With Little Fanfare, The Pandemic Is Officially Over In America

As reported recently, as of August 11, 2022, after two and a half years, the pandemic is now officially over in terms of its social end.  The CDC, quietly and subtly of course so as to retain what's left of what little credibility they still have, changed their of official guidelines in regards to the now-endemic Covid to be much closer to treating it like the common flu:

And most notably of all, their new guidance no longer differentiates at all between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals anymore.  They must have finally and very belatedly realized that the whole narrative has collapsed faster than formerly healthy young athletes on the field after being injected with the jabs.  Great, now if only the feds would also finally lift the bizarrely still-existing ban on unvaccinated people from entering the country, and let the legendary Novak "No-vax" Djokovic play over here.

Of course, their latest guidelines are not entirely the same as they are for common flu yet, in that they still unscientifically recommend that any known exposed individuals and those who test positive wear a mask for ten days to ostensibly protect others, but otherwise they had taken the very largest step yet towards true 2019 normal.  No more quarantines of exposed individuals, no more antisocial distancing in general, no more obsessive mass testing, no more contact tracing in general, and no more differentiation based on vaccination status.  Thus, any further steps towards that goal will therefore be that much easier to take from now on as a result. 

Regardless of anything though, no matter how much they try to gaslight and hoover us all about what happened, we must NEVER forget.  Seriously, we must NEVER, EVER allow the horrors of the past two and a half years to happen again.  Like, ever.

UPDATE:  A deeper dive into this stunning reversal of the CDC can be found here, courtesy of the Brownstone Institute.  Certainly worth a read.  The CDC's MMWR of August 11, 2022 apparently really "buried the lede" in regards to their about-face.

When "#DisbandTheCDC" is now trending on Twitter and elsewhere, it's pretty obvious that the Overton window has now finally snapped back with a vengeance after being forced too far under false pretenses in the direction of totalitarianism and Lysenkoism.  Action, meet equal and opposite reaction.  The technocrats are now clearly recognized as being on the wrong side of history, their recent and futile face-saving attempts notwithstanding.

SEPTEMBER UPDATE:  On September 18, 2022, President Biden officially announced that the pandemic is over.  Can you say, "ipse dixit"?

Latest Mask Study Reaches A New Low (Which We Didn't Even Think Was Possible At This Point)

Just when you thought that The Science (TM) couldn't get any lower, it reached a new low today.  The latest pro-mask study, a preprint which has yet to even be peer-reviewed (though will probably be pal-reviewed at some point), is a classic example of cherry-picked junk science not even worth the paper it is printed on.

The ever-insightful Ian Miller of Unmasked does an excellent job of taking it down here.  In a nutshell, the so-called "systematic review" study took 1732 mask studies, and only looked at a whopping....13 of them.  That is less than 1% of all of the studies done to date, so why did they disregard over 99% of the evidence that they found?  Probably because it wasn't exactly flattering to the pro-mask side, that's why.  And the 13 studies they did include, with a combined sample size of only 243 people, of course yielded implausibly (and laughably) high estimates of mask effectiveness.  This clearly has "cherry picking" written all over it.

And that's before we even get into the obvious fatal flaws in at least some if not all of those 13 studies (lack of generalizability, not done in real world conditions, no comparison group, and of course small sample size).  Also, all studies after July 2020 (!) were arbitrarily excluded, because reasons.  This is apparently what passes for The Science (TM) these days, and it has gotten increasingly desperate now as the narrative has thoroughly collapsed by now.  We are now seeing naked Lysenkoism without so much as even the pretense of scientific integrity anymore.

We recently noted how the same Ian Miller so thoroughly debunks, debones, slices, dices, and juliennes the pro-mask arguments, and lays waste to their utterly scorched remains for good.  And check out the latest new study from Josh Stevenson about masks for kids as well, likely the very best one yet.  Spoiler alert:  masks STILL don't work.

A recent Australian study confirmed via experiment that surgical masks (and by extension, cloth masks as well) are utterly useless against aerosolized viruses, as are even N95s unless they are properly fit-tested and NO mistakes are made.  The latter, of course, does NOT apply to the general population, as Germany unfortunately learned the hard way when their general N95 mandate failed so spectacularly to contain or control their Covid outbreak.

