Discovered: Covid 'trust threshold' where restrictions do not work - and UK is on the cusp - "A Covid "trust threshold" below which restrictions do not work has been discovered by scientists - and Britain sits right on the cusp. Research by the University of Exeter has found that countries in which at least 40 per cent of citizens agree that "most people can be trusted" were found to have used restrictions to effectively reduce cases and deaths during 2020. More trusting societies tended to achieve a faster decline in infections and deaths from peak levels, but those below 40 per cent struggled to bring the virus under control. The researchers believe the effect happens because behaviours needed to stop the spread of coronavirus, such as mask wearing and social distancing, depend on mutual trust to be effective. Previous studies show levels of trust in the UK are at the critical 40 per cent, compared to more than 60 per cent in Scandinavian countries. China also has high levels of trust within society... Looking across countries, the researchers found no significant correlation between trust in government and success at bringing down cases and deaths. Wealth and better health services were also found to help, but they were less important than how much citizens trusted each other."
Weird, everyone in China is out to cheat you
Pandemic has ‘stoked distrust in authority and allowed terrorists to sow conspiracy theories’ - "The pandemic has left people more vulnerable to being radicalised by extremists because it has stoked distrust in authority, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police has said. Dame Cressida Dick said terrorists had exploited the social isolation caused by lockdown to peddle dangerous conspiracy theories... Dame Cressida also warned that the switch in recent years to less sophisticated terror attacks meant vulnerable people were increasingly being targeted and recruited by extremists. She said: “In the past, perhaps recruiting children or those with mental ill-health would have been an unacceptable risk when trying to execute a complex bomb plot. “But when you’re simply trying to push vulnerable people over the edge towards crude, direct action such as a random knife attack, the opposite is true.”"
Terrorist attacks are a small price to pay to save a few people from covid
Derek Burney: Meandering facts and directives on COVID are sapping public trust - "People are losing trust in the meandering and at times politicized facts and directives being announced and wondering whether the strategy on COVID is working. While generally accepting the value of vaccinations many question the need and constitutionality of coercion through mandates. Some see this as excessive control by governments. President Biden announced that Americans should get a “booster” shot eight months after being doubly vaccinated for COVID, but no rationale was provided for the eight month wait. Nor is there enough evidence that the proposed booster is necessary. The Food and Drug Administration’s Advisory Committee delivered a stinging rebuke to the president voting 16-2 against giving the booster to the general public but the CDC Director rejected their advice and insisted on broader implementation. Mask mandates are back though opinions remain mixed on their utility, especially for those already vaccinated. Concerns have also been raised about the deleterious effects mask wearing for six to eight hours per day have on young children in school. What we do know is that virtual teaching outside the classrooms did not work well. Nor did remote working prove to be productive for governments or many in the private sector. Statistics on COVID mortality rates can be misleading because, especially among seniors, pre-existing conditions can contribute to death. One salient fact is that the impact on long term care residents has been severe in both Canada and the U.S., suggesting that these facilities should have been given much higher priority from the outset. There are also questions about whether the lockdowns that paralyzed much of the North American economy and the functioning of governments, notably the educational systems, were necessary. Drastic efforts to contain the disease come at a price. A clash between the common good and individual freedoms is never easy to resolve. In Canada, John Carpay, President of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedom, has challenged in court many COVID edicts that he believes violate fundamental human rights. In a June op/ed he wrote , “We have the ideology of Covidism, whereby everything must give way to the sole objective of stopping the spread of a single virus … Nothing else matters: not our mental and emotional health which depends on connecting in person with friends, family members and fellow believers at a house of worship.” According to Carpay, “Covidism’s kernel of truth is that people make reasonable efforts to protect seniors and other vulnerable individuals but it perverts and corrupts this truth by imposing unscientific measures that destroy our economy, shred the fabric of civil society, harm our mental and physical health and drive people into unemployment, poverty, depression, anxiety and despair.” His concerns should prompt a broader perspective on the virus, something sadly absent from much of the debate. Our singular obsession with COVID has completely overshadowed dramatic spikes in the use of opioids like fentanyl in 2020 and the first six months of 2021. A June report from the Public Health Agency of Canada found that, on average, 17 people died per day of opioid overdoses in 2020."
