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Friday, March 04, 2022

Links - 4th March 2022 (1 - Covid-19)

Rod Dreher on Twitter - "Day 6 of Covid. Now my wife and kids have it too. All of us vaxxed; wife and I both boosted not long ago. Everybody we know who has omicron was vaxxed; most also boosted. So I gotta ask: what's the point of vaccine passports now? Security theater? Prepping social credit system?"

Genève CampbeII on Twitter - "In ~4 weeks I’m looking forward to the people who think Texas is committing genocide to revisit their assumptions. How effective are many of the (mostly performative) rituals we cling to in other states? What if cases and deaths continue along the same trajectory as elsewhere?"
Covid hystericists never learn. They just go on making apocalyptic predictions that are repeatedly debunked. This is climate change hysteria on steroids

Genève CampbeII on Twitter - "CDC Director Walensky warns of "impending doom" as covid cases rise again. "Right now I'm scared," she says."
"Behavior modification through instilling fear has been so successful, hasn’t it? Let’s push through to the finish line!"
From March 2021. So much for disaster

Meme - "Dear Democrats, You have some work to do to reclaim your role as the "party of science". Stop demanding fully vaccinated people participate in theater for your "feelings". That's not how science works. Masks are a tool to prevent viral spread, not a talisman or a symbol of virtue. When they are not serving their scientific purpose, they need to GO. I'm completely disgusted that I'm forced to side with people like Ted fucking Cruz and Ron DeSantis because Democrats have abandoned facts and data in favor of fear and safetyism, and seem hell bent on prolonging this dystopia for as long as possible. PS, if we don't fight to get back to normal post- vaccination, it means we will never see normalcy again. There will always be people who refuse the vaccine, new variants, and new risks."
Genève CampbeII on Twitter - "A friend, who supported Bernie and voted for Biden, shared this on Facebook. It’s exactly how I feel."
From March 2021

Mike Birbiglia on Twitter - ".@ASlavitt You may not have time to answer this but I feel like a lot of people want to know the answer to this one: two parents vaccinated, six-year-old child. Grandparents fly in from Florida, both vaccinated. Is there a waiting time before we can all see each other?"
Genève CampbeII on Twitter - "I actually find this very sad. I’ve liked the guy for years. His question is regarding a situation wherein **all adults are vaccinated**— a year of well-intentioned restrictions literalism has short-circuited understanding the spectrum of relative risk and transmission dynamics."
The world can never go back to normal. Covid hystericists don't believe the vaccines work

Genève CampbeII on Twitter - "A friend was at an #OpenSchools protest in NYC this morning, pushing for full five days a week next year, and there was a counterprotest with teachers wearing yellow “WE WON’T DIE FOR THE DOE” banners. This is in May 2021. Months after every teacher has been vaccinated. 🤷🏻‍♀️"

Genève CampbeII on Twitter - "As an atheist, I find it funny how the secular mock religious zealots for antiquated, nonsensical beliefs but now exude the same thinking when it comes to NPI mandates (which, demonstrably, aren’t controlling the pandemic trajectory). Is ritual magic okay when it’s Science-y?"

Genève CampbeII on Twitter - "The value for the chickenpox (and other R0s in the slideshow) came from a graphic from The New York Times, which wasn't completely accurate."
"Today I learned the CDC (yes, the literal CDC) creates policy based off of un-factchecked data scraped from social media infographics:"
If you don't "Trust the Science" you are backward

Despite high vaccination rate, Singapore's experience shows risk of reopening - "Few are left to inoculate in wealthy Singapore after a vigorous campaign achieved a level of coverage envied by many nations battling the coronavirus pandemic, but a record surge in deaths and infections gives warning of risks that may still lie ahead... "Singapore may potentially experience two to three epidemic waves as measures are increasingly relaxed," said Dr Alex Cook, a disease modelling expert at the National University of Singapore (NUS).  "Until then, deaths will probably continue to rise, unless many of the residual unvaccinated elders can be vaccinated or more get their booster shot.""
Maybe Singapore will forever be in "transition" phase due to its covid "success"
When the boosters wear out, maybe a second booster will be mandated, or you'll get fired

