MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

FDA Limits Use of Johnson & Johnson Covid Vaccine

Posted By on May 6th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fda-limits-use-of-johnson-johnson-covid-vaccine/

The Food and Drug Administration limited its emergency authorization of Johnson & Johnson’s Covid vaccine because of the risk of blood clots, the agency said on Thursday.

The risk of “rare and potentially life-threatening blood clots” following use of the vaccine “warrants limiting the authorized use of the vaccine,” the FDA said in a statement.

“The FDA has determined that the reporting rate of [blood clots] is 3.23 per million doses of vaccine administered and the reporting rate of TTS deaths is 0.48 per million doses of vaccine administered,” the agency said.

However, the agency determined that the benefits of the vaccine “outweigh the known and potential risks” for adults who either cannot receive Pfizer or Moderna vaccines or who refuse to take any Covid vaccine except Johnson & Johnson’s. This means that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is authorized only for individuals who cannot receive an mRNA vaccine or refuse to do so.

“Today’s action demonstrates the robustness of our safety surveillance systems and our commitment to ensuring that science and data guide our decisions,” Dr. Peter Marks, head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in a statement. Marks added that the FDA “will continue to monitor the safety” of all Covid vaccines authorized in the U.S.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israeli ‘unity’ lies in Zionism By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on May 6th, 2022

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/culture/article-705999

Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel Independence Day, is always marked by a mixture of joy and reflection. This year is no different, though a touch of malaise is putting a damper on the former, while taking the latter in the wrong direction.

Among the minority currently in power are members of the Left, who have always held Israel accountable for the plight of Palestinian Authority denizens and for international condemnation. This group still blames the entire Right for the 1995 murder of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. Neither nationwide horror surrounding that unprecedented event, nor the fact that assassin Yigal Amir has been sitting in prison since then, has made a dent in the Left’s view that anti-Rabin incitement from the opposition — led at the time, as today, by Benjamin Netanyahu — was directly responsible.

That Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s family recently received threatening letters with live bullets in them has brought the old accusations to the fore, providing the “anybody but Bibi” crowd with proverbial ammunition.

The above camp’s go-to position whenever Arab terrorism spikes, as it is currently doing, is the one that was voiced ad nauseam by gung-ho supporters of the disastrous Oslo Accords: that we cannot allow the “enemies of peace” to win.

This bloc, which now has important ministerial portfolios, contains politicians who call for Israeli “soul-searching” at every opportunity, including during Holocaust Remembrance Day and Yom Hazikaron, our Memorial Day for fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism. Their message is that if Israel isn’t careful, it will become like Nazi Germany.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Myth of Biden the Uniter By David Harsanyi

Posted By on May 6th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-myth-of-biden-the-uniter/

When the president was asked yesterday about the Roe v. Wade leak, he ranted about how the “MAGA crowd” was “really the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history.”

First of all, does any sentient human really believe that conservatives took up pro-life cause — one that Biden himself championed in the past — in 2015? Candidate Trump had to do a lot of work to allay social-conservative fears over his inconsistent position. This was the entire impetus for releasing a list of potential SCOTUS nominees.

Anyway, Biden, a unifer at heart, noted many in media, had largely avoided such charged rhetoric. This, too, is a myth. It’s Biden who recently said that chasing moderate legislators into bathrooms to pressure them into supporting his agenda was just “part of the process.” It’s Biden who said that supporters of voter-ID laws are backing “21st-century Jim Crow.” He’s the one who calls Republicans “authoritarian” and claimed that we’re “facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That’s not hyperbole, since the Civil War.” It is hyperbole. It is hyperbole most of the time.

