PA Counties locked down

[85MikeTPI]

Data doesn't lie!

Which is why all the raw and unfiltered data was withheld, and instead we got pretty normalized graphs for the fear porn mongers to pleasure themselves to...

[Sgt.K]

Data doesn't lie!

In my head I'm hearing something about Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics...

[ImminentDanger]

The city of Philadelphia will reinstate an indoor mask mandate,
the first major U.S. city to do so this spring.
By Campbell Robertson - April 11, 2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/11/u...k-mandate.html

With new coronavirus cases low but rising sharply in recent days, the city of Philadelphia announced on Monday that it will reinstate an indoor mask mandate a little more than a month after lifting it, becoming the first major U.S. city to do so.

"This is our chance to get ahead of the pandemic," said Cheryl Bettigole, the city's health commissioner, in a news conference. She acknowledged that the average number of daily new cases, currently at 142, is still nowhere near what it was at the beginning of the year, when the Omicron variant was pushing the seven-day average to nearly 4,000.

But she said that if the city failed to require masks now, "knowing that every previous wave of infections has been followed by a wave of hospitalizations, and then a wave of deaths, then it will be too late for many of our residents." Over the past week, the city reported that the number of residents who had died of Covid-19 passed 5,000.

The mandate will go into effect next week. A spokesman for the city's health department said it would end when case numbers and rates go beneath a certain threshold.

So we are to continue the PANIC RESPONSE to Maybes & Mights! Not an actual circumstance, but only the potential - Like prosecuting thought crimes rather than punishing only actual criminal activity - Punishing people for what they say rather than what they do.

And what is the 'beneath a certain threshold'? The goal posts of reasonable personal freedom have been pushed totally outside the stadium of reality. Like the Chinese goal of ZERO TOLERANCE, these people will never willingly let go of the power they usurped during the CORONAVIRUS PANIC. They must be voted out of office to be replaced with those who believe in personal freedom, rather than authoritarian governmental control.

...

[bogey1]

I'm sure this is illegal (again) but shop owners will comply.

[ImminentDanger]

Judge voids federal mask mandate for public transportation
By Kerry Picket, Alex Swoyer and Tom Howell Jr. - Monday, April 18, 2022
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news...ravel-unlawfu/

A federal judge in Florida nixed the federal mask mandate for air travel and other public transportation on Monday, leading a Biden administration official to announce that the mandate will not be enforced while it considers its options.

Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, a Trump appointee, said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention overstepped its authority and did not justify the mask requirement for public transportation systems. She said the agency ran afoul of federal law because it did not adhere to the Administrative Procedure Act when issuing the mask order.

"Because 'our system does not permit agencies to act unlawfully even in pursuit of desirable ends,' the court declares unlawful and vacates the mask mandate," Judge Mizelle wrote in the 59-page order.

An administration official said the mask mandate will not be enforced while agencies weigh their next steps.

The court decision "means CDC's public transportation masking order is not in effect at this time," the official said. "Therefore, [the Transportation Security Administration] will not enforce its Security Directives and Emergency Amendment requiring mask use on public transportation and transportation hubs at this time."

The White House criticized the ruling. "This is obviously a disappointing decision. The CDC continues recommending wearing a mask in public transit," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said. A spokesperson for the Justice Department said officials are reviewing the decision.

Meanwhile, congressional Republicans celebrated the decision. Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee tweeted out the ruling with the word "Freedom." Sen. Steve Daines, Montana Republican, said it was a significant victory for common sense. "It's past time we let families get back to normal and put an end to all of Biden's unscientific, unconstitutional mandates for good," he said.

Fully masked airline employees working the ticket desks at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Northern Virginia told The Washington Times on Monday night that they were shocked by the court decision earlier and were not sure about the next steps. One airline employee said she had received an e-mail from her company about the court's decision on the mandate just 30 minutes before a reporter asked her about it. "I just read it. Nobody has said anything," she said, agreeing she "totally" felt blindsided by the news. Another airline employee pumped his fists in the air when told about the court decision.

But a Transportation Security Administration employee told The Times that TSA personnel were still getting "orders to wear masks." "As you can hear, in the airport, they still want people wearing them," he said.

The public-address system at Reagan National on Monday night still was advising people that "face coverings were required at all times." However, five of the biggest U.S. airlines * Southwest, Alaska, Delta, United and American * all had announced within hours that masks were now optional on their flights.

The lawsuit was brought by the Health Freedom Defense Fund and two travelers with anxiety who protested wearing the masks.

The federal government last week announced an extension of the mask mandate for transportation, which included planes, trains, buses and subways, because of an uptick in COVID-19 cases. The mandate was issued on Feb. 3, 2021, roughly two weeks after President Biden took office. The mandate provided exceptions for children younger than 2 and for people with certain disabilities. It was set to expire on April 18 but was extended to May 3 until the judge handed down the order on Monday.

