What Happened Today: April 21, 2023
Biden's CIA campaign boost; Chicago has to hire back vaccine refusers; Ten Commandments are coming to Texas schools
The Big Story
The 2020 letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials that falsely claimed Russia orchestrated the release of emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop had been organized by the Biden campaign and Michael Morell, the former CIA deputy director, according to Morell’s testimony in a closed-door interview with the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Morell had taken on the task of drafting the letter and soliciting co-signers after speaking with Tony Blinken, who was at that time working for the campaign of then nominee Joe Biden. In a letter to Secretary of State Blinken on Thursday, House Republicans disclosed details of Morell’s testimony, writing that the Biden campaign’s efforts had “the effect of helping to suppress the Hunter Biden story and preventing American citizens from making a fully informed decision during the 2020 presidential election.”
“Morell also explained that the Biden campaign helped to strategize about the public release of the statement,” says the letter to Blinken, signed by the committee chair, Jim Jordan. “[The] Biden campaign wanted the statement to go to a particular reporter at The Washington Post first and that he should send the statement to the campaign when he sent the letter to the reporter.”
In late 2020, Morell’s name was on the short list of candidates being considered by Biden to become director of the CIA. Ultimately, the nod would go to William J. Burns, but not for Morell’s lack of trying, it seems. According to the letter, “Morell further explained that one of his two goals in releasing the statement was to help then-Vice President Biden in [an upcoming] debate and to assist him in winning the election.”
In The Back Pages: The Spike
The Rest
→ Employees who were either fired or suspended by the City of Chicago because of their failure to satisfy COVID-19 vaccine requirements must be allowed to return to work and be repaid for lost wages, according to a new ruling by the Illinois Labor Relations Board. In a strong rebuke against the regulations enforced by Mayor Lori Lightfoot in 2021, the Administrative Law Judge Anna Hamburg-Gal sided with the city workers represented by trade unions that argued the city had violated labor laws by not negotiating in good faith with workers over the vaccine policies.
→ Belgian customs officers crushed some 2,000 cans of Miller High Life this week, though the beer-soaked afternoon wasn’t much of a party. The Comité Champagne, a trade association that protects the northeastern French makers of a sparkling wine known as champagne, had told Belgian officials the “Champagne of Beers” was not welcome on the continent. Miller High Life isn’t currently exported to the European Union, but its decades of using the popular “Champagne of Beers” slogan has long rankled the real champagne makers, who rely on E.U. rules to ensure products don’t falsely claim designations of origin. The cases of beers emptied in Antwerp were destined for a German buyer who, when informed of the Comité’s campaign, “did not contest the decision.”
→ Two new bills touted as religious-freedom legislation were passed by the Texas Senate on Thursday: One requires every public school to “conspicuously” display a roughly two-foot-tall poster of the Ten Commandments in every classroom, and the other allows schools to implement new rules to set aside time each day for students and employees to read the Bible or religious texts. Despite, or perhaps because of, a flagrant disregard for the distinction between the church and the state, the bills will now move on to the House of Representatives. Though taxpayer money will ostensibly be needed to pay for the tens of thousands of scriptural posters, Texas Lieutenant Gov. Dan Patrick nonetheless championed the idea of using religious texts to transform young minds. “I believe that you cannot change the culture of the country until you change the culture of mankind,” Patrick said. “Bringing the Ten Commandments and prayer back to our public schools will enable our students to become better Texans.”
The Grateful Dead dedicated its eighth studio album, Blues for Allah, to the former Saudi king Faisal, believing he was a Deadhead.
Since 2015, at least 119,000 protestors have been injured by tear gas or chemical sprays.
Some 62% of Black Americans say race should not be a factor in college admissions.
About 38% of Black Americans say funding for police should go up; another 38% say it should stay the same.
Invented in 1973, the barcode was first used on a pack of Wrigley’s gum at a register.
Built upon morse code, the barcode is a 13-number system capable of producing 1,000 billion variations.
The average car weighed 2,500 pounds in 1940. Today SUVs weigh as much as 5,000 pounds.
A $3 million Damien Hirst lawn sculpture was run over by a Rolls-Royce in Florida.
India’s tiger population, down to 1,800 because of trophy hunting in the 1970s, has surged to more than 3,100 today.
