By Kathleen Parker | Friday, October 28, 2022 | 4:43 PM EDT
CAMDEN, S.C. — There is a tradition in my family of retreating to the woods when illness strikes.
One of my Revolutionary War forefathers, Tarleton Brown of Barnwell, S.C., had to abandon the siege of Augusta in 1781 when he contracted smallpox and returned home, such as it was.
The British, alas, had preceded him, reducing his family’s home to ash and leaving both his father and little brother dead. His mother and sister miraculously escaped both the king’s army and “the Indians,” as he put it in his 1862 memoir, “Memoirs of Tarleton Brown: A Captain of the Revolutionary Army” — a 28-page pamphlet published in New York and “Written by Himself.”
Now, why put it that way? “(T)he Indians” was the only part Miss Parker quoted directly, so she could have, if she doesn’t like the term “Indians”, used native Americans or indigenous Americans. Instead, she threw shade on a colonial American, one of her ancestors and a brave revolutionary soldier who risked his own life fighting for our independence, for using the term almost universally used in his time and culture.
Skipping over several paragraphs in which Miss Parker told us about what she called “The Covid Cottage,” an in-the-woods hut in which some of her family and she isolated when positive with the virus, she got to the parts I find important:
We’re not by a long shot. Despite our best efforts to thwart the virus that leads to covid — and despite my own adherence to best practices — it got me again.
That’s two vaccinations, two boosters, and now, two covids — appropriate for a Libra, I suppose.
If Miss Parker adhered to “best practices,” I assume that she was masked as well at the “packed art gallery” in which she believes she contracted the virus. Yet, with all of that, she still got the virus! Which leads me to ask: why does she believe that we should all mask up again, since her own “adherence to best practices” did not prevent her from contracting the virus again?
Her most telling line was:
But I’ll tell you what’s everywhere — covid-19, and it smells your fear.
Yup, she told the truth: she’s haunted by fear. But if the SARS-CoV-2 virus “smells (our) fear,” then the way to avoid it is to not be afraid of it! 🙂
I have no complaint about her article, in that she is asking people to start wearing masks again, rather than demanding that the government impose mask mandates; asking people to do something is very well within her freedom of speech and of the press. But while I agree with the sensible precautions of getting vaccinated, I will not succumb to mindless, mind-killing fear.
Five months ago, The New York Timestold us that it appears that the COVID vaccines can help to protect people from “long COVID,” or symptoms which persist long after infection:
As the pandemic enters its third year, long Covid has emerged as an increasingly important concern. And many people are wondering whether getting a Covid shot can reduce their chances of developing long-term symptoms.
The jury is still out, but a growing number of studies suggest that getting a Covid vaccine can reduce — though not eliminate — the risk of longer-term symptoms.
The United Kingdom’s Health Security Agency conducted an analysis of eight studies that had been published on the topic before mid-January. It reported that six of the studies found that vaccinated people who became infected with the coronavirus were less likely than unvaccinated patients to develop symptoms of long Covid. The remaining two studies found that vaccination did not appear to conclusively reduce the chances of developing long Covid.
Some study results suggest substantial protection, while others find only a slight benefit.
One large study of electronic records of patients in the U.S. Veterans Health Administration found that vaccinated Covid patients had only a 13 percent lower risk than unvaccinated patients of having symptoms six months later.
That was then, and this is now. From Time magazine, not exactly an evil reich-wing or anti-vaxxer source:
COVID-19 vaccines were designed primarily to prevent severe disease and death—two purposes for which they continue to work very well. But when the shots first rolled out, many people also hoped they would block or even reverse symptoms of Long COVID, such as fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, chronic pain, and neurological issues.
By now, it’s clear that even people who are fully vaccinated and boosted can get Long COVID, and recent research suggests that vaccines aren’t the Long COVID shields people wished for.
Studies have come to very different estimates about the degree of protection vaccines offer against Long COVID. But some of the latest findings point to fairly disappointing protection. In one July report from the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics, more than 4% of vaccinated and boosted adults in the U.K. who were infected by Delta, Omicron BA.1, or BA.2 still had symptoms at least 12 weeks later. A preprint posted online on Sept. 6 (which has not yet been peer-reviewed) suggests the situation isn’t any better in the U.S. Researchers surveyed people from June into July, as the BA.5 variant was taking over. Among those who said they’d had COVID-19 at least a month earlier, roughly 20% had symptoms that lasted at least four weeks, with little difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
There’s more at the original, and while Time has a paywall, your first couple of articles are free.
