Delta outbreak in Southeast Asia prompts shift away from China's covid vaccines - The Washington Post - "Countries such as Indonesia and Thailand once bet heavily on China’s Sinovac, despite warnings from medical experts, but their health systems have come under intense strain as the delta variant tears through towns and cities. Indonesia has recorded more than 100,000 deaths overall. “The current reality does present a stark contrast to the fanfare with which Beijing rolled out their vaccines and then insisted on their high efficacy, even when data was less available,” said Chong Ja Ian, an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore who studies U.S.-China competition in Asia. The change, he added, shows “how risky it is to try to make the current pandemic, and the very real dangers to human life, into a sort of propaganda tool.” Sinovac and Sinopharm were among the earliest to begin clinical trials, but they did not release full data... Even Beijing’s closest allies are making the switch. Cambodia said last week that it would start offering AstraZeneca booster shots to those who had received two doses of the Chinese-made vaccines, which have already been rolled out to about half of the population... Yet even before the delta variant surge, people showed a preference for Western-made vaccines, particularly the mRNA shots developed by the United States. A survey early this year in the Philippines showed more than 63 percent of adults preferred the United States as a source of coronavirus vaccines. In May, residents flocked to the one site offering Pfizer doses, with lines forming from 2 a.m."
Damn CIA!
A coronavirus vaccine race against all odds in covid ravaged Indonesia - The Washington Post - "Fitriliani, a 26-year-old restaurant owner who also goes by one name, had no idea about the vaccination program. “I think there’s no virus here,” she said. “So why do we need vaccination then?”... To assuage doubters, Indonesia’s highest clerical body signed off on the vaccine as halal. But the move has had little impact in Aceh, a deeply religious and conservative region of this mostly Muslim country. Rather than social distancing, vaccines or lockdowns, many there said prayer would be the answer. “We have been through a lot of outbreaks since the era of prophet Muhammad. There is no other cure except prayer and the grace of Allah,” said Zakaria, a 53-year-old merry-go-round operator in Banda Aceh who also uses one name... One anti-vaccine Facebook group, the Anti-Vaccine and Immunization Movement, has nearly 2,800 members and has been active since 2013. In the “About” section, site administrators cite passages from the Koran to justify their beliefs that God has provided humans with enough natural resources to fight off illnesses."
Clearly the reason for lower vaccine uptake among "minorities" is structural racism and white supremacy, and it's racist to believe that different groups have different beliefs that could affect vaccine takeup (or indeed affect anything at all)
Has Delta Peaked? - The New York Times - "Since the pandemic began, Covid has often followed a regular — if mysterious — cycle. In one country after another, the number of new cases has often surged for roughly two months before starting to fall. The Delta variant, despite its intense contagiousness, has followed this pattern... We have asked experts about these two-month cycles, and they acknowledged that they could not explain it. “We still are really in the cave ages in terms of understanding how viruses emerge, how they spread, how they start and stop, why they do what they do,” Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, said. But two broad categories of explanation seem plausible, the experts say. One involves the virus itself. Rather than spreading until it has reached every last person, perhaps it spreads in waves that happen to follow a similar timeline. How so? Some people may be especially susceptible to a variant like Delta, and once many of them have been exposed to it, the virus starts to recede — until a new variant causes the cycle to begin again (or until a population approaches herd immunity). The second plausible explanation involves human behavior. People don’t circulate randomly through the world. They live in social clusters, Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, points out. Perhaps the virus needs about two months to circulate through a typically sized cluster, infecting the most susceptible — and a new wave starts when people break out of their clusters, such as during a holiday. Alternately, people may follow cycles of taking more and then fewer Covid precautions, depending on their level of concern."
Weird. The narrative was that everyone in India was going to die due to Delta
Meme - Jeff Tiedrich @itsJeffTiedrich: "yeah sure. bro, America has lost confidence in our scientists, thanks to your constant carnival barking about imaginary miracle cures. great job, goofus, even if you do come out with a real vaccine, no one's going to trust it. pat yourself on the back, peacock, real ace work"
Jeff Tiedrich @itsJeffTiedrich: "you stupid fucks had ONE JOB: to get vaccinated"
Rabbi Yisroel Kahan 🇺🇸 on Twitter - "When in doubt blame the Jews... MYTH: Dr. Fauci blames #ChasidicJews in #NYC for not taking the #Measles vaccine. FACT: @HealthNYGov, Vaccine rate at Jewish schools in Brooklyn is 96%"
Leave Desmond Swayne alone - "It’s early 2021 and the deputy leader of the opposition is furious that someone has dared to question the government. Leave Desmond Swayne alone Share Topics Free Speech Politics UK It’s early 2021 and the deputy leader of the opposition is furious that someone has dared to question the government. It would have been hard to imagine this scenario a year ago. But the (first) year of Covid has warped things to such an extent that the only people more enthusiastic about government policy than the government are its alleged opponents. In November, Conservative backbencher Desmond Swayne gave an interview to Save Our Rights UK, an anti-lockdown (and sometimes anti-vaccination) group. He said that official figures about Covid ‘appear to have been manipulated’ and that the virus poses a ‘manageable’ risk to the NHS. Swayne also said: ‘We’re told there is a deathly, deadly pandemic proceeding at the moment. That is difficult to reconcile with ICUs actually operating at typical occupation levels for the time of year and us bouncing round at the typical level of deaths for the time of year.’ He also encouraged the group to keep up its campaigns against government restrictions. This month, he conducted another interview with US TV host and anti-vaxxer Del Bigtree. Swayne said, in reference to government policies, ‘There are aspects of this which I’m certain come down to social control, like the wearing of masks’, adding that the host had just ‘rubbished’ the medical case for face coverings. This has sent lockdown supporters into meltdown. Chief among them is Labour’s Angela Rayner, who has accused Swayne of peddling misinformation, undermining both ‘the government’s message’ and public confidence in the vaccine programme. She has demanded the Tories remove the whip from him ‘immediately’ and has branded his comments as ‘really dangerous’. In his own party, Michael Gove said Swayne was ‘completely out of order’. Swayne has reportedly been asked to meet with the government’s scientific advisers... his comments about the ‘manipulation’ of data were referring to graphs that Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance produced in their press conference before the November lockdown. If this was what Swayne was referring to, then his comments were reasonable. The graphs were like something out of Brass Eye. And they were a manipulation of the data. They projected a possible future death rate as high as 4,000 per day. They were clearly intended to justify the restrictions that were also being announced at the press conference. It wasn’t just Swayne who took issue with the graphs — they were even rebuked by the UK Statistics Authority. The government later withdrew the projection, citing an error in the data... Sky’s headline – ‘Tory MP Sir Desmond Swayne urged anti-vaxxers to “persist” against Covid restrictions’ – tried to paint Swayne as an anti-vaxxer. But anyone who spent half a minute looking into the issue would find that he isn’t one. He has said on his own website, ‘I see vaccination as the escape clause from our current enforced confinement with all its devastating economic consequences. The more people who are vaccinated the better, and the sooner the better.’ In the end, though, the crucial question is not whether Swayne was right, but whether he is entitled to an opinion at all. When you can be hounded for disagreeing with the government on the key policy of the day, it is clear that we lack a proper opposition in parliament, and that debate is being suppressed. Clearly, some of lockdown’s evangelists cannot tolerate dissent. They are so convinced they are right – and so certain their enemies are both wrong and dangerous – that they feel compelled to hunt down and destroy all opposition. The hounding of sceptics has to stop."
Raymond J. de Souza: On COVID, we should heed science, but not follow it blindly - "The expert class, which has its role, has got a great deal very wrong, at great cost. It has tried the patience of the populace by countering honest queries by shouting ever louder “follow the science.” That is not a policy precept. It is a slogan. It is not a repository of wisdom; rather it is the refuge of the philosophically confused... I expect that the “follow the science” (FTS) slogan is quite popular at both Pfizer and Health Canada. So why do they disagree on whether there are five or six doses in a vial? After all, the European Medicines Agency already decided that there were six, not five... FTS assumes that there is pharmacology and physics and then off you go. But there is also the expertise of the vaccinator. Is technique a matter of art or science, of experience or simple instructions? Anyone who has tried to assemble furniture from IKEA knows the answer to that. The problem with FTS is that there are very few matters that are purely scientific when it comes to public policy, including public health. There are some matters that are, as for example the temperature at which flammable materials can be safely stored. But when it comes to transporting them, many other fields besides chemistry come into play. A public policy decision has to be made, risks have to be weighed, cost-benefit analysis undertaken... FTS can become, at the extreme, an ideology. Canada has already seen that in effect, in the refusal to exempt homeless people from Quebec’s curfew order. Quebec’s premier argued that if the gendarmerie were prohibited from ticketing homeless people from being on the street at quarter past eight, then other people would pretend to be homeless, thus weakening the FTS-mandated curfew. But FTS does not mandate a curfew in the first place, and certainly does not tell you if Quebecers are inclined to fake homelessness in the dead of winter. That is the premier’s psychological and moral assessment of his fellow citizens, which is not physics. The attractiveness of FTS sloganeering arises from our desire to know the truth with certainty. The problem with FTS is that it assumes there is only one method — empirical measurement — that arrives at that truth. But there are many questions that are not amenable to measurement. Even the greatest of scientists know this.
"Follow the science" is just an unholy fusion of scientism and the imposition of dogma to smash opponents
LGBT outrage over Franklin Graham's NYC field hospital is anti-religious bigotry | The Post Millennial - "LGBT activists complained about Samaritan's Purse. Their concern is with the pledge that medical personnel are required to take prior to joining the ranks of Samaritan's Purse... The Christian leader of the group funding a 68 bed field hospital fully equipped to help COVID-19 patients in a time of extreme need is being accused of hate and bigotry by people actively calling for his charity organization to be discriminated against without any evidence other than their own prejudices to back them up. Those shouting the loudest about protecting ‘inclusion’ are actively engaging in anti-Christian bigotry with absolutely nothing to support their claims. Despite their unfounded assumptions, Christian views on homosexuality do not equate to discrimination, especially within a medical setting... In this time of crisis, anti-religious bigotry has no place in the public conversation and should be shamed as strongly as antisemitism or Islamophobia would be in the same situation. Samaritan’s Purse is doing good work and the unfounded hatred from activists should not impede their ability to help people in need."
Guess covid is not serious, so they can afford to politicise it as always
Anti-malaria drug, throat spray reduce Covid-19 spread in closed, crowded settings such as dorms: NUHS study - "A team of clinician-scientists from the National University Health System (NUHS) has found that oral hydroxychloroquine and povidone-iodine throat spray are effective in reducing the spread of Covid-19 in high-transmission settings such as dormitories, cruise ships and prisons."
They didn't get the memo that hydroxychloroquine is useless
Had COVID? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime - "The study provides evidence that immunity triggered by SARS-CoV-2 infection will be extraordinarily long-lasting"
Protection of previous SARS-CoV-2 infection is similar to that of BNT162b2 vaccine protection: A three-month nationwide experience from Israel - "Our results question the need to vaccinate previously-infected individuals."
This suggests that the obsession to get everyone vaccinated - even those who have recovered from covid - is not "following the science".
Of course if you question this and point to possible drug company lobbying (which certainly is present for booster shots), you are an anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist, even if the same people calling you that dismiss all results they don't like which have even the barest hint of a conflict of interest
Natural infection vs vaccination: Which gives more protection? - "Coronavirus patients who recovered from the virus were far less likely to become infected during the latest wave of the pandemic than people who were vaccinated against COVID, according to numbers presented to the Israeli Health Ministry."
So since there's an obsession with imposing vaccine passports to coerce people into getting vaccinated, shouldn't those who have recovered from covid get even more of their rights back than the vaccinated?
Does natural infection with SARS-CoV-2 offer more protection than a vaccine against new variants? - "vaccines may be less effective at countering the newer variants compared to natural infection... The study shows that severe COVID-19 and BNT162b2 vaccination both produce high IgG responses directed against the spike, RBD and NTD antigens, but the former has a higher breadth, with a short-lived but strong IgA and IgM response in addition to a durable IgG response."
ChefTom420 Furlong/Charlotte/Newport 🍻🦅🇺🇲🇮🇱 on Twitter - "Can someone please tell me how the Taliban survived a year & a half without masks, social distancing, pcr testing, mandatory vaccines, & now even managed to recapture Kabul & freely rule Afghanistan in the middle of a global pandemic."
Meme - SJW to black people: "I'm literally your biggest advocate."
Black people: We're not getting vaccinated"
SJW: "You're too stupid to make that decision. I hope you die."
Sal the Agorist on Twitter - "It's weird that the only ones still worried about COVID are the ppl who've been vaccinated against it."
Replies: "I find it disturbing. How come if the vaccine is so good and efective, people still do not feel protected enough? It should be us unvaccinated people feeling scared out of our minds but we observe the contrary in reality."
Thread by @eugyppius1 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Medical bureaucrats & political elites are pursuing only two goals with respect to Corona. These goals explain everything that they do. They wish 1) to minimise Corona infections, possibly even to eradicate the virus; and 2) to escape blame for failed policies.
To minimise infections, they set out to modify the behaviour of the populace via messaging campaigns. This has brought about a feedback effect demanding ever more extreme containment policies and driving ever more extreme messaging from the press.
To escape blame for failed policies, every containment policy is universalised, insofar as it is possible, both domestically and internationally. The point has been to eliminate all control groups and destroy any means of evaluating the success or failure of containment campaigns
Political elites and medical bureaucrats are not actually trying to optimise public health outcomes or even (necessarily) to save lives, except indirectly through the suppression of the virus.
This thing comes to an end when minimising Corona infections no longer seems reasonable or possible to most ordinary people; or when escaping blame for the failure and costs of containment is no longer a feasible option.
More & more I’m convinced that the failure of the vaxx to prevent transmission brings the end within reach. Every day it is harder to argue that controlling Corona is possible, which brings the possibility of a breakdown in the international lockdown consensus ever nearer."
Covid-19 Live Updates: Second J. & J. Shot Gives Strong Gain, Trial Finds - The New York Times - "The authorities in at least 12 cities in China have warned residents that those who refuse Covid-19 vaccinations could be punished if they are found to be responsible for spreading outbreaks"
Of course all the liberals on the NYT Facebook were cheering this. Probably the next step in the evolution of their beliefs will be to call all those who object to this "Nazis"
When will China be held accountable?
Considering that the vaccinated are probably as likely to spread it if infected, will they be held accountable too? Especially if, due to risk compensation, they are even more likely to do so
It's OK to blame the unvaccinated — they are robbing the rest of us of our freedoms | Salon.com - "Republicans, always ready to destroy lives for some perceived political gain, aren't even hiding anymore that they think being pro-COVID is good politics... But, of course, the return of restrictions is the direct result of Republican efforts to dissuade Americans from getting vaccinated and keep those COVID-19 case rates high"
"Look what you made us do to ourselves!"
