Pfizer announced on Thursday that it’s working on developing a booster for its groundbreaking two-dose coronavirus vaccine as it sees effectiveness levels drop over time in those inoculated, CNN reports.

“As seen in real world data released from the Israel Ministry of Health, vaccine efficacy in preventing both infection and symptomatic disease has declined six months post-vaccination, although efficacy in preventing serious illnesses remains high,” the company said in a statement emailed to CNN.  “Additionally, during this period the Delta variant is becoming the dominant variant in Israel as well as many other countries. These findings are consistent with an ongoing analysis from the Companies’ Phase 3 study.”

The company said it would seek FDA approval through an emergency use authorization for the booster, which it believes will be introduced in August.

Michele Bachmann, the old Minnesota Congressional representative who is now–believe it or not–the dean of a college, has abandoned her previous stance that the government must regulate everything that occurs within a person’s body to take a pro-choice view.

“It is your body,” the Dean of the Regent School of Government declared on a Fox News show hosted by some posh Canadian trying hard to sound British.

Of course, Bachmann’s pro-choice view only applies to getting the coronavirus vaccine… ’cause getting a vaccine that is not mandated by the government but provably helps stop the spread of a deadly virus is completely against core conservative principles, like having the government control a woman’s body.

The Department of Justice filed indictments against five Tampa Bay-area residents who were part of the group of domestic terrorists that attacked the Capitol in Washington on January 6th, CNN reports.

The defendants, arrested last week, face 19 criminal counts.  Three of the defendants entered not guilty pleas and were released without bail on home detention and monitoring.

Prosecutors say Jonathan Pollock charged at police with a flagpole, dragged two officers down a set of stairs, kneed a police officer, punched two officers in the face, grabbed at one officer’s neck and pinned them to the ground, and rammed a stolen police shield into an officer’s throat.

At least 15 states won’t hit the 70% vaccination threshold the Biden Administration wants to hit to achieve of modicum of public safety from the coronavirus pandemic until sometime in 2022, with all of them having state leaders who have openly undermined vaccination efforts.

One state, West Virginia, isn’t expected to hit the 70% mark until 2023.

According to Forbes, two states–Kansas and Nebraska–might make the 70% mark the end of 2021 or early 2022.  But the others are so far behind the curve that it’s not likely they’ll pick up efforts.  Those states are North Carolina, Mississippi, Wyoming and Missouri in January; Arkansas, Oklahoma and Ohio in February through April; and South Carolina, Montana and Louisiana in May through June.

Alabama, Indiana, Michigan and North Dakota will hit the 70% mark by the end of September 2022.

The Food and Drug Administration reversed course on its endorsement of Aduhelm, a drug it said could be used effectively to treat patients with all degrees of Alzheimer’s disease, reissuing instruction that it should only be administered to patients with mild memory or thinking problems.

The New York Times reports that the new guidance shrinks the pool of potential patients eligible for the drug from six million to about 1.5 million.

The initial, now-revoked FDA permission would’ve marked the first time a single drug was licensed to treat all Alzheimer’s patients regardless of the disease progress.  It was also the first Alzheimer’s drug in 18 years to be approved.  Aduhelm works differently than the previous treatments in that it works on the limiting the protein amyloid that builds up in the brain, thought to be the cause of Alzheimer’s. 

A CDC study shows that 99.5% of recent coronavirus deaths have been in unvaccinated patients, Yahoo News reports, with new cases centered on counties and communities in the South and the Midwest.  In Northeastern and Western states, where vaccination rates are comparatively high, little vaccination spread is seen.

“We are seeing that communities and counties that have high vaccine coverage and low case rates are getting back to normal,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, said during a briefing of the White House pandemic response team.

The study found that in 93% of the 173 counties with the highest infection rates–those with more than 100 new cases per 100,000 population–fewer than 40% of the residents were vaccinated.

Haitian officials announced that an American citizen of Haitian descent was one of six people arrested relating to the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse Wednesday, the Washington Post reports.

James Solages was arrested Wednesday after some suspected gunmen got into a firefight with local police.  Another arrested man, who was not named, is believed to be a Haitian-American dual citizen.

Mathias Pierre, Haiti’s minister of elections and inter-party relations, shared a video with the Washington Post showing the two men being arrested and a crowd forming cheering the police.  The pair were taken to a local police station which was receiving additional police support.  “The special units are trying to protect the police station, because the population is very mad and is trying to get to them, to burn them,” he said. “We’re trying to avoid that.”

Hello Wendy. How are you today? DID YOU KNOW THE WOOL HAS BEEN PULLED OVER YOUR EYES? A whole conspiracy about the 2020 election was executed with the help of Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, Hungarian satellite technology, and fake ballots sent from Russia? IT’S TRUE! A secret government agent, codenamed OMEGANON (sometimes spelled OMEGA ANON, less often ΩAnon) recently EXPOSED the whole plan to steal the states of Texas and Florida from President Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Biden WON both states and they were STOLEN by the MAGA-Saudi Cabal of Satan-worshipping beastialists. An audit by expert election analysts/cyber samurais CROWDSTRIKE will reveal turnip fibers in the mail-in ballots for Trump, proving they were fakes sent from Russia! Trump will be re-defeated by August 13th!

