COVID panic is mostly based on unscientific speculation…
…and the phenomenon has been present from the start. In my opinion, it’s done intentionally, and it continues with each new variant that has taken hold to any marked degree.
I’m not a scientist, but very early on in the pandemic I noticed that principles that really don’t seem to apply to most viruses were being applied to COVID.
One of those principles was that people who had already had the virus and recovered from it could give it to others. This is ordinarily not true of viruses causing illness.
Another was that people who already had the virus could get it again. This also is ordinarily not true of viruses in all but the rarest of cases, usually people who are immune-compromised in some way.
Another was that new variants would be not just more easily transmitted than the original – that could probably be true – but more virulent. But the pattern of most viruses is that later variants are more easily transmitted and milder, although there are exceptions to that rule.
Those principles are rather basic. And yet we see the MSM talking about them anew for Omicron, even close to two years into the COVID phenomenon. I believe that the goal is to drum up panic and/or keep the panic going, and they’ve been remarkably successful although that success is finally waning to a certain degree. More people are tired of this, and more are onto the leftist’s game.
I’ve written so many posts about COVID that to go back and see where I’ve written these things, and how long ago it was that I did so, would be very labor-intensive. So consider this post from late February of 2020 (one of my earliest about COVID) representative of the whole. Looking back on it now, I’m rather pleased with how well it holds up. Here’s an excerpt [emphasis added]:
I haven’t written too many posts on the new coronavirus (COVID-19) because we know quite little, and much of what we read about it in the MSM probably is incorrect. Nevertheless, it’s what we have to work with right now.
You keep hearing “don’t trust the Chinese on this.” And I agree. But that also means that we can’t trust the people who at least theoretically know the most about it, because they’ve had the largest numbers of cases. And it also sets the scene for cinematic apocalyptic imaginings to rush in, ideas that many in the MSM are only too happy to entertain, the better to raise ratings and to hurt Trump. A twofer.
Prognosticators don’t want to be caught flat-footed if this becomes a much much bigger deal than it already is. People have learned more and more in recent years not to trust governments and bureaus and bureaucrats. So all of that is operating, too.
But here’s what I’ve gleaned so far.
First, some general statements. I’ve read that for infectious diseases, lethality and ease of contagion are ordinarily (not always) somewhat in opposition. That makes sense, because if a disease is quickly and highly lethal, the sufferer will have much less opportunity to be walking around with it in his or her most contagious stages, and therefore will tend to infect fewer people.
That’s why many illnesses that are highly widespread – take the common cold, which is called “common” for a reason – are usually mild (although tell that to the cold sufferer). And yet even such seemingly innocuous illnesses have some lethality, in that (for example) a cold can lead in the susceptible to pneumonia, which is far more likely to kill.
Pneumonia is something we’re all familiar with because, like the common cold, it’s reached a relatively stable rate of infection and, although far less common than the cold, it’s something not especially uncommon. And unlike COVID-19, it’s far from new. But pneumonia can kill, and you might be surprised to learn how often. Pneumonia statistics are as follows:
“For US adults, pneumonia is the most common cause of hospital admissions other than women giving birth. About 1 million adults in the US seek care in a hospital due to pneumonia every year, and 50,000 die from this disease.”
That’s a death rate of 5% [for serious cases]. And not all these people are old or ill to begin with, either (see the link for more), although many are…
Most estimates I’ve seen so far about the death rate in COVID-19 are that it’s around 2.5% of people who are infected (not of the general population). However, there are several possible problems with this. One is that doctors may be missing a large number of mild or even asymptomatic cases, which would make the actual death rate much lower than that. Another is that it’s not just the death rate but the pattern of deaths that’s important. Most of the deaths have occurred in the elderly and especially the very elderly.
I want to emphasize once again that that was written in February of 2020, and it wasn’t rocket science either to figure all of that out. It was also obvious already that the MSM and the Democrats had huge motivations for making the situation seem as bad as possible.
It’s impossible to know for sure – but without COVID, I think Trump would have been re-elected. And even if you think that fraud was implicated in his 2020 loss, that fraud was encouraged by the enormous increase in mail-in voting that was supposedly justified by the COVID pandemic. No pandemic, no Joe Biden, no undoing of all the good things that Trump accomplished.
It should long ago have been apparent to any rational and thoughtful person that the tactic of fear-mongering favored by the ruling elites and the ensuing hysteria gripping much of the public have nothing to do with science and everything to do with the left’s accumulating ever more and more power and exercising ever more and more control. The reaction to Dr. Ronny Jackson’s recent tweet provides yet more evidence, as though any were needed. The three godsends, for the “progressive” cause, of the past two years (the Wuhan virus, the mostly self-inflicted death of the blessed martyr Floyd, and the (probably FBI-instigated) unruliness of J6) will continue to be incessantly exploited by the totalitarian Democrats until such time as a strong and fearless opposition (not GOPe) can rise up to save our moribund republic.
Covid-19, 20, 21 are real. Social contagion is real. Denying and stigmatizing early treatments is real. Planned parent/hood through inclusion and equity was/is real. The excessive adverse events correlated with general distribution of the non-sterilizing “vaccines” are real. Symptom suppression and silent spread are real. The collateral damage from mandates that follow the cargo cult and offer viable legal indemnity are real.
