solarbird | Entries tagged with covid19

One of the many, many terrible things Trump has pledged to do is revoke all funding for schools that require childhood vaccinations. The Party of Plague will bring back every old plague it can – measles, mumps, rubella, polio, whatever.

Since that’s been forgot again, I wanted on this Labour Day to bring back an essay I wrote on Twitter, back when it was actually Twitter and not X, Elon Musk’s fascist disinformation and propaganda fountain, because this exactly is what is prompting Trump to make these kinds of promises.

If you like, you might also give a look the essay I wrote in September of 2021, wherein I talked about how the Republican Party and the MAGAt movement would pretend that nothing bad happened under Trump, disowning 2021 entirely. It’s not the same, but it’s related, and I think underappreciated at the time.

63 days remain.

Steve Silberman – @stevesilberman · 6 October 2021
Mind-blowing phrase from a right-wing doctor in my inbox this morning pushing ivermectin for what he calls the Wuhan virus: “The tyranny of evidence-based medicine.” #medtwitter #COVID19

Fundamentalism has been railing against empiricism – the idea that you can learn about the world through observation/evidence and make improvements based on what you learn – since before I started following/studying them.

In that context, this is predictable.

Why?

Mostly because their worldview is contradicted by it. but also because their view religiously and culturally is that truth is inherited from a better past, handed down from ultimate authority, maintained through authority. “received knowledge,” essentially… from god.

And they like it that way. any change is a threat to their authority as holders of that received truth. so of course they push against it, obviously.

(Many of them say/said western culture lost its way with the Italian renaissance – because that marked a “turning from god.”)

Mind you: it’s all bullshit. their beliefs are much younger than the renaissance, centuries younger, no matter how much they insist it’s eternal unchanged truth.

But it’s bullshit they believe.

And one of the reasons – one of the attractions – is that you don’t have to think. just react.

Andrew the racist dickhead Sullivan may be a racist dickhead, but he made a cogent observation years ago about his own side: most conservatives really don’t like having to think.

Whoever wrote Frank Burns in MASH and had him say, “I don’t think, I know,” was, sure, setting him up for a punchline (“I don’t think you know either”) but like a lot of good jokes, it’s pointing at a reality.

Frank Burns was a Christian conservative, in the text.

He didn’t want to have to think. not critically. he just wanted to already know – or be handed down the “truth,” whatever that was, which he’d accept as long as it didn’t offend other received “truth.”

Or his wallet.

(of course.)

So as surprising as this “doctor” railing against “evidence-based medicine” might seem to be, it’s really kinda… not.

It’s bad, fuck, of course it is.

But it’s not surprising.

It’s what they are.

If reality offends received knowledge, it’s not received knowledge at fault. it’s reality that’s the problem – and which must be denied or attacked.

And in that context, all it takes is the right kind of evil opportunism to make a crisis into a disaster.

And with the GOP more than happy to become a literal party of sedition and plague to keep power, well.

The crisis became a disaster, exactly as you’d expect – if you’re willing to think about it.

Which they aren’t. Not if they can help it.

It’s genuinely two different theories of knowledge at war here. if you wonder how they can reject reality so consistently and in real time, well, this is how.

They have lots of practice at it. So it’s easy.

And if you’re wondering whether the explicitly fascist slogan of “reject modernity, embrace tradition” is connected? Yes. It is. It is exactly the same thing, lightly rephrased just with more explicit emphasis on racism and patriarchy, not that either faction is light on either.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

…let’s get caught up with a little reality about the Party of Plague.

Trump’s covid response was even worse than you remember; In a sane country, it would disqualify him from ever again holding office. Remember him telling people that lights would cure COVID? Remember telling people to use bleach, like, internally? I do.

“What repeated #COVID19 infections are doing to us,” in the form of long-term disability, moreso than early death, though if you’re wondering – are COVID deaths massively undercounted? Why yes, yes they are, as this new analysis from Boston University (New Analysis Reveals Many Excess Deaths Attributed to Natural Causes Are Actually Uncounted COVID-19 Deaths) demonstrates.

So as bird flu and much-more-contageous monkeypox variants are floating around, what’s the Republican response?

What do you think?

Trump vows to defund schools requiring vaccines for students if he’s reelected

It’s still the party of plague, and it’s still a death cult.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Nothing is ever about “bodily autonomy” with Republicans. Nothing. Today’s example:

The Republican Senate of North Carolina just passed a ban on masking for medical reasons in public.

