Author Archives: Dana Pico

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CDC doctor says that achieving ‘herd immunity’ is unlikely even with universal vaccination

The vaccinated Joel Embiid is out for the 76ers due to a positive test. Quarterback Ben Roethlisburger, who is fully vaccinated, is out today for the Pittsburgh Steelers due to COVID-19. Yet somehow, while everyone is trashing Aaron Rodgers, no one seems to note that fully vaccinated players are also testing positive. Now, the CDC are saying that ‘herd immunity’ is not an achievable goal:

The prospects for meeting a clear herd-immunity target are “very complicated,” said Dr Jefferson Jones, a medical officer on the CDC’s COVID-19 Epidemiology Task Force.

“Thinking that we’ll be able to achieve some kind of threshold where there’ll be no more transmission of infections may not be possible,” Jones acknowledged last week to members of a panel that advises the CDC on vaccines.

Vaccines have been quite effective at preventing cases of COVID-19 that lead to severe illness and death, but none has proved reliable at blocking transmission of the virus, Jones noted. Recent evidence has also made clear that the immunity provided by vaccines can wane in a matter of months.

The result is that even if vaccination were universal, the coronavirus would probably continue to spread.

“We would discourage” thinking in terms of “a strict goal,” he said.

If such is the case, vaccination appears to be personally useful, but its societal usage is questionable. If none have proven “reliable at blocking transmission of the virus,” what is the justification for compelling vaccination? At this point, choosing not to get vaccinated puts an individual at greater danger, but it’s a danger for himself, without being a proven greater danger to others.

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A few real journalists challenge the #woke journolism of the credentialed media

Bari Weiss is not a conservative; she’s very liberal in her politics, though just plain not #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading enough for the young wokes in The New York Times newsroom. Glenn Greenwald is not a conservative; he’s very much on the political left as far as an American would be defined, though he now lives in Brazil. And Andrew Sullivan is hardly a conservative, either.

But these three journalists have one thing in common: they stand for freedom of speech and accuracy in journalism!

    When All The Media Narratives Collapse

    In case after case, the US MSM just keeps getting it wrong.

    by Andrew Sullivan | Friday, November 12, 2021

    The news is a perilous business. It’s perilous because the first draft of history is almost always somewhat wrong, and needs a second draft, and a third, and so on, over time, until the historian can investigate with more perspective and calm. The job of journalists is to do as best they can, day by day, and respond swiftly when they screw up, correct the record, and move forward. I’ve learned this the hard way, not least in the combination of credulousness and trauma I harbored in the wake of 9/11.

    But when the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem. If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major stories, is hard to deny. It’s as if the more Donald Trump accused the MSM of being “fake news” the more assiduously they tried to prove him right.

    And these mass deceptions have consequences. We are seeing this now in the Rittenhouse case — a gruesome story of a reckless teen with a rifle in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha. The impression many got from much of the media was that a far-right vigilante, in the middle of race riots, had gone looking for trouble far from home and injured one man, and killed two, in a shooting spree.

    Here’s the NYT on August 26, the morning after the killings: “The authorities were investigating whether the white teenager who was arrested … was part of a vigilante group. His social media accounts appeared to show an intense affinity for guns, law enforcement and President Trump.” Rittenhouse’s race is specified; the race of the men he killed and injured were not (they were also white).

    Almost immediately, the complicated facts became unimportant. The far right viewed Rittenhouse as a hero — which he surely wasn’t. He had no business being there with an AR-15. The MSM and far left viewed him as a villain, appalled that he was being elevated, in Jamelle Bouie’s words, “as a symbol of self-defense.”[2]I have my own criticism of Mr Bouie’s work here. (Another NYT article, painting Rittenhouse as a MAGA fanatic, did note at the very bottom of the page: “Supporters of Mr. Rittenhouse said he was being attacked by the mob and acted in legitimate self-defense.” So they did have a caveat.)

