This Twitter thread is surreal.
Surely in any rational polity, one where country (or state) mattered more than party, the calls would be ringing to impeach Governor DeSantis for his campaign to cause the children of Florida to infect their (often elderly, or immunocompromised, or – this being Florida – unvaccinated) vulnerable relatives, thus leading in many cases to hospitalization and death.
But this is, demonstrably, not a rational polity. [Update: see Masking Is Effective] So the question, blunt and indecorous as it may be, must be asked: how many dead people will it take before impeaching DeSantis becomes sufficiently necessary that people demand it of our gerrymandered and Republican-controlled but, one assumes, still-human state legislature?
Recall that the Governor’s policy is not simply one of inaction in the face of pandemic: it is to very actively block local government attempts to prevent the spread of the disease, and to punish (now via his tame Board of Education) those who have the moral courage to act in the face of his attempts to intimidate them.
What’s that you say? There is no chance that the Trumpist Florida House of Representatives would ever risk angering its base — the kind of people who boo Trump himself when he encourages vaccination — by even tolerating a suggestion that ur-Trumpist DeSantis’s pro-death policy was in any way objectionable? I agree that is the most likely story. But ‘a week is a long time in politics’. And the movement has to start somewhere.
UPDATE (8/24): A new poll shows that a large majority of the people of Florida think DeSantis’s stand on mask rules is nuts. That doesn’t inevitably mean that (despite being immoral) it’s a bad tactic to get the Republican nomination, as Republicans agree with DeSantis’s view 72 – 24 percent. It’s everyone else who loathes them: Democrats support school mask requirements 98 – 1 percent, independents support them 63 – 32 percent.
Anyone still afraid of the rona needs to isolate in a green zone until the end of days.
Sure, because there is nothing to worry about!
Please show me a place in the world without risk.
Then once you find that location simply move there.
There is no place without risk of infection when there is a global pandemic. (There is of course variety as to degree of risk; Florida compares poorly to most
of the US right now in this.) That is why it is essential to take all reasonable measures to bring it under substantial control worldwide, else it comes back.
The weight of current scientific opinion is that as covid is aerosolized, masks help stop the spread. They may do more for other people than the wearer, but that does not reduce their importance.
I wonder if I might ask you to aim for less splenetic and/or more substantive posts? Maybe take ten before hitting the post button?
I have tried posting substantive comments that took me weeks in the making to subsequently receive no feedback so every once in a blue moon I will simply float a basic idea to see if it gets any traction and develop it accordingly.
After reviewing the logic behind the views embraced by you and others, I am convinced that the people asking everyone to modify their default lifestyles and subsequently inject novel substances into their bloodstream for the indefinite future are simply lacking in balance.
Just like the House rounds down minority views and the Senate rounds up in order to reach a semblance of equilibrium in the chaos of the masses, every single concept in logic needs to be constrained by a top-down and bottom-up approach to reasoning.
While it may sound good on paper to attain zero-Covid by forcing the majority to substantially alter their lifestyles for the indefinite future at great cost to society, it only approaches the issue of the greater good from a single dimension.
The alternative viewpoint would be that the minority of citizens need to alter their lifestyles instead of the majority.
I raised the point in a previous post that vulnerable individuals need to become healthier with government mandated daily exercise and dietary restrictions at the very least. They will need to take all possible medications regardless of personal risk because it’s for their own good.
And what about the issue with the diabetics who became vulnerable to disease because of poor lifestyle choices? Or smokers who now are at increased risk of pneumonia from any cold?
Why does the world have to revolve around them and not the other way around?
We require vaccinations eg measles mumps chicken pox for many things eg public school already. This is not materially different, assuming a narrow religious opt out.
Your blather about exercise as an answer for the immunocompromised is frankly ignorant. Read something about transplant patients and persons on chemo. I take this aggressive ignorance personally since I’m in the circa 3% of the immunocompromised. And at times in my treatment the issue was staying conscious, not how far to jog.
Zero Covid may not be attainable soon or at all. Very very much less Covid, like modern measles or ebola, may be attainable. But the more DeSantis and his ilk turn their states into variant-creation-friendly Petri dishes, the greater the odds of spread, and in time growing variants that elude the first gen vaccinations.
With respect to the vaccine programs in the United States, my research into autism this last decade has strongly led to a shocking conclusion that adjuvants pass the blood-brain barrier, get stuck in the meninges and subsequently create the lifetime of inflammation that has only recently been identified in the examination of autistic brains and possibly others (eg, Alzheimer’s).
“Aluminum is an experimentally demonstrated neurotoxin and the most commonly used vaccine adjuvant. Despite almost 90 years of widespread use of aluminum adjuvants, medical science’s understanding about their mechanisms of action is still remarkably poor.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21568886/
“Animal experiments indicate that biopersistent nanomaterials taken-up by monocytes-lineage cells in tissues, e.g. fluorescent alum surrogates, can first translocate to draining lymph nodes, and thereafter circulate in blood within phagocytes and reach the spleen, and, eventually, slowly accumulate in brain.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3623725/
“Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most prevalent neurodegenerative disease of the elderly and is characterized by regional specificity of neural aberrations associated with higher cognitive functions. Aluminum (Al) is the most abundant neurotoxic metal on earth, widely bioavailable to humans and repeatedly shown to accumulate in AD-susceptible neuronal foci.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21157018/
Is your fear of the population merely existing and indirectly causing poor health to you any more significant than my fear of the vaccine causing significant harm to me?
