For anyone who reads this blog, but doesn't also read Divemedic :
1) Stop not doing that. He writes an eclectic collection, and covers more things we agree on than disagree, since ever. You'll find good stuff there.
2) He's recently changed ED jobs, and posted a couple of updates on how COVID is going down Florida way at his new shop. You should read them both.
I commented there, but for anyone's benefit, here's the same info I shared from hereabouts.
From an average of zero cases most of this year, my ED in Southern Califrutopia is now seeing 3-6 new COVID cases/day over the past couple of weeks.
The youngest was a patient several weeks old. The oldest was 102.
Of the ones we've seen, we've admitted exactly Z-E-R-O cases for solely COVID signs/symptoms. We routinely do COVID tests on patients we're admitting, particularly those with URI/respiratory symptoms, or suspicious chest X-rays.
None of them had COVID symptoms serious enough to merit hospitalization; the ones admitted were for other problems almost or entirely unrelated. For some of them, their signs/symptoms of COVID were so subtle as to be non-existent.
Which means five, ten, or eleventy mutations later, COVID is now "just the flu".
Three years ago was quite simply horrific. Now, for most of the ones testing positive, it's a nothingburger.
{For those curious: We use a bedside 10-minute test cassette, very similar to a home preg test. One snot swab, swished and dribbled, positive or negative. Period. Usually pops in 1-2 minutes, but the book says it's not over for 10 minutes. Whatever. Flu is a separate swab, and different test, and that one is run in the lab within an hour; it's the same one we've used for flu for a decade. COVID was never the flu, and the flu was never mistaken for COVID, now or ever.}
And the 2/3rds of staff who got double- and triple-vaxxed have all had a new case of COVID. Some of them, for the fifth or sixth time.
Of the one-third of us who refused Death Jabs, only one tested positive for COVID this time around; the rest of us are COVID-free, and have been. All the vaxxhole shit-talkers giving us endless mountains of sass for not getting the vaxx two years ago are now deeply submerged, running silent, and gone deep.
They don't want to even mention the topic any more.
This last is completely understandable, because no one likes seconds on a shitburger.
The death rate during peak initial-wave COVID was 1-3%. Annual flu is 0.1%, since before anyone reading this was born.
If anyone is dying of COVID now, they're either extremely fragile, or someone was holding a pillow over their face to get their life insurance.
Wash your hands, and stay home if you're sick. Kids too. I still don't want your goddamned colds and flu bugs. Once school is back in session, all your mindless little juvenile spawn become petrie dishes for whatever URI crud has been waiting to spring free and sweep the nation, just like it does every year.
If you get sick, a URI virus wants rest, and fluids (alcohol and caffeine are diuretics, and make URIs worse, not better). Think water, gatorade/non-caffeinated sports drinks, soup, jello, etc. If you aren't peeing crystal clear, you're under-hydrated.
And COVID or not, unless your SpO2 reading is <90% on room air, no one cares. (Fingertip pulse oximeters to check your SpO2 go for $12 on Amazon and under $20 at the drug store, and they work fabulously well. You should have put one in your first aid kit three years ago, and/or keep one in the household medical cabinet, beside your thermometer.)
Don't come to the ED if you're not sicker than that; stay your ass home and self-treat. If you're panicky, call your family doctor for a prescription. Ivermectin is now an approved treatment for COVID, btw, and the EUA for most of the COVID experimental Death Vaxxes has been rescinded. Avoid all of them like the plague itself.
But anyone telling you to be afraid of COVID at this point is trying to steal another election. And/or has a 60 IQ. (The two are not only not mutually exclusive, they tend to be the same circle on a Venn diagram.)
And for the 12 millionth time: If you ever wore a simple face diaper mask, with the misbegotten impression that was to protect yourself from anything, you're in the same diagram circles, above. And always were. Like we told you, then and now.
That concludes your 2023 COVID briefing.
TL;DR: You have actual real issues to deal with. Bank real assets; stockpile food; and you never have enough sturdy boots, sturdy friends, and ready ammunition. Hard days are coming.
See to all that, if you please.
The unravelling of society accelerates exactly like a pandemic curve: slowly, then all at once.
This is a published paper, copiously foot-noted, by a retired MD (thus immune from career reprisals), detailing the entirety of the COVIDiocy we all experienced and continue to see, from 2020-present.
Read The Whole Thing (take your blood pressure medication first) if you can tolerate it. I'd give it about a 95% accuracy rating (a few of his sources are questionable, but not automatically suspect). It's still an excellent overview, far superior to anything you'd get outside of an honest documentary on the subject, which thing will happen When Hell Freezes Over.
More importantly: go to the right column at the site, click on the "Other Formats" PDF option, and archive the whole thing on your machine. To prevent TPTB from memory-holing all of it, and to use as ammunition when TPTB gaslight this, lest it receive wide distribution, and the torches and pitchforks come calling.
At the end of the day, the DNA-altering not-a-Vaxx was the bigger disease, and the lies used to cover it and its consequences up constitute a modern-day Holocaust, in plain sight. And you were the target.
God help you or yours if any of you got the jab, because the sequellae of that fall under GOK: God Only Knows. By design. Evidence thus far suggests you're screwed, and only those who live long enough will see the next 80 years of fallout from it.
{For the inevitable 2 or 3 Low-Comprehension Usual Suspects: If you're going to accuse me, 180° out from the actual reality, of "shilling for" anything to do with this nonsense, go do your homework, find that moment, and post a link to the articles in your imagination where I wrote that, which are all still unaltered, right where I left them, and show your work, or rant on along with the other voices in your head, unlistened to by anyone, and remain there in perpetuity. Words mean things, and when you can't find it, it's because it didn't happen, no matter what the Voices In Your Head tell you. That's how Reality works. If that's too hard for you, enjoy oblivion, and continue to suck on it.}
So, it turns out the reason the ED was short-staffed the last two weeks, is that something over 50% of the ED staff, and including several of the docs - the ones who were "fully vaxxed" and boostered - all got Kung Flu. (We don't test for variants as such - and neither does anyone else, BTW, in case you wondered about that b.s. - so no one has any wild idea what strain got them).
