COVID Corruption News Stories

Excerpts of Key COVID Corruption News Stories in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on COVID corruption from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

For further exploration, delve into our comprehensive Coronavirus Information Center.

Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

The need for touch exists below the horizon of consciousness. Before birth, when the amniotic fluid in the womb swirls around us and the foetal nervous system can distinguish our own body from our mother's, our entire concept of self is rooted in touch. As adults, we may not comprehend the importance of touch even when it disappears. "We might begin to realise that something is missing, but we won't always know that it's touch," says Prof Francis McGlone, a neuroscientist. "But when we talk about the problem of loneliness, we often ignore the obvious: what lonely people aren't getting is touch." As the pandemic continues, many of us will be trying to cope with profound stress without the comfort of touch. The total absence of touch ... contravenes the hardwiring that regulates us from our preverbal years. In these times of touch deprivation there is no real substitute for what we get from other humans, but there are ways to soothe ourselves. We may be able to experience touch vicariously. Researchers have found that seeing touch (on TV or in films, for example) – particularly social, affective or pet touch – can give us some of the benefits of feeling touch. This is not a permanent or complete substitute, but a partial one. A hunger for touch is a signal that a primitive need is not being met. But evolution is on our side. Every scientist I spoke to was hopeful that, once we can come together again, we will adjust quickly.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus and health from reliable major media sources.

A study evaluating COVID-19 responses around the world found that mandatory lockdown orders early in the pandemic may not provide significantly more benefits to slowing the spread of the disease than other voluntary measures, such as social distancing or travel reduction. The peer reviewed study was published in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation on January 5, and analyzed coronavirus case growth in 10 countries in early 2020. The study compared cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the U.S. – all countries that implemented mandatory lockdown orders and business closures – to South Korea and Sweden, which instituted less severe, voluntary responses. The researchers used a mathematical model to compare countries that did and did not enact more restrictive lockdown orders, and determined that there was "no clear, significant beneficial effect of [more restrictive measures] on case growth in any country." "We do not question the role of all public health interventions, or of coordinated communications about the epidemic, but we fail to find an additional benefit of stay-at-home orders and business closures," the research said. Mandatory lockdown orders have also been a highly politicized issue across the U.S. Some Republican leaders ... have vehemently opposed state or nationwide closures. In Democratic states, including New York and California, lockdown orders have been a consistent part of the coronavirus response.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.

There are a few reasons why I supported lockdowns at first. Initial data falsely suggested that the infection fatality rate was up to 2-3%, that over 80% of the population would be infected, and modelling suggested repeated lockdowns would be necessary. But emerging data showed that the median infection fatality rate is 0.23%, that the median infection fatality rate in people under 70 years old is 0.05%. In addition, it is likely that in most situations only 20-40% of the population would be infected before ongoing transmission is limited (i.e., herd-immunity). Emerging data has shown a staggering amount of so-called â₏˜collateral damage' due to the lockdowns. This can be predicted to adversely affect many millions of people globally with food insecurity [82-132 million more people], severe poverty [70 million more people], school closures for children [affecting children's future earning potential and lifespan], and intimate partner violence for millions of women. In high-income countries adverse effects also occur from delayed and interrupted healthcare, unemployment, loneliness, deteriorating mental health ... and more. A formal cost-benefit analysis of different responses to the pandemic was not done by government. Once I became more informed, I realized that lockdowns cause far more harm than they prevent. The costs of lockdowns are at least 10 times higher than the benefits. Lockdowns cause far more harm to population wellbeing than COVID-19 can.

Note: The above was written by Dr. Ari Joffe, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at the Stollery Children's Hospital in Edmonton. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.

