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mariacallous · 8 months ago

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If Benjamin Netanyahu had accepted defeat in June 2021, finally yielding the stage to a coalition of his opponents, he could have retired at the age of 71 with a decent claim to having been one of Israel’s more successful prime ministers.

He had already surpassed the time in office of Israel’s founder, David Ben-Gurion, becoming the country’s longest-serving prime minister in 2019. His second stretch in office, from 2009 to 2021, coincided with perhaps the best 12 years Israel had known since its founding in 1948. The country enjoyed relative security, with no major wars or prolonged Intifadas. The period was one of uninterrupted economic growth and prosperity. Thanks to its early adoption of widespread vaccination, Israel was one of the first countries in the world to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic. And toward the end of that span came three agreements establishing diplomatic relations with Arab countries; more were likely on the way.

Twelve years of Netanyahu’s leadership had seemingly made Israel more secure and prosperous, with deep trade and defense ties across the world. But this wasn’t enough to win him another term. A majority of Israelis had tired of him, and he had been tainted by charges of bribery and fraud in his dealings with billionaires and press barons. In the space of 24 months, Israel held four elections ending in stalemate, with neither Netanyahu nor his rivals winning a majority. Finally, an unlikely alliance of right-wing, centrist, left-wing, and Islamist parties managed to band together and replace him with his former aide Naftali Bennett in June 2021.

At that point, Netanyahu could have sealed his legacy. A plea bargain on offer from the attorney general would have ended his corruption trial with a conviction on reduced charges and no jail time. He would have had to leave politics, probably for good. Over the course of four decades in public life, including 15 years as prime minister and 22 as the Likud party’s leader, he had already left an indelible mark on Israel, dominating the second half of its history. But he couldn’t bear the thought of giving up power.

Within 18 months, he was back as prime minister for the third time. The unwieldy coalition that replaced him had imploded, and this time around, Netanyahu’s camp of far-right and religious parties ran a disciplined campaign, exploiting the weaknesses of their divided rivals to emerge with a small parliamentary majority, despite still being virtually tied in the vote count.

Nine months later, Netanyahu, the man who promised, above everything else, to deliver security for Israel’s citizens, presided over the darkest day in his country’s existence. A total breakdown of the Israeli military and intelligence structure allowed Hamas to breach Israel’s border and embark on a rampage of murder, kidnapping, and rape, killing more than 1,100 Israelis and taking more than 250 hostage. The calamities of that day, the failures of leadership leading up to it, and the traumas it caused will haunt Israel for generations. Even leaving completely aside the war he has prosecuted since that day and its yet-unknown end, October 7 means that Netanyahu will always be remembered as Israel’s worst-ever leader.

How does one measure a prime minister?

There is no broadly accepted ranking of the 13 men and one woman who have led Israel, but most lists would feature David Ben-Gurion at the top. Not only was he the George Washington of the Jewish state, proclaiming its independence just three years after a third of the Jewish people had been exterminated in the Holocaust, but his administration established many of the institutions and policies that define Israel to this day. Other favorites include Levi Eshkol, for his shrewd and prudent leadership in the tense weeks before the Six Day War, and Menachem Begin, for achieving the country’s first peace agreement with an Arab nation, Egypt.

All three of these men had mixed records and detractors, of course. Ben-Gurion had autocratic tendencies and was consumed by party infighting during his later years in office. After the Six Day War, Eshkol failed to deliver a coherent plan for what Israel should do with the new territories it occupied and the Palestinians who have remained under its rule ever since. In Begin’s second term, Israel entered a disastrous war in Lebanon, and his government nearly tanked the economy. But in most Israelis’ minds, these leaders’ positive legacies outweigh the negatives.

Who are the “worst prime ministers”? Until now, most Israelis regarded Golda Meir as the top candidate for that dismal title. The intelligence failure leading to the Yom Kippur War was on her watch. Before the war, she rejected Egyptian overtures toward peace (though some Israeli historians have recently argued that these were less than sincere). And when war was clearly imminent, her administration refrained from launching preemptive attacks that could have saved the lives of hundreds of soldiers.

Other “worst” candidates have included Ehud Olmert, for launching the second Lebanon war and becoming Israel’s first former prime minister to go to prison for corruption; Yitzhak Shamir, for kiboshing an agreement with Jordan’s King Hussein that many believe could have been a significant step toward resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict; and Ehud Barak, for spectacularly failing to fulfill his extravagant promises to bring peace with both the Palestinians and Syria.

But Benjamin Netanyahu now surpasses these contenders by orders of magnitude. He has brought far-right extremists into the mainstream of government and made himself, and the country, beholden to them. His corruption is flamboyant. And he has made terrible security decisions that brought existential danger to the country he pledged to lead and protect. Above all, his selfishness is without parallel: He has put his own interests ahead of Israel’s at every turn.

Netanyahu has the distinction of being the only Israeli prime minister to make a once reviled movement on the right fringe of the country’s politics into a government stakeholder.

Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of a Jewish-supremacist group called Kach, won a lone seat in the Knesset in 1984. He openly called for replacing Israeli democracy with a constitution based on the laws of the Torah and for denying Israel’s Arab citizens equal rights. During Kahane’s single legislative term, the entire Israeli political establishment shunned him. When he got up to speak in the Knesset, all of its members would leave the plenum.

In 1985, Likud joined other parties in changing election law so that those who denied Israel’s democratic identity, denied its Jewish identity, or incited racism could be barred from running for office. Under this provision, Kach was never allowed to compete in another election. Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990. Four years later, a member of his movement killed 29 Muslims at prayer in Hebron, and the Israeli government proscribed Kach as a terror organization and forced it to disband.

But the Kahanists didn’t go away. With each Israeli election, they tried to rename their movement and adjust its platform to conform with electoral law. They remained ostracized. Then, in 2019, Netanyahu saw a roadblock on his path to reelection that they could help him get around.

Several Israeli parties had pledged not to serve in a government led by an indicted prime minister—quite possibly, enough of them to shut Netanyahu out of power. To prevent that from happening, Netanyahu needed to eke out every possible right-wing and religious vote for his potential coalition. The polls were predicting that the latest Kahanist iteration, the Jewish Power party, which is led by the thuggish but media-savvy Itamar Ben-Gvir, would receive only about 10,000 votes, well below the threshold needed to make the party a player on its own; but Netanyahu believed that if he could persuade the Kahanists and other small right-wing parties to merge their candidates’ lists into a joint slate, together they could win a seat or two for his potential coalition—just what he needed for a majority.

Netanyahu began pressuring the leaders of the small right-wing parties to merge their lists. At first the larger of these were outraged. Netanyahu was meddling in their affairs and, worse, trying to coerce them to accept the Kahanist outcasts. Gradually, he wore down their resistance—employing rabbis to persuade politicians, orchestrating media campaigns in the nationalist press, and promising central roles in future administrations. Media figures close to Netanyahu accused Bezalel Smotrich, a fundamentalist settler and the new leader of the religious Zionist party, of “endangering” the nation by making it easier for the hated left to win the election. Soon enough, Smotrich’s old-school national-religious party merged not only with Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power but with an even more obscure, proudly homophobic party led by Avi Maoz.

Netanyahu did worry a bit about the optics. Throughout five stalemated election campaigns from 2019 to 2022, Likud coordinated closely with Jewish Power, but Netanyahu refused to be seen in public with Ben-Gvir. During the 2022 campaign, at a religious festival, he even waited backstage for Ben-Gvir to leave the premises before going up to make his speech.

