Mary Jane Freeman

Fauci: 99.2% of June U.S. COVID Deaths Were Unvaccinated People

July 9, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in COVID-19, General updates, Healthcare, Healthcare

Fauci: 99.2% of June U.S. COVID Deaths Were Unvaccinated People

July 8, 2021 (EIRNS)–The ideological insanity of people who either refuse to get COVID-19 vaccines, or who preach to others not to get the vaccine, is producing a forecastable result: death from SARS-CoV-2.

On July 4, Dr. Antony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, appeared on the NBC News Meet the Press program. Host Chuck Todd asked Dr. Fauci,

“It’s disconcerting to realize that we have had nearly 10,000 people die of COVID in this most recent month that we completed in June. How preventable were each one of those deaths? And how many of them were unvaccinated?”

Fauci responded, “Well, if you look at the number of deaths [in June], about 99.2% of them are unvaccinated. About 0.8% are vaccinated. No vaccine is perfect. But when you talk about the avoidability of hospitalization and death, Chuck, it’s really sad and tragic that most all of these are avoidable and preventable… The overwhelming proportion of people who get into trouble are the unvaccinated. Which is the reason why we say this is really entirely avoidable and preventable.”

Fauci continued: “Over the decades that I’ve been doing this, you’re frustrated because you have diseases where you don’t have an appropriate countermeasure, be it prevention or a treatment. And then when you have a situation like you have today, where you have a formidable enemy in the virus that has tragically really disrupted our planet now for about a year and a half, destructive — destroyed economies, ….and yet we do have a countermeasure that’s highly, highly effective. And that’s the reason why it’s all the more sad … And whatever the reasons, … some of them are ideologic, some of them are just fundamentally anti-vax or anti-science or what have you. But, you know, we just need to put that aside now. We’re dealing with a historic situation with this pandemic. And we do have the tools to counter it.”

He added that, “There are people throughout the world who would do anything to get vaccines.”

On July 1, at a briefing at the White House by the White House COVID-19 Response Team, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control, said, “Preliminary data from a collection of states over the last six months suggest 99.5% of deaths from COVID-19 in these states have occurred in unvaccinated people.” Even though this covered a period at the beginning of the year when vaccines were not generally available, the numbers remain impressive.

UN Rapporteur Slams US Sanctions

March 6, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Color Revolutions, General, General updates, Geopolitics updates, World war danger updates

Hypocrisy of “human rights” cries are exposed.

Mar. 5 (EIRNS)–Speaking at the United Nations offices in Geneva on March 4, UN Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights, Alena Douhan, and Obiora C. Okafor, UN Independent Expert on human rights and international solidarity, said sanctions adopted by the US violate the rights of citizens from many other countries.

“Emergencies declared by the United States often last years, and in some cases decades, and so do the sanctions they authorize,” the experts said in a statement. “Instead of being true emergencies, they seem like excuses to impose sanctions indefinitely.”

“The sanctions authorized by the U.S. on the base of announced states of emergency violate a wide range of human rights in China, Cuba, Haiti, Iran, Nicaragua, the Russian Federation, Syria, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and other countries around the world, including rights to freedom of movement, of association, to due process such as fair trial and the presumption of innocence, as well economic and social rights and the very right to life,” Douhan and Okafor stressed.

They also charged that the sanctions affect the rights of those engaged in providing assistance for the reconstruction of Syria, and slammed the imposition of secondary sanctions.

They called on the US to “fully and completely observe its obligations under the ICCPR to prevent any negative impact on the human rights of persons subject to sanctions authorized under the emergency declarations” — a very weak conclusion, when clearly the sanctions are illegal and should be cancelled.

Beethoven: Sparks of Joy!

March 6, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Daily Beethoven — Sparks of Joy, General updates, Music updates

Beethoven: Sparks of Joy — the 1795 Horn Sextet

Though published in 1810, the Horn Sextet was composed some time around 1795, when Beethoven was a newcomer to Vienna and popular taste was dominated by Haydn and the recently-deceased Mozart. Scored for two horns, two violins, viola and cello, the horn parts are so demanding that Beethoven probably composed with specific players in mind (one possibility being his Bonn publisher Simrock, who was a talented amateur horn player).
It’s performed here by members of the National Symphony Orchestra. [Notes by Margaret Scialdone.]

