Category: Coronaplague

Coronavirus kills the vaccinated in the UK, but not in the U.S.

by philg

U.S., July 5:

Anthony Fauci on Sunday said more than 99 percent of the people who died from COVID-19 in June were not vaccinated, calling the loss of life “avoidable and preventable.”

“If you look at the number of deaths, about 99.2 percent of them are unvaccinated. About 0.8 percent are vaccinated. No vaccine is perfect. But when you talk about the avoidability of hospitalization and death, Chuck, it’s really sad and tragic that most all of these are avoidable and preventable,” Fauci told host Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

(Mx. Fauci does not merit the “Dr.” title to join Dr. Jill Biden?)

Situation across the pond, July 2 (WSJ):

Data from Public Health England show that there were 117 deaths among 92,000 Delta cases logged through June 21. Fifty of those—46%—had received two shots of vaccine.

So… 46 percent of the deaths from the Delta variant (soon to be the only form of coronavirus that anyone has, at least until the “Delta Delta Delta” variant is available) are among the fully vaccinated in the U.K. The corresponding number in the U.S.? Around 1 percent.

You might say “Of course this makes sense. The U.K. has a higher vaccination rate than the U.S. If 100 percent of people in the U.K. were vaccinated, 100 percent of COVID-19 deaths would be among the vaccinated.” Yet the vaccination rates are not that different….

(Since we just celebrated July 4th, consider that if we hadn’t traitorously rebelled, we would still be part of the U.K. and would therefore be enjoying a far superior COVID-19 prevention strategy (more lockdowns (exceptions for the elite), more vaccines!). We would also have been spared four years of Donald Trump’s maladministration, racism, anti-LGBTQIA+ policies, etc.)

How do we explain the fact that the vaccines work so much better at preventing death in the U.S. compared to in the U.K.? These are more or less the same vaccines that are authorized for emergency use (not “approved”) here. The U.K. has our three plus Oxford/AstraZeneca (NHS).

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Lockdown advocates now object to restrictions on open-water swimming

by philg

Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker has decided to protect residents against the dangers of open-water swimming. “Swimmers Frustrated By New Ban On ‘Open Water Swimming’ At Walden Pond” (from state-sponsored NPR-affiliate WBUR):

The state’s decision to ban open water swimming at Concord’s iconic Walden Pond is eliciting a quick and irate response from swimmers.

The Department of Conservation and Recreation announced Friday that swimming outside of designated areas at Walden would be prohibited “indefinitely.” In a statement, the agency said the decision was made “in order to simplify and standardize education and enforcement” across all state-regulated bodies of water and to “protect public safety.”

The legislation follows a series of drownings in Massachusetts, including a 19-year-old who drowned Thursday swimming off South Boston’s Castle Island.

An open letter to the state purporting to represent “the open water swimming community of greater Boston” had collected more than 400 names before it was converted to an online petition, where it gathered thousands more. The letter claims the Walden ban “infringes on our reasonable right to access the natural assets of our state,” and proposes instead that open water swimmers should be allowed as long as swimmers use safety devices known as swim buoys.

11,058 of the Massachusetts righteous have signed a petition at change.org seeking relief from this latest governor’s order.

What’s interesting about this? The folks whom I know who signed the petition were enthusiastic lockdown advocates. They cheered when Governor Baker closed the schools “to keep kids safe” from a disease that had never killed a child in Maskachusetts (0 deaths among under-20s in MA through August 11, after which the state withheld deaths-by-age data from the public). Now, however, the Lockdown Karens object to Governor Baker using #Science and his newly unlimited powers to deal with a very real danger (Dr. Jill Biden’s colleagues at the CDC say that roughly 4,000 Americans drown annually.)

An October 2008 aerial photo of Walden Pond. The sandy beach at left is where Governor Baker orders you to swim. The area near the railroad tracks on the right (which went quite close to Thoreau’s cabin back in the old days) is where the open water swimmers used to risk death.

On a separate note, and it may be too soon to wonder this, but why are Americans so interested in the Champlain Towers South collapse, in which roughly 140 lives were lost? We are informed that 600,000 Americans were cut down in their prime by COVID-19. These folks, who had their best years ahead of them, went from the tennis court and soccer pitch to a ventilator in the ICU to the morgue. On June 24, 2021, when the Florida condo collapsed, we are informed that 355 young healthy Americans fell to COVID-19. If COVID-19 kills unpredictably and indiscriminately, like a building collapse does, why would we have time and energy to mourn building collapse victims who are so greatly outnumbered, even on the day of the collapse, by COVID-19 victims?

A January 2021 photo of Normandy Isles and North Beach with Surfside just beyond. The collapsed building, from this perspective, is just behind the first tower to the north of the park (green area along the beach).

