Opinion
By Jeff Childers
04-03-24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! You roundup today includes: Florida Supreme Court issues a pair of controversial abortion decisions; U. Texas at Austin ashcans DEI department and liberal students fiercely emote; new money squabble between NIH scientists and PFizer/BioNTech confirms government origins of the jabs; former CDC Director Redfield convinced covid came from science; Rand Paul’s new covid origins committee; cancer cluster pops up in a building on North Carolina University campus; Rutgers finally reverses its jab mandate; and atheist superstar scientist comes around to “cultural Christianity.”
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
🔥 The Washington Post ran a rare, non-paywalled story Monday headlined, “Florida Supreme Court allows one of nation’s strictest abortion bans to take effect.”
“We conclude there is no basis under the Privacy Clause to invalidate the statute,” Justice Jamie Grosshans wrote while dropping the Court’s culture bomb. The decision overturned decades of pro-abortion law in Florida. Justice Grosshans explained, “In doing so, we recede from our prior decisions in which — relying on reasoning the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected — we held that the Privacy Clause guaranteed the right to receive an abortion through the end of the second trimester.”
Although the case was ostensibly about a previous 15-week ban, the court’s reasoning applies equally to the new six-week ban. The precedent-crushing decision, which only Florida’s Supreme Court could make, removed an injunction staying the new laws.
The case will have a monster effect. The Post reported that last year, more than 84,000 abortions were performed in Florida, more than in almost any other state, and far more than previously reported in any of the 17 states that have now banned all or most abortions.
In a separate abortion ruling this week, the court also approved a 2024 ballot initiative to amend Florida’s Constitution to allow abortions. The proposed amendment would leave the decision about when an abortion could be provided to the woman’s doctor: “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.”
In other words, an individual doctor could determine that ‘viability’ means ‘birth.’ To pass, the amendment requires a 60% supermajority of voters.
The decision upholding Florida’s new abortion limits was particularly interesting to me, since my winning mask and vaccine cases were based on Florida’s Right to Privacy and decades of abortion decisions extolling bodily autonomy and physical privacy. Needless to say, Florida’s Supreme Court didn’t include those issues.
Florida’s election season just got a gigantic emotional upgrade.
🔥 Local Austin ABC affiliate KVUE ran a terrific story yesterday headlined, “Dozens of UT Austin employees in DEI-related roles to be laid off.” Well, to be honest, KVUE was not super excited about the news. The story’s first quote was Aaliyah Barlow, president of UT’s Black Student Alliance, who reportedly sobbed “honestly, I cried and I was angry.”
Thanks democrats! Welcome to 2024. This is what things have come to. Adults crying over politics. Forget about policy or even reason. It’s all emotion now: mainly grief and rage. I’m not exaggerating. KVUE’s next ‘DEI policy analyst’ quote was from UT junior Chrisdianna Mcafee, who said, “A lot of people are upset; all of my group chats are raging. All of the GroupMe’s, all of the Slacks – everybody is raging.”
Goodness. Her inability to enunciate a rational objection makes one wonder what Ms. Mcafee’s student loan balance has climbed up to. The University of Texas might be wildly succeeding in its ‘emo’ studies, but it is clearly failing students elsewhere. Is that really value for money?
The news devastating UT’s far-left students was the announcement by the school’s president that, following passage of a new Texas law, the school’s DEI department would be rolled up, its diverse faculty employees reassigned, its funding equitably redeployed, and around 60 highly-inclusive “support staff” would be ashcanned. The president explained:
Funding used to support DEI across campus prior to SB 17’s effective date will be redeployed to support teaching and research. As part of this reallocation, associate or assistant deans who were formerly focused on DEI will return to their full-time faculty positions. The positions that provided support for those associate and assistant deans and a small number of staff roles across campus that were formerly focused on DEI will no longer be funded.
This is more excellent progress. And the blue-state / red-state divide grows ever wider.
💉 This won’t surprise you, but the other vaccine vial dropped last week when Reuters quietly ran a financial story headlined, “BioNTech Hit with NIH Notice of Default Over COVID-19 Vaccine Royalties.”
Here we go. As the money dries up, the thieves are once again fighting over the score:
The National Institutes of Health has slapped BioNTech with a notice of default over alleged royalty payments the biotech owes the agency related to sales of its Pfizer-partnered COVID-19 vaccine Comirnaty, according to the company’s SEC filing.
