Reader’s Links for June 18th, 2022

Each day at just after midnight Eastern, a post like this one is created for contributors and readers of this site to upload news links and video links on the issues that concern this site. Most notably, Islam and its effects on Classical Civilization, and various forms of leftism from Soviet era communism, to postmodernism and all the flavours of galloping statism and totalitarianism such as Nazism and Fascism which are increasingly snuffing out the classical liberalism which created our near, miraculous civilization the West has been building since the time of Socrates.

This document was written around the time this site was created, for those who wish to understand what this site is about. And while our understanding of the world and events has grown since then, the basic ideas remain sound and true to the purpose.

So please post all links, thoughts and ideas that you feel will benefit the readers of this site to the comments under this post each day. And thank you all for your contributions.

This is the new Samizdat. We must use it while we can.

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

29 Replies to “Reader’s Links for June 18th, 2022”

  1. – I was waiting for this to go to bed. The STORY: I read it this a.m. but police were investigating. The investigation concluded no foul play is involved. –

    ON A PERSONAL NOTE: We hear so many of these stories of sudden deaths because known people are the victims. But we don’t hear about the common folk and sudden deaths. Surely, if it happens to known people, it happens to the citizenry also.

    STORY: Another one? Very-healthy and super-athletic 18-year-old male actor who loved life dies after going to bed.

    ** Tyler Sanders, an actor who starred and was nominated for a Daytime Emmy for his role on the Amazon Prime series Just Add Magic: Mystery City, died at the age of 18 on Thursday.

    The 911 Lone Star performer was found at home in Los Angeles but the cause of death is still not known. A family representative said that an autopsy will be conducted and there will be an investigation into his death.

    Police in Los Angeles got a call for a male not breathing Thursday, according to TMZ. Responding officers found Sanders alone at the home and shortly after pronounced him dead.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-10928317/911-Lone-Star-actor-Tyler-Sanders-dead-18.html

  2. “Can I have a dollar?” the man asked. I had stopped at the Quickie convenience store en route to home. It was hot and I wanted a drink. I had parked my car a few feet away and was walking in the front door.

    A couple of weeks ago I stopped at a red light. A man stood holding a cardboard sign with something written on it I didn’t catch.  He stood on the median two feet away while I waited for the light to turn. My window was down. He was in his early 60’s, neatly dressed and didn’t appear stoned. I don’t like to pretend I don’t see people, and that they don’t exist. I asked him if he was a drug addict. He said no. I asked why he begged. He seemed believable in his story. Something about having lost his business and everything else because of the Covid lockdowns. “Don’t be a hard ass all the time,” said the little voice in my head. I gave him five bucks as the light turned green. Don’t judge a book by its cover, I told myself as I took off. And as the economy deteriorates there will be more beggars on the streets and not all will be drug addicts and bums. There will be decent people who have had much worse luck than I, and who the welfare system won’t help for some reason. I often see panhandlers in center town and in the east end clearly wacked out of their heads on crack or fentanyl or whatever. I ignore them. Supporting a drug habit hardly helps anyone, least of all society as a whole. I know the City people making all those “safe injection” sites around town think differently. I also doubt many live next to one.

    “Why are you begging for money?” I asked the man outside the Quickie. It was in the east end of town. The road it’s on separates the highest-end neighborhood in the city from one of the poorest. The man was young, black and appeared healthy. He was cleanly dressed.
    “I new to this city,” he replied. “I don’t know this city.” I know the Caribbean accents. This one was African.
    “There are many businesses looking for workers, now. They can’t find enough people since everything opened up,” I said. “How many doors of businesses around here have you knocked on?”
    “It is difficult for people like me,” he said.
    “People like you? What do you mean?” I asked.

    I saw the wheels in his head start to turn. He angled his body slightly sideways. He didn’t want to elaborate, but I knew what he meant. Maybe this was where the progressive donor is supposed to volunteer his race card on his behalf. Maybe this is what he wanted and expected. When a book changes its own cover before your eyes it gives you something to read. I reached into my pocket for change. I had asked enough questions, and while the answers didn’t do anything they were a due in own right, on this day, I decided to grant.

