Some Covid-19 thoughts
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Monday, September 29, 2025 18:59
VIEWED: 301579
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Quote:Baby yawns like an idiot
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
*yawn*
Trump Is Still Bragging About Passing His Cognitive Test
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Baby yawns like an idiot
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
*yawn*
Is that you? Awwwwww. Cute.
Quote:
Trump Is Still Bragging About Passing His Cognitive Test
It really shouldn't be something to brag about. But that was before we had a year of a President* who can't pass his cognitive test.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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Immunity
https://xkcd.com/2557/
This plan may sound appealing to people who know a little about the immune system, but the drawbacks are clear to people who know a lot about the immune system and also to people who don't know anything about it.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The problem with aiming for "natural immunity" is that, for some people, the risk of dying from Covid the " natural way" is far higher than the risk of dying from the vaccine.
Unless you live in SIX's inside-out world. 
What SIX can't seem to understand is that various factions have weaponized the pandemic, but for different reasons. Pharma wants to make money, but politicians want social control.
***
Omicron seems to be a mild infection which rarely causes hospitalization. Not something I'd personally want to catch, but this focus on "cases" (not deaths) is obvious fear-mongering by various governments so they can clamp down even further. (See "V for Vendetta")
WHY governments want to clamp down, aside from the general desire of most governments to want more control, is a matter of speculation. But I believe they anticipate a general economic and financial breakdown and want the levers already in place to prevent, in essence, a general revolt.
Once more was known about SARS-Cov2, it seems to me that the BEST approach would have been "targeted protection". i.e. protect the vulnerable. If they had done that, we wouldn't have had the farce of sick people being returned to nursing homes, not would we have had all of those general lockdowns and vaccine mandates, and there wouldn't have been such pushback on treatment with ivermectin and pretreatment with HCQ.(But then, the DNC had to repay its pharma donors somehow.)
So the obese, ppl over the age of 50, immune-compromised younger ppl, and those for whatever reason simply concerned about getting sick could have been preferentially prescribed N95s, and assisted (for example) with food deliveries and subsidies to allow them to self-isolate as necessary.
Everyone else willing to take their chances would be allowed.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
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Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Travel bans are stupid. Let’s focus on other stuff.
By Kevin Drum, Published on December 20, 2021 – 11:07 am
Israel has added the US and Canada to its travel ban, and it seems likely that other countries are going to start doing the same in the face of the Omicron onslaught.
At the risk of sounding like an idiot, I don't get it. What's the point of all these bans? Omicron is already in every country and it's going to spread whether people travel or not. In fact, since proof of vaccination is required to travel, the people entering all these countries are probably safer than the average resident.
What's more, a grueling five-minute scan of Google suggests that epidemiologists pretty much agree about this. Generally speaking, a travel ban might slow down transmission in a region that hasn't been hit with a particular virus—which means the initial COVID travel bans in early 2020 might have done a little bit of good—but it doesn't do any good if the virus is already there. And in the case of COVID in December 2021, the virus is already everywhere.
So this is all just virus theater, and it's a huge pain in the ass for a lot of people. Why don't we knock off this nonsense and put our energy into stuff that actually has an effect?
China was the target of the initial COVID travel bans in early 2020. They might have done some temporary good, but as this chart shows, probably not much. Countries with and without bans seem to have done about the same.
https://jabberwocking.com/travel-bans-are-stupid-lets-focus-on-other-s
tuff/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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There are several statistics one can apply to any measure. Of those statistics, one is 'average' (central tendency, with various calculations available such as mean, median, and mode), and another is dispersion (also using various calculations).
What I see in the chart is that 'travel restriction' numbers are evenly scatted all over the graph. But 'no travel restriction' numbers are mainly clustered at the high end.
Travel restrictions obviously CAN work, because they provide a different set of data than having no travel restrictions.
What that indicates to me is that someone needs to figure out the specifics that lead to success with travel restrictions, by examining the places where they did work v the places where they didn't work.
As for the comment about China's travel restrictions not being effective, since it isn't listed on the graph it would be really hard to say using it as an example.
But going by other figures - from DIVOC-91 - countries with travel restrictions like Australia, NZ, Singapore, Macau, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China did a really good job keeping their numbers very low.
I personally don't think travel restrictions are THE answer. They're a way to buy time, until one can, for example, deploy vaccines.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/19/health/omicron-vaccines-efficacy.ht
ml
Most of the World’s Vaccines Likely Won’t Prevent Infection From Omicron
A growing body of preliminary research suggests the Covid vaccines used in most of the world offer almost no defense against becoming infected by the highly contagious Omicron variant.
All vaccines still seem to provide a significant degree of protection against serious illness from Omicron, which is the most crucial goal. But only the Pfizer and Moderna shots, when reinforced by a booster, appear to have initial success at stopping infections, and these vaccines are unavailable in most of the world.
The other shots — including those from AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and vaccines manufactured in China and Russia — do little to nothing to stop the spread of Omicron, early research shows. And because most countries have built their inoculation programs around these vaccines, the gap could have a profound impact on the course of the pandemic.
