Are Covid Vaccinations Causing Deaths?

Are Covid vaccinations causing deaths?

That is a question I got from a BeeLine reader recently when he saw this article about a surge in Covid deaths in Gibraltar right after introduction of the Pfizer vaccine in that British Territory adjoining Spain.

He asked me if it was true.

I know a little about Gibraltar having visited there on a cruise about 10 years ago. It only has about 30,000 residents and a good part of the workforce comes into the territory on a daily basis from neighboring Spain.

This is another article on Gibraltar's recent surge in Covid deaths asking the question of whether the vaccine could be contributing to the death toll.

Ever since the epidemic began, sorting genuine Covid deaths from others has been a major issue. Now we have the added problem of vaccines in the mix. The UK now allegedly has the highest daily “Covid death” rate ever. Even higher than the “First Wave,” in spite of the substantial degree of herd immunity that has inevitably accrued since the beginning. This atypical “Second Wave” coincides with the vaccine roll-out. Are the two connected?

Gibraltar, normally called simply “Gib,” provides a very clear picture. This tiny British Colony, barely three miles long, appended to the South coast of Spain, has only 32,000 residents. It had suffered relatively little from the epidemic before the 9th January this year, with only seventeen deaths for the whole period. The death rate was well down the Deaths per Million League Table. This was not due to isolation, since Spanish workers have continued to pour into Gib every morning, and back out every evening.

On January 9th, the British Royal Air Force flew in 6,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine and they were quickly deployed on the population to avoid degradation of the supply. Therefore, as many as 20% of the population of Gibraltar were quickly given the vaccine in a short period of time.

I was not aware of what had been going on in Gibraltar so I did a little independent research to understand what the truth might be.

The surge in deaths is true. Answering the question of whether they have been caused by the vaccine is more difficult to answer.

Gibraltar had been relatively unscathed by Covid until the middle of December.

The surge in cases seems to have peaked right about the time that the vaccine was first administered.

Despite the fact that Gibraltar did not have one death from Covid until November, 2020, 69 deaths have now been recorded. There were only 12 deaths from Covid as of January 9.

Despite having one of the lowest Covid death rates in the world two months ago, Gibraltar now has the highest per capita death rate of any place in the world.

Are the Covid vaccinations causing deaths in Gibraltar?

I don't know at this point. 

There is usually about a three week lag effect between the rise in Covid cases and an increase in deaths. It is therefore entirely possible that the increase in deaths in Gibraltar in January are the result of the increasing number of cases that began in mid-December and peaked around January 9. The increased deaths could clearly have nothing to do with the vaccine.

We should know more as we get into February. It is encouraging that new Covid cases have continued a downward trend in Gibraltar recently. Is this due to the vaccine or is it a natural result of the virus burning out? With so many variables involved, it is always difficult to know anything with certainty concerning Covid.

Consider the recent death of Hank Aaron at age 86.

On January 5, Aaron received the Moderna vaccine as part of a public relations campaign to encourage  African Americans to get the vaccine. He passed away in his sleep on January 22 from what has been described as "natural causes".

That very well could be true. It likely is just a coincidence. However, it is also true that if Aaron had tested positive for Covid on January 5 (even if he had no symptoms), and died 17 days later, his death would have been counted as a  Covid death. There is no question about that.

This is the double standard and bias that is so difficult to understand.

Covid is listed as the cause of death if there is the slightest hint it was present in someone's body over the previous 60 days.

If someone dies 60 minutes after getting the vaccine, it is a "coincidence".

This should be troubling to anyone who is trying to honestly assess the issues involving the virus and the vaccines.

The media and the "experts" have painted the most negative and dangerous narrative they could involving Covid-19. They are also portraying the vaccines in the most positive light they can.

The truth undoubtedly lies somewhere in the middle but it is next to impossible for the average person to decipher what it is. 

As an example, here is the Oregon Health Authority falsely stating on its website that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have been APPROVED by the FDA. This is a false and deceptive statement. These vaccines have merely been AUTHORIZED for use under an emergency use authorization. They are unapproved and unlicensed at this point. We are effectively still in an experimental trial period with these vaccines.

Source: https://covidvaccine.oregon.gov/#safety

If there is any place in the world we can look to in order to see how effective the Pfizer vaccine is (or is not) it will be Israel.

Israel has now vaccinated 82% of its population in the last month. It is an incredible accomplishment.

Israel was able to acquire large supplies of the vaccine because it agreed to provide Pfizer all of the immunological data on its population in return. In effect, the people of Israel are a huge experimental group that will help Pfizer determine the benefits (and risks) of the vaccine that is much larger than was used in the clinical trials.

Just as was the case in Gibraltar, Israel was seeing a spike in cases just before the vaccination program began. New cases are almost double today what they were a month ago when the vaccine program began. However, in the last week new cases have declined slightly. Is this the beginning of a large trend? We better hope so.

Daily New Cases in Israel
Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/israel/

Daily deaths are over three times what they were a month ago when the vaccine program was initiated. If this does fall sharply over the next month with 82% vaccinated, there should be a lot of questions asked about the Pfizer vaccine.

Daily Deaths in Israel
Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/israel/

Keep your eyes on Israel's experience with Covid over the next month or two. It could be a useful indicator of how effective the Pfizer vaccine is.

Where can someone go to attempt to find out what adverse effects and deaths are being associated with the Covid vaccines in the United States?

The CDC and the FDA maintain a Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) for doctors, nurses or patients to report any adverse events that occurs after a vaccination. This system was created in 1990 in response to the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act which exempted pharmaceutical companies from any liability for damages or deaths caused by their vaccine products. It was thought that having a system to capture adverse events centrally would be helpful in that it might allow vaccines that are causing problems to be scrutinized in a more timely basis to cut off access if there is a problem.