For bonus points, it has an exemption preserving the right of the KKK to march around masked. Republican leadership refused to allow a floor vote to take that out, so passed it with the exemption intact.

But masking for medical purposes in public? That they’ll make illegal.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

An interesting new paper out modelling COVID-19 infection rates – using long-established models – against carbon-dioxide readings taken within a space, assuming one infected person and four non-infected people, across time.

This study does not consider vaccination, which I think is probably a good idea given what it’s doing. But the short form is: according to what we know about this kind of modelling, what they consider well-ventilated works and by itself should be enough to take R0 below 1 for hospitalised patients without masks at all.

That doesn’t mean no infections at all, but it does mean a continually declining infection rate, as one case produces less than one infections.

Now, what they consider “well ventilated” is pretty aggro – it’s even more than I maintain here, and I have built what is considered by HVAC standards to be excellent ventilation. But they also aren’t taking filtering into account – this is just air-exchange, and doesn’t include filtration, just like it doesn’t include vaccination. It’s just raw use of CO2 as a proxy for everything else.

Plus it’s a bloody hospital setting, they can do it if they want. And they should very much want.

Anyway, what all this comes down to is: air exchange works. We also already know air filtration works. If we actually want to finish off COVID, the way to do it without getting a fascist insurgency is air exchange and filtration.

Apropos of everything, here’s another link to my air-exchange-based HVAC assistance project on github. There’s reasons I do this. Just saying.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

The Washington Post really ran a shit article on their front page, “Most in U.S. back GOP’s anti-trans policies.” The problem, as Parker Malloy points out in great detail, is that the article both misrepresents Republican anti-trans policies and the poll results themselves. Not only is there 70%ish support for anti-discrimination law including trans people generally, but – going to Parker here:

62% of adults support trans kids between the ages of 10 and 14 being able to access gender-affirming counseling/therapy, which is something that the GOP is trying to make illegal.

This is absolutely appalling – and opinion-shaping – coverage by the Washington Post. However, that doesn’t make everything rosy, because the years of hate campaign really is having an effect: Autostraddle also has analysis on the topic here.

Republican Texas have decided to take “rolling coal” statewide, slamming the breaks on renewable energies, erecting a huge fleet of permitting and bureaucratic hurdles on new installations – basically, weaponising the state against renewable energy. Meanwhile, they’re launching a whole series of fossil fuels initiatives, all because fuck, not hack, the planet. Also because they’re owned by fossil fuel companies. Original at Washington Post, a probably-copyright-violating but no-paywall copy here.

45 is still siding with Putin, as you’d expect. I’m just including this to show he hasn’t budged and he’ll get so much support from Musk-enabled Russian, Chinese, and possibly even Iranian propagandists. Authoritarians stick together – unless they find another stooge they like better, of course.

Here’s an update on Musk Twitter from G. Willow Wilson, in the form of a big Mastodon thread, along with commentary on Mastodon from people who prefer Bluesky. But as far as the old birdsite goes itself:

Twitter somehow gets worse week by week–right now it is an unusable swamp of right wing conspiracy theory, wave after wave of racism (there is currently an “invasion” underway at the southern border that must be stopped by lethal force) crypto bros, and bots selling high-follower accounts.
G. Willow Wilson, 2023/5/8 on Mastodon

The New Republic reports from TERF Island on suppression of free speech rights around Chuckie’s coronation: “To Hold a Coronation, Britain Suppressed Free Speech. That’s Insane. The monarchy used to be quaint. As of Saturday, it’s a menace.”

Hilarious, except sad and evil, from Rolling Stone: “Oath Keepers Leader Wants Leniency for Public Service … of Creating the Oath Keepers.” You know. The group that was involved in creating the seditious conspiracy.

Anyway, to the states:

Florida:

Judd Legam has a breakdown on some of the books Republicans are banning in Florida libraries statewide, books Republican DeSantis called “porn.” They are, to put it mildly, not porn.

Republican DeSantis’s conspiracy-theorist anti-vaccination surgeon general, known for modifying studies that disproved his anti-vaccination conspiracy bullshit and publishing his lies as fact, was just confirmed for a second term by the Republican Florida Senate on a strict party line vote.

