It's getting to the point where I'm so full up I can't eat any more of the insulting pastries served up by the Globe.
I hope you can find some use for it and I apologize if I missed something. The truth is I am falling further and further behind every day and am flat out exhausted by the last eight months. I know there are only a few weeks left before the shit really hits the fan.
May God bless you and watch over all those you love and find important, dear readers, and I mean that with all sincerity.
"Here come the tortoises: In the race for a Covid-19 vaccine, slow starters could still win out" by Helen Branswell, STAT | September 24, 2020
The race is not always to the swift, as the cocky hare learned in Aesop’s classic fable, “The Hare and the Tortoise.” Those handicapping the so-called competition to develop Covid-19 vaccines would do well to keep an eye on the slower runners in this pursuit.
Corporate giants Sanofi and Merck, which got a relatively late start in developing Covid-19 vaccines, may seem far behind the frontrunners, but experts say they also have such deep experience developing and testing vaccine candidates, and producing vaccine at commercial scale, that both could well close the gap considerably in the months ahead.
Each is developing two vaccines, in partnership with others.
Saad Omer, a vaccinologist and director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, noted that some companies closer to the front of the pack lack Sanofi’s competitive advantages.
Cambridge, Mass.-based Moderna, for instance, has not yet brought a vaccine through the approval process and is now attempting to produce doses of a Covid-19 vaccine at a massive scale. It estimates it should be able to make between 500 million and 1 billion doses a year — an output target that would be daunting to even a seasoned manufacturer.
“Would you rather have … a company that has done scaled-up manufacturing under strict regulations and has substantial muscle memory of doing that?” Omer wondered, speaking about the appeal of a vaccine veteran. “That gives you some reassurance.”
Robin Robinson, the former head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, similarly noted that Merck, with its large global footprint, has experience conducting clinical trials around the world and significant manufacturing know-how.
“They can move fast,” he said.
A vaccine being produced by Pfizer in partnership with BioNTech appears poised to be the first to produce data that will show if it protects against Covid-19 infection. Moderna appears to be a close second, followed by a vaccine being developed by University of Oxford and AstraZeneca — the study of which is still on hold in the United States because of an adverse event in Britain — and Johnson & Johnson, which started its Phase 3 trial this week. Novavax, which also has yet to bring a vaccine to market, is currently running Phase 2 trials.
Related:
Also see:
J&J confirms COVID-19 vaccine trial paused after unexplained illness
It's a bad moment for Johnson & Johnson and one of the 7 looming questions about the rollout of a Covid-19 vaccine, but I'm sure they will soon be back on track like AstraZeneca.
Sanofi and Merck are behind this group of five, but the race for a vaccine is not a winner-take-all situation. The world is expected to need vaccines from any number of manufacturers to curb the Covid-19 pandemic, and it’s likely that some that aren’t among the first to cross the finish line will have advantages the earliest vaccines do not.
“The best outcome for us is to have several across the finish line because the global need is tremendous,” said Luciana Borio, a former acting chief scientist at the Food and Drug Administration who is now vice president at In-Q-Tel, a not-for-profit investment group.
“Speed is just one parameter, and actually in the global scheme, it’s not the most important one,” said Borio, who stressed the need for safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines.
Who or what is In-Q-Tel, and would it surprise you that they are basically a front for the CIA.
Did you know the CIA has a venture capital wing and secret links to Operation Warp Speed?
The vaccination effort is a MILITARY CAMPAIGN!
Sanofi and Merck are both known to prefer underpromising and overdelivering.
“We’re not a flashy, you know, press-release-everyday kind of company,” said Nicholas Kartsonis, who leads infectious disease clinical research for Merck Research Laboratories.
“We tend to be more conservative for our positions because we know the complexities and the challenges, especially for making vaccines,” said John Shiver, head of vaccine R&D for Sanofi.
Shiver initially estimated that it would take “several years” to develop and license a Covid-19 vaccine during a meeting with President Trump and other vaccine manufacturers at the White House in March. Trump appeared more taken with Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel’s projection that his company could generate clinical efficacy data for a vaccine in mere months.
Moderna, along with Pfizer and BioNTech, are making messenger-RNA vaccines, which are far quicker to develop in the early stages than some of the more established vaccine constructs. While there is hope that with that great speed, mRNA vaccines will be the answer to newly emerging diseases in future, some experts question whether the technology is ready for a prime-time debut now. Much rides on how well the vaccines stimulate the immune system and how durable that effect is.
“In terms of making billions of doses, we’re probably a little premature for that to be as cheap and available at some of the other approaches,” philanthropist Bill Gates, whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded the science behind the RNA vaccine platform, told STAT in a recent interview.
“Five to 10 years from now, if things go well for that platform, it would be the primary and perhaps even the only response that we make here. So that timing’s a bit unfortunate,” Gates said.
I'm wondering how much money he has given to STAT, and the last thing you want in your body is his poisonous concoction that will admittedly alter your DNA.
The genocidal psychopaths and control freaks have already done it to the plants and animals, and now they want to treat us like cattle as well because that is how the monsters see us.
One of Sanofi’s Covid-19 candidates is an mRNA vaccine, which it is developing with Translate Bio, a Lexington, Mass.-based biotech that has been developing therapeutics using mRNA. The company has a decade’s worth of experience learning how to manufacture mRNA to substantial scale, Shiver said, adding the partners believe they can make between 90 million and 360 million doses of this two-dose vaccine in 2021.
“The mRNA, for example, is a very interesting technology. That’s one of the reasons why we’re also pursuing that with a partner, but there are no licensed products with mRNA. No one’s ever made hundreds of millions of doses either before,” he noted, adding the Phase 1/2 trial for this vaccine is expected to start by the end of November.