Domestic violence homicides are on the rise in many cities around the country, according to preliminary data from local law enforcement. In at least two major counties, they have doubled – a reversal of multi-year declines. Experts attribute much of the alarming increase to the social and economic pressures of the coronavirus pandemic. Annual national data on domestic violence murders is not released until well into the following year, but violent crime and homicides have increased this year in cities from Milwaukee to New York, and some cities are already reporting spikes in domestic violence homicides. In Memphis, Milwaukee and Jefferson Parish, a New Orleans suburb, domestic violence homicides had equaled or surpassed last year's total by Oct.13, NBC News found. In Tarrant County, Texas ... they had more than doubled. In the Seattle area, there were 14 domestic violence homicides in 2020 through Oct. 8, equal to the combined total for 2018 and 2019, according to the King County District Attorney's office. All but one of the 2020 homicides occurred after the governor issued a Covid-19 state of emergency. Domestic violence lawyers and advocates in eight cities told NBC News that anecdotal information supports their belief that during lockdowns victims have had fewer opportunities to report abuse or seek help. The reports that do come in are more violent and dangerous. The very conditions that keep us safe in the public health pandemic are creating greater danger for victims of domestic violence.

Note: It is not the pandemic which is causing these homicides. It is the lockdown measures that are negatively impacting the emotional and spiritual lives of billions of people around the globe. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.

At the end of 2020, Chicago police reported more than 750 murders, a jump of more than 50% compared with 2019. By mid-December, Los Angeles saw a 30% increase over the previous year with 322 homicides. There were 437 homicides in New York City by Dec. 20, nearly 40% more than the previous year. New Orleans-based data consultant Jeff Asher studied crime rates in more than 50 cities and says the crime spikes aren't just happening in big cities. With the numbers of homicides spiking in many places, Asher expects the final statistics for 2020 to tell a startlingly grim story. "We're going to see, historically, the largest one-year rise in murder that we've ever seen," he says. Asher says it has been more than a half-century since the country saw a year-to-year murder rate that jumped nearly 13%. "We have good data that the rise in murder picked up in the early stages of the summer," Asher says, "and we also have good data that the rise of murder picked up again in September and October as some of the financial assistance started to wear off." Chicago minister the Rev. Marshall Hatch Sr. says the spike in violence is sadly not surprising. His church is located in a west side Chicago neighborhood hard hit by both poverty and the pandemic. "COVID has had a disproportionate impact and people are increasingly desperate," Hatch says. "And people, because of the concentration of poverty, tend to turn on each other."

Note: It is not the pandemic which is causing these homicides. It is the lockdown measures that are negatively impacting the emotional and spiritual lives of billions of people around the globe. The CDC also reports overdose deaths hit a record high last year. And poverty had the sharpest rise in 50 years. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus and income inequality from reliable major media sources.

Millions of Americans have lost their jobs. They've watched helplessly as their meager savings dwindled away, as they were confined to their homes–prohibited from interacting with friends, attending church, temple or music and sporting events due to restrictions enacted in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. This resulted in a profound impact on the mental health and emotional well-being of people–leading to a significant increase in cases of anxiety, depression and deaths by suicide. The CDC conducted a survey of 5,412 people between June 24 and 30 and the collected data on suicides is alarming. Roughly 25% percent of young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 say they've considered suicide because of the pandemic. About 30.9% of the respondents said that they "had symptoms of anxiety or depression" and about 26.3% reported trauma and stress-related disorders caused by the outbreak. Over 13% said that they have used alcohol, prescription and/or illegal drugs to deal with their pandemic-induced stress and anxiety. The amount of Americans reporting anxiety symptoms is triple the number of this time last year. The CDC reported that 11% of adults surveyed had seriously considered suicide in the past 30 days. The study showed "19% of Hispanics reported suicidal ideation" and "15% of Blacks reported suicidal thoughts." As it relates to young adults, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the CDC, said, "We're seeing, sadly, far greater suicides now than we are deaths from [Covid-19]."

Note: What this article glaringly failed to mention is that the large majority of these tragic problems are not caused by the virus, but rather by the lockdown policies. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.

Health authorities in Norway sought to allay safety concerns raised by the death of some elderly patients after they were vaccinated against Covid-19, saying there's no evidence of a direct link. The initial reports from Norway raised alarm as the world looks for early signs of potential side effects from the vaccines. Although doctors say it's possible that vaccine side-effects could aggravate underlying illnesses, they were expecting nursing-home residents to die shortly after being vaccinated because deaths are more common among the frailest and sickest elderly patients. In Norway, 33 people aged 75 and over died following immunization, according to the [Norwegian Medicines Agency]'s latest figures. All were already seriously ill, it said. The Scandinavian country has already inoculated almost all of its nursing home population, with more than 48,000 people vaccinated. The reported fatalities are well under 1 out of 1,000 nursing-home patients to be vaccinated, [Steinar Madsen, medical director at the Norwegian Medicines Agency] said. The side effects of immunization can, in some cases, "tip the patients into a more serious course of the underlying disease," Madsen said. "We can't rule that out." Other countries, including Germany and Israel, have also reported deaths in people who recently were vaccinated. Until Friday, Norway had only used the vaccine provided by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE. The companies are now working with the Nordic country to look into the deaths.

