Coronavirus pandemic 2019-20 #4

Mir wrote:The Western Mainstream Media is a fully funded propaganda machine looking after the interest of the elite.

Hani was one of at least 20 workers at STMicro’s facility in the Malaysian district of Muar who died from Covid-19 after the delta variant raged through the country this year. The company kept its chip assembly and testing plant running while the virus was killing workers, as the company raced to meet surging demand from automakers and other customers. Authorities in Malaysia, like in many other countries, were concerned about keeping their economy on track during the pandemic and they granted chipmakers exemptions while much of the country locked down.

“I’m really upset because if ST shut down the plant when people were getting infected in June, I don’t think my husband would have died,” said Nancy.

While Covid-19 killed millions of people around the globe, deaths at the Muar facility were substantially higher than averages in the rest of the country and the world. One in 1,100 people in Malaysia died from the virus since the start of the pandemic, according to the country’s Ministry of Health, while it was at least one in 210 at the plant, according to Bloomberg News reporting. STMicro declined to comment on the specific number of workers who died at the Muar location.

The tragedy in Muar shows the little-understood human cost of keeping supply chains running in a pandemic. While politicians in Washington and Paris urge suppliers to step up production of semiconductors and government officials in countries like Malaysia give special exemptions to powerful corporations, employees like Hani put their lives at risk.

“The duty of the government is to look after the workers’ interest more than the country’s or the companies’ interest,” said Zaid Ibrahim, a former law minister in Malaysia. “Of the three — the government, companies and workers — the most vulnerable are the workers. I wish we could have avoided these tragedies.”

STMicro, run by Chief Executive Officer Jean-Marc Chery, faced extra pressures this year from politicians around the world who grew alarmed that shortages were shutting down auto plants and other factories. And of course, staying open benefits the company financially. The day Hani died, STMicro reported robust financial results that sent its stock to a record high.

The families of the people who died in Muar have avoided talking publicly about their tragedy. Nancy decided to speak out to honor the memory of her husband: She sees Hani as a good man who was caught between powerful forces of government and corporations, a man who didn’t have to die. 

higurashihougi wrote:
Many Western media companies belong to and is the property of the elite, to be more accurate.

Mir wrote:Do you realize that you just quoted an article owned and sponsored by one of these elite!  

In 1992 Schwab established a parallel institution, the Global Leaders for Tomorrow school, which was re-established as Young Global Leaders in 2004. Attendees at the school must apply for admission and are then subjected to a rigorous selection process. Members of the school’s very first class in 1992 already included many who went on to become important liberal political figures, such as Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Tony Blair. There are currently about 1,300 graduates of this school, and the list of alumni includes several names of those who went on to become leaders of the health institutions of their respective nations. Four of them are former and current health ministers for Germany, including Jens Spahn, who has been Federal Minister of Health since 2018. Philipp Rösler, who was Minister of Health from 2009 until 2011, was appointed the WEF’s Managing Director by Schwab in 2014.

Other notable names on the school’s roster are Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand whose stringent lockdown measures have been praised by global health authorities; Emmanuel Macron, the President of France; Sebastian Kurz, who was until recently the Chancellor of Austria; Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary; Jean-Claude Juncker, former Prime Minister of Luxembourg and President of the European Commission; and Annalena Baerbock, the leader of the German Greens who was the party’s first candidate for Chancellor in this year’s federal election, and who is still in the running to be Merkel’s successor. We also find California Governor Gavin Newsom on the list, who was selected for the class of 2005, as well as former presidential candidate and current US Secretary of Transportation Peter Buttigieg, who is a very recent alumnus, having been selected for the class of 2019. All of these politicians who were in office during the past two years have favored harsh responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and which also happened to considerably increase their respective governments’ power.

But the school’s list of alumni is not limited to political leaders. We also find many of the captains of private industry there, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Virgin’s Richard Branson, and the Clinton Foundation’s Chelsea Clinton. Again, all of them expressed support for the global response to the pandemic, and many reaped considerable profits as a result of the measures.