Biden has been a run-of-the-mill hyperpartisan demagogue for a long time. Watch some of his cringeworthy speeches on the Senate floor in the 1980s. Biden has been smearing judicial nominees for decades. When Biden accuses Republicans who disagree with him of “betting against America” or Mitt Romney — Mitt Romney — of wanting to put black Americans “back in chains” he is fueling paranoia, not comity. Biden’s “unity” talk, as it was with his old boss, Barack Obama, is little more than a pseudo-patriotic appeal meant to pressure Republicans into capitulation.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The U.S. Should Not Be Funding The WHO Follies Henry I. Miller and Jeff Stier

Posted By on May 6th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/04/the-u-s-should-not-be-funding-the-who-follies/

The two-years-plus of the COVID-19 pandemic should be a wakeup call that there is something very wrong – irreparable, even – at the chronically inept World Health Organization (WHO). Two recent transgressions show that the bureaucrats there are not getting any smarter.

The first is almost inconceivable. Medicago, a Canadian company, developed a COVID-19 vaccine synthesized in the Nicotiniana plant, a relative of tobacco. In clinical testing, it showed efficacy against all variants studied prior to the emergence of Omicron of 71%, and for the Delta variant specifically of 75%.

Health Canada approved the vaccine for domestic use in February, but its distribution around the world encountered a bizarre obstacle: the WHO said it would not even consider approving the vaccine for wider use because of the manufacturer’s ties to U.S.-Swiss tobacco company behemoth Philip Morris International, which owns a roughly one-third equity stake in Medicago. 

Although wealthy countries currently have plenty of COVID-19 vaccines available, the WHO authorization of the Medicago vaccine, Covifenz, is critical, because only then can the vaccine be part of the WHO’s own COVAX global vaccine program for low- and middle-income countries.  It would be especially advantageous to the countries lacking sophisticated medical infrastructure, because, unlike many of the other COVID-19 vaccines, Covifenz doesn’t require stringent (cold) storage conditions.

It remains to be seen whether a work-around, such as Philip Morris divesting itself from partial ownership of Medicago, can be found, or whether the WHO’s intransigence will prolong misery and death in the very countries that its COVAX program is supposed to benefit.

The second recent WHO blunder is that the (deservedly) much-vilified architect of Sweden’s disastrous, irresponsible pandemic management plan, state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, is now at – wait for it! – the WHO.

These missteps shouldn’t come as a surprise; after all, the WHO is a component of the relentlessly incompetent and politicized United Nations. There are so many examples of U.N. self-inflicted wounds, perhaps most notable its abject inability to respond effectively to Russia’s barbaric, genocidal invasion of Ukraine. But there are so many more; for example, the 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti – the first in the country’s history – caused by a sewage leak from a base of U.N. peacekeepers who were there to help after an earthquake earlier in the year. The waste fouled Haiti’s principal river, sickened hundreds of thousands and led to at least 10,000 deaths. (And the U.N. has failed to make good on its commitments to provide compensation.)

BOOKS Comments turned off

The Real Black Swan of 2020: The Assault on Small Business By Janet Levy

Posted By on May 6th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/05/the_real_black_swan_of_2020_the_assault_on_small_business.html

Most people believe the coronavirus was a Black Swan, an unexpected event of large magnitude with unprecedented consequences. But Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who coined that metaphor, disagrees. Coronaviruses were well known, though the SARS-CoV-2 strain that hit humans was new. And the pandemic wasn’t unexpected. Experts had been warning of one – though not of the coronavirus per se – for some years. In 2019, the government had even conducted months-long pandemic preparation drills. Taleb’s annoyance is at the diminution of his coinage to a cliché.

There was, however, a real Black Swan event in 2020, says Carol Roth in her book The War on Small Business: How the Government Used the Pandemic to Crush the Backbone of America. It was the U.S. government’s reaction to the pandemic – with unprecedented decisions and a lockdown that forced people to stop working and doing business for months on end. The pandemic became a pretext for a politically motivated campaign against small businesses and individuals to hasten the consolidation of power in Big Business, Big Tech, and Big Government. That is the hook and weighty claim with which Roth begins her book.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Palestinian State Bill: Palestinians Ask That More Arab Repression Not Be Allowed by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on May 5th, 2022

http://The Palestinian State Bill: Palestinians Ask That More Arab Repression Not Be Allowed by Khaled Abu Toameh

According to the new bill, foreign journalists who do not endorse the Palestinian narrative or who do not “respect the Palestinian identity and history” may soon be banned from operating in PA-controlled areas.

