Tag Archives: #COVID19

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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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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.

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They thought we wouldn’t notice, but we did.

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.

Covid is no longer mainly a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Here’s why.

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.

If you hover your cursor on the Post’s article title, you’ll see the hyperlink for it, and see that it was originally https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/23/vaccinated-people-now-make-up-majority-covid-deaths/, “Vaccinated people now make up majority (of) covid deaths”. I am reminded of Tony Stark’s line in the first Avengers movie, “That man is playing Galaga. He thought we wouldn’t notice, but we did.”

You can read the rest at the link, and if the Post’s paywall stymies you, another site has copied it.

Also see: William Teach: Vaccinated Account For Majority Of Wuhan Flu Deaths

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.

But the original title very much undercuts what William Teach noted yesterday, “World Leaders Sign Declaration to Introduce COVID Vaccine Passports“:

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.

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The Democrats sure love a fearful public

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:

No KY counties are at high COVID levels but 10 are medium, CDC says. See the map

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 was talking about the number of Kentuckians who still haven’t received their Omicron booster for the COVID-19 vaccine — even as seasonal flu and RSV cases spike and shutter schools or fill up beds in Kentucky’s children’s hospitals.

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.

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Fear is the mind-killer

Thanks to a tweet from William Teach, I found this article from Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker:

Put your masks back on, please

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.

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Has anything the experts have told us about #COVID19 been true? Should anyone be surprised that the public are no longer responding to the dire predictions from the government?

Five months ago, The New York Times told 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:

You Can Still Get Long COVID If You’re Vaccinated and Boosted

By Jamie Ducharme | September 8, 2022 | 1:46 PM EDT

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 →