I’ve mentioned that I am using homemade Carageenan Nasal Spray because it may or may not help transmissibility of Covid-19. It also might or might not reduce the rate of viral growth in the nose after nasal cells have been infected. The evidence is by no means complete; human tests are lacking. However, it is strong enough for the makers of a nasal spray that uses 1.2 mg ι-carageenan and 0.5% saline to initiate clinical trials. See clinical trials:Coldmarisnasal and oral and nasal only. Nevertheless, the in vitro studies and past studies with other viruses suggest this might be helpful, so I decided to give this a try. It might be nothing more than a placebo. But it’s almost certainly at least harmless so I’m giving it a go.
The main difficulty with giving this a go is that the commercial sprays available to me would be somewhat expensive if used 4 times a day for the months I anticipate I will have to endure before I get a vaccine. I could, for example spend $23 for 20 ml Betadine. Technically, I could afford that, but I figured out that homemade is cheaper.
This post is mostly about making your own spray and what I found. Obviously, I can’t do a true efficacy test using a sample size of 1 (me.)
To make up spray, I purchased
- Cheap plastic 50 ml spray bottles. These are currently 20 bottles for about $9.
- ι-Carageenan. This is currently 8 ounces for about $20.
I already had some not-iodized table salt. I didn’t worry about other additives.
In all cases, I have much larger quantities required to make enough spray to last for a very, very long time. If you throw away the bottles after each use, the main cost per for spray is associated with the bottles. Initially, I threw them away. Lately, I’ve been reusing them.
My recipe for the spray requires
- 1/2 C water (4 fluid oz)
- 1/16 t carrageenan (scant)
- 1/8 t salt
My process is to first set out the measuring spoons, a flat edge device, a very small whisk, a thermometer and two clean spray bottles. I then fill a 2 C measuring cup with water, boil it. Pour some hot water into the spray bottles, insert the sprayers and screw on. I boil more and dunk the spoons and other equipment into the boiling water. I then lay these on a clean towel.
When the water has cooled sufficiently, I prime the sprayers and make sure they spray cool water well.
I then fill a 1 C measuring cup with slightly more than 1/2 C water and boil it. Once it’s boiled, I set that aside to cool. This takes a while. (I have not timed. You can speed up the cooling process by placing the cup in a large bowl of ice water.) Once the water is cooled below 90F, I pour off water to have only 1/2 C. I measure out the carageenan and salt, mix them and whisk them into the water. I then place the mixture back in the microwave, hit the 1 minute button and heat until it boils again. I then stir again.
Subsequently, I let the mixture cool somewhat. The target is just cool enough to handle the filled bottles. I empty the spray bottles and pour mixture in each bottle to fill. As 1/2 is more than 100 ml, I throw the extra away. Seal the bottles and once again test they spray. They generally do. I put one bottle of mixture into the refrigerator and almost always use the other bottle right away.
The hitch
Notice my procedure involves testing whether the bottles spray?
Early on, I thought half the bottles were defective or wore out or something. I would use these, and within about a day all would plug.
Over time, I’ve found that this mixture consistently sprays well if it’s temperature is (likely) above 95F; the bottles will plug if they are kept at room temperature. They might not spray the same day I make the stuff or they might not spray after a day or two. But they fail.
The difficulty in spreaying is probably because the salt and carrageenan increase the surface tension of the mixture above that of room temperature water; heating reduces the surface tension of water, and so presumably that of the mixture. (Streams break into sprays more readily if the Weber number is high. With respect to factors I can control, that means I want lower surface tension.) Another factor is that boiling carageenan results in a mixture that can be a gel at room temperature. I have sometimes noticed “bits” of gel get stuck in the sprayer. The gel can be reversed by heating, but it will regel if you heat.
I imagine makers of the commercial sprays have tweaked the recipe or process to get around the problem of poor spraying. Possibly, the main problem is not surface tension but that I can’t stir to avoid having little “bits” of gel which clog the whole. However, I’m not going to try a zillion variations to perfect this process using kitchen equipment. Instead, to use the spray, I place the spray in a water bath (often boiling). I test the spray against my hand to be sure it sprays and won’t burn my nose. After that, I spray twice into each nostril and inhale. A minute later, I need to blow my nose, so I do. Then I spray again twice into each nostril and inhale.
After use, I put the bottle in the refrigerator and store for later use. (As long as I need to heat in hot water, I figure why not refrigerate to impede growth of anything bad anyway?)
I find that heated these spray quite well until the bottle is very close empty. When empty, I pour out the contents, clean the bottles and then sterilize in boiling water. I put them away for later use. I’m using this about 4 times a day. I’m sure my procedure uses this mixture up at a faster rate than in clinical trials. The stuff is cheap and I just like to be sure my nose is coated.
I should add: after I use this, my nose does feel like it has a little dried snot in it. Not much, but a little. Perhaps this is because the viscous muco-adhesive ι-carageenan gel is actually staying in my nose (as required to work. ) Or maybe it’s my imagination.
Post script: There are also other nasal sprays understudy; I’ll list a few later. I’ll also link to some of the studies with results of tests which sometimes include discussions of how and why the carageenan might work to reduce transmission of Covid (and other viruses). Mostly these studies will either be (a) in vitro, (b) animal studies, (c) apply to other viruses (because they were done pre-covid) and/or (d) may have indefinite results. So there is no particular reason to rush out and use this stuff. But it might be helpful. Or it might just result in your spouse rolling their eyes because you fall for every home-remedy under the book.
As usual: Open Thread.
Lucia,
You definitely are channeling your inner polymer chemist! 😉
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The issue with lack of spraying and plugging may be resolved by using a little lower concentration of polymer.
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Viscosity of high molecular weight polymer solutions depends very much on concentration (viscosity rises exponentialy with concentration) and temperature. When you raise the temperature, the viscosity of the solution is falling (a lot!), so that makes it much easier to atomize the liquid. The drop in viscosity has two contributors: the water itself is becoming much less viscous at higher temperature, and the higher temperature also allows the molecules to move past each other more easily when shear is applied (because molecular motion increases at higher temperature, decreasing the importance of interactions/attractions between the polymer molecules). Of course, if there are small gels, they will interfere with spraying as well, and they will dissolve/melt at higher temperature. The effect of temperature on surface tension is modest for most polymers.
SteveF,
I figured less ι-Carageenan would result in less plugging. The only difficulty is that also means less “active ingredient”. So I’m a bit torn on that. That’s why I went for heating.
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The other alternative would be never heating the ι-Carageenan. The it doesn’t form a gel. But looking at the mixture it seems to me that it doesn’t all suspend. Also: I think gelling may be helpful to forming the coating that is discussed in some of the mechanism papers.
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Small gels is what I noticed in my homemade mixture. It might be possible to do better in a large batch that I could blend in the food processor or blender. But I don’t really want to make 100 spray bottles worth at a time!
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Here’s a gellan& κ-carageenan paper you may like where they worked on looking at spray-ability as a function of the ingredient proportions.
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https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.18.388645v1.full
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I especially like the graphic of the inside of the nose!
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This happens to be one of the proposed sprays one could mimic at home. But I don’t know what proportions they might suggest for efficacy. (It’s totally in vitro as far as I can tell.)
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There are other sprays that have animal studies (ferrets!). But I can’t get “NO releasing particles” from Amazon (as far as I can tell.)
SteveF,
I should add: the paper on sprays I found had spray formation characteristics as a function of Weber number, which does not involve viscosity.
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It does, however, involve velocity of the jet as it emerges from the sprayer. So I figured given geometric characteristics of the sprayer, viscosity could very well matter over all, especially if it is very high. Actual plugging obviously also will. I took apart a plugged on and I could see a little bead of gel stuck in there. Heating resolves this.
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As heating works, and I’m at home, it’s a do-able solution for me. It would not be a commercially viable solution for over the counter nasal sprays.
So if going for home-made, how about a homemade vaccine instead?
See here for details of how and of someone who is actually doing it.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/niQ3heWwF6SydhS7R/making-vaccine
He estimated cost at $1000 but that would be a lot of doses.
It would cost me more because I would need to buy the stirrer and the pipettes! I think I’ll wait until I hear his test results. 🙂
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I’m afraid I haven’t used any wet lab skilzzzzzz since Freshman year in college chemistry. (I do cook though.)
But Lucia, you could vaccinate 250 friends with 2 doses! I notice that you are not waiting for results of test before self-administering Carageenan. 🙂
I see that radvac have a white paper on testing so maybe some formal results will come that way. If this works, it could surely be useful for future pandemics – or seasonal colds.
Lucia, … Trying to help. I have a DIY routine I use for chronic sinus infections. Mix baking soda and table salt at 50/50 and store in a mason jar. Twice a day take 1/4 teaspoon and dissolve in two ounces of warm water. Apply with disposable pipette/dropper [Amazon, 1-ml, 300 for $5.99]. Perhaps you could adapt this and add your magic elixir to the water. It has kept my nose infection free for years. I could send pictures of the setup.
Lucia, Moderna vaccine side effects… final report. Monday injection at 6:30 PM. Tuesday, AM Flu symptoms. Would not have gone to work [I am retired]. Wednesday a little better, probably would not have gone to work. Thursday, better still, would have gone to work but brain not 100%. My wife called me a big baby. Friday… up & at em. My wife also had the Moderna shot and only suffered a couple days of arm pain.
Phil,
But I don’t have 250 friends nearby. I definitely don’t have that many who would want to be guinea pigs. I doubt I could even convince my husband. I haven’t convinced him to use the nasal spray. I put up with eyerolls. 🙁
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I did convince him to take Vitamin D. But that’s only because he was prescribed that because of a deficiency in the past. His levels got up above the very low that lead the doctor to prescribe, but he’s willing to take to keep them from dropping back.
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I know I would never be able to convince my sister (the m.d. ) to take a vaccine I concocted. He’s very conservative about these sorts of things. I don’t think I could get my mom to take it because my sister (the m.d. ) would advise against.
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And I really can’t even imagine the liability associated with trying to dole this out to others. I mean… I’m in the US!!! We take the prize for lawsuits.
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So in my case, it would really be $1000 to use on only myself. If it was $1000 to use on 250 willing guinea pigs, and there was someway to avoid liability, I might do it!!
Russel,
I found an online recipe that had the salt and baking soda. I tried that with the carageenan. I used the same nasal spray bottle.
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I found leaving out the baking soda more comfortable!! Perhaps a pipe would avoid the clogging. But the spray ought to be better at covering the whole surface area.
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Do send a picture of the pipette though. Is it just a dropper? Or something else?
Lucia,
Freshly prepared dilute baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) has a pH of about 8.3, considerably higher than blood (~7.4) or tears (~7.0).
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The most common physiological buffer is PBS (phoshate buffered saline) with a pH near 7.3 and salt concentration (with a bit of potassium chloride) that matches the osmolality of blood. PBS would never be irritating like sodium bicarbonate. Dry powder to make 1 liter is $7 at Sigma Aldrich. You could probably find it cheaper.
Lucia I couldn’t find an email address for you to send a pic. It’s a plastic dropper with a squeeze bulb on the end. I used a spray bottle till I switched, you get much better coverage with 1 ml of liquid than a spray…it’s a flood. The baking soda is a cleansing agent. Amazon…. moveland 200PCS 3ml Disposable Plastic Transfer Pipettes, Calibrated Dropper Suitable for Essential Oils & Science Laboratory
#1 Best Seller in Transfer Pipettes
List Price: $12.99
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SteveF,
I don’t find the saline/carrageenan irritating. But I did find the baking soda/saline/carrageenan irritating. I left out the baking soda and I was fine.
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The ingredients on the clinical trials are carageenan and sodium chloride only. So I’m fine with using that only.
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I’m not sure I want to flood my nose! On the other hand I don’t get chronic sinus infections like Russel.
The first I have seen in the media discussing how we could have sped up vaccine development:
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The Virus Lessons We’re Getting Wrong
It’s crucial to distinguish real failures from those caused by chasing political phantoms.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-virus-lessons-were-getting-wrong-11612562285
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“Early in the pandemic, outside experts urged so-called challenge trials, in which volunteers are deliberately exposed to the virus. An organization, 1 Day Sooner, signed up thousands of would-be participants. Rolling out the candidate vaccines as early as possible to willing volunteers, their fellow citizens and the media could have witnessed the results, which they can’t in double-blind studies where neither the subjects nor the administrator know who got the vaccine.
Not only would shots have gotten into millions of arms sooner. The risks of such an approach would have been merely substantial and the potential benefits off-the-charts, measured in trillions of dollars and thousands of lives saved.”
WSJ: “The variant, known as B117 and believed to be 50%-70% more transmissible, now accounts for an estimated 10% of infections in Florida, according to Helix. Last month, the variant was found in 1%-2% of samples in the state.”
“Helix said Wednesday that based on their data, the U.K. variant will be the primary type of Covid-19 virus in Florida and California in a few weeks. ”
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Looks like the UK variant is going to proliferate quickly as some predicted. Not great news. The UK has seen a rapid decline in cases over the past month, so the data is the usual mixed mess.
NPR runs some numbers and gives a state by state estimate of how many have been infected.
US: 36%
ND: 52%
SD: 41%
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https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/02/06/964527835/why-the-pandemic-is-10-times-worse-than-you-think
“There’s a fair amount of variation: In North Dakota and New York, for instance, Shaman estimates about half of the population has now been infected. “They may even be approaching herd immunity there,” he says.”
My brother in law got his first dose!! Whooo hoooo!
They gave him a card. So Robert is now a card-carrying Pfizer first -dose vaccinated person.
Tom Scharf,
As usual, NPR gets things exactly backwards. Because there have been a lot more infections than confirmed cases, the pandemic is 10 times better, i.e. less damaging, than NPR and the rest of the MSM have made the average American think.
I think they’re undercounting in SD. I don’t think there’s any reason to believe the number of infections in SD are significantly different than ND. Both have passed the HIT, but neither has reached HI quite yet.
Then there’s Bloomberg:
https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/covid-19-retreats-in-kristi-noem-s-south-dakota-because-so-many-got-infected
What Failure? Seriously. And there’s no mention of similar statistics in North Dakota in the article at all and both states have Republican governors. Maybe ND gave more lip service to lockdowns and social distancing, but it didn’t make a difference. ND has more confirmed cases than SD and, if you believe the NPR numbers, 25% more infections.
Lots of other states are also catching up to ND and SD. Something else the Bloomberg article fails to mention.
Yes, the spin NPR puts on it is a bit confounding, and most of what they report is old news. The only point is that they made a model and put out some state by state numbers. It’s like nobody is allowed to say the obvious, that given the actual numbers of infected people already we will reach herd immunity sooner with vaccines. In most cases the media estimates for HIT don’t even mention the existing infections at all, a slight oversight from Team Science. Most of the media has given up on the red/blue policy analysis angle, the numbers just don’t bear out anything useful. Once CA went wild they moved on.
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Naturally the expert class is now calling for war crimes tribunals for those who didn’t listen to their wise counsel. The guilty (oops, I mean potentially accused) are rather carefully selected.
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n314
Is there any state in which cases are rising?
MikeM,
I don’t know. You’d have to hunt through all the states!!
NYT has a covid data page: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html. It says no state is currently going up in cases.
I went through all 50 states and DC on worldometers.info. Vermont and Arkansas may have slight upticks on the seven day moving average of new cases/day, but in both states, active cases are down from their peaks. In many states, active cases are way down. I expect this to continue even though B.1.1.7 is making its presence known.
Isn’t it wonderful how Joe Biden is crushing the virus much better than the BOM and only 17 days into his term. [/sarc]
DeWitt,
Yes, cases are falling most everywhere and in total. Deaths unfortunately lag behind cases by a couple of weeks.
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BTW, I think it is supposed to be OMB.
Thanks, DeWitt. That was my impression.
Tom, I checked and both Dakotas have a population fatality ratio of around 0.2%. Many other states are worse that than including New York. Most are between 0.1% and 0.2%. It’s really hard to make the case that strong mitigation has accomplished anything. There is a growing scientific literature on this too. It’s clear masks in community settings don’t work for example. Stay at home orders also don’t add much over more voluntary social distancing.
NPR is to me totally untrustworthy. They can be counted to misrepresent most things.
What is interesting to me is that if the Dakotas have reached herd immunity (and I can think of no other reason why all of a sudden cases and deaths would plunge starting in the beginning of winter when flu for example is often still rising), then it makes high values of IFR like 1% pretty unlikely.
I also check European countries. Sweden’s population fatality rate is lower than that of about 10 other European countries including Switzerland, the UK, France, Spain, and Italy.
Carrageenan is derived from certain seaweeds. As an experiment, I chew a small piece of dried seaweed every day – not for the Carrageenan but for the iodine. My thinking is this:
– iodine in small amounts is a powerful disinfectant known to kill bacteria and viruses.
– iodine is found naturally in human saliva glands.
– the covid virus is known to appear first in the saliva glands.
– iodine-deficiency is a known problem in many countries.
So killing off the virus before it takes hold seems a good idea, and there might be a slightly increased probability to achieve this by chewing a small piece of seaweed. The seaweed I use is called Wakame and it came from a local Chinese food store.
I wrote up lots of extra details with supporting references here:
http://www.old-sock.co.uk/essay
David Young,
“…..then it makes high values of IFR like 1% pretty unlikely.”
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I think it is prudent to keep in mind that the true number of infections is not known. The fatality rate per confirmed infection remains somewhere over 1% in most places where testing is widely available. For example, in Florida since November 1, there have been about 950,000 confirmed cases, and a bit over 11,000 deaths (there will be some additional deaths among those already with confirmed illness, but still alive), which puts the rate at near 1.2% among confirmed cases. There are similar numbers in other states.
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How many cases are completely asymptomatic or so mild that no test is taken? I don’t know, and I doubt anyone does. So the death rate in Florida is certainly below 1.2% of confirmed cases, but how much below is uncertain. The single biggest factor controlling that rate is the age of those infected, and I have not seen any recent data on that. When I looked at the first 52,000 confirmed cases in Florida (the state published detailed data on every case, but this was early, so not all cases were being tested), the rate of death was near 5% for 65 year olds, but increased to 10% for 70 YO, and reached more than 25% for people past 85. NY and NJ have very high overall rates of death because the governors were channeling their inner Pol Pot, so made sure to maximize the number of contagious people sent to nursing homes. Since they have stopped that stupid practice, the rates of death in those states are now comparable to other places. The continued draconian rules in NY and NJ clearly have not eliminated spread of the virus.
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I think the more important question is how many people have some inherent immunity to the virus. Once again, the exact number is not known, but there is lots of evidence than in the range of half the population or more is unlikely to ever contract the illness, even if exposed. So while the exact rate of death per infection is unknown, and depends very much on the age profile of those who contract the illness, the population wide risk of death is for certain much lower, since many people appear resistant to infection.
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My SWAG is that there will be another 200,000 to 250,000 deaths before the pandemic ends in the States, putting the nationwide death total (for the entire population) at ~0.2% for the pandemic.
It looks like the UK is on pace to complete immunization of everyone over 65 by early March (or a bit later). They are way ahead of the states in working to end the deaths. In the States, woke politics and virtue signaling have corrupted the prioritization of vaccinations in most places, and the Biden administration is all in with the crazies…. ensuring lots of unnecessary deaths.
I agree SteveF that no one knows how many have been infected. It also depends a lot on how you defined “infected”. Has someone with preexisting immunity who had mild symptoms “infected.” I think the CDC claims 81 million infections or about 3 times the number of cases. I still come back to age and population adjusted mortality. 2020 is worse than some recent years but on par with 2003 and lower than all preceding years going back to mid 20th Century. In 2020 across all age groups, you were 8 times more likely to die of something else.
The other thing to bear in mind about the scary IFR’s for people over 80 is that many of those are residents of nursing homes who are already quite ill. I’m a little fuzzy on this but saw somewhere (perhaps here) that average length of nursing home stays is 3 years and the median is a lot lower than that indicating that quite a few die within a few months of admission. Any death is a trajedy, but in terms of policy, one must take into account total years of life lost.
If half of us have preexisting immunity, then we must be very close to herd immunity already if not past it.
Also, the US is vastly more unhealthy than Sweden for example. I was shocked to learn last spring that 36% of US adults are obese (BMI >25). Many if not most of these people will have diabetes and high blood pressure, decreased liver function, etc. They are easy targets for any infectious disease.
David,
The standard definition for obese is BMI>30.
David,
25 < BMI < 30 is merely “overweight”.
Yes, obese are targets for disease. But we still don’t want them to die and most the overweight and obese would live quite a very long time absent the recent pandemic. Diabetes, high blood pressure and so on are no fun, but they are manageable.
OK, I stand corrected SteveF. Here’s another source for the obesity statistic. It’s actually worse than I said earlier.
Nearly 40% of all adults over the age of 20 in the U.S. – about 93.3 million people – are currently obese, according to data published in JAMA in 2018. Every state in the U.S. has more than 20% of adults with obesity, according to the CDC – a significant uptick since 1985, when no state had an obesity rate higher than 15%.
I believe the number is Sweden is 12% or so. This perhaps explains why our deaths per million is among the highest in the world.
I agree we don’t want people dying prematurely. But the consequences of the obesity epidemic are very real. Having just recently lost 35 pounds over the last 2 years, the difference is amazing. All the metabolic measures have gone from marginal to excellent.
David Young,
The high obesity rate is also likely a (not the) reason why we spend more on health care than other developed countries. Type II diabetes, for example, can be managed, but managing it with a drug regimen and/or insulin injections isn’t free, absent weight loss and a strict diet.
Once I got out of quarantine at the skilled nursing facility and was put in a semi-private room, my roommate was a diabetic with severe fluid retention and poor circulation in his hands and feet. A pulse oximeter on his finger frequently couldn’t get a reading. He too had survived a bout with COVID-19. I think he had Afib too.
SteveF (Comment #198193): “I think it is prudent to keep in mind that the true number of infections is not known. The fatality rate per confirmed infection remains somewhere over 1% in most places where testing is widely available.”
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But what is a coronavirus fatality? If a person who dies had a positive test at one time, is that a coronavirus fatality?
The rise in deaths lagged 2-3 weeks behind the rise in cases. But it is now 4 weeks since the peak in U.S. cases, and there is no sign of deaths decreasing. The states that peaked in November have shown a drop in deaths, but lagging by at least a month (from eyeballing noisy data).
Here in NM, deaths are still more than half the peak. They only really started to drop 2-3 weeks ago and it is still hard to be sure they are dropping. Prior to that, they were at a plateau since early December. Cases sharply peaked in mid November and dropped by a factor of two about a month later.
It is normal for there to be 1000-2000 more deaths a day at this time of year compared to summer. I suspect that a lot of those are being misattributed to the Wuhan virus.
Mike M.,
That”s likely because we would normally be near the peak of flu season. But influenza cases are a tiny fraction of normal this year. There’s also the problem of the 100,000 excess deaths out of 500,000 that aren’t attributed to COVID-19. There was an article about that in the WSJ not long ago. I’m sure there are people whose deaths are misattributed to COVID-19, but I’m not at all sure that the number is significant. So far I have only seen anecdotal evidence of a few cases.
And in news of the woke: As well as renaming a number of schools in San Francisco, while not opening schools for business, the school board wants Lowell High School to stop being selective for admission using high test scores and gpa’s. Interestingly enough, my mother and her sister both graduated from Lowell, my aunt in 1928 and my mother in 1932.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/san-franciscos-race-games-11612571242?mod=opinion_lead_pos4
DeWitt,
Here are two newly adopted definitions, along with their actual meanings:
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“Equality of opportunity” – Means systemic racism (when in fact it is the opposite of racism)
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“Equity” – Means no racism (when in fact it is explicit systemic racism).
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Orwell would be laughing.
SteveF,
Kurt Vonnegut’s short story Harrison Bergeron is also a lesson in equity.
https://www.bpi.edu/ourpages/auto/2017/10/14/55813476/Harrison%20Bergeron.pdf
It doesn’t end well for Harrison.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #198214): “Thatâ€s likely because we would normally be near the peak of flu season.”
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Confirmed influenza deaths are about 5% of the excess deaths during flu season. The claimed flu deaths are maybe 20%. Those are determined by some sort of correlation, but the correlation between influenza deaths and total deaths is not very good most years.
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There are probably not many blatant misattributions, such as someone who tests positive for the virus then dies in a car crash. But it seems that about 1/3 of hospitalized cases are only diagnosed after someone is admitted for something else, then gets a positive result on a test done as part of the admission procedure. If such a person then dies of whatever they were admitted for, the Wuhan virus gets the blame. And for how long after a positive test is a death attributed to the Wuhan virus?
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If there is not an attribution issue, then why are deaths lagging so far behind cases? Misattributed deaths in combination with the usual seasonal cycle would explain that.
“Last year the nonprofit Brightbeam put out a report called “The Secret Shame: How America’s Most Progressive Cities Betray Their Commitment to Educational Opportunity for All.†The report says that in San Francisco “70% of white students are proficient in math, compared to only 12% of black students reaching proficiency—a 58-point gap.—
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If you remove all the good performing schools by administrative edict, then parents of good students will just go to private schools and make the public system even worse off. I just see this as a sign that activists are simply giving up on doing the hard work necessary to correct this problem. Typically parents of good students react very forcefully to the removal of good schools in their area. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this not come to pass.
MIkeM
Covid does not get the blame if they follow CDC protocols for reporting death. Covid is only considered the cause of death if the doctor thinks it’s the cause of death. See
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf
Cases have been dropping in FL for almost a month but the death count has stayed nearly level. This also happened in the last wave but deaths then dropped off quickly after a month of cases dropping.
https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/data/coronavirus/en/
Tom Scharf
The parents have all sorts of strategies:
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1) Find a private school.
2) Hire tutors and make sure your kids get put in the honors class. Pestering is involved in 2.
3) Move to the a wealthy suburb with only 1 or 2 high schools both of which are good. (And do #2.)
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People who care about their kids education and can do something about it will do something about it. People who don’t or can’t, won’t.
Most of the “right thinking” areas have gone to lottery based school choice systems for regular high schools. They went to this in my county a while back and there was a lot of competition for the best schools, however the vast majority of the average to lower performing students went with their local neighborhood schools * by choice *. The parents weren’t willing to put their kids on long bus rides or drive them daily. School segregation got worse after the choice system was implemented. The good schools continued to perform well and the poor schools continued to do poorly. It’s almost like the school buildings and entrance requirements aren’t the problem if you looked at the data, but what do I know?
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School boards only have so many levers to pull when trying to address this problem, and most of the levers have been tried and failed. For decades and decades. They have little choice but to try to pull a different lever when all the others (that pass politically correct muster) have been tried. So in a way it’s not surprising they go to madness.
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The SF case is just another version of dragging good kids down to make things more equal. Removing dual track “honors” classes is also a thing. They did that in NYC.
Ultimately they can be held accountable by voters.
lucia (Comment #198219): “Covid does not get the blame if they follow CDC protocols for reporting death. Covid is only considered the cause of death if the doctor thinks it’s the cause of death.”
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Sorry, but I am not seeing that in the document you linked. It does say
So it is not automatic that a person who had the Wuhan virus previously will have that listed on the death certificate. But it does seem to be the usual practice.
Tom Scharf,
I noted that as well. Part of it may be that people are tested earlier than before…. meaning a longer time from confirmed case to death. But part may also be that the people infected in the early part of a surge are not the ones most likely to die from covid-19. Those infected early then pass it to others at greater risk. People who know they are at risk are likely more careful about social distancing than those who know they are not, but when the infected postulation grows large enough, the people at risk become more likely to be infected in spite of their caution.
WRT dumbing-down of selective schools: it is an inevitable consequence of the unmitigated demand for “equity” by the crazies on the left. That applies to both selective high schools and selective colleges….. equality of outcome is demanded, not equality of opportunity, and certainly not rewarding excellence with greater opportunity.
Tom Scharf (Comment #198220): “This also happened in the last wave but deaths then dropped off quickly after a month of cases dropping.”
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I don’t see it. It looks to me like the FL summer peak in cases was July 17; it dropped about 10% over the next two weeks and then started to drop rapidly. Deaths are noisier, but were roughly level the first two weeks in August, then dropped rapidly. So a lag a bit more than two weeks.
The winter peak seems to have been about Jan 10, followed by a fairly steady decline. Still no indication of a decline in deaths.
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The recent level for deaths is just about the same as the summer peak, but with a 25% higher peak in cases.
Som questions about Covid to which I haven’t seen any hard answers:
In the beginning, cases were based on judgement of the doctor, but now a case is based on a test indcating a positive result. How accurate are the tests at identifying a truly infectious person?
Do the hospitals routinely test for both influenza and Covid when someone with repiratory distress is admitted?
Can somebody test positive for both influenza and Covid? If they do, which one is the cause for being admitted to the hospital or cause of death?
The fact that influenza is way down this year isn’t too surprising as people still aren’t congregating anywhere near prior norms. But I worry about the intense focus on Covid driving the folks trying to manage the countries health are not measuring everything they use to measure or we are not being told about the measures being done because they might “confuse” the public.
The large number of Covid deaths being thrown around are frightening but at the same time, the CDC data shows the total number of deaths in the US is right about where we would have expected absent Covid. It isn’t just influenza deaths that are down, but all of the major killers are down as well.
I’ve lso noticed that there are more articles being published showing the efficacy of things like invermectin and zinc if used early in treatment are now getting reported – but there were discussions about those things, along with HCQ as early as March last year (although first mentin of Invermectin I saw was in May).
I also wonder about the emphasis on social distancing and masking but neglecting any of the prophylactic (aside from washing hands) measures, like the nasal spray, or vitamin D and zinc. I’ve seen papers written after SARS 1 went around that mentioned the effectiveness of the prophylactic measures so this lack of mention by the authorities as a possible means of mitigating the infection worries me.
The fear mongering in the media about the UK strain without mentioning anything about what makes it different enough to worry that measures for earlier strain will be ineffective. If they’ve identified it as different then they should be able to say whether it binds to cells the same way or not shouldn’t they?
I’m quite the cynic which biases me towards thinking that the authorities are hiding something fom us – more than just incompetence. I hope that my cynicism is unwarranted. Can any of you help show me that the authorities are not trying to “put one over on us”?
The main evidence that the new strains are more transmissive is that genetic sequencing shows that they are becoming the dominant strains in the community rather quickly over the previous versions. It’s possible they randomly become more dominant, but I find that unlikely when it has happened in multiple locations. They speculate that it binds to cells more easily, not sure how they would know that. The UK is by far the world leader in the genetic sequencing of the virus apparently.
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I assume most everyone who is placed in a hospital is quickly tested for covid, but I don’t know. Certainly those with resp symptoms would be tested. Everyone is likely tested to prevent the spread of asymptomatic cases. I would guess every hospital has a rapid test machine by this point.
My county is discontinuing the browser refresh Olympics. It will now contact people who are already registered for appointments. There were lots and lots of complaints and the politicians had to step in and demand changes. They are silent on whether this is a lottery or some kind of prioritized system.
pauligon59 (Comment #198228): “How accurate are the tests at identifying a truly infectious person?”
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They are terrible at identifying infectious people. The PCR tests routinely amplify for 35-40 cycles. Even at 30 cycles, the virus usually can not be cultured. Anything more than 25 cycles (or maybe 20) is probably from a person who is not infective.
Because they amplify so much, a person who has recovered can continue to test positive for weeks. The record is over two months.
There is a claim that most cases in the UK are false positives. The issue is cross contamination during sample handling, so that one true positive can result in many false positives.
But it seems there has been no real effort to determine the false positive rate. Given the massive resources put into testing and the devastating consequences, the lack of quality assurance is shocking.
Mike
Based on what you quoted the cdc does not advisethat practice. The advise that only conditions that contributed to death need be recorded.
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Nothing about the guidance tells us what the “usual practice” is. It might be that doctors are not following the advice of the cdc, and the usual practice deviates from the advice you quoted. But if so, it would help you you found something to indicate they do.
Tom
I read an article that discusses how the shape of the “spike” changed based on the mutation. It had pictures. In one mutation, the spike sort of ends up with three little “prongs” at the end. But I think the idea it binds more easily is mostly that it’s spreading faster.
I think it’s probably for the best your county got rid of the browser refresh olympics. That’s frustrating and waste of time. A lottery is actually probably the best approach. Bet they reason they are silent is that it is not a lottery. 🙂
off-topic
Joe Biden, interviewed last weekend, on the $15 minimum wage proposal: “No one should work 40 hours a week and live below the poverty wage and if you’re making less than $15 an hour, you’re living below the poverty wage.”
Curious, I looked it up. For an individual, federal poverty level is $12,760. (For two, $17,240.)
$15 an hour, 40 hours a week, is around $30K. 245% of the individual poverty level.
I wonder if the media call him out for his lie…
That’s semi-rhetorical. (a) I don’t think they would. (b) I wouldn’t call it a lie, it’s an exaggeration, something politicians engage in all the time. (But if Trump said it, it would be a lie.)
My county’s vaccine registration allows you to enter race/ethnicity during registration. You can decline. They also have addresses so they can redline if they want to. They won’t get away with anything but 100% transparency here, so I’m not too worried. If they go into equity mode then I think they will likely make themselves miserable, but I don’t trust silence and some poor soul is going to have to defend equal opportunity in a county meeting to stop equity mode.
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They said they weren’t providing any new 1st shots this week which sounds a bit suspicious, but they also opened up a bunch of pharmacy vaccination sites.
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I’m just glad my wife already got in. I’m probably 3 months away at least.
polygon59, What’s your source on the death statistics. I think CDC mortality statistics show about 115% of normal for December but I haven’t seen it broken down by all causes.
lucia (Comment #198233): “Based on what you quoted the cdc does not advisethat practice. The advise that only conditions that contributed to death need be recorded.”
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Sure. But unless there is obviously no connection (such as an auto accident), there is a tendency to assume that if a person who had the Wuhan virus near the time of death, then it must have least contributed to the death.
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lucia: “It might be that doctors are not following the advice of the cdc, and the usual practice deviates from the advice you quoted. But if so, it would help you you found something to indicate they do.”
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The problem is that the document is totally unclear as to where the line is drawn. And we know there are cases where the line has been obviously crossed.
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We don’t know how many questionable or gray area deaths there are. It seem that there have been no audits done to assess that and that at least one state government (Minnesota) has resisted doing such audits. That is unacceptable.
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We can’t find much evidence of exaggerated reporting because it is hidden. So we don’t know if it is a little or a lot. As with false positives. The only data we get are the data that serve the ruling class’s preferred narrative.
HaroldW,
Yes, and they are celebrating how SNL has been so “refreshingly” non-political the last few weeks, ha ha. See the exceedingly gibberishy explanatory powers of the media here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/02/snl-is-rejecting-old-habits/617956/
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This isn’t bias, it’s:
“But that’s the thing: SNL isn’t actually playing it safe. The show is rejecting the habits it accumulated over the past four years, being judicious about the targets of its jokes and the subjects it highlights, and, most importantly, training its spotlight on its cast.”
David Young (Comment #198240): “I think CDC mortality statistics show about 115% of normal for December but I haven’t seen it broken down by all causes.”
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I don’t think we have complete data for December and won’t for many months. The CDC uses some sort of model to fill in the data, but we have no way of knowing how good the model is.
“We can’t find much evidence of exaggerated reporting because it is hidden.”
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This may very well be, but the burden of proof on conspiracy theories is on the ones professing them. I do trust they can count bodies accurately and as long as they are counting them consistently then at least we know the trend directions. You could look for declines in other common deaths to support the theory, we know that flu deaths are down this year in a major way, but that is likely due to the lack of flu.
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The media going into max fear mode is nothing new, climate change will end the world in a dozen years as we all know. However the initial “fear” that covid would cause 100,000’s of deaths turned out to be accurate, even though they really didn’t know that at the time. Just because the media is selling it doesn’t mean it is not true, but we know they are biased in their projections of the future to doom and gloom generally.
HaroldW,
Stupid federal policies are never far off topic. Yes, $15 minimum wage prices plenty of people (especially the young and unskilled) out of the labor market. Biden is too far gone to be called by the press on anything. He is in la-laland.
HaroldW,
Biden could have meant the head of household for a family of four. But even then, the poverty level is $26,200. But maybe he’s referring to a family of four with only one earner in Alaska ($32,750) or Hawaii ($30,130). But more likely it’s his trainers who don’t actually know what the official poverty level is.
According to the Pew Research Center, hardly a bastion of conservatives, only 2.7% of working Americans in 2016 earned the minimum wage or less and more than half of those were in the 16-24 age group and the majority work in the hotel and restaurant business. Well, used to work before the pandemic. Palo Alto, CA has a high poverty rate as well as some of the most expensive homes in the country because they count Stanford students, most of whom are only technically poor.
MikeM
If the person was Covid positive and had symptoms of Covid like lungs fill up and then dies because their lungs filled up, then the doctor will “tend” to diagnose Covid as the cause of death. Because that’s the way diagnoses are made.
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If they had a Covid test but died from a head wound, bleeding and went into a coma, the doctor won’t “tend” to diagnose that as from a head wound.
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This is the normal method of identifying who died of what. It’s not going to “overcount” Covid deaths.
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I think you are letting your imagination and “we don’t know anything for certain” drive too much of your argument that there might be some huge overcount.
lucia,
The fact that *some* cases are obvious one way or the other does not show that *all* cases are obvious.
Last spring, Dr. Deborah Birx said that we are using an extremely expansive way of counting covid deaths.
What about a person with a mild case who dies of a heart attack a few weeks later? What about an elderly person who has congestive heart failure and many other problems who has a moderate case and then dies? What about someone like DeWitt except ending up with a tragic outcome?
Mike M,
“What about someone like DeWitt except ending up with a tragic outcome?”
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I, for one, am pleased that wasn’t the case. Who would nitpick? 😉
MikeM
I never suggested all cases are obvious. I’m sure some cases are mis-classified. The same happens with all causes of death.
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So what if Deborah Birx said that? That’s not quantitative.
Sure, what about them? Do you have examples of any instances of deaths certificates for this sort of case? Or the other ones? I bet you don’t.
You are trying to advice some soft of case using rhetorical “what abouts” as evidence for your position. That’s not evidence. (But I think you know that.)
Something else that was true at least last spring was that hospital reimbursement rates were higher for covid patients than influenza patients. I can’t remember the details however. There is no question that hotspots were getting massive infusions of Federal help on PPE and temporary hospitals, etc. The incentives clearly encouraged over reporting.
I agree with Mike that an audit would be welcome. I also remember that last summer I think in August Colorado admitted their numbers were inflated and reduced them by 25%. I doubt if that was an outlier.
Tom, Actually the initial scary stories such as 2.2 million deaths in the US from Ferguson were exaggerated. Also the media constantly showed case numbers and death numbers implying a 10% case fatality rate. That was almost criminal as it scared people to death. In the UK in March and April hospital admissions for heart attack and stroke were down 50% year on year.
Actually Mike, I remember Birx saying that. Was it 25% or 33% too high that she was arguing. That combined with the Colorado action I think is pretty conclusive evidence that there is over reporting.
There was also the case of a county in Western Colorado where 2 of the 4 “covid” deaths were gunshot victims. Maybe that’s why Colorado audited their numbers.
In any case, I think there is enough smoke to suggest that an audit is justified.
And some bad news:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/south-africa-suspends-astrazeneca-vaccine-drive/ar-BB1dtt1M?ocid=uxbndlbing
I’ve been concerned since this spring about this when my sister said she would be surprised if covid vaccines would be more effective than flu vaccines. Maybe the newer technology will make them better but I’m skeptical.
David Young,
AstraZeneca uses completely different biochemistry, adenovirus vectored, than Pfizer and Moderna. Their trial had problems from the beginning. And again, why should we care what your sister thinks?
Trying to follow up on what poligon said I found this site.
https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Weekly-Counts-of-Deaths-by-State-and-Select-Causes/muzy-jte6
It appears to me that before the pandemic in 2020, heart disease deaths were averaging roughly 13.5K per week. They spiked as the pandemic started in earnest and then fell to the 12.5K per week range. This would indicate to me that in the early epidemic covid deaths might be understated and some were attributed to heart disease. The bigger effect seems to be that as covid testing became more common, some heart attack deaths were attributed to covid. Perhaps around 1000 per week.
Roughly the same is true of chronic lower respiratory diseases. That also dropped about 1000 per week.
So poligon appears to me to be correct.
DeWitt,
I think we’ll all have to start supporting our arguments with “David Young’s sister thinks …”
I don’t care if you care what my sister said. She claimed that she was following the trials however.
David,
I’m bet your sister thinks your stretching when you try to use the Δ in heart disease deaths to support your theory about the number of Covid deaths.
So it appears that the CDC mortality by cause of death data would indicate that starting in May of last year, perhaps 2000 deaths per week were attributed to covid that may have been normally expected due to heart disease and chronic lower respiratory disease. I can’t think of a reason why heart disease deaths would go down by around 1000 per week. One could argue that perhaps these “missing” deaths were doubtful cases where the cause of death was heart failure but the underlying cause was listed as covid. Anyone have an alternative explanation? Looks like prima facia evidence that covid death attribution is not reliable.
Lucia, I haven’t had a chance to ask her yet as I just discovered the data within the last hour. I am interested in what she and Jay think.
David Young,
*sigh*
So what. Nobody here cares what your sister said because you haven’t given us a valid, no make that any, reason to care. So continuing to use her as an authority is really annoying.
David Young,
Thanks for your comments (#198254, #198256, #198258, #198263, #198267). As you say, there is a lot of smoke, but the authorities refuse to look for the fire. So we don’t know how much over reporting there is. 10%? 59%? We have no idea. That leads to mistrust, which further politicizes everything. It is inexcusable.
DeWitt, Getting a little bit hostile because I mentioned my sister? I will mention her whenever I want and I think she might know more than the rest of us here. She’s an MD who graduated close to the top of her class and is good at keeping up with the literature. That makes her much better qualified than me and you.
I am really interested in alternative explanations for the mortality data. That’s why I’m here: to learn from the rest of you.
David Young,
It would have saved a lot of bandwidth if you had mentioned that the first time you gave us her opinion on vaccine efficacy. We’re not mind readers.
David Young,
I don’t have “alternate” explanations of mortality data. It seems to me to be a record of who died of Covid, with all the same issues that any record of who died of a particular disease will have.
DeWitt,
My sister knows nothing about the covid 19 virus nor vaccine technology. 😉
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David Young,
There are probably some cases where underlying illness contributed substantially to patient death. Sorting out exactly how many is unlikely to happen. OTOH there are very few flu deaths because of social isolation…. so covid-19 ‘reduced’ those deaths. In any case, there is a substantial excess of deaths over the expected numbers, and that is for certain due to covid.
David/SteveF,
I’m sure that similarly, when flu is rampaging there are cases where underlying conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure contribute to death.
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https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/13/8/876
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Doctors still write down the cause of death is flu if the caught the flu and died as a result of their severe flu symptoms. I doubt anyone bitches about this saying they really died of diabetes, obesity or cardiovacular disease and just happened to get the flu.
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All of these people might have died slightly later if they didn’t get the flu. But they were susceptible and died of Covid instead.
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People who “want” to believe Covid is not very deadly want to complain that similar deaths in people with Covid symptoms is not Covid. But unless they would call those flu deaths not flu they are inconsistent. (If they do call those flu deaths not flu, then they are wrong.)
Wierd idea… I like many people have delayed my regular cardiologist visit (by about 5 months) because of the virus. Is it possible the reduction in heart related death is because people are not going to their cardiologists? ….. implies that they cause death with all their “procedures I know.
lucia (Comment #198291): “Doctors still write down the cause of death is flu if the caught the flu and died as a result of their severe flu symptoms. I doubt anyone bitches about this saying they really died of diabetes, obesity or cardiovacular disease and just happened to get the flu.”
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Several problems with that. There are only about 8K influenza deaths a year (as listed on death certificates), so even if a fair chunk of them are misclassified, it does not make a big difference. I don’t think people are usually tested for the flu unless they have symptoms, so you aren’t likely to get the cause of death listed as influenza if the infection was asymptomatic or if the patient has recovered from their bout with the flu. Also, you don’t know that they treat the two the same.
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I don’t doubt that if someone dies with a significantly symptomatic case of influenza, that gets listed on the death certificate. It is appropriate to do the same with the Wuhan virus. The question is how they handle asymptomatic, mild, and recovered cases. As pointed out by David Young above, there are many indications that those are not being treated properly.
MikeM
Misclassification is still misclassification.
There’s really no reason to expect this is happening at any significant rate with Covid. You’re just imagining MDs might hypothetically do this at some significant rate. You need evidence for this extremely unlikely thing.
Your argument doctors do treat Covid differently from all other diseases and that they do deviate from the protocol in the CDC advise (which is a protocol similar to other diseases) seems to basically be that we don’t know they don’t. That’s pretty darn weak.
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Neither you nor David have linked to these “many” indications. I’m sure there are a few cases as would be the case for all diseases. If you want to make a case there are “many” deviations, you actually have to link to quantitative evidence. Currently, I’ve seen no evidence that there is any significant amount of misclassification. I’m hearing anectdotal stories of single incidents (with no link to the story). I’m hearing you and David appearing to “worry” these sort of incidents that would happen with all diseases indicate something untoward.
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If you are worried there is misclassification and you want to make a case, you or someone else who thinks this might be an issue need to dig up the data. I’m not going to do it because (a) I don’t see any smoke so I don’t think there is a fire and (b) it’s not my bug-bear.
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But even you must see how stupendously weak your case for overcounting is. It’s based on almost nothing combined with ideal speculation that it’s not impossible for doctors to suddenly act totally differently from how they normally do when classifying deaths and also deviating from cdc advice which basically just describes what would be the normal procedure!
I suspect that the increased lag between peak cases/day and deaths/day is because doctors are doing a better job treating patients with severe COVID-19 than they were earlier in the pandemic. The lag was only about two weeks early on. It now appears to be at least a month. Evidence for this hypothesis is that case fatality rates are a lot lower than they were earlier.
TN cases/day peaked December 18 for the seven day moving average. Deaths/day still hasn’t peaked.
DeWitt,
That’s what I suspect that’s a big element. Early in the pandemic, doctors had no idea what treatments were useful for patients with severe symptoms. Now, they have some treatments that prevent death, but that also likely means those who die take longer to die.
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Treatment both reducing death and prolonging time to death is not uncommon. Chemo for cancer reduces death, but it doesn’t always work. In which case, patients often do live longer.
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Treatment extending the time between onset and death should be the “null” assumption as that’s nearly always what happens. If someone thinks this did not happen, they should bring forward the evidence that improved treatment is not extending life.
lucia (Comment #198294): “Your argument doctors do treat Covid differently from all other diseases”
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Of course this is different from all other diseases. Doctors learn to diagnose from symptoms, treat based on symptoms, and judge things like cause of death from disease progression. Testing is used to confirm.
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With the Wuhan virus, testing is the whole story. If you test positive, you have it, if you test negative, you don’t. Partly, that is due to the obsession with testing. But doctors have no prior experience with the disease, so they can’t fall back on that.
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If a frail 88 year old has a cold then a couple weeks later dies of the congestive heart failure they have had for years, I seriously doubt that the doctor does not list the cold as a cause of death. Because they “know” that a cold doesn’t kill unless it develops into pneumonia. But they don’t know that with covid, so it gets listed.
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There are surely people who die a few weeks after a mild or asymptotic case of covid. Do you claim that is rare? When it happens what do you think goes on the death certificate? Real questions. I await your answer, rather than making a conditional reply.
Was there a football game yesterday?
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Yes there was, ha ha! My sympathies to all you Mahomes fans out there, not. Nothing gets people to forget covid rules like a SuperBowl win. My local paper:
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Tampa Bay! You’re drunk, go home!
Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans celebrate during Super Bowl 55 near Raymond James Stadium on Sunday.
We won the Super Bowl, but now it’s time to stop the Super Spread.
