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Moshe Feiglin on the Corona Vaccine Threat

‘You’ll have to kill me before you stick a syringe in me’: Feiglin distrusts COVID vaccine

Moshe Feiglin calls for herd immunity and to protect at-risk populations, attacks government: ‘Worse failure than Yom Kippur War.’

Mordechai Sones , Oct 29 , 2020 11:49 AM
Former Knesset Member Moshe Feiglin called to introduce a “herd immunity” policy in Israel while protecting the elderly and at-risk populations, doubts the promised COVID-19 vaccine.

In a Facebook post today, Feiglin attacked government and coronavirus cabinet policies.

“This is a worse failure than that of the Yom Kippur War,” he wrote. “The number of deaths is already the same, but there, in 1973, the war ended and everyone understood there was a failure – a failure of the ‘conception’.

“The problem is that the coronavirus cabinet and decision-makers are physically blocking any other opinion. With real terror,” he said. “It’s forbidden to express another opinion there. And I know this mostly from the inside, from professionals who sit there on committees. There’s no humility or ability to hear opposing viewpoints.”

He called for a policy of herd immunity: “The doctors I met call to focus all resources and efforts on protecting the elderly and sensitive populations only,” he wrote. “In this way, it will be possible to continue the full functioning of the rest of the population, which will be exposed to the virus and develop resilience, with no significant morbidity or mortality. Like this: Overall mortality will decrease, a devastating economic crisis will be avoided, and the end of the crisis can be expected when ‘herd immunity’ is created.”

Even if there is a COVID-19 vaccine, Feiglin suspects it: “You’ll have to kill me before you stick a syringe in me with this vaccine,” he wrote.

In his remarks, Feiglin compared the situation in Israel today with the situation in Sweden, where a policy similar to the one he hopes for has been applied. He said that from now on he would continue to make comparisons between the countries and even promised: “To be continued.”

From Arutz Sheva, here.

Rabbi Pruzansky Looks At the REAL America

Third World

Posted on December 17, 2020

      I have been fortunate to visit dozens of countries on almost every continent on this planet, and the standard advisory when visiting any country that is part of the third world is: “don’t drink the water.” Too often the water is contaminated, unclean, unfiltered or insufficiently so, or just doesn’t rest well in a first world stomach. Tourists live off bottled water and hotels routinely provide bottled water (the good ones, for free) in every room. It is the price of visiting these countries and enjoying their other, non-potable, attractions.

Then I realized that for many years most people I know do not drink the water in New Jersey or many other places in the United States. That is why the bottled water business is a $7,000,000,000 (that’s billion) industry in America. It might not be a lot compared to other industries –it is half of what was spent on the 2020 presidential election and a third of what Americans spend on chocolate – but it means that people would rather pay good money, billions of dollars, for something that they can get for free right from the tap. There are very few, if any, similar choices made by a consumer.

What about infrastructure? It is not uncommon in the Third World to travel on potholed roads, rundown highways, and transit systems that are crowded and inefficient (although European trains are a marvel of efficiency and exactitude). Bridges and tunnels are often in disrepair and collapses are not unknown. Railroad tracks always seem to be on their last legs.

Is the United States really that different? The subways in many cities compare unfavorably with the third world. Highways, bridges and tunnels are in such need of upgrade and modernization that it is a perennial promise by the politicians to spend hundreds of billions to do it, and never do. That little seems to be done is not only because politicians need something to promise in the future and the union demands grossly inflate the cost of any project but mainly because until anything breaks down completely, why fix it? That money can be spent elsewhere on something new and shiny.

Likewise, the urban areas in third world countries are teeming with slums, old buildings and neighborhoods, and, too often, garbage and rubbish in the streets. These areas abound with dysfunctional families, aimless children, and poor educational frameworks. While the American poor have standards of living that far exceed that of the third world poor, the rest of the description is far too accurate. A slum is a slum wherever it is, and some slums seem to exist permanently. The inner cities wherever they are located remain places of high crime (and misdemeanors), homelessness, social maladies and disorders that seem to defy resolution. In the US as in the third world, there are areas of great opulence that are a short ride from places of great poverty and deprivation. The only difference is that the US has many more places of great opulence than one would find in the third world.