Politicising "science" and lying (that it's all Republicans who are hesitant) are good when liberals do it
Martin Kulldorff on Twitter - "For thousands of years, disease pathogens have spread from person to person. Never before have carriers been blamed for infecting the next sick person. That is a very dangerous ideology."
Liberals are going to call him a "dangerous" "anti-vaxx" "Nazi". Already a lot of them in the comments are upset at him
Replies: "Medicine is not about punishing the sick. Medicine is about treating the sick, cure if possible, relieving always, without prejudgement to color, race, ideology, religion, money or guilt.We are not judges, we are doctors. Blaming the sick is sadistic and dangerous."
Genève Campbell on Twitter - "I love all the historians dunking on this by inadvertently pointing out that it is, in fact, VERY BAD. “We’ve obviously done this before, you historically illiterate moron. What about HIV criminalization targeting gay men, or when Jews were blamed for the Black Death?? Hmmmm???”"
On the above. The same people who happily point out that Kulldorff was wrong are very eager to hate on people due to covid
With the rise of Delta, are vaccines still enough to end the pandemic? - "a majority of Canadians believe that the unvaccinated are selfish, irresponsible and putting others at risk, a view the unvaccinated take strong issue with... Some have argued that dividing people into the “risky” and “safe” underplays that vaccination may not fully stop transmission of the Delta variant. Vaccines protect against serious disease, Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina tweeted this week. “Vaccines may slow spread — yes,” he said. “But many policies across (the) US & elsewhere assume vaccines totally prevent spread. This leads to outbreaks among vax’d — which ultimately erodes trust in the whole vaccine effort unless the expectations are set properly.”... Some concerns may not be totally irrational. Some women have reported unusual menstrual cycles... A huge new study from Israel appearing in this week’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine found that while the Pfizer vaccine increases the risk of heart inflammation (about three events per 100,000 people vaccinated) the risk is several-fold higher among people infected with the SARS-Cov-2 virus (11 cases per 100,000). Infection with COVID was also associated with a substantially increased risk of other seriously bad things, like heart attack, blood clots and bleeding inside the skull or brain... a preprint paper published this week suggests immunity, including protection against a breakthrough infection with Delta, lasts longer after a natural infection than immunity after two doses of Pfizer... "in certain provinces, we’re taking very serious steps to protect the unvaccinated by preventing their exposure to the virus and the vaccinated population,” he said. “It’s sad that we have to go to the extent to do that, to protect the unvaccinated. But that is what is necessary in this situation, until we get them vaccinated""
Some admit that preventing healthcare system burden is the goal, but most covid hystericists are pretending that coercing others into getting vaccinated is justified to prevent harm to others by infecting them. The latter is sexier, after all, since the former has inconvenient implications (e.g. smoking and obesity). Ditto for apartheid to "protect" the unvaccinated
Jimmy Kimmel defines the “Jimmy Kimmel test” on health care - “No family should be denied medical care, emergency or otherwise, because they can't afford it.”
Jimmy Kimmel Says Unvaccinated People Shouldn't Get ICU Beds
Lange on Twitter - "COVID-19 quarantine signage must now be placed on the front doors of homes in South Australia where occupants are isolating for two weeks."
"A key element in allowing a dictatorship to keep a grip on its people is ensuring there is mistrust amongst neighbours and a willingness to report each other to authorities. It works in China & North Korea, and ofc it was used in 1930s Germany. Stick #together Australia"
"Also the Soviet Union 1/3 of people where goverment informants meaning most likely someone in your family and even your house could be an informant and could have u sent to the gulag for any anti communist behaviour. It was the back bone to stopping counter revolutionaries"
Mark Changizi on Twitter - "If you are not a scientist, and you disagree with scientists about science, it's actually not a disagreement. You're just wrong"
"I disagree heartily with this meme going around. As a scientist, those who disagree with me are right or wrong depending on the content of their idea, not whether it says “scientist” on their resume. “Science worship” is why we’re in this mess."
Donald Trump Jr. on Twitter - "The new Governor of New York just announced that an additional 12,000 previously undisclosed COVID deaths occurred under Gov Cuomo. That’s almost four 9/11s under the Dem’s units of measurement. Will there be criminal charges brought now for Cuomo’s deadly nursing home coverup?"
History may well conclude that the lockdowns were a dreadful mistake - "Looking back through history it is hard to find a parallel. Only in the depths of war and rampant pestilence was it ever contemplated that the state should deny healthy people the right to leave their homes or associate with their own kith and kin. As the pandemic appeared to be spreading in large gatherings and households with older family members, limiting wider contact was considered justified and sensible. Yet national lockdowns had never been part of pandemic emergency planning. It is often stated that we had planned for a flu pandemic only to be hit by Covid instead and forced to adopt a different approach. But in fact the UK preparedness plan for influenza had anticipated the possibility of a novel virus with an unknown incubation time and which in a “reasonable worst-case scenario” would have a fatality rate of 2.5 per cent – much higher than Covid-19 – spreading over one or more waves and causing disruption to the economy. But while mitigation measures such as better hygiene, protective equipment and the development of vaccines and treatments were part of the plan, lockdowns never were. So how did we end up in not just one but three (so far)? These were political decisions driven by scientific caution and because this is what China did when the coronavirus was first identified. The Beijing authorities locked down Wuhan because they feared a pestilence on a par with Sars had been released with the potential to kill 10 per cent or more of the population. By the time the world found out that Covid was nasty but not as virulent as feared, it had embarked on a course of action that those responsible could never accept might have been wrong. Moreover, the death toll means that they will never be persuaded otherwise and the UK Government can say, with some justification, that it avoided the national health service being overwhelmed. But concerns that the lockdowns would have consequences for younger generations that were not warranted by the scale of the crisis have been borne out by the colossal costs that will have to be paid off over decades, the loss of schooling and, most of all, by the risk aversion inculcated in our children. Our culture has been changed, perhaps irrevocably. Enough people are now so inured to the sense of security offered by lockdowns that they will accept them in other circumstances, including perhaps a bad flu epidemic next year. One of the mysteries is why we have accepted them this time round. Behavioural scientists a year ago thought the British would rebel but we haven’t. Largely this is because most people who might have caused a fuss have been insulated from the lockdown’s impact by furlough schemes, online working opportunities that never existed before, and the continued availability of the sustenance without which they would have been intolerable. Historically, times of grave crisis have manifested themselves in dreadful privation. Yet one of the most remarkable aspects of the past year is that there has been no interruption to the supply of food or anything else as far as I can see... Perhaps the lives of most people in the prosperous West have been so cushioned from adversity that we have forgotten how to deal with it. The reason we have had lockdowns today but didn’t in the past is because we can now and couldn’t then... for how long is this feasible? When this nightmare began we thought that it would last a few weeks; yet not only are we a year on but the Government is seeking to extend emergency powers for another six months even though there is a vaccine and half of the adult population is protected. On the continent of Europe, curfews are being re-imposed, stay at home orders reissued and economies shutting down once more. Foreign holidays have been ruled out for as far as one can see. Does that look to you like the end? Wasn’t the vaccine supposed to be our escape route? We have given up a great deal in the past year, and some will rightly point out that many have given up their lives. But above all we have sacrificed that sense of proportion that we once possessed... The fact that five times as many people died from non-Covid related conditions (some exacerbated by the lockdown) is a reminder of our mortality. Moreover, the deaths of around 600,000 people every year does not constitute an annual disaster but the normal end-of-life phenomenon... It is telling, indeed, that the date chosen for the commemoration of Covid was not that of the first death, but the start of the lockdown."
LILLEY: End the doctatorship, elected politicians must be in charge | Toronto Sun - "Thanks to politicians wanting to ensure that every decision they make has cover, they, and we in the media, have elevated the position of public health doctors to that of omnipotent god instead of what they really are, medical advisors. In a democracy such as ours, there is no way that unelected doctors should wield so much power and authority, enough to force us to close schools, businesses, change our entire way of life. Yet, that is where we are in Ontario thanks to a system deeply in need of reform. If you doubt for a minute that doctors are really the ones in charge in Ontario, look no further than what Premier Doug Ford said... “I’m going to be very frank. There’s no politician in this country that is going to disagree with their chief medical officer. They just aren’t going to do it. They might as well throw a rope around their neck and jump off a bridge. They’re done”... Now some argue that we must listen to the doctors and that politicians should have no say in these matters. First off, that is not democratic and goes against the basis of our system. Secondly, if you think all doctors think alike, then you aren’t paying attention... Doctors are not all-powerful, all-knowing beings who must be obeyed lest we anger the COVID gods. They are people like the rest of us with a specialization in health. Somehow, we have decided that they should run the entire economy, our entire society. Doctors need to be listened to, their advice should be considered at every turn, but they should not be in charge — not unless we want to start electing our medical officers at the same time as we elect MPPs and mayors."
When politicians admit that covid hysteria is about political incentives
Faith in COVID-19 medical science is illusory and dangerous - "All right, so doctors have usurped democracy. At least they’re thinking independently and using their best judgment, right? Okay, maybe not. Last December, Ontario’s associate medical officer of health, Dr. Barbara Yaffe, made some people question otherwise. Her mic was on when she told her colleague before a press conference, “I don’t know why I bring all these papers. I never look at them. I just say whatever they write down for me.” She later told CTV she does “speak freely,” but her communications team gives her “researched and vetted remarks” that include stats such as new cases and pandemic deaths. Although she might “speak freely,” most doctors cannot. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario issued three cautions to Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill for what it called “unprofessional” and “inappropriate” tweets. The Brampton doctor said there was “absolutely no medical or scientific reason for this prolonged, harmful and illogical lockdown,” that “we don’t need a vaccine” and that contact tracing, testing and isolation were “ineffective, naïve & counter-productive against COVID-19.” Dr. Richard Schabas, Ontario’s former chief medical officer of health in the 1990s, agrees with Gill, … somewhat. Schabas wrote on Jan. 18 to say, “Outside of Long Term Care, the risk of dying if you are infected with COVID is probably less than 0.2 per cent overall and deaths are concentrated in the frail elderly.” Schabas added, “lockdown was never part of our planned pandemic response nor is it supported by strong science … there are significant costs to lockdowns – lost education, unemployment, social isolation, deteriorating mental health and compromised access to health care. … We will be paying for lockdown – in lives and dollars for decades to come. … Our well-intentioned but misguided efforts to control COVID are only compounding the tragedy. We need to change course.” Months later, little has changed. The illusory medical consensus still holds, supported by the censorship of regulatory bodies, social media companies and mainstream media outlets afraid to present contrary views... Global financial institutions also help form global opinion. Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus since 1994, claimed the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) offered his country US$940 million of COVID relief aid if it agreed to impose mask use, lockdowns, quarantines and curfews. Lukashenko refused, but how many others agreed? Money, global institutions and prevailing medical opinion converge in one influential man: Bill Gates. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gives 9.8 per cent of the WHO’s funds, second only to the United States. The foundation is also a major donor to GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, an initiative that’s the fifth-highest donor to WHO. On Oct. 18, 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation held Event 201. As the event’s web page explains, “the scenario illuminated the need for co-operation among industry, national governments, key international institutions, and civil society, to avoid the catastrophic consequences that could arise from a large-scale pandemic.” As 15 leaders played out the coronavirus outbreak scenario, they emphasized “flooding the zone” with their desired message, apparently to drown out all others. This strategy has since been employed to great effect. Science has become dogma, democracy has become dictatorship and speech has become proscribed. Politico called Bill Gates “the world’s most powerful doctor” in 2017. These days, when democracy is dormant, that also makes him the world’s most powerful politician. Unfortunately, Gates is not qualified to be either. And that, more than anything, makes sense of the pandemic’s senselessness."
No Lockdowns: The Terrifying Polio Pandemic of 1949-52 - "Though there was no cure, and no vaccine, there was a long incubation period before symptoms would reveal themselves, and while there was a great deal of confusion about how it was transmitted, the thought of locking down an entire state, nation, or world was inconceivable. The concept of a universal “shelter in place” order was nowhere imaginable. Efforts to impose “social distancing” were selective and voluntary. "
Covid Mania Returns Australia to Its Roots as a Nation of Prisoners - WSJ - " It’s hard to know exactly when Australia’s pandemic response crossed the line from tragedy into farce. But future historians could do worse than pinpoint the moment when Sydney’s chief health supremo told the city’s residents to stop being friendly to one another when they ventured out to buy essentials, lest they get themselves and others killed... Never mind that you can’t even go near a shop without a mask, she said. Masks aren’t foolproof and this is, in her words, “no time for complacency.” A simple g’day, in other words, could be deadly... Given this level of official hysteria, an outsider might imagine that Australia is a Covid charnel house. In fact, all of Australia is recording around 150 coronavirus cases a day. The current outbreak of 2,000 or so cases total over the past month has been associated with eight deaths so far, almost all of them people over 70. This in a nation that records, on average, about 460 deaths a day from all causes. Cancer kills nearly 50,000 Australians a year. Shark attacks killed eight in 2020. A good 18 months into the pandemic, the nation is still trapped in April 2020... Australians need permission from the federal government to leave the country—applications succeed about half the time—and Australia’s states throw up their borders against one another at the slightest hint of trouble. Residents of Sydney may leave their homes only if it is “essential,” and not stray more than six miles when they do. This is before discussing the economic fallout from the latest lockdowns. Billions will be spent by government or lost by businesses as a result. A restaurant-industry representative told me last week that many chefs and waiters are leaving for greener pastures. Many iconic restaurants will likely never reopen. So how did Australia become a hermit kingdom? Geography plays a large part. By mistaking their good luck for brilliance in being able to pull up the drawbridge to the world at the start of the pandemic, Australians quickly became trapped in an “elimination” mindset that is now officially referred to as Covid Zero. Politics, too, conspired to create this outcome. Labor state premiers (the equivalent of U.S. governors) quickly learned to play Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s center-right government like a fiddle, forcing the commonwealth to bail states out for the economic wreckage created every time they locked down their cities or shut their borders. Elected officials have allowed their judgment to be replaced by that of the new priestly class of health mandarins... Australia also has no tradition of liberty in a sense Americans might understand, and appeals to freedom are looked at suspiciously. Australians living in small towns are now congratulated by police for “dobbing in” outsiders who have fled cities for the countryside while recent anti-lockdown marches attracted widespread condemnation. Among the relentlessly secular Australian left, as with their woke American counterparts, Covid has provided a moral code even more compelling and immediate than climate change. As the screws were tightening on Sydney’s lockdowns a few weeks ago, nonessential retail shops were still allowed to stay open, leading these 21st-century Savonarolas to hammer the government on Twitter over why people were still allowed to buy luxury handbags during a pandemic. If they get their way, not many people will be able to afford to buy one when it’s over, either."
