Free Republic

University COVID-19 vaccine mandates are unethical because the vaccines are up to nearly 100 times more likely to cause a person of student age serious injury than prevent him or her from being hospitalised with COVID-19, a new study has concluded. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4206070 The study, whose authors include Dr. Kevin Bardosh, a recipient of funding from the pro-vaccination Wellcome Trust led by Sir Jeremy Farrar, and Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg of the Florida Department of Health, presents a risk-benefit assessment of booster vaccines among people of student age and provides five ethical arguments against mandates. The researchers estimate that 22,000-30,000 previously...

On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” Senate Homeland Security Committee Ranking Member Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) said that “We don’t know how many Afghans are in this country who pose a national security threat” and that “we just hope” that the few dozen we know of based on statements by the FBI are being monitored. Portman stated, [relevant remarks begin around 4:35] “In terms of the Afghan refugees, all of us want to take care of the Afghans who helped Americans, who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with us, the interpreters, and so on. But remember that chaotic withdrawal,...

A subscriber asked me to write a post about my thoughts on Novavax because she “really trusts my judgement.” Flattered, I felt like I should share what they are. So here goes.Before any medical intervention, but especially in the case of a novel or barely tested one, a long standing practice of medical ethics is that informed consent must be obtained. The emphasis should be on the informed part and not the consent part. Note that informed consent has been one of the foundations of medical ethics, essentially an inviolable standard, or at least it used to be before this...

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito mocked Prince Harry, Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, and other foreigners who have taken it upon themselves to intervene in America’s abortion debate.In a speech to Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Summit in Rome, Italy, the conservative justice quipped he “had the honour this term of writing I think the only Supreme Court decision in the history of that institution that has been lambasted by a whole string of foreign leaders who felt perfectly fine commenting on American law,” referring to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.“One of these was former prime...

During an interview with CBS’ “Red and Blue” on Wednesday, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy defended the transit mask mandate even as masks are not required in other indoor settings by arguing that travel is different because “you bring a lot of people together in a closed environment for a prolonged period of time,” and “many people don’t have the option not to travel.” Murthy said, “So, the CDC’s decision is based in part on the fact that, look, we have cases going up right now and what the CDC wants to be able to understand is the trajectory of...

It feels like we're turning a corner. Since the beginning of the calendar year, a lot of things have changed. More importantly, a lot of minds have changed as well. The world and the nation don't look like they used to, and don't seem likely to again any time soon. Consider the masks. On New Year's Day, 30% of people in 11 states and the District of Columbia were subject to statewide masking mandates. In addition, mask mandates were in effect in several dozen politically liberal cities and counties in other states, raising coverage to more than one-third of the...

“Risk” is on. I don’t mean market risk: not when Western stocks are slumping after yet another head-fake rally, the Nasdaq now in a bear market again; not when Chinese stocks are experiencing a 2008-style collapse – and who knew geopolitics and ideology still mattered in a highly geopolitical, openly Leninist political-economy?; not when oil prices are down 35% from their recent high; and not when US Treasury yields are surging, and the 5s-10s curve is close to inverting even before the Fed meeting this week. No, that is all very much risk off, even as some will cling to...

Yogi Berra called and he says he’s got Deja Vu like it’s the 2008 financial crisis all over again.In 2008, formerly staid and respectable mortgage lenders found themselves at huge risk from stupid government policies forcing them to lend to people who could not pay back. Never fear, they had spread the risk in the secondary market, which should have had a stabilizing effect, but ended up more like a circular firing squad with banks toppling like dominoes.History does not repeat, but it rhymes:In 2021, staid, respectable, and conservative insurance companies suddenly found themselves at huge risk from bad government...

Former President Barack Obama released a statement Thursday marking the anniversary of the January 6 protest, lamenting that a “sizable portion of voters” agree with the claims that he believes fueled the protest; he also warned that “our democracy is at greater risk today than it was back then.” “One year ago, a violent attack on our Capitol made it clear just how fragile the American experiment in democracy really is,” Obama began.

STORY AT-A-GLANCE Dr. Robert Malone says he was kicked off twitter for this 40-minute video presentation https://rumble.com/vqx3kb-the-pfizer-inoculations-do-more-harm-than-good.html and PDF created by the Canadian Covid Care Alliance, which consists of over 500 independent doctors, scientists, and health care practitioners. The video and PDF are a deep-dive into Pfizer’s own vaccine trial data which conclusively shows an INCREASED risk of illness and death for the vaccinated group compared to the placebo group. For example, there were 20 total deaths in the vaccinated group versus 14 total deaths in the placebo group with nearly double the amount of cardiovascular deaths among the vaccinated....

