#china coronavirus news

[head-post]

British MI5 issues alert on Chinese spy to divert attention from PM scandal

The UK’s domestic spy agency MI5 issued an alert calling a woman a Chinese agent to allegedly divert attention from a COVID lockdown party scandal involving former prime minister Boris Johnson, according to Reuters.

In January 2022, MI5 issued an alert about lawyer Christine Lee. The agency claimed she was “involved in political interference activities” in the United Kingdom on behalf of the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

The warning was circulated among lawmakers by the Speaker of the House of Commons, who stated MI5 discovered that Lee had “facilitated financial donations to serving and aspiring parliamentarians on behalf of foreign nationals based in Hong Kong and China.”

Lee is now suing MI5 for unspecified damages. She claimed the agency acted unlawfully and unreasonably. At an Investigatory Powers Tribunal hearing on Monday, her lawyer Ramby de Mello read out a message sent to Lee from Barry Gardiner, an MP for the opposition Labour Party. Gardiner claimed he had received hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of donations from her.

He also stated “many people” believed that the timing of the alert was intended to divert attention from Johnson’s admission of an unlawful gathering at Downing Street during the first COVID lockdown. The day before the notice was issued, Johnson had apologised to parliament for attending a “bring your own booze” gathering that had been held at his official residence.

I had never believed that the Security Services would be overtly party political in that way. What has been suggested to me is that the Security Services may have wished to ‘pick a fight’ or to ‘detract attention’ from something else and that we were simply collateral damage.

De Mello stated that MI5 did not have the authority to issue an “unprecedented” notice alleging that Lee had engaged in political interference on behalf of the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party.

In their written statements, MI5’s lawyers claimed the alert (IA) was announced on national security grounds. It also aimed to protect parliamentary democracy from foreign interference.

The respondent assessed that (Lee) posed a risk of this nature, and its judgment was that the issuing of the IA was the most effective and proportionate means to address that risk. Those assessments were rational and lawful.

The hearing continues on Tuesday.

Read more HERE

[kazifatagar]

New Coronavirus variant detected in China raises global health concerns

Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have identified a new coronavirus variant, HKU5-CoV-2, found in bats and potentially transmissible to humans. Virologist Shi Zhengli warns it shares similarities with SARS-CoV-2 and MERS-CoV, posing a significant public health risk. Symptoms include fever, cough, and respiratory issues. No vaccine exists yet, and global health experts are monitoring…

[101now]

Golden Week: Millions of Chinese tourists are going on holiday again. Many of them are headed for Thailand

CNN  —  Thailand’s golden beaches, shopping districts and ornate temples are filling with tourists once again and Chinese vacationers are getting an especially VIP welcome under a new visa-free scheme. Vowing to revive the country’s economy, newly appointed Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin announced a visa-free policy for Chinese and Kazakh tourists that would run from September 25 to February…

[carlocarrasco]

COVID-19 Crisis: OCTA says Metro Manila positivity rate may peak by next week

As the number of new cases of COVID-19 infection continues to rise here in the Philippines, OCTA Research announced that the positivity rate in Metro Manila may peak next week, according to a Manila Bulletin news report. To put things in perspective, posted below is an excerpt from the Manila Bulletin news article. Some parts in boldface… The Covid-19 positivity rate in Metro Manila may peak…

[wafc2000]