→ Number of the Day: 22%
That’s the total drop in home sale prices in March of this year compared to the same time last year. And while some areas of the country continue to attract new residents because of their growing job markets and affordable cost of living, on the whole the nation is seeing both prices and sales volume drop. Rising mortgage rates and persistently low inventory continues to flummox homebuyers, and with so many buyers satisfied to lock in the historically low rates they secured when they bought their homes in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, they’re incentivized to hold on to their houses, meaning inventory will only be further strained. “Now we’re left with leftovers or people who missed the boat,” Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at real-estate brokerage Redfin, told The Wall Street Journal.
→ The lure of pro sports gambling was too strong for five NFL players, the league said on Friday, announcing the indefinite suspension of two players from the Detroit Lions and one from the Washington Commanders, with two other Detroit Lions players hit with six-game suspensions each. It remains unclear exactly what they were wagering on. The three indefinitely suspended players (Lions wide receiver Quintez Cephus and safety C.J. Moore, and Commanders defensive end Shaka Toney) can petition to be reinstated after the end of the 2023 season; Cephus and Moore have already been cut by the Lion’s front office. With gambling poised to engulf the entire audience experience for our biggest sports, perhaps the NFL should drop the vain pretense of being above the fray and let its players bet millions on their own games, heightening the stakes for victory.
→ States with new abortion-ban laws saw an 11% drop in applicants for gynecology residencies in 2023 compared to the year prior, according to a new study by the Association of American Medical Colleges. The shrinking of the talent pool will be particularly pronounced in regions across the South and the Midwest where contiguous states have enacted such restrictions in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade last year. The bans also seem to have led to a drop in residency applications in emergency medicine departments, where obstetric complications are initially treated, because the bans may limit the training that those departments can provide to residents. “It really ties peoples’ hands,” Mindy Sharon, a recent graduate of Marshall University’s school of medicine, told The Washington Post. “I didn’t want to be in a situation of letting that decision dictate what type of care I could give.”
→ Former Knesset member and centrist Israeli politician Michal Cotler-Wunsh was scheduled to deliver a talk at Yale’s law school on antisemitism, a subject that was apparently too controversial for the school’s Jewish Law Students Association, which abruptly pulled its sponsorship of the event. Now, since it’s being hosted by Deputy Dean Yair Listokin, the talk will continue, but it would have been otherwise canceled for what Cotler-Wunsch said was growing opposition on campus against pro-Israeli speakers who are decried for repressing Palestinians. “When a lecture about antisemitism provokes this sort of response,” Cotler-Wunsch said to the Washington Free Beacon, “how does that help Palestinians advance their right to self-determination?”
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Oxford Comma Makhloykes by Ann K. Brodsky
What I learned from teaching English grammar and punctuation to Hasidic adults
Poems for the Ancestors by Jake Marmer
Dan Alter’s debut collection explores Jewish melancholy and the joys of Neil Young
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
The Spike
A growing number of scientists are sounding the alarm about the risks of both COVID and its cures
By Clayton Fox
Those raising evidence-based concerns about the adverse effects of COVID-19 vaccines are often labeled purveyors of misinformation, and derided as anti-scientific conspiracy theorists and paranoid kooks. Or worse. Bill Kristol tweeted in late 2021 that, “there is blood on the hands in 2021 of the unvaccinated and especially their enablers and encouragers who know better.” However, there are a number of prominent scientists, doctors, and independent researchers who are wary of both COVID infection and the vaccines. Many of these figures are worried about one particular piece of the SARS-CoV-2 virus: the spike protein, which allows the virus to enter your cells, and which was chosen to be the featured element used in the Moderna, Pfizer, J&J, and AstraZeneca vaccines. The available evidence shows that COVID, especially in light of new forms of treatment, is not as acutely deadly as once feared, and while mortality attributable to the COVID vaccines has not been definitively characterized, it is likely relatively rare. But some scientists are concerned by the potential effects of repeated exposure to the spike protein, and therefore the advisability of further boosters that contain it, given that we are going to be frequently reexposed to the circulating virus. Those voicing these concerns, however, have been subjected to censorship, ostracization, and damaging attacks on their reputations.
Take, for example, evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein. On his DarkHorse podcast on June 21, 2021, Weinstein sat down with mRNA pioneer Dr. Robert Malone (COVID-vaccinated) and Silicon Valley inventor turned COVID investigator Steve Kirsch (COVID-vaccinated) to discuss the potential dangers of the vaccines rapidly being distributed around the country and across the world. The focus? The spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, which is produced when the mRNA from the vaccines enters your cells.