Critics say the problem with VAERS is that many adverse events are not reported. Many see an event and believe it was a " coincidence". Therefore, some believe the VAERS data vastly understates the number of adverse events. Those that are pro-vaccine argue the opposite. They state that many of the events reported are temporal and should not have been reported into the system to begin with.

To compound matters, VAERS is very clunky if you want to attempt to extract data from the system. It has been even worse lately as the system was down recently. The CDC states that it is because the server was overwhelmed by too many queries according to Alex Berenson.

I have found it easier to research vaccine adverse events by going to this site (OpenVAERS) which takes the VAERS data but packages in a user-friendly interface.

This is the VAERS data for the Covid vaccines through January 22, 2021.

This is the breakdown on deaths by vaccine manufacturer and by gender.

It is important to remember that these are cases where the death was close enough in time that someone was suspicious the vaccine caused the death. There might not be a relationship between the vaccine and death. Then again, you have cases like Hank Aaron which were clearly not reported to VAERS but should it have been?

Pfizer has more reported deaths but that might be a function of the fact that it was introduced earlier.

Note that deaths between males and females is almost equal.

This is the distribution by age.

I am personally troubled by the deaths reported in the age 25-50 age group. Did the potential benefit of the vaccine outweigh the cost for this group considering the low Covid death rate for these ages?

I think the breakdowns by sex for the adverse events that have been reported to VAERS for hospitalizations and ER/urgent care visits is very interesting.

Are the vaccines creating greater side effects on females than males? These are very heavily skewed towards females for some reason.

Hospitalizations-VAERS data for Covid vaccines

ER/Urgent Care-VAERS data for Covid vaccines

You also see some interesting differences in the data by age. 

Look at the high number of adverse events in those younger even though a focus in many states has been to prioritize those over age 65 for the vaccine. Most of these younger age people have to have been health care workers.

Some believe that the vaccine elicits a much stronger immune response from the vaccine in the young versus the old. This might be an indication of that. Could the response be too strong in some younger people?

Hospitalizations-VAERS data for Covid vaccine

ER/Urgent Care Visits-VAERS data for Covid vaccine

Of course, you have to keep all of these numbers in perspective. Allowing for a lag of one week in reporting to VAERS, I estimate that approximately 12 million doses of vaccine had been administered to which the potential 182 deaths VAERS associated deaths were reported. 

All of those numbers above don't look as bad with that context. However, if you are THE ONE, odds don't matter much.

Are Covid vaccinations causing deaths? 

It would surprise me if they weren't. The question is whether the number of deaths is acceptable in comparison to the potential deaths saved.

For example, for those between the ages of 18-50, there have been 17,787 deaths attributed to Covid in the last 13 months. 334,689 people in these age groups died of another cause. In other words, in these age groups, there is almost a 20x chance of dying from something else than Covid. 

Deaths by accident in these age groups have annually been about 56,000. This would put the odds of dying from an accident for these ages at over 3x that of dying from Covid. Deaths from suicide have also been higher than the number of Covid deaths and this was before the lockdown effects of Covid have increased the suicide rates for these ages.

Do these low death from Covid rates for these ages justify any risk by taking the vaccine?

My view is that we will know a lot more about the costs and benefits of the vaccines in another couple of months when more data is available----especially from Israel.

What would I recommend in the meantime?

Looking at the data, I would have a hard time recommending anyone under age 50 take the vaccine right now. This seems even more true for females. I just don't see the benefits outweighing the potential costs.

For those above that age it probably comes down to personal choice.

I personally believe that it is more prudent to wait and see what the data from the large population set in Israel reveals. We are going to know a lot more in a few months. It doesn't make sense to me to force a decision when we will be much better informed in a month or two. 

If you choose to wait, there are still things you do to enhance your own immune system naturally.

Many doctors say that the most important preventive health action you can take is to maintain high Vitamin D levels. This might be a reason that lockdowns have not worked as well as we were told they would. If you are inside you are not getting the Vitamin D levels you need.

Most people should be taking Vitamin D supplements in the winter months in particular. Is it a coincidence that we have had the highest peaks of Covid when people were pushed inside due to the weather?

If you want to learn more about Vitamin D levels and Covid, I recommend you read this article on a big push in this area in Ireland.

As always...

Stay informed. Stay healthy.

Coronavirus and BeeLine +1

It was exactly one year ago that I first wrote about the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China.

Since that first blog post I have written about Covid another 74 times. That represents almost 50% of all of the blog posts I wrote in the last year.

I am reposting that first blog post from last year below to provide some perspective on my early take about the virus. What it shows is that in some ways we have come a long way in the last year. In other ways we are just as confused about it as we were a year ago.

Early on I showed concern about potential asymptomatic spread and what was said to be a long incubation period that could be as long as 14 days.

There is still not clear consensus that asymptomatic spread is a significant driver in the spread of the virus. A 14 day incubation period seems to be an extreme outlier. Most of the time symptoms will present within no more than 5 days after exposure with 2-3 days being most common.

I wrote a year ago that I suspected the virus might have escaped from the Wuhan biolab that was doing 'gain of function' research on viruses. At that time, China was blaming the virus on people eating bats at a wet market in Wuhan.

A WHO official said yesterday they still could not say the virus originated in China.

A year has passed and we still don't know where the virus originated? That seems to be very hard to believe.

We also still don't know the extent to which Dr. Tony Fauci and his NIH group might have actually been partially funding the "gain of function" research at Wuhan. My guess is that he was.

Fauci was also a name that most had never heard of a year ago.

Now almost everyone knows his name. Until yesterday few would have ever thought that Fauci was also the highest paid federal government employee in 2019.  

He actually made more last year than the President of the United States. However, Donald Trump donated his entire salary to charity. To this day we don't know if Fauci may also be profiting from patents on the Covid vaccines.

