Reflections on the recent global societal disaster. And unfortunately, there will be no apologies, or consequences.
[Monday morning update]
[Bumped]
19 thoughts on “The Great Cloud Of Disrepute”
Comments are closed.
Reflections on the recent global societal disaster. And unfortunately, there will be no apologies, or consequences.
[Monday morning update]
[Bumped]
Comments are closed.
Well, no consequences for the perpetrators…
Two weeks to flatten the curve, eight weeks to flatten the economy! According to medical “professionals”: People fighting for social justice causes and demonstrating such by marching and shouting together in large crowds during a pandemic are justified. However those that sing in church choirs or those that like motorcycles and want to enjoy them by gathering with their fellow cyclists will irresponsibly kill us all! As the song goes, “These are some of my favorite things…”
Just because the people-in-charge acted like Putin wannabes does not mean the threat wasn’t serious.
What has “gotten into” much of the commentary on the Right Blogosphere? Who here commenting on Rand’s fine Web site isn’t over age 60 and under the care of a cardiologist, putting us smack in the middle of the high-risk profile?
Did Rand claim that he never took the vaccine? If my memory serves me, the over-age-60 and seeing-a-cardiologist cohort around here expressed eagerness to take the vaccine when it came out, posting experiences of how to find a vaccination “slot” in the early part of year 2020.
Whether the mitigation methods, in hindsight, were fully justified, this thing was not “just the flu, bro”, or if it was, the early death of a million American citizens was really, really, really bad multi-year flu seasons.
As to flattening the economy, the policies advanced by Mr. Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin blew up the Deficit by spending multiple trillions of other-people’s-borrowed money to promptly unflatten the economy. As the Great Depression demonstrated, sometimes blowing up the Deficit is the correct action, which was followed this time.
The problem is all the hate directed at Mr. Trump got us you-know-who once elected thought, “What an opportunity, if Trump can blow up the deficit, I can blow it up by trillions more for my wishlist of government programs!” Lawrence Summers, no right-winger, a believer in Modern Monetary Theory, but a person who speaks his mind, to his own personal detriment as he found out, correctly interpreted Modern Monetary Theory that once you spend beyond “the gap in economic demand, you will blow up prices”, but that didn’t stop anyone and here we are.
Except we know for a fact that the number of Covid deaths was exaggerated from the beginning. Dying with Covid is a far cry from dying from Covid. Quarantining the healthy never made any sense, nor did shutting down small businesses while allowing big box stores to operate. I’m willing to bet that the increased death rates from the side effects of the lockdown were much higher in healthy people under age 65 than from Covid.
Exaggerated, but by how much?
Exaggerated by a factor of 10? That would support the “it’s just the flu, bro.”
I saw a claim of exaggeration by 30%. Speaking engineer-to-engineer, 30 percent of the cases being guys with a positive COVID test losing their life in a motorcycle crash is the usual measurement error that breaks in the direction of the expected financial benefit to the service provider.
More likely, the 30 percent is the dude under sedation and with supported breathing who has end-stage kidney disease along with heart failure with a positive COVID test ending up with COVID written on the death certificate.
Most importantly, a 30% reduction is nothing in changing history of the deadliness of this pandemic.
Every single person who went into a hospital seeking treatment during that time was tested for Covid. That was actually reasonable since hospitals needed to know if the patient needed to be isolated. However, anyone who tested positive and subsequently died for any reason (e.g., heart attack or accident) was listed as dying from Covid when in fact many of them died with Covid, not from it.
I was 59. In mid-2021 I had a quintuple bypass. Nobody insisted I get vaccinated and over he course of that year I went from making no particular effort to get it. to gently resisting if anyone brought it up.
Almost no one ever did.
The treatment you received sounds rigorous, and I hope that you have a good outcome from it from all you have endured in treatment.
The virus has the properties it has, and the vaccine is doing what is possible given current scientific understanding. The virus isn’t blocking transmission as once hoped, either due to collecting real-world data or the virus mutating. It has the contagiousness of measles, but owing to the differences between a DNA (measles) and an RNA (COVID) virus, encouraging people not to take a vaccine doesn’t have the public health consequences as it does with measles.
My experience suggests that “the vast Left-wing conspiracy to harm us with lockdowns, mask mandates, proof-of-vaccination cards and suggestions to leave the kids at home when going to the grocery store” is a little bit overstated.
Where I work, I am in contact with people travelling from all parts of the globe. I am in close contact with large numbers of young adults who live in crowded quarters. When I started work here over 40 years ago, I caught every single, last upper-respiratory virus that came with a bad sore throat. Suffering from which me and my colleagues would drag ourselves to appear for our classroom lectures.
