Americans were Shutdown Champions (at watching TV)

by philg

A European eyeglass retailer published a screen time index based on data gathered in mid-October 2020 (i.e., during coronapanic).

Americans were champions at watching TV, dominating all other nations (175 minutes/day compared to 119 minutes in Ireland and 113 in Switzerland). Colombia and Mexico were the only other nations that came close to matching our couch potato achievement.

And, before we wisely decided, in response to a virus that attacks the obese, to lock ourselves into our apartments and park next to the fridge, how were we doing with obesity? Our government loves to sort us by race:

Keep in mind that this is based on 2018 data and Americans are likely much fatter now.

What about “fat” rather than “obese”?

If you’re a white guy whom United Airlines doesn’t want to hire, there is a 75 percent chance you’re “overweight” (i.e., fat). If you’re a Black woman whom United Airlines does want to hire, there is an 80 percent chance you’re “overweight”. Maybe after a few of these quota-arranged training classes graduate it will be time to un-mothball the Airbus A380s (1,265,000 lbs. max gross weight)!

[My recollection is that taking an average within the NHANES data reveals that American “women” (whatever that term might mean) actually have a higher BMI than American “men”. That’s not necessarily inconsistent with the above tables, which look only at those who’ve exceeded a threshold, but maybe it is worth exploring.]

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Textbook soft-field landing

by philg

Happy Spring Flying Season! For those folks who use grass airports they presumably are likely to be wet and therefore will require a soft field landing. This is part of training for a Private certificate, but few of us get the opportunity to practice as paved runways are so common in the U.S.

For inspiration, consider this landing, filmed by a bystander, near St. Petersburg, Florida, in “Plane Forced to Land on Treasure Island Beach After Engine Dies” (scroll towards bottom of the page to see the smartphone video):

The Piper Archer II took off from Albert Whitted Airport in St. Petersburg and had been airborne about 15 to 20 minutes with the student in control when the engine quit, according to instructor pilot Jenna Dunay.

Dunay took the plane’s controls but could not restart the engine, she told Spectrum News. Dunay said she decided the plane would not make it back to the airport so she decided they had to land on the beach.

“I went for a walk down the beach and all of a sudden this plane is coming directly at me. I thought, ‘Man, that’s pretty low to be seeing the beach.’ It kept getting lower, literally coming right at me,” he described, saying that the plane was at least 300 yards away from him.

Thompson, who is visiting Florida with his business partners, said he saw one of the pilots getting out of the plane.

“She smacked down and she jumped out with bags in her hand. I thought maybe that’s what you guys do down here in Florida, but turns out it’s not common,” said Thompson…

From another TV station:

She was forced to land the plane behind the Bilmar Resort in Treasure Island. The pilot said she clipped a plastic pole with one of the wings while trying to avoid people on the sand.

“I don’t think I had time to be nervous,” Dunay said. “I just picked a part of the beach with the fewest amount of people, wide enough to where even if there were people we could avoid them.”

Dunay has been flying planes since 2017, and has been an instructor a little more than a year. She’s thankful, knowing it could have ended differently.

“I’m glad the sand was packed down well so it made for a better landing then if it was soft sand, so could’ve been worse but could’ve been better,” Dunay said. “It was muscle memory, didn’t need to look at the checklist, just ran through every possible thing and that’s all you can do.”

When glass-is-half-empty types write the headline: “Small plane crashes into pole during emergency landing on Florida beach” (minimal damage to a 41-year-old airplane, N82746, that is worth less than a lot of new cars and hitting a pole is what’s significant about this event?).

The track, from FlightAware:

A good reason to take a longer parental leave? (“Third day back at work after maternity leave”)

Related:

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Will lockdowns protect us from jihad? (they can’t hate our freedom anymore)

by philg

George W. Bush, September 20, 2011 explained the motivations of those who had waged jihad against the U.S.:

Americans are asking “Why do they hate us?”

