Category Archives: COVID

Posted on by

The numbers just don’t add up

Now we are finding out, 2½ years after the panicdemic began, and 1½ years after vaccines started to become available, that a lot of children contracted the SARS-CoV-2 virus, or were exposed enough to it to develop anti-bodies, than we ever thought, and almost all were either only mildly sick, or didn’t get sick at all.

No, my source is not some evil reich-wing publication, but the very much pro-vaccine, and pro-vaccine-and-mask mandates Philadelphia Inquirer!

Many more children have had COVID-19 than you might think

The CDC’s figures come from blood samples that were taken for non-COVID reasons.

by Tom Avril | Friday, August 19, 2022

With so many people using at-home COVID-19 tests, if they’re testing at all, experts acknowledged long ago that the true number of cases is higher than what is officially reported.

New CDC data suggest that among children, the true number is a lot higher.

The evidence comes from the blood samples of children who had their blood drawn at commercial labs for non-COVID reasons, such as measuring levels of cholesterol or lead. Among 26,725 blood samples collected in May and June, nearly 80% contained a type of antibody that the immune system produces only in response to infection — not in response to the vaccines.

Assuming that percentage holds true for all U.S. children, the CDC estimated that at least 57 million youths had been infected with the coronavirus by the end of June, four times the cumulative total of reported cases at that point. Even that figure could be an underestimate of cases dating to the beginning of the pandemic, as the levels of these telltale antibodies drop to undetectable levels in most people within a year.

Breaking that down in more detail, the e American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association reported that, as of June 30, there were 13,768,212 known cases of COVID-19 reported, which was 18.73% of all reported cases (73,493,180).

But there’s more to the numbers. If “at least 57 million youths” have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2, that’s roughly 78% of the under 18 population, approximately 73 million, for the entire United States!

The proportion of children with COVID-positive blood samples was slightly lower in Pennsylvania (73.2%), New Jersey (72.5%), and Delaware (75.7%), but still well above official reported totals, said Craig Shapiro, an infectious diseases specialist at Nemours Children’s Health in Delaware.

“The fact that more than 75% of those samples were positive for antibodies does tell us that we’re definitely underestimating the number of children who’ve been infected,” he said.

In other words, the restrictions we put on children, on attending school, on forced masking, were not necessary and did not work!

Comparable data for adults are available only as late as April, but even then, nearly 60% of adult blood samples contained the antibodies that indicate infection.

While some of these infected people may have tested themselves at home and did not report the results, others probably had no idea they were infected and never got tested, Shapiro said. Their immune systems, in many cases bolstered by vaccination or previous infection, may have snuffed out an infection before it caused any symptoms.

Or, perhaps, as was the case with me, they got slightly sick, and had an experienced registered nurse — my wife — say, “You’ve got COVID,” but when tested twice, four days apart, while ill and while recovered, tested negative anyway. There can be both false positive and false negative tests for COVID. Full disclosure: at that point I was fully vaccinated, but this was before boosters were recommended.

But with school already underway in some parts of the country, Shapiro cautioned that vaccination rates are still too low. As of Aug. 17, fewer than one-third of children ages 5 to 11 had gotten both doses of a vaccine, according to the CDC. Among those ages 6 months to 4 years old, fewer than 2% were fully vaccinated.

What we have not seen, however, is a huge mortality, or even hospitalization, rate for children. If fewer than one-third have been fully vaccinated, yet there are indications that more than three-quarters have been infected at some point, then just what evidence is there that vaccination has been lowering the severity of the disease, at least among children, in those who do contract the virus?

That, after all, has been the latest claim. No, vaccination does not seem to prevent someone from contracting the virus in the first place, and no, vaccination does not seem to prevent a vaccinated person who does contract the virus from transmitting it to another person, but, we have been told, vaccination does show a strong correlation in reduced severity of illness among those who do contract the virus.

Now, at least among children, even that claim might not be supportable.

Posted on by

You can’t inspire fear forever

We have mentioned, many times before, how the COVID-19 panicdemic — and no, that’s not a typographical error; ‘panic’ is exactly what this has all been about — has promoted fear far more than combatting the virus. Though he was talking about national security rather than the virus, Glenn Greenwald got it absolutely right when he noted the importance of fear to government power:

Fear is crucial for state authority. When the population is filled with it, they will acquiesce to virtually any power the government seeks to acquire in the name of keeping them safe. But when fear is lacking, citizens will crave liberty more than control, and that is when they question official claims and actions. When that starts to happen, when the public feels too secure, institutions of authority will reflexively find new ways to ensure they stay engulfed by fear and thus quiescent.

Even with the panicdemic 2½ years old now, and most people having learned to live with the possibility of COVID-19, we keep seeing the articles stoking fear among the populace. This one is from The Guardian, the left-wing British newspaper:

‘Most have thrown their hands up’: has the US forgotten about Covid?

