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.”
Our family have been on several flights, including several foreign airports, over the past two months — Toronto, Amsterdam, Aberdeen, Zurich and Tel Aviv — and in none of these were masks either required or even much in evidence.
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:
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.
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!
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.
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:
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.
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 subvariantknown 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:
Our family have been on several flights, including several foreign airports, over the past two months — Toronto, Amsterdam, Aberdeen, Zurich, Istanbul, Kuwait City and Tel Aviv — and in none of these were masks either required or even much in evidence.
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.
Ever since Powerline and Little Green Footballs spotted the use of forged documents by CBS News 60 Minutes, in their attempt to swing the 2004 election away from President Bush and toward Senator John Kerry (D-MA), the credentialed media were, or at least should have been, put on alert that there were eyes on them, looking for the kind of bovine feces they had long been peddling. And so you’d think that the editors of The Washington Post would have learned that lesson by now, 18 years later.
So, when James Woods tweeted a screen capture from the Post, it was going to live forever, regardless of how the editors tried to soften the headline. It didn’t work.
Analysis by McKenzie Beard | Wednesday, November 23, 2022 | 7:46 AM EST
For the first time, a majority of Americans dying from the coronavirus received at least the primary series of the vaccine.
Fifty-eight percent of coronavirus deaths in August were people who were vaccinated or boosted, according to an analysis conducted for The Health 202 by Cynthia Cox, vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
It’s a continuation of a troubling trend that has emerged over the past year. As vaccination rates have increased and new variants appeared, the share of deaths of people who were vaccinated has been steadily rising. In September 2021, vaccinated people made up just 23 percent of coronavirus fatalities. In January and February this year, it was up to 42 percent, per our colleagues Fenit Nirappil and Dan Keating.
Let’s be clear about this: the original headline would grab far more attention than the revised one, and part of a headline writer’s job — articles in newspapers traditionally have an editor rather than the author compose it — is to write a headline which is accurate but will still grab the reader’s attention and make it more probable that he will read the article.
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. (snip)
In a statement, the leaders affirmed their respective countries’ support of the World Health Organization mRNA Vaccine Technology Transfer hub, which aims to build capacity in low- and middle-income countries to produce mRNA vaccines.
The leaders said they welcome joint production and research of vaccines and acknowledge the importance of shared technical standards and verification methods.
They also agreed to a globalised ‘vaccination passport’.
While the details are scant at this stage, the statement says this will be done under the framework of the International Health Regulations to “facilitate seamless international travel, interoperability, and recognizing digital solutions and non-digital solutions, including proof of vaccinations.”
Indonesia’s Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin said that a Digital Health Certificate using World Health Organization standards would be introduced during the next World Health Assembly in Geneva, in May next year.
“If you have been vaccinated or tested properly, you can move around. So for the next pandemic, instead of stopping the movement of people 100%, you can still provide some movement of the people,” Mr Sadikin said.
So, it’s somewhat alarming that governments – and of those belonging to the G20, the majority represent democracies – would consider introducing a passport that, since it was first mooted by individual countries, been widely condemned as medical discrimination as well as a violation of privacy with serious ethical implications.
Of more concern are reports that the vaccine won’t just apply to Covid vaccinations, but also to any vaccination that WHO recommends is required for international travel.
But if the SARS-CoV-2 virus is simply bypassing the vaccinations, something we have known for a year now, there is really no purpose in requiring vaccine passports, at least no real medical purpose. There is, as always, a Control Of People purpose. The editors of the Post have no real objections to more government control over the public, at least not if that control is exercised in the direction they like.
Between my wife and I, we’ve been in the Netherlands, Scotland, Canada, Israel and Switzerland — three of them just airport layovers, but there was nothing stopping us from leaving the airport in those countries — in the past two months, and neither of us has ever been asked for our vaccination records. We did carry them with us, in case they were required, but I, for one, was very happy that the busybodies and Karens didn’t ask. We were not asked for such when we returned to the United States.
While we have the stupid COVID-19 vaccination records, being relatively recent, how many people have their childhood vaccination records? Sure, I had all of the childhood vaccinations when I was a child, but that stuff was sixty years ago. The physicians who administered them are all probably dead, their offices gone. The school I attended from third grade through high school closed after the 1976 school year; where would those vaccination records be?
