But not vaccinating, thinking one can outsmart public health officials, being intolerant is apparently not a freedom to me.
Personally I feel lied to and misled, the messaging from the government where I am from was far from what one would call nuanced and informed. The short story is that they promised: "If you take your shots, then we'll get out of this mess". Even now, a propaganda ad that states: "We don't want you to take a booster to make things impossible, we want you to take your booster to make things possible again". Even though it's abundantly clear that people are getting reinfected and spreading Omicron, booster or no booster.
From my perspective we're kidding ourselves that we can get a handle on this disease without permanently going in and out of lockdowns. In my county we stamped out the virus at least twice before (stamped out going to < 20 cases per day, some cities without for months). And then it comes back. Well I'm done locking down, and I think this is a consistent, fair standpoint to take. I don't want to have to identify myself and my status to enter the store or public life. People get sick, people die, everyone will get omicron, or something similar, eventually.
Some people will make decisions you see as stupid or bad. Upside: others can't impose their decisions on you. Downside: you can't impose your decisions on others.
The only problem is faking efficiently.
Highly vaccinated countries are now at the point where any of the current variants are now only a little more dangerous than seasonal flu, which we live with almost every year. As such, barring a more dangerous variant arising, there is no point to further lockdowns. It's endemic, it's not going away entirely, but we can now live with it.
The most important thing we can do now is get the rest of the world into a highly vaccinated state, which will help suppress further variants emerging so quickly.
Fake vaccine cards are the least of our worries. You heard it here first. The emergency medical system is in deep trouble for way too many reasons to enumerate here.
Anecdote time; I responded to the same 200 person retirement home 3 times last night (Thus the "grumpy" tude). "Mask up" signs everywhere, every employee wearing a mask properly, NO visitors for the past month, etc. AND the place is at least 80% infected with Covid. Every resident is "fully vaccinate with boosters"!
The eldery that live there are pissed, we are pissed and the staff is running on fumes. They were told they were getting a vaccine... their definition of vaccine doesn't include still getting the disease, but just a little less sever (which, incidentally has NOT been the case for a lot of them). That doesn't make sense to them or me if I am being honest.
They are sick, some of them really sick. There isn't much we can do except to give them options... stay home and fight the fever/sickness yourself or go to ER and wait for hours (depending on severity of symptoms). We are waiting for transports to the ER for an hour or more as the wall time at ER's explodes due to staffing shortages across the board.
I don't see a difference between what I saw in April, May and June of 2020 and now, with respect to Covid... with the exception of less people willing to work at ER's and EMS. Call numbers are UP massively as everyone thinks covid is going to kill them instantly. Its like people forgot how to take care of a common cold as was the case when Covid hit initially. Treat the fever, drink fluids the second you start feeling bad... don't wait until you have a 104 temp to start taking care of yourself.
I am so jaded with how bad people are at doing ANYTHING for themselves. I often wonder how people have made it to the age of 60, 75, 80 with the kinds of lifestyles I see out there. SO MANY OBESE PEOPLE. SO MANY. You wonder why you are sick? really?
Everyone wants that easy pill (or shot) to “make it go away”. Or the magical mask talisman to wear and ward off evil. But nobody wants to actually make a permanent lifestyle change to end this.
If COVID at the very least serves as a REAL wake up call about our obesity crisis, it would be a miracle outcome for public health.
Hasn't this always been the case with the flu shot which I imagine many if not most people in a retirement home have been getting for years?
COVID19 vaccines, on the other hand, were (contrary to today's frantic efforts to pretend otherwise) always sold as being a) >90% protection and b) ending the pandemic once enough people were vaccinated.
That's problems of communication (Vaccines: You can get pretty sick but you won't die.) and abusing EMS (fear of being sued hypochondria and not triaging calls enough), not the vaccine.
The vaxx card should've contained anti-forging properties like holograms or security threads, and been maintained electronically at issuance with a QR code for verification purposes. The card itself shouldn't be proof.
