All things political. Coronavirus Edition. (6 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?

 

[Optimus Prime]

From the moment he slipped in at dawn, before most of the bereaved who planned to confront him had arrived, to his departure in a hail of boos, Boris Johnson’s first appearance at the Covid-19 public inquiry proved by turns frustrating and enraging for many.

Families who squeezed into a packed hearing room in west London to see him finally testify about the key decisions that preceded their loved ones’ deaths observed what they described as a “casual, careless and chaotic” former leader.

Many of the dozens of families who had travelled to see Johnson in the witness box simply wanted accountability so that the tragedies that had befallen them were not repeated in future.

But once the hearing began, Johnson seemed to be obfuscating and deflecting, the latest decision-maker whose testimony was shaded by the calculus of political reputation management. To some he seemed deluded and his account suggested he had little better grasp of the crisis in its opening weeks than the general public.

He quickly apologised for “the pain and the loss and the suffering of the Covid victims”, but Aamer Anwar, a solicitor representing the Scottish bereaved group, said that could not accepted by many. “He also claimed his government saved thousands of lives, and that, for many, is a grotesque distortion of the truth,” he said.

Lobby Akinnola, a spokesperson for UK Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, said the evidence the inquiry had heard about the early weeks of the pandemic had been “worse than what the bereaved families feared was happening at the time”.……

‘Skill set of a clown’: Covid bereaved frustrated by Boris Johnson evidence

Families who had travelled to see former PM say inquiry appearance showed him to be ‘careless and chaotic’

www.theguardian.com

 

[MT15]

 

[fooferdoggie]

hell the right can hardly admit covid was real and that horse paste would not fix it. or masks would not help.
Any idiot putting a slum lord and a dog groomer in charge of such a bad thing should be birch slapped all over the place. There is not responsibility ever expected from trump.

 

[Dragon]

This one is really funny (tragically). Paxton is suit Pfeifer for not "ending the pandemic quickly enough"

Texas attorney general sues Pfizer, claiming vaccines didn’t end pandemic quickly enough

Experts argue other assertions made in the lawsuit filing are completely unsubstantiated, such as one claiming that vaccinated people were more likely to die from COVID-19, which Texas health data disputes.

www.texastribune.org

And the antivax group on twitter is in a frenzy..



That stupid "swede" is one of the worst spreader of conspiracy lies on x and I have a lot of fun exposing him every time.

 

[Optimus Prime]

In 2021, a bizarre cure for COVID-19 began to emerge on social media, the anti-parasite drug ivermectin. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is now under fire for its efforts to refute claims that the drugs could stop the deadly virus.

A group of doctors is now suing the FDA, saying the agency’s efforts to refute claims about the drug’s effectiveness against COVID caused them personal harm. Some experts fear that punishment the FDA could face for refuting false information about the drug could undermine public health messaging in America.

After a questionable later-retracted study claiming ivermectin could cure COVID emerged in 2021, many Americans began to seek it out. It especially became popular among people in communities that were skeptical of the COVID-19 vaccines and other pandemic measures such as masking and social distancing.

Ivermectin is an FDA-approved drug, meaning doctors are allowed to prescribe it as they see fit. While it is meant to treat parasitic diseases, many doctors — some hoping to cash it on the ivermectin craze — began to prescribe it off-label for COVID. The drug has never been proven to be effective against COVID, and multiple studies investigating its efficacy have found it to be ineffective against the virus.

Some anecdotal reports emerged that people were seeking out veterinary versions of the drug, meant for horses or cows, to use to fight infections.

A now-infamous Tweet from the FDA responding to these stories is now at the center of the current lawsuit.

“You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it,” the FDA wrote on the platform now known as X.

Three doctors are plaintiffs in the lawsuit, first filed in September. Robert Apter, M.D., an Arizona physician; Paul Marik, M.D., a doctor at Eastern Virginia Medical School; and Mary Talley Bowden, M.D., a Texas doctor who made national headlines when she was suspended by Houston Methodist Hospital for allegedly spreading vaccine misinformation..........