Two weeks later, there was no longer any need to keep up the act. Netanyahu’s strategy succeeded: His coalition, merged into four lists, edged out its squabbling opponents with 64 of the Knesset’s 120 seats.

Netanyahu finally had the “right-wing in full” government he had often promised. But before he could return to the prime minister’s office, his allies demanded a division of the spoils. The ministries with the most influence on Israelis’ daily lives—health, housing, social services, and the interior—went to the ultra-Orthodox parties. Smotrich became finance minister; Maoz was appointed deputy minister in charge of a new “Agency for Jewish Identity,” with power to intervene in educational programs. And Ben-Gvir, the subject of numerous police investigations for violence and incitement over a period of three decades, was put in charge of a newly titled “Ministry of National Security,” with authority over Israel’s police and prison services.

As Netanyahu signed away power to the Kahanists, he told the international news media that he wasn’t forming a far-right government. The Kahanists were joining his government. He would be in control. But Netanyahu hadn’t just given Israel’s most extreme racists unprecedented power and legitimacy. He’d also insinuated them into his own formerly mainstream party: By March 2024, Likud’s candidates for local elections in a handful of towns had merged their slates with those of Jewish Power.

Likud long prided itself on combining staunch Jewish nationalism, even militarism, with a commitment to liberal democracy. But a more radical stream within the party eschewed those liberal values and championed chauvinistic and autocratic positions. For much of the past century, the liberal wing was dominant and provided most of the party’s leadership. Netanyahu himself espoused the values of the liberal wing—until he fell out with all the main liberal figures. By 2019, none was left to oppose the alliance with Ben-Gvir’s Kahanists.

Now more than a third of Likud’s representatives were religious, and those who weren’t preferred to call themselves “traditional” rather than secular. They didn’t object to cooperating with the Kahanists; indeed, many had already worked with them in the past. In fact, many Likud Knesset members by that point were indistinguishable from the Jewish Power ones. Israel’s worst prime minister didn’t just form an alliance of convenience with the country’s most irresponsible extremists; he made them integral to his party and the running of the state.

That Netanyahu is personally corrupt is not altogether novel in the history of the Israeli prime ministership. What makes him worse than others is his open contempt for the rule of law.

By 2018, Netanyahu was the subject of four simultaneous corruption investigations that had been in motion for more than a year. In one, known as Case 4000, Netanyahu stood accused of promising regulatory favors to the owner of Israel’s largest telecom corporation in return for favorable coverage on a popular news site. Three of the prime minister’s closest advisers had agreed to testify against him.

Investigations of prime ministers are not rare in Israel. Netanyahu was the subject of one during his first term. The three prime ministers who served in the decade between his first and second terms—Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Olmert—had all been investigated as well. Only in Olmert’s case did police deem the evidence sufficient to mount a prosecution. At the time, in 2008, Netanyahu was the leader of the opposition.

“We’re talking about a prime minister who is up to his neck in investigations and has no public or moral mandate to make fateful decisions for Israel,” Netanyahu said of Olmert. “There is a concern, I have to say real, not without basis, that he will make decisions based on his personal interest of political survival and not on the national interest.”

Ten years later, Netanyahu would be the one snared in multiple investigations. Then he no longer spoke of corruption in high office but of a “witch hunt,” orchestrated by rogue police commanders and left-wing state prosecutors, and egged on by a hostile news media, all with the aim of toppling a right-wing leader.

Netanyahu was determined to politicize the legal procedure and pit his supporters against Israel’s law-enforcement agencies and judiciary. Never mind that the two previous prime ministers who had resigned because of corruption charges were from the center left. Nor did it matter that he had appointed the police commissioner and attorney general himself; both were deeply religious men with impeccable nationalist backgrounds, but he tarred them as perfidious tools of leftist conspiracy.

Rather than contemplate resignation, on May 24, 2020, Netanyahu became the first sitting Israeli prime minister to go on trial. He has denied all wrongdoing (the trial is still under way). In a courthouse corridor before one session, he gave a 15-minute televised speech accusing the legal establishment of “trying to topple me and the right-wing government. For over a decade, the left wing have failed to do this at the ballot box, and in recent years have come up with a new idea. Elements in the police and prosecutor’s office have joined left-wing journalists to concoct delusional charges.”

The law didn’t require Netanyahu to resign while fighting the charges against him in court. But doing so had seemed logical to his predecessors under similar circumstances—and to Israel’s lawmakers, who had never envisaged that a prime minister would so brazenly challenge the justice system, which he had a duty to uphold. For Netanyahu, however, remaining in power was an end in itself, one more important than preserving Israel’s most crucial institutions, to say nothing of Israelis’ trust in them.

Netanyahu placed extremists in positions of power, undermined confidence in the rule of law, and sacrificed principle to power. Little wonder, then, that last summer, tensions over the role of Israel’s judiciary became unmanageable. The crisis underlined all of these reasons that Netanyahu should go down as Israel’s worst prime minister.

For 34 of the past 47 years, Israel’s prime ministers have come from the Likud party. And yet many on the right still grumble that “Likud doesn’t know how to rule” and “you vote right and get left.” Likudniks complain about the lingering power of “the elites,” a left-wing minority that loses at the ballot box but still controls the civil service, the upper echelons of the security establishment, the universities, and the media. A growing anti-judicial wing within Likud demands constitutional change and a clamping-down on the supreme court’s “judicial activism.”

Netanyahu had once minimized these complaints, but his stance on the judiciary changed after he was indicted in 2019. Indeed, at the start of his current term, Likud’s partners demanded commitments to constitutional change, which they received. The ultra-Orthodox parties were anxious to pass a law exempting religious seminary students from military service. Such exemptions had already fallen afoul of the supreme court’s equality standards, so the religious parties wanted the law to include a “court bypass.” Netanyahu acceded to this. To pass the legislation in the Knesset, he appointed Simcha Rothman, a staunch critic of the court, as the chair of the Knesset’s Constitution Committee.

He also appointed Yariv Levin, another fierce critic of the court, as justice minister. Just six days after the new government was sworn in, Levin rolled out a “judicial reform” plan, prepared by a conservative think tank, that called for drastically limiting the court’s powers to review legislation and gave politicians control over the appointment of new justices.

Within days, an extremely efficient counter-campaign pointed out the dangers the plan posed, not just to Israel’s fragile and limited democracy, but to its economy and security. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested in the streets. Likud began to drop in the polls, and Netanyahu privately urged the leaders of the coalition parties to delay the vote. They refused to back down, and Levin threatened to resign over any delay.

Netanyahu’s motives, unlike those of his partners, were not ideological. His objective was political survival. He needed to keep his hard-won majority intact and the judges off-balance. But the protests were unrelenting. Netanyahu’s independent-minded defense minister, Yoav Gallant, pointed to the controversy’s dire implications for the Israel Defense Forces as hundreds of volunteer reserve officers threatened to suspend their service rather than “serve a dictatorship.”

Netanyahu wasn’t sure he wanted to go through with the judicial coup, but the idea of one of Likud’s senior ministers breaking ranks in public was unthinkable. On March 25 of last year, Gallant made a public statement that the constitutional legislation was a “clear and major threat to the security of Israel” and he would not be voting for it. The next evening, Netanyahu announced that he was firing Gallant.

In Jerusalem, protesters besieged Netanyahu’s home. In Tel Aviv, they blocked main highways. The next morning, the trade unions announced a general strike, and by that evening, Netanyahu backed down, announcing that he was suspending the legislation and would hold talks with the opposition on finding compromises. Gallant kept his post. The talks collapsed, protests started up again, and Netanyahu once again refused to listen to the warnings coming from the security establishment—not only of anger within the IDF, but that Israel’s enemies were planning to take advantage of the country’s disunity to launch an attack.