It seems disingenuous to call the vaccine a "damn joke".
Ontario Canada breaks down deaths by vaccination status, which is currently close to 50/50 on a daily basis.
Please stop believing anything on Reddit.
I guess the people who don't really understand how vaccines work also overlap with with people who don't understand how paper cards with no security features work.
Passports are just a means to move to a social credit score. Which is horrifying in its implications.
You know what would help fight these forgeries? Visible consequences for producing and possessing them.
1. Go back in time and use one or more anti-forgery features of drivers licenses to at least make them hard to forge
2. Hold retailers accountable who fail to check or accept a forgery (like we do for liquor stores checking ID)
3. Consequences for possession of forged documents
4. Find and go after producers of them. This can’t be hard—the police could probably find quite a few just with a web search.
By the way, German administration at the time wanted to be seen as "liberators from communist oppression". The conscription was promoted as highly noble thing, beneficial for the "New Order". Those joining "labor camps" were celebrated. There were bounties set for dobbing in partisans ("bandits"). Although collaborators were many, nonetheless many others, lacking the necessary connections to obtain fake ausweiss, chose to fight the "liberators" with all the rage they could muster. Many paid the ultimate price. If my grandma's document forgery was revealed, the whole family would be in line for execution. By no means it was an "easier" option than conscription, but certainly "easier" than fully joining "people's avengers".
I believe when the matter is perceived as life-and-death, the lack of "easier" option to take out a fake document may very well push some people into full-blood fight. You don't need many of them before society falls into a bloody war. So, the prevalence of fake vaccine certificates may be not a problem, but a blessing in disguise. If one is willing to consider a possible alternative.
Yes, exactly. And "signed" was not the best term. "Filled out" would be better.
In order for vaccine passports to be effective, they need to be full-scale, uniform, and zero-tolerance. For ex. Australia does this high effect.
But in the U.S. every state, business, and household has a different set of rules and they've been making it up as they go. This has resulted in numerous non-fraud scenarios where the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups mingle, and supposedly exchange the virus. Ex. Grocery stores, schools, holiday dinners and parties
Our approach has been so federated that I can't imagine any meaningful improvements can be attributed to the passports. Inversely I can't imagine any real negative effects can be attributed to fraud.
But just now with the pearl-clutching? Because when they handed me my card almost a year ago, I almost didn't hang on to it because my first thought was, "well, no one is going to accept that as proof of vaccination. I could have photocopied it for all anyone knows." Turns out...
Sometimes. In my experience, it's just as likely your photo ID will be scrutinized and compared with the QR code. Which in your scenario does not work. The problem is there are rarely repercussions for the individual that presents the bogus documentation, or the entity that accepts them.
Can just anybody call up say, Walmart and verify if a vaccination card supposedly filled out by them is authentic? If not then that's the issue. Not the fact that fakes exist.
[1] - https://niebezpiecznik.pl/post/falszowanie-certyfikat-covid-... (in Polish)
On a paper this looks great - hell, the solution might even work for a time but additional unexpected factors may spawn out of nowhere and destroy whole thing.
*many liberal Americans
The ideological weakness is self evident. We can't go door to door with police to give everyone the jab, so we wishy-washy try to force people with other measures. Who can respect an authority that lies and betrays one of its core principles? How can one respect a government that truly tried to outlaw natural human behavior? Talk about heavy handed.
There were politics involved but it was relatively mild, and ignored by many people it was about two or three months in when much of the news around COVID changed to being news about how Trump was doing what about the virus, and congress what congress was saying about responses to the virus and the usual schlop I noticed things started to get polarized at the same time the estimates were being adjusted from 1-9% fatality rates to 0.3% fatality rates.
And if it did anticipate it, well that's just worse.
Policy in a representative government tends to come from established interests.
