“China eats weird animals disease”

From the moment COVID-19 appeared, the pandemic became inseparable from politics.

Political frenzy was inevitable because the SARS-CoV-2 virus may have escaped from a level-4 security virology lab in Wuhan, China. The rapid-fire spread soon threatened to indict the Chinese communist government for nearly destroying the world economy and killing millions.

Western elites, in response, feared that their own lucrative investments in China would be jeopardized by such disclosures — and so acted accordingly in defending Beijing.

Together with guarded hopes that the decline of the omicron COVID-19 wave marks the beginning of the end of the pandemic comes the question: what happens when it has finally run its course? What will the post-pandemic world be like? The most likely scenario is that it will unleash the greatest political jailbreak since the end of the second world war. Only a few months after Hitler’s armies surrendered, the British electorate, eager to put the restrictions of war behind them, handed Winston Churchill a landslide defeat and replaced him with Clement Atlee. Once victory removed the rationale for all the regulations they had willingly accepted, they set about removing them. With the end of the current pandemic, the justification for lockdowns, masks, mandates, tracking, and restrictions on the public will similarly vanish and the desire for a new world will be unleashed.

We are now two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, and no doubt everyone is frustrated and emotionally and physically fatigued from it all. We have cycled through what now feels like an infinite number of “waves” of peak infections, and their accompanying public health restrictions. The latter have ranged from face mask mandates and school and business closures, to travel restrictions and vaccine passports. And now the prospect of truly mandatory vaccinations, with Quebec promising “significant” financial penalties for those not vaccinated, could cause already simmering tensions in the country to become combustible.

The Marine Corps granted two religious exemption requests for the coronavirus vaccine, the service announced Thursday, marking the first time any such accommodation was affirmed despite thousands of requests.

Religious exemptions are hard to come by in the military. This is the first the Marines have granted in at least a decade, according to the Military Times. The lack of such accommodations as it relates to the coronavirus has also become a source of political division, a microcosm of the perpetual debate regarding whether mandating the vaccine comports with people’s First Amendment rights.

Italian police have arrested a nurse in Palermo for allegedly pretending to give Covid vaccines to anti-vaxxer activists so they could benefit from official health certificates to travel and access bars, restaurants and public transport in the country.

Investigators used a hidden camera to film the nurse, a 58-year-old woman working at an inoculation centre in the Sicilian capital. The clip, released on Saturday on Twitter, shows the health worker apparently loading up a dose of Covid-19 vaccine and then emptying the syringe into a tissue before pretending to inject it into the arms of anti-vaxxers.

It has been quite a week. With Omicron cases on the rise, and politicians ramping up the rhetoric against the unvaccinated, I decided a few days ago to pen what I thought was a column about how either extreme — demonization or accommodation — was the wrong approach to take. It was a moderate position, I thought. And I paid dearly for it.

The unvaccinated cherish their freedom to harm others. How can we ever forgive them?

Will we ever forgive the deliberately unvaccinated for having helped spread a disease that killed and disabled so many, devastating the economy, leaving many of us jobless and wretched?

Will we ever look on them gently when their casual choices left us unable to hold a loved one as she died? When a young woman with stage 4 colon cancer had her surgery postponed for the third time because hospitals are packed with unvaccinated COVID-19 patients at death’s door? Death has an open-door policy, never more so than now.

She’s like a Karen on Meth.

USE HMA and this link

h/t Clink

That senior scientists saw evidence for theories that they trashed in public has shattered trust in science

Inch by painful inch, the truth is being dragged out about how this pandemic started. It is just about understandable, if not forgivable, that Chinese scientists have obfuscated vital information about early cases and their work with similar viruses in Wuhan’s laboratories: they were subject to fierce edicts from a ruthless, totalitarian regime.

It is more shocking to discover in emails released this week that some western scientists were also saying different things in public from what they thought in private. The emails were exchanged over the first weekend of February 2020 between senior virologists on both sides of the Atlantic following a meeting arranged by Sir Jeremy Farrar, head of the Wellcome Trust, with America’s two top biologists, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Novak Djokovic left Australia on Sunday evening after losing his final bid to avoid deportation and play in the Australian Open despite being unvaccinated for COVID-19. A court earlier unanimously dismissed the No. 1-ranked tennis player’s challenge to cancel his visa.

Djokovic, a 34-year-old from Serbia, said he was “extremely disappointed” by the ruling but respected it.