They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

Depending on the state, Americans no longer have the right to assemble (see the multi-year emergency unfold in 66+ governor’s orders here in Maskachusetts, for example). Americans who want to hold a job certainly don’t have freedom of speech and they’d better not disagree with the hashtag campaign du jour (e.g., #StopAsianHate) nor with diversity and inclusion efforts. We are informed by our media that citizens of Georgia no longer have the freedom to vote.

An immigrant from Moscow, now living in New England: “I never expected to see a day when Russians would have more freedom than Americans.” (She was referring, e.g., to the freedom to leave one’s house and walk around outdoors without wearing a mask or the freedom to host a dinner party for 12 in one’s home (both illegal in Massachusetts).)

Could there be an upside to this? A jihadi who hated Americans for our freedoms now has fewer reasons to hate us!

A memorable moment from 2003…

Source: The History Channel, which notes “the war in Iraq continued for several years thereafter” (and you thought that it was the British who excelled at understatement!).

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Science proves that I’m right: airlines should leave the middle seat empty

by philg

“Laboratory Modeling of SARS-CoV-2 Exposure Reduction Through Physically Distanced Seating in Aircraft Cabins Using Bacteriophage Aerosol” (CDC, April 14, 2021):

Aircraft can hold large numbers of persons in close proximity for long periods, which can increase the risk for transmission of infectious disease.* Current CDC guidelines recommend against travel for persons who have not been vaccinated against COVID-19, and a January 2021 CDC order requires masking for all persons while on airplanes.†,§ Research suggests that seating proximity on aircraft is associated with increased risk for infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 (1,2). However, studies quantifying the benefit of specific distancing strategies to prevent transmission, such as keeping aircraft cabin middle seats vacant, are limited. Using bacteriophage MS2 virus as a surrogate for airborne SARS-CoV-2, CDC and Kansas State University (KSU) modeled the relationship between SARS-CoV-2 exposure and aircraft seating proximity, including full occupancy and vacant middle seat occupancy scenarios. Compared with exposures in full occupancy scenarios, relative exposure in vacant middle seat scenarios was reduced by 23% to 57% depending upon the modeling approach. A 23% exposure reduction was observed for a single passenger who was in the same row and two seats away from the SARS-COV-2 source, rather than in an adjacent middle seat. When quantifying exposure reduction to a full 120-passenger cabin rather than to a single person, exposure reductions ranging from 35.0% to 39.4% were predicted. A 57% exposure reduction was observed under the vacant middle seat condition in a scenario involving a three-row section that contained a mix of SARS-CoV-2 sources and other passengers. Based on this laboratory model, a vacant middle seat reduces risk for exposure to SARS-CoV-2 from nearby passengers. These data suggest that increasing physical distance between passengers and lowering passenger density could help reduce potential COVID-19 exposures during air travel. Physical distancing of airplane passengers, including through policies such as middle seat vacancy, could provide additional reductions in SARS-CoV-2 exposure risk.

As we know, #Science says that we can extrapolate from a simple lab test to a population (e.g., masks prevent virus transmission in a lab so the early-masked Czech Republic does not have a plague).

For a whole year I have wondered how it can possibly be legal for airlines to pack cramped aluminum tubes 100 percent full with potentially plagued people (see below). The government has used its awesome power to shut down outdoor tennis doubles, for example, and beaches.

Now I’m beginning to wonder at the disparate treatment accorded to airlines and cruise ships. It is legal for an airliner to depart 100 percent full with no testing of anyone before or after. It is not legal for a cruise ship to depart 30 percent full with vaccinated and tested passengers who can easily be tested prior to disembarking. The exposure on a cruise ship is for a longer period of time, of course, but the airlines cumulatively pack a ton of people together for 16 hours per day (and those people are packed closer together in airports than they would be on a cruise ship). Could we be seeing a disparity in lobbying power? From a December 2018 trip to Cuba on Royal Caribbean, two sitting ducks for any virus:

Readers may remember my idiosyncratic passion:

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Pharma ads on TV will turn our kids into the biggest hypochondriacs in human history?

by philg

I like to limit my TV viewing to content targeted at 5-year-olds, generally streaming and ad-free. However, the kids sometimes hear about a big tennis tournament that is going on and ask to see parts of it. What do they see? About 30 percent of the ads seem to be for drugs that treat medical conditions afflicting older adults. Perhaps this isn’t surprising in a country where health care is 20 percent of GDP (and 40 percent of profits?). Each of these ads leads to a question: “What’s that for?” So they’re getting a much earlier education in all of the ways that the human body can fail than we Boomers did (we saw ads for cars, packaged food, toys, beer and wine, etc.).

