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Here’s a recent graph from Maccabi Healthcare Services, one of the 4 Israeli HMOs, on the trajectory of their first 50,000 clients vaccinated. The green line represents 50,777 members who were age 60+ and vaccinated on December 19-24 (green line) versus Maccabi’s entire clientele of 480,000 age 60+ clients, including the 50k vaccinated (blue line).
The horizontal axis is days after the patient’s first dose. The vertical axis represents percent infected (blue and green lines) or percent hospitalized for COVID among the inoculated (yellow line).
So, the Pfizer vaccine doesn’t do anything for a couple of weeks after the first dose, but then kicks in on Day 14. By the end of the 3rd week, which is when people are supposed to go back for their second dose, it’s about 60% effective. And that’s probably understated because the blue line is 11% made-up of people in the green line, plus over time the blue line includes more and more people who were inoculated after December 24 and are entering the third week when the vaccine starts to work.
So this isn’t quite as good as in the Pfizer clinical trial. I believe they reported 89% efficacy from one dose by the end of three weeks, but their clinical trial sample wasn’t skewed as old as this one. But, it’s pretty good. It should make the Brits feel better about their controversial First Doses First strategy.
Another Israeli HMO called Clalit earlier reported 33% efficacy from Day 14 thru Day 17. But in the Maccabi graph, efficacy steadily improves through Day 22, then flattens somewhat in Day 23, which is a different metric than what Clalit reported. So the two results might well be reconcilable. I don’t think those two studies are all that contradictory. Clalit just chose a metric they could release faster: efficacy through Day 17, while Maccabi waited until they had efficacy through Day 23.
So some takeaways from the Maccabi numbers:
- The vaccine is having real positive effects in the real world. It’s not a giant anti-Semitic hoax imposed on the naive Israelis.
- The first dose is not having as strong third week effects as in the Pfizer clinical trial. Is this because one dose is less effective on older people? Perhaps … Or is the overall efficacy going to be less than in the clinical trial? We don’t know yet.
- Britain’s First Doses First strategy isn’t as bad as the Clalit report made it sound, but it’s still up in the air. We don’t yet know what happens after the third week after one dose.
Steve, Biden is president now. Covid is over. Time to move on. Why do you think they keep saying the “healing” will start?
Healing! Nothing more than healing!Replies: @JimB
Do you relish being delusional?
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/09/01/816707182/map-tracking-the-spread-of-the-coronavirus-in-the-u-sReplies: @Je Suis Omar Mateen
Israel has a fair share of snake oil peddlers, so I would just wait until further ….
What does Masada Healthcare Services have to say?
Did the Jews Kill Themselves at Masada Rather Than Fall Into Roman Hands?
Trump Cancels Visit to Ancient Masada Site after Israel Refuses Helicopter Landing
Bugger it.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/22/new-uk-covid-variant-may-be-more-deadly-says-boris-johnson
Late last year the WHO sent out new suggestions regarding PCR testing – stop running so many cycles! That directly affects the number of “new cases” as well as “asymptomatic cases”, because apparently even now there’s not really such a thing as a “false positive COVID test”.
Healing! Nothing more than healing!
I’m not generally a fan of Bibi Netanyahu and his influence on US politics, but credit is due where it is due: he and his government handled this well. It’s deeply depressing to compare Israeli acumen to vaccination doses being thrown away in the US.
Here in the US we have zillions of smaller polities like states, counties, and cities, so we have a huge range of policies with one extreme being New York's "If you give someone a dose who isn't on the current priority list we will fine you one million dollars (yep, more Dr. Evil) and yank your licenses," which is not a idle threat as the Montefiore New Rochelle Hospital is finding out. So it's a perfectly rational response to throw away perfectly fine doses if people don't show up for their appointments, the clock is ticking on the six hours both mRNA vaccines are good for after dilution (Pfizer/BioNTech) or first puncture of vial (Moderna), and you can't find anyone else in the current priority sets.
But other parts of the country realize every dose is precious, and with one so far reported logistical "oops!" exception they just find people, any people, who are willing to get left over doses. For example, in the first stage of front line hospital healthcare personal (HCP), it was reported the inoculaters would simply walk down the hallways of the hospital asking each patient if he wanted a dose now (those would be non-COVID-19 patients not in isolation rooms).
Good for Israel, we need hard data to convince these vaccine skeptics that it works to reduce transmission and infection! A real world example of the vaccine demonstrating efficacy should go a long way to convince MOST people who are on the fence to take it. Here in Los Angeles County it is a scramble for limited supplies after Hilda Solis authorized those over 65 to get it. Many people still refuse to get it. I would get it in a heartbeat but I’m in the last group to be vaccinated. I’m hoping the Johnson & Johnson vaccine gets approved soon that should be a game changer!
So I say thanks to Israel for performing the needed long-term testing on its citizens, and I look forward to getting a vaccine as soon as we get those results.
There is no place on this planet that is more transparent, more intent on the advancement of all the world’s people, than Israel. Ergo, these news must be true.
It’s a little hard to make out in the graph, and the data are quite limited, but the number of hospitalizations overall seem to have taken a greater dip — it peaks at 2.3%, following the rise in the number of cases, but goes down to 0.3% on the final day reported.
I wonder if we see this because the most vulnerable — perhaps the oldest — patients were given the vaccine first, and are much overrepresented among the 60,000 vaccinated, and now much less frequently need hospitalization.
of course you will have results fast, if you give the vax to the few oldies and vulnerable who might need it. and if they didn’t need it, well their passage won’t be missed as much. either way, better keep the vax for them, and let the healthy live. #IOANNIDISSTILLRIGHT
Healing! Nothing more than healing!Replies: @JimB
And for the first time in US history, there was no such thing as a fraudulent vote in the most corrupt Democrat-run election districts.
Steve’s blogging gets gayer by the day
“#IOANNIDISSTILLRIGHT”
Hash-tag it however you like, that is currently very much a minority opinion. There was an effort to rehabilitate him by some of Ioannidis’ associates in late November, that seems to have backfired big-time and the opinion piece they wrote was savagely ripped apart by the very same journal that had previously chose to publish it:
I think there’s a good chance Ioannidis will survive the so-called “Ioannidis affair”, given his previous accolades, but I doubt he would do it the same way, were he given a chance to do it all over. Moreover, unlike some of the covid-truthers around who think their failed predictions only add to their expertise, he had the good grace to stop making an utter ass of himself by digging in deeper, and he at least deserves credit for that.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/ioannidis-trump-white-house-coronavirus-lockdowns
And then they kept on with their opinionated activism on the same side of the debate ignoring the fact they were so wrong. What personality trait makes them operating w/o the corrective feedback loop? By not owning to what they said they clearly do not take themselves seriously while at the same time being dead sure that they must be listened to all the time.Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome, @Dieter Kief, @Bert, @Desiderius, @The Soft Parade
Israel will be interesting since a big reason they went with mass vaccination is the large proportion of the population that is now Orthodox and the social practices of Orthodox leading them to have huge infection rates along with their desire not to go along with social distancing as seen in NYC. Will they begin to engage in risk compensation too soon and give lower results of effectiveness through this?
OT:
Joe Biden has a Peloton bike, the New York Times thinks this is very important and a bad thing.
Also Joe Biden is wearing, presumably the Rolex watch every president is gifted and has been gifted for 50? 60 years? Such that the model has been named the ‘presidential’. This is also a very important issue.
Did Obama really wear a Timex? They’re so poorly made and tick like a Katyusha rocket launcher. I mean, supporting native industry is always good but nothing in the Timex range shouts ‘presidential’ and it probably doesn’t make meetings easy to have an audible ticking at all times.
Or is Joe wearing the Rolex his car dealership owner dad gave him?
Mechanical watches are a thing that should no longer exist any more than mechanical adding machines. Quartz watches are cheaper and keep better time and don't stop if you don't wear them for a day. But for some reason men love them. I like them too but most Swiss watches are vastly overpriced - you're paying for the brand name and not for the hardware. Rolex's biggest expense is advertising - the watches cost them very little to make in relation to their sales price. The markups are ridiculous - Rolex will sell you a steel bracelet for $500 or you could buy a fake Chinese bracelet for $10 and you'd need a microscope to tell them apart.Replies: @Jim Christian, @Whiskey, @Pericles
I hope that this is true. I’ve been worried that the Israeli numbers didn’t seem to be dropping. These numbers also make me less jumpy about the one jab approach. I still don’t like it, but it seems like a viable option if these results continue to hold.
Could the numbers be due to behavioral changes in the vaccinated? They could be self-segregating more than the general population after getting the jab. It’s easier to lock yourself away for a few weeks if there’s hope afterwards.
Were you droned in the middle of typing that sentence?
many people are on the fence about taking the vaccine because they fear the side effects are worse than the disease, not because they fear the vaccines are not effective. Others, like me, will refuse to take the vaccine because we already recovered from COVID and do not feel the need to get vaccinated for a virus we already defeated with our innate immune system.
Could the numbers be due to behavioral changes in the vaccinated? They could be self-segregating more than the general population after getting the jab. It’s easier to lock yourself away for a few weeks if there’s hope afterwards.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Anon, @Aardvark
Could be, but the trendline looks a lot like the expected physiological response.
But Kerry was raised Catholic, so I’m not sure he’s just “half-Jewish, half-Boston Brahmin.”
I thought you said it was good news.
OT but partially coronavirus related: Sales of existing homes in the US have reached a 14-year high.
Americans who can afford to buy a house are moving out of the cities. Gee, one wonders why.
Remote working (what we who did some of it in the 1990s called “telecommuting,”) brought on by the reaction to SARS-CoV-2 is a factor, freeing many to move to suburbs and exurbs. Low interest rates help too, but there is something else that might provide motivation… What could it be?
At first thought, high sales would seem counterintuitive, until one thinks of all those things.
Some Americans are doing rather well these days, as things fall apart and change. A new shuffling of the deck is going on. Will the Biden/HARRIS Fringe Coalition government insert a few jokers in there? Will they Further Affirm Non-White Ownership of Little Boxes?
1. Rona panic, social distancing, need telecommuting
2. Offices close because telecommuting makes them obsolete.
3. Speculators buy up all the offices at depressed prices.
4. Rona over. No more need to telecommute.
5. Need to buy back the offices again from the speculators.
6. Profit!Replies: @Buzz Mohawk
Wow!!! Thank you for your totally legit opinion, totally real person!!! My skepticism has been cured!!!
Whoa, I like to think that I’m immune to the coof, oh yeah. It’s closer to the truth to say I can’t get enough. I know I’m gonna have to face it, I’m addicted to covid.
