I said I’d write more about anti-Covid nasal spray! There are tons of possible Covid preventative nasal sprays being studied in some way or other. One has finally passed the gate of becoming commercial at least some place in the world: This is the Nitric Oxide releasing spray called either NONS, SaNotize or EnovidTM depending on where it is sold. It is now registered in New Zealand and according to crowdfuninsider.com:
In New Zealand, SaNOtize has registered its nasal spray with the New Zealand Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Authority, which permits the company to distribute and sell NONS over the counter immediately.
SaNOtize is evidently also applying for emergency use in Canada. Perhaps it will become available there.
Reports about results of phase II trials abound and make quite strong claims. The claims are that NONS is both a prophalactic measure and can pretty much cure light to moderate cases of Covid. Clinical trials arena reports
In a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase II trial that evaluated 79 confirmed cases of Covid-19, SaNOtize’s early treatment significantly decreased the level of SARS-CoV-2, including in patients with high viral loads infected by the concerning UK variant of Covid-19.
Patients treated with SaNOtize’s spray saw an average viral log reduction of 1.362 in the first 24 hours, which corresponds to a decline of around 95%. Within 72 hours the viral load plummeted by more than 99%. No adverse events were recorded in the UK trial nor in earlier Canadian trials that saw over 7,000 patients testing the self-administered treatment.
Given the mode of action of the Nitric Oxide this would be expected to work for most or even all variants. (It is expected to work against many viruses, not just Covid-19.)
Unfortunately, none of the business-PR type articles point to an actual scientific paper. Crowdfundinsider writes
“The study has been submitted to a leading medical journal for review and publication.”
So we all must wait before we can read whether we found the claims convincing.
If it works as claimed it would be a breakthrough. People being tested for suspected Covid-19 could go out, buy spray and treat themselves while waiting for test results. They’d be cured by the time they got their test result back! 🙂
I think vaccines that works day in day out are still more important. People can’t really be relying on spraying something up their nose constantly. Some people remain hesitant about vaccines. Some may not be able to take the vaccine; I have a friend who works in a hospital and reports being allergic to “everything”. She’s undergoing a series of allergy tests to make sure she isn’t allergic to any of the ingredients before she gets vaccinated. Sprays like this would definitely help those who can’t or won’t be vaccinated. They’ll also help in the event that any variant escapes the immunity given by the vaccine. (I’ve had my J&J jab. Yay!!)
Update: Ministry of Health rejects reports virus-killing nasal spray approved for sale in New Zealand. Evidently, contrary to the company’s business PR pages, New Zealand has not approved this for sale. We now await reading whether Israeal also does not approve.
I have used saline rinse for years. I had a very good year [healthwise]. I have a lot of metrics to backup that statement. I hear a lot of people have had good years [healthwise]. To accomplish this, I stopped exercising [I was used to five days a week cardio rehab], stopped going to all doctors [I had been a regular], and spent a lot of time upping my cooking game. Maybe that is the way to do it!
Russel,
From what I can tell, saline only appears to be the placebo in this study. So the NO releasing material evidently works much better than saline spray. My impression is it wasn’t a “rinse” but a “spray”.
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The reason for the caution on what it was: I read a whole bunch of “business” articles, but there is no link to the study.
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As far as I know there is no study on saline rinse and Covid. So “we don’t know” anything empirical to test your theory that it works for Covid.
Lucia, Yes no studies on saline… there is no money to be had on saline. It’s been used since Roman times and has an excellent track record of disease prevention… but it’s dirt cheap. No one will invest in a study on something like that.
You can’t get away with claims like that in the US. The FDA would shut you down in a heartbeat unless you have submitted and they have authorized those marketing claims. This smells a bit suspect, ha ha.
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Now what they are more likely doing is getting the spray authorized for some other use and then a wink and a nod for “off label†use. If the company itself engages in the marketing of off label use then it is time to go to FDA jail, so it is important to check exactly what the company is claiming, not 3rd parties. The less reputable companies can arrange for 3rd parties to do all the off label advertising but this can be rather risky.
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These type of FDA authorizations are basically marketing authorizations. You tell them exactly what you are going to advertise and give them the science to prove it’s true. You cannot say anything else new unless you resubmit new claims.
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If you are building a new version of an existing product category then you test and submit information to show it is just as good as existing products in that category. This take months to complete the review. EKG, pulse oximeter, etc. If you are creating a new product category then the bar to clear is much higher and takes longer. Years and a crapload of money.
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It’s entirely possible a product such as this might actually work and the roadblocks put in place by the FDA are preventing it from being used and costing lives. That’s the price to be paid for preventing snake oil from being sold.
Tom Scharf
There’s a NO releasing spray marketed for sports
It’s oral not nasal. I don’t know how long it’s existed nor if it’s got the same “nano” technology. It does claim “Patented Nanosyzed Absorption Process”
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I think it’s a different company. But yes, the Israeli/Canadian NONS company could probably formulate a “special” blend for “sports performance”. Heck, they might make more money that way.
Tom,
You can read what the Canadian company is claiming in Canada:
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https://sanotize.com/covid-19/
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The last bullet is “Received an IND to allow a clinical trial in the US”.
So they might really be going for this in the US. But of course, maybe not.
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There is no link to any peer reviewed paper nor any preprint. So I still don’t know details.
This is a press release. SaNOtize links to it:
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210315005197/en/UK-Clinical-Trial-Confirms-SaNOtize%E2%80%99s-Breakthrough-Treatment-for-COVID-19
Among other things:
Lucia,
Sounds a little doubtful to me. Maybe nasal sprays are a magic bullet… but I think more likely not. Placebo controlled studies rule.
The rest? Not so much. Perhaps nasal sprays work to significantly reduce infection, but AFAICT, that is far from proven. What is clear is that the vaccines really do reduce symptomatic illness and death by huge margins.
“and is working diligently to determine its efficacy for preventing and treating COVID-19 infections.â€
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I’m not the FDA police but they are getting perilously close to making claims that it’s a treatment or preventive for covid. Denying it and then trying really hard to say it with some excerpts about viral loads and so forth.
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“The study concluded that NONS accelerated clearance of SARS-CoV-2 by a factor of 16-fold versus the placeboâ€. I’m not sure what that really means. It sounds like they effectively spray “bleach†in the noses of people with covid and show it kills the virus in nasal passages. Whether that is helpful to the disease process is above my pay grade.
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The concept I suppose is that it kills it on the way to infecting you and reduces the chances / viral load of the initial infection when used as a preventative.
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The correct study is of course to do a double blind study and count who got symptomatic/severe covid and who didn’t. Perhaps they tried that and the results weren’t so great. The problem here is that this company likely doesn’t have the resources to do a n=20,000 trial even if their product worked, and of course they would need some patent protection to make it work business wise.
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What we don’t know is why other experts probably think this tech doesn’t work or one would expect that it would get funded and tested by Big Pharma or academia. This would be great 12 months ago if it worked.
SteveF,
I think we await the published study! As I said: these are all on “business pages”. I put that up because Tom said to look at what the company claims because the FDA will whomp on them for “false claims”. But it’s worth nothing that those claims are made in Canada. I assume that’s out of the reach of the FDA.
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It would be cool if things are even 1/2 as good as they claim though. We await the peer reviewed article. (Heck, we await the pre-print!!!)
Tom,
Yes. Otherwise it’s just a test to see if you can trigger a false-negative on a Covid test. That would be of interest to some people for some reasons, but it wouldn’t really be helpful to reducing disease. (Some reasons might be: getting a “pass” on your Covid test so you can watch the March Madness playoffs even though you’re actually sick.)
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Yes. An intelligent sounding guy with an Indian accent explained that the theory is that it sort of cripples the spike and prevents the virus from entering cells. then it sort of makes those that replicated inside a cell from leaving. So virus that’s landed in your nasal passages (where there are plenty cells with ACE) can’t really multiply. Then unable to multiply, they die out.
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That’s the theory. (And of course, youtube is where you go for these!)
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We don’t know they think it doesn’t work. It’s quite possible there are lots of irons in the fire and people work one one thing. Heck, even Moderna wasn’t “big Pharma” until now. They were small Pharma.
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The main knock against this is no article discussing details of the results of the study. There was a registered study. So we should read details– but right now, tons and tons and tons of “PR” articles that are based on the press release. No. Details.
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It’s proprietary and company based. So it’s not that suprizing they may not issue a pre-print. But still, until we see the article there is good reason to doubt.
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Unlike that cold fusion company they don’t seem to be asking me for money. But perhaps they are asking people for money. I would be cautious about investing.
Reported Florida covid-19 deaths continue to fall. 7-day trailing average is now 60, and looks to be falling steadily. Since ~25% of those over 65 have so far refused the vaccines, there is likely a floor below which deaths can’t drop for a long time…. 15? 30?
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In spite of many people now being effectively immune due to vaccination, the CDC has instituted rules that for the first time require US citizens to have a negative covid swab test less than three days before being allowed back into the USA whenever they travel outside the USA.
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No rational explanation on offer, and no exceptions. You just have to do it, or you will NEVER be allowed back into the country. Don’t have the hundreds of dollars these tests cost in some places? Visited a place where such tests are simply not available? They don’t care… they are the CDC… they don’t have to care.
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I note that undocumented migrants asking for “asylum” are never subjected to this requirement at the border. They are immediately allowed into the country. Gotta love Biden’s clown-car style government: it’s an evil and stupid joke.
Fauci was at it again saying 75% to 80% of the populace needed to be vaccinated, the oracle of all Science once again makes the simple mistake that the already infected count too. Then an article in The Atlantic started posing the theory that even if we hit 80% that since the vaccinations are not going to be homogenous (Republicans!) in the population then blah blah blah doom, gloom. A precursor to the oncoming shame festival. This after they reviewed data on previous virus vaccinations that show the US will probably get around 60% to 70% based on flu vaccinations and such. Vaccine hesitancy is pretty stable over decades, except for kids.
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It’s all soooooo tiring. Everyone in journalism wants to be Cassandra. That’s fine as a minor, but when that’s the hive mind it’s not.
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Here The Atlantic does its best to declare Florida’s covid performance sub par.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/the-curious-case-of-floridas-pandemic-response/618360/
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He misses the point entirely. If you compare FL’s performance to how * the media presented it and predicted it *, it did super great. Otherwise it is about average and was a useful experiment to show that government policy wasn’t that important, which makes progressives mad for whatever reason. Now this guy is constructing a straw man that FL is number one in everything (“But the national narrative of an exceptionally white-hot Florida economy doesn’t match the statistical record of its performance”) and demonstrating it is not. I can tell you with certainty that narrative is non-existent in the elite media.
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Mask compliance in my area is near 100% still. 90% of Floridians behave exactly the same as 90% of other states. Because any policy that is below China style draconian lockdowns doesn’t work well, the partial lockdowns haven’t been effective and drawing distinctions is wishful thinking.
There is also statements being made that the vaccines only last 4-6 months. So that’s 200 million vaccinations, in two doses, two to three times a year.
Yet another perfect test case for the media, and I would say quite a predictable outcome.
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As we know the media has been pushing an anti-Asian hate crime narrative in the Atlanta shooting even though there is little to no evidence that is was based on white supremacy / racial animus. The shooter says it’s a sex addiction thing. Perhaps more data will be forthcoming but so far, nothing.
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Fast forward. A shooter “Ahmad Al-Issaâ€, apparently an immigrant from Syria, kills 10 people in Boulder yesterday who are mostly white. What do you think is going to happen in the media? I don’t think they will be going down the hate crime lane. It looks like another case of crazy person with a gun.
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They will cover this one like they should be covering all of them. Facts and not jumping to conclusions on motives until more is known. But if one wanted to push a narrative …. Atlanta = White supremacy narrative, Boulder = Firearms access narrative.
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Off topic, ridiculous statement at CNN: “The weapon used in the attack was an AR-15-style pistol modified with an arm brace, according to the source.â€. This makes no sense at all.
On a lighter note, the attack on Substack is picking up speed. It’s a free country and if you don’t like working for the MSM you can just go write somewhere else if you think people are that interested in what you have to say. Good luck with that, ha ha.
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The very serious people now say Substack’s policy to prepay some writers (like an advance) is a way to force problematic views of nefarious VC’s on the unsuspecting populace and it.must.be.stopped.
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Apparently he who laughs last, laughs the hardest.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adding-my-data-point-to-the-discussion
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https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/financial-transparency
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-all-just-displacement
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It seems people are rather interested in opinions outside the hive mind and willing to pay for it.
Y2K lives 😂
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Spain’s child COVID-19 deaths – reported as the “highest rate†among developed countries in a recent study – are based on false data.
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“Those errors are when introducing people of more than one hundred years, it has happened that they are figurative as that those deceased have 1 year, or 2, or 3 instead of 101, 102 or 103 “
Tom,
People are willing to pay to have their own voices heard via those paid authors on Substack and the like. The truth is: the politics that dominate MSM are wildly disconnected from the average politics of the country. And even worse than that, the only reaction of the “woke” in the MSM to very nearly half the voters opting for Trump over Biden is that nearly half the populace must be evil. These people are so un-selfaware and so certain of their self righteousness that they are incapable of seeing reality, or even listening to a different POV. They are intellectual trash.
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Freddie DeBoer has sympathy for these folks… for how they are underpaid and have little job security. I have none; I think they deserve worse, much, much worse. Minimum wage manual labor, waiting tables, or maybe tending bar are all far more suitable and productive jobs than the ‘journalism’ they use to damage the social fabric and advance insane policies.
“The weapon used in the attack was an AR-15-style pistol modified with an arm brace, according to the source.â€
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That’s an actual thing. The ATF set out regulations defining what a certain type of gun consists of and the gunsmiths create weapons that fit within the descriptions, which is how you end up with an AR15 pistol.
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“An AR pistol is an AR-15 minus the stock and, usually, long barrel. Since the guts are still the same, an AR pistol is equipped with a naked buffer tube in lieu of a stock, which, on a rifle, would be built around the tube.
More recently, AR pistols have seen a jump in popularity thanks to a device called a stabilizing brace. While these braces look and can function like a stock, they’re intended to fit around or against the user’s forearm. As the name implies, the brace helps the user stabilize the gun during use.
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By the numbers, an AR pistol is an AR-style firearm without a buttstock and a barrel under 16 inches in length. In comparison, a rifle has a barrel 16 inches or longer and is intended to be fired from the shoulder, according to ATF rules.”
Tom Scharf,
Assuming that Fauci actually believes what he says to the press, it’s quite clear that he believes that having been infected does not confer immunity. I think this may be because unless there was a double blind study, it isn’t real. So in spite of the data that says reinfection is extremely rare, vaccination is the only answer. To quote Bugs Bunny: “What a maroon!”
Pretty much the same for how long vaccination confers immunity. Since the vaccination trials started in late July, we only have maybe seven months of data. The (extremely) conservative view is then that immunity doesn’t last for more than six months, again with zero evidence of significant infection of those vaccinated in the trials getting infected now. A more correct view would be that vaccination lasts at least six months with no idea of the upper limit.
Given the (alleged) perps name, it’s (very) slightly surprising that there has been zero speculation about the CO shooting being a terrorist attack. But, of course, the Atlanta shooting must be a hate crime. I love the way the media insist on taking the Atlanta ‘Spas’ at face value. They’re brothels in all but name.
MikeN
Sure. And there are statements being made that the evidence we have is pointing to durable immunity. The only “evidence” they might only last 4-6 months is the “non-evidence”. That is, it’s “we don’t know because they haven’t existed very long so data to prove they last doesn’t exist.”
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That said: if they turn out to last 4-6 months, I’ll get a vaccine every 4-6 months. I’ve always said that’s not a problem for me and it remains a non-problem for me. My cat too insulin twice a day. I injected it. a vaccine every 4 months is not a problem.
Lucia,
Yes, all the evidence is that the immunity will be long lasting, with no evidence of short duration. It is a question like “How do know a meteor will not strike the Earth and kill everyone next week?” The answer is: we will have to wait until next week to be sure, but all evidence is that this is a very unlikely outcome.
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Some journalists are actually pleading to not end the covid shut-down policies “when we are only a few months away from success”. Pure garbage. The fatalities are falling everywhere in the states, and very soon risk of death from covid will be something you choose to have…. by not getting vaccinated. At that point, there is no logical justification for continuing destructive covid policies.
SteveF
I also think those are jobs that the proverbial “aspiring actor” takes while trying to hit it big. Some hit it big, some don’t. It’s not entirely clear why doing those things while trying to establish your “voice” in journalism isn’t just as fair as when trying to get an acting gig.
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There are difficulties around sustaining hard nosed investigative reporting or even “true” news. But I suspect almost none of the people complaining about the substack giving advances to the Matt Yglesias of the world were really doing investigative. I best most just wish they could make big bucks being pundits. Or for some reason, they think all pundits should pool earnings and divvy up equally. Or (and there is reason to suspect this) some wanted the power to shut Matt Yglesias up. Matt is “somewhat left” while many of them want only those who are “super progressive left” to have a voice.
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They were gaining that power before sub-stack. Then that power vanished because the people the wanted to give a choice to bend-to-their will or lose columns found better landing places.
DeWitt,
“They’re brothels in all but name.”
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WHAT?!? Just because a naked young woman rubs her oil-slick body all over yours… for money… doesn’t mean it’s a brothel. /sarc
I keep hearing about long-haul COVID. Here’s a countervailing opinion piece from the WSJ:
OTOH, a lot of the responders to the survey had what they thought was the disease early on when people with mild symptoms weren’t tested at all and not even all of those with severe symptoms were tested.
DaveJR,
Thanks for that.
Lucia,
“Matt is “somewhat left†while many of them want only those who are “super progressive left†to have a voice.”
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The evidence (see the NYT mutinies by young reporters) is that most of them want nobody to the right of Che Guevara to have a public forum of any kind for their views. Manual minimum wage labor is what they really need, not jobs in journalism…. and society would then be much better off to boot.
Looks like AstraZeneca stepped in it again, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is basically accusing them of misrepresenting their results in the US. The company says it will update them this week. At this point, heads need to roll at this company.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-health-officials-raise-concerns-over-astrazeneca-vaccine-data-11616485793
“In an early-morning statement, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said it had been informed by the independent data-monitoring board working with AstraZeneca on the U.S. trials that the drug company might have used out-of-date information in its public disclosure of the vaccine’s effectiveness. The day before, AstraZeneca released interim data from a large-scale U.S. trial that it said found its Covid-19 vaccine to be 79% effective in preventing symptomatic disease.”
DeWitt,
I have a long time friend who is suffering from long Covid. I don’t want to say much more but: my husband and I can report she appears to be typical of the long Covid population.
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I read Some With Long-Haul COVID See Relief After Vaccination before I saw the WSJ article. When I read that vaccination “cured” long covid. I have a theory why. Not going to share it. . .
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I once knew a woman who told me she had Chronic Fatigue syndrome. Evidently, she was on disability for it. I never knew a person with a more active hobby life. (Showing dogs. Singing in choirs. Yada yada. She seemed to have plenty of energy. I said something in surprise when she told me of her chronic fatigue. She explained to me having a lot of energy was quite possible with chronic fatigue syndrome. I wasn’t going to argue. )
Tom
I guess it’s a good thing we are donating our AstraZeneca to Canada and Mexico.
lucia,
CFS reminds me of ADHD, or maybe the other way around. There may be something to it, but it’s almost certainly highly over-diagnosed now. As I remember, psychosomatic health problems often respond well to placebos.
Another thing in the WSJ today is a lifetime analysis of carbon emissions of an electric vs a gasoline powered car. Over 200,000 miles, the electric vehicle emits 46% less carbon than a similar gasoline powered vehicle (36 vs 78 tons). The problem is, that’s nowhere near good enough. You need at least a 90% reduction to counter the carbon emissions from things you can’t reduce (at least without Carbon Capture and Storage), like calcining calcium carbonate to calcium oxide to make concrete. I think many CCS schemes that have been proposed are far more dangerous than burying nuclear waste.
DeWitt,
Yes. “Everyone” has ADHD these days. It’s especially bad that standardize test writer like the college boards created accommodations but then doesn’t report that accommodations were made to colleges. It think it’s pretty obvious that if someone has ADHD to the extent of needing an accommodation, they will likely continue to need accommodations for everything. But these accommodations are going to vanish on the job. No one is going to give the brain surgeon, nurse practicioner, lawyer and so on an “accommodation” so that they do less in the same amount of time. It doesn’t make any sense.
Lucia,
“She explained to me having a lot of energy was quite possible with chronic fatigue syndrome.”
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You get that from crossing chronic fatigue syndrome with extreme manic phase of bipolar illness. Ether that or it’s just lying. I favor the latter.
lucia,
IMO, ADHD is largely a construct and not a real disorder. It’s claimed to result from a chemical imbalance and can be treated with drugs. The problem is that the supposed imbalance has never been identified and demonstrated clinically. Treating COVID-19 with hydroxychloroquine, zinc and azithromycin has far more clinical support than ADHD.
But then I think that a lot of psychiatrists and psychologists are little better than witch doctors or scientologists. Anyone remember the recovered memory flap from a few years ago? That did a lot of damage to a lot of people.
“The board of experts monitoring the clinical trial of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine determined that the vaccine is actually between 69 percent and 74 percent effective at preventing symptomatic disease—not 79 percent effective, as AstraZeneca announced Monday.
According to a report by The Washington Post, the trial’s Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) had been in meetings with the company through February and March and saw data that indicated the 69-to-74 percent efficacy range. The board “strongly recommended†that the latest information be included in the company’s Monday press release.
However, the press release Monday only stated an efficacy of 79 percent and, in a second press release Tuesday, the company noted that they had used a data cut-off of February 17.”
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“The DSMB is concerned that AstraZeneca chose to use data that was already outdated and potentially misleading in their press release,†the letter states. The data “they chose to release was the most favorable for the study as opposed to the most recent and most complete. Decisions like this are what erode public trust in the scientific process.â€
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/03/authorities-raise-red-flags-about-astrazenecas-vaccine-press-release/
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Own goal. What a f*** up. Although this isn’t really a huge deal in the grand scheme, given the pressure this company is under it cannot afford to do stuff like this. The head regulatory people at this company really need to be fired.
Shades of Philip K. Dick’s ‘The Minority Report‘ (and the film starring Tom Cruise).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-de-blasio-11616537821?mod=opinion_major_pos4
Let’s see, shootings in NYC are up 42% over the same period in 2020, but investigating precrimes (see above link) and delivering warnings is more important. Meanwhile, stop-and-frisk is still anathema.
Re: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. When practicing workers’ comp law, I had 2 clients diagnosed with CFS. They had almost exactly the same personality. Extremely headstrong and very hard to reason with. If I were to run into a 3rd, I would know it in 5 or 10 minutes.
Lucia, After 2,000 years Roman doctors are still advocating saline rinse….. “We advocate the inclusion of Saline Nasal Irrigations and ethanol oral rinses as additional measures to the current public health measures, to prevent and control the transmission of any respiratory infectious disease, including COVID-19.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7436790/
Russel,
I’m not saying it doesn’t work. I agree with you there is no money on the table to study it. It probably will never be studied! I’m not sure a double blind one is even possible. I think it’s entirely possible it’s helpful.
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I also think it’s possible some of these sprays may pan out. But as others have pointed out, in the case of the pricey over the counter sprays, they may take the path that ‘dietary supplements’ do. Third parties may allude to possible dramatic benefits in all sorts of area. Then people will play plenty to self medicate. That’s a big business in the US. (Though, perhaps actual nasal spray needs some FDA authorization? Ingestibles don’t. That’s why we have so many health supplements.)
What is the end game for covid-19 in the USA? there has been a substantial drop in confirmed cases…. about 57,000 yesterday, but that drop has leveled out and is rising slightly in some places. As people become less concerned about killing granny, it is very likely a significant level of infections among those not at significant risk of severe illness or death will continue for a long time….. unless a large enough fraction of younger people opt for the vaccine to drive the overall rate of cases much lower than today. I just can’t see a large majority of 18 to 35 YO’s opting for a vaccine which at best saves them from an unpleasant cold.
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In contrast with cases, deaths continue to fall rapidly, reaching 975 yesterday. This is no doubt in large part due to due to vaccination of the most vulnerable in most places.
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But just as in individual states, nationwide a significant fraction of the at-risk population (~25%) has refused the vaccination. Combined with a continuing background of covid-19 infection, there will be a continuing stream of people who die from covid-19, almost indefinitely. My SWAG is that deaths are unlikely to fall below 150 per day nationwide any time in the next 6 – 12 months…. with nearly 100% of those deaths among vulnerable people who refused the vaccines. This is, IMO, nothing short of tragic.
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But worse than that, 150 deaths per day will be used by many politicians (and their idiot vassals in the MSM) to justify permanent crazy covid policies, not to mention permanent ’emergency’ taking of personal liberty. That would be the far greater tragedy.
SteveF
Some students I tutor have volunteered they are eager to take it. That said: they are in a particular demographic. Prosperous parents, college bound. Many are Desi and have relatives in medicine or tech fields. I’m guessing that demographic is more likely to take it even if all they are averting is being noticeably sick rather than death. (I’m happy to have it be less likely I’ll be sick. Not dying is also a benefit.)
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Still, I do think the acceptance rate will level off. We’ll see what it really is soon. I hope Jim can get his vaccine soon. Everyone will be eligible by April 12 and perhaps supply will be sufficient for him to get a vaccine within a week of that.
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The WSJ reported moderna is working on a combined flu/covid vaccine that would also cover variants as they come out. That would be nice. I do think we will see some deaths from Covid every year for a long time– possibly forever. We see that will flu. (I haven’t checked, but I bet we have some TB deaths every year. We have some pneumonia deaths and we don’t require vaccine for either of those!)
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Some people still don’t get flu vaccines, but flu mostly doesn’t get out of hand because there is a base of immunity from past illness and past vaccine. It’s boosted by vaccines each year. That’s what we are going to see. Obviously, we need to get back to “normal life” while accepting that we aren’t at zero cases or zero death.
Lucia,
“Many are Desi and have relatives in medicine or tech fields.”
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What is Desi?
noun: desi; plural noun: desis; noun: deshi; plural noun: deshis
a person of Indian, Pakistani, or Bangladeshi birth or descent who lives abroad.
SteveF (Comment #200452): “but that drop has leveled out and is rising slightly in some places.”
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Which raises the question of background noise and false positives.
Curiously, it looks like the places where cases ar rising are largely the places that led the rise at this time last year.
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SteveF: “I just can’t see a large majority of 18 to 35 YO’s opting for a vaccine which at best saves them from an unpleasant cold.”
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What fraction of young adults get the flu shot?
I would think that the percentage of young, healthy people who have gotten vaccinated would increase if it becomes clear that the vaccine is safe and effective in the long term. If only because the number vaccinated will be cumulative.
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SteveF: “In contrast with cases, deaths continue to fall rapidly, reaching 975 yesterday. This is no doubt in large part due to due to vaccination of the most vulnerable in most places.”
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But deaths are not dropping faster than cases. If anything, deaths are dropping more slowly, from eyeballing the Financial Times graphs.
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SteveF: “But just as in individual states, nationwide a significant fraction of the at-risk population (~25%) has refused the vaccination.”
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Many of the 25% are surely just taking a wait-and-see attitude. Many more have already had the virus. So 75% of the population getting vaccinated in the first wave should be enough to produce herd immunity. That may not drive the virus into extinction, but it should drive the levels down by way more than 75%.
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SteveF: “Combined with a continuing background of covid-19 infection, there will be a continuing stream of people who die from covid-19, almost indefinitely”
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In other words, it will be like influenza, rhinovirus, the other coronaviruses, adenovirus, etc.
Over 1/3 of the population has been vaccinated. Shouldn’t we be seeing an effect?
Annnnnd….. it’s gone… (Cuomo out of the news so I expect that’s the end of that).
DaveJR,
I don’t know about that. Here are some recent pieces:
https://www.nytimes.com/article/cuomo-impeachment.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/nyregion/impeachment-andrew-cuomo.html
Indian, Pakistani, Bengali.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desi
The potential rise in the next couple months will likely be almost entirely due to the takeover of the UK variant. (Note how it’s OK to say “UK variant”, but “Wuhan virus” was racist, ha ha).
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The interesting thing to watch will be the death trend. The death trend probably has another 3 weeks of declines built in at the moment, but should see either a leveling off or further declines with the vaccine effect. This will be counterbalanced by increased risk as places open up because of vaccinations will hit their thresholds.
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In other words, anybody who thinks they know what will happen beyond it’s going to get better is lying. Globally though we are a long way from herd immunity and there are 100’s of millions of new infections and trillions of replications forthcoming which can produce a vaccine evading variant. Realistically we should be paying the vaccine companies to overbuild their vaccine production so we can get out a vaccine update in a few months.
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I think once vaccines are readily available they will be taken to schools and vaccinations can occur on the premises. Even though this will have a marginal real effect, it will bump up the vaccination numbers. 65+ vaccination rate is ~70% now which is pretty good, hopefully it can get to 80%.
Mike M,
I look at the Worldometer graphs (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/) which seem to be accurate and up to date. There is a lag (longer now than early in the pandemic) between cases and deaths, and the overall “profile” of cases is sharper (faster rises and faster falls) than deaths. But cases have declined only slightly since late February, while there is no indication that is happening with deaths. I expect deaths will continue to fall to somewhere under 500 per day within a few weeks (lower than at any time since March 2020).
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“Many of the 25% are surely just taking a wait-and-see attitude. Many more have already had the virus. So 75% of the population getting vaccinated in the first wave should be enough to produce herd immunity.”
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I hope you are right about waiting and seeing, but many say they will never accept the vaccine. It doesn’t matter much for the under 50 crowd, but it matters a lot for the elderly. WRT people who already got the virus: It is likely somewhere near 20% (including asymptomatics).. that still leaves ~20% of the elderly who will remain susceptible to severe covid-19 infection.
