Month: December 2021

By AFP/TheLocal.de

Germany on Tuesday inched closer to mandatory coronavirus vaccines after incoming Chancellor Olaf Scholz said they were necessary to contain a fierce fourth wave of the pandemic.

Following crisis talks with acting Chancellor Angela Merkel and the leaders of Germany’s 16 states, Scholz said he wanted parliament to vote on the matter before the end of the year.

“Too many people have not got vaccinated,” Scholz told Bild television. Making jabs compulsory is justified “to protect us all”.

The compulsory vaccinations should be in force “in the beginning of February or March so we must move quickly now,” Scholz said, promising that lawmakers would be allowed to vote according to their conscience. Generally, MPs are expected to vote with their parties on key issues, but with ethically sensitive issues, exceptions can be made to allow parliamentarians to be guided by their conscience alone. 

In the meeting, Scholz had signalled his personal support for such a measure. He said he was “aware that there were cross-party debates” among lawmakers about making the vaccine compulsory, a source said.

“Scholz signalled his sympathy for such a regulation,” added the source, who is from Scholz’s centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD).

The introduction of a general vaccine mandate has been a hot topic in Germany after Austria announced the move. It has previously been ruled out in Germany but fears are growing over the dramatic fourth Covid wave and the newly detected Omicron variant. 

According to sources of German news magazine Spiegel, Scholz said that compulsory vaccinations should be in place “when everyone has had a realistic chance to be double-vaccinated.”

What else is happening in the talks?

Scholz, Merkel and the heads of Germany’s 16 states had been discussing tougher curbs to confront record-high infection rates and rapidly filling intensive care beds. Among the measures discussed were the closures of bars and clubs, and limiting large events.

Several hard-hit German regions have already cancelled Christmas markets and barred the unvaccinated from public spaces like gyms and leisure facilities. But critics say the patchwork of rules is confusing, and Tuesday’s crisis talks are aimed at coming up with more uniform rules for the whole country.

Scholz reportedly spoke to Merkel and the state premiers about a “national task” in which solidarity had to be shown with the German states experiencing extreme infection figures.

The incoming Chancellor said he wanted to see 30 million Covid jabs administered to people in Germany by Christmas – and that this  would help to break the wave. He said for this to happen, more vaccination offers were needed – involving pharmacists, dentists and vets in giving out shots.

According to German media, Scholz has also told participants at the talks that he is in favour of barring the unvaccinated from more parts of public life, including non-essential retail.

It comes after Germany’s highest court ruled that extreme Covid measures like curfews and contact bans – dubbed the emergency brake – were lawful, possibly paving the way for authorities to bring in tougher restrictions again if the situation calls for it. 

The scheduled meeting between the federal government and state leaders has been moved forward by a week to December 2nd.  

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

Robert F Kennedy Jr’s The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health should be front-page news in all the news media in the US. Instead, it has been met with the proverbial thundering silence.

Critics seeking to have Kennedy dismissed as a kook trading on a famous name had scored a hit in February, when Instagram permanently deleted his account, allegedly for making false claims about coronavirus and vaccines. Nevertheless, the book, published only a few days ago, is already a certified pop hit on Amazon.

RFK Jr., chairman of the board of and chief legal counsel for Children’s Health Defense, sets out to deconstruct a New Normal, encroaching upon all of us since early 2020. In my early 2021 book Raging Twenties I have termed this force techno-feudalism.

Kennedy describes it as “rising totalitarianism,” complete with “mass propaganda and censorship, the orchestrated promotion of terror, the manipulation of science, the suppression of debate, the vilification of dissent and use of force to prevent protest.”

Focusing on Dr Anthony Fauci as the fulcrum of the biggest story of the 21st century allows RFK Jr to paint a complex canvas of planned militarization and, especially, monetization of medicine, a toxic process managed by Big Pharma, Big Tech and the military/intel complex – and dutifully promoted by mainstream media.

By now everyone knows that the big winners have been Big Finance, Big Pharma, Big Tech and Big Data, with a special niche for Silicon Valley behemoths.