Ginny Roth: By raging against the hesitant, Liberals are undermining our vaccination campaign - "the majority of elite public opinion has dripped with disdain. Popular feminist author and public intellectual Jessica Valenti wrote a column for the New York Times capturing the general feeling among urban, highly educated professionals. Raging at the unvaccinated, her quotes were shared heavily on social media by those who felt she gave voice to their anger. “Either you’re someone who cares about your neighbours and community or you’re not,” she wrote. “Either you’re willing to sacrifice for the good of others or you’re not.” Valenti has no desire to understand the unvaccinated. Her only motivation is to express her anger and confusion, and let the unvaccinated know she thinks they’re scum.  The tribalism Valenti deploys to split her country into camps has run rampant in the United States these past couple years. Mask mandates and lockdowns have been political footballs and sources of cultural tension since the first weeks of the pandemic. Canada had managed to largely avoid those kinds of conflicts until recently, but impending elections are proving too tempting to those who seek to drive wedges through the electorate. First, the federal Liberals announced they would be verifying the vaccination status of election candidates, then they announced a plan to require employees in the public service and in some federally regulated industries to be vaccinated (after months of inaction), in what was clearly designed as a political trap for Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole. At the same time, the Ontario Liberals are attempting to tie anti-vaxxers to Premier Doug Ford, even though his Progressive Conservative government has laid out plans to mandate vaccinations for health-care and education workers.  Meanwhile, federal Infrastructure Minister Catherine McKenna made her disdain for the vaccine hesitant clear, tweeting: “climate deniers, anti-vaxxers and misogynists all hang out together. Quite the club.” But the 42-year-old Ontario woman who votes Liberal, the archetype of the average vaccine-hesitant person according to pollster Bruce Anderson, might be surprised to know she is perceived that way. Anderson’s research brings nuance to the conversation about the unvaccinated. In fact, only about seven per cent of Canadians outright refuse to get vaccinated. Of the 30 per cent who aren’t fully vaccinated, around 10 per cent have received one dose and could likely be easily persuaded to get the second.  Thoughtful investigation of the motivations of the remainder of unvaccinated Canadians reveals that there is no single explanation for vaccine hesitancy. There are a constellation of reasons, including inaccessibility, precarious work, geographic isolation and lack of trust in a health-care system that has often let underprivileged Canadians down...   The actions of Liberal political leaders, and the angry public intellectuals who encourage them, are hindering the cause of reducing vaccine hesitancy and increasing our collective immunity. They are the actions of ideological warriors who are capitalizing on public fear to further sow division, wedge voters and trip up their opponents. This may serve them well in upcoming elections, but it will do so at the expense of institutional trust and social cohesion, making public health another permanent front in the culture war."

Typical 'vaccine hesitant' person is a 42-year-old Ontario woman who votes Liberal: Abacus polling - "The hesitant are not conspiracy theorists. They aren’t angry at the world. They don’t think COVID-19 is a hoax. They aren’t radicals of the left or the right — 61 percent of them say they are on the centre of the spectrum. Two thirds have post-secondary education. They might be timid, but they’re not stupid.  Almost half of them (46 percent) live in Ontario and well over half of them (59 percent) are women. A quarter were born outside Canada. Their average age is 42 and the plurality are between 30 and 44 years old. If they were voting in a federal election today, 35 percent would vote Liberal, 25 percent Conservative, 17 percent NDP, 9 percent Green — pretty similar to overall voting intentions for the entire population.  However, compared to the vaccinated, they don’t have a lot of trust in government. They also try to avoid prescriptions, dislike putting anything unnatural in their bodies and 83 percent say they are reluctant to take any vaccines. Most worry that COVID-19 vaccines haven’t really been tested for a long time.  Just under half hate needles and 43 percent believe that if others get vaccinated they don’t need to.  A third say their doctor could persuade them and a quarter say friends and family can. A similar number say they will get vaccinated if it makes attending events and travelling easier."

