalls that might damage their reputations or be required to pay fines. Some distillers have hired legal counsel to advise them on working with the FDA, according to Rebecca Harris, which can become costly in itself. At a minimum, the letters from the FDA require the distillers to comply with complex and time-consuming records requests and to provide an "action plan and timelines for conducting full chemical and microbiological testing of retain samples within six weeks of the date of this letter to determine the quality of all batches of hand sanitizer drug product distributed in the U.S. within expiry."

Reason reached out to the FDA's press office on August 2 to ask what potential risks concern the agency with regard to distillery-produced sanitizer, why it has taken so long to address the results from testing, and what potential penalties distillers may face. At the time of publishing, the agency has not responded to these questions.

Whatever the propriety of the FDA's 50 ppm standard, the year-and-a-half gap between taking samples and notifying distillers of noncompliance raises questions about the agency's enforcement priorities. If the standard is unreasonably low, then it is imposing costs on distillers for no real benefit. If the standard protects against a real danger, then the action has come far too late to protect consumers.

Distillers "feel like it's been one thing after another," says Harris, referring to a surprise notice distilleries producing sanitizer received from the FDA in December 2020 informing them that they were obligated to pay a surprise $14,000 fee as registered drug production facilities. That fee was waived by the Department of Health and Human Services following reporting by Reason and other sources and vociferous public objections. The unexpected compliance costs some are facing now strike many as yet another undue burden. "No good deed goes unpunished" is a phrase that came up often in conversations with distillers.

The guidelines allowing beverage distillers to produce hand sanitizer when it was in short supply during the pandemic were intended to remove regulatory roadblocks, acknowledging that the emergency justified easing restrictions that make sense in normal times. Distillers saw making sanitizer as a way to stay afloat while helping their communities, but the lesson many are learning is that dealing with government regulation turns this into a mistake they would not repeat.

"At a point in time, I was so glad of sanitizer, and right now, I wish we'd never done it," says Lupo, who reports taking out a $45,000 loan to produce sanitizer at a very marginal profit. "I will not put myself on this same chopping block again."

Agreed.  Doing business with the federal government and expecting largesse from them is indeed a "no good deed goes unpunished" scenario.

 

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‘I didn’t really learn anything’: COVID grads face college: https://apnews.com/article/covid-science-health-race-and-ethnicity-milwaukee-5ab5394b2513e7136b9b854355770a1a

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Angel Hope looked at the math test and felt lost. He had just graduated near the top of his high school class, winning scholarships from prestigious colleges. But on this test — a University of Wisconsin exam that measures what new students learned in high school — all he could do was guess.

It was like the disruption of the pandemic was catching up to him all at once.

Nearly a third of Hope’s high school career was spent at home, in virtual classes that were hard to follow and easy to brush aside. Some days he skipped school to work extra hours at his job. Some days he played games with his brother and sister. Other days he just stayed in bed.

Algebra got little of his attention, but his teachers kept giving him good grades amid a school-wide push for leniency.

“It was like school was optional. It wasn’t a mandatory thing,” said Hope, 18, of Milwaukee. “I feel like I didn’t really learn anything.”

Across the country, there are countless others like him. Hundreds of thousands of recent graduates are heading to college this fall after spending more than half their high school careers dealing with the upheaval of a pandemic. They endured a jarring transition to online learning, the strains from teacher shortages and profound disruptions to their home lives. And many are believed to be significantly behind academically.

Colleges could see a surge in students unprepared for the demands of college-level work, education experts say. Starting a step behind can raise the risk of dropping out. And that can hurt everything from a person’s long-term earnings to the health of the country’s workforce.

The extent of the problem became apparent to Allison Wagner as she reviewed applications for All-In Milwaukee, a scholarship program that provides financial aid and college counseling to low-income students, including Hope.

Wagner, the group’s executive director, saw startling numbers of students who were granted permission to spend half the school day working part-time jobs their senior year, often at fast food chains or groceries. And she saw more students than ever who didn’t take math or science classes their senior year, often as a result of teacher shortages.

“We have so many students who are going on to college academically malnourished,” Wagner said. “There is no way they are going to be academically prepared for the rigor of college.”

Her group is boosting its tutoring budget and covering tuition for students in the program who take summer classes in math or science. Still, she fears the setbacks will force some students to take more than four years to graduate or, worse, drop out.

“The stakes are tremendously high,” she said.

Researchers say it’s clear that remote instruction caused learning setbacks, most sharply among Black and Hispanic students. For younger students, there’s still hope that America’s schools can accelerate the pace of instruction and close learning gaps. But for those who graduated in the last two years, experts fear many will struggle.

In anticipation of higher needs, colleges from New Jersey to California have been expanding “bridge” programs that provide summer classes, often for students from lower incomes or those who are the first in their families to attend college. Programs previously treated as orientation are taking on a harder academic edge, with a focus on math, science and study skills.

In Hanceville, Alabama, Wallace State Community College this year tapped state money to create its first summer bridge program as it braces for an influx of underprepared students. Students could take three weeks of accelerated lessons in math and English in a bid to avoid remedial classes.

The school hoped to bring up to 140 students to campus, but just 10 signed up.

Other states have used federal pandemic relief to help colleges build summer programs. In Kentucky, which gave colleges $3.5 million for the effort this year, officials called it a “moral imperative.”

“We need these people to be our future workforce, and we need them to be successful,” said Amanda Ellis, a vice president of Kentucky’s Council on Postsecondary Education.

After the pandemic hit, Angel Hope worked up to 20 hours a week at his job with a local nonprofit aid group. He felt the time away from school was worth it for the money, especially when nobody was paying attention in the online classes. With his parents away at work, he often felt alone, shunning social media for days and eating ramen noodles for dinner.

“I think isolating myself was a little bit of my coping mechanism,” he said. “I was kind of like, ‘Keep it in a little bit and you’ll get through it eventually.’”

The pandemic led many high schoolers to disengage at a time when they would usually be preparing for college or careers, said Rey Saldaña, president and CEO of Communities in Schools, a nonprofit group that places counselors in public schools in 26 states.

His group worked in some districts where hundreds of students simply didn’t return after classrooms reopened. In Charlotte, North Carolina, the allure of steady paychecks kept many students away from school even after in-person classes resumed, said Shakaka Perry, a reengagement coordinator for Communities in Schools.

Perry and her colleagues spent last school year bringing students back to school and getting them ready for graduation. But when she thinks about whether they’re ready for college, she has doubts: “It’s going to be an awakening.”

A couple months after struggling through his math placement test, Hope headed to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for six weeks of intense classes at a summer bridge program. He took a math class that covered the ground he missed in high school, and he’s signed up to take calculus in the fall.

He also revived basic study skills that went dormant in high school. He started studying at the library. He got used to the rhythms of school, with assignments every day and tests every other week. He rediscovered what it’s like to enjoy school.

Most importantly, he says it changed his mindset: Now he feels like he’s there to learn, not just to get by.

“After this, I definitely feel prepared for college,” he said. “If I didn’t have this, I would be in a very bad place.”

The government schools needs to stop pushing college as the primary post-high school graduation path.  Learning a trade like Automotive repair,  Electrical, HVAC, and Plumbing are all valuable, in-demand skills.

 

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On 8/9/2022 at 8:47 AM, Muda69 said:

FDA Can't Stop Harassing Distillers Who Made Hand Sanitizer During the Pandemic: https://reason.com/2022/08/08/fda-cant-stop-harassing-distillers-who-made-hand-sanitizer-during-the-pandemic/

Agreed.  Doing business with the federal government and expecting largesse from them is indeed a "no good deed goes unpunished" scenario.

 

I think this is illustrative of the issue of congress shirking their responsibilities and passing lawmaking to ABC agencies. Someone or a team of government bureaucrats that are unelected and unaccountable arbitrarily just came up with a number. And now two years later, this same unaccountable entity is out to get their pound of flesh, and they have men with guns that will take it. 

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Fauci, top infectious disease expert, to retire in December: https://apnews.com/article/anthony-fauci-announces-retirement-7efdacac6a9ff7aa6e2f870b551fe508

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 Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert who became a household name — and the subject of partisan attacks — during the COVID-19 pandemic, announced Monday he will depart the federal government in December after more than five decades of service.

Fauci, who serves as President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, has been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation. He was a leader in the federal response to HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases even before the coronavirus hit.

“I will be leaving these positions in December of this year to pursue the next chapter of my career,” Fauci said in a statement, calling those roles “the honor of a lifetime.”

