Government
America’s Freight Railroads Are Incredibly Chaotic Right Now
America’s Freight Railroads Are Incredibly Chaotic Right Now
By Rachel Premack of FreightWaves
Jason Doering has seen a lot during his 18…
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By Rachel Premack of FreightWaves
Jason Doering has seen a lot during his 18 years at Union Pacific Railroad. But what’s happening with the current hiring class at UP is unprecedented. “They’re dropping like flies,” Doering said. “I mean, I’ve never seen it.”
A railroad engineer or conductor typically earns a six-figure salary, retires with a pension and enjoys union benefits. They don’t need a college degree; the monthslong training is provided on the job. It’s the kind of career that ought to be popular — but Doering said trainees and longtimers alike are getting burned out. It used to be a job with eight- or nine-hour shifts and plenty of time at home. Now, Doering says railroading demands too much time away from one’s family and workdays that last up to 19 hours, combining 12-hour shifts with hours of waiting around for transportation or relief crews.
Union Pacific is struggling to find railroad crews after years of slashing headcounts. The $22 billion railroader had 30,100 employees during the first three months of 2022, according to its latest earnings report. Five years prior, the company had nearly 12,000 more workers. (A representative from Union Pacific declined to provide a comment for this article, as the company is reporting its second-quarter earnings later this month. The rep did share a company blog on the importance of supply chain fluidity and cooperation.)
This employment issue isn’t unique to Union Pacific. America’s railways are in an unusually chaotic state as Class I lines struggle to find employees. That’s led to congestion that analysts say is even worse than 2021, which saw some of the biggest rail traffic in history. Now, a strike of 115,000 rail workers could happen as soon as next week.
“We’re spending more time at home-away terminals than we are at home,” Doering said. Doering is also the Nevada legislative director for SMART Transportation Division, a labor union of train, airline and other transportation workers. “So the attitudes out here, I think, are warranted. Morale is at an all-time low.”
Longtime rail analyst Tony Hatch said there’s something unusual going on with rail headcounts right now. Typically, crews and carloads move in lockstep, with railroaders able to hire up or down in times of increased or decreased traffic. Now, those companies haven’t been able to keep up. Carloads have steadily increased since mid-2020, but employment hasn’t matched that.
“There was a big, ahistorical break in the tandem relationship between rail crews and volume,” Hatch said.
Outside being stuck behind a miles-long behemoth, one does not think often about the importance of the humble train. It isn’t as ubiquitous as the truck, as swift as the cargo plane or as cosmopolitan as the container ship. It may seem even a bit antiquated. Indeed, the cargoes on railcars aren’t usually goods exposed to the consumer — think gravel, grain, coal and chemicals. These are crucial components for our larger economy. Gravel becomes the foundations of our homes and roadways, grain our food (and our food’s food), coal our electricity and chemicals the basis of many everyday products.
So, while you may not have been keeping up to date with rail congestion, industrial bigwigs and lawmakers alike are furious. The coal industry is slamming rail for the “meltdown” in service capacity and grain shippers said they had to spend $100 million more in shipping costs to get their product moved amid poor rail service. The Port of Los Angeles is taking to the press to demand rail move those gosh darn containers away, saying that railroaders could cause a “nationwide logjam” with the unmoved containers sitting around. Members of the federal government’s Surface Transportation Board recently demanded answers from railroad executives in a May two-day hearing, but tensions seemed to have only worsened since then.
Even more exhausted are the rail workers themselves. Rail unions have been negotiating with their employers since January 2020, with a “dead end” in negotiations reported two years later. Now, President Joe Biden is being charged with appointing a “Presidential Emergency Board” to nail down a new contract. If he doesn’t do so by Monday, railroad crews could legally have their first nationwide strike since 1992. Such a strike, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, would be “disastrous.”
“They’ve cut labor below the bone, really,” STB Chairman Marty Oberman told the House Transportation Committee in May. “In order to make up for the shortage of labor, they are overworking and abusing the workforces they have.”
