COVID Transmission Among Vaccinated People Raises Risk of New Variant - "The coronavirus could be "just a few mutations potentially away" from evolving into a variant that can evade existing COVID-19 vaccines, CDC director Rochelle Walensky said Tuesday. According to research published Friday in the journal Scientific Reports, vaccinated people — counterintuitively — play a key role in that risk. The best way to stop coronavirus deaths and severe illness is to roll out vaccines quickly. However, the researchers concluded that the chance a vaccine-resistant strain will emerge is highest in a scenario that combines three conditions: First, a large portion of a population is vaccinated, but not everyone. Second, there's a lot of virus circulating. And third, no measures are in place to curb potential viral transmission from vaccinated people. Sound familiar?... Infections among people who are partially vaccinated raise the risk of a game-changing mutation because it takes time for the body to develop the antibodies, T cells, and B cells that fight the virus, and our immune response increases dramatically following the second dose. So if someone gets infected in the interim, it gives the virus a sneak peek at what it's up against. With Delta, research shows, a single shot of the Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccines is only 33.5% effective against the variant."
Looks like we'll be having covid restritions for the rest of time, since the world will never get to 100% vaccination (partly because of moral panic over boosters, which reduces the supply the developing world gets). In any event, even 100% vaccination won't end covid mutation since the vaccines aren't sterilising, so covid hysteria need never end
A doctor friend pointed out a 2 week interval between vaccine courses is unprecedented, and an artefact of pandemic exigencies pushing for trials to be concluded ASAP, and really should be considered one course
It's weird how so many people who claim they follow the "science" are unaware that the vaccines don't really reduce transmission. When I provide the science they either ignore it or get upset
Meme - BrooklynDad_Defiant!: "I can guarantee you RIGHT NOW that I will not be taking anything called the trump vaccine."
BrooklynDad_Defiant!: "Does the #FreedomFlu come with the sound of your own unvaxxed raspy breaths through a ventilator?"
Majority of Canadians want COVID restrictions lifted: Poll | Toronto Sun - "A majority of Canadians now say it is time to end COVID restrictions, according to an Angus Reid poll, a sharp increase from when the same question was asked in early January... A majority back lifting restrictions in every province and region in Canada, with rural dwellers being more likely than urban dwellers to want restrictions lifted – 58% to 54%. Support for lifting is also the majority viewpoint for both men and women and across all but one age group. “Women over the age of 54 are the only age-gender group that disagree that restrictions should be ended"... “Women over the age of 54 are the only age-gender group that disagree that restrictions should be ended. A majority of each of the other gender and generation groupings agree that the time has come,” the institute said. Support for lifting restrictions is highest among men aged 35-54 at 67%, followed by men 18-34 at 60% and women aged 35-54 at 58%. Among women aged 55 and over, 51% disagree with lifting restrictions while 40% agreed. Just over one in five say that they or someone in their household have been infected with COVID-19 since Dec. 1 with most describing symptoms as minor"
A covid hystericist tried to dismiss this as a poll on a "web forum", and when I pointed out that FiveThirtyEight rated them a B+ for election polling, tried to pretend their election polling was probability polling (when all their polls are based on an online forum)
The Maker on Twitter - "54% of Canadians are willing to throw anyone with an immunosuppressive condition under the bus so they can go to Boston pizza."
