Health Minister Director-General Nachman Ash attends a press conference about the coronavirus, in Jerusalem on August 29, 2021. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)

Then there is this:

FDA panel recommends Pfizer’s Covid booster doses for people 65 and older after rejecting third shots for general population

PUBLISHED FRI, SEP 17 20213:31 PM EDTUPDATED 2 HOURS AGO
Berkeley Lovelace Jr.

An influential FDA advisory committee on Friday rejected a proposal to distribute booster shots of Pfizer and BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine to the general public.
The panel pared back those plans to unanimously recommend the third shots to people age 65 and older and other vulnerable Americans.
FDA panel votes for Pfizer booster for those 65+ and at higher risk
An influential Food and Drug Administration advisory committee on Friday rejected a proposal to distribute booster shots of Pfizer and BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine to the general public, paring back those plans to unanimously recommend the third shots to people age 65 and older and other vulnerable Americans.

“It’s likely beneficial, in my opinion, for the elderly, and may eventually be indicated for the general population. I just don’t think we’re there yet in terms of the data,” said Dr. Ofer Levy, a vaccine and infectious disease specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital.

The panel voted 16-2 against distributing the vaccines to Americans 16 and older, before unanimously embracing an alternate plan to give boosters to older Americans and those at a high risk of suffering from severe illness if they get the virus. That’s previously included people with diabetes, heart disease, obesity and other so-called comorbidities.

Pfizer’s stock closed down 1.3%, while shares of BioNTech fell 3.6%.

The nonbinding decision by the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee comes as the Biden administration has said it wants to begin offering booster shots to the general public as early as next week, pending authorization from U.S. health regulators. While the agency hasn’t always followed the advice of its committee, it often does. A final FDA decision could come in a matter of hours. The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention has scheduled a two-day meeting next week to discuss plans to distribute the third shots in the U.S.

“We are not bound at FDA by your vote, just so you understand that. We can tweak this as need be,” Dr. Peter Marks, the agency’s top vaccine regulator, reminded the panel after the votes. He asked the group for suggestions on what other populations the FDA should consider for boosters, like front-line health workers and other occupations that face more exposure to Covid.

Los Angeles, CA – April 15: Liesl Eibschutz, a medical student from Dartmouth University, loads a syringe with Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine before giving it to people on the first day that people ages 16 and up can receive the vaccine at Kedren Health on Thurs
Liesl Eibschutz, a medical student from Dartmouth University, loads a syringe with Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine before giving it to people on the first day that people ages 16 and up can receive the vaccine at Kedren Health on Thursday, April 15, 2021 in Los Angeles, CA.
Allen J. Schaben | Los Angeles Times | Getty Images
The committee vote was expected to be a controversial one as some scientists, including two senior FDA officials who were involved in the meeting Friday, have said they aren’t entirely convinced every American who has received the Pfizer vaccine needs extra doses right now.

White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said he wasn’t surprised they didn’t recommend the shots for people 16 and older. Fauci, who has publicly backed boosters, hesitated in an interview Friday on “Closing Bell” to guess what the committee would ultimately decide.

“I don’t want to get ahead of the advisory committee at the time that they’re deliberating,” he said.

In a paper published days before the advisory committee meeting, a leading group of scientists said available data showed vaccine protection against severe disease persists, even as the effectiveness against mild disease wanes over time. The authors, including two high-ranking FDA officials and multiple scientists from the World Health Organization, argued Monday in the medical journal The Lancet that widely distributing booster shots to the general public is not appropriate at this time.

In outlining plans last month to start distributing boosters as early as next week, Biden administration officials cited three CDC studies that showed the vaccines’ protection against Covid diminished over several months. Senior health officials said at the time they worried protection against severe disease, hospitalization and death “could” diminish in the months ahead, especially among those who are at higher risk or were inoculated during the earlier phases of the vaccination rollout.

Before the vote, some committee members said they were concerned there wasn’t enough data to make a recommendation, while others argued third shots should be limited to certain groups, such as people over age 60 who are known to be at higher risk of severe disease. Some members raised concerns about the risk of myocarditis in younger people, saying more research is needed.

Dr. Hayley Gans, a voting member, said she was “struck” that the FDA was asking the committee to look at the totality of the evidence presented Friday because some data, including on safety, was still insufficient.

Another member, Dr. Paul Offit, said he would support boosters for people over 60, but had trouble backing third shots for younger groups due to a higher risk of myocarditis.

