Category: Science

‘Science’ Fact-Checks Biden Agenda: FDA Nixes Pfizer COVID-19 Booster Vax

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There is a huge backstory to what the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did Friday, but first the basic news:

A Food and Drug Administration (FDA) panel voted Friday afternoon to reject a plan to provide Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus booster vaccines for most Americans, due to a lack of data showing that the additional doses are safe and effective. However, the agency’s advisory committee said it may still approve the shots for older individuals.
The panel opposed the proposal by a vote of 16-12.
“I don’t think a booster dose is going to significantly contribute to controlling the pandemic,” Dr. Cody Meissner, Tufts University professor, said as panel members debate the requirement for a booster shot. “And I think it’s important that the main message we transmit is that we’ve got to get everyone two doses.”
“At this moment it is clear that the unvaccinated are driving transmission in the United States,” added Dr. Amanda Cohn of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Booster shots by Pfizer or Moderna have already been greenlighted for Americans who are immunocompromised.
The FDA panel’s overwhelming rejection came despite full-throated arguments about the need for boosters from both Pfizer and health officials from Israel, which began offering boosters to its citizens in July.

Pfizer is a multibillion-dollar enterprise and, like other companies marketing COVID-19 vaccines, they stand to profit handsomely from Biden’s plan to make vaccination mandatory. Guess what? Pfizer spends a lot of money on political contributions, ranking in the Top 200 of donors in the 2020 cycle, with more than $4 million in contributions, not to mention spending another $11 million on lobbying activity. Joe Biden repeatedly claimed that his COVID-19 policy would be based on science, but big money and political “optics” are clearly a factor. Last month, while Afghanistan was collapsing in chaos, Biden started talking up the idea of COVID-19 booster vaccinations, and two members of the FDA panel resigned in protest against the political pressure:

Joe Biden has said he would “follow the science” on coronavirus policy, but two Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials have just resigned in protest against what they claim is political pressure to push coronavirus booster shots.
According to Politico, the two top FDA vaccine regulators — Marion Gruber and Philip Krause — resigned from the agency over what they see as “uncomfortable similarities between the Biden team’s top-down booster plan and former President Donald Trump’s attempts to goad FDA into accelerating its initial authorization process for Covid-19 vaccines and push through unproven virus treatments.” . . .
In fact, as many as 11 current and former FDA officials told Politico that they have grown frustrated with the administration’s “disjointed process” regarding the booster shots. . . .
In August, the HHS released a joint statement with medical health officials announcing the release of coronavirus booster shots by September 20, but senior health officials told Politico that “political appointees within the White House largely steered” the statement instead of the FDA and other medical professionals.
“The tension within the administration plus open skepticism from outside experts has fueled finger-pointing and divisions among health agencies,” according to Politico. “Career scientists, in particular, have been confused and surprised by the process, multiple people involved in the talks said.”
FDA officials were also confused over the fact that Biden abruptly shifted from suggesting that boosters be recommended 8 months after the first shots to 5 months after the first shots. His suggestion allegedly came “after a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.”

About two-thirds of American adults (myself included) are fully vaccinated, and most of the unvaccinated people are just against it, period. So that means the end of Big Pharma’s government-funded vaccine profit bonanza is approaching quite soon. That’s the real reason (not “the science”) why the Biden administration is now trying to make vaccination mandatory, and also why they were trying to get booster shots approved. Big money is involved, see? And there’s also the narrative factor — Biden wants to be able to take credit as the Hero Who Defeated the Killer Virus, and he’s also desperate to distract from his debacle in Afghanistan and the mess he’s made on the U.S.-Mexico border.

That’s why Biden was ready to spend the next few weeks urging people who were already fully vaccinated to get booster shots, which would give him further opportunities to demonize Republicans (especially including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis) as being enemies of “science.” And it would’ve worked, too, if it weren’t for those damned FDA people!

Live by “the science,” die by “the science.”