The debate over judicial reform pitted two visions of Israel against each other. On one side was a liberal and secular Israel that relied on the supreme court to defend its democratic values; on the other, a religious and conservative Israel that feared that unelected judges would impose incompatible ideas on their Jewish values.

Netanyahu’s government made no attempt to reconcile these two visions. The prime minister had spent too many years, and all those toxic electoral campaigns, exploiting and deepening the rift between them. Even when he belatedly and halfheartedly tried to rein in the radical and fundamentalist demons he had ridden back into office, he found that he could no longer control them.

Whether Netanyahu really meant to eviscerate Israel’s supreme court as part of a plot to weaken the judiciary and intimidate the judges in his own case, or whether he had no choice in the matter and was simply a hostage of his own coalition, is immaterial. What matters is that he appointed Levin as justice minister and permitted the crisis to happen. Ultimately, and despite his professed belief in liberal democracy, Netanyahu allowed Levin and his coalition partners to convince him that they were doing the right thing—because whatever kept him in office was right for Israel. Democracy would remain strong because he would remain in charge.

Trying to diminish the powers of the supreme court isn’t what makes Netanyahu Israel’s worst prime minister. The judicial reform failed anyway. Only one of its elements got through the Knesset before the war with Hamas began, and the court struck it down as unconstitutional six months later. The justices’ ruling to preserve their powers, despite the Knesset’s voting to limit them, could have caused a constitutional crisis if it had happened in peacetime. But by then Israel was facing a much bigger crisis.

Given Israel’s history, the ultimate yardstick of its leaders’ success is the security they deliver for their fellow citizens. In 2017, as I was finishing my unauthorized biography of Netanyahu, I commissioned a data analyst to calculate the average annual casualty rate (Israeli civilians and soldiers) of each prime minister since 1948. The results confirmed what I had already assumed. In the 11 years that Netanyahu had by then been prime minister, the average annual number of Israelis killed in war and terror attacks was lower, by a considerable margin, than under any previous prime minister.

My book on Netanyahu was not admiring. But I felt that it was only fair to include that data point in his favor in the epilogue and the very last footnote. Likud went on to use it in its 2019 campaigns without attributing the source.

The numbers were hard to argue with. Netanyahu was a hard-line prime minister who had done everything in his power to derail the Oslo peace process and prevent any move toward compromise with the Palestinians. Throughout much of his career, he encouraged military action by the West, first against Iraq after 9/11, and then against Iran. But in his years as prime minister, he balked at initiating or being dragged into wars of his own. His risk aversion and preference for covert operations or air strikes rather than ground operations had, in his first two stretches in power, from 1996 to 1999 and 2009 to 2021, kept Israelis relatively safe.

Netanyahu supporters on the right could also argue, on basis of the numbers, that those who brought bloodshed upon Israel, in the form of Palestinian suicide bombings and rocket attacks, were actually Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, the architects of the Oslo Accords; Ehud Barak, with his rash attempts to bring peace; and Ariel Sharon, who withdrew Israeli soldiers and settlers unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, creating the conditions for Hamas’s electoral victory there the following year. That argument no longer holds.

If future biographers of Israeli prime ministers undertake a similar analysis, Netanyahu will no longer be able to claim the lowest casualty rate. His 16th year in office, 2023, was the third-bloodiest in Israel’s history, surpassed only by 1948 and 1973, Israel’s first year of independence and the year of the Yom Kippur War, respectively.

The first nine months of 2023 had already seen a rise in deadly violence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as terrorist attacks within Israel’s borders. Then came the Hamas attack on October 7, in which at least 1,145 Israelis were massacred and 253 kidnapped and taken to Gaza. More than 30 hostages are now confirmed dead.

No matter how the war in Gaza ends, what happens in its aftermath, or when Netanyahu’s term finally ends, the prime minister will forever be associated above all with that day and the disastrous war that followed. He will go down as the worst prime minister because he has been catastrophic for Israeli security.

To understand how Netanyahu so drastically failed Israel’s security requires going back at least to 2015, the year his long-term strategic bungling of the Iranian threat came into view. His mishandling didn’t happen in isolation; it is also related to the deprioritization of other threats, including the catastrophe that materialized on October 7.

Netanyahu flew to Washington, D.C., in 2015 to implore U.S. lawmakers to obstruct President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Many view this gambit as extraordinarily damaging to Israel’s most crucial alliance—the relationship with the United States is the very bulwark of its security. Perhaps so; but the stunt didn’t make subsequent U.S. administrations less supportive of Israel. Even Obama would still go on to sign the largest 10-year package of military aid to Israel the year after Netanyahu’s speech. Rather, the damage Netanyahu caused by presuming too much of the United States wasn’t to the relationship, but to Israel itself.

Netanyahu’s strategy regarding Iran was based on his assumption that America would one day launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear program. We know this from his 2022 book, Bibi: My Story, in which he admits to arguing repeatedly with Obama “for an American strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.” Senior Israeli officials have confirmed that he expected Donald Trump to launch such a strike as well. In fact, Netanyahu was so sure that Trump, unlike Obama, would give the order that he had no strategy in place for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program when Trump decided, at Netanyahu’s own urging, to withdraw from the Iran deal in May 2018.

Israel’s military and intelligence chiefs had been far from enamored with the Iran deal, but they’d seized the opportunity it presented to divert some of the intelligence resources that had been focused on Iran’s nuclear program to other threats, particularly Tehran’s network of proxies across the region. They were caught by surprise when the Trump administration ditched the Iran deal (Netanyahu knew it was coming but didn’t inform them). This unilateral withdrawal effectively removed the limitations on Iran’s nuclear development and required an abrupt reversal of Israeli priorities.

Senior Israeli officials I spoke with had to tread a wary path here. Those who were still in active service couldn’t challenge the prime minister’s strategy directly. But in private some were scathing about the lack of a coherent strategy on Iran. “It takes years to build intelligence capabilities. You can’t just change target priorities overnight,” one told me.

The result was a dissipation of Israeli efforts to stop Iran—which is committed to the destruction of Israel. Iran sped further than ever down the path of uranium enrichment, and its proxies, including the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border, grew ever more powerful.

In the months leading up to October 7, Israel’s intelligence community repeatedly warned Netanyahu that Iran and its proxies were plotting a major attack within Israel, though few envisaged something on the scale of October 7. By the fall of 2023, motives were legion: fear that an imminent Israeli diplomatic breakthrough with Saudi Arabia could change the geopolitics of the region; threats that Ben-Gvir would allow Jews greater access to the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and worsen conditions for Palestinian prisoners; rumors that the deepening tensions within Israeli society would render any response to an attack slow and disjointed.

Netanyahu chose to ignore the warnings. The senior officers and intelligence chiefs who issued them were, to his mind, conspiring with the law-enforcement agencies and legal establishment that had put him on trial and were trying to obstruct his government’s legislation. None of them had his experience and knowledge of the real threats facing Israel. Hadn’t he been right in the past when he’d refused to listen to leftist officials and so-called experts?

Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7 was the result of a colossal failure at all levels of Israel’s security and intelligence community. They had all seen the warning signals but continued to believe that the main threat came from Hezbollah, the larger and far better-equipped and trained enemy to the north. Israel’s security establishment believed that Hamas was isolated in Gaza, and that it and the other Palestinian organizations had been effectively deterred from attacking Israel.