The vaccines are available for free, and anybody who wants to take them can do so. What the government does not like is the fact that those who do not want to take them have the right not to take them, so our government, and other governments, want to add more coercive pressure on those who decline.
I am not opposed to the vaccines, and am vaccinated myself. But I am very much opposed to the government trying to coerce people, trying to use force to get people to comply. A nation which has individual liberty as its standard should never, ever do that, and should always be resisted.
In 2020, Reichsstatthalter Andy Beshear (NSDAP-KY) tried to use the fear of COVID-19 to push through authoritarian orders, including a ban on groups of more than ten people, from more than two separate households, gathering together for Thanksgiving. I am proud to say that that our family violated that ban, and would do so again.
Fortunately, Kentuckians banded together in the voting booth in November of 2020, and elected a Republican super-majority in both chambers of the General Assembly, and the Republicans, once the legislative session began, quickly limited the Reichsstatthalter’s executive authority. Naturally, the Governor, with the help of his toady Democrat judge, Philip Shepherd, temporarily blocked the legislature’s actions, but, eventually — and far too long eventually — the state Supreme Court ruled that the laws passed were constitutional.
And now, here it is, two years later, and the Governor is trying to stoke fear again:
by Aaron Mudd | Sunday, November 20, 2022 | 7:00 AM EST
During his weekly update Thursday covering the state of the coronavirus pandemic in Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear underscored one dismal data point that he said, “I know we can do better than.”
Beshear cited data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
There’s more at the original.
One interesting thing about the article: if you look at the ‘tab’ at the top of the screen, the article isn’t entitled what I have noted, but “Where do I need a mask in KY? See latest CDC COVID-19 data”. That must have been the article title when reporter Aaron Horn submitted it, but either he or one of the Lexington Herald-Leader’s editors thought better of it.
“Current data from the CDC indicates only 8% of Kentuckians 5 and older have gotten the Omicron booster,” Beshear said.
From the Lexington Herald-Leader, November 20, 2022. Note that, even subdued, most counties are low transmission in the bordering states as well as Kentucky. Click to enlarge.
Yet, as we can see from the image to the right, almost all of Kentucky is experiencing low levels of COVID-19 transmission, as are the surrounding states.
That might be a bit deceiving, given that it reflects only those tests about which the government knows, while many people are using the at-home tests. But that also implies that, regardless of any home test results, people aren’t getting sick enough from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, regardless of variant, that they have been seeking professional medical attention.
The issue is compounded by the fact that the flu is making a roaring comeback after all but disappearing in the U.S. in 2020 to 2021. Additionally, fewer than half of Kentucky’s children got the flu shot during the 2021-22 flu season.
Uhhh, if “fewer than half” of the kids in the Bluegrass State got the flu shots last winter, and influenza “all but disappeared” in 2021, maybe, just maybe, the flu shots weren’t really needed last winter.
Of course, kids were still under health restrictions last winter, with schools either closed or operating under serious restrictions.
As Kentuckians enter the holiday season, Beshear said, “Get the (flu) shot. Get the booster, and … if you’re concerned about your health or other conditions, consider wearing a mask at indoor get-togethers right now. It’s not forever.”
At least the Governor isn’t trying to make it an order this time, but, then again, he can’t. It isn’t just that the 2020 elections resulted in 75-25 and 30-8 Republican majorities in the state House of Representatives and Senate, respectively, but the 2022 elections upped those to 80-20 and 31-7. 🙂 It’s hardly a surprise, though: the Democrats didn’t even contest 44 of the 100 House seats, or 10 of the 19 Senate seats up for election!
I might have ignored this story completely had I not noticed Mr Horn’s original article title. “Where do I need a mask in KY?” The answer is nowhere!
Kentuckians specifically, and Americans overall, are just plain done with masks. Oh, I still see a couple, now and then, but I’d guess that well over 90% of the public are not wearing them anymore.
That might be worldwide as well: I saw a few, but not many, in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv last week, and only a few of the airline passengers were wearing the silly things either, despite us being crammed in a long aluminum tube for hours on end.
