Bad News Thread

[dad4]

11/24/20

Remember when the CDC credited masks for bringing down "cases" in Arizona?

When they say ridiculous things like this, they give the green light to people who want to blame their neighbors for rises in cases. "Why, since we know masks work, the rise in cases must be because of you stupid anti-science people who refuse to wear them!"

Even though mask compliance is as high as ever, these "pro-science" people just know it can't be, because they just know masks at the very least go a long way toward solving the problem.

Well, anyway, how about we check out Arizona's curve now?

Well, how about that.

Could it be that masks didn't bring the curve down after all? That these curves seem to do more or less the same thing no matter what?

Right now one blue state after another that supposedly "followed the science," is seeing a rise in "cases." And all their people can do is blame their neighbors. Because, don't you know, the "science" works! So if the "science" isn't working, that means someone somewhere must not be sciencing.

The blue state train wreck right now is NY, who opened indoor dining.

Nothing to do with D/R. It's just behavior. If you open restaurants and/or skip masks, your numbers go up.

 

[happy9]

They granted Emergency Use Authorization to provide liability protection to Big Pharma.

Yes indeed, that was my point. Big Pharma is gonna ride this horse.

 

[Bruddah IZ]

Trump urges all Americans to get COVID vaccine: 'It's a safe vaccine' and it 'works'

Never!!! I dont care what Dr F or T says. My wife and I are 100% a, "No."

Fauci is a fraud. Always has been big pharma shill.

 

[dad4]

Why not?? How do you think our species made it this far?

So take one of the old fashioned ones once they get approved. They work, too.

-Buzz

 

[Grace T.]

Fauci is a fraud. Always has been big pharma shill.

He's also a particular kind of shill. Most (IIRC around 90%) of the money allocated early on was directed by him entirely towards vaccines. Only about 10% was allocated towards treatments, mostly the antibody treatments Trump received. He made a deliberate decision not to put money into treatments (either new or repurposed). On the one hand, credit where credit is due, we (unlike the EU) have vaccines. On the other hand, because some treatments like ivermectin were and continued to be ignored, if proven out he will have contributed to the needless death of thousands. Trade offs. Life's messy.

 

[Grace T.]

"And in recent months, the meme has evolved into something new: Coronavirus Karen. This particular form of Karen refuses to wear a face covering in shops, won't stick to quarantine, and thinks the whole pandemic thing is overblown. "

What exactly is a 'Karen' and where did the meme come from?

To many the Karen meme - and its male equivalent Ken - sums up a specific type of white privilege.

www.bbc.com

There is a good video embedded in that article with a lot of Grace Karens speaking.

So if I (a person of color) were to be yelled as in a supermarket for not wearing a mask by a white woman I'd be a Karen?

Yet if I (a person of color) were to call the police on the Dangy Bros next door (also persons of color, including one African American) to complain about their monthly keggers (sans masks, with loud music), I'd also be a Karen?

Yet if you (a white person with relatives who are persons of color) were to do either you'd not be a Karen because you are a guy?

Something seems strangely amiss to me. Almost like two spidermen accusing each other of being karen.

Spider-Man Pointing at Spider-Man | Know Your Meme

Spider-Man Pointing at Spider-Man refers to an image from the 60’s Spider-Man cartoon episode in which two people in Spider-Man costumes are pointing at ea

knowyourmeme.com

 

[espola]

So if I (a person of color) were to be yelled as in a supermarket for not wearing a mask by a white woman I'd be a Karen?

Yet if I (a person of color) were to call the police on the Dangy Bros next door (also persons of color, including one African American) to complain about their monthly keggers (sans masks, with loud music), I'd also be a Karen?

Yet if you (a white person with relatives who are persons of color) were to do either you'd not be a Karen because you are a guy?

Something seems strangely amiss to me. Almost like two spidermen accusing each other of being karen.

