Note by Algora: As the UK goes so goes the US, and as the US goes so goes the rest of the West. This signals the official end of the Scamdemic.
By Lily Zhou of the Epoch Times
Restrictions including COVID-19 passes, mask mandates, and work-from-home requirements will be removed in England, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on Wednesday. Johnson also suggested that self-isolation rules may also be thrown out at the end of March as the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic becomes endemic.
Effective immediately, the UK government is no longer asking people to work from home. The COVID pass mandate for nightclubs and large events won’t be renewed when it expires on Jan. 26. And from Thursday, indoor mask-wearing will no longer be compulsory anywhere in England.
The requirement for secondary school pupils to wear masks during class and in communal areas will also be removed from the Department for Education’s national guidance.
Roaring cheers from lawmakers could be heard in the House of Commons following Johnson’s announcements on masks.
People who test positive for COVID-19 and their unvaccinated contacts are still required to self-isolate, but Johnson said he “very much expect[s] not to renew” the rule when the relevant regulations expire on March 24.
“As COVID becomes endemic, we will need to replace legal requirements with advice and guidance, urging people with the virus to be careful and considerate of others,” the prime minister said.
Asked to remove testing rules for vaccinated UK-bound travellers, Johnson said the government is reviewing the testing arrangements on travel and that an announcement can be expected in the coming days.
But he refused to reconsider the vaccination mandate for frontline health care workers, insisting “the evidence is clear that health care professionals should get vaccinated.”
Johnson told MPs that the Cabinet decided to remove its so-called “Plan B” measures on Wednesday morning as data suggest the Omicron wave has peaked nationally, and he attributed stabilising hospital admission numbers to “the extraordinary booster campaign” and the public’s compliance to the restriction measures.
The removal of the “Plan B” measures against the CCP virus came as the prime minister battles increasing pressure calling for him to resign over alleged lockdown-breaching parties in Number 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s official residence, during the pandemic.
It also came after Number 10 received a petition on Monday signed by more than 200,000 people, calling for an end to vaccine passports and similar COVID certifications.
A separate petition calling on the reversal of vaccine mandates for health care workers, which was also delivered to Number 10 on Monday, received about 160,000 signatures.
Governments in Scotland and Wales have also announced the removal of Omicron curbs, but mandatory indoor mask-wearing and COVID passes will remain in place.
University of London professor Angus Dalgleish, who co-authored a paper in summer 2020 after spotting “unique fingerprints” in Covid-19 samples that point to genetic manipulation, says that he’s been the victim of a “disgusting whitewash,” and that anyone suggesting a non-natural origin for Covid-19 has been silenced by peers.
“This goes back to the days of Copernicus and Galileo – it is the death of science,” said the oncologist – who in 1984 discovered how HIV enters and kills cells.
Dalgleish’s work was roundly rejected by a string of journalists before it was eventually published in a ‘watered-down form,’ according to the Express.
In February 2020, the Lancet had published a letter that “strongly condemned conspiracy theories” suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin. This highly influential letter – subsequently cited in thousands of scientific publications – was signed by 27 experts including Wellcome Trust head and former Sage member Sir Jeremy Farrar.
However, it has since emerged that two weeks before the letter was published, Sir Jeremy stated in private emails that some senior scientists believed a ‘likely explanation’ was that the virus was man-made. -Express
Indeed, Farrar led a February 1, 2020 teleconference (one day after Farrar emailed Anthony Fauci about a Zero Hedge article suggesting Covid may have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology) – in which one virologist was “80 percent sure this thing had come out of a lab,” with others sharing his view.
Dalgleish is the author of a book on Covid which claims the virus has “no credible natural ancestor.” He says his team found amino acids within the Covid-19 spike protein with a positive charge – allowing the virus to cling to negative parts of the body.
But it was highly unusual to find so many positive charges in a row because they also repel each other, he said.
“We realised when they released the sequence of the virus it broke the laws of physics for a natural virus meaning it was genetically modified.
“At the time my position was supported by Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6 who now chairs the University of London board of trustees.”
However, when they tried to publish their work they were turned down by numerous papers, including the Lancet.
“My paper was rejected within five hours”, he said. “Normally it takes three weeks before it is even peer reviewed.” -Express
According to Dalgleish, “It was a political decision for this to be suppressed,” adding that after the paper was released, “I was ostracised. I was fearful – really frightened at the way I was being treated.”
“I was told I was not an expert on coronavirus’ and should just shut up. People tried to push us away. We were told our theory had no rationale and it was a conspiracy theory. I am so angry about this. I have more virus papers cited than most virology experts and they tried to push me aside.
“They did not even look at the science. It was obvious it was a gain of function escape from a lab and I say escape, but that is generous. We had this data in late February after the sequences were released.
“This has been a whitewash. This whole thing has killed science. Science is meant to look at evidence. It is truly unbelievable.”
According to Jacques van Helden, a bioinformatics professor at Aix-Marseille University in France, Peter Daszak’s February 2020 Lancet letter effectively shut down debate over the origins of Covid-19.
“By labelling anyone with different views a conspiracy theorist, the Lancet letter was the worst form of bullying in full contravention of the scientific method,” said van Helden,” adding “To say that something has leaked from a lab does not make it a conspiracy theory.”
“Why was that letter signed by so many people? Why can’t we discuss this issue in a scientific journal? I do not want to have to resort to an open exchange on Twitter.”
Its recent withdrawal from Afghanistan was only the latest in a string of moves from the U.S. that served to reduce its influence in the Middle East
As the U.S. has been withdrawing from the region, both Russia and China have been capitalizing on the power vacuum
In Beijing last week the Gulf Cooperation Council attempted to set up a Free Trade Agreement with China, a move that highlights China’s growing influence in the region
Last week saw a series of meetings in Beijing between senior officials from the Chinese government and foreign ministers from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, and the secretary-general of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). At these meetings, the principal topics of conversation were to finally seal a China-GCC Free Trade Agreement and “deeper strategic cooperation in a region where U.S. dominance is showing signs of retreat,” according to local news reports.
