Health-Related Behaviors Among School-Aged Children and Adolescents During the Spanish Covid-19 Confinement - "Covid-19 confinement reduced physical activity levels, increased both screen exposure and sleep time, and reduced fruit and vegetable consumption. Therefore, most HRBs worsened among this sample of Spanish children and adolescents. Closure of schools, online education, and the lack of policies addressing the conciliation between labor and family life could have played an important role in HRBs worsening among pupils, which might be mitigated with adequate conciliation policies, parental guidance, and community support."
We need to lockdown more to protect children from covid
Development of Psychological Problems Among Adolescents During School Closures Because of the COVID-19 Lockdown Phase in Italy: A Cross-Sectional Survey - "school closures because of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak was associated with significant lifestyle changes in all the students, regardless of age and gender. Despite some differences in some subgroups, the study confirms that school closure can cause relevant mental health problems in older children and adolescents. This must be considered as a reason for the maintenance of all school activities"
Meme - "You're not getting the shot? Fine. It's your funeral."
"You're getting the shot? Fine. It's your funeral."
*same scene playing out 6 more times*
James Smith on Twitter - "So it turns out “get vaccinated to save other people” was a farce. I think I owe a lot of people an apology. I genuinely thought I could trust the ‘experts’. I’m very disappointed to have been hoodwinked by the propaganda of 2020."
Matthew Williams on Twitter - "Didn't most people have the vaccine on the basis that it would greatly reduce the risk of ending up in hospital, as opposed to reduce transmission. It was explained that it doesn't stop you from spreading, just reduces the risk of serious complications etc. Thought most knew?"
Theresa Purnell on Twitter - "And, stop trans mission. We were told this repeatedly."
IndianaNet on Twitter - "Sure! I heard “you killed grandma” thrown around a lot from the sheep. No sympathy…none."
Did the CDC favor social-justice optics over American lives? - "When I heard that Illinois was giving covid-vaccine priority to all “essential workers” over the aged, I was puzzled. Not because “essential” workers should all queue up behind older people, but because some “essential workers” weren’t really essential in a sense that should give them priority over older people whose chance of dying from the infection was much higher. “Essential workers” include, according to Yascha Mounk, bankers, liquor-store employees, hardware-store employees, and movie crews. On what grounds, especially considering the differential risk of death or serious illness, should these “essential workers” be given vaccination priority over adults with high-risk medical conditions or older folks (over 65, 70, or 75, depending on the state and the ordering)? Yet that is what the CDC decided not long ago, realizing, even by their own accounting, that such a decision would cause more people to die than if the order was reversed. The decision to let people die was apparently based on social-justice considerations, as older people were deemed to be more white than were essential workers... the proportion of people of color among essential non-healthcare workers isn’t much different from their proportion among the elderly, and it’s in fact conceivable that prioritizing column 1 over column 3 could lead to the deaths of more people of color than the other way around!... what the CDC was trying to do originally—and may be doing to a lesser extent now—smacks of prioritizing the appearance of equity above the lives of Americans—and that includes black lives. I see no other explanation once you realize that the CDC is supposed to have done the math about overall deaths caused by their different strategies—and then opted for a ranking that would increase the number of dead. We all know the importance of optics (Glenn Loury calls it “ass covering”) over substantive and meaningful progress these days, especially when it comes to alleviating inequalities among groups. To use one example, optics rather than achievement is the basis of land acknowledgments. In the end, Mounk uses this ranking as an example of why we shouldn’t even trust government institutions like the CDC, which is supposed to be using science to make its decisions. Although ethics has to figure in somewhere, if you can’t trust the CDC’s science, what can you trust? And I agree that there was a misstep in the CDC which only public scrutiny prevented. Mounk is especially exercised by the failure of the press to notice and call out the CDC’s priorities, unlike Nate Silver"
From 2020. Of course even in 2022 I still see people claiming that we should "trust scientists" and if you don't, you're ignorant
Social justice means more people (even more "minorities") die for virtue signalling
Adverse effects of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines: the spike hypothesis - "It is well established that the risk for severe COVID-19 increases with age or pre-existing comorbidities. Given the ‘unknowns’ discussed herein, boosting doses in healthy children and even adolescents should be delivered only if the benefit–risk profile is clearly established."