Every single article I have seen that examined excess deaths (compared death trends to previous years) has noted a substantial rise in excess deaths this year, even after accounting for official covid deaths. This would suggest covid deaths are being undercounted by around 20% or so. See the multiyear graph here:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/14/us/covid-19-death-toll.html
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This doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of uncertainty in individual deaths, but the large scale numbers don’t indicate overcounting at all.
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Covid-19 Data Remain Mired in Inconsistencies
https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-data-remain-mired-in-inconsistencies-11611311401
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““We would figure out if this is a cause of death that is associated with Covid and if we can safely say these are probably Covid deaths,†Dr. Anderson said. “For some, it will be straightforward. If we get excess pneumonia deaths in the Covid pandemic, we know Covid commonly causes pneumonia.â€
It’s more complicated to look at, say, heart disease.
“We do know Covid can cause a heart attack or a stroke,†Dr. Anderson said. “But it’s also possible that some are just heart-disease or stroke deaths. That’s where it’s going to be really tricky to sort. We would probably do models according to different assumptions.â€
The CDC won’t alter the underlying records, but states have the opportunity to amend the death certificates, and a handful have been changed to reflect fatalities caused by Covid-19 that occurred before the first U.S. case was diagnosed on Jan. 20, 2020.â€
MIkeM
Your support for it’s “different” is to give evidence that it’s exactly the same! That’s how all doctors learn to diagnose everything including Covid.
That’s a bald claim and nonesense. Yes. Testing tells us whether you have it. That’s the same with diabetes and lots of diseases. It’s not what’s used to diagnose death.
At this point, doctors do know symptoms of Covid pretty well.
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They also know what it looks like when a diabetes patient ods on their insulin and goes into shock from lack of glucose. The also know what it looks like when a person with pre-existing heart condition has a heart attack. There’s really no reason to think doctors are seeing a patient die from lack of glucose and then attribute it to Covid because the covid test came back positive. That sounds like a “doctors are really dumb and don’t know what they are doing” theory.
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My mother-in-law had Alheimers and then had a urinary tract infection. The doctors listed urinary tract infection as the cause of death.They didn’t list Alzheimers. My frail grandfather had throat cancer for years and was in the hospital because he was being treated for that. He got a cold. His cause of death was listed as the cold because that was what he died of. Cancer contributed to his death.
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No. What I doubt is their deaths get mis-diagnosed with any frequency.
Sure. You don’t know. You not knowing and speculating the answer is “Covid” for reasons that seem unlikely constitutes your main argument.
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My view– and I’ve said this before– is that you need to come up with data for your favored answers. Because my experience with my mother-in-law and grandfathers death is that the cause of death on the certificates was what appeared to be the cause at the time of death not what weakened them and made the susceptible to dying from some small malady most people survive.
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Loyalty to Trump seems to demand flu truthing. But the more likely scenario is uncounted Covid19 deaths, not an overcount. Part of this is from economic hardships or depression. We had excess deaths during the 2017-18 flu season and much more in the last year when flu incidence was lower than normal.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/14/us/covid-19-death-toll.html
And scroll down to the figure for all cause deaths here
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Another analysis shows a strong relationship of excess deaths with lower-income regions; in rural areas; in the South; and with lower levels of education.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.31.20184036v4.full
Geeeyodddd…
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The outright pandering award for 2021 goes to the NYT:
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West Virginia Has Everyone’s Attention. What Does It Really Need?
With the right federal response, it could become a model of renewal for other places around the country that prosperity has left behind.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/upshot/west-virginia-manchin-stimulus.html
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The NYT has written almost nothing in the past 20 years about WV and Appalachia that wasn’t condescending and smug. This is clearly a sell job for a payoff aimed directly at Joe Manchin. All Manchin has to whisper is “I’m thinking of switching parties” and the yellow brick road will be laid down for WV. These are the very same people who support emissions rules that prevent WV from burning it’s own coal for it’s own energy because some emissions might blow over to the Northeast.
Tom Scharf,
Manchin voted for some of the Republican amendments to the Democrat porkfest they’re calling stimulus, but also voted for the amendment that struck down all of them, which passed 51-50. Manchin is, as they say, sitting in the catbird seat.
OK. So it appears that no one has an alternative explanation for why heart disease and chronic respiratory tract disease deaths each dropped by 1000 per week between the first 3 months of 2020 and the last 6 months of 2020. I am interested in one to test my hypothesis.
RB, The evidence I found indicates that in March and early April covid deaths were likely undercounted because heart disease deaths spiked significantly by up to 1500 per week. Usually heart disease deaths are not seasonal. If you have an alternative explanation for the CDC data, I’m listening.
Your New York Times piece is remarkably uninformative and says this “Measuring excess deaths does not tell us precisely how each person died. Most of the excess deaths in this period are because of the coronavirus itself. But it is also possible that deaths from other causes have risen too, as hospitals in some hot spots have become overwhelmed and people have been scared to seek care for ailments that are typically survivable. Some causes of death may be declining, as people stay inside more, drive less and limit their contact with others.”
This is relevant because people who are already seriously ill are vastly more susceptible to any infectious disease. There are many millions of such people in the US. If covid wasn’t the culprit some other infection would be the villain fairly shortly. I would argue that in such cases, the underlying serious illness should be put down as the ultimate cause of death.
As far as the CDC covid numbers, I believe their criteria was (is?) that anyone with a positive test who dies is classified as a covid death or at least that was the case last spring. There were a lot of arguments about this I’m sure. That’s why Colorado reduced their count by 25% as I recall in August of 2020.
David Young (Comment #198240)
The article I was recalling, once I found it again, was retracted by the newsletter it was published in.
newsletter site: https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2020/11/a-closer-look-at-u-s-deaths-due-to-covid-19
retracted article: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Tnb1a8TXHj_jJCM2BDfGSriUgdn-2gec/view?usp=sharing
So I was incorrectly attesting this to the CDC – apologies.
The reason for the retraction in the link above didn’t seem to say that she was wrong, just that what she (Genevieve Briand) was saying “has been used to support dangerous inaccuracies that minimize the impact of the pandemic.”
ok then.
The CDC data on this page https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
shows that there have been increases in mortality by week for several diseases. I didn’t find the numbers in a quick search on the CDC pages to show one way or the other about total deaths for 2020. Folks with diseases that would put them in long term care facilities seem to have been very hard hit in 2020.
pauligon59, I saw the original post last spring and didn’t believe it. However, I am surprised at the massive retraction notice. I could see providing a more accurate and updated analysis. It does show how we are becoming a very censorious society where free and open discussion is often censored by our Tech titan rulers.
David
I don’t think it needs much explanation. But one reason it could drop is that people with heart disease did die of covid when they got it. Consequently, there were now fewer people with heart disease. Since you can’t die twice, the subsequently did not die of heart disease.
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We are going to see similar drops in deaths of elderly from other things going forward. This isn’t an “overcount” of covid. It’s merely that you can’t die twice.
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I would argue changing the long standing protocol for indicating the precipitating cause of death as the cause of death is nuts. I don’t see any reason to make Covid a special exception to the rule. (Though, I can see someone who wants to undercount Covid deaths might finding having a unique rule that allows uncercounting Covid.)
David
That’s not the criteria in the CDC document describing their criteria (linked above.)
RB,
“Loyalty to Trump seems to demand flu truthing.”
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I have no loyalty to Trump, but I have not a clue what that is supposed to mean. Can you clarify?
SteveF,
Apparent undercounting of Covid19 deaths is by no means limited to, but is greatest in Trump-supporting areas.
https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/25/undercounting-covid-19-deaths-greatest-in-pro-trump-areas-analysis-shows/
RB (Comment #198314): “Apparent undercounting of Covid19 deaths is by no means limited to, but is greatest in Trump-supporting areas.”
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Excess deaths are not just covid deaths. Many are lockdown deaths.
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Looks like a silly study, done by a person obviously biased against Trump voters (“There’s potentially latitude to make a judgement call conditional on a set of beliefs about Covid and whether it represents a serious problem or a hoaxâ€) who got the result he wanted. The results could be just that Trump supporting areas have fewer Wuhan virus deaths but just as many lockdown deaths. Actually, it is probably at least partly due to that since many the hardest hit areas seem to be heavily Democrat.
Well people feel strongly about this. There are experts who argue there is undercounting and some who argue there is overcounting. But its all caught up in political narratives and emotions.
One thing is certain and that is that the media has an incentive to exaggerate how bad any crisis is so that people will be driven to come back frequently to check on how bad its gotten.
What I discovered recently is that people who monitor public health tend to use age and population adjusted mortality. In the western world that has been dropping for 150 years. 2020 will come in at about the 2003 level for the US and at the 2013 level for Sweden. So we have lost some ground. But most people in 2003 weren’t scared to leave their homes because they might die. What will be interesting to me is to see what happens in 2021. I think its possible 2021 will see a lower than expected mortality because a lot of vulnerable people likely to die soon did get covid19 and died in 2020. We’ll see.
lucia (Comment #198301): “At this point, doctors do know symptoms of Covid pretty well.”
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An impressive list of symptoms here:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms-testing/symptoms.html
Only “Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing” and “New loss of taste or smell” seem at all specific and most people get neither. And then it says “This list does not include all possible symptoms”.
The effects are also quite broad:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects.html
It smacks of the symptoms and effects being anything displayed by someone with a positive test result.
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I asked: “There are surely people who die a few weeks after a mild or asymptotic case of covid. Do you claim that is rare? When it happens what do you think goes on the death certificate?”
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lucia answered: “No. What I doubt is their deaths get mis-diagnosed with any frequency.”
and
“You don’t know. You not knowing and speculating the answer is “Covid†for reasons that seem unlikely constitutes your main argument.”
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There have many anecdotal reports to support my claim. So where are the anecdotal reports the other way? That is, the doctors saying that many people die after contracting covid but it is not put on the death certificate, therefore the official count is a big undercount. I think there are plenty of doctors who would be happy to blow that whistle and there are no doubt many in the corporate media who who be more than happy to amplify it.
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lucia: “My view– and I’ve said this before– is that you need to come up with data for your favored answers.”
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And there is no data for your favored answers. That is the real problem: no data, even though there should be.
David Young (Comment #198316)
“But most people in 2003 weren’t scared to leave their homes because they might die”
________
I think there was less risk of catching a fatal disease in 2003. That’s why I didn’t avoid crowds back then. I do avoid crowds now, but I’m out about as much. I just don’t go to bars, restaurants, movies, and other places which have lots of people.
Even if I caught Covid-19, it probably wouldn’t be very serious. But I might give it to someone who would die. I don’t want to risk that.
That’s fine Max. You are more rational than the majority in this country many of whom are afraid to go to the hospital if they have a heart attack for example. Covid is a danger but in 2020 you were 8 times more likely to die of something else.
We have been obeying our rulers here in Washington state when we are out in public even though they are acting on pseudo-science in many cases. However, in private we totally disregard their religious rules. When my friends and family visit from out of state we do not wear masks, quarantine or any of that stuff. We should whisper so the Stassi doesn’t find out.
I’ve been doing a lot of hiking the last two years and the demographics of mask wearing are interesting. People under 30 seem to be very religious about masks even outdoors in the forest. Older men like me are the most likely to not wear one. Older women are somewhere in the middle. One reason these rules are silly is that most older people are smart to make these decisions for themselves and ignore unenforceable mandates and rules. I never wear a mask outdoors and don’t feel the slightest bit guilty.
My experience with hiking outdoors is that many people put on their masks when there are others approaching to signify consideration of others. And people acknowledge others for this gesture. Perhaps the young people you meet are concerned for the welfare of older people such as yourself.
I guess I’m having a hard time understanding where you think all the dead people came from. One thing there shouldn’t be a problem with is counting dead bodies. There is clearly excess mortality. There is at least 20% more excess dead bodies than the official covid count. Are you suggesting that in 2020 there was an exceedingly rare and unprecedented death blitz from something else? If you want to get to overcounting then you need to at least first get to “not undercounting”.
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Here is another in depth article for you to simply reject and replace with your own reality. There are many, many, more of these.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-covid-19-death-toll-is-even-worse-than-it-looks-11610636840
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“The recorded death count from the Covid-19 pandemic as of Thursday is nearing 2 million. The true extent is far worse.
More than 2.8 million people have lost their lives due to the pandemic, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from 59 countries and jurisdictions.”
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Maybe some people died because they were afraid to visit the hospital, maybe there is a secret room where all the people who make out death certificates are meeting to execute their diabolical plan to undercount deaths and subsequently take over the world. Maybe not.
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Explain all the dead bodies first.
More information on why they think surface contamination isn’t a major factor of covid transmission.
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COVID-19 rarely spreads through surfaces. So why are we still deep cleaning?
The coronavirus behind the pandemic can linger on doorknobs and other surfaces, but these aren’t a major source of infection.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4
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Basically it is still just a judgment call, mostly based on studies of surface contamination of other viruses, they won’t test covid contamination because “such studies are considered unethical for SARS-CoV-2, because it can kill.”
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“On the basis of the levels of RNA contamination and how often people touched surfaces such as doorknobs and buttons at pedestrian crossings, the team estimated that the risk of infection from touching a contaminated surface is less than 5 in 10,000 — lower than estimates for SARS-CoV-2 infection through aerosols, and lower than surface-transmission risk for influenza or norovirus.”
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“Hundreds of studies of COVID-19 transmission have been published since the pandemic began, yet there is thought to be only one that reports transmission through a contaminated surface, by what it termed the snot–oral route. According to the report, a person with COVID-19 in China blew his nose with his hand and then pressed a button in his apartment building elevator. A second resident in the building then touched the same button and flossed with a toothpick immediately after, thereby transferring the virus from button to mouth”
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“Evidence from superspreading events, where numerous people are infected at once, usually in a crowded indoor space, clearly point to airborne transmission, says Marr. “You have to make up some really convoluted scenarios in order to explain superspreading events with contaminated surfaces,†she says.”
Tom Scharf,
The whole “scrub everything with chlorine bleach” psychosis is truly nutty. It is a respiratory virus, and the potential for spread should be evaluated based on that fact.
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I needed some bleach many months ago (for clothes washing) but it was cleaned out of every store. Then I discovered that 10% active sodium hypochlorite solution for swimming pools was always available in unlimited quantities for 1/4 the price. I picked up a couple of gallons (equal to 4 gallons standard 5%), and haven’t needed to buy since.
RB, I think it has more to do with the young and inexperienced being unable to think independently. When I was 30, my thought processes were often confused and emotional and I would typically cherry pick things I read, despite having survived PhD training in mathematics. As I’ve grown older, emotions have faded and experience has taught me to be more critical of my own feelings and conclusions.
The science here is pretty clear. Masks in a community setting don’t make much difference for flu and its unlikely they make a difference for covid19. I discovered this when talking to my woke niece on facebook. She posted a link on mask wearing that she thought would prove her point that we should all mask up all the time. The paper showed a benefit from continuous n95 mask wearing in a hospital setting. It also pointed to 3 articles showing no benefit in a community setting. My niece is typical of young people in their inability to get straight the subtle details. Being woke by itself shows a certain lack of mental maturity.
Tom, I don’t know who you are addressing. This epidemic is quite serious. I also think that our response has been uniquely irrational. Never before in human history have the healthy been quarantined. The economic consequences of our response will be severe with strong inflation leading the list. There are tens of millions of retirees in the US, many on fixed incomes. There will be lots of hidden for now collateral damage too. Millions of screening tests have been skipped and millions of children have lost a vital year of education. Many cancer treatments have been postponed or canceled. Many have refused to seek treatment for heart attacks and strokes in the UK.
I believe that the epidemic will peter out at 0.2% to 0.25% fatality rates in the US and lower in many healthier European countries. That’s a large number for the US but its a blip in age and population adjusted mortality.
I’m only addressing the theory that we are overcounting covid deaths that are potentially from other causes.
David
That’s not remotely true. The word comes from requiring ships to sit in port for 40 days before landing. Many people on many ships were healthy and quarantined!
https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/historyquarantine.html
Quarantines imposed on healthy people weren’t uncommon. In fact, making healthy people wait out possible incubation periods was the whole point of quarantines in medieval times!
lucia,
Here is data. It is not the data we really would want, but it seems to be the best available.
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36% of people hospitalized in ND with the Wuhan virus were admitted from something else, but tested positive when admitted:
https://healthy-skeptic.com/2020/11/12/how-to-report-hospitalizations-in-a-more-transparent-manner/
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In Iowa, over 25%: https://healthy-skeptic.com/2020/11/30/another-state-provides-real-hospital-information/
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In MA, 30%: https://healthy-skeptic.com/2020/12/07/a-head-full-of-coronavirus-research-part-74/
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I have seen similar numbers for Mississippi, but can’t find them.
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That is hospitalizations, not deaths. But it is highly likely that the same magnitude applies to reporting deaths. Maybe more discretion is shown on death certificates, but from what I have seen the numbers that CDC gets from death certificates are consistent with the numbers reported by states.
Tom Scharf (Comment #198326): “I guess I’m having a hard time understanding where you think all the dead people came from. One thing there shouldn’t be a problem with is counting dead bodies. There is clearly excess mortality.”
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No question there is significant excess mortality. No question that a big chunk of that is the Wuhan virus. No question that a lot of that is due to fear and lockdowns. The question is the proportions.
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The UK seems to actually have up to date excess death data:
https://fingertips.phe.org.uk/static-reports/mortality-surveillance/excess-mortality-in-england-latest.html#all-persons
Note that the graph shows about 3 months at a time and you can scroll right and left. In the spring, excess deaths were 30-40% higher than Wuhan virus deaths. In summer, excess deaths were negative in spite of a continued low level of Wuhan virus deaths. In the fall, excess deaths are much less than Wuhan virus deaths (those numbers are just above the bottom axis). One week in early December had 2568 deaths from the virus but just 891 excess deaths.
——–
Note: The above page has a zillion graphs and may take a long time to load. If you are patient, the link should take you to the intended graph. Or you can click on “All persons” in the table of contents at the top of the page.
Mike
I’m left with so? This doesn’t come close to advancing your claim that deaths are over counted.
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It may help advance the claim that many people who are infected are asymptomatic since they only discovered they were infected as a result of being tested and not symptoms. We’d need follow on information about whether the ever got sick to advance that claim. But that’s not your claim.
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Data that is irrelevant to your claim doesn’t advance your claim. You need to find something relevant.
lucia (Comment #198349): “It may help advance the claim that many people who are infected are asymptomatic since they only discovered they were infected as a result of being tested and not symptoms.”
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Those people are reported to the state as being in hospital with covid. If they then die, it is logical that they are then reported to the state as having died with covid. That process is independent of death certificates.
David Young
At least they don’t spend their time reading about covid19 like you and coming to political conclusions. Next time you are there in the outdoors, try enjoying being outdoors instead of feeling smug superiority to those you see around you.
A 64 year old obese diabetic with heart disease is admitted to the hospital with respiratory distress, tests positive for the flu, develops pneumonia, oxygen delivery is compromised and they have cardiac arrest and die. What’s the cause?
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A person with advanced stage 4 pancreatic cancer with constant pain OD’s on morphine to prevent his family further suffering watching them die a certain death. What’s the cause?
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Everyone dies from eventual heart failure, right? I bet they haven’t buried a single person with a beating heart.
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So I think we all agree that single cause mortality is messy and likely not sufficient to describe what is really going on. State’s vary how they report things.
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The theory and question here is did they change reporting methods specifically for the covid pandemic? Maybe, but political pressure would likely result in undercounts as politicians were being held accountable for a while on their state’s death counts before the pandemic became uniformly “pandemicâ€.
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NYC’s undercount by our Emmy award winner hero Cuomo was by far the worst at 62%. They may have an excuse in that testing was so restricted in the early days they they didn’t test deceased people or those without obvious symptoms. Undercounts exist.
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The claim is that too many people who are being counted are simply dying with covid, not from it. There is anecdotal data to confirm overcounts:
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https://www.kgw.com/article/news/investigations/questions-over-the-accuracy-of-how-the-state-tracks-covid-deaths/283-0b1b7b6c-695e-4313-92cf-a4cfd7510721
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“According to the Oregon Health Authority (OHA), there is no difference when it comes to tracking and reporting COVID deaths. OHA spokesman Jonathan Modie explained in an email how the state determines what is counted as a COVID-19 death:
We consider COVID-19 deaths to be:
Deaths in which a patient hospitalized for any reason within 14 days of a positive COVID-19 test result dies in the hospital or within the 60 days following discharge.
Deaths in which COVID-19 is listed as a primary or contributing cause of death on a death certificate.
We count COVID-19 deaths this way because the virus can often have effects on an individual’s health that may complicate their recovery from other diseases and conditions, even injuries, and indirectly contribute to their death. Another reason is because OHA is using this data to track the spread of the disease, and to create actionable steps for stopping its spread.â€
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They do not do that for the flu. So some states are using a covid deaths to better track the local outbreaks. Overcounts exist. Undercounts exist. Which one is dominant? I still think you have to examine all cause mortality and excess deaths from prior years as the best method for the first pass. My guess is undercounts were dominant early and overcounts are localized and occurred later. It would require further examination, but covid gently pushing already ill people over the edge is a real thing, and maybe that’s what this debate is
Tom Scharf
This is also why the cause of death reports have multiple lines. They report cause of death and underlying factors as separate entries.
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The diabetic died of flu. The cancer patient OD’s. They had underlying factors.
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Reading what the CDC write, the answer appears to be “No”. It’s just that (for what I suspect are political reasons) some people want Covid to be treated differently so that fewer deaths are recorded. For example, above someone suggested the underlying pre-existing cause be listed as the cause of death. That’s not the norm. If it were, my mother in laws cause death would hve been “Alzheimers”. It was “urinary tract infection”. My grandpa’s death would have been listed as “cancer”. It was “pnuemonia” a bacterial infection he caught and which ultimately killed him.
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States might. But that means they aren’t going by death certificates. Perhaps a tally of both would be useful. But in which case, we need the tally.
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That would make both counts useful. Neither would necessarily be “over count” nor “undercount”. The states method is quick and good for that reason.
Snicker, snicker
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Will American Ideas Tear France Apart? Some of Its Leaders Think So
Politicians and prominent intellectuals say social theories from the United States on race, gender and post-colonialism are a threat to French identity and the French republic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/world/europe/france-threat-american-universities.html
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“The threat? “Certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States,’’ said President Emmanuel Macron.
French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas — specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism — are undermining their society. “There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,’’ warned Mr. Macron’s education minister.
Emboldened by these comments, prominent intellectuals have banded together against what they regard as contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture.”
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When you have lost the French, you have lost the world.
RB,
Also
Ironic.
Tom Scharf (Comment #198357): “Deaths in which a patient hospitalized for any reason within 14 days of a positive COVID-19 test result dies in the hospital or within the 60 days following discharge.”
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In other words, a positive test plus death is counted as a covid death. That is NOT done with other causes and is NOT consistent with CDC specifications for death certificates.
That is the issue: What fraction of deaths are in that category?
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“Deaths in which COVID-19 is listed as a primary or contributing cause of death on a death certificate.”
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Basically a subset of the above, but also including cases that the doctor attributes to covid but with no test. Presumably very few of those at this point.
RB, Forgive me if I don’t take your condescending advice. My niece is all the evidence I need that young people are not thinking rationally about this.
When I emailed the CDC data to my sister and her husband (also an MD) he said there is no doubt overcounting. He pointed to differential reimbursements offering a financial incentive to assign ambiguous cases to covid19. What Tom quoted from Oregon state policy is quite conclusive for me. The rules for covid are different than for other diseases. The Colorado admission of 25% overcounting is also impossible to explain away.
Generally I think Tom is right that the real issue here is how many “covid” fatalities were already seriously ill and likely to be pushed over the edge by any one of a large number of infections. Since 40% of fatalities have been among care facility residents, many covid fatalities are in this category.
I personally think that such cases should be attributed to the underlying condition that caused the person to be very susceptible to infections. A cancer patient who is immunocompromised who gets a bacterial infection and dies is a good example. The goal is to devise better cancer treatments, not to put that person in a pathogen free plastic bubble. That I think gives a clearer picture of the state of overall health in the country and what we need to focus on in terms of prevention or treatment. We need data that tells us what to focus on in terms of root causes.
But the real issue here is that people have different opinions about how to weight excess deaths vs. more broad measures of health (physical and economic). I prefer the measures most professionals use to monitor how our health system is doing, age and population adjusted mortality. Others focus on 460K deaths in the US from covid19. It is not really possible to resolve this conflict of values.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/
Just reread this excellent piece. Here’s an interesting item.
“In an autopsy series that tested for respiratory viruses in specimens from 57 elderly persons who died during the 2016 to 2017 influenza season, influenza viruses were detected in 18% of the specimens, while any kind of respiratory virus was found in 47%. In some people who die from viral respiratory pathogens, more than one virus is found upon autopsy and bacteria are often superimposed. A positive test for coronavirus does not mean necessarily that this virus is always primarily responsible for a patient’s demise.”
Tom Scharf,
“Politicians and prominent intellectuals say social theories from the United States on race, gender and post-colonialism are a threat to French identity and the French republic.”
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Actally, the French are understating the threat.
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It is not just a threat to national identity and national culture, it is a threat to rational thinking and even the acceptance of reality as a bound for public policy. Not to mention a threat to all personal liberties like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and more. The crazy woke ideology that has infected US education and with it the minds of generations of students is more destructive to human welfare than anything else I have encountered in my 70+ years. It is a potentially fatal cancer threatening 2000+ years of western civilization. It needs to be defeated, driven out, and eliminated. If not, the future will look more like George Orwell’s nightmare vision of total personal oppression than the relative freedoms enjoyed today.
I agree 100% with SteveF. It’s the biggest threat since Communism and Nazism and equally irrational.
David,
Thanks, but I feel like the preacher who’s only audience is the choir.
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Communism and Nazism were at least honest enough to admit they were not offering liberty to the individual. The Woke Aristocracy is insidiously dishonest: they insist that they are “increasing freedom” while they strangle personal liberty out of existence. They are far more dishonest and far more dangerous than either the communists or the Nazis.
Mike M.,
Using the data from one country, the UK, as evidence that there is overcounting is cherry picking. You were given a link to an article which looks at many countries for most of 2020. In some countries, South Korea for example, there are a lot more excess deaths than deaths listed as due to COVID-19. In nine countries, there were negative excess deaths: Serbia, Latvia, Norway, New Zealand, Mongolia, Taiwan, Australia, Georgia and Japan. The totals from those countries are small compared to the rest of the world.
Looking at the graph for the US, the excess deaths not attributed to COVID-19 appear to be correlated in time with COVID-19 deaths. That’s yet more evidence, IMO, of an undercount.
While you have given many reasons why it would be possible to overcount, the data seems to indicate that there is a significant undercount. Until you can explain quantitatively how 800,000 excess deaths over and above confirmed COVID-19 deaths fits in with your hypothesis, I will continue to reject it.
For anyone who wants to read the article and can’t get through the paywall, I could possibly save a copy as a PDF and put it on imgur, say, for a day or two and post a link here.
DeWitt, I looked briefly at the article and in the case of France for example, one could make the case for under reporting in the very early epidemic. After that, its not at all clear. The CDC data I linked here shows the same thing for the early epidemic but is in my book evidence of over-counting after roughly mid April.
But its not just the mortality by cause of death evidence. Colorado and the Oregon directives are also evidence.
I don’t think its cherry picking to exclude the rest of the world either.
SteveF,
I think Critical Legal Theory and Critical Race Theory and thus the whole woke movement traces back to Jacques Derrida and deconstruction.
It’s not hard, IMO, to go from literary deconstruction to, for example, gender as a social construct. We can apparently ignore the fact that so-called gender reassignment treatments still don’t (will never in the foreseeable future, IMO) allow people born with XY chromosomes to conceive and bear children, much less to lose the Y chromosome and replace it with an X. Similarly, people born with two X chromosomes cannot become genetically male, much less engender a child with a female. It’s all an illusion.
David Young,
It’s cherry picking to use one country, with what appears to be a very low undercount, as a proxy for the whole world.
MikeM
No. It’s not logical to conclude that at all.
DeWitt,
“It’s not hard, IMO, to go from literary deconstruction to, for example, gender as a social construct.”
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Sure, except that physical reality does not allow it. Gender is not a social construct, it is a physical reality. Those who insist otherwise are simply ignoring reality; when that group is put in charge (and with the Biden administration, it is already happening “big-time”), very bad outcomes for society are inevitable.
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Next, all of physical science will be dropped into the garbage disposer of woke social constructs. Try reading C&E News (if you have the stomach); it is almost 100% garbage reporting by woke people who know almost nothing about chemistry.
SteveF,
I quit the ACS many years ago because that was the only way I could stop getting that worthless rag C&E News. It was useless then and I’m sure it’s even worse now.
What I was trying to say is that using the tools of deconstruction, it’s a small step to justifying gender as a social construct, not that it’s a valid concept. IMO, it’s a gross misuse of a lit-crit tool which might, in the proper context, be valid.
I was just looking at an article about a case in Texas where the parents are divorced and the mother, a pediatrician, wants to start treatment to ‘transition’ her male child because she thinks that the child thinks that he’s a she. But her father strongly objects and has brought suit to obtain sole custody. I don’t think a parent should be allowed to make an irreversible decision like that for a child younger than the age of consent. But we now have government funded clinics that are, IMO, mutilating children.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #198380): “Using the data from one country, the UK, as evidence that there is overcounting is cherry picking.”
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Using the one country for which I had data is very limited, but it is not cherry picking.
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DeWitt: “Looking at the graph for the US, the excess deaths not attributed to COVID-19 appear to be correlated in time with COVID-19 deaths. That’s yet more evidence, IMO, of an undercount.”
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The excess deaths in the US are from a model, since the data are far from complete. There is, of course, some correlation. If official covid deaths are used a model input, that correlation will be amplified. I do not claim that all or even most covid deaths are not such, only that some unknown and possibly significant fraction are misattributed.
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I can see how there may have been an undercount last spring when testing was limited. I do not see how that can still be so with the massive amount of testing done.
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The excess deaths are not hard to explain at all. People not getting care for heart attacks and strokes. People missing cancer treatments. All sorts of other medical care postponed or foregone. Frail elderly people depressed by isolation. More suicides and drug overdoses.
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In many cases, the excess deaths will continue for a long time, such as from missed cancer screenings and those resulting from the economic devastation and interruption in children’s educations. The collateral damage has been huge. And largely unnecessary.
DeWitt, I said nothing about the world. I’m concerned with the US. My CDC data when viewed using the WSJ method you linked to shows perhaps 10-15K undercounting in the first few weeks of the epidemic and then about 60K-65K overcount since then. If you believe the WSJ article and not the CDC data that’s bias.
I can see how other countries might have severe undercounts too especially in less developed parts of the world. It’s totally uninformative to lump all countries together because each has vastly different data quality and protocols.
Mike M.,
It’s still cherrypicking.
Yet more handwaving of possibilities with no data.
Did I not say a quantitative explanation? Yes, I did.
Then there’s the problem of why excess deaths above the COVID-19 deaths vary a lot between countries with similar government policies on lockdowns. Which is also why using just the UK date is indeed cherrypicking.
David Young,
Umm, the WSJ cites CDC as the source for their data in the graph for 2020.
DeWitt,
“It was useless then and I’m sure it’s even worse now.”
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It has continued its decline to almost comical idiocy, with the key word being idiocy, not almost. I only remain a member to have access to group life insurance…. which I need because I still have a 13 YO. But otherwise I would instantly revoke my membership.
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Many years ago C&E News wanted a telephone interview about a certain polymer market. I agreed to the interview on the condition they would pass to the editor of C&E News my strenuous objection to their insane “climate change” focus. I sent a nice letter. The reply was “join the thousands who have raised similar objections”, but otherwise (paraphrasing) ‘I don’t give a sh!t what the membership thinks’. The guy was driven out eventually, but was replaced by someone even worse. The ACS is no longer a scientific organization at all; it is an extension of the woke, anti-reality, social justice culture. It is both ridiculous and worthless.
Reporting and Coding Deaths Due to COVID-19
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/coding-and-reporting.htm
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“Certifying deaths due to COVID–19
If COVID–19 played a role in the death, this condition should be specified on the death certificate. In many cases, it is likely that it will be the UCOD, as it can lead to various lifethreatening conditions, such as pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). In these cases, COVID–19 should be reported on the lowest line used in Part I with the other conditions to which it gave rise listed on the lines above itâ€
“In cases where a definite diagnosis of COVID–19 cannot be made, but it is suspected or likely (e.g., the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty), it is acceptable to report COVID–19 on a death certificate as “probable†or “presumed.â€â€
“Intermediate causes are those conditions that typically have multiple possible underlying etiologies and thus, a UCOD must be specified on a line below in Part I. For example, pneumonia is an intermediate cause of death since it can be caused by a variety of infectious agents or by inhaling a liquid or chemical. Pneumonia is important to report in a cause-of-death statement but, generally, it is not the UCOD. The cause of pneumonia, such as COVID–19, needs to be stated on the lowest line used in Part I.â€
Palm Beach County examines all 581 deaths through July 2020 listed as Covid, and finds 8 that were definitely not Covid. Only 169 were listed as Covid without other contributing factors. This problem exists but I don’t think it is severe.
https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/deaths-incorrectly-attributed-to-covid-19-in-florida-county
DeWitt, If I didn’t make it clear before my hypothesis is about the US. There may have been 800K excess deaths worldwide many in countries where testing is very spotty. Those may have been due to covid.
I almost feel like I’m at Climate Etc. and dealing the trolls there. I don’t think you are seeing what I’m saying or looking at the evidence. You can go look at the CDC data yourself. Maybe I made a mistake. My assumption was that Jan and February and1st two weeks of March could be used a baseline of normal mortality.
You use previous years as the baseline because deaths are seasonal.
See the graphs here:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/pdfs/mm6942e2-H.pdf
I’ll need more time to do a more detailed analysis. I don’t think heart attacks are seasonal and they appear to be essentially constant from May2020 through January 2021. Similarly chronic lower resp. disease deaths are pretty constant from that period. I checked rather carefully some of the other causes of death and there was not a strong seasonal signal. Seasonality is probably almost totally due to virus infections and deaths being strongly seasonal, at least that’s my guess.
Something is not adding up here and I don’t know exactly what it is.
The seasonal deaths are seasonal, ha ha. It’s maybe 5% or 10% of deaths peaking in winter. However it is critical to use this as the baseline when analyzing. Same thing, flu and so forth pushing people over the edge in the same way covid does. As DeWitt mentioned, you cannot ignore the correlation in excess deaths (after normalizing for official covid counts) that matches the outbreaks almost perfectly.
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So it’s possible these are people not seeking treatment et. al. or these are covid deaths that are missed et. al. The assumption in the media is the latter, although I have not seen anyone conclusively demonstrate it. It may not be provable either way. What is certain is that there are significant extra deaths compared to annual averages after covid normalization.
Tom, My point is that in 2020/2021Jan, there is no clear seasonality in the heart disease and chronic lower resp. disease mortality data. Most of the “seasonality” in total mortality is probably due to viral infections like the flu.
David Young,
” Most of the “seasonality†in total mortality is probably due to viral infections like the flu.”
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Sure, and rhinovirus, the other types of human coronaviruses, pneumococci, and more. But I think the excess mortality data (CDC) for 2020 is overwhelming: almost certainly there has been, if anything, an undercount of deaths due to covid-19. I do not pretend to be able to divine how many of those excess deaths were directly due to covid infection, due to a combination of covid with other factors, or due to suicide brought on by covid inspired depression, but I doubt it matters much. Overall excess deaths among older Americans exactly follows the total reported death rate… no surprise, since almost all covid fatalities are among those over 55, and the overwhelming majority over 65. If you continue beating this dead horse, then it will will only make the flies delay their egg laying for a bit.
I think you can find an undercount of COVID that would overwhelm all overcounts just in Bombay alone. There are these slums on the way from the airport that stand out in contrast to the rest of the development there. Testing there found antibodies in the majority. Dead bodies were being burned before any testing could be done.
MikeN,
Yes, the very poor region near the airport in Mumbai is terrible (with horrible traffic to boot). There is little doubt that in a place like that many (if not most) infections are never confirmed and many deaths are never reported. OTOH, India has only 5% of it’s population past 65 (versus 13% for the States), so they have a relatively smaller population at high risk of death. The fraction over 75 in India (where the probability of death is much higher) is even smaller than in the States. So while the absolute number of cases and deaths in India is high, the rate of death per million is very likely to be extremely low compared to the States and Europe.
Concerning excess mortality, here is an interesting study comparing Sweden to Norway:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.11.20229708v1
Whether there was an excess depends on which years are compared. Sweden had very low mortality in 2018-19 (July 26 to July 26), which can lead to higher mortality the next year. If 2015-2019 is used as the base, then Sweden had 3600 excess deaths in 2019-2020 compared to Norway. But if 2018-2020 is compared to 2015-2018, there is essentially no difference. For the time period of the study, Sweden had 5741 covid deaths compared to 255 in Norway (about half the population).
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The link above seems somewhat different than the version I have. That one says:
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I guess my main point is that analyzing excess mortality is not as easy at it might seem. Also, a lot of the people who died of covid would have died anyway, independent of whteher there is misattribution.
We should see lower than normal mortality in the next few years if the bulk of covid deaths are people be gently pushed over the edge.
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Of course you can find single countries that exhibit slightly different characteristics. You need to look at average mortality but also the noise in that signal year to year. The CDC paper above had an upper bound on what it would consider the mortality for a given year. A big factor is how bad the flu season is on any given year. To overcome this problem you use bigger data sets. You tend not to find more wisdom by parsing big data sets down until the noise gets so high you can find examples of what you like. Texas had a hot summer so global warming is an existential threat, etc. 1/3 of temperature sensors show cooling so global warming isn’t real.
Tom Scharf,
“We should see lower than normal mortality in the next few years if the bulk of covid deaths are people be gently pushed over the edge.”
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Yes, that seems the logical result. Unfortunately, while real, the effect may be lost in the noise. If there turn out to be 700,000 excess (earlier than expected) deaths, with nearly all among people over 60, then future deaths should be reduced in total by a that amount. But the effect will be spread out over multiple years. The typical total of deaths (IIRC) is about 2,700,000 per year. The 700,000 excess will be spread over a decade or more, so the fall in deaths may be only 70,000 per year, or even less.
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There will likely be some exceptions. In NY and NJ, with super-high death totals in nursing homes, there should be an immediate and significant drop in total deaths once the pandemic ends, since most nursing home residents don’t have very long life expectancy absent covid; the drop in deaths should be over a shorter period, and so more obvious.
Double Masks Offer Significantly Better Protection, CDC Study Finds
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“In a series of laboratory experiments using headforms and machines to generate aerosols, the CDC found that wearing a three-ply cloth mask over a three-ply medical or surgical mask blocked 92.5% of particles from a cough.â€
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Sigh. If two is better than three must be really good! Ironically this is an example of how the “just wear a mask and the pandemic will go away†narrative has been false from the beginning. The data shown here does not match previous effectiveness studies of surgical masks (which until now were shown to be super great(!)) suggesting the lab experiments here probably used enormous amount of aerosols and a measure of effectiveness to get the result they wanted.
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It was obvious from the beginning that a tight fit matters. Watching sports where players/coaches would move their masks down to yell at players and then put them back up was eye rolling funny. Many of the reusable masks have such a loose fit that they seem pretty worthless. You need to breath * through * the mask, not around it. Every heard that advice, even once? Then there is the “it only really helps for people who are contagious to block their aerosols†narrative. I wonder if mouth breathers have an advantage.
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It’s as if this year was the first time anyone every tested a mask in the history of ‘S’cience.
Tom Scharf,
And if you make people breath inside a plastic bag, then they absolutely never spread covid-19… or anything else, ever again. 100% effective. Wait, didn’t they try that in Cambodia?
Obviously if we all wore two masks (with contrasting colors so we * know * you are wearing two, preferably with the smaller on on top) then this pandemic would be over. Shame on all of you who aren’t wearing two.
I’ll just this right here…
https://www.surrey.ca/sites/default/files/styles/16x9_1920w/public/2020-12/COVID%20Champ_Report%201200%20x%20675.jpg
The City of Surrey (Vancouver, BC) efforts to ensure compliance.
I am thinking the only real solution to covid-19 is demanding that everyone unwilling to commit suicide use full face-piece compressed-air respirator (like fire fighters use), with a penalty of public execution by beheading for violators…. while wearing a double cloth mask, of course. Democrat politicians would be, naturally, exempted from the full face-piece respirator requirement. That would finally solve the problem. After all, you can’t complain while wearing a full face respirator.
SteveF, I need to download the CDC data by cause of death and examine it in detail before saying more. I don’t have any time right now to do it. If someone else is interested that would be great.
Interesting times. Dems are trying to advance $15/hr minimum wage as part of their COVID-19 relief package. Will Elizabeth MacDonough bend reconciliation rules enough to permit it to be passed by budget reconciliation? Will Joe Machin ride along? I guess we’ll see!
Mike M, That is indeed a very interesting analysis.
mark bofill,
She should disallow it, of course, since it is not the kind of item which is covered under reconciliation. That does not mean she will; if Schumer threatens to override her ruling, she may go along with it to ‘preserve the authority’ of her office. Whether or not Schumer threatens that ‘mini-nuclear-option’ will depend mainly on a senator named Manchin. If Manchin goes along with it, then the filibuster is for practical purposes no longer in effect. I hope Manchin is smart enough to recognize that. Of course, Schumer may be trying to give a fig leaf to Manchin to cover an effective flip-flop on his promises about preserving the filibuster.
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One thing is certain, Democrats are really going to hate it the next time Republicans have a thin majority and reverse every law Democrats support. Democrats remind me of the obnoxious little girl in Willy Wonka who sang “don’t care how, I want it NOW!”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Wzr12gBrXA8
Common inhaled asthma corticosteroid reduces severe covid illness in elderly people by ~90% if started within first week of symptoms; placebo controlled trial (146 patients) stopped early because it was judged unethical to continue the placebo arm. Also shortened recovery and reduced long term symptoms.
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https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.04.21251134v1.full.pdf
Yippeeeee…. I got an appointment for the vaccine today!
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I thank DeSantis for not giving my dose to a 25 year old inmate at a Florida prison.
SteveF,
I saw the budesonide results for severely ill hospitalized people linked on twitter. Someone proclaimed something like “gamechanger” and “more important than vaccines”. I thought… uhhmmm. That’s overhyping a bit. Not getting severely ill (vaccine) is more useful than getting severely ill but avoiding death. Still, I thought that was optimistic.
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I hadn’t seen it for early treatment. Now that is a big deal. I don’t think it’s more important than vaccines, but something you can give as soon as someone has mild symptoms and prevents getting severely ill is terrific.
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Of course, I still think vaccine is better! Heck, even though I’m trying the ι-carrageenan prophylactic, I think vaccine is better than spritzing my nose several times a day forever. (Vaccine would also be cheaper in the long run. Plus, we know perfectly well that nose-spritzing adherence would be much less than 100% even if over the counter nasal sprays were cheap. The are cheap for 1 time use. But they aren’t if the need is 4 times a day every day of the year. As homemade is so cheap, I suspect quality control, need to keep sanitary with long shelf life even after first opened, shipping, stocking and so on drive the cost. Due to issues of sanitation, in the end, I don’t mind that I have to heat to use because I ended up storing the the fridge. Otherwise, I would have stored at room temp in the bathroom. A bottle lasts me about 4 days.)
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Glad you got a vaccine!
Lucia,
Yes, it does seem the magic bullet, but of course, added studies are needed….. preferably in parallel with off-label treatment. But it does seems a winner.
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I am standing in line for my injection….. you never seen so many old people in one place, even in Florida. But 78F and sunny, matching the average age and disposition in the line, I can’t complain.
Hummmm…. a spray into your lungs that stops the covid progression to severe illness…. almost sounds like something Trump might propose…. just sayin’.
Pfizer…. in 4 weeks I’m freeeeeeee.
SteveF (Comment #198462): “Yes, it does seem the magic bullet, but of course, added studies are needed”.
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Less evidence for the steroid spray than for hydroxychloroquine. The 90% reduction is 1 case seeking out urgent care vs.10. That is decent evidence that there is *some* effect, but hardly determines how large the effect is.
Yes, it’s definitely a good day when you get the vaccine shot. I was really happy for my wife, and quite frankly relieved that I would soon be unable to give her covid even I got it, at least to 95%.
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My county said they were going to allocate vaccine appointments in the order people originally registered. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when the woke argument was made during that assessment. They also opened up appointments at grocery stores, Walmart, and Sams which all schedule independently to make it a confusing mess.
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It looks like this last covid surge will be the “big one” in the US. Given the vaccinations rates globally we will have covid with us for years, if not forever. The variants might make a comeback but it seems there won’t be enough people left for a major surge unless it completely bypasses the vaccine(s).
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They are trying to figure out how to fast track vaccine updates, but they seem to be doing this rather slowly IMO. The WSJ noted today that people who have access to a vaccine (65+ etc) are rather unwilling to be in a placebo controlled trial at this point in the US.
It’s a good thing Trump isn’t around to promote the corticosteroid, or else it would deemed worthless and counterproductive immediately, ha ha.
Mike M,
“Less evidence for the steroid spray than for hydroxychloroquine.”
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I don’t think that is correct. Although small, the study was randomized and presents reasonably convincing data and P values. Last word? Clearly not, but combined with the well documented much lower than expected incidence of severe covid illness among people who take the same medication routinely for asthma, the evidence is quite strong. Additional, larger studies are needed to verify the effect, but I expect medical doctors will not hesitate to prescribe off-label.
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It seems to me much stronger evidence than studies of hydroxychloroquine, most of which are after-the-fact clinical evaluations. I note also that there was never any documented evidence that the many people who take hydroxychloroquine routinely for autoimmune illnesses (my wife among them) have an abnormally low incidence of covid infection or severity of covid infection. That is consistent with very weak or no effect.
Tom Scharf,
“It looks like this last covid surge will be the “big one†in the US.”
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Yes, it does look that way. There are enough examples of individual states where herd immunity appears to have been reached to suggest that the pandemic will come to an end in most places once ~10-15% of a population has tested positive.
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In Florida, the identifiable populations that have a higher than average incidence of severe illness and death (Hispanic and black) are not signing up for the vaccine as quickly as white/Angelo people, which unfortunately leads to more deaths than there could be/should be. I hope DeSantis focuses his energies on getting the elderly in these groups signed up.
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I agree that the roll-out in Florida has been a confused mess. I think it is in part because many of the county health agencies were just not up to the task, and in part for lack of available doses. My county (Martin) did basically nothing, a joke. I got my vaccination in St. Lucie county, where they seem to be doing as well as they can within the dose restrictions. They apparently had some cancellations this AM, and I got an email message at 8:45AM
“There are 12 doses available at 11:00 AM today if you sign up in the next two minutes.” I did.
The SF school board voted to eliminate merit testing for entry to Lowell HS on a 5-2 vote. Curiously they noted systemic racism as a problem even though Lowell is 51% Asian and 18% white.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/san-franciscos-anti-school-board-11612985956
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I also read this, which falls into the category or unintended consequences, or is it intended consequences?
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“San Francisco is about 48 percent white, but that falls to 15 percent for children enrolled in its public schools. For all the city’s vaunted progressivism, it has some of the highest private school enrollment numbers in the country — and many of those private schools have remained open.”
Tom Scharf,
My wife does not qualify for preference, so I too am relieved I will soon be very unlikely to give her (or anyone else!) the illness. Then there is not being as concerned about air travel… a huge advantage for me. I have put off multiple trips.
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Mike M,
I will let you know if my skin starts turning purple or green or if I have a sudden desire to eat human brains.
Tom Scharf,
“… is it intended consequences?”
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I doubt those sending their kids to private schools in the SF area give the tiniest sh!t about anything except their highly visible virtue signaling. Hence the willful abuse of kids who are neither rich nor advantaged like theirs. Moral midgets.
My brother-in-law scored a shot by being in the right place at the right time. (He got one that would have been thrown out, so they started calling people!)