Fauci became the face of the government response to COVID-19 as it hit in early 2020, with frequent appearances on television news and at daily press conferences with White House officials, including then-President Donald Trump. But as the pandemic deepened, Fauci fell out of favor with Trump and his officials when his urgings of continued public caution clashed with the former president’s desire to return to normalcy and to promote unproven therapies for the virus.

...

 

Good for Mr. Fauci. He's earned enough $ and done enough damage to America.

 

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Elementary School Calls Cops on 4-Year-Old for Violating Mask Mandate

https://reason.com/2022/08/23/elementary-school-calls-cops-on-4-year-old-for-violating-mask-mandate/

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Last week, a Bay Area principal called the cops on a 4-year-old student who tried to attend Theuerkauf Elementary School without a mask on, in violation of Mountain View Whisman School District's policy.

"I'm going to have to have him removed from campus if you don't leave at this time," the principal, Michelle Williams, can be seen telling the student's father, Shawn, who has asked media organizations to withhold his last name for privacy. The school then called an officer to intervene. In another clip, the school resource officer seems sympathetic to both parties but must do the school district's bidding. Though there is no statewide mandate in place, and many area school districts have different policies, this district had decided that all students must mask in order to attend for the fall.

Shawn had anticipated that his family's decision not to mask would be a problem and contacted school officials in advance of the fall term starting.

 

"I was looking for accessibility options," Shawn told Fox & Friends First. "The only thing I got back from the principal was a cut-and-paste response." Other school district officials told him that schooling is compulsory in the state starting at age 6; since Shawn's son is 4, he doesn't need to attend.

"This parent worked with an advocacy group outside Mountain View to create a professional video in order to nationally shame a public servant doing her job while maintaining a safe and orderly school," Superintendent Ayindé Rudolph said in a statement sent to parents, not acknowledging that masking 4-year-olds may do more harm than good.

After this incident went viral last week, the school district on Thursday revoked their policy, admitting no wrongdoing and instead cloaking their call in language about how local COVID transmission rates have for now declined enough to put an end to the mandate. Shawn's son was allowed to attend school.

This mandate reversal has echoes of a similar situation that just transpired in Los Angeles County. In mid-July, L.A. County's Barbara Ferrer, the director of the Department of Public Health, announced that universal indoor masking might need to be mandated if COVID transmission rates rise to a "high" level, determined by the authorities as 10 new weekly hospital admissions per 10,000 residents. L.A. County entered this "high" transmission level on July 14, but the Beverley Hills City Council immediately voted not to enforce any mandates if imposed from on high, and Ferrer quickly cooled her jets.

The unpopular mandate had been slated to go into effect on July 29. "It's reasonable to assume that the recent decline we have seen in cases will lead to continued decreases in hospital admissions over the next couple of weeks," Ferrer said July 28, suddenly optimistic, having recently dropped plans for the mandate. (L.A. County technically remained at a "high" transmission level until August 11.)

In both Mountain View and Los Angeles, the mask enforcers won't simply admit that there's little public will to follow these mandates, that they look weak and ineffective if people refuse to obey.

When dropping plans to institute mandates, Ferrer, Rudolph, and other decision makers rarely admit that they were wrong to impose coercive mandates on a largely vaccinated and low-risk general public. They instead claim it's the case counts that have gone down. Since the situation has changed, they say, the mandate is no longer necessary, leaving themselves a little bit of room to reimpose masking at a later date if they deem it appropriate.

Given what we know about how COVID works more than 30 months into this pandemic, armed with vaccines, Paxlovid, and an understanding that this virus does not do much harm to our very youngest, many parents might say kid-masking is never appropriate, contra California's insistent health enforcement apparatus.

 

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Best tennis player in the world not allowed to play in the U.S. Open because he’s not vaccinated for Covid. Simple COVID testing should have been sufficient for participation. Vaccination that doesn’t prevent the vaccinated from contracting or spreading the very virus being vaccinated for doesn’t make a lot of scientific sense. Also if you are able to walk into our country at our Southern Border without Vaccination, Passport or work Visa without policy enforcement, what is the point of enforcing the very same policy for legal entry into the U.S.? Clearly demonstrates the idiocies and hypocrisy of our governmental leadership

May be an image of 2 people, people standing and text that says 'HEAL UKG LCOSTE Novak Djokovic @DjokerNole 14min Sadly, will not be able to travel to NY this time for US Open. Thank you #NoleFam for your messages love and support. Good luck my fellow players! keep in good shape and positive spirit and wait for an opportunity to compete again. See you soon tennis world! tenns warla'

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12 hours ago, swordfish said:

Best tennis player in the world not allowed to play in the U.S. Open because he’s not vaccinated for Covid. Simple COVID testing should have been sufficient for participation. Vaccination that doesn’t prevent the vaccinated from contracting or spreading the very virus being vaccinated for doesn’t make a lot of scientific sense. Also if you are able to walk into our country at our Southern Border without Vaccination, Passport or work Visa without policy enforcement, what is the point of enforcing the very same policy for legal entry into the U.S.? Clearly demonstrates the idiocies and hypocrisy of our governmental leadership

May be an image of 2 people, people standing and text that says 'HEAL UKG LCOSTE Novak Djokovic @DjokerNole 14min Sadly, will not be able to travel to NY this time for US Open. Thank you #NoleFam for your messages love and support. Good luck my fellow players! keep in good shape and positive spirit and wait for an opportunity to compete again. See you soon tennis world! tenns warla'

Novak, Kyrie and Rodgers will be awaiting their apologizes for a while I’d imagine.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Blood clotting increases in the past 2 years being noticed by embalmers......Can this anomaly be tied to Covid, the vaccines, or is it something else?  Kinda would like to know......

https://www.theepochtimes.com/embalmers-have-been-finding-numerous-long-fibrous-clots-that-lack-post-mortem-characteristics_4696015.html?utm_source=ref_share&utm_campaign=navigator&rs=SHRNBSWT&

Embalmers Have Been Finding Numerous Long, Fibrous Clots That Lack Post-Mortem Characteristics

By Enrico Trigoso
 
September 2, 2022 Updated: September 7, 2022

Several embalmers across the country have been observing many large, and sometimes very long, “fibrous” and rubbery clots inside the corpses they treat, and are speaking out about their findings.

Numerous embalmers from different states confirmed to The Epoch Times that they have been seeing these strange clots, starting from either 2020 or 2021.

It’s not yet known if the cause of the new clot phenomenon is COVID-19, vaccines, both, or something different.

The Epoch Times received additional videos and photos of the anomalous clots, but could not upload them due to the level of gore.

Mike Adams, who runs an ISO-17025 accredited lab in Texas, analyzed clots in August and found them to be lacking iron, potassium, magnesium, and zinc.

Adams’s lab uses inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), triple quadrupole mass spectrometer, and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry, usually testing food for metals, pesticides, and glyphosate.

“We have tested one of the clots from embalmer Richard Hirschman, via ICP-MS. Also tested side by side, live human blood from an unvaccinated person,” Adams told The Epoch Times.

He found that the clots are lacking key elements present in healthy human blood, such as iron, potassium, and magnesium, suggesting that they are formed from something other than blood.

Adams is joining analytic forces with more doctors and plan to invest out of their own pocket in equipment in order to further determine their composition and probable causation.

The string-like structures differ in size, but the longest can be as long as a human leg and the thickest can be as thick as a pinky finger.

Drastic Increase in Clots

Richard Hirschman, a licensed funeral director and embalmer in Alabama, recalled that he has been in the trade since the tragedy of 9/11.

“Prior to 2020, 2021, we probably would see somewhere between 5 to 10 percent of the bodies that we would embalm [having] blood clots,” Hirschman told The Epoch Times.

“We are familiar with what blood clots are, and we’ve had to deal with them over time,” he said.

He says that now, 50 percent to 70 percent of the bodies he sees have clots.

“For me to embalm a body without any clots, kind of like how it was in the day, prior to all of this stuff … It’s rare,” Hirschman said.

“The exception is to embalm a body without clots,” he noted.

Clot Analysis

The chart below shows the differences between the blood of the unvaccinated and the clot tested with ICP-MS, according to Adams’s analysis.

