I thought that something like a pandemic would have brought us all together around a base truth. However, politics + social media was stronger than R₀, this time.
That particular plague is in Il Promisi Sposi ( The Betrothed), the Italian national epic. Really, it's a bit picardesque. But the first hand descriptions of that plague are just so damn similar to what the COVID was like. I remember reading it years before the pandemic and thinking that I was glad we weren't so mideaval anymore. Now it read it again ( it's only a few chapters in the book) and I feel more like one veteran talking to another about their war.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45334
Chapter 31 is where the plague part starts, you needn't really read the rest, but it's a good summer book all the same
;)
However Standard Ebooks didn't have it. They did have a page about how they want sponsors or volunteers to help create it which I found interesting in itself:
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/alessandro-manzoni/the-bet...
Three of my direct coworkers died from covid. One guy didn't get his sense of taste back for a year.
People just gasping to death in their bedrooms waiting for things to improve and only going to the overloaded ER when it's too late.
I'm an asthmatic, I've been close to that feeling where sub 90% oxygen saturation made me feel like death. Anything like 80% your lungs start to fail. You're dead in a hurry.
On my part, I didn’t need anyone to tell me how various masks do or do not work. They all have certifications one can read on their own.
But, that mask messaging was bad. I suppose the alternative was, yes masks work, but we don’t enough have for you. Apparently we are not adult enough to hear that type of thing. And, I mean we’re not.
The fact of the matter is that such dishonesty makes one untrustworthy. It was clear that everyone landed in political lines here. The right answer is to not lie. “You can’t handle the truth” is nice in a movie but we’re in real life and if you say that to me you shouldn’t be surprised if the next time you say something I think that you’re lying again.
East Harlem - poor district - no health officials only harsh police enforcement, >20 people arrested.
Lots of arrests in Manhattan for social distancing. Even taking video of the arrests got you arrested
https://abc30.com/nypd-violent-arrest-east-village-caught-on...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/08/social-dista...
Famous report of Texas woman arrested for not wearing mask to Bank AFTER Abbott rolled back the federal mask mandate.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/13/us/galveston-arrest-bank-...
No mask - no vote https://marylandmatters.org/2020/10/28/gop-lawmaker-takes-le...
Famous case of Mom arrested and taken to the ground for not wearing mask correctly, lol. https://ny1.com/nyc/brooklyn/coronavirus-blog/2020/05/15/mot...
We can go on and on...but seriously do people have such terrible short term memory that all the arrests, business closures and police abuse are already forgotten ?
In multiple cases, the individual was given the opportunity to comply with the law (or request, in the case of a private business), refused, and then was arrested for trespassing when they were asked to leave. That's actually different from "Arrested for not wearing a mask".
In one article, the women who refused to wear the mask threatened to cough on people.
In another case, the lawsuit was thrown out by the judge; the individual who was arrested was actually given the opportunity to vote (in a no-mask area), but refused and then was asked to leave, then arrested for trespassing.
There certainly were rights violations, and unnecessary violence/arrests by law enforcement officials. I'm not excusing those, but I will observe that it's challenging to uphold the law in a rapidly changing medical emergency.
In another ac
> When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent ... Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, "I can nudge this up a bit," so I went to 80, 85. We need to have some humility here .... We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I'm not going to say 90 percent.
The intention doesn't really matter; you can't admit to lying for policy purposes, then wonder why people stopped trusting the government.
But if the bar is that public officials must communicate flawlessly during an emergency situation and have it so all of their recommendations end up being the correct ones once we have complete information then there's no possible hope. People point at the changing guidance as evidence of a conspiracy when public health officials were learning new things every day.
There should be public debate around most of any issue. Tell people something as simple that getting some sunlight is good for them and some will even argue against it claiming that no it's not, you'll just get skin cancer. And that's fine, even those sort of views deserve their place in the public discourse. But when that discourse is completely absent - presumably to try to give the appearance of complete consensus, it doesn't inspire confidence, but destroys it.
The problem isn't the lack of debate, it is the hysteria against minor inconvenience and raw selfishness.