    Then his eyes shot two fast sideways glances to my right hand that now held the change. It was so conspicuous with that I didn’t like it. It made him gamy. “What should I do,” he started, “go to library, make copies of resumé, then pass them out?” He said this as if it were somehow absurd.
    “That would be a good start,” I said, a little surprised by the clarity. “When I started out I did the worst jobs, and I worked day and night.”
    “I did worst jobs too, before,” he said.
    “How old are you?”
    “Twenty-eight.”
    “How long have you been in this city?”
    “Three months.”
    “Where did you come from?”
    “Toronto.”
    He had been here for three months and still had no job in a labour-starved market. “I wish you good luck and a nice day,” I said as I dropped the coins back into my pocket and began to turn away.

    “You no give?” A spark suddenly flickered in his leading eye and his shoulders twitched forward almost imperceptibly as his words fired out like some kind of warning shot.
    “No.” I said turning back to face him squarely. He stood only five feet from me.
    “You ask too many questions and you no give? Why you no give?” The sparks in his eyes were now a dark menacing glow, and his brow had dropped angry and low.
    “You gave me the right to ask questions when you asked for money. I no give because you’re not looking for work. Like I said, good luck. This is a socialist country. There are many places you can get food, clothing, shelter and even money.”

    Whatever his story, he was even too lazy to go through those motions, or more likely he took from the system but begged just for the gravy. Who knew. I was done. I turned away again but this time I was a little more situationally aware.

    As I paid for my pop I looked out through the plate glass window into the parking lot. He walked out to the street and back. My car window was down. He passed by it then entered the store, staying as clear from me as space allowed. The thought occurred that no one goes into a store without money. I paid and started to leave. I didn’t think I even looked at him, but maybe I did.

    “Naw, Naw, Naw!” he shouted angrily at me, whisking me away repeatedly with the hand of his right arm extended, like I was trash.

    I’m no expert on contract law, but I do know that contracts are sneaky little critters. They can form with few words, and quickly. They can surprise.

    I didn’t write this with the intention of commenting on human capital in any way.  I started out only to sketch a moment that had struck me, without having read much into it, yet. But we have done a fine job at degrading our own domestic stock even before grading that which we import. Our destructive education and welfare systems, our inability to control horrible, illegal drugs, and the technology that makes our people sedentary all contribute to the corruption and corrosion of this most valuable form of capital. When I try to remember when begging became fashionable I can’t think of an example prior the late 1980’s. Before that time I recall it was only old drunks with their hands out. The sense of pride and dignity in the individual was still culturally embedded enough that begging had a bad stigma attached. This all somehow changed, at some point, but not because of desperate poverty. In fact to the contrary. It changed while we were becoming more prosperous. Our money supply was expanding massively. In other words it changed while we were becoming more collectivized by Keynesian monetary policies, not less.

    In this man’s mind he and I had formed a contract, but not in mine. His sense of entitlement to payment evidently came from his volunteering answers to questions that I had asked. Yet, the substance of his answers he considered to be outside of this imaginary contract.

    With legal minds like this in play, it doesn’t matter if you pay. The contract doesn’t work that way. What other sorts of malevolent social contracts are being formed, furtively, by Dear Leader? With one-sided terms and conditions not expressed, arbitrary and discovered by us only when we break them? There are those who sense these contracts forming early on. They are often branded conspiracy theorists.

    I won’t be talking much more to panhandlers. I see now how it can go bad quickly and easily. I meant well.

    • I follow you. Why? Because I also have spoken to many of them. I ask questions and the answers seem wrong as well as what emanates from the eyes.

      Once, while at home, I hear a bell ringing on the street. I go out and I see a cleanly dressed man in his early fifties pushing a nearly empty grocery cart and a seemingly professional woman behind him.

      I spoke with him, he’s a recovering alcoholic with no money for food, he was rebuilding his life. All he wanted was food and then look for a job. I ran back into the house and grabbed a lot of leftover food I had frozen and put it in his cart. He was so grateful, nearly in tears, a very humble person.