Meanwhile, the Association of American Railroads said in a May statement that the rail companies it represents were committed to hiring more and to addressing rail service issues.
“The rail industry understands its critical role in serving the U.S. economy and is confident in its abilities to work alongside customers to remedy service issues moving forward,” AAR President and CEO Ian Jefferies said in the statement.
It’s a chaotic situation, and the roots predate COVID. Here’s what happened:
Two sneaky tricks railroads love — and shippers hate!
Let me tell you the hottest rail trend of the 2010s: precision-scheduled railroading. As The Wall Street Journal’s Paul Ziobro explained in a 2019 story, PSR means that railroads have set times for when they pick up cargo from their customers, not unlike a commercial airline. Before, railroads would wait for the cargo.
There are endless implications that come from this system, some of which my colleague Mike Baudendistel delved into in this 2020 article. PSR allowed railroads to reduce capital budgets, slash headcount and consolidate with glee. But its biggest boon to the railroaders was how much it boosted their cred on Wall Street, creating billions in shareholder value.
“The railroad stocks have greatly outperformed the broader market in the past 15 years, which took place despite the major deterioration of coal volume, the railroads’ historical business,” Baudendistel wrote.
There are serious service issues with PSR, though. When the tactic was first implemented at CSX Transportation, dwell time at some terminals increased by as much as 26 hours, according to another 2019 WSJ piece by Ziobro. Trips that would take a few days stretched out to more than two weeks — a struggle for customers that relied on just-in-time supply chains.
We could go on all day about PSR, but I’m bringing it up today because the tactic allowed railroads to seriously slash headcounts.
The legacies of PSR have contributed to low employee numbers at the railroads today, said Todd Tranausky, vice president of rail and intermodal at forecasting firm FTR Transportation Intelligence.
Doering of Union Pacific noted another trend: super-long freight trains. This is a problem so grave that the federal government literally released a report on it in 2019, saying the trains had gotten so massive that pedestrians were climbing over them and emergency responders were unable to respond to incidents. However, long freight trains allowed railroaders to extract more profit from their equipment and workers, helping reach economies of scale.
MODES readers will know my, uh, feelings on overly large pieces of freight transport. But when it comes to railroad conductors and engineers, they really don’t like the mega-trains. One reason is that they’re simply slow, stretching the workdays longer and longer and grinding on morale. “When you’re going up a 20-mile hill going 9 or 10 miles an hour in the middle of the night, it gets on you,” Doering said.
Another reason is that it takes longer to fix them should a car or locomotive fail. Walking along miles of railcars, checking for broken knuckles or stuck brakes at each, isn’t my personal idea of a good time.
“That’s part of the lifestyle issue [in hiring],” Tranausky said. “How many people, when it’s 105 degrees outside or there’s a foot of snow, actually want to trudge a mile, two miles to find an issue, fix that issue, then go back down the road? There’s that lifestyle issue that’s exacerbated for how long the train is.”
COVID wiped out even more railroad payrolls
Rail giants, as you could guess, struggled during the early months of COVID. In April 2020, for example, rail carloads saw their biggest year-over-year drop since 1989 and intermodal loadings saw a decline not experienced since 2009.
Railroads were shedding employees from April until July 2020, when my colleague Joanna Marsh reported that crew headcount had finally begun to increase again. Still, there were 25% fewer crews than in 2019 and 28% fewer than 2018, according to data from the Surface Transportation Board.
The financial status of these firms was in question, which motivated them to furlough workers. “At least one Class I railroad held meetings to decide whether they had enough cash through the summer, if they had enough cash to pay the bills and could they stay in business,” Hatch said. “When they began to lay people off, much to the consternation today of the regulators and whatnot, you need some understanding that they did not know how long this would last.”
Railroaders struggled to re-hire those crews they furloughed. Many of them found work in construction or manufacturing, industries that allow workers to spend evenings and weekends at home, Tranausky said.
