Restaurants Seek Federal Aid
It’s been another hard winter prompting Restaurants to Seek Federal Aid.
Small restaurants are heading back to Congress for help, saying their challenges are worsening as the Omicron variant drives a surge in Covid-19 cases across the country.
Nearly two years into the pandemic, U.S. restaurants and bars are dealing with higher costs, accumulating debts and customers fearful of the latest virus variants, according to a letter signed by more than 3,300 operators and sent to Washington lawmakers in December. The restaurant operators said they were in danger of closing permanently if a federal fund adopted last year to assist the food-service industry isn’t replenished soon.
“I can’t go into further debt to salvage this restaurant,” said Dwayne Allen, owner of the Breadfruit & Rum Bar in Phoenix, who fell behind on his restaurant’s rent after closing the business for long stretches during the pandemic. He said he has to pay his landlord in full by the end of January and has taken out a $48,000 loan to do so.
“I have no idea where that money is going to come from,” said Mr. Allen, who signed the letter organized by the Independent Restaurant Coalition, an advocacy group for small operators formed in 2020 in response to the pandemic.
Sara Lund, owner of the Bodega and The Rest bar and restaurant in Salt Lake City, said she entered the pandemic debt-free but has accrued more than $100,000 in loans and credit-card balances since. She said she recently transferred the last of her personal savings to cover her property taxes and payroll.
“There is nothing left. I’m at the end,” said Ms. Lund, who was among restaurant operators advocating for more federal funding.
Minor League Teams Seek Aid
It’s not just the restaurant industry. An Omicron Surge Spurs New Covid-19 Relief Push in Congress
Hotels, fitness clubs, tour bus companies and minor league ball clubs are part of a long line of businesses seeking billions of dollars in new Covid-19 relief aid—if they can overcome opposition from many Republicans who say Congress has already given enough.
“The U.S. government has no money to give anyone,“ said Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.). ”In the past two years, Congress piled on several trillion dollars to our already substantial deficit. This unprecedented accumulation of debt is causing today’s inflation and will continue to wreak havoc in the future.”
Industry lobbyists are targeting legislation being crafted by Sen. Ben Cardin (D., Md.), the chairman of the Senate Small Business Committee, who had found an ally in Sen. Roger Wicker (R., Miss.) for a bill that would deliver roughly $60 billion in grants from the Small Business Administration.
Gym owners say the PPP wasn’t much help to them because they have few employees and a greater share of expenses from facility leases and insurance. Their lobbyists are now pressing Congress for a $30 billion aid package, which is roughly what they say gym owners have lost from the start of the pandemic through June 2021. Roughly one in five health clubs permanently shut down.
The hotel industry is pushing legislation in the House and Senate that calls for the Treasury Department to cover roughly $20 billion in salary and benefit payments to employees of hotels that have seen revenue losses of 40% or more. The legislation has the backing of Unite Here, the labor union that represents about 300,000 hotel, laundry and food service employees.
Omicron Surge Pressures U.S. Hospitals
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warns of tough weeks ahead as the Omicron Surge Pressures U.S. Hospitals.
Americans shouldn’t expect the Omicron variant to peak nationwide in coming days, the U.S. surgeon general warned Sunday, as Covid-19 cases continue to rise and put more pressure on hospitals.
“The next few weeks will be tough,” Dr. Vivek Murthy said during an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The seven-day average for confirmed and suspected Covid-19 hospitalizations is at the highest recorded level, with about 155,958 reported Sunday, after topping old records last week, data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services show. The seven-day average for newly reported cases also reached nearly 808,000 a day on Saturday, the first time it has topped 800,000, data from Johns Hopkins University show.
Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said on “Fox News Sunday” that Covid hospitalizations have either peaked or will soon in New York, New Jersey and parts of New England and Florida. But he said the rest of the country hasn’t yet seen the worst of the Omicron surge.
Omicron, Inflation Drive Down U.S. Growth Outlook
Finally, please consider Omicron, Inflation Drive Down U.S. Growth Outlook
The outlook for economic growth in the first quarter and 2022 is darkening amid the latest wave of Covid-19, as consumers grapple with high inflation and businesses juggle labor and production disruptions.
Forecasters surveyed by The Wall Street Journal this month slashed their expectation for growth in the first quarter by more than a percentage point, to a 3% annual rate from their forecast of 4.2% in the October survey.
The combination of higher inflation, supply-chain constraints and the fast-spreading Omicron variant caused economists to trim their forecast for growth to 3.3% for the current year as a whole, based on the change in inflation-adjusted gross domestic product in the fourth quarter of 2022 from a year earlier, from 3.6% in October. Last year, output rose 5.2%, economists estimate.
