In obscure economic news, the death economy really boomed in 2021 for some reason

 

Florida has been the left's target since the pandemic began because it was an early adopter of lockdown skepticism under DeSantis

Newsom is just full of it, as usual. 

U.S. coronavirus cases have been stuck at 103.44 million for six months in 2023

 

HHS: Two percent of Americans have taken the latest COVID booster

 Reported here.

Increased risk of stroke in older adults from COVID booster and flu vaccine received at the same visit

 

New Zealanders and Americans were vaccinated at about 84% and 81% of population respectively, but Americans died of COVID-19 at a rate 6 times higher

 And no one seems to be the slightest bit interested in how or why.

It's a scandal. 

Meanwhile a so-called conservative coalition has now taken over in New Zealand after Jacinda Ardern resigned earlier this year.

 

Cumulative COVID cases in the US have been stuck at 103.44 million for three months, effectively meaning zero per month

 There were about 22.4 million cases added to this data between about May 9, 2022 and May 9, 2023, when just 12.49 million Americans received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine at the same time.

So few vaccinations. So few cases.

🤔

About 118,230 Americans died of COVID year over year on May 9, 2023 as well. Deaths also have been stuck: At 1.13 million May 8, 2023 to Aug 23rd, now over three months.

Let's check in on Nordic COVID champion Sweden

Still the leader lol!

Drill for oil and eat your King Oscar sardines, folks.

 

The dollar's purchasing power has collapsed 16.2% since the onset of the pandemic hysteria, down another 0.3% in July 2023

 

Don't be fooled: Dollar purchasing power fell again in June 2023 as the US orgy of pandemic spending has now devalued the dollar by 18.9% since April 2020

Aka inflation.

 

Public school education in the United States continues its decades-long freefall, accelerated by pandemic closures and a system obsessed with sexual grooming

 The decline in math scores last year was the biggest in the past 50 years, according to newly released federal data. ...

The lowest-performing students scored at levels last recorded in the 1970s, when the assessment began. ...

Test results from earlier this year showed that U.S. history scores among middle schoolers are also falling — dropping to the lowest levels ever recorded since the assessment began in 1994. 

More.

Lesbian couple still obsessively testing and masking, even outdoors, and up-to-date on their jabs, has COVID-19 land at their door anyway

 

In the past two years, my partner and I have taken more at-home COVID tests than we can count. After our first test in 2021, we obsessively checked every few seconds to see what the indicator would reveal. Longest 15 minutes ever.

We’re up to date on our vaccinations. We still mask up in stores and on public transportation. We recently attended our first concert in three years and though most of our fellow concertgoers at the outdoor venue weren’t masked, we were. Still we swabbed our nostrils a few days later. Both negative.

So it never crossed our minds as we were about to leave town for the Memorial Day weekend that we would get anything other than the desired result. My COVID test was negative. Hers was positive. A second test confirmed the first.

More.

World Health Organization declares global public health emergency over today, a week ahead of the US

WHO declares end to Covid-19 global public health emergency

The spread of Covid-19 is no longer a global public health emergency, the World Health Organization declared Friday.

“For more than a year, the pandemic has been on a downward trend with population immunity increasing from vaccination and infection, mortality decreasing, and the pressure on health systems easing,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news conference in Geneva.

“This trend has allowed most countries to return to life as we knew it before Covid-19,” Tedros said. “It’s therefore with great hope that I declared Covid-19 over as a global health emergency.”

Nearly 7 million people have died from the virus worldwide since the WHO first declared the emergency on Jan. 30, 2020, according to the U.N. organization’s official data. Tedros said the true death toll is at least 20 million.

The WHO’s decision comes as the U.S. is set to end its national public health emergency on Thursday.

Tedros said there is still a risk that new variant could emerge and cause another surge in cases. He warned national governments against dismantling the systems they have built to fight the virus.

“This virus is here to stay. It’s still killing and it’s still changing,” he said.

But the WHO chief said the time has come for countries to transition from an emergency response to managing Covid like other infectious diseases. ...

“Covid-19 has been so much more than health crisis,” Tedros said. “It has caused severe economic upheaval, erasing trillions from GDP, disrupting travel and trade, shattering businesses and plunging millions into poverty,” he said.