What’s new about this sordid story is it was the last bit of confirmation of the original root source of the mRNA tech: every bit of it was excreted by that massive government health agency, the wellspring of mRNA, the National Institutes of Health. The article showed, as we’d long presumed, that neither Pfizer nor BioNTech were smart enough to whip up a brand-new vaccine technology and turn it into a covid vaccine in just a few weeks.
It was always a government project.
In February of last year, the first signs of trouble proved that, like Pfizer, Moderna wasn’t smart enough to make mRNA either. The New York Times ran a story back on February 23rd, 2023, headlined “After Long Delay, Moderna Pays N.I.H. for Covid Vaccine Technique. The article explained a patent dispute had arisen between government NIH scientists and Moderna, since the NIH scientists insisted they were the original source of the mRNA technique:
So let’s play follow the money. Recall that, under a weird loophole, NIH scientists may earn money from patents obtained from their government work, and need not turn that money over, or even disclose any royalties they earn. It’s likely that both Fauci and Collins, for example, have made millions from the covid jabs—but they are not required to tell whether they have, or how much they’ve earned (and they have both repeatedly declined to say).
Here’s my primitive attempt to describe the complex, interlocking parts of this wonderful public-private partnership and what may have happened:
Just saying. Here’s another good question. Since it has now become clear that the covid mRNA tech originally came from the NIH: why didn’t the NIH brag about inventing it from day one? Why are we only finding out now, after they started fighting over the money?
Why was the NIH origin of the mRNA technology long kept a secret?
It was the new genetic gold rush! Not just NIH scientists, not just big pharma, but even the jabby doctors were getting paid. Here, for example, is Blue Cross/Blue Shield’s vaccine provider incentive schedule:
The mRNA jabs may have been a depopulation conspiracy, who knows. But if so, they made sure they would all get rich in the process.
💉 It seems like a good time to link The Hill’s outstanding video podcast Rising, which interviewed Trump’s CDC Director Robert Redfield a couple months back:
CLIP: Former CDC Director Robert Redfield interview on Rising (3:52).
In the clip, Redfield agreed with me that idiot scientists will kill us all one of these days:
“The great pandemic is coming. It’s not coming from spillover. It’s going to come from intentional bioterrorism or gain of function research. It’s gonna be a bird flu virus that is manipulated to be transmitted from human to human. Very similar to what we saw with the covid.
This research is being done in university laboratories all over the world. It hurts me to say this, but I do believe that the most likely answer when we get to the truth is it was caused by science, not by a natural spillover.”
Science! Given what we’ve all been through, and I’m just spitballing here, it seems like the nation’s top priority should be locking down gain of function research and other genetic manipulation techniques. But what do I know? I’m just a lawyer.
Here’s the link to the full Redfield interview on YouTube (24:56).
💉 Related: last week, Politico ran a story headlined, “A new Covid origin inquiry is bipartisan.” Senators Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Gary Peters (D-Mich.), chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, announced formation of the latest covid origins investigation. Another one.
Rand Paul’s new committee will peer not only into covid’s murky origins, but will also focus “on high-risk life science research, biodefense, synthetic biology, biosafety and biosecurity lapses” — exactly what Dr. Redfield said he was worried about.
Finally.
I get it. Nobody’s throwing a party over yet another covid investigation committee. But there has been a wee bit of progress. Politico reported a Homeland Security panel last week unanimously approved Senator Paul’s bill requiring government scientists — like from the NIH — to disclose royalties they receive from companies — like Pfizer — and make public the secret financial disclosure forms filed by members of federal scientific advisory committees.
When Rand Paul said the goal was “preventing future pandemics,” he means in the sense of stopping science from killing us all.
Drip, drip, drip. Sooner or later, we will get to accountability.
💉 This is a weird one. The UK Daily Mail ran an eye-popping story Monday headlined, “Cancer on campus: Over 150 students and staff at North Carolina university ‘are diagnosed with host of tumors and disease’ – as officials find lecture halls and classrooms teeming with toxic chemicals.” The first sentence explained, “Cases of lymphoma and thyroid and breast cancers have been reported among patients who spent time at Poe Hall, a class building at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.”
The university is current dealing with a docket of new lawsuits filed by some of the 152 patients who’ve alleged falling sick with diseases linked to certain banned industrial chemicals, specifically “polychlorinated biphenyls,” or PCBs. PCBs were widely used last century in a variety of common products like paint, rubber, and sealants. PCBs were outlawed in 1979 (Poe Hall was built in 1971), but are still hanging around like a persistent venereal disease because they never really go away.