What else characterizes a third world country? Typically, one finds debilitated social and political systems and even the latter is often tenuously held together by a strong man. In the third world, one expect to see lawlessness, mobs and riots in the streets, with the homes and businesses of the successful looted by the unsuccessful and embittered. One would expect the commission of crimes that will or won’t be prosecuted based on the personal whims of the prosecutor. One expects the judiciary to be so corrupt that it places its political predilections over the rule of law. Justice itself is not just illusory but it is altogether capricious, a veritable gamble as to who wins and who loses. The mob drives disfavored politicians from office and places its favorites into office. The government just prints money and distributes it in order to placate the people, oblivious to the fact that soon that money will be worth less and less.

In the third world, it is quite common that the wealthy people are those who cozy up to government power brokers. Cronyism is rampant, sweetheart deals, contracts and monopolies are the norm, and politicians, oligarchs and their media acolytes are often interchangeable. There is a revolving door in which jobs and perks are exchanged regularly. The media, controlled by the elites, suppresses dissent, breaks and cancels its enemies, and sets the agenda for the society. Cabals in the establishment, usually military or intelligence, plot from within and attempt to overthrow any leader who does not conform to their wishes. Dissidents are cast out of civil society unless they do penance, often embracing views they previously found repugnant in order to regain entry into the world of the elites, and having to pay a premium price to do so. The crimes of the disfavored lead to their excision and incarceration while the crimes of the elites are overlooked, minimized or covered up. The rich and powerful get away with it.

Well, how well does that describe modern America? Almost perfectly. The mobs and rioters intimidated and continue to intimidate decent people. A good percentage of Biden voters did so out of fear that the streets would explode and burn (again) if Biden lost. These threats were not subtle in the least. Cities across America deployed their security agents in force on Election Day lest the mob find the results distasteful. (As a general rule, Republicans don’t burn down buildings or businesses. Why would they? They own the buildings and businesses.) In many cities, property crimes, assaults and trespassing committed by the mobsters were not prosecuted. Literally, people committed crimes by the thousands and got away with it only because their politics of the rioters and the prosecutors corresponded. Some rioters were arrested, released without bail, and then arrested again for more crimes, and released again. Black supremacists are disgracefully hailed even as white supremacists are justifiably castigated.

In New York City, police solve crimes at a rate below 30%, which is actually astounding. Criminals just get away with it, and the average citizen does not realize the extent to which they get away with it. Dissidents on moral issues have their religious liberties threatened and curtailed, even as the margin of victory in the Supreme Court (their last protection) is extremely narrow. Congress is as dysfunctional as any third world parliament, with the only saving grace is that Congressmen have not yet come to blows on the floor of the House or Senate, something quite common in the third world. Elements within the CIA and FBI plotted against a sitting president, and few if any will be brought to justice. Money is printed and distributed by the trillions, which is not to say it is fairly or equitably distributed, or distributed to those who need it most rather than to the oligarchs and political cronies of the powerful.

And what better characterizes a third world country than election fraud? It is almost synonymous with the third world, as is the weaselly, politician/media cliché repeatedly uttered of “no evidence of widespread fraud.” Left open is why there should be any fraud at all, as well as a precise definition of “widespread.” Note this well: if 99 ballots out of 100 are legitimate, and 1 out of 100 is bogus, then most people would not construe that as “widespread” fraud. After all, it is only 1% of the vote. Yet, in the three key states of Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan, Biden defeated Trump by less than 1% of the vote. Widespread? Hardly. Determinative? Absolutely. And if we expand the definition of “no evidence of widespread fraud” to 3% of the vote (meaning that the election was 97% honest) then crunch the numbers and Trump won a smashing victory. I accept the outcome, but please do not insult our intelligence with the vapid banality of “no widespread fraud.” And at least acknowledge as well the oddity that all accusations of fraud went in one direction, not both.