Element Blood  (Unvaccinated) Clot
Mg (Magnesium) 35 ppm 1.7 ppm
K (Potassium) 1,893 ppm 12.5 ppm
Fe (Iron) 462 ppm 20.6 ppm
Cu (Copper) 1 ppm 0.3 ppm
Zn (Zinc) 7.9 ppm 2.4 ppm
Al (Aluminum) 1.3 ppm 1.6 ppm
Na (Sodium) 1,050 ppm 1,500 ppm
C (Carbon) 137,288 ppb 152,845 ppb
Ca (Calcium) 74 ppm 23.8 ppm
Sn (Tin) 163 ppb 943 ppb
Cl (Chlorine) 930,000 ppb 290,000 ppb
P (Phosphorus) 1,130 ppm 4,900 ppm
     

“Notice that the key elemental markers of human blood such as iron are missing in the clot (which is just at 4.4 percent of blood). Similar story with magnesium, potassium, and zinc. These are clear markers for human blood. Live human blood will always have high iron, or the person would be dead. These clots have almost no iron, nor magnesium, etc.,” Adams told The Epoch Times.

Wade Hamilton, a cardiologist who is familiar with clots, told The Epoch Times: “The fact that the magnesium, potassium, and iron are very low in the samples could suggest that they are not the usual post-mortem clots, that in fact there was no blood flow in these vessels. These structures raise but do not totally answer some interesting questions.”

“The combination of the low electrolytes and the novel very strong string-like structures suggests that these areas where the string-like structures are seen in the blood vessels did not receive circulation. They are not ‘normal’ post-mortem findings according to experienced embalmers bent on obtaining total body vascular access from one site, which because of the unusual ‘clots,’ they were unable to do,” he added.

“They are not normal post-mortem clots but rather the long tiny strings may have been etiologic in the deaths, preventing circulation to those regions. Others have shown that the spike protein can and does unfold and form a different configuration, contributing to tight string-like bonded structures with longitudinal twisting as well as cross binding, visible by microscopy, each one measuring angstroms in diameter—it takes 254,000,000 angstroms to make an inch—a typical capillary is around 5 microns, so many strings are needed to occlude a vessel.”

The embalming process has become much more difficult too, causing some embalmers to have to drain the blood via multiple points instead of a single spot.

‘Never Seen’ Before

“In 20 years of embalming, I had never seen these white fibrous structures in the blood, nor have others in my field. In the past year, I have seen these strange clots in many different individuals, and it doesn’t seem to matter what they die of, they often have similar substances in their blood. This makes me very concerned because if something is wrong in the blood, it begs the question: is something causing people to die prematurely?” Hirschman said.

“As the summer [of 2021] went on, COVID deaths were on the decline, but these clots were increasing in number. My suspicion is that the vaccine may be the cause of these strange clots. I realize that I am not a doctor nor am I a scientist, but I do know what blood looks like and I am very familiar with the embalming process that I have been doing for two decades. I do not know 100 percent what causes these clots, but I do know from my experience and through speaking with several other embalmers and funeral directors none of us had seen this strange clotting before.”

Hirschman sent the clots to a few pathologists and claims that some of them have “overlooked” them, probably due to fear of retaliation.

He has embalmed thousands of bodies and is very familiar with blood, and he feels that the blood of most of the bodies he has seen in the last two years “has changed.”

Hirschman is not afraid to lose his job because he’s a trade embalmer and not employed by a funeral home, but is also cautious not to reveal where exactly he works.

“They’re not even dead from COVID. They’re dying of sudden heart attacks, strokes, cancers. It doesn’t seem to matter what these people die of nowadays, so many of them have the same anomalies in their blood.”

“The blood is different. Something is causing the blood to change. And the whole purpose of me trying to come out was to try to say: look, something’s wrong. Let’s figure out what it is so that maybe we can find a way to help break this stuff down and save people’s lives,” Hirschman said.

“If it’s not the vaccine, fine! What is it? Let’s figure it out, because something is causing it and it can’t be healthy.”

Vaccination Status

Hirschman is not always able to talk to the families but has been diligently trying to confirm if the bodies of the people with clots had been vaccinated.

The funeral house sometimes knows the vaccination status of the deceased person and tells him; sometimes it may also be that the person got vaccinated and did not tell the family.

“I had a 49-year-old, was totally healthy getting ready for work, collapses dead. Next thing you know, I’m embalming him, and guess what I’m pulling out of him? The same stuff. Same stuff! He was totally fine, totally healthy. Shocked everybody. Find out, oh, yeah. Not only was he vaccinated, he was boosted,” Hirschman recalled.

He also stated that he found the “same stuff” in a man who had a stroke while sleeping and who died of cancer.

“I spoke with an embalmer in Louisiana and she said the same thing,” Hirschman said. “Sometimes they’re not huge, there are other varieties of anomalies, some of them were small, sometimes they’re little specks, like pieces of sand or coffee grounds.”

 

Other Embalmers

Wallace Hooker is an expert embalmer who lectures on a national level as well as internationally. He has a significant presence on social media, especially on some private embalming websites.

Hooker sees about 300 bodies a year, and has seen numerous clots of the same kind Hirschman has.

He told The Epoch Times that “people are seeing these [clots], it’s just not Richard and me and Anna [Foster],” another embalmer.

“I have people sending me photos almost every week of what they’re seeing,” Hooker said.

After he stated that he suspected the vaccines could have something to do with the clots, he was dismissed by some people who said he wasn’t a qualified doctor who could comment on the cause.

Hooker also suspects that the so-called Sudden Adult Death Syndrome could have some relation to these clots.

Hooker lives in a conservative, rural area, and from his observation, fewer of the people there have been vaccinated compared to those in big cities.

“At least 25 percent of what I was embalming would display a significant amount of clotting,” Hooker said.

He also noted that some embalmers with lesser skill might not find the clots after draining and that pathologists who do autopsies on the bodies might not do a full check on the vascular system.

“Some embalmers are not being thorough embalmers. Many work for corporate firms that absolutely do not allow a cell phone in the embalming room. They do not allow photos to be taken, and it’s grounds for immediate dismissal. I’ve talked to these people that work for these firms,” he further stated.

Anna Foster, a licensed funeral director from Missouri, explained that she started seeing more frequent and larger clots after the COVID pandemic started.

“I often sit with the families to make the arrangements. Families tend to tell us about the lead-up to the individual’s death, and knowing I embalmed the person the night before led me to keep track of these cases,” Foster told The Epoch Times.

“In the beginning, none had ever been diagnosed with COVID, but they had all been vaccinated. Later, a couple had had COVID but not recently, and they were also vaccinated,” she continued.

“Most of the individuals I embalmed and saw these changes were over the age of 75 and lived in nursing facilities, except for two men in their early fifties. One of these men was a friend of ours, and he had the vaccination, and after his second dose, he began to feel ill. His wife took him to their family doctor, and the doctor immediately sent him to the ER because he was showing signs of a thrown clot or a heart attack. He went into cardiac arrest while transferring, and he died shortly after. He was embalmed right after death, and the clotting was by far unexplainable, and this is when I began to feel very concerned about this vaccination and canceled my thoughts of receiving the vaccination myself,” Foster said.

In one case, she pulled out clots that were 2 feet in length and “several more” that were at least 12 inches—from the same body.

“I know before the vaccination, my embalming cases did not have the amount of clotting I see now, and very rarely would you find many with fibrin attached; now, it is at least ten times the amount, if not more,” she said.

Strange Clots

Larry Mills, a licensed embalmer and funeral director in the state of Alabama, has been in the funeral business since 1968 and has been involved with the embalming procedure since the beginning of his career.

“We as embalmers are seeing some strange clots since the COVID outbreak. These clots are very rubbery feeling and very long as they exit the veins that we use during the embalming procedure. They really appear to be like earthworms. I have never seen this in my career until now,” Mills told The Epoch Times.

Other funeral directors or embalmers wanted to maintain anonymity, because they don’t know how the funeral houses would react.

“I can tell you with certainty that the clots Richard has shown online are a phenomenon that I have not witnessed until probably the middle of last year. That is pretty much all I have to say about it. I have no knowledge as to what is causing the clots, but they did seemingly start showing up around the middle of 2021,” another embalmer, licensed since around 2001, told The Epoch Times.

“You can rest assured that the clots we are seeing are not something we ever saw prior to last year,” he added.

A licensed funeral director and apprentice embalmer who has been in the funeral industry for over 3 years has participated in over 200 embalmings.

“During May of 2021, the embalming process became more difficult. The normal draining of the blood was almost halted by thick, jelly-like blood. Instead, of the blood flowing normally down the table, it was very viscous. So thick, that it would not wash down the table without assistance,” she told The Epoch Times.

As time has passed since the vaccines were distributed she has seen more of the “thick blood” as well as “thick, fibrous-like clots.”

The clots are not only clotting the veins but the arteries as well.

She explained that normal embalming usually takes around two hours, but now it can take up to four hours.

