EXCLUSIVE: 16K COVID-19 Positive Migrants Released into U.S. by ICE, Says Whistleblower - "More than 16,000 migrants who tested positive for COVID-19 while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody were released into the United States"
Liberals will be very upset at this whistleblower. And presumably criticising the release of covid-positive "refugees" is racist even as they call for quarantine
Meme - "Terrible that the Taliban are back in charge of Afghanistan. Armed men will now roam the streets to prevent children from going to school. They will stop people singing in groups in public. They won't allow unapproved business to take place, and people who don't work in approved jobs will not be allowed to earn a living. Women must cover their faces when out in public. Playgrounds will be closed. Hey - wait a minute..."
Echo on Twitter - "In 6 months, we've gone from the vax ending the pandemic—to you can still get covid even if vaxxed—to you can pass covid onto others even if vaxxed—to you can still die of covid even if vaxxed—to the unvaxxed are killing the vaxxed."
Time for Covidnomics - The Atlantic - "Ordering an Uber or a Lyft? Ask the driver whether he is vaccinated. If not, refuse the ride. If the company tries to charge you for the refusal, complain. Pretty soon, Uber and Lyft will require that their drivers be vaccinated."
Since vaccine refusal is bigger in minority communities and disparate impact is a beloved liberal principle, David Frum is racist. Not to mention ignorant of how covid vaccines aren't as effective in preventing transmission as he claims
Emmys Producer Hits Out At Seth Rogen For His ‘Deeply Frustrating’ Covid Jokes - "Rogen took to the stage as a presenter on the night of the awards ceremony, joking about the amount of people who were in the room considering the coronavirus pandemic. However, it was reported that Rogen did not get his covid comments approved prior to his speech, leading to Emmys producers being thrown off guard and feeling irked by the sudden improvisation."
Capacity limits don't apply to liberal-approved events
Stars attending VMAs from out of state will not be subject to New York quarantine mandate - "Stars will have the privilege of skipping out on New York's 14-day quarantine mandate when they visit for the MTV Video Music Awards"
Peasants and elites have different rules
Vaccine skeptics 'weaponize' Colin Powell's death (despite two shots of Pfizer) - "Tucker Carlson opened his prime-time Fox News program Monday evening by telling his viewers that Powell’s death shows that they’ve “been lied to” about the vaccines’ ability to quash the pandemic. “Vaccines may be highly useful for some people, but across the population, they do not solve COVID"... Powell, who was 84 and immunocompromised, fit perfectly into a demographic that remains vulnerable to infections despite vaccination. His age puts him at a higher risk for COVID-19, and he was battling a blood cancer that’s known to make vaccines less effective. He also suffered from Parkinson’s disease. But in a political moment where every public health strategy to mitigate the virus has been politicized, public health experts said they expect Powell’s death to be misconstrued to feed a narrative that the vaccinations do not work."
Of course we must pretend that weaponising the death of the unvaccinated (and not mentioning that most of them, like Powell, were old and/or had pre-existing conditions, is praiseworthy, and that the public health strategies themselves aren't politicised
Tucker Carlson: America Has Become Segregated Between Clean And Unclean - "Vaccines may be highly useful for some people, but across the population, they do not solve COVID. That's not speculation. It is an observable fact. People have been fully vaccinated can still get the virus. They can still transmit the virus to others, and they can still die from COVID. Colin Powell is hardly the only example of that. So the question is why are they telling us otherwise? And the answer is simple. They're telling us that to divide us from each other to set the country against itself. That's been going on for a long time, but it never needed to happen. There's no inherent reason that a virus should rip apart the United States. COVID easily could have brought us together. Shared suffering often does that—9/11 did that. And yet, from the very beginning, demagogues, like Joe Biden and many others have used this virus as a hammer to smash the bonds that connect Americans to one another. During last year's presidential campaign, Joe Biden, repeatedly and always with a straight face, told us that every single American who died from COVID died because of Donald Trump's negligence. That's not an overstatement. Every single one. Just look at the data, Biden said. But there were no data that was false, and yet no public health official contradicted Joe Biden. Now, Biden is telling us that the only reason people are still dying from COVID is because stubborn, mostly working-class Americans won't submit to his shot. Only the unvaccinated are dying, Biden claims. And yet, at the very same time, Biden tells us that the unvaccinated somehow threaten the lives of the vaccinated. It's not logical. It's ridiculous. It doesn't make