Unvaxxed me: still negative for two solid years, and still forced to test twice a week at work.
Anonymous Idiots in the crowd: Keep telling me masks and handwashing don't work.
Similar stories in the rest of the hospital.
So now, HR and Infection Control have told them to return to work after just five days. (Because Kung Flu magically dissipates in health care workers after a few days, apparently.)
They're worried they're still contagious. I'm worried they are too.
The one bright light: After three bites at the apple, many of them have said "Fuck another booster. Fire me, or fuck off, but I'm not getting any more of those worthless jabs!"
So they're not jet-fueled geniuses, but they are teachable.
Masktardation is a thing, and it cuts both ways. Don't be a masktard.
Some blogs, even ones which we visit and pass along content here, apparently either desperate for content, and/or overcome by pathological levels of confirmation bias, go dredging old news to come up with that content. (Kids with a blog, we beseech you earnestly, don't do this. It rarely goes well, and will nearly always blow up in your face.) Kill your own meat, kids, and eat it fresh, not months-old. Case in point:
The Federalist has now breathlessly announced that Kung Flu is an "airborne" virus. Based on the pronouncements of "medical experts" (our emphasis, with appropriate derision) from the Communist News network, CNN.
Firstly, when you're listening to any of the usual gang of five-star gold-plated idiots at CNN, you deserve what you get, and even the fucktards at The Federalist who pointed at that bunch of @$$clowns should have known better than to go there, yet away they went.
Secondly, much like that term in a military context, the designation of a virus as "airborne" has actual criteria, which Kung Flu does not meet, and has never met thus far. It's a virus transmitted by droplet transmission and contact transmission. (And nota bene, gentle reader, that the @$$clowns at CDC and numerous sites have deliberately hazed and clusterfornicated up all those definitions in their ceaseless efforts to karenize Kung Flu into the Virus From Hell; I had to go all the way to that bastion of accuracy, Wikipedia, which was the seventh or eighth listed definition for "airborne" transmission, to get an accurate and correct definition that hadn't been completely and purposely fucked up to make Kung Flu fit that mold, which it does not meet to date.)
For reference: "Airborne or aerosol transmission is transmission of an infectious disease through small particles suspended in the air." (Emphasis mine, for a reason.)
Briefly, something like TB is airborne. The bacteria wafts around and floats in air for prolonged periods of time (we're talking half an hour to hours) after mere exhalation, let alone coughs or sneezes. This is what makes TB or any airborne disease such a royal PITA, medically and epidemiologically. One person with TB can infect dozens in a restaurant or movie theater in a few minutes' time, and did before antibiotics, and still do. Which is why places where TB is endemic and widespread, like slam-packed Asian nations, are places where wearing a cloth surgical mask over the nose and mouth is a daily thing going back decades. (We'll return to tht point momentarily as well.)
But then, the dutiful Karens at Wikipedia, not content to leave the science alone, have gotten into the moving goalposts act, which is what happens when high school and college "experts" are left to edit any repository of knowledge, with all the experience of Gilligan playing with plastic explosive:
"Airborne transmission traditionally has been considered distinct from transmission by droplets, but this is incorrect." - same Wikitardia article
With a footnote that links directly to some hogwash entitled "COVID-19 has redefined airborne transmission".
By the numbers:
1) Airborne transmission is, is, IS distinct from transmission by droplets. If you have a plant mister, you get this. Blast a mist of aerosolized water into the air, and there's a mist cloud there, briefly. Unlike, e.g. tuberculosis bacteria, that vapor cloud isn't there very long. (For instant proof, try that on a hot day.)
2) COVID-19 didn't "re-define" airborne transmission, but jackholes trying to make COVID-19 do something which it manifestly does not do, have changed the definition of "airborne" to suit their purpose, by first ass-raping the English language and medical definitions.
QED
Language doesn't work like that, especially in science, versus in political advocacy.
Language, especially medical and scientific, is not fungible, despite the earnest opposing desires of crack-smoking Leftards.
For those with military training, it's the difference between getting hit with nerve gas, versus by a projectile. If you're standing in someone's cough- or sneeze-spew cone, you're being hit with a droplet. It's a projectile. If you walk into a cloud of VX, you're getting hit with something airborne. And minute sneeze particles hanging about for a few minutes is not the same as something that lingers for hours. Period.
But wait, there's more.
Then, our heroes, both the blog in question, and The Federalist, not content with that much fail, go far beyond stupid, to recockulous.
"Joe Biden’s COVID-19 adviser Dr. Michael Osterholm similarly agreed that wearing masks is “largely” nonsense and that “trying to stop the flu [another respiratory virus] is like trying to stop the wind.”
Point of Order: So CNN "experts" weren't stupid enough, now you're going to reference Joe Biden's "science adviser"?!? Well-played, soopergeniusii.
And then point to a "meta-analysis". Which isn't a clinical study. It's a study of other clinical studies.
What could possibly go wrong with that?
If you do a meta-analysis of physics studies, published by Einstein, Fermi, Richard Feynman, and Sir Isaac Newton, you might have something worth reporting. If instead you do a meta-analysis of studies published by Gilligan, Goober from Mayberry, Inspector Clouseau, and Baldrick from Blackadder, well, not so much.
