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A COVID lockdown backlash? — 19 Comments

1. I don’t think the truth or falsehood of attacks matter to them at all.
   It doesn’t matter when they are making attacks.

   They have never really looked at data or science only “The Science” tm.
   The only thing they are afraid of is that independents and conservative democrats, yes the exist in the wild, will see that much of what they did and what they pushed Trump to do was not backed very well by data and small s science.

2. If I had school age children in a public school that had remote learning and then required masks, I’d never vote for a Dem in my life.

   The Dems need to pay a high price for their child abuse as that is what it was.

   Covid revealed the Dems to be the lunatics and authoritarians that they are.

3. Their big worry has to be the House. Fraud cannot take the whole thing, as there are too many districts outside the big blue corruptopolis. They can still do some, of course, and they are going all in on redistricting, unlike the GOP in some places*. The Senate, of course, they can steal, and I’m not betting against that.

   However, I expect them to try other tactics in the House. One would be seeing that so many Republican winners are disputed that the undisputed House remains majority Democrat. They then settle the disputes.

   *I was talking to a friend who has a theory that overdoing gerrymandering is counterproductive, because things change too fast over a decade. Maybe. And even if he’s right, one cycle may be enough to end it.

4. They will never ever admit they were wrong. That is the common theme of leaders around the world from Canada to NZ to Australia to US governors. Instead they either gaslight everybody by claiming the NPI’s worked or they just quietly move on from them.

   And it is a mortal lock that mask mandates will return again next winter if not sooner.

   Their only chance for electoral success is to hope enough people have forgotten by November and my cynical self says they will probably see their hope realized.

5. Democrats are now responding to awesomely bad polling eight months before an election. They’re responding so abruptly because they’re genuinely surprised at how awesomely bad they are. And they’re surprised because THIS is the media bubble in which they live:

   https://talkingpointsmemo.com/

   Mike

6. The democrat party is facing a bloodbath and since the only way they can see to reduce it is with deceit and fraud, they have no alternative but to dig the hole they’re in even deeper. In seeking to appear to get out of that hole, they have to engage in even more deceit and fraud. They’re caught in a vicious cycle.

   “Oh! What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive” Sir Walter Scott

   “If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.” Abraham Lincoln

   The left’s supporters are slowly being reduced to fools and traitors and that, by their own actions.

7. The new narrative will be that they did follow the science and now it is safe to return to normal, and their loyal followers will be relieved that the evil deplorables can be not only ignored but ridiculed for being so impatient. It will comfort the true believers but may not be accepted by the unwashed masses.

   Speaking from rural south of Houston Texas the following is accurate: The level of hatred for Democrats has reached biblical levels. In rural America, pro-Joe Biden stickers are hidden. Democrats feel like they’re “on the run.”

   https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2022/02/17/i-feel-like-were-on-the-run-the-hatred-for-democrats-in-rural-america-has-rea-n2603428

   IMO the GOP campaign slogan should be Defund the Swamp..

8. I live in the congressional district that Sean Patrick Maloney represents.

   I look forward to voting for his Republican opponent in the 2024 election.

9. @ Dick Illyes > “IMO the GOP campaign slogan should be Defund the Swamp..”

   Except the Swamp includes far too many of themselves.

10. That bit about Republican attacks having “alarming credibility” also underlies the general point of view of the Talking Points Memo Bubble Bunch – as described in this post by Byron York.

    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/war-over-trump-spying

    Anyone who has followed political journalism for more than a minute or two could predict how some big outlets would cover the revelation that operatives connected to the Hillary Clinton campaign spied on the Trump campaign. Once legacy media journalists saw the story reported on Fox News, and especially when they saw former President Donald Trump promoting it, they immediately thought: How can we knock this down?

    Normally, when news breaks — and the spying information was contained in a court filing by Justice Department special counsel John Durham — a news organization first reports the news. Then it might publish one or more analysis pieces, reaction pieces, and follow-up stories. But first, they report the news.

    That didn’t happen this time. The New York Times, for example, skipped the news story and went straight to the analysis. And it was really more analysis and commentary, with this lengthy and oddly worded headline: “Court Filing Started a Furor in Right-Wing Outlets, but Their Narrative Is Off Track; The latest alarmist claims about spying on Trump appeared to be flawed, but the explanation is byzantine — underlining the challenge for journalists in deciding what merits coverage.”