Yes, things could change, but at least right now, COVID-19 has changed into something of no more concern than the flu. Yes, it will be serious enough in some people to require hospitalization, and can even result in death, but the same is true of influenza, and we haven’t resorted to the idiocy that attended COVID-19 when it came to the flu.
It’s simply something with which we have to live, just as we have to live with the flu.
By Kathleen Parker | Friday, October 28, 2022 | 4:43 PM EDT
CAMDEN, S.C. — There is a tradition in my family of retreating to the woods when illness strikes.
One of my Revolutionary War forefathers, Tarleton Brown of Barnwell, S.C., had to abandon the siege of Augusta in 1781 when he contracted smallpox and returned home, such as it was.
The British, alas, had preceded him, reducing his family’s home to ash and leaving both his father and little brother dead. His mother and sister miraculously escaped both the king’s army and “the Indians,” as he put it in his 1862 memoir, “Memoirs of Tarleton Brown: A Captain of the Revolutionary Army” — a 28-page pamphlet published in New York and “Written by Himself.”
Now, why put it that way? “(T)he Indians” was the only part Miss Parker quoted directly, so she could have, if she doesn’t like the term “Indians”, used native Americans or indigenous Americans. Instead, she threw shade on a colonial American, one of her ancestors and a brave revolutionary soldier who risked his own life fighting for our independence, for using the term almost universally used in his time and culture.
Skipping over several paragraphs in which Miss Parker told us about what she called “The Covid Cottage,” an in-the-woods hut in which some of her family and she isolated when positive with the virus, she got to the parts I find important:
We’re not by a long shot. Despite our best efforts to thwart the virus that leads to covid — and despite my own adherence to best practices — it got me again.
That’s two vaccinations, two boosters, and now, two covids — appropriate for a Libra, I suppose.
If Miss Parker adhered to “best practices,” I assume that she was masked as well at the “packed art gallery” in which she believes she contracted the virus. Yet, with all of that, she still got the virus! Which leads me to ask: why does she believe that we should all mask up again, since her own “adherence to best practices” did not prevent her from contracting the virus again?
Her most telling line was:
But I’ll tell you what’s everywhere — covid-19, and it smells your fear.
Yup, she told the truth: she’s haunted by fear. But if the SARS-CoV-2 virus “smells (our) fear,” then the way to avoid it is to not be afraid of it! 🙂
I have no complaint about her article, in that she is asking people to start wearing masks again, rather than demanding that the government impose mask mandates; asking people to do something is very well within her freedom of speech and of the press. But while I agree with the sensible precautions of getting vaccinated, I will not succumb to mindless, mind-killing fear.
Five months ago, The New York Timestold us that it appears that the COVID vaccines can help to protect people from “long COVID,” or symptoms which persist long after infection:
As the pandemic enters its third year, long Covid has emerged as an increasingly important concern. And many people are wondering whether getting a Covid shot can reduce their chances of developing long-term symptoms.
The jury is still out, but a growing number of studies suggest that getting a Covid vaccine can reduce — though not eliminate — the risk of longer-term symptoms.
The United Kingdom’s Health Security Agency conducted an analysis of eight studies that had been published on the topic before mid-January. It reported that six of the studies found that vaccinated people who became infected with the coronavirus were less likely than unvaccinated patients to develop symptoms of long Covid. The remaining two studies found that vaccination did not appear to conclusively reduce the chances of developing long Covid.
Some study results suggest substantial protection, while others find only a slight benefit.
One large study of electronic records of patients in the U.S. Veterans Health Administration found that vaccinated Covid patients had only a 13 percent lower risk than unvaccinated patients of having symptoms six months later.
That was then, and this is now. From Time magazine, not exactly an evil reich-wing or anti-vaxxer source:
COVID-19 vaccines were designed primarily to prevent severe disease and death—two purposes for which they continue to work very well. But when the shots first rolled out, many people also hoped they would block or even reverse symptoms of Long COVID, such as fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, chronic pain, and neurological issues.
By now, it’s clear that even people who are fully vaccinated and boosted can get Long COVID, and recent research suggests that vaccines aren’t the Long COVID shields people wished for.