Texas:

I’m just gonna paste in the subhead here: In response to school shootings, a new bill in Texas would require public schools to install “bleeding stations” and train kids as young as third grade in trauma care.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Huh.

Turns out even asymptomatic COVID-19 infections can cause Lewy Body Syndrome as one of the “long covid” sequelae.

LBS is a fucking nightmare. Think Parkinson’s disease – just for starters. Then it gets worse.

If you’ve stopped masking up, you might want to reconsider that decision. This is… bad.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Record numbers of people are out of work due to illness, reports Boing Boing.

Gosh, I wonder why.

(Endemic means “everywhere,” not “gone,” you fucking assholes. Fucking learn already.)

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

I see New York City elected the biggest clowncar of a mayor they’ve had in two decades. Guess this one will get a bunch of people killed too. Christ, what a nightmare.

NYC Wants Shoppers to Take Off Masks in Crime-Fighting Measure
Laura Nahmias – March 6, 2023

New York City Mayor Eric Adams called on shop owners to require customers to remove their face masks when entering stores to help cut down on retail crime that has surged since the pandemic.

“We are putting out a clear call to all of our shops: Do not allow people to enter the store without taking off their face mask.”

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

We finally have some new good news on COVID. This is the kind of vaccine I’ve been tracking and hoping for, and it’s testing well so far.

I’ve talked about “sterilising” vaccines in earlier posts. What that means – and I’m not sure I’ve ever said – are vaccines that stop viral loading on contact, or close to it. Vaccines which prevent that initial infection from taking hold. Now, not being some kind of nonsense force-field, they can’t stop it from ever making contact and landing on your tissues – but they can try to stop its initial setup.

That’s what the nasal vaccines are hoping to be.

See, the problem is – and I’m not an immunologist, I don’t know the details – is that the whole upper respiratory tract has a lot of its own ideas about immune function, for no doubt good evolutionary reasons. But a downside to that is that intramuscular vaccines aren’t picked up well by that tract. It’s not that they aren’t picked up at all – they are! – but it’s going to be pretty incomplete.

And that’s all terribly oversimplified and vague but it gets the idea across, I hope.

If you’ve ever had to deal with allergies, you may have noticed that oral antihistamines and nasal antihistamines behave very differently. (I certainly have.) Same phenomenon, in very rough terms.

These sorts of vaccines are intended to inform the upper respiratory system directly. They get the full load. What you’d hope for at that point is higher immune memory and stronger initial-infection blocking.

In first trials, that’s exactly what this does. In a big way. It’s still entirely preliminary, of course. But we’re behind the curve on this. This is a known technology. In general, it works. There’s no reason it shouldn’t work here, given the right formulation, which is what a lot of the experimentation is about.

And I will be the first in queue to get one, when I can.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

I genuinely don't even know how to start with this weekend.

You've seen bits of it, even if you go nowhere else. Mastodon successfully launched its first Internet Meme of the Day, proving that it's a real social network after all.

It got started when Mediaite reported on the JoinMastodon account being banned by Musk on Twitter. The reporter misread the account name as JOHN Mastodon, and made up whole cloth that John Mastodon was the founder of Mastodon, a company they made up as the operator of the Mastodon social network, named for John Mastodon. A few hours later, here we were. Also here and here and here and here and here and you get the idea it goes on a lot.

Musk Twitter responded by banning links to profiles on a list of other social media sites - calling it "promotion of other social media platforms" or some such bullshit - starting with links to Mastodon, but also Facebook, Instagram, Linktree (because those could have links to the banned sites, you see) and an assortment of others, but not to Gab, Gettr, or Parler, meaning basically that linking to explicitly fascist sites was still okay. That's since been modified and mostly wound down, but I don't know that Twitter isn't still tagging links to major Mastodon sites as unsafe/malware.

Which they were doing, if you missed that.

We know also that Musk went to Saudi Arabia for the world cup finale, was photographed with Jared Kushner in the Saudi box, and it's being reported his Saudi investors are not amused and have insisted he install a proper CEO and stop being a clown. He's currently running a poll about whether he should step down as CEO. Last I saw, he was losing badly.

Also banned from Twitter were several more reporters, another assortment of left-leaning people (usual suspects and all that), and a bunch of other people who dared link off-site such as Paul Graham of Y Combinator, one of the most important if not the most important venture capital groups in Silicon Valley. Parts 1 and 2 are funny, but it's part 3 which is the real "life comes at you fast sometimes" story.

