In this messed up, mixed up world, the formerly respected Fourth Estate has devolved into a collection of flat-out liars, brain-dead ideologues, and unmitigated ignoramuses.  Turn on any of the mainstream media channels or go to any one of hundreds of online outlets, and you'll be swamped in effluent.

The horrific, murderous tragedy in Waukesha, Wisconsin, in which a man deliberately and determinedly drove his SUV at a high rate of speed through a parade last week, is being called a "parade crash" by the most liberal media outlets.

According to 95% of the media talking heads and their cohorts, Kyle Rittenhouse is a "murdering white supremacist."  Laughably, Snopes calls the three convicted felons who attacked Rittenhouse — one a domestic abuser and rapist, another a pedophile, and the third a burglar — "victims."  Snopes goes farther, saying those three felons were there to "peacefully protest."  Never mind the fires, the looting, and the property destruction.  None of this was discussed in the vast majority of the media during Rittenhouse's trial or after his acquittal.

Now we have a new variant of COVID-19, which the physician who first encountered and reported it says is "mild."  In a report in the Telegraph, Dr. Angelique Coetzee, a general practitioner for thirty-three years who also chairs the South African Medical Association, says, "Their symptoms were so different and so mild from those I had treated before."

Mild illness.  Zero hospitalizations.  No deaths.  Yet with this report, we have yet another round of wholesale fear-mongering from the press and governments.

"Biden to restrict travel from South Africa and 7 other countries starting Monday."  (Remember the cries and howls from the left when Trump shut down travel when COVID first appeared?  Xenophobe!)

"Boris Johnson announces 'tighter rules' in response to Omicron variant."

"Israel to ban entry of foreigners from all countries over Omicron."

Across the ether, alleged "news" outlets are spouting nonsense about this variant that the WHO and CDC say appears to be mild and, thus far, not deadly.

MSNBC proclaims: "Omicron variant renews calls for more robust vaccination..."

Why, when the vaccines we currently have a) do not work against the pre-existing COVID variants and b) aren't designed for this variant?  (MSNBC's institutional ignorance was run up the flagpole for fullest display with this story.)

"Omicron variant puts world in a 'race against time', says EU Commission President" is the headline quote from CNN.

MSNBC proclaims, "New covid variant: Omicron is a pandemic gut check."  The people there hype the "growing concern" and breathlessly report that "[o]micron variant represents a 'significant potential risk' to its (Moderna's) Covid-19 vaccine."  Well, duh!  Previous vaccines that didn't work against alpha, beta, or delta sure aren't going to work against a new strain.  The biggest risk is that if this is as mild or non-threatening as it seems to be thus far (zero deaths, zero hospitalizations, remember), then the market for COVID vaccines may have just dried up.

As soon as news of this variant came out and was blasted around the world, financial and commodity markets tanked, prompting Goldman Sachs to announce, "This mutation is unlikely to be more malicious and that the existing vaccines will most likely continue to be effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths.  We do not think that the new variant is sufficient reason to make major portfolio changes."

According to Paul Elias Alexander, Ph.D. at the Brownstone Institute, it might be that COVID has now transformed so much that new variants might be more infectious but less deadly.

This is a brain-twister of an article if you're not accustomed to reading technical papers, but Alexander makes several key points (emphasis added):

The virus is behaving just like how viruses behave. They are mutable and mutate and via Muller's ratchet, we expect this to be milder and milder mutations and not more lethal ones given the pathogen seeks to infect the host and not arrive at an evolutionary dead-end.

For example, the (Pfizer) vaccine has failed to stop infection and spread against Delta… fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases.

What's most fascinating in this paper is a reference to a Swedish study of records of the nation's entire population.  The study's findings are that the efficacy of Pfizer's BioNtech vaccine "waned progressively from 92% (effectiveness) at day 15–30 to 47% at day 121–180, and from day 211 and onwards no effectiveness could be detected."

AstraZenica's mRNA vaccine fared even worse: "effectiveness of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 was generally lower and waned faster, with no effectiveness detected from day 121 and onwards."

This Swedish study is news, given that governments are forcing vaccines into our bodies.  Shouldn't this be reported?  Shouldn't it be headlines?  Yet nowhere is this information readily available outside the medical community.  The WHO isn't reporting it; the CDC and FDA aren't reporting on it in the U.S.  Nowhere in Europe is it being reported.

The only reason Dr. Alexander's paper and the Swedish study are presented here is because of diligent research through many sites and noting a single reference embedded in a longer article.

The fact is, all of this COVID hysteria is being driven by the lobbyists for the pharmaceutical companies and fomented by "news" organizations and governments for power and control over us, our livelihoods, and our lives.

Isn't it about time this nonsense ends?

Graphic credit: U3161929, CC BY-SA 4.0 license.