any sense at all. It's not simply divisive. It's absurd. And still, some percentage of the terrified population believes it... The question is, over time, what does that do to your most cherished relationships, to your friendship, to your family relationships? What does it do to the country? It means that at the very deepest level, below the level of law, the level of your own neighborhood, at the level of your own family. America has once again become what it was when Colin Powell got his commission in the Army. America has become segregated not between Black and White, but between vaccinated and unvaccinated, clean and unclean. The question is, how long will this go on and how long once it ends, will it take for us to recover? That's impossible to know now, but we do know that it's a tragedy and it did not happen by accident. A small group of credentialed partisans did this on purpose... You’ll read that some plumber in Wichita was choked to death from COVID alone in a hospital bed, and then you watch as the blue checks and social media celebrate his death. He wasn't vaccinated. They'll tell you he deserved it. Some preacher in Florida will die, leaving behind not just a grieving family, but tweets skeptical of the COVID vaccine, and then suddenly his death becomes a neat little morality play performed at maximum volume for the rest of us. See, this is what you get. This is the most corrosive possible way to approach the deaths of fellow Americans, but the president himself joins in gleefully... Colin Powell follow the instructions he did what Joe Biden asked. So did 40 percent of fully vaccinated people who recently died in Maryland. They all died anyway. So what are we to make of their deaths since every death is now a morality tale? Are those deaths more or less tragic than the passing of the disobedient plumber in Wichita or the preacher in Waco? In fact, they're all the same in their significance and in their effect..."
The Carlson quote makes a lot more sense in context, and the rest of his commentary is great too. Misrepresenting people you disagree with to demonise them is par for the course for the media
Is Germany Planning To Put Quarantine Violators in Detention Centers and Refugee Camps? | Snopes.com - "On Jan. 17, 2021, the German Sunday paper Welt am Sonntag contacted officials in each German state to see if they actually had plans to create or use a facility to segregate quarantine breakers from the rest of the population. In their survey, four of the 16 German states had some sort of plan in place for that possibility. That report spawned headlines and commentary in English-language media markets suggesting comparisons to Nazi Germany’s use of concentrations camps... Four states did respond to say that they had plans in place to use or create a facility to detain repeated offenders: Baden-Württemberg, Brandenburg, Saxony, and Schleswig-Holstein. The largest of these facilities would have the capacity to hold only nine detainees, and only people who had repeatedly and flagrantly violated COVID-19 laws would be sent there."
Presumably Snopes would rate as "Mixture" a claim that Nazi Germany sent Jews to concentration camps by noting that not all Jews were sent there
Federal wage subsidies ended up costing taxpayers $188,000 a year for every job saved — maybe we should try a different approach | The Star - "Canadians are increasingly feeling frustrated by the number of profitable businesses that are receiving the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS). Linamar recently became the newest corporate villain after announcing a doubling of dividends while receiving more than $108 million in government handouts. They are far from alone... A bonanza for businesses and shareholders, but not a good investment of $97.6 billion. However, the biggest cost of the program might be not in dollars spent for dubious benefit, but in stifling Canadian creativity and enterprise. The CEWS acts as a deterrent to innovation and technology adoption, and at the precise moment that Canadian businesses need to reinvent themselves... The CEWS stifles revenue-generating innovation because subsidies get clawed back as business revenues increase. Few CEWS recipients will find it profitable to invest in developing new products and services when the government takes a large share of any derived benefit. The CEWS also suppresses the incentives of firms to adopt labour-saving technologies by making workers artificially cheap... the stifling of innovation and technology adoption can have equally dire long-term consequences. Recent research suggests that crises are times of rapid economic transformation through automation and reallocation"
Of course liberals imagine it's possible to speedily roll out a targeted wage subsidy program that is quick to disburse funds