Because you lump all the studies in together, and assume that their methodology wasn't hugely suspect, and that their results are repeatable.
Put another way: Exactly how much straight horsehsit are you okay with being cooked into your meatloaf?
Now bear in mind that most of the "studies" are pure horseshit, and re-answer the question.
That the overwhelming bulk of such studies are results that are totally unreproduceable has been an open secret in research science for two decades. SiG revisits this topic frequently, and it's gotten worse than 70% bullshit, year after year. It's something like 90%+, when last I looked. "Meta-analysis" sweeps all that under the rug into a nice hidden shitball of fail.
That's just the overall problem. Next, there's methodology.
IOW, if you want to study something, you have to account for all variables. ALL variables. Ideally, you want to get down to studying just one. Hopefully, the exact one you're hypothesizing about.
For instance, if you want to know the exact temperature at which water freezes, you do at testing at 14.7 psi, I.e. atmospheric average pressure at sea level. Otherwise, when someone tries to replicate your data in Denver, it won't work. You standardize ambient humidity at, e.g., 50%. Or else someone in Panama, at 99% humidity, and someone in Anchorage in January, when humidity is 2%, are going to fail to get the same results, and thus doubt your "proof". And you use absolutely pure sterilized ionized water, with 0% salinity, otherwise, someone trying seawater, or sediment and bacteria-laden swamp water, are going to announce loudly and publicly that your research is horse cobblers. So then, with only the ambient water temperature a factor, at standard sea level pressure, and 0% salinity, you freeze water 100 times, and it keeps coming to 32° F. time after time after time, and you've got something you can publish.
And, for bonus points, if you get random other numbers, you've failed, but you've discovered a hidden variable, an Unknown Unknown, and your new job is to find that little bastard, and track down the Truth. This is why Edison tried and failed hundreds of times to invent a working lightbulb, until he'd weeded out all the variables, and it finally worked.
But grant-beholden scientists nowadays especially are too lazy for that. It's too hard; they know they're right, so they skip a few steps. And when someone checks their experiment, and it cannot be reproduced, it's so much crap. But the "scientist" who did the original experiment has "proved" that asbestos is harmless, and smoking causes no health problems, so the building material supplier or tobacco company who funded their "experiment' pays out, and they cash the check, and never look back. Have lab coat, will falsify data for cash.
Enter advocacy government.
Global warmism/climate change. Or gender dysphoria. And now, coronatardation and COVIDmania.
Suddenly, you're "testing" masks never designed to protect the wearer, and - mirabile dictu! - "masks don't work". (Somebody call Pasteur, Lister, and Semmelweiss, and tell them it's not germs, it's bad air floating in the phlogiston that cause diseases. I'll wait over here.)
There may be others in recent times, but I'm aware of precisely one proper study of the effectiveness of cloth and surgical face masks, used as intended, using documented infected persons, in a study that lasted years, and controlling for the only variable that matters: does the virus get out?
TL;DR:
No mask - 100 to 1000 coronavirus viral particles land in a viral particle chamber in front of their face after 30 minutes.
Bog-average surgical mask - 1 viral particle escaped. IOW, a 99.9% to 99.99% prevention of viral load down to 5 microns or less was achieved over 30 minutes' exposure.
None of the studies referenced by The Federalist tested that. They tested whether the masks protect the wearer. [Pro-tip, fucktards: they are neither designed nor intended for that, since ever. You could look it up.] This is like testing parachutes to see how many people wearing them didn't land on the earth. Fucktard Science 101 level error there, geniuses.
They tested whether the masks stopped everything, for unknown long periods of time, e.g., during extended surgical procedures.
In one "study" cited, they found that wearing a double t-shirt mask increased the level of virus expelled above the level transmitted by wearing nothing. [Pro-tip: if you can't figure out why this is prima facie recockulously impossible, try putting a t-shirt over the gas nozzle at the local station, and see if that delivers more gasoline into your car's tank. IOW, you can't exceed the results of no mask, under any circumstances, unless you're having people blow through a fully colonized petri dish of germs grown for days beforehand.]
When a test succeeded exactly as expected, it was labelled as "apples and oranges".
We could go on and on, as these assclowns have, but their point is pointless.
When you keep pointing to retards, and bullshit studies, and then act like Little Jack Horner pulling a plum out of your ass, you're just an idiot.
When you can't account for a thousand other things, like people wearing their masks on their chin, or touching everything with gloves, and then taking those gloves off with their teeth to touch their cellphones, or don't wash their nasty hands after they crap and rub feces all over them and then finger-bang everything they touch afterwards with their poo, the problem isn't masking or not, it's societal retardation. And dozens of variables you forgot to control out of the experiment.
Masks Work - As Designed
A surgical or cotton mask isn't something you wear to protect yourself. Write that on your hand with a Sharpie in case you're too stupid to remember that. You wear one to protect other people from you. For the same reason you put a diaper on a baby's ass. It's not there to protect the baby from shitting himself. If this needs further explanation, you're not smart enough to be let out in public without the chaperone from the short bus field trip, and you can probably tell the class what the glass on its windows tastes like.
If your aim is self-protection, you need to be wearing a properly fitted and fit-tested N95, or better. Got facial hair that prevents a proper seal? You're f**ked. Haven't been fit-tested? You might be f**ked. Don't know how to put it on right and seal it properly? You're f**ked. That's why the surgeon general correctly told you not to bother with an N95, unless you're going to do the homework necessary. Only afterwards did CNN and Fauci retardedly conflate that down to "masks don't work".
Anybody who was ever in a military or police tear gas training chamber exercise knows what I'm talking about here.
People too stupid to understand that were very entertaining to those of us in those chambers who watched them spaz out and lose their shit, choke, and puke, because they didn't pay attention. Don't be That Guy.