As OilPrice.com has been highlighting for some time now, the U.S.’s influence across the Middle East has been in particular decline since the presidency of Donald Trump, in line with his comments to “get out of endless wars” and that the U.S. should no longer resolve “old conflicts in distant lands.” The repercussions of this broad policy idea found the greatest resonance in those countries already aligned to the U.S.’s primary global rivals for power – China and Russia. These included most notably Iran, Iraq, other states in the Shia crescent of power, and Syria, a shift that is analyzed in-depth in my new book on the global oil markets. Following the U.S.’s unilateral withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in May 2018, and the subsequent broad- and deep-ranging alliance between Iran and China as delineated in its 25-year comprehensive strategic agreement, it was Iran’s historical enemy, Saudi Arabia, that felt particularly vulnerable to a seemingly newly-reenergized Tehran, and looked to the U.S. for reassurances.
The problem at that point was that a series of events in the preceding years had undermined the core relationship between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. that had been formulated and formalized at a meeting on 14 February 1945 between the then-U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Saudi King at the time, Abdulaziz. This agreement was that the U.S. would receive all of the oil supplies it needed for as long as Saudi Arabia had oil in place, in return for which the U.S. would guarantee the security both of the ruling House of Saud and, by extension, of Saudi Arabia. However, facing the prospect of having its own oil industry – the only substantial revenue generator it has – marginalized by the then-nascent U.S. shale oil sector, Saudi Arabia launched the 2014-2016 Oil Price War to try to destroy the U.S. shale threat, or at least severely disable it. When that effort failed to have the desired effect – succeeding only in destroying Saudi Arabia’s own finances and those of its oil-producing neighbors as well – the U.S. changed the 1945 agreement in one key way. The new understanding was: the U.S. will safeguard the security both of Saudi Arabia and of the ruling House of Saud for as long as Saudi Arabia guarantees that the U.S. will receive all of the oil supplies it needs for as long as Saudi Arabia has oil in place and that Saudi Arabia does not attempt to interfere with the growth and prosperity of the U.S. shale oil sector. Shortly after that (in May 2017), the U.S. assured the Saudis that it would protect them against any Iranian attacks, provided that Riyadh also bought a huge quantity of weapons from Washington – US$110 billion immediately and US$350 billion over the next 10 years. However, the Saudis then found out that none of these weapons were able to prevent Iran from launching successful attacksagainst its key oil facilities in September 2019, or several subsequent attacks.
At around the same time as the U.S.’s assurances of its security were proving of limited worth to Saudi Arabia, Riyadh was also trying to raise money to plug the huge holes in its finances that had been caused by the 2014-2016 Oil Price War by doing an initial public offering (IPO) for its oil and gas giant, Saudi Aramco. The additional problem in this respect for Saudi Arabia was that whenever oil prices rose to or above the level where it could make a profit (US$84 per barrel of Brent was its budget breakeven price for a couple of years after the end of the 2014-2016 Oil Price War), the U.S. told it and its OPEC brothers to pump more because it was damaging the U.S.’s economic prospects. Specifically, before the latest disconnect between oil and gas prices, the longstanding rule of thumb was that for every one cent that the U.S.’s average price of gasoline increased, more than US$1 billion per year in discretionary additional consumer spending was lost. The U.S. – and every other Western country – refused to allow Aramco to undertake any part of its listing on their respective benchmark stock exchanges for a wide range of reasons, thus limiting Saudi’s ability to begin to repair its own finances, but China was ready, willing, and able to provide a solution for the Aramco IPO problem.
China’s willingness to do this – and more importantly from the personal perspective of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) to allow him to save face over the IPO – was another major milestone in the shift of Saudi towards China. The solution was that China would simply buy the entire stake – at that time 5 percent was the stated amount to be offered – in a straight private placement. This would have the twin huge benefits for MbS of firstly, raising the money that Saudi Arabia needed immediately, and secondly, not requiring any public disclosure of the offer price per share. This latter factor would allow MbS to assure the senior Saudis, who by that time were skeptical of his abilities to lead the country when the time came, that he had managed to hit the US$2 trillion valuation for the whole of Aramco that he had publically set as a benchmark for IPO success.
Although the offer was eventually declined, the fact that China had offered itself as a backstop bid for MbS’s most important public project to that point was not forgotten, and nor were the corollary desires of China to forge closer links with Saudi Arabia going forward. Shortly after the offer was made, China was referred to by Saudi Arabia’s then-vice minister of economy and planning, Mohammed al-Tuwaijri, as: “By far one of the top markets” to diversify the funding basis of Saudi Arabia and that: “We will also access other technical markets in terms of unique funding opportunities, private placements, panda bonds and others.” These comments came at around the same time as the visit of high-ranking politicians and financiers from China in August 2017 to Saudi Arabia, which featured a meeting between King Salman and Chinese Vice Premier, Zhang Gaoli, in Jeddah and, during the visit, Saudi Arabia first mentioned seriously that it was willing to consider funding itself partly in Chinese yuan, raising the possibility of closer financial ties between the two countries. At these meetings, according to comments at the time from then-Saudi Energy Minister, Khalid al-Falih, it was also decided that Saudi Arabia and China would establish a US$20 billion investment fund on a 50:50 basis that would invest in sectors such as infrastructure, energy, mining, and materials, among other areas. The Jeddah meetings in August 2017 followed a landmark visit to China by Saudi Arabia’s King Salman in March of that year during which around US$65 billion of business deals were signed in sectors including oil refining, petrochemicals, light manufacturing, and electronics.