GOLDSTEIN: Trudeau and Ford governments fuelled vaccine hesitancy | Toronto Sun - "The unseemly rush by governments to vilify Canadians refusing to be vaccinated as the root of all evil ignores the fact government actions throughout the pandemic have contributed to vaccine hesitancy. To begin with, it is a myth to claim everyone who refuses to be vaccinated is irresponsible, reckless, racist, misogynist, throws stones at the prime minister or demonstrates outside hospitals... Before reversing their positions, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ontario Premier Doug Ford adamantly opposed vaccine passports, saying they would be divisive to society.  With the Trudeau government now decreeing workers who lose their jobs because of vaccine mandates will not be eligible for employment insurance — even if they had agreed to be tested every day — the vaccine hesitant have every right to feel betrayed.  Then there is the issue of how governments changed their positions on pandemic protocols, often almost overnight, with little or no explanation for the reasons. True, some of this occurred because medical understanding of COVID-19 changed over time.  But when the Public Health Agency of Canada originally claimed mask wearing could be less safe than not wearing them before reversing itself, we now know PHAC took that position amid a severe shortage of masks, because the federal and provincial governments had failed to maintain adequate stockpiles of personal protection equipment despite a decade of official warnings to do so.  We also know while the federal government publicly insisted for months that restricting air travel, imposing border controls and mandatory quarantines wouldn’t control the spread of COVID-19 — before reversing itself on these issues — federal officials were privately advising the government it didn’t have the resources to enforce mandatory quarantines and similar measures. Failing to be open, honest and transparent with the public has obviously contributed to vaccine hesitancy.  Decisions by the Ford government in Ontario to allow big box stores to remain open to in-person shopping while denying this to small businesses, and later allowing increased capacity limits for Scotiabank Arena and Rogers Centre — including eating and drinking during games — while continuing to enforce social distancing requirements for restaurants reinforced the belief big business was calling the shots with the government.   Ontario’s ill-advised decision to allow police to question anyone about where they were going to determine if they had a legitimate reason for being outside — hastily withdrawn after police forces said they wouldn’t enforce it — fed into the belief of those already suspicious of governments that they were using the pandemic as an excuse to increase arbitrary powers.  Inconsistent messaging on vaccines — repeated statements from Trudeau, premiers and public health officials that “the best vaccine for you to take is the very first one offered to you,” followed by the National Advisory Committee on Immunization declaring that no, actually Pfizer and Moderna were preferred to AstraZeneca — obviously contributed to vaccine hesitancy.  Ditto the Trudeau government’s original plan to concoct a deal with China to provide vaccines to Canada — when Canadians had good reasons to be suspicious of China’s actions throughout the pandemic on a number of fronts — undoubtedly fuelled the vaccine hesitant’s distrust of government."

Rupa Subramanya: New data makes the case for vaccination, but officials are fuelling booster hesitancy - "Recall that the original rationale for getting vaccinated was that it would give us a path toward normalcy and bring an end to the lockdowns.  That provided a strong incentive to get vaccinated last summer and into the fall. However, since provinces such as Ontario have reneged on their promises to avoid lockdowns, there is an obvious cynicism that getting a booster now will lead us back to normalcy.   Adding to the lack of interest in boosters is also surely the tone-deaf messaging by some experts, who focused on the waning efficacy of vaccines rather than talking up their benefits, which obviously would reduce the incentive to get a booster for those who are already on the fence. But the most egregious failure of all was that the province chose to accelerate its booster roll-out at the same time as it was locking us down. It missed a golden opportunity to tell the public to “go get a booster so we can prevent another lockdown.” In short, the public’s trust has likely been badly eroded, if not destroyed."

Commentary: Trapped in its zero-COVID policy, a new homegrown vaccine offers China a way out - "The results of the first stage of clinical trials using Walvax’s ARCoV were released this week, with an immune response in up to 95 per cent of recipients.  The development of such a vaccine, combined with the completion of the Winter Olympics in February, would provide an opportunity for Beijing to loosen restrictions and at least implicitly end its strategy, giving the country a much-needed economic boost ahead of the National Party Congress later in the year.  The new vaccine could also deliver sizeable diplomatic benefits as well.  But reversing its strategy may be politically challenging. The Communist Party of China (CPC) has put considerable store in its ability to keep the population safe during the pandemic, often suggesting the data on deaths and cases reinforces a favourable comparison of its one-party political system to the more chaotic democracies of the West. If a shift from zero-COVID leads to spikes in deaths, that argument will be undermined... gross domestic product growth slowed to 4 per cent year-on-year in the fourth quarter, as consumption has stalled amid intermittent lockdowns... Outbreaks in 2021 in countries that primarily utilised the Chinese vaccines, such as the Seychelles and Mongolia, undermined Beijing’s message of philanthropy and competence.  An mRNA vaccine with a higher level of protection should deliver the soft power benefits of vaccine export with fewer potential negative connotations...   But implementing a new strategy is not a simple path for Beijing. The CPC needs to persuade its population that while the zero-COVID strategy was the right call for the first two years of the pandemic, now a new strategy is warranted. Moreover, while much national pride can be fostered in the domestic development of an mRNA vaccine, its creation years after a US version and the adoption of a more “Western” strategy comfortable with coexistence with COVID-19 may appear to be failure."