What Masks Won't Do
An N95 won't protect you from anyone if you wear it wrong, or it doesn't fit and seal.
A surgical or cotton mask isn't there to protect you from anyone else.
Any mask is pointless if you aren't in close proximity to the infected, and you aren't infected yourself.
In your car, by yourself, wearing a mask? You're a fucktard. Walking outside, or exercising, by yourself, with a mask on? You're a fucktard. In a population that isn't infected with COVID, flu, or anything else, and wearing a mask? You're a fucktard.
The problem comes with that last part: knowing whether you, or anyone else, is infected. Want to go mask-free? ROWYBS. And so will everyone else around you. Which works fine (just like with VD and AIDS, and merrily sport-f**king people.) Until it doesn't. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
I've been wearing masks of all levels, and putting them on people, professionally, for decades. They piss me off mightily. But if you cough or sneeze or spit, fuck your comfort. And if I have to be around you, and you could give me something nasty, or lethal, fuck my comfort too. Harden the fuck up.
When enough people play stupid games, the professional jackasses in politics feel honor-bound to nanny them.
When they have a spring-loaded fuck-with-everyone-and-control-their-every-waking-activity setting, then it becomes the shitshow we've lived for the last two years and counting.
And when intelligence is a constant, but the population is increasing, the mean IQ is dropping like CNN's ratings.
Bloggers and the usual gang of science-impaired idiots at The Federalist should probably stop hitching their wagons to the fucktards at CDC and ABCNNBCBS. Unless you don't want people to be able to tell the difference.
Got my first COVID patient since September today. So I guess that means that mini-vacation's over. (We've gotten maybe one or two a week overall, but it's been pretty sporadic, and our outside COVID isolation tents came down for good in early fall). This one came to me.
(Mind you, this is supposed to be at a time when "cases" are rampant all over So Cal, and rising like a rocket launch. Maybe they are, somewhere. In a galaxy far, far away. A year ago, we were carpeted wall to wall in those literally deathly ill, with COVID, and because of COVID. Now, no such thing is happening hereabouts.)
So was this pt. unvaccinated? Like the drumbeat the idiot media (but I repeat myself) has been beating endlessly and crying "Wolf!" about breathlessly for weeks, eleventy times an hour?
O Hell no.
Fully vaccinated. And boosted.
Did a rapid COVID test. Supposed to wait several minutes to read it. Except he/she/it* popped positive in about half a minute.
Winner! Winner! Chicken dinner!
Probably will get hospitalized, for a host of reasons. But it's kicking his/her/its* ass too.
So maybe since the first three shots didn't work, he/she/it* should get a fourth one, if he/she/it* survives this?
Why stop at four? Why not just make auto-injectors, like COVID Epi-pens, and have everyone inclined just jab themselves 5-10 times a day, forever, right? Maybe make a COVID vaxx salt lick, or COVID Lifesavers, and people could pop them like Skittles 24/7/365.
Meanwhile, still among the hardcore refuseniks at work, I self-test 2x/week (apparently, until Hell freezes over), and remain completely uninfected after 2 solid years of working amidst the plague throng.
Including this guy/gal/thing*, who had been un-isolated and seen by several staff members for two hours before we did a routine test prior to admission. And it's a pretty safe bet his/her/its* spouse has got it too.
I have a suggestion about what TPTB can do with the Not-A-Vaxxes:
UPDATE 12/27:
And two more COVID patients last night, all fully vaxxed and boostered, including one patient in their twenties, who has now nonetheless gotten full-blown COVID twice. And who, btw, describes this bout, after three shots, as much worse than last year's round, acquired after just two vaxx shots.
Clever readers may deduce a trend here.
*(HIPPA, bitchez. You can't identify any of these patients from anything I said. I may have made it all up. This blog may be a figment of your imagination too. At any rate, no actual patient information has been disclosed, because you don't know nothing about nobody.)
I see where several blogs (and I'm not gonna point fingers) are commenting on Vodkapundit's article on PJ Media, regarding Italy "revising" their Kung Flu death numbers.
Except, not so much. Italy did not go all Democrat on Glenn Youngkin's vote tallies with their COVID death rate, and just try to erase 97% of them. Anyone who suggested that isn't very bright, or worse. They simply moved most of them from "dead only from COVID" to "dead fromCOVID and more". What, people with pre-existing serious chronic conditions might have died from COVID because those exact conditions made them less able to cope with a debilitating systemic illness? WHO KNEW? I mean, besides every doctor except maybe Dr. Phil, Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Seuss, or Dr. Doolittle.
Look, I like Stephen Green (Vodkapundit), he's a funny guy, and I've watched him for years with Bill Whittle, but the way he's portraying this is flat-out moronic (and face-palmingly wrong), and he needs to put the bottle down before he blogs anything further. And when the alcohol wears off, he's going to have a helluva time getting his foot out of his mouth on this. It's that stupid. Or else deliberately deceptive.
Point of order:
Those people in Italy didn't all spontaneously die without COVID either, and they had all those chronic conditions for years and decades without dying - until they got COVID.
So this is Italy re-arranging deck chairs, and tidying up their casualty lists a very, very small bit.
Not lowering the overall CFR for COVID. Just for "COVID alone".
The videos of dead people stacking up outside hospitals there, or Italian hospitals chock-a-block with the sick and dying, multiple hospitals being overwhelmed, and doctors triaging people over 70 to "wait outside and die quietly", while letting people under 70 into the hospitals for treatment, because they didn't have the resources to care for both groups - like has happened never in modern peacetime history with "just the flu" - didn't just suddenly not happen. And Green knows it.