This family of three are the only employees at Wonton Hut. They were fined $880 for COVID-19 infractions, but guidelines are unclear, they say - "“We have signs, temperature control, sanitizer,” Yeung said. “Also no one is allowed to go into the restaurant unless it’s take away or delivery. There is no dine in.” But on Sunday, the restaurant situated in a strip mall plaza at Hwy. 7 and Warden, received an $880 ticket because they didn’t have a written workplace safety plan — a requirement they didn’t know about due to confusing and conflicting information posted on regional and provincial websites... Along with confusing information on websites, Yeung is also concerned that the rules are only outlined in English. Since receiving his ticket, Yeung’s called 50 other local Chinese restaurants speaking to owners in Cantonese and Mandarin to make sure they know about the requirements. About 95 per cent of the restaurants said they had no idea where to find this safety plan, he said. A 2016 report by the Municipality of York Region, gives a glimpse at how language barriers could be a problem. Among the findings: Recent immigrants who did not speak English or French was more than double the national average. Markham was dubbed Canada’s most ethnically diverse community that year with 78 per cent of the population identifying as a visible minority."
From 2021
Top general was warned military's COVID vaccine mandate was unnecessary, possibly illegal: memo - "The commander of the Canadian Armed Forces was warned by his senior legal and medical advisers last year that requiring all troops to be vaccinated against COVID-19 was unnecessary — and that doing so “may not constitute a legal order.” The message was delivered to chief of the defence staff Gen. Wayne Eyre in an August 2021 briefing note, two months before then-defence minister Harjit Sajjan directed him to impose a vaccine requirement for all troops... “We get lots of legal opinions out there, but we can’t allow one legal opinion from stopping us from doing the right thing,” Eyre said. “And here, the right thing is ensuring our operational readiness so that we can protect Canada and Canadian interests around the world.” However, Catherine Christensen, the Edmonton lawyer who obtained the briefing note through the Access to Information Act, argued the document shows Eyre’s order was driven by politics... The memo also said a mandate for the Armed Forces “would not only be punitive in nature, but would also be counter to the successful efforts made to date to encourage maximum voluntary uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine.” The advisers suggested the military share its voluntary approach with other federal departments as a “best practice.”... the military is using 5F releases instead of charging those who refuse to comply with Eyre’s order. “They didn’t want their mandate or their order for everyone to be vaccinated to be challenged in court,” said Christensen. She said Eyre had the power “to order everyone to be vaccinated. Full stop. Then if they did not want to be vaccinated, they had to come up with a reasonable excuse at court martial. … (Eyre) didn’t do that.”"
Albanian PM: EU’s vaccine policy, ‘shameful mistake’ - "He referred to the period of the pandemic when vaccines first became available and were being distributed to EU member states leaving many others out in the cold... The EU did eventually take action and start supplying Albania with vaccines, but this was months after supplies had already been secured from Turkey and Russia in the form of Sinovac and Sputnik, with the first vaccine being given in January 2021."
Harvard Economist Raj Chetty Creates God’s-Eye View of Pandemic Damage - Bloomberg - "The American dream is dead, as he’d proved with exhaustive government data showing today’s workers can no longer expect to earn more than their parents did. Now those left behind by the economic changes of the past few decades could be robbed of any remaining opportunities to get ahead... Because high-income Americans make up such a large share of overall spending, the effects of their caution lingered even as cities and states allowed businesses to reopen. Using the tracker, you can compare neighboring states that reopened at different times, such as Colorado on May 1 and New Mexico on May 16, and see there’s almost no difference in employment or consumer spending trajectories."
