Connect with us

International

COVID-19 Vaccines Can Cause ‘Permanent Disabilities,’ Says German Health Minister

COVID-19 Vaccines Can Cause ‘Permanent Disabilities,’ Says German Health Minister

Authored by Lorenz Duchamps via The Epoch Times (emphasis…

Published

on

COVID-19 Vaccines Can Cause 'Permanent Disabilities,' Says German Health Minister

Authored by Lorenz Duchamps via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Germany’s Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach, who once claimed that COVID-19 vaccination is free of side effects, admitted last week that he was wrong, saying adverse reactions occur at a rate of one in 10,000 doses and can cause “severe disabilities.”

German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach speaks to the media to explain a new government plan to fundamentally reform Germany's hospital system in Berlin, Germany, on Dec. 06, 2022. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

On Aug. 14, 2021, Lauterbach said on Twitter that the vaccines had “no side effects,” further questioning why some Germans refused to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

During an interview on ZDF’s “Heute Journal” on March 12, Lauterbach was asked by anchor Christian Sievers about the claim he made in the summer of 2021, confronting the health minister with his previous tweet that stated the shots are virtually free of side effects.

Lauterbach responded that the tweet was “misguided” and an “exaggeration” he made at the time, noting that it “did not represent my true position.”

“I’ve always been aware of the numbers and they’ve remained relatively stable … one in 10,000 [are injured],” Lauterbach said. “Some say that it’s a lot, and some say it’s not so many.”

Lauterbach’s remark on vaccine adverse events came after the German network played a segment of several Germans who’ve been seriously injured after getting the shot, including a 17-year-old gymnast who previously competed in the German Artistic Gymnastics Championships before she was hospitalized for more than one year shortly after receiving the second dose of the BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

“What do you say to those who have been affected [by vaccine injuries]?” Sievers asked Lauterbach.

What’s happened to these people is absolutely dismaying, and every single case is one too many,” Lauterbach responded. “I honestly feel very sorry for these people. There are severe disabilities, and some of them will be permanent.

Steve Kirsch, executive director of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, did not agree with Lauterbach, but he commended the health minister for making “progress” when comparing his latest remark to his previous comments regarding the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.

“The true rate of serious adverse events is approximately 100 times greater than the figures Lauterbach cited—’closer to 1 in 100 doses’ and ‘For death, it is ~1 in 1,000 doses,'” Kirsch said on Twitter.

By Oct. 31, 2022, the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut received a total of 333,492 individual case reports on suspected COVID-19 vaccine adverse reactions or vaccine side effects in Germany, according to official data (pdf) released in December 2022 by the medical regulatory body that researches vaccines and biomedicines.

The number of individual case reports per month peaked in December 2021 and continued through the summer,” according to the federal agency, which is subordinate to the German Ministry of Health.

Despite these findings, the country’s health ministry website states, as of March 16, that “modern vaccines are safe and adverse effects only occur in sporadic cases.”

Lawsuits Pending

As the subject of post-vaccine injuries has started to be more widely covered by some German media outlets, lawsuits have begun to roll out against BioNTech, and also against other COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers.

BioNTech has denied all responsibilities, ZDF reported.

Vaccine manufacturers such as Pfizer and Moderna have immunity from liability if something unintentionally goes wrong with their vaccines, putting them in a very strong legal position.

It’s true that within the framework of these EU contracts, the companies were largely exempted from liability and that the liability, therefore, lies with the German state,” Lauterbach said.

Read more here...

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/18/2023 - 08:10

Read More

Continue Reading

International

Canadian dollar edges higher as retail sales rebound

Canada retail sales climb 2% The Canadian dollar has posted losses on Friday. In the European session, USD/CAD is trading at 1.3446, down 0.28%. Canada’s…

Published

on

  • Canada retail sales climb 2%

The Canadian dollar has posted losses on Friday. In the European session, USD/CAD is trading at 1.3446, down 0.28%.

