Free Republic

One week after the US media and its "scientists" rolled out a full-blown panic parade over the Omicron variant, setting the stage for a new round of lockdowns as a result of a strain which nobody knew much about, yet which was conveniently viewed as a greenlight for trillions more in stimmies, the narrative is gradually turning.First a note out of South African's Medical Research Council discussing the recent development in the Tshwane District, which is the global epicenter of the Omicron Outbreak, and the Gauteng Province Fourth Wave, with the weekly number of cases rising exponentially over several weeks.........

Are the antibodies we produce to fight COVID-19 infection causing severe disease?A new paper—so new in fact that it hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed—from scientists in Hangzhou, China, appears to indicate just that.The researchers’ data suggests that at least two antibodies that target the spike protein that enables the COVID-19 virus to enter human cells are “pathogenic”—meaning these antibodies create illness all by themselves.It’s hard to think of antibodies—one of the body’s best infection fighters—as “pathogenic,” but that’s exactly what happens in autoimmune disease. Antibodies that the body develops in response to foreign invaders attach to body tissues instead, sometimes causing...

SummaryWhat is already known about this topic? Early data from China suggest that a majority of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) deaths have occurred among adults aged ≥60 years and among persons with serious underlying health conditions. What is added by this report? This first preliminary description of outcomes among patients with COVID-19 in the United States indicates that fatality was highest in persons aged ≥85, ranging from 10% to 27%, followed by 3% to 11% among persons aged 65–84 years, 1% to 3% among persons aged 55-64 years, <1% among persons aged 20–54 years, and no fatalities among persons aged...

The case of a German adult who acquired novel coronavirus infection locally in Munich from a Chinese who hails from Shanghai is the second reported case of a person human-to-human transmission the incubation period...It also reports the first known case of fourth-generation transmission (assuming that the infection was transmitted to the Chinese lady by a close contact) of the novel virus outside China...Even more sobering is the fact that persons recovering from illness can have huge viral load. This raises “concern about prolonged shedding of the virus even after recovery,” writes Dr. Camilla Rothe, who is the first and corresponding...

As the economy boomed, few people worried much about the debt that local and state governments were amassing to pay for increasingly generous pension and health-care benefits for public employees. Now that budgets are tight thanks to a down economy, the issue is big news — made even bigger by the outrageous pay and benefit plans received by officials of the small, working class city of Bell, Calif., where the now-ex-city manager stands to receive a pension valued at $30 million. That news story, uncovered by the Los Angeles Times, put some faces on overall public-employee-pension scandal. Even bigger news...

Past Financial Crises Suggest Pain Far From Over Economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have been publishing various findings from a large-scale data set they have constructed of past financial crises. They have looked back as far as 800 years, but not surprisingly, most of their output has consisted of analyses of modern crises (you can find some earlier discussions here and here). /snip Their work has shown that financial crises are more severe and protracted than "normal" recessions. In some of their previous presentations, they had parsed out financial crises in advanced economies versus those in developing countries, and...