The CDC, and the entire federal public health apparatus in the United States, has been an absolute disaster for the entire duration of this pandemic. It's embarrassing how incompetent they are. A pandemic is an emergency and requires proactive action. The CDC has been anything but proactive. As stated in the article, it seems as if they're reacting to every event that occurs with a month-long delay.
Data Collection--It's an absolute disgrace that there is no federal central repository of COVID-19 breakthrough infection data. We are navigating this mess completely blindfolded. Instead, we have to rely on individual state reporting, and sometimes data is only available on a county-level.
Wide-scale Home Testing--It took the FDA an entire year and a half to approve a lateral assay antigen test. Yet, they're on retail for $20 at CVS. That's far too expensive for a simple piece of nitrocellulose paper with immunofluorescent antibodies. If we were serious about curtailing the spread of Delta, we would invest funds in a federal effort to mass-produce these tests at a $1 price point, and distribute them to all households for daily testing.
Mutations--It seems as if everyone forgot the concept of a "derivative" from entry-level calculus. Everyone is focused on Delta without exerting the slightest effort in thinking about the future. We need to get proactive, folks. Immune evasion to Delta may be low, but what about future variants? We need to model the rate of mutations in the spike protein based on the magnitude of transmissions. This is possible if effort is put into it. Doing such, we can forecast antibody evasion in future variants based on current cases.
Booster Doses--I truly hope that the boosters that are being planned are not simply a third dose of the same Spike encodement. The spike region has mutated since the Alpha iteration of the virus. Current vaccines encode for that old version of the Spike protein. The boosters should have the mRNA encoding of the Delta spike. Giving senior citizens a booster of the old Spike sequence would be extremely short-sighted.
Treatments--Why is the United States investing so little in COVID-19 infection treatment? Why are we hedging all our bets on prophylaxis? We must invest far more into Coronavirus inhibitors.
In short, I have lost all faith in our federal public health apparatus. The CDC is nowhere near as agile as it needs to be to deal with a pandemic.
NYTimes | When asked if he had gotten a Covid-19 vaccine, Lamar Jackson, a quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens, declined to answer. “I feel it’s a personal decision,” he said. “I’m just going to keep my feelings to my family and myself.”
Jackson
echoed another N.F.L. quarterback, Cam Newton of the New England
Patriots, who said much the same a few days earlier. “It’s too personal
to discuss,” Newton replied, when asked if he was vaccinated. “I’ll just keep it at that.”
Jackson and Newton are not the only prominent people to say hey, it’s personal
when asked about the vaccine. It is a common dodge for public-facing
vaccine skeptics or those using vaccine skepticism for their own ends.
“I don’t think it’s anybody’s damn business whether I’m vaccinated or
not,” Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, told CNN last month. Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, wrote similarly
(albeit less abrasively) in May that vaccination was a “personal and
private decision” and that “no one should be shamed, coerced or mandated
to take Covid-19 vaccines that are being allowed under an emergency use
authorization.”
Johnson and all the others are wrong. Wearing a helmet while bike
riding, strapping on your seatbelt in a car — these are personal
decisions, at least as far as your own injuries are concerned.
Vaccination is different. In the context of a deadly and often
debilitating contagion, in which the unchecked spread of infection has
consequences for the entire society, vaccination is not a personal
decision. And inasmuch as the United States has struggled to achieve
herd immunity against Covid-19 through vaccination, it is because we
refuse to treat the pandemic for what it is: a social problem to solve
through collective action.
In addition to not being paid, fed, or resupplied by leadership that fled the country with cars full of embezzled $$$ - the Afghan National Army folded quick, fast, and in a hurry for the following reason(s):
1. The Taliban has had 20 years to build lists.
2. So, the Taliban knows who the ANA Kandak commanders are. Everyone's got a cousin in the Taliban and a cousin in the ANA/ANP/ABP/CTPT whatever. The ANA Kandak commanders get a phone call from the Taliban commanders: we've got your family in X province under our protection now.
3. When the American ETT's lost operational control over their advisors, the ANA officers and NCOs had no one to put a check on the tendency to abuse new Askars, and also the tendency to steal the new Askars' money (Here's $100, we'll take $90 back now for your food and uniform).
4. Morale within the units is shit, and the trust and mutual respect needed for effective small-unit combat actions to actually work doesn't really exist. Corruption runs wild, drug abuse is a big problem, and again, everyone's got a cousin on the other side, so fuck it, right?
5. Plus, the US concentrated on developing combat forces in their own image, supplying the ANA with surplus Flag of United States arms, vehicles, uniforms & commo gear. The US spent thousands upon thousands of dollars training and equipping each ANA Askar, but forgot something: they didn't issue eyeglasses.
6. I have shit uncorrected eyesight, like, I really need glasses to do just about anything, certainly to shoot an M4 or an M203 accurately enough to kill the person I'm aiming at. Don't you reckon there might be myopic askars? None of the Askars had eyeglasses.
7. Afghanistan was a complete, total, and epic fuckup by the Administration, the Intelligence Community, the American Deep State. Sheer and utter incompetence played out over 20 years to the nth degree. For any of us looking, all I got is that we should now understand our Vietnam veterans better. And, man, every administration since Jimmy Carter (or hell, you can go back to Eisenhower and Morrison-Knudsen's dam building efforts) fucked up afghanistan.
p.s. the Talibs also have cousins who are Askars in the army. The difference is that the Talibs believe they're right and the Askars don't. That's the biggest difference. Weapons and big spending can't buy that.
