Orthodox Reflections

Much of the resilience of the COVID narrative resulted from the way it benefitted so many powerful interests. Big Pharma made billions. Politicians got unprecedented levels of control, and a “get-out-of-jail-free” card for all their many mistakes (particularly economic ones). The World Economic Forum made progress on its “Great Reset.” Climate Change activists got a blueprint for how to shut down the world economy to stamp out Carbon emissions. The media got ratings, and massive ad buys from Big Pharma. Big Tech got to flex its muscles as the new gatekeepers of what was, and was not, “misinformation.” Major investors reaped windfall profits. New billionaires were minted. The corrupt public health bureaucracy cashed in as well, with Fauci even getting to play president. The rich got richer, the poor sank deeper into poverty, and small businesses were crushed to the benefit of big corporations. For those actively pursuing totalitarian control of all aspects of our society, the vaccine passports have been a dream come true.

Just a couple of years ago, no one could have ever imagined that formerly free people would accept being accosted by police in a restaurant to show proof they had been injected with an experimental gene therapy. Now? Everyone meekly complies and just hopes it doesn’t get worse.

We covered many aspects of the COVIDian coalition in this article. Because of the powerful, but decentralized, nature of support for Pandemia Forever – many of us wondered how we could ever bring the “pandemic” to an end. Now, we have our answer. The band is breaking up, because the members of the coalition no longer have the same goals.

How do we know this is happening? Well, ironically enough, we have the New York Times Morning newsletter to thank for this amazing news. Let us look at the ways things have now changed.

Omicron is a Bust

Here is what the NYT had to say about Omicron and COVID in general:

In truth, the virus has already been largely defanged for most Americans, and it would be surprising if Omicron changed that. The death rate for vaccinated adults under 50 is virtually zero, according to data from Minnesota and King County, Wash. (which publish detailed statistics); the hospitalization rate is similar to that of a typical flu. For children, vaccinated and not, the risks are even smaller.

Are you terrified, yet? No? You are not alone. America has treated the dawn of the Omicron variant with a giant, collective sigh of boredom. Clearly Joe Biden and his minions (among others) wanted this to be a bigger deal. But it isn’t, and their attempt to oversell it is causing even diehard COVIDians to start asking uncomfortable questions.

To paraphrase the old peace movement slogan about war, “What if they gave a pandemic and nobody came?” Well, here we are. Not even the NYT is down for trying to make a mild cold seem like the Black Plague. There is simply too much fatigue among their readers and the general public. Anyone in media who wants to salvage any credibility at all is not going to go all-in for Omicron. How can you keep up the hysteria without the active, monolithic cooperation of the media?

The Need to Get Back to the “Real” Normal

The NYT and the media are finally admitting that our COVID-induced panic and overreaction have really hurt us:

Not only can they reduce serious Covid illness, but they can also reduce Covid fears and help society move back to normalcy, lessening the pandemic’s huge social and economic side effects.

 

(If you haven’t read my colleague Campbell Robertson’s story about the continuing crisis in schools — including mental health problems among children and exhaustion among teachers, nurses and janitors — it’s sobering.)

No more talk about kids being “resilient” or touting the benefits of “lockdowns.” The NYT is actually acknowledging the severe damage down by COVID mitigation measures. This is at least an implicit rejection of the “new normal” of never-ending crisis. This is part credibility-saving, but also an endorsement of the treatments that were the main focus of the article (which we get to later).

Even the most paranoid liberals have had enough of the “new normal” and want to get on with life. Molly Jong-Fast wrote this in the previously, reliably COVIDian Atlantic:

The right-wing media always accuses the left of wanting the pandemic to go on forever, but let me tell you, I want this f***ing thing to be over so badly that I can feel it in the marrow of my bones. And that’s why the arrival of Omicron has been such a psychological blow.

 

I will celebrate Christmas by taking my children to see their grandparents in California. I’ve been vaccinated and had my booster. My husband has had two shots of AstraZeneca and three shots of Pfizer. All of our kids are vaccinated. We’re going to mask up, but try to live as if we’re almost in the endemic stage.