The epidemiological relevance of the COVID-19-vaccinated population is increasing
via market-ticker.org
Many decisionmakers assume that the vaccinated can be excluded as a source of transmission. It appears to be grossly negligent to ignore the vaccinated population as a possible and relevant source of transmission when deciding about public health control measures.
…
In Israel a nosocomial outbreak was reported involving 16 healthcare workers, 23 exposed patients and two family members. The source was a fully vaccinated COVID-19 patient. The vaccination rate was 96.2% among all exposed individuals (151 healthcare workers and 97 patients). Fourteen fully vaccinated patients became severely ill or died, the two unvaccinated patients developed mild disease [[4]]
n.n.,
I’ve also wondered why the discussions on early treatments and improved testing were suppressed. They seemed to prefer putting infected people into nursing homes, and now we are living with their incompetence.
I think what was fairly eye opening to me over the course of this thing (although in hindsight, perhaps it shouldn’ve been) is the zealotry of many of my fellow citizens, and also how so many of them have very authoritarian tendencies. It’s depressing to think that the most personal freedom loving and individualistic nation on Earth is evidently filled with so many people who are more than willing to trade away all these hard fought freedoms in exchange for hypothetically reducing risk by (in most cases) a miniscule amount.
“No pandemic, no Joe Biden, no undoing of all the good things that Trump accomplished.”
CCP, Democrats, and Zaphod’s “Globo-Homo,” mucho benefits from the Wuhan – Eco-Health Alliance [was there ever a more intentionally misnamed group?] – Fauci, COVID work.
It’s not like the basics of virology are incomprehensible to most of us. For years we’ve heard how viruses work and how once you’ve built immunity you’ll never need a vaccine. That’s all changed now. Think chicken pox or measles. But now “you need the vax!”.
Then they threw out the lessons on when to vaccinate. When polio was a problem it got passed around in the summer time. So they started their vaccination programs in November. Now we’ve got people who have partial immunity encountering the virus and giving it the opportunity to live while it mutates as opposed to it being crushed.
The common masks don’t hinder the transmission of the virus. They can stop infected ejected droplets from a cough or sneeze. But if you’re sick you shouldn’t be in public anyway.
There’s reason to believe that the people who’ve suffered severe adverse side effects of any of the mRNA vaccines are those where the vaccine got into their bloodstream. After all, it’s the spike protein itself on the virus that wreaks havoc. Those lipid particles encasing mRNA can go just about anywhere should the shot put little into muscle tissue and more into a vein.
On the bright side, we probably won’t have a vaccine mandate. It’s irrational to mandate a vaccine when so many who’ve had even their third shot get sick. There’s plenty of data from England that show this is true.
We may, however, end up with more mask mandates simply because it’s mostly harmless.
Unsurprisingly, the first confirmed case of Omicron has been found in US in California. It’ll be darkly interesting to see how all this plays out. I’m curious to see how often Omicron ends up causing “break through infections” and how often it leads to hospitalizations.
I think one thing to recognize is this isn’t all about Trump or even the US. I don’t disagree that Trump was headed for an easy re-election without COVID, and COVID emergencies allowed Democrats to manipulate elections in a way that could never have been done. But this is bigger than Democrats and the US.
Just look at Australia. What is happening in Melbourne makes anything in the US look tame. And world leaders called Trump racist and dangerous for banning international air travel to certain places, and now those same leaders will ban travel at the mere mention of a new variant. Just ignore China welding doors closed for homes with COVID outbreaks.
I see the world’s elite flexing their muscle to create a clear boundary between them and us. You need only see Jill Biden reading Christmas stories to children while being the only one unmasked and not socially distant to see who she is and who everyone else is. World leaders at COP21 just tossed coins into a fountain, shoulder to shoulder and none wearing masks. They can travel to Scotland and Rome on private jets, while they will let you know if you can work and under what conditions. And who knows, maybe we will just keep doing the same for climate change, or if you won’t comply, then COVID will just keep having variants.
I wish this was only about Trump. Instead, it feels more like the early 20th Century being replayed again.
Nothing to do with this post, but I don’t know how else to contact you: I wanted to let you know that the Amazon link doesn’t show up with Firefox. I had to go to MS Edge to find it. Maybe someone can fix this for you…?
Mr. Bill:
Make sure your adblocker is off for this site.
Yawrate:
I noticed it prior to COVID, with the shingles vaccine. I have had shingles but they keep pushing the vaccine even for those who’ve had shingles. And yet having shingles twice is almost unheard of except for people who are very immune compromised.
And the person that tested positive for the dread variant was full vaccinated of course.
The rationale for vax mandates has totally fallen apart but yet they keep pushing them.
The loss of trust in public health officials can’t be overstated. These clowns were out there saying the vaccines were ‘100% effective’ and even if you say that was obviously not true they usually offered no qualifiers.
They lie, they lie, they lie.
We comply to make this end but by complying we ensure it never ends.
“No pandemic, no Joe Biden, no undoing of all the good things that Trump accomplished.”