How Australia became the world's most luxurious prison - Nikkei Asia - "Four to five years. That has always been my answer when people in Asia ask me how long I think Australia will remain closed and prevent its own citizens from traveling abroad since the country enacted one of the world's toughest border restrictions at the start of the pandemic. There have been some protests... They were met with brute force by police sometimes mounted on horseback in scenes reminiscent of videos from Wuhan when the Chinese Communist Party implemented its ruthless COVID-19 elimination there. Individual police officers have posted security footage of protests on social media with crude, cowboy-like promises about tracking down perpetrators and making them pay. Regardless, there have been few times when public protests have changed Australia's foreign policy. A poll conducted by the Lowy Institute, a Sydney think tank, released in May shows only 18% of Australians think they should be free to leave the country for leisure or business, while only 40% believe vaccinated citizens should be allowed to travel... Under Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison's new four-stage plan to greater freedom from coronavirus restrictions, the ban on outbound travel for vaccinated Australians will not be lifted until 80% of the population is vaccinated. Morrison believes 70% of Australians will be vaccinated by the end of the year. But reaching 80% " is going to be a herculean task"... Australia is one of the only countries in the world that has banned its own citizens from leaving and charged returning citizens more than $2,000 to quarantine. And this month the Federal Government introduced a new rule banning any Australian who is resident overseas but has returned home for a visit from leaving the country without special permission. In May, it even banned its own citizens from returning home from India because of the scale of the outbreak there, reflecting a centuries-old Australian mindset that vilifies outsiders and promotes a fortress mentality to ostensibly protect its citizens from the ugliness of the outside world. The government did this most infamously by detaining thousands of refugees in offshore prison camps between 2007 and 2017 to discourage more asylum-seekers from following in their footsteps. Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court described the camps as "cruel" and "inhumane." Canberra may have lifted the ban on citizens returning home from India, but it has found an easier way to impede the 38,000 Australians who wish to return home: by restricting the number of people who can enter the country every week to 3,000. The move forced commercial airlines, which can only sell a limited amount of seats on every flight, to jack up their fares to levels few can afford: $24,000 from Los Angeles to Melbourne and $6,500 from Jakarta to Sydney. For me, the two-way travel ban hit especially hard. Last year, when my mother got cancer, I was faced with an impossible choice: say goodbye to my fiancee overseas or risk never seeing my mother again... By the time she was released from mandatory two-week quarantine, her mother had passed away. Now a new law has been introduced that makes it almost impossible for Australians to leave the country, even if they normally work or live overseas, and the woman is being denied the comfort of her partner in Belgium during the grieving process. Australia may still be the lucky country but it is also a big prison: a luxuriously appointed North Korea. "The problem with Australians is not that so many of them are descended from convicts," said Clive James, a famous Australian poet who spent most of his life overseas, "but that so many of them are descended from prison officers.""
Of course I see covid hystericists blame the federal government for not being strict enough, since it is "right wing" and covid hystericists are more or less all on the left
When COVID-19 Puts Kids at Risk, Parents May Overreact - The Atlantic - "So far the Delta variant isn’t thought to be more lethal than prior variants. Although clearly more contagious, Delta doesn’t seem to specifically target kids. No one should be surprised that nonimmune children account for a bigger share of the total number of infections as more adults get vaccinated. Although cases are certainly increasing among children as well as adults, a recent report by the American Academy of Pediatrics shows that 0.9 percent of COVID-19 cases in children have resulted in hospitalization—a slight increase since the spring but well below the corresponding percentage for most of last year—and 0.01 percent have resulted in death. A recent peer-reviewed study in Britain of nearly 260,000 children (1,700 of whom showed symptoms) reminds us that for most kids, a coronavirus infection will manifest as the common cold—if anything. Also reassuring is that only 4.4 percent of children diagnosed with COVID-19 in this study had symptoms after 28 days (and 1.8 percent after 56 days). Probably not surprising to any parent, about 1 percent of kids in this study who had upper-respiratory symptoms and tested negative for COVID-19 also had lingering symptoms at 56 days—a reminder that COVID-19 is only one potential cause for a child’s malaise. Abundant evidence indicates that coronavirus transmissions rates in schools are roughly equal to or less than those of the surrounding community. In other words, educational settings are not inherently dangerous for younger children. This should reassure parents and policy makers who are nervous about sending them back to the classroom... fragmentary data and muddled messaging from the CDC and elsewhere have stoked the public’s collective fear—especially among parents. The “younger, sicker, quicker” narrative—which asserts that Delta infects people more intensely and at an earlier age—has taken hold on TV news and social media. The Delta surge has also created new opportunities for grifters, anti-vaccine propagandists, and others to spread misinformation that preys on parental anxiety... Being constantly wired like this nevertheless carries a cost: Rational thought is hijacked. Our risk tolerance goes down. Our instinct to protect shifts into overdrive. We default to primitive thought patterns including black-and-white thinking (School isn’t safe until all kids are vaccinated) and catastrophizing (My child’s runny nose will probably land him in the hospital). We also engage in filtering, a cognitive distortion whereby we sort through masses of information and latch onto specific ideas that reinforce a personal fear (After reading that ICU doctor’s Facebook post about a hospitalized infant, I’m certain my child will get sick with COVID-19). Marinating in a toxic brine of fear and uncertainty can make us sick—whether from fatigue and insomnia or irritability and burnout. And when our children hear us processing endless loops of what if thinking, they can become worried and depressed too. Fixating on a single threat to children’s health can keep us from recognizing their broad human needs... we must accept the unpleasant reality that risk is everywhere. Children face many serious threats to their well-being, including other diseases, mental illness, and accidents. Vehicular crashes kill more than 1,000 Americans younger than 15 each year. Yet we’ve accepted this risk; we also don’t revisit it with every news story about a car crash. When my patients ask me whether a given activity is safe, I usually tell them the answer isn’t a firm yes or no. Absolutism itself can do harm. Rather, I ask about individual patients’ circumstances, explain medical evidence, and try to help frame their decision by offering advice about relative risks and benefits. As with fear, risk cannot be eliminated; it can only be mitigated. Health stems from allowing fear to protect us from dying but not allowing it to prevent us from living. Similarly, victory over COVID-19 will require accepting our perilous reality, releasing ourselves from the impossible task of eradicating danger, and relishing the sometimes-immeasurable reward that comes from tolerating risk"
The Odds of being struck by lightning in your lifetime are about 0.01%. Meanwhile for 0-19 year olds the covid IFR is estimated at just over 0.005% for the age group most at risk (0-4)
Covid hystericists are to a great extent the same people who mock "conservatives" by mockingly crying "what about the children?"
Unfortunately she didn't explicitly call out vaxholes for spreading misinformation
Though the writer is an internist (practising internal medicine), covid hystericists won't care
Stephen L. Miller on Twitter - "ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Gov. Kathy Hochul acknowledges nearly 12,000 more COVID-19 fatalities in NY than publicized by Cuomo administration."
"Ron DeSantis needs to resign immediately or be recalled. This is criminal."
The most vaccine-hesitant group of all? PhDs - "in the first five months of 2021, the largest decrease in hesitancy was among the least educated — those with a high school education or less. Meanwhile, hesitancy held constant in the most educated group; by May, those with Ph.Ds were the most hesitant group. So not only are the most educated people most sceptical of taking the Covid vaccine, they are also the least likely the change their minds about it…"
So much for mocking all covid vaccine skeptics as ignorant and uneducated
Meme - "Fran Cene: The information is out there. There is a vaccine that is working. At this point, as the delta variant ramps up and continues to get worse, we, as a society, need to shift the focus to how we manage these Patients. If you willingly refuse a vaccine, then it should be a refusal of medical treatment for the disease. We will have socially responsible people dying of other diseases and traumas because there will be no beds or staff to care for them. If you refuse the vaccine, own the consequences."
"Wanting others to die because of their beliefs is so hot right now."
So much for us being all in it together.
Nowadays liberals want a disproportionate number of minorities to die by depriving them of healthcare. How ironic
Liberals claim healthcare is a human right. I guess human rights are only if you don't do anything liberals disapprove of
Facebook - "Do all these vaccine and other snitches not know the deeply racist history of snitching culture? Do they not realize they're upholding a culture that maintained slavery, segregation, apartheid, and Jim Crow?"
Joe Rogan, who's not a doctor, gives terrible vaccine advice
COVID-19 variants: 5 things Bill Gates wants you to know
Erich Hartmann on Twitter - "Wow. The AAP is actively *deleting* entire sections from their website re early childhood development & the importance of facial cues for learning. They are memory holing decades of known & accepted medicine, all bc they have embraced forced masking of our nations children. Wow."
Opinion | Actually, Wearing a Mask Can Help Your Child Learn - The New York Times
"Science"
Meme - ""Omg no one says this" says the clowns
"Refusing to vaccinate for any dumb reason should terminate any human rights.""
Facebook - "The dumbest conspiracy theory I’ve ever heard is that the government locked you in your house to benefit your health & it was only going to last for 15 days"
"Next time you write a dumb article about me, don’t call me a “conspiracy theorist” when you’ve been wrong fifty times in the last year."
Jo on Twitter - "I would eat rancid durian left in a hot car for 12 days while listening to Josh Groban sing Christmas songs before I would take some bullshit trump “vaccine”. You?"
Jo on Twitter - "Who’s got two thumbs and an appointment for a Covid vaccine?!?!"
Damn conservatives and their vaccine hesitancy!
Hollywood Writer Don Winslow Promotes COVID-19 Vax After Telling People Not to Get 'Trump's Rushed Vaccine' - "Hollywood writer and left-wing influencer Don Winslow has created a new video to promote COVID-19 vaccinations less than a year after he warned people against taking what he called President Donald Trump’s “rushed ‘vaccine.'”... Winslow was promoting a much different message when Trump was still in office, claiming that anyone who gets “Trump’s rushed ‘vaccine'” is an “idiot.” “If you take Donald Trump’s rushed ‘vaccine’ you’re an idiot,” he tweeted in October. Winslow appears to have deleted the tweet, but screenshots of the post are circulating online. Winslow has acknowledged the screenshots by claiming he was only referring to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. His original tweet made no reference to Johnson & Johnson or any brand of the COVID-19 vaccine."
So much for stopping "the lies and misinformation"
Meme - Tony Posnanski @tonyposnanski: "Not one fucking legitimate doctor is endorsing this fucking vaccine coming out in a month. Fuck Trump. He only cares about himself."
Tony Posnanski @tonyposnanski: "I will fucking take a vaccine booster every fucking day I don't give a fuck."
Meme - "Scott Dworkin @funder Replying to @realDonald Trump: "There is no vaccine. This is a lie, acting like there is one. You're a fraud. Resign."
Scott Dworkin @funder: "If you're spreading vaccine lies then you're on the side of the virus."
James Lindsay - Posts | Facebook - "Our new paper in @JAMANetworkOpen shows no disparity in adjusted outcomes between Black/Hispanic/White #COVID19 patients @nyulangone once hospitalized; if anything, Blacks seem to do a little better. Is this an anomaly?"
"No one is shocked. Next, no one will be shocked when this paper gets retracted because lunatics on Twitter start calling everyone involved "racist." Importantly, this article shows a disparity in hospital outcomes—whites do WORSE than blacks—but that's NOT what they focus on. They focus on conjecture about why black patients OUTSIDE of the hospital do worse and assume anomaly. That's how dominant the narrative is. It's a look at the Matrix trying to correct itself around a blatant glitch, and people in it blinking a bit and trying to figure out if something is off."
Jason Rantz on KTTH Radio on Twitter - "A WA teacher's union president says reopening schools is an example of "white supremacy," concern over a child's mental health or suicide risk is "white privilege," and push to reopen schools is like rioters pushing to enter the U.S. Capitol"
Chicago Teachers Union: ‘The Push To Reopen Schools Is Rooted in Sexism, Racism, and Misogyny’ - "The Chicago Teachers Union, which represents more than 28,000 educators in the nation's third largest city, tweeted on Sunday: "The push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny." That was the entire tweet; the union provided no additional comment or clarifying statement. There was no acknowledgment that many people who argue schools should reopen are doing so in good faith... Stressed-out parents who want to send their kids back to the classroom are not motivated by animus toward teachers, and they are certainly not motivated by animus toward women or minorities. Indeed, many people who want schools to reopen are women and minorities. Pandemic-related closures have disproportionately affected inner-city families that rely on public education. Young kids of color are some of the hardest hit. More than 800,000 women have dropped out of the work force during the pandemic, in large part because they now have to take care of their kids. Given this reality, it would be more accurate to say that the push to keep schools closed is racist and sexist—though the root cause of the continuing closures is not racism or sexism, but rather the tremendous political power of teachers unions, who have lobbied district officials to stick with virtual education even as other essential employees return to work. Public school teachers, after all, continue to receive a paycheck regardless, which means their union has very little incentive to take any risk whatsoever, no matter how substandard the quality of remote education might be. It's worth recalling that the effort to keep schools closed is not grounded in science: Everyone from Anthony Fauci to Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) agrees that many districts should move toward reopening on a case-by-case basis. The evidence shows that classrooms are not a significant source of spread for COVID-19."
When Covid-19 closed schools, Black, Hispanic and poor kids took biggest hit in math, reading
SI activist trashes Pete Davidson for forgetting his roots - "The “King of Staten Island” should get out of his ivory tower, a local activist said Monday, trashing comedian Pete Davidson for looking down on his home borough and small business owners struggling with coronavirus restrictions. Davidson, of “The King of Staten Island” and “Saturday Night Live” fame, cracked on the most recent installment of the late-night sketch show that supporters of Mac’s Public House, a borough bar flouting COVID-19 restrictions, are making locals “look like babies.”"
‘Saturday Night Live’ Found a COVID Loophole for Its Live Audience - "members of the “Saturday Night Live” studio audience who attended the show’s taping last weekend were paid, effectively making them cast members. Though New York state guidelines prohibit the public from attending live television shows, the “Saturday Night Live” team’s loophole allowed the show to be filmed in accordance with the state’s reopening guidelines, which were enacted to slow the spread of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic."