“The distribution of the arterial fluid is being blocked by these clots and making my job more difficult. The clots are so large and thick that with the flow of arterial solution, massage and manipulation of the artery or vein is necessary for removal,” she continued. “I am able to assist some of the large clots with forceps.”

“Many families have reported their loved one’s death as a sudden heart attack, embolisms, and blood clots. Many families have stated, that their family members had no health issues prior to receiving the vaccine. I myself am vaccinated, as well as my parents. My father was vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine, two weeks later he had emergency surgery for blood clots in his popliteal artery. After his second vaccine dose, he was hospitalized with more clots, he had surgery a second time, and the third time he almost died. My father had to have a complete bypass in his leg,” she said.

“During my father’s hospitalization, my best friend’s father was having emergency surgery at the same hospital for a massive heart attack, which he suffered weeks after receiving his vaccine.”

“My father now suffers from nerve damage and loss of usage in his leg. After my mother received her Moderna vaccine, she has suffered complications of heart valve failure, and surgery for blood clots in her arteries. I have been diagnosed, with pericardial effusion of the tricuspid valve and I also have myocarditis. I started having sharp chest pain, shortness of breath, and it has progressively become worse. I went to the emergency room and followed up with a cardiologist, who diagnosed me. My blood pressure is at an all-time high. I was a very healthy person until I received the Moderna vaccine,” she added.

The Epoch Times reached out to Moderna for comment.

Four other embalmers also confirmed over the phone having witnessed anomalous clots.

Possible Explanations: Doctors

“The very large blood clots that are being removed before and after death are unlike anything we have ever seen in medicine,” Dr. James Thorp, a maternal-fetal medicine expert who has been observing anomalies in pregnant women and fetuses, told The Epoch Times.

“The COVID-19 vaccine diverts energy away from the physiologic processes in the body towards the production of the toxic spike protein,” Thorp said. “This directs energy away from the normal process of internal digestion also known as autophagy. This results in protein misfolding and propagation of large intravascular blood clots and also a variety of related diseases including prion disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, amyloidosis, and dementias including Alzheimer’s and others. While it is possible that COVID-19 illness in itself could potentially contribute to these diseases, it is unlikely and if so the effect of the vaccine would be 100- to 1,000-fold greater than that of COVID-19 disease.”

Epoch Times Photo Figure 1 Proper 3D conformation of a protein is dependent on available energy in the cellular milieu. Protein misfolding is more likely to occur during periods of impaired mitochondrial function and oxidative stress. (Courtesy of James Thorp)

Hamilton added: “Another possible explanation of the low electrolytes is that they have been taken up and bound to the toxin as part of a failed process to get rid of the ‘toxin,’ as when Vitamin B-12 is lowered in patients on anti-psychotic medications as the body attempts to get rid of the medication, bound to B-12 as a step in elimination. Every toxin has to be bound to an electrolyte to leave the body.”

Hamilton thinks that the overwhelming accumulation of these strings that have “nearly the strength of steel” could have caused multi-organ failure and death.

“The term amyloid has previously been employed to describe a number of pathological conditions in diseased organs and is the cause of death in the rare genetic condition amyloidosis. It is never normal. Whether a partial accumulation of thousands of the string-like structures can cause fatigue based on decreased blood flow, brain fog, or sudden adult death is speculative, but certainly possible,” Hamilton said.

“The pathologists will need to do more detailed examinations than are routinely done to answer this question. This process, for example, could lead to an acute myocardial infarction with enzyme elevation in a young soccer player with no gross anatomical findings.”

Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, who has been analyzing vaccine adverse reactions for about three decades, also thinks the clots have to do with amyloid proteins.

“It appears the answer is coming directly through that needle. Spike protein disease, leading to the deposition of amyloid in organs and filling up arteries and veins,” Tenpenny told The Epoch Times.

“The spike protein also interacts with platelets and fibrinogen, interfering with blood flow, also leading directly to hypercoagulation. When the spike protein was mixed with other blood proteins, the combined amyloid-like structure was resistant to the enzymes that would normally break down the clot (called impaired fibrinolysis),” she added.

“This leads to the persistence of a voluminous number of microclots in small blood vessels throughout the body called capillaries. Millions of these tiny clots effectively block the passage of red blood cells into tissues, decreasing oxygen exchange and leading to multiorgan system failure.”

 

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

https://nypost.com/2022/10/03/biden-thanks-coast-guard-member-for-hurricane-heroics-before-vax-mandate-firing/

President Biden thanked a US Coast Guard member for saving lives during Hurricane Ian — only for the hero rescue swimmer to reveal he will soon be discharged for not being vaccinated against COVID-19.

“I told him how proud of him I was and thanked him for all the work he and his Coasties are doing to save lives,” Biden said Friday of his call with Aviation Survival Technician Second Class Zach Loesch, Fox News reported.

The president also spoke with Lt. Cmdr. Christopher Hooper.

“The President thanked them for saving lives and asked for a report on the work that continues to rescue Floridians. He also asked if they needed any additional support that he can provide to accelerate successful rescues,” the White House said in a readout.

But despite the tribute, Loesch told Breitbart News that he is among the service members poised to be discharged in 30 to 60 days for not following Biden’s mandate making the jabs mandatory in the military.

SF is reasonably sure the people these guys rescued in Florida last week and over the weekend probably weren't concerned if their rescuers had been vaccinated for CoVid or not.

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  • 3 weeks later...

https://www.bostonherald.com/2022/10/17/boston-university-covid-researchers-combine-omicron-spike-protein-with-original-virus-test-strain-on-mice/

Boston University COVID researchers have combined the omicron variant spike protein with the original virus, testing the created strain on mice “to help fight against future pandemics,” according to BU.

The scientists in BU’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories found that all mice infected with only the BA.1 omicron variant had mild cases and survived, while the combined omicron spike protein with original COVID-19 virus strain inflicted severe disease with an 80% mortality rate.

When mice were infected with just the original, ancestral virus strain, 100% of the mice died.

“First, this research is not gain-of-function research, meaning it did not amplify the Washington state SARS-COV-2 virus strain (original virus from 2020) or make it more dangerous,” BU said in a statement following online reports that the university called “false and inaccurate.”

“In fact, this research made the virus replicate less dangerous,” the university added.

This study provides important insights into omicron’s ability to cause disease, according to the researchers.

“Consistent with studies published by others, this work shows that it is not the spike protein that drives Omicron pathogenicity, but instead other viral proteins,” said lead study author Mohsan Saeed.

“Determination of those proteins will lead to better diagnostics and disease management strategies,” Saeed said.

“Furthermore, this research mirrors and reinforces the findings of other, similar research performed by other organizations, including the FDA,” BU said. “Ultimately, this research will provide a public benefit by leading to better, targeted therapeutic interventions to help fight against future pandemics.”

The study did not include humanized mice.

“One potential limitation of our study is the use of K18-hACE2 mice for pathogenesis studies instead of the primate models that have more similarities with humans,” the study reads. “It should however be noted that the K18-hACE2 mouse model is a well-established model for investigating the lethal phenotype of SARS-CoV-2.”

????

WTF?!!!???!!  

SF is reading "Coronavirus" + "Researchers created new strain" + "80% mortality" and "It's not illegal to do this".  Followed by "We made it LESS dangerous" = "Yeah, nothing to see here.....Trust the science".......

SF isn't buying that anymore than the original virus came naturally from a bat in China (just really close to the Wuhan Virus Lab)......

And thinking why are we doing this in the US - I thought (according to Lord Fauci) it was illegal to do that in the US.......

 

 

 

 

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  • 1 month later...

No longer a "pandemic of the unvaccinated".  This trend started in APril, 2022 according to the CDC.  This lends credence to the concept of natural immunity being more effective than the mRNA vaccinations.  But you won't see this data advertised in the MSM

https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/vaccinated-people-make-up-majority-of-covid-19-mortalities-cdc-data_4895167.html?utm_source=News&src_src=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-12-01-1&src_cmp=breaking-2022-12-01-1&utm_medium=email&est=73hx%2BX3S73SQQGWuDMKnuDxsoJYHTUyb3KxTjYJwprSieCBBpAA4rYM0e4Rzhg%3D%3D&fbclid=IwAR2_Lt4_RNBhd2Yonu9vISHj3gHntH8uMPJr_SuglhXgEgRWu09JOjaAKaM

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that vaccinated and boosted people made up most of the COVID-19 deaths in August.

Of the total 6,512 deaths recorded in August 2022, 58.6 percent of the deaths were attributed to vaccinated or boosted people, and seem to be a sign of a growing trend where vaccinated individuals are increasingly becoming the majority in COVID-19 mortalities.