Studies have come to very different estimates about the degree of protection vaccines offer against Long COVID. But some of the latest findings point to fairly disappointing protection. In one July report from the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics, more than 4% of vaccinated and boosted adults in the U.K. who were infected by Delta, Omicron BA.1, or BA.2 still had symptoms at least 12 weeks later. A preprint posted online on Sept. 6 (which has not yet been peer-reviewed) suggests the situation isn’t any better in the U.S. Researchers surveyed people from June into July, as the BA.5 variant was taking over. Among those who said they’d had COVID-19 at least a month earlier, roughly 20% had symptoms that lasted at least four weeks, with little difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
There’s more at the original, and while Time has a paywall, your first couple of articles are free.
People “really do not trust (the COVID experts) that much anymore,” William Teach wrote. At a certain point, it has to be asked: has anything that the “experts” have told the American people turned out to be true? Continue reading →
I seem to remember a time, not so long ago, when the left were telling us that it was not just right, but mandatory, that people alter their desired behavior because a horrible virus was loose. Now some are demanding, demanding! that the government enable their ability to do exactly as they please, without any health consequences. From NBC News:
Queer men across the U.S. talked to NBC News about the dates they never went on, the sex they never had and the gatherings they avoided due to the viral outbreak.
by Benjamin Ryan | Friday, September 2, 2022 | 9:04 AM EDT
For many gay and bisexual men, the sprawling and chaotic monkeypox outbreak has upended a summer that was supposed to be a well-earned opportunity — following the peak of the Covid crisis — to finally have some fun and revel with their gay brothers without the threat of viral infection hanging over them.
Soon after Memorial Day, however, these men, as well as transgender individuals and other queer people — GBTQ for short, because lesbians’ monkeypox risk is remote — were met head-on with harrowing reports about monkeypox’s often devastating and disfiguring effects on the body. Next came anger and frustration over what queer activists characterize as the Biden administration’s fumbling initial response to the outbreak.
I guess that it’s OK now to call queers queer. After all, they seem to have embraced the term for themselves. It’s not how I choose to express myself, but whatever.
Lost amid the frantic media and public health reports about monkeypox epidemiology, the delayed vaccine deliveries and the squabbling over how best to communicate about the virus are the millions of GBTQ people whose happiness, well-being and connection to one another have in many cases been considerably compromised by the mere threat of monkeypox infection.
“Life has sort of halted,” said Guillermo Rojas, 29, a Mexican citizen and public administration graduate student in New York City. “This was supposed to be the great summer that everything went back and opened.”
Dr. Alex Keuroghlian, a psychiatrist at the LGBTQ-health-focused Fenway Institute in Boston, said the outbreak has “been extremely distressing for community members and is also triggering in that it harkens back to the early days of the AIDS epidemic. It has a chilling effect on people’s sense of community, cohesion and belonging.”
Let’s be truthful here: in the NBC article, “people’s sense of community, cohesion and belonging” means their ability to go out and seek anonymous, promiscuous sex.
The article continues to note that monkeypox, while quite painful, has been fatal in only one instance in the United States, in an already “severely immunocompromised person”, which would be extremely politically incorrect to read as a homosexual male who had AIDS. The vaccine is becoming much more readily available.
One very politically correct notion, that monkeypox is spread by skin-to-skin contact, is disabused, as the article cites a study which points out that Sex between men, not skin contact, is fueling monkeypox, new research suggests: The claim that skin-to-skin contact during sex between men, not intercourse itself, drives most monkeypox transmission is likely backward, a growing group of experts say.
Now, however, an expanding cadre of experts has come to believe that sex between men itself — both anal as well as oral intercourse — is likely the main driver of global monkeypox transmission. The skin contact that comes with sex, these experts say, is probably much less of a risk factor.
Over 100 gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people responded to an NBC News online survey seeking to learn about how monkeypox has affected their lives. What this diverse cross-section of the community most had in common were missed opportunities. They wrote about sex they never had, dates they never went on and gatherings with friends they avoided.
This was really the most important part of the 2,684-word long article, because it set the stage for the rest of it, and the rest of it was basically whining that so many homosexual males felt it unsafe to go to bathhouses and bars cruising for mostly anonymous sex. COVID-19 put a real crimp in that starting in 2020, and once the panicdemic — not a typo, but a word reflecting the fact that the worst symptom of the disease was panic — was over, and the license for promiscuous, anonymous sex was restored, it all got shut down again.