Masks didn't work in 1918, and they clearly didn't work in 2020 or 2021 either.  So anyone who thinks they will somehow work in 2022 or beyond, clearly has their head in an anatomically impossible position.  Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is a functional definition of either insanity or Lysenkoism (same difference).

UPDATE:  Looks like masks may be even worse than we thought.  From the Foegen Effect to the various questionable chemicals and microplastics in the masks (as well as in the Covid tests and disinfectants too), these things may very well be exacerbating, perpetuating, or even causing Long Covid as well (to say nothing of the jabs).  Plus there is also the issue of bacteria and mold growing on the masks, as well as impaired O2/CO2 exchange.  An excellent article that makes such a case can be found here.  For all of the times that the TSAP had ever foolishly advocated masks to any extent back in 2020 before belatedly changing our stance, we certainly do apologize.

2023 UPDATE:  Still further evidence against masks, especially for kids, can be found here as well.

What To Do Now? Hindsight is 2020

As the fearmongers are trying to dial up the fear factor over Covid once again, this time over the new BA.5 Omicron subvariant, most sane people two and a half years in would be tempted to respond to all this with a resounding (yawn).  But clearly we must still remain on guard--against tyranny, that is.  That may sound like we are boxing ghosts or strawmen, but we must never, EVER forget just how the easily March 2020 madness started, and how easily it is to slip back into it if we so foolishly allow it.  We simply cannot meet tyranny or insanity in the middle, and if we give them an inch they take a mile every time.  We must oppose them from the very first new or reimposed restriction, mandate, or the slightest attempt at coercion, period.  And we must counteract fearmongering with honesty and truth.

One restriction clearly leads to another, until We the People finally push back.  In March 2020, under the influence of 24/7 fearmongering, it started with "reasonable" sounding restrictions, which quickly got tighter by the day.  Lockdowns, closures, and the milder versions thereof that precededed it, led to mask mandates ostensibly as a way to avoid having to go back to lockdown.  But the places that imposed mask mandates were in fact the places that were MORE likely to return to second and even third lockdowns later.  And both mask mandates and the threat of lockdowns and closures independently and synergistically led to the vaccine mandates and passports that followed.  And all of it was for naught, as many studies and even the most casual glance at excess death rates have shown globally.

In fact, a very strong case can be made that doing nothing, or rather adopting the time-honored "flu strategy," would have been better than what was done.  At best, all that the restrictions did (or could do) was delay the inevitable, drag it out, and make it far more painful than it had to be, at very great social, economic, and health cost.  Once the virus was already "in the wild" in early 2020 in much of the world, if not even earlier, the "therapeutic window" for restrictive NPIs was permanently closed.  Notably, many countries, including the USA, UK, Australia, NZ, and others, all had pandemic playbooks that explicitly did NOT include and even discouraged these sorts of largely unprecedented restrictions, even if we were to face another "Category 5" pandemic like the infamous 1918 one.  Such playbooks were actually based on hard science, that is, what we have learned empirically (often the hard way) over the past couple of centuries.  But then suddenly in mid-March 2020, the powers that be had panicked and threw the wisdom of the ages out the window like so much garbage, and as they say, the rest is history.

Fortunately, most people simply don't have the appetite for more restrictions now.  Not only are people tired of it all, but also they see things like inflation, crime, the economy, etc. as being far more salient concerns than the virus today.  But that is not something we can automatically take for granted either.  Hindsight is 2020, in more ways than one.

P.S.  Apparently "flurona", or co-infection of flu and coronavirus, doesn't exactly seem to be the threat the fearmongers claim it is either.  New research finds that an influenza virus infection actually somewhat mitigates a Covid infection if the flu infection occurs first, and co-infection with both viruses does not seem to make the combo worse.  So as our old frenemy inevitably returns, that is one less thing to fear.

