Dancing around Covid-19 - big press reviews

1) Quebec's draconian (https://bit.ly/343T5Bb) new vaccine passport
law for unvaccinated people went into effect. Unvaxxed people will
be denied entry to big-box retailers unless they shop for food or visit
the pharmacy. Even then, they will be under the supervision of an
employee (to make sure they don't buy anything else). 
Quebec expanded the vaccination passport to enter all businesses
with surface areas larger than 16,000 sqft or more -- except for
groceries and pharmacies. The new measure was announced on
Sunday night. 
For pharmacies located in Walmart and other big-box retailers, an
unvaxxed must be "accompanied at all times during his or her travels
by an employee of the business, the pharmacy or any other person
mandated by them for this purpose" the measure reads. 
"This person may not purchase products other than those related to
the pharmaceutical service they are receiving," it also said. What's
transpiring in Quebec is another example of how vaccine passports
create two-tier societies, punishing unvaxxed for disobeying the
government. We first described this as a possible scenario in the
early days of the pandemic -- now it has become fact. 
There's no more debating if society is headed for a two-tier society
because it's already happening in Canada.
2) Now Pfizer is sweeping in with droves of lawyers to control how
the FDA releases (https://bit.ly/3IWWxfz) their vaccine safety data.
Just two weeks after the directive, Pfizer asked the federal court
to allow the company to intervene in the FDA’s disclosure of their
documents. Pfizer lawyers want to ensure that certain information
is not “disclosed inappropriately” under the FOIA request. Pfizer
wants to hire its own team of internal regulators to help the FDA
sift through the documents and withhold certain information and
make additional redactions.
According to the court filings, Pfizer “seeks leave to intervene in
this action for the limited purpose of ensuring that information
exempt from disclosure under FOIA is adequately protected as FDA
complies with this Court’s order.” The FDA is also asking the court
to allow Pfizer to police the release of its own safety data, “due to
the unprecedented speed with which the Court has ordered FDA
to process the records at issue.”
3) Professor Ulf Dittmer, head of the Institute of Virology at the
Essen University Hospital, harbors hope that Omicron will be
a decisive turning point in the pandemic (https://bit.ly/32UNah8):
"There is no evolutionary path back to a more deadly virus," Dittmer
said in "19 - die Chefvisite," the Medical University's video
podcast series Essen (https://bit.ly/3Hp9WMT).
4) With half of the Russian citizens who fell ill with a new strain
of coronavirus "omicron", strange things happen. They do not have
the once main symptoms of this disease, PRIMPRESS reports with
reference to PensNews (https://bit.ly/3APQSVC). Andrey Pozdnyakov,
an infectious disease specialist, spoke about an unusual situation for
a coronavirus. According to him, the virus began to behave extremely
strange. After all, almost half of those who fell ill with a new
strain now have almost no elevated body temperature. Although
earlier it was one of the main symptoms of the disease. “The virus
mimics, evades the attack of the collective immune response and
more and more turns into a common respiratory infection. For a
virus, this is a forced measure, if we talk about it as something
that fits into reasonable laws, ”said the doctor. According to him,
another, previously leading symptom of the virus, is also being
lost. This is the disappearance of taste and smell in patients. In
a new wave of morbidity, there are almost no such manifestations
in patients. Also, symptoms such as muscle pain and decreased
appetite have almost disappeared.
5) In an article published by New York Times reporter Apoorva
Mandavilli on Wednesday (https://bit.ly/3s9GwMC), Times readers
were told that “nearly 900,000 children have been hospitalized with
COVID-19 since the pandemic began.” A correction issued on Thursday
notes that the correct number is 63,000 between August 2020 and
October 2021, which means Mandavilli exaggerated the number of child
hospitalizations by 837,000 cases. The exaggeration was included in
a report on the debate surrounding whether and how to vaccinate
children.