Shiver said the earliest the vaccine might be approved — if it’s proven safe and effective — would be the second half of 2021. Sanofi’s other vaccine is being developed using the same platform the company uses to make its Flublok vaccine. That’s a plus: There’s always a greater degree of comfort and confidence on the part of regulatory agencies when a vaccine is made using a platform that they are familiar with and that has an established safety record.
(Likewise, by the time Sanofi has data on its mRNA vaccine, it may be able to benefit from the regulatory agencies’ evaluations of Moderna’s and Pfizer’s vaccines, Omer noted.)
This Sanofi vaccine, called a recombinant protein vaccine, will be used with an adjuvant — a compound that boosts the immune system’s response — made by GSK.
Just what would that adjuvant be?
A Phase 1/2 clinical trial — involving 440 subjects, large for an early trial — is already underway. Shiver said the company expects to have safety and immunogenicity data by the end of December. It also expects to have 100 million doses of the vaccine made by then — should the Food and Drug Administration start to issue emergency use authorizations for Covid-19 vaccines.
Shiver said Sanofi expects to be able to produce 1 billion doses of this vaccine in 2021. The vaccine is likely to require two doses — though the company is also testing a single dose.
I couldn't help jabbing at that a little.
Another advantage: This vaccine does not need to be shipped and stored at the ultra-cold temperatures of the mRNA vaccines, which makes distribution and administration easier.
One of the Merck vaccines is also being made using a platform that regulatory agencies already know. The vaccine is made by fusing genetic material from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, onto a livestock virus that can infect people but does not sicken them. The vesicular stomatitis virus, or VSV, backbone triggers a rapid and robust immune response — and all research on the backbone to date shows it does it with a single dose. It’s the same platform that was used to develop Merck’s Ebola vaccine, which has shown strong results. It has “not good and not very good, but outstanding efficacy” said Robinson, the former head of BARDA.
They literally see us as livestock and insects, folks.
We are dealing with supreme evil.
Merck is developing this vaccine in conjunction with IAVI — the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative — which is run by former Merck chief scientist Mark Feinberg.
Kartsonis noted Merck’s Ebola vaccine worked as well in the elderly as it did in young, healthy adults. That’s not a common feature of vaccines, and if the same is true for a VSV-vectored Covid vaccine, that would be a big selling point — given the elderly are at the highest risk from SARS-2. “There may be scenarios where this is a great vaccine for the elderly or a great vaccine for certain patient populations,” Kartsonis said.
Another potential plus: IAVI is working to see if the vaccine could be given orally. A vaccine that doesn’t need to be injected “would be the crown jewel of having a vaccine for this,” Kartsonis said.
He talks like a eugenicist, what with the vaccine being great for certain populations.
This vaccine is not yet in clinical trials, though Merck expects to start them before the end of the year. The company said it is too soon to say when Phase 3 studies — the large studies that show if a vaccine works — could take place.
The second vaccine that Merck is making — in collaboration with its newly acquired subsidiary, Austrian-based Themis BioScience — is already in clinical trials. It uses an attenuated (weakened) measles virus as a vector with which to introduce genetic material from SARS-2 to the immune system. There are no licensed vaccines using this backbone, but clinical trials of a chikungunya virus vaccine using this approach show promise.
“Timing is important. Don’t get me wrong. It’s very important, but at the end of the day where we all want is a vaccine that highly effective, highly well tolerated and safe and is as durable as it can be,” Kartsonis said.
He and Shiver both expressed the hope that multiple vaccines will work and that others are approved before their companies’ products are ready for use, but both expressed a fair amount of confidence that as the Covid-19 market establishes itself, there will be some vaccines that perform better than others.
“The race has started, but I mean, how many marathon runners do you know in mile 1 win a race?” Kartsonis asked.
Ah, COVID is to become a MARKET!
A COMMODITY if you will!
MOO-MOO!
With other diseases, being fourth or fifth (or sixth or seventh) to market might make pursuit of a vaccine, even if promising, financially infeasible. But the global need for Covid-19 vaccine has introduced a whole new type of calculus to these considerations, said Omer.
“It’s not necessarily that the first vaccine is the one that establishes the market share,” he said, “because the pie is so big.”
That right there makes one want to violently vomit, and it is DAMN OBVIOUS this is not about CURING COVID!
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I'm sure there is a lesson in there somewhere to keep plodding along here as the Boston research team says it has enrolled a diverse group in Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine study.
That is literally HOW the WORM will TURN.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
These may be of interest to you:
"How Pinterest beat back vaccine misinformation — and what Facebook could learn from its approach" by Erin Brodwin, STAT | September 21, 2020
The battle over misinformation amid the Covid-19 pandemic has pitted health experts, parts of the public, and the leaders of online platforms against one another.
So far, one social media giant seems to be winning the fight against falsehoods: Pinterest.
The company, which made a name for itself as an idea collection platform for everything from clothing trends to healthy recipes, has taken a hardline strategy against health misinformation, and in particular, vaccine falsehoods. Pinterest has a zero-tolerance vaccine misinformation policy, a team tasked with enforcing it, and a flexible approach that accounts for emerging intel from health authorities.
It's called censorship, and illustrates the immense power of the pharmaceutical lobby and those who fund it; however, beyond that it leaves the question of why something that is claimed to be for our own good and health need to have opposing information censored given the alleged self-evident benefit of their product.
To say it stinks is an understatement.
Pinterest’s strategy appears to run in stark contrast to that of Facebook, which has seen misinformation run rampant. Facebook, which has frequently cited free speech as a reason for leaving potentially harmful posts untouched, has drawn criticism from health experts who say the social network hasn’t done enough to combat it. Some experts say it could stand to take a page from Pinterest.
“Pinterest’s results suggest that if Facebook scaled up its moderation, it might get further,” said Neil Johnson, professor of physics and researcher at the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics at George Washington University.