      Then, other neighbors showed up with food also. I was the instigator of the food donations on the street; had I not spoken to him, nobody would have opened their door. The woman was his support group leader.

      Since that episode some ten years ago, I stopped giving money to panhandlers.

  3. Mark Steyn -John Mason MSP mocks people for asking questions about vaccine injuries

    • Mark Steyn -‘I smelled a rat’ | Actor John Bowe explains why he’s starting a vaccine injury charity

    • Twitter blocked post from vaccine injury solicitor: Stephen Atherton speaks to Mark Steyn

    • Eva Vlaardingerbroek on ‘very strange’ rise in health complications among young people

    • Neil Oliver: Covid has been used to green light the revolution those in power had in mind

      Neil Oliver: Whatever Covid is, or was, it has been used to green light the revolution those in power had in mind.

  4. abc news – CDC approves Covid vaccines for youngest kids

    CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky’s final approval means shots can begin immediately, finally ending the two-and-a-half year wait on the part of parents of children under 5.

    The wait is finally over.

    On Saturday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky signed off on Covid vaccines for the youngest Americans. Her endorsement means shots can begin immediately, finally ending the two-and-a-half year wait on the part of parents of children under 5.

    Walenksy accepted the recommendation within hours after the CDC advisory committee voted unanimously in favor of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines for children as young as 6 months. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee on Saturday endorsed Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccines for the youngest children, the last step before CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky could issue her final sign-off.

    The unanimous recommendations from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices followed the Food and Drug Administration’s authorization of the shots on Friday.

    Shortly before Saturday’s votes — one for Moderna and a separate one for Pfizer — many panel members celebrated the milestone, noting that parents will soon have two effective tools to protect their youngest children from Covid after more than two years of living with the virus.

    “We want to say today that if you’re not going to immunize your children, we think that’s a misplaced concern and that you should immunize your children to SAVE THEIR LIVES,” said committee member Dr. Sarah Long, a pediatrician at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia.

    While young children are generally less likely than adults to experience the most serious outcomes of the virus, some do. Among children 6 months old through age 4, there have been more than 2 million confirmed cases of Covid, more than 20,000 hospitalizations and more than 200 deaths, according to CDC data. Covid is the fifth most common cause of death in children younger than 5.

    “This is an opportunity, which one doesn’t get very often, to participate in preventing the death of young children,” said committee member Dr. Beth Bell, a clinical professor in the department of global health at the University of Washington. “A death of a young child is an incredible tragedy, and we know that this disease is killing children.”

    The vaccination campaign may not get underway in earnest until Tuesday, as pediatricians’ offices are likely closed on Sunday, and may also be closed on Monday in observance of the Juneteenth federal holiday. Shots will also be available at some pharmacies and mass vaccination sites.

    Every state except Florida has placed preorders for the kid-size shots, which began shipping to distribution centers on Friday, following the FDA’s authorization.

    Both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines consist of different doses and dosing schedules.

    Pfizer’s is administered as a three-shot regimen, with the first two doses given three weeks apart, followed by the third shot given at least eight weeks after the second. Moderna’s shot is two doses, given four weeks apart.

    The Pfizer vaccine was authorized by the FDA for children age 6 months to 4 years, while the Moderna vaccine was authorized for children age 6 months to 5 years.

    Shipments of the vaccines will come with all of the supplies that health care providers need to administer the shots to young children, the White House said this month, including smaller needles.

    In order to differentiate between the doses intended for young children and older age groups, the vials will have different colored caps and labels: a dark blue cap with a magenta label for Moderna’s and a maroon cap and label for Pfizer’s.

    There are roughly 18 million children under age 5 in the U.S. The federal government has made 10 million vaccine doses available to states, tribes and territories, though millions more doses are expected to be shipped in the coming weeks, according to the White House.

    Because a large number of young children have had Covid infections, some parents may not see the need for vaccination. The CDC scientists noted that vaccination provides more protection against reinfection than does previous infection, particularly as more variants emerge. Even for children who had Covid during the omicron wave, there is a greater risk of reinfection from the newer strains, BA.4 and BA. 5.