Why Fauci?

RFK Jr. argues that for five decades, he has been essentially a Big Pharma agent, nurturing “a complex web of financial entanglements among pharmaceutical companies and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and its employees that has transformed NIAID into a seamless subsidiary of the pharmaceutical industry. Fauci unabashedly promotes his sweetheart relationship with Pharma as a ‘public-private partnership.’”

Arguably the full contours of this very convoluted story have never before been examined along these lines, extensively documented and with a wealth of links. Fauci may not be a household name outside of the US and especially across the Global South. And yet it’s this global audience that should be particularly interested in his story.

RFK Jr accuses Fauci of having pursued nefarious strategies since the onset of Covid-19 – from falsifying science to suppressing and sabotaging competitive products that bring lower profit margins.

Kennedy’s verdict is stark: “Tony Fauci does not do public health; he is a businessman, who has used his office to enrich his pharmaceutical partners and expand the reach of influence that has made him the most powerful – and despotic – doctor in human history.”

This is a very serious accusation. It’s up to readers to examine the facts of the case and decide whether Fauci is some kind of medical Dr Strangelove.

No Vitamin D?

Pride of place goes to the Fauci-privileged modeling that overestimated Covid deaths by 525%, cooked up by fabricator Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College in London, duly funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This is the model, later debunked, that justified lockdown hysteria all across the planet.

Kennedy attributes to Canadian vaccine researcher Dr Jessica Rose the charge that Fauci was at the frontline of erasing the notion of natural immunity even as throughout 2020 the CDC and the World Health Organization (WHO) admitted that people with healthy immune systems bear minimal risk of dying from Covid.

Dr Pierre Kory, president of Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, was among those who denounced Fauci’s modus operandi of privileging the development of tech vaccines while allowing no space for repurposed medications effective against Covid: “It is absolutely shocking that he recommended no outpatient care, not even Vitamin D.”

Clinical cardiologist Peter McCullough and his team of frontline doctors tested prophylactic protocols using, for instance, ivermectin – “we had terrific data from medical teams in Bangladesh” – and added other medications such as azithromycin, zinc, Vitamin D and IV Vitamin C. And all this while across Asia there was widespread use of saline nasal lavages.

By July 1, 2020, McCullough and his team submitted their first, ground-breaking protocol to the American Journal of Medicine. It became the most-downloaded paper in the world helping doctors to treat Covid-19.

McCullough complained last year that Fauci has never, to date, published anything on how to treat a Covid patient.” He additionally alleged: “Anyone who tries to publish a new treatment protocol will find themselves airtight blocked by the journals that are all under Fauci’s control.”

It got much worse. McCullough: “The whole medical establishment was trying to shut down early treatment and silence all the doctors who talked about success. A whole generation of doctors just stopped practicing medicine.” (A contrarian view would argue that McCullough got carried away: A million US doctors – the approximate number practicing at any given time – could not all have been in on it.)

The book argues that the reasons there was a lack of original research on how to fight Covid were the dependence of much-vaunted American academics on the billions of dollars granted by the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the fact they were terrified of contradicting Fauci.

Frontline Covid specialists Kory and McCullough are quoted as charging that Fauci’s suppression of early treatment and off-patent medication was responsible for up to 80% of deaths attributed to Covid in the US.

How to kill the competition

The book offers a detailed outline of an alleged offensive by Big Pharma to kill hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) – with research mercenaries funded by the Gates-Fauci axis allegedly misinterpreting and misreporting negative results by employing faulty protocols.

Kennedy says that Bill Gates by 2020 virtually controlled the whole WHO apparatus, as the largest funder after the US government (before Trump pulled the US out of the WHO) and used the agency to fully discredit HCQ.

The book also addresses Lancetgate – when the world’s top two scientific journals, The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine published fraudulent studies from a nonexistent database owned by a previously unknown company.

