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| Silverfiddle Rant! |
... brought to you by the same people who brought you endless wars!
“If you favor university vaccine mandates for low-risk American and European students, when there is not enough vaccine for older high-risk people in Asia, Africa and Latin America, please remove your #BLM tags from your Twitter/Facebook profiles.” -- Martin Kulldorff, Harvard Epidemiologist
John Tierney has written an excellent essay at City Journal: Keeping Fear Alive. It has some great links to scientific information on masks, etc. (Spoiler alert! There is scant evidence they do any good).
“If you favor university vaccine mandates for low-risk American and European students, when there is not enough vaccine for older high-risk people in Asia, Africa and Latin America, please remove your #BLM tags from your Twitter/Facebook profiles.” -- Martin Kulldorff, Harvard Epidemiologist
John Tierney has written an excellent essay at City Journal: Keeping Fear Alive. It has some great links to scientific information on masks, etc. (Spoiler alert! There is scant evidence they do any good).
Children are being sentenced to another round of unnecessary mask mandates and probably more school closures based on evidence-free warnings from Anthony Fauci and others that the Delta variant will be more deadly to them than the original virus. While the variant is more infectious, the evidence does not show it to be any more lethal. In fact, the current mortality rate among American children with Covid is lower than it was last year—and last year many more children died of the flu than of Covid. One of the most thorough studies, in England, shows that the survival rate for those under 18 with Covid is 99.995 percent. But instead of emphasizing these reassuring statistics, public-health officials like Jerome Adams, the former surgeon general, keep looking for new ways to scare parents and children.
Please, ignore the screaming headlines and shabby morality tales peddled by the Infotainment Media Complex.
Instead, go to this interactive CDC website: CDC COVID Tracker
You can click on areas like deaths, cases and hospital admissions. They are graphed over time, so you can compare current numbers to the past 18 months. Click on Trends in Cases and Deaths by Race/Ethnicity, Age, and Sex, and you will see that Covid cases have gone up, even among children and adolescents, but then look at the death rates. Thankfully, barely a blip.
What about all those deaths in Texas and Florida? They are still way down the list.
Meanwhile, covid rages in Japan where everyone has always been masked up. Australia and New Zealand are finding that even on an island, eradicating covid is impossible.
Please read the short essay and see the links that show no correlation between mask wearing and covid rates. Tyrannical lockdowns did nothing but inflate the egos of the dictators.
What say you?
"Tyrannical lockdowns did nothing but inflate the egos of the dictators."
ReplyDeleteI think they can be partially credited with keeping the childhood covid deaths below the flu level. I'm not sure that happy result would still hold true, if the covid infection had been allowed to burn unopposed through the population.
"Please, ignore the screaming headlines and shabby morality tales peddled by the Infotainment Media Complex."
Yes, do that but keep in mind that those narratives are not aimed at you. They are a. sensationalist concoctions for selling papers, but also they are b. messaging designed to counter this sort of thing: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/570221-georgia-anti-vaxxers-shut-down-mobile-vaccine-event .
It's all very well for us to seek out rational interlocutors to thrash these ideas around with, meanwhile the government has to actually communicate with the non-rational faction of the population.
In the US, more children died in the 2018-2019 flu season (Sep to Apr) than have died of covid over the past 20 months.
DeleteLockdowns are the absolute worst thing to do, and making people wear masks outside is a close second. We need fresh air and sunshine. Every government tyrant that shut down a park, playground or other outdoor recreation area should be jailed.
DeleteSan Diego local television news reporting on a teacher resigning in objection to school policy.
ReplyDelete"She is fully vaccinated, but fears she could pass the virus on to her children from unvaccinated coworkers."
If, being "fully vaccinated," she can pass on the disease, why would she not be worried about passing the virus to her children from her FULLY VACCINATED coworkers?
She might well have misjudged it, but it might be that she's able to distinguish between a high probability multiplied by a small probability vs the square of that small probability.
DeleteExcellent comments both. Here in the US, at many workplaces, groups of fully vaccinated people are still required to mask up. Jazz, I know you are a math-minded man. What is the probability that one vaccinated person will contract covid and then pass it on and make ill another vaccinated person?
DeleteThe CDC will not tell us that. My suspicion is they either don't know, or the probability of what I just posited is infinitesimal
I meant Jez. Voice to text only gets me so far I guess...
DeleteThe mask Kabuki continues...
I expect on the level of the individual, the probability is pretty small, but not so small that we should be surprised by it happening a few times in the population of, say, a city. Of course it's always hard to say for sure exactly who infected you...