(For the record, I personally am sad about the victims of the Champlain Towers South collapse partly because I do not believe that COVID-19 has killed hundreds of thousands of healthy Americans who had a lot of great years to look forward to, whereas I do think that the collapse killed healthy people who could have lived enjoyable active lives for years or decades to come.)

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Reinterpreting MLK’s ideas of freedom for the Age of COVID

by philg

Today we celebrate our traitorous rebellion from the legitimate rule of Great Britain, carried out in the name of “freedom.” The rebellion enabled us to continue chattel slavery and stealing land from Native Americans west of the Proclamation Line. Let’s consider our current state of “freedom” as we all take a break from cashing our unemployment checks on this holiday of July 4th.

From Martin Luther King, Jr., whose first book was titled Stride Toward Freedom:

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.

All we say to America is, ‘Be true to what you said on paper.’ If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn’t committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. …

MLK, Jr. was one of our greatest thinkers, but even his mind could not stretch to the idea that people in Massachusetts, California, and New York would actually welcome being locked down for more than a year:

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.

(When exactly?)

Reasonable people, of course, would point out that healthy young people in these states were denied what had formerly been considered their rights for only 16 months or so. And maybe this coming fall or winter too, depending on what the public health technocrats recommend.

A right delayed is a right denied.

Let’s see how the ideas of our greatest thinker on the subject of freedom have been reinterpreted during the ongoing coronapanic…. some photos from an April 2021 trip to Atlanta and the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park. The “Freedom Hall” was closed “out of an abundance of caution regarding the COVID-19 virus”:

How about the Freedom Walkway? That’s now a “Restricted Area”:

Even before coronapanic, the architect’s original vision for the reflecting pool had been disfigured with plastic barriers, which I was told were essentially permanent fixtures, to keep the public away:

Compare to my photo from the summer of 1994:

What words were important enough to be on MLK, Jr.’s grave?

“Free at last! Free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

At least as of June 16, according to the web site, all of the park buildings remained closed.

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COVID-19 policy is more like the Vietnam War or more like the Penicillin miracle drug euphoric stage?

by philg

Averros’s comment on The English decide to stay in their foxholes (COVID surge despite vaccination):

The main lesson of this quasi-pandemic is that public experts are, by and large, idiots and/or charlatans.

Any actual scientist given the facts as following: quickly mutating kind of viruses, vaccine tech producing very specific immune response and incapable of conferring sterilizing immunity, widespread community transmission will immediately figure out that mass immunization creates strong selective pressure on the virus thus rapidly creating new strains which not only avoid vaccines but also re-infect people who did get the cooties before.

With these givens the correct strategy is to vaccinate only those at risk of severe illness so as to protect them while minimizing generation of new strains.

But, no, the over-educated idiots and vaccine salesmen never think about anything further than immediate results of their actions. It’s like antibiotic overuse take 2 – only faster moving. The EYIs [Educated Yet Idiots] learned nothing from the previous bouts of medically-induced pathogen evolution.

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)).

But I wonder if averros has a better analogy. Circa 1950, the typical layperson thought that we were done with bacterial infection, despite the fact that #Science had already seen evolved resistance in action. See “Penicillin’s Discovery and Antibiotic Resistance: Lessons for the Future?” (Yale J. Biol Med):

2016 marks the 75th anniversary of the first systemic administration of penicillin in humans, and is therefore an occasion to reflect upon the extraordinary impact that penicillin has had on the lives of millions of people since. This perspective presents a historical account of the discovery of the wonder drug, describes the biological nature of penicillin, and considers lessons that can be learned from the golden era of antibiotic research, which took place between the 1940s and 1960s.

More than 150 antibiotics have been found since the discovery of penicillin, and for the majority of antibiotics available, resistance has emerged. Moreover, the recent rise of multi/pan-drug resistant strains has correlated with enhanced morbidity and mortality. Overall, ineffectiveness of the antibiotic treatments to “superbug” infections has resulted in persistence and spread of multi-resistant species [42] across the globe. This represents a serious worldwide threat to public health [41].

In early 1945, Fleming predicted that the high public demand of antibiotics would determine an “era of abuse”; this eventually became a reality [43-45]. No sooner had the miraculous effects of penicillin become apparent to the general public, then the antibiotic started to be overused. This triggered selective pressure for the emergence of penicillin-resistant strains, which over a few years spread across different countries. The discovery of each new generation of antibiotic quickly followed the same trend.

(How long it will be before American K-12ers are taught to celebrate the pioneering efforts of BIPOC American women in developing penicillin and the 1945 Nobel Prize won by Alexa Fleming, Ernestine Chain, and Heather Walter Florey?)

From the Journal of Popular Studies:

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Did we ever figure out whether Vitamin D and Hydroxychloroquine were helpful against COVID-19?

by philg

One of the great things about medicine is that convincing conclusions are seldom reached. COVID-19, on the other hand, has been of such tremendous interest to humans worldwide that it doesn’t seem unreasonable to hope for answers.