The crux of Pinterest’s anti-misinformation arsenal is its mission statement: Inspire people to do the things they love. Unlike Facebook, which is centered around connection — negative or positive — Pinterest has a narrower, more positivity-minded focus. The company’s emphasis on fostering inspiration carries over to its misinformation policies.
“There’s nothing inspiring about harmful misinformation that might affect your health or your family’s health or your community’s health,” said Sarah Bromma, the company’s head of policy.
The strategy isn’t perfect, of course. There’s still an abundance of “pin” collections that encourage non-evidence-based treatments for issues like anxiety and weight loss, yet overall, the approach has produced some positive outcomes, especially when it comes to vaccine misinformation, which was once common on Pinterest.
Unlike Facebook, which has separate teams for safety and health, Pinterest considers public safety and individual or community health to be two sides of the same coin. Its health misinformation policy states that any content that could result in immediate, negative effects on someone’s health or on the safety of the general public has no place on the platform. There are no exceptions for prominent political leaders or celebrities.
“Content that incites violence, or false and misleading health information, or hateful content — all these things we see as antithetical to inspiration,” Bromma said.
I'm starting to lose Pinterest.
Users who search for either vaccines or Covid-19 and any related terms are shown results only from Pinterest boards maintained by the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
For vaccines and Covid-19, subjects that simultaneously threaten individual health and public safety, the company has escalated its anti-misinformation tactics. For example, ahead of the planned release of the second “Plandemic” conspiracy film, Pinterest had its moderators run proactive searches for terms that might have been associated with the movie, deleting them to nip any problematic content in the bud. (The second film, which was the full-length version of the first, didn’t go viral in the same way.)
Pinterest has also suspended people from the platform who violate that policy, including prominent vaccine conspiracy theorist Larry Cook.
The world is upside down these days, and it is the pre$$ and ma$$ media who are pushing ungodly and unholy conspiracies of lies.
When the true science isn't on your side, holler conspiracy.
No offense, but that has been soooo played it no longer means anything.
Facebook, too, points people who use its search feature to information about vaccines and Covid-19 from the CDC and the WHO, but it hasn’t stemmed the tide of a growing pool of groups and pages that spread falsehoods about the two subjects, according to Johnson and other experts who monitor misinformation on social media.
In a July report assessing the growing influence of anti-vaccination content on social media, the U.K.-based nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate concluded that so-called “anti-vaccination entrepreneurs” — people who sell or profit off of vaccine misinformation — garnered a total following of 28 million people on Facebook and saw their followers grow by 854,000 between May and June. Zeroing in on Facebook groups, the researchers identified 64 that regularly shared vaccine misinformation, with a collective following of 1 million that has also kept growing.
For Pinterest, responding to misinformation isn’t a static strategy, Bromma said. Rather, the company’s approach is designed to change in step with regularly evolving guidance from public health organizations including the WHO and the CDC.
Those two are the prime misinformers.
For example, back in February, when the CDC warned against hoarding masks and said they weren’t necessary for the general public, Pinterest banned ads for face masks and started cracking down on users’ posts about them. When the CDC changed its guidance to encourage mask-wearing, Pinterest pivoted, once again allowing advertisers and the public to share content about masks, including handmade coverings.
Pinterest’s actions are overall a positive effort, Johnson said, but given Pinterest’s petite footprint within the broader social media landscape, they only serve as a small Band-Aid over a far larger problem.
Online networks have a way of fostering increasingly extremist ideologies, Johnson’s research has found. This happens primarily because social media communities — particularly Facebook groups, for example — connect extremists who would otherwise be silenced by a more vocal and rational majority. When people don’t find others who espouse their misinformed beliefs, they simply migrate to a new group or a new social network.
In order to read this right you have to turn it inside-out and backwards. Then it makes sense.
“It’s like a forest fire,” Johnson said. “People just direct themselves. If they don’t find what they want — and we’ve seen this with vaccines — they just work around it into another space.”
Related:
"Northern California's wine country was on fire again Monday as strong winds fanned flames in the already scorched region, prompting evacuation orders involving more than 50,000 people. Residents of the Oakmont Gardens assisted living home in Santa Rosa boarded brightly lit city buses overnight, some wearing bathrobes and using walkers. They wore masks to protect against the coronavirus as orange flames marked the dark sky. Flames also engulfed the Chateau Boswell Winery north of St. Helena. The Adventist Health St. Helena hospital suspended care and transferred all patients elsewhere, according to a statement on its website....."
Globe coverage of those has petered out and “it’s like God has no sympathy, no empathy for Sonoma County."
Although vaccine-related falsehoods appear to have only spread further on Facebook since the outset of the pandemic, the conflagration has been blazing for a while, according to Johnson and his colleagues, who published a study in Nature in May that showed a sizable uptick in the followers of pages promoting anti-vaccine rhetoric between February and October of 2019.
Humanity rising to its defense!
The problem is especially dire because of the way Facebook appears to help extremists recruit new followers: Johnson found, for example, that while pages spreading vaccines myths had fewer followers than factual pages, falsehood-spreading pages were higher in number, faster-growing, and increasingly more connected to neutral pages where people did not yet have a clear leaning one way or the other. If the trend continues, Johnson predicted that anti-vaccination rhetoric will dominate on the platform by 2030.
We are winning, and that is why they need to censor.
Experts have also raised questions about some of the tactics Facebook has deployed in response to Covid-19 misinformation. After it deletes a false post about the pandemic, Facebook places a generic message with links to the WHO’s myth-busting site in the feeds of any users who “liked” or commented on it. Experts — including the researchers whose studies Facebook has said it based its strategy on — have said they believe Facebook misinterpreted their work. Rather than placing a generic post at the top of users’ feeds, the experts favored more direct messages to users that included specific corrections to the falsehood.