Oh, and you're probably wondering why the phrase "protect the vulnerable" was not anywhere in this article.  That is because that once-noble phrase, which would normally go without saying in a civilized society, has sadly become a meaningless platitude once it had been thoroughly appropriated by the lockdown and mask zealots, who twisted it into making the perfect the enemy of the (reasonably) good.  And it had become a very handy excuse for not only draconian restrictions, but also cruelty and callousness towards the very same vulnerable people they claimed to "protect", often at the expense of other vulnerable people in other ways as well.

Ruh Roh. What Hath The Technocrats Wrought? (Children of Men Edition)

You may want to sit down and take a deep breath before reading this.  Seriously.

As the ever-insightful Igor Chudov has recently reported, in several diverse countries from Hungary to Taiwan to Germany to Switzerland to the UK to Sweden to Japan and many others, including some US states too, birthrates plummeted by double-digit percentages in the first quarter (or two) of 2022 relative to the same time last year.  This is not a trend, this is an event!  And that unusually steep drop in births did not begin until about nine months after those novel experimental gene therapy jabs misnamed "vaccines" were rolled out en masse to young people of childbearing age.  Funny how that works.  But I'm sure it is all just a "coincidence", right?  Move along, nothing to see here folks....

Riiiiiiiight.

Was it the lockdowns that caused it?  No, since there was no similar drop in 2020 or 2021, and notably Sweden experienced the same drop without any lockdowns.  Was it the virus itself, or its sequelae?  No, since Taiwan was practically free of the virus for the most part until April 2022, and yet they still saw birthrates drop as well.  Was it 5G, maybe?  No, since Taiwan and many other countries have been using 5G for years now, again with no sudden drop in births until 2022.  Was it climate change, perhaps?  Global warming is by definition global, so why does this trend only really seem to be noticeable in highly-jabbed areas rather than everywhere in the world?

And indeed, while birthrates have been gradually declining for years or even decades now in most of the world, this is a much, much steeper drop that cannot be explained by any of the usual suspects.

Looks like all of those VAERS reports of menstrual irregularities and even fetal abnormalities (!) correlating with the jabs were quite real after all, and the tip of a much larger iceberg.  And fellas beware, the reproductive effects are most likely NOT confined to only one gender either.  When many people last year would half-jokingly say, "clean sperm is the new Bitcoin" or something to that effect, that may not have been very far off from the truth, unfortunately.  (The recent epic Bitcoin crash notwithstanding, of course.)

Let's hope that this is just a short-term blip, because if it's not, this is literally Children of Men territory, and it will NOT end well for humanity at all.  Yes, we know the Earth is overpopulated and in severe ecological overshoot.  But if this current disturbing trend lacks an "off" button, and continues irreversibly, it will clearly do far more harm than good in the long run.

Moral of the story:  Mother Nature apparently does NOT like to be effed with!  Too bad people end up having to learn that the hard way sometimes.

UPDATE:  The Swiss Doctor offers an alternative explanation, namely that marriage rates plummeted in many countries in 2020 (and even into 2021) due to Covid and the restrictions on gatherings (since even Sweden had restrictions on large gatherings), and thus a large number of (mainly first) births may have simply been postponed as a result of weddings being postponed.  Let's hope that is the case.  However, the Swiss Doctor also cautions that this does not necessarily explain all of the observed drop in births.  Thus, the jabs are not really exonerated just yet.

In fact, as Igor Chudov reports later, in ultra-jabbed Germany, not only births, but even abortions are down too.  That means that even accidental pregnancies are down as well as purposeful ones, so it's not simply due to people choosing to delay or avoid procreation.  Really makes you wonder!

SEPTEMBER UPDATE:  The drop in births seems to be persisting per the latest data, at least in England.  Why don't we just call it what it is--infertility.

In A World Of Lysenkos, Be A Zelenko

We at the TSAP are saddened to hear that the legendary Dr. Vladimir Zev Zelenko has passed away from his four year battle with cancer today, at the age of 48.  He was truly a beacon of light shining in a world of darkness during the pandemic.  A real mensch indeed if there ever was one.