So let's not pretend those other 97% died from "something else". Didn't happen. They died from COVID plus comorbidities, not the other conditions alone, which exact comorbidities made them a lot more susceptible to dying than people who were otherwise healthy, and got COVID alone.
All this revision tells us is that 97% of the people who died with COVID had a comorbidity, and only 3% of those who died from COVID alone didn't have any such thing.
So the COVID CFR didn't drop by 97%. And Green is either too stupid to notice that he left off the key word "alone" from that sentence, or he's deliberately lying like a sonofabitch. There is no third option besides stupidity or mendacity: he's either a moron, or a liar. It's not a pretty place for him to be.
Nice try, but no cigar.
The COVID alone CFR did drop by 97%. BFD.
COVID still killed just as many people in Italy today as it did when originally reported. Anyone who couldn't suss that out on their own in 0.2 seconds is simply not tall enough for this ride.
Italy is simply acknowledging that a host of conditions gave COVID a great big boost at knocking people off at 28X the rate, in Italy overall, as "just the flu", with those having significant comorbidities like obesity, hypertension, COPD, and cardiac disease, at a tremendous disadvantage compared to people without them.
This "news" is about as earth-shattering as telling me really short people have trouble seeing over the heads of any crowd, and that fat people are easier prey for predators than skinny ones.
And it doesn't change the COVID mortality rate a whit. It simply bifurcates it into those already hamstrung by other problems (97%), and those whacked by the 'rona outright, despite being healthy (3%). Total dead: 100% of those reported dead in the first place. Gee thanks, I feel so much safer now.
This is an exercise in precision, not a revision of absolute COVID mortality downward by 33X.
Telling me people with cardiac conditions survive head-on impacts more poorly than people without them doesn't make head-on collisions safer, either.
There's a lot of people who should know better celebrating a non-news item that is functionally meaningless regarding COVID, and a lot of people who are flaming statistical and mathematical blithering idiots cock-a-doodle-dooing because they're so stupid they don't know what they don't know.
From Fran Porretto's blog, this past week, some points to ponder:
All the following factors play into an American’s decision to accept or not accept The Jab:
The probability of catching the disease.
The probability that the disease will be fatal.
The probability that the vaccine will prevent the disease.
The probability that the vaccine will have side effects worse than the disease.
Awareness of alternative approaches and the probabilities associated with them.
Any incentives and coercions associated with accepting or not accepting the vaccine.
The probability of significant changes to those incentives and coercions in one’s personal context.
The most significant thing about the above factors is that all of them have large error bars. No one’s sense for any of the probabilities above can be firm enough for confident decision-making.
That isn’t the case with most older vaccines. The polio vaccine, for example, is well understood. It has been demonstrated to be effective and safe, in the 99%-plus sense in which those words are usually used. But the record of polio vaccine in use is open to anyone who cares to study it. And the polio vaccine wasn’t urged – in some districts, forced — upon us by political forces and agencies with spotty records for veracity.
In other words, we are being asked to make a potentially life-altering (possibly life ending) decision under a dense, dark cloud of uncertainty. In such conditions, the choice made by some will appear unreasonable to others, perhaps even hysterical.
(BTW, his rationale stated for not getting the jab is beyond dispute, and similar to my own, though I have a number of additional reasons, which I won't go into at this point. He mave have some additional reasons as well, but the only one he expressed therein is merely legal. My own are political, legal, philosophical, medical, moral, and religious, any one of which would be sufficient for carrying the point, but the weight of all of them makes it an absolute root-hog-or-die no-go decision for me, forever, and I'm willing to play with lives - mine and theirs - as poker chips in that dispute.)
However, his points aren't nearly as murky as he states.
In order:
The probability of catching the disease
While there are dozens of variables, maybe hundreds, this isn't that hard.
Per the Johns-Hopkins Kung Flu map/data page, a cursory look shows the US with a smidge over 36M documented infections. Stay out of the weeds about how accurate the tests were, are, or will be, and focus on a simple reality. There are about 330M people in the US. So your raw shot at getting Kung Flu, over 18 months, has been about 1 chance in 9, or 11% (36 divided by 330 + 10.9%). It's higher in NYFC, suburban Califrutopia, or any major city, and damned near nil in BFE, WY or the Dakotas. And that's after 18 months of this nonsense.
Yes, growth can become exponential, but it literally fell off a cliff last February, when everyone stopped being the World's Biggest Jackasses after ever-bigger holiday gatherings for Labor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years'. This is because overall, on average, people are bastard-covered bastards, with bastard filling.
The same thing happens with flu, bubonic plague, Ebola, measles, and every other epidemic or pandemic. When people stop spreading the plague du jour by being raging jackasses, either voluntarily or mandatorily, it tapers off. Hopefully before reaching a pK of 100%.
So if you act like a jackass, and hang around with jackasses, as always, when you play stupid games, you'll win stupid prizes. In this case, Kung Flu.
But the average person's chance for getting it can be curtailed just as easily. So on average, in any given year, your raw chance at getting it is right around 10%. (And BTW, the vaxx does nothing whatsoever, on its own, to alter that percentage. Individual behavior once vaxxed, however, increases your odds for getting Kung Flu, and passing it to others. We'll get to that.)
The probability that the disease will be fatal
This past spring, we ran the numbers of 26 states plus the District of Corruption (out of 50 states +). Before politicization, and the rampant Covidiocy from most of America (and the world) having less grasp of actual science of anything, especially epidemiology, than they do of the efficacy of washing their hands before they eat or after they crap, the worldwide accepted CFR for any given coronavirus was 1-5%. Period. (No amount of hand-waving and goat sacrifice will suddenly transmogrify that number down to 0.1%, or 0.000001%, or any other damned thing. If you're doing that, or trying it, you're the witch doctor in that equation. Put down the rattle and bones please.) With Solomonic precision, we assumed that Kung Flu would probably split the middle of that bell curve, assuming no further precautions were attempted.
