Kansas AG Sues Pfizer For ‘Falsely Representing’ And ‘Suppressing The Truth’ About Its Covid Jab
Kobach's lawsuit makes Kansas the third state to take action against Covid shot manufacturers for purportedly misleading consumers.Kobach's lawsuit makes Kansas the third state to take action against Covid shot manufacturers for purportedly misleading consumers.Former FDA commissioner admits: 'Cloth masks aren't going to provide a lot of protection'
Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb admitted that cloth masks do not provide a high level of protection against COVID-19. Gottlieb — who sits on the board of directors of Pfizer — delivered his insight on face masks as well as stating that the omicron is a milder variant during an appearance on "Face the Nation."
"Cloth masks aren't going to provide a lot of protection, that's the bottom line," Gottlieb told host Margaret Brennan on Sunday morning.
"This is an airborne illness," he continued. "We now understand that, and a cloth mask is not going to protect you from a virus that spreads through airborne transmission."
"It could protect better through droplet transmission, something like the flu, but not something like this coronavirus," explained Gottlieb, who was a clinical assistant professor at New York University School of Medicine before becoming the 23rd FDA commissioner in 2017.
At this stage of the pandemic, cloth masks don't provide much protection against COVID-19, according to @ScottGottliebMD.pic.twitter.com/pvX5McVnzX— Face The Nation (@Face The Nation) 1641139038
Last January, Gottlieb shared a CNN opinion piece titled: "America needs better masks to fight Covid-19."
Part of the reason is that new Covid-19 variants are more transmissible – meaning you are possibly more likely to be infected with even less exposure time and from greater distances than before. As Dr. Walensky herself mentions, ongoing studies are evaluating the efficacy of cloth masks in light of new variants. Without definitive answers, the precautionary principle – erring on the side of caution – should be invoked before more people become infected. Secondly, because -- regardless of variant -- the virus is still transmitted by both droplets and aerosols, the latter of which are best trapped by electrostatic charges found in N95 caliber masks.
In November 2020, Gottlieb wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled: "Some Masks Will Protect You Better Than Others."
In the article, Gottlieb noted that at the beginning of the pandemic, health agencies advised the public to use cloth masks because "medical masks were in short supply."
"A cotton mask offers far less protection than a surgical mask," he wrote, adding, "An N95 or equivalent mask offers the best protection and, if used properly, will filter out at least 95% of infectious particles."
During Sunday's "Face the Nation" interview, Brennan asked Gottlieb if schools should mandate COVID-19 booster shots for 12- to 15-year-olds.
"Well, look, I certainly don't think schools should be mandating boosters," he replied. "I think this should be left up to the discretion of parents and their physicians."
"You know, it's going to depend on the individual circumstance," Gottlieb said. "What is the risk that the child's facing? Are they in a setting where they're more likely to come into contact with the infection? Do they have some underlying health conditions that put them at increased risk of bad outcomes?"
Gottlieb stressed that schools need to remain open.
"I think the imperative needs to be to try to open schools," he stated. "What you're saying by closing schools preemptively, and even colleges, is that you can't possibly control outbreaks in those settings. And I just don't think that that's the case. I think with the tools we have with prudence, with the knowledge we have about how to control this infection in those settings, you can do pretty- a pretty good job of trying to control large outbreaks, certainly within the classroom."
Gottlieb said the Omicron variant "does appear to be a milder strain of coronavirus and we also have a lot of immunity in the population."
"There is a very clear decoupling between cases at this point in hospitalizations and ICU admissions," he said. "There's a very clear, as I said, decoupling between cases and hospitalizations and does appear now based on a lot of experimental evidence that we've gotten just in the last two weeks, that this is a milder form of the coronavirus appears to be a more of an upper airway disease and a lower airway disease that's good for most Americans."
"The one group that- that may be a problem for his very young kids — very young children, toddlers who have trouble with upper airway infections, and you're in fact seeing more croup-like infections and bronchiolitis in New York City among children," he added. "So, that could be a challenge for young kids, and we are seeing rising hospitalizations among that pediatric segment."
Gottlieb believes that the current wave of the Omicron variant will begin to decline in most of the U.S. by the end of February.