From 2020. Of course those calling for eternal lockdown weren't the poor
This suggests that government policies per se did relatively little to affect covid hysteria, at least in the short term
School Closures Were a Failed Policy - The Atlantic - "Student achievement plummeted during COVID. The survey of fourth and eighth graders found that math scores fell in nearly every state. No state showed significant improvements in reading. The lowest-performing students saw the largest declines in achievement... Advocates of school closures make the case that in the fog of pandemic, these policies were made to save lives. Doing the brute utilitarian math of death versus learning, one might argue that a decline in test scores was a fair price to pay for avoiding deaths. But school closures were not a universal response to the pandemic... Compared with their counterparts in the U.S., European policy makers seemed to place more faith in reports that schoolchildren did not play a major role in community transmission, and in evidence from Ireland, Singapore, Norway, Israel, South Korea, and North Carolina that young children were less likely than adults to get severely sick from COVID... Democrats’ disproportionate support for school closures was very likely an unforced error that has contributed to worse achievement gaps between rich kids and poor kids, and that has set children back several years in math classes in which they were already struggling to demonstrate proficiency. I believe the school closures were a mistake, not only because of their direct effects on achievement but also because of the message they’ve sent about the blue cities and states where closures were concentrated. To steal a vibe from Matthew Yglesias: Democrats shouldn’t just want to be the party of government. They should want to be the party of government that actually works. With little evidence that school closures saved lives and ample evidence that they hurt kids, this is a policy that failed. To make government work better next time, we have to see reality clearly"
So who didn't "trust the science"?
Updated Covid-19 boosters offer protection, but new studies suggest they don't offer an edge against Omicron - "The updated Covid-19 booster shots appear to work about as well against the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants as the original boosters they replaced, according to two new studies from research teams at Harvard and Columbia universities... Immunologists say a vaccine against two strains may not be better than a single strain shot because of a phenomenon called immune imprinting... the hope was that by tweaking the vaccine recipe to include currently circulating strains of the Omicron variant, it would help broaden immunity against those variants and perhaps offer better and longer-lasting protection... experts who were not involved in the research say that two studies from well-regarded labs arriving at roughly the same conclusions about the vaccines gives them confidence that the results are correct... neutralizing antibodies spiked after both shots to about the same high levels... The numbers of T cells didn’t budge much after either vaccine... Worobey says that when the strains are combined as they are in the updated boosters, they actually end up competing. The body’s response to the original strain is so strong, it will end up blocking the updated portion of the vaccine from stimulating those blank slate B cells against the newer variants and reshaping the immune response. Thus, imprinting will complicate efforts to keep up with the virus"
This won't stop covid hystericists pretending that they reduce transmission and demanding people be forced to take them and sliming those who don't as plague rats or walking agents of doom
Clearly antibodies are the only things we should look at and we should mandate boosters until everyone's blood is sludge
Had COVID? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime
Time to force people to get a second booster on pain of losing their jobs
Meme - Paul Rieckhoff @PaulRieck...: "My six-year old got his second shot today. He was scared. And he cried before, during and after. But he was very brave and he stepped up. He did it for you, for himself, and for the world. If you're an adult and refuse to do what my little boy did today, you're a selfish coward."
Keith Burgin - The Toxic Something... @KeithBurgin: "He did it because you forced him, tough guy"
We still have people pretending no one said the vaccines would affect transmission
Meme - "We live in a simulation. I'm not sure what's a joke anymore."
Scary Decisis, The Ghost of Legal Preced... @telefemi...: "I'm flying today but I'm not fucking around with Omicron.
Pfizer x 3
Negative rapid test
Natural immunity
N95 sealed to my face with surgical tape
Secondary mask for displaying opinions
Face shield
Touchscreen gloves
Shitton of Xanax"
Canadian Official Reprimanded for Withholding Winnipeg Lab Info - "The Canadian House of Commons publicly reprimanded Iain Stewart, the president of the Public Health Agency of Canada, on Monday (June 21) for failing to produce unredacted documents related to the firing of two government scientists. It was the first time since 1913 that someone other than a member of Parliament received this type of formal rebuke... “We need these documents,” said MP Michael Chong in a parliamentary committee hearing in May, according to an earlier CBC report. “We need to know what the Government of Canada was doing through the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg with respect to cooperating with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China.”"