Global Space Cooperation

March 5, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in General, Space updates

Jubilation in Paraguay Over Launching of First Satellite

March 4, 2021 (EIRNS)–With great pride and excitement, Paraguay launched its first satellite, GuaraniSat-1, on Feb. 20, from NASA’s launch facility on Wallops Island, Virginia–an event considered to be of great historic significance for the country. Two days after launch, the Northrop Grumman Cygnus supply ship carrying the nanosatellite docked at the International Space Station (ISS) from which Guaranisat-1 will be placed in orbit in the next month or two. This CUBESAT satellite which measures only 10x10x10 cm, was developed by the Paraguayan Space Agency (AEP) as part of multi-nation program known as BIRDS-4, developed by Japan’s Kyushu Technological Institute and backed by Japan’s space agency, JAXA. Once in orbit, GuaraniSat-1 will be involved in monitoring the prevalence of Chagas disease in the country’s Chaco region, but Paraguayan engineer Adolfo Jara told EFE news agency that the satellite will actually have to perform nine missions in the space of a year and a half.

Amidst much jubilation and congratulations, an AEP twitter feed showing two small children happily reporting on the launch and waving the Paraguayan flag, captured the nation’s sentiment. The head of the AEP’s Planning Division, Jorge Kurita, told EFE that the AEP’s participation in this program has had a “domino effect” in “the creation of research teams in the space sector, applied to solving problems on Earth.” AEP’s director of Aerospace Development, Alejandro Roman, added that for a country like Paraguay, subject to annual floods and forest fires, the GuaraniSat-1 observation satellite can help in “planning responses. This is an example of how science and space technology can help improve a government’s and a nation’s management” capabilities, “The AEP isn’t just dedicated to the launching of a satellite,” he added. “It’s a means to advance in technological development.”

Brzezinski’s Nightmare: a `Khyber Pass Development Corridor’

July 8, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Economic development updates, General updates, New Silk Road / BRI updates, World Land-Bridge updates

Brzezinski’s Nightmare: a `Khyber Pass Development Corridor’

July 7 (EIRNS) – The United States/NATO occupation of Afghanistan, the latest, long trail of fruitless wasting of blood and treasure in that suffering country, is now ending. There is an alternative start to peace through economic development which could now succeed, if the sine qua non which Lyndon LaRouche made clear years ago goes into action. The great powers in the region – China, Russia, and India – along with the United States must cooperate, not with their special forces but with their engineers and their credits, to support that success.
            This was proposed by LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review in special reports already in 1997. It was sabotaged by regime-change wars throughout the region. Proposed again by Russia in 2014 — an Afghan region development concept reported by EIR in its 2014 special report (updated), The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge — it was again sabotaged by Russia’s expulsion from the G8 after the Ukraine coup. Behind this was the British intelligence Bernard Lewis Plan, adopted by Zbigniew Brzezinski as Carter’s National Security Advisor, to use this region as an “Arc of Crisis” permanent weapon of war and terror against Russia and China.
            The Belt and Road Initiative, initially a Chinese land-bridge infrastructure project across Eurasia but now involving more than 100 countries, offers economic development advantages and prospects to Afghanistan, including the Taliban, if major nations in the region cooperate on them.
            The obvious question is why the U.S./NATO occupation persisted for so long in blocking the government of Afghanistan from negotiating on the Belt and Road, when it clearly was open to this and in desperate need of development as we show here.
            Railway-technology.com, the Belt and Road News, and The Diplomat have all recently reported on the agreement reached in February 2021 by the foreign ministers of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan for a railway to be built at an estimated cost of $4.8 billion from Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s most northerly major city and its capital, through Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul, Afghanistan, to Peshawar, Pakistan. Uzbekistan – the initiator of the plan, according to The Diplomat – proposed to ask the World Bank to loan this fund, and that request was made in April.
            Moreover, a Peshawar-Kabul-Dushanbe highway project was recently agreed upon between Pakistan and Afghanistan representatives. As a Pakistani planned project, called the Khyber Pass Economic Corridor as an offshoot of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, this plan dates to March 2015 when a feasibility study was begun.
            If the rail and road developments are combined, effectively a North-South transportation and economic development corridor begins to be launched running from the main Eurasian Land-Bridge on the north, to the Indian Ocean on the south. This is true even though the core Kabul-Peshawar stretch through the Khyber Pass runs East and West. Tashkent will connect the corridor north through secondary rail lines to the dry port of Khorgos, Kazakhstan, on the main Eurasian Land-Bridge rail line from Lanzhou Port in China to Russia and Europe. Peshawar, via the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), will connect the corridor directly to Pakistan’s growing port of Gwadar on the Indian Ocean – and of course, back into China’s southern industrial heartlands. Mazar-e-Sharif in the extreme north of Afghanistan is the only Afghan city with rail connections now, largely into Uzbekistan.
            Within Afghanistan itself, this rail-road corridor would turn the northeast quadrant of the Afghanistan Ring Road into a protected part of that international corridor; and through Mazar-e-Sharif, it would connect the Tajik capital Dushanbe which lies to the East of that corridor.
            The major economic powers must turn from tensions, charges and confrontations, and cooperate for this potential to finally allow peace and development in Afghanistan. The rail line from Peshawar to Tashkent and potentially north to Russia will have serious logistical-engineering challenges which only the Chinese rail-building companies can solve. The World Bank loan will only be made if the United States agrees to support the plan, and then the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) can become involved in providing additional credit. And development along the corridor will require a lot of new electric power, which can best be nuclear plants engineered by Russia’s world-leading nuclear exporter Rosatom.
            These are only the beginning of the needs for power, water management, transportation, and urgently now, healthcare. They are the way out of the constant “Arc of Crisis” warfare LaRouche first exposed in his 1998 classic video lesson, Storm Over Asia.

