America’s science-following health care professionals and science-informed politicians decided that health care workers, police, and firefighters should have top priority in getting COVID-19 vaccinations. (example from Maskachusetts)
What about the wicked non-masked non-shut kids-in-school Swedes? Their Phase 1 is organized entirely around those old and/or sick enough to require nursing care. Their Phase 2 is for people 65 years and older and also includes health care workers. From the Swedish government:
How many shots has Sweden administered? About 6 per 100 through February 19, or right at the EU average:
As one colleague of Dr. Jill Biden has pointed out, the strict lockdown in the UK has been very effective at driving COVID-19 out of Sweden:
The same guy also looks at media analysis of North Dakota versus South Dakota:
Circling back to vaccine priority… we are told that public health authorities make decisions regarding vaccines based on science. Yet science apparently may give the authorities in every state and country a different answer.
Separately, how important are vaccines? Let’s compared locked-down, masked, and mostly-vaccinated Israel to unlocked, unmasked, and only-starting-to-vaccinate Sweden:
Sweden seems to have had a more dramatic fall in the death rate, starting at roughly the same time, and actually to a slightly lower value than Israel’s. (But maybe this is because party-on Sweden’s cumulative death rate is 2X forever-shut Israel’s and there is a limit to how many COVID-vulnerable people exist in any given population.)
A final thought on the science of vaccinations… “Vaccine Alarmism: We look at the costs of vaccine alarmism.” (NYT):
About one-third of members of the U.S. military have declined vaccine shots. When shots first became available to Ohio nursing-home workers, about 60 percent said no. Some N.B.A. stars are wary of appearing in public-services ads encouraging vaccination.
Nationwide, nearly half of Americans would refuse a shot if offered one immediately, polls suggest. Vaccination skepticism is even higher among Black and Hispanic people, white people without a college degree, registered Republicans and lower-income households.
Friends on Facebook have cited this disapprovingly. They can’t believe that any young healthy person wouldn’t welcome an “investigational” vaccine that would be illegal to give as soon as a declared “emergency” is over. I asked one of these guys why he expected young healthy folks to want it:
- Him: because most of the information we have seems to show it’s much better than the alternatives.
- Me: Better for whom? Italy was one of the world’s worst-afflicted countries by coronaplague. 60 million people live there. Among those 20-29 years old, exactly 46 have died over the past year with a COVID-19 tag. You’re saying that a healthy slender 24-year-old Italian should take an “investigational” vaccine to avoid becoming the 47th person in this age group to die with/from COVID-19 (remember that, as far as we know, the 46 who did die might have been extremely sick with some other diseases, extremely fat, etc.)?
- Him: yes, to keep from spreading it.
- Me; Here in Maskachusetts, our governor assures us that the vaccine does NOT prevent people from being infected with and spreading coronavirus. “At this time, vaccinated individuals must continue to comply with the Governor’s Travel Order and related testing and quarantine requirements. While experts learn more about the protection that COVID-19 vaccines provide under real-life conditions, it will be important for everyone to continue using all the tools available to us to help stop this pandemic, including quarantining after a possible exposure, covering your mouth and nose with a mask, washing hands often, and staying at least 6 feet away from others.”
- Me: So you’re saying that young people should believe the government when it tells them that getting stuck with this experimental pharma product will stop them from spreading coronavirus. And they should also believe the government when it tells them that getting stuck with this experimental pharma product will not stop them from spreading coronavirus, which is why they need to wear masks, stay at home, quarantine after travel if they do somehow escape their home, etc.? (CNN: “Dr. Anthony Fauci said that Americans should continue wearing their masks and social distancing even after getting the vaccine because they can still spread coronavirus”)
- Me: If the government doesn’t trust the vaccines enough to change the travel quarantine laws, why should healthy young people believe that they will help the old/vulnerable by experimenting on themselves?
- Him: because they’re rational?
Readers: Do you expect your government overlords to grant any special privileges to the vaccinated? If so, when? And will these privileges be revoked as soon as mutant variant coronaplague is circulating?