While I have some idea where the uneducated floomers do come from it is much harder for me to wrap my mind around the phenomena of scientists like John Ioannidis or Michael Levitt. The latter in March while in Israel stated he would be surprised if more than 10 Israelis ended up dying from the virus:
And Ioannidis also in March predicted only 10,000 deaths for the US.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/ioannidis-trump-white-house-coronavirus-lockdowns
And then they kept on with their opinionated activism on the same side of the debate ignoring the fact they were so wrong. What personality trait makes them operating w/o the corrective feedback loop? By not owning to what they said they clearly do not take themselves seriously while at the same time being dead sure that they must be listened to all the time.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/some-pretty-good-news-out-of-israel-about-vaccines/#comment-4424488
Could the numbers be due to behavioral changes in the vaccinated? They could be self-segregating more than the general population after getting the jab. It’s easier to lock yourself away for a few weeks if there’s hope afterwards.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Anon, @Aardvark
Also, there will be behavioral changes in people after vaccination. Some percentage will take somewhat higher risks. The initial tests made no effort to track behavioral changes, so we can’t really compare apples to apples. But the tests involved a broad range of ages. The innoculatees are over 60. The over-60 crowd has probably been the most isolated demographic for a full year, they have the least life left, and they want to make the most of it. I could imagine people wanting to see grandchildren, go to temple/synagogue, and just get out. They will be careful, but careful is a spectrum, and on average an inoculatee will be less careful than the same person without the jab.
OT:
Joe Biden has a Peloton bike, the New York Times thinks this is very important and a bad thing.
Also Joe Biden is wearing, presumably the Rolex watch every president is gifted and has been gifted for 50? 60 years? Such that the model has been named the 'presidential'. This is also a very important issue.
https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1352775345792032770
Did Obama really wear a Timex? They're so poorly made and tick like a Katyusha rocket launcher. I mean, supporting native industry is always good but nothing in the Timex range shouts 'presidential' and it probably doesn't make meetings easy to have an audible ticking at all times.
Or is Joe wearing the Rolex his car dealership owner dad gave him?Replies: @epebble, @Jack D, @Lurker
Why does a president need a watch? Doesn’t he have, like, a dozen people managing every minute of his time? I stopped wearing my watch, a few years back, after the battery died. If I ever need to look up time when there is no clock or computer around, there is always a phone nearby.
A wristwatch also lets you inconspicuously check the time. If I'm in a meeting, and someone is going on with small talk, and I need to gauge just how much of that I can allow before getting to brass tacks (so as to not be late for the next), it would be rude to pull out the phone and look. A careful glance at the wristwatch is usually unnoticed. Even if noticed, it doesn't interrupt the conversation flow like pulling out a phone does.Replies: @epebble
"Let your fingers do the talking..."
There’s fashion reasons.
A wristwatch also lets you inconspicuously check the time. If I’m in a meeting, and someone is going on with small talk, and I need to gauge just how much of that I can allow before getting to brass tacks (so as to not be late for the next), it would be rude to pull out the phone and look. A careful glance at the wristwatch is usually unnoticed. Even if noticed, it doesn’t interrupt the conversation flow like pulling out a phone does.
And the "rudeness" in cutting off someone going over time - that sounds pleasantly 1950's nostalgia. Most of my working life involved meetings with lots of interruptions.
People from cities with low covid rates get vaccinations more often.
So factor that in.
OT:
Joe Biden has a Peloton bike, the New York Times thinks this is very important and a bad thing.
Also Joe Biden is wearing, presumably the Rolex watch every president is gifted and has been gifted for 50? 60 years? Such that the model has been named the 'presidential'. This is also a very important issue.
https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1352775345792032770
Did Obama really wear a Timex? They're so poorly made and tick like a Katyusha rocket launcher. I mean, supporting native industry is always good but nothing in the Timex range shouts 'presidential' and it probably doesn't make meetings easy to have an audible ticking at all times.
Or is Joe wearing the Rolex his car dealership owner dad gave him?Replies: @epebble, @Jack D, @Lurker
No, Obama didn’t wear a Timex but Bush and Clinton did. Timex nowadays are no longer made in America and no longer noisy unjeweled mechanical pin pallet watches and haven’t been for decades. Their just another brand of Asian made quartz watch. Some of them are really not bad for the price.
Doubtful. Joe apparently owns several mid range (meaning nowadays $5 to $8K) stainless Swiss watches such as Omega and Rolex. It’s his money and he has every right to wear them. Trump (and Putin) favor high end Swiss gold pieces such as Patek Philippe where you’d have to add a couple of zeroes to the price of Biden’s watches.
Mechanical watches are a thing that should no longer exist any more than mechanical adding machines. Quartz watches are cheaper and keep better time and don’t stop if you don’t wear them for a day. But for some reason men love them. I like them too but most Swiss watches are vastly overpriced – you’re paying for the brand name and not for the hardware. Rolex’s biggest expense is advertising – the watches cost them very little to make in relation to their sales price. The markups are ridiculous – Rolex will sell you a steel bracelet for $500 or you could buy a fake Chinese bracelet for $10 and you’d need a microscope to tell them apart.
The total cost of ownership of a battery powered quartz watch, and I have more than a few, is high. Its about $75 or more for replacement of a battery every three years. For a decent mechanical watch -- zero cost.
You can get a decent mechanical watch from Orient for about $125 (used to be cheaper). A Vostok Amphibia is about $90 (again, used to be cheaper). A Kommanderski, around $55 (used to be $35). The Vostok is a true diving watch, good for up to 200 meter. Its a unique design, with a heavy plastic crystal that presses down even harder under high water pressure. You can buff out scratches with toothpaste. [I've done it]. Decent Seikos can be had for around $175 or so if you shop around. That's Dive Watch water resistant Seikos.
A good watch is a god send. Not just meetings but all sorts of activity needs timing. Cooking, exercising, commuting (particularly by train), all are dependent on an accurate watch. Then there's survival. A good watch can act as a compass. Put the hour hand on the sun. Halfway between it and the 12 O'Clock indicator will be due South.
A decent mechanical watch will have a nice ticking sound, smooth non-jumpy movement of the second hand, and the reassurance of accurate time keeping without batteries. That might be hard to come by. Really, with a shortwave radio you can regulate a mechanical watch to be accurate within 25 seconds or so of the UTC time broadcast and then you won't be late for things.
Vostoks have really awful bands, but then you want to replace any manufacturers band with a decent NATO strap anyway. There are very nice polyester ones but I'm partial to canvas. Particularly the ones with metal rings in the holes. Very useful in the summer.Replies: @Jack D
You probably don’t need the vaccine yet but they don’t think that having Covid gives you lifetime immunity (esp. with the new variants floating around) so you’ll probably need a vaccine eventually if you don’t want to risk a repeat infection.
Also, there is speculation that those same two variants might bypass some of the current vaccines (again, not always, and not all of them), so if that comes to be there would be at least two classes of vaccinated: those who took the old shots and those who took the newer ones. This might matter if corporations start demanding their current and future employees to be vaccinated: is taking just one of the vaccines enough? Which ones? Do they need to take the newest vaccines to be considered vaccinated? For the ones that are meant to be given in two doses, is taking just one dose enough?
Thus Travis is doing the right thing to put himself at the very end of the list at priority 0, unless and until we learn more, and/or it mutates into a new "strain," not variant, and does so in a way that evades the targeting of both spike and nucleocapsid proteins. Which if we get enough people vaccinated will be less likely, the selection pressure then being strongest to get around spike protein targeted immunity.Replies: @The Alarmist, @anon
Yeah, REAL men don’t worry about no coof or wear no sissy masks. Not wanting to die of an infectious disease for which there is now a vaccine is a sure sign of gayness.
Exactly, which is why we normally do long-term testing on the potential side effects of the vaccine. If you can remember all the way back to 2020, you know that most experts were saying that even if we could get a vaccine by the end of the year, it wouldn’t be safe to roll it out until we had long-term testing … then Biden won …
So I say thanks to Israel for performing the needed long-term testing on its citizens, and I look forward to getting a vaccine as soon as we get those results.
This is why I’ve never worn a watch. By the time I was old enough to regularly wear one, I was surrounded by clocks – car, computer, phone, TV, plus all the clocks in offices, classrooms, gyms, etc.
…Then, when ‘Rona is over (thanks, Biden) and social distancing is cancelled etc., we go back to normal and telecommuting is cancelled, then we need to go back to the city, but you already sold your house for depressed prices where it was bought up by speculators, and you have to buy it back from them.
1. Rona panic, social distancing, need telecommuting
2. Offices close because telecommuting makes them obsolete.
3. Speculators buy up all the offices at depressed prices.
4. Rona over. No more need to telecommute.
5. Need to buy back the offices again from the speculators.
6. Profit!
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/ioannidis-trump-white-house-coronavirus-lockdowns
And then they kept on with their opinionated activism on the same side of the debate ignoring the fact they were so wrong. What personality trait makes them operating w/o the corrective feedback loop? By not owning to what they said they clearly do not take themselves seriously while at the same time being dead sure that they must be listened to all the time.Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome, @Dieter Kief, @Bert, @Desiderius, @The Soft Parade
Well, he was right, after all.
Where are you coming form? I just can't imagine somebody spouting nonsense like that out of his own volition. Is somebody holding gun to your head?Replies: @Je Suis Omar Mateen
Mechanical watches are a thing that should no longer exist any more than mechanical adding machines. Quartz watches are cheaper and keep better time and don't stop if you don't wear them for a day. But for some reason men love them. I like them too but most Swiss watches are vastly overpriced - you're paying for the brand name and not for the hardware. Rolex's biggest expense is advertising - the watches cost them very little to make in relation to their sales price. The markups are ridiculous - Rolex will sell you a steel bracelet for $500 or you could buy a fake Chinese bracelet for $10 and you'd need a microscope to tell them apart.Replies: @Jim Christian, @Whiskey, @Pericles
Fair enough, Jack. But you don’t have to go Rolex and up. I own two Citizen Solars, a titanium and a basic and a gold Seiko Solar. This not because I’m ‘green’ but because no battery to replace. All are waterproof 10 years in and haven’t moved three seconds in any given fall/spring DST cycle. I wear em swimming, the shower, fishing on the Gulf or Atlantic, rainstorms on the bike, no problem and not one was over $300.00. I wouldn’t have a Rolex or the others no matter how much money I have because mechanical movements suck and are never accurate without lengthy stays at the jeweler to time the thing and then it promptly starts deviating. Walking around with a Rolex is asking for a robbery anyway. But watches will always exist because there are lots like me. If I’m making time on my motorcycle, I’m not dicking around with the phone to check the time, that’s crazy. Even driving the car, to check the time I have to check my phone?