This may become the most infamous — and devastating — press conference ever held by an American President. pic.twitter.com/j4kKwyPDVm
taibbi | Cast out, the Times said, were “the majority of former Obama
administration officials… who generally credit themselves with helping
create the Obama legacy,” including former top aide David Axelrod, who’d
just called Obama an “apostle of hope” in the Washington Post and
sat for a three-hour HBO documentary deep-throat of his ex-boss.
Remaining on the list were celeb couples Chrissy Teigen and John Legend,
as well as Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union, along with Steven
Spielberg, George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Questlove,
Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Don Cheadle, and other Fabulous People, who drank “top
shelf liquor,” puffed stogies, and hit the links at the Vineyard Golf
Club (membership fee:
$350,000). An early report that Pearl Jam had been hired to perform was
later refuted. Eddie Vedder would just be there, but not to play.
One attendee called it the “party of all parties,” while another added, “Y’all never seen
Obama like this,” There’s a glorious moment in the life of a certain kind of
politician, when either because their careers are over, or because
they’re so untouchable politically that it doesn’t matter anymore, that
they finally get to remove the public mask, no pun intended. This Covid
bash was Barack Obama’s “Fuck it!” moment.
He extended middle
fingers in all directions: to his Vineyard neighbors, the rest of
America, Biden, the hanger-on ex-staffers who’d stacked years of
hundred-hour work weeks to build his ballyhooed career, the not quite
A-listers bounced at the last minute for being not famous enough (sorry,
Larry David and Conan O’Brien!), and so on. It’d be hard not to laugh
imagining Axelrod reading that even “Real Housewife of Atlanta” Kim
Fields got on the party list over him, except that Obama giving the
shove-off to his most devoted (if also scummy and greedy) aides is also
such a perfect metaphor for the way he slammed the door in the faces of
the millions of ordinary voters who once so desperately believed in him.
Obviously, getting rich and not giving a shit anymore is the
birthright of every American. But this wasn’t supposed to be in the
script for Obama, whose remarkable heel turn has been obscured by the
Trump years, which incidentally were at least partly his fault. The
history books and the still-starstruck press will let him skate on this,
but they shouldn’t.
Obama was set up to be the greatest of
American heroes, but proved to be a common swindler and one of the great
political liars of all time — he fooled us all. Moreover, his
remarkably vacuous post-presidency is proving true everything Trump said
in 2016 about the grasping Washington politicians whose only motives
are personal enrichment, and who’d do anything, even attend his wedding,
for a buck. Trump’s point was that he, Trump, was already swinishly
rich, while politicians have only one thing to sell to get the upper
class status they crave: us.
alicefromqueens | Harris opposed legalization as recently as 2014, in her re-election
campaign for attorney general of California, even as her Republican
opponent supported it. Incidentally, the answer Harris gave a local
reporter on the subject that year was the first time her laugh got her in real trouble. Hold onto that for bar trivia-night.
TO BE CLEAR: I HAVE NO PROBLEM
with Kamala’s personality type as such. But before she dropped out of
the primaries, it amazed me that no one else found her
fish-out-of-waterness worth remarking on. Surely it’s not problematic to
discuss frankly whether any politician as feminine as Kamala can win a
presidential election.
The nearest thing to a high-profile criticism of Harris’s personality was delivered unwittingly in The Washington Post. In an Opinion piece titled, “Vogue got too familiar, too fast,” the paper’s former fashion critic, Robin Givhan, blamed Vogue for making Harris look relatable:
“The cover did not give Kamala D. Harris due respect. It was overly
familiar. It was a cover image that, in effect, called Harris by her
first name without invitation.”
Givhan goes on to suggest that the cover reflected solely the preferences of Vogue’s
editor and Hollywood-villain Anna Wintour, and that Wintour’s
cluelessness exemplified Vogue’s ongoing problems with race.
Astonishingly, this all came after Givhan acknowledged, “Harris styled
herself. She chose her ensembles.”
No one inflicts relatability on Kamala, and no one needs an invite to
call her by one name. There’s an invitation in every smile and word from
her mouth. Whether Americans want such an invitation from their
president is a different question, one we’ll be returning to in this
series
independent | The response from the office of Kamala Harris to reports that her office was a mess of dysfunction and distrust is to say the anonymous critics are "cowards".
An incendiary story in Politico based on leaks from within and around the vice president’s
orbit describes her office as chaotic, tense, dour, abusive, and an
unhealthy work environment where "people feel treated like s***".
The
report quotes 22 current and former vice presidential aides,
administration officials and associates of both Ms Harris and Joe Biden
to paint a picture of a toxic and incompetent operation from the
top-down, with particular ire aimed at the VP’s chief of staff Tina
Flournoy.
“People
are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and
it’s an abusive environment,” said a person with direct knowledge of how
Ms Harris runs her office.
The report claims Ms Flournoy created
an insular environment where ideas are ignored and she refuses to take
responsibility for delicate issues and blames staffers for negative
results that follow, like the bungled trip to the Mexico border that
blindsided members of the vice president’s own office.
In response to Politico, Ms Harris’ chief spokeswoman said people criticizing Ms Flournoy "are cowards to do this this way".
“We
are not making rainbows and bunnies all day. What I hear is that people
have hard jobs and I’m like ‘welcome to the club,’” Ms Sanders said.
“We
have created a culture where people, if there is anything anyone would
like to raise, there are avenues for them to do so. Whoever has
something they would like to raise, they should raise it directly.”