Restaurants and Bars Account for 1.4 Percent of COVID-19 Spread in New York, According to State Data - "Restaurants and bars accounted for 1.43 percent of COVID-19 cases recorded between September through the end of November, according to data derived from 46,000 voluntary responses to contact tracing surveys in New York. Those cases only account for about 20 percent of the total 210,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases that were recorded in New York during that timeframe. The vast majority of cases either did not know the source of infection or would not disclose... A Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report from September indicated that the risk of contracting the virus at restaurants was much higher than places like hair salons or shopping. Yet based on its contact tracing data, the state places the restaurant industry as just the fifth-largest contributor to spreading COVID-19 in the state, following education employees (1.5 percent), higher-education students (2.02 percent), and healthcare delivery (7.81 percent). The largest contributor to COVID-19 spread in New York, by far, is private household and social gatherings. According to the state, 73.84 percent of COVID-19 cases spread through private gatherings. During the same press conference in which the COVID-19 spread data was released, Cuomo also announced that indoor dining was banned in NYC starting on Monday. Even though restaurants were not a large contributor to the uptick in COVID-19 cases in comparison to private gatherings in this data set, Cuomo said that banning indoor dining in the city was “one of the few areas where we think we can actually make a difference” in slowing the spread"
Clearly he was right to lock down restaurants and bars to tackle covid
Millions 'unwittingly tracked' by phone after vaccination to see if movements changed - "Campaigners against greater state surveillance in the UK said Britons would be “disturbed to discover they were unwittingly tracked and subjected to behavioural analysis via their phones”. Silkie Carlo, a spokesman for Big Brother Watch, said: "No one expects that by going to get a vaccine they will be tracked and monitored by their own Government. “This is deeply chilling and could be extremely damaging to public trust in medical confidentiality. "Between looming Covid passports and vaccine phone surveillance, this Government is turning Britain into a Big Brother state under the cover of Covid. This should be a wake up call to us all.""
BREAKING: Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot busted partying maskless after declaring she will continue to wear masks | The Post Millennial - "The viral video tweeted by Haley Mills Pfaffenberger garnered over 4,000 likes on Twitter and mass outrage over the progressive city leader's captured hypocrisy. Pfaffenberger said she spotted Lightfoot in the middle of the multi-level riverfront rooftop party at RPM Seafood. She said it appeared that the party was celebrating Lightfoot's inauguration. No one was seen wearing masks. A security team stopped onlookers from taking photographs... Lightfoot at the beginning of the week said she refuses to unmask despite new guidance issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC told the public that masks are not required for vaccinated individuals. The Chicago mayor maintained said that she'll stay woke regardless of science-based guidance"
Compulsory Covid-19 Vaccinations May Be Unpalatable but Necessary - Bloomberg - "the harm principle also suggests that intervention is necessary when there is real or potential injury to others, and the harm here is great — 3.4 million lives lost to date... Take University of Richmond philosopher Jessica Flanigan’s comparison between vaccine refuseniks and a person firing a weapon into the air"
Turns out "my body, my choice" only applies to abortion. I like how covid hystericists are so ignorant of the science, when we have long known that the vaccines don't prevent either infection or transmission, and we have known for even longer than covid has an under 1% IFR
One year after circuit breaker, people in S'pore socialising less, working more; mental well-being has declined - "61 per cent of the 1,000 respondents said they now socialise less frequently with those outside their immediate family than before the restrictions were put in place... Forty-four per cent also reported that their social circles outside of their immediate family had shrunk over the past year. And while 20 per cent said they socialise with their immediate family more frequently nowadays, 23 per cent said they do so less frequently... Mental health has been under the spotlight since the pandemic started and the survey found that 31 per cent reported their mental well-being had "somewhat worsened". Five per cent said it had worsened "much more"."
We need more lockdowns to protect public health!
Stay-at-home policy is a case of exception fallacy: an internet-based ecological study - "A recent mathematical model has suggested that staying at home did not play a dominant role in reducing COVID-19 transmission. The second wave of cases in Europe, in regions that were considered as COVID-19 controlled, may raise some concerns. Our objective was to assess the association between staying at home (%) and the reduction/increase in the number of deaths due to COVID-19 in several regions in the world. In this ecological study, data from www.google.com/covid19/mobility/, ourworldindata.org and covid.saude.gov.br were combined. Countries with > 100 deaths and with a Healthcare Access and Quality Index of ≥ 67 were included. Data were preprocessed and analyzed using the difference between number of deaths/million between 2 regions and the difference between the percentage of staying at home. The analysis was performed using linear regression with special attention to residual analysis. After preprocessing the data, 87 regions around the world were included, yielding 3741 pairwise comparisons for linear regression analysis. Only 63 (1.6%) comparisons were significant. With our results, we were not able to explain if COVID-19 mortality is reduced by staying at home in ~ 98% of the comparisons after epidemiological weeks 9 to 34."
Facebook - "If the vaccine narrative completely falls apart, will they go back to blaming Trump for it? LOL"
Gad Saad on Twitter - "People have such poor abilities to think broadly. When I criticize the endlessly evolving and random COVID rules, this does not imply that I don’t take the virus very seriously nor does it imply that I think we should rub crystals together to cure COVID. I don’t need to be lectured about the virtues of science. I critique shoddy decision making and incoherent public policy making. It’s precisely my commitment to science that causes me to mock some of the utter random BS."
An0maly on Twitter (March 14, 2020) - "They are going to use this to push:
✅ Medical tyranny
✅ Mandated vaccines
✅ Government mandated lockdowns
✅ Authoritarian power grabs
✅ Even bigger speech censorship
Life will never be the same & Trump doesn’t have a magic plan to save you ‘til the end of time."
Facebook - "I said this BEFORE “15 Days to Slow The Spread” & “Operation Warp Speed”. People on the right hated hearing it because they thought their savior Trump would do everything for them. The left probably called it a “conspiracy theory”. The same people complaining about my takes today were complaining about this. Oh well!"
How strange when "conspiracy theories" turn out to be stunningly accurate predictions
Early signs COVID-19 vaccines may not stop Delta transmission, England says | Toronto Sun
VEZINA: On mandatory vaccines and the Delta variant | Toronto Sun - "The problem is that the argument in favour of mandating vaccines is being made solely in the context of the Delta variant... At present, the argument in favour of mandatory vaccination is that if everyone is vaccinated, Delta won’t spread... there is a difference between public safety and personal safety... vaccination is mainly a personal safety tool — get vaccinated so you won’t get really sick or die. It is one thing to curtail freedoms for public safety. It is another to do so for reasons of personal safety because then personal freedom comes into play. The argument in favour of vaccines can, however, be positioned differently. If the primary concern is reducing the workload on the hospital system and preventing severe COVID-19 cases from overwhelming it, then getting vaccinated becomes a public safety issue, not just one of personal safety. It changes the argument to “you must get vaccinated because treating you in the hospital will have a negative outcome on others due to the backlog of both Delta and non-Delta patients who need treatment.” There are some interesting implications to this. The leading cause of death globally is heart disease. In Canada, in any given year, it’s heart disease or cancer. If a reduction on the strain on our medical system justifies a mandated government public safety response, why not mandate healthy eating? Why not make smoking illegal? Justifying mandatory vaccinations solely on the basis of one mutation of the COVID-19 variant is a difficult argument for many to accept."
Elad Eliahu on Twitter - "This jewish refusenik protesting new covid requirements in NYC compares these restrictions to those faced by jews in 1938 says he's a proud deplorable, and has been a deplorable since his time in the Soviet Union"
Liberals can't dismiss him as a goyim who has no right to invoke the Holocaust (even as they always invoke it themselves), or someone who has no idea what oppression really is.
MALCOLM: Let's talk about who could be harmed by domestic vax passports | Toronto Sun - "former Chretién advisor Peter Donolo proclaims that passport vaccines are Trudeau’s path to a majority. “The fact is that 80 per cent of those aged 12 and older have already received at least one dose of vaccine. By that measure, we can infer that a supermajority of actual voters have been inoculated,” says Donolo. “Anyone who has ever advised a political leader will tell you that when you have an issue that roughly 80 per cent of the electorate agree on, you have a winner – especially if your main opponent won’t touch it.” What Donolo is roughly describing here is what political scientists call a “tyranny of the majority.” He seems to believe that 80% of Canadian adults who are vaccinated will happily run roughshod on the 20% of the population who are hesitant to get vaccinated. A national vaccine passport would be an institutionalized policy of discrimination against those who have not been vaccinated. And while many Liberals seem giddy about this idea, it may put them on the wrong side of history. That’s because it appears that vaccine passports and forced vaccination schemes may prove to disproportionately harm black and Indigenous Canadians. Allow me to explain. In data obtained by True North, Statistics Canada observes that “certain sub-groups in Canada are more likely to report COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. These include black Canadians, Indigenous peoples, newcomers, and younger adults, among others.” The StatsCan report, which is based on a COVID-19 vaccine willingness survey from March of this year, reveals that black Canadians have the lowest willingness to take the COVID-19 vaccine (56.6%), while Indigenous Canadians have the second-lowest (71.8%)... First Nations band councils, as well as community services staff on reserves, are also federally regulated industries. Is Trudeau prepared to fire any black civil servants or remove any First Nations band councillors who refuse to get vaccinated? Is he willing to impose a policy that will further harm these already marginalized groups? When Trudeau took a knee at a protest in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, or when he went on about “systemic racism” in Canada, does it become meaningless if he’s also willing to implement a policy that may exclude and harm a sizeable percentage of the black population in Canada? If Trudeau imposes a vaccine passport, a future prime minister may one day apologize for it."
OPINION: Mandatory vaccination for COVID has no rational basis | Toronto Sun - "what is a vaccine passport supposed to prove? What are vaccination mandates meant to achieve? Before Delta, vaccinated individuals may have been slightly less contagious than the unvaccinated. But with Delta, there does not appear to be a difference in spreading the virus... It is therefore nobody’s business to know whether another person is vaccinated or not. And there is no reason to expect, pressure or require another person to “take the jab.” The campaign to vaccinate children and young adults is particularly offensive, since they bear all the risks from short- and long-term adverse events and obtain no measurable benefits from the shot. In addition, people who had recovered from a SARS-CoV-2 infection were not recruited for the pharma companies’ phase II/III trials. Therefore, we also do not know how the vaccines interact with natural immunity from a previous infection. Having recovered from COVID-19 should count for something... Germany is one example of a country where three groups — recovered, negatively tested and fully vaccinated individuals — are treated the same way, at least in some areas of public life. Mandatory vaccination for COVID has no rational basis. We must wonder what the true motivations are when public health doctors, union leaders and politicians insist on vaccine passports. It is high time that we wake up from our collective delusion and return to some form of normal life. That includes preventing and treating respiratory diseases, as we always have, without intruding in personal health decisions."
Canadian Human Rights Commission weighs in on vaccine passports - ""requirements for a passport might potentially discriminate on the basis of disability or religious belief.”... Vaccine passports inherently raise issues related to privacy and human rights, said Halifax-based privacy lawyer David Fraser. “I think there's going to be questions related to accommodation of individuals who can't be vaccinated for whatever reason,” he said. For example, he said pregnancy status and health conditions related to being immunocompromised are both protected grounds of discrimination in human rights legislation... The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) is opposed to the idea of vaccine passports regulating travel and activities within Canada. All Canadians have mobility rights under the charter, which are supposed to allow people to move freely throughout Canada, and a passport system could infringe on those rights, said Cara Zwibel, director of the CCLA’s fundamental freedoms program. Zwibel said another worry is that requirements to prove vaccination status could expand beyond COVID-19 to other communicable diseases, resulting in a health system where Canadians have to share personal health information to access basic public services... “We're obviously concerned about the privacy implications and the fact that this would potentially authorize a whole bunch of actors across different segments of society to collect personal health information about people”"
Damn moronic snowflakes who are experts at false equivalences and are plague rats who are spreading plague! "Life is going to get tough for the verminkind" (all actual adjectives used to describe those against vaccine passports, and the last is a direct quote - so much for inappropriate Holocaust comparisons)
Not to mention that the whole logic about mandating vaccines to "protect others" falls apart due to their being very good at protecting those who get them but not so good at protecting others (since they don't lower infection rates that much and certainly don't make a big difference in transmission). Indeed, a negative test is more useful if your objective is to "protect" other people. But science never stopped the covid hystericists or covid hysteria anyway
‘Potential for discrimination’: Human rights body urges caution on vaccine passports - "the Australian Human Rights Commission said any move to impose vaccine passports or certificates should be “reasonable, necessary, and proportionate” and “must take into account the potential for discrimination”. It said groups that could be discriminated against include people who have a medical reason not to be vaccinated, individuals who seek to avoid contact with government agencies including migrants and vaccine-hesitant Australians... In an apparent break from national cabinet’s position, Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan said on Sunday he will pursue a policy of zero COVID-19 cases in his state even after it reaches an 80 per cent vaccination rate."
Looks like Western Australia will be cut off from the rest of Australia, much less the world, for all time
What Are The Rights-Based Implications Of Vaccine Passports? - "The notion of introducing passports for the Covid-19 vaccine has been controversial, particularly following their usage at England’s 2020 Euro match. The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee (PACAC) has concluded that, based on race, religion, age and socio-economic background, they will “disproportionately discriminate”. This would directly contradict the Equality Act 2010, which protects marginalised groups against discrimination, and would mean vaccine passports are not justifiable if they exacerbate inequalities. “We are entirely unconvinced by the case for their introduction,” says William Wragg, the chair of the committee. “As vaccine uptake statistics indicate, any Covid certification system will be a discriminator along the lines of race, religion and age.” Currently, the WHO do not recommend the use of them saying “States Parties are strongly encouraged to acknowledge the potential for requirements of proof of vaccination to deepen inequities and promote differential freedom of movement.”... human rights barrister and EachOther founder Adam Wagner said, “Vaccination certificates themselves are not controversial or new. What is controversial and new is the proposed use of certificates to determine whether an individual can participate in workplace and social activities.”... “Domestic vaccine passports are potentially discriminatory,” says employment solicitor Simon Robinson. “I don’t believe anyone should be indirectly forced to have a jab against their will. If they are told they will lose their job or can’t go to the pub unless they have a domestic vaccine passport, then it isn’t a free choice.” There is also concern that vaccine passports could be a ‘slippery slope’, as articulated by Liberty: “This has wider implications too because any form of immunity passport could pave the way for a full ID system – an idea which has repeatedly been rejected as incompatible with building a rights-respecting society.” This is a concern Robinson echoes, “If I genuinely thought they’d be used for Covid-19 and they would be for a defined and short amount of time, and they were necessary, I’d be less uncomfortable with them. The problem is I don’t think any of those things are true.”"