With Russia having already positioned itself as being vital for the efficacy of any future OPEC policies and deals in the aftermath of the 2014-2016 Oil Price War, China through its ‘One Belt, One Road’ (OBOR) program – with all of its associated investment – was and remains ideally placed to pick-up influence across the region as the U.S. eases back. Moreover, for the oil-producing countries of the Middle East, China is not a threat to their positions in the global oil sector, as the U.S. is through its shale oil sector, but rather remains a notable end consumer. The fact that the OBOR-related investments made by China come with considerable caveats allowing Beijing to secure key strategic tracts of land or sea in lieu of debts owed or investments made – including Iran’s major airports and naval ports under the 25-year deal with China, Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port, and Djibouti’s Doraleh Port – may be regarded by these Middle Eastern states as being little different to the conditions attached to U.S. investment since the end of the Second World War. For the U.S., though, news just before Christmas that Saudi Arabia is now actively manufacturing its own ballistic missiles with the help of China, may not be regarded as part of a reasonable rebalancing of power in the Middle East, especially in light of Washington’s current and ongoing efforts to address Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Whether or not Vladimir Putin moves his troops into Ukraine, he has once again confronted Europe with a most painful reality: while being too weak to defend itself, it can no longer rely on the United States to come to its rescue.
We are facing a reality in which Russia, despite its economy only having the size of Italy’s, can bully and intimidate a continent thanks to its energy reserves and its readiness to project vast military power.
Sure, any Russian invasion of Ukraine would cost Russia a fortune and likely degrade into a grinding war of attrition. Invasion is unlikely to be president Putin’s preferred option. Yet, this game of brinkmanship has another part of the equation. If Russia invades Ukraine, the costs for Europe will be equally devastating.
It will force gas-addicted European countries to find expensive alternatives and to severe billions in infrastructure, from pipelines, over pumping stations, to dedicated storages.
Russia also remains a key export destination and a supplier of other resources than oil and gas. Think of titanium. While the Kremlin has long prepared a gradual decoupling from Europe, the opposite remains unthinkable for most Europeans.
While a sizeable part of the Russian population would support an intervention in the eastern part of Ukraine, citizens in many European countries will find it hard to accept soldiers to die for what they consider a strange, peripheral country: Ukraine.
Countless times, I have heard very senior European business leaders sympathize with the leadership of Putin, to the point that one got the impression that they were more attracted to Russian strong leadership than Western liberalism.
Cannon fodder
Let’s also be fair. If, at this stage, European countries would have to stand up to a large Russian land invasion, many soldiers would end up as cannon fodder.
Western European land forces have decayed into a bulky peace corps, their wheeled armoured vehicles hardly suitable for combat in the muddy battlefields in eastern Europe, their fire power no match for Russia’s, and their command and communication infrastructure highly-vulnerable to Russia’s immense electronic war-fighting capabilities.
Chasing poorly-equipped terrorists is one thing; facing a formidable conventional army, ready for sacrifice yet another.
Many European land forces struggle with a predator complex from the ‘Global War on Terror’. They are used to being superior, at least in terms of technology and fire-power, and have huge difficulties imagining that the hunter of the last decade might become the hunted in a large-scale conflict.
The whole strategic mindset in that regard has become skewed towards defense; tactics towards limited surgical offense, often even from a distance.
Stand-off, it is called. Land powers like Russia have also trained in precision and long-range strikes, yet always combined with blunt power: wearing volleys of missiles and artillery and big division-size units moving in.
Sacrifice and attrition
If everything in Europe is about efficiency; armed forces like Russia still factor in sacrifice, redundancy, and attrition. Clean wars do not exist in the Russian strategic lexicon.
Europe has a lack of everything. Even if it tries to steer clear of frontline involvement, supporting from behind will not be much in evidence either. Many countries lack stand-off missiles or their ammunition stockpiles are dangerously low. Advanced fighter jets, capable of penetrating Russia’s air defence, are still rare. Special forces that would, a crucial asset, are stuck in Africa and struggle to enlist enough quality recruits.
The US is slowly restocking their arsenals, with new long-range precise ammunitions, but will prefer to send them to the Pacific. It preserves a sizeable conventional deterrence in Europe, including 70,000 troops, hundreds of prepositioned armoured vehicles and dozens of fighter jets.
Yet, this is not sufficient to counter a Russian invasion in a country like Ukraine – and Washington just cannot afford a war with Russia now that China has become so powerful.
We can endlessly reflect on what drives Russia in amassing its vast military presence on Ukraine’s border, on how we came to this point, the misgivings and frustrations on both sides.
What is clear, however, is that we enter a new tournament of great power politics and that Europe arrives at the start not as a strong, unified team, but as throng of plump puerile pygmies.
This isn’t going to be pretty, folks. The downfall of a death cult rarely is. There is going to be wailing and gnashing of teeth, incoherent fanatical jabbering, mass deleting of embarrassing tweets.
There’s going to be a veritable tsunami of desperate rationalizing, strenuous denying, shameless blame-shifting, and other forms of ass-covering, as suddenly former Covidian Cult members make a last-minute break for the jungle before the fully-vaxxed-and-boosted “Safe and Effective Kool-Aid” servers get to them.
Yes, that’s right, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, the official Covid narrative is finally falling apart, or is being hastily disassembled, or historically revised, right before our eyes.
We are all exhausted. Even the Covidian cultists are exhausted. And they are starting to abandon the cult en masse.
It was always mostly just a matter of time. As Klaus Schwab said:
the pandemic represent[ed] a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.”