Note: For more details on these and other deaths from the vaccines, see this webpage. Are all these deaths shortly after vaccination simply coincidence? Read about many problems with these vaccines based on reports from reliable sources. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on coronavirus vaccines from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Coronavirus Information Center.

Health authorities are investigating the case of a Florida doctor who died from an unusually severe blood disorder 16 days after receiving the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine. Dr. Gregory Michael, a 56-year-old obstetrician and gynecologist in Miami Beach, received the vaccine at Mount Sinai Medical Center on Dec. 18 and died 16 days later from a brain hemorrhage, his wife, Heidi Neckelmann, wrote. Shortly after receiving the vaccine, Dr. Michael developed an extremely serious form of a condition known as acute immune thrombocytopenia, which prevented his blood from clotting properly. About nine million people in the United States have received at least one shot of either the Pfizer or Moderna coronavirus vaccine, the two authorized in the United States. So far, serious problems reported were 29 cases of anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction. Dr. Jerry L. Spivak, an expert on blood disorders at Johns Hopkins University, who was not involved in Dr. Michael's care, said that based on Ms. Neckelmann's description, "I think it is a medical certainty that the vaccine was related." "This is going to be very rare," said Dr. Spivak, an emeritus professor of medicine. But he added, "It happened and it could happen again." Dr. Paul Offit, an expert in vaccines and infectious diseases ... said that the measles vaccine and measles itself have been known to cause this same clotting problem, but it is usually transient and not serious. It occurs in about one of every 25,000 measles shots

Note: The supposed experts are claiming the numerous deaths of people within hours to weeks after the vaccine are just coincidental. This article examines these deaths and raises many questions. And why are so few of these being reported? Read about many problems with these vaccines based on reports from reliable sources. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on coronavirus vaccines from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Coronavirus Information Center.

The coronavirus pandemic is emerging as an existential threat to the nation's small businesses. Already, economists project that more than 100,000 small businesses have shut permanently since the pandemic escalated in March, according to a study by researchers at the University of Illinois, Harvard Business School, Harvard University and the University of Chicago. Their latest data suggests at least 2 percent of small businesses are gone. The carnage has been even higher in the restaurant industry, where 3 percent of restaurant operators have gone out of business, according to the National Restaurant Association. Analysts warn this is only the beginning of the worst wave of small-business bankruptcies and closures since the Great Depression. "We are going to see a level of bankruptcy activity that nobody in business has seen in their lifetime," said James Hammond, chief executive of New Generation Research. "This will hit everyone, but it will be harder for small businesses." Many small-business owners say Congress' financial rescue isn't designed well to help very small businesses, known as micro firms, that have large overhead costs such as rent. "It wouldn't be surprising if well over 1 million of these micro firms ultimately fail," Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, wrote in a recent note to clients, referring to firms with fewer than 10 employees.

Note: These numbers have likely tripled or more since the article was published. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.

When President Donald Trump signed the $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief and government funding bill into law in December, so began the 180-day countdown for US intelligence agencies to tell Congress what they know about UFOs. The director of National Intelligence and the secretary of defense have a little less than six months now to provide the congressional intelligence and armed services committees with an unclassified report about "unidentified aerial phenomena." It's a stipulation that was tucked into the "committee comment" section of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, which was contained in the massive spending bill. That report must contain detailed analyses of UFO data and intelligence collected by the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and the FBI, according to the Senate intelligence committee's directive. It should also describe in detail "an interagency process for ensuring timely data collection and centralized analysis of all unidentified aerial phenomena reporting for the Federal Government" and designate an official responsible for that process. Finally, the report should identify any potential national security threats posed by UFOs and assess whether any of the nation's adversaries could be behind such activity, the committee said. The submitted report should be unclassified, the committee said, though it can contain a classified annex.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on UFOs from reliable major media sources.

