Search Results for: vaccination

Have you reported your recent vaccinations to Facebook?

by philg

A Trump-hating professor at the University of California recently posted “Got my flu and new covid vaccines at CVS this morning”:

His friends (nearly all Trump-hating academics) were thrilled. Here are some of the 27 comments:

  • Sounds good. For the theorists amongst us …. Yale researchers last year used, simple parsimonious 😃 models (see screenshot) to compute the optimal time of year for a Covid vax. For NYC, it’s Sept. 15th.
  • Where? There appear to be none available (yet) in San Diego. Using their scheduling tool, I could only get it to declare me eligible if I clicked the “I have an underlying condition that makes me susceptible to severe outcomes from the COVID-19 virus”. Is that what you did? (Response: CVS in La Jolla Village Square. I went to pick up a prescription and the pharmacist asked if I would like to receive the flu and/or covid vaccine.)
  • Good on you. I have been told to wait until next month. Wearing my mask on the MTA until then.
  • Mazel tov. I had Covid a few weeks ago so I will have to wait a few months. (This is my favorite; she got 7 previous shots and then got the disease and her confidence in the value of Shot #8 is not diminished.)

Readers: I hope that all of you posted on Facebook after receiving a vaccine!

Righteous contempt as Florida follows Japan, Sweden, and Switzerland into non-coerced vaccination of children

by philg

ChatGPT:

Countries like Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the UK, and most of Scandinavia do not condition public school attendance on vaccination status. Japan – Vaccines are strongly promoted, but school entry is not denied for unvaccinated children. Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland – All Nordic countries besides Iceland follow voluntary vaccination policies for school entry. Switzerland – Vaccination is voluntary, and school entry does not depend on vaccine status.

“Which countries have mandatory childhood vaccination policies?” (Our World in Data):

A Democrat on Facebook:

What’s the punchline to this post? The author lives in… Japan, where childhood vaccines are optional. My response to him:

When do you expect the wave of unvaccinated death to hit Palm Beach, Coral Gables, Bal Harbour, Wellington, and Key Biscayne?

Note that Florida has a free “Vaccines for Children” program in which $200 million/year of injections are administered every year. Florida doesn’t have the highest vaccinate coverage rates for kindergartners, but nonetheless Florida has higher rates than the Orthodox Democrat states of Minnesota and Colorado (CDC).

The trailblazing 2SLGBTQQIA+ governor of Maskachusetts:

I personally doubt that the reduction in vaccine bureaucracy will have a large effect on standard childhood vaccination rates in Florida. People already had the option of opting out for religious reasons. Maybe the vaccination rates will go up if the lack of a legal requirement results in some additional creativity among the public health experts, e.g., free medical marijuana to any parent who brings his/her/zir/their child in for shots, convenient shot clinics at places where children are likely to gather. The Righteous assume that the only way to get humans to do something is to threaten them, but economists have found that very small financial incentives can create dramatic behavioral changes.

If we accept that the government has the right to coerce humans in the name of public health what I would do is force Americans to exercise and maintain a government-monitored BMI. Philip’s Shut-Yo-Pie-Hole System would use cameras and AI to make sure every American gets on a scale in the morning. If over 25 BMI then he/she/ze/they can’t get food other than broccoli at either a supermarket or a restaurant (control with a phone app and step tracker). Add one chicken nugget for every 5000 steps. There would be a chocolate ration of 20 grams (increased from the former value of 30 grams) for anyone with a BMI of under 21.

Loosely related, a friend in a discussion group in Maskachusetts let everyone know that he’d moved to Florida and a Democrat responded:

look on the bright side. At least you will live worry free in Florida: no state taxes, no climate change, no vaccines, and no one to tend to your lawns or clean your pools.