Meanwhile, Tesla investors are getting pretty angry, though I don't have a convenient link and I need to get this posted, sorry. I may edit later if I come across one.

And all hilarity aside, it's very important to note that Twitter absolutely is becoming a deadly serious disinformation hub throughout all of this, with a particular emphasis on anti-vaccination conspiracy theories. See also. So get off Twitter, stay away from Twitter. For reals.

Meanwhile, Mastodon is currently dealing with another mass influx of new users, with the largest instances putting a temporary stop to accepting additional accounts. With so many nodes, however, this hasn't really affected the uptake rate yet. It's not quite up to the terrifying numbers of the Great Day of Layoffs, but it's close. The largest instances are a bit slow at the moment, but staying up. Smaller instances are generally doing fine.

I'm genuinely kind of stunned at how well Mastodon-the-software has scaled so far. This is an absolutely brutal stress test, and it's holding up - as yet, anyway. Fingers crossed.

And that's the news.

Current Mood: a little dizzy

Sphagnum Moss · @moss_sphagnum · 11:38 PM · Jun 16, 2022
I had a chance to go to this @VSOrchestra Orpheum Theatre built after the Spanish Flu to be *pandemic proof* and WOW. This ventilating system is FULLY OPERATIONAL. Huge crowd 1/n
[IMAGE showing CO₂ at 518ppm]

I rebuilt my house's HVAC to do this (filtration+air exchange) before COVID, for reasons.

Holy shit has it worked out for me.

This cuts COVID spread from indoor to near-outdoor levels.

We can and should do this everywhere.

Let's talk about the reasons. They were:

1. Allergies (I'm very allergic to grass pollen) and smoke season (which from a solution point of view is the same problem)

2. Cooling, in summer

Let's talk about #2 in particular.

Our house is really difficult to keep cool in summer because of where and how it's built. Lots of windows facing unobstructed east on a hill. We got toasty.

We'd been using two wheelabout ACs and attempting to cool down at night with fan-forced venting. It didn't really work.

I put a heat-pump Mitsubishi cooling system (240V AC) in on the top floor only, a bunch more ducting, full-time filtered air circulation (for allergies and smoke season) and, most importantly, a lot of temperature sensors in inside-outside pairs.

Beforehand, the house upstairs would be 10°F or more over outside.

Afterwards, well, this is with the air conditioning OFF:

We weren't even running the air-exchange cooling at full, because if we did, it would get TOO COLD INSIDE THE HOUSE.

In the SUMMER.

Again: that's with the air conditioning turned OFF, doing opportunistic cooling via air-exchange at the right times, as possible.

So with much better results, and much better indoor air quality at all times, and a much bigger AC unit in place, used when needed...

...our electricity bill went down by 40%.

In September, anyway.

That June had a record-smashing heatwave. The whole month was monstrous.

The hottest any part of the partially-AC house got in the areas with NO air conditioning was... 79°F.

And again, year over year, our electricity bill went... down.

That was pre-COVID. Post-COVID?

We had a housemate come home with COVID after visiting family.

He isolated. Filtration on, air exchange maxxed, but still, same house.

Nobody else got it.

Air exchange. Filtration. It works, it's cheaper, and it's better.

And we could do this EVERYWHERE.

From the Seattle Times yesterday:

Notice that 2.4% Delta peeking in? Delta's been at basically 0% for a bit. Not forever, but a bit.

Combine with this unfortunate (but small-numbers) study indicating that unvaccinated people who get omicron don't have the expected/hoped for immunoreaction to previous strains and you've got bad news for Get Lucky.

The story is very different if you were vaccinated already, of course. Nice immune response jump.

But I had written that that if we got lucky we might have a mass - if extremely shitty - pseudo-vaccination of the unvaccinated, via omicron.

That at very least, we'd have good groundwork for resistance.

But, well.

If the numbers from this small study hold up... then... I guess not. No Get Lucky scenario for us.

And what that's going to mean, given that we know there's a Delta reserve hanging around out there, is a brief return to lows followed by everybody shrugging off containment measures followed by Delta II: Even Deltier.

Goddammit.