I know a lot of people who are 10 to 30 years old and are afraid to leave their homes because of a virus that kills 82-year-olds. I wonder if these folks were already preconditioned to be anxious about their health by the preponderance of TV ads for medication.

I’m thinking that it will be even worse for kids currently 0-10. The only world that they’ve known looks like an Ebola clinic and, in addition to all of the masks, gloves, face shields, obsessive surface cleaning, and shutdowns of which they’ve become aware, they’re spent a lot of time at home seeing TV ads for all of the conditions that were considered serious prior to coronapanic.

Here’s an example…

Lots of good questions for an early reader… “What’s HIV?”, “What’s getting HIV through sex?”, “What’s people assigned female at birth?”

A still frame from the above in case it disappears from YouTube:

Another example:

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Life on the Google Manhattan Coding Plantation

by philg

“After Working at Google, I’ll Never Let Myself Love a Job Again” (NYT), by Emi Nietfeld (Harvard CS graduate):

I bought into the Google dream completely. In high school, I spent time homeless and in foster care, and was often ostracized for being nerdy.

(The product of an unsuccessful family, she herself was unsuccessful at Google, adding some weight to University of California research on heritability of success; see The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications and also The Son Also Rises: Tips for Optimizing Your Life (summary: don’t expect a smooth relationship if you hire (or date/marry) someone from an unsuccessful family; if that person appears to be successful, e.g., due to having obtained an elite degree, regression to the family mean is likely).

Matrix management prevails…

The few people who’d worked at other companies reminded us that there was nowhere better. I believed them, even when my technical lead — not my manager, but the man in charge of my day-to-day work — addressed me as “beautiful” and “gorgeous,” even after I asked him to stop. (Finally, I agreed that he could call me “my queen.”) He used many of our one-on-one meetings to ask me to set him up with friends, then said he wanted “A blonde. A tall blonde.” Someone who looked like me.

(i.e., humans formerly known as “guys” who work at Google have trouble getting dates in New York City, a city with 200,000 more single women than men, according to Mini Mike (who never had any trouble finding women!))

The company encourages denunciations, but then keeps the denouncer and the target of the denunciation yoked together in close quarters while it investigates at a glacial pace:

As soon as my complaint with H.R. was filed, Google went from being a great workplace to being any other company: It would protect itself first. I’d structured my life around my job — exactly what they wanted me to do — but that only made the fallout worse when I learned that the workplace that I cherished considered me just an employee, one of many and disposable.

The process stretched out for nearly three months. In the meantime I had to have one-on-one meetings with my harasser and sit next to him. Every time I asked for an update on the timeline and expressed my discomfort at having to continue to work in proximity to my harasser, the investigators said that I could seek counseling, work from home or go on leave.

Note the faith in therapy (“counseling”)!

Eventually, the investigators corroborated my claims and found my tech lead violated the Code of Conduct and the policy against harassment. My harasser still sat next to me. My manager told me H.R. wouldn’t even make him change his desk, let alone work from home or go on leave. He also told me that my harasser received a consequence that was severe and that I would feel better if I could know what it was, but it sure seemed like nothing happened.

The aftermath of speaking up had broken me down. It dredged up the betrayals of my past that I’d gone into tech trying to overcome. I’d made myself vulnerable to my manager and the investigators but felt I got nothing solid in return. I was constantly on edge from seeing my harasser in the hallways and at the cafes. When people came up behind my desk, I startled more and more easily, my scream echoing across the open-floor-plan office. I worried I’d get a poor performance review, ruining my upward trajectory and setting my career back even further.

I went weeks without sleeping through the night.