The emphasis on cheap/slave labor via low-skill immigration is fascinating to me. The American Righteous decided to fully open our borders to low-skill migrants almost exactly coinciding with the Age of AI/robots. (Of course, it is actually much easier to get labor in Florida than in Maskachusetts because chillin’ on taxpayer-funded housing, health care, food, etc. doesn’t pay as well in Florida as in Maskachusetts (see Table 4 in Cato’s Work v. Welfare Trade-off.)

See also

For whom do we root in the Super Bowl? A Pfizer COVID vaccine shill or a whole city of coerced vaccination, forced masking, and school closure?

by philg

Today is the Super Bowl. On one side we have junk vaccine profiteer Travis Kelce, paid a reported $20 million to promote Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines (recently shown to have zero effect on death rate among those who’ve previously made it through a SARS-CoV-2 infection; see “Effectiveness of a fourth SARS-CoV-2 vaccine dose in previously infected individuals from Austria”). On the other side we have a team from San Francisco, renowned for its muscular 1.5-year public school closures, forced masking, coerced vaccinations (meekly accepted by everyone except In-N-Out), etc.

“We refuse to become the vaccination police for any government,” Arnie Wensinger, [In-N-Out’s] chief legal and business officer, said in a statement. “It is unreasonable, invasive and unsafe to force our restaurant associates to segregate customers into those who may be served and those who may not.”

Our neighborhood is having a party on the green where the kids play every afternoon. The HOA will run a couple of cables from the clubhouse/gym and project the game on an inflatable outdoor screen.

For whom should an anti-coronapanic and anti-Covidcrat American root?

Related:

COVID-19 vaccination coverage among the nation’s smartest people

by philg

I’m still on the mailing list for City of Cambridge (Maskachusetts) updates. Every day they send out their dead pool data. From yesterday:

Nobody died yesterday in Cambridge because everyone got the Sacrament of Fauci, right? The Harvard-educated Democrat-voting folks in Cambridge wouldn’t contribute to coronaplague by running around unvaccinated like the Deplorables in the Unspeakable Republican South, certainly. Well…

Only 73 percent fully vaccinated?!!? Now that vaccines are emergency-used authorized for 6-month-old babies, how can this be? And how does this compare to a state in which public health authorities do not promote the idea of injecting children with experimental medicines that are designed to prevent deaths among the elderly? The percentage of Floridians (DeSantis voters!) who are fully vaccinated is currently 68 percent. Maybe the answer for how the intelligent people who live next to MIT and Harvard can have such similar vaccination coverage to the morons of Florida is that the newly approved COVID shots for babies require at least 8 weeks for the baby to be considered “fully vaccinated” and the emergency use authorization for sticking babies was issued only a month ago.

British Medical Journal weighs in on forced vaccination

by philg

Me: Should the COVID-19 injections be renamed to something other than “vaccine”?

#Science: “The unintended consequences of COVID-19 vaccine policy: why mandates, passports and restrictions may cause more harm than good” (BMJ Global Health)…

… we argue that current mandatory vaccine policies are scientifically questionable and are likely to cause more societal harm than good. Restricting people’s access to work, education, public transport and social life based on COVID-19 vaccination status impinges on human rights, promotes stigma and social polarisation, and adversely affects health and well-being. Current policies may lead to a widening of health and economic inequalities, detrimental long-term impacts on trust in government and scientific institutions, and reduce the uptake of future public health measures, including COVID-19 vaccines as well as routine immunisations.

The publicly communicated rationale for implementing such policies has shifted over time. Early messaging around COVID-19 vaccination as a public health response measure focused on protecting the most vulnerable. This quickly shifted to vaccination thresholds to reach herd immunity and ‘end the pandemic’ and ‘get back to normal’ once sufficient vaccine supply was available. In late summer of 2021, this pivoted again to a universal vaccination recommendation to reduce hospital/intensive care unit (ICU) burden in Europe and North America, to address the ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’.

There are also worrying signs that current vaccine policies, rather than being science-based, are being driven by sociopolitical attitudes that reinforce segregation, stigmatisation and polarisation, further eroding the social contract in many countries.

