(National Party media release)

Te Pūkenga’s latest moves to employ highly paid co-leaders while polytechnic teaching and support staff face the chop is offensive, National’s Tertiary Education spokesperson Penny Simmonds says.

“I’m astonished that in the wake of Te Pūkenga’s poor financial performance over the past three years, and at a time when the organisation is attempting to claw back on its over-spending, we’re seeing this largesse.

“Te Pūkenga is advertising for eight new co-leaders, each earning between $200,000 and $350,000 a year, while teaching and support staff at the mega polytechnic are on tenterhooks over future job losses.

“Acting chief executive Peter Winder last month announced a $63 million deficit. How can Te Pūkenga management justify this expenditure while at the same time taking the axe to vocational and trades education across the country?

“The extravagance of these new senior management co-leadership positions and their corresponding high salaries fly in the face of the dramatic cuts that everyday polytechnic staff are expected to make, with $10 million in savings from work-based learning and $25 million across former polytechnics being enforced.

“Employing highly paid co-leadership executives will do nothing for the already low staff morale and reflects a misguided view that these senior management positions are more important than teaching staff.

“Surely the Education Minister must be concerned about this reckless spending when he has recently asked Te Pūkenga to be more financially responsible.

“This is yet another example of the Labour Government’s fixation with centralisation, co-leadership and co-governance ideology, that’s strangling the regions and building a head office bureaucracy that is big in costs and little in value.

“It will do nothing to improve the serious skills shortage being felt around New Zealand, nor will it provide taxpayers with the reassurance that the Government’s polytechnic mega-merger is back on track.”

by Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

The old bogeyman – “covid” – is getting tired. It’s time for a new bogeyman, “climate change.”

Does anyone remember the older bogeyman – Islamofascism?

Of course, it’s always the same bogeyman – in that all of them are based on fiction used to terrify people into submission. The three threes, if you like. It’s the old witch doctor formula: Do as we tell you or the sky will fall! Accompanied – in the past – by the shaking of a dead chicken in the audience’s face.

Today, accompanies by assertions just as ludicrous.

Wearing a “mask” will keep you safe. Taking a “vaccine” will keep you alive. Assuming it doesn’t kill you first.

The “COVID” mass terror was based on the fiction that an airborne plague was afoot, dangerous to all – when in fact it was lethal to very few. That fact was deliberately suppressed, in order to create the mass terror that was used to justify the measures imposed upon the masses, which they otherwise would never have accepted.

Continue reading→

According to this Beehive media release, Prime Minister Sanna Marin will be in New Zealand from November 29 until December 1, and during this time she will meet with Jacinda Ardern in Auckland.

It will be the first visit by a Finnish prime minister. Ardern said New Zealand and Finland are natural partners. 

“We share similar approaches and views on many international issues, including the importance of the rule of law, multilateralism, sustainability, and free and open trade,” Ardern said.

What’s the betting this has been organised by Jacinda’s Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet as yet another attempt to make their boss look good? Both Comrade Jacinda and Comrade Sanna are Leftists and Globalists. Comrade Sanna is actually 5 years younger, 37 at present, and both have a daughter. Read her Wikipedia page here

Always a special time of year for many in both public and private gardens.

It’s slowly dawning on even the dimmest that Zelensky is nothing more than a first-rate conman. From Philip Giraldi at unz.com: Let’s try to avoid World War III. One week ago, the Ukrainian government may have deliberately attacked neighbor Poland in an attempt to draw the NATO alliance into its war with Russia. The incident […]

Putting an End to Volodymyr Zelensky’s Follies, by Philip Giraldi — STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC

by Steve Kirsch

As the CDC blocks all my e-mails, a doctor friend of mine sent in the question.

The question

This question was submitted to the CDC on October 11, 2022 1:54 PM (Pacific Time):

Is this true that the death safety signal in VAERS triggered and nobody at the CDC noticed as pointed out in this article.

If not, can you supply the correct calculation?

The CDC’s response (6 weeks later)

As you might expect, they side-stepped the question.

They said that since the calculation was done by a third party, they couldn’t comment on it.

But you can rest assured that the CDC is monitoring VAERS for safety signals!