"Now this is a big country, this will affect different parts of the country at different points in time," he said. "But if the UK is any guide, London's already peaking. If South Africa is any guide. This is about a two-month epidemic wave from start to finish. And so, parts of the country that were affected earlier, like New York, probably are going to start to peak in the next two weeks, other parts within the next four weeks. So, I think certainly by the end of February, we will be through this if businesses need a guide of when prevalence is going to start to decline in terms of school."
Last month, Gottlieb predicted that 2022 "is going to be a transition year." He said we will likely "go from a pandemic into a more endemic phase."
Gottlieb says Omicron appears to be a "milder form" of COVID-19, but pediatric danger remains www.youtube.com
Dr. Scott Gottlieb: New documents show NIH funded Chinese research that made viruses more dangerous, lab leak plausible
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, acknowledged Wednesday that newly released documents show that the National Institutes of Health funded research in Wuhan, China, that created circumstances that could have led to a dangerous engineered virus possibly escaping from a lab.
Speaking on CNBC, Gottlieb said that whether the work done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other laboratories in the Wuhan area meets the government's technical definition of gain-of-function research is a "political and legal discussion."
"The bottom line is they were doing research on viruses in that institute that was making those viruses potentially more dangerous to humans. And handling the viruses in ways that could potentiate their release, particularly by infecting transgenic animals that have fully-humanized immune systems," Gottlieb said.
"They were doing things in that lab that could have led to circumstances where a virus that was purposefully evolved in ways that it could be more dangerous to humans could have escaped," he continued.
"They were doing things in that lab that could have led to circumstances where a virus that was purposefully evolve… https://t.co/GzJYKkEB0k
— Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) 1631105960.0
Earlier this week, The Intercept published more than 900 pages of documents that detail how the NIH awarded grants to EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based nonprofit group that turned those grants around and handed them to Chinese researchers to study coronaviruses.
One of those grants from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases appears to have funded gain-of-function experiments, research that intentionally make viruses more transmissible among mammals, and particularly among humans. The possible role that such experiments had in the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic is both unknown and controversial.
While most scientists believe that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has a natural origin, there are others who question whether it's possible the virus was engineered at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or another nearby lab, and somehow leaked, causing the pandemic.
NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fuaci has repeatedly denied that NIH funded such experiments in China and maintained that the natural origin theory is the most probable explanation for where COVID-19 came from. But Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), one of Fauci's prominent critics, says the newly revealed documents show Fauci lied about taxpayer funding for gain-of-function research and that further investigation is needed to the role NIAID and NIH played in the possible origins of the pandemic.
According to Gottlieb, there were two relevant details in the documents that were previously not known.
"What's revealed by these documents are two interesting details I previously didn't know. First, there was experimentation being done on MERS-like coronaviruses, not just SARS-like coronaviruses. Second, they affirmed what we suspected about coronavirus research being done at other institutes around Wuhan ... at a level three biocontainment facility," he said.
Horowitz: No, N95s won’t stop the virus either
We all knew this was coming. The same people who were wrong for over a year about the power of surgical masks — at a very painful cost to our children and society — are now seamlessly pivoting to their new position without ever apologizing for their original mistakes. They now want children to wear the even more cruel N95 masks. The twisted irony is that after causing more discomfort and potential medical harms to children, they will still not provide protection against the virus.
Like a dog returning to his vomit, Scott Gottleib, a former FDA administrator under Obama, called for kids to wear N95s rather than confess the mistake of the failed social experiment. Last week, Gottlieb advised schools to begin using KN95 masks, the Chinese version of the N95. He also praised the Utah RINO governor for making KN95 masks available for school districts that want them. Since he called for these masks, there is now a torrent of N95 and KN95 articles in the media. Dr. Michael Osterholm, Biden's former COVID adviser, has also called for all adults to wear N95s after conceding that surgical and cloth masks failed to show any efficacy. Ezekiel Emanuel, who is very influential with Democrat policymakers, has also publicly recommended N95 respirators.
We've seen this nightmare before, and what begins as a bad dream rapidly descends into reality and soon turns into a mandate.
Aside from the fact that anyone pushing them on kids should be charged with reckless child endangerment, N95s really don't make any more of a difference against the virus than the other masks. Should we trust the same people who were wrong about surgical masks to now make kids suffer under their crueler cousin?
