Interesting news: No luck, even for full vaxxed Taiwanese wanting to return to their own country.
True in the narrow sense, so I gave that a like. However, one small correction:
Unvaccinated old people:
Catch and spread virus
High risk of severe illness and hospitalization
Vaccinated old people:
Catch and spread virus
High risk of severe illness and hospitalization
Unvaccinated old people:
Catch and spread virus
High risk of severe illness and hospitalization due to COVID
Vaccinated old people:
Catch and spread virus
Lower risk of severe illness and hospitalization due to COVID
To be clear : old people are at very high risk of hospitalisation and death, for an assortment of reasons, because they are old. Their additional risk due to COVID is relatively small: for an 80-year-old, all-cause mortality risk increases from something like 15% to 18%, IIRC, in a high-COVID prevalence situation. Since they respond poorly to vaccines, their risk reduction after vaccination is also small.
In absolute terms, then, two āidenticalā old people, one vaccinated and one not, might have an all-cause mortality risk of 16% and 18% respectively.
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The upshot of that article seems to be āvaccines donāt do what we want them to do, so lockdowns will continue foreverā.
Iām not sure what antibiotics have to do with the situation, but yes, thatās broadly true (not universally true - smallpox and measles vaccines, I believe, do induce sterilizing immunity). And your point is?
If you do want to bring antibiotics into the picture, itās worth pointing out that misuse of antibiotics - eg., routine prescription prior to lab culture and testing, prescription without reasonable justification, and their use as prophylactics in meat factories - has caused immense harm. Many once-useful antibiotics are now completely ineffective.
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Another excellent analysis! But, since the vaccines have no long term safety studies, then that has to be factored into the equation. Anybody taking them might have additional risks that those that have not taken them do not have. We simply do not know.
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Indeed.
Two things annoy me intensely:
-
āScientistsā who stand up in front of the TV cameras and announce āweāve vaccinated hundreds of millions of people, so the vaccine must be safeā. There are at least two holes in that statement so large that you could build an intergalactic highway through them.
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The risk calculation changes dramatically depending on how old you are, and this is always ignored by the pro-vaccine crowd. For people in the 50-70 agegroup, it might be a reasonable calculated gamble to take an untested vaccine. For people who are very old, itās largely pointless. For people who are very young, the calculation comes down very firmly on the side of ādonāt do itā, precisely because the long term risks are completely unknown (and AFAIK arenāt even being monitored). If - for the sake of argument - it turned out to impair reproductive health, giving it to people under 40ish would be a criminal act.
Iāve been thinking similar things myself. Itās depressing, and I can understand why a lot of people donāt want to think these things and prefer to live in a warm fuzzy dreamworld where everything is OK as long as they stay in their homes and accept this weekās vaccine. But as the guy says, it really is time to pick a side. This has little to do with science anymore. Itās about what sort of world we want to live in.
What makes it challenging is that the question used to be āwhat kind of country do you want to live in?ā. That was a manageable thing to contemplate. But now itās all gone global, and most of us just canāt cope with a problem of that enormity. Nevertheless, we have to pick a side.
In a sense itās a pity the world canāt just divide itself into two : believers and non-believers. The humbug thread itself seems to have prevented a lot of nastiness by separating people with irreconcilable views. Canāt we just sort of, I dunno, set up a Caliphate of COVID where all the anointed ones can go to stick needles in each other and engage in PPE cosplay, and everyone else can just get back to life as normal?
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Totally agree with this.
We could all go to Sweden! 
Fortunately, humanity is (slowly) beginning to wake up to the total mess weāve been in for an eternity.
Covid mini rant incomingā¦
Iām getting slightly p***ed by these temp readings. Why am I being mandatorily detained to undergo a useless āheath checkā by clearly medically-unqualified store clerks? Why are these guys all of a sudden the guardians of national health policy, allegedly screening the populace for Covid? Why are they now the ones who determine whether or not I am healthy enough or not to enter the store?
Oh, I know, the Covid passport will eventually be required, plus instant PCR test. Maybe theyāll ditch the temp. reading at that stage?
And to think all I wanted was to buy some cookies.
To paraphrase CJ Hopkins: Itās simply pathologized totalitarianism. Weāre remaking whatever remains of society into a global pseudo-medicalized police state.
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It will be interesting to see what will become of people and societies as these restrictions continue to take away what makes life worth living: enjoying freely with family and friends, going to pubs/bars, eating out, singing and dancing, parties and weddings, live sports, travelling the world, and so on.
Is this what the anti-choicers call an āanti-vaxxerā?
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Bloody hell, that guy appears to have snorted at least a half gram before that tweet.
Jokes aside, I feel heās not quite balanced and hope heās okay.
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He does seem to be a bit manic, doesnāt he. Still, I agree with him that there are millions of people who are sick of it all and (perhaps!) Nuremburg is coming.
Temp checks: who was it who commented that itās just a submission ritual? Itās designed so that you have to bow your head to the machine. Canāt remember if it was someone on forumosa or one of cakeās twitter links.
Here is something @finley has been talking about for a long time. The link with co-morbidities:
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Interview with Mattias Desmet, psychotherapist & Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University on the psychology of totalitarianism.
Iām just going to put this up here. I can recommend his writing just for entertainment value as well as his wise words.
I was tickled to find heās made exactly the same suggestion I did the other day: we should ātattooā ourselves with a Nazi-regime-style identifier, deliberately marking ourselves out as one of the Enemy:
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Oops! 
yeah, sorry, I just read your PM and deleted that bit 
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The issue with this at the moment is it justifies apartheid.
Actually I suspect this is set up.
GEts to go on CNN. One man in a mask protesting who appears in the news piece and the owner disgards him (āLook! That evil anti-vaxxer is nasty to mask wearersā).
Good God. How does anybody end up with ā6-10ā comorbidities? It must take a lifetime of serious dedication to junk food, TV, alcohol and couch-sitting to achieve that level of ill-health.
But yeah. This sits well with the information released by the UK ONS, indicating that only about 1 in 25 COVID deaths were recorded as having no comorbidities associated with them. So seems legit.
And the implication, of course, is that if weād told people back in April 2020 to get themselves healthy with the greatest expediency, we could have actually saved lives, at very little cost.
But as we all know by now, āsaving livesā is not the goal, and probably never was.
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