Two experiments in Germany and the USA found that a new COVID-19 vaccine mandate would likely energise anti-vaccination activism, reduce compliance with other public health measures, and decrease acceptance to future voluntary influenza or varicella (chickenpox) vaccines.

COVID-19 vaccines have also generated at least $100 billion profit for pharmaceutical companies, especially Pfizer.

The authors are from the School of Public Health, University of Washington, University of Edinburgh, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University, Oxford, Harvard Medical School (!), and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Related:

  • “The Concept of Classical Herd Immunity May Not Apply to COVID-19” (J Infect Dis, March 2022, by David M Morens, Gregory K Folkers, and Anthony S Fauci (!)): SARS-CoV-2 appears not to substantially engage the systemic immune system, as do viruses such as smallpox, measles, and rubella that consistently have a pronounced viremic phase. Moreover, neither infection nor vaccination appears to induce prolonged protection against SARS-CoV-2 in many or most people. Finally, the public health community has encountered substantial resistance to efforts to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2 by vaccination, mask wearing, and other interventions.

Why are people able to charge for fake CDC vaccination cards?

by philg

Dumb question of the day… why are fake CDC vaccination cards a marketable item? “Fake Vaccine Card Sales Have Skyrocketed Since Biden Mandate” (Pew):

The price of fake COVID-19 vaccine cards and the number of vendors selling them have shot up since President Joe Biden announced his vaccine mandate plan last week, according to a global cybersecurity company.

Check Point Software Technologies found that the typical cost of phony vaccine cards bearing the logo of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was $100 on Sept. 2. The day after Biden’s Sept. 9 announcement, they jumped to $200, according to company spokesperson Ekram Ahmed.

The estimated number of sellers also rose from about 1,200 to more than 10,000 during that period, added Ahmed, whose company has been studying the black market for fake vaccine cards.

The CDC makes a PDF for a blank card available on its web site. The information on the card can be written in by hand. A person who wanted to make his/her/zir/their own card would not even need to buy card stock because he/she/ze/they would generally be able to show a photo of a card rather than the card itself, e.g., to get into a restaurant in Washington, D.C. Clinic site and lot numbers can be copied from a card image found on the Web and/or from a friend’s legit card.

Why are people paying $200 for something that can be easily created at home? What is the skill of the referenced “black market” vaccination card vendors?

(And, given the state of American electronic medical records, how would it be possible to determine that a card was fake if the bearer copied lot numbers and clinic names from a legit card? (my booster shot record just says “CVS” in the right hand column, which could be anywhere in the U.S.) Even if the injection can’t be found in a database, should we infer from that missing record that the card is fake? How do we know that the people at the CVS did all of the upstream tasks correctly?)

Is it legitimate for the Supreme Court to use numbers to rule on forced vaccinations?

by philg

Based on what Justices said during last week’s hearing regarding the constitutionality of President Biden’s forced vaccination orders, the Supreme Court seemed to be prepared to rule based on numbers.

There are some questions about whether these numbers are correct. See “Sotomayor’s false claim that ‘over 100,000’ children are in ‘serious condition’ with covid” (Washington Post), for example:

But then Sotomayor went off the rails: “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.”

That’s wildly incorrect, assuming she is referring to hospitalizations, given the reference to ventilators. According to HHS data, as of Jan. 8 there are about 5,000 children hospitalized in a pediatric bed, either with suspected covid or a confirmed laboratory test. This figure includes patients in observation beds. So Sotomayor’s number is at least 20 times higher than reality, even before you determine how many are in “serious condition.”

Moreover, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been less than 100,000 — 82,843 to be exact — hospital admissions of children confirmed with covid since Aug. 1, 2020.

