Corporate accountability

SHOT: FDA orders the destruction of another 60 million doses of J&J’s vaccine produced by its partner, Emergent BioSolutions. This on the heels of a previous contamination of 15 million doses.

June 11 2021: EU drug regulator stops use of J&J vaccine doses made at Baltimore plant during time of contamination

The EMA announcement marks the latest blow to Emergent, which has suffered a wave of negative publicity once the contamination concerns were revealed earlier this year, leading to the plant’s shutdown in April.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is ordering Johnson & Johnson to throw out 60 million doses of its single-shot COVID-19 vaccine produced, while allowing another 10 million to be distributed with a warning that the FDA cannot guarantee they were produced using good manufacturing practices.

Federal officials "determined several other batches are not suitable for use, but additional batches are still under review and the agency will keep the public informed as those reviews are completed," the agency said.

Meanwhile, it came to light earlier this month that Emergent has been embroiled in quality control problems for some time. 

The FDA has repeatedly cited the company for a myriad of potentially dangerous issues, such as poorly trained employees, cracked vials and problems managing mold and other contamination around one of its facilities, according to records obtained by The Associated Press through the Freedom of Information Act. The records cover inspections at Emergent facilities since 2017.

Chaser: Emergent BioSolutions’ chief received a 51% pay hike this year

Fewer equestrians looking to move to Greenwich these days?

610 Round Hill Road, currently asking $3.950 million, is reported pending. It’s a tired, 1940 house of no particular distinction, but it does have some facilities for horses, including a three-stall outbuilding (until the GMLS strikes it off the list, you can find a more detailed description than that provided by Redfin here).

These owners bought it for $4.6 in 2014 from owners who’d paid $5.5 in 2004. Not an encouraging trend line here.

CIRCLING BACK: Several readers disagree with my negative opinion of this house. “Historically Yours” writes: I respectfully disagree. What's distinctive about this place is its setting in Round Hill. When I came here last year it was for one of the Backcountry Jazz concerts. I felt transported to another place and time. It conjures Currier & Ives. Congratulations to the farm's new owners. I hope they enjoy it for many years to come.

Is there anything the media and the Washington permanent class hasn’t lied about in the past six years?

There’s no truth to the rumor that big pharma resisted this drug because it costs 6¢ a pill.

Margolis: Hydroxychloroquine increases the survival rate of severely ill COVID patients 300%.

A new study shows that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), the antimalarial drug, combined with azithromycin (AZM), could increase the rate of survival by nearly three times for severely ill COVID-19 patients. The observation study analyzed 255 mechanically ventilated patients at the Saint Barnabas Medical Center in New Jersey.

“We found that when the cumulative doses of two drugs, HCQ and AZM, were above a certain level, patients had a survival rate 2.9 times the other patients,” the study, published by medRxiv.says in its conclusion.

By using causal analysis and considering of weight-adjusted cumulative dose, we prove the combined therapy, >3 g HCQ and > 1g AZM greatly increases survival in Covid patients on IMV and that HCQ cumulative dose > 80 mg/kg works substantially better. These data do not yet apply to hospitalized patients not on IMV. Since those with higher doses of HCQ had higher doses of AZM, we cannot solely attribute the causal effect to HCQ/AZM combination therapy. However, it is likely AZM does contribute significantly to this increase in survival rate. Since higher dose HCQ/AZM therapy improves survival by nearly 200% in this population, the safety data are moot.

An analysis of hospitalized COVID patients from last year in New York State’s largest health system found that the death rate of COVID-19 patients on mechanical ventilation was 88 percent, compared to 21 percent overall, when treated with the HCQ/AZM combination.

Unfortunately, the benefits of hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID-19 were never realized. Ever since March 19, 2020, when Trump mentioned a small French study that found chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine showed promise as a potential treatment for COVID-19 and directed the FDA to fast-track clinical trials to approve them as therapeutics, has been at war with Trump over the drugs.

The president “peddles snake oil and false hope,” wrote the USA Today editorial board.