    It’s always all about them.

    That’s a lot to put in a headline. First, the New York Times said the story was so complicated that perhaps it shouldn’t be reported at all. Yes, they really said that. Stories like the Durham filing, the Times wrote, “tend to involve dense and obscure issues, so dissecting them requires asking readers to expend significant mental energy and time — raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims.”

    Then the article discussed some of the particulars of the Durham filing, which were contained in a motion in Durham’s false statements case against Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who worked on behalf of the 2016 Clinton campaign.

    York gives the background, which we don’t need to rehearse for Neo’s audience.

    The point of the Times story was to suggest that Durham’s filing was somehow wrong. But the first thing the Times did was to argue that the coverage of the filing was wrong.
    …
    The Times’s bigger problem was that it set out to knock down the “right-wing” coverage of Durham’s filing without first reporting on Durham’s filing. And since the Times is quite influential in some journalistic circles, its arguments were echoed throughout many cable TV discussions.

    Then came a postscript. In a new motion, Sussmann’s lawyers accused Durham of seeking to “politicize” the case, “inflame media coverage,” and, ultimately, “taint the jury pool.” Sussmann asked the court to strike the relevant portions from Durham’s motion. Durham obviously had to respond, and in his response, he wrote, “If third parties or members of the media have overstated, understated, or otherwise misinterpreted facts contained in the government’s motion, that does not in any way undermine the valid reasons for the government’s inclusion of this information.”

    The Times read that argument and said, aha! Durham is distancing himself from all that “right-wing” coverage! Not long after, the Times published a story headlined, “Durham Distances Himself From Furor in Right-Wing Media Over Filing; The special counsel implicitly acknowledged that White House internet data he discussed, which conservative outlets have portrayed as proof of spying on the Trump White House, came from the Obama era.” It does not seem to have occurred to the New York Times that the New York Times might be one of those media outlets that either overstated, understated, or otherwise misinterpreted the facts in Durham’s filing.

    Here’s the key: Directing attention to “right-wing” coverage of the Durham filing allows some media outlets to ignore the substance of Durham’s filing. But it does not change the substance of Durham’s filing. And in the future, the special counsel will undoubtedly reveal more about what really happened.

    Very typical methodology at the Times.

11. Whatever changes one may see in Democrats now is completely fraudulent; their default setting is “accrue power to rule over society because they’re the smartest people who know better than anyone else.” When facing voter backlash they appease. It’s all an act.

    Once the dust settles they will go back to their natural way; leopards, spots, etc. Trust them at your – and our – peril.

    Whether Republicans can grow enough vertebrae over the next few months to take the Democrat threat to our country seriously remains to be seen. I rather doubt it, myself, but we’ll see; an 80% response from Repubs will be inadequate, but easier on the landscape than what the Citizens would do if forced to assume the duty.

12. PS. Reading the entire post from SF Gate, the Democrats have more to worry about than just the public response to their Covidiocy:

    The DCCC presentation also contained a slide showing that the top two concerns of voters in competitive districts are inflation and health care, with the COVID-19 pandemic coming in third. Medicare/social security and climate change rounded out the top five. At the bottom of the list were voting rights, taxes and racial justice/equality.

13. I have developed a Grand Unifying Field Theory about why the Canadians (among other governments, including the USA), are being so hysterically adamant about enforcing injection mandates for the Covid vaccines that, it is increasingly clear, are not effective either at preventing infections in the jabbed, or preventing passing them along to anyone else, jabbed or not. In other words, mandates are a useless tool for stopping the viral spread. [see post linked below]

    So why the double – triple – quadrupling down on the mandates, to the point that they are willing to run horses over elderly ladies in walkers?
    [I can’t believe no one has pulled up a parallel to the Border Patrol Whips Immigrants stories, but the Canuck Faux-Mounties aren’t getting out of this one so easily.]

    Go back in time to the first days of the vaccines’ public introduction, and the stories of the tests for efficacy and safety, and look at this particular point. The placebo group is the unvaccinated cohort, having received an injection of something other than the product being tested.