Hong Kong’s overly cautious coronavirus policymakers must seek to drown out the ‘noise’ | South China Morning Post - " The US judge Marvin Frankel was so disturbed by defendants getting wildly different sentences for the same offence that, in 1974, he asked 50 judges to pass sentence on a hypothetical extortion case. The jail sentences ranged from three years to 20. Similarly, I have worked in investment teams where individual experienced fund managers have delivered variable results in the same market conditions. Variability of opinion is due to the different emphasis we place on parts of the same evidence. That difference is driven by our emotion, values and upbringing, which impart biases to our thinking. The truth lies within the information flow, but distracting noise hides it in plain sight. The lack of warning about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour was due to the belief that domestic sabotage was more likely than a direct attack by an external foe. That noise meant the US was taken by surprise by the approach of the aircraft carrier fleet, so much so that some Americans came to believe a conspiracy theory that the US government was complicit in the attack. Noise is the enemy of the truth... Noise affects the narrative we hear, that we understand and that we pass on to others. American statistician Nate Silver , in his 2012 book, The Signal and the Noise, wrote that “noise is what distracts us from the truth”... While the virus causing Covid-19, if left unchecked, causes widespread illness and death, its reproduction rate can be controlled with measures tailored to the population. However, in such a situation, noisy narratives can feed fears – even though the Pfizer vaccine is the safest and most effective in decades. The poor ability of humans to judge the probability of catching and dying from Covid-19 led some parents to lock their children (and their parents) away for a year, perhaps with even more serious consequences. Public policies have shuttered economies following knee-jerk decisions based more on noise than the underlying science. The Hong Kong government’s overcaution in forcing up to 21 days of jail-like quarantine made people reluctant to report symptoms, while the length of time spent in quarantine may have increased the possibility of contacting Covid-19 within confinement itself."
How many deaths are acceptable in ‘zero-Covid-19’ economies? From Australia to Hong Kong, that’s the tough question | South China Morning Post - "While much of the world has been exposed to mass death and disease during the pandemic to the point of desensitisation, many Asia-Pacific economies have kept death rates below that of a typical flu season. Down the track, that leaves them facing uncomfortable decisions that authorities appear unwilling to discuss or even acknowledge out loud. Unless they remain cut off from the world indefinitely, even as North America and Europe restart travel and learn to live with the virus, societies that avoided the worst of the pandemic will ultimately have to reassess their tolerance for death. “It is going to be difficult to refocus and see the big picture because people have been terrorised into myopically focusing on Covid-19 deaths,” said Julian Savulescu, a philosopher and bioethicist based between the University of Oxford and University of Melbourne. “There has been little or no honest discussion about the value of life, how much we should spend to save a life, how we should consider length and quality of life, of risk for specific groups, of the value of liberty and the costs in terms of other lives and well-being of the policies adopted.” Nancy Jecker, a bioethics professor at the University of Washington who serves as an adviser to the Centre for Bioethics at Chinese University of Hong Kong, said societies needed to have an open discussion about acceptable levels of death and disease. “It would be helpful if we clarified our values about risk by speaking more directly about this in our families and communities,” she said. “It would also be helpful if government leaders and public figures modelled this.”... In a sobering analysis that raised questions about Australia’s prospects for returning to pre-pandemic normality, Margaret Hellard, director of the Melbourne-based Burnet Institute, last week said authorities might need to intermittently “reintroduce public health measures and restrictions to control outbreaks” even with high vaccine coverage. Yet societies tolerated much higher tolls from the flu before the pandemic. In New Zealand, where just 26 people have died of Covid-19, researchers at the University of Otago in 2017 estimated that the country experienced about 500 flu deaths every year. In Hong Kong, which has reported 210 deaths from the disease, a 2004 paper published in the Clinical Infectious Diseases journal found that more than 1,000 people died of flu-related illness annually... Within the zero-Covid-19 club, authorities have offered few specifics when it comes to the level of disease and death they would be willing to accept to reopen to the world... Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who has flagged keeping borders shut until at least mid-2022, has vowed not to ease restrictions on travel until it is “safe”. Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor has indicated that a high vaccination rate, along with other disease control measures, would be “beneficial to the reopening of borders”, although people’s safety would come first. Seeking greater clarity about zero-Covid-19 exit strategies, including trying to define what subjective terms such as “safe” precisely mean, has proved a perilous task for those who have dared to try. Last month, Virgin Australia CEO Jayne Hrdlicka faced boycott calls and an avalanche of criticism, including from the prime minister, after she suggested Australia’s borders should reopen once enough people had been vaccinated even though “some people may die”. Bennett, the Deakin University epidemiologist, said that rather than targeting a specific number of acceptable deaths, societies should learn to view Covid-19 as “one of the possible infectious contributors to our death numbers”. “Our elderly will succumb to pneumonia, flu or Covid-19, or any other number of conditions,” she said. “We should not be reporting just Covid-19 deaths on a daily basis.” Savulescu, the University of Oxford bioethicist, said one way to approach the issue of determining a reasonable disease burden would be to take a “fair innings” approach that did not count deaths after a certain age. “Personally, I think it is wrong to count the death of an 80 year old who is vegetative from dementia as the same as a fit, healthy 40 year old who has a young family,” he said. “But they are counted the same by governments all around the world. So I don’t think it is just numbers of deaths that matter but the length and quality of life that is lost.” Although attempting to measure the value of human life may appear both callous and complicated, governments in fact often do just that when determining whether regulatory policies and medical treatments are worth the cost. The World Health Organization considers a treatment to be cost effective if it is priced at less than three times an economy’s GDP per capita for every one year of good health it provides – a measure known as “quality-adjusted life year”. Authorities also use a measure called value of a statistical life, also known as VOSL, to quantify the economic benefit of saving one human life. In Hong Kong, a government review into air quality standards in 2019 put the value of one life in the city at HK$18 million. Jecker, the University of Washington professor, said science alone could not answer questions about which strategies governments should pursue. “These questions are inherently value questions,” she said. “Answering them depends on weighing values such as individual liberty, public health and safety, loss of life, and duties to those who are at most risk of becoming infected and dying.” Roberto Bruzzone, co-director of the HKU-Pasteur Research Pole in Hong Kong, criticised the lack of “rational” discussion about acceptable risk during the pandemic. “We are all mortal but seem to have forgotten this simple truth,” he said. “Society should have a comprehensive discourse to explain this crisis and move on: we cannot keep publishing this daily war bulletin of numbers of cases and deaths per country.”... “We should discuss this, give these numbers, talk about how many people have died of flu in Hong Kong and of car accidents, and of community-acquired pneumonia,” he said, adding that governments should set a timetable for reopening their borders. “If people do not want to get vaccinated, it is their choice, but if a government endorses and recommends vaccination, then those who do not comply should not influence public health policies.”"
Covid hystericists' perverse reformulation of Blackstone: It is better that ten people die from measures to contain covid than one person dies from covid itself
They Had the Vaccines and a Plan to Reopen. Instead They Got Cold Feet. - The New York Times - "The vaccines were supposed to be the ticket out of the pandemic. But in Singapore, things did not go according to plan. The Southeast Asian city-state was widely considered a success story in its initial handling of the coronavirus. It closed its borders, tested and traced aggressively and was one of the first countries in Asia to order vaccines. A top politician told the public that an 80 percent vaccination rate was the criterion for a phased reopening. Singapore has now fully inoculated 83 percent of its population, but instead of opening up, it is doing the opposite. In September, with cases doubling every eight to 10 days, the government reinstated restrictions on gatherings. The United States said its citizens should reconsider travel to the country. Long lines started forming at the emergency departments in several hospitals. People were told once again they should work from home. The country’s experience has become a sobering case study for other nations pursuing reopening strategies without first having had to deal with large outbreaks in the pandemic. For the Singapore residents who believed the city-state would reopen once the vaccination rate reached a certain level, there was a feeling of whiplash and nagging questions about what it would take to reopen if vaccines were not enough. “In a way, we are a victim of our own success, because we’ve achieved as close to zero Covid as we can get and a very, very low death rate,” said Dr. Paul Tambyah, an infectious diseases specialist at National University Hospital. “So we want to keep the position at the top of the class, and it’s very hard to do.” Singapore’s careful, some say overly cautious, approach to reopening contrasts with that of the United States and Europe, where vaccinated people are already gathering at concerts, festivals and other large events. But unlike Singapore, both of those places had to manage substantial outbreaks early in the pandemic. Lawrence Wong, Singapore’s finance minister and a chair of the country’s Covid-19 task force, said the lesson for “Covid-naive societies” like Singapore, New Zealand and Australia is to be ready for large waves of infections, “regardless of the vaccine coverage.”