DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Covid ~ Part 11

Just based on his body language, gestures, eye rolling, and general giddyness, I don't see how he can be the director of anything, he acts like a crackpot.

Yet he has been the director under 7 different presidents and was appointed director in 1984 when Reagan was president. Nobody seemed to question his qualifications, abilities or demeanor until covid came along.

Who are you talking about, I'm talking about the guy in the video, supposedly Director of Research or something at Phizer.

Sorry about the mix up.

Which makes it even more strange that they haven't confirmed or denied his actual statements. If he's lying, wouldn't you just fire him? I would.

Mask Study

The article overstated the findings a little, but seems to be close enough, at least against the study summary. I've not dug into the actual data or the full study, and I'm not likely to.

j/c:

That’s a mature response. Typical how the radical right has grasped our society. Where violence has replaced peaceful protesting and actually is promoted.

Hey, look at the bright side, at least he didn't shoot him. I mean it was a very minor criminal offense so it's all good, right?

I said it was a very minor criminal offense? What is incorrect about that? Are you saying we shouldn't be thankful he wasn't shot? You're reaching again. And only seem to be able to use a stupid meme as a means to do it.

It looks like the incident actually happened in 2017 and was a protest over same sex marriage.


https://www.theguardian.com/austral...ntas-boss-alan-joyces-face-pleads-guilty

As usual, the radical right is here spreading misinformation, again.

As usual anyone you don't agree with is the radical right. You can't even look at a simple clarification without trying to vent bile.

Aww bless your heart.

Surprised this was allowed to be published...


It's Time for the Scientific Community to Admit We Were Wrong About COVID and It Cost Lives

KEVIN BASS , MS MD/PHD STUDENT, MEDICAL SCHOOL
ON 1/30/23 AT 8:00 AM EST


As a medical student and researcher, I staunchly supported the efforts of the public health authorities when it came to COVID-19. I believed that the authorities responded to the largest public health crisis of our lives with compassion, diligence, and scientific expertise. I was with them when they called for lockdowns, vaccines, and boosters.

I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives.

I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural vs. artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness and safety, especially among the young. All of these were scientific mistakes at the time, not in hindsight. Amazingly, some of these obfuscations continue to the present day.

But perhaps more important than any individual error was how inherently flawed the overall approach of the scientific community was, and continues to be. It was flawed in a way that undermined its efficacy and resulted in thousands if not millions of preventable deaths.

What we did not properly appreciate is that preferences determine how scientific expertise is used, and that our preferences might be—indeed, our preferences were—very different from many of the people that we serve. We created policy based on our preferences, then justified it using data. And then we portrayed those opposing our efforts as misguided, ignorant, selfish, and evil.

We made science a team sport, and in so doing, we made it no longer science. It became us versus them, and "they" responded the only way anyone might expect them to: by resisting.

We excluded important parts of the population from policy development and castigated critics, which meant that we deployed a monolithic response across an exceptionally diverse nation, forged a society more fractured than ever, and exacerbated longstanding heath and economic disparities.

Our emotional response and ingrained partisanship prevented us from seeing the full impact of our actions on the people we are supposed to serve. We systematically minimized the downsides of the interventions we imposed—imposed without the input, consent, and recognition of those forced to live with them. In so doing, we violated the autonomy of those who would be most negatively impacted by our policies: the poor, the working class, small business owners, Blacks and Latinos, and children. These populations were overlooked because they were made invisible to us by their systematic exclusion from the dominant, corporatized media machine that presumed omniscience.

Most of us did not speak up in support of alternative views, and many of us tried to suppress them. When strong scientific voices like world-renowned Stanford professors John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas, or University of California San Francisco professors Vinay Prasad and Monica Gandhi, sounded the alarm on behalf of vulnerable communities, they faced severe censure by relentless mobs of critics and detractors in the scientific community—often not on the basis of fact but solely on the basis of differences in scientific opinion.

When former President Trump pointed out the downsides of intervention, he was dismissed publicly as a buffoon. And when Dr. Antony Fauci opposed Trump and became the hero of the public health community, we gave him our support to do and say what he wanted, even when he was wrong.

Trump was not remotely perfect, nor were the academic critics of consensus policy. But the scorn that we laid on them was a disaster for public trust in the pandemic response. Our approach alienated large segments of the population from what should have been a national, collaborative project.

And we paid the price. The rage of the those marginalized by the expert class exploded onto and dominated social media. Lacking the scientific lexicon to express their disagreement, many dissidents turned to conspiracy theories and a cottage industry of scientific contortionists to make their case against the expert class consensus that dominated the pandemic mainstream. Labeling this speech "misinformation" and blaming it on "scientific illiteracy" and "ignorance," the government conspired with Big Tech to aggressively suppress it, erasing the valid political concerns of the government's opponents.