Covid hystericists ignore the WHO when they want to push their agenda
Jacob Airey on Twitter - "It's just 2 weeks
It's just a mask
It's just 6 feet
It's just a vax
It's just a booster
It's just a passport
It's just an app
It's just a tracker
It's just a denial of medical care
It's just a hotel
It's just a quarantine
It's a camp
It's just jail
It's just a firing squad"
Quebec's vaccine passports may pose risks to fundamental rights, experts warn - "While the majority of the population appears to support Quebec’s plan to require vaccine passports, human rights advocates and privacy experts caution they could infringe on personal liberties and drive marginalized communities further underground... For pharmacologist Sabina Vohra-Miller, co-founder of the Toronto-based South Asian Health Network and the Vohra Miller Foundation, however, the concept of vaccine passports serves only to “further marginalize communities that already have built-in inequities.” Many of those not yet vaccinated include migrant or undocumented workers frightened of being deported, essential service workers, people with mobility issues and racialized groups with a deep-rooted distrust of the health-care system. “What’s going to happen when you disallow people from certain activities is you further stigmatize and disadvantage the same populations that have been very marginalized throughout the entire pandemic,” Vohra-Miller said. “So it’s just going to perpetuate inequities.”... Personal privacy is also at risk, as the QR code issued digitally by the government could easily include an element of surveillance... Quebec’s human rights watchdog La Ligue des droits et libertés expressed concerns over the fact the government is imposing the measure without debate. “The government of Quebec should not have the power to decide in a unilateral and unclear manner on an issue that could have grave consequences on rights and liberties,” the group said Friday. “This suspension of democratic debates is permitted by the state of emergency, which leads to an intense concentration of powers in the hands of the government.” Opposition party Québec solidaire has also criticized the government for failing to call a parliamentary committee that would allow experts to testify on the positives and negatives of vaccine passports."
Quebec politicians’ COVID-19 vaccine passport QR codes allegedly hacked, police complaints filed - The Globe and Mail - "The quick response codes are scannable codes containing a person’s name, date of birth and information about the vaccinations they have received. They are the central feature of the government’s vaccine passport system, which will be required as of Sept. 1 to visit businesses the provincial government deems non-essential, such as bars, clubs and restaurants."
Meme - "I used to like to get a burger and fries. Vaccine discrimination is systemic racism in disguise. 55% of Black folx will be excluded from public life in New York City by vaccine passports. The New Jim Crow. Stand against this discrimination. #AskMeWhy #SystemicRacism #HumanRights #VaccinePassportsAreRacist #MyBodyMyChoice
BLACK LIVES MATTER
"One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of 'not racist.' The claim of "not racist" neutrality is a mask for racism" - Ibram X. Kendi"
The left loves disparate impact reasoning after all
NMSU study: COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy highest among Hispanic, Black adults in US
Nolte: NY's Jim Crow Vaccine Passport Will Deny Service to 72% of Young Black Residents - "A full 72 percent of young, black New Yorkers are about to be denied service and the right to work in New York City restaurants, gyms, and theaters. The far-left New York Times reported Thursday only 28 percent of black New Yorkers aged 18 to 44 years are vaccinated, “compared with 48 percent of Latino residents and 52 percent of white residents in that age group.”... they won’t only be denied service; they will also be denied the right to work at these establishments... Why would anyone trust a media that for three years told us Donald Trump was a Russian spy? Why would we trust health “experts” who tell us MAGA rallies are super-spreader events and Black Lives Matter riots and Obama birthday parties are not? Why would anyone trust a government that told us we were winning in Afghanistan? Why would anyone trust the institutions that told us Trump could never win, Brexit could never happen, riots are “mostly peaceful,” Andrew Cuomo epitomizes leadership, men can magically transform into women, Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation, Trump voters spread COVID, and illegal aliens don’t, the coronavirus came from a bat and definitely not a lab, killer Hurricanes are on the way, we’ve seen the last of snow, and Trump supporters killed a police officer with a fire extinguisher? Why would anyone trust a Democrat party that tells us we’re killing people if we don’t wear a mask and is then constantly caught not wearing masks? Why would anyone trust a health community that locked us down even as Texas, Florida, and South Dakota prove lockdowns changed nothing? Why would anyone trust a CDC that is right now spreading hysteria over “breakthrough” coronavirus cases among the vaccinated that are nowhere near as dangerous as driving a car or crossing the street?"
Vaccine passports are a step on the road to Hell - " It’s a testament to our national confusion that even the virtuous citizen manning a vaccination centre might not know the rules, but what if I were an elderly person, or someone with learning difficulties, who showed up without a lanyard and couldn’t wear a mask, would she have refused me entrance and thus denied me a vaccine? That strikes me as discriminatory and quite mad, but then the direction of this whole enterprise isn’t protection against death but the regulation of daily life. The latest step towards Hell is the vaccine passport. Supporters say they will only be at nightclubs and large venues, like stadiums, and temporary to boot, but the Government ruled out even creating them several times before – and if we have learnt anything it’s that what seems unimaginable one week is public policy the next... It was noticed that when Nadhim Zahawi, in the Commons on July 22, listed locations that would be exempt from passports, he did not include places of worship. A priest called me to say that not only would he regard this as an appalling invasion of religious liberty but as a vaccine refusenik himself, on the grounds that some vaccines are feared to have a historic link to abortion, he would be banned from saying Mass in his own church. Who would police the mosques or the synagogues? If someone refuses to show a passport and makes a mad dash for the pews, is Fr McCarthy supposed to pin him down while Sister Perpetua telephones the police? Churches attract the very groups one can see vaccine passports being a logistical problem for, namely the disabled and the elderly, and the bureaucratic assumptions behind showing papers, electronic or physical, are naive and disturbing... Isn’t it astonishing how something that was an accessory about 10 years ago – basically a phone with a camera – has become a necessity, almost a requirement? It has rendered technophobes like my mother, who every time she tries to make a phone call takes a photograph of her knees, a virtual non-citizen. The selling point is convenience, which modern man thinks is a synonym for freedom, but it absolutely ain’t, as a recent horror story in the United States demonstrates. A Catholic newsletter, The Pillar, accused a prominent cleric of being a regular user of the gay hook-up app Grindr, presumably breaking his vows. He resigned his post, but even some conservatives regarded his sin as a second order issue when they discovered how The Pillar says it uncovered his activities – via “commercially available records of app signal data”. In layman’s language, the newsletter purchased information related to the priest’s phone usage. I never thought this possible; apparently in America, it very much is... The UK Government is thinking of launching a smartphone app that will reward citizens for exercising and shopping healthily with discounts, free tickets etc, a calorie-lite version of the Chinese social credit system. A good citizen used to be someone who voted and paid their taxes. Now we are expected to finish our vegetables, too."
“Papers Please” Passports Are a Portal Towards a COVID-Vax Caste System - "A “papers please” police state is built on a culture of suspicion. There is no due process. No mercy. No habeas corpus. Domestic papers which grant permission for movement and privilege are also the substance of caste systems. When discussing India’s affirmative action programs, Thomas Sowell explains that although India is the “world’s largest multi-ethnic society, it’s the most socially fragmented.”... Social stigma encourages social fragmentation. Violence against outcastes, Sowell states, has been widespread."
The nuances of vaccine passports - "a vaccine passport, enacted broadly, can create unseen costs. Presumably, the kitchen staff will have to be fully vaccinated if a restaurant requires a vaccine certificate from its customers, and yet there will be many whose employers will not reimburse time lost to accessing vaccines and/or recovering from vaccine side-effects: This financial burden might be the cost of a bottle of wine for the consumer but may represent a whole day’s wages for some staff. Further, think of individuals experiencing homelessness who have food insecurity and rely on spending significantly less money at the local McDonalds; perhaps they are turned away because they don’t have a phone to show their electronic certificate. COVID-19 security for some can thus translate into food insecurity for others. To some extent, vaccine certificates might reinforce the walls between social classes rather than providing meaningful social good... [Some] cannot overcome economic barriers to vaccine access or live in mistrust of a medical enterprise implicated in historical abuses predicated on race, gender or socioeconomic status. Others might wish to be vaccinated but are constrained by communities or spouses (or parents, in the case of adolescents) who prevent them, perhaps even violently, from getting their jab. Vaccine passports might “close the gap” on the outcome measure (i.e., the per cent of the population that has been vaccinated) but will do so in a way that, for some, exacerbates rather than solves the barriers that created that gap in the first place by demanding proof in spite of poverty or by countering mistrust with force (especially where a vaccine certificate is broadly applied and its absence equates to exclusion from shopping centres, libraries, or other places where attendance may not be optional for a given individual)."
It is interesting that most analyses of vaccine passports don't even look at the rationale for introducing them, but take it for granted that they are to protect others, when almost all the others are mostly going to be vaccinated anyway (kids are at neglibile risk, and very few mention those who have medical exemptions, who ironically not all vaccine passports implementations will have an exemption for) and the vaccines are not good at preventing infection and transmission. So despite claiming they believe in science, it's weird how vaxholes don't understand how the vaccines work
Checkpoints for vaccine passports: Law, rights and ethics - "Some bioethicists have argued... that those who can demonstrate that they are highly unlikely to spread COVID-19 no longer pose a risk to others’ right to life, and so it is unjustified to restrict their civil liberties. The argument centres on an individual being able to prove that they are not a substantial risk to others, through proof of vaccination or antibodies, to lift restrictions on that individual’s liberty. This argument does not necessarily require vaccination or natural immunity to COVID-19 to be perfect: we commonly accept a level of risk in our everyday lives, for example infectious diseases like flu are considered to be a tolerable risk, to be managed without additional restrictions. This argument requires a vaccine or natural immunity to reduce risk to an acceptable level to remove the justification for restrictions. The strength of this argument therefore turns on what level of risk is acceptable for a given society, the impact vaccinations and antibodies have on transmission and therefore risk to others, and the degree of certainty we are willing to accept in the evidence on transmission...
The legality test requires that COVID status certification schemes interfering with the right to respect for private life must have a basis in domestic law and be compatible with the rule of law.
The necessity test demands that the measures adopted address a pressing social need.
The proportionality test requires that the measures taken by public authorities are proportionate to the legitimate aims pursued and entail the least restrictive viable solution...
Even once all eligible adults have been offered a vaccine, those groups where vaccination is not recommended may still be able to claim that a vaccination requirement is discriminatory under the Equality Act 2010. Others might be able to claim discrimination on the basis of religion or belief that requires vaccine refusal... Many of these discrimination concerns can potentially be avoided if appropriate alternatives to vaccination certification are available, for example by exempting certain groups or through providing a negative viral test alternative. Some schemes could prove discriminatory against minority ethnic communities and women with darker skin tones in particular because of the way they verify identity. It has been suggested that some COVID vaccine passport schemes could use facial recognition to verify an individual’s identity. Research demonstrates that commonly used commercial facial recognition products do not accurately identify Black and Asian faces, especially when trying to recognise women with darker skin types... Some bioethicists have highlighted that marginalised groups as a whole may face more scrutiny, as the creation of new checkpoints to access services and spaces may perpetuate disproportionate policing. Labelling people on the basis of their COVID-19 status would also create a new categorisation by which society could be stratified, i.e. the ‘immunoprivileged’ and the ‘immunodeprived’, potentially creating circumstance for novel forms of discrimination... This kind of immunological stratification is not without precedent. In nineteenth-century New Orleans, repeated waves of yellow fever generated a hierarchy of ‘immunocapital’ where those who survived became ‘acclimated citizens’ whose immunity conferred social, economic and political power, and ‘unacclimated strangers’ – generally those who had recently migrated to the area – were treated as an underclass. This stratification also helped to entrench existing ethnic and socioeconomic inequality.
There are many low-income countries that do not currently have the economic capacity to acquire all the doses needed to immunise their whole population... health practitioners and researchers from low-income countries already struggle to conduct research, share their work at conferences and undertake consultancy work in high-income countries, because of existing difficulties obtaining visas and meeting entryrequirements. International COVID vaccine passports could worsen this imbalance, making diversity and inclusion an even more difficult task in the field, and side-lining valuable expertise of academics in low-income countries... There is already pressure on governments to acquire vaccine supplies, which in turn triggers a form of ‘vaccine nationalism’ – where richer countries are able to buy up supplies of vaccines where poorer ones can’t. Tying movement to vaccine certification could entrench existing global inequalities"
This alludes to the importance of considering the deadliness of covid (e.g. mentioning the flu and the proportionality principle) without actually mentioning it, which is a pity; measures that might be justified for a disease with a 30% IFR may not be justified for one with an under 1% IFR
LILLEY: SciTable wants vax certificates they admit aren't scientific | Toronto Sun - "They say this despite admitting that there is no scientific proof that such documents will help stop the spread of COVID-19 or boost vaccine uptake. Basically, they want them because they want them — and it makes them feel better. This would be the same self-appointed and overly self-important “Science Table” which has consistently botched projections for case counts of COVID and what it would take for the government to get the pandemic under control."
Anyone who thinks that 'Covid certification' would be a temporary measure is fooling themselves - "Vaccine passports are only a temporary measure, we will be told – just to protect us during the pandemic. But you can bet that they will soon morph into a smartphone-based ID card which we are expected to carry wherever we go – at least if we want access to any commercial premises or public building. There are too many vested interests to allow the idea to die a death with the pandemic. There are huge fortunes to be made for the tech industry if it can persuade governments and commercial organisations to force on us electronic ID cards which can then be used to collect, store and access our personal data... There is a model for what will be coming our way if we do not resist vaccination passports and electronic ID cards: China’s social credit system, which blacklists people for numerous antisocial offences, from crossing the street on a red light to failing to sort their recycling, and uses the information to deny them the right, for example, to buy rail and airline tickets. The adoption of lockdowns has shown just how pernicious is the influence of authoritarian China on the West. No-one should fool themselves that Britain and other ‘freedom-loving’ western societies have some sort of cultural defence against over-bearing surveillance. We don’t. A combination of authoritarian-minded government ministers, greed on the part of big tech and apathy on the part of many citizens will ensure that vaccination passports quickly evolve into a permanent surveillance infrastructure. What purpose do vaccination passports serve in any case? Vaccination rates among the upper age groups are already up above 95 percent. Those who are vaccinated will be at little extra risk from the odd unvaccinated individual they encounter in a bar or some other venue – it is mostly the unvaccinated people who will be at risk to each other. Do we really need to persecute those who, for whatever reason, have chosen not to be vaccinated? They are not all anti-vaxxers. According to an ONS survey, only nine percent of those who have rejected the vaccine have an opposition to vaccines in general, and three percent of them said they has been advised by their own doctors not to be vaccinated."
James Lindsay - Posts | Facebook - "Once a vaccine is ready and approved, @KamalaHarris and I are going to ensure it’s distributed equitably, efficiently, and free of charge to every American."
