Category Archives: COVID

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Killadelphia: The city is losing population, and not just to murder!

In news that should surprise exactly no one, Philadelphia is losing population, and it’s worse than every other city among the twenty most populous in the United States.

Most large U.S. cities reversed or slowed pandemic population drops. But not Philly.

New data released by the U.S. Census Bureau Thursday shows 19 of the 20 most populous American cities either gained residents or slowed pandemic-era population declines — Philly being the exception.

by Ximena Conde | Friday, May 19, 2023 | 5:24 AM EDT

Nineteen of the 20 most populous American cities reversed or slowed pandemic-era population declines — Philadelphia being the notable exception — data released by the U.S. Census Bureau Thursday shows.

Not to worry: the blurb means exclusive article for subscribers to The Philadelphia Inquirer, not The First Street Journal. As Robert Stacy McCain would put it, I read the Inquirer so that you don’t have to! 🙂

Does this spell a period of gloom for the city? Hard to say. Experts have consistently cautioned against reading too much into year-to-year population changes.

“One year of data is not a trend,” said Katie Martin, project director at Pew Charitable Trusts’ Philadelphia research and policy initiative.

What’s more, the census numbers only tell us the number of people arriving or leaving; they don’t tell us what’s driving the changes or if they’re permanent.

The start of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted Americans to spend a lot more time at home and reevaluate their priorities, mulling whether it was better to live in cities or the suburbs. Trend stories emerged of Brooklynites moving to nearby cities like Philadelphia because of the bang for-your-buck housing prices. At the same time, other stories told of families retreating to the suburbs out of fear that packed city living brought about more risk of contagion and concerns over rising gun violence in major cities, including Philadelphia.

Let’s tell the truth here: the homicide numbers have been worse in Philadelphia than the other large cities, and Philly is the poorest city of over a million people in the US. And while reporter Ximena Conde said that there were 33,000 residents lost between July 2020 and July 2022, I’m a bit more of a numbers geek than she is, so I looked up the numbers from the Census Bureau’s website, and saw listed the official Census number from April 1, 2020, and population guesstimate for July 1, 2022: 1,603,799 and 1,567,258. That works out to a loss of 36,541 souls, or 2.28%.

And, Killadelphia being what it is, I also added up the homicides from April 1, 2020 through June 30, 2022. Between those dates, there were 403 of the total of 499 homicides in 2020, 562 in 2021, and 257 of the 516 in 2022. Of the 36,541 people lost in the city during those dates, 1,222, or 3.34%, were lost to being murdered.

Southern and Southwestern cities like Phoenix, San Antonio, and Jacksonville continued to experience population growth, which those regions were experiencing long before the pandemic.

Meanwhile, New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago saw smaller population declines than the first pandemic year.

Does Miss Conde mean cities in mostly Republican governed states, with far fewer panicdemic[1]Panicdemic is not a typographical error, but reflects what is actually the case: governments and people reacting in mindless panic! restrictions? One point she did not mention is that foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia under Mayor Jim Kenney and Commissioner of Health Cheryl Bettigole kept COVID-19 restrictions, including indoor mask mandates, far longer than most cities, and the city’s teachers union — you know: the teachers who concealed a fellow teacher’s sexual abuse of a student for years — kept resisting reopening the public schools. Americans really don’t like authoritarian controls.

Of course, those Southern and Southwestern cities don’t have Pennsylvania winters, so I can’t blame Philly’s population loss solely on the city’s government and culture.

A lot of my Philadelphia friends are reacting positively to the Cherelle Parker Mullins having won the Democratic mayoral nomination: she’s at least somewhat moderate for a Democrat, and at least appears to be more active and energetic than outgoing Mr Kenney. Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw will almost certainly be not just toast, but toast which has fallen on the floor, buttered side down, once Mr Kenney’s term ends at the beginning of 2024, and that can only be good news for the seriously undermanned Philadelphia Police Department.  The city will still be afflicted with the George Soros-sponsored, police-hating defense lawyer now ensconced as District Attorney at least through 2025, but perhaps, just perhaps, Philly can become greater than what it has been.

Even the homicide rate, though far, far, far too high, appears to be coming down, though is still above the 2020 pace which resulted in 499 — or was it 502? — homicides.

There are a lot of reasons to appreciate Philly, for its architecture and its history. The restaurants are great, and nothing can top a hot, fresh Philadelphia pretzel. A lot of people like (ughhh!) Philly cheesesteaks, though I think that they’re vile. But the current culture of the city is terrible, and that has to be driving some people away. Yes, 1,222 of the people who ‘left’ the city did so because someone else killed them, but that still means that 35,319 souls left for other reasons.