If policymakers are to comprehensively address social media’s misinformation problem, Johnson said, they need a research-driven guide that details where extremists are making connections online and how they are recruiting more moderate or undecided individuals.
“You won’t win this battle if you don’t have a map of the battlefield,” said Johnson.
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Time to Face up to the facts:
"Facebook Bans Content About Holocaust Denial From Its Site" by Sheera Frenkel New York Times | October 12, 2020
In 2018, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, famously cited Holocaust deniers in a fumbled attempt to make a point about free speech.
At the time, he said the deniers — those who reject or distort the Holocaust, a genocide in which millions of Jews and others were killed by Nazis and their collaborators during World War II — were a key example of people whom he personally disagreed with, but, he said, he did not think Facebook should censor or remove what they posted “because I think there are things that different people get wrong.”
On Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg announced he was reversing his decision. Facebook, he said, would now ban content that “denies or distorts the Holocaust.”
It's massive clampdown against the myths of our time.
In announcing the change, Facebook cited a recent survey that found that nearly a quarter of American adults ages 18 to 39 said they believed the Holocaust either was a myth or was exaggerated, or they weren’t sure whether it happened.
That must horrify a certain cho$en tribe, and with good reason.
“I’ve struggled with the tension between standing for free expression and the harm caused by minimizing or denying the horror of the Holocaust,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote in his blog post. “Drawing the right lines between what is and isn’t acceptable speech isn’t straightforward, but with the current state of the world, I believe this is the right balance.”
I'm sick of it being a topic of conversation when it is near ancient history now and we have the existential threat of real fascists in our midst with 21st-century genocides that remain unaddressed.
Mr. Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that he does not want Facebook to be an arbiter of free speech. The Silicon Valley company has faced plenty of criticism for that stance, including from civil rights groups who have said Facebook has allowed toxic speech and misinformation to flow unchecked on its site. Many have called for Mr. Zuckerberg to rethink his position.
More recently, the social network has become more proactive about removing some content, including banning the QAnon conspiracy movement and taking a stronger line against hate and vigilante groups. Facebook has said it has made some of the changes because QAnon has been linked to real-world harm and vigilante groups have been arrested for violent acts.
The truth is leaking out everywhere as evil plays whack-a-mole and it definitely feels apocalyptic, folks.
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether it was re-evaluating its stance on free speech.
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Meet the face of misinformation:
"On Facebook, Misinformation Is More Popular Now Than in 2016" by Davey Alba New York Times | October 12, 2020
During the 2016 presidential election, Russian operatives used Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media platforms to spread disinformation to divide the American electorate.
Why would they need to when the agenda-pu$hing pre$$ does such a good job of it?
Since then, the social media companies have spent billions of dollars and hired tens of thousands of people to help clean up their act, but have the platforms really become more sophisticated at handling misinformation?
Not necessarily.
People are engaging more on Facebook today with news outlets that routinely publish misinformation than they did before the 2016 election, according to new research from the German Marshall Fund Digital, the digital arm of the public policy think tank. The organization, which has a data partnership with the start-up NewsGuard and the social media analytics firm NewsWhip, published its findings on Monday.
When it comes to COVID, the majority of misinformation is conveyed by the media without question or correction.
In total, Facebook likes, comments and shares of articles from news outlets that regularly publish falsehoods and misleading content roughly tripled from the third quarter of 2016 to the third quarter of 2020, the group found.
About two thirds of those likes and comments were of articles published by 10 outlets, which the researchers categorized as “false content producers” or “manipulators.” Those news outlets included Palmer Report and The Federalist, according to the research.
The group used ratings from NewsGuard, which ranks news sites based on how they uphold nine journalistic principles, to sort them into “false content producers,” which repeatedly publish provably false content; and “manipulators,” which regularly present unsubstantiated claims or that distort information to make an argument.
“We have these sites that masquerade as news outlets online. They’re allowed to,” said Karen Kornbluh, director of GMF Digital. “It’s infecting our discourse and it’s affecting the long-term health of the democracy.”
Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman, said that analyzing likes, shares and comments to draw conclusions was “misleading” because the data does not capture what most people see on Facebook. The social network does not make other data, such as the reach of posts, publicly available; engagement data is the only information it provides.
Ms. Kornbluh said Facebook users engaged more with articles from all news outlets this year because the coronavirus pandemic forced people to quarantine indoors, but the growth rate of likes, shares and comments of content from manipulators and false content producers exceeded the interactions that people had with what the researchers called “legitimate journalistic outlets,” such as Reuters, Associated Press and Bloomberg.
Was that an unintended consequence of this exercise because they thought we would all be watching TV?
Ms. Kornbluh said social media firms face a conundrum because their businesses rely on viral content to bring in users, who they can then show ads to. Tamping down on misinformation “just runs against their economic incentives,” she said.
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Good thing Microsoft(!) stopped them in their tracks:
"Microsoft takes down a risk to the election, and finds the US doing the same; Fearing Russian ransomware attacks, the company and US Cyber Command mounted similar preemptive strikes" by David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth New York Times, October 12, 2020
Microsoft and a team of companies and law enforcement groups have disabled — at least temporarily — one of the world’s largest hacking operations, an effort run by Russian-speaking cybercriminals that officials feared could disrupt the presidential election in three weeks, but as soon as Microsoft began dismantling the operations last week, seeking to cripple a network of infected computers known as TrickBot that has been used to paralyze computer systems with ransomware attacks, it discovered that someone else was trying to do the same thing.
I've seen this movie before, and Trick me once, shame on you, Trick me twice.... we can't get tricked again!
In a separate but parallel effort — which was apparently not coordinated with Microsoft — US Cyber Command, the military cousin to the National Security Agency, had already started hacking TrickBot’s command-and-control servers around the world late last month, according to two government officials.
