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It’s Time to End the Preference and Tax Capital Gains as Ordinary Income

It’s Time to End the Preference and Tax Capital Gains as Ordinary Income

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The United States entered the COVID-19 crisis with an unusually large budget deficit for an economy at or close to full employment. Even if employment, output, and growth were to recover quickly to where they were at the end of 2019 (something that is far from certain), the deficit, under current law, will remain large.


The good news is that interest rates are likely to remain well below the rate of GDP growth for the foreseeable future, as they have since the beginning of the century. As long as that remains the case, there is no danger of an “exploding debt” scenario in which a large but constant federal deficit causes debt to grow without limit as a share of GDP. At this point, the greatest danger to the recovery is premature austerity. Still, as the recovery proceeds, we are sure to hear it argued on both economic and political grounds that the deficit should be reduced.


At that point, the search will be on for ways to close the budget gap. Although everyone will roll out their favorite spending cuts, much of the heavy lifting is going to have to come on the revenue side of the budget. As former Trump adviser Gary Cohn put it recently, talking to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria,
Our next Congress, the Congress that sits down in 2021, almost has to sit down and look at our spending and our revenue side. … How we spend money? There are a lot of places where we could cut back. In addition to that, I think they have to look at our tax system and think of ways that we raise revenue.
No area of the tax code is more ripe for reform than the preferential treatment given to capital gains. While incomes from wages and salaries face a maximum tax rate of 37 percent, capital gains on assets held for more than a year, in most cases, are taxed at a maximum rate of just 20 percent.

The benefits of the capital gains tax preference flow predominantly to the rich. Some 70 percent of the benefits go to taxpayers with annual incomes of $1 million or more, who enjoy annual benefits of $145,000 each. Benefits for households with incomes of $50,000 or less average about $10. For years, backers have tried to find broader justifications for this tax break, contending that benefits to the few somehow trickle down to the rest, but their efforts are less than convincing.


Here are some of the many issues raised by the capital gains tax preference, and the many reasons why its elimination should be at the top of the list in the search for additional sources of federal revenue.



Are capital gains really income?


One argument for lenient tax treatment is that even if income is to be taxed, capital gains are not income at all, but only a reflection of a transfer of ownership of an existing asset. If we want assets to come under the control of those who can put them to best use, say defenders of the preference, we should not erect barriers to their purchase and sale. Just as we tax labor income when it is paid out to workers, we should tax capital income only when it is paid out as interest, dividends, royalties, or whatever, but not when ownership of an asset is transferred from one party to another.


That might make sense if it were possible to distinguish cleanly between income and capital gains, but it is not. Instead, it is all too easy to transform income from almost any source into something that looks like a capital gain.


Consider a fanciful example: I make a contract with my wife to supply 2,000 hours of labor over the coming year for a payment of $2,000. Under the terms of the contract, she can, if she wants, call on me to use those hours in any way she wants. She could ask me to mow the lawn and make lasagna for dinner, but she could also sell the local university an option that would allow it to buy my services at the same $2,000 she paid for them. The university willingly pays her $95,000 for the option, which is a good deal for them since they would otherwise have had to pay me $100,000 to teach my quota of courses. When we file our joint tax return come April 15, we will be taxed at the capital gains rate on my wife’s $95,000 income from the option sale, while I report ordinary income of $2,000. Our before-tax income is a little lower than it otherwise would be, but our total taxes are a lot lower.


Although this example seems absurd, the real world is full of situations where businesses can do much the same — structure a transaction to make it look like a capital gain instead of ordinary income. In fact, one law firm advertises an options-based strategy exactly like that described above, except that it is used to shelter income from real estate rather than from labor. Choices like organizing a firm as a partnership instead of a corporation, paying executives with stock options instead of a salary, or imaginatively structuring a real estate deal can also convert ordinary income to capital gains. The strategies are endless.