DHS– The Secretary of Homeland Security has issued a new National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin regarding the current heightened threat environment across the United States. […] These threats include those posed by domestic terrorists, individuals and groups engaged in grievance-based violence. […] Such threats are also exacerbated by impacts of the ongoing global pandemic, including grievances over public health safety measures andperceivedgovernment restrictions.
Indystar |The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention has recommended that K-12 schools adopt universal masking for
all students, teachers and staff members, regardless of vaccination
status. The Indiana State Department of Health has recommended that
schools follow the CDC guidance.
But the
decision has been left to local school boards, the very people that
Stock is telling not to listen to the CDC or the state health officials.
State
health officials have pushed back on Stock’s video, while maintaining
the position that Indiana is a "home rule state" and decisions around
masking and more are up to local officials.
“Throughout
this pandemic, we have relied on data and science to make
recommendations, and we will continue to do so,” said Megan Wade-Taxter,
a spokesperson for the Indiana State Department of Health. “The
COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective at preventing hospitalizations
and deaths, as evidenced by the fact that more than 98% of Hoosiers who
have been hospitalized with COVID-19 since mid-January are
unvaccinated."
That’s true even as the delta
variant drives a surge of new cases. More than 97% of Hoosiers who have
been hospitalized with COVID-19 since June 1 have not been vaccinated,
she said.
"Decisions about school protocols
rest with school boards and local leaders," she said, "including local
health departments and elected officials."
The Hancock County Health Department has also
advised all schools in the county, including Mt. Vernon, to follow the
CDC and state health recommendations.
"You’ve
got so many things coming at you," said Kellie Freeman, a member of the
Mt. Vernon Community Schools board that heard from Stock last week.
"It’s difficult to know."
At that meeting of
the Mt. Vernon board, members were considering parameters that would
require individual school buildings to increase cleaning and move toward
a mask mandate, based on the percentage of students out due to illness
or quarantine. Currently, the district is mask-optional.
Ultimately, the board decided to table the discussion after hearing Stock's comments.
"I think we have an obligation to… find the facts that were shared today," said board member Shannon Walls.
geertvandenbossche | The WHO’s mass vaccination program has been installed in response to a public health emergency of international concern. As of the early days of the mass vaccination campaigns, at least a few experts have been warning against the catastrophic impact such a program could have on global and individual health. Mass vaccination in the middle of a pandemic is prone to promoting selection and adaptation of immune escape variants that are featured by increasing infectiousness and resistance to spike protein (S)-directed antibodies (Abs), thereby diminishing protection in vaccines and threatening the unvaccinated.
This already explains why the WHO’s mass vaccination program is not only unable to generate herd immunity (HI) but even leads to substantial erosion of the population’s immune protective capacity. As the ongoing universal mass vaccination program will soon promote dominant propagation of highly infectious, neutralization escape mutants (i.e., so-called ‘S Ab-resistant variants’), naturally acquired, or vacinal neutralizing Abs, will, indeed, no longer offer any protection to immunized individuals whereas high infectious pressure will continue to suppress the innate immune defense system of the non-vacinated. This is to say that every further increase in vaccine coverage rates will further contribute to forcing the virus into resistance to neutralizing, S-specific Abs.
Increased viral infectivity, combined with evasion from antiviral immunity, will inevitably result in an additional toll taken on human health and human lives. Immediate action needs, therefore, to be taken in order to dramatically reduce viral infectivity rates and to prevent selected immune escape variants from rapidly spreading through the entire population, whether vaccinated or not. This first critical step can only be achieved by calling an immediate halt to the mass vaccination program and replacing it by widespread use of antiviral chemoprophylactics while dedicating massive public health resources to scaling early multidrug treatments of Covid-19 disease.
ritholtz | “In every well-ordered society charged with the duty of
conserving the safety of its members, the rights of the individual in
respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great
dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable
regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand.”
I noted back in February that America’s CEOs were “Having a Good Year.”
Not just in their response to a deadly pandemic, or to the logistical
challenges of remote work or feeding a nation stuck at home, but even
their response to the January 6th attempted coup (Let’s stop pussyfooting around with equivocal words like “insurrection”).
The Vaccine hesitancy that has been stoked by bad actors – an
unseemly mix of malicious, opportunistic, and plain old stupid – has
presented another chance for the corporate sector to demonstrate
leadership. The track record is at best mixed.
If for no other reason than self-interest, it’s time for Corporate America to step up its Vax game – and fast. More than their new hires,
companies need to get their customers, aka the public, vaccinated.
Otherwise, we are going to be living through an echo of 2020, with Covid
as an ongoing and perhaps even long-term drag on the economy. This will
affect revenue and earnings at all companies.
Even better, as an exercise, let’s name names. Consider these 10
companies as well-situated to effect real social change relative to
Vaccines. But really, any company can show leadership.
epochtimes | Dr. Kulldorff: First of all, we expected that we would have good natural immunity from a virus like this. So it’s not a surprise that we do have it. There have been studies showing that we have good immunity from having COVID before. People can be reinfected and test positive, but there’s very few cases where somebody had it and then they get the serious disease afterwards. There are millions of people who have had COVID.
So if this was a common thing, it would have shown up all over the place, but it hasn’t. So it’s very rare. Once you’ve had it, you have good protection from your immune system for a serious disease or for mortality. There has been some direct comparison.
There was some data from Israel that came out recently showing that if you have had a vaccine, you’re 6.7 times more likely to be reinfected than if you have had the COVID disease itself. So we would expect that you get better immunity from the disease than you do from the vaccine. And of course, there’s only that one study.