My friend's sibling just died two months ago. Otherwise healthy and everything. Not old. But in a red county with lots of Fox News watchers, so they'd avoided the vaccine. Sad thing is, the rest of the family finally talked them into getting it and they were scheduled but got Covid the week before. Dead a month later.
Honestly, I feel like the pandemic politics predated all the right wing conspiracy theories emergence. The democrats/progressive left/resisters decision to make Covid the central issue to oust Trump is the more likely genesis. Very early on (Jan/Feb 2020) everything the Trump administration was doing was met with immediate 180 degree resistance from the progressive left and the left-leaning media. Including things they later supported—Travel bans, social distancing suggestions and yes, even the vaccine too.
Before I get accused of being a conservative or a Trumpie…I’m not and far far from it. But…I am not willing to excuse problematic approaches that have negative downstream unintended consequences even if the initial intention may have been positive.
Blaming the right is akin to being mad when the person you punched in the nose decides to fight back. How dare they!
https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/does-paying-people-get-v...
Where did they do it that it failed?
I've been really impressed with how much data my province (Alberta) has made available, but now, I'm wondering.
They recently had "technical difficulties", and the numbers changed from showing that double-vaxxed people were the most at-risk for omicron, to showing that unvaxxed people are. https://twitter.com/AB_CovidFacts/status/1486112498977685506
Also disturbing is that, if you get vaccinated and have issues within the first 14 days, they count you as being unvaccinated in all the reports: https://metatron.substack.com/p/alberta-just-inadvertently-c...
Vaccine passports somehow forces or incentivizes people to vaccinate more?
This is like counting lines of code or repo commits to see how productive a SWE is. If you want to incentivize X, you have to be very careful not to instead incentivize an imperfect proxy for X.
Of course I'm also boosted and got my flu shot (and do it every year), so I'm probably already more conscientious living in NYC than many.
If someone uses a fake to get in... well... there's only so much I can do, but I discourage it for their own health and for the health of others around them. I flat out told my friend who did the same as such.
I'm sure he'd get through it, but why get mega sick instead of getting the vaccine at this point?
This is why everyone reading this can attest to the fact that they know more people infected in the last 2 months (most of whom were vaccinated) than the entire rest of the pandemic.
I think you're conflating getting a vaccine card with getting the vaccine.
But it was made abundantly clear that the original vaccines were less effective against newer strains.
Why are you assuming these are mutually exclusive? Governments are famous for nothing if not conspiring.
https://ldh.la.gov/news/SF100-Extended
https://www.wboy.com/news/health/coronavirus/watch-live-wv-g...
Yet, their vaccination rates still largely follow their political predispositions.
I initially thought these plans were a great idea, but I'm not sure that they've been as effective as I hoped.
Also, where are you getting your information from? This is what I could find from a quick search, and it shows unvaccinated deaths 8x higher than fully vaccinated: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1257040/number-covid-dea...
There's https://www.publichealthontario.ca, but I can't find any comparison between vaccinated and unvaccinated deaths.
I do not believe the thread is full of liars or propaganda, although there is probably some, but I do believe many many people are ill informed and regurgitating headlines they read.
https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/documents/ncov/ep...
Page 16 shows deaths by vaccination status in the last 60 days.
BMI mandates and passports to grocery stores and restaurants: yes it's evil, but we've already decided that this particular abrogation of rights is a moral good. So, fuck it. Starve the fatties. The precedent is set, we can do whatever we want if we scream "public health" loudly enough.
We’ve always had this. And its been strongly protected for centuries. And this isn't even the first time its been applied to health (lepers, plague victims, tuberculosis, measles, etc).
Its the right of the business to not associate with someone, for pretty much any reason. A person, outside of government owned businesses, has no inherent right to associate with a business.
You have to wear pants, you can't drive at night without headlights, you can't sit in a restaurant yelling F*K at the top of your lungs in between bites, you have to get a permit to hold a music festival on the street, you can't post political signs on my property ...