... For Mr. Wong, one vision of how the pandemic might play out in Singapore and elsewhere would include face masks, limited travel and social distancing, perhaps until 2024... For many, the repeated tweaks to the restrictions have taken a toll. The number of suicides in 2020 was the highest since 2012, a trend that some mental health experts have attributed to the pandemic... “It’s just economically, sociologically, emotionally and mentally unsustainable,” said Devadas Krishnadas, chief executive at Future-Moves Group, a consultancy in Singapore. Mr. Krishnadas said the decision to reintroduce restrictions after reaching such a high vaccination rate made the country a global outlier. “And, importantly, it moves Singapore in a complete 180 degrees, opposite direction from where the rest of the world is headed,” he said. “That brings us to the strategic question of where will this leave Singapore — if we don’t get off what I call the hamster wheel of opening and closing.”... “I think a lot of times we are so focused on wanting to get good results that we just have tunnel vision,” she said. Ms. Ng lives across from a testing center. Almost daily, she watched a constant stream of people go in for tests, a strategy that many public health experts say is a waste of resources in such a highly vaccinated country... The government should not wait for perfect conditions to reopen, “because the world will never be perfect. It’s so frustrating that the politicians are almost like waiting for better circumstances”... Sarah Chan, who works in business development, said she had a fleeting taste of what normal life was like when she arrived in Italy last month to visit her husband’s family. No masks were required outdoors, vaccinated people could gather in groups, and Dr. Chan and her son could bop their heads to music in restaurants. In Singapore, music inside restaurants has been banned based on the notion that it could encourage the spread of the virus. Dr. Chan said she was so moved by her time in Italy that she cried. “It’s almost normal. You forget what that’s like,” she said. “I really miss that.”"
Of course some insecure Singaporeans claim this article is just to put Singapore down
If You Can't Question It, Don't Call It Science - "I'm an astrophysicist at a major university. Science is my life. But when I hear somebody somberly intone, "science says" or "follow the science," I get very nervous. Science doesn't belong to any ideology. Science is the never-ending search for new knowledge... scientists—even the best ones—can get things wrong. The brilliant astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle believed the universe existed in a steady state forever and had no beginning. But his view, once held sacrosanct by all astrophysicists, no longer holds. It's been superseded by the Big Bang theory that the universe had a beginning and is still expanding. In the 20th century, some of the most respected scientists in the world, including Nobel Prize winners, believed in eugenics—the reprehensible idea that the human race could be improved by selective breeding. The National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the Rockefeller Foundation supported it. By the middle of the century, it had been thoroughly rejected as quackery. No reputable scientist would have anything to do with this idea. So, we all need to get over this notion that just because someone—be it a politician, a bureaucrat, or even a scientist—employs the phrase "science says" means whatever they're saying is right. It might be right. But it might also be wrong. And if it's wrong, it won't necessarily be a bunch of scientists who say it's wrong. It might be one guy. Ask Einstein. One hundred scientists wrote a book explaining why his theory of relativity was wrong. He quipped, “If I were wrong, then one would've been enough.'' It takes a lot to convince scientists to accept a new theory, especially if that new theory refutes what they have always believed—in some cases, what they've staked their entire careers on. As Richard Feynman, one of the most eminent physicists of the 20th century, famously said, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts…" What Feynman is saying is that a good scientist should always maintain a healthy amount of skepticism. Science is, by its nature, provisional. Science would stagnate if we merely accepted proclamations of past authorities... Popper said that a subject is scientific if, and only if, it can be falsified. In other words, if your theory can't be tested—if it can't be proven wrong, it's probably not good science. This is just one reason why we have to be very careful about putting too much faith in "models." They often can't be tested. Models are predictions of the future based on current data. They can easily get things wrong."