We don’t know exactly, but we can confidently say that having had the disease at least gives you as good and probably better immunity than the vaccine. Empirically, we know that if you have a disease, you have at least one-and-a-half years of good immunity, because the virus has been with us for that amount of time. So we know that there’s long lasting immunity from having had COVID disease.
From the vaccine, we have less information because it only came in December. So it’s a bit over half-a-year. So we know that there’s good immunity for six months. Hopefully it’s longer, but we don’t have the same amount of data, the same evidence as we do for a natural immunity from actually having the disease naturally.
But for public health scientists, it’s very surprising that this is not recognized. We are forcing people who had the disease, who have good immunity to take a vaccine, even though they have an immunity that’s better than, or at least as good as those who have only had the vaccine.
At the same time, there are a lot of people who need these vaccines who are not getting them. People in India, Nigeria and Brazil, where a lot of older and especially poor people do not get the vaccine because they don’t have enough doses.
So those are the ones we should emphasize being vaccinated. Then we should view this as a global effort to vaccinate the old everywhere in the world, instead of vaccinating people that already have very good immunity against the disease.
Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned that people are being forced to take a vaccine. I don’t know of anyone in the U.S. actually being forced to take it directly. Tell me what you mean when you say that.
Dr. Kulldorff: There’s a push both for vaccine passports and vaccine mandates. If people want to have a job and stay at the job, they are required to take the vaccine or they’ll be fired. If they want to study at the university, many universities are requiring vaccines for all the students.
So there are these vaccine mandates and vaccine passports. In New York City, for example, now they’re requiring restaurants to require vaccinations for people who go to the restaurants.
That is a very coercive way to get people to vaccinate. And that’s very bad for public health. One question is, “Why do you coerce people who are immune or people who are young, who have very small risk, when the vaccines are much more needed in for older people in other places?” So that’s an ethical aspect of it. I think it is very unethical to do so.
The other aspect is that if you force something on people, if you coerce somebody to do something, that can backfire. Public health has to be based on trust. If public health officials want the public to trust them, public health officials also have to trust the public. I’ve been working on vaccines for almost two decades now. One thing that we’ve always tried to do is to maintain good confidence in the vaccines.
For example, measles vaccines are very important, as well as polio vaccines. There is a small group of people who are very vocal, who don’t like vaccines, but they haven’t really been able to put any dent in the confidence in vaccines. It’s very high in the U.S. So we’ve been very successful in maintaining that confidence.
But right now with these vaccine mandates, and vaccine passports, this coercive thing is turning a lot of people away from vaccines, and not trusting them for very understandable reasons. “Why do you have to force somebody to take the vaccine, if it’s so beneficial to you?” That’s one rationale.
Those who are pushing these vaccine mandates and vaccine passports—vaccine fanatics, I would call them—to me they have done much more damage during this one year than the anti-vaxxers have done in two decades. I would even say that these vaccine fanatics, they are the biggest anti-vaxxers that we have right now. They’re doing so much more damage to vaccine confidence than anybody else.
Even if they manage to coerce somebody to get the COVID vaccines, because of people saying, “Okay, I have to take it because I need to go to a university or I have to, because I want that job, or I want to go to restaurants,” even if they manage to get those people to take the COVID vaccine, it will turn them off from public health. It will make them distrust public health and turn them off from other vaccines that are not mandatory.
So it has ripple effects in other aspects of public health that are very unfortunate. I’m a native of Sweden. so I know a little bit about Sweden. Sweden has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, and the highest confidence in vaccines in the world.
But there’s absolutely no mandate. It just doesn’t do it that way. It’s completely voluntary. If you want to have high confidence in vaccines, it has to be voluntary. There shouldn’t be any mandates.
First, let me
be absolutely clear. I believe the vaccines help prevent serious
illness, hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19. And I am not just
implying that a few people are protected. The data that I have reviewed
suggest that the vaccines are still around 90% effective in preventing bad things from happening even if people catch COVID.
That’s the very good news. Here’s the very bad news. I suspect that a lot
of vaccinated people are behaving as if they are fully protected
against the coronavirus. They have given up their masks and are shopping
in grocery stores, big box discount emporiums and hardware and garden
retailers, to name just a few locales. They are getting their hair cut,
going to banks and bars and trying to get back to a normal existence.
I
suspect that a great many of these folks are going to catch the Delta
COVID variant. They might not get very sick. They might not end up in
the hospital. They probably won’t die. But they will catch COVID. They will spread COVID. And they could end up with Long COVID!
Why Long COVID Matters:
You
have heard of “long haulers.” These are people who recover from
COVID-19. Some had mild symptoms. Others were asymptomatic. Some were
pretty darn sick. What they all have in common is continuing symptoms. And those symptoms can be life changing!
We now know that people who were fully vaccinated and caught COVID anyway can have persistent symptoms after they recover (New England Journal of Medicine, July 28, 2021). No one yet knows how many vaccinated people who catch COVID-19 will go on to develop long COVID (aka post COVID syndrome [PCS], Post-acute sequelae of SARS-COV-2 [PASC], chronic COVID, etc.). It could be a small number or it could go as high as 30% to 40%. That is the estimate of how many people develop this condition if they catch the virus without being vaccinated.
How Bad Is Long COVID?
Bad!
Symptoms can include unrelenting fatigue, breathing difficulties and/or
shortness of breath, cough, chest pain, muscle aches and joint pain,
brain fog, insomnia, head pain, loss of taste or smell, dizziness upon
standing, rapid heart rate, etc. You can read more about other symptoms
and the prognosis at this link.