I would be less concerned if I thought the Democrats and the media cynically exploited the pandemic to defeat Trump. But I think it’s pretty clear that many if not most of them DIDN’T cynically exploit the situation. They genuinely believed that Trump was the only reason COVID was a problem and getting rid of him would fix it. The reason Biden could say “I’m not going to shut down the country. I’m going to shut down the virus” and get no pushback or questions is because they literally did think it would be that simple.
This is why it’s paradoxically always better to have a smart enemy than a dumb one.
Mike
“The rationale for vax mandates has totally fallen apart but yet they keep pushing them.”
This is where the medical establishment has really failed us. Anyone familiar with the numbers and history knows it’s essentially impossible to ever get 100% of the public vaccinated for anything, yet that is the idiotic standard that shapes public debate on COVID.
Mike
And get ready for the Moronic variant vaccine mandates in about three months.
People are so incredibly stupid. The Dow went from 500 up to almost 500 down after the announcement of the Moronic variant positive test.
Did anybody think this would never happen?
I’m convinced that the timing of the news of this new variant was made with the idea to short the market earlier in the week and then watch the short position increase in value on the Friday after Thanksgiving.
And then the real news comes out that it is very mild. Market up.
Cornhead,
Maybe but the Dow is down almost 3% the last two days. And this isn’t necessarily that big of a deal as there are a bunch of reasons for this other than COVID but it annoys me when the market sells off for obvious news.
“The loss of trust in public health officials can’t be overstated.” Griffin
People used to understand the maxim, “follow the money”. Our politicians and medical personnel are vested in this big-time. It is the only thing that explains it to me, because real science has had to become “science” to drive this farce. Sad times.
Good little video by Vinay Prasad about Moronic, boosters and Fauci.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMAzzV6pLbo
The Fauci part is very good.
Among the many ‘tells’ in the reaction to the severity of COVID is how the mandates don’t seem to apply to some people coming into the country. Peter Doocy is pretty much the only reporter that asks serious questions of these clowns.
https://twitter.com/FreeBeacon/status/1466123343287832576
This is where the medical establishment has really failed us.
Remember, members of the medical establishment stripped Paul Church of his admitting privileges at four hospitals around Boston; members of the medical establishment do nothing to ostracize psychiatrists, endocrinologists, and general surgeons who participate in ‘gender transitions’ – or even criticize them; members of the medical establishment are sitting on committees of the Association of American Medical Colleges attempting to impose race patronage imperatives as a condition for medical school accreditation; members of the medical establishment are deans of medicine at schools who accept underperforming applicants for reasons of race patronage; members of the medical establishment sat on CDC committees which unanimously recommended that ‘diversity’ criteria trump utilitarian considerations in distributing vaccine doses last year. A previous generation within the medical establishment gave their imprimatur to psychoanalysis and sat on their hands while Walter Freeman, MD went round the country giving people lobotomies. And then there’s the free rein given to characters like Barnett Slepian.
There are a lot of goddamned bad men in the medical establishment. Don’t trust your doctor.
I work for a woke corporation that mandated vaccines even for those of us who work from home. I had two doses of Moderna, and was sick for three weeks after the second dose. Now they’re talking about mandating boosters which means that I’ll be fired after being a stellar employee for 26 years. I have worked from home for 21 years and haven’t been to an office for at least 10. We don’t even have an office to go back to as they closed the IT offices during the lockdown. I won’t go quietly.
LisaM:
In that case, it’s not about COVID or vaccines. It’s about weeding out the noncompliant.
“There are a lot of goddamned bad men in the medical establishment. Don’t trust your doctor.” Art Deco
In the last 3 years, I personally know of multiple cases of near-death causing mistakes by physicians. It is hard-to-believe, because in all cases these were people being treated by practitioners working in highly-regarded hospitals/practices. The only thing that explains it is that merit no longer is the standard for advancement. And it isn’t just the medical arena where this is true.
Griffin:
COVID vaccine mandates were never warranted. But COVID vaccines themselves- which are not traditional vaccines but rather COVID immunity boosters – do help individuals stave off a serious case of COVID.
neo,
Yes, I think you are likely right about that but again that is not how they were sold to the public.
One of the really encouraging things is that Biden’s mandates are getting shot down left and right in the courts but so much of the damage has already been done.
2 years of fear mongering is working I am afraid. People here walking alone, coming out of house to car, driving alone, kids getting off school bus alone walking down sidewalk or up driveway all with masks on.
“Anyone familiar with the numbers and history knows it’s essentially impossible to ever get 100% of the public vaccinated for anything, yet that is the idiotic standard that shapes public debate on COVID.”
True, but I think that at this point what’s going on is a lot less about disease control and/or eradication and a lot more about TOTAL CONTROL of the population…at the macro-level of government, media and educational institutions and—especially—at the micro-level (i.e., individuals).
Australia may be the model that “Biden is shooting for but he can’t do that in the US—not yet—because of the 2nd Amendment and because I don’t believe “he” has total control of the military or LE at the civic and state levels…yet. Ditto regarding Federal judges who have ruled against “him” regarding vaccination mandates.
“He” thought “he” could forge ahead but it seems “he” realizes it’s not possible at the moment; but he has most certainly NOT given up.
And so the total usurpation will have to be incremental. One step forward, one back; two steps forward one back, etc. (Keep in mind the Bolshevik strategy of probing and attacking where possible but retreating if meeting sufficient resistance; whereupon the cycle rinses and repeats (probe and attack perceived weak points but retreat where there is sufficient pushback—to probe/fight another day and/or on another front).
