Good Day!
I just finished my Solstice pruning of my blueberry and blackberry bushes. I read a book last year called Grow a Little Fruit Tree (which I then apparently loaned out because I have no idea where the book is and I do that frequently - do you have my copy?), which encouraged keeping fruit trees to a manageable height and size: an idea within the gardening community that apparently has gotten a lot of pushback despite its very approachable practice.
So naturally, because it’s a bit against the grain, I’m loving the ideas. ;-)
When pruning near the Summer Solstice (tomorrow! - hence Teacups & Tissues (+tequila & techno) happening THIS FRIDAY, June 24th at 4pm at my office) is one wherein you actually prune branches that contain fruit.
It’s easy to prune things that are sticking out and up and have no fruit. But to prune a branch with existing fruit, one that has shown its production value and has demonstrable potential, is a different ball game.
Just because something is working doesn’t mean it’s working right now or in the right way. I thanked the blueberry bushes for their growth and for sharing with our family, personally ate every single ripe berry that I pruned, and laid the unripe berries and potentiality of their branches to rest in our compost pile, to be re-created into life-giving and sustaining nourishment for our family.
Such is the life cycle of a homestead.
Now to update you on what I've found in the past week that seems important.
Well, we saw that coming. The FDA voted Tuesday (the same day as the peak super moon) regarding the EUA for kids under 5 to receive a Pfizer or Moderna shot series. But Alex Berenson reported on that document that I previously told you didn’t get released until Monday:
That 80 percent figure for efficacy you’ve seen reported is worse than a joke, it’s essentially a fabrication.
Here’s what the Food and Drug Administration and Pfizer did; they only counted cases after the THIRD mRNA dose.
But of the 375 Sars-Cov-2 infections in the trial, 365 occurred before the third dose. Only 10 occurred after the third dose.
Yes, you are reading that right. The efficacy figure is based on 3 PERCENT OF ALL THE INFECTIONS IN THE TRIAL. (Which is why the confidence intervals are so large.)
Count the other 97 percent of the infections, and the vaccine was roughly 20 percent effective over the entire trial - far, far below what the FDA said was approvable in 2020. The confidence intervals went below zero for kids under two, meaning the possibility that the vaccine increased the risk of infection cannot be excluded. And cases of severe Covid - including one two-year-old who was hospitalized - were mostly in the mRNA group.
That document was shorter than Moderna’s 190 pages and was only 66 pages. I’m sure all of the VRBPAC members read through every bit of it and used that to inform their decision in the vote Tuesday.
Here’s a 45 minute video of Vinay Prasad's take, which breaks down the studies and data that are available:
If you don’t watch, know that the data you’ve been told supports these shots in kids under 5 is at best misleading. Kids have not been at risk from covid, most have had it by now, and the shots are pointless for them.
I had intended on including this section on vision changes in my last email (per my original subject line if you saw it), but it didn’t flow with everything else, so I bumped it to my next publication. And then the WHO sent out an email detailing a brand new app that could help prevent sun damage:
A new app for mobile phones that provides localized information on ultraviolet (UV) radiation levels has been launched by the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Labour Organization (ILO). The SunSmart Global UV app provides five-day UV and weather forecasts at searchable locations. It highlights time slots when sun protection is required with the aim of helping people around the world know when to use sun protection, in an effort to reduce the global burden of skin cancer and UV-related eye damage.
Obviously I’m going to download the app ASAP. That was a joke. My Edward Snowden-endorsed phone does not have WHO tracing apps on it.
But if you’ve read about how I improved my eyesight without LASIK, you know that the sun was and is a huge player in that. As such, it might surprise you to see the WHO recommending something that I completely disagree with.
Wait, no. We’ve been doing this for a while. So here we are at odds again, and I’m sure Dr. Tedros is again losing sleep because I’m not falling in line with the WHO recommendations.
Will you?
Will you prevent the sun from touching you, run in fear when its rays pierce through the geoengineered clouds? Or will you bask in it, let it warm you, and gaze lovingly toward it when it peers over the horizon to greet you in the morning, giving life to your planet and signaling to your cells, “I’m here! You’ve seen me! Now make vitamin D!”
No, I am not disregarding skin cancer. But I am also going to recognize the myriad negative effects of vitamin D deficiency, potential skin cancer as a result of sunscreen ingredients, damage to coral reefs from sunscreen, and the UV exposure from your laptop or smart phone. (Look all of those up - I’ve shared about them before on my previously-attended-to Instagram channel and past newsletters.)
Back to my improved vision, read this if you’re interested in how the sun played a huge part (and how vision changes are possible) and then check out Jake from End Myopia’s podcast, Short Sighted, linked below:
Even though they’ve got their new app (and they’re hitting climate change hard while simultaneously still talking covid - their newsletters are exhausting), the WHO is still hitting the monkeypox hard. Last week they released guidance on using smallpox vaccines for monkeypox. Mass vaccination NOT required nor recommended. Again, I’m just getting ahead of things in case they go awry. They stated:
This interim guidance provides the first WHO recommendations on use of (smallpox) vaccines for monkeypox.
The goal of the global outbreak response for monkeypox is to control the outbreak, and to effectively use public health measures to prevent onward spread of the disease. Judicious use of vaccines can support this response.