It isn’t over, but that window is closing, and our world has not been “reimagined” and “reset,” not irrevocably, not just yet. Clearly, GloboCap underestimated the potential resistance to the Great Reset, and the time it would take to crush that resistance.
And now the clock is running down, and the resistance isn’t crushed … on the contrary, it is growing. And there is nothing GloboCap can do to stop it, other than go openly totalitarian, which it can’t, as that would be suicidal. As I noted in a recent column:
New Normal totalitarianism — and any global-capitalist form of totalitarianism — cannot display itself as totalitarianism, or even authoritarianism. It cannot acknowledge its political nature. In order to exist, it must not exist. Above all, it must erase its violence (the violence that all politics ultimately comes down to) and appear to us as an essentially beneficent response to a legitimate ‘global health crisis’ …”
The simulated “global health crisis” is, for all intents and purposes, over. Which means that GloboCap has screwed the pooch.
The thing is, if you intend to keep the masses whipped up into a mindless frenzy of anus-puckering paranoia over an “apocalyptic global pandemic,” at some point, you have to produce an actual apocalyptic global pandemic.
Faked statistics and propaganda will carry you for a while, but eventually people are going to need to experience something at least resembling an actual devastating worldwide plague, in reality, not just on their phones and TVs.
Also, GloboCap seriously overplayed their hand with the miracle “vaccines.” Covidian cultists really believed that the “vaccines” would protect them from infection. Epidemiology experts like Rachel Maddow assured them that they would:
Now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person,” Maddow said on her show the evening of March 29, 2021. “A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else,” she added with a shrug. “It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to go get more people.”
And now they are all sick with…well, a cold, basically, or are “asymptomatically infected,” or whatever. And they are looking at a future in which they will have to submit to “vaccinations” and “boosters” every three or four months to keep their “compliance certificates” current, in order to be allowed to hold a job, attend a school, or eat at a restaurant, which, OK, hardcore cultists are fine with, but there are millions of people who have been complying, not because they are delusional fanatics who would wrap their children’s heads in cellophane if Anthony Fauci ordered them to, but purely out of “solidarity,” or convenience, or herd instinct, or…you know, cowardice.
Many of these people (i.e., the non-fanatics) are starting to suspect that maybe what we “tin-foil-hat-wearing, Covid-denying, anti-vax, conspiracy-theorist extremists” have been telling them for the past 22 months might not be as crazy as they originally thought.
They are back-pedaling, rationalizing, revising history, and just making up all kinds of self-serving bullshit, like how we are now in “a post-vaccine world,” or how “the Science has changed,” or how “Omicron is different,” in order to avoid being forced to admit that they’re the victims of a GloboCap PSYOP and the worldwide mass hysteria it has generated.
Which…fine, let them tell themselves whatever they need to for the sake of their vanity, or their reputations as investigative journalists, celebrity leftists, or Twitter revolutionaries.
If you think these “recovering” Covidian Cult members are ever going to publicly acknowledge all the damage they have done to society, and to people and their families, since March 2020, much less apologize for all the abuse they heaped onto those of us who have been reporting the facts … well, they’re not.
They are going to spin, equivocate, rationalize, and lie through their teeth, whatever it takes to convince themselves and their audience that, when the shit hit the fan, they didn’t click heels and go full “Good German.”
Give these people hell if you need to. I feel just as angry and betrayed as you do. But let’s not lose sight of the ultimate stakes here. Yes, the official narrative is finally crumbling, and the Covidian Cult is starting to implode, but that does not mean that this fight is over.
GloboCap and their puppets in government are not going to cancel the whole “New Normal” program, pretend the last two years never happened, and gracefully retreat to their lavish bunkers in New Zealand and their mega-yachts.
Totalitarian movements and death cults do not typically go down gracefully. They usually go down in a gratuitous orgy of wanton, nihilistic violence as the cult or movement desperately attempts to maintain its hold over its wavering members and defend itself from encroaching reality. And that is where we are at the moment…or where we are going to be very shortly.
Scotland. Italy. Spain. The Netherlands. New York City. San Francisco. Toronto. The list goes on, and on, and on.
I don’t know what is going to happen. I’m not an oracle. I’m just a satirist. But we are getting dangerously close to the point where GloboCap will need to go full-blown fascist if they want to finish what they started.
If that happens, things are going to get very ugly.
I know, things are already ugly, but I’m talking a whole different kind of ugly. Think Jonestown, or Hitler’s final days in the bunker, or the last few months of the Manson Family.
That is what happens to totalitarian movements and death cults once the spell is broken and their official narratives fall apart. When they go down, they try to take the whole world with them.
I don’t know about you, but I’m hoping we can avoid that. From what I have heard and read, it isn’t much fun.
The poll found 57 percent disapproved of Biden’s handling of the economy, 54 percent disapproved of his handling of foreign policy and 55 percent disapproved of his handling of the pandemic, which was once a consistent bright spot for Biden.
Senator Kyrsten Sinema has delivered a major blow to President Joe Biden as she reiterated her support for the chamber’s 60-vote filibuster—the biggest obstacle for Democrats in passing voting rights legislation.
All but conceding defeat, President Joe Biden said Thursday he’s now unsure the Democrats’ major elections and voting rights legislation can pass Congress this year. He spoke at the Capitol after a key fellow Democrat, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, dramatically announced her refusal to go along with changing Senate rules to muscle the bill past a Republican filibuster.
The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked the Biden administration’s vaccine-or-test rule for businesses with at least 100 workers, but granted a separate request from the Biden administration to allow its vaccine mandate for health care workers to take effect.
The value of overall purchases decreased 1.9%, after a revised 0.2% gain a month earlier, Commerce Department figures showed Friday. The figures aren’t adjusted for inflation, suggesting price-adjusted receipts were even weaker than the headline number.
