So approx 0 of that actually happened, yes?
6 Likes
Yeah this guy is a total piece of shit. How/why he became this way is another matter. How much or how little his paper thin hippy dippy outlook mitigates anything is another matter. If any of this actually happened, his particular way of being a moron endangered a minor. #teamdad on this one.
eta: itās kinda spooky but a friend told me about a colleague of his who uses identical rationalizations, almost point by point. Itās all bullshit and should be treated with hostility, at least intellectually.
1 Like
Australia having a normal one. Apologies to UK readers for daily mail link
Let him burn?
Gonna laugh if he catches COVID at the hospital and dies.
One of my wifeās unvaxxed uncles fucked around and is currently finding out.
Wouldnāt get vaccinated because his body reacts āprofoundly adverse to vaccinesā but also because his body is strong enough to easily fight off Covid (this logic makes no sense).
Well, he nearly died. Bedridden for 2 weeks, went to hospital to get monoclonal antibodies at some point and probably should have stayed longer but no beds. Sent a āCovid is no jokeā voice memo to the family once he turned a corner for good, and oh boy did he sound awful. Quiet and raspy voice, coughing, extremely labored breathing. There was a celebratory text sent by his wife when he was finally strong enough to stand up and walk to the bedroom window to look at the sun.
At least the voice memo was a mea culpa explaining how arrogant heād been.
2 Likes
So he going to get vaxxed in future or just FAAFO again?
1 Like
Ready to board first flight today and there are so few passengers (looks like a quarter of capacity) that they are changing seats to rebalance the plane. Iāve seen them do it before with one or two people, but not with almost everybody, and not preboarding. Kind of weird and not what I expected after hearing that thousands of flights have been getting canceled every day due to covid causing staffing issues.
If this means that 90% of the global population dying will make everyone forget Reagan/Thatcherism, bring it on. #TeamCovid.
1 Like
Iām not sure, but I will not be surprised at all when he conjures up a reason why he doesnāt need to get vaccinated.
None of the indigenous groups that werenāt simultaneously being conquered by the Spanish had writing though.
Donāt know what this means. I canāt think of an example of an indigenous group āthat lost their cultureā.
Probably for another thread though.
1 Like
https://twitter.com/bradspellberg/status/1477196271517536256?s=21
Not sure what Brad is up to hereā¦
I kinda disagree with this, or at least to the extent itās true, itās only so because people are going to react to Omicron in purely destructive ways (school closures, etc.), rather than reckoning with the fundamental problems that Omicron has revealed. It was not even 6 weeks ago that people (not including you, to be clear) were claiming that mRNA vaccine technology made the risk of immune-escape COVID variants less of a threat. Thatās obviously been disproved to an extravagant, almost comical extent, but I think we really, really need to reckon with the fact that Omicron was identified very early, it was plainly a BFD from the instant it was identified, yet our response was basically nothing. Travel bans that were too limited in scope but also really controversial, maybe a little extra speed in approving Paxlovid, insurance-reimbursable tests TK, and thatās about it. Itās increasingly looking like Omicron is only going to be a minor catastrophe, not an abject disaster, but that fact has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that no serious effort was made to slow its spread or otherwise defend against it. We did nothing about Omicron because we donāt have any institutions that are capable of responding to a pandemic. (In some ways, this is more true of the US, but itās really true globally as well, since US policy largely bottlenecks pharma advances that are crucial for pandemic response.)
One of the most pessimistic things about the future coming out of this pandemic is that thereās really been no political movement to fix public health. The polarization is between Trumpist death-cultism on the right and naive āfollow-the-scienceā passivity on the left. Thereās a congressional committee on COVID, but they seem focused on partisan investigations into Trumpās (extensive, terrible) bungling rather than legislative action to fix things. (The toxic victim-blaming culture thatās grown up is an outgrowth of this dynamic, but thatās probably a distraction from the real point.)
Itās beyond obvious that an extensive public-health shakeup is required. My program would look something like this:
- The CDC has proven to be completely useless, so disband it.
- Ideally disband the FDA as well, but thatās ambitious, so maybe fold whatever useful stuff CDC is doing (recalling vegetables contaminated with E. coli etc.) into FDA.
- Create a new pandemic-response organization with appropriate funding. Give it sweeping power to implement and enforce quarantines, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, etc. Also take away FDAās power to do EUAs and give it to the new organization, and also give it concurrent power to approve drugs relevant to a pandemic.
- Somehow (not sure how) murder the idea that responding to a global crisis that kills tens of millions of people is an apolitical exercise in scientific judgment and build a clear framework of political decisionmaking and accountability for dealing with these crises.
Now obviously, this is never going to happen, which is too bad, but itās much worse that no one is even going to try. We have convinced ourselves that the best we can do is to flail around incoherently and hope that the viruses that decide to run rampant arenāt too severe. Itās a real tragedy.
6 Likes
Having your go to example of reacting to omicron āpurely destructivelyā being a school closure is too funny. I think we can find some better examples
Meaning purely destructive in the context of Omicron mass infection already taking place. In other contexts school closures are costly but may provide benefits.
Donāt see how flattening the curve is destructive.
2 Likes
Someone just called about the COVID test I took on Thursday. It initially sounded like some kind of scam, but he did know my birthdate, so I guess itās legit. Anyway, result is negative so suck it, Obamacron!
12 Likes
One thing that might get peoples attention and demonstrate that this wave is different is if essential government services are impacted in ways they havenāt been until now.
I noticed that our recycling didnāt get picked up on the usual day last week. It was picked up the next day, but this has never happened before. I suspected that city staffing shortages were to blame and todayās news confirms it: Covid has come for the trash collectors.
Jan and maybe part of Feb is gonna be bumpy, since there will be massive shortages in services, goods, etc.
Americans gonna be shocked.
1 Like
Good.
A short term labor shortage is actually a huge long term positive for workers.