And the raw milk (might or might not contain a bit of cow poop)
Maybe he did have a real parasite in his brain, but according to him the parasite left no permanent damage after it got cleaned up after the divorce ended in his favour.
I don't see why raw milk necessarily contains cow poop unless the udders aren't cleaned before milking (though I suppose you can't trust the diary industry to take care of that reliably) but I doubt he's consuming any of it beyond the public appearances set up for the raw milk grifters.
Why attribute to insanity that which could just as easily be attributed to corruption and lies.
Indeed
Because his “insanity” is more than just a claimed brain worm:
The trauma from the men in his life being assassinated when he was an impressionable little boy. He now blames the CIA for both.
The heroin addiction.
The whale on the car incident.
The bear cub corpse in NYC.
The swimming in raw sewage.
There is no spy or health conspiracy too large for this guy. Everyone is corrupt/corruptable in his mind except him.
These are not the actions of a stable person. His solution to autism is to dictate that there is no significant genetic component, then give scientists 6 months to “find the cause” (after hijacking all of the medical data the US government can coerce).
Sure, there is corruption in that he is making referral money from some of his companies. I’m not sure he’s lying though — that requires Mens Rea. He might just have crazy ideas about reality. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t believe in _germ theory_ after his statements about HIV /AIDS.
https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/04/rfk-jr-s-anti-vaccine...
> It's important to note here that our understanding of Kennedy's disbelief in germ theory isn't based on speculation or deduction; it's based on Kennedy's own words. He wrote an entire section on it in his 2021 book vilifying Fauci, titled The Real Anthony Fauci. The section is titled "Miasma vs. Germ Theory," in the chapter "The White Man's Burden."
I posted my remark because "swimming in raw sewage" gives a pretty lurid picture, as of Oliver St. John Gogarty's escape through the Liffey--"not really swimming, just going through the movements."
He (the head of US HHS) seems to be trying to push a medical social Darwinism (eg. Expose people directly to the deadly pathogens instead of using vaccines/inoculations), without getting anywhere close to a national consensus.
He is surrounding himself with sycophants of his strange pseudo-scientific beliefs. He claims to believe in science and testing, but the choices he has made as a political leader at the head of the HHS have been top-down dictates and fabricated + sock puppets “research” he is too scared to have peer reviewed in public by de-anonymized reviewers.
It happened with Governor Perry and the Department of Energy, and with Dan Bongino and the Epstein suicide.
This is the only way I see we break the fever of MAGA in a relatively short period of time.
Once it turned out not to be true public trust was seriously eroded.
(1) https://abc3340.com/news/local/those-fully-vaccinated-very-u...
Weird link you got there.
You: Fauci's statement is true.
Me: How does that square with the fact that approximately everyone got covid? Do you think all of the infections came from unvaccinated people?
You: The vaccine was never advertised to prevent infection 100%, especially after time.
Do you see the logical disconnect here? How what you wrote was not responsive to the question?
A: If vaccinated then p(transmission) = low.
B: p(transmission) != low, given that many vaccinated people had to have transmitted.
How can A and B both be true? Or are you saying that B is not true, and everyone got sick via immaculate infection?
I was told by family and friends that the shots were 100% safe and effective, and that if I didn't take the shot I wanted grandma to die, because that's what the TV told them; and when I tried to show them quotes from the actual scientists creating the shots that contradicted that, they said it was misinformation.
Sorry - calling absolute bullshit on this one.
Take a look at the vaccine studies - only J&J actually tested the effect on transmission, and J&J was hardly used.
The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines never tested transmission. So why would Fauci make such a claim?
Pfizer trial protocols: https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577/suppl_f...
Moderna trial protocols: https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2035389/suppl_f...
But what did Fauci say on national news?
“So even though there are breakthrough infections with vaccinated people, almost always the people are asymptomatic and the level of virus is so low it makes it extremely unlikely — not impossible but very, very low likelihood — that they’re going to transmit it,” Fauci said.
Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” - June 16, 2021
While the vaccines do not eliminate all transmission, they can help. Studies done after distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines began, including research by Pfizer, did find that the company’s shot reduced asymptomatic infections in addition to symptomatic cases with earlier variants of the virus. Researchers in the United Kingdom reported in a February observational study that Pfizer’s vaccine helped cut transmission of the alpha and delta variants.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-pfizer-transmission-eu...
I don't remember the Manhattan project making any public statements that had an impact on public health?
What kind of a comparison is that?
Yeah, that's my point.
How is your example at all relevant?
1. They lied about masks, first it was irrelevant whether you wore one or not, then they changed their mind and suddenly masks were super important and you just have to wear one or else. The truth is that it probably helps a little because duh, you have some cloth in front of your breathing, it probably catches some particles but definitely not all all the time. Saying that scientific truth evolved is utter nonsense, experts definitely always knew particle size and mask efficiency. They just didn't care and didn't do their job figuring it out and telling people the real efficiency.
2. They lied constantly that vaccines are super safe and super effective, outright attempting to gaslight you that "nobody" dies to vaccines. Which is just a flat out lie. People absolutely died from vaccines and always have. Just stop lying about it.
3. The U.S president himself lied that you will not spread it anymore if you get vaccinated. All lies. And it was definitely already known at the time he said this, frankly it's common sense.
3. They lied about herd immunity which is basically impossible to achieve.
4. Deals with vaccine companies were kept secret, that doesn't exactly inspire much confidence to follow guidances when everyone knows how much money can corrupt.
5. They mounted a massive coercion campaign and constantly shamed everyone in the most pathetic ways possible with patronizing TV coverage. Colbert's little vaccine dance is historic at this point.
6. They strongly suppressed alternative points of view from other scientists and doctors. These were not flatearther tier people, they made good points and many were and are well respected people. And yet they were suppressed anyway.
And after all this you come here with a very generic comment about how disappointed you are that people didn't come together on a base truth. I'm disappointed that you seem to have no complaints and offer such a generic, apologist view of the past.
Commercial airplane travel is super safe. Some people die from commercial airplane crashes. Both statements are true. Ignorance is bliss.
Covid vaccines have different risk based on sex and age. The blood clot risk of the AZ vaccine was similar to the ICU risk from Covid for under 40s. The Moderna vaccine caused heart problems for young males.
Both of these issues were downplayed by politicians and officials, but the public health system eventually worked and AZ was discarded while young males were switched to Biontech.
With ideological purges done by the fake, ideological left, which is still in power in the western EU, it’s not clear that we won’t have nonsense policies in the future, such as dictating that BLM protests are fine during Covid while everyone else must stay indoors.
We have zero expectation that information on Tuberculosis in 1920 is accurate today. Some of it is, a lot of it isn't.
COVID was a new disease. That means, no matter what, we were going to change our mind a lot. It's honestly quite impressive we didn't change our minds more.
You are wrong.
Here in Sweden, I never got covid that I know of, people lined up real fast to get the vaccine without any threats.
Unfortunately, because of how special Americans are, the outcome of being stuck with this current administration was inevitable. It was going to happen sooner or later.
Im glad at least its happening sooner when Im still fairly young and have the flexibility to peace out if I need to.
Asking people to inject themselves with something that was rushed out the door, most using novel technology, and whose results did not come remotely close to the early rhetoric (which included claims that you would not get infected or spread COVID if vaccinated) is not something that people would ever organically rush to adopt.
The only country that had a very good societal response was Japan, as a result they had one of the lowest death rates in the world, even with their aging population, while having the law in place that pretty much only restrict government power to closing certain places, without being able to enforce quarantine. The initial decision of the government was even against imposing emergency powers, but eventually all parties agreed that emergency powers were necessary.
>Asking people to inject themselves with something that was rushed out the door, most using novel technology, and whose results did not come remotely close to the early rhetoric (which included claims that you would not get infected or spread COVID if vaccinated) is not something that people would ever organically rush to adopt.
And yet, those same people eat food that contains who knows what, was processed with random chemicals that may or may not cause cancer, buy meat from animals injected with chemicals that they don't know the contents of, smoke, drink alchol, vape.