Higher inflation and low unemployment mean economists expect the Fed to start increasing borrowing costs soon. Nearly two-thirds expect the Fed to raise rates at its March 15-16 policy meeting and keep raising them over the course of the year. Over half of forecasters expect three rate increases this year, while nearly a third expect more than three.
No Decoupling
The Fed is likely to get in a couple of hikes this year but it is by no means certain. Beyond that, I don’t know.
As for 3 or 4 this year and three more next year, my position has not changed.
On December 15, 2021 I penned The Fed Expects 6 Rate Hikes By End of 2023 – I Don’t and You Shouldn’t Either
The US economy appears to be cooling more than people understand. GDP Forecasts Stumble Then Take a Dive After Retail Sales Data
Outside the US, Europe and China are both struggling.
China did not decoupled from the global economy in 2007 and the US won’t in 2022.
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Mish
The Physicians Declaration now with more than 17,000 signatures confirmed through a rigorous validation process, these physicians and scientists are represented by Dr. Malone as he speaks at the march to Defeat the Mandates on Sunday, January 23 in Washington, D.C.
The over 17,000 signers to the declaration have reached consensus on three foundational principles:
Healthy children should not be subject to forced vaccination: they face negligible risk from covid, but face potential permanent, irreversible risk to their health if vaccinated, including heart, brain, reproductive and immune system damage.
Natural Immunity Denial has prolonged the pandemic and needlessly restricted the lives of Covid-recovered people. Masks, lockdowns, and other restrictions have caused great harm especially to children and delayed the virus’ transition to endemic status.
Health agencies and institutions must cease interfering with the physician-patient relationship.
Policymakers are directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, as a result of institutional interference
and blocking treatments proven to cure at a near 100% rate when administered early.
Many doctors who have spoken out against the corruption, censorship and hypocrisy by authorities have been threatened, fired, censured, lied about, intimidated, and harassed – all while saving patients’ lives daily. Never has the public been forced to become lab rats, for a vaccine 5 years away from adequate testing, violating basic principles of informed consent. Moreover, the medical and scientific evidence on the efficacy and safety of the COVID- 19 vaccine do not support mandating its use for anyone, especially healthy children.
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/press-release-on-the-eve-of-washington
Florida counties with the highest vaccination rates have recently experienced the highest infection rates. The opposite was also true. Florida counties with the lowest vaccination rates had the lowest infection rates.
Dr. Peter McCullough in an interview Thursday night stated that the official pandemic narrative that has been fiercely guarded by establishment media and social-media censors is “completely crumbling.” Dr. McCullough emphasized that the vaccines are still “research” and they’re not turning out to be “safe or effective”.
With the cdc
director now admitting that data that was withheld on deaths attributed to
covid
over 75 percent had at least four comorbidities. She along
with Fauci also made it clear that the children in
reported as hospitalized with covid that most all were in the
hospital for something else and tested positive
for covid. The New York governor also has come clean and
admitted that 50% of the people listed
has being
hospitalized with covid were actually in the hospital for
another reason and just tested positive for covid
but that was not what they were in for . Funny how Mish and his community has not
touched this after all
we have tons of people kicked off of Facebook , Twitter, You Tube and other social
platforms and all for
this supposedly conspiracy stuff that they just admitted to .
Many doctors and Nurses that came forward
telling of these exact things that they were seeing from the
inside were also banned and threatened by the
corporates that now control hospitals . Also these same
organization and institutions did everything to
stop very affordable therapeutics that could of saved many
thousands of lives . Many of these people were
denied these drugs and yes many were before the vaccines even
became available . Remember the the dems
call not enough testing not enough Vents not enough hospital
beds ? Military ships sent in that
nobody needed
and temporary hospitals set up that were never used by the
Army Corps . Now the virus runs like a
wild fire through the population vaxed or not does not matter
it spreads like a wildfire . Yes it is less potent
but who knows what the next variant will be . Yet it exposes
the lies of the left that the mask would
not
be needed and you couldn.t catch the virus if you had the vax
or spread it . They are all proven to be lies .
appears that age demographics are really at play here in increased
deaths this year and last as evidenced by the increased death rates
mimicking the increase birth rates 75 years ago. The life expectancy of
males nearly matches the beginning of the Baby Boom 75 years ago.