Fauci is also the "expert" who told us 11 months ago that the risk of coronavirus in the USA was "minuscule" and there was no value in wearing face masks.

Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/02/17/nih-disease-official-anthony-fauci-risk-of-coronavirus-in-u-s-is-minuscule-skip-mask-and-wash-hands/4787209002/

Fauci is now saying it "makes common sense" that we wear two masks.

Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/01/26/covid-double-masking-effective-fauci-says-makes-common-sense/4157884001/

Do you think Dr. Fauci might be slightly overpaid?

Speaking of the vaccines, I doubt that any expert a year ago could have conceived that we would have two Covid vaccines being administered right now. It has been an extraordinary achievement.

I also doubt that anyone could have predicted that China, which was being devastated by the virus in Wuhan a year ago, would be the country that would weather the pandemic and its economic ramifications better than any other country.

Was this great crisis management? Did we ever get the real story from China? Is there something more nefarious at play here? A year later and we don't know.

I also wrote a year ago that should the virus spread widely beyond China that the two countries that public health experts believed were best prepared to deal with a pandemic were the United States and the United Kingdom. China was ranked #51.

A year later it is the USA and UK that have fared worse than almost all other major countries. 

Did the world public health experts know what they were talking about when they made that original assessment?

Did the public health experts in the USA or UK make major mistakes in responding to the pandemic?

Or is it just a function that the USA and UK have counted cases and deaths much more thoroughly and liberally than other countries? Perhaps they have inflated case and death counts because they have more resources and tools that other countries do not. Might they have been too smart for their (and our) own good?

There is a lot we still don't know a year later.

I wish I was confident we will know more a year from now. 

In the meantime, take a few minutes and read what I wrote about coronavirus a year ago.

Coronavirus and China

(originally published January 26, 2020)

There is good and bad news about the coronavirus epidemic in China.

The bad news is that this appears to be a particularly virulent virus strain. It is also centered in Wuhan, China which is the home to 11 million people. We are talking about a city that is larger than any in the United States but chances are that 99% of Americans did not even know it existed until last week.

The virus also apparently has a long incubation period (14+ days) before any symptoms manifest themselves. In the meantime, the subject is contagious even if they do not know they are sick. In that 11 million people live in Wuhan it only takes a small percentage of those people to travel elsewhere for the virus to spread.

We are already seeing that effect as we see the confirmed cases spread out from Hubei province in China where Wuhan is located.

* As of Jan. 27 the death toll in China had risen to 80, with 76 in Hubei province, authorities reported. Another 2,744 people in China had been infected: As of the end of Jan. 26, there were 1,423 confirmed cases in Hubei province.

* Thailand and Hong Kong have each reported eight cases of infection; the United States and Macau have five each; Taiwan, Australia, Singapore and Malaysia each have reported four; France and Japan three each; Vietnam and South Korea two apiece, and one each in Canada and Nepal.

* No fatalities have been reported outside China.

The five suspected cases in the United States are in California (3), Washington state and Chicago,

The most effective way to stop an outbreak of a virus such as this one is to aggressively isolate and quarantine those that are ill so as to not infect other people. They need to be identified, treated aggressively by medical professionals, and isolated.

It always seems that new virus strains originate in China. Each year's flu strains are expected to start there.

A lot of that seems to be due to the massive number of people in China and the fact that there is often more daily exposure to animals in China compared to Western countries. Many of these viruses originate in animals and mutate to humans. That is why we have heard of the swine flu, bird flu and the like in the past.

Ground zero for the coronavirus is reportedly a seafood market in central Wushan in which unauthorized animals were also sold. There have been some reports that the virus has been traced to bats that were eaten with soup in that market.

I can't believe that I missed eating that when I was in China a year ago!

More troubling are reports that this virus may have escaped from a Chinese biolab that is located in Wuhan and was involved in studying the highest risk pathogens in the world.

U.S. scientists were worried about the risks that pathogens like this could escape from facilities like this one as evidenced by this article in The Scientist back in 2015.

As a result, the United States ceased funding any of this "gain-of-function" research back in 2013 because it determined the risk of creating a pandemic was much greater than any information gained from the research.

It is worthwhile to note that at that time this decision was made there was research being done in the U.S. on an engineered coronavirus. Note as well where the surface protein came from for that virus.

Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last week (November 9) published a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of to one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice, according to the team’s results, which were published in Nature Medicine.

One more piece of bad news is that fact that the Chinese Communists are not known to be the most transparent government on the planet. If they are admitting to 2,700 cases how many are we not being informed about?

Enough bad news.

What is the good news?

If there is any place on earth where a quarantine and mass mobilization can be carried out to combat this disease it is in China where the totalitarian government has total control of the population.

China has already banned all travel in and out of Wuhan. The city has become a ghost town. They have established quarantines in a dozen other cities cities as well such that some 50 million people are locked down.

China also has announced that they are going to build two hospitals each with over 1,000 beds in Wuhan.

What is in incredible is the Chinese say that these hospitals will be able to accept patients in a couple of weeks!

How is that possible?

Here is a photo of the site work on the first hospital taken on January 24..

Credit: Reuters

China's Wuhan city, the centre of the outbreak of the new coronavirus, will build a second dedicated hospital to treat patients.

Construction has already started on the first facility, with enough space for 1,000 patients, which is expected to be completed by 3 February.

The second, which is designed to have 1,300 beds, is due to be finished within three weeks. 

This may seem like an unrealistic time frame, however, China has a history of quickly building hospitals at times of crisis.

During the SARS outbreak in 2003, 7,000 people worked day and night in Beijing, taking just seven days to build the Xiaotangshan facility.  

The Chinese are known for being able to construct buildings and bridges very quickly.

Graham Allison in his book, “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?" has some incredible examples of Chinese construction capabilities.