“To fight the coronavirus, President Donald Trump is adopting the audacity of false hope,” claimed CNN.

“Trump was at the White House podium peddling a fake cure for a virus that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans in a way that would have gotten him kicked off the Home Shopping Network and potentially invited federal prosecution for false claims and fraud,” claimed Salon.

Even CNN’s Chris Cuomo mocked Trump for taking the drug, though he would go on to take a version of it himself for his own treatment after he tested positive for COVID-19.

There have now been over 250 studies into hydroxychloroquine’s effectiveness in treating COVID-19, the overwhelming majority of them showing positive results. Studies on early treatment with the drug showed a 66% improvement in mortality rates. But the media chose to ignore those studies, instead deciding to report on a few heavily flawed studies that allegedly showed the drug was either ineffective or increased mortality.

Dr. Fauci also dismissed the drug’s potential for treating COVID patients, claiming that “valid” scientific data showed hydroxychloroquine wasn’t effective in treating COVID-19.

Last year, as data continued to show that hydroxychloroquine was actually effective in treating COVID-19, doctors who spoke out in support of the drug were censored.

And the human cost of this media assault on hydroxychloroquine was catastrophic. One analysissuggests that over 2.4 million lives worldwide have been unnecessarily lost because hydroxychloroquine was not being widely used as a COVID therapeutic. That’s a lot of people who may have died unnecessarily just because the media hated Trump.

Pending on Rogues Hill

425 Round Hill Road, asking $11.9 million, contract in 51 days. That’s an improvement from its last attempt in 2015-2016, when it started at $16.5 million (Tamar Lurie pricing) and expired unsold a year later still asking $12.450.

The list of improvements is impressive, though whether they were made after that 2016 listing expired is not stated; my guess is that some or most of the work was done more tan five years ago.

It's an udder disaster, is wot it is

28 Dairy Road, which started off a year-ago March at $4.595 million and then raised its price to $4.850 this January, dropped today to $4.250. The idea that somehow, someday, raising the price of an unwanted listing will produce a buyer is a puzzling delusion held by any number of otherwise rational sellers; hint: it won’t.

And certainly, there’s no sales history to back up this modular’s reach for glory. Poorly assembled in 2002, doused in glitter (the original photos showed a rented Rolls in the driveway, snicker) and priced at $5.950, it eventually sold to someone at the end of 2004 for $5.125. That poor fool, in turn, installed a pool, ripped out the Home Depot landscaping, including the tiny Brussels sprouts shrubby things lining the driveway, rebuilt the bathrooms, and returned it to the market in 2014 at $5.995. All that work and money expended, he ended up selling to these current owners for $3.950 in June, 2018. And now they’re stuck with it.

I’ll be surprised if even COVID can bring them back to their purchase price; lipstick can only do so much.

circa 2002

Hillcrest Park bidding war

45 Hillcrest Park Road closed Friday at $1.450 million; it started off in May asking $1.295 and immediately received multiple offers.

Which is entirely understandable in this market: Hillcrest is an appealing neighborhood, is in the North Mianus and Eastern school district, and this particular property sits on 1.3 acres. There isn’t much out there in this price range offering what this one did.

Right up there next to the fake Wuhan Lab conspiracy

something to see here?

A judge wonders: what went on in Georgia?

When Fulton County, Ga., poll manager Suzi Voyles sorted through a large stack of mail-in ballots last November, she noticed an alarmingly odd pattern of uniformity in the markings for Joseph R. Biden. One after another, the absentee votes contained perfectly filled-in ovals for Biden — except that each of the darkened bubbles featured an identical white void inside them in the shape of a tiny crescent, indicating they'd been marked with toner ink instead of a pen or pencil.

Adding to suspicions, she noticed that all of the ballots were printed on different stock paper than the others she handled as part of a statewide hand recount of the razor-thin Nov. 3 presidential election. And none was folded or creased, as she typically observed in mail-in ballots that had been removed from envelopes.

In short, the Biden votes looked like they’d been duplicated by a copying machine.

