PrairiePundit

  Science Daily: A new study led by researchers at National Jewish Health has found that recent infection with the common cold -- often caused by rhinoviruses -- may offer temporary protection against infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The research provides fresh insight into why children are less likely than adults to develop symptoms and could point toward new ways to reduce the severity of respiratory illnesses. Published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases earlier this month, the study analyzed data from the nationwide Human Epidemiology and Response to SARS-CoV-2 (HEROS) study, which tracked more than 4,100 people in 1,394 households from May 2020 to February 2021. Researchers found that people, particularly children who had a recent rhinovirus infection, were significantly less likely to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the following weeks. This effect is thought to be linked to the body's antiviral defenses. Rhinoviruses trigger a strong interfer...

 CLG: FDA Commissioner Dr. Makary Says NIH ‘Brewed Up a Virus That Killed 20 Million People Worldwide’ This turned out to be one of the biggest mass-murder events in history.  While not everyone who got COVID died from it, millions more did get sick, including my wife and me. 

 Blaze: Smug Obama speechwriter provides damning reminder of Democrats' intolerance for conservatives, vax-refusers  While trying to signal his tolerance, David Litt provided a reminder of Democrats' loathing for the unvaccinated. There were good reasons to challenge the efficacy of the COVID vaccine.  My wife and I were both fully vaccinated and still came down with COVID.  WE did both survive COVID.

 Just the News: US helps secure arrest of alleged Chinese hacker accused of stealing COVID-19 research for CCP "Xu is accused of hacking U.S. universities and stealing critical COVID-19 research on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party," Patel posted to X. "The CCP’s relentless attacks on our institutions will not go unanswered." The article does not disclose why the hacking took place, but I suspect the Chinese government wanted to see to what extent it was being blamed for releasing the pandemic.  They may also have been looking for ways to deal with pandemic they had released on the world.

 Federalist Wire: ... A Chinese doctor who fled her homeland after exposing controversial COVID-19 research claims that scientists from China working in American laboratories are systematically trained to steal intellectual property for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), raising alarms about national security threats embedded within U.S. research institutions. Li-Meng Yan, a Chinese-educated doctor born in Qingdao, China, asserts that Chinese scientists are bound by government contracts to pilfer U.S. research, technology, and other valuable assets for the benefit of the CCP. “Scientists getting visa from China to the US, they are visiting scholars. They have signed the contract with Chinese government to go back to China, serve China with whatever they can get from the US,” Yan said during a recent television interview. Her statements suggest a calculated effort by the CCP to exploit U.S. openness in academic exchanges. Yan’s claims align with recent actions by the Trump administr...

 Daily Mail: The Biden administration has been accused of purposefully covering up potentially deadly side effects of the Covid vaccines. A Congressional investigation found White House officials held back warnings about heart damage from Covid vaccines in younger people, even after getting early alerts from other countries, including Israel . Internal emails and memos suggest a planned Health Alert Network (HAN) message by the CDC regarding myocarditis - inflammation of the heart muscle - was not released. Drafts of this alert reportedly downplayed risks, emphasizing vaccine benefits over potential adverse events, according to the report. Emails indicate FDA officials, including then-Commissioner Janet Woodcock, expressed reservations about the language in the proposed HAN, leading to its suppression. The Biden administration, the report alleges, gave former top infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci talking points to downplay the myocarditis risk , instructing them to sa...

 National Review: The Small Business Administration failed to implement fraud detection measures until after it had distributed hundreds of billions of dollars in Covid relief and, once the agency did start flagging fraud, most of its fraud referrals lacked the necessary information for further action, according to an explosive government watchdog report. ... There is much more.   There should be consequences for those who screw up in this fashion.  Will anyone get fired?

 American Action News: The state of Missouri won a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against China for its role in the COVID-19 pandemic after none of the defendants showed up to court. A Missouri federal judge ordered China and the other defendants on Friday to pay the state “an amount of $24,488,825,457.00,” with post-judgment interest “at a rate of 3.91 percent, compounded annually.” The People’s Republic of China and co-defendants, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology, “failed to appear or otherwise answer after being properly served, and [are] therefore in default,” Senior U.S. District Judge Stephen Limbaugh wrote in his order. In 2020, Missouri sued the Chinese government for $25 billion “for causing and exacerbating the COVID-19 pandemic” and for hoarding medical equipment during the pandemic, but China refused to appear in court, according to Bailey’s office. Instead, Beijing dispatched a Chinese government surrogate to litigate its lawsuit on its behalf to shield itself...

