Sunday, August 15, 2021

Most vaccine-hesitant group is those with PhDs

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(THE COLLEGE FIX) -- A study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh researchers found that vaccine hesitancy is highest among those with a PhD.

The online survey of more than 5 million adults was conducted between January 6 and May 31. People who said “probably not” or “definitely not” when asked if they would get the vaccine were considered vaccine hesitant.

“There was not a decrease in hesitancy among those with a professional degree or PhD,” the paper states.

Read the full story ›

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Ex-CDC chief says he was 'threatened' after supporting lab-leak theory

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It is extraordinary how often we are told to “trust the science” these days when "the science" seems to so clearly coordinate with certain political or ideological agendas.

At the start of the pandemic, a theory emerged that the COVID-19 may have leaked from a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the city of Wuhan, China, where the virus originated.

This was bolstered by the fact that the Chinese government told us that the virus was transmitted from bats to humans and the Wuhan institute just so happened to be studying, well, coronaviruses in bats.

So it wasn't exactly a wild notion that the virus leaked out of a lab.

Yet then-director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, says he says he was “sidelined” and “threatened” for floating what basic common sense dictates was a rational theory as to the origin of the virus, given the circumstances and what global and domestic officials now say might just be a perfectly reasonable explanation.

Although the World Health Organization maintained an adamant stance for over a year that the virus was most likely passed originally from animal to human, around the same time that CNN reported that Biden administration officials were warming up to the idea, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus admitted top officials had been a bit hasty in dismissing the idea.

Yet it is Redfield who never changed his stance, and was slammed and even threatened for it last year, he says.

“I think what you have seen over the last 18 months is no new evidence to suggest that this evolved from nature. Haven’t seen any evidence of it being associated with any of the animal species they’ve tested, over 80,000 animals,” Redfield told Fox News host Martha MacCallum on Monday, as The Daily Caller reported.

“But we have seen growing evidence to support that this in fact was a consequence of a laboratory leak. So I continue to believe of the two hypotheses that the laboratory leak is the most likely origin of this virus.”

Check out the video of Redfield's interview here.

As you can understand, Redfield, who left the CDC when Joe Biden became president, said he was “disheartened” to see the scientific community so broadly reject the lab leak theory, a fact I’m sure made all the more so because he was personally maligned for ascribing to it himself.

“And I think I’m very disheartened when I have seen how the scientific community failed to approach both hypotheses with an open mind,” he explained.

“I mean I was very rapidly sidelined, threatened and really sort of outed because I believed as a virologist that this virus may have come from the laboratory.”

Delivering threats to those with hypotheses that buck the mainstream isn't the behavior most people associate with scientists. But when it comes to the origin of a pandemic that's killed millions around the world, and arguably was the deciding factor in a brutally divisive presidential election in the United States, what matters is conformity.

And to maintain that conformity, as Redfield learned, even so-called "scientists" were prepared to engage in thuggish behavior.

The former health official recalled that in February, “the scientific community in bulk said the only acceptable answer,” was that of a “natural event from a natural evolution,” adding that both hypotheses should have been taken "seriously.”

It was indeed truly sickening to observe at the start of the pandemic the adamant rush to deny any wrongdoing on the part of the Chinese Communist Party.

These people were defending the authoritarian communist regime that is routinely accused of intellectual property theft from American businesses and private citizens, creating an Orwellian dystopia for its own people, committing genocide against an ethnic minority, and vowing to be in a position of dominance on the world stage by 2035, and they were accusing President Donald Trump and anyone else who shared his stance on the origins of the virus and the manner in which the CCP handled it as “racist” of all things.

It was not merely sharply dismissed by global public health officials and the American legacy media complex, it was actually regarded as “verboten” by our information war overlords in Big Tech to share information that upheld the stance.

Yet now the WHO and Biden administration officials are casually admitting that the whole theory had merit this entire time.

While in March of this year the WHO’s own report on the origins of the virus deemed it to be “extremely unlikely” that the virus originated in a lab, Tedros told reporters in Geneva last month that there had been a “premature push” to dismiss it.

He even went as far as to say that he knows from personal experience that “accidents happen.”

"I was a lab technician myself, I'm an immunologist, and I have worked in the lab, and lab accidents happen," Tedros said, as NPR reported. "It's common."