It is sad that the United States, to too great an extent, is becoming a third world country in all the aspects that define a third world country. The great irony is that, notwithstanding this political and moral collapse, only the United States could have produced the Coronavirus vaccine in such record time, and only the United States has the material and constitutional heft to lead the world, to be an example for other nations, and to fight the evil that persists in the world especially in countries antagonized by the American ethos. The United States has many places of astonishing beauty and prosperity, and successful people have long segregated themselves into communities that are gated, literally or figuratively. But Americans can also easily be fooled by the glitz, the glamour, the trappings of modernity and technology, and the soothing sounds of social media that indulge the worst facets of our nature and few of the positive ones. America is filled with soporific distractions, the bread and circuses of the Romans that lulled people into thinking that all is good and getting better even as every feature of civil society was breaking down.

As Romans could tell you, nothing lasts forever. It is easy to get complacent, and easier, and worse, to deny what is happening in front of us because the consequences are too unpleasant to consider. “All are considered blind until G-d opens their eyes,” especially diehard partisans. Those who notice this should take it to heart, ignore the mindless cheerleading and empty platitudes, and draw the appropriate conclusions.

From Rabbi Pruzansky, here.

Don’t Even Go There: What a U.S.-China War Would Look Like…

An Expert Military Analysis of War with China

Actually, None is Necessary

• DECEMBER 13, 2020

The Correlation of Armed Forces: U.S. goods and services trade with China totaled an estimated $634.8 billion in 2019. Exports were $163.0 billion; imports were $471.8 billion. The U.S. goods and services trade deficit with China was $308.8 billion in 2019. Trade in services with China (exports and imports) totaled an estimated $76.7 billion in 2019. Services exports were $56.5 billion; services imports were $20.1 billion. The U.S. services trade surplus with China was $36.4 billion in 2019.

There is talk within the Washingtoniat of a possible war with China. Steve Bannon, who apparently was dropped on his head as a child, actually favors such a war. We hear the usual shoo-the-boobs alarm about how the Chinese are doing something terrible and we must gird our loins and American values and show them what for, bow wow, woof. The danger is that the current game of who-blinks-first in Asian waters might actually provoke a shooting war. You know the kind of thing: One warship refuses to get out of the way of another, a collision ensues, some retard lieutenant who signed up on waivers opens fire, and we’re off and running. It is not a good idea to let children play with matches.

The said war is discussed either in emotional terms by idiots or in purely naval terms by those familiar with such things, so we hear of the First Island Chain and the Second Island Chain and whose missiles against the other’s missiles and so on. This would be appropriate if we were fighting World War Two again. Which we aren’t. Let’s take a quick-and-dirty look at how such a war might go.

To begin the war, America would overestimate itself and underestimate China. This is doctrine in the Pentagon. There is probably a manual on it. Inside the DC Bubble, fern-bar Napoleons would assure us that it would be a short war, a cakewalk, a matter of days, not weeks. You know, like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. When it turned out that the Chinese had other ideas, among which surrendering was not, and the months dragged on, various fascinating things would happen.

Rand, a thinktank wholly owned by the Pentagon, at least mentally, has wargamed both the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, concluding that the war could be both very long and a loss for America. We no longer live in 1960.

OK, the war: On day one, all the multitudinous American factories in China shut down. Example: Apple loses its factories, products from those factories, and the Chinese market of 1.4 billion consumers. Its stores close. Tim Cook’s gratitude will know no bounds. American auto manufacturers sell googolplexes of cars in China (or at least lots), mostly made in China. Overnight they will lose factories, cars, and Chinese customers. Overall, China buys many more cars than does the US. This analysis, if anything so obvious may be called analysis, can be repeated for industry after industry after industry. Goodbye, business vote.

Within weeks, Walmart’s shelves go bare. Walk down the aisles and read the “Made in” labels. We are not talking only plastic buckets and mops but chain saws, pharmaceuticals, motorcycles, and blood-pressure cuffs. So much for the blue-collar vote. The US buys 472 billion in goods annually from China, high-tech, low-tech, consumer goods, manufacturing components. No more.

China buys over $163 billion annually in American goods: petroleum, semiconductors, airline engines, soybeans, airliners, on and on. No more. It is hard to underestimate the joy this will cause in influential boardrooms. And of course the American workers who would have produced these things for China will be laid off. As electoral politics, this will prove suboptimal.

China produces a great majority of the rare earth elements crucial to the manufacture of electronics, such as semiconductors. No quick substitute is in sight. Just about everything in America uses these, to include the computers that run the electrical systems of cars. Though I haven’t checked, it is quite possible that the computers themselves are made in China. If you want a new and deeper understanding of the word “hostile,” check the influential CEOs of businesses on their second chipless day.