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/12/pandemic-vaccinated-two-studies-show-new-evidence-covid-19-vaccines-cause-illness-prevent/

    The report also shows that Pfizer had recorded an increased risk of illness – and even an increased risk of death – in individuals who had taken the vaccine compared to those who were in the placebo group – something that was also backed up by Pfizer’s latest clinical trial data that was published last month.
    …
    Overall, adverse events that were attributed to the vaccine were an astounding 300% higher than in the placebo group.
    …
    Additionally, because Pfizer unblinded their clinical trial groups early, they are unable to produce any relevant long-term safety data because they don’t have a control group for reference anymore.

    By early 2021, nearly everyone in the study, even the placebo group had been vaccinated, which effectively ended any hope for meaningful data.

    Now, consider some of the very, very many stories where the illness or death of vaccinated persons is alleged to be the results of the vaccines, which are one of the reasons a lot of people are rejecting the jabs (other objections stem from the fetal cell connections, but that’s an irrelevant issue to my argument).

    I don’t know that any of those allegations have been proven yet.
    There has to be a statistical analysis of the same sorts of health events in the unvaccinated in order to determine if the illnesses and deaths are more likely caused by the vaccines and not some other factor.

    BUT, if you don’t have an unvaccinated population, you can’t make that kind of comparison, and you then can’t definitively blame the vaccines for the adverse health events.

    Funny how that works out.

    Ah, but what about using the unvaccinated in other countries as the placebo group?
    Well — I would argue, if I were one of Pfizer’s or Moderna’s minions — those populations are too different demographically from the ones we are talking about here to make meaningful comparisons.

    There are more points in the Theory having to do with immunity for lawsuits (which hasn’t been court-tested yet), suppression of the actual trial data for 75 years (although I think that’s been knocked down to a shorter period), and a few other things, but you get the gist of it: in addition to the fees for providing vaccines – the more people, the more money — the pharma companies get the added benefit of not having any unvaxxed population to compare to the vaxxed for purposes of charging them with being, for some people, a cure worse than the disease.

    That’s not chump change, for the pharma companies, or the governments that have promoted them.

    * * *
    I’ve added some paragraphing to make the text more readable.
    https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-vaccines-are-a-tool-not-a-silver-bullet-if-wed-allowed-more-scientific/

    In December, 2020, the new mRNA vaccines were rolled out, and were, according to the randomized clinical trials, 95 per cent (Pfizer) and 94.5 per cent (Moderna) efficacious in stopping infection. Physician-scientist Eric Topol, head of Scripps Labs, said these vaccines “will go down in history as one of science and medical research’s greatest achievements.”

    But by the time summer 2021 arrived, real world experience contradicted Mr. Bourla’s and Dr. Sahin’s claims of potency at six months, no transmission by the vaccinated, and imminent herd immunity. Pfizer’s Mr. Bourla, in his February interview, had called Israel “the world’s lab,” because it was vaccinated with the Pfizer extensively and several months ahead of other countries, giving the world a glimpse of its future. But when Israeli public health released its six-month data, they showed that vaccine effectiveness had dropped to 39 per cent, and Delta was surging. (The FDA had originally said it would not approve a vaccine less than 50-per-cent effective.) A Mayo clinic study showed that after six months, protection granted by the two Pfizer doses dropped from the original 95 per cent to 42 per cent. Another Israeli study showed it had dropped to 16 per cent.

    That huge discrepancy couldn’t be attributed just to the new variant, Delta, because protection was already fading at five months for the earlier variants too.
    So why such a discrepancy?

    The original studies were clinical trials. The Pfizer study followed about 38,000 people without COVID who were divided in two groups – half got the vaccine, and half a placebo. The investigators asked the question: could the vaccines prevent symptomatic cases of COVID-19? But, as Peter Doshi, senior editor at the British Medical Journal, warned, “None of the trials currently under way are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths.” He explained that, “Because most people with symptomatic COVID-19 experience only mild symptoms, even trials involving 30,000 or more patients would turn up relatively few cases of severe disease.” Susanne Hodgson of the University of Oxford agreed: “The current [randomized control trials] that are ongoing are … not powered to assess efficacy against hospital admission and death.”

    The Moderna report to the FDA on Dec. 17, 2020, confirmed “there were no deaths due to COVID-19 at the time of the interim analysis to enable an assessment of vaccine efficacy against death due to COVID-19.”