Mir wrote:Klaus Schwab the founder of The World Economic Forum at age 32.

https://rairfoundation.com/exposed-klaus-schwabs-school-for-covid-dictators-plan-for-great-reset-videos/

In 1992 Schwab established a parallel institution, the Global Leaders for Tomorrow school, which was re-established as Young Global Leaders in 2004. Attendees at the school must apply for admission and are then subjected to a rigorous selection process. Members of the school’s very first class in 1992 already included many who went on to become important liberal political figures, such as Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Tony Blair. There are currently about 1,300 graduates of this school, and the list of alumni includes several names of those who went on to become leaders of the health institutions of their respective nations. Four of them are former and current health ministers for Germany, including Jens Spahn, who has been Federal Minister of Health since 2018. Philipp Rösler, who was Minister of Health from 2009 until 2011, was appointed the WEF’s Managing Director by Schwab in 2014.

Other notable names on the school’s roster are Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand whose stringent lockdown measures have been praised by global health authorities; Emmanuel Macron, the President of France; Sebastian Kurz, who was until recently the Chancellor of Austria; Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary; Jean-Claude Juncker, former Prime Minister of Luxembourg and President of the European Commission; and Annalena Baerbock, the leader of the German Greens who was the party’s first candidate for Chancellor in this year’s federal election, and who is still in the running to be Merkel’s successor. We also find California Governor Gavin Newsom on the list, who was selected for the class of 2005, as well as former presidential candidate and current US Secretary of Transportation Peter Buttigieg, who is a very recent alumnus, having been selected for the class of 2019. All of these politicians who were in office during the past two years have favored harsh responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and which also happened to considerably increase their respective governments’ power.

But the school’s list of alumni is not limited to political leaders. We also find many of the captains of private industry there, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Virgin’s Richard Branson, and the Clinton Foundation’s Chelsea Clinton. Again, all of them expressed support for the global response to the pandemic, and many reaped considerable profits as a result of the measures.

Schwab also wrote 2 very influential books The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Covid-19: The Great Reset
In the video below you can see some of his scholars in action. Note how Ardern seems to be slightly struggling with her line  

If anything, political pressures may prevent the White House from going far enough, Binghamton University political science professor Olga Shvetsova argued.

In order to halt the virus, she said vaccines must not only be mandated but that fully vaccinated people need to be tested regularly to stop the emergence of new variants.

“We cannot allow people to be sick but not too sick,” Shvetsova said. “That’s what created delta, and that’s what created omicron. It’s not only about preventing people from being terribly sick. It’s about preventing them from being sick in invisible ways.”

The US Food and Drug Administration is cooperating with a Freedom of Information Act request for clinical data associated with Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine, but may require 75 years to do so – even longer than a prior estimate.

The FDA has insisted it cannot commit to a faster release of the medical data associated with the approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, according to a legal brief filed on Tuesday in response to the FOIA request. The agency reiterated that after processing 12,000 pages in about a two-month period, it will only be able to process 500 pages per month going forward. With tens of thousands of additional files up for review, plaintiffs fear the process may drag on two decades longer than the previous 55-year estimate.
Release of US vaccine data ‘may take till 2076’ READ MORE: Release of US vaccine data ‘may take till 2076’

Lawyer Aaron Siri sued the FDA on behalf of a group of doctors calling themselves Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, who had previously complained the FDA wasn’t supplying the data they had requested in a timely fashion. Having pointed out last month that the FDA had looked through Pfizer’s documents in a mere 108 days in order to license the vaccine, Siri questioned why the agency now required a whopping 20,000 days to make the same documents public.

Approximately 451,000 pages regarding the clinical trials for a vaccine millions of Americans are being mandated to take will remain floating in legal limbo for up to 75 years if the agency has its way, Siri warned. He called it “dystopian” for the government to pay Pfizer billions of dollars, shield it from lawsuits and require citizens to be injected with its product, only to refuse access to the documents used to grant its licensure in the first place.

The FDA has justified the unusual timetable by pointing out its Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research – the body tasked with reviewing the records – only has 10 staffers, two of whom are “new.” The FDA also complained that stepping up the pace would divert “significant resources away from the processing of other FOIA requests that are also in litigation.”