By June 21, 2021, Weinstein felt there was enough evidence to demonstrate that the spike was “cytotoxic” (toxic to cells) and asked for Malone’s take. Malone not only concurred but said he had already warned the FDA about that potential risk “months and months and months ago.” On June 3, 2021, according to an email provided to Tablet, Malone contacted Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, regarding his concerns about “circulating spike protein, and the associated implications.” Malone said on the podcast that his contacts inside the FDA ultimately felt that his evidence wasn’t strong enough to prove that the spike alone was “biologically active.” Dr. Marks has not responded to Tablet’s requests for comment.
Not one week after Weinstein’s podcast, as the concept of a toxic spike protein spread across the internet, the new fact-checking police leapt into action. Reuters wrote, “Posts are sharing the false statement that the spike protein in COVID-19 vaccines is cytotoxic, suggesting that it kills or damages cells. There is no evidence to support this,” and quoted a couple of experts. The fact check deemed Weinstein’s claim “false,” just as it had once done with the assertion that COVID-19 was likely created in a laboratory. As it turns out, the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is now considered extremely toxic to many human systems—a conclusion reachedin paper after paper. Evidence to support this has also been found in tissue samples from deceased COVID patients, and those who were suspected to have died due to complications from vaccination, as well as those with post-vaccination myocarditis.
Every virus, like every organism, is made up of proteins, which are in turn made up of complex chains of amino acids. These are the microstructures of life itself. Coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2 are composed of four main types of proteins: envelope, membrane, nucleocapsid, and spike. The spike protein’s primary role is to help the virus attach to cells, gain entry, and propagate itself. To begin with, the ruthless efficiency of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein makes it an extremely dangerous bit of biology. But also, this spike is itself a pathogen. This assessment is not breaking news; researchers who studied past human coronaviruses, especially SARS, noted that the spike protein can cause inflammation and increase disease severity. In fact, a 2005 study in the prestigious Nature Medicine journal proved that the spike protein of SARS, due to its effects on the now-famous ACE2 receptor, can “cause severe and often lethal lung failure.”
But the SARS-CoV-2 version makes those past spikes look simple by comparison. Dr. Paul Marik, the founder and chief scientific officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, and the second-most-published critical care physician in the world, told Tablet that the only substance he’s aware of as toxic as the SARS-CoV-2 spike is cyanide. “Cyanide kills you quickly, spike kills you over a prolonged period of time. It’s truly astonishing the things it does.” Marik thinks that spike is the primary driver of COVID’s virulence, which he saw firsthand while treating severely ill patients during the first wave of the pandemic. “It is the most vicious disease I have ever seen. People have said this is like the flu, and it’s no big deal. Let me tell you … It is an extremely evil disease. It’s difficult to treat. It responds poorly and it kills people slowly over time.”
Veteran viral pathologist Dr. Gerard Nuovo, a retired professor at Ohio State University and an active researcher of COVID-19, was similarly shocked after looking at tissue samples from people who died from the illness. “I said to myself, I have never seen a fatal viral infection with so much viral protein in the target organ, which as you know is the lung.”
Here are some of the things that the spike protein has been found to have the potential to do. In the cardiovascular system: One segment of spike can signal the cells of blood vessels in the lungs to grow, causing “thickened” vessel walls typical of pulmonary hypertension, a condition that makes it harder for the heart to pump blood into the lungs; that same fragment, S1, can damage the cells which line the inside of every blood vessel in the body including the lungs; can damage the cells in your heart which work in concert with those cells; can cause the heart to become fibrotic; and can, says this 2022 paper, even contribute to the development of myocarditis, an inflammatory condition of the heart muscle which weakens it, and can cause sudden death in recovered patients. The Cleveland Clinic estimates that the survival rate for myocarditis is 80% after one year and 50% after five.
In the blood: Spike can deform our clotting cells—or platelets—sometimes irreversibly activating them; it binds to blood clotting proteins and creates clots that are “structurally abnormal”; it can cause microclots from red blood cells clumping together that deplete blood oxygen levels. David Scheim, an independent researcher who co-authored a study published in December 2022 about those microclots with a team from France’s famed Méditerranée Infection Institute in Marseille, told Tablet that their experiment revealed the red blood cell clumping “is actually visible [to the naked eye], it forms a film so you don’t even need a microscope, you just add the spike to a suspension of red blood cells and you see this clumping.”