Emphasis mine on the word judicious, as in sound judgment. As in not mandating products that are unproven. And they go on to say:
Mass vaccination is not required nor recommended for monkeypox at this time.
For contacts of cases, post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) is recommended with an appropriate second- or third-generation vaccine, ideally within four days of first exposure to prevent onset of disease.
Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is recommended for health workers at risk, laboratory personnel working with orthopoxviruses, clinical laboratory staff performing diagnostic testing for monkeypox, and others who may be at risk as per national policy.
Vaccination programmes must be backed by thorough surveillance and contact-tracing, and accompanied by a strong information campaign, robust pharmacovigilance, ideally in the context of collaborative vaccine effectiveness studies with standardized protocols and data collection tools.
Decisions on use of smallpox or monkeypox vaccines should be based on a full assessment of risks and benefits on a case-by-case basis.
Most interim recommendations provided here concern off-label use of vaccines. The guidance will be updated as more information becomes available.
And remember how I was a conspiracy theorist for concerns about fertility post-covid vaccination? Well, that didn’t age well. According to this study, published last week, the title explains it all:
Covid-19 vaccination BNT162b2 temporarily impairs semen concentration and total motile count among semen donors
Apparently, semen count decreased, but then recovered around 5 months post-injection. No word yet on what getting a booster at 5 months (just as your sperm is recovering from its first shots) does to your swimmers, fellas.
But some don’t regard fecundability (likelihood of achieving pregnancy) as notable, despite its importance as a marker in terms of overall health. Turning things from sperm to sex and relationships, this conversation between Abigail Shrier and Heather Heying, shared here, was very insightful:
Internet porn gives young men the facsimile of a sexual relationship just as social media offers young women the facsimile of female friendship. Both seem to be rendering humans less suited to each other—less able to absorb life’s pain and challenge and joy? Are we all becoming the anxious child, endlessly accommodated in our retreat from the in-person world, forfeiting our vitality and efficacy and courage?
The whole conversation is worth reading in its entirety (it’s very long, even by my measures).
As we investigate our relationship with technology, the furthering of technology is bringing its own baggage to the relationship. My friend Ginger shared this conversation between LaMDA (Google’s AI chatbot) and two interviewers who work at Google. Again a lengthy conversation, but quite telling. I’d love to hear in the comments your thoughts on the rights of AI and if you view them as comparable to human rights or if they differ.
Now I’d like to introduce you to the Foegen effect, a hypothesis published in February of this year by which face masks contribute to the covid-19 case fatality rate.
From the abstract:
These findings suggest that mask use might pose a yet unknown threat to the user instead of protecting them, making mask mandates a debatable epidemiologic intervention.
You see? Face masks are debatable. Too bad you can’t debate with a totalitarian rule that imposes draconian measures on its citizens and forces compliance at the cost of your food supply, education, or employment. Sigh.
Anyway, the hypothesis specifically states:
A rationale for the increased RR [risk ratio] by mandating masks is probably that virions that enter or those coughed out in droplets are retained in the facemask tissue, and after quick evaporation of the droplets,[17] hypercondensed droplets or pure virions (virions not inside a droplet) are re-inhaled from a very short distance during inspiration. This process will be referred to as the “Foegen effect” because a review of the literature did not yield any results on this effect, which has not been described earlier.
(Feel free to peruse past content if you’d like to visit the other negative impacts of respiration trash muzzles.)
Remember the food processing and packing plants that have been blowing up? And the millions of birds that were culled? And the DHS reporting an increase on cyber security attacks on food plants? And the president discussing food shortages with no plans laid out? (I told you about these things, so feel free to peruse my old substacks, like this one and this one.) Well the list of food destruction just keeps growing. (Thanks to my friend Josh for sharing that list with me!)
I’m sure it doesn’t have anything to do with Bill Gates owning all of that farm land or how easy it would be to control a population if you controlled its food supply. I’m sure that’s just me being ridiculous. Because people never do things for control or profit, right? For example:
It doesn’t matter that those who distribute funds and approval are being paid royalties (which one might see as bribes if one was so inclined) in exchange for doing so.
Besides, the companies behind the vaccines are super above board, as you well know. To demonstrate this point, check this out this Violation Tracker that I came across:
Ten billion, one hundred ninety-three million, eight hundred ninety-six thousand, three hundred thirty-three dollars. It seemed important to write that out. That’s how much money Pfizer has had in penalties (meaning they got CAUGHT) since 2000.
And Pfizer continues to release data each month (after being court-ordered to do so, not voluntarily, of course) from their trials on the vaccines originally. It sure would’ve been cool to have this data in order to make an INFORMED choice rather than being coerced into a medical intervention that you had no available data on. But I digress.
Paid subscribers are getting a peek into the Pfizer data released on June 1.
For everyone else, I’ll wrap this up, but quickly want to share that if you’re one of my European readers (which is truly astounding to me), then you can access Xero Shoes’ Clearance Sale. There isn’t currently a sale in the US, but you can always shop my affiliate link here if you want to grab some of my all-time favorite shoes (which support your foot’s natural abilities rather than conforming them to the shape of a shoe).
Free subscribers, thanks for reading. Paid subs, just a tidbit more for you coming up.
Reminder that all are welcome on Friday for Teacups & Tissues. Leave a comment if you have questions!
Happy Solstice!
L
