An immigrant friend has slender athletic children in high school. Their statistical risk from COVID-19 is negligible, possibly smaller than the risk of being injured or dying in a car accident on the way to the vaccine clinic (a handful of children are harmed by COVID-19, of course, but most were vulnerable due to obesity or previously identified disease). He vaccinated his children, despite his belief that they were not at risk and that the vaccine had no value to them. They live in Maskachusetts so they still have to wear masks at school. If they want to travel internationally, they’re still subject to testing hassles.
How about altruism? Maybe the former Soviet wants to help Joe Biden shut down coronavirus as promised during his election campaign? That’s can’t be the explanation. He doesn’t believe that the currently available vaccines have any public health benefit due to the fact that people who are vaccinated can still get infected and be contagious and also due to the fact that SARS-CoV-2 will evolve its way around the current vaccines (potentially mutating into something wildly more deadly, as happened with the Marek’s Disease vaccine). So he didn’t inject his children with the idea that their stimulated immune system would be helpful to an 82-year-old somewhere in Massachusetts.
Earlier this year I asked him to explain his decision and he responded with the following:
Because I know how collectivists think and act. Back in the USSR, we had this saying roughly translated as “Don’t separate yourself too far from the collective, or the collective will separate you.”
This week he has been vindicated. A text message:
The United States Fencing Federation voted for a vaccine mandate for everyone at national events, including kids.
(Said kids still have to wear coronarags under their fencing masks, despite everyone in the arena having been injected with a vaccine that is advertised as miraculously effective.)
Can’t blame him. I knew people from the Soviet Union in the 1990s who had emigrated to the West and were still afraid of the university administration (that was when professors had more power, could do what they wanted and the administration was universally looked down upon).
Turns out these people are well adapted for the West in 2021.
Regarding vaccination, Portugal is almost fully vaccinated and it will be interesting to see the magnitude of the Winter outbreak (right now #TheCurve looks good).
From the very beginning of this thing, given my current medical history especially, I’ve known that I was going to be a member of the All Soviet Team all the time, and I absolutely have been. You should see the looks on people’s faces when I walk into the local convenience store in my Aegle N95 folding mask. I wear it *everywhere*.
I can absolutely empathize with your former-Soviet friend. I know the mindset so well it scares me. I worked in the higher administration of a very liberal, activist university!
I normally don’t like to compare myself with Nostradamus, but very near the beginning of this entire adventure, I had an unpleasant argument one day with my father. He was of the opinion that the virus would be GONE by the Summer of 2020, that summer heat would kill it all off. I said to him: “You do not understand what this IS. This is virus and all its epiphenomena are going to last for YEARS, if not forever. Everything you have seen thus far is a PRELUDE. We are not even in Act I yet!”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/03/17/905264/coronavirus-pandemic-social-distancing-18-months/
Aside: Several months ago I bought a box of 50 of them from Aegle. They’re made TX, USA and ship free from Texas via UPS ground in less than a week. They have proven to be very durable and even (for what they do) somewhat comfortable masks. The straps are very durable and each one lasts me at least 25 on-off cycles. I keep three of them in my car at all times, two in the center console (fresh) and one hanging from the rearview mirror. Of course, the act of wearing the mask more than once, folding it up and storing it for later use means that I am touching the mask after wearing it, so I also sanitize my hands! I have absolutely no confidence that all of this it’s doing any good whatsoever, but nobody can doubt my commitment to the Collective. The mask filters 95% of particles down to 0.3 microns and the virus is ~0.1 micron in diameter, so you tell me what that means. #InFauciWeTrust.
https://aegleco.com/products/foldable
> “Study Finds Teenage Boys Six Times More Likely To Suffer Heart Problems From Vaccine Than Be Hospitalized by C19”
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.30.21262866v1
The mortality for acute myocarditis is about 20% at 12 months, and at four years, there is a 56% survival.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK441847/ (scroll down to the outcomes section)
This just in from Reason:
“CDC Wants Your Vaccinated 5-Year-Old Masked Indefinitely”
https://reason.com/2021/10/20/cdc-wants-your-vaccinated-5-year-old-masked-indefinitely/
Even some heretics from Johns Hopkins are now wondering where the Off Ramps are! We’re finding out that once you on this road, there *are none.* Didn’t plan for any!
“…as Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo wrote yesterday, “Masks in schools were meant to be a temporary measure. It is good policy and practice to establish off-ramps for interventions that aren’t meant to be permanent….***We should be able to answer what conditions would enable an end.***”
Straight from the top: Nobody can answer that question yet!
Journalistic License Department: I love the wording of the question from AP’s Zeke Miller asking Wallensky about what effect expanding 5-11 year old vaccination would have on masking policy:
“You can **speak to sort of the benefits** along those lines,” Associated Press reporter Zeke Miller prompted her.”
Let’s put this another way:
“Let’s get some sort of straight answers here! I’m gonna, sort of, ask you – on behalf of the American people, who kind of want to know…a little bit of a direct question, sort of. If you kind of, sort of, want to answer it, please do and tell us – sort of – the benefits, you know, kind of, along those lines. Sort of. Thank you!”
