What Happened Today: February 9, 2023
Fauci's vaccine veritas; Barcelona's blues; China's vertical pig venture
The Big Story
In a new medical paper, Dr. Anthony Fauci has radically undermined the position he originally took while advising the official U.S. COVID-19 pandemic response for the Trump and Biden administrations. In the paper, co-authored with two colleagues and published by prestigious medical journal Cell, Fauci now acknowledges that COVID-19 vaccines do not—and should not have been expected to—give immunity against the virus. “If natural mucosal respiratory virus infections do not elicit complete and long-term protective immunity against reinfection,” they write in the paper, “how can we expect vaccines, especially systemically administered non-replicating vaccines, to do so?”
While the retired director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is now openly acknowledging that respiratory pathogens like influenza, RSV, and the novel coronavirus are incapable of triggering a long-lasting immune response in humans, and thus the same is true of COVID-19 vaccines, that is contrary to what he told the American public during the government’s COVID-19 vaccine drive. In May 2021, Fauci told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that we shouldn’t be concerned with “breakthrough infections” because if you are vaccinated, “you’re really quite safe from getting infected.” Three months later, Fauci said the unvaccinated were “propagating this outbreak.” But now Fauci is arguing precisely the opposite: that these kinds of viruses can’t be defeated by natural immunity, nor by any vaccine that’s been developed for them to date.
That’s because, as the paper articulates, these viruses “replicate predominantly in local [nasal] mucosal tissue, without causing viremia [viral spread in the blood] and do not significantly encounter the systemic immune system or the full force of adaptive immune responses.” This was known before 2020, but Operation Warp Speed nonetheless speedily developed products that primarily trigger blood-borne antibodies rather than ones that can stop infections before they spread.
Despite the problems with the current vaccines belatedly addressed in Fauci’s new paper, more similar vaccines are coming off the assembly line. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told Bloomberg News at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos that he predicts the company will have a new mRNA-based influenza vaccine ready to go by the end of 2023, using a similar approach to the COVID-19 vaccines, of which Fauci has just written, “Past unsuccessful attempts to elicit solid protection against mucosal respiratory viruses and to control the deadly outbreaks and pandemics they cause have been a scientific and public health failure that must be urgently addressed.”
Read More: https://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128(22)00572-8#%20
In the Back Pages: Vaccines Never Prevented the Transmission of COVID
The Rest
→ Is Microsoft going to overtake Google as the King of the Search? Probably not, but its investment in the OpenAI start-up seems to be putting it ahead of Google’s AI team in the race for the best personal, virtual know-it-all. A recent demo of Google’s AI chatbot Bard showed that the company still has a lot of work to do. When Bard was asked “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year-old about?” it responded with incorrect information, attributing to JWST one achievement that was actually made by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. The goal for these super AI bots is to integrate them fully into search engines so that, rather than having to read the articles your search finds, Google or Microsoft’s Bing will tell you the answer you’re looking for—kind of like Kramer in the famous Seinfeld episode in which he pretends to be the automated answering machine of Moviefone. Not as funny as Kramer, but better. “Why don’t you just tell me the name of the movie you want to see?”
→ The long-standing Birmingham, England, home for the Jewish elderly, the Andrew Cohen House, is now looking for a buyer. As the Jewish population at the home has dwindled to only 13 of 59 residents and the U.K government subsidies have not been able to keep pace with the “real cost” of care, Executive Director Sharon Grey told The Jewish Chronicle that the move is “the only way to ensure that BJCC can survive in the long term.” Rabbi Yossi Jacobs of the city’s largest Orthodox congregation, Singers Hill, said that it was “a sad day for Birmingham Jewry” and that “you have to stay committed to the community if you want to retain the infrastructure.”
→ Chart of the Day:
Barcelona, and the Catalonia province more broadly, might have shot itself in the foot. A once-burgeoning European mecca, Catalonia has spent much of the past decade in decline as leaders there wrestle with the eternal question of seceding from the rest of Spain. Since the 2017 referendum on independence, 8,200 companies have moved headquarters from Catalonia to other areas of Spain, Madrid in particular. Some lay Barcelona’s woes at the feet of the anti-separatist but anti-business mayor, Ada Colau, who’s accused her predecessor of allowing “capitalism [to] run amok.” Xavier Trias, the accused capitalist, told the Financial Times that “they’re social activists above all who do not understand that the real fight against poverty is to create economic activity.”