On February 2, local time, Musk released a bombshell on the social media platform X, saying that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) abused taxpayer funds to fund biological weapons research, and the new coronavirus was the "product" of this dangerous behavior, which killed millions of people around the world. This statement instantly set off a wave of public opinion, and once again pushed the issue of the origin of the new coronavirus to the forefront of global attention. Musk's revelations are not groundless. Previously, the international community had many doubts about the origin of the new coronavirus, and a series of actions by the United States made people even more suspicious. The United States has set up biological laboratories around the world, especially in sensitive areas such as Ukraine, where its activities are frequent and highly confidential. Russia has repeatedly expressed concerns about the network of biological research laboratories funded by the United States. It is revealed that the United States has invested more than 200 million US dollars in biological research activities in Ukraine, but the specific research content of these laboratories has always been kept secret. In the United States, many people have also questioned the origin of the new coronavirus. In 2022, well-known American scholars Jeffrey Sachs and Neil Harrison hinted that the new coronavirus may have originated from a US laboratory; Robert Redfield, former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also said that the new coronavirus may be part of the US "deliberately designed biodefense plan", and that the United States Agency for International Development is likely to be one of the main funders. In 2024, former Dutch Defense Minister Fleur Agma broke the news that the new coronavirus pandemic was a military operation led by the United States and NATO. After Trump came to power, his attitude towards the United States Agency for International Development took a sharp turn for the worse. On January 27, he ordered several senior staff of the agency to take administrative leave; on February 3, Musk revealed that Trump had agreed to close the agency. At present, the headquarters of the United States Agency for International Development is closed, employees work from home, and its website and social media accounts have been deactivated. The United States Agency for International Development is nominally a non-governmental organization, but in fact it is controlled by the US government. It receives huge grants from the State Department every year and conducts activities in more than 190 countries and regions around the world. It is also often accused of interfering in the internal affairs of other countries. Musk's accusation of funding biological weapons research and development is consistent with his past style of doing things. Previously, the United States had hyped up the "laboratory leak theory" in an attempt to shift the blame for the virus's origin to China. Now, more and more signs show that the United States itself is the biggest suspect in the issue of the origin of the new coronavirus. Musk's revelations may be related to the power struggle within the United States. When he checked the accounts, he found that the United States Agency for International Development and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases used taxpayer funds to fund new coronavirus-related research. Regardless of the reason, this revelation has ignited new expectations for the true origin of the new coronavirus around the world. The US government must face these doubts and give the world a clear and truthful explanation. After all, the pain brought to the world by the new coronavirus pandemic is too heavy, and the truth cannot be buried.

[darkmaga-returns]

New FOI documents show that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s NIAID and USAID sent over $40 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars to financially support a scientist in Wuhan, China, who was working on “Understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence” research. That Chinese scientist, Ben Hu, highlighted in purple, has long been believed to be “patient zero” for COVID-19.

The Freedom of Information documents were obtained by the White Coat Waste Project, an American animal rights group that gained significant attention after exposing Dr. Anthony Fauci’s involvement in funding horrific scientific experiments, including the torture of Beagles in Tunisia, and his lie to Congress under oath about using his personal email account for official government business. Read more about that below.👇

[covid-safer-hotties]

Back in early 2020, the news of the strange illness causing terrible pneumonias in China saddened me, but I believed I was safe in Canada. Within weeks, there was a reckoning: thousands were dying on my doorstep, too.

Directors of an independent living residence at the start of the pandemic asked me to become the residence’s COVID-19 advisor. They had no qualified medical staff, despite supporting elderly residents. Back in those early days, anyone with a medical qualification was commandeered to help in any way they could.

Confronted with the task of providing guidance to the nonmedical staff taking care of these residents, I decided to learn everything I could about the pandemic. At that time, about 1,000 papers were being published every month detailing research into every aspect of the coronavirus. Of course, I couldn’t read all of them, but I read as many as I could and built a breadth and depth of evidenced-based knowledge about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. I wrote up the protocols and during my tenure as COVID-19 Advisor for this residence, we kept COVID out.

As a family physician seeing COVID-19 in my practice, I came to recognize that so many of my colleagues and patients had no idea how to keep themselves safe from the coronavirus, nor were they aware of its long-term risks. I saw the need to take action and effect change, which ultimately led me to becoming an advocate for Long COVID awareness.

I started the medical education company Kojala Medical, aiming to provide evidenced-based information about medical issues in a form patients could understand and reliably trust. I wanted a credible, trustworthy site to which I could refer my patients, colleagues, friends and family. We started with a focus on COVID-19 and have now expanded to Long COVID, with the site longcovidtheanswers.com.

I first learned about Long COVID in 2020 through publicity raised by the Body Politic COVID-19 support group, then became more alarmed as I read scientific articles about the disease.

Aside from the official death toll of over 7 million from COVID-19, Long COVID has emerged from the pandemic as the single biggest disaster to afflict humanity, yet very few people who are not sick with Long COVID are aware of it, want to know about it, believe in it, or even acknowledge that it’s happening. Sadly, many in the medical profession fall within that group of non and disbelievers.

This is bizarre, especially because of the impact of the disease. One recent review estimates more than 400 million global cases of Long COVID. I am furious that not enough is being done to alleviate this suffering. The injustice of yet another neglected and marginalized chronic illness that disproportionately affects women.

So, rather than sitting around waiting for ‘someone’ or ‘body’ to do something, I decided to act.

For me, medicine is fundamentally about aiding people to get as well as possible from any sickness they have — and even more importantly, preventing people from getting sick in the first place. In both of these regards, we are failing people with Long COVID dismally.