I decided to take three months of paid leave. I feared that going on leave would set me back for promotion in a place where almost everyone’s progress is public and seen as a measure of an engineer’s worth and expertise.

After my leave, the manager I loved started treating me as fragile. He tried to analyze me, suggesting that I drank too much caffeine, didn’t sleep enough or needed more cardiovascular exercise. Speaking out irreparably damaged one of my most treasured relationships. Six months after my return, when I broached the subject of promotion, he told me, “People in wood houses shouldn’t light matches.”

(Note: do not invite this guy to any Hanukkah celebrations, COVID or no COVID.)

Having been inside Google’s Manhattan building, which is one of the largest in the world, I’m shocked that they engage in these multi-month investigations while leaving the unhappy co-workers together. With so many thousands of engineering positions all around the enormous building and all around the world, why not give those who are unhappy for any reason an immediate transfer? Investigate later if desired, and punish the guilty if the kangaroo court so rules, but transfer first so as to defuse the situation.

(Separately, someone I know from MIT worked at Google, became disillusioned, and, like Ms. Nietfeld, joined Facebook. For a while she would post on Facebook about how awesome Facebook was and how Sheryl made sure that it was specifically a great place for those who identified as “women”, etc. But eventually she became disgruntled with Facebook along similar lines.)

Here’s my favorite reader comment on the piece, from Eva Klein of Washington, D.C.:

Judith Martin (Miss Manners) put it best — the American workplace is too informal for its own good. We reject strict hierarchies, but at the end of the day, the bottom line reigns and there is no loyalty to any worker, regardless of how cherished they were when they contributed profits to the company.

Americans would do well to learn about the European approach — strict work and life boundaries. You won’t celebrate your colleague’s birthday or new baby at the office. But you also won’t feel a visceral tear at the heart strings if you are fired (or “made redundant”, as the lingo goes).

Another Harvard graduate (this one with a Ph.D. in research psychology (not counseling!)), the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, says that Google can and does determine the outcome of American elections, e.g., by reminding liberals, but not conservatives, to go out and vote. Google can also sway swing voters by tweaking search results (stories about Hunter Biden’s cash-stuffed plaintiff might be pushed way way down, for example). See “Big Tech’s Greatest Threat”, by Robert Epstein. Excerpts from an article that is way too long for modern attention spans:

During a period of days before the 2020 election, we found that on Google’s home page, it was sending “go vote” reminders just to liberals. That’s a powerful ephemeral message, and not a single one went to conservatives. How do we know this? Because we were recording the content our 700 “field agents” were seeing on their computer screens. That was a diverse group of registered voters we had recruited in three key swing states. Google was sending those vote reminders only to liberals. That’s a powerful manipulation that’s entirely invisible to people — unless a group like ours has found a way to monitor what people are seeing.

A preliminary analysis of the more than 500,000 ephemeral experiences we preserved in Arizona, North Carolina, and Florida, turned up some disturbing things. Number one, we found a strong liberal bias in the search results people saw on Google when they searched for political topics; this bias was absent on Bing and Yahoo. 92% of searches are conducted on Google, and we know from years of experiments we’ve conducted that biased search results can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters, and those are the people who decide the outcomes of close elections. In experiments, we can easily shift 20% or more of undecided voters after just one search by showing them biased search results.

Even before people see search results, biased search suggestions — those phrases Google flashes at you when you start to type a search term — can shift thinking and behavior. We have shown in controlled experiments that biased search suggestions can turn a 50‑50 split among undecided voters into a 90‑10 split, with no one having the slightest idea they have been manipulated.

Tailoring suggestions is an interesting idea. I’m surprised that the effect can be as large as this guy says. Maybe it would be for product purchases. If you type “ergonomic mouse” and the first suggestion is “ergonomic mouse logitech” that could give a big boost to Logitech. But how can it help with an election? If the completion for “Joe Biden” is “Joe Biden kids in cages” that will be read by Democrats as a reminder that Joe Biden freed migrant children from their cages and by Republicans as a reminder that Joe Biden is continue to park migrants who say they’re under 18 into the same kinds of facilities as were used during the Trump and Obama administrations. Same deal with “Joe Biden higher tax rates” or “Joe Biden $2 trillion spending”.