To weaken the resistance that “Biden” has met thus far—resistance that wasn’t supposed to happen—means that “he” will have to weaken the Second Amendment to the point where it’s no longer effective; where “he” will have to weaken those Federal judges that oppose his demands until the judges are no longer able to have any leverage or influence (i.e., power); that “he” will have to expand SCOTUS; that he will have to lie about CRT and conceal that it is the policy of the Democratic Party, while changing the name of that abomination, or just erasing it from the agenda while continuing to surreptitiously promote and implement it full throttle (unless there is local or state pushback); to sic “his” DOJ on parents protesting and pushing back on CRT being taught to THEIR kids (no matter what name CRT is given…or not given); for that matter to “sic” his DOJ on anyone or any organization who does not toe “his” line; to sabotage the economy and impoverish the middle classes; to ensure that supply chains are damaged and remain in shambles; to weaken the military; to betray former allies and abet enemies; to continue to promote the destruction of city neighborhoods, attacks on property, theft, the weakening of the public realm and the social fabric; to continue to promote racial division and injustice, etc…which brings us to COVID and the need to perpetuate this crisis, just as all the other crises must be perpetuated.
But COVID is special because THE WAY to attain perpetual power is to initiate AND sustain societal panic. To turn citizen against citizen and family member against family member. To make panic the default position. To convert panic, fear, doubt and uncertainty into perpetual reality.
To establish Hobbes’s Leviathan State so as to rationalize, justify—and cement—total control over the panicked, even crazed, population.
COVID does all this and so must be nourished, engineered, exploited, unleashed whenever necessary. COVID is the all-purpose cudgel, the awesome—elegant—truncheon, the way to achieve and maintain power.
COVID is the key.
COVID is the ultimate ‘Don’t let a good crisis go to waste’.
Nearly two years later, and the “experts” still don’t know anything worthwhile that you didn’t know then…
I do remember that the 2.5% fatality figure was enough to alarm people. I suspect that if they had led with less than 0.1 percent and included the demographics of the fatalities, the entire crisis would never have happened.
I am reading Scott Atlas’ new book, “A Plague Upon Our House.”
I highly recommend it. Many of the points made above, he covers.
As for physicians, I am starting to wonder about the current crop. I taught medical students for 15 years, up until about 7 years ago. I doubt I could tolerate the stuff I read about now.
My hypothesis with regard to the mandates was that they were never intended to survive a court hearing – they just had to last long enough to get the big companies to sign on and create corporate vax mandates that would then survive beyond the not-really-legal OSHA rule and executive orders. For example, why did they announce the OSHA temporary emergency rule more than a month before the rule was written/released? Why does the rule cite the ‘delta variant’ as the justification, even as the delta variant had long since peaked and declined? Because it didn’t matter – it was the *threat* to big companies to get them on board, and once they were on board, if the mandates were struck down, so what? People had either gotten the jab or lost their jobs, and the corporate vax mandates would live on.
The other thing is that the news out of China in the early days of the pandemic was relentlessly dire – the video of a man allegedly collapsing from COVID on the street, the extreme lockdowns by the Chinese government, the insanely rapid construction of a “COVID hospital” – all of which I think led people in the rest of the world to think this was a giant, severe, civilization-ending crisis. Little did we know at the time that the first cases in the west had already arrived three months earlier (e.g., blood in blood banks donated in September 2019 were found to have COVID antibodies).
Tweet shows a screen cap of the newspaper publication of the South African doctor’s objections to the Omicron Strain panic – also confirms that the variant in question predates November.
https://twitter.com/brithume/status/1466029847256436741
“…so what? People had either gotten the jab or lost their jobs, and the corporate vax mandates would live on.”
An intriguing theory—the ultimate in Democratic Party manipulation and fake news?
And perfectly believable since the Democrats have proven time and time again that they are capable of anything.
OTOH, if “…the mandates…were never intended to survive a court hearing…” shouldn’t we be expecting a veritable tsunami of law suits brought by employees fired or compelled to be vaccinated against their wishes?
(I would imagine that the lawyers are drooling 24/7 in anticipation….)
Magnum opus alert: a clearing house of puzzling, troubling and demoralizing blinking red lights and synchronicities….
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/488666/
NewYorkCentral,
I think you are very likely correct about the strategy with the mandates and further proof of that is even after the first court struck down OSHA mandate the administration instructed businesses to ignore it and continue on.
Barry Meislin,
There are dozens and dozens of lawsuits from everywhere. Robert Barnes highlights them just about daily.
Minor observation. During the daytime shows the host and their guests are unmasked and not practicing social distancing. The audience? All masked with matching masks…proles indeed.
It’s sort of off topic but something that has struck me recently is the TV shows and movies clearly filmed in the COVID times yet acting like it never happened are starting to bother me.
At first I supported this but now scenes with people in malls or kids in schools with masks nowhere or workplaces full of unmasked office workers are in like some alternate fantasy world that I prefer but is not reality.
If this hellscape is to be our new forever policy then let’s record it for all times.
That goes for newscasts also. Wear your damn masks, idiots!
