Pasta News Network - New Zealand

Russia has banned oil sales to countries and companies that comply with a price cap agreed by Western nations earlier this month.

The price cap - which was agreed by the G7 group of nations, Australia and the EU - came into force on 5 December.

The cap prohibits countries from paying more than US$60 (NZ$95) per barrel of Russian oil.

Russia has now said its oil and oil products will not be sold to anyone imposing the price cap.

Russia will simply continue to sell to China and India, or use them as intermediaries. Trying to force a price on something you do not even own, let alone at a price well below market rate, is quite the sight to be hold.

A Wellington medical company is researching a combined flu and Covid-19 vaccine.

P3 Research is looking for people aged between 50 and 80 years old to take part in the clinical trial, which is investigating whether a single vaccine can effectively prevent both illnesses.

There are (already) potential complications from having both a Covid vaccine and Flu vaccine in each arm at the same time.

Meanwhile, Moderna already has a pipeline for this, and they still haven't produced a functional product.

Some ideas, are genuinely very bad ideas. This is one of them.

Germany’s Federal Network Agency, a government watchdog responsible for the regulation of electricity and gas in the country, has announced a new plan that will allow power grid operators to remotely limit the use of heat pumps and electric car chargers in Germany next winter without the user’s permission.

With the plans set to be put in place by January 2024, the measure has been described as a way of ensuring energy grid operators have the ability to artificially curb electricity demand should consumption outstrip supply.

"Wir schaffen das."

From Canadian truckers to Dutch farmers, working people have had enough of the laptop elites.

The laptop elites. The pyjama classes. It’s hard to know what to call the new establishment. Those upper-middle-class graduates who make up the knowledge economy. Who think tweeting is a job. Who have faithfully imbibed every woke mantra, from ‘Trans women are women’ to ‘Wear your mask!’. Who are waited on hand and foot by the precariat of Deliveroo and Amazon. Who loathe the old economy – the one that actually makes things – for its unsightly footprint on the planet. And who loved lockdown. Six months making sourdough bread for your Instagram Stories while still getting paid for whatever it is you do for a job? What’s not to like?

The 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy possibly ranks as the single most famous event of the twentieth century.

For nearly sixty years, there have been widespread suspicions that he died at the hands of a conspiracy, as did his brother Robert a few years later. Although these “conspiracy theories” have been ignored or dismissed by nearly our entire mainstream media, they have inspired hundreds or thousands of books and films along with countless articles, and have been widely believed by large portions of the American public. The resulting loss of faith in our major institutions has been dramatic, leading to today’s intense popular skepticism on so many other issues, whether justified or unjustified.

Our government has still never released all of its official records on the death of our 35th President, but after almost six decades that monumental cover-up may finally be starting to collapse.

In the aftermath of the world’s catastrophic response to Covid-19, some governments have begun conducting inquiries into what went wrong. Yet owing to a combination of politics, face-saving, and outright corruption, these inquiries have generally been toothless. For example, a report published last year by the UK House of Commons concluded, backwardly, that if the UK had gone into strict lockdown three days sooner, disaster would have been averted.

Conclusions like these are as insulting to the public’s intelligence as was the response to Covid itself. The response to Covid led to the sharpest economic collapse since the Great Depression, global famine, a mental health crisis, runaway inflation, a transfer of over $3 trillion from the world’s poorest to the very richest, the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of young people, and the worst education crisis since the Second World War.

50 key questions, of how suddenly in dealing with Covid, established protocols were ignored and new ones were invented.

Shortly after the initial two mRNA vaccine doses, the IgG response mainly consists of the pro-inflammatory subclasses IgG1 and IgG3. Here, we report that several months after the second vaccination, SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies were increasingly composed of non-inflammatory IgG4, which were further boosted by a third mRNA vaccination and/or SARS-CoV-2 variant breakthrough infections. IgG4 antibodies among all spike-specific IgG antibodies rose on average from 0.04% shortly after the second vaccination to 19.27% late after the third vaccination. This induction of IgG4 antibodies was not observed after homologous or heterologous SARS-CoV-2 vaccination with adenoviral vectors.

This is not Good.

Importantly, this class switch was associated with a reduced capacity of the spike-specific antibodies to mediate antibody-dependent cellular phagocytosis and complement deposition. Since Fc-mediated effector functions are critical for antiviral immunity, these findings may have consequences for the choice and timing of vaccination regimens using mRNA vaccines, including future booster immunizations against SARS-CoV-2.

This would imply, that the anti-body overload the mRNA vaccines ellicit may turn a segment of the populace into perpetual "plague rats".