Spider-Man Pointing at Spider-Man | Know Your Meme

Spider-Man Pointing at Spider-Man refers to an image from the 60’s Spider-Man cartoon episode in which two people in Spider-Man costumes are pointing at ea

knowyourmeme.com

 

[Bruddah IZ]

He's also a particular kind of shill. Most (IIRC around 90%) of the money allocated early on was directed by him entirely towards vaccines. Only about 10% was allocated towards treatments, mostly the antibody treatments Trump received. He made a deliberate decision not to put money into treatments (either new or repurposed). On the one hand, credit where credit is due, we (unlike the EU) have vaccines. On the other hand, because some treatments like ivermectin were and continued to be ignored, if proven out he will have contributed to the needless death of thousands. Trade offs. Life's messy.

So much of what Fauci does depends on him not knowing what he is doing. He is a puppet like Biden. They lack the public policy background to even consider trade offs in a meaningful way.

 

[Bruddah IZ]

From the standpoint of what we laughingly call our "public health" establishment, the most dangerous heretic of 2020 was Scott Atlas.

Atlas, who served in the White House during 2020 as a public health adviser on matters related to COVID-19, recently spoke to a group of students at Stanford University about his experience.

Atlas was treated absurdly by his fellow academics and (of course) by the media, who accused him of all kinds of wickedness because he dissented from the lockdown consensus.

He reviewed all the key points from the past year.

First, in order to explain away the clear failures of lockdowns and other alleged mitigation measures, the lockdowners have tried to pretend that Americans weren't really all that locked down after all, and that in any case Americans didn't really change their behavior all that much.

Atlas threw cold water on both of those claims:

Here's the unacknowledged reality: almost all states and major cities, with a handful of exceptions, have implemented severe restrictions for many months, including closures of businesses and in-person school, mobility restrictions and curfews, quarantines, limits on group gatherings, and mask mandates dating back to at least the summer.

And let’s clear up the myths about the behavior of Americans – social mobility tracking of Americans and data from Gallup, YouGov, the COVID-19 Consortium, and the CDC have shown significant reductions of movement as well as a consistently high percentage of mask wearing since the late summer, similar to Western European countries and approaching those in Asia.

He then proceeded to lay out some of the costs of lockdown, of which I offer a sample here:

A recent study confirms that up to 78% of cancers were never detected due to missed screening over three months. If one extrapolates to the entire country, up to a million new cases or more over nine months will have gone undetected. That health disaster adds to missed critical surgeries, chemotherapy, organ transplants, presentations of pediatric illnesses, heart attack and stroke patients too afraid to call emergency services, and others, all well documented.

Beyond hospital care, CDC reported four-fold increases in depression, three-fold increases in anxiety symptoms, and a doubling of suicidal ideation, particularly among young adults – college age – after the first few months of lockdowns, echoing the AMA reports of drug overdoses and suicides. An explosion of insurance claims for these psychological harms in children just verified this, doubling nationally since last year; and in the strictly locked down Northeast, there was a more than 300% increase of teenagers visiting doctors for self-harm.

Domestic abuse and child abuse have been skyrocketing due to the isolation and specifically to the loss of jobs, particularly in the strictest lockdowns.

Was anybody even bothering to consider these effects?

That, said Atlas, was why someone like him needed to be part of the discussion:

To manage such a crisis, shouldn’t policymakers objectively consider both the virus harms and the totality of impact of policies? That’s the importance of health policy experts – my field – with a broader scope of expertise than that of epidemiologists and basic scientists. And that’s exactly why I was called to the White House – there were zero health policy scholars on the Task Force; no one with a medical background who also considered the impacts of the policies was advising the White House.

He also spoke about the policy of universal masking:

Regarding universal masks: 38 states have implemented general-population mask mandates, most since at least the summer, with almost all the rest having mandates in their major cities. Widespread, general-population mask usage has shown little empirical utility for stopping cases, even though that evidence has been censored by Twitter and Amazon. Widespread mask usage showed only minimal impact in Denmark’s randomized controlled study. Those are facts. And facts matter.

I posted a list where mask mandates empirically failed to stop cases, along with direct quotes, without any edit, from WHO, CDC, and Oxford University. That was censored by Twitter. And I stated numerous times that it would be irrational to wear a mask “when alone riding a bicycle outside, when driving your own car alone, or when walking in the desert alone.” I stand by those words.