Before the vote Friday, the committee listened to several presentations on data to support the wide distribution of booster shots, including from health authorities from Israel, where officials began inoculating the nation’s population ahead of many other countries and began offering third shots to their citizens in late July.

Phil Krause, an FDA vaccine regulator and a co-author of The Lancet paper, was critical of the findings presented Friday, saying much of the data had not been reviewed by the federal agency or had not been peer-reviewed. He said the models used were complex and scientists have to ensure it “is giving you the correct results.”

“That’s part of the difficulty at looking at this kind of data without having the chance for FDA to review it,” he said.

In documents made public by the FDA on Wednesday, Pfizer said an observational study in Israel showed a third dose of the Covid vaccine six months after a second shot restores protection from infection to 95%. The data was collected from July 1 through Aug. 30 when the fast-spreading delta variant was surging throughout the country.

In a presentation Friday, Dr. Sharon Elroy-Preiss of Israel’s Health Ministry argued that if officials there had not begun distributing boosters at the end of July, the nation likely would have exceeded its hospital capacity. Health officials began to see a trend, she said, of individuals in their 40s and 50s who were fully vaccinated become critically ill with Covid.

“We didn’t want to wait to see those results and we knew that we needed to vaccinate a larger portion of the population in order to get the numbers down quickly,” she told the committee. Israeli health authorities expected severe cases to average 2,000 by late August, she said. “We were able to dampen that effect and our severe cases are roughly 700 or less and have stayed stable, even though we still have days at 10,000 confirmed cases.”

She also said the booster shots were well tolerated by many people, citing data that showed there was only one case of myocarditis, a rare heart inflammation condition that’s been linked to mRNA vaccines, out of roughly 2.9 million people who received the extra doses.

Pfizer’s booster side effects are also comparable with those that emerge after receiving the second vaccine dose, Dr. Joohee Lee, an officer at the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review, said during the meeting.

Of the 289 booster recipients ages 18 to 55 monitored in Pfizer’s phase three trial, 63.8% developed fatigue, 48.4% had headaches and 39.1% experienced muscle pain. The FDA studied side effects in 2,682 recipients of Pfizer’s second Covid dose, ranging from 16 to 55 years old, reporting fatigue among 61.5% of patients, headaches among 54% and muscle pain among 39.3%. One adverse event — swelling of the lymph nodes — occurred in 5.2% of booster recipients but just 0.4% of those who received their first two doses.

“The majority were mild to moderate and they did resolve,” Lee said of the lymphadenopathy cases. “Although one is reported to be ongoing at this time.” – cnbc.com

article website here

What I see here is that Israel is living our future.  What they are going through now, we will be going through at the end of the year.

In Israel, the increase in cases is being blamed on ‘vaccine’ waning.   Here, it will be blamed on the fourth wave and anti-vaxers.  Anti-vaxers is a hateful term coming from the darkest recesses of a segment of the population that used to be compassionate and caring. It should be labeled as what it is….hate speech. Anti-vaxxers is a term is being thrown about with such venom. Such hate. .  In my whole life, I have never seen anything like this happening in this country. Canadians hating Canadians. It is disgusting.  For the first time, I am ashamed of Canada. I thought we were better than that.

Being cautious about the mRNA ‘vaccines’ is not anti-vax.  Believing that people have a choice as to whether to take the jab is not anti-vax.

Anyway, expect all failures of the ‘vaccines’ to protect against infection from the SARS-2 virus and hospitalizations due to COVID-19 to be blamed on the small fraction of the population that is not fully ‘vaccinated’.

Maybe the reason for all that hate is….A clash of the classes. See below:

Taibbi: Does America Hate The “Poorly Educated”?

It was impossible to mistake the tone of Joe Biden’s announcement of a vaccine mandate last week. It was an angry speech, which started by explaining that “many of us are frustrated with the nearly 80 million Americans who are still not vaccinated,” and went on to announce that “our patience is wearing thin,” and “your refusal has cost all of us.” Biden, not normally one for oratorial effects, even conveyed a sense of barely contained rage by muttering, “Get vaccinated!” as he walked off the stage.

“Enjoying the angry Dad vibes from this Biden speech,” came the cheerful comment of former Justice Department spokesman and MSNBC analyst Matthew Miller:

Enjoying the angry dad vibes from this Biden speech. He is turning the damn car around.

— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) September 9, 2021

Who’d attracted Biden’s anger — the unvaccinated — was clear. The why was more confusing. The president decried how “the unvaccinated overcrowd our hospitals… leaving no room for someone with a heart attack or pancreatitis or cancer,” a legitimate enough point. But after reassuring those who’d “done their part” that just “one out of every 160,000 fully vaccinated Americans was hospitalized” this summer, Biden nonetheless explained that “a distinct minority of Americans” is “causing unvaccinated people to die.” He added: “We’re going to protect the vaccinated from unvaccinated co-workers.”

As many noted, the statements were contradictory. If the vaccine really is that effective, the overwhelming consequences of of any failure to get vaccinated will be borne by the unvaccinated themselves. But Biden’s speech was as much about directing anger as policy. The mandate was an extraordinary step, but Biden’s unique — and uniquely strange — rhetorical setup, which framed the decision as a way to stop “them” from doing “damage” and killing “us,” was just as big a story.

The arrival of Covid-19 has exacerbated a troubling divide that’s been growing in America for decades, and is elucidated at length in Michael Sandel’s recent The Tyranny of Merit. The book tells a politically unsettling story about meritocracy in America, one that runs counter to prevailing narratives on both the left and the right. Though mention of Covid-19 is limited to a few paragraphs in a new prologue, the pandemic in many ways has become the ultimate test case of Sandel’s thesis: that we Americans have been so conditioned to believe that winners deserve to win that we’ve found ways to hate losers of any kind as moral failures, even when life is at stake, and especially when lack of education is seen as a factor.

It’s not remotely the same kind of book, but The Tyranny of Merit does follow up on themes in Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. Lasch’s late seventies premise described American society devolved into a ceaseless all-against-all competition on all fronts, from the professional to the physical to the social and sexual and beyond. Moreover, Lasch wrote, if the original “American dream” was imbued with at least some vague ideas that success should be tied to virtues like thrift, discipline, and wisdom, by the disco age “the pursuit of wealth lost the few shreds of moral meaning.”

In the time since Lasch’s iconic treatise, though, relentless messaging campaigns emanating from both sides of the political aisle re-emphasized the idea that material success was tied to moral character. Ronald Reagan evangelized the idea that poverty was mostly a deserved state, and government at most owed those who weren’t to blame for their own problems. When Bill Clinton came along, he took Reagan’s finger-wagging moralizing and re-cast it in the cheery new technocratic language of global capitalism. “We must do what America does best,” Clinton said at his inauguration. “Offer more opportunity to all and demand more responsibility from all.”

Clinton’s formula was really Yin to Reagan’s Yang: in a world that offered more “opportunity,” there was now even less excuse for failure. We forget, because the pre-9/11 world seems so long ago, but Clinton-era editorialists spent much of the late nineties hyping the opportunity gospel. We were told a combination of the Internet and an increasingly integrated international economy created vast new worlds of material possibility, for those willing to “fill the unforgiving minute” and run the race. “If globalization were a sport,” wrote an exultant Thomas Friedman in 1999, “it would be the 100-yard dash, over and over and over. And no matter how many times you win, you have to race again the next day.”

Onetime labor parties paradoxically were the biggest boosters of the new hyper-competitive global economy, whose central feature was forcing Western workers to face off against masses of laborers in China, South Asia, Mexico, and other places where political rights were, shall we say, less of a priority. As the stress on former blue-collar workers intensified, politicians often sold the public on the idea that higher learning was their Golden Ticket out of the miseries of debt, higher medical costs, and especially social immobility.

By the time Barack Obama came along, it was axiomatic among the cosmopolitan set that anyone with enough ingenuity and entrepreneurial energy should be able to get ahead. Sandel amusingly points out that Obama often culled from a Sly and the Family Stone song in describing his vision of modern American capitalism, using the phrase “You can make it if you try” 140 times during his presidency:

The explosive and uncomfortable message at the heart of The Tyranny of Meritocracy is the idea that the resulting political divide is now less about ideology than education. Sandel deserves credit for taking on a subject that almost no one in high society wants to hear about, let alone those in the academic world. Forget red versus blue: he shows the real gulf is between those who have diplomas, and those who don’t. The subtext is that people with the right degrees deserve to be rich, and have health insurance, and good schooling for their kids, and dignified work, while those who threw away their books after high school deserve failure, in the same way smokers deserve lung disease — especially if they make unsanctioned political choices. – taibbi.substack.com

article website here

Is what we are seeing is the start of class warfare?  White collar versus blue collar?