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I will be shocked if 75% of the adult population gets vaccinated…. young people who know they are at little risk are not going to be as motivated as older people who know they are at risk.
Still no autopsy report on Sicknick 10 weeks later. The MSM is parading around proof that he was hit with bear spray. Fine.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/24/us/officer-sicknick-capitol-riot.html
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I have not found a single MSM article that has asked their mighty collection of experts who know and Follow The Science if bear spray can be fatal, whether this is common, and under what circumstances this occurs. “Sicknick was killed by a fatal reaction to bear spray”, Arm wave. End of story. Perhaps this is true but I think we need more evidence this actually happened.
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On the cause of death potential coverup issue, there may be a more mundane reason for this. I think death benefits to survivors are greatly enhanced when it is a “line of duty” death. The police and media are incentivized to not look really hard at this.
Does anyone know where I can get downloadable data on cases and deaths? CDC sort of has it, but in a form that appears to be deliberately designed to make it hard to work with.
SteveF (Comment #200470): ” WRT people who already got the virus: It is likely somewhere near 20% (including asymptomatics)”.
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It was close to that, and possibly a lot higher, before the last wave. It is probably more like 30-40% by now.
I rassled the CDC data into submission and looked at case fatality rates from Sept 1 to present. I used delays of 1-4 weeks, it looks like 3 weeks works best. There is no clear pattern, but there might be a slight downward trend.
The most recent CFR is about 1.6%, the same as the average for the 7 months. It is down from about 1.9% two weeks ago and up from about 1.3% a month ago. The full range of CFR was 1.1% to 2.0%.
The calculated CFR seems to have a quasi-periodic variation. Probably due to reporting issues. For instance, there was a holiday dip in both deaths and cases; surely a reporting artifact. That produced a dip in CFR followed 3 weeks later by a spike in CFR.
Tom Scharf,
Bovine excrement. A fatal reaction would have been anaphylaxis which would almost certainly have happened within a few minutes of exposure, certainly less than one hour. The symptoms would not look anything like a stroke either.
Mike M.,
SteveF is convinced that the ratio of total infections to confirmed infections is ≤ 2.5. Pfizer found 38% of the population had antibodies in February (personal communication). A positive antibody test will likely undercount actual infections by up to a factor of two.
The Germans and other European countries are proving that flattening the curve does not change the area and ‘crush’ the virus because you still have a large population of susceptibles and lockdowns are not sustainable. You need ~80% of the population to not be susceptible to achieve herd immunity. Immunity can only be achieved by infection or vaccination. There may be some T cell cross-reactivity from other coronavirus infections, but it’s likely, IMO, that only results in a mild to asymptomatic infection and may not prevent those people from spreading the infection.
If 25% of elderly do not get the vaccine, they are still having a much lower chance of getting infected since so many others have gotten the vaccine or been infected. If the virus itself is not able to spread much, does it matter if they are not vaccinated?
There is the issue that the virus is airborne, but if the overall community incidence is low, then being at a high level in the air is a low chance.
Perhaps what is needed is for health inspectors to be able to test the air inside an establishment, with authority to shut down immediately if the virus exceeds a certain level. If they had done that originally, business owners would have upgraded to Level 13 filters and the numbers would have been lower to begin with.
MikeN,
Do you mean “does it matter” as a normative statement? Or do you mean will the rate at which they get sick and die be different than if they get vaccinated?
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The answer to the latter: if some of the elderly don’t get vaccinated, they will be at continue to be at elevated risk of getting sick and dying. There will be a risk they infect others. They will then do so where they otherwise would have not. But, as you noted, this risk will be lessened by the fact that many surrounding them are vaccinated or have achieved immunity in some other ways.
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The other risk with people being infected is over all mutation rate is going to be related the number of people infected. So the non-vaccinated increase the pool in which mutations can happen. So those who want protection may need a vaccine booster sooner because of the existence of the unvaccinnated of any age.
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Better filters would provide them some protection relative to lesser filters.
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As to whether any of this “matters”, that’s a value judgement. Some people seem to have thought it didn’t matter if tons of elderly died in the first place. Some seem to have a fatalistic approach that what will be will be. Others think every life lost is some sort of catastrophe. I think something in between.
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Besides that, it’s a bit difficult to decide if something “matters” if you don’t specify in what context. I don’t think the death of 1 elderly person is a good reason to shut down an entire economy until Covid is gone from this earth. I do think overloaded hospitals with the prospect of millions of death can sometimes be a reason to put some regulations in place and change habits. (I thought my doctors office having no one in the waiting room was a good thing.)
MikeN,
” business owners would have upgraded to Level 13 filters”
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That it were so simple. The pressure drop across a highly efficient filter is much greater than across a less efficient filter. In some situations there is plenty of pressure drop available for the air handling system (like in airliners), but in normal structures? It will be hit or miss…. some will just not be able to go with very efficient filters without changing their ventilation system to much higher power fans. Doable? Yes. Cheap? No. Then there is the issue of residence time. Having a super filter doesn’t help unless there is also tremendous turnover of the air….. which makes everything more complicated and costly.
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Another option is mounting UV lamps on the ceiling to damage the virus RNA and deactivate it. Again: Doable? Yes. Cheap? No.
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People should just get the damned vaccine.
Florida’s death toll finally collapsed in the last month. 7 day avg:
Feb 22: 166
Mar 24: 51
https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/data/coronavirus/en/
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The cases are down about 3x overall as well. It’s difficult to tell how much is due to the “natural” decline of deaths and how much is the vaccine effect. It’s likely to decline further over the next week or so.
The vaccinations will effectively decrease contact rates by 3x to 4x depending on the rate of vaccinations. This should reduce R accordingly. How all that pans out is unclear. All things being equal we should see future breakouts with less steep increasing slopes. All things aren’t equal with the variants.
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That faster the unvaccinated get infected, the faster we reach herd immunity.
Tom scharf,
“That faster the unvaccinated get infected, the faster we reach herd immunity.”
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Yes, but the unvaccinated over ~50 may well die in the process, which will cause endless political hysteria. They are welcomed to die if that is their wish of course, but it is going to have bad public policy consequences. How to convince them to get the vaccine? I don’t know the answer and it is a very big problem if people want to return to normal lives.
Quick, which is the satire, based on title only!
1) Kamala Harris To Hold Discussion With Harvey Weinstein On Empowering Women And Girls
2) Kamala Harris to hold discussion with Bill Clinton on ’empowering women and girls’
[Edit: Not that easy to tell anymore, huh!]
mark bofill,
Just remember, Bill Clinton had more women visit the oval office than any president since Kennedy…. you could even say he ’empowered’ women in a certain way. Willy Brown did even more to ’empower’ Kamala Harris, over a long period, so she won’t have much to learn from Clinton.
It just amazes me though Steve. How is it that anybody thought that was going to be a good idea, Bill Clinton on empowering women? Heck, I’d think even Bill himself would laugh at the idea and say no thanks to an offer to do that.
It’s almost as if it’s on purpose, although that’s nonsensical as well. Nothing to be gained by making Kamala look any crazier than she already does, with that inappropriate laugh she can’t seem to get a handle on.
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[Edit: Oh. Rhetorical question. I apologize. I don’t see how anybody would be likely to think having Bill Clinton speak on empowering girls and women would be a good idea, is what I meant to say.]
Eating Brexit Crow
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Johnson Hopes Vaccine Success Can Inoculate Him Against Brexit Critics
The British prime minister is riding high on a strong vaccine rollout, despite a bumpy departure from the European Union and earlier pandemic missteps.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/world/europe/boris-johnson-vaccine-brexit.html
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I especially enjoyed this part, after the elite media paraded uncountable experts pre-Brexit on how it was going to be a disaster:
“The monthslong shutdown of much of Britain’s economy will also complicate the task of identifying the negative effects of Brexit, since they are likely to be lost in a sea of red ink. And long before the pandemic, economists predicted that Brexit’s biggest cost would be to dampen economic expansion, an effect that would compound almost imperceptibly over many years, rather than create a sudden shock.”
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So … now the predicted effects will be imperceptible? Ha ha.
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” .. the task of identifying the * negative * effects”. Freudian slip no doubt, in theory there would also be a task of identifying positive effects, or just effects.
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Yet another chapter on why trusting experts and trusting expert prediction, especially on political topics, are completely different things.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #200480): “SteveF is convinced that the ratio of total infections to confirmed infections is ≤ 2.5. Pfizer found 38% of the population had antibodies in February (personal communication). A positive antibody test will likely undercount actual infections by up to a factor of two.”
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Indeed. Looking at the CFR, it seems unlikely that the ratio of undetected cases to positive tests has decreased by more than a factor of two since last spring, when the ratio was about 10:1. So 30 million positive tests implies at least 150 million cases. So probably more than half the adult population. And that ignores the people who have T cells from an infection but no antibodies.
mark bofill (Comment #200497): “It just amazes me though Steve. How is it that anybody thought that was going to be a good idea, Bill Clinton on empowering women?”
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In isolation, that is indeed amazing. But in context, it is not strange at all. Just one more example of how incredibly arrogant and out of touch our ruling class has become.
DeWitt,
“Pfizer found 38% of the population had antibodies in February (personal communication).”
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February 2020, or February 2021? Where? In what state(s) or country(ies)? If February 2021, then does that include people who had received a vaccination?
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I don’t mind being mistaken…. it would be better if the infection rate were higher…. I just what to know where your data comes from.
It’s a tad bit ironic that the public health experts who don’t want to count infected toward herd immunity are the very same people who are tasked in determining what that background infected number actually is, and have failed miserably in doing so in spite of being given an ocean of money.
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FYI, WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/herd-immunity-is-near-despite-faucis-denial-11616624554
“Data from the California Department of Public Health, released earlier this month, show that while only 8.7% of the state’s population has ever tested positive for Covid-19, at least 38.5% of the population has antibodies against the novel coronavirus. Those numbers are from Jan. 30 to Feb. 20. Adjusting for cases between now and then, and accounting for the amount of time it takes for the body to make antibodies, we can estimate that as many as half of Californians have natural immunity today.
The same report found that 45% of people in Los Angeles had Covid-19 antibodies. Again, the number can only be higher today. Between “half and two-thirds of our population has antibodies in it now,†due to Covid exposure or vaccination, Mayor Eric Garcetti said Sunday on “Face the Nation.†That would explain why cases in Los Angeles are down 95% in the past 11 weeks and the positivity rate among those tested is now 1.7%.â€
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These kind of numbers are why I think reaching 50% vaccination status will be very meaningful for future trends.
SteveF,
As I said, that was a personal communication from someone in the Pfizer trial who didn’t go into the details. I assume that’s from all the vaccine trial participants, but I don’t know for sure. I think you can find a list of all the Pfizer trial sites on-line. Trial participants also may not be a representative random sample of the population.
Tom Scharf,
Assuming the multiplier is six, then over half the population of the US has immunity from infection and recovery. But that also means that about half the people getting vaccinated are already immune whether they know it or not.
WRT to top of the claim about the nasal spray: It’s possible the claim it is approved for over the counter sale in New Zealand is a big fat lie. Of course, it could be a misunderstanding. (We can debate which we suspect. 🙂 )
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2021/03/coronavirus-canadian-company-falsely-claims-it-has-approval-to-sell-virus-killing-nasal-spray-in-new-zealand.html
So, it appears not only is it not approved for over the counter use, it’s not even the type of thing NZ would approve for over the counter use.
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I bet the business pages saying it’s approved will mostly not be updated.
Lucia, Snake oil salesmen have to make a living too.
The lack of a link to a paper was a sign things might not be right. Outright lying it was going to be sold over the counter did not occur to me! I just figured New Zealand must have much easier rules for letting something be marketed than we have.
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Most the snake-oil businesses do avoid outright lying about things like government approvals. Those are easy to check. They usually shade things. Right now the promotions are generally “submitted for approval” or “being tested”. These claims are generally true. (Tests for Xylotol spray and Iota-Carrageenan are to be completed in January 2022. There is a registered test for the NONS type spray it is is scheduled to complete about now.)
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I guess I’ll wait to see if the paper ever comes out! I had been assuming the paper would come out. Now I’m not sure. This could be “cold fusion” by those two guys. (Trying to remember the technology that will be available but always 6 months from now.)
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The ingredients do look fairly harmless. Of course, the same would be said for saline. But this NO spray will likely be expensive so the harm will be to the pocket book and by creating a risk people will not go to the doctor and get real treatment.
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Lucia, I am often amused at the ingenious ways these hucksters find to sell miracle cures. I am amazed at how many gullible saps there are that fall for it too.
The NO is already sold in supplements for body builders. These are powers and oral spray. I have a suspicion nasal spray might automatically be considered somehow medical.
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I don’t know the regulations. But I know lots supplements can get by because they can be “food”. They then just need to be careful about precise claims. Nasal spray is not “food” even if the ingredients are exactly the same. So perhaps they fall under the regulated umbrella more quickly. I know I don’t see nasal sprays under the various supplement counters.
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Obviously, one could transfer stuff to a nasal spray bottle.
Lucia, I do a lot of research for my supplements. https://labdoor.com/, WEBMD, MAYO, and Consumer Reports are my go-tos.
lucia (Comment #200544): “The NO is already sold in supplements for body builders. These are powers and oral spray.”
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I am not sure that is true. I don’t see how you can put NO in a powder. I think they are actually things that are claimed to enhance the body’s production of NO.
Well… things that claim to be NO supplements are sold. See
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Nitric+oxide&ref=nb_sb_noss
I thought I saw one as a powder. Maybe those are all pills and the one spray.
Ok. I clicked. This one claims the beet powder causes your body to make NO! So maybe the “breakthrough” with NONS is supposedly getting the NO itself in the blend. (The nasal spray claim NO is in the ingredients themselves
“Ingredients
Vitamin c, Vitamin b12,Proprietary Nitric Oxide Blend,Deionized water,vegetable glycerine,potassium sorbate”
I loath beets, in any form; taste just like a mouthful of dirt. I can avoid this temptation easily.
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It does sound very much like snake oil….. but it clearly works…. probably 99.5% or more of buyers never die from covid-19.
Yeah… NO is a gas. The only way you put it in a supplement is via a donor molecule such as nitroglycerine or sodium nitroprusside, which have been in general use in medicine for a long time now (nitroglycerine commonly for angina because it relaxes blood vessels increasing coronary perfusion). NO is a natural signalling molecule produced by the body though so you can stimulate its production by activating the relevant receptors.
I got my first Pfizer shot today, that dark covid cloud following me around is starting to lighten up.
~grins~
On another topic entirely, Bernie Sanders has proposed an inheritance tax. From here:
$3.5 million seemed low to me for the 99.5th percentile, so I googled. According to this site, 99.5the percentile for household wealth is about $17.5 M, the 99th percentile is about $11 M, and $3.5M puts one at about 96th percentile. So, not 0.5%, but 4%.
Another case of, as Mark Twain [didn’t quite] put it, “lies, damn lies, and political promises”.
Apparently the reason why the Boulder shooter used a modified AR-style “pistol” modified with a shoulder stock is because short barreled “rifles” are federally restricted. So they build the same thing from parts.
https://blog.refactortactical.com/blog/ar-15-pistol-vs-a-short-barrel-rifle-sbr/
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It is noted that the Boulder shooting has disappeared from the news, not a favorable narrative.
My guess is wealth is counted in a lot of different ways, just like poverty. Some measures probably don’t count retirement funds for example. Lots of 401K millionaires out there.
Tom Scharf,
Please do report any bad side effects from the vaccine like turning purple or a sudden desire to eat human brains.
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HaroldW,
“Estates valued between $3.5 million and $10 million would be taxed at 45%, those between $10 million and $50 million at 50%, those between $50 million and $1 billion at 55%, and the tax rate for estates valued at over $1 billion would be taxed at 65%.”
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So estates under 3.5 million not taxed at all? That would never last, if only to make the confiscation of already taxed income a little more “fair”. Lemme guess: there is no provision for indexing due to inflation of values either.
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There is more than a bit of “nose of the camel in the tent” going on here. What Sanders wants is complete confiscation of wealth at death, but of course couldn’t ever get that passed…. so it is the camel’s nose approach instead. He would never tax “carried interest” income at normal income rates, of course. He is a profoundly dishonest person.
I skimmed the IRS instructions for estate tax. Its rates are progressive, starting at 18% and increasing to 40% above $1 million. However, the first $11.58 million (“basic exclusion amount”) is not taxed. [I didn’t go into all the stuff relating to inheritance by a spouse, so I don’t know if that $11.58M figure is effectively doubled for a married couple.]
That IRS document shows the recent history of the exclusion amount. In 1977 it was near zero, $30,000. It was increased in steps until it reached $1M in 2002. It was then increased from $1M to $5M in 2011, increasing each year thereafter (by cost-of-living adustment, perhaps), then more than doubled in 2018 to $11.18 M, increasing slightly each year. I’m guessing that Sanders’ proposal retains the same structure, but reduces the exclusion to $3.5M and has only 3 rate tiers, all of which are higher than the current maximum marginal rate.
My daughter was able to schedule a vaccination on April 5th when the 18 and older bracket opens up in FL. In Florida different sites allow you to preschedule your appt. for the day you become eligible. Might check it out in your area.
WP: “Vaccinations are underway, but uncertainties persist, including whether the vaccines protect against infection as well as disease, and whether they work against emerging variants.â€
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Same page: 89.6M vaccinated. Avg cases per day: 59K.
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Why don’t we know that yet? Nobody is tracking how many vaccinated are testing positive? What is $1.9T and $900B good for?
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And it’s not like there isn’t any data. One of the reason Israel got vaccinated so fast was it agreed to share data with Pfizer. 80% of Israeli cases were the UK variant during the vaccination period.
https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/real-world-evidence-confirms-high-effectiveness-pfizer
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“Data suggest Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine prevents asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection
Latest data analysis finds unvaccinated individuals were 44 times more likely to develop symptomatic COVID-19 and 29 times more likely to die from COVID-19
Findings represent the most comprehensive real-world evidence to date demonstrating the effectiveness of a COVID-19 vaccineâ€
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NOTE: This is a press release, but Big Pharma can’t get misleading with the FDA over watch. The way the game typically works is if the data isn’t good then Pfizer just doesn’t release it.
Tom Sharf,
The are at least trying to collect data.
I signed up for “vsafe”. I am sent a brief questionaire every day. It’s short and I’ve filling it out.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/vsafe.html
So far no side effects to report and no illness to report. If I get covid, I’ll presumably be detected.
I suspect lots of people didn’t pay attention to the note suggesting they sign up. But it’s probably not too late. They can have the data to resolve “uncertainties” if people send in info! So I am.
Tom Scharf,
The Pest simply isn’t going to print anything that doesn’t promote FUD about COVID-19. I suspect they can torture the data to make it seem like we don’t know things that we actually do know or are reasonably certain about. The data from Israel isn’t from a double blind controlled trial so the Pest can ignore it.
You can also always find someone suitably credentialed to back you up. See, for example, the opinion piece in today’s WSJ:
Contact tracing? What a joke. The authors of this piece are clueless about the real world. They also lowball the number of infected so they can claim we are far from herd immunity and completely ignore the actual case rate data. I guess it was just magic that caused case rates to peak and then decline rapidly in the Dakotas and elsewhere. It certainly wasn’t extreme lockdowns.
lucia: “I signed up for “vsafeâ€. I am sent a brief questionaire every day.”
I received a questionnaire each day for a week after (each) vaccination, then only once per week. Are you still getting daily reminders?
Harold,
Yes, I’ve been getting them every day. But my vaccine was Saturday, so perhaps I’ll only get then once a week after today.
The “plan” for vaccine promotion is out.
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Biden Administration Plans Localized Approach to Promote Covid-19 Vaccine
The administration decided working with trusted groups would fight skepticism better than national ads
https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-administration-plans-localized-approach-to-promote-covid-19-vaccine-11616773642
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“The Biden administration’s new campaign promoting Covid-19 vaccination will emphasize working with community groups and others to target specific populations that are skeptical of the vaccine, senior administration officials said.
Much of the overall messaging budget will be spent on such localized outreach, with a lesser portion to be spent on ads for television, digital, print and radio. The White House didn’t provide a total budget for the campaign, but officials said it would largely be funded by money from the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package that became law this month and will be made available beginning in April.
The localized campaign’s focus will be built around the slogan “We Can Do This,†and will rely on messengers from community-based organizations to press the importance of the vaccine, especially in underserved populations, including rural ones.”
“The Biden administration’s strategy is a shift from a nationwide media push that many public-health leaders and advocacy groups had expected in January, after Mr. Biden pledged an “unprecedented vaccination public-health campaign†tailored to meet the needs of diverse communities.”
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I put that through the Google BS translator ™ and it came up with “We just printed a huge amount of money and we are using this slush fund to reward our political supporters and their constituencies with highly paid welfare jobs with no plan, no required competence, no visibility, no oversight, and no accountability.”
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No word on how they plan to handle the biggest reported group of vaccine hesitators, Republicans.
Apparently there is a v-safe app.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/vsafe.html
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It’s not clear how this data will be used, it appears to be a vaccine safety monitoring system.
Florida’s median age of covid has dropped from 41 to 35 over the last 3 months.
https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/2021/03/27/median-age-covid-19-cases-florida-has-now-fallen-35/7030775002/
“Only a week or two after widely shared videos showed crowds of teens and twentysomethings partying on South Florida’s beaches, health officials are finding a surge of coronavirus infections in younger people.”
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However this analysis is almost certainly wrong. The drop started before spring break and it is much more likely the vaccine effect. This may be one of the best ways to measure the vaccine effect.
Tom wrote: “No word on how they plan to handle the biggest reported group of vaccine hesitators, Republicans.”
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I’m highly sceptical of this claim. There’s a reason outbreaks of vaccinateable disease occur largely in democrat strongholds like hippy dippy California, and there was no shortage of democrats decrying the safety of the vaccine. I suspect claimed “studies” found only what they were looking for, as most of these studies usually do (to the extent that the data don’t even support the claims made in some cases).
Tom,
Obviously, we’d expect the median age of new cases to drop since the old have been (and are being) vaccinated. Looks like Florida new cases is in a bit of a plateau. Deaths are declining.
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Israel had a plateau for a while and then cases continued to decline.
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Yes, people are starting to skip masking, isolating and so on. So we are seeing some periods where people are taking more risks. We could have cases decline faster, but it’s not everyone’s priority. In particular the ones who were only doing isolation “for the old” are going to take the risk and come out now that they feel they are mostly only risking their less-vulnerable selves and others who are similarly situated.
They simultaneously report that vaccine hesitancy among minority groups has gotten much better and also report actual vaccination rates among minority groups is lagging substantially. I can’t square that circle quite yet. We will only really know when vaccinations become widely available where the numbers really are.
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I think they are missing the window on vaccine promotion. There will be a few weeks where vaccines become readily available and my guess is that people will make a go/no go decision at that point. Now is the time to promote.
lucia (Comment #200635): “Yes, people are starting to skip masking, isolating and so on. So we are seeing some periods where people are taking more risks.”
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But there is no evidence that masking etc, has had any effect. In fact, it seems that places with lockdowns and mask mandates have done no better than places with much more relaxed rules.
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Some states in the NE have been seeing an increase in cases. There is a report that those states also have a big spike in one of the common cold coronaviruses (HKU1, I think – no, it is NL63). So maybe they are getting false positives from that.
In FL it is a race between the UK variant and vaccines as it will be everywhere. The vaccines will eventually win the race in the US because they have a numerical advantage, the rest of the world not so much. The US is vaccinating just in time here.
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I expect to see new cases increase over the next month in FL before a hopefully final decline to a low(ish) plateau. The media will likely blame spring break but that doesn’t appear to be the case. FL will seed the B117 more across states no doubt but the other states have a lower prevalence of B117 than FL.
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FL is vaccinating about 100K people per day, and has about 5K new validated cases.
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This is the important graph with B117.
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/03/05/us/covid-variant-sequencing-promo-1614997858855/covid-variant-sequencing-promo-1614997858855-superJumbo.png
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This increasing prevalence of B117 as it takes over from the original virus has been seen almost everywhere in the world.
There seems to be lot of confusion between mask mandates and actual mask usage. These are conflated or separated depending on the favored narrative.
Here is some info I found:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(20)30293-4/fulltext
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Do statewide mandates actually affect mask usage? Apparently not so much.
“We evaluated the change in self-reported mask-wearing in the 2 weeks before and after statewide mask mandates for 12 states (figure 4). Although there was a general trend of increased reported mask usage over this time period, the linear segmented regression models resulted in no significant change in slope in crude (β=0·04; 95% CI −0·47 to 0·54) or weighted (0·31; −0·28 to 0·91) mask usage after the interventions. There was a non-significant 2·2% (95% CI −2·1 to 6·5) change in average mask usage after the mandate in the unweighted model and a 2·31% (−2·76 to 7·38) change in the weighted model.â€
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This doesn’t mean masks don’t help, but more likely people’s behavior is much less dependent on state mandates then some people like to believe, and also many places like FL had local mandates already in place, and many people were already scared into using masks to start with. And not to be repetitive, but we just had a huge outbreak with high mask usage.
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The other graphs in the paper of regional mask usage doesn’t really square much with outbreak sizes as well. Masks just aren’t a prophylactic but they might help, but also may not help very much in the grand scheme, and invoking or revoking state mandates doesn’t really change things that much.
Tom Scharf (Comment #200639): “There seems to be lot of confusion between mask mandates and actual mask usage.”
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So does everyone in Florida wear masks whenever they are in any place of business? Do most people wear masks outside? Even if running or bicycling?
My county has been under mandatory indoor mask regulations for over a year. Even though DeSantis says there won’t be any actual penalty to citizens the grocery store and other indoor corporate places (Home Depot, etc.) I have been are still basically 100% compliance. Outdoor use is rare, although I see an occasional walker with a mask, way less than 1% on the golf course. Restaurants are a wild card, but I don’t go to sit down indoor places. The golf course bar regularly has a few people without masks in there.
MikeM,
The issue I’m alluding to is not the mask per se. The mask itself may not matter. But people are going out to places and socializing. When they do, they mostly don’t wear masks much.
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When Jim and I went dancing on Friday, the shared parking lot was full. The local bar and restaurants were doing a nice business. Weh could hear laughter and socializing from the parking lot . Three weeks ago they were dead. People are mixing now. Those in the bar are sipping drinks and eating. The chances that mask compliance is good in that crowd is approximately.
What I have noted is that older people have started returning to restaurants…. no doubt most of those have been vaccinated. Establishments that target a younger crowd are now pretty crowded, but restaurants that in the past had an older average demographic remain much less than full. The restaurants filled mostly with those under 50 no doubt contribute to the number of cases, since very few of those under 50 have been vaccinated…. there are still over 4,500 cases per day in Florida.
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Tom Scarf,
I have never seen a golfer on the course wearing a mask. A few wear a mask in the pro shop when they check in, but I’d say not more than 15%. Anywhere outside: never. BTW, rakes were returned to sand traps last week, and flags are no longer locked into the cups….. normal golf now.
Lucia,
“The local bar and restaurants were doing a nice business. Weh could hear laughter and socializing from the parking lot . Three weeks ago they were dead.”
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Looks like total cases per day have started rising in Illinois.
SteveF,
Yeah. They’ll probably go up for a little while while spread is a bit faster than they can vaccinate. But my understanding is vaccines are starting to be more and more available.
The CDC doing their job, relative to my prior complaining. Encouraging results in line with prior Israeli studies.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7013e3.htm
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NYT interpretation of interim report, unusually optimistic for them:
“Consistent with clinical trial data, a two-dose regimen prevented 90 percent of infections by two weeks after the second shot. One dose prevented 80 percent of infections by two weeks after vaccination.
There has been debate over whether vaccinated people can still get asymptomatic infections and transmit the virus to others. The study, by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suggested that transmission may be extremely unlikely, as infections were so rare.
There also has been concern that variants may render the vaccines less effective. The study’s results do not confirm that fear. Troubling variants were circulating during the time of the study — from December 14, 2020 to March 13, 2021 — yet the vaccines still provided powerful protection.
The C.D.C. enrolled 3,950 people at high risk of being exposed to the virus because they were health care workers, first responders, or others on the front lines. None had previously been infected with the coronavirus.”
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“Participants collected their own nasal swabs each week, which were sent to a central location for P.C.R. testing, the most accurate type of test. The weekly swabs allowed the researchers to detect asymptomatic infections as well as symptomatic ones.”
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“Among those who were fully vaccinated, there were .04 infections per 1,000 person-days, meaning that among 1,000 persons there would be .04 infections in a day.
There were 0.19 infections per 1,000 person-days among those who had had one dose of the vaccine. In contrast, there were 1.38 infections per 1,000 person-days in unvaccinated people.”
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“The C.D.C. said this is the first of many vaccine effectiveness studies it will be conducting.”
Tom Scharf,
The strange thing is that they reported on nasal swab test results, not symptomatic illness, and not any indication of severity of illness.
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Seems the most important thing you can say about the study is that vaccination reduces the chance for transmission by at least 90% compared to no vaccine. It could be much more than 90%, if we assume many of the illnesses were asymptomatic and that asymptomatic infection is less contagious than symptomatic.
Right.
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I think they are saying they have shown asymptomatic and symptomatic (detectable through PCR) illness down by 90%, so it then follows transmission for the vaccinated must also be down by * at least * 90% and probably more.
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This is the best data yet. It’s an important finding.
Tom Scharf (Comment #200664): “The CDC doing their job, relative to my prior complaining. Encouraging results in line with prior Israeli studies.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7013e3.htm”
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I was just about to post on that study. But my take was either that I have misread the paper (a definite possibility) or the CDC badly needs to be defunded.