Well, lo and behold, Hawaii, isolated by an entire ocean, separated into multiple individual islands, and sealed off from air or boat travel for months, had a COVID CFR (deaths-to-cases) raw average of 0.5%. That was the only state we found that got under 1%. NYFS and Joisy, the over-achievers in the group, after leaving the NYFC Subway open every day for months during the height of the pandemic, without even sanitizing the cars in any way overnight for months, and mandating infected elderly be housed in with uninfected and debilitated potential infectees, managed to achieve 2.8% and 2.9% CFRs, respectively. Those are the ends of the curve, for the 26+ states we looked at. (You want to check all 50, knock yourself out.) The nationwide average was about 1.9%. This after draconian nationwide and worldwide shutdowns, mask mandates (observed to degrees ranging from solid to not-a-fucking-bit), the halt of all travel, tourism, air line flights, conventions, employment, or school in the country overall, and in at least 45 of 50 states. Which, we point out for the thick-skulled, is doing a wee bit more than the assumed not-a-fucking-thing when we selected 3% as the round average.
IOW, we nailed this. {Haters, suck on that, and enjoy your 6' party sub sh*t sandwich.}
Mathtards who try to lump the uninfected into their totals to get some recockulous lower CFR are quite simply too short for the internet, and too stupid to know what they don't know. The COVID CFR is damned near exactly 3%, and in all but the afore-mentioned case of Hawaii, fell between the 1% and 5% goalposts, just as unpoliticized science told you it would, from before this was fornicated 50 ways to Sunday by known asshats like Fauch the Grouch.
So you can expect, apart from other factors, a 97-98% chance of survival.
If you weigh 350 pounds, smoke 3 packs a day, have diabetes, emphysema, congestive heart failure, asthma, and you're aged 70+, your survival odds drop appreciably. At the other end of the bell curve, if you're 20, run marathons, have 8% body fat, and bench press V-8 engines, your odds go up in the same way. IOW, math and statistics have not ceased to function just because TPTB listen to idiots. That said, healthy 20 year olds can still die, and train-wreck old bastards in the declining years may survive. It's just not the way to bet. This can all be filed under "Duh."
The probability that the vaccine can prevent the disease
Alone among the list in the easiest answer to arrive at, that probability, per the CDC, Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson and Johnson, and everyone with an IQ above room temperature in Buffalo in January with the windows open, have pegged that probability at exactly 0.000%. ever.
Not 90+%.
Z-E-R-O.
Getting the jab means you can still get COVID again, still get sick from it, and absolutely can continue to pass it on to everyone you contact, like Johnny Appleseed with a sack full of Covid virus and a backpack sidewalk blower. For prevention of anything, including needing to wear a snot mask, the vaccines, every damned last one, are all known and agreed to be, completely worthless.
Getting the vaxx does NOTHING to "help others". Let me repeat that point:
GETTING THE VAXX DOES NOTHING to "help others".
NOTHING.
Those same scientific entities all note that there's a possibility that the vaccine may confer you, the recipient, with lesser symptoms on subsequent go-arounds. Except when it doesn't. Which may sometimes mean the vaccinated will have worse symptoms than the unvaxxed.
Yes, really. Hand to God Almighty. You could look it up.
Notably, these truths aren't on the "Get Vaccinated" PSA posters or ads. Wonder why...
They didn't tell you. I just did. Sorry if this is news to you.
The probability that the vaccine will have side effects worse than the disease
This was poor wording on Fran's part.
The disease kills you. And in at least 7000 or so US cases to date, so does the vaccine.
So the way that was worded, the vaccine is just as bad as the disease, but not worse.
Oh, there are also another 6000+ people that we know about with permanent disabilities from the vaxx. Strokes, heart attacks, blindness, etc. It's on the CDC VAERS website. Go look. And BTW, those adverse reactions have nothing whatsoever to do with age or co-morbidities. Being debilitated, and having your young, healthy lifetime stolen overnight, coupled with a lifelong disability, may be considered by some people to be a fate worse than death. Especially with a disease with a 97+% survival rate.
There have been another 250,000 adverse effects reported. That we know about. All those numbers may have been fudged harder than Detroit election returns last November, and we'll probably never know that, or by how much, either. Ever.
What we do know is that of the 11% of the country that's gotten COVID, about 2% of that 11% died, and probably another 2-4% (SWAG there; feel free to link any actual specific numbers) were severely ill and hospitalized, some with permanent damage and disability as a result.
The probability of an adverse reaction (up to and including death) from the vaxx is about 0.2%, as far as we know.
So the vaccine, in raw numbers, is only about 1/10th as lethally harmful as the disease.
Unless you're one of the ones who dies, has a heart attack, stroke, and a small army of other serious consequences. Just like Kung Flu is no big deal to the 98% of people it doesn't kill. But if you die, or your dad, mom, brother, sister, etc, dies, it's kind of a bitch, and it doesn't matter to you at that point that you had good odds, but died anyway, does it?
FTR, in the 70s, there were a small number (53, nationwide) of deaths recorded from receiving Swine Flu vaccine. It was pulled from use immediately and in perpetuity, and that's the last you heard of that. COVID vaxx has killed at least 140 times as many people, yet it hasn't been pulled, and in fact, TPTB want to kill almost as many more to get to 100% vaxx numbers.
At gunpoint, if necessary. For your own good.