COVID-19: Vaccine Access for All

March 5, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in China, COVID-19, Economic development updates, General updates, Global Diplomacy, Healthcare, The Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites

China Announces Plans To Produce 3.5 Billion Vaccine Doses in 2021

March 4, 2021 (EIRNS)–A major expansion of COVID-19 vaccine production is underway in China, now surpassing 3.5 billion doses in 2021. Further, China has decided to vaccinate 560 million of its citizens by June 30, an average of about five million/day. The U.S. is just now arriving at the capacity for 2.5 million/day, on its way to a 3-4 million/day level.

At a major meeting of the Chinese Center for Disease Control on Tuesday, decisions were made to escalate vaccinations on a vast scale. Up to now, China has targeted 52.5 million vaccinations, concentrating upon those who are most exposed to people and products coming into the country at airports, train stations, and harbors, and upon those exposed internally, such as health workers. Their testing and tracking methods have pre-empted a need to rapidly vaccinate. However, they have decided that it would undermine the efforts of neighbors, such as India, who are going for herd immunity levels of vaccination, if China were unvaccinated when their neighbors had achieved their goal. Social responsibility dictates that China should not be the weak link at that point. Health authorities were sent around the country after the Tuesday meeting, to organize the vaccinations of 560 million people by June 30 and another 330 million by the end of the year.

The 3.5 billion vaccine doses will come from Sinovac Biotech, which, according to CEO Yin Weidong, is expanding to a two-billion-dose/year capacity; CansinoBIO, which is building a new factory in Shanghai and plans on 500 million doses in 2021; and Sinopharm, which guarantees at least one billion doses in 2021. Previously, India has led the world, with a production schedule of 2.25 billion COVID-19 vaccines in 2021.

Winners in New `Global Minimum Corporate Tax: Tech Giants, London `Offshore’

July 8, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Finance, General updates, Geopolitics updates

Winners in the New `Global Minimum Corporate Tax: Tech Giants, London `Offshore’

July 7 (EIRNS) – The Financial Times on July 3 reported that the City of London financial center had succeeded in winning an “exemption” for its banks and other financial firms – and those of Wall Street and Frankfurt – from the new “global minimum corporate tax” agreement ballyhooed by the U.S. Treasury at the time of the G7 finance ministers and heads-of-state meetings. The minimum tax scheme, considered a U.S. priority, is actually being negotiated and planned under OECD auspices.

A ZeroHedge column on July 1 had already noted that “while Washington likes to talk about the new framework as a foregone conclusion, there’s plenty of reason to doubt that it will ever be implemented. One reason is that countries like Ireland, Singapore, Indonesia and island tax havens like Bermuda all oppose the new scheme.” It could be expected that London would play this card.

In what was portrayed in financial media as hard bargaining between “the United States” on one side and “the UK and France” on the other, financial corporations got a “carve out” or safe haven from the minimum tax; and in exchange, the UK agreed to eliminate in stages its “digital services tax”, which has no American counterpart. France agreed to do this as well, on behalf of continental European countries’ tax authorities.

So while some nations may be hurt by the agreement – for example, Ireland and Russia, which currently have corporate tax rates below 15% — the Silicon Valley tech monopolists will come out just as sales tax-free worldwide, as they have always been in the United States; and the City and Wall Street banks will be subject to the 15% minimum corporate tax only in their home bases, and not in all the other places they operate in. That is to say that “London offshore” tax havens will still be tax havens.