"54% of Canadians realize that we can and have the tools to protect the immunosuppressive and should be the government responsibility to ensure they have proper care while leaving the rest continue so that we can produce the resources necessary to sustain the immunosuppressive"
Clearly, the world must be locked down forever for the rest of time to protect the immunocompromised since even if 100% of people get vaccinated, it won't stop covid spread
The Pandemic Isn’t Over for Immunocompromised People - The Atlantic - "for a time, immunocompromised people caught a glimpse of something better. Beth Wallace, a rheumatologist at the University of Michigan, told me that many of her patients once accepted that viruses would regularly flatten them but have now realized that they don’t have to live that way. Cautious behaviors and flexibility around work meant that the flu practically vanished, and many immunocompromised people were actually less sick during the COVID era than before. And while they don’t want lockdowns to persist, they had hoped that the flexibility might. Sung Yun Pai of the National Institutes of Health told me that in the past, her patients—children who receive stem-cell transplants to treat genetic immune disorders—would simply have had to miss school. “In some ways, the whole world going virtual gave them better access to education”... Eugenics—the concept of improving humanity by encouraging the “fittest” people to have children while preventing the “unfit” from doing so—is most commonly associated with the Holocaust, Aparna Nair, an anthropologist and historian of disability at the University of Oklahoma, told me... when a society acts as if the deaths of vulnerable people are unavoidable, and does little to lessen their risks, it is still implicitly assigning lower value to certain lives. COVID isn’t going away. With eradication long off the table, the disease will become a permanent part of our lives—another serious infectious threat added to a ledger already full of them... Beyond equitable access to treatments, the people I spoke with mostly want structural changes—better ventilation standards, widespread availability of tests, paid sick leave, and measures to improve vaccination rates. Above all else, they want flexibility, in both private and public spaces. That means remote-work and remote-school options, but also mask mandates for essential spaces such as grocery stores and pharmacies, which could be toggled on or off depending on a community’s caseload"
The world needs to build up immunity debt and teachers need to forever provide hybrid learning to protect the immunocompromised, apparently (the latter is ironic since liberals are usually pro-teacher - I guess the solution will be to hire more teachers)
Edward Vranic, CFA on Twitter - "The absolute meltdown the "pro-lockdown until 2058" people are having over the poll showing 54% of Canadians agree that restrictions should be lifted is evidence that we are turning the corner. COVID will always be around, along with thousands of other viruses. Deal with it."
Former N.L. premier suing federal government over vaccine mandates for air travel - "Brian Peckford, the last surviving premier involved in the drafting of the Canadian constitution, is suing the federal government, claiming vaccine mandates for air travel are unconstitutional. In documents lawyers say have been filed with the Federal Court, Peckford and five others claim the mandate “effectively bans Canadians who have chosen not to receive an experimental medical treatment from domestic and international travel by airplane.”... “Requiring travellers and employees to be vaccinated, ensures that everyone who travels and works in the transportation industry will protect each other and keep Canadians safe,” said Transport Minister Omar Alghabra at the time... Over the course of the pandemic, he has emerged as an anti-public-health-measures activist, claiming in letters to various health officials that such policies violate the charter... Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s mandate letter to Alghabra made mention of enforcing such a mandate, and “his hateful comments of calling anyone who believes that people should have a choice with respect to vaccines as being racist, misogynists” are evidence that the measure was improperly developed and implemented... The suit also argues the vaccine travel mandate violates privacy rights, equality rights, mobility rights, rights to “life, liberty and security of the person” and freedom of religion and conscience. These are all rights protected by the charter and all can be limited by government with sufficient justification... Eric Adams, a law professor at the University of Alberta, said numerous lawsuits against COVID-19 measures have failed to overturn public-health restrictions, and this case raises many of the same issues. “It’s always going to be difficult to win a case for you where you’re bringing out arguments that have already failed in similar context,” Adams said. “But at some point, perhaps the pandemic’s duration becomes a variable that becomes a factor in one of these lawsuits.” Wilson said many of the cases that had come before the court were done on tight time schedules, with less well-developed scientific evidence and a “factual change in the risk profile of the pandemic.”"
Clearly another ignorant plague rat who is obsessed with freedumb and who doesn't understand that restrictions on civil liberties are needed in an amergency
China-linked disinformation campaign blames Covid on Maine lobsters - "Zha Liyou, the Chinese consul general in Kolkata, India, tweeted an unfounded claim that Covid-19 could have been imported to China from the United States through a batch of Maine lobsters shipped to a seafood market in Wuhan in November 2019. It marks the latest in a series of theories that have been pushed by pro-China accounts since the start of the pandemic. With some further digging, Schliebs uncovered a network of more than 550 Twitter accounts, which he shared with NBC News, spreading a nearly identical message, translated into multiple languages — including English, Spanish, French, Polish, Korean and even Latin — at similar times each day between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. China Standard Time. Some of the accounts were “unsophisticated sock puppets” with “very few or zero followers,” Schliebs said, while others appeared to be accounts that were once authentic but had been hijacked and repurposed to spread disinformation... “This is the third or fourth major different redirection Chinese officials have gone in to try and somehow pin the Covid outbreak on the U.S.,” Bret Schafer, the head of the information manipulation team at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, part of the nonprofit German Marshall Fund of the United States, said about the diplomats spreading the messaging bolstered by inauthentic accounts. “It looks crude and not sophisticated when you look at individual accounts. But these kinds of networks are designed to try and get topics to trend on social media.”"