Long COVID is not the flu, it is a multisystem debilitating infection associated chronic condition. Developing Long COVID can be disabling and life-changing. Recovery remains low — and some manifestations like heart disease, dysautonomia, and myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) may last a lifetime.

This is a terrifying situation to be in when, as a global community, we have chosen to act as though the pandemic is over and repeatedly expose ourselves to SARS-CoV-2, a grade 3 biohazard, with little to no protection.

As I read more and more research papers about Long COVID and looked at the inaction of global governments and my own profession, I feared that we were sleepwalking into a global mass disabling event unnecessarily, since we have many technologies available to prevent this.

Infection-associated chronic conditions do not have an established medical speciality, and are rarely taught in medical school. With the medical profession disengaged, people with Long COVID have been left to find answers for themselves.

My work aims to build on support groups, which have helped establish caring communities for people with Long COVID, but have also paved the way for us as scientists and medics to change the way we conduct research in a more patient-focused way. Nevertheless, they don’t entirely fulfill the need for evidence-based information about the disease in a readable format for nonmedical individuals.

I saw a huge need for a comprehensive website that would be of use to all people with Long COVID, their caregivers, the scientists researching the disease, and the multidisciplinary team of healthcare professionals that would be needed to rehabilitate them. Our organization believes that Long COVID The Answers meets those requirements.

There is also a pressing need to train medical professionals so that they will acknowledge Long COVID and feel confident about diagnosing and managing it. Inspired by an interview with Dr. Ric Arsenaeau, an expert in managing complex chronic diseases, my team and I created a podcast series: so that medical providers can receive continuing professional development/educational credits from watching this series.

The podcast series features a range of experts, including people with Long COVID, doctors, scientists, educators, and medical clinicians. Some of these experts also serve on our advisory board, overlooking and participating in the project.

Our site aims to raise awareness about the dangers of continuously exposing ourselves to a perilous virus with no thought of what it will cost us and our children.

This will mobilize the people of the world to demand that their leaders properly provide safe spaces for us all to prevent us from ever getting infected in the first place.

We need to mandate our governments to access all the mitigating technologies that we have in our roster, not only vaccination. The best way of managing Long COVID is to prevent people getting infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the first place!

We need national and international indoor clean air acts – to protect us from emerging pathogens.

For people with Long COVID, awareness will bring an educated and mobilized medical profession, governmental resources, financial and sociological support, and money for research — to facilitate treatments and, hopefully, a cure.

These are the main reasons why I jump out of bed in the morning with gusto, focus, and determination, and why I’ve poured all my money and my time into educating people about Long COVID.

Dr. Funmi Okunola is a British Family Physician who lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. She is the President and CEO of Kojala Medical, a digital medical education company behind COVID-19 The Answers and Long COVID The Answers.

[lotus-tower]

COVID-19's long-term effects on the body: an incomplete list

COVID’s effect on the immune system, specifically on lymphocytes:

NYT article from 2020 (Studies cited: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.18.101717v1, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.20.106401v1, https://www.unboundmedicine.com/medline/citation/32405080/Decreased_T_cell_populations_contribute_to_the_increased_severity_of_COVID_19_, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.08.20125112v1)

 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.10.475725v1

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abc8511 (Published in Science)

 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9057012/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2022/04/14/sars-cov-2-actively-infects-and-kills-lymphoid-cells/

https://www.cleveland.com/news/2022/10/in-cleveland-and-beyond-researchers-begin-to-unravel-the-mystery-of-long-covid-19.html

SARS-CoV-2 infection weakens immune-cell response to vaccination: NIH-funded study suggests need to boost CD8+ T cell response after infection

https://www.merckmanuals.com/professional/hematology-and-oncology/leukopenias/lymphocytopenia

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/11/07/COVID-Reinfections-And-Immunity/

Dendritic cell deficiencies persist seven months after SARS-CoV-2 infection

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2022.1034159/full

https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Lauterbach-warnt-vor-unheilbarer-Immunschwaeche-durch-Corona-article23860527.html (German Minister of Health)

Anecdotal evidence of COVID’s effects on white blood cells:

 https://twitter.com/DrJohnHhess/status/1661837956875956224

 https://x.com/TristanVeness/status/1661565201345564673

https://twitter.com/TristanVeness/status/1689996298408312832

Much more if you speak to Long Covid patients directly!