References

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↑1 Panicdemic is not a typographical error, but reflects what is actually the case: governments and people reacting in mindless panic!
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When you don’t tell the truth at first, don’t be surprised if fewer people believe you later When it comes to COVID-19, if we had been told the truth all along, people wouldn’t be doubting the government’s word!

My good friend William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove noted that the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, sitting in full on an appeal of a ruling by a three-judge panel, blocked President Biden’s mandate that all federal employees must be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Mr Teach’s money line:

And, even with the mandate, people who got vaxxed were still getting COVID and still dying.

And this was the entire problem. If the ‘vaccines’ had actually been vaccines, had actually prevented the vaccinated from contracting COVID-19, vaccine resistance would have vanished. But it wasn’t long after the ‘vaccines’ became available to everyone that we started to hear reports of ‘breakthrough’ cases, of people who had been fully vaccinated — defined at the time as 14 days past their second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines — contracting the Peking pox. Continue reading →

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The left say they are for democracy, but they’re really not We must do as Our Betters say, because it's for our own good!

It took a couple of Washington Post reporters to say the quiet part out loud. According to her Post biography, Lauren Weber joined newspaper in 2023 as an accountability reporter focused on the forces promoting scientific and medical disinformation. She previously investigated the decimated public health system and covid disparities for Kaiser Health News. Yeah, that’s the definition of an unbiased reporter! Joined by Joel Achenbach, they produced this gem:

Covid backlash hobbles public health and future pandemic response

Lawsuits and legislation have stripped public health officials of their powers in three years

By Lauren Weber and Joel Achenbach | Wednesday, March 8, 2023 | 6:00 AM EST

When the next pandemic sweeps the United States, health officials in Ohio won’t be able to shutter businesses or schools, even if they become epicenters of outbreaks. Nor will they be empowered to force Ohioans who have been exposed to go into quarantine. State officials in North Dakota are barred from directing people to wear masks to slow the spread. Not even the president can force federal agencies to issue vaccination or testing mandates to thwart its march.

Conservative and libertarian forces have defanged much of the nation’s public health system through legislation and litigation as the world staggers into the fourth year of covid.

If you hold your cursor on the title tab, you’ll see that the article was originally entitled “Covid lawsuits weakened public health, U.S. pandemic preparedness.” Reporters submit their articles, but editors frequently write the headlines.

But think about what Miss Weber and Mr Achenbach wrote: that “conservative and libertarian forces” — quite the liberal bugaboo there! — used “legislation and litigation” to “(defang) much of the nation’s public health system”. Legislation is the act of legislatures, the elected representatives of the people, and litigation is the use of the courts, the legal system, to bring to account actions taken which might be outside existing law. Are not both acts of democracy in a democratic system?

At least 30 states, nearly all led by Republican legislatures, have passed laws since 2020 that limit public health authority, according to a Washington Post analysis of laws collected by Kaiser Health News and the Associated Press as well as the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and the Center for Public Health Law Research at Temple University.

Health officials and governors in more than half the country are now restricted from issuing mask mandates, ordering school closures and imposing other protective measures or must seek permission from their state legislatures before renewing emergency orders, the analysis showed.

We have previously mentioned Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) dictatorial orders concerning COVID-19 restrictions, and his refusal to involve the General Assembly.

Beshear was asked at Friday’s (July 10, 2020 — Editor) news conference on COVID-19 why he has not included the legislature in coming up with his orders. He said many state lawmakers refuse to wear masks and noted that 26 legislators in Mississippi have tested positive for the virus.

Though the Governor is supposedly very popular, and the public supposedly approve of his handling of COVID-19, the November elections increased Republican control over both chambers of the state legislature. The GOP increased their majority in the state Senate from 28-10 to 30-8, and in the state House of Representatives from 61-37 (with 2 vacancies) to 75-25. Both were, and again are, veto-proof majorities under the state constitution. Republicans campaigned in 2020 on reining in the Governor’s powers, and the voters of the Commonwealth apparently approved of their message.

The subsequent legislative elections, in 2022, further increased the Republicans’ majorities, to 31-7 and 80-20. As an act of democracy in the only polls that count, actual elections, it would appear that the voters approved the Republicans’ actions in the previous legislative sessions.

Of course, our Democratic Governor was appalled that the state legislature would rein him in:

Beshear has indicated he would like no approach at all. He has criticized the effort to restrict his ability to issue executive orders, painting it as a potentially “catastrophic” attempt to limit his ability to deal with COVID-19, and one that would hamstring future governors if another unforeseen emergency arrives.

“I hope when they show up, making a lot of noise, let’s take a breath, let me get on through this and afterwards, have at it,” Beshear told the Herald-Leader when asked about the legislature’s effort to limit executive power. “Then we can go to court or anything else.”