I’ve actually completely flipped Fauci style on this. Let history record the stupidity.
I mean let’s see Action News 10 have to show the clip of Amber Wu, Jose Montoya, DeMarcus Jackson on sports and Tiffany Marshall with the weather all masked up in their promos.
Or all the hospital staff on The Good Doctor masked up or napping on the fourth floor of the hospital that has been closed because of lack of staff.
Keep ’em afraid. They’re easier to manipulate that way. At the outset of this, the only thing I was afraid of was a disruption or a total shutdown of the supply chain. I stocked up in canned goods and dry pasta and Knorr side dishes. The supply chain didn’t collapse, but there are some items that are frequently out of stock. I was never afraid of the virus itself, owing to maintaining my immune system with numerous supplements.
One thing I don’t understand is why UV lighting isn’t in widespread use. It’s very effective in killing or neutralizing pathogens. Then again, Trump mentioned using it, so it can’t be any good.
Or all the hospital staff on The Good Doctor masked up or napping on the fourth floor of the hospital that has been closed because of lack of staff.
Or take a camera into Milwaukee’s children’s hospital where the remaining staff is trying to care for the kids run over in the Christmas parade.
expat,
It wasn’t incompetence.
Nonapod,
They take their freedoms for granted. Not a clue that they’re enabling the fashioning of the chains of their future enslavement. Which they’ll richly deserve. Their great grandchildren will curse their memory.
Leland,
You’re correct that this is an international ploy by the elite and leftists. However, the problem with the elite creating a clear boundary between them and us is that it exposes their perfidy. It’s not going to end well for them.
Art Deco,
“There are a lot of goddamned bad men in the medical establishment. Don’t trust your doctor.”
“Gerald E. Harmon, American Medical Association: Defends an AMA document calling equality and meritocracy “malignant narratives.”
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/06/09/almost_overnight_standards_of_color-blind_merit_tumble_across_american_society_780262.html
Griffin:
“ It’s sort of off topic but something that has struck me recently is the TV shows and movies clearly filmed in the COVID times yet acting like it never happened are starting to bother me.”
I think the assumption was that this would disrupt things for a few weeks and we’re be back to normal… not 20 months to flatten the curve. My guess is that they didn’t want to be locked too tightly into a time period, particularly if the COVID mania quickly passed. Plus presumably some of these things were already in production when the pandemic started.
“But COVID vaccines themselves- which are not traditional vaccines but rather COVID immunity boosters – do help individuals stave off a serious case of COVID.” neo
Weak sauce. The Ivermectin protocol is far more effective, as India’s death rate vs other highly vaccinated nations demonstrates.
Barry Meislin,
“To weaken the resistance that “Biden” has met thus far—resistance that wasn’t supposed to happen—means that “he” will have to weaken the Second Amendment to the point where it’s no longer effective;”
An absolute necessity, which is a trigger wire for civil war. One that only taking back Congress in 2022 and the Presidency in 2024 may avoid.
NewYorkCentral,
“My hypothesis with regard to the mandates was that they were never intended to survive a court hearing – they just had to last long enough to get the big companies to sign on and create corporate vax mandates that would then survive beyond the not-really-legal OSHA rule and executive orders.”
Agreed but as Griffin states, it opens those companies to massive lawsuits, given that the US is a signatory to the Nuremburg Code.
“COVID vaccine mandates were never warranted. But COVID vaccines themselves- which are not traditional vaccines but rather COVID immunity boosters – do help individuals stave off a serious case of COVID.”
The underlying justification for vaccinating is inevitably herd immunity. Except that these (pretend) vaccines don’t really contribute to that, because they still allow the “vaccinated” to pass on the virus – the “breakthrough cases”. We are now finding that these “vaccines” don’t really inhibit the spread of the virus very much at all – some evidence that they provide no protection from spreading the virus at all.
Yes, the “vaccines” seem to reduce the severity of the disease, when contracted. But that cannot be a legitimate basis for mandatory vaccinations (since they at best only marginally help us reach herd immunity) and esp in demographics that have negligible fatality rates. What everyone involved keeps dancing around is that the side effects from the vaccines seem to be killing more people in the under 30 demographic, than the virus is. They gloss over this by looking at overall death tolls from the virus and the vaccines, and ignoring that the fatality rate from the virus, compared to age, is almost exponential. Kids just don’t die from the virus, at least absent well known comorbidities (esp obesity). Rationally, vaccinating them with these “vaccines” is idiotic.
A lot of people still haven’t caught onto the “science.” It was known fairly early on that the virus mostly spreads through air and you’re unlikely to pick it up from touching things. Even the CDC recommended ending the “hygiene theater” months ago. https://news.yahoo.com/end-the-hygiene-theater-cdc-says-173440864.html
But people still think they’re being “safe” by disinfecting everything.
It was also obvious by mid-2020 that the virus spreads mostly in closed-air, crowded settings. Declining to leave your home at all, or wearing masks outdoors, does nothing to help. And yet, people still did this well into 2021.