We were told that vitamin D might protect us against coronavirus, e.g., in “Study suggests high vitamin D levels may protect against COVID-19, especially for Black people” (University of Chicago, March 19, 2021). But has the correlation/causation situation been worked out? People who are healthier and more robust will tend to spend more time outdoors and therefore have higher vitamin D levels. These same people will be harder for coronavirus to kill, but maybe it is because they are strong and healthy, which is why they were outdoors instead of inside watching TV, not because they happen to have high vitamin D levels.

Similarly, the debate over hydroxychloroquine does not seem to be settled. “Observational Study on 255 Mechanically Ventilated Covid Patients at the Beginning of the USA Pandemic” (medRxiv from Saint Barnabas Medical Center in New Jersey) was published on May 31, 2021 describing what happened to patients who were admitted prior to May 1, 2020 (i.e., it took more than a year to crunch the numbers). The paper certainly proves that ventilators are not very helpful. 78.8 percent of the ventilated patients died. Only 3.5 percent were “discharged to home without any cognitive or motor deficits and off oxygen therapy” (i.e., “walked out of the hospital”):

We found that when the cumulative doses of two drugs, HCQ and AZM, were above a certain level, patients had a survival rate 2.9 times the other patients. By using causal analysis and considering of weight-adjusted cumulative dose, we prove the combined therapy, 3 g HCQ and 1g AZM greatly increases survival in Covid patients on IMV and that HCQ cumulative dose 80 mg/kg works substantially better.

With so many people around the world supposedly afflicted with COVID-19 and so many $trillions of dollars being thrown at this medical problem, how is it possible that we don’t have the seemingly simplest questions answered?

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Smartest people in the U.S. can’t figure out why the young don’t want to be vaccinated against a disease that kills 82-year-olds

by philg

“Why Young Adults Are Among the Biggest Barriers to Mass Immunity” (New York Times, today) shows that, despite scientific leadership in the White House, America is not safe from science deniers. From the folks who say that they’re the smartest people in the U.S.:

Many young adults are foregoing Covid vaccines for a complex mix of reasons. Health officials are racing to find ways to change their minds.

But the straightforward sales pitch for older people — a vaccine could very possibly save your life — does not always work on healthy 20-somethings who know they are less likely to face the severest outcomes of Covid.

Many young adults are relatively healthy, and they often have work, school and young children to worry about. Getting vaccinated does not always register as a top priority, experts and young adults said.

My comment:

“healthy 20-somethings who know they are less likely to face the severest outcomes of Covid”

“Less likely”?

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-age.html

shows that the risk of death to an 18-29-year-old is 1/610th the risk faced by an elderly American (85+)

A slender 20-year-old is more likely to be killed in a car accident driving to/from the vaccine clinic than he/she/ze/they would be likely to be killed by COVID-19 if he/she/ze/they did not get vaccinated. If we’re confused regarding why such a person does not want to spend the time and effort to get vaccinated maybe we should question our own intelligence, not the intelligence of the young person.

I guess what is most interesting about this is that the technocrats who are now in charge of the economy and society couldn’t have figured this out 6-12 months ago and come up with a plan, e.g., to pay healthy young people for undergoing a procedure that has no benefit to them. It was already apparent then that COVID-19 was a killer of the elderly (median age of a COVID-19-tagged death here in Maskachusetts: 82). And it was certainly known as of December 2020 that the vaccines wouldn’t be FDA-approved, but only authorized for emergency use. It was entirely predictable that the side effects of the vaccines, e.g., a few days of flu-like symptoms and worse, would be rationally perceived as outweighing the benefits to slender healthy young people.

From Jun 25, St. Petersburg, Florida, part of a crowd of 10,000+ packing into the bars and clubs of Central Avenue just after 11:00 pm:

(I got out my handy bullhorn and told the young people to cease their covidiocy and disperse. I tried to get a chant going where I would say “Stay Home” and they would respond by shouting “Save Lives”, but was unsuccessful.)

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Can public schools suspend students who go away for a weekend and aren’t able to arrange a COVID test?

by philg

Keeping a child from attending public school is a crime. Parents can be arrested and imprisoned for obstructing a child’s access. See, for example, “The Story Behind Kamala Harris’ Truancy Program” (NPR):

In 2019, HuffPost reporter Molly Redden wrote about the families affected by this truancy program, including a Black mother named Cheree Peoples, who was arrested in April of 2013. She came on the show to help explain why this program, which initially launched without much criticism, ended up becoming so controversial, and why it disproportionately affected families of color. Here’s the extended cut of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Cheree is a mother in California, and her daughter has a chronic illness. Her name is Shayla, and she has sickle cell anemia, a really painful genetic disease that causes lots of complications. It’s pretty typical for people who live with this disability to miss a lot of school if they’re children. As her daughter missed a lot of school for valid medical reasons, Cheree and the school were in a dispute about how to accommodate and account for those absences.