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It was a longitudinal study in which rates of infection in the cohort were compared before and after vaccination. Thus, “before” was weighted to early in the study and “after” was weighted to late in the study. It took place from mid-December to mid-March. So far as I can tell, they took no account of trends in viral prevalence in the community.
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Half the participants were in Arizona, where the positive test rate was 95 per 100K in mid-December and just 7 per 100K in mid-March. It seems to me that would influence the results. In the other states, the decrease was only about a factor of 4.
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It is not quite as bad as I just implied since most of the unvaccinated days were participants who were no vaccinated at all and most of those vaccinated got their first dose early in the study. But it should still be a significant factor.
From the report:
“Nonetheless, the majority (87.3%) of PCR-confirmed infections were associated with symptoms consistent with COVID-19–associated illness. The remaining PCR-confirmed infections were associated with other symptoms not part of the COVID-19–associated illness definition (e.g., headache, fatigue, and rhinorrhea) (2.0%) or no symptoms (10.7%). Only 22.9% of PCR-confirmed infections were medically attended, including two hospitalizations; no deaths occurred.”
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Only 10% of these results were officially asymptomatic. This is way different than other estimates, it might be that closely monitoring symptoms shows there is usually evidence that many people might not differentiate from other low grade illnesses.
Tom Scharf,
“This is way different than other estimates, it might be that closely monitoring symptoms shows there is usually evidence that many people might not differentiate from other low grade illnesses.”
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Indeed. Back in May of 2020, I traveled by car to my production plant in Louisiana while Louisiana was in the throws of many cases and deaths. A day after my return I had a low grade fever (never more than 99.8F), sore throat, and mild headache… with more pain on one side of my head than the other, along with a little bit of febrile “touch sensitivity”… where you touch skin and the touch hurts. It all passed in 3 days. Was it covid-19? Donno, probably not, but I wasn’t going to spend the money to find out. It is good to remember that in most places the rate of positive tests is under 8%. More than 92% of the time, it is something else.
Tom Scharf,
“Only 10% of these results were officially asymptomatic.”
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I suspect the “health care workers, first responders, or others on the front lines” do not include many of the young people who are more likely to have minimal or no symptoms.
MikeM,
The analysis seems to recognize the problem associated with time-varying vaccination status:
lucia (Comment #200697): “The analysis seems to recognize the problem associated with time-varying vaccination status:”
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But that says nothing about time-varying exposure risk.
It is not entirely clear to me why it takes a fancy model to account for vaccination status. It is also not clear why the vaccine effectiveness is not just the ratio of the rates per person day. The paper does say that the analysis accounts for things like location, race, sex, etc. So the implication is that both the “time-varying vaccination status” and the exposure rate was different for different groups and the model was used to account for that.
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The paper says nothing about time-varying prevalence. It seems to me that if that was accounted for, it would be at least mentioned. The paper should also give the data source for prevalence and say at what level (state, metropolitan area, county) that was used. The discussion should address the uncertainties associated with however that was treated. Complete silence on the issue implies that it was not considered at all.
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The paper is strong evidence of gross incompetence by the authors. What is at issue is the nature of that incompetence.
MikeM
I don’t know what problem you think this raises. At any given time there are N_u unvaccinated and N_v vacinated vaccinated. Certainly if N_u ad N_v don’t change with time there is no problem even if the exposure is time varying because it varied the same way for both groups.
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So the problem you seem to be worried about would presumably be something that only matters both because N_u and N_v varied with time while risk also varied by time.
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But it would seem you avoid any problem even if both the proportion of vaccinated and the exposure risk are time varying provided you keep track of now N_u and N_v and make sure you know that the person who went from vaccinated to unvaccinated gets switched into the right bin. I’m pretty sure you could show there is absolutely no problem if incubation time and detection time are zero.
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There is a bit of a problem with non-zero incubation and detection times. But that time is short compared to the total time of the study.
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Obviously, I could be missing something here. But perhaps you can explain why you think the change in exposure time creates an actual problem. Because so far you’re just positing that it must without providing any explanation why it should.
Mike M
I don’t think anyone said it’s “fancy”. But I think it’s pretty obvious that if someone was unvaccinated during the first 2 months and vaccinated subsequently, you need to count them as “unvaccinated” during the first period and “vaccinated” only after they are vaccinated. Otherwise, you need to toss their contribution to the set out entirely.
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As I noted above, there is a bit of a problem with the delay-incubation time period. Perhaps you should just not count them as even existing for two or three weeks after vaccination. But it’s pretty clear that before the got vaccinated their man-months of exposure goes in the unvaccinated group and sometime after vaccination their man-months go in the vaccinated group. It seems to me the time-variation of risk will drop out as unimportant. (Though I admit someone running monte carlo or doing actual math could convince me otherwise.)
This appears to be an unsupported claim. But perhaps as I suggested you can explain the problem more fully.
If the vaccinated and unvaccinated were both subject to the same environment then I don’t think it matters that the environment varied during the test. You just count up infections for both groups and you have useful data. The test occurred during the biggest surge so it was almost optimal in a way.
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The vaccinated should have counted as unvaccinated for the days they spent in the environment before vaccination.
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I doubt the analysis is perfect but it seems it is useful for its intended purpose. What purpose do you think the analysis is unfit for?
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This has all the same problems with other observational studies, but since the medical industry refuses to do challenge trials then it is the best we are going to get. The biggest result here is vaccination works at high rates for ANY detectable covid, which also leads to the conclusion that the retransmission threat among vaccinated appears to be rather low.
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We may never know the actual retransmission threat for the vaccinated, but if it prevents 90% of detectable covid then we can start there. If the viral load for the vaccinated with breakthrough infections is also low (likely as they almost never get hospitalized) it is likely they aren’t effective spreaders. Vaccination probably limits retransmission by 95% to 99% is my guess.
Tom Scharf,
” The biggest result here is vaccination works at high rates for ANY detectable covid, which also leads to the conclusion that the retransmission threat among vaccinated appears to be rather low.”
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Yup, that is the only important conclusion I draw from the paper. It means that if everyone were vaccinated, the pandemic would end very quickly. The more people that remain un-vaccinated, the longer transmission goes on. There is nothing complicated here. In most states, about 15%-20% of the adult population has been fully vaccinated…. make that 50%, then add those who were already confirmed infected, and it is hard for me to see how the pandemic doesn’t die out.
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This paper basically says all the hysteria about the need to wear masks almost forever (a la Fauci) is just that… nothing but hysteria…. and pure rubbish.
I misunderstood the vaccination numbers. They are reporting number of doses delivered. So the total number vaccinated is not over 100 million but about 50 million who have gotten both doses, and 90 million who have gotten one dose.
Tom Scharf (Comment #200704): “If the vaccinated and unvaccinated were both subject to the same environment then I don’t think it matters that the environment varied during the test.”
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But they were not exposed to the same environment. The unvaccinated were primarily exposed to the environment that prevailed near the start of the study. The fully vaccinated were primarily exposed to the environment that prevailed near the end of the study. Those were very different.
They can compare the background infection rate on a per week basis to normalize all that. It’s not obvious whether they did or did not. No discussion. Perhaps their proportional hazard model took this into account also. It’s an interim report. It’s possible the vaccinated numbers look better because they had more days in a declining overall trend. About 1/3 of participants were never vaccinated.
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“Hazard ratios were estimated by the Andersen-Gill extension of the Cox proportional hazards model, which accounted for time-varying vaccination status. Hazard ratios of unvaccinated person-days to partial immunization person-days (≥14 days after first dose and before second dose) and to full immunization person-days (≥14 days after second dose) were calculated separately.
The 13 person-days between vaccine administration and partial or full immunization were considered excluded at-risk person-time because immunity was considered to be indeterminate.â€
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The other useful data point is that one shot proved 80% effective after two weeks. It would interesting to know what it would be after 4 weeks. 82% 91%? It gives ammo to the everyone should get one-dose first crowd.
Tom Scharf (Comment #200712): “They can compare the background infection rate on a per week basis to normalize all that. It’s not obvious whether they did or did not. No discussion.”
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But there are a bunch of things included in the model that they did mention and discuss. Change in community prevalence is not some trivial detail they might just forget to mention.
Hazard ratios are the difference between the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups. They say they calculated these independently for the partial and full vaccination groups. So in theory they only compared the unvaccinated group to the fully vaccinated group for the days where those comparisons were available. They don’t make it clear exactly how they did it, or whether it was time aligned as it should be. I think it’s just not known how they did it from the description, they may have done it correctly.
Tom Scharf (Comment #200716): “So in theory they only compared the unvaccinated group to the fully vaccinated group for the days where those comparisons were available. They don’t make it clear exactly how they did it, or whether it was time aligned as it should be.”
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But it seems pretty clear that is not what they did. Look at Table 2.
Unvaccinated 116,657 person days, 161 cases, 1.38 incidence rate
If you take the 994 who were not vaccinated at all and multiply by the entire 13 week length of the study, you get 90,454 person days. That is 78% of the unvaccinated person days. So the number in table 2 includes pre-vaccination data for those who were vaccinated. How is it possible for that to be time aligned?
Have seen a lot of comments about the vaccines but haven’t followed them closely. I have been eligible for about 2 weeks. Wondering what people’s recommendations are for the best and least side effects vaccine. I am older but very healthy and mostly not concerned about the virus. However, some of the parents of my daughter’s friends have hinted that they would like me to do so, and I am happy to make them feel more comfortable and also to contribute to heard immunity.
JD Ohio (Comment #200721): “Have seen a lot of comments about the vaccines but haven’t followed them closely. I have been eligible for about 2 weeks. Wondering what people’s recommendations are for the best and least side effects vaccine.”
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I am in much the same boat. I am in no hurry to get the vaccine, but would like to start getting pertinent info.
I am inclined toward the J&J because it is one shot and done. And I heard something about it having a very good T cell response.
JD Ohio,
I don’t think they know for sure which has fewer side effects. But I think I’ve read it might be J&J
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https://news.northeastern.edu/2021/03/01/johnson-and-johnsons-1-shot-covid-19-vaccine-could-spark-fewer-side-effects-than-vaccines-from-moderna-or-pfizer/
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The big advantages is only one shot. So you’ll be done and in 14 days you can tell people you’re good to go.
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I got it: my side effect was minor pain the day of the shot. I still have a bruise but I bruise easily.
JD Ohio,
I got the Pfizer vaccine. My only noticed side effect (both doses) was a sore upper arm for about 36 hours. My wife gets her second dose of Pfizer vaccine today; after the first dose her only side effect was a sore upper arm for 24 hours. The double blind studies indicate about 20% of people have systemic side effects, but mostly mild. That “20%” is the difference between people who actually got the vaccine and reported side effects and people who got a placebo (physiological saline injection) but reported side effects…. with the apparent assumption that the reported systemic side effects with saline were not due to the injection.
SteveF
What was the rate of side effects for placebo? 🙂
Lucia,
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The answer depends a little on what question is asked, or if the people in the study reported an adverse reaction without being asked. For solicited systemic adverse reaction, the data is:
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Vaccine group Placebo group
12553/15176 (82.7) 8032/15,162 (53.0)
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By “solicited” they mean the response when they asked the people for any adverse systemic reaction they had following injection. There are a bunch of ways to look at it, but the original data are here: https://www.fda.gov/media/144434/download pages 32 and 33
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One thing is consistent: nearly all people, 92%, in the vaccine group reported a sore arm after the injection, versus only 28% for the placebo group. This is by far the most common (non-systemic) adverse reaction.
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When adverse reactions were not solicited (reported voluntarily within 28 days of vaccination, without being requested), the data are:
Vaccine group Placebo group
3283/15184 (21.6) 2902/15165 (19.1)
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So probably aches, pains, and other common maladies were being reported over the 28 days following vaccination. The above suggests 2.5% of people (21.6-19.1) had systemic reactions severe enough to be self-reported.
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“Serious” adverse events (medically treated) were identical for both groups:
Vaccine Placebo
82/15184 (0.5) 86/15165 (0.6)
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IMO, the safety data for both Moderna and Pfizer was clear and convincing: very little risk of serious side effects. I remain astounded how many people in the at-risk age group are reluctant to get the vaccination. In Florida it is still a little over 25% of those over 65 who refuse the vaccines… I find this almost unbelievable.
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I am off shortly to get my ‘travel-nasal-swab’ test so I can get on a plane to Brazil tomorrow….$135 for 45 minute turn-around. I will need another test in Brazil before I am allowed back into the States…. another $100 or so. And this in spite of being virtually immune, and so very unlikely to spread the infection… in either country. We live in crazy times.
The mRNA vaccines have tested out a bit better than J&J for symptomatic covid, but they both were 100% against severe illness. They were tested at different places and times so that might make a difference.
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There isn’t a lot to differentiate Moderna and Pfizer. I read Moderna injects more mRNA particles than Pfizer (100 units for Moderna vs 30 units for Pfizer) so it might have a bit more side effects. These units of mRNA were basically guesses by these companies. Pfizer has a a 3 week interval between shots instead of 4 weeks so you get done a bit sooner.
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It’s entirely possible that if J&J had a 2 shot regimen it might equal the mRNA effectiveness.
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How well they work against the variants is officially unknown, but I think the mRNA vaccines have demonstrated effectiveness against the UK variant in Israeli testing and in the UK. The J&J might be just as effective for severe illness but there is less data to prove it.
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The South African and Brazil variants have less data but are not yet prevalent in the US like the UK variant already is. Best guess is that they all will work.
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So if you have a choice my view is the mRNA are basically equivalent and the Pfizer gets done a bit quicker. J&J is one and done and “probably” is equally effective in things that matter (severe illness).
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1A = Pfizer
1B = Moderna
2 = J & J
3 = AstraZenaca
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Looking toward the future for potential breakthrough variants it might be the case that booster shots can be more easily designed and manufactured for mRNA vaccines, so you might get access to this type of booster shot sooner. I don’t think it’s an issue for you to get a mRNA booster after J & J though, so no issues here either way.
Fun Fact: That crappy little CDC card they give you is the ONLY proof you may have of vaccination in the US. There is no national system due to privacy issues, it is literally against federal law to make that database. Some states have different databases. YMMV.
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So you probably want to take some pictures or scan that thing.
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Why isn’t this card the size of a credit card? Why, why, why?
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Vaccine passports are already causing a political stir, NY is making one and Florida is banning them entirely. I’m undecided on the issue. I know I won’t set foot on a cruise line unless everyone on it is vaccinated.
Tom
It’s not even the threat of getting sick. It’s the threat of being quarantined because the non-vaccinated got sick!!! oy!
On getting the vaccine: I’m pretty much counting on wanting a booster within 6 months. I hope those get cleared.
Tom Scharf,
“I know I won’t set foot on a cruise line unless everyone on it is vaccinated.”
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Not a problem for me…. I wouldn’t go a cruise no matter the presence or absence of covid. 😉
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WRT ‘passports’: once everyone has had access to vaccination, ‘passports’ are unnecessary… those who don’t want to catch the virus can get vaccinated. Those who want can run the risk of infection and opt not to get vaccinated. Make your choice and live (or die) with the consequences. Some might go so far as to describe such agency as personal liberty. There is no reason to exclude people from anything if they don’t want to get the vaccines, once the vaccines are available to all.
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Of course, international travel would be a lot easier with some kind of certification of vaccination, since most countries outside the States have not offered vaccination to people at risk….. and won’t do so for a very long time, if ever.
Virus pristine places like NZ will probably make you quarantine for 14 days unless you have been vaccinated, especially before they have finished in country vaccination. If that proof is an easily forged CDC paper card then I’m not sure how effective that will really be.
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Part of FL’s lean toward openness is political, but part is its dependence on tourism. Every place that has a big tourism industry but an unvaccinated population is going to want to open its doors for the vaccinated for the sake of their economy.
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I could photoshop and print a CDC card for anyone in 10 minutes.
FYI: A good even handed summary today of the current vaccine situation from Zeynep Tufekci
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/03/fourth-surge-variant-vaccine/618463/
Tom Ssharf,
“Why isn’t this card the size of a credit card? Why, why, why?”
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Maybe for the same reason you are not injected with a RFID chip when you get the vaccine. The little yellow card is not, and never will be, ‘proof’ of vaccination.
SteveF (Comment #200743): “WRT ‘passports’: once everyone has had access to vaccination, ‘passports’ are unnecessary”.
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What else is new? None of the things we have been subjected to over the last year have actually been necessary. Unless, that is, the objective is unbridled power. That is the sole purpose of ‘vaccine passports’.
MikeM,
Someone organizing a November dance competition in Illinois told me she’d been advised that based on ‘current rules’ there would be a maximum number of people allowed in a room. I don’t remember the number but it was low relative to what you would want in the competition hall.
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However, the vaccinated will count as “zero”. I’m guessing Pritzker and his health department people are going to want us to be able to provide proof of vaccination otherwise the organizers won’t be able to count the vaccinated as zero. Absent proof you are presumed unvaccinated.
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I don’t have any idea how she and her co-organizer are going to figure out how to deal with this nor how we are going to provide our proof to her nor how she is going to provide proof to the state if requested.
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I did provide ID when I got vaccinated, so the state may be keeping track. I’m also keeping my card handy. It’s magnetized to the fridge. 🙂
Curious whether any here have noticed this, which was posted on PSU thread:
“my brother has long been a consultant and prof at tOSU, and we were on a call this AM and he said his students (teaches OR in Fisher College of Business and IE in the College of Engineering) seem to be less capable each year to critically think around problems. Most have a hard time with problem statements and tend to Google for answers that skip root cause, scientific method or any kind of thinking. he said COVID worsened it. Any of you teach and notice this tendency? Loss of scientific method, challenge assumptions, etc.”
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Second post (and many similar later posts with most agreeing)
Professor at a medical school. Very much so. My trainees lack critical thinking and problem solving skills as well as foundation of basic scientific knowledge that would facilitate those problem solving skills. They cannot reason their way through by utilizing an understanding of basic biology, physiology, anatomy to solve a problem or understand symptoms in a patient. But there has been gross de emphasis on acquiring a foundation of fundamental, important knowledge on which to be able to solve and reason. Simple example in pharmacokinetics. Simple rule of thumb 5 half lives till a medication is at steady state blood level. I will ask resident or med student how long till we should get a blood level from starting a medication? Blank stare, furtive effort to google from lap top open in front of them. I always quote them the Motto of Faber University…….
https://bwi.forums.rivals.com/threads/brother-teaching-at-tosu-says-critical-thinking-mia.292206/
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The statement by the medical school professor is a bit scary.
Thanks to the people upthread who responded to my questions about Covid vaccines. Much appreciated.
JD Ohio,
“The statement by the medical school professor is a bit scary.”
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I suppose it is a little scary, but the truth is that nearly all my interactions with medical doctors have told me that most are very far from ‘scientists’. Maybe it has gotten worse over time, maybe not. MD’s have a huge knowledge base, of course, but the means by which they diagnose and treat is very (very!) far from guided by evidence. They almost invariably follow “cook-book” diagnosis and treatment, even when their is overwhelming contrary evidence that the treatment is not working. If “standard practice” says how you treat, that is how you treat, even if it is not working.
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Part of it may be fear of malpractice lawsuits…. always following established standard practice is a good defense.
JD Ohio (Comment #200759): ““my brother has long been a consultant and prof at tOSU, and we were on a call this AM and he said his students (teaches OR in Fisher College of Business and IE in the College of Engineering) seem to be less capable each year to critically think around problems. Most have a hard time with problem statements and tend to Google for answers”
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In my experience, professors have been saying such things (except for the bit about Google) about their students since time immemorial. That does not mean it has not recently gotten much worse, just that such testimony does not actually tell us anything.
lucia (Comment #200757): “Someone organizing a November dance competition in Illinois told me she’d been advised that based on ‘current rules’ there would be a maximum number of people allowed in a room. … the vaccinated will count as “zeroâ€.”
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That is one way that governments might effectively mandate vaccine passports while pretending that it is the private sector doing it.
Mike M,
“That is one way that governments might effectively mandate vaccine passports while pretending that it is the private sector doing it.”
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Sure, but as Tom Scharf noted, you could create an fake yellow covid vaccination card like that from the CDC with a few minutes of effort, light weight yellow card stock, and a laser printer. Without an official, certified immunization card, with criminal prosecution for forgery (like a driver’s license), any such effort is unenforceable.
There is almost no pushback in the MSM for Biden’s over the top spending (not even the WSJ’s news side?!). It’s like it’s all free. I guess every generation needs to learn a hard lesson that money has to come from somewhere and it’s not magic.
Tom Scharf,
Not to mention the total lack of even an attempt to gain support from Republicans. The plan is to pass all these bills using the reconciliation process on a straight party line vote. The so-called infrastructure bill has only a small fraction of the total spent on actual infrastructure. Yet the press coverage leads with fixing roads and bridges. No wonder it polls well.
Then there was his rant about the voting laws in Georgia and Iowa. Biden’s home state of Delaware has more stringent requirements for absentee ballots and far fewer drop boxes, for example. But somehow its voting laws are not despicable.
MikeM,
That’s one way of looking at it. The other is that if the case rates remain high, they are maintaining the restriction on numbers at gathering but permitting an “out”.
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If they can restrict gathering to no more than 50 people period, I’m not sure why the restriction can’t change to 50 unvaccinated people.
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Then again, I don’t find the term “vaccine passport” in an of itself a horrifying concept. The details of the rules matter to me.
lucia,
It’s not the concept of a vaccine ‘passport’ so much as apparently completely ignoring immunity acquired by infection and recovery a la Fauci.
The ‘infrastructure’ bill contains a proposal for spending $400 billion on home health care. Only the SEIU would define home health care as infrastructure.
Lucia,
“Then again, I don’t find the term “vaccine passport†in an of itself a horrifying concept. The details of the rules matter to me.”
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Sure. But I resist it because it is a way for government to force desired behavior…. as always, an effort to remove individual agency and substitute mandated behavior. It is like the old Russian joke: That which is not explicitly allowed is implicitly prohibited. This is not what I want the USA to become.
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I agree that those reluctant to get the vaccine are acting foolishly and/or irrationally, but it is (and it should be) their irrational decision to make, even if it may do them harm. Nobody should be forced or coerced against their will to get vaccinated. I see zero reason for any public policy designed to force specific personal behavior once the vaccines are available to all, as they will be within a month or so. After that, I will be an absolute opponent of not just vaccine passports, but every other rule and regulation related to covid-19.
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More than enough already, this nightmare needs to end!
SteveF,
There are situations where it makes sense to forbid anything that isn’t explicitly allowed, race car preparation rules come to mind. However, that rule should be applied to the government, not the individual citizen, as our Constitution was originally intended. Unfortunately, the US SC has expanded the interpretation of the commerce clause to such an extent that it’s getting hard to find things that the US government can’t do to its citizens.
Not surprised by the lack of critical thinking. Curriculums are changing with more topics just keep getting added in, which reduces time for the primary items.
In my son’s algebra 1 class, they had a topic on line of best fit, which is generally not seen in a high school curriculum. They weren’t actually calculating it, just using Excel to find the numbers, and they were supposed to be able to extrapolate and interpolate.
This is one of the statistics and data analysis modules that they think is important to include. Meanwhile, word problems are downgraded.
Similarly, geometry rushed through the proofs portion.
Now Virginia is adopting a new idea, of eliminating all advanced math, and all students will be in the same grade level math thru 10th grade. I think they wanted to do for all grades, but they want to be able to claim that students can still take calculus in high school. Many students currently take in 1oth or 11th, but now a small sliver can try and fill in everything in between geometry and calculus in 11th grade.
MikeN
Not the right solution to whatever the problem is.
lucia,
One assumes that it’s the usual problem du jour, equity, whatever that actually means. If you dumb down the curriculum enough then everyone will supposedly be at the same level. See Harrison Bergeron.
My son’s unintended commentary on the issue of generally lower standards. When he first started college (he goes to a reasonably good one with ACT of 29 — He had 33 ACT) he told me about 10 days into school– “Dad, I used to get angry at you when you were talking about bad situations and blamed them on stupid people. There are a lot of stupid people in college. Now I see where you are coming from.”
Payment of NCAA athletes was at the SC this week:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ncaa-player-compensation-restrictions-reach-supreme-court-11617183001
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“Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of several big sports fans on the court, said the antitrust laws shouldn’t work in a way that provides “cover for exploitation of the student athletes.â€
The NCAA rules, he said, mean schools are effectively conspiring with one another “to pay no salaries to the workers who are making the schools billions of dollars, on the theory that consumers want the schools to pay their workers nothing. And that just seems entirely circular and even somewhat disturbing.—
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This case is just for allowing different NCAA schools to give extra benefits to players, thus allowing them to “compete” for players. This is just for extra educational benefits but is a first step but includes up to $6,000. I think the NCAA will lose badly here, but we shall see. Worth a read.
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How academia stands behind this and defends it at the SC while condescending to the nation on every other social justice issue is baffling in the extreme.
The tail is wagging the dog. After leisure air travel has returned to near pre-pandemic levels the CDC officially says the vaccinated can now safely travel.
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CDC Relaxes Covid-19 Travel Guidance for Fully Vaccinated People
Health officials say travel risk is low for those fully vaccinated; they also ease testing and self-quarantine recommendations
https://www.wsj.com/articles/cdc-says-travel-is-low-risk-for-fully-vaccinated-people-11617376809
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I believe that the mixed messaging now coming from public health organizations is because they want to be conservative but also want to avoid having mass disobedience undercut their perceived authority. This is probably the way the rest of this will play out.
Tom Scharf,
‘And if you are good little boys and girls we may allow you to meet with your family again.’
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They are idiots. They make me furious.
I flew on Alaska Airlines earlier this week. At the gate, they had a poster which read
This struck me as odd, because of all the fuss concerning ~1 million air travelers per day — at 0.003%, that would suggest about 30 cases per day from air travel, negligible among ~50K cases per day in the US.
The .003% figure seems to refer to this study, which is now prefaced with a statement, “After seeing some initial reactions to the study, the authors of this study are concerned about the potential misinterpretation of the findings, based on some hypothetical calculations originally included as discussion points. In particular, the […] assumptions […] were not designed to provide actionable information about viral risk during flight, safe flight times or seating capacity.”
I have no idea if the .003% figure is actually accurate, but we have conflicting narratives — CDC warning against air travel, airlines saying it’s very safe due to the airflow within a plane (and filters). CDC has (imo) overplayed risks, trying to scare people into being more careful. Airlines have a financial incentive to downplay risk. Whom to believe? Being inoculated, I don’t have to believe either. 🙂
Tom Scharf,
They may also realize that trying to give “conservative” advice to the vaccinated undercuts the motivation to get vaccinated. After all, if the vaccines don’t “work”, there is no reason to get them. At a minimum vaccines “working” means preventing the vaccinated from getting sick. It makes some sense to suggest you wait a certain amount of time before traveling or that you need both vaccines for the two-vaccine vaccines. But saying you still can’t travel if you are vaccinated suggests they don’t work. And if they don’t work, then even a small risk of an adverse reaction isn’t worth it.
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Heck, if they don’t work even the 30 minutes lost to drive to a vax site, get the vaccine, and drive home isn’t worth it.
Harold W,
“Being inoculated, I don’t have to believe either.”
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Yes we immune people do not need to take the scare stories seriously. The problem is that the hysteria continues to make everything complicated and difficult. I forgot, briefly, to put a mask on before entering an airport. The reaction was exactly as if I was walking around with a lighted WWII flamethrower, ready to immolate every person in sight. It is all out of control, all the time. Really, it’s nuts.
Not sure what it’s like here, but Steve McIntyre said he was in a crowded building to get vaccinated. So you are risking getting infected prior to the vaccination as well.
Lucia, it is a push to eliminate tracking. The weaker students feel bad if they are left out of advanced math.
Plus they don’t think calculus is important in high school anyways.
MikeN,
You have confirmed that this is the wrong solution to “the problem”. I think eliminating tracking in academics is misguided. Getting rid of tracking will not spare the feelings of the weaker students. They will merely come to “feel bad” for a different reason. In this case, they will “feel bad” because they sit next to kids who have almost no trouble learning math while they still struggle.
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Anyway, if they are going to eliminate tracking to avoid the hurt feelings of the weaker students, I think they should get rid of the competitive sports teams. Some students feel bad they don’t make the football, basketball, track, gymnastics or swim team. Yet almost no one suggests that they decide who gets on the team by a lottery. Nor do they decide to just have a bunch of teams picked by lottery who only play inside the school.
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Likewise, they could also do the say with the school theater, choirs or bands. Just cast the play by lottery. Give the solos by lottery and so on. After all, the weaker actors, singers or instrumentalists probably “feel bad” they don’t get the lead, or to sing solos.
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Of course those suggesting eliminating tracking in academic are unlikely to eliminate things that let talented athletes, musicians or actors shine just to prevent hurt feelings on the part of other students. Among other things, they know it won’t actually make the students who can’t run fast, jump high or sing “feel” happy about their short comings. Nor will it make them not notice their shortcomings.
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Guess what? The academically weak kids will still notice they are weak. Some will still feel bad.
MikeN,
Dupage county ran the vaccination site where I got vaccinated very well. No crowding. Fast. Efficient. It was great!
Lucia,
It is far more than hurt feelings. The refusal to select by achievement is tied to the desire for equality of outcome and to eliminate “processes with disparate outcomes”. Nobody gets hired based on their time in an 800 meter race, but if you got pushed through primary, secondary, and post-secondary education without being accurately evaluated for performance relative to your peers, then you will get offered a job, often over someone far more qualified.
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There are now complaints that completely blind try-outs for symphony orchestras (where the judges never see nor know who the person trying out is, only hear them play) are “racist” because not enough minorities are selected. I think that cuts to the heart of the issue.
MikeN,
“Plus they don’t think calculus is important in high school anyways.”
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It is probably not important for someone destined to sell widgets or run a restaurant kitchen, and for whom the concepts and methods of calculus would be very difficult. But I would have benefited enormously had I been offered calculus in high school. I still use calculus routinely in my work.