“Post-Covid,” said (Guillermo Rojas, 29, a Mexican citizen and public administration graduate student in New York City), recalling how he experienced the free-spirited bacchanalia into which monkeypox arrived in New York City this spring, “everybody went crazy, and there were sex parties all over town.”
Monkeypox swiftly pushed the contemporary safer-sex playbook out the window. Queer people have been left scrambling for answers about how to protect themselves and have expressed bewilderment as they’ve struggled to process mixed messaging from public health leaders and journalists about what poses a substantial risk of infection.
Rojas was one of the first U.S. residents to receive the prized monkeypox vaccine, in late June. But even with the benefit of his first jab of the two-dose vaccine, he has still sharply curtailed what he had hoped would be a long-awaited libertine summer.
“I’ve stopped going to sex parties,” he said, given that public health authorities identified such gatherings of men as major monkeypox risk factors. “I also stopped having sex with people who live off their OnlyFans. I additionally stopped cruising at the gym, I did not continue to go to Fire Island, and I stopped attending orgies.”
To misquote Dirty Harry, I’m just all broken up about Mr Rojas’ ability to go out to orgies.
Not everyone in the queer community has been on the same page regarding monkeypox precautions. Just as battles over mask mandates and school closures have turned neighbor against neighbor during the Covid pandemic, fierce internecine conflicts have arisen among GBTQ people this summer about the best ways to respond to and communicate about monkeypox.
Michael Weinstein, the president of the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation, dusted off his outspoken antipathy toward PrEP and published a scathing rebuke of the sexual liberties the HIV-prevention pill has facilitated in an op-ed titled “Monkeypox Reckoning” in the Los Angeles Blade on Monday. Notorious for an unapologetically strident, moralizing and fear-based approach to HIV-prevention communication, one that is far out of step with that of the vast majority of the public health community, Weinstein decried “a wholesale abandonment of safer sex promotion in favor of PrEP.”
“There has always been a sex radical group that has defined gay liberation as absolute sexual freedom,” Weinstein wrote, blaming monkeypox on (the loss of) those freedoms.
Let’s see, a disease spread primarily by sex, and some people see a highly promiscuous sex life as more probable to spread the disease? That’s pretty much logic, you know?
John Pachankis, a psychologist at the Yale School of Public Health, noted how for the past two decades, queer advocacy organizations have pushed “a narrative that gay people are just like everyone else” in a successful effort to secure many civil rights protections. He spoke to the conflict that members of this community now face when the particulars of gay sex lie at the heart of the monkeypox outbreak and, as during the AIDS crisis, have become fodder for intense public debate.
“In the context of the real threat of those rights’ being taken away,” Pachankis said, referring to the recent rising tide of anti-LGBTQ sentiment and policies in the U.S., “the last thing that you want to do is disconfirm that narrative — even if the picture is a little more nuanced, even if gay people do live distinct lives from straight people, even if they express their sexuality more creatively, some might say more authentically.”
Brian Minalga, 36, who is gender nonbinary and works in the HIV field in Seattle, said: “There’s this idea that there are good people with good behaviors having the good type of sex. It’s moralistic and puritanical.”
It’s also practical.
Every human society of which we know has developed the concept of marriage, of restricting sexual activity to husbands and wives, and gradually eliminated legal polygamy, because that was what worked best for society. But let’s tell the truth here: the sexual drive for men is heavily skewed toward f(ornicating) anyone in a skirt, and it has always been the reluctance of women, who bear the far greater burden in reproduction, which has held men back.
But when the prospective copulation is between two men males? That restraining force just isn’t there, and that’s why homosexual males have such a promiscuous culture. If homosexual males were really like the propaganda put forward to normalize homosexuality, just people seeking only loving, coupled relationships, who deserve the benefits and stability of marriage, the tremendous spread of monkeypox wouldn’t have occurred.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and various state andlocal health departmentshavereported that monkeypox is indeed already disproportionately affecting Blacks and Latinos. And yet outsize shares of the vaccines have tended to go to whites — thanks, health advocates say, to structural factors that favor access to more privileged members of society.
Watching such patterns play out “is painful,” said Carlos E. Rodríguez-Díaz, an associate professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, “because it’s a reminder of the presence of systemic racism.”