 

Mask Fetishists Mourn End of an Era

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Joe Biden was having a terrible week and, I suspect, James Carville must have advised the White House that it was a bad look for them to be insisting that people keep wearing masks even after they’d been vaccinated against COVID-19. Also, what else could explain why the American Federation of Teachers — the radical union that had been dictating Democratic Party policy on whether schools should re-open — suddenly reversed its position and embraced re-opening plans?

Someone (and, as I say, I strongly suspect it was Carville) must have penetrated the MSNBC/CNN groupthink bubble surrounding Biden and said, “Hey, man, you’re looking like a big loser here.”

At any rate, with Israel under attack, the jobs report sending “stagflation” signals, and the Colonial Pipeline shut down, the Biden administration decided that, contrary to its earlier position, mandatory mask-wearing is now over. And liberals immediately mourned this news.

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said Thursday she would need to “rewire” herself to no longer look at unmasked people as a “threat” in response to relaxed federal guidelines for vaccinated persons.
Following months of criticism, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Thursday that vaccinated people could ditch masks in nearly all circumstances. While met with relief and calls like “it’s about damn time” from Republicans like Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, some liberal figures fretted about the sudden shift.
“I feel like I’m going to have to rewire myself so that when I see someone out in the world who’s not wearing a mask, I don’t instantly think, ‘You are a threat,’” Maddow said. “Or you are selfish or you are a Covid denier and you definitely haven’t been vaccinated. I mean, we’re going to have to rewire the way that we look at each other.”

You see? You’re selfish and ignorant, and so wearing masks was, for liberals, a symbol of their own power to force other people to comply.

Honestly, I was never one of those anti-mask rebels. Because I work from home anyway, the only time mask requirements affected me was when I had to go to the store or out to eat at a restaurant. Is it annoying and uncomfortable? Sure, but I understood that store clerks are exposed to hundreds of customers every day, so that if having customers wear masks reduced the risk of contagion even marginally, then mask mandates would help ensure that stores remained open for business.

It was the government-ordered lockdowns of “non-essential” businesses that caused the real economic damage, whereas mask requirements were merely bothersome and yet, to a certain type of liberal, wearing masks was a ritual of political symbolism. They knew that lots of people hated wearing masks, and that there was not a lot of scientific evidence in support of masks as a disease-prevention measure. However, symbolic obedience was the real value of mask mandates. Liberals derived from this the thrill of seeing everyone forced to comply with their demands, and ending mask mandates deprives them of that source of pleasure.

Why would anyone vote to be governed by liberals? I mean, you might not like Tucker Carlson, but he’s not afflicted by the kind of sadomasochistic urges that inspire Rachel Maddow, et al.




 

Of Course, Evolution Is Racist

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Our friends at Breitbart are having a point-and-laugh carnival about the fact that England’s Sheffield University has made Charles Darwin the latest historical figure to be “cancelled” because, it is alleged, his theory of evolution was used to “justify white male supremacy.”

While we may enjoy the fun — “Hahaha! Crazy academic radicals!” — I must soberly remark that the wokies may be onto something here.

What are the logical implications of Darwin’s theory?

The most obvious inferences one must deduce from evolutionary theory is that there is no God and the Bible is not true. And this is why every atheist claims to be a devotee of Science with a capital S.

What Darwin proclaimed was that the origins of the world (and all life in the world, including human life) were the result of random coincidence, rather than the creation of God: “Fiat lux.”

This first logical implication of evolutionary theory leads to a second: There is no divine Law, no transcendent Truth, no discernible moral order in human life, no fixed standard of right and wrong.

In a world where there is no such thing as sin, where there is no fear of eternal punishment for wickedness, then everything in human life ultimately must be a struggle for power, as Nietzsche foresaw.

The philosophical path from Darwin to Nietzsche is entirely logical, if one accepts the Darwinian premise of a godless world, a random cosmic accident without divine law. Human life has no inherent value — no meaning or purpose — in the Darwinian scheme of things, and if one accepts this as true, the Nietzschean “will to power” must rule.

That such beliefs led directly to the totalitarian nightmares of the 20th century is certainly no accident, nor was it accidental that the Jews — whose scriptures formed the basis for worship of the Creator as the norm in Western culture — were chief among the victims.