Only a few weeks later both journals – deeply embarrassed and with their hard-earned credibility challenged – withdrew the studies. There was never any explanation as to why they got involved in what could be interpreted as one of the most serious frauds in the history of scientific publishing.

But it all served a purpose. For Big Pharma, says Kennedy, killing HCQ and, later, Ivermectin (IVM) were top priorities. Ivermectin happens to be a low-profit competitor to a Merck product, molnupiravir, which is essentially a copycat but capable of retailing at a profitable $700 per course.

Fauci was quite excited by a promising study of Gilead’s remdesivir – which not only is not effective against Covid but is a de facto deadly poison, at $3,000 for each treatment.

The book suggests that Fauci might have wanted to kill HCQ and IVM because under federal US rules, the FDA’s recognition of both HCQ and IVM would automatically kill remdesivir. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation happens to have a large equity stake in Gilead.

A key point for Kennedy is that vaccines were Big Pharma’s Holy Grail.

He details how what could be construed as a Fauci-Gates alliance put “billions of taxpayer and tax-deducted dollars into developing” an mRNA “platform for vaccines that, in theory, would allow them to quickly produce new ‘boosters’ to combat each ‘escape variant.’”

Vaccines, he writes, “are one of the rare commercial products that multiply profits by failing.… The good news for Pharma was that all of humanity would be permanently dependent on biannual or even triannual booster shots.”

Any similarities with our current “booster” reality are not mere coincidence.

The final summary of Pfizer’s clinical trial data will raise countless eyebrows. The whole process lasted a mere six months. This is the document that Pfizer submitted to the FDA to win approval for its vaccine. It beggars belief that Pfizer won the FDA’s emergency approval despite showing that the vaccine might prevent one (italics mine) Covid death in every 22,000 vaccine recipients.

Peter McCullough: “Because the clinical trial showed that vaccines reduce absolute risk less than 1 percent, those vaccines can’t possibly influence epidemic curves. It’s mathematically impossible.”

The Gates matrix

Bill Gates – Teflon-protected by virtually all Western mainstream media – describes the operational philosophy of his foundation as “philantrocapitalism.” It’s more like strategic self-philantropy, as both the foundation’s capital and his net worth have been ballooning in style ($23 billion just during the 2020 lockdowns).

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – “a nonprofit fighting poverty, disease and inequity around the world” – invests in multinational pharma, food, agriculture, energy, telecom and global tech companies. It exercises considerable de facto control over international health and agricultural agencies as well as mainstream media – as the Columbia Journalism Review showed in August 2020.

Gates, without a graduate degree, not to mention medical school degree (like author Kennedy, it must be noted, whose training was as a lawyer), dispenses wisdom around the world as a health expert. The foundation holds corporate stocks and bonds in Pfizer, Merck, GSK, Novartis and Sanofi, among other giants, and substantial positions in Gilead, AstraZeneca and Moderna.

The book delves in minute detail into how Gates controls the WHO (the largest direct donor: $604.2 million in 2018-2019, the latest available numbers). Already in 2011 Gates ordered: “All 183 member states, you must make vaccines a central focus of your health systems.” The next year, the World Health Assembly, which sets the WHO agenda, adopted a Global Vaccine Plan designed by – who else? – the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Foundation also controls the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE), the top advisory group to the WHO on vaccines, as well as the crucial GAVI Alliance (formerly the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization), which is the second-largest donor to the WHO.

GAVI is a Gates “public-private partnership” that essentially corrals bulk sales of vaccines from Big Pharma to poor nations. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, only three month ago, proclaimed that “GAVI is the new NATO”. GAVI’s global HQ is in Geneva. Switzerland has given Gates full diplomatic immunity.

Few in East and West know that it was Gates who in 2017 handpicked the WHO’s director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus – who brought no medical degree and a quite dodgy background.

Dr Vandana Shiva, India’s leading human rights activist (routinely accused of being merely anti-vax), sums up: “Gates has hijacked the WHO and transformed it into an instrument of personal power that he wields for the cynical purpose of increasing pharmaceutical profits. He has single-handedly destroyed the infrastructure of public health globally. He has privatized our health systems and our food systems to serve his own purposes.”