A global surge of infections in a world where billions of people remain unvaccinated not only threatens the health of vulnerable individuals but also increases the opportunity for the emergence of yet more variants. The disparity in the ability of countries to weather the pandemic will almost certainly deepen. And the news about limited vaccine efficacy against Omicron infection could depress demand for vaccination throughout the developing world, where many people are already hesitant or preoccupied with other health problems.
Most evidence so far is based on laboratory experiments, which do not capture the full range of the body’s immune response, and not from tracking the effect on real-world populations. The results are striking, however.
The Pfizer and Moderna shots use the new mRNA technology, which has consistently offered the best protection against infection with every variant. All of the other vaccines are based on older methods of triggering an immune response.
The Chinese vaccines Sinopharm and Sinovac — which make up almost half of all shots delivered globally — offer almost zero protection from Omicron infection. The great majority of people in China have received these shots, which are also widely used in low-and middle-income countries such as Mexico and Brazil.
A preliminary effectiveness study in Britain found that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine showed no ability to stop Omicron infection six months after vaccination. Ninety percent of vaccinated people in India received this shot, under the brand name Covishield; it has also been widely used across much of sub-Saharan Africa, where Covax, the global Covid vaccine program, has distributed 67 million doses of it to 44 countries.
Researchers predict that Russia’s Sputnik vaccine, which is also being used in Africa and Latin America, will show similarly dismal rates of protection against Omicron.
Demand for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine had been surging in Africa, because its single-shot delivery regimen makes it easy to deliver in low-resource settings. But it too has shown a negligible ability to block Omicron infection.
Antibodies are the first line of defense induced by vaccines. But the shots also stimulate the growth of T cells, and preliminary studies suggest that these T cells still recognize the Omicron variant, which is important in preventing severe disease.
“What you lose first is protection against asymptomatic mild infection, what you retain much better is protection against severe disease and death,” said John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. He called it “a silver lining” that Omicron so far appears less lethal than the Delta variant.
But this protection will not be enough to prevent Omicron from causing global disruption, said J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for International and Strategic Studies.
“The sheer scale of infection will overwhelm health systems, simply because the denominator will be potentially so big,” he said. “If y
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Quote:I found the original research article about Omicron transmissibility and pathogenicity but I haven't read it yet. Going by media reports, Omicron is more transmissible because it infects and propagates in upper airways better, but less pathogenic because it infects and propagates in lung tissue worse.
Originally posted by JO753:
Sorry if sumwun posted this alredy:
[url= https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/15/omicron-found-to-grow-70
-times-faster-than-delta-in-bronchial-tissue]Omicron multipliez 70x faster in broncial tissue[/url]
I gather that meanz in the upper respiratory area, so maybe produsing much more exhaled particlez? The next variation uv this will also multiply that fast deep in the lungz. Then soon after, a version that develops that fast in the rest uv the body.
48 owrz divided by 70 = :shock:
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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
The real pandemic solution: http://uvpk.net/
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Trump: Don’t let liberals take credit for the vaccines
Author Kevin Drum, Published on December 20, 2021 – 2:02 pm
Check this out. It's only a minute long video:
Video is at https://twitter.com/NoSpinNews/status/1472983120601403400
'You’re playing right into their hands' when you doubt the vaccine, President Trump says.
President Trump Got the Booster
President Trump reveals to Bill O'Reilly that he got the COVID vaccine booster.
11:31 AM · Dec 20, 2021·Twitter Media Studio
This is just jaw dropping. Finally, a year after vaccines became available, Donald Trump is telling his fans that he was the one responsible for getting them out so fast and they've saved "tens of millions of lives."
You're playing right into their hands when you're sort of like, "oh the vaccine"....We saved tens of millions of lives. Take credit. Don't let them take that away from you.
"Them" is liberals, in case you're wondering. And that's fine. Trump could pretend that he uncovered a plot by Hunter Biden to wreck the vaccine supply if that's what it takes to get conservatives on board.
Can you imagine if Trump had taken this position from the start? We'd probably be 90% vaxed by now. Hell, Republicans might have a higher vaccination rate than Democrats.
Better late than never, I suppose. I wonder how this is going to go over with the faithful?
https://jabberwocking.com/trump-dont-let-liberals-take-credit-for-the-
vaccines/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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I'd have to go back and dig into the technologies of the various vaccines to see if I can come up with a reasonably valid idea of why only the mRNA vaccines seems to work against infection (even though they weren't developed to guard against infection, only severe disease and death).
But offhand my first surmise is that it was because the mRNA vaccines were based on the entire spike protein (one original version used only a portion of the spike protein but it was never pursued to clinical trials). And that since the entire spike protein was freshly manufactured by the body's own virus-making machines (the ribosomes, which make ALL of the body's proteins), the newly-minted mRNA spike proteins were a lot more like the viral spike protein in its native state. Since the mRNA spike proteins looked more like the virus, they triggered antibodies that worked better against the virus.
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