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5 Mistakes Dr. Anthony Fauci Made on COVID That Spelled Disaster
The man almost single-handedly responsible for the failed COVID policies of the past two-plus years has announced that he will be retiring soon. For many of us, that day cannot come soon enough.
During the first year of the pandemic, Anthony Fauci, MD, was a study in confusion. He expressed wildly conflicting opinions about how lethal and contagious the coronavirus was depending on who he was talking to.
In public he warned us that we were facing a viral apocalypse, touting a pandemic model from the Imperial College in London that predicted millions upon millions of U.S. deaths.
It turned out that the model was algorithmic garbage, but that didn’t stop America’s most famous virologist from recommending — in mid-March 2020 — that the economy of the entire country be shut down indefinitely, 40 million people be put out of work, tens of millions of children be denied an education and millions of “nonessential” small businesses be shuttered, many never to reopen.
Birx Admits She Knew COVID Vaccines Were Never ‘Going to Protect Against Infection’
A year ago, President Biden told the world during a now infamous CNN town hall that “you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
As The Epoch Times’ Zachary Stieber reports, one of the former U.S. officials who led the COVID-19 response during the Trump administration said on July 22 that COVID-19 vaccines were not expected to protect against infection.
“I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection. And I think we overplayed the vaccines. And it made people then worry that it’s not going to protect against severe disease and hospitalization,” Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House COVID-19 response coordinator under former President Donald Trump, said during an appearance on Fox News.
The Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines were granted emergency use authorization in late 2020 to prevent symptomatic COVID-19 and were promoted by many health officials, including Birx. She made no mention of concerns the vaccines might not protect against infection.
WHO Declares Monkeypox a Global Health Emergency as Infections Soar
The World Health Organization on Saturday declared the international monkeypox outbreak a global emergency, a decision that underscores concerns about rapidly spreading infections sparked by the virus.
The move to label the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, the highest level of alert the WHO can issue, is expected to marshal new funding to fight the outbreak and pressure governments into action. More than 16,500 cases of monkeypox have been reported in 74 countries.
The decision means the world is now confronting two viral diseases that have crossed the extraordinary threshold of being declared health emergencies: COVID-19 and monkeypox. The WHO labeled the coronavirus pandemic a global crisis early in 2020.
WHO officials said the global risk of monkeypox is moderate, but that it is high in Europe, where most of the infections have been recorded in an outbreak that ignited in the spring.
Fauci Now Claims to Have ‘Open Mind’ About COVID Lab-Leak Theory
In January, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed that Dr. Anthony Fauci not only initiated efforts to cover up evidence pointing to a Chinese lab as the origin of COVID-19 but that he actively shaped a highly influential academic paper that excluded the possibility of a lab leak.
Fauci’s involvement with the paper wasn’t acknowledged by the authors, as it should have been under prevailing academic standards. Neither was it acknowledged by Fauci himself, who denied having communicated with the authors when asked directly while testifying before Congress — which we now know is a bald-faced lie.
Fast forward six months and the World Health Organization (WHO) finally admitted that the lab-leak theory — while maintaining that it’s not the most likely scenario — is a possibility that “needs study.”
Now, Fauci is suddenly “open-minded” about the theory.
Is BA.5 Past Its Peak? COVID Deaths Drop 20% From Previous Week
Immunologists and scientists have been concerned about the latest COVID subvariant, BA.5. Data has shown that it is more contagious than previous strains and that it can not only get by antibodies created by vaccines, it can bypass even those gained by catching the actual virus.
Now, though, a new report has come out saying perhaps the spread of BA.5 has already peaked.
The U.S. is now averaging 426 COVID deaths per day, a 20% drop from the previous week, the Daily Mail reported. That is significant because deaths between July 6-13 had doubled over the previous week.
The number of case figures are beginning to fall off as well, dropping 8% over last week to 128,785 per day.
Second Coronavirus Booster Shots for People Under 50 on Hold Amid Drive to Speed up New Vaccine
Second booster shots of the coronavirus vaccine for people younger than 50 are on hold as the Biden administration tries to accelerate a fall vaccination campaign using reformulated shots that target the now-dominant Omicron subvariants, according to federal health officials.
Officials are hoping vaccine makers — Moderna and Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech — are able to make the updated shots available as soon as early to mid-September instead of later in the fall, said three officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the issue.
The retooled boosters will contain components from the Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 as well as the original formula, which was based on the version of the virus that spread globally in early 2020. The hope is that the redesigned boosters will be more effective in dealing with an evolving virus.
White House Plans COVID Vaccine Summit as Biden Recovers
As President Joe Biden continues to recover from his coronavirus infection, the White House plans to hold a summit on Tuesday to discuss developing a new generation of vaccines that could more effectively guard against contagious variants.
The summit, which involves top administration officials, scientists and pharmaceutical executives, comes as the country faces a surge of infections from BA.5, a variant that’s an offshoot of the Omicron strain.
First Cases of Monkeypox in Children in U.S. Confirmed
The first two U.S. cases of monkeypox in children have been confirmed as part of a record outbreak of more than 2,800 infections nationwide, a top health official said Friday.
The pediatric cases, detected this week in an infant and a toddler, are likely the result of household transmission, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky disclosed the development in a Washington Post Live interview Friday.
CDC and public health authorities are still investigating how the children became infected. The two cases are unrelated and in different jurisdictions, the agency said in a statement. The toddler is in California; the infant’s case was confirmed while the family was traveling in Washington, DC, but they are not residents of this country.
Scientists Are Narrowing in on Why Some People Keep Avoiding COVID. BA.5 Could End That Luck.
A majority of people in the U.S have had COVID-19 at least once — likely more than 70% of the country, White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha said on Thursday, citing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Many have been infected multiple times. In a study that has not been peer viewed that looked at 257,000 U.S. veterans who’d contracted COVID at least once, 12% had reinfection by April and about 1% had been infected three times or more.
This raises an obvious question: What is keeping that shrinking minority of people from getting sick?
Disease experts are homing in on a few predictive factors beyond individual behavior, including genetics, T cell immunity and the effects of inflammatory conditions like allergies and asthma.
High Blood Pressure Doubles Odds That COVID Will Be Severe
U.S. News & World Report reported:
Nearly half of American adults have high blood pressure — and that alone more than doubles their odds of being hospitalized if they are infected with the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, a new study revealed.
This was true even in people who were fully vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19, according to researchers at the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
People with high blood pressure (hypertension) who get COVID-19 should be aware of this heightened risk and should discuss antiviral therapy with their doctor, suggested study author Dr. Joseph Ebinger, a clinical cardiologist at the institute.
Monkeypox Vaccine From Bavarian Nordic Wins EU Approval
Danish biotechnology company Bavarian Nordic (BAVA.CO) said on Monday the European Commission had given permission for its Imvanex vaccine to be marketed as protection against monkeypox, as recommended last week by the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
The approval comes just one day after the World Health Organization issued a high-level alert declaring the rapidly spreading monkeypox outbreak as a global health emergency.
