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PANDEMIC ALERT LEVEL
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Now tracking the new emerging South Africa Omicron Variant

Close the Airports Now!

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Tabitha111 View Drop Down
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Tabitha111 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Close the Airports Now!
    Posted: December 21 2020 at 5:11am

by monotreme1000

I honestly do not know what is the nature of the malfunction in the White House. First they refuse to close the airports until it is way too late, SARS2 gets in, and now over 300,000 Americans are dead.


Now there is a mutant strain of SARS2 in England with a much higher transmissibility. We don't know if it is more lethal. But it might be. We don't know if it will escape the vaccine. But it might. It may have many other bad characteristics. We cannot afford to wait to find out.


Many European countries are closing their borders to the UK. But we are doing nothing. This is insane. If the White House will not act, Governors and Mayors should look to see if they have the power to close international airports in their jurisdictions. If so, they should move to do as if the lives of their constituents, and their economies depends on it.


All international airports should be closed. We don't know that the mutation occurred in the UK. And we certainly don't know whether or not it has escaped to other countries. We should assume that it has.


This is an emergency. I cannot fathom what the federal government is waiting for.

'A man who does not think and plan long ahead will find trouble right at his door.'
--Confucius

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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (1) Thanks(1)   Quote Pixie Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: December 21 2020 at 6:53am



Trump has used the American citizenry as guinea pigs. He will just let this rip.



https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/we-want-them-infected-trump-hhs-appointee-said-in-email-pushing-to-expose-infants-kids-and-teens-to-covid.html


We want them infected,’ Trump HHS appointee said in email pushing to expose infants, kids and teens to Covid to reach ‘herd immunity’


Excerpt..


Alexander wrote in a July 4 email to Caputo and six other HHS communications officials that the U.S. needed to establish herd immunity by allowing “non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus.

“Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk....so we use them to develop herd...we want them infected....and recovered...with antibodies,” he wrote.

Alexander later brought the proposed strategy to Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn, another email shows.


“It may be that it will be best if we open up and flood the zone and let the kids and young folk get infected as we acutely lock down the elderely and at risk folks” to get to “natural immunity…natural exposure,” he wrote on July 24 to Hahn, Caputo and other HHS officials. Caputo asked Alexander to look further into the idea, further emails show.


As the virus spread through the country, these officials callously

wrote, ‘who cares’ and ‘we want them infected,‘” Clyburn said in a statement. “They privately admitted they ‘always knew’ the President’s policies would cause a ‘rise’ in cases, and they plotted to blame the spread of the virus on career scientists.” 

On June 24, amid the post-Memorial Day surge in cases, Alexander wrote to Caputo and two other HHS officials, “we always knew as you relax and open up, cases will rise.” He then questioned, “but are the new cases problematic???”

“We need also to tout the good stories as we know of elderly with serious conditions who get it and survive…this is key to tell,” he added.

Throughout the emails, Alexander heavily criticized top government scientific advisors, including Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In a July 3 email to Caputo and other HHS communications officials when U.S. cases stood at just under 2.8 million, Alexander lamented that Fauci warned the public to “expect a dramatic increase in spread.” 

“He just wont stop!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  He cant keep quiet….and he is not on the same page of the govn….does he think he is the President???” Alexander added.

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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (1) Thanks(1)   Quote ViQueen24 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: December 21 2020 at 9:52am

Tabitha, I just got done ranting to my mother about this very topic!  It would be common sense, as Pixie has noted here, and as I noted when I linked to Politico's version of CNBC's story in Scenarios Saturday, our government doesn't give a crap about us.

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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (1) Thanks(1)   Quote ViQueen24 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: December 21 2020 at 12:36pm

And this headline would go hand in hand with what Pixie and I have quoted:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/21/house-watchdog-cdc-covid-reports-449517

Subpoenas are necessary’: House watchdog details extensive meddling with CDC Covid-19 reports

New documents show political appointees sought to influence at least 13 reports as they ignored warnings from career officials.


Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) speaks during a news conference

Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) speaks during a news conference | Drew Angerer/Getty Images


By DAN DIAMOND


12/21/2020 10:02 AM EST


Updated: 12/21/2020 11:45 AM EST


The House panel probing the Trump administration's coronavirus response released new documents detailing political appointees’ extensive efforts to modify or scuttle scientific Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports, as it also ordered top Trump health officials to quickly provide documents.


Trump appointees attempted to “alter or block” at least 13 scientific reports on the coronavirus as outbreaks surged across the spring and summer, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), the chair of the House select subcommittee on coronavirus, wrote on Monday in a letter that was shared with POLITICO.



"Top political officials at [Health and Human Services] and [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] not only tolerated these efforts, but in some cases aided them," Clyburn added in the letter to HHS Secretary Alex Azar and CDC Director Robert Redfield.


Clyburn issued subpoenas to Azar and Redfield, ordering them by Dec. 30 to produce "full and unredacted" documents that Clyburn said his panel has sought for months.


The panel’s probe into administration’s coronavirus response began in mid-September, shortly after a POLITICO story revealed how appointees meddled with the famed Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, which are authored by career scientists and are typically free of political interference. In recent weeks, the panel released evidence alleging that Redfield ordered agency staff to delete an email that appeared to show political interference and that a political adviser repeatedly advocated a controversial “herd immunity” strategy regarded by most public health experts as reckless.


Clyburn's subcommittee on Monday produced dozens of new documents detailing how Trump appointees — including then-science adviser Paul Alexander, the department's top spokesperson Michael Caputo and other health department officials — worked to subvert the CDC's MMWR reports.


Among the MMWRs that were targeted for edits: reports on the use of masks, the spread of Covid-19 in children, the virus' transmission during an April 7 primary election in Milwaukee and other reports that were seen as politically sensitive.


The newly released documents further detailed appointees' extensive efforts to suppress and even write a rebuttal to planned reports on hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug favored by President Donald Trump as a coronavirus treatment despite little evidence of its effectiveness. CDC has historically insisted that political appointees not review the draft content of the MMWRs, but in at least one case, Trump appointees obtained the full text of a pending report.



"I got the draft of the WWMR [sic] about hydroxychloroquine and media that was supposed to be released on Tuesday," then-CDC adviser Nina Witkofsky wrote on June 29 to Alexander, Caputo and Caputo's aide Madeleine Hubbard. Witkofsky, who served as a contractor helping plan events for Medicaid chief Seema Verma before joining the Trump administration this summer, was tapped in August to be the CDC's acting chief of staff.


The MMWR on hydroxychloroquine, which reviewed how doctors prescribed the drug, was originally scheduled to be published on June 30 but was not published until Sept. 4.


The reasons for the delay were not immediately clear, but Trump appointees in the meantime further strategized on how to minimize the CDC’s findings – including Alexander’s plans to publicly dismiss the agency’s hydroxychloroquine report. “The authors of this study are a disgrace to public service,” Alexander wrote in a planned rebuttal that does not appear to have been publicly released.



In his letter to HHS, Clyburn said the department continues to block his panel's scheduled interviews with Redfield, CDC principal deputy director Anne Schuchat and Witkofsky, among other officials that HHS previously agreed to make available. HHS also waited until after the election to release its documents, which were mostly pulled from Alexander's files, Clyburn wrote, rather than from officials like Azar and Caputo despite a previous commitment to do so.


"Given the importance of the Select Subcommittee’s investigation and the continued obstruction by HHS, subpoenas are necessary," Clyburn wrote.


Asked about the House panel's findings, HHS said that it had pulled more than 1 million documents for the subcommittee's probe and that Alexander, who has since left the department, did not set strategy.


"While the Administration is focused on vaccination shots, the Subcommittee is focused on cheap shots to create headlines and mislead the American people," said HHS spokesperson Caitlin Oakley.