As Americans go about their daily lives, severely affected Covid patients are wondering if others are moving too quickly from the worst days of the pandemic

by Maya Yang | Friday, August 19, 2022 | 6:00 AM EDT

Despite signs that indicate the latest Covid-19 surge is slowing down, an average of 400 deaths in the US is still reported on a daily basis.

Various mask and social distancing mandates across the country are becoming anything but strictly enforced.

Actually, it’s not that “various mask and social distancing mandates” are not being “strictly enforced,” but that most have been eliminated.

But as Americans and many of their elected officials go about their daily lives, many healthcare professionals still on the frontlines of the pandemic and severely affected Covid-19 patients are left wondering whether the rest of us are moving too quickly from the worst days of the pandemic.

Have we simply forgotten about Covid-19?

At this point, I am reminded of the original pilot episode of Star Trek, “The Cage.” Captain Christopher Pike has become the captive of the Talosians, who have the ability to project extremely lifelike illusions into their captives minds, when he discovers that the Talosians cannot read his mind when it is consumed by extreme rage and hatred. Vina, a human who has been a captive of the Talosians for 18 years, confirms what the Captain has discovered but points out that it really doesn’t matter, because people cannot just keep that up for long.

And thus we have discovered about fear: the human mind gets used to the constant inputs, and people have become so used to the overblown fears pushed by government officials and others that those fears simply don’t take hold any longer.

My wife is a registered nurse, working in a hospital, and yes, she has taken care of COVID patients. Yes, she is vaccinated and boosted, but I have also seen the changes in her behavior. When COVID-19 first arose, and she had a COVID patient, she’d come home, head immediately to the shower, and wouldn’t allow me to pick up her doffed clothes; she would put them in the washing machine herself. Even before the vaccines became available, that behavior slowly lessened, and now it’s entirely gone. She is directly exposed to COVID-positive patients, and then comes home, taking no special precautions with me, or the rest of our family. When our older daughter tested positive for the virus while at Fort Bliss, before being shipped out to the sandbox, she had to isolate for a few days, but none of us bothered with getting tested or anything, nor did any of us feel ill, even though my wife and I had been traveling with her, in a car with the windows rolled up, to take her to Knightdale Army Reserve Center, a ten-hour drive, from which she departed.

Data obtained earlier this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reveals that the rate of new infections has been decreasing, with the country reporting an average of 107,000 new cases a day. This marks a 12% decrease compared to infection rates two weeks ago.

Even though hospital admission rates have been increasing across the US this summer as a result of highly infectious variants, the amount of patients currently hospitalized with Covid-19 has plateaued at 43,000 patients, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

By contrast, more than 160,000 virus-positive patients were hospitalized during last winter’s surge. Nevertheless, the daily average of 400 deaths across the country since spring remain a concerning figure for healthcare officials.

Translation: while cases rose again, they’ve started to fall.

As the pandemic stretches on and vaccines roll out, numerous restrictions are being eased. States have been lifting strict capacity limits and large-scale mask orders while many others are no longer requiring proof of vaccination to travel or to enter dining facilities.

This was happening months ago. Here in the Bluegrass State, the voters of the Commonwealth gave huge majorities to Republicans running against Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) and his draconian orders. One of the first things they did when the legislature returned to session in January of 2021 was to pass laws greatly restricting the Governor’s ’emergency’ authority. Mr Beshear vetoed those bills, and the legislature just as quickly overrode his vetoes. Through various legal maneuvers, the Governor obtained a court order from a highly partisan state judge, holding the new laws in abeyance, but finally, on August 21, 2021, the state Supreme Court finally, finally! put an end to the Governor’s shenanigans.

That was a year ago come this Sunday.

Last week, the CDC issued new guidelines that loosened its recommendations on social distancing and quarantining. Individuals who were exposed to Covid-19 no longer have to quarantine unless they develop symptoms or test positive.

Unvaccinated people who have been exposed should test on the fifth day of exposure and wear a “high-quality mask”. Additionally, the CDC no longer recommends screening asymptomatic individuals who have not had a known exposure to the virus.

“This guidance acknowledges that the pandemic is not over, but also helps us move to a point where Covid-19 no longer severely disrupts our daily lives,” CDC epidemiologist Greta Massetti said in a statement.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what the nattering nabobs of negativism say about the virus, the American people are (mostly) done with fear. Oh, there are a few whiners, like The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz, telling us that she is immunocompromised, and that:

Disabled/medically vulnerable people also live in society. We have to go to work, to the doctor, we have to grocery shop and go to school, we ride the same trains and busses as everyone else. It’s terrifying how many ppl want sick & vulnerable people to die or be locked away

Miss Lorenz’s attempted guilt trip didn’t work, because the American people are done with fear over this. They have seen the economic devastation the lockdowns imposed, they have seen the social consequences of forced separation and masking, and they have seen that, in the end, while the vaccines seem to have the effect of making the disease caused by the virus less severe, neither the vaccines nor masks prevent either the contraction or transmission of the virus.