He reports zero side effects. I don’t remember if he got moderna or pfizer.
Lucia,
Side effects were mostly after the second injection, especially with the Moderna vaccine.
Another Glenn Greenwald epic rant on free speech and journalism.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-journalistic-tattletale-and-censorship
Three weeks after my first (Moderna) shot. There was a little soreness at the injection spot for a couple of days. (I anticipate worse effects after the booster next week.)
I report no increase in urge to eat brains.
CDC asked us to sign up for their Vsafe program. They send a text with a link to a brief survey of health and any reactions. Daily for the first few days, now weekly. I wonder if they’ll make the response statistics public.
The NYT’s firing of Donald McNeil Jr. gets more humorous every day (except for the fired reporter of course). The editor stated during the firing that “We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intentâ€.
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This was after an original investigation into the alleged incident (the details are both ridiculous and unsurprising) absolved McNeil ““I authorized an investigation and concluded his remarks were offensive and that he showed extremely poor judgment, but it did not appear to me that his intentions were hateful or malicious”. The woke newsroom later erupted and demanded he be fired because “intent is irrelevant” (in their words). He was fired.
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Naturally it took about 12 seconds for people to search the NYT’s own articles, Twitter, etc for racist language regardless of intent and find numerous examples. Oops. The never Trumper conservative there Bret Stephens had his column on the subject “spiked” Monday by none other than the NYT publisher.
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NYT Today:
“In our zeal to make a powerful statement about our workplace culture we ham-handedly said something that some of you rightly saw as threatening our journalism. It was an oversimplification of one of the most difficult issues in American life,†Baquet said in a staff meeting on Thursday, according to Times media reporter Ben Smith. “It was a deadline mistake, and I regret it. Of course intent matters when we’re talking about language and journalism.â€
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Unsurprisingly the oversimplified reporter remains fired, but the rest of the staff get to remain under the intent matters guidelines, ha ha. What a twisted web we weave …
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nyt-editor-retracts-racial-slur-standard-used-to-justify-mcneil-ouster-of-course-intent-matters/
Note that McNeil was not officially fired, it was a negotiated surrender. It sounds like there was probably a payoff involved, and the usual groveling apology (struggle session) was forthcoming after terms were finalized. Apparently McNeil had the gall to refuse to apologize for the incident all the way up until the moment he left.
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The loyalty purge is on at that organization. Get your early retirement while you can!
Tom Scharf,
I like Greenwald, because he really is trying to be honest. I have subscribed to his Substack. But I am becoming puzzled by his repeated rants about pretty much standard behavior for woke left journalists. He seems shocked (shocked!!!) at behavior that is now so mainstream on the left as to be barely worth mentioning. I would expect Greenwald to begin to understand that the horrible behaviors now on routine display are a product of the destructive fundamental principles of the left… expected, and not at all surprising. He carries on constantly about how the ACLU has abandoned any actual adherence to civil liberties, yet fails to see the issue is those running the ACLU are profoundly left in their philosophy, so for them the niceties of civil liberties are but an impediment to “social progress”… and one to be overcome by any means available.
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I had hoped that maybe, just maybe… Greenwald would begin to see that the fundamental problem is that the philosophy of the left enables (even encourages) both destructive behaviors and public policies which damage the social fabric. I am beginning to wonder if he has it in him to step back and appreciate how his continuing support for leftist principles help leads to terrible outcomes for society.
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So far, not a hint of that. There are none so blind as those who choose not to see.
SteveF, I also subscribe to Greenwald. I think he has a history of supporting freedom of speech and opposing the deep state particularly the intelligence agencies. I don’t know what his position is on economics, crime, and that kind of issue. He’s certainly got a lot of courage to leave the company he founded to become essentially an independent journalist. Sharyl Attkisson is another one I really like. I just gave her a donation.
It appears unlikely that Officer Sicknick was killed by rioters. More likely is that he suffered an unrelated stroke. I had noticed this earlier reading news reports that said he died “following” incident (or altercation or whatever), not that he died of , for instance, a forceful blow to the head. See https://www.revolver.news/2021/02/maga-blood-libel-why-are-they-hiding-the-medical-report/ CNN reported part of the story. https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/02/05/cnn-finally-acknowledges-the-story-media-spread-about-officer-sicknicks-cause-of-death-isnt-true-n322837
In Hillary’s words, really “deplorable” that Dems routinely make false accusations of murder as a fact when so far no evidence exists.
On an unrelated matter I stumbled on the fact that Michael Mann was ordered to pay about $12,000 to one of the defendants in Steyn case because he had refused to turn over income records. An indication to me that judge is getting tired of case. Real busy now so don’t have time to supply link.
JD Ohio (Comment #198495): “It appears unlikely that Officer Sicknick was killed by rioters. More likely is that he suffered an unrelated stroke. I had noticed this earlier reading news reports …”
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Indeed. Right from the beginning it seemed iffy that he died of injuries. But it seems that he suffered no physical trauma and the investigators have not been able to find any cause on the tapes. That has not stopped the corporate media, including Fox News, from continuing to repeat the story that he died of injuries, or even the now clearly disproved claim that he was bludgeoned with a fire extinguisher. But the full facts have not been released.
No wonder people hatch conspiracy theories.
Will the FDA approve the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in spite of it being only 66% effective? The “experts” are saying that we need to get 80-90% of the population vaccinated in order to reach herd immunity and for life to return to normal. If that is true, then it would be irresponsible to approve a vaccine that is incapable of reaching the stated end point. I am guessing they will do it anyway.
Mike M,
The J&J vaccine is an interesting case. I read today that even though it is only 66% effective at stopping mild and moderate cases, it appears about 85% effective in stopping severe illness and maybe ~100% effective in stopping deaths. If that is true (and I can’t say for certain that it is), then approval still makes sense. The vaccine offers other advantages: only 4C refrigeration, not deep freeze, a single dose, and few and very mild side effects. J&J started a 2-dose trial in November…. two doses may end up being comparable in effectiveness to the other two-dose vaccines.
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BTW, I think that figure of more than 80% needing active (antibody) immunity to reach herd immunity is inconsistent with observations in places like the Dakotas. Lots of people appear very resistant to infection, in spite of certain exposure.
MikeM,
Let’s hope they do. It would be better to get everyone willing vaccinated. It’s not as if you can’t get a booster later on.
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I always said I’d take a 20% effective vaccine if they made it available. If a better one comes along later, I’ll take that.
This is absolute nonsense. Herd immunity is not the only endpoint. Reduction and illness and death is a sufficient end point for approving a vaccine. A 66% effective vaccine reduces those. That is sufficient reason to approve it.
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In fact: not approving it would be utterly irresponsible. It is just careless of people’s lives to not give them tools to protect themselves individually merely because you can’t reach collective immunity.
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Sorry: but I’m not going to adopt the communist philosophy that I only exist for the good of all. I want a vaccine for myself and sooner not later. Choices that deprive me as an individual of protection might be ok to a communist dictator. But as an American, I don’t accept that.
Interesting study on COVID reporting history
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COVID-19 Data Collection, Comorbidity & Federal Law: A Historical Retrospective
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https://jdfor2020.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/adf864_165a103206974fdbb14ada6bf8af1541.pdf
I want a vaccine, but my reason differs from Lucia. I don’t want to kill my wife.
Thomas,
Yep. I also don’t want to kill Jim. He doesn’t want to kill me. Neverthless, it’s a fairly personal reason. I’m much more motivated by concern about people nearest me and people I know than by “herd immunity”.
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Yes, I’d like to achieve herd immunity. But I would be utterly appalled if individuals who want the vaccine weren’t allowed to get whatever protection it provides merely because it can’t get us to the ideal of herd immunity.
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I’m honestly astounded that anyone would think or suggest a vaccine that saves many lives should not be approved merely because it won’t get us to “herd immunity”. Other than some sort of weird communist ethos that sacrifices the good of individuals for the good of all, I can’t see any argument in favor of not approving of the J&J vaccine.
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Well… maybe people who refuse the vaccine want those who get it to create herd immunity so that the refusers get protection without getting vaccinated themselves. But that would be nuts!
I’m probably still willing to believe that if an otherwise healthy man gets hit in the head with a fire extinguisher and dies two days later of a stroke that they may likely be related, especially if he had a concussion. I’d need more information on how prevalent that series of events can be though. I will say that I also noted a near blackout by the media on details of how he died and the lack of evidence for any actual perpetrators when it seems everything was being videoed from multiple angles. Anyway both things can be true simultaneously, the media coverage was needlessly biased for a desired narrative, and the events were medically connected.
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I haven’t been following the trial at all, so maybe there is some evidence.
Even if J&J was only 66% effective then the combination of already infected and vaccinated can still get to herd immunity. The roadblock in the US and places like France is going to be getting enough people to take the vaccine.
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CDC: “It conveys that the FDA would expect that a COVID-19 vaccine would prevent disease or decrease its severity in at least 50% of people who are vaccinatedâ€.
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I’m not sure why they said that. Perhaps it was because the vaccine risks outweigh the benefits for emergency use, it costs too much, or they expect another vaccine should be able to reach that level. The FDA won’t let you take a 25% effective vaccine even if you wanted to.
https://www.webmd.com/stroke/news/20110728/brain-injuries-increase-risk-of-stroke
“People who have had a traumatic brain injury face a tenfold increase in the risk of having a stroke within three months, according to a new study.”
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That risk is still very low for people under 50, but concussions do increase risk. I’m sure the magnitude of the injury is also a factor.
Tom,
Yes. The roadblock to herd immunity is going to be people refusing the vaccine. J&J is not mRNA.
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Some people are at least claiming the reason they won’t take the others is some concern about mRNA being “genetic engineering”. Perhaps they’ll take this one where they wouldn’t take the other one. Their doing so would still move us closer to herd immunity.
.
Of course, if they are lying to themselves of others, it might turn out they will reject the J&J vaccine too. But I’d still much rather see the J&J vaccine approved. I’d take it while I wait for my booster (which I’m sure all who are willing to be vaccinated will end up taking due to variants.)
lucia (Comment #198505): “Sorry: but I’m not going to adopt the communist philosophy that I only exist for the good of all. I want a vaccine for myself and sooner not later.”
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Perfectly reasonable.
Unfortunately, our society is being destroyed by the authoritarian actions justified by the virus. The goalpost movers are now saying that we can’t get back to normal until the virus has been extinguished. If they let us get back to normal, then I am fine with approving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. If given the option, I’d probably go for that one myself.
Well, OK then, 6 weeks later:
.
NYT: “Though law enforcement officials initially said Officer Sicknick was struck with a fire extinguisher, police sources and investigators are at odds over whether he was hit. Medical experts have said he did not die of blunt force trauma, according to one law enforcement official.
Investigators have found little evidence to back up the attack with the fire extinguisher as the cause of death, the official said. Instead, they increasingly suspect that a factor was Officer Sicknick being sprayed in the face by some sort of irritant, like mace or bear spray, the law enforcement official said.”
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I guess I’m more willing to engage in conspiracy theater at this point. This quote is from a NYT article claiming this was the worst attack on law enforcement since 9/11. It also counts officers who died by suicide later, those expected to have PTSD later, those who may have been exposed to covid, etc. Let’s just say their standard is a bit “dynamic” and they fail to mention the Dallas killing of 5 officers, or endless injuries to that standard all last summer.
Tom Scharf (Comment #198511): “I’m probably still willing to believe that if an otherwise healthy man gets hit in the head with a fire extinguisher and dies two days later of a stroke that they may likely be related”
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Of course. But if Officer A gets hit by a fire extinguisher then officer B has a stroke a few hours later, they are most certainly NOT related.
One of the few facts we have is that Sicknik was not one of the officers hit by the fire extinguisher.
Tom Scharf,
There is zero evidence he died from anything related to the riot. The cause of death is obviously known, but is not being released to the public. If it were blunt force trauma, a stroke in the aftermath of a concussion, or anything else related to the riot, that information would have been released immediately. My guess (and all we have is guesses) is that he died of some long term health problem, an overdose, a stroke, or a heart attack, completely unrelated to the riot, and that is why the cause of death has not been released.
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Information damaging to the advance of their political cause is always withheld by Democrats. This instance is no different. Unfortunately, with the complete cooperation of the MSM, they almost always get away with it, although Andrew Cuomo may finally pay a political price for his combination of stupidity, incompetence, and utter dishonesty.
24 hours after the first dose of Pfizer vaccine: The initial soreness in my shoulder peaked about 12 hours after the injection and is 85% gone; no other side effects so far. IIRC, the incidence of systemic side effects (fever, headache, body ache, etc) is much more common after the second dose than the first.
MikeM
Perhaps. But the authoritarian action of making a ruling that prevents me from getting the vaccine only makes things worth. I would rather the FDA because less authoritarian, not more. You seem to want them to be moreauthoritarian.
I want the J&J vaccine whether or not we get back to normal. I’d like to get back to normal whether or not we get the J&J vaccine.
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Honestly I think it is immoral to suggest that someone like me would have to defer getting protection against that virus because someone wants to use getting the vaccine approved as bargaining chip to getting back to normal. So I think it would be appalling to hold up approval for such a reason.
As for this: I’m not sure whose really saying that. And at that it all sort of depends on what they mean by “get back to normal”.
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But even if they mean something like “we’ll still require masks on flights”, my reaction is so? Once the number of cases and hospitalizations drops, these so called goalpost movers will lose their case. They aren’t all powerful gods.
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Having cases and deaths down will get us closer to normal. Restrictions will be relaxed. If you want to get close to normal, doing something that delays the decline in case or death rates is counter productive. (In addition to immoral.)
Lucia,
I think the FDA’s position was that at less than 50% efficiency, the potential risks were too high to justify an “emergency approval”. I always though it was a BS argument considering death rates for the elderly and the available safety data for the vaccines after a phase 3 trial. Of course, I think almost everything the FDA does is utter crap, so that may influence my evaluation.
Lucia,
“Honestly I think it is immoral to suggest that someone like me would have to defer getting protection against that virus because someone wants to use getting the vaccine approved as bargaining chip to getting back to normal. So I think it would be appalling to hold up approval for such a reason.”
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In every evaluation of a policy, bureaucrats want to take all decisions away from individuals. If they think the risk is too great for you to take a medication, then they want to be absolutely sure you can’t get that medication. They treat the public as if they were all 4 years old, not adults with agency who can make rational decisions for themselves. They simply want to control everyone’s life. I find it appalling, but it grows ever worse.
I guess Bret Stephens is not long for the NYT. The NY Post prints the column the NYT refused to:
https://nypost.com/2021/02/11/read-the-column-the-new-york-times-didnt-want-you-read/
lucia (Comment #198521): “But the authoritarian action of making a ruling that prevents me from getting the vaccine only makes things worth. I would rather the FDA because less authoritarian, not more. You seem to want them to be moreauthoritarian.”
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I mostly agree, except for the position you accuse me of. I want logically sound decisions based on science, not ad hoc decisions based on a political objective.
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I hope you are right that they will not just keep moving the goalposts to keep people under their authoritarian thumbs. I am not optimistic.
SteveF,
But in this case, it appears MikeM is “ok” with J&J vaccine being approve provided we lift various restrictions to business and activities first. But he’s not ok with approving the vaccine if the restrictions are in place.
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I sure as heck hope the FDA approves of the vaccine. I certainly hope the don’t take the view that it’s sufficiently efficacious only if Governors have already dropped all Covid restrictions. The status of Governors restrictions shouldn’t be relevant to the evaluation of efficacy!
SteveF
Like you, I agree. But Mike M seems to want to consider 66% efficiency insufficiently high to warrant approval. That’s even bigger BS than a threshold of 50%!
If it’s safe then the FDA should let the market decide. The problem is that there isn’t enough data to conclusively prove it is safe to the FDA’s rather high standard under normal conditions. The 50% number is a bit arbitrary, but it might be better that they state this upfront then making it up later. If all the vaccines were at 40% I would expect them to rethink that position given the emergency.
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There is also some reason to believe that combining different vaccines results in improved efficacy overall. As with everything else, it depends, and it is not proven until it is proven in the FDA’s view. This could become important later if mutations evolve around certain vaccines.
Apparently the FDA isn’t meeting on the J&J vaccine until Feb 26th.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavirus-covid-19-update-fda-announces-advisory-committee-meeting-discuss-janssen-biotech-incs
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This might not be that important as my understanding was J&J was having production problems.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/judas-and-the-black-messiah-review-betrayal-of-the-panther-party-11613079490?mod=opinion_reviews_pos2
It doesn’t look like much has changed after Hoover, does it. People always say that most special agents are good people, but many people were saying that the city riots and lootings were ‘mostly peaceful’ protests too.
The left used to be against the FBI, but they seem fine with it now they’ve mostly taken it over, at least at the management level. Also see The X-Files. FBI management was portrayed as mostly corrupt there too.
You write
Mike M. (Comment #198525) 
February 12th, 2021 at 1:18 pm


But what you wrote previously still sounds like you being fine with approval of a vaccine is contingent on a desired political outcome, not “scienceâ€.
Mike M. (Comment #198516) 
February 12th, 2021 at 11:44 am
Either you want the decision about the J&J vaccine to be based on science, or your determination of whether it is “fine†to approve it is contingent on going back to normal which is political. But this really is not either or.
Well my wife is keen to get vaccinated because she has diabetes. I’m not as keen. Others can go first and that’s fine with me. I calculated that for 2020 people across all age groups were roughly 8 times as likely to die of something else than covid19. I haven’t had even a cold in at least 5 years and am in excellent health. There are lots of risks in life. I’m content to let the population wide vaccine trial continue for a while. In any case, I’ve seen some analysis that indicates that in the US we may be getting close to 40% already exposed (case numbers approaching 15% of population and using the CDC guess of infections to cases). Can’t remember if that was here or elsewhere.
DAvid,
I think this is the first winter I haven’t had at least 1 cold in a long time! I want a vaccine. If others don’t, that’s ok with me. But I want it.
David Young,
I am more than happy to act as your guinea pig. My arm hurt a bit for 24 hours, but the Pfizer phase 3 data suggest my risk of covid illness will drop by somewhere near 80% by next Friday. If I have any bad reaction I will keep you posted. In the mean time Get plenty of sunshine to keep your vitamin D up.
There are way more than enough people vaccinated now for any bad immediate side effects to have shown up (1.6M per day in the US). Further testing on kids and pregnant people are pending, and one could certainly justify not getting vaccinated by new tech mRNA if one was in those untested groups. Especially kids who have little covid risk.
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There is also a risk of some unknown future long term problem that is difficult to quantify. It’s a personal decision on whether you want to risk covid or not take a vaccine.
Oh boo hoo! Here I was hoping Impeachment 2.0 would drag on for weeks as witnesses were called. It appears the Senate has realized what a bad idea that’d be [for them anyway] and have backtracked on dragging this out.
Oh well. Perhaps they’ll find other ways to waste time in gridlock.
I hadn’t been following that much. I figured it was going to be what it was going to be and I could just catch up when it was done.
Tom Scharf
If I was a pregnant man, woman or child, I’d wait to be vaccinated.
I didn’t follow it, but it seemed to be mostly a standard appeal to emotion trial in which the prosecution spends a lot of time proving that a terrible thing happened, saying somebody justifiably needs to be punished, and providing little proof that the person at the defense table is that person. This followed by the defense saying it agrees that a bad thing happened but you need to punish the right person(s).
Are you suggesting pregnant people are limited to those who identity as a woman? Get with the times, person.
I wasn’t following too closely. I don’t personally find that circus especially entertaining, setting aside that it was tying up the Senate. I disliked that it was holding up COVID relief, but I was pleased that it was also holding up $15/hour minimum wage efforts and other projects I hope go nowhere.
FWIW, I have no issue with States deciding to raise their minimum wage. I read that a number of them have opted for $15/hour. I think it’s a mistake at the Federal level mandated for everybody. Cost of living isn’t the same everyplace so I think it follows that minimum wage needn’t be the same everyplace. Let the locals figure it out.
Aaaand it’s a wrap. Impeachment 2.0 ends once again with acquittal.
With any luck, Trump will no begin to fade into relative obscurity, perhaps with minor interludes of boring incomprehensible stories about various court cases related to his financial and personal woes.
Impeachment 2.0 turned out just about as I expected. Of the seven GOP Senators who voted to impeach Trump, only two were from Southern States, Richard Burr of North Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.
I doubt Trump will have enough support to win the GOP nomination to run for President in 2024. He could run for President as a third party candidate, but that seems like a sure way to sink both him and the GOP candidate. Running for the Senate may be his best chance to remain in national politics.
Lucia,
Yes, hopefully so.
Tom Scharf (Comment #198550)
“There are way more than enough people vaccinated now for any bad immediate side effects to have shown up (1.6M per day in the US).”
“There is also a risk of some unknown future long term problem that is difficult to quantify. It’s a personal decision on whether you want to risk covid or not take a vaccine.”
______
True, but by choosing to not be vaccinated, you may get covid and put others at risk, some of whom may die from the infection.
OK, I did some more research on mortality by cause of death and my initial impression was not accurate. I did find another site where one can plot mortality by cause of death for 2020 vs. earlier years and it shows that I was wrong about heart disease. It is surprisingly to me seasonal. Heart disease deaths have been well above normal all year. The only cause of death I found that was arguably below normal in 2020 was chronic lower respiratory diseases.
https://episphere.github.io/mortalitytracker/#cause=chronic_lower_respiratory&state=All%20States
Not that this is particularly important, just for my own piece of mind. I said above that I have no issue with State minimum wages. I’d like to qualify that. Personally, I would prefer that there was no minimum wage limit. But it’s not something I’m sure of, not something I feel is worth arguing over, and not the hill I’d pick to die on fighting about. It *is* true that I’d prefer for the question to be left to the States.
I think SteveF you may be underestimating Trump’s core support. Those people are very loyal and love the man. It’s probably enough to get the Republican nomination again assuming he’s actually learned something over the last 4 years. Unless someone like De Santos or Grinell runs, I’d back Trump over say JEB or the execrable Romney or some other apologist for the elites. We really do need reform and disempowerment of the deep State, the media, and the international monopolies. Trump is one of only a few Republicans who is willing to try. I know he says stupid stuff and sometimes false stuff. Like every other politician does. Obama was vastly more dangerous because his lies were dressed up in obfuscation and qualifiers.
Max,
it is unclear if Trump will run again; I for one hope not . What is clear is that politically motivated impeachments are way beyond stupid. Yes, Democrats hate Trump. No, that doesn’t mean squat. I expect other Republicans will step in to fill Trump’s void.
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Here is the key thing: Democrats do not represent the interests of the majority of voters. They can fein that interest, and do of course, but it is an uncomfortable deception. Democrats have become the party of ivy-league universities, and crazy professors, with their crazy-woke views. It is not a good look.
Impeachment 2.0: An incredibly stupid waste of time. Really??? Can nobody in the Senate count noses? It was obvious, as with impeachment 1.0, that Trump was not going to be convicted of being an a$$hole. Why did they do this? My only conclusion is that Pelosi and her tribe are so full of hate that they can’t make rational choices. Fortunately, Pelosi is going to be gone in two years…. talk about a$$holes!
David Young (Comment #198567): “I’d back Trump over say JEB or the execrable Romney or some other apologist for the elites. We really do need reform and disempowerment of the deep State, the media, and the international monopolies. Trump is one of only a few Republicans who is willing to try.”
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That is the key issue. It would be great if the Republicans can find someone with the nerve and backbone to take on Deep State and its private sector allies, champion ordinary people, and who also has the political skill to get elected. Maybe DeSantis.
Who is Grinell?
David Young,
“assuming he’s actually learned something over the last 4 years”
,
I have seen nothing to suggest that is true.
,
Trump has given butt-holes a very bad name over the past 4 years, and there is nothing I have seen to suggest he has learned anything. He acts like an a$$hole, most likely because he is in fact an a$$hole.
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Which is not to say his policies were bad. In fact, many of Trump’s policies were perfectly sensible, and a welcomed improvement from the rubbish policies of Obama et al. Unfortunately, we now face the suffocating policies of the Biden administration, at least until Republican gain control of the House in 2022. At which point the investigations into the blatant Biden family corruption will make it impossible for an addled President Biden to remain in office. Expect President (idiot) Kamala to take over when Biden is no longer plausible.
Lucia,
“With any luck, Trump will no begin to fade into relative obscurity, ”
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Maybe. Depends on how severe his personal (and business) financial problems become. I expect the Biden administration will do its best to torment him on taxes over the next several years.
Speaking of addled puppets, I read somewhere that during Biden’s meeting with Republican Senators to supposedly discuss how to make the stimulus bill bipartisan, there was a staffer in the back of the room who would shake his head when a Republican raised a point that didn’t agree with dogma. They apparently can’t trust him to remember that sort of thing.
If they had actually wanted a bipartisan bill, they could have split the bill into a part the Republicans could vote for and then ram the rest through on a separate bill. But, of course, bipartisan is Newspeak for complete Republican acceptance of whatever the Democrats propose. They want issues for the next election. A bipartisan bill can’t be used to bludgeon Republican candidates. So the bill is intentionally written to gain as few Republican votes as possible. See, for example, Obamacare, otherwise known as the ACA.
If you have twenty some odd Republican candidates for the 2024 Presidential nomination, which is what is expected, Trump could win the same way he won in 2016 with a plurality of the votes in a winner takes all format.
DeWitt,
I hope that will not happen in 2024, but sadly, it could. There are few Republicans who are willing to actually address the issues Trump raised: The rise of the elite left, the transfer of middle class jobs to low-cost countries, the endless acceptance of poor illegal immigrants, the undermining of the plain meaning of the Constitution, etc… few Republicans are willing (or able) to address these issues. Trump, badly acting, did. I do not know who will step up do do the same.
DeWitt
Sadly, yes. And if that happens, the 2024 election will be won by the Democratic candidate.
Everything being said here was said in 2016 and turned out to be wrong.
DeSantos is also someone I would back wholeheartedly and would be better than Trump. Hawley is another one who might be more acceptable to SteveF.
Lucia: Sadly, yes. And if that happens (Trump wins Republican nomination), the 2024 election will be won by the Democratic candidate.
….
I think you underestimate how much damage a 78 year old senile man can do, particularly as he gets older. I really don’t want Trump to run because he is so personally divisive, and strongly support Pence. But all the Democrats have is a 78-yr-old senile man who is totally flummoxed by basic numbers [he said during the campaign he thought he could help 700 million women workers in the US] and who will get worse as time goes on.
David Young,
I didn’t say Trump would lose in 2016.
I didn’t say you said it Lucia, merely that it was being said. Virtually everyone in the Republican establishment was saying it. Virtually everyone in the deep state believed it, but that didn’t keep them from taking out an illegal “insurance policy.” Virtually everyone in the media believed it.
This explains the violent and in many cases illegal and immoral (engaging in constant lying such as Brennan did) resistance to Trump. The elites were shocked and desperate and literally threw away any shred of objectivity, fairness or respect for the law they had. If one can say Trump was an asshole, the resistance were endangering the very fabric of the Republic and set some very dangerous precedents. Impeachment as a partisan tool as in a Parliamentary system. The capture of the Democrat party and many of our institutions by a deeply irrational intersectional ideology that’s resulted in the worst witch hunts since the Red scare of the 1950’s. A deep collusion between virtually all the elite institutions to rig the 2020 election by controlling the flow of information and lying about covid19. This is worse than in the Guilded Age, because tech titans are more competent at control than 19th Century malefactors of great wealth and because the government is vastly more powerful than it was then.
Some of the worst actors in this 4 years of nonstop dishonesty and grifting are now starting to face the music. Cuomo looks like he has been exposed as a fraud and probably head of a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice. The Lincoln project as a bunch of cynical grifters whose only goal was to enrich themselves using deeply dangerous tactics such as publishing a list of Trump officials with the suggestion that they should not work again anywhere. And its not over either.
David,
He won’t win in 2024.
Lucia,
I agree that he is very unlikely to win in 2024. His behavior after the election was so unhinged that it has convinced many people to never vote him again.
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I actually doubt he can even win the Republican nomination, although if he tries he will damage the Republicans and almost guarantee Kamala wins in 2024. I do hope his financial and tax problems over the next few years keep him from running again. I will not be surprised if Biden directs the Department of Justice to pursue multiple criminal charges against Trump in Washington DC, ensuring a jury conviction if any case goes to trial.
Disclaimers : I was wrong about Trump winning the nomination and winning the Presidency in 2016. I was wrong about Biden winning the nomination in 2020. So one could argue with some justice that my predictions demonstrate negative skill.
If one believes COVID significantly impacted the election, then one is reminded that politics are subject to the same governing chaos that the weather is. Before COVID I think it would have been fairly uncontroversial to suggest that Trump was highly likely to win a second term. As a result, I think the best we can do in forecasting politics is to look at the past:
U.S. Presidents almost never win re-election after having been defeated once; Grover Cleveland is the only person to have managed it. I think voters are skeptical of getting behind somebody who has already lost; they have precedent to believe the candidate will lose again. This is the foundation of my claim that the only unforgiveable political sin is to lose.
All other things being equal, I think it is rather unlikely that Trump will win in 2024. I hope he does not seek the office, but instead musters his followers behind some viable candidate.
It’s a long way out, but for now I like DeSantis.
mark
Because candidates who lose are L_OOOO_SERS.
~grins~ Just so.
mark bofill (Comment #198591): “U.S. Presidents almost never win re-election after having been defeated once; Grover Cleveland is the only person to have managed it.”
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Jackson was elected in 1828 after losing in 1824. Nixon was elected in 1968 after losing in 1960. Cleveland was the only former President to get elected after failing to get re-elected. I think he was the only one to attempt it. Unless you count Van Buren being denied the 1844 nomination by shennangins at the convention.
Mike,
Yah, that’s what I said?
Sorry if I was unclear.
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[Oh. You disagree with the generalization about the unforgivable sin. That’s fine. It’s a generalization, not an ironclad rule. It doesn’t help to have lost in the past.]
I’ve reread what I wrote and I agree I didn’t speak as precisely as I might have. I meant to say once elected as President, a defeat in a subsequent Presidential election is essentially unrecoverable.
Thanks Mike for pointing out that that needed clarification.
“Those people are very loyal and love the man.”
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I think “those” people are loyal to the concept of Trumpism, and most all of them are willing to vote for the sane version of Trump who has a different name. My interpretation of the concept is someone who will unflinchingly fight back against globalism, political correctness, illegal immigration, and media / Hollywood / academia bias. There is a lot of fertile ground to sow in these areas, and it is a huge blind spot to the left.
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I will say that my perception is the behavior of the ruling/elite class over the past few years has done nothing to pacify “those” people. The double standards on protests, the protection of Biden by the media, the obsession with destroying those people’s duly elected leader by any means necessary, outright censorship, extreme social punishment for wrong think, and so on. If they felt like burning it all down in 2016, they haven’t been giving much reason to think differently.
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Anybody who runs in 2024 will be tarred as “another Trump” by the elites and the same toolkit that got Biden to victory will be used again, however everyone knows that will happen and the cries from the media of “danger to * their * democracy” will fall on deaf ears.
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Governing is hard and it will be likely that Biden will have many missteps along the way, namely an unexpected economic downturn or a war not of his choosing. Anything bad happening during a democratic presidency is always framed as unexpected, ha ha. There are many things the media cannot protect you from.
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Biden can improve his odds by governing from the middle, but I hesitate to say that what his advisers think the middle is and where the middle actually is are very far apart.
Well some things Trump and his lawyers said about the voting machines are crazy. The overall theme that the election was rigged is transparently true. Molly Ball in Time gave all the details and made the colluders into heros.
Overall Trump has every right to be angry about a 6 year campaign of lies, illegal surveillance, a baseless investigation of a hoax (Russian collusion), and endless persecution of his allies. There was a 4 year campaign of organized political violence to deligitimize the government. Democrats actively incited this political violence. This is really the worst (I believe criminal) conspiracy to overthrow the us government since the Civil War. This was all extremely dangerous and this conspiracy will probably go unpunished. It’s something that is still shocking and makes people angry.
The campaign of lies about covid did cost many lives. Cuomo, a double digit IQ liar, was lionized and Trump’s responses demonized. DeSantos was treated just as badly. I personally believe Cuomo cleared the hospitals of care facility residents with covid to avoid having to use the hospital ship Trump provided. He could have transferred them to the ship or the Javitz center facility and the Feds would have picked up the cost too. There is no other viable explanation.
This is the latest instantiation of the madness. Somebody * defends * another person accused of cultural appropriation. The mandatory struggle session ensues.
https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/chris-harrison-briefly-stepping-aside-bachelor-wake-racist-controversy-n1257878
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Sadly this incident is nothing special lately. The mere questioning of cancel culture is now career threatening. One needs to read pretty closely lately to find out what actually happened as it is routinely not even covered in many articles, just conclusions of behavior. This has actually turned into McCarthyism, and I don’t use that term lightly. You will get blacklisted in Hollywood for even questioning orthodoxy.
The election wasn’t rigged. There was plenty of time and effort to demonstrate that and it didn’t meet any real standard of evidence. Enough people really care about fair elections that this isn’t very feasible to start with, and would be very difficult to cover up on a state or national level if it happened.
The bit that caught my eye about that was “I invoked the term ‘woke police’ which is unacceptable.”
It gets a little far-fetched I think. I think it’s possible for somebody to honestly believe [that] the neoracist bullshit of today is virtuous. I find it difficult to fathom how anybody can honestly believe that complaining about overzealous self appointed enforcers of this screed is ‘unacceptable’.
I’d have liked to hear the guy elaborate on this nonesense, but I’m fairly certain he didn’t believe much of what he was saying anyway.
Regarding the election – I don’t think it was rigged. (1) I know I haven’t seen evidence that persuades me that the election was rigged, and (2) it doesn’t appear (to me) to be necessary to invoke fraud as an explanation for Trump’s defeat, to make sense of it.
The trouble I have is of course I’m not sure. I don’t specifically have evidence that widespread decisive fraud did not decide the election. But when I have no evidence for something, generally speaking, I don’t waste much time on it. I have no evidence that extraterrestrials didn’t interfere with the election, or magical gremlins, or the illuminati, etc. I’m not going to waste my time on the arbitrarily large set of possibilities supported by no particular evidence — I’d never get anything done.
I think the election was more or less as fair as any election ever is in the U.S. Good enough.
It was rather unhelpful for the same media that questioned Trump’s election legitimacy for 4 years to turn around and demand people believe the election system is now beyond reproach. The same media that supported recounting only Democratic counties in FL in 2000, and were peddling Russian hacking for years after 2016. They are now offended that people don’t believe them and are striving to isolate and socially punish anybody who says different.
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That there isn’t a lot of earned credibility in their narrative doesn’t mean there was evidence of wrongdoing that was covered up. I believe most journalists would jump at a chance to show real election fraud and earn themselves a Pulitzer Prize. The difference here is how hard they and their bosses are willing to attempt to uncover fraud. They will look under every rock for something against Trump but are barely willing to even read an accusation hand delivered to them that would help Trump (see Hunter Biden).
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So the books are cooked a bit here, but there are enough checks and balances in the election system to stop large scale fraud because both sides want that, at least they want that the day before the election, ha ha
mark bofill (Comment #198596): “I meant to say once elected as President, a defeat in a subsequent Presidential election is essentially unrecoverable.”
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But there is really no evidence for that. Sine the two Cleveland-Harrison elections in 1888 and 1892, only two incumbents have lost close elections: Ford in 1976 and Trump in 2016. Bush in 1992 was not all that close and Taft, Hoover, and Carter all got their butts kicked.
So an incumbent getting his but kicked is unrecoverable.
mark bofill (Comment #198602): “Regarding the election – I don’t think it was rigged.”
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The *voting* may or may note have been rigged, but the election certainly was rigged, as documented in the Time article by Molly Ball that David Young referred to. It was rigged by changing voting procedures, by biased media reporting that shamelessly protected Biden, and by biased social media and search engines that did the same and hid anything that might help Trump.
Tom Scharf (Comment #198597): “I think “those†people are loyal to the concept of Trumpism, and most all of them are willing to vote for the sane version of Trump who has a different name. My interpretation of the concept is someone who will unflinchingly fight back against globalism, political correctness, illegal immigration, and media / Hollywood / academia bias.”
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Exactly, plus the person needs the political skills to get elected. At present, the list of such people is very short: Donald Trump. Maybe DeSantis, but is he up to a national campaign? Maybe Hawley, but he is in the Senate where all he has to do is talk. Probably not Pence since he showed a notable lack of backbone as Governor of Indiana.
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Tom Scharf: “There is a lot of fertile ground to sow in these areas, and it is a huge blind spot to the left.”
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Indeed. That is cause for hope, since Trump has shown others the way. But it will also attract ambitious fakers.
Clarifying. I don’t know how much fraud there was. There is a lot of evidence and a lot of eye witness testimony. There were oddities like Pennsylvania Dept of State records showing 200000 more absentee ballots counted than sent out. It is possible in Georgia we may find out. Secretary of State has I thing 30 some odd investigations going on. I personally regard ballot harvesting as fraud and that was rampant with the drop boxes etc.
By rigged I mean the massive collusion to change state election laws in the courts (clearly against the clear words of the Constitution) and most of all the iron control of what information most people had access too. This involved lots of lying (such as that the Hunter laptop story was Russian disinformation or ‘hadn’t been ‘verified’’). It involved suppressing any story or information favorable to Trump. The covid coverage is the most obvious big lie here. NGO’s were involved too in ballot gathering. Given the level of lying involved, I personally believe they would not hesitate to turn in fraudulent ballots.
Tom Scharf (Comment #198604): “I believe most journalists would jump at a chance to show real election fraud and earn themselves a Pulitzer Prize.”
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Real journalists would jump at that chance. There are very few of those left.
Mike,
Yes. It’s probably worse for incumbents who get their butts kicked.
Mike & David,
Ok. I don’t think of all that as rigging exactly, but I see what you’re saying.
David,
I don’t think the election was rigged even in the way you claim. There wasn’t “collusion”.
My personal gripe was the delay of releasing very favorable trial data until after the election. That one thing could easily have swung very close states to Biden.
I don’t know whether or not there was collusion. It seems to me that collusion [or more commonly conspiracy] generally isn’t the requirement for getting things done that people sometimes appear to think it is.
Thinking out loud, probably got some things wrong here, but:
Maybe I can use historic racism in the South as an example. It didn’t require collusion; a bunch of people did not need to get together and join in an explicit conspiracy to oppress black people. It was simply a culturally widespread practice.
I think progressive activism is similar today. It doesn’t require a conspiracy or coordination. There’s a whole bunch of culturally like minded people out doing their ideology upon the world. In common of course they viewed Trump as opposition to be removed. I suspect anybody and everybody with a leaning towards progressive activism took whatever steps seemed appropriate to them to make it less likely that Trump would be re-elected.
I wouldn’t call this a fix or a rigging exactly. I don’t know what the word is for this.
I should have added, I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with that.
I notice fact-checkers debunking the claim “pennsylvania dept of state records showing 200000 more absentee ballots counted than sent out”.
eg:
https://www.inquirer.com/politics/election/trump-washington-rally-pennsylvania-fact-check-20210106.html
lucia,
There doesn’t need to be collusion when there’s groupthink. Bernard Goldberg, who worked at CBS News, wrote a couple of books about that (Bias, 2001 and Arrogance, 2003) long before it got as bad as it is now, although it was pretty bad even then.
Here’s the capsule review from Amazon for Bias:
I think what Mike M. was trying to point out is that what was done to Trump in 2020 far exceeded anything the Russians purportedly did in 2016 in support of Trump that supposedly threw the election to him. But Trump, being Trump, was fair game and Hillary in 2016 and Biden in 2020 weren’t.
Btw, I think people in the US complaining about Russian hackers ‘interfering’ in our election should be included in the definition of chutzpah along with a a person who killed his parents claiming mercy because he’s an orphan. Our NSA ran, and maybe still runs, one of the largest computer hacking groups in the world, estimates on the order of 1,000 people. Worse, they were incompetent enough to get hacked themselves and had their hacking toolkit stolen and spread around the world, thus greatly aiding and abetting the ransomware epidemic.
In my view it got pretty bad with GWB, but outright openly biased with Obama. They stopped even trying with Trump. Just the composition of the photographs they used with Obama in the first election was very one sided. It wasn’t just the general election, they heavily favored him against HRC as well.
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Back in the days when the media could self reflect:
https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/democratic-debate/n12190
I *do* think that having large swaths of various professions not actually doing their jobs (journalist working as activists as opposed to reporters, for example) probably becomes pathological past some point.
Shrug.
The thing about either “collusion” or “group think” caused Trump to lose theories is if they are true, he still won’t win in 2024.
mark bofill,
R. Pielke, Jr. coined a term for what’s going on in the MSM in his book The Honest Broker, stealth issue advocacy. They appear to think they’re getting away with something by not being honest about their advocacy by claiming to be objective when they’re not. But they aren’t. They are only increasing distrust and opening the way for the echo chambers of social media.
Needless to say, Pielke, Jr. has effectively been canceled. He no longer writes about climate science.
lucia,
Trump lost because, like Hillary in 2016, he ran a stupid campaign. For one thing, he almost never talked about what he would do in a second term. His behavior in the first debate was also less than helpful. That allowed Biden free rein to campaign, mostly from his basement, as being not-Trump without having to say much about his policies. Hence people could make the mistaken assumption that he was running as a moderate instead of where he now appears to be, somewhat to the left of Bernie Sanders.
Thanks DeWitt. I’m passing familiar with Roger’s story, although I’ve never read his book.
Phil, This fact check is typical of partisan bias.
1. The Secretary of State’s office said the records were incomplete without providing any actual data. They are Democrats who said the Republican legislators who made the finding were wrong. That tells me nothing really.
2. On the 10,000 late ballots. The Penn. Supreme Court ordered an extension despite the Constitution’s clear language that State legislatures are the sole arbitors of election rules. Trump is not incorrect to claim that those are illegal votes. Perhaps the Supreme Court will weigh in on this.
So called “fact checkers” have a track record over the last 4 years of bias and falling in line with the media narrative of the moment. The real truth is that just like the Hunter Biden laptop story, the media are ignoring claims of fraud and instead calling such claims “lies.” They themselves are irresponsible to say so since they haven’t investigated the question.
It’s very clear that the covid19 narrative by the media by itself changed the election result. Trump actually did a good job in most ways that were controllable, such as providing medical supplies and equipment, getting the vaccines done in record time, doing travel bans. It is true that Trump’s performance in his covid19 news conferences was not helpful, but still if the media had reported it honestly, that would have had little effect.
The 1st debate performance didn’t help and it was an unforced error by Trump.
I may have this wrong and am open to being corrected if so, but my impression is that voters aren’t always rational or fair in assigning blame (or credit). Maybe Trump did a great job (relatively speaking) handling COVID. It might be that voters still penalized him for COVID.
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We tend to give disproportional weight to negative experiences in our minds; it’s just the way human brains are wired.
DeWitt,
I agree Trump ran a stupid campaign. Biden’s platform got to be “I’m not Trump”.
David Young (Comment #198626): “It’s very clear that the covid19 narrative by the media by itself changed the election result. Trump actually did a good job in most ways that were controllable”.
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mark bofill (Comment #198627): “I may have this wrong and am open to being corrected if so, but my impression is that voters aren’t always rational or fair in assigning blame (or credit).”
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You are both correct.
David Young – the Penn. final voter count numbers are finalised. All the data is complete. Has Ryan produced the numbers and source to back his claim? My understanding is no, despite multiple requests.
” Trump is not incorrect to claim that those are illegal votes. Perhaps the Supreme Court will weigh in on this.” I understood that Trump did take to supreme court and lost. And discounting 10,000 ballots would still not give it to Trump.
Phil, The Supreme Court declined to hear the Pennsylvania case on an expedited basis. It has agreed to hear it this spring though. So no the issue has not been ruled on.
I have seen no follow up on the voter numbers in Pennsylvania.
David Young,
” It is true that Trump’s performance in his covid19 news conferences was not helpful, but still if the media had reported it honestly, that would have had little effect. The 1st debate performance didn’t help and it was an unforced error by Trump.”
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Actually, Trump needed a 9 bullet clip and several extra clips to keep shooting himself in the foot as often as he did. The covid news conferences were effectively unwatchable, because Trump kept embarrassing himself with bizarre off-the-cuff remarks. His debate performance was effectively unhinged….. though not nearly as unhinged as after the November election. Trump had many sensible policies, but he was unable to implement them efficiently because he was constantly getting in the way, and with his endless outrageous behavior, giving people who opposed those sensible policies an easy excuse to declare those policies bad.
David, Phil,
It is true that the Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of that case. But everything I have read is that it appears the case will get nothing more than an unsigned one page ruling: “case dismissed for lack of standing”. I just don’t think the Court wants to get involved. I agree that voting rules were changed in ways contrary to the individual state constitutions, and perhaps contrary to the US Constitution. The Court sill won’t get involved.
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Trump’s failure to raise strenuous objections to the many dubious changes well before the election was a fatal strategic error.
I disagree SteveF. Trump’s main problem getting things implemented were deep state types who didn’t like the policies. Once he got some people who would support him things happened. Pompeo, Pence, Barr and even McConnell and Graham eventually lined up to help Trump get things accomplished. If anything Trump was way too slow to fire a whole herd of people. He allowed himself to get manipulated into firing Flynn, one of his best people. That was another deep state conspiracy to defang Trump’s policy ideas. Flynn was hated in the deep state. It illustrates though how the elites conspired to keep Trump from acting.
An example is foreign policy. My nephew was a captain in the Army and absolutely hated Flynn and Trump. Aside from the emotions of an inexperienced young man, it was the policy that drove him crazy.
You are also correct that Trump’s personality played some small role but his hatred of Flynn was just as intense. But the main thing was just that my nephew was a card carrying member of the foreign policy establishment and Trump didn’t accept the experts as expressed in the Economist and by the CIA.
https://episphere.github.io/mortalitytracker/#cause=chronic_lower_respiratory&state=All%20States
For those who haven’t followed it this is a great piece about how Nunes pieced together the details of how Obama before he left office set in motion what amounted to a coup.
Sorry wrong link. Here’s the correct one.
https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/28/how-the-obama-administration-set-in-motion-democrats-coup-against-trump/
David,
“Once he got some people who would support him things happened. Pompeo, Pence, Barr and even McConnell and Graham eventually lined up to help Trump get things accomplished.”
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Trump had to rely on those people 100% because he was counterproductive when acting alone. You will note that those people were the “measured, serious” types who are the exact opposite of Trump, and the kind of people who actually can get things done. Trump was far too out-of-control to be suitable material for any leadership position; his election in 2016 was only possible because Hillary represented both absolutely horrible policies and was a dishonest, corrupt, and evil person to boot. Trump alone among candidates recognized the problem of corrupt “elite” leadership and the damage it is doing. Beyond that, he was pretty much useless.
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Yes, Trump was far too slow in firing people….. he should have fired every Obama appointee in every part of the government the day he took office. He should have asked Sessions for his resignation the day after he recused himself from oversight of the Russia-scam investigation. He should have asked for the resignations of many of his own appointees (Defense, State, and others) as soon as it was clear they disagreed with his basic policies. In most of his appointments, Trump was just naive.
David Young: ” Once he got some people who would support him things happened. Pompeo, Pence, Barr and even McConnell and Graham eventually lined up to help Trump get things accomplished.”
A huge problem Trump had with his lawyers was that he gave them no loyalty and was an awful client. As a lawyer sometimes you are asked to stick your neck out. You won’t do that for a disloyal client who will stab you in the back at any time. That is just who TRump was. Barr could have done a ton for Trump if Trump had exhibited more loyalty and didn’t keep mouthing off all of the time about cases that were sitting in front of courts. Lots of lawyers would have loved to do Trump’s work for him if they thought he had their back.
JD Ohio
He’s going to have similar problems in the inevitable lawsuits that will spring up in the future. Plus unlike before he was president, his opponents won’t tend to be “little guys” who he is buffaloing
JD Ohio,
“A huge problem Trump had with his lawyers was that he gave them no loyalty and was an awful client.”