Good thing we never interfere with anyone.
The one-two punch painted a picture of the accelerating cyberconflict underway in the final weeks before the elections. Cyber Command, following a model it created in the 2018 midterm elections, kicked off a series of covert preemptive strikes on the Russian-speaking hackers it believes could aid President Vladimir Putin in disrupting the casting, counting, and certifying of ballots this November. Meanwhile, Microsoft, Symantec, and other American companies are doing the same.
The hacks could be coming from anywhere and fingerprints don't mean a thing.
TrickBot is their biggest target yet. A vast network of infected computers, known as a botnet, TrickBot has been used for everything from stealing people’s online banking credentials to attacking towns, cities, and hospitals with ransomware, malware that locks up victims’ computers until they pay a ransom, often in Bitcoin. So far, TrickBot has not been directed at voting infrastructure, officials say, but it would be well suited to turn against the offices of the secretaries of state who certify tallies, vulnerable voter registration systems, or electronic poll books, the records that allow people to vote.
“Just imagine that four to five precincts were hit with ransomware on Election Day,” said Tom Burt, the Microsoft executive overseeing the team that has been dismantling TrickBot. “Talk about throwing kerosene on this unbelievable discussion of our elections and about whether the results are valid or not,” Burt said. “It would be a huge story. It would churn on forever, and it would be a huge win for Russia. They would be toasting with vodka well into the next year. That is a risk I want to take out,” he said.
How?
Burt said he did not know for sure where the TrickBot operators were based beyond Eastern Europe, but they are Russian-speaking and have developed their tools into a sophisticated, profitable operation. They not only infect computers, but also catalog lists of infected computers and sell access to valuable systems to other cybercriminals looking to commit banking fraud or lock them up with ransomware.
Good Lord, they could be Ukrainian Jews or the Jewi$h mafia!
The list of victims has expanded to include cities in Florida, courts, and school districts in Georgia, The Los Angeles Times, the City of New Orleans, and state agencies in Louisiana, and, in recent weeks, one of the largest medical cyberattacks in US history after ransomware delivered through TrickBot hijacked more than 400 hospitals run by Universal Health Services.
What connection, if any, TrickBot’s operators share with the Kremlin remains an open question, but the acceleration of ransomware attacks on US municipalities and government agencies has led US officials and executives at Microsoft to fear that ransomware attacks will be used to lock up election systems in November, either on direct orders from a state eager to undermine American democracy or by cybercriminals who figure the urgency around the election would increase pressure on victims to pay.....
They look everywhere but at Israel, and the open question means this piece of propaganda stinks of sewage!
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Related:
Russia reports over 8,000 new cases
The Russians are losing the race to vaccinate India and Brazil.
Maybe you should tweet that out:
"Twitter seeks to limit spread of misinformation before vote" by Kurt Wagner Bloomberg, October 9, 2020
Twitter Inc. announced a handful of product changes intended to make it harder for users to spread misinformation on the service in the final weeks of the US presidential campaign.
Some of the alterations are related to Twitter’s retweet feature, which lets users share another person’s post to their own followers, and is the fastest way for a tweet to go viral. If someone tries to retweet a post that has been labeled as false, Twitter will show “a prompt pointing them to credible information about the topic,” the company said Friday. It will also put more misleading tweets behind a warning screen, forcing users to click in order to see the original post.
Twitter will also prompt users to “quote tweet” a post before retweeting it — asking them to “add their own commentary” to the message instead of just passing it along.
“Though this adds some extra friction and an extra step for those who simply want to retweet, we hope it will encourage everyone to not only consider why they are amplifying a Tweet, but also increase the likelihood that people add their own thoughts, reactions and perspectives to the conversation,” the San Francisco-based company wrote in a blog post.
What do you think I'm doing here?
Twitter, like rival Facebook Inc., is preparing for a contentious US presidential election on Nov. 3 in which results are likely to be delayed, and experts fear misinformation will run rampant online. Unlike Facebook, Twitter doesn’t have a large fact-checking operation, and only verifies tweets in particular categories, including election- and COVID-related misinformation. The company has drawn praise and criticism from different sides of the political spectrum for its decision to fact-check posts from President Trump about mail-in voting and the coronavirus.
Twitter doesn’t remove inaccurate tweets unless they pose an immediate risk or harm to users or violate another one of the company’s rules, like promoting hate speech or harassment. This approach to leaving misinformation up, but with a label, is why the company is trying more creative methods to keep people from sharing misinformation more widely.
It’s also trying to prevent the spread of misinformation caused by its own software. The company says it will stop inserting popular posts into users’ feeds from people they don’t follow.
“This will likely slow down how quickly tweets from accounts and topics you don’t follow can reach you, which we believe is a worthwhile sacrifice to encourage more thoughtful and explicit amplification,” the company said in the blog. Twitter will also only surface trends for people if the trend includes additional context.
Twitter already announced a handful of other policies intended to curb confusion around election night. Twitter and Facebook, for example, will forbid candidates from claiming victory before official results are available.