These doctors and COVID-19 experts are pushing for quicker return to pre-pandemic normal - "“The approach moving forward with COVID needs to be more sustainable,” he said. “What we’re doing right now, closing economies, restaurants, gyms, schools, that is not a sustainable solution.” He is one of the leaders of a controversial new U.S.-based group — the Urgency of Normal — that’s pushing for a rapid return to unrestricted in-person learning for children, whom they argue have suffered unduly because of pandemic lockdowns. The organization’s 400 or so signatories include 32 other Canadian physicians and health-care professionals, among them four infectious disease or medical microbiology specialists, emergency medicine doctors, university professors and a hospital chief of medicine... there’s scant evidence to support closing schools or keeping students in masks and say it’s hard even to justify the vaccine mandates that brought hundreds of truckers to Ottawa in a mass protest. Though restrictions are easing in most provinces as case counts drop, the possibility of imposing further lockdowns again has not been ruled out. “We’re doing a lot of harm to the fabric of society ,” said Dr. Martha Fulford , a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at McMaster University and chief of medicine at Hamilton’s university hospital about the measures. “We need to understand what the endpoint is, what the rationale is for any of this we’re doing.”... A recent review in the Canadian Journal of Public Health said there’s a shortage of rigorous studies comparing rates of youth mental-health problems like depression before and during the pandemic — but that there’s reason to believe the pandemic could leave long-term impacts. A sharp increase in eating-disorder cases has been well-documented. And the Quebec public-health institute reported this week that while actual suicides have remained stable, emergency room visits by teenage girls for suicidal behaviour jumped in 2021. “The distress remains very palpable,” it said. Kyeremanteng said school closures and online learning have had a particular impact on people of colour and other marginalized communities... “We have a vaccinated population that should be largely protected from severe disease . So what else do people want before you have the conversation about going back to normal?” asks Dr. Ari Bitnun, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist and University of Toronto professor. “We are going to have to live with it, basically.” The focus should shift beyond just combatting the coronavirus, echoed Dr. Jocelyn Srigley, a clinical professor of medical microbiology at the University of British Columbia and infection-control leader at a major Vancouver hospital. “We need to keep in mind that health is about more than just COVID-19 and look at the bigger picture,” she said. The four Canadian doctors also said it’s hard to justify mandates when evidence points to vaccines doing little now to prevent transmission of the Omicron variant, even as they continue to be a potent defence against serious illness.“If you’re going to mandate something, it needs to have a very clear public-health rationale,” said Fulford. “I don’t believe that coercion is a line that any physician, any government should cross.”... Fulford said the discussion needs to allow for a middle-ground position, not just a black-and-white choice between total lockdown and “let her rip.” Since his role in the Urgency of Normal was revealed, even Kyeremanteng’s family has faced attacks."
Of course, attacking the families of doctors who speak out about the harms of lockdowns is good because you're trying to save people's lives (from covid and only covid)
LILLEY: Twitter doctors can dish it out but can't take it | Toronto Sun - "This species is rarely seen by normal people who don’t live on social media, those who don’t spend day and night fretting about the intricacies of COVID-19 and government policy regarding the same. Yet sadly, even normal people live with the impact of this invasive species because they have been amplified by traditional media as experts who must be listened to even when their credentials, their erratic behaviour and their track record suggest otherwise. Take Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth, a family physician who takes to social media to make outlandish statements and then claims those who question or criticize are “bullying physicians” or that criticism amounts to “attacks on physicians.” This was Dr. Kaplan-Myrth’s reaction to being called irresponsible for falsely claiming “paediatric hospitalizations are now through the roof, surpassing hospitalizations in 20, 30 and 40 year olds.” Of course, her claims aren’t true, they aren’t backed up by the data from Public Health Ontario or the various paediatric hospitals around the province... Dr. Kaplan-Myrth’s claim is false but she is widely followed in her native Twitter habitat by people who find comfort in her constant warnings of impending doom. We know that across Ontario roughly 45% of all hospital patients who are listed on the COVID rolls were actually admitted for other reasons. The chief of staff at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario — the local children’s hospital for Dr. Kaplan-Myrth — told the Globe and Mail this week that most patients with COVID “are admitted for reasons unrelated to the virus.” Yet Dr. Kaplan-Myrth continues to fearmonger on the issue while also pushing vaccine advice for children which contradicts federal and provincial health guidelines. She follows in a long line of Twitter doctors who seem determined to tell the world that children face a greater risk than the facts actually support, that schools are unsafe and that generally, society must shut down. Like other Twitter doctors, such as Fisman, Dosani, Stall and others, there is a strong political bent leaning to the left. These are the doctors who will claim the chief medical officer — a doctor — is completely wrong and misguided, but they don’t see that as bullying or attacking doctors. They will claim statements put out by children’s hospitals and their physicians are lacking, dangerous or, in some cases, paid for by corporate donors without seeing that as an attack on doctors. Question their wild claims though and you will be labelled by the Twitter doctors and their supporters as anti-science, against medicine, sexist and more. Meanwhile, Dr. Kaplan-Myrth has actually been found to have been in violation of the rules of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario for her attacks on Twitter against another doctor... Twitter doctors, like Dr. Kaplan-Myrth, want to influence or even dictate public policy — which goes far beyond their medical specialty — but don’t want to be questioned. If these doctors want to set public policy, then they should put their names on the ballot for the election this June. They should expect to be questioned though — it’s part of the job."