“I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.” ― Richard P. Feynman, famous Science Denier
Since we know that if you're not a scientist and you disagree with a scientist about science, you're wrong, all those championing "science" (who claim to believe the former) had better listen to this astrophysicist and accept that they're wrong
When the left and scientism enter into an unholy alliance
Better to bite bullet and roll back Covid-19 curbs than delay the inevitable - "Even as Singapore extended its Covid-19 restrictions for a month, Health Minister Ong Ye Kung had some good news to share. Cases have stabilised and infection numbers are no longer doubling every few days the way they were since last month; increasing numbers of infected people suffer from only mild or no symptoms; and there has been a drop in the number of older people getting infected. So why continue keeping the entire nation in a state of semi-lockdown?... Mr Ong's target is to build up immunity against Covid-19 in the nation through booster shots (Didn't we say the same thing early this year about enough people getting fully vaccinated?) as well as having more people catch the virus while experiencing only mild flu-like symptoms so their antibodies and immunity will build up over time so we "will see cases falling, and then we can open up social economic activities without cases rising very rapidly". But when will this happen? So far, only about 3 per cent of the population has become infected. At this rate, it will take years to achieve the level of immunity Mr Ong is aiming for. This is especially so, since there is a question mark over how long antibodies will stay high after the third vaccine jab. If the level wanes after six months, the way it has after the first two jabs, will restrictions continue indefinitely as another round, or two, of boosters will be needed to prop it up again? Those who received their booster in September may need another one by March, and so it continues. At this rate, will there ever be a right time to roll back restrictions?"
Vaxholes will just blame the unvaccinated and demand mandatory vaccinations
What Are The Medical Exemptions For Not Getting A Covid-19 Vaccine? - "There are no known medical conditions which absolutely prevent a person from getting a Covid-19 vaccine. However, as with everything during the pandemic nothing is simple and there are rare circumstances where people should consult with physicians to help them make an informed decision and manage any potential risk"
Vaxholes: legitimate medical exemptions for a covid vaccine are exceedingly rare so almost no one should qualify
Also vaxholes: everyone needs to get vaccinated because there're many people with medical exemptions and we need to protect them, and we'll pretend that getting vaccinated dramatically cuts/eliminates your risk of transmission
Toronto restaurant says it won't accept medical exemptions - "A midtown Toronto restaurant worries its staff won't be able to tell the difference between real vaccine passport exemptions and potential fakers when it opens to indoor diners in just over a week — so, it’s only going to let fully vaccinated people in. “Just for now I’m not going to be accepting doctor's certificates as exemptions. I just want fully vaccinated people in here. For the past two years we’ve been incredibly safe, our staff are healthy, our customers are healthy, and I want to keep it that way”... Bistro on Avenue owner Cindy Stern said she’s still going to serve anyone who comes by through her take-out window... A restaurant has an obligation to serve anyone with a disability under Ontario’s Human Rights Code, and it’s possible that someone who fits either of those categories is disabled... David Lepofsky, a lawyer with the AODA Alliance, said the restaurant must make sure it’s accommodating any disabled customers."
Weird. We were told that vaccine passports wouldn't apply to people with medical exemptions
Good luck being sued for discrimination
Once again the vaxholes don't believe the vaccines work
Safety Protocols and Procedures | The National Ballet of Canada - "No exemptions or accommodations, including medical or religious, to the vaccination policy will be granted. This policy applies to all audience members, staff and artists who enter the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts"
Toronto woman says she was refused medical treatment because she is unvaccinated - "The woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, says she is chronically ill with a genetic syndrome and has declined to get vaccinated over concerns for her health. "All my life, I caught everything, I react to everything," she tells blogTO. "My body is hypersensitive to life"... the practitioner was not comfortable treating her unvaccinated... This situation has come up in other places — in BC a teen with a sore wrist was turned away from a walk-in clinic because he wasn't vaccinated and told to seek care at the emergency room instead."
Given that we have vaxholes proclaiming that the vaccinated should be denied medical care, this is no surprise
It's weird how even medical professionals don't believe the vaccine work
VEZINA: Deny health care to unvaccinated? Don't go there - "Start down this slope and we are fundamentally redefining human rights with regard to medical treatment. The leading cause of death every year globally is heart disease. In Canada, it is either heart disease or cancer. The vast majority of 911 calls are for cardiac events. So, go ahead and eat all the cake you want — but the public isn’t going to pay for your medical care because your heart attack was self-inflicted? See where this logic leads? How about firefighters? Respiratory illnesses are common in their profession. Why treat them? They should have picked a less risky job... Motor vehicles kill substantially more people annually than guns and bullets. It isn’t even close. A speeding ticket is a financial penalty given to an individual who exceeds a public safety limit designed to reduce accidents, injuries and deaths. Ever get a speeding ticket? How about no access to the emergency room for you? Redefining the rules of who “deserves” health care would have sweeping and unforeseen consequences. Some emergency health-care workers are saying “this isn’t the job I signed up for.” Actually, this is the job they signed up for and the vast majority of health-care workers understand that. The reality is that people ignore the advice of medical professionals all the time, ignore public safety measures designed to prevent illness, injury and death, and then, exactly as predicted, show up in emergency rooms needing treatment."