In a real war, it is likely that China, having thought of the foregoing, would (intelligently) destroy Taiwan’s semiconductor fabs, notably those of TSMC, as well as other factories of electronics. This would hardly be difficult since the Taiwan Strait is only a hundred or so miles wide. Losing these industries would be exceedingly painful for the US since its high-end chips come from Taiwan. It would take America years to replace this capacity domestically. Some of the necessary equipment, extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, is not made in America and in any event cannot be stamped out like beer cans.

In America it would quickly be discovered that the country is rather more dependent on China than some might think. If I may make up an example: The automotive industry finds that its sparkplugs come from China. While America could certainly make spark plugs, it turns out that a decade back the industry found that China could make them for forty percent less. In the cooperative commercial world pre-Trump, this was no problem. Not now. So much for sales of cars. And for the jobs of the workers who make them.

I will bet you all my diamond mines in South Africa and cattle lands in Argentina, that if you went through a parts list for, say, Boeing’s airliners, you would find lots of them made in China. Sure, the US could manufacture most of them, eventually. But companies need parts now, not eventually.

The effects on other countries of a large war against China would be catastrophic if not worse. Other countries also get many things, from China or Taiwan, such as semiconductors. Google on “country x largest trading partner.” A strong pattern quickly becomes clear: China is huge in trading with practically everybody. “Everybody” includes Germany, Japan, Australia, Russia, and South America as a whole. The world economy in its entirety would collapse.

How smart would this be? The United States is already in serious trouble, what with a currency rapidly being debased, a sinking middle class, businesses dying of Covid, jobs disappearing abroad, people living paycheck to paycheck, and social unhappiness resulting in continent-wide riots. Do you suppose the public will gladly support an unfathomably stupid war causing an instant, profound, and murderous economic depression? If so, you probably already have a collection of bridges.

This can be inflicted on the entire earth by a half-dozen loons in or circling around the White House unhindered by a worthless Congress. Six loons. Yes, I know, Trump is unlikely deliberately to start a Third world War, even as a publicity stunt. No, the generals in the Pentagon are not nearly stupid enough. (They might even refuse, pointing out that starting a war requires a declaration by Congress.) The problem is that for years America has been, if not actually looking for a fight, at least daring other countries to start one. For example, murdering Iranian officials, pulling out of arms-control treaties, pushing NATO ever closer to Russia, sanctioning countries far beyond anything that can be called a trade war, and playing chicken with China in the South China Sea. Under these circumstances you can get a fight without quite looking for one.

From Unz, here.

Conspiracies: Some of Them Are True…

Why People Don’t Trust Pfizer’s Covid Vaccine.

12/16/2020

Why do people believe in conspiracy theories?

Michael Shermer, a famous skeptic, was forced to admit that one of the reasons is that some of them are true. In his research he found that the fact that some conspiracy theories are real feeds people’s suspicion and makes them susceptible to the belief in others that are far less credible.

We are increasingly herded into taking a hard line on issues which are nuanced. One example of this is an apparent increase in two camps: some people are entirely against mainstream medicine while others will bend over backwards to mount an extreme defense of the indefensible excesses of Big Pharma.Drugs save lives. Drugs are dangerous. These should not be controversial statements, nor do they contradict one another. According to the American Medical Association’s own figures, medical care has become the third leading cause of death in the United States,1 yet few would advocate a return to a time before we had modern medical care.2

When the government is buying the drug no matter what and those companies are protected from liability for damages that may be caused by those drugs, it ceases to be surprising that people may question whether what is being offered up to them is safe or not. One of the reasons why people believe in conspiracy theories about Big Pharma is because some of them are true.

