RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17812/paskudnyak

“Paskudnyak” will surely become familiar to our ears during the remaining years of the Biden Presidency as this ill-starred administration becomes the tool of power players, profiteering lobbyists, and Progressives intent on abducting an enfeebled White House for their own socialist mission.

[T]he Biden administration has revealed itself to be a weekly calamity that must be blamed on either incompetence or worse, a captive of special interests whose agenda has nothing to do with protecting the nation’s future.

The President’s popularity has declined to its lowest level since he was sworn in, with half the nation’s adults disapproving of his performance, according to a report by Reuters. Not surprisingly, the dramatic plummet began following his disastrous retreat from Afghanistan that will see countless Afghans executed for embracing our democratic principles.

From Capitol Hill to the White House, we are witnessing the hinge of history that will determine whether America will continue as a respected world power and it will be decided, in very large measure, by those who may well have chosen power and profits over patriotism.

We might want to make the word “Paskudnyak” a plural.

For the Afghans left behind….

For the French who were double-dealed….

For the Texans confronting an open border that mocks our nation’s sovereignty…

And for the members of the Fed who privately know just how destructive our massive national debt will be to our future…

All of them may want to learn a word not currently in their vocabulary:

“Paskudnyak”

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/vaccine-mandates-the-end-of-covid

This Will Come Back to Haunt Us

By Jay Bhattacharya and Jonathan Ketcham  

Why the push for vaccine passports and mandates? Public health officials have offered one overriding justification: As soon as enough of us are vaccinated, we’ll reach herd immunity and the disease will stop spreading. Vaccine passports and mandates get us there faster.

This is nonsense.

We have good reason to doubt that, if most everyone got vaccinated, we’d achieve herd immunity. That’s because the protection offered by the Covid-19 vaccines against infection is short-lived. A large study of vaccinated patients in Qatar found that, by five months after the second jab, the vaccine’s effectiveness had already started to wane. It continued to protect against severe disease and death, but it did not provide any protection from less severe infection.

In fact, getting Covid and recovering from it is better protection from future reinfection and severe Covid disease than any of the available vaccines. This is clear from an excellent Israeli study. 

That study, conducted at the Maccabi Healthcare Services, in Tel Aviv, makes clear that it is probably safer to be in a room filled with unvaccinated people who have recovered from Covid than it is to be in a room filled with vaccinated people who have never had Covid.

Now, looking beyond the epidemiology, it’s worth considering the psychology that comes into play when we start forcing people to do things: It is practically a mathematical certainty that the mandates will lead many people to distrust the government, leading experts at places like the Centers for Disease Control, and our most prominent research universities even more than they do now. Why, the thinking goes, are you forcing me to do something that, you insist, is obviously good for me? If it were obviously good for me, you wouldn’t have to force me to do it. 

The mandates, far from persuading the unvaccinated to fall into line, will further undermine the authority of those pushing them — and, critically, it will make it that much harder to persuade the public to get vaccinated when an even more dangerous pandemic sweeps the globe.