"We need information, direct information on what the situation of this lab was before and at the start of the pandemic," he also said, urging China’s cooperation. "If we get full information, we can exclude" the lab connection.

Within the same week, CNN published a report that stated that Biden officials were beginning to consider the hotly disputed lab leak theory as viable.

“Senior Biden administration officials overseeing an intelligence review into the origins of the coronavirus now believe the theory that the virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan is at least as credible as the possibility that it emerged naturally in the wild — a dramatic shift from a year ago, when Democrats publicly downplayed the so-called lab leak theory,” CNN reported at the time.

So when President Donald Trump was in office and he and his officials floated the lab leak theory, they were broadly dismissed of not only errancy but actual racism.

Now, when the WHO chief and the safely-installed Biden establishment administration affirm that there’s viability to this theory, they’re regarded as authoritative and reasonable and the media reports on their change of heart quite soberly with none of the criticism regarded for Trump-linked supporters of the theory.

Can you even imagine how very different things might have turned out the whole world over had the "scientists"  treated this theory as viable?

The Chinese Communist Party clearly had no interest in either transparency or honesty with the global community about the nature of the virus and very likely contributed directly to its spread around the world.

This could have turned into a complete and total disaster for Beijing, had the global community more closely scrutinized the origins of the virus and found President Xi Jinping's government distinctly culpable to some degree. Yet many of the authorities who could have held China accountable were emphatically refuting the idea that it was possible that Chinese human error — or even malice — could have been behind the emergence of the novel coronavirus.

Let that sink in.

If there’s ever been a reason we need to dismantle the idea that “the science” and the health officials that cite it need to stop being protected from criticism by totalitarian censorship, now is that time.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.

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Subway franchisees revolt, want company to end woke Rapinoe's ads: 'It gets tiring apologizing'

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It is unquestionable that U.S. soccer star Megan Rapinoe has a knack for drawing (usually negative) attention to herself.

The athlete, now sporting purple hair, embraced social justice activism several years ago, and there is no sign that she is deviating from that path. She once even appeared in an ad where she knocked a burrito out of some guy's hands, according to the New York Post.

True to form, at the Tokyo Olympics this summer, the 36-year-old kneeled for "The Star-Spangled Banner" ahead of one of her matches.

She probably thought she'd be hailed as a virtue-signaling hero. She also probably didn't expect that the stunt would threaten her cushy spokeswoman job for Subway.

The Post reported that several Subway franchisees are incensed about the company's continued embrace of Rapinoe and are demanding an end to advertisements that include her.

One Wisconsin customer posted a letter on the door of their local Subway that went viral. The letter read, according to the Post:

"Boycott Subway until Subway fires the anti-American ... Megan Rapinoe, the creep who kneels for our beloved National Anthem!"

“The ad should be pulled and done with,” the owner of the Wisconsin store said regarding Rapinoe. “It gets tiring apologizing.”

“Spending our money to make a political statement is completely and totally out of bounds," an Arizona franchisee agreed, venting  frustration on a blog.

Another franchisee, who wants to remain anonymous and is located somewhere on the West Coast, told the New York Post that Subway should focus on its improved bread (I've tried it; it is slightly better) as well as emphasizing the mom-and-pop nature of its business model.

“They probably wanted more splashy advertising to go along with more splashy foods,” said John Gordon of Pacific Management Consulting Group, which advises restaurants.

“We are so politically divided in this country, and Subway should have done more careful due diligence, without a doubt, before choosing [Rapinoe]."

I think Gordon is right.

Rapinoe was a controversial figure long before the Olympics, but the Games took it to another level. After a disappointing showing by the U.S. women's soccer team, former President Donald Trump weighed in.

“If our soccer team, headed by a radical group of Leftist Maniacs, wasn’t woke, they would have won the Gold Medal instead of the Bronze. Woke means you lose, everything that is woke goes bad, and our soccer team certainly has,” Trump wrote in an email, according to the Post.

“There were, however, a few Patriots standing. Unfortunately, they need more than that respecting our Country and National Anthem. They should replace the wokesters with Patriots and start winning again."

All in all, I hope Subway realizes its mistakes and pulls Rapinoe from the its advertising. Franchisees, most of whom are local small-business owners, should not have to suffer for the parent company's political whims.

It's easy to say "partner with a different company," but everything becomes harder when that business is your livelihood.

I think we're all tired of major corporations weighing in on politics. It's time for something different.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.