Man is born free and eveywhere in chains, literally this is a solved problem from 260 years ago.
If people want to eat at restaurants unvaccinated in NYC they have a variety of options. They can eat outside in the stalls which often have heat and shields against the wind. They can order at home and eat with their friends who want to take that risk.
Going to a concert so you can more likely catch and spread a highly infectious virus and become more sick and hospitalized isn't some constitutional right.
And the value of not having people who'll willingly "limit someone else's freedoms" by spreading a virus they could be vaccinated against, well, at the end of the day, I'd rather "limit their freedoms" to use your term, then the person who didn't need to catch it anyways and is now sick or hospitalized. That sounds a lot more like "limited freedoms" than "Oh no, I can't see a play".
Your comment history betrays you.
Just because I don’t hold the established dogmatic progressive opinions on every topic doesn’t mean I am conservative or supported Trump. Don’t make politics a religion.
> I suspect that if this omicron had emerged in 2018 at least with the symptoms and lack of severe disease that we have seen so far…it would likely have been described as a virulent common cold and may have gotten an occasional news mention, but zero public and government panic.
This is so wholly inaccurate, it's beyond the pale. Our average daily death rate from Omicron has already exceeded Delta. Omicron 'seems' milder overall due to the high level of vaccinations which prevent hospitalization and death and decrease transmission. If Omicron came out first, our overall death rate would be far beyond the 870,000 US deaths we've seen so far. And there would have been far more refrigerated morgue trucks at the hospital down the street from me in the initial wave.
Here in Poland we have a compulsory IDs, which for over 20 years now are plastic. Recently RFID tags and finger prints were added; there's also a standard biometric photo of face. All of this comes also with electronic and qualified electronic signature which can be used to verify our identity in government services or to sign the digital documents. And yes, we need to have it or the slowly accepted digital version when we want to vote in any elections.
Besides, with "Real ID" state ID's meet federal verification standards now as well.
A military ID is a also federal document (Department of Defense) but that only applies to a certain subset of the population.
> Americans don't want to use ID even for voting
You said:
> a national ID
Most Republicans do not favor national ID's and do favor checking ID's to vote. The idea behind voter ID is using the same state ID you use to buy liquor, etc.
It is no secret MRNA vaccines do not last. It was known before COVID and no miraculous break through occurred that fixed this this issue they have. Previous MRNA vaccines applicants also showed you cannot just keep reinjecting yourself every x months. It causes a whole host of problem including weakening your immune system (EU recently rewarned about this for the Covid one).
So its seems the people not vaccinated will have an option to actually get protected, not so much for those that have taken it already though.
> So its seems the people not vaccinated will have an option to actually get protected, not so much for those that have taken it already though.
This is utter hogwash horseshit. Let me guess. You watch InfoWars, OAN, and Fox News. You need some better "alternative facts" that include how long vaccines take to generate neutralizing antibodies and how long they last.
* Instead, countries should leave more time between booster programs and tie them to the onset of the cold season in each hemisphere, following the blueprint set out by influenza vaccination strategies, the agency said.*
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-11/repeat-bo...
Maybe when you learn to read and quote things fairly, you won't look like such a dummy.
I never said there wasn't a good strategy but rather than doing it x month was bad which in fact it is. You however had to make something up so you can launch your personal attack.
Please review the guidelines and rules before you type more utter hogwash horseshit https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The obese also experience disproportionately more classic hits including diabetes, amputations, falls, strokes, heart attacks, and cancers.
Speaking of drunk idiots: from my vantage, I regularly see more than one rider piled on a Lime scooter in the middle of the street in nightclub traffic. Organ donors? Nawh. I think they're too selfish and stupid to opt-in. But big mommy and big daddy consequence-free, unlimited care will spare no expense to patch them back together (i.e., craniofacial trauma, TBI, ortho) if they hit a rock, pothole, curb, bump, or get run over.