"Between 2011 and 2013 China both produced and used more cement than did the US in the entire twentieth century. In 2011, a Chinese construction firm built a 30-story skyscraper in just 15 days. Three years later, another firm built a 57-story skyscraper in 19 days” 

Allison also observed that it took nearly four years for a bridge near his office at Harvard University that crossed the Charles River to be replaced. The Chinese took only 43 hours to replace a substantially larger 1,300 ton bridge in China in November, 2015.

It just goes to show you have much you can accomplish when the government controls the entire labor supply and you don't need to worry about governmental regulations and permits and dealing with agencies like the EPA, OSHA, HHS and CMS to approve your projects.

Let's hope that China can control the spread of the virus. It is a significant challenge considering the population density in that country and the fact that this outbreak began over the Lunar New Year holiday when many people are traveling.

If you live in the United States some additional good news is that the 2019 Global Health Security Index ranks it as the best prepared in the world to deal with a pandemic although it found that the no country was fully prepared. These are the ten countries that are most prepared.

China ranks 51st out of 195 countries in the index.

If you want to be best prepared personally I thought this was a good article from a reporter who covered the SARS epidemic in China in 2003. It is has some good tips and precautions that you can use to protect yourself. These make good sense even if we are only talking about avoiding seasonal flu or colds.

Let's hope and pray that China and other countries around the world can keep the virus in check.

In the meantime, stay safe and be healthy. 

Proof of Fraud

 Fraud is defined in legal terms as follows.

A false representation of a matter of fact—whether by words or by conduct, by false or misleading allegations, or by concealment of what should have been disclosed—that deceives and is intended to deceive another so that the individual will act upon it to her or his legal injury.

Allegations of election fraud has gotten a lot of attention in the 2020 election.

However, the most obvious fraud in most elections involves candidates who say one thing on the campaign trail and do something completely different when elected.

They make false or misleading claims to deceive the voters in order to get elected. Once elected, their true position becomes known.

Whatever your views are on Donald Trump, there was no politician in my lifetime who governed consistently in the same manner in office as he did while campaigning. He did not say one thing during the campaign and do something differently in office. There were no games. There was no obfuscation. He did what he said he was going to do. 

It was a big reason why the Washington establishment never liked Trump. He didn't play the game the way it was supposed to be played. It is the real reason why they impeached in the last days of his term and want to bar him from ever running for federal office again. 

Charles Hurt explains it well in a recent opinion piece. "Trump Feared Now More Than Ever" by pointing out that Trump was the only honest and serious person in Washington.

In one final shock to all the people who never understood Mr. Trump (or the 75 million Americans who supported him), he declined to attend his successor’s inauguration. Cue the fits of sputtering rage.

Truly, Mr. Trump is the only honest one of the whole bunch — the only one who is not kidding; the only serious person in Washington.

He didn’t attend Wednesday’s festivities because it would have been a lie — much like everything in Washington.

It was the same shocking outrage Mr. Trump sparked four years ago when he delivered his inaugural address and told the assembled crowd that — yes, indeed — he meant every word of his campaign and intended to make good on every promise he had made.

Washington.

Melted.

Down.

And from that moment on, they never recovered from their visceral hatred of Donald J. Trump.

We are back to standard practice with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

The people who vote are viewed as nothing but props in a play or chumps in a fixed game.

We are already seeing it all revealed in the first few days after January 20.

Joe Biden spent most of the campaign criticizing Donald Trump's Covid policy and telling people he had a plan that would end the crisis.

In fact, we heard this claim more than any other during the campaign.

Joe Biden had a plan and he was going to fix everything.

What do we hear from Biden on his second full day in office?

Proof of fraud?

Since the Covid vaccines first began being distributed in mid-December Biden has also been stating that he was going to be introducing an ambitious plan to do 100 million vaccinations in 100 days. Biden intimated that Trump did not have any plan in place to do that.

Source: https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/20210120/bidens-covid-challenge-100-million-vaccinations-in-the-first-100-days-it-wont-be-easy#1

Biden “has made clear that slowing down the spread of Covid-19 and getting 100 million vaccine shots into Americans’ arms in his first 100 days in office are of utmost priority—goals that will shape whether Biden’s first years in office are ultimately deemed successful.”

An ambitious goal? Trump hasn't done anything?

The reality is that vaccinations in the week before Biden took office were running very close to 1 million per day already. In fact, between January 20-22 vaccinations were running at 1.4 million per day. These vaccinations were already in the logistics pipeline before Biden took office.

Sounds like a misleading allegation to me.

Does anyone remember Joe Biden on the campaign trail when he criticized President Trump for stopping flights from China and Europe into the United States to stop the spread of Covid?

Biden said travel bans were useless. He would have a plan to combat it that didn't rely on racist, xenophobic policies.

I thought walls didn't work?

Perhaps Biden decided they do work considering the fencing that was put up in Washington for his inauguration.

Why didn't Trump come up with that plan? 

You see all of this and you marvel at how Biden can say all of this with a straight face. However, then you realize, he has been a politician all his life and it just comes naturally. 

Biden is also attempting to create a narrative right now that the economic crisis is deepening and it's not getting better.

That's interesting because the unemployment rate is currently less than half of what it was in April.

It would be better still but for the economic lockdowns that have been instituted in Democrat states like California and New York.

The United States economic performance has also been better than any other major country in the world except China. Funny how that has worked out.

 

Despite Covid, it should also be noted that the unemployment rate when President Trump left office is still lower than it was for any of the first five years of the Obama and Biden administration.

More concealment and deception?

Of course, we also have the massive misrepresentation that Biden and Harris made during the campaign about their intentions about fracking and oil and gas drilling.

Remember when Biden and the media stated that Trump was lying when he said Biden wanted to abolish the U.S. oil industry and eliminate fracking.

It was a FACT that Joe Biden had no intention of banning fracking. His own VP said so.

It didn't take long to see where this is going.

Who was telling the truth?

