All things political. Coronavirus Edition. (3 Viewers)

[Maxp]

I fear we are really going to be in a bad place due to the obvious cuts to the federal agencies that deal with infectious disease, but also the negative effect the Affordable Care act has had on non urban hospitals. Our front line defenses are ineffectual and our ability to treat the populous is probably at an all time low. Factor in the cost of healthcare and I can see our system crashing. What do you think about the politics of this virus?

 

[J-DONK]

The fact that Dr. Fauci needed to be preemptively pardoned shows how messed up this country is.

Everyone that protested those pardon's looks like clowns now.

 

[Dragon]

These are the worst kinds of Christians put their faith above their children. based on nothing but shirt info no less. of course, they brodcast it because they want others to support their horrible choices. all the shirt th kid has done to her and they worry about a vaccine gits amazing how stupid maga can be

It is sheer irresponsibility on the part of the parents to refuse vaccination for their sick child. Given that she will be on immunosuppressants for the rest of her life, she will be extremely vulnerable to infections. To put it bluntly, giving her a heart transplant while she faces a high risk of dying from COVID would mean denying another child—whose parents took every precaution to ensure the best possible outcome—a chance at life. The hospital must prioritize transplant recipients based on where the procedure has the highest likelihood of long-term success.

 

[Optimus Prime]

WASHINGTON (AP) — Roughly 650 Marines and Army soldiers who were forced out of the military for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine have so far expressed interest in returning to the force under an executive order from President Donald Trump, officials said this week.

The number represents about 8% of the roughly 8,200 troops who had been discharged. The total, officials say, confirms military leaders' early view that many troops have moved on with their lives. They have been allowed to rejoin since 2023, and Trump's offer of providing back pay may be a factor in spurring a bit more interest now.

The Army and Marine Corps have been sending out emails, texts and phone calls to service members discharged for refusing a pandemic-era order to get the vaccine. The Navy and the Air Force are planning to begin their efforts to contact service members, but are waiting for additional guidance. The totals would likely increase once their formal notices go out.

Officials stressed that the numbers are very preliminary because troops have only expressed interest in reenlisting and haven't actually taken steps to formally do so. They will have to go through the enlistment procedure again, pass all required legal and moral standards and physical fitness requirements, and agree to reenlist for at least two years.

Trump has argued that the vaccine mandate wrongly pushed troops out and suggested that many would return. In an executive order signed a week after he took office, Trump said that the mandate cost the military “some of our best people” and he vowed to “rehire every patriot who was fired from the military with … backpay.”

Under Trump's directive, those who were discharged for refusing the vaccine can rejoin and get back pay. Those who voluntarily left to avoid the vaccine also can rejoin, but they must swear that they left the service for that reason and they will not receive back pay.

Two years ago, the military services sent out notices to all troops discharged for refusing the vaccine, advising them they could return to the military. Just 113 reenlisted.

As a result of those notices:

— Of the 3,748 Marines discharged, 25 opted to re-enlist.

— Of the 1,903 Army soldiers discharged, 73 returned.

— Of the 1,878 sailors discharged, two returned.

— Of the 671 airmen discharged, 13 returned.

In mid-February, the Defense Department told the military services to reach out once again to service members who were forced out or voluntarily left the military because of the COVID-19 vaccine and see if they want to reenlist. This time it came with the financial incentive..............

Marines and soldiers discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine show limited interest in rejoining

Officials say roughly 650 Marines and Army soldiers who were forced out of the military for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine have so far expressed interest in returning to the force under an executive order from President Donald Trump.

apnews.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

…….Five years on from the declaration of the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s the masked passenger who is suspect, nobody notices the scuffed distancing lines and trust in vaccines has taken a tumble.

A different narrative has invaded the conversation: it wasn’t the virus that ruined our lives, but the response.

This narrative was always there, but for a long time it stayed on the fringes. Now it’s becoming mainstream, turbo-charged by the recent successes of its political champions who typically gravitate towards the populist right.

Public health experts have watched its advance with a gathering sense of doom. They know that how we respond to the next pandemic depends on how we understand the last, and that the next one is probably closer than most people think.

Mind-bogglingly, many of them worry that Covid-19 has left us more, rather than less, vulnerable to it.


The response was far from perfect, these experts say, but the purveyors of the new narrative have picked the wrong target: science. The mRNA vaccines prevented millions of deaths. The technology for building new, effective vaccines quickly came on in leaps and bounds. Masks worked. And as with every pandemic in recent history, subsequent reviews have found that the advice to go early and hard with containment was correct.

Did the scientists make mistakes? Of course, but they were working in conditions of high uncertainty. But they were also often ignored or countered by the politicians they advised, as well as by others in positions of influence – and yet those people aren’t the villains of this piece.

Anyone who doubts the power of narrative need only look at that modern Icarus, Anthony Fauci.

Five years ago, the seasoned epidemic warrior and prominent figure in the US Covid-19 response (he was chief medical adviser to the president, 2021-22) was anointed the country’s “most trusted coronavirus expert”, and its “scientific voice of reason”.