 American Action News: The recent announcement of the U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization has raised questions about its future viability and may signal lingering resentment over its capitulation to Chinese censorship during the COVID-19 pandemic. Last week President Donald Trump signed an executive order initiating withdrawal from the WHO, citing unfair dues and the outsize influence of certain member states on the organization. This week, serious questions are swirling about the organization’s survival in Washington and in Geneva. WHO leaders present at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week privately acknowledged the U.S. is serious about its plan to leave the organization and that it will take a big gesture to persuade them to go back in, according to a source speaking on condition of anonymity. “If the United States withdraws it may well collapse,” said health care consultant Kathleen Sebelius, who served as the Department of Health and Human...

 DC Daily Journal: The Left pretends they’re open and tolerant. Nothing could be further from the truth. And the White House was caught strong-arming and screaming for censorship behind closed doors. Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed to podcaster Joe Rogan that members of President Biden’s administration pressured and even berated his employees, demanding they remove certain content during the COVID-19 pandemic. Speaking candidly, Zuckerberg recounted the intense challenges his company faced in balancing freedom of expression with government demands. Meta’s recent announcement to end its controversial fact-checking practices and lift restrictions on speech marks a significant shift in policy. According to Zuckerberg, the decision reflects the need to “restore free expression” across its platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. “During the Biden administration, when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program,” Zuckerberg explained, “they also tried to censor an...

 Blaze: Blaze News original: Let us never forget the left's reprehensible behavior toward fellow Americans who refused COVID jabs After COVID-19 vaccines became available in early 2021, not everybody in America was down with the getting the jabs. Typical vaccines take years of testing prior to approval, but since the COVID vaccines were produced with lightning speed, lots of folks were concerned and resisted getting the shots. Readers of Blaze News won't soon forget what happened next. Vaccine mandates and steadily growing pressure to get the jab turned into an all-out assault on "anti-vaxxers" by the government, businesses, the mainstream media, celebrities, politicians, and the medical community. In September 2021, President Joe Biden issued an executive order requiring federal workers to be vaccinated; that same month, he announced a sweeping vaccination mandate for businesses with more than 100 employees, which the Supreme Court later blocked . In October 2021, ...

 Red State: ... Speaking to Rogan, Zuckerberg revealed that representatives of the Biden administration would call his employees and "scream and curse" at them over content that made their narrative over COVID and the vaccines look fragile. This included memes. "These people from the Biden administration would call up our team and scream at them and curse," said Zuckerberg, noting that this is all documented. Rogan asked if any of the phone calls were recorded, to which Zuckerberg said sadly they weren't, but that there are emails in the open now that prove just how crazy the Biden admin got with them. "It basically got to this point where we were like, 'No, we're not going to take down things that are true, that's ridiculous,'" said Zuckerberg. "They wanted us to take down this meme of Leonardo DiCaprio looking at a TV, talking about how ten years from now you're going to see an ad that says 'Okay, if you took a COVID vacc...

 Daily Mail; China is reportedly being ravaged by a mysterious viral outbreak that is overwhelming some hospitals. Videos on social media appear to show hospital units overrun with patients in face masks, and parents holding sick children in long lines in pediatric units. There have also been unverified reports that crematoriums and funeral homes are being overwhelmed. The alarming scenes and lack of official commentary have led some to draw similarities to the early days of the Covid outbreak in China. Local news reports have blamed a little-known virus called human metapneumovirus (HMPV) — which normally causes a mild cold-like illness — for the latest outbreak, though officials have yet to confirm this. The situation is similar to winter 2022/23 when China was hit with a wave of mycoplasma pneumonia cases, a condition dubbed 'white lung' , which is also normally mild. That outbreak was blamed on children having low natural immunity due to the effects of China's harsh lo...

 NY Post: Spy chiefs “silenced” researchers in the Defense Department and FBI who discovered strong evidence that COVID-19 most likely leaked from a Chinese lab, The Post has learned. As a result, their findings were kept out of an August 2021 report to President Biden on the origins of the global pandemic. That report concluded that the virus behind COVID “was probably not genetically engineered.” After the pandemic erupted in Wuhan, China, three scientists from the Defense Intelligence Agency began trying to figure out exactly where it came from — whether SARS-CoV-2 jumped from bats into humans, or whether the virus was man-made and came from a lab accident. The “zoonotic origin” theory was backed by powerful members of the public health establishment, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, and questions about a possible “lab leak” were repeatedly dismissed as a conspiracy theory. But the researchers’ analysis compiled dozens of data points in favor of a lab leak — compared with a “paucity...