I know a lot of people don’t wear a watch because they don’t want a thing having off their wrist but then spend all day checking their phone for meetings and appointments. That’s an all-day thing. That’s crazy to me, but there you have it.
If having it doesn’t give permanent immunity, will a vaccine?Does that mean this is going to be like the flu, were you need to repeatedly get shots, and were each shot is hit-or-miss for the current strain going around?
Remember, if big gov't liberals CAN make you do something, then they WILL. It doesn't really matter what IT is, just so they can make you do it. I know I sound cynical and paranoid, but I've been watching it my whole life and it's a sound principle.Replies: @Buck Ransom
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/ioannidis-trump-white-house-coronavirus-lockdowns
And then they kept on with their opinionated activism on the same side of the debate ignoring the fact they were so wrong. What personality trait makes them operating w/o the corrective feedback loop? By not owning to what they said they clearly do not take themselves seriously while at the same time being dead sure that they must be listened to all the time.Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome, @Dieter Kief, @Bert, @Desiderius, @The Soft Parade
The Buzzfeed article is a gem. Thanks for linking it.
John Ioannides, Sunetra Gupta, Michael Levitt et al. can't be excused on the account of ignorance and imbecility as many floomers who commented at the UR but their activism should be looked at as the deliberate sabotaging effort to derail the effective response in the Western countries.Replies: @Bert, @BB753
Mechanical watches are a thing that should no longer exist any more than mechanical adding machines. Quartz watches are cheaper and keep better time and don't stop if you don't wear them for a day. But for some reason men love them. I like them too but most Swiss watches are vastly overpriced - you're paying for the brand name and not for the hardware. Rolex's biggest expense is advertising - the watches cost them very little to make in relation to their sales price. The markups are ridiculous - Rolex will sell you a steel bracelet for $500 or you could buy a fake Chinese bracelet for $10 and you'd need a microscope to tell them apart.Replies: @Jim Christian, @Whiskey, @Pericles
Sorry, wrong on every account here. Just wrong.
The total cost of ownership of a battery powered quartz watch, and I have more than a few, is high. Its about $75 or more for replacement of a battery every three years. For a decent mechanical watch — zero cost.
You can get a decent mechanical watch from Orient for about $125 (used to be cheaper). A Vostok Amphibia is about $90 (again, used to be cheaper). A Kommanderski, around $55 (used to be $35). The Vostok is a true diving watch, good for up to 200 meter. Its a unique design, with a heavy plastic crystal that presses down even harder under high water pressure. You can buff out scratches with toothpaste. [I’ve done it]. Decent Seikos can be had for around $175 or so if you shop around. That’s Dive Watch water resistant Seikos.
A good watch is a god send. Not just meetings but all sorts of activity needs timing. Cooking, exercising, commuting (particularly by train), all are dependent on an accurate watch. Then there’s survival. A good watch can act as a compass. Put the hour hand on the sun. Halfway between it and the 12 O’Clock indicator will be due South.
A decent mechanical watch will have a nice ticking sound, smooth non-jumpy movement of the second hand, and the reassurance of accurate time keeping without batteries. That might be hard to come by. Really, with a shortwave radio you can regulate a mechanical watch to be accurate within 25 seconds or so of the UTC time broadcast and then you won’t be late for things.
Vostoks have really awful bands, but then you want to replace any manufacturers band with a decent NATO strap anyway. There are very nice polyester ones but I’m partial to canvas. Particularly the ones with metal rings in the holes. Very useful in the summer.
Any mechanical watch is going to need cleaning after a few years - $100 and up, which is more than a cheap watch is worth.
Invicta makes some nice Rolex homage type mechanical diver watches with OK Miyota (Japanese) movements. There are tons of Chinese mechanical watches with Chinese quality - dubious.
Only because you pose this question seriously prompts me to observe your good nose is simply held too far into the bark of the tree to see the forest of psychopaths. Their “belief” object is different. We all see not as the object is, but as we are.
Mechanical watches are a thing that should no longer exist any more than mechanical adding machines. Quartz watches are cheaper and keep better time and don't stop if you don't wear them for a day. But for some reason men love them. I like them too but most Swiss watches are vastly overpriced - you're paying for the brand name and not for the hardware. Rolex's biggest expense is advertising - the watches cost them very little to make in relation to their sales price. The markups are ridiculous - Rolex will sell you a steel bracelet for $500 or you could buy a fake Chinese bracelet for $10 and you'd need a microscope to tell them apart.Replies: @Jim Christian, @Whiskey, @Pericles
Yup, the Big Guy sure earned it.
OT:
Joe Biden has a Peloton bike, the New York Times thinks this is very important and a bad thing.
Also Joe Biden is wearing, presumably the Rolex watch every president is gifted and has been gifted for 50? 60 years? Such that the model has been named the 'presidential'. This is also a very important issue.
https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1352775345792032770
Did Obama really wear a Timex? They're so poorly made and tick like a Katyusha rocket launcher. I mean, supporting native industry is always good but nothing in the Timex range shouts 'presidential' and it probably doesn't make meetings easy to have an audible ticking at all times.
Or is Joe wearing the Rolex his car dealership owner dad gave him?Replies: @epebble, @Jack D, @Lurker
Has Neil Kinnock checked to see if he’s still got his own watch?
Ive always been unlucky with watches, bashing them against things, catching the strap. Not worn one for years now. Mostly rely on the phone.
I would also endorse this comment:
and I would include Sunetra Gupta on the list of those to be investigated for her fraudulent March 2020 paper that was leaked to The Financial Times and negatively impacted many countries where the decision how to respond to the epidemic was being considered. Her subsequent activism including the Great Barrington Declaration funded by libertarian Charles Koch organizations should also be looked at.
John Ioannides, Sunetra Gupta, Michael Levitt et al. can’t be excused on the account of ignorance and imbecility as many floomers who commented at the UR but their activism should be looked at as the deliberate sabotaging effort to derail the effective response in the Western countries.
"Anyone who thinks the tried and true shutdown method isn’t a good one when dealing with an unknown viral entity needs their medical or lab licenses revoked (...) "Lockdowns aren't a tried and true method but rather a novelty. Who's ever heard of quarantining everybody, the sick and the healthy, regardless whether they are infected or not? No precedents whatsoever in medical history." because their interests are in money rather than medicine." Unlike Big Pharma and big corporations, who are known to always act in defense of human health and liberty, with no pecuniary interests.
Give me a break!Replies: @utu, @HA
Actually, the Israeli data and the Pfizer trial data may be even more reconcilable than it seems here. That’s because they looked at different things. This Israelis are looking at test positivity—that is, infections, while the Pfizer trial looked only at symptomatic cases. A 60% efficacy at blocking infection 14 days after a single dose is nothing to dismiss.
Did the Jews Kill Themselves at Masada Rather Than Fall Into Roman Hands?
Trump Cancels Visit to Ancient Masada Site after Israel Refuses Helicopter LandingReplies: @Bardon Kaldian, @Alexander Turok
Perhaps not- but it’s a damn good story.
But in conspiracy land of course the data would come out of Israel
What is happening in Europe…mainland
Old people were dying in Norway last week
Russia, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Scandinavia…
Bad news:
Pfizer behaving like a software vendor (looking at you, Oracle). It’s all “licenses” (and you are not allowed to run this software on that powerful CPU unless you pay more etc.)
No freebies! Pfizer to charge for ‘extra’ Covid-19 vaccine doses as doctors squeeze vials of every drop to inoculate more people
“5 doses” now becomes “6 doses” (i.e. OBLIGATORILY six doses, which means the actual number of vaccinations goes down unless everyone does the 5->6 doses trick while income goes up).
> Practically state-approved monopoly, FDA approval needed, Sputnik V kept out etc.
> Guaranteed income
> Sweetheart deals with govnmnts behind closed doors
> Forced buyers, same as having druggies on the line
> Market made “more interesting” because people want to get out of govnmt-imposed lockdown
> Distribution and inoculation made for free
> Testing on volunteers
> Problems with the cold chain are on you
> Cannot be dragged to the court over interesting side-effects (not everywhere though)
> Gets free patents out of that
> Wants more money now
Pfizer needs to be ass-slammed so hard that they bleed out of their eye sockets
Instead everyone rolls over like a doggie:
The spatial intelligence of European engineers and technicians made possible to extract 6 doses instead of 5 from each Pfizer bottle.
The verbal intelligence and Chutzpah of’Pfizer CEO, a Greek Thessaloniki Jew, Albert Bourla made possible to rip off this benefit because UE sold not millilitres but doses. So Pfizer is now procuring 20% less bottles and selling them instead to places that pay more.
That’s a long tradition.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/ioannidis-trump-white-house-coronavirus-lockdowns
And then they kept on with their opinionated activism on the same side of the debate ignoring the fact they were so wrong. What personality trait makes them operating w/o the corrective feedback loop? By not owning to what they said they clearly do not take themselves seriously while at the same time being dead sure that they must be listened to all the time.Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome, @Dieter Kief, @Bert, @Desiderius, @The Soft Parade
Sounds like your own rejection of the constantly increasing evidence for the efficacy of prophylaxis and early treatment of Covid-19 by repurposed drugs, and yes vitamins and minerals, during the summer and fall of last year. Seek within yourself the personality traits that led Ioannidis and Levitt astray.
John Ioannides, Sunetra Gupta, Michael Levitt et al. can't be excused on the account of ignorance and imbecility as many floomers who commented at the UR but their activism should be looked at as the deliberate sabotaging effort to derail the effective response in the Western countries.Replies: @Bert, @BB753
And how many deaths are you and your ilk (Fauci, Collins, Hahn) responsible for through your efforts against repurposed drugs for early treatment? Your line here on UR was entirely the MSM line, the Big Pharma line, and the globalist line that, in what was clearly an emergency situation where many lives were at stake, only RCTs could provide legitimate evidence, that compassionate use should not be allowed, that natural experiments wherein a locality experienced reduced deaths after widespread use of a repurposed drug with known anti-viral properties did not allow valid conclusions. You are a real piece of work.
Anything new on the homeopathic suppositories preventing Covid? Does the size matter?
It depends on how one defines “REAL men” (presumably in contrast to “sissies”). If it’s by the number of offspring a man leaves behind, then I suspect (it’s only a suspicion) that the most succesful in that endeavor do not care much about the WuFlu, infectious diseases, masks, vaccinations, or much of anything other than getting into a tight one, which even with birth control tends to result in quite a few children (and can also help spread the Covid, so be sure to mask up!). But what kind of “REAL man” cares about poontang, anyway? Research should be done on this.