Then the white-hot heat of public opinion melted his wings. Having accepted a pre-emptive pardon from Joe Biden, he was forced to point outthat he had committed no crime. And though he has been subjected to frequent death threats, Donald Trump has withdrawn his federal security detail.

Fauci’s British counterparts, Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, have also received death threats. But in allowing these scientists to be treated so shabbily, we undermine ourselves in the long run.

Who would take on that thankless task now, if a new pandemic struck? Fauci et al are just the visible face of the backlash.

Behind the scenes, infectious disease researchers report their funds are drying up, leaving them less able to predict and prevent the next pandemic. The Trump administration has sown disarray at its medical research agency, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and ordered US withdrawal from the only global public health agency, the World Health Organization.

Negotiations over a pandemic treaty, which would improve disease surveillance and vaccine access globally, have stalled…….

Five years on from the pandemic, the right’s fake Covid narrative has been turbo-charged into the mainstream | Laura Spinney

Before the next outbreak, we need a serious conversation about how to cope, but first, the more strident, misguided voices must be muted, says author Laura Spinney

www.theguardian.com

 

[MT15]

It’s almost like the anti-science narrative was crafted to do the greatest possible damage to our society. As if it were targeted and calculated.

People were conditioned to this craziness:

If a person listened to the scientists and followed the safety precautions an an attempt to limit the death and destruction - they were labeled “afraid” of the virus. Even though they were using the only means we had early on to fight against the virus.

If a person ignored science and refused to protect themselves, but rather left themselves vulnerable to a deadly novel virus before there were vaccines, they championed themselves as brave and willing to fight for freedom. Even though they were actually endangering themselves and others.

That’s how forked up these people have been by the narrative. I’m definitely not a conspiracy theorist, but I sincerely doubt this narrative sprang up organically. It has been pushed on the part of our populace which is most vulnerable to propaganda. And boy, howdy, did they buy it.

And the article is exactly right. A second pandemic like Covid coming now will kill easily twice as many people as Covid did. Easily. And it’s lurking out there. All sane people can do is hope like hell we are spared.

 

[MT15]

A bit of good news here. We may need it with the North Korea-like purging going on by Trump. I just bookmarked it.

 

[Optimus Prime]

For what it’s worth. We may never know definitely the origin

But my opinion is still the same as I’ve said here before

What would have changed regarding the world and US response to Covid if we knew for sure it came from a lab?

We still would have had the shutdown, the quarantine, social distancing, masks and vaccines, anti masks and anti vax, misinformation, Asian American violence probably would have been higher

Still would have had millions of deaths


============================
……..Our argument for the lab leak hypothesis is as follows: the scientists in Wuhan were doing exactly what they said they were doing.

To study viruses that might pose a threat to humans, they collected tens of thousands of samples from bats, wild animals, and even sick villagers or wildlife traders.

In 2013, they discovered a novel lineage of Sars-like viruses from a mine in Yunnan province where workers had sickened and died from a mysterious respiratory infection.

The scientists grew novel coronaviruses in the lab, experimenting with and genetically engineering them in ways that sometimes enhanced their ability to infect human cells and jump across species.

Their work with live viruses was conducted at low biosafety, shocking even their close collaborators.

The year before the pandemic, the Wuhan scientists and their US partners planned to insert a unique feature called a furin cleavage site into novel Sars-like viruses.

Of hundreds of Sars-like viruses known today, only Sars-CoV-2 possesses this special feature, which is what makes it a pandemic pathogen.

Despite the efforts of numerous research groups to find evidence for the origin of the virus in the wildlife trade, there have been no signs of an infected animal source or any evidence that such viruses circulate in Wuhan markets or its supply chain.

In 2019, a virus matching the 2018 experiments by Wuhan-US scientists, well adapted for spreading in humans and other animals, appeared abruptly in Wuhan and none of the other thousands of large population centres in the region not even two years after they concocted this plan, leaving no trace along its thousand-mile journey from the bat caves where Wuhan scientists frequently collected such viruses.

Influential scientists were advocates for risky research where viruses are enhanced in laboratories. Years before Covid-19, they said such “gain-of-function” research was a risk worth taking.

When the virus spilled out of Wuhan, home to the largest novel Sars-like virus laboratory in the world, many of these leading scientists privately speculated that the Wuhan lab had conducted dangerous experiments at low biosafety.

Yet, instead of coming out to the public with: “Yes, the novel coronavirus might have escaped from a laboratory by accident. As responsible scientists, we will investigate and hold our colleagues accountable. And, even if the virus did emerge naturally, the fact that it could have come from a lab means we must implement measures to prevent catastrophic research accidents”, they did the opposite.

These leading names organised and co-signed prominent letters for public consumption, ruling out and condemning suggestions of a laboratory origin as conspiracy theories………

‘ Why I think a lab leak origin of Covid-19 is plausible – and it could happen again’

Five years on from the first UK lockdown, the origin of the virus is still hotly contested. Dr Alina Chan was the scientist who was labelled a conspiracist when she went against the official view it started in a wet market. Today, many scientists agree with her and not enough is being done to...

www.independent.co.uk

 

[RobF]

The year before the pandemic, the Wuhan scientists and their US partners planned to insert a unique feature called a furin cleavage site into novel Sars-like viruses.