“It has caused severe social upheaval with borders closed, movement restricted, schools shut and millions of people experiencing loneliness, isolation, anxiety and depression,” Tedros said.

More.

The pandemic wraps on May 11

 US Covid Case Count to Go Dark as Public Health Emergency Ends

(Bloomberg) -- The US government’s count of new Covid-19 cases has been dropping for months. Soon, it will disappear entirely. 

Thousands of Americans are still contracting the coronavirus each week. But when the public health emergency ends May 11, laboratories across the country will no longer be required to report Covid test results to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That will eventually mean no more weekly infection, transmission and community-level numbers in CDC’s Covid Data Tracker. 

Concern about the pandemic is rapidly flagging as infection levels fall to those seen in the earliest months of the outbreak. The World Health Organization also moved to end its global health emergency Friday, lowering its alert level for the pandemic three years after the lethal disease was first seen in China. 

US infection data had already become increasingly unreliable as Americans began opting for at-home, rapid Covid tests — which most patients don’t report — rather than laboratory assays, like PCR. CDC will turn its attention to tracking severe Covid illness via hospital admissions, officials said on a call with reporters, while continuing to analyze wastewater and tests of international travelers to determine how the virus is spreading and evolving.

More.

LOL, Moderna's surprise quarterly profit plunged 97% per share amid collapsing vaccine demand, comes from Covid shot revenue deferred from 2022, first quarter sales tank 69%, CNBC says 30%

CNBC, here:

Moderna on Thursday blew past estimates for first-quarter earnings and revenue, posting a surprise quarterly profit, despite lower demand for Covid vaccines, its only marketable product.

The biotech company generated first-quarter sales of $1.9 billion, driven by Covid shot revenue deferred from 2022. That’s down more than 30% from the $6.1 billion it recorded in the same period a year ago amid a resurgence of Covid cases.

Moderna posted net income of $79 million, or 19 cents per share, for the quarter. That’s compared with $3.66 billion in net income, or $8.58 per share, reported during the same quarter last year.

Seeking Alpha got it right, noting the inventory write-downs of "excess and obsolete COVID-19 products" nobody wants:

 

I'll just put this here for the record in the event CNBC later corrects their reporting without saying so:

As usual the media and the Democrats, but I repeat myself, are portraying the House Republican bill which lifts the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion as a bill with "big spending cuts"

This is how NPR, who else?, frames the issue from the beginning:

The House of Representatives has narrowly approved a Republican bill to raise the debt limit. However, it ties the ability to raise that debt ceiling to big spending cuts. And this House bill rolls back several of President Biden's key policies.

The House Republican bill, now languishing in the Senate, rolls back spending levels to pre-COVID levels. That's not a spending cut. That's saying, as Biden himself says, the emergency is over.

If the emergency is over, the emergency spending should end, too.

Outlays in fiscal 2020 and 2021 ballooned because of the new pandemic spending. Deficits for just those two years soared to almost $6 trillion. Republicans seek to roll that spending back. Democrats want that spending to form the new baseline. If Democrats succeed, Katy bar the door. The national debt will absolutely explode.

NPR knows this. It just chooses to hide the facts about it all, how the pandemic spending created these massive deficits, and how that spending which flooded the economy with money contributed to the new inflation:

So it raises the debt limit by $1.5 trillion or through March of 2024, whichever comes first. It also sets spending levels for federal programs to those that were in place two years ago. It limits the growth of spending going forward to 1% annually. But as you said, it also targets a list of the president's policies. It repeals the president's student loan forgiveness program, which is tied up in the courts. It claws back unspent COVID relief money and rolls back key energy provisions that were in the Inflation Reduction Act. It also puts in place new work requirements for adults without children who receive federal assistance like food stamps or Medicaid.

Fauci: "So many people cannot be completely wrong"

Fewer than 19 million Americans completed the initial vaccine protocol in 2022. Fewer than 25 million received at least one dose.

FAUCI: "When you look around, nobody did great, except maybe one or two countries"

 

Fauci: "We also had a public-health system that we thought was really, really good. But it was really, really antiquated."

 

Wallace-Wells: "We had vaccines designed by the end of January 2020." Fauci: "Yes."