Current Mood: goddammit

[In reply to an earlier post on Tumblr] This didn’t age well. The CDC has come out supporting the FACT that the jabs do NOTHING but allegedly make you less ill, as if that can be measured. You still get it, spread it, and get sick from a CCP flu with a 90% survivability. CDC says natural immunity SIX TIMES stronger than the jab. CDC admitted spiking the death numbers.... The GOP via PDJT got the vaccine y’all denied first, and now you worship. The military is proving the injury numbers. But, keep spreading your poo.

Except none of this is true.

I think I know what you're conflating, because I've seen other anti-vaccination activists conflating the same thing. And that's that the CDC have said that monoclonal antibody therapy based on earlier variants of COVID is not effective against omicron cases. That's true, but very different to "the jabs do NOTHING but allegedly make you less ill, as if that can be measured."

For one thing, that can be measured. It is being measured, in an ongoing fashion. Here's a recent, large-number, and incredibly good news paper out on the effects of just the basic two-shot vaccination, showing that Long COVID symptom presentation went to zero for vaccinated individuals.

Zero. As in no more likely to show those symptoms than someone who has not had COVID. That's zero.

So we can measure this. We do measure this. The numbers are very, very clear. Vaccination - particularly once boosted - strongly reduces case severity, and strongly reduces death rates.

Now, what you call "natural immunity" here isn't even a thing. It's not that you were immune, or even became immune, so I'll try to address it as what it is - post-infection resistance to later re-infection.

The problem with this approach in general, of course, is that it exposes you to all of the dangers of COVID in order to get that post-infection resistance. And it's not the 1%ish death rate that matters here nearly as much as the no less than 20% rate (pre-omicron) of long-term major organ damage even including mild cases.

It appears that this 20% number may drop to around 10% with omicron, at least, in children. I kinda hope that's true - I'd rather it be 0% - but even that sharp reduction is still a disaster, and still terrible for long-term, ongoing damage to health.

But let's get back to that "natural immunity" itself, which is to say, again, "post-infection resistance to reinfection."

We know from published data that post-omicron resistance to delta is about 70%, in the short term. I emphasise that this is the short term, because we know that omicron can create new illness again in someone who has already had omicron in as little as two months, because that has also happened.

We also know that post-booster resistance to delta is around 95%, and to omicron, around 90% at peak.

90% (vaccination plus booster) is much higher than 70% (getting and surviving omicron)

0% major organ damage (vaccination plus booster) is much less than 10-20% (getting and surviving COVID).

"Natural resistance" - which again in reality means post-infection resistance to re-infection - is much worse, by the numbers, by the hard facts on the ground. Not six times better.

Now, I think where the "six times" number you're presenting may come from is the fact that the initial two-dose vaccination's ability to completely prevent disease does decline sharply over time, to as low as 20% depending upon the study.

Its ability to prevent severe disease and death does not decline, because the whole point of this is to tell your body's natural immune system how to fight the disease, and the body remembers. You can see that clearly in numbers.

But once the initial antibody wave fades, it's remembered in what amounts to long-term immunological memory - T-cells and all that. And antibody production takes some time to ramp back up once the knowledge is stored away down there, which is why you can get breakthrough cases after being vaccinated. But disease severity is dramatically - dramatically! - reduced.

(The exact same thing happened with polio - it took years of boosters to wipe out polio, and that's why boosters exist.)

The mRNA COVID booster shot raises that antibody resistance back up to a solid 90% for a while - for how long, we don't know yet, but long enough to matter. (I was honestly surprised it was that effective, but that's the most recent study data I've seen. I'd link it but I seem to have misplaced the link.)

But what also kicks that immunological response back up is getting a mild, no-long-term-damage case of any COVID variant AFTER having had both initial vaccination shots.

But again, that only works after having been fully vaccinated.

When you have been fully vaccinated, even if antibody levels have returned to normal, getting a mild breakthrough infection absolutely does boost your antibody response back up, in much the same way as a booster shot does, only maybe even better.

So if your breakthough-upon-exposure resistance is down to 20% - a very low number but I've seen it in in a small study - and the booster shot takes it to 90%, and getting mild omicron takes it to, I don't know, let's say 95%... that gets you close to that six times number you present. I suspect that's where "six times" came from.

But you have to have had the initial vaccination sequence for that to work. That's where the lie comes in.