Rex Murphy: How COVID-19 taught the public to distrust the authorities - "the first request of the public was to put up with a shutdown of two weeks “to slow down the curve.” Certainly no one was happy about it, but everyone gave it a quick “yes.”... as the anxieties of the population began to swell and the question of whether face masks would be a useful or necessary safeguard, at a time when face masks were not abundantly available here in Canada, Tam was ready with advice on those as well: “Putting a mask on an asymptomatic person is not beneficial, obviously if you’re not infected,” she said. But when, just seven days later, the same front figure of the federal response to COVID-19 did a full 180-degree turn and returned to her podium to urge the benefit, if not the necessity of face masks, you could sense the turbulence in the public’s confident reception in what the political and medical authorities were urging and ordering. It would take the whole column and a few more besides to catalogue the declarations and decrees which came down from Ottawa only to be — same phrase — altered, revised, or even contradicted a week or month after their initial commanding iteration. But these pronouncements, uttered in the first instance with great authority and then reversed with even greater aplomb, began to grate. There was a succession of them, right up to the present moment, on whether we should have travel bans, whether there should be quarantines, whether people landing in our airports from other countries should be getting tested, or whether it was OK that some were just landing, picking up their baggage and going their way. Then there were the discrepancies in the application of closures and lockdowns. “Necessary” services were allowed to operate — grocery stores, trucking, and curiously, Big Box stores — but “unnecessary” services were to close. Gyms, barbershops, shoe stores, indeed any retail outlet, big or small, that didn’t belong in a chosen category, were to close totally. And people were urged or ordered to stay away from work, unless of course they were, prime example, clerks in the grocery and food outlets. There was another discrepancy, too, this one financial, and it never has, to this moment, received the full attention it should have. All civil servants, teachers, those on any public contract, remained on permanent payroll, while those in the private sector — even with the CERB payments and other federal assistance — were being brutalized by the closures. This was nowhere more obviously than in the restaurant and hospitality industries, but almost every trade, from taxi-driving to sales, was hit very hard as well. While people kept hearing the Liberal mantras — “we all in this together, and we’ve got your back “ — it was clear some backs could claim more shielding (and got it) than others, and “all” and “together” did not quite carry the weight both terms should aspire to. But there was one discrepancy that towered above all the rest. This was made evident in early June, 2020, when gatherings of thousands of people were permitted to protest the death of George Floyd despite the fact lockdowns were universal in North America and people normally caught amassing in groups larger than five or 10, other than with immediate family members, were either chastened, charged, ridiculed or all three... That’s also when a veritable multitude of “medical authorities” — 1,200 of them in fact — thought it both necessary and enlightened to issue a major media statement . They posted a letter — not a Luther at the Wittenberg church door moment its signatories evidently thought it to be. “We created (this) letter in response to emerging narratives that seemed to malign demonstrations as risky for the public health because of COVID-19 … We wanted to present a narrative that prioritizes opposition to racism as vital to the public health, including the epidemic response .” (My emphasis.) Now was that not Interesting,? Protest demonstrations as public health prophylactics — better than vaccines? The point was then explicitly made: “We do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission.” Everyone else was told to stay at home, avoid congregating, people walking dogs in the wrong places were arrested, barber shops were shut down .. but here were “medical authorities” essentially saying that gathering in the thousands, for the right cause, “was … vital to public health.” Up here in shutdown-mad Canada, there were a number of those “vital to public health” protests, and one was attended by no less than the prime minister himself, who duly “took a knee.” This was the moment that skepticism of the authorities was powerfully launched and the public recognized there was not one set of rules for all, and that even the strictest medical advice could easily, almost triumphantly, be trumped by political considerations."