Noting inflation’s regressive impact, Curtin said consumer sentiment among households with total incomes below $100,000 slumped by 9.4 percent in early January, while sentiment among households with incomes over that amount increased by 5.7 percent.
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Losses on all fronts. The midterms will likely be devastating for the Democrats. Afterwards Biden will be a lame duck.
The only field where he will still be able to show political initiative, and maybe have some successes, will be in foreign policy.
Note: As we at Algora predicted many months ago, the rhetoric at the very top is changing. “They” are admitting already that this is no longer sustainable. But the state bureaucracy is difficult to turn on a dime; it is difficult to come overnight and proclaim the opposite of what was the “truth”/indoctrination for the masses. And here is why the turnaround:
1. The war on China is self defeating. Even the latest attempt to send the Omicron via the Post Office backfired. The military “superiority” is melting away, the semiconductor blackmail/blockade slowly turns into a major Chinese industrial revolution. China supports an economic alliance with Iran and just signed up Syria for its Belt & Road.
2. The adventure/coup in Ukraine, didn’t scare Russia a bit, the economic blockade of North Stream 2 only backfired horrendously by bringing Europe to a freezing winter. No SWIFT embargo is possible and now Russia has high level discussions with Iran on a possible alliance.
3. Biden’s approval rating is nosediving, the country rallies against the curriculum of CRT, against woke culture, against the vaccine mandates, against BLM, against the BBB, against electoral reform, etc.
The net balance of Covid mania: total shambles, inflation and mutiny.
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Just a few days ago, Bill Gates shared some of his (revised) thoughts on the COVID pandemic and the trajectory that omicron has left us on. Several weeks after warning that omicron’s heightened infectiousness might send the pandemic into overdrive, the Microsoft founder postulated instead that omicron might hasten the end of the pandemic by leaving the human population with more antibodies against the virus. As a result, SARS-CoV-2 might enter its endemic stage more quickly, Gates suggested.
While the piece mostly focused on the UK, the sense is that the developed world more broadly is closer to the end because of its access to vaccines.
So, is a new Covid-era truly imminent and what will that actually mean for our lives?
“We’re almost there, it is now the beginning of the end, at least in the UK,” Prof Julian Hiscox, chairman in infection and global health at the University of Liverpool, tells me. “I think life in 2022 will be almost back to before the pandemic.”
What’s changing is our immunity. The new coronavirus first emerged two years ago in Wuhan, China, and we were vulnerable. It was a completely new virus that our immune systems had not experienced before and we had no drugs or vaccines to help.
It even came with his handy illustration depicting the difference between “pandemic” and “endemic” COVID:
Well, it appears the CEO of Pfizer has caught on to this narrative – and he approves. Speaking to the French media, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla that while he expects COVID to continue to circulate for many years to come, he expects future waves won’t cause the types of restrictions that people have become used to over the last two years, and that life will return to “normal” in the spring.
Bourla told French news outlet Le Figaro in an interview published Jan. 16 that he expects a “return to normal life” at some point in spring of this year. However, he added the caveat that the mysterious dynamics of COVID’s spread make accurate predictions more difficult.
“We will soon be able to resume a normal life,” Albert Bourla told the French paper. “We are well positioned to get there in the spring thanks to all the tools at our disposal: tests, very effective vaccines and the first treatments that can be taken at home.”
He also credited improvements in COVID testing, vaccines, and therapeutics for his optimistic outlook, telling BFM TV that he expects the current omicron-driven wave to be the “last with so many restrictions.”
But given its affinity for its human hosts, COVID will likely be “very difficult to get rid of,” which is why Bourla expects it to become endemic, with the occasional seasonal flareup, like the flu.
Finally, the Pfizer CEO shared details of local partnerships that he said would help France produce more of Pfizer’s COVID fighting drug Paxlovid.
With his approval rating at an all-time low, President Biden better hope the likes of Bourla and Gates are right. Ending the COVID pandemic might be the only thing that could help Biden regain some support among the tired and frustrated American electorate.
While many voters have become skeptical toward the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a majority of Democrats embrace restrictive policies, including punitive measures against those who haven’t gotten the COVID-19 vaccine.
A new Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 48% of voters favor President Joe Biden’s plan to impose a COVID-19 vaccine mandate on the employees of large companies and government agencies. That includes 33% who Strongly Favor the mandate. Forty-eight percent (48%) are opposed to Biden’s vaccine mandate, including 40% who Strongly Oppose the mandate. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
Voters are similarly divided over the federal government’s top COVID-19 expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Forty-five percent (45%) view Fauci favorably, including 28% who have a Very Favorable impression of him. Forty-eight percent (48%) have an unfavorable impression of Fauci, including 34% who have a Very Unfavorable view of him.
The even split among voters is the result of deep partisan divisions. While 78% of Democratic voters support the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate plan, only 22% of Republicans and 41% of voters not affiliated with either major party support the vaccine mandate. And many Democrats would support even harsher measures, including fines for Americans who won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine and criminal punishment for vaccine critics.
The survey of 1,016 U.S. Likely Voters was conducted on January 5, 2022 by the Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.
The survey found that 75% of likely Democratic voters – but only 21% of Republicans and 38% of unaffiliated voters – have a favorable opinion of Dr. Fauci. Among other findings of the survey:
– Fifty-eight percent (58%) of voters would oppose a proposal for federal or state governments to fine Americans who choose not to get a COVID-19 vaccine. However, 55% of Democratic voters would support such a proposal, compared to just 19% of Republicans and 25% of unaffiliated voters.
– Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democratic voters would favor a government policy requiring that citizens remain confined to their homes at all times, except for emergencies,if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Such a proposal is opposed by 61% of all likely voters, including 79% of Republicans and 71% of unaffiliated voters.