There's still that chance of severe disease and death, mind you. But at least there's no longer - statistically speaking - any chance of Long COVID. And that matters a lot.

Now, I know, you won't pay attention to any of this. I kinda feel - as someone who has done original research and had her work presented and published in actual science journals, and used by other people doing original science to do more original science - that I have to try. But I know you've made this identitarian and will naturally reject all of it in favour of what you already want to believe. I get that. You'll dig in.

Why do it anyway?

You're already dug in hard, so there's no real making it worse, so no additional harm done, I hope.

So I do it for the examples.

You've presented a couple of great examples here of how people take data and modify it and reframe it into lies for political purposes. It's exactly the same way the American fundamentalist evangelical movement has been doing it since at least the 1980s and 1990s, when I was studying it up close and personal.

Delete context, change context, move numbers from one context to another context and ding! you have "numbers" showing exactly the opposite of what those numbers actually meant, and that's one of the ways disinformation traditionally works.

An example from back in the day: Concerned Women for America's Beverly LaHaye used to quote "a San Francisco homosexual newspaper" called "Bay Windows" saying that "pedophilia is the foundation of homosexuality" as part of a pro-pedophilia editorial stance. It was part of the standard fundamentalist propaganda arguing that all queers were child-molesting faggots who couldn't reproduce so wanted to rape children, turn them gay, and give them AIDS.

She'd quote extensively, and eventually turned out that the quotes were reasonably accurate. But the lie was one of context.

In reality, Bay Windows was quoting NAMBLA literature in an editorial condemning NAMBLA and their attempts to integrate themselves into pride parades.

By removing and lying about the context - an editorial condemning NAMBLA, et al - she could "quote" the "homosexual newspaper" as "endorsing child molestation," when the actual editorial she was quoting did exactly the opposite.

(It was also a Boston newspaper, not San Francisco. But San Francisco was scarier than Boston, so they changed the city.)

The techniques have not changed. Only the target.

So if anyone's made it down to the bottom of this long read, know this is one of the big ways disinformation works. Take the words and numbers, put them into the food processor and spin 'em around until they line up in the way you want, then attribute them back to the original writer as a quote. And these are a couple of examples.

Mind you, it also works by just straight up lying.

But if you think about it, straight-up lies aren't as bad. They're just lies.

This shit, though.

This shit straight-up corrodes truth. And that's... that's so much worse.

Current Mood: busy

The worst part of Republicans calling for COVID-19 vaccines to be banned - and what you have to understand - is that the @GOP don't need a majority to trainwreck blanket effects of vaccination for diseases like measles and polio.

They only need 10% - 20% tops - to monkeywrench everything and bring back recurring plagues.

With a 20% refusal rate, we will absolutely see waves of measles, polio, who knows what else, if they can pull it off.

They're trying, right now, in Florida, and probably other states. Dismantling childhood vaccination requirements for schools, in particular.

Vaccination will still protect the people who get polio and measles in these new outbreaks from severe disease, like COVID now. But there will be outbreaks, and breakthrough cases again.

Most of these breakthrough cases will be okay. Some won't be, because _literally no vaccines_ are 100% proof against disease, and they never have been.

Particularly but not exclusively amongst the unvaccinated, Long Polio will return.

What makes outbreaks end isn't vaccines stopping 100% of cases. What makes them end is vaccines reducing probability of disease, of case severity, of duration of sickness, and by doing so, reducing contagiousness windows.

With smallpox, we got the odds so far down it died out.

But the higher the unvaccinated rate - the larger number of people who let disease run free - the less possible it becomes to stop outbreaks.

Some anti-vax strongholds were already seeing measles outbreaks _before_ the GOP went all-in on being the Party of Plague.

That was with a much lower refusal rate, mostly of cranks. It wasn't even partisan, I've had my share of fights with anti-vax leftists, mostly trendy new-age assholes and the like.

But now it is partisan, made so entirely by the right.

The GOP are making vaccination denial part of their identity. This won't stop with COVID.

They only need 10-20% to bring back disease outbreaks. When they do, they'll declare vaccination doesn't work, and double down.

Just like Agent Tucker on Fox News, boosting a literal plague by sabotaging not just vaccination, but _every_ attempt to fight the disease.

Doubling down like they always do, every time.

The GOP have become a Party of Plague. They will not stop. Functionally, they can't.