    But notice how the narrative — embedded in a deeper one that the Blake shooting was just as clear-cut as the Floyd murder, that thousands of black men were being gunned down by cops every year, and that “white supremacy” was rampant in every cranny of America — effectively excluded the possibility that Rittenhouse was a naive, dangerous fool in the midst of indefensible mayhem, who, in the end, shot assailants in self-defense. And so when, this week, one of Rittenhouse’s pursuers, Gaige Grosskreutz, admitted on the stand that Rittenhouse shot him only after Grosskreutz pointed his pistol directly at Rittenhouse’s head a few feet away, it came as a shock.

There’s much more at the original, and I absolutely encourage reading it. Mr Sullivan goes into many examples of recent journalistic ‘errors,’ and notes what we wicked reich wing conservatives have been saying for years now: the mistakes the credentialed media make all seem to be on one direction, the direction which feeds into the narrative of the American political left, of the American Democratic Party.

Was Kyle Rittenhouse “a naive, dangerous fool in the midst of indefensible mayhem, who, in the end, shot assailants in self-defense”? While I have never called him a “naïve, dangerous fool,” I have said, “Young Mr Rittenhouse helped to create the situation by traveling to Kenosha and appearing on the scene with a firearm. That does not mean it wasn’t self-defense; it seems pretty clear that it was. But he should never have gone there, certainly not armed.”

    We all get things wrong. What makes this more worrying is simply that all these false narratives just happen to favor the interests of the left and the Democratic party. And corrections, when they occur, take up a fraction of the space of the original falsehoods. These are not randos tweeting false rumors. They are the established press.

The trial of Mr Rittenhouse reminds me of that of George Zimmerman. Mr Zimmerman should never have followed Trayvon Martin, and certainly should have backed off when dispatchers told him to do so, but that did not give Mr Martin the right to assault him. Local law enforcement knew that Mr Zimmerman’s actions were legal self-defense, but political pressure pushed the state of Florida to appoint a special counsel and prosecute him anyway. It was really no surprise that Mr Zimmerman was acquitted, because the state had no case. The left waxed wroth, but they’d had their trial, and the jury exonerated Mr Zimmerman. Prosecutors in Kenosha surely knew, unless they are just boneheadedly stupid, that they didn’t have much of a case, but my guess — and it really is a guess — is that they were unwilling to take the political heat for dropping the charges against the defendant; they’re leaving it up to a (supposedly) anonymous jury.

But, as Mr Sullivan noted, the liberals in the credentialed media — even ones who masturbate during Zoom meetings — can’t escape their own narrative that he simply must be guilty!

This is why I have so often referred to ‘journolists’ as opposed to journalists. The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I have noted, many times, how publisher Elizabeth Hughes has openly admitted that her goal is to filter reporting, filter (supposedly) straight news stories, in The Philadelphia Inquirer through a political sieve, rather than report the unvarnished facts.

Newspapers can, and should, have editorial and OpEd sections; with word count and column inch limits having been mostly replaced by nearly unlimited bandwidth, there should be more, not less, of such sections. The credentialed media ought to be perfectly free to engage in expressions of opinion. But for the credentialed media to regain lost credibility, they need to report the news as straight news, and not report opinion as fact.

That’s the difference between journalism and journolism.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑2 I have my own criticism of Mr Bouie’s work here.
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A Republican Form of Government

In his New York Times biography, it states that “Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine.” Yup, you’re right: that’s pretty much the definition of an American political liberal. Mr Bouie on Friday set out to claim that the Guarantee Clause to the Constitution means that Democrats can fight gerrymandering by Republicans:

    Madison Saw Something in the Constitution We Should Open Our Eyes To

    by Jamelle Bouie | Friday, November 12, 2021

    Not content to simply count on the traditional midterm swing against the president’s party, Republicans are set to gerrymander their way to a House majority next year.

    Last week, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled statehouse passed a new map that would, in an evenly divided electorate, give it 10 of the state’s 14 congressional seats. To overcome the gerrymander and win a bare majority of seats, according to the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, Democrats would have to win an unattainably large supermajority of votes.