DeleteAre you keeping an eye on https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#hospitalizations or similar?
Yes, I am keeping an eye on it. Hospitalizations are the highest since the peak last year. I would like to see those numbers broken down by vaxxed/unvaxxed.
DeleteI bet over 90% of those cases are unvaxxed, but again, I'd like to see some stats.
I keep reminding people in the UK that because most of the population here is vaccinated (and includes almost everyone who was particularly vulnerable) it has become much more difficult for the dwindling unvaxed population to account for as many as half of the cases presenting at hospital. (Lots of people find this unintuitive, but consider the extreme case: when 99.9% of the population has been vaccinated, would you still expect more than half of cases to arise from the tiny 0.1% of the population who haven't been jabbed yet?) But I see that in America only about half of the population is fully vaccinated, so the unequal group size effect hasn't kicked in yet.
DeleteJez, I understand what you're saying percentage-wise, but overall hospitalizations should go way down as more get vaxxed, right?
DeleteI heard from somewhere--can't verify it--that 98% of hospitalizations in the US were the unvaxxed.
Yes, all else being equal (which they are not).
Delete98% would be an extraordinary result, better than their performance in trials.
As one has TWICE reacted to vaccine badly enough to be hospitalized -- once as an infant to the DPT shot and another as a 64-year-old adult to chickenpox vaccines -- I am extremely hesitant to get another COVID "vaccine"; I did react badly to the J&J COVID "vaccine" (as did my same-age cousin, headache and fuzzy brain for four days, then three weeks later respiratory distress, which has never fully resolved).
ReplyDeleteMy doctor's comment to my reaction to the COVID vaccine: "worse than most, not as bad as some."
Just sayin'.
I note that two FDA regulators have resigned because of the White House's push for a booster shot.
ReplyDeleteAnger, frustration at FDA over Biden’s booster plan; two top regulators resign "Huge loss" at FDA amid concerns of political pressure over vaccine decisions
Excellent find. Thanks for the link. Good to know we still have responsible people in the government
DeleteThe CDC has admitted that people who have received the mRNA vaccine and are "fully vaccinated" can still be infected to the degree that they can spread the disease. The vaccine does, they advise, greatly reduce the risk of "severe illness, hospitalization, or death" but, to repeat, it does not prevent spreading the disease.
ReplyDeleteGiven that admission, why are they still pressing for everyone to get the vaccine, when doing so will not stop spread of the disease? The only government interest in vaccination is to prevent spread of disease. It is the government's business whether or not I leave myself in a condition where I can cause others to become sick, so if the vaccine would prevent that it would make sense for the government to mandate that I get the vaccine.
But, by the government's own statement, the vaccine does not do that. At best, it reduces the harm that the virus will do to me personally, but that is none of the government's business. That is my choice. So why is the government so adamant about making me choose when the public at large is not affected by my choice?
Excellent observation. This is the result of the "do something!" Syndrome that has a death grip on our government. Unfortunately it is supported by a majority of the population who's hysteria is stoked by the infotainment media complex's 24/7 info ops
DeleteDoes it reduce transmission rate, albeit without altogether eliminating it? How much reduction would there need to be to bring it into the government's remit?
DeleteJayhawk,
DeleteThe vaccine...does not prevent spreading the disease.
Given that admission, why are they still pressing for everyone to get the vaccine, when doing so will not stop spread of the disease?
Why, indeed? I think it's money! Money and power!
Jez
DeleteThe government does not even claim that it reduces the chances of infection, and therefore the spread of the disease. It only claims to REDUCE the risk of "severe illness, hospitalization, or death."
"The government does not even claim that it reduces the chances of infection..."
DeleteUnderstood. But my question is, does it? and how much would it have to in order to justify government promotion?
Again, Jez, it doesn't matter how much it would have to reduce infection in order to justify government promotion, my point is that the government is promoting (actually in effect mandating) the vaccine WITHOUT the justification that it provides such a reduction. They count on sycophants such as you to provide spurious justification on their behalf.
DeleteDon't look to me to justify your government (nor mine), we're just chatting. In general I consider the messaging coming from our leaders to be unreliable.
Delete"compelling universal obedience" ... and everything else the essay said. That's what it's about.
ReplyDeleteCDC stopped tracking 'cases' in vaccinated as of May 1 (or April 1??) unless hospitalized or dead. So how does that help? Answer: it helps those who sell vaccines.
We had the phrase at one time, when criminal Republicans were in power, that, "It's okay if you're a Republican."
ReplyDeleteWe do not seem to have the same phrase for the current criminal party in power that, "It's okay if you're a Democrat."