If you give the GOP power, that's what they will do.

If you _don't_ give the GOP power, they'll sabotage to make sure we have plagues anyway, knowing you'll blame whoever _does_ have power..

Just like they've always done.

Just like they're doing right now, with COVID.

The only way out is to deny them the one thing they really want, which is power.

We can't stop the GOP from being the Party of Plague _except_ by starving them of power.

That's what it takes. _Sustained_ removal from power. Because that's really the only thing they care about.

That's their actual guiding light.

Well, that, and having someone to persecute while claiming they're being persecuted, as their cultural and religious beliefs demand.

(If that sounds fascist to you, that's because it is.)

But push comes to shove, it's about having power.

Know this now. Fight the primary fights you need to fight _now_ to get better Democrats.

But whether you win or lose in primaries... remember _all_ this, I beg you, in November.

Any vote for _any_ Republican is a vote for the return of plagues.

Like this one.

But _more_.

Current Mood: worried

The GOP is turning against vaccination against disease in general.

The reason I say this isn't just that this professional plague pusher is demanding vaccines be taken off market.

It's because Fox News Agent Tucker _supports this guy's lies_ about vaccines being "ineffective," thus giving credibility to the _rest_ of his evil mendacity to the @GOP.

nikki mccann ramírez - @NikkiMcR · 5:48 PM · Jan 25, 2022
Alex Berenson tells Fox viewers: "The mRNA COVID vaccines need to be withdrawn from the market. No one should get them. No one should get boosted. No one should get double boosted. They are a dangerous and ineffective product at this point."

The @GOP's psychotic promotion of plague won't stop with just making vaccines "optional" - they'll _ban_ them.

Here in reality, vaccines make you 19 times less likely to get severe COVID, and statistically speaking _completely prevent_ Long COVID.

They won't just stop with COVID-19 vaccinations, they're already working on dismantling vaccination for things like measles, rubella, and everything else at the state level.

The @GOP are a _disease_ busily promoting _disease_.

I don't want this to be true, but it's a _fact_.

So REMEMBER THIS, I BEG YOU:

When it's time to vote later this year, you have to compare the options you _actually have on the ballot_ and decide whether you want a party you _dislike_, or a party actively working to bring _mass death by plague_.

LITERALLY.

Don't be fooled by "suburban dad in a nice sweater" Republicans like Virginia did.

The _day_ he took office reversed vaccine and mask rules in order to help make the plague worse.

_First day_.

And if you want to make November's choices better?

You need to be working RIGHT NOW.

Primaries are where @TheDemocrats candidates are chosen.

You have to win _those_ elections to get the choices you want on ballots in _November_.

But in November, if it comes down to a Democrat you don't like vs. ANY Republican?

The @GOP are the ones literally working literally every day to BRING. MORE. PLAGUES.

It sounds insane, it sounds _stupid_, it sounds _goofy_. _Saying it_ sounds _mad_.

But it's literally true.

This is the choice the Republicans have chosen - and they've absolutely chosen - to give us.

An authoritarian party of plague, sedition, and madness, vs...

it doesn't matter vs. what.

When you vote in November, you'll have two choices.

A Democrat, or a member of a death cult.

Work NOW to make that "vs." the best you can.

And when it comes to November, remember this moment, because things will be different by election day...

...but this part won't have changed one single goddamn bit.

Choose wisely.

Hell.

Choose _sanity_.

Current Mood: anxious

This article on Long Covid is not data yet. Not good data, anyway. But there's some data in it, and that data is bad.

Not on continuing cases. We'll find out shortly if we're going to augur down like so many other places, and I think we will, and big surges will be basically over by March, barring a more substantially new variant that genuinely bypasses vaccine protection against serious acute and long Covid - something which so far has not happened. And here, at least, in Cascadia, where vaccinations rates are high, it'll be a good spring.

But where they aren't. Oh god.

10% of children. And that's a low range. Christ.

I mean, I've talked about this. Repeatedly. I've begged people to come to terms with it and talk about it more and for the love of fuck stop focusing solely on deaths - which are bad! really bad! - and start focusing on long-term effects (like enfeeblement), and it just doesn't stick.

And now it's more or less too late.

I mean, it's not too late. For individuals. Get. Your. Goddamn. Shots. Get your kids their shots. For kids too young to get shots, I don't know what to tell you other than don't send them to school. And get them shot up the instant pediatric doses become available because if these numbers are real, then just fuck me this is what I was afraid of.