The same people who mock religious prophecies of doom breathlessly promote predictions of covid or environmental catastrophe despite repeated falsification. As Dawkins said, the retreat of Christianity has left the way open to something worse
Philippe Lemoine on Twitter - "This is just based on anecdotal evidence, but I'm starting to fear that differences in risk-aversion and conformism between men and women are going to turn COVID-19 into a new battleground for the war of the sexes, going into the long term."
André Pratte: Controlling COVID (and us) is mission impossible - "I am reading Why Liberalism Works, by distinguished American economist Deirdre Nansen McCloskey. Quote: “A complicated economy far exceeds the ability of even a government-sized collection of human intellects to govern it in detail. … Governing in great detail from the capital the trillions of plans shifting daily by the nearly 330 million individuals in the American economy is a fool’s errand … I wonder if the same applies to the unprecedented attempts by governments, in Canada and elsewhere, to control their citizens’ private lives in the hopes of containing the COVID-19 pandemic. Isn’t there a point where such attempts are so fastidious, arbitrary and rights-infringing that they become futile, counterproductive even? More importantly, if we accept this extent of state intervention in our private lives now, what will prevent governments from doing it again to contain another crisis, real or apprehended? What if this becomes the new normal?... As John Stuart Mill wrote in 1859: “There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence; and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs as protection against political despotism.” As regards the government of Québec, maybe it has not “lost control” because it is incompetent, as many believe. Maybe it has lost control because, as McCloskey implies, there are simply too many things to “govern in detail.” In other words, this is mission impossible. In the fight against COVID, governments have relied on statistics: number of cases, number of hospitalizations, number of patients in ICUs, number of deaths. People believed that those numbers were rigorously compiled, and therefore that governments based their liberty-infringing measures on science. Omicron has now lifted the veil on a different reality: the number of cases is no longer a reliable indicator, if it ever was, because many people cannot get tested. Neither are hospitalizations a good indicator, for it has been confirmed that a significant number of patients counted as “COVID” were not hospitalized for the virus, but tested positive after their admission for another ailment. It has now become clear that many of the restrictions were based not only on science, but on a mix of speculation, guesswork and politics. A public health-care system such as what exists in Canada has many advantages and Canadians are rightly proud of Tommy Douglas’s legacy. However, there are also drawbacks, since the government monopoly prevents private initiative from finding new solutions to the capacity problems that currently hamper testing and treatment across the country. It is not only ideology; governments are paralyzed by the fear of losing control of the system, even though in fact, they are unable to manage it efficiently.”