From what I’ve read the immunity lasts at least many months in people who were already infected, except against the new variants (but nowhere near always). If the South African and Brazilian variants become widespread, then unless the virus mutates even further (which is actually quite possible) those who first got sick with those variants are unlikely to be infected a second time.
Also, there is speculation that those same two variants might bypass some of the current vaccines (again, not always, and not all of them), so if that comes to be there would be at least two classes of vaccinated: those who took the old shots and those who took the newer ones. This might matter if corporations start demanding their current and future employees to be vaccinated: is taking just one of the vaccines enough? Which ones? Do they need to take the newest vaccines to be considered vaccinated? For the ones that are meant to be given in two doses, is taking just one dose enough?
I see satire isn’t dead
What test and symptoms would determine infection?
How many cycles?
Which Symptoms?
Meanwhile: someone’s doing something to end the Scamdemic.
https://www.corbettreport.com/freedom-airway-solutionswatch/
And this doctors group is worth looking at
https://worlddoctorsalliance.com/
I see Steve’s “Happy New Fear” is just a rerun of last years.
Maybe this should be a pause for thought.
https://welovetrump.com/2021/01/22/nancy-pelosi-reportedly-wants-crew-manned-machine-guns-added-to-the-capitol-building/
John Ioannides, Sunetra Gupta, Michael Levitt et al. can't be excused on the account of ignorance and imbecility as many floomers who commented at the UR but their activism should be looked at as the deliberate sabotaging effort to derail the effective response in the Western countries.Replies: @Bert, @BB753
“All should be investigated by the FBI and Interpol and others law enforcement agencies.”
Yeah, because we know those agencies can be trusted, LOL!
“Anyone who thinks the tried and true shutdown method isn’t a good one when dealing with an unknown viral entity needs their medical or lab licenses revoked (…) ”
Lockdowns aren’t a tried and true method but rather a novelty. Who’s ever heard of quarantining everybody, the sick and the healthy, regardless whether they are infected or not? No precedents whatsoever in medical history.
” because their interests are in money rather than medicine.”
Unlike Big Pharma and big corporations, who are known to always act in defense of human health and liberty, with no pecuniary interests.
Give me a break!
Here are two recent articles from New Zealand and Australia that can give you an idea what a successful management of Covid epidemic could look like if a country decided to use the strategy of virus elimination (no cure flattening strategy, no herd immunity strategy) and then all it had to do is to prevent importation of virus from the abroad:
New Zealand had total 25 deaths. The last one was in September.Australia had 900 total deaths and the last death occurred in October.Replies: @Jiminy
The British government said the new British 70% more transmissible variant was not more lethal. Now they admit the new variant is more lethal as well as transmissible.
The idiot fat drunk Prime Minister nearly died of ordinary Covid-19.
As for Israel...
https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1352395454793789443?s=20Replies: @Sean
I registered to get vaccinated two weeks ago. I have not been contacted to schedule a date to receive my jab. The county health department says its a random drawing. An additional 80,000 people have registered to get vaccinated since I registered. I may win the lottery before I can get my shot as Florida Health Departments says more than 37,000 non residents have been vaccinated and that was as of 3 days ago.
Isn’t that due to Israel being small enough there’s just one government running things, so its all in bets work in a pretty uniform way, this time very good?
Here in the US we have zillions of smaller polities like states, counties, and cities, so we have a huge range of policies with one extreme being New York’s “If you give someone a dose who isn’t on the current priority list we will fine you one million dollars (yep, more Dr. Evil) and yank your licenses,” which is not a idle threat as the Montefiore New Rochelle Hospital is finding out. So it’s a perfectly rational response to throw away perfectly fine doses if people don’t show up for their appointments, the clock is ticking on the six hours both mRNA vaccines are good for after dilution (Pfizer/BioNTech) or first puncture of vial (Moderna), and you can’t find anyone else in the current priority sets.
But other parts of the country realize every dose is precious, and with one so far reported logistical “oops!” exception they just find people, any people, who are willing to get left over doses. For example, in the first stage of front line hospital healthcare personal (HCP), it was reported the inoculaters would simply walk down the hallways of the hospital asking each patient if he wanted a dose now (those would be non-COVID-19 patients not in isolation rooms).
Citation Needed. Because while I’m not following this closely, it’s my understanding natural immunity is considered likely to be very long term, but of course we by definition can’t know except with every new day, and it’s more thorough, also targeting the nucleocapsid protein. Which is less desirable for vaccines if only because it’s hidden under the virus’s envelope.
Thus Travis is doing the right thing to put himself at the very end of the list at priority 0, unless and until we learn more, and/or it mutates into a new “strain,” not variant, and does so in a way that evades the targeting of both spike and nucleocapsid proteins. Which if we get enough people vaccinated will be less likely, the selection pressure then being strongest to get around spike protein targeted immunity.
Ignore them - they don't have your best interests at heart.
Could the numbers be due to behavioral changes in the vaccinated? They could be self-segregating more than the general population after getting the jab. It’s easier to lock yourself away for a few weeks if there’s hope afterwards.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Anon, @Aardvark
How do we know that the version of the experimental injection that is being sent to Israel is the same as the experimental injection sent elsewhere?
How it started with Pfeizer: “a million percent proof protection! Believe science!”
How it turned out: “oh look, it really does kind of work a little bit if you squint. Yay science!”.
I don’t know the details of Joe’s income (though he has released his returns) but given Trump’s lifestyle and lack of transparency, Republicans are in no position to question Joe on this stuff.
https://i.postimg.cc/Kv72S0Yv/Larry-coffee-sip.png
Thus Travis is doing the right thing to put himself at the very end of the list at priority 0, unless and until we learn more, and/or it mutates into a new "strain," not variant, and does so in a way that evades the targeting of both spike and nucleocapsid proteins. Which if we get enough people vaccinated will be less likely, the selection pressure then being strongest to get around spike protein targeted immunity.Replies: @The Alarmist, @anon
There is a body of literature that suggests that while antibodies might fade away after a few months, T cell and B cell bodies might provide significant protection for years. Persons who had SARS in the first go around 17 years ago in some cases still show T cells that fight that strain ( https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2550-z ), and researchers have even found B cells in Spanish flu survivors that possibly provide significant adaptive immunity response more than 90 years later ( https://doi.org/10.1038/nature07231 ). Given the impact a SARs-Cov 2 infection seems to have, it may be one of those strains that triggers long term adaptive immunity.
One doesn’t need to. Smoking laptops and smoking sons reveal that being in the inner sanctum of democracy for years and years can and will be leveraged.
Effective at what? Do they claim the mRNA vaccines prevent the recipients from getting covid, do they prevent transmission? Or does the 90% effectiveness claim refers to the percentage of hospital stays that were shortened by a few days?
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/ioannidis-trump-white-house-coronavirus-lockdowns
And then they kept on with their opinionated activism on the same side of the debate ignoring the fact they were so wrong. What personality trait makes them operating w/o the corrective feedback loop? By not owning to what they said they clearly do not take themselves seriously while at the same time being dead sure that they must be listened to all the time.Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome, @Dieter Kief, @Bert, @Desiderius, @The Soft Parade
Overcorrecting for the widespread corruption/suppression of the research community and faulty/motivated reasoning of policy-makers. He just overdid it/did it in the wrong direction*/overestimated the effectiveness/competence of the policy response.
If the original plan had been followed deaths would be an order of magnitude lower and we’re working with spotty/slanted data re: true # of deaths as is.
* -online autists who’ve been ahead of the game like Loki were never Floomers.
What is most needed and most lacking are outspoken contrarians like Ionnadis to shore up flaws in the official thinking. That’s why Steve is being optimistic here.
The critics of Ioannidis who published their opinion were way too mild IMO:I wish that F. Scott Fitzgerald was correct that "there are no second acts in American lives," but in the age of short memory and shamelessness I am afraid that Ioannides may come back.Replies: @utu, @Desiderius
“Covid is over”.
Do you relish being delusional?
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/09/01/816707182/map-tracking-the-spread-of-the-coronavirus-in-the-u-s
BULLSHIT-2020 may be over, as the WHO has issued official guidance lowering the PCR test threshold. This will greatly reduce the number of """""cases""""".
If so, then my analysis as of March 2020 that, after impeachment 1.0 failed spectacularly, the CoronaHoax was the Democratic Party's strategy to elect Creepy Joe Diapers via massive mail-fraud voting is vindicated and validated. Then again, it appears that CovImbeciles genuinely enjoy Facediapers™ and assburger-distancing, so the CoronaHoax is likely permanent.Replies: @Keypusher, @Corvinus
Did the Jews Kill Themselves at Masada Rather Than Fall Into Roman Hands?
Trump Cancels Visit to Ancient Masada Site after Israel Refuses Helicopter LandingReplies: @Bardon Kaldian, @Alexander Turok
You won’t find many bodies lying around the Alamo at the exact point where they were slain either.
I am willing to risk getting COVID again, because I did not get very sick, no fever just a sore throat and fatigue for 5 days. It seems that the side effects of the vaccine may actually be worse for people like me with good immune systems and under the age of 60.
A wristwatch also lets you inconspicuously check the time. If I'm in a meeting, and someone is going on with small talk, and I need to gauge just how much of that I can allow before getting to brass tacks (so as to not be late for the next), it would be rude to pull out the phone and look. A careful glance at the wristwatch is usually unnoticed. Even if noticed, it doesn't interrupt the conversation flow like pulling out a phone does.Replies: @epebble
It has been over 20 years when I was in any meeting room where there weren’t an array of computers with at least a few projecting a power point on a screen. Many places even had multiple wall clocks brightly announcing time in Los Angeles, New York, London, Tokyo, Singapore etc.,
And the “rudeness” in cutting off someone going over time – that sounds pleasantly 1950’s nostalgia. Most of my working life involved meetings with lots of interruptions.
Biden presumably had nothing but a “public service” income his entire life until about four years ago. So I’d say if he splurges, he has more ‘splain’ to do than Trump.
I’m not sure how much of a difference this makes, but Clalit was originally part of the Histadrut labor union, and thus linked to the Labor Party that ran Israel for its first three decades, which gave it a near-monopoly until the mid-1990’s when reforms were enacted. It still covers about half the population, and a much higher percentage of the elderly, who got it when they were young and employed and never switched. (A friend who works in healthcare says that older patients will still say, “I’m with Histadrut” instead of “Clalit.”)
Maccabi, to which I belong, covers about a quarter of the population, and the rest is divided between the other two, Meuhedet (in third place) and Leumit (in fourth).
