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Smoking

Best of the Web: ANOTHER study finds smokers are less likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19

smoker
© Getty Images
Smoking may reduce the likelihood of being hospitalised with coronavirus, claims a study.

Here is the abstract of the study - Smoking, vaping and hospitalization for COVID-19 - by researchers at the University of West Attica in Greece and New York University.

Red Flag

Best of the Web: As a GP, I fear our Covid-19 lockdown will result in significantly more deaths than we are trying to prevent

Medical staff
© REUTERS/Hannah McKay
We are paying too high a price to try to combat Covid-19. Not just in terms of the £350 billion ($430 billion) bill, but also in the health costs our actions are causing.

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought a very thorny issue to the forefront. How much money can we, as a society, spend on keeping people healthy or alive? No one has ever fully got to grips with this question, but it has never been more important than now.

America has set aside $2 trillion to deal with the crisis, and Britain £350 billion - which is almost three times the current yearly budget for the entire NHS. Is this a price worth paying?

Comment: The good doctor is applying logic - from his perspective as a medical professional - to the situation and arriving at the core issue: there is no way in hell this global lockdown has been instituted to 'save lives'!

Clearly, something else is going on.


Attention

Best of the Web: Setting up to fail: Gates funded clinical trial on hydroxychloroquine uses Vitamin C as placebo

hydroxychloroquine
As many as 4,000 seriously ill coronavirus patients in New York are being treated with the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, state health officials say.

President Trump has touted hydroxychloroquine as a potential life-saver, although there is no widespread scientific evidence to date showing it helps battle COVID-19.

But Gov. Andrew Cuomo last month said health care providers in the state would be using the drug in combination with the antibiotic Zithromax, or azithromycin, for some last-ditch cases, based on potentially promising research.

Comment: What a transparent scam! Why they would actually tell journalists they're using vitamin C as a placebo is either stupidity or hubris (or both).

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Attention

Best of the Web: Beware the creeps who enjoy a new pandemic power

Pence/Fauci
© Official White House photoUS VP Mike Pence • Dr. Anthony Fauci
The problem with people referring to this bizarre pandemic life limbo as "the new normal" is that there are people out there, both in and out of positions of responsibility, who are digging this opportunity to boss us around. And it is troubling to see that there are a number of prominent folks who are in no hurry to curtail their ability to boss us around. We need to note carefully who these people are and ensure that they never get a chance to control anything again.

You are starting to see more of that as this drags out. You have got Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom and others thinking this is a great time to get our socialism on. You also have functionaries - all of whom are still getting paychecks - who are way too eager to start issuing orders instead of relying on citizens to behave rationally. We don't need to be ordered around, but they can't resist the ordering. The moron mayor of LA is offering rewards to freedom narcs, and government hacks making stores refuse to sell "non-essential" items - what the hell they are thinking telling us what is and is not "essential" anyway? They are thinking, "Hey, this power stuff is fun!" Which is why you should never give power to someone who enjoys it.

Comment: Power has made its choices. It's time for the people to make theirs.


Stock Down

Best of the Web: Researchers warn the COVID-19 lockdown will take its own toll on health

other costs of covid
© Illustration/REUTERS/Maryanne Murray
It's the most dramatic government intervention into our lives since World War II. To fight the coronavirus outbreak, governments across the globe have closed schools, travel and businesses big and small. Many observers have fretted about the economic costs of throwing millions of people out of work and millions of students out of school.

Now, three weeks after the United States and other countries took sweeping suppression steps that could last months or more, some public health specialists are exploring a different consequence of the mass shutdown: the thousands of deaths likely to arise unrelated to the disease itself.

The longer the suppression lasts, history shows, the worse such outcomes will be. A surge of unemployment in 1982 cut the life spans of Americans by a collective two to three million years, researchers found. During the last recession, from 2007-2009, the bleak job market helped spike suicide rates in the United States and Europe, claiming the lives of 10,000 more people than prior to the downturn. This time, such effects could be even deeper in the weeks, months and years ahead if, as many business and political leaders are warning, the economy crashes and unemployment skyrockets to historic levels.

Comment: The above article is coming from the perspective that "the coronavirus is bad, but..." But what if the coronavirus isn't any worse in it's death toll than the seasonal flu? Or even not as bad? Then how can all the above consequences be justified?

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Cardboard Box

Best of the Web: Let them eat vaccines: Foodbanks overwhelmed as America's poorest starve during lockdown

unemployment GDP
America is crashing into a depression. In just two weeks, 10 million people have claimed unemployment benefits. This has put unprecedented stress on food bank networks across the country, a new investigation via The Guardian shows.

The US labor market is in free fall - the increasing lockdowns across major US metropolitan areas have forced millions of people out of work and into a hunger crisis.

