"Free fries when you get vaccinated? I got vaccinated. You're saying I could get these delicious fries? Wait a minute, there's also a burger element to this?" he said, snacking on fries and waving a half-wrapped burger during his daily COVID-19 update.
Bill de Blasio (/dɪˈblɑːzioʊ/; born Warren Wilhelm Jr., May 8, 1961; later Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm) is an American politician who served as the 109th mayor of New York City from 2014 to 2021.
"The question is whether the State’s summary imposition of § 2.61 conflicts with plaintiffs’ and other individuals’ federally protected right to seek a religious accommodation from their individual employers," wrote Judge David N. Hurd, a Bill Clinton appointee.
"The answer to this question is clearly yes. Plaintiffs have established that § 2.61 conflicts with longstanding federal protections for religious beliefs and that they and others will suffer irreparable harm in the absence of injunctive relief," reads the 27-page ruling, which offers a reprieve for thousands of unvaccinated doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers who would have otherwise been fired or prevented from working on Tuesday if the ruling had gone the other way.
Hurd issued a preliminary injunction preventing the NY Department of Health from acting against any employer who grants religious exemptions, adding that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in their case.
"The Department of Health is barred from interfering in any way with the granting of religious exemptions from Covid-19 vaccination going forward, or with the operation of exemptions already granted," reads the ruling.
New York Governor Kathy M. Hochul indicated that the state would appeal.
"My responsibility as governor is to protect the people of this state, and requiring health care workers to get vaccinated accomplishes that," she said. "I stand behind this mandate, and I will fight this decision in court to keep New Yorkers safe."
In late-August, Hochul's administration overrode a religious exemption contained within former Gov. Cuomo's original vaccine mandate - prompting 17 healthcare workers to sue the state in federal court, claiming that the mandate conflicted with their religious beliefs "because they all employ fetal cell lines derived from procured abortion in testing."
"With this decision, the court rightly recognized that yesterday’s ‘front line heroes’ in dealing with Covid cannot suddenly be treated as disease-carrying villains and kicked to the curb by the command of a state health bureaucracy," said Christopher Ferrara of the Thomas More Society.
Tuesday's order technically extends an earlier temporary restraining order which applied to religious exemptions filed in mid-September onward - effectively allowing many healthcare workers to continue working even after the mandate went into effect.
In the federal case, titled Dr. A et al v. Hochul, the 17 health care workers argued that they could not consent to be inoculated with vaccines “that were tested, developed or produced with fetal cell lines derived from procured abortions.”
Pope Francis has said that Catholics may get the Covid-19 vaccines; most of the health care workers suing in the case are Catholic. But Judge Hurd did not question whether the health care workers were correct in their religious objections. Instead, he focused on their broader constitutional right to have their religious beliefs considered, and when possible, accommodated. -NYT
Now do cops, firefighters, teachers, and other professions.
Bill DeBlasio is dangerous and combines both ignorance and fundamental authoritarianism with his statements here. They want to get vaccines inside of children and it could be very dangerous for them.
Dr. Robert Malone explains why the risk of COVID-19 in children is almost non-existent unless they have some prior health issue. The FDA is quite explicit about ongoing studies that happening with regards to cardiac issues associated with the disease.
Mary Josephine Generoso of Rocco's says she doesn't want to conflict with hungry New Yorkers' right to "roam freely."
Not all Big Apple restaurants were happy as a citywide vaccine mandate took effect on Monday — and some are all but thumbing their noses at the controversial clampdown.
The so-called “Key to NYC” program — which requires diners to show proof they’ve been vaccinated from COVID — has gotten support from high-profile restaurateurs like Danny Meyer of the Gramercy Tavern and Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin, as well as the owners of Sylvia’s in Harlem.
But some fret that the new rules won’t be enforceable and that they will turn off tourists as local eateries scramble to recover from a year and a half of lockdowns. Others say they won’t even try to enforce the new rule beginning Sept. 13, when city inspections at restaurants, indoor entertainment venues and gyms are slated to begin.
Shortly after Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the new rules on Aug. 3, a sign appeared in the front window of Pasticceria Rocco, a pastry shop and diner in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn: “We do not discriminate against any customer based on sex, gender, race, creed, age, vaccinated or unvaccinated. All customers who wish to patronize are welcome.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city of New York are facing their first lawsuit from restaurants for the executive order requiring proof of vaccination to dine indoors.
The Independent Restaurant Owners Association Rescue, Max’s Esca, DeLuca’s Italian Restaurant and Pasticceria Rocco are seeking an injunction against de Blasio’s executive order. Two fitness venues, Evolve-33 and Staten Island Judo Jujitsu, were also listed as plaintiffs in the complaint. All of the plaintiffs, excluding Pasticceria Rocco, are based in Staten Island. The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in New York Supreme Court.
Nick Paolucci, press secretary for New York City’s law department, said that the city is reviewing the complaint.A NYC restaurant manager goes renegade in the face of new vaccination-proof rules https://t.co/BoXxJhF6Dbpic.twitter.com/itFy65xY2P
This chart was from March of 2021 and has not changed much. This shows you the African American community doesn't trust the government also!
The current Black New Yorkers Vaccine Rate in August of 2021 is 31%
.@DailyCaller's @ShelbyTalcott asks Jen Psaki if the WH is "concerned...that the burdens imposed by governments and businesses like this New York City proof of vaccination is going to fall heaviest on these minority communities" seeing as how the rate for Black New Yorkers is 31% pic.twitter.com/rJn7uN8W4p
A reporter for the Daily Caller asked a great question today of Jen Psaki regarding the new NYC vaccine mandate being pushed by Mayor Bill De Blasio:
Does the White House had any issues with the vaccine mandate being imposed on businesses in New York City because it will hurt blacks the most because of their low vaccination rate.
Since when is the White House ok with ‘show me your ID’ or ‘show me your papers’? I thought voter ID was bad for blacks? But suddenly turning away black folks because they aren’t vaccinated is a good thing?
Some of the city’s largest agencies have lower vaccination rates than the general public. Of NYPD’s 54,000 uniformed and civilian workforce, only 43% are vaccinated, the New York Post reported last week, also finding that the FDNY has a 55% vaccination rate. Roughly 42% of city Department of Correction workers are vaccinated, the agency told THE CITY, based on the information it has about those who were vaccinated in the five boroughs.