I don’t expect the rulers here in Austin to grant special privileges to the vaccinated, but I _do_ expect them to eventually start persecuting the un-vaccinated.
Yesterday’s news on transmisson (perhaps not with governor X yet):
Vaccine reduces transmission (22 Feb 2021): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56145392
Sweden is nothing special:
Sweden ditches controversial Covid approach (8 Jan 2021) “I don’t think Sweden stands out [from the rest of the world] very much right now” https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/sweden-coronavirus-covid-restrictions-b1784470.html
Sweden isn’t special? If you live in Boston it seems special! Children under 16 haven’t missed a day of school. A Swede can host a party for 125 people inside his/her/zir/their home (would get you arrested in Maskachusetts for being more than 10). A Swede can go to the mall unmasked (our Swedish helicopter instructor reports 5-10 percent mask use during his visit home (coinciding with the winter coronaplague peak)). A Swede can ride unmasked on public transit (though it is “recommended” to weak a mask on the subway during a few designated peak hours).
> Do you expect your government overlords to grant any special privileges to the vaccinated?
Just getting vaccinated is turning out to be the big reward in itself! As you’ve noted in some of your prior posts (and from what I’ve seen among the luckier of my FB friends who have received theirs) – people who successfully navigate the labyrinth and manage to get the shot tend to be so overcome with gratitude that they immediately forget and forgive any of the difficulties it took to get there. It’s a reward all unto itself! No special privileges required, and none will be granted, of course.
As we know, the course of this virus is completely unpredictable even at this late date. Dr. Atul Gawande stated as recently as last week that his biggest worry was that we were “taking our foot off the brakes” too early. And as new variants inevitably emerge, new versions of the vaccine will need to be developed and all the lockdown measures will have to be turned back on, as necessary, indefinitely.
I do not expect the governments involved here to *ever* allow the world to return to “normal” – where people can travel unimpeded, even from state to state. A state of “constant vigilance” that will be ratcheted up and down whenever it’s deemed necessary is the new, permanent reality for the world. At least, it will not happen during this Administration. I expect us to be wearing masks, quarantining, locking things down, and rolling kids in and out of distance learning ***forever***. All it takes is a new strain that is resistant to the vaccines currently being administered and it all starts all over again.
And….5…4…3…2…1…
Right on cue, @Philg, from today, 8:00 AM:
https://news.yahoo.com/californias-coronavirus-strain-looks-increasingly-130055544.html
“The devil is already here,” said Dr. Charles Chiu, who led the UCSF team of geneticists, epidemiologists, statisticians and other scientists in a wide-ranging analysis of the new variant, which they call B.1.427/B.1.429. “I wish it were different. But the science is the science.”
“A coronavirus variant that emerged in mid-2020 and surged to become the dominant strain in California not only spreads more readily than its predecessors, but also evades antibodies generated by COVID-19 vaccines or prior infection and is associated with severe illness and death, researchers said.”
“It also opens the door to a “nightmare scenario”: That the two viruses will meet in a single person, swap their mutations, and create an even more dangerous strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.”
It will never end. It is just as the MIT Technology Review forecast early last year: We are *never* going back to normal. The #Science is the #Science.
Metallica – “No Remorse” – Kill ‘Em All, 1983 Blackened Recordings
Of course they would give some privileges back,.. vaccine passport!!! Wait,… can’t say that, it’s “covid status certificate” in the UK iirc. We know that vaccine passport is conspiracy theory and the government in the UK has no intention of it since they told us so, thus fully debunking it. They take our right and only give some of it back for a period to those who obey.
Question is, what is the harm of having the experimental vaccine? Has it or will it be censored?
A new strain. Lolz. They’ve never isolated the first one. https://gab.com/Ruth-Plant/posts/105730290598245938
Normalcy is yours for the taking.
Don’t know if they isolated or if covid exist for sure. The water is muddle up so much that such information into me is uncertain. There are some expert that put up easily recognisable fake proof that covid 19 doesn’t exist,… humanity can remain ignorant.
What I do know is that things like hcq not only work against what we know as covid 19, it also work against the flu and etc. That antimicrobials are effective treatment for virus is a truth that little people should never embrace.
https://www.jpands.org/vol25no3/merritt.pdf
Your friend is using the word “rational” in its bizzaro world sense, i.e. “irrational”.
