Free Republic

How can I protect myself from the new omicron variant? The same way you guard against COVID-19 caused by any other variant: Get vaccinated if you haven’t yet, get a booster if you’re eligible and step up other precautions you may have relaxed, like wearing a mask and avoiding crowds. “What we need to do is add more layers of protection,” says Dr. Julie Vaishampayan of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. That’s especially important with holiday travel and gatherings around the corner. A booster shot is one of those layers. The added dose triggers a big jump in virus-fighting...

While documenting my former high school’s attempt to indoctrinate me with critical race theory six years ago, I remarked that now, several years later, “the situation has undoubtedly worsened.” Worsened it has. Now, Campbell Union High School District has promoted more than 100 “equity resources” to students and staff, including a document that taught students how to put a curse on those who say “all lives matter.”Colorblindness, Cops, and CursesThe page serves as a vast library for CRT resources and features 60 different links, including a Google Drive folder with 45 different documents. The list made sure to include the...

"There are obviously remedies that we're not looking at," attorney Kristin Erickson says. "And we need to think outside of the current standard of care. ================================================================================= An Illinois lawyer who helped a dying COVID patient win court-ordered treatment with ivermectin and survive says the episode reveals a deep need for American health professions to rethink their approach to a pandemic that has persisted nearly two full years. "There are obviously remedies that we're not looking at," attorney Kristin Erickson told Just the News. "And we need to think outside of the current standard of care that hospitals are giving. And...

All private sector employers will be subject to vaccine mandate in the state, and children over the age of five will need proof of vaccine to dine indoors. Children who want to take part in school activities like band, sports teams, orchestra or others will also have to receive at least one shot of a Covid vaccine by December 14 . Currently, all people aged 12 or older have to show proof of vaccination to dine indoors or attend indoor events in the city. The city was averaging nearly 1,600 new Covid cases every day when data was last updated...

As we approach the dawn of Covid Year Three, things that might once have attracted a wee bit of attention from the media now pass all but unnoticed. For example, last week the President of the European Union, Ursula von der Leyen, called for the compulsory vaccination of half-a-billion people and, in order to facilitate it, the dumping of the Nuremberg Code on medical experimentation - whose first clause would appear to be dispositive:The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential."President" von der Leyen is one of those figures most people have never heard of but who decides...

Inflation is like toothpaste – once you got it out, you can’t get it back in again.” Forget everything you think you know about inflation. It is not solely a consequence of “monetary phenomena”, but largely about the behaviour of crowds. That’s why it’s so dangerous to growth and markets. After a torrid week for markets as Big Tech got spanked, and bonds rallied on a risk-off move following the mixed employment data, there is a distinct feeling of uncertainty and more pain to come in the December markets. Bond yields falling as inflation fears multiply is a very mixed...

Last week, President Biden announced several steps his administration will be taking to battle Covid-19 during the winter, which included updating international travel rules.On Monday, “the United States will tighten pre-departure testing protocols by requiring all inbound international travelers to test within one day of departure globally, regardless of nationality or vaccination status,” the White House said. “This tighter testing timeline provides an added degree of public health protection as scientists continue to assess the Omicron variant.”On the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website it explains what, exactly, will be required of passengers regarding testing before a flight. That’s...

Democrats including President Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and most of the mainstream media have trotted out the claim that President Trump's tax cuts only benefited wealthy Americans. This dubious line has been used in attempts to justify the tax increases that will be necessary to fund President Biden and congressional Democrats' woke and expensive Build Back Better Act that now faces an uphill battle in the United States Senate. The only problem with their claim about Trump's tax cuts, not a rare one for Democrats seeking to force their agenda on the American people, is that it's just not...

A new pre-print study examining the deaths of children aged 5-11 from COVID in Germany has found that there have been no deaths of healthy children from the disease. Examining a range of data sources, the study found that the case fatality rate (the likelihood of dying if infected) for children under 18 was 0.09 per 10,000 or roughly one in 100,000. For children aged between 5-11, the numbers are even lower, with only 89 children in total needing intensive care treatment and only 4 deaths out of a total population of 5,267,742 children aged 5-11. None of these 4...

As The Federal Reserve tries to drain-off the extraordinary growth in its balance sheet since COVID without raising its target rate (good luck with that!), it is time to appraise where we are sitting. First, liquidity. Let’s look at the ongoing saga of Chinese conglomerate Evergrande (mainly known as a large real estate developer). Their 8.25% bond has plunged to $23.481 on speculation of a catastrophic default on their bond payments. Then we have Invesco’s Golden Dragon China ETF (measuring a diversified market cap of US-listed companies headquartered or incorporated in China & derive a majority of their revenues from...