Calculus is important for some students and not for others.
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The thing is, even if calculus is not important in high school, that’s not a good reason to not track. A talented kid who turns out to love music or performance but is great in math should still be tracked in math. They can do algebra in 7th or 8th grade and continue at a pace commensurate with their abilities.
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Then, you can let them stop taking math after some point– say algebra 2. Not tracking will just drag that math out s_l_o_w_l_y for no good reason. While the sit in the untracked time wasting (for them) math class they won’t be able to spend time concentrating on things like voice, performance, a little dance/movement or other things they might find useful as a in their hoped for career in music and acting.
On the subject of which vaccine is “best”, this article, from a month ago, says that the J&J vaccine was designed to produce both antibody and T-cell responses and so might provide loner lasting protection and better protection against variants:
https://www.businessinsider.com/johnson-and-johnson-covid-19-vaccine-arguably-the-best-2021-2?op=1
Of course, “designed to” does not mean that happens in the real world.
———–
Addition: There are reports that the mRNA vaccines also produce a good T-cell response.
Mike M,
yes the phase 2 studies of both m-RNA vaccines showed good t-cell response.
MikeM,
My 27 year old vaccine averse dance teacher is coming around the idea that getting a vaccine would be a good idea. (The Ukranian and Russian immigrants have a tendency to distrust of vaccines. A Russian dance teacher ended up in the hospital with a Russian TB vaccine when she was a child. Let’s just say “safety” tended to be less of a concern with the Russian equivalent of the FDA. )
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Anyway, I explained the advantages to him of the J&J vaccine. The official decree that 1 shot is enough will be very useful to him. He’s not afraid of needles, but lets face it, making two appointments is inconvenient for anyone. So one-and-done is very attractive. Also: he’s 27 yo and in great health. So for him, I suspect the extra 30 minutes to drive to Walgreens, get a vaccine, and sit around being monitored for a 2nd vaccine to go from 80% immunity to 90% is just a waste of time.
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I also mentioned other social/business advantages for him. Like it or not some of his clients are going to be “afraid” to dance with him if he is not vaccinated even if they are. (I’m not one of these people. But they exist.)
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If Illinois does end up having occupancy limits apply to only the unvaccinated, competition organizers are going to be very thankful that the pros who go to a lot of shows are vaccinated and don’t count against the limit.
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Many of the organizers are also judges and many are coaches. It’s a tight community. For a pro-competitor it’s better to be in the good graces of judges. (How they feel about you is not supposed to matter. But the notion that it doesn’t is naive. It matters at least a little)
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Honestly though I think what is swaying him more is that he really likes seeing his students faces. He was glad I’m willing to not wear my mask now that I’ve hit 14 days. (Ok.. I didn’t wear my mask on day 13. But I suspect those who died or whose symptoms first emerged between day 7-14 after getting their J&J were already infected before they got the vaccine. The immunity probably happens sooner than the final day someone in the vaccine group died in the study.)
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I’m glad J&J exists for people especially ones like him. I think him getting the vax would be a very good idea.
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Likely nearly all young people should go for J&J. Most will probably be offered that anyway. The 2nd dose of the MRna vaccines are locked up by the phase 1 people who got their first vaccine. (My mom finally got her second vaccine yesterday.) So: applause for J&J coming online!
People who don’t have tracking in their high school will ultimately end up competing in college against schools that do have tracking and will suffer for it. That’s exactly what happened for me, I was in the “big city” in WV which had tracking and went to school with lots or rural people who were woefully behind. The first two years were rather non-competitive. The smart people eventually caught up but it was a lot of work for them in these two years. This was before you could test out of classes or get college credits before attending which makes it even easier now.
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Eliminating tests of competence in academics is just insanity.
It’s unclear who will ultimately be the best against particular vaccine variants, but Pfizer has the most promising data and has a lot more international use and testing than Moderna, J & J just doesn’t have much data one way or the other. AstraZeneca has some data and it isn’t so great.
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The most widely used vaccines may end up being at a disadvantage as those are the ones the virus will want to breakthrough on the most, similar to antibiotics.
It’s pretty much a self imposed business requirement for dance teachers to get a vaccine IMO. I wouldn’t go to a teacher without a vaccine and I probably need teaching more than any human out there, ha ha.
Tom Scharf,
Some students will go to teachers who don’t get vaccinated. Now that I am vaccinated, I would. But some won’t.
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Also, the teachers who also compete go to a number of competitions with students. So the competition venue is going to strongly prefer those coming be vaccinated. The people running the competitions are often their friends. People do like to make their friends happy.
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The teachers are going to feel some push to be vaccinated.
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I’m going to have to try to look up what fraction of public school teacher are “reluctant” (i.e. refusing) to get vaccinated.
Lucia,
“I’m going to have to try to look up what fraction of public school teacher are “reluctant†(i.e. refusing) to get vaccinated.”
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I tried to find similar information some days back. I tried to find how many of the unvaccinated elderly are simply refusing to get the vaccine…. I found nothing. When vaccines were not commonly available there were many published stories about those reluctant to get the vaccines…. but not so much recently. Teachers refusing the vaccines, while demanding students be required to have all kinds of vaccinations, is not a good look. I hope you find some data.
SteveF,
Not to mention that according to the latest data, transmission from teachers to students is much more probable than from students to teachers. A requirement for teachers to be vaccinated would make a lot of sense, but when unions are involved, logic usually isn’t a factor.
SteveF,
So far I’ve found articles saying the data are hard to find because no one is tracking teacher acceptance or refusal.
DeWitt,
Fortunately the various vaccines are being tested on teens and moving into younger ages. So by fall, kids should get vaccinated. Still, it would be nice to know how many teachers decline vaccination.
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That is one job where I think vaccination should be required absent religious objection. What precisely to do about religious objection could be debated.
Lucia,
Groups that are politically favored by the MSM simply don’t get covered in ways that would make them look bad. Lots of coverage of Trump supporters refusing the vaccine…. not a peep about teachers or health care workers. The MSM stopped being honest reporters of facts that are socially and politically relevant a long time ago. It is now mostly propaganda to advance a politically motivated narrative.
Lucia,
“That is one job where I think vaccination should be required absent religious objection. What precisely to do about religious objection could be debated.”
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Even after everyone, including kids, has access to the vaccines? I don’t see the need for coercion when vaccination is available to all.
SteveF,
I think teachers should be required to be vaccinated but now when the kids can’t get vaccinated. Afterwards it depends. If after tests kids can be widely vaccinated, then there’s little need to require teachers get vaccinated. If for any reason a large number of kids can’t get vaccinated, then teachers should be required to do so (absent honest religious objections which are rare.)
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It will probably turn out kids can get vaccinated.
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I do think if kids are required to be vaccinated, the requirement should also apply to teachers though. Other than the difficulty adults might have getting records not kept by parents in the past, I don’t understand why a requirement would apply to one group and not the other. (I don’t think I could prove I had my polio vaccine though I had one!) With Covid, all vaccines are recent so it’s no more difficult for an adult to prove vaccination status than a child to do so.
It is notable that after demanding early access to vaccines, teachers unions still refused to go back to work after receiving said priority in many areas. The government is suing the teacher’s union is several areas to force them back to work. I think teaching is a noble profession but teacher’s unions are a disgrace and really hurt their public image. The Chicago teacher’s union is as militant as they come and could care less about their students, period.
Tom,
Yep. I did get my vaccine earlier as a “teacher”. (I fit the rule, so I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.) I could have gotten it even earlier, but many of the teacher vaccination events were organized for specific public or private schools. So “real teachers” did get vaccinated almost immediately after 1B was allowed to get it. The rule didn’t prioritize them over other essential staff, but the events did. (A cashier was 1B, but didn’t get invited to the “teacher” events organized by a local school district.)
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We are at 1B+ now. Teachers were 1B. Medical and really old were 1A.
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Next up: all adults.
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In fairness: around here in person school is resuming after spring break. Naperville schools start in person on Monday.
4M vaccine doses each of the last 2 days in the US. Senior vaccination rate now at 75%. This thing is going to be effectively over in two months. The light at the end of the tunnel is getting pretty bright.
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We just need less clowns in Baltimore ruining 15M doses, ha ha. All the FDA rules associated with medical production are what caught this mistake though so that PITA does occasionally pay off.
SteveF,
See, for example, the ‘Republicans suppressing voters’ meme. There is zero evidence for this. If the press were honest, any time a Democrat claimed that the Republicans were suppressing votes, the account should add ‘without evidence’ like they always did to Trump. Biden’s home state of Delaware still has more stringent voting restrictions than GA after the recent legislation. But since GA is a Republican controlled state, than any change in voting laws will be declared to be voter suppression. MLB has even moved the All Star game from GA. Virtue signaling rules.
DeWitt,
“MLB has even moved the All Star game from GA. Virtue signaling rules.”
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I canceled my MLB TV subscription in response. They are evil and stupid… idiots, nothing else. I will not watch the Allstar game, nor anything else these fools are offering. I would prefer to not watch MLB than tolerate this socially damaging crap. I can watch college kids destined for MLB in the Cape Cod League: live, honest, and not corrupted with all the social justice nonsense.
I attended an “Easter-egg” hunt for my 2+ YO grand daughter and two friends of similar age. I was shocked to learn that at least two grandparents of the participants (7 total alive) have refused the vaccines. WTF? Really, I find this shocking…. and almost a guarantee that insane “social distancing” rules, masks, etc will never end. It is all madness.
“It is now mostly propaganda to advance a politically motivated narrative.”
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Cmon man, this from today is just straight news reporting:
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NYT: Biden Effort to Combat Hunger Marks ‘a Profound Change’
As millions of Americans lack enough to eat, the administration is rapidly increasing aid — with an eye toward a permanent safety net expansion.
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“… the Biden administration officials will expand assistance by more than a $1 billion a month”
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Clearly we have a real starvation problem in the US that requires profound changes to public policy. Can we please get the median BMI of those who aren’t getting “enough” to eat in the US? Spoiler:
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“The prevalence of obesity decreased with increasing income in women (from 45.2% to 29.7%), but there was no difference in obesity prevalence between the lowest (31.5%) and highest (32.6%) income groups among men. Moreover, obesity prevalence was lower among college graduates than among persons with less education for non-Hispanic white women and men, non-Hispanic black women, and Hispanic women, but not for non-Hispanic Asian women and men or non-Hispanic black or Hispanic men.”
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Apparently we need anti-food stamps for the good of the people to be mandated by those who care the most.
I also attended an easter egg hunt event at a local church. No masks or social distancing to speak of. Seem to be more maskless people in Walmart as well and restaurants aren’t short of sit down customers. The “rules” aren’t going to last much longer here.
DaveJR,
“The “rules†aren’t going to last much longer here.”
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Where is here?
Tom Scharf,
Joking aside, anyone who has been to a shopping mall, supermarket, or (Heaven forbid) a beach in the last decade knows starvation is not a serious problem in the USA….. absurd, you-got-to-be-kidding scale obesity is a serious problem. Only an idiot like Biden could imagine starvation is a problem.
Smallish city in SC.
SteveF,
It’s not about starvation or malnourishment. The buzzword is hunger. Supposedly 1 in 4 children are hungry. I’m not sure how they define hunger. Of course at least 1 in 5 are obese.
No, no, no, no. You people are soooooo backward and uncaring. It is “food insecurity”. There are many definitions of this depending on what you are trying to accomplish. Example: “the state of being without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food.” Reliable and nutritious being the key words in how one comes to big numbers that need big dollars. This allows one to be obese and have food insecurity at the same time.
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This mostly applies to kids. I don’t know how much more can be done after school breakfast and lunch (which forces the nutrition part). Throwing more money at irresponsible parents doesn’t make them more responsible and start buying broccoli.
I would just like to say that MLB can k*** my a**. Breaking up with Coca Cola may be more difficult for me unfortunately.
Tom,
As I don’t watch baseball nor drink coca cola, I can’t adjust my consumer behavior to punish either. I’m certainly not going to watch a game that doesn’t interest me or drink a beverage I don’t really enjoy to reward them either. So I have no leverage there.
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I just hope Connie’s Pizza doesn’t start putting political stuff on their boxes. (I don’t want political ads or promotions on my food generally. Obviously stuff I object to is worse, but I don’t even want things I support on there. )
Tom Scharf,
Cartman on South Park immediately came to mind. Of course his food insecurity revolves around cheesy poofs and other less than nutritious foods.
Tom Scharf,
Of course the point is to justify giving “disadvantaged” people (though they are very often obese) more money for food…… and everything else.
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“Breaking up with Coca Cola may be more difficult for me unfortunately.”
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I loath the stuff, and haven’t had any in probably 30 years.
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Not watching (now) very “woke” MLB is a little more of a loss, but all I have to do is think about the a$$holes that run it, and my resolve is renewed. I have more productive things to do with my time anyway. MLB is a morally corrupt organization, and should not be supported in any way. I’ll do my best to avoid morally corrupt Delta Airlines as well.
Skipping baseball is pretty easy, since it’s boring to watch on TV.
Skipping Delta would be a great benefit to them, as I have all these miles that they no can take off their balance sheet.
Just got back from dropping off my yard waste at the city site. I live in one of those one-party Northeastern cities.
Not only did I have to present photo ID, but they are now scanning them.
Good thing nobody was trying to vote.
Apparently the elite media is worried about DeSantis for 2024. 60 Minutes did their classic hit job on him last night. It is pretty weak tea.
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Inside Florida’s chaotic vaccine rollout
Sharyn Alfonsi reports on corruption allegations clouding Florida’s efforts to vaccinate its residents.
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/covid-vaccine-distribution-florida-de-santis-60-minutes-2021-04-04/
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This is about as dishonest a story as one can make, typical for a 60 Minutes slant.
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It extrapolates the bungled vaccine rollout everywhere in the US onto DeSantis as if FL was the only one to have problems.
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It leads with an anecdotal story (always, always a red flag) from a heavily Democratic county interviewing Democratic politicians. It then goes into the “favoring the wealthy†meme which has been going on down here for months. Well FL’s senior residents are wealthier (as in all states, but particularly in FL). This has never been supported by the facts.
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It says he broke with CDC’s (social justice inspired) recommendations, which he wisely did to favor seniors as many other states did. “DeSantis said seniors have the highest riskâ€. No, that’s what the data clearly says. Maybe you can now quote the CDC? Nope. The browser Olympics are all true, but this has been common everywhere.
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Then the usual racial histrionics. This is just tiring and it’s the usual outcomes equal intentions narrative. The Publix smear is outright propaganda.
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Note to 60 Minutes, Palm Beach County is run by Democrats and they control the vast majority of vaccine distribution in their county, just as my county. The health departments are where me, my wife, and my daughter got our shots. All of them in different distressed areas of the county (BTW I have no issues with county health departments being located in these areas). We also have Publix, CVS, Walgreens, Sams, Walmart, one large scale Federal sites, and several smaller pharmacies and weird pop-up sites that come and go.
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Then, of course, deceptive editing. If you have the energy to actually watch this thing, not recommended, here is his full response to a 60 minutes question and the bold parts are what was edited out.
https://twitter.com/JerryDunleavy/status/1379064011455668225/photo/1
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I stopped watching 60 Minutes over a decade ago because of this problem, it hasn’t changed, and it’s why the media has lost trust. Publix and DeSantis aren’t going to sit down with 60 Minutes because of this problem, so their side will never be told.
Tom Scharf,
I stopped watching after November, 1986. That’s when 60 Minutes ran their hit piece on the Audi for so-called unintended acceleration. It was a gift to the plaintiff’s bar, but in the end I think most of the law suits were overturned or were won by the defendant. Audi sales suffered for years, though.
I believe the legal term for the reason to not watch 60 Minutes is: Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. The principle is applicable in this case because the piece was not an accidental misstatement or memory failure and the lies were central to the premise of the segment. If 60 Minutes is actually correct about something, it’s probably by accident.
DeWitt,
60 minutes became a pure Democrat advocacy program right around the time Dan Rather falsified documents about George W Bush’s military record; it was a willful lie designed only to damage Bush politically. Pretty much like most of what is on 60 minutes is designed to damage Republicans. I stopped watching 60 minutes decades ago. They are too dishonest to take anything they present at face value.
Through Decades Of Addiction, Hunter Biden Says His Family Never Gave Up On Him
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/983385027/hunter-biden-says-his-family-never-gave-up-on-him
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Hard hitting interview, ha ha. The word “laptop” never came up somehow, probably because NPR is completely unaware of this. I guess this article won’t be banned by The Ministry of Information.
The 60 Minutes edited video and the full answer. Obviously DeSantis knew this question was coming and was prepared. 60 Minutes just multiplied that by zero and added in their preferred narrative.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1379107540475248647
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Democratic County Mayor of Palm Beach statement: “I watched the 60 Minutes segment on Palm Beach County last night and feel compelled to issue this statement. The reporting was not just based on bad information -it was intentionally false. I know this because I offered to provide my insight into Palm Beach County’s vaccination efforts and 60 Minutes declinedâ€
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FL FEMA Director: “This idea why Publix was picked has been utter nonsense. We reached out to all pharmacies and they were the only one who at the time could execute on the mission. The federal government delayed the federal pharmacy program and we yet again stepped up first to serve more seniors”
SteveF, at the time 60 Minutes tried to claim that the TANG memos about George W Bush had nothing to do with them- that was 60 Minutes 2.
You can go back further, with Westmoreland suing them for their interview. They put in different questions to go with his answers.
With all of the discussion we have had regarding actual malice and defamation liability, the statement of the Palm Beach mayor puts the governor in a good position to sue for defamation, if he was so inclined.
JD Ohio,
I don’t know. It seems the actual malice standard will be hard to prove…. even though it is pretty obvious they hold actual malice against DeSantis. The cost would also be huge, and DeSantis is not at all a rich man. I doubt he will file a defamation suit.
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I for one would contribute to a go-fund-me-page for DeSantic to go after 60 minutes.
John M,
“Not only did I have to present photo ID, but they are now scanning them.”
,
Which just proves Democrats think valid dumping of trash is far more important than valid votes….. I am not surprised. I would be surprised if it were the other way around.
The 60 Minutes farce is basically a “You stand accused! Anonymous accusers say you are evil! What say you!†piece. It presents no evidence that there was a pay to play scheme, only a donation was made and Publix got a vaccine contract. If that was the standard for pay to play then every politician would be in jail. They probably did an investigation and found almost nothing and decided to do a hit job with what little they had.
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60 Minutes could choose to do a hit job on Cuomo or MI/CA’s governor where it’s a more target rich environment. It’s standard story selection bias. If 60 Minutes comes knocking, I would suggest closing the shades and locking your door. 60 Minutes is like a trial where only the prosecution gets to present evidence and there is no cross-examination. If they didn’t do stories like this then their “real†stories would have more impact.
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Publix is one of the most revered companies in Florida so it’s a bad target down here anyway.
E-mail from Viking Cruise Lines I received today:
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“Today I am pleased to unveil a new collection of ocean voyages for travelers who are ready to get back out into the world—and for loyal guests who are eager to return to the familiar comfort of our small ships. These Welcome Back voyages * are exclusively available for vaccinated guests *, in accordance with local entry rules in many of the destinations—and as a complement to the Viking Health & Safety Program, which was designed to protect guests and crew even while the COVID-19 vaccine rollout is still moving forward”
Tom Scharf,
A week with 800 of your closest friends, all in tiny cramped rooms, wouldn’t interest me if it were free. Vaccinations or not.
Tom Scharf,
“their “real†stories”
.
Say what? See DeWitt’s comment about how their endless lies discredit everything they ‘report’.
“We as WHO are saying at this stage we would not like to see the vaccination passport as a requirement for entry or exit because we are not certain at this stage that the vaccine prevents transmission,†WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris said.â€
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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-vaccines-idUSKBN2BT158?taid=606c42cbc8c94b00018576a3&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter
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That statement makes one all warm and fuzzy on taking the vaccine.
“But the D.C. Medical Examiner’s Office, three months later, still cannot disclose exactly what happened to Brian Sicknick. “The…medical examiners comply with the National Association of Medical Examiners’ (NAME) standard to determine the cause and manner of death within 90 days; however, for cases that are more complex it could be longer,†a spokeswoman told American Greatness by email on Monday.”
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It’s complicated. My guess is they are searching for a new and unique theory from some academics to make it a line of duty death. The actual problem here is if they go down that route, then some bear sprayer may pay the price with a unique unwarranted murder charge. This is a cover up by inaction.
If dishonest hit pieces are shown side by side with honest hit pieces and you can’t tell the difference then you can’t trust the messenger. Credibility is often burned for short term political advantage and it’s a big mistake for journalism. After decades of news consumption one can often see the difference but this is not what the usual suspects want to teach people about fake news.
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They want to basically say certain news organizations should be treated as sacrosanct and the others should be ignored. That actually used to be the case, but it changed over the past few decades. Blaming the consumers of news for this is pretty naive.
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There used to be a time when the only way to know what a competitor’s news analysis and news selection would be was to buy their paper the next morning or watch their show in the evening. You could easily have totally different takes by different organizations. Now the hive mind is synchronized by social media in real time before print and the news is ideologically homogenized.
Ed Forbes
Okie dokie. So do they want:
1) just let everyone go everywhere. Damn the possibility of transmission.
2) make everyone take a Covid test and then quarantine before leaving?
Or what? (I don’t think the article says.)
Doubtless I’m just highlighting my own personal failings in grasping the difference between parody and news, but…
https://babylonbee.com/news/in-new-captain-america-steve-rogers-swayed-by-red-skull-videos-to-take-responsibility-clean-room
I’m under the impression (and it is bizarre) that this actually happened? Not rhetorical; maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe I’ve gone insane..
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/07/jordan-peterson-shocked-by-captain-america-villain-espousing-10-rules-for-life
Having a hard time wrapping my head around this…
I don’t value making my bed in the morning. On the other hand, I have nothing in particular against Jordan Peterson. He’s wrong about Frozen though.
Lucia,
Sure. Peterson gives talks and sells books with his self help advice, and some think his advice is worthwhile, and some don’t. Nothing odd about that.
What boggles my mind is … well, it’s a few different things actually that I’m trying to adjust to all at once:
1) Ta-Nehisi Coates writes comics. I didn’t know that. Maybe I’m an intellectual snob, still, I’m startled to discover that this man, who used to write for the Atlantic, who’s written opinion pieces that have been published in the NYT regarding racism in the U.S., who’s hailed as a public intellectual — writes comics.
2) He goes after Jordan Peterson, who writes self help books. I ‘get’ that some on the left dislike Jordan Peterson because he criticizes many things they hold dear vocally (identity politics, critical theory, etc.). But his political / philosophical criticisms are incidental, he’s basically a psychologist selling his self-help advice. So, Ta-Nehisi Coates apparently smears Peterson’s self help advice as nazi propaganda. In his comics.
It just struck me as odd as heck. Actually what originally got me going was that I couldn’t readily tell the difference between the Babylon Bee piece and the Guardian piece.
mark,
It’s amazing how angry people get at his advice. I’m not angry he advocates making the bed. I’m not angry he wants young me to find direction in their lives– and that direction is often to take responsibility for their family. I’ve watched some of his videos and he doesn’t advocate some sort of “Dad is in charge; Mom and kids obey” type of philosophy.
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Some of his stuff goes off a bit into history of philosophy in a way I can’t really appreciate much. But if I listen to a longer bit rather than just a snippet, I certainly don’t find it offensive or denigrating.
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He’s wrong about Frozen though. 🙂
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To some extent, his view of Frozen is illusrtrative of ways he’s wrong when he is wrong.
Lucia,
I’m tugged between mild curiosity about what you mean by his view of Frozen being illustrative of how he’s wrong when he’s wrong and an impulse to ad-lib some bad verse advising you to ‘let it go’ regarding Frozen.
Most likely I should get back to work. I am mildly curious about what you mean though. If you cared to elaborate on it I’d read what you had to say regarding this with some small modicum of interest and gratitude.
In todays world, if you are wrong about anything in the culture world, you are therefore wrong about everything. The ongoing character assassination of Peterson has always been rather odd.
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He was one of the original “cancel at all costs” targets. He said he wouldn’t be forced to use all those alternate gender pronouns on a free speech basis when Canada passed laws with penalties for those who refuse. He has a bunch of videos that are somewhat interesting, he goes off onto religious tangents which are not very interesting. Just like anyone, he has flaws and strengths.
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He was never afraid to debate anyone or go into hostile interviews and from my view he got the better of it almost every time because people underestimated his intellect. He’s kind of like Shapiro in one sense, debate him at your peril. So they try to destroy him with comic books instead, or something, ha ha.
Aaaaghhhh!!!! Young people are getting covid!
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/young-people-are-driving-latest-covid-19-surge-especially-michigan-n1263199
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“We are now entering our fourth week of increased trends in cases,†Walensky said Monday. “The trends and data have been indicating cases are increasing nationally as we are seeing this occur predominantly in younger adults.â€
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That’s one take, the other is that seniors first vaccination is working exactly as hoped.
Lucia,
A couple of things:
1) “and an impulse to ad-lib some bad verse advising you to ‘let it go’ regarding Frozen.” was intended to be humorous as opposed to rude. Rereading it I feel like that was ambiguous, particularly given the low level of interest I expressed in what you were saying. I feel like I wrote that comment poorly.
2) I spent lunch trying to track down Petersons views and explanations on Frozen. Mostly what I came up with is that Peterson thought Frozen was propaganda, and not [or as opposed to, perhaps] an archetypical story. Usually, I have very little trouble following (or so I believe anyway) Petersons explanations; I think he explains himself pretty clearly in general. I did not follow what short explanation I heard him express for his position regarding Frozen. I may not have understood him properly – I got the impression that he felt like Frozen contradicted Sleeping Beauty somehow, and masculine and feminine symbolism was involved with the problem. Finally, I have to confess that I don’t actually remember the storyline of Frozen with enough detail to have an opinion on whether or not it was propaganda.
Anyways – my chief purpose in this comment is to apologize if I gave offense; I didn’t intend to.
[Edit: Here is a link to some of what Peterson says about why he thinks Frozen is propaganda:
https://time.com/5176537/jordan-peterson-frozen-movie-disney/
]
In truth, besides the catchy song this was the only thing I really recalled about my reaction to the story:
I was a little annoyed that there seemed to be no way to see this coming, that the apparent good guy was in fact a villian; I do distinctly remember that much.
Oh well. I’ll let it go now. 😉
mark bofill,
Disney: character development, foreshadowing, etc.? I think you’re expecting far too much and Peterson is reading far more than is actually there in Frozen. I’m still mad about how they ruined The Jungle Books. There was no King Louis in the original. The monkeys kidnapped Mowgli because they didn’t have a leader. At least Kaa the python in the live action remake wasn’t silly.
DeWitt,
Maybe I was expecting too much. I’m thinking about switching from Disney movies to Ta-Nehisi Coates superhero comics. Well, I don’t really watch Disney movies all that much, and rather than merely having no interest in superhero comics, I think it’d be fair to say I have an active aversion to such things. I have this perverse, scatalogical curiosity though..
If you only read other people’s analysis you don’t get Peterson’s full view. He says it’s Disney’s worst movie. He goes so far as to say it’s dismal and wretched.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GtYEPoc9wM
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Sorry, but he’s just wrong.
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First: Obviously, many people LOVE this movie. I’m one of them.
Second: It is not pure ideology.
Third: He labastes it for not balancing out an archetype. WTF. Casablanca is great and doesn’t “balance out the archetype”. True Grit is great and doesn’t “balance out the archetypes”. Movies aren’t required to balance out archetypes to be great. And no, cartoon movies don’t need to either. That Sleeping Beauty does doesn’t mean Frozen has to.
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Frozen is great in its own right. I cried at the end. The message is important: it’s your own love for others that saves you. This is a very strong, very good, very deep message. It doesn’t become meaningless or propaganda because it’s not the same message as freakin’ Sleeping Beauty!
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My view is when he’s wrong it’s because he gets stuck on his archetypes and evaluating ever freakin’ thing in context of that. Not everything is Jungian archetypes.
I should also add: a movie being propaganda doesn’t necessarily make it bad. Nor does someone being able to explain a movie mean it is bad nor even propaganda!
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(His whole analysis of he movie is so freakin’ bad. He clearly has some gripe there.)
Tom,
I agree with Peterson on the gender pronouns things. I even think a lot of his advice is helpful. He’s just wrong about Frozen. 🙂
Lucia,
I agree with much of what you say. Specifically, I don’t consciously care if a story I’m reading is archetypical. Like you I think, I care if I find myself enjoying a story or movie.
Thanks. I think I see what you meant now. Fair enough.
Anna saving Elsa always make me cry.
https://youtu.be/8V2zsYhNopM
Lucia,
It’s a nice ending, but I didn’t cry. I watched it years ago with my youngest daughter when she was 7 years old…. I’ll ask if it makes her cry.
There was no way to see it coming because this was a late change to the script.
MikeN,
I actually wouldn’t say that was “propagandistic”. It was a fairly undeveloped transition. But I think Peterson sees it as “propagandistic” because (for some reason mysterious to me) he sees the “message” as being “women don’t need men” and/or “men are evil and/or useless”.
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I never perceived that as a message.
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I would point out that the prince from the beginning “changing” is entirely understandable if you see it from the POV that the isolated, innocent, unsocialized girl brought up on fairy tales couldn’t notice he was never “into” her as a woman. And also: it’s not entirely unpredictable. They do show a scene suggesting his “country” has motives vis-a-vis courting either of the two princesses. It might be a bit clumsy, but it’s not nothing.
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Maybe only men wouldn’t notice that it’s not nothing. 🙂
SteveF,
When you consider the answer: Does she have a sister close in age?
