Replace “test kit manufacturers” with “big pharma”, and “tests / test kits” with “vaccine”, and you’ve found a chunk of why I’m a vaccine skeptic.
And so can vaccinated people. If you choose to be afraid, you don’t gather with family, period. For both their sake and yours.
But instead, we’re just encouraging more infighting and bigotry. Have you learned nothing?
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Biden has now had longer to deal with this pandemic than Trump had. Plus, he had nearly a year of watching the so-called mistakes of his predecessor, then a year to do it better.
Has Biden done anything tangibly different this second year, than was done the first year? After a year of criticizing testing shortfalls, it took another year to come up with a plan for testing (which is apparently just an idea and even a plan yet)?
All any of this proves is that it’s much easier to criticize from the outside. And that it’s always about the money; it’s only when testing centers start to fall out of favor that at home tests get put on the table to keep the funds flowing.
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An article has appeared in the WaPo this morning regarding Biden’s failure to provide adequate COVID testing resources. As you would anticipate, since the WaPo is wildly biased in favor of Democrats, the article pulls a lot of punches. Nevertheless, the underlying incompetence of the Biden administration shines through.
A key situational difference, as between Biden and Trump, is that Biden was not taken by surprise. Trump was, and he was being impeached as well as the pandemic began unfolding. No sane American would support impeachment of President Biden. And Trump as well could have done better on testing, though everything was so new (now almost) two years ago. I’m not even sure the testing technology was ready at that point. Thank God Trump at least was successful with Operation Warp Speed, something for which Biden now is seeking to take credit.
Trump was, and he remains, a putz whose personality is highly offputting. But he did know how to get stuff done, particularly when he was permitted by his legion of opponents to focus on critical tasks.
Biden is a nice guy. And as the article points out he was well aware of our testing needs on January twentieth of this year. Yet here we are, not in a good place, with promises rather than tests.
Why can we not have a President with a nice personality who is also competent and knows how to get stuff done? I guess that is asking too much!
Anyway at the bottom line Biden has let us down, there will be no timely recovery from his ineptitude, and we continue to stumble along as a country still behind the COVID eight ball. Here is a link to the WaPo article; read it and weep:
Inside the administration’s failure to avert a covid testing shortfall
ETA
Here is a telling short lift from that WaPo article:
“They were like, ‘Great. We can vaccine our way out of this thing, so we don’t need so many tests,’ ” said a former transition official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private conversations.
Another official, who works for the Biden administration, confirmed that account, saying that White House health aides believed that once Americans were vaccinated, few would need testing.
That suggests both Trump and Biden are (and were) victims of the same problem: poor strategic medical advice.
Neither President has, or claims to have, any medical credentials whatsoever. I’m certain Trump leaned heavily on his team and Biden has had to do the same. Trump is more of a “pull out all the stops” guy, though. I thought he was nuts when he ordered all those ventilators at a time it seemed fewer were needed. I was wrong. Biden apparently bought into his medical team’s erroneous thinking and he is getting plenty burned as a result. You have to moderate your criticism of Biden a little bit on that account. But in the end he is the guy in charge, so he must take the blame.
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I’d take the PFE pill if I got sick and was high risk, no question, and maybe if I was sick and not high risk too if someone offered. It’s a good mechanism and a great trial result. Remember it works best in the first few days, so don’t delay getting a rapid test and start trying to get a prescription for the pill if you find yourself in that situation.
In contrast, the Merck pill was also just approved on an emergency basis, and only if no other treatment options were available. This is the FDA saying it’s better not to die from covid if you’re high risk, but get the PFE pill if you can.
The authorization for molnupiravir is limited to adults over 18 who have a high risk of severe illness and “for whom alternative FDA-authorized treatment options are not accessible or medically appropriate,” the FDA said in a press release Thursday. It’s not recommended for use in pregnant people.
Or, said less charitably on the Merck pill, approval was
despite FDA panel ambivalence during the November 30 review owing to the poor efficacy findings in the second portion of the trial, bone marrow toxicity signals, and failure to pass one of two carcinogenicity assays.
I agree with the FDA. If I was very high risk and my only treatment option was the Merck pill or nothing, I’d probably take it. But I sure wouldn’t take it in any other circumstances. The mechanism is dangerous generally and the trial results showed only 30% improvement (vs 90% for PFE). Worse, Merck somehow managed to show 50% in early trial results but then, after selling a huge preorder to the credulous administration, revised the final results to only 30% improvement, perhaps suggesting funny business with the trial reporting, the drug’s efficacy, or who knows what. But the group they didn’t report on in the second half showed nearly no benefit in order for that drop to happen.