Fired Winnipeg lab scientist listed as co-inventor on two Chinese government patents - "Neither Chinese patent makes any mention of her Canadian government employer. The federal Public Servants Inventions Act states that the federal government owns all inventions “made by a public servant that resulted from or is connected with his duties or employment.” And the legislation says a government employee cannot file a patent outside the country without the minister’s permission."
Rising non-Covid excess deaths reveal the disastrous legacy of the pandemic - "When Britain first locked down on March 23 2020, the average daily death rate from Covid was around 213, triggering understandable alarm and the ushering in of strict restrictions. Now, a similar number of unexpected deaths are occurring each day, the majority of which are not primarily caused by coronavirus. Yet there is largely silence from the Government and health service. Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows that in the past six months there have been more excess deaths from causes other than Covid, than deaths ‘due to’ coronavirus for the entire year... it is likely that collateral damage from the pandemic, coupled with long term NHS problems, have collided into a perfect, and deadly, storm... Prof Banerjee fears that the indirect effects of the pandemic will turn out to be greater than the harm from Covid itself, and that it is vital for future preparedness planning to take into account long-term outcomes... “We focussed on the direct effects of excess deaths from Covid but from the beginning it’s likely the indirect effects will lead to more deaths, and more morbidity and more economic impacts than Covid deaths itself.”... Cobus Daneel, the chair of the CMI Mortality Projections Committee, said: “The third quarter of 2022 saw unusually high mortality for the time of year – higher than any third quarter since 2010. “There were more deaths than expected from non-Covid causes. This contrasts with most of the pandemic period, when non-Covid deaths were lower than expected.” The situation is all the more unusual as mortality rates should have fallen after the pandemic because so many people died early, an effect known as ‘harvesting’. Instead we are seeing the reverse trend. The Government has made a half-hearted attempt to find out what is going on with excess deaths... The report showed a worrying increase in deaths in people who had heart complaints and diabetes, many of which were preventable. Recent reports have found that people hospitalised with Covid-19 are more likely to suffer heart problems, particularly in the first month after their release, which could be leading to some of the excess... experts believe there is still too much attention being paid to the direct effects of Covid at the expense of the wider impacts. Prof Banerjee said specialists should come together to pool their data on excess deaths in their field. “What I see is still a focus on the direct effects of Covid,” he said. “Nobody who is in charge of the NHS, or any of the new health secretaries, are making any noises about it.”"
Failure to challenge poor scientific advice during pandemic cost thousands of lives - "Britain did not lock down sooner because ministers failed to challenge poor scientific advice, the first major report into the Government’s pandemic response has concluded."
From 2021. This is ironic since we know that lockdowns don't work. When you need to support the narrative...
The Wuhan Institute of Virology 'Faced an Acute Safety Emergency in November 2019' - "ProPublica and Vanity Fair question how Yusen Zhou could have applied for a patent for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine on February 24, 2020. Yusen Zhou is the director of the State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, in Beijing. The top experts in vaccine development conclude that it is impossible to start from scratch and have a vaccine ready in three months"
Australia's Vaccine Apartheid - YouTube - "As Australian police arrest middle aged women for allegedly nor showing their vaccine passports, its politicians are considering charging the unvaccinated for healthcare. So, are we witnessing the creation of a two-tier society? #PoliceState #VaccinePassports #VaccineAparthied #TwoTierSociety"
No wonder the left hate Russell Brand now
Greenwald: How Authoritarian Do You Have To Be To Support Google Censoring Political Speech? - "there are mainstream news outlets like The Guardian which reported on a study that said that for boys from 13-18, the risk of a bad outcome from the vaccine is greater than the risk that if they got Covid they would actually suffer any serious illness. So the idea that you can't debate these things without Google intervening and censoring you off the internet is compete madness. How authoritarian do you need be to want a corporation like Google telling us what we can and can't say, not just on Covid but many political debates. The most ironic part of all is that it is journalists, who are supposed to defend free discourse and free inquiry, leading the way not just cheering Google but demanding more and more censorship... Who would celebrate people losing their jobs with economic struggles and in the middle of a pandemic, especially over ideological differences? That's demented. That's really sociopathic. The problem is they want to maintain this narrative, that's false, that anyone who is vaccine-hesitant is stupid or primitive or this narrative that is also false that it's just Trump supporters who are vaccine-hesitant. The reality is, polls show there are large percentages of African-Americans, Latinos, people who live in large liberal cities who are vaccine-hesitant and have long been. What they're doing when they're calling on people to be punished who are vaccine-hesitant, it's calling on black people, Latinos, liberals, and Trump supporters, deplorables, all to lose their jobs or be punished instead of trying to persuade them that do in a civil society."