One of the most controversial ploys is the carried interest rule, which allows hedge fund and private-equity managers to structure the income they receive for their services in a form that qualifies for taxation as capital gains. Even some commentators who are otherwise enthusiastic about lenient taxation of capital gains draw the line at carried interest. For example, David Frum, who thinks a lower tax rate for capital gains is good policy, agrees that the rule is “utterly unjustifiable. If you’re investing with other people’s money,” he says, “What you are earning is income — and it should be taxed as such.” The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which slashed the corporate tax rate, was supposed to close the carried interest loophole, but it ended up making only minor modifications. For the most part, say tax analysts, the rule lives on.


Tax avoidance strategies that convert ordinary income to capital gains would be a problem even if they did nothing but generate inequities and reduce federal revenues, but that is not the whole story. Such strategies may require more than just waving an accountant’s wand over something a firm would do anyway. Instead, structuring transactions to take advantage of specific tax rules often requires changing actual business practices, such as the choice of financing methods, the timing of investments, even the choice of one’s whole line of business. Often, the changes would be unprofitable except for their tax advantages. Although proponents of the capital gains preference claim it supercharges growth and efficiency, tax-induced changes in business practices are a significant drag on the real economy.


Do we need a capital gains preference to correct for inflation?


A second argument used by supporters is that we need low tax rates on capital gains to avoid taxing “phantom” gains produced by inflation. The argument is superficially plausible. When there is inflation, asset owners may be taxed on nominal gains even when real asset values do not increase.


For example, suppose you buy some shares of stock at $100 and sell them for $120 a couple years later. Inflation has meanwhile pushed up the cost of living by 10 percent. That leaves you with an inflation-adjusted pretax gain of just $10. If you pay 37 percent tax as ordinary income on the $20 nominal gain, your tax rate on the $10 real gain is 74 percent. Cutting the rate on nominal capital gains to 20 percent reduces the real rate to 40 percent — not quite enough even to fully level the playing field, but a move in the right direction, it would seem.


But there are two flaws in that argument.


First, any arbitrary rule, such as a fixed lower tax rate or an exclusion of a portion of capital gains, can only crudely approximate the necessary adjustment for inflation. The 20 percent rate that is close to right in the example we just gave becomes too low if inflation slows (as it has in recent years). If inflation instead accelerated, it would become too high. Second, the rate that just levels the playing field for a person in one tax bracket could be too high or too low for those in other brackets.


A more nuanced approach would be to index the basis on which capital gains are calculated to reflect actual inflation between purchase and sale. That would avoid the taxation of phantom capital gains, but not a second, equally serious problem: Other forms of investment income, too, are subject to phantom taxation when there is inflation.


Suppose, for example, that in a zero-inflation world, borrowers would offer a 5 percent coupon rate on top-rated corporate bonds. If the rate of inflation rises to 5 percent, borrowers would be willing to offer a 10 percent nominal coupon rate on the bond, since they know they will be able to pay future interest and principle in less valuable dollars. The 10 percent nominal rate leaves your real return and their real interest cost at 5 percent. So far, so good. But suppose now that you are subject to a 20 percent tax on your interest income. In the zero-inflation case, your interest income after tax is 4 percent. In the inflationary case, you have to pay tax on the whole 10 percent nominal rate, leaving you an 8 percent nominal return after taxes. When you subtract 5 percent inflation, that 8 percent nominal return becomes just 3 percent. In short, even if borrowers adjust nominal interest rates to fully reflect inflation, inflation increases the effective tax rate on bondholders.


The situation would be similar for income from the common stock of a firm that has constant real profit, from which it pays a constant fraction in dividends. Faster inflation would increase the real effective rate of taxation on the dividends.


A helpful 1990 paper from the Congressional Budget Office explores the problem in detail. The paper confirms that faster inflation raises the effective tax rate on investment income, but it points out that the effect is inherently smaller for capital gains than for dividend or interest income. Attacking the problem of phantom capital gains in isolation by whatever means — a preferential capital gains rate, an exclusion, or indexation — only widens the gap between the way inflation affects capital gains and the way it affects interest and dividends. Doing so increases the attractiveness of tax avoidance strategies that involve inefficient business practices.