Both the city’s 135,000 public school employees and 42,000 public hospital workers have a 60% vaccination rate. An MTA spokesperson estimated 65% to 70% of the transit agency’s 65,000 employees have received the vaccine.
Maybe a decent number of NYPD and FDNY personnel voted for Trump. But it’s hard to believe there are many Republicans, registered or self-identified, among the ranks of the workforces of the MTA, city hospitals, or the city’s public schools.
And that last one is a strong argument for metaphorically burning teachers’ unions to the ground and salting the earth where they once stood. For the past eighteen months, teachers’ unions across the country and in New York City insisted that school buildings could not be reopened because the threat of COVID-19 infection to teachers, administrators, and other staff was just too high.
In New York state, teachers became eligible for vaccination back on January 11! And almost eight months later, 40 percent of city Department of Education employees remain unvaccinated? Clearly, these educators were not all that worried about catching COVID-19. Apparently, the fear of the coronavirus was just powerful enough to make returning to the classrooms unthinkable, but not quite so powerful enough to get them to get off their butts and go get vaccinated.
If the mainstream media wants to shame some people for not getting vaccinated, they don’t have to look through the social media posts of members of the Hillsong church.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded an MIT "quantum dots" project to track vaccines and could be delivered to the skin to record vaccinations.
Conspiracy theories need just the right ingredients to take off within a population, and the COVID-19 pandemic has been a breeding ground for them. A Pew Research Center survey recently asked people if they had heard the theory that the COVID-19 outbreak was intentionally planned by people in power. Seventy-one percent of U.S. adults said they had. And a third of those respondents said it was "definitely" or "probably" true.
One version of this theory goes something like this: The COVID-19 pandemic is part of a strategy conceived by global elites — such as Bill Gates — to roll-out vaccinations with tracking chips that would later be activated by 5G, the technology used by cellular networks.
Residents of Palm Beach County, Fla., cited it in a county commissioner's hearing in late June when voicing their opposition to mandatory mask enforcement. "Six feet ... is military protocol. You're trying to get people to train them, so when the cameras, the 5G comes out, what? They are going to scan everybody? We've got to get scanned? We've got to get temperature? ... Are you insane?" asked Cristina Gomez, one of the residents who attended the hearing. She even mentioned Gates by name, asking the commissioners why he is not in jail.
Molly, 24, who lives in Kentucky and asked that her last name not be used, said earlier this spring, her sister told her she did not intend to get the COVID-19 vaccine because she believed it contained microchips. Molly said she was shocked.
"I was like, what are you talking about? That's not true. And she's like, 'Oh well, you know so much about science.' I'm like, I know that there's no microchips in vaccines." She said the conversation spiraled into a fight. "Then I just went upstairs and cried because we are best friends. And now since this, we basically haven't talked about COVID or what's going on at all."
Otis Hart, 42, in New York City sought the help of a tinnitus therapist in May following an ear injury. At the end of his session, Hart shared that he was looking into getting a better Internet connection. "[My therapist] said that things like 5G [are] responsible for some terrible things going on," Hart said. "And he connected 5G with the coronavirus pandemic." Hart said he stopped seeing him after this appointment.
NPR talked to more than a dozen people who said they had similar experiences. So how did this particular theory come to be?
The first ingredient of a good conspiracy is a plausible element. Not one that's necessarily true, just plausible. In this case, the tracking chips. In December, a team of Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers published a paper in the medical journal Science Translational Medicine detailing how something called "quantum dots" could be delivered to the skin to record vaccinations.
Kevin McHugh, now an assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice University and the lead researcher on the project, said he's baffled by the idea that his project involves tracking chips. "There's no microchips at all," he said. "I don't even know where that comes from. All the quantum dots [do is] produce light."
The technology, tested on rats, has not yet been tested on humans. McHugh said the dot signals a patient has received a vaccine in an effort to keep an accurate record.
"It is really difficult to determine who has received what vaccines in the developing world because there is not good record-keeping," McHugh said. "So the idea is, can we actually have something that could inform a health care worker what vaccines have been administered and therefore which ones are still needed?"
Funding for the project was provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which brings us to the second ingredient of a good conspiracy theory: a real person, someone powerful — and rich.
Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington, who has studied misinformation during crisis events, said conspiracy theories use the same elements and plug in different actors.
"A rich person controls the world and they want to do bad things so they can continue controlling the world," she said. "Sometimes it's George Soros. Now it's Bill Gates. So, they just move that person over."
But why Gates this time?
Steven Brill is the founder of NewsGuard, a company that tracks false information. He said there are two reasons: The Gates Foundation funds global vaccination research and drives, and Gates is the co-founder of Microsoft Corp.
"So you have the anti-vaxxer movement targeting Bill Gates as well as the anti-tech movement," Brill said.
The anti-tech movement brings us to the final ingredient of a good conspiracy theory: an element that makes it go viral. In this case, the fear of 5G and the power of social media.
Joseph Downing, a fellow at the London School of Economics, studied the origins of the 5G conspiracy theory on social media and said he and his colleagues were able to track down the exact account that turned this conspiracy theory into a trending topic on Twitter.
The account was @5gcoronavirus19, which sent out 303 tweets in seven days.
"So you've got somebody here who understands a way of, in effect, kind of manipulating the social media landscape," Downing said.
It's unclear who operated the @5gcoronavirus19 account, which has since been taken down. But it managed to create such momentum that other platforms picked it up from there. Downing said someone doesn't need to have a huge following to do that; they just need to know how the algorithm works.
"One thing that we found that was really important was that people were tagging President Trump in their tweets. And that was enough to gain traction," he said.
Enough traction that more than 70 cellphone towers were set on fire in the United Kingdom in April and May because of their alleged link to the spread of the virus, Mobile UK, which represents Britain's four mobile operators, told Business Insider in May.
"In the [time of] COVID-19, when we can see [that] a large number of people begin to believe these things and take actions that are harmful to either themselves or their communities — then those theories are translated into harm," Starbird said.
And experts such as Brill and Downing agree: A society so divided because of misinformation can lead to disruptions in elections, health care and even create distrust in the entire democratic system.
Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a supporter of NPR.