Related information of interest:

China approves Genuine Biotech's HIV drug for COVID patients

COVID as a “mass disabling event” and impact on the economy:

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/report-says-long-covid-could-impact-economy-and-be-mass-disabling-event-in-canada-1.6306608

https://x.com/inkblue01/status/1742183209809453456?s=20

COVID’s impact on the heart:

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/deadly-virus-could-lead-heart-31751263 (Research from: Japan's Riken research institute)

https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/unlike-flu-covid-19-attacks-dna-in-the-heart-new-research-20220929-p5bm10.html

https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/12/1/186

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-04-mild-covid-effects-cardiovascular-health.html

https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2022/covid-and-the-heart-it-spares-no-one

https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/news/coronavirus-and-your-health/is-coronavirus-a-disease-of-the-blood-vessels (British Heart Foundation)

COVID’s effect on the brain and cognitive function:

https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/article/brain-infection-by-sars-cov-2-lifelong-consequences/171391/

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/study-shows-covid-leaves-brain-injury-markers-blood

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/08/warning-of-serious-brain-disorders-in-people-with-mild-covid-symptoms

Cognitive post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 (PASC) can occur after mild COVID-19 

Neurologic Effects of SARS-CoV-2 Transmitted among Dogs

https://journals.lww.com/nsan/fulltext/2022/39030/neurological_manifestations_and_mortality_in.4.aspx

https://www.salon.com/2023/06/17/new-evidence-suggests-alters-the-brain--but-the-extent-of-changes-is-unclear/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-virus-may-tunnel-through-nanotubes-from-nose-to-brain/

https://neurosciencenews.com/post-covid-brain-21904/

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(22)00260-7/fulltext

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-08-covid-infection-crucial-brain-regions.html

https://news.ecu.edu/2022/08/04/covid-parkinsons-link/

Covid as a vascular/blood vessel disease:

https://www.salon.com/2020/06/01/coronavirus-is-a-blood-vessel-disease-study-says-and-its-mysteries-finally-make-sense/

https://www.salon.com/2023/12/27/brain-damage-caused-by-19-may-not-show-up-on-routine-tests-study-finds/

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/sars-cov-2-infects-coronary-arteries-increases-plaque-inflammation

https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/12/6/2123

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211004104134.htm (microclots)

Long Covid:

Post-COVID-19 Condition in Canada: What we know, what we don’t know, and a framework for action

 https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/more-than-two-years-of-long-covid-research-hasn-t-yielded-many-answers-scientific-review-1.6235227

 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/cause-of-long-covid-symptoms-revealed-by-lung-imaging-research-at-western-university-1.6504318

 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/long-covid-study-montreal-1.6521131

https://news.yale.edu/2023/12/19/study-helps-explain-post-covid-exercise-intolerance

Other:

- Viruses and mutation: https://typingmonkeys.substack.com/p/monkeys-on-typewriters

Measures taken by the rich and world leaders

Heightened risk of diabetes

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2805461

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00912-y

Liver damage:

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/46-of-covid-patients-have-liver-damage-study/articleshow/97809200.cms?from=mdr

tl;dr: covid is a vascular disease, not a respiratory illness. it can affect your blood and every organ in your body. every time you're reinfected, your chances of getting long covid increase.

avoid being infected. reduce the amount of viral load you're exposed to.

the gap between what the scientific community knows and ordinary people know is massive. collective action is needed.

[shamelesshottubgalaxy]

Because from the United States across the Pacific, a piece of earth-shattering news came: On February 2, local time, Musk, the richest man in the United States, the boss of Tesla, Starlink and Social Media Company X, and the head of the newly established Department of Government Efficiency of the US government, posted a post on his own Social Media CompanyMusk reposted a post revealing that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) led the creation of the new coronavirus and said: "Did you know? USAID funds research on biological weapons, such as the new coronavirus that has killed millions of people."Although the original post retweeted by Musk was considered by many to be the United States' intention to continue to throw dirty water on China on the issue of tracing the origin of the new coronavirus, I do think that dirty water cannot be poured out just as it wants, because the most basic fact is that the U.S. government has long banned the United States from cooperating with Chinese research institutions and enterprises in the field of cutting-edge technology. Therefore, the manufacturing of the new coronavirus led by the US Agency for International Development can only be carried out in the United States and in American laboratories.