The ideal solution to distortions caused by inflation would be to index the entire tax system. Indexation would have to cover not only all forms of investment income, but also taxation of ordinary income, real estate, inheritance, and everything else. But trying to remove the effect of inflation on capital gains taxes separately is likely to make things worse, not better.


Do we need the preference to avoid double taxation of corporate profits?


“Double taxation” of corporate profits is a third common argument in defense of lenient tax treatment of capital gains. The idea is that corporate profits are taxed once at the business level and then again at the individual level when they are paid out as management bonuses, dividends, or capital gains.


It is true that a preferential rate on capital gains would be one way to attack the distortion — one way, but a bad one. A much better way would be to fix the flaws in corporate taxes that are the source of the problem rather than apply a Band-Aid to capital gains.


Actually, part of the job was done in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which lowered corporate tax rates across the board. A further step would be to get rid of the numerous loopholes in the corporate tax system that allow a big chunk of corporate profit to escape taxation altogether while those unlucky enough not to qualify pay much more.


But the 2017 corporate tax cut left a key part of the job unfinished. If we want to enjoy the potential efficiency benefits of corporate tax reform, those taxes should not just be reduced; at the same time they should be shifted to the individual incomes of the managers and shareholders who are the ultimate recipients of corporate profits. To do that would require eliminating the capital gains preference. A regime that had no corporate income tax and full taxation of profits, whether earned by shareholders as capital gains, dividends, or in any other form, would eliminate double taxation once and for all without an unfair redistribution of the overall burden of taxation.


The lock-in effect


The “lock-in” effect is a final problem with capital gains taxation. As the tax is currently administered, people do not have to pay capital gains on an asset until it is sold. As a result, the after-tax return on an appreciating asset increases the longer it is held.


Compare a bond that pays a steady interest income every year to a stock that increases in value by the same amount each year. Over time, the effective tax rate on the stock would be lower even if the statutory tax rate were the same on both interest income and capital gains. The reason is that bondholders have to pay their tax year by year, while stockholders can defer payment of the tax until they sell their shares, possibly many years later.


Moreover, if people still have not sold their stock or other assets when they die, their heirs never have to pay taxes on the capital gains at all. Instead, the value of the assets is “stepped up” to the market value at the time of the original purchaser’s death. In the meantime, the original owners can live quite well by borrowing against the value of the assets. When they die, their heirs can sell enough shares to pay off the loans, without paying capital gains taxes either on those shares or the ones they keep.


The lock-in effect, then, creates an artificial incentive for owners to hold on to stocks or real assets longer than they otherwise would. In many cases, that means that assets do not move smoothly from the hands of those who own them to those of new owners who could make better use of them. Furthermore, the lock-in effect greatly reduces the revenue that the government realizes from capital gains taxes.


Unfortunately, removing the tax preference and taxing capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income would, by itself, make the lock-in problem worse. Assets would move from hand to hand even more slowly than they do now. As a result, the increase in revenue from lifting the capital gains preference would be disappointingly small.


Fortunately, there are ways to overcome the lock-in problem. A recent study from Brookings by Grace Enda and William G. Gale discusses several possible reforms.


Two of the simplest reforms attack the so-called “Angel of Death” loophole that allows heirs to fully or partially escape capital gains taxes. One version would eliminate the valuation step-up at death. Suppose John Sr. buys an asset for $1,000 in 1990 and dies in 2010 when the asset is worth $2,000. John Jr., the heir, finally sells the asset in 2020 when it is worth $3,000. Under the current regime, John Jr. pays no capital gains tax until 2020, and then only on the $1,000 gain that has occurred since the time of inheritance. Without the step-up, John Jr. would pay tax in 2020 on the full $2,000 gain that had taken place since the original purchase. An even stronger version of the same reform would require John Jr. to pay tax on the first $1,000 of the gain in 2010, at the time of inheritance, and pay the tax on the remaining $1,000 when the asset is sold in 2020.