In 1976, an outbreak of the swine flu, influenza A virus subtype H1N1 at Fort Dix, New Jersey caused a mass vaccination of Americans. After the program began, the vaccine was associated with an increase in reports of Guillain-Barré Syndrome, which can cause paralysis, respiratory arrest, and death. This is the story of how in 1976, the US government faked a pandemic.
In January 1976, several soldiers at Fort Dix complained of a respiratory illness diagnosed as influenza. The next month, Private David Lewis, who had the symptoms, participated in a five-mile forced march, collapsed and died.
The New Jersey Department of Health tested samples from the Fort Dix soldiers. While the majority of samples were of the more common A Victoria flu strain, two were not. The atypical samples were sent to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, which found evidence of swine influenza A related to the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed 50 to 100 million people worldwide.
The Center for Disease Control (now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) verified the findings and informed both the World Health Organization and the state of New Jersey. On February 13, CDC Director David Sencer completed a memo calling for mass vaccination for the swine flu.
The CDC Assistant Director for Programs of the Center for Disease Control, Bruce Dull, held a press conference on February 19 to discuss the flu outbreak at Fort Dix and, in response to questions from reporters, mentioned the relationship of the flu strain to the 1918 outbreak.
US President Gerald Ford was officially informed of the outbreak memo on March 15 and the suggested vaccination program. He met with a “blue ribbon” panel that included Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin. Ford then made a televised announcement in support of the mass vaccination program.
A hearing was held before the United States Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, and C. Joseph Stetler, a drug company spokesman, requested government indemnity for the vaccine manufacturers.
Pharmaceutical companies Sharp & Dohme (Merck & Co.), Merrell, Wyeth, and Parke-Davis also refused to sell doses to the government unless they were guaranteed a profit, a concession that the government also eventually made.
The House Appropriations Committee reported out a special appropriations bill, including $135 million for the swine flu vaccination program, which was approved on April 5. Two days later, the World Health Organization held a conference to discuss the implications of a swine flu outbreak for poorer nations.
On April 8, an official from the Federal Insurance Company informed Merck & Co., a manufacturer of the swine flu vaccine, that it would exclude indemnity on Merck’s product liability for the swine flu vaccine on July 1, 1976.
T. Lawrence Jones, president of the American Insurance Association, informed the Office of Management and Budget that the insurance industry would not cover liability for the vaccine unless the government extended liability protection.
The chairman of Merck wrote a memo a day later, April 13, to various government agencies, including the White House emphasizing the “duty to warn”. In May, other vaccine manufacturers including Marion Merrell Dow, Parke-Davis, and Wyeth, were notified of indemnity problems by their respective insurers.
Assistant Secretary Theodore Cooper (HEW) informed the White House on June 2 that indemnity legislation would be needed to secure Merrell’s cooperation. In June, other vaccine manufacturers requested the same legislation. A little more than two weeks later, the Ford administration submitted a proposal to Congress that offered indemnity to vaccine manufacturers.
Bruce Dull stated at a flu conference on July 1 that there were no parallels between the 1918 flu pandemic and the current situation.
Later that month, J. Anthony Morris, a researcher in the Food and Drug Administration’s Bureau of Biologics (BoB), was dismissed for insubordination and went public with findings that cast doubt on the safety of the vaccine, which was produced in fertilised hen’s eggs.
Three days later, several manufacturers announced that they had ceased production of the vaccine. Later that month, investigations into alleged swine flu outbreaks in other parts of the world found no cases of the strain. On July 23, the President sent a letter that urged Congress to take action on indemnification.
In early August, an outbreak of illness in Philadelphia was thought to be related to swine flu. It was later found to be an atypical pneumonia that is now called Legionnaires’ disease. On August 6, Ford held a press conference and urged Congress to take action on the indemnification legislation. Four days later, both houses of Congress passed the legislation.
Merrill became the first company to submit samples to the FDA’s Bureau of Biologics for safety testing, which approved it on September 2. Merck made the first shipment of vaccines to state health departments by September 22. The first swine flu inoculations were given at the Indiana State Fair.
In October, three people died of heart attacks after they had received the vaccine at the same Pittsburgh clinic, which sparked an investigation and the recall of that batch of vaccine.
The investigation showed that the deaths were not related to the vaccination. The President and his family received their vaccinations before the television cameras. On November 2, Ford lost the presidential election to Jimmy Carter.
Also in early November, Albert Sabin published a New York Times editorial, “Washington and the Flu.” He agreed with the decision to create the vaccine and to be prepared for an outbreak but criticized the “scare tactics” that had been used by Washington to achieve that. He suggested to stockpile the vaccine and to have a wait-and-see strategy.
By 15 December, cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) affecting vaccinated patients were reported in 10 states, including Minnesota, Maryland, and Alabama. Three more cases of Guillain-Barré were reported in early December, and the investigation into cases of it spread to eleven states.
On December 16, a one-month suspension of the vaccination program was announced by Sencer. William Foege of the CDC estimated that the incidence of GBS was four times higher in vaccinated people than in those not receiving the swine flu vaccine.
Ford told reporters that he agreed with the suspension, but he defended the decision to create the vaccination program. Joseph A. Califano, Jr., was sworn in as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare on January 20, 1977. On February 4, Sencer was informed that he would be replaced as the head of the CDC. The vaccination program was not reinstated.
Laurence Gostin, in his article “At Law: Swine Flu Vaccine: What Is Fair?”, wrote that “the swine flu affair fails to tell us whether, in the face of scientific uncertainty, it is better to err on the side of caution or aggressive intervention.”
There is not even complete agreement about the causal relationship between the swine flu vaccine and Guillain-Barré syndrome, as noted in Gina Kolata’s book Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It.
She wrote that the CDC did not have a “specific set of tests and symptoms to define Guillain-Barré” and that since doctors who reported cases already knew that a link was suspected, a bias in reporting was introduced. She quoted Keiji Fukuda: “if a new virus gets identified or reappears, you don’t want to jump the gun and assume a pandemic is happening.”
The response from the corporate media and the Left was predictable. California Governor Gavin Newsom declared the move “absolutely reckless.” Beto O’Rourke called the GOP a “cult of death.” Joe Biden called the move “Neanderthal thinking.” Keith Olbermann insisted, “Texas has decided to join the side of the virus” and suggested Texans shouldn’t be allowed to take the covid vaccine. Vanity Fair ran an article with the title “Republican Governors Celebrate COVID Anniversary with Bold Plan to Kill Another 500,000 Americans.”