What China’s Covid-Zero Policy Means for World Supply Chains and Inflation - Bloomberg - "A Goldman Sachs report from January posited that if multiple provinces were hit with the omicron variant this winter and the government imposed a national lockdown, growth in China could plunge to 1.5% this year, the lowest since 1976... While these restrictions have led to temporary shutdowns of ports and factories, the country’s industries have so far come through the pandemic remarkably unscathed. Exports hit records in 2020 and then again in 2021, and if it had not been for that constant stream of goods, prices of U.S. imports would have risen even faster, and shortages of products, both essential and luxury, would have been even more pronounced. That steady supply may be difficult to maintain when China does eventually reopen its borders and gets rid of internal Covid controls... the blow to supply chains would be worse than anything seen so far during the pandemic. Globally, there’s no ripple effect from supermarkets in Sydney having to limit purchases or shut temporarily because they can’t get workers; if absenteeism forced factories and ports across China to slow or shut down, that would feel like a giant wave crashing. Even if only temporary, shortages of a broad range of goods would push up already elevated inflation and drag on a global economic recovery that’s looking more fragile than it did before the advent of omicron...Even access to better vaccines might not be enough to push China to change track because relying on shots alone isn’t effective at stopping infections as mutations can evade immunity, according to Wu Zunyou, the chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.  “We previously thought Covid-19 could be basically contained through vaccines, but now it seems that there’s no simple method to control it except with comprehensive measures,” he told the state-backed Global Times newspaper recently, adding that China will continue its current policies as long as imported infections have the ability to trigger large-scale outbreaks. Yet as the past two years have demonstrated, temporary and isolated shutdowns don’t mean manufacturers and exporters stop working and goods don’t get onto ships. So the longer China sticks with Covid zero, the better it’ll be for the rest of the world."
Lots of people claim that inflation is only due to the money supply being boosted, so they won't care

China's zero-Covid policy 'won't work' with omicron: Epidemiologist - "“Trying to stop omicron is kind of like trying to stop the wind,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia.”  China is “uniquely at risk” to omicron, Osterholm said, for a combination of reasons: Early studies suggest its Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines are “not very effective” against the variant, and at the same time China’s success at preventing the spread of Covid so far means it has a very large population that remains vulnerable... According to U.S.-based consultancy Eurasia Group, China’s zero-Covid policy ranks among the top risks for 2022."
Weird. I thought natural immunity doesn't work