"Equitably. And one has to wonder how that will be applied. Blacks first? Racist Uncle Joe does medical experiments on black people. Not blacks first? Racist Uncle Joe doesn't want black people protected from a pandemic that's impacting them disproportionately. Haha. 🍿🍿🍿"
1/1024th Liberty Memes - Posts | Facebook - "Austin mayor records message telling citizens "Stay at home" ... while on vacation in Mexico, after hosting 20 at his daughter's wedding while his city was telling people to limit gatherings to 10.
Denver mayor tweets no-Thanksgiving-travel message ... 30 minutes before boarding a plane for his Thanksgiving travel.
San Jose mayor tweets everyone should cancel their multi-household gatherings for Thanksgiving ... then gathers with 5 households, including his elderly parents, for Thanksgiving.
LA County supervisor votes to sustain ban on both indoor and outdoor dining, and calls even outdoor dining a "most dangerous situation" ... then leaves to dine outdoors at her favorite restaurant.
Chicago mayor scolds citizens for months about large gatherings, then urges them not to gather with even one other household for any reason ... right after celebrating election in a massive street party, periodically removing her mask, because "relief was needed." This came 6 months after she admitted without apology to a haircut during lockdown while it was illegal for salons to offer services, and claimed that the hair stylist wore a mask, although photographs showed that both parties were unmasked.
California governor urges citizens to avoid indoor dining, groups of more than 3 households, and social gatherings ... then dines unmasked and mostly indoors with 21 others, including CA medical officials, at a $20,000 lobbyist dinner.
San Francisco mayor bans tables feeding more than 6 for months, then bans dining in her city ... right after patronizing the same swank restaurant the governor went to, in the same kind of mostly-enclosed room with a party of 8, even though the restaurant's town was at a higher alert level than her own city.
NY governor tells residents to eat Thanksgiving dinner alone ... then plans his own Thanksgiving dinner with 4 households, including his elderly mother, until the public outcry pushes him to cancel.
His brother, a CNN anchor, is caught fighting with a cyclist during the time he claims he never left his basement while quarantining in April. He then scolds the public for 7 months that covid would end if they would just follow social distancing, mask-wearing, and avoiding large gatherings ... but has been seen getting a haircut without a mask, has been threatened with a fine by his apartment for constantly using hallways and elevators without a mask, and most recently was seen socializing indoors at a private club, where he shook hands with many at the large gathering, without social distancing or a mask.
DC mayor requires 2-week quarantine for everyone returning from her list of "high risk" states ... then travels to one of those states and refuses to undergo the quarantine on her return.
Philadelphia mayor closes restaurants in his own city ... then is seen dining in a restaurant in another state.
California Senator calls for national airport mask mandate ... this is seen walking maskless through an airport in violation of its mask mandate. Two months later she's seen speaking maskless and undistanced with two men in a hallway just before attending an indoor Senate hearing where no one was wearing masks, including herself.
Speaker of the House gets a haircut and blowout at a salon, unmasked, while indoor salons are still illegal in her city, blowouts are specifically banned, and outdoor salon services had just been re-legalized the previous day. Two months later she's forced by public outcry to cancel a large indoor dinner she's hosting for new Democrats to Congress.
Numerous mayors, governors, and members of Congress advocate for and enact restrictions regarding large gatherings, indoor gatherings, building capacity, mask-wearing, social distancing, singing, and funerals ... then attend memorial services in June that violated all of those rules, both in the politicians' states and in the states hosting the memorials.
Michigan governor relaxes her ban on motorboating, but urges citizens not to visit Lake Michigan the week of Memorial Day "unless absolutely necessary" ... then her husband calls the storage facility to have their boat put into the water and his car is seen at their lake house just before Memorial Day.
These aren't aberrations. It's a pattern. These Democratic officials just don't think Covid risk is all that high - for them.
I'm tired of petty tyrants making "rules for thee, but not for me.""
Being Classically Liberal - Posts | Facebook - "*Judge Tells Los Angeles They Actually Need Evidence to Ban Outdoor Dining* As we enter day 263 of “fourteen days to slow the spread,” Los Angeles has been hard at work to, in the words of Mayor Eric Garcetti, “cancel everything.” Among his new nonsensical restrictions includes a ban on outdoor dining, driving, and travel on public transport, bikes, motorcycles, and scooters (except for “essential” activities). So severe are his travel restrictions that even “unnecessary walking” is banned. There’s still no word on how regulated excessive breathing and thinking will be. Among the “essential industries” granted exceptions include those who work in entertainment, and private golf courses. Or in other words, people with the political power to lobby for exceptions. The timing on these severe restrictions is just as absurd as the restrictions themselves. After all, one doesn’t need to do more than take a few seconds to search “Los Angeles Black Lives Matter protest” on Google images to find countless images documenting tens to hundreds of thousands of people walking in close proximity in crowded streets earlier this year. Large crowds also gathered in the city to celebrate the media’s declaration of a Biden presidential win, to which participants faced zero consequences (despite the fact that many were walking – excessively!). Garcetti is facing the kind of resistance one would expect, and opponents of his restrictions already have scored a temporary victory when it comes to his ban on outdoor dining... It sure if nice to see a judge actually requiring evidence to justify the clampdowns on human freedom we’ve witnessed this year for a change. And evidence aside, for the sake of consistency, how does one allow outdoor protest but ban outdoor dining? Perhaps the coronavirus is just acting as a Trojan Horse for these sort of politicians."
Calvin Cheng - Posts | Facebook - "In Singapore, about 600 people die from complications related to the common flu yearly. Yes, SARS COV 2 is deadlier and more infectious. But even for flu, those 600 deaths can be reduced through mask wearing, closure of f&b and night life , lockdowns and border closures. Yet we don’t do that. But we continue to do so for Covid, when when most of our seniors are now vaccinated. We are happy to tolerate 600 deaths from flu yearly. Are we able to tolerate 600 deaths from COVID yearly ? Why not ?"
Meme - "ICU nurse here. I don't mind watching our COVID patients die anymore. I've been an ICU nurse for 6 years. 25% of my career (1.5 years) has been dealing with the pandemic. I've FaceTimed loved ones, bagged bodies and lived through the hell you see on TV. It was emotionally draining in the beginning but now it's just cathartic to see these anti-Vaxxer, anti-maskers on their death beds. I have zero empathy for them. They made a choice and now they get to die with their consequences. At this point, I'd just like to wish a huge fuck you to everyone who is making the incomprehensible, selfish decision to not get vaxxed."
Apparently if you're a covid hystericist it's appropriate to wish death on your patients
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "Britain and the United States made different decisions in how vaccines were distributed. The U.K. decided to focus on getting as many people inoculated as possible using one dose instead of the study-confirmed two dose schedule. The overly cautious FDA and CDC chose to adhere to the two dose regimen that the Pfizer and Moderna studies were based on. One dose is 70-80% effective after several weeks while the two dose regimen is over 90% effective. Britain saw their case numbers fall far faster and is now out of the pandemic. The US has used slightly more doses than the U.K. on a per capita basis but isn’t likely to reach the same low levels of community spread for another two months."
Ivermectin in Adults With Severe COVID-19.
Ivermectin is the new hydroxychloroquine and all the covid hystericists hate it. One proclaimed that it would take years of clinical trials before we'd know if it worked (oddly the covid vaccines only took months; he seemed to assume mRNA vaccine technology having been worked on for a while meant there wasn't a need for Phase 1-3 trials for the specific vaccines, even though I cited that Moderna for one had conducted a Phase 1 trial). He also proclaimed that we had ZERO Phase 1-3 clinical trials for it, and doubled down when I found Phase 2 trials like this. Later he accepted that there were some trials, but dismissed them as "overseas" studies. When I asked him to justify his xenophobia he was unapologetic, claiming that it was regarding his friends' and family's safety
Ivermectin vs COVID-19 clinical trial phase 3 to begin mid-September - "The third phase of clinical trials on the use of ivermectin as an alternative treatment for patients with severe COVID-19 cases is expected to start this month, a health expert said. Philippine Council of Health Research and Development of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST – PCHRD) Executive Director Dr. Jaime Montoya said in a Laging Handa public briefing on Monday (Sept. 6) that the Ethics and Technical Review Board is about to finish their review on protocols before allowing the start of phase three of ivermectin as an alternative treatment here... the Philippines, as part of the International Clinical Trials Consortium, is among other participating nations that need to conduct trials for the use of the therapeutic drug."
It's telling that virtually all the trials are from the Third World. There's one German and one Singaporean trial but that's it. So much for scientific research. Ideological conformity is more important - the only acceptable answers to covid are lockdowns or vaccines
Rolling Stone slammed for FAKE story about Oklahoma patients overdosing on ivermectin - "When Rolling Stone shared a story about Oklahoma hospitals being overwhelmed by patients overdosing on the drug ivermectin, they expected it to go viral. But they most definitely did not expect it to be fake. After it created a lot of furore on social media, the publication was forced to issue an update to their viral story about the Oklahoma hospitals. The story got the "update" after the doctor they cited — Dr. Jason McElyea — was contradicted by the hospitals he referenced... The story was also shared by publications like New York Daily News, Newsweek, The Guardian, and Insider. The Rolling Stone later published an "update" to the top of the story which repeats NHS' statement. Critics slammed the magazine for publishing what appears to be a false story. Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted "The only reason Rolling Stone is calling this an ‘UPDATE’ as opposed to what it so plainly is — a RETRACTION — is because liberal outlets know that their readers don't care at all if they publish fake news as long as it's done with the right political motives and goals." Adding, he said, "That's the same reason the hard-core Dem Party media loyalists, led as usual by @Maddow, spread this fake story all over based on what appears to be a fraudulent source without checking. Fake News is 100% acceptable if done with good political motives:""
Plus even the photo used was fake
Meme - ""YOU'RE NOT A HORSE, DON'T TAKE HORSE MEDICINE." SAID THE MENTALLY ILL MAN WHO CUT OFF HIS PENIS BECAUSE HE THOUGHT HE WAS A WOMAN."
Ivermectin infertility story correction: FDA rejects 2011 Nigeria study - "A national story regarding Ivermectin and a study regarding its effect on men’s reproductive health that KTSM published, has been removed from our website. Concerns over the scientific research methods, the veracity of the original, peer-reviewed report and public statements by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) saying that infertility is not a known side effect of Ivermectin all led to our editorial decision to remove the story."
I still see all the covid hystericists cheerfully spreading the fake news
Liberal Feels Sad For Man Dying Of COVID, Then Happy After Hearing He Wasn’t Vaccinated, Then Sad Again Because He Was An Illegal Immigrant | The Babylon Bee - "As Brynlee continued to read the news, his sadness turned to joy once again when he found out that the illegal immigrant was an anti-communist refugee from Cuba. "Eh—I guess the dummy should have stayed in Cuba where they have the best healthcare," he said smugly. "Did I mention how compassionate I am?""
Harvard Epidemiologist: The Case for Vaccine Passports Was Demolished - "infection from COVID-19 confers considerably longer-lasting and stronger protection against the Delta variant of the virus than vaccines... vaccinated individuals were 27 times more likely to get a symptomatic COVID infection than those with natural immunity from COVID... Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kuldorff said research showing that natural immunity offers exponentially more protection than vaccines means vaccine passports are both unscientific and discriminatory, since they disproportionately affect working class individuals. “Prior COVID disease (many working class) provides better immunity than vaccines (many professionals), so vaccine mandates are not only scientific nonsense, they are also discriminatory and unethical,” Kuldorff, a biostatistician and epidemiologist, observed on Twitter. Nor is the study out of Israel a one-off. Media reports show that no fewer than 15 academic studies have found that natural immunity offers more protection from COVID-19 than the virus. Moreover, CDC research shows that vaccinated individuals still get infected with COVID-19 and carry just as much of the virus in their throat and nasal passage as unvaccinated individuals."
To vaxholes, if you deviate from the narrative on vaccine or vaccine pasports, you're an "anti-vaxxer". So he might be the most prominent "anti-vaxxer" to date!
Comparing SARS-CoV-2 natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity: reinfections versus breakthrough infections - "This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity. Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant."
#FirstDoNoHarm | Open Letter From Health Professionals - UsforThem - " We the undersigned British health professionals and scientists, wish to express our serious concern about the current situation regarding the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The management of the crisis has become disproportionate and is now causing more harm than good. We urge policy makers to remember that this pandemic, like all pandemics, will eventually pass but the social and psychological damage that it is causing, risks becoming permanent."
Lockdown: a deadly, failed experiment - "The country this year which has been most ravaged by Covid-19 – losing a shocking 1,600 people in every million to the virus at the time of writing – is Belgium. That might come as something of a surprise. You could be forgiven for thinking it was America, thanks to Trump’s alleged ignorance of science. Or what about Britain, which locked down ‘too late’ because of its government’s short-lived but foolish belief in freedom? Or Brazil, whose right-wing leader complained that lockdowns and masks were for ‘fags’? If not those, then surely Sweden, where there has famously been no hard lockdown at all? But no, it’s Belgium. There’s nothing particularly unusual about Belgium’s response. Nothing that diverged significantly from the consensus. It did the same thing as everyone else around the same time as everyone else. It even garnered praise for its testing capacity... go down the list of deaths per million and you find more places you might not expect. Hard-hit Italy is in second place, but it was the first to get hit in the West so we should let them off. Then there’s Slovenia, which was relatively unscathed in the spring. After that, it’s Peru. Peru announced one of the earliest lockdowns in the world on 16 March – also the first in Latin America. The restrictions were some of the most stringent on the planet, enforced by the military. Masks were made mandatory in public. But by May, two months in, cases began to jump considerably. This was despite the country doing ‘everything right’ and ‘right on time’. There was some easing of the lockdown from June onwards. But social gatherings were still illegal in August, by which point 200 people were still dying per day. Elsewhere in Latin America, Argentina experienced a similar mid-lockdown explosion in cases and deaths. Its lockdown began on 20 March and was supposed to be short and sharp. It ended up becoming the longest continuous lockdown in the world. In June, Time magazine hailed Argentina’s success in containing the virus. But not long after, cases began to surge. The deadliest day of its pandemic was on day 145 of lockdown. Lockdowns have become central to any discussion of Covid-19. The assumption that lockdown is the only way to prevent Covid deaths has become embedded in mainstream thinking. Apparently, the only permitted questions are if we are locking down early enough, hard enough or for long enough. Lockdown has similarly become the default response to rises in cases (though sometimes these now take local rather than national form). But the conventional wisdom that more lockdown means fewer deaths simply does not hold true in the real world. There is globally no association, let alone causation, between lockdowns and Covid deaths. And yet the harms of the policy are extreme. Developed countries have this year experienced record drops in economic output. Britain, for instance, has experienced its worst recession in 300 years (since the Great Frost of 1709, if you were wondering). The burden of this has fallen overwhelmingly on the poorest in society, while billionaires have watched their wealth multiply. In the developing world, the World Bank estimates that an additional 150million people will fall into ‘extreme poverty’. Children have born a disproportionate brunt of the lockdowns – even though children face very minor risks from Covid and school closures are not associated with reduced transmission. Nevertheless, an estimated 1.5 billion children – 87 per cent – have been affected by school closures around the world. There is now an obscene gulf in access to education between rich and poor, between the privately and state educated, and between those with access to home learning via the internet and those without. The effect on broader health has been similarly catastrophic... One of the greatest costs – which cannot be quantified in lives lost or dollar signs – has been to freedom. And this goes deeper than the (hopefully) temporary curbs on everyday life. Our entire culture of freedom has collapsed. We now need and expect the state’s explicit permission for whatever limited activities we can do. Even Christmas can now be cancelled by the state... it is striking just how little questioning there has been of either the efficacy or the harms of the defining policy of the pandemic. Even if the lockdown debate becomes academic at some point in the new year, and despite the fact that lockdown has clearly failed, there is a danger lockdown becomes the default policy for the next pandemic – if not for some other threat. And there will be another one."