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Here is a feed worth following.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
"International negotiators said on Monday that they would not reach agreement this year on how and where to tax technology giants like Google and Facebook, as talks remain hindered by the pandemic and an ongoing dispute between the United States and other wealthy nations. Pressure is mounting on negotiators, as an increasing number of countries look to patch budget holes by imposing new taxes on American tech corporations, inviting retaliatory threats from the Trump administration. Officials at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which has organized the negotiations, warned in a news conference from Paris that failing to strike a deal would lead to a proliferation of taxes and tariffs that could reduce the size of the global economy by as much as 1 percent — more than $1 trillion at current levels — per year. “The alternative to finding an agreement would be a trade war,” Angel Gurria, the organization’s secretary-general, told reporters. As nations try to rebuild their economies from the coronavirus pandemic, he said, “it would inflict a very serious setback.” Mr. Gurria and Pascal Saint-Amans, who directs the O.E.C.D.’s Center for Tax Policy and Administration, cited the virus and “political issues” as having derailed the goal of reaching agreement by the end of this year. The politics heavily feature the Trump administration, which said in June that it was pulling out of negotiations, amid disputes with other wealthy countries over the treatment of American companies that could face higher global tax bills under a new international agreement. Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, has pushed for a provision in any agreement that would effectively allow American corporations to choose whether or not to be governed by the global tax system set up by an agreement, a demand that other leading countries oppose, but the O.E.C.D. officials said on Monday that the administration had remained a part of the talks and had not pulled American experts out of the negotiations. “The United States has been working with us and has added its technical competence and expertise to the work the O.E.C.D. has been doing,” Mr. Gurria said. “They have been participating actively and at high levels.” The talks cover a high-stakes, and highly lucrative, issue that has emerged around the world in recent years: the question of how countries should tax the sale of goods and services to their citizens over the internet, by corporations that have little or no physical presence inside their national borders. That question has taken on greater urgency. Countries are looking for new sources of tax revenues to shore up their government budgets as they spend heavily to contain the pandemic and help their economies emerge from it as quickly as possible. Many governments, in Europe and elsewhere, have increasingly looked to implement so-called digital service taxes, which apply largely to American tech giants like eBay and Amazon. Italy, Spain, Austria and Britain have all announced plans to levy digital services taxes, following the lead of France. In response, the United States has threatened to impose tariffs on imports from countries that impose the taxes. The administration said in July that it would move next year to tax $1.3 billion in products like cosmetics and handbags from France, in retaliation for its digital service tax. Mr. Saint-Amans said Monday that he had seen no indication that the United States or France would hold off on re-escalating the dispute next year. France, which has been leading the European campaign to tax digital giants, will press ahead with a plan to impose a tax on Apple, Facebook and other internet giants this year despite the delay announced by the O.E.C.D., a finance ministry spokesman said Monday. The 3 percent tax on total annual revenue from services to French users was approved this year by the French parliament and “will apply,” the spokesman said, adding that Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire would urge countries at a G20 meeting on Wednesday to strike a deal on digital and minimum taxation quickly. A key goal of the talks has been to de-escalate tensions by reaching international agreement on how and where digital activity may be taxed. In recent months, including what officials described as 70 days of virtual conference meetings online, negotiators have sought to flesh out the details of what such an agreement might look like in practice — while essentially ignoring the high-level political disputes that are keeping any agreement from coming together. Typically in international tax negotiations, parties strike a political agreement first and then fill in the details, said Manal Corwin, a former Treasury Department official in the Obama administration who now heads the Washington national tax practice at KPMG. “Here, it’s a bit reversed,” she said. “They’re trying to make as much progress as possible on the technical details, and then try to make a political agreement.” One of the technical documents released on Monday would guide where multinational companies pay taxes, including a new push that would effectively make some tech companies pay taxes where their customers are, even if they have no operations in those countries. Another would establish a new global corporate minimum tax. Those efforts, combined with changes in international taxation that were included in President Trump’s signature 2017 tax law, could raise up to $100 billion a year in new tax revenue from multinational companies, the O.E.C.D. estimates. Another $100 billion in corporate taxes could shift between countries. Countries of all income levels would benefit from additional tax revenues, the O.E.C.D. estimated on Monday, though some low-tax countries like Ireland could lose out. The American business community is divided over the talks. Some multinational companies, including many technology companies, are eager for an agreement that would head off the complications of complying with different digital services taxes in a wide range of countries. Other companies fear the agreement would raise their taxes unexpectedly and were a driving force in pushing the administration to announce its disengagement from negotiations in the summer."
Related:
"U.S. stocks climbed to an almost six-week high amid a rally in some of the world’s largest technology companies. The S&P 500 extended gains into a fourth day and the Nasdaq 100 posted its biggest advance since April after surging as much as 4.1%. Amazon.com Inc. soared ahead of its Prime Day while Apple Inc. jumped as the tech giant -- whose price target was raised by RBC Capital Markets -- is set to embrace 5G as one of its most significant additions to this year’s iPhones. Twitter Inc. rallied on an upgrade at Deutsche Bank, which also boosted its price estimates for other companies that derive their revenue from digital advertising such as Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc. Investors have once again turned back to the companies flush with cash that can thrive if the economic recovery slows down. Said Keith Gangl, a portfolio manager of Gradient Investments: “People are worried about missing out, so they are going right to the tech leaders.” Elsewhere, oil slumped with workers in the U.S. Gulf heading back following Hurricane Delta’s landfall and Libya taking a major step toward reopening its biggest field....."
The market is unsteady and the phones vulnerable to hacking.
Not everybody is getting rich:
"The Covid-19 pandemic will exact a $16 trillion toll on the U.S. -- four times the cost of the Great Recession -- when adding the costs of lost lives and health to the direct economic impact, according to former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and fellow Harvard University economist David Cutler. About half of that amount is related to lost gross domestic product as a result of economic shutdowns and the ongoing spread of the virus, while the other half comes from health losses including premature death and mental and long-term health impairments, Cutler and Summers wrote in an essay published online Monday in in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “The immense financial loss from Covid-19 suggests a fundamental rethinking of government’s role in pandemic preparation,” the authors wrote. “Currently, the U.S. prioritizes spending on acute treatment, with far less spending on public health services and infrastructure.” The $16 trillion amount is equal to about 90% of annual U.S. GDP; it’s also more than twice as much the U.S. has spent on wars since Sept. 11, 2001, including those in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, according to the essay. Policies including wide-scale population testing, contact tracing and isolation can reduce the spread of infection and prevent some of these losses. Spending on testing and tracing strategies is about 30 times less expensive than the projected economic cost without those policies, the authors said. Testing and tracing should be permanent investments by the U.S. government, and shouldn’t be dismantled when the pandemic recedes, wrote Cutler and Summers, who’s a paid contributor to Bloomberg Television."