(Jazmyn Henderson, an activist with ACT UP, an HIV and AIDS advocacy group), a trans Black woman, said Black men who have sex with men may still identify as heterosexual. “Identifying as gay, identifying as trans, all of that is very stigmatized,” she said. “I didn’t realize how stigmatized trans women are until I became one.”
Just as with COVID-19, the black community have been more resistant to taking the vaccine. The left have given us all sorts of reasons for this, most involving distrust of government, but whatever the reasons, the reluctance to take the COVID vaccines existed, and they were part of the community, whether the left wanted to blame that on racism or not. With monkeypox, that reluctance is a baseline, and the added stigma over homosexuality in the black community layers on top of that.
Simply put, the vaccine against monkeypox exists, and has existed for a long time; it’s not experimental the way the COVID vaccines were. There were some initial shortages, but those are being rapidly resolved, and if black homosexual males have been more reluctant to take the vaccine, that’s on them. The wryly amusing part is the view of the view of the left that black males and white males have exactly the same social concerns and should think exactly the same way.
There’s a lot more at the original, with much of the rest telling us how specific individuals have curtailed their promiscuity over fears of monkeypox. But, alas! sexual promiscuity has been curtailed in society because it has real, identifiable, and sometimes serious consequences.
A former friend of mine was fond of saying that the sexual revolution is over, and the men won. Well, in a lot of ways, that’s true. But it’s also true that the men lost, and when you get two, or more, males together interested in sex with each other, sometimes that will result in negative consequences for them. The homosexual activists want the government to subsidize and protect their right to screw indiscriminately, but once everyone is vaccinated against monkeypox, something else will come along.
Growing up in Mt Sterling, Kentucky, in the 1960s, air conditioning in the public schools was not something we had. Mt Sterling High School, from which I was graduated in 1971, was a 1937 Works Project Administration / Civilian Conservation Corps building, with 12-foot ceilings and very tall windows, which could be opened to let outside air in the bottoms and the hotter inside air out the tops, so it was with some amusement that I noted this article from The Philadelphia Inquirer:100 Philly schools closing early Tuesday, Wednesday because of heat: Extreme heat will cause 100 schools that lack air conditioning to close three hours early Tuesday and Wednesday. The rest of the district’s schools will remain open as usual.
In the hotter, more humid South, if the schools closed early due to the heat, summer vacation would have lasted from the middle of May until the middle of September.
“Our schools are hubs for our community and are among the safest places for our students to be,” said Tony B. Watlington Sr., the district’s new superintendent.
Philadelphia School District staff and students must mask for the first 10 days of the 2022-23 school year, but masks will then be optional — but “strongly recommended” — as long as case counts do not spike.
“We are committed to keeping students in school for in-person learning,” Kendra McDow, a pediatrician and epidemiologist and the district’s chief medical officer, said at a news conference Friday.
A mask mandate will be reinstated if the COVID-19 community transmission rate, as determined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, becomes high. (It’s currently in the medium range.)
“Our schools are hubs for our community and are among the safest places for our students to be,” said Tony B. Watlington Sr., the district’s new superintendent, who with McDow detailed the district’s 2022-23 health and safety protocols.
Though they have a plan in place, things may shift, district officials said.
“It is important that we remain flexible, as we have done for the past 2½ years,” said McDow.
There’s more at the original, and while I think the Philadelphia School District is being overcautious and silly — the masks the students have do nothing to stop the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus — that isn’t my focus here.
What is my focus? Mayor Jim Kenney, who used to style himself on Twitter as “Jim ‘Mask Up’ Kenney”, though, sadly, I didn’t take a screen capture of it before he deleted the ‘Mask Up’ from his handle, was at the Dunbar Elementary School for the first day of school . . . and, as the screen capture of KYW radio’s morning news reporter Tim Jimenez’s tweet shows, neither Mayor Kenney, nor school’s Superintendent Tony Watlington Sr., nor state Representative Malcolm Kenyatta (D-181st District), all happily cheering the returning students, was wearing a mask! Some of the students were — albeit some of them improperly — but the people and politicians who were forcing the students to wear the masks did not think that the rules applied to them!
If you click on the link to the original tweet, you’ll find not just a still photo of the event, but a 16-second video of it.