Randall Denley: Flying blind, Doug Ford pulls old lockdown levers that won't work anymore - "After nearly two years of assuring us that its COVID policies are based on science, data and expert medical advice, the Ontario government is now flying blind... We’re coming down to the point where the only reliable metric is the number of people in hospital with COVID. Even there, nothing is simple. Hospitals have a broader definition of what constitutes a COVID patient. The number of people in hospital with COVID is the number the provincial government releases every day. But some public health units look at it more narrowly and don’t count people admitted to hospital for something else and are later found to be COVID positive, but don’t need COVID treatment. The two methods of counting explain why hospitals say they are overburdened with cases while public-health-unit figures show something different. For example, in Ottawa earlier this week the city’s biggest hospital and two smaller ones say they have 146 COVID patients. Ottawa public health put the number at 26... The Ford government is no longer in a position to act on meaningful data related to specific COVID threats. That’s why it was wrong to shut down the usual suspects such as restaurants, gyms and places of entertainment. It’s a move that will have, at best, a minor effect on case numbers this month, but a major effect on those targeted. That’s not the worst of it. Despite supposedly learning the lesson that closing schools has significant negative impacts, they are closed again with no clarity on what it will take to reopen them. If the key indicator is now hospitalizations, how do you use that number to reopen schools? Is the political message “We’re sending your kid back to school because there’s room in the hospital for him”?... It’s time to keep it simple. Here’s the reality of the Omicron variant: A lot of people will get sick. About one per cent of them will be hospitalized. Far fewer will die. The wave will abate like all the rest of the waves, probably by late January based on the experience in South Africa, where Omicron started. The question is how much collateral damage government will do to Ontarians while the inevitable unfolds. That’s the one thing Doug Ford can control."
The Covid blame game could destroy trust in science - "President Biden and his backers are rewriting history. They one-sidedly blame Trump for causing Covid-19 deaths. But they never give an ounce of credit to Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, which spurred the development of Covid-19 vaccines. No doubt Biden will in time claim the vaccination victory as entirely his own. Such a promiscuous relationship with the truth will further politicise science and expertise... leading scientists are backing claims that Boris Johnson’s dithering in March 2020 cost lives, even though it was the SAGE committees who advised he wait. Politicians were not dithering. They were following ‘The Science’, as it has come to be termed. On various issues the scientific ‘consensus’ has changed drastically, but few of the experts acknowledge this. As Syed notes, NERVTAG (the advisory group on new and emerging respiratory virus threats) said last year that masks were a bad idea. Jenny Harries — then the deputy chief medical officer — stated that testing was no longer appropriate back in March 2020. What’s more, the government now denies that there was ever a plan to develop some level of herd immunity via natural infection. But the chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, and the chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, said publicly that herd immunity was part of the strategy in spring last year, as did others connected to SAGE. They were acting on a sincere expert belief that if the lockdown were imposed too early it would lead to a higher winter peak, and therefore more deaths. The media then pushed the sick notion that Boris and his advisers wanted to ‘kill your granny’. That the experts were seeking ways to save as many grannies as possible got lost in the politicisation of the pandemic... The seriousness of this cannot be overstated. As all other forms of authority have diminished over the past century, science has become the last bastion of authority in Western society. The critical controversies of our times continually appeal to the authority of science. But this only belies the lack of authority elsewhere in society. What happens when even that prop goes?"
Fauci's fed up: Hot mic catches top COVID doctor mocking GOP senator as a "moron" - "Following a day of grilling and tedious questioning, Dr. Anthony Fauci wrapped his nearly daylong testimony before a Senate committee by getting caught on the hot mic mocking a Republican as a "moron... "What happens when he gets out and accuses me of things that are completely untrue, is that all of a sudden that kindles the crazies out there, and I have threats upon my life, harassment of my family, and my children, with obscene phone calls because people are lying about me," Fauci asked during the Senate hearing."
"When they go low, we go lower". Of course on Facebook all the liberals were praising this
Of course when the demonisation of Republicans, which goes beyond the questioning he is subject to, leads to their harassment, this is right and just
German police under fire for misuse of COVID contact tracing app - "The incident concerns authorities in the city of Mainz. At the end of November, a man fell to his death after leaving a restaurant in the city, prompting police to open a case. While trying to track down witnesses, police and prosecutors managed to successfully petition local health authorities to release data from the Luca app, which logs how long people stayed at an establishment. Authorities then reached out to 21 potential witnesses based on the data they had unlawfully acquired from the app."
