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Shanghai Lockdown Expanded To Cover Entire City As China’s Worst Outbreak In 2 Years Drags On

Shanghai Lockdown Expanded To Cover Entire City As China’s Worst Outbreak In 2 Years Drags On

Unfortunately for the CCP bureaucrats in charge…

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Shanghai Lockdown Expanded To Cover Entire City As China's Worst Outbreak In 2 Years Drags On

Unfortunately for the CCP bureaucrats in charge of China's largest city, the punishing 9-day staggered lockdown imposed late last month on Shanghai has failed to suppress the omicron driven outbreak in the city. Instead,  cases have continued to rise, prompting authorities to expand the scope of what was supposed to be a short-lived staggered freeze to cover the city's entire population.

The eastern half of Shanghai remains under tight movement restrictions even after a four-day lockdown was supposed to have ended Friday morning. This means the entire city of roughly 26 million is currently under some form of restrictions as the lockdown in the western half of the city begins, Bloomberg reports.

While the lockdown of Shanghai’s east officially ended at 5 a.m. local time Friday, most residents were not able to leave their homes immediately under what the local government described as a tiered quarantine regime.

People with mild or no symptoms are required to be put under compulsory central quarantine for treatment or monitoring at mostly makeshift facilities built in massive gymnasiums or exhibition centers around the city. If parents with young kids are sent to central quarantine, authorities will try to help find volunteers or staff to look after the children left behind, Zeng Qun, deputy head of Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau said at a briefing.

The rules also required anyone living in a building where a Covid case has been reported to stay confined in their home for two weeks. Residents of other buildings in the same compound as the block where a positive patient was reported will be subject to seven-day home quarantine.

Thanks to these "targeted" restrictions, nearly all of the nearly 9 million residents living in the eastern half of Shanghai were still subject to some form of COVID restrictions. Nearly 40% of Saturday’s newly reported infections in the city came from Pudong, the eastern part.

Now that the outbreak in Jilin Province has subsided (a punishing multi-week lockdown in that province has finally been lifted), Shanghai has emerged as the epicenter of China’s worst virus outbreak since the early days of the pandemic. The financial center's daily case count has surged from less than five at the beginning of March to a peak of more than 6,300 on Friday.

"At present, the epidemic situation is severe and complex, and the task of prevention and control is extremely arduous," Wu Qianyu, an official at the Shanghai municipal health commission, said at a media briefing.

To be sure, it's likely that the increase in new cases is a result of further screening. Authorities tested more than 14 million people in the western half of the city Friday as part of two-round tests.

Last month, President Xi Jinping instructed local authorities to take a more nuanced approach to combating COVID. While preserving human life must remainthe priority, the president urged policy makers to embrace more "targeted" measures - including an increase in testing and locally-focused lockdowns on residential complexes where cases had been confirmed.

But the continuing spread of the virus in Shanghai is the biggest test yet of Xi's plan to preserve economic growth without sacrificing lives. Amid reports of deaths of old folks homes and a surge in medical emergencies, local public health authorities have ordered hospitals and clinics across the city to reopen emergency wards amid reports that people were being denied access to treatment during the lockdown. There has even been a case of one individual dying after being turned away from a hospital due to COVID protocols, according to the SCMP.

Meanwhile, authorities have employed robot emissaries like this robot dog to bark instructions at local residents as the citywide testing campaign continues.

While millions of Chinese will likely suffer as the government scrambles to provide enough food, medicine and other emergency supplies to the increasingly desperate population, there's one individual who stands to benefit: President Joe Biden. Assuming news of the tighter lockdown sends crude oil prices lower, Biden might be able to take credit, given the timing of the SPR release announcement earlier this week (although few sell-side analysts expect the decision to have a meaningful impact on prices long term).

Tyler Durden Sat, 04/02/2022 - 21:00

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Government

“We Can’t Force The Human Body To Accept Foreign Genetic Code” Dr. McCullough On mRNA Technology

"We Can’t Force The Human Body To Accept Foreign Genetic Code” Dr. McCullough On mRNA Technology

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch…

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"We Can't Force The Human Body To Accept Foreign Genetic Code'' Dr. McCullough On mRNA Technology

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough warned that messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines inject “foreign genetic code” into human beings, which the body fails to break down or expel for a prolonged period of time.

