That was quick. Silver has been a cult for decades. The first time some true believer tried to sell me shares in a silver mine was 2004. It was going to boom any day now!
A few of my friends got into buying silver in like 2014. It was being pushed by ZeroHedge, a cult investment site with ties to Putin, and Russia Today's Max Keiser. For years, they and thousands of others have been buying silver.
ZeroHedge in particular has been trying to convince the WSB crowd to pump silver. So has Keiser.
There are a LOT of people out there who've invested their life savings in silver. It's not quite the Iraqi Dinar, but it's in that general direction. They genuinely believe silver is massively undervalued by market manipulation and soon it'll be worth a fortune.
So between all those silver holders hoping for a payout, and the weird pro-Kremlin investment media world (ZeroHedge, Kaiser etc), there are a lot of people incentivised to boost silver prices.
Meanwhile, on WallStreetBets, people are claiming that this silver rush is being driven by Wall Street and the banks, despite the evidence that it's being pushed hard by ZeroHedge and friends.
Prevalence of the B117 British variant of Sars-CoV-2 in Israel as a percentage of total cases.
The blue line is the Arab community where prevalence is about 25%.
The brown line is the Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) Jewish community, 90%.
Purple is the wider public: up to 80%
On the one hand, this is strong evidence that the Pfizer vaccine protects against B117. Israel is still seeing a strong protective effect among the vaccinated despite the British variant.
Israel vaccine update: Of 668,100 over-60s who had their second Pfizer jab more than a week ago, 473 have tested positive for the virus. Of them, 38 are hospitalised, 14 are considered 'serious' and 2 have died.
For comparison, among ALL over-60s in the last week, 3,835 tested positive for the virus, some 0.25% of the total population of over-60s.
Comparing the fully vaccinated (ie 7 days past 2nd dose) over-60s with the non-fully-vaccinated over-60s, there's an 83% decrease in observed cases of Covid-19.
Updated vaccine data: Maccabi reports only 31 new Covid cases among 163,000 people who had their second Pfizer dose 16 or more days ago. None of the cases were serious or required hospitalisation.
The group was observed for the period from 7-16 days after receiving their second dose. Maccabi estimates that this translates to a 92% effectiveness compared to the unvaccinated (but locked-down) population.
For comparison, among their unvaccinated members, Maccabi saw 6437 infections over the same period (the HMO has 2.4M members total).
Vaccination stats of over-80s in England revealing huge racial disparity, with white people more than double as likely to have been vaccinated as black people.
A similar pattern has been seen in Israel, where Israeli Arabs have low coronavirus vaccine uptake, despite relatively easy access. Vaccine uptake also lower among Ultra-Orthodox Jews.
In Israel, conspiracy theories about the vaccine are spreading widely on Arab/Palestinian social media, which could be contributing to hesitancy.
1. Let's assume all the 428k vaccinated people are over 60. They aren't, but most will be and this assumption will tend to conservatism in the analysis.
There are 1,471,000 over-60s in Israel. In the last week, 4,723 of them received their first positive coronavirus test, which is 0.3% of the total cohort.