Our acceptance of a mass lock-in is more dangerous than any party - "The prospect of a fatal plague which might be unstoppable simply blew every other consideration - personal freedom, the need for human contact, even familial intimacy - out of sight. But there is something rather odd in the historical progress of events. At the beginning of this story, the scientific experts (and the government authorities who were so religiously following their advice) were telling us explicitly that most people who contracted Covid-19 would not become seriously ill. That, in fact, they would very possibly not even know they had the virus. (I recall Sir Chris Whitty among others, stating this clearly at one of the early Downing Street briefings.) And this was being said before the arrival of the vaccines or even any reliable treatments. Yet somehow, this virus which had been described as a threat largely limited (as it was then, and still is) to those with other comorbidities, transmogrified into a national emergency justifying measures that were, in the literal sense of the word, inhuman: restrictions that, if rigorously followed, would dismantle many of the most fundamental, instinctive forms of social and emotional life. Yes there was some resistance. But the general assent to all of this in principle was overwhelming. The justification for the mass house arrest of the population was a blur of two issues: protection for those who were actually susceptible to the most severe form of the illness - those with predisposing health conditions - and the need to protect the NHS from collapse which was a separate but not unrelated problem. The public discourse was dominated by the dissemination of constantly escalating terror. The broadcast news became a relentless succession of the most pessimistic possible analysis and statistical prediction, much of which we now know to have been mistaken and which, even at the time, was more contentious than the official messaging (relayed unchallenged by the broadcast coverage) acknowledged. But what was worse - much worse - was what happened when government and NHS authorities discovered that instead of legally prohibiting the behaviour they wished to suppress, they could use psychologically coercive techniques to manipulate public attitudes. Did the events of the last century teach us nothing about the terrible consequences of using fear to control a population, and about the peculiarly sinister force of a fear that cannot be questioned or debated?... There must be an answer eventually to the obvious query: why did virtually all of the healthcare systems in the developed world react to this pandemic with such unprecedented panic? The Hong Kong flu epidemic of 1968 which took far more of the young and healthy, did not evoke anything like this response. (Is contemporary healthcare now so stretched because it has taken on much wider responsibilities for treatments and conditions than it did a generation ago?) Then there was that other, more salubrious pressure that led to this mass surrender of the norms of life and liberty: the introduction of an alternative set of virtues. We were enduring very special conditions which required an entirely new set of social responses. The old understanding of societal connection depending on physical contact had to be replaced by a sense of communal responsibility in which concern for people meant avoiding them. By ironic extension, the basic principle of a national healthcare system - compassion, which in its most natural form involves physically comforting those you care for - had to be suspended. It was perverse and completely alien to all the natural impulses that human beings possessed - and yet, with the aid of an exceptionally forceful advertising campaign and, again, the enthusiastic complicity of the broadcast media, it succeeded. Each of these ingredients - the promulgation of fear, and the creation of a new moral order by psychological manipulation - would have been powerful alone. Together they were unbeatable."
'Public Health' Has Become a Catchall Excuse for Bad Ideas - "One of the notable developments of the pandemic era has been the tendency to use public health as a pretext for some other goal that has little or nothing to do with public health. You can see this, in different ways, in everything from Neil Young's war on Spotify and Joe Rogan to teachers union recalcitrance to President Joe Biden's legislative agenda. But let's start with an issue close to my heart: the fight over to-go cocktails in the state of New York. Until the onset of COVID, it was illegal to purchase a to-go cocktail in New York... New York's legalization of to-go cocktails was passed on an emergency basis. And in June 2021, the emergency authorization expired rather unexpectedly. One reason why it expired was that liquor stores, who would prefer to have the market for booze consumed at home all to themselves lobbied heavily against extending the policy... Among the reasons the liquor store lobby has cited for prohibiting bars and restaurants from selling to-go booze: the prospect of a "public health crisis." As Baylen Linnekin noted recently, a lobbying group for New York liquor stores recently warned that permanent to-go cocktails could also "increase DWI incidents and underage sales," as if it's impossible to pop open a beer in the car on the way home from the local spirits shop, or for an adult to purchase a bottle of Jameson and pass it off to a minor. In any case, what we have is an industry whose entire business revolves around selling booze for people to consume at home strenuously objecting to a law that would expand the ways in which people consume alcohol at home—for public health reasons. Sure... There's something at least a little bit similar at work in the recent battle of the bands between Neil Young, Joe Rogan, and Spotify... Neil Young, one of pop music's most outspoken audiophiles, has long been a critic of streaming music, and Spotify in particular, since Spotify does not currently offer high-resolution audio. Years ago, when Apple's digital music business was still developing, Young backed an expensive device to rival the iPhone, the Pono, which was built for high-resolution music. And in 2015, before high-resolution digital music became common, Young took his music down from all streaming services, complaining that low-quality streaming "devalued" his music. So Young had a preexisting gripe with Spotify's service that had nothing to do with Rogan's interviews. It wasn't much of a surprise to see that after Young's music came down last week, he posted another note saying that he felt "better" having left "the shitty degraded and neutered sound of Spotify." He further warned that "if you support Spotify, you are destroying an art form" and told listeners who used the service they should "go to a new place that truly cares about music quality." Exactly how much of Young's decision was about Rogan and vaccines, I cannot say. But it seems reasonable to suspect that at least some of Young's decision to leave Spotify came as a result of his longstanding complaints about audio quality—which he'd pulled his music from streaming services over before—rather than about Joe Rogan's influence on public health. But public health was the reason the old rock star gave for leaving, and the one that made headlines, perhaps not incidentally putting Young in the spotlight. (Surely unrelated: Did you know he has a new album and documentary out?) Public health provided Young a pretext for doing what he already wanted to do, and gave him attention in the process. Everywhere you look these days, you can see versions of this tendency, in large and small ways: Teachers unions have spent the last two years using public health fears as an excuse to stay out of classrooms. Biden and congressional Democrats have used the pandemic as an excuse for massive expansions of social spending that have little to do with responding to the coronavirus... the totalizing emergency of the pandemic has created an aura of permission whereby moves that might otherwise seem selfish can be recast as pure and selfless when the reality is anything but."