If you want to learn what it’s like to have this condition, here is a link to our podcast with two health professionals who themselves have experienced Long COVID.
The Bottom Line:
If
you have been vaccinated, you are not guaranteed protection against the
Delta COVID variant! You probably won’t get terribly ill and you
probably won’t die if you get sick, but if you develop long COVID you
will be sorry. That is why you need to be careful. I do not like wearing
a tight-fitting N95 mask when I am out and about, but I do!
NYMag | “The
message that breakthrough cases are exceedingly rare and that you don’t
have to worry about them if you’re vaccinated — that this is only an
epidemic of the unvaccinated — that message is falling flat,” Harvard
epidemiologist Michael Mina told me in the long interview that follows
below. “If this was still Alpha, sure. But with Delta, plenty of people
are getting sick. Plenty of transmission is going on. And my personal
opinion is that the whole notion of herd immunity from two vaccine shots
is flying out the window very quickly with this new variant.”
“We’re
seeing a lot more spread in vaccinated people,” agreed Scripps’s Eric
Topol, who estimated that the vaccines’ efficacy against symptomatic
transmission, which he estimated to be 90 percent or above for the
wild-type strain and all previous variants, had fallen to about 60
percent for Delta. “That’s a big drop.” Later, he suggested it might have fallen to 50 percent, and that new data about to be published in the U.S. would suggest an even lower rate. On Wednesday, a large pre-print study published by the Mayo clinic suggested the efficacy against infection had fallen as far as 42 percent.
“The
breakthrough problem is much more concerning than what our public
officials have transmitted,” Topol continued. “We have no good tracking.
But every indicator I have suggests that there’s a lot more under the
radar than is being told to the public so far, which is unfortunate.”
The result, he said, was a widening gap between the messaging from
public-health authorities and the meaning of the data emerging in real
time. “I think the problem we have is people — whether it’s the CDC or
the people that are doing the briefings — their big concern is, they
just want to get vaccinations up. And they don’t want to punch any holes
in the story about vaccines. But we can handle the truth. And that’s
what we should be getting.”
The central distortion reflected in the Kaiser report — and echoed by communicators elsewhere, including in the Times
— is the result of a basic error of comparison, one that should have
been obvious to anyone familiar with the shape of the pandemic. Almost
all of these calculations about the share of breakthrough cases have
been made using year-to-date 2021 data, which include several months
before mass vaccination (when by definition vanishingly few breakthrough
cases could have occurred) during which time the vast majority of the
year’s total cases and deaths took place (during the winter surge).This
is a corollary to the reassuring principle you might’ve heard, over the
last few weeks, that as vaccination levels grow we would expect the
percentage of vaccinated cases will, too — the implication being that we
shouldn’t worry too much over panicked headlines about the relative
share of vaccinated cases in a state or ICU but instead focus on the
absolute number of those cases in making a judgment about vaccine
protection across a population. This is true. But it also means that
when vaccination levels were very low, there were inevitably very few
breakthrough cases, too.
That means that to calculate a prevalence ratio for cases
or deaths using the full year’s data requires you to effectively divide
a numerator of four months of data by a denominator of seven months of
data. And because those first few brutal months of the year were
exceptional ones that do not reflect anything like the present state of
vaccination or the disease, they throw off the ratios even further.
Two-thirds of 2021 cases and 80 percent of deaths came before April 1,
when only 15 percent of the country was fully vaccinated, which means
calculating year-to-date ratios means possibly underestimating the
prevalence of breakthrough cases by a factor of three and breakthrough
deaths by a factor of five. And if the ratios are calculated using data
sets that end before the Delta surge, as many have been, that adds an
additional distortion, since both breakthrough cases and severe illness
among the vaccinated appear to be significantly more common with this
variant than with previous ones.
unherd |There has been much debate over how to get the unvaccinated to get their jabs — shame them, bribe them persuade them, or treat them as victims of mis- and disinformation campaigns — but who, exactly, are these people?
Most of the coverage would have you believe that the surge in cases is primarily down to less educated, ‘brainwashed’
Trump supporters who don’t want to take the vaccine. This may be
partially true: the areas in which the delta variant is surging coincide
with the sections of red America in which vaccination rates are lowest.
But according to a new paper by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh,
this does not paint the full picture. The researchers analysed more
than 5 million survey responses by a range of different demographic
details, and classed those people who would “probably” or “definitely” not choose to get vaccinated as “vaccine hesitant.”
In some respects the findings are as
predicted — for example the paper finds that there is a strong
correlation between counties with higher Trump support in the 2020
presidential election and higher hesitancy in the period January 2021 —
May 2021.
But more surprising is the breakdown
in vaccine hesitancy by level of education. It finds that the
association between hesitancy and education level follows a U-shaped
curve with the highest hesitancy among those least and most educated.
People with a master’s degree had the least hesitancy, and the highest
hesitancy was among those holding a Ph.D.
What’s more, the paper found that in
the first five months of 2021, the largest decrease in hesitancy was
among the least educated — those with a high school education or less.
Meanwhile, hesitancy held constant in the most educated group; by May,
those with Ph.Ds were the most hesitant group.
So not only are the most educated
people most sceptical of taking the Covid vaccine, they are also the
least likely the change their minds about it…
In
2020 people were told that business closures, stay-at-home orders,
lockdowns, and mask mandates were necessary to slow the spread of
SARS-CoV-2.
Some people expected that places where these measures
were absent or implemented half-heartedly would have drastically worse
results.