George Orwell concept of doublethink… thus to him it rational.
Critical thinking cannot be done with false premise or information. All it would result in is the wrong conclusion at best. So to me the concept of critical thinking is second to uncensored information.
While propaganda and slogans aim to educate people to guided conclusion, giving people a perception of intellect. Thus it hard for people to escape from the invisible prison of a well crafted narrative.
Intellectual/experts for one reason or another used such know to guide the bewildering herd… enslavement without the whip.
According to the people I work with in Sweden, it is more or less life as usual with young people out and about and older people making their own decisions on what to do. Though restaurants at least in Stockholm now limit the number to people who can sit together at a table to four — indoors of course.
My 60-year-old next door neighbor has been furloughed from her retail job until she can arrange to get vaccinated. My frail octagenerian parents-in-law have received the shot with no complaints of side effects.
I am thankful for Lent giving me an excuse to give up the many bad habits that have gotten worse over the past year.
Totalitarian Consigliere Department, Number 235,304,202:
Now that Orange Man is gone, the Great Dr. Fauci has reached down, found his stones and his voice, and he’s giving us all “Un calcio nei coglioni.” Vaccination doesn’t help you get back to normal, until much later, when we say so.
“There are things, even if you’re vaccinated, that you’re not going to be able to do in society,” Fauci said on Monday during a White House COVID-19 press briefing. “For example, indoor dining, theaters, places where people congregate. That’s because of the safety of society.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-vaccinated-people-should-not-indoor-dine-go-to-theaters-2021-2
By the way, he’s very impressive and determined and chillingly authoritarian in the video. He’s really coming into his own now under this Biden guy. Ben Shapiro has the full video on Facebook but I can’t find it ***anywhere*** else. It’s marvel to listen to!
The formerly timorous and cautious Dr. Fauci is now singing full-throated! What kind of special privileges are you expecting from a man so determined to do his utmost?
Here it is. You can watch from 31:00 on to hear what Dr. Fauci has to say about “Special Privileges.” Subject: “Messaging on the Vaccines”
https://www.c-span.org/video/?509224-1/white-house-covid-19-response-team-briefing
Here, I transcribed his statements. I’m pretty good at that. It also helps to turn the speed down to 0.5x just for the effect.
“Q: Your thoughts around the MESSAGING around the vaccines. There’s a lot of conversation about how you need to keep doing the same things, even after you get vaccinated. You know, like wearing a mask, not seeing your family, things like that. Do you think that’s preventing people from being more enthusiastic about getting vaccines, and may we see that change in the future?
…
Fauci: “You know, actually I’ll start. Whatever. I’ll start off and be very brief and hand it to Dr. Walensky. There are certain aspects of being vaccinated and what that means to you personally and to your own personal safety and that of your family versus what vaccines will ALLOW YOU TO DO IN SOCIETY. One relates to you, yourself being vaccinated and the other relates to the number of people in and the relative percentage of people in society that will be vaccinated. Because there will be things that you WILL NOT BE ABLE TO DO, because the burden of virus in society will be very high, which it is right now.
Even though we’re going way down on the decline that Dr. Walensky showed you, we are still at an unacceptably high baseline level, with the seven day average being quite high. So there are things, even if you’re vaccinated, that you’re not going to be able to do in society. For example, indoor dining, theaters, places where people congreate [like schools?], that’s because of the safety of society.
You yourself, what you can do, when you are together with another person, we are looking at that, and we are going to try and find out very quickly, what recommendations could be made about WHAT PEOPLE CAN DO. One of the things that’s universal here that we know, that at this point in time, it is unclear whether when you get vaccinated and you might be protected from clinical disease, which is the primary endpoint of the vaccine studies, that you could conceivably be infected, have virus in your nasal pharynx, and at the same time have no symptoms. Which is the reason why we recommend and say you STILL need to wear a mask. Because if you do have virus in your nasal pharynx, even though we HOPE that when the data comes in, it’s gonna show that the virus level is quite low, and you’re not transmitting it, we don’t know that now. And for that reason we want to make sure that people continue to wear masks despite the fact that they’re vaccinated.”