Unlike its siblings in trucking or ocean shipping, the railroad industry didn’t have a bonkers 2021 — but it survived. 2021 saw healthier volumes from the year before. They were still below 2019’s levels.
Railroad service is suffering even as volumes tick down
Service complaints from shippers, bureaucrats and lawmakers have gotten louder and louder in 2022. And data from the rail carriers shows that service has declined — train speeds have largely decreased from 2021 while terminal dwell time is up. But there’s an interesting wrench in this: Rail volume has actually decreased during that same period, according to data from Susquehanna International Group.
These railroads cut too much staff through the adoption of PSR and the pandemic. Rail employment today is down more than 20% since the beginning of 2019, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — a “dramatic decline,” Tranausky said.
“It’s possible that the railroads furloughed too many and that they could have taken on more costs,” Hatch said. “I think one lesson out of this in the so-called just-in-case economy of the future will include railroads who will keep more safety stock [of labor].”
PSR helped railroaders boost margins and share prices, but its legacies could be contributing to today’s woes.
To address low staff, Berkshire Hathaway’s BNSF took one particularly unpopular approach. In February, BNSF began to penalize employees who took time off for fatigue, family emergencies or illness. Union officials said 700 rail crew left as a result of the policy. The $23.3 billion railroader nixed the policy in June.
Some issues are completely out of the railroads’ control. Most kinds of employers across the country are still struggling to find workers. Even finding shuttle drivers to take railroad crews to their terminal has been a struggle, from Doering’s observations. Recently, Union Pacific has put him in a taxi to go from Las Vegas to inland California. “We’re watching the little ticker up there in the cab go up to $400 or $500 for a trip,” Doering said.
Even in the best of times, it’s hard to find someone to sign up to be a railroad crew member. They have a similar lifestyle to, say, airline pilots, who must be away from their families for days at a time, living in hotels and manning massive, potentially dangerous pieces of equipment. Railroad crews are on call even during their home time.
They require months of training and after that need years or decades on the job to become truly masters of the rail. “There’s a learning curve,” Tranausky said. “[New crews are] not as efficient, not as productive as those higher-seniority crews.”
While Tranausky and Hatch said labor is the main driver of today’s congestion, one factor is totally outside the control of railroads. Unlike 2021, many warehouses are packed with inventory. Some insiders told FreightWaves that shippers are essentially using railcars as storage rather than moving the cargo into their own warehouse. That’s causing a shortage of chassis and increasing congestion — particularly in rail yards like Chicago.
“I think it’s easy to point fingers at a railroad and say the railroad’s creating the issue,” said Ashley Rittman, CEO of Valor Victoria, a railroad technology company. “Oftentimes I think the railroad is in a position (where) they have to be reactive to what environmental things happen to them, for them. If chassis are short or if customers are sitting on containers, their equipment is really held hostage from turning if everybody’s not working in harmony.”
… but the situation could get dire very quickly
Rail workers are governed by a slew of complex labor laws that dictate when they can legally strike. Currently, crews and their employers are in a mandated 30-day “cooling-off” period. That ends Monday, at which point crews could legally strike. President Biden is expected to appoint a Presidential Emergency Board to head off this strike.
Labor negotiators for the railroads told the Financial Times on Thursday that they offered workers a major pay increase and “benefits among the best in the nation.” A union negotiator countered to the FT that these offers had been “insulting.”
The tensions couldn’t come at a worst time for the so-called “pro-union” president, who is also pledging to help navigate tensions at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. There, the union contract for some 22,000 workers just expired. Further adding to the chaos at America’s largest port complex is the recent Supreme Court decision to not hear a lawsuit concerning AB5, a bill that would dissolve the owner-operator model of trucking in the state of California. Hundreds of truck drivers there protested AB5 on Wednesday.