A still more far-reaching reform would be to tax capital gains annually on an accrual or mark-to-market basis. Suppose that your tax rate is 30 percent, and in year 0, you buy 100 shares of stock at $50 a share. They rise in price to $100 in Year 1, fall to $75 in Year 2, and rise again to $150 in Year 3, at which point you sell them. Under mark-to-market taxation, in Year 1 you pay tax of $1,500 on a capital gain of $5,000; in Year 2, you have a negative tax liability of $750 on a capital loss of $2,500, which you can carry forward; and in Year 3, you have a capital gain of $7,500 on which you owe tax of $2,250, $750 of which you cover with the carried-forward loss. Your total tax over the 3 years is $3,000, the same as it would be if you were taxed only at the time of sale, but because there is no deferral of taxes, there is no lock-in effect.


Mark-to-market taxation would be easy to implement for assets like stocks and bonds that were actively traded, but not so easy for hard-to-value assets like real estate or private business interests. An approach called retrospective taxation could be used in such cases. Under that system, capital gains would be taxed at the time of sale, but the tax rate would be higher the longer the asset had been hed. The rate of increase in the tax rate would depend on market interest rates. If it were done right, the cost of the rising tax rate would exactly balance out the benefit of deferring taxes until sale. In short, retrospective taxation would eliminate the lock-in effect without encountering the problem of annual evaluation of hard-to-value assets.


Any of these reforms, alone or in combination, would mitigate the lock-in effect. As a result, capital markets would operate more efficiently, since assets would move more freely into the hands of the owners who could put them to the best use. It would also increase the revenue gain from elimination of the capital gains tax preference.


The bottom line


Those who defend the preferential rate on capital gains are right when they argue that all taxes affect business decisions. But it is a non sequitur to say that because they affect business decisions, capital gains taxes should be as low as possible. The proper conclusion, instead, is that we should consider capital gains taxes in the context of the tax system as a whole:


  • Taxing capital gains at lower rates than other forms of investment income does little to encourage investment in general. However, it does a lot to encourage the structuring of investment in ways that avoid taxes, even if they are inherently less efficient.

  • Theoretically, an ideal tax system would be fully indexed for inflation, but singling out capital gains for special treatment while other forms of capital income are not adjusted actually increases the degree to which inflation undermines the equity and efficiency of the tax system.

  • A case can be made against double taxation of corporate profits, but the proper reform would be to tax capital gains and dividends as ordinary income at the same time that profit taxes at the corporate level were reduced or eliminated.

  • The lock-in effect is real, but the appropriate way to mitigate it would be through elimination of the angel-of-death loophole while taxing all capital gains on a mark-to-market or retrospective basis.

In short, as we look ahead to the likely need for additional federal revenues as the U.S. economy fully recovers from the COVID-19 downturn, a thorough reform of our system for taxing capital gains should be a high priority.


Based on a previous post at NiskanenCenter.org. Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com.



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Who Can You Trust?

Who Can You Trust?

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

“I’m sick and tired of hearing Democrats whining about Joe Biden’s…

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June 4, 2023

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Who Can You Trust?

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

“I’m sick and tired of hearing Democrats whining about Joe Biden’s age. The man knows how to govern. Just shut up and vote to save Democracy.”

- Rob Reiner, Hollywood savant

Perhaps you’re aware that the World Health Organization (WHO) is cooking up a plan to impose its will over all the sovereign nations on this planet in the event of future pandemics.

That means, for instance, that the WHO would issue orders to the USA about lockdowns, vaccines, and vaccine passports and we US citizens supposedly would be compelled to follow them.

Why the “Joe Biden” regime would go along with this globalist fuckery is one of the abiding mysteries of our time - except that they go along with everything else that the cabal of Geneva cooks up, such as attacks on farmers, and on oil production, and on relations between men and women, and on personal privacy, and on economic liberty throughout Western Civ, as if they’re working overtime to kill it off. And all of us with it.

I think they are working overtime at that because the sore-beset citizens of Western Civ are onto their game, and getting restless about it. So, the Geneva cabal is in a race against time before the center pole of their circus tent collapses and the nations of the world are compelled to follow the zeitgeist in the direction of de-centralizing, foiling all their grand plans.