– Nearly half (48%) of Democratic voters think federal and state governments should be able to fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications. Only 27% of all voters – including just 14% of Republicans and 18% of unaffiliated voters – favor criminal punishment of vaccine critics.
– Forty-five percent (45%) of Democrats would favor governments requiring citizens to temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Such a policy would be opposed by a strong majority (71%) of all voters, with 78% of Republicans and 64% of unaffiliated voters saying they would Strongly Oppose putting the unvaccinated in “designated facilities.”
– While about two-thirds (66%) of likely voters would be against governments using digital devices to track unvaccinated people to ensure that they are quarantined or socially distancing from others, 47% of Democrats favor a government tracking program for those who won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine.
How far are Democrats willing to go in punishing the unvaccinated? Twenty-nine percent (29%) of Democratic voters would support temporarily removing parents’ custody of their children if parents refuse to take the COVID-19 vaccine. That’s much more than twice the level of support in the rest of the electorate – seven percent (7%) of Republicans and 11% of unaffiliated voters – for such a policy.
The survey also found that more black voters (63%) than whites (45%), Hispanics (55%) or other minorities (32%) support Biden’s vaccine mandate for government workers and employees of large companies.
President Biden’s strongest supporters are most likely to endorse the harshest punishments against those who won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine. Among voters who have a Very Favorable impression of Biden, 51% are in favor of government putting the unvaccinated in “designated facilities,” and 54% favor imposing fines or prison sentences on vaccine critics. By contrast, among voters who have a Very Unfavorable view of Biden, 95% are against “designated facilities” for the unvaccinated and 93% are against criminal punishment for vaccine critics.
Most Americans are concerned about new variants of the COVID-19 virus, but Democrats are more concerned than others, and place more trust in vaccines to protect against the disease.
By Ivan Timofeev, Valdai Club Programme Director & one of Russia’s leading foreign policy experts.
Washington mulling some of the harshest sanctions ever proposed
A new bill before the US Senate that would introduce unprecedented new sanctions against Russia, as well as against top officials including President Vladimir Putin, has soured security negotiations between Moscow and Washington.
At present, the measures have been mooted as a potential response to any invasion of Ukraine but, if imposed, they would have a dramatic effect on the Russian economy. While businesses are wary of ‘geopolitical risks,’ so far the markets have exercised restraint. Indeed, avoiding panic is the right choice, given that, barring military escalations, the chances the bill would come into force are low.
However, the proposals represent an exceptionally tough stance on Moscow’s Euro-Atlantic security proposals, which have been the subject of talks between Russia, Washington and NATO. The White House opted not to dismiss the two draft treaties put forward by the Kremlin straight away, and entered into a cautious dialogue with Russia. Nevertheless, it is clear diplomacy does not appeal to everyone, and Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, the chief architect of the sanctions, has urged Washington not to make any concessions when it comes to Russia.
In addition, the bill calls for more military assistance to Ukraine, and using punitive measures to contain Russia. And what an impressive list of sanctions it is, including:
Internationalrestrictions on dealing with major Russian banks;
Restrictions on transactions with Russian bonds (including bonds issued by state-owned companies);
Secondary sanctions against companies providing financial messaging services (i.e. SWIFT);
Personal sanctions against the Russian president and key government officials;
Sanctions with respect to Russian extractive industries like oil, gas and mining;
A review of sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline
Unlike the US administration, which ties tougher sanctions with an open military confrontation between Russia and Ukraine, American senators themselves do not clearly spell out the conditions under which the proposed set of sanctions is to be implemented. The bill calls for regular reports to be submitted to the president describing the level of tensions between Moscow and Kiev.
Should Moscow build up pressure, compared to its levels of December 2021, and if Russia’s actions (from Washington’s point of view) threaten Ukrainian statehood, the President of the United States would be required to introduce new sanctions.
In fact, the sanctions can be imposed at any time, since the criteria are somewhat vague.
It’s a bit of a consolation that the chances of the current version of the draft bill passing the Senate don’t seem to be very high. This is primarily because the bill itself is intended to provoke Russia into escalating tensions. It’s highly unlikely, though, that the US administration would be willing to meet Moscow halfway on its proposals. Instead, it will most probably try to stall many of those proposals, leaving only those that the US cares about on the table. However, it is also very clear that Washington is in no mood to anger Russia. Moscow has already demonstrated in recent years that it’s both capable of and willing to use military force – swiftly and efficiently. Slapping Russia with severe sanctions and supplying Ukraine with weapons on a fast track could by all accounts provoke the Kremlin to use force.
This is why the US administration wants to act ‘slowly but surely.’ It can, and probably will, tighten up sanctions and supply arms to Ukraine, but gradually, step by step.
There is another reason why the bill might not fly. It will burden Washington with way too much red tape. Foreign policy is where the executive and legislative branches of power in the United States have a history of playing tug-of-war. Every now and then, the United States Congress attempts to have the White House perform some of the oversight procedures for the sanctions, and the White House is never happy about it. It is therefore not entirely impossible that this proposal will go down the same track as the Defending American Security from Kremlin Aggression Act (DASKA). The DASKA bill also proposed a tightening of the sanctions on Russia and left the procedural burden to the Administration. The bill met substantial criticism from the Bureau of Legislative Affairs of the US Department of State.
Finally, only a small fraction of sanctions bills ever make it into laws. According to the Russian Council on Foreign Affairs, in 2019-2021, only 29 out of 368 bills across all types of sanctions became laws, which is around 7%. Russia sanctions bills are drafted all the time: Bob Menendez’s initiative is impressive in its scale, but is, in effect, part of the legislative routine, given that there have been at least 40 other bills against Russia introduced over the past three years. Incidentally, there have been even more such bills discussed – 65, to be precise – against China.
