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Why did Frontiers publish a flawed study massively exaggerating Covid risk to children?

bogus study
<Note: Before publishing this article we sent it to the Editors of Frontiers in Pediatrics asking if they wished to correct any inaccuracies or provide any updates, giving them several days to respond. They did not acknowledge or respond.>

In September 2021 Frontiers in Pediatrics published this article by members of the Indonesian Pediatrician Association (IDAI) claiming that the case fatality rate (CFR) for children with 'suspected' Covid in Indonesia was 1.4% (i.e. 1 in 71) with a CFR of 0.46% (1 in 217) for those with 'confirmed' Covid. No such high Covid fatality rates for children have been observed elsewhere in the world. In fact, worldwide the infection fatality rate was estimated (at the time the IDAI paper was published) to be 1 in 37,000 for those aged under 20.

The IDAI authors also made the startingly claim that, of the 175 'confirmed Covid deaths' of children in their study, 62 had no existing comorbidities. But again, elsewhere in the world cases of covid death in children without serious comorbidities are almost unheard of. For example, in the UK in the whole of 2020, a deep analysis of ALL child deaths with Covid (there were 28 in total) revealed only 8 were confirmed as likely caused by Covid and that all 8 had a comorbidity recorded, seven of whom had a life-limiting condition.

Comment: The people behind this study, and those promoting it, should be held criminally liable.

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Microscope 2

It's getting harder for scientists to collaborate across borders

international space station
© NASA/FlickrShortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent Western-imposed sanctions, Russia threatened to pull out of the International Space Station.
The United Nations and many researchers have emphasized the critical role international collaborative science plays in solving global challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss and pandemics. The rise of non-Western countries as science powers is helping to drive this type of global cooperative research. For example, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa formed a tuberculosis research network in 2017 and are making significant advancements on basic and applied research into the disease.

However, in the past few years, growing tensions among superpowers, increasing nationalism, the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine have contributed to nations' behaving in more distrustful and insular ways overall. One result is that it is becoming increasingly difficult for researchers to collaborate with scholars in other nations.

The near-global cessation of collaboration with Russian scholars following the invasion of Ukraine - in everything from humanities research to climate science in the Arctic - is one example of science being a victim of - and used as a tool for - international politics. Scientific collaboration between China and the U.S. is also breaking down in fields like microelectronics and quantum computing because of national security concerns on both sides.

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Syringe

Hundreds of thousands of US troops may face dismissal

army troops
More than 260,000 American servicemembers could be discharged due to non-compliance with vaccine mandates.

The Biden administration's strict Covid-19 vaccination mandates place more than 13% of the US' fighting forces at risk of discharge, according to Department of Defense data updated on Wednesday.

The Pentagon's website shows 268,858 "partially vaccinated" individuals across the Army, Marines, Navy, and Air Force, plus another 50,710 civilian employees. However, the figures don't include servicemembers who have had no shots at all, meaning the real number imperiled by the administration's vaccine mandates could be significantly higher.

Comment: Meanwhile the Air Force has been barred from kicking out those seeking religious exemption. From RT:
A federal judge in Ohio on Thursday certified a national class action lawsuit against the US Air Force and issued a restraining order forbidding the military branch from enforcing a Covid-19 vaccine mandate on airmen seeking religious exemption.

Judge Matthew McFarland ordered the entire Air Force to cease the mandatory vaccination of all active-duty and reserve members objecting on religious grounds. The order is temporary and expires in 14 days, during which time President Joe Biden's Secretary of the Air Force, Frank Kendall III, is required to make his case for the mandate to stand.

The case was brought by a few dozen airmen stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, but McFarland's ruling impacts more than 9,000 service members nationally and internationally who have sought religious exemptions from the jab. According to court documents, the Air Force had only approved 86 of these requests as of early June.
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Megaphone

Best of the Web: Farmer protests spread across the globe

farm protest netherlands
© VINCENT JANNINK/ANP/AFP via Getty ImagesFarm vehicles stopping traffic near the border of the Netherlands and Germany
A WAVE of agricultural protest has swept Europe and the wider world, as a host of issues conspire to pit farmers against national politics.