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Not unexpected when your client is a total a$$hole.
Israeli study finds 94% drop in symptomatic Covid-19 cases with Pfizer vaccine
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/15/covid-pfizer-vaccine-israel-study-finds-94percent-drop-in-symptomatic-cases.html
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“Israel’s largest healthcare provider on Sunday reported a 94% drop in symptomatic Covid-19 infections among 600,000 people who received two doses of Pfizer’s vaccine in the country’s biggest study to date.
Health maintenance organization (HMO) Clalit, which covers more than half of all Israelis, said the same group was also 92% less likely to develop severe illness from the virus.”
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This shouldn’t be surprising but I only include it here as confirmation that the original clinical studies were very accurate. Studies of the China vaccine apparently were quoted at 90% effective but tested to only around 50% in South America.
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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55212787
“CoronaVac has been undergoing phase three trials in various countries. Interim data from late-stage trials in Turkey and Indonesia showed that the vaccine was 91.25% and 65.3% effective respectively.
Researchers in Brazil initially said it was 78% effective in their clinical trials, but in January 2021 revised that figure to 50.4% after including more data in their calculations.”
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More data? Hmmmm. I would expect the Russian numbers to hold up, but we shall see.
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The Russia/China numbers are really important for the rest of the world as the Western world hogs up the mRNA vaccines.
Operation Warp Speed should have been classed as a generational triumph. The media was ready to do so. It was a big, big deal and I hope we’ll be bragging about it for years to come.
But, like the fabled person who could mess up a wet dream, along came Trump.
I can feel Phil’s panic attack all the way from the US.
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New Zealand City Goes Back Into Lockdown After New Coronavirus Cases Detected
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/02/14/967868371/new-zealand-city-goes-back-into-lockdown-after-new-coronavirus-cases-detected
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Hopefully they will get it isolated.
The US now has the best access to the best vaccines and is near the top in actual vaccinations per capita. Something like 130 countries haven’t vaccinated anyone yet.
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It’s possible for the media to cover this without knee jerk political analysis, however “Warp Speed = Trump” is imprinted on their brains.
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Here is another article on why large portions of nursing home staff are refusing the vaccine:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/nursing-home-skip-vaccine/2021/02/12/4d31d17a-6bfa-11eb-9f80-3d7646ce1bc0_story.html
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What I found striking is the charity with which their misinformed positions are handled, as opposed to the lack of charity misinformed positions of other subjects are typically handled. I’d prefer the media always do the former and let the reader decide.
Tom Scharf,
The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and J&J vaccine will also be available, though a little later. The J&J is a better fit for the available logistics in much of the world.
Tom Scharf,
Charity towards those who are badly misinformed is only afforded people who are politically favored. It is caused by the profoundly corrupt nature of the MSM.
Many court cases are still moving through the courts and Trump and his affiliates have won a number of them. Interesting times ahead as they move through the system.
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http://wiseenergy.org/Energy/Election/2020_Election_Cases.htm
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https://hereistheevidence.com/
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https://sharylattkisson.com/2020/12/hard-to-find-2020-election-fraud-stories-and-links/
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And one of my favorites
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https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/judge-orders-release-report-says-dominion-systems-are-designed-throw.
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https://www.depernolaw.com/uploads/2/7/0/2/27029178/antrim_michigan_forensics_report_%5B121320%5D_v2_%5Bredacted%5D.pdf
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Due to the high loyalty of Trump supporters to Trump, and the high percentage that these supporters make in the GOP, the nomination is a forgone conclusion if Trump wants it.
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As to Trump being an asshole, so what? When I hire someone to represent me, I look for a “junkyard dog†that has my interest front and center. I do not look for someone that will lose “gracefullyâ€. Trump may be an asshole, but he is my asshole. He plays to win, which is all I, and his millions of supporters, care about.
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Ed Forbs,
The biggest point of Trump being an a$$hole is that it keeps him from succeeding. I wouldn’t want to have a beer with Trump, I find him far too offensive and uninformed, but that is not really the point. It is that he constantly put himself in the path of success by saying things he would have been better off not saying, and doing things that made success more difficult. Had Trump not dissed McCain multiple times, the ACA would have been killed long ago. Had he not gone on endless twitter tirades, his opponents would have been forced to address policy substance. Here is what he said:
“I don’t see why we have to take in people from all those shit-hole countries.” Which just gave Dems a talking point. What he should have said: “I don’t think it is in the country’s interest to accept people who lack education and skills, not to mention lack of basic English language. We should be focusing on accepting people with the education and skills that allow them to make a greater economic contribution.”
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That second statement would force Pelosi and Schumer to address the substance: immigration policies that hurt the poorest Americans are destructive and should be changed. Instead they had a field day screaming to the MSM about what a racists Trump is.
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As to Trump getting the nomination: I’d say he has little chance, but if he did, he would lose the general. He has offended too many people for far too long.
Ed Forbes
I don’t. But in any case, I’ve never believed Trump has my interested front and center.
Well, he lost the election. He lost because he didn’t play to win. He played to whine.
“I can feel Phil’s panic attack all the way from the US.”
Huh? On the other island apart from anything else (where only have level 2 restrictions), but lockdown is precautionary. Countries that have largely eliminated the virus tend to have a hair-trigger for lockdowns because that is what works. The big issue is no genomic link to a source and that virus is the UK variant. While there is an unlikely scenario of catching virus from airline laundry, chances are that there is another source is undetected. Massive testing yesterday so we will know more today.
And we can always go to level 4 if turns out to be wider outbreak but so far the contact tracing and isolation systems have worked well without having to do that.
Fortunately, vaccinations start this weekend, with all border workers then their household contacts at the top of the queue.
“ Well, he lost the election. He lost because he didn’t play to win. He played to whine.â€
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The fraud and criminally in the election is obvious ( please refer to my links above) and will play out in the courts. As most court actions take a year or more to play out, the elections in 2022 and 2024 will be interesting.
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Where war is politics by other means, politics is also war by other means. Where one battle doesn’t generally mean victory in war, one election does not mean losing in politics. Nixon and Andrew Jackson as cases in point.
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Now I realize that TDS is a real disease, and many are infected, but one should not let it blind one to reality. Trump is a major player now and will continue to be one into the future. Thinking that Trump is finished due to the last election is blinding oneself to reality.
“ As to Trump getting the nomination: I’d say he has little chance, but if he did, he would lose the general. He has offended too many people for far too long.â€
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LOL…wait until the Dems get rolling on their policy agenda to see who is hated the most.
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The enemy of my enemy is my friend is very much an operative norm for elections.
Ed,
Trump has supporters, nobody questions that. It remains to be seen how long his support lasts, and what it looks like in 2024. If his support grows significantly, he may prevail. If it remains the same or diminishes however, it seems reasonable to doubt Trump could prevail in 2024, since his current level of support proved insufficient to allow him to win in 2020.
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He is out of office, banned from twitter, and the media despises him. I’m not sure how he grows his support in this scenario. Not saying it is impossible, but I think it’s far from obvious how he might accomplish this.
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Speaking for myself at least, I assure you that I do not have Trump Derangement Syndrome. Trump lost my support because of his actions since 11/2020, but I indeed supported him up till that point.
Trump is also getting pretty old. Besides needling people for his own entertainment I just wonder if he really wants to go through that experience again. The newly built Information Ministries aren’t going to give him access to platforms as well (not a fan of this).
Also, although it is possible Democrats will pass a bunch of legislation that will annoy people to fuel a Trump surge, it is equally likely (AFAICT) that Machin will stick to his guns and the Biden administration will end up passing not much of anything. Biden may still irritate people with his pen and phone. But the point is that all scenarios here are far from certain. I wouldn’t count on any of it.
Ed Forbes,
Perhaps you would entertain a friendly wager: My $500 says Trump is not the nominee in 2024, your $500 says he is. Loser contributes to the charity of the winner’s choice. There is a poor kid in Giatamala who could use your help.
SteveF (Comment #198666): “The biggest point of Trump being an a$$hole is that it keeps him from succeeding.”
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That is deranged.
He is a billionaire.
He got elected President!
He accomplished a lot as President in spite of the opposition of Congress, the Deep State, and many in his own cabinet.
He has re-aligned American politics. Probably permanently.
If that is failure, please tell me what success looks like.
Was he perfect? No. Did he make mistakes? Yes. Which only proves that he is not superhuman.
Steve, I only bet on sure wins, which does not really count as “bettingâ€. This to the point that my friends and family now always withdraw offers to bet if I take them up on it.
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Too many variables for me to bet money on Trump being a nominee. At his age he may be dead at that point in time.
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But do you disagree that if the nomination was held today, he would win the GOP nomination?
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If you do not disagree, why do you think he will lose support over time? His base is rock solid, as seen by the reaction of the party to those in the GOP who voted for impeachment.
The Democrats had to enter emergency mode to prevent Sanders from winning in a similar “split the vote among the normies” scenario. I would expect the Republicans will find a way to do the same next time around if Trump enters the race.
Mark: “ Biden may still irritate people with his pen and phone. But the point is that all scenarios here are far from certain. I wouldn’t count on any of it.â€
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Ahaa…but it has already started. Ask the labor unions who stood with the Dems, who told their members that Biden had their interests at heart, how they now feel that on day 1 Biden killed thousands of union jobs.
Ef Forbes,
“But do you disagree that if the nomination was held today, he would win the GOP nomination?”
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What a strange question. There is no nominating process for 3+years, so the question is irrelevant. I think Trump has definitely offended enough people that re-election in 2024 is so unlikely as to be the kind of “sure bet” you say you like. Too bad, I was thinking I might get to fund school for another poor kid.
Mike M,
“That is deranged.”
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Don’t hold back, tell us what you really think. Trump started life with considerable wealth. AFAIK, he never actually held a job. That allows behaviors which are effectively beyond the pale; I very much doubt Trump could ever have been employed, except maybe by his father. Trump made money, yes, but but his ventures have been haphazard…. he is no Warren Buffett.
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But all that is beside the point: Trump messed up as President, and accomplished much less than he could have… and I think should have…. with survival of the execrable ACA a perfect example. He is not a politician. He won’t likely run again. He faces serious financial and tax difficulties. He is unlikely to gain the nomination if he does run again. Should he gain the nomination, his chance of election is near zero. I offer you the same bet as I offered Ed Forbes. I MHO, Trump is finished.
Trump was a political outsider in 2016. He’s got more baggage now.
I agree with Steve; at least with respect to holding office, Trump is done.
He may retain some power in the party for a time. Trump being Trump he will probably squander and ruin what standing remains to him, given time. Then again, he can’t tweet anymore, so maybe that will limit his ability to wreck his ‘elder statesman’ credibility quickly.
Ed,
Some will remember his loss and not want to risk losing again. See also, unforgiveable political sin. He’ll be older, the attack ads will have more to work with, so on and so on.
I’m not saying he would have no support. I do think his support will erode, at least somewhat. It wasn’t enough in 2020. Why would anybody believe it’ll be enough in 2024?
The polar vortex has resulted in ice storms in Texas. Needless to say, icing isn’t good for wind turbines. The have to use helicopters to deice the blades. So even if the ice hadn’t brought down power lines, there would be a shortage of electricity in Texas. Also, everyone is using so much natural gas for heating that some of the gas fired generating plants can’t get enough at any price.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-deep-green-freeze-11613411002?mod=hp_opin_pos_1
Also, Bill Gates has a plan.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bill-gates-interview-climate-change-book-11613173337
I couldn’t stomach reading it. To summarize the little I managed to scan before becoming too nauseous: The sky is falling (we need to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2050 or the world as we know it will end) and we need to put wings on pigs so they can fly in order to fix it, or something.
We’ll see what happens. I do believe however that Trump’s following is very large and very loyal. There are better scenarios than Trump running again. Trump could get active in 2022 and shoot down quite a few Rinos in Red states (Chaney is a prime candidate) which would be helpful. In fact this could be a real clarifying and unifying time for Republicans. Then Trump bets behind someone like DeSantos or Hawley in 2024.
Don’t know if I mentioned this earlier but Trump has accomplished something revolutionary and permanently changed the Republican party. It is no longer the party of Middle Class whites even though there are a lot of them still in it. Trump changed it into a working class multi-ethnic party. People like Marco Rubio are smart enough to understand this because this has been Rubio’s goal for a long time. This is what “establishment” Republicans like the Bushes have always wanted but were too incompetent to achieve. They thought amnesty and policies that resulted in declining wages would work. The Democrat party has become a leftist party of the elites across all our institutions. That was already happening to some extent before Trump. I believe that the party was on the slow road to extinction though since it had little to offer except continued loses on every important issue and ineffective and half hearted resistance to a more potent left wing destructive ideology. Establishment Republicans were too afraid to fight and most didn’t really care about winning.
A perfect example is the execrable Lincoln Project. It’s a prefect instantiation of the cynical quest for money and total lack of principle of that old establishment. These people always were clever at getting people to give then money in exchange for half hearted resistance to left wing ideas. Trump has also clarified this issue as these people will hopefully never be involved in public life again.
This is why Trump has a very loyal following among serious Christians and cultural conservatives. They were sick and tired of being sold out.
David,
Trump does have some very loyal followers. But I think the “very loyal” part of Trump following is not very large! Yes, there are working class multi-ethnics who voted for Trump. Many will vote for not-Trump.
Which is a small group.
Lucia, https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/New-French-nose-spray-eliminates-99-of-Covid-virus-via-nose-blowing#.YCuvbqgQhaM.twitter. New French nasal spray for the China virus.
Lucia, Ignore my previous post… I think it’s a scam. “Ionized water” is total BS. Stick with Baking soda and salt.
There is no question that Trump could easily win the nomination in 2024. I think that whatever the rest of the field looks like, he could get substantial majorities (not pluralities) of Republican voters. He can certainly beat any individual candidate one-on-one or win pluralities against multiple candidates. The fact that he lost last year is not an issue. First, there is no evidence that is actually a problem. Second, most Republicans believe he really won but that the election was stolen.
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If one adopts conventional wisdom, then Trump’s big problem is whether he could win over moderate Republicans, Independents, and Democrats disgusted with the next four years. That is not likely. But winning over those voters is not the path to victory for a Republican. I very much doubt that any Republican can make much headway there without abandoning the working class, in traditional Republican style. Those days are over.
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The Republican path to victory is not to win over what used to be the middle. It is to win over hard core Democrat voters, especially visible minorities. Conventional Republicans can not do that since they have too much baggage as the water boys for big business.
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Ideally, Trump spends the next three years expanding his base among minorities. Ideally, another champion of the working class emerges with the ability to win over those voters, but without Trump’s baggage. And ideally, Trump throws his support behind that person. Of those three, the second is the weak link.
Florida’s Ron DeSantis to a reporter asking classic, unfair “goccha” questions: “You can whizz on my pant leg, but don’t tell me it’s raining.”
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DeSantis is a) smart, b) politically fearless, and c) gets things done.
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He won by successfully courting Hispanics in Florida. He has (sensibly) insisted that people actually at risk of death from covid-19 be given priority over those not at significant risk; for that and other sensible policies related to covid (like blocking of all fines by counties and municipalities for mask-wearing violations, and keeping beaches open), he is absolutely loathed by the MSM. I think he is in a strong position for 2024 if he wants it. But it is not clear he does. I believe he will be a shoo-in for reelection in Florida in 2022, especially after vaccinations of the elderly drive covid deaths down, in spite of Florida’s large elderly population.
Huh. Where did I get the notion the man’s name was ‘Rick’ DeSantis?
Bizarre. I see it’s actually ‘Ron’.
mark bofill,
Oddly enough, some people call him DeSantos, instead of DeSantis. Rick DeSantos is most certainly not Ron DeSantis.
MikeM
No question? I think there is a question. Trump running or being in the lead would mobilize those who don’t like Trump to go out and vote.
Huh? You think winning over the bulk of the GOP party and the independents isn’t the path to victory? I think it’s a more likely path than having them all vote Democrat.
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SteveF “The biggest point of Trump being an a$$hole”
I think Trump personally was an ahole, but looking back his presidency was reasonably good. Until the virus hit, the economy was good and minorities were doing well. He didn’t get us into new wars. He somewhat secured the borders. At the beginning he didn’t do a good job with the virus, but with vaccines coming in in record time, his record is reasonably good overall with respect to the virus. (He let private business do their job instead of for instance, mandating diversity in research into the virus). Also, his instinct to be cautious about shutting down the whole economy was reasonably good.
…..
All that being said, if he was personally more likable and responsible he would still be President.
DeWitt,
I read the Bill Gates article earlier and kept waiting to find out about the actual plan, and never did, ha ha. They buried the lede by not talking about nuclear power until the end. I did almost stop reading when I got to the “In another 20 years, you’re not going to be wondering if you got a return. You’re wondering if there’s going to be a planet left for your great-grandchildren” part, but Gates never actually said that, he is a bit more rational, but the writer of the article just spun it like every other environmental journalist.
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It was notable that all the green power billionaire funds so far have been horrendous money losers. I have no problem with private investors doing their thing though, energy research is the right path versus gigantic subsidies.
lucia (Comment #198709): “Trump running or being in the lead would mobilize those who don’t like Trump to go out and vote …
the bulk of the GOP party …”
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You are mistaken. Trump’s final approval rating was 39%, measured after it crashed in January by polls with a history of underestimating Trump: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
About 30% of voters register as Republicans: https://ballot-access.org/2020/10/24/nationwide-voter-registration-data-by-party/
Republicans overwhelmingly still support Trump. And his support extends beyond Republicans.
“he (DeSantis) is absolutely loathed by the MSM”
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In this day and age that is actually a benefit for a Republican. I find that the national media hate him a lot more than the local media. The local media aren’t favorable as expected, but also aren’t psychotically obsessed with political spin.
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DeSantis really stuck out his neck with covid policy but it ended up working out for him. There was a lot of uncertainty here and he guessed more or less correctly. Any fair comparison between FL and NY/CA shows DeSantis bucking the popular opinion and doing better. It should be stressed that nobody got a “win” against covid in the US, it was varying degrees of bad and worse.
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DeSantis has no patience for the Twitter shamers and media moral posturing. That is almost enough by itself for my vote, ha ha.
Mike,
I disagree with (among other points) the certainty you express:
The fact that some among us question that Trump could easily win the nomination appears to indicate that there is indeed some question, despite your assertion.
We disagree. This is fine with me, and maybe I won’t clog up the works arguing further, but don’t take my silence for agreement.
MikeM
It’s not 2023 yet.
Mark bofill,
I agree with you and not MikeM. You are wise not to argue the issue. I’m not going to either.
NYT: Police Forces Have Long Tried to Weed Out Extremists in the Ranks. Then Came the Capitol Riot.
At least 30 law enforcement officers from around the country took part in the rally on Jan. 6 that preceded the riot. Many are now being investigated.
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“There is zero room, not only in society, but more so in professions of public trust and service, for people to have extremist views, regardless of ideology,â€
“President Biden’s goal of addressing domestic extremism will partly hinge on the ability to curb its spread in police departments and the military, experts noted.”
“Polygraph tests for Houston police candidates that focus on past drug use or criminal activity will be expanded to include anti-government views”
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It’s so weird that after demonizing the police as racists / murderers for years and supporting eliminating their jobs entirely as a group that they aren’t supporting your progressive agenda. Obviously we need to “investigate” this because we can only conclude they wouldn’t support the NYT’s agenda because they are extremists.
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Seriously, who are the extremists here? The NYT is literally asking for police officers to be weeded out based on their political beliefs.
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The not so clever game that has been happening for a while now is that the extremist net has gotten larger and larger with little distinction between run of the mill Republican, right, far right, and bomb planting zealot. This is intentional and transparent. These kind of loyalty purges are going to create a lot more extremism in my view.
Taom Scharf,
“eriously, who are the extremists here? The NYT is literally asking for police officers to be weeded out based on their political beliefs.”
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Yup. It is a frightening prospect, and is exactly what happens whenever totalitarians take over. The police in Venezuela were purged of anyone who didn’t support Chavez; same with the military. Obama pushed out military leaders who didn’t agree with his policies. You can almost be sure “liberals” will ultimately suggest only those who view “government” favorably (AKA liberals) be allowed to join the military, as if protecting government from an unhappy populace were a legitimate use of the military.
Taom Scharf,
“The local media aren’t favorable as expected, but also aren’t psychotically obsessed with political spin.”
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I don’t watch much local TV, but what I have seen is a lot more negative about DeSantis than his record supports. DeSantis has a lower than average rate of death for covid-19, in spite of a very large population of elderly, has kept nearly all businesses functioning, and has restricted Floridians’ personal behavior hardly at all. His performance on covid is far better than all those governors held up by the MSM as ‘heros’, in spite of much higher death rates (with younger populations!) and horrible economic damage from endless, useless covid restrictions.
Tom Scharf,
I do not know about your area of Florida, but in my area, there is a giant boom happening in new home construction. I see more construction right now than any time since 2007; I guess all those people fleeing the likes of Cuomo, Murphy, Pritzker, Whitmer, et al need houses to live in.
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What is not to like? Low taxes, good weather (most of the time), restaurants open, most schools open, churches unrestricted, beaches open, and you can even spend a day on your boat without any special covid rules getting in the way. Most of all, the governor is not an id!ot.
There are hardly any houses for sale in my area now because they are going so fast. Housing prices are sharply up since last year. The WSJ had an article today about lumber prices being near all time highs due to new housing boom and remodeling increases.
Trump’s control of the GOP is increasing
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https://thehill.com/homenews/538944-republican-support-for-trump-to-play-role-in-party-up-18-points-from-january
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“.. The percentage of Republicans who wish to see former President Donald Trump play a role in the future of the party has jumped by double digits since early January, according to a new poll.
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A total of 59 percent of Republican voters indicated they want Trump to play a major role in their party going forward, a Politico/Morning Consult Poll released on Monday found. That figure represents an 18-point increase from Jan. 7.
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The same poll found 81 percent of Republicans now said they have a positive view of the former president, up from 77 percent early last month. ..â€
Maybe Trump’s popularity among Republicans is recovering somewhat from the Capitol Hill Riot and impeachment, but:
https://thehill.com/sites/default/files/trump-approval-among-gop-voters.jpg
81% approval among Republicans used to be a low water mark for Trump. I’d hardly conclude that ‘his control of the GOP is increasing’.
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000177-a856-d644-a377-eedf47990000&nname=playbook&nid=0000014f-1646-d88f-a1cf-5f46b7bd0000&nrid=0000014e-f0f3-dd93-ad7f-f8f7ec490002&nlid=630318
It’s just one poll and it seems high on Biden’s approval. Trump is getting blamed for the Capitol riot, So are the media and the tech titans. But Trump is way ahead for 2024 among Republicans.
SteveF (Comment #198721)
16th, 2021 at 12:44 pm
Tom Scharf,
“I do not know about your area of Florida, but in my area, there is a giant boom happening in new home construction.”
“What is not to like?”
_______
Humidity, bugs, alligators, huge snakes!
Yah Trump is ahead. A good chunk of Republicans probably have no clue who the heck DeSantis even is. Not everybody pays much attention to politics.
Roughly one in eight people in one poll in 2019 had never heard of Mike Pence.
One in three people can’t name the Governor of their own State.
Like Lucia said, it’s not 2023 yet. We can’t call the 2023 landscape this far out. Wait and see.
Cuomo’s approval rating in NY is still over 50% even after the revelations about the coverup of nursing home COVID-19 deaths.
OK_Max,
“Humidity, bugs, alligators, huge snakes!”
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Bugs? Far fewer than most places I have lived…. including PA and Maine.
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Alligators? Big ones are moved to the everglades. I haven’s seen an alligator on a golf course in a decade or more.
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Huge Snakes? No, mostly small snakes, not many, and mostly not poisonous. Little coral snakes do bite a few people each year, but that is almost never fatal. Really, I don’t see many snakes.
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Humidity? That is certainly true ~5 months per year… but most of that time I am on Cape Cod…. where, unfortunately, there are a lot more bugs than in Florida. Some people say the summer humidity doesn’t bother them that much, but I find it uncomfortable. A more significant downside in the summer is diruption due to hurricanes…. which can be a PITA, but is only once a decade or so.
These presidential polls always show numbers like that. The known names poll high. Joseph Lieberman was leading in many polls in 2003, but the media ignored him and focused on Howard Dean.
In Feb 1983, Gallup had the Dems leading choice as George Wallace.
DeWitt,
“Cuomo’s approval rating in NY is still over 50%…”
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Does seem incredible, but consider how many people still say they support Trump. I think Cuomo’s magic has long since peaked. He is pretty much a sociopathic villain. It is going to catch up with him. Derek Chauvin had his knee on the neck of one helpless person. With Cuomo it was thousands. And here is the best part: Cuomo doesn’t seem to care that he killed them; no apologies for bad judgement, no mea culpas…. just F-U to the families of the dead.
Cuomo understands that in today’s woke environment, apologizing is the worst thing you can do. Sort of like blood in the water with sharks nearby
I see alligators all the time, and big ones on the golf courses around here. Mostly they are 8 feet or less but I see 10-12 footers several times a year. They move around a lot. This is last year on my local course, about 10 feet:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/qR91qJPTBMTJsux66
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In my county alligators are only “relocated” to a trapper’s pickup in a non-alive state. They are licensed somehow and work for free and get to keep what they catch, however somebody has to call in a nuisance gator first. Mostly nuisance means big enough to be scary and too close to a community. If you move to Florida you will learn quickly to never let your dog swim in a pond.
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Realistically they look much scarier than they are. They are really lazy and very rarely attack humans given their large numbers and proximity to people.
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I see snakes, but not often, and they are generally small and non-poisonous. Probably there are way too many bird predators for them. Florida has an immense variety of large and small birds and they are quite at home near cities.. If you like nature, Florida is actually a great place to see it.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #198730): “Cuomo’s approval rating in NY is still over 50% even after the revelations about the coverup of nursing home COVID-19 deaths.”
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Are you sure that is *after*? The latest revelations are quite recent.
Yes Cuomo is quite a shameless liar and self-promoter. People in New York and California are pretty well locked into leftist politics and as long as politicians don’t stray too far, no venality or dishonesty seems to matter. It really is shameful though that the media covers for these people. Media coverage is a big part of it too. If you are a good leftist or even liberal you still get your news form the New York Times (a former newspaper). As one of my friends put it after I posted 6 items blasting the 1619 project (from left, right, and center) and the Times: “So one newspaper has a point of view. Why is that a problem?)
The NYT’s spin on the Texas power outages is pretty entertaining.
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“A Glimpse of America’s Future: Climate Change Means Trouble for Power Grids
Systems are designed to handle spikes in demand, but the wild and unpredictable weather linked to global warming will very likely push grids beyond their limits.”
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It’s not the limitations of a government regulated power grid increasingly based on intermittent power, it’s extreme cold weather caused by global warming!
Better idea for vaccine lottery:
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“Jha offers a similar cure: “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity is key,†he said. Given the elevated fatality rate of older Americans, he said we should vaccinate everybody over 55 in stages from oldest to youngest. That group includes about 100 million Americans. After that, he’s advocated for a “national or state-based [lottery] that selects a number at random every two weeks, corresponding to the month or last digit of people’s birthdays.†The benefit of a random lottery is that it would be apolitical, and everybody would have confidence that their number would be called eventually.”
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I especially like that 55 and over tier! Ha ha. The jousting for essential worker vaccinations and verifying them is already a mess and it hasn’t even started.
Tom Scharf,
You must live in the wild areas of Florida I am unfamiliar with. I used to see a few alligators in the 3 to 5 foot range 15 years ago, but they all got ‘removed’ after they ate a ‘fluffy’ or two that were barking in front of their noses. Honestly, there just are no alligators of any size around here.
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Of course vaccinating by risk group makes perfect sense; that doesn’t mean it will happen. But really, after the highest risk groups have been inoculated, it won’t make a lot of difference: with 95+% of the deaths eliminated, I doubt there will be that much of a rush for vaccinations. if you are 29 years old, and your gandma and 58 YO parents have already been inoculated, your motivation is going to be pretty weak…. especially if some rumor spreads that the vaccine causes impotence.
“Sicknick was not taken to the hospital directly from the Capitol. To the contrary, not only had the officer made it back to police headquarters; he had texted his brother hours after the siege, stating that although he had been “pepper sprayed twice,†he was “in good shape.†”
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This report is a bit sketchy, but can’t somebody in the media figure out what the eff happened here? The updates in the MSM are written like eleven-teen lawyers all parsed it to make sure that the original narrative can still be used. The NYT updated their story:
“UPDATE: New information has emerged regarding the death of the Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick that questions the initial cause of his death provided by officials close to the Capitol Police.”
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What new information? What officials? Can somebody actually look into this? Am I to have no suspicion that this only came into question by the MSM after Trump’s trial is somehow a coincidence? This one is starting to smell rather badly.
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This was reported as * fact * for weeks. You can’t tell me the NYT did this retraction and now knows nothing, they must have further information beyond “questions” or else they wouldn’t have reversed their article. They really need to figure this out.
The NYT is evil and dishonest. There is no other explanation needed.
Bryan York has been trying to get the Capitol Police to answer some very basic questions about Jan. 6, including Sicknick’s cause of death. They seem to be stonewalling.
Here is NPR on Feb 3:
“He was responding to the riots led by a pro-Trump mob attempting to prevent lawmakers from certifying President Biden’s Electoral College victory. Capitol Police said Sicknick was injured “while physically engaging protesters,” adding that he later “returned to his division and collapsed.”
Some witnesses said Sicknick had been struck with a fire extinguisher.
He died the following day from his injuries.”
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Some unknown and unidentified witnesses I guess. The wordsmithing here is a bit curious with the scare quotes and all, but still maintaining the original narrative to an inattentive reader without actually lying about it. There is no inference to draw that the entire story is now in question. This is your basic lying without lying that the media is so skilled at when important narratives are at play.
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How is that hoards of internet sleuths went through every frame of media publicly available (and privately with Parler hack) to identify anyone at the event, and the Capitol must have huge numbers of cameras and nobody even mentioned that this attack was never found? Surely they must have been a little interested in who murdered Sicknick?
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I just never noticed that they had NOTHING AT ALL to support the narrative. I was fooled. I find it reprehensible that this was effectively buried. The back pedaling is now that whether he died of injuries sustained during the attack or perhaps stress or some mysterious late effects of chemical irritants is just a detail. Well, it’s not.
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Maybe they will find something, but it’s not looking likely at this point. Very disappointing behavior for the Ministry of Truth.
Tom Scharf: “This report is a bit sketchy, but can’t somebody in the media figure out what the eff happened here?” [In reference to Sicknick’s death]
Most of the press was not trying to find out what happened, they were explicitly trying to cover it up and make it worse than it was. I practiced workers’ compensation law for 17 years, and I am very familiar with direct words of causation. Several weeks ago, I became suspicious in seeing weasel words like, Sicknick physically engaged with the rioters and died later. (Not an exact quote, but correct according to the gist of what I read — no mention of direct causation)
I was initially looking for evidence of blunt trauma and could find no statement like he received blunt trauma to the head and died of a skull fracture. Everything was loose and wide open. I spend a lot of time on another political message board and before it became public, one poster said he knew Sicknick’s brother and that Sicknick mentioned to the brother that he had been sprayed. The fact that the family knew that and that it wasn’t prominently discussed is further evidence of a Leftwing media cover-up.
……
No doubt in my mind that the media played up the “murder” of Sicknick to get the internet social justice/media mob going. The fact that Sicknick lied in state at the Capitol Rotunda [with so little evidence of causation] is further evidence to me that Pelosi and higher up congressional people were trying to use his death as a rallying point on social media. They had to know that there was no evidence that any rioter directly caused Sicknick’s death.
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So far the best evidence is that Sicknick probably died of a stroke or heart attack unrelated to his work.
Tom, Hopefully they will get it isolated.
Looks like you get your wish. Levels dropped as authorities take a calculated risk that they have the infection corralled. Testing and wastewater screening looking good. Where I am is back to normal, Auckland at Level 2 till Monday unless bad stuff happens.
JDOhio,
“So far the best evidence is that Sicknick probably died of a stroke or heart attack unrelated to his work.”
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Yes, or even a drug OD. I very much doubt an official cause of death will ever be released (‘at the family’s request’ of course) and the crazies on the left will forever claim he was indirectly murdered by Trump. Like most propaganda, it is nothing but a lie. That the family agreed to have the remains lie in state at the Rotunda just means they are going along with the lie.
JD wrote: “No doubt in my mind that the media played up the “murder†of Sicknick to get the internet social justice/media mob going.”
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Nah. This narrative was aimed at getting conservatives going and to pin the “murder” on Trump, which they did. The social justice mob doesn’t need any prodding to play their part.
North Dakota was only recently one of the “hottest” Covid states. But things change… Massachusetts requires all travelers, except those in “lower-risk” states, to quarantine upon arrival for 14 days. “Lower-risk” is defined as “average daily cases per 100K below 10 AND positive test rate below 5%, both measured as a 7-day rolling average.”* Last week, only Hawaii was on that “lower-risk” list. This week, one more was added: North Dakota.
*The daily cases threshold was originally set at 6 per 100K, and increased to 10 when all states (or perhaps all but HI) exceeded that.
HaroldW,
I stay on Cape Cod in the summer and saw lots of people arrive from other states. The 14-day self quarantine is widely ignored, and almost unenforceable to boot.
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Since Massachusetts does not itself have under 10 cases per 100K, the 14 day quarantine rule is a nonsensical joke masquerading as virtue signaling.
Mass. has the 15th highest breakout in the nation currently, requiring quarantines from travelers is rather inconsequential when there are that many cases already in the community. If they aren’t requiring an in-state lockdown then this is just performative politics.
I’m not sure what Sicknick’s family really knows. Perhaps they have access to the autopsy. What makes this whole thing just a potential disgrace is the political theater of wailing at his funeral while laying in state at the Capital. Heroic cop killed by insurrectionist mob. He was used as a political tool. I expect the media is less than motivated to unwrite that narrative out of respect for his family (real) and just coincidently they don’t want to embarrass themselves (also real). They are not incentivized to correct the record at the same loudness that they pedaled the false narrative. As they say, this narrative was too good to not be true.
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The standard way to handle an embarrassing situation like this is to wait a really long time for the investigation to officially complete and then print an article on page 17A two months from now. The case will likely remain open and the narrative will be it was unproven (known facts to be left out).
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There are all kinds of weasel words in play now if you read recent articles with a conspiracy theory. The case is “being investigated as a homicide”, it’s not a homicide. 6 weeks later and there is no “public information” on the autopsy results as the WP wrote a week or so ago. The phrasing here seems to indicate there is “not public information” that they know about, perhaps the CNN report of no blunt force trauma. They are Sergeant Shultz and they know nothing about this, and don’t want to know anything further, even though they still write 100 articles a day on this Jan 6 episode.
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Lying by omission, selection bias, framing bias, and the selected stories they report on obsessively are the primary methods the new media with their moral judgments now report the news. “Facts and evidence” for favored narratives are selective anonymously sourced people, these type of facts are not adequate for non-favored narratives. In the past year we have seen Tara Reid, Hunter Biden, and now apparently this Sicknick ugliness. Russia collusion. The Trump dossier. The worst part is the media act like they don’t see this. When they make mistakes like this, why is it always biased in one direction?
Unsubstantiated so far. But it’s a really fun story anyway!
DeSantis sticks it to Biden:
Priceless.
Here’s an article on what I have pondered many times, beyond what causes covid spikes, what is causing them to stop rising and sometimes decline very quickly given previous strong exponential growth.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/why-covid-19-cases-are-falling-so-fast/618041/
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“One month ago, the CDC published the results of more than 20 pandemic forecasting models. Most projected that COVID-19 cases would continue to grow through February, or at least plateau. Instead, COVID-19 is in retreat in America. New daily cases have plunged, and hospitalizations are down almost 50 percent in the past month.”
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I don’t think changes in human contacts rates are the whole story here, or even perhaps a major piece of the story. This is mostly just my gut instinct, are we really changing R through behavioral changes in a significant way over just one month? I just don’t see that in my anecdotal observation. These seem to be changes of R from 1.5 to 0.5 in a space of 6 weeks (not sure of the actual numbers). Cases are down 43% in the last two weeks. And then, why don’t they keep going down? It will plateau at some baseline level pretty soon.
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What is telling as usual, is that they simply don’t know, can’t really measure it, aren’t really doing much actively to understand it, and are still just postulating in the wind. How do we know they don’t know, because they can’t predict it with any skill.
mark bofill,
Has the ring of a mostly made-up and exaggerated story.
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I do not doubt Biden wants to impose covid restrictions on Floridians, if only to weaken DeSantis. I doubt people in his administration are dumb enough to not recognize the courts would in fact tell Biden to go fuck himself if he tries (Withhold vaccines? Hold Floridians captive with a military blockade? These things are never going to happen). I also doubt the people in the Biden administration want to piss off enough Floridians that they can write off Florida for Senate and presidential elections for a generation. Not to mention that Florida gains two House seats in 2022…. both likely to go Republican.
Steve,
Yeah. Probably exaggerated / a fictional account loosely based on events in reality.
Better late then never.
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U.K. gets approval to infect healthy volunteers in world’s first coronavirus ‘challenge trial’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/covid-challenge-trial-uk/2021/02/17/a785a80c-7106-11eb-8651-6d3091eac63f_story.html
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“The first stage will see up to 90 adults, aged 18 to 30, exposed to the coronavirus “in a safe and controlled environment†to gauge the smallest amount of virus needed to cause infection, the government said in a statement Wednesday.
The government has said that in subsequent stages it hopes to quickly assess vaccines and conduct head-to-head comparisons.”
“The volunteers in the first study will receive about 4,500 pounds ($6,243) for their participation, which will involve 17 days of quarantining at the Royal Free Hospital in north London and follow-ups over 12 months.”
“Indeed, if we can just demonstrate that the virus grows in the nose, that’s really the endpoint we’re looking for.”
mark bofill,
If they were honest, pandemic forecasting models would be referred to as SWAG’s, the acronym for Scientific Wild Ass Guess. Because that’s all they are. If they get something right, it’s purely by accident. The reason cases are falling, IMO, is because the country has passed the Herd Immunity Threshold. And South Dakota isn’t far behind North Dakota.
Tom Scharf,
“Cases are down 43% in the last two weeks. And then, why don’t they keep going down?”
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I am beginning to suspect there is a lot more going on than simple changes in R. This is event in the changing temporal relationship between cases and deaths: total cases often rise and then fall quickly, but deaths never rise as much nor fall as much no as quickly. I suspect one issue is that early in surges the people infected are younger and more likely to pass on the virus, while later on more vulnerable people (who are more likely to die) are catching the virus from the increased population of infected people.
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As to what causes the surges: most likely that is related to both changing behavior and changing weather, along with constant introduction of infected individuals due to travel. The norther states (Montana, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and others) all started surging in cases in October to early November, with the arrival of cold weather and people staying indoors. States with milder weather and later arrival of cold (Forida, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, California, and others) all started their winter surge much later. In the case of Florida, Arizona, and a few other states, there is huge influx of people from northern states (many millions!) right around the time cases were peaking in many norther states.
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It is difficult to project exactly how the total number of cases will respond to increasing vaccination rates; bar hopping 20-somethigns are going hop the bars, especially after granny gets her vaccinations. But at least in Florida we can be sure the death rates will drop and continue to, no matter what trajectory the case counts take. On current pace, every person over 65 who wants the vaccine (and that is a very large majority!) is going to receive both doses by mid-April, and have maximum immunity by late April. Deaths are going to drop… a lot.
DeWitt,
In many places, I agree the cases are falling because the HIT is long past. I only point out that the HIT is not a fix number but depends on multiple factors in addition to the number of people already exposed and resistant: demographics, behavior, population density, weather, etc. So for example, the history of case numbers in Illinois is consistent with being long past the HIT, but if all the restrictions were lifted, cases could surge again in Illinois.
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Which is why I find it almost unbelievable that many states are NOT giving priority to people at high risk of death. If these places want to reduce damage done by the pandemic (economic and social) they should be using vaccines to stop the deaths.
“aged 18 to 30”
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Whaaaat? No elderly? Clear age discrimination.
Mark
Wow! Now that’s a game of “Quien es mas macho!” Looks like DeSantis won. Demanding someone address you with a title of respect is usually a loser move, especially if they aren’t actually required to do so. ( DeSantis is not required to call Biden President Biden.) And wow… F*** You!
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DeSantis may very well win over Trump supporters!
Lucia,
Si, lo es MUY macho!
LOL!
I thought that too. It’s a good story in that regard. Unfortunate that it’s probably not strictly speaking true, but it’s still a good story.
Alligators are cold blooded. If you can avoid getting bitten for 30 seconds by holding its mouth closed, it will tire out.
DeSantis won his primary by running ads with him and his kid building Trump’s wall.
If Trump doesn’t run, he will get all of that support, and Kristi Noem is probably second for keeping her state open(and getting attacked by the media for it).
SteveF, India’s reported cases are low, and even the real number probably is low per capita. However, Indians in the US seem to be particularly frightened, and it’s rare to see them send their kids to school or sign up for sports.
>Huh? You think winning over the bulk of the GOP party and the independents isn’t the path to victory? I think it’s a more likely path than having them all vote Democrat.
It is the path to victory, and National Review recently ran an article that Republicans are now favored to win a presidential election, with Harry Enten or Henry Olsen was the source.
I don’t see this, but the thinking appears to be that Trump’s support will stay with any Republican candidate, and a different candidate will add more Republican voters who loathed Trump.
The alternative is that Trump’s rallies are able to mobilize so many voters that they are able to overwhelm any losses they have among Republicans voters. Ten thousand votes for a rally or two adds up pretty quickly.
Steve F, Tom Scharf:
I agree that MA’s out-of-state rules became silly when MA exceeded those thresholds…perhaps the thresholds should have adjusted in line with MA values.
And yes, it’s hard-to-impossible to enforce such a rule. Perhaps the colleges could enforce it on students, but hard to do it with non-students.
HaroldW,
“MA’s out-of-state rules became silly”
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My observation is that most every rule/restriction/requirement/licence in Massachusetts is either silly virtue signaling or, more often, a corrupt payoff to a politically influential group. Really, it is bad. Good thing Cape Cod has nice summertime weather…. and I don’t have to pay their income taxes.
Tom, You have hit the nail on the head. Viral epidemiology is an immature field dominated by crude mechanistic narratives that mostly have little quantification. That is what makes the policy responses so arbitrary. There is little to no science supporting most of it. The flu has a similar pattern. Epidemics grow very quickly and then die out just as quickly and no one really knows why.
Rush Limbaugh died from lung cancer this morning. His last broadcast was February 9.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #198767)
“The reason cases are falling, IMO, is because the country has passed the Herd Immunity Threshold.”
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DeWitt, I sure hope you are right, and the U.S. has passed the Herd Immunity Threshold. Of course I plan to get vaccinated anyway. A third shot may be needed for protection against the South African variant, which I understand can be severe but less likely fatal.
DeWitt,
Proving, yet again, that using tobacco (especially smoking) is a very bad idea.
OK_Max,
South Africa seems to have survived their variant. The seven day trailing moving average of new cases/day was 2123 on February 16, down from a peak of 19,042 on January 11. The population of South Africa is 59,777,893 (worldometers.info). So new cases/100,000 is equal to 3.55. I still haven’t heard that documented reinfections have increased drastically (or at all) with the new strains other than speculation about Manaus in Brazil. The UK is down to 18 new cases/day/100,000.
I’m also not particularly bothered by the apparent ineffectiveness of the AstraZeneca vaccine against the South African strain. That vaccine appears to have been a cluster-f*** from the beginning. Their attitude seems to have been ‘we’re going to save the world on the cheap.’ I’d rather get a vaccine from a company that wants to make money like Pfizer.
OK_Max,
“Of course I plan to get vaccinated anyway.”
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Let us know if your skin turns green or purple and you get a strong urge to eat human brains. I have no such symptoms so far (7 days).
SteveF,
As expensive as cigarettes are now, I don’t see how anyone can afford the habit. If you’re going to spend that kind of money you might as well get ‘better’ drugs.
Unfortunately, a significant fraction of lung cancer cases, I think it’s around 15%, do not appear to be related to smoking. But if you get it, everyone is going to assume you were a smoker.
DeWitt,
South Africa has a median age of ~27 years and 5% of their population is over 65 (with about 1.5% over 75). ~36% of their population is under 18. They are not going to have high fatalities unless a new strain kills younger people. Average life expectancy at birth is only ~65.
DeWitt,
” But if you get it, everyone is going to assume you were a smoker.”
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No need to assume, Rush Limbaugh was a long time smoker of both cigarettes and cigars.
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My long time business partner died a few years back from esophageal cancer (and it’s not a good way to die)…. long time tobacco chewer.
Remember zip-tie guy at the Capital? This was trotted out as evidence of “capture and kill” teams roaming the grounds looking for the political evil doers and sending them to their rightful deaths. Well … the prosecutors now say that he found the zip-ties in the capital and grabbed them to prevent capital cops from using them on protesters. Glenn Greenwald is as usual on my page relating to media narratives:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-claims
Tom Scharf,
Yes, it was all lies: Nobody (except the police) was holding firearms, there was no smashing of heads with fire extinguishers, the zip ties were brought to the capitol by police, not rioters. All the five people who died, except for the young woman shot by a police officer, died from an apparent heart attack or stroke, not from violence during the riot. All lies, willfully spread, and never really retracted, even after they are shown to be completely false.
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The MSM can’t be trusted.
SteveF,
If by ‘holding’ you mean brandishing, then I agree. There is no evidence to support that. But if you mean possession, then I believe there is evidence that some people involved were in possession of firearms. But there is zero evidence, only assertions from the usual suspects, that there was intent to use them.
You must be wrong, DeWitt. I clearly remember the news report showing an organized team of military style individuals walking up to the Capitol. Clearly, by the description of dress, action, and obvious intent, it must have been a warzone in there. Blood from wall to wall. Such a group could not have precipitated anything less. We must focus on this attack, that people didn’t even brandish weapons is silly, dangerous, conspiracy theory. Blood from wall to wall. Think about that. Blood… from wall… to wall. You can’t ignore that and pretend it didn’t happen.
DeWitt,
I meant holding in their hands.
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“But if you mean possession, then I believe there is evidence that some people involved were in possession of firearms.”
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Can you provide that evidence?
LOL
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“.. During a recent television appearance on MSNBC, White House Senior Covid Response Advisor Andy Slavitt admitted the fact that California and other blue states under lockdown cannot record better infection numbers than comparatively free Florida is “just a little beyond our explanation. .â€
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https://nationalfile.com/biden-covid-expert-beyond-our-explanation-why-blue-lockdown-states-have-same-numbers-as-free-florida/
Yes, we really need to mentally screen all these people and any profession that has any tangential connection to national security. Anyone who exhibits the wrong answers to cleverly posed questions that seeks to uncover their “real†deep inner think must be banned from any job, forever.
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It’s all pretty hilarious. What are they going to do, make them pledge loyalty to the constitution? Every single person at that rally believes in the constitution at about a magnitude higher than the typical citizen. They were there waving flags and believing they were the patriots defending the US. They may have gotten their facts completely wrong, but their intent was to save the union as it exists, not tear it down.
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Compare this to the burning of flags, waving upside down flags and so forth that happens at other protests. Antifa is openly for a new form of government, as are a lot of hard core Marxists. “Not my president!â€, “By any means necessary!â€. Which of these groups continuously wants changes to the Constitution for political gain? I don’t see any need to chase down these blowhards for re-education camps either, their numbers are small and they have no political power, zero.
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If we have 350M people in the US, a small fraction of these people are going to be crazy and organize. So what? When they commit actual crimes (as opposed to thought crimes) then hold them accountable.