In January 2022, COVID-19 mortalities in the vaccinated was still the minority with 41 percent of the data related to vaccinated or boosted individuals.

However, analysis of the CDC data from June and July showed over 50 percent of deaths were being reported in vaccinated individuals, with 61 and 56 percent reported respectively.

“We can no longer say this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Cynthia Cox, the vice-president of the Kaiser Family Foundation told the Washington Post in an article dated Nov. 23. 

Epoch Times Photo COVID mortality data from September 2021 to August 2022 (Courtesy of the Kaiser Family Foundation)

Cox, while in support of COVID-19 vaccination, gave three reasons that may explain why.

One was that the majority of Americans have at least been given the primary series. Her second reason is that elderly, who have the greatest risk of dying from COVID, are also more likely to take up vaccinations.

Cox’s final reason was that the potency of the vaccine will wane over time and as variants become more resistant, and therefore recommended more booster uptake.

COVID-19 vaccinations has been shown to wane dramatically over the period of a few months, sometimes falling into negligible efficacy.

Professor Jeffrey Townsend from Yale University, biostatistician, and lead author to a research study evaluating natural and vaccinated immunity against COVID-19, wrote in an email to The Epoch Times that at this stage in the pandemic, rather than comparing the vaccinated against the unvaccinated, it is more helpful to look at an individual’s time since last exposure instead, with exposures meaning vaccinations or infections.

“Most people have had some kind of exposure, the time since last exposure, along with what the last exposure was, dictates the level of immunity and can explain most variation in susceptibility, morbidity, and mortality,” Townsend wrote.

Long term studies on immunity against COVID-19 have shown that whether a person is vaccinated or infected with COVID-19, their immunity wanes over time, though research that compared natural immunity with vaccinations often showed that vaccination tend to wane at a much higher rate than that of natural infection.

Some scientists also posited that mRNA vaccines may interfere with the body’s natural immune response. Since the current technology used in mRNA vaccines may “hide the mRNA from cellular defenses and promote a longer biological half-life and high production of spike protein,” according to a June 2022 paper published in Food and Chemical Toxicology. The spike protein is the main pathogenic part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Clinicians Question ‘Pandemic of the Unvaccinated’ Narrative

Internal medical physician and cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough told The Epoch Times that the pandemic was only driven by the unvaccinated in 2020, where there were no vaccines available, and from 2021 it was mostly the vaccinated people who were dying from COVID-19. He reasoned that it is simply because the vaccine did little to control mortality.

“[The CDC data] is far too late in drawing that conclusion, [the vaccinated] probably assumed the majority sometime during 2021,” said McCullough.

In 2020, more than 385,000 COVID deaths were documented by the CDC, whereas in 2021, when vaccinations were rolling out, there were more than 463,000 COVID-19 deaths.

By June of 2021, around 53 percent of the U.S. population had received their first dose and 44 percent were fully vaccinated.

Yet there was little difference in COVID-19 mortality cases between the first half of 2021 and the second half, with over 244,000 cases (more than 50 percent of the whole year) reported from July to December.

It certainly can’t be a situation where we blame the unvaccinated for COVID deaths. And we certainly wouldn’t conclude that the vaccines made any impact on us as the majority of deaths happened during the era of vaccinations,” said McCullough.

Data from other countries have also demonstrated higher rates of vaccinated patients being hospitalized with COVID as vaccination rates overall rose.

As early as January 2022, hospitalization data coming out from the state of New South Wales (NSW) in Australia showed that a greater proportion of hospitalized patients were vaccinated. The vaccinated contributed to 50.3 percent of ICU presentations as compared to the 49.1 percent who were unvaccinated.

NSW was the only state that continued to track and publicize the vaccine status of the people being hospitalized in Australia. It is one of the most vaccinated places; by Nov. 24, over 80 percent of people over the age of 16 received their first boosters.

The most recent weekly data from NSW continued to show that the vaccinated make up the majority of COVID hospitalizations, ICU admission, and deaths. The most recent report, dated to Nov. 12, showed that unvaccinated patients contributed to 21 percent of COVID deaths, and less than 1 percent of hospitalizations and ICU admissions.

However, it should be noted that there was only 24 cases of COVID deaths reported in the report, with 440 hospitalizations and 40 ICU admissions, suggestive of a decline in disease severity.

Mortality data from Manitoba in Canada in the week July 31 to Aug. 6, 2022 also showed that while the boosted population made up 70 percent of all COVID mortalities, the unvaccinated contributed to less than 10 percent of deaths. This is with 43 percent of the population boosted.

Reports out of the UK also showed similar findings. A report (pdf) published on March 31, 2022 showed that almost 73 percent of COVID mortalities were in boosted individuals while 10 percent were attributed to unvaccinated people. At the time, over 57 percent of the population received a booster shot and 73 percent received their primary doses.

Unvaccinated Mortality Rates May Not Reflect the Whole Picture

McCullough added that with the decrease in overall disease severity with Omicron, the data may not present an accurate understanding on COVID deaths.

“The CDC death data has to be interpreted with caution, because they’re not adjudicated as dying of COVID. They can actually die with COVID.”

The CDC’s website currently estimates that only 5 percent of COVID-19 deaths have COVID as the sole cause of deaths. Therefore, there may be cases counted as a COVID mortality even if COVID was not the primary driver for the death.

McCullough gave the example that a person may be admitted to the hospital for a heart attack and test positive on the COVID test from having contracted the disease 6 months ago.

This could imply that, for some deaths, “whether they’re vaccinated or unvaccinated is relatively irrelevant,” said McCullough.

McCullough said that studies that assess COVID hospitalizations but do not adjudicate for COVID diseases or respiratory illnesses may also not be directly reflective on the prevalence or significance of COVID diseases.

“Patients can be intermittently positive for COVID for many months after the illness. So if a patient comes in for an ankle sprain or unrelated problem, they can count it as COVID hospitalization.”

McCullough also warned that hospital studies on disease outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals often collected vaccine data that was unsynchronized with the U.S. vaccine administration record.

“The hospital electronic medical records assume that the patient is unvaccinated unless the patient really makes the case that they are indeed vaccinated. Many patients who are on the ventilator are in the ICU, they can’t produce their vaccine card.” The CDC’s MMWR reports list people who were vaccinated but received their two primary shots less than 14 days before the initial infection as unvaccinatedanother report wrote that unvaccinated also included people who could not be matched to the registry.

SF is not anti-vax, just anti-mRNA vax.  But the MSM is quick to point out just because data today shows more vaccinated people are dying with Covid than non, that's not a reason to avoid the new mRNA vaccinations.........

https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/nov/30/more-deaths-among-vaccinated-americans-not-reason/

The "new" mRNA vaccinations were the forerunner to Covid, lest anyone forgets......

https://www.c-span.org/video/?465845-1/universal-flu-vaccine

 

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"Lipid nanoparticles" in 2020.  The big experiment.  Now the effects of the synthetic ingredients are starting to come 2 years in.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41578-021-00398-6

Lipid nanoparticles are going into billions of arms in the form of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, delivering, at last, on the promise of nanotechnology to revolutionize drug delivery. Revolutions have the ability to alter the course of history. In the case of nanotech-based drug delivery, with many promising applications being explored, it looks like lipid nanoparticles have done just that.

 

Almost exactly 1 year ago, UK regulators granted emergency-use authorization to the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, followed by approval of Moderna’s mRNA vaccine. In many ways, this was a historic moment. Not only were these vaccines the first mRNA vaccines authorized for clinical use, they were also developed within only 3 months of sequencing the viral genome of SARS-CoV-2 and showed an astonishing efficacy of >90% in preventing COVID-19 disease. Without doubt, the approval of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines also marked a milestone in nanotechnology. Without lipid nanoparticles, COVID-19 mRNA vaccines would not exist.

The clinical success of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines is built on many years of fundamental and clinical research, from the design of tools to produce biologically active mRNA to the transformation of mRNA into a drug platform. Importantly, the lipid nanoparticles required for mRNA delivery had to be engineered and optimized to ultimately enable safe and efficient mRNA vaccines. This was by no means an easy task. The groundwork for lipid-based drug delivery systems was laid more than 40 years ago in the lab of Pieter Cullis. We talked to Pieter about how his basic research on lipid asymmetry provided the foundations for the encapsulation of nucleic acids into lipid systems. The story of lipid nanoparticles perfectly exemplifies the importance of fundamental science in nanomedicine; without a thorough understanding of lipid and nanoparticle behaviour, mRNA delivery would not have been possible. Yet, to get technologies out of the lab and into the clinic, greater resources and collaborations across fields are needed, beyond the academic system.