For comparison, when 19 ragheaded fanatics flew four planes into NYFC, the Pentagon, and a PA farm field, and killed only half as many people as the COVID vaxx has to date, we went to war worldwide, sent half the military of the US to kill the perpetrators, and laid waste to two entire countries. One wonders when the Army, Navy, Air Farce, and Marines will start napalming the CDC, White House, Congress, Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson and Johnson, which would seem to be absolutely indicated, and which eventuality we would cheer until our throat gave out.
Just saying.
But wait! There's more!
The vaxx has only been around a few months, less than a year even in the earliest experimental forms.
We therefore have no wild idea what new Hells it will unleash on the recipients at 2,3,5,10, or 20 years out. Nor what happens when those recipients reproduce for the next generation and more. Nor will we until 2,3,5,10, and 20 years, and the births (or not) of succeeding generations.
I'm not speculating; just stating the obvious facts. These mystery concoctions may do unimaginable harm to everyone who's gotten it, and to succeeding generations, beyond anyone's wildest imaginations.
Awareness of alternative approaches and the probabilities associated with them
We know there are alternative treatments, which when applied early, make COVID less of a threat than a dose of clap. Hydrochloroquine (HCQ) has been used against malaria for decades, with safety far beyond anything seen for the COVID vaxx jabs. And while it was derided out of Trump Derangement Syndrome rather than scientific and medical rationales early on in this pandemic, even the Enemedia at ABCNNBCBS has had to circle back, and retract their farcical critiques, to admit it both works and is safe.
What we don't know is how much more effective and how much safer HCQ, Ivermectin, or anything else is, because there aren't billion$ of dollar$ in patent royaltie$ for sale worldwide at stake for drugs in common use for decades. Nor does the use of easily-manufactured and safe remedies offer TPTB the prospects of unbridled control over one's entire life, including the power of life and death, let alone work, travel, and such paltry other concerns as being left the hell alone to freely enjoy one's personal birthright of liberty.
Any incentives and coercions associated with accepting or not accepting the vaccine.
The probability of significant changes of those incentives or coercions in one's personal context.
Here, precisely as with the farcical inability of the "vaccine" to provide any protection from the disease, we are on rock-solid footing.
Government overreach, at all levels, only ratchets one way: UP.
The only wrench that corrects that, in all of recorded history, is to start stringing the bastards up by the neck to the nearest tall object, or to shoot the m*****f*****s in the face.
Period. Full stop.
The old Soviet maxim was "plunge the bayonet inwards until you strike steel."
The head of SAC's well-known answer to that was straightforward:
BTW, if the only successful value of "Enough" is 100% of them, I'm just fine with that.
{As Comments have already borne out, stick to what you know and can prove, kids, and stay away from the wildest imaginary scary hairy boogeyman that you can imagine, or attempt to extrapolate from a gnat hair of truth. This is not an exercise in imagination. More Pasteur, and less H.P. Lovecraft, if you please. The title of the post should have been a hint.}
Oh, wait, you can't do that because the CNN interview on YouTube was already pulled, in less than 24 hours after it escaped into the wild. Bravo, Comrade Partyline! Motherland Is Proud!
About three-fourths of people infected in a Massachusetts Covid-19 outbreak were fully vaccinated, according to new data published Friday by the CDC.
The new data, published in the U.S. agency's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, also found that fully vaccinated people who get infected carry as much of the virus in their nose as unvaccinated people.
A CDC document that was reviewed by CNBC warned that the delta variant sweeping across the country is as contagious as chickenpox, has a longer transmission window than the original Covid strain and may make older people sicker, even if they've been fully vaccinated.
So you should get the vaccine
because it protects you against new strains
so you can stop wearing masks
because it'll make the symptoms of COVID less severe for you
because the gauleiters and gruppenfuhrers at the CDC say so, dammit!
You can also take anything the CDC puts out with a grain of salt, because even in the linked article, after they come to all those conclusions, the CDC then hastens to undermine everything you just read. (I don't think they can help contradicting and self-delegitimizing themselves automatically at this point. If anyone from the CDC fell in a river, they would float upstream out of habit.)
But when you've lost CNBC to the vaxx bullshit, the jig is well and truly up.
And any chance of getting people to risk serious side effects, including death, for a now patently worthless not-a-vaxx has gone up in smoke.
Look for TPTB to start painting the COVID vaxxes as "Trump's Folly", in 3, 2,...
COVID?
For the 329,400,000 people in the U.S. self-evidently totally vulnerable to this year's variant?
Cover your snot holes, wash your hands, and use hand sanitizer.
Now taking bets on how long it takes the stone-headed morons who still think it's all imaginary to destroy the healthcare system. Or not. It seems that the people yapping about COVID-⌂ seem to have developed a wee credibility problem.
I already told you how serious Kung Flu isn't, midway through Year Two of The Horse-and-Chicken Soup Show*.
B, over at MotR blog, wonders if and if so, how much, of the current increase in Kung Flu cases is due to the hordes of untested, unvaxxed illegals being salted hither and yon, particularly in Red State America, by the current fraudulent regime, seemingly without a COVID care in the world.
It's almost certainly happening, and TPTB will go to any measures necessary to make sure you can never, ever document that causality.
To do so would be to pull the curtain back on the Great And Powerful Oz, than which there is no greater sin.
We seem to recall telling you that the actual effects of Kung Flu would be the LEAST of the problems you'd face from this thing. Maybe we just imagined that. Maybe not. Go back and look...
FWIW, as I noted previously, we've seen a small uptick in cases where I'm at in CA.
We also serve a city with a yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge population of illegals. Since 1851.
And FTR, the CFR (Case Fatality Rate) from COVID in the US averages between 1.5-2%.
In parts of Mexico, particularly those nearest the US border, it's 16%.
That's not a typo. In Mexico, up to 1 person in 6 who gets COVID dies from it, because no insurance, no money, and no healthcare.