Pfizer chairman Albert Bourla told NBC's Dateline host Lester Holt that the pharmaceutical company was "not certain" if the vaccine prevented the coronavirus from being transmitted, saying: "This is something that needs to be examined." In a prime-time special titled "Race for a Vaccine" ... Holt questioned Bourla and other individuals involved in the development and distribution of the vaccine. In November, Pfizer announced that its vaccine candidate had been shown to be more than 90% effective at preventing COVID-19 and has applied for emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The U.K. became the first country to approve Pfizer's vaccine this week with the first round of immunizations expected to roll out next week. In August, Canada signed a deal with Pfizer for 20 million doses of the vaccine. In a list of interview highlights released before the special, Holt asked Bourla: "Even though I've had the protection, am I still able to transmit it to other people?" "I think this is something that needs to be examined. We are not certain about that right now with what we know," Bourla responded.

Note: An MSN article reported that a 41-year-old Portuguese health worker died two days after getting the Pfizer vaccine, but then removed the article. Learn more about this death in this article. A Florida doctor also died after receiving the vaccine. This CDC report states "December 14–23, 2020, monitoring … detected 21 cases of anaphylaxis after administration of a reported 1,893,360 first doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine." For more, explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Coronavirus Information Center.

The pandemic has forced untold hardships onto many Americans, with tens of millions of families now reporting that they don't have enough to eat and millions more out of work on account of layoffs and lockdowns. America's wealthiest, on the other hand, had a very different kind of year: Billionaires as a class have added about $1 trillion to their total net worth since the pandemic began. And roughly one-fifth of that haul flowed into the pockets of just two men: Jeff Bezos, chief executive of Amazon (and owner of The Washington Post), and Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX fame. Musk has quintupled his net worth since January, according to estimates put together by Bloomberg, adding $132 billion to his wealth and vaulting him to the No. 2 spot among the world's richest with a fortune of about $159 billion. Bezos's wealth has grown by roughly $70 billion over the same period, putting his net worth estimate at roughly $186 billion as the year came to an end. Such a rapid accumulation of individual wealth hasn't happened in the United States since the time of the Rockefellers and Carnegies a century ago, and we as a society are only just beginning to grapple with the ethical implications. What does it mean, for instance, that two men amassed enough wealth this year to end all hunger in America (with a price tag of $25 billion) eight times over? Or that the $200 billion accumulated by Bezos and Musk is greater than the amount of coronavirus relief allocated to state and local governments in the Cares Act?

Note: The new richest man in Asia reached his position partially through making vaccines for the coronavirus. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on income inequality from reliable major media sources.

Tech's biggest companies just wrapped up a huge year. The seven most valuable U.S. technology companies – Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Tesla and Nvidia – picked up a combined $3.4 trillion in market cap in 2020, powering through a global pandemic and broader economic crisis. Between continued optimism over iPhone sales, Microsoft's growing Teams collaboration product, Amazon's ongoing control of e-commerce and the strength of Google and Facebook's online ad duopoly, Big Tech was neither slowed by Covid-19 nor the rising number of investigations into its dominance. By far the biggest increase in market cap went to Apple, which jumped by almost $1 trillion in value, thanks to its stock climbing 81%. Amazon, which benefited from growth in its consumer and cloud-computing business, rose by $710 billion. Microsoft picked up $480 billion, while Alphabet gained $268 billion and Facebook $193 billion. The gains are clearly reflected in the ranks of the richest people. Amazon's Jeff Bezos is the wealthiest person in the world, followed by Tesla's Elon Musk and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is fifth. Also in the top 10 are Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Microsoft ex-CEO Steve Ballmer.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.