Those who charge that it is unethical, even dangerous, to question broad population mask mandates must not realize that several of the world’s top infectious disease scientists and major public health organizations explicitly question the efficacy of general population masks. The public needs to know the truth.

For instance, Jefferson and Heneghan of University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine wrote: “It would appear that despite two decades of pandemic preparedness, there is considerable uncertainty as to the value of wearing masks.” Oxford’s renowned epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta said there is no need for masks unless one is elderly or high risk. Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya stated “mask mandates are not supported by the scientific data … there is no scientific evidence that mask mandates work to slow the spread of the disease.”

Throughout this pandemic until December, the WHO’s “Advice on the use of masks in the context of COVID-19” stated: “At present, there is no direct evidence (from studies on COVID-19 and in healthy people in the community) on the effectiveness of universal masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19.” In December, the WHO changed their wording to today’s “At present there is only limited and inconsistent scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2.”

The CDC, in a review of influenza pandemics, “did not find evidence that surgical-type face masks are effective in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza transmission, either when worn by infected persons (source control) or by persons in the general community to reduce their susceptibility.” And until the WHO removed it on October 21, 2020 (almost immediately after Twitter censored my tweet highlighting the WHO quote), the WHO had written, “At the present time, the widespread use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not yet supported by high quality or direct scientific evidence and there are potential benefits and harms to consider.”

Atlas then slammed the academic community, particularly at Stanford (his home institution), which conducted itself appallingly in his case.

It's a great summary of the insanity.

 

[crush]

 

[crush]

 

[Bruddah IZ]

"In the last 20 years, we can point to three very specific events in which we have a Corona virus that shifts its behavior from a specific upper respiratory experience to one that's more involving the deep lungs and vascular systems and those present clinically much different finding. The first one was called SARS that really appeared coming out of China and South Asia in 2001, 2002, and then burned itself out importantly within 18 to 24 months, never to really reappear in its same form because humanity had reached this new homeostasis with it. And not just humanity, but water systems, soil systems, air systems, everything had come into balance with that new species within the Corona family, if you will, or that new element of genomic information. Because we can't really, speciate a non-living organism like a virus. So instead it's more of a description of a family of genetic codes."--Zach Bush, MD.

 

[Grace T.]

Public health officials and teachers unions have a lot to answer for.....

What School Shutdowns Have Wrought

Though Covid-related restrictions are easing across the country, fewer than half of America’s students are back in school full-time, according to Burbio, a website tracking school reopenings. A look at the national map shows that the most populous state, California, is also the most locked down...

www.city-journal.org

 

[Grace T.]

In the EU, Spain, Ireland, and Portugal remain declining. Belgium, Sweden and Switzerland are now no longer declining but have a slightly rising trajectory. Czechia seems to have finally turned a page but is still awfully high. Pretty much everywhere else including France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Eastern Europe are rising. In particular, the previously spared Norway, Finland and Estonia are hitting record highs, getting hit extremely heavily, hospital systems under strain. Seems like everyone in Europe is pretty much going to end up in the same place (possible exception Portugal, Ireland and the UK).

 

[Desert Hound]

In the EU, Spain, Ireland, and Portugal remain declining. Belgium, Sweden and Switzerland are now no longer declining but have a slightly rising trajectory. Czechia seems to have finally turned a page but is still awfully high. Pretty much everywhere else including France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Eastern Europe are rising. In particular, the previously spared Norway, Finland and Estonia are hitting record highs, getting hit extremely heavily, hospital systems under strain. Seems like everyone in Europe is pretty much going to end up in the same place (possible exception Portugal, Ireland and the UK).

Well it must be in person dining that is causing the rise right?

I just answered for someone else on these boards. Sorry. But you knew what the rote response was going to be. I just got here before he did.

 

[Desert Hound]

In the EU, Spain, Ireland, and Portugal remain declining. Belgium, Sweden and Switzerland are now no longer declining but have a slightly rising trajectory. Czechia seems to have finally turned a page but is still awfully high. Pretty much everywhere else including France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Eastern Europe are rising. In particular, the previously spared Norway, Finland and Estonia are hitting record highs, getting hit extremely heavily, hospital systems under strain. Seems like everyone in Europe is pretty much going to end up in the same place (possible exception Portugal, Ireland and the UK).