So. As long as the data show that there are people who are harboring the virus in their nasal pharynx at whatever level Dr. Fauci deems unacceptable, you can’t do anything other than what he says, even if you’re vaccinated.
By the way I know that it’s “nasopharynx” but I transcribed it as I heard it, and I thought he drew out the “l.” It’s unclear whether it’s his enunciation or my perception of it.
Regardless, it seems to me that the metric for normalcy is now measured in the viral load of the collective nasopharynx, through whatever means Dr. Fauci determines it. He’s quite clear about that, and you know, recommendations are coming because new data is emerging all the time.
If data come out that show people aren’t harboring virus in their nasopharynx, I’m sure he’ll be able to come up with a new reason for people to keep wearing a mask (or two). All of these standards are made post hoc anyway.
Thanks for doing this transcript.
@Jane: You’re welcome. I really do hope (if) when all of this is over, some really good Constitutional lawyers can sit around picking the bones of the aftermath and read statements like this to determine whether the presence of viral load at some indeterminate level in the collective nasopharynx constitutes enough grounds for depriving people of their rights – down to the level of individual mobility – for hundreds of millions of people, even if they’ve been vaccinated, and based on whatever data analysis is being done at the moment, prefaced with the word: “HOPE.”
“Gosh, we HOPE we can let you out of jail, but we have to get the data back from our nasopharyngeal testing across the entire prison population first and then see whether it’s valid.”
Ridiculous airport security restrictions have not been lifted, although they are no longer required. Why would public bureaucrats give up tjeir power and the spotlight now that we pretty much have herd immunity? Variants? We’ve been locked down! Every town has a variant! Just an excuse to keep the party going!
Meanwhile …
“India’s Subject Expert Committee (SEC), a panel that advises the nation’s Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO), a national regulatory body focused on pharmaceuticals and devices, ruled that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine should not be recommended for an EUA in the country ‘at this stage’. The committee noted that incidents of palsy, anaphylaxis and other SAE’s have been reported during post marketing and the causality of the events with the vaccine is being investigated. Further, the firm has not proposed any plan to generate safety and immunogenicity data in Indian population.”
Nick a, my web search to seek confirmation of your quote led me to an interesting result. In a wonderful demonstration of “reality control” by the Coronafaithful, I found that it is “mostly false” to call the SEC’s decision a “ban”. You can’t lawfully use the stuff in India, but only a conspiracy theorist would call that a “ban”!
Fact checker are not independent and we see how they explain things suited to the agenda they got paid for,.. if it not even allow for emergency use authorisation (EUA) where they scrutiny is lax, is not a ban?
A fun article to read,… hum…
https://local12.com/news/local/two-sisters-at-villa-hills-monastery-die-from-covid-19-after-28-test-positive-cincinnati
Let’s ignore deaths and even how so many caught covid 19 after first shot of vaccination in extreme closed down situation. Why is the second shot needed if they have covid and their system is thus able to produce antibodies? Vaccination for the sake of vaccination using EUA experimental vaccine? Pure madness.
@John Doe, from the link: “The sisters will receive their second dose of the vaccine in May.” ??? It either poor insanity, medical testing or more like shoddy journalism.
Yes… that last line with timeline was a bit unexpected. It is from a more pro-vaccine source site. Usually when from pro-vaccine I noticed they tend to recommend other to get it or say they will continue with vaccination there ignoring that lots have caught covid at that specific location after vaccination.
Oh.. to be fair, those anti covid vaccine side will natural bring any harm as a call to end vaccine or provide a more comprehensive inform consent.
Both side won’t see eye to eye because medical field usually don’t want to scare people and release an unadulterated potential correlation. Since correlation doesn’t mean causality and maintain public trust in modern medicine is utmost importance.
Distrust of covid vaccine has been painted as distrust in all vaccine. It will push people toward anti vaxxed side. I am finding myself who used to be pro vaccine moving to anti vaxxed side due to covid vaccine.