I think it is significantly more of a moral issue to punish people by letting them die in the street than it is a moral problem to require adherence to public health standards to eat in a restaurant.
Applied to any other public health concern, this suggestion would be silly. Should we deny people treatment for food poisoning if they want the freedom to break food-safety rules at a restaurant? Should we deny treatment to a traffic accident victim if they were speeding?
Likewise, Tennessee laws crushed a single kind of tow truck (called a "wrecker", I think) when they targeted a specific configuration of truck. What you see now is mostly tilt-bed tow trucks because the other kind of truck is more expensive to operate.
Money/access incentivizes people to change their habits. We are creatures that seek a minimal energy expenditure solution. If going to some website and filling in a pdf that generates an "ok" looking picture is required to retain access to a bar, people will do that.
Besides, people don't like to lie if they can avoid it. Being honest and getting a vaccine card by getting a vaccine is what most people will do.
If it's 10-12% such as the YouGov poll suggests, that feels in line with "Who are the assholes in our society?" Most people aren't like that.
All it says is that the test said positive or negative. It in no way tells you anything about how bad your Covid is, how far along it is, and if you can spread it to others.
The tests are a last minute cash grab.
Stop getting tested and this thing ends. (However I know a bunch of folks who have to be tested anyway because they didn’t want to be boosted, despite getting the initial vax)
Not wrong, however cash flow does have something to do with hospitalizations and covid death counts. Hospitals get subsidized for admitted covid patients and for covid deaths.
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/20/three-pha...
Trump has a history of xenophobia. The China ban was viewed as a second Muslim ban. It also appeared to be disconnected from the facts at the time because it was neither a full ban and was only singling out China. So it was clearly going to be ineffective and unfairly stigmatize Chinese people. Considering all of this, it isn't surprising his critics called it racist.
Also now that we are still in a pandemic two years later, it should be obvious that Trump patting himself on the back for this China ban is at best foolish. It was never going to have much of an impact.
> and for using the phrase China virus, when there is a decent history of naming diseases from where they came from.
Just because there is a "decent history" of something happening doesn't mean we should continue it forever. It is known that this type of naming is often wrong (the Spanish Flu likely originated in Kansas) and can lead to unnecessary and unproductive stigmatization. There is already a history of intentionally not using the place of origin to avoid these problems (Ebola was consciousness not named after the village it was found so they used a more generalized area)
> I think in fact your link attests to that because it's not saying anything about COVID it is all about how Trump is being racist for using the word China flu.
Why do you think Trump would consistently use "China flu" other than for political reasons? Isn't it obvious so people blame China for it?
>Personally I can't stand the guy, but if you believe that the entire virus and COVID response was made entirely politicized by Donald Trump, I'd check your medication because you might just be taking crazy pills in that case as you stated at the beginning.
I didn't say he was the only person responsible. I said he was the one who initially politicized it. Once it is politicized, both sides will continue to perpetuate that polarization.
In general it was both. Trump was both a reaction to polarization and helped increase it.
With the pandemic, I don't think there was an polarization beforehand. The US usually rallies around even unpopular leaders during trouble. 9/11 is the obvious example. Who specifically do you think caused the pandemic polarization?
We love wars. A vast majority of Americans have historically gotten behind wars. Wars on drugs. Wars on terror.
I dunno how things would have turned out, but it makes me wonder.
This smacks of a “believe exactly what my church believes or you are going to hell you evil sinner” Zealotry at its finest.
As for your comments about the deaths attributed to omicron… post some statistics. Because what you are saying here doesn’t jive with what I am reading AND more importantly doesn’t jive with what a lot of countries are doing in regards to Omicron. Most notably and recently being Denmark.