Even in Germany, with a strong culture of privacy, the police are unable to resist the temptation. Of course they'll blame "anti-vaxxers" if people are skeptical of the app and call anyone with privacy concerns a "covidiot"
Compulsory workplace vaccination rules cannot apply to vegans - "More than half a million vegans will be exempt if companies introduce compulsory vaccination rules in Britain because their beliefs are protected by employment law, legal experts have said. So-called ethical veganism was ruled to be a protected characteristic at a tribunal last year, meaning employers would risk legal action if they order staff to be vaccinated. Other people in protected categories are also likely to be protected by human rights laws, including some religious groups as well as people with certain disabilities or medical conditions... Although the actual doses of vaccine available in the UK contain no ingredients derived from animals, some ethical vegans – who morally object to the exploitation of animals – say the use of animal testing in the development of shots infringes upon their beliefs... The Government has already introduced legislation which states that all care home staff must be vaccinated, a decision which campaigners said is likely to result in some people from protected groups having to leave their jobs... Clare Chappell, an associate solicitor at Peacock & Co, said: “Somebody at some point who is an anti-vaxxer is going to bring a claim that an anti-vax belief is a philosophical belief. “I think it's going to throw a lot of interesting developments into discrimination law over the coming months and years.”"
Moncef Slaoui: "It’s Unfortunate That It Takes a Crisis for This to Happen" - Freakonomics - "The one thing I was frankly very naive to — and is the only thing that made me twice or three times tell myself, “Oh my God, why did I do this?” — was the incredible politicization of what was going on. I was aware that the pandemic was political, but I thought, “O.K., if we’re trying to make vaccines and medicines, who on earth would come to interfere with it?” And I do have to say that, frankly, the current administration did not interfere with it.
LEVITT: It strikes me that one of the things that makes your job quite unattractive is that so many people despise Trump and the administration so much. Therefore, they don’t want to acknowledge under any circumstances that anything good could have come out of it. It sounds like you’ve experienced a little bit of that.
SLAOUI: I think that was the case. And that’s been very disappointing to me, but I got used to it...
LEVITT: So there’s something called a challenge trial where people are given an experimental vaccine. And instead of waiting around to see how many people in treatment and control get Covid over the ensuing months or years as they live their life, in a challenge trial you actually intentionally expose people who got the vaccine to Covid to see if they get sick. And the huge benefit of the challenge trial is that it yields answers quickly. And I suspect that if we had done challenge trials on Covid, we probably could have speeded up approval of a vaccine by two to four months maybe. Maybe it would have saved a hundred thousand U.S. lives and 500 billion dollars in government deficit. Why didn’t we do challenge trials? And do you regret that choice?... there’s a weird dichotomy for me between what medical ethics believes and what common sense says, which is if you can save a hundred thousand lives by maybe killing 10 volunteers, who you could pay very generously, a million dollars apiece, to take a one in 100 chance to die. I don’t understand why that’s unethical.
SLAOUI: Well, you are going to have to take people with comorbidities, old people, obese, et cetera. Very complex, and the issue of the ethics gets very important. If this was Ebola, where exposure to the virus means 90 percent chance of death, it’s a different story. If there is an airborne virus that kills 90 percent of people that it gets in, yes, challenge trial and I’ll volunteer to save the others. But this virus kills — it’s horrible to say this way — it’s one in a thousand, maybe two in a thousand
From 2020, from the head of Operation Warp Speed. So much for Orange Man Bad
Weird. I thought covid is literally the plague. Yet it's not deadly enough to do a challenge trial
Omicron may cut future severity of coronavirus: Study | Toronto Sun - "A laboratory study that used samples from 23 people infected with the omicron variant in November and December found that while those who previously caught the delta variant could contract omicron, those who get the omicron strain couldn’t be infected with delta, particularly if they have been vaccinated... The study — an update to one conducted last year — suggests that omicron can displace delta"
Commentary: Why Omicron is breaking through populations that are triple-vaccinated - "There is now ample evidence that shows the vaccines are not very effective at stopping a vaccinated person from getting infected or from spreading infection. This was graphically illustrated by a superspreading event that took place in the Faroe Islands where 21 out of 33 triple-vaccinated healthcare workers who attended a private gathering caught Omicron. This was also despite the fact that several had done a PCR or lateral flow test in the 36 hours before the event."