Neo, my very nice essay seems to have been eaten. Can you resurrect it? Thanks
Claim: an energetic vitamin D campaign could have prevented virtually ALL Covid deaths.
https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/horowitz-studies-show-an-aggressive-vitamin-d-campaign-could-have-prevented-nearly-all-covid-deaths
I confess that I hope many Woke corporations are inundated with wrongful termination lawsuits if the courts find the vaxx mandate conflicts with the Constitution
I usually don’t trust Wkipedia, but this article gives a good explanation of Herd immunity. Note the dependence between HIT (Herd Immunity Threshold) and R0 (infectivity), and that that is a best case, assuming a sterilizing vaccine (no breakthrough cases), which these are clearly not (esp given the high frequency of breakthrough cases). We cannot possibly get to herd immunity just from these vaccines alone. We can’t even get there with a 50% natural immunity level. 70% with natural immunities combined with everyone else vaccinated, with a breakthrough rate of 50% (which looks quite high), gives a combined coverage of 85%, which fits in the center of the Delta variant HIT expectation of 80-88%.
That brings up the Delta issue. The ancestral variant had an R0 of roughly 2.9, for a HIT of roughly 65%, but Delta has an R0 of 5-8, with a HIT of 80-88%. Delta pushed out other variants throughout the month of July, rising from about 20% to 80% that month, and is now over 99%. That effectively put herd immunity pragmatically out of reach, even with 100% vaccination, with a much more effective vaccination.
One note is that it claims that COVID-19 spreads through droplets and aerosols through the air. Turns out that almost every COVID-19 pro-masking study I have read assumes droplet dispersal. That is important because the holes in an N95 surgical mask are of a similar order of magnitude to water droplets containing the virus causing COVID-19. The problem is that there is evidence that the predominant dispersal mechanism is as an aerosol, where the particles are an order of magnitude smaller than the droplets. And the holes in homemade masks are larger still, and the holes in neck gaiters and bandanas even larger – maybe 2-3 orders of magnitude. In short, masks do little to prevent the spread of the virus.
@ NewYorkCentral > “My guess is that they didn’t want to be locked too tightly into a time period, particularly if the COVID mania quickly passed.”
That and the other suggestions you made are probably at least partial factors.
My guess is that they didn’t want to cover up the faces they were paying millions of dollars to film.
Let’s see if they follow through.
McConnell and McCarthy allegedly not on board.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/conservatives-government-shutdown-vaccine-mandate
What was that we were saying about sausage and the news media?
https://www.theblaze.com/news/forbes-stealth-edits-article-explaining-yes-the-vaccine-changes-your-dna
Because the peons are too stupid to understand complex, nuanced explanations?
Or because the CDC thinks the peons are smart enough to know they’ve been lied to, unless they keep the charade consistent?
Bruce Hayden —
The problem is that there is evidence that the predominant dispersal mechanism is as an aerosol
Logically, it must be aerosols, if asymptomatic transmission is a thing. If you don’t have symptoms, you’re not coughing and sneezing out big droplets, so the only remaining respiratory mechanism is the aerosol.
Unless you’re one of those annoying people who spits when they talk, I suppose.
Speaking of “unscientific” panic –
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/11/30/omicron-stricter-travel-rules-us-entry/
Red State already did the fisking.
https://redstate.com/bonchie/2021/12/01/joe-biden-is-preparing-new-covid-restrictions-and-they-are-absolutely-insane-n484777
Because of Covid a Presidency was lost
“COVID-19 vaccines do not change or interact with your DNA in any way. Both mRNA and viral vector COVID-19 vaccines deliver instructions (genetic material) to our cells to start building protection against the virus that causes COVID-19. However, the material never enters the nucleus of the cell, which is where our DNA is kept.”
Apparently, they never heard of mitochondrial DNA, which everyone only gets from their egg provider (in the past, I would have said “mother”, but that term seems to have been broadened, of late, so “egg provider” is maybe more accurate).
“ Logically, it must be aerosols, if asymptomatic transmission is a thing. If you don’t have symptoms, you’re not coughing and sneezing out big droplets, so the only remaining respiratory mechanism is the aerosol.”
Thanks. Makes sense. Which is why all the papers proving that masks work, based on droplet dispersal, are idiotic.
Geoffrey Britain: “Agreed but as Griffin states, it opens those companies to massive lawsuits, given that the US is a signatory to the Nuremburg Code.”
The Nuremburg Code question appears to have been tested in court and failed, unfortunately:
“On June 12, 2021, a federal District Court in Texas in Bridges, et al v. Houston Methodist Hospital et al, Docket No. 4:21-cv-01774 (S.D. Tex. Jun 01, 2021) dismissed a case challenging a hospital’s mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy for employees. This is the first court opinion addressing the ability of employers to require employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19. The decision is also notable in that it rejects the argument, which has been advanced in other cases challenging mandatory vaccination policies in the employment context, that such policies are prohibited by the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (“FDCA”).
…
In its decision, the court also cited recent Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidance, which states that employers can require employees to be vaccinated, subject to the obligation to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with legitimate medical or religious reasons for not being vaccinated. The court also rejected Plaintiffs’ arguments regarding the Nuremberg Code, emphasizing that equating a COVID-19 vaccine mandate to forced human medical experimentation during the Holocaust is “reprehensible,” and that in any event, the Nuremberg Code does not apply to private employers.”