If you are inclined to theological contemplation, it is difficult to ignore the significance of what happened in the 20th century as a consequence of atheistic philosophies based on belief in Darwinian evolution as Science with a capital S. Of course, Darwinism is racist, regardless of whether Darwin himself intended it to be so (he didn’t). However, many evils in this world happen that way — well-meaning intellectuals promote ideas that they believe will be beneficial to mankind, but which lead to the most dreadful results. “Be not deceived; God is not mocked.”

God rules the universe, all men will be judged by Him, and “there is no respect of persons with God.” The high and the low, the rich and the poor, men of every race and tongue — all shall acknowledge God’s authority at the final day. Never doubt that for a minute. Selah.




 

‘15 Days to Slow the Spread’

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Yes, today is a memorable anniversary. Jim Geraghty reminds us:

On Monday, March 16, 2020, the White House advised all Americans to avoid gathering in groups of more than ten and urged older people to stay at home in a set of new guidelines designed to fight the coronavirus outbreak, labeling the effort “15 Days to Slow the Spread.”
That set of restrictions later was summarized as “two weeks to flatten the curve,” a slogan that grew more bitterly ironic as the pandemic and its quarantine restrictions dragged on and on — now for more than a year. That call for a voluntary avoidance of large groups quickly morphed into far-reaching restrictions upon the most basic rights and normal activities of American citizens: Forty-three governors issued orders directing residents to stay at home and nonessential businesses to close.

Read the whole thing. I was perfectly OK with 15 days, and it didn’t really bother me much when they extended that another month. After six weeks, though, I was like, “Let’s get back to business.”

Ah, but the “experts” (and the fear-stricken women who love to have “experts” tell them what to believe) wouldn’t let us get back to business. With a full year of data now available, what do we know?

LOCKDOWNS DON’T WORK!

If lockdowns were effective as disease prevention, the COVID-19 death rate in New York would be lower than Florida’s. Instead, Florida has been wide open for months — and mostly healthy — while New York is still locked down and Andrew Cuomo killed your granny. What happened is that everybody forgot the original rationale of “15 days to slow the spread,” i.e., governments, hospitals and medical personnel needed time to acquire the protective equipment (masks, etc.) to deal with this pandemic, and there were fears that a “surge” of patients would overwhelm hospitals, especially in terms of ICUs.

By instituting a preventive quarantine for a few weeks, we were buying time to “flatten the curve,” to prevent that drastic spike of cases that would flood hospitals with critical cases. That policy actually worked — with a few localized exceptions, our hospitals were never beyond capacity, and the dreaded ventilator shortage never happened.

What lockdowns could never do, however, was to completely eliminate risk of contagion, which is what the “Karen” mob of mask Nazis expect.

Do you see the difference between “slowing the spread” (the original goal) and eliminating risk altogether? One was feasible — and in fact, we did it — but the other is irrational, and especially so once (a) effective treatment protocols were developed, (b) widespread testing was available and (c) we discovered that almost no one under age 70 died from COVID-19.

But the fear-stricken women craved perfect safety:

The general lockdowns were never about protecting the general public.
They were only about protecting Karen.

All policies oriented toward the emotional needs of such people are bad.

How strange it is that the same dimwit women who demand the government shut down everything to protect them from germs are also generally in favor of open borders and “criminal justice reform.”




 

Why Isn’t Manhattan Underwater Yet?

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Nearly five years ago — it was September 2016 — New York magazine featured the above article, illustrated by a “speculative rendering showing what a hundred-year storm could briefly do to the Meatpacking District decades from now, when sea levels have risen several feet.”

“Global warming” alarmists have learned to place their dire predictions decades into the future, so that the failure of events to match their predictions cannot be easily demonstrated. Indeed, they have quietly changed the name of the catastrophic scenario from “global warming” to “climate change,” so that any unusual weather event — including blizzards and record-setting cold waves — can be cited as “proof.”

The problem they experience, however, is that they’ve been warning us that the sky is falling for decades now, so that even their long-term predictions can now be demonstrated to be false.