HHS did not respond to a question about whether the department would comply with the panel's subpoena. CDC did not immediately respond to requests for comment.


Alexander and Witkofsky did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Caputo, who took medical leave the same day that Alexander left the department in September, has referred previous inquiries to HHS.


According to the new documents, Bill Hall, the top career civil servant in the HHS press shop, on June 5 warned Alexander, Caputo and other officials that they should not interfere with the MMWRs, comparing the CDC's flagship reports to a "peer-reviewed journal" akin to the Journal of the American Medical Association.


"[A]s matter of long-standing policy, we do not engage in clearing scientific articles, as that arena needs to remain an independent process," Hall wrote in an email obtained by the subcommittee.



But the subcommittee's documents reveal that political appointees instead kept trying to edit a series of internal and external reports.


"Hi Michael, is this not the article we were shelving?" Alexander wrote to Caputo and Witkofsky on June 29 about a pending CDC-authored report on hydroxychloroquine that was set to run in JAMA. The House panel concluded that Alexander "appeared to mistake" the planned JAMA report for the MMWR report that would be delayed.


The subcommittee also released documents showing how Alexander repeatedly petitioned Charlotte Kent, the MMWR editor-in-chief, to make changes to planned reports, such as an upcoming MMWR on the spread of Covid-19 at a Georgia summer camp amid a robust debate about whether it was safe to reopen schools in the fall. In a separate email chain, CDC career officials discussed how best to navigate the political pressures, and Kent ultimately sent Alexander an email seeking to placate him.



"In response to thoughtful comments from CDC leadership and you, the opening sentence of Georgia’s report has been reframed," Kent wrote to Alexander and other officials on July 28. "The opening sentence was the only reference to schools or institutions of higher learning in the report, and reference to them has been removed."


However, the Georgia summer camp report, which was released on July 31, still angered the health department’s Trump appointees, sparking another effort to author their own response that they believed would be more favorable to the president.


“I am not sure where it can be published but this has very re-assuring information and even for the White House,” Alexander wrote in a planned rebuttal to the report.


HHS has insisted that there was no interference in the MMWRs, pointing to comments from Kent, the reports' editor, who during a Dec. 7 interview with House investigators said that the agency published reports that were scientifically sound.



"Dr. Kent’s interview established there was no political interference in the publication of MMWR Articles," Sarah Arbes, the HHS assistant secretary for legislation, wrote to Clyburn last week.


Clyburn, however, said Kent's testimony made clear there was political pressure to alter her office's reports.


"To the extent career staff were successful in limiting the damage, as Dr. Kent stated she was, that is a testament to the career staff’s integrity and resilience — not an indication that the Trump Administration’s political pressure tactics were appropriate or scientifically sound," Clyburn wrote Monday.


The documents released by Clyburn's panel also further shed light on interactions between Trump appointees and career health department officials as the outbreak worsened. In one exchange, a CDC official complaining about the "pattern of hostile and threatening behavior" from Caputo, the department's top spokesperson who was personally installed by the president.



"In what world did you think it was your job to announce an Administration public service announcement to CNN?” Caputo wrote to a CDC official who confirmed to a CNN reporter in June that the health department was pursuing a vaccine education campaign. Caputo had previously told the reporter she was "wildly incorrect" when she inquired about the campaign.


In another set of July emails, Caputo demanded the name of a CDC press officer who arranged an interview between a senior official and NPR about the health department's data changes without his permission.


After POLITICO obtained emails of Alexander pressuring infectious-disease expert Anthony Fauci to not speak publicly about the risks of Covid-19 to children, Alexander protested to colleagues that he wanted to go public with his complaints about Fauci.


"They have no clue what they are saying and I welcome the chance to inform them," Alexander wrote on Sept. 9. HHS announced that Alexander, who is a part-time professor at a Canadian university, would exit the department a week later


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WitchMisspelled View Drop Down
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (1) Thanks(1)   Quote WitchMisspelled Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: December 21 2020 at 1:37pm

Six direct flights from UK into Kennedy every single damn day.