Now, in fairness, I doubt that the Department of Labor or the EEOC would have jumped to attention and said, “Sir, yessir! Your vaccine mandate is totally legal and is totally enforceable by companies!” if *Trump* was still president…
Regarding the question of whether the mRNA jabs are a vaccine or not, I think that they do *technically* meet the definition of a vaccine, in the sense that they stimulate an immune response. This article by Julius Ruechel – “The Snake-Oil Salesmen and the COVID-Zero Con: A Classic Bait-And-Switch for a Lifetime of Booster Shots (Immunity as a Service)” – explains the different types of immune response and why a jab for smallpox is good forever and a jab for the flu or COVID is only good for six months…it’s not just the strains/variants, though that’s part of it too.
https://www.juliusruechel.com/2021/09/the-snake-oil-salesmen-and-covid-zero.html
emphasizing that equating a COVID-19 vaccine mandate to forced human medical experimentation during the Holocaust is “reprehensible,”
Because we say so. Our judges are contemptible.
This blog, Neo and her commenters were a tremendous help to me throughout the pandemic. My personal experience would have been much worse without the words written here on the topic. This was a tremendous resource. A font of solid data, debate and analysis.
Thank you to all who contributed.
Given the suspicion that this virus had been engineered in the lab, it was reasonable to assume that it might well behave differently than the viruses we are familiar with, which arise out of nature and cannot survive very long by killing their host. Also, in those early days I read a number of interviews with local ER physicians, who seemed a bit freaked out by what they were seeing. There is no doubt that the media has hyped this, and that the high level of concern was useful during the 2020 election. But this does not explain why reactions elsewhere in the world seem to have followed much the same pattern.
But this does not explain why reactions elsewhere in the world seem to have followed much the same pattern.
They were taking their cues from American and British epidemiologists. The government that didn’t was Sweden’s. Sweden’s in satisfactory shape as we speak. No crisis.
Germans in Munich who are vaxx hesitant banned from wearing a yellow star
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57020697
Germany’s anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix Klein, has urged authorities to stop protesters using the Nazis’ yellow star forced on Jews in World War Two.
Some protesters have replaced the word “Jude” (Jew) with the phrase “ungeimpft” (unvaccinated), equating Covid restrictions with the persecution of Europe’s Jewish population.
The yellow Star of David has also been seen in protests in London.
Mr Klein said he hoped German cities would follow Munich in banning it.
Which is why all the papers proving that masks work, based on droplet dispersal, are idiotic.
Exactly. As I understand it, if you’re wearing a mask and your glasses fog up, that’s aerosols. Which is why “masks work! (peasant)” ONLY if it’s an N-95 or respirator and fitted perfectly and tightly enough to leave a line around your face.
All this has been clear since mid-2020. But we still have to play at mask theater so the easily herded can feel saaaaaafe. saaaaafe. baaaaaa.
That Ruechel article is absolutely amazing.
Should be read by everyone; even if it’s a bit on the long side, it makes a complicated, intricate topic as clear as possible and is extremely well organized.
Nor is he afraid to tell it like it is…and call a lie a lie.
Thanks very much for the link!
NewYorkCentral,
I too thank you for that link. I’ve ordered his book, from which the piece is an excerpt, also.
NewYorkCentral, that is a very interesting paper you provided the link to. Thanks. Much of what he says agrees with Scott Atlas’ book. I am not sure about a conspiracy but the reaction was the expected one from bureaucrats like Birx and Fauci. Neither has any recent clinical experience and both spent years trying to create an AIDS vaccine with zero success.
Trump was ill served and when Atlas tried to help he was demonized by the Media.
I’m glad that the Julius Ruechel article was helpful – I had a ‘lightbulb coming on’ moment when I first read it, and I send it to people I know who are interested in the topic and have an open mind. I first saw the article linked on ZeroHedge – which is, coincidentally, where I’d first heard about COVID (in late 2019).
‘Inside Australia’s Covid Internment Camp’
Anybody that truly loves freedom should NEVER EVER visit these countries again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGFdWcJU7-0
The COVID cab that takes you to Australia’s COVID Internment Camp is a casino van and if you refuse to go in the COVID cab you get a $5,000 fine.
The above video is amazing. Lots of video of what life is like inside the internment camp.
By the way the young woman in the video has already had COVID and was only being sent to Australia’s COVID internment camp because she was a close contact of someone else.
“Why I changed sides in the vaccine wars”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_uAwsVn10Y
Typical left-leaning environmental activist who got vaxxed (lives in Ireland), obeys all rules and is highly sympathetic … well, belongs … to the Left. But now it’s just gone too far towards totalitarianism for him: “fear of galloping authoritarian control”.
JimNorCal,
I linked to that entire interview earlier this week it’s about a half hour long and is pretty interesting. More philosophical than medical.
Related:
“This** is really big news for DoD personnel. This means that what DoD has been doing is illegal. As I have been saying for months now. The Pentagon/POTUS/Exec branch is not allowed to administer unlicensed vaccines to .mil personnel. This is against federal law.”
https://twitter.com/RWMaloneMD/status/1466086416358813707
H/T Lee Smith twitter roll.