The foot soldiers of the pandemic are deserting the ranks, and the consequences will be profound for the pro-pandemic party. If they keep focusing on COVID and mitigations, the Democratic Party is facing a 2022 bloodbath. Joe Biden has already presided over more COVID “deaths” (with COVID, from COVID, etc.) than Donald Trump. The supply chain is broken, inflation is through the roof, job creation is anemic, the border is out of control, a crime wave is engulfing our major cities, and the Biden Regime is less popular than any presidency in history. The Democrats need to change the narrative and focus on getting the economy moving, because right now they look awful. Especially since the policies they champion (masks, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, lockdowns) are clearly not helping, and are responsible for horrific social damage.

Worse, a party that relies heavily on African American support is being credibly accused of racism after banning travel from eight African countries. Simon Ateba is an African journalist who engaged in a verbal tussle with White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki over President Biden’s sweeping travel ban. He came on Fox News and accused Biden of having “disrespected” his home continent. Ateba is the chief White House correspondent for Today News Africa. He also told “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that such actions by Donald Trump would have been decried as racist:

“Can you imagine if… Donald Trump banned 8 African countries and those countries have zero cases of the variant, there would’ve been an uprising, and they would’ve branded him as a racist that hates Blacks and hates Africa.”

Things that can’t go on – won’t. And this can’t go on. Regardless of the ulterior motives (increased power, changing voting laws, serving Big Pharma), the Democrats can’t survive politically if they keep the focus on the pandemic, regardless of how much voter fraud they commit. They need an off-ramp to let the saner, more moderate Democrats focus on actually doing something to benefit American workers.

For the sake of their own political survival, the Democrats must join Team Reality, and the new drugs give them that chance.

COVID is Treatable – Pfizer and Merck Say So!

COVID has always been treatable. The first multi-drug protocol for treating COVID was published in early 2020. Unfortunately for Big Pharma, most protocols for treatment relied on inexpensive, off-patent medications. Plus, if there is an approved treatment for a disease, Emergency Use Authorization of an unapproved “vaccine” would have been illegal.  So for multiple reasons, it was necessary from the beginning to suppress treatment information and instead push a narrative that there was no treatment. Only a “vaccine” could end the pandemic. Doctors who treated COVID reported excellent patient outcomes, mostly on an out-patient basis. Those doctors were hunted down and silenced by Big Tech and the medical associations who are captives of Big Pharma.

The public health establishment joined the lie as well.  As Dr. Ryan Cole said, “The three-letter government agencies have practiced therapeutic nihilism. Apathy, complete apathy. If you get sick, go home. If your lips turn blue, then go to the hospital. If you can’t breathe, go to the hospital.”

In hospitals, RNs and other staff were forced to watch as the approved “treatment” protocols of ventilation and Remdesivir murdered patients before their eyes. Tens of thousands of patients were allowed to die that combinations of cheap, effective, safe drugs could have saved. Despite the human cost, the narrative was protected – COVID can’t be effectively treated so our only hope was vaccines and mitigation methods to prevent infection (masks, social distancing, etc.)

To encourage uptake of the jabs and their associated mega-profits, Big Pharma was fully invested in suppressing treatment protocols and keeping the level of fear as high as possible. Until now.

Everything just changed. Merck and Pfizer have now figured out ways to earn obscene profits treating COVID. And the NYT is ecstatic:

In the simplest terms, they can help turn Covid into a more ordinary respiratory disease, similar to the common cold or flu, rather than one that’s killing about 1,000 Americans a day and dominating daily life for millions.

 

Two treatments are on the way — one from Pfizer and one from Merck — and they will have both medical and psychological benefits…. Both Pfizer’s and Merck’s treatments are pill regimens that people take for five days after a positive Covid test. The pills prevent the virus from replicating inside the body and are broadly similar to treatments that revolutionized H.I.V. care in the 1990s.

 

Pfizer’s version, which is likely to become widely available early next year, appears to be the more effective: It reduced the risk of hospitalization or death by 85 percent in a research trial. Merck’s version, which should be available sooner, reduced risk by 30 percent.