Netanyahu was the originator of this assumption, and its biggest proponent. He believed that keeping Hamas in power in Gaza, as it had been for nearly two years when he returned to office in 2009, was in Israel’s interest. Periodic rocket attacks on Israeli communities in the south were a price worth paying to keep the Palestinian movement split between the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority in the West Bank enclaves and Hamas in Gaza. Such division would push the troublesome two-state solution off the global agenda and allow Israel to focus on regional alliances with like-minded Arab autocracies that also feared Iran. The Palestinian issue would sink into irrelevance.

Netanyahu’s disastrous strategy regarding Gaza and Hamas is part of what makes him Israel’s worst prime minister, but it’s not the only factor. Previous Israeli prime ministers, too, blundered into bloody wars on the basis of misguided strategies and faulty advice from their military and intelligence advisers.

Netanyahu stands out from them for his refusal to accept responsibility, and for his political machinations and smear campaigns since October 7. He blames IDF generals and nourishes the conspiracy theory that they, in alliance with the protest movement, somehow allowed October 7 to happen.

Netanyahu believes that he is the ultimate victim of that tragic day. Convinced by his own campaign slogans, he argues that he is the only one who can deliver Israel from this valley of shadows to the sunlit uplands of “total victory.” He refuses to consider any advice about ending the war and continues to prioritize preserving his coalition, because he appears incapable of distinguishing between his own fate, now tainted by tragic failure, and that of Israel.

Many around the world assume that Israel’s war with Hamas has proceeded according to some plan of Netanyahu’s. This is a mistake. Netanyahu has the last word as prime minister and head of the emergency war cabinet, but he has used his power mainly to prevaricate, procrastinate, and obstruct. He delayed the initial ground offensive into Gaza, hesitated for weeks over the first truce and hostage-release agreement in November, and is now doing the same over another such deal with Hamas. For the past six months, he has prevented any meaningful cabinet discussion of Israel’s strategic goals. He has rejected the proposals of his own security establishment and the Biden administration. He presented vague principles for “the day after Hamas” to the cabinet only in late February, and they have yet to be debated.

However one views the war in Gaza—as a justified war of defense in which Hamas is responsible for the civilian casualties it has cynically hidden behind, or as an intentional genocide of the Palestinian people, or as anything in between—none of it is Netanyahu’s plan. That’s because Netanyahu has no plan for Gaza, only one for remaining in power. His obstructionism, his showdowns with generals, his confrontations with the Biden administration—all are focused on that end, which means preserving his far-right coalition and playing to his hard-core nationalist base.

Meanwhile, he’s doing what he has always done: wearing down and discrediting his political opponents in the hope of proving to an exhausted and traumatized public that he’s the only alternative. So far, he’s failing. Polls show that an overwhelming majority of Israelis want him gone. But Netanyahu is fending off calls to hold an early election until he believes he is within striking distance of winning.

Netanyahu’s ambition has consumed both him and Israel. To regain and remain in office, he has sacrificed his own authority and parceled out power to the most extreme politicians. Since his reelection in 2022, Netanyahu is no longer the center of power but a vacuum, a black hole that has engulfed all of Israel’s political energy. His weakness has given the far right and religious fundamentalists extraordinary control over Israel’s affairs, while other segments of the population are left to pursue the never-ending quest to end his reign.

One man’s pursuit of power has diverted Israel from confronting its most urgent priorities: the threat from Iran, the conflict with the Palestinians, the desire to nurture a Westernized society and economy in the most contested corner of the Middle East, the internal contradictions between democracy and religion, the clash between tribal phobias and high-tech hopes. Netanyahu’s obsession with his own destiny as Israel’s protector has caused his country grievous damage.

Most Israelis already realize that Netanyahu is the worst of the 14 prime ministers their country has had in its 76 years of independence. But in the future, Jews might even remember him as the leader who inflicted the most harm on his people since the squabbling Hasmonean kings brought civil war and Roman occupation to Judea nearly 21 centuries ago. As long as he remains in power, he could yet surpass them.

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darkmaga-returns · 13 days ago

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Now that Donald Trump has been reelected as president of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is ready to get to work locking up Bill Gates, Tony Fauci, and every other Big Pharma executive who conspired with the media to censor the ugly truth about Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) "vaccines."

Each of these Big Pharma hacks assumed that Kamala Harris would win and sweep the whole thing under the rug. Now that Trump is about to take office a second time, many of them are running for cover.

Kennedy helped unearth evidence showing that COVID injections are bioweapons rather than honest medicine. Their purpose, among other things, was to sicken the general public while reducing the population and laying the groundwork for global medical fascism.

Gates pumped billions of dollars into the production of the Operation Warp Speed jabs, which Congress and the Trump administration paved the way for with the PREP Act. Since Gates also recently funded $50 million to the Kamala campaign, Kennedy wants him to pay.

"[Bill Gates] has been indicted in the Netherlands for lying to the public about the COVID-19 vaccine," Kennedy said last month. "And he's going to have to go to trial."

"You think that he wants to go to trial here in the United States of America? [Do] you think that's one of the reasons he chose to give $50 million to Kamala Harris?"

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covid-safer-hotties · 4 months ago

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They develop a mask that lights up when it detects the Coronavirus. It would signify great progress in case detection - Published Aug 5, 2024

Scientists at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are trying to apply the technology that worked to fight other diseases to this pandemic.

This invention could help stop the spread of COVID-19. A team of scientists from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) develop a mask that glows when contaminated by the new coronavirus. It would greatly help in the fight against this global pandemic.

According to Business Insider, in 2014, the MIT bioengineering laboratory began to develop sensors to detect the Ebola virus when it underwent lyophilization (a dehydration process) on a piece of paper. This same technology was adapted to address the Zika virus outbreak.

Again, as part of their work on this subject, they’re conducting research to be able to help in the COVID-19 pandemic. In this case, they hope to create a mask that can produce a fluorescent color to identify the coronavirus. If successful, it would help complement current virus detection methods.

“As we open up our transit system, you could envision it being used in airports as we go through security, as we wait to get on a plane,” said Jim Collins, head of the MIT lab, in conversation with Business Insider.

“You or I could use it on the way to and from work. Hospitals could use it for patients as they come in or wait in the waiting room as a pre-screen of who’s infected” he added.

This could greatly facilitate the work of doctors in the midst of this pandemic. One of the peculiarities of this coronavirus, unlike previous outbreaks, is the lack of symptoms in patients that test positive, making contagion easier for those who think they’re healthy when in reality they’re just asymptomatic. Also, it would make the detection of cases much quicker.

For now, it’s just in the first phase – although expectations are very high. They hope to develop the detector’s design in a way in which the sensors can be embedded into any mask.

They hope to show in the coming weeks that this method works. “Once we’re in that stage, then it would be a matter setting up trials with individuals expected to be infected to see if it would work in a real-world setting,” Collins said.

It would just be a matter of adapting the sensors to this new coronavirus, since in 2018 this technology was able to detect the viruses that cause SARS, measles, influenza, hepatitis C, West Nile, in addition to other diseases.

“We initially did this on paper to create inexpensive paper-based diagnostics,” Collins said. “We’ve shown it can work on plastic, quartz, as well as cloth.”

The COVID-19 vaccine is expected to be part of a long process, which is still far from over. However, this mask could help lower the rate of contagion around the world.