Each of the funds sets slightly different rules for the vaccine. For example, Maccabi lowered the age considerably last week, robocalled me, and gave me an appointment. I got the first dose two days later and was already scheduled for the next, three weeks later. The same sore arm I get for any vaccination and no side affects as far as I can tell.
My parents, who need it a lot more than I, live in New York, and are having a terrible time trying to get vaccinated. In any normal place and time, Cuomo would be run out of town on a rail.
Even if Trump is a conman of sorts at least he was a conman in the private sector. Joe’s been a swamp creature for 40 years.
Sorry, but I don’t trust healthcare organizations, from socialist countries (especially those that I presume to be home to a lot of ambulance chasers), to provide accurate data about anything.
Have private sector, life insurance underwriters weighed in on the vaccine? My guess is that since tests for the virus are so unreliable, and its official listings as cause-of-death are so inflated, that their models would indicate, by-&-large, no significant advantage from taking the vaccine.
Domestic partner and I contracted the virus.
Eh.
Three weeks start to finish. Our worst symptom was that we felt unusually lethargic throughout the day. I had some toilet trouble. Otherwise, neither of us felt especially ill.
In years past, I’ve felt much worse from having a bad cold.
Governments tell us to say no to drugs, and yes to drugs.
I’m waiting for those bitter, ugly, “I control my own body!” femnizts to start screaming how CV vaccinations should be mandatory.
Schoolteachers should not be forced to vaccinate. Keep the schools closed.
No Parkland-style shootings.
No on-campus bullying.
No cultural sociopathy.
Oh, and rebate our property taxes.
Completely off-topic and out-of-country (because it’s about the UK and the service where you don’t want to spend too much time lest you get maimed by AA hires or superbugs or extreme bureaucracy, namely the NHS) but this seems interesting.
After Brexit #3:
COVID-19 and the Failed Post-Political State
Is it really April when Boris got COVID-19? It’s crazy, time flies.
Also, the headlines currently:
30% more deadly! Now with added stain remover!
How does he even know? The bullshit they spew!
I’m sure Big Guy conscientiously saved his long-time congressman salary so his account by now is comparable in value to Trump’s real estate empire — I mean, Trump has been in debt trouble before, right, so it could totally be the case. But you’re suggesting a good idea; let’s subject him to the same tax scrutiny as they did Trump. They might come up empty in Big Guy’s case too.
Do you relish being delusional?
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/09/01/816707182/map-tracking-the-spread-of-the-coronavirus-in-the-u-sReplies: @Je Suis Omar Mateen
“Do you relish being delusional?”
BULLSHIT-2020 may be over, as the WHO has issued official guidance lowering the PCR test threshold. This will greatly reduce the number of “””””cases”””””.
If so, then my analysis as of March 2020 that, after impeachment 1.0 failed spectacularly, the CoronaHoax was the Democratic Party’s strategy to elect Creepy Joe Diapers via massive mail-fraud voting is vindicated and validated. Then again, it appears that CovImbeciles genuinely enjoy Facediapers™ and assburger-distancing, so the CoronaHoax is likely permanent.
Wait, I thought we weren't suppose to trust this organization, and now you are citing it? Do even understand what you are talking about?
https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/90508"If so, then my analysis as of March 2020 that, after impeachment 1.0 failed spectacularly..."
It did fail, but not in the way you believe.
"the CoronaHoax was the Democratic Party’s strategy to elect Creepy Joe Diapers via massive mail-fraud voting is vindicated and validated."
No hoax on COVID, and assuredly, no massive voting fraud. Trump lost, but at least Epstein didn't kill himself.
Maccabi, to which I belong, covers about a quarter of the population, and the rest is divided between the other two, Meuhedet (in third place) and Leumit (in fourth).
Each of the funds sets slightly different rules for the vaccine. For example, Maccabi lowered the age considerably last week, robocalled me, and gave me an appointment. I got the first dose two days later and was already scheduled for the next, three weeks later. The same sore arm I get for any vaccination and no side affects as far as I can tell.
My parents, who need it a lot more than I, live in New York, and are having a terrible time trying to get vaccinated. In any normal place and time, Cuomo would be run out of town on a rail.Replies: @That Would Be Telling
Can they confirm the reports that the online process is the only method, and it can take a very large number of steps, up to 51 if someone doesn’t already have accounts in the required systems etc.? And if they were required to upload anything, like an image of an ID card?
(That said, my parents report that the lines at the vaccination centers- where they can't get in- are heavily non-white. Even taking into account that they live in one of America's Most Diverse Counties, that problem's solved, I guess.)
Just do what Russia did. Stop lying. Pandemic over.
Oh look, Kansas was using a PCR threshold of 42. FORTY TWO!!! (AKA every single test will be positive). So they “discretely” (aka sneakily) just lowered it to 35. Guess cases are gonna drop now in Kansas. A Biden miracle!
1. Rona panic, social distancing, need telecommuting
2. Offices close because telecommuting makes them obsolete.
3. Speculators buy up all the offices at depressed prices.
4. Rona over. No more need to telecommute.
5. Need to buy back the offices again from the speculators.
6. Profit!Replies: @Buzz Mohawk
Yes, good summary, but I’ve been out here for a long time. This environment is the kind I imprinted on when I came of age. As soon as I could, I came back to it, bought into it, now decades ago.
Whether I am right or not, I feel in my bones that city people are suckers and that most of the problems that get shouted to us at loud volumes are just what city suckers care about. Frankly, I could have ignored all media and “news” for most of my life.
I already own my real estate out here — as I have for a long time now — where the city suckers are now buying. If they sell and move back to where they came from, as you suggest, I will still be here, owning my pieces of it — and perhaps more after they sell.
BTW I see them here now in our semi-rural community. The men wear skinny pants and have carefully coiffed beards. Their cars are shiny.
Why do we need a vaccine when we have a cheap cure? Ohhhhhh, there’s multiple billions of reasons.
I saw that Nature article a few months back, and started reading up on Tissue Resident Memory cells and the like. I’ve thought for a while now that one reason East Asian countries skated so lightly on covid was that they got exposed to Sars back in the day, and they developed some degree of natural immunity. The national responses ranged from strict lockdown (China) to pretty much nothing (Japan), and they all have about the same results (i.e., way better than western countries). Is this a totally stupid idea? I don’t know nearly enough about the subject to be too certain of anything, but then again nobody else seems to know too much either (or if they do, they’re not saying).
And of course we've re-learned not to believe a word coming out of the PRC/CCP, "including 'and' and 'the'." Pretty much everything officially reported about their early response to COVID-19 turned out to be blatant lie. Or let us say that it says something when a country's response to a very nasty bug they set loose in the world (SARS-CoV(-1)) was to suborn the world's top health authority. Also see how badly the CCP handled "pig Ebola," African swine fever.
For SARS, we sure don't believe a huge fraction of the East Asian population got cases so mind they were not noticed, you'd want to look for serological tests done afterwords to gauge its real infection rate. Officially, it wasn't efficient at transmitting, many or most outbreaks were associated with one or more super spreaders, and of course lethality cuts against respiratory transmission, dead people don't breath. Another thing to investigate is of course what we believe about immunity from SARS carrying over to COVID-19. Also see the nasty MERS outbreak in South Korea.
My guess, when the people reading this blog are either dead or locked up.
Don’t forget, you can wrap a wristwatch around your knuckles in a fistfight.
“Let your fingers do the talking…”
The total cost of ownership of a battery powered quartz watch, and I have more than a few, is high. Its about $75 or more for replacement of a battery every three years. For a decent mechanical watch -- zero cost.
You can get a decent mechanical watch from Orient for about $125 (used to be cheaper). A Vostok Amphibia is about $90 (again, used to be cheaper). A Kommanderski, around $55 (used to be $35). The Vostok is a true diving watch, good for up to 200 meter. Its a unique design, with a heavy plastic crystal that presses down even harder under high water pressure. You can buff out scratches with toothpaste. [I've done it]. Decent Seikos can be had for around $175 or so if you shop around. That's Dive Watch water resistant Seikos.
A good watch is a god send. Not just meetings but all sorts of activity needs timing. Cooking, exercising, commuting (particularly by train), all are dependent on an accurate watch. Then there's survival. A good watch can act as a compass. Put the hour hand on the sun. Halfway between it and the 12 O'Clock indicator will be due South.
A decent mechanical watch will have a nice ticking sound, smooth non-jumpy movement of the second hand, and the reassurance of accurate time keeping without batteries. That might be hard to come by. Really, with a shortwave radio you can regulate a mechanical watch to be accurate within 25 seconds or so of the UTC time broadcast and then you won't be late for things.
Vostoks have really awful bands, but then you want to replace any manufacturers band with a decent NATO strap anyway. There are very nice polyester ones but I'm partial to canvas. Particularly the ones with metal rings in the holes. Very useful in the summer.Replies: @Jack D
Where do you get your watch batteries changed? $75 is beyond ripoff. I think most jewelers charge $10 or so but I get my watch batteries on ebay for under $1 each (only buy American or Japanese brands, never Chinese) and I spent under $10 for a watch case opening tool.
Any mechanical watch is going to need cleaning after a few years – $100 and up, which is more than a cheap watch is worth.
Invicta makes some nice Rolex homage type mechanical diver watches with OK Miyota (Japanese) movements. There are tons of Chinese mechanical watches with Chinese quality – dubious.
Irrelevant.
Relevant:
Average age of death attributed to BULLSHIT-2020 is equal or higher than average human lifespan.
My gf is a nurse and also the BS-2020 specialist at her clinic, so she sees these people 30-plus hours per week. She WANTS to test positive so she can get a paid vacation. Yeah, super scary stuff 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣.
Total deaths for 2020 were unremarkable, slightly higher than last year because the Boomer cohort has reached its seventies now and is dying.
It’s a hoax and a medical coding fraud. End of discussion.
• Agree x1000: Adam Smith
☮
BULLSHIT-2020 may be over, as the WHO has issued official guidance lowering the PCR test threshold. This will greatly reduce the number of """""cases""""".