Posted on by

Taylor Lorenz is just hopping mad!

Remember Taylor Lorenz? As we have noted previously, Miss Lorenz is The Washington Post author over whom the newspaper was paying owner Jeff Bezos’ hard earned dollars to Twitter to promote an article doxing a conservative on Twitter? The image to the right is a screen capture, but if you click on it, it will take you to the original tweet.

Miss Lorenz spent a lot of time investigating the Twitter account 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 Chaya Raichik, a Brooklyn-based real estate salesperson and LoTT creator would lose her job, and her posting last April was a hope that Mr Musk’s buyout of Twitter results in the whole thing being killed.

Elon Musk is buying Twitter for a sum of money so large as to be meaningless to all normal people. That’s enraging many or most Twitter users, but it also feels appropriate. After all, that platform is largely controlled by trolls. So why shouldn’t one of the biggest trolls on the platform own it outright? It’s a little like Snoop Dogg buying Death Row Records. Of course, trolls never wrote “Gin and Juice.” They are just draining the life out of our democracy.

As I argued a couple weeks ago, when Musk first started making sounds about buying Twitter, his plan to let the already obnoxious troll problem spiral out of control will likely sound the death knell for the social media behemoth. Trolls are good for business on social media, up to a point. But if they take over too much, they run all the normal people off. Then the trolls leave too, because they’re hapless and forlorn without non-trolls to troll. Soon it’s just a ghost town, like Donald Trump’s utterly pointless platform Truth Social.

That’s rather amusing, given that Miss Marcotte had posted 22 separate Twitter threads dated April 25th through 10:40 AM on the 26th, to promote her own sites and writing.[1]Miss Marcotte has me blocked, but all I have to do is hit [Ctrl][Alt][N] and it takes me to the private browsing screen, in which I am not logged in on Twitter, and I can see what she has posted. She used her willingness to post profanity on the now-defunct website Pandagon to build an ‘edgy’ audience, so it’s difficult not to laugh at her calling other people trolls. It was just last Thursday that she complained that conservatives wanting to keep sexually loaded works out of school libraries means that they want to ban and burn books.

LOL!

Well, Miss Lorenz was not very concerned about other people’s privacy, or potential harm to them, when she doxxed Miss Raichik, but she certainly is concerned about potential risks to herself! Very, very concerned about the new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control over COVID-19, which basically says that there’s no need for serious restrictions, Miss Lorenz tweeted:

Miss Lorenz is, herself, immunocompromised. She wrote:

Disabled/medically vulnerable ppl shouldn’t have to risk their lives to participate in society, nor are most even given that choice. Disabled people also have to work, go to school, grocery shop, go to the doctor’s office. We are human beings in the world just like everyone else. As someone working in media who’s immunocompromised and medically vulnerable I really wish we as an industry hired more disabled writers and did more to center vulnerable people in our coverage, esp on COVID. What’s happening right now is so horrific on such a massive scale

I would point out here that the CDC are not run by evil reich-wing Republicans, but that the current administration is under all sweetness-and-light liberal Joe Biden. She did note that, sort of, when she said that such a view is “championed by liberals and large media institutions.” The truth is simple: even if the left were not as tired of silly mask rules — and we did note how Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney is firing the last vaccine holdouts, even though the vaccines neither prevent people from contracting SARS-CoV-2 nor transmitting it to others — as are conservatives, there’s an election coming up in 12 weeks, and the Democrats are doing everything that they can to cut their anticipated losses.

I do not want Miss Lorenz to contract the virus, but the fact is that almost everybody eventually will. Realistically, I can more reasonably hope that when Miss Lorenz contracts it — if she hasn’t already — her symptoms will be very mild or even non-existent. But her fears are not enough to override the desires of the vast majority of people in this country, people who have long ago thrown away their silly masks.

References

References
↑1 Miss Marcotte has me blocked, but all I have to do is hit [Ctrl][Alt][N] and it takes me to the private browsing screen, in which I am not logged in on Twitter, and I can see what she has posted.
Posted on by

When it comes to #VaccineMandates the maintenance of dictatorial power is far more important than the effectiveness of the vaccines!

On July 25th, The Wall Street Journal reported that “most people” have been infected at some point with SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19.

Geneticists and immunologists are studying factors that might protect people from infection, and learning why some are predisposed to more severe Covid-19 disease.

