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Some Covid Links

Jay Bhattacharya was a recent guest on the Tom Woods Show.

Jeffrey Tucker is impressed with Sunetra Gupta’s 2013 book, Pandemics: Our Fears and the Facts. A slice from Tucker’s essay:

Dr. Gupta, I suspect, wrote this book to familiarize readers with the normalcy of pathogens, and to explain why it is not likely that an entirely new and deadly disease will arrive to wipe out large swaths of the human race. She had solid reasons to doubt that there was a case for panic. In all human experience, taking on germs and minimizing their threat took place with marginal steps toward better therapeutics, medical attention, better sanitation, vaccines, and, above all else, exposure. Much of this text is about exposure – not as a bad thing but as a hack to protect the human body against severe outcomes.

With computer viruses, the way to deal with them is to block them. Our operating systems must remain perfectly clean and free of all pathogens. For the machine to work properly, its memory must be pure and unexposed. One exposure could mean data loss, identity theft, and even machine death.

Despite what Bill Gates seems to believe, our bodies are not the same. Exposure to milder forms of germs works to protect us against more severe forms. The cell memory of our body is trained through experience, not by blocking all bugs but by incorporating the capacity to fight them off into our biology. This is the essence of how vaccines work, but more than that, it is how our whole immune system works. Pursuing an agenda of zero-pathogenic exposure is the road to disaster and death. We did not evolve that way and we cannot live this way. Indeed we will die if we take the route.

Writing in the Telegraph, Charles Walker, MP, applies the logic of supporters of vaccine passports to obesity. A slice:

The Government’s own research shows that 63 per cent of adults in England are overweight and 27 per cent of all adults are obese, with a BMI above 30. The cost of this fat epidemic to the NHS and wider economy is put at £27 billion a year. How many lives could be saved and improved with this £27 billion? It is clear that by sucking resource away from deserving illnesses and social causes, the obese kill those of a healthy weight.

But at last change might be possible. In the same way that people will soon have to prove their Covid status, we could also be at the stage where technology could be deployed to monitor people’s obesity status. Such a breakthrough would finally allow the state to restrict the overweight’s access to certain dining facilities and high-calorie foods.

Think of it. Upon entering a restaurant, the business could scan a mobile phone app that showed your BMI. Those within the healthy range could order what they wished off the menu, while the overweight could be restricted to ordering size-limited portions. As for the obese, they could be asked to settle for a salad or simply invited to leave.

Cancer research ‘could be delayed by two years’ due to coronavirus pandemic.” (TANSTAFPC – There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)

Covidocrats love their power. A slice:

As states around the country lift COVID-19 restrictions, Oregon is poised to go the opposite direction — and many residents are fuming about it.

A top health official is considering indefinitely extending rules requiring masks and social distancing in all businesses in the state.

The proposal would keep the rules in place until they are “no longer necessary to address the effects of the pandemic in the workplace.”

Michael Wood, administrator of the state’s department of Occupational Safety and Health, said the move is necessary to address a technicality in state law that requires a “permanent” rule to keep current restrictions from expiring.

Sinead Murphy reveals the horrors of ‘public-health’ policy grounded in the sweet-sounding but evil notion that “Nobody is safe until everyone is safe.” A slice:

As we embark on our second Covid year, the sentiment is chilling.

‘Nobody is safe until everyone is safe’ is the latest phase in the capture of virtue that has been the most profound effect of Covid.

At first, we were asked to keep our distance. Other people, for whose sake we do most of the good things we do, were put beyond our reach. We no longer held the door for the next person to pass through. We no longer offered to carry an old lady’s shopping. We stopped shaking one another’s hand and patting each other on the back. We no longer hugged.

Almost all of the ways in which we knew how to be good to each other were paused; the bonds of mutual support were severed.

Then, for the first time uncertain about how to do good, we were asked to mask up. Not for our own sake. For the sake of the other person – I mask for you, you mask for me. Being good to other people was returned to us. But it was not quite like it had been before. Other people, still at a distance, were now also without faces, and faces are so important in arousing our pity, requesting our assistance, eliciting our smile. Virtue had been readmitted, but for the sake of anonymous beings.

Great Barrington Declaration co-author Martin Kulldorff, writing in The Hill, warns of the dangers of pausing the J&J vaccine. A slice:

With more than six million J&J doses administered, CVST is a very rare adverse reaction at around one per 1 million doses, but that number is misleading. The risk is higher for those under 50, who are better off receiving the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines. Even though many more patients have received those vaccines, no CVST safety problems have been linked to them.

The policy should be different for the older population, for which there were no reported cases of CVST. To deny the J&J vaccine to older people is neither desirable nor necessary. With a pause for all ages, the total vaccine supply will decrease, delaying vaccinations and increasing COVID-19 mortality.

While anyone can get infected, there is more than a thousand-fold difference in the risk of COVID-19 mortality between the old and the young. The older population – for whom this disease is particularly deadly – needs this vaccine. We need to vaccinate them as quickly as possible, not only in the United States but worldwide.

It may seem strange to have different vaccine recommendations for different ages, but that is common.

(DBx: By the way, among the ad hominem arguments blasted against the GBD is that it’s associated with anti-vaxxing. How does one square this piece by Prof. Kulldorff with the implication that the GBD is either opposed to vaccines or, at least, insufficiently enthusiastic about them?)

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