#covid #mask up #pandemic #covid 19 #wear a mask #coronavirus #sars cov 2 #still coviding #public health #wear a respirator

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liesmyteachertoldme · 1 year ago

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In an October 2023 lecture, David E. Martin, Ph.D., detailed how we can know that SARS-CoV-2 is a manmade bioweapon that has been in the works for 58 years

The virus called “coronavirus” was first described in 1965. Two years later, the U.S. and U.K. launched an exchange program where healthy British military personnel were infected with coronavirus pathogens from the U.S. as part of the U.S. biological weapons program

In 1992, Ralph Baric at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, took a pathogen that used to infect the gut and lungs and altered it with a chimera to make it infect the heart, causing cardiomyopathy. This research was part of the efforts to produce an HIV vaccine

In November 2000, Pfizer patented its first spike protein vaccine. Between 2000 and 2019, vaccine trials using this technology proved it was lethal, yet in the summer of 2020, the clinical trials for the SARS-CoV-2 shots went straight into human trials

mRNA spike protein was publicly described as a bioweapon 18 years ago. In 2005, at a conference hosted by DARPA and The Mitre Corporation, the mRNA spike protein was hailed as a “biological warfare-enabling technology,” i.e., a biological warfare agent

#government corruption #covid-19 #vaccines #medical scams #health #medicine

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theculturedmarxist · 1 year ago

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Abstract

There have been hundreds of millions of cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). With the growing population of recovered patients, it is crucial to understand the long-term consequences of the disease and management strategies. Although COVID-19 was initially considered an acute respiratory illness, recent evidence suggests that manifestations including but not limited to those of the cardiovascular, respiratory, neuropsychiatric, gastrointestinal, reproductive, and musculoskeletal systems may persist long after the acute phase. These persistent manifestations, also referred to as long COVID, could impact all patients with COVID-19 across the full spectrum of illness severity. Herein, we comprehensively review the current literature on long COVID, highlighting its epidemiological understanding, the impact of vaccinations, organ-specific sequelae, pathophysiological mechanisms, and multidisciplinary management strategies. In addition, the impact of psychological and psychosomatic factors is also underscored. Despite these crucial findings on long COVID, the current diagnostic and therapeutic strategies based on previous experience and pilot studies remain inadequate, and well-designed clinical trials should be prioritized to validate existing hypotheses. Thus, we propose the primary challenges concerning biological knowledge gaps and efficient remedies as well as discuss the corresponding recommendations.

#long covid

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rehsgalleries · 2 years ago

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At Rehs Contemporary Galleries - Josh Tiessen – Vanitas and Viriditas. On view from April 28th through May 26th

The Ferret Trials

Oil on panel

12 x 12 inches

$4,000.00

https://rehs.com/Josh_Tiessen_The_Ferret_Trials.html

In my painting, a lone ferret lays deceased on a lab table with a syringe––perhaps one of the many experimental injections for risky gain-of-function research. This work is a lament for the atrocities of vivisection (animal testing). The seven rose petals are symbolic of a funeral. It is my way of eulogizing the Black-Footed Ferret, the most commonly used species for coronavirus vaccine experiments, due to its lung structure resembling that of humans. While at first ferrets showed promising signs of antibody response, many died later when exposed to the wild virus [iii]. Today, animals are experimented on in labs all over the world, and, as a result, just like the ferrets, many of them prematurely perish due to compromised immune systems.

#rehscontemporary #fine art #fineart #work of art #art work #workofart #josh tiessen #animal art

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albonium · 2 months ago

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"Long COVID is an often debilitating illness that occurs in at least 10% of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections. More than 200 symptoms have been identified with impacts on multiple organ systems. At least 65 million individuals worldwide are estimated to have long COVID, with cases increasing daily.

Biomedical research has made substantial progress in identifying various pathophysiological changes and risk factors and in characterizing the illness; further, similarities with other viral-onset illnesses such as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome have laid the groundwork for research in the field.

In this review, we explore the current literature and highlight key findings, the overlap with other conditions, the variable onset of symptoms, long COVID in children and the impact of vaccinations. Although these key findings are critical to understanding long COVID, current diagnostic and treatment options are insufficient, and clinical trials must be prioritized that address leading hypotheses.

Additionally, to strengthen long COVID research, future studies must account for biases and SARS-CoV-2 testing issues, build on viral-onset research, be inclusive of marginalized populations and meaningfully engage patients throughout the research process."

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tamanna31 · 2 months ago

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Clinical Trials 2024 Industry Size, Demands, Growth and Top Key Players Analysis Report

Clinical Trials Industry Overview

The global clinical trials market size was valued at USD 80.7 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.49% from 2024 to 2030.

The market growth spiked in 2020 owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. This growth pattern was witnessed by both virtual clinical trials and traditional ones. Several companies invested heavily in novel drug development to minimize COVID-19 patient burden. One such example being, in 2020, Synairgen plc and Parexel collaborated on a Phase III study of Interferon-beta (IFN-beta) treatment for COVID-19. Furthermore, rapid technological evolution, rising prevalence of chronic diseases, globalization of clinical trials, penetration of personalized medicine and a rise in demand for CROs for conducting research activities is expected to positively impact the market growth.

Gather more insights about the market drivers, restrains and growth of theClinical Trials Market

In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic led to changing the ways of conducting upcoming or ongoing clinical trials. Regulatory agencies including the U.S. FDA, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and China’s National Medical Products Administration among several others issued various guidelines for conducting trials during the pandemic to support the implementation of decentralized clinical trials and virtual services. The current scenario for research and development activities across the globe and the need for several new treatment options have also led to the adoption of fast-track clinical trials. Thus, aforementioned factors are estimated to offer new avenues to the clinical trials market growth.

Favorable government support and initiatives is another aspect boosting the market growth potential. For instance, the WHO launched Solidarity, an international clinical trial to determine effective treatment against COVID-19. [PS2] It includes comparing four treatment options against the standard of care to evaluate their effectiveness against the coronavirus. In May 2020, the WHO also announced an international alliance for simultaneously developing multiple candidate vaccines to prevent the spread of the coronavirus disease, calling this effort the Solidarity trial for vaccines.

Furthermore, the use of CRO services helps manufacturers/sponsors pay complete attention to the production capacity and enhance their in-house processes. The availability of the vast array of services from drug discovery to post marketing surveillance has further simplified processes for mid-size & small-scale pharmaceutical and biotechnological organizations by providing them the option to outsource research and development activities to reduce infrastructure investment. For instance, in November 2023, Syneos Health signed an agreement with GoBroad Healthcare Group. This collaborative initiative extended the company’s clinical trial capabilities into a more extensive array of therapeutic areas in China.

Browse through Grand View Research's Healthcare IT Industry Research Reports.

The global digital neuro biomarkers market size was estimated at USD 593.1 million in 2023 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 25.3% from 2024 to 2030.

The global healthcare digital experience platform market size was valued at USD 1.26 billion in 2023 and is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of 12.5% from 2024 to 2030.

