Covid

The BBC carried a story this week with the headline ‘Covid origin studies say evidence points to Wuhan market’. Bizarrely the paper in Science they are referring to, by Michael Worobey and colleagues, says no such thing. It says: ‘the observation that the preponderance of early cases were linked to the Huanan market does not establish that the pandemic originated there’. All three of the scientists quoted in the BBC story have been highly dismissive about even discussing the possibility that the pandemic began as an accident in a Wuhan laboratory. Their vested interest is clear: they worry that the reputation of their field of virology would be threatened by such a discussion.

Joe Biden has had a lot to worry about lately. First, according to his own account, he has cancer thanks to emissions from oil refineries near his childhood home in Delaware: "That’s why I and so damn many other people I grew up with have cancer and why for the longest time Delaware had the highest cancer rate in the nation." A White House spokesman later clarified that Biden had had "non-melanoma skin cancers" removed before he took office, though that doesn't explain why he claimed he has cancer now. Apparently he's contracted Covid too. The president tested positive today and will be isolating at the White House.

Dr. Fauci has announced that he will retire soon — and Cockburn is popping Champagne. Anthony Fauci, surely the most (in)famous scientist in the United States, has decided to call it quits by the end of Joe Biden’s first (and hopefully last) term. As he departs from his monopoly on mainstream media health consultancy, he’ll pass go and collect a whopping $350,000 per year, the largest federal retirement package in US history. So cue up the in memoriam reel of everything that made the Fauci regime suck. While churches had to close starting in March 2020, somehow Fauci was OK with Tinder hookups. A year later, he waged a war on Christmas gatherings worse than the Grinch himself.

“Somebody had to say it,” and apparently that somebody is comedian Jim Breuer. In a set that broke Twitter over the July 4 weekend, Breuer came right out and delivered the news: vaccinations didn’t stop Covid. Mandates are stupid. Social distancing is meaningless. The entire Covid regime under which we’ve lived, to various degrees, for the last two-plus years is a worthless and sinister form of social control. Breuer’s twelve-minute routine on The Pandemic isn’t very good. His physical comedy doesn’t hit; the depictions of the vaccine are sloppy-looking, and he accompanies them with a dumb raspberry noise. His “Broadway musical” bit could be funny except that nothing he does resembles a current Broadway musical in the slightest.

Recent mass shootings have reminded us of just how much gun violence has surged since Covid. The record of 45,222 Americans dying from gun-related injuries in the first year of the pandemic could well be topped in 2022, with more than 12,000 fatally shot since the end of April. Many rightly condemn progressive district attorneys in cities for failing to condemn the increased bloodshed. Yet the uptick in violence has been uniform across the nation, plaguing rural counties as much as urban ones, which is why most psychological experts put the blame squarely on the emotional residue of lengthy Covid lockdowns.

Soaring gasoline prices (they’re up 49 percent since President Biden took office) are due to “Putin’s price hikes,” claims Biden. But last I checked, Putin wasn’t stateside canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline, pursuing efforts to end federal oil and gas leasing programs, and careening our country toward more Covid-like lockdowns, social isolation, supply chain shortages, and another summer crime wave. A brief recap of Biden’s oil and gastastrophe: in January 2021, during his first days in office, the president revoked the Keystone Pipeline permit and issued an executive order that, in his own typically eloquent words, directed the “Secretary of the Interior to stop issuing new oil and gas leases on public lands and offsh- — and offshore waters, wherever possible.

Washington, DC Amid the recent orgy of violence across America, it was the carjackings that finally got me. Lost amid all the mass shootings and gang slayings of late has been another wave of crime: vehicle thefts. In Washington DC, carjackings in 2021 were up by a third over 2019, while in nearby Alexandria a motorist made national news after he shot two boys at a gas station who were trying to lift his car. In Chicago, 1,900 vehicles were jacked just last year, which is eye-wateringly high even by that city’s grim standards. There is an inhumanity at work in this country that’s as stark as anything I’ve seen in my lifetime These thefts are almost all committed by teens, often at gunpoint.

Something felt off about Mother’s Day this year. For one weekend every May, we post social media tributes and bow to marketing campaigns thanking our moms, letting them know they’ve given us something that can never be repaid. But that same weekend, the national news cycle was caught up in the drama — and the fear — generated by the mysterious leak less than a week earlier of a draft majority opinion written by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito that would overturn Roe v. Wade and return the issue of legal abortion to the states. By that Sunday, we’d seen maternity clinics and Catholic churches vandalized, protests in front of the homes of Supreme Court justices, and ominous warnings from the mainstream press explaining what women stand to lose if Roe falls.