Oh, TESTING and TRACING SHOULD CONTINUE even WITHOUT COVID, huh?
That is the $ame globalist $hitbag who is of the opinion that electronic signatures are needed to protect our democracy, and who is also one of the architects of all the economic destruction with a hand in it all through the years as he has worked his way through the revolving door before he became a tax reformer and health and labor nut.
I'm sure that is all conspiracy talk, right?
"He’s a recruiter for a Covid-19 vaccine trial. Can he overcome communities’ distrust — and his own mother’s?" by Eric Boodman STAT October 7, 2020
BOSTON — Whenever his mother told him about her newfound mistrust of vaccines, Jorge David Gutierrez saw it as a kind of cognitive dissonance. She was proud of him, the first person in their family to graduate from college — Brown University, no less, in neuroscience. He was applying to medical school. Here he was, in the meantime, working on a clinical trial for Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She valued the work he did, yet friends also sent her posts on social media. She trusted her friends, so she trusted what they sent. It frustrated him. He’d tried to point out the telltale signs that something online might not be worth believing in — the post with less-than-reputable sources, the shoddy quality of a video, the ad posing as an article — but she was never quite convinced.
She was online more and more these days. She’d been, at various times, a nanny, a custodian, and a warehouse worker — and then suddenly she was swept up in the pandemic’s layoffs. She’d since managed to get a part-time job cleaning offices, but it was only six hours a week.
With no car, little work, and the worry that she might get sick on public transportation, she was home a lot, with her phone and tablet as a primary link to the world. As Gutierrez saw it, that influenced how she thought about Covid-19 vaccines: “She’s said, ‘This is the work of the devil, to get a chip in us, to track us.’”
First, he should listen to his mother, and second, she is right.
The fact that the Globe is in overdrive against us "baseless conspiracy theorists" tell you it's not baseless at all, and is quite the opposite.
He wondered, in that moment, if she didn’t realize that the project he’s working on is a Covid-19 vaccine.
Gutierrez is 23, a true believer in his work. He wishes he could volunteer for the study he’s recruiting for. If he weren’t ineligible, as a hospital employee working on the trial, he’d sign up in a second — one more person, nudging toward the 30,000 needed. Instead, he talks to strangers about it. He knows there’s a risk, striking up conversations in the line waiting for coronavirus tests. It’s worth it. Even a face shield feels like too much of a barrier to him, so he doesn’t use one. Just wears his glasses and mask and tries not to get too close.
Building trust is everything. He asks for permission to broach the subject. Waits, scans the person’s face. Sometimes people brush past him, ignore him, tell him to go away. He wishes they didn’t have to be so rude about it. I’m just doing my job, he thinks, just trying to make some small contribution toward ending the pandemic. Not only has the vaccine companies lost it, so has the pre$$.
He doesn’t say that. He just smiles under his mask and wishes them a good day. Sometimes, after a string of refusals, he’ll take a break, cheer himself up with TikToks and memes.
If someone has even the slightest bit of interest, he might say, “We’re looking for volunteers in the hopes of finding a vaccine that will protect people from getting or developing Covid. It will involve around six visits over two years. You will not get or develop Covid because of the vaccine. We will not expose you to the virus. You will live your normal life.”
He’s been giving this spiel since July, when he signed on to the Brigham’s trial for the Moderna vaccine. The conversations take place in the parking lot of the Brookside Community Health Center, where a cluster of tents are open Wednesdays and Thursdays for walk-in coronavirus testing and a handful of other services. People come to have their nose swabbed and leave registered to vote, carrying a white garbage bag, plastic stretched under the weight of free food. Sometimes the lines wrap around the block — a measure of the surrounding neighborhoods’ need. Employees might hand out 1,050 diapers, 750 apples, 600 oranges, and 450 tomatoes in a day.
That is what is behind impoverishing us all with unlawful lockdowns.
If your are dependent on government for necessities, then they can pretty much have their way with you.
Technically, it’s in the southwest Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain. Here, the crowd waiting is diverse, chatting to pass the time in Spanish and Haitian Creole and Portuguese and Mandarin, health care workers in scrubs and construction workers in paint-spattered jeans.
That’s why Gutierrez is there: to recruit the communities of color that have been alienated by American medicine, left out of clinical research, hit hardest by the pandemic. “If we want to make sure this vaccine works for everyone, then we need to include everyone,” he said.
It isn’t easy. In early August, for instance, only 5% of Moderna’s enrollees were Black — less than half their share of the U.S. population. Eventually, the organizers became worried enough that they slowed down the breakneck pace of recruitment, instructing some sites not to sign people up if they were white.
For outreach workers, that meant overcoming people’s deep-seated distrust. To try to prevent coronavirus spread, a lot of that had to happen on Zoom or Facebook, in webinars or virtual town halls. At Brookside, it’s happening face-to-face, the recruiters decked out like clipboard-carrying fundraisers on the street — except what they’re hoping for is not people’s money, but a donation of their time and body. It means discussing everything from their fear of deportation to their understanding of immunology.
Gutierrez is Colombian American himself, his co-worker Nicole Taikeff Gabela, Ecuadorian. They speak Spanish with the Dominicans, the Salvadorans, the Puerto Ricans, the Guatemalans. They’d both spent time recruiting for other research projects, with the goal of including people of color. They know to avoid the word “investigacion,” which is one way of translating “study,” but which can also carry a connotation of law enforcement.
