Author: philg

I wasn’t invited to Barack Obama’s 700-person mass gathering and I haven’t followed the example set by the former President by hosting my own. However, I did recently attend my first big in-person gathering since March 2020, i.e., EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”). One thing that I wondered about at Oshkosh, while surrounded at most times by 100,000+ people, roughly 1 in 200 of whom were masked indoors (closer to 1 in 500 or 1 in 1,000 outdoors), was what the point of city- and state-level COVID-19 restrictions are in a country where there are no internal border controls (or any external ones either, assuming that the person wishing to cross is willing to say that he/she/ze/they have suffered from domestic violence, gang attention, etc.?). A relatively quiet moment inside the Garmin pavilion (zooming in, I can find one guy in a non-N95 mask; what’s his rationale I wonder?):

First, let’s assume that, contrary to the lived experienced of folks in the Czech Republic and Peru, masks and police-/military-enforced lockdowns actually are effective. #Science proves that masks and shutdowns save lives, no matter how high on the COVID-19 death rate leaderboard a masked-and-shut country is. Wrapping a population in saliva-soaked bandanas will stop an aerosol virus.

Second, let’s assume that people can travel freely from an irresponsible unmasked un-shut part of the country to a virtuously masked-and-shut part.

Under these two assumptions, is the masking and partial shutting of Los Angeles, for example, effective when people can leave LA, attend an unmasked mass gathering, and return to LA?

Here’s a scene that has been repeated more or less every weekend in St. Petersburg, Florida, for example:

(Phone video of 10,000+ people gathering in various bars along one street. Fortunately the local public health authorities ordered children to wear masks for 7 hours/day in the nearby schools!)

I don’t like to say that everything needs to be directed by the central planners in Washington, D.C., but I’m having difficulty understanding why we ever thought that this state-by-state, county-by-country, and city-by-city policy-setting could be effective, even if we started from the assumption that humans are in charge of coronavirus.

(The 1,000+ government employees, e.g., USAF flight crews, Army helicopter crews, U.S. Navy pilots, FAA controllers, NOAA scientists, police officers, etc. were entirely unmasked at the event, even, for example, when officially hosting the Delta-variant-infected public inside poorly ventilated aircraft or hangars. It seems that scientifically-guided leadership from the White House is not sufficient to convince even those on the government payroll.)

Related:

• “Oxford study: 2020 Sturgis Rally tied to more than 400 COVID-19 cases across 30 states, 1 death”

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“Despite delta, Sturgis Motorcycle Rally poised to ride again” (ABC):

South Dakota’s Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, which begins Friday and runs through Aug. 15, is expected to draw upwards of 700,000 attendees. Last year’s rally, which took place during the height of the United States’ summer surge, had more than 400,000 estimated attendees, many of whom didn’t wear masks as they patronized bars, restaurants and concerts.

The downstream effect was tangible: At least 649 COVID-19 cases were linked to Sturgis, including secondary and third-degree contacts.

Republican Gov. Kristi Noem supports the rally, a major economic driver in the state.

“There’s a risk associated with everything that we do in life,” Noem wrote on Twitter Wednesday. “Bikers get that better than anyone.”

So… the 400,000 Fauci-deniers in 2020 were responsible for 649 out of the 35,392,284 total cases thus far reported out of PCR toaster ovens in the U.S. Reprehensible! (see this Bill Burr video at 6:40 for the correct way to say “reprehensible”)

See also “Oxford study: 2020 Sturgis Rally tied to more than 400 COVID-19 cases across 30 states, 1 death”:

More than 463 COVID-19 cases across 30 states were directly connected to the Sturgis Rally in August and September 2020. Seventeen patients were hospitalized and one person died, according the report by the Oxford University Press for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

The #Science-informed righteous condemned the Sturgis gathering in 2020 and they are condemning it this year as well.

Let’s look at a smaller mass gathering that is not condemned and for which there have been no calls for shutdown. Provincetown, Massachusetts has a population of about 3,000, which expands with tens of thousands of additional visitors during summer weekend (certainly not to 400,000; the town has essentially just two streets). From Slate:

According to a report the agency released on Friday, the CDC’s latest findings were based on a July 4 COVID-19 outbreak in queer mecca Provincetown, Massachusetts, where among a cluster of 469 (with no deaths) at the time of study, an astonishing three-quarters of the infected had been fully vaccinated. As of July 31, the P-Town outbreak had ballooned to 965 cases.