WAKE UP SHEEP-WOMAN! The GREAT TYPHOON is coming! OMEGANON will EXPOSE the truth behind the Coronavirus, that its development into a highly contagious bioweapon was funded by Jared Kushner and Mike Lindell to kill of minority pet owners and provide their orphaned cats and dogs with a steady supply of animal sacrifice victims. TRUST THE ITINERARY! The Coronavirus vaccines are PROVEN to enhance sexual virility and the PSYOP to get you to avoid taking it is a plot to buy up dead homeowners’ land to build more Trump golf courses?

President Joe Biden announced that US forces will be withdrawn from Afghanistan by August 31st, earlier than the previous deadline his administration had announced, as Afghanistan returns to an ongoing civil war, NBC News reports.

“We did not go to Afghanistan to nation build,” Biden said in a speech at the White House. “It’s the right and the responsibility of the Afghan people alone to decide their future and how they want to run their country.”

Biden said that military commanders had been planning for the withdraw since he announced his intention to take the remaining troops out of the country, and that the withdraw was occuring in a “secure and orderly way.”  Biden also vowed that the United States would assist in evacuating thousands of native Afghan translators and their families to the United States, an issue that had become a public cause for veterans serving in Congress and the US intelligence community. 

Michael Avenatti, the lawyer who shot to national prominence for representing porn star Stormy Daniels in her legal wranglings with Donald Trump, has been sentenced to two and a half years in jail for trying to extort $20 million from athletic apparel maker Nike, the Wall Street Journal reports.

A Manhattan federal judge sentenced Avenatti Thursday afternoon for a plot to get the money from Nike to run an internal investigation, or Avenatti said he would release information about supposed corruption in Nike’s elite basketball program.  Seeking an eight year sentence, prosecutors said Avenatti “betrayed his client’s trust and sought to enrich himself by weaponizing his public profile in an attempt to extort a publicly traded company out of tens of millions of dollars.”

Avenatti launched himself into the national spotlight by representing Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, in her efforts to nullify a non-disclosure agreement she signed with Trump after having illicit sex with him while he was married to his third wife, Melania, and getting paid $130,000 to remain quiet about the affair so it wouldn’t hurt his 2016 presidential campaign.

✅ We are excited to announce that @JudgeJeanine is the Keynote Speaker for the 15th Annual NRA Women’s Leadership Forum Luncheon & Auction to be held Friday, September 3, 2021 in Houston! pic.twitter.com/GYQWqit5cK

— NRA (@NRA) July 8, 2021

https://youtu.be/59bWBOLSD-w

That’s right, ladies and gents and the inclusive in between, Marjorie Taylor Greene–the woman who claims she can dispense medical and legal advice because she owns a gym–now demonstrates her lack of knowledge about political science and economics.

“The big corporations, the big ‘woke’ corporation,” Madge goes on.  “I call them ‘corporate communists’.  Those are the big companies that are going to survive under the Democrats.”

P.S.  Having watched her do pull ups using her own, um, “unique” technique, I wouldn’t advise listening to her for fitness advice either unless you want your shoulders torn up.

In an op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal under a “Donald J. Trump” byline, a ghostwriter claims that “Big Tech has been illegally deputized as the censorship arm of the U.S. government,” while failing to mention that he was in charge of the US government when this deputization reportedly happened.

In a piece titled “Why I’m Suing Big Tech,” Trump claims that “Social media has become as central to free speech as town meeting halls, newspapers and television networks were in prior generations,” without noting that meeting halls, newspapers and television networks have the legal authority to ban content or events from being included in their venues.

Trump goes on to whine about how social media companies deleted false information being posted about hydroxychloroquine being a miracle cure for coronavirus; about a Chinese lab intentionally developing and releasing the coronavirus; and–you saw this coming–Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

In today’s first installment of “Conservatives Inappropriately Comparing People to Nazis,” Fox News commentator Tomi “Don’t Call Her Tammy” Lahren noted during a conversation about unruly passengers attacking flight attendants that, sometimes, she thinks the flight attendants deserve to be beaten.

Yet another excerpt from Wall Street Journal senior White House reporter Michael Bender’s new book “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost”, published Thursday in the Wall Street Journal (no paywall in link) has a lot of good clips, but this might be the best:

“Trump’s attention had turned to his vice president, who was responsible for presiding over the Jan. 6 congressional certification of the election. The two men had debated for weeks whether Pence could reject the results. But the vice president wasn’t practiced in confronting Trump. The only example some administration officials could remember was in 2018, when Pence’s political committee hired Corey Lewandowski, the president’s ubiquitous adviser. Trump was holding a newspaper article about the hiring and said it made him look weak, like his team was abandoning him as he was probed for his campaign’s role in Russian election meddling. He crumpled the article and threw it at his vice president. ‘So disloyal,’ Trump said.”