Wilfred Reilly on Twitter - "It'll be legitimately interesting to see what percentage of fully vaccinated people keep wearing masks as a virtue signal, and what the justification for this behavior will be - "saving children's lives" is my guess."
Replies: "The most pathetically embarrassing answer I've seen was "to remind people we're in a pandemic." FOH"
"Mostly they don’t want to be seen as Trump supporters. Or anti vaccine. It seems like an insane loop to be stuck in, but they seem to be fine with it."
"And it’s also funny how the people who bragged about “trusting the science” apparently don’t trust the science anymore. What they actually were were afraid, and by appealing to “science”, they made their fear feel like virtue."
Genève Campbell on Twitter - "It’s just bananas that the “highly educated” and “media literate” demographic is the one that is relatively more misinformed regarding covid risks, especially its relative risk to young children. How did we get to this point?"
When the media misinform
Wilfred Reilly on Twitter - "A good metric for "where not to live" would be "which cities are keeping openly unscientific lockdowns or mask mandates in place?""
Jake 🦆🌳 on Twitter - "NEW: The WHO has published a "guidance document" for countries on the introduction of vaccine passports. The work was part funded by the Bill & Melinda Gate's Foundation"
"I will never be gaslighted into not believing a conspiracy theory again, unless someone can categorically prove it isn’t happening."
Opinion: The invisible wounds inflicted by pandemic journalism - The Globe and Mail
Journalists get to profit off stoking mass hysteria, then try to get pity by claiming they're traumatised. Maybe they need to go to a warzone to see what real trauma is
Covid: UK at ‘pre-peak stage of third wave’, warn scientific advisers - "Scientific advisers in Wales believe the UK is at the “pre-peak stage of a third wave”, first minister Mark Drakeford has warned."
From June. Of course it's been memory-holed so covid hystericists can continue to claim their prophecies of doom must be heeded
JCVI issues updated advice on COVID-19 vaccination of children aged 12 to 15 - "The assessment by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) is that the health benefits from vaccination are marginally greater than the potential known harms. However, the margin of benefit is considered too small to support universal vaccination of healthy 12 to 15 year olds at this time... For the vast majority of children, SARS-CoV-2 infection is asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic and will resolve without treatment. Of the very few children aged 12 to 15 years who require hospitalisation, the majority have underlying health conditions... There is evidence of an association between mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and myocarditis. This is an extremely rare adverse event. The medium- to long-term effects are unknown and long-term follow-up is being conducted. Given the very low risk of serious COVID-19 disease in otherwise healthy 12 to 15 year olds, considerations on the potential harms and benefits of vaccination are very finely balanced and a precautionary approach was agreed."
Damn anti-vaxxers and covid deniers! They just want children to die and the pandemic to never end! We must definitely vaccinate everyone, even newborns! Anyone who says there is no long term safety data is spreading fake news!
Teenage boys more at risk from vaccines than Covid - "Teenage boys are six times more likely to suffer from heart problems from the vaccine than be hospitalised from Covid-19, a major study has found Children who face the highest risk of a “cardiac adverse event” are boys aged between 12 and 15 following two doses of a vaccine, according to new research from the US."
Clearly more anti-vaxx fake news!
Boys more at risk from Pfizer jab side-effect than Covid, suggests study - "So far, UK children have not been admitted to hospital for Covid in large numbers and may not be at great risk of long Covid. While the recent Clock study found that up to 14% of children who caught Covid may still have symptoms 15 weeks later, levels of fatigue appear similar to those in children who have not caught the virus. This suggests that children may be spared some of the most debilitating problems seen in adult long Covid... Prof Adam Finn, a member of JCVI at the University of Bristol, said: “I stand by the JCVI advice, which is not to go ahead at this time with vaccinating healthy 12 to 15-year-olds on health outcome risk-benefit grounds given the current uncertainty – as there is a small but plausible risk that rare harms could turn out to outweigh modest benefits.”"
One muppet refused to read the previous story since it was in the Telegraph. But since the Guardian has reported the exact same thing, covid hystericists need to look for some new nonsense excuse to dismiss facts they hate
The Flimsy Evidence Behind the CDC’s Push to Vaccinate Children - WSJ - "A tremendous number of government and private policies affecting kids are based on one number: 335. That is how many children under 18 have died with a Covid diagnosis code in their record, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet the CDC, which has 21,000 employees, hasn’t researched each death to find out whether Covid caused it or if it involved a pre-existing medical condition. Without these data, the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices decided in May that the benefits of two-dose vaccination outweigh the risks for all kids 12 to 15. I’ve written hundreds of peer-reviewed medical studies, and I can think of no journal editor who would accept the claim that 335 deaths resulted from a virus without data to indicate if the virus was incidental or causal, and without an analysis of relevant risk factors such as obesity. My research team at Johns Hopkins worked with the nonprofit FAIR Health to analyze approximately 48,000 children under 18 diagnosed with Covid in health-insurance data from April to August 2020. Our report found a mortality rate of zero among children without a pre-existing medical condition such as leukemia... we’ve already seen inflated Covid death numbers in the U.S. revised downward. Last month Alameda County, Calif., reduced its Covid death toll by 25% after state public-health officials insisted that deaths be attributed to Covid only if the virus was a direct or contributing factor. Organizations and politicians who are eager to get every living American vaccinated are following the CDC without understanding the limitations of the methodology. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky claimed that vaccinating a million adolescent kids would prevent 200 hospitalizations and one death over four months. But the agency’s Covid adolescent hospitalization report, like its death count, doesn’t distinguish on the website whether a child is hospitalized for Covid or with Covid. The subsequent Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of that analysis revealed that 45.7% “were hospitalized for reasons that might not have been primarily related” to Covid-19. Hospitals routinely test patients being admitted for other complaints even if there’s no reason to suspect they have Covid. An asymptomatic child who tests positive after being injured in a bicycle accident would be counted as a “Covid hospitalization.” The CDC may also be undercapturing data on vaccine complications. The CDC’s risk-benefit analysis for vaccinating all children used rates of complications extrapolated from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System database, known as Vaers, which contains raw, self-reported data that is unverified and likely underreports adverse events. The CDC or the Food and Drug Administration should expeditiously assign doctors to research each of the thousands of vaccine complications reported to Vaers. Authorities should also consider whether a single-vaccine dose is a safer option for healthy kids. Researchers at Tel Aviv University reported that a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine was 100% effective against infection in kids 12 to 15. Not only has the CDC refused to examine the possibility of a one-dose regimen for minors; Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff told me he was kicked off the advisory committee working group on Covid-vaccine safety after he expressed a dissenting opinion. The CDC’s poor performance isn’t limited to kids or vaccine safety. Early in the pandemic the CDC left us all flying blind by not reporting the medical conditions of those who died of Covid. Collecting this information early would have made it easier to protect nursing-home residents and patients with renal failure or diabetes. It took until March 2021 for the CDC to report that 78% of Covid hospitalizations were among overweight or obese patients. Most striking, the CDC has never systematically collected and reported the No. 1 leading indicator of the pandemic—daily new hospitalizations for Covid sickness. Instead, the CDC offers the lagging indicator of hospitalization for anyone who tests positive for Covid. The CDC data on natural-immunity rates is similarly disappointing. The CDC reports this measure in fragments on their website, but it’s outdated and some states are listed as having “no data available.” The low priority given to this indicator is consistent with how public-health officials have played down and ignored natural immunity in their drive to get everyone vaccinated."
More anti-vaxx propaganda from an unqualified idiot who does his "research" on YouTube and spreads fake news about covid deaths being over-counted!
Clearly all the experts agreeing on covid has nothing to do with those who disagree being fired
Cuba's Covid-19 vaccine now offered to children as young as two
Clinical coding of long COVID in English primary care: a federated analysis of 58 million patient records in situ using OpenSAFELY - "Regional variation was high, ranging between 20.3 per 100,000 people for East of England (95% confidence interval 19.3-21.4) and 55.6 in London (95% CI 54.1-57.1)... Long COVID coding in primary care is low compared with early reports of long COVID prevalence"
This won't stop covid hystericists claiming everyone must aim for zero covid because of the risks of long covid and how it ruins your health even if you don't die
Virus czar calls to begin readying for eventual 4th vaccine dose - "Israel’s national coronavirus czar on Saturday called for the country to begin making preparations to eventually administer fourth doses of the coronavirus vaccine. “Given that that the virus is here and will continue to be here, we also need to prepare for a fourth injection,” Salman Zarka told Kan public radio... The Health Ministry last week also announced that the “Green Pass” system — a document that allows entry into certain gatherings and public places for those who are vaccinated or have recovered from the coronavirus — will expire six months after the holder received their second or third dose, hinting that a fourth dose may be administered in six-months time"
So much for the "myth" of the slippery slope. Of course covid hystericists will say the "science" changed, even as they claim the "science" is settled and that anyone who disagrees or has doubts is a paranoid far right conspiracy theorist covid "denier"
Meme - "It's dangerous to believe anything blindly."
"the science is settled"
"that's.... not how science works."
"you're a racist"
More Covid Mysteries - The New York Times - "Michael Osterholm, who runs an infectious disease research center at the University of Minnesota, suggests that people keep in mind one overriding idea: humility. “We’ve ascribed far too much human authority over the virus”... Britain has become another example. The Delta variant is even more contagious than Alpha, and it seemed as though it might infect every unvaccinated British resident after it began spreading in May. Some experts predicted that the number of daily cases would hit 200,000, more than three times the country’s previous peak. Instead, cases peaked — for now — around 47,000, before falling below 30,000 this week. “The current Delta wave in the U.K. is turning out to be much, much milder than we anticipated,” wrote David Mackie, J.P. Morgan’s chief European economist. True, you can find plenty of supposed explanations, including the end of the European soccer tournament, the timing of school vacations and Britain’s notoriously late-arriving summer weather, as Mark Landler, The Times’s London bureau chief, has noted. But none of the explanations seem nearly big enough to explain the decline, especially when you consider that India has also experienced a boom and bust in caseloads. India, of course, did not play in Europe’s soccer championship and is not known for cool June weather."
The U.K.’s Delta Surge Is Collapsing. Will Ours? - "A few weeks ago, when the country’s new daily-case total was around 60,000, the prominent British epidemiologist and government adviser Neil Ferguson declared that a rise to 100,000 a day was inevitable, and that 200,000 a day was possible. The country is now at 27,000 and falling. Ferguson looks foolish now, but predictions about the near-term course of pandemic spread have made their makers look foolish again and again over the last 18 months, in part because the disease seems to be driven by a much wider and more mysterious range of factors (weather, superspreader luck, social behavior that often moves independent of public advisories) than we tend to acknowledge (focusing instead on mask-wearing and indoor-dining policies). The challenges of forecasting were clear as early as last spring, and bedeviled both sorts of predictions, optimistic and pessimistic — at one point last summer, for instance, it was conceivable that something like “temporary herd immunity” might be achieved with only between 10 and 30 percent of the population exposed. As I wrote earlier this year, at one point in January, 26 of 28 models collected by the CDC to project the near-term future of the pandemic failed to include what proved to be the ultimate course of the disease, just two weeks later, in their range of what was considered possible... he Delta variant was so much more transmissible, in part, because of how quickly and prolifically it reproduces and takes root within the nose. What is most remarkable about that is that we have a suite of tools that might help precisely combat that problem, though we aren’t using them: intranasal vaccinations, which are delivered not by jabbing a needle into the muscle of your shoulder but by spraying a mist up your nostril... “Given the respiratory tropism of the virus,” they write, “it seems surprising that only seven of the nearly 100 SARS-CoV-2 vaccines currently in clinical trials are delivered intranasally.”"
Weird. We are told that the models are more reliable and to trust the "science"
Israel, Once the Model for Beating Covid, Faces New Surge of Infections - The New York Times
Paradoxically, rushing to get everyone vaccinated as soon as possible is bad (if you care about cases), since immunity wanes all at once. But most hystericists ignore that disease burden is still relatively low
Israel’s COVID-19 surge shows the world what’s coming next - "unvaccinated people account for more than 10 times as many serious cases as those who have received two doses, showing that even with immunity waning, shots are providing protection."
Push For Vaccine Boosters Could Drive Emergence Of New Variants, WHO Says - "it strongly opposes booster shots for all adults in rich countries because the boosters will not help slow down the pandemic. By diverting doses away from unvaccinated people, booster shots will help drive the emergence of more dangerous mutants... The problem with a call for boosters, she said, is that the virus is primarily circulating in unvaccinated people — not in the fully vaccinated... Any available vaccine should first go to people around the world who are at high risk of hospitalization and deaths, said Dr. Michael Ryan of the WHO. "If we think about this in terms of an analogy, we're planning to hand out extra life jackets to people who already have life jackets, while we're leaving other people to drown without a single life jacket.""
So covid hystericists who demand boosters are just making the problem worse. Then again, that is a feature not a bug, since the hysteria gives their life meaning
Dr. Chant: COVID Will be With us “Forever,” People Will Have to “Get Used To” Endless Booster Vaccines - "Australian health chief Dr. Kerry Chant says that COVID will be with us “forever” and people will have to “get used to” taking endless booster vaccines. The New South Wales Chief Health Officer made the alarming comments during a recent press conference... Given that Australians were previously told authorities “wouldn’t hesitate” to go door to door to carry out COVID tests, what’s to stop them doing the same thing for vaccines? As we previously highlighted, the infamously stern-faced Chant previously warned Aussies that they shouldn’t even be talking to their own friends and neighbors, even if they’re wearing a mask... Australia continues to pursue a disastrous ‘zero COVID’ policy enforced via endless lockdowns that have characterized the country as a “prison island” with no escape anywhere on the horizon. Anyone who challenges the policy via protests faces fines of up to $11,000 dollars while police have also carried out home visits to people who merely promote anti-lockdown demonstrations via social media."