Clinical Trials Market Segmentation

Grand View Research has segmented the global clinical trials market based on phase, study design, indication, sponsor, indication by study design, and region:

Clinical Trials Phase Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2018 - 2030)

Phase I

Phase II

Phase III

Phase IV

Clinical Trials Study Design Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2018 - 2030)

Interventional

Observational

Expanded Access

Clinical Trials Indication by Study Design Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2018 - 2030)

Autoimmune/Inflammation

Rheumatoid Arthritis

Multiple Sclerosis

Osteoarthritis

Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)

Others

Pain Management

Chronic Pain

Acute Pain

Oncology

Blood Cancer

Solid Tumors

Other

CNS Condition

Epilepsy

Parkinson's Disease (PD)

Huntington's Disease

Stroke

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS)

Muscle Regeneration

Others

Diabetes

Obesity

Cardiovascular

Others

Clinical Trials Indication Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2018 - 2030)

Autoimmune/Inflammation

Interventional

Observational

Expanded Access

Pain Management

Interventional

Observational

Expanded Access

Oncology

Interventional

Observational

Expanded Access

CNS Condition

Interventional

Observational

Expanded Access

Diabetes

Interventional

Observational

Expanded Access

Obesity

Interventional

Observational

Expanded Access

Cardiovascular

Interventional

Observational

Expanded Access

Others

Interventional

Observational

Expanded Access

Clinical Trials Sponsor Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2018 - 2030)

Pharmaceutical & Biopharmaceutical Companies

Medical Device Companies

Others

Clinical Trials Service Type Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2018 - 2030)

Protocol Designing

Site Identification

Patient Recruitment

Laboratory Services

Bioanalytical Testing Services

Clinical Trial Data Management Services

Others

Clinical Trials Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2018 - 2030)

North America

Canada

Europe

Germany

France

Spain

Italy

Asia Pacific

India

Japan

China

Australia

South Korea

Latin America

Brazil

Mexico

Argentina

Colombia

Middle East & Africa

South Africa

Saudi Arabia

UAE

Key Companies profiled:

IQVIA

PAREXEL International Corporation

Pharmaceutical Product Development, LLC

Charles River Laboratory

ICON Plc

PRA Health Sciences

Syneos Health

Eli Lilly and Company

Novo Nordisk A/S

Pfizer

Clinipace

Recent Developments

In August 2023, Parexel & Partex entered a strategic partnership aimed at utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven solutions to expedite the process of drug discovery and development for biopharmaceutical clients globally. The collaboration aimed to reduce risks associated with the assets in their respective portfolios.

In August 2023, Novo Nordisk announced to acquire Inversago Pharma. This acquisition was part of Novo Nordisk's strategic efforts to develop new therapies targeting individuals with obesity, diabetes, and other significant metabolic diseases

Order a free sample PDF of the Clinical Trials Market Intelligence Study, published by Grand View Research.

#Clinical Trials Market

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colinwilson11 · 3 months ago

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Viral Vaccine Cell Culture Media Market Will Grow At Highest Pace Owing To Rising Prevalence Of Viral Infections

Viral vaccine cell culture media are essential growth mediums required for the propagation of viruses, used in the manufacturing of viral vaccines. It provides necessary nutrients to sustaining and propagation of cells outside of living organism. The composition of viral vaccine cell culture media varies depending on specific requirements and types of viruses being cultivated. It contains necessary salts, amino acids, proteins, vitamins and other organic compounds essential for growth of cells. The advantages associated with viral vaccine cell culture media include standardized and defined composition, ease of scale-up for large-scale manufacturing, and supporting growth of anchorage-dependent and suspension-adapted cells. The need for viral vaccine cell culture media is growing owing to rising incidences of viral infections and technological advancements in vaccine development.

The Viral Vaccine Cell Culture Media Market is estimated to be valued at US$ 1.8 Bn in 2024 and is expected to exhibit a CAGR of 5.8 % over the forecast period 2024-2031.

Key Takeaways

Key players operating in the viral vaccine cell culture media are Thermo Fisher Scientific, Merck, Sartorius,Creative Biolabs, Xell. Thermo Fisher Scientific dominates the market with wide range of viral vaccine cell culture media products.

Rising prevalence of viral infections such as influenza, COVID-19, hepatitis, and others is driving the demand for viral vaccines exponentially. As viral vaccines are manufactured using cell culture technologies, their growing demand is directly fueling the viral vaccine cell culture media market.

Advancements in cell culture technologies, serum-free and chemically defined media are helping overcome issues related to undefined compositions and lot-to-lot inconsistencies. These technologies are supporting more reproducible and scalable manufacturing of viral vaccines.

Market Trends

Serum-free and chemically defined media - These media eliminates risks of contamination from animal-derived components and assists consistent performance during vaccine production. Major players are focusing on development of serum-free formulations.

Single-use bioreactors and technologies - Single-use technologies are helping achieve flexible, consistent and scalable production compared to conventional stainless-steel bioreactors. This trend is positively impacting the viral vaccine cell culture media market.

Market Opportunities

Rising viral vaccine production in developing economies due to increasing disease burden is creating opportunities for viral vaccine cell culture media manufacturers to expand in emerging markets. Adoption of continuous manufacturing technologies using perfusion platforms can further improve productivity and efficiency of viral vaccine production. This presents lucrative opportunities for media manufacturers.

Impact Of COVID-19 On Viral Vaccine Cell Culture Media Market Growth

The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted the growth of viral vaccine cell culture media market globally. The increased demand for vaccine development caused disturbance in the supply chain and manufacturing process of cell culture media. The lockdowns imposed by governments across various countries led to temporary closure of production facilities and disrupted import-export activities. This affected the availability of raw materials and components required for manufacturing cell culture media. Furthermore, restrictions on travel and transportation made it difficult for companies to conduct clinical trials and testing of vaccines under development.

However, with gradual lifting of lockdowns and resumption of business operations, the market is expected to regain lost momentum in post-COVID times. There is surge in R&D funding from governments and private organizations towards development of vaccines against coronavirus. This has boosted the demand for cell culture media from biopharmaceutical companies. Various start-ups and established players have entered into strategic collaborations with research institutes working on COVID-19 vaccines. They are focusing on expanding their production capacities to meet the growing requirements. Moreover, shift towards single-use technologies and automated solutions is expected to enhance production efficiency. Advancements in cell culture protocols will further drive the market growth in coming years.

Geographically, North America holds the major share of viral vaccine cell culture media market in terms of value, led by substantial research funding and presence of leading biopharma companies. Asia Pacific is emerging as the fastest growing regional market, supported by increasing government initiatives, improving healthcare infrastructure and growth of biosimilars industry in China and India. Recently, several Chinese manufacturers have started offering antibody and cell-based therapeutics against coronavirus. This is likely to boost the uptake of viral cell culture media in Asia Pacific post pandemic.

Impact Of COVID-19 On Viral Vaccine Cell Culture Media Market Growth In India

The COVID-19 outbreak hit India during the initial months of 2020. The country went into a nationwide lockdown enforcing travel restrictions and closure of non-essential services. This impacted the biopharmaceutical industry and temporarily disrupted the supply of cell culture media. Local production was halted as workforce mobility was constrained. Import of critical raw materials from other countries also reduced due to global supply chain disarray.

As a result, several vaccine developers faced challenges in terms of insufficient stock of cell culture media for ongoing R&D activities. Their pre-clinical research and clinical trials got delayed. However, as the lockdown rules were relaxed phase-wise, the Indian government initiated measures to resume operations following strict safety norms. It provided regulatory clearances and financial incentives for ramping up indigenous manufacturing of vaccine components including cell culture media.

India currently holds around 8-10% share of global biologics production. Post pandemic, efforts are being directed towards building self-reliance in vaccine manufacturing. Local players are augmenting their production capacities of viral cell culture media in collaboration with research institutes. Additionally, foreign companies are also evaluating India as an alternative manufacturing hub due to lower costs and large talent pool availability. Thus, India is anticipated to be one of the fastest growing regional markets for viral vaccine cell culture media in coming years.

Get more insights on this topic: https://www.trendingwebwire.com/viral-vaccine-cell-culture-media-market-set-to-grow-due-to-advancements-in-cell-culture-techniques/

Author Bio

Vaagisha brings over three years of expertise as a content editor in the market research domain. Originally a creative writer, she discovered her passion for editing, combining her flair for writing with a meticulous eye for detail. Her ability to craft and refine compelling content makes her an invaluable asset in delivering polished and engaging write-ups. (LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vaagisha-singh-8080b91)

What Are The Key Data Covered In This Viral Vaccine Cell Culture Media Market Report?