“Pence lost it. Kushner had asked him to hire Lewandowski, and he had discussed the plan with Trump over lunch. Pence picked up the article and threw it back at Trump. He leaned toward the president and pointed a finger a few inches from his chest. ‘We walked you through every detail of this,’ Pence snarled. ‘We did this for you – as a favor. And this is how you respond? You need to get your facts straight.’ Three years later, the moment seemed to call for another get-your-facts-straight lesson from Pence. But the vice president’s team believed he’d been clear with the president that he didn’t have the constitutional authority to overturn the vote. ‘Anything you give us, we’ll review,’ Pence told the president during a meeting on Jan. 5. ‘But I don’t see how it’s possible.’ Trump later insisted that his vice president never told him no.”

“A very interesting development in Trump world. As of today, Allen Weisselberg, the CFO of the Trump Organization, who has been charged with multiple counts of tax fraud in New York, is no longer a director of Trump’s inaugural company in Scotland” Martyn McLaughlin, The Scotsman.

McLaughlin’s tweet includes a screenshot of some sort of UK business regulatory system automated reporting email which says “You have been sent this email because you are following TRUMP INTERNATIONAL GOLF CLUB SCOTLAND LIMITED (SC292100) – The following information is available from the company’s filing history – Termination of appointment of Allen Weisselberg as a director on 8 July 2021” which may or may not mean anything in terms of Weisselberg’s overall position in terms of whether or not he flips on Trump, but it means something.

Non-Correction: The current version of this article misspelled Alan Weisselberg’s last name as ‘Weaselberg’ in the headline. National Zero does not regret the error and will not be correcting it.

NASA successfully completed a test of procedures that would be used to switch to backup hardware on Hubble in response to the payload computer problem. This switch could occur next week after further preparations and reviews.

For previous updates: https://t.co/HSGm8ckNdT

— Hubble (@NASAHubble) July 8, 2021

Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine: “Babbitt’s death, while tragic, occurred for a very good reason. The Air Force veteran, who had been fully converted into the most dangerous and fantastical pro-Trump conspiracy theories, had joined the aggressive vanguard of the January 6 insurrection. Babbitt died trying to squeeze through the smashed window of a barricaded door that led to the inner sanctum where members of Congress were hiding from the mob. Talia Lavin’s profile of Babbitt, in the current issue of the magazine, notes her emergence as a martyr on the far right. As Lavin points out, Babbitt is not the only Trump supporter who lost her life during the insurrection. Rosanne Boyland also died, but the manner of her death – trampling by the mob – does not serve the same propagandistic purpose.”

“The whole point of Babbitt’s centrality is that she was leading the mob violently forward toward its goal of threatening or killing officials who refused to cooperate with their objective of overturning the election result. It is revealing that Trump has only taken up Babbitt’s cause now, six months after the insurrection. In the immediate aftermath of the riot, Republicans were briefly furious enough to contemplate writing Trump out of the party and even voting to impeach him… The anti-anti-Trump right has dismissed the insurrection as overblown, a protest march gone bad, perhaps ill-considered but never posing any serious threat to the republic. The far right’s highlighting of Babbitt’s death sends a different message: The insurrection was good. Babbitt’s effort to penetrate the defensive barrier was brave, and the stopping of her charge a crime. By throwing himself behind this message, Trump is endorsing the most radical interpretation of his presidency. January 6 was not a minor misstep after a successful era, as fans like Mike Pence and Lindsey Graham now say. It was the heroic culmination of a righteous uprising.”

“The Department of State encourages counties to refuse to participate in any sham review of past elections that would require counties to violate the trust of their voters and ignore their statutory duty to protect the chain of custody of their ballots and voting equipment. The Department stands ready to assist counties in upholding their statutory duty to protect the security and integrity of their election machines and systems. Further, we will direct the counties that, if they turn over voting machines or scanners, they should be prepared to replace that brand-new, expensive equipment before any future elections. When the Secretary certifies voting systems, she certifies that they can be secured from outside intrusion. Such a ‘forensic’ exercise as that described by the senator would nullify that assurance. Additionally, the federal government has designated voting equipment as protected infrastructure and, as such, there should be no expectation that anyone without the necessary security clearance would be afforded the kind of access requested here.”

“We already have seen systems compromised in Fulton County and in the state of Arizona. In both cases, the politically motivated reviews turned up absolutely no evidence of any fraud or discrepancies. Those partisan exercises did, however, prove to be very costly for local officials and taxpayers when election administrators were forced to lease or purchase replacement equipment. Pennsylvania counties, despite a convergence of difficult circumstances, ran a free, fair, and accurate election in 2020. The majority of Pennsylvanians – and Americans – are satisfied with that truth” – Pennsylvania Department of State via KDKA.

Who is “Trump world?”

I talk to Trump directly, unlike Fruitpunch News. https://t.co/Wxrb78bjd4

— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) July 8, 2021