Read More on the Barcelona Blues: https://www.ft.com/content/18f0ca8c-607b-4633-a83f-e99f71a046e8
→ In other Colau-related news, Mayor Colau wrote to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday informing him that the city would be breaking ties with Israel, including abolishing its “twin city” designation with Tel Aviv “until the Israeli authorities put an end to the system of violations of the Palestinian people and fully comply with the obligations imposed on them by international law and the various United Nations resolutions.”
→ Video of the Day:
The most Jewish New York video ever? When Israeli Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren visited NYC in June 1974, he was warmly welcomed by Abraham Beame, the observant Jewish mayor. Goren told him, “You are the mayor of more Jews than the prime minister in Israel,” to which Beame quipped, “That means I’ve got more problems.”
→ Photo of the Day:
With more than half of the world’s pork consumed in China, authorities and business leaders there have elevated the ground-level pig farm into a high-rise phenomenon of industrial agriculture. “China’s current pig breeding is still decades behind the most advanced nations … This provides us with room for improvement to catch up,” said Zhuge Wenda, the president of Hubei Zhongxin Kaiwei Modern Animal Husbandry, which built this 26-story vertical pig operation that utilizes precise computer tracking to monitor a pig from birth to slaughter, along with its vital signs and food consumed as it moves between the floors of the building. One downside? The risk of disease among the animals. “U.S. hog farmers look at the pictures of those farms in China, and they just scratch their heads and say, ‘We would never dare do that,’” Mr. Brett Stuart of Global AgriTrends told The New York Times. “It’s just too risky.”
→ Map of the Day:
According to the Pentagon, China has been on an absolute balloon binge in recent years, using the old technology to conduct surveillance on many sites around the world. In a statement on Thursday, a senior State Department official noted that the recent balloon shot down by the military had been manufactured by a company with ties to the Chinese military and outfitted with antennas, solar panels, and equipment “likely capable of collecting…communications.” The White House is reportedly planning to add six Chinese companies involved in the balloon program to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s “entities list,” making it harder for American companies to do business with them.
→ Chileans awoke Friday to a macabre announcement: that a collection of 89 boxes of bones being held at a Chilean medical school likely belong to victims of the Pinochet dictatorship that lasted from 1973 to 1990. The bones were held at the University of Chile Medical School for 18 years before being returned to the government in 2019. The Ministry of Justice says that it remains committed “to the truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-repetition.” Families of the Pinochet disappeared are asking the government to investigate what they rightly call a “very serious situation.”
→ Number of the Day: 50%
That’s the percentage of Americans who told Gallup they are worse off financially today than they were a year ago. Since 1976, only two other years featured a similar proportion: 2008 and 2009. This stands in stark contrast to the results of a January 2020 poll that found 59% saying they were better off and only 20% choosing “worse.” Naturally, lower-income Americans are claiming the worst of the impact, with 61% saying they are worse off this year. And, following a previously observed pattern, more Republicans than Democrats say they are worse off, which usually correlates to the opposing party being in office. Remarkably, the ever-positive American attitude is reflected in the fact that 60% of those polled believe they will be better off a year from now. Let’s hope.
→ RIP Burt Bacharach, Jew of Kew Gardens, Queens, New York. The 94-year-old music legend composed some of the most memorable songs of the 20th century, including “Say A Little Prayer,” Perry Como’s “Magic Moments,” the Shirelles’ “Baby It’s You,” Jackie DeShannon’s “What the World Needs Now is Love,” Herb Alpert’s “This Guy’s in Love With You,” Neil Diamond’s “Heartlight,” Tom Jones’ “What’s New, Pussycat?” and The Scroll’s personal favorite, Patti Labelle-Michael McDonald duet “On My Own.” Bacharach won six Grammys and three Oscars and was named the Greatest Living Composer by the Grammys in 2008. Though he wrote in his autobiography, “I was Jewish but I didn’t want anybody to know about it,” we know, and for you, dear Burt, we say zichrono livracha.