Also see: William Teach: All That Backlash To COVID Tyranny Will Make Next Pandemic Tough

As we have previously noted, the General Assembly passed the bills restricting the Governor’s emergency powers, requiring any executive orders to be approved by the legislature within thirty days or automatically lapse, which Mr Beshear vetoed, his vetoes were promptly and overwhelmingly overridden, and the Governor then went to his toady judge to file suit to overturn the legislature’s actions. It took 5½ months, but the state Supreme Court finally overruled Judge Philip Shepherd’s injunction and stated that the legislature acted within their authority.

All of that, even with the delays, was through the democratic action of a legally elected state legislature, and ruled on by legally elected judges.

That, of course, appalls Miss Weber and Mr Achenbach!

The movement to curtail public health powers successfully tapped into a populist rejection of pandemic measures following widespread anger and confusion over the government response to covid. Grass-roots-backed candidates ran for county commissions and local health boards on the platform of dismantling health departments’ authority. Republican legislators and attorneys general, religious liberty groups and the legal arms of libertarian think tanks filed lawsuits and wrote new laws modeled after legislation promoted by groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative, corporate-backed influence in statehouses across the country.

I just love that paragraph! The authors note a “populist rejection of pandemic measures”, “Grass-roots-backed candidates”, “Republican legislators and attorneys general, religious liberty groups and the legal arms of libertarian think tanks”, and “groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative, corporate-backed influence in statehouses”, all examples of public opinion in democratic action.

The Alabama legislature barred businesses from requiring proof of coronavirus vaccination. In Tennessee, officials cannot close churches during a state of emergency. Florida made it illegal for schools to require coronavirus vaccinations.

We were critical, from the very beginning, of the authoritarian dictates of so many of our nation’s governors when the COVID-19 scare first erupted.

On March 19, 2020 Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) unconstitutionally ordered all churches closed in the Bluegrass State. That order covered the Easter holiday, the most important day in the Christian calendar. When a couple of churches ignored the Governor’s order, he sent the Kentucky State Police to record license plates and vehicle identification numbers on vehicles in church parking lots, on Easter Sunday!

Two federal judges ruled against the Governor, allowing churches to reopen, but they did not rule until May 8, 2020.

The result, public health experts warn, is a battered patchwork system that makes it harder for leaders to protect the country from infectious diseases that cross red and blue state borders.

Well, it will certainly make it hard for dictators to take action! In states like Kentucky, the Governor can issue executive orders, but he has to call the General Assembly into a special session — if they are not already in session — to approve the orders if they are to extend beyond thirty days. That almost sounds, you know, reasonable!

“One day we’re going to have a really bad global crisis and a pandemic far worse than covid, and we’ll look to the government to protect us, but it’ll have its hands behind its back and a blindfold on,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. “We’ll die with our rights on — we want liberty but we don’t want protection.”

There was a rather famous Virginian by the name of Patrick Henry who said something about liberty.

There’s a lot more at the Post’s original, and if you are stymied by the Post’s paywall, you can read the whole thing for free here. But what you will be reading is a thinly-veiled defense of authoritarianism, of allowing Our Betters the power to tell us what we must do and cannot do in the event of the next panicdemic.

No, that’s not a typographical error: I spelled it to indicate exactly what I thought it to be.

The cited article is not listed as an opinion piece, but the authors’ opinions are very, very obvious. That quiet part they said out loud? That we must sit down and shut up, and be ruled by the left.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

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Taylor Lorenz loves to express her opinions, but doesn’t really want other people expressing their opinions back to her

Taylor Lorenz, from her Twitter profile.

We have previously mentioned Taylor Lorenz, who covers technology and online culture for The Washington Post. Miss Lorenz is probably most famous for her article doxing Chaya Raichik, the previously anonymous lady who ran the Twitter site Libs of TikTok. LoTT’s schtick is to find the silliest things leftists put on the social media site Tik Tok, and snark them for sensible people on Twitter. Basically, LoTT is mocking people for their own exposed stupidity. My good friend Amanda Marcotte of Salon loved that LoTT was doxed, doubtlessly hoping that Miss Raichik, a Brooklyn-based real estate salesperson and LoTT creator would lose her job — she wrote in September of 2021 that the unvaccinated should all lose their jobs, and retweeted it with the same message just four days ago — and posted back in April a hope that Elon Musk’s buyout of Twitter results in the whole thing being killed. Miss Lorenz was also appalled that the Biden Administration’s plans to open a Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security.