But suddenly, when it comes to taking a vaccine with technology that not only has been around for a while, but also adequately tested, the "government can't be trusted".
The negative response to vaccine was never about government distrust, it was pretty much a very easy ideological line to draw in the sand. This is why every single anti vaxxer person on their way to the grave breathing through a ventilator was changing their mind and telling people to take the vaccine, because when shit actually gets real, ideology matters less.
And equivalently now, maybe (and hopefully), when US is embroiled in civil unrest with martial law in place, and people can't feed their families, they will realize that having a black woman president would have been probably a much better outcome than voting for a convicted felon who sold them lies of individual liberty.
First of all, a medical treatment which is enforced by the government is a major thing, no matter how small the intervention may appear.
In Germany a limited mandate for healthcare workers was introduced. This didn’t force people to accept a vaccine, but they could be temporarily forbidden from coming to work. This was declared valid by the constitutional court.
Forcing people to get the vaccine would clearly contradict the constitution on the other hand.
Problem is, in America, that group is large enough to make significant impact on government.
People still act like it's some common cold. My partner has nearly no taste left, years later. That's an entire sense, a fundamental perception, gone.
Even if it was a common cold, I don't want to be forced to have it.
Versus those of us that were forced to get the the vaccine lest suffer the social consequences and live with the physical repercussions?
Or the conservative viewpoint now that one is entitled to have a job, and people MUST be nice to you? Sounds very leftist if you ask me.
I lived in Orange County CA at the start of the pandemic and moved to Cincinnati in the great diaspora. Went shopping in both places. Was never asked about a vaccine. I did have to mask up.
I don’t recall being asked about a vaccine anywhere. If I worked certain jobs I can imagine it, and those would be jobs where it would make sense.
There are countries that had a stricter response, but this is a US centric discussion. Hearing Americans complain about lock downs makes me roll my eyes. The USA did not have “lock downs” outside a few very dense metros you were free to leave at any time.
Old school union Democrats were often fiercely anti immigration too. Trump turned Ohio from purple to red and carried a lot of that region by pulling in these people.
I’m not personally a fan of populism of either left or right variety. It almost always has a negative outcome. It turns out that experts, even if they are sometimes assholes, often do really know something, and purging them and putting crackpots and apparatchiks in charge has consequences. People who don’t know how to do things don’t do them as well.
RFK is going to be an epic disaster. I think he’s the worst person in the administration in terms of potential long term blast radius. He’s a crank who will kill people with new agey granola anti medicine bullshit.
I used to regard that stuff as part of the loony left. I guess it was. Trump is the Sauron of crackpottery, gathering all con artists and crackpots to himself as if by some magical magnetism.
Sure, you could just say "well just ruin your future and NEET it up forever", but is that really any different than having it literally mandated? Remember, at the time it was heavily pushed that mandates would not be going away in the future, so the implication was anything forgone in the present would be for naught when you're inevitably forced to recieive it eventually anyway.
Granted, at the time I thought nothing if it, and happily got my first two doses. It was actually the experience of suffering side-effects from the second vaccine and getting labelled "anti-vax" when asking those around me for help that really turned me off the whole movement, forever.
You'd probably find more people in any given thread pushing back against the tech stack the OP site is using, lol
There used to be a lot less of us critics around 2020/2021, I don't know if it's a case of less moderation around such topics nowadays (doubtful, I'd expect dang to be pretty good even in the COVID heyday) or if there's more of us that have since wisened up or developed health conditions ourselves.
When you come out of the gate with masks aren't effective, just was your hands, then go to masks are mandatory, Americans are going to be upset because you're making them do something that you just told them not to do. They're also going to distrust future recommendations. When a new mandate comes through, they're going to be less likely to comply and more likely to make a big fuss.
Combine that with less than effective outreach on reasonable expectations of the vaccine in terms of reduction of illness and immune response to the injection, and it's a recipie for mistrust.
And since many of the mandates were found unenforcable, it weakens the potential power of future mandates, should there be a need.
Yes, this is true