Of hundreds of Sars-like viruses known today, only Sars-CoV-2 possesses this special feature, which is what makes it a pandemic pathogen.

Thing is, people raised that as a possibility... and it was investigated, and found that "Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses" and that "While it has been proposed that the FCS might have been engineered, it is becoming clearer that natural selection is, in fact, the driving factor in its acquisition and functionality, through recombination and epistasis" (source).

Now, the writer of the above is a molecular biologist. But they've clearly just ignored subsequent evidence in favour of presenting a misleading view that supports their initial presumption. That's deeply unscientific.

Similarly, they present the fact that "efforts of numerous research groups to find evidence for the origin of the virus in the wildlife trade" haven't yet succeeded as significant, when the reality is, that's not surprising. SARS-CoV-1 was responsible for the 2002-2004 outbreak, and it took around ten years to find a 96% genetically similar strain, and they still haven't found a direct progenitor as far as I'm aware.

To be clear, that doesn't mean it can't have been a lab leak; after all, something that could have occurred naturally could also have occurred in a lab, of course. It does mean they haven't shown that, and they're misrepresenting the evidence to argue for it.

I honestly think, generally, one of the biggest problems in learning from Covid (and how the pandemic has been handled) is people's absolute refusal to learn from Covid and how the pandemic has been handled, and just plain refusing to admit they assumed something that was wrong.

I saw another example of this yesterday. "Ten lockdown lessons to learn for next time" from a science editor. Some of it's fine, but part way down it quotes a paediatrician just glibly asserting:

"The main lesson that we learned in 2020 is straightforward: when you get a pandemic, don’t assume it’s going to be like the last one. Five years ago, everyone expected the next pandemic would be flu, and so models assumed we had to shut down schools and keep children at home because they would be the ones spreading disease. That would have been true for flu, but it wasn’t for Covid."​

​

And then it follows that up by stating, "The closing of schools, colleges and nurseries in March 2020 has become one of the most hotly debated decisions of the Covid lockdown. At the time, it was feared children would become major vectors in the transmission of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, the cause of the disease. This did not happen ..."

But it's just not true that children weren't spreading it. They were! But the sheer amount of dodgy science around the subject is terrifying. E.g. looking at the impacts of schools reopening at the point when it was deemed safe to open them with additional precautions in place to limit transmission, and then concluding that the limited impact from doing that means children don't spread it and it wouldn't have been a really bad idea to keep schools open with no such precautions.

Meanwhile, when you have restrictions eased generally, we saw things like, in England following Summer 2021, "A surge in household clusters with school-aged index cases was noted at the start of the school term, with secondary cases predominantly in children aged 5–15 years and adults aged 30–49 years" (source). That's obviously not just random and clearly indicates spreading through schools and into those households.

But then there are other sources arguing this is household transmission because 'that's more likely'. But while siblings in a house together are more likely to have concurrent infections than than two random children in a classroom, that, a) doesn't mean two random children in a classroom can't spread it to each other - they can - and it completely ignores how the virus spreads into a household in the first place.

It just seems like people really want, a) schools not to be closed under any circumstances, and b) no precautions to be necessary to keep them open either, and then just go from there with just endless amounts of wishful thinking and tortured science.

 

[Optimus Prime]

Federal health officials said Tuesday they are pulling back $11.4 billion in COVID-19-related funds for state and local public health departments and other health organizations throughout the nation.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement.

The statement said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects to recover the money beginning 30 days after termination notices, which began being sent out on Monday.

Officials said the money was largely used for COVID-19 testing, vaccination and global projects as well as community health workers responding to COVID and a program established in 2021 to address COVID health disparities among high-risk and underserved patients, including those in minority populations. The move was first reported by NBC News.

Lori Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County & City Health Officials, said much of the funding was set to end soon anyway. “It’s ending in the next six months,” she said. “There’s no reason — why rescind it now? It’s just cruel and unusual behavior.”

In a related move, more than two dozen COVID-related research grants funded by the National Institutes of Health have been canceled. Earlier this month, the Trump administration shut down ordering from covidtest.gov, the site where Americans could have COVID-19 tests delivered to their mailboxes for no charge.

Although the COVID federal public health emergency has ended, the virus is still killing Americans: 458 people per week on average have died from COVID over the past four weeks, according to CDC data.

HHS wouldn't provide many details about how the federal government expects to recover the money from what it called “impacted recipients.” But HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said in an email: “The $11.4 billion is undisbursed funds remaining.”

Freeman said her understanding is that state health departments already had the COVID money.

“The funding was authorized by Congress, was appropriated by Congress, and it was out the door, basically, into the hands of the grantees" — states, she said, which decide how to distribute it locally..............

Trump administration says it will pull back billions in COVID funding from local health departments

Federal health officials said Tuesday they are pulling back $11.4 billion in COVID-19-related funds for local public health departments and other health organizations throughout the nation.

apnews.com