“It can cause a lot of harm, it can push people away,” said Taikeff Gabela. “We can’t ignore that there’s a specific climate that has caused a lot of fear in immigrant communities.”
Her experience has been different from Gutierrez’s. She said that the majority of people she approaches want to hear about the trial. Some are enthusiastic enough to start filling out the pre-screening questionnaire right then and there. Most, though, want to talk to her and then read more at home. She gives them her name and phone number. She tells them they can find her there again next week. People ask about where the study is taking place and how they can get there. To some, a potential side effect of a headache, for instance, seems manageable. To others, that might get in the way of balancing work with childcare.
People also wonder about the American government’s involvement in the project and what that means for participants. “Is this the Trump vaccine?” Gutierrez remembered people saying. “Are they going to ask me about my citizenship, my legal status?”
They’d always been close. He was her only son. In fact, she was part of the reason for his interest in medicine. It’s an understandable mistake. Some vaccines do contain weakened live viruses, so that your body learns to recognize them and fight them off without getting sick. Taikeff Gabela asked if the woman felt OK hearing more about how this particular vaccine was made, and the woman said yes. So Taikeff Gabela explained that this shot contains just a tiny, synthetic fragment of the virus — just enough for the body to learn to recognize the pathogen, but nothing that can actually cause the disease.
Is that supposed to convince me?
“In order to have the infection, you need to have the whole virus,” Taikeff Gabela said. It didn’t mean that the woman was ready to sign up right away — but she thanked the recruiter for the clarification. Over the course of a few minutes, her tone had shifted.
“You don’t try to push people into this, it’s not like a hard business sell,” said Paulette Chandler, an epidemiologist and family doctor who’s helping coordinate recruitment for the Brigham. “Ideally you provide the information about what it is, about what the benefits and what the potential harms are, and then you let the person decide, because it truly is an act of altruism.”
That kind of guilt trip is SICKENING!
Every so often, during his paperwork days, Gutierrez sees a name he recognizes, and feels a little burst of excitement. “I’m like, ‘I enrolled that person,’” he said. More often, he’s just happy if he’s able to spark even the shortest conversation.
If they become permanently ill or die will he still feel the same way?
As the 30,000 spots across the country have started to fill up, though, the outreach has paid off: According to the company, as of August 21, about 18% of all participants so far were Black, Latinx, American Indian or Alaska Native, but as of October 2, about 33% were “from diverse communities.” A company spokesperson said he did not have a more detailed breakdown.
Gutierrez knows firsthand the sort of enthusiasm that underlies this trend. For some, it emerges from loss, but he’s also become a grudging connoisseur of the fears and conspiracy theories that cling burr-like in people’s minds. Whenever someone tells him that this vaccine is part of a plot by Bill Gates, to keep tabs on people by injecting them with microchips, he gently tries to tell them otherwise. Yes, it was made in a lab, he says, but not by Gates. Yes, it’s synthetic, but it doesn’t contain any microchips. He imagines that he’s talking to his mom, but his tone is light and professional, with no trace of arguments past, no hint of exasperation.
Why $hould I believe him?
“If I haven’t been able to change my mom’s mind, would I be able to change the mind of some stranger outside of a health center?” he asked. “Maybe, but most likely not.”
Who knows? He might see the person again, back for another bag of food next week.....
--more--"
Hey, it's not like the pharmaceutical companies ever prescribed something that would hurt you, right?
That's why they have legal immunity from any harm their altruistic product causes.
Also see:
"The head of the World Health Organization warned against the idea that herd immunity might be a realistic strategy to stop the pandemic, dismissing such proposals as “simply unethical.” At a media briefing on Monday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said health officials typically aim to achieve herd immunity by vaccination. Tedros noted that to obtain herd immunity from a highly infectious disease such as measles, for example, about 95% of the population must be immunized. “Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it,” he said. “Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak,” Tedros said. Tedros said that WHO estimates less than 10% of the population has any immunity to the coronavirus, meaning the vast majority of the world remains susceptible.
Susceptible to what?
An unidentified virus with a survival rate of 99.98% and one so fatal you never even know you had it?
Beyond that, Tedros just proved what an idiot he is! He obviously doesn't understand the concept of herd immunity as he makes himself look foolish while completely discrediting himself.
He LITERALLY wants to keep the non-existent VIRUS ALIVE!
"Tedros said that too little was known about immunity to COVID-19 to know if herd immunity is even achievable. “We have some clues, but we don’t have the complete picture,” he said, noting that WHO had documented instances of people becoming reinfected with coronavirus after recovering from an initial bout of the virus. Tedros said that while most people appear to develop some kind of immune response, it’s unclear how long that lasts or how robust that protection is — and that different people have varying responses. “Allowing a dangerous virus that we don’t fully understand to run free is simply unethical,” he said....."
And for that the world was locked down and our livelihoods destroyed?
What a f**king world cla$$ criminal!
Maybe someone should TEST HIM:
"The World Health Organization announced Monday that it and leading partners have agreed to a plan to roll out 120 million rapid-diagnostic tests for the coronavirus to help lower- and middle-income countries make up ground in a testing gap with richer countries — even if it’s not fully funded yet. At $5 apiece, the antigen-based rapid diagnostic tests for which WHO issued an emergency-use listing last week, the program initially requires $600 million and is to get started as early as next month to provide better access to areas where it’s harder to reach with PCR tests that are used often in many wealthier nations. The rapid tests look for antigens, or proteins found on the surface of the virus. They are generally considered less accurate — though much faster — than higher-grade genetic tests, known as PCR tests. Those tests require processing with specialty lab equipment and chemicals. Typically that turnaround takes several days to deliver results to patients. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus hailed the program as “good news” in the fight against COVID-19."
Good news will be when he occupies a jail cell at the Hague.
