Slipsliding away

Just say no.

18 comments:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

We are disagreeing more and more strongly on this. Casting public health measures that have been around for decades as deep encroachments on freedom is something that conservatives are talking themselves into, not something that is actually so. Vaccines have long been required - over a century. Quarantine used to be mostly in reverse, of sequestering the known infected, but when a disease has a longer period of invisibility that is less helpful.

Those who don't have wide networks of people in health care come to believe there's no real problem. But we had another one die yesterday, 49 years old, the son of church friends. who worked at a Massachusetts hospital.

E Hines said...

Vaccines and quarantining, historically, have been required for the general population only with dangerous diseases.

Requiring vaccines and quarantining for something as benign as the Wuhan Virus (a mortality rate of a small faction of 1% for cases, even less for actual infections) is for the generally healthy most assuredly is an attack on individual liberty. Panicking over very isolated instances that only illustrate the trend serves no useful purpose.

Eric Hines

raven said...

It is going to be extremely inconvenient for the narrative if the trend keep going the way it is- increasing numbers of "fully vaccinated" getting sick and dying from ADE.
Oops.

Oh yes- "when a disease has a longer period of invisibility"
and this is the case in the "vaccinated"- it allows people to have a high viral load, yet show no symptoms, so they can walk around and infect people.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Focusing on "mortality rate," largely based on nations that lie in their reporting is not helpful. Even just looking at the US, if a disease is very contagious (R greater than 1), but hey, not many of those die, that's not actually "benign" in any previously-accepted meaning of the term, before conservatives lost their minds this year. The basic fact is 750,000 excess deaths, and counting. That is in a country that took fairly stringent efforts to contain the disease.

And as I have mentioned many times before, this isn't even including the long terms effect of Covid. With all the hand-wringing that "we don't know the long-term effects of the vaccines," let me point out that vaccines rarely have any long-term effects that don't show up in the first few days, but Covid has respiratory, cardiac, and cardiac effects already showing up. Can you - all of you - ask yourselves why that is strangely not even mentioned in the discussion of our little circle of blogs we share? I am hugely disappointed. It isn't mentioned, because it goes entirely against the narrative folks want to be true. Let me hit that point hard again. Not mentioned. Not by any of you. Why would that be? We are in areas of basic intellectual honesty, and my long-time friends are failing at this.

E Hines - You don't mean to be cruel and insensitive. I have read your comments and seem to be a decent enough person. But your statement can only mean that some greater number of deaths would have been okay. There is no logical escape-hole from that. So I am not just being sneering and difficult when I ask whether twice that many, totaling 1.5 million fellow citizens, is the okay number you are willing to accept. I actually don't think that's acceptable.

Especially since getting safe vaccines, distancing a bit, and wearing a bit of cloth on your face is not even worth mentioning in terms of freedom. These are minor inconveniences in response to reality. Clinging to a fantasy world where "it's just not fair that there's this disease and we shouldn't have to put up with this" doesn't compare to what anyone defined as oppression until last Tuesday.

I have every recognition that shaming people and putting them on their heels makes them more likely to double down and just believe what they previously did even more, dammit. I have spent 18 months trying very hard to be evenhanded, seeing other possibilities, ratcheting down and putting things moderately - and where has it gotten me? We are back over 1,000 deaths a day again. Acute-care workers are seeing heightened risks again.

It's Cowslip's Warren all over again. https://watershipdown.fandom.com/wiki/Cowslip%27s_Warren

Grim said...

This probably deserves some care, because there are really several discussions getting run together.

1) There's an issue about decades (even a century) of approval for vaccination mandates and similar things. That's true, but it's also true that the original period (the Progressive Era) was one in which there was very high trust in scientific experts to know the right thing for everyone. This same period produced eugenics and Buck v. Bell, which was a SCOTUS ruling that the government wasn't violating your rights if it forcibly sterilized you because (in the judgment of experts) we'd be better off collectively if you didn't reproduce. The baseline philosophy that undergirds those century-ish old policies has broken, and for good reason.