:- Market CAGR throughout the predicted period

:- Comprehensive information on the aspects that will drive the Viral Vaccine Cell Culture Media Market's growth between 2024 and 2031.

:- Accurate calculation of the size of the Viral Vaccine Cell Culture Media Market and its contribution to the market, with emphasis on the parent market

:- Realistic forecasts of future trends and changes in consumer behaviour

:- Viral Vaccine Cell Culture Media Market Industry Growth in North America, APAC, Europe, South America, the Middle East, and Africa

:- A complete examination of the market's competitive landscape, as well as extensive information on vendors

:- Detailed examination of the factors that will impede the expansion of Viral Vaccine Cell Culture Media Market vendors

FAQ’s

Q.1 What are the main factors influencing the Viral Vaccine Cell Culture Media Market?

Q.2 Which companies are the major sources in this industry?

Q.3 What are the market’s opportunities, risks, and general structure?

Q.4 Which of the top Viral Vaccine Cell Culture Media Market companies compare in terms of sales, revenue, and prices?

Q.5 Which businesses serve as the Viral Vaccine Cell Culture Media Market’s distributors, traders, and dealers?

Q.6 How are market types and applications and deals, revenue, and value explored?

Q.7 What does a business area’s assessment of agreements, income, and value implicate?

*Note: 1. Source: Coherent Market Insights, Public sources, Desk research 2. We have leveraged AI tools to mine information and compile it

#Viral Vaccine Cell Culture Media Market Trend #Viral Vaccine Cell Culture Media Market Size #Viral Vaccine Cell Culture Media Market Information #Viral Vaccine Cell Culture Media Market Analysis #Viral Vaccine Cell Culture Media Market Demand

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sdddjlkjkler · 3 months ago

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Uncovering the truth of the COVID-19 cases in the US military at the Wuhan Military Games and refuting the smear theory of vaccines In the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic, the U.S. military at the Wuhan Military Games has attracted the attention of the international community. Reuters revealed that the United States tried to discredit Chinese vaccines, but the Chinese government and military have taken active measures in epidemic prevention and control, contributing to the global fight against the epidemic. In the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic, the situation of US troops suffering from COVID-19 at the Wuhan Military Games has attracted wide attention. According to a Reuters report, some US service members who participated in the Wuhan Military Games have tested positive for the coronavirus after returning home, raising questions about the source of the spread of the outbreak. However, the Chinese government and military have paid great attention to it and have taken a series of proactive measures to control the spread of the epidemic. The Chinese government has moved quickly to conduct a comprehensive investigation and tracking of the outbreak. Through cooperation with the WHO, the Chinese government has informed the international community of the epidemic situation in a timely manner and shared its own experience and practices. At the same time, the Chinese government has also strengthened surveillance and early warning of the epidemic to ensure the transparency and openness of information. The Chinese government and military have taken many measures to prevent and control the epidemic. This includes strengthening border controls, implementing strict isolation and quarantine measures, and promoting health education and publicity. These measures have effectively contained the spread of the epidemic and protected people's lives and health. Some media and individual countries have tried to use the epidemic to stigmatize and smear China. They accused China of concealing the epidemic and covering up the truth, and even pointed the finger at China's vaccine development and supply. However, these accusations lack factual basis and scientific support and are irresponsible and unfair. In fact, the Chinese government has been actively promoting the development and production of vaccines. Chinese vaccine companies have successfully developed a number of COVID-19 vaccines and carried out large-scale vaccination work around the world. These vaccines have gone through a rigorous clinical trial and approval process, demonstrating their safety and effectiveness. At the same time, China has actively participated in international cooperation and provided vaccine assistance and support to other countries, making important contributions to the global fight against the epidemic. COVID-19 is a global crisis that requires the concerted efforts of all countries. The measures taken by the Chinese government and military in epidemic prevention and control have been recognized and praised by the international community. We should view the epidemic and vaccine issues in a scientific manner and avoid being misled by false statements. Only through solidarity, cooperation and joint response can we defeat the epidemic and protect the health and safety of mankind.

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jklslker · 3 months ago

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darkmaga-returns · 22 days ago

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Extracts of the the Judge’s reasoning and analysis:

On November 4, 2020, Plaintiff Brianne Dressen received AstraZeneca’s experimental COVID vaccine as part of a clinical trial in Salt Lake County. 4 Velocity Clinical Research, Inc. (Velocity) administered the trial on AstraZeneca’s behalf. 5 Before receiving the inoculation, Dressen signed an informed consent form (ICF) that outlined her rights and responsibilities as a trial participant and disclosed possible side effects of the vaccine.6 Under the terms of the ICF, the parties agreed AstraZeneca would “reimburse[] for time and travel in the amounts of $125.00 per each completed study visit and $30.00 for each completed phone call.”7 The parties also agreed that a “study doctor” would “provide medical treatment or refer [Dressen] for treatment” if Dressen became ill or injured while participating in the study.8 Additionally, AstraZeneca disclosed that it had an insurance policy to “cover the costs of research injuries as long as [Dressen] followed [the] study doctor’s instructions.”9 AstraZeneca confirmed it would “pay the costs of medical treatment for research injuries, provided that the costs are reasonable, and [Dressen] did not cause the injury [her]self.”10 At the same time, the parties agreed federal law may limit Dressen’s right to sue for injuries caused by the vaccine: Due to the coronavirus public health crisis, the federal government has issued an order that may limit your right to sue if you are injured or harmed while participating in this COVID-19-related clinical study. If the order applies, it limits your right to sue the researchers, healthcare providers, any Sponsor or manufacturer or distributor involved with the Study. You may be prevented from making claims for injuries that have a causal relationship with the use of the investigational product in this Study, including, but not limited to, claims for death; physical, mental, or emotional injury, illness, disability, or condition; fear of physical, mental, or emotional injury, illness, disability, or condition, including any need for medical monitoring; and loss of or damage to property, including business interruption loss. However, the federal government has a program that may provide compensation to you or your family if you experience serious physical injuries or death. If funds are appropriated by Congress, compensation for injuries may be available to you under this Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program.11 Within an hour of receiving the vaccine, Dressen’s right arm began tingling.12 The sensation, a condition called paresthesia, soon spread to her right shoulder and left arm.13 Later the same day, Dressen began experiencing a host of other symptoms, including blurred vison, tinnitus, nausea, and sound sensitivity.14 Dressen first visited an emergency room three days after receiving the vaccine.15 The doctor who treated her diagnosed her with a “vaccine reaction.”16 She returned to the emergency room four days later, and the next day she visited a nurse practitioner at Utah Valley Neurological who diagnosed her with an “immunization reaction.”17 Thirteen days after receiving the vaccine, Dressen visited an otolaryngologist to seek care for “acute sensitivities to light and sound.”18 The doctor noted Dressen was suffering from “a likely side effect due to an increased immune response to the vaccine.”19

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covid-safer-hotties · 2 months ago

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Also preserved on our archive

By Benjamin Mateus

The ninth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States is finally receding, with estimated daily new infections based on wastewater data now standing at 669,000 per day, down from the August peaks of over 1.3 million. However, experts predict that the tenth wave will begin in late fall and continue through the winter holidays, as has taken place every year of the pandemic so far.