Given the Laissez les Bons Temps Rouler policy on airborne viruses in the university community, I was resigned to catching COVID with my risk factors of age and being treated for elevated blood pressure. A colleague in high-power small electric motors research remarked, I think it was in late February 2020, that Hamilton-Sunstrand in Rockford, IL had its employees on travel restrictions and wouldn’t let you past the front gate with a runny nose. By some miracle, the presidents of all the major universities got on a conference call and all agreed to send everyone home over Spring Break, and I remember scrambling to climb the learning curve of the computer tech to conduct online learning.
Our maniac Democrat governor “locked down” our state. The Left requires a political slogan for everything, and being the Badger State, our governor offered the “Badger Bounce Back” promising an imminent reopening, the “two weeks to flatten the curve, eight weeks to flatten the economy” mentioned earlier in this thread. Nothing was Bouncing Back until our maniac Republican legislative leadership working through our then maniac right-wing Supreme Court rolled back our statewide lockdowns.
Our follow-the-science U eagerly resumed in-person instruction for Fall 2020, justifying the risk by rigorously requiring masks and COVID testing. I guess our undergraduates who didn’t rigorously follow the advice of not attending either church or mass demonstrations were making a significant contribution to community spread. We were shamed into returning to online instruction and sending everyone home over Thanksgiving break by none other than a certain construction contractor who happened to be our elected County Executive. The politically correct, Woke, progressive flagship state research university got shut down by the county Public Health authorities like a mom-and-pop restaurant having an outbreak of food poisoning.
I am bothered by a kind of political correctness emerging on the Right. If a 60+ person with a bunch of risk factors shows up wearing a mask, they look at you like a Left-wing COVID Karen. But if the government grudgingly admits that the outbreak could have come from a “lab leak” in a Communist country, Communist countries having a bad track record for similar deadly industrial accidents, the lab leak pointing back to our own NIH outsourcing dangerous virus research to a Communist country with many fewer rules to follow, I get the finger pointing. But how do we square that with “it’s just the flu, bro”, “the vaccine is more dangerous than the disease”, and “we wrecked the world economy over nothing”?
Right wing postmodernism. It cannot be called conservatism because the universe begins anew every day. I think it is partly a consequence of giving too much attention to people who have a financial need to fill several hours of TV or radio time, or 24 hours of Internet, every day.
Mr. Pedant notes:
The
virusvaccine isn’t blocking transmission as once hoped,Mr. Observant also notes:
My experience suggests that “the vast Left-wing conspiracy to harm us with lockdowns, mask mandates, proof-of-vaccination cards and suggestions to leave the kids at home when going to the grocery store” is a little bit overstated.
There were public service employees who refused the experimental RNA vaccine and lost their jobs. Many State Police troopers in my neighboring state to the south, (not in my state) and my neighbor’s wife who is a Nurse Practitioner formerly at a local hospital which shall remain nameless for its actions against her. There was no compelling reason for these actions while mask mandates were in place.
The panic porn was more than a little unjustified. And the faith put in the mRNA vaccines more than a little overblown. Today and from now on it will be treated as something completely optional, like the annual flu shot or the pneumococcal vaccination, or the shingles shot. You won’t lose your job over it. Even though any of these diseases can make you very sick, possibly even fatally so if you have one or more co-morbidity.
That’s not to say SARS-CoV2 was not dangerous when it was novel. Novel viruses that are lethal make for ideal bio-weapons but have an expiration date. Normally, one wouldn’t deploy the bio-weapon until one has developed an effective but secret vaccine. To my mind that makes what happened in Wuhan what I’d call a “skilled accident”. I.e. an accident that one had to have worked hard at in order to experience. Like getting killed in an explosion while making explosive chemicals for example. For respiratory viruses eventually they evolve into highly contagious but non-lethal forms that become ubiquitous and don’t kill their hosts for evolutionary reasons. Something along the lines of a novel measles or small pox might present more of a problem, given a much higher morbidity rate and that with extinction of the host virus in most of the world, people are not routinely vaccinated against these diseases anymore and are vulnerable.
Some of this I lay at the feet of Dr. Fauci aka Mr. Vaccine. I can’t tell you how many gay men probably died in the 80s because Dr. Fauci’s NIAID would not prioritize antivirals over vaccines for HIV. Eventually after several years and thousands of deaths he relented. There are now very effective anti-viral treatments for HIV today even if it is a lifetime regimen of medication (not unlike medication for high blood pressure, diabetes etc.). There is still no vaccine.
