[barmar]

Quote

"I'm not going to talk about it. I don't think anybody should have to share their personal, private medical information with anybody," said Rep. Greg Steube of Florida.

The problem with attitudes like this is that this is not just personal information. This is a highly contagious disease, so your medical information is relevant to all the people you interact with.

Feel free to keep your cancer or pregnancy status a secret. But not anything related to COVID-19.

Florida recently passed a law prohibiting businesses from requiring proof of vaccination. DeSantis said:

Quote

In Florida, your personal choice regarding vaccinations will be protected and no business or government entity will be able to deny you services based on your decision. I’d like to thank President Simpson, Speaker Sprowls and the Florida Legislature for getting this legislation got[sic] across the finish line.

Many cruise ships leave from Florida, they're likely to switch to other ports so they can require that all passengers be vaccinated.

[kenberg]

 barmar, on 2021-May-14, 15:45, said:

The problem with attitudes like this is that this is not just personal information. This is a highly contagious disease, so your medical information is relevant to all the people you interact with.

And it is even worse. With me, yes, who I interact with care. With those in a leadership position in the R party, their refusal to speak out is passing up an opportunity to help get the "wait and see" fold to stop waiting.

And it is even worse worse. It is impossible that these Rs in leadership roles do not understand the effect that their silence has. Of course people must take responsibility for their own choices, but often the way we do this is to follow the lead of someone that we trust. We do not become experts on everything, often we just trust. who we trust. That can cost dearly if the trusted ones are totally irresponsible.

[pilowsky]

When I worked at UNC in the 1990's many things were new and surprising.

• When my daughters missed the school bus (such things don't exist in Australia), they were returned to us by a couple of friendly police officers.
• The airport at Charlotte had the worlds best second-hand bookshop. This area has the highest concentration of PhD's in the world.
• The supermarket had so many varieties of potato it was nearly impossible to choose.
• What are grits anyway?

But one thing stood out: our fully vaccinated children could not attend school until they could prove that they were immunised against Haemophilus Influenza B.
This happened in the antebellum south. You could almost hear Rhett telling Scarlett that he didn't give a damn.


Go to school without being vaccinated for a much more lethal respiratory disease, sure!

[y66]

From Ezra Klein Interviews Michael Lewis about "The Premonition":

Quote

LEWIS: I go where my characters take me. They took me on that journey. I would have loved to have been able to just write this as the sequel to “The Fifth Risk.” It was just messier than that. And even in “The Fifth Risk,” it was clear that, yeah, Trump is taking a wrecking ball to this machine that we have to deal with existential risks. But it’s like the one tool we have to deal with lots of problems. But that tool, that machine has been allowed to rust for generations. So it was easier to destroy than it should have been. And one form of the rust is like what happened inside the CDC.

When I have a character who’s a local public health officer in Santa Barbara County — Charity Dean — this is the main character in the book who is fighting very bravely crazy outbreaks of disease in her county. It’s not COVID. It’s tuberculosis, or it’s HIV, or hep C, or measles in schools. And has little microcosms of the same experience we’ve seen writ large with COVID. Controversies, upsetting people to save lives.

And she has — when she takes this job — this sense that there is this federal enterprise that’s there to help her called the Centers for Disease Control. She’s supposed to lean on them for academic help, but also to have her back in cases. And she realizes that they don’t have her back. That, in fact, just the opposite. Any kind of controversy that she causes, they run away from. It’s a premonition of what’s coming.

If you had asked Charity Dean in 2015, before Trump is in the air, what’s going to happen if there’s a pandemic, she’d have told you there’s nobody to run it. The supposed institution on top is actually not engaging with the problems in a serious way and the system isn’t a system. It’s just 3,000 of me around the country unconnected, on our own, with no one coming to save us.

[y66]

Farnoush Amiri said:

Important to note that Friday, May 14, two days after Gov. DeWine announced the Vax-a-Million or Shottery as (@karenkasler has named it), Ohio saw the highest daily vaccination rate in 3 weeks, with more than 25,000 people receiving a dose.