I would say all of this is a pretty convincing proof of election fraud. 

You also had Joe Biden telling labor unions that he was in their corner during the campaign only to kill the Keystone XL pipeline project and thousands of high paying labor jobs even before his first day in office.

Biden told us he was going to be the most "pro-union" President in history.

Here are a couple of big unions endorsing Biden during the campaign.

It seem these unions realized they were a victim of election fraud even before the inauguration.

The most "pro-union" President?

Perhaps that only applies for the teachers' unions.

There was no fraud in the 2020 election?

What more proof does one need?

It doesn't even require anyone to even look at one voting machine or suspicious mail-in ballot.

More Covid Craziness

Covid-19 is a highly infectious virus that is not to be taken lightly.

Almost 2 million deaths have been attributed to Covid-19 worldwide over the last year.

However, compared to many past pandemics the death rate is relatively low. This is especially true when you adjust the death toll for the smaller world population in years past.

200 million deaths from the Bubonic Plague in the 13th and 14th centuries

56 million deaths from smallpox in 1520.

50 million deaths fro the Spanish flu in 1918-19.

35 million deaths from HIV/AIDS since 1981.

Source: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/history-of-pandemics-deadliest/

When we look back in history what is going to be most remarkable about the Covid-19 pandemic will be all the self-inflicted damage we have done to the human race in our reaction to the virus. This damage will be many, many times greater than the virus causes itself.

Consider the Covid relief package that Joe Biden is sending to Congress.

It calls for $1.9 trillion in additional federal spending.

This is on top of $4.4 trillion in Covid relief and stimulus spending that was already enacted during 2020.

This tweet lists some of the highlights of the Biden bill which includes another $1,400 in individual stimulus payments, an extra $400 per week in unemployment benefits and a proposed $15 national minimum wage.

In reaction to this news I came across this tweet from a liberal know-nothing from Seattle (with 288,000 followers--which is scary in itself) proclaiming how great all of this is and comparing it to what he thinks were the "horrible" Trump tax cuts.

Note that this tweet got 4,700 likes!

The only problem is liberal Dan is spreading the types of disinformation and lies that Twitter is supposed to be guarding against.

He fails to mention that that $1.9 trillion cost for the Trump tax cuts was a 10-year cost.

Biden is proposing to spend this Covid relief money in a few months.

The $1.9 trillion Trump tax cuts also included all of the middle income tax cuts that included tax rate reductions for all tax brackets. It also resulted in the elimination of a number of itemized tax deductions and personal exemptions. The loss of itemized deductions were specifically targeted against high income earners who lost deductions for state and local taxes.

In fact, of that $1.9 trillion in net budget costs the amounts below went specifically to middle and lower income taxpayers beyond the rate reductions.

Increase in standard deduction     $720 billion

Additional child care tax credit    $573 billion 

I wrote a blog post right after the 2018 tax filing season was over and cited a report by HR Block that the average tax liability for its 20 million clients (almost all of which are lower and middle income) had seen an average overall tax liability that was down 24.9% compared to before the Trump tax cuts.

It is hardly accurate to state that Trump tax cuts were solely for the rich and corporations is it?

Where are those Twitter censors when it comes to liberal misinformation?

If the Biden Covid relief package is enacted we will have spent $6.3 trillion in one year reacting to the virus.

Let's put that amount in perspective.

In the year before Covid-19 hit, we only collected $3.5 trillion in total federal revenues.

We spent $1.3 trillion on federal discretionary spending.

We spent a grand total of $676 billion on defense in 2019.

We are close to spending 10 times that amount on Covid relief in just one year!

This graph give a sense of where we are before we do any more damage with that $1.9 trillion.

There is no society in the history of mankind that would have ever contemplated this amount of craziness.

Locking down people and businesses.

Quarantining healthy people.

Closing schools for close to a year.

Taking on massive amounts of debt to fund the craziness. 

If you want to visualize crazy here is a picture of what is called a "virtual learning center" for the Metro Nashville Public Schools.

The schools are not open but children can still attend these virtual centers as their parents need to work and they have no one to supervise their virtual learning.

Note the three children who are sleeping at their desks.

The teachers are missing but they are still getting paid as are all other government employees. Of course, most of those government employees vote Democrat.

Who is being hurt the hardest? Many small business owners the majority of which vote Republican. Is that just a coincidence?

What is going on?

What are we doing to an entire generation of young people?

Why have we done it?

A big reason this has even been possible is that technology never made it feasible to consider anything like this before.

Prior generations could not think about what we are doing. If you wanted to go to school you had to be there. If you wanted to work you had to be there. If you wanted to buy something you had to go to the shop to purchase what you wanted.

There was no choice. People did what they had to do because they knew they would not survive if they did not. They had to persevere as a society or perish.

Where is all the money coming from that we are throwing around? We just issue more debt and have the Federal Reserve buy it with the money they create out of thin air.

We have come to think that we can survive by hunkering down, printing money and throwing it around to give people some hope. There seems to be no consideration of the long term costs of what we are doing. It is crazy.

We also now find almost a year into the lockdowns there is no evidence they have done anything to control the spread of the virus in a new analysis by the American Institute for Economic Research.

The use of universal lockdowns in the event of the appearance of a new pathogen has no precedent. It has been a science experiment in real time, with most of the human population used as lab rats. The costs are legion. 

The question is whether lockdowns worked to control the virus in a way that is scientifically verifiable. Based on the following studies, the answer is no and for a variety of reasons: bad data, no correlations, no causal demonstration, anomalous exceptions, and so on. There is no relationship between lockdowns (or whatever else people want to call them to mask their true nature) and virus control. 

The World Health Organization is also now admitting that the high cycle threshold PCR tests for Covid are much too sensitive and have resulted in millions of false positive tests. This is something I have been writing about for months. This means millions have been quarantined needlessly as well as anyone they had contact with. These people either did not have Covid or the viral load they had was not infectious at all. The economic impact has been staggering.