If so, then my analysis as of March 2020 that, after impeachment 1.0 failed spectacularly, the CoronaHoax was the Democratic Party's strategy to elect Creepy Joe Diapers via massive mail-fraud voting is vindicated and validated. Then again, it appears that CovImbeciles genuinely enjoy Facediapers™ and assburger-distancing, so the CoronaHoax is likely permanent.Replies: @Keypusher, @Corvinus
What is it with tards who explain a global pandemic as a byproduct of domestic politics? How can you stand to be so stupid?
until at least a couple of days ago that I checked this mass vaccination in Israel hadn’t so far impacted much on the infection rates
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/ioannidis-trump-white-house-coronavirus-lockdowns
And then they kept on with their opinionated activism on the same side of the debate ignoring the fact they were so wrong. What personality trait makes them operating w/o the corrective feedback loop? By not owning to what they said they clearly do not take themselves seriously while at the same time being dead sure that they must be listened to all the time.Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome, @Dieter Kief, @Bert, @Desiderius, @The Soft Parade
zigged when i shoulda zagged:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/some-pretty-good-news-out-of-israel-about-vaccines/#comment-4424488
https://twitter.com/LilithAssyria/status/1353049063596449792Replies: @HA
“Just do what Russia did. Stop lying. Pandemic over.”
Actually, the last time they decided to stop lying, back on Dec 28, their COVID death tally tripled:
Also, if one looks at the COVID death toll for Russia on that same site where the above graph was taken, you’ll see that it took a dip and then started rising again. I.e. pandemic is by no means “over”. True, they’ve also started vaccinating and spring is coming, so we’ll see. Fingers crossed.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/russia/
“What is it with tards who explain a global pandemic as a byproduct of domestic politics? How can you stand to be so stupid?”
There is no pandemic. Total deaths for 2020 in the US and all of Europe were normal and the average age of death attributed to BULLSHIT-2020 is at or above average life expectancy in all of Europe and the US – viz, it is old people dying of old age.
I can speak only to US politics, which I know very well: the Democratic Party clearly manufactured a crisis to destroy our President’s economic miracle. I can’t speak to why other nations participated in this hoax, as I don’t understand their politics.
Love you.
“ Also, if one looks at the COVID death toll for Russia on that same site where the above graph was taken, you’ll see that it took a dip and then started rising again.”
No, it’s peaking. Deaths are lagging cases like always, and cases are clearly declining. Deaths will head down shortly, to your everlasting regret. You just can’t get enough of your morbid thrill seeking.
“Deaths are lagging cases like always, and cases are clearly declining.”
Which cases? The ones that according to the tweet you cut-and-pasted were bogus so that once they stopped giving tests, they began dwindling away? OK, fine, but if you want to point to them as justification for the deaths that are still increasing, then they’re clearly not as bogus as that tweet would have us believe.
I realize your strategy is just to throw anything against the wall in the hope that something sticks, as desperate as you are at this point, but without at least some consistency, you’re not going to convince anyone who isn’t already in your echo chamber. Better luck next time.
I have to get details out of them. They tend not to complain, raised in the 30’s and 40’s. But if that’s true…wow. The most vulnerable are the elderly, and they are the least used to online matters. (My parents don’t have smartphones. Heck, they have one email account between them, and one rarely-used cellphone.) And of course the Left, which has been telling us now that the first people who need to get this are non-whites, have been carrying on for decades about the “digital gap” or whatever.
(That said, my parents report that the lines at the vaccination centers- where they can’t get in- are heavily non-white. Even taking into account that they live in one of America’s Most Diverse Counties, that problem’s solved, I guess.)
Neil Ferguson with his models again, already rowed back the new mutant strain BS.
As for Israel…
How it turned out: "oh look, it really does kind of work a little bit if you squint. Yay science!".Replies: @LondonBob
A friend of my mother has had the Pfizer first jab, the NHS won’t give her the second, probably because the adverse effects from the second are so much worse they are holding it back now.
BULLSHIT-2020 may be over, as the WHO has issued official guidance lowering the PCR test threshold. This will greatly reduce the number of """""cases""""".
If so, then my analysis as of March 2020 that, after impeachment 1.0 failed spectacularly, the CoronaHoax was the Democratic Party's strategy to elect Creepy Joe Diapers via massive mail-fraud voting is vindicated and validated. Then again, it appears that CovImbeciles genuinely enjoy Facediapers™ and assburger-distancing, so the CoronaHoax is likely permanent.Replies: @Keypusher, @Corvinus
“as the WHO has issued official guidance lowering the PCR test threshold.”
Wait, I thought we weren’t suppose to trust this organization, and now you are citing it? Do even understand what you are talking about?
https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/90508
“If so, then my analysis as of March 2020 that, after impeachment 1.0 failed spectacularly…”
It did fail, but not in the way you believe.
“the CoronaHoax was the Democratic Party’s strategy to elect Creepy Joe Diapers via massive mail-fraud voting is vindicated and validated.”
No hoax on COVID, and assuredly, no massive voting fraud. Trump lost, but at least Epstein didn’t kill himself.
yes. Get ready for mandatory yearly shots from here to eternity. I already had a doctor try to bully/shame me into this predictable position.
Remember, if big gov’t liberals CAN make you do something, then they WILL. It doesn’t really matter what IT is, just so they can make you do it. I know I sound cynical and paranoid, but I’ve been watching it my whole life and it’s a sound principle.
"A Liberal doesn't care what you do, as long as it is mandatory."
You’re hysterical. Take a schvitz and calm down.
https://twitter.com/richardursomd/status/1352525822834450432Replies: @Dieter Kief
Why is Ivermectin no bigger story? Just because of the money? – That’d be boringly simple.
People don’t seem to care much. Not here on the Unz Review – and not elsewhere too.
Japan could be having bad outcomes and just not reporting them, given how things work, or rather don’t there. Face for officials is infinitely more important that the people’s lives and has been so for centuries. For recent examples, see the Great Hanshin AKA Kobe earthquake response, or for something obscure, the response to the relatively gentle crash landing of Japan Airlines Flight 123. See also how they have absolutely no business doing anything nuclear, which was clear long before Fukushima.
And of course we’ve re-learned not to believe a word coming out of the PRC/CCP, “including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” Pretty much everything officially reported about their early response to COVID-19 turned out to be blatant lie. Or let us say that it says something when a country’s response to a very nasty bug they set loose in the world (SARS-CoV(-1)) was to suborn the world’s top health authority. Also see how badly the CCP handled “pig Ebola,” African swine fever.
For SARS, we sure don’t believe a huge fraction of the East Asian population got cases so mind they were not noticed, you’d want to look for serological tests done afterwords to gauge its real infection rate. Officially, it wasn’t efficient at transmitting, many or most outbreaks were associated with one or more super spreaders, and of course lethality cuts against respiratory transmission, dead people don’t breath. Another thing to investigate is of course what we believe about immunity from SARS carrying over to COVID-19. Also see the nasty MERS outbreak in South Korea.
“Why is Ivermectin no bigger story?”
It’s moving ahead — trials take time. You mean this article, which was published on the 19th?
I take your point (at least, what I suspect you’re getting at) that cheaper, patent-free solutions deserve more attention, or access to some of the same marketing that big pharma employs, but ivermectin is still in the running. The Lancet is about as high-profile as anyone ought to expect.
My point was - also - a meta point: Why people don't talk more about this Ivermectin-story. If I compare it to the vaccine, vaccines are spoken about maybe 100 times more which might indicate, that on a more popular level, Ivermectin does (still) not get it's fair share of attention.
(I for one couldn't tell, what difference it could make if it turned out that it really works as effectively as it now looks - would it be big (with it I mean the possible difference Ivermectin could make. Is it too early to ask this question?).Replies: @That Would Be Telling, @Jack D, @LondonBob
I can’t speak to this event specifically, but as the resident of another country, don’t underestimate how much US news coverage can influence other parts of the world.
I know. I am amazed at Europeans preoccupation with our President Trump. I pay almost zero attention to foreign politicians - which is normal for Americans. The worldwide CoronaHoax may very well be a response to our President.
Thanks, HA.
My point was – also – a meta point: Why people don’t talk more about this Ivermectin-story. If I compare it to the vaccine, vaccines are spoken about maybe 100 times more which might indicate, that on a more popular level, Ivermectin does (still) not get it’s fair share of attention.
(I for one couldn’t tell, what difference it could make if it turned out that it really works as effectively as it now looks – would it be big (with it I mean the possible difference Ivermectin could make. Is it too early to ask this question?).
Now, if any of these existing drugs can be used as as prophylactics, with reasonably well understood and good enough safety profiles, they should definitely get more attention, although profiles of good vaccines ought to better in the long term for most people. So as a stopgap until people can get vaccines, if we can get some reasonable proof from honest studies (never an option for HQC in the West after Trump boosted it), that would be great if there's enough to go around.
Emphasis on the latter (and won't anyone think of the horses?), something to give impetus to this is that so many vaccine companies are reporting disappointing misses in their near term production, and Pfizer will or has actually shut down their European plant, claiming this is to increase production once they make some changes (sounds like either BS or very bad plant design to me). Janssen is only the latest, will be late with their first 12 million doses for the US, which might become important soon since they are said by Saint Fauci to be close to reporting results (although that might only be on their one dose attempt, they started another Phase III trial after that one for two doses 57 days/8 weeks apart as I assume a backup).
The other thing is where is money for clinical trials going to come from? Big Phase III ones are expensive, like a billion dollars for starters, in the US context I don't know if ivermectin would for example qualify for orphan drug status (a way of getting exclusivity for an old drug for a new but limited purpose). As a river blindness treatment it would except we don't have that problem in the US as far as I know, but per Wikipedia Merck donated "hundreds of millions of doses since 1988" so we can make it scale (Wikipedia data suggests it can be fermented), although not necessarily a huge amount from a standing start.
One other factor: any promising claims coming from the Third World automatically gets less respect because cargo cult science is so much more prevalent there (parse that carefully, it's here too). So I can see people in the developed world looking askance at reports than came from there. Or see how the politicians severely damaged the reputation of Sputnik V by boasting about it a month before it started its Phase III trial (a very clever one now finished with very good results). Also, old fashioned small molecule drug screening should have already checked to for indications it might help. That is, one tool Big Pharma has is zillions of compounds of all sorts of things that might make good drugs, and automation to try all of the out to see on the off chance if something someone never would have thought of might work (although I can see them junking this method in recent decades).
https://twitter.com/hughosmond/status/1353613244896858113?s=20Replies: @Dieter Kief, @That Would Be Telling
One counter argument I see for that thinking is African countries weren’t impacted by SARS but have fared well compared to other nations with Covid.
“…probably because the adverse effects from the second are so much worse they are holding it back now.”
I thought it was part of the same gamble that Israel tried in the hope that giving a half dose to 20 people takes a bigger bite out of the death toll than giving the full dose to 20. That doesn’t seem to have worked, as noted in the link, but it’s going to take some weeks to change the scheduling around.