The beauty of lipid nanoparticles is that they can serve as a platform technology, in which the same nanoparticle is able to deliver a variety of nucleic acids. As Pieter puts it: “Once you know the protein you wish to silence or express, the requisite siRNA or mRNA can be synthesized in a month or two, and can be packaged in a lipid nanoparticle in a day or two to provide a targeted drug.” Indeed, several lipid nanoparticle–mRNA vaccines against other infectious diseases, various cancers and genetic disorders are already in clinical trials or clinical studies, as discussed in a Review in this issue by Yizhou Dong, Tal Zaks, Robert Langer and colleagues, and new mRNA flu vaccines have just entered clinical trials. The composition and chemistry of lipid nanoparticles can further be tailored to target specific tissues, and researchers have already engineered designs that allow delivery of mRNA directly into the lungs by inhalation. The community is also working on improving large-scale manufacturing and temperature stability of lipid nanoparticles to address problems associated with cold chain requirements and distribution. After all, vaccines don’t save lives — vaccinations do.

Although lipid nanoparticles have now finally gotten the deserved attention, other nanoparticles are also promising candidates for various clinical applications. In a Comment in this issue, Chengzhong Yu, Amirali Popat and colleagues highlight clinical trials of silica nanoparticles — inorganic nanoparticles that offer high drug loading capacity, good mechanical stability and the possibility to release drugs in response to internal or external stimuli. Silica nanoparticles are, for example, being investigated for localized cancer therapy and as imaging agents, with several clinical trials already completed.

Nanoparticles can also be made of synthetic polymers, peptides, proteins or nucleic acids, and the drug delivery community has an eye on extracellular vesicles, which are naturally occurring, complex nanoparticles with the inherent ability to safely transport biomolecules throughout the body. However, the more complex the nanoparticle, the more difficult it may be to achieve regulatory approval. In fact, all clinically approved nanomedicines are based on simple designs encompassing only a small number of components. That said, there was a time in nanomedicine when lipid nanoparticle-based drug delivery was also deemed too complex to ever find widespread application in humans, and many questioned its clinical impact and commercialization potential. Well, they were proven wrong.

mRNA vaccines may not have received the Nobel Prize this year, but their clinical success will have a lasting impact beyond COVID-19. Clearly, lipid nanoparticles are on a roll, and the nanomedicine community will certainly capitalize on their clinical success. There are plenty of applications beyond vaccines to explore and nanoparticle designs to be improved. Maybe there are even better ways to deliver drugs into cells? The nanotech future will tell. The revolution has only just begun.

 

 

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Congress Has a New Scapegoat for COVID Fraud: Banking Apps  : https://reason.com/2022/12/12/congress-has-a-new-scapegoat-for-covid-fraud-banking-apps/

Quote

App-based financial service firms like PayPal and Square have revolutionized how American consumers and businesses move money around—and now, they're being blamed for COVID-19 relief fraud.

Yes, really. In a congressional report published last week, lawmakers on the Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis say widespread fraud in the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which was supposed to pay shuttered businesses to keep employees on the payroll during the pandemic, should spur calls for new regulations on so-called "fintech" companies.

"While the PPP delivered vital relief to millions of eligible small businesses, at least tens of billions of dollars in PPP funds were likely disbursed to ineligible or fraudulent applicants, often with the involvement of fintechs, causing tremendous harm to taxpayers," the report reads, in part.

That's a bit like blaming a bank robbery on whichever company manufactured the getaway car.

And when it comes to the PPP, there were a lot of robberies. Between a quarter and a third of the $835 billion distributed via the program is suspected of having been stolen by fraudsters, in part because of lax oversight over the PPP's loans and in part because, well, that's what always happens when the government starts throwing money around in a crisis.

Was some of that fraud facilitated by some fintech firms? Yep. As the congressional report details, a pair of fintech companies—specifically Womply and Blueacorn—were responsible for a larger share of shady transactions related to PPP loans. Both "failed to implement systems capable of consistently detecting and preventing fraudulent and otherwise ineligible PPP applications."

Another fintech, Kabbage, which has subsequently filed for bankruptcy, "missed clear signs of fraud in a number of PPP applications," according to the report.

Do you know who else failed to implement systems and missed clear signs of fraud in much the same way? The Small Business Administration (SBA).

But, OK, maybe that's beside the point. Let's accept the congressional committee's premise that some fintech firms were unwilling or unable to vet users in a way that made the PPP fraud mess even worse than it would have been with only government incompetence in the equation. Calling out those bad actors in a government report might have some value to the rest of the industry or to consumers. Maybe there could be law enforcement actions to track down the fraudsters who used those services, and maybe the specific services themselves could be hauled into court if they failed to meet contractual obligations that came along with being trusted to disseminate those PPP loans.

Those, of course, are not the conclusions that the committee reached.

"Based on these findings, Congress and the SBA should consider carefully whether unregulated businesses such as fintechs, many of which are not subject to the same regulations as financial institutions, should be permitted to play a leading role in future federal lending programs," the committee concludes.

In other words, an entire industry that has emerged to compete with traditional financial institutions like banks ought to be banned from being involved in federal lending programs because a few members of that industry engaged in some bad behavior—behavior that was rampant within the same government that now should regulate them. Does this make any sense at all?

To carry the getaway-car metaphor forward, this would be like banning all cars from driving on public roads because Bonnie and Clyde drove a Ford. The horse-drawn carriage and bicycle makers of the time might have loved that idea, of course.

A similar thing could be happening here. "The report will be cited to justify putting more roadblocks before the fintech industry and more protections for the legacy banking system, neither of which is warranted," warns Nicholas Anthony, a policy analyst for the libertarian Cato Institute. That wouldn't only be unfair to those businesses and their investors; it would be unfortunate for the millions of people who use those services for nonfraudulent activities.

Again, PPP fraud should be almost entirely blamed on the federal government's own actions, which included removing safeguards designed to prevent fraud so loans could be distributed as quickly as possible. The PPP program clearly overloaded any capacity the SBA may have had for reviewing loans, as the agency was charged with distributing more than 20 times as much as it had handled in any full year in the span of just 33 days in March and April 2020. As the SBA's inspector general pointed out in a report published in May, the agency did not have "a centralized entity to design, lead, and manage fraud risk" until February 2022—nearly two years after the PPP loans began being distributed and long after the bulk of them had been forgiven.

But, yeah, the fintech industry is definitely to blame.

Government again refusing to point the finger at the true culprit in this fraud:  themselves.

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  • 1 month later...

https://nypost.com/2023/01/18/chief-covid-crazy-finally-admits-were-overcounting-cases-but-its-years-too-late/

Had she done less damage to our nation’s most vulnerable, it might be possible to applaud public health “expert” Dr. Leana Wen for her recent admission in The Washington Post and on CNN that the United States has been systematically overcounting the number of deaths from COVID by including deaths with COVID. The true toll of deaths and hospitalization, she notes, may be as little as 30% of the reported numbers. 

Horrifying? Yes. But more reason to fight back, tooth and nail, against any future effort to put kids and adults back in masks — as the feds are trying to do for air travel and as two of New Jersey’s largest school districts have done — or to lock down commerce and social life. 

Those policies, which had no significant measurable effect on bad outcomes, were always based on junk science. And Dr. Wen just admitted it for the world to hear. 

But her daring to speak this truth (obvious to any numerate person and long pointed out by The Post) comes years too late. Dr. Wen backed school closures and the CDC’s Orwellian “guidance” on indoor masking. She once infamously implied the right of unvaccinated people to go out in public should be restricted.

She — along with the WaPo and CNN — was part of the establishment that fought to suppress “misinformation,” i.e. correct but controversial statements about COVID, and brand all dissenters as conspiracy theorists. 

What prompted Dr. Wen’s “Road to Damascus” moment? Was it a desire to help out Joe Biden by making it politically acceptable for left-leaning Dems to (gasp!) start thinking about going back to normal? Or maybe WaPo and CNN audiences were so dialed in on COVID propaganda that this really does come as news to them? 

We may never know. But this much is obvious. Their demure admission now, when the damage is done, that oopsie, we got the central statistic used to justify the destruction of life in America completely wrong! is as reprehensible as it is insufficient.  

 

Anyone else not surprised?