Given that reality there, who wouldn't do whatever was necessary to flee that??
I would. You would. Everyone you know would.
The Mexicans are. (I'm explaining, not excusing.)
This ain't rocket science.
The difference is that now, it's no longer US policy to stop anyone.
Which is what will lead those along the border, and elsewhere, to start employing the Three Ss:
Shoot - Shovel - Shut up
Works for wolves near Yellowstone. Works for mountain lions in CA.
And shortly, works for illegals at the border.
In 3, 2, ...
*(In the former Soviet Union, in the hard times after the Great Patriotic War, a curbside vendor was brought before the court with allegations he was selling greatly diluted horse-and-chicken soup, with far more horse to chicken .
The judge asked him "How much horse to how much chicken are you selling?"
The man replied, "It's absolutely even, 50:50, Your Honor!"
"How can you be so sure of that?" asked the judge.
"Oh, that's easy, Your Honor. I put in one horse, and one chicken."
Currently, the chicken is what's actually happening from COVID, and the horse is the amount of all the horsesh*t the government is laddling into the soup. And the ratio is the same as that horse-and-chicken soup.)
I just left the ER. Where I work in Greater Southern Califrutopia.
We are officially far from being crushed by COVID. We're mainly annoyed at the stupid fuckers who keep spreading it, as if it just "went away" or something. Our COVID tents are going back up, to keep dipshits who know they have an active symptomatic case of it from walking inside and hanging out with family members before they think it's important enough to tell us this. (After the first five times you have to decon the entire waiting room and triage area, it's just not funny anymore). And we've gone back to full N95s all the time, within the ER, because of the recent spike in herd stupidity.
COVID is making a small comeback; nothing like last December/January when we WERE being crushed by it. We just got our first cases since February, starting about two weeks ago. And one jackass employee who came to work sick, and exposed an entire department to it, instead of taking sick days. Not all fucking morons who come to the hospital, and deserve to be clubbed about the head and shoulders with table legs until they bleed from their ears and eyes, are the patients.
Our ICU is half-full, because half the nursing staff left or quit after COVID 1.0 due to workload burnout. So half the beds are full, with the normal ICU patients (intubated, post-surgical, heart attacks, strokes, major trauma, etc.). The other half are unstaffed, nightly, because we can't find replacement ICU nurses at anything less than exorbitant rates, so they are unusable beds. AFAIK, we don't have a single COVID patient in the ICU, but if we did, it wouldn't be more than 1 or 2. The bigger problem is that this backs up ICU patients into the ER for days on end, and so new patients can't get in for hours, even for serious problems.
Our new COVID cases are about a 50:50 split between fully vaxxed, and totally unvaxxed.
That's the difference between reality on the ground, and bots and idiots spreading CDC b.s. talking points on Facecrack and other socialist disinformation websites.
And BTW, to date, the "Delta variant" doesn't mean Jack or Shit to us.
You either have active COVID, or you don't.
You either have it bad enough to need hospitalization, or you don't.
(The latter would mean "COVID hypoxia so bad you can't go home without oxygen", FTR.)
Anything else is officially in the IDGAF file, pretty much in perpetuity.
(For those who missed it 50+ times in the comments here and multiple other sites, I'm not vaxxed, and don't intend to be in any foreseeable future. I won't be a beta-test guinea pig for an experimental not-a-vaccine, with questionable safety, and no liability to the makers. And even if they put skin in the game - which none of them have, to date - I can't sue anyone if I'm dead. N95s and hand washing got me through the last 18 months with frothing fulminant COVID patients at halitosis range just fine; I see no need to change course at this point, come hell or high water. When someone makes an actual vaccine, with absolutely the same level of safety as a flu shot, or tetanus booster, that isn't a frankenvirus DNA experiment, we can talk. Until then, pass the hand sanitizer, and stay your sick ass over there please.
And for the Just-The-Flu-Bro morons who keep pimping that monumentally jackassical level of stupidity, a relatively pissant 1.6% CFR rate (only 16x worse than annual flu) among the almost 4M Califrutopians (i.e. 10% or so, no more) who ever contracted it means, that while 98.4% of those who did, didn't die, the over 60,000 who did is more deaths, in a year and change, just in Califrutopia, than all US deaths in the Vietnam War, from 1954-1975. It's not "just the flu, bro", it's "Just The Vietnam War, every year, bro". If that cluebat of reality upside the head isn't enough to put it into proper perspective for you, you're really too stupid to be on the internet without adult supervision, aren't you? And the pat you're about to get on the back won't be anything like what you thought was coming your way.)
Run and hide? FUCK NO.
Just stop being stone-IQ fucking morons about what's really out there.
And stop acting shocked and butthurt when TPTB use that Reality to go Miles Beyond Full Retard to ratchet up Tyranny, like they have, like they will.
It's what they do.
Tell them to fuck off with that shit.
If they won't listen, shoot the sumbitches in the face until they do.
(It was amazing how reasonable the Nazis got when we took their whole country away, wasn't it?)
So maybe more of that, and less Coronatardation and Covidiocy about kooky black helicopter chemtrail theories, please. If reality hurts your head, that was the 2x4 hitting the back of your skull a few times.
Not counting the news outlets or websites along the full range of accuracy and veracity, I follow multiple actual individuals' handwritten blogs. (Bot news aggregators don't thrill me.) Looking them over, many are current serving or former military and a couple are some variation of high-speed low-drag elite forces ninjas. Or just funny as all. Because life without humor is just despair. So in other words, the same folks I trusted in the military not to wet the bed, sh*t themselves, or otherwise run around like headless Nancys, are the same folks I trust on the interwebz, for demonstrating pretty much the same trustworthiness and circumspectly responsible behavior. Color me shocked.
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