A much closer look at how NIAID was funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology and why, needs another Congressional investigation. I’d be particularly interested in Peter Dasak’s testimony in front of Congress. He may not be a US Citizen but his NGO operated out of New York City and should be held accountable for its lack of oversight. It is still funding potential GoF research in opaque totalitarian countries around the world. Ones that would no doubt have an interest in developing WMDs.
It is only Mr. Pedant because I worked at a place where everyone had advanced degrees and the policy was to call all employees “Mr.” or “Ms.”.
Far be it for me to demand a “source” for a point advanced on an Internet forum, but I never heard that antiviral drugs took a back seat to a crash program for a vaccine against AIDS. As to drawing any parallels to COVID, the road not taken was a more vigorous public health response. My source for that is reporter Randy Shilts’ “And the Band Played On”, a self-described gay man who succumbed to this illness, who described the politics behind delaying the closure of “bath house” venues for casual encounters where AIDS was spread. In the way that the public health response to AIDS was discriminating against gay persons, any public health response to COVID was met with mutterings of “muh freedom.”
I remember that antiviral therapy was at the forefront of the treatment of AIDS, and that not being treated with AZT was analogous to rejecting the COVID vaccines. Scientist Peter Duesberg is a dissident from the cohort exemplified by Anthony Fauci, where Duesberg blamed AZT treatment for the preponderance of AIDS deaths in claiming that HIV was if not harmless, at least mostly harmless.
Fauci and Duesberg were virologists from Nixon’s War on Cancer working from a dead-end hypothesis that viruses triggered most cancers, the failed War on Cancer leaving infrastructure in place to fight the War on AIDS.
My source for this? I attended a public lecture by Peter Duesberg and remember his slide presenting his evidence that AZT therapy pretty much wiped out an entire generate of mostly male hemophiliacs. Without getting sidetracked too much into whether HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, AZT was a nasty cancer chemotherapy agent, the current generation of anti-viral drugs is much less toxic, and to the extent that these drugs prevent people with positive HIV tests from dying from AIDS, there is this “thing” that statin medicines don’t as much prevent heart attacks by lowering cholesterol but by another avenue through reducing inflammation.
My source for the theory that the anti-AIDS anti-virals work by a “side effect” is straight from Dr. Duesberg’s response to my question, “If HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, how come people with HIV are living much longer with the current anti-viral drugs?” My source for statins also having an important “side effect” not directly related to lowering cholesterol is my cardiologist who got into an argument with my insurance carrier not wanting to pay for a whopping 80 mg daily dose of Lipitor for a patient with a total cholesterol without treatment of 160.
As to long-term anti-viral therapy for HIV-positive patients being similar to taking medicine for high blood pressure, I have experience with the ins-and-outs of controlling blood pressure with a mix of medicine and “lifestyle” changes, and something tells me that the anti-viral therapy to prevent coming down with AIDS is much more complicated, both the number of medicines one needs to take, the consequences of missed doses, and the recurrent blood tests for one’s “viral load.” Something tells me that anti-HIV anti-viral therapy is more analogous to people with certain forms of cancer they keep in long-term remission with a very expensive pill they take, Gleevec comes to mind.
As to people forced to take a COVID vaccine, I was in a workplace where it was either show proof of vaccination or take weekly COVID tests, and I am grateful for that for the reasons outlined in my earlier post. I opted for the mRNA vaccine, but one colleague told me he took the Johnson and Johnson vaccine based on less experimental technoloy.
As to the analogy between AZT and the mRNA vaccine, the mRNS vaccine is nothing like AZT, for which I saw Duesberg’s slide that it killed just about everyone taking it. AZT is more like the “we don’t have enough ventilators to treat COVID patients, where the doctors soon caught on that ventilators were a death sentence and that COVID pneumonia could be managed with a combination of steroids and simply not freaking out over low oxygenation levels.
My sense of the hyper-ventilating about undisclosed risk of the mRNA vaccines is that if there were to least bit of a problem, the Media would be all over this, blaming Trump of “pushing the vaccine out too soon” or “the big bad pharmaceutical corporations.” The Johnson and Johnson vaccine early on had a low but measurable incidence of blood clots in young women, and this vaccine was withdrawn for some weeks until the risk was better understood.
Relying on intuition instead of sources, I stand by my claim that Steve Mnuchin did what was needed to “jump start” the economy in the aftermath of a real public health emergency, but the following Administration messed this all up when they were warned by Larry Summers that they were taking the recovery spending too far and would rekindle inflation, by declaring war on hydrocarbon fuel on Day 1 and then turning around and draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and by supplying enough military aid to Ukraine to encourage them to resist but not enough to win the war. These decisions are tangential to COVID.