People “really do not trust (the COVID experts) that much anymore,” William Teach wrote. At a certain point, it has to be asked: has anything that the “experts” have told the American people turned out to be true? Continue reading →
I seem to remember a time, not so long ago, when the left were telling us that it was not just right, but mandatory, that people alter their desired behavior because a horrible virus was loose. Now some are demanding, demanding! that the government enable their ability to do exactly as they please, without any health consequences. From NBC News:
Queer men across the U.S. talked to NBC News about the dates they never went on, the sex they never had and the gatherings they avoided due to the viral outbreak.
by Benjamin Ryan | Friday, September 2, 2022 | 9:04 AM EDT
For many gay and bisexual men, the sprawling and chaotic monkeypox outbreak has upended a summer that was supposed to be a well-earned opportunity — following the peak of the Covid crisis — to finally have some fun and revel with their gay brothers without the threat of viral infection hanging over them.
Soon after Memorial Day, however, these men, as well as transgender individuals and other queer people — GBTQ for short, because lesbians’ monkeypox risk is remote — were met head-on with harrowing reports about monkeypox’s often devastating and disfiguring effects on the body. Next came anger and frustration over what queer activists characterize as the Biden administration’s fumbling initial response to the outbreak.
I guess that it’s OK now to call queers queer. After all, they seem to have embraced the term for themselves. It’s not how I choose to express myself, but whatever.
Lost amid the frantic media and public health reports about monkeypox epidemiology, the delayed vaccine deliveries and the squabbling over how best to communicate about the virus are the millions of GBTQ people whose happiness, well-being and connection to one another have in many cases been considerably compromised by the mere threat of monkeypox infection.
“Life has sort of halted,” said Guillermo Rojas, 29, a Mexican citizen and public administration graduate student in New York City. “This was supposed to be the great summer that everything went back and opened.”
Dr. Alex Keuroghlian, a psychiatrist at the LGBTQ-health-focused Fenway Institute in Boston, said the outbreak has “been extremely distressing for community members and is also triggering in that it harkens back to the early days of the AIDS epidemic. It has a chilling effect on people’s sense of community, cohesion and belonging.”
Let’s be truthful here: in the NBC article, “people’s sense of community, cohesion and belonging” means their ability to go out and seek anonymous, promiscuous sex.
The article continues to note that monkeypox, while quite painful, has been fatal in only one instance in the United States, in an already “severely immunocompromised person”, which would be extremely politically incorrect to read as a homosexual male who had AIDS. The vaccine is becoming much more readily available.
One very politically correct notion, that monkeypox is spread by skin-to-skin contact, is disabused, as the article cites a study which points out that Sex between men, not skin contact, is fueling monkeypox, new research suggests: The claim that skin-to-skin contact during sex between men, not intercourse itself, drives most monkeypox transmission is likely backward, a growing group of experts say.
Now, however, an expanding cadre of experts has come to believe that sex between men itself — both anal as well as oral intercourse — is likely the main driver of global monkeypox transmission. The skin contact that comes with sex, these experts say, is probably much less of a risk factor.
Over 100 gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people responded to an NBC News online survey seeking to learn about how monkeypox has affected their lives. What this diverse cross-section of the community most had in common were missed opportunities. They wrote about sex they never had, dates they never went on and gatherings with friends they avoided.
This was really the most important part of the 2,684-word long article, because it set the stage for the rest of it, and the rest of it was basically whining that so many homosexual males felt it unsafe to go to bathhouses and bars cruising for mostly anonymous sex. COVID-19 put a real crimp in that starting in 2020, and once the panicdemic — not a typo, but a word reflecting the fact that the worst symptom of the disease was panic — was over, and the license for promiscuous, anonymous sex was restored, it all got shut down again.
“Post-Covid,” said (Guillermo Rojas, 29, a Mexican citizen and public administration graduate student in New York City), recalling how he experienced the free-spirited bacchanalia into which monkeypox arrived in New York City this spring, “everybody went crazy, and there were sex parties all over town.”
Monkeypox swiftly pushed the contemporary safer-sex playbook out the window. Queer people have been left scrambling for answers about how to protect themselves and have expressed bewilderment as they’ve struggled to process mixed messaging from public health leaders and journalists about what poses a substantial risk of infection.