Gaming pandemics

The book’s Chapter 12, Germ Games, may be arguably its most explosive, as it focuses on the US bioweapons and biosecurity apparatus, with a special mention to Robert Kadlec, who might claim leadership of the – contagious – logic according to which infectious disease poses a national security threat to the US, thus requiring a militarized response.

The book argues that Kadlec, closely linked to spy agencies, Big Pharma, the Pentagon and assorted military contractors, is also linked to Fauci investments in “gain of function” experiments capable of engineering pandemic superbugs.

Fauci strongly denies he’s promoted such experiments. Already in 1998 Kadlec had written an internal strategy paper for the Pentagon – though not for Fauci – promoting the role of pandemic pathogens as stealth weapons leaving no fingerprints.

Since 2005 DARPA, which invented the internet by building the ARPANET in 1969, has funded biological weapons research. DARPA – call it the Pentagon’s angel investor – also developed the GPS, stealth bombers, weather satellites, pilotless drones, and that prodigy of combat, the M16 rifle.

It’s important to remember that in 2017 DARPA funneled $6.5 million through Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance to fund “gain of function” work at the Wuhan lab, on top of gain of function experiments at Fort Detrick. EcoHealth Alliance was the organization through which Kadlec, Fauci and DARPA financed these gain of function experiments.

DARPA also developed the GPS, stealth bombers, weather satellites, pilotless drones, and that prodigy of combat, the M16 rifle. In 2017 DARPA funneled $6.5 million through Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance to fund “gain of function” work at the Wuhan lab, on top of gain of function experiments at Fort Detrick. EcoHealth Alliance was the organization through which Kadlec, Fauci and DARPA financed these gain of function experiments,

Few people know that DARPA also financed the key tech for the Moderna vaccine, starting way back in 2013.

RFK Jr dutifully connects the Germ Games progress, starting with Dark Winter in 2001, which emphasized the Pentagon’s drive towards bioweapon vaccines (the code name was coined by Kadlec); the anthrax attack three weeks after 9/11; Atlantic Storm in 2003 and 2005, focused on the response to a terrorist attack unleashing smallpox; Global Mercury 2003; and Lockstep in 2010, which developed a scenario funded by the Rockefeller Foundation where we find this pearl:

During the pandemic, national leaders around the world flexed their authority and imposed airtight rules and restrictions, from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks at the entries to communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets. Even after the pandemic faded, this more authoritarian control and oversight of citizens and their activities stuck and even intensified. In order to protect themselves from the spread of increasingly global problems – from pandemics and transnational terrorism to environmental crises and rising poverty – leaders around the world took a firmer grip on power.

RFK Jr paints a picture in which, by mid-2017, the Rockefeller Foundation and US intel agencies had all but crowned Bill Gates as the top financier for the intel/military pandemic simulation business.

Enter the MARS (Mountain Associated Respiratory Virus) simulation during the G20 in Germany in 2017. MARS was about a novel respiratory virus that spread out of busy markets in a mountainous border of an unnamed nation that looked very much like China.

It gets curiouser and curiouser when one learns that MARS’s two moderators were very close to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and one of them, David Heymann, sat with the Moderna CEO on the Merieux Foundation USA Board. BioMerieux happens to be the French company that built the Wuhan lab.

Big Pharma kisses Western intel

Afterward came SPARS 2017 at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation happen to be major funders of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. SPARS 2017 gamed a coronavirus pandemic running from 2025 to 2028. As RFK Jr. notes, “the exercise turned out to be an eerily precise predictor of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

By 2018 bioweapons expert Peter Daszak was enthroned as the key connector through whom Fauci, Kadlec, DARPA and USAID – which used to be a CIA cover and now reports to the National Security Council – moved grants to fund gain-of-function research, including at the Wuhan Institute of Virology Biosafety Lab.