Of course, the cope is that by being unvaccinated, the unvaxxed are speeding up mutation of covid and thus harming everyone else.
Meme - Noah: "Remember, if someone young and healthy dies unexpectedly, it is improper to ask about their vaccination status. That question is only for important occasions, like entry to restaurants"
I'm sure deplatforming everyone who asks uncomfortable questions will raise social trust and reduce vaccine hesitancy
Australia’s new Covid rules: isolation recommended but not required - "From 14 October, people who test positive to Covid will no longer have to isolate, following a unanimous decision by national cabinet"
As Victoria's COVID-19 pandemic declaration lifts, vaccine mandates and policies being scrutinised - "As Victoria's COVID-19 pandemic declaration comes to an end, a behavioural scientist says the continuing use of vaccine mandates may be "ethically problematic" and should be carefully scrutinised. While, from 11:59pm Wednesday, the state government's mandate will only apply in healthcare, in many other sectors vaccination requirements will remain in place. Julie Leask — whose work focuses on vaccination — said although mandates did have an important role to play during the COVID-19 pandemic, continuing them was "ethically problematic"... In some cases, existing mandates required Victorian workers to have three vaccine doses, including in aged care, health care, specialist schools, disability care, custodial settings and emergency services... Companies such as Woolworths, Coles, ALDI, Virgin and Telstra are among those who told the ABC they would retain policies requiring staff to be vaccinated. Professor Leask said the fact that COVID-19 vaccines were most effective at reducing severe disease, and less effective at reducing transmission was an important consideration. "You've got to ask whether it's reasonable to exclude the completely unvaccinated from certain workplaces," she said. "I think it's getting increasingly difficult to justify that, given the limited ability for the vaccine to stop you getting COVID, [which would therefore mean] you're a vastly reduced transmission risk." Professor Leask said vaccine mandates could have adverse outcomes, becoming "hard to walk back" for subsequent vaccines or boosters... Professor Leask co-authored an article in the Medical Journal of Australia that laid out considerations that should be satisfied for a "justifiable mandate", including whether vaccines reduce transmission and whether less-restrictive measures have been tried first. Meanwhile, Doherty Institute director Sharon Lewin said she did not think mandates were "appropriate at this point in time in the pandemic"."
To protect others from covid, the unvaccinated cannot work in many jobs, but the covid positive can go to work
Meme - "r/COVID19_support
u/doritothrowaway
Went out for first time in a while and I made a mistake
Hi everyone. I'm in Canada, in a major city. I've been staying home through most of Covid-working from home, very little to no socializing with anyone outside of my family-but I went out tonight to a fairly empty bar (with vaccine mandates + masking when you're not at your seat) to say goodbye to coworker who is moving to another job. I really had to go to the bathroom and rushed off, in the process completely forgetting to put on my mask between going to the table to the restroom. There were two other people in there (masked), and I was completely maskless. I feel like such an idiot putting myself at risk like that. I'm convinced I'm going to contract the Omicron variant from my stupid mistake, and it just doesn't feel like it was worth it. I'm going to do a rapid test tomorrow or the following day, but I can't shake this upset. Running to the washroom while drinking in a bar has never felt so fraught before. Should I be deeply worried about what happened? Am I overreacting? And will going out ever feel normal again?"