According to the CDC, giving the full 2-dose series to one million teenagers will save on average 1.5 lives! Even one life is worth it, right, so with 1.5 it’s an obvious “go.”
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-2021-06/05-COVID-Wallace-508.pdf , slide 32.
It will also prevent 55 ICU admissions, but will also cause 40 cases of myocarditis. Whoops!
The sad thing is that the population that is ending up in the ICU without the vaccine and the population that is ending up with myocarditis because of the vaccine are probably nearly disjoint. Myocarditis seems to be happening primarily in fit young men. So a vaccine policy that targeted the vaccination to those who were most at risk for COVID complications (e.g., the 20% of teenagers that are obese) could probably save just as many lives and ICU visits without causing the excess myocarditis. But that would require allowing people to make choices, which is so 2019.
RS: Thanks for that presentation. Slide 39 is my favorite. If you almost kill a child via myocarditis with the 1st dose of the vaccine that he/she/ze/they didn’t need, just proceed with that 2nd dose as soon as the kid is out of the hospital. Same deal with pericarditis. Just give that second dose after the first one causes an internal infection. #AbundanceOfCaution
Slide 32 is confusing. The same agency (CDC) says that humans come in a beautiful rainbow of genders (see https://www.cdc.gov/healthcommunication/Preferred_Terms.html ). Yet their slide 32 gives us data for only two gender IDs: “male” and “female”. What happens when you vaccinate 1 million two-spirit teenagers, for example? (and should a two-spirit person receive twice as many shots as a one-spirit person?)
And, it is worth pointing out that the 1.5 deaths were probably not randomly distributed among people in this age group (just as they are not randomly distributed among older humans). You might be able to prevent 1.48 deaths with 20,000 vaccinations, merely by prioritizing the obese and the diseased, leaving the ordinary teenagers alone.
A Russian should know better. I assume he is trusting American Tass for compliance information. He just might just have committed his kids to the mudblood minority. The reported numbers of vaccinated are awfully close to the usual fake push a narrative number i.e. just over 50%.
They used to but they are dying out.
The level of being affected by propaganda is heavily dependent on the “typical” Soviet emigre age. For simplicity sake, let’s say those who are in their 60-70 have been reliably inoculated, as it were, against governmental b.s. by virtue of having fully experienced the joys of living under the Soviet state . Those who are in their 40-50 did not acquire much of anti-propaganda immunity having grown up during the time the Soviet regime shut down itself.
I have a friend who is in the 40-50 category, a PhD level educated. He, his wife and his 12 y.o. son got infected in December of last year and fully recovered in a couple of days (the boy would not even know he was infected if it were not for the tests they took post infection). Yet they decided to and got vaccinated in May per CDC recommendations. They refused to read the research papers showing that natural immunity is as good or better than the one acquired through vaccination, they just blindly “believed” whatever Dr F et al. told them on TV and were rather irritated when I pointed out to certain contradictory pieces of advice from CDC during the last year and a half. Now they are waiting for CDC to allow them to Pfizer their son. So, in this instance, it’s not so much fear as blind trust in benign paternalistic government. Regrettably, Soviet bred sheep are not so much different from the local variety.
Ivan: Your friends are “survivors”! I think that there should be a prize for the first American who can get to 50 booster shots of COVID-19 vaccine before the typical person living in Africa is offered his/her/zir/their first vaccine shot.
Ivan, your anecdote is not typical. I know only one former Soviet couple in their 60th who is by now thoroughly brainwashed,. All 40-ish – 50th and other 60th former soviets that I know and I know a few of them are government and vaccine skeptics at different levels of deplorability. Their American or those emigrated young children are a different story. Ironically only those children of former soviets that became religious (and traditionally, not light – religious) or those who exhibited child behavior issues and joined (or led) American gangs retained independent mind and think for themselves, majority of both “smart” and really smart kids with a lot of “education” or real education are either brainwashed to a significant degree or exhibit cowardly traits .
LSI: I will readily admit that my selection is not representative being limited mainly by professional encounters — I do not move much in wider Russian emigrant circles as you might.
Regarding children, yes, it’s a sad story but quite understandable. See Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” as to how much influence, other than genetic, parents have over their own children (hint: virtually nil).
I am sure that the children were brainwashed by American TV and education and vaccinated themselves, in this country parents who are not religious fanatics have little say over their teenagers’ behaviors and teenagers are usually antagonistic to their parents and your friend is too ashamed to admit or lies to himself.
Maybe the children are not brainwashed bud did it out of calculation to stay in the right crowd and get into right college. If the later is the case then they are for the rude awakening: if things are going as they are going now then membership in a street gang and street creed will become more important then laughable educational credentials, like it happened in former USSR and is happening now in Venezuela. Nobody will care of being part of PC crowd.
Heard of some olympic level athletes getting incapacitated by covid despite not fitting the media’s profile, manely Athlete Special. Knowing how collectivists think is definitely the beginning of the reasons for getting such a simple vaccine.
How many covid vaccinated pro athletes have collapsed on field this year? What is the average on field pro athletes collapse per year pre covid vaccine?
I see bright future for the air vaccination cottage industry.
*That* is how former Soviet people think. At keast those who are not total sheep.