Stephen Petty, a certified industrial hygienist and hazardous exposure expert, sent me a copy of an N95 usage label made by 3M that he enlarged into an infographic. It turns out the company's own disclosure blows up the myth of using an N95 for viral protection.
The label confirms what everyone understood prior to the mask mania of COVID: Masks cannot stop aerosols, certainly not viral ones, which are much smaller than bacteria. What's truly revealing is that the label recommends against relying on them for source protection even against asbestos particles, which are on average 5 microns – 50 times larger than SARS-CoV-2 virions.
A large randomized controlled trial published just months before the discovery of SARS-CoV-2 — before masking became a political and social control tool — showed no benefit to N95s over surgical masks in terms of protection against the flu. "Among outpatient health care personnel, N95 respirators vs medical masks as worn by participants in this trial resulted in no significant difference in the incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza," concluded the authors of the large trial, published in JAMA on Sept. 3, 2019.
Not surprisingly, we have seen no real difference in efficacy of N95s against this virus either. Bavaria and Berlin are two of the only known places to mandate the use of N95 masks, yet they failed to stop the subsequent wave, just as we saw with surgical and cloth masks elsewhere.
As “the experts” start pushing N95 masks for all, even kids, while tacitly acknowledging that cloth & surgical mask… https://t.co/D14859whQC
— IM (@ianmSC) 1628448366.0
So, for no gain, what sort of pain should children expect to experience after wearing these devices for seven hours? A 2013 study published in the American Journal of Infection Control found that a sample of nurses experienced significant increases in CO2 levels and "complaints of headache, lightheadedness, and difficulty communicating also increased over time." More recently, a study of 154 N95-wearing health care workers in Singapore found a significant increase in mask-induced blood carbon dioxide levels, which was associated with noticeable headaches in most of the trial group.
It's therefore not surprising that for wildfires, the California Department of Health warns that children should not wear NIOSH N95 or P100 masks. "Children should not wear these masks – they do not fit properly and can impede breathing," states the department of health on the Q&A page about smoke inhalation and wildfires. As the Sacramento County Department of Health Services states, "N95 respirator can make it more difficult for the wearer to breathe due to carbon dioxide buildup, which reduces the intake of oxygen, increased breathing rates, and heart rates."
Remember, gradual and subtle oxygen deprivation is worse for children while their bodies are still growing. Is this what we are prepared to foist upon our children now that we've thrown out the pre-political science we once abided by?
The sad irony, according to Stephen Petty, is that there is a much more effective way of controlling a hazardous environment based on the hierarchy of controls we apply in any other interaction with potential toxins. Here is a simple way to view the hierarchy of controls from a PowerPoint presentation Petty, who has testified in court cases on mask mandates, put together.
While endless isolation and PPE-wearing have proven unfeasible and ineffective, what we haven't tried is placing filters in major public areas that actually dilute and kill the virus particles. Petty recommends iWave-R Air Ionization filters in particular.
Our failed approach to source control is quite similar to the treatment approach of the virus. Rather than treating it early and effectively with cheap medicines, our government has spent a fortune investing in an ever-weakening vaccine and ineffective, expensive treatments like remdesivir. Officials are placing the onus on the people to experiment with their lives rather than helping empower people with reliable and safe, proven drugs.
Similarly, as it relates to source control, they focused on civilization-killing lockdowns and control of the human body, which never works as well as controlling the environment by killing the virus.
No, installing these filters will not permanently save us from the natural flow of the virus, but to the extent that anything will work to slow the spread indoors, it would be an ionization filter, not a piece of cloth. But our government refuses to focus on what actually works and helps people in the most efficient and cost-conscience way; officials seek to maximize the pain with no gain. After all, this is not really about source control, but about social control.
Former FDA chief says now is the time to begin lifting mask mandates: 'As aggressively as we put them in'
Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said this week that indoor mask mandates should begin to be lifted immediately, saying vaccine efficacy means the government should relax pandemic-related restrictions.
In fact, Gottlieb said Thursday that if the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not begin encouraging the lifting of mask mandates, they will quickly lose credibility.
"I think we should start lifting these restrictions as aggressively as we put them in," Gottlieb told CNBC host Shepard Smith.