The “Joe Biden” regime is pretending to ignore the reality that this WHO deal is actually a treaty that would require ratification by a two-thirds vote in the senate, an unlikely outcome. In any case, handing over authority to the WHO — in effect, to its chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus — to push around American citizens like a giant herd of cattle would be patently unlawful.

That center pole of the circus tent is the wobbling global economy. It’s barely holding up the canvas over the three rings of the circus. In the center ring, the death-defying spectacle of the Biden Family crime case is playing out before a huge audience (us). This week, a gun went off at the FBI and smoke is curling out of the barrel. FBI Director Christopher Wray was forced to verify that he’s been sitting on an incriminating document for three years from a “trusted” confidential human source, i.e., an informant, stating that the Biden Family received a $5-million bribe from a foreign entity when “JB” was vice-president.

That’s only one bribe of many others, of course, as documented in the Hunter Biden laptop, and it must be obvious it represents treasonous behavior that will demand resignation or impeachment. As this spools out in the weeks and months ahead, do you think Americans will be in the mood to accept further insults such as “Joe Biden” surrendering our national sovereignty to the WHO?

Anyway, you must ask yourself: why on earth should I trust the WHO about anything? Did they not participate in laying a trip on the world with Covid-19? How did those lockdowns work out? Do you think they destroyed enough businesses and ruined enough households? How’s the vaccination program doing? Effective? Safe? Yeah, maybe not so much. Maybe killing a lot of people, wrecking immune systems, sterilizing reproductive organs, causing gross disabilities, shattering lives.

Of course, in over three years neither the WHO nor the US medical authorities showed the slightest interest in helping to figure out how the Covid-19 virus was made in a lab, and exactly how it got loose in the world. Lately, Dr. Ghebreyesus has warned the world about much worse future pandemics supposedly coming down at us. Oh? Really? What does he know that we don’t? That possibly new efforts to concoct chimeric diseases are ongoing in labs around the world? (You know that dozens of such labs were discovered in Ukraine as the war got underway there in 2022.) What’s Dr. Ghebreyesus doing to stop that?

If US orgs and citizens are involved in this “research,” why doesn’t the WHO alert our government leaders so they can stop it? (Would they? I’m not so sure.) And, who is behind it this time? The Eco-Health Alliance again, like with Covid-19? By the way, that outfit got another whopping grant last fall from the NIH to “study” bat viruses — right after the NIH terminated a previous grant on account of The Eco-Health Alliance failing to turn over notebooks and other records.

No, you cannot trust the WHO about anything. The “trust horizon” (a concept introduced by the great Nicole Foss, late of The Automatic Earth dot com) is shrinking. You can no longer trust any distant authorities. You also cannot trust the US federal government (especially the executive branch behind “Joe Biden”). And notice: the trust horizon is shrinking just as the world is de-centralizing. This, you see, is the main contradiction behind all the Globalists’ twisted ambitions to control everything, including you. They are working against the current tide of human history which is pushing everything toward down-scaling, re-localization, and re-assertion of the sovereign individual person.

That trend will become increasingly evident as things organized at the giant scale start to implode — giant retail chains, medical behemoths, hedge funds, big banks, you name it. The world no longer has the mojo for globalism. There’s reason to wonder these days whether the USA has the mojo to remain a unified national polity of states. Our federal government is not only financially bankrupt beyond any coherent reckoning, it is also morally bankrupt, and it has decided to make war against its own people. None of this is satisfactory and none of this is working. It’s time to figure out who and what you can trust and act accordingly.

Tyler Durden Sun, 06/04/2023 - 09:20

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Removing antimicrobial resistance from the WHO’s ‘pandemic treaty’ will leave humanity extremely vulnerable to future pandemics

Drug-resistant microbes are a serious threat for future pandemics, but the new draft of the WHO’s international pandemic agreement may not include provisions…

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Antimicrobial resistance is now a leading cause of death worldwide due to drug-resistant infections, including drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis, pneumonia and Staph infections like the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus shown here. (NIAID, cropped from original), CC BY

In late May, the latest version of the draft Pandemic Instrument, also referred to as the “pandemic treaty,” was shared with Member States at the World Health Assembly. The text was made available online via Health Policy Watch and it quickly became apparent that all mentions of addressing antimicrobial resistance in the Pandemic Instrument were at risk of removal.