And yes, the adverse effects are supposedly worse the second time around, which presumably has something to do with why people have received the full two doses have 6-12 times the antibodies. Maybe it would be better to give people (at least the elderly and frail) lots of little jabs over a full month, to slowly ramp up the antibodies, but figuring out whether that makes sense or how best to do it would take a lot more time to test and fine-tune, so getting the full second jab, fireworks notwithstanding, is probably the best that is available, for now.
My point was - also - a meta point: Why people don't talk more about this Ivermectin-story. If I compare it to the vaccine, vaccines are spoken about maybe 100 times more which might indicate, that on a more popular level, Ivermectin does (still) not get it's fair share of attention.
(I for one couldn't tell, what difference it could make if it turned out that it really works as effectively as it now looks - would it be big (with it I mean the possible difference Ivermectin could make. Is it too early to ask this question?).Replies: @That Would Be Telling, @Jack D, @LondonBob
Without going into exact fair shares of attention, a treatment is simply not as attractive as something that prevents infection in the first place. Lot of people will fall through the cracks of a treatment, like those who don’t seek medical help until they’re at death’s door which “Aesop” reports is a significant factor in Southern California.
Now, if any of these existing drugs can be used as as prophylactics, with reasonably well understood and good enough safety profiles, they should definitely get more attention, although profiles of good vaccines ought to better in the long term for most people. So as a stopgap until people can get vaccines, if we can get some reasonable proof from honest studies (never an option for HQC in the West after Trump boosted it), that would be great if there’s enough to go around.
Emphasis on the latter (and won’t anyone think of the horses?), something to give impetus to this is that so many vaccine companies are reporting disappointing misses in their near term production, and Pfizer will or has actually shut down their European plant, claiming this is to increase production once they make some changes (sounds like either BS or very bad plant design to me). Janssen is only the latest, will be late with their first 12 million doses for the US, which might become important soon since they are said by Saint Fauci to be close to reporting results (although that might only be on their one dose attempt, they started another Phase III trial after that one for two doses 57 days/8 weeks apart as I assume a backup).
The other thing is where is money for clinical trials going to come from? Big Phase III ones are expensive, like a billion dollars for starters, in the US context I don’t know if ivermectin would for example qualify for orphan drug status (a way of getting exclusivity for an old drug for a new but limited purpose). As a river blindness treatment it would except we don’t have that problem in the US as far as I know, but per Wikipedia Merck donated “hundreds of millions of doses since 1988” so we can make it scale (Wikipedia data suggests it can be fermented), although not necessarily a huge amount from a standing start.
One other factor: any promising claims coming from the Third World automatically gets less respect because cargo cult science is so much more prevalent there (parse that carefully, it’s here too). So I can see people in the developed world looking askance at reports than came from there. Or see how the politicians severely damaged the reputation of Sputnik V by boasting about it a month before it started its Phase III trial (a very clever one now finished with very good results). Also, old fashioned small molecule drug screening should have already checked to for indications it might help. That is, one tool Big Pharma has is zillions of compounds of all sorts of things that might make good drugs, and automation to try all of the out to see on the off chance if something someone never would have thought of might work (although I can see them junking this method in recent decades).
Israel Shuts Down International Air Travel to Bring Outbreak Under Control
https://www.newsmax.com/t/newsmax/article/1006963/75
My point was - also - a meta point: Why people don't talk more about this Ivermectin-story. If I compare it to the vaccine, vaccines are spoken about maybe 100 times more which might indicate, that on a more popular level, Ivermectin does (still) not get it's fair share of attention.
(I for one couldn't tell, what difference it could make if it turned out that it really works as effectively as it now looks - would it be big (with it I mean the possible difference Ivermectin could make. Is it too early to ask this question?).Replies: @That Would Be Telling, @Jack D, @LondonBob
100 to 1 is about right because a 95% effective vaccine that has been thru phase III trials and that stops you from ever getting the disease (and probably stops it from spreading in the community) thru a well understood process (vaccines have been used for hundreds of years) IS 100x better than some unproven bug killer that supposedly reduces the severity of Covid by a mysterious mechanism. There’s just no comparison – it’s like the polio vaccine vs. aspirin even IF it did work, which nobody really knows that it does. Remember all the excitement about hydroxychloroquine, which went nowhere?
There are very few effective anti-viral drugs. Since viruses integrate themselves into you cells once you’ve been infected it’s hard to make something that kills a virus in your cells but doesn’t kill you. Lots of things will kill viruses on surfaces or in a test tube but it’s difficult to get the necessary concentration inside your body without damaging your body too.
We should continue with clinical trials for Ivermectin but I’m not optimistic. Vaccines are the gold standard treatment for viral diseases. We have vaccines now, we just need to get more doses produced and distributed.
What I don’t understand is why the desire for some magic bullet antiviral treatment when vaccines are known to work? It just seems like wishful thinking to me – I don’t have to wear a mask or take precautions or get the vaccine but if I get sick I’ll take this magic $5 tube of horse medicine and everything will be great. It would be wonderful if that was true but it’s like a pill that turns water into gasoline – too good to be true.
So - we have to wait since there are (expensive) clinical trials of Ivermectin underway. Maybe there are reasonable ways to speed them up a little; if not - since the virus will be around for quite some time, it could work cheap wonders for any number of reasons later on.
“…predicted only 10,000 deaths for the US…” —> “Well, he was right, after all.”
Where are you coming form? I just can’t imagine somebody spouting nonsense like that out of his own volition. Is somebody holding gun to your head?
‘I can’t speak to this event specifically, but as the resident of another country, don’t underestimate how much US news coverage can influence other parts of the world.’
I know. I am amazed at Europeans preoccupation with our President Trump. I pay almost zero attention to foreign politicians – which is normal for Americans. The worldwide CoronaHoax may very well be a response to our President.
Where are you coming form? I just can't imagine somebody spouting nonsense like that out of his own volition. Is somebody holding gun to your head?Replies: @Je Suis Omar Mateen
About 20,000 american death certificates list BULLSHIT-2020 as the sole cause of death, so 10,000 is much closer to the truth than that fake 400,000 number spewed by the fakestream media. 2020 had 60K more deaths than 2019. Hoax: confirmed.
Sorry, but 2020 had about ~15% more deaths of any cause than 2019 in the US. See the graph of weekly deaths, which isn’t quite complete for December 2020:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/1353539189900455936?s=20
didn't produce a spike.
Contrarians often are driven by serious personality flaws like excessive pride and hubris which leads them to parse reality imprudently. Ionnadis destroyed his reputation by giving fuel to floomers with his March 17 article that appeared on STAT (now scrubbed). He misread Diamond Princess data coming with ridiculously low IFR while after the date of his publication still 40% (6 more passengers) were to die. His statement in the article is pure floomerism:
He doubled down in his April paper when already there was overwhelming evidence that he was completely wrong:
He invented the favorite trope of Covid deniers that large number of cases are created by testing so the data can be be ignored:
His advocacy was in favor of doing nothing which either came from the floomerist position that covid was a mouse and the countermeasures were an elephant:
or from the callous “let old people die because they lived enough” morality position when he permitted himself to consider the opposite that Covoid was actually a dangerous disease with high IFR and large R0:
He used the inverse of the precautionary principle: “do nothing if you do not know enough” rather than “do something when chance of it turning bad and are not negligible”
where he misleadingly conveyed that countermeasure implemented once would last forever as if they could not be reversed if it was found that indeed the floomers like him were right
The critics of Ioannidis who published their opinion were way too mild IMO:
I wish that F. Scott Fitzgerald was correct that “there are no second acts in American lives,” but in the age of short memory and shamelessness I am afraid that Ioannides may come back.
When you decide to rejoin the scientific community we don’t hold grudges.
Are you suffering from the delusion of grandeur by proxy attributing power to the exchange we had where I demolished all your flaky mambo-jumbo claims with citations from published papers that did not support any of your claims?
Anything new on the homeopathic suppositories preventing Covid? Does the size matter?
"Anyone who thinks the tried and true shutdown method isn’t a good one when dealing with an unknown viral entity needs their medical or lab licenses revoked (...) "Lockdowns aren't a tried and true method but rather a novelty. Who's ever heard of quarantining everybody, the sick and the healthy, regardless whether they are infected or not? No precedents whatsoever in medical history." because their interests are in money rather than medicine." Unlike Big Pharma and big corporations, who are known to always act in defense of human health and liberty, with no pecuniary interests.
Give me a break!Replies: @utu, @HA
Are you for real? An indiscriminate lockdown is the fastest way to reduce R0 below one and bring the infection rate to the ‘managable” level. Once the in infection rate is manageable the contact tracing system can be effective and then only the ‘suspects’ are locked up in the quarantine.
Here are two recent articles from New Zealand and Australia that can give you an idea what a successful management of Covid epidemic could look like if a country decided to use the strategy of virus elimination (no cure flattening strategy, no herd immunity strategy) and then all it had to do is to prevent importation of virus from the abroad:
New Zealand had total 25 deaths. The last one was in September.
Australia had 900 total deaths and the last death occurred in October.
“About 20,000 american death certificates list BULLSHIT-2020 as the sole cause of death,…”
Just because something isn’t the sole cause of death doesn’t mean it isn’t responsible for the bump in the death toll. HIV isn’t solely what AIDS patients die of. Instead, it messes up their immunity so that something else that otherwise wouldn’t kill them does exactly that. Is that really so difficult for you to understand?
If a pack of wolves attacked your family or your neighborhood, they would undoubtedly focus their efforts on eating those who move the slowest, but so what? If PETA wants to say, actually, we think it was the crutches or the asthma or the obesity that killed everyone here, so don’t anyone try and blame the wolves, I guess that’s their right, but no one who isn’t a loon is going to agree with them.
"Anyone who thinks the tried and true shutdown method isn’t a good one when dealing with an unknown viral entity needs their medical or lab licenses revoked (...) "Lockdowns aren't a tried and true method but rather a novelty. Who's ever heard of quarantining everybody, the sick and the healthy, regardless whether they are infected or not? No precedents whatsoever in medical history." because their interests are in money rather than medicine." Unlike Big Pharma and big corporations, who are known to always act in defense of human health and liberty, with no pecuniary interests.
Give me a break!Replies: @utu, @HA
“Lockdowns aren’t a tried and true method but rather a novelty. Who’s ever heard of quarantining everybody, the sick and the healthy, regardless whether they are infected or not? No precedents whatsoever in medical history.”
Not true.
Likewise, a 1900 bubonic plague incident caused an entire neighborhood of 25K Chinese residents to be roped off. This was later condemned not for being ineffective, but for being “racist”. Actually, it is such “targeted” quarantine efforts (against, say, blacks in South Africa or WWI prostitutes) that are nowadays being condemned as being primarily designed to punish marginalized groups, leaving general-purpose lockdowns as the more workable option. You may long for the days of targeted quarantines, but be careful what you wish for. Yeah, the Nancy Pelosis and Andrew Fergusons of the world will always find a way to ensure that rules don’t apply to them, but if you want to fix that, work on holding them accountable.