“FDA decided to target that practice via the ‘horse’ message—and others like it. The messaging traveled widely across legacy and online media,” they write in their suit. “Left unmentioned in most of the messaging: ivermectin also comes in a human version. And while the human version of ivermectin is not FDA-approved to treat the coronavirus, some people were using it off-label for that purpose.”

The plaintiffs say they prescribed the medication off-label to “thousands of their patients”. They claim the FDA’s ivermectin messaging “interfered with their own individual medical practice”...............

MSN

 

[MT15]

Those are 3 quacks. And they feed into this type of disinformation system that has people believing they are endangered by simply being around vaccinated people.

 

[Dragon]

Sometimes I wonder where people on x have parked their brain. Those conspiracist are so stupid and make claims a 5 yo. could repudiate.

 

[bird]

Sometimes I wonder where people on x have parked their brain. Those conspiracist are so stupid and make claims a 5 yo. could repudiate.

Yeah. Vax shedding? Yeesh. This country should be spending about $500 billion a year on mental health.

 

[LA - L.A.]

Yeah. Vax shedding? Yeesh. This country should be spending about $500 billion a year on mental health.

At a minimum, because it's truly a national security issue. You can't have a healthy democracy unless nearly the entire population is relatively emotionally/mentally healthy. A single mass shooter can cause PTSD in dozens of people which, if left uncared for and untreated, will lead to some of those people doing things that puts a drag on the emotional/mental health of other people. Emotional/mental dis-ease spreads if not treated properly, just like physical diseases do.

There is currently a global pandemic of emotional/mental disease and not nearly enough is being done about it.

 

[SaintForLife]

 

[SaintForLife]

 

[bird]

Why did Trump pull the CDC team out of Wuhan?

 

[Optimus Prime]

I’ve asked this before and don’t think anyone answered

Suppose this is 100% true

Suppose we knew it was 100% true in April 2020

What would have changed from a response standpoint?

Do you think the world and American death toll would have been much lower if everyone agreed it came from a lab?

Do you think the anti mask/ anti distancing/ anti quarantine/ anti shutdown/ anti vax / 5G conspiracy theorists sentiments are any different if everyone agreed it came from a lab?

Do you think the exponential increase in violence against Asian Americans doesn’t happen if everyone agreed it came from a lab?

 

[BullSheetBuddha]

I’ve asked this before and don’t think anyone answered

Suppose this is 100% true

Suppose we knew it was 100% true in April 2020

What would have changed from a response standpoint?

Do you think the world and American death toll would have been much lower if everyone agreed it came from a lab?

Do you think the anti mask/ anti distancing/ anti quarantine/ anti shutdown/ anti vax / 5G conspiracy theorists sentiments are any different if everyone agreed it came from a lab?

Do you think the exponential increase in violence against Asian Americans doesn’t happen if everyone agreed it came from a lab?

Opinion | Let’s Imagine We Knew Exactly How the Pandemic Started (Published 2023)

Its meaning really does depend on whether it began with a lab leak.

www.nytimes.com

It may well be natural that in living through disaster, we focus first on triage and response. But as we piece together a working history of the past few years, you might hope we’d grow more focused on nailing the story down.

It is hard to write pandemic counterfactuals with great confidence and detail, of course, particularly given how messy our narratives about real-world events tend to be. But it seems likely to me that in the very earliest days of 2020, with cases exploding in China but not yet elsewhere, knowing that the disease was a result of gain-of-function research and had escaped from a lab probably would have produced an even more significant wave of global fear. We’d lived through SARS and MERS and still carried some faint cultural memory of 1918 (less so 1957 and 1968). But it is hard to hear the phrases “lab leak” and “gain of function” and not think “superbug.” And it is hard to think “superbug” and not panic.

Whether that panic would have produced a more robust or productive response is perhaps an open question, particularly for those who now strikingly believe the country — and indeed the world — went overboard. But presumably, many fewer people contemplating the initial news would’ve assumed that the outbreak would be largely limited to Asia, as previous outbreaks had been; public health messengers in places like the United States probably would not have been so casually reassuring; and even more dramatic circuit-breaking responses like a monthlong international travel ban might’ve been instituted quite quickly. It may be hard to imagine a more dramatic response than the one we did engineer, globally, given how unprecedented that response was — billions of people sheltering in place for weeks or months to protect themselves and one another. But it is even harder to imagine that a lab-leak pandemic would have been scarier still.