Canada’s retail sales jump

Canada’s retail sales rebounded in impressive fashion on Friday. Retail sales in July jumped 2% y/y, following a -0.6% reading in June and beating the 0.5% consensus estimate. On a monthly basis, retail sales rose 0.3%, up from 0.1% in June but shy of the consensus estimate of 0.4%. The good news was tempered by the August estimate, which stands at -0.3% m/m and would be the first decline since March. The Canadian dollar showed little reaction to the retail sales release.

The Bank of Canada doesn’t meet again until October 25th and policy makers will have plenty of data to monitor in the meantime. The BoC has been walking a tightrope that will be familiar to most central banks, that of trying to balance the risks of over and under-tightening. The difficulty in finding the right balance was highlighted in the BoC summary of deliberations of the policy meeting earlier this month.

The BoC decided to hold the benchmark rate at 5.0% after concluding that earlier rate hikes were having an effect and slowing economic growth. The summary indicated that policy makers were concerned that a pause might send the wrong message that rate cuts might be on the way. With inflation still above the BOC’s target, the central bank is not looking at rate cuts and stressed at the September meeting that rate hikes were still on the table and that inflation remained too high.

.

USD/CAD Technical

  • USD/CAD is testing resistance at 1.3468. The next resistance line is 1.3553
  • 1.3408 and 1.3323 are the next support lines

Read More

Continue Reading

International

Quantitative Tightening Is Not Biggest Threat To Global Yields

Quantitative Tightening Is Not Biggest Threat To Global Yields

Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist,

The Bank of England’s…

Published

on

Quantitative Tightening Is Not Biggest Threat To Global Yields

Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist,

The Bank of England’s quantitative tightening program shows that unwinding central-bank bond portfolios, even with outright sales, need not be disruptive for markets. The greater risk for US and global yields comes from positive stock-bond correlations driving risk premia wider.

The BOE has been a pioneer and a thought leader in QT. While the Fed and ECB have only allowed bonds to run off naturally to help achieve their balance-sheet contraction goals, the BOE has sold gilts outright in addition to allowing bonds to mature.

So far, it has not led to any significant market disruption. This enabled the BOE Thursday to increase the pace of reduction in the Asset Purchase Facility (APF) from £80 billion last year to £100 billion over the coming 12 months from October (while holding Bank Rate steady). As colleague Ven Ram also noted, the schedule of maturing bonds next year allowed the bank to keep gilts sales unchanged from last year while increasing the total amount of the APF’s decrease.

The QT watchwords from the bank are “gradual and predictable.” If gilt sales are conducted in such a way, then market disruption should be minimized. The chart below shows the BOE’s own assessment of the impact of bond sales on the market.

The BOE estimates that of the ~40 bps of term-premium increase since the MPC voted to begin QT in February 2022, about 10-15 bps comes from QT specifically – small in comparison to the overall rise in yields since that time.

QT or bond sales, though, are not the most critical risk facing bond prices in the current cycle. Rising and now positive stock-bond correlations threaten to lead to a structural rise in bond risk premium, and lower prices. The correlation is now positive in the US, Japan, and the UK.

In a positive stock-bond correlation world, bonds lose their portfolio-hedge and recession-hedge capabilities, and thus become less sought after. The penny has not fully dropped yet, but the negative term premium for bonds is increasing, and is prone to rising much higher as they become less desirable.

Yields of developed market countries are biased structurally higher, but QT is unlikely to be the culprit. Instead, it allows central banks to reload their capacity for a future time when they may need to restart quantitative easing, in order to stabilize the market from sharply rising term premia.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/22/2023 - 09:10

Read More

Continue Reading

International

What happens if a university goes bust?

Universities face growing costs but no prospect of increased funding.

Published

on

By

fongbeerredhot/Shutterstock

Governments face difficult choices when industries fail. They can stand by while private businesses collapse and see the resulting loss of jobs and revenue. Or they can step in and use public money to prop up these firms.

The Scottish government intervened in 2019 to rescue Ferguson Marine, the last shipbuilding firm on the river Clyde, but faces ongoing controversy on whether it broke state aid rules in doing so. And, of course, the global financial crisis of 2008 saw the UK government intervening to rescue banks such as RBS that were seen as “too big to fail”.