Miss Lorenz previously told us that she was immunocompromised, though I have included that link to show that I once saw it; she has since deleted it. Thus, the image of one of her latest threads is just that, a screen captured image. Of course, it had to be screen capped because Miss Lorenz, who has her tweets protected and limited to her “approved followers” — Miss Lorenz has, as of this writing, 355,400 followers, but she follows only 8,674 people — both restricts those who can reply to it and set it so that her tweet cannot be retweeted. It is interesting that someone with the blue checkmark of being a high-profile person, who has the major public soapbox of a Washington Post reporter, and believed that Chaya Raichik needed to be doxed, has her tweets protected.

If it’s difficult to read what she tweeted, you can click on the image to enlarge it.

You know, I get it: Miss Lorenz is immunocompromised herself, and thus she has a personal reason to see the rest of us forcibly vaccinated and masked for the rest of our lives. But most people realize that the masks don’t really do much, and that the vaccines neither prevent people from contracting the virus nor prevent those who do contract it from transmitting it to others. And, as I have noted previously, it’s not just evil reich-wing American conservatives: in our family’s recent travels, we flew on Air Canada and Swissair, and were in airports in Toronto, Amsterdam, Aberdeen, Zurich, Tel Aviv, Istanbul and Kuwait City, and on neither any flights nor in any of those airports were there mask mandates, vaccine records checks, nor more than a small minority of people wearing masks voluntarily.

No, I don’t want Miss Lorenz to contract the SARS-CoV-2 virus. For the vast majority of people, as it was for me, it’s like an annoying cold or flu bug for a few days, but nothing debilitating. For someone immunocompromised as she is, it could be significantly worse. But there comes a point at which the vast majority of people cannot and should not have their rights and freedoms restricted for the benefit of a relatively few.

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Some “public health activists” want new #MaskMandates Not just no, but Hell no!

The New Yorker is not one of my frequent reads, but when I saw this tweet from Eli Klein, I knew that I’d have to check out the story.

The Case for Wearing Masks Forever

A ragtag coalition of public-health activists believe that America’s pandemic restrictions are too lax—and they say they have the science to prove it.

By Emma Green | Wednesday, December 28, 2022

Last December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that it was shortening the recommended isolation period for those with covid-19 to five days. Getting exposed to the virus no longer meant that people needed to quarantine, either, as long as they were fully vaccinated and wore a mask. It was a big moment, and it occurred just as the Omicron variant was surging. Mindy Thompson Fullilove, a professor of urban policy and health at the New School, was livid.

I will admit it: when I saw “A ragtag coalition of public health activists”, my mind went to “a ragtag fugitive fleet on a lonely quest”, from the introduction to the original Battlestar Galactica. 🙂

Fullilove, who is Black, has spent her career studying epidemics: first aids, then crack, then multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. She has seen how disease can ravage cities, especially in Black and working-class communities. From the beginning, Fullilove was skeptical of how the federal government handled the coronavirus pandemic. But these new recommendations from the C.D.C., she said, were “flying in the face of the science.” Not long after the announcement, she sent an e-mail to a Listserv called The Spirit of 1848, for progressive public-health practitioners. “Can we have a people’s CDC and give people good advice?” she asked. A flurry of responses came back.

Why is it important that Dr Fullilove is black?

What emerged was the People’s C.D.C.: a ragtag coalition of academics, doctors, activists, and artists who believe that the government has left them to fend for themselves against covid-19. As governments, schools, and businesses have scaled back their covid precautions, the members of the People’s C.D.C. have made it their mission to distribute information about the pandemic—what they see as real information, as opposed to what’s circulated by the actual C.D.C. They believe the C.D.C.’s data and guidelines have been distorted by powerful forces with vested interests in keeping people at work and keeping anxieties about the pandemic down. “The public has a right to a sound reading of the data that’s not influenced by politics and big business,” Fullilove said.

Let’s be honest here: there have been many people and groups who have “made it their mission to distribute information about the pandemic—what they see as real information, as opposed to what’s circulated by the actual C.D.C.”, but The New Yorker would never publish a glowing article about them, because those people and groups were saying that the government’s reaction to COVID-19 was too strict, rather than not strict enough.

We have noted, as recently as 3½ weeks ago, that there are signs that the government wants to reimpose mask mandates. More, as William Teach just reported, President Biden has imposed a requirement for a negative COVID test on airline passengers coming from China:

The Biden administration announced new testing requirements Wednesday for travelers coming to the U.S. from China — a response to soaring Covid infections in China and a sign of increased worry about the potential emergence of new variants.

Beginning Jan. 5, anyone older than 2 years old arriving from China, Hong Kong or Macau will need to show a negative result from a Covid-19 test taken within two days of their flight. The requirement applies to all passengers regardless of nationality or vaccination status, those connecting through other countries, and people transferring through U.S. airports to other destinations.