Work on the Pandemic Instrument began in December 2021 after the World Health Assembly agreed to a global process to draft and negotiate an international instrument — under the Constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO) — to protect nations and communities from future pandemic emergencies.

Read more: Drug-resistant superbugs: A global threat intensified by the fight against coronavirus

Since the beginning of negotiations on the Pandemic Instrument, there have been calls from civil society and leading experts, including the Global Leaders Group on Antimicrobial Resistance, to include the so-called “silent” pandemic of antimicrobial resistance in the instrument.

Just three years after the onset of a global pandemic, it is understandable why Member States negotiating the Pandemic Instrument have focused on preventing pandemics that resemble COVID-19. But not all pandemics in the past have been caused by viruses and not all pandemics in the future will be caused by viruses. Devastating past pandemics of bacterial diseases have included plague and cholera. The next pandemic could be caused by bacteria or other microbes.

Antimicrobial resistance

Yellow particles on purple spikes
Microscopic view of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that cause bubonic plague, on a flea. Plague is an example of previous devastating pandemics of bacterial disease. (NIAID), CC BY

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is the process by which infections caused by microbes become resistant to the medicines developed to treat them. Microbes include bacteria, fungi, viruses and parasites. Bacterial infections alone cause one in eight deaths globally.

AMR is fueling the rise of drug-resistant infections, including drug-resistant tuberculosis, drug-resistant pneumonia and drug-resistant Staph infections such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). These infections are killing and debilitating millions of people annually, and AMR is now a leading cause of death worldwide.

Without knowing what the next pandemic will be, the “pandemic treaty” must plan, prepare and develop effective tools to respond to a wider range of pandemic threats, not solely viruses.

Even if the world faces another viral pandemic, secondary bacterial infections will be a serious issue. During the COVID-19 pandemic for instance, large percentages of those hospitalized with COVID-19 required treatment for secondary bacterial infections.

New research from Northwestern University suggests that many of the deaths among hospitalized COVID-19 patients were associated with pneumonia — a secondary bacterial infection that must be treated with antibiotics.

An illustrative diagram that shows the difference between a drug resistant bacteria and a non-resistant bacteria.
Antimicrobial resistance means infections that were once treatable are much more difficult to treat. (NIAID), CC BY

Treating these bacterial infections requires effective antibiotics, and with AMR increasing, effective antibiotics are becoming a scarce resource. Essentially, safeguarding the remaining effective antibiotics we have is critical to responding to any pandemic.

That’s why the potential removal of measures that would help mitigate AMR and better safeguard antimicrobial effectiveness is so concerning. Sections of the text which may be removed include measures to prevent infections (caused by bacteria, viruses and other microbes), such as:

  • better access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene;
  • higher standards of infection prevention and control;
  • integrated surveillance of infectious disease threats from human, animals and the environment; and
  • strengthening antimicrobial stewardship efforts to optimize how antimicrobial drugs are used and prevent the development of AMR.

The exclusion of these measures would hinder efforts to protect people from future pandemics, and appears to be part of a broader shift to water-down the language in the Pandemic Instrument, making it easier for countries to opt-out of taking recommended actions to prevent future pandemics.

Making the ‘pandemic treaty’ more robust

Measures to address AMR could be easily included and addressed in the “pandemic treaty.”

In September 2022, I was part of a group of civil society and research organizations that specialize in mitigating AMR who were invited the WHO’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) to provide an analysis on how AMR should be addressed, within the then-draft text.

They outlined that including bacterial pathogens in the definition of “pandemics” was critical. They also identified specific provisions that should be tweaked to track and address both viral and bacterial threats. These included AMR and recommended harmonizing national AMR stewardship rules.

In March 2023, I joined other leading academic researchers and experts from various fields in publishing a special edition of the Journal of Medicine, Law and Ethics, outlining why the Pandemic Instrument must address AMR.