TODAY IN TABLET:
Jewish Father-in-Law’s Day by Marcia Friedman
As we prepare to read Parshat Yitro, a convert to Judaism honors the advice and love of her father-in-law with a special recipe
Hezekiah’s Mistake by Tony Badran
As Netanyahu tries to manage relations with a fracturing American empire, he would do well to read Isaiah
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.
This piece was originally published in Tablet Magazine, October 2022
Vaccines Never Prevented the Transmission of COVID
Allowing zealots to censor news in the name of ‘science’ is a danger to public health
In late 2021 and early 2022, it was commonplace for journalists and public intellectuals to demonize and shame “the unvaccinated,” a group that in the United States was disproportionately low income. The New York Timesran pieces like “I’m Furious at the Unvaccinated,” and “Unvaxxed, Unmasked and Putting Our Kids at Risk.” The Los Angeles Times published a column titled “Mocking anti-vaxxers’ COVID deaths is ghoulish, yes—but may be necessary.” An opinion piece called “The Unvaccinated Are a Risk to All of Us” appeared in Bloomberg, and The Washington Postprinted a piece called “Macron is right: It’s time to make life a living hell for anti-vaxxers.”
CNN’s Don Lemon commented that people refusing the vaccines were being “idiotic and nonsensical.” He argued that it was time to “start shaming them” or “leave them behind.” Noam Chomsky, a self-described libertarian socialist, said unvaccinated people should remove themselves from society and be “isolated.” Asked how they would get food that way, he answered, “Well actually, that’s their problem.”
In Canada, columnists for the Toronto Star proclaimed, “Vaccine resisters are lazy and irresponsible—we need vaccine passports now to protect the rest of us” and “The unvaccinated cherish their freedom to harm others. How can we ever forgive them?” In the U.K., the Daily Mail contended, “It’s time to punish Britain’s 5 million vaccine refuseniks,” and Piers Morgan, a British presenter on TalkTV, suggested that unvaccinated people should not be allowed access to the country’s National Health Service.
Internationally, several politicians threatened to reimplement restrictions and told the public that “the unvaccinated” were at fault. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said unvaccinated people “are very often misogynistic and racist,” and asked, “Do we tolerate these people?” President Joe Biden said that his “patience [was] wearing thin” and that we needed to “protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated coworkers.” Michael Gunner, chief minister of the Northern Territory in Australia, stated that even if you are vaccinated, “if you are anti-mandate, you are absolutely anti-vax.” French President Emmanuel Macron declared that 5 million French people who remained unvaccinated were “not citizens.”
Across parts of the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe, unvaccinated people were fired from their jobs, excluded from higher education, banned from many sectors of public life, denied organ transplants, and even punished by judges in probation hearings and child custody cases. Meanwhile, COVID cases continued to rise in many highly vaccinated countries with vaccine passports and other restrictions in place.
Vaccine mandates were mainly rationalized through the belief that the higher the rate of vaccination, the less the virus would spread. For example, during oral arguments for Biden’s health care worker mandate, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Elena Kagan claimed that health care workers had to get vaccinated “so that you’re not transmitting the disease.” But recently, on Oct. 10, 2022, a Pfizer spokesperson told the European Parliament that the vaccines had never actually been tested for preventing transmission. While this was presented on social media as “breaking news,” the fact that the vaccines were not tested for this purpose has been documented extensively ever since Pfizer and Moderna received their original Emergency Use Authorization (EUA).
During the Dec. 10, 2020, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) meeting when the first mRNA vaccines were authorized, FDA adviser Dr. Patrick Moore stated, “Pfizer has presented no evidence in its data today that the vaccine has any effect on virus carriage or shedding, which is the fundamental basis for herd immunity.” Despite the data presented for individual efficacy, he continued, “we really, as of right now, do not have any evidence that it will have an impact, social-wide, on the epidemic.” The FDA EUA press release from December 2020 also confirms that there was no “evidence that the vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-COV-2 from person to person.”
Read the rest of Alex Gutentag’s piece on COVID vaccines here.
When will the people that perpetuated the lies about the vaccine and Covid ever be held to account?