WP: Manchin says he would not vote to get rid of the filibuster
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The West Virginia senator also suggested, in an op-ed published in The Washington Post, that he would be opposed to using the budgetary reconcilation process again to circumvent the filibuster, an avenue Senate Democrats have considered for passing President Biden’s ambitious infrastructure package.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/joe-manchin-filibuster-vote/2021/04/07/cdbd53c6-97da-11eb-a6d0-13d207aadb78_story.html
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Looks like crazy on a party line vote just ended.
In the Derek Chauvin trial, a witness for the prosecution testified that he heard on audio George Floyd say, “I ate too many drugs.’
After a break, the same witness testified he heard is as ‘I ain’t do no drugs’.
Lucia,
I showed her the ending scene; she had seen in at least two or three times before. It doesn’t make her cry; she has no sister close in age.
MikeN,
He had apparently ingested drugs. The second statement is not something a native speaker would likely say; the first is.
MikeN,
The defense should have a field day with those two conflicting statements from the witness.
Chauvin did drugs. I don’t think there is any doubt about that.
Lucia,
Chauvin or Floyd?
Lucia,
If Floyd said that he had swallowed too many drugs during his restraint by the police, that would be relevant I think, in so far as it would suggest Floyd recognized he had taken too much and was having an OD symptoms. Floyd claiming he didn’t do drugs would be sort of expected for a long time drug user.
Sorry… Floyd. Just drinking my morning cofveve.
The best thing for the defense to do is to find what is likely very numerous autopsy findings of drug overdoses from fentanyl that have similar or lower levels of the drug in the body, especially from the same pathologists, then ask them to explain.
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What they are saying is:
“Here, context matters. Dr. Baker told prosecutors that if Mr. Floyd had been “found dead at home alone†with “no other apparent causes,†they wrote, it could have been acceptable to determine that Mr. Floyd died of an overdose because of the relatively high levels of fentanyl found in his blood collected at the hospital.
Instead, recordings revealed both the prolonged restraint of Mr. Floyd just before his death and also that he appeared agitated rather than lethargic, which could suggest tolerance to higher doses of fentanyl. The drug typically “causes you to become relaxed,†Dr. Wecht said.”
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The defense can argue he took the drugs right when the cops arrived and there was delay before the OD.
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I saw a WP article where multiple pathologists very emphatically said this was not an OD, but the emotional way in which they stated it seemed to indicate this was emotionally entangled. I think there is some question here, most likely the video will overcome it, but one or two jurors may see this as enough doubt to lower the sentencing level. The defense needs to show similar cases with different autopsy outcomes and argue the fix is in for political reasons. I have little doubt the fix is in, but it may still reflect the facts anyway.
Behold the humanitarian solution to children in cages!
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/08/985296354/almost-19-000-migrant-children-stopped-at-u-s-border-in-march-most-ever-in-a-mon
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“The number of migrants encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border in March was the most in at least 15 years, as agents for U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended nearly 172,000 people, according to Biden administration officials.
This included nearly 19,000 children and teenagers traveling without a parent — double the levels from February and the most ever in a single month.
The overall surge in March — a 71% spike over February’s figures — illustrates the scope of the ongoing challenge President Biden faces as he seeks to enforce the border while overhauling the nation’s asylum rules.”
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See if you can detect slightly different framing from previous stories:
https://www.npr.org/2018/06/30/624950726/protesters-across-the-country-rally-against-trumps-immigration-policies
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“In California, Sen. Kamala Harris crafted a speech around the words “We are better than this,” and John Legend, from behind a piano, sang a brand new song about staying engaged: “Heaven knows I’m not helpless. But what can I do? … I can’t just sit and pray.”
In Houston, people chanted “No baby jails!” In Chicago, protesters marched to the ICE’s field office and erected tents. In New York, demonstrators on the Brooklyn Bridge chanted “Shame!” In Atlanta, someone carried a cage with baby dolls inside.”
The Biden administration clearly wants people to enter the USA over the southern boarder in large numbers. I suspect they want to “create” a sufficiently bad “humanitarian crisis” to justify a major overhaul of laws to “solve the immigration problem”….. which is to say: add 15 million new voters for democrats everywhere, ASAP, ensuring electoral majorities until they can completely “transform the way people live their lives”.
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It is all so dishonest it makes me want to vomit.
What is strange is the defense counsel had asked a witness the day before and got him to say he heard ‘I ate too many drugs.’
Why was this team of prosecutors unprepared when the next witness was asked this?
This is a huge team of prosecutors.
This practice should not be allowed, for the government to enlist private lawyers to help put people in prison. A basic idea is that the government has to pick and choose how it expends resources on which laws to enforce.
The EU’s medicines regulator says unusual blood clots should be listed as a very rare side effect of the AstraZeneca vaccine for Covid-19.
After a study looking at 86 European cases, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) concluded the benefits of the vaccine outweighed the risk.
It is, of course, vital that Chauvin’s defense make the case the Floyd died of an OD. But given the video and the outside pressure on the judge and jury that probably won’t be enough.
They also need to make the case that Chauvin’s actions were reasonably consistent with his training. They have already taking steps toward that in cross-examining prosecution witnesses. Specifically, by bringing out that Chauvin’s knee was not on Floyd’s neck for at least part of the time, that someone in excited delirium can go from seemly unconscious to violent without warning, and that the presence of a hostile crowd is a reason to maintain restraint.
Do we know the prosecution theory of how Floyd died? It must have been part of their opening argument. Are they claiming that Chauvin’s actions were the sole cause of Floyd’s death? That seems improbable, given that the autopsy showed no physical injury. Or are they arguing that Chauvin’s actions combined with Floyd’s drug use caused his death?
——–
Addition: This at least partially answers my question:
https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/545561-can-derek-chauvin-possibly-be-acquitted
MikeM
Doesn’t seem improbable to me. Asphyxia needn’t and often doesn’t show any injury and asphyxia precisely what the video suggest. It’s what everyone who screaming at Chauvin were warning about on the video. They weren’t shouting about repeated stabbings.
After over a year and >500K deaths the CDC says yesterday:
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“People can be affected with the virus that causes Covid-19 through contact with contaminated surfaces and objects,†Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the C.D.C., said at a White House briefing on Monday. “However, evidence has demonstrated that the risk by this route of infection of transmission is actually low.â€
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Perhaps they should have run some tests a little earlier. How hard is this? Their ethical hard line in testing never takes into account the damage that * lack of action * can incur. I see no reason this is going to change and it has real costs.
Tom,
They reported risk of transmission by fomites was low long ago. I had an argument with someone about it on a dance blog (that set up a “non-Dance Covid” thread.) I kept telling him that path of transmission was thought to be low and could not get him to believe me.
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I think the reason it sticks around is many people want to feel they can be safe by active cleaning. They want to feel they can look around and tell if a place is safe if it “looks clean”. To most “looks clean” is orderly, wiped polished surfaces, made beds, tidy throw pillows, no scattered kids toys and so on.
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That sort of “looks clean” is usually healthier– fewer bed bugs, lice, fungi, bacteria, mouse droppings and so on. Bugs, animals, growing organisms can all be disease transport vectors! But some diseases are contagious even if a place “looks clean”. (And some “looks not clean” is disorder, not dirt. For example: kids toys scattered after play. It is a problem if they are never picked up so surfaces are never vaccummed swept or mopped. But the legos on the floor generally don’t carry pathogens and if they do, putting them in the toy box where they belong doesn’t help much. Of course, disorder can be dangerous. I’ve stepped on Legos. Ouch!)
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FWIW, I know my mom is the sort who automatically “feels” safe if the place “looks” clean. She went on about how her hairdresser had to be safe because the floors were swept, the counters immaculate, everything ‘in it’s place’. Since I’m pretty sure she wore a mask I wasn’t going to get on her case about it, but with Covid the stereotypical messy artists den with brushes scattered and odd objects all around but good ventilation would be safer.
The most recent witnesses completely destroy the asphyxiation theory. The neck hold is irrelevant, and therefore the defense counsel’s eliciting of testimony that the procedures were proper, and they were not applying full force to the neck, because they were coming between the shoulder blades, actually hurts his case.
The witness from Ireland said that it was pressure on his chest that collapsed Floyd’s lungs and that even a healthy person would have dies with this restraint.
I find this hard to believe given the people who said Chauvin’s methods were according to protocol, at least the first 5 minutes.
According to the witness, it wouldn’t have mattered what happened in the last 4 minutes, whether they put Floyd in an upright position.
lucia (Comment #201216): “They reported risk of transmission by fomites was low long ago.”
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Did the *CDC* formally say that? I think not, but am not sure. There were certainly such reports last summer, some of which may have been in a CDC publication. But was it made official?
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lucia: “I think the reason it sticks around is many people want to feel they can be safe by active cleaning.”
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I am sure that is a big part of it. But governors have issued a slew of diktats as to what can remain open and as to what requirements businesses must meet. I think that compulsive cleaning of surfaces is often required by those diktats.
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lucia: “the stereotypical messy artists den with brushes scattered and odd objects all around but good ventilation would be safer.”
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Indeed. I was called for jury duty last fall. Courts were open with a long list of safety precautions, but nothing was said about ventilation. As if masks, plexiglass screens, and compulsive surface cleaning would make up for that. I have not been all that worried about the Wuhan virus. But I was still nervous about the possibility of many hours of discussions in a possibly poorly ventilated room. I was relieved when I never had to show up.
I don’t know if the CDC said it. I just know the prevailing view was airborn or aerosols pretty darn early on. That’s the argument for masks!
Aerosols was last year sometime. This was different than droplets that fall within 6 feet. This took quite a while.
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I think the CDC spends too much effort worrying about messaging and psychologically manipulating the public for their desired outcome instead of just stating the science, it’s uncertainty, and how to reduce personal risk if you have to do things, or choose to do things.
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Thus they hold on to personal agency such as cleaning surfaces and washing hands instead of relaying the much more scary aerosols message. It’s invisible, it’s floating around, and wearing a mask only reduces the risk by an unknown amount.
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Then there is this:
CDC Director Declares Racism A ‘Serious Public Health Threat
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/08/985524494/cdc-director-declares-racism-a-serious-public-health-threat
“So what does it mean for the agency? Walensky has charged all of the offices and centers under the CDC to develop interventions and measurable health outcomes in the next year, addressing racism in their respective areas. And she’s made clear that is a priority for the entire CDC.”
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This is what they are worrying about? That’s actually a * priority * for the CDC in a pandemic year, ha ha? This is performative virtue signaling. Previously they recommended vaccinating “essential workers” before seniors which was just a euphemism for racial preferences. This kind of stuff just isn’t helpful for building public confidence in their mission.
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Note that beyond arm waving explanations of structural racism we still don’t really know why there are racial disparities in covid illness. Lots of theories but very little science.
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On the other hand their website has been pretty decent and possibly the reporting of the CDC’s finding holds a lot of faults.
Mike M. “Do we know the prosecution theory of how Floyd died? It must have been part of their opening argument. Are they claiming that Chauvin’s actions were the sole cause of Floyd’s death? That seems improbable, given that the autopsy showed no physical injury.”
……
With the recent testimony of a pulmonary specialist we know their theory of death. Not that Floyd was strangled in the neck — rather that pressure on his chest while lying down made it impossible for Floyd to breath. State’s pulmonary expert even identified the point of death. Unless his testimony is strongly rebutted [and Andrew McCarthy of the National Review said Chauvin’s lawyer did lay a hand on this witness], then to me the scientific evidence is clear that the police killed Floyd. The most pertinent part of the evidence was summed up by McCarthy this way:
….
“”Chillingly, Dr. Tobin identified the precise moment when he could detect “the moment the life goes out of [Floyd’s] body.†It happened just after one of Floyd’s legs jutted out wildly, a telltale sign of anoxic seizure. “There’s a flickering and then it disappears,†Tobin remarked as, on the video screen, jurors saw death’s gaze fall over Floyd’s face.” https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/gripping-medical-testimony-gets-chauvin-prosecution-back-on-track/
……
If you view this as chest asphyxiation, then everything makes sense, including no injury to Floyd’s neck.
An enlightening poll finding:
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/just-29-of-vaccinated-adults-say-its-now-safe-to-travel-compared-to-51-of-vaccine-rejectors/
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“In the latest Economist/YouGov poll, three in 10 Americans who have received at least one vaccinate shot (29%) believe it is safe for them to travel within the United States today. By contrast, half of the one in four Americans who reject the vaccine believe it is safe for them to venture out now.”
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So the vaccine hesitators may be mostly downplaying the danger. This may be true for the young and healthy, but not so much for the oldsters.
This has become a bona fide slippery slope. The Ministry of Truth just can’t stop themselves once they look down and find a hammer in their hands.
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YouTube removes video of DeSantis coronavirus roundtable
https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2021/04/09/youtube-removes-video-of-desantis-coronavirus-roundtable/
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“The March 18 roundtable discussion featured a panel of physicians who appeared to be hand-picked because their views aligned with DeSantis’ handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Among them was Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist who was a pandemic adviser to former President Donald Trump, as well as Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, of Stanford Medical School — all of whom have been critical of lockdowns and certain other measures amid the pandemic.”
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Should kids be required to wear masks? Please don’t ponder that or I shall report you.
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This video had been up for a month before the madness was discovered. Thankfully we have been saved from the opinion of people from Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard.
â€Chillingly, Dr. Tobin identified the precise moment when he could detect “the moment the life goes out of [Floyd’s] body.â€
.
But didn’t the paramedics say that Floyd was alive when they got there and died of cardiac arrest in the ambulance?
Tom Scharf (Comment #201234): “So the vaccine hesitators may be mostly downplaying the danger. This may be true for the young and healthy, but not so much for the oldsters.”
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Or maybe those anxious to get the vaccine are overstating the danger. 🙂
———–
Tom Scharf (Comment #201236): “Thankfully we have been saved from the opinion of people from Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard.”
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Now if only we could *always* be saved from the opinions of such people. 🙂
CDC very early on said that surfaces is not a primary means of transmission. I remember being surprised by this and checking wayback and found out this was what CDC was saying from the beginning.
Mike M: “But didn’t the paramedics say that Floyd was alive when they got there and died of cardiac arrest in the ambulance?”
Haven’t seen that at all. Everything I have seen indicates that Floyd was dead for 4 minutes before Chauvin got off of Floyd.
Here’s where I read about the Hans script change in Frozen.
Originally, Hans kills Elsa because of a prophecy from the trolls.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/in-defense-of-prince-hans
Tom Scharf,
“This video had been up for a month before the madness was discovered. Thankfully we have been saved from the opinion of people from Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard.”
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The overwhelming desire to enforce pubic policies that take personal liberty away and substitute forced compliance has been evident from the very beginning of the pandemic, of course. This is not going to change.
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But I think it useful to not consider covid policy in isolation, but rather as one small part of a much larger political disagreement: those who value personal liberty/autonomy versus those who prefer to force ‘majority will’ upon the individual… a simple description is personal liberty versus public control. Most substantive policy disagreements hinge on that disagreement. For those who find little value (and see much harm!) in personal liberty, any policy which advances their perception of public good should, indeed must, be forced upon everyone. For those who value personal liberty, many (if not most) public policies are at best a trade-off against liberty, and most covid-19 policies wholly unacceptable because they usurp personal liberty with little or no benefit. It is ultimately a question of political priorities, one on which there is fundamental disagreement, and on the left, complete intolerance of any opposition to public control.
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The pandemic will pass, and at some point people will begin to ignore onerous rules imposed in the name of ‘public safety’. But the fundamental disagreement will not pass: taxes, health care, minimum wages, gun control, global warming, land use, public takings, auto milage rules, and everywhere that personal vs public control are in conflict, will continue to be fronts in the battle. History shows the prescriptions of the left have never worked very well, and have consistently diminish both wealth and liberty (Ignoring the many mass murders that have been carried out by those on the left). But that will never dissuade those on the left from insisting, by every means at their disposal, on their preferred policies…. when you are certain you are absolutely right, any means is justified.
SteveF
Sugary drink ban anyone? (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drinks_portion_cap_rule supported by deBlasio and Bloomberg.)
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This is where risk/reward ought to be weighed. I think there is a point where dangers to the public are large enough that some policies restricting personal behavior are warranted. However, there is no bright line that marks “here”.
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Some politicians clearly went much too far. ( Cuomo for one.)
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Our Pritzger might have liked to go too far but he got pushback in the suburbs and rural areas. At least one sherriff (?) in rural area wrote a letter explaining that he was not going to direct his miniscule forces to spend time hunting down family graduation parties, weddings and so on that might be taking place on farms. He was also not going to be hunting down bars or stores violating. He did warn that the State of Illinois might do something like yank your license– which was inside the States authority not his.
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In the end, Pritzger made rules that people mostly complied with. To some extent, the rules dovetailed with behavior many people wanted to do anyway. Lots of people wanted to work at home if they could. (Some did not, but still, lots of people wanted rules that encouraged staying at home. Office workers who kept their jobs generally didn’t mind that a boss who might otherwise be reluctant to switch to remote work had to let them stay at home.)
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Well, many were willing to comply, except people in Chicago where Lori Lightfoot was utterly unable to get people to stop having parties in small apartments. Based on newstories, those people tended to be African-American. There, people were breaking rules but the enforcers didn’t want to be heavy-handed but their reasons for not wanting to enforce differed from those of rural and suburban sherriffs departments.
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With >30% vaccination rates I think we are reaching the point where only the lightest restrictions are going to be possible. (Pritzkers proposal of occupancy limits that only count the unvaccinated might fly for a while. After case numbers and death rates fall low enough, even that won’t fly.)
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Note: “might fly” is different from “warranted” vs “unwarranted” which can be debated separately. But really, there is no way occupancy limits are going to be policed by local sherriffs if case rates are down. And people who are vaccinated are not going to put up with restrictions unless (a) case rates stay high and (b) it’s shown vaccines don’t work against whatever new variants might emerge.
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I’m willing to wear a mask at dance venues for now because I don’t want to put those in charge in the position of having to police and I know some unvaccinated are still worried and I’d like them to feel they can come and dance a bit safely. I absolutely know some dancers own “fake masks” and I suspect these dancers would claim to be vaccinated when they are not. I don’t expect my worried, unvaccinated friends to “just know” I am not lying. I’ll wear a mask. But once everyone who wants a vaccine can get one and death rates are miniscule, no way will I want to wear a mask. I’ll want some different rule That could be “no mask at all” (best).
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But failing that: “monitor for vaccine status” just like we monitor for over 21 for alcohol. The vaccinated can be no-mask. Others mask. That would protect those who aren’t vaccinated because they can’t be and just putting a burden on those who can be but just don’t want to be and so are putting the “can’t be vaccinated” at some risk because they prefer to be unvaccinated for whatever reason.
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This is, of course, dancing. It’s a nearly face to face activity.
These are, btw, fake masks:
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https://www.amazon.com/Barode-Sparkly-Rhinestones-Masquerade-Nightclub/dp/B08CR6HNKV/ref=asc_df_B08CR6HNKV/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=459496558788&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=362493779099262042&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9021653&hvtargid=pla-943953948680&psc=1
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One of the dance coaches had one. She got Covid or at least says she got it. No big surprise. (Her case was reportedly mild. But, yeah, she went to dance events, bars, flew etc. So she’s in the demographic more likely to get it.)
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Another dance coach who told me she thought the fake masks were just stupid especially when traveling circulated around very similar events and did not get Covid. This coach isn’t particularly pro-mask but knows that getting Covid or even behaving in ways that make her clients feel at risk is not good business. And she thins even apart from the effect on business fake ones are just stupid.
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Nevertheless, fake masks are “a thing” in dance circles. The people who wear them tend to be wanting to convey a message.
“This is where risk/reward ought to be weighed. I think there is a point where dangers to the public are large enough that some policies restricting personal behavior are warranted. However, there is no bright line that marks “hereâ€.”
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For me anyway, there is a bright line where our information overlords deem it unfit to even discuss where that bright line shall be. The bright line on masks has been demarcated and thou shall not transgress upon that wisdom benevolently gifted to us rubes from upon high by those blessed with infinite wisdom.
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C.S. Lewis: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.â€
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YouTube bans like this are made by unaccountable committees of private companies that are more or less acting like a cartel (see Hunter Biden and Parler) with very near monopoly power over information.
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Activists from the left use these censorship rules to further their agenda. This will never stop, nor do I wish activists to disappear, but the fault lies with the committees who do this bidding and are not sufficiently accountable for their one sided and increasingly intolerant views.
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I’m very much against taking action against private companies for their censorship decisions (shall we force the DNC to have RNC views?) but there are limits if these companies garner too much power and start acting like quasi-governments and cannot use this power wisely. I’m still for letting this play out in the market, but I grow impatient with their behavior.
I think fake masks are the opposite of conveying a message. They are a way to pretend to follow the rules without wearing a real mask and being more breathable. The objective is to not have people notice you are doing anything different.
Fake masks, that is pretty effed up. I very much question the efficacy of masks (it will be interesting to see where this eventually settles out in few years) but wearing one you intentionally buy as not compliant is very strange thinking.
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The people most likely to not wear masks are likely the unvaccinated so there is this paradox. As the information continues to accumulate that the vaccinated are safe from even the unvaccinated it will be a non-issue in the grand scheme. With 30% of the nation unvaccinated we will likely have continuous low level covid for years but the victims will be self selecting at least.
Sometimes people just don’t get the message:
SC: “This is the fifth time the court has summarily rejected the Ninth Circuit’s analysis of California’s Covid restrictions on religious exerciseâ€
“California treats some comparable secular activities more favorably than at-home religious exercise, permitting hair salons, retail stores, personal care services, movie theaters, private suites at sporting events and concerts and indoor restaurantsâ€
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I don’t have much of an opinion on favoring religious activity over secular activity, but that’s a right explicitly stated in the Constitution and you can’t just pretend it isn’t there and isn’t enforceable.
MikeN,
I know the people who wear these, and they think they are sending a message. I assure you, they are not trying to have anyone not notice they are flouting the spirit of the mask rule. They absolutely let you know the masks are fake. And at this point, everyone in the dance community recognizes these fake masks. This is not subtle.
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To a large extent, their position is masks are “mask theater”. They are being theatrical but their performance is not the script The Governor wrote.
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Tom Scharf
Yes. I think this is going to happen. Other than people who really can’t take the virus or whose immune systems really don’t work and so don’t respond. But this will be a small fraction of the unvaccinated.
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I have a friend-acquantance who I like very much. In person she tells me she can’t get the vaccination because of allergies. But on Facebook she is very anti-vax. So I suspect she is “courageous” about her beliefs on Facebook but not so much in my presence. (I don’t actually know. In any case, I wouldn’t give her shit. But some people would and I suspect she doesn’t know that.)
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Also, we don’t shut down the economy or make onerous rule just for “Boy in the Bubble” sorts. To some extent, people whose immune system doesn’t work need to take their own precautions. (Though I understand peanut butter will often be banned at school to avoid exposure of kids with peanut allergies. )
Tom,
The aren’t really saying religious activity should be favored over secular activity. It just can’t be disfavored. More specifically, it has to be treated as favorably as anything with comparable risk and the burden that it has more risk than something treated more favorably is on the government, not on worshipers.
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I’m agnostic/atheist. But I think this is precisely right. Newsom, Cuomo and the 9th circuit wants to say that if they treat any secular activity as badly as worship, then that’s enough. But that really doesn’t work because then Governors like Newsom and Cuomo could treat nearly all secular activities more favorably than religion but pick exactly one trivial secular activity to regulate harshly for “reasons” and use it to justify regulating religion. Perhaps that would be one activity they don’t like anyway.
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To some extent they did that by deeming some businesses “essential” and others “not essential” with to some extent little rhyme or reason to “essential”. It’s not as if the only essential businesses were grocery and pharmacy. According to parts of the ruling quoted here indoor restaurants we allowed to have more patrons than home worship. Eating is essential. Lots of people love to eat at restaurants. But indoor dining isn’t “essential”.
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I would suggest the reason for the exemption is Newsom likes to dine out. So do many politicians. Dining out is helpful to campaigning, building coalitions, persuading, raising money and so on. Fine. But let worshipers worship.
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This is very important too
Right, greater than or equal to other secular activities of any kind, not just other secular home activities in this case. The ninth circuit will not accept religion is effectively deemed an essential activity by the Constitution. It’s not that hard for politicians to just avoid these religious entanglements, but they seem to seek them out and pick fights for political advantage for their voting base.
Tom, Lucia, for my son playing basketball I took a surgical mask and cut out the material and replaced it with part of a jersey. They are required to wear while playing, and this actually gives him an advantage over other kids, who can be seen on the sidelines pretending to drink water just so they can breathe.
The one Lucia linked is more decorative, but if available I can see people buying the one I made.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/20a151_4g15.pdf
From the dissent (who think it’s ok to compare religious meeting in private homes to other meetings in private homes.)
This is pretty darn speculative and also depends on what business. People are often in and out of a pharmacy or bakery. Women stay for rather prolonged periods at hair and nail salons and spas. People stay a long time at sporting events. People often spend more than an hour when having dinner in a nice restaurant.
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I’m not at all sure this is true. I think many small stores and salons in older buildings are smaller than private houses and more poorly ventilated. Worse yet: It’s harder to improve the ventilation in many small stores. Many stores have a big single pane that cannot be opened in the front. This is nice for display, but not so nice for ventilation. (The dance studio where I dance has windows like this.)
Houses often have lots of windows that can be opened. Usually, there is at least 1 window per room (possibly excepting bathrooms or basements.
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If lack ventilation was the reason Newsom’s “experts” treated private differently from public, they could have said that groups could only meet in rooms where it was possible to open a window and you were required to open it. (If I were hosting a religious event in my living room, I would crack the window and run the exhaust fans in the kitchen and bathroom. That would tend to draw air into the living room, then out the kitchen and bathroom. On nice days, I’d fully open the window.)
But, of course, if they actually discussed ventilation in homes, the law would probably have to impose conditions on ventilation in restaurants, theaters and so on. They could require a minimum fresh air replacement rate like 3 volumes of turn over per hour or whatever. Or they could require a particular level of filtration along with volume turn over. They probably don’t want to do that. And the reason they don’t want to do that is lots of restaurants, bars, salons, spas, grocery stores and so on wouldn’t qualify.
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And the reason lots wouldn’t qualify is the dissenting judges in this case are mistaking: public places are often poorly ventilated.
Plausible. But that depends on the business owner and employees. I went to the fabric store during the peak of the epidemic and no one said a peep to women shopping with no mask.
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Mask wearing was scant in the restaurant bars at the dance events I went to. (It was 100% in the competition hall!)
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I suspect in a truly ‘private’ setting where everyone is involved in a social gathering social distancing and mask-wearing are often non-existent. But I would think in a religious gathering which is more formal, social distancing and mask-wearing would be similar to in bars and restaurants.
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Honestly, people are picking and choosing experts. There really isn’t enough known for someone to really have scientific findings in many cases.
MikeN,
With kids playing outdoors, I think they shouldn’t require masks at all. If I had a kid in an outdoor sport (especially baseball for heaven’s sake), and masks were required, I would hunt down the lightest weight “solid” fabric I could find just being sure it did not look transparent. (You could have a “on field” mask and a “dugout” mask if necessary!)
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There are plenty of light weight, non transparent solid fabrics with looser weaves. I could solve that.
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For many indoor kids sports I’d do the same. Perhaps not wrestling though. That can’t be remotely social distanced during a bout.
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If I worried a lot about transmission during the sport, I’d probably just be the “bad cop” parent and not let them do the sport at all. I might be wrong, but I’m not sure any mask will really protect during wrestling or most self defense type sports.
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For what it’s worth, I think the fake masks I showed are heavy. The kid wouldn’t want that bouncing up and down on their face. It’s worse than eyeglasses that have gone out of adjustment. People wear them sitting. Ballroom dance links “blingy” things anyway. In principle, one might wear the bling over the mask. In practice, the ones wearing the “bling” fake mask don’t wear anything else.
The SC said you can’t assume the worst for religious services and assume the best for secular services. The entire thing stinks to high heaven, ha ha. CA updated it’s requirements within hours of the appeal for intervention by the SC. The SC is obviously fed up with this subject.
https://reason.com/volokh/2021/04/10/breaking-scotus-grants-injunction-in-tandon-v-newsom/
The NCAA basketball tournament had players on the court without masks and with mask when on the bench with bizarre socially distanced bench seating. The coaches did their regular thing with going into chin diaper mode anytime they need to yell to the players which was frequent. Quite the mask theater. It seems this issue has gone off the deep end.
Tom Scharf,
“YouTube bans like this are made by unaccountable committees of private companies that are more or less acting like a cartel (see Hunter Biden and Parler) with very near monopoly power over information.”
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I am becoming convinced that the only practical solutions are:
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1) Break these very large de facto monopolies into many smaller companies (eg. Google becomes 6 companies , Facebook 6 companies, etc) with criminal penalties for coordinated actions by managers after the breakups, or
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2) Make these de facto monopolies subject to common carrier rules that demand they treat all content exactly the same….. with criminal penalties for non-compliance.
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These companies have demonstrated clearly that they will not allow competing political opinions to receive wide distribution….. they can only be stopped via legislation.
They can also be stopped by competition, however their actions against Parler were quite stupid and now they are really asking for it.
Tom,
What’s Parler done lately? (Real Question.)
Lucia,
Looks like they are operating: https://parler.com/auth/access
Impossible to say how much traffic they et.
The kids’ basketball was indoors with a questionnaire to be filled out and temperature taken. I was one of the people taking temperatures and noticed that the thermometers were all reading low. They had rules for masks at all times, but they made an exception for pictures, where the league gets a cut of sales.
Soccer was outdoors, and they had rules of masks while going to and from the parking lot, but not on the bench. However, kids had to be distanced along the bench. Coaches and spectators are to be wearing masks at all times.