 

Pfizer has projected that it will produce enough doses to treat 20 million people in the first half of next year and another 60 million in the second half. The Biden administration has agreed to buy 10 million of the treatments, known as Paxlovid, at a cost of about $530 each. Americans will probably not have to pay much, if anything, out of pocket.

 

As a rough sense of scale, 10 million treatments would have covered every American 65 and above who tested positive for Covid in the past year — with millions of doses left over.

 

Merck projects that it will produce more than 10 million courses of its drug, called molnupiravir, by the end of this year, and at least 20 million more in 2022. The federal government has agreed to buy 3.1 million of those courses for around $700 each. A Merck spokesperson said that the government would provide the drug to patients for free.

 

As Dr. Monica Gandhi of the University of California, San Francisco, told me, the treatments are “a huge deal. These will be game-changing for our ability to control Covid worldwide in 2022.”

COVID can now be allowed to become endemic. Rising numbers of “cases” (as inflated as those are by inaccurate testing) no longer need be cause for hysteria. Now a “case” equals profits for Pfizer and Merck. It is no longer necessary to shut down the economy to “stop the spread.” It is no longer necessary to mask. Doctors no longer have to pretend that there is no treatment. COVID is going to be no more serious than any other cold / flu. The NYT said so. Pfizer may lose out on revenue from vaccines / boosters that fewer will want in the absence of panic, but that jig is largely up anyway (as we will see shortly). Whatever Pfizer loses in revenue from the vaccines should be more than made up for in selling treatment.

Let the nasal swabbing commence! Test positive, stay home, get treated, call it a success. For Pfizer and Merck, the gravy train is ready to leave the station.

But that will leave some pandemic-dependent constituencies high and dry. How can Biden mandate travel restrictions if COVID is no more than a treatable cold? How can you justify your horrific economic policies on the basis of “COVID”, when a few pills will fix infected people right up? Emergency? Expanded powers? Why do you need those or vaccine passports or quarantine facilities or a “Great Reset” or masks or lockdowns or vaccine mandates to “combat” a treatable, mild cold? Well, you don’t, do you?

To sell the drugs, you have to promise that they will be effective. If they are effective, the pandemic is over, no matter how Biden and the World Economic Forum feel about that.

“Vaccine” Narrative in Collapse

“Official”, highly profitable drugs are probably going to change the game. But even without them, the “vaccine” narrative was already falling apart.  Doctors, and even the general public, have started asking pesky questions. This comment was sent to us by a physician we know and trust:

My question is, if this new variant is so heavily mutated, are they going to expect us to get a third and fourth dose of the same vaccine, which will probably be ineffective, or are they going to introduce a new vaccine? Research on vaccines cannot possibly keep up with all the emerging variants. What we need is a good treatment, as Dr. McCollough has already explained, not a prevention, for we cannot prevent a moving target; but if we are told to get the same vaccine for such a different variant, you can bet your bottom dollar that the vaccine is not about our health.

The doctor is right, as the facts on the ground clearly show. The existing jabs are useless against Omicron. Dutch officials admitted as much after an incident with travelers from South Africa. A spokesman for a Dutch health authority said “around 90%” of South African travelers that tested positive were vaccinated. The infection rate among the passengers from South Africa sparked calls from Dutch health authorities for testing to replace vaccination status for flying. Expect the requirement for “testing” for both the vaxxed and the unvaxxed to become the “official” focus very soon.

The official word still is – get a “vaccine,” then get one or more “boosters.” But these are the same jabs already acknowledged to lose effectiveness after only a few months, and which were formulated (supposedly) for the original Wuhan strain. Several countries are already on their fourth “booster” in less than a year. Even the biggest advocates of the jabs have now admitted that they do not stop transmission, and do not stop you from getting sick. At best, so claim the shills for Big Pharma, they reduce the severity of your case when you do get sick.

But, Omicron is already extremely mild,  and now we have officially acknowledged treatments from Big Pharma companies with substantial marketing power. So will we now “officially” recognize the signs visible everywhere that the “vaccines” are failures? The higher the vaccination rate in an area, the more “cases” you have. Germany is Exhibit A in this regard.

