I was told that kids don’t spread the disease.
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Fuck. My kids spent the day with my mother-in-law, who just got a positive COVID result (asymptomatic breakthrough) from a pre-surgery screener. She has been incredibly careful. Going into quarantine. Hope my kids are ok.
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To reporters:
“Y’all are either patriots or you’re communists, and we hate communists, and we kill communists Wait until this civil war breaks out because it is coming, mark my fucking words.”
Biden’s got this.
Umm… I’m due then. I got my first shot 12/18/20
I find the booster stuff super frustrating. We need people to get the fucking shot for the first time
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I kept trying to tell everyone that the illegal immigrants are infiltrating our schools disguised as children and no one believed me. WHERE DO I GO FOR MY APOLOGY!!!
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The emergency meeting:
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Makes vax passports really unwieldy with our current set up?
Also, for those who have dealt with this, how bad is this gonna be for convincing people to take a first shot?
Man, it’s going to be incredible when the President announces that people should get booster shots, then we wait 2 months while the FDA goes through a show review process to reach the preordained result, bodies stacking up in the ICUs and the morgues all the while. The process fetishists will nod sagely. “Any deviation from the process will only encourage the antivaxxers,” they’ll say. “This is the best of all possible public health organizations.”
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As laid out in Michael Lewis’ excellent book, the navel gazing bureaucrats that are obsessed with process don’t even really care about the outcomes, they are more interested in having a good data set with which to write a publishable research paper after the fact. Lots of deaths just means lots of data - hooray! My research grant will be approved!
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Nice hyperbole, but I doubt people with breakthrough infections are going to be filling the ICUs.
The problem is as @CaffeineNeeded implied (I think) that navelgazing on tecommending / necessitating a booster shot is going to increase vaxx-hesitancy by giving the media the opportunity to both-side it, which the usual suspects will spin into OMG Pfizer so useless/dangerous. The vaxx-hesitant will definitely show up in ICUs.
I don’t even mind the bureaucrats so much. This is their career on the line. You can wish that everyone was perfectly public-spirited and selfless, but that’s not realistic. What I get upset about is the public, with no stake other than not wanting a bunch of people to die, wholeheartedly buying in to every single bullshit rationalization that people come up with.
The unvaxxed are already flooding hospitals. If they’re unfazed seeing their friends and neighbors catch COVID it’s silly to think that some discussion of boosters is going to make a difference to them.
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What are you even talking about here? The FDA and CDC have already approved booster shots. And how many people with one full course of the vaccine are “stacking up in the ICUs and morgues?”
, he said, nodding sagely. You may well be right. It’s hard to say, because there are a bunch of different base rates all competing with each other. And in the US, any surge in vaccinated hospitalizations will be buried beneath a much larger wave of hospitalized antisocial yahoos and unprotected children. The point is, let’s not rush this stuff. We need to take our time, gather data, make a decision, then spend another month papering the decision after we make it.
Boosters shots are currently only approved for immunocompromised people. If I’m wrong about this and the FDA approves general boosters in the next couple weeks, then I’ll happily eat a mountain of crow and write an appreciative poem celebrating the FDA.
Sure. But having a system where bureaucrats are incentivized to behave one way, and the declaring their predictable reaction to be a failure, is bad policy. I don’t mean that they don’t care about dead people like they’re psychopaths, I mean they don’t care about dead people in the sense that they are not set up to behave like it’s their job to do that. They are set up to dispense position papers and guidance and then go home.
They are more likely to be fazed by the sudden “realization” that their friends and neighbors have been crisis actors all this time. You can’t trust anybody!
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I agree with you, I think, but I’m a little leery of the term “system.” I don’t think it’s really possible to build a system that produces effective bureaucrat-ing in isolation. You need a good system plus continuous political accountability flowing from the public and the media to electeds to political appointees to bureaucrats. Structurally I think the US bureaucracy is fine (maybe some arcane Administrative Procedure Act problems or something), but it’s decaying because people either hate it unconditionally or want to champion it unconditionally, so no one actually cares how well it performs.
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