Lawrence O. Gostin, a global health law professor at Georgetown University, said the judge is "clearly wrong" but her ruling will be a big setback to Mr. Biden and the CDC if it is not swiftly overturned on appeal. "CDC clearly has the power to prevent the interstate transmission of COVID on airplanes by requiring masking," he said. "This ruling could cause chaos at airports across the United States. This is also a major blow to the president because it questions his administration's authority to act to protect the public health."

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has a group of pending cases challenging the mask mandate. In addition, a federal court in Texas is handling a lawsuit filed by the state, a Republican congresswoman and an advocacy group against the CDC over the mask requirement. Judge Reed Charles O'Connor, a Bush appointee, is handling that legal battle.

Besides travelers, pilots and flight attendants have sued to end the mandate. They say it is difficult to wear masks for hours on end and to police passengers who refuse to obey the rule. Although some passengers might feel safer because of the mandate, major airlines have lobbied Mr. Biden to let the rule expire. They have cited the burden of enforcement and the fact that the CDC does not recommend universal mask-wearing in much of the country.

The administration decided last week to prolong the mandate so it would have time to evaluate the fast-moving BA.2 variant of the coronavirus, which accounts for 85% of COVID-19 cases in the U.S., and whether the variant will cause major problems.

Daily COVID-19 case counts remain close to pandemic lows across the country but are slowly increasing and have reached 38,000 per day, an increase of about 40% from two weeks ago. Hospitalizations have continued to decline, and the daily average of COVID-19 patients sits below 15,000 as scientists point to a possible decoupling of cases and bad outcomes because of vaccines, boosters and available treatments. However, the decline is starting to level off as the BA.2 variant becomes dominant.

Philadelphia reimposed its indoor mask mandate on Monday, saying it needed to stay ahead of the new variant.

The White House is sticking to business as usual. It held an outdoor Easter egg roll on Monday and scheduled indoor events in the East Room in recent weeks.

Mr. Biden is trying to pivot to an era in which COVID-19 is treated as a disease in the background of society, but his decision to prolong the transportation mask mandate is complicating that position.

Republicans and centrist Democrats say it is odd that the transportation mandate has an uncertain endpoint, even as Mr. Biden has opted to lift Title 42, the pandemic order that allowed the U.S. to swiftly turn away migrants at the border, on May 23.

They say the twin decisions send an inconsistent message about the trajectory of the pandemic.

Arthur Caplan, director of the division of medical ethics at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, said the Biden administration will have to decide whether it is worth fighting to restore the mask mandate given the widespread push for normalcy.

"It's just not worth it to get into the war unless you had a complete explosion in COVID rates," he said. "I think the drive back to normal is huge. The political cost of trying to fight that wish is very high. Whether the virus agrees or not, that seems to be what the American people want to do."

Because of that, he said, people who are immunocompromised will be left to fend for themselves.

"They're going to be stuck restricting their behavior, wearing masks," he said, "because their fellow citizens just aren't willing to sacrifice for them."

...

[ImminentDanger]

In my head I'm hearing something about Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics...

Unvaccinated Children Hospitalized at Twice the Rate During Omicron Surge
Tuesday, 19 April 2022
https://www.newsmax.com/health/healt...19/id/1066333/

Hospitalization rates for unvaccinated children ages 5 to 11 were twice as high as among those who were vaccinated during the record COVID-19 surge caused by the omicron variant, according to a U.S. study released on Tuesday.

For every 100,000 unvaccinated children in the age group, 19.1 per were hospitalized with COVID-19 between mid-December and late February, compared with 9.2 per 100,000 vaccinated kids, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

The researchers looked at nearly 400 hospitalizations in 14 states during the period.

It found that among the 397 children who were hospitalized with COVID when omicron was dominant, 87% were unvaccinated, one third had no underlying medical conditions, and 19% were admitted to an intensive care unit.

The highly contagious omicron variant, which drove coronavirus infections to record levels in the United States in January, fueled an increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations among those under age 18, leading to concerns about the impact on unvaccinated children.

U.S. regulators had authorized the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for children aged 5 to 11 years in October, prior to the omicron surge.

Just 28% of children in the age group - around 8 million - are fully vaccinated, according to CDC data.

The study also found that peak COVID-19 hospitalization rates among children in the age group were higher during the omicron wave than when delta was the predominant variant.

That's .0191% versus .0092% --- Meaning that 99.98% (taking the higher number) were not affected significantly enough to be hospitalized. And over 60% of those that were had underlying medical conditions. What financial incentives are still in place for hospitals to admit Coronavirus Panic patients to profit from their condition?