Here is the official response that was received

From: Vaccine Safety (CDC) <vaccinesafety@cdc.gov>
Date: Wed, Nov 23, 2022 at 6:51 AM
Subject: Your Inquiry Regarding VAERS
To: <my doctor friend>
Cc: CDCExecSec (CDC) <CDCExecSec@cdc.gov>

Dear Dr. <redacted>:

Thank you for your inquiry to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle P. Walensky, MD, MPH, regarding your concerns about the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Your message was referred to my office for a response.

CDC was not involved with the work you mentioned in your correspondence, which used limited information from a publicly accessible VAERS database. Please see the disclaimer on the CDC WONDER site for more information: About the VAERS System. CDC is unable to comment on this analysis conducted outside of the agency. CDC has been publicly presenting and openly discussing data from our vaccine safety monitoring systems regarding coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccinations at meetings of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and we have also regularly published analyses of these data. Statements that imply that reports of deaths to VAERS following vaccination equate to deaths caused by vaccination are scientifically inaccurate, misleading, and irresponsible. We continue to monitor these and other adverse events using our safety surveillance systems.

Authorized and approved COVID-19 vaccines are being administered under the most comprehensive and intensive vaccine safety monitoring effort in U.S. history. CDC expanded and strengthened its ability to monitor vaccine safety and created new ways to gather information about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines. Robust systems and processes are in place to identify and evaluate potential vaccine safety concerns. Monitoring vaccine safety involves multiple complementary ongoing systems. Within CDC, these systems include VAERS, the Vaccine Safety Datalink, the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment Project, v-safe, and the v-safe Pregnancy Registry. For more information on vaccine safety monitoring systems at CDC, please see: Vaccine Information and Safety Studies | Vaccine Safety.

Anyone can submit reports to VAERS, including patients, family members, healthcare providers, and vaccine manufacturers, regardless of the plausibility of the vaccine causing the event or the clinical seriousness of the event. Data from VAERS are especially useful for the timely detection of unusual or unexpected patterns of adverse event reporting that might indicate a possible safety concern (or “safety signal”) about a vaccine. VAERS is not designed to assess causality; VAERS is designed to collect data, detect potential safety signals, and generate hypotheses.

Around 90% of reports to VAERS after COVID-19 vaccination have been non-serious. Healthcare providers who administer COVID-19 vaccines are required under the provider agreements for the CDC COVID-19 Vaccination Program and Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to report certain serious adverse events, like deaths, to VAERS regardless of whether the reporter thinks the vaccine caused the adverse event. This required reporting is one reason why many reports to VAERS do not represent adverse events caused by the vaccine.

Physicians at CDC and FDA continuously screen and analyze VAERS data for possible safety concerns related to COVID-19 vaccines, including review of individual reports and aggregate data analysis. Reports of death after COVID-19 vaccination are rare. FDA requires healthcare providers to report any death after COVID-19 vaccination to VAERS, even if it is unclear whether the vaccine was the cause. Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem. More than 624 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered in the United States from December 14, 2020, through October 6, 2022. During this time, VAERS received 16,803 preliminary reports of death among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine. As part of the vaccine safety review and analysis process, CDC and FDA clinicians obtain additional information for these reported patients, including death certificates, autopsy reports, and medical records.

Through these methods, FDA and CDC have successfully identified various rare safety signals related to COVID-19 vaccines, including anaphylaxis, thrombosis with thrombocytopenia (TTS) following use of the Johnson & Johnson/Janssen COVID-19 vaccine, and myocarditis and pericarditis following use of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. This information is included in the fact sheets for both healthcare providers administering vaccines and for vaccine recipients and caregivers. Continued monitoring has identified nine deaths causally associated with Johnson & Johnson/Janssen COVID-19 vaccination, who all died after developing TTS. On May 5, 2022, FDA revised the EUA for the Johnson & Johnson/Janssen COVID-19 vaccine to limit the authorized use of the vaccine to people ages 18 years and older for whom other authorized or approved COVID-19 vaccines are not accessible or clinically appropriate, and to people ages 18 years and older who elect to receive the Johnson & Johnson/Janssen COVID-19 vaccine because they would otherwise not receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

CDC continues to monitor the COVID-19 pandemic and is partnering with international, state, and local governments and public health partners to respond to this public health threat. For further information on the response and the current situation in the United States and abroad, please visit www.cdc.gov/COVID-19/.

We appreciate your interest in this important public health issue and hope you find this information helpful.

Sincerely,

Michael McNeil, MD MPH

Acting Director,
Immunization Safety Office, Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion, National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Disease
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

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