Rojas was one of the first U.S. residents to receive the prized monkeypox vaccine, in late June. But even with the benefit of his first jab of the two-dose vaccine, he has still sharply curtailed what he had hoped would be a long-awaited libertine summer.
“I’ve stopped going to sex parties,” he said, given that public health authorities identified such gatherings of men as major monkeypox risk factors. “I also stopped having sex with people who live off their OnlyFans. I additionally stopped cruising at the gym, I did not continue to go to Fire Island, and I stopped attending orgies.”
To misquote Dirty Harry, I’m just all broken up about Mr Rojas’ ability to go out to orgies.
Not everyone in the queer community has been on the same page regarding monkeypox precautions. Just as battles over mask mandates and school closures have turned neighbor against neighbor during the Covid pandemic, fierce internecine conflicts have arisen among GBTQ people this summer about the best ways to respond to and communicate about monkeypox.
Michael Weinstein, the president of the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation, dusted off his outspoken antipathy toward PrEP and published a scathing rebuke of the sexual liberties the HIV-prevention pill has facilitated in an op-ed titled “Monkeypox Reckoning” in the Los Angeles Blade on Monday. Notorious for an unapologetically strident, moralizing and fear-based approach to HIV-prevention communication, one that is far out of step with that of the vast majority of the public health community, Weinstein decried “a wholesale abandonment of safer sex promotion in favor of PrEP.”
“There has always been a sex radical group that has defined gay liberation as absolute sexual freedom,” Weinstein wrote, blaming monkeypox on (the loss of) those freedoms.
Let’s see, a disease spread primarily by sex, and some people see a highly promiscuous sex life as more probable to spread the disease? That’s pretty much logic, you know?
John Pachankis, a psychologist at the Yale School of Public Health, noted how for the past two decades, queer advocacy organizations have pushed “a narrative that gay people are just like everyone else” in a successful effort to secure many civil rights protections. He spoke to the conflict that members of this community now face when the particulars of gay sex lie at the heart of the monkeypox outbreak and, as during the AIDS crisis, have become fodder for intense public debate.
“In the context of the real threat of those rights’ being taken away,” Pachankis said, referring to the recent rising tide of anti-LGBTQ sentiment and policies in the U.S., “the last thing that you want to do is disconfirm that narrative — even if the picture is a little more nuanced, even if gay people do live distinct lives from straight people, even if they express their sexuality more creatively, some might say more authentically.”
Brian Minalga, 36, who is gender nonbinary and works in the HIV field in Seattle, said: “There’s this idea that there are good people with good behaviors having the good type of sex. It’s moralistic and puritanical.”
It’s also practical.
Every human society of which we know has developed the concept of marriage, of restricting sexual activity to husbands and wives, and gradually eliminated legal polygamy, because that was what worked best for society. But let’s tell the truth here: the sexual drive for men is heavily skewed toward f(ornicating) anyone in a skirt, and it has always been the reluctance of women, who bear the far greater burden in reproduction, which has held men back.
But when the prospective copulation is between two men males? That restraining force just isn’t there, and that’s why homosexual males have such a promiscuous culture. If homosexual males were really like the propaganda put forward to normalize homosexuality, just people seeking only loving, coupled relationships, who deserve the benefits and stability of marriage, the tremendous spread of monkeypox wouldn’t have occurred.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and various state andlocal health departmentshavereported that monkeypox is indeed already disproportionately affecting Blacks and Latinos. And yet outsize shares of the vaccines have tended to go to whites — thanks, health advocates say, to structural factors that favor access to more privileged members of society.
Watching such patterns play out “is painful,” said Carlos E. Rodríguez-Díaz, an associate professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, “because it’s a reminder of the presence of systemic racism.”
(Jazmyn Henderson, an activist with ACT UP, an HIV and AIDS advocacy group), a trans Black woman, said Black men who have sex with men may still identify as heterosexual. “Identifying as gay, identifying as trans, all of that is very stigmatized,” she said. “I didn’t realize how stigmatized trans women are until I became one.”
Just as with COVID-19, the black community have been more resistant to taking the vaccine. The left have given us all sorts of reasons for this, most involving distrust of government, but whatever the reasons, the reluctance to take the COVID vaccines existed, and they were part of the community, whether the left wanted to blame that on racism or not. With monkeypox, that reluctance is a baseline, and the added stigma over homosexuality in the black community layers on top of that.