Stephen L. Miller on Twitter - "sure hope abbott doesn’t need a icu bed. there aren’t many around"
"He's vaccinated. He was vaccinated in December of 2020. Take a break.
They get vaccinated. They say the right things. And it still doesn't matter to these guys. Nothing will.
Don't even care about the cheap shot at Abbott. It's Twitter. It's politics but putting out there that a vaccinated Governor might need an icu bed is telling and causes a ton of shit.
Or does this make Abbott anti anti anti vax now?"
Jennifer 'pro-voting' Rubin on Twitter - ".GovRonDeSantis doubles down, says he'll call legislators back into special session if federal government requires schools to require masks. "We're not doing that in Florida. We needs our kids to breathe." He claims: "There's not very much science behind it.""
"He is putting children at risk of a deadly disease. He should hold no office." - Jul 2021
Jennifer 'pro-voting' Rubin on Twitter - "@NYGovCuomo " The boyfriend" looks nice and the girls seem to have eaten their spaghetti and meat balls!" - Apr 2020
Meme - Steve Cox @RealSteveCox: "I love the idea of untested vaccines being delivered to the public. What could possibly go wrong?"
Steve Cox @RealSteveCox: "All who *choose* not to get vaccinated *are* a threat to my family. And fuck you for making excuses for them."
Meme - "'Choices have consequences.'"
If you choose NOT to get the "vaccine" you shouldn't get life saving medical care.
If you choose to over-eat and are fat you shouldn't get life saving medical care.
If you choose to smoke or vape you shouldn't get life saving medical care.
If you choose to get drunk and crash you shouldn't get life saving medical care.
If you choose to screw someone and get AIDS you shouldn't get life saving medical care.
If you choose to quit your job and lose insurance you shouldn't get life saving medical care.
If you choose to enter this country illegally you shouldn't get life saving medical care.
And That's How Facists Works"
Facebook - "A new study found differences in COVID-19 vaccination coverage by sexual orientation and vaccine confidence by sexual orientation and gender identity. Higher percentages of gay or lesbian and bisexual adults compared with heterosexual adults, and transgender or nonbinary adults compared with persons who do not identify as transgender or nonbinary thought the vaccine was very or somewhat important to protect oneself. Understanding these differences can help inform efforts to increase vaccine coverage & health equity"
Time to look into the structural heterophobia stopping cis straight people from getting vaccinated
Facebook - "Another mind-blowing moment in our sport today - and unfortunately not in a good way. Badminton Association of Malaysia - BAM has decided to refuse to enter world no. 7 and All England champion Lee Zii Jia and women's singles player Goh Jin Wei to any international tournament for at period of 2 years. Their crime? They want to follow their own path. Choose their own coaches, their own training set up, their own tournament schedule, do their own sponsorship deals etc. Basically they want to make a living for themselves playing badminton professionally. Honestly, how is that a crime? They haven't done anything whatsoever to discredit the sport nor their country."
I saw people who demanded that Djokovic just obey the rules like everyone else, and that it was very simple, condemning this
John Bracey on Twitter - "The reopen-at-all-costs movement is racist, classist, and ableist. It’s a pro-eugenics movement that believes that some lives are worth less than others, and that the more valuable lives shouldn’t be inconvenienced to save the less valuable lives."