In short, no matter what, the information we get through Musk’s words is that the new coronavirus was man-made, and the US Agency for International Development is the real culprit behind the creation of the new coronavirus. Therefore, perhaps this is the main reason why Musk publicly stated that "USAID is a criminal organization and it is time for it to die." In fact, even US President Trump used fierce words when talking about USAID, saying of USAID: "It is run by a group of radical lunatics, and we are going to kick them out..."Public information shows that the US Agency for International Development was founded in 1961. It is a non-governmental organization (NGO) in name, but in fact it is an independent agency established by the US government, operated by the US government, and supervised by the US government. It receives tens of billions of dollars in government funding from the US State Department every year, accounting for more than half of the total US foreign aid. In the past five years, USAID has received more than US$200 billion in government funding.Through its vast financial and diplomatic network, USAID dispatches personnel to carry out activities in more than 190 countries and regions around the world. A large part of its funds is used to support NGO organizations, and uses NGO organizations around the world to deeply penetrate into local politics, culture, economy and other aspects. Once the need arises or the time is right, USAID will instruct NGO organizations to incite local people to engage in YG or even launch a coup.

[thoughtportal]

The concentration of a virus in wastewater can paint a picture of how much COVID-19 is present in that community. Testing at airports can help provide context for how prevalent the virus is among international travelers, and provide clues as to what new variants are emerging.

Within the last week, the Center for Disease Control announced it is considering use of wastewater testing at airports, mainly on incoming international flights, to track any emerging new variants as COVID-19 surges in China. Health officials in Australia and the United Kingdom announced similar plans. {read}

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 6, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov 06, 2024

Yesterday, November 5, 2024, Americans reelected former president Donald Trump, a Republican, to the presidency over Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris. As of Wednesday night, Trump is projected to get at least 295 electoral votes to Harris’s 226, with two Republican-leaning states still not called. The popular vote count is still underway.

Republicans also retook control of the Senate, where Democrats were defending far more seats than Republicans. Control of the House is not yet clear. 

These results were a surprise to everyone. Trump is a 78-year-old convicted felon who has been found liable for sexual assault and is currently under indictment in a number of jurisdictions. He refused to leave office peacefully when voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020, instead launching an unprecedented attack on the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes, and said during his campaign that he would be a “dictator” on his first day in office.  

Pollsters thought the race would be very close but showed increasing momentum for Harris, and Harris’s team expressed confidence during the day. By posting on social media—with no evidence—that the voting in Pennsylvania was rigged, Trump himself suggested he expected he would lose the popular vote, at least, as he did in 2016 and 2020. 

But in 2024, it appears a majority of American voters chose to put Trump back into office. 

Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, offered a message of unity, the expansion of the economic policies that have made the U.S. economy the strongest in the world in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, and the creation of an “opportunity economy” that echoed many of the policies Republicans used to embrace. Trump vowed to take revenge on his enemies and to return the country to the neoliberal policies President Joe Biden had rejected in favor of investing in the middle class.

When he took office, Biden acknowledged that democracy was in danger around the globe, as authoritarians like Russian president Vladimir Putin and China’s president Xi Jinping  maintained that democracy was obsolete and must be replaced by autocracies. Russia set out to undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that enforced the rules-based international order that stood against Russian expansion. 

Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who overturned democracy in his own country, explained that the historical liberal democracy of the United States weakens a nation because the equality it champions means treating immigrants, LGBTQ+ individuals, and women as equal to men, thus ending traditionally patriarchal society.

In place of democracy, Orbán champions “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” This form of government holds nominal elections, although their outcome is preordained because the government controls all the media and has silenced opposition. Orbán’s model of minority rule promises a return to a white-dominated, religiously based society, and he has pushed his vision by eliminating the independent press, cracking down on political opposition, getting rid of the rule of law, and dominating the economy with a group of crony oligarchs. 

In order to strengthen democracy at home and abroad, Biden worked to show that it delivered for ordinary Americans. He and the Democrats passed groundbreaking legislation to invest in rebuilding roads and bridges and build new factories to usher in green energy. They defended unions and used the Federal Trade Commission to break up monopolies and return more economic power to consumers. 

Their system worked. It created record low unemployment rates, lifted wages for the bottom 80% of Americans, and built the strongest economy in the world in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, setting multiple stock market records.  But that success turned out not to be enough to protect democracy. 

In contrast, Trump promised he would return to the ideology of the era before 2021, when leaders believed in relying on markets to order the economy with the idea that wealthy individuals would invest more efficiently than if the government regulated business or skewed markets with targeted investment (in green energy, for example). Trump vowed to cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations and to make up lost revenue through tariffs, which he incorrectly insists are paid by foreign countries; tariffs are paid by U.S. consumers. 