Farmer-led protests in Germany, Italy, Spain and Poland have sprung up in the wake of action by Dutch farmers, who were first to take to the streets to complain about the impact of new emissions rules.


Comment: More accurately, protests by farmers have been occurring across Europe with an increasing frequency for a number of years now, although, indeed, this time the situation is critical.


German farmers blockaded roads on the border with the Netherlands and gathered in large numbers to protest near the city of Heerenburg. Italian farmers also held tractor protests in rural areas and threatened to take the protests to the streets of Rome.

Polish farmers took over the streets of Warsaw complaining against cheap imports, and the high interest rates which have destabilised their businesses and threatened their livelihoods. The heat of rising inflation has also reached Spain, where farmers blocked highways in the southern region of Andalusia to protest against high fuel prices and the rising costs of essential products.

Comment: Apparently Australia can now be added to the growing list; see below for recent footage of some of the protests:





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Bad Guys

Best of the Web: A Conspiracy of Systems, A System of Conspiracies

kraken
© Sebastian LudkeKraken Uprising
One of the perennial debates in dissident circles is the old question of whether the rampant weirdness and fuckery of clown world is an emergent consequence of a severely maladaptive society, or a deliberate imposition by malign influences operating from the shadows on high. There are good arguments either way, which is one of the reasons this question is as seemingly intractable as the existence of God or the nature of life after death.

The systemicists currently hold the upper hand within respectable society, which is one of the reasons that the more intellectual commentators seem to prefer this more fashionable position. Broadly speaking, the systemicist view is that no one is really in charge of anything. Instead, social conditions are emergent phenomena, arising due to the intersection of psychological forces, evolutionary drives, economic incentives, and technological capabilities, with the high-level phenomena of mass psychoses, currency crises, wars, the dumbing down of the educational system, and so on arising as the sum of billions of individual decisions. Systemicists emphasize the complexity of the human world, and view it as a priori implausible that any one group could steer the teeming masses of humanity with anything like a sure hand. Systemicists seem to come from professional and academic backgrounds, and have some degree of personal familiarity with the talentless inanity that prevails in our venal managerial incompetocracy, so they have a natural personal bias against any hypothesis that requires such people to be capable of orchestrating any coherent plot on any scale larger than office politics.

Briefcase

New York quarantine measures ruled unconstitutional and illegal

Hochul
© AP/Mary AltafferNew York Governor Kathy Hochul
New York State's COVID-19 measures that required people infected with or exposed to highly contagious communicable diseases to quarantine are a violation of state law, a judge ruled. The New York Isolation and Quarantine procedures, known as Rule 2.13, were enacted in February.

The stringent measures stated:
"Whenever appropriate to control the spread of a highly contagious communicable disease, the State Commissioner of Health may issue and/or may direct the local health authority to issue isolation and/or quarantine orders, consistent with due process of law, to all such persons as the State Commissioner of Health shall determine appropriate."
Isolations could include home confinement, or in residential or temporary housing, based on what the public health authority deemed "appropriate."

For more serious illnesses that require hospitalization, infected individuals were required to spend the quarantine period in a New York hospital. "Symptoms or conditions indicate that medical care in a general hospital is expected to be required, the isolation location shall be a general hospital," read the now scrapped requirements.

Attention

"The 6 justices ... Should never know peace again": Harvard instructor calls for people to "accost" justices in public

Protest/Caraballo
© Roberty Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images/Caraballo Campaign/KJNSupreme Court decision protest • Alejandra Caraballo
We recently discussed the Georgetown law professor who defended "more aggressive" protests targeting the Supreme Court justices, but Harvard clinical instructor Alejandra Caraballo wants to guarantee that "The 6 justices who overturned Roe should never know peace again." Accordingly, Caraballo is calling for people to "accost them every time they are in public." That harassment, according to Caraballo, is the "civic duty" of every American.