Other states have followed in Texas’s wake, and Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia are now all states where covid restrictions range from weak to nonexistent.
Georgia and Florida, of course, are both notable for ending lockdowns and restriction much earlier than many other states. And in those cases as well, the state governments were criticized for their policies, which were said to be reckless and sure to lead to unprecedented death. Georgia’s policy was denounced as an experiment in “human sacrifice.”
Yet in recent weeks, these predictions about Texas’s fate have proven to be spectacularly wrong. Moreover, many of the states with the worst growth in covid cases—and the worst track records in overall death counts—have been states that have had some of the harshest lockdowns. The failure of the lockdown narrative in this case has been so overwhelming that last week, when asked about the Texas situation, Anthony Fauci could only suggest a few unconvincing lines about how maybe Texans are voluntarily wearing masks and locking down more strenuously than people in other states. In Fauci's weak-sauce explanation we see a narrative that simply fails to explain the actual facts of the matter.
The Texas situation is just one piece of a state-by-state picture that is devastating for the lockdowns-save-lives narrative.
For example, let’s look at covid case numbers as of April 20.
Case numbers are a favorite metric for advocates of stay-at-home orders, business closures, mask mandates, and repressive measures in the name of disease control.
In Texas, the total new cases (seven-day moving average) on April 20 was 3,004. That comes out to approximately 103 per million.
Now, let’s look at Michigan, where a variety of strict mask mandates and partial lockdowns continue. Restaurant capacity remains at 50 percent, and the state continues to issue edicts about how many people one is allowed to have over for dinner.
In Michigan, the seven-day moving average for new infections as of April 20 was 790 per million - nearly eight times worse than Texas.
Last week, Anthony Fauci, head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) struggled to come up with an explanation as he testified to Congress.
In previous weeks, Fauci tended to rely on the old tried-and-true claim that if we only wait two to four more weeks, cases will explode wherever covid restrictions are lessened or eliminated. Lockdown advocates tried this for months after Georgia ended its stay-at-home order, although Georgia consistently performed better than many states that continued their lockdowns.
But now that we’re six weeks out from the end of Texas’s mask mandate and partial lockdowns, Fauci could offer no plausible explanation. Rather, when pressed on the matter by Representative Jim Jordan, Fauci insisted that what really matters is compliance rather than the existence of mask mandates and lockdown mandates:
There’s a difference between lockdown and the people obeying the lockdown…. You know you could have a situation where they say, "We’re going to lock down," and yet you have people doing exactly what they want—
Jordan asked if this explains the situation in Michigan and New Jersey (and other states with quickly growing covid case rates). Fauci then claimed he couldn’t hear the question, and Jordan was cut off by the committee chairman.
No one who is familiar with the situation in states like Texas, Florida, and Georgia, however, would find it plausible that the spread of covid has been lessened in those areas by more militant use of masks and social distancing. Fauci's testimony was clearly just a case of a government “expert” grasping about for an explanation.
But don’t expect Fauci and his supporters to give up on insisting that New York and Michigan are doing "the right thing" while Texas and Florida are embracing "human sacrifice" as a part of a "death cult."
The actual numbers paint a very different picture, and even casual observers can now see that the old narrative was very, very wrong.
The mantra has been to test, test, and test some more since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, major concerns emerged right from the beginning about the tests being used to diagnose this infection, and questions have only multiplied since then.
As a rationale for keeping vast parts of the planet locked down for the better part of 2020, positive reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) experiments have been used.
Dr. Mike Yeadon, Pfizer's former vice president, and scientific director, also went on record saying that false-positive results from faulty PCR tests are used to "produce a 'second wave' based on new cases,'" when a second wave is quite unlikely in fact.
A positive test does not actually mean that an active infection is present. As noted in a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and prevention publication on coronavirus and PCR testing dated July 13, 2020:
Detection of viral RNA may not indicate the presence of an infectious virus or that 2019-nCoV is the causative agent for clinical symptoms.
The performance of this test has not been established for monitoring the treatment of 2019-nCoV infection.
This test cannot rule out diseases caused by other bacterial or viral pathogens.
So, what does the PCR test tell us, actually?
From your nasal cavity, the PCR swab extracts RNA. The reverse transcription of this RNA into DNA is then completed. The genetic snippets, however, are so tiny that they must be amplified to become discernible. Each round of amplification is called a loop.
Amplification over 35 cycles is known to be inaccurate and technically unjustified, but 45 cycles are set for Drosten tests and tests recommended by the World Health Organization.
"What this does is enhance some even negligible sequences of viral DNA that might be present to the extent that even if the viral load is extremely low or the virus is inactive, the test reads "positive. You end up with a much higher number of positive tests as a result of these excessive cycle thresholds than you would otherwise have.
We've had concerns with defective and tainted samples as well. German researchers rapidly developed a PCR test for the virus as soon as the genetic sequence for SARS-CoV-2 became available in January 2020.
The New York Times announced in March 2020 that the initial test kits produced by the CDC had been found to be faulty. The Verge also stated that in turn, this defective CDC test became the basis for the WHO test, which the CDC eventually declined to use.
PCR Tests Cannot Detect Infection
Maybe most notably, inactive viruses and "live" or reproductive viruses can not be separated by PCR tests.
What that means is that infection can not be identified by PCR tests. It can't tell you whether you're sick at the moment, whether you're going to show symptoms in the near future, or whether you're infectious.
The tests may accumulate dead debris or inactive viral particles that do not pose any danger to the patient and others at all. What’s more, the test can pick up the presence of other coronaviruses, so a positive result may simply indicate that you’ve recuperated from a common cold in the past.
An "infection" is when a virus penetrates and replicates in a cell. Symptoms set in as the virus multiplies. A person is only contagious if the virus actually replicates. As long as the virus is inactive and not replicating, both the host and others are totally harmless.
Chances are, if you do not have symptoms, a positive test simply indicates that your body has detected inactive viral DNA. This will also suggest that you are not infectious and pose no threat to anyone.