(We will not address remarks made by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, which some readers also thought were wrong. The official court transcript suggested he had made an inflated statement about the annual flu: “Flu kills — I believe — hundreds of thousands of people every year.” The flu kills between 12,000 and 52,000 people in the United States a year, but the audio of the argument shows Gorsuch actually said that “flu kills, I believe, hundreds, thousands of people every year.” So the transcript is incorrect.)

Let’s assume for the sake of this blog post that perfect numbers are available for every statistic and that all of the Justices are able to comprehend and remember these numbers. A reader sent me an interesting email:

What is the definition of small? And who decides? What can they force you to do in the future with this precedent?

What if we had a pandemic with a 5% death rate and a “vaccine” with a 4% death rate?

If the Constitution limits what the federal government can do, it shouldn’t be necessary to resort to a statistical analysis to determine whether the government can constitutionally force healthy people to take a medicine that they don’t want.

I don’t think this is as simply as making an analogy to vaccinations required for children to attend taxpayer-funded schools. As far as I am aware, all of those vaccinations were and are intended to protect those being vaccinated whereas the argument for forcing a vaccine on a healthy 20-year-old is to protect others (since Science proves that the vaccine will prevent infection and transmission). Also, those vaccines had been through a traditional (non-accelerated) testing and approval process. (I would point out that those vaccines are more than 37% effective, but that gets us back to turning law into a numbers game.)

Readers: Will you be sorry if the Supreme Court refers to numbers and statistical studies when it finally rules on this issue of how much power the federal government has?

Related:

Supreme Court hears arguments on forced vaccination in two parallel universes

by philg

The Supreme Court recently took up the question of whether elderly elites can order young peasants to get vaccinated against a virus that attacks the elderly. The argument took place in two parallel universes.

Let’s first check my usual source for truth… “Conservative Majority on Supreme Court Appears Skeptical of Biden’s Virus Plan” (New York Times):

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said the states and Congress, rather than a federal agency, were better situated to address the pandemic in the nation’s workplaces. Justice Amy Coney Barrett said the challenged regulation appeared to reach too broadly in covering all large employers.

The court’s three more liberal justices said the mandate was a needed response to the public health crisis.

“We know the best way to prevent spread is for people to get vaccinated,” Justice Elena Kagan said.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer said he would find it “unbelievable that it would be in the public interest to stop these vaccinations.”

The NYT has one sentence regarding Sonia Sotomayor, the self-described “wise Latina”:

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who has diabetes and has worn a mask since the justices returned to the courtroom in October, participated remotely from her chambers.

What about the Deplorables over at the Washington Examiner? “Liberal Supreme Court justices spread COVID-19 misinformation”:

Kagan began by claiming “the best way” to prevent the spread of COVID-19 is “for people to get vaccinated,” and the “second best way” is to “wear masks.” Neither claim is true. While the vaccines appear to slow the spread of COVID-19 and reduce the chance of death, there is absolutely no evidence that they prevent transmission, especially not against the much more contagious omicron variant. The cloth masks mandated in different parts of the country don’t prevent the spread of the virus either, as several public health experts have recently admitted.

Breyer continued to spread misinformation by falsely claiming that 750 million people — there are only 330 million people living in the United States — tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday. That would mean every single one of us tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday twice.

Breyer then implied, like Kagan before him, that Biden’s vaccine mandate would bring the number of daily cases down to zero. Again, this is not true. Fully vaccinated and boosted adults are testing positive for COVID-19 at about the same rate as unvaccinated people, which means everyone is going to get the virus one way or the other, vaccinated or unvaccinated.

But the worst falsehoods by far came from Sotomayor, who claimed the omicron variant is just as deadly as the delta variant was and that more than 100,000 children have been hospitalized by COVID-19, with “many” on ventilators.

he current national pediatric COVID-19 census from the Department of Health and Human Services shows 3,342 children with COVID-19 in hospitals. And, as Anthony Fauci admitted last week, there is a huge difference between children hospitalized by COVID-19 and those hospitalized with COVID-19. The vast majority of pediatric cases are from children hospitalized with COVID-19, meaning they were hospitalized by something else first and happened to test positive at about that same time.