"We need to preserve the credibility of public health officials to perhaps reimplement some of these provisions as we get into next winter, if we do start seeing outbreaks again," he continued. "And the only way to earn public credibility is to demonstrate you're willing to relax these provisions when the situation improves. That's what gives you the credibility to implement them when things worsen."
Overall, Gottlieb predicted the COVID-19 situation in the U.S. will only continue to improve, yet another reason to relax or rescind mask mandates.
"Even if vaccination rates are slowing, we're still going to continue to chip away at getting more people vaccinated," he said, "but I think that these gains are locked in, and the summer looks very good."
"I think we can do it right around now," @ScottGottliebMD says on lifting indoor mask mandates. https://t.co/weVu2jTo0q
— The News with Shepard Smith (@thenewsoncnbc) 1620343325.0
What is the CDC saying?
The CDC, under President Joe Biden's leadership, does not agree with Gottlieb.
Despite finally updating mask guidance allowing fully vaccinated individuals to go outside without wearing a face mask under most circumstances, the CDC still says all people, regardless of their vaccine status, should wear a mask indoors.
Surprisingly, as vaccination rates slow because the people most enthusiastic about vaccines have already received their shots, the CDC and other public health officials who were aggressive with restrictions are not using mask mandate rescission as an incentive for more people to get vaccinated.
However, polling data suggest such incentives would work.
In one recent study, researchers discovered an overall increase of 13% in vaccine eagerness if it meant mask mandates become a thing of the past.
Yep: "large increases in willingness to take vaccines emerged for those who were asked about getting a vaccine if d… https://t.co/BwRjAquhEH
— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) 1620491499.0
Former FDA chief admits 6-foot social distancing not 'based on clear science': 'Single costliest mitigation tactic'
Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said Friday that mandating social distancing of 6 feet throughout the coronavirus pandemic "has probably been the single costliest mitigation tactic."
Gottlieb's comments came the same day the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released updated guidance essentially saying that 3 feet is adequate social distancing if masks are worn. The new guidelines mainly addressed schoolchildren.
What did Gottlieb say?
Speaking on CNBC's "Closing Bell," Gottlieb shockingly admitted the 6-foot social distancing requirement was not "based on clear science."
"The 6-foot distancing requirement has probably been the single costliest mitigation tactic we've employed in response to COVID," Gottlieb said.
"And it really wasn't based on clear science," he added. "We implemented it early on based on an assumption coronavirus was going to spread like influenza, and there had been some prior research that flu spread predominately through droplets, and if you stated 6 feet apart from people, it reduced droplet transmission."
However, Gottlieb explained scientists learned COVID-19 spreads "through aerosols — not just droplets."
"So, probably 6 feet isn't as effective as it would be if this was purely droplet transmission," Gottlieb said. "I think the fact that we've probably over-relied on a flu-based model caused us to under appreciate the role of aerosol transmission, and probably caused us to overestimate contaminated surfaces as a source of spread. It probably caused us to underestimate the utility of high-quality masks in reducing transmission. It probably caused us to overestimate the impact of distancing to 6 feet."
"We should have re-adjudicated this much earlier," Gottlieb admitted.
"This six-foot distancing requirement has probably been the single costliest mitigation tactic that we've employed… https://t.co/2EzSWhjt8J— CNBC's Closing Bell (@CNBC's Closing Bell)1616187934.0
What about the biggest mistake?
Gottlieb said on CBS' "Face the Nation" earlier this month the failure to mandate mask wearing at the beginning of the pandemic was "the single biggest mistake because it was the easiest intervention that we could have reached for early to prevent spread."
"I think this was a real failure to detect all of the asymptomatic spread. We overestimated the role of fomites, of contaminated surfaces in spreading this virus, because we weren't recognizing all the spread that was happening from asymptomatic individuals, because we weren't doing good tracking and tracing. We were using a flu-model to detect COVID spread and it wasn't applicable," Gottlieb explained.
"If we had recognized earlier all this spread through asymptomatic transmission and the fact that this is spreading not just through droplets but also aerosolization, enclosed environments, we probably would have recommended masks and high-quality masks much earlier," he continued. "So that was probably the single biggest mistake, largely because it was a single easiest intervention that we could have reached for early."
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