RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
February 27 to March 5, 2022 President Biden and his top health officials promised that COVID-19 vaccines were virtually surefire lifesavers, but the little-publicized deaths of thousands of vaccinated Americans have undermined that narrative, Clayton Fox reports for RealClearInvestigations. Biden, echoed by the likes of Dr. Anthony Fauci, has repeatedly touted the effectiveness of vaccines, claiming unequivocally as recently as December: “This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Yet little-publicized CDC statistics show that among 118,000 Covid deaths across 25 U.S. jurisdictions between April and December 2021, more than a fifth had been vaccinated. And that was before things got worse, as omicron surpassed delta as the dominant strain: Figures from California, Georgia, and Illinois show the vaccinated accounting for more than a third of all deaths. The federal government has been loath to publish detailed COVID-19 data, including so-called “breakthrough” deaths among the vaccinated, in part because, as an official recently told the New York Times, “they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.” Some health experts say such deaths were predictable, given that the jabs were designed for the original strain of the virus and not its later variants. Biden, Trump and the Beltway
The criminalization of political differences continued apace this week when the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol said former President Donald J. Trump and some of his allies might have conspired to commit fraud and obstruction by misleading Americans about the outcome of the 2020 election and attempting to overturn the result. This article reports that the House committee’s lawyers for the first time laid out their theory of a potential criminal case against the former president. A court filing in a civil case in California involving one of Trump’s lawyers said Trump and his associates “might have broken a common law statute against fraud through Mr. Trump’s repeated lies that the election had been stolen.” “The evidence supports an inference that President Trump, plaintiff and several others entered into an agreement to defraud the United States by interfering with the election certification process, disseminating false information about election fraud, and pressuring state officials to alter state election results and federal officials to assist in that effort,” the filing states. In a separate article, the Washington Post annotates a series of emails between lawyers for Trump (who wanted to overturn the election results) and Vice President Mike Pence (who believed that was impossible). The Post casts the dispute as a battle between truth and lies, though it can also be read as a legitimate disagreement. There is no information yet on whether Democrats who falsely claimed fraud in the 2004 and 2016 presidential elections (including several members of the Jan. 6 committee) might also be in legal jeopardy. Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway How American Policy Triggered Russia's Invasion Tablet Magazine
Boycott Fail: Minimal Amount of Vodka in U.S. Is Russian USA Today
Biden Admin Close to Russian-Brokered Deal with Iran Free Beacon
4 Things We Just Learned About Durham's Probe Federalist
‘They Broke Him’: Suicide of a Jan. 6 Defendant American Greatness
IRS Is Audited Over 'Revolving Door' Wall Street Journal
Hunter Biden Pal Gets Prison for Role in Fraud Scheme New York Post Other Noteworthy Articles and Series
There are many reasons why NATO does not want to engage in a shooting war with Russia over Ukraine. This article details an important one: Europe’s growing dependence on Russian energy. In 2016, 30 percent of the natural gas consumed by the European Union came from Russia. In 2018, that figure jumped to 40 percent. By 2020, it was nearly 44 percent, and by early 2021, it was nearly 47 percent. This dependence did not just happen, it was intentional, as many EU countries – especially Germany, the continent’s richest and most powerful nation – embraced unreliable renewables while jettisoning carbon-free nuclear plants. At the turn of the millennium, Germany’s electricity was around 30 percent nuclear-powered. But Germany has been sacking its reliable, inexpensive nuclear plants. … By 2020, Germany had reduced its nuclear share from 30 percent to 11 percent. Then, on the last day of 2021, Germany shut down half of its remaining six nuclear reactors. The upshot here is that you can’t spend enough on climate initiatives to fix things if you ignore nuclear and gas. Between 2015 and 2025, Germany’s efforts to green its energy production will have cost $580 billion. Yet despite this enormous investment, German electricity still costs 50 percent more than nuclear-friendly France’s, and generating it produces eight times more carbon emissions per unit. Plus, Germany is getting over a third of its energy from Russia. The former judge named to investigate Wisconsin's 2020 election says there is enough evidence of voting irregularities for the legislature to consider decertifying the state's final results declaring Joe Biden the winner. Retired Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Mike Gableman presented a 136-page report which, this article reports, follows two major court rulings ... ... that declared election rules changes enacted in 2020 – which allowed for ballot drop boxes to be used and voters to skip ID requirements by declaring themselves "indefinitely confined" by COVID – were illegal. Those rulings call into question tens of thousands of ballots cast in a state where Biden won by less than 21,000 votes. In a separate article, the Federalist reports that Gableman also found that “rampant fraud and abuse occurred statewide at Wisconsin’s nursing homes and other residential care facilities.” According to the report, nursing home staff and administrators illegally handled absentee ballots, illegally assisted with “marking” residents’ ballots, illegally “witnessed” the voting, and possibly forged elderly residents’ signatures. Under Wisconsin law, these violations of the election code constitute fraud. An audit by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has identified more than 2,000 suspected foreigners who tried to register to vote in the state – none, however, cast a ballot. Georgia is just the second state to perform such a review: An audit of Texas voter rolls released in December identified nearly 12,000 non-citizens suspected of illegally registering to vote, and county officials in Texas are now being asked to determine if any actually cast ballots. The Georgia and Texas audits come as Democrats in many localities – including New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, two Vermont cities and several Maryland communities — have moved to permit non-citizens to vote in local elections. David Berry’s DNA ancestry search provided some surprising results: he was 50 percent Jewish and his dad did not father him. Over the next three years, Berry learned that he had at least 10 half brothers and sisters. Last May, he finally discovered the identity of this prodigious procreator: his mother’s gynecologist. Turns out Dr. Morris Wortman is not the only doctor with extended family: Over the past several years, more than 50 fertility doctors in the United States have been accused of fraud in connection with donating sperm, according to legal experts and observers. The article only provides a cursory exploration of the ethics involved. On the one hand, if people want to marry a doctor, why not be impregnated by one? Overriding this, it seems, is the issue of trust. In all of the cases mentioned the doctors lied to patients, telling them they would find an anonymous sperm donor. This sort of deception by a physician “can lead to traumatic distress” for the women involved, a bioethicist explained. Coronavirus Investigations This strange article trumpets a study that uses a long known fact – that the original coronavirus outbreak occurred near a wet market in Wuhan, China – to claim that the pandemic began when humans were infected by animals, and not by a mistake at the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology. Perhaps. But the physical evidence is not just thin; it is nonexistent. So this is science of inference rather than proof. The study presents ... ... evidence that wild mammals that might [italic emphasis added] have harbored the coronavirus were being sold in December 2019. But no wildlife was left at the market by the time Chinese researchers arrived in early 2020 to collect genetic samples. … Chinese scientists said they found the virus in dozens of samples taken from surfaces and sewers in the market, but not in any swabs taken from animals in the market. Instead of establishing the pandemic’s origins, this article suggests that the wet market theory may be true and also impossible to prove. Other Coronavirus Investigations Emails Reveal More NIH Bat Coronavirus Grant Issues Intercept
How the FDA Botched a Vaccine Rollout for Kids City Journal
Mystery: Why Can't Some People Get Covid? Guardian | 