“ CORONAVIRUSHEALTHCARENEWSVACCINES Spain: Second Pfizer Shots Halted After 46 Nursing Home Residents Die After The First Shot HAFHAFFebruary 18, 2021
LOS BARRIOS, SPAIN — The Nuestra Señora del Rosario (Our Lady of the Rosary) nursing home is reeling due to mass deaths after mRNA inoculations.â€
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“.. Most residents became extremely ill shortly after the shots. It is believed many came down with COVID-19, despite being “vaccinated against it.â€..â€
https://humansarefree.com/2021/02/spain-pfizer-shots-halted-after-46-nursing-home-residents-died.html
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This in a facility with a max of 145 residents
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Mars rover 2020 landing today at around 3:55 pm. If you want to watch a room full of really nervous anxious nerds then watch the live stream.
Will soon see if the Mars Space Defense Force is able to successfully target the invader. It has a pretty good success rate so far.
Ed,
You cannot get covid from a mRNA vaccine.
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Lot’s of people die at nursing homes all the time. People may arrive with covid at a nursing home or might catch it there before the vaccine becomes effective (take several weeks). Etc.
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It’s worth investigating, it’s possible that there was some tainted version of a vaccine, sabotage etc. However there have been 56M+ vaccine doses administered in the US so far and any major issue like this would have been obvious by now.
Tom…I did not, and the article did not, say the vaccine gave the virus. It implies, and I tend to agree, that it is just not that effective on protecting against the virus.
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Still looks to me that the potential harm exceeds potential benefits for otherwise healthy individuals.
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Now if I had diabetes or similar high risk existing symptoms, I would likely evaluate the risk vs benefit differently
Ed Forbes,
That’s quite the opposite of what they are seeing all across Israel. Maybe someone in that old folks home failed to keep the vaccine cold.
DeWitt: “But if you mean possession, then I believe there is evidence that some people involved were in possession of firearms.â€
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SteveF (Comment #198804): “Can you provide that evidence?”
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I can’t speak for DeWitt, but I have seen a report that some of those arrested turned out to have firearms in their vehicles. I have not seen any evidence of rioters entering the capital building with firearms. Byron York has been trying to get the Capital Police to tell him how many such cases there were. So far as I know, they are still stonewalling him.
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Meanwhile, the armed occupation of DC continues. The whole business stinks.
SteveF,
Holding a gun in your hand is brandishing, so no, that didn’t happen, or at least no one has presented evidence that it happened. Given how many cameras there are around the Capitol and how many videos were posted, if it did happen, someone would have taken a picture or video. But the MSM really likes to make things up, particularly the NYT and the Sicknick being hit with a fire extinguisher story. The progressive MSM (probably redundant) also needed to make the incident look much, much worse than all the mostly peaceful burning and looting that took place last year.
The NY Democrats may go after Cuomo after all. Apparently, he’s not woke enough and they feel they need someone much more progressive. Along those lines, apparently AOC is going to challenge Schumer for the Senate in 2022 for similar reasons.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-catches-andrew-cuomo-11613603167?mod=opinion_featst_pos2
Mike M,
“..turned out to have firearms in their vehicles.”
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Where did you see said report? Is it credible?
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I’ll bet those folks have a lot more guns at home. Both, even if true, are utterly irrelevant. I know lots of good-ol-boys in Louisiana that carry a gun in their car all the time.
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With regard to the army guarding the Capitol: The Dems are truly crazy. There is no danger anyone is going to attack the Capitol building. It is all nutty paranoia and promotion of their insurrection narrative….. “See, the insurrection is so dangerous that we have to have the army guarding us.” Dishonest, totally nuts, or both.
DeWitt,
“AOC is going to challenge Schumer for the Senate in 2022 for similar reasons.”
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It is like a dream come true: the comedy value alone would be fantastic. Like I said above, the Dems are crazy.
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AOC’s qualification for the Seanate is… well…. she knows how to tend bar better than anyone else in Congress. Which, of course, is exactly what she should be doing.
Lucia,
I am reminded of:
“A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World Before the Truth Puts On its Shoes.”
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There will be an obvious explanation, and it won’t be that m-RNA vaccines gives people covid-19. Still no desire to eat brains… day 9.
Well, only an army similar to the Saddam’s Republican Guard, who have professed personal loyalty to Biden and the left, not the actual army who are apparently full of closet insurrectionists.
Real time animation of Mars descent and landing:
https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/mars2020/#/home
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NASA Live Stream
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm0b_ijaYMQ
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Live 360 View of Mission Control
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIooAx_GkJs
SteveF (Comment #198816): “Where did you see said report? Is it credible?
I’ll bet those folks have a lot more guns at home. Both, even if true, are utterly irrelevant.”
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Don’t remember where I saw it or if it was very credible. It does not matter because, as you say, it is not relevant. I only mentioned that as one more example of the silliness of the reports.
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“Silliness” is not the right word. It would be if not for the evil motives involved.
Successful touchdown!
Ya, they got it on the ground. It will be interesting to see how much imagery and data becomes available soon. The objective of the mission is to evaluate the possible existence of early life before Mars turned inhospitable….. lots of digging/measuring. Should be interesting, but I am guessing they will find squat.
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Of course, if the Dems continue their crazy woke agenda, I might consider Mars… more hospitable than crazy leftists.
SN10 could launch tomorrow! Musk gives it a 60% chance of landing successfully.
Who knows, we may live to see Starship arrive at Mars, if not deliver people there.
SHAMEFUL — “Shameful and inhumaneâ€: DeSantis threatens to withhold vaccine amid criticism
Pop-up vaccination site serves “whitest demographic, the richest demographic.”
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/02/florida-governor-threatens-to-withhold-vaccine-from-area-that-criticized-him
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This is your typical DeSantis take from the health reporter on this site. This a brazenly bad faith article. No coverage of Cuomo and nursing homes to be found here, but enough time and energy for this, ha ha.
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You can throw darts at anywhere in Florida and your 65+ demographic will be heavily white. The county in question here has about a 10:1 white/non-white ratio.
https://www.tampabay.com/florida-politics/buzz/2019/06/20/floridas-under-70-population-now-majority-minority/
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mark bofill,
Musk seems to have a strange development plant…. try to run like hell, then learn to walk. But anything is likely better than NASA, which AFAICT has been a 60 year long a black hole for public funding…. with plenty of astronaut deaths to show for it. Musk is unlikely to do worse, and at least we are not paying for his learning curve.
As I observe the absolutely insane, destructive policies of the Biden administration, with the frenzied support of the vocal left and the MSM (but I repeat myself), I begin to wonder: Is this how ‘the matrix’ begins? Will they try to supplant every factual reality with a fabricated ‘reality’ that takes all agency away from the individual….forever? It seems frighteningly consistent with what is happening right now. We live in scary times: powerful people absolutely opposed to the acceptance, or even the acknowledgement, of factual reality; a willingness to punish whoever embraces factual reality, by whatever means available, and a growing desire to not countenance any view that differers in the slightest from the fabricated path which will crush all opposition.
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It is by far the most dangerous political climate of my 50 years of adult life….. dangerous to the continuation of liberty.
Musk seems to be trying a “fail often but learn while you fail” method of big rocket development. As opposed to NASA’s try really hard to make the first attempt perfect no matter how long or how much it costs.
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NASA’s manned flight / big rocket development has gotten too conservative and too scared to fail. The thing is because these things are so hard and so prone to failure you are likely to fail anyway. China is catching up quickly because they are also willing to take more risks, and the technology is much cheaper and the way forward has been shown.
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NASA’s scientific spacecraft and exploratory craft are still by far best in class. In almost every category NASA has been first and/or best in class. There’s a lot to be proud of here, and competition for the future is a good thing.
And in the irony increases category, I have a banner ad in Yahoo Mail from an organization called Let America Vote calling for signatures on a petition “demanding” the resignation of Marjorie Taylor Greene from Congress.
The vaccine effect is now clearly starting to show up in deaths from long term care facilities. See the long term care graphs here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/02/major-covid-19-metrics-are-falling/618068/
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The percent of deaths from long term care trend is especially enlightening. This separates out the confounder of a declining overall trend. I thought this would show up earlier, but apparently there is a pretty long lag. They had to remove NY from the analysis because of the enormous adjustment they recently made, ha ha.
All recent studies show the vaccines have reduced effectiveness with the B1.351 variant from S. Africa, which has significant changes in its spike protein. I sure hope Pfizer and Moderna are using the very fast development time of the m-RNA technology to good advantage, and that the FDA does not delay approval of a slightly modified version for long. Seems to me by year end there is a reasonable chance a revised vaccine booster for B1.351 will be needed.
Tom Scharf (Comment #198834): “The percent of deaths from long term care trend is especially enlightening. This separates out the confounder of a declining overall trend. I thought this would show up earlier, but apparently there is a pretty long lag.”
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Encouraging but maybe not convincing. The author says that US deaths have been falling for two weeks, using the Covid Tracking Project data. I just looked at that, and I don’t see it; deaths might be dropping but it is too soon to tell for sure. The Financial Times shows the same. So maybe the author is not so careful about signal vs noise.
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The Covid Tracking Project makes no effort to synchronize data, as shown by the sudden surge in deaths in NY nursing homes. Also, their numbers for deaths appears to lag a week or two behind the CDC. But synchronization is critical in comparing different data sets.
Mike M,
“deaths might be dropping but it is too soon to tell for sure.”
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I think it is very clear. Confirmed cases have been falling in the USA since early January, and deaths have been falling since late January.
Look at the 7-day trailing average for reported cases and deaths in the USA: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
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Worldometers just sums reported cases and reported deaths in the different states and territories. Enough states (but not all) have given a high priority to those in nursing homes and those over 75 (only later later those over 65) that it is almost inevitable deaths rates will continue to fall.
SteveF (Comment #198849): “deaths have been falling since late January.
Look at the 7-day trailing average for reported cases and deaths in the USA: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/”
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Interesting. The Covid Tracking Project numbers are quite different: 2522 deaths/day for the most recent 7-day period, centered on Feb. 15. Compared to 2776 for the period centered on Feb. 8 and 3217 for Feb. 1. Probably dropping, but enough noise that we can’t really be sure. Those agree with the Financial Times:
https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&cumulative=0&logScale=0&per100K=0&startDate=2020-09-01&values=deaths
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But Worldometers shows 2075 for the most recent average, but with similar numbers from one and two weeks ago.
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The CDC shows deaths plunging by more than 50% over the last 5 weeks. But that is death certificate data, so the dates are different and the recent data are probably incomplete.
Woo-Hoo.. I’m free. New data analysis indicates one dose of Moderna vaccine is 92% effective after two weeks. This is a monumental shift in results interpretation. I had my first shot 18 days ago. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2036242
Counting deaths are done differently by different people, some people track the deaths reported per day, and some people like to count the deaths on the specified date which has a significant lag time. It’s curious that these people don’t have close numbers for the same time period averaging, however the older trends all looks similar.
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However almost everyone is now showing a steep decline in rolling average deaths along with a month old steep decline in cases, so it is likely this is not noise and will continue, especially with the vaccine effort ongoing.
With more and more data on the effectiveness of one shot, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the US shift to one shot vaccinations to get more people vaccinated sooner. The ongoing same one shot effort in the UK will provide more information.
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Also lack of vaccine effectiveness against the new strains needs to be better defined in the media, the impression is that they aren’t helping at all but from what I have read they aren’t as effective in preventing detectable disease, but are still very effective in preventing severe disease and death. There seems to be mixed information here.
Russell Klier,
I am at 10 days from first dose, so I am also probably pretty well protected, or will be in a few days.
Tom Scharf,
Changing to a 1 dose regime would make perfect sense, since it would more efficiently end deaths. That doesn’t mean it will happen in the USA. The only doubt about one dose is the duration of protection; would immunity fade much sooner with only one dose? Probably not, since it is both antibody and T-cell mediated, but you never know.
It’s a tradeoff, but getting twice as many people with very good immunity seems to be a better deal than getting half the number with an extra ~10% effectiveness. Note that we will hit the wall somewhere around 60% vaccinated of people starting to refuse the vaccine, and 2nd doses can be given out.
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Also important, WSJ:
“Separately, the vaccine, which has been authorized in the U.S., the U.K., the EU and elsewhere, can be stored and transported at between minus 25 and minus 15 degrees Celsius, or minus 13 and 5 degrees Fahrenheit—similar to a consumer freezer—Pfizer and BioNTech said.”
Tom,
Yes. I hope they decide to start skipping 2nd doses and so those of us with low priority have a chance before July!!
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We are probably all going to want or need boosters for the new strains. If they speed testing for that it can be everyone’s 2nd jab anyway.
SteveF,
As I think I said in a different post, I’ll worry about the South African, Brazilian and UK strains when I start to see documented reinfection cases increase substantially. The last I heard was that reinfection was still at less than 1%. Having had the disease and recovering from it is then significantly more effective than a vaccine. I fully expect the UK strain to become dominant in the US, but I don’t think it will have a significant effect on the new case rate, which will continue to fall.
Then there’s this:
A standard comment on the piece goes something like this: He’s not an epidemiologist so what does he know. In fact, that’s a pretty standard type of response to many of the opinion pieces written by non-experts. Given the many failures of the experts, I ignore those comments.
Another thing that bothers me is the tendency to simply add the percentages vaccinated and recovered to get a total for immunity. Given that above estimate of total infected, including asymptomatic in the US was around 55% (~6.5x) while confirmed cases are around 8%, then one would expect that at least 40% of those vaccinated are already immune. And that assumes that people who knew they had the disease don’t get vaccinated, which is probably not true.
Tom Scahrf,
I suspect (and hope) the number of people refusing the vaccine will drop over time when no obvious bad side effects are discovered. The most recent numbers I have seen are ~20% – 25% who say they will refuse the vaccine. One problem is that over 35% of black Americans say they are going to refuse the vaccine, which means a lot of unnecessary deaths. Many black Americans work in nursing homes, and have already been offered and refused vaccination.
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I find it all rather astounding.
DeWitt,
I was not very impressed by the article…. too much arm waving and too little firm data. The large drop in cases is obvious, but I think the author does not appreciate that “herd immunity” depends on multiple factors, including behavioral, environmental, and social, which means many places where cases have fallen, clearly indicating they are past the HIT, could return to case growth if behavior changes and government restrictions are lifted. There is no doubt that we are nearing the end of the pandemic, I just think it unwise to claim it will all be over by April.
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If susceptible populations (mostly those over 65) are given priority for vaccinations, then there is a good chance deaths will indeed fall very dramatically by April. How much deaths fall will depend in part on how many susceptible people refuse vaccination.
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It won’t be really over until it is over… with restrictions lifted and people’s behavior returning to that of pre-covid-19.
The multiplier for confirmed cases to actual cases has a lot of variability, and I haven’t seen a recent number that takes into account the huge surge we just had. That number was probably over 10x early in the pandemic and probably below 5x now. The WSJ article is probably a little optimistic in my view, but not absurdly so. The worst offenders though are the articles that don’t even take into account confirmed cases or don’t attempt a multiplier of any kind. How can you write about a pandemic for a year and not understand the very basic math involved?
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There’s a lot of reason to be hopeful now, vaccination rates are increasing along with what appears to be a significant “natural” drop in cases. I don’t think we will have another surge close to what we just had.
Well Washington state is doing a terrible job of getting vaccines out. My wife has been trying for a month to find an open appointment near us and has not been able to do so. The department of health web site is terrible. It just has a list of locations (there are hundreds in our county and probably thousands statewide) and no way to determine if anything is available without going to each one individually. I tried 20 or so and all had nothing available.
Washington state is getting almost as bad as California in terms of dreadful government. It’s cost a lot of lives too with the crime surge in 2020. It looks like I won’t be able to get vaccinated before my trip in March.
If in fact the epidemic is almost over and we are near herd immunity, it will prove something very interesting. Most US states are at a population fatality rate of between 0.1% and 0.2%. That will mean that the IFR (even in a very unhealthy country like the US) is between 0.2% and 0.4%, i.e., right in line with Ioannidis and coauthors best estimates. Will the shameful political attacks on Ioannidis stop? Of course not. Woke narratives are so insane (as SteveF points out) that being a top scientist guarantees an ongoing attack.
I’m so glad we are entering talks with Iran because we haven’t been there before. It’s impossible to predict what will happen, for sure it won’t be something like this:
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1. US announces new talks, globalists swoon over each other
2. Initial progress is made, Iran seems serious
3. There are some sticking points, talks drag for a long time
4. Some things are resolved
5. Iran keeps adding new conditions a little at a time …
6. … until the US is forced to take a bad deal or walk away
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Could never happen like that. They could do these talks in 10 minutes if they really wanted to, but both sides now prefer diplomacy theater.
Tom Scharf,
I look at the ratio of confirmed cases to deaths to get some idea of how the multiplier of actual cases to confirmed cases has changed. My SWAG: it was probably near 5 early, but likely fell to about 1.5 to 2 by last summer, with a mean somewhere near 2.5 to 3. With 29 million confirmed cases, that puts the actually infected population at ~70 million to ~90 million. Add to that people with inherent resistance… maybe 40%, and you get somewhere near 200 million unlikely to get the illness going forward. But that 40% with some kind of inherent resistance were always present, so the susceptible population probably started near ~200 million and is now down to 110 million to 130 million. That is still a lot of potential cases, and more importantly, deaths, unless those at risk of death are vaccinated.
Tom Scharf,
It is very much like negotiating with the Palistinians: their minimum demand (no more Isreal) is more than they can ever get, so negotiations are futile. With the mullahs their minimum demand is that they get nuclear weapons, no questions asked, to ensure their repressive regime, just like North Korea’s, is never going to be attacked and toppled. Negotiations with the mullahs are a waste of time.
David Young,
“Well Washington state is doing a terrible job of getting vaccines out.”
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Ever consider moving to Florida?
We are definitely going to get a second home and gradually reduce our footprint. Probably South Carolina or Oklahoma though. The level of upper middle class and upper class cultural suffocation is high in this state.
SteveF,
A ratio of 4:1 missed cases:confirmed, a multiplier of 5, means an IFR of 0.35%. That seems too high. A multiplier of only 2.5 gives an IFR of 0.7%. That’s way out of the ballpark, IMO. I think your SWAG machine is broken. A multiplier of 6.5 as used in the article you denigrated above gives an IFR of 0.27%.
I find it curious that Cuomo is now getting thrown under the bus by his own party for the same things people on the right have been pointing out for almost a year.
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I suppose it was a “Democrats can do no wrong while Trump is in charge” mentality. Cuomo looks to have delayed the real death stats until post election so he would be provided political cover, but the exact opposite happened. Looks like he will be facing a damaging federal / state inquiry. Now that covid might be on a real decline we might be entering the search for political scapegoats and a scramble for survival. There aren’t any winners against covid, although Biden got lucky with his timing. New candidates have a target rich environment.
The following quote is from David Leonhardt’s newsletter in today’s NYTimes:
“If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you’re probably familiar with the idea of vaccine alarmism. It goes something like this:
The coronavirus vaccines aren’t 100 percent effective. Vaccinated people may still be contagious. And the virus variants may make everything worse. So don’t change your behavior even if you get a shot.”
Leonhardt says this message is only partially true and is misleading:
“Much of this message has some basis in truth, but it is fundamentally misleading. The evidence so far suggests that a full dose of the vaccine — with the appropriate waiting period after the second shot — effectively eliminates the risk of Covid-19 death, nearly eliminates the risk of hospitalization and drastically reduces a person’s ability to infect somebody else. All of that is also true about the virus’s new variants.
Yet the alarmism continues. And now we are seeing its real-world costs: Many people don’t want to get the vaccine partly because it sounds so ineffectual.â€
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I am not anti-vaccine, but I do wonder about the effect of vaccines against the Covid-19 variants, such the one from South Africa. I presume the two vaccines available in the U.S. today offer some protection against the variants, at least enough protection to keep you from being hospitalized.
Do not underestimate AOC, the smiling gulag warden.
I think she is pretending to be stupid, as George W Bush did, though he also had a speaking problem that was a family trait but nobody called his dad stupid.
There is video of her complaining about what this thing is in her sink that cuts up the waste. She grew up pretty wealthy so I’m pretty sure she knows what a garbage disposal is.
She also won an award in the Intel science fair, and based on this got a star named after her.
She likely would lose to Schumer, but they did fail to beat her in a primary. The Justice Democrats she is a part of is pretty well organized capable of delivering primary wins, though generally losing against the already elected people they targeted. It is suspected that they didn’t expect to win her campaign, but was just a vehicle for getting donations. They ended up with ridiculous campaign finance charges for their trouble.
The infection fatality rate has also changed over time. Initially, doctors couldn’t save the very ill (and may have done things that made things worse.) Now they seem to be able to save people.
OK_Max,
I wonder about efficacy against new variants. But I figure there is no point in being totally susceptible to both the old and new variants. So that’s a good reason to get the vaccine. I’m guessing we’ll all need a booster for the new variants. I have no problem getting several shots.
DeWitt,
Only time will tell if my SWAG machine is broken; I don’t think it is. I hope there are very few cases by April, but I doubt that will happen. We will see.
According to my math, we can either have the Biden covid stimulus or land 700 more rovers on Mars for the same price. I haven’t decided which one I prefer.
lucia,
I think that would be the case fatality rate changed a lot. Early on, the ratio of undetected to confirmed cases was probably very high, probably a factor of ten or more, so the infection fatality rate would change a lot less. Not only that, but the total case numbers were still fairly small.
Lucia, FAU publishes data daily that supports your hypothesis about reduced mortality. In the past 11 months the case fatality rate in Florida for people aged 66-75 dropped from 10.4 % to 2.1%. https://business.fau.edu/covidtracker/data/florida-data/index.php
I’d be interested in your thoughts on the site. Note you can download the raw data and tinker with it yourself.
Russell,
I have a totally different data tinkering project. A dance friend wants to know if leads or follows win more in “pro-am” competitions. So I’m finding shitwads of data, reading the files organizing and doing statistics on that!
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But it just seemed to me that case fatality had to drop. Early on, doctors were intubing and so on. It was sort of horrific. Now they seem to have a handle on some things they can do.
“There is video of her complaining about what this thing is in her sink that cuts up the waste. She grew up pretty wealthy so I’m pretty sure she knows what a garbage disposal is.”
This is actually a case of reality being dumber than your imagination can fathom, because many people in New York really won’t likely have ever encountered a garbage disposal-they were *illegal* in New York City until 1997.
I am not making this up, this is real! So it is entirely possible-possible!-that AOC literally never encountered a garbage disposal until the first time she lived in a dwelling constructed after 1997.
Remember that no matter how dumb you think politicians are individually, they are infinitely dumber collectively.
Lucia, That same data site shows a dramatic (38%-6%) reduction in hospitalization rates for my age group. Younger age groups are similar in reduction % but at a much lower absolute level.
…on your dance competition data, I have always been a total klutz and prefer to watch. The Nutcracker is a favorite of mine.
https://business.fau.edu/covidtracker/data/florida-data/index.php
Russell Klier,
Very informative site; someone obviously put some effort into building it.
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WRT changing rates of hospitalization: Some of the reduction has to be from changing efficiency in detecting cases, and some may be due to changing medical practice. Early on (April, May) doctors may have erred on the side of caution and admitted people that today they would not admit. Both hospitalization rates per confirmed case and death rates per confirmed case have fallen by comparable amounts for the elderly, but it looks like the drop in hospitalizations for younger people has been much greater than for older people.
On a subject we covered before, almost everyone in a covid clinical trial who got a placebo and was offered a vaccine, took the vaccine.
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Long-Term Studies Of COVID-19 Vaccines Hurt By Placebo Recipients Getting Immunized
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/02/19/969143015/long-term-studies-of-covid-19-vaccines-hurt-by-placebo-recipients-getting-immuni
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“Mott was one of about 650 volunteers who took the experimental Moderna vaccine at a company called Johnson County Clinical Trials in Lenexa, Kan. Dr. Carlos Fierro, who runs the study there, says every participant was called back after the Food and Drug Administration authorized the vaccine.
“During that visit we discussed the options, which included staying in the study without the vaccine,” he says, “and amazingly there were people — a couple of people — who chose that.”
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It should also be noted that some participants knew they had gotten a real vaccine because they had a reaction to one or both of the shots.
Tom Scharf,
I’m not going to open your NPR link. The title is idi0tic enough. Given the real risk of serious injury or death, there is nothing that can be learned from people remaining in the placebo arm that justifies the risk. Challenge trials would be more ethical.
Russel Klier,
I’m a big fan of The Nutcracker as well. We saw a production in Covent Garden one year while visiting relatives in London for Christmas. It was spectacular. I still listen to a recording I have every year around Christmas time.
lucia (Comment #79711)
July 28th, 2011 at 7:18 am
SteveF–
“I predict that by 2025, or possibly sooner, it will be clear to most everyone (OK, maybe not V&R and James Hansen, assuming he is still around) that the V&R projections of extreme sea level rise are just wrong. I believe their projections are badly distorted by the use of an obviously incorrect (not physically reasonable) semi-empirical model.”
We’ll have to keep track now!
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You were right to note that. In July I will do the 10 year comparison…. assuming the covid vaccine doesn’t turn me into a brain-eating zombie. FWIW, V&R’s projections of sea level rise are crazy wrong.
SteveF,
Here’s my SWAG: About 40% of the population has some immunity to SARS-CoV-2 through exposure to other coronaviruses. Does that mean they can’t be infected and spread the disease? Not necessarily. It more likely, IMO, means they will have very mild to no symptoms. But most will still have sufficient viral load for a few days to be able to infect others, but with lower probability than for someone with no immunity at all and a higher peak viral load. That’s what leads to a multiplier on the order of 6, not 2.5.
North Dakota, for example, had their seven day moving average cases/day peak in mid-November with confirmed cases being only 8.8% of the state population (worldometers.info). Tennessee peaked with confirmed cases being 7.5% of the state population. The only way the total case multiplier can be less than three is if you make the highly unlikely, IMO, assumption that a large fraction of the population cannot be infected and spread the disease at all. I have seen no evidence that this is the case. Perhaps it will show up in the UK challenge trial, assuming that actually happens.
This should also mean that variants won’t be much of a problem in the US because so many people will have some immunity to the variants from having been previously infected or vaccinated. I see people predicting spikes in US cases from the variants like in Ireland and Portugal. Before the spike in Ireland, confirmed cases were only 1.6% of the population and 3.8% in Portugal. The rate for the whole US is currently 8.6% My prediction is that spikes are unlikely to happen in the US. Trailing seven day average new cases/day in the USA peaked on January 11, 2021 with confirmed cases at 7% of the population.
Without the vaccines, I would project total confirmed cases to be about 13% of the population or 43 million. That would be up to 14 million new confirmed cases. The vaccines should significantly reduce that number.
For n00bs, here’s an actual link to the article SteveF wrote in July, 2011:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/a-first-order-estimate-of-future-sea-level-rise/
Vermeer and Rahmstorf V&R published a paper in 2009 projecting a large increase in sea level by 2100. Ten years later, it may be possible to reject their model using actual sea level rise.
I had to click on a lot of Older Entries links to get back that far.
DeWitt,
Sorry, I should have given that link.
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Yes, their model was (and is) total crap.
Tom Scharf,
“I haven’t decided which one I prefer.”
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If the Federal government is going to go into that extra debt, I would much prefer to forget 700 more Mars landers, forget the entire “stimulous” package, and have a major FICA tax holiday. That would at least actually provide maximum fiscal stimulus instead to bailing out irresponsible Dem states.
I just went looking for a Florida sea level analysis I examined about 5 years ago. The “extreme” sea level scenario it included was about 2x the IPCC max, and all the usual suspects quoted those numbers like it was the nominal prediction. Rather helpfully though they included a year by year table of actual sea level rise rate for the extreme scenario starting at around 2010. Needless to say that didn’t happen as satellite altimetry has been holding rather steady at around 1 inch /decade or so.
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But, but, but … do not lose faith. They now have a 2019 update!!!!
https://southeastfloridaclimatecompact.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Sea-Level-Rise-Projection-Guidance-Report_FINAL_02212020.pdf
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They have totally jettisoned all those old estimates and have no comment on their previous estimate’s accuracy. Their new estimates:
“In the short term, sea level rise is projected to be 10 to 17 inches by 2040 and 21 to 54 inches by 2070 (above the 2000 mean sea level in Key West, Florida). In the long term, sea level rise is projected to be 40 to 136 inches by 2120.”
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Given it’s 2020 and we have had about 2-3 inches of rise since 2000, this maps out to an expectation of * 7 to 14 inches of sea level rise in the next 20 years *. In other words about 5x increase in the rate of change, starting tomorrow, for something that has been steady for the last 30 years or so on the satellite altimeter.
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Of course they continue to use RCP 8.5 as a baseline emissions profile. They rather humorously label the IPCC AR5 max estimate of RCP 8.5 (around 1M) as “IPCC median”, which infers it is some lowball estimate, they then upgrade their new estimate to a NOAA high and extreme model.
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There are more PhD’s than you can shake a stick at here. I gave up taking this seriously several years ago, and am totally unsurprised that they just toss out old projections and make up news ones with even grander estimates. It’s not a scandal, it’s standard operating procedure. I suppose if you want to say something different in this profession you have to quit your job and go to substack, ha ha.
Thanks for the link. That was before my time, which makes me a noob. Interesting thread.
Darn aerospace software engineers don’t know nothing. I coulda toldja that! :p
mark bofill,
You’re welcome.
And he demonstrated it at such great length.
SteveF,
Well, that was pretty much a given considering the authors. The question will be, how is your model holding up?
New banner ad from Stop Republicans on Yahoo Mail: “Urgent Petition: Demand Sen. Josh Hawley Resign. Sen. Josh Hawley tried to overturn the election. We need 100,000 signatures….
Funny I don’t remember anything like that when everyone and his dog was trying to remove Trump from office with baldface lies about how they had evidence of his supposedly colluding with Putin to rig the election. Adam Schiff, I’m talking about you in particular.
Even if they get the signatures, I seriously doubt anyone is going to pay attention. The only signatures that would count for anything would be from residents of Missouri. But Missouri doesn’t have a statewide recall procedure. I think they’re stuck with him for the next six years.
DeWitt,
“how is your model holding up?”
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I can tell you already, my model is not far off… which is not saying too much: my model predicted pretty close to a continuation of the preceding 15 year trend. But really, who is SteveF except some racist, right-wing hack who, shockingly enough, is no climate scientist. .
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Actually, I am a life-long scientist, and V&R are a pair of lefty/green hacks, who wouldn’t know physical reality if it jumped up and bit them in the buttocks.
Steve,
Nice work btw.
mark bofill,
All that work seems an eternity ago; I go back only because, even while rubbish projections like V&R are clearly refuted by physical reality, the relentless propaganda never stops; since V&R dozens more rubbish projections of ‘catastrophic sea level rise’ have been published. To demonstrate that a paper, popularly touted, from a decade ago was the purest of garbage may (in my wildest dreams) actually make some climate scientist talking about sea level rise step back and think a bit. Which is not to say they will… climate science is after all more politics than science….. it is only a hope. What is clear: Projections of a meter or more rise by 2100 are nothing but green/left propaganda, and should be ignored by all policy makers worldwide. Embracing such rubbish only causes social harm.
On the question of the “armed insurrection”, here is a summary of charges laid: https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/19/no-proof-january-6-was-an-armed-insurrection/
Note that a number of those “weapons” were picked up inside the building. The guy with the stun gun does not seem to have used it.
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No rioters with firearms in the capital building. Two people arrested for firearm violations in the vicinity, but no evidence that either entered the building or was involved in the riot.
I was under the impression from recent reporting that many of the rioters, aware of DCs strict gun laws, cached their weapons outside the city limits before proceeding to grab their less explosive weaponry.
I should also note the obvious–that even without RPGs etc., the rioters managed to put a fair few police in the hospital, some of whom will be minus an eye or blessed with other permanent conditions.
Follow the science people.
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Fauci: ‘Possible’ Americans will be wearing masks in 2022 to protect against COVID-19
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NBC: Covid masks save lives. The CDC says double-masking may save more. It is time for masks to perform one last heroic act.
“Masks have saved far more lives than any other biomedical intervention for Covid-19.”
“One day it will be a fun challenge for nerds like me to try to estimate whether masks saved more lives than vaccines.”
“States with lower mask use predictably fared worse in various ways.”
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For that last one they point to a Vox article from October conveniently timed to denigrate the Midwest and once again obfuscate statewide mask mandates with mask use in general. They show this illuminating graph:
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22019881/Chart4_MaskWearNationalTrend_Final.jpg
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Mask use in the USA up to 88% by October, masks have saved more live than anything (unsourced). What happened after October with miracle life saving masks in place? By far the biggest death surge of the entire pandemic. As usual, no comment on this.
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I think people should wear masks because they might help reduce the spread and psychologically it’s a constant reminder to social distance, but these overconfident overstatements of “science” that fly in direct contradiction to the facts aren’t helpful. I could do a first order correlation study and show mask use increases deaths substantially, right?
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This is what the expert class considers proper messaging to the rubes, it insults my intelligence. What are people to think when the next day they say vaccines are perfectly safe?
I think Dr. Fauci, an eminent scientist with a partially political mandate, recognizes that messaging to encourage a range of prophylactic measures should encourage all of them, not give pride of place to the one that will reach the populace last.
From what I have read, Fauci is *not* an eminent scientist. He was an OK scientist, but 35 years ago found his true calling as a government bureaucrat.
I was in the Bay Area during the 80s and 90s. What Fauci did in the fight against AIDS was quite something. Some of it was as a scientist. Some of it was as a ‘bureaucrat.’ All of it was laudable.
What Wikipedia says about Fauci’s scientific chops: “Fauci has made important scientific observations that contributed to the understanding of the regulation of the human immune response and is recognized for delineating the mechanisms whereby immunosuppressive agents adapt to that response. He developed therapies for formerly fatal diseases such as polyarteritis nodosa, granulomatosis with polyangiitis, and lymphomatoid granulomatosis. In a 1985 Stanford University Arthritis Center Survey, members of the American Rheumatism Association ranked Fauci’s work on the treatment of polyarteritis nodosa and granulomatosis with polyangiitis as one of the most important advances in patient management in rheumatology over the previous 20 years.[17][18][19]
Fauci has contributed to the understanding of how HIV destroys the body’s defenses leading to the progression to AIDS. He has outlined the mechanisms of induction of HIV expression by endogenous cytokines.[19] Fauci has worked to develop strategies for the therapy and immune reconstitution of patients with the disease, as well as for a vaccine to prevent HIV infection. His current research is concentrated on identifying the nature of the immunopathogenic mechanisms of HIV infection and the scope of the body’s immune responses to HIV.
Fauci was one of the leading researchers during the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s.[20] In 1981, he heard of the virus, and he and his team of researchers began looking for a vaccine or treatment for this novel virus, though they would meet a number of obstacles.[21] In October 1988, protesters came to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci, who had become the institute’s director in 1984, bore the brunt of the anger from the LGBTQ community, who were largely ignored by the government.[1][22]”
I find it rather curious that the concerns in the Portland protests are about (heroic) protester injuries, and the concerns in DC are all of sudden (heroic) officer injuries.
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I suppose if the DC protesters were using commercial grade fireworks, heavy rocks, frozen water bottles, eye damaging lasers, tasers, paint bombs, setting fires to buildings, fired pellet guns, used sledgehammers, used slingshots, endless graffiti to public buildings, and looting local establishments then the media would give them a pass. The local DC district attorney would no doubt announce that he was dropping charges against anyone who wasn’t involved in a felony attack. There are clear differences here.
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All these people in both protests committing crimes should be arrested and thrown in jail where there crimes are severe enough. We definitely have a double standard in the media, but whether that remains to be a double standard in front of the law remains to be seen.
I guess ’eminence’ is at least partially measured by recognition by peers and associates.
Again from Wikipedia, a list of prizes, medals and awards for Anthony Fauci:
1979: Arthur S. Flemming Award[79]
1993: Honorary Doctor of Science, Bates College[80]
1995: Ernst Jung Prize (shared with Samuel A. Wells, Jr.)[81]
1995: Honorary Doctor of Science, Duke University[82]
1996: Honorary Doctor of Science, Colgate University[83]
1999: Honorary Doctor of Public Service Degree, Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania[84]
2002: Albany Medical Center Prize[85]
2003: American Academy of Achievement’s Golden Plate Award[86]
2005: National Medal of Science[87]
2005: American Association of Immunologists Lifetime Achievement Award[88]
2007: Mary Woodard Lasker Public Service Award[89]
2007: George M. Kober Medal, Association of American Physicians[6]
2008: Presidential Medal of Freedom[86]
2013: UCSF medal[90]
2013: Robert Koch Gold Medal[91]
2013: Prince Mahidol Award[92]
2015: Honorary Degree, Johns Hopkins University[93]
2016: John Dirks Canada Gairdner Global Health Award[94]
2018: Honorary Doctor of Science, commencement speaker, American University[95]
2018: Honorary Doctor of Science, Boston University[96]
2020: Federal Employee of the Year[97]
2020: Presidential Citation for Exemplary Leadership, National Academy of Medicine[98]
2020: Ripple of Hope Award from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights[99]
2020: TIME Magazine’s Guardian of the Year, along with the frontline health workers, Assa Traoré, Porche Bennett-Bey, and racial justice organizers.[100]
2020: Harris Dean’s Award[101]
2021: Public Welfare Medal of the National Academy of Sciences[102]
2021: Dan David Prize[103]
Tom, You seem unaware of a lot with regard to our Lord and Savior Dr. Fauci. He wasted millions of dollars on an AIDS vaccine program that completely failed. Overall the AIDS response was totally irrational with the elite approved message that “we are all equally at risk.” That was a big lie designed to get more money for what was always a disease of a small but vocal minority.
With regard to masks, the available science (admittedly not a well studied issue) shows that masks don’t make much difference in a community setting. Continuous use of an N95 mask among health care workers does reduce flu infections by as I recall 50% or so. Masks also help in a household setting. So the requirement to mask up in public is pseudo-science and virtue signaling.
I recently bought some N95 masks. I can tell they restrict air flow much more than surgical masks and they also fit more tightly and are pretty uncomfortable. My sister had to wear one for most of the pandemic as she is an opthamologist and she had constant problems with facial irritation and rashes. In the health care worker study I mentioned, compliance in the group that was told to wear the N95 mask all the time was only 67%. There is also some danger of hypoxia with these masks, which can be dangerous if you faint for example.
Regarding “messaging.” To me “messaging” is usually a form of deception and is not appropriate for public officials especially scientists. People should be given the information in all its usually messy forms including if the evidence is inconclusive and be allowed to make up their own minds. In an era of deep dishonesty and corruption of the media, the gullible can always find the elite “approved” messaging in some former newpaper or online.
Thomas Fuller,
“some of whom will be minus an eye or blessed with other permanent conditions.”
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Really? Document sources?
Hiya Tom
As a Portlandian (with my own personal chicken served to me weekly) I must confess that I did not see media coverage of ‘heroic protester injuries,’ in part because they were few and far between.
As I have mentioned on this blog, I think, there were two classes of protests in Portland–the almost completely non-violent Black Lives Matter marches (in which I participated and can testify to their non-violent nature), and the annual dick measuring parade between antifa and white supremacists, which for some reason got a bit more media attention. Usually the confrontation takes place in Watefront Park alongside the Willamette River. Last summer it spread downtown.
The Antifa idiots usually make the trip down from Seattle, joined by a handful of my fellow Portlanders. The white supremacists, for some reason, seem to hail in large part from Vancouver, Washington.
It is to be devoutly hoped for that next summer will be calmer. But if the last decade or so is any indication, the usual idiots will be back and worse than ever.
Thomas Fuller,
“I was under the impression from recent reporting that many of the rioters, aware of DCs strict gun laws, cached their weapons outside the city limits before proceeding to grab their less explosive weaponry.”
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What kind of insurrectionist cares about local gun regulations?
https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/08/thats-so-fauci-failing-up-while-botching-science-and-undermining-u-s-allies/
Well sourced article on the record of our Lord and Savior Dr. Fauci. He’s very good at public relations and self promotion and not so good at science. He also allows partisanship to enter his public pronouncements. Last year Cuomo was a “model governor.” Now Fauci speaking ex cathedra doesn’t want to comment.
Wikipaedia is a garbage source Tom. All sorts of activists can get appointed editors and use the platform for activist propaganda.
SteveF, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/us/politics/capitol-riot-police-officer-injuries.html
“The Capitol assault resulted in one of the worst days of injuries for law enforcement in the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. At least 138 officers — 73 from the Capitol Police and 65 from the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington — were injured, the departments have said. They ranged from bruises and lacerations to more serious damage such as concussions, rib fractures, burns and even a mild heart attack.
One Capitol Police officer, Brian D. Sicknick, was killed, and investigators are increasingly focused on whether chemical irritants were a factor in his death, according to a senior law enforcement official. The Capitol Police said in a statement that Officer Sicknick died from injuries sustained “while physically engaging with protesters.†Two officers involved in the response have died by suicide, the local police have said.”
I’m not commenting on Fauci here, I am commenting on the media’s selection bias and science marketing for basically endless mask wearing and their inability to question their own dogma. It’s the dumbing down of uncertainty in science and selective reductionism to adhere to their prior biases. Try getting a straight answer on when they think mask wearing should end.
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Example: Does science say people who are completely vaccinated be * required * to wear masks? Probably not, they are almost incapable of getting severe illness (proven) and unlikely to be large asymptomatic virus shedders (not proven but early evidence suggest so).
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Should they wear them anyway? Probably at least until vaccination rates are high and case counts are low. It’s too hard to separate out mask offenders where there are laws and this shouldn’t go on for more than another 6 months. This has nothing to do with the science of virus spread.
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The expert class has gotten into a very lazy habit of branding anything that has poor evidence of science backing but fits their ideological preferences as “Science” and doing it anyway with the same fervor as gravity makes a dropped ball go down.
Dave Young, I can’t help but chuckle when you criticize Wikipedia (not inaccurately, I must say) but cite the Federalist in your attack on Fauci.
Given what I’ve seen of your commenting here, I doubt if you would be impressed by what the Harvard School of Public Health writes (https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/voices/events/fauci/#:~:text=Fauci%20was%20the%20world's%2010th,from%20Cornell%20University%20Medical%20College) or his employer (https://www.niaid.nih.gov/about/anthony-s-fauci-md-bio), let alone the ‘Career Expert’ webside Zippia (https://www.zippia.com/advice/dr-anthony-fauci-resume-cv/).
I took a moment to read what The Federalist has written about him (https://thefederalist.com/?s=fauci). All they seem to be lacking is a stake and a match.
https://nypost.com/2020/08/04/federal-officers-in-portland-suffered-113-eye-injuries-from-lasers-dhs/
Minimizing the impact of the BLM summer of riots is a partisan narrative that is not supported by facts. The BLM riots were very destructive. I saw some figures that I don’t have at my fingertips, but I think the most costly since the 1960’s.
What is most troubling is that the response of local governments encouraged the violence and excused it. That happened in Seattle with deadly results (2 young people murdered) in the Chop zone. An excellent police chief was forced out for doing her job and a University of Washington professor of meteorology (Cliff Mass) had his public radio weather show cancelled and he was subjected to a UW “truth commission” for daring to publicize that downtown Seattle was a war zone.
Murders were up 30% in 2020 over 2019. The insane ideology of intersectionality has a lot of blood on its hands as do politicians who support or wink at this insane ideology.
Tom Scharf, yes, most members of the media exhibit bias. I would note that neither the media nor their bias is monolithic.
This has not changed over the past 150 years. It’s good to bring it to our attention, lest we think that either Wikipedia or The Federalist is written on stone tablets. But to imply that it is new or different is odd.
David Young, I can only repeat that I attended various BLM protests in Portland and that they were peaceful. I believe Cliff Maas has been in trouble in Seattle for more than two decades. I wish him well.
Fuller,
We have commented at length previously upthread on the media’s handling of Sicknick. NYT has recently “updated” their story:
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“UPDATE: New information has emerged regarding the death of the Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick that questions the initial cause of his death provided by officials close to the Capitol Police.”
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In summary, nobody now officially knows what happened, and it increasingly looks like he died of natural causes which may or may not be connected to the riot. The original fire extinguisher story now looks false.
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I will also highlight the NYT has conveniently forgot about the 5 police officers killed in Dallas during BLM protests, and so have you.
Tom, What you cited from Harvard has no detail I could find except a recitation of awards and honors. That seems to be the case with all praise of Fauci. At least the Federalist is well sourced and very detailed. Fauci has been a fount of contradictions and misleading “communication” regarding covid19.
You didn’t really respond on any of the details.
Tom, are you referring to the 2016 shootings in Dallas? I echo the president’s statement on them: “”I believe I speak for every single American when I say that we are horrified over these events and that we stand united with the people and the police department in Dallas,” Of course, that was Obama.
As for the killer, a veteran of the forever war in Afghanistan, “An investigation into his online activities uncovered his interest in black nationalist groups.[81] The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and news outlets reported that Johnson “liked” the Facebook pages of black nationalist organizations such as the New Black Panther Party (NBPP), Nation of Islam, and Black Riders Liberation Army, three groups which are listed by the SPLC as hate groups.[93]” (Again from Wikipedia, sorry David). He had been kicked out of the NBPP and was not in any way affiliated with Black Lives Matter.
David, have you ever heard of CNT? Your ability to overlook Dr. Fauci’s rather lengthy list of scientific credentials is… almost amazing for those who aren’t familiar with the syndrome.
Tom, it does seem clear that initial reporting on the death of Brian Sicknick was in error, as the NY Times clarified after their first story.
As none of us knows the truth about what happened as of yet, I’ll just quote Snopes:
“Sicknick’s brother, Ken Sicknick, told the non-profit news outlet ProPublica that Brian Sicknick’s family had been informed the officer had suffered a stroke resulting from a blood clot. (The term “stroke†means an event in which blood flow to the brain is interrupted, resulting in brain cell death.) Ken Sicknick also said his brother told him in a text message sent before he collapsed that he had been hit with bear spray wielded by rioters.
There isn’t enough information from official sources available at this time to state either way what the cause and manner of Sicknick’s death was, or what mechanisms contributed to it. We will update this story with further information when it becomes available.”
Being sprayed with a chemical irritant is not the same as being hit over the head repeatedly by a fire extinguisher. It can, however, contribute to a cardiovascular event.
I will also add on the mask issue, one of the reasons the original messaging was “masks aren’t useful” was because the same unidentified but never fallible experts worried that people would become complacent and think that masks are a prophylactic against the disease. They had studies to back that up then, people became less diligent in hand washing and other preventative measures such as social distancing.
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Then, after the reversal of messaging, they start acting like masks are a prophylactic against the disease and if only everyone would wear them covid would disappear, thus enforcing their original fear. Obviously some people said different things, but the mask shamers are convinced of their 100% efficacy.
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I’ve seen it in my own house. My wife told me she wasn’t worried about an eye appointment because she was going to wear her mask. These reduce risk, but aren’t protective in that way. Covid is currently like driving, defensive driving reduces your risk but you are still likely to get in an accident eventually.
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How many people wore masks and social distanced but still got covid? Isn’t it really strange that nobody has any information on this very basic and very informative data point? 1%, 10%, 40%?
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If masks are so useful and most people get covid from their own household, why aren’t we being told to wear masks at home?
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I’m not saying it’s a conspiracy, I’m saying the messaging here tells me the experts know much less than they pretend to, and they feel pressure to project certain knowledge by our society and their own insecurities.
Credentials are meaningless. Every CEO in the country accumulates many of these as does every famous politician. Even a poor scientist like Mike Mann has I’m sure pages full of them.
I’m surprised Thomas that you seem unfamiliar with the specifics of Fauci’s long track record of misinformation and contradictory messaging, not to mention partisan messaging. His AIDS vaccine failure is pretty spectacular when you realize how that money might have been better spent on helping those most at risk. His lionizing Cuomo now looks almost like aiding and abetting.
Tom, my memory of messaging during the initial phases of the Covid epidemic is not perfect. I do remember Fauci and others repeatedly hedging their recommendations as ‘based on what we know now’ and subject to revision.