2.8 million
3.9 million
3.5 million
3.56 million
3.6 million
3.75 million
3.85 million
3.9 million
4 million
4.1 million
4.16 million
4.3 million
4.2 million
4.25 million
4.26 million
4.3 million
4.17 million
4.1 million
“Dr. Tess Lawrie, a physician, independent WHO researcher, and Director of the https://www.e-bmc.co.uk/ in Bath, England, had heard that Dr. Hill was about to change his
conclusions about ivermectin’s efficacy. So she called him on Zoom to
find out why—and recorded the entire conversation.
During that
Zoom call, Dr. Hill confessed to Dr. Lawrie that he was changing his
study conclusions from positive to negative—because he was under
pressure from his funding sponsors to do so.
Wait, what? His sponsors told him to change the study conclusions? NOT the data? What in the hell was going on?”
And you’re here because You’re addicted to that little squirt of adrenaline you get when I trigger your cognitive dissonance. Well that ant everyplace else banned you for trying to spread your delusions.
Spain is calling for Covid-19 to be treated as an endemic disease, like the flu, becoming the first major European nation to explicitly suggest that people live with it. The idea has gradually been gaining traction and could prompt a re-evaluation of government strategies on dealing with the virus. British Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi on Sunday told the BBC that the U.K. is “on a path towards transitioning from pandemic to endemic.”
We have three variates, the Alfa, Delta and the Omicron. The vaccines help
with the first two but not really with the third. The Alfa and the Delta are
still in circulation but almost all of the highly susceptible people are
vaccinated so no problem with them. If the immunity natural or vaccinal wanes
after a year they might come back but that will depend on whether Omicron
infection convers protection over the Alpha and the Delta. For myself I haven’t
seen any studies showing if Omicron does give that protection or not but it
would be nice to know. In any case it seems that the skies are clearing and
that opening up is warranted even if some governments are resisting the
evidence. The minds of government bureaucrats are inscrutable and mysterious in
my experience.
The countries that were able to avoid covid by extreme lockdowns and/or
extreme isolation will have a harder time managing the pandemic since they can’t
stay isolated forever. The RNA vaccines help of course but they do not give
herd immunity and the Chinese and Russian vaccines are ineffective so they will
have to depend on new and hopefully better vaccines and better treatments to
see the end of the pandemic.
One last thing I want to mention and that is your pet dogs and cats are reservoirs
for covid so expect to see animal vaccines eventually.
Today, the TGA determined that an additional COVID-19 vaccine, the two dose course of the Gamaleya Institute vaccine (Sputnik V, Russian Federation) would be ‘recognised’ for the purpose of establishing a traveller’s vaccination status.
Last week the TGA obtained additional information demonstrating this vaccine provides protection and potentially reduces the likelihood that an incoming traveller would transmit COVID-19 infection to others while in Australia or become acutely unwell due to COVID-19. The supporting information was based on published studies provided to the TGA by the Russian Government with the assistance of the Australian embassy in Moscow.
The data indicated that two doses of the Sputnik V (Gamaleya Institute) showed an average efficacy against symptomatic infection of 89% and against hospitalisation or death of 98-100%. As for most studies on the efficacy of the TGA approved or recognised COVID-19 vaccines, these studies were conducted prior to the emergence of the Omicron variant of COVID-19. Real-world studies assessing the effectiveness of a range of vaccines against Omicron are currently underway in many countries. The single dose course of the Gamaleya vaccine (“Sputnik Light”) is not currently recognised by the TGA.
Recognition of the two dose course of the Sputnik vaccine by the TGA today follows on from recognition in late 2021 by the TGA of two major Chinese-manufactured vaccines – BBIBP-CorV (Sinopharm, for those under 60 years old) and Coronavac (Sinovac) and two major Indian-manufactured vaccines – Covaxin (Bharat Biotech) and Covishield (Serum Institute of India /AstraZeneca). The recognition of Sputnik will expand options for the return of international students, travel of skilled and unskilled workers to Australia, and travel by business people and elite sports people to our country.
Further information on requirements for incoming travel to Australia can be found at https://covid19.homeaffairs.gov.au/vaccinated-travellers.”
Only the recently boostered show any advantage compared to the unvaccinated.
Restaurants and bars in north Texas are packed. So are the gyms and just about everything else. Stupid government rules is the problem. There is no pandemic.
Dr. Clive Dix, the former chairman of Britain’s Vaccines Taskforce who played a key role in helping pharmaceutical firms create the vaccines, told LBC radio on Jan. 16: “The Omicron variant is a relatively mild virus. And to just keep vaccinating people and thinking of doing it again to protect the population is, in my view, now a waste of time.”