Now the funny/disappointing thing is...we still have a bunch of people running around saying the US blew it. That is a non thinking and usually a partisan response.

As I look at the various western democracies, it seems that we are all roughly in the same boat. It is like the virus doesn't care about gov policy.

 

[dad4]

Well it must be in person dining that is causing the rise right?

I just answered for someone else on these boards. Sorry. But you knew what the rote response was going to be. I just got here before he did.

I was wondering what you'd talk about now that Texas and Florida have daily case rates twice and three times that of California.

FL: 21 cases per 100k
TX: 16 cases per 100k
CA: 7 cases per 100k

You can't really talk about the EU surge in cases and ignore the UK variant and lack of vaccines. It's a bad combination. (Though I agree they should close their bars and restaurants )

 

[espola]

Public health officials and teachers unions have a lot to answer for.....

What School Shutdowns Have Wrought

Though Covid-related restrictions are easing across the country, fewer than half of America’s students are back in school full-time, according to Burbio, a website tracking school reopenings. A look at the national map shows that the most populous state, California, is also the most locked down...

www.city-journal.org

"...maybe..."

 

[Desert Hound]

I was wondering what you'd talk about now that Texas and Florida have daily case rates twice and three times that of California.

I made a screen shot on March 10 of the big 3 states. Lets see where they are cases per million and deaths per million a month from that date.

Further did the downward trends continue in cases or do we see a rise after TX opens up?

Or are you now saying 6 days later you can make the call?

 

[dad4]

"...maybe..."

Maybe?

Who else is responsible? We have a D governor, a D senate, a D assembly, D city councils and teachers union school boards.

California is running out of right wingers to blame. The last three are packing their bags for Texas.

 

[Desert Hound]

"So when they told us to stay far apart from each other last spring in the name of public health, it was an enormous sacrifice, whether or not we understood it at the time. Because this was a trusting and law-abiding country, we obeyed that order. We barely grumbled about it. We assumed they knew best. "Stay six feet from each other." That was social distancing. It was the law and most of us followed that law.

But where did that law come from? Who did the scientific research that determines six feet was the safest distance apart from other people that you could be? Somebody should have asked that question last spring, but as far as we know, nobody did.

It turns out the research that formed the basis of that law came from a German hygenicist called Carl Flugge. It was Flugge who decided that six-foot separations were necessary to slow the spread of pathogens. The CDC went with Flugge's judgment. What the CDC didn't tell us was that Karl Flugge had been dead for nearly 100 years. His research on social distancing was published in the 19th century, before most Americans had electricity or indoor plumbing. So why is that research still guiding public health policy in this country in 2021? It's a good question, and experts don't seem to have a good answer.

Last year, one of the top aerosol scientists in Australia, a woman called Lidia Morawska, likened social distancing regulations to a cult ritual: "The dogma was born. Like any dogma, it's extremely difficult to change people's minds and change the dogmas." So it was all just faith-based, and it had massive consequences.

Millions of American schoolchildren have not been educated for a year because the CDC turned century-old German theories about tuberculosis into a kind of modern, state-enforced religious faith. It's enough to make you feel sick.

Yes, our authorities are just that mediocre. But the most infuriating part of it all is not that they were wrong, but that they won't admit they were wrong and apologize for it. Dr. Anthony Fauci spent much of last year pretending "six feet apart" was some kind of unquestioned, universally recognized physics principle, like gravity or photosynthesis."

"The science was settled, we were told.

Or at least, was settled until last week, when the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases found that the law of six feet of social distancing isn't actually real. It's not a law. It was a guess, and it's wrong. Researchers looked at coronavirus case rates in Massachusetts school districts that required six feet of social distancing and compared those with school districts that required only three feet of social distancing (yes, there were some). Researchers found there was no statistically significant difference in coronavirus cases between the two. That wasn't just true for students; it was also true for adult staff members. The study also controlled for coronavirus rates in the surrounding communities. It was not shoddy research. It was real. Here's the conclusion:

"Lower physical distancing policies can be adopted in school settings with masking mandates without negatively impacting student or staff safety."