    A proposed Republican gerrymander in Ohio would leave Democrats with two seats out of 15 — or around 13 percent of the total — in a state that went 53-45 for Trump in 2020.

    It is true that Democrats have pursued their own aggressive gerrymanders in Maryland and Illinois, but it is also true that the Democratic Party is committed, through its voting rights bills, to ending partisan gerrymandering altogether.

Of course, Maryland, in which the Democrats hold veto-proof majorities in both houses of the state legislature, wants to gerrymander the state’s lone Republican congressman out of office.

The Democrats in Congress are concerned because there are simply more “red” states than blue ones; Joe Biden is President only because the blue states are mostly larger in population than the red ones. The Democrats were perfectly fine with gerrymandering decades ago, when the South was solidly Democratic, and most elections were determined not in November, but in the earlier Democratic primaries.

    The larger context of the Republican Party’s attempt to gerrymander itself into a House majority is its successful effort to gerrymander itself into long-term control of state legislatures across the country. In Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and other states, Republicans have built legislative majorities sturdy enough to withstand all but the most crushing “blue wave.”

And in those states, Republicans seized control of state legislatures after Republican candidates won under district maps passed by Democrats. In Kentucky, the GOP finally won control of the state House of Representatives in the 2014 elections, in districts drawn by a previously Democrat-controlled state House, and signed into law by Governor Steve Beshear, a Democrat. In districts drawn by Democrats, Kentucky Republicans won 75 out of 100 state House districts in the 2020 elections.

In the 2004 elections, President George W Bush got zero votes in five Philadelphia precincts; John Kerry won twenty congressional districts by greater percentages than Mr Bush’s best district. In 2008, John McCain got zero votes in a whopping 57 city precincts, and four years later, Mitt Romney was blanked in 59 precincts. The Philadelphia Inquirer, of course, could find no evidence of fraud in any of this, but it points out a fact that everyone knows, but the Democrats just don’t want to talk about: Democrats, and Democrat votes, are very heavily concentrated in our major cities. How would you redistrict Philadelphia to not gerrymander the state of Pennsylvania? Remember: it’s the weight of Philadelphia that carries statewide elections for Democrats. President Trump would have easily carried the Keystone State in 2020, which he lost by 80,555 votes, were it not for Joe Biden’s 471,305 margin in Philly. Mr Trump just barely overcame Hillary Clinton’s 475,277 margin in the city to carry the state in 2016. Even President Obama’s 2012 309,840 vote margin in Pennsylvania would have been a loss without his 492,339 vote win in Philadelphia.

The problem for Democrats isn’t that Republican legislatures have gerrymandered the districts; the problem is that the people have gerrymandered themselves with their choices of where to live.

    In Article IV, Section 4, the Constitution says, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.”

Mr Bouie claims that the Guarantee Clause should mean something other than what it was understood to mean, a government not headed by a King or Prince. Rather, he wants it to mean, citing Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v Ferguson, that Congress should have the right of approval of each state government:

    Still, a broad understanding of the Guarantee Clause might be a potent weapon for Congress if a Democratic majority ever worked up the will to go on the offensive against state legislatures that violated basic principles of political equality.

That cuts two ways; Congress is sometimes controlled by Republicans!

But, it seems to me that the wisest way to read, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,” given that “Republican” is capitalized in the original document, is that the United States should guarantee to every state that it will be governed by Republicans! 🙂

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Philly ties for 3rd place!

It wasn’t really that much of a stretch to guess that 475 wouldn’t be the final homicide number for Thursday, and it wasn’t: the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page shows that 476 Philadelphians have been murdered so far this year, up from ‘just’ 428 on the same day last year. Last year being a leap year, the gang bangers had an extra day to hit that 428 number.

The numbers are ugly: 476 homicides in 315 days works out to 1.5111 per day, or a projected 551.5555, rounding up to 552 for the year.

With 50 days left in the year, and ‘only’ 24 murders needed to tie the all-time record of 500, set in 1990, the homicide rate would have to drop to slightly less than a third of what it is right now, and, at this point, only God could make that happen. At the current rate, the city should tie the all-time high in just 16 days, or Saturday, November 27th.