The overall lower deaths and hospitalizations due to Omicron are due to the vaccines. Generally, if you're vaccinated and boostered, your case of Omicron is relatively mild. Though not always, as my sister's Father-in-law found out winding up with afib in the hospital. If you're unvaccinated, you're not so lucky. Currently 2,000-3,000 daily deaths in the last 7 days in the US as per the CDC [2]. And that's with ~64% of the US population fully vaccinated. If this happened in 2018 with none of the population vaccinated, no knowledge of the spread or how to prevent it, etc... it would have been very bad.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-deaths-in-u-s-exceed-de...
[2] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_totaldeaths
For what it’s worth here is the quote in its entirety. If you read the parent thread it was speaking to cloth vs N95 efficacy:
“Personally I think cloth masks are worthless for anything but the most casual exposure to the virus, and then for it to maintain any reasonable protective effect, you would need to remove and dispose of the mask as those luckily trapped virus particles can dislodge and infect. Continuing to wear a cloth mask that has accumulated virus particles in it just turns a chance casual exposure into a long term one.”
Now, explain how that opinion is in conflict with this CDC mask guidance which is less than one week old:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...
Here’s the NYT reporting on the change in CDC masking guidance:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/14/health/cloth-masks-covid-...
Here is WebMD making the argument against against cloth masks due to their lack of efficacy:
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20211229/cloth-masks-vs-surg...
Or this lovely gem from the CDC which basically tells me that, because of my choice of facial hair, pretty much all masks short of a space suit are worthless:
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npptl/pdfs/facialhairwmask11282017...
If you are going to assume my quote about the worthlessness of cloth masks makes me a conservative trumpie, then you better stop listening to the CDC, stop reading the NYT, maybe boycott WebMD for good measure too. Damn right wing organizations, them.
Also not that it matters, but in terms of public figures, my politics are probably closest to Bill Maher. If you think he is conservative or a Trumpie, well…I suspect anyone short of Bernie Sanders or AOC fails your acid test.
The progressive left saw it as a strategy to attack an opposing party president in an election year. The pandemic was their only real hope of election success. Their candidate field was weak. The economy was strong leading up to 2020. The president was polarizing, but was immensely strong among his base and had cross over appeal to the blue collar middle class and increasing support of other demographics that usually vote Democrat.
I think there is no doubt in my mind that no pandemic Trump would have easily won a second term. You can argue that the pandemic polarization strategy was successful in that Trump lost, but there was a cost. Also considering the significant lack of success that the Biden administration has had managing the pandemic, too, I am of the opinion that the cost of the increased public polarization may not be worth it.
And yes, the NY Times headline "C.D.C. concedes that cloth masks do not protect against the virus as effectively as other masks" is exactly what I just posted above. We know that. We've known that. And I'll post the exact same thing again. A well fitting cloth mask is far better than nothing but less than a surgical mask which is less than an N95. It's not worthless.
Damn…40 years of undercover work wasted.
...which was also misrepresented in the media. They literally used the same countries the Obama Administration had put on their list with the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015.[1]
Also, the majority of countries on the list weren't Muslim, and the majority of Muslim countries weren't on the list.
[1] https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2017/01/29/news-bull...
The Muslim ban included people who had already been living in the US for years. These are people who have lives, families, and jobs here. But if they happened to be outside the US when the ban went into effect, they couldn't reenter the country. If they already were in the country, they couldn't leave. They couldn't have their friends or family from back home visit them. There is no logic to a ban of that scale when it comes to preventing terrorism. That is the type of universal ban one creates to stop a pathogen. Except the China ban was full of holes and thousands of Chinese nationals continued to travel to the US. That isn't a plan based on science.
The motivations for both these moves was not rationale. Considering they both came from the same person, a person who has a long documented history of other bigoted actions, his critics connected them with the shared thread of xenophobia.
Sure there is, it was specifically related the inability of the countries on their list to demonstrate proper port/airport screening & security. The reason most Muslim countries weren't on the list is because most Muslim countries took security seriously enough. This is also why the non-Muslim countries that were on the list were on there.