My understanding of the mask ‘controversy’ is that Fauci and others warned against mask usage in the very early days as they wanted to conserve supplies for health care professionals on the front line. As soon as it became obvious that the Trump administration was incapable of supplying it, they pivoted to advocating widespread usage.
That may be an oversimplification and parts of it can be wrong. But that’s how I remember the narrative.
What I have learned over the last year is quite disheartening but I should have suspected it given the replication crisis. Epidemiology is really a primitive science based on mechanistic narratives that usually don’t have rigorous quantification. The mask thing is just the tip of the iceberg of incompetence and pseudo-science.
Thomas, You should read the article I posted above on the flu. I was a little surprised at how little “science” knows.
Let me translate what Thomas says. Fauci and others were not fully honest with the public about their recommendations on masks. That’s in my opinion a direliction of duty and a firable offense.
So David Young, correct me if I’m wrong but you seem to be shifting your rationalizations for condemning Dr. Fauci. You write above, “Well sourced article on the record of our Lord and Savior Dr. Fauci. He’s very good at public relations and self promotion and not so good at science. He also allows partisanship to enter his public pronouncements.” Now you say that his credentials are window dressing and should be discounted.
Is it possible that you settled on your opinion of Dr. Fauci and then began looking for reasons for it?
Actually David, Dr. Fauci said on national television that he wanted to save masks for front line healthcare workers. He was not dishonest. I did hear him say that.
It might have been lost in the shuffle as he was specifically referring to N95 masks. But he said it and I heard it.
Let’s please not legislate the mask messaging again
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/health/coronavirus-n95-face-masks.html
“Seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS!†the surgeon general, Jerome M. Adams, said in a tweet on Saturday morning. “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if health care providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!â€
“Both masks help prevent the spread of droplets from a person’s cough or sneeze, but medical specialists have said that for average members of the public, they are generally not effective.
A person is more likely to get infected by touching contaminated surfaces than from a droplet traveling through the air.
Air can also get in around the edges of the masks, particularly flat surgical masks.â€
““Not having a mask does not necessarily put you at any increased risk of contracting this disease,†Dr. Ryan said.â€
“But there is no evidence that face masks are effective in preventing healthy people from becoming ill, JAMA said.â€
“Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday … “There is no role for these masks in the community,†he said.â€
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Now we are confidently told to wear two masks, ha ha.
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We can all agree that messaging on masks has been a clusterf*** from the beginning and continues to be. What this really means is that the science isn’t settled, and wasn’t magically settled anytime in the last year. This original messaging was self contradicting in the very same sentence from the beginning.
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One could reasonably ask that after billions of dollars have been dumped into the CDC, NIH, and WHO why nobody understands it yet.
Thomas Fuller,
I didn’t think any police officers lost an eye or suffered other permanent injury. I note that the reports don’t offer any real counts of significant injuries…. oh say hospitalizations dues to serious injury. I doubt that will ever be provided. The officer who died almost certainly died from something unrelated to the riot. That no cause of death has ever been released is bizarre. My guess is none ever will be… too damaging to the “murderous insurrection” narrative when it turned out he died from a heart attack or drug OD.
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The riot was foolish and criminal, and I am all for prosecuting those who entered the Capitol. I was also for prosecuting all the rioters, looters, and arsonists last summer…. but, of course almost none were; those who rioted at the Capitol will not be treated so leniently. The use of the riot as an excuse to bludgeon people who had nothing to do with it just because they disagree with the Biden administration’s policies is nothing but dishonest politics.
Tom Scharf,
Thus the run on bleach. Unfortunately, that statement is the exact opposite of reality. Yet more evidence that our esteemed Surgeon General was an affirmative action appointee.
Surface transmission is quite low, unless you believe the Chinese that the virus was imported into China on frozen fish. The WHO appears to give that obviously bogus theory more credence than the logical inference that it might have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Considering that they still haven’t found any animals infected with an immediate precursor to SARS-CoV-2, the lab escape hypothesis is still best candidate.
The former administration, from the Surgeon General to the head of the CDC, struggled mightily to understand and communicate the essentials. I don’t think Dr. Fauci was the boogeyman here.
Steve F, https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/lfu9vt/fbi_most_wanted_insurgent_who_gouged_out_the_eye/
“At least 140 Capitol Police officers sustained injuries during the riot, according to a statement by Gus Papathanasiou, chairman of the USCP Labor Committee, the union representing Capitol Police officers.
https://www.npr.org/sections/insurrection-at-the-capitol
“I have officers who were not issued helmets prior to the attack who have sustained brain injuries. One officer has two cracked ribs and two smashed spinal discs. One officer is going to lose his eye, and another was stabbed with a metal fence stake,” he said.”
No Thomas I knew Fauci was a second class scientist when he “guessed” that the IFR for Covid19 was 1%-2%. Much better scientists had more accurate estimates. John Ioannidis analyzed the Diamond Princess data and came up with a mid range estimate of 0.3% which looks like it will turn out to be amazingly accurate.
Since you haven’t responded to any specifics I raised, can I infer that you are easily impressed by “credentials” and by agreement with your political identifications but are unable to judge “experts” based on the science? You see how easy it is to descend to your mind reading gutter?
I think Tom’s point is that public health officials (most of whom are long time bureauocrats) are not very good at communicating the science perhaps because they are not very familiar with it. Fauci just in the last week said we won’t be able to take the masks off until Christmas. That’s fantasy. Once someone gets vaccinated, the mask is coming off unless that person is as disconnected from reality as Fauci.
I get (and don’t care about) the Fauci argument. What’s the other thing Fuller is trolling us about? Sure, some police were injured in the DC riot. So what?
Dave
Key epidemiological parameters such as the Infection-Fatality-Rate (IFR) give us a clue to fill the gap between confirmed and actual infections, under the assumption that the number of undocumented deaths is negligible (Fig 1). The IFR of COVID-19 has been a focus of intensive research, yet studies from different locations and times have not reached a consensus estimate [9]. A recent large seroprevalence study in 133 cities of Brazil presented an IFR estimate of 1.0% [10]. In a different approach, a study analyzed early pandemic data in China combined with the prevalence obtained by PCR-testing of the entire international resident population repatriated from China. The authors’ estimate of the IFR was 0.66% with a wide band of uncertainty (0.39%–1.33%, 95%-confidence interval) [11]. The same study also reported the mean duration from onset of symptoms to death or recovery (17.8 and 24.7 days, respectively) based on individual-level data.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0246772
So what? Mark, that doesn’t sound like you at all.
Let me rephrase Thomas. Some police were injured, yes. We can all agree about that. What if any point are you trying to make?
I was responding to people such as SteveF, who wrote, “I didn’t think any police officers lost an eye or suffered other permanent injury. I note that the reports don’t offer any real counts of significant injuries…. oh say hospitalizations dues to serious injury.”
An IFR of 0.3% and 511,008 deaths implies 170,336,000 infections. With 28,757,006 confirmed cases, the confirmed to total multiplier is equal to 5.9. 170,336,000 infections is 51% of the population of the USA. Is it any wonder that new cases/day are dropping? If we take January 11, 2021, the peak rate for the trailing seven day moving average, there were 23,169,203 confirmed cases on that date. Multiplying by 5.9 gives 136,698,298 total cases, or 41.1% of the population. Using the SEIU equation for HIT, 1-1/Ro, gives an Ro of 1.7, which should be in the ballpark, given masking and social distancing.
Speaking of infections, how did the idea that vaccination is more effective in producing immunity than actually having the disease and recovering get started? That also means that people who have had the disease still need to be vaccinated, but probably only need one shot. AFAIK, the reinfection rate for people that have recovered from the disease is still less than 1%. That’s 99+% effective in the real world. No vaccine is that effective.
Thomas,
Thanks. So you’re just refuting a claim and aren’t trying to make some larger point.
OK.
Thomas Fuller,
Seroprevalence is known to underestimate total infections, which means it overestimates IFR.
https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3364
The majority of infections are mild. Maybe that’s why people think that naturally acquired immunity is weaker than vaccination. Show me the reinfections if that’s actually the case. Not only that, but cases would likely still be rising.
DeWitt
The paper I linked to earlier (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0246772) explores those issues in detail.
Thomas Fuller,
I think the head of the police union may not be the most reliable source of information about injuries suffered by his members. What that fellow says is not anything like an official accounting of injuries, and is not anything like credible. Sounds to me mostly like he is setting up to ask for huge payouts to his members.
SteveF, would you prefer hearing it from the Chief of the Capitol Police?
https://dcist.com/story/21/02/06/capitol-police-chief-insurrection-one-month/
“According to Pittman, 125 Capitol Police officers were assaulted on Jan. 6, and 70 sustained injuries.”
Or do you trust The Hill? https://thehill.com/homenews/house/533186-1-capitol-police-officer-in-critical-condition-up-to-60-injured
“One Capitol Police officer is in critical condition and 15 were hospitalized after up to 60 officers were injured after a violent pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on Wednesday.”
There is no IFR for covid-19. There are many different IFR’s depending mostly on the age and health condition of the people who catch covid-19. For people under 40 without other serious health conditions, the IFR is very close to zero. For 85 year olds, it may be well over 10%. There are very different average IFR values for different countries with different demographics, and for different states within the USA… even different places within a state. Places like the Dakotas (relatively sparse population, relatively fewer people over 65, very few imposed restrictions) will likely have a different apparent IFR than Pennsylvania (higher population density, older population, lots of imposed restrictions).
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Talking about “‘the IFR” for the illness is just about meaningless.
Tell David Young. He brought it up and quoted a percentage.
Thomas,
“One Capitol Police officer is in critical condition and 15 were hospitalized after up to 60 officers were injured after a violent pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on Wednesday.”
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That is far more credible. 15 sustaining injuries leading to hospitalization is a credible number.
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Of course, the Capitol riot injured relatively few police officers compared to riots between May 26 and June 7, 2020
https://nypost.com/2020/06/08/more-than-700-officers-injured-in-george-floyd-protests-across-us/
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Of course, there were plenty of other police injuries following that story on June 8, including police officers shot and killed during the mostly peaceful riots.
Thomas Fuller,
No, it doesn’t, or at least that’s not how I read it. It uses estimates of IFR to calculate total cases. IMO, those estimates are too high because in the end they are based on seroprevalence of probably the wrong type of antibodies with the detection limit set too high. What’s needed is a test for T-cell response as well as antibodies and, AFAIK, we don’t have one that can be used on a large scale.
SteveF, If you weight the age categories you can get an approximate IFR. That’s what people tend to use. But I agree it’s a simplification that can be misleading.
Thomas, You cite a couple of cherry picked papers. Seroprevalence studies will undercount infections perhaps by a lot. All long term immunity is T cell immunity as antibodies fade often quickly. That’s particularly true with studies done later in the epidemic. Thus I conclude that the early seroprevalence studies are the most accurate. Santa Clara, Los Angeles, and Miami Dade are 3 such studies.
You may have missed it but there has been extensive discussion above on the idea that the US is approaching herd immunity. That’s the only way to explain the strong tailing off of cases in North Dakota for example.
I’m not sure your paper explores the issue of seroprevalence studies missing infections at all. I couldn’t find it on a quick perusal. It’s mostly about their model of reported cases and estimated infections. I’m assuming they used seroprevalence studies as the “truth” to tune the model. If so, that’s not accurate.
DeWitt,
“AFAIK, we don’t have one that can be used on a large scale.”
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Yes, but after the pandemic is over, I am sure there will be studies on T-cell mediated resistance and the prevalence of that resistance.
We just are not going to get a clear picture any time soon…. and the divisive politics doesn’t make rapid publication of that kind of study more likely.
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David Young,
“If you weight the age categories you can get an approximate IFR”
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If so, then that approximate IFR only applies to that specific population living under the conditions that population lives under. You just can’t meaningfully characterize the risk of fatality for the illness with a single number.
Texas power issue caused by refusal of DOE to allow generators to run at capacity unless customers charged a minimum of $1500/MW
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Should be short hearings on why Texas consumer electric prices spiked.
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https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2021/02/f82/DOE%20202%28c%29%20Emergency%20Order%20-%20ERCOT%2002.14.2021.pdf
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I agree SteveF, Individual risks vary very widely and a single number doesn’t capture that.
The other scandal that has been completely disappeared by the media and Pelosi is why Capitol police were so unprepared for the incursion. That’s in stark contrast to the White House defense during the summer siege where Secret Service did a good job. Actually the White House siege was much longer and more dangerous. If they had broken through, who knows what the damage would have been.
Thomas Fuller,
“This has not changed over the past 150 years.”
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Well, I have been a voter for 50 years, and I have observed that the MSM has become much more biased, and much less honest, over the past 25 years. YMMV.
EdForbes,
$1.50 per KWH ~12 times the normal cost in Texas, but only about 3 times the normal price of electricity in Germany…. Count on the Biden administration do do everything it can to drive up all energy costs everywhere.
David Young,
But that assumes you know the IFR for each age group. The same problem with estimating total cases and thus the IFR applies to within age groups as well as overall.
DeWitt, Thanks for the reference on T cell vs. antibody responses. If that preliminary study is accurate, seroprevalence will underestimate infections by perhaps a factor of 2 and IFR’s so estimated will need to be divided by a factor of 2. This makes Fuller’s paper’s best estimate come in at 0.33% quite consistent with Ioannidis’ body of work on the subject.
SteveF, could you point me to some stories supporting what you write, “Of course, there were plenty of other police injuries following that story on June 8, including police officers shot and killed during the mostly peaceful riots?”
I am only aware of one police officer killed during the BLM protests, David Underwood. Who was killed by a white supremacist who hoped to lay the blame at the feet of the BLM protesters.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/10/03/i-dont-like-this-i-am-not-cool-with-this-defense-releases-new-details-in-boogaloo-linked-killing-of-federal-officer-in-oakland/
The reason Thomas that you may be unaware of police casualities in the BLM riots is that the media actively pushed the narrative that the “protests” were “mostly peaceful” and tried to downplay casualties.
Thomas,
Riots are generally lawless. Some lead to police shootings.
Here are three police shootings:
https://heavy.com/news/2020/05/patrick-underwood-oakland-cop-police-killed/
(Another officer standing next to Underwood was shot but survived.)
https://nypost.com/2020/06/15/las-vegas-officer-shot-at-protest-paralyzed-from-neck-down-family/
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/03/us/david-dorn-st-louis-police-shot-trnd/index.html
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Then there are the many officers (and also private citizens) injured during the riots. In Washington DC, for example:
“During violent protests in Washington, DC, another 60 Secret Service agents and 40 US Park Police were also injured — 22 of those officers hospitalized with serious injuries, Attorney General William Barr told reporters last week.”
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Lots of others injured in other places, of course.
So the only death you link to is the one I linked to above. The cop who was shot by a white supremacist.
The officer shot in Vegas was actually paralyzed by a man shooting at the protesters.
And in the sad case of retired policeman David Dorn in St. Louis, the man arrested and charged was apparently a looter not affiliated with BLM. He was previously convicted for felony robbery in 2014
With respect Thomas, what you are doing here is pure narrative and bias. This was easy to find.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/police-officers-killed-surge-28-year-point-civil/story?id=71773405
It outlines a large increase in killings of officers in the first half of 2020 and points to the obvious point that periods of civil unrest seem to always cause this. Generally mass lawlessness results in well a sharp decline in respect for police, particularly if they are being persecuted by the elected officials they serve such as in Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis.
Hi David
With equal respect I’ll note that none of them were killed by BLM protesters. And I see no evidence for ‘mass lawlessness.’ Some types of crime are up–including homicides in urban areas. But mass lawlessness? Ain’t happening.
As for the body count, I show white supremacists one, BLM zero.
Murder is up 30% in 2020 over 2019. That is the result of the BLM protests directly or indirectly. In places like Minneapolis and Seattle police have been reduced and many police officers have quit resulting in a climate of fear and a dramatic increase in crime. This is a direct result of left wing “Progressives” who hate the police so much they are willing to cause the loss of a lot of innocent lives.
Well, hey, David. I have an idea. If you want all us Progressives to quit creating a climate of fear and a dramatic increase in crime, why don’t you tell the cops to quit killing black people?
Some problems are just so easy to solve.
David Young (Comment #199001)
February 21st, 2021 at 10:43 pm
Murder is up 30% in 2020 over 2019. That is the result of the BLM protests directly or indirectly.
______
I doubt much of the increase in murders is a result of BLM protests.
I would look for reasons related to the pandemic, such as the sharp
rise in unemployment.
Thomas Fuller,
I find the distinction you keep drawing between BLM and rioters/looters/arsonists silly. What enabled all that violence, theft, and damage were the “mostly peaceful” BLM protesters. Yes, yes, I know, the BLM protesters were actually all angels. Funny how so many BLM protests coincided with concurrent looting, arson, and assault.
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WRT police killing black people: Nearly all police killings (whether the victim is white or black, and whether the police officer was white or black) happen when someone threatens the police officer with potentially lethal force, most often with a gun, sometimes another weapon, sometimes grabbing for the officer’s pistol. There are very few cases where the victim was not threatening the officer with lethal force, and like the George Floyd case, those are all terrible. It is equally terrible when police use excessive force with whites, Hispanics, or anyone else. As I have said more than once on this blog, I think there should be more careful screening of applicants to be police officers, and better means to remove officers who display the kind of aggressive, sociopathic behavior that leads to the use of excessive force. But I ask you for some perspective: consider how many black Americans are murdered by other black Americans…. it is thousands per year versus a handful of cases were police used excessive force, usually while making an arrest. All lives matter, even black lives taken by other black people. When organizations like BLM focus on the bigger problems that lead to all those deaths, they will gain my vocal support. Focusing on negative life outcomes, and rare cases of bad policing, rather than the underlying causes for negative life outcomes, is never going to make much difference, but has the potential to do great harm.
SteveF
I agree with you.
Thanks so much Thomas. I always find it preferable for people to come out in the open with their beliefs and methods.
And, yeah: No. The terrorist philosophical argument isn’t persuasive.
I find the accounting argument over who’s extremists did more damage to be rather unenlightening, they should all be punished for their crimes where applicable. We have punishment for murder on the books and a system to deal with it. The numbers are rather low in the grand scheme.
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Additionally Fuller’s argument of certain criminal elements not being part of BLM is a distraction as they have no official membership roles just like Antifa so it’s pointless. One could easily argue they are sympathizers of the movement by participating in and around the protests. One could also argue that the self elected leaders of BLM don’t want criminal elements and would throw them off their roles if they could do so. These protests are full of people with mixed motivations. The capital riots had many true believers who thought the election was being stolen.
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“If you want all us Progressives to quit creating a climate of fear and a dramatic increase in crime, why don’t you tell the cops to quit killing black people?”
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This comment is uncalled for, and is rather shameful, it implies people here desire such outcomes. Anyway, here you go: Hey cops, stop killing people without justification. I sincerely hope this solves the problem.
Thomas Fuller,
If you really want cops to stop killing people, Black or otherwise, then you should demand that cops not be allowed to carry guns at all or only under special circumstances. Of course the consequence of this would likely be mass resignations and a crime spree, so it might be counterproductive. [/sarc]
Since the era of Charlemagne
Report 3+ days after 2nd vaccination (Moderna):
Side effects within the first 36 hours — fatigue, chills, headache, slight fever. After that, nothing. Well, a little soreness at the injection site. Appetite for brains remains unchanged so far.
Tom Scharf
I’m sure it had many people who thought the only thing they were going to do is stand around, shout slogans and carry banners.
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You see on video some who ended up trespassing had no intention of doing much of anything. They walked past cops who seemed to be doing nothing to stop anyone– it’s plausible they thought permission had been granted.
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If they had reason to know in advance that there were others using them, they share responsibility with the others. If not… not so much.
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The problem for “peaceful” BLM supporters is that they continued to organize events knowing full well that the “others” were arriving, infiltrating and starting riots which included huge amounts of property destruction, fighting, looting and setting buildings ablaze. I know by the time we had a riot in Naperville (which was fairly early) none of the mayhem was a surprise.
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Some local peaceful protestors cancelled planned peaceful events. Hinsdale kids did. Others continued to plan “peaceful” events which tended to result in at least some mayhem.
Ya know, it never ceases to floor me how some progressives take zero responsibility for society. Here’s Fuller essentially saying ‘if you want us progressives to behave like civilized human beings, why don’t you go fix these problems.’
Makes me chuckle though. It’s as if somewhere deep down progressives know they’re a bunch of children who don’t actually know how to accomplish much of anything themselves. It’s a tacit admission that civilization isn’t theirs to begin with.
HaroldW,
I’m disappointed that we aren’t seeing at least some cases of people becoming brain-eating Zombies!
Tom Scharf (Comment #199015): “I find the accounting argument over who’s extremists did more damage to be rather unenlightening, they should all be punished for their crimes where applicable.”
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I agree completely.
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What I find annoying is that the BLM/Antifa associated “peaceful” rioters and looters were not punished. In many cases, it seems they did not even get a slap on the wrist. Contrast that with the heavy handed way the state in coming down on the Jan. 6 rioters.
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I am not complaining about the latter, I am complaining about the former and the unequal treatment. I would much prefer equally harsh treatment to equally lenient treatment.
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Fuller seems perfectly happy with disproportionate treatment based on political affiliation.
Mike M,
“Fuller seems perfectly happy with disproportionate treatment based on political affiliation.”
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The problem is there appear to be many, many millions in the States who share that view. It is destructive and counterproductive…. not to mention unfair. Rioting, looting, arson and assault seems OK for some (nearly all charges dropped in the end), but the full force of law is brought to bear on people guilty of lesser crimes, if they hold “the wrong” political views.
It remains to be seen whether the DC rioters are treated differently than the other protesters in sentencing. There is little doubt that this argument will be made that their particular crimes should be sentenced equivalently with others who committed similar property crimes. The legal system we have has guardrails to prevent politically biased outcomes, it’s not that easy to overcome.
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The popularly accepted argument in the MSM that this is way different because this was a serious attempt to overthrow our government isn’t likely to impress judges is my guess.
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Ironically all the sentencing reforms over the past few decades (which I support) to prevent racially biased sentencing outcomes will now not work to the progressive’s desired outcome. What can make a difference is over charging people (insurrection!) and refusing to plea bargain. Since the environment is rather hostile it makes sense to delay proceedings as long as possible and go to a jury trial.
lucia: “I’m disappointed that we aren’t seeing at least some cases of people becoming brain-eating Zombies!”
I think in FL we’re over 2 million seniors vaccinated. So start looking for headlines like “Florida man eats brains for breakfast every day”
Laugh out loud. Sometimes partisan hypocrisy is so blatant my eyes roll so far back that they almost detach.
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The NYT’s literally fired their opinion editor after he “allowed” Senator Tom Cotton’s opinion piece “Send In The Troops” arguing for the national guard to be used to help stop the ongoing looting and riots last summer.
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The NYT’s today:
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“The Lost Hours: How Confusion and Inaction at the Capitol Delayed a Troop Deployment
As violence grew out of control on Jan. 6, the head of the Capitol Police made an urgent request for the National Guard. It took nearly two hours to be approved.”
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Two hours! I hope their newsroom didn’t feel physically endangered again that somebody wanted to call in the troops. No word yet, but it doesn’t look like it. The NYT’s is still in the “flood the zone” coverage for the Capital riots. It’s gotten rather tedious and boring, but at least it’s funny sometimes.
Fuller’s intrusion here is instructive in how the narrative is driven by the media among “Progressives.” You will note that he didn’t respond to the substance of the crime wave we have experienced beginning with the George Floyd protests. But the narrative in this matter is insane.
1. Murder rates in the Black community are perhaps 5 times what they are among whites. Virtually all of the murders are also Black. There is an underlying violence problem in many Black communities.
2. Most Blacks actually want more police presence and not less. The victims of the crimes of all these “saints” who died while in contact with the police are forgotten or lied about.
3. Since Blacks commit perhaps half the felony crime in the US they are vastly more likely to encounter police doing their job. Once they contact police they are actually a little bit less likely to die than other contacts.
4. George Floyd was not a saint and had a record of abusing women. He was very high on fentenol at the time he was detained and his symptoms were entirely consistent with an overdose (inability to breath). There was no trauma to his neck or windpipe upon autopsy.
His deification is bizarre and insane.
5.
5.
Sorry, hit the wrong key.
5. Crime was at historic lows in 2016 following 30 years of improved enforcement led by people like Rudy Gulliani. In 2020 it surged 20% due to the riots and their aftermath.
6. There are a lot of fatalities of this wave and it is entirely due to the narrative of BLM and the insane actions of local juristictions.
7. People who say they support BLM like Fuller are hypocrites. Their policy “solutions” have resulted in massive death and injury in the Black community.
8. As Lucia points out it is also hypocritical to say you support BLM and that all those who show up to the protests that are violent are not “BLM” or Antifa members. The reality is that there are always fellow travelers who take advantage of the moment to steal stuff and kill people who interfere. Causing a mass “protest” is guaranteed to cause a higher level of lawlessness and violence.
All this is actively covered up by the media, the Woke left and their useful idiots. The ascendancy of this evil ideology (it is racist) is a huge problem. Ordinary people are afraid to speak up and push back because the mob has created a climate of fear. This is actually much worse than the Red scare in the 1950’s. Then there were a lot of real Communists in government and society. “White supremecists” are a really small group and the idea that we have to purge our military and police of anyone to the right of Stokely Carmichael is insane and dangerous.
So the peaceful people at the Capitol should get a pass even though many were violent insurrectionists, but the peaceful BLM protestors are fully responsible for the looters that showed up.
Got it.
Thomas,
Nobody here thinks the Capitol rioters should get a pass.
When BLM spokespersons explicitly condone the looting, yeah, BLM becomes complicit.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/dahleen-glanton/ct-looting-black-lives-matter-reparataions-20200817-xdxu4ipu5rhqzkbdl4fpslsnha-story.html
And I don’t think the looters that showed up at (but mostly long after) BLM protests should get a pass. Nor do BLM members.
Apologies Thomas, I wasn’t finished editing my comment when you replied.
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When BLM spokespersons explicitly condone the looting, yeah, BLM becomes complicit.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/dahleen-glanton/ct-looting-black-lives-matter-reparataions-20200817-xdxu4ipu5rhqzkbdl4fpslsnha-story.html
Nor was this a misstatement that was retracted, or anything of the sort:
https://nypost.com/2020/08/13/blm-organizer-who-called-looting-reparations-doubles-down/
This is BLM Chicago talking.
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/diversity-delusion?msclkid=0a37588886e61b7fa78b38bb7eb7c636&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=MI_Books&utm_term=heather%20mcdonald%20diversity%20delusion&utm_content=Books_HMD_Diversity%20Delusion%20(Exact)
As always McDonald is correct and amasses a lot of evidence. Thomas if you are really interested in getting outside the media narrative, it would be useful.
Thomas, Cuomo’s demise seems imminent, after our Lord and Savior Dr. Fauci calling him a model governor and the media just lying for a year about his performance.
https://theweek.com/articles/966553/resign-andrew-cuomo
David Young,
I think Cuomo will ultimately skate (and stay in office) no matter how egregious and harmful his nursing home decision was. I think his star has been badly tarnished though, and he is unlikely to run for president in 2024…. or ever. Good thing, he is remarkably dumb.
Thomas Fuller,
“So the peaceful people at the Capitol should get a pass even though many were violent insurrectionists, but the peaceful BLM protestors are fully responsible for the looters that showed up.
Got it.”
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Wow, it’s like you can’t read. Nobody is saying the people who assaulted police officers and entered the Capitol unlawfully should not be prosecuted. What they are saying is that all those who were involved in looting, arson, and assaults on police officers in many US cities in 2020 should ALSO have been prosecuted. Very few were; most had minimum bail set and then had charges dropped before prosecution. Our current vice president actively worked to raise money so those who were arrested could be bailed out.
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I am not seeing much leniency for those arrested for the Capitol riot, and most will be prosecuted to the maximum extent of the law. I can see that the vaunted “liberal” sense of justice and fairness is at best situational…… and doesn’t ever apply when offenders happen to disagree with them politically.
David Young,
From your link:
Practically Trumpian??? He’s practically Trump on steroids because he appears to be far more corrupt. He’s at least as much a narcissist and a bully as Trump, but up until the current scandal, he was praised for it. The media have been lying about him for far more than a year.
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/whistleblower-at-smith-college-resigns
And the show trials and purges continue.
I’m now impressed by substack. They have attracted quite a few of the refugees from various media purges including Weiss, Taibbi, and Greenwald.
Yes DeWitt, I posted it because it shows Cuomo is being thrown under the bus by those who previously worshiped him. You are right that there is little evidence I’ve seen that Trump or his family were corrupt as in profiting off their government positions.
SteveF,
You’re just picking up on that? No, he can’t. In this thread, he insisted that a paper on calculating IFR he linked dealt with the problem of highly variable seroprevalence of antibodies for SARS-CoV-2 in detail. It didn’t. There was one reference to a paper about using a more accurate antibody test. The link to it didn’t work. That’s it. He sees, for the most part, only what he wants to see.
Thomas
No one said that.
SteveF (Comment #199042): “Thomas Fuller,
Wow, it’s like you can’t read.”
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Nonsense. He can read perfectly well. It is just that, like most leftists, he can not process that which conflicts with his world view. So he translates such things into something that he finds understandable.
Thomas
No one thinks looter should get a pass. But you are trying to explain why the BLM protests who gave looters cover should not be criticized. (I’m going to avoid the “get a pass” language because it’s not clear what it means. People don’t go to jail unless the violated a a law and “giving cover” isn’t actually illegal. Plus, it has plausible deniability.)
The looters didn’t show up after the BLM protestors had left. The show up while BLM is still there. Or at least, they show up while people who say they are BLM are still there. Given the structure of the organization, if you say you are BLM and are at a BLM protest, you are BLM.
Geez. And I don’t even like Cuomo.
1. Looters at BLM protests (or after) should go to jail.
2. Insurrectionists at the Capitol should go to jail.
3. That idiot from BLM who defended looting should have her head examined.
4. BLM protesters were 99% peaceful. (I am not 100% sure about the percentage.)
When SteveF writes, “Nobody is saying the people who assaulted police officers and entered the Capitol unlawfully should not be prosecuted. What they are saying is that all those who were involved in looting, arson, and assaults on police officers in many US cities in 2020 should ALSO have been prosecuted” I agree.
He notes that many who violated the law at BLM protests were not prosecuted. It was more than the 400 or so out of the 25,000 at the Capitol protests who have been arrested so far.
Between May 30 and June 2 2020, the height of the racial justice protests, 427 “unrest-related” arrests were made in D.C., including 24 juveniles, the police department says.
That’s DC alone.
Thomas,
I’m not interested in joining you in a game of motte and bailey today. Instead, let me suggest that that idiot need not have her head examined, but rather that you should reconsider your support for organizations that condone rioting.
That idiot’s position is far from an aberration. Here is what proports to be a list of 31 times the media has justified or explained away rioting or looting. This suggests that it is not the idiot in question who is out of touch with the movement so much as it is you who are out of touch with the movement.
If BLM came out loudly and overwhelmingly to disavow the words of that idiot, I’d be somewhat more willing to listen to a dismissal of said idiot as a crazy person. It didn’t happen.
Don’t kid yourself, or at least don’t kid me.
Thomas Fuller,
“It was more than the 400 or so out of the 25,000 at the Capitol protests who have been arrested so far.”
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Lemme see. Are you suggesting that all 25,000 who were there should be prosecuted? Or are you suggesting that a tiny fraction of those at the Capitol were involved in assaulting police and entering the Capitol unlawfully? I really don’t understand what you are suggesting. Of course, people who willfully assaulted police and entered the Capitol ought to be prosecuted. People outside…. not so much.
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I keep wondering: Is there some common ground between the left and right in the USA? I am not encouraged by the exchanges I have seen (here and elsewhere). I think the left excuses absolutely inexcusable criminal behavior, and it seems you think the right does the same WRT the capitol rioters. But you are mistaken: the right agrees the Capitol rioters should be prosecuted (and I am sure the will be). Seems to me the left does not at all agree that the looters/arsonists/etc. from the past summer should have been prosecuted (see the “needs her head examined” quote from the Chicago BLM leader above).
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If you are comfortable supporting BLM with crazies from BLM suggesting looting is perfectly OK, then you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
SteveF, actually, no I don’t think there’s much common ground between left and right in this country. I find this thread extremely typical of the conversations I have had with members of the right. I find most of you deliberately obtuse and convinced that the left needs to make concessions to your demands.
Since the ascendancy of Trumpism to the forefront of the Republican party, his flavor of rightism has lost the House, the Senate and the Presidency. And you think we should bow to this twisted view of reality. This view of the world is not only infantile and wrong–it has been rejected in repeated elections. Trump boasts of having received 74 million votes (he actually exaggerates and says 75). Biden beat him by 7 million votes. And yet we progressive liberals are supposed to be the ones to reach out. Yeah, just like the right did when Trump squeaked into office having lost by 3 million votes.
Your last sentence is emblematic of your inability to listen. I have repeatedly written in this thread that I don’t support looting and do not countenance those who advocate it. Scroll up before you launch your attacks.
WSJ Editorial Board blames wind turbines for Texas power outages
“Mr. Abbott blamed his state’s extensive power outages on generators freezing early Monday morning, noting “this includes the natural gas & coal generators.†But frigid temperatures and icy conditions have descended on most of the country. Why couldn’t Texas handle them while other states did?
The problem is Texas’s overreliance on wind power that has left the grid more vulnerable to bad weather. Half of wind turbines froze last week, causing wind’s share of electricity to plunge to 8% from 42%”
Source: WSJ Editorial Board, Feb.16, 2021
__________
I don’t know why the WSJ blames frozen wind turbines for the Texas power outage when most other sources say the outage resulted from
a freakishly low temperatures that affected all means of electric power. The wind turbines in Texas, like the States other sources of power (natural gas, coal, and nuclear), were not equipped to handle the plunge in temperature, but could be equipped to do so.
BTW, the WSJ says before the freeze wind power accounted for 42% of the electricity generated in Texas. That seems too high to me. Does anyone here know what that 42% means?
Max, if I had to hazard a guess, I’d guess the 42% is a typo; somebody transposed digits. The actual number I find is 24%.
FWIW I agree with you; AFAICT blaming wind power is a gross oversimplification of the problem Texas had.
Thomas,
I don’t even know where to begin. What demands? Is there anyplace in this thread where we demand anything? (real question; I’m not wasting my time searching)
Thomas, we are hearing what you are saying and it is pretty superficial slogans. If you want to have a discussion you need specifics of what you are proposing. Intersectionality is evil and needs to be resisted. BLM is part of that ideological left. Do you know the first thing about it? You actually have not responded to my main point about the dramatic increase in murder and violence since the George Floyd riots. That means top me you know I’m right but can’t acknowledge it.
Thomas
I haven’t made any demands of the left or you. I certainly haven’t suggested the your or the left need to make concession to my demands.
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I don’t even know what this claim is supposed to mean. Yes: after winning once, Trump now lost. The GOP didn’t previously hold the house, but gained seats. The GOP did lose a few seats in the Senate. Control is constantly oscillating and has during my whole lifetime.
But what you don’t see is that you appear to state you don’t support looting nor coutenance those who advocate it, but support “BLM”. The problem with supporting “BLM” is it’s both merely a phrase– which is fine as it goes and an organization. As an organization it is dominated by people who clearly do advocate looting and violence. We know they do because they say so.
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You want to have some sort of division in your mind between the “true” BLM, the “not BLM”. In your mind, you consider the first to merely become collection of people who would like police to get better training so that there is less killing of blacks during law enforcement and the second to be some sort of interlopers who somehow mysteriously appear “after” your “true” BLM has some sort of event.
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The problem is that the group you consider “not BLM” dominates the organization that self named itself. It’s a nice name. But that doesn’t mean the organization is not violent.
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It’s all well and good to tell people to “scroll up”. But you can say you don’t condone violence until you are blue in the face, if you keep insisting that somehow violence was incidental to BLM marches or BLM was not violent, and then supporting whatever that was, then you are condoning violence by redefining it.
No David, I do not believe you are correct about, I guess, all of the things you have asserted in this thread–and others where I have seen your comments.
I am not proposing anything. I am saying as clearly as I can that I support BLM and like the overwhelming majority of those who also support it, I reject the party crashers and looters that have managed to sully its name to those insanely focused on the sins of the left but refuse to acknowledge the far worse sins of the right.
Remember David, there was one cop killed during the BLM protests. He was killed by a white supremacist. There was one cop paralyzed during the BLM protests. He was shot by a man who was aiming at the protesters.
BLM didn’t plot to kidnap and kill the governor of Michigan.
BLM didn’t put up a noose and search for Mike Pence.
To repeat, I do not think you are correct about anything you have written on this thread.
No, Lucia, one idiot supported looting, not BLM.
Because idiots plotted to kidnap the governor of Michigan, does that mean you’re a kidnapper?
Okay Thomas. Here’s another BLM idiot, name of Hawk Newsome.
https://nypost.com/2020/08/19/blm-leader-hawk-newsome-defends-looters-compares-america-to-terrorists/
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Now I give you that Newsome isn’t quite as dumb as Atkins, in that he refuses to explicitly verbalize what he is obviously trying to imply.
What I don’t understand is why you feel like you’re better qualified to tell us what BLM is all about than those who actually lead it. I don’t think you make any sort of persuasive case that you are better qualified.
Shrug.
Mark, he not only doesn’t verbalize it, he doesn’t hint at it, doesn’t suggest it, doesn’t imply it. So obviously he thinks looting is okay.
So Thomas, if you don’t support looting, arson and the rest, what exactly is it you want? Honest question. Is it that you want to eliminate the (possibly) 10 or 15 deaths per year due to excessive police force? Or is it much more than that? I suppose that you imagine ‘systemic racism’ is what holds back African Americans, and demand that systemic racism be eliminated. But here is the problem: immigrants from Africa and immigrants of African descent from other countries (Bahamas, etc) do far better in life outcomes than native born African Americans. Do you really think all the systemic racism only applies to people born in the States? Real question.
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WRT “I find most of you deliberately obtuse and convinced that the left needs to make concessions to your demands.”
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I can’t begin to tell you how disconnected from reality I find that comment. Not to mention pretentious and insulting. I make no demands on the left beyond consistent application of the law. Anything more is your fevered imagination running wild.
OK_Max (Comment #199055): “I don’t know why the WSJ blames frozen wind turbines for the Texas power outage when most other sources say the outage resulted from
a freakishly low temperatures that affected all means of electric power. The wind turbines in Texas, like the States other sources of power (natural gas, coal, and nuclear), were not equipped to handle the plunge in temperature, but could be equipped to do so.”
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I think that is correct. People on the right also sometimes see things through an ideological filter.
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OK_Max: “BTW, the WSJ says before the freeze wind power accounted for 42% of the electricity generated in Texas. That seems too high to me. Does anyone here know what that 42% means?”
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It might be 42% just before the turbines started to freeze. The front coming through would have produced a lot of wind, and a time of day (I think) when demand was low.
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A bunch of generators suddenly going off line can destabilize the grid and force other generators off line. But I have not seen any evidence that happened in Texas.
Thomas
You are incorrect.
Well… that’s rhetorical. And as usually, a dodge.
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If the self-proclaimed members and heads of group “XYZ” plotted to kidnap the governor I don’t claim that “XYZ” are not kidnappers. And if I did claim to be part of group “XYZ” myself and then went around saying things “Like “XYZ” are not kidnappers! The ones who did the kidnapping are just aberrations! I’m not in favor of kidnapping.” I would expect people to think I supported kidnappers even if I simultaneously wrote other things like “I’m don’t support kidnappers! Scroll up! I keep saying I don’t support kidnappers!”
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And yes, I might point out that I would not become a kidnapper because someone in XYZ kidnapped someone.
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But sheesh… I sure as heck would be supporting kidnappers if I joined their group and went around denying that somehow that group, in fact, welcomed kidnappers into their fold and even had them at the top of their loosely connected “organization”.
Thomas
Come on. While looting is going on in the name of the organization he refuses to condemn looting
“MacCallum then asked Newsome for his response to a clip of Ariel Atkins, a BLM activist in Chicago, who said looting was a form of reparations.
He pivoted the conversation to white supremacy.”
And this pivoting doesn’t happen just once. It continues. This is supporting looting.
SteveF, the police kill far too many people–I think about a thousand a year, although I’m not sure of the number.
Some–perhaps most–of those killings have nothing to do with race, more to do with the militarization of the police and the emphasis in training on ‘going home at the end of the shift’ which somehow has morphed into looser guidelines on the use of force.
But some of it is white cops killing black people because they are black (simplification–obviously some of it is some police have different expectations for black behavior when confronted, etc., etc.)
I advocate measures to reduce all police killings. But I definitely want to start by stopping police killing unarmed black people. There is no excuse for what happened to George Floyd. And it is sadly not just George Floyd. Police kill black people who are running away from them. Why?
Oh. So the Trumpian New York Post analyzes a Fox News Interview and parses that as a ‘pivot.’ So the fearsomely named Hawk is obviously supporting looting. Because reasons!
Except he didn’t say or hint at anything like that.
“MacCallum then asked Newsome for his response to a clip of Ariel Atkins, a BLM activist in Chicago, who said looting was a form of reparations.
He pivoted the conversation to white supremacy.
“Let’s be very careful, Martha,†he said. “The problem with oppression and white supremacy is, white supremacy will have you criticizing the oppressed and worshiping the oppressors.”
I do not see anyone supporting or legitimizing looting. What I see is someone trying to avoid the ‘pivot’ by his interviewers away from the very real white supremacy to the (equally real) looting.
Whites lynch black people–oh, not so much anymore. Now they just shoot them or kneel on their necks and blame fentanyl for the tragic outcome.
Black people break storefront windows and grab stuff.
Hoo-yah.
Thomas Fuller,
We are making progress I think. Yes, police do in fact kill about 1,000 people per year, and that number has been reasonably steady for quite a long time. But who are the people getting killed by police? About 25-30% are black; the remainder white, Hispanic, or native American. The fatality rate appears closely related to the rate of serious crime among identifiable groups. Almost no Asians are killed by police.
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Under what circumstances are these people killed? Almost always because they draw a gun on police officers, or pose some other obvious lethal threat (running toward the cop with a large knife, attempt to run over, etc). The number of instances where an unarmed non-threatening suspect is shot is miniscule. Yes, there are a few crazy cops who have killed when that was not needed, and they should be removed (or never let on the force in the first place). But virtually all police killings are associated with arrests of people with an outstanding warrant…. independent of their race.
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I remind you again: about 10,000 black Americans are murdered each year by other black Americans. The social/cultural problems which lead to those 10,000 deaths per year are a far larger problem than the handful of deaths due to excessive use of force by police. The murder of black Americans by other black Ameticans is 50 times more important than police killings of unarmed black Americans… if you care about needless deaths. Yet BLM says not a word about the culture of violence which leads to those deaths. It is not a credible organization.
Thomas Fuller,
If you believe the people here are “white oppressors”, then please be very clear about that. I want to not waste any more of your time or mine if you actually believe that.
No, Steve, I don’t think the people here are ‘white oppressors.’ The truth is I think you are afraid to admit the prevalence of racism or the extent to which it has penetrated organizations in this country. As I hate to admit it myself, I understand this fear.
I think this leads some of you to put forward increasingly bizarre contortions, such as saying that George Floyd was killed by something–anything–other than a cop kneeling on his neck for 8 and a half minutes.
Or that BLM protests were anything other than largely peaceful (93% of protests being completely peaceful with no need for any police activity, according to one report), etc., etc.
It is because I love my country that I want her to be just.
Well Thomas, you say you disagree with my 9 points but offer nothing specific. I can’t take that seriously. The facts about felony crime come directly out of the FBI uniform crime report.
Do you support insectional race theory otherwise known as woke ideology? If you don’t know what it is, you have no business supporting BLM since that’s their motivating ideology. I’ve posted some links earlier.
I guess I don’t know what you hope to gain here if you are not willing to learn from what others know.
Without specifics, I don’t think anyone will take what you have said seriously. Learning requires informed dialogue. You fail the test if you can’t do a minimal amount of due diligence.
Why would Steve (or anyone here) be afraid of admitting that, if any of us thought it to be true?
I don’t know, Mark. It’s just that the alternative explanations seem worse to me.
Thomas, With regard to George Floyd, I quoted the medical examiner and the autopsy. If you haven’t looked into it, saying that “I think this leads some of you to put forward increasingly bizarre contortions, such as saying that George Floyd was killed by something–anything–other than a cop kneeling on his neck for 8 and a half minutes” is ill-informed and shows you have drunk the kool aid. Not a good or persuasive look.
What is your source on George Floyd? If it’s BLM propaganda, you have a problem admitting the truth. Accusing others with essentially reality denial is hypocritical as you engage in it yourself.
Incidentally Thomas, your argument about Newsome is lacking. Given the opportunity to unequivocally state that Atkins should have her head examined and that BLM does not support looting, he refused to do so. I can see that you’ve got your head crammed too far up your rectum to see this, but to everybody else that refusal has plain implications. At minimum, the implication is – BLM [officially] refuses to condemn looting.
Such as?
Thomas, I’m only a software engineer, which means I’m hardly any sort of engineer at all, but even so. There’s no point in sticking my head in the sand, far as I can tell. If a thing is so, it’s so, and I’d like to know about it. I suspect everybody here has a similar attitude.
Thomas,
“The truth is I think you are afraid to admit the prevalence of racism or the extent to which it has penetrated organizations in this country.”
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There is very little I fear, and certainly not that. I think you are delusional about rampant racism. There is a tiny minority who are in fact racists, but the key word is tiny. What I see, and have seen from my late teens, is exactly the opposite of what you claim is pervasive: organizations, companies, universities, etc bending over backwards to give explicit advantage to black Americans, usually at the expense of others. It is very clear that whatever reality you see with regard to racism, it is not the one one I have experienced. As I have said many times before: I wouldn’t care the slightest if someone were green.
Gee, Mark, why would you engage with someone who you believe to have their head shoved up their rectum?
Certainly I have no wish to engage with someone who thinks of me that way.
Thomas Fuller,
I’m old enough to have lived through the civil rights movement. It is ludicrous to state that racism is the same or worse than it was then. Vast progress has been made.
That being said, the woke movement is in the process of restoring racism, not reducing it. They are apparently reading 1984 as a how-to manual. Oh, and the Federal minimum wage and Davis-Bacon for that matter, true Jim Crow relics, were introduced specifically to disadvantage blacks in the labor market, much like the white only labor unions in South Africa started apartheid. Raising the minimum wage will drastically affect the employment opportunities for black teenagers. We do need small businesses that can’t afford to pay their employees $15/hour.
Of course if inflation kicks in, the purchasing power of $15 may end up being less than $7.25 in fairly short order.
Yes, I’m curious what the alternative explanations Mr. Fuller is referring to here. Please enlighten me.
Well, I guess it’s a bummer that you’ve decided to come troll us here then. I wouldn’t respect your pronouns if you had any and see no reason to respect your wish not to engage. Ignore me if you like, if you can. I will certainly continue to rebut your nonesense as I see fit.
DeWitt,
I strongly agree.
Tom Scharf,
“Yes, I’m curious what the alternative explanations Mr. Fuller is referring to here.”
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Very good question. No answer on offer so far. He should correct me if I am mistaken, but I think he means anyone who doesn’t “admit the prevalence of racism or the extent to which it has penetrated organizations in this country” is automatically a racist. If that is true, and I truly hope it is not, then Thomas Fuller is not worth conversing with any further.
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Saying “you are a racist” to people who clearly are not is the ultimate in destructive interaction, and I for one will then suggest to Lucia that Fuller be blocked from future comments.
The problem with the BLM organization is there is no hierarchical structure and no leadership authority to either confirm or deny their positions. As far as I know I could start my own local branch and proclaim all kinds of silly stuff. This is both a feature and a bug. The bug part is definitely some half crazy people self electing and saying full on crazy stuff. Because the peer organizations are quite into loyalty and solidarity they are unlikely to denounce other peer originations as a matter of course. This social behavior is seen everywhere and is unsurprising.