Mayor James Kenney (Democrat-Philadelphia), District Attorney Larry Krasner (Soros stooge-Philadelphia), and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw (Kenney Puppet-Philadelphia) have certainly done a fine, fine job, haven’t they?

But hey, Philadelphians must like all of those bodies stacked up like cordwood, because they just re-elected George Soros stooge District Attorney Larry Krasner. No one can say that they didn’t know what they were getting.

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Killadelphia

This brings the homicide total in the City of Brotherly Love to 475 for the year; one more, and Philadelphia ties 1989’s Bronze Medal for most murders! Of course, as of this writing, Thursday isn’t over, and the police could still report more killings.

    Nicetown fire that killed 2 ruled arson

    The fire occurred on the 1400 block of West Jerome Street shortly before 4 a.m. Thursday.

    by Robert Moran | Veterans’ Day, November 11, 2021

    A predawn house fire Thursday that killed two men in the city’s Nicetown section has been ruled an arson and is being investigated as a homicide case, police said.

    Firefighters and police responded to the blaze just before 4 a.m. on the 1400 block of West Jerome Street. Two men in their 50s were found in an upstairs bedroom and were transported to Temple University Hospital and Einstein Medical Center. Both were pronounced dead shortly before 5 a.m. Their names were not released.

    Investigators from the Philadelphia Fire Department and the ATF Arson Task Force found an accelerant was used inside the front door.

    Police said the motive for the arson was unknown.

One thing is certain: whoever started this fire didn’t care for anyone’s life. The 1400 block of West Jerome Street consists entirely of Philadelphia row houses. The Google Maps street view shows them as primarily brick buildings, presumably with brick firewalls between each unit, but there’s still plenty of century-old wood involved, and the arsonist could have burned down a whole side of the street.

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The Dems blew off the best they had!

One thing I’ve said all along: while Republicans wouldn’t have been happy that President Trump lost, if the Democrats had nominated then-Representative Tulsi Gabbard Williams (D-HI) in 2020, we’d have been a lot happier with the outcome than we are about Joe Biden being President.

Make no mistake about it: Mrs Williams is very much a liberal. But she’s a lieutenant colonel in the Hawai’i National Guard, and has served in Iraq and Kuwait. Most importantly, she understands and respects our individual liberties. Were she President today, she would be strongly encouraging vaccinations, but she’d never try to order them.

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Happy Veterans’ Day!

Happy Veterans’ Day to my daughters. Our older daughter, a staff sergeant in the United States Army Reserve, will be headed for an overseas deployment in May, while our younger daughter has completed her eight years in the Army Reserve and is a civilian again.

And Happy Veterans’ Day to Hoagie, a Vietnam veteran!

Also having served: my mother and father, during the Korean war, and grandfather, during World War I.

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How gun control works Convicted felon tells police that he'd never be caught without a gun

Erich Storck. Photo by Nicholasville Police Department.

Were criminal stupidity an actual legal violation, Erich Storck would be guilty of it.

Mr Storck is a previously convicted felon, and, well, you can read it for yourself:

    Man who fired shots with police in his house said he’d ‘never be caught without a gun’

    by Karla ward | Tuesday, November 9, 2021 | 6:33 PM EDT

    Nicholasville police arrested a man who fired a gun inside his home multiple times while police were there talking with him.

    Police said they went to Erich Storck’s home on the 500 block of Courchelle Drive Monday evening in response to a call about shots fired in the area, according to a police uniform citation.

    When they arrived, Storck, 49, was inside. With three officers inside the home trying to talk to him, police said Storck “fired multiple bullets,” which police said put their lives in danger, as well as the lives of his neighbors.

    Police said two bullets exited Storck’s home, went through a neighbor’s window and lodged in the neighbor’s bathroom wall, which put the lives of the seven residents there “in substantial danger of death or serious physical injury.”

    Police said Storck’s possession of a firearm was also “a violation of his Kentucky DVO.”