There hasn’t been a rail shutdown in the U.S. since 1992, when machinists at CSX Transportation went on strike. Their work stoppage actually shuttered all American rail operations, including passenger service, which operates on some freight rail. At the time, the White House estimated that the shutdown cost Americans $1 billion per day, or more than $2 billion in today’s dollars.
The 1992 strike, just two days long, was still incredibly disruptive. The Chamber of Commerce fears that a work stoppage this time around could be similarly crippling. “Any breakdown would be disastrous for U.S. consumers and the economy and potentially return us to the historic supply chain challenges during the depths of the pandemic,” wrote Suzanne P. Clark, CEO and president of the Chamber of Commerce, in a July 8 letter to the administration.
Meanwhile, Doering fears that even a robust contract couldn’t fix the low morale among his fellow railroad workers.
“Everybody goes to work and there’s nothing positive to talk about,” Doering said. “There are no positive things going on within the industry. You are forced to choose between your career and your life.”
International
Mistakes Were Made
Mistakes Were Made
Authored by C.J.Hopkins via The Consent Factory,
Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that…
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Authored by C.J.Hopkins via The Consent Factory,
Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that a bit during these past few years, but, if there’s one thing they’re exceptionally good at, it’s taking responsibility for their mistakes. Seriously, when it comes to acknowledging one’s mistakes, and not rationalizing, or minimizing, or attempting to deny them, and any discomfort they may have allegedly caused, no one does it quite like the Germans.
Take this Covid mess, for example. Just last week, the German authorities confessed that they made a few minor mistakes during their management of the “Covid pandemic.” According to Karl Lauterbach, the Minister of Health, “we were sometimes too strict with the children and probably started easing the restrictions a little too late.” Horst Seehofer, the former Interior Minister, admitted that he would no longer agree to some of the Covid restrictions today, for example, nationwide nighttime curfews. “One must be very careful with calls for compulsory vaccination,” he added. Helge Braun, Head of the Chancellery and Minister for Special Affairs under Merkel, agreed that there had been “misjudgments,” for example, “overestimating the effectiveness of the vaccines.”
This display of the German authorities’ unwavering commitment to transparency and honesty, and the principle of personal honor that guides the German authorities in all their affairs, and that is deeply ingrained in the German character, was published in a piece called “The Divisive Virus” in Der Spiegel, and immediately widely disseminated by the rest of the German state and corporate media in a totally organic manner which did not in any way resemble one enormous Goebbelsian keyboard instrument pumping out official propaganda in perfect synchronization, or anything creepy and fascistic like that.
Germany, after all, is “an extremely democratic state,” with freedom of speech and the press and all that, not some kind of totalitarian country where the masses are inundated with official propaganda and critics of the government are dragged into criminal court and prosecuted on trumped-up “hate crime” charges.
OK, sure, in a non-democratic totalitarian system, such public “admissions of mistakes” — and the synchronized dissemination thereof by the media — would just be a part of the process of whitewashing the authorities’ fascistic behavior during some particularly totalitarian phase of transforming society into whatever totalitarian dystopia they were trying to transform it into (for example, a three-year-long “state of emergency,” which they declared to keep the masses terrorized and cooperative while they stripped them of their democratic rights, i.e., the ones they hadn’t already stripped them of, and conditioned them to mindlessly follow orders, and robotically repeat nonsensical official slogans, and vent their impotent hatred and fear at the new “Untermenschen” or “counter-revolutionaries”), but that is obviously not the case here.
No, this is definitely not the German authorities staging a public “accountability” spectacle in order to memory-hole what happened during 2020-2023 and enshrine the official narrative in history. There’s going to be a formal “Inquiry Commission” — conducted by the same German authorities that managed the “crisis” — which will get to the bottom of all the regrettable but completely understandable “mistakes” that were made in the heat of the heroic battle against The Divisive Virus!
OK, calm down, all you “conspiracy theorists,” “Covid deniers,” and “anti-vaxxers.” This isn’t going to be like the Nuremberg Trials. No one is going to get taken out and hanged. It’s about identifying and acknowledging mistakes, and learning from them, so that the authorities can manage everything better during the next “pandemic,” or “climate emergency,” or “terrorist attack,” or “insurrection,” or whatever.
