“China eats weird animals disease”

Ontario will mandate vaccines for hospital and long-term-care workers and begin targeted COVID-19 booster shots while keeping current pandemic restrictions indefinitely, the Star has learned.

Against the backdrop of the pandemic’s fourth wave, Dr. Kieran Moore, the chief medical officer of health, will announce the sweeping measures next Tuesday, including a pause on any further reopening of the economy.

“The watchword is caution,” said a senior Progressive Conservative government official, speaking confidentially in order to discuss internal deliberations

WASHINGTON, Aug 13 (Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in a new terrorism warning bulletin, said violent extremists could view the reimposition of COVID-19-related restrictions following the spread of coronavirus variants as a rationale to conduct attacks.

The new DHS bulletin also warned of the risk of “targeted violence” around the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington and around religious holidays.

In the last few weeks the media vomited up a barrage of “Vaccinated America is Angry at Unvaccinated America” stories.

This wholly artificial construct of identity politics (there is no vaccinated or unvaccinated America, there are a variety of different people making medical decisions for a variety of reasons) falls apart when the media deals with unvaccinated demographics that can’t be spun as conservative Trump supporters.

Canada to make COVID vaccines mandatory for all federal employees, airline, rail and cruise ship passengers

Vaccinations will now be mandatory for all federal public service workers and the government expects to see this extend to employees of other crown corporations as well, Minister for Intergovernmental Affairs Dominic LeBlanc announced at a press conference Friday afternoon.

Passengers wishing to travel on commercial planes, interprovincial trains and cruise ships will also be required to vaccinate in order to board, Minister of Transport Omar Alghabra said. The announcements come amid rising cases of COVID-19 across Canada, fuelled by the virus’s highly transmissible Delta variant.

Former president Barack Obama shrugged off the concerns of scientific experts by throwing himself a massive 60th birthday party at his $17.5 million estate on Martha’s Vineyard this past weekend.

As usual, the scientific experts were correct: The star-studded affair was a confirmed “super spreader” event, putting countless lives at risk and further cementing Obama’s reputation as a narcissistic war criminal.

The world’s first Covid-19 patient may have been infected by a bat while working for a Wuhan lab in China, a World Health Organization chief has admitted.

Dr Peter Embarek, who led the WHO probe into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic in China, made the shocking claim despite initially dismissing the notion that the virus escaped from a lab as extremely unlikely.

This theory assumes the release of the China flu was an accident.

h/t TB

French police have been urged to step up security around Covid vaccination and testing centres after a spate of attacks and vandalism in the last month.

As France prepares for a fifth weekend of demonstrations against the health pass, the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, has written to police chiefs calling for greater vigilance. French media reported that the request had come directly from Emmanuel Macron.

It came after the ministry reported that 22 health sites had been vandalised, including five test centres, 15 vaccination centres, a medical laboratory and a health centre, since 12 July.

Over at City Journal, Jeffrey Anderson has written a very interesting article that dives into many of the studies our public health officials have used to justify mask-wearing. Now that the mask debate is back in full swing as several cities and states reimplement mask mandates, it’s worth asking, as Anderson does: How effective are masks really?

The answer: It depends on the study.

Protests are erupting in cities across Europe in response to government efforts to impose so-called Covid passports, documents that show proof of immunization against Covid-19. The passports, which effectively reward the vaccinated and punish the unvaccinated, have sparked a heated debate over the constitutionality of government attempts to force people to get vaccinated.

In the last two weeks alone, hundreds of thousands of people of all political persuasions have gathered in at least 300 European cities to protest government overreach and to defend civil liberties. So far, the protests have not had the intended effect of reversing government policies, but they have highlighted that Europeans are thoroughly divided on the issue of Covid vaccines.