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Meet next week in Jupiter, Florida?

by philg

We’re escaping to the Florida Free State for the Maskachusetts school vacation week (April 18-25). A journey of 1,000+ miles is the best way for the kids to get a “mask break” (under what would be the “law” if it had been passed by the legislature instead of merely ordered by the governor, walking outside one’s yard, even at midnight in a low-density exurb, is illegal without a mask).

Our destination: Jupiter, Florida, specifically Abacoa. Who wants to meet for coffee, lunch, beach walk, etc.? Please email philg@mit.edu if you’d like to get together! Bring the dog:

In case you’re wondering when coronapanic begins to wind down here in the epicenter of coronapanic… from Monday, “[Governor] Baker: No Plans Yet to Change Guidance on Outdoor Mask-Wearing” (NBC):

Gov. Charlie Baker said Monday he had no immediate plans to change the Massachusetts’ mask mandate, saying his administration would only do so when more people are vaccinated.

Almost half of the states in the country no longer have mask mandates, but all of New England still has them, which has prompted questions about when the rules might be relaxed in Massachusetts and the region.

In a press conference at the Family Health Center of Worcester, Baker said he would follow federal guidance on mask-wearing and incorporate additional information about COVID-19 variants.

“A lot of it is going to depend on both guidance we get from the feds and how fast we are able to vaccinate people, and how big a deal these variants are, not just here in Massachusetts and the northeast but around the country generally,” he said.

Everyone will be wearing a mask, which #Science says makes spreading coronavirus nearly impossible (it is even safe to join 150 people inside a 100% full Airbus!), much will continue to be shut down or capacity-restricted, and everyone who was previously considered vulnerable has already been vaccinated. But sticking healthy young people, the only folks left here who haven’t tried out the investigational vaccines, will make all the difference:

“The vaccine saves lives,” Baker said at the press conference, during which he highlighted the importance of community health centers during the pandemic.

Related:

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Coronaplague in India proves Dr. Jeff Goldblum’s theories?

by philg

Dr. Jill Biden’s colleagues (the “experts”) say “India Worst Hit Country in the World”:

The TIME article:

India became the country with the world’s second highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases on Monday, surpassing Brazil, and now second only to the United States.

India now has 13.5 million confirmed cases, compared to the U.S.’s 31.1 million. The country is currently in the midst of a second wave of the virus, with confirmed daily infections reaching an all-time high of 168,912 on Monday.

Dividing by 1.4 billion is apparently too challenging for American journalists. How about the Brits? From the Guardian:

This week has marked a series of grim Covid milestones for India. It was this week the country once again outstripped Brazil to become the second-worst affected globally, with a total of over 13.68m cases.

In other words, India has suffered more from COVID-19 than a country in which 100 percent of the population died of COVID-19, just as long as that country had only 13 million people.

How bad are things in what TIME and the Guardian say is the worst-plagued country on Earth? The country has suffered 125 COVID-19-tagged deaths per million inhabitants (ranking). That compares to 2,530 per million here in Massachusetts (states ranked; note that this is per 100,000 so multiply by 10). Maybe they will be getting worse, though. If things get 20X as bad as they’ve been in India, the situation will be about as bad as it is right now in Massachusetts.

From the New York Times, the “cases”:

and the deaths tagged to COVID-19:

The trend certainly does not look good. I wonder if this proves what Dr. Jill Biden, M.D.’s colleague Dr. Jeff Goldblum said: “Life Finds a Way.” The non-Chinese Wuhan-edition coronavirus was perhaps not a good fit for hosts in India, which is why, adjusted for population size, not much happened during Coronawave #1 (TIME: “health experts had predicted that India, with a population more than four times the size of the U.S., would quickly become the world’s worst-hit country”). But now the virus, with approximately 30,000 base pairs, has evolved. How much? Here’s the March of the Mutants:

If there isn’t already, there should soon be a coronavirus suitable for any host: Indian, not Indian, vaccinated, not vaccinated, etc.

