Eleftheros

Don't worry, it doesn't show.

Oh, I know the one you mean. That's the guy who denied that the US was funding WIV to do exactly the kind of gain-of-function research that the US has now specifically stopped funding. Fauci, that's it. A real piece of work.

I think it was Rachel Maddow on MSNBC..

After 3 years of obfuscation, mis-statements, deflections, and cancellations, the US government has given its clearest signal that dodgy work at the US-funded Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was likely to have caused the Covid-19 virus outbreak. In very strong language for a government communique, the Department of Health & Human Services issued a Notice of Suspension and Notice of Proposed Debarment directly to WIV director-general Dr Yanyi Wang, noting: As the saying goes, the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth is about 18 months. This one took a little longer. At least we don't have to call it a "pandemic" any more, it's just an "unacceptable outcome".

A question worth asking is : How long are these little time-bombs going to last inside people's bodies and what is likely to be their effect over a scale of decades? Most of Europe is seeing overall excess mortality in the 25-49 age group running in the region of 10-20%, and as if that were bad enough, the figures show no sign of returning to normal. Spain, for example, has been recording excess mortality of 11% or more for 12 consecutive quarters - 3 years non-stop - according to Eurostat data. The silence from governments is deafening.

I can't tell if you're joking, or are a green climate zealot. At this point, with climate change, it's almost impossible to tell the real statements from parody.

You could say the same about most members of the US government and bureaucracies at this point.

A truly noble insight, Comrade! Let the red star sparkle as we march off to war!

She's not a 'spokesperson'. She's the CEO.

Dr Peter Hotez is probably the least credible of all the US government health spokesmen, a remarkable achievement in itself. Instead of finding dangerous anti-vaxxers to contradict, he spends all his time contradicting himself.

Alastair McIntosh (2020). Riders on the Storm: The Climate Crisis and the Survival of Being.

Welcome as this is, I see it as only a minor part of the picture. There are hundreds of millions, probably billions of people who were not injured by the vaccines, but had their lives ruined to a considerable extent by the Covid situation. Even the UN admits this, in its recent ‘Political Declaration of the United Nations General Assembly High-level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response.’ To restate the obvious, this does not happen due to a virus targeting sick elderly people, resulting in a median age of death at around 80. It occurs when children and productive adults are barred from school, work, healthcare and participating in markets for goods and services. Economic, social and health catastrophe inevitably results, disproportionately harming poorer people and low-income countries, with the World Bank estimating that 150 million people would be thrown back into extreme poverty.

What Dr. Ho is describing is also known as "original antigenic sin", and was first properly categorized in 1960 by the American virologist Thomas Francis Jr. It was well known in medicine from then on until 2021, when it was forgotten, along with the concept of natural acquired immunity to infection, so it's good to see that the NY Times, of all places, has rediscovered it.

Well, that was essentially the point I was making - thinking brains are increasingly being banned everywhere across the online space, because there are too many people in positions of influence who think that pointing out reality is the same as hate speech. They act from a combination of cowardice and narcissism, but there's no point in complaining about it, because that's the way things are right now. And to be honest, I don't think we've even reached the bottom of the pit yet.

It's too bad that we are barred here from discussing the VAERS data (US) or Yellow Card (UK) data or EUDRAVigilance (EU), because one look at those figures is enough to curl your toes up when you think about getting injected with any of those Big Pharma products. I understand (to an extent) the rationale for banning mention of these data, as they are self-reported rather than scientifically rigorous, but then again, people don't report adverse reactions to vaccines for fun, and most likely only a very small proportion of adverse reactions are reported. The data is chilling, but inadmissible as evidence, as they say.

It appears that a great many people believe in the general good faith approach of Big Pharma in this situation. I find that strange, since the same people believe that Big Oil and Big Tobacco are the devil incarnate, full of evil tricks and unbridled greed, who will happily cause death to millions for an extra dollar of profit. But Big Pharma is regarded as a noble benefactor of the human race. Odd.

Prepare yourself to receive a flood of regurgitated government declarations, presented as though it were holy writ handed down at Mount Sinai.

I couldn't agree more. But to learn anything from this, people have to honestly look at what they did, accept that they made mistakes and take responsibility for those mistakes. And up to now, I do not see any governments, bureaucrats or health authorities owning up to the appalling train wreck which they caused with their panicky, heavy-handed and authoritarian responses. They're all still pretending that they acted in a competent and appropriate fashion, bar the occasional understandable slip-up. Their failures will affect us all for decades. We now live in a landscape where unexplained excess deaths continue to hover around 10% in many western countries, where children's early development has been forever damaged, and countries have piled up trillions of dollars of debt which will have to be paid off by subsequent generations.

That makes sense. Most of the government narrative throughout the last 3+ years regarding Covid has been conducted at a Disney intellectual level, so why change now?

From the rather snide tone of your opening sentence, it seems that you think I was using AI to come up with my opinions on battery technology. I was not. I have been interested in battery technology for a long time, and am well researched on the topic. I do not need AI to formulate my opinions on the matter. Don't judge other people by your own standards. If, by some small chance, it was not your intention to be petty and snide, then you might think more carefully before posting material that can very easily be misunderstood in that direction.

I really hope an outstanding battery technology or technologies comes along. As Arthur C Clarke wrote, a real breakthrough is 100 years overdue. Most likely, there will be different technologies for different applications; vehicles need a good Watt-hours/kilogram ratio, mega storage projects need widely available materials (even the hot sand pilot projects sound pretty cool). The Japanese are apparently working on carbon-carbon batteries, which would be ideal. The blockage I see, so far, is that many pilot projects are working successfully, but nobody has yet taken the leap to commit to any of these on a large scale. There needs to be some courage and some faith, or these important technologies are just going to linger on the periphery for decades.

He's got plenty. Vaccine mandates were rife in large public institutions across the US, and imposed at the national level in many other countries. Austria mandated vaccination for over-18s, while Germany locked down those who were unvaccinated. A couple of great role models from the past for authoritarian control of society. NZ Prime Minister Jacinda "We are the truth" Ardern said that the country would become a two-tier society between the vaccinated and unvaccinated, while French president Macron declared he would "piss off the unvaccinated" by barring them from public places. Greece levied fines of 114 euros per month on over-60s who were unvaccinated, a 25% hit to their already meager state pension. Vaccine mandates were widespread worldwide and enforced by the jackboot in a great many countries. To pretend otherwise can accurately be described as "denialism".

Good point. And that's what the government health bureaucrats have been doing relentlessly for the last 3 years, all the way from "2 weeks to flatten the curve" to US colleges reinstating mask mandates.

The AstraZeneca vaccine is not a "traditional vaccine". It is quite similar to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, but uses DNA rather than RNA as a delivery mechanism . It was pulled from use in a number of countries back in 2021 for suspected adverse reactions. https://time.com/5947134/astrazeneca-covid-vaccine-stopped/ Its use has also been restricted in the UK to the over-40s even in the UK, where it was developed, and it is facing lawsuits in the UK over adverse effects. https://www.reuters.com/legal/astrazeneca-facing-two-london-lawsuits-over-covid-19-vaccines-2023-08-23/ So it is maybe not the best choice. The only "traditional" vaccines are the Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines, which may be hard to find.

More tolerant and humane opinions from the Covid zealots....