Tweet [1]
Robby Soave details some of the incoherence of DC’s Covidocracy [2]. A slice:
It would be hard to argue that the mask mandate was what kept delta deaths at bay, since all those masks failed to prevent cases from increasing. Widespread vaccination—which dramatically reduces severe disease and death—is the public health initiative that’s working well, not the mask mandate.
Yet [Mayor Muriel] Bowser’s administration leaned hard on mask mandates as a pandemic prevention tool, even prioritizing them over vaccination in some curious cases. When D.C. gyms petitioned the city government to allow them to require their customers to be vaccinated rather than masked, for example, city health officials said no [3].
Bowser’s decision to keep the mask mandate in place for schools is a perfect example of the government’s incoherent thinking about COVID-19 risks. While many school-aged children remain unvaccinated, they are at very low risk of a negative coronavirus health outcome—whether they are vaccinated or not [4]. Elderly Americans who are vaccinated have much more to fear from COVID-19 than kids do, so it makes little sense to link the withdrawal of mask mandates to the degree of vaccination among the kinds of people who congregate in a given location.
It is long past time to accept that COVID-19 is endemic and that there will always be some level of risk associated with it. People can drastically reduce their risk by getting vaccinated, getting booster shots, or even practicing greater caution if they so choose.
The ping-pong ball has been drawn, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is the winner. All of the various state, industry, and union challenges to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) mandating large employers to require vaccination or regular testing and masking of employees will be consolidated into a single proceeding in the Sixth Circuit.
Thomas Harrington writes wisely about Covid and the calamitous over-reaction to it [6]. A slice:
That Covid exists and has contributed to the deaths of many people is a fact. But the notion that it constitutes an “unprecedented” threat that requires the destruction of basic rights that have been hard-won over the centuries is an ideological presumption, one, moreover, that has been heartily disproven in places like Sweden, Belarus and huge expanses of the so-called developing world.
Here are the age-stratified statistics of the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) for the disease, recently compiled [7] by John I. A. Ioannides, one of the most prestigious bio-statisticians in the world.
0-19: .0027% (or a survival rate of 99.9973%)
20-29 .014% (or a survival rate of 99,986%)
30-39 .031% (or a survival rate of 99,969%)
40-49 .082% (or a survival rate of 99,918%)
50-59 .27% (or a survival rate of 99.73%)
60-69 .59% (or a survival rate of 99.31%)More than 70, between 2.4 and 5.5% (or a survival rate of 97.6 and 94.5% depending on residential situation).
Jon Miltimore reports that “swine flu was far more deadly to children than COVID-19.” [8] A slice:
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio this week announced he is considering requiring children as young as five years old to demonstrate proof of vaccination to enter private establishments, such as restaurants and gymnasiums.
Though New York City only began making vaccinations available to children a week ago, the outgoing mayor said he’d like to have a plan in place for incoming mayor Eric Adams.
Adams, who recently announced he hopes to soon end mask requirements in schools, may have less enthusiasm for mandates than his predecessor. But New York is not the only city pushing for proof of vaccination for children.
Last week, San Francisco lawmakers announced their plan to extend vaccination passport requirements for children 5 to 11 years old, “the first major U.S. city to do so,” NBC News reports [9]. The vaccine passports would apply to children seeking to attend private establishments such as restaurants, gyms, and sporting venues.
reached for comment, those capable of basic math had the following to say:
- this is a completely fabricated number with no basis in science or epidemiology.
- it’s a 0.0000303 infection rate. 1 in 33,000. this means a city of a million would have 30 cases a day.
- this number is impossible to reach under current circumstances to a degree that makes it clear, obvious fraud.
the US has never, not once been that low since this all began.
but this is inherently a function of one simple thing: testing.
we’re currently running a million tests a day in the US. expect a spike back to 1.5 million as the high season kicks off.
a 1% false/non-clinical positive rate would be 10k cases at a million test rate, 15k at 1.5mm.
no test has such a low false rate. at a million tests a day, even at zero covid, you could not hit this.
we DID hit a low of 12k cases back in july, but testing was, wait for it, only 500k then.
The straw man will again stomp through Germany [12].
Tom Penn decries medical apartheid [13]. A slice:
Segregation on so-called medical grounds is finding ever firmer footing in Europe – no doubt spurred on by its increasingly successful introduction in Australia and New Zealand even in the face of huge, impassioned protests.
This is the hyper-normalisation of medical apartheid at work, and one day soon the witless masses who permit this process to erode unchallenged the moral bedrock of their societies, will wake up to find that it was they, not their governments, who were the engineers of an all-encompassing punitive style of governance whose dystopian interventions not even the quadruple-jabbed will ultimately be able to evade.
This Wall Street Journal headline – “Pfizer Submits Covid-19 Pill for FDA Authorization [14]” – prompts me to wonder if news of these Covid treatments will dampen the mania for vaccine mandates. Alas, I predict not. Vaccination has become an indispensable sacrament for the fundamentalist sect, Covidopalian, to which so many human beings have converted since early 2020.