[kenberg]

Perhaps this belongs on the education thread, but wherever it is I found it a fun read.

https://www.washingt...b2a5_story.html

[pilowsky]

The QANON congresswoman thinks that wearing a mask is equivalent to being forced to wear a yellow star in nazi Germany.
Words fail me. And that doesn't happen often.

Quote

You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star and they were definitely treated like second-class set of citizens so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers and Nazi Germany, and this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.

[kenberg]

 pilowsky, on 2021-May-22, 04:25, said:

The QANON congresswoman thinks that wearing a mask is equivalent to being forced to wear a yellow star in nazi Germany.
Words fail me. And that doesn't happen often.

I think the phrase "false equivalence" is often overused. But in this case the phrase would be totally inadequate. She is an embarrassment to herself, to her constituents, to the House of Representatives, and to the country. I don't know if being a total moron is grounds for expulsion, probably not, but I hope every member of the house makes it unequivocally clear that she does not speak for them.

From time to time something happens where everyone agrees "This person does not belong here". No one can disagree. I've been in some cheap bars in my life and she wouldn't be welcome there. Nowhere.

[Winstonm]

 kenberg, on 2021-May-22, 06:23, said:

I think the phrase "false equivalence" is often overused. But in this case the phrase would be totally inadequate. She is an embarrassment to herself, to her constituents, to the House of Representatives, and to the country. I don't know if being a total moron is grounds for expulsion, probably not, but I hope every member of the house makes it unequivocally clear that she does not speak for them.

From time to time something happens where everyone agrees "This person does not belong here". No one can disagree. I've been in some cheap bars in my life and she wouldn't be welcome there. Nowhere.

Keep in mind that she was elected in a Georgia district that has a population of over 700,000 of which 59% are urban. The fringe crazoids have become mainstream, and if responsible people don’t shout them down right now the outcome is quickly becoming irreversible.

[pilowsky]

 kenberg, on 2021-May-22, 06:23, said:

I think the phrase "false equivalence" is often overused. But in this case the phrase would be totally inadequate. She is an embarrassment to herself, to her constituents, to the House of Representatives, and to the country. I don't know if being a total moron is grounds for expulsion, probably not, but I hope every member of the house makes it unequivocally clear that she does not speak for them.

From time to time something happens where everyone agrees "This person does not belong here". No one can disagree. I've been in some cheap bars in my life and she wouldn't be welcome there. Nowhere.

Doesn't she own a 'cheap bar'? Or is that the other one?

[johnu]

NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll of 1,249 National Adults

Interesting polling results on a variety of topics. There are definitely 2 Americas, or should I say, one USA and one Confederate States of America.

[Winstonm]

 johnu, on 2021-May-23, 19:11, said:

NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll of 1,249 National Adults

Interesting polling results on a variety of topics. There are definitely 2 Americas, or should I say, one USA and one Confederate States of America.

I wonder if we would be better off if Grant had hanged the treasonous Confederates and redistributed the south to the victors.

[barmar]

 kenberg, on 2021-May-22, 06:23, said:

I think the phrase "false equivalence" is often overused. But in this case the phrase would be totally inadequate.

False equivalencies seem to be SOP these days. This is the same Congress where a member said that the insurrection looked like tourists, to argue against creating a bipartisan commission to investigate.

[pilowsky]

I've seen American tourists in Europe, so I can see where the misunderstanding arose.

[johnu]

From the pages of Stranger Than Science,

Boris Johnson Wanted Coronavirus Injected In His Arm On TV To Reassure UK: Ex-Aide

Quote

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson formulated a bonkers plan to prove coronavirus was a “scare story” by injecting himself with the virus on live TV, his former chief adviser said Wednesday. (Watch the video below.)

In February 2020, a month before the virus was declared a pandemic and Britain imposed its first lockdown, Johnson dismissed COVID-19 as “the new swine flu,” Dominic Cummings told lawmakers.

“The prime minister regarded this as just a scare story,” Cummings said in testimony that blasted the government’s response to the pandemic. He added that Johnson’s aides viewed the prime minister’s attitude as, “It’s swine flu, don’t worry about it. I’m gonna get (Chief Medical Officer) Chris Whitty to inject me live on TV with coronavirus ― then everyone realizes it’s nothing to be frightened of.”