The same restriction applies to Palestinian media organizations and journalists seeking permits to operate in these territories.

The PA leadership apparently fears that stories about corruption, anti-Israel incitement and terrorism will prompt Western donors to halt their funding to the Palestinians.

Unlike other Arab regimes, however, the PA is almost entirely dependent on foreign aid from the US, the European Union and other international donors, who do not seem the least bit bothered by the Palestinian leadership’s measures to curb freedom of expression and deprive its people of an independent media.

In response, several Palestinian human rights and media organizations, including the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, expressed deep concern and disapproval of the PA leadership’s intention to hijack the media.

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate also warned that the draft bill, if approved, would have a negative impact on the international community’s support for the Palestinians and undermine Palestinians’ “dream of a modern Palestinian state that respects basic rights and freedoms.”

Sadly, the Palestinians harbor no hope that their current leaders will work towards establishing a state where public freedoms and human rights are valued and respected.

The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip are corrupt dictatorships that care only about their own interests.

What remains difficult for Palestinians to understand is the continuing silence of the international community and foreign media towards the human rights violations and restrictions on the institutions of democracy and freedom of speech perpetrated by the Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

While the US administration and many countries seem enthusiastic about the establishment of a Palestinian state, the Palestinians themselves are worried that such a state would end up like most of the corrupt and authoritarian regimes in the Arab world.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The consequences of the stolen 2020 election are increasingly catastrophic By Patricia McCarthy

Posted By on May 5th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/the_consequences_of_the_stolen_2020_election_are_increasingly_catastrophic.html

Last year, Mollie Hemingway wrote a book about the 2020 election.  Its title was Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.  It is a comprehensive story of the numerous ways the left orchestrated the Biden win.

A few weeks ago, David Bossie released his film, also titled Rigged.  It exposed the scheme perpetrated by Mark Zuckerberg: “Zuckerbucks” in the amount of $400M to fraudulently ensure a Biden victory.

This week brings the release of Dinesh D’Souza’s film, 2000 Mules.  This film exposes and explains how paid “mules” in numerous states stuffed those drop boxes that Zuckerberg paid for with many thousands of ballots faked or harvested.  Using geo-tracking of cell phones, Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote and Gregg Harris uncovered two thousand people who were paid via a variety of leftist non-profits to stuff those drop boxes, over and over again.

The film is a shocking exposé and reveals yet another complex and devious way certain leftist non-profits cheated to win.  There can no longer be any question that Trump handily won the 2020 election and that the most criminal methods in American history were employed to steal his victory from the American people.

Neither film, Rigged nor 2000 Mules, addressed the possible manipulation of the voting machines by way of illicit programming or hacking via their connection to the internet.  Those issues have been deeply covered by several cyber-experts.  Peter Navarro’s report early on also essentially proved that the 2020 election was marred by massive fraud.

The elephant in the room is this: why has no DOJ investigation been mounted, given the overwhelming volumes of evidence of election fraud?  Why have the courts dismissed each case without even looking at the evidence?  The only answer is that the DOJ, every other federal law enforcement agency and the corporate media are corrupt.  They are all agents of the Democrat party.  As Dennis Prager often comments, truth is not a left-wing value.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Abbas Threatens to Cut Ties to Israel Why the PA leader is desperate to look tough on the Jewish state. Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on May 5th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/abbas-threatens-cut-ties-israel-no-one-cares-hugh-fitzgerald/

Is it every year, or every other year, that President-For-Life of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas threatens to end all ties to Israel? Sometimes he says he’s done it, but nothing actually changes. Sometimes he says he’s going to do it, and then doesn’t. Sometimes he says he’s waiting for a meeting of the PA leadership to discuss it, then cancels the meeting. A report on the latest farcical threat by the angry rais in Ramallah is here: “Bennett: UN must stop serving terrorists’ agenda,” by Lahav Harkov and Khaled Abu Toameh, Jerusalem Post, April 22, 2022:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has again threatened to halt security coordination and suspend Palestinian recognition of Israel.