Meanwhile, there's a substantial part of the American and European populations that have adopted another policy: "My body, my choice." "No one but me and my doctor should be involved in my medical decisions." These are generally hand-waves to justify abortion, but the underlying philosophy is widely accepted instead of the century-old consensus that experts should govern us for the common good. (Indeed, the same objection applies here as there: it's not really your body we're interested in, but the harm you might do to another with your decisions).

Conservatives normally reject abortion, but not by rejecting the idea that individuals should have a kind of ownership of their physical body that entitles them to not be forced to take medical procedures without consent. So that's one issue.

Grim said...

2) In terms of the long term effects -- or risks in general -- of COVID, I think we have actually discussed it both here and at your place. I know Tex and I have both expressed that we worked out the figures as well as we were able, and found the vaccines to be a better risk by perhaps two orders of magnitude.

That said, we don't really know what the risks in the long term are of either horn of the dilemma. It's not been long enough to know.

Likewise, it is true that vaccines rarely have long term effects -- but the reason it is true is that usually they are taken one time. This particular set of vaccines not only uses a new technology (for mRNA; I went with the old-fashioned J&J), it also now is supposed to require regular booster shots.

That means that there may well be long-term effects to these vaccines, because the body will be re-injected with them on a regular basis. We don't know that there will be; but it's suddenly a much bigger concern than usual.

(Not that it will necessarily go badly. Flu shots are taken annually, and I always get one, and never have developed long term negative effects. That might be true here also.)

Grim said...

3) There could usefully be a discussion about what sorts of restrictions are acceptable or philosophically justifiable, but what we're having instead is an all-or-nothing discussion about whether any are. Australia and NZ, France and other places are showing that blanket acceptance of restrictions can go very wrong very fast.

Even Michigan and similar places in America have found that the government can be willing to impose draconian restrictions and to be almost unsteerable by public pressure. The Michigan State Supreme Court rejected the executive orders; the governor just issued new ones. The legislature passed a law overturning her executive actions; she vetoed it.

In a world in which the government were genuinely responsive to (a) Constitutional limits on its power, or (b) actions by the people's duly elected representatives to restrain it, or (c) court orders rolling back its power, in that world we could more easily accept that there might be temporary restrictions. In this world, it's hard to allow the government an inch because it is inclined to take a mile -- and it's not clear that they ever intend to give any of it back, because this kind of power is delightful to the sort of people who go into government.

The reaction against letting the government grab new powers or extend/reimpose older ones is a consequence of bad behavior by the government itself. It's not just a blind rage against inconveniences, but a reasonable reaction to a refusal to be bound by constitutional limits.

Grim said...

4) There is also a general collapse in trust in experts that is deserved. This is not limited to medical experts or scientific experts; it is true even of our long-beloved military, whose leadership has proven to be just as bad at its job as our diplomats have proven to be at theirs. The bureaucracies are ossified, as I've discussed in many contexts, and are incapable of learning lessons. As a result, they fail frequently and publicly; and the more often they fail, the less people are willing to extend the kind of trust to 'the experts' as of a century ago.

There is also the problem of propaganda, which has intensified in recent years and especially since 2019. That makes it hard to trust too, because you're not being given access to truth and allowed to reason like adults (and citizens!). Having the 'right answer' forced on you makes people intensely distrustful, and for good reasons.

But it's not just the propaganda. It really is that the experts are so regularly wrong about the very things they're supposed to be experts at doing. Lockdowns in no place they occurred last year even correlate strongly with viral effects; some places locked down tightly and had terrible effects, others had light or no lockdowns and not terrible effects, but mostly it didn't seem to matter. Texas and Hawaii have very similar curves in spite of totally different policies. Some say to do more lockdowns, or do them harder. Other claimants to the title of expert say not to do them again, and to try other things.

Who are the real experts? We aren't, none of us here, and judging who really are requires the same skill set as being experts ourselves. So what do we do? Well, normally you rely on reputation. Reputation, when other people who are experts proclaim that 'this guy is one of us,' is the normal way in democracies to know that someone is an expert. That allows the many, who aren't, to decide as a group whom to heed.