Insurers need experts to calculate risk. Among those number-crunchers’ riskiest endeavors are the tortuous exams for credentials. Kaylee Cohen studied two months for an actuarial exam last year—then failed it. She dreaded telling the actuaries at the insurance company where she was interning that she had flunked. “But when I told them, they said, ‘Oh yeah, I failed that one too,’ ” says the 23-year-old student at Montreal’s Concordia University. “It made me feel so much better knowing everybody else was in the same shoes.” She finally passed that exam and now has several more to go for an actuarial...

South Africans who contract the omicron COVID-19 variant in the current fourth wave of infections are 80% less likely to be hospitalized compared with other strains, according to a pre-print study released Tuesday.A separate study released Wednesday by researchers at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland found the omicron hospitalization risk was two-thirds below delta.Meanwhile, Michael Dowling, the president and CEO of Northwell Health in the New York City area, told CNN on Wednesday morning his hospital system is doing well, even as COVID cases increase, and “there is no crisis.”His network of 22 hospitals is at less than 10%...

The COVID-Cult dogma is rich in exaggeration and weighted down by deception. Nothing they have claimed is clinically or statistically accurate, and COVID-Galielo’s are quickly put before the inquisition to be examined by its Holy Officers. Galileo was found guilty of “vehement suspicion of heresy” and forced to repent his sins before God and the masters of his time by reading remarks prepared for him by The Church. These days, the blasphemers are nurses, doctors, clinicians, oncologists, epidemiologists, numerous professionals in scientific disciplines, all of whom have found themselves put before the inquisition – much like the climate scientists who...

Former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, now a CNN contributor, said Tuesday on “Anderson Cooper 360” that the “situation in this country with firearms” was out of control and causing our children to be in danger. McCabe was reacting to three students being killed and six others injured in a shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan.

The heavily mutated Omicron coronavirus variant is likely to spread internationally and poses a very high risk of infection surges that could have "severe consequences" in some places, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday. No Omicron-linked deaths had yet been reported, though further research was needed to assess its potential to resist vaccines and immunity induced by previous infections, it added. Anticipating increased case numbers as the variant, first reported last week, spreads, the U.N. agency urged its 194 member states to accelerate vaccination of high-priority groups. "Omicron has an unprecedented number of spike mutations, some of which...

Editor’s Commentary: The article below by Toby Rogers dives into as much of the statistical data that he could get his hands on. While most of the data has been suppressed, there is still plenty available that all points to an indisputable truth: Children age 5-11 have a much higher risk of dying from the Covid-19 “vaccines” than they do from the coronavirus itself. This report will shock those who have bought into the government’s push to vaccinate all school-aged children. It will likely even shock many who are against the jabs. How evil must the machinations of our own...

After advisers to FDA and CDC committees expressed concern about the lack of data on long-term risks before approving the Pfizer vaccine for children ages 5-11, a survey finds only 27% of parents are eager to get the shots for their kids. The Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that 33% of parents say they will wait a while and see how the vaccine is working, and 30% say they will definitely not get the vaccine for their child. The rest are split among those who will get the shots if it's require and those who are undecided. Many prominent epidemiologists...

Human beings aren't great at assessing risk. In 1979, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky posited a new branch of behavioral economics, which they titled prospect theory. One of their key findings was that human beings are naturally loss-averse -- we generally are willing to forego the probability of gains in order to minimize the chance of losses. Because of our loss aversion, human beings are also subject to what Kahneman and Tversky label the "planning fallacy": our self-serving bias toward believing that we are capable of planning for contingency more successfully than we are. As Kahneman writes, "Exaggerated optimism...

America remains bound by often extreme pandemic restrictions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends staying 6 feet away from others. In Oregon, everyone must wear a mask outdoors. In parts of the country, 2-year-olds must wear masks. Are such rules necessary? Recently, Denmark lifted all pandemic restrictions. "Go Denmark!" cheers George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux in my latest video. "We in the United States should do the same." "We reduced COVID, through vaccination, to a fairly mild ailment for the vast majority of people," says Boudreaux. "You don't have to worry if the bartender at your favorite...

America remains bound by often extreme pandemic restrictions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends staying 6 feet away from others. In Oregon, everyone must wear a mask outdoors. In parts of the country, 2-year-olds must wear masks. Are such rules necessary? Recently, Denmark lifted all pandemic restrictions. "Go Denmark!" cheers George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux in my latest video. "We in the United States should do the same." "We reduced COVID, through vaccination, to a fairly mild ailment for the vast majority of people," says Boudreaux. "You don't have to worry if the bartender at your favorite...