On the third hand, what goes up exponentially might well come down exponentially. So far the actual daily death rate from Coronawave #2 in India is lower than during the first wave. The higher case rate could simply be an artifact of increased test availability.

Readers: What’s your best guess as to how events unfold in India? My guess is based on regression to the mean. India was an outlier (125 deaths per million). When the dust settles, India will be somewhere in the middle (right now the worldwide average is about 375 deaths per million; 3 million deaths in a population of 8 billion). Perhaps we’d have to adjust for the fact that the median age in India is roughly 27, slightly younger than the world median (around 30).

Related:

  • “India sees record surges in cases due to coronavirus variants” (New Scientist): The surge appears to be driven mainly by the more transmissible B.1.1.7 variant from the UK, which is causing around 40 per cent of cases in Asia, according to pathogen-tracking project Nextstrain. Another 16 per cent of cases are due to the B.1.351 variant that evolved in South Africa.
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Medicare focuses on end-of-life because we do too?

by philg

The death of my father was sad, but it was also illuminating. Relatives who hadn’t paid much attention to my parents for years suddenly sprang into action, on hearing that my father had gone sharply downhill (perhaps coincidentally, but it was one week after the second Pfizer Covid vaccine shot).

People were desperate to show up in person, get on Zoom or FaceTime, or talk on the phone. The neglect of the elderly in America reached a state of perfection starting in March 2020. People who hadn’t visited relatives in retirement homes suddenly had a perfect excuse: #AbundanceOfCaution #BecauseCorona. Even when the inmates were released to meet friends and family on outdoor terraces in masks, the Coronarighteous refrained from visiting (often while posting on Facebook photos of themselves enjoying various activities with other potentially infected humans, going out to get food at/from restaurants #BecauseTooLazyToCook, etc.). All of that changed once my dad slipped toward unresponsiveness.

Apparently I am always out of step with my fellow(?) humans. I was happy to have talked on the phone with my parents every day or two for the preceding 10 years. I was happy that we’d been able to visit them (from Boston to DC) every few months, including amidst “the global pandemic”, over the same period. As it happened, I was also able to be there during my father’s final week, but I didn’t consider that essential or important compared to what had transpired over the preceding 10 years.

Folks often decry the huge expenses that Medicare is willing to incur even when it is obvious that death of the beneficiary is imminent (see “Medicare Cost at End of Life” for some data; as much as 25 percent of spending is during the last year of life). But now I’m thinking that this is a feature and not a bug. If Medicare is a reflection of ourselves and what is important to us, it actually make sense for Medicare to pull out all of the stops when the end is near and certain.

Readers: What have you seen in your own families when the end is plainly near for an older relative? Do folks who’ve not been interested in the soon-to-be-deceased suddenly come out of the woodwork?

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Why don’t migrants get COVID vaccines at the border?

by philg

“Vaccine Refusal Will Come at a Cost—For All of Us” (Atlantic, owned by someone smart enough to marry rich):

People who refuse to get the COVID-19 vaccine will have higher health-care costs. The rest of us will foot the bill.

Imagine it’s 2026. A man shows up in an emergency room, wheezing. He’s got pneumonia, and it’s hitting him hard. He tells one of the doctors that he had COVID-19 a few years earlier, in late 2021. He had refused to get vaccinated, and ended up contracting the coronavirus months after most people got their shots. Why did he refuse? Something about politics, or pushing back on government control, or a post he saw on Facebook. He doesn’t really remember. His lungs do, though: By the end of the day, he’s on a ventilator.

You’ll pay for that man’s decisions. So will I. We all will—in insurance premiums, if he has a plan with your provider, or in tax dollars, if the emergency room he goes to is in a public hospital. The vaccine refusers could cost us billions. Maybe more, over the next few decades, with all the complications they could develop. And we can’t do anything about it except hope that more people get their shots than those who say they will right now.

… A new study found that 34 percent of COVID-19 survivors are diagnosed with a neurological or psychological condition within six months of recovering from the initial illness. …

As lockdowns are lifted, [former Obama administration official Kathleen] Sebelius hopes that vaccine passports will create social pressure, which might wear down hesitancy if unvaccinated people are barred from sports games, concerts, and other public events.