On top of this Biden and the Democrats want to mandate a $15 per hour wage as well?

Biden's argument is that it will lift 1.3 million workers out of poverty. However, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that it will also result in 1.3 million losing their jobs. That looks to me like a net loss overall 1.3 million workers get some type of wage boost to get out of poverty. However, 1.3 million will lose their wages completely. How is that a positive for the economy and our country? It is crazy.

However, Donald Trump's economic policies lifted 6 million people out of poverty between 2017 and 2019 (2020 data is not yet available)  of which over 2 million were children under the age of 18.

Those policies also resulted in the lowest poverty rates in history for African Americans and Hispanic Americans as well as the lowest unemployment rate for these Americans.

This wasn't done with government mandates. In fact, it was accomplished by government being less intrusive with lower tax rates and fewer job-killing regulations.

Which brings us to more craziness.

One of Biden's first actions was to impose a mandate that a mask must be worn while on any federal property.

Does that mean that he has to wear a mask in his bedroom at the White House? Isn't that federal property?

What about those who want to hike at Yosemite or Yellowstone? That is federal property.

What about the Marines at basic training at Parris Island on a 3 mile run? That is federal property.

Of course, here is Joe Biden and his family in the Lincoln Memorial shortly after he signed that federal mask order.

Perhaps he forgot what he signed a few hours earlier.

I don't begrudge the family photo without the masks. Who would want that on such a big day?

However, who signed the order? I thought he was the guy who said it is all about leadership?

Crazy. 

There is surely more on the way. And Covid will only be a small part of it.

It's All Downhill From Here

Joe Biden reaches a lifetime goal today.

He has dreamed of being President of the United States since he first entered the U.S. Senate when he was 30 years old. That was 48 years ago.

This is a quote from an article in The Washingtonian magazine in 1974 a year after Biden became a U.S. Senator titled "Death and the All-American Boy" which focused on the young Senator who had lost his wife, Neilia, and his infant daughter in an auto accident shortly before he took office.

Biden says he no longer allows himself the luxury of long-range planning, but he enjoys the prestige of being a Senator and seems committed to finishing his six-year term. In fact, he says he might consider running for President. “My wife always wanted me to be on the Supreme Court,” he says. “But while I know I can be a good Senator, and I know I can be a good President, I do know that I could never be another Oliver Wendell Holmes. I know I could have easily made the White House with Neilia. And my family still expects me to be there one of these days. With them behind me anything can happen.”

I highly recommend that you read this Kitty Kelley profile of Biden in its entirety. It has a number of insights into the man even though it was written 47 years ago. 

Unfortunately, Biden's inauguration today will probably be the one shining moment for him.

It will most likely be all downhill for him from here.

Why do I say that?

First, Biden has to overcome the fact that a good portion of the country believes that he is taking office illegitimately. He starts with a pretty large handicap out of the gate. For many the mantra is going to be "NOT MY PRESIDENT". It is the same thing many Democrats said about Trump. Biden says he wants to "unify" the country. It is a nice sound bite but color me skeptical. Perhaps "Good Old Joe's" heart is in the right place but his head is going to tell him that he can't cross the majority of Democrats who don't want any unity.

Biden also clearly has diminished mental capacities compared to what he once had. It is undoubtedly going to get worse. His staff and the media protected Biden during the campaign and in the post-election period. It will get harder to do that after tomorrow. There are a lot of expectations about Presidential performance. It is going to be harder to hide Biden and any gaffes will be more noticeable to the public at large. 

It is also likely that the Hunter Biden investigation will rear its head at some point. Biden has to hope that the deep state and the media will cover it over but there is already enough evidence to suggest that Hunter is very, very dirty. Perhaps he did not do anything criminal but Hunter is a very troubled soul. At some point it is going to be hard for Joe to continue saying that his son "is the smartest man he knows".

Biden also faces the challenge in trying to appear to be a responsible American in a party that has made a hard left turn. How does Biden mollify the radical leftists in his party without looking like he has totally sold out to their agenda? 

I think a lot of people voted for Biden thinking that it would result in less protests, mayhem and violence in our country. I predicted during the campaign that the reverse might be true. Many of these groups think Biden and the Democrats "owe them". If they don't get their way they are not going to be happy.

Look at a few examples we have already seen in the last week or so.

A day of resistance?  I thought their guy won? Are they worried they might actually have to return to the classroom and teach?

We also have the manner in which many of those Biden voters celebrated Martin Luther King day in New York City.

Bottle-flinging marchers incited by anti-cop rhetoric instigated a Martin Luther King Day clash between cops and protesters near City Hall, with 11 officers injured at the event honoring the famously non-violent civil rights leader, NYPD officials charged Tuesday.

Police Commissioner Dermot Shea, in back to back interviews on NY1 and WINS-AM 1010, said some in the crowd marching across the Brooklyn Bridge were hellbent on hurting cops — with five of the injured cops taken to area hospitals and a sixth declining medical help after taking a bottle to the head.

“Whatever this was it certainly didn’t represent a peaceful protest,” Shea said on NY1. “This is the protest that we see on a day honoring Martin Luther King. It consisted of violence, threats, bottles being thrown and people calling for the death of police officers.

“(This) wasn’t created by the police, it was created by people who want to destroy our city.”

If anyone can find where Joe Biden or Kamala Harris condemned these actions please let me know as I can't find it.

At some point Biden is also going to have his record on many other issues compared to Donald J. Trump.

Does anyone remember what ISIS was doing when Trump took office and what they were doing when he left office?

What about North Korea?

How many terrorist attacks against the United States while Trump was President?

What about the peace deals in the Middle East that all of the former Presidential administrations failed to achieve but Trump got done?