    “Prior infection does not confer immunity that would make one comfortable enough not to get vaccinated,” said committee member Dr. Oliver Brooks, chief medical officer at Watts HealthCare Corporation.

    Children under 5 can get vaccinated at pediatricians’ offices, more than 100 children’s hospitals and select pharmacies and public health clinics across the U.S., according to the White House. The Biden administration has said 85% of children younger than 5 live within 5 miles of a vaccination site.

    During Saturday’s meeting, federal health officials said they were expecting more vaccine waste from the pediatric vaccine campaign. That’s because the vaccine comes in 10 dose vials that must be used within 12 hours, they said.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-panel-endorses-covid-vaccines-littlest-kids-rcna34173
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    WaPo- CDC endorses coronavirus vaccines for children under 5

    Doctors urge vaccination even if kids have already had the virus

    Pediatricians are preparing to administer the nation’s first coronavirus vaccines for children under 5 in coming days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention signed off Saturday on giving the shots to as many as 19 million children across the United States.

    The endorsement from CDC Director Rochelle Walensky to vaccinate all children as young as 6 months old against the virus came less than two hours after the agency’s vaccine advisory panel unanimously recommended two vaccines — one by Moderna and the other by Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech.

    “Together, with science leading the charge, we have taken another important step forward in our nations fight against COVID-19,” Walensky said in a statement. “We know millions of parents and caregivers are eager to get their young children vaccinated, and with today’s decision, they can.”

    Doses began shipping Friday following the authorization by the Food and Drug Administration, which found both vaccines to be safe and effective.

    The conclusion of this long, deliberate regulatory process, with the final signature from Walensky coming at the start of the busy summer travel season, will be a welcome relief for families who have seen the lack of vaccination among children as a major obstacle to intergenerational gatherings. Health officials plan to ramp up public campaigns to encourage vaccination as a still-underutilized weapon against the ongoing pandemic.

    Pediatricians who placed orders two weeks ago are expecting doses to arrive in the coming days. Some eager parents are scouring for appointments for toddlers who may have never seen the inside of a grocery store during childhoods severely limited by fear of covid-19 infection. The Biden administration plans to set up pop-up clinics at children’s museums and libraries.

    “This is an opportunity which one doesn’t get very often to participate in preventing the death of children, of young children,” said panel member Beth Bell, a global health professor at the University of Washington.

    Oliver Brooks, chief medical officer at Watts Healthcare Corp. who also serves on the panel, said parents and families need to be prepared for future coronavirus variants because the virus is not going to disappear. “We don’t know what’s coming,” Brooks said. “But I feel comfortable in saying that vaccinating will be a benefit…. We’ve taken a major step forward today.”

    The advisory panel voted 12-to-0 to recommend the vaccines; three members were absent.

    Parents, in consultation with pediatricians, will have to make a decision about which vaccine to obtain. They can consult the website, Vaccines.gov, for pharmacies and health care providers that have the vaccine. Pharmacies are allowed to administer the vaccines to children who are at least 3 years old.

    The two newly approved vaccines employ different dosages, a different number of shots and different intervals between shots. Regulators are not favoring one over the other because of differences in the way the clinical trials were conducted, said CDC official Sara Oliver.

    Either vaccine is better than no vaccine, Oliver told the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices during its two-day meeting concluding Saturday.

    Panel members raised many concerns they said they are fielding from pediatricians and families, including whether children who were previously infected with the coronavirus should get the shots.

    Roughly three out of four children carry antibodies showing that they have already been infected at least once with the coronavirus, according to research published earlier this year. The CDC emphasized that children who have had the virus should still be vaccinated to protect against reinfection — as well as to protect their family members and communities.

    “We know that we are also not good at predicting which children are going to unfortunately have severe or even potentially fatal outcomes with a [coronavirus] infection,” Oliver said Saturday. Vaccination is the safest way to gain broad protection against current and future variants, she said.