MikeN,
In Florida, it seems to me almost nobody who plays golf is paying any attention to distancing rules…. handshakes are common again. Rakes are in bunkers, flags in cups. Really, no difference from February 2020. YMMV, especially in bluer states.
Tom Scharf,
“Quite the mask theater. It seems this issue has gone off the deep end.”
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Yes, the entire tournament was pure theater of the absurd. But look at who the teams play for….. a bunch of universities run by the woke left…. and those folks are consistently absurd in what they say and do. Unfortunately, not enough politicians are willing to tell the NCAA to shove it. A few high profile state schools withdrawing from the NCAA and starting an independent intercollegiate sports organization would go a long way toward restoring sanity. But the governors who could force the issue are cowards.
The CFA (College Football Association) was formed in 1977 because a lot of schools didn’t like the way the NCAA was running college football, especially negotiating TV rights. It lasted about 20 years, now the conferences negotiate the rights.
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Of course they are still officially attached to academia, but like separate worlds. As time goes by this is getting to be more and more of an anachronism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Football_Association
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“After the CFA negotiated its own TV deal in 1981, the NCAA threatened sanctions against any colleges participating in the CFA deal, in all sports, not just football. The Universities of Georgia and Oklahoma, two prominent members of the CFA, sued the NCAA in U.S. District Court, seeking an injunction that would prevent the NCAA from imposing sanctions against CFA members, and asserting that the NCAA was engaged in restraint of trade and price-fixing.[5]
On June 27, 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in NCAA v. Board of Regents of University of Oklahoma that the NCAA’s television plan violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. As a result, individual schools and athletic conferences were freed to negotiate contracts on their own behalf. Together with the growth of cable television, this ruling resulted in the explosion of broadcast options currently available.”
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The legal groundwork has been laid. I think the main impediment is that an independent team not associated with a conference and academia will not be allowed to compete in those leagues which makes it really hard to startup. College football probably hates their association with academia (and vice versa) but isn’t going to want to threaten a really goo thing they already have.
The NYT runs a long profile of DeSantis. It’s about as close to a puff piece as a Republican will ever get at that place, meaning it’s not a 100% hit job, only 25%.
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Could Ron DeSantis Be Trump’s G.O.P. Heir? He’s Certainly Trying.
Florida’s governor has elbowed his way to the front of the line of 2024 Republican hopefuls by leveraging a brand of “competent Trumpism†(as one ally put it) and hitting back at critics of his pandemic leadership.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/us/politics/ron-desantis-republican-trump.html
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Realistically DeSantis is peaking too early here. It’s hard to survive 3 more years of constant character assassination and the media’s Eye of Sauron upon you.
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It is noted that they use the word “Trump” 17 times in the article so you know what the not so subtle takedown strategy will be.
Tom Scharf (Comment #201326): “The NYT runs a long profile of DeSantis. It’s about as close to a puff piece as a Republican will ever get at that place, meaning it’s not a 100% hit job, only 25%.”
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My impression of that piece was that they really wanted it to be a 100% hit job, they just couldn’t find enough mud. So they resorted to calling his covid policy a mixed bag, because although he kept the schools and businesses open they had the virus there anyway and he did not adhere to the conventional wisdom. And they referred to the Publix thing as not enough proof, rather than invented out of thin air. Etc.
FL is a mixed bag with covid, as is virtually ever other state. It’s just not sortable very effectively by policy as the media so wishes it was. DeSantis only narrowly won the election. Had the Democrat won and imposed more draconian policies FL would be praised and protected by the media, but I seriously doubt the covid results would have changed much. The overriding parameter in covid results is the widespread presence of covid in the community. Full stop. Not the good intentions of politicians or their desire to take “actionâ€.
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What was always off base was the way the media treated states relatively depending on whether they were red and blue by even a few percentage points (FL is basically 51/49). DeSantis allowed local communities to impose a lot of restrictions and Miami/Dade run by Democrats imposed more restrictions and consistently had the worst results. There are actually things to learn here and it is useful data.
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One side is a victim of the virus and * other people * not following the rules, the other side is a victim of their moral failings and deserve what they get for electing the wrong color politicians. This framing still persists even when it has been severely undercut by the data. The media is going through their stages of grief for this narrative and coming around to acceptance.
Tom Scharf (Comment #201329): “FL is a mixed bag with covid, as is virtually ever other state.”
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I suppose that whether you call it a mixed bag depends on spin. The NYT would like to depict them as worse, or certainly no better, than New York or Michigan. Both of which have been unmitigated disasters.
Here is another common media framing technique used to hide their intentional bias.
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NYT on DeSantis:
“His recent tangle with “60 Minutes†centered on the extent to which political connections have helped white, wealthy Floridians get vaccinated.
Local news outlets have chronicled how vaccine access has been slower for Black, Latino and poorer communities. Some pop-up vaccination sites were opened in neighborhoods that had many older residents — and that also had ties to DeSantis campaign donors.â€
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Note the subtle “other people have criticized person for …†framing. Why insert that “other people†language? Because the NYT has itself chronicled this disparity all across America, and has itself shown recently that FL leans heavily white in the senior demographic and that by itself explain the bulk of the racial disparity, not weird governor PR pop-up sites.
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See the charts here on black vaccination rates and black share of the senior population brought to us by the lead prosecutor. Those who are furthest “behind†are those that have heavily white senior populations.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/05/us/vaccine-racial-disparities.html
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They know this framing is not an honest framing, yet they focus this framing on FL when it is everywhere and leave it for the reader to sort out. If this were Trump stating something it would be fact checked and contextualized as misleading, etc.
New York, NJ, Connecticut, and Massachusetts (the blue blanket) have all been unmitigated covid-19 disasters, yet it is DeSantis who is constantly hammered. He made good choices about focusing on protecting the elderly in nursing homes, and good choices about vaccination priorities. So even while Florida has a much older population than most blue blanket states, Florida has MUCH lower death rates.
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The distorted framing and endless criticism of DeSantis by the MSM (both in Florida and outside Florida) is politically motivated dishonesty. The MSM strikes me as the purest of stinking garbage; they are incapable of honest reporting, and should be ignored.
Lucia, “What’s Parler done lately? (Real Question.)”
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Extremely frustrating to me that Parler requires your phone no. just to VIEW posts. They would be doing much better if they would drop that idiotic requirement. I am not going to give them my phone no. merely to read posts.
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In the meantime, Twitter continues with idiotic censorship, blocking Jason Whitlock for pointing out that BLM founder has bought an expensive house in Los Angeles area that is 98% white. https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/twitter_does_not_want_you_to_know_that_the_cofounder_of_blm_just_bought_a_14_million_house_in_an_exclusive_lilywhite_neighborhood.html
Checked vaccine appts today in my area. 3 hours after opening I could schedule one in 3 days 1 mile from my house at the local evil Publix pay for play pharmacy. FL has been all-eligible for a couple weeks. Few to no people are complaining about access on local message boards.
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We are rapidly approaching the point where everyone who wants a vaccine can get one easily enough. Some people who are less concerned may just wait until they can walk up at the grocery store and get jabbed instantly with J & J and be done. That should happen within a few weeks (although J & J likely won’t have enough shots due to production problems).
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The media continues its narrative of “young people getting covid” while barely addressing the vaccine effect in older people. I will give them credit for not scaremongering every time a vaccinated person gets covid though.
Tom Scharf (Comment #201483): “Some people who are less concerned may just wait until they can walk up at the grocery store and get jabbed instantly with J & J and be done. That should happen within a few weeks”.
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That is basically what I am doing. Although it might take longer since I live in a state with a governor determined to hold on to as much power as possible.
Tom Scharf,
While it is true that the vaccine will be widely available very soon (basically walk in and get a shot), I doubt that will provide much additional motivation to receive the vaccines. There exists a significant fraction of the at-risk population (mostly those over 65) who appear unwilling to get vaccinated, independent of availability. There is also a population of much younger people for whom there is little personal risk…. so even if the vaccine is readily available, and even if they are in principle willing to be vaccinated, many will not be. This seems to me a formula which guarantees a very long, slow decline in both cases and deaths…. making the lifting of draconian policies unlikely in many states. I just don’t see how the madness ends within the foreseeable future with so many people not being vaccinated.
“I thought I was shooting my taser” isn’t likely to be an especially good defense in Minnesota at the moment. At least there is bodycam footage and it was immediately released to get to the facts quickly.
>Some people who are less concerned may just wait until they can walk up at the grocery store and get jabbed instantly
Hate to think I can walk into a grocery store unsuspecting and some government agent will just jump out and jab me with a needle.
JD, I have a Parler account, and I never gave them my phone number. I don’t remember how I got it. It’s possible I gave them a fake number, or perhaps I got an account at a time when it wasn’t needed.
I stayed away from gmail while they were requiring phone numbers as well.
I would say Derek Chauvin is less guilty than the cop in the most recent shooting. The video footage backs up the claim that he thought he was firing a taser.
Lucia, I don’t know if this is news or more hype [SaNOtize] https://www.hospimedica.com/covid-19/articles/294787821/portable-nasal-spray-that-destroys-sars-cov-2-could-prove-to-be-breakthrough-covid-19-treatment.html
To weigh in on the mask controversy…. I where one even though it is not required. I suppose I look like a Liberal but I don’t care. I haven’t had a respiratory infection since I started wearing it….. and my Asthma has been in retreat for many months. I wear a dust mask made for woodworking. It is not approved for covid because it has exit valves. [RZ Mask M2 Mesh Air Filtration]…. I look like Bane from The Dark Knight Rises.
Russel,
It has one big edge over most other articles. It actually does give a synopsis of results of a trial
Lucia, I tried and tried to find what they used as a placebo…. if it saline, this shoots my hypothesis all to heck.(eg saline rinse is the best).
I think a big reason the media are attacking DeSantis is to try to eliminate him as a Presidential candidate in 2024 or at least to tarnish his reputation sufficiently to make him unelectable. They did something similar to Bob Dole in 1995. The idiot Republicans failed to react. They claimed they needed to save money for the campaign in 1996. Of course by then, Dole was toast.
MikeN,
I understand the officer who shot a gun rather than a taser (by accident) was a female officer, not male. The sound track from her body camera confirms she shouted “taser, taser”…. while actually holding her service pistol.
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The background is that the victim was stopped based on an expired registration, and was then found to have an outstanding arrest warrant. When the officer tried to arrest him, he resisted, then jumped into his car. After she shot him, he drove away, then crashed within a short distance….. and was pronounced dead at the crash site.
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I suspect this officer will be fired, but if she is prosecuted, not prosecuted for multiple murder counts. The reason I think that is 1) the body camera shows the officer really thought she was tasing, not shooting a pistol…. stupid incompetence? Yes. Willful killing? Clearly not. 2) The video of Chauvin strongly suggests to most viewers (including me) that he is a depraved sociopath who didn’t give the slightest sh!t about whether or not Floyd was in distress, or even if Floyd had a pulse…. and Floyd clearly was in distress and did not have a pulse. Chauvin behaved horribly…. almost a caricature of a violent ‘bad cop’ so often portrayed in b-grade movies.
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As I have said since last year: I believe Chauvin is going to prison for a very long time, with ‘for-life’ a real possibility. Whether he survives for long once in prison is more difficult to predict. Should he get acquitted on the most serious charges, I expect the Biden Justice Department to bring Federal civil rights charges…. thus ensuring Chauvin will be in prison for decades, no matter the outcome of the current trial.
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The bigger picture is that we simply do not want sociopaths like Chauvin to ever become police officers…. Chauvin will be an example of what can happen when the wrong people get hired. Fair on not, Chauvin will be hammered, in part to dissuade other sociopaths from trying to become police officers.
Two things can be true simultaneously.
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1. The vast majority of these shooting victims have agency in their own deaths, they fight with cops which by now everyone understands can result in bad outcomes.
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2. Some shootings are not warranted, especially in hindsight. The police concern is likely that the victim was entering his vehicle and might have a weapon there. Nobody should get shot until a weapon is identified or a cop is going to get run over.
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This is a “fog of war” shooting in a highly agitated situation. Both sides could have easily prevented this outcome. The cops have a higher expectation of responsibility.
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It is a good thing video is available early. I don’t see malice in this shooting so I expect it will be a liability for the police, and a termination of the trigger happy “can’t tell whether she is holding a taser or pistol” officer. In theory I could see them allowing her to continue on as an officer, but not with a weapon. Normally I don’t also see criminal liability here, but the timing for her is very poor to say the least.
It is noted that the study articles explicitly leave out clinical outcomes. One would expect these were tracked because that would be incredibly useful if it worked. My guess is they were tracked and it didn’t pan out, so no comment in the PR release.
A sure sign of the non-apocalypse:
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WSJ: Americans Have Too Much Toilet Paper. Finally, Sales Slow.
Tissue sales fall to below prepandemic levels as consumers work through their stockpiles
https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-have-too-much-toilet-paper-it-is-catching-up-to-companies-11618306200
I read that. I never stocked piled like that. I have a pantry and always bought toilet paper in the “mega” packages. I also have these little tp hangers on the side of the toilet and once a week I stock things there are 3 rolls in each bathroom. We have 3 toilets in our house. Only two people live here. I did it pre-Covid, I’ll continue post.
What I did do was buy when the mega package was half empty. That was good enough. I never ran out. But ordinarily, I wait until the pantry is empty after “stocking” the bathrooms. So during covid, I pretty much bought when I had 9 distributed +9 in the pantry. Non-covid I buy when I have 9 rolls distributed and 0 in the pantry.
Minnesota police press conference. Media questioning why the police acted to dispel “protest”. Chief says there was a riot. Someone from media pipes up to tell him not to call it that, after which the chief explains they were pelted with frozen drinks, molatov, rocks, and fires were set with an officer taken to hospital for injuries. Disgustingly dishonest individuals.
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A few days ago I saw a comment on a youtube thread repeating the line of the capitol cop getting beaten with a fire extinguisher. Thankfully they were made aware that the story was false.
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The media are fake news and the enemy of the people. I can pretty much guarantee the “juicy” stories supporting the mainstream narrative are lacking important facts or flat out false.
Question for those who have been vaccinated: Did they collect contact information so that they might in future ask about unreported side effects?
Question for lucia or anyone else who got the J&J vaccine: Have you been contacted? Possibly too early.
I am wondering about what the authorities expect to learn during the pause.
@ Mike M.
I got my second Moderna vaccination yesterday. I was given a link to the CDC Vsafe web site at the time of my first shot. It’s a voluntary survey of after-vaccination effects. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/vsafe.html
So far just some tenderness in the arm where the injection was. Nothing too bad, feels like when as a kid my friends and I used to punch each other in the shoulder.
So where’s the Spring Break/Easter surge? I don’t see it and I don’t see any media apologies for their fearmongering.
The J&J blood clot thing, it’s called CVST (cerebral venous sinus thrombosis), has been way overblown. The incidence, ~1/1,000,000, is similar to the incidence in the general population. Since the cases were all women in the 18-48 age range, they could have just recommended that people in that demographic either avoid the J&J vaccine or be aware that there is a tiny risk. But no, we have to suspend using the vaccine for everybody until there is a full review.
A friend of mine recently had CVST, but I don’t think it was vaccine related.
I think the J&J pause is primarily performative. They will re-enable it in a few days, although they might recommend women under 40 and people under 30 to get other vaccines. They could do this without a pause.
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The safety trade-offs are clear for older people to get any vaccine. Healthy people in their 20’s aren’t in very much danger from covid so the danger from clots starts to compete with the actual danger of serious illness from covid. Young people, especially women, should get another vaccine IMO, although the numbers are so low that it’s not really that big of a deal.
DeWitt,
My oldest daughter died suddenly from CVST when she was 36. Depending on the extent of the subsequent brain damage, outcomes range from partial, temporary loss of voluntary control to rapid death. The most susceptible population is pre-menopausal women; common factors which further increase risk in that population are use of oral contraceptives and treatment for auto-immune diseases. My daughter had both risk factors. CVST is very rare over the whole population, but the risk is concentrated heavily among relatively young women; the frequency among those with the known risk factors is easily 50 times the general population. Neurology treatment center staffers told me it is not uncommon for them to treat CVST, and mostly it is young women who are admitted.
See relative risk graphs for J&J here:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/j-j-covid-19-vaccine-pause-poses-another-test-for-balancing-pandemic-risks-11618412070
Any new surge is going to be because of the UK variant, not spring break and motorcycle festivals. This is just the media’s blame the red people impulse. The race is on between the vaccine and the UK variant and right now it appears to be more or less a stalemate in the US. That may change either way, really hard to predict.
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Encouraging signs are the UK’s and Israeli numbers which both primarily had the UK variant and are at high vaccination rates relatively. It can be beaten down. Not so encouraging is Michigan.
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The world should go with the UK’s “first shot first” protocol.
Tom Scharf,
I suspect the issue in Michigan (and other “hard-lockdown” blue states, is that they suppressed infections among relatively young people, and now suffer a “surge” as rules are relaxed (a little!) and people begin to behave more normally. Places where a greater fraction of people were infected are showing much less tendency for a new surge.
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But the surge seems to me much ado about nothing: the cases surge, but the deaths very much less, since a significant fraction of elderly people have been vaccinated. Numbskulls like Gov Whitmer only know one thing: they never want people to have contact with each other. So now Michigan suffers a new ‘surge’ as a result. The real problem is that Whitmer never took appropriate steps to protect the elderly, so Michigan has both high deaths among the elderly and a high case rate now. I have repressed my gag response long enough to listen to her talk a few times; boxes of rocks probably make fun of her stupidity.
Yep. I was contacted yesterday.
Mike M,
I received only CDC yellow card with contact information to report significant adverse side effects….. no other contact or requests for information. They very carefully confirmed my contact information (photo ID was required) when I got the injections. Funny a photo ID is needed for a vaccine but is ‘racist’ if it is required to vote. FWIW: for both doses, the racial mix of the hundreds of people standing in line was not similar to the demographics of the area: black and Hispanic people were under-represented, which I found very odd considering that Hispanics suffered much higher rates of fatality in this area than white people.
lucia (Comment #201534): “Yep. I was contacted yesterday.”
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Were they asking about whether you had experienced certain specific symptoms, presumably ones related to CVST?
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I am thinking is that they have to try to determine if the reported cases of CVST are representative. It seems that it is difficult to diagnose, often spontaneously resolves, and often is mistaken for a stroke. All of which could lead to various degrees of under reporting in different groups. All that would make it hard to assess risk.
I’ve been participating in vsafe.
The letter was brief. The third paragraph stated
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I’m also participating in vsafe and fill out a questionaire once a week. Everyone is asked to participate. I’m sure most decline. I accepted.
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I think they have the informing covered.
CDC: No conclusion, we will table it for 7-10 days until we meet again. That’s really just not acceptable. How about meeting again tomorrow? There really isn’t going to be a lot more data in a week.
Yeah…. Oh. Well. Glad Jim and I got our shots. One of my dance teachers too. . .
From the above, lucia (Comment #201539) and Tom Scharf (Comment #201542), it sounds to me like the CDC is not trying to gather any additional data. They are just contemplating the data they do have. Maybe not even that; perhaps just waiting for what they consider to be a decent interval until announcing their already arrived at conclusion.
Time to defund the CDC.
MikeM,
Huh? Seriously. Vsafe is a formal operation to collect data. It’s seems like a very good operation to me, it’s pretty broad. They obviously can’t compel participation. So that strikes me as a very good program.
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Of course the CDC is are going to focus on contemplating data they have. I think they are behaving entirely reasonably. Also: I don’t think this is a side effect that needs much in the way of additional surveying to detect. If someone gets it they will either (a) die, (b) end up in the hospital or (c) have gone to their doctor soon enough to be detected, in which case it will be reported. There’s no reason to send out email, phone or paper surveys to track people down and badger them with questions.
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The only thing I would criticize them for is suspending vaccination. I think the evidence there is an problem is flimsy. At most they should suggest that women of childbearing ages who are also taking birth control pills should take one of the other vaccines. The birth control pills already elevate your change of clots much more than J&J seems to but there is no point in taking one thing that definitely raises risk (the pill) and also taking something that might
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Out of curiosity what do you think they should be doing they aren’t doing? Real question because right now I have an impression of what you think they “should” be doing and it’s idiotic.
The police officer who shot a fleeing suspect in Minnesota with her pistol instead of her taser has been charged with 2nd degree manslaughter, and faces up to 10 years in prison. Based on the words of the statute, that charge seems inappropriate….. it is a charge based on death caused:
It was an accidental shooting, and there is zero evidence of “consciously taking chances of causing death”. As with all homicides, the issue is ‘state of mind’ of the accused. That officer’s state of mind (tragic error at a moment of high tension) is in no way consistent with the charge. I doubt she will ever be convicted, and I am surprised the charge was brought against her. Of course, it may turn out she is a registered Republican, explaining the ‘Trumped-up’ charge.
SteveF,
That is such a sad incident all around.
Lucia,
It is doubly sad because (once again) the problems that led to the death are not even being addressed: 1) despite being only 20, the victim had multiple earlier criminal incidents, 2) the victim failed to appear for a court hearing, leading to an arrest warrant being issued, 3) the victim resisted and fled from a previous arrest attempt, 4) the victim resisted arrest and attempted to flee again..
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The victim already faced a substantial prison sentence at the time of the second arrest attempt, but again attempted to flee. Had he succeeded in fleeing, he would be facing multiple additional counts…. further increasing his likely sentence. Yes, it is a very sad incident, but the victim’s background is even sadder. Most sad of all is the refusal of the MSM to explain the circumstances that actually caused this tragic death.
I think the CDC should temporarily halt J&J for women under 40 while they further review the data. Only one person has died in 7M shots in the US (6 injured), or as another person put it, if you live to be 7M years old you might be injured from this shot and those unwilling to take that risk should not be getting in their car and driving 6 miles. This is once again the “do no harm” through direct action ethics.
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The proper argument is of course that if there are safer alternatives then those should be used, and just because the vaccinations are paused it doesn’t mean production is paused so this only represents a small time window of potential harm through inaction.
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It’s not going to help the mindset of vaccine hesitators though.
As per the standard, the only place you can get info on the victim’s past is Fox News
https://www.foxnews.com/us/daunte-wright-had-outstanding-warrant-for-attempted-aggravated-robbery-when-he-was-killed
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Another gentle giant I suppose, except when he is doing aggravated armed robbery and choking the female victims for their rent money. Also: “Police then tried to arrest him on an outstanding warrant after failing to appear in court on charges that he fled from officers and possessed a gun without a permit during an encounter with Minneapolis police in Juneâ€
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This as usual doesn’t mean he should get shot during an arrest attempt, but this background is part of the story that matters. The fact that other news organizations blacked out any references to his past was a red flag. If he had no criminal history this would have been reported widely.
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The rush to charge the officer was likely motivated to try to quell the protests. This isn’t really proper justice, and she may very well beat those charges. I don’t know why anyone would want to be a cop now, and those who do so are doing it at their own peril if they fail at any given moment of high stress.
Tom,
That’s definitely better than halting it for everyone. The way vaccines are admistered, they can’t really check for other interactions so that would work.
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Vaccine hesitators are going to hesitate. I honestly doubt this is making a big difference.
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My impression is Mike M is likely not vaccinated and is not going to be. I think he should be free to make his choice. That said: I don’t think the CDC’s action on J&J has any effect on him.
The usual suspects are grousing that second degree manslaughter is not a sufficient charge even though an acquittal because they won’t be able to prove intent should be nearly certain. Yet another thug made a bad choice to resist a valid arrest and paid a high price.
Oh oh… watch for the overreaction: “Blood clots as prevalent with Pfizer and Moderna vaccine as with AstraZeneca’s” https://www.marketwatch.com/story/blood-clots-as-prevalent-with-pfizer-and-moderna-vaccine-as-with-astrazenecas-report-2021-04-15
52% of J&J shots were given in the last two weeks. With heightened sensitivity to the issue some borderline cases may now get identified and all h*** could break loose. A media feeding frenzy.
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What will become more clear to vaccine hesitators is that this “science” is more about nuanced judgment calls than black and white safety issues. This is where public health experts oversimplified representations and messaging about things being safe backfire. Now they have to explain relative risk and so forth. They should have always said vaccines have risk from the beginning.
Chauvin case is nearly over, looks like he is going to go to jail from my sparse reading of the trial. Perhaps a reduced charge at best. If they let him walk then I expect a … rapid response … from the public.
lucia (Comment #201559): “My impression is Mike M is likely not vaccinated and is not going to be. I think he should be free to make his choice. That said: I don’t think the CDC’s action on J&J has any effect on him.”
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I am not yet vaccinated but expect to eventually get vaccinated. If the J&J vaccine gets cancelled, that will likely significantly delay my getting vaccinated.
Pfizer has by far the most shots in arms globally, thus the most safety data. A single shot of Pfizer is probably about the same effectiveness as a single shot of J&J.
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When you examine the original trial data, there is not really any bump of effectiveness after the second shot. Perhaps it adds some durability or enhanced protection for variants.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/10/1013914/pfizer-biontech-vaccine-chart-covid-19/
Russel Klier,
“Blood clots as prevalent with Pfizer and Moderna vaccine as with AstraZeneca’sâ€
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Maybe, but it looks like they show up only in an already known susceptible population (pre-menopausal women). I would wager most of those women with CVST were also taking oral contraceptives (known risk factor); there is a very good chance the incidence of CVST is no higher among young women who got the vaccine(s) than those who did not. The CDC is acting (again) like a bunch of clowns; they are going to scare people out of getting a vaccination…. AKA, they are going to kill people with their foolishness. Idiots.
Tom Scharf,
My guess would be that the second shot boosts the serum antibody titer without improving effectiveness much. The data from the UK appears to indicate that one shot of either the Pfizer, Moderna or AstraZeneca vaccine is, in fact, sufficient. The AstraZeneca vaccine will not be used for the under 30 population when they’re eligible because of the blood clot issue
The worldometers UK seven day trailing average new cases/day is less than 5% of the January 10 peak and seven day trailing daily deaths are less than 3% of the January 23 peak. Confirmed cases are only 6.4% of the population but 47% of the population has received at least one dose of vaccine. They expect the entire adult population will have at least one dose of vaccine by the end of July. Over 90% (95-97% in many areas) of the over 50 population has received at least one shot.
IOW, the UK is doing way better than us at the moment, although we’re tied for fifth in the world for total vaccine doses/million. But because our FDA insisted on maintaining a two shot protocol, there are likely a lot fewer people/million that have received at least one shot. I suspect that’s a contributing factor to the UK having only 40/million new cases/day (seven day trailing average) compared to 219/million for the US.
One relevant study (https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/strokeaha.112.671453)
suggests the actual incidence of CVST among women 30 to 50 years old is 28 per million per year. The study concludes that CVST is far more common than previously believed. The CDC is likely over-reacting…. again.
lucia (Comment #201550): “If someone gets it they will either (a) die, (b) end up in the hospital or (c) have gone to their doctor soon enough to be detected, in which case it will be reported.”
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Apparently not.
From the link provided by SteveF (Comment #201568): “improved neuroimaging has shown that, unlike previously believed, CVT often has a benign course.”
It is difficult to diagnose:
https://www.nuemblog.com/blog/cerebral-venous-sinus-thrombosis
and often misdiagnosed:
https://patient.info/doctor/Intracranial-Venous-Thrombosis
Mike M,
It is in fact often mis-diagnosed. My daughter went to her primary care doctor twice over 3 days complaining of severe headache. He suggested it was a migraine and sent her home; she died three days later.
MikeM,
Ok. Fair enough. But if someone gets it and it goes through a benign course, it’s not much of a side effect in their case.
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I still think being alerted to symptoms and urged to visit a doctor is the right thing for the CDC to do.
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I’m still wondering about your answer to my question: You think the CDC’s response to this is sufficienlty bad to have suggested
And it sounded like your criticism was that they aren’t pestering me enough about having taking the J&J vaccine.
What, precisely, do you think the CDC ought to be doing?
WSJ: Blood Clots More Likely After Covid-19 Than After Vaccination, Study Finds
Review by Oxford shows risk of rare, serious blot clotting is eight to 10 times greater in people who caught the coronavirus than among people who received any of the first three Western-developed vaccines
https://www.wsj.com/articles/serious-blood-clots-are-more-likely-in-covid-19-sufferers-than-in-those-who-got-vaccine-study-finds-11618510158
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“The main finding regarding CVT is that “the risk is many-fold higher after Covid-19 than after receiving a vaccine,†said Masud Husain, an Oxford professor of neurology and cognitive neuroscience who was part of the study.
The Oxford study, which looked at a database of primarily U.S. patient data, found the risk of CVT within two weeks of a Covid-19 infection is roughly 100 times greater than in the general population—again caveated by data and statistical limitations. The study found the risk was eight to 10 times greater than among adults receiving any one of the three vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca.
Pfizer and Moderna have said their shots are safe.
Researchers said the limited data used, which lags behind real-world vaccine rollouts, didn’t include anyone who reported taking the J&J shot. The data included 513,000 patients who were diagnosed with Covid-19 from January 2020 through March 25, 2021.”
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Small numbers so YMMV with future results. It may be possible that the vaccine triggering of antibodies and covid’s triggering of antibodies causes this rare problem. You may not be able to have a vaccine that doesn’t do this if a covid infection does it.
13 year old killed in Chicago. This boy was walking with an adult and the adult fired several shots at 2:30 AM at something. Police responded and chased them, the boy ran down an alley, stopped, turned around and got shot.
The NBC version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXUrkbtqshs
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The longer version. Pay careful attention to 1:20
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dUBC0q-Gsw
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You cannot leave that part out of a media story, it’s quite relevant. Obviously the boy was running with a gun, tossed it behind the fence, then turned around. So the cop apparently saw the gun during the chase but didn’t see him toss it and was faced with an instant decision and shot. The boy did stop and was seemingly surrendering at that point. A quick trigger, but a gray area. Body cameras are a good thing, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the issues of judgment calls, only clarifies what actually happened. Without body cameras this one would likely be buried as armed person gets shot and killed.