The promotion of the use of the (pharmaceutical) profitable vaccine for all children is based on less than .02% being critically affected, while 99.98% are not so affected.

The statistics are still being twisted to appear greater than the facts and people (kids) are being treated as though all are equally at risk as the most vulnerable.

The lies continue in order to make money & exercise power.

...

[ray h]

In other words 28% of children are vaccinated, but 30% of those hospitalized are vaccinated. Sounds about right.

[ImminentDanger]

Philadelphia lifts mask mandate days after reimplementing it
by Christopher Hutton - April 22, 2022
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/n...mplementing-it

Philadelphia reversed its reinstated indoor mask mandate days after it was reimplemented.

The city's Board of Health voted Thursday to rescind the rules, meant to stop the spread of COVID-19 after an uptick in coronavirus cases occurred due to the omicron subvariant BA.2. Philadelphia was the first big city to reimpose a mask mandate since the last remaining ones were lifted starting in February.

"Due to decreasing hospitalizations and a leveling of case counts, the City will move to strongly recommending masks in indoor public spaces as opposed to a mask mandate," said the Philadelphia Public Health Department in a statement Thursday.

The department did not release new data to support its reversal, according to 6 ABC, instead claiming that it would provide more information on Friday.

"We're in a situation that we really had not anticipated being in this soon, but it is good news," said Philadelphia Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole, according to a transcript of the Thursday meeting. "So I'm really very happy ... to say it appears that we no longer need to mandate masks in Philadelphia and that we can actually move to simply a strong recommendation."

Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney defended the mask reinstatement from its critics hours before the board reversed it.

"The politicalization of this issue, based on national politics and politics around the country, [has] just made everyone crazy about it," Kenney said during a live Washington Post interview. "It's not a big burden to wear a mask walking into a restaurant, sitting down at your table, and when you eat, you take your mask off. It's not a big burden to wear your mask on a plane or on public transportation."

City officials announced the reimposed mandate on April 11, claiming that it was implemented in response to an anticipated increase in cases attributable to the COVID-19 BA.2 subvariant. Joe Holden, a CBS Philadelphia anchor, noted that the department was "rejecting" guidance released by the PolicyLab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Several cities and government entities have dropped their mask mandates in recent weeks. A Florida judge overturned the federal mask mandate for transportation on Monday, stating that the mandate "exceeds the CDC's statutory authority." Several airlines have dropped their mask mandates since. The Biden administration is appealing the decision.

So, what changed in the 5 days the mandate was in place? Nothing in reality --- Only in the political consideration...

This is more evidence that the PANIC REACTION to the pandemic IS & WAS NEVER about the actual medical conditions - but rather about making political power evident and seeing how far it could be pushed...

...

[ImminentDanger]

Study into mRNA vaccine death rates sends ‘danger signals’
A new Danish study reveals disparities in all-cause mortality between mRNA and adenovirus vaccines
by Jay Bhattacharya - 3 May, 2022
https://unherd.com/thepost/study-into-mrna

Do the covid vaccines save lives? That is the question on many people’s minds, that has led to heated discussions across the world.

A bombshell new study by a distinguished team of Danish researchers led by Prof. Christine Stabell-Benn suggests a surprisingly nuanced answer. In the randomized trials of the covid vaccines, the adenovector-based vaccines, including the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, reduced all-cause mortality of study participants relative to people randomly assigned a placebo. Indeed, the reduction in mortality is larger than expected from the Covid effect and may suggest additional beneficial “non-specific effects” from those vaccines against other health threats.

On the other hand, Stabell-Benn and her colleagues found no statistically meaningful evidence in the trial data that the mRNA vaccines reduced all-cause mortality. The numbers of deaths from other causes including cardiovascular deaths appear to be increased in this group, compensating for the beneficial effect of the vaccines on Covid. Stabell-Benn is keen to stress that the sample is relatively small and is calling for further investigation, and also that the study took place during very low levels of Covid, so the relative advantage of protection against Covid would have been smaller at that time compared to at other points in the pandemic.

However, these preliminary results stand in sharp contrast to the unambiguous message from public health agencies and governments worldwide, which granted emergency authorization to the vaccines based on evidence from the trials that the vaccines reduce the likelihood of getting symptomatic covid. From a purely scientific perspective, preventing symptomatic covid is an interesting outcome to study. From a public health perspective, prevention of covid symptoms is not as important as prevention of death or disease transmission, which the randomized trials did not study. Dr. Stabell Benn and her colleagues have now looked at overall mortality for the first time.

At the very least, the plain implication (since both sets of vaccines are available) is that public health authorities should have recommended the cheaper adenovector vaccines over the mRNA vaccines all along for most patients.