She was in her house one morning, and the police showed up and handcuffed her. She had time to put on a jacket over her pajamas. And when she was walked by the police out of her apartment where she lived with her daughter, there were news cameras waiting, and she was booked by the police. What she said to me was that she was shocked. She was really floored. And she said to me, “You’d swear I’d killed somebody.” It felt to her like a really excessive show of force for what was essentially a misunderstanding between her and her child’s school.

[Harris] fought for this law, which raised the financial penalty and made it a criminal misdemeanor for parents, up to a year in jail, when their children missed at least 10 percent of school time.

Here in Lincoln, Massachusetts, soon to be home to the nation’s most expensive (per student) public school building, the school bureaucrats decided that students could be excluded from the building (i.e., suspended) if they went away for a Saturday overnight in another state, e.g., neighboring New Hampshire or Vermont, and did not have a negative PCR COVID-19 test result to show. As with the former state governor’s order (one of 69), the test had to be taken within 72 hours of returning to Maskachusetts. So, in a twist that only students of the absurd can appreciate, it was legal to be tested for COVID-19 on Thursday evening in MA as a way of determining if someone was going to acquire COVID by traveling on Saturday morning and returning Sunday evening.

Although the school had a fully remote option, a student kicked out of school for quarantine could not transition into the fully remote option for the period of suspension.

The governor’s order was eventually dropped, replaced by an “advisory”. The school, however, continued with their requirement that, essentially, students be tested prior to departure for weekend excursions. They’d been running a “pool testing” program at the school as well, but the pool test could not be used to meet the travel requirement. So a student who was going to go to Vermont for the weekend would end up needing two COVID-19 tests in the week prior (to see if the student acquired COVID-19 in Vermont?).

Not every family can get organized for these tests nor afford them (we spent a month without insurance and we got billed $750 per child for a test at a “doc in a box” urgent care center). Perhaps a test goes awry and a result is never returned. For whatever reason, a child may end up over the border into another state (almost any of which actually have experienced far less COVID-19 than Maskachusetts; Florida, for example, adjusted for population over 65 is at roughly 1/3rd the MA death rate) and later have no test result to show. Why is it legal to deny this child an education for a two-week quarantine period?

#BecausePublicHealth? Maybe that was a good answer when the governor’s travel order was still in place. Now that the technocrats have rescinded their order, however, what is the school’s justification for denying education to children, a criminal offense if parents had done it?

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Why didn’t we ever get convenient neighborhood COVID-19 testing?

by philg

We spent $trillions purportedly fighting COVID-19. We said that testing was critical to this fight. There is empty retail space all over the U.S. (thanks partly to closures ordered by governors!). Why didn’t we ever get COVID testing that was actually convenient, fast, and simple?

Plainly it can be done. Here’s a storefront COVID-19 testing center near Times Square (June 12 photo):

Why weren’t there storefronts like this all over the U.S., starting around April 2020, the fees paid via the government money printing press?

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ICUs were clogged during coronaplague partly because relatives couldn’t visit

by philg

Our anonymous hero behind Medical School 2020 is working in a hospital now. Part of his residency training has included shifts in the intensive care unit. There he has gained some insight into why American ICUs became clogged during COVID-19 peaks.

“Hospitals wouldn’t let relatives come in to see the patients,” he said. “A patient with no long-term chance of survival can’t be unplugged with relatives approving ‘goals of care.’ But people are reluctant to approve unplugging a loved one if they aren’t able to see the patient and understand the patient’s situation.” In other words, without relatives coming into the ICU, the docs and nurses had no “goals of care” and therefore kept patients on ventilators for weeks after they would ordinarily have been unplugged.

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Four weeks to flatten the curve (U.S. keeps the border closed)

by philg

From the Biden administration:

In other words… “4 weeks to flatten the curve” (“reduce the spread”).

How is this supposed to work? Can’t anyone come in from Canada or Mexico currently, so long as he/she/ze/they says that he/she/ze/they is seeking asylum? (“The Justice Department Overturns Policy That Limited Asylum For Survivors Of Violence” (NPR, June 16, 2021) says “in effect, restoring the possibility of asylum protections for women fleeing from domestic violence in other countries”, but the law should apply to people with all gender IDs, just as the “Violence Against Women Act” in theory can be used by those who identify as “men”. So if two people live together and say that they hit each other, both should be able to apply for asylum, emigrate to the U.S., and move in together to continue their domestic arrangements.)

The Canadian side of Niagara Falls, June 2019.

From the Cirrus:

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