The Guardian shows demand for food aid in some regions of the country has surged eightfold in recent weeks as RealInvestmentAdvice.com's Lance Roberts warns the unemployment rates in the US could spike to levels not seen since the "Great Depression," or about 15-20% in the second quarter.

The National Guard has been deployed for a variety of reasons: One is to support local area hospital systems, another is to maintain social order, and now soldiers in Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Phoenix have supported food banks to ensure shortages do not materialize, mostly because that would trigger social unrest among the working poor.

Comment: Well ZeroHedge, maybe you should have thought about some of these things before you jumped on the CoronaHoax in January?

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Bullseye

Best of the Web: Coronavirus lockdown: We are so afraid of death, no one even asks whether this 'cure' is actually worse

social distancing
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." The words are Franklin D Roosevelt's. His challenge was recession, not disease, but his words have a wider resonance.

Fear is dangerous. It is the enemy of reason. It suppresses balance and judgment. And it is infectious. Roosevelt thought government was doing too little. But today fear is more likely to push governments into doing too much, as democratic politicians run for cover in the face of public panic. Is the coronavirus the latest and most damaging example?

Epidemics are not new. Bubonic plague, smallpox, cholera, typhoid, meningitis, Spanish flu all took a heavy toll in their time. An earlier generation would not have understood the current hysteria over Covid-19, whose symptoms are milder and whose case mortality is lower than any of these.

Bizarro Earth

Best of the Web: Big one coming for Yellowstone? Utah rocked by more than 700 earthquakes in weeks since 5.7 magnitude tremor

utah earthquake
© George Frey/Getty ImagesBricks and debris lay at the base of a building damaged by an earthquake on March 18 in Magna, Utah
The state of Utah has been rocked by 728 earthquakes in the weeks since a 5.7-magnitude tremor rattled residents of Salt Lake City and beyond last month.

That figure includes three quakes with a magnitude of at least four and another 30 with a magnitude of at least three, according to the University of Utah Seismograph Stations. Experts additionally determined there were no foreshocks ahead of the initial earthquake, which shook swaths of Northern Utah awake on March 18 around 7 a.m.

The biggest of the aftershocks, a 4.7-magnitude tremor, occurred an hour later and a second quake of the same size rocked region again around 1 p.m.

Gold Seal

Best of the Web: Coronavirus 'Plandemic' - This IS the global reset

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way . . ." - Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Global Reset
© Corbett Report
Every now and then, the world resets.

Sometimes it's a cataclysm or natural disaster that pushes the reset button. Sometimes it's a political revolution. Sometimes it's a war. Sometimes it's a technological innovation.

Dickens' immortal "best of times / worst of times" formulation comes from his novel about one such reset: the French Revolution. Dickens' words capture the dual natures of these fracture points in history. Like the old (and spurious) trope about the Chinese word for "crisis," a reset presents both a danger and an opportunity.

It is now apparent to all that we have arrived at another world reset. This time we are being asked to believe that it is a viral pandemic that has pushed the reset button. Others would contest that it is in fact the panic over the (presumed) pandemic that is responsible for this crisis. Yet others insist that the p(l)andemic is nothing more than a distraction from the global financial reset which was going to happen regardless.

Whatever the case, the fact remains that the reset button has been pushed. No one knows for certain what lies on the other side of this chasm, but — as we've been endlessly told in recent weeks — life will never be the same.

So, following Dickens, let's explore the dual nature of this global reset and outline the dangers and the opportunities that this crisis presents.

Syringe

Best of the Web: WHO is inducing panic, is utterly corrupt, and is being paid off by Gates Foundation & Big Pharma to push vaccines

Tedros Adhanom
The most influential organization in the world with nominal responsibility for global health and epidemic issues is the United Nations' World Health Organization, WHO, based in Geneva. What few know is the actual mechanisms of its political control, the shocking conflicts of interest, corruption and lack of transparency that permeate the agency that is supposed to be the impartial guide for getting through the current COVID-19 pandemic. The following is only part of what has come to public light.

Pandemic declaration?

On January 30 Tedros Adhanom, Director-General of the UN World Health Organization declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern or PHIEC. This came two days after Tedros met with China President Xi Jinping in Beijing to discuss the dramatic rise in severe cases of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan and surrounding areas that had reached dramatic proportions. Announcing his emergency PHIEC declaration, Tedros praised the Chinese quarantine measures, measures highly controversial in public health and never before in modern times attempted with entire cities, let alone countries. At the same time Tedros, curiously, criticized other countries who were moving to block flights to China to contain the strange new disease, leading to charges he was unduly defending China.

Comment: The confluence of monied interests, societal engineering goals, egregious corruption and sheer stupidity is off the proverbial charts as we continue to follow where the Covid-19 story leads us. We can do no better than to get the word out to those with 'ears to hear' of this immense crime being foisted on half the world.

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