A number of highly respected scientists around the world now believe, for all these reasons, that what we have is not a COVID-19 pandemic, but a PCR test pandemic. In his article 5, "Lies, Damned Lies and Health Statistics, The Deadly Danger of False Positives," on September 20, 2020, Yeadon explains why it is so troublesome to base our pandemic response on positive PCR tests.
In short, it seems like millions of individuals are actually found to be carrying inactive viral DNA that poses no danger to anyone and the global technocracy is using these test results to introduce a brand new economic and social structure focused on draconian surveillance and totalitarian controls.
“The test’s threshold is so high that it detects people with the live virus as well as those with a few genetic fragments left over from a past infection that no longer poses a risk. It’s like finding a hair in a room after a person left it, says Michael Mina, MD, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York, and Nevada, up to 90% of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The New York Times found...
'We’ve been using one type of data for everything, and that is just plus or minus — that’s all,’ Dr. Mina said. ‘We’re using that for clinical diagnostics, for public health, for policy decision-making.’
But ‘yes’ or ‘no’ isn’t good enough, he added. It’s the amount of virus that should dictate the infected patient’s next steps. ‘It’s really irresponsible, I think, to forgo the recognition that this is a quantitative issue,’ Dr. Mina said.”
Again, medical experts agree that any cycle threshold over 35 cycles makes the test too responsive, as it begins to pick up harmless inactive fragments of DNA at that point. Mina suggests 30 or less will be a more fair cutoff.
The CDC's own estimates indicate that it is highly impossible to detect live viruses in samples that have gone through more than 33 cycles, according to The New York Times, and studies reported in April 2020 concluded that patients with positive PCR tests with a cycle threshold above 33 were not infectious and could be released from the hospital or home isolation safely.
Importantly, when officials at the New York State Laboratory, the Wadsworth Center, reanalyzed research data at the request of The Times, they found that about 43 percent of the positive outcomes were removed by changing the threshold from 40 cycles to 35 cycles. A whopping 63% was removed by restricting it to 30 cycles. The Response to Vaccine adds:
“In Massachusetts, from 85 to 90% of people who tested positive in July with a cycle threshold of 40 would have been deemed negative if the threshold were 30 cycles, Dr. Mina said. ‘I would say that none of those people should be contact-traced, not one,’ he said.
‘I’m really shocked that it could be that high — the proportion of people with high CT value results,’ said Ashish Jha, MD, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. ‘Boy, does it really change the way we need to be thinking about testing’...
In late August, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first rapid coronavirus test that doesn’t need any special computer equipment. Made by Abbot Laboratories, the 15-minute test [BinaxNOW] will sell for U.S. $5 but still requires a nasal swab to be taken by a health worker.
The Abbot test is the fourth rapid point-of-care test that looks for the presence of antigens rather than the virus’s genetic code as the PCR molecular tests do.“
Massive Waste of Resources
As Dr. Tom Jefferson and Professor Carl Henegan noted in an article in the Daily Mail on October 31, 2020, 16 mass PCR research was a huge waste of resource, as it does not provide us with the data we really need to know-who is contagious, how far is the virus spreading and how quickly does it spread?
Instead for weeks and months on end, it has contributed to economic damage from company shutdowns and isolating non-infectious individuals in their homes. Jefferson and Henegan say that about a month ago, they discussed their pandemic response plan with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and just introduced it again to him. They write, "We encourage him to pay attention and accept it," adding:
“There are only two things about which we can be certain: first, that lockdowns do not work in the long term... The idea that a month of economic hardship will permit some sort of ‘reset’, allowing us a brighter future, is a myth. What, when it ends, do we think will happen? Meanwhile, ever-increasing restrictions will destroy lives and livelihoods.
The second certainty is this: that we need to find a way out of the mess that does no more damage than the virus itself... Our strategy would be to tackle the four key failings.”
Four areas where we are failing as a society area are:
Addressing the concerns in the mass testing program of the government
Addressing' the calamity of confused and unreliable figures'
Secure and isolate the weak, especially the elderly, but also general and staff hospitalized patients, while allowing the rest to retain "some semblance of normal life"
Inform the public of the real and quantifiable lockdown costs that "destroy individuals just as surely as COVID-19"
There is real hope if we do these things that we will learn to live with the virus. That, after all, was supposed to be the plan,” Jefferson and Henegan note. "As far as testing is concerned, the pair calls for a national quality management testing program to ensure that reports are reliable, precise, and consistent.
Importantly, on positive/negative readings alone, we must not rely on. To assess who potentially presents an infectious risk, the findings must be analyzed in relation to other variables, such as the subject's age and whether they are symptomatic. At the end of their Daily Mail post, you can check the full details of their proposed proposal.
Lockdown hazards have been kept out of the public debate
Jefferson and Henegan are not the only ones who illustrate the fact that more damage and devastation than the virus itself is caused by the global lockdown strategy. In an article in The Federalist on June 16, 2020, James Lucas, a New York City attorney, wrote:
“If we’re going to allow models and modelers to dictate the entire nature of our society, one would hope that the models are as complete as possible. Yet the epidemiological models that have so transformed our world are seriously incomplete, and therefore fundamentally inadequate.
Any medical therapy is supposed to be tested for both efficacy and safety. There have been several studies examining the effectiveness of the lockdowns in combating the spread of the COVID-19 virus, with mixed conclusions.
So far, however, none of these studies or models have analyzed the safety side of the lockdown therapy. In response to questions from physician Sens. Rand Paul and Bill Cassidy, Dr. Anthony Fauci admits this side of the equation has not been accounted for in the models now driving our world.
As noted in an open letter recently signed by more than 600 health-care professionals, the public health costs from the lockdowns — described as a ‘mass casualty incident’ are real and growing.
These models are estimations based on existing research. The constantly changing projections of coronavirus deaths are extrapolations from research on previous epidemics. Yet modelers have no excuse for leaving evaluations of the lockdowns’ massive costs to public health out of their models.”
The Hidden Costs of Lockdowns
How does public safety impact "lockdown therapy"? Lucas highlights the following in his article:
Research23 by the Veterans Department has shown that delaying cancer treatment by only one month has contributed to a 20 percent rise in mortality due to elevated chronic disease rates due to unemployment, poverty, and placing non-COVID medical care on hold. Research23 Another study showed that each one-month delay in the diagnosis of breast cancer increased mortality by 10%.