“If you look at the children [who] are hospitalized, many of them are hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID,” Fauci said last week. “What we mean by that is that if a child goes in the hospital, they automatically get tested for COVID, and they get counted as a COVID-hospitalized individual, when in fact, they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that.”

There is almost no overlap between what the NYT reported as having happened and what the Washington Examiner reported as having happened.

How about the Sotomayor 100,000? That’s a lot of hospitalized and/or ventilated kids. But could we ever establish the truth or falsehood of her statement? I thought the whole point of the U.S. is that we can’t distinguish between people who go to the hospital because of COVID-19 or who go to the hospital for some other reason and then happen to test positive for what might be an asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Readers: Who wants to guess the outcome? (and when will the Supreme Court rule?) I’m 95 percent sure that the Supreme Court says it is okay for President Biden to order the health care industry around. The health care industry is essentially part of our government, with most of the costs socialized (albeit with the profits privatized). I’m less confident regarding the order directed at private employers, but I still think it will be approved since Americans desperately crave central planning and management whenever a crisis is declared. A ruling against President Biden would be taking away the president’s emergency powers. Who on the Supreme Court would be willing to risk a lifetime Facebook and Twitter ban by saying “COVID-19 is not an emergency”?

Related:

  • Why doesn’t the raging plague in Maskachusetts cause doubt among the true believers in Faucism? (infections and transmission in a 95% vaccinated population doesn’t dim anyone’s faith in vaccines)
  • Email received today from a hospital in Massachusetts: “As you may know, hospitals and health care providers across the country are busier than ever. The number of hospitalized patients is the highest since the start of the pandemic. The high demand for care and staffing challenges are causing longer than normal wait times for all types of care, which we know can be frustrating.” (Summary: NYT says nearly everyone in the state is vaccinated; CDC says they are therefore protected from severe illness; this email says that the vaccinated righteous are nonetheless hospitalized…)

German and Swiss restaurants refuse to accept CDC cards as proof of vaccination

by philg

I was chatting with a pilot friend who returned to his native Germany recently and reported that he’d been unable to get into restaurants. “They refused to accept my CDC card as proof of vaccination,” he said, “because they said it was too easy to forge one.”

I mentioned this at a pilot gathering in Palm Beach and one of the guys at my table said, “the same thing happened to me in Switzerland. Nobody would accept the CDC card.”

What papers do you need to show? “It’s called a European vaccine certificate,” my German friend explained. “You get this from a pharmacist [QR code with some text] then load in app or if you are old show on paper. It’s tied to a Europe-wide database and issued by the local CDC equivalent. It can only be put into the database by authorized pharmacists and some other designated officials, but not doctors.”

So enjoy your trip to Europe, but if you got vaccinated in the U.S., don’t plan to be indoors at museums, restaurants, etc.

Social justice and vaccination crusaders meet IEEE floating point arithmetic (Facebook)

by philg

For several years I’ve been a member of “Airplanes for Sale” on Facebook. The software at Facebook apparently thinks that an airplane is a car and therefore tries to display the mileage. The result is “NaN“, a value in the IEEE floating point arithmetic standard used for the result of dividing by zero and similar outrages against Mathematical Justice. Here’s an example: “1999 Cessna 172 R · Driven NaN miles”

With all of humanity’s money (except for the cash that Google and Apple have harvested) and a healthy fraction of the world’s best programmers, you might think that Facebook would have noticed that it was displaying this internal value from IEEE floating point to end-users. The company’s software is smart enough to flag anyone who has questioned the idea that a COVID-19 vaccine is in the best interest of a 20-year-old. The company had the energy to kick Donald Trump off the platform (to keep us safe from another insurrection, was the justification). But they don’t have anything left over to catch this error that occurs literally millions of times per day (87,000 members in this group times lots of ads that show NaN).