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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (1) Thanks(1)   Quote carbon20 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: December 21 2020 at 2:01pm

Scary times......

Sheer lunacy......

Take care all  😷😉

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.🖖

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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (1) Thanks(1)   Quote Dutch Josh Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: December 21 2020 at 9:58pm

[url]https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/uk-travel-ban-coronavirus-variant/index.html[/url] or https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/uk-travel-ban-coronavirus-variant/index.html ;

US Assistant Secretary for Health Admiral Brett Giroir told CNN that as of Monday morning, there weren't plans for US restrictions on travel to or from the UK because of the new coronavirus variant, but "everything is possible, we just need to put everything on the table, have an open scientific discussion and make a best recommendation."
"CDC is following the situation closely and actively assessing the implications of the new variant and response options with respect to international travel," according to a statement from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.


DJ-Insane...

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (1) Thanks(1)   Quote KiminNM Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: December 22 2020 at 9:33am

Short version: we are absolutely screwed until January 20th when we transition to President Biden.


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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote roni3470 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: December 26 2020 at 9:40am

Americans need to follow some guidlelines.  I am watching group after group of my friends get together partying.  Some have had COVID so they feel like they get a free pass.  And a huge handful of my friends have all gone to Mexico on flights.  Just COVID fatigue or the belief they won't get it again.  I have no idea but its crazy!

NOW is the Season to Know

that Everything you Do

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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (1) Thanks(1)   Quote carbon20 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: December 26 2020 at 3:44pm

To much traveling.....

To many selfish people.....

Not going to go away anytime soon....

Only going to get worse until people comply.....resistance is futile...mmmmm

Love the Borg....lol

Take care all  😷😷😉

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.🖖

Marcus Aurelius
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (4) Thanks(4)   Quote Penham Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: December 27 2020 at 1:37am

Some of us Americans are just too damn spoiled. Think they can do whatever they want with no consequences. Won't follow some simple rules like wearing a mask or trying to stay home a bit more because it "infringes upon their rights". Makes me want to slap someone lol and I'm not really a violent person. But the lack of common sense is just.........

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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (1) Thanks(1)   Quote WitchMisspelled Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: December 27 2020 at 5:19am

Originally posted by Penham Penham wrote:

Some of us Americans are just too damn spoiled. 

Bingo!  Penham gets the prize!   

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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Technophobe Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: December 27 2020 at 6:39am

Americans are not unique, there are a few Brits I want to slap and a Dane or two.

I think it is human nature to believe yourself immune.  BLOODY IDIOTS AND LOONIES!!!


Here is a German word, much needed by us English speakers:  'backpfeifengesicht'  =  'A face in need of a fist!'

You are not alone Penny.


How do you tell if a politician is lying?
His lips or pen are moving.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (1) Thanks(1)   Quote carbon20 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: December 27 2020 at 2:33pm

My cousins, brother and sister (English),

Sister lives in Wisconsin(married a yank) Brother in UK,both believe it's a plot and it's not real,

Very odd behaviour....

Very odd way of thinking.......

I ask why do they think  it's a plot ,"to give governments more control over us" was reply.......Mmmmm!!!?..

I think more meds..... Are needed.......



Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.🖖

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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (1) Thanks(1)   Quote roni3470 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: December 27 2020 at 7:35pm

I have to ask this, but for those that think it is a plot....do they really think the government of all these countries worked together to pull it off?!?!?!  I mean really!!  hahahahaha

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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote carbon20 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: December 28 2020 at 4:33am

It's to find out more about you....

Like how much you earn, where you spend,What you buy.....what tv you watch,which way you vote.....

they know all that anyway,even what you put down the toilet.....

so what more do they need to know......

thought Police a coming..... already here.......!!!!!!

...

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.🖖

Marcus Aurelius
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