My suspicion is that the “omicron variant” was actually just such a “secret vaccine” developed by loss-of-function research. It was always strange that the virus appeared suddenly in one place, was directly genetically descended from the original novel strain, and turned out to be so contagious and non-lethal that it managed to outcompete all the other more dangerous strains, while expressing all the antigens of the virus providing better immunity. Granted it could have “jumped to mice then back to humans” early on naturally, but it could also have “jumped” into lab mice and back with a bit of persuasion.
Of course I’m no microbiologist or scientist of any kind, so what do I know.
If a 60+ plus person is wearing an N95 mask I prefer to hope for them the best.
When I see a 20 something wearing a cloth mask outdoors I feel sorry for them, whether they are physically ill or not.
FWIW I notice a larger percentage of Whole Foods customers masked up than at the local discount priced supermarket chains. Draw your own conclusions.
I will admit that when I see someone wearing a mask but leaving their nose uncovered, I deem them to be suffering from an intellectual disability.
I reluctantly admit that in the hands of the unwashed masses, whose ability to follow anti-infection rules is even less than the scientists at the Wuhan Center of Virology, masks are largely infection-control theatre. On the other hand, the willingness to wear a mask in a public setting indicates one is taking the other public health measures such as self-isolation seriously and not going into an Aldi with a productive cough. Not being the colleague with a deep, chronic cough that he covers with a cloth mask, who always manages to sit down next to me in committee meetings that our Chair insists cannot take place on Zoom, who travels to his native country where tuberculosis is endemic to implement electric-power micro grids, which even President Nerendra Modi think are stoopid and wants his country to have First-World coal-fired electric generation infrastructure.
I am a week past attending a family birthday party. I approach to greet my sister-in-law, and she tells me, “Stay away from me, I’m sick!” I ask, “Do you know what you have?” to hint at asking, “did you run one of those home COVID tests that the gummint gave out for just this circumstance.” The answer was “no!”
Let’s say I was socially obligated to not leave early, and I was really put out that my sister-in-law didn’t have the judgment to simply stay home if she felt she had a communicable illness. She lives nearby where this was held, and I didn’t see the social compulsion for her to be the one sick person at this event. Half of the adults there were at high risk — over 60, family history of diabetes and high blood pressure, rural Northern Michigan body styling.
Another family member, who as a matter of fact actually does have a PhD in Microbiology, calls to tell me that she had a miserable time confined to her cabin on an Alaska cruise ship after testing positive for COVID. She claims she must have caught it on the bus ride from the airport to the cruise terminal where she hadn’t worn a mask.
This family member is Dr. Carefully-following-infection-prevention-protocol-as-if-still-doing-research-in-her-PhD-area. Can’t say wearing a mask on the bus would have helped, but what is this almost-age-70 family member doing going on a cruise, which was the original spreader-of-COVID at the beginning of this whole thing?
“My experience suggests that “the vast Left-wing conspiracy to harm us with lockdowns, mask mandates, proof-of-vaccination cards and suggestions to leave the kids at home when going to the grocery store” is a little bit overstated.”
Hmmm. Perhaps a little understated in my experience.
Far be it for me to demand a “source” for a point advanced on an Internet forum, but I never heard that antiviral drugs took a back seat to a crash program for a vaccine against AIDS.
Well you have to scroll down a bit on the Internet search to find any anti-Fauci viewpoints. To say the guy is somewhat controversial is a bit of an understatement. But if you want other viewpoints there are ones: here and here . Of course these are not as authoritative a citations as one would get from incorruptible peer-reviewed journals, like Nature on the Proximal Origins of COVID for example…
It isn’t about COVID. COVID was just an opportunity to accelerate what the Progressive Marxists around the globe were already working on. COVID was just another tool. Why would they face any sort of repercussions when they were doing the right thing for their ongoing crusade?
I’ve had only one instance of a bad reaction of a vaccine. It was last year’s flu shot, a quad-valent that was double strength to account for my advanced age. I became allergic to sunlight. I broke out in hives everywhere my skin was exposed to the sun, and experienced anaphylaxis as well. After the ER filled me with benadryl and some other stuff IV, I stayed out of the sun for three weeks. But then it happened again, this time with only reflected sunlight. Whatever it was has worn off by now, though. But two other people I know who had the same type of vaccine (by two different manufacturers, both different from mine) had bad reactions of different kinds. The heck with double strength.
I feel that society has become too trusting, lacks the knowledge to consent, and that pharmaceutical companies have become lazy, greedy, and prone to cut corners because no one holds them accountable or audits them.