    Moderna followed about 30,000 people. When asked by the British Medical Journal, why the trial had not been designed to assess if the vaccine could prevent hospitalization and death, Moderna answered: “You would need a trial that is either 5 or 10 times larger or you’d need a trial that is 5-10 times longer to collect those events.”

    In the Pfizer study of 38,000 people, not a single person in the placebo or the vaccine group died of COVID. By publication date, only one person had died of COVID in the Moderna study. To state it clearly: One person out of about 70,000 in the combined studies of Pfizer and Moderna actually died of COVID. In the real world, at the time, about 60 per cent of COVID deaths were in people over 75 years of age. But only 4.4 per cent of that age group were in the Pfizer study. The sample chosen was not appropriate to answer the public’s most pressing question: Could the vaccines save lives?

    And how long had the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines been studied, when released for mass use in the winter of 2021? Two months.

    These studies looked at the vaccines at their most potent, in a low risk population, and gave us a flattering snapshot. But COVID-19 is a movie.

    In contrast, the Mayo study, and the Israeli data, were looking at data over a more realistic time course to test effectiveness.

    The waning created a crisis in Israel. Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, director of Israel’s Public Health Services, told the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee on boosters, why the country became the first to roll out a third shot: “What we saw prior to our booster campaign was that 60 per cent of people in severe and critical condition were immunized, doubly immunized, fully vaccinated and as I said, 45 per cent of the people who died in the fourth wave were doubly vaccinated.”

    Most “breakthrough infections” are indeed mild, but she was describing life-threatening ones in the vaccinated. As breakthrough infections became commonplace throughout the world, noted Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina said, the message that “this is only an epidemic of the unvaccinated … is falling flat.”
    …
    In fact, the original randomized clinical trials for Pfizer and Moderna did not test if the vaccines stop transmission. Now our best hope was that the vaccinated might transmit less than the unvaccinated. Several studies could be interpreted as showing this. But others found the vaccinated likely had equal transmission.

    One study, conducted in a prison, concluded that the vaccinated prisoners had as much “transmission potential” as the unvaccinated prisoners, adding, “clinicians and public health practitioners should consider vaccinated persons who become infected with SARS-CoV-2 to be no less infectious than unvaccinated persons.” Dr. Cyrille Cohen, head of the immunotherapy lab at Bar-Ilan University, and adviser to the Israeli government on vaccine trials, said that with respect to transmission with Omicron, “we don’t see virtually any difference … between people vaccinated and nonvaccinated,” adding “both get infected with the virus, more or less at the same pace.” The rancour that we, the vaccinated, are increasingly directing against the unvaccinated, fuels itself by remaining wilfully oblivious of this later painful truth: we too spread, to ourselves, and to the unvaccinated, as they to us and each other.

    The master narrative was silent about natural immunity and its relationship to vaccination status. Many scientist-physicians, from prominent universities in the U.S. with specialties in public health, argue that one can be for the use of the COVID vaccine, but also against mandating it for unvaccinated people who are already immune.

    These scientists maintain what matters is not whether a person is vaccinated or not, but whether they are immune or not. Thus, the European Union recognizes natural immunity in its Digital COVID Certificate, which is in lieu of a vaccine passport, and is not limited to proof of vaccination. You could get a passport and travel if you have been vaccinated or if you have “recovered from COVID-19? or if you have a recent test saying you are negative. For air and train travel, Canada has also acknowledged recovery from COVID as an exemption, if one presents a recent negative test – but, inconsistently, natural immunity is not recognized in most other quasi-mandate situations here. Such scientists think it irrational that government calls for mass mandates are escalating just as the core original justifications for them – that the vaccinated don’t transmit the virus, and the vaccine will bring us to herd immunity – have collapsed.

14. So the demokrats are changing their policies as a result of, and ONLY as a result of the polling data.
    This implies that “science” never had anything to do with the implementation and continuation of masks, shots, lockdowns, etc.
    The also implies that if the polling data was favorable to the demokrats, they would continue the masking, shot, lockdown policies.

    In a nutshell, the ENTIRE COVED response imposed upon the citizenry by the govt was a hoax, a sham, a fraud. Science never had anything at all to do with it.