A similar financial crisis may be looming in higher education, a sector worth billions each year to the UK economy and a source of great national pride.

The UK boasts the second-largest collection of Nobel laureates and four of the world’s top-20 universities. But all is not well in higher education.

Financial woes

The most recent data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency for the financial year ending in 2022 shows that (excluding pension adjustments, which can skew accounts for particular years) 24% of UK universities reported a deficit.

The Russell Group, which represents an elite group of research-intensive universities, claims it faces an average shortfall of £2,500 on every home undergraduate taught, and that this could grow to £5,000 by 2029-2030.

The outgoing vice-chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University, Sir Chris Husbands, recently suggested that calls to increase fee levels could be perceived as being tone deaf. Faced with their core undergraduate activities being unprofitable, universities have diversified their income by recruiting more international students, despite UK immigration policy limiting their ability to do so.

With no immediate prospect of increased funding either from government or through increased fee levels for domestic students, such restrictions on international recruitment together with damaging rhetoric from the government about so-called “rip-off degrees” means it is no longer unthinkable that a UK university might fail.

To consider what might happen if a university went out of business, we can look at what transpires when other businesses – such as banks – go bust.

Students in coffee shop
Universities play a significant role in local economies. Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock

Of the brand names that collapsed during the 2008 global financial crisis, few will remember the Heritable Bank. It held 22,000 accounts, making it comparable to the number of students at a mid-size university.

The cost to UK taxpayers of rescuing the Heritable Bank was £500m. The government, via the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, paid compensation to Heritable’s customers and, while some of these monies were recouped, the upfront costs were significant and the endgame did not see all of the cost recovered.

Part of the solution when Heritable failed was that another provider, ING, took on its customers. Were a university to become insolvent, thousands of students would find themselves marooned part-way through a degree programme, with no obvious route to complete it. There is no guarantee that another university would want to absorb a collection of “new” students, especially at fee levels that are already acknowledged to be below the break-even point.

Consequences for students

Even if a neighbouring university was given incentives to step in by the government, there would be practical issues to consider. Despite a potential merger under consideration in Australia, there is little history of mergers between universities in the UK.

The government could step in to avert a crisis. However, compared with the crisis in financial services in 2008, there is no equivalent compensation scheme in place and the public finances are in poorer health. In combination, this means there is no certainty of a government rescue package – and there may be a real reluctance to interfere in the market.

Almost inevitably, a series of messy class action lawsuits would result, with students seeking recompense for fees paid, perhaps over multiple years, that did not result in the qualification advertised. Worse, the shockwaves felt in one university could easily rock confidence in others. Future students might become more interested in the annual financial reports of a prospective university than its traditional prospectus.

Pulling down communities

Beyond the students, there would be significant economic consequences for the region, town or city concerned. Universities are typically large employers, sometimes the biggest in the area, and often refer to themselves as “anchor institutions” – central to the local economic ecosystem in the same way that a household-name retailer might be key to the viability of a shopping mall.

Yet anchors can also drag. In the case of a university failure, the potential for large numbers of high-skilled roles to disappear would be matched by a set of economic ripples that would be felt more widely.

This could range from housing, hospitality and retail being starved of income, to these and many other sectors suffering a shortage of a part-time, flexible workers. There are 142 members of Universities UK, and the 130 universities operating in England are estimated to contribute £95bn to the economy each year. Somewhere between £0.5bn and £1bn is a reasonable estimate of the amount attributable to any one university.

Finally, there would be political consequences. Electorates, of course, comprise many current, past and future students. Accusations would follow that jobs, qualifications and potential futures had been squandered.

The university sector is not immune to the kind of industrial or technological revolutions that have swept through other industries. But neither is it a purely commercial sector. Some of our policymakers and regulators might regard a university failure as an indication that the market is working. If so, they should be careful what they wish for.

Robert MacIntosh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Read More

Continue Reading

Trending