In other words, the international move to de-authorise the AstraZeneca vaccine across Europe and elsewhere looks like it may have been a mistake, and that AZ was actually a better option than the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines.

It offers a potential contributory explanation for the better overall mortality outcomes in the UK (which overwhelmingly used the AZ vaccine) than much of continental Europe (which phased out the AZ vaccine) after the vaccine programme in the second half of 2021.

Since its publication in pre-print, the Stabell-Benn study has received very little coverage in the media. As Dr Stabell-Benn told Freddie Sayers in her UnHerd interview, she has become used to this reticence:

"I have been in this game for now almost thirty years, studying vaccines and finding these non-specific effects which have been very controversial. There are strong powers out there that don’t really want to hear about them. But to me this is good news: it means that we can optimize the use of vaccines to not only be strong protective effects against vaccine disease, but we can also optimize their use in terms of overall health." - Professor Christine Stabell-Benn, UnHerd

The reaction

For a study with such a consequential conclusion, review from independent experts is crucial. In the past, such peer-review took place in anonymity, behind the closed doors of a scientific journal, with a single editor or associate editor serving as an umpire. Because of the small number of people involved in the review, the peer-review process is subject to well-known biases and long delays (months or longer). Worse, the public never had access to these deliberations and was asked to take it as an article of faith that a published peer-reviewed paper presented accurate conclusions.

A better process for the scientific review of some important papers has emerged during the pandemic – open peer review whereby the public can see the conversation among scientific experts. Though the Danish team released their paper in early April, it was an online review by vaccine safety expert and world-renowned epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff that catalyzed a discussion by scientists about it.

In his review, Kulldorff pointed to the clear implication of the results of the Danish paper. When both mRNA and adenovector vaccines are available, it’s better to take the vaccine with good randomized evidence of reductions in all-cause mortality rather than taking a vaccine where we cannot tell from the best evidence whether it reduces mortality. Kulldorff called for a new randomized controlled trial of the mRNA vaccine to find out if they can compete with the adenovirus-vector vaccines – as should occur in medicine whenever an effective intervention exists and another intervention seeks to show that it is as good or better. He also suggested that it is inappropriate to mandate vaccines for which the randomized clinical trials show a null result for mortality.

Kulldorff’s open peer-review stoked some discussion among scientists about the feasibility of running a randomized trial comparing the vaccines. Mortality rates from covid infection – due partly to high levels of population immunity from covid recovery – are low, so a large sample size would be necessary to detect a difference. Whether such a study is even feasible is an open question, as is the importance of such a study. This kind of constructive discussion happens all the time in science.

However, some scientists – including zero-covid advocate Deepti Guradsani – reacted to Kulldorff’s article with public smears, false accusations of spreading vaccine misinformation, and the usual claims about right-wing connections. Even Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust and a prominent architect of the pandemic policy in the UK, joined the fray by promoting such smears on his Twitter feed.

Kulldorff is a prominent vaccine scientist who has presented his honest views on the covid vaccines, even when they go against the established narrative. In March 2021, he lost his position as an advisor to the US CDC for recommending against pausing the Johnson & Johnson vaccine for older Americans – an action that effectively killed the demand for the adenovirus vector vaccines in the US. He is the only person I know who the CDC has fired for being too pro-vaccine.

When scientists slander prominent vaccine scientists, that damages vaccine confidence. Scientists should be encouraged to evaluate, compare and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of different vaccines, and to be free to advocate for one vaccine over another. Farrar’s promotion of the lies is particularly insidious because it sends a signal to scientists who might be interested in funding from the Wellcome Trust to shy away from voicing their honest thoughts about the Danish study or vaccines in general.

The stakes in the discussion about this paper are tremendously high. Of course, for the public at large, what covid vaccine is best for them is literally a life-and-death question. For scientists, at stake is the ability to participate honestly in open scientific reviews of hot button topics without having to face smears and reputational damage based on lies by other prominent scientists. If scientists lose their ability to reason publicly about studies like the ground-breaking Danish study, physicians will have no solid basis for their advice to patients on this topic or much else, and the public will have no reason to trust physicians and scientists.

The slow drip of evidence, regarding Coronavirus PANIC mandates, continues to accumulate against the knee-jerk reactions by the leftist lunatics.

It demonstrates that the leftist liberals will use any situation possible to advance the Anti-America Agenda. No matter the reality of the situation, they will advocate for Anti-Freedom Action to push forward their desire for chaos, in order to promote Authoritarian Rule as a solution. They will create and promote distortions of the facts or outright lies in order to destroy the Right To Know the TRUTH, making it difficult to make INFORMED DECISIONS. The Deep State & the Media have been complicit in these Anti-American promotions.

...

[bogey1]

Speaking of lock downs. Since this administration is modeled after china.