PCBs have been shown to cause cancer in animals, but there’s no ‘conclusive’ link yet to cancer in humans.
Last year, the North Carolina Department of Labor tested Poe Hall and found high levels of PCBs in some places inside the building, like in a women’s bathroom, on a door gasket, in an air handler and other spots like those.
Anyway, here’s the first weird bit. The University had initially asked the CDC to perform a free environmental review of Poe Hall. The CDC was all set to investigate, but the University called it off January. There are no state or local investigations ongoing. The University denies the PCBs caused the panoply of cancers, most of which arose recently.
Before they closed it in November, Poe Hall was used for graduate and undergraduate classes and housed faculty focused on education and psychology.
It was also odd that the few plaintiffs described in the various stories that I could find attended NCU at various times, but most of their wide variety of cancers seem to have developed recently. Like Sarah Glad, who died in January of Stage 4 breast cancer. Or like Jennifer Walter, who attended between 2004-2007, but was recently diagnosed with synovial sarcoma in 2022.
Could their exposure to PCBs decades ago have been triggered by something that happened recently, provoking this massive cancer cluster? It would be helpful to know their jab status. Just asking.
💉 On Monday, Rutgers (finally) dropped its college jab mandate:
Slow. And late. But it’s a little more progress.
🔥 The Daily Caller ran a shocking story Sunday headlined, “Richard Dawkins Admits The West Needs Christianity.”
CLIP: Atheist superstar scientist Richard Dawkins declares himself a ‘cultural Christian’ (2:29).
In 2006, British evolutionary biologist and Oxford Professor Dawkins wrote “The God Delusion,” which became an instant bestseller and made Dawkins a celebrity to delighted atheists around the world. In his book, Dawkins argued for substituting atheistic humanism for religion. But Dr. Dawkins seems to have come around, at least partway. In the clip, Dawkins tells the interviewer he now wants to keep Christianity:
“I call myself a cultural Christian. I’m not a believer. (But) I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos. I would not be happy if we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches. If we substituted any alternative religion, that would be truly dreadful. If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I would choose Christianity every time. It seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion, in a way that I think Islam is not. I find that I like to live in a culturally Christian society, although I do not believe in a single word of the Christian faith.”
Needless to say, in 2006 Dawkins did not mention his cultural Christianity in The God Delusion.
If I had more time, I’d explore how profoundly the landscape of anti-religious opposition has changed in just the fifteen years since I experienced the vision leading to my conversion. I remember well that back then, luminaries like Dawkins occupied the debate stage. As a result, I spent a lot of time studying ‘apologetics,’ which can be loosely described as the study of evidence showing science is perfectly consistent with Christianity, as well as its logic and history.
Not even ten years ago, it was uncontroversial that atheism posed the greatest challenge to Christianity. Intellectuals popularly debated the faith issue in large forums. Libraries of books were published arguing both sides. The battle lines were drawn over atheist cause célèbre’s like hauling the Ten Commandments monument out of Alabama’s courthouse.
But something changed. And whatever changed, changed fast. Atheism is no longer Christianity’s greatest challenge, having mostly been relegated to a historical footnote. Now Christianity faces supercharged, social media-powered neo-paganism sporting hashtags like #WitchTok. The debate is no longer over atheists wanting to take down the Ten Commandments, it’s about Satanists putting up demonic Baphomet statues in City Hall during Christmas, or Joe Biden declaring Easter is transgender awareness day.
Reflecting on the recent spiritual growth of other celebrity influencers like Joe Rogan and Russel Brand, it occurred to me that maybe the celebrity author of The God Delusion is deluding himself. Maybe Dawkins’ affinity for Christianity is growing, not because he thinks cathedrals are pretty, but because he’s being swept along with an invisible, worldwide spiritual movement.
Anyhow that’s how I prefer to see things. To me, the changing of Richard Dawkins’ heart is not an artifact of aging. Neither is it a nuanced accessory to his atheism; after all, the good Professor made a lucrative career advocating for a secular humanist society. He won’t get very far with his cultural Christianity.
Instead, I think something wonderful and beautiful is afoot. Be of good cheer.
I hope you have a wonderful Wednesday! Keep you eye on the prize and get yourself back here tomorrow morning for more full-caff Coffee & Covid.
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© 2022, Jeff Childers, all rights reserved
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