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The other bug part is that the organization can be easily tarred and feathered by their own extremists, and this has already happened. BLM is constantly on the defensive for the violence, looting, and fires. This is THE REASON why almost all successful organizations have official leadership, policy positions, and spokespeople. BLM can still choose to do this, but have so far not done so to their own detriment.
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Fuller is full on with his no true Scotsman defense of BLM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
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Obviously anyone on the right can do the same with the Capital rioters. They aren’t conservatives or Republicans because by definition we don’t support those things, case closed. Easy as pie.
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It’s rather tedious. Are these organizations doing “enough” to rid themselves of their detrimental tribe members? Does BLM really support looting? How do I know? Who do I ask? I don’t know. I’m sure we can find some interviews where some members say they don’t. Mixed messages combined with the solidarity confounder just creates messaging chaos. It’s a problem for BLM and it’s their burden to fix. They have not done so.
The US in not racist at least the vast majority of its people are not racist. We’ve elected a black President, the Republican party has black Senators and Representatives who play very prominent roles in the party. Anyone who is connected to reality must acknowledge that while racism is always present, the US in 2008 was the least race conscious nation since ancient Rome. That’s not a comforting comparison as Rome was a slavery soaked brutal tyrrany, but we are not there yet even though the woke could take us there.
We can look at Newsom’s other statements to try to get some idea where he stands:
https://www.newsweek.com/blm-leader-well-burn-system-down-if-us-wont-give-us-what-we-want-1513422
Somebody ought to brief the guy on the concept of the tu quoque.
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Needless to say, I don’t support this. Not clear to me [if] Thomas knows this and agrees, or doesn’t know this and denies that BLM is at best an organization that refuses to condemn rioting, and more realistically an organization that views rioting as a political tool.
Another alarming confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill today. Russian collusion was a 3 year hoax and involved the deep state, the media, and the Democratic party. It was an attempt to nullify the 2016 election by forcing Trump out of office by any means except open insurrection. The BLM riots actually came pretty close to a political insurrection. Now we are faced with an imminent witch hunt to track down domestic terrorists which is always left undefined.
https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/21/questions-the-gop-should-ask-merrick-garland/
The current increase in urban violence may be from multiple causes. The Ferguson effect (protests, police pullback), covid lockdowns, economic stress, etc. People barely understand why violent crime declined after the 1990’s and still argue over it. It’s quite likely to have several different major causes but that doesn’t stop people from confidently asserting it is one or the other.
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I don’t recall exactly but I think the increase in violence predates the covid lockdowns in many places. What we should hopefully see is this summer the covid crisis being contained and an economic recovery in the service sector. What will happen to the violence uptick? We shall see, but everyone should be prepared to alter their pet theories.
Tom, While BLM has no official position on rioting, they do have radical positions on things like the family. We do know that Democrat leaders do support it. Pelosi and her famous “maybe we need more insurrection” is blatant. Harris also said that it wouldn’t stop until the election and it wouldn’t stop. I could go on with Schumer.
Tom, There could indeed be multiple causes for the crime wave. It is true that the normalization of political violence goes back quite far. It ramped up in 2016 and then in 2020.
However, it’s hard to argue that downsizing police departments and attacks on the police by their own leaders lead to a reluctance to be proactive in preventing crime. DeBlasio’s anti-cop policies and statements clearly do have an effect. You see New York police won’t even defend themselves from assault in some cases, much less ordinary citizens.
I thought there was a concensus in law enforcement circles that the broken windows policies did work. But I haven’t looked into it in detail.
Thomas
(a) Hawk didn’t answer the question asked.
(b) He changed subject to something else.
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That’s a “pivot”. It’s not just “parsing” it as a pivot. It is a pivot.
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Hawk is named Hawk. It never occurred to me that calling him Hawk suggested he was “fearsome”. The Post can’t very well call him something else like Canary.
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Yes: Changing the topic when asked whether you criticize someone’s call to mayhem or violence is accepting violence. This is especially true after mayhem has erupted.
Thomas
His interviewers are doing the interviewing. They asked about looting. Pivoting aways from that is legitimizing the looting. You can love “what aboutism” all you want. But he’s using “whataboutisms” to specifically deflect discussions of looting to avoid having to condemn it. The actual effect is to legitimize the violence which just occurred as somehow ok.
I should add that part of doing “enough” to rid yourself of detrimental tribe members is at a minimum having to answer questions about whether you support certain behaviors. Nancy Pelosi should answer whether she supports looting and protester violence and so should Mitch McConnell. You can receive official answers in this manner. The RNC, the DNC, etc. They should also be given an opportunity to correct any misstatements or clear up incorrect interpretations in the media. Gotcha questions are not very enlightening.
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Their answers are for the most part uncontroversial, albeit partisans always try to do secret mind reading exercises on how they really didn’t mean what their plain words said. I have little patience for this.
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Nancy Pelosi probably shouldn’t attend any events with Hawk Newsome, and McConnell shouldn’t go to Proud Boys events. I don’t expect people to throw their own extremist tribe members under the bus, but I do expect them to get out of the way so others can.
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There are a huge number of city, state, and national politicians that have real power in society and so far the revolutionary arms of these crazy organizations have approx. 0% representation. Near Zero. The bruhaha is mostly for entertainment only. The natural path for revolutionary groups that actually obtain power is they are domesticated on their way to power and become just another bureaucratic organization.
Thomas
You started with “people around here” and then switch to “you”.
Perhaps your memory is poor. I’ve certainly never said Floyd was killed by anything other than the cop kneeling on his neck. Many here have not. Like me, many around here said the cop killed Floyd.
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This was quite easy to find: Basically bias in police use of deadly force is inconsistent with the data.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myth-of-systemic-police-racism-11591119883
Lucia,
LOL. Tweetie the BLM [co-]founder.
I agree with you. Saying ‘we don’t condemn rioting or looting’ allows BLM to shelter rioters and looters under their umbrella without having to take responsibility for it. Effectively it legitimizes rioting and looting; when you neither condone nor condemn something in such a context as one of the leaders of a movement I think you’re implicitly saying it’s an acceptable choice.
mark bofil
Particularly when (a) you are specifically asked your view on the violence and (b) the violence is happening all across the country. Thomas can say most protesters were peaceful all he wants. But windows were broken, stuff was stolen, buildings were burning. Sites like Kenosha look like they were firebombed. It looked like the aftermath of wars.
Exactly.
4K video of the Mars landing from the multiple onboard cameras.
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Awesome.
https://youtu.be/4czjS9h4Fpg
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Today’s gator sighting on the golf course, about 9 feet.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/xMXGNPR8WgwY2Vbs9
Tom Scharf,
I have never seen a gator like that on a golf course.
mark bofill,
“…BLM is at best an organization that refuses to condemn rioting, and more realistically an organization that views rioting as a political tool.”
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The reason they view violence as a political tool is because they reject the legitimacy of the government of the USA, so will accept most any means to get rid of (or at the very least fundamentally change) that government…. if not peacefully, then violently.
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Re-scanning the above comments by Thomas Fuller and others, I am forced to conclude that the real disagreement has nothing to do with BLM, the rioting that happened last summer, or even the riot at the Capitol in January. The real disagreement is whether or not the USA is a fundamentally racist country.
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The key quote is: “The truth is I think you are afraid to admit the prevalence of racism or the extent to which it has penetrated organizations in this country.”
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So for Thomas, the ‘truth’ is racism is prevalent, and that is not subject to debate. It is only my ‘fear’ which keeps me from accepting that ‘truth’. I have hear similar arguments before…. but most often from a bible-thumping preacher.
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There seems to me no rational or factual analysis that will ever change the minds of those who believe the large differences in life outcomes between identifiable racial and ethnic groups is due to anything other than systemic racism. It strikes me as a pseudo-religious belief, so offering factual analysis, counter examples, and reasoned explanations that do not involve racism are never really heard, much less actually rationally considered…. any more than rational analysis would be by a bible thumping preacher. At bottom, I think it is a waste of time to try to engage those who are convinced racism is prevalent, when it is actually rare.
I agree with just about everything you said there Steve, with the exception of it being a waste of time to engage people who are convinced racism is prevalent. Certainly, I don’t expect to persuade those people who are already quasi-religious believers. But I think there is value in standing up and saying ‘No, we aren’t a fundamentally / systemically racist nation’, if for no other reason than that failing to do so cedes the issue and allows critical race theory assumptions to become dominant unchallenged and by default. I suspect that this is largely why CRT has become so dominant; too few people stood up and called it nonsense before it metastasized.
In other words, it’s worth arguing because of the spectators who might be persuaded, and the possibility of giving hope and courage to those spectators.
mark bofill,
CRT is intellectual garbage, but has become a guiding principle for many colleges and universities. Yes, CRT should be directly described as the garbage that it is, because it is a destructive influence which does enormous social harm. But convincing Thomas and his ilk they are mistaken is an impossibility. The most important form of resistance against CRT takes place in the voting booth.
Agreed.
I’m trying to convince people reading the conversation I’m having with Thomas who haven’t been born again Woke yet.
I agree with this too. The fewer born again Woke there are to vote the better the chances of successfully resisting neoracism via the voting booth.
I don’t believe I owe Thomas an apology for using the expression ‘head up his rectum’, but perhaps doing so was a discourtesy to those here. If anyone thinks so, let me know and I will endeavor to moderate my idiom more rigorously in the future.
I agree with what SteveF wrote (Comment #199119) with one exception. Although racism was in decline in America and had become rare (at least compared to what used to be), it is now on the rise. Racism is being actively promoted by the Democrat Party, its propaganda arm (the corporate media), and its militant wing (BLM and Antifa). As anti-white racism increases, it is only natural that pro-white racism will increase in response. If this continues, it will not end well.
The reason intersectionality can gain power is fear. People are afraid they will be punished for speaking up. The main reason to speak up is to help other people do so. If enough people push back it gets impossible to punish them all.
Here is the most convincing story ever for the government to heavily regulate the power markets, good job idiots:
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WSJ:
“Wholesale power prices on Texas’ main power grid hit the ceiling price of $9,000 per megawatt hour for parts of five straight days. That was exponentially higher than the average price, which was $21.18 per megawatt hour in 2020, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or Ercot, the nonprofit that controls the grid.
Now power retailers and municipal utilities are trying to figure out how to pass on the billions of dollars in costs to customers, some of whom face bills in the thousands of dollars that may need to be stretched out over time.”
“While market watchers estimate that most Texas ratepayers have fixed-rate plans, some consumers with variable-rate contracts are more exposed to last week’s electricity spikes—some much more so.
Adrian Soto, a 40-year-old restaurant server who lives in a 700-square-foot apartment south of Houston, signed up for Griddy Energy LLC, which gives customers access to wholesale power prices in exchange for a flat monthly charge.
Usually, this means low bills. But last week, he was strapped on to the bucking bronco of the state’s power market. He lost power for two and a half days during the deep freeze. Having it on for the remainder was enough to push his monthly charges above $1,100.”
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Who’s in charge down there, Enron? So customers get an unreliable grid, and when it goes down they have to pay 400x higher prices. I don’t think the incentives are properly set here. If it’s going to be unregulated, then you need to punish poor performance, not reward it. I don’t know all the details here, but this is ridiculous.
Environmentalism became a victim of their own success. They did fix a lot of real problems but now have a lot energetic activists with almost no convincing enemy to focus on, so they came up with the quasi-spiritual climate change dogma which is heavily religious in nature.
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The same thing has happened to race activists, overt racism has all but disappeared so now what are the legions of activists to do? No overt racism now means hidden racism everywhere, which is apparently much worse. The belief in this dogma is now also religious in nature. Literally taking a knee, groups chanting verses, heretics, excommunication, shibboleths, and so on.
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One of the key characteristics of these types of dogma is the activists outright refusal to debate or engage in dialog. They are preaching known Truth to the ignorant rubes who’s job is not to make up their own minds but to shut up and listen to scripture.
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The voting booth is where this is getting settled. Corrupt unions hate secret ballot elections. Why? Obviously they want to publicly coerce / shame people with pressure campaigns.
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I have no idea why people fold to Twitter shame campaigns so quickly. Twitter’s attention span is about 20 seconds so all a company needs to do is announce a 30 day investigation and let Twitter go find something else to obsess over.
WP: “Drug companies told lawmakers Tuesday that they project a major increase in vaccine deliveries that will result in 140 million more doses over the next five weeks, saying they have solved manufacturing challenges and are in a position to overcome scarcity that has hampered the nation’s fight against the coronavirus.â€
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/02/23/vaccine-distribution-pfizer-moderna/
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My wife got her second Pfizer shot today. No zombification as of now.
Tom Scharf,
I played golf today with three men from the Northeast: one from New Jersey and two from Rode Island; all three in Florida for just 10 weeks.
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Two of the three had covid-19 in December and January (when they were in the north). These were all men over 65, and the two who had covid described it as “very bad”…. they were not hospitalized, but close. I am really happy I got a dose of vaccine 13 days ago.
Pfizer has cut their manufacturing cycle from 120 to 60 days, effectively doubling their production capacity. And it can be stored in conventional freezers, so distribution is less of a problem.
The elephant in the room for those who claim systemic racism is to blame for, well, pretty much everything bad is Asians. Some (many?) of the woke want to get around this by declaring that Asians aren’t really people of color, but white-adjacent. Ludicrous.
Mike M,
” As anti-white racism increases, it is only natural that pro-white racism will increase in response. If this continues, it will not end well.”
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I agree. The institutional, permanent racism that “progressives” now demand is socially destructive and hurts everyone… including those it purports to help. The fundamental social and cultural problems that lead to far too many poor life outcomes for black Americans remain completely unaddressed, while non-black Americans (not just white) will become ever more frustrated and angry, because they face obvious discrimination for no reason but the color of their skin.
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The whole idea of permanent, institutionalized, and legally sanctioned racism, which is exactly what is being demanded, is so crazy that it beggars belief. The best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
DeWitt,
“Asians aren’t really people of color, but white-adjacent. Ludicrous.”
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Beyond ludicrous. Italians, Irish, Asians, and others have faced HORRIBLE discrimination, yet have all overcome that discrimination.
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It always comes back to the same issue: the demand for equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. I find that demand morally repugnant, and horribly destructive.
Let’s see now. The obvious implications of the statements of some of the Biden administration appointments are that we need to throw out the First Amendment and replace it with a Ministry of Truth because otherwise the deplorables in flyover territory might be exposed to opinions other than the holy writ of Critical Race Theory, among other things.
Among those other things appears to be the presumption of innocence. After all, only deplorables might think that Chauvin deserves a fair trial because he’s so obviously guilty. So now we’re also throwing out the Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments as well as Coffin v. United States (1895), or at least the parts we don’t agree with. “Sentence first; verdict afterwards.”
And we also have Judge Roy Bean: “Hang ’em first, try ’em later.”
There are now reports that vaccine production will increase to the point that all Americans will have an opportunity to receive a covid 19 vaccine by May of this year. I am skeptical, but hope that is true. The pandemic craziness needs to stop, for both social and economic reasons, and only broad vaccination of the populace will allow that.
Yes, well it depends on who is being tried for who gets rights or not depending on the messenger. I actually do have faith we have a decent system of justice, which is not to say perfect by any means. The justice system saw through the mob during the Michael Brown fiasco, and just cut loose all the cops in Rochester which was yet another mob justice initiative. It does help to have money (see O.J.).
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Chauvin’s trial begins in two weeks and I imagine the fentanyl will play a major role in the defense. It will be interesting to see if the media gives that information a fair hearing or not. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them suppress this info from the public, but maybe not.
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Many businesses in Milwaukee have stayed boarded up intentionally until this trial is over so they don’t have to rebuild twice. It won’t go over well if Chauvin walks. The fentanyl could put some doubt in some juror’s heads, but I think the video is going to erase those doubts. If you are going to kneel on someone for 8 minutes you better hope they don’t die of something else coincidently.
Tom
Well… yeah.
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We’ll see if he gets off. But video is powerful. I doubt OJ’s lawyer’s could have gotten him off if there’d been ring-video showing there.
https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Report-CUPES-007.pdf
It’s shocking how uninformed Americans are about policing and race. Thomas may be at the top of the heap. Not surprising given our corrupt media.
Tom Scharf,
Are you sure Chauvin’s trial is going to start in two weeks? The last I read, the prosecution had asked for another 3 month delay, and the defense said they would not object to that delay… so sone time in June. Better weather for riots as well.
Back surgery is bad for a golf career, but a compound leg fracture, along with multiple other leg and foot injuries, ends it. Fare well Tiger in your retirement. Treat your girlfriend well.
Chauvin trial is scheduled for March 8th, I would try to delay it if I was Chauvin but it seems to be on schedule.
https://www.fox9.com/news/derek-chauvin-trial-mayor-frey-minneapolis-leaders-to-provide-update-on-security-plans
My wife definitely having a reaction to second Pfizer shot. Chills, fatigue, body aches 24 hours later.
I was a bit concerned Tiger Woods might die in that wreck after little information was available for many hours, they weren’t saying “not life threatening” until like 6 hours later. Looks like a catastrophic leg injury, after a previous 5 back surgeries.
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Golf may look tame to many, but the velocity with which professionals must hit the ball to be competitive has now reached destructive levels to the body. Just like any sport, there is a wasteland of promising people who were taken out by injuries before their prime, especially the back. Any of us golfing oldsters know that back injuries and pain are by far the leading problem in staying in the game among our peers.
Tom Scharf,
The appeals court case hearing on the third degree murder charge may cause a delay in the trial. The trial judge struck the 3rd degree charge because under Minnesota law, third degree murder can only be charged against someone who acts recklessly and endangers the general public, not a reckless act targeted against a single victim. The trial judge referenced multiple cases where the Minnesota SC ruled exactly as the trial judge did. The appeals court may well re-instate the 3rd degree charge, but if they do, then there will be an immediate appeal to the Minnesota SC, likely delaying the trial. I read the Minnesota statute when Chauvin was charged with 3rd degree murder, and I concluded (just as the judge) that the law as written does not allow a third degree murder charge against Chauvin.
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Ominous for Chauvin are the potential Federal civil rights charges… which could add a decade or more to this prison time. Both state and Federal prosecutors are doing everything they can to make sure the guy never leaves prison…. except in a pine box.
Tom
The fact that Golf is physical (as opposed to mental) and it’s competitive, means it requires some conditioning and physical attributes. Serious body injuries are going to be a problem for Tiger.
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Too bad. On the other hand, this was a one vehicle accident. I’m suspecting we’ll hear more and he might have other behavior problems that would also have affected his game.
Of all places, deep blue Connecticut announces they are going to age only vaccine eligibility:
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CONNECTICUT — Gov. Ned Lamont made a surprise announcement Monday about the state moving to an age-based system for coronavirus vaccinations.
Teachers, child care workers and many other in-person school staff are also qualified to get the vaccine through special clinics.
Here are some answers to questions about the recent announcement.
What are the age brackets?
March 1: Expands to the age group 55 to 64
March 22: Expands to age group 45 to 54
April 12: Expands to age group 35 to 44
May 3: Expands to age group 16 to 34″
“”KISS, keep it simple stupid,” Lamont said, referring to the longtime business motto. “A lot of complications are the result from states that tried to finely slice the salami, and it got very complicated to administer.”
Some questions with no easy answers included: Do office employees at grocery stores qualify as front-line workers? What about liquor store employees? Does the agricultural sector include landscapers and arborists? Why isn’t my serious health condition like type 1 diabetes included on the list of qualifying conditions to receive the vaccine? What if I don’t have a doctor to certify I have a pre-existing condition?
“In our own experience we found the close correlation between age and risk, age and comorbidities, and age and fatalities,” Lamont said.
Around 96 percent of all coronavirus fatalities in Connecticut are people over the age of 55.”
Tom Scharf,
“Around 96 percent of all coronavirus fatalities in Connecticut are people over the age of 55.”
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A truly shocking observation by the governor. Who would ever have noticed that? OK, in a deep blue state who would have noticed?
Under Title 18, U.S.C., Section 242 – Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law, Cauvin faces essentially unlimited possible sentences, ranging from many years to life in prison. To kill, or attempt to kill, “under color of law” (that is, acting in an official capacity) has an explicitly stated penalty up to death.
SteveF,
I realize that the SC has ruled recently (7-2, Ginsburg and Gorsuch in dissent) that the dual sovereignty exception to the double jeopardy rule still applies, but IMO, that makes as much sense as the extreme broadening of the application of the interstate commerce clause. Chauvin would still be in jeopardy of life or limb twice if he is tried by both state and federal courts. There are not, by any analysis I consider rational, two separate crimes.
DeWitt,
I completely agree that it smacks of double jeopardy, but as you note, the SC has affirmed the “different governments -different laws” standard multiple times, whether we agree with it or not. Same with the bizarre expansion of the commerce clause to include federal jurisdiction over anything one might imagine, including growing wheat in your back yard for your own consumption, or buying health insurance.
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In the past the Federal civil rights prosecutions have mostly been used as a backup to punish offenders when the local jury lets them walk or get away with only a wrist slap. In this case, I expect the DOJ (under Garland) will do their best to make sure Chauvin never gets out of prison… and I would not wager that he ever does.
More “non-existent “ voter fraud
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“Steven Crowder explained tonight that he’s been blocked by Twitter for revealing fake voter addresses that were really just empty lots and other non-residential areas.
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Here’s the video that got him blocked by the fascist Twitter leftists:â€
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https://therightscoop.com/steven-crowder-blocked-on-twitter-for-revealing-fake-voting-addresses/.
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Showing a number of voter address at parking lots, bridge underpasses, and other non-existent voter residence locations.
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Though I do understand that requiring ID to vote is considered to be racist. How could it not be.
Is a private tutor a K-12 education worker?
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I’ve turned down jobs with high school students because I’m not vaccinated. It’s not a big hardship, but if it were, I’d be pretty motivated to want to insist i am a k-12 education worker.
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My dance teacher said maybe I would qualify. I told him that Walgreens is asking for a work id. I’d have to fake one. I have no idea if it’s illegal but even if it’s not, I don’t want to be highlighted in the newspapers as someone who faked an id to jump to the front of the line. 🙂
The shaming campaign for line jumpers is ongoing
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/24/970176532/high-end-medical-provider-let-ineligible-people-skip-covid-19-vaccine-line
I read Illinois statute and I think it’s illegal to make a fake work id. My plot of tricking Walgreens is foiled.
https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/fulltext.asp?DocName=001503350K14B
later
It continues elaborating more specific situations with escalating penalty. But this would seem to cover it.
If I want to jump the line I’ll clearly need to get the grocery store to hire me, get the vaccine and then quit immediately. That way my ID will be real.
Having said that, it appears the requirements to create a private school in illinois is “zip”.
https://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/non-public-education/regulation-map/illinois.html
So perhaps I can create “Lucia’s School of Physics”. Then enroll 1 k-12 student. Then I can make myself an employee id of the school.
Lucia,
Just form “LL Education Counselors” as a legal entity and print up your own ID…. nothing false at all. I don’t know how many hoops that involves in Illinois, but sole proprietorships are usually very simple.
Lucia,
cross posted
That’s actually sort of interesting Lucia. Does the meaning of ‘fake’ or ‘legitimate’ derive from (1) whether or not you are who the ID says you are, or (2) from the legitimacy of the issuing institution?
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I’d imagine you are already automatically the sole proprietor ‘Lucia Lilgegren’ by default. Who is to say you couldn’t issue yourself a work ID as the sole proprietor of your .. proprietorship?
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[Edit: Darn, Steve beat me to it! Cross-posted..]
Lucia,
cross posted
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“appears the requirements to create a private school in illinois is “zip—
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Requirements are set normally set up to make life easy for the wealth and difficult for everyone else. Rich people would be inconvenienced if their access to private schools was restricted by regulations.
This claims they’ll form one for me for $42 with a huge savings over the normal process. (How the get around state fees, I have no idea.)
https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/start-your-llc-in-illinois
An LLC huh. Seems like extra armor, unless you speculate that you might be sued for using this ID.
In today’s crazy world that might conceivably be a concern.
Oh… it’s $42 a month.
Here you go Lucia,
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/how-establish-sole-proprietorship-illinois.html
It goes on to say that you don’t need the EIN if you are the only employee, and you don’t need to file an assumed business name if your sole proprietorship is using your own personal name.
mark
Clearly if my motivation is to be able to make a non-fraudulent business ID to get a vaccine, I need to create an assumed business name that is called something like “Lucia’s High School”.
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It looks like I could do it. If the reason for doing it was to get a vaccine, it would be a little pricey. But if it looked like I wouldn’t get vaccine for a year, maybe it would be worth it. I could make Jim and employee too. Perhaps, I could hire a number of other staff.
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Would this be jumping in line? Absolutely. Am I going to do it? Nope.
Fair enough. 🙂
Actually, I still don’t think it’d be fraudulent. It might not be accepted, but I don’t think that makes it fraudulent. Are you technically an education worker? It seems to me that that’s the only sticky question to be sure of. You are Lucia Lilgegren, so the ID part isn’t fraudulent (you are who the ID would say you are). You’re a self employed sole proprietor, so the legitimate employer ID part isn’t fraudulent (you’re not pretending to work someplace you don’t / presenting a forged ID).
But whether or not anybody would accept it, yeah. I agree with you there that I think people might balk at it. Essentially you’re asking them to take your word for it and I think they’d likely realize that.
mark,
I’m either paid by clients or as a private contractor. I don’t have “an employee ID”. So I’m not entirely sure if I can assign myself an “employee ID” for my business.
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Whatever I presented, I would definitely be asking Wallgreens to accept that it proved I was a k-12 educator. The published guidelines at the Illinois Covid page don’t have any more detailed definition of k-12 educator. So, honestly, I have no idea if the “rules” consider me one or not.
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I do know I am not exposed as a result of my employment. But that’s because I refuse to meet students in person. I also know that many k-12 teacher are also not in contact with students because school is online.
I see. I personally think you ought to be able to, but. What the heck do I know about it. Nothing in truth.
Yeah, that’d be a problem. I sure wouldn’t risk it.
Thanks Lucia.
mark,
I’m not by the way howling at the injustice of it all. I think this is just one of the many examples of why complicated methods to deliver the the most “in need” are even more complicated than it looks at first glance.
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As far as justice goes: I’m clearly not in as great a need as the local grocery store teller, or my friend who works at the Barnes and Nobels. Both deal with customers daily, so many more people than I do. But I also know that some k-12 teachers also aren’t in great need. Some are online and campaigning to stay that way until kids are vaccinated. Well, if they are waiting until them, they clearly have no need for priority over anyone else.
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But of course some teachers are in person. You’d like to see them vaccinated along with grocery store tellers.
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But I rarely read rules saying teachers will be prioritized only if their schools are meeting in person. So actual need is not the driver.
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I’ll get the vaccine when my age group is allowed. I will sign up to learn every neighborhood. So if I have to go to West Chicago because someone wants to send more vaccine over there for “equity” to minority neighborhoods, so be it. I’d drive. I’ve got a car. Not a big deal.
Lucia,
“But that’s because I refuse to meet students in person.”
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Right there, that proves you are in fact a K-12 educator. 😉
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But seriously, if you got the vaccine would you meet with students? Did you meet students in person before the pandemic? Do you declare your tutoring income on your taxes? If the answers are yes, then I don’t think anyone would complain about you lining up for the vaccine with the priority of educators.
I did meet in person before Covid. My conditions were to meet at the Lisle Library which technically, is in walking distance. (I’ve never walked there, but Jim and I have walked to the commuter train once or twice when we’ve gone to the city. It’s a hike.)
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I charged and extra $10/hour for in person. That made up for the slight time issue of getting packed up and too the library and etc. It’s still much more convenient to meet on line.
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My mom asked about online vs. in person just yesterday. I told her I imagine I will probably never meet in person again. Covid isn’t the issue. It’s the convenience of online.
As I expected, the Supreme Court refused to hear any cases about changes in election laws in 2020 that were not made by state legislatures. There was no ruling on the merits… all the cases were declared moot because the election is over and Biden is in the White House. I read the dissenting opinions by Thomas and by Alito and Gorsuch. They laid out why the cases are important and should be heard: not to reverse election results, but to settle the important constitutional question of who has the authority to set election laws. They warn that the failure to address the question will cause future election problems. No affirmative opinion was offered.
I blush to admit I’ve been eligible to make an appointment to go get vaccinated for a couple of weeks now, just haven’t found the time. I figure roughly a quarter percent COVID fatality rate for my age group, which is enough that I ought to make the time. But I haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Apparently in Alabama, Group 1B (critical workers) includes those who help make military planes and helicopters fly.
Shrug.
mark
I assume you “help” by sitting at home writing code? Or helping people who install code understand it so it gets up and running?
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The categories can be odd. That’s why we hear of high school administrators and non-patient facing (back office) medical getting vaccinated. (I’d be fine with non-patient facing janitorial or something like that being vaccinated. But if you are IT at a hospital? I’m not seeing need for priority.)
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One problem is defining the boundaries is tough!
Well, as chance would have it the shop I currently work at has a heavy empirical orientation in that they insist that everybody work, develop and test on the actual hardware. They don’t let anyone borrow it, so I have to show up and work in a lab.
I basically sit around in ESD safe labs and write code, or debug code, or test code, or do paperwork. Mostly I have to be physically present. Not all that much interaction with other people, although the number of labs (and available equipment) is scarce relative to the number of people who need them, so there’s people in there with me.
I agree that the categories are odd. I don’t think anything we work on is particularly critical. Lots of these programs are a good long ways from deployment anyway. Some are upgrades that wouldn’t seem to be critical to postpone. Some programs are for export anyway; wouldn’t seem to be critical to the U.S.
I wouldn’t say anything I’m involved with ought to be in a critical category.
mark,
The problem is that the need to make categories is a bit of a one time thing. People have this notion of wanting to be more fair, or achieve the greatest possible benefit to society with each shot. But there really isn’t time to discuss all the boundary cases, write rules to make the “optimum” yes/no decision or to figure out exactly how you implement things. So we just get “k-12 educators”. I’m arguably that: I educate. I have students in high school. But it would make total sense for someone to say: “Oh. But we don’t mean you.” They don’t need me vaccinated to open schools.
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And then, once you start having categories that aren’t on your id, how do you check? Suppose they say “Obese” gets priority. So… I show up at Walgreens pharmacy claiming to be obese. I’m a little plump but not obeses. So maybe I wear some padding — I can find a big bra maybe put some stuffing in my pants. I’m sure I can think of something.
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So they could check my height and weight on my driver’s license. But I can just say I put on lots of covid weight. They can measure my height and weight. I can slump a little to lose an inch or two. (2″ shorter gets me an extra 1.5 BMI!)
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I could put weights in the toes of my shoes. I could wear a heavy belt. I could strap some weights on my thighs, in a bra or in body shaper. (Lots of room in those body shapers!!). I could put coins in my pants. I’m sure I can get an extra 10-20 lbs if I work hard enough.
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If the turn a blind eye, I’m pretty sure I can manage to be ‘obese’. But maybe they care about the rule. What are they going to do?
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They aren’t equipped with a metal scanner like TSA. A public pharmacy is probably not going to want to institute pat downs. You know people are going to claim the patdowns were to intimate. They aren’t going to want to strip search me.
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And you know if they do start patting people down or strip searching someone is going to complain about profiling or racial discrimination or something.
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I think Jim is one of the few people who isn’t going to manage. But I bet I could manage to be “obese”.
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New Jersey had cigarette smoking on their list. I could buy a pack and take a puff.
Yeah. Good policy is a PITA to get right and implement properly. I don’t envy people who’s jobs involve that.
Lucia, Mark,
The only simple answer is make more vaccine, and inject it ASAP into people…. starting with oldest and working your way down to teenagers. If the details get too complicated, then it will just delay the decline in pandemic deaths.
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That the governor of super-blue Connecticut has finally come to this conclusion is a positive sign. Maybe he will give other blue-state governors the courage to stop listening to people who seek perfect ‘fairness’ at the expense of people’s lives.
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Speaking of fairness, I read today that Cuomo faces credible accusations of sexual harassment…. I can think of little that is more fair than a dishonest scumbag like Cuomo facing those accusations.
Steve,
This is my impression too. I almost said so, but I didn’t feel prepared to properly defend this position. Keep It Simple Stupid. Words to live by, as far as I’m concerned. The more complicated a policy is the more can and will go wrong with it.
Age looks to me to be the biggest categorical factor in COVID mortality. I’d go with that in setting priority and call it a day.
SteveF,
Yes. Doing it by age only, and trying to distribute widely is the only reasonable way. That’s sort of my point about how hard it is to try to come up with any other way.
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Faking my age requires honest to goodness illegal forging of ID papers. Faking height, weight, smoking status, where I work etc. All could be faked by a sufficiently motivated person especially with some connections. Honestly, if I was the manager at the local grocery store, I’d be “hiring” my college age kids and nieces right now. Hours? Who needs stinking hours?
(They do appear to be hiring right now. I think it’s hard to keep staff. But I’m sure the temptation to fake hiring is very real.)
.
I bet the dancer I know who teaches aerobics at Edwards Hospital got a shot but the aerobic teachers at the Lisle Park District or private health clubs will need to wait. I know I might lose that bet, but, betcha dollars to donuts.
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Some people taking aerobics at Edwards Hospital are going it as part of their medical care. Most just join it as a health club.
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Sexual harrassment? Gov. Cuomo? Say it’s not so!!!! Hah!! 🙂
Lucia,
“Sexual harrassment? Gov. Cuomo? Say it’s not so!!!!”
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Yes, it is indeed true. But considering his obnoxious persona, who could have expected it? (Sorry, that was supposed to be: who could NOT have expected it.)
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Apparently NYC mayor DeBlasio has decided to throw Cuomo under the bus, and is calling for “an independent investigation” into the allegations. Which I am sure is payback for Cuomo criticizing DeBlazio’s most ‘woke’ policies ove rthe past 6 months or so. DeBlasio is soon term limited out… maybe he is imagining what a great governor he would be.
I imagine the governor of Connecticut got quite a heavy load of lobbying and finally determined that no matter what he did he was going to suffer for it politically. So he just gave up and did what some poor nerd on his staff told him, the numbers say vaccinate by age.
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I find it incredibly strange that Team Science hasn’t told us a thousand times over that method X is optimal for reducing the death / serious illness count. All that data is easily available. We all know why they don’t, it runs counter to the equity narrative. The CDC has shamed themselves by literally showing age is the biggest factor and then multiplying that by zero and adding in an equity recommendation.
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Showing that sanity sometimes exists, almost all the states multiplied the CDC’s recommendation by zero and added in their own formula, much to the chagrin of the media which declared they weren’t following the CDC’s “scienceâ€. Florida was one of the first to just say 65+, now Connecticut takes the lead with further age bracketing. I expect many more will follow, especially as supplies increase and they just want to stick people as fast as possible.
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The more complex and unverifiable the requirements for vaccination are, the less likely vaccinators will even try to verify anything.
“Sexual harrassment? Gov. Cuomo? Say it’s not so!!!!â€
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It aint so according to CNN’s coverage, ha ha. They didn’t cover it all. Actually they just did their first story, which is amusingly “Cuomo Denies blah blah blah”. The double standard is so blatant that nobody even cares even more. It has pretty much killed the MeToo movement. Remember, BELIEVE WOMEN.
NY politics are very brutal. If I was doomed to the seventh level of he** they would reincarnate me as a NY politician.
Sounds like Lucia has given line jumping quite a bit of thought, ha ha. I’m not saying I have, I’m not saying I haven’t. Just find one of your friends who doesn’t want the vaccine who is 65+ and looks even remotely like you and borrow their ID. That would be one method, not that I’ve thought about it.
Vaccine effect in nursing homes becomes even more clear:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/25/us/nursing-home-covid-vaccine.html
The fearmongering by the press about COVID-19 knows no bounds. the latest is that US new cases are edging up. So I looked at the individual states to see where it was happening. It’s Texas and probably a few other states hit by the bad weather. It isn’t real. It’s a glitch caused by the weather. There was a steep drop during the freeze and a substantial runup/correction after things thawed out. Any mention of this hypothesis in the article? Nope. You’re meant to think it’s the beginning of a new strain surge, although that wasn’t mentioned either. And, of course, the article in the WSJ wasn’t one on which readers are allowed to comment.
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/covid-2021-02-25
This one takes the cake, social justice gone bonkers. This is quite a good researched article, this one guy at the NYT has written several of these.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/us/smith-college-race.html
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Lower class janitors and cafeteria workers sacrificed and villainized for doing their jobs exactly as they were told, and a snowflake student being elevated for an accusation that was completely in her head.
mark bofill (Comment #199205): “Good policy is a PITA to get right and implement properly. I don’t envy people who’s jobs involve that.”
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The Governor of Connecticut finally realized that the trick is KISS. Keep It Simple, Stupid.
DeSantis today:
Up Next: Add law enforcement and teachers who are 50 and older
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Then: “We’re going to do it based on facts and circumstances on the ground, based on progress getting through the 65-and-plus population,†he said. “Once we see the demand go down, then we are going to lower the age and get people at a minimal 60, and then maybe even 55, right off the bat. But it really is dependent on making sure we have the supply.â€
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Sounds good to me of course.
Tom Scharf,
The better DeSantis does, the more the MSM will vilify him. It is shameful but true: the MSM can’t ever say anything good about a politician who’s political philosophy departs from that of the woke social justice left. I am pretty sure DeSantis is a shoo-in for re-election, no matter how much that upsets the MSM… after 2022, we’ll see about the presidency.
Is the requirement to enforce no queue-jumping and fairness really that important? In virtually any system there are people who will game it or defraud it but numbers are usually low enough that it doesnt affect overall running of the system. If you went for fairly complex risk prioritization based on age, occupation (eg health or aged care workers), underlying health conditions, obesity, etc then sure, you would get defectors jumping the queue on various pretexts, but it seems you would still get faster coverage of most vunerable than a straight age-based system that might be harder to game. Ie overall lower deaths.
Phil Scadden
I guess it depends what you mean by important. Those making the complicated rules (generally state governors) have some idea of what they think is “fair” or “right”. Then, once they’ve made them, whether or not the rules are fair and/or right, medical people in pharmacies have to at least kinda-sorta enforce those rules. These people are usually pretty low on the medical hierarchy. They can give shots. The rules not entirely unclear but also not entirely clear.
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The end result will be motivated rule breakers will get an edge over rule followers or the unmotivated. That’s probably not a result the governors intended.
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Also a fair number of low on the totem pole people who work in pharmacies are going to bear the brunt of any rules that get broken. Also not a good thing.
.
Simple age based rules would probably be best all around. Naturally, most our state governors are not doing that. So we are going to have confusion, rule breaking, rule bending. I bet in a few years “studies” will show there was lessequity in states that had more complicated rules motivated by the desire to achieve equity. (The Illinois pages on vaccine distribution have all sorts of window dressing language about equity. I’d be surprised if we end up doing any better than any other state.)
Phil Scadden,
“you would get defectors jumping the queue on various pretexts”
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Of course, just as you will get drivers who drive unlawfully to get past a traffic jam (I have seen people drive the wrong way on the opposite side of the road!). But the point about “defectors” is that they corrupt the integrity of the system; they state very clearly: “screw you, I am going first”.
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If everyone figured only fools pay taxes, then the entire federal revenue system of the USA goes down in flames. If everyone figured only fools wait in line, then lines become the rule of a mob. The enforcement of civility is an important social structure, which I think very unwise to forget or eliminate.
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WRT the specific case of covid vaccines: There are a few people with serious health issues (immuno-suppressed, for example) who should obviously be given priority. But in nearly all cases, the people at greatest risk of death are the oldest people. The rest of the drama is mostly due to “defectors”, as you describe them, pushing to get to the front of the line.
Mike,
Yup.
Steve F, I largely agree with you. So much of society is about everyone following conventions for overall good which necessarily means punishing those that dont (I like “defector” because you can model so much of these as prisoner dilemmas of various forms). So I do think there should be enforcement and sanctions – but not worth spending a lot on them nor on giving up better strategies because they are difficult to enforce. A 60yo might be able to fake 70, (so a little ahead in the queue) but 40yo could not. I think you really do have prioritize front-line health and age-care workers.
What I did not appreciate is the public health system or lack there of. I agree with Lucia, that pharmacy staff should not be having to make those kind of calls, so perhaps you right about age-only for non-front line staff.
SteveF (Comment #199219): “I am pretty sure DeSantis is a shoo-in for re-election”.
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I was a little skeptical when I saw that, since the last I looked DeSantis had a worse approval rating than Newsom. But that was last fall. It seems that as Newsom (and presumably Cuomo) have been fading, DeSantis has been climbing. As he deserves.
Mike M,
DeSantis was at ~54% approval in late January, and I am pretty sure that has only improved. Another important factor is that DeSantis will run in 2022, a non-presidential year, where Republicans, and especially senior Republicans, are especially likely to vote. DeSantis setting elderly people at the front of the vaccination line will not be forgotten in November 2022. The fact that this is the best way to reduce total deaths is another plus.. 😉
15$/hr minimum wage appears to be dead. MacDonough has ruled that it can’t be passed by reconciliation.
mark
That means low priced diners may survive. I was expecting take out to be the only option.
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I also wondered how $15 was going to affect the landscaping business. I have no idea what all those people mowing lawns get paid. (We mow our own.)
I guess banks could just put out a big table where everyone deposits and withdrawals their money. That should work out OK even though there might be a few rule breakers.
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I jest of course, the thing with vaccines is it very high profile and people are very emotionally engaged. It is literally life and death for some people who will get shoved to the back of the line and get unlucky by getting covid late in the game.
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People want a fair system that is robust against cheating. If cheating is perceived as commonplace then everyone will easily justify their own cheating. This will breed resentment against the politicians who allowed it.
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It is 10x more inflammatory than the college admissions scandal. The media will have a field day with line jumpers.
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Example today. WSJ:
Top Pension Fund Head Beat Canada’s Covid-19 Vaccine Queue by Getting a Shot in Middle East
CEO of CPPIB flew to the U.A.E. amid slow Canadian vaccine rollout and pandemic travel advisory
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mark-machin-head-of-canadas-biggest-pension-fund-traveled-to-middle-east-and-received-covid-vaccine-11614294557
Iran didn’t waste any time testing Biden. Biden had to strike back today against the usual bad behavior by Iran’s proxies. This isn’t likely to be helpful in trust building. The mullahs use The Great Satan to prop up domestic political support. I don’t care if we talk to Iran but I don’t envision anything useful coming out of it.
Well, it turns out that it wasn’t just people in nursing homes that Cuomo put at risk. A similar order to accept infected patients was issued to group homes for people with intellectual and developmental disorders. Needless to say, the Cuomo administration isn’t releasing data on that either.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/another-cuomo-cover-up-11614029575?mod=opinion_minor_pos3
and
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/dont-forget-andrew-cuomos-other-coronavirus-victims/
Tom Scharf,
Anyone who thinks that the Iranian government’s hatred of the US can be altered by, say, removing sanctions should read this:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-i-learned-in-an-iranian-prison-11614200732
In COVID-19 news, New York was the state with the highest number of new cases yesterday.
DeWitt,
Must be all the people going to mass or temple.
Cuomo made a terrible mistake of judgement…. he actually believed that hospitals would be overwhelmed, so he sent lots sick people back to all kinds of care facilities. Bad mistake, and one that cost a lot of lives. Had he reversed his error early, explained why that (very bad) decision was made, and promised to do his best to protect the most vulnerable, he would have been OK politically. But he didn’t do those things. He stuck too long with a foolish policy, then did everything he could to hide the many deaths that policy caused…. all the while carrying on like he is some kind of secular saint. He is a remarkably dishonest person, even by the standards of politicians. I don’t know for sure that he is finished, but with the credible accusation of sexual harassment, his position is tenuous at best. At some point soon, all the Dem politicians in NY who want to be governor will turn on him.
Lucia,
I was more worried about retail salespeople and brick and mortar retail businesses overall. It’s not as if they’ve been doing fantastic anyway since online business has taken off. Average retail salespeople wage is about $12/hr. I read that there were about 10 million people working retail sales in 2018.
*shrug*
It ($15/hr minimum wage) would’ve hurt businesses [and employment] some. It doesn’t matter now. Not going to happen anytime soon.
mark,
I think it was going to be tough on retail too. I figured we’d see an acceleration of self check out for places. (Walmart and many grocery stores around here have them.) As you do need *some* staff in a location, would then drive out many mom-and-pop sized stores with a cashier who “does everything else”. Brick and mortar things that survive would need to either by “high value unique” services or approaching “big box store size”.
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The former would services like having personal shoppers who really, really help you select outfits (which you will pay through the nose for), or stores that are big enough to have a staff member watch 5 self-checkout cash-registers and fix things when they go wrong. (Walmart does this.)
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Otherwise, I really don’t know how many smaller brick and mortar retail establishments could exist while hiring and paying staff.
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I don’t know what it would have done to ballroom dance!! I don’t entirely know the pay arrangements for the teachers.
mark bofill,
My guess is that Schumer got word from Joe Manchin that he would not vote for a bill with a $15 minimum wage, so told McDonough to declare it out of order…. it is a fig leaf. Schumer has shown many tines that he doesn’t give a hoot about Senate rules, and would have over-ruled McDonough if he had the votes.
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Removal of the $15 minimum wage makes the nightmare “covid relief” bill only very slightly less of a legislative nightmare. It is mostly a “Christmas time for progressives” bill, loaded with large expenditures completely unrelated to covid.
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In other developments: Georgia’s newly elected senator Warnock has proposed legislation which would require the Federal Government to purchase 32 million acres of farm land and give it to black people. Only black people. Not lease, give away as reparations for slavery. At current farm land prices, that would be a ‘reparations’ payment of about $100 billion. It is blatantly unconstitutional to treat people differently under law based on skin color. Warnock doesn’t care.
Steve,
Could be.
No mules? It seems to me at least 800K mules would round that out, I mean. What’s anybody supposed to do with forty acres and no mule? :p
No seriously, madness.
I have numerous issues with reparations. This is probably the least of them, but:
Slavery was abolished in 1865, or over 150 years ago. Six generations ago. Estimates about inherited wealth vary, but it looks to me like roughly 10-30% of wealth is inherited. (.3)^6=.00073ish. Less than 1/10’th of a percent of the net worth of a slave (had s/he) not been a slave would be passed down to a descendant today.
Lets say average net worth in 1850 was 50K by todays standards (https://www.amyjohnsoncrow.com/how-much-was-your-ancestor-worth/) highly debateable, but let’s just suppose.
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We are talking about 36 bucks. Do we really have to have this conversation? It was six generations ago. I don’t believe it has a measurable effect on wealth today.
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[Edit: In my view, it’d be a lot more reasonable mathwise to discuss Jim Crow reparations. But that doesn’t seem to be sexy enough to capture the imagination of reparation advocates.]
mark bofill,
“Do we really have to have this conversation?”
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We certainly shouldn’t be having any conversation about reparations, but I have no doubt we will. I agree it is madness. It stems from an absolute conviction that all differences in life outcomes for identifiable groups is caused by racial discrimination, when in reality the biggest drivers of differences in outcomes are cultural and behavioral.
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The absolute refusal to address the fundamental cultural and behavioral problems has been consistent since Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action”. Just as now, the left condemned Moynihan for “blaming the victim”, and absolutely refused to address the issues Moynihan raised. It is no surprise at all that there has been little or no movement toward a more constructive culture, and in many ways cultural factors have only gotten worse. People who are reasonably successful share common productive behaviors which have nothing at all do with their racial or ethnic background. Until the culture which encourages destructive behaviors changes, the discrepancies between life outcomes for black and white Americans will continue.
Mr. Canadian Covid Line Jumper was rather hastily dealt with.
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Canada Pension Fund CEO Mark Machin Resigns After U.A.E. Vaccine Trip
Resignation comes after WSJ reported Machin’s travel to the U.A.E. for a Covid-19 shot
https://www.wsj.com/articles/canada-pension-fund-head-resigns-after-report-of-covid-19-vaccination-in-middle-east-11614347392
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““We are very disappointed by this troubling situation and we support the swift action taken by the Board of Directors,†Ms. Cuplinskas said.