Even the most compliant media can’t hide that level of failure forever. But it gets worse for the jabs. Not only are they failed products, the world is finally waking up to how dangerous they are. Researchers are increasingly able to get reports of their jab-adverse reaction studies published, and the public is taking note.  In mid-November 2021 came a report in the medical journal Circulation that two doses of the mRNA jab more than doubles your chances of Acute Coronary Syndrome – an umbrella term covering heart attacks and a range of other conditions involving abruptly reduced blood flow to your heart. Doctors are openly discussing the frightening increase in heart attacks in otherwise healthy people. There are a great many other side effects as well. All the serious adverse reactions probably explain why research has found that the higher the vaccination rate in an area, the higher the excess mortality. The number of reported VAERS deaths in the U.S. in 2021 alone, after COVID-19 vaccines were authorized for emergency use, is greater than the number of deaths after inoculation from all vaccines given from 1990 to 2020 combined.

Even Soviet-level media control and manipulation can’t cover up this amount of failure and harm forever.

Vaccine Mandates and Vaccine Passports Are Getting Swatted Down

Logically, the new “treatments” should get us off the endless loop of “surging cases” followed by non-sensical mitigations and more “vaccine” authoritarianism. With Big Pharma making money either way, why keep pushing the “pandemic narrative”? Not all of this is about money only. There are those who benefit from the pandemic because they are seeking control. One blogger said it this way:

I characterized the so-called “New Normal” as a “global totalitarian ideological movement.” Since I published those essays, more and more people have come to see it for what it is, not “insanity” or “an overreaction,” but, in fact, a new form of totalitarianism, a globalized, pathologized, depoliticized form, which is being systematically implemented under the guise of “protecting the public health.”

Treating COVID like a mild cold / flu stops all this dead in its tracks. No “vaccine”, then no “vaccine” passports, no control, no quarantine camps, no travel restrictions. Abandoning the “vaccines” in favor of treatment destroys the conditions on which the “New Normal” / “Great Reset” / “Build Back Better” strategies depend. Without vaccine passports, how do you graduate up to a full social credit system? How do you end cash and adopt digital money only, if you can’t mandate that everyone show a permission slip to go shopping?

No, Klaus Schwab and egomaniacal billionaires, most looking to transcend our human limitations, will not like seeing all their “progress” reversed by the end of the pandemic.

But, to be honest, that is exactly what is most likely to happen.

As we mentioned, the vaccines are failures. To mandate such failures, governments have to pretend that they “slow the spread” and “protect others.” The problem is, the science is clearly proving that mandating these “vaccines” is helping no one.

Two studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that:

Simply put, the very best scientific evidence currently available to mankind does not support the widely held contention that COVID-19 vaccination using the Pfizer or Moderna brands lowers risk of death, at least over the first half-year after vaccination.

 

Perhaps the key takeaway message is that absolutist, rigid COVID-19 vaccine mandates such as that put forth by OSHA are not based on best science. Such mandates run counter to the universal medical dictum of risk stratification, whereby treatment is tailored to individuals based on individual risks and benefits to be accrued. They also violate the dominant philosophy of evidence-based medicine, which supports the use of current best evidence when making decisions about patient care.

 

The Pfizer and Moderna trials show that in lower risk populations (which account for most of society) COVID-19 vaccines do not reduce mortality. Therefore, vaccine mandates, which are enormously costly and terribly divisive, are a cure worse than the disease.

There is no emergency. The jabs provide no benefit, at high costs. Governments can keep ignoring these results and keep pushing mandates, but for how long?

Especially since, in the world media capital that is the United States, our courts are crushing “vaccine” mandates. The mandates from OSHA, affecting employees of larger companies, and from Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), targeted at health care workers, have already been halted by courts, and subsequently abandoned by the sponsoring agencies. U.S. District Court Judge Gregory F. Van Tatenhove found that President Joe Biden exceeded his authority by issuing the vaccine mandate for federal contractors in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

After losing their bureaucratic cover, many companies (even such Titans of “wokeness” as Disney) have rescinded their “vaccine” mandates.