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1 hour ago, swordfish said:

https://nypost.com/2023/01/18/chief-covid-crazy-finally-admits-were-overcounting-cases-but-its-years-too-late/

Had she done less damage to our nation’s most vulnerable, it might be possible to applaud public health “expert” Dr. Leana Wen for her recent admission in The Washington Post and on CNN that the United States has been systematically overcounting the number of deaths from COVID by including deaths with COVID. The true toll of deaths and hospitalization, she notes, may be as little as 30% of the reported numbers. 

Horrifying? Yes. But more reason to fight back, tooth and nail, against any future effort to put kids and adults back in masks — as the feds are trying to do for air travel and as two of New Jersey’s largest school districts have done — or to lock down commerce and social life. 

Those policies, which had no significant measurable effect on bad outcomes, were always based on junk science. And Dr. Wen just admitted it for the world to hear. 

But her daring to speak this truth (obvious to any numerate person and long pointed out by The Post) comes years too late. Dr. Wen backed school closures and the CDC’s Orwellian “guidance” on indoor masking. She once infamously implied the right of unvaccinated people to go out in public should be restricted.

She — along with the WaPo and CNN — was part of the establishment that fought to suppress “misinformation,” i.e. correct but controversial statements about COVID, and brand all dissenters as conspiracy theorists. 

What prompted Dr. Wen’s “Road to Damascus” moment? Was it a desire to help out Joe Biden by making it politically acceptable for left-leaning Dems to (gasp!) start thinking about going back to normal? Or maybe WaPo and CNN audiences were so dialed in on COVID propaganda that this really does come as news to them? 

We may never know. But this much is obvious. Their demure admission now, when the damage is done, that oopsie, we got the central statistic used to justify the destruction of life in America completely wrong! is as reprehensible as it is insufficient.  

 

Anyone else not surprised?

Not in the least.

 

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Inside the Facebook Files: Emails Reveal the CDC's Role in Silencing COVID-19 Dissent: https://reason.com/2023/01/19/facebook-files-emails-cdc-covid-vaccines-censorship/

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) played a direct role in policing permissible speech on social media throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Confidential emails obtained by Reason show that Facebook moderators were in constant contact with the CDC, and routinely asked government health officials to vet claims relating to the virus, mitigation efforts such as masks, and vaccines.

For a broader analysis of the federal government's pandemic-era efforts to suppress free speech—and whether they violated the First Amendment—see Reason's March 2023 cover story on the ramifications of these emails. This article provides screenshots of the emails themselves.

After Elon Musk took control of Twitter, he permitted several independent journalists to peruse the company's previous communications with the FBI, the CDC, the White House, and government officials elsewhere. These disclosures, which have become known as the Twitter Files, reveal that government bureaucrats put substantial pressure on Twitter to restrict alleged misinformation relating to elections, Hunter Biden, and COVID-19.

The Facebook Files, which were obtained by Reason as a result of the state of Missouri's lawsuit against the Biden administration, reveal that the CDC had substantial influence over what users were allowed to discuss on Meta's platforms: Facebook and Instagram.

The messages reveal an environment where the CDC kept tabs on Meta's moderation practices and regularly told the company what the agency wanted it to do.

For instance, in May 2021, CDC officials began routinely vetting claims about COVID-19 vaccines that had appeared on Facebook. The platform left it up to the federal government to determine which assertions were accurate.

 

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Facebook's moderator notes that some of the above claims "would already be violating"—an implicit admission that the CDC's opinion on the other claims would be a deciding factor in whether the platform would restrict such content. Facebook was clearly a willing participant in this process; moderators repeatedly thanked the CDC for its "help in debunking."

Claims vetted by the CDC included whether "COVID-19 is man-made." The CDC told Facebook that it was "theoretically possible, but extremely unlikely."

 

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For months, it was Meta policy to prohibit users from asserting that the pandemic may have originated from a lab leak. The platform revised this policy around the same time that the above email exchange took place.

By July 2021, the CDC wasn't just evaluating which claims it thought were false, but whether they could "cause harm."

 

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Then, in November, the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency authorization for children to receive Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine. Meta proudly informed the CDC that it would remove false claims—"i.e. the COVID vaccine is not safe for kids"—from Facebook and Instagram. Meta also provided the CDC with a list of new claims about vaccines and asked whether the government thought they could "contribute to vaccine refusals."

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The CDC determined that this label applied to all such claims.

 

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It's important to consider the ramifications. Meta gave the CDC de facto power to police COVID-19 misinformation on the platforms; the CDC took the position that essentially any erroneous claim could contribute to vaccine hesitancy and cause social harm. This was a recipe for a vast silencing across Facebook and Instagram, at the federal government's implicit behest.

Meta frequently gave the CDC lists of pandemic-related topics that had gone viral, seeking guidance on how to handle them. And the CDC informed Meta "to be on the lookout" for misinformation stemming from specific alleged misconceptions.

 

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Meta also kept the CDC apprised of criticism of Anthony Fauci, the White House's COVID-19 advisor and head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). One email warned the CDC that Facebook users were mocking Fauci for changing his mind about masking and double-masking. The CDC replied that this information was "very helpful."

 

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If the tone of Meta's communications seems overly friendly, it's worth noting that staffers viewed government employees at the CDC as their "colleagues." In one email, Meta discussed providing said colleagues with access to a "reporting channel" for COVID-19 misinformation. The list of individuals with access included CDC staff, as well as employees at Reingold, a communications firm advising government health agencies.

 

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This is just a snapshot of the messages exchanged between the CDC and Meta. They also had regular conference calls. The CDC was not the only arm of the federal government engaged in this work, of course: White House staffers also castigated Meta for not deplatforming alleged misinformation fast enough. President Joe Biden himself accused Facebook of "killing people" in July 2021.

One wonders whether these condemnations, from Biden and others in his administration—which included the specific threat of punitive regulation if demands for greater censorship were not met—influenced Meta's decision to delegate COVID-19 content moderation to the CDC.

 

 

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21 hours ago, Muda69 said:

Inside the Facebook Files: Emails Reveal the CDC's Role in Silencing COVID-19 Dissent: https://reason.com/2023/01/19/facebook-files-emails-cdc-covid-vaccines-censorship/

 

I guess the bigger question is giant corporations and the government conspiring against their customers/citizens is news?

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Oh wait! - Yeah......Ivermectin (the old, non-patented, and inexpensive drug) does work after all........Well in Africa, but nowhere else apparently.  

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7968425/

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.26.21254377v1

Conclusions The morbidity and mortality in the onchocerciasis endemic countries are lesser than those in the non-endemic ones. The community-directed onchocerciasis treatment with ivermectin is the most reasonable explanation for the decrease in morbidity and fatality rate in Africa. In areas where ivermectin is distributed to and used by the entire population, it leads to a significant reduction in mortality.

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

The Federal Government Is Tracking the Unvaccinated: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/02/joseph-mercola/the-federal-government-is-tracking-the-unvaccinated/

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As recently discovered and reported by Dr. Robert Malone,1 the U.S. government has secretly been tracking those who didn’t get the COVID jab, or are only partially jabbed, through a previously unknown surveillance program designed by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The program was implemented April 1, 2022,2 but didn’t become universally adopted by most medical clinics and hospitals across the U.S. until January 2023.

Under this program, doctors at clinics and hospitals have been instructed to ask patients about their vaccination status, which is then added to their electronic medical records as a diagnostic code, known as ICD-10 code, without their knowledge or consent so that they can be tracked — not just within the health care system but outside of it as well.

Secret Tracking Program Revealed

The new International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes were introduced during the September 14-15, 2021, ICD-10 Coordination and Maintenance Committee meeting. The ICD committee includes representatives from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the NCHS.3

Below is a screenshot of page 194 of the agenda4 distributed during that meeting. According to the NCHS, “there is interest in being able to track people who are not immunized or only partially immunized,” and they figured out a way to do just that, by adding new ICD-10 codes.

As you can see below, ICD-10 code Z28.310 identifies those who have not received a COVID jab and Z28.311 identifies those who are not up-to-date on their shots.

Tracking Unjabbed Is Part of the Biosecurity Agenda

Why do they want to track the unvaccinated? For what purpose? The short answer: to facilitate the implementation of vaccine passports. As noted by Malone:

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“Code Number Z28.310 listed above is not a code for an illness or diagnosis, but rather for non-compliance of a medical procedure … Once a person’s vaccination status is coded and uploaded into large data base, it can be accessed by government and private health insurers alike.

The administrative state officers at the CDC have not made immunization status a reportable disease (yet) but immunization status is listed as one of the reasons for mandatory reporting.6 They are just one step away from being able to collect this information without your permission. Ergo: vaccine passports made easy. In this country, not having your vaccine records ‘up-to-date’ might mean:

•The government will not restrict your travel, airlines will.