Mr. Machin didn’t comment when reached by phone by the Journal on Friday. A spokesman for the CPPIB didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.”
“On Thursday, the Journal reported that Mr. Machin, 54 years old, got a Covid-19 vaccine shot in the U.A.E., ahead of millions of Canadians waiting on one at home.”
Tom Scharf (Comment #199243): “Mr. Machin, 54 years old, got a Covid-19 vaccine shot in the U.A.E., ahead of millions of Canadians waiting on one at home.â€
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Of course, his action had exactly zero impact on the millions of Canadians waiting, so no one in Canada should care about a private citizen doing that.
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But the guy was indirectly a public employee, not really a private citizen. So it is appropriate that he is now a private citizen.
Zeynep Tufekc, this lady has had some of the best information about the pandemic from the beginning. Specifically she studiously avoids divisive framing and acknowledges uncertainty while being able to convey the state of knowledge.
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The Five Fallacies That Hamstrung Our Response to COVID-19
The assumptions made by public officials, and the choices made by media, too often backfired.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/how-public-health-messaging-backfired/618147/
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“Amidst all the mistrust and the scolding, a crucial public-health concept fell by the wayside. Harm reduction is the recognition that if there is an unmet and yet crucial human need, we cannot simply wish it away; we need to advise people on how to do what they seek to do more safely. Risk can never be completely eliminated; life requires more than futile attempts to bring risk down to zero. Pretending we can will away complexities and trade-offs with absolutism is counterproductive. â€
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“Similarly, since the vaccines were announced, too many statements have emphasized that we don’t yet know if vaccines prevent transmission. Instead, public-health authorities should have said that we have many reasons to expect, and increasing amounts of data to suggest, that vaccines will blunt infectiousness, but that we’re waiting for additional data to be more precise about it. â€
.
“People might well want to party after being vaccinated. Those shots will expand what we can do, first in our private lives and among other vaccinated people, and then, gradually, in our public lives as well. But once again, the authorities and the media seem more worried about potentially reckless behavior among the vaccinated, and about telling them what not to do, than with providing nuanced guidance reflecting trade-offs, uncertainty, and a recognition that vaccination can change behavior. No guideline can cover every situation, but careful, accurate, and updated information can empower everyone.â€
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Telling vaccinated people they are free to enjoy normal life again with some risk would likely be the most powerful vaccination messaging you can have.
Tom Scharf,
“Telling vaccinated people they are free to enjoy normal life again with some risk would likely be the most powerful vaccination messaging you can have.”
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That is obviously true, of course. But I am unable to imagine a politician in the USA with the courage to even hint at that truth, never mind come right out and say it. It seems we live in a time when dolts, cowards, and demented people get elected to leadership positions. It is frightening.
Tom Scharf,
Sense from The Atlantic, who’d have thunk it. There’s another article whose headline makes sense to me: Mars is a Hellhole with the subhead Colonizing the red planet is a ridiculous way to help humanity. OTOH, we have more of the usual fare: The Republican Party Is Now in Its End Stages; Ban All Big Mergers. Period; and The Biggest Country Musician in America Is a Disgrace. After saying a racial slur and being exiled from radio, Morgan Wallen has become only more popular. What’s going on?
I’m betting they don’t blame Morgan Wallen’s popularity on Critical Race Theory and wokism, but I’m not interested enough to actually read the article.
Now I want to fly to the UAE to get my shot!!!
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Well, on the one hand, a public employee should line jump. On the other hand, the story may manage to convince some reluctant people the vaccine is really worth taking!
lucia,
I think the UAE is right up there with Israel in the fraction of its population who are vaccinated. Also, I agree with Mike M. that it isn’t really line jumping to get vaccinated in another country just because Canada can’t get it’s act together. But it does look bad, though probably not as bad as Ted Cruz and his family going to Cancun while Texas froze.
As to the decline and fall of the Republican Party article in The Atlantic, I’m pretty sure I saw articles with similar headlines in 1965 after the Goldwater debacle. OTOH, Goldwater didn’t go around after the election threatening to keep other Republicans from being reelected.
DeWitt,
“.. probably not as bad as Ted Cruz and his family going to Cancun while Texas froze.”
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Ya, Cruz made a very big mistake, one which may cost him his Senate seat. What the hell was he thinking? It wasn’t like the extreme cold weather was a surprise. It is a self inflicted wound which may be fatal to his political career.
Lucia,
Round trip Chicago to Dubai (UAE), departing March 22, non-stop (13.5 hours): $800 on Emirates. Add hotel, and paying someone off to get the vaccine immediately, and you’re probably talking under $2,000. I won’t think less of you.
You can tell the article is biased by the reference to the fact that we no longer have a “misinformer in chief.” As if Biden didn’t lie about the pandemic constantly during the campaign.
David Young,
It’s The Atlantic. Some negative reference to Trump was probably obligatory. I consider it window dressing. As for misinformer in chief, we still have Fauci.
As far as Trump campaigning in 2022, at this point I’m not sure which would be better, Trump campaigning for you or against you. I guess it would depend on the location. After all, according to former Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, all politics is local.
Tom Scharf (Comment #199245)
“Telling vaccinated people they are free to enjoy normal life again with some risk would likely be the most powerful vaccination messaging you can have.”
_____
I would agree, as long as you tell them to be cautious until they can’t possibly infect others. Some vaccinated people can be carriers of covid-19 for brief periods after vaccination. And some may not know they are infected.
The full effect of covid-19 vaccinations isn’t immediate. Since it may take a couple of week after the second shot to gain full immunity, wearing a mask during that period is recommend, even though partial protection may start as early as two weeks after the first shot.The partial protection may be great enough to make hospitalization unnecessary for those who catch the disease after receiving the shots, but they may pass this disease on to others.
The above is my understanding. I could be wrong.
She’s a freelancer, here is her substack:
https://zeynep.substack.com/
I think “The Republican Party Is Doomed” article has been rewritten approx. 4,000 times since 2016. The usual suspects can write that article in their sleep on a slow news day.
OK_Max,
They know the level of effectiveness by day for the vaccines. After 3 weeks it is ~80% and at 10 days after the second shot it is ~95%. That’s protection against symptomatic covid, and even better for severe illness and death.
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It is best to wait until after you get your second shot to start thinking about changing your behavior. I think the “vaccinated but potential carrier” risk has been overplayed. It is unlikely that the covid vaccine provides what is called “sterilizing immunity” but the data suggests it drops the chances considerably of transmitting the disease.
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The point being that telling 85 year old grandma that she still can’t see her grandchildren after a year of absence and full vaccination seems like bad advice to me, but tramping around in the old folks home after she spent the night carousing in bars full of unmasked patrons is also a bad idea.
OK_Max,
I would make that most [vaccinated] will not know (without testing) rather than some may not know. Even if infected, the viral load will be lower, decreasing the probability of infecting someone else. One of the trials, Moderna I think, showed that their vaccine substantially reduced asymptomatic infections too.
Besides, the most important thing is to keep the grandparents from being infected by their children and grandchildren, not so much the other way around. And whether to take the risk of transmission from people over 65 to people under 50 should be an individual, not government, decision. You can meet outside on a sunny day to lower the risk even more. Life is risky.
DeWitt,
I agree that going to UAE isn’t really line jumping. I also agree it looks bad for a public official to do something impossible for all other Canadians. (Or, if he was going to do it, he should have announced he was going to do it and excoriated the government for their ineptitude before jumping on the plane!)
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Thanks, Tom. That Atlantic article is good. I have seen a number of good articles about the Wuhan virus in the Atlantic. I think they might all have been by Prof. Tufekci.
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Many of the communication problems have been a result of violating the 5 basic rules of public health communication:
Never lie.
Don’t exaggerate the risks.
Don’t minimize the risks.
Don’t pretend to know more than you do.
Don’t conceal what you do know.
lucia,
Being up front would have helped.
Canadians come to the US for medical procedures they can’t get in a timely fashion in Canada all the time. I think sometimes Canada even pays for it. But I really don’t see much difference between coming to the US for something like a hip replacement and going to the UAE for COVID-19 vaccine.
If you have the money, you’re going to be able to do things that other people with less money can’t. That was true in the old Soviet Union and is certainly true in China today. Some animals are more equal.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #199261)
And whether to take the risk of transmission from people over 65 to people under 50 should be an individual, not government, decision.
______
I’m not sure which individual you mean is making the decision, the one at risk or the one not at risk (a person who knows he is already infected.) If I’m the one at risk, I don’t think it would be OK to be infected, and I would be glad for the government to prevent it.
I doubt that. Say the government decided to prevent it by locking you up in isolation for the rest of your life – no further human contact whatsoever. You could get your food through a slot in the cell door. It would be extremely effective [at preventing infection].
OK_Max
Both. If I go to a dance social thinking w/o being vaccinated, I am the one “at risk”. I make the decision to take the risk. I go. So I am taking the risk.
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The person who is vaccinated, who think they probably aren’t contributing to my risk and knows they aren’t at risk also makes a decision to go or not go.
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It seems to me to be rather obvious that the person who is vaccinated should not bear the burden of staying at home to keep me “safe” when I could have stayed home myself.
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The only way for the government to prevent the risk to the one at risk– me in this example– would be to lock me up. There is no point in locking up the vaccinated person. They can only put me at risk if (a) I go out and (b) it turns out we are wrong that vaccines prevent him from infecting me (which is unlikely.)
.
So… just lock me up. Create a vaccine passport. Then the “at risk” are stuck at home.
Dr. Seuss is racist now.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/loudoun-county-public-schools-dr-seuss-racial-undertones
May God Almighty have mercy on us all.
lucia (Comment #199269): “It seems to me to be rather obvious that the person who is vaccinated should not bear the burden of staying at home to keep me “safe†when I could have stayed home myself.”
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I very much agree.
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lucia: “Create a vaccine passport. Then the “at risk†are stuck at home.”
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I don’t get it. Why make the vaccinated have to constantly prove it? To protect those who are not vaccinated? And why not let the “at risk” make their own decisions rather than casting them out of society? If you are vaccinated, why would you care if I am vaccinated? If you are not vaccinated, then what gives you the right to demand to know if others are vaccinated?
Telling the vaccinated that they have to be masked up, socially distancing, locked down, would send a strong signal to people to not bother getting vaccinated.
MikeM
OK_Max wants the government to protect the unvaccinated. The way to do that is have some way to make the unvaccinated remain at home rather than go out. For that you need a passport to have the unvaccinated identified.
This vaccination passport is already law, passed under Bill Clinton.
Ron Paul blocked funding for it every year, but by law the government should be creating a health care ID for every American that holds all your records.
I think this might be nice in theory, but in practice most people are so sick and tired of being locked up and isolated that once they are vaccinated, they are mostly going to go back to their normal activities. That’s just human nature. My friends and relatives are growing increasingly restless to resume their lives. In Oklahoma and South Carolina that’s mostly already possible except for international travel.
lucia (Comment #199274)
“OK_Max wants the government to protect the unvaccinated. The way to do that is have some way to make the unvaccinated remain at home rather than go out.â€
________
I would be a hypocrite if I recommended the unvaccinated stay at home. I don’t stay at home myself, but I do avoid being around people as much as possible, and stay away from bars, theaters, and other places restricted by government. So far what I do has worked, unless I have caught the virus and don’t know it.
After getting the second shot, I will continue to avoid people for a couple of weeks. I believe this brief post-vaccination period should make it less likely for me to catch the virus or infect others if I already am a carrier. After being careful for a year or more, two more weeks won’t matter much to me.
Re mark bofill (Comment #199270)
Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss) did some very racist publications for adult audiences. I haven’t read all of his books for children. If those I have read contain racism, it didn’t jump out at me, but I may have overlooked it.
OK_Max,
Please provide a reference or two to the racist publications by Theodor Seuss Geisel. I have read his Dr Seuss books to my kids… nothing racist at all; I still read ‘green eggs and ham’ to my 2 1/2 YO granddaughter. Most characters are colors like blue, pink, and green.
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I note that Daniel Patrick Moynihan was also called a racist, when he was in fact a dedicated liberal, completely opposed to racism.
Well, Steve, these people are so racist they cannot look at the world without impressing their racist views upon it. Then they assume everyone else must think as they do, but are simply unrepentant racists, not the guilty racists that they are. So, for example, they see an orc in lord of the rings and think “that’s a representation of a black person”. Rather than take a few seconds of reflection to wonder why they would possibly come to that conclusion, and what that says about them, they seek virtue in lambasting everyone else for not seeing what they see.
MikeN (Comment #199272): “Telling the vaccinated that they have to be masked up, socially distancing, locked down, would send a strong signal to people to not bother getting vaccinated.”
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It is ridiculous. I may have had the virus back in December, but I can’t get an antibody test. My doctor won’t give me a referral since he claims that whether I had it or not is completely irrelevant.
Mike M,
If you pay for it out of pocket, there are labs willing to test for antibodies…. last I saw it was about $250.
SteveF (Comment #199283): “Please provide a reference or two to the racist publications by Theodor Seuss Geisel.”
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I was curious, so I spent a few minutes on Wikipedia. It seems that while working as a political cartoonist, Geisel drew a cartoon lambasting the America First movement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dr_Seuss_and_the_wolf_chewed_up_the_children.jpg
It takes a special kind of stupid to see that as racist.
He supported Japanese internment during WW2. And he drew a cartoon about a department store where you could buy things like a fly to put in your ointment, a needle of an appropriate size for you haystack, etc. One of the figures of speech is no longer remotely familiar.
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In other words, Geisel being racist is the usual leftist garbage.
SteveF (Comment #199288): “If you pay for it out of pocket, there are labs willing to test for antibodies…. last I saw it was about $250.”
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Maybe in Florida. You don’t live in a state with a fascist governor.
I think a strong case could be made that the chief characteristic of Dr. Seuss’s popular works is that young children enjoy reading them. I think there is considerable value in getting young children to enjoy reading, in that this helps people develop reading fluency early. In my opinion it is absurd to suggest that Dr. Seuss’s children books have anything to do with promoting racism. I think that canceling Dr. Seuss’s works to indulge the modern neoracist witch-hunters is appalling and directly damaging to our children.
Mike M,
“He supported Japanese internment during WW2.”
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Well so did Franklin Roosevelt, Congress, and enough members of the SC to not stop it (until the war was safely over). There was little or no evidence of people of Japanese parentage, but born in the States being aligned with Japan, so the internment was very bad policy. Bad policy, contrary to the Constitution, is one of the unfortunate consequences of war. Which is what is so dangerous about politicians when they compare pursuit of their desired policies tantamount to war: it encourages destructive, unconstitutional government….. it is ‘just like war’ after all.
Mike M,
This company seems willing to do antibody tests for anyone:
https://www.dukecityurgentcare.com/coronavirus-antibody-test/
They say it may be covered by insurance.
OK_Max,
So when you wrote, “If I’m the one at risk, I don’t think it would be OK to be infected, and I would be glad for the government to prevent it.”,
what would you prose the government do to prevent at-risk-OK-Max from risk of infection? Other than making vaccine available which they are in the process of doing? Actual question. Because it seems to me that now that we have vaccines and increasing numbers of people are not at risk, the burden on the unvaccinated-at-risk needs to fall on the unvaccinated-at-risk themselves.
SteveF (Comment #199293): “This company seems willing to do antibody tests for anyone:
https://www.dukecityurgentcare.com/coronavirus-antibody-test/
They say it may be covered by insurance.”
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Yes. But I first need a referral from one of their doctors. Since I am not already one of their patients, it takes over a month to get an establishing visit. Less than two weeks to go. Then maybe I can get the test.
SteveF (Comment #199292): “Well so did Franklin Roosevelt, Congress, and enough members of the SC to not stop it (until the war was safely over).”
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They did so at the urging of California’s Attorney General (later Governor). Some guy named Earl Warren.
*chuckles*
The NYT has updated their Sicknick information. They so desperately want to keep the original narrative in the verbiage, but the facts just don’t support it.
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Note the very careful wording of the headline and sub-head, no way to infer the original narrative is now completely false unless a very careful readers wonders why the word “after” is in that sentence.
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F.B.I. Is Said to Have Singled Out Suspect in Capitol Officer’s Death
The death of the officer, Brian Sicknick, after the Capitol riot has been a major focus for investigators scrutinizing the attack by a pro-Trump mob.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/us/politics/brian-sicknick-capitol-riot-investigation.html
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“In a significant breakthrough in the case, investigators have now pinpointed a person seen on video of the riot who attacked several officers with bear spray, including Officer Sicknick, according to the officials.â€
… (the buried lede)
“Given the evidence available to investigators, prosecutors could be more likely to bring charges of assaulting an officer, rather than murder, in the case.â€
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“In the hours after Officer Sicknick was rushed to the hospital, officials initially said that he had been struck with a fire extinguisher. They later said that there was no evidence to support that he had died from any blunt force trauma. More recently, F.B.I. officials homed in on the potential role of an irritant as a primary factor in his death.â€
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“Potentialâ€!? No autopsy info, no mention of it all. This assertion can’t be proven at this late stage. You bear spray a cop you should be charged with assault, but this story has completely fallen apart.
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The NYT’s anonymous sources were the only info that started this “Trump mob kills cop†narrative that spread like wildfire across the media. They make NO EFFORT to explain how they or their sources got this so wrong, and additionally make NO EFFORT to explain why it took so long to correct the record, 7 weeks later.
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This is an egregious error. Yet they wring their hands daily on fake news, disinformation and conspiracy theories, all the while sticking themselves and their peers up on pedestals as The Ministry of Truth.
NPR for the first time today deviates from the fire extinguisher story. Note the framing, and no mention of why the story has suddenly changed. At least the NYT admits the story has changed.
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“The FBI has singled out an individual seen on a video of the Jan. 6 insurrection spraying law enforcement officers, including a Capitol Police officer who died from injuries sustained while defending the building, according to a law enforcement official.
Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick was injured while fending off the mob of Trump supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. He died the following evening from his injuries.”
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“The Capitol Police reiterated Friday night that the medical examiner’s report is not yet complete.”
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That’s very weird. This guy is in the ground. I think this guy’s death is tragedy but I’m starting to wonder into conspiracy land, the fix may be in.
https://www.uscp.gov/media-center/press-releases/statement-officer-sicknick
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“Statement on Officer Sicknick
February 26, 2021 Press Release
The medical examiner’s report on Officer Brian Sicknick’s death, which followed the attack on the Capitol on January 6, is not yet complete. We are awaiting toxicology results and continue to work with other government agencies regarding the death investigation.
Officer Sicknick’s family has asked for privacy during this difficult time and that the spreading of misinformation stop regarding the cause of his death. The Department and the Sicknick family appreciate the outpouring of support for our fallen officer.”
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As far as I can tell the leading cause of misinformation of the cause of death is the NYT. This entire thing is smelling worse every day. If the medical examiner’s report had incriminating information in it, it’s hard to believe they would be shy about it.
WP: “No autopsy or toxicology report has been made public, unusual seven weeks after a death.”
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Unrelated but interesting. Bear spray is a * less * concentrated version of pepper spray. Pepper spray is illegal in some areas but bear spray is not.
The lethality of pepper spray:
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/238262#is-it-lethal
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The police version of pepper spray can be more concentrated. Can have more complications with people with asthma.
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DOJ Report
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/195739.pdf
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What is missing here is how rare death really is based on use or dose, and whether someone exposed to pepper spray would die from it a day later. It seems to be a “death within hours”, but little info available.
Tom Scharf (Comment #199300): “You bear spray a cop you should be charged with assault, but this story has completely fallen apart.”
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Yes, such a person should be charged with assault, but murder is ridiculous. If Sicknick had collapsed or been in significant distress shortly after getting sprayed, there *might* be a connection. But hours later he was fine. I have not seen anything saying that pepper spray can cause a delayed reaction, or even that it is dangerous to someone who does not have asthma.
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Tom Scharf: “This is an egregious error.”
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Not an error. A lie.
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Tom Scharf (Comment #199301) quoting NPR: “a Capitol Police officer who died from injuries sustained while defending the building”.
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Another lie. He was not injured.
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One should never attribute to mendacity that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. Six weeks ago, incompetence was plausible. Not at this point. NPR and NYT are telling deliberate lies.
Tom Scharf,
Count on the medical examiner to declare the cause of death is “uncertain”. There is no other way to preserve the garbage narrative about crazy Trump supporters ‘murdering’ a police officer. Nobody thinks the cause of death is unknown…. but that cause will NEVER be honestly disclosed to the public. One of the evils of complete one-party control is officially sanctioned lying about facts.
Recovery from bear spray to a stroke is a very tenuous chain of events to support in a courtroom I suspect. Nobody yet knows what the actual cause of death was at this point, only rumored to be a stroke. There isn’t a lot of science on short and long term affects of pepper spray. Obviously quite a few people have been sprayed so real word data exists, just not very well researched.
SteveF,
You can usually always count on a medical examiner to declare the cause of death to be what’s needed to sustain a particular narrative.
Mike M.,
I would seriously consider changing doctors. Your doctor may be technically correct at the moment, but that will likely change in the near future. That being said, a positive antibody test is good evidence that you had been infected. A negative antibody test is, however, not proof that you weren’t infected. As I posted earlier in this thread, antibody tests apparently miss mild infections.
From the linked reference above:
The paper also noted that the best results are for antigens to the trimeric spike glycoprotein, not to the nucleocapsid (the target of 6 of 24 FDA approved test, including high throughput tests in wide use). Also, most tests look at only IgG and/or IgM.
Before I paid a lot of money for an antibody test, I would want to know exactly what was being tested. Caveat emptor.
I have to admit to having no expertise in how one dies from bear or pepper spray whether one can die for pepper spray. There are reports the police used pepper spray on protestors.
https://www.tmz.com/2021/01/06/trump-supporters-clash-cops-washington-dc-pepper-spray/
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While police using it doesn’t mean it can’t kill you. But if they do use it, I imagine the defense is going to ask whether the DC police’s position is that pepper spray is potentially deadly or what rules they have about using it.
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I don’t carry the stuff around myself. I don’t even know if it’s legal in Illinois.
lucia,
Not worth even looking while you’re sitting (I assume) in front of a keyboard and screen connected to the web? Well, if you don’t care, then I don’t either.
In the vein of Cato the Elder, but not going to translate into latin:
Deplatform the New York Times!
I should make that my sig, if I bothered with that sort of thing.
Yes, it’s going to be rather hard to make the argument that civilian pepper spray killed an officer who likely shows no signs of a specific cause of death related to the irritant, and then have to answer the question that more concentrated versions of the same spray (likely carried by the same force) is somehow safe to use on others.
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I think they are just running out the clock here as much as possible before they state cause of death “indeterminate” or some such conclusion. This is the reason we have a slow grinding justice system, the mob gets bored and moves on.
NYT reporting a second Cuomo aide piling on with another sexual harassment charge.
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Cuomo Is Accused of Sexual Harassment by a 2nd Former Aide
The woman, 25, said that when they were alone in his office, Gov. Andrew Cuomo asked if she “had ever been with an older man.â€
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/27/nyregion/cuomo-charlotte-bennett-sexual-harassment.html
“Ms. Bennett said she had disclosed the interaction with Mr. Cuomo to his chief of staff, Jill DesRosiers, less than a week later and was transferred to another job, as a health policy adviser, with an office on the opposite side of the Capitol, soon after that. Ms. Bennett said she had also given a lengthy statement to a special counsel to the governor, Judith Mogul, toward the end of June.”
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It’s pretty tame in the grand scheme, but not for the zero tolerance types. Given it was post-Kavanaugh, it was ill advised. Unlike others, she has it well documented. Cuomo is in serious trouble.
Tom Scharf.
“I think they are just running out the clock here as much as possible before they state cause of death “indeterminate†or some such conclusion.
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Of course that is what is happening. The liars at the NYT, NPR, and a host of other “serious” MSM outlets will NEVER report that the guy died from a heart attack, stoke, or other unrelated cause, even though that is for sure what happened. It is all lies, all the time.
Tom Scharf,
“Cuomo is in serious trouble.”
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That he killed thousands due to his incompetence is good enough reason for him to be working at Burger King. That he will never be driven to that extreme is the real travesty. The guy is a total scumbag.
Lucia,
I looked at the rates for Illinois. Here is my coclusion:
“you should be dancin’ yah, you should be dancin yah”.
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The rates are down to 20% of the peak, and deaths are down almost as much. Which is not to say covid could not resume its attack on Illinois… only that it is now very unllikely. You should be dancin’ ya!
Tom Sharf
“I think they are just running out the clock here as much as possible before they state cause of death “indeterminate†or some such conclusion. This is the reason we have a slow grinding justice system, the mob gets bored and moves on.â€
It’s so frustrating to try and have a rational conversation with my liberal friends over this whole thing. They always hit the “you’re against people killing cops†and since they’re convinced a cop was killed it’s conversation over. Secondarily in this conversation is how many think it was an armed insurrection. So frustrating.
SteveF,
One of the local dance studios is re-starting social dances next Friday. We are going. 🙂
Also tertiarily (?) they make me try to apologize for a handful of idiots on one day in January when I never associated them with rioters who did billions in damage over the summer. I still use the everyone that committed a crime should be prosecuted but it’s not enough. This was an armed insurrection that killed cops. The killed cops narrative is way too powerful.
Lucia
“One of the local dance studios is re-starting social dances next Friday. We are going. “
I’m confused. You seem worried enough about the virus to contemplate schemes for line jumping but yet you’ll go to this. I believe I’m in your age range 55-64 and I’m with you with going but I can’t reconcile your focus on a vaccine. It would be nice to be vaccinated but I’ll wait until it’s really easy to get. Waiting in line sucks more the older I get.
Jerry
I don’t quite know what’s confusing.
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(1) I’m an imaginative person. I always contemplate schemes even if I have no intention of carrying them out. So yes, I’ve contemplated how one would get around rules if they exist. This is not because I’m horribly worried and desparate to get the vaccine. It’s I like to think about whether rules really work.
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(2) I do want the vaccine. It will make me safer. This is also not because I am petrified of going out, but because it’s prudent to be safer.
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(3) I think risk has fallen somewhat and so it can be worth the risk to go out. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to lower my risk further by having a vaccine.
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I”ll get the vaccine as soon as it’s offered me. I have no problem waiting in a line if it turns out that’s necessary. Currently, I can’t get it. I’m 61, not over 65. If the rules were legally bendable in my direction, I’d bend them. I don’t know how this is confusing.
Yes Lucia that makes sense. I feel like we’ve been born into the nerd world of mathematics and engineering but our outlooks are somewhat different. I don’t worry about vaccinations but if my social life revolves around dancing it would change my outlook. As a normal healthy 55+ year old I don’t worry about a vaccine at all. I’m kinda pissed we don’t have our normal poker games in the neighborhood. Buncha 40 to 60 year olds and we don’t even dance.
Jerry,
Yes. Trump f’cked up bigly with his demonstration / riot. There is no defending that as far as I am concerned. I would say so and refuse to engage further on that topic. Trump f’cked up. It doesn’t invalidate conservativism, or his policy achievements. It does not validate progressive positions. It is between you and your conscience to decide if you continue to support the man Donald Trump. For me this was too much; this was the incident that cost Trump my support. But that’s a personal judgement call.
[Edit: There was a little more to it than just the riot that cost Trump my support. His apparent inability to accept the political reality that regardless of whether or not widespread cheating occurred, he effectively lost the election was a big part of it. The idiocy with trying to get Pence to refuse the certification was the rest of it.]
It’s not so much that a cop died during the riot, those two events may be connected to the extent that had there been no riot then possibly the cop doesn’t die. That remains to be seen.
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It’s the framing and narrative by the media of “mob killed cop” that was sold and not retracted once more information was known. They are currently in a phase of “prove a negative” in that once they know for sure the mob didn’t kill the cop then they will eventually report it that way. This is otherwise known as “assertions without evidence” in media speak, or depending on the speaker they are referring to, a lie.
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A riot at the capital is in fact more serious than looting the local Best Buy. However overplaying this into some “insurrection” that almost overturned our democracy by a Viking and a bunch of people taking selfies or stealing Pelosi’s lectern is a bit much. What was going to happen, our government was going to be overturned by a few crazy people who came with pepper spray? They ultimately got bored and just left on their own. It’s being marketed for political advantage, as any political party would do, and it was a gift to the left. The mob’s behavior is indefensible, so don’t do it.
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If the left wants to defend their side’s riot’s then that is fine by me. Politically you make them commit to a standard of what is and isn’t a riot or insurrection which they will usually gladly commit too based on their current events bias. That professed standard of justice comes back to haunt almost always. Believe All Women.
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Getting into a whizzing match over who has the worse extremists is just silly. None of these people on either side is on my team from my point of view. People breaking laws should be punished according to the criminal code. Which means assault on an officer, etc. not insurrection and treason or other trumped up charges.
Tom,
I basically agree with you. I don’t see what difference the death of a cop makes; the rioters were already wrong to riot in the capitol. I wouldn’t lift a finger to defend them. Why would the degree to which they were wrong (I.E., did they kill a cop) make any difference to me.
I think allowing somebody to draw me into arguing about a difference that makes no difference is a trap. Maybe some do it deliberately – if they can say something outrageous enough about ‘insurrection’ they hope they can provoke some conservative into arguing with them. Then they can easily take down that conservative’s defense, since the rioters were wrong anyway you slice it..
Anyways.
Just because your vaccinated doesn’t mean you can change your behavior! No, no, no, NOOOOOOOOOOO. The hive mind has spoken, return to your cave of isolation and we shall notify you when we have deemed it to be safe.
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What I’m not seeing is any of our credentialed nannies in the hive mind actually committing to * any * standard in which they think behavior can be changed, or what behavior can be changed now, and what behavior needs to be wait. It’s been over a year and they apparently have given this no thought beyond stay in your cave until the virus is eliminated.
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Not helpful, not realistic, not inspiring confidence in public health messaging. I actually did see one person actually set a standard, when deaths fall to the level of flu, around 100 / day nationally, then masks can come off. I also saw Fauci said vaccinated people might be able to socialize together soon. Wow, I hope no furniture that might tip over will be in the room at the same time.
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Although I salute somebody making a measurable commitment this is what we are going to see, an extremely conservative recommendation that politicians are going to have to ignore and make up their own standard, thus rendering public health advice meaningless because these people have the wrong incentives.
Tom Scharf,
With US deaths running 2000 per day, 100 per day is a very long way off. With 25% of adults claiming they don’t want the vaccines, reaching 100 deaths per day is likely impossible, no matter how long you wait. I expect that most red states will declare the pandemic effectively over, at least in terms of public policy, once vaccines have been distributed to all who want them… and virtually all deaths are among those who refused vaccination.
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Of course, blue states will probably maintain restrictions so long as democrat voters will tolerate them. The Biden administration will continue to hype the need for permanent restrictions on individuals and businesses….. restricting personal liberty is their wont.
Yes, widespread vaccine availability will trigger the public being done with the pandemic, regardless of what anyone else has to say about it. The experts need to get ahead of this.
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Florida is now over 50% of 65+ getting at least their first shot. DeSantis made a comment that he was seeing demand soften, but no info on what he meant by that. If so, then that’s not a great sign that vaccine uptake will be very far north of 50% when enough supply is available for everyone.
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I find it humorous when elite media discusses vaccine hesitancy lately. The hesitancy among certain groups is justified as righteous and other groups are vilified as being misinformed and conspiracy theorists. It’s so patronizing.
Tom Scharf,
In excusing vaccine hesitancy among Blacks, the key word is Tuskegee, as in “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” Never mind that ended nearly 50 years ago, has been universally condemned and nothing like it has happened since. The press will keep flogging it to keep the memory alive in order to provoke white guilt and help justify things like reparations, affirmative action and diversity training (struggle sessions).
When some people wanted to vaccinate minority groups first as part of an equity initiative (never mind it was completely unconstitutional) it was met with “using us as guinea pigs†response in the same manner. It’s all so tiresome. Perhaps treating people as monoliths of an identity group isn’t really a productive way to run society. I heard Bill Gates was putting GPS chips in vaccines. YouTube is actively suppressing this important information.
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If we don’t get to herd immunity through vaccination + already infected then the virus will burn through the not vaccinated at its earliest opportunity. Those who choose not to be vaccinated can take that risk if they choose. Explain the risks and let them decide like adults. We don’t need clever graduate level communication propaganda. “You or your loved ones might die if you refuse†is enough. The vaccines are effective enough so that the vaccinated shouldn’t care too much about the dissenting group.
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There is a third group of people who cannot be vaccinated due to other health issues who would potentially be the real victims here.
Tom,
Imagine if they had insisted on giving it to minority groups first (whether they wanted it or not) and there had been unforseen side effects! Then they would have been “guinea pigs”.
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Turns out saying “minorities should get it first” may have been precisely the wrong way to build trust.
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Honestly, the best approach is to try to distribute widely, work on making it easy to figure out if you can get it yet, have public service announcements then get out of the way!
Lying without lying. NPR Today:
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“Sea level rise is accelerating around the globe, likely to displace millions of people who live in coastal communities. Forecasts show between 3 and 6 feet of rise by the end of the century, or potentially more, depending on how much heat-trapping pollution humans emit.”
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How does the casual reader interpret this sentence? “Forecasts show between (min) 3 and (max) 6 feet”.
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What are they technically saying for a charitable interpretation? “Forecasts show (up to) between (max of range in IPCC AR5 RCP 8.5) 3 and (max of range in NOAA extreme RCP 8.5) 6 feet”
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I’m a broken record on this, but I can no longer give environmental journalism a pass on these type of statements as they are framed like this continuously. They are intentionally deceptive, noble cause and all.
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Same article, later: “Global sea levels have * already * risen about 8 inches since 1900 on average”. Already? 120 years for 8 inches and the article estimates up to 72 inches in the next 80 years. No comment from Team Science on this massive discrepancy. SSDD.
FYI: This appears to be the alleged Sicknick perpetrator.
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DOJ charges Texas man with dousing 15 officers with chemical spray at Capitol riot
https://www.foxnews.com/us/doj-capitol-riot-texas-man-officers-chemical-spray
Tom Scharf,
Even if we were to say the rate will average twice the rate for the last 27 years, or 6.6 mm per year, the sea level would rise only 21 inches by 2020. That is not going to happen. Environmental journalists are either fools or bald faced liars, and I tend to think it’s the later. They don’t care at all about an honest representation of reality; they want the Green New Deal, with all the foolish lefty green policies and economic damage those would bring.
Pretty sure Steve meant 2100, not 2020; typo.
mark bofill,
Yes a typo, 2100…. maybe I was channeling my inner green crazy-man.
Sacramento City Unified School District:
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“Racial Affinity Groups offer a structure of inquiry and can address many needs… They can cultivate racial solidarity and compassion and support each other in sitting with the discomfort, confusion, and numbness that often accompany white racial awakening.
…
A Racial Affinity Group brings us into clear intention and is a critical step in developing, from the inside out, racial intimacy, literacy, and skillfulness. To separate into same-race groups, in this sense, is not intended to divide us but rather to leverage the fact that, in relative reality, we are racially divided. In a Racial Affinity Group, we use separation to more deeply understand this conditioning.”
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Not intended to divide us? Is that glib statement suppose to prevent the obvious? Haven’t these experiments been done already?! I suppose smoking isn’t meant to cause cancer, so cancer isn’t an outcome…
Yeah.
This was meant to be comedic:
When Wokes and Racists Actually Agree on Everything
But when you get right down to it it’s the simple truth. The woke antiracist dogma is racism. Full stop.
I like the term ‘neoracism’, but it’s racism all the same.
A decent write up about it can be found here.
https://medium.com/unsafe-space/why-does-being-woke-often-sound-racist-3325ebc74cc6
Well I would say that perhaps 50% of science is wrong. It goes downhill fast from there. Berri Weiss’ resignation letter should be required reading for any journalist or informed citizen. The NYT is now doing post journalism narrative promotion. In this climate virtually everything they say will be a half-truth or a falsehood. Then we get to Fauci and the public health establishment who are not honest about how abysmally primitive the science of viral epidemiology is while professing certainty that their latest position on masks is not correct after saying the opposite not too long ago.
And its going to get worse. Amazon (which sells 83% of our books) has decided it will not offer previously OK books. I just want to stock up on ammo, gold, and real property when I think about where this could go. Unfortunately the former is largely unavailable because tens of millions of people see what I see.
And moving to a Red state will be another step we will take. It’s not a guarantee but probably at least you will still be able to defend yourself and your property.
Alabama the Beautiful, Heart of Dixie, would welcome you. You can defend yourself and your property here, no problem. Not uncommon for people to ask you where you go to church, but if you can get past that it’s pretty sweet here.
There are people offering reasoned critiques of “woke education”, but the question is: Will voters listen to them?https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/is-it-racist-to-expect-black-kids?
I would add to that article one other observation: My experience is that kids usually learn the formalism of math before they grasp the theory behind the formalism. I note that understanding a concept without any formalism to put it into practice is utterly useless if you actually have to solve a real problem….. say calculate a complicated heat balance. The suggestion that math, chemistry, thermodynamics, physics, etc are all racist in nature is a level of absurdity I had never imagined could exist. The woke left is a danger not just to liberty, but to all of civilization.
Not that the absurdity needs to be pointed out anymore.
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6 Dr. Seuss books won’t be published for racist images
https://apnews.com/article/dr-seuss-books-racist-images-d8ed18335c03319d72f443594c174513
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I read 4 of these articles, but what they all failed to do is point out which of those images was racist and why, just the assertions. My rule of thumb is the longer you read a cancel culture article without detailing the specific allegation the more absurd it is going to be. It’s as if the journalists aren’t even curious what the accusations are exactly, an unaccountable judge has rendered an opinion and that is enough. And nobody has the courage to pushback on this.
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This kind of crap will get Trump reelected.
John McWhorter has written in many different places and somehow survives at Columbia. I bet he eats lunch alone, ha ha.
https://www.theatlantic.com/author/john-mcwhorter/
There are lots of first and second generation immigrants in engineering/STEM precisely because their language skills are deficient but their math skills are on par with everyone else. Claiming math teaching is somehow angled at a specific identity group is nuts. Math is the case study of how cultural attitudes can affect outcomes.
I was wondering about that too. But don’t worry, the Bee has it covered:
https://babylonbee.com/news/we-found-17-different-instances-of-racism-on-just-one-page-of-a-dr-seuss-book
Steve,
Thanks for the link.
Donald McNeil (NYT reporter fired for using N-word in Peru) tells his side of the story in a 4 part post
https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/nytimes-peru-n-word-part-one-introduction-57eb6a3e0d95
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“Since January 28, I’ve been a jackal circled by jackals.”
Re: Dr. Seuss
To their credit, Snopes shows some explicit examples, the second one in particular.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dr-seuss-racist-cartoons/
Ironically, they’ve twisted themselves into the typical Snopes pretzel in recent days trying to poo-poo the idea of Seuss being “canceled.” (They have a knack of choosing when to be literal and when to use “context”.) We’ll have to see how they address the removal of six Dr. Seuss children’s books from re-publication. Perhaps they’ll careful describe the difference between “cancelling” and “removing.”
I am ironically wondering (if you’ll allow me the rhetorical quesion), is Snopes risking being canceled for showing the cartoons?
Thanks John. I hadn’t seen those and I’d gone looking too.
Snopes canceled? Well, intent doesn’t matter. Until after the deplorable gets canceled, at which point the powers that be go back on their decision and admit that intent *does* matter. So I’d say probably not.
I don’t care if Dr. Seuss was a racist. He wrote great children’s books. I don’t buy that there are ‘undertones of racism’ in his children’s books, but I’ll listen to an argument with particulars if somebody makes it. Till then, nope. I’m going to make a special point of collecting Dr. Seuss books for my grandkids (supposing I ever have any).
I think it’s debatable that merely because the man wrote a cartoon ad in the 1920’s that people find offensive today that he was actually in fact a racist.
We can talk about canceling Dr. Seuss after we discuss canceling the Democratic Party for their many sins before the civil rights era, how bout that.
SteveF (Comment #199283)

February 27th, 2021 at 7:07 am
OK_Max,

“Please provide a reference or two to the racist publications by Theodor Seuss Geisel. I have read his Dr Seuss books to my kids… nothing racist at all; I still read ‘green eggs and ham’ to my 2 1/2 YO granddaughter. Most characters are colors like blue, pink, and green.â€
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SteveF, I apologize for the late reply.
See link for example of Theodor Seuss Geisel’s early work. I believe the drawing is racist.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dr-seuss-racist-cartoons/
Some of his later work (Dr Seuss books) wiill no longer be published because the publisher believes the illustrations are racist.
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/6-dr-seuss-books-wont-be-published-anymore-because-of-racist-and-insensitive-images/
Because I haven’t read these books, I have no opinion on their content.
Gosh, I should have read the comments on Dr.Seuss before posting my last comment. I haven’t been here for a few days and didn’t know the subject was still being discussed.
mark bofill (Comment #199479): “I think it’s debatable that merely because the man wrote a cartoon ad in the 1920’s that people find offensive today that he was actually in fact a racist.”
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Exactly.
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mark bofill: “We can talk about canceling Dr. Seuss after we discuss canceling the Democratic Party for their many sins before the civil rights era, how bout that.”
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Like using the same offensive figure of speech that Geisell used. Against Lincoln in the 1860 Presidential campaign.
OK_Max,
The Snopes article at least presents images which are by today’s standards clearly offensive…. this was in the 1920’s though, an era with very different standards. I am not sure what the Snopes material has to do with “The Cat in the Hat”, etc.
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The CBS news report is completely uninformative…. no illustrations that are deemed offensive are even described, never mind shown.
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Seeing that I read lots of Dr. Seuss books to my kids (and now to my granddaughter), and have seen no offensive images, I remain unconvinced that any of his children’s books should be banned. Show me the meat (offensive images)…. as they say.
Obviously you don’t understand the unequal power dynamics between red fish and blue fish, nor the cultural appropriation of eating green eggs and ham, or the naked prejudice of refusing to eat them under any circumstance.
SteveF (Comment #199484)
“Seeing that I read lots of Dr. Seuss books to my kids (and now to my granddaughter), and have seen no offensive images, I remain unconvinced that any of his children’s books should be banned. Show me the meat (offensive images)…. as they say.”
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As a white person, I may not be sensitive to what non-whites find racially offensive. An example is Uncle Ben’s Rice. I was not offended by this brand, but some blacks were, and the name has been changed.
Correction: The name “Uncle Ben”s” has not been changed, just the picture on the rice package. Related, however, is a change in the name of Aunt Jemima pancake mix.
OK_Max,
I am asking what images from Dr Seuss children’s books are offensive. As far as I know, nobody is saying. Nobody is in a position to judge the claims without being told what images are offensive and why they are offensive.
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There is now (apparently) a run on Dr Seuss books; no surprise there. The trust that holds copyright to his books has apparently agreed to stop publishing 7 of his books….. no explanation of which books or why….. the cancel culture is so mysterious in how it works.
I find some attempt at explanation here:
https://apnews.com/article/dr-seuss-books-racist-images-d8ed18335c03319d72f443594c174513
I can’t begin to estimate how many movies and books, paintings? pictures? have portrayed Asian people eating with chopsticks. I read here that chopsticks have been used in East Asia for the past three thousand years. I am flabbergasted that anyone takes seriously the idea that this is somehow offensive to anyone.
Here I find what appears to be National Geographic images of Mbuti boys wearing grass skirts. The Mbuti people I read in the wiki are Africans.
Are the Mbuti people offensive to progressives? I had thought progressives profess cultural tolerance..
The bulk of these cancellations are from very serious people who worry that somebody might be offended, not from actual offended people. However very serious people don’t need this help themselves, they can take it, they aren’t so fragile as the people they need feel protected from … ummmm … Dr. Seuss and Uncle Ben.
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Rarely is there any effort given to actually determining whether any significant number of people are actually offended. And if a poll is actually done, it doesn’t change a thing.
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New poll finds 9 in 10 Native Americans aren’t offended by Redskins name
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/new-poll-finds-9-in-10-native-americans-arent-offended-by-redskins-name/2016/05/18/3ea11cfa-161a-11e6-924d-838753295f9a_story.html
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Let me count the number of Hollywood movies that treat people from Appalachia or the deep south as educated and sophisticated people. I can’t tell you how upset I am that The Beverly Hillbillies and Buford T. Justice are still around to be shown to impressionable youth. At least we still have Forrest Gump and Daniel Boone to be proud of. Obviously removing these stereotypes would change everything and the next James Bond would be from Alabama. Strangely very serious people aren’t concerned. I’m probably going to take a swim in my cement pond after eating my gopher stew to take my mind off of it.
Yeah. Reminds me of Latinx / Latino. Latino’s don’t use it, overwhelmingly. https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in-four-u-s-hispanics-have-heard-of-latinx-but-just-3-use-it/
It’s all the progressives offended on behalf of the Latinos.
Ahh, the progressive-man’s burden is heavy indeed. Someday these savages will learn to appreciate how they were oppressed and how social justice warriors set them free.
Tucker Carlson had a segment on Dr. Suess pointing that he was actually a big believer in a colorblind society and even wrote a book in the 1960’s about a fictional species that had two kinds of superficial markings and how they realized that it didn’t matter.
This is indeed irrational unless you realize that intersectionality demands that we drop the older ideas of the irrelevance of race and demand that everything be about race, just as it was in the late 19th Century. Once you realize this, its even more scary.
mark bofill,
I have to admit I eat with chopsticks when I go to a sushi restaurant, no matter what country the restaurant is in. I guess I am guilty of cultural appropriation… or mocking Asians? If the Japanese restaurant is in Sao Paulo it is more complicated…. is my use of chop sticks then a lesser offense…. second degree cultural appropriation, with the primary appropriation being by the Brazilian restaurant owner? I wonder, when I had lunch at a tiny, simple, restaurant in Kyoto with some Japanese business associates, was it cultural appropriation for me to eat with chop sticks, or would it have been better if I had eaten everything with my fingers; the restaurant did not have any utensils for customers but chopsticks.
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Then again, Korean restaurants are quite popular in Japan…. and I once went to a French restaurant in Shanghai. Cultural appropriation seems everywhere. Heck, I saw a Japanese wedding where the bride wore a Western style white wedding dress, not the traditional Japanese dress. And don’t even mention me appropriating French béarnaise sauce, which I admit doing for the Valentine’s dinner I cooked a couple weeks back. Or the fabulous Cuban sandwich I had at a lunch counter in Chicago some years ago.
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It is all so tiresome and superficial. And ridiculous. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
You’re dead to me Steve! Dead to me!
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Not because of cultural appropriation. I loathe béarnaise and hollandaise. Only things I ate visiting Paris many years ago I didn’t find absolutely delicious (least as far as I can recall).
mark bofill,
Noted, no béarnaise sauce for you…. which means more for me. Do you hate the other “mother sauces” of french cooking, or just hollandaise and béarnaise?
I don’t know, unwashed deplorable troglodyte that I am. Probably I don’t.
I’ll have to make a point of finding out! I don’t know where to get French cuisine in Huntsville though. It’ll take some research.
mark,
Looks like more options in Birmingham… but a 90 minute drive.
David Young (Comment #199501):
Indeed. The Left’s real problem with Dr. Seuss is not that he was racist. It is that he opposed racism.
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I suppose Oscar Hammerstein is next:
SpaceX SN10 Test Flight again today. These are usually pretty “eventful”.
I’ve got this last remark (hopefully) on Dr. Seuss. The Sneetches and Other Stories” does not appear to me to be consistent with the notion that Geisel was a racist author who had a racist message to hide in his children’s book.
I object to the whole idea BTW of witch hunting for racism in the past. I’ve indulged it this time for the sake of argument, but in general I think it’s counterproductive to conduct retroactive trials of people in history and cancel their works accordingly.
SN10 launch could be in as little as 15-20 minutes!