The capitalist economy is based on the private sector and the public sector operates as a support of the former. The private sector works for profit, so it engages into activities procuring profits and abstains and/or withdraws from non-profitable activities. Furthermore, the capitalist economy, in order to surpass health and economic crises, needs to mobilise primarily the private sector (as this is the dominant sector of the economy). This requires using the public sector in order to subsidise the private sector by giving to the latter sufficiently profitable incentives. So actions are slow and fuzzy in a capitalist economy.

In contrast, in a planned economy, the dominant sector world be collectively owned and controlled. It would have non-surplus producing activities and even loss-making activities if this were decided by social planning. Loss-making activities would also be viable since they would be designated as such by social planning and would be structurally subsidized by the other economic activities. Additionally, when faced with an urgent contingency, a planned economy could mobilise resources on time and in sufficient numbers through a direct mechanism operated by the planning authority. Hence, it is certain that (a) it would take place and (b) be punctual.

For these reasons, a planned economy is better equipped to face contingencies like a health crisis. During the COVID pandemic, Donald Trump said that the US economy was not built to be shut down. The fundamental reason is that capitalist enterprises operate for profit, or else they have no reason to exist. Consequently, they cannot operate at a low cost of production level and moreover with losses. Unless someone else subsidises them to keep operating, they are going to close. On the contrary, a socialist economy can survive without achieving surplus (profits) by simply covering production costs. For the same reasons, it can survive longer even with economic losses.

The lesson of the coronavirus vaccine response is that a few billion dollars a year spent on additional basic research could have prevented a thousand times as much loss in death, illness and economic destruction. What better lesson can we learn from the COVID vaccine experience than that the multi-national pharma companies should be publicly owned so that research and development can be directed to meet the health and medical needs of people not the profits of these companies? Sure, state-owned companies can also work for the interests of capital and profits, but within a democratically planned economy, they would work for social needs. In a planned economy, necessary vaccines can get to the billions in the poorest countries and circumstances rather than to just those countries and people who can afford to pay the prices set by these companies. “This is the people’s vaccine,” said corporate critic Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program. “Federal scientists helped invent it and taxpayers are funding its development. … It should belong to humanity.”

Within a planned global economy, it would be possible to set up a programme to monitor wildlife, reduce spillovers, end the wildlife meat trade and reduce deforestation.16 Such a scheme could cost no more than $20bn a year, a price tag that is dwarfed by the cost of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has wiped trillions of dollars from national economies round the world. Spending of about $260bn over ten years could substantially reduce the risks of another pandemic on the scale of the coronavirus outbreak, which is just 2% of the estimated $11.5tn costs of Covid-19 to the world economy.

kvs wrote:The choice to buy mRNA concoctions when AZ is available is proof in itself of a conspiracy.   Why would the UK do this?
I can see Scotland doing it since it needs to prove that it is "independent", but why drop AZ in favour of the mRNA wonder cures?

The only value from the boosters is that they shock the immune system into an active state.   They serve no vaccine purpose
if the spike variant they encode for is obsolete.   The official reaction to the Omicron strain is full bore abuse.

JohninMK wrote:All systems go then Garry

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the easing of COVID-19 restrictions on national television, based on a 'traffic light system.' She said orgies for up to 25 people are permitted.  

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/new-zealand-approves-orgies-25-people-part-new-covid-rules

JohninMK wrote:Not so good news here. I've tested positive in first a lateral flow and then a PCR test. So I have to hide for 10 days.

But I was ready for it. I have been taking Vit D 4000/8000 alternate days with 50mg zinc for months so my D levels must be pretty high. I have been taking Quercetin for a couple of weeks and doubled the dose with more zinc the moment I felt ill. I am now taking Ivermectin.

I think I was just too early for it to be Omicron so its probably Delta. Pity as it probably means I will get it again.

The result is that I had really bad chest pains for 3 hours on Saturday night and then they went. Since then I feel like I have a mild case of flu, slight temperature and some sinus pressure.

I have only had 2 AZ jabs, the second in May, not wanting the Pfizer currently the only 3rd jab option.

We will see how it turns out