    “When advised of this charge the above subject stated he would never be caught with out a gun,” police wrote in the uniform citation.

Naturally, the Lexington Herald-Leader did not publish Mr Storck’s mugshot, but it was easy enough to find.

This is why gun control will never work. Mr Storck is a previously convicted felon, and thus it is illegal for him to have a firearm. He was under a domestic violence order, which also prohibited him from having a firearm. But he was a drug dealer — the police got a warrant after seeing pot plainly visible in his house, and a more thorough search found plenty of evidence — and drug dealers, even small time ones, find firearms to simply be a necessary tool of their trade.

Mr Storck, allegedly, of course, reacted as a smoked up drug criminal would act: stupidly. But his statement shows that criminals won’t obey gun control laws, regardless of how the left think gun control laws will work.

Of course, there’s more. With his criminal history, he could not have purchased a firearm legally, so someone else must have violated the law in getting it for him. That guy might never be found.

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Fear is the mind-killer!

William Teach noted New York Times columnist Tom Friedman’s paean to fear:

    When you see how hard it’s been for governments to get their citizens to just put on a mask in stores, or to get vaccinated, to protect themselves, their neighbors and their grandparents from being harmed or killed by Covid-19, how in the world are we going to get big majorities to work together globally and make the lifestyle sacrifices needed to dampen the increasingly destructive effects of global warming — for which there are treatments but no vaccine?

Perhaps, just perhaps, when the plebeians see the patricians taking 118 private jets to the ‘climate summit’ COP26, they simply aren’t convinced that global warming climate change emergency is all that much of an emergency. Whether Mr Friedman took a private jet or, gasp!, flew commercial I do not know, but we do know that he’s been flying all over the globe to attend these things, telling us that he has “been to most of the climate summits since Bali in 2007”.

Yeah, if I could get the Times to pay for a vacation in Bali, I’d go, too!

But Mr Friedman hit upon the instrument of control the government, at all levels, have been trying to use: fear! When he complains that some people are not cooperating with the message that COVID-19 could harm or kill people’s grandparents, neighbors, and themselves, he frets that people, free people, are just not going to go along with the “lifestyle sacrifices” the patricians demand of others, though seemingly not of themselves.

But he needn’t worry: there have been plenty of people who were filled with fear, and are still filled with fear. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

    The catharsis of attending my first concert of the COVID-19 era | Opinion

    I didn’t realize how profoundly being home with only myself and my boyfriend for company had affected me until we started venturing out into the larger world.

    by Rachel Kramer Bussel, For The Inquirer | November 5, 2021

    “Is this your first time?” a stranger asked me in an elevator at the Met as we tried to find our seats at the St. Vincent concert a few weeks ago.

    Stunned, I stared back at her, trying to form an answer. How did she know? Did I look stricken by the nerves I’d felt bouncing around for weeks as I tried to decide if attending a public event was finally safe? I eventually nodded.

    “You have two masks, just like me. It’s my first too,” she said. We both knew she meant it wasn’t our first concert ever, but our first pandemic outing.

    I didn’t realize how profoundly being home with only myself and my boyfriend for company had affected me until we started venturing out into the larger world. For the last few months, we’d been going to a local grocery store to supplement our Instacart deliveries, but beyond that and work interactions, we hadn’t been close to such a large group of people since before the mid-March 2020 lockdown.

There’s a sadness in that: Miss Bussel has just told us that her boyfriend and she had virtually shut down their social lives for nineteen months. For the “last few months” they’d worked up the nerve to venture out to go to the grocery store, apparently when they’d missed putting something on their Instacart order. Of course, they were willing to put other people at whatever risk they were afraid to take themselves, because Instacart requires living human beings to put together the grocery order, and living human beings to drive through Egg Harbor Township[1]Miss Bussel noted in her original that her home is in Egg Harbor, so my noting it does not constitute ‘doxxing.’ to deliver the orders. The stressful social situations Her boyfriend and Miss Bussel avoided themselves they thought little of putting on other people.