Tom,
It’s also not beyond the realm of possibility that some people who got vaccinated were already infected at the time they got their vax. Or being incautious, some might have gotten infected very shortly afterward. They don’t give people a Covid test before the vax. A positive antibody test after the vax won’t be diagnosed as covid.
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If their immune system was reponding to both actual Covid virus and the vaccine at the same time, maybe the increased risk of clots from Covid was partly from the actual virus.
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I doubt this is something we can know or test for.
lucia (Comment #201571): “But if someone gets it and it goes through a benign course, it’s not much of a side effect in their case.”
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Yes, but how many of the reported cases would have gone through a benign course? Someone who just got the vaccine and suddenly gets an unusual headache might be more likely to seek medical care and the doctor might be less likely to dismiss it as a migraine. That alters attempts to calculate relative risks.
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lucia: “I still think being alerted to symptoms and urged to visit a doctor is the right thing for the CDC to do.”
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That is absolutely right to do. But it is not clear that it is the *only* thing they should be doing.
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I think my “time to defund the CDC” remark was in reaction to the appearance that what they are doing is safety theater. What will they know a week from now that they don’t know now? So far as I can tell, the answer is “nothing”. So what is the point of the pause?
I don’t know what your point is with respect to the question “Yes, but how many of the reported cases would have gone through a benign course?”
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Could you explain why it isn’t. Perhaps tells us what you think they should be doing.
I don’t consider alerting me, someone who got the vaccine, of the symptoms of a possible reaction and advising me to go to the doctor if I have it “theater”. I don’t know why you think it’s theater.
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You still haven’t explained what you think they should do. You’ve told me they clearly should so “something” else, but not what. I have no idea whether the thing you think they should do is useful, useless, counter productive and so o and so on because you aren’t saying what you think they should do.
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I think they shouldn’t pause. So do several people here. Someone suggested they could have just paused for women under 40. That might be ok.
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You on the other hand are asking what the point of the pause is, but it’s not clear if you think
(a) they should not have paused and just allow people to continue to be injected,
(b) should pause but do some entirely unspecified “more” or
(c) something else.
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I have grasped you are criticizing them. But honestly, I don’t know which aspect of what they are doing you don’t like.
If a cop shoots a gun at someone, they shouldn’t be acquitted just because they said ‘taser’.
Chauvin said ‘excited delirium’ and acted accordingly.
I think the former is more a sign of incompetence than the second.
Mike N,
Watch the video. She clearly was warning that she was about to taser the victim. Grotesque error during a violent few seconds as someone resists arrest is not the same as 9 minutes restraining a subject already handcuffed and completely controlled, who also is pleading that he can’t breath. She will walk on the manslaughter charge. Chauvin will be sentenced to a long prison term.
I agree with SteveF. This one looks like a tragic accident. Chavin-Floyd looks intentional.
Tom Scharf,
The study asks the wrong question. The real question is not the risk of CVST among covid sufferers versus those who received a vaccine, but the risk of CVST among people who had neither covid nor vaccination versus those who were vaccinated. The Dutch study I linked above suggested 28 cases per million per year among women between 30 and 50. Once you start inoculating millions of women in that demographic group, there are going to be lots of cases of CVST, but that doesn’t mean the vaccine caused the CVST.
SteveF
J&J has probably been hitting a younger demographic than Pfizer and Moderna. J&J wasn’t available when they were first vaccinating senior facilities. It was approved just the groups approved for vaccination widened.
Another promising nasal treatment is the asthma medication, budesonide (Pulmicort). See:
https://www.sealevel.info/covid.html#therapeutics
Dave,
I saw that one too! I hope some of these work. The asthma one seems more Covid specific. The otherones claim general anti-viral ability which would potentially mean reduce susceptibility to common colds.
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If any of these pan out and are economical for common colds and don’t have somewhat obnoxious side effects, I’d use them for that! If they were “barrier” nor “nose mask” type, I’d use them before going to dance parties. If they were “knock down virus in while growing but limited to nose”, I’d consider using nightly.
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Common cold is not as obnoxious as Covid. But they are still obnoxious.
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I just don’t know if any are going to pan out. I’m still waiting to read this NO products journal article. Crickets.
lucia (Comment #201576): “I think they shouldn’t pause. So do several people here.”
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It seems to me that you are assuming that you have all the relevant information.
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lucia: “You on the other hand are asking what the point of the pause is, but it’s not clear if you think
(a) they should not have paused and just allow people to continue to be injected,
(b) should pause but do some entirely unspecified more”.
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That is because I think it possible that I do not have all the relevant information.
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Either (a) they should not pause or (b) they should use the pause to improve the information needed for a decision. I am considering the possibility that the reason is (b).
They made a big deal on the Today show this morning about how cases are increasing rapidly in Maine. But that shouldn’t be entirely surprising as confirmed cases are less than 4.2% of the population. The death rate is also way below average but seems to have leveled off. So in terms of acquired immunity, Maine should still be below the herd immunity threshold. But they didn’t give the age distribution of new cases. Given that the death rate hasn’t increased significantly so far, it’s probably mostly young people. OTOH, about 47% of the population has had at least one dose of a vaccine.
Maybe this is the spring break surge. /sarc
Mike M
Nope. I form opinions based on information that has been released or is available. I can change my opinion if new information is released. So this is my opinion at this point. It is subject to revision.
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And yet you have been extremely harsh in your criticism. You said the CDC should be defunded!. I think it’s odd that you think I need huge amounts of information to merely hold an opinion they are making a mistake but you think you can decree they should be defunded despite thinking you lack information!
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It seems to me they are doing they are improving information. But even if they aren’t studying and processing information is sufficient for a pause if the preliminary information suggest the danger outweighs the benefit.
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But they could also not pause and also improve information and study it. They have been improving information using a system designed in advance for this. Vsafe surveys are part of that. It’s planned out. They haven’t halted them, so they are improving information. They monitor information gathered from Vsafe and other methods.
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It is entirely appropriate to not pause when the evidence for danger is piddly. If they have any real evidence there is a problem they should tell us. Or, if they do in future, I’ll change my mind.
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I think you are simply wrong to believe they are not improving information when it’s manifestly clear they are.
Dewitt,
In Illinois, deaths have plateaued at roughly 10-20 their peaks . Cases are rising. That’s probably young people. The pause in J&J isn’t helpful to the case numbers. OTOH, it’s largely young people unprotected, so they likely won’t die. Deaths will probably stay near the plateau. Still, getting extremely sick isn’t a picnic and that happens to some.
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It is funny that when articles do mention it’s the young still getting sick they don’t pretty well point out that was the plan. The plan was to vaccinate the elderly and frail to get deaths and hospitalizations down. They could have vaccinated younger people first. That might even have reduced cases more; but death’s would likely be higher.
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By the way, in terms of long term effects: My former sister in law says she still has an impaired sense of taste. That’s not a stupendously dramatic long term effect, but if the vaccine caused it the in 0.1% of vaccinated, uhmmm, “vaccine skeptical” would be saying “look! See we told you there would be long term effects!” They shouldn’t have rolled it out! (Never mind if not rolling out the vax would mean 60% to 80% of the population gets covid and 1% lose their sense of taste. )
I don wonder why they are having so many cases in Maine. They’ve supposedly vaccinated 46.8% with at least one does.
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I haven’t been hearing of vaccinated people getting sick at unexpected rates. (I have heard the occasional story of someone getting sick within the first 3 weeks. I’m surprised we don’t hear more given that the vaccines were never said to be 100% effective.)
lucia (Comment #201587): “In Illinois, deaths have plateaued at roughly 10-20 their peaks . Cases are rising. That’s probably young people.”
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Or it is because deaths lag cases. In Michigan, deaths are up by a factor of three from a month ago. Three weeks ago, cases were up by a little over a factor of three from a month prior. Most of the rise in cases in IL has been in the last 3 weeks.
MikeM
That’s an alternative hypothesis. But we have very strong data that indicates the young die at a lower rate. We also know vaccination rates are preferentially for the old.
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Obviously, both theories can contribute preferentially. My call is the cases rising are probably young people who remain mostly unvaccinated. (Plus, article are mentioning the new case rises are driven by the young. So, it would seem there is data to back this up, though I’m not hunting.)
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Sure. If it had been in the elderly, we would have expected to see an uptick in deaths 2 weeks ago. Maybe it will happen. I bet not.
Mike M,
There may be some rise in deaths in places with rising case numbers, since there remains a significant fraction of the at-risk population that has not been vaccinated. Based on the data I have seen, it looks like more than 60% of the population over age 65 has been vaccinated almost everywhere in the USA. So if we can believe the efficacy trials, a reasonable expectation is that fatalities going forward will be considerably lower per confirmed case than before the vaccines were available.
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A fraction of those at risk who have not gotten the vaccines will for sure die. There is not much anyone can do about that.
One of the students I tutor got the vaccine last week. One is getting it Monday. I’m guessing college students will tend to get vaccinated even if people point out their risk of dying is low. (Some universities will require it anyway. Plus, getting sick during midterms is a killer to the GPA. Lots of people think work life is hectic and it can be. But professors teaching pace absolutely don’t get pushed back because you missed two weeks, and often course work is cummulative. It’s hard to learn “electrodynamics” when you are simultaneously trying to learn “magnetic force on a particle”.
Lucia: “I haven’t been hearing of vaccinated people getting sick at unexpected rates. (I have heard the occasional story of someone getting sick within the first 3 weeks. I’m surprised we don’t hear more given that the vaccines were never said to be 100% effective.)”
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According to recent CDC numbers, 0.008% of people who have been fully vaccinated have had “breakthrough†cases of COVID-19. (The headline oddly described that as “less than 1%”.)
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https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/548440-cdc-5800-breakthrough-covid-19-cases-documented-among-millions-who-are
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Not stated is what the numbers were for people who had not been vaccinated, but that would require a specific timeframe and determining a day 0 for each group. Not having that information, we can do a rough estimate using an assumption of 90 days from the time when a significant number of people were full vaccinated and an estimate of about 75K/day being diagnosed in the general population over the last 90 days (eye-balled from the Worldometers graph for the US.) So for the general US population that’s (75K/day X 90 days )/330M = 0.02 or 2%. That implies a vaccine effectiveness of about 99.6% (100 X (1 – 0.008/2)). I would be interested to know if someone wants to take a different stab at the calculation (or find an error in mine—I’ve been known to miscount zeros).
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That’s almost certainly too high especially since some of those folks had the J&J shot, but given the uncertainties in my calculation, it seems “consistent†with an effectiveness of >90%. Of course, “thousands of breakthrough cases” can be a good phrase in a headline if one chooses to spin it that way.
Regarding Maine and vaccination rates, there is an emerging effort on the part of the media to ignore case rates, since those now make “blue states†look bad. The “narrative†now is based on vaccination rates. Notice anything about these states?
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“Out in front is New Hampshire, where 65% of the population age 18 and older has received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Following close behind are New Mexico, Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts at 55% or greater. All have a history of voting Democratic and supported President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.â€
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https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/vaccine/ct-aud-nw-coronavirus-vaccine-red-states-20210414-wj3rocp2ivfwtoekmz6h7rx63m-story.html
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All except New Mexico have COVID rates well above the US average, and considerably higher than in a lot of states populated by “dumb white conservatives.†This is considered unimportant to the narrative. And let’s not get started on vaccination rates in urban centers. Following those media narratives can corkscrew you into the ground.
I agree with lucia and SteveF that we ought to be seeing a drop in cases due to vaccination and a much bigger drop in deaths due to the elderly being vaccinated at a higher rate. But I don’t see that in the data. It seems that any effect has yet to emerge from the noise.
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The impact of vaccination ought to be non-linear. It not only reduces the number of susceptible individuals but it should also reduce cases among the unvaccinated.
Every single region where the UK variant has gotten a foothold, it has become the dominant strain in a matter of months. Most studies show it to be 30% to 60% more transmissive. Changing R from 1.0 to 1.5 is a huge difference in outcomes. One thing for sure in the US IMO, if we do not vaccinate the population we will reach herd immunity the hard way with the UK variant.
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The bad news is the so far spared areas of the globe will need to do battle with this variant instead of the original if it enters widespread community transmission in those places. It may be global whack a mole for a while.
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I read somewhere that the mutation of the UK variant is on the spike crown, and a few other of the variants (Brazil?) also have very similar differences in the same area. One geneticist opined that there isn’t a lot of possible mutations in that area so he was hopeful that further variants will not be substantially worse.
When the vaccinated get covid, it should usually be milder cases. The most important comparison I think is the death rate between the vaccinated and unvaccinated in similar populations. I haven’t seen this data yet, it’s a bit early. I would expect this to be around 99% or so though.
Vaccination rates are a non-story, although I agree some outlets are trying to parse them with the same tired narrative. At this point every state is getting vaccines at the same rate, and every state is basically using them all. Differences are by slower reporting rates or by some states having a longer pipeline for distribution, and some states holding back 2nd shots etc. Nobody has warehouses full of unused vaccines. This is likely to change over the next month when supply starts to exceed demand.
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Vaccine hesitancy is supposedly higher among rural conservatives (or so I’ve seen a 100 headlines lately). This is because they are backwards and stupid and deserve to suffer for their moral failings. Vaccine hesitancy among minorities is a tragedy caused by white supremacy and structural racism (all bias emanating from the same rural conservatives, ha ha).
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Biden wants to fix hesitancy from rural conservative by hiring NASCAR people, it’s all so clueless and demeaning. Poor rural whites are not underserved communities in the new fangled way of thinking.
SteveF,
I don’t think that’s correct because a substantial majority (at least 70%) of those who haven’t had COVID and don’t get vaccinated should eventually get COVID. So the comparison is vaccinated vs. infected.
Mike M,
Unfortunately, infection rate depends on many other factors beyond vaccination rates. Behavior, climate, and other things have generated bizarre multi-hump case histories most everywhere.
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What I think we can say safely say is that all else equal, death rates would be much higher absent vaccinations… especially of those most at risk of death.
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The USA has about 17% of people over 65… so about 54 million. If 30% of those remain permanently unvaccinated, that is 16 million potentially at risk of death from covid. If even 5% of those were to die after contracting covid, that is 800,000, almost 300,000 over the death count until now. Increases in vaccination among younger people will of course tend to reduce the number of cases, but as restrictions are relaxed (and people grow ever more tired of the restrictions) it seems to me possible that cases will continue at a relatively high level for a long time….. like another year or more. So I can see no way there will not be many deaths in the coming months among unvaccinated people who are at significant risk of death from covid. Or as my wife commented a couple of weeks ago… “I don’t see an end to the nightmare with so many refusing the vaccines”.
DeWitt,
“I don’t think that’s correct because a substantial majority (at least 70%) of those who haven’t had COVID and don’t get vaccinated should eventually get COVID.”
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Really? In places that appear to have reached herd immunity (like South Dakota) the confirmed infection rate is nowhere near 70%…. 10% to 12% is more like it. Even if you assume half of all cases are asymptomatic, it is still way less than 70%. Do you have any reference (beyond the wild-eyed rants of Fauci et al) which suggests that 70% would be infected absent vaccination?
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Beyond that, if the objective is to evaluate the actual risk of getting vaccinated, the comparison has to be against unvaccinated people. The risk/benefit calculation for vaccination can only be correctly done once you have fairly evaluated the true increase in risk due to the vaccine… which in this case I expect is very close to zero.
The UK and Israel should be nearing herd immunity. One should be able to work out where the threshold is, but there are serious confounders such as the “natural†rate of change present in the environment. That number will eventually be known but it will likely take a while. I don’t think anyone really knows but I would be quite surprised if it was less than 50% or greater than 80%. Remember that herd immunity for the UK variant is going to be higher.
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MI has 37% with at least one shot and it’s outbreak appears to be peaking. It has a confirmed case count of around 9%. They should be around 50% immunity now using rough calculations. It’s all a bit messy though.
SteveF,
We’ve been through this before. You have stated elsewhere that total cases are less than three times the confirmed cases. I think that’s way too low. Blood antibody tests give a multiplier at least that high. But according to an article I linked somewhere here, blood antibody tests can miss up to half of all infections. The case rate data from North and South Dakota where confirmed cases are still less than 14% of the population is consistent with a multiplier of at least 5. That would be at least 70%.
That number is not just a Fauci rant, it’s a sensible estimate of the immune fraction of the population at herd immunity, not the herd immunity threshold, based on the rate of increase of death rates early in the pandemic. A true example of a Fauci rant is his ever increasing necessary vaccination rate to achieve herd immunity. As I remember it’s up to 90% now.
In North Dakota, the daily confirmed case rate peaked in mid-November, before the vaccine rollout, at somewhere between 8 and 9% of the state population. With a multiplier of three, that would mean the herd immunity threshold was about 25% of the population. That is close to the low end of the optimistic estimates of the HIT for a heterogeneous population and seems highly unlikely to me.
Tom Scharf,
Messy indeed because we don’t know the percentage of those have received the vaccine who had already acquired immunity from infection. But I agree (see above) that the HIT is in the range of 40-50% of the population.
If you want a reason to ponder for defunding the CDC, it is their failure to monitor the variants properly and perform widespread antibody survey tests. That we have to wonder whether the multiplier is 2x or 5x in Apr 2021 is inexcusable. We have no idea what the infected rate really is.
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UPDATE: It is getting better, but testing rate is pretty low. See trending of B117 here.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions
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State by state seroprevalance. These numbers seem low?
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#national-lab
Tom Scharf,
The CDC, as I remember, also did a lousy job of communicating best treatment practices early on. Sure, the buck stops at the President’s desk, but it’s not possible for any President to micromanage an agency like the CDC. And that was especially true for Trump.
The state by state seroprevalence :
“CDC is expanding its partnership with commercial laboratories to conduct a nationwide COVID-19 seroprevalence survey that has tested de-identified clinical blood specimens across 52 sites (50 US states, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico). Like the Phase 1 commercial laboratory survey, this nationwide survey includes people who had blood specimens tested by commercial laboratories for reasons unrelated to COVID-19, such as for routine care or a sick visit. This survey aims to test about 1300 samples collected from each of these 52 sites approximately every 2 weeks. Collaborating commercial laboratories will collect and test about 1.5 million samples in total over 12 months. Researchers are looking to see what percentage of blood specimens tested have antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, how this varies across different geographic areas and age groups, and how the percentage of previous SARS-CoV-2 infections is changing over time.â€
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This game if officially over now though because of the presence of vaccines making one test positive I think(?).
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So MI is 19% according to the CDC in late Feb, a multiplier of about 3X for that time. The age breakdown is interesting Under 18(21%) 18-49(21%) 50-64(17%) 65+(12%).
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So … some of this data is actually there and is easy to find … I retract some of my criticism. The media doesn’t really pay much attention to it.
Tom Scharf,
Yes, well they’re rather old. The latest numbers from TN, 27.3% (24.0-30.6%) are for Feb. 8-12, 2021, or two months ago. At the time, February 10, confirmed cases were 11%. So that puts the multiplier at 2.5 (2.2 – 2.8). And that’s the low end of the possible range because we know that antibody analysis misses infections.
Now let’s see if the multiplier has changed over time.
July 30- August 11, 2020 estimated seroprevalence 6.3% (4.4 – 8.3%)
Confirmed cases August 5, 2020 1.67%
multiplier 3.77 ( 2.6 – 5.0 )
So the multiplier may have decreased somewhat, but not drastically as the uncertainty ranges overlap.
For Maine:
seroprevalence February 8 – 19, 2021: 3.4% (1.8-5.4%)
confirmed cases February 14: 3.2%
multiplier: 1.1 (0.6 – 1.7)
Now that seems low. But if true, then there’s even less reason to be surprised that cases are rising now.
South Dakota (no recent data from ND):
seroprevalence January 25 – February 5, 2021: 25.0% (15.2-38.1%)
confirmed cases January 31, 2021: 12.2%
multiplier: 2.0 ( 1.2 – 3.1 )
On January 31, 2021, the seven day trailing average of new cases/day was less than 11% of the peak rate in mid-November. Seroprevalence November 10 – 25, 2020: 12.0% (4.8 – 20.2% ). Yet more evidence that seroprevalence misses a lot of cases. There is no way the HIT could be that low and there should be little doubt that SD passed the HIT in mid-November, 2020.
Tom Scharf,
I wouldn’t say this game is over. Seroprevalence should be a good way to measure vaccine effectiveness as antibody levels of vaccinated people tend to be higher and longer lasting than for infection acquired immunity. We should be seeing seroprevalence increasing rapidly in March and April when those reports get posted.
If it doesn’t, then it means that a large fraction of those vaccinated were already immune. But that would be useful information too.
They may have stopped in Feb because vaccinations were going to corrupt the intent of the testing. It is of course useful to know antibody detection of infected plus vaccinated so maybe they should still be doing it. The delay seems excessive so it seems they might have stopped. I think we can probably say a 3X multiplier is about a good a guess as anything.
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MI has 37% one shot and 3x 9% confirmed infections of 27%.
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Assuming MI infected get vaccinated at the same rate:
37% + ((1 – 0.37) * 27%) = 54% immunity
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There are timing issues etc. If that number is correct we should start seeing a collapse of MI cases within weeks. It’s impossible to separate from the increases and decreases we already see and don’t really understand though.
DeWitt,
“There is no way the HIT could be that low ”
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I think there is a simple way for the HIT to be that low: lots of people have substantial resistance to symptomatic infection due to previous infection with related (common) coronaviruses, or perhaps a fortunate natural resistance. There are many instances where people within a single household simply do not become ill, even while they are for certain exposed to one (or more) infectious household members. Even when concurrently tested, they are covid negative.
Tom Scharf,
The study information (tab in the upper right corner) says that the study is planned for 12 months and it looks like they started in late July to early August so it should continue through July, 2021.
Interestingly, the seroprevalence in NY has dropped from 23.3 % in early August, 2020 to 13.7% in early February and the decline is larger than the error range. Wyoming peaked in mid-January at 31.8% and has declined to 22.6%. But the error range is large enough that it could be noise.
SteveF,
We have good reason to believe that infected people vary a lot in their ability to spread the infection. So we get nearly everyone at the infamous choir practice getting infected by one person while, as you point out, others don’t infect anyone around them. This leads to the statement that something like 80% of the infections are caused by 20% (or less) of the infected. And it certainly doesn’t prove that there is some inherent immunity to SARS-CoV-2 in the population.
That will lower the HIT from 67% with an Ro of 3 in a homogeneous population of susceptible individuals to possibly as low as 20%. But that doesn’t mean the pandemic is over. Herd immunity should not be defined as Reff < 1. Herd immunity is when Reff is close to zero. What we've seen is that, unlike the simple SEIU model, the case rate tends to declines much more slowly than it increased, i.e. a long tail. That could mean that for an HIT of, say, 25%, the total infected would be more than an additional 25%. And I still don't think, based on the data I've seen, that the HIT is as low as 25%
DeWitt,
Perhaps we should agree to disagree. I remain convinced that the biggest variable in spread is resistance to infection, not variability in the capacity to pass on the infection. There are just too many instances where people who appear more exposed remain uninfected, while those less exposed do become infected.
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This kind of question is unlikely to be resolved until long after tge pandemic is over. The more pressing question in my mind is when the pandemic will end. As I noted up thread, it is difficult to see an end to the draconian public policies, especially in blue states (where I spend 4.5 months per year). So long as either cases or deaths remain significant, I can’t see blue states relaxing the madness.
See the recent discussion on transmission from zeynep:
https://www.theinsight.org/p/the-gaslighting-of-science
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It addressing the reluctance to embrace aerosol transmission in spite of obvious evidence and talks about uniform (flu) versus cluster (covid) transmission.
Tom Scharf,
I am puzzled a little by the linked article. It seems the author is a bit behind any rational evaluation of the virus. I think it has been clear to most everyone willing to think about it a bit, and for a very, very long time, that the virus spreads via aerosol dispersion. No other means of spread is consistent with the observations.
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OTOH, the world over people are routinely dunking their hands in 75% ethanol and standing two meters apart to ‘stop the spread’… I was required last week in Brazil to accept the ‘magic’ 75% alcohol hand treatment several times to be allowed into a store. People have been driven to near insanity by false and inflammatory information, and at no time will those responsible for that destructive misinformation ever retract their lunatic statements about formite spread. Like the Bourbons, frozen in time, and led by current generation Bourbon Dr. Tony Fauci, they neither learn nor forget anything. But the public suffers the cost of their craziness, not the Bourbons or Faucis.
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American Airlines rants endlessly about their daily disinfection of airplane interior surfaces (arm rests, handles, toilets, light switches and entertainment system buttons), even though these have essentially nothing to do with transmission of covid…. madness, it seems, rules most everywhere in the world of covid.
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“Do something, don’t think” is not a good prescription for public health policy. Sadly, it is the policy we have.
I agree it is accidental use of taser. It was 8 seconds not a few seconds. I think it is more reasonable to expect cops to be able to tell the difference between taser and handgun, and more reasonable that a cop might misdiagnose excited delirium.
You speak of 9 minutes. Even the prosecution witnesses testified that Chauvin followed procedure for the first 5 minutes.
I think you are right on the results of the trials, though I wouldn’t rule out a guilty verdict where Chauvin gets only manslaughter leaves the mob demanding more from a second trial. One defense witness suggested the police car exhaust may have contributed to Floyd’s death.
SteveF Is it possible surface sanitizing may be a good thing anyway? I understand Rhinoviruses spreads by surface contact. Getting fewer colds is OK in my book.
MikeN,
I think your missing the issue of “mens rea”. If the taser use was accidental, it was accidental. If you accept it was accidental, there is no mens rea for murder.
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In contrast, Chauvin did chose his actions when dealing with Floyd. Pressing on the neck or back and continuing to do it was not “an accident”. That means there can be mens rea.
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You seem to be introducing some standard of “reasonable” that I don’t think is part of the law.
Russell,
The problem with constant unnecessary repetitious sanitizing is that it is a wildly inefficient use of resources. You waste money on cleaning product. You waste money on staff to clean. You do this over and over to achieve nothing very useful. And the staff time and money spent on products could have been used for something else that might be more beneficial.
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Besides that, the cleaners can cause some minor health problems too. So some costs aren’t even pursely financial. They are health risks too.
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I mean: it’s find to say something might be good anyway because it has some small benefit. Many things do. But you need to balance against costs.
Russell Klier,
See here:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2446913/
“Current research suggests that rhinoviruses are spread chiefly by aerosol, rather than by fomites or personal contact.”
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Respiratory illnesses are, well, spread mainly by respiration. Wasting a lot of time and effort ‘sanitizing’ surfaces is not going to make much impact, even if that makes some less creeped out about catching something. The above article points to ways that the spread of rhinoviruses can be reduced.
SteveF Thank you that was interesting
Lucia, Did you notice in the reference from SteveF the recommendation for nasal hygiene? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2446913/
I just woke up! But I think it’s behind a paywall?
Russell Klier,
In the abstract the nasal hygiene appears to refer to use of virucidal tissues to smother aerosols generated by coughing, sneezing and nose blowing, not nasal lavage, but I haven’t read the full article and I’m not going to spend $40 to obtain the pdf.
Also in the abstract:
Sounds familiar.
Just embarrassing. News analysis.
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NPR: Can Biden Join FDR And LBJ In The Democratic Party’s Pantheon?
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/17/985980593/can-biden-join-fdr-and-lbj-in-the-democratic-partys-pantheon
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“Is Biden reaching for the mantle of FDR, or having it thrust upon him?”
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Please discuss, ha ha.
The cruise ship data came very early and they didn’t accept aerosols formally until much later. The problem I think is science inertia and the inability to change their minds from initial guesses even when the initial guess was very loosely determined.
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They still really don’t know the prevalence between surface, droplet, and aerosol transmission. They are inferring the estimates of all these things from anecdotal information and isolated small studies. I suppose they think they have adequate information but I’m not so convinced.
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These are things that could be tested easily enough in a lab environment, but the entire medical industry refuses to run those tests. It’s just not the US, even China, Russia, et. al. apparently have the same do no harm by direct action ethics.
“NPR: Can Biden Join FDR And LBJ In The Democratic Party’s Pantheon?”
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The guy has Alzheimer’s and is having difficulty speaking clearly. He has surrounded himself with die-had liberals. Perhaps they can join the party’s ‘pantheon’.
If Biden assumes the mantle of FDR, we’re really in trouble. FDR turned a severe recession into the Great Depression. Well, Hoover helped too (Lord save us from engineers outside their area of expertise). The economy was about as bad or possibly worse in 1937 than it was in 1932. But he gave great radio talks. Or at least that’s what people say. It was a bit before my time.
Not that it matters to NPR, but here’s some math.
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1932 Election
Electoral votes: 472 FDR, 59 Hoover
States carried: 42 FDR, 6 Hoover
Popular vote: 57.4% FDR, 39.7 Hoover
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1936 Election
Electoral votes: 523 FDR, 8 Landon
States carried: 46 FDR, 2 Landon
Popular vote: 60.8 FDR, 36.5 Landon
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1964 Election
Electoral votes: 486 LBJ, 52 Goldwater
States carried: 44 LBJ, 6 Goldwater
Popular vote: 61.1 LBJ, 38.5 Goldwater
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2020 Election
Electoral votes: 306 Biden, 232 Trump
States carried: 25 Biden, 25 Trump
Popular vote: 51.3 Biden, 46.9 Trump
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And that doesn’t even address the composition of Congress. You can look that up yourself.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_States_Congresses
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There sure don’t make mandates like they used to. But I guess for the journalists at NPR, “everyone *I* know voted for Biden,” so I guess that’s good enough.
Really AP? Really??