Nevertheless, the US administration can clearly capitalize on such tactics. By introducing these bills, it demonstrates that Washington is ready to use tougher, more radical methods. The bills can be used to intimidate, but the US doesn’t have to go through with them. The chances of them passing would increase only in the case of a military escalation. Should that happen, the hawks on Capitol Hill would have a lot more cards to play.
Basic income has been tried successfully countless times. So why the hell isn’t the US government implementing it?
This article was originally published by Scheerpost.
Here’s how the world should operate in simple terms: A certain country or region or city or township or Hobbit hole tries something in order to help their society or group or hovel – if it works, other places then do it. If it doesn’t work, other places don’t do it. It’s like when you were a kid and you saw your brother slide down the banister and rack himself on the newel post – You then thought, “Maybe that activity is not for me.” But if he didn’t nail himself in the jewels, you probably thought, “I think I’ll try that.”
That’s how the United States government should work, but it doesn’t. For-profit healthcare, corporate personhood, the drug war, funding terrorists overseas that we call “moderate rebels,” etc. – all of these things have been tried, they fu***n’ suck every time, and we keep doing them. The U.S. continually racks itself on the newel post all day long and then responds, “I think I’ll try that again.”
But the reverse should be true also – if a city or country anywhere in the world tries something and it works great, we should do it.
This brings me to Universal Basic Income: everybody receiving money from a government simply for being a citizen, no questions asked. It’s high time we try it in the US and see whether it works. Oh wait, I just remembered – it’s been tried countless times and worked every damn time. How do I know that? …Reading.
As Rutger Bregman details in his book “Utopia For Realists,” UBI has been tried many times — in Canada, Alaska, Africa, the US, Europe, and more. Even backwards lawless lands like North Carolina have experimented with it.
There was a study in Britain where 13 men who had lived on the streets for years were given £3,000 each (about $4,500 at the time). Did they use it for hundreds of pricey almond milk lattes, or giant bags of crack, or maybe just wad it up into balls and wipe themselves with them? Nope, turns out they didn’t do any of those things. Eighteen months after receiving the money, over half were no longer homeless, and all of them had improved their lives significantly.
As Bregman noted, “Even The Economist had to conclude that ‘the most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.’”
No! We can’t possibly do that! We here in the US have to take the money meant to help the homeless and launder it through all kinds of plans and incentives and bureaucratic digestive tracts that result in one out of every 100 people in extreme poverty receiving a gift certificate for a free basket of breadsticks at Arby’s.
In another program Bregman describes, everybody in a village in Kenya was given $500, about a year’s wages. Several months later, the village had been completely transformed. People had better jobs, sturdier home structures, and healthier kids. “In Namibia figures for malnutrition took a nosedive (from 42% to 10%), as did those for truancy (from 40% to nothing) and crime (down by 42%),” writes Bregman.
So, basically there’s almost a silver bullet to ending poverty and decreasing crime. Well, we better avoid it like the plague. Let’s go back to giving homeless people a can of soup and a pair of mismatched socks. If they collect enough cans and socks, they can build a house out of them
The point is basic income has been tested numerous times. By 2010, there were income transfer programs for 110 million families in 45 different countries. In North Carolina, in 2001 the Cherokee were getting $6,000 a year per family thanks to a casino they had built. When that started, for most of those families that money took them out of extreme poverty, and the Cherokee children saw drastic changes. Their crime rates, behavioral issues, and alcohol abuse went down significantly. The money literally changed their lives. (And sure, all casinos are based on drunk people spending money they don’t have on machines they don’t know are rigged in hopes of getting money they will never get. But you can’t get mad at the Cherokee because that’s also the basic definition of capitalism: Drunk people spending money we don’t have on machines we don’t know are rigged in hopes of getting money we’ll never get.)
The University of Manchester summarized many UBI programs in poor African communities. They found, overall, the money was put to good use: Poverty decreased, and while the programs cost less than other so-called solutions, there were myriad long-term benefits that impacted health and safety. How shocking! The thing we know works seems to work! (Hopefully somebody can study this a little more and find out if it works.)
Bregman then writes of NGO workers, “So why send over to Africa expensive white folks in SUVs when we can simply hand over their salaries to the poor?” Great point. At the very least, let’s give away the SUVs.
The latest basic income “test” reported-on last month in Fast Company showed that it worked yet again in Hudson, NY. Despite all of these successful trials, people still argue, “We can’t have basic income because the poor will just use it for beer and cigarettes!” Well, first of all – So what? The world’s on fire. Beer and cigarettes sound like just what the doctor ordered. In fact, I think we’re at the point when we can call alcohol and tobacco survival foods. (I am a longtime supporter of Universal Basic Beer and Cigarettes.)
But perhaps more importantly, as Bregman notes, “A major study by the World Bankdemonstrated that in 82% of all researched cases in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, alcohol and tobacco consumption actually declined.” Declined? Well, then I have to say these poor people have their priorities completely wrong.
Another major argument against UBI is, “It’s not fair. Giving people money for doing nothing simply isn’t fair.” My response to that is twofold. First, it actually is fair because the money would go to literally everyone. Hence the word “universal” in the name. (It would be weird to have something called “Universal Basic Income” that only went to a vintage clothing store clerk named Stanley.) Secondly, who told you fairness mattered in life? Who told you fairness has anything to do with our stupid world? There’s no fairness. In the first three seconds you come out of the womb, life is not fair. You’re covered in blood and mucus, some doctor slaps you on the ass, and you’re told your name is something you’ve never even heard before! Completely unfair. You’re just lying there going, “Chet? My name’s CHET?!”
Some people are born rich as sh*t.
Some people are born poor as sh*t.
Some people are born hot as sh*t. (I mean, not as a baby but… later. You get the point.)