Our family were traveling internationally in October and November, and on no flight nor at any airport were there either mask mandates or requirements to show vaccination records or negative COVID tests.

It’s not just Americans who are just plain over the COVID restrictions: from our observations, Canadians, Scots, Dutch, Swiss, Turks, Arabs, and Israelis were over them as well, including the people from other countries who were on those flights or in those airports or just walking around.

Back to The New Yorker:

No one is in charge of the People’s C.D.C., and no one’s expertise is valued more than anyone else’s. The problems of “the pandemic and its response are rooted in hierarchical organizations,” Mary Jirmanus Saba, a filmmaker and one of the volunteers, told me. Roughly forty people come to each weekly meeting, but many more are involved. (This spring, after a few of the group’s organizers published a manifesto of sorts in the Guardian, several thousand interested people reached out, Fullilove said.) The group sends out a weekly Weather Report—put together by a team composed, in part, of doctors and epidemiologists—summarizing data about transmission rates, new variants, and death rates. They’ve published explainers on testing, masks, and ventilation, among other topics, typically with a call to action: call the White House, call your congressperson, demand free tests and treatment for all. On their Web site, they recently posted a guide for safer gatherings, which recommends that all events be held outdoors with universal, high-grade masking. The organization has nearly twenty thousand followers on Instagram, and it prides itself as a resource for various groups, including people who are immunocompromised and want to find a way to protect themselves and activists who are trying to lobby their local government for more covid restrictions.

Note what the “People’s CDC” are asking. Yes, they are providing what they claim are accurate data about things, but they also want people to call the White House and call their congressmen, the type of thing which tells us, inter alia, that they are doing more than just asking people to follow their recommendations, but to get the government to impose restrictions and enforce compliance.

One wonders whether the artwork that came with the article, of a bullhorn in a mask, is a not-so-subtle way of stating that those who hold contrary opinions should be muzzled. Given the revelations from the internal files that Elon Musk released from Twitter, that’s hardly a wild speculation.

Further down, you’ll find that the People’s CDC are very much in favor of forced action:

And then there are masks. The People’s C.D.C. strongly supports mask mandates, and they have called on federal, state, and local governments to put them back in place, arguing that “the vaccine-only strategy promoted by the CDC is insufficient.” The group has noted that resistance to masks is most common among white people: Lucky Tran, who organizes the coalition’s media team, recently tweeted a YouGov survey supporting this, and wrote that “a lot of anti-mask sentiment is deeply embedded in white supremacy.”

Well, of course it has to include complaints about ‘white supremacy,’ though I’ve seen nothing telling me that black Americans are wearing masks with greater frequency than white Americans.

Emma Green, from her Twitter biography.

There’s a lot more, and while the magazine does have a paywall, you can normally read a couple of ‘free’ articles a month; I’m not a subscriber, and I can see it, although I took care not to close the article until I was done with mine, in case I couldn’t access it again. Emma Green, the staff writer at The New Yorker who covers education and academia, actually wrote a reasonably fair and unbiased article, noting some of the opposition to the People’s CDC’s demands, and just how impossible it would be to impose them on an unwilling nation. But I want to note her concluding paragreph:

America is heading into its third covid winter, this time paired with high rates of flu and RSV. Mayor Eric Adams just urged New Yorkers to put their masks back on. People are tired of it all. But the People’s C.D.C. members do not feel deterred. “The reality is, I feel so hopeful,” (Zoey Thill, a family physician in Brooklyn) said. Testing, masking, moving events outdoors—“if we do these things, it’s not a slog,” she added. “It’s uplifting. It’s a demonstration of care and solidarity and love.”

There’s a certain disconnect with Dr Thill, a New Yorker herself, talking about moving events outdoors . . . just as a typical New York winter has begun. In Philadelphia, where winter is only slightly milder than in the Big Apple, the city has required that the outdoor dining ‘streeteries’ which sprang up to remain open during the city’s COVID restrictions, now get permits, including some fairly expensive regulations, yet, as of December 22nd, only 22 had applied, and none approved. Instead, most unlicensed streeteries are being dismantled.

There’s a lot of clickbaitness in the article’s title, “The case for wearing masks forever,” which I will admit, before I read the article I expected a screed which would demand such, and that’s not what I found. I do not know if Miss Green wrote the article headline herself — that’s frequently an editor’s job — or selected the masked bullhorn graphic, but I found it a decent article.