Dr. Zelenko famously devised an early treatment protocol, which later evolved into prophylaxis as well, against Covid all the way back in March 2020.  Originally consisting of zinc, HCQ, and azithromycin, this treatment really seemed to work wonders for one high-risk patient after another, keeping them alive and out of the hospital.  Later he added a recommendation for Ivermectin to the protocol as well, and he also devised an OTC nutritional supplement for general use called Z-Stack consisting of zinc, quercetin, Vitamin C, and Vitamin D, that is GMP and Kosher certified.  There is even a children's version now, and also a new detox version apparently designed with the jabbed in mind.

It bears repeating:  MARCH 2020.  April at the very latest.  Read that again.  Let that sink in.

If the powers that be had actually heeded his advice, instead of ignoring, censoring, and vilifying him, countless lives would have been saved (hundreds of thousands in the USA alone), hospitals would not have gotten anywhere even remotely close to overwhelmed, and even the slightest hint of lockdowns, closures, mask mandates, and related restrictions would have been summarily laughed out of existence as the utterly harebrained ideas that they were.  As for those novel experimental gene therapies misnamed "vaccines" that the powers that be have been pushing on the masses?   Well, Zelenko himself had some rather choice and colorful words to say about those!  He was certainly no fan.  And with the successful Zelenko protocol in place, the jabs would most likely have not so much have even gotten off the ground, being rejected as superfluous at best and far too risky to chance.  (And a fortiori for children!)

In fact, true natural herd immunity would have been reached much sooner, and much more safely as well if such sage advice was actually followed.  As it clearly had in Zelenko's very own hometown of Kiryas Joel, NY, who famously did everything "wrong" per the "experts".  Instead of the infamous lockdowns, high excess deaths, and then followed by the seemingly endless cycle of boosters, variants, and reinfections that continue to plague heavily-jabbed communities, states and countries to this day.

But NO, the powers that be not only censored and even banned the centerpiece of the Zelenko protocol in some places, they even had the GALL to try to fallaciously taint it in people's minds as "guilt by association" with Trump.  Never mind that the jabs that those same powers later came to obsess over, especially Moderna, were also developed under that very same president as well (Operation Warp Speed, anyone?).  And they knew that if anyone tried to seriously debate Zelenko himself, they would lose, so as time went on the mainstream media wouldn't even mention him at all, and would immediately pivot to Trump whenever the subject of HCQ came up.

Note as well that another legend, Dr. Dmitry Kats, independently devised his own Niacin-based protocol around the very same time.  Either way, hindsight is quite literally 2020.  March 2020, to be precise.

In a world of Lysenkos, be a Zelenko.  May he rest in peace.

Roe v. Wade Has Fallen

Well, after nearly half a century, it actually happened:  the landmark Roe v. Wade decision has officially fallen.  Today the US Supreme Court struck it down completely.  Forced-birther Republicans are thus now emboldened to further ban or restrict abortion at the state level, as several states have already done recently.  That is, women's hard-won reproductive rights are now in grave danger, and this goes WAY beyond abortion.  Undoubtedly, birth control and things like that will be next on the chopping block, and so on, and thus we are just a few steps away from Margaret Atwood's worst nightmare.  In fact, Clarence Thomas himself implied as much, actually saying the quiet part out loud.

Add to this the fact that the recent lockdown-induced "recession" (more like depression) has actually hit women harder than men and set back women's progress by decades by dumping even more unpaid work on them at home, and the future looks even worse still.

Democrats in Congress are still looking to pass a bill that would codify Roe v. Wade into federal law, superseding the abortion bans in any state that attempts such bans.  But alas, success in that regard is far from guaranteed.

We at the TSAP are pro-choice, and hereby condemn this travesty in the strongest possible terms. 

The Root Cause Of All Economic Woes Of The Past Half-Century: "Financialization" Of The Economy

The year was 1971, just over half a century ago.  The utterly costly (in both lives and money) and protracted Vietnam War was gradually winding down but still raging, inflation was getting out of control, and the Bretton-Woods system of an international (fool's) gold standard and fixed currency exchange rates was rapidly collapsing on itself due to rampant cheating and attrition.  On August 15, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon decided to effectively suspend the gold standard, first temporarily, though it would soon become permanent by 1973.  And by 1975, any nominal and vestigial links between gold and the dollar had been severed completely.   