Rising rates of problems with mental health due to unemployment and isolation
Increased suicide death rates were correlated with a two-fold to three-fold greater relative suicide risk in one study. "A more recent report reports that "deaths of misery" are related to maybe around 75,000 lockdowns in the U.S.
Reduced collective life span is often associated with shorter, unhealthier lives with extended unemployment. A prolonged economic shutdown could shorten the lifetime of 6.4 million Americans entering the labor market by an average of around two years, Hannes Schwandt, a health economics researcher at Northwestern University, reports. Lucas notes:
“If epidemiologists don’t care to take account of this toll, another profession must. A study28 just released by a group of South African actuaries estimates that the net reduction in lifespan from increased unemployment and poverty due to a national lockdown will exceed the increased lifespan due to lives saved from COVID-19 by the lockdown by a factor of 30 to 1.
In other words, each year of additional life attributable to isolating potential coronavirus victims in the lockdown comes at a cost of 30 years lost due to the negative public health effects of a lockdown...”
Education shortages are also linked to significantly shorter life spans and poorer health. High school drop-outs die on average nine years earlier than college graduates, and poorer students are disproportionately impacted by school closings.
Who Pays the Most?
As Lucas pointed out, modelers must therefore decide "on whom those costs fall," in addition to estimating the total cost to society, since the costs are not met equally by everyone. Those who are also the most disadvantaged, both financially and health-wise, such as those living near the poverty line, the chronically poor, individuals with mental illness, and minorities in general, are disproportionately affected by the effects of the lockdowns.
“Contrary to the PR slogan, we are NOT all in this together,” Lucas writes. “We need less insipid pro-lockdown propaganda extolling the virtues of the ‘essential’ workers, and more serious analysis of the enormous public health toll the lockdowns are imposing on them. Otherwise, we may come to see the era of coronavirus as simply the time where pro-lockdown elites sacrificed the working class31 to protect themselves.”
A Pandemic of Fearmongering
An October 28, 2020, article featured by the Ron Paul Institute points out that:
“Ever since the alleged pandemic erupted this past March the mainstream media has spewed a non-stop stream of misinformation that appears to be laser focused on generating maximum fear among the citizenry.
But the facts and the science simply don’t support the grave picture painted of a deadly virus sweeping the land. Yes, we do have a pandemic, but it’ a pandemic of ginned up pseudo-science masquerading as unbiased fact.”
The article notes that nine facts that can be backed up with evidence paint a very different image of the fear and dread being continuously drummed into the minds of naive people. In addition to the fact that PCR testing is practically useless, for all the reasons already mentioned, these data-backed facts include:
1. "As Dr. Lee Merritt explained in her August 2020 Disaster Preparedness Doctors 33 lecture, featured in How Medical Technocracy Made the Plandemic Inevitable," media and public health authorities tend to have deliberately combined "cases" or positive tests with the actual disease. A positive test is NOT a "case.
Medically speaking, a' case' refers to a person who is ill. It never referred to anybody who had no signs of illness. This well-established medical phrase, "case," has now been totally and arbitrarily redefined, all of a sudden, to mean anyone who tested positive for viral RNA involvement. That is not epidemiology, as Merritt noted. It is a scam.
2. According to the CDC34 and other research data,35 the COVID-19 survival rate is over 99%, and the vast majority of deaths occur in those over 70, which is close to normal life expectancy.
3. Analysis by the CDC indicates that 85 percent of patients testing positive for COVID-19 "sometimes or "still" wore face masks in the two weeks preceding their positive test. As noted in the Ron Paul article,36 "The only reasonable conclusion from this research is that cloth face masks provide little to no defense against infection with Covid-19."
4. Examples involve numerous regimens involving hydroxychloroquine with zinc and antibiotics, quercetin-based protocols, the MATH+ protocol, and nebulized hydrogen peroxide, and there are affordable, proven effective therapies for COVID-19.
5. The death rate has not risen despite pandemic deaths — Data37,38 show the overall all-cause mortality has remained steady during 2020 and doesn’t veer from the norm. In other words, COVID-19 has not killed off more of the population than would have died in any given year anyway.
As noted in the Ron Paul article, “According to the CDC as of early May 2020 the total number of deaths in the US was 944,251 from January 1 — April 30th. This is actually slightly lower than the number of deaths during the same period in 2017 when 946,067 total deaths were reported.”
15,000 Doctors and Scientists Call for End to Lockdowns
All in all, there are many reasons to believe that continuing lockdowns, social distancing, and mask mandates are entirely needless and that the trajectory of this pandemic epidemic, or the final death count, will not change drastically.
And with regard to universal PCR testing where people, whether they have symptoms or not, are checked every two weeks or even more often, this is simply a futile endeavor that generates useless results. It’s just a tool to spread fear, which in turn allows for the rapid implementation of the totalitarian control mechanisms required to pull off The Great Reset. Fortunately, more and more individuals are beginning to see through this plot now.
The Great Barrington Declaration, which calls for the end of all lockdowns and the introduction of a herd immunity approach to the pandemic, has now been signed by around 45,000 scientists and doctors worldwide, meaning that governments should encourage individuals who are not at substantial risk of severe COVID-19 disease to return to normal life, as the lockdown strategy has a devastating impact on the population. The declaration states:
“Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health...
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to coronavirus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this focused protection.”
The declaration points out that current lockdown policies will result in excess mortality in the future, primarily among younger people and the working class. As of November 5, 2020, The Great Barrington Declaration had been signed by 11,791 medical and public health scientists, 33,903 medical practitioners, and 617,685 “concerned citizens.”
If people stopped getting tested for the virus, the positive case numbers would go down and the media would have less ammunition to fear-monger.
My genuine question to those of you that are getting tested: Why are you getting tested given that the tests are: 1) Incredibly inaccurate. 2) The government is keeping a database of 'positive' people.
There are some workplaces that require it, and schools/universities, of course! Lots of people, particularly students, don't have a choice. There are also hypochondriacs getting tested over and over, and anyone who blows off contact tracers is assumed to be positive.