Simply put, the vaccine against monkeypox exists, and has existed for a long time; it’s not experimental the way the COVID vaccines were. There were some initial shortages, but those are being rapidly resolved, and if black homosexual males have been more reluctant to take the vaccine, that’s on them. The wryly amusing part is the view of the view of the left that black males and white males have exactly the same social concerns and should think exactly the same way.
There’s a lot more at the original, with much of the rest telling us how specific individuals have curtailed their promiscuity over fears of monkeypox. But, alas! sexual promiscuity has been curtailed in society because it has real, identifiable, and sometimes serious consequences.
A former friend of mine was fond of saying that the sexual revolution is over, and the men won. Well, in a lot of ways, that’s true. But it’s also true that the men lost, and when you get two, or more, males together interested in sex with each other, sometimes that will result in negative consequences for them. The homosexual activists want the government to subsidize and protect their right to screw indiscriminately, but once everyone is vaccinated against monkeypox, something else will come along.
I am by no means an anti-vaxxer. Vaccines have seriously mitigated many diseases, and almost eliminated a couple. Who would want to go back to the days of paralysis and iron lungs of polio? Why would we want a return of smallpox, which has killed millions? And yes, as I have stated previously, I have taken the COVID-19 vaccines, and the boosters.
But until the COVID-19 panicdemic — and no, that’s not a typographical error; panic was really the disease — we had serious clinical trials. In the late 18th century, Edward Jenner, having heard how dairy workers seemed immune to smallpox, devised a clinical trial.
In May 1796, Edward Jenner found a young dairymaid, Sarah Nelms, who had fresh cowpox lesions on her hands and arms. On May 14, 1796, using matter from Nelms’ lesions, he inoculated an 8-year-old boy, James Phipps. Subsequently, the boy developed mild fever and discomfort in the axillae. Nine days after the procedure he felt cold and had lost his appetite, but on the next day he was much better. In July 1796, Jenner inoculated the boy again, this time with matter from a fresh smallpox lesion. No disease developed, and Jenner concluded that protection was complete.
That was a clinical trial with one subject, but, thanks to the politicization of COVID-19, it might be a larger clinical trial than one today:
The lack of human data means officials likely won’t know how much better the new shots are — if at all — until the fall booster campaign is well underway.
By Berkeley Lovelace Jr. | Tuesday, August 30, 2022 | 4:09 PM EDT
The updated Covid vaccine boosters, a reformulated version targeting the BA.5 omicron subvariant, could be available around Labor Day. They’ll be the first Covid shots distributed without results from human trials. Does that matter?
Because the Biden administration has pushed for a fall booster campaign to begin in September, the mRNA vaccine-makers Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna have only had time to test the reformulated shots in mice, not people. That means the Food and Drug Administration is relying on the mice trial data — plus human trial results from a similar vaccine that targets the original omicron strain, called BA.1 — to evaluate the new shots, according to a recent tweet from the FDA commissioner, Dr. Robert Califf.
That could be a potentially risky bet, experts say, if the shots don’t work as well as hoped.
Note that my source was NBC News, not some evil reich-wing blog!
Of course, the Biden Administration wants to get this in people’s bodies almost immediately:
The Biden administration plans to begin offering next-generation Covid-19 booster shots as soon as the Labor Day weekend, according to people familiar with the matter, aiming to stave off a fall surge in cases of the disease.
Food and Drug Administration regulators are expected to clear the use of Covid-19 vaccines reformulated for omicron variants next week, the people said. They asked not to be identified ahead of an official announcement.
The so-called bivalent vaccines are designed to better protect against subvariants of the virus that are now dominant in the US, BA.4 and BA.5. The shots are poised to begin shipping next week and can be administered after Centers for Disease Control and Prevention clearance.
A CDC advisory panel hearing is set for Sept. 1 to 2 to discuss the issue, the people said. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky has the final say and could sign off as soon as next week.
That timeline sets up the potential for a smattering of shots as soon as the Labor Day weekend beginning Sept. 3, with broader availability in the following week or two, the people said. The US will have between 10 and 15 million doses initially available, one of the people said, out of a total order of 171 million doses.