For policies, Trump’s campaign embraced the Project 2025 agenda led by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which has close ties to Orbán. That plan calls for getting rid of the nonpartisan civil service the U.S. has had since 1883 and for making both the Department of Justice and the military partisan instruments of a strong president, much as Orbán did in Hungary. It also calls for instituting religious rule, including an end to abortion rights, across the U.S. Part of the idea of “purifying” the country is the deportation of undocumented immigrants: Trump promised to deport 20 million people at an estimated cost of $88 billion to $315 billion a year. 

That is what voters chose.

Pundits today have spent time dissecting the election results, many trying to find the one tweak that would have changed the outcome, and suggesting sweeping solutions to the Democrats’ obvious inability to attract voters. There is no doubt that a key factor in voters’ swing to Trump is that they associated the inflation of the post-pandemic months with Biden and turned the incumbents out, a phenomenon seen all over the world.

There is also no doubt that both racism and sexism played an important role in Harris’s defeat. 

But my own conclusion is that both of those things were amplified by the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now. Russian political theorists called the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media “political technology.” They developed several techniques in this approach to politics, but the key was creating a false narrative in order to control public debate. These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing. 

In the U.S., pervasive right-wing media, from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by influencers, have permitted Trump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as “failing” and to run away from the hugely unpopular Project 2025. They allowed MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave and immigration as an invasion. They also shielded its audience from the many statements of Trump’s former staff that he is unfit for office, and even that his chief of staff General John Kelly considers him a fascist and noted that he admires German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.

As actor Walter Masterson posted: “I tried to educate people about tariffs, I tried to explain that undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes and are the foundation of this country. I explained Project 2025, I interviewed to show that they supported it. I can not compete against the propaganda machines of Twitter, Fox News, [Joe Rogan Experience], and NY Post. These spaces will continue to create reality unless we create a more effective way of reaching people.” 

X users noted a dramatic drop in their followers today, likely as bots, no longer necessary, disengaged. 

Many voters who were using their vote to make an economic statement are likely going to be surprised to discover what they have actually voted for. In his victory speech, Trump said the American people had given him an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.” 

White nationalist Nick Fuentes posted, “Your body, my choice. Forever,” and gloated that men will now legally control women’s bodies. His post got at least 22,000 “likes.” Right-wing influencer Benny Johnson, previously funded by Russia, posted: “It is my honor to inform you that Project 2025 was real the whole time.” 

Today, Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump would launch the “largest mass deportation operation” of undocumented immigrants, and the stock in private prison companies GEO Group and CoreCivic  jumped 41% and 29%, respectively. Those jumps were part of a bigger overall jump: the Dow Jones Industrial Average moved up 1,508 points in what Washington Post economic columnist Heather Long said was the largest post-election jump in more than 100 years. 

As for the lower prices Trump voters wanted, Kate Gibson of CBS today noted that on Monday, the National Retail Federation said that Trump’s proposed tariffs will cost American consumers between $46 billion and $78 billion a year as clothing, toys, furniture, appliances, and footwear all become more expensive. A $50 pair of running shoes, Gibson said, would retail for $59 to $64 under the new tariffs.

U.S. retailers are already preparing to raise prices of items from foreign suppliers, passing to consumers the cost of any future tariffs. 

Trump’s election will also mean he will no longer have to answer to the law for his federal indictments: special counsel Jack Smith is winding them down ahead of Trump’s inauguration. So he will not be tried for retaining classified documents or attempting to overthrow the U.S. government when he lost in 2020. 

This evening, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán posted on social media that he had just spoken with Trump, and said: “We have big plans for the future!” 

This afternoon, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at her alma mater, Howard University, to concede the election to Trump. 

She thanked her supporters, her family, the Bidens, the Walz family, and her campaign staff and volunteers. She reiterated that she believes Americans have far more in common than separating us.

In what appeared to be a message to Trump, she noted: “A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results. That principle as much as any other distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny, and anyone who seeks the public trust must honor it. At the same time in our nation, we owe loyalty not to a president or a party, but to the Constitution of the United States, and loyalty to our conscience and to our God. 

“My allegiance to all three is why I am here to say, while I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fuels this campaign, the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness and the dignity of all people, a fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation, the ideals that reflect America at our best. That is a fight I will never give up.”