    The coronavirus vaccines can be given at the same time as other vaccines, including on the same day, or any time before or after another vaccine, Oliver said.

    The clinical trials involved thousands of children during the omicron variant wave this past winter. Side-effects from vaccinations were minimal — pain at the injection site being the most common — and were comparable to what is seen in other pediatric vaccines.

    Even though deaths in young children are relatively uncommon compared with adults, covid-19 is a leading cause of death among children and adolescents, including 1- to 4-year-old children, according to the CDC. Medical professionals emphasized during the CDC advisory panel meeting that the disease is serious enough among young people that it should be treated as a risk similar to other diseases that kids are routinely vaccinated for.

    “These very clear data should just decimate the myth that this infection is not life-threatening in this age group,” panel member Sarah Long, a pediatrics and infectious-disease expert at Drexel University, said Friday.

    “All children six months and older should be immunized against [covid-19],” Long said Saturday.

    Vaccines reach patients only after a multi-step process that includes clinical trials and FDA review, which culminated Friday. A critical final step comes from the CDC, which, after hearing from its advisers, decides on how to use vaccines.

    This final green light for pediatric vaccines from the CDC completes a historic scientific and regulatory effort that began in early 2020 as vaccine makers raced to develop a powerful weapon for fighting the novel coronavirus.

    The first shots went into the arms of health care workers in December 2020, and over the course of the next year the majority of the population was vaccinated. Regulators approved boosters as well for older people and those with vulnerabilities.

    But the youngest group — 6 months to under 5 years old — had been left out of the vaccination campaign until now, pending research to show that the vaccines are safe and effective and, most critically, worth recommending for babies and small children who are least likely to have a severe case of covid-19.

    Although most children with covid-19 recover uneventfully, data presented to the CDC panel Friday made clear that this highly contagious virus has managed to sicken thousands of children who were too young until now to get vaccinated. Children 6 months to 4 years currently have higher rates of emergency room visits and hospitalizations for covid-19 than older children, and more than half of the hospitalized younger children have no underlying medical conditions, according to CDC data.

    The virus has killed more than a million people in the United States, the highest death toll of any nation during the pandemic. Vaccinations have helped drive down the infection fatality rate, as have therapeutics, including antivirals.

    In recent months, coronavirus subvariants with mutations that evade the neutralizing effects of antibodies from vaccines or previous infection have rolled across the country, and government officials are debating whether and when to reformulate vaccines to better match new strains of the virus.

    For now, the newly approved vaccines are the same as they’ve been all along, with the difference being that the youngest kids will get much smaller doses.

    Millions of parents with babies and young children have waited for these shots they view as essential to resuming indoor playdates, birthday parties and other gatherings with families and friends.

    During the panel’s public comment session Friday, Caitlin Komm, a special-education teacher, said her 2½-year-old had never been inside a grocery store or a museum and was learning about the world through books. She said her daughter told her that some day she wanted to go to an aquarium like Curious George.The little girl also gives her stuffed animals coronavirus tests and says, “Don’t worry, Mama, coronavirus test is negative,” Komm said.

    The impact on child care has been particularly tough. A Kaiser Family Foundation Survey found that parents of children under 5, younger parents, Black and Hispanic parents, and parents with lower household incomes were more likely to report job disruptions because of child care needs than parents of older children, White parents and higher-income households.

    Experts predict the initial vaccine uptake will be modest, with many parents choosing a wait-and-see approach. Another recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey found only 18 percent said they plan to get their children vaccinated right away, while 27 percent said they will “definitely not” get their child vaccinated.

    States began ordering the vaccines from the federal government two weeks ago. When the deadline for preorders closed Tuesday, states had ordered 3.8 million doses from the 10 million doses of Pfizer and Moderna initially available, according to a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services.

    Every state except Florida preordered doses. The Florida health department said in a statement Thursday that it was not participating in the “convoluted vaccine distribution process.” The department does not recommend pediatric coronavirus vaccine for healthy children, the statement said — a policy that goes against CDC guidance. On Friday, after the FDA authorization and public criticism of the state’s decision not to preorder doses, Florida health officials told pediatricians that they were able to place orders for the newly authorized vaccines.