Ironic, given that lockdowns kill more than they save
Quebec government faces backlash for 2nd curfew - "Quebec is one of the few jurisdictions in the world to impose a curfew in the pandemic — let alone do it twice. Thanks to a belief in a strong provincial government, the first curfew was generally accepted by the population, according to McGill University political science Prof. Daniel Béland. But since Premier François Legault announced Thursday that Quebecers would once again be prevented from leaving their homes between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. starting Dec. 31, he appears to be receiving more criticism this time around. The strict public health measure was criticized by 13 academics and public health experts in an open letter published on the website Pivot the same day Legault made the announcement. Members of all three opposition parties in Quebec have also denounced the curfew since then. The open letter noted that most outbreaks throughout the pandemic in the province have taken place in schools, daycares and workplaces. "At best, the curfew is a spectacle," the letter said. "At worst, it is a punishment on individuals to mask the negligence and systemic inaction in managing the pandemic." One of the letter's signatories, Jean-Sébastien Fallu, a Université de Montréal professor, said the curfew may do more harm than good, especially for marginalized populations. "It has an impact, even at 10 p.m., for many people: sex workers, people on the street, people living with violence at home," Fallu said. Béland, who was not one of the people who signed the letter, said the criticism has come from beyond experts and general opponents of public health measures. "People, who may have even supported the first curfew or were a bit neutral about it, now they're coming out swinging, saying, 'Well, you never showed us the evidence that the first curfew made a positive difference in the first place'"... When reporters asked Legault on Thursday what evidence there was to justify imposing a curfew a second time, he replied that it was "du gros bon sens," or common sense, since limiting people's movements after dark discourages indoor gatherings... It can be difficult to isolate a curfew's impact on virus transmission because it is just one of many public health restrictions, according to Dr. Nazila Bettache, a member of the Caring for Social Justice Collective. Evaluating its effectiveness is complicated by the fact that, at the same time, the government closed restaurant dining rooms, prohibited indoor gatherings and moved schooling online. Bettache sees the curfew as another way the Legault government is managing the pandemic with a "logic of oppression" rather than prevention. Instead, the government should provide people and workers access to quality masks, testing, ventilation in schools and financial support to be able to quarantine... "Police repression and population control is not going to get us out of this pandemic," she said. "We need solutions that take into consideration those who are most affected, whether it's front-line workers or people living in precarious social situations." Despite inflicting a curfew on Quebecers for nearly five months last year, Legault remains the Canadian premier with the most popular support in the polls, said Béland. The province's leaders and residents tend to follow the news in France more closely than the rest of the country, which may explain not only why the curfew was imposed in the first place, but also why people were accepting of it, he explained. From October 2020 to June 2021, France had a curfew in the regions hardest hit by COVID. "The provincial state is perceived as the protector or the defender of not just Quebec's identity, but also the health and the wealth of the nation," Béland said. "There is this sense in Quebec that under some circumstances individuals have to make some sacrifices for the common good and in the name of this strong role of the state, which is itself justified by Quebec nationalism." All that may have held true a year ago, but things could be different this time, the political scientist said. Two weeks ago, the premier was still in favour of allowing holiday gatherings of up to 10 people indoors. Legault may have made a calculation to reinstate the curfew as a way of countering criticism that his government had not done enough to prevent the overwhelming surge in cases and hospitalizations. The fact that the government hasn't conducted its own study on the impacts of the curfew may speak for itself, Béland said. "It may indicate that … the main objective of the curfew was more political, was more about optics, telling people that the situation was really serious," he said. "Rather than being effective from a public health standpoint.""
Quebec to lift restrictions for restaurants, home gatherings, bars - "After almost two years of the pandemic, the opposition Parti Quebecois said its patience and collaboration with the Legault government had reached its limits. There will be no more "carte blanche" for the CAQ, said PQ leader Paul Saint-Pierre Plamondon before the Legault news conference on Tuesday. No new health measures will be accepted without a proper debate in the National Assembly, he said, and there is also no question of accepting the extension of health emergency decrees until the election campaign next fall. Plamondon said citizens have consented to many restrictions because they were intended to be exceptional and temporary, but the government seems to want to extend them into permanent measures. Premier Legault said his government is already working on tabling a bill in March "to create a framework for the need to have exceptional rules," including the state of emergency. Plamondon said in an interview with The Canadian Press that the lack of debate has ultimately damaged public confidence and fuelled opposition movements such as the trucker 'freedom convoy' that took place last weekend in Quebec City."