Omicron in China: New Variant Weakens Xi Jinping's Covid Policies - Bloomberg - "Despite firmly closed borders and a vaccination rate near 90%, the highly transmissible omicron variant has been reported in seven out of 31 provinces and all of China’s biggest cities. Port disruptions and citywide shutdowns are increasingly common, and on Monday, the government signaled it’s bracing for more: The central bank cut its key interest rate after the economy posted its weakest quarter since the beginning of the pandemic.  The human costs are rising, too. In the city of Xi’an, at least two people died and two women miscarried, barred from medical treatment by zealous enforcement of Covid lockdown protocols that began just before Christmas. The official tally of daily infections there, on the other hand, remains in the dozens, with zero deaths. “I understand they take these measures to keep everybody safe,” said He Kun, a 55-year-old general manager of an electric vehicle company just outside Xi'an. “If it takes a month or so I think that's OK. But if it lasts half a year, then everyone will lose their job and companies will shut down.”... The country won’t be able to fully keep out omicron and subsequent mutations, the report predicted, requiring more lockdowns and further disruption of the supply chain: “Low growth, high inflation, and growing inequality will exacerbate public frustration with governments and stoke political instability to a degree we haven’t seen since the 1990s,”...  Goldman Sachs and Nomura have predicted China will stay the course through late 2022 — after Xi is expected to secure an unprecedented third term — and possibly into spring 2023... Keeping the country Covid-free got harder after the delta variant cropped up in May. On the border with virus-ravaged Myanmar, the town of Ruili went so far as to install spiked iron wire atop its border fence to deter unsanctioned border crossers who might be carrying coronavirus. Still, Covid cases still triggered four lockdowns in seven months, and the curbs forced many small businesses to close. Residents lived with frequent testing, no exceptions: one of the city’s youngest residents, a two-year-old, was swabbed for Covid as many as 74 times... Ruili boasted a vaccination rate around 97% and reported zero Covid deaths in 2021. “Every lockdown is a severe emotional and material loss,” Dai Rongli, the town’s former deputy mayor and now a senior executive at a state-owned rail construction firm, wrote on his social media account. “Every battle against Covid adds a layer of unhappiness.”  Over the summer, periodic shutdowns and transit delays mostly tapped into citizens’ well-developed sense of patriotic duty. By mid-October, the country’s streaks of zero-case days were gone, and the efforts to stop the virus’ spread turned increasingly hardcore. On Halloween, Shanghai Disneyland detained 34,000 guests for mass testing after a park visitor tested positive. A small county in eastern China responded to a single case by turning its traffic lights red, permanently, to keep people from moving around. When a Beijing teacher and student tested positive in November, the government ordered snap lockdowns for hundreds of students and staff. Anxious parents waited outside the schools through the night. Some eventually brought pillows and blankets to join their kids in quarantine.  In December, the delta variant hit Xi’an, China’s 10th biggest city, and the government response triggered new wrath. Authorities banned people from shopping for groceries, then failed to deliver food to residents. Some started trading with neighbors, swapping cigarettes for instant noodles and other shelf-stable foods. One tearful woman posted a video online, pleading with local Covid containment staff to let her leave her apartment to buy period supplies.  Two pregnant women miscarried after hospitals refused to let them in, citing Covid containment protocols. A man in his 60s died after suffering a heart attack. He was turned away by several hospitals because he hadn’t taken a Covid test. By the time he took one and it came back negative, it was too late. All that, even before omicron emerged... Transportation services are suspended in places with confirmed cases. Testing is mandated, creating long lines in in bitter winter weather. Workers tasked with enforcing the curbs and testing are also under increasing strain; some have reported passing out from stress and long hours... Frustration is rising among Chinese citizens, who can do little but wait. With worsening outbreaks, the consequences of exposure have grown harsher. Last week, three people were sentenced to four-plus years in prison for violations that, the government said, led to a Covid outbreak... “I just keep watching what's going and following the rules,” said He Kun, the automaker in Xi’an. The lockdown measures there meant he couldn’t get critical parts — truck drivers didn’t want to get caught making deliveries in an outbreak zone — and his company missed its production and sales targets in December and January"