 DC Daily Journal: ... The FBI is reportedly abusing its security clearance process to “purge” political conservatives from the bureau, according to recent whistleblower disclosures reviewed by the New York Post. The federal law enforcement agency’s Security Division has been allegedly suspending or revoking clearances for employees whose political affiliation or COVID-19 vaccination status are suspect. A supervisory special agent who formerly worked in the division alleges this is the case. The unnamed agent, described as “a registered Democrat” and represented by the nonprofit Empower Oversight, claims that high-ranking officials in the division believed “if an FBI employee fit a certain profile as a political conservative, they were viewed as security concerns and unworthy to work at the FBI.” In Marcus Allen’s case, a former FBI staff operations specialist (SOS) suspended without pay for more than two years, officials ignored “possibly exculpatory information” and overruled inv...

 Federalist: Former NIH Director Admits Government Was Top Source Of Covid Misinformation  Former NIH Director Francis Collins admits there was no ‘science or evidence’ to support social distancing the government used censorship to push. There was poor leadership at all levels in pushing the false narrative. 

 American Action News: The blue city of Madison, Wisconsin, funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars in COVID-19 relief funds to illegal immigrants, according to the Institute for Reforming Government (IRG). The funds were appropriated by the federal government to Madison’s State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds ( SLFRF ) and intended to aid city residents in recovering from the coronavirus pandemic and public safety lockdown measures. Roughly 10% of the total SLFRF were funneled by Madison into nonprofit organizations providing aid to illegal immigrants, equating to about $700,000 dollars, according to an IRG Center for Investigative Oversight (CIO) probe, the results of which were released on Wednesday. “It is troubling to learn that the City of Madison is funneling taxpayer dollars intended to help Wisconsinites to illegal immigrants. Taxpayers need answers,” IRG’s General Counsel and Director of Oversight Jake Curtis said in a statement on Wednesday. “Our team at the Center fo...

 Headline USA: Secret Gov’t Grant Proposal May Offer ‘Smoking Gun’ Proof of COVID Origin 'We have to acknowledge the fact that the pandemic could have started from some research-related incident...' See also:  Esteemed molecular biologist warns of 'smoking gun' evidence COVID-19 was engineered by researchers at Chinese lab ... American and Chinese virologists lobbied to receive a $14 million grant from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, for funding to engineer bat viruses related to SARS-CoV-1 to examine how they could jump to human transmission. According to the Wall Street Journal , "The proposal for Project DEFUSE specified that the viruses’ infectivity would be enhanced by inserting into them a genetic element known as a furin cleavage site. Depending on the starting viruses, this protocol could have produced SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, which has a distinctive furin cleavage site." The proposal involv...

 NY Post: Amazon ‘censored’ COVID-19 vaccine books after ‘feeling pressure’ from Biden White House: docs The results of the vaccine were that it did not prevent people from getting Covid.  Censoring those who questioned the efficacy of the vaccine meant that it took longer to find a better solution.  It turned out that the Biden regime was guilty of spreading "misinformation" about the efficacy of the vaccine. See also: ‘Who Can We Talk To?’: White House Leaned On Amazon To Suppress Vaccine ‘Propaganda,’ Emails Show And:  DCNF Reporter Reveals How Biden Admin Is Quietly Funding A ‘Censorship Industrial Complex’ In Congressional Testimony And:  Jim Jordan Subpoenas National Science Foundation For Communications Discussing ‘Content Moderation On Social Media’

 City Journal: It’s instructive to observe where Americans are moving, and where they are leaving. Such comparisons are particularly revealing when made during, or immediately following, a crisis, such as the recent Covid-19 pandemic. States dealt with that crisis quite differently. Movement statistics from recent years help to establish which of the 50 “laboratories of democracy” responded best to the pandemic. The Census Bureau publishes annual data on each state’s net domestic migration—that is, how many U.S. residents have moved to a given state, minus the number who moved from that state to elsewhere in the U.S. The second quarter of 2020 (from April 1 to June 30 of that year) was the first quarter to take place entirely after Covid-19 was known to have hit our shores; the most recent statistics available are from July 1, 2023. Looking at net domestic migration over that 13-quarter span yields some interesting results—and some clear winners and losers. Among large states (tho...