For many, the explanation is likely that they have in fact been infected with the virus at some point without realizing it, said Susan Kline, professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School. About 40% of confirmed Covid-19 cases are asymptomatic, according to a meta-analysis published in December in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

More than two years into the pandemic, most people worldwide have likely been infected with the virus at least once, epidemiologists said. Some 58% of people in the U.S. had contracted Covid-19 through February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated. Since then, a persistent wave driven by offshoots of the infectious Omicron variant has kept daily known cases in the U.S. above 100,000 for weeks.

As we have previously noted, this past winter, acting Food and Drug Administration head Commissioner Janet Woodcock told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee that she expected that, eventually, almost everyone would contract the virus. Celebrity doctor Anthony Fauci said that COVID-19 would infect “just about everybody.” This was during the BA.1 variant’s primacy, and two months later, the American Medical Association warned that the then-new BA.2 subvariant could be “30% to 60% more transmissible” than BA.1. While playing Blondie’s One Way of Another, we noted that BA.4 and BA.5 are gonna get ya, get ya, get ya, get ya! Yale Medicine also said that BA.4 and BA.5 appear to be more transmissible.

But, as it has turned out, the latest variant — has there been one since BA.5? — hasn’t been leading to serious illnesses. Also from the Journal:

Colleges Scale Back Covid Precautions for Fall, Saying Pandemic Phase Over

Requirements for masking, testing, vaccinations and isolation decrease even as virus surges

By Isabelle Sarraf and Melissa Korn | Updated August 3, 2022 | 8:59 AM EDT

Colleges this fall are no longer treating Covid-19 as an emergency upending their operations, shifting to eliminate mask requirements and mandatory coronavirus testing and letting students who contract the virus isolate in their dorms with their roommates.

With easy access to vaccinations and low hospitalization rates among college-aged adults—even during the latest surge in BA.5 subvariant cases—administrators said it is time to lift or at least rethink restrictions and redefine the virus as endemic, not a pandemic. That means scaling back mass testing, removing bans on large indoor gatherings and preparing for a fall term that more closely resembles life before Covid.

Another issue driving the decisions is exhaustion, according to public-health experts and academics on several campuses. Students and staff have been subjected to two years of daily health checks, weekly trots to a testing center and a roller coaster of mask protocols.

“It really comes down to a change in mind-set,” said Ken Henderson, who was co-chair of Northeastern University’s Covid-management operations until the group disbanded in January. Citing clinical therapies and the reduced severity of current variants, he said, “We’ve pivoted significantly to more living with the virus.”

Simply put, the COVID panicdemic — and no, that’s not a typo; panic has been exactly the overreaction people have had! — is both something with which we will have to live, and is not as serious as the doomsayers have been crying. But that hasn’t led Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia), who has presided over the City of Brotherly Love having already exceeded every single year’s homicide totals under his predecessor’s, Michael Nutter’s, two terms, and who is very vocally pro-choice when it comes to abortion, determination to enforce his choice when it comes to the COVID vaccines which neither prevent contraction of, nor the spreading of, the virus. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Nearly all city workers have complied with Mayor Jim Kenney’s vaccine policy, but 68 are getting fired

The 68 employees who are not in compliance with the policy and will be terminated soon include 39 who work in the Streets Department.

by Sean Collins Walsh | Tuesday, August 9, 2022

Philadelphia

Seal of the City of Philadelphia: Public Domain

Eight months after Mayor Jim Kenney’s vaccine mandate for city workers was supposed to take effect, the administration announced Tuesday that all but 68 of the city’s 22,000 unionized employees are now in compliance with the policy.

That doesn’t mean that almost all city employees are vaccinated against the coronavirus. Roughly 3,000 employees have obtained religious or medical exemptions from the mandate, and are required to test regularly to go to work.

The 68 employees who are not in compliance with the policy will be terminated soon, but dates will vary due to differing levels of paid time off, Kenney’s office said.

Fifteen city employees had already been fired for failing to comply with a vaccine mandate that took effect for the city’s 3,200 non-unionized employees in December 2021.

The Democratic mayor obviously doesn’t care that 68 people will lose their jobs over refusing to take a vaccine which has had some negative side effects in some people and which, while it appears to make illness caused by the virus less serious, doesn’t prevent contraction or spreading of it. The city is already below authorized staffing levels and has been having real difficulties attracting applicants. Philly has had such a serious shortage of lifeguards that it was able to open only 50 of the 65 community swimming pools this year, and had such a serious behavioral problem at one pool in Kensington that it closed the McVeigh Recreation Center for the rest of the year. The news reports did not say that the staff refused to work there any longer, but I’d bet euros against eclairs — my version of the oft-used dollars to doughnuts expression — that that’s what happened.