Colorized scanning electron micrograph of a cell (purple) infected with a variant strain of SARS-CoV-2 virus particles (pink), isolated from a patient sample. (NIAID via The Epoch Times)

Research on mRNA “has been going on for decades,” Dr. McCullough said during an Oct. 5 interview. The 2023 Nobel Prize for medicine was awarded to two scientists for making “messenger RNA long-lasting in the human body,” he said. “I mean, it has been tested in multiple applications … It's an absolute bust. It was just the worst idea ever to install the genetic code for a lethal protein without being able to shut it off. It wasn't the fact that it was rushed; it's just ill-conceived from the very beginning.”

We can't force the human body to accept foreign genetic code and produce a foreign protein … Messenger RNA for vaccines is a completely failed concept. It’s a dangerous concept, and the U.S. government wasn't honest. They should have been honest. Trump should have come out and said, ‘Listen, it's on our website; our military's been working on this since 2012.’”

During a testimony at the European Parliament last month, Dr. McCullough said, “There's not a single study showing that the messenger RNA is broken down” in the human body once it is injected.

There's not a study showing it leaves the body.” Since the vaccines are “made synthetically, they cannot be broken down.”

He added that the lethal protein from the [COVID-19] vaccines found in the human body after vaccination was found to be circulating “at least for six months, if not longer.”

In the case of seasonal jabs, that is, taking an injection or booster at the end of six months as recommended by the authorities, “there's another installation in more circulating potentially lethal protein.”

Scientist Drew Weissman, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his role in developing mRNA technology, warned in a 2018 paper that not only did clinical trials of mRNA vaccines produce “more modest [results] in humans than was expected based on animal models,” but that the “side effects were not trivial.”

Dr. Mccullough’s comments come as the Gates Foundation is spending $40 million on countries in Africa and other economically backward nations to produce new mRNA vaccines in efforts to prevent diseases like tuberculosis and malaria.

Concealing a ‘Global Security Threat’

In the Steve Deace interview, Dr. McCullough said that the ineffectiveness of the technology was not unknown to the government since they’ve been testing it for nearly 40 years.

He referred to a February 2023 paper published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), which cited that the U.S. government has been investing billions of dollars in developing messenger RNA technology since 1985.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began investing in mRNA tech in 2011. DARPA then launched the Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program in 2016 that sought to produce “relevant numbers of doses” against infections within 60 days of identifying them.

The ADEPT P3 was a program by the U.S. military “to end pandemics in 60 days.” There is no other technology “that our government has invested more in,” Dr. McCullough said.

Dr. McCullough cited another paper that stated there were “over 9,000 patents on messenger RNA. And all the patent assignees are big entities. At the top is Sanofi, then Cervavac, BioNTech, Moderna, and the U.S. government. No single person invented messenger RNA. Someone who comes up in 2021 and says, ‘You know I invented it’. That's impossible. This has been going on for decades.”

Dr. McCullough pointed out that the United States and China have been in “collaboration for years” in their research on infectious and lethal coronavirus.

However, officials like Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Francis Collins, the former head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and “a whole cadre of scientists, they collaborated to conceal this global security threat.”

“They actually intentionally lied to the world and said the virus came out of nature. They knew it came out of the Wuhan lab,” he said, citing a research paper by Ralph Baric and Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi that was published in the Nature journal in 2015.

Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi is affiliated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, while Mr. Baric is from the Department of Epidemiology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

They said they created SARS-CoV-2 virus. They called it the Wuhan Institute of Virology 1 virus. That was the prototype SARS-CoV-2. So, that's in 2015. Instead of bringing Ralph Baric out [and asking] ‘Dr. Baric, how do we get ourselves out of this disaster,’ you masterminded this virus funded by the US.”

‘Pull All COVID-19 Vaccines Off the Market’

In his interview, Dr. McCullough made three recommendations. “I say number one, I've called in the US Senate [and] now the European Parliament [to] pull all COVID-19 vaccines off the market before anyone else is harmed.”