In all your years of research into the law and government, have you ever once considered the possibility that the powers that be are evil beyond comprehension and don’t care about the people and the vaccine is just another lie to make money for a very small group of psychopaths in charge?
Assuming this is a real issue, what is the quantity of those substances in a dose of vaccine, and how does it compare to other vectors suspected (e.g. pans, foil-on-food) as pre-covid causes? I’m gonna guess that as a vaccine is a small quantity it’s tiny, but I don’t know for a fact – do you?
I don’t know anything for sure to be quite honest with you.
After a lifetime of trying to fix my autism, my research has led to me to believe that the medical community has no interest in solving anything other than their money issues.
I can prepare another 9+ page substantive comment to respond to this medical topic but I am sure you will just tell me to feel ashamed of myself for trying.
(FYI – you have no idea how painful it is when someone you look up to says that to you.)
But just like you believe in the power of discourse to explore the realm of human experience, the censoring of academic articles that question the correlation between vaccines and chronic health effects in and of itself raises a significant red flag to me.
And it should to you as well.
It has been known for over 100 years now that injecting substances directly into the bloodstream creates an allergic reaction that is not seen by the normal exposure to these substances.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1913/richet/lecture/
The plant-based adjuvants of old could also explain the mysterious creation of “hay fever” since the early 1800s which also corresponds with the introduction of vaccines in the first place.
You do realize that peanut allergies are also a result of the adjuvants being injected into the bloodstream and creating a lifelong reaction in some people, right?
Safe and effective indeed.
You do realize that the issue in the post was MASK WEARING not vaccinations, right? Although to be fair I would also support requiring vaccinations (subject to religious & medical exceptions) for a wide variety of shared activities.
It’s just good that we have a “news” story that distracts us from the Biden administration, single-handedly botching any chance of a clean pullout from Afghanistan and the inevitable new Hostage-Crisis that is in the works. Not to mention the very real stain this puts on any idea that the U.S. actually DOES have the back of those various countries who are only not at war today because their enemies believe we are protecting them.
Certainly, wearing masks that numerous studies have shown are less than effective, and the endless debates about whether otherwise healthy young people will suddenly seize up and die when they get within 10 feet of the virus, is more important than thousands of Americans that Biden shows no real interest in saving, who will soon be completely at the mercy of the Taliban, once the Taliban decide to stop allowing the use of the ONE runway Biden decided to keep running at the Taliban’s pleasure.
You also better hope all these Trump and DeSantis supporters don’t stop enlisting in our armed forces, because trust me, you won’t have enough Biden supporters to fill the gaps.
You have no perspective at all where the risk is in the world today.
We should have just waited “two more weeks” before leaving.
But in all seriousness, it’s another round of the circus act in clown world.
OK. Since I’m so awful I invite you to go away and stop commenting. Your comments are of negative value and make me feel I have to explain why, in case someone is fooled by them. Eg peer reviewed studies in fact do show masks reduce transmission of covid. See https://www.kxan.com/news/coronavirus/do-face-masks-work-here-are-49-scientific-studies-that-explain-why-they-do/ for details.
Anyway I have no patience for seditious insurrectionists, and part of your post pretty nearly goes there.
So, goodbye.
The poll you cite contacted 997 of the 21,000,000 people in FL.
https://poll.qu.edu/images/polling/fl/fl08242021_demos_fldn33.pdf
And please don’t censor Vic – I appreciate learning about his worldly perspective.
I truly have no idea why you think this 997 point is a sensible critique of a state poll using standard sampling methods. I am not being coy. I simply can’t imagine what you could have thought it tended to prove if you had even a rudimentary understanding of how polling works.
Are you aware polling firms routinely use similar samples to poll the entire nation? That a couple thousand for the whole USA can be considered a great sample? Have you ever had a basic stats course? I tell all my students they need one to avoid dumb mistakes, and to avoid being taken advantage of by those who understand numbers.
Are you saying they needed to sample the whole state population? Do you have a trained opinion on what would be a sufficient sample? Do you have any reason to suspect, other than negativity and cussedness, that the result is not a very plausible depiction of reality? One likely right within a reasonable margin of error?
It is true that the move to cell phones away from land lines has increased the risk of sampling error generally, but there’s no reason I can think of that this poll would be unusually wrong compared to any other. The pollster, Quinipiac, is considered one of the better firms in the business. Plus if the error is in sample design, more sample is not going to be as much better as you seen to want readers to think.
This is exactly the sort of comment you should self-censor if you want any respect. It’s genuinely embarrassing.
And Vic dug his own hole. May he enjoy it. Don’t join him.
You are absolutely correct.
I am truly ashamed of my behavior.
May you enjoy a wonderful and healthy life.
spectrographic analysis has shown that Aluminum is the thirteenth most common element in the universe. Where do you go to avoid it?
Hint: don’t inject into veins.