This, Too, Is a Start

To paraphrase an old trope, transgenders are people, too. Whether gender dysphoria is truly the case in particular individuals, or it’s a sham claim by some boys and young men in order to gain access to girls’ and women’s sports competition (or just their locker rooms), or it’s the manufacture of woke “schooling,” transgenders, those victimized by that pseudo-schooling, even the cheaters, need a place to compete.

Just not a place where males transgendered into women compete against women. Nor should women transgendered into men be competing against men, but given the nature of transgendering, that’s not a problem.

A Campaign Issue

Republican candidates for Senator Dr Mehmet Oz and Herschel Walker (Pennsylvania and Georgia, respectively) have been ordered by President Joe Biden (D) to resign from their positions on President’s Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition “by the end of the day” or “face termination.

Both have refused.

Both, also, should wear their terminations as the badges of honor they will be, and they should use their terminations as campaign issues. Oz has the right of it:

Clearly, Joe Biden can’t be around anyone who doesn’t completely fall in line with his fear-mongering authoritarian one-size-fits-all COVID handling. I am proud of my service and will not resign.

Deaths from Wuhan Virus Vaccine Side Effects?

Lancet claims so. Leave aside that the magazine long ago went political and abandoned serious medical paper publication, having already had to publicly retract one paper that was shown (not by the magazine’s putative peer reviewers) to be badly flawed and written from a predetermined political conclusion.

This paper is just as badly flawed, in its own right.

The paper begins by depending in part on the CDC and FDA jointly maintained Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System database. VAERS is a badly flawed database, being a collection of claims voluntarily reported by anyone who felt like interacting with it—and lacking who knows what other information that others didn’t feel like reporting.

There’s a Hint

Approval of Pfizer vaccinations against the Wuhan Virus for kids under 5 years old has been delayed as Pfizer has opted to test more before looking for approval. The vaccines don’t seem to work as well as hoped against the Omicron variant. But this part of the reasoning in the linked article jumped out at me.

So few study subjects [those kids], whether vaccinated or unvaccinated, developed Covid-19 during testing thus far that the small number of Omicron cases made the vaccine appear less effective in an early statistical analysis, the people said.

Wuhan Virus Boosters

The CDC now says

studies showed effectiveness against COVID emergency-department and urgent-care incidents was “87% and 91%, respectively, during the two months after a third dose” of the [mRNA vaccine] booster,” but that it decreased to 66% and 78% by the fourth month after a third dose.

That’s for both the Delta and Omicron variants of the Wuhan Virus.

Leave aside, for the moment, the lack of credibility of anything coming from the Biden-Harris’ CDC; instead, accept, arguendo the narrow claims of the CDC paper Just the News cites.

Walensky Fails

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky was asked on Bret Baier’s Fox News Sunday episode last Sunday,

Do you know how many of the 836,000 deaths in the U.S. linked to COVID are from COVID or how many are with COVID, but they had other comorbidities? Do you have that breakdown?

Walensky proceeded to weasel-word her answer and segued to the only talking point she could remember, that everyone must get vaccinated and boosted and get their children vaccinated, too, as soon as they’re eligible. Only toward the end of her off-topic response did she reveal her larger failure:

Child Abuse

Now the New Orleans government is requiring children as young as five years old to get vaccinated, whether they need it or not, whether their parents want it for their children or not.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell said she is implementing the policy “to keep the omicron variant at bay,” amid surging cases in Orleans Parish.

And

“The vaccine mandate will expand to include children ages 5-11,” she said. “We will require proof of vaccination or negative tests at bars and restaurants and other locations for everyone ages 5 and older.”

Wuhan Virus Deaths and Wuhan Virus Politics

The Wuhan Virus mortality rate for those of us who are basically healthy is, and has been all along, once we started getting enough data to make such assessments, a pretty constant and small fraction of 1%—out of 1,000 cases, fewer than 5 of us are likely to die.  Fewer yet, if we consider all infections, but the only hard data we have are reported cases, since many with infections either are asymptomatic, and so go unreported, or are sufficiently mild that the individual self-medicates, and so go unreported.

“It is a lawful order.”

That’s what SecDef Lloyd Austin is insisting, through his Press Secretary Admiral John Kirby, regarding his order to States’ National Guard to get vaccinated against the Wuhan Virus or face serious consequences that have

the same potential [for punishment] as active-duty members who refuse the vaccine.

That punishment extends up through dishonorable discharge.

Leaving aside the fact that Austin’s vaccine mandate violates Guardsmen’s religion-related rights and utterly ignores existing virus immunity from having already been infected and recovered, the Austin Mandate is a deliberate overreach of his authority as a Federal government cabinet secretary.

Government Controls

Here’s the latest version of the Biden-Harris administration’s attempt to expand government control over our economy, this time using Medicare drug pricing as their venue. This example also is the latest inclusion in the Progressive-Democratic Party’s reconciliation bill.

The Health and Human Services Secretary will “negotiate” 10 to 20 of the drugs that Medicare spends most on, starting in 2025. Drug makers will get socked with a 95% excise tax on gross sales if they don’t agree to the government’s price.