“Number two, US, EU and all westernized Nations [should] pull out of the WHO. They're not trustable. And number three, I'm following the World Council for Health. I am recommending a halt on all childhood vaccines, the entire vaccine schedule until this is clarified since messenger RNA is now on the schedule without any concerns for safety.

Cardiologists Dr. Aseem Malhotra (left) and Dr. Peter McCullough (right) in Dallas, Texas, on Nov. 29, 2022. (Bao Qiu/The Epoch Times)

While some studies related to the safety of COVID-19 vaccines have shown the jabs to be safe, others have raised concerns about the safety of the shots.

A December 2022 study analyzed trials comparing vaccine recipients with individuals who did not receive a vaccine or were given a placebo.

It concluded that “compared to placebo, most vaccines reduce, or likely reduce, the proportion of participants with confirmed symptomatic COVID-19, and for some, there is high-certainty evidence that they reduce severe or critical disease.”

However, a June 2022 study that looked at mRNA vaccinations found that “Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were associated with an increased risk of serious adverse events of special interest (AESI).”

“The excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest surpassed the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group in both Pfizer and Moderna trials.”

‘Shedding’ the Infection

During the interview, Mr. Deace asked about hearing issues that he and his colleague suffered and whether they had any ties with the vaccines. While he did not take a COVID-19 shot, the colleague was vaccinated. Mr. Deace asked if this was “further proof that basically the last few years Peter everybody was a lab rat whether you took the vaccine or not.”

Syringes and vials of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine are prepared to be administered at a drive-up vaccination site in Reno, Nev., on Dec. 17, 2020. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)

“It's true, nearly all of us have been exposed to the Wuhan spike protein,” Dr. McCullough replied. “When I see patients in the office, we check antibodies against the spike protein. Invariably, they're elevated. Rarely, I'll find somebody who hasn't been exposed.”

Dr. McCullough pointed out that there are “clear-cut papers” showing individuals suffering hearing loss after taking COVID-19 jabs. “It's all related to the spike protein,” he said. mRNA vaccines work by instructing cells in the body to produce the spike protein found on the surface of the COVID-19 virus.

Once vaccinated, an individual’s muscle cells begin producing spike protein pieces, displaying them on cell surfaces, which end up triggering the immune system to create antibodies. When such an individual gets infected with the COVID-19 virus, these antibodies will then fight the virus.

Dr. McCullough warned that even people who have not received mRNA COVID-19 vaccines can eventually get affected by messenger RNA through a vaccinated individual via “shedding.”

Shedding means that one has been exposed to the spike protein or to the messenger RNA from close contact with another individual. We know both of them can travel via exosomes which are small phospholipid packets that can be exhaled [via] breath, through sweat, [and] various forms of body fluid, typically you know very close contact.”

“There was a big project called the Eva project in the UK showing 78 percent of women who take a vaccine—they actually have menstrual abnormalities. And those who even didn't take a vaccine, they end up having menstrual abnormalities. There's been plenty of these reports that have occurred.”

Dr. McCullough cited an interview he did with scientist Helene Banoun, an expert on shedding, who believes such things “clearly happens, for sure, in people who've taken the vaccine within 30 days, close contact.”

“Now, two studies—one in the United States, one in Japan—[show] the messenger RNA comes through breast milk. The spike protein may be shedded potentially for a much longer duration of time. It's been shown in the human body now for months, maybe even years afterward. And that's the rationale for what our recent proposal to actually undergo spike protein detoxification.”

The cardiologist pointed out that “every signal” related to cardiovascular disease, neurologic disease, blood clots, immune disease, and cancer “is up.”

“There can be debates on why all these chronic diseases are up, all-cause mortality up in every single area of the world,” he said. “The two big exposures we've had are COVID-19 infection and now COVID-19 vaccines, and I think both mechanisms have led to this wave of disease.”

“I think more powerfully with the vaccines since the vaccines are largely genetic, they're given every six months, and they install the genetic code for the disease-promoting and lethal Wuhan spike protein.”