Early findings demonstrate Omicron's ability to evade mRNA protection - "Booster shots with messenger RNA vaccines such as those made by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE failed to block Omicron in a study of some of the first documented breakthrough cases caused by the highly contagious variant... That underscores the need to continue fighting the pandemic with measures besides vaccination, such as social distancing and masking"
Time to force people to get a second booster or get fired, in order to "protect" everyone else
Life can never go back to normal because many vaccinated are in fear of something that poses less risk to them than the flu
UCSF COVID doctor: Hospital surge isn't what you may think - "for the past few weeks, San Francisco hospitals have been in dire straits. But it’s not because people are sick — it’s because of staffing shortages driven by overly strict state quarantine rules... After reviewing the charts of every COVID-positive patient at UCSF hospitals on Jan. 4, Dr. Jeanne Noble, an associate professor of emergency medicine at UCSF, determined that 70% of them were in the hospital for other reasons... Staffing shortages are so severe that California is considering canceling elective surgeries... "The vast majority of COVID-plus patients I take care of need no medical care and are quickly discharged home with reassurance."... “[Emergency departments] are flooded with the worried well that are simply seeking testing and reassurance,” she added. “I have not intubated a single COVID patient during this Omicron surge. We have a total of 5 patients with COVID on ventilators across our 4 hospitals. An average of 1.25 intubated COVID patients per hospital is a good news story."... 79% of cases in California are now caused by the omicron variant, which causes more mild illness than previous strains of the virus. A study from the U.K. Health Security Agency found people who contracted the omicron variant were about half as likely to need hospital care as those who contracted the delta variant... “If we view everyone in the hospital with COVID-19 as being in there because of infection, we’ll estimate severity in a potentially damaging way,” Marin County Health Officer Dr. Matt Willis told SFGATE. “I’m not saying we’re there yet, but … if, in fact, we’re at a point where the consequences of being infected are predictably benign enough, then we need to rethink the entire notion of quarantine and isolation.”"
Time to lock down even more to "protect the healthcare system" and stir up even more covid hysteria, so there will be even more worried well
Why Canada is shutting down during Omicron while the U.S. stays open: their health care systems - "As Omicron sweeps through North America, the U.S. and Canadian responses couldn’t be more different. U.S. states are largely open for business, while Canada’s biggest provinces are shutting down. The difference largely comes down to arithmetic: The U.S. health care system, which prioritizes free markets, provides more hospital beds per capita than the government-dominated Canadian system does. “I’m not advocating for that American market-driven system,” said Bob Bell, a physician who ran Ontario’s health bureaucracy from 2014 to 2018 and oversaw Toronto’s University Health Network before that. “But I am saying that in Canada, we have restricted hospital capacity excessively.” The consequences of that are being felt throughout the economy... Ontario’s hospitals get overwhelmed even by a busy flu season... “Both Canada and the U.S. have lower capacity than many European countries”"
Time to lockdown during flu season to protect the healthcare system
Cornell University students say COVID outbreak response not fast enough - "Despite a 97% vaccination rate on campus, the university said it had reported a spike in cases and evidence of the omicron variant in a significant number of the positive results. Now some students are accusing the school of not responding to COVID-19 outbreaks quickly enough. "Ninety-seven percent of the campus is fully vaccinated, a large portion of them have booster shots and there's mandatory masking, and we still have this uptick""
Cornell University shuts down Ithaca campus due to COVID-19 case surge
Looks like they don't believe the vaccines work
I’m Starting to Give Up on Post-pandemic Life - The Atlantic - "What were we supposed to do before? Just hold out for the hospitals, we heard in spring 2020. Just wear masks, we heard that summer. Hold off on travel, the winter said. Test often, warned the spring. Just wait for the vaccines to be deemed safe for kids, entreated early fall. Now it’s winter again, and even with vaccines, next year feels no more encouraging than this one. Just more of the same... We took precautions, at times too many of them, and thought we were acting for the greater good. But it could never be enough—masking up at Trader Joe’s doesn’t vaccinate the global South. The failure of this righteousness only adds more gloom. Why did we even bother? And why keep at it now? I am vaccinated, Gen Z says, so I’m just gonna, like, do me."