Crimson Contagion, overseen by Kadlec after eight months of planning, came in August 2019. Fauci was on board the self-described “functional exercise,” representing the NIH, alongside the CDC’s Robert Redfield and several members of the National Security Council. The war game was held in secret, nationwide. The After-Action Crimson Contagion Report only came out via a FOIA request.

The star of the Gates pandemic show was undoubtedly Event 201 in October 2019, held only 3 weeks before US intel may – or may not – have suspected that Covid-19 was circulating in Wuhan. Event 201 was about a global coronavirus pandemic. RFK Jr. persuasively argues that Event 201 was as close as possible to a “real-time” simulation.

The book’s Germ Games chapter leads the reader to acknowledge what mainstream media have simply refused to report: how the pervasive involvement of US (and UK) intel has a secretive – yet dominating – presence in the whole response to Covid-19.

A very good example is the Wellcome Trust – the UK version of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – which is a spin-off of Big Pharma’s GlaxoSmith Kline. This epitomizes the marriage between Big Pharma and Western intel.

The Wellcome Trust chair, from 2015 to 2020, used to be a former director general of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller. She was also chair of the Imperial College since 2001. The “English Dr. Fauci,” Neil Ferguson, of the infamous, deadly wrong models that led to all lockdowns, was an epidemiologist working for the Wellcome Trust.

These are only a few of the insights and connections woven through RFK Jr’s book. As a matter of public service, the whole lot should be available for popular scrutiny worldwide. These matters concern the whole planet, especially the Global South.

Nobel laureate Luc Montaigner has noted how, “tragically for humanity, there are many, many untruths emanating from Fauci and his minions.” Even more tragic is what emanates from his masters.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on Tuesday urged Western allies in NATO to act fast to “deter” Russian aggression aimed at the country’s east, claiming that a Russian military assault could come “in the blink of an eye”.

“What we are seeing is very serious. Russia has deployed a large military force in regions close to Ukraine’s state border,” he told reporters after weeks of widespread Western media assertions that at least 90,000 Russian troops are mustering near the border. “If Russia decides to undertake a military operation, things will happen in literally the blink of an eye,” the foreign minister added.

Kuleba’s numbers were even higher than common Western press estimates: “Moscow has massed 115,000 troops around Ukraine, on the Crimean peninsula,” he was cited as saying. He also alleged tanks, military vehicles, and electronic warfare systems were also being positioned. 

But the consistent response from the Kremlin has been to point out it’s free to move its forces anywhere it wants within Russia’s own sovereign borders. Ironically enough no officials in the US or anywhere else have actually disputed the reality that there’s not been any attempt to breach Ukraine’s borders.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby seemed to acknowledged this in statements the same day. He said the Pentagon is monitoring Russian troop movements… within Russia. Kirby described Russian forces as—

…”a continuing concern” and pledged US support for Ukrainian forces, though he downplayed expectations of a direct US military intervention.

“We continue to see movement, we continue to see additions” to their forces near the Ukrainian border, said Kirby.

“We’re watching it very closely,” he told reporters, adding: “We don’t envision any US military intervention in this conflict.”

To be sure, if US intelligence actually believed Putin is preparing an “imminent” invasion (as an initial Bloomberg report and some US officials earlier this month claimed), Kirby would now be threatening US military intervention to prevent such an offensive. 

But instead Kirby is obviously downplaying the “invasion” scenario, and is reduced to admitting the Pentagon is merely “watching” the “movement” of Russian troops within Russia’s own territory. He with a serious tone told the press pool that Russian troops are growing…in Russia.

This is tantamount to if China or Russia called a press conference, only to inform reporters that American troop movements are being monitored within the United States and in the vicinity of US bases on US soil. Moscow days ago slammed what it’s classified as an ongoing ‘disinformation campaign’ coming from Ukraine and Washington, meant to increase the Western pressure on Russia and provide leverage.

Last week Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova issued a searing response to what’s perhaps in reality a ‘non-crisis’. She said, “The hot heads in the Kiev regime, apparently with a feeling of complete impunity, are in favor of a military solution to this internal Ukrainian crisis.”