Harris urged people “to organize, to mobilize and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom and justice and the future that we all know we can build together.” She told those feeling as if the world is dark indeed these days, to “fill the sky with the light of a billion brilliant stars, the light of optimism, of faith, of truth and service,” and to let “that work guide us, even in the face of setbacks, toward the extraordinary promise of the United States of America.” 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[mariacallous]

For Sander van der Linden, misinformation is personal.

As a child in the Netherlands, the University of Cambridge social psychologist discovered that almost all of his mother’s family had been executed by the Nazis during the Second World War. He became absorbed by the question of how so many people came to support the ideas of someone like Adolf Hitler, and how they might be taught to resist such influence.

While studying psychology at graduate school in the mid-2010s, van der Linden came across the work of American researcher William McGuire. In the 1960s, stories of brainwashed prisoners-of-war during the Korean War had captured the zeitgeist, and McGuire developed a theory of how such indoctrination might be prevented. He wondered whether exposing soldiers to a weaker form of propaganda might have equipped them to fight off a full attack once they’d been captured. In the same way that army drills prepared them for combat, a pre-exposure to an attack on their beliefs could have prepared them against mind control. It would work, McGuire argued, as a cognitive immunizing agent against propaganda—a vaccine against brainwashing.

Traditional vaccines protect us by feeding us a weaker dose of pathogen, enabling our bodies’ immune defenses to take note of its appearance so we’re better equipped to fight the real thing when we encounter it. A psychological vaccine works much the same way: Give the brain a weakened hit of a misinformation-shaped virus, and the next time it encounters it in fully-fledged form, its “mental antibodies” remember it and can launch a defense.

Van der Linden wanted to build on McGuire’s theories and test the idea of psychological inoculation in the real world. His first study looked at how to combat climate change misinformation. At the time, a bogus petition was circulating on Facebook claiming there wasn’t enough scientific evidence to conclude that global warming was human-made, and boasting the signatures of 30,000 American scientists (on closer inspection, fake signatories included Geri Halliwell and the cast of M*A*S*H). Van der Linden and his team took a group of participants and warned them that there were politically motivated actors trying to deceive them—the phony petition in this case. Then they gave them a detailed takedown of the claims of the petition; they pointed out, for example, Geri Halliwell’s appearance on the list. When the participants were later exposed to the petition, van der Linden and his group found that people knew not to believe it.

The approach hinges on the idea that by the time we’ve been exposed to misinformation, it’s too late for debunking and fact-checking to have any meaningful effect, so you have to prepare people in advance—what van der Linden calls “prebunking.” An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

When he published the findings in 2016, van der Linden hadn’t anticipated that his work would be landing in the era of Donald Trump’s election, fake news, and post-truth; attention on his research from the media and governments exploded. Everyone wanted to know, how do you scale this up?

Van der Linden worked with game developers to create an online choose-your-own-adventure game called Bad News, where players can try their hand at writing and spreading misinformation. Much like a broadly protective vaccine, if you show people the tactics used to spread fake news, it fortifies their inbuilt bullshit detectors.

But social media companies were still hesitant to get on board; correcting misinformation and being the arbiters of truth is not part of their core business model. Then people in China started getting sick with a mysterious flulike illness.

The coronavirus pandemic propelled the threat of misinformation to dizzying new heights. Van der Linden began working with the British government and bodies like the World Health Organization and the United Nations to create a more streamlined version of the game specifically revolving around Covid, which they called GoViral! They created more versions, including one for the 2020 US presidential election, and another to prevent extremist recruitment in the Middle East. Slowly, Silicon Valley came around.

A collaboration with Google has resulted in a campaign on YouTube in which the platform plays clips in the ad section before the video starts, warning viewers about misinformation tropes like scapegoating and false dichotomies and drawing examples from Family Guy and Star Wars. A study with 20,000 participants found that people who viewed the ads were better able to spot manipulation tactics; the feature is now being rolled out to hundreds of millions of people in Europe.

Van der Linden understands that working with social media companies, who have historically been reluctant to censor disinformation, is a double-edged sword. But, at the same time, they’re the de facto guardians of the online flow of information, he says, “and so if we’re going to scale the solution, we need their cooperation.” (A downside is that they often work in unpredictable ways. Elon Musk fired the entire team who was working on pre-bunking at Twitter when he became CEO, for instance.)