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To the government, telling the whole truth will make you less likely to comply, so the whole truth will be hidden

When I saw this tweet from the New York Times Guild, asking me to not cross a “digital picket line” and read any material from The New York Times, I knew that I’d have to reference some story from the Grey Lady on my site today. And it actually turned out to be something good; someone who was doing something really radical like telling the truth about COVID-19:

Covid-19 Isn’t a Pandemic of the Unvaccinated Anymore

by David Wallace-Wells | Wednesday, December 7, 2022

Americans received their first Covid-19 vaccine doses in December 2020, which means we are now approaching the beginning of the third year of the pandemic’s vaccine phase. And yet hundreds of Americans are still dying each day. Who are they? The data offers a straightforward answer: older adults.

Though it’s sometimes uncomfortable to say it, mortality risk has been dramatically skewed by age throughout the pandemic. The earliest reports of Covid deaths from China sketched a pattern quickly confirmed everywhere in the world: In an immunologically naïve population, the oldest were several thousand times more at risk of dying from infection than the youngest.

We reported, on November 24th, how The Washington Post used a similar headline, “Covid is no longer mainly a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Here’s why.“, and even that was an editorial change from the original, “Vaccinated people now make up a majority of covid deaths”. It was that similarity which caught my eye on the Times website.

But the skew is actually more dramatic now — even amid mass vaccinations and reinfections — than it was at any previous point over the last three years. Since the beginning of the pandemic, people 65 and older accounted for 75 percent of all American Covid deaths. That dropped below 60 percent as recently as September 2021. But today Americans 65 and over account for 90 percent of new Covid deaths, an especially large share given that 94 percent of American seniors are vaccinated.

Yet these facts seem to contradict stories we’ve told about what drives vulnerability to Covid-19. In January, Joe Biden warned[1]Full disclosure: this reference hyperlink was not in the author’s original, but was added by me. that the illness and death threatened by the Omicron variant represented “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” But that month, in which nearly 85,000 Americans died, the unvaccinated accounted for 59 percent of those deaths, down from 77 percent the previous September, according to analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The share of deaths among older adults that January was nearly 74 percent.

There’s more at the original, but, Alas! it is available only to Times subscribers, so if you aren’t one, you’ll just have to take my word for it that what I’ve quoted is the real thing. Several paragraphs further down, after Mr Wallace-Wells goes through some statistics and caveats, we come to this:

That is a very good deal, of course. But it also means that, given the underlying age skew, a vaccinated person in their late 80s shares a similar risk of Covid death as a never-vaccinated 70-year-old. Which is to say, some real risk. If it was ever comfortable to say that the unconscionable levels of American deaths were a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” it is surely now accurate to describe the ongoing toll as a “pandemic of the old.”

So why aren’t we?

One answer is that as a country, we prefer just to not see those deaths at all, regarding a baseline of several hundred deaths a day as a sort of background noise or morbid but faded wallpaper. We don’t need to understand who is dying or why in part because we don’t want to reckon with the fact that around 300 Americans are now dying from Covid-19 every day, at a rough pace of about 100,000 per year, making it the country’s third leading cause of death. This is normalization at work, but it is also a familiar pattern: We don’t exactly track the ups and downs of cancer or heart disease either.

At 69½ years old, and having contracted the SARS-CoV-2 virus myself, though not very ill at all and seemingly getting over it, I’m not particularly thrilled with it being a “pandemic of the old,” but let’s face it: the elderly are always at greater risks, from everything. Our immune systems are weaker, our reflexes slower. I’m perfectly able to admit that there are things I just can’t do as well as previously. But Mr Wallace-Wells continues to tell us why the government was shading the truth:

Another answer is that — partly to promote good behavior, partly to more easily blame others for our general predicament — the country spent a lot of time emphasizing what you could do to protect yourself, which left us without much of a vocabulary to describe what underlying vulnerability inevitably remained.

Translation: “to promote good behavior” means to try to push people to take a vaccine some were clearly reluctant to take by not telling the whole truth about it. The government were so worried that people might be less willing to take the decision to get vaccinated if they had the complete truth that they preferred to hide part of the truth.

And we’re still seeing that today. Think about the commercials for various prescription drugs that producers say you should “ask your doctor about” if you have a particular condition. They all have one thing in common: they all have a list of potential negative results or reactions that some patients have had.

But not the COVID vaccines! The government is pushing them, every day, through television commercials, but I have yet to see one in which the negative side effects, the documented negative side effects that some people have suffered, have been listed. The percentage of people who have suffered serious side effects is small, but it is not zero.

Then, of course, there was the truly Big Lie, a lie spread by many people:

  • Rachel Walensky, Director of the Centers for Disease Control: “Our data from the C.D.C. today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick. And that it’s not just in the clinical trials, it’s also in real-world data.” Even some of her minions at the CDC pushed back against that.
  • Joe Biden: “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in an ICU unit, and you’re not going to die. “

We found out, of course, that the vaccines did not stop either contracting or transmitting the virus to others. Heck, I’m pretty much the poster boy for that one, in that my wife contracted it first, despite being fully vaccinated, twice ‘normally’ boosted, and having taken the additional, supposedly Omicron-specific booster, . . . and then I contracted it from her, despite being fully vaccinated and twice normally boosted.