The researchers of this special issue argued that the Pandemic Instrument was overly focused on viral threats and ignored AMR and bacterial threats, including the need to manage antibiotics as a common-pool resource and revitalize research and development of novel antimicrobial drugs.

Next steps

While earlier drafts of the Pandemic Instrument drew on guidance from AMR policy researchers and civil society organizations, after the first round of closed-door negotiations by Member States, all of these insertions, are now at risk for removal.

The Pandemic Instrument is the best option to mitigate AMR and safeguard lifesaving antimicrobials to treat secondary infections in pandemics. AMR exceeds the capacity of any single country or sector to solve. Global political action is needed to ensure the international community works together to collectively mitigate AMR and support the conservation, development and equitable distribution of safe and effective antimicrobials.

By missing this opportunity to address AMR and safeguard antimicrobials in the Pandemic Instrument, we severely undermine the broader goals of the instrument: to protect nations and communities from future pandemic emergencies.

It is important going forward that Member States recognize the core infrastructural role that antimicrobials play in pandemic response and strengthen, rather than weaken, measures meant to safeguard antimicrobials.

Antimicrobials are an essential resource for responding to pandemic emergencies that must be protected. If governments are serious about pandemic preparedness, they must support bold measures to conserve the effectiveness of antimicrobials within the Pandemic Instrument.

Susan Rogers Van Katwyk is a member of the WHO Collaborating Centre on Global Governance of Antimicrobial Resistance at York University. She receives funding from the Wellcome Trust and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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Repeated COVID-19 Vaccination Weakens Immune System: Study

Repeated COVID-19 Vaccination Weakens Immune System: Study

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Repeated COVID-19…

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June 3, 2023

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Repeated COVID-19 Vaccination Weakens Immune System: Study

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Repeated COVID-19 vaccination weakens the immune system, potentially making people susceptible to life-threatening conditions such as cancer, according to a new study.

A man is given a COVID-19 vaccine in Chelsea, Mass., on Feb. 16, 2021. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)

Multiple doses of the Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines lead to higher levels of antibodies called IgG4, which can provide a protective effect. But a growing body of evidence indicates that the “abnormally high levels” of the immunoglobulin subclass actually make the immune system more susceptible to the COVID-19 spike protein in the vaccines, researchers said in the paper.

They pointed to experiments performed on mice that found multiple boosters on top of the initial COVID-19 vaccination “significantly decreased” protection against both the Delta and Omicron virus variants and testing that found a spike in IgG4 levels after repeat Pfizer vaccination, suggesting immune exhaustion.

Studies have detected higher levels of IgG4 in people who died with COVID-19 when compared to those who recovered and linked the levels with another known determinant of COVID-19-related mortality, the researchers also noted.

A review of the literature also showed that vaccines against HIV, malaria, and pertussis also induce the production of IgG4.

“In sum, COVID-19 epidemiological studies cited in our work plus the failure of HIV, Malaria, and Pertussis vaccines constitute irrefutable evidence demonstrating that an increase in IgG4 levels impairs immune responses,” Alberto Rubio Casillas, a researcher with the biology laboratory at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico and one of the authors of the new paper, told The Epoch Times via email.

The paper was published by the journal Vaccines in May.

Pfizer and Moderna officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Both companies utilize messenger RNA (mRNA) technology in their vaccines.

Dr. Robert Malone, who helped invent the technology, said the paper illustrates why he’s been warning about the negative effects of repeated vaccination.

“I warned that more jabs can result in what’s called high zone tolerance, of which the switch to IgG4 is one of the mechanisms. And now we have data that clearly demonstrate that’s occurring in the case of this as well as some other vaccines,” Malone, who wasn’t involved with the study, told The Epoch Times.

“So it’s basically validating that this rush to administer and re-administer without having solid data to back those decisions was highly counterproductive and appears to have resulted in a cohort of people that are actually more susceptible to the disease.”

Possible Problems

The weakened immune systems brought about by repeated vaccination could lead to serious problems, including cancer, the researchers said.

Read more here...

Tyler Durden Sat, 06/03/2023 - 22:30

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