Some people are born in wealthy areas with safe streets, good schools and clean water.
Some people are born in poverty with crime-ridden streets, terrible schools, and water that has a crispy film on the top like a cancerous crème brulée.
In our society, on average, men get paid more than women, white people get paid more than Black people and Native people, and most everyone gets paid more than ugly people. (I’m not even kidding – ugly people earn up to 15% less per hour in the workplace.)
Society. Is. Not. Fair.
So if I say that universal basic income would solve several of society’s problems and someone responds that UBI’s not fair, they’re being completely illogical. It’s like if I said a law against killing endangered species would save the exotic birds, and you retort, “But we can’t do that because it’s not purple.”
Cura Annonae (“care of Annona”) was the term used in ancient Rome, in honour of their goddess Annona, to describe the import and distribution of grain to the residents of the cities of Rome and, after its foundation, Constantinople. Rome imported most of the grain consumed by its population, estimated to number one million people by the second century AD. An important part of this was the grain dole or corn dole,[a] a government program which gave out free or subsidized grain, and later bread, to the poorest residents of the city of Rome. The dole was given to about 200,000 people, and is an early and long-lasting example of a social safety net.
A regular and predictable supply of grain and the grain dole were part of the Roman leadership’s strategy of maintaining tranquility among a restive urban population by providing them with what the poet Juvenal sarcastically called “bread and circuses“. In 22 AD, the emperor Tiberius said that the Cura Annonae if neglected would be “the utter ruin of the state”.[1]
The most important sources of the grain, mostly durumwheat, were Roman Egypt, North Africa (21st century Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco), and Sicily. The logistics of moving the grain by sea from those places to Rome required many hundreds of ships, some very large, and an extensive system for collecting the grain and distributing it inside Rome itself. The archaeological records of the grain trade are sparse, due to the perishability of grain which has made its detection difficult for archaeologists.[2]
It is unknown when the Cura Annonae ended. Some form of it may have persisted as late as the 6th century for Rome, but far less grain was shipped compared to earlier periods; in Constantinople, a reduced form of it lasted as late as the 7th century. Tiberius was correct that the Cura Annonae was tied to the health of the city of Rome: the population of the city of Rome declined precipitously during the last years of the Western Roman Empire. After Rome’s decline, no city in Europe would assemble the transportation network required to feed a million inhabitants until the 19th century.
History of the grain dole
The city of Rome grew rapidly in the centuries of the Roman Republic and Empire, reaching a population approaching one million in the second century AD.[3]
In the early centuries of the Republic (509-287 BC), the Roman government intervened sporadically to distribute free or subsidized grain to its population. Regular distribution began in 123 BC with a grain law proposed by Gaius Gracchus and approved by the Roman popular assembly. Adult male citizens (over 14 years of age) of Rome were entitled to buy at a below-market price five modii, about 33 kilograms (73 lb), of grain monthly. Approximately 40,000 adult males were eligible for the grain. In 62 and 58 BC the number of Romans eligible for grain was expanded and grain became free to its recipients. The numbers of those receiving free or subsidized grain expanded to an estimated 320,000 before being reduced to 150,000 by Julius Caesar and then set at 200,000 by Augustus Caesar, a number that remained more or less stable until near the end of the Western Roman Empire.[4][5]
In the 3rd century AD, the dole of grain was replaced by bread, probably during the reign of Septimius Severus (193-211 AD). Severus also began providing olive oil to residents of Rome, and later the emperor Aurelian (270-275) ordered the distribution of wineand pork.[6] The doles of bread, olive oil, wine, and pork apparently continued until near the end of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD, although the decline in the population of the city of Rome reduced the quantities of food required.[7]
The dole in the early Roman Empire is estimated to account for 15 to 33 percent of the total grain imported and consumed in Rome.[8]
Supply
By the late 200s BC, grain was being shipped to the city of Rome from Sicily and Sardinia. In the first century BC, the three major sources of wheat were Sardinia, Sicily, and North Africa, i.e. the region centered on the ancient city of Carthage, present day Tunisia. With the incorporation of Egypt into the Roman empire and the rule of the emperor Augustus (27 BC – AD 14), Egypt became the main source of supply of grain for Rome.[9] By the 70s, the historian Josephus was claiming that Africa fed Rome for eight months of the year and Egypt only four. Although that statement may ignore grain from Sicily, and overestimate the importance of Africa, there is little doubt among historians that Africa and Egypt were the most important sources of grain for Rome.[10] To help ensure that the grain supply would be adequate for Rome, in the second century BC, Gracchus settled 6,000 colonists near Carthage, giving them about 25 hectares (62 acres) each to grow grain.[11]
Grain made into bread was, by far, the most important element in the Roman diet. Several scholars have attempted to compute the total amount of grain needed to supply the city of Rome. Rickman estimated that Rome needed 40 million modii (272,000 tonnes) of grain per year to feed its population.[12] Erdkamp estimated that the amount needed would be at least 150,000 tonnes, calculating that each resident of the city consumed 200 kilograms (440 lb) of grain per year.[13] The total population of Rome assumed in calculating these estimates was between 750,000 and one million people. David Mattingly and Gregory Aldrete[14] estimated the amount of imported grain at 237,000 tonnes for 1 million inhabitants;[15] This amount of grain would provide 2,326 calories daily per person not including other foods such as meats, seafood, fruit, legumes, vegetable and dairy. The Historia Augusta, states that Severus left 27 million modii in storage, enough for 800,000 inhabitants at 225 kilograms (496 lb) of bread per person per annum.[16]
Jeremy Farrar
Vladimir Putin (second left) with senior military officers on Moscow’s Red Square. ‘Washington just cannot afford a war with Russia now that China has become so powerful’