Since this "Nixon Shock" of 1971, the money creation capability of the federal government and the Federal Reserve were no longer constrained by gold or anything else (except the remaining arcane and archaic rules of Congress left over from the defunct gold standard, and thus no longer make any sense).  Thus, Congress could really create as much money as they wanted from then on, and the Fed could create as much as Congress would allow them to.   The money supply had clearly exploded exponentially since then, and a fortiori after 2008 and 2020.  

So where did nearly all of those newly-created dollars go?

Wall Street, of course.  The result?  A perpetually yawning chasm between the financial sector (which grew exponentially along with the money supply) relative to the real, physical economy (which has basically stagnated and hollowed-out ever since).  That absolute and relative advantage was then weaponized against the bottom 99% of Americans, as the financial sector is dominated by the top 1% and especially the top 0.01%.  Extreme inequality and very much harm followed.  Decades of utterly remarkable progress against poverty stalled and even reversed somewhat.  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the real root of all economic woes of the past half-century.

Prior to 1971, the financial sector moved largely in lockstep with the rest of the economy.  And not coincidentally, prior to 1973, wages grew largely in lockstep with labor productivity as well.  But ever since then, both have seen an ever-widening divergence, to the detriment of the greater working class.  While the oligarchs literally laughed all the way to the bank.  And that was clearly no accident, but rather by design.

Imagine if even a fraction of all that newly created-out-of-thin-air money since 1971 was rained down upon We the People directly instead of Wall Street and the big banks.  How different would America, and indeed the world, be today?  If that doesn't make you feel RIPPED OFF, check your pulse 'cause you might be dead!

The cure for this disease is indeed very, very simple.  All it takes is a simple Act of Congress to 1) scrap the remaining arcane and archaic rules that prevent Overt Congressional Financing, 2) implement Overt Congressional Financing, and then 3) use it to benefit We the People instead of the oligarchy.  UBI, Medicare For All, expanded Social Security, free college, debt cancellation, Green New Deal, oh my! Basically, the entire progressive economic agenda and more can be paid by the federal government for without any borrowing or taxes unless Congress wants to.  

That is the real logical conclusion of Monetary Sovereignty:  when a government issues it's own currency, by definition it has infinite money, which is constrained only by the laws that the government passes.  Time to end the Big Lie and act like it for once.

(And no, going back on the gold standard now would be a dumb idea, as that would only lead to artificial scarcity of money.)

As for inflation, that can be cured by 1) raising interest rates (in the short term), and 2) counterintuitive as it sounds, increased federal spending to cure shortages by incentivizing increased production of goods and services that are experiencing shortages (food, energy, labor, computer chips, etc.) in the longer-term.  Problem solved.  Next.

(And of course, stop creating shortages via supply chain problems due to lockdowns!)

So what are we waiting for?

UPDATE:  We would be remiss if we did not also enumerate the more proximal causes in addition the more distal root cause of financialization.  Those include:  

• Legalization of usury (lifting of federal 12% usury cap on interest rates) (1978)
• Union-busting re-legitimized by Reagan against the PATCO strike, which made an example of them for the private sector going forward (1981)
• Legalization of stock buybacks (1982)
• General deregulation and tax cuts for the ultra-rich and corporations (1980s)
• General deregulation of big banks and Wall Street (1980s)
• Shrinking the social safety net by stealth, letting it lag behind inflation (1970s through 1990s))
• NAFTA (1994)
• Shrinking the social safety net again via welfare deform (1996)
• Repeal of Glass-Steagall Act, the firewall between commercial banks and investment banks (1999)
• China joining the WTO as a "most favored nation" (2001)
• More tax cuts for the rich (2001-2003)
• NOT learning the lessons of 2008, particularly the moral hazard created by the Wall Street bailouts (2008-2009)
• Offshoring/outsourcing of manufacturing jobs (ongoing)
• Pandemic relief money disproportionately going to, and benefitting, Wall Street much more than Main Street (2020-2021)
• And of course, the lockdowns which, when combined with the above, constituted the largest wealth transfer in history, from the poor and middle class to the ultra-rich and Wall Street, both nationally and globally (2020-2021)