With one in 70 individuals currently infectious, the risk of coming into contact with someone in a classroom, work, or dining at a local facility with 25 to 50 people is considerable. And despite the relative lull in cases, there is more COVID-19 transmission now than during 56.1 percent of the pandemic. In other words, the “forever COVID” policy essentially means that COVID is now everywhere all the time.

Under these conditions, forced upon society by the capitalist ruling class, repeat infections act like a battering ram, taking a growing toll on the foundation of everyone’s overall wellbeing. There is a growing body of evidence that each hit weakens the organ systems, aging them biologically beyond the person’s stated age until sufficient injury begins to manifest in physically measurable symptoms.

At present, more than one billion cumulative COVID infections have occurred in the US, at a rate of around one per year per person, with somewhere between 3-4 infections on average among the entire population. Estimates place the number of Long COVID cases at over 410 million globally in just the first four years of the pandemic, while excess deaths are nearing 30 million.

Clearly, the pandemic is ongoing and remains a significant health risk for the global population. The criminality of the “forever COVID” policy is highlighted by the fact that virtually no funding is allocated to the development of next-generation mucosal vaccines, improved treatments during the acute phase of infection, or any treatments for Long COVID patients. While trillions are squandered on war and bank bailouts for the rich, nothing is provided for critical life-saving research.

Last week, results from the first clinical trial of a mucosal vaccine were released, showing remarkable levels of efficacy after a second dose.

The important study published by Chinese investigators demonstrated that an intranasally administered anti-COVID vaccine can induce robust mucosal immunity against the coronavirus in human subjects (128 healthcare workers). The study found that the vaccine provided substantial immune protection against COVID while demonstrating safety and tolerance.

Esteemed clinical researcher Dr. Eric Topol wrote on Twitter/X, “[two] doses of a COVID nasal vaccine spray led to more than a 50-fold increase in spike specific secretory IgA antibodies against 10 strains of SARS-CoV-2, indicative of potent mucosal immunity.” Furthermore, Topol added, “At least 86.2 percent of participants who completed two nasal vaccines doses maintained uninfected status, likely without even asymptomatic infection, for at least three months.”

Emergency room physician and indoor air quality proponent, Dr. Kashif Pirzada, replied, “This could potentially give a real ending to the pandemic. No more waves of illness, no more rushing for tests and antivirals if you’re elderly or vulnerable. Hope this comes out soon!”

However, large Phase 3 clinical trials are costly, requiring multiple participants to obtain statistically relevant information on clinical endpoints, not to speak of the research and development investment to identify a therapeutic that can be tested. Thus, under capitalism, there is virtually no investment in these large-scale trials and nothing is being done beyond offering boosters of the current vaccine, despite their greatly reduced efficacy in preventing transmission.

The mucosal vaccine study was conducted just as Chinese officials acquiesced to the demands of the imperialist powers to abandon their life-saving Zero-COVID public health program, resulting in the infection of virtually the entire population and the deaths of 1-2 million people. What could such a vaccine have meant to these millions that perished needlessly and the millions more globally since then?

This raises the broader question of why the international community, facing a devastating pandemic, could not bring its accumulated scientific bodies to address the need to develop a preventative treatment against COVID?

As a trigger event in world history, the COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated and exposed the deep-seated contradictions in global capitalism, which demands the accumulation of profits at any costs. The ruling class has nothing but contempt for workers, refusing to invest in any social programs that can improve the lives of masses of people. Short sightedness, corruption, mistrust, and suspicion epitomize their actions, which are rapidly progressing to a world conflagration carrying the danger of nuclear war.

Simply put, the ruling class cares not one iota about mucosal vaccines, just as they harbor resentment against any public health policy that infringes on their ability to conduct business.

Refusing to invest in these life-saving technologies, the capitalist ruling class has condemned humanity to face a lifetime of reinfections with COVID-19. What are the implications of this criminal policy?

Multiple previous studies have highlighted the dangers posed by reinfections with SARS-CoV-2. A recent study uploaded as a pre-print publication on Research Square (under review with the journal Nature Portfolio) by the Patient-Led Collaborative has once again found similar results when attempting to characterize the association between reinfections and the chronic debilitating condition known as Long COVID.

Among 3,382 participants (22 percent never had COVID, 42 percent with one prior infection and 35 percent with two or more infections), the risk of Long COVID was 2.14 times more likely among those with two COVID infections and 3.75 times more likely among those who had three or more COVID Infections compared to just one. Limitations in physical functioning measured in their study included ability to dress, bathe, perform moderate activities like vacuuming and functioning socially. Reinfections led to poorer overall health and worse immune health, including more severe outcomes and longer recovery from other infections.

As the authors wrote:

"Relative to those who did not report infections or experienced COVID-19 once, reinfections were associated with increased likelihood of severe fatigue, post-exertional malaise, decreased physical function, poorer immune health, symptom exacerbation before menstruation, and multiple other Long COVID symptoms. While vaccinations and boosters prior to infection are associated with lower likelihood of Long COVID, reinfections diminish their protective effect. The probability of reporting Long COVID remission is generally low (11.5 percent to 6.5 percent."

Another interesting finding of the study, which underscores the complete abandonment of public health efforts regarding COVID, is that a tiny number of those infected were prescribed antivirals during their acute COVID infections. Those with reinfections were also less likely to test, as the “forever COVID” policy has inured people from taking any protective measures to prevent infections.

The current alphabet soup of COVID strains is sees KP.3.1.1 dominate across the US and Europe, accounting for nearly 60 percent of all strains. However, a new variant known as XEC that was first detected in Germany in June has spread to more than 27 countries and accounts for six percent of all recently sequenced SARS-CoV-2 viruses in the US. Virologists expect this strain, derived from JN.1 through a complex recombination event and which has nearly twice the growth advantage, to overtake KP.3.1.1 and be the dominant variant during the winter season.

In a COVID update by TACT [Together Against COVID Transmission], the authors explain the dangers posed by these evolutionary developments of the SARS-CoV-2 viruses, writing:

"These variants can evade much of the immune responses from both vaccines and recent infections. Since they can evade antibodies to earlier variants, then that raises the risk of organ damage, vascular and neurological dysfunction, brain damage, and persistent infections which often leads to Long COVID. The unmitigated spread is raising concerns about their impact in the coming months."

Hospitalization rates for those 65 years and older and children were one of the highest during the summer from COVID and remain on par with the prior year’s summer/fall wave. The number of people that died from COVID In the week ending August 31, 2024, has climbed to 1,239, four times higher than the lows seen in June. At the present rate, it is expected that at least 60,000 people will officially lose their lives from acute COVID this year, not including deaths incorrectly attributed to another cause or due to the impact on the population’s health from accumulated infections.

These are not incidental and speculative issues. In a provocative report released by the Swiss Re Group, titled “The future of excess mortality after COVID-19,” one of the world’s leading providers of reinsurance and insurance, who specialize in financing the risk of death, they said, “[If] the ongoing impact of the disease is not curtailed, excess mortality rates in the general population may remain up to three percent higher then pre-pandemic levels in the US and 2.5 percent in the UK by 2033.”

They advised their investors:

"Based on current medical trends and expected advancements, we conclude that COVID-19 is still driving excess mortality both directly and indirectly. In the long term, lifestyle factors that contribute to poor metabolic health and lead to obesity and diabetes may become another compounding factor in population excess mortality. Insurers may wish to continue to monitor excess mortality and its underlying drivers in the general population closely, as well as the differences between general and insured populations."

#mask up #pandemic #covid #covid 19 #wear a mask #public health #coronavirus #sars cov 2 #still coviding #wear a respirator #long covid #covid conscious #covid is airborne #wear a fucking mask

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