    I was expecting to enjoy hearing St. Vincent perform for the first time, but I wasn’t prepared for the sense of catharsis the communal experience would be. I looked around at my fellow concertgoers, at the dazzling chandelier, at the dancers and musicians onstage, and felt deeply grateful that I’d said yes to attending. In August, I’d reluctantly had my boyfriend sell our long-awaited tickets to see Sleater-Kinney and Wilco at the Mann Center, even though that was an outdoor show. The risks felt too great.

    But having received my Pfizer booster shot two days before the St. Vincent show, and knowing the Met requires a COVID-19 vaccination or a recent negative test, I felt that was a risk worth taking.

Uhhh, if Miss Bussel got her COVID-19 booster shot two days prior to attending the concert, it hadn’t had time to work yet![2]“At least 12 days after receipt of the third dose, the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate was 11.3 times lower in the booster group than in the control group (95% confidence interval [CI], 10.4 to … Continue reading

Of course, she was reassured by the fact that other concert goers had to show their papers! Wir müssen Ihre Dokumente sehen![3]Full disclosure: I received my initial dose of the Moderna vaccine on April Fool’s day, and the second on Cinco de Mayo. I’d really liked to have gotten the booster on Veterans’ … Continue reading

The author continued to tell us how she is now facing decisions about what her boyfriend and she can and cannot, should or should not, do to return to a normal life, but I have to wonder: after nineteen months of seemingly abject fear, is it reasonable to think she ever can just turn it off? The ‘experts’ are now telling us that SARS-CoV-2 will be with us forever, though it will become endemic and not be classified as a panicdemic pandemic. Miss Bussel revealed that she has asthma, which could mean that, if she became infected, the disease could be worse for her. Nevertheless, at least to judge from the photo she supplied to the Inquirer, as well as on her website, she’s a fairly young woman, and younger people, while still susceptible, tend to have far less serious outcomes.

Life is full of risks, and COVID-19 is but one of them. Miss Bussel was in about as much danger driving to that concert from a traffic accident as she was of contracting the virus. And since we know that even those who have been vaccinated can contract and spread the virus, going to that concert did not reduce her risk of contracting the virus to zero.

What government, governments at all levels, have done, is to spread fear through our society, fear of contracting a disease which can be deadly, and is deadly in a small percentage of cases, to the extent that it has crippled our society. The American Automobile Association has reported that Thanksgiving travel plans appear to be near pre-pandemic levels, despite Joe Biden’s soaring gasoline prices, but that simply tells us just how much restrictions and fear disrupted Americans’ lives in 2020. Many Governor’s, including Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, issued orders restricting how many people, and from how many households, people could have in their own homes for Thanksgiving last year, orders that I am proud to say the Pico family ignored. For government to have tried to virtually cancel Thanksgiving is something that only induced fear could accomplish.

We must not fear! As Frank Herbert wrote, fear is the mind-killer, but fear is also the freedom killer, the liberty killer! We allowed fear to get people to obey unconstitutional orders from state governors, orders restricting our freedom of religion and freedom of peaceable assembly. When we let fear get us to go along meekly with government diktats that infringe on our individual rights, we enable governments to keep doing so. They only need to instill the next subject of terror and fear to be able to do so.

References

References
↑1 Miss Bussel noted in her original that her home is in Egg Harbor, so my noting it does not constitute ‘doxxing.’
↑2 “At least 12 days after receipt of the third dose, the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate was 11.3 times lower in the booster group than in the control group (95% confidence interval [CI], 10.4 to 12.3), for an absolute difference of 86.6 infections per 100,000 person-days.”
↑3 Full disclosure: I received my initial dose of the Moderna vaccine on April Fool’s day, and the second on Cinco de Mayo. I’d really liked to have gotten the booster on Veterans’ Day, but the county health department would have been closed for the holiday, so I got it on the 9th. It was my choice — well, actually, my wife, a hospital nurse, asked me to do so, because she says she puts me at risk, since she treats COVID patients — but I absotively, posilutely refuse to carry around the vaccination records. I will not comply with “Ve need to see your papers!”