For example, the Inquiry Commission will want to look into how the government accidentally declared a Nationwide State of Pandemic Emergency and revised the Infection Protection Act, suspending the German constitution and granting the government the power to rule by decree, on account of a respiratory virus that clearly posed no threat to society at large, and then unleashed police goon squads on the thousands of people who gathered outside the Reichstag to protest the revocation of their constitutional rights.
Thousands gathered outside the Reichstag building in Berlin to protest the "New Normal" totalitarianism this morning, so the police declared the demonstration illegal and turned the water cannons on them ... are you satisfied yet, totalitarians? pic.twitter.com/j70CHsEWWM
— Consent Factory (@consent_factory) November 18, 2020
Once they do, I’m sure they’ll find that that “mistake” bears absolutely no resemblance to the Enabling Act of 1933, which suspended the German constitution and granted the government the power to rule by decree, after the Nazis declared a nationwide “state of emergency.”
Another thing the Commission will probably want to look into is how the German authorities accidentally banned any further demonstrations against their arbitrary decrees, and ordered the police to brutalize anyone participating in such “illegal demonstrations.”
Memories fade, and history is rewritten, so here's a 2.5 minute montage of goon squads in Germany (which, of course, bear no resemblance whatsoever to the SA, or the SS, or any other Nazi goons) enforcing compliance with official "New Normal" ideology during 2020-2022. https://t.co/GIrb4NCJcC pic.twitter.com/6BIOgLVLKx
— CJ Hopkins (@CJHopkins_Z23) March 10, 2024
And, while the Commission is inquiring into the possibly slightly inappropriate behavior of their law enforcement officials, they might want to also take a look at the behavior of their unofficial goon squads, like Antifa, which they accidentally encouraged to attack the “anti-vaxxers,” the “Covid deniers,” and anyone brandishing a copy of the German constitution.
Don't worry, Covidian Cultists ... German Antifa is mobilizing to unleash total war on "extremist neo-Nazi Corona Deniers" like the lady holding the copy of the German constitution in the lower right! pic.twitter.com/HkdXBxyaEJ
— Consent Factory (@consent_factory) December 12, 2020
Come to think of it, the Inquiry Commission might also want to look into how the German authorities, and the overwhelming majority of the state and corporate media, accidentally systematically fomented mass hatred of anyone who dared to question the government’s arbitrary and nonsensical decrees or who refused to submit to “vaccination,” and publicly demonized us as “Corona deniers,” “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” “far-right anti-Semites,” etc., to the point where mainstream German celebrities like Sarah Bosetti were literally describing us as the inessential “appendix” in the body of the nation, quoting an infamous Nazi almost verbatim.
And then there’s the whole “vaccination” business. The Commission will certainly want to inquire into that. They will probably want to start their inquiry with Karl Lauterbach, and determine exactly how he accidentally lied to the public, over and over, and over again …
And whipped people up into a mass hysteria over “KILLER VARIANTS” …
And “LONG COVID BRAIN ATTACKS” …
And how “THE UNVACCINATED ARE HOLDING THE WHOLE COUNTRY HOSTAGE, SO WE NEED TO FORCIBLY VACCINATE EVERYONE!”
And so on. I could go on with this all day, but it will be much easier to just refer you, and the Commission, to this documentary film by Aya Velázquez. Non-German readers may want to skip to the second half, unless they’re interested in the German “Corona Expert Council” …
Look, the point is, everybody makes “mistakes,” especially during a “state of emergency,” or a war, or some other type of global “crisis.” At least we can always count on the Germans to step up and take responsibility for theirs, and not claim that they didn’t know what was happening, or that they were “just following orders,” or that “the science changed.”
Plus, all this Covid stuff is ancient history, and, as Olaf, an editor at Der Spiegel, reminds us, it’s time to put the “The Divisive Pandemic” behind us …
… and click heels, and heil the New Normal Democracy!