    The two vaccines use the same technology but differ in key ways.

    The Moderna regimen, for children 6 months through 5 years, consists of two doses of 25 micrograms each — one-quarter of the adult dose — given four weeks apart. It was shown to be 51 percent effective in preventing illness in children 6 months to 2 years old and 37 percent effective in children ages 2 to 5. Moderna has said it is testing a third dose, or booster shot.

    The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, for children 6 months through 4 years, is three shots of 3 micrograms each — one-tenth the adult dose — with the third shot given at least two months after the second shot. Preliminary data suggested the vaccine’s efficacy against symptomatic illness is 80 percent. But that estimate was based on 10 covid-19 cases.

    Pfizer-BioNTech has said effectiveness for two shots was just 28 percent for children 6 months through 4 years old and, according to the FDA, even lower for children 6 months through 23 months old.

    Public health officials have embraced the vaccines as the best tool to limit the risk of severe cases of covid-19, and abundant research over the past two years, both in clinical trials and in “real world” epidemiological data, has shown that UNVACCINATED people are at higher risk of a bad disease outcome.

    Among the youngest children in the clinical trials, there was not enough data to make a definitive estimate of the benefit against severe disease, but researchers believe that all signs point to the vaccines helping this age group in the same way they have in older groups.

    Pediatricians and immunization advocates said many medical offices are trying to figure out what vaccine to order because they don’t want to carry both brands to avoid making mistakes because one requires three shots and the other, only two. They are also worried about wasting doses. Some doctors and parents may prefer to get the two shots of Moderna because of convenience, with protection kicking in sooner than the Pfizer-BioNTech three-dose series.

    Jason Terk, a Keller, Tex., pediatrician, said he is “leaning toward” Moderna. The three-shot Pfizer series may be a challenge except for the “few highly motivated families who really want to get it,” he said in an email earlier in the week.

    But he said Moderna is associated with a higher rate of fevers that are mild to moderate and “may be a tougher sell for many families who mostly doubt the seriousness of the risk of covid in this population.”

    Not many families are clamoring for the shots. “I only have a few families who are barking up my tree about the under 5 crowd, but it is early, ” he said.

    Rob Weiss, a Sarasota, Fla., pediatrician, said he wasn’t able to preorder either vaccine. Even after receiving an email from the state health department Friday with directions to order vaccine online, Weiss said he went to the website and “there was no place where you can place an order.”

    “It’s preposterous. We’ve been waiting for vaccine,” Weiss said. Even if he is able to order doses next week, “it’s going to be a significant delay in children in Florida getting vaccine.”

    Holly Chesnoff is among the parents in Weiss’s practice who have been eagerly awaiting the shots for her youngest child, 2-year-old Sydney.

    “We would be first in line, honestly,” said Chesnoff, a Sarasota educator. She, her husband and their 8-year-old daughter have been vaccinated; Chesnoff has also been boosted because she takes immune suppressing drugs for her rheumatoid arthritis. Her 70-year-old mother also lives with the family.

    Getting Sydney vaccinated would not only protect and bring much needed peace of mind, butChesnoff feels it’s part of a broader obligation to protect their community. She’s frustrated that parents in Florida will have to wait longer for shots.

    “For all the talk about parental rights, I should have the right to access something that’s approved,” she said.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/06/18/cdc-coronavirus-vaccine-young-children/
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    • Director Debrief: COVID-19 Vaccine for Young Children

      CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky shares CDC’s latest COVID-19 vaccination recommendation that everyone 6 months and older get vaccinated against COVID-19.

      The updated recommendation now make COVID-19 vaccinations available for children 6 months to 4 years of age.

      All children should stay up to date on their COVID-19 vaccination.

    • JAN 2022 – Rochelle Walensky on CDC omicron response, vaccinating kids under five, and coronavirus origin

      Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), talks with Katie about omicron variant peaking, “sublineage BA2”, the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and when children under five may be able to get vaccinated, and what families should do until the FDA authorizes vaccines for kids under five.