What is scary to me is the number of states (New York being the largest and most recent) to mandate being tested for traveling. This horrific practice may be more of a freedom threat than masks. Not even lord Newsom and daddy Inslee or even Whitmer have mandated such garbage. First, it will be a few states, then all flights, then all travel. I think more resistance to this needs to happen.
I will not get tested unless they test me by force.
TV network CBS News has been accused by right-wing activist group Project Veritas of using a staged shot to exaggerate how bad the coronavirus pandemic has hit Michigan. Footage of a long line of cars, apparently waiting to get coronavirus tests at Cherry Medical Center in Grand Rapids, was used in a CBS This Morning series on testing in Michigan, which accused the state’s health system of “fail[ing] some of its people.” However, Project Veritas said the CBS News crew got hospital staff to line up in their cars so it looked busier. The claim is based on an interview with an anonymous hospital “insider” who approached Project Veritas with information on the CBS shoot, and other hospital staff who are named in the clip but appear to have been filmed covertly by the “insider” discussing the staged shot.
In a statement to Project Veritas, CBS News accused Cherry Health of adding staff to the queue without their knowledge, and said the Cherry Health portion of the report would be removed. CBS This Morning admitted last month that they mistakenly used footage of an overflowing Italian hospital ward in a report on New York hospitals.
These 3 companies are the single greatest threat to free speech!
NY Post is the 4th highest circulated news media and was censored!
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified at a virtual Senate hearing on whether the technology industry enables bad behavior. Ted Cruz grilled Big Tech CEOs over bias concerns; 'The Five' weigh-in.
Jack Dorsey perjured himself today lying about the NY Post being on Twitter regarding Hunter Biden.
"Mr. Dorsey, who the hell elected you and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report and what the American people are allowed to hear, and why do you persist in behaving as a Democratic super PAC silencing views to the contrary of your political beliefs?" Cruz asked.
Dorsey claimed that this was not the case. He also denied that Twitter has the ability to influence elections, a claim that Cruz derided as "absurd."
“You’re testifying to this committee right now that Twitter, when it silences people when it censors people when it blocks political speech, that has no impact on elections?”
“People have a choice of other communication channels,” Dorsey claimed.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, ripped into Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey during a hearing with tech titans on Wednesday, accusing him and his social media platform of improperly censoring reporting that reflected poorly on Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, asking at the point, "Who the hell elected you?"
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The exchange comes as Republicans over the last several weeks have decried Twitter's actions to lock the New York Post's Twitter account, and censor links to the outlet's stories, on Biden's son, Hunter, and his overseas business dealings.
Dorsey said this was due to a policy regarding hacked materials because the stories were based on emails from Hunter Biden's purported laptop. Cruz noted that a New York Times article about President Trump's tax returns did not face the same treatment, even though the materials appeared to be leaked illegally.
What @jack told the Senate, under oath, is false. I just tried to tweet the @nypost story alleging Biden’s CCP corruption.
In South Korea, 36 people have died of flu shots in 2020 and 65 people in 2019 & vaccines were only 29% effective.
At least 36 people have died after taking flu vaccinations since last Friday, including a 17-year-old. The average age of those who died was 74, according to the South Korean Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA).
As of Friday, more than 14 million people had gotten the flu vaccine, of which 9.4 million were children, elderly, and pregnant women, according to the KDCA. Ki Moran, a professor at South Korea's National Cancer Centre, said the flu vaccine is known to cause serious side effects in one out of 10 million people.
In 2019, 227,000 people over the age of 65 died in South Korea, she added. That's an average of 621 deaths a day, to put the recent figures into perspective. The KDCA decided on Friday not to suspend the flu vaccinations. The vaccination expert committee will hold a meeting Saturday morning to review additional data, according to a KDCA statement.
The KDCA's Friday meeting came after rising scrutiny from experts and politicians.
On Friday, South Korean Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun called for a thorough investigation into the deaths, citing public anxiety, according to a press release by the Health Ministry. He did not call for a halt to the vaccination campaign.
The Korean Medical Association, a coalition of 130,000 doctors, has urged the government to suspend the vaccination program for a week until they determined the cause of the deaths.
In a statement, the Korean Vaccine Society emphasized the importance of the flu vaccine, especially "for children, the elderly, and patients with chronic diseases and low immune system." The organization cited concerns about the possible spread of flu during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Experts globally are preparing for flu season in the middle of the pandemic. "This is a critical year for us to try to take flu as much off the table as we can," said Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in an interview with the AMA's JAMA Network.
One reason is to decrease the strain on public health services and hospitals, which are bracing for a winter wave. Experts say it possible to get Covid-19 and the flu simultaneously -- and, because flu symptoms look so similar to that of Covid-19, it will be impossible to rule out a coronavirus diagnosis without a test. That means a case of the flu can cause substantial disruption to work and school.
In South Korea, Covid-19 has infected 25,775 people and killed 457, according to Johns Hopkins University.
At least seven companies’ products were reportedly tied to the deaths, including France-based Sanofi and six domestic firms—SK Bioscience, Shinsung Pharm, Korea Vaccine, GC Pharma, Boryung Biopharma and LG Chem. Sanofi didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Back in September, before the deaths began, the KDCA temporarily halted its free national flu inoculation program, citing cold-chain problems. Turns out, a batch of Shinsung’s vaccines were left at room temperature during transportation when they should have been refrigerated. A recall followed, but some 2,300 doses had already been given, according to The New York Times. High temperatures would render a flu vaccine ineffective but not likely toxic.
Most of the deaths happened in elderly people, who are covered by the country’s free vaccination scheme. KDCA said Thursday that at least seven of the nine people it investigated had underlying health problems, according to Reuters.
Former Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski has confirmed that an email published in the New York Post's bombshell exposé is indeed genuine - something the Biden camp hasn't disputed, and that the "Big Guy" described in one of those emails is none other than Joe Biden himself. Bobulinski also says Joe Biden was lying when he said he and Hunter never discussed business dealings.
Bobulinski issued the statement late Wednesday, affirming that, contrary to Joe Biden's claims that he never discussed business dealings with Hunter, the former Veep actually profited from his son's dealings, which were undertaken with the full support of the Biden family. Hunter Biden’s ex-business partner told ‘don’t mention Joe’ in text message. Bobulinski claims cash and equity positions and 10% stakes in dealings were set aside for "the big guy," - aka Joe Biden
Here is Bobulinski's statement in full:
My name is Tony Bobulinski. The facts set forth below are true and accurate; they are not any form of domestic or foreign disinformation. Any suggestion to the contrary is false and offensive. I am the recipient of the email published seven days ago by the New York Post which showed a copy to Hunter Biden and Rob Walker. That email is genuine.