VEZINA: Deny health care to the unvaccinated? Part 2 - " Penalizing a citizen with the removal of a right due to an action which is not unlawful is asinine. Even if vaccination were deemed a public safety concern, the removal of a right would still be difficult to justify. Emergency health care is afforded to convicted serial killers. Is someone who is vaccine hesitant, or simply refuses to be vaccinated, worse than a serial killer? Privileges are different. An argument can be made — and is being implemented — for the loss of employment and restricting access to non-essential services for those who refuse to be vaccinated. But those are not rights. Canada’s universal health insurance system (we do not have universal health care), could be redesigned to have people pay different amounts based on their individual risks caused by their behaviour, instead of distributing the risk regardless of behaviour or pre-existing conditions. That would result in many people below a certain income threshold and people who smoke, eat unhealthily, play aggressive sports or otherwise engage in risky personal behaviours being denied health insurance and ending up in a poverty trap, or dead... since our hospitals were already overstressed even before the pandemic, why not consider spending less resources on hospitals and more on public health education and emergency preparedness? After all, if an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, shouldn’t we be focusing on prevention?"
mirax on Twitter - "Two years after the covid-19 pandemic broke out in Wuhan, China, troubling revelations continue to emerge about U.S.-government sponsored research there"
"That's funny. Legacy media, science journals and tech companies were censoring any discussion of this topic for over a year. What changed?"
Some muppet claimed that they were right to censor that at the time since it was deemed fake news but now we know more and know it's not so we can discuss it. Imagine having this level of epistemic arrogance combined with a lack of reflexivity
Congressman Thomas Massie - Posts | Facebook - "$700 million for Sudan attached to the legislation that provides $600 checks to Americans. We have less than 8 hours to read this 5500+ page bill before voting on it tonight. Members should refuse to vote for it if for no other reason than they’ve not been given time to read it, and therefore don’t really know what’s in it."
Ottawa to seek equity or cash from companies applying for new COVID-19 loan program - "Large companies that receive bridge financing through a new federal loan program will have to give the government the option to take an ownership stake, or provide a cash equivalent."
It's convenient that companies shutdown by government need to give up ownership to government for help to mitigate those same shutdowns
Eddie Zipperer on Twitter - "The same people who wanted to defund the police now want you to call the police if you see your neighbors having some company over."
Facebook - "I see people saying that the SG-HK travel bubble was a bad idea all along and that it should be cancelled/suspended right away. Maybe. But it’s quite brave of Ong Ye Kung to pursue one in the first place. If he hadn’t negotiated a travel bubble, and we subsequently find out that the rise in cases over the next few months was manageable, he wouldn’t be blamed for failing to take advantage of the opportunity. Errors of omission (not doing something which, in hindsight, should have been done) are not usually criticised or even noticed. In contrast, a travel bubble exposes him to accusations of recklessness if there’s a subsequent spike in cases, as is happening now in HK. Errors of commission (doing something which, in hindsight, should not have been done) are criticised far more severely. Because of this, public officials often have an omission bias: they prefer to err on the side of omission rather than commission. This, in turn, leads to the status quo being in place for too long, excessive conservatism, people being rewarded for not taking any risks, etc — which of course is what people routinely criticise government for. So I hope people can see that when they rubbish the travel bubble and say it should never have been put in place, they’re also encouraging the very bias (and risk aversion) that they usually accuse the authorities of. (Edit: An example of the omission bias by the Sg authorities is the comprehensive ban on e-cigarettes. If they maintain the ban (ie. the status quo), no one will blame them if subsequently we find that e-cigarettes are less harmful and could have saved lives and reduced the disease burden of smoking. In fact, those people keeping the ban can even claim that they were simply being prudent. If they lift the ban, and we find out later that e-cigarettes are more harmful than previously thought, they’d be pilloried. The fear of the latter scenario is far greater than the fear of the former.)"
Also why governments love lockdowns