Trump was also the first President in recent memory that did not get us into one foreign war conflict.

Trump entered office with masses of immigrants trying to pour into the country. He left with hundreds of miles of new wall and a deal where Mexico's military was protecting us by patrolling the border on their side. How long has it been since you heard about immigrant caravans? You hadn't for a couple of years until recently when a new caravan started based on the belief that Joe Biden is going to let them into our country.

What about the new trade deals with Canada and Mexico? Those are other deals which were said to be impossible to do.

What about the increased funding by our NATO partners?

What about the China trade deals and the import duties on China imports?

What about energy independence that many said was impossible for the United States to ever have again?

Let's document a few economic measures here with the most current data (as of January 19, 2021) so that there can be an easy comparison of the Biden record to what Trump achieved at some point down the road.

Dow Jones Industrial Average   30,931  (+56% since 1/20/17)

S&P 500     3,799  (+67% since 1/20/17)

NASDAQ   13,197  (+138% since 1/20/17)

10-year Treasury yield  1.094%

30 year mortgage rate (average)  2.87%

Gallon of gas (AAA national average for regular)  $2.39

Natural gas per cf   $2.48   (increasingly importantly as proxy for residential energy costs) ($3.39 when Trump took office)

Lowest unemployment rate during Trump term  (before China virus)     3.5%

Current unemployment rate (as of 12/20)  6.7%

Inflation rate for last full year of Trump term (2020)    1.2%

Real median household income per Federal Reserve estimate  $71,186

Poverty rate at end of 2019 ( 2020 rate not published yet)   10.5%  ( lowest in history)

Poverty rate for African Americans at end of 2019     18.8%   (lowest in history)

Poverty rate for Hispanic Americans at end of 2019   15.7%   (lowest in history)

I wish Joe Biden all the luck in the world to better these measures.

More power to him if he can.

However, most likely it is all downhill from here simply due to the fact that it is hard to imagine anyone bettering these marks. How much better can it get on some of these? We have to be near the top of the hill right now. Trump would almost certainly not have been able to come close to matching them himself if he had remained in office. 

We may see the stock market go higher due to the Fed continuing to print money. Perhaps there is a post-Covid economic explosion to push things ahead for awhile. However, the bubble would seem to have to burst at some point. Can they keep it going for another four years? That seems doubtful right now.

Covid will end at some point but will Biden have anything to do with it? We are already past the 8 month period when most viruses die a natural death. Lockdowns have actually probably extended the life cycle of this virus. The vaccines are also in play now but what did Biden have to do with them?

All of this suggests to me that Biden will struggle in office on a downhill trajectory for a combination of the factors outlined above.

This also suggests to me that Donald Trump might begin to look better and better over time to the voters who rejected him in 2020 for not having the style or comportment they wanted in their President.

In summary, Biden appears to have nowhere to go but down. At the same time, Trump seems to have nowhere to go but up when people start comparing records down the road a little bit.

It remains to be seen whether Trump will be a viable candidate in 2024. The Democrats are clearly concerned about that prospect or they would not have been so intent on impeaching him to foreclose that possibility. That action alone tells me that they are not real confident in Joe Biden's (and their) prospects over the next couple of years.

However, irrespective of how the impeachment trial goes, age is not on Trump's side. Ironically, Trump's future prospects may actually be dependent on Biden's performance in office. Voters may decide that putting another 78 year old in the White House is simply not a good idea.

The media narrative today shows Biden on top of the world while they portray Trump as a beaten man who has been kicked to the curb.

 I am interested to see how history looks at all of this in several years.

My advice to Joe Biden is to enjoy it while you can. I am betting it is all downhill from here.

Are You Going To Get The Vaccine?

Are you going to get the vaccine?

That is a question I hear often these days.

Two vaccines have been authorized in the United States to this point---one developed by Pfizer and another by Moderna.

Over 10.5 million people have received at least one dose of the vaccine thus far out of over 30 million doses that have been purchased by the federal government and distributed to the states.

It is believed that two doses of the vaccine are necessary spaced out about 3-4 weeks apart to be effective.

More doses of the Pfizer vaccine have been administered to date than the Moderna vaccine. 

What I have found interesting in talking about the vaccines with people is how little most know about what they may have injected into their body.

Most people believe that these vaccines have been APPROVED by the FDA. This is not correct. They have merely been AUTHORIZED under an emergency use authorization.

Those who take these vaccines are effectively participating in an additional experimental trial phase of these vaccines.

Most people are also not aware that these vaccines have also been developed using biotechnology that has never been successfully used with humans before. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines use messenger RNA (mRNA) which is designed to create a spike protein in your body that is unique to Covid-19 that attaches to cells near the vaccination site. Once that spike protein is recognized by your body it is designed to begin producing antibodies and T-cells to fight off what it thinks is an infection.

If the mRNA process works as advertised it will be be a tremendous medical advance as it will facilitate much quicker development of vaccines in the future. Vaccines can be developed using DNA templates rather than relying on the traditional method of using weakened or inactivated versions of the disease-causing pathogen to activate the body's immune response.

However, some are concerned that it could potentially cause a problem named "Antibody Dependent Enhancement" in which the vaccine actually results in a worse situation for the person who received it if exposed to a future virus in the coronavirus family. This is a major reason that previous efforts to develop a vaccine involving other coronaviruses were not successful. 

This usually did not allow the vaccines to get past animal trials. It should be noted that few animal trials were conducted with the Covid vaccine trials due to the compressed testing schedule.

Due to the "warp speed" development process there were also limits in the population of those tested.

No one under the age of 18 was tested. Nor were pregnant women. Few were tested who were over age 75. No one was tested with two or more comorbidities. It was considered too risky and unethical to test the vaccines on these vulnerable groups.

You can assume that almost no one in a nursing home was tested but that group has proven to be the demographic most vulnerable to the virus.