More lawsuits are on-going, including one against the military’s mandate. Unlike the other court victories which tended to hinge on a federal system unique to the U.S., this case is likely to come down to the experimental nature of the jabs. The “approval” of the Pfizer jab was actually a bait-and-switch, as the “approved” jab is not available. Here is more information about the case:

A federal district court judge has rejected a claim by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) that the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine being administered under Emergency Use Authorization is interchangeable with Pfizer’s Comirnaty vaccine, which in August was fully licensed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

 

…the judge’s acknowledgment that “the DOD cannot mandate vaccines that only have an EUA” is significant for two reasons.

 

One reason pertains to the difference in ingredients and manufacturing process between Pfizer’s EUA vaccine and the approved Comirnaty vaccine, and the other pertains to the legal difference between a fully licensed vaccine and an EUA vaccine.

 

The latter reason would apply not just to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, but also to the vaccines produced by Moderna and Johnson & Johnson (Janssen), both of which are authorized only as EUA products.

 

Under law, everyone has ‘right to refuse’ EUA product.

 

When the FDA approved Pfizer’s Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine in August, approval was accompanied by a series of confusing documents and equally confusing public statements.

 

One such confounding statement reads as follows:

 

“The licensed vaccine has the same formulation as the EUA-authorized vaccine and the products can be used interchangeably to provide the vaccination series without presenting any safety or effectiveness concerns. The products are legally distinct with certain differences that do not impact safety or effectiveness.”

 

The FDA provided no explanation as to how the licensed Comirnaty vaccine and the Pfizer-BioNTech EUA vaccine could “be used interchangeably” despite having “certain differences” that make them “legally distinct.”

Emergency Use Authorization provides legal protection for the manufacturers even above and beyond those available to regular “vaccines.” This level of legal protection is critical to Pfizer and Moderna, because they know their products are killing and injuring people while failing to provide even minimal benefits. That is why they will only market the jabs where they have iron-clad protection.

World Bank President David Malpass said, “Pfizer has been hesitant to go into some of the countries because of the liability problems, they don’t have a liability shield.”

Most people, if you ask them, believe the Pfizer jab they are being offered is FDA “approved.” The military case is likely to expose that as a lie. Just one more in a string of lies from Pfizer and Big Pharma. Between 2002 and 2010, Pfizer was fined $3 billion in criminal convictions, civil penalties and jury awards, including a $2.3 billion fine in 2009, the then-largest health care fraud fine in American history. In 2011, Pfizer paid $14.5 million to settle charges of illegal marketing, and in 2014 they settled charges relating to unlawful marketing of the kidney transplant drug Rapamune to the tune of $35 million.

If the only way to “mandate” the jabs is to fully approve them and ditch the EUA, will the manufacturers go along with that? The potential liability arising from the Pfizer jab will make those previous penalties look like chump change.

While it may break the hearts of Klaus Schwab and company, if the “vaccine” mandates go away in the United States, the rest of the world will eventually follow suit.

This Was Never About a Virus

At the recent World Health Summit Stefan Oelrich, President of Bayer’s Pharmaceuticals Division had this to say about the true motivations behind the “pandemic” hysteria:

We are really taking that leap [to drive innovation] – us as a company, Bayer – in cell and gene therapies … ultimately the mRNA vaccines are an example for that cell and gene therapy. I always like to say: if we had surveyed two years ago in the public – ‘would you be willing to take a gene or cell therapy and inject it into your body?’ – we probably would have had a 95% refusal rate,”

This was a massive, multi-level experiment and we were all guinea pigs, whether we took the jabs or not. It was never about public health or a “virus.” The “official” sources can keep trying to discredit “conspiracy theories,” but there is too much truth already in the public domain for that to keep working. As more than one commentator has noticed – the difference between “Conspiracy Theory” and “Conspiracy Fact” in the Age of COVID is just time. The COVID coalition is cracking for the same reason rats flee a sinking ship. Now is the time when concerted, sustained effort can bring us victory over the “new normal.”

Thanks be to God for His mercy endures forever.

Nicholas – member of the Western Rite Vicariate, a part of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese in America