Government
Harvard Medical School Professor Was Fired Over Not Getting COVID Vaccine
Harvard Medical School Professor Was Fired Over Not Getting COVID Vaccine
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A…
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Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A Harvard Medical School professor who refused to get a COVID-19 vaccine has been terminated, according to documents reviewed by The Epoch Times.
Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist, was fired by Mass General Brigham in November 2021 over noncompliance with the hospital’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate after his requests for exemptions from the mandate were denied, according to one document. Mr. Kulldorff was also placed on leave by Harvard Medical School (HMS) because his appointment as professor of medicine there “depends upon” holding a position at the hospital, another document stated.
Mr. Kulldorff asked HMS in late 2023 how he could return to his position and was told he was being fired.
“You would need to hold an eligible appointment with a Harvard-affiliated institution for your HMS academic appointment to continue,” Dr. Grace Huang, dean for faculty affairs, told the epidemiologist and biostatistician.
She said the lack of an appointment, combined with college rules that cap leaves of absence at two years, meant he was being terminated.
Mr. Kulldorff disclosed the firing for the first time this month.
“While I can’t comment on the specifics due to employment confidentiality protections that preclude us from doing so, I can confirm that his employment agreement was terminated November 10, 2021,” a spokesperson for Brigham and Women’s Hospital told The Epoch Times via email.
Mass General Brigham granted just 234 exemption requests out of 2,402 received, according to court filings in an ongoing case that alleges discrimination.
The hospital said previously, “We received a number of exemption requests, and each request was carefully considered by a knowledgeable team of reviewers.”
“A lot of other people received exemptions, but I did not,” Mr. Kulldorff told The Epoch Times.
Mr. Kulldorff was originally hired by HMS but switched departments in 2015 to work at the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which is part of Mass General Brigham and affiliated with HMS.
“Harvard Medical School has affiliation agreements with several Boston hospitals which it neither owns nor operationally controls,” an HMS spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email. “Hospital-based faculty, such as Mr. Kulldorff, are employed by one of the affiliates, not by HMS, and require an active hospital appointment to maintain an academic appointment at Harvard Medical School.”
HMS confirmed that some faculty, who are tenured or on the tenure track, do not require hospital appointments.
Natural Immunity
Before the COVID-19 vaccines became available, Mr. Kulldorff contracted COVID-19. He was hospitalized but eventually recovered.
That gave him a form of protection known as natural immunity. According to a number of studies, including papers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, natural immunity is better than the protection bestowed by vaccines.
Other studies have found that people with natural immunity face a higher risk of problems after vaccination.
Mr. Kulldorff expressed his concerns about receiving a vaccine in his request for a medical exemption, pointing out a lack of data for vaccinating people who suffer from the same issue he does.
“I already had superior infection-acquired immunity; and it was risky to vaccinate me without proper efficacy and safety studies on patients with my type of immune deficiency,” Mr. Kulldorff wrote in an essay.
In his request for a religious exemption, he highlighted an Israel study that was among the first to compare protection after infection to protection after vaccination. Researchers found that the vaccinated had less protection than the naturally immune.
“Having had COVID disease, I have stronger longer lasting immunity than those vaccinated (Gazit et al). Lacking scientific rationale, vaccine mandates are religious dogma, and I request a religious exemption from COVID vaccination,” he wrote.
Both requests were denied.
Mr. Kulldorff is still unvaccinated.
“I had COVID. I had it badly. So I have infection-acquired immunity. So I don’t need the vaccine,” he told The Epoch Times.
Dissenting Voice
Mr. Kulldorff has been a prominent dissenting voice during the COVID-19 pandemic, countering messaging from the government and many doctors that the COVID-19 vaccines were needed, regardless of prior infection.
He spoke out in an op-ed in April 2021, for instance, against requiring people to provide proof of vaccination to attend shows, go to school, and visit restaurants.