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/14/2023 - 22:10

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International

Rent Control Is A Disaster – Don’t Let It Spread Across The Nation

Rent Control Is A Disaster – Don’t Let It Spread Across The Nation

Authored by Betsy McCaughey via The Epoch Times,

America’s renters -…

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Rent Control Is A Disaster - Don't Let It Spread Across The Nation

Authored by Betsy McCaughey via The Epoch Times,

America’s renters - more than one-third of the nation’s households - are in for trouble.

Left-wing politicians are demanding rent regulation from coast to coast. Wherever it is adopted, the result will be a disastrous reduction in the rental housing supply, leaving renters desperate for places to live.

New York is the poster child for the failures of rent regulation. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently mulling a challenge to the constitutionality of the city’s rent regime.

Whatever the justices decide, the public needs to consider less destructive, more targeted ways to help low-income people pay for housing. The court of public opinion needs to consider these facts.

Fact No. 1: Rent regulation isn’t targeted to the poor.

In New York, there’s no means test. What you need is luck or connections. The mean income of a rent-stabilized apartment dweller is $47,000, but census data show that tens of thousands of them earn more than $150,000 per year. Some occupants use what they’re saving on rent to pay for a weekend place in the Hamptons or New England.

The pols don’t object—a sure sign they’re calling for rent regulation to help themselves politically, not the poor.

In New York, 44 percent of rental apartments are regulated by the Rent Guidelines Board (RGB), established in 1969, which sets the maximum amount by which landlords are allowed to raise the rent. Those limits apply to all buildings of six or more units built before 1974.

In 2022, the RGB set the maximum rent hike at 3.25 percent on one-year leases and this year at 3 percent. Never mind that last year, fuel costs to heat the buildings soared by 19 percent and overall inflation hit 8.3 percent.

The decisions are political, not economic. Many Democratic politicians vilify building owners as “greedy landlords” and depict themselves as the champions of the downtrodden. It’s a scam.

Fact No. 2: Winners and losers.

The winners are the lucky few with rent-regulated apartments and the pols who count on an army of tenant activists to turn out at the polls. The losers are the 56 percent of renters who don’t score a regulated apartment and have to scour neighborhoods for an unregulated place that they can afford. They’re paying more.

Why? Because regulation causes some landlords to walk away, reducing the overall supply of apartments. The laws of supply and demand mean rents go up. New Yorkers in unregulated apartments are paying the highest rents in the United States for a one-bedroom apartment. They're the real victims, and they should be furious.

Yet the left-wing press pretends that rent control offers only benefits. The New Republic warns that the Supreme Court challenge threatens “laws that have benefitted the city’s tenants for generations.” Sorry, untrue—only some tenants, and not always the neediest.

It’s economic madness. The saner way to help those who need assistance paying rent is with a voucher. We offer the needy SNAP debit cards to help them pay for groceries. No one slaps price controls on grocery stores or designates certain stores as “regulated,” forcing them to sell at below cost.

Yet New York forces certain landlords to pay what should be a public cost shared by all, an argument made to the court.

Fact No. 3: The Marxist fantasy that rent regulation will help the poor is spreading across the United States and Europe as well.

Maine and Minnesota have enacted laws allowing municipalities to impose rent regulations. In November 2024, California voters will be asked to approve a proposition allowing local governments to add additional restrictions to the state’s existing rent caps.

The laws of supply and demand are international. Berlin froze rents in 2019, and the rental supply plummeted, according to the Ifo Institute, a think tank.

Yet London Mayor Sadiq Khan is calling for freezing rents for two years. London provides housing vouchers to the poor—a smarter approach—but when the city froze the voucher amounts during the COVID-19 pandemic, fewer apartments were available in the price range. The answer is to raise the voucher amount. Freezing rents will only make the shortage worse.

Ignore the demagogues. The evidence is in: Rent regulation is a political scam. There are better ways to help Americans afford a place to live.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/14/2023 - 16:20

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Government

China’s Birth Rate Plummets 10% To Lowest On Record

China’s Birth Rate Plummets 10% To Lowest On Record

China’s birthrate fell 10% last year to its lowest level on record, a significant drop…

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China's Birth Rate Plummets 10% To Lowest On Record

China's birthrate fell 10% last year to its lowest level on record, a significant drop in spite of extensive efforts by the CCP to encourage people to get busy.