Meme - "And then told them after the seventh booster shot we'd let them see their families *Lizard people laughing*"
Meme - "Me tryna find my 14th booster pass for the Omicron Variant so I can buy a sandwich (2025, colorized)"
Meme - "Year 2028 when we're still getting covid and booster shots and keeping up with lockdowns
Gov: I didn't hear no bell"
Chris Selley: Now that the COVID-zero fallacy is toast, Canada needs a real exit strategy - "Australia’s COVID-zero bubble has burst. “(Lockdowns) cannot go on forever. This is not a sustainable way to live in this country,” Australian prime minister Scott Morrison said at a news conference on Monday in Canberra. “It will end when we start getting to 70 per cent and 80 per cent (vaccination).” In theory, this is an uncontroversial and inevitable position... In practice, however, it calls the country’s entire strategy into question. For starters, only a quarter of Australians are fully vaccinated. At the current rate, it would take 17 weeks to get to 80 per cent. That’s assuming there’s enough supply, which there is not, and assuming 80 per cent of Australians are willing to get vaccinated, which is considerably more than the 64 per cent a survey of 2,400 Australians conducted in April and May found. In the meantime, it’s all going pear-shaped. In New South Wales, case counts are five times higher than they have ever been, at 10 per day per 100,000 population. That’s hardly catastrophic: British Columbia is currently at 12, Alberta at 18. But the situation could get a lot worse: case counts more than doubled in just nine days ending Thursday, and with a proper lockdown in place: Sydneysiders aren’t allowed more than five kilometres from home; only one member of a household is allowed out at a time to shop for essentials. Melbourne, too, is back in lockdown — its sixth. There’s a 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew. (In Sydney the curfew is currently confined to the poorer, immigrant-rich western suburbs.) Months after we learned surface transmission really isn’t much of a concern, playgrounds are off-limits. For months, many Canadian public health experts insisted Australia’s COVID-zero approach should be Canada’s as well. Never mind the practical impediments. (Australia’s economy does not rely on 110,000 truck drivers crossing the border every week.) And never mind that many of the things Australia did are literally inconceivable here. In July last year, Victoria Police locked 3,000 residents of nine Melbourne public housing towers in their homes for 14 days, 24 hours a day, with no notice. Australian police officers routinely arrest scores of anti-lockdown protesters at a time; Canadian police officers escort anti-lockdown marches around town on their bicycles. Australia can certainly claim remarkable success on the very important metric of keeping people alive: At 38 deaths per million population, it has fared better than all developed nations except Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand. But Australia’s draconian lockdowns will likely impose a far greater social toll than Canada’s. That’s precisely what COVID-zero’s proponents claimed the approach would prevent. “At the end of the COVID-zero path lies safety and longstanding freedom, whereas, on the other path, freedom will be fleeting, and will certainly result in an ongoing roller-coaster of restrictions,” three Calgary doctors wrote... The Aussies have been stuck on that rollercoaster for months. And now they’re trailing most of the world on vaccinations. And a lot of people are angry... All that said, Australia at least had a plan and stuck to it. It’s more than many Canadian governments, certainly the one that recently vacated Ottawa to hold a pointless election, can claim. The federal Liberals’ appalling record has been to dismiss things other countries are doing as unnecessary, misguided and possibly racist, until late on a Sunday night, and then adopt them as matters of urgent priority on the Monday morning... There’s a complex discussion about risk and freedom to be had from those findings, all of which could be overturned by future study or future variants: To what extent is an unvaccinated restaurant patron only risking his own health? How much risk to the vaccinated are we willing to tolerate in the name of not effectively forcing medical procedures on unwilling people? Don’t take my word for it. Take Justin Trudeau’s. In May, online broadcaster Brandon Gonez asked the prime minister if it was conceivable that people who can’t or choose not to get vaccinated would be barred from a Toronto Raptors game. “I’m really worried about that,” Trudeau replied. He said he understood the potential value of such policies “as a motivator” to get needles in arms, but asked: “What do you do with someone … who for religious or deep convictions decides that, no, they’re not going to get a vaccine?” “We’re not a country that makes vaccination mandatory,” Trudeau confidently concluded. He was right. Most environments in this country where vaccination is theoretically mandatory — in public schools, for example — offer no-questions-asked exemptions. It’s nauseating to see Trudeau, in campaign mode, now stumping for mandatory vaccination for airline and interprovincial train passengers, dismissing the idea of religious or conscientious objections, and claiming it’s all “about protecting our young people,” all for political gain. Whatever we think of vaccine passports, we should be intensely leery of politicians proposing to limit people’s freedoms because it’s popular. We should demand coherent explanations, based on the best data available, and we should demand the sort of exit strategy that Australians, unfortunately, now lack."
Chris Selley: The Liberals' vaccination wedge collapses — thank goodness | National Post - " Whenever governments talk about mandatory vaccination — even for health-care workers and nurses — the unions’ reaction is central. After the “mandatory vaccine” policy became official on Friday, the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) wasted no time demanding the government “provide accommodations for workers who cannot be vaccinated for reasons protected under human rights legislation, including health concerns” — and presumably religious ones as well. This planted a seed of doubt: How mandatory would mandatory really be? Canada’s Chief Human Resources Officer, Christine Donoghue, answered that in a memo to deputy ministers published on the Treasury Board Secretariat’s website. “For those who refuse vaccination, we will need to consider alternative measures, such as testing and screening,” it said — O’Toole’s basic position, in other words. Whoops... In a February article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, University of Ottawa law professors Colleen Flood, Bryan Thomas and Kumanan Wilson argued that a vaccine mandate even for health-care workers would have to exclude those “who object to vaccination on bona fide religious or conscientious objection grounds” to be reliably charter-proof. It’s conceivable it might be a tougher sell for, say, data entry clerks."
Chris Selley: Pro-lockdown or anti-lockdown, Canadians need to guard their freedoms | National Post - "Father Raymond J. De Souza argued British Columbia’s provincial health officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, has seriously damaged religious freedom with her order banning “indoor in-person religious gatherings and worship services of any size.” It is easy to see how people of faith might infer hostility. As Father De Souza noted, churches can host Alcoholics Anonymous meetings but not their own services. And those who get therapy at their local saloon have been free to do so... However necessary Canada’s various anti-pandemic measures have been, our governments will not have failed to notice how gratefully most of us accepted them. They sure as heck noticed after 9/11. No one should trust those governments to deploy these unprecedented restrictions on everyday life in future fairly, or only when necessary, or only when we happen to agree with them. Religious freedom is certainly imperilled in Canada nowadays, and I am bemused by arguments to the contrary. The Ontario and British Columbia law societies refused to accredit graduates of Trinity Western University’s prospective law school because it insisted upon a Biblically informed student code of conduct, just as several highly regarded American law schools do, and the Supreme Court of Canada said that was fine... Religious freedom isn’t uniquely imperilled nowadays, obviously. Freedom of mobility? Good luck going to Newfoundland right now. Freedom of assembly and association? You can get arrested for that. On Thursday, two weeks after allowing Toronto restaurants to reopen their patios — too soon to have any reliable data on the subject — Ontario shut them down again. Canada’s pandemic-era rules could have been far harsher, and plenty of ostensibly freedom-loving Canadians were demanding it: Arrest people trying to go their cottages! Lock people in their apartment buildings! It worked in Australia! Victory at any cost! The most distressing aspect of the pandemic, from my point of view, has been watching people turn against each other’s rights based on their own preferences: No one needs to go to a restaurant, so anyone who goes to a restaurant is an idiot and a menace, and should suffer. No one needs to travel, so anyone who travels is an idiot and a menace, and should suffer. God is a superstition, so anyone who goes to church is an idiot and a menace, and should suffer. This is precisely what informed the public health restrictions, and precisely why they’re so incoherent: The restrictions weren’t what were “necessary,” but rather what people would support. As an epidemiological exercise, that’s defensible: The goal is maximum limitation of human interactions, and the best way to achieve it is the way that works best. As a long-term societal proposition, however, it’s terrifying. Canadians have quite spectacularly failed to “all be in this together” during the pandemic. We should resolve to be in everything together more so in future, not less. Every reasonable person’s reasonable defence of their freedoms is worth your time to consider."
Are female leaders more successful at managing the coronavirus crisis?
Revisiting this: "Gender stereotypes are harmful". Of course we know when liberals say "gender stereotypes" it's basically anything that can be spun as disadvantaging women
Also I thought only incels call women females
Covid booster jab campaign may not be needed, says Astra boss - "Booster jabs may not be needed for everyone in the UK and rushing into a nationwide rollout of third doses risks piling extra pressure on the NHS, the heads of AstraZeneca have warned... “Moving too quickly to boost across the entire adult population will deprive us of these insights, leaving this important decision to rest on limited data... “Because NHS staff and resources are scarce, another national mobilisation would potentially leave us with fewer resources for cancer screenings and the other care provided by doctors and nurses each day.”"
Anyone pointing out that Astrazeneca has no financial conflict of interest in promoting booter shots is an anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist. Conflict of interest is only important when it can be used to dismiss something liberals don't like
How EU leaders destroyed AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine dream - "n the darkest days of the coronavirus crisis, Emmanuel Macron took to the media circuit with a scathing attack on the world’s cheapest Covid vaccine – and the only one to be produced at cost. Britain’s pioneering jab, developed by Oxford University and manufactured by AstraZeneca, was “quasi-ineffective” on older people, the French President said. “The real problem on AstraZeneca is that it doesn’t work the way we were expecting it to,” he added. Weeks later, when a study suggested there was a tiny chance that patients could develop blood clots, the vaccine’s use was curtailed across Europe. In America, it was never approved at all. The damage caused by Europe’s assault on AstraZeneca is now becoming clear. The company’s decision to make its jab without taking a profit has squeezed margins... Meanwhile, AstraZeneca’s biggest rival Pfizer is hiking forecasts, despite a paper submitted to The Lancet this week suggesting that the two vaccines have a similar safety profile. In Britain, ministers have reacted with blind fury to what they see as a European Union campaign motivated chiefly by envy at British scientific expertise and animosity over Brexit. “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine now have blood on their hands,” a Government official told Politico. “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people are directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries.” After all, AstraZeneca’s vaccine has been the only one available to many people in poorer parts of the world. Under the Covax scheme, which distributes vaccines to developing countries"
AstraZeneca may be done with vaccines. That’s sad but not surprising - "Is anyone going to be willing to produce vaccines at cost price for distribution around the world if and when this happens again? Doubtful."
Tasha Kheiriddin: AstraZeneca advice is another in Canada's long list of pandemic flip-flops - "The long list of COVID policy reversals began even before the pandemic officially took hold a year ago, and continues unabated. Here’s a short trip down memory lane: COVID won’t be Canada’s problem; we are officially in a pandemic. There is no evidence of asymptomatic spread; asymptomatic spread is real. Masks are not helpful; everybody wear masks please. Canada will have adequate vaccines; dear U.S. President Joe Biden, please send us vaccines. Vaccines shouldn’t be spaced more than three weeks apart; vaccines can be spaced four months apart. The AstraZeneca vaccine is not safe for seniors; the AstraZeneca vaccine shouldn’t be given to people under 55. And so on. It’s enough to make you sick — literally. It’s true that COVID-19 is a new disease and the science is continually evolving. But as Auditor General Karen Hogan chronicled in a scathing report released last week, Canada’s public health officials still made a shocking number of mistakes, the top of the list being the failure of our early warning system coupled with inaccurate risk assessments. The result was the needless deaths of thousands of seniors in care homes and congregate living centres. Shamefully, Canada has the worst record for COVID-19 deaths in long-term care homes among wealthy countries."
Joe Biden: Covid vaccination in US will not be mandatory - December 2020
Sweeping new vaccine mandates for 100 million Americans (September 2021) - "In his most forceful pandemic actions and words, President Joe Biden on Thursday ordered sweeping new federal vaccine requirements for as many as 100 million Americans — private-sector employees as well as health care workers and federal contractors — in an all-out effort to curb the surging COVID-19 delta variant."
Of course I saw covid hystericists cheering, even though this came very soon after the Texas abortion law which they hated
WHO: Covid will mutate like the flu and is likely here to stay - "Covid-19 is likely “here to stay with us” as the virus continues to mutate in unvaccinated countries across the world and previous hopes of eradicating it diminish"
Damn anti-vaxxers prolonging the pandemic! Of course the third world not being able to get vaccines has nothing to do with covid hystericsts demanding endless booster shots
Facebook - "In HK’s case, the authorities are still wedded to a zero-Covid goal that’s not tenable for much longer, especially with the far more transmissible Delta variant. Amazingly, the weight of public and even expert opinion here is that faced with these more transmissible variants, HK has to maintain (and even tighten) existing travel and social restrictions. There’s of course some lip service paid to getting more people vaccinated, but there’s no roadmap for a return to normality, no target date, no discussion of how with vaccination, we should accept and live with endemic Covid. It’s an endless source of mystery to me how a society that is risk-seeking in so many ways can be so risk-averse when it comes to public health."
Meme - Tami Burages @tburages: "Republicans are salting the earth for Biden's presidency. Casting doubt on vaccine's safety might result in millions of deaths, but if it gives McConnell a majority in 2022, then it's all worth it to them."
SEVERAL MONTHS LATER
Tami Burages @tburages: "A week ago today my brother's 13-year-old son had his covid shot. Less than 3 days later he died. The initial autopsy results (done Friday) were that his heart was enlarged and there was some fluid surrounding it. He had no known health problems. Was on no medications.
Our family is devastated. I struggled with putting this out on twitter. I am pro-vaccine. We vaccinated my own 14-year-old son as soon as it was available. I know it is *mostly safe*. But Jacob is dead now."
Facebook - "New Covid-19 cases: US vs EU"
"Weirdly, nobody refers to that bump in June and July as the BLM bump."
Leslie Jūratė (She/Her/Hers) on Twitter - "I wear a mask that says "Fully Vaxxed and Ready to Party" with "Party" Xed out and below it "well, keep wearing a mask and social distance". I don't trust strangers. I don't care if you tell me you're fully vaxxed. I don't trust you. And you shouldn't trust me. (But I am.)"
This is telling of mask fetishism