With more than a year of these measures behind us, it's time to evaluate the results.
Preliminary
academic studies have already been published, and they deserve our
attention. This quiz is intended for the layman, because if these
radical measures were truly justified the results should be clear and
unambiguous in the data.
covidstates | Researchers from the COVID States Project developed an interactive dashboard
to explore public behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic, support for
restrictive measures aimed at curbing the spread of the virus, and
approval for state governors’ and the president’s handling of the
pandemic.
The dashboard presents data from a series of large-scale monthly surveys with approximately 20,000-25,000 participants each.
Users can engage with state and national data in the following ways:
Health Behaviors:
This tab presents public health behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic.
It has three separate panels. The first shows core activities such as
going to work, church, or the gym. The second shows whether respondents
were in close proximity with people living outside their household.
Finally, the third panel presents data on public adherence to health
recommendations aimed at curtailing the spread of the pandemic. These
recommendations include mask wearing, hand washing, avoiding contact
with other people, and staying away from crowds and public spaces. Users
can select their state of interest and the three panels will
automatically update to reflect the selected state.
Restrictive Measures:
Restrictive Measures: The second tab presents data on public support
for federal, state and local governments to implement restrictive
measures meant to curtail the spread of the virus, such as limiting
restaurants to carry-out service only or requiring businesses to close.
Executive Approval:
This tab tracks public approval of state governors and the president. A
vertical line indicates the transition from the Trump Administration to
the Biden Administration on January 20, 2021. Prior to that point,
presidential approval numbers refer to Donald Trump, while subsequent
data points refer to Joe Biden. Users can select the state and the
official (Governor/President) they would like to view.
Maps:
This tab generates state-level choropleth maps for the data presented
in the dashboard. The tab contains two subpanels: one for health
behavior and another for restrictive measure support. Within each
panel, users should also specify the month that they are interested in
viewing. Below these maps, users will find bar charts comparing the data
from each state and ranking states in the context of the behavior or
measure of interest.
All
graphics in this app can be downloaded in a PDF or PNG format using the
“Download” buttons in the respective tab. Users who are interested in
downloading the underlying data can find it in a CSV format at the
bottom of the Overview tab.
consentfactory | People can tell themselves that they didn’t see where things have
been heading for the last 17 months, but they did. They saw all the
signs along the way. The signs were all written in big, bold letters,
some of them in scary-looking Germanic script. They read …
“THIS IS THE ROAD TO TOTALITARIANISM.”
I’m not going to show you all those signs out again. People like me
have been pointing them out, and reading them out loud, for 17 months
now. Anyone who knows anything about the history of totalitarianism, how
it incrementally transforms society into a monstrous mirror image of
itself, has known since the beginning what the “New Normal” is, and we
have been shouting from the rooftops about it.
We have watched as the New Normal transformed our societies into
paranoid, pathologized, authoritarian dystopias where people now have to
show their “papers” to see a movie or get a cup of coffee and publicly
display their ideological conformity to enter a supermarket and buy
their groceries.
We have watched as the New Normal transformed the majority of the
masses into hate-drunk, hysterical mobs that are openly persecuting “the
Unvaccinated,” the official “Untermenschen” of the New Normal ideology.
We have watched as the New Normal has done precisely what every
totalitarian movement in history has done before it, right by the
numbers. We pointed all this out, each step of the way. I’m not going to
reiterate all that again.
I am, however, going to document where we are at the moment, and how
we got here … for the record, so that the people who will tell you later
that they “had no clue where the trains were going” will understand why
we no longer trust them, and why we regard them as cowards and
collaborators, or worse.
Yes, that’s harsh, but this is not a game. It isn’t a difference of
opinion. The global-capitalist ruling establishment is implementing a
new, more openly totalitarian structure of society and method of rule.
They are revoking our constitutional and human rights, transferring
power out of sovereign governments and democratic institutions into
unaccountable global entities that have no allegiance to any nation or
its people.
That is what is happening … right now. It isn’t a TV show. It’s actually happening.
The time for people to “wake up” is over. At this point, you either
join the fight to preserve what is left of those rights, and that
sovereignty, or you surrender to the “New Normal,” to global-capitalist
totalitarianism. I couldn’t care less what you believe about the virus,
or its mutant variants, or the experimental “vaccines.” This isn’t an
abstract argument over “the science.” It is a fight … a political,
ideological fight. On one side is democracy, on the other is
totalitarianism. Pick a fucking side, and live with it.
Anyway, here’s where we are at the moment, and how we got here, just the broad strokes.
libertytree | Google said it removed the content because “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines."
Paul said in response, which is no longer on YouTube, “YouTube said the video violated their policy because of my comments on masks, and that they don’t allow videos that contradict government’s guidance on COVID."
Sen. Paul expressed concern that Big Tech companies are behaving like the government during a press call on Tuesday.
“I’m not sure when YouTube became an arm of the government, and I’m not really sure it’s good for journalism to also be an arm of the government without any repercussions or push back, Paul said.
Paul said that private companies have the right to host content or not as they please, Big Tech's lack of interest in free speech is concerning.
“As a libertarian-leaning Senator, I think private companies have the right to ban me if they want to, but I think it is really anti-free speech, anti-progress of science, which involves skepticism and argumentation to arrive at the truth,” Paul said.
He continued, “We realize this in our court systems that both sides present facts on either side of a question and complete an adversarial process to reach the truth in each case.”
The senator said such decisions being made by Big Tech companies could also affect the quality of journalism.