The Kremlin is now turning the accusation right back, asserting it’s Ukraine that’s pushing for fresh confrontation in Donbass, while attempting to hype tensions to the point that Kiev’s Western backers get drawn in. 

By Isasbel van Brugen of Epoch Times,

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered a new investigation into a 2019 airstrike in Syria that led to multiple civilian deaths, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby announced on Monday.

The renewed probe will be led by U.S. Army Forces commander Gen. Michael Garrett within a 90-day deadline. It aims to review “reports of investigation already conducted” while simultaneously conducting “further inquiry into the facts and circumstances” of the U.S. airstrike that killed dozens of women and children, Kirby said.

The news follows an investigation published by The New York Times earlier this month, titled “How the U.S. Hid an Airstrike That Killed Dozens of Civilians in Syria.”

Its report revealed that the March 18, 2019 airstrike on ISIS in Baghouz, Syria, was carried out by a classified American special operations unit, called Task Force 9, which was in charge of ground operations in Syria, and resulted in the deaths of as many as 70 civilians.

There were mostly women and children in the region hit by the strike, the Times reported, noting that the Baghuz strike was one of the largest civilian casualty incidents of the war against the Islamic State, but it has never been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. military.

The investigation also alleged that top officers and civilian officials attempted to downplay these figures.

The probe will cover “civilian casualties that resulted from the incident, compliance with the law of war” and “whether accountability measures would be appropriate,” Kirby said.

Garrett will also be asked to recreate the timeline of the original probe into the incident after it was “stalled and stripped of any mention of the strike,” according to the Times.

It comes after Austin earlier this month said that the U.S. military was “committed” to getting right its transparency about strikes and how they are conducted.

“The American people deserve to know that we take this issue very seriously. And that we are committed to protecting civilians and getting this right both in terms of how we execute missions on their behalf and how we talk about them afterwards,” Austin said at a press briefing on Nov. 17. “And I recognize that and I’m committed to doing this in full partnership with our military leaders.”

Kirby said on Monday that Austin decided to order a new probe after being briefed on the matter by Central Command head Gen. Kenneth McKenzie earlier this month.

Fewer than 250 confirmed cases of the omicron variant have been recorded worldwide (although epidemiologists fear the number of cases caused by the variant could be much higher). But that isn’t stopping the CDC, led by Rochelle Walensky – the same bureaucrat who admitted two months ago that COVID jabs “can’t prevent transmission” of the virus – from pushing for tighter travel restrictions in an effort to “slow” the new variant’s entry into the US.

President Joe Biden signaled that he would be taking the new variant seriously during a press conference yesterday where he delegated to Dr. Anthony Fauci multiple times. Dr. Fauci has seized the opportunity to bombard Americans with FUD related to the new strain.

Cases of the variant have been confirmed in Canada, and many believe it’s only a matter of time before a case is confirmed in the US (even if the US were to close its borders to non-citizens again tomorrow).

CDC Dir. Walensky: “We don’t know everything we need to know yet about the omicron variant, but we know that vaccination is a safe and effective way to protect yourself from severe illness and complications from all known SARS-CoV-2 variants to date.” https://t.co/SNpGmVWFmu pic.twitter.com/TTHQVLsNHH

— ABC News Live (@ABCNewsLive) November 30, 2021

But instead of taking such drastic action, the CDC is looking at a handful of less intensive measures.

These include narrowing the testing window for travelers heading into the US, while adding quarantine requirements in certain cases, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said Tuesday on a call with reporters. It’s also expanding surveillance programs at four major airports to test for the omicron variant, and just regular old COVID, from certain international arrivals.

In the meantime, Canada, which has just confirmed another case of the new variant, is reportedly adding Nigeria, Malawi and Egypt to the list of African countries where travelers are banned due to concerns about the new variant, the Toronto Star. The first cases of omicron were reported in travelers from Nigeria.

Walensky added that local health officials across the US are actively looking for the omicron variant. “Right now, there is no evidence of omicron in the United States…the delta variant remains the predominant circulating strain” she added.