So much interesting stuff in here! The CDC estimates that roughly half of Americans have had a COVID infection, so if we accept the above statistic, roughly 17 percent of us are the walking wounded, with new neurological and psychological deficits. The Obama official is excited by the idea that everyone should have to carry some kind of proof of vaccination in order to participate in society. Maybe this will be a smartphone app or a RFID wristband (or my own favorite: RFID neck chip, as proven in dogs). Mx. Sebelius would, presumably, react with horror if someone suggested that one form of ID be required in order to vote, but now a much more onerous task will be imposed on those who wish to shop for groceries at Target.

The Atlantic makes the point that Democrats bear “The White Man’s Burden”. They work hard at their elite/government jobs while the non-whites (Republicans) clog up ICUs and hog ventilators that Democrats fund.

Take up the White Man’s burden—
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain.
To seek another’s profit,
And work another’s gain.

With enough federal and state orders and restrictions on the non-vaccinated, presumably the recalcitrant can be coerced eventually. But what about a group of people over whom the Feds have a lot of control, i.e., migrants? They no longer try to sneak across the border, but instead run right into the arms of the nearest government worker. Roughly 96 percent of these folks will be here in the U.S. forever. Many of the “children” saying that they’re under 18 have a biological age that is older than 18 and therefore they would easily fall into the emergency use authorization age range for the vaccines that are currently being used (though not “FDA-approved”) in the U.S.

If these folks are going to live in the U.S. forever and they’re going to be on Medicaid or “charity care” forever and we believe that these vaccines will actually reduce long-term health care costs, why not set up vaccine clinics at the detention and processing facilities for migrants (who are not in a “concentration camp” and who are not “kept in cages”, unlike from 2017 through early 2021)?

This could also be a good opportunity prototype a federal vaccine passport. By definition, the migrants are “undocumented” so they need a document-free way of showing that they’ve had the shot that entitles them to walk free amongst the righteous (vaccinated) natives.

The argument can’t be that vaccines are in short supply. See “Nearly 40% of Marines decline COVID-19 vaccine, prompting some Democrats to urge Biden to set mandate for military” (USA Today) for one place where the Feds could get boxes of vaccine vials.

The argument can’t be that the migrant lifestyle prevents infection. See photo below from “Biden administration spending $60 million per week to shelter unaccompanied minors” (Washington Post article, but Texas Tribune photo). Just as the Swedish MD/PhDs predicted, humans don’t bother with the 6′ distance requirement once you give them a paper mask and tell them that #Science says it works.

The argument can’t be that there aren’t enough migrants to make it worth the trouble of setting up a vaccine tent with refrigerator and technician. The above-linked article says “about 22,000 to 26,000 unaccompanied minors will arrive at the border each month and require federal care” (that’s just the minors; there are also plenty of adults).

What is the argument against immediate vaccination for those migrants who want it? That the children are unaccompanied and therefore the feds are unable to get parents to consent? Teenagers can get abortions without parental consent here in Massachusetts. Why not a vaccine that #Science says will save their lives? (Our legislature couldn’t find time to pass a legal framework for all of the restrictions that have been imposed by 66 (so far) executive orders, but in December 2020 they did manage to pass a new abortion law. See “Groundbreaking Massachusetts Abortion Law Repeals Parental Consent for Older Teens” (Ms. Magazine):

Last week, the Massachusetts legislature passed a groundbreaking new law creating an affirmative right to abortion in the state, expanding abortion access after 24 weeks, and removing a parental consent requirement for 16- and 17-year-olds. … We are saying that women and pregnant people should be trusted to make the personal decisions about their body and if, when and how to become pregnant that we know they’re perfectly capable of making and there should not be barriers, especially barriers that disproportionately impact low-income people and people of color.

“women” and “pregnant people” can be trusted, which means that a “man” can be trusted only if he becomes pregnant? So at least young “women” and “pregnant people” among the migrants should be entrusted to make their own decisions about whether to take a non-approved vaccine.)

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