In the brain: The S1 fragment of spike has been shown to move straight across the blood brain barrier, the all-important gatekeeper of the brain, in humanized mice. Once it’s in, the spike can damage cells that line the walls of blood vessels in the brain, lead to memory loss, or disrupt the mitochondria of similar brain blood vessel cells, potentially triggering “a more severe form of stroke.” Perhaps more ominously, certain sequences on the S1 portion of the spike are able to bind to amyloid proteins that have been known to cause severe neurological disease. The proteins that spike is able to bind are related to the development of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Creutzfeldt-Jacob, an irreversible, and fatal brain disease. Additionally, the spike itself may be considered an amyloid, a misfolded protein that can grow and form fibrous plaques. Think of the 1958 horror classic The Blob, but at a cellular level.
In short, spike can contribute to cardiovascular damage, brain damage, blood clots, autoimmunity, cell deformation, and cell-to-cell fusion. As Walter Chesnut, an independent researcher, has previously written, “It is a Swiss Army Knife of death.” Chesnut co-authored an article in 2021 with a group of scientists, doctors, and journalists that included Luc Montagnier (who won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of HIV) outlining what may tie together all of the spike’s nasty effects. They theorized that spike preys on our DNA, and that repeated exposure will prematurely age us, leading to earlier death by natural causes. “Spike is spike. The more the worse,” Chesnut told Tablet.
The Chesnut and Montagnier et al. hypothesis that spike protein can accelerate biological aging is still novel, and not widely accepted. Professor Masfique Mehedi, a microbiologist and virologist who has studied Ebola at the prestigious Rocky Mountain Laboratories, and whose work shows that COVID spike can enter the nucleus of our cells, told Tablet that their hypothesis may be “premature.” There is, however, mounting evidence that the larger idea that vaccine-induced spike could be harming people is worth taking seriously.
The spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 is not precisely identical to the spike used in the vaccines, though they are very similar. First of all, at any given point in time, the wild-type spike is mutating (e.g., omicron) with unknown consequences, whereas the vaccine spikes are predetermined. But the design of the vaccine spike was deliberately altered from the original in at least two key ways: to increase stability, and to “lock” the protein in its “prefusion” shape, in the hopes that it would teach our immune system to recognize and neutralize the virus’s spike before it has a chance to bind to our cells.
One argument against the spike protein hypothesis of vaccine injury—meaning the notion that exposure to the spike protein is the main cause of the vaccine’s potentially severe side effects—is that due to the changes locking the spike in its prefusion shape, it can’t cause the damage alleged. However, many of the examples provided above of spike-related pathologies don’t require cell-binding, but rather just require exposure.
Because of how dangerous it is, some believe that it’s a secondary question where the spike is coming from, COVID or the treatments for COVID—all that really matters is that it’s coming into contact with your cells. “The more spike, the greater the risk. So if you have COVID and get vaccinated, you have a greater risk, if you are vaccinated and you get COVID, you have a greater risk,” Marik said. In February 2023, a group of researchers from the University of Colorado seemed to affirm Marik’s contention. After assessing a small group of patients with myocarditis, they concluded: “These observations suggest that myocardial injury during COVID-19 or after mRNA vaccination may be produced by the same Spike protein–based mechanism, which may be amenable to preventative or therapeutic strategies.”
A second argument against the hypothesis is that there simply isn’t enough spike released into the blood after vaccination to cause the kinds of issues we’ve seen in COVID patients. “The low doses of the spike protein in the vaccine, in our experiments anyway, didn’t cause any recognizable damage,” Dr. Nuovo told Tablet. Nonetheless, Nuovo abstained from getting his third vaccine dose because “the initial vaccine data showed that people who didn’t get the booster were still very well protected against severe COVID, and the second point was I didn’t see the point of introducing more spike protein into my body if there was no benefit to be coming from it … because the spike protein per se does have some toxicity associated with it.”
There is another way that the vaccines might be causing harm. Due to FOIA requests from Judicial Watch and others, we now know that the vaccine material travels beyond the upper arm muscle throughout the body, in spite of the CDC’s web page maintaining the 2020 narrative that it stays put. Because the vaccines were designed to express the full-length spike protein in our cells, some researchers like professor Mehedi worry that the vaccines could be inducing a major attack of the immune system against healthy cells throughout the body. “An unfortunate & unimaginable detrimental consequence … face[d] by everyone who took it due to a poor and unacceptable design by the low-grade researchers and opportunistic makers.”
Read the rest, here.