For the past two years, the mainstream media has given tons of coverage to the Black Lives Matter movement — and rightly so. More than 80 percent of black Americans, including me, support the movement, especially in the wake of George Floyd’s death in police custody. But the media is missing many nuances among African-Americans. For one, we don’t all vote alike. Yes, almost 90 percent of black voters went to bat for the Biden-Harris administration last year. But that leaves 10 percent of black voters who didn’t. Meanwhile, 25 percent of black Democrats actually consider themselves “conservative” and 43...

Many years ago I had the privilege of delivering a lecture on the life and ministry of John Calvin in the unlikely context of the Interfaith Seminar of the Catholic Archdiocese of Trento in northern Italy. A lone Reformed voice speaking to a room filled with priests and monks at the historic epicenter of the Catholic Reformation, I may not have been the exact modern equivalent of Leonidas at Thermopylae but I enjoyed being heavily outnumbered nonetheless. At the end of my lecture, every single question I was asked related to the burning of Michael Servetus by the Genevan authorities...

Cruise News Norwegian Cruise Line Ship Changes COVID-19 Testing, Masking Requirements After Omicron Variant Discovered Norwegian Cruise Line Ship Changes COVID-19 Testing, Masking Requirements After Omicron Variant Discovered December 06, 2021 All passengers and crew returning to New Orleans on December 5 after a one-week Western Caribbean sailing on the 3,963-passenger Norwegian Breakaway were tested for Covid-19 before they were allowed to leave the ship. The move, which is new for cruise lines coming and leaving from a U.S. homeport, followed the discovery of what the cruise line is calling "a handful of COVID-19 asymptomatic cases among guests and crew."...

Bob Dole was a happy undergrad at the University of Kansas in 1942. “He didn’t want to go to war,” Richard Ben Cramer writes in chapter 5 of What It Takes: The Way to the White House, his doorstop “masterpiece” (as Jonathan Martin called it when Cramer died in 2013). Dole was happily “fooling around” on campus and at his fraternity, pursuing his studies, going out for football, baseball, and track. When he heard the footsteps of the draft board after him, however, he enlisted in the Army. By the spring of 1944 he had risen to the rank of...

Dr. Anthony Fauci says that officials “feel bad” about slapping a travel ban on seven African countries, now that the omicron variant has been confirmed in several other countries.Fauci explained that, at the time the travel ban was imposed, not much was known about the omicron variant and the administration felt it was better to be safe than sorry.Some nations affected by the travel ban were upset, with United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres calling it “travel apartheid.”But Fauci now says that with “more information,” the travel ban will be lifted in a “reasonable period of time.”Fox News:“That ban was done...

Usually at this time of year, San Francisco’s luxury stores are decked with holiday garlands. Instead, they’re boarded up after widespread “flash mob” looting turned Union Square — the city’s most fashionable shopping district — into an area resembling a blighted neighborhood in Detroit. “It’s a ghost town,” said Michelle Tandler, a San Francisco native and high-tech entrepreneur, whose photos of the stores barricaded in plywood went viral on social media this week. “Every store has a security guard. People are going to lose their jobs. And these things have a ripple effect.” Two weeks ago, San Francisco was the...

Although released a week or two ago, I've found myself several times returning to the federal employee vaccine compliance numbers released by the White House Briefing Room. Looking at those numbers, some things just aren't adding up as they should. When consideration is made the fact that the administration has paused and pushed back any "enforcement" actions against employees from the end of November until sometime in January, the numbers start to look a lot more suspicious...and so do the motives behind the numbers that were released.The White House compliance numbers are very high and seem to involve only two...

As Vladimir Putin mobilizes forces on the Ukraine border and Chinese submarines patrol the Taiwan Strait, President Joe Biden’s State Department has made its priorities clear: The slave-made solar panels must flow. Republican senator Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Democratic senator Jeff Merkley (Ore.) introduced a bill in January prohibiting the importation of goods made with forced labor from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where a genocide perpetrated by the Chinese government is afoot. It passed the Senate in a voice vote in July. It was more controversial at Foggy Bottom, where we now know that Deputy Secretary of State Wendy...

A doctor in the UK who was banned from using social media by the General Medical Council for claiming “masks do nothing” has won his case in the High Court. Dr. Samuel White was slapped with and 18 month ban by the GMC after he posted a video to Instagram and Twitter in June questioning the efficacy of face coverings. In the video, White said why he could no longer tolerate working in his previous roles because of the “lies” around the NHS and the government’s response to the pandemic, which were “so vast” he could no longer “stomach” them....

A one per cent to five per cent citywide tax on gross receipts was due to be imposed in January after it was approved by voters three years ago. But the recent spate of smash-and-grab robberies has led to city supervisors delaying the tax until December 31, 2022, in a bid to help retailers who are struggling to compete with illegal drug dealers.