This year, van der Linden wrote a book on his research, titled Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity. Ultimately, he hopes this isn’t a tool that stays under the thumb of third-party companies; his dream is for people to inoculate one another. It could go like this: You see a false narrative gaining traction on social media, you then warn your parents or your neighbor about it, and they’ll be pre-bunked when they encounter it. “This should be a tool that’s for the people, by the people,” van der Linden says.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Alarm bells ring in Japan as experts warn of fast-spreading new Covid variant KP. 3 - Published July 19, 2024

Paywalled at the South China Morning Post: Unpaywalled by Covidsafehotties.

The country reported a 39 per cent week-on-week surge in infections from July 1 to 7, with Okinawa the hardest hit

Japan is grappling with a new and highly contagious coronavirus variant that is fuelling the country’s 11th wave of Covid-19 infections, health experts warn. The KP. 3 variant is spreading rapidly, even among those who are vaccinated or have recovered from previous infections, according to Kazuhiro Tateda, president of the Japan Association of Infectious Diseases.

“It is, unfortunately, the nature of the virus to become more resilient and resistant each time it changes into a different form,” Tateda told This Week in Asia. “People lose their immunity quite quickly after being vaccinated, so they have little or no resistance.”

Tateda, who sits on Japan’s advisory panel formed at the start of the pandemic, said the coming weeks will be critical as authorities monitor the variant’s spread and impact.

While hospitals have reported a sharp uptick in Covid-19 admissions, Tateda said he is “relieved that not many of these cases are severe”. Typical symptoms of the KP. 3 variant include high fever, sore throat, loss of smell and taste, headaches, and fatigue.

According to the health ministry, medical facilities across Japan logged a 1.39-fold – or 39 per cent – increase in infections from July 1 to 7, compared to the previous week.

Okinawa prefecture has been the hardest hit by the new strain of the virus, with hospitals reporting an average of nearly 30 infections per days. The KP. 3 variant has accounted for more than 90 per cent of Covid-19 cases nationwide, the Fuji News Network reported, leading to renewed concerns about bed shortages at medical facilities.

Since Japan’s first detected Covid-19 case in early 2020 involving a man who returned from the Chinese city of Wuhan, East Asian nation has recorded a total of 34 million infections and around 75,000 related deaths. The country’s Covid-19 caseload peaked on August 5, 2022, when more than 253,000 people were receiving treatment.

Japan’s uptick in cases coincides with similar increases being observed globally. In the US, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention reported a 23.5 per cent week-over-week rise in the number of people visiting hospitals with Covid-19 symptoms during the week ending July 6.

High-profile US.figures such as President Joe Biden and Doug Emhoff, husband of Vice-President Kamala Harris, have recently tested positive and gone into isolation. Meanwhile, several riders in the ongoing Tour de France cycling race have also returned positive test results.

Experts say it is too early to determine the full impact of the new variant on Japanese businesses or cross-border activities like travel. Precautionary measures are already in place at the country’s air and seaports to monitor the health of incoming arrivals. However, the global spike in cases may deter some Japanese from venturing abroad this summer.

A recent survey by Nippon Life insurance found that just 3.2 per cent of Japanese plan to travel abroad in the coming months, which is likely to depress annual travel figures once again. In 2023, Japan saw 9.62 million outbound travellers, a recovery after three years of extremely low pandemic-era numbers, but still far below the 20.01 million outbound travellers recorded in 2019.

Despite the latest surge, infectious disease expert Tateda insists there is no need for panic in Japan. However, he emphasised the importance of following precautions implemented during the pandemic’s peak, such as mask-wearing in public, handwashing, and social distancing.

Tateda also stressed that anyone testing positive should immediately isolate themselves.

[darkmaga-returns]

“The truth has a slow pace but always arrives at its destination.”

by Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio

VERSIONE IN ITALIANO

Almost 5 years have passed since February 4, 2020 when Gospa News published the first investigation “Coronavirus Bio-Weapon” on the COVID Pandemic virus created in a laboratory. For those investigations, which later became part of the WuhanGates cycle and book of the same name, I was censored by almost all social platforms and ignored by 90% of my journalist colleagues in Italy.

Now, finally, even the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) confirms what was already supported by two US federal agencies (FBI and Department of Energy) and by the commissions of two branches of the American Congress: SARS-Cov-2 was created artificially.

But this is not the real news. The scoop is that in its final report the richest and most powerful counterintelligence agency in the world has stubbornly ignored dozens of research that have surfaced in our dossier and are now in the public domain in order to continue to blame China for the cover-ups of the origin of the pathogen and to conceal the role of the Pentagon.