The post Subway franchisees revolt, want company to end woke Rapinoe's ads: 'It gets tiring apologizing' appeared first on WND.



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Eviction Moratorium: A Postmortem On Private Property

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Eviction Moratorium: A Postmortem On Private Property

Authored by Michael Milano via The Libertarian Institute, 

At the beseeching of congressional Democrats and the fanatical urgings of Nancy Pelosi, who called the extension of the federal eviction moratorium a "moral imperative," the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a new nationwide ban on evictions for counties with heightened levels of coronavirus community transmission. This latest CDC order comes in spite of President Biden’s candid admission that "the bulk of the constitutional scholarship says it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster." In The Ethics of Liberty, Murray Rothbard attests that the "right to contract is strictly derivable from the right of private property." If private property is a keystone for prosperous societies and a fundamental tenant of common law, what happens in the aftermath of the vitiation of millions of private contracts?

A brief recap. In March 2020 under the CARES Act, an eviction moratorium was applied to all dwelling units participating in federal assistance programs. Invoking the Public Health Service Act of 1944, the CDC broadened the moratorium to cover all rental properties countrywide in September 2020. The CDC’s unprecedented unilateral expansion was rationalized as a reasonable measure to combat the spread of COVID-19 by preventing crowded living conditions that would stem from mass evictions and by facilitating self-isolation. This decree, initially slated to end after three months, had been extended on five separate occasions. Rent protection programs have additionally been enacted at the state level. In some states these eviction moratoriums are scheduled to expire over the upcoming weeks. In others, they are set to continue indefinitely.

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In consonance with the ethos of a free society, the United States Constitution is a document grounded in natural rights, conceived to protect private property. The Founding Fathers did not include a universal pandemic exception. The Fifth Amendment states that no one shall be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law," but does permit private property to be expropriated with just compensation (e.g., eminent domain). The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees due process protection at the state level. According to the Contract Clause, no state "may pass a law impairing the obligation of contracts." During the eviction moratorium however, contractual obligations were voided, property was despotically taken with no compensation, and liberty was deprived without a hearing.

For many painstaking months, landlords have been stripped of their rights to freely use their property, while being forced to fulfill legal duties for squatters. Courts at the district level ruled the CDC’s edict unconstitutional, yet the moratorium persisted. In June 2021, the Supreme Court chimed in, allowing the eviction moratoriums to stand in the case of Alabama Association of Realtors v. Department of Health and Human Services. However, Justice Brett Kavanaugh clearly stated that the CDC exceeded its authority, that congressional authorization would be required for a moratorium extension, and that his deciding vote was cast only due to the fact that a few weeks remained before the moratorium was set to expire. Nevertheless, in open defiance of the Supreme Court ruling, the CDC issued their slightly scaled back, 60 day ban on evictions, at the beginning of August.

A dangerous precedent has been established. If eviction moratoriums are deemed a lawful intervention, why shouldn’t the seizing of private property be used to quell future "crises"? Will the current fallout include landlords abandoning the industry, or will rents be raised to offset uncertainty risks as speculated by Jeff Deist? How do members of a society continue to confidently form agreements when the trust associated with contract enforcement erodes?

When taking this all into account, proponents of strict constitutionalism are inevitably forced to reconcile their philosophy in the face of a swelling regulatory state, led by power mongering aspiring autocrats, who perceive the founding documents as ignorable relics. None of this should be overly surprising given that politicians and bureaucrats are perversely incentivized to perpetually expand the size of government. In spite of illusions of separated powers, regardless of whether the reigns are wielded by Democrats or Republicans, when the state is the ultimate arbiter, even in cases involving itself, justice becomes an empty abstraction distributed to gain political favor.

Applying one set of ethical standards to the citizenry and another to the state is hypocrisy and downright immoral. In a system that preserves property rights, a creditor may grant a debtor forgiveness solely for obligations between the two parties. As Lysander Spooner wrote in No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority:

"A man’s natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime; whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, or by millions calling themselves a government."

Tyler Durden Sun, 08/15/2021 - 21:30

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No, hospitalised COVID-19 patients in NSW aren’t all vaccinated



The Statement A Facebook post featuring a slip-up by an Australia health official at a press conference has been used to claim that COVID-19 vaccines are “literally useless” in preventing people from being hospitalised.

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