John Nolte quotes a New York Times article warning that a “continuing rise in average global sea level” means that “most of the beaches on the East Coast of the United States would be gone in 25 years.”

That was published in 1995 — 26 years ago. Oops.

Turn on the TV. It’s spring break. Kids seem to be having lots of fun at those East Coast beaches we were told would be gone by now.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)




 

Yes, China Caused This Pandemic

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Everybody knows this, but you’re not supposed to say it:

A new study from renowned University of Hamburg researcher Roland Wiesendanger concludes the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the “cause” of COVID-19.
The February study argues against two prevailing theories that COVID-19 was transmitted to humans either via a wet market or a lab accident.
“To date, there is no scientifically based rigorous evidence for either mentioned theories,” Wiesendanger, a three-time recipient of the prestigious European Research Council grant.
Wiesendanger’s 105-page report continues, asking: “is the current global crisis actually the result of a coincidence in nature — a coincidental mutation of a coronavirus a bat with the assistance of an intermediate host — or the result of a Scientist carelessness when carrying out the project is high-risk research with global pandemic potential?”
To answer the question, Wiesendanger cites 600 incontrovertible facts to bolster his theory that “the number and the quality of evidence clearly indicate a laboratory accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
A summary of the report outlines the primary arguments in favor of Wiesendanger’s case, emphasizing the fact that the host has still not been identified; the virus can “couple surprisingly well to human cell receptors”; The Wuhan lab “carried out genetic manipulations on coronaviruses for many years with the aim of making them more contagious, dangerous and deadly for humans”; and that there were “significant safety deficiencies” at the facility . . .

Read the whole thing. What we are looking at is this result of a Chinese experiment in developing a biological warfare weapon. Wiesendanger believes evidence indicates that the COVID-19 virus escaped the Wuhan lab as the result of carelessness by the lab’s staff. That is to say, China did not cause the pandemic intentionally, even though the virus was developed for malign purposes. You don’t manipulate a virus to make it more contagious and deadly just for the theoretical scientific value, eh?

(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)




 

COVID-19 Update

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For the past few months, I’ve been ignoring the news about COVID-19 because who cares? Once we got over the original lockdown hysteria — first two weeks to “slow the spread,” then another month to “flatten the curve” — the pandemic ceased to be newsworthy. Medical science developed effective therapeutic regimes that substantially lowered the death rate, and death rates are the only statistic that really counts.

The number of COVID-19 deaths reported daily in the U.S. peaked six months ago, on April 21, at 2,742 daily. There was a belated summer uptick, which peaked at 1,851 deaths on July 30, and since then the toll has gradually but steadily declined. During the week of Sept. 14-20, the average daily death total was 782; during the most recent week, Oct. 12-18, the average was 725 deaths daily, a 7.3% decline in about a month, and about 30% lower than in the first week of August.

This is unmistakably good news, but the media keeps fear-mongering about “surges” and “outbreaks” based on the number of reported new cases. But they’re counting every positive test as a “case,” without regard for whether the person testing positive has any symptoms at all, much less whether they require hospitalization. If someone tests positive for the coronavirus, yet has only mild symptoms that don’t even require a doctor’s visit, why are such “cases” presented as evidence of an impending crisis? Yet that’s what the media is doing.

‘Hunker down’: The fall Covid-19 surge is here
— CNN, Oct. 13

The Third Coronavirus Surge Has Arrived
— The Atlantic, Oct. 15

Rural Midwest hospitals struggling
to handle coronavirus surge: “It just exploded”
— CBS News, Oct. 19

You see the theme here. Just in time for the home stretch of the presidential election campaign, the dreaded surge has arrived. And while there has, indeed, been a remarkable increase in the number of new cases reported, this has not been reflected in an upward trend in the number of coronavirus deaths — as I say, the past week’s death numbers were 7.3. percent down from a month ago, and nearly a third lower than in August. What is likely being reported as a “surge” is a pattern of outbreaks among school-age children, but since anyone under 60 has a 99.9% survival rate from COVID-19, this “surge” likely won’t result in any substantial increase in deaths. A nationwide crisis, it ain’t.