    Goes to show how reprehensible and disgusting the demonkrats are. All they care about is power and control.
    In this regard, they are no different than the policies, ex-exterminations, of a Stalin or Hitler.

    The PM of Canada, Trudeau, spilled the beans when he admitted he most admired the govt of communist China. This statement, from a politico/ ideological perspective is in accord with Hillary’s ” the deplorables,” and barry HUSSEIN ocommies, “guns and bibles,”comments.

    Do not think for one minute that lefties do not admire and wish once again to emulate the types of govt that existed in Europe prior to about 1900; govt. of, by and for the “anointed by God, destined to rule” elites.
    The elites HATE the notion of govt of, by and for the people.

15. God: I told you all that the injections were bio weapon binary component toxins.

16. ‘Stories like the Durham filing, the Times wrote, “tend to involve dense and obscure issues, so dissecting them requires asking readers to expend significant mental energy and time — raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims.” ‘

    A—typically—“cute” tack from the NYT!
    indeed, THE MASTER of obscurantism, spin and dishonesty pronounces on the difficulty of covering “dense and obscure” issues…and then goes on to—you guessed it—ignore, spin and cover up those “obscure” issues so as to make them even MORE OBSCURE…as their DEAR (not to mention, PRECIOUS) READERS are further—by intention and malice—misdirected and misinformed.

    The NYT really has this “trick” down pat!
    “All the news that WE DECIDE YOU SHOULD SEE—AND HOW YOU SHOULD SEE IT”, indeed.

    Meanwhile, Durham (continued from AF’s post, above) still has to bushwhack through the sleaze, to which the NYT et al.—punching above their weight as usual—are contributing more than their “fair share”….

    Margot Cleveland and Andrew McCarthy explain remarkably clearly what the NYT seems to find “obscure” (and intentionally makes MORE “obscure”).
    Their respective posts should be read in tandem, though there is overlap. More revelations should be forthcoming pretty soon.
    https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/18/michael-sussmanns-lawyers-its-ok-if-he-lied-to-the-fbi/
    https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/the-misleading-claim-that-durhams-reference-to-trump-white-house-records-was-misleading/

17. Durham, continued…

    “Durham for Dummies” provides a rundown of several articles on what the NYT and its fellow masters of the cover up tell us there is nothing really to see (except more Trumpian subterfuge, of course)—
    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/02/durham-for-dummies.php
    H/T Powerline blog.
    1.
    “Truth about techies who targeted Trump” by Kimberley Strassel—
    https://nypost.com/2022/02/18/truth-about-techies-who-targeted-trump/
    2.
    “The Clinton campaign’s plot to politically assassinate Trump”—
    https://spectatorworld.com/topic/clinton-plot-politically-assassinate-trump-durham-joffe-neustar/
    Key grafs (from #2):
    “…This would mean Hillary and her lawyers masterminded a coordinated electronic conspiracy against Trump when he was a candidate and later president, while simultaneously perpetuating the dossier hoax. As with the dossier, everything Clinton peddled was fake. There was no pee tape, no payoffs from Putin, no connection to Alfa Bank and no Russian-made smartphones.
    “But this is not a fake scandal. Durham has potentially uncovered the most destructive political assassination attempt since Kennedy.”

    When the media deigns to tell you there is nothing to see, then you know—automatically, absolutely—that there is. An awful lot, in fact.

18. More on the “uncontested” election, from Michigan (again)…
    “Lawsuit claims Michigan election chief illegally accepted Zuckerberg money to swing 2020 election”—
    https://justthenews.com/nation/states/center-square/lawsuit-claims-sos-benson-illegally-accepted-zuckerberg-money-swing

19. From the Someone-Really-Doesn’t-Get-It File:
    “….Trudeau Needs To Stop Using COVID As A Wedge”
    https://blazingcatfur.ca/2022/02/20/harry-rakowski-trudeau-needs-to-stop-using-covid-as-a-wedge/

    But that’s PRECISELY what he’s doing to assume total control of what was once Canada.
    “Biden”, similarly, is exploiting COVID—and extending it as much as “he” possibly can—to amass total power of the USA.

    Two peas in a pod of perversity. (And there are others.)

    File under: The Double-/Triple-/Quadruple-Down Club…and their slipping masks…

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