So, President Biden and his minions want people to start taking a vaccine which has never been tested on humans starting this coming weekend. And while there’s no word, at least yet, of an attempted federal mandate, we have previously noted how Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia) — who wouldn’t wear the mask his city’s public schools have mandated for students while visiting a school — is finally getting his wish and firing the 68 remaining unionized city employees who have refused to take the existing COVID-19 vaccines. Will the Mayor, along with other big city mayors who have done the same things he has, try to force people to take the newest vaccine, the one not tested on humans?
We already know that the existing vaccines neither prevent people from contracting the SARS-CoV-2 virus, nor prevent those who have contracted it from spreading it to others. At best, the vaccines may lessen the severity of symptoms in those who do contract the disease.
But even that is becoming questionable. As we have previously noted, there is strong evidence that a lot more people have had the virus at some point, in line with acting Food and Drug Administration head Commissioner Janet Woodcock having 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.” 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.
With the advent of at-home testing for COVID-19, we do not know how many people have tested positive for the virus and never reported it. After all, if reporting that you have contracted the virus would subject you to restrictions, there would doubtlessly be those who did not feel sick enough to stay home and subject themselves to self-quarantine. We also do not know how many people felt slightly ill, but didn’t bother to get tested, either at a clinic or at home, and we don’t know how many have contracted the virus at some point but were completely asymptomatic.
What we do know is that BA.5, while serious for a relatively small percentage of people, isn’t much more than a typical cold or perhaps the flu for most people.
Why, then, would we want to introduce an untested vaccine into millions of people, for a disease that is simply not that serious for most of the public?
Growing up in Mt Sterling, Kentucky, in the 1960s, air conditioning in the public schools was not something we had. Mt Sterling High School, from which I was graduated in 1971, was a 1937 Works Project Administration / Civilian Conservation Corps building, with 12-foot ceilings and very tall windows, which could be opened to let outside air in the bottoms and the hotter inside air out the tops, so it was with some amusement that I noted this article from The Philadelphia Inquirer:100 Philly schools closing early Tuesday, Wednesday because of heat: Extreme heat will cause 100 schools that lack air conditioning to close three hours early Tuesday and Wednesday. The rest of the district’s schools will remain open as usual.
In the hotter, more humid South, if the schools closed early due to the heat, summer vacation would have lasted from the middle of May until the middle of September.
“Our schools are hubs for our community and are among the safest places for our students to be,” said Tony B. Watlington Sr., the district’s new superintendent.
Philadelphia School District staff and students must mask for the first 10 days of the 2022-23 school year, but masks will then be optional — but “strongly recommended” — as long as case counts do not spike.
“We are committed to keeping students in school for in-person learning,” Kendra McDow, a pediatrician and epidemiologist and the district’s chief medical officer, said at a news conference Friday.
A mask mandate will be reinstated if the COVID-19 community transmission rate, as determined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, becomes high. (It’s currently in the medium range.)
“Our schools are hubs for our community and are among the safest places for our students to be,” said Tony B. Watlington Sr., the district’s new superintendent, who with McDow detailed the district’s 2022-23 health and safety protocols.
Though they have a plan in place, things may shift, district officials said.
“It is important that we remain flexible, as we have done for the past 2½ years,” said McDow.
There’s more at the original, and while I think the Philadelphia School District is being overcautious and silly — the masks the students have do nothing to stop the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus — that isn’t my focus here.
What is my focus? Mayor Jim Kenney, who used to style himself on Twitter as “Jim ‘Mask Up’ Kenney”, though, sadly, I didn’t take a screen capture of it before he deleted the ‘Mask Up’ from his handle, was at the Dunbar Elementary School for the first day of school . . . and, as the screen capture of KYW radio’s morning news reporter Tim Jimenez’s tweet shows, neither Mayor Kenney, nor school’s Superintendent Tony Watlington Sr., nor state Representative Malcolm Kenyatta (D-181st District), all happily cheering the returning students, was wearing a mask! Some of the students were — albeit some of them improperly — but the people and politicians who were forcing the students to wear the masks did not think that the rules applied to them!
If you click on the link to the original tweet, you’ll find not just a still photo of the event, but a 16-second video of it.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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:
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’sTaylor 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.
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 Salonloved 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:
It’s just wild how fast 2020’s “we’re all in this together” flipped to “I’m personally safe now, so vulnerable ppl’s deaths should be normalized.” This view is completely standard now across the political spectrum and championed by liberals and large media institutions
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.
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.
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 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:
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.
Thanks to a tweet from William Teach, I found this article from Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker: 