Tuesday’s announcement brings to an end a chain of events that began in November 2021, when Kenney said city workers had to be vaccinated by Jan. 14, 2022. The mandate was delayed for months as the administration struggled through negotiations with each of the four major municipal unions, ending when an arbitration panel in May ruled that the International Association of Fire Fighters Local 22, the staunchest opponent of the policy, had to comply.

I did suggest, on July 14th, that the firemen and emergency medical technicians should go on strike, at least for a day, to support their union brethren who were getting suspended for refusing the vaccine. The fireman’s union President, Mike Bresnan, stated that about 700 of the union’s 2,300 members had obtained exemptions, almost all of them religious. Roughly 15% of police union members also requested exemptions.

Kenney said Tuesday that “safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines remain the best way to protect Philadelphians and save lives.”

“We have reached nearly 100 percent compliance with our vaccination mandate for our represented workforce, and this success was possible because of the hard work and partnership between our City labor partners and our Administration team,” he said in a statement. “I am proud of our City’s workforce who, as public servants, bear a responsibility to mitigate the harm that would result from inadvertent transmission.”

I wonder how many of the city’s employees would have taken the vaccine voluntarily were their jobs not put at risk. How many would have freely chosen to get vaccinated, and how many simply yielded to force? And how many used the faked vaccination cards to keep their jobs to get around tyrannical dictates?

We were told that the vaccines would prevent contraction of the virus, but that has turned out not to be the case. We were told that the vaccines would stop the spread of the virus, but that didn’t happen either.

But refusal to take the vaccine does harm the mayor’s exercise of dictatorial power, and that’s what this is really all about.

Posted on by

I wonder how many Philadelphia workers used this to get around the city’s #VaccineMandate ? What if others went on strike to support their laid-off brethren fighting the mandate?

As we have previously noted, with the vaccine mandates imposed by various governments, some enterprising nurses were selling faked COVID-19 vaccination cards while other people stole blank vaccination cards.

Philadelphia was one of the cities which mandated vaccinations for its employees, and continues to enforce them even though it has become clear that vaccination, while it seems to reduce symptoms, has virtually no effect on preventing people from either contracting the virus, or spreading it if they do contract it.

Philly has started placing unvaccinated city workers on leave. Here’s how the numbers break down.

More than 20% of the city’s Fire Department and 15% of the Police Department requested exemptions for religious or medical reasons.

by Anna Orso[1]One thing about Miss Orso’s article: at 992 words, it proves my point about newspapers, at least in their online articles, no longer need to be concerned with word or column inch restrictions! | Thursday, July 14, 2022

Philadelphia city officials placed about 270 workers on leave this month for failing to comply with the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, and more than 1 in 6 of the city’s public-safety employees requested to be exempt.

The employees placed on leave are a fraction of the city’s unionized workforce of more than 22,000. The majority are from two departments: the Prisons Department and the Fire Department, both of which are already short staffed amid a broader labor shortage, according to data provided by Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration. Continue reading →

References

References
↑1 One thing about Miss Orso’s article: at 992 words, it proves my point about newspapers, at least in their online articles, no longer need to be concerned with word or column inch restrictions!
Posted on by

Will the next set of #COVID19 restrictions come on November 9th?

As we noted on Saturday, the Editorial Board of The Washington Post do not think that we have been scared of COVID-19 enough. That was an editorial; here comes what passes for a straight news story:

As the BA.5 variant spreads, the risk of coronavirus reinfection grows

By Joel Achenbach | Sunday, July 10, 2022 | 6:00 AM EDT

America has decided the pandemic is over. The coronavirus has other ideas.

The latest omicron offshoot, BA.5, has quickly become dominant in the United States, and thanks to its elusiveness when encountering the human immune system, is driving a wave of cases across the country.

The Post illustrated the article with a photo captioned, “Commuters board the subway in New York, which still requires masks on trains and indoor stations.” There were very few people in the photo visibly wearing masks.

The size of that wave is unclear because most people are testing at home or not testing at all. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the past week has reported a little more than 100,000 new cases a day on average. But infectious-disease experts know that wildly underestimates the true number, which may be as many as a million, said Eric Topol, a professor at Scripps Research who closely tracks pandemic trends.

They know that it “wildly underestimates” the true number? How do they know this?

Many of the at-home COVID tests use your cell phone to read the test data, though apparently not all of them do. I’m waiting for the government to mandate that tests using a smartphone require the phone to send the test results to the government, and to pull from the market at-home tests which do not require a smartphone.

Is that paranoid? Perhaps a little, but the left have shown no concern at all for people’s privacy when it comes to the virus, and a fascistic bent toward requiring people to get vaccinated and wear masks.

I admit it: when I see the name “Topol,” I think of Reb Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof. Orthodox Jewish men traditionally use the honorific Reb to honor their ancestors. Click to enlarge.