It was about halfway through our weeklong stay when one vaccinated friend from New York City began to report not feeling well. Unable to stop coughing, he and his boyfriend drove to Outer Cape Health Services, where he tested positive for COVID and immediately fled the cape. Soon after that, I began to hear whisperings—whether at the Mussel Beach gym or traditional “high tea” gatherings by the pool at the Boatslip Resort—of a “gay cough” circulating among some out-of-towners.

The gathering in Provincetown caused 2X as many cases as Sturgis 2020, despite being only about 1/10th the size (could there be a behavioral difference comparing Harley riders to P-town visitors?). Shouldn’t we expect public health experts to demand a governor’s order to shut down the P-town scene? Why is it irresponsible for motorcycle enthusiasts to gather in South Dakota and responsible for New Yorkers and Bostonians to gather in Provincetown?

Addressing the national lifeguard shortage (July 2018):

View of the harbor from the public library:

A P-town shop in which all genders are welcome, but only one gender ID has a future (July 2018):

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The featured Young Adult Non-Fiction section at the public library (March 2019):

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What if we try to merge the rainbow of Provincetown with the value system of Sturgis? We get “Better a Sister in a Whorehouse than a Brother on a Honda” T-shirts in a rainbow of colors!

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The government had approximately 50 years of warning that hundreds of thousands of people would be gathering at the Oshkosh airport last week (608,000 through the gates (but the same person could be counted twice if showing up on multiple days, I think); 10,000 aircraft landing KOSH). The same government says that it will pay any price (with printed money?), bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, and oppose any foe to get life-saving vaccines into the arms of those too stupid to realize that they need salvation. From July 28, 2021, state-level: “‘Get vaccinated’ is the united message Wisconsin health officials say amidst COVID-19 spike”. From July 29, federal: “Biden announces measures to incentivize Covid-19 vaccinations, including a requirement for federal employees”.

You don’t have to be a marketing genius to see the opportunity to reach the general public at EAA AirVenture. Ford runs a big pavilion promoting its SUVs and pickups. Cookware, mattress, knife, and massage chair companies rent small booths. You can check out a new concrete truck or military vehicle from the local defense contractor. You can order an AC Cobra replica. The majority of the attendees aren’t pilots and many attendees aren’t even interested in aviation specifically, but merely show up as companions with someone who is. Some Mennonite farm kids, below, for example, just waiting for a technocrat to inject them for their own good:

Why wouldn’t the multi-billion dollar government vaccine bureaucracy not set up a booth at Oshkosh and offer people one-shot J&J or their first or second shot of the other vaccines? EAA probably would have given the government worthies space for free, given that the COVID-19 mandarins have the power to shut down gatherings such as EAA AirVenture. It can’t be a shortage of personnel. At any one time there were probably hundreds of government workers on site for various reasons (police, U.S. military recruiters in their recruiting booths, U.S. military crews that had come with aircraft, FAA administrators and educators, Border Patrol folks showing off their gear, etc.). [Exactly 0 of these folks were observed to be following President Biden’s example by wearing masks!]

Here’s a sampling of non-aviation enterprises that decided a gathering of hundreds of thousands was worth showing up for:

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The excuse is that vaccine injections are too complex to deliver without a permanent building? The government actually has several permanent buildings at its disposal during “Oshkosh”. One is an FAA Safety building and one is half of a huge hangar in which various agencies explain their operations (“International Federal Pavilion”). Even without a permanent building, Chick-fil-A was delivering 20+ sandwiches per minute out of a trailer and tent:

Related:

• Why aren’t vaccines available at highway rest stops?

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One month ago, from COVID-19 policy is more like the Vietnam War or more like the Penicillin miracle drug euphoric stage?

My personal view for most of the past year has been that the best analogy to the typical Church of Shutdown state’s War on COVID-19 is the American side of the Vietnam War. Our best and brightest (e.g., Dr. Fauci, state governors flanked by their public health officials) present charts and statistics showing that, in any given month, the war against coronavirus is being won. The population is assured that just a little more sacrifice will yield massive dividends. Sometimes the Priests of Shutdown will draw on mathematical models from Whiz Kids. Month after month of winning battles leads to… a lost war (e.g., Maskachusetts having 3X the death rate of Florida, adjusted for population over 65, but the population still has faith in Robert S. McNamara (Governor Charlie Baker)).

and in January 2021, Lockdown is our Vietnam War so it will end gradually? (quoting a Facebook user)

Of course, we can’t actually do this reassessment because doing so would admit that the last year was madness. The lockdowns are like Vietnam, the political and media establishment have so much invested in them, only a gradual drawdown will be permitted, regardless of the “science.”