Raymond J. de Souza: The high cost of safety - "After a few decades of “safety first” on everything from construction sites to seat belts and bike helmets, there was no question that everything else would give way when safety was our top social priority — and everything else did... The ratcheting up of safety culture is partly a function of prosperity. Everyone wants to be safe, and if you can afford the cost of safety, why not pay it?  Yet figuring out that cost is tricky. Static analysis is conceptually easy — the extra railing costs this much, snow tires cost that much, the extra insurance rider is an additional $100. It’s painstaking, but with enough effort it can be done. We can measure how many fewer people die in car accidents in terms of kilometres driven, and the insurance industry can tell us how many of the safer, crash-absorbing cars they write off. Manufacturers know the marginal cost of the safety features. So the cost of safer cars can be (laboriously) estimated. Dynamic analysis is fiendishly complicated, however. How many fewer decks are built because of more stringent safety requirements? How many fewer summer painting jobs are available because regulations require safety equipment most students cannot afford?  Intangibles make it more difficult still, because, by definition, they cannot be measured. What is the cost, in terms of loss of enjoyment and fostering a spirit of adventure, of building safer, but more boring playgrounds? Or, more to the point this year, what is the cost of dying alone? Or not having family visits? Or the emotional toll of losing a business?  In Alberta, more people have died from opioid overdoses in 2020 than from the coronavirus. It may be that the spike in overdose deaths has been caused by some pandemic policies. Pandemic deaths are largely amongst the elderly, and opioid deaths generally occur among those much younger, so if the pandemic restrictions increased the number of opioid deaths, the total life-years lost to those additional overdose deaths may have been greater than life-years saved due to the pandemic policies... one of the most fascinating academic papers of 2020 was titled, “Car Seats as Contraception.” Published over the summer in the Journal of Economic Literature, it first got some attention in the economic press and in some conservative publications, before landing on the front cover of The Economist in November.  In the paper, economists Jordan Nickerson and David Solomon argue that 40 years of increasing mandates for child safety seats in cars — in some places required for children up to eight years old — make it difficult to have three children in the back seat of a sedan. The third child means the added cost of a minivan. This has a measurable contraceptive effect — or at least a stronger correlation than many other explanations for declining birthrates. Nickerson and Solomon estimate that car seat laws that have been put in place since 1980 have led to 145,000 fewer births in the United States. For every life saved by a car seats, 141 children were never born. In 2017, 57 child deaths were prevented by car seats, but there were 8,000 fewer births that year.  The idea that keeping children safer leads to fewer children may seem counter-intuitive at first. But it should be expected. If making something safer — children in cars — costs more, then it is not surprising that there is less of it. After all, that’s the whole point of the government’s highest priority policy: the carbon tax. If parents were levied a tax upon the carbon emissions of their children, we would have fewer babies.  Knowing the cost of safety does not determine whether it should be paid. My guess is that by large margins Canadian adults prefer boring playgrounds to exciting ones, and more child safety regulation rather than less. Yet measuring the cost of safety, even if in a rough and ready way, does at least remind us that we are paying a price for it.  What that price actually was in 2020 will be a key matter for investigation in 2021."

PETER HITCHENS: Guess where Professor Lockdown got his ideas ... China's police state - "One of the strangest things about our recent national madness has been the role of Professor Neil Ferguson, the physicist who has somehow come to dominate Johnson’s Covid policy.  Physicist? Yes, that is his main academic discipline. He doesn’t even have a Biology O-level, as he himself cheerfully admits. But that’s no odder than his repeated record of wild predictions of vast numbers of deaths, for a variety of diseases from foot-and-mouth to mad cow, which can kindly be described as exaggerated.  And then there’s his complicated private life, which resulted in a pretty clear breach of the miserable restrictions he had helped to impose on the rest of us. As with all such cases, I don’t blame him for breaking the stupid rules. I despise him as a hypocrite for supporting them and then thinking they didn’t apply to him... Modern China is a horrible place, cruel, ruthless and unembarrassed. But for some reason SAGE came to like Peking’s Covid strategy. Ferguson told The Times that ‘as the data accrued it became clear it was an effective policy’.  I’d be interested to know how the SAGE geniuses evaluated data from this police state, which lacks a free press or independent universities. But there.  Even so, they hesitated. As Ferguson says: ‘It’s a Communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought.’  Aren’t those words ‘we couldn’t get away with it’ interesting? Is this the way in which public servants in a free country think of the normal limits on what they can do? I can only hope not.  But Ferguson and his friends then saw what happened in Italy, where a formerly free country reached for the weapons of repression and mass house arrest. And the rule of fear was so great that they got away with it. So we were next. Or, as Ferguson puts it: ‘And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’  They could. But they did not have to. They chose the Chinese way. And so they ‘got away with’ beginning a disaster which still continues. There is still no evidence that any of this Chinese-inspired repression has worked. Every country that has locked down has failed to control the disease and keeps doing the same thing over and over again in the hope of getting a different result.  If lockdown is an effective policy, then the guillotine is a good cure for a headache (except that the guillotine probably does cure a headache). The shame of it is that the lockdown fanatics did ‘get away with it’, and continue to do so. That is, quite simply, because most of the responsible people in our society did not stand up for wisdom and freedom but allowed themselves to be swept away in a flood of State-sponsored fear, like so many pawns.