But reputation has broken down, in two ways. First there are different claimants on different sides, and they praise their side and damn the other. So there are now competing reputations. But second, as mentioned, the once-mighty bureaucracies of technocratic experts have damaged their own credibility. They are no longer able to use reputation to credential an expert because no one trusts the institutions themselves.

This is a big problem. I don't know how many people will die of it, but it'll be more than if we didn't have the problem. But that's wishing for a thing that can't be, not quickly; we need deep and substantial reforms to get to such a world. In the world we live in, authority cannot be trusted and should not be. Thus, we don't know as a polity what to do or whom to heed; and so, many reason that we should at least err on the side of more freedoms and fewer restrictions, because that at least is something whose value we can see and experience directly.

Grim said...

That last, by the way, is the answer I would give to the challenge of 'how many more deaths would be acceptable?'. The challenge presupposes that we know for sure how to stop more deaths, and it's just a question of granting the authority to do it or not. I don't think we do know what to do, and I think we may vastly overestimate our ability to affect the outcome.

For example my buddy in Mobile says they're having a lot of deaths down there; here, in spite of weeks of surge, we still haven't had any. Why? After a lot of comparing notes, we came to the conclusion that the most probable reason is that Mobile has a 50% black population, and here it's 0%. Black Americans are more vulnerable because their bodies don't handle Vitamin D the same way as those with less melanin. Supplements can partly address that, but there may be something about the body's own naturally produced vitamins that are superior.

So should we lockdown? Should Mobile? Should they adopt stronger restrictions that might keep people apart, but might also keep people inside and out of the sun? Would it matter? Maybe we still don't know enough to know how to judge what would reduce deaths.

E Hines said...

Couple small bits:

Conservatives normally reject abortion, but not by rejecting the idea that individuals should have a kind of ownership of their physical body....

Indeed. Some of us Conservatives (I don't speak for very many) reject abortion, not by disparaging the woman's right to control her own body, but by insisting that the baby has an equal right to his own body--he just needs someone to speak for him. "My body, my choice" applies to all of us, not just several of us. And it applies whether the question is pregnancy or getting a shot or being locked down. On that last, my home is my castle, not my dungeon. I'll sally whenever I see fit to.

This particular set of vaccines not only uses a new technology (for mRNA; I went with the old-fashioned J&J), it also now is supposed to require regular booster shots.

Well, one booster, anyway. And so might the J&J vaccine, J&J is beginning to suggest. There are other vaccines, also, that need boosters, tried and true vaccines: Hepatitis B (which requires an initial dose of three shots, vice two for the current mRNA Wuhan Virus vaccines) might need a booster for the immuno-depressed. Tetanus needs a booster every 10 years, and sometimes after a tetanus infection--what some Wuhan Virus worriers might call a "breakthrough" infection. Whooping cough's primary vaccine, DTaP, needs a booster every 10 years, and every time a woman gets pregnant, which boosts the woman even more often, even though the target is the baby.

Whether the Wuhan Virus vaccines--at least our mRNA and the J&J versions--need more than one booster, or a booster every 10 years, or annually remains to be seen.

Eric Hines

raven said...

The problem is the lies- the CDC admitted people who die FROM covid, not WITH covid, amount to 6% of the total. The lies abound about this- I keep hearing about hospitals where 95% of the covid cases are unvaccinated. Yet the nurses say it is about half. I am really curious about the younger deaths, because if they are vaccinated this could be the leading edge of what has been the downfall of every other coronavirus vaccine attempted- ADE.

I personally know (or should say, am aware of), of one person who died "from" covid. He was the father of a sisters husband, 101 years old, with several complicating issues. COVID COVID COVID run and hide and lock it all down.

How many people do you folks know who died FROM covid?