Some of Pfizer’s History

A 2004 advert for Zoloft claimed that over 16 million Americans were affected by social anxiety disorder. But here’s the thing: a study conducted by Pfizer (the manufacturer) discovered that participants did a lot better overcoming social anxiety with “exposure therapy,” including counseling with a primary care doctor about their symptoms and homework to learn how to identify and break through social habits and fears, did better than people who took their drug.3

When the Upjohn Company (now Pfizer) developed Minoxidil, a drug that was originally manufactured to lower blood pressure, they found that it could cause hair regrowth in some balding patients. So they simply switched the marketed effect for the so-called side effect, and they had a drug for balding which just so happened to lower blood pressure.4

The ALLHAT Study (Antihypertensive and Lipid-Lowering Treatment to Prevent Heart Attacks Trial), was intended to compare the effectiveness of four drugs in preventing complications form high blood pressure. It was originally intended to continue for between four and eight years, but part of it was stopped prematurely because those participants assigned to Cardura (manufactured by Pfizer) were developing significantly more cardiovascular complications than those taking a diuretic. At the time the results were published in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), about $800 million worth of Cardura was being sold each year—but the diuretic was proving more effective at preventing high blood pressure complications at a seventh of the cost. Taking advantage of the fact that most doctors weren’t aware of the research, Pfizer hired damage-control consultants. The American College of Cardiology (ACC) issued a press release recommending that doctors “discontinue use” of Cardura but mere hours later downgraded its wording to “reassess.” Could this be something to do with Pfizer contributing more than $500,000 a year to the ACC?5

Whoever funds the study comes out on top. Companies commonly use positive results from head-to-head trials to encourage doctors to prescribe their drug rather than a competitor’s. When the authors of a Journal of Psychiatry survey looked at the trials, they found a curious thing: in five trials that were paid for by Eli Lilly, its drug Zyprexa came out looking superior to Risperdal, a drug made by the company Janssen. But when Janssen sponsored its own trials, Risperdal was the winner three out of four times. When it was Pfizer funding the studies, its drug Geodon was best. In fact, this tendency for the sponsor’s drug to come out on top held true for 90 percent of the more than thirty trials in the survey.6

A 2017 article noted that “prices for U.S. made pharmaceuticals have climbed over the past decade six times as far as the cost of goods and services overall.”7 In a famous case Mylan was able to increase the price of the EpiPen by more than 450 percent, adjusting for inflation, between 2004 and 2016—despite the epinephrine in each injection costing only around $1—because they were the only legal supplier of the product.8 This example, while extreme, is unfortunately not exceptional. Pfizer, Biogen, Gilead Sciences, Amgem, AbbieVie, Turing Pharmaceutical, Envizo, Valeant Pharmaceuticals, and Jazz Pharmaceuticals (to name a few) all seem to have benefited from price gouging by obtaining legally protected monopoly power over certain healthcare products.9

The covid-19 vaccine manufactured by Pfizer—having bypassed the usual 5–10 years of safety testing—may well be completely harmless, but so long as this kind of tomfoolery continues to be common within the medical field we can expect ever more skeptical people to be labeled by their critics as “antivaxx.”

Pfizer set a record for the largest health care fraud settlement and the largest criminal fine of any kind with $2.3 billion in 2009. The online website Corporate Research Project includes a Pfizer Rap Sheet detailing a number of the controversies they have been involved in.

  • 1.Ray Sipherd, “The Third-Leading Cause of Death in US Most Doctors Don’t Want You to Know About,” CNBC, Feb. 22, 2018, http://bit.ly/100_errors.
  • 2.In their famous report, To Err Is Human, the Institute of Medicine estimated that while 98,000 Americans are killed each year by medical errors, between 90,000 and 400,000 patients are harmed or killed by the innocent use of drugs. They either received the wrong drug, the wrong dose of the right drug, or two drugs that interacted in the wrong way. Institute of Medicine, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, ed. Linda T. Kohn, Janet M. Corrigan, and Molla S. Donaldson (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2000).
  • 3.John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013), p. 232–33.
  • 4.Doug McGuff and Robert P. Murphy, Primal Prescription: Surviving the “Sick Care” Sinkhole (n.p.: Primal Nutrition, 2015), p. 65.
  • 5.Abramson, Overdosed America, p. 108–09.
  • 6.Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), p. 230.
  • 7.Robert Pearl, “New Checks and Balances For Big Pharma,” The Health Care Blog, May 12, 2017, http://bit.ly/New_Checks.
  • 8.Charles Silver and David A. Hyman, Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2018), p. 28.
  • 9.Silver and Hyman, Overcharged, pp. 25–30.

From Mises.org, here.