2020 has been a killer year in every way, including murder. The United States has experienced the largest single one-year increase in homicides since the country started keeping such records in the 20th century, according to crime data and criminologists. The data collected so far is stark – a 20.9 percent increase in killings nationwide, in the first nine months of the year, according to the FBI, and even bloodier increases in many major cities, due largely to gun violence. Homicides recorded by 57 U.S. police agencies found a 36.7 percent increase for a similar time frame, according to figures compiled by Jeff Asher, an analyst and consultant who studies crime data. "Like everything else in 2020, the crime data was a disaster. There was a huge spike in murder, and it's hard to say just how bad it is, but it's fairly clear we are going to see the largest single-year rise," Asher said. Experts agree the pandemic has played a huge role in the rise in killings, but it has also probably contributed to a significant decrease in nonviolent crimes, which the FBI data shows fell by more than 8 percent in the first nine months of the year, possibly because there were fewer people on the street. It's not just big cities that are seeing rising homicides. According to the FBI data, small cities with fewer than 10,000 residents saw more than a 30 percent increase in killings in the first nine months of this year – a data point Asher called "insane."the main resource for national crime data, the FBI, will not report final figures for 2020 until September 2021.

Note: This new spike in homicides comes on the heels of a long downward trend in violent crime. An alarming survey published by 12 professors of leading US universities shows depression is up sharply since lockdowns were instituted. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles from reliable major media sources.

If you experience severe side effects after getting a Covid vaccine, lawyers tell CNBC there is basically no one to blame in a U.S. court of law. The federal government has granted companies like Pfizer and Moderna immunity from liability if something unintentionally goes wrong with their vaccines. "It is very rare for a blanket immunity law to be passed," said Rogge Dunn, a Dallas labor and employment attorney. You also can't sue the Food and Drug Administration for authorizing a vaccine for emergency use, nor can you hold your employer accountable if they mandate inoculation as a condition of employment. Congress created a fund specifically to help cover lost wages and out-of-pocket medical expenses for people who have been irreparably harmed by a "covered countermeasure," such as a vaccine. But it is difficult to use and rarely pays. Attorneys say it has compensated less than 6% of the claims filed in the last decade. In February, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar invoked the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act. The 2005 law empowers the HHS secretary to provide legal protection to companies making or distributing critical medical supplies. The protection lasts until 2024. That means that for the next four years, these companies "cannot be sued for money damages in court" over injuries related to the administration or use of products to treat or protect against Covid.

Note: Dr. Carrie Madej lays out the case for transhumanism through these mRNA vaccines. Are these vaccines the beginning of a well hidden agenda using nanotechnology to control all humans through advanced technology? Don't miss this powerful 20-minute video and do your own research as she suggests. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on coronavirus vaccines from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Coronavirus Information Center.

Australia on Friday canceled a roughly $750 million plan for a large order of a locally developed coronavirus vaccine after the inoculation produced false positive test results for H.I.V. in some volunteers participating in a trial study. Of the dozens of coronavirus vaccines being tested worldwide, the Australian one was the first to be abandoned. While its developers said the experimental vaccine had appeared to be safe and effective, the false positives risked undermining trust in the effort to vaccinate the public. The Australian setback showed the missteps that can inevitably occur when scientists, during a pandemic that has killed more than 1.5 million people, rush to condense the usual yearslong process to develop vaccines into a matter of months. The trouble that arose with the Australian vaccine, developed by the University of Queensland and the biotech company CSL, was related to its use of two fragments of a protein found in H.I.V. The protein formed part of a molecular "clamp" that researchers placed on the spikes that surround the coronavirus and allow it to enter healthy cells. The clamp stabilizes the spikes, allowing the immune system to respond more effectively to the vaccine. The use of the H.I.V. protein posed no risk of infecting the volunteers with that virus, the researchers said. But the clamp generated the production of antibodies recognized by H.I.V. tests at higher levels than the scientists had expected. The researchers decided to abandon development of the vaccine.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on coronavirus vaccines from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Coronavirus Information Center.

The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency updated its assessment of the origin of the novel coronavirus to reflect that it may have been accidentally released from an infectious diseases lab. The report, dated March 27 and corroborated by two U.S. officials, reveals that U.S. intelligence revised its January assessment in which it "judged that the outbreak probably occurred naturally" to now include the possibility that the new coronavirus emerged "accidentally" due to "unsafe laboratory practices" in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. Chinese officials at first insisted that the virus, SARS-CoV-2, could be caught only through direct contact with animals. But many of the early patients in Wuhan had no connection to the wild animal markets, which meant that the virus had already been spreading from person to person. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, not far from the animal markets in downtown Wuhan, houses the world's largest collection of coronaviruses from wild bats, including at least one virus that bears a resemblance to SARS-CoV-2. What's more, Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists have for the past five years been engaged in so-called "gain of function" (GOF) research, which is designed to enhance certain properties of viruses for the purpose of anticipating future pandemics. Gain-of-function techniques have been used to turn viruses into human pathogens capable of causing a global pandemic. Similar work ... has been carried out in dozens of labs throughout the world.