The July 30, 2021 CNN front page:

As with the Vietnam War, being on a “wartime footing” means different things to people of different ages. In 1968, the 18-year-olds went to sweat and die in the jungle (not yet upgraded to “rainforest”) while 40-year-olds could sip cocktails and play golf. In 2021, K-12 students and Latinx essential workers wear masks 8+ hours per day while the upper-middle-class white people don the hijab for 15 minutes as they go into the “declared-essential” marijuana and alcohol stores. Schools in major cities, e.g., Boston, were closed for a year while adults could party in restaurants (reopened in Maskachusetts in June 2020), meet on Tinder, etc.

Since we are, in fact, losing this war (“life finds a way,” as Dr. Jeff Goldblum, M.D., Ph.D., noted), we also need someone to blame. During Vietnam we blamed the 30-40 percent of Americans who did not support the war. Absent these domestic enemies, our military could have mopped up the rifle-toting peasant resistance using advanced tech. Today we obsess over the people who haven’t taken the time/trouble/risk to get vaccinated. Absent these domestic science-denying Republican-voting enemies, our scientists armed with advanced mRNA tech could have mopped up the remaining pockets of SARS-CoV-2. From CNN, July 31, 2021:

The latest “science” seems inconsistent with blaming the unvaccinated, however. The virus is having no trouble spreading among the vaccinated (CDC; Israel) and it is have no trouble killing the vaccinated in the U.K., where they are good at tracking deaths, COVID-19 status, and vaccination status. Why do we imagine that all of our dreams would come true if the Deplorables got all of their shots?

(The Deplorables might want to consider getting their shots soon, actually, if they read about Marek’s Disease:

Because vaccination does not prevent infection with the virus, Marek’s is still transmissible from vaccinated flocks to other birds, including the wild bird population. The first Marek’s disease vaccine was introduced in 1970. The disease would cause mild paralysis, with the only identifiable lesions being in neural tissue. Mortality of chickens infected with Marek’s disease was quite low. Current strains of Marek virus, decades after the first vaccine was introduced, cause lymphoma formation throughout the chicken’s body and mortality rates have reached 100% in unvaccinated chickens. The Marek’s disease vaccine is a “leaky vaccine”, which means that only the symptoms of the disease are prevented.[12] Infection of the host and the transmission of the virus are not inhibited by the vaccine. This contrasts with most other vaccines, where infection of the host is prevented. Under normal conditions, highly virulent strains of the virus are not selected. A highly virulent strain would kill the host before the virus would have an opportunity to transmit to other potential hosts and replicate. Thus, less virulent strains are selected. These strains are virulent enough to induce symptoms but not enough to kill the host, allowing further transmission. However, the leaky vaccine changes this evolutionary pressure and permits the evolution of highly virulent strains.[13] The vaccine’s inability to prevent infection and transmission allows the spread of highly virulent strains among vaccinated chickens. The fitness of the more virulent strains is increased by the vaccine.

The evolution of Marek’s disease due to vaccination has had a profound effect on the poultry industry. All chickens across the globe are now vaccinated against Marek’s disease (birds hatched in private flocks for laying or exhibition are rarely vaccinated). Highly virulent strains have been selected to the point that any chicken that is unvaccinated will die if infected.[14] Other leaky vaccines are commonly used in agriculture. One vaccine in particular is the vaccine for avian influenza. Leaky vaccine use for avian influenza can select for virulent strains.[15]

The CDC tells us that the COVID-19 vaccines are proving to be “leaky”. Vaccinated Americans are infected and transmitting the virus even in the most virtuous of settings (Provincetown, Massachusetts, for example). So we are very likely breeding a Super COVID-21 that will live up to the doomsday scenarios that were forecast for Sweden and other mask and shutdown scoffers. (The greedy might want to buy some stock in the vaccine companies. Marek’s Disease shows us that selling Batch 1 of a leaky vaccine can lead to 50+ years of sales for additional vaccine doses, required for staying alive in the face of the deadly mutants supported by Batch 1.))

Related:

• “‘Overwhelm the problem’: Inside Biden’s war on COVID-19” (AP, February 11, 2021)

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