The Trump Cabinet and key post thread (5 Viewers)

[superchuck500]

Surely to be a clown show. We know that RFK certainly thinks he’s getting nominated for HHS, which includes FDA.

 

[Dragon]

Given the care we took opening the schools it was obviously a big deal. The drive to get everyone vaccinated. My point is simply that it wasn’t appropriate to keep schools closed. The covid threat to 0-17 was so low schools needed to be open. We took great caution and given the circumstances it went well. A good number of local school systems did the same as our community and the private schools and had similar results.

1 million young people experiencing lifelong side effects from COVID-19 is not "no big deal."

Imagine the profound impact on their lives—the physical, emotional, and financial burden they and their families will face for decades. The cost to society in healthcare, lost productivity, and support services will be immense. For some, this struggle will resemble that of polio survivors from 50 years ago, who lived with the consequences of an underestimated disease.

Hindsight makes everything clearer, but at the time, schools were closed because the full extent of COVID-19’s effects was still unknown. As vaccinations became widely available and the risk of severe illness decreased, schools reopened—reflecting the evolving understanding of the pandemic.

 

[Sendai]

1 million young people experiencing lifelong side effects from COVID-19 is not "no big deal."

Imagine the profound impact on their lives—the physical, emotional, and financial burden they and their families will face for decades. The cost to society in healthcare, lost productivity, and support services will be immense. For some, this struggle will resemble that of polio survivors from 50 years ago, who lived with the consequences of an underestimated disease.

Hindsight makes everything clearer, but at the time, schools were closed because the full extent of COVID-19’s effects was still unknown. As vaccinations became widely available and the risk of severe illness decreased, schools reopened—reflecting the evolving understanding of the pandemic.

The young were getting Covid just like everyone when the schools were closed. The threat to 0-17 wasn’t sufficient to shut down education for an extended period.

 

[RobF]

The young were getting Covid just like everyone when the schools were closed. The threat to 0-17 wasn’t sufficient to shut down education for an extended period.

"Just like everyone else" was at a substantially lower rate because schools were closed (along with the other measures). It would have been even more catastrophic for everyone otherwise.

 

[Dragon]

The young were getting Covid just like everyone when the schools were closed. The threat to 0-17 wasn’t sufficient to shut down education for an extended period.

Thats a cop out statement. Do you really think that young people staying at home were just as likely to get infected than those in a full classroom with multiple other children? Where is your source of that information or it is just your beliefs?

Yes late in the pandemic, transmission when strict mitigation measures—such as mask-wearing, physical distancing, and hand hygiene dropped but most red states were against these strict measures - some even attacking student wearing masks when going to school.

 

[cuddlemonkey]

The young were getting Covid just like everyone when the schools were closed. The threat to 0-17 wasn’t sufficient to shut down education for an extended period.

And if your kids were among the dead or those living with long covid, would you still hold the same position?

 

[faceman]

1 million young people experiencing lifelong side effects from COVID-19 is not "no big deal."

Imagine the profound impact on their lives—the physical, emotional, and financial burden they and their families will face for decades. The cost to society in healthcare, lost productivity, and support services will be immense. For some, this struggle will resemble that of polio survivors from 50 years ago, who lived with the consequences of an underestimated disease.

Hindsight makes everything clearer, but at the time, schools were closed because the full extent of COVID-19’s effects was still unknown. As vaccinations became widely available and the risk of severe illness decreased, schools reopened—reflecting the evolving understanding of the pandemic.

I mentioned the following in the Covid thread awhile back. My wife is from Taiwan. They took covid seriously. The count
as of 2023 was 19K deaths in a country with 24M people. It's common practice to wear masks in public during a normal
flu season. A vast majority don't need to be told. Asking Americans to do that led to public outrage. I love my country,but
we are really dumb when it comes to infectious diseases and how to prevent them


contrast this with my home state of Ms. 13,474 deaths with a population of only 2.9M

https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spread-map/state/mississippi/

 

[Optimus Prime]

What is your point? It’s your right to question the government about anything. You either believe in that or you don’t.

I thought the point and parallels were pretty clear

If you don’t get it I’m not sure what to tell you

 

[MT15]

That is very interesting

But I would have thought that Trump getting elected in 2016, Charlottesville, election denial and all culminating in January 6th was the extinction burst

God help us if Trump 2.0 isn’t it either

Evidently the extinction burst for an entire segment of society is going to take some time. But even though he won in 2024, the GOP cannot stop the demographic changes that are coming. And I would submit that Trump (and the GOP with him) will be as unpopular at the end of his second term as he was at the end of his first term. Maybe more unpopular, who knows?

 

[DaveXA]

Evidently the extinction burst for an entire segment of society is going to take some time. But even though he won in 2024, the GOP cannot stop the demographic changes that are coming. And I would submit that Trump (and the GOP with him) will be as unpopular at the end of his second term as he was at the end of his first term. Maybe more unpopular, who knows?

Eh, the demographics drum has been beat for decades, yet here we are. Wake me up when it actually matters.