Thus far, more than 10% of the total doses administered in the USA have been to those in long-term care facilities.

However, Norway has already sounded an alarm about what they have seen in vaccines given to those over age 75.

Norway is reporting that they have recorded 29 deaths from the Pfizer vaccine in those over age 75 shortly after receiving the shot.

Norway's public health authority has suggested that the vaccine might be too risky for the elderly.

There was also a recent report that an upstate New York nursing home has seen 32 deaths since Covid vaccinations began there on December 22. Authorities state there is no connection since they had seen positive Covid tests in the home beginning December 16. 

However, it seems that someone should be studying this closer.

At a minimum, it suggests a double standard in that Covid seems to be suspected in any nursing home death but there is a quick rejection of any possible connection between the vaccine and any deaths that occur soon after the vaccination.

The biggest misconception I see in people regarding the vaccine is that they believe it will prevent them from being infected with Covid or if loved ones are vaccinated it will prevent the transmission of the virus to them. This would seem to be an obvious assumption and a primary reason to get the vaccine.

Incredibly, there is no evidence that any of the Covid vaccines will prevent transmission of the virus.

As I wrote when these vaccines were under development, that was never a stated objective or goal of the vaccines. They merely were intended to minimize the symptoms if you get the infection.

Many tell me that they want to get the vaccines so they can travel.

However, right now the U.S. rules for anyone boarding an international flight to the United States is that they test negative for the virus or have documentary evidence that they have had Covid-19 and recovered with the antibodies. Evidence that you have had the vaccine will not allow passengers to avoid these other requirements.

This is the relevant excerpt from the CDC directive issued January 12, 2021.

Air passengers are required to get a viral test (a test for current infection) within the 3 days before their flight to the U.S. departs, and provide written documentation of their laboratory test result (paper or electronic copy) to the airline or provide documentation of having recovered from COVID-19. Airlines must confirm the negative test result for all passengers or documentation of recovery before they board. If a passenger does not provide documentation of a negative test or recovery, or chooses not to take a test, the airline must deny boarding to the passenger.

This is pretty clear evidence that the CDC itself does not believe that the vaccine is trusted to prevent infection and transmission of the virus right now.

Hopefully this will change over time but right now there is no evidence that getting the vaccine will prevent you from getting the virus or transmitting it. Almost everyone I have talked to about this has been surprised to find this out.

I suggest you look closely at the actions of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Dr. Tony Fauci in the coming weeks. They have all had both doses of the vaccines. There should be no reason that any of them should wear a mask. If the vaccine had the effectiveness people are being led to believe it has, they should not be able to be infected by or transmit the virus. Therefore, there should be no reason to wear a mask. See what they do. Ask yourself what is the purpose of the vaccine if they are still saying masks are required for those who have been vaccinated?

There is also some interesting data out of Israel on the vaccine front.

Israel leads the world right now in vaccinating its citizens.

It has already administered the vaccine to almost 25% of its population since they started their vaccination program in mid-December.

There is no other country in the world comes close to that effort.

Israel leads the world in COVID-19 vaccinations. It has already vaccinated nearly a quarter of its population, including 75 percent of the population most at risk, people over age 60. It has administered 24.5 doses per 100 persons, nearly double the next-best country (the United Arab Emirates) and about 8 times as many people per capita as in the U.S. and the U.K. Israel’s per capita vaccination rate is 24 times that of the normally efficient Germans and 50 times better than the world average. Only three other countries in the world — the U.S., China, and the U.K. — have administered more vaccines.

However, confirmed cases in Israel starting to explode upwards at about the same time the vaccination program began.

On December 15 Israel had 18,832 active cases of Covid-19.

Israel now has 83,104. That is a 5-fold increase in one month at the same time they have vaccinated almost 25% of the population.

This could be just an odd coincidence. 

There could be a lag effect before cases sharply move down.

However, it is sure not what you would expect with a vaccination effort than has shown such significant penetration of the population in a short period of time.

I think many are also under the illusion that the Covid vaccine is in many respects similar to getting a flu shot.

Alex Berenson, the former New York Times reporter who has been at the forefront of Covid coverage, recently examined the CDC data reported thus far on its Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting Systems (VAERS) on the Covid vaccines. There is a lag in this data so this is only based on 6.6 million doses administered. However, it shows that this is not the flu shot when it comes to adverse events.

Deaths per dose at 85x that of the flu shot.

ER visits at 35x the flue vaccine.

It is my fervent hope that the vaccines are effective and they prove to be safe.

However, there is no clear consensus even among health professionals on the front lines whether the benefits outweigh the risks involving these vaccines.

I have seen a lot of numbers suggesting that 40%-60% of health care workers are declining the vaccine. 

The fact that so many health care workers have declined the vaccines is a reason that there are over 30 million doses that have been made available to the states but only 13 million have been used thus far.

For myself, I am taking a wait and see attitude on whether I am going to get the vaccine.

I think a lot of questions will be answered about the true efficacy of the vaccines as well as their safety over the next 6-12 months.

Right now I would also feel more comfortable waiting for the vaccines that have been developed using the more traditional development methods and avoiding the mRNA vaccines.

The only thing I know for sure is that the media and the "experts" have painted the most negative and dangerous narrative they could involving Covid-19. They are also portraying the vaccines in the most positive light they can.

Neither narrative should be trusted. The risks of Covid to most people is a much smaller than most are led to believe. At the same time, the benefits of the vaccine are much less and there also can be real risks attached to these vaccines that should not be overlooked.

The truth undoubtedly lies somewhere in the middle but it is next to impossible for the average person to decipher what it is. 

My advice to anybody is to do as much research as you can. Don't take anything you are told at face value. Make sure you understand the risks and benefits of the vaccines. 

If you do that you will be in a much better position to make an informed decision on whether you should get the vaccine.