This afternoon I received a request from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs and the Senate Committee on Finance requesting all documents relating to my business affairs with the Biden family as well as various foreign entities and individuals. I have extensive relevant records and communications and I intend to produce those items for both Committees in the immediate future.
I am the grandson of a 37 year Army Intelligence officer, the son of a 20+ year career Naval Officer and the brother of a 28-year career Naval Flight Officer. I myself served our country for 4 years and left the Navy as LT Bobulinski. I held a high-level security clearance and was an instructor and then CTO for Naval Nuclear Power Training Command. I take great pride in the time my family and I served this country. I am also not a political person. What few campaign contributions I have made in my life were to Democrats.
If the media and big tech companies had done their jobs over the past several weeks I would be irrelevant in this story. Given my long-standing service and devotion to this great country, I could no longer allow my family’s name to be associated or tied to Russian disinformation or implied lies and false narratives dominating the media right now.
After leaving the military I became an institutional investor investing extensively around the world and on every continent. I have traveled to over 50 countries. I believe, hands down, we live in the greatest country in the world.
What I am outlining is fact. I know it is fact because I lived it. I am the CEO of Sinohawk Holdings which was a partnership between the Chinese operating through CEFC/Chairman Ye and the Biden family. I was brought into the company to be the CEO by James Gilliar and Hunter Biden. The reference to “the Big Guy” in the much publicized May 13, 2017 email is in fact a reference to Joe Biden. The other “JB” referenced in that email is Jim Biden, Joe’s brother.
Hunter Biden called his dad ‘the Big Guy’ or ‘my Chairman,’ and frequently referenced asking him for his sign-off or advice on various potential deals that we were discussing. I’ve seen Vice President Biden saying he never talked to Hunter about his business. I’ve seen firsthand that that’s not true, because it wasn’t just Hunter’s business, they said they were putting the Biden family name and its legacy on the line.
I realized the Chinese were not really focused on a healthy financial ROI. They were looking at this as a political or influence investment. Once I realized that Hunter wanted to use the company as his personal piggy bank by just taking money out of it as soon as it came from the Chinese, I took steps to prevent that from happening.
The Johnson Report connected some dots in a way that shocked me — it made me realize the Bidens had gone behind my back and gotten paid millions of dollars by the Chinese, even though they told me they hadn’t and wouldn’t do that to their partners.
I would ask the Biden family to address the American people and outline the facts so I can go back to being irrelevant — and so I am not put in a position to have to answer those questions for them.
I don’t have a political ax to grind; I just saw behind the Biden curtain and I grew concerned with what I saw. The Biden family aggressively leveraged the Biden family name to make millions of dollars from foreign entities even though some were from communist-controlled China.
God Bless America!!!!
An e-mail to Hunter Biden's partner from a top Chinese official on July 26, 2017 shows the Chinese energy company CEFC proposed a $5 million "interest-free" loan to the Biden family "based on their trust on [Biden] family[.]"
It will take 270 electoral votes to win the 2020 presidential election. Click states on this interactive map to create your own 2020 election forecast. Create a specific match-up by clicking the party and/or names near the electoral vote counter. Use the buttons below the map to share your forecast or embed it into a web page.
Trump won the presidency in 2016 despite Clinton receiving almost 3m more votes, all because of the electoral college. How does the system work? Were all of the votes legitimate? Not likely with all the election voting fraud coming out recently.
In 2016, Trump gained a quarter of his electoral votes from just 191,000 votes in the closest four states.
“At the moment, the electoral college favors Republicans because of the way Republican voters are distributed across the country. They are more likely to occur in states that are closely divided between the parties.”
Under the winner-take-all system, the margin of victory in a state becomes irrelevant. In 2016, Clinton’s substantial margins in states such as California and New York failed to earn her enough electoral votes, while close races in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Michigan took Trump over the 270 majority.
The Senate Judiciary Committee will vote to subpoena Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey next week to testify on allegations the company is stifling conservative viewpoints. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is leading the fight. He says Twitter blocked him from sharing a New York Post article about Hunter Biden.
The article alleged Hunter Biden introduced his dad, Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden, to Ukrainian officials. But Cruz says no one could share it on social media. “Suddenly Jack Dorsey and a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires are deciding that no criticism, no allegations, no evidence of corruption concerning Joe Biden are permissible,” Cruz said. “That is blatant election interference.”
“Facebook and Twitter have policies to not spread things that are utterly unreliable,” Coons said.
Jack Dorsey CEO announced Twitter changed its policy Friday morning said in a tweet, “Straight blocking of URLs was wrong.” This was likely pressure for lawsuits threatened.
White House Chief Of Staff Warns Of Potential Lawsuit Against Tech Giants. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on Monday suggested that the Trump administration would bring a lawsuit against the social media companies that have recently restricted and blocked news reports about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on Monday suggested that the Trump administration would bring a lawsuit against the social media companies that have recently restricted and blocked news reports about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
In an interview on “Fox & Friends,” Meadows said that the online platforms try to censor conservatives and suggested that if the story about Joe and Hunter Biden was about President Donald Trump and his family, tech companies would have not blocked the story.
The Chief of Staff’s comments come in the wake of a report by the New York Post alleging to have obtained emails from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. Many Democrats have claimed the story is an effort to discredit Joe Biden and an attempt by Russia to help elect Trump. So far, neither of the Bidens have denied the authenticity of the emails.
The threat of a lawsuit was also prompted by the actions Twitter took to lock Trump’s reelection campaign account last Thursday for trying to share the New York Post story.
Meadows said he has not received any intelligence suggesting that the Russians were involved in the emails being extracted from Hunter Biden’s laptop as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has alleged.
NEW — U.S. Senator Josh Hawley has formally requested @Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and @Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to appear before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism in a coming hearing titled "Digital Platforms and Election Interference.” pic.twitter.com/VlXBo17bX0
— Senator Hawley Press Office (@SenHawleyPress) October 15, 2020