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Christmas travel plans thrown into disarray by hundreds of flight cancelations due to staffing issues around quarantines. Shoulda booked on Omicron Airways, the up and coming leader in airborne transmission, instead of Delta.
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O first US death was high risk, bad health, and had survived covid previously.
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So was it die of or die with? Nothing in biology is either/or but my call is that this is more die with than die of. If this is truly the first death that the fear mongers can attribute to O, that is really saying something.
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Yet should still serve as proof everyone should be afraid it’ll kill them too, I’m sure.
I’m continuously amazed at how a death tole that is 90% over the age of 50 (and that’s before factoring in health conditions) is cited ad nauseum as evidence of the risk to healthy younger people. And that you are called out as the bad guy when you point this out.
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Yeah, unclear what actually killed him.
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The vaccinated people have a lower chance of being infected, a much lower chance of getting severely ill, hospitalized, or dying. Even if someone in a room full of vaccinated people is a carrier, it’s much safer for everyone in that room than if some or all were not vaccinated (or tested), isn’t it?
Ok? So if you’re vaccinated, you have no reason to be obsessive about the status of those around you since it doesn’t affect you at all.
I know, I know, you’re supposed to be concerned about others. You care so much so, that you make everyone hate each other by telling the deplorables in your family that they’re too stupid to be allowed to make their own choices about their bodies. So compassionate.
More and more, it’s become nothing but selfish bitterness - “I did what I’m supposed to, and I’ll be damned if your going to get any benefit from it without doing it yourself. Even if you don’t want or even think you’ll be getting a benefit, I think you are, so that’s all that matters and it’s all your fault I now have to be an ass about it.”
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I’m not exactly sure what comparison case you’re considering here. Pre-O, it looked like infected vaccinated people had similarly high viral loads, and so were probably similarly contagious, but they didn’t stay that way for as long since they recovered faster.
If you’re asking if you should, absent any additional information, feel safer in a room of vaxxed people or recently tested people, I think you’d rather have the tested ones. These days the vaccines don’t protect much against O transmission.
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“This is a terrifying statistic,” said Don Lemon on his nightly CNN broadcast. “The correlation between being infected and eventually dying is too high to dismiss. The important takeaway here is that we should all be terrified.”
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Unrelated to covid, but this is why I have little faith in “the science”, especially when what it claims seems to go against logic and common sense.
Based on the arrangement of the muscle fibers, the muscle layer likely helps stabilize the lower jaw by “elevating and retracting” the coronoid process, the team wrote in their report. And in fact, the newfound muscle layer is the only part of the masseter that can pull the jawbone backward, Mezey said.
After centuries of cutting apart the human body down to microscopic levels, how the hell do they just now suddenly discover the layer of muscle that moves your jaw? Its not like finally figuring out the source of some hormone or something requiring some detective work to figure out, this is a physical structure that has always been there.
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Ivermectin dangers were made up from a few cases of fake news, and subsequently propagated by the CDC.
You mean decades of safety data, both in trials and in billions of doses given to people worldwide, turned out to be more correct than listening to our pandemic propagandists? Color me shocked.
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No shock. Once again it all boils down to “follow the money”.
CDC, FDA, et al . . . . . many of those denizens are sitting on huge personally-owned piles of Pfizer, Moderna, and other big pharma stock. They are merely looking out for “number one”.
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Speaking of fake news, that big British ivermectin trial had to be put on hold until the PFE and Merck pills could get their EUAs, by claiming a shortage of ivermectin. Some actual reporters followed up with their drug suppliers, who indicated there was no shortage at all and plenty of supply.
The New Jersey pharmaceutical company supplying ivermectin to a UK trial that was paused for a short period of time, says there are no supply issues with its pills.
Ivermectin is being investigated as part of the government-backed Platform Randomised Trial of Treatments in the Community for Epidemic and Pandemic Illnesses (PRINCIPLE) in the United Kingdom as a possible home treatment for COVID-19. The trial was put on hold due to “temporary supply issues” as reported by Medpage Today on Dec. 14.
Details were not provided on the cause of the supply issues. The trial’s joint chief investigator, professor Chris Butler, and the trial’s press team declined to comment and respond to a query asking when the supply issue is expected to be resolved.
Trust The Science.
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Doesn’t this only confirm basic, long-known facts of the immune system? After about 3 months, if no additional threat has been experienced, the antibodies go away and it files the solution away in memory for future reference?
If this is going to be the standard requirement, the day the vaccine was announce they could’ve included a booster would be needed every 3 months. The ongoing research isn’t uncovering anything groundbreaking or particular useful.
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