And this despite the fact that pandemic policy was created by a razor-thin sliver of American society who anointed themselves to preside over the working class—members of academia, government, medicine, journalism, tech, and public health, who are highly educated and privileged. From the comfort of their privilege, this elite prizes paternalism, as opposed to average Americans who laud self-reliance and whose daily lives routinely demand that they reckon with risk. That many of our leaders neglected to consider the lived experience of those across the class divide is unconscionable.

Incomprehensible to us due to this class divide, we severely judged lockdown critics as lazy, backwards, even evil. We dismissed as "grifters" those who represented their interests. We believed "misinformation" energized the ignorant, and we refused to accept that such people simply had a different, valid point of view.

We crafted policy for the people without consulting them. If our public health officials had led with less hubris, the course of the pandemic in the United States might have had a very different outcome, with far fewer lost lives.

Instead, we have witnessed a massive and ongoing loss of life in America due to distrust of vaccines and the healthcare system; a massive concentration in wealth by already wealthy elites; a rise in suicides and gun violence especially among the poor; a near-doubling of the rate of depression and anxiety disorders especially among the young; a catastrophic loss of educational attainment among already disadvantaged children; and among those most vulnerable, a massive loss of trust in healthcare, science, scientific authorities, and political leaders more broadly.

My motivation for writing this is simple: It's clear to me that for public trust to be restored in science, scientists should publicly discuss what went right and what went wrong during the pandemic, and where we could have done better.

It's OK to be wrong and admit where one was wrong and what one learned. That's a central part of the way science works. Yet I fear that many are too entrenched in groupthink—and too afraid to publicly take responsibility—to do this.

Solving these problems in the long term requires a greater commitment to pluralism and tolerance in our institutions, including the inclusion of critical if unpopular voices.

Intellectual elitism, credentialism, and classism must end. Restoring trust in public health—and our democracy—depends on it.

Kevin Bass is an MD/PhD student at a medical school in Texas. He is in his 7th year.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

https://www.newsweek.com/its-time-s...bout-coivd-it-cost-lives-opinion-1776630

So we should be inclusive in our covid debates with Trump in office acting a fool, lying his ass off, and every die-hard Trump supporter being systemically turned against science? Watching all that unfold resembled the unclean masses of superstitious, uneducated peasants during medieval times protesting bathing. Why the hell would they apologize for calling out the ridiculousness and insulting anti-logic oozing from the darkest regions of the far right while we were trying to save lives and the country? Snowflakes who brought zero value to the table and easily cost more lives than science ever could with their idiocy. These people made a political thing out of their personal health! I had two extended family members pass just like this, and because they loved them some Trump right up to the day they died of covid unvaxxed... This is who they apologized to for not taking them seriously or pandering to their idiocy? This country is a wreck.

He's a student. A seventh year medical student. They dig these people up anywhere they can find them.

You just can’t fix stupid. Sorry to say, it’s natural though. Natural selection kills off the weak and weak minded. It’s nature’s way of cleansing.

A take a med student in Texas opinions seriously over the entire collective medical and scientific world? Really?…… Oh yeah his opinions fit your own false narrative, nevermind.

No, no, no... I prefer a poster on DT with the emotional intelligence of a mosquito and the critical thinking capacity of a dead mouse.

The headline should have been...

"College Student Puts Scientific Community On Notice"

At least people would know the context to begin with.

Newsweek digs them up? Not sure what you mean here...

No, they allowed a college student to act as if he's qualified to question the entire scientific community. You managed to dig it up, seem surprised it was even published and act as though that's a legitimate claim that should somehow be taken seriously.

and act as though that's a legitimate claim that should somehow be taken seriously

Did I have some posts deleted? Can't find that one. Voices in your head?

It's just food for thought.

I know it doesn't fit the narrative, so I can understand the faux outrage from your clan.

If you don't think "the community" turned science into a team sport and shunned and blacklisted all who opposed... well, you must have slept through COVID.

If you don't think that did damage to the public's perception and trust in 'science', you're either not that smart or in denial. I know denial is easy when you can just blame a certain group (your bogeymen), if that's how you wish to live life -- more power to you.

See, you were trying to say it should be taken seriously. The damage to the public's perception and trust in 'science' was manufactured and perpetrated on society by disseminating misinformation just as you did. It's not a boogeyman. So keep up the good work.

So, a combination of the two.

Is that the new math people keep talking about?

I too am surprised it was allowed to be published.

Consider the sources credentials.

"Kevin Bass is an MD/PhD student at a medical school in Texas. He is in his 7th year."

No professional who chooses to voice an opinion obscures their background.

He made up word salad and offered no clarity on the consequences of alternative actions.

In simple terms, he is a blithering buffoon.

Everyone will second guess and postulate alternative responses to the pandemic. Those such inclined will be able to model outcomes of alternative scenarios.

That wont change the fact that over a million people in the US died because of COVID.

We did some things right, such as getting the vaccine into production. That saved lives.

We did many things wrong, and it was an open tussle that became a conflict between science and politics.

If we are smart we will learn from this and be in a better position next time.

If we are not so smart, we will continue to complain about the failings of the past and offer no concrete alternatives.