Time for more lockdowns and more restrictions to "protect" people from covid and pretending that depression due to covid hysteria is due to "long covid"
Meme - "WHITE PEOPLE LISTEN UP! I simply CANNOT, as a straight white person_andin good conscience, use up even ONE SINGLE INJECTION of of this precious vaccine as it would continue our inherent privilege over minorities. Every single jab into the arm of a white person MUST be used to protect the highly at risk BIPOC community. We white people should not take as a SINGLE vaccine until every last BIPOC body has been vaccinated. We must also prevent BIPOC folx from going to public and concerts where they could be harmed, must be priority signed up for vaccine passports and placed in a national database for their own good. "QUIT" the vaccine for "EQUITY.""
Caldron Pool - Posts | Facebook - "NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said a 27-year-old man has died from Covid, making him the youngest victim of the virus in the state. But his family isn't convinced Covid was the cause. The man's cousin told the Daily Mail his family has a history of heart conditions. The family said the man had no significant symptoms. “No coughing, nothing,” his wife said. “Paramedics who responded to the emergency reportedly confirmed that he suffered heart failure, whereas the hospital specified that Covid was a contributing factor in his death.”"
It's only "misinformation" if it's from one direction
Wake Up, Singapore - Posts | Facebook - "Safe distancing enforcement officers can enter homes without warrants to check compliance with COVID-19 rules: URA"
"Even the Police need warrants to search homes, right? I do not doubt the intentions of the safe distancing officers but we really need to pause and think about the amount of powers and discretion that we are giving them."
Not like human rights exist in Singapore anyway
Dr. Benjamin Braddock on Twitter - "Vaccination alone won't stop the rise of variants and in fact could push the evolution of strains that evade their protection, researchers warned"
"I got a 12 hour suspension in June for saying this"
Glenn Greenwald on Twitter - "It's indescribably chilling how -- since the pandemic began -- Big Tech monopolies have banned any questioning of or dissent from official COVID orthodoxy. As that orthodoxy morphs and changes, so too do the rules of what's permitted and banned: a frightening template.
No matter how many times public health officials got caught lying, misleading or just having erred, the Big Tech dedication to banning any questioning of them has somehow intensified, acclimating everyone to the idea that the internet will not allow dissent of official views.
The Founding Father of MSNBC liberalism calls for the banning of one of the country's most popular YouTubers from Twitter and every other internet platform. It's hard to overstate how authoritarian is US liberalism: begging for corporate censorship is one of their leading tools"
Quote by Bertrand Russell - "“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.” ― Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays"
Meme - Billie Veline, RN @NursePrada2: "Make vaccines as easy to get as buying a gun."
Comrade Bot @xxdspence49: "So people that wants vaccines will need a criminal background check and a 3 day wait?"
Meme - Billie Veline, RN @NursePrada2: "Fuck you.
Fuck your freedom.
Fuck your racism.
Fuck your fascism.
Fuck your Constitution.
Fuck your Trump.
Fuck your DeSantis.
Fuck your anti-vaccine stance.
Yes, Mussolini was a better leader than DeSantis and he never deliberately killed people like DeSantis is doing."
Meme - Steven Polanco @sjp2010: "Mussolini never deliberately killed people" was something I didn't expect from Twitter today."
Why Only 28 Percent of Young Black New Yorkers Are Vaccinated - The New York Times
Contrast this with how unvaccinated white people are treated by the media
Facebook - "When anti-vaxxers rack up tens of thousands of dollars in hospital bills, who pays? Think about it, and you'll realize that their political positions are effectively being subsidized by members of insurance pools, taxpayers, and the vaccinated."
"When the morbidly obese fat acceptance activists rack up tens of thousands of dollars in hospital bills, who pays? Think about it, and you'll realize that their political positions are effectively being subsidized by members of insurance pools, taxpayers, and the fit."
When he discovers that "minorities" are disproportionately unvaxxed...