“Journalism isn’t far from that and in some ways, the adversarial part of the courtroom is ideally what you would find in journalism, where both sides would present facts, there is a period of argumentation and people figure out the truth for themselves,” Paul explained.
Paul added, “YouTube and Google though, have become an entity so huge that they think they are the arbitrator of truth.”
theguardian |The Delta variant was
first identified in the United States in April and by May it was well
onto its exponential growth curve, doubling every 10-12 days, as the
basis for Covid infections, now reaching over 96% prevalence. Ironically,
on 1 May, the CDC announced it would stop monitoring post-vaccination
breakthrough infections unless they led to hospitalizations or deaths.
This decision can be seen as exceptionally ill-advised and has led to a
country flying blind in its attempt to confront its fourth wave of
infections – one that has rapidly led to well over 100,000 new cases per
day and more than 60,000 hospitalizations, both higher than the US
first and second pandemic waves. It is unfathomable that we do not know
how many of these are occurring in people who were vaccinated.
Without
tracking, we have no idea of the proportion of people fully vaccinated
who are getting ill, hospitalized, or dying. There is no question the
frequency of requiring hospitalization is increasing, as reflected by
data from some counties that are tracking breakthroughs on their own and
reporting that 10 to 20% of admissions are in vaccinated individuals.
But we have no denominator.
Why is this so
critically important? For one, the false sense of security transmitted
by CDC’s lack of data in the Delta wave likely fosters complacency and
lack of protective measures such as masks and distancing. The mission of
the CDC to prevent such illness, and the first step is to collect the
relevant data. It would be very simple to know the vaccination status of
every American with a breakthrough infection admitted to the hospital
with Covid-19, along with key demographics such as age, time from
vaccination, which vaccine, and co-existing medical conditions. The PCR
diagnostic test for each patient has an accompanying cycle threshold
(Ct) value, which is an indicator of viral load, and would be important
to track. Moreover, the sample of the virus could undergo genomic
sequencing to determine whether there has been further evolution of the
virus and blood samples for neutralizing antibody levels that could be
obtained in as many patients as possible. Contact tracing of these
individuals would help determine the true rate of transmission from
other vaccines, something that is pure conjecture. Such systematic
collection of data would be the foundation for understanding who is at
risk for breakthrough infections, determining the current level of
effectiveness of vaccines and whether, when, and in whom, booster shots
should be recommended. It is remarkable that none of this is getting
done for hospitalized patients, who represent an undetermined fraction
of the people who are getting quite ill, some requiring monoclonal
antibody infusions to pre-empt getting admitted.
This
is not by any means the first breakdown of the CDC in managing and
communicating about the pandemic. But with billions of dollars allocated
to CDC earlier this year for improved Covid-19 surveillance, this
represents a blatant failure that is putting millions of vaccinated
Americans at unnecessary risk for breakthrough infections and leaving us
without a navigational system for the US Delta wave.
HuffPost |As I write this now, I’m midway through my quarantine, still symptomatic and contagious. At first, I was worried that my condition would worsen, but it hasn’t been too bad so far, like a persistent summer cold.
The at-home kit recommended retesting after three days. I waited until Day 5 and tested positive again, which could be a detection of dead virus particles since, according to the CDC, COVID is rarely detectable via the test after six days.
Slowly, I’m feeling better, although the brain fog, the inability to latch onto a chain of thought long enough to get my day started or get some serious work done, has been the most worrisome.
So far, my other symptoms have included a general achiness and grogginess, head and chest congestion, headaches and, in the first few days, a lot of sneezing. And, just like when I was sick last summer, I haven’t lost my sense of smell or taste, which only reaffirms my belief that I previously had coronavirus.
Thanks to the vaccine, none of my symptoms have been severe, and they weren’t serious for any of my family members either. In fact, my brother, mother and cousin all seemed to make a full recovery within one to two weeks. But if the delta variant infected my whole family, it suggests that we still need to keep masking up in public, maintaining social distance and being cautious socially.
The federal government only keeps track of these breakthrough cases if they result in death or hospitalization. In fact, the CDC hasn’t been tracking mild breakthroughs since May. That means the number of breakthrough cases throughout the country, the truenumber of infected people, is likely much higher.
To think just three weeks ago I flew on an airplane, happily went out to restaurants and bars with my colleagues in Seattle, comfortable enough to sometimes unmask in public. But did I infect more people? Did I feed the deadly surge of this delta variant?
I feel guilty, but I also feel greatly misled. Our leaders told us vaccinated people could go out in public again without their masks. They told us we would be safe, that others would be safe. That turned out to be false.
None of this should be a surprise to me or to the experts. This is what viruses do: They spread, they evolve, they spread some more. And I’m not knocking the vaccines. Those who haven’t been vaccinated should do so immediately.
Even if you still catch COVID, as I did, it will likely mitigate the symptoms, and it may reduce the spread to others. I’m very grateful for the vaccine, grateful that it protected my family from the worst that COVID can bring.
Yet, if we’re looking at the current infection rates across the country ― which are as bad as they were during this year’s fatal winter surge or in some caseseven worse ― then we as a nation need to recognize that just saying “get vaccinated” isn’t going to make the current COVID spike go away tomorrow.