•The government will not restrict your travel, other nations will.

•The government will not restrict your travel, auto rental companies will.

•The government will not restrict your travel, public transport will.

•The government will not restrict your travel, private companies will.”

 

World Health Organization Signed Off on Tracking Codes

The ICD codes were created by the World Health Organization, and doctors — with the exception of those in private practice who don’t accept insurance — are required to use these codes to describe a patient’s condition and the care they received during their visit.

As noted by Malone,7 the fact that the ICD system is run by the WHO is an important detail, as this means the WHO had to authorize the CDC to add these new codes. The implication is that these codes may be in use internationally and we just don’t know it yet.

The codes are entered into your electronic health record and used by insurance companies for billing purposes. They’re also used by statisticians who track and analyze national and global disease trends such as cancer and heart disease rates over time.

Over the past decade, these statistical analyses have gotten easier to do, thanks to the transition into electronic record keeping. In the U.S., the ICD coding system has been fully integrated into the electronic health record system since 2012.

Within the ICD-10 codes, there’s a category called ICD-10-CM,8,9 and this is the category the CDC is now using to track the unvaccinated with specific codes for “Unvaccinated for COVID-19”10 and “Partially Vaccinated For COVID-19.”11

Gross Violation of Medical Privacy Rights

Since there’s no billing or payment involved with being unvaccinated, and since being unvaccinated is extremely unlikely to be part of your disease profile, there’s no valid reason to record anyone’s vaccine refusal. It’s also a violation of medical privacy, as the records can be accessed by a variety of individuals and not just your personal doctors.

As noted by Malone, a person’s decision to get a vaccine or not is a private matter, and your privacy rights are enshrined in the Privacy Act of 1974. However, during the COVID pandemic, medical privacy rights have been repeatedly violated and broken.

Children’s’ vaccination statuses were shared with schools and employers were granted the “right” to know the jab status of their employees. Private venues were even permitted to demand proof of vaccination status — all this without a single word of the law having been revoked or amended.

They’re Tracking Reasons for Jab Refusal Too

If you need proof that these codes will be used for reasons unrelated to your health, consider this: They’re also using codes to describe WHY you didn’t get the primary series or stopped getting boosters. Those codes are listed in the screenshot below, under Z28.3 Underimmunization Status.12

The use of “delinquent immunization status” under code Z28.39 also tells us something about where this is all headed. “Delinquent” means being “neglectful of a duty” or being “guilty of an offense.” Is refusing boosters a criminal offense? Perhaps not today, but some day, it probably will be.

All Missed Vaccinations Will Be Tracked

Another tipoff that these codes are part and parcel of the biosecurity control grid is the fact that code Z28.39 — “Other underimmunization status”13 — is to be used “when a patient is not current on other, non-COVID vaccines.” As detailed on the American Academy of Family Physicians website:14

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“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services have announced three new diagnosis codes, including two for COVID-19 immunization status …

According to ICD-10-CM guidelines,15 clinicians may assign code Z28.310, ‘Unvaccinated for COVID-19,’ when the patient has not received a dose of any COVID-19 vaccine.

Clinicians may assign code Z28.311, ‘Partially vaccinated for COVID-19,’ when the patient has received at least one dose of a multi-dose COVID-19 vaccine regimen, but has not received the doses necessary to meet the CDC definition of ‘fully vaccinated’ at the time of the encounter … New code Z28.39 is for reporting when a patient is not current on other, non-COVID vaccines.”

n other words, they have already begun tracking ALL of your vaccinations, not just the COVID shot, and they can use the Z28.3 sub-codes to identify why you refused a given vaccine.

Vaccine Passports Are a Fait Accompli — Unless We Act Now

As noted by Malone:16

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“The administrative state is busy building a vaccine passport system that will be active before most Americans are aware of what is being done to them. No one is going to knock on your door asking for your vaccine status because they already know …

They don’t need approval from Congress or the courts because we have given them the information through our health care providers. The CDC is the governmental organization tasked with tracking vaccine status on individuals.

They already have the records, as well as updated booster information. They just need to tweak a definition here and there, or get President Biden to keep the COVID-19 public health emergency in place indefinitely and the vaccine passports will be a fait accompli.”

You Can Now Be Billed for Immunization Safety Counseling

As if all of that weren’t tyrannical enough, they’ve also added a billable ICD-10 code for “immunization safety counseling.” That’s right. If you’ve decided you’re not willing to partake in the mRNA experiment, or you just don’t think you need some other vaccine that’s recommended, your doctor can bill your insurance for regurgitating the WHO’s vaccine propaganda.

They have codes identifying whether you declined the COVID jab and/or any other vaccine, and for each vaccine refusal, there’s a code detailing why you declined it. ‘Belief or group pressure’ is one of those, and you can bet that code will automatically qualify you for immunization safety counseling, whether you want it or not.
This may become more or less automatic because, again, they have codes identifying whether you declined the COVID jab and/or any other vaccine, and for each vaccine refusal, there’s a code detailing why you declined it. “Belief or group pressure” is one of those, and you can bet that code, Z.28.1, will automatically qualify you for immunization safety counseling, whether you want it or not.

They also intend to indoctrinate your children, and make you pay for it. The immunization safety counseling code, Z71.85, was described in the September 2021 issue of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Pediatric Coding Newsletter. You have to be a member to read the entire article, but here’s the publicly available preview:17

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“Reporting Encounters for Immunization Safety Counseling.

As physicians and other qualified health care professionals field increasing numbers of concerns about immunization safety, International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM) offers a new code, Z71.85, for identifying immunization safety counseling as a reason for an encounter provided on or after October 1, 2021.

Use this code when reporting counseling provided to patients and caregivers who are vaccine hesitant, wish to follow an alternative immunization schedule, or otherwise require time spent in counseling at lengths beyond that typical of routine immunization counseling.

Code Z71.85 may be reported to indicate the principal or first-listed reason for an encounter or as a secondary reason.

Documentation of time spent in preventive medicine counseling and separate time spent in immunization administration counseling should be explicit in the encounter note to support that the preventive medicine counseling was significant and separately identifiable.”

Unjabbed Teachers Flagged

In related news, in early February 2023 it was revealed that New York City teachers who did not get the jab were “flagged” with a “problem code” in their personnel files, triggering their fingerprints to be sent to the FBI and the New York Criminal Justice Services.18

The purpose of this is unclear, but former public school teacher Michael Kane, founder of Teachers for Choice, believes “that unvaccinated NYC educators were being set up to be viewed as ‘right-wing extremists’ or even ‘terrorists.'”

Kane was among those who got fired for refusing the COVID jab. The revelation that teachers’ fingerprints were illegally entered into not just one, but two, criminal databases “are certain to open up a new round of lawsuits,” Kane writes.

Call to Action

Knowing all of this, what can you do about it? How do we stop this madness? Here are a few suggestions:

1.Demand Congress finish what the Senate started by declaring the public health emergency over and done with. January 17, 2023, HR 382, a bill “To terminate the public health emergency declared with respect to COVID-19” was referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. This bill must be passed.

2.Contact your Congressional representative and let them know you:

•Support the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government’s investigation.

•Want Congress to reject all attempts by the administrative state, the United Nations, the WHO, Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Biden Administration to require a vaccine passport or a digital ID.

•Expect them to work to ensure the freedom of travel for all citizens.

•Expect them to protect Constitutional rights.

•Expect them to protect all rights to privacy, including and especially medical privacy, and since these new ICD-10 codes are in violation of your right to privacy, you want them to take immediate action to ensure the codes are revoked.

With respect to what you can do to protect your medical privacy on a personal level, keep in mind that independent doctors are not required to use ICD codes unless they accept insurance. So, by choosing a doctor who is in private practice, you can avoid getting tagged and trapped in the system.

Sources and References

1, 5, 7, 16 RW Malone Substack January 25, 2023
2 MLN Matters April 2022
3 CMS.gov ICD-10 Coordination and Maintenance Committee Meeting
4 CDC ICD-10 Coordination and Maintenance Committee Meeting September 14-15, 2021
6 MedlinePlus.gov Reportable Diseases
8 Healthcare Brew November 21, 2022
9 National File February 2, 2023
10 ICD10data Unvaccinated
11 ICD10data Partially vaccinated
12 Naked Emperor Substack January 27, 2023
13 ICD10data Underimmunization
14 AAFP New Diagnosis Codes
15 ICD-10-CM guidelines
17 AAP Pediatric Coding Newsletter September 2021; 16(12)
18 Teachers for Choice February 9, 2023

 

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