All you have to know is that if we consider Scott Atlas as an alternative voice, you are indeed an idiot.

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/30/940376041/dr-scott-atlas-special-coronavirus-adviser-to-trump-resigns

I am going to try and provide a bit more detail about the underlying issue with herd immunity and the concept of targeted herd immunity.

There are a couple of items that I think have merit on the surface, but when you look at the consequential impacts, they just don't pan out, meaning that the total loss of life would have been far greater.

Herd immunity means that you let the virus spread through the community, everyone gets it, some die, most do not. Those who do survive, has natural resistance that will protect them into the future. That is fine, but you will expose everyone. And even though you get immunity, there will be reinfection. With reinfection there is a lower probability of dying, but ultimately everyone has to get the disease.

Targeted herd immunity, means that you let those who are most unlikely to die (young), get the virus, and you develop their own immunity.

The problem is you can't really isolate a unlikely to die population (young) from a more likely to die population (old). There will be co-mingling between young and old and transmission is inevitable.

So what do you do to make targeted herd immunity work. You have to keep the young away from the old.

But in that scenario everyone eventually gets it.

Now what actually happened is that because of the vaccine those who were most at risk (old) were given immunity as if they had the disease.

What we did not do well was recognize that those who got the disease were far less at risk after they recovered. The whole vaccine card issue did not make much sense if you had recovered from the disease. It made a lot of sense if you had not had the disease.

What we did not do well was address masks and transmission of the disease.

If you recall even our efforts to slow the spread still had hospitals overrun with patients. So under a targeted herd immunity scenario, the challenges faced by hospitals would have been worse, leading to a greater loss of life across for everyone infected.

We have sort of reached a level of herd immunity now. Either by getting the disease or getting the vaccine.

There are people that never had COVID and others who have had it 3 or 4 times. It really is a matter of surviving the first go around with the disease or getting the vaccine that makes the difference. If you did not get the vaccine, and got the disease you it was going to be a long recovery.

j/c:

17 year-old daughter of Congressman dies of ‘heart attack’ — Completely healthy, then her heart stopped

https://citizenfreepress.com/column-1/17-year-old-daughter-of-congressman-dies-of-heart-attack/


DIED SUDDENLY: Deadly Outcome: 8-Year-Old Argentinean Girl Dies After Receiving COVID-19 Vaccine

https://ussanews.com/2023/02/02/die...l-dies-after-receiving-covid-19-vaccine/


Univ of Arizona swimmer dies suddenly at 23…

https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/univ-of-arizona-swimmer-dies-suddenly-at-23/


MSNBC Anchor hospitalized with severe myocarditis… Blames it on ‘common cold’…

https://citizenfreepress.com/breaki...itis-blames-it-on-the-common-cold-virus/


Anastasia Weaver: 6-year-old Ohio girl dies unexpectedly; mother scrubs Facebook page after relentless attacks, finger-pointing

https://thecovidblog.com/2023/01/31...fter-relentless-attacks-finger-pointing/


The mysterious collapse of Thai princess after 3rd Covid booster

https://sharylattkisson.com/2023/02...f-thai-princess-after-3rd-covid-booster/


Famous last words for FDA doctor…

https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/famous-last-words-for-fda-doctor/

Chew on this. Not counting China …roughly 700 million cases of Covid worldwide. Nearly 7 million deaths. Mostly unvaccinated.

And then the internet's underbelly started to produce false doubts about covid vaccines and modern medicine... The whole damn republican party is under the sway of Russian puppets, fascist wannabes, and brainless buffoons. Can you imagine any GOPer falling for the truth in 23? Nope. Because they are so far gone, they couldn't recognize the truth if it drove a semi up their asses. Twenty-five years ago, no republican would have fallen for all the crap today's Rs have fallen for. You damn sure would never have heard praise for Putin and Russia back then. I'm at the point of telling ordinary republicans they are traitors for continuing to support a party so notorious as to have attempted a fascist coup d'etat, trying to install a dystopian autocracy under a very real Manchurian Candidate, and attacking the core institutions that formed the backbone of American greatness/success over the last two hundred and forty-six years. Or to become Russian-praising, Putin-loving, and far-right American politicians so unfit for office that your party becomes a laughing stock, so choc-full-of-nuts that nobody takes them remotely serious, and expounding complete and utter BS at every turn, running their mouths just to be sure to keep the water muddy.

How you know covid is over...

posting crap from fringe websites won't help your cause.

Ahhh the dream that COVID is over… as I lay here in bed about to get up to face my day where I’ll be going to see two COVID patients this morning. One who’s at home with their entire family suffering from it. The other in a care facility that at last count had at least 12 other residents doing battle, along with a bunch of the staff. I’ll also be texting my buddy in a couple hours to check in on him as he and his entire household have it. He’s been off of work for the past week because of it. He’s a maintenance guy for an assisted living facility. They have a massive outbreak in that building right now.

Sure glad it’s over.

I'll just drop this here. https://www.yahoo.com/news/where-d-medical-school-gop-181407823.html