Tens of millions of inoculations will take weeks to administer and weeks more to take effect. The delta variant is here, and allowing it to spread nearly unabated could create new, potentially more virulent versions of the virus, which (lest we forget) is how this highly contagious variant came to be in the first place.
ecosophia |Stage Seven: Don’t Breathe A Word Of This
There
was another reason for people to be suspicious, though that wasn’t
clear at first. Everyone who’s had to use Microsoft programs knows that
Bill Gates’ management style tends to produce second-rate, bug-ridden
products that don’t work the way they’re supposed to work, and have to
be pushed on reluctant consumers via high-pressure marketing and
monopolistic practices. It turns out that the same was true of the
biotechnology on which the Covid-19 vaccines are based. That would have
been discovered in the usual way during the two to five years of testing
a new vaccine normally gets, but the Covid vaccines didn’t get that;
the first one to be authorized had a total of eight weeks of not
especially rigorous testing, the others didn’t get much more, and so a
far from minor problem slipped past. In the spring of 2021 word thus
began to trickle out that the Covid-19 vaccines had a serious problem
with ADE: once the initial protection wore off, a process which took a
few months, people who’d been vaccinated were much more likely to get
seriously ill from repeat exposure to Covid-19 than people who hadn’t.
Thus the federal government and the medical industry suddenly had a
self-inflicted disaster on their hands.
Stage Eight: Panic In The C-Suites
The
first response of the people in power, of course, was to find somebody
else to take the blame. That’s when politicians and the media turned on a
dime (again) and suddenly started admitting that the virus could have
come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That’s when Bill Gates
suddenly stopped being the poster child for the vaccine effort and got
dumped in a hurry by his wife and kids, and when Anthony Fauci suddenly
had to deal with a flurry of negative publicity and the unexplained
cancellation of his ghostwritten memoirs. The goal was to find
someone—Gates, Fauci, the Chinese, anyone—who could be made into the
fall guy and blamed for the impending mess. Apparently that first round
of bad news was followed by even worse news, however; I suspect that the
news was that the ADE caused by the vaccine had a noticeable fatality
rate, but that’s just a guess. One way or another, finding fall guys
wasn’t an adequate dodge any more, since at this stage it wasn’t just
careers that were at risk: it was potentially the viability of the
entire political-economic establishment.
Stage Nine: Things Get Serious
All
of a sudden, as a result, it was no longer enough to vaccinate 70% of
the US population. Everyone without exception had to get vaccinated—if
everyone gets the vaccine, after all, it will be easier to claim that
what’s happening is a nasty new variant rather than vaccine-driven ADE,
since nobody will be able to point out that the unvaccinated aren’t
getting it. All of a sudden, officials dropped the (inaccurate) claim
that the vaccines keep you from getting Covid-19. New outbreaks flared
in which most people who got sick had been fully vaccinated; stories
surfaced in the media about how strange it was that so many people were
getting really nasty summer colds; the labor shortage somehow just kept
getting worse and other shortages snowballed, but if you suggested that
it was because too many people were sick you could count on being
shouted down. Authorities began to talk earnestly about how a new
variant might show up soon that would kill a third of the people who
caught it. Under normal circumstances, there’s no way they could know
that in advance. It makes perfect sense, however, if the vaccines have
been found to cause serious ADE and they already have a good idea of
what the fatality rate will be.
This is where we are as I write this. If my hypothesis is right, here’s what we can expect.
Stage Ten: Hoping for a Miracle
As
ADE becomes more common, breakthrough infection clusters will pop up
with increasing frequency, and the higher the percentage of the
population in that region is vaccinated, the worse they will be.
Variants will be blamed for this. Word of the imminent crisis will
spread through the upper levels of society, however, causing
increasingly frantic and irrational behavior, until it becomes next to
impossible to get anything done if it depends on the government or big
corporations. Medical laboratories will scramble to find a way to
counteract ADE, though that’s been tried for decades now without
success. Meanwhile the people who refuse to get vaccinated won’t budge
no matter how much furious rhetoric and punitive policy gets dumped on
them. Once this becomes clear, authorities will insist that everyone but
a few holdouts has been vaccinated, in the fond hope that people will
believe them one more time.
Stage Eleven: Into The Endgame
When
ADE becomes too widespread to ignore and people begin to die in
significant numbers, expect governments to proclaim the arrival of the
predicted new hyper-lethal variant and impose a new round of shutdowns,
mask mandates, and the like. The media will insist that the people who
are dying are all unvaccinated as long as they can get away with it; pay
attention to the vaccination status and health outcomes of people you
know for a reality check. Unless some way of stopping ADE-enhanced
infections can be found in a hurry, medical systems will buckle under
the caseload and triage will become the order of the day. How soon this
will happen, if it does, is impossible to say in advance. It’s also
impossible to know in advance how soon it will become clear that the
vaccines are responsible—or just how violent a backlash against the
political and economic establishment this could provoke.
Celebrating 113 years of Mama Rosa McCauley Parks
-
*February 4, 1913 -- February 4, 2026*
*Some notes: The life of the courageous activist Mama Rosa McCauley Parks*
Mama Rosa's grandfather Sylvester Ed...
Monsters are people too
-
Comet 3I/Atlas is on its way out on a hyberbolic course to, I don't know
where. I do know that 1I/Oumuamua is heading for the constellation Pegasus,
and ...
Remembering the Spanish Civil War
-
This year marks the 90th anniversary of the launch of the Spanish Civil
War, an epoch-defining event for the international working class, whose
close study...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
-
(Damn, has it been THAT long? I don't even know which prompts to use to
post this)
SeeNew
Can't get on your site because you've gone 'invite only'?
Man, ...
First Member of Chumph Cartel Goes to Jail
-
With the profligate racism of the Chumph Cartel, I don’t imagine any of
them convicted and jailed is going to do too much better than your run of
the mill ...