By last January, this was known: acting Food and Drug Administration head Commissioner Janet Woodcock told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, last January, that she expected that, eventually, almost everyone would contract the virus. Celebrity doctor Anthony Fauci said that COVID-19 would infect “just about everybody.” But the government have kept up the Big Lie, that if you get vaccinated and boosted, you wouldn’t get COVID.

What if the government had done something really radical and just told the truth? We can’t know whether developing a reputation for telling the truth would have led more or fewer people to choose to take the vaccines, though it surely seems probable that government efforts to force people to get vaccinated increased resistance. And maybe, just maybe, if the government had a reputation for telling the truth, people would trust them more on things other than COVID-19.

References

References
↑1 Full disclosure: this reference hyperlink was not in the author’s original, but was added by me.
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Watch out! The signs are there that the Biden Administration wants to reimpose mask mandates

As my good friend, and occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach recently noted, the twenty leaders at the G20 ‘summit’ “signed a declaration to introduce vaccine passports for their respective jurisdictions, with the stated intention of creating a global verification system to facilitate safe international travel.”

I embedded my own tweet here:

I should have included Istanbul and Kuwait City, those being the airports at which SSG Pico stopped on her (too short) pass to meet me in Jerusalem.

While Representative Massie said that the American people had moved on, he was too restrictive: as nearly as any of us could see, much of the world have moved on as well.

But, of course, the Biden Administration wants to instill fear, because that’s better for government to control people. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

CDC Director Walensky is urging people to wear masks indoors and on public transit, raising alarms about the ‘tridemic’

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky will speak at a health summit in Philadelphia Tuesday.

by Jason Laughlin and Sarah Gantz | Tuesday, December 6, 2022 | 10:21 AM EST

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky is in Philadelphia today to speak about pressing public health threats as officials raise alarms about the so-called “tridemic” — a surge of influenza, RSV and COVID-19 cases straining the health system.

“The past several years have certainly not been easy, and now we face another surge of illness, another moment of overstretched capacity, and one of tragic and often preventable sadness,” Walensky said during a CDC press briefing Monday.

Would that be the same Dr Walensky who told us, “Vaccinated people do not carry the virus — they don’t get sick”?

She is expected to address a crowd of medical professionals and public health stakeholders today at the Bloomberg American Health Summit, taking place at Loews Hotel Philadelphia in Center City.

The CDC has recorded at least 8.7 million cases of flu, including 78,000 hospitalizations and 4,500 deaths since October, the Washington Post reported.

Children’s hospitals have been flooded with cases of RSV, a flu-like virus that can cause severe respiratory problems among very young children and those with underlying health conditions.

Flu season hits every year. And nurses, such as my wonderful wife, know that RSV season hits pediatric hospitals every year, the government wasn’t trying to push indoor and travel masking for the flu and RSV. They got away with doing so due to the COVID-19 panicdemic — and no, that’s not a typographical error; I spelled it exactly the way it should be spelled — so now they want to try it again.;

“Our hospital is filling up with young babies that are struggling to breathe,” James Reingold, chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia, told the Inquirer in early November.

COVID cases and hospitalizations are also rising in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, but remain within the range the region has seen over the past two months.

In her remarks to reporters Monday, Walensky urged people to be proactive in protecting themselves and others by seeing a doctor if they have symptoms, getting vaccinated and wearing a mask indoors and on public transportation.

That last fits in with what Mr Massie stated, that the President “is still fighting in federal court to reinstate the airplane mask mandate.” The federal government sure loves them some arbitrary and authoritarian power!

I had said that masks weren’t much in evidence in my recent travels, but it’s also true that there were at least a few people who chose to wear them. And that’s the point: they chose to wear them. If someone feels either the need or desire to wear a mask, I have no way of knowing what his reasons and decision-taking processes were, and it’s really none of my business. But when the government tries to force people to wear them, then it becomes my business, and my answer is what it will always be: not just no, but Hell no!

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I got the Wuhan Flu

My darling bride — of 43 years, 6 months, and 16 days — has been full vaccinated against COVID-19, plus she got the two original boosters, plus she got the specific Omicron variant booster.

Guess what? She got sick — not seriously — took an at home COVID test, and was positive.

Me? I’m fully vaccinated, and yes, I took the two original boosters, though not the specific Omicron booster, and a couple of days after Mr Pico became ill, I did, too. We waited a couple of days, but yup, I took an at home test on Saturday, and yup, I’m positive for COVID.