“All of them were strangely pristine," said Voyles, who said she’d never seen anything like it in her 20 years monitoring elections in Fulton County, which includes much of Atlanta.

She wasn’t alone. At least three other poll workers observed the same thing in stacks of absentee ballots for Biden processed by the county, and they have joined Voyles in swearing under penalty of perjury that they looked fake.

Now election watchdogs have used their affidavits to help convince a state judge to unseal all of the 147,000 mail-in ballots counted in Fulton and allow a closer inspection of the suspicious Biden ballots for evidence of counterfeiting. They argue that potentially tens of thousands may have been manufactured in a race that Biden won by just 12,000 votes thanks to a late surge of mail-in ballots counted after election monitors were shooed from State Farm Arena in Atlanta.

Judge Brian Amero, a donor to Democrats, has ordered ballots unsealed for inspection.

The Lunatics are Running the Asylum — literally

transferred to yale

Yale speaker, a psychiatrist, admits to fantasizing about shooting white people in the head

“I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favor.”

If a patient of this (Pakistani/American) doctor expressed dark fantasies like this, she’d be required under medical ethics to report him to the authorities. Instead, she gets invited to speak at Yale.

And this:

Whiteness is a "parasitic condition" that has no "permanent cure," according to a new paper in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association

RELATED?

Black man shoots white oppressors

Atlanta police have arrested a 22-year-old man for shooting at three people – and wounding a local father of three who was out for his morning walk – and then seriously injuring a man after hitting him with his car during a crime spree through one of the state’s wealthiest zip codes over the weekend, authorities announced Monday. 

Andrew Worrell was walking in Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood around 8:35 a.m. Saturday when he was shot twice, according to police and his apparent wife, Anne Pearce Worrell. 

Pearce Worrell wrote in a Facebook post after the shooting that her husband was about one mile through his three-mile walk when a car – identified by police as a silver Hyundai sedan – rolled up to him. 

"The very tinted window rolled down and the guy pointed a gun at him and shot him," she wrote in the Saturday message thanking her Facebook friends for their concern. 

The gunman, identified by authorities as 22-year-old Gaelen Newsom, first shot Worrell in the leg, then fired another round as "Andrew turned to run," Pearce Worrell wrote. The second shot went through Andrew’s hip and into his ball-and-socket joint, then into his lower abdomen before landing in his right hip, she continued. 

Two other joggers were shot at around that time of the shooting, though no one else was injured, police said. 

At a news conference later that day, Deputy Atlanta Police Chief Charles Hampton Jr. said Newsom went on to crash into and seriously injure a man in his 20s.

According to police, a man was struck hours later while he taking out the trash. He was rushed to a local hospital and hurried into surgery, Hampton said. 

Newson was taken into custody roughly one mile away from the initial shooting, at the scene of the crash, police said. Hampton said he might have been experiencing, "some type of mental health crisis."

If I understand modern, woke psychiatric theory, Mr. Newsom’s difficulties are all in his head, and were planted there by white slavers in 1619. His acting out his fantasies is both personally therapeutic and a boon to society in general.

Sold on North Street

504 North Street closed at $6.1 million on an original April ‘20 ask of $6.995. Close enough: the sellers paid $5.8 for it in 2013.

I never particularly liked this house or its location, but that distaste was influenced by my distrust of what was happening to our real estate market back in the 2000-2007 era. The builder of this pseudo-castle (the listing claims 16,758 sq. ft., the town measures it at 11,536 but who ya gonna believe, a realtor, or some lyin’ tax assessor?) paid $3.5 for the land in ‘04, erected his masterwork and priced it at $11.795 in 2007. Not satisfied with the market’s response, he raised the price to $12,960 later that year. Only when reality hit him upside the head in the form of a foreclosure suit did he begin to get real, and even then, it took until 2013 to pry it from his cold, stiff fingers for the aforesaid $5.8.

And for probably same price as Conyers Farm, this

27 Leeward Lane, Riverside, 4,737 sq. ft., 0.7 acre, asking $4.495 milion. Twelve days to contract.