Latest News Roundup By Ajax The Great

By Ajax the Great 

(Originally posted as four separate articles on True Spirit of America Party blog)

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.

LATEST MASK STUDY REACHES 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.

CHINA'S ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, AND NOT IN A GOOD WAY EITHER

The People's Republic of China, aka Communist China or simply China, is skating on extremely thin ice now, and numerous cracks and fissures are forming all over the place.  From the Covid pandemic that they had unleashed on the world, to their failed but never-ending Zero Covid strategy and its rolling lockdowns, to their (not coincidentally) ultra-low and still plummeting birthrates, to their utterly tarnished world image now, to their massive Evergrande debt crisis, housing bubble crisis, and thus incipient financial crisis that would make 2008 look like a walk in the park, their once-buoyant but now sclerotic and increasingly moribund economy (if not society too) now stands on the precipice of truly epic collapse.  The ruling CCP is quickly losing clout each day, and civil unrest is only growing.  Meanwhile, their biggest ally, Russia, is now a pariah state bogged down in the quagmire of their own making in Ukraine, and North Korea is, well, North Korea.  If they did decide to foolishly invade Taiwan, that would of course only accelerate their collapse.  But even if they don't, they are still bound to collapse soon.  First gradually, then suddenly, as Ernest Hemingway would say. 

See you on the dark side of the moon....

Of course, being the second largest economy in the world, when China sneezes, the rest of the world catches much more than a cold.  Thus, a global financial crisis looks likely.  Hopefully the contagion will only be metaphorical this time around.

ABOUT THAT LANCET STUDY 

The latest Lancet study that supposedly found a modestly increased risk of dementia, psychosis, and other neurological and psychiatric disorders up to two years after a Covid diagnosis is all over the news now.  But as with most mainstream Covid studies, there is much less than meets the eye here yet again.

For starters, the study only compared people who had Covid listed in their medical record with those who had other respiratory infections instead, which would inherently exclude the vast majority of infections that were either asymptomatic or too mild to even see a doctor about.  Especially for Omicron and its subvariants, as another study found that most people who were infected with Omicron (i.e. confirmed by antibody testing later) weren't even aware that they had it at all.  Which honestly is not even the least bit surprising for a variant that typically does not exceed the "I have a cold" threshold in terms of symptoms.  And if anything, the antibody testing is underinclusive, not overinclusive.

Additionally, most of the effect sizes found in the Lancet study for most of the neuropsychiatric sequelae studied were either transient and/or not radically different than for other respiratory infections, especially for children but also for adults as well.  And confidence intervals were fairly wide for many of the endpoints studied as well.

Finally, as much as the mainstream media likes to claim it does, it does NOT really exonerate the gene therapy injections misnamed "vaccines" either.  At best, not nearly enough time has gone by to do so.  Meanwhile, evidence the risks and lack of durable benefits of the jabs continues to mount as we speak.

See also here, here, and here as well for further evidence that Long Covid is typically not radically worse than Long Flu, and why Long Lockdown and Long Jab Injury are far worse things to fear.  And as we noted previously, the masks probably don't help matters much either, and likely make things worse.

Thus, there is literally no valid scientific reason to treat Covid any differently than the flu now, if there ever really was.  It is endemic now, and for practical purposes it really is no worse now.  Case closed.