From Dec 2021
Locking down sooner was not the answer - "Suppose the UK government produced some analysis showing that, when you consider all the deaths from chest infections, flus and other transmissible diseases, there could be 100,000 fewer deaths each year if all nightclubs, pubs, team sports, parties, theatres, orchestras and other convivial gatherings were banned. And so for the next year the government would be instituting such a ban to save 100,000 lives. The main objection would not be anything to do with the economy or ‘deaths caused by lockdown’. It would be that such a measure would be authoritarian madness on an unprecedented scale, wildly disproportionate to the gains, and the kind of thing one would imagine only being proposed by the sort of personality-cult dictator who erects 80-foot gold statues of himself and names months of the year after his mother-in-law. It wouldn’t be that saving 100,000 lives wasn’t a worthy goal, but that banning all convivial gatherings in the country for a year to achieve it would be wildly disproportionate to the point of derangement. Worryingly, the consensus that seems to have emerged is that we always ought to lock down preemptively, at the earliest sniff of any disease, regardless of whether there is any chance of vaccines or therapies, and regardless of how fast it spreads, how severe it is and what the scientific advice says. That will not do at all. Lockdowns may sometimes be necessary, but they should always be seen as an absolute last resort, not a first measure. And their objective should not even be the mere saving of lives, let alone deaths being shifted in time so that a slightly different set of people die."
Omicron Makes Biden’s Vaccine Mandates Obsolete - WSJ - "The Supreme Court held in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905) that the right to refuse medical treatment could be overcome when society needs to curb the spread of a contagious epidemic. At Friday’s oral argument, all the justices acknowledged that the federal mandates rest on this rationale. But mandating a vaccine to stop the spread of a disease requires evidence that the vaccines will prevent infection or transmission (rather than efficacy against severe outcomes like hospitalization or death). As the World Health Organization puts it, “if mandatory vaccination is considered necessary to interrupt transmission chains and prevent harm to others, there should be sufficient evidence that the vaccine is efficacious in preventing serious infection and/or transmission.” For Omicron, there is as yet no such evidence. The little data we have suggest the opposite. One preprint study found that after 30 days the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines no longer had any statistically significant positive effect against Omicron infection, and after 90 days, their effect went negative—i.e., vaccinated people were more susceptible to Omicron infection. Confirming this negative efficacy finding, data from Denmark and the Canadian province of Ontario indicate that vaccinated people have higher rates of Omicron infection than unvaccinated people. Meantime, it has long been known that vaccinated people with breakthrough infections are highly contagious, and preliminary data from all over the world indicate that this is true of Omicron as well. As CDC Director Rochelle Walensky put it last summer, the viral load in the noses and throats of vaccinated people infected with Delta is “indistinguishable” from that of unvaccinated people, and “what [the vaccines] can’t do anymore is prevent transmission.” There is some early evidence that boosters may reduce Omicron infections, but the effect appears to wane quickly, and we don’t know if repeated boosters would be an effective response to the surge of Omicron... The best policy might be to let Omicron run its course while protecting the most vulnerable, naturally immunizing the vast majority against Covid through infection by a relatively benign strain. As Sir Andrew Pollard, head of the U.K.’s Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, said in a recent interview, “We can’t vaccinate the planet every four or six months. It’s not sustainable or affordable.”... there is no scientific basis for believing these mandates will curb the spread of the disease... Justice Stephen Breyer suggested that if mandatory vaccination went forward, that would prevent all new Covid infections—750,000 new cases every day, he said. This is wildly false. So is Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s assertion that “we have over 100,000 children . . . in serious condition, many on ventilators.” According to Health and Human Services Department data, there are currently fewer than 3,500 confirmed pediatric Covid hospitalizations, and that includes patients who tested positive and were hospitalized for other reasons."
From January
Clearly the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine is a dangerous active vaxxer who doesn't know anything about disease, and a constitutional scholar doesn't know anything about the law and how justified covid vaccine mandates are