As the pandemic wore on, I suspect that effect would have lingered beyond the initial panic. At first, it might’ve been harder to decide that the virus was just something to live with if we knew simultaneously that it was something introduced to the world in error. And later, when the vaccines arrived, I suspect there might have been considerably less resistance to them, particularly on the American right, where anxiety and xenophobia might have trumped public-health skepticism and legacy anti-vaccine sentiment. Or at least moderated them. And swaths of the country might not have turned so swiftly against public-health authorities if they had been seen as fighting a pathogen arising from somewhere other than nature.

But the opposite counterfactual is just as illuminating. If there had been no question about the natural origin of the disease, with an intermediate host discovered as quickly as scientists identified the palm civet with the first SARS, would public-health skepticism have gained the foothold it has? Pandemics are long and hard, and offer ultimately ample opportunities for recrimination. But ambiguity contributes, as well, even when the known facts raise only a sliver of doubt.

 

[Taurus]

Opinion | Let’s Imagine We Knew Exactly How the Pandemic Started (Published 2023)

Its meaning really does depend on whether it began with a lab leak.

www.nytimes.com

It may well be natural that in living through disaster, we focus first on triage and response. But as we piece together a working history of the past few years, you might hope we’d grow more focused on nailing the story down.

It is hard to write pandemic counterfactuals with great confidence and detail, of course, particularly given how messy our narratives about real-world events tend to be. But it seems likely to me that in the very earliest days of 2020, with cases exploding in China but not yet elsewhere, knowing that the disease was a result of gain-of-function research and had escaped from a lab probably would have produced an even more significant wave of global fear. We’d lived through SARS and MERS and still carried some faint cultural memory of 1918 (less so 1957 and 1968). But it is hard to hear the phrases “lab leak” and “gain of function” and not think “superbug.” And it is hard to think “superbug” and not panic.

Whether that panic would have produced a more robust or productive response is perhaps an open question, particularly for those who now strikingly believe the country — and indeed the world — went overboard. But presumably, many fewer people contemplating the initial news would’ve assumed that the outbreak would be largely limited to Asia, as previous outbreaks had been; public health messengers in places like the United States probably would not have been so casually reassuring; and even more dramatic circuit-breaking responses like a monthlong international travel ban might’ve been instituted quite quickly. It may be hard to imagine a more dramatic response than the one we did engineer, globally, given how unprecedented that response was — billions of people sheltering in place for weeks or months to protect themselves and one another. But it is even harder to imagine that a lab-leak pandemic would have been scarier still.

As the pandemic wore on, I suspect that effect would have lingered beyond the initial panic. At first, it might’ve been harder to decide that the virus was just something to live with if we knew simultaneously that it was something introduced to the world in error. And later, when the vaccines arrived, I suspect there might have been considerably less resistance to them, particularly on the American right, where anxiety and xenophobia might have trumped public-health skepticism and legacy anti-vaccine sentiment. Or at least moderated them. And swaths of the country might not have turned so swiftly against public-health authorities if they had been seen as fighting a pathogen arising from somewhere other than nature.

But the opposite counterfactual is just as illuminating. If there had been no question about the natural origin of the disease, with an intermediate host discovered as quickly as scientists identified the palm civet with the first SARS, would public-health skepticism have gained the foothold it has? Pandemics are long and hard, and offer ultimately ample opportunities for recrimination. But ambiguity contributes, as well, even when the known facts raise only a sliver of doubt.

Trump still would have lost his water in abject cowardice. He was told in January 2020 that Covid was coming and that it'd be bad. His response was to curl up in a corner, suck his thumb and pretend it wasn't happening.

 

[Optimus Prime]

Opinion | Let’s Imagine We Knew Exactly How the Pandemic Started (Published 2023)

Its meaning really does depend on whether it began with a lab leak.

www.nytimes.com

It may well be natural that in living through disaster, we focus first on triage and response. But as we piece together a working history of the past few years, you might hope we’d grow more focused on nailing the story down.