The tweet from Caraballo is the latest example of academics seeking to harass these justices because they hold opposing constitutional views. It is also an example of the addiction to rage that has developed in this country. There is a license that comes with rage that is evident in Caraballo's writings: "Since women don't have their rights, these justices should never have a peaceful moment in public again." The tweets even attach photos to assist others in this ignoble enterprise.


Comment: Passive America is rudely awakening.


Eye 2

Telford and the moral depravity of political correctness

Sex abuse in Telford
The grooming-gang scandal shows us that there is nothing noble about silencing uncomfortable truths.

One-thousand girls. That's the stark figure at the centre of the inquiry into grooming gangs in Telford, which released its landmark report this week. It is believed that more than 1,000 girls have been abused and raped by grooming gangs in the West Midlands town since 1980. The inquiry was sparked by a Sunday Mirror investigation in 2018. Back then, the authorities dismissed the 1,000 figure as 'sensationalised' and suggested the newspaper had 'made it up on the back of a fag packet'. This week, inquiry chair Tom Crowther QC described the Sunday Mirror's estimate as a 'measured, reasonable and non-sensational assessment'.

Then there are the stories behind those numbers. It is hard to think of anything more depraved, more stomach turning, more evil, than what went on in Telford. Girls as young as 12 - predominantly white and working class, many of them in care - were groomed, drugged, raped, gang raped, passed around like pieces of meat by groups of predominantly British Pakistani men. Some of these girls never reached adulthood. In 2000, 16-year-old Lucy Lowe was burned to death in a house fire alongside her mother and sister. It was started by Azhar Ali Mehmood, the 26-year-old who impregnated her when she was 14. So little was done to tackle this cancer in the community that the abuse, in some cases, became 'generational', daughters suffering the same fate as their mothers.

Comment:


MIB

The hidden agenda behind the New York Times' desperate puff piece on Jan 6 provacateur Ray Epps

ray epps
© Revolver NewsAlan Feur (L) Ray Epps (R)
The New York Times just released a puff piece on Ray Epps that is hugely important.

Ray Epps, the only person caught on camera repeatedly directing people into the Capitol, is the only January 6 rioter for whom the New York Times has written a highly sympathetic puff piece:
Ray Epps Jan 6 nyt puff piece
© New York Times
To get acquainted with Epps, watch the following video compilation:


Again, this is the one Jan. 6 rioter the New York Times has managed to write a puff piece for.

Comment: More excellent reporting from Revolver:


Bad Guys

RT visits neo-Nazi torture dungeon in Ukraine

Tornado's insignia spray-painted on the wall.
Tornado's insignia spray-painted on the wall.
RT's Murad Gazdiev has visited the former base of the notorious but now disbanded Ukrainian neo-Nazi Tornado battalion. It is located in the village of Privolye near the Lugansk People's Republic city of Lisichansk, which was recently liberated by Russian and allied forces.

The Tornado battalion was formed in 2014 from the remnants of another volunteer unit called Shakhtersk. Despite the unit's designation as a volunteer police battalion, it was led by a career criminal named Ruslan Onishchenko and the core of the group also consisted of ex-cons.

Tornado was disbanded in 2015 after it faced an array of allegations of kidnapping, rape, torture and unlawful killings. The 'policemen' committed many of their grisly deeds at their headquarters, which had been set up in a local school. While the battalion is long gone, the memory of its actions lives on among the locals.

Comment: Back in 2015 Reuters reported on the 'maverick battalions' in Ukraine, of Tornado they said:
Andriy Filonenko, a founder of the Tornado battalion, was equally defiant about accusations against his fighters. Eight members of the battalion have been accused of crimes including rape, murder and smuggling. Ukrainian officials say one video shows a re-enactment of how members of Tornado forced two captives to rape another man; they also say some 40 members of the battalion have criminal records.

Filonenko told Reuters the charges were ridiculous. "I don't understand all this talk about criminal records," he said. "All I know is that people spilt their blood for Ukraine, for the motherland."
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