. This virus is doing what viruses do- it is getting more infectious, and less lethal. It is not going to be eliminated, and it is not going to kill us all. It is going to circulate , become endemic, and we are all going to get it at some point, and a few will die from it, just like we die from flu and colds- a few, who are sick. Judging by the stats, the CDC would have been miles ahead urging everyone to lose weight, as obesity seems to be the # 1 complicating factor.Followed by diabetes, a subset of #one.
But no, we are pushing vaccinating (in quotes, this has no relation to a TRADITIONAL VACCINE) everyone in the face of a pandemic, with a leaky AKA non sterilizing vaccine guaranteed to produce evasion- Insane. While demonizing every option for treatment that does not dump dollars into the hands of drug companies and hospitals.

The potential adverse reactions from this are a nightmare. and no, the worst will not be immediate. The previous animal trials for coronavirus vaccines seemed to be going fine too- till they caught the wild virus and all of them died.

And to cap this all off, since the vaccine does not prevent infection, nor does it prevent transmission,somehow all the non vaxxed are to blame.

It is really interesting to me how this belief issue cuts across ethnicity, party line, education, social strata, and every other way to slice up a group of people- there are those who accept the narrative, and those who don't. And the weirdest is some will buy the story, who swore a year ago BIG PHARMA was the apex of evil. Epipens from $40 dollars a two pack to $800!! Bad Bad! Fear is a fantastic control tool.

you know, the funny thing- I have always been at the leading edge of worry about stuff- in January 2020 I was all over this story from China, at a time it was a non issue. And I was freaked out. People were collapsing on the street. Giant fire trucks were running three abreast up avenues spraying disinfectant. Chinese police in moon suits were welding up stanchions to keep people from exiting apartments. Crematoriums were running 24/7. They were running out of urns. All on you-tube, from cell phone videos, from the most tightly controlled nation on earth. Hmm. Something wicked this way comes from the Wuhan Bio Weapons Lab. And over a period of months, I watched, and watched and watched- as the hysteria built, and the questions mounted- why was this scenario not repeated anywhere else? Why did all our special hospital ships and stadium tent hospitals go un-used? Where did all the normal flu deaths go? Why was there no attempt to test all ready existing drugs, and in fact an orchestrated censorship enacted against anyone questioning the approved story? There is a list of questions a mile long-

If this was serious enough to justify the restrictions imposed, we should be looking at a stack of bodies on every street corner. OK< hyperbole- let me re-phrase-

If this was serious enough to justify the restrictions imposed every one of us, should PERSONALLY know someone who died from this.

This is about money and power, not disease.


Grim said...

I don't know that ADE is going to be a big issue; no currently issued vaccines are productive of that. But I do think that power -- and money, as you say -- are bigger motivators for the bureaucracy than public health. There's no reason to ban people from buying food garden seeds in a store they're already in, which is already open and where there's already interaction to buy the approved products. There was also great reason not to do it, because the supply chain disruptions suggested that we might have trouble getting food. That kind of starvation is at least as dangerous as COVID, though fortunately we didn't get hit as hard as we might have done.

But that's what that one governor did in Michigan.

raven said...

And that is the point- WE do NOT KNOW if antibody dependent enhancement is going to be a problem, because the test was not done , and cannot be done without time- some things can be rushed, but time cannot be compressed. That is why this is so insanely reckless.
It is a toss of the dice.
And the risk- reward ration is skewed so badly - if ADE does turn out to be a problem, as it has in other coronavirus attempts, we could stand to lose a lot of the population. All to ostensibly protect against a virus that kills a few tenths of a percent.
And now they are finding out the jab is losing efficacy rapidly.

Tom said...

if ADE does turn out to be a problem, as it has in other coronavirus attempts

Could you link some info on this? I'd like to read more about it. Thanks!

Also, for AVI, what sources of information do you consider most trustworthy on the topic of COVID in general? What do you think people should be reading to be fully informed?

Anonymous said...

As you put it, Grim, the virus is being loaded with a lot of other arguments. What is the proper way to deal with infectious disease? What is the proper role of federal vs. state government, if there is one in providing information about matters of concern to the public? Is there an acceptable level of risk in society for certain things, and if so, what is that level? What are the limits of personal freedom as compared to public good, and who decides those limits? Should public and private entities control the flow of information, and if so, for what compelling reasons, and how should it be done?