“The idea that everybody needs to be vaccinated is as scientifically baseless as the idea that nobody does. Covid vaccines are essential for older, high-risk people and their caretakers and advisable for many others. But those who’ve been infected are already immune,” he wrote at the time.
Mr. Kulldorff later co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for focused protection of people at high risk while removing restrictions for younger, healthy people.
Harsh restrictions such as school closures “will cause irreparable damage” if not lifted, the declaration stated.
The declaration drew criticism from Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who became the head of the CDC, among others.
In a competing document, Dr. Walensky and others said that “relying upon immunity from natural infections for COVID-19 is flawed” and that “uncontrolled transmission in younger people risks significant morbidity(3) and mortality across the whole population.”
“Those who are pushing these vaccine mandates and vaccine passports—vaccine fanatics, I would call them—to me they have done much more damage during this one year than the anti-vaxxers have done in two decades,” Mr. Kulldorff later said in an EpochTV interview. “I would even say that these vaccine fanatics, they are the biggest anti-vaxxers that we have right now. They’re doing so much more damage to vaccine confidence than anybody else.”
Surveys indicate that people have less trust now in the CDC and other health institutions than before the pandemic, and data from the CDC and elsewhere show that fewer people are receiving the new COVID-19 vaccines and other shots.
Support
The disclosure that Mr. Kulldorff was fired drew criticism of Harvard and support for Mr. Kulldorff.
The termination “is a massive and incomprehensible injustice,” Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, an ethics expert who was fired from the University of California–Irvine School of Medicine for not getting a COVID-19 vaccine because he had natural immunity, said on X.
“The academy is full of people who declined vaccines—mostly with dubious exemptions—and yet Harvard fires the one professor who happens to speak out against government policies.” Dr. Vinay Prasad, an epidemiologist at the University of California–San Francisco, wrote in a blog post. “It looks like Harvard has weaponized its policies and selectively enforces them.”
A petition to reinstate Mr. Kulldorff has garnered more than 1,800 signatures.
Some other doctors said the decision to let Mr. Kulldorff go was correct.
“Actions have consequence,” Dr. Alastair McAlpine, a Canadian doctor, wrote on X. He said Mr. Kulldorff had “publicly undermine[d] public health.”
International
“Extreme Events”: US Cancer Deaths Spiked In 2021 And 2022 In “Large Excess Over Trend”
"Extreme Events": US Cancer Deaths Spiked In 2021 And 2022 In "Large Excess Over Trend"
Cancer deaths in the United States spiked in 2021…
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Cancer deaths in the United States spiked in 2021 and 2022 among 15-44 year-olds "in large excess over trend," marking jumps of 5.6% and 7.9% respectively vs. a rise of 1.7% in 2020, according to a new preprint study from deep-dive research firm, Phinance Technologies.
Extreme Events
The report, which relies on data from the CDC, paints a troubling picture.
"We show a rise in excess mortality from neoplasms reported as underlying cause of death, which started in 2020 (1.7%) and accelerated substantially in 2021 (5.6%) and 2022 (7.9%). The increase in excess mortality in both 2021 (Z-score of 11.8) and 2022 (Z-score of 16.5) are highly statistically significant (extreme events)," according to the authors.
That said, co-author, David Wiseman, PhD (who has 86 publications to his name), leaves the cause an open question - suggesting it could either be a "novel phenomenon," Covid-19, or the Covid-19 vaccine.
Cancer deaths in US in 2021 & 2022 in large excess over trend for 15-44 year-olds as extreme events. A novel phenomenon? C19? lockdowns? C19 vaccines? Honored to participate in this work. #CDC where are you? @DowdEdwardhttps://t.co/iUV5oQiWCW pic.twitter.com/uytzaIvvor
— David Wiseman PhD, MRPharmS (@AdhesionsOrg) March 12, 2024
"The results indicate that from 2021 a novel phenomenon leading to increased neoplasm deaths appears to be present in individuals aged 15 to 44 in the US," reads the report.