It is hard to write pandemic counterfactuals with great confidence and detail, of course, particularly given how messy our narratives about real-world events tend to be. But it seems likely to me that in the very earliest days of 2020, with cases exploding in China but not yet elsewhere, knowing that the disease was a result of gain-of-function research and had escaped from a lab probably would have produced an even more significant wave of global fear. We’d lived through SARS and MERS and still carried some faint cultural memory of 1918 (less so 1957 and 1968). But it is hard to hear the phrases “lab leak” and “gain of function” and not think “superbug.” And it is hard to think “superbug” and not panic.

Whether that panic would have produced a more robust or productive response is perhaps an open question, particularly for those who now strikingly believe the country — and indeed the world — went overboard. But presumably, many fewer people contemplating the initial news would’ve assumed that the outbreak would be largely limited to Asia, as previous outbreaks had been; public health messengers in places like the United States probably would not have been so casually reassuring; and even more dramatic circuit-breaking responses like a monthlong international travel ban might’ve been instituted quite quickly. It may be hard to imagine a more dramatic response than the one we did engineer, globally, given how unprecedented that response was — billions of people sheltering in place for weeks or months to protect themselves and one another. But it is even harder to imagine that a lab-leak pandemic would have been scarier still.

As the pandemic wore on, I suspect that effect would have lingered beyond the initial panic. At first, it might’ve been harder to decide that the virus was just something to live with if we knew simultaneously that it was something introduced to the world in error. And later, when the vaccines arrived, I suspect there might have been considerably less resistance to them, particularly on the American right, where anxiety and xenophobia might have trumped public-health skepticism and legacy anti-vaccine sentiment. Or at least moderated them. And swaths of the country might not have turned so swiftly against public-health authorities if they had been seen as fighting a pathogen arising from somewhere other than nature.

But the opposite counterfactual is just as illuminating. If there had been no question about the natural origin of the disease, with an intermediate host discovered as quickly as scientists identified the palm civet with the first SARS, would public-health skepticism have gained the foothold it has? Pandemics are long and hard, and offer ultimately ample opportunities for recrimination. But ambiguity contributes, as well, even when the known facts raise only a sliver of doubt.

I honestly don't think that much of anything would have changed

Why would there be less resistance to the vaccines? I believe that anti-asian rhetoric and attacks would have skyrocketed from where it was

There would have been new conspiracies, "China has the cure right now", "China is intentionally trying to destroy the American economy" etc.

 

[SaintForLife]

I’ve asked this before and don’t think anyone answered

Suppose this is 100% true

Suppose we knew it was 100% true in April 2020

What would have changed from a response standpoint?

It wouldn't have changed anything in regard to the response, but it would have exposed the US role in the research at Wuhan. It would also have exposed the scientists who lied and covered up things to protect the US government.

Remember that nobody was allowed to even discuss anything about a possible lab leak on social media until recently.

Do you think the world and American death toll would have been much lower if everyone agreed it came from a lab?

Nope. It's about accountability for the people involved and the cover-up. It should also lead to gain of function research being banned due to the risk of causing worldwide pandemics.

There was a pause on gain of function research in the US so they got around it by funding the research in Wuhan.

Do you think the anti mask/ anti distancing/ anti quarantine/ anti shutdown/ anti vax / 5G conspiracy theorists sentiments are any different if everyone agreed it came from a lab?

Do you think the exponential increase in violence against Asian Americans doesn’t happen if everyone agreed it came from a lab?

I don't see why you would think those things are related to knowing how covid 19 was created in a lab and how it got out and who was involved in the entire process.

 

[MT15]

It wouldn't have changed anything in regard to the response, but it would have exposed the US role in the research at Wuhan. It would also have exposed the scientists who lied and covered up things to protect the US government.

Remember that nobody was allowed to even discuss anything about a possible lab leak on social media until recently.

Nope. It's about accountability for the people involved and the cover-up. It should also lead to gain of function research being banned due to the risk of causing worldwide pandemics.

There was a pause on gain of function research in the US so they got around it by funding the research in Wuhan.

I don't see why you would think those things are related to knowing how covid 19 was created in a lab and how it got out and who was involved in the entire process.

This is all just conspiracy theory hogwash. There is no way there was a huge conspiracy about the lab research in Wuhan. It’s ridiculous. But so on brand for you, lol.