(Guess this means that “Biden” will just have to change the law…)
** “Federal Judge Rejects DOD Claim That Pfizer EUA and Comirnaty Vaccines Are ‘Interchangeable’”
https://twitter.com/RWMaloneMD/status/1466085220604686341
This little one minute clip of Australian news on the escape from Australia’s COVID Internment Camp is hilarious and Viva Frei’s comments are spot on. They were only ‘staying’ at the internment camp.
https://twitter.com/thevivafrei/with_replies
This little one minute clip from Australian news on the escapees from Australia’s COVID Internment Camp is hilarious and Viva Frei’s comments are spot on. They were only ‘staying’ in the internment camp.
https://twitter.com/thevivafrei/status/1466474818249895939
Rabbit hole time (again):
“Shortly after Austria became first country to make COVID vaccines compulsory, EU chief Ursula von Der Leyen calls for dispensing with the Nuremberg Code and making vaccination mandatory across Europe.”
https://twitter.com/MichaelPSenger/status/1466150597422321671
(!)
To which Jordan Peterson responds, “Hey, it’s only the Nuremberg Code…”
https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/1466153664423374851
– – – – – – – –
Meanwhile, that “but-Covid-CAN-be-treated-why-aren’t-we-doing-it?” meme raising its constantly decapitated head…again (and again and again):
‘”I’m looking at clinicians who have now treated more than 150,000 patients, with fewer than 2 dozen deaths, with #hydroxychloroquine.”
‘Yale epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch on the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine, #Ivermectin & other therapeutics.’…
https://twitter.com/JanJekielek/status/1465833303567745031
– – – – – – – –
As the peerless Il Fauci demonstrates yet again why he is the preferred fabulist of the “Biden” junta:
‘Doocy: “You advised the president about the possibility of new testing requirements for people coming in to this country, does that include everybody?”
‘Fauci: “The answer is yes.”
‘Doocy: “What about … these border crossers?”
‘Fauci: “That’s a different issue.”’
https://twitter.com/FreeBeacon/status/1466123343287832576
H/T Hans Mahncke twitter roll (all three).
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Related:
Adverse reaction reports on the Pfizer vax…
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/over-42000-adverse-reaction-reports-revealed-first-batch-pfizer-vax-docs
…and Twitter springs into action to block it!!
…because we must learn to love Big Brother….
I have to disagree with Yawrate. He first wrote “ Yawrate on December 1, 2021 at 2:28 pm said:
It’s not like the basics of virology are incomprehensible to most of us. For years we’ve heard how viruses work and how once you’ve built immunity you’ll never need a vaccine. That’s all changed now.”
Nope. It depends on the virus and is depends upon the subject. It is pretty variable. But Covid19 was likely to become endemic with the Indian variant. And most will contract it.
The tools to prevent is may have been there a half year ago. But not government attempted to apply all of them systematically enough to get an ambitious result.
This whole thing now reeks of bureaucratic (allied with Big Pharma) opportunism and political mobsterism.
NewYorkCentral, I’m about halfway through that Reuchel essay. I hope he’ll tell me what the heck I should do, but maybe not. My husband and I have already decided that we’re off the vaccine roller coaster. We dodged serious side effects once, and if it’s not going to stop the infection, then we’re done. We’ll seek treatment if and when we get it.
Griffin: “I linked to that entire interview earlier this week”
Dang.
YouTube has us pegged.
Neo wrote “It’s impossible to know for sure – but without COVID, I think Trump would have been re-elected.”
Let’s also not forget that the Pfizer vaccine was approved before the election, but Pfizer didn’t announce it until after the election. I think that would have changed a lot of votes.
Also, I am highly skeptical of the effectiveness of masks per se, but guess that they have been indirectly effective by curtailing uncovered sneezing, coughing, spitting etc.
@ JimNorCal & Griffin – excellent video. Philosophy is what’s needed at this point, to see that the Covid tyranny is part of a bigger picture.
The notes from the link:
Freddie Sayers speaks to Paul Kingsnorth.
Paul Kingsnorth sees the vaccine wars as symptomatic of a bigger division between two fundamentally different world views: he calls them “thesis” and “antithesis.” When it comes to Covid, “thesis” is the establishment viewpoint: that lockdowns are needed to contain the virus, masks work, vaccines are safe, and people who question them are wrongheaded or worse. When Covid-19 first struck, Kingsnorth took the “thesis” viewpoint.
But over the last few months, his perspective changed. As he writes in today’s UnHerd, the crystallising moment arrived when he woke up to the news that the Austrian government had ‘interned an entire third of the population’. This move, he writes, sent a ‘chill down my spine’.
The “antithesis” view can be summed up as: lockdowns are not needed, masks do not work, the safety and efficacy of the vaccines are being oversold, vaccine passports will not only fail but further segregate society, and in the near future we can expect Giradian scapegoating of the unvaccinated. In other words, we are positioned on the precipice of a slippery slope that leads towards increasingly draconian biopolitical control measures, the grip of which is unlikely to release even once the pandemic is over.
In a conversation with Freddie Sayers on this week’s UnHerdTV, he explains this division and the bigger epistemological divides it reveals. “People are arguing about vaccines,” he says, “but they’re really under the surface arguing about what kind of person you are if you have taken these things, whether you’re a good or a bad person, or clean or unclean one”.
In Kingsnorth’s view, each of us has a line that cannot be crossed. And his has now been reached.