Antibodies from vaccines and previous coronavirus infections offer limited protection against BA.5, leading Topol to call it “the worst version of the virus that we’ve seen.”

“The worst version of the virus that we’ve seen”? Well, that’s what the headline on last Thursday’s Post editorial called it, but somehow, someway, this “worst version” has yet to result in significantly more hospitalizations.

Other experts point out that, despite being hit by multiple rounds of ever-more-contagious omicron subvariants, the country has not yet seen a dramatic spike in hospitalizations. About 38,000 people were hospitalized nationally with covid as of Friday, according to data compiled by The Washington Post. That figure has been steadily rising since early March, but remains far below the record 162,000 patients hospitalized with covid in mid-January. The average daily death toll on Friday stood at 329 and has not changed significantly over the past two months.

Let’s do the math: 38,000 ÷ 162,000 = 0.2345679012345679, or 23.46%, slightly less than ¼ of the number of the less contagious BA.1 Omicron variant that was primarily seen last January.

Restrictions and mandates are long gone. Air travel is nearly back to pre-pandemic levels. Political leaders aren’t talking about the virus — it’s virtually a nonissue on the campaign trail. Most people are done with masking, social distancing and the pandemic generally. They’re taking their chances with the virus.

Well, of course. Both Republican and Democratic candidates know that the public are fed up with the restrictions, and have been for a long time now. With the restrictions gone, Republicans have no issue against which to campaign, and the last thing that the Democrats want is to have the voters thinking that they’ll try to reimpose them. I linked that photo of New Yorkers boarding the train; despite the stated restrictions, even liberal New Yorkers aren’t obeying them.

So, what are the credentialed media trying to do here? They know as well as the politicians that the public will simply not obey a reimposition of restrictions, but the media aren’t running for election; they simply have to make certain that their stories don’t negatively affect Democratic candidates in an election that’s just four months away.

But they are setting it up, just in case BA.5 does turn out to be as bad as Dr Topol might have you believe, because if the urban Democrats — it won’t be Republicans, anywhere — try to reimpose restrictions, they’ll have some cover from a media which will say, “See, we told you so!”

Perhaps the next set of restrictions will come on November 9th?

This article was from The Washington Post, but The Philadelphia Inquirer published it as well, and we’ve seen how Philly’s city government, wholly dominated by liberal Democrats, has been very willing to put restrictions on people, though they had to drop the last mandate due to politics.

I don’t expect the Democrats trying to reimpose mandates soon, because the election is approaching, but I will never underestimate their desire to control your life.

Posted on by

The Washington Post tells us that we are not fearful enough

As the propaganda-generated fear in America about COVID-19 has dramatically waned, the Editorial Board of The Washington Post want to ramp it up again:

The worst virus variant just arrived. The pandemic is not over.

by the Editorial Board | Thursday, July 7, 2022 | 1:58 PM EDT

The pandemic is a relentless race against Mother Nature. Waves of infection took millions of lives, and only highly effective vaccines prevented even more deaths. Now, the coronavirus is speeding up once again, mutating, evading immunity and still on the march. The arrival of subvariant BA.5 should be a reminder that the finish line in this race is nowhere to be seen.

What’s BA.5? This is the latest subvariant of omicron, which stormed the planet late last year and caused a huge wave of infection. As of now, BA.5 and a closely related variant, BA.4, account for about 70 percent of all infections in the United States, according to estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based in part on modeling. These two newcomers are easing out an earlier variant, BA.2.

The obscure names should not hide the punch of BA.5. Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research, says that BA.5 “is the worst version of the virus that we’ve seen.” He adds, “It takes immune escape, already extensive, to the next level, and, as a function of that, enhanced transmissibility,” well beyond earlier versions of omicron. There has not been a marked increase in hospitalizations and deaths, he reports, because there is so much immunity built up from the winter omicron wave. But there are aspects of this new variant very much worth keeping an eye on as the United States remains stuck at an uncomfortably high plateau of pandemic misery. And the new variants are driving a case surge in Europe.

At the core of the BA.5 difference is its biology. Evolution has given it more fitness, a term that incorporates its ability to transmit, grow and evade immunity; the variant shows “marked difference from all prior variants,” reports Dr. Topol. One way it does so is by evading the body’s immune system, and BA.4 and BA.5 together are “the most immune-evasive variants” seen in multiple studies to date.

As we have previously noted, this past winter, acting Food and Drug Administration head Commissioner Janet Woodcock told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee that she expected that, eventually, almost everyone would contract the virus. Celebrity doctor Anthony Fauci said that COVID-19 would infect “just about everybody.” This was during the BA.1 variant’s primacy, and two months later, the American Medical Association warned that the then-new BA.2 subvariant could be “30% to 60% more transmissible” than BA.1. While playing Blondie’s One Way of Another, we noted that BA.4 and BA.5 are gonna get ya, get ya, get ya, get ya! Yale Medicine also said that BA.4 and BA.5 appear to be more transmissible.