The authors suggest that the cause may be the result of "an unexpected rise in the incidence of rapidly growing fatal cancers," and/or "a reduction in survival in existing cancer cases."
They also address the possibility that "access to utilization of cancer screening and treatment" may be a factor - the notion that pandemic-era lockdowns resulted in fewer visits to the doctor. Also noted is that "Cancers tend to be slowly-developing diseases with remarkably stable death rates and only small variations over time," which makes "any temporal association between a possible explanatory factor (such as COVID-19, the novel COVID-19 vaccines, or other factor(s)) difficult to establish."
That said, a ZeroHedge review of the CDC data reveals that it does not provide information on duration of illness prior to death - so while it's not mentioned in the preprint, it can't rule out so-called 'turbo cancers' - reportedly rapidly developing cancers, the existence of which has been largely anecdotal (and widely refuted by the usual suspects).
While the Phinance report is extremely careful not to draw conclusions, researcher "Ethical Skeptic" kicked the barn door open in a Thursday post on X - showing a strong correlation between "cancer incidence & mortality" coinciding with the rollout of the Covid mRNA vaccine.
The argument is over.
— Ethical Skeptic ☀ (@EthicalSkeptic) March 14, 2024
The Covid mRNA Vaxx has cause a sizeable 2021 inflection, and now novel-trend elevation in terms of both cancer incidence & mortality.
Now you know who the liars were all along.
????Incidence = 14.8% excess
????UCoD Mortality = 5.3% excess (lags Incidence) pic.twitter.com/uwN9GMrHl1
Phinance principal Ed Dowd commented on the post, noting that "Cancer is suddenly an accelerating growth industry!"
????Indeed it is…Cancer is suddenly an accelerating growth industry! @EthicalSkeptic provides a chart below showing US Cancer treatment in constant dollars with a current growth rate of 14.8% (6.3% New CAGR) versus long term trend of 1.78% CAGR or $33.8 billion in excess cancer… https://t.co/RIn4R2YZZ7
— Edward Dowd (@DowdEdward) March 14, 2024
Continued:
As a former portfolio manager of of a $14 billion Large Cap Growth Equity portfolio I can definitively say Cancer treatments and the Disabilities have become growth industries that both have inflection points coincidental to the mRNA vaccine rollouts in 2021.
— Edward Dowd (@DowdEdward) March 14, 2024
Chart 1 from… pic.twitter.com/TCt4X1plnM
Bottom line - hard data is showing alarming trends, which the CDC and other agencies have a requirement to explore and answer truthfully - and people are asking #WhereIsTheCDC.
We aren't holding our breath.
Experts are sounding the alarm on a spike in cancer diagnosis worldwide. It is still a mystery. @DowdEdward from Phinance Technologies has also been sounding the alarm for months.
— dr.ir. Carla Peeters (@CarlaPeeters3) March 15, 2024
We are facing a dramatic degradation of the human immune system https://t.co/CPnwP3Oj9G
Wiseman, meanwhile, points out that Pfizer and several other companies are making "significant investments in cancer drugs, post COVID."
Pfizer among several companies making significant investments in cancer drugs, post COVID. @DowdEdward @Kevin_McKernan @JesslovesMJK @niki_kyrylenko https://t.co/nefEZYLW1o https://t.co/r505Sbbcq4
— David Wiseman PhD, MRPharmS (@AdhesionsOrg) March 15, 2024
Phinance
We've featured several of Phinance's self-funded deep dives into pandemic data that nobody else is doing. If you'd like to support them, click here.
List of our projects following disturbing tends in deaths, disabilities and absences.
— Edward Dowd (@DowdEdward) March 16, 2024
Link to projects at bottom.
✅ V-Damage Project
✅ Excess Mortality Project
✅ US Disabilities Project
✅ US BLS Absence rates Project
✅ US Cause of Death Project
✅ UK Cause of Death…
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