You know who is having a COVID-19 crisis? Belgium:

Belgium could soon be overwhelmed by new coronavirus infections, the health minister has warned, amid soaring case numbers across the country.
Frank Vandenbroucke said new cases were close to a “tsunami” where authorities “no longer control what is happening”.
New measures to try to halt the spread came into force on Monday. All bars and restaurants are closed for four weeks.
Infection numbers are climbing throughout Europe, prompting new restrictions across the continent. . . .
Belgium was one of the worst-hit countries during Europe’s first wave of coronavirus earlier this year.
Overall it has the third-highest number of Covid-related deaths per 100,000 people globally, behind only Peru and San Marino, according to Johns Hopkins University data. . . .
According to the Belgian health institute Sciensano, Belgium has recorded an average of 7,876 new daily infections over the last seven days, a 79% rise on the previous week. Last Tuesday the country reported 12,051 cases in 24 hours, its highest daily figure since the pandemic began.
Hospitalisations have also risen, with 2,485 people in hospital with Covid-19 on Monday. Officials warn that if cases continue to rise at the same rate, Belgium will fill its capacity of 2,000 intensive care beds by mid-November.
“The situation is serious,” Prime Minister Alexander De Croo told RTL. “It is worse than on March 18 when the lockdown was decided.”

Compare Belgium to Florida. Remember when Gov. Ron DeSantis ended the lockdowns and everybody thought Florida was headed for disaster?

Nope. Didn’t happen. Still not happening.

While Belgium (population 11.5 million) was reporting nearly 8,000 new cases daily last week, Florida (population 21.5 million) was reporting a little over 2,900 cases daily for the week of Oct. 12-18. With a population nearly twice as large as Belgium’s, in other words, Florida’s average daily new case number was about 63% lower. The state’s daily death totals have decreased more than 50% during the past two months.




 

‘Climate Scientist Explains …’

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When I was in school, back in Ye Olde Ancient Tymes, we were taught that skepticism was necessary to science. That is to say, our teachers emphasized the distance between theory and proof, teaching an experimental approach to the scientific method — trial and error, etc.

During the past several decades, however, the emphasis on skepticism and logical processes of research has apparently been abandoned, largely because education bureaucrats were determined to eradicate Christianity from the classroom. Bible believers kept raising doubts about the scientific basis of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, and so it was that indoctrinating students to accept evolution as proven fact — no skepticism permitted — became a core goal of curriculum and pedagogy. Having purged from the classroom any criticism of Darwinian theory, these education bureaucrats thereby paved the way for the promulgation of other official dogmas, including “climate change,” i.e., anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Not long after skepticism of AGW was declared heretical — “The science is settled!” — a new official dogma was introduced to the curriculum; now anyone who dissents from Third Wave Gender Theory is denounced as a transphobic bigot who is anti-science.

You can ask Colin Wright about this. He is an accredited evolutionary biologist, who has been mocking Christian creationists since he was a teenager. After he got his Ph.D., however, Dr. Wright became increasingly irritated by dogmatic Gender Theory proponents. As a result of his criticism, Dr. Wright became persona non grata in academia, and has been smeared as a “racist,” to boot. The science is settled!

God moves in mysterious ways, and has a profound sense of irony, too.

So this morning, I received an email promoting the work of another scientist, Dr. Peter Langdon Ward (Dartmouth College, BA 1965, and Columbia University, MA, 1967, PhD 1970), who spent many years working for the U.S. Geological Survey, and who could be called a dissenter from the AWG “consensus”:

In a 2009 paper, Ward suggested that “large volumes of SO2 [sulfur dioxide] erupted frequently appear to overdrive the oxidizing capacity of the atmosphere resulting in very rapid warming.” In addition, he noted that sulfur dioxide is a strong absorber of visible light. He proposed that the rapid increase in global warming during the 20th century was caused by these mechanisms as a result of the rapid increase in sulfur dioxide emitted by the burning fossil fuels. Since 2009 Ward has been arguing that Climate Change is caused by ozone depletion and not human-derived CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions, a hypothesis that is not supported by referred literature.