She also warned that the CDC is “strengthening” its recommendation that all adults over 18 get their booster shots.

“Everyone ages 18 and older should get a booster shot either when they are 6 months after their initial Pfizer or Moderna series or 2 months after their initial J&J vaccine,” she said.

Assuming the US does impose new travel restrictions, how much longer until Americans who don’t have their boosters are treated as de facto unvaccinated? While those who haven’t had any of their shots are treated like lepers.

Source: NYT

A handful of countries – Israel, Morocco, Japan and South Korea – have closed off foreign travel while European nations shut their borders specifically to travelers from southern Africa. And a US governor has already declared a state of emergency without a single omicron case being confirmed. That all seems to contradict President Biden’s insistence that the new variant is a “cause for concern, not panic”.

Authored by Brendan Taylor via Insider Paper (emphasis ours),

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has stated that the country will not be placed back into lockdown in response to the Omicron variant of Covid-19.

Morrison met with state and territory leaders on Tuesday afternoon to discuss the national response to the new variant of concern.

Prior to the meeting, Morrison stated that the federal, state, and territory governments would be cautious about Omicron, but ruled out a return to strict stay-at-home restrictions, according to the Xinhua news agency.

He said he would use the national cabinet meeting to implore state and territory leaders to keep domestic borders open in the run-up to Christmas.

“We’re not going back to lockdowns. None of us want that,” he told reporters in Canberra on Tuesday.

“What we did last night was protecting against that by having a sensible pause and to keep proceeding with where we are now and to further assess that information so we can move forward with confidence.”

Earlier on Tuesday, Health Minister Greg Hunt said that the federal government’s “overwhelming view” is that the Omicron variant is “manageable.”

Six cases of the new variant had been confirmed in Australia as of Tuesday.

Australia reported more than 1,100 new Covid-19 cases and nine deaths on Tuesday morning, as the country battles the third wave of infections.

The majority of new cases were reported in Victoria, the country’s second-most populous state with Melbourne as its capital city, which reported 918 cases and six deaths.

According to the Health Department, as of Monday, 92.4 percent of Australians aged 16 and up had received one vaccine dose and 87% had received their second dose.

Goldman Sachs and Amazon are launching their most ambitious collaboration yet:  a new cloud computing service geared toward Wall Street firms to help them with high-frequency trading and other practices.

And all these firms need to do is agree to entrust their entire back-end IT setup to the Vampire Squid to access what Amazon is touting as one of the fastest and most useful back-end systems available to Wall Street firms looking to transition on to the cloud.

The new product – the result of a two-year collaboration with Amazon – will allow buy-side and sell-side firms to access all of Goldman’s tools for quickly analyzing market data while enabling clients to set up high-speed trading strategies. Instead of simply relying on Goldman for prime brokerage services, hedge funds could soon outsource most of their IT setup to Wall Street’s most powerful investment bank, with a critical assist from Amazon.

CNBC said the collaboration is in line with Goldman’s attempt to use technology to better serve clients of the firm’s markets division.

“Clients of the firm will get access to our decades of experience and data aggregation that should enable them to enhance their business decisions, both from a speed and efficiency perspective,” Solomon told CNBC last week in a phone interview. “We think that adds to our position as a leader in the marketplace.”

The new service, called GS Financial Cloud for Data with Amazon Web Services, will purportedly allow buy side firms to save time by allowing developers to focus on what matters – making sure trades are filed and filled as quickly as possible, rather than wasting time wrangling data sets and leaning on a patchwork of legacy software to analyze said data. It will also “lower the barriers to entry” for firms to use advanced quantitative trading techniques, Goldman said.  

To be sure, using Goldman’s IT platform will also help the Vampire Squid monitor the activities of clients, granting Goldman the transparency to avoid any overlevered time bombs like Archegos.

The industry is struggling to keep up with the rising technological demands of the latest investment techniques, according to Goldman co-chief CIO Marco Argenti.