 

[MT15]

The young were getting Covid just like everyone when the schools were closed. The threat to 0-17 wasn’t sufficient to shut down education for an extended period.

As has been pointed out numerous times, it wasn’t that anyone thought the kids were the main risk so much as the teachers, janitors and cafeteria workers were at risk, especially in the beginning. And a lot of urban school districts were dealing with a higher prevalence of the virus in the community and substandard air handling equipment.

I think most schools in areas such as you seem to be describing were opened in a similar time frame as yours. I recall the local schools in my area were opened after 1 semester - with certain precautions. So the kids missed part of the spring semester on site, although they did have e-learning for that part.

It wasn’t ideal, but I do think each school district had to make its own decisions, along with input from local infectious disease docs - taking prevalence of the virus in the community, physical facilities and their air handling capability, and whether e-learning was a viable option. I know that’s what schools in my state did.

It wasn’t some decree that came down from on high.

Seriously - what is your complaint? You seem to think all schools were capable of doing what your local schools did, and that it was some malevolent intent that kept them closed. That’s a pretty jaundiced view of your fellow Americans. Everybody was trying to do the right thing for their own particular circumstances, with an Administration that was constantly muddying the water with statements from the President that were contradictory and just plain ignorant from time to time.

Different areas of the country experienced widely variant levels of circulating virus in the community at different times. School buildings had widely variant levels of abilities to control ventilation.

Why do you want to ascribe bad intent here?

 

[MT15]

Eh, the demographics drum has been beat for decades, yet here we are. Wake me up when it actually matters.

Well, the forecast has been pretty consistent I think. By 2045-ish. People have been talking about it, yeah, but everybody knows it’s happening in that decade.

 

[TampaJoe]

Joe - you’re simply wrong. You’re smashing roughly 2 years into a small point of time and claiming that scientists knew early on who was at risk.

As said, I was manager of a hospital lab throughout the pandemic. Young people were dying early on. People in their 30’s and 40’s with no comorbities were dying early on. Doctors and nurses and hospital workers were dying in the big cities early on. It took some time to figure out how to treat the disease properly. It took some time to figure out what worked and what didn’t.

By the time the vaccines rolled out, we knew better who was at risk. So yeah, by then they prioritized who got them. I got mine in December of that year - you know why? Because I worked in a hospital. Not because of my age. Everybody who worked in the hospital was offered their first shot in December.

For that whole first year we had a novel virus killing people at roughly 10x the rate of influenza. Oh, and the difference in fatalities between states with high vaccination rates and states with low vaccination rates is definitely not negligible. Wherever you got that idea, it just flat wrong. Many epidemiological studies have been done.

The respirator type masks were in short supply for months and months. Wearing a surgical mask is better than nothing. They will stop droplets. The virus doesn’t swim through the air - it still has to be carried on something, just smaller aerosols. We re-used surgical masks in the lab for quite a while - saving the respirators for those who had to enter the rooms. It was better than nothing and causes absolutely no harm to anyone wearing one. To say someone harmed you by asking you to wear a surgical mask is just crazy. And as pointed out, the decisions were made by elected officials on the recommendation of the experts. Elected officials of both parties I might add.

Honestly, I just don’t know how to deal with this level of misplaced anger. Yeah, we would probably do some things differently. Everybody was doing the best they could under the circumstances. And instead of people pulling together, we got nothing but grief from the always angry right MAGA. So in a national emergency, people like you choose to agitate instead of pulling together. I repeat - wearing a surgical mask never hurt anyone.

Then again, now that Trump is back in the WH I would expect the same level of response if the bird flu makes the jump to human-to-human transmission. Worse, probably, because Trump is getting rid of good scientists and replacing them with absolute idiots like RFK, Jr. who thinks that polio wasn’t conquered by the polio vaccine. Trump has never learned anything from his mistakes.

The vaccine saved us from Covid. That and learning how to better treat the symptoms. We need to do better with ventilation sure - but these things came out more than a year into the pandemic. They were not evident in the early days.

MT,

I have relatives in hospital administration and they knew fairly early who was most at risk. The folks developing the vaccine knew who was most at risk. It didn’t take them a year to figure it out. As I said, anyone working ICU could spot the pattern. Anyone looking at CDC data could spot the pattern. All one had to do was look. People 60 years and older and or with co morbidities. 15 percent of the population accounted for greater than 85 percent of the fatalities.

As for Red states versus Blue state prevaccine, I looked at those numbers as well. Straight from the CDC. Available to anyone to download. Reds states versus Blue states virtually no difference. CA versus FL, virtually no difference. We agree the vaccine bent the curve. No doubt in my mind. But all the other restrictive measures, didn’t make that much difference.