Note: If you want to understand the huge risk to humanity of "gain of function" research, read the entire article at the link above. Explore also eye-opening information on how the questions about the origin of the virus have been manipulated. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.

When I called up Chuck Collins on Tuesday afternoon, I found him glued to one of the grimmest new metrics documenting America's economic and social unraveling. Collins is a scholar of inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank, and since March he has been tracking how the collective wealth of American billionaires has been affected by the coronavirus pandemic. In previous recessions, Collins said, billionaires were hit along with the rest of us; it took almost three years for Forbes's 400 richest people to recover losses incurred in 2008's Great Recession. But in the coronavirus recession of 2020, most billionaires have not lost their shirts. Instead, they've put on bejeweled overcoats and gloves made of spun gold – that is, they've gotten richer than ever before. On Tuesday, as the stock market soared to a record, Collins was watching the billionaires cross a depressing threshold: $1 trillion. That is the amount of new wealth American billionaires have amassed since March, at the start of the devastating lockdowns that state and local governments imposed to curb the pandemic. On March 18, according to a report Collins and his colleagues published last week, America's 614 billionaires were worth a combined $2.95 trillion. When the markets closed on Tuesday, there were 650 billionaires and their combined wealth was now close to $4 trillion. In the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, American billionaires' wealth grew by a third.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on income inequality and the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.

With few exceptions, big businesses are having a very different year from most of the country. Between April and September, one of the most tumultuous economic stretches in modern history, 45 of the 50 most valuable publicly traded U.S. companies turned a profit. Despite their success, at least 27 of the 50 largest firms held layoffs this year, collectively cutting more than 100,000 workers. Corporate leaders are touting their success and casting themselves as leaders on the road to economic recovery. Many of their firms have put Americans out of work and used their profits to increase the wealth of shareholders. 21 big firms that were profitable during the pandemic laid off workers anyway. Berkshire Hathaway raked in profits of $56 billion during the first six months of the pandemic while one of its subsidiary companies laid off more than 13,000 workers. Salesforce, Cisco Systems and PayPal cut staff even after their chief executives vowed not to do so. Companies sent thousands of employees packing while sending billions of dollars to shareholders. Walmart, whose CEO spent the past year championing the idea that businesses "should not just serve shareholders," nonetheless distributed more than $10 billion to its investors during the pandemic while laying off 1,200 corporate office employees. Economists estimate at least 100,000 small businesses permanently closed in the first two months of the pandemic alone.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption and the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.

If you were to approve a coronavirus vaccine, would you approve one that you only knew protected people only from the most mild form of Covid-19, or one that would prevent its serious complications? The answer is obvious. You would want to protect against the worst cases. But that's not how the companies testing three of the leading coronavirus vaccine candidates, Moderna, Pfizer and AstraZeneca ... are approaching the problem. According to the protocols for their studies ... a vaccine could meet the companies' benchmark for success if it lowered the risk of mild Covid-19, but was never shown to reduce moderate or severe forms of the disease, or the risk of hospitalization, admissions to the intensive care unit or death. To say a vaccine works should mean that most people no longer run the risk of getting seriously sick. That's not what these trials will determine. Influenza vaccines ... reduce the risk of mild disease in healthy adults. But there is no solid evidence they reduce the number of deaths. In fact, significant increases in vaccination rates over the past decades have not been associated with reductions in deaths. Moderna and Pfizer acknowledge their vaccines appear to induce side effects that are similar to the symptoms of mild Covid-19. In Pfizer's early phase trial, more than half of the vaccinated participants experienced headache, muscle pain and chills. If the vaccines ultimately provide no benefit beyond a reduced risk of mild Covid-19, they could end up causing more discomfort than they prevent.

Note: Did you know that the FDA allows cancer cells to be used in vaccines? And the Vatican has stated "It is morally acceptable to receive Covid-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on coronavirus vaccines from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Coronavirus Information Center.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.