Argenti added that “if this existed, we would have used it…but we had to build it for ourselves. All you need to do is assemble the interface and integrate it with your application and then everything else is kind of taken care of for you.”

Amazon and Goldman unveiled the new product at the AWS: Invent Conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday. But this isn’t the start of the relationship between Goldman and Amazon. The two company’s have been collaborating for more than a decade. Goldman leaned on Amazon to help build the back end of Goldman’s “Marcus” consumer finance business, along with its Apple Card, which was released a few years after Marcus.

Adam Selipsky, who rejoined Amazon as head of AWS earlier this year, said the idea for a collaboration with Goldman arose from conversations with other financial services customers.

“We have a lot of customers who ask us to help them do what Amazon did with AWS,” Selipsky said in a phone interview. “When we started talking about Goldman’s capabilities around data and around analytics in the financial services realm, the ideas just sprang up pretty rapidly about collaborating together.”

Goldman CEO David Solomon said the new offering will “enhance the experience” of Goldman’s institutional clients and that “the way we get paid for that is we get more of their wallet share because the overall experience and services we provide gives us more mindshare, more opportunities to trade with them, to finance them and do things like that,” Solomon said.

It’s only the latest major cloud deal involving a Wall Street player as firms with complicated trading operations look to the cloud to solve their problems.

Hey look at that. Another cloud deal.

CME – Google
Nasdaq – Amazon
Goldman – Amazon https://t.co/FAUlOKQM6D

— Patrick Rooney (@patrickrooney) November 30, 2021

Put another way: once Goldman is running the buy side’s back end, firms will effectively be forced to trade with Goldman (not to mention the treasure drove of data and information that Goldman might glean from the arrangement). Nothing’s free on Wall Street.

By Zachary Stieber of Epoch Times

A judge on Tuesday blocked President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal contractors, finding that Biden likely lacks the authority to force them to get vaccinated.

“This is not a case about whether vaccines are effective. They are. Nor is this a case about whether the government, at some level, and in some circumstances, can require citizens to obtain vaccines. It can,” U.S. District Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove, a George W. Bush nominee, wrote in the 29-page order.

“The question presented here is narrow. Can the president use congressionally delegated authority to manage the federal procurement of goods and services to impose vaccines on the employees of federal contractors and subcontractors? In all likelihood, the answer to that question is no,” he said.

The judge granted a request for a preliminary injunction by the attorneys general of Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee.

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“This is not about vaccines, it’s about the mandates,” Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, a Republican, said in a statement.

“The judge’s opinion clearly states that and it has been our position all along that the president cannot impose these mandates on the people.”

Biden signed an executive order on Sept. 9 that led several weeks later to the White House requiring contractors force all their workers to get a COVID-19 vaccine unless the worker is entitled to an exception.

Contractors who did not comply with the order, originally set with a Dec. 8 deadline, were poised to lose the government’s business.

The states charged that the vaccine mandate was both illegal and unconstitutional, in part because it was imposed with little regard to “important aspects surrounding the mandate, including but not limited to economic impacts, cost to States, cost to citizens, labor-force and supply-chain disruptions, the current risks of COVID-19, and basic distinctions among workers such as those with natural immunity to COVID-19 and those who work remotely or with limited in-person contacts, among other aspects.”

The government disagreed, arguing that the president does have authority to regulate contractors under the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act because. Courts have ruled the president can pursue “efficient and economic” procurement, which he was in the order, lawyers asserted.

Van Tatenhove sided with the states.

Defendants, he said, failed to point to a single instance when the services act was used “to promulgate such a wide and sweeping public health regulation as mandatory vaccination for all federal contractors and subcontractors.” He also expressed concern that the mandate “intrudes on an area that is traditionally reserved to the States,” citing the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution.

A preliminary injunction means the mandate is blocked for now in the three states, with the possibility of becoming a permanent block or eventually being allowed to take effect.

A preliminary injunction has already been entered against the Biden administration’s health care worker vaccine mandate and a similar mandate for private businesses.