Dr. Langdon’s speciality is volcanos and earthquakes, and his theory (at least as I understand it, as a mere amateur) is that the impact of volcanic eruptions on the atmosphere has been underestimated by those fixated on carbon dioxide emissions. You see that Dr. Langdon’s scientific expertise, however, has had no impact on the “consensus,” because anyone who criticizes the official dogma is ostracized as a heretic.

Anyway, the email I got this morning:

ONCE UPON A TIME ALL HUMANS
HAD DARK SKIN
Climate Scientist Explains Global
Variables to Evolving Skin Color
Since the mid-18th century, skin color has been the single most important physical trait used to define human groups, including variously named varieties, races, subspecies, and species.
Humans are a colorful species, yet all modern humans share a common ancestor who lived around 200,000 years ago in Africa. Once upon a time, all humans had dark skin. Variations in human skin color we know today are adaptive traits that correlate closely with geography and the sun’s ultraviolet (UV) radiation.
“For thousands of years, human skin was the sole interface between our bodies and the environment,” says Dr. Peter L. Ward, 27-year veteran of the U. S. Geological Survey.
Human skin evolved to absorb just enough ultraviolet-B radiation long before clothes were available. The dosage of ultraviolet-B radiation reaching human skin is greatest in the tropics, least around the poles, and varies with climate change.
Around 1.2 million years ago, in response to climate change killing trees, hominins moved out of tropical rain forests into sunny savannas where they lost body hair, evolved more efficient perspiration, and evolved short, curly, Afro-textured hair to protect the thermosensitive brain from bright sunshine. The loss of body hair led to heritable increases in melanin, a pigment that blackens the skin and darkens the eyes of people living in intense sunlight in equatorial regions.
Our species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa and were originally dark skinned. As humans migrated out of equatorial Africa to higher latitudes, where sunshine is less intense, they evolved over hundreds of generations lower levels of melanin, leading to lighter skin and lighter eye color so that they could absorb adequate ultraviolet-B radiation to have healthy levels of vitamin D. Humans evolved straighter hair that provided increased warmth. Eskimos in the Arctic kept dark skin perhaps because of nearly 24-hour sunlight half the year and because they absorb large amounts of vitamin D from their diet primarily of fish, seals and other animals.
“Thus, the existence, health, and even skin color of humans living on Earth is determined by having just the right Goldilocks balance between how much solar ultraviolet-B radiation is absorbed by the ozone layer versus how much reaches Earth’s surface.” says Dr. Ward.

Very interesting, as a theory.

My early education in scientific skepticism requires me to point out that, however much evidence there is for humans originating “1.2 million years ago” in “tropical rain forests,” this is nevertheless a speculative theory, rather than a fact proven by science. My own belief — and it is merely a belief, which I cannot prove — is that human life began approximately 10,000 years ago. Thus, the racial differences among mankind are of rather recent origin and, as best as I can determine from the Bible, originated with Noah’s sons Shem, Ham and Japheth.

Of course, it is impossible to prove my belief, but my observation of human differences (one of my five grandchildren is playing with his toys about 10 feet from my desk as I write this) suggests that if, like Noah, you had three sons married to three daughters-in-law, there might be tremendous variation in the appearances of your grandchildren. If these three families of your descendants went their separate ways — Noah’s sons repopulated the entire earth — it strikes me that within a few hundred years there might be remarkable differences between your remote descendants. Whatever the evidence may be for Dr. Ward’s assertion that “all modern humans share a common ancestor who lived around 200,000 years ago in Africa,” I do not believe that such a lengthy amount of time was necessary for the “evolution” of racial differences.

Well, I suppose we must agree to disagree on this topic, but I must insist on pointing out the dangers inherent in the demand for a scientific “consensus” in areas of inquiry where our knowledge is imperfect. Totalitarian regimes in the 20th century sought to impose an “official” view of science, which led to Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union and to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. We should hope that old-fashioned skepticism and intellectual freedom can make a comeback.