But here comes the money line from the Editorial Board, five paragraphs down:

Whether BA.5 will lead to more severe disease isn’t clear yet. But knowing that the virus is spreading should reinforce the need for the familiar mitigation measures: high-quality face masks, better air filtration and ventilation, and avoiding exposure in crowded indoor spaces.

Translation: while no one yet knows if BA.4 and BA.5 will actually cause more serious symptoms, Our Betters want us to return to the fears of 2020. Yet, despite not knowing, the editorial headline declares it to be “the worst virus variant.”

Yale Medicine already stated:

The second question has been whether Omicron—and currently the BA.4 and BA.5 variants—is more likely than Delta or other variants to cause severe disease. While there is more to learn about BA.5, early data from South Africa has not shown a sharp rise in deaths from the subvariant. The original Omicron caused a record number of cases, but while it has also caused its share of hospitalizations and deaths, factors such as lengths of hospital stays, ICU admittance, and death have been “lower than during previous pandemic peaks,” according to a CDC report in January.

The CDC says the presence of severity of symptoms can be affected by vaccination, history of prior infection, and age and other health conditions.

Click to enlarge.

As the WaPo wants us to return to “high-quality face masks,” I will note here that for many, perhaps most, American men, including me, an N-95 face mask cannot be worn properly: a third of all American men always wear a beard, while another 27% say that they sometimes do.

It would seem that the Editorial Board want to control our facial hair as well. After all, it’s only us evil reich-wing conservatives who wear beards, right?

OK, OK, so I’m projecting here, but one thing is clear: the Editorial Board want more subservience to control — from the government? — by the population in general. As Glenn Greenwald said:

Fear is crucial for state authority. When the population is filled with it, they will acquiesce to virtually any power the government seeks to acquire in the name of keeping them safe. But when fear is lacking, citizens will crave liberty more than control, and that is when they question official claims and actions. When that starts to happen, when the public feels too secure, institutions of authority will reflexively find new ways to ensure they stay engulfed by fear and thus quiescent.

Mr Greenwald, certainly no conservative, was writing about the desire of governments for more security control, not the virus, but the same statement applies. And the Editorial Board, worried to death as they are that, Heaven forfend! the evil Republicans will win significant majorities in the November elections, want us all to be more subservient to the federal government.

Posted on by

What happens when “racial inequities” are the choices of minority populations?

The newspaper I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. has been very, very worried about “racial inequities” afflicting “underserved communities”, especially since the beginning of the COVID-19 panicdemic. Now, more than two years later, they’re still worried.

Racial inequities in vaccination are emerging again, this time among Philly’s elementary age kids

From vaccines for kids to COVID treatments, old inequalities appear to be reasserting themselves.

by Jason Laughlin | Sunday, July 3, 2022 | 9:00 PM EDT

The Black Doctors Consortium was among the first in the city to offer newly approved COVID shots for young children in June, setting up clinics at its health center in a mostly Black neighborhood in North Philadelphia.

Despite the neighborhood’s demographics, most of the 100 families that showed up were white. When it comes to children’s vaccinations in Philadelphia, that’s not uncommon.

More than a year and a half since COVID vaccines became available, ensuring equitable access to all Philadelphians, regardless of race or income, remains a challenge. The demographics for vaccinations among children under 5 have not yet been collected, but among 5 to 11-year-olds, who have been eligible since last fall, about 37% of Philadelphia’s white children are fully vaccinated, compared to 25% of Hispanic children and 22% of Black children. Vaccination rates among Asian children are much higher than the rest in that age group — 57%.

White and Asian Philadelphians are more likely to have received booster doses, too, with 38% of white city-dwellers and 48% of Asian residents having received additional shots. Just over a quarter of Black and Hispanic Philadelphians have received a booster.

OK, let’s look at that. The article title and subtitle — possibly written by an editor rather than the article author — refer to “racial inequities” and “old inequalities”. But the clinic described is in a “mostly black neighborhood” in North Philly, so it’s not as though access ought to be a problem. There should be a lot of black families within walking distance of the clinic. More, the shots are free, so expense is not a factor. Add to that the fact that the Black Doctors Consortium plans to have their clinics that stay open until 7:00 PM, so that working parents have more of a chance to get their kids there, and there is no reason that children from “underserved communities” would be getting vaccinated at lower rates other than the conscious decisions being taken in those communities by parents.

Other health care workers noted child vaccinations may seem less of a priority because children are not in school, are away at camps, or are with their families on summer vacations. Others may not feel the need to vaccinate children because the virus is typically milder for kids.

So, personal choices.