U.S.-China: A Shared Humanity

March 5, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in China, Economic development updates, General updates, Global Diplomacy, New financial order updates, United States, World Land-Bridge updates

U.S.-China State Legislators Meet for 5th Forum; Amb. Cui Lauds Cooperation

March 4, 2021 (EIRNS)–The 5th China-U.S. Sub-national Legislatures Cooperation Forum met online on March 2. Attending were state legislators from the states of Alabama, Hawaii, California, Delaware, Iowa, Michigan, and Tennessee. On the Chinese side were leaders of the standing committees of provincial or municipal people’s congresses of Beijing, Hebei, Shanxi, Jiangsu, Hubei, Guangdong and Yunnan. The forum was the outcome of President Xi’s state visit to the United States in 2015.

During the course of the Forum, the two sides had extensive discussions on the theme of “Win-win Cooperation for a New Chapter.” The U.S. legislators’ organization participating in the meeting is the State Legislative Leaders Foundation, whose president is Stephen Lakis.

China’s Ambassador to the U.S. Cui Tiankai addressed the group. He underlined that this was the first such event since the change of administrations, and he emphasized the importance of U.S.-China cooperation, particularly in a year in which the world is still in a major fight against COVID-19. Cui referred to the call that the two presidents had made in February as the possible beginning of an improved relationship between the two countries.
“A China-U.S. relationship based on coordination, cooperation, and stability is both in the fundamental interests of the two peoples, and meets the shared aspiration of the international community,” he said. “The two countries need to work together under the principle of no conflict, no confrontation, mutual respect, and win-win cooperation, focusing on cooperation and managing differences, to promote the healthy and stable development of China-U.S. relations, to bring more tangible benefits to the two peoples, and contribute to peace and development of humanity.”

NASA’s Mars Helicopter Flies an Even More Daring Mission

July 8, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Economic development updates, General updates, Space updates

NASA’s Mars Helicopter Flies an Even More Daring Mission

July 6, 2021 (EIRNS)—NASA reports that Ingenuity successfully completed its ninth and most challenging mission so far on Monday. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Ingenuity’s “mother”) tweeted: “#MarsHelicopter pushes its Red Planet limits. The rotorcraft completed its 9th and most challenging flight yet, flying for 166.4 seconds at a speed of 5 m/s.” That’s 16 feet a second, the fastest speed since the beginning of the experiments in April. The little heli flew about 625 meters (0.4 miles). Ingenuity has been tested performing increasingly greater tasks than originally planned. Yesterday Ingenuity was sent off on a different route than its rover companion, Perseverance, flying over “unfriendly” terrain which has elevations and sandy “ripples,” not the flat terrain for which Ingenuity had been prepared. The “significantly elevated risk” makes it “the most nerve-wracking flight since Flight 1,” JPL wrote in its July 2 pre-flight statement. It was a success, but the full statistics and image collection have yet to arrive back at Earth. Read more here.

WHO Briefers Angry at Lack of Health Infrastructure in the War vs. COVID-19

July 8, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in COVID-19, General updates, Geopolitics updates, Healthcare

WHO Briefers Angry at Lack of Health Infrastructure in the War vs. COVID-19

July 6, 2021 (EIRNS)—The World Health Organization’s Mike Ryan and Maria Von Kerkhove answered questions for the public on Monday and allowed some of their frustration and anger to show. First on Monday: While new cases worldwide have stabilized, they have done so at an uncomfortably high level; this, in fact, reflects a dangerously unstable situation. While new cases in the Americas declined (13%), they raced upwards in Africa (15%) and Europe (28%). This last week had twenty countries undergoing sharp rises. Basically, the point of impact simply shifted. The two WHO specialists cited three interacting factors: uneven vaccination levels, the spread of the Delta variant, and social relaxing.

Then the anger: The WHO teams are fighting on the front lines. We’re really humanitarians, and we won’t give up. But the vaccines aren’t coming as they should, or even as promised. “The cavalry is not coming.” This destroys morale. So, people then give up, go back to work and accept what fate will bring them. What is needed is to build and invest in systems now—don’t wait for the next surge. A system involves: surveillance systems, testing in place, isolation, clinical care, contact tracing or at least cluster investigations and such; so that we can find out where the enemy is and go after it. Those systems need to be built now, and the wealthier West is not even doing it for their own populations. Their admonitions are an echo of Helga Zepp LaRouche’s 2020 call for a new global health platform for each country.

Ryan stressed that there were enough vaccines in the world right now to inoculate all the “at-risk” categories and the medical personnel. Kerkhove stressed that enough is known about the workings of the coronavirus to design a comprehensive war plan against it. It seems that the first 18 months of the battle finds the immaturity of political culture is no match for the reality of the virus.

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