[kenberg]

 barmar, on 2021-May-23, 22:01, said:

False equivalencies seem to be SOP these days. This is the same Congress where a member said that the insurrection looked like tourists, to argue against creating a bipartisan commission to investigate.

We have people in Congress saying things that are so stupid that you would expect better from a drunk. I'm fine with people disagreeing with me about politics or about a movie. But someone who represents his district in Congress saying that what he saw looked like a bunch of tourists taking pictures? People voted for this guy? I don't get it.

[pilowsky]

 kenberg, on 2021-May-27, 07:32, said:

We have people in Congress saying things that are so stupid that you would expect better from a drunk. I'm fine with people disagreeing with me about politics or about a movie. But someone who represents his district in Congress saying that what he saw looked like a bunch of tourists taking pictures? People voted for this guy? I don't get it.

I've known many politicians in my time.
The best answer I've heard to your question came from one of them:
If there's a horse called "Self-Interest" in a race, always put your money on it.
At least you know it's trying.

[y66]

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution said:

Here is Ross Douthat at the NYT:

…there’s a pretty big difference between a world where the Chinese regime can say, We weren’t responsible for Covid but we crushed the virus and the West did not, because we’re strong and they’re decadent, and a world where this was basically their Chernobyl except their incompetence and cover-up sickened not just one of their own cities but also the entire globe.

The latter scenario would also open a debate about how the United States should try to enforce international scientific research safeguards, or how we should operate in a world where they can’t be reasonably enforced.

I agree, and would add one point about why this matters so much. “Our wet market was low quality and poorly governed” is a story consistent with the Chinese elites not being entirely at fault. Wet markets, after all, are a kind of atavism, and China knows the country is going to evolve away from them over time. They represent the old order. You can think of the CCP as both building infrastructure and moving the country’s food markets into modernity (that’s infrastructure too, isn’t it?), albeit with lags. “We waited too long to get rid of the wet markets” is bad, but if anything suggests the CCP should have done all the more to revolutionize and modernize China. In contrast, the story of “our government-run research labs are low quality and poorly governed”…that seems to place the blame entirely on the shoulders of the CCP and also on its technocratic, modernizing tendencies. Under that account, the CCP spread something that “the earlier China” did not, and that strikes strongly at the heart of CCP legitimacy. Keep in mind how much the Chinese apply a historical perspective to everything.

A number of you have asked me what I think of the lab leak hypothesis. A few months ago I placed the chance of it at 20-30%, as a number of private correspondents can attest. Currently I am up to 50-60%.

https://marginalrevo...s.html#comments

[shyams]

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution said:

"We waited too long to get rid of the wet markets” is bad, but if anything suggests the CCP should have done all the more to revolutionize and modernize China.

In contrast, the story of “our government-run research labs are low quality and poorly governed”…that seems to place the blame entirely on the shoulders of the CCP and also on its technocratic, modernizing tendencies.

There is another causal/associated factor, right? Money! The Wuhan Institute of Virology is actually designed to be world class in terms of its safety standards. Its BSL4 facilities are among the best in the world (Bio-Security Level, 4 being the highest). BSL4 is available even though research under BSL4 is slow, cumbersome and expensive.
* If the Chinese Govt. were funding the research at this lab, they would not worry much about the cost implication of BSL4.
* If the US Government were directly funding research at the lab, it is reasonable to say that they too would not worry about the cost implications of BSL4.

However, when the US National Institute of Health wants research done on potential viral threats, they always award the grant to intermediaries. The intermediaries then subcontract the actual work to WIV. In my mind, the equation is simple --- if the intermediary can charge the NIH a BSL4 quote but can somehow convince the WIV to conduct the research at BSL2 or BSL3 levels, the resultant "savings" are for the intermediary to keep.

How is it then the fault of the "government-run research labs" in China? Alternatively, why are they alone to blame?

[Winstonm]

Perhaps it is time for natural selection to work its magic.

Quote

The country's declining covid-19 case rates present an unrealistically optimistic perspective for half of the nation - the half that is still not vaccinated.

As more people receive vaccines, covid-19 cases are occurring mostly in the increasingly narrow slice of the unprotected population.