Children play outside a cafe in Beijing, China. (AFP)

The country had just 9.56 million births in 2022, the lowest figure since they began keeping records in 1949, according to a report by the National Health Commission.

The high costs of child care and education, growing unemployment and job insecurity as well as gender discrimination have all helped to deter many young couples from having more than one child or even having children at all. -NBC News

China's population also fell for the first time in six decades, dropping to 1.41 billion people - a demographic shift that's caused officials to worry that the country will 'get old before it gets rich' - with a slowing economy and declining tax receipts amid increases in government debt due to soaring health and welfare costs.

According to the report, the demographic downturn is largely thanks to China's one-child policy imposed between 1980 and 2015. Nearly 40% of Chinese babies last year were the second child of a married couple, while 15% were from families with three or more children.

The sharp decline in births comes despite Beijing's efforts to increase child care and provide other financial incentives. In May, President Xi Jinping presided over a panel to study the topic.

Not just China

As we noted in June, Japan's birth rate has also plummeted to a record low for the seventh straight year, with the number of babies born falling below 800,000 this year, health ministry data showed on June 2.

The number of newborns in Japan fell to 770,747 this year, down 40,875 from the previous year and the lowest since the country began record-keeping in 1899, Kyodo News reported, citing health ministry data.

Japan’s fertility rate—the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime—fell from 1.30 in 2021 to 1.26 last year, equivalent to the previous low recorded in 2005. The number is far below the 2.07 rate necessary to sustain a stable population.

The decline in Japan’s birth rate is attributed to people delaying parenthood due to the economic impact brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the prevailing trend among couples to delay marriage, according to the report.

The US birthrate has also been in decline, falling slightly in 2022 compared to 2021, with roughly 3.7 million babies born nationwide. It still hasn't recovered to pre-pandemic levels according to the CDC.

And as Mike Shedlock noted two years ago.

More via Mish Talk, worth a review:

The Pandemic Caused a Baby Bust, Not a Boom

Scientific American reports The Pandemic Caused a Baby Bust, Not a Boom

When the COVID pandemic led to widespread economic shutdowns and stay-at-home orders in the spring of 2020, many media outlets and pundits speculated this might lead to a baby boom. But it appears the opposite has happened: birth rates declined in many high-income countries amid the crisis, a new study shows.

Arnstein Aassve, a professor of social and political sciences at Bocconi University in Italy, and his colleagues looked at birth rates in 22 high-income countries, including the U.S., from 2016 through the beginning of 2021. They found that seven of these countries had statistically significant declines in birth rates in the final months of 2020 and first months of 2021, compared with the same period in previous years. Hungary, Italy, Spain and Portugal had some of the largest drops: reductions of 8.5, 9.1, 8.4 and 6.6 percent, respectively. The U.S. saw a decline of 3.8 percent, but this was not statistically significant—perhaps because the pandemic’s effects were more spread out in the country and because the study only had U.S. data through December 2020, Aassve says. The findings were published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

Birth rates fluctuate seasonally within a year, and many of the countries in the study had experienced falling rates for years before the pandemic. But the declines that began nine months after the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency on January 30, 2020, were even more stark. “We are very confident that the effect for those countries is real,” Aassve says. “Even though they might have had a bit of a mild downward trend [before], we’re pretty sure about the fact that there was an impact of the pandemic.”

Covid Accelerated the Existing Trend

Covid accelerated the already declining birth rates. 

Given the 16-year lag between births and the civilian noninstitutional population coupled with the aging of the workforce there will be fewer and fewer workers supporting retired workers on Social Security. 

Notice the relatively steep decline in the birth rate starting in 2008 and continuing through today. 

That impact will start showing up in 2024 and last a minimum of 12 years.

How long depends on whether the birth rate picks up after Covid. I highly doubt the birth rate will pick up.

Deflationary and Inflationary Impacts

  1. Inflationary: Shortage of workers increases wage pressures
  2. Deflationary: Fewer workers support an increasing number of retirees
  3. Deflationary: Older workers need more assistance, buy fewer things, travel less. 
  4. Deflationary: More government debt and deficits. Government spending has a negative impact on real GDP.

*  *  *

Time for another sexual revolution?

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/13/2023 - 22:40

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