Read this news report: ‘Many A&E units have been severely overcrowded in recent days, with patients lying in corridors and ambulances queuing outside.  ‘Hospitals have already been forced to cancel tens of thousands of operations and NHS chiefs fear things will only get worse… On Tuesday, hospitals were ordered to cancel up to 55,000 non-urgent operations and put patients in mixed-sex wards to create more room.’  Sound familiar? But actually it’s three years old, from the Daily Mail of January 6, 2018, under the headline ‘Now the NHS tells us: Don’t get ill.’  If you look back into the archives of any newspaper or TV news station, you will discover that the NHS has a ‘winter crisis’ thanks to overloaded intensive care wards, year after year.  But nobody ever thought before that this could be solved by strangling the country and forbidding grandparents to hug their grandchildren.  I do not doubt that our intensive care units are overloaded now.  But it is odd, since this was so foreseeable, that the huge new Nightingale Hospitals have been so little used to deal with this.  Why were they built at huge expense, if not for this moment?
One day last week, BBC Radio 4’s self-important Today programme played a recording of President Franklin Roosevelt rallying his people against the Great Depression in 1933. It was thrilling to hear. He said: ‘The only thing we have to fear is… fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.’  It was an admirable thing to say. But who in our government or the BBC could now say such a thing, having themselves made such shameless use of nameless, unreasoning, unjustified fear, so they could get away with behaving just like, well, Chinese dictators and their hired mouthpieces?"

Most at risk, first in line: Public health experts say racialized Canadians should be prioritized for vaccines
Comments: "That’s a very colonial view, are they suggesting that the rapidly tested and provisionally approved vaccine be used on racialised communities in order to test it more before giving it to white people?"
"Men are more likely than women to die from COVID19, why aren't they vaccinating men first?"

(7) Perma Banned - Posts | Facebook - "-Be Doctor
-Instructed to distribute vacs
-There's a remainder of 10, and they're expiring soon
-Follows Hippocratic oath and tries to do house calls for a group of strangers and some acquaintances,
-One of them to get a SPARE vac, that would be expiring if not used, is his wife who has a breathing problem, following his superior's orders of "no wastage".
-reports everything transparently following day
-Gets arrested, charged, and disgraced.....for not wasting vacs.
-when every single fucking country other than Post-Murica would have said he did the right thing by not wasting.
-not in Post-Murica though, to these officials; the doctor was wrong and "should have returned/dumped the excess stock"
And THIS here is the punchline:
-because what he did was not "equitable" enough (i.e. race/gender/identity quotas)
-in other words, the medical institutions were overtly racist
So takeaway - Post-Murican med institutions would rather see Vacs literally expire, become unusable and wasted than to distribute it "unequally"
So with this said;
"Why are you making fun of us so much admin?" -Post-Americans
I hope some of you stop asking me that question."

All plan B Covid restrictions, including mask wearing, to end in England - "While Johnson’s statement will please a number of his backbenchers, it prompted concern from teaching and health unions, and from NHS and public health representatives."
The covid hystericists were very upset, but once again their predictions of mass dieoffs were proven to be nonsense. That won't stop them from their cognitive dissonance, just like failed doomsday predictions don't stop cults or climate change hystericists
The same people who claim the lifting of restrictions in Canada has nothing to do with the trucker protests also are very upset at Boris Johnson for removing covid restrictions

Boris Johnson pursuing Covid policy of mass infection that poses ‘danger to the world’, scientists warn - "More than 1,200 scientists from around the globe have condemned the prime minister’s decision to forge ahead with so-called “freedom day” on 19 July, describing it as “unscientific and unethical”.  Some of the experts convened an emergency summit on Friday, warning that the UK government’s decision to lift its rules on social distancing and masks amounted to a “murderous” policy of “herd immunity by mass infection”.  The group of scientists – who all signed a recent letter to The Lancet warning against the plans – fear next week’s reopening in England will allow the Delta variant to spread rapidly around the world... Professor Jose M Martin-Moreno, from the University of Valencia in Spain, said: “UK policy affects not only UK citizens, it affects the world. We cannot understand why this [unlocking] is happening.”  The public-health professor claimed Spain had already made the mistake of allowing transmission to rise by ending compulsory face coverings. “Our prime minister in Spain decided to remove on 26 June the mandatory use of masks outdoors … It is an experiment in disaster to remove the tools to contain transmission.”"
From July 2021. So much for that

Was this the week England stopped worrying about Covid?

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