We've been arguing, discussing, and theorizing about many of these questions as a society for some time. Now all of them are concentrating on SARS2-Covid19. Teasing apart the tangle to find out, "What is the basic question being asked?" and then answering that question . . . can't be done by soundbite or in 140 characters, in many cases.

It's a mess, there are very good, thoughtful concerns and positions held by people. There are also people who are making use of the situation and confusion for personal gain and to advance pet ideologies.

It's a mess, and I have no clarity or good answers. I'm certainly not going to impose by beliefs on others, but I don't want their beliefs imposed on me, either.

LittleRed1

Ymarsakar said...

I have done my part in bringing vod s decision upon humanity. So let s let the health ranver and 2 human doctors explain and address many of the points here.

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douglas said...

I don't know that excess deaths here are a good measure, at this time, of the effects of covid per se. Sweden is now looking better and better as their excess deaths for 2021 so far look *very* low, correcting for last year likely, which was itself exacerbated by a record low year in 2019 (so more dry tinder left over for 2020). We have so much 'dry tinder' that it's going to take a couple years to see if we really have excess deaths or not- AND whether they were from covid or instead, the side effects of covid mandates..

random observer said...

Frequent lurker, rarely commented. But this issue strikes a nerve for me, along the lines of AVI's initial comment. I've had some real moments of moral and conceptual dismay.

I am in Canada, born and raised in Ontario. I'd have to check when if ever vaccines were mandatory for adults before. Maybe they never were. But on that thought I'd note-

We haven't had an out of control pandemic of much of anything since before my lifetime [1970]. Even the Hong Kong and Asian flus, the best contenders, were before that and not as out of control. And not of a brand new disease. Most of the public health emergencies I can remember were things like regionalized outbreaks of meningitis, often in teens. There may have been similarly regionalized vaccination requirements.

This is different from any of those times in terms of such metrics as speed of spread and of disease evolution, as well as ease of catching it.

Also, I do remember that vaccination was long mandatory in Ontario if you wanted your kid in the public schools. Medical exemptions perhaps, but boy you'd better have some paperwork. Our culture in the 70s was before the "every kid has an allergy" world of today and the establishment did not easily accept such arguments. Not a limitation on freedom, perhaps, except that you were obliged to provide your kid an education by law, private schools cost an arm and a leg, they also adopted the vaccination requirements anyway, and nobody had heard of homeschooling even if the province would have accepted it. So de facto as well as de jure mandatory vaccination for kids. Including immigrant kids who missed the usual rounds of jabs but arrived later.

This was all just normal. I doubt anyone thought of rudimentary public health measures as tyranny. And Canada's mindsets then were a lot more like America's than today.

I know mileage varies across cultures. Stuff we think of as harmless and routine strike many Americans as tyranny (I'm broadly in favour of private gun ownership as a right and would love to see more freedom of transport and less arbitrary rules, but don't see a problem with gun licenses and required safety courses as such). Some Brits still think of armed police as a force for tyranny. Once we all in Angloworld thought any police were a form of tyranny. But all that considered, I can't understand pretty basic public health as such. If we were in a Black Death situation, real tyranny would be appropriate public health- blockades of towns, seizing and burning property, internment, you name it. This disease doesn't come close and while I think some of the lockdowns were over the top in the US, what we had was pretty limited. Im biased- I couldn't care less about travel.

And yet now we are at a point where many I otherwise agree with in Canada as well as the US have taken up opposition to vaccination in full Thomas Paine mode, which strikes me as equivalent to such opposition, not even to trifles like seatbelts, but to drivers licensing or mandatory car insurance, or the existence of police or fire services.

Maybe it's risk management at heart, not liberty. But even then, I'm 50, diabetic, high BP, and maybe asthmatic though w/o symptoms, so I figured getting COVID is far more likely to kill me than vaccines already given to millions, developed quickly or not. I just don't get it.