“There are not enough people still involved in pushing for residents to bring their children to get vaccinated,” said Quetcy Lozada, vice president of community engagement and organizing for Esperanza, a Hispanic community organization in the Hunting Park neighborhood.

The end of mandates, and reduced rates of infection and death have made the virus feel less urgent, she noted, though the virus has waned before only to surge again.

“As the city started to open up, and folks were able to come back to their places of work and their places of worship, and the mask mandates started to become less and less required, the sense of urgency I think also became a little bit relaxed,” she said.

There are other ‘reasons’ given in the article as to why people are just not choosing to get their children vaccinated at the rates the health care professionals say they should, with, of course, an emphasis on ‘misinformation’ in the public and on social media, and the statement that the black community in the city simply don’t have as much trust in the health care system. But in every case, it all condenses down to one thing: the high muckety-mucks simply haven’t been persuasive enough, haven’t sold everybody on the need to get their kids vaccinated.

This raises the obvious, if nevertheless hugely politically incorrect question: if this particular issue has led to “racial inequities” and “inequalities” in minority communities, is it not possible, just possible, that other “racial inequities” and “inequalities” in minority communities are the result not of those communities somehow being discriminated against, but personal choices and decisions being taken in those communities?

Is it possible that the decisions being taken by individuals lead to an aggregate effect that might not be to the benefit of a community as a whole? Too often the left, the “progressives,” are left scratching their pumpkin heads trying to figure out why such things are so, and coming up with all sorts of excuses to blame everything other than the obvious.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
Posted on by

One way or another, I’m gonna get ya, get ya, get ya, get ya

You can never escape!

One way or another, I’m gonna find ya
I’m gonna get ya, get ya, get ya, get ya
One way, or another, I’m gonna win ya
I’m gonna get ya, get ya, get ya, get ya
One way, or another, I’m gonna see ya
I’m gonna meet ya, meet ya, meet ya, meet ya
One day, maybe next week
I’m gonna meet ya, I’m gonna meet ya, I’ll meet ya

. — Blondie and coronavirus

It seems that the plebeians have become too complacent about COVID-19, and need to be frightened again! From CNN:

New coronavirus subvariants escape antibodies from vaccination and prior Omicron infection, studies suggest

By Jacqueline Howard, CNN | Updated 5:20 AM EDT, Thursday June 23, 2022

Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 appear to escape antibody responses among both people who had previous Covid-19 infection and those who have been fully vaccinated and boosted, according to new data from researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, of Harvard Medical School.

However, Covid-19 vaccination is still expected to provide substantial protection against severe disease, and vaccine makers are working on updated shots that might elicit a stronger immune response against the variants.

The levels of neutralizing antibodies that a previous infection or vaccinations elicit are several times lower against the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants compared with the original coronavirus, according to the new research published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday.

“We observed 3-fold reductions of neutralizing antibody titers induced by vaccination and infection against BA4 and BA5 compared with BA1 and BA2, which are already substantially lower than the original COVID-19 variants,” Dr. Dan Barouch, an author of the paper and director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, wrote in an email to CNN.

“Our data suggest that these new Omicron subvariants will likely be able to lead to surges of infections in populations with high levels of vaccine immunity as well as natural BA1 and BA2 immunity,” Barouch wrote. “However, it is likely that vaccine immunity will still provide substantial protection against severe disease with BA4 and BA5.”

Note what is being said here: we are being told that the vaccines will protect people better from getting sick from the BA.4 and BA.5 variants, but implies, though it does not directly state, that immunity from the vaccine will protect you where “natural BA.1 and BA.2 immunity,” from having contracted and recovered from the virus will not.

They recently found that the BA.4 and BA.5 viruses were more likely to escape antibodies from the blood of fully vaccinated and boosted adults compared with other Omicron subvariants, raising the risk of vaccine-breakthrough Covid-19 infections.

The authors of that separate study say their results point to a higher risk for reinfection, even in people who have some prior immunity against the virus. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 94.7% of the US population ages 16 and older have antibodies against the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 through vaccination, infection, or both.

Simply put, the vaccines will not prevent you from contracting the virus, but will, at best, keep you from getting as sick from it. We might as well face it: masks don’t help anything, and we’re all going to contract the virus at some point. In all probability you have already contracted it at some point, but may not know that you had it.

BA.4 and BA.5 caused an estimated 35% of new Covid-19 infections in the United States last week, up from 29% the week before, according to data shared by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday.

BA.4 and BA.5 are the fastest spreading variants reported to date, and they are expected to dominate Covid-19 transmission in the United States, United Kingdom and the rest of Europe within the next few weeks, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

I am certainly no anti-vaxxer, and have been vaccinated, and twice boostered myself. But these were my free choices, and I believe that everyone should have the right to choose freely whether or not to take the vaccines.