According to the latest propaganda, even if you do get infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, you won’t get as sick if you’ve taken the vaccine-that-isn’t, but who can know that? We’ve already been told that the Omicron variant does not cause as severe symptoms as the previous ones, so the fact that Mrs Pico and I are only housebound ill and not hospitalized could just as well be due to the milder variant as the vaccine-that-isn’t.

The propaganda spouted by the ‘experts’ in the chart to the right? Let’s face it: they didn’t actually know what they claimed to know, and were only parroting what their minions told them, to justify all sorts of vaccine mandates and intrusions into people’s personal lives. As for their minions? They probably didn’t know, either, but were doing what the developers of the vaccines were doing all along: guessing!

But with their guessing, all sorts of restrictions on our individual liberties and rights were imposed.

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The racism of The Philadelphia Inquirer They really just can't help themselves!

Viruses are very much non-racist: they do not care what color or ethnicity the person they infect happens to be, but the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer seem to think otherwise.

Sunday morning’s main editorial — which has the look of something written specifically by Will Bunch, but I don’t know that — begins innocently enough:

Fighting the spread of viruses — and lies | Editorial

Health officials warn the flu could be worse this year, and roughly 300 Americans a day are still dying from COVID-19. Boosters and flu shots remain effective protection.

by the Editorial Board | Sunday, December 4, 2022 | 6:00 AM EST

Many have moved on from the pandemic, but it is not over. As Americans gather during the holidays, there remains a need to get booster shots, practice social distancing, and fight the spread of misinformation.

Roughly 300 Americans a day are still dying from COVID-19. That is an obvious improvement from the pandemic’s peak of more than 4,000 deaths a day early last year, but the country is still losing the equivalent of an airplane full of passengers each day. Most deaths involve those who are older, sicker, and poorer.

The trauma to families who have lost loved ones is incalculable, while the financial impact continues to roil the economy. At the same time, many students have fallen further behind in their education.

Oh, as in the effects of closing the schools has had devastating effects? Remember: The Philadelphia Inquirer fully supported the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers in their reluctance to reopen the city’s schools to in person learning.

Health officials remain optimistic this winter will not bring another surge in coronavirus cases like last year, when the omicron variant swept through the country. However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is tracking a new subvariant known as XBB, which is showing up in a growing number of cases.

Anthony Fauci, who is retiring in December as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned that XBB appeared adept at evading antibodies from prior vaccination or infection and urged everyone to get COVID boosters.

Why did I say that this has the look of a Will Bunch column? Whoever wrote this used a plethora of links, the way Mr Bunch normally does! But I will admit to not understanding the last quoted paragraph: if XBB “appeared adept at evading antibodies from prior vaccination or infection,” why would getting yet another booster make a difference?

The drop in the number of patients getting boosters has spilled over to fewer Americans getting their annual flu shot. More troubling, even fewer Black, Hispanic, and Native American adults have been getting flu shots in recent years.

While the viruses don’t care about the race or ethnicity of the people they infect, it seems that the Editorial Board do: why is it “more troubling” that fewer Hispanic, black or Indians have been getting the flu shots? Why do the Editorial Board take such a distinction here?

The editorial continues on to blame evil reich-wing Republicans for all of this, another sign of Mr Buch’s probable authorship, as well as Twitter — though not specifically Elon Musk — because all would be well if only those who disagree with the Inquirer would just shut their mouths .  .  . and keyboards.

Which brings me to this:

It’s not that just “the American people have moved on,” but foreigners have as well. I’m guessing that there aren’t a lot of Arabs, Turks, Brits, Dutch, Swiss, Israeli and Canadians who watch Tucker Carlson on Fox News, one of the people blamed by the Editorial Board, but they aren’t wearing masks with, at least to my eyes, any greater frequency than Americans. Of course, I can’t tell by looking whether a person has been vaccinated, but I can tell you that, along with masks not being much in evidence, we were never asked for our vaccination records, either.

William Tech noted a couple of weeks ago that at this year’s G20 ‘summit’ in Indonesia, “the twenty participating world leaders signed a declaration to introduce vaccine passports for their respective jurisdictions, with the stated intention of creating a global verification system to facilitate safe international travel.” Yet, among the G20 nations are Canada, the United Kingdom, and Turkey, nations our family visited, which did not ask to see our vaccination records.

The COVID-19 vaccines are ‘free,’ and, in some places, the flu vaccines are as well, with your insurance card. If someone wants to get a vaccine, he can get it, always free with the COVID shots, and frequently so for the influenza vaccine. People are taking their free decisions.