Remember, if big gov't liberals CAN make you do something, then they WILL. It doesn't really matter what IT is, just so they can make you do it. I know I sound cynical and paranoid, but I've been watching it my whole life and it's a sound principle.Replies: @Buck Ransom
A quote coming back to me from somewhere:
“A Liberal doesn’t care what you do, as long as it is mandatory.”
Here are two recent articles from New Zealand and Australia that can give you an idea what a successful management of Covid epidemic could look like if a country decided to use the strategy of virus elimination (no cure flattening strategy, no herd immunity strategy) and then all it had to do is to prevent importation of virus from the abroad:
New Zealand had total 25 deaths. The last one was in September.Australia had 900 total deaths and the last death occurred in October.Replies: @Jiminy
It makes me wonder though if the eventual decrease in cases in the Melbourne, Victoria area weren’t due to mass immunity, once that required number of cases were reached. I’m to lazy to find confirmation, and truthfully I’m over it. Of course both being isolated islands help the cause.
Australia virtually eliminated the virus. They have no community infections any more and they can keep it that way if they prevent importation of virus from abroad, which they do with mandatory quarantine of all new arrivals and when it happens that the virus escapes and they get few infections then the contact tracing, which they are good at, will take care of it and in the worst case if the contact tracing is overwhelmed in some locality then they go back to the local lockdown. Most importantly Australians can go on living as before the epidemic. They do not need to impatiently await the salvation by the vaccine being at the mercy of the Big Pharma.
Australia and New Zealand did what no other Western country tried to do (Norway and Finland also are doing well.). They opted for the virus elimination strategy while this option was not even put on the table in Europe or America where people and governments were misled with the false alternative between curve flattening and herd immunity. Basically people were told that the deaths are inevitable and they will die now our or little bit later and the de facto floomers like John Ioannides in the US or Sunetra Gupta in the UK were constantly advocating to throw the towel and succumb to the epidemic.
If Ioannides and Gupta were Chinese agents they earned every penny they were paid.Replies: @BB753
‘Andrew Marr of the BBC grilled Israeli Health Minister Yuli Edelstein about why Israel is not extending its vaccination program to the Palestinian people in territories it occupies, and Edelstein said Israel has no more obligation to them than the Palestinian minister of health has to “take care of dolphins in the Mediterranean.”’
Legally, he’s actually wrong about that. As the occupying power, Israel is responsible for the welfare of the civilian population it rules over.
But law, shmaw. This is Israel. who are we kidding?
As for Israel...
https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1352395454793789443?s=20Replies: @Sean
With the population density and lack of distancing in London, one would expect a specialized variant to become very successful
The critics of Ioannidis who published their opinion were way too mild IMO:I wish that F. Scott Fitzgerald was correct that "there are no second acts in American lives," but in the age of short memory and shamelessness I am afraid that Ioannides may come back.Replies: @utu, @Desiderius
Will the ‘robot zombie army’ be defeated?
Thus Travis is doing the right thing to put himself at the very end of the list at priority 0, unless and until we learn more, and/or it mutates into a new "strain," not variant, and does so in a way that evades the targeting of both spike and nucleocapsid proteins. Which if we get enough people vaccinated will be less likely, the selection pressure then being strongest to get around spike protein targeted immunity.Replies: @The Alarmist, @anon
There’s a chatbot AI known as ‘That Would Be Telling’, and shut-in israeli failure ‘Jack D’ spewing thousand word salad posts in support of vaccines.
Ignore them – they don’t have your best interests at heart.
My point was - also - a meta point: Why people don't talk more about this Ivermectin-story. If I compare it to the vaccine, vaccines are spoken about maybe 100 times more which might indicate, that on a more popular level, Ivermectin does (still) not get it's fair share of attention.
(I for one couldn't tell, what difference it could make if it turned out that it really works as effectively as it now looks - would it be big (with it I mean the possible difference Ivermectin could make. Is it too early to ask this question?).Replies: @That Would Be Telling, @Jack D, @LondonBob
The SaNOtize Nitric Oxide Nasal Spray (NONS) is another promising treatment.
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/cells.png
Immunity from what? Herd immunity? No way. Official data: 28,000 cases in Australia. If you look at the total death: 900 cases, then assuming IFR=0.5% which is lower than most estimates, you get at most 180,000 infections which is 0.7% of Australia’s population. The herd immunity threshold for this epidemic is estimated to be around 70%.
Australia virtually eliminated the virus. They have no community infections any more and they can keep it that way if they prevent importation of virus from abroad, which they do with mandatory quarantine of all new arrivals and when it happens that the virus escapes and they get few infections then the contact tracing, which they are good at, will take care of it and in the worst case if the contact tracing is overwhelmed in some locality then they go back to the local lockdown. Most importantly Australians can go on living as before the epidemic. They do not need to impatiently await the salvation by the vaccine being at the mercy of the Big Pharma.
Australia and New Zealand did what no other Western country tried to do (Norway and Finland also are doing well.). They opted for the virus elimination strategy while this option was not even put on the table in Europe or America where people and governments were misled with the false alternative between curve flattening and herd immunity. Basically people were told that the deaths are inevitable and they will die now our or little bit later and the de facto floomers like John Ioannides in the US or Sunetra Gupta in the UK were constantly advocating to throw the towel and succumb to the epidemic.
If Ioannides and Gupta were Chinese agents they earned every penny they were paid.
The Effective IFR during the vaccination campaign in the US. How many millions need to be vaccinated to lower country’s effective IFR, say, to 0.2%?
The vaccination starting with the oldest is the steepest paths of IFR reduction. The Effective IFR can be understood as follows: What percentage of people in a random sample N out of 331 million including both vaccinated and unvaccinated would die if exposed to virus.
The graph does not tell us about R0 and how infection rate would drop as more people are vaccinated.
The values of the age dependent IFR used in calculations are from the Fig.3 in
Note that the IFR for the US age demographic pyramid is 1.26% providing that all age groups have the same infection rate..
The 2020 age population pyramid in the US is from:
Meta-Regression IFR from
https://i.ibb.co/rvZ42hF/e-IFR-Vaxx-US.png
The vaccination starting with the oldest is the steepest paths of IFR reduction. The Effective IFR can be understood as follows: What percentage of people in a random sample N out of 331 million including both vaccinated and unvaccinated would die if exposed to virus.
The graph does not tell us about R0 and how infection rate would drop as more people are vaccinated.
The values of the age dependent IFR used in calculations are from the Fig.3 inNote that the IFR for the US age demographic pyramid is 1.26% providing that all age groups have the same infection rate..
The 2020 age population pyramid in the US is from:Replies: @utu
Meta-Regression IFR from
The critics of Ioannidis who published their opinion were way too mild IMO:I wish that F. Scott Fitzgerald was correct that "there are no second acts in American lives," but in the age of short memory and shamelessness I am afraid that Ioannides may come back.Replies: @utu, @Desiderius
Sry, I mistook you for someone worth engaging.
When you decide to rejoin the scientific community we don’t hold grudges.
The whole quote is interesting, and this is certainly a difficult topic.
I want to point out while their’s indeed “no necessary relationship between transmissibility and severity,” for a virus like this, the more severe the case, the more how someone with can and probably will change how they transmit it. For two extremes, dead people don’t breath and are thus are rather limited in how they can transmit it.
Whereas someone who gets sick enough to require bed rest isn’t out in the world transmitting it to random people, but I’ve read that we think (or guess) most transmission right now (or in some places) is happening in households. So such a patient can elevate the risk of whomever is in the household depending on things like air circulation, how much the patient can isolate/how disciplined the rest of the household is at avoiding him, etc.
I’m willing to accept that those could be COVID but then I’d need an explanation for how scaring the populace away from hospitals and things like this:
didn’t produce a spike.
See?
So – we have to wait since there are (expensive) clinical trials of Ivermectin underway. Maybe there are reasonable ways to speed them up a little; if not – since the virus will be around for quite some time, it could work cheap wonders for any number of reasons later on.
https://twitter.com/hughosmond/status/1353613244896858113?s=20Replies: @Dieter Kief, @That Would Be Telling
Tahnks.
A well known German ENT Professor proposes to gargle with some kind of mild disinfectant and says that that lowers the risk of getting CO-19.
https://twitter.com/hughosmond/status/1353613244896858113?s=20Replies: @Dieter Kief, @That Would Be Telling
From the way the The SaNOtize Nitric Oxide Nasal Spray (NONS) is talked about, it’s garbage (nitric oxide is a “nanomolecule” … OK…), and looking at the details and its toxicity I’m pretty sure it follows this well known principle:
Australia virtually eliminated the virus. They have no community infections any more and they can keep it that way if they prevent importation of virus from abroad, which they do with mandatory quarantine of all new arrivals and when it happens that the virus escapes and they get few infections then the contact tracing, which they are good at, will take care of it and in the worst case if the contact tracing is overwhelmed in some locality then they go back to the local lockdown. Most importantly Australians can go on living as before the epidemic. They do not need to impatiently await the salvation by the vaccine being at the mercy of the Big Pharma.
Australia and New Zealand did what no other Western country tried to do (Norway and Finland also are doing well.). They opted for the virus elimination strategy while this option was not even put on the table in Europe or America where people and governments were misled with the false alternative between curve flattening and herd immunity. Basically people were told that the deaths are inevitable and they will die now our or little bit later and the de facto floomers like John Ioannides in the US or Sunetra Gupta in the UK were constantly advocating to throw the towel and succumb to the epidemic.
If Ioannides and Gupta were Chinese agents they earned every penny they were paid.Replies: @BB753
As if Ionannides or Gupta had any effect on the sanitary policies of their respective countries. Faulci and Fergusson were in charge and what good did they do? You don’t make any sense.
Relevant:
Average age of death attributed to BULLSHIT-2020 is equal or higher than average human lifespan.
My gf is a nurse and also the BS-2020 specialist at her clinic, so she sees these people 30-plus hours per week. She WANTS to test positive so she can get a paid vacation. Yeah, super scary stuff 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣.
Total deaths for 2020 were unremarkable, slightly higher than last year because the Boomer cohort has reached its seventies now and is dying.
It's a hoax and a medical coding fraud. End of discussion.Replies: @Adam Smith
It’s a hoax and a medical coding fraud. End of discussion.
• Agree x1000: Adam Smith
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