As for masks, if you are symptomatic and spewing and sneezing large droplets, the mask commonly worn might help. But if you were contagious but not symptomatic and breathing normally, those same masks offered little to no benefit. They weren’t engineered to capture that sized virus in normal respiration. They had studies that went back years to that effect. In that situation, you need to disburse the virus. I recall when the SEC decided to allow fans in football games and Fauci and the government warned that hundreds of thousands could become infected and we would have another surge. People packed tightly together, unmasked in a stadium. And it didn’t happen. Why, they were outside. Ventilation.

We spent billions of dollars on the 6 ft rule and masking. Closing restaurants, businesses and schools or limiting capacity. When asked in Congressional hearings about the 6 ft rule, Fauci the expert, couldn’t recall a study. Speculated that there was some empirical evidence somewhere. And we spent billions of dollars. The study posted in this thread to one of my posts to justify the 6 ft rule in fact said that 6ft was not better than 3 ft. It included related links to studies that said school kids shouldn’t be masked.

We should not be making policy on something like we are flipping a coin and if we are going to shutter businesses and restrict people from living normally as they choose, whomever makes those recommendations should be ready, able and willing to explain those decisions and the science used to support those decisions and be willing to answer any and all questions. I don’t give a crap in your hat what my elected representative does. Obviously he/she was just following the recommendation of an “expert”.

As far as vaccines. I work in the industry. Prior to the election, Democrats labeled it the Trump vaccine. Many including Harris said they wouldn’t take it unless Fauci signed off on it. Undercutting the FDA. After the election, some republicans undercut the FDA and vaccines. It was the same FDA before and after the election. The same independent scientists running those clinical trials. The problem was our elected officials were behaving like children. I don’t believe in mandates and Infirmly believe had the political parties behaved like adults instead of politicians, and approached and educated the public with one consistent message, more people would have taken the vaccine. Instead it became political and more people died as a result. They both behaved stupidly.

 

[TampaJoe]

Question yes. But in this case and this thread this quote from my profile is quite fitting


“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Isaac Asimov

Your ignorance is your problem. If you have to tell me how smart you are, you probably aren’t as smart as you think.

I can find a study on the internet to justify just about anything. All it takes is money and you can get some expert to say about anything. It’s all in how you pick your samples and choose your assumptions. The problem comes in when the guy without his doctorate or MBA but who has years of experience and load of common sense looks at it and says “that doesn’t make any sense”.

You folks share the same problem as Trump. You believe you are the smartest folks in the room. But lots of people are smart. If you spent more time understanding their point instead of calling them ignorant and stupid, you would get farther. I don’t know how Trump pulls it off. That crap doesn’t work for most people. It didn’t work for Hillary. It didn’t work the second time around for Joe and it didn’t work for Kamala. But don’t listen to me. I’m anti intellectual.

 

[MT15]

I have relatives in hospital administration and they knew fairly early who was most at risk. The folks developing the vaccine knew who was most at risk. It didn’t take them a year to figure it out. As I said, anyone working ICU could spot the pattern. Anyone looking at CDC data could spot the pattern. All one had to do was look. People 60 years and older and or with co morbidities. 15 percent of the population accounted for greater than 85 percent of the fatalities.

The data took some time to compile, and everything was changing rapidly as they tried to figure out how to treat this virus. And lower risk doesn’t mean no risk - there were lots of young healthy people who died in the early stages especially in the hardest hit areas. It’s pure hindsight for you to say that they should have known then what we know now.

As for your assertion that Dems and Rs were equally bad about the vaccine - simply not true. The GOP reps promoted crazy conspiracy theories and refused to take the vaccine even after all the scientists had signed off on it. Expressing no faith in Trump, but full faith in Fauci, isn’t even close to the same. At the time Harris made that statement, Trump had put a gag order on the CDC and the FDA if you will recall. So no, it wasn’t the same FDA/CDC because Trump was meddling in them.

You have been shown the studies that the early recommendations were based on - why do you keep saying they were just randomly made up? Because Fauci couldn’t cite the study in a hostile situation? He cited it after the grilling. Fauci was treated like a criminal by idiots who were undermining the vaccine during a global pandemic. As far as I’m concerned all those GOP reps have blood on their hands. People died needlessly because of them.
Looking at state data compared to other state data isn’t very helpful - because states are not monoliths of one party. Even the reddest of states have sizable democratic populations. If you want to compare - compare the vaccine utilization between GOP and Dem voters. Also compare hospitalizations and deaths between voters based on party. I can assure you that will show you the story.
Here’s one to get you started - there are plenty more.

Excess Death Rates for Republican and Democratic Registered Voters in Florida and Ohio During the COVID-19 Pandemic - PubMed

In this cross-sectional study, an association was observed between political party affiliation and excess deaths in Ohio and Florida after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults. These findings suggest that differences in vaccination attitudes and reported uptake between Republican and...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[MT15]

I can find a study on the internet to justify just about anything. All it takes is money and you can get some expert to say about anything. It’s all in how you pick your samples and choose your assumptions. The problem comes in when the guy without his doctorate or MBA but who has years of experience and load of common sense looks at it and says “that doesn’t make any sense”.

This is actually pretty close to what Trump just said the other day, lol.