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“Four of them were members of Indianapolis’ Sikh community. The attack was another blow to the Asian American community a month after six people of Asian descent were killed in a mass shooting in the Atlanta area and amid ongoing attacks against Asian Americans during the coronavirus pandemic.”- AP on Fedex shooting.
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Just couldn’t leave the IDpol at the door could you? Not convinced Sikhs would be down with such a ridiculous comparison.
DaveJR,
They pretty much have to play the race card because the assailant in this case was white, unlike the assailants in most of the attacks against Asian Americans. But that subject is taboo in the MSM outside the editorial pages of the WSJ.
Speaking of which, there’s this today:
I’m not suggesting murder charges.
Just that this is not just ‘an accident’ but sign of tremendous incompetence by the officer, and more incompetence than shown by Chauvin.
Mike N,
You seem to be comparing apples and bananas. Yes, the officer who mistook her Glock service pistol for her taser gun is grossly incompetent. Chauvin is an obvious sociopath. The two characteristics are unrelated to each other. The only similarity I see is that neither should ever have been a police officer.
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The officer who accidently shot a fleeing suspect is not going to prison. Chauvin most certainly is going to prison. If Chauvin walks on the most serious charges, then the Justice Department will almost certainly charge Chauvin with Civil Rights violations…. and he will go to Federal prison on those charges. Any suggestion Chauvin will not be incarcerated a decade or more from now is a fantasy (assuming he survives in prison for that long…. which is far from certain). He is toast.
Mike N,
“Incompetence” is not inconsistent with “accident” and/or “no mens rea”. In contrast, intentionally doing something means there “mens rea exists”. There is a difference. You may not like that mens rea is important in chargeable offencses, but it is.
There’s incompetence and there’s lack of training leading to bad outcomes. I have no idea how much training she got for her taser, but my guess is that most of these incidents could be solved by better training, although they are very rare already.
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It cannot be incredibly hard to tell the difference between a taser and a handgun, tasers are usually yellow and carried on a different side and I believe the handgun is much heavier. If she did a random taser/ handgun on command exercise 50 times a week this probably wouldn’t happen. Then again maybe she is just bad under pressure which many people are.
Dewitt, I think you are right about that article on nasal hygiene for rhinovirus prevention. Covering sneezes, hand washing, and surface disinfection seem to be what CDC and everyone else is stuck on. https://www.cdc.gov/features/rhinoviruses/index.html I wonder if N95 masks will soon be recommended. My household (and apparently many others) have had a remarkable year free of colds and flu.I hope there will be research that finds out why. On a side note my brother-in-law is in the hospital on a ventilator. He cought covid six weeks after getting his second shot.
Russell,
How old is your brother in law?
Oxygen supplement or actual forced ventilation?
SteveF, He is 71, overweight and was a heavy smoker. He has a full ventilator. This AM the hospital said he in no longer getting worse. They said anticipate a 30-40 day hospital stay if he makes it.
Russel,
I hope he makes it, but forced ventilation has been associated with high probability of death.
Russel,
I do hope your brother in law pulls through!
SteveF Thank you. My wife is not accepting the reality of the situation. It’s her baby brother.
Lucia, Thank you.
Tom Scharf, Minneapolis/Minnesota police have a large number of such incompetence cases leading to deaths.
Philando Castile shot after the officer asked if he had a gun, and he was following instructions.
The woman who was shot after calling the cops about a rape, and this case.
Lucia, agree on mens rea, but I think Chauvin was bad judgement that was less guilty than this case. It was not instant firing of the taser, but several seconds to tell the difference.
I think the officers who testified against Chauvin were under heavy pressure to lie about improper procedures, and even then under defense questioning they said he acted appropriately for the first 5 minutes.
MikeN,
Do you think Chauvin will go to prison? Of so, for how long?
Do you think the accidental shooting officer will go to prison? If so, for how long?
MikeN
I think at a minimum, Chauvin intended his actions of pressing down on neck and chest. That’s mens rea — mental intention– to do what he did. The action is reckless.
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He may have intended worse– but at a minimum, he intentionally did something reckless that lead to death.
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I think the evidence suggested the cop intended to use a taser and thought she was using one. She may have had an amount of time you deem “sufficient” to “tell”. But I think nevertheless, she failed to detect the difference. This is incompetence given the task but there is no mens rea to kill.
MikeN
What? Police officers lie? Under pressure? Of course some do. I doubt they are under more pressure here than they are in other circumstances. I suspect the main problem here is they have difficulty lying in the other direction because of the huge amount of video evidence.
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Well, Chauvin is under heavy pressure to lie too. He may well be a habitual liar who “diagnoses” the need to use excessive force and has studied what to claims about the victims state as CYA when he uses force to arrest.
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There is no rule that says it’s ok to escalate to over the top inexcusable behavior merely because you had not yet done so in the first 5 minutes. The defense may have gotten that “concession”, but it’s just silly.
Lucia,
I have read about the sorrow of having a family member isolated in the hospital with covid but didn’t really appreciate the reality of it. My sister-in-law sits at home waiting for the phone to ring…. All the while knowing no news is good news. By extension, her children and the other family members [like my wife] are in the same situation. It’s a phenomenon I had never contemplated.
I don’t think Chauvin’s knee on the back / neck was intent to kill and was arguably procedure, but his failure to remove the knee after it was obvious to everyone there wasn’t a threat was negligent and likely led to the Floyd’s death.
My neighbor’s boyfriend called her from the ICU and told her they were probably going to take him out of the ICU the next day, instead he ended up on a ventilator the next day and subsequently died later. Best of luck to you Russell.
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I really hope this vaccination campaign can get enough people to beat down this scourge.
I took my 2nd shot on Friday AM, no side effects so far. Interestingly women report 79% of all side effects and nearly all of the anaphylactic reactions to Covid-19 vaccines have occurred among women. This is consistent with flu vaccines as well.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/08/health/vaccine-side-effects-women-men.html
“These robust immune responses help to explain why 80 percent of autoimmune diseases afflict women. “Women have greater immunity, whether it’s to ourselves, whether it’s to a vaccine antigen, whether it’s to a virus,†Dr. Klein said.”
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A double bladed sword.
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I tried to find out if there were genetic links to vaccine side effects (families have more or less) but found nothing. I was also wondering if side effects are linked to better or worse outcomes with breakthrough infections but also found nothing.
Tom Scharf
Thank you. I too am hopeful for the success of the vaccine. I am also hopeful we remember the role the Chinese Commies played in this tragedy.
An aside… I remember the successful campaign to roll out the Polio vaccine. We lived a couple miles from the PITT lab where Dr. Salk developed it. That was even more terrifying to us as kids than this is. Many of us had never had an injection before.
Russell,
Yes. Having loved ones be very ill and at risk of dying is very stressful. You have my sympathy!
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I think some vaccine-reluctant rhetoric doesn’t recognize how traumatizing serious illness is and is worded to suggest that getting sick but not dying is not so bad. Well, getting a minor cold is not so bad. But being very ill is hard on the patient and everyone who loves them.
Tom
Interesting. I wonder if perhaps they need a lower does “woman’s” vaccine and a higher does “men’s” vaccine to account for stronger reaction in woman (both in getting immunity and in getting side effects.)
Lucia,
With the isolation protocols the family member is dying alone in a room being attended to by strangers who have a lot of other pressing responsibilities. The family’s only contact is an occasional update from the hospital staff (Who also are overworked strangers). In the usual end of life scenario family is in the room and the family physician makes regular calls. This is really different.
Russell
I know it’s worse. But it’s always bad. This is just heart breaking.
Tom Scharf,
“…but his failure to remove the knee after it was obvious to everyone there wasn’t a threat was negligent and likely led to the Floyd’s death.”
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It is actually much worse than that. He over-ruled one of the younger cops who suggest Floyd be rolled over. He continued the restraint when no pulse was found. The guy acted like a frickin’ monster. He will suffer the consequences of the monstrosity.
Tom Scharf,
I should add that those responsible for hiring Chauvin should be doing some real soul searching. There is no way that sociopaths should be hired as police officers. That Chauvin was hired (and retained in spite of complaints of excessive force) is a condemnation of the Minneapolis police department hiring and diciplinary procedures. Sadly, the people who hired and kept Chauvin around (when he should have been fired) are almost as responsible as Chauvin himself. Let’s have no sociopaths as police officers.
Lucia, Chauvin didn’t escalate to over-the-top behavior, he failed to deescalate.
SteveF, I am in agreement regarding likely prison sentences.
MikeN,
Either way: he acted inappropriately. His actions were intentional not accidental. (So– mens rea.) Those actions killed Floyd.
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Not only did he act intentionally, he did so while people were shouting at him to stop and after another cop suggested a different strategy. This is not an accident. It’s highly reckless– and people on the scene recognized how reckless it was. But he intentionally persisted in this behavior.
Lucia,
“… people on the scene recognized how reckless it was. But he intentionally persisted in this behavior.”
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Yup. Sociopathic behavior. Exactly the kind of person who should not be a police officer.
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The only thing that could save Chauvin from the murder count is a ruling by the MN supreme court, where they interpret the law exactly as written…. and as they have multiple times in the past. The MN 3rd degree statute is written in a way which makes a legitimate conviction of Chauvin on that count very unlikely. I think Cauvin will be convicted on lesser charges, of course, but the poorly written law should shield him from the 3rd degree charge. But it is a Democrat controlled state, so the MN supreme court could just ignore what the statute actually says and let a 3rd degree conviction stand. I think then Chauvin will appeal in federal court.
One other issue which gets little coverage: Chauvin also faces multiple felony charges on tax evasion, jointly with his estranged wife. The couple faces up to 45 years (that is, effectively life in prison). I expect those charges will be tried shortly after the current trial unless the couple enters into plea agreements. Combined with possible Federal civil rights charges (up to and including the death penalty), and it is safe to say Chauvin will be in prison until he is a very old man…. or dead.
SteveF,
Given evidence about Chauvin’s behavior the theory that somehow prosecution expert witnesses are lying (because of pressure) while Chauvin was entirely truthful in his “diagnosis” of excited delirium with all the concomitant dangers– even at the time– is a bit hard to swallow. The fact is: Chauvin has been a cop for a long time. He has used excessive force in the past. He knows which “diagnoses” to give to justify use of force. He, uhmm, shades things in his favor on other things (e.g. taxes). His behavior seems entirely consistent with someone who finds justifications for what he wants to do on tenuous grounds.
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Lucia,
“…..while Chauvin was entirely truthful in his “diagnosis†of excited delirium with all the concomitant dangers– even at the time– is a bit hard to swallow.”
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Chauvin declined to testify, so we don’t have any sworn statement of his ‘diagnosis’ of excited delirium. Considering his history of use of excessive force, fraudulent claim of Florida residency, and clear tax evasion, he is not a credible witness. So it is better for him that he not testify. Which is not to say the prosecution witnesses were not under considerable pressure to paint as bad a picture of Chauvin as possible; they all know what is going on outside the courthouse, and don’t want to face a potentially violent mob.
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I am actually surprised Minnesota did not prosecute the tax evasion charges last summer; it is a slam-dunk case, and probably one where a plea deal down to 10 years or so would be likely, with no trial needed, especially if his estranged wife plead guilty with a reduced sentence to testify against him. Having certainty that Chauvin would be in prison for the next 10+ years might help reduce the potential for violence after the Floyd trial if the jury doesn’t convict on the murder charge.
I know this is off topic but I am aggravated. I wear an N99 dust respirator for my own protection. [I have Asthma]. I wear it while working in garden because of the pollen and dust. I also wear it in public to protect against dust and pathogens like the covid virus. It is somewhat better than a N95 medical respirator at protecting your lungs…and immensity better than those ubiquitous surgical masks. Because of the intense filtration it has silicone flaps to facilitate exhaling. Therefore it is prohibited where covid masks are required. I am required to wear one of those BS surgical masks over it when I go to the doctor’s office. [Usually in public people don’t realize I am wearing a contraband mask and leave me alone.] As a country we are doing this mask thing backwards. We mandate people wear masks that only protect others and ban masks that protect the wearer.
All they need to do for closing arguments in Chauvin’s case is play the videos and sit down.
So they are now saying the pause in J&J is to allow medical providers to be aware of how to detect this rare condition and to treat it properly. This is a very good story, it’s a bit unclear why they didn’t say that from the beginning. Fauci says it’s likely J&J will continue on Friday.
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Over 50% of adults have now had their 1st shot. Hopefully we will see a vaccine related decline start in a month or so. 65+ is now near 80% vaccinated. All good news.
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I saw my first public service ad on TV to get vaccinated. I really think they should try harder here, but we will see how it pans out.
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It is still quite hilarious the whiplash media framing for vaccine hesitators who are conservative versus anyone else:
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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/19/us/vaccine-rollout-seniors.html
“Back in March, when Debra Furr-Holden, an epidemiologist at Michigan State University, heard President Biden urge states to make all adults eligible for the vaccine by May 1 — essentially, to scrap slower plans that emphasized certain priority groups with higher vulnerability — she said she started to tear up with disappointment. It was not what she wanted to hear.”
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“The New York Times recently analyzed vaccine records and voter records in every county in the United States and found that both willingness to receive a coronavirus vaccine and actual vaccination rates were lower, on average, in counties where a majority of residents voted to re-elect former President Donald J. Trump in 2020.”
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This isn’t subtle, and the NYT is repeating this mantra over and over. There is little reason to drag Trump into this except as a signal for their readers to dismiss one group and empathize with another. One could just as easily say “poor disadvantaged rural communities”.
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I don’t really have a lot of empathy for people who choose to not get vaccinated when it become convenient for them to do so, however I expect somewhere in the governments trillions of dollars is an effort to educate these hesitators that goes beyond banning wrong think on social media platforms. Inflaming toxic divisiveness “you are a Trump moron for not getting vaccinated” is about self righteousness, not making the world safer. B117 will burn through a good segment of the unvaccinated.
Tom Scharf,
I gave up on reading anyhting the NY Times publishes…. it is just too frustrating to read 95% garbage to get 5% actual news reporting.
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“B117 will burn through a good segment of the unvaccinated.”
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I agree that is very likely, and there will be plenty of deaths among the unvaccinated elderly, nearly all of which could have been avoided. I can almost understand people under 40 not being highly motivated to get vaccinated, but the fact that 20-25% of people over 65 refuse the vaccine is, for me, almost unbelievable.
Congratulations to the Mars drone making its first flight. It’s only been 120 years sine the first powered flight on earth. Things are advanced rather rapidly.
Lucia, people on the scene were not aware of all the facts, did not have training. In fact one witness testified that the crowd’s hostility may have contributed to Floyd’s death. They were why the EMTs did not try to treat on scene instead of loading him into the ambulance. Yes Chauvin’s actions were intentional, but they were intentionally following training protocol based on possibly a mistaken diagnosis of excited delirium. His fellow officer who suggested a change in treatment did so based on the same diagnosis, and Chauvin then said that this is the correct treatment for that.
To those who were following it, a medical examiner’s report is finally out regarding Sicknick’s cause of death. Natural causes, looks like two strokes.
Lets all hold our breath and wait for the retractions from major media outlets…
MikeN,
Yet they were right: He died. The fact is you didn’t need “training” to be aware of the relevant facts.
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FWIW: Chauvin wasn’t aware of all the facts. No one is ever aware of all the facts. Also: just because Chauvin formed an opinion doesn’t make what he thought “a fact”.
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Oh. Sheesh. This doesn’t help Chauvin. His showing them who is the boss by continuuing just adds to his motive. More mens rea!
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Chauvin refused to listen to the other officers suggestion. (Intentional on Chauvin’s part). The other officer as correct. But despite the calls from the crowd and the other officers, Chauvin chose to do what he chose to do.
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And as far as claiming this is just following training: The other officer was also trained. So the frame of ‘training’ really doesn’t help Chauvin much because it’s obvious that whatever this training was another cop’s training suggested doing something different. So training didn’t say “do this“.
mark bofill,
I’ve been checking that every few days, thanks for that.
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Natural causes, who.would.have.guessed?
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The Capital Police commented that this does not change their view he died in “line of duty”. I had a feeling this might be what this was all about.
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They obviously knew this all along and it is a scandal IMO that they let this “Trump mob killed officer” narrative go on this long, 3.5 months. I predict the media will dutifully note this on page 12A and never speak of it again.
Tom,
Yup.
As expected, Glenn Greenwald is taking this news with all the class one would expect, ha ha. A Greenwald scorned …
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-media-lied-repeatedly-about-officer
That the NY Time is perfectly happy with their reporting of the riot tells all one need know about the organization: corrupt liars who’s only objective is advancing their political preferences with propaganda. They are disgusting and should be ignored.
On a positive note, Tamino (AKA Grant Foster) has posted nothing since late July 2020. His last couple of posts were rants about how Florida should not open its public schools, because covid!!! Which of course did happen and caused exactly nothing, except kids when to school instead of staying home to please the teacher’s union. Just when you think there is nothing positive happening, a numbskull like Tamino goes off air…. which is of course positive, whatever the cause.
RE: T Scharf — Glenn Greenwald–Sicknick. What is so frustrating/disgusting about the false Sicknick stories is that it was obvious that the cause of death was being covered up. I as an outsider noticed it quickly.
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Here is what I as an outsider could see on Jan. 11 in a post I made:
“What is missing is any description of a substantial physical blow to a vulnerable part of the body. Since it is a number of days since his death and there has been no description, the most likely explanation is that he had some sort of cardiac condition and had an attack or stroke coincidentally with the protest (small component of which was a riot)
I had a number of heart attack cases in my workers’ comp practice, and it was my duty to prove that the heart attack was caused by work (typically heavy exertion) or whether it just happened coincidentally at a time when the employee was at work. So far, the evidence is strong that it is the latter.”
Nancy Pelosi (her impeachment charge claimed Sicknick was murdered) has joined her compadres Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren as being blatant liars about murder.
Lucia, I brought up the whitepaper on excited delirium before. My reading of it is that Chauvin was following the recommendations(and he had been trained on it relatively recently) given in the whitepaper. So assuming excited delirium, his fellow officer had it wrong and Chauvin had it right. Of course it is possible that Chauvin made up the excited delirium as cover.
It is not correct to say he has repeatedly engaged in excessive force. He has repeatedly been accused of excessive force, but we don’t have context for how common this is for someone who has worked as long as he has.
I haven’t seen excited delirium mentioned as part of the defense argument. He appears to be going with fentanyl and other possible causes of death. He already has a prosecution witness saying the knee on neck was irrelevant.
The crowd causing problems was not that Chauvin had to show them who’s boss, but just that they had to use an officer for crowd control, and the hostility forced the EMTs away from treatment on site. though of course likely at that point it was too late.
Regarding tax evasion on Chauvin, he is guilty, but it is clear that he would never have been discovered except other agencies singled him out for investigation.
MikeN,
Yes. He has repeatedly been accused of excessive force. I think he has repeatedly engaged in excessive force. You, evidently, think he may not have.
Even that didn’t force Chauvin to treat Floyd as he did.
We’ll see if the jury buys this.
JD,
Yes, this one smelled very suspicious from the beginning, and it is telling that the media refused to follow up on the obvious stink. Too good not to be true from their view. There is still no released report, just an interview with the pathologist by the WP. The information release is being over managed. It may get worse, there might be some unflattering info in the toxicology report or something. There are a few organizations suing under FOI for the release and they are refusing to release it so far.
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NPR: “But the official ruling of his death from natural causes will likely make homicide charges difficult to justify”. It also makes NPR’s reporting on this subject to date difficult to justify…
MikeN,
“Regarding tax evasion on Chauvin, he is guilty, but it is clear that he would never have been discovered except other agencies singled him out for investigation.”
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So except for being charged with homicide counts he might have got away with tax evasion. Is that an excuse? Maybe being a criminal routinely draws the attention of tax authorities. Like Al Capone. Chauvin will probably get another 5-10 years on top of any homicide sentence for the tax evasion.
Tom Scharf, JD Ohio,
Unless all criminal charges related to Sicknick’s death are, or have already been, dropped, I think the pathologist’s report will be demanded before any trial. The interview with the WP may be the classic “limited hang-out” that Nixon’s staff proposed to stop further investigation when it was becoming clear the conspiracy to cover up the Watergate break-in was falling apart.
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There are a lot of very dishonest people involved in this sham. They ought to suffer consequences for their mendacity, but I am pretty sure they won’t, at least not until November 2022.
SteveF/MikeN
Like Steve, I don’t think the fact that it’s highly likely Chauvin would have gotten away with tax fraud had he not killed Floyd makes Chauvin’s character look any better. Nor does it take away from my point which is they guy has a strong self-serving – dishonest streak.
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As much as you want to rely on Chauvin’s likely characterization of the situation, people who know his history are likely to think the first sentence of this song is about him
That he judged there was little likelihood he’d get caught doesn’t make him credible. Oh. Let’s see: He didn’t take the witness stand.
I think the NYT owes its readers an accounting of how it got the Sicknick story so wrong. They were the sole source of the fire extinguisher story and used anonymous sources to do so. I think if you give a source of a major story anonymity and they prove to be wrong, especially what appears to be a complete fabrication without evidence, then those sources should be exposed for their errors. No explanation at all is just digging the credibility grave deeper. Anonymous sources that feed preferred narratives have become a narcotic for the legacy media.
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My expectation is The Ministry of Truth will just brush this under the rug with Trump collusion, Hunter Biden, Russian bounties, etc. and continue to campaign for censorship to protect the public from “disinformation”. I’m sure YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are busy marking all the old posts on the Sicknick story as bad information, ha ha.
Pretty shocking results from poll here:
What are the chances somebody with covid must be hospitalized?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EzR8hxJVIAUVMtR?format=jpg&name=medium
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Most people miss this by 10X.
My argument has nothing to do with Chauvin’s credibility. I don’t like the idea of government agents singling out for investigation people they don’t like. A witness for Chauvin had a bloody pig dropped on his door, or at least what the mob thought was his door.
Perhaps these witnesses will also have their tax records poured over, along with maybe the guy in the neighborhood who was a key witness for George Zimmerman.
MikeN,
If you take care not to kill people on the street, slowly and with many histrionics, then It seems to me unlikely you will have a dead pig dropped at your door, won’t have you tax records poured over, and won’t be bothered much by the woke mob. Chauvin is going away for a long time.
SteveF, that also includes if you serve as a witness to someone who has done these things.
Or being an ally of President Trump.
One thing that annoys me about this blog is the ban on rhetorical questions. Not the ban, but that it leads to people asking a question and preemptively saying, ‘This is a real question.’
I mentioned before the elimination of tracking in math teaching.
At a blog discussing this, I saw this post-
Which top private schools do not require an admissions test? Serious question.
So this is a more common form of writing than I thought.
It’s pored over, not poured over. Pouring is something you do with water or coffee, not tax returns. Once or twice could be a typo, but this is happening far too often. At the WSJ online I keep seeing ‘boarder’ when ‘border’ is meant when commenting on immigration. Sure you can interpret the correct meaning from context, as you would if spoken, but it’s still annoying for someone like me who is probably slightly OCD.
A quick verdict, to be announced in 45 minutes. Almost certainly guilty. 100:1.
MikeN,
It can be very difficult to tell a question is meant as an actual question when it is merely typed. There is no intonation. Also: at blogs and in comments on line, tons of people like to use rhetorical questions to “make a point”. (Unfortunately, what that point is can be ambiguous.)
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Like it or not, if you want a real question to be understood as a real question in comments or online, you actually have to say it’s a question. The main thing is I strongly discourage rhetorical questions because they just cause utter confusion both in the person who thinks the made a point and other people who have no clue what point was supposedly made. Plus, it’s lazy on the part of the person who think they made a point with a rhetorical Q.
DeWitt, while writing it I paused and got confused over the spelling. Even as I typed it it was bugging me, but I stopped at thinking it was better than my first attempt ‘poored’.
Hah. I almost always use the ‘real question’ convention precisely because I have such a horrible habit of using rhetorical questions without even really noticing what I’m doing. It’s a fair bet that if I’m not explicitly thinking about it enough to remember to say ‘real question’ that my questions are usually rhetorical.
Probably. But if it isn’t second degree murder, which seems somewhat unlikely, there will be riots. There may even be riots with second degree because it wasn’t first degree with the death penalty even though that wasn’t an option for the jury.
Oh well, guilty on all counts.
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The third degree murder conviction may be tossed by the MN supreme court.
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But in any case, he is toast for 30 years.
End the nightmare, and send him off to jail quickly.
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Cops should not do this sort of thing.
I’m not sure how you can be guilty of second degree, third degree murder and manslaughter for the same crime. It sounds more like the jury was throwing stuff against the wall and hoping one of them sticks on appeal. If third degree murder was questionable on the details of the law, than surely second degree is out of the question. But then I didn’t read the judge’s instructions to the jury. Maybe he said that you didn’t have to pick one.
Here’s a modest proposal, a la Jonathan Swift: Cops should be disarmed and can’t use any force to arrest anyone who resists. Only people who surrender voluntarily can be arrested and tried. That should work and should solve SteveF’s problem with sociopathic cops.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #201701): “I’m not sure how you can be guilty of second degree, third degree murder and manslaughter for the same crime.”
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I was wondering the same thing. Just adds to the impression that Chauvin was railroaded.
I googled a little and found some confusing articles. But it appears if you are found guilty of 1st degree you are automatically also guilty of the lower murders which are “included” crimes.
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Charging with all 3 gives the jury the option of finding him guilty on only the lower ones and not the higher. But they don’t pick which and then clear him of the alternative ones.
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We can wait for the lawyers to clarify a bit more.
DeWitt,
“That should work and should solve SteveF’s problem with sociopathic cops.”
My problem is most certainly NOT with cops in general, but with cops who’s behavior is beyond the pale. It is unclear to me if you perceive that difference in behavior or not. Chauvin is a classic sociopath…. everything in his history suggests the same. His behaviors is that of a sociopath….. someone who should never have been a cop. There is to my knowledge zero mitigating evidence. Please explain if you see something different.
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FWIW, I think Chauvin should have been convicted of second degree manslaughter, sentenced to 10 years, add 10 years for tax fraud, and another 10 for civil rights violations….. leaving prison at 75 seems about right… should he manage to survive that long. All the other charges were rubbish.
This says that conviction on all three charges is contrary to Minnesota law:
https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/609.04
Second degree murder is intentional. Third degree murder is unintentional. A single act can not be both.
Mike M,
“This says that conviction on all three charges is contrary to Minnesota law”
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The jurors have families, and don’t want to incite riots. The crazy pile-on of charges is perfectly understandable.
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Chauvin should have gone to prison for about a decade… plus another 10 for tax fraud. In the end, 20 years may be what he actually serves. The rest is irrelevant. This is not complicated: don’t hire sociopaths to work as cops. Does that mean cops will be “less effective”? Marginally, maybe, but at least there won’t be videos that lead to riots and looting that the MSM defends as justified “reparations”.
Mike M,
“Second degree murder is intentional. Third degree murder is unintentional. A single act can not be both.”
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Of course. You are looking at it as rational prosecution, not irrational vengeance, which the conviction clearly is. In the end Chauvin will be punished for the most severe of the charges, and the others will be dropped…. which, if I remember correctly, means likely the rest of his life in prison. Sociopathic cops beware: don’t do anything like this.
SteveF (Comment #201708): “The jurors have families, and don’t want to incite riots.”
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Indeed. Tucker Carlson nailed it by saying that the jury arrived at a clear and unambiguous verdict: “Please don’t hurt us”.
Mike M,
I support reasonable application of law. But Chauvin’s behavior was so offensive and so over-the-top that the case led to both wildly inappropriate application of criminal statutes and wildly inappropriate prosecution…. not to mention hundreds of millions of dollars losses due to riots, looting, and arson.
I do hope that cooler heads will prevail in the future, and Chauvin will ultimately suffer a sentence in line with his behavior…. but there is no way to be sure that will happen; he may well suffer more than he should. The only thing that can be secured is that similar events do not happen in the future: get rid of bad cops.
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My greatest hope is that law enforcement across the country will learn from this sorry episode and change the way they hire and retain police officers. Really, there is no excuse for Chauvin’s behavior, and every police department should make sure their employees will never behave that way.
Mike M,
As I think I wrote here long ago: the few young men from my youth who went into law enforcement were absolutely NOT the kinds of people who should have a sidearm and be enforcing the law. I do not know how to hire police officers who are not obvious head cases, but I know this is critically important.
MikeM,
I’m waiting to hear how actual lawyers interpret that statute. It may be that it means that if he was charged with murder 1 only, the jury could convicted him of murder 1 OR murder 2 OR murder 3 which are included.
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I think what you say is not quite right. I think for conviction it “need not be intentional”. They can convict your of “3” if they think it might have been intentional but think the evidence doesn’t prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. The prosecution doesn’t have to prove it’s unitetional. They only failed to prove it was.
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In which case: you aren’t “not guilty” of “3” by virtue of being ‘guilty’ of 2. You are actually guilty of both. It may be that you only serve for “2” because 3 is “included”. But the jury doesn’t acquit you of three.
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It also seems highly unlikely that the judge would not have directed them that they could only convict on one count and then say “not guilty” on the others.
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So I’m not going to accept your reading (which makes no sense to me) unless lawyers tell me you are correct.
Lucia,
I think the issue is if you are guilty of willfully killing, then you can’t also at the same time be guilty of inadvertently killing the same person. Chauvin will almost certainly be sentenced based on the most serious homacide charge, but he can’t be sentence for killing the same person many different times.
SteveF, Lucia just explained that the charge might not be inadvertently killing, but a lesser crime of killing that may or may not be intentional. I think the law says reckless disregard, but that may be the manslaughter charge. So the 2nd degree murder would be 3rd with deliberate intent, that carries a higher burden of proof, but does not contradict 3rd degree.
SteveF,
I think he can’t be sentenced to serve sequential terms for all of them. I suspect there is no difficulty with the verdict itself.