The latest threat was made during a meeting in Ramallah on Thursday night with US administration envoys Yael Lempert, Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, and Hady Amr, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Israeli and Palestinian Affairs….

Abbas usually makes this threat to cut ties with Israel when he feels the hot breath down his back of Hamas and other even more violent rivals; it’s a way of re-establishing his anti-Israel bonafides with the doubting thomases: he’s assuring them that he still knows how to be tough on Israel, and don’t anyone forget it.

Earlier this week, Abbas abruptly called off an emergency meeting of the Palestinian leadership that was scheduled to take place in Ramallah on Sunday night to discuss the implementation of a resolution by the Palestinian Central Council (PCC) to terminate all agreements with Israel, including the security coordination and Palestinian recognition of Israel.…

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

High Noon in the USA Our country is headed for a showdown. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on May 5th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/high-noon-usa-bruce-thornton/

“It looks like this year’s midterm elections will be the showdown between the “woke” tyrants and the defenders of freedom.”

Since the Sixties the Left has been expanding its influence throughout our nation and its institutions. But decades earlier communism had already established a foothold in the U.S. starting in the early 20th century. Even the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 only briefly checked this process. But history’s repudiation of a totalitarian political order––one fundamentally opposed to the Constitution’s protection of individual freedom and unalienable rights––could not uproot decades of leftist transformation of America.

Indeed, the last 20 years saw the Left reinvigorated by the rise of “woke” ideology and its anti-Constitutional agenda. The Biden administration and its hubristic policies and glaring failures increasingly look likely to ignite a backlash. The showdown between the “woke” Democrats and freedom-loving Americans, whatever their party, is coming in November, and will decide whether the Left has succeeded in “fundamentally transforming America.”

The principles, however, for “woke” leftism were laid down a century ago in the rise of progressivism. Like communism, progressivism favors centralized, concentrated power administered by government bureaucracies and agencies staffed by “experts” who know better than the sovereign people how best to run their lives.

But this ideology conflicts at every point with the Constitution, which balances, checks, and disperses power so that citizens are free to manage their lives, their families, and their businesses as they see fit, checked only by Constitutionally compliant laws created by Congress, whose members are accountable to the citizens who put them in office.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

As Roe Hangs In The Balance, An Ugly Class Blind spot Distorts Abortion Discourse By: Emily Jashinsky

Posted By on May 5th, 2022

https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/04/as-roe-hangs-in-the-balance-an-ugly-class-blindspot-distorts-abortion-discours/

The political establishment’s class blindspot is on full display in conversations about abortion, and the discourse on Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion in the Dobbs case is no exception to this rule. Support for abortion increases with income and education levels. Pollsters use many questions to gauge public opinion on abortion—from support for Roe to support by trimester to general morality—but wealthier Americans tend to be more supportive across the board.

The left is correct that wealthy women in a post-Roe world will be able to get abortions with greater ease than women in lower income brackets: they can afford travel, childcare, and time away from work more easily. But as a demographic, they’re also more supportive of abortion, so the argument that overturning Roe is an attack on the working class is not sound.

It’s true, as The New York Times wrote in 2019, that “[w]omen getting abortions today are far more likely to be poor than those who had the procedure done 20 years ago.” The Times also notes, “About half of women who had an abortion in 2014 were below the poverty line, with another quarter very close to poverty.”

But Gallup data from 2021 found that respondents asked whether abortion was “morally wrong,” “morally acceptable,” or “depend[ent] on the situation” were more supportive as yearly household income increased. This tracks with education level as well, as you can see in the screenshot below.

Above the $100,000 income threshold, 63 percent of people said abortion was morally acceptable and 32 percent said morally wrong. Below the $40,000 threshold, those numbers were almost reversed. Only 38 percent of respondents said it was morally acceptable while 55 percent said it was morally wrong. This pattern is consistent among Gallup’s recent research on the question.