This is what I kept warning about.

People have already forgot - and even written off - a million US deaths. Yeah, the official number is less than that, we know from excess deaths that it's much worse than that.

But 10-20% systemic/major organ damage in children.

Fuck.

Vaccines stop Long Covid.

We know this. Symptom rates return to baseline.

And the GOP have turned into an anti-vaccination/pro-disease party that is going to absolutely fuck this country for a generation, even if they all vanished tomorrow.

And if these numbers are right, there's gonna be hell to pay. Once people figure it out, there's gonna be absolute hell, and nothing about it will be rational.

For the love of fuck, get your shots, because this... the aftereffects of this will last decades.

Current Mood: worried

New paper in The Lancet. Read it.

My takeaway of interest: detection rate is down to 5% of cases worldwide. That's an absolutely dramatic decline. You get slightly higher with semi-aggressive testing, but to get legitimately higher, you really have to work at it. A few places are, most places aren't, but let's put speculation to the side as one should and go with numbers we actually know.

Now let's go back to the path to r0 << 1, remind yourself of that if you like.

1,049,560 12-and-over cases remaining/anticipated in Washington State remains a valid number from its date. I'd aimed at 80% resistance from boosters, that was probably a little optimistic, and 70% or less would've been a little more accurate, but let's not change the number now.

5% of 1,049,560 is 52,478. 10% is 104,956. We're doing a lot of testing, let's say we bump it up real high (and that some UW data that isn't strictly about this but is kind of reflective about this) indicating a 10% detection rate. Much higher detection than typical, but we have some fairly aggressive testing here. For, you know, the US.

Two-week average for cases is 14,085/day. Times eight days (since the route to r0 post) gives us 112,680 detected cases, vs. a detection of 104,956.

That should just about compensate for that overly-optimistic 80%.

Now let's throw in some worse numbers for the under-12 set, which wasn't included in the above at all.

Population data says there are 1,044,827 under-12s in Washington State. No way to know how many have already had COVID before the path to r0, so let's assume none. And let's assume 100% case rate and be really on the high side. 10% is 104,482 detections remaining, without reinfection. Given the testing at schools, that might be low, but... we can't know. We're on the tenuous edge of numbers as it is. But despite that, I'm just going to say it:

If these numbers are right, we should be at peak right now.

If I'm right, we're about to be heading down in case count like the wrong kind of rocket but the absolutely right kind of epidemiology.

And as if on cue, the statewide two-week average looks like it has levelled off, and King County - as you'd expect, given our vaccination + booster rate - is already very well past peak.

If these numbers are right, we're done by March, folks. Not even mid-March. Beginning of March.

We. Are. Done. By. March.

Not to zero. But as an epidemic. Barring, as usual, a new and unpredictable variant that resets resistance. Read the Lancet paper, they talk about that, saying that COVID isn't disappearing, but it's about to become the flu.

Get your shots, be ready for occasional outbreaks, but as a true pandemic, here, in Washington State? Assuming all the assumings?

You do have to keep riding this out, but it's all downhill from here. And everybody else is going to be only a couple of months further along.

Barring a vastly new variant...

...it looks like it actually is gonna be a pretty nice spring in Cascadia.

Current Mood: optimistic

I've been writing on and off for a long time about how we need to start talking less about COVID deaths and talk more about the long-term effects of COVID on survivors. I'm not alone in that, but I was fairly early out the gate.

The reason I've been talking about this is because neither fascists nor fundamentalists give a fuck about theoretical death, particularly not in the 1% range, particularly not amongst the people they see as "old" or "already ill" or - as was particularly obvious in the early parts of this pandemic - of colour. The fascists want to kill all those people, the fundamentalists see death as just going to be with Jesus, and none of them see any of that as applying to them anyway.

It's never caught on, sadly. I've tried.

But I think part of it is that I've never found the right word.

I might've found it now.

Let's talk about enfeeblement.

I surveyed a lot of papers in late 2020 and early 2021 talking about not just Long COVID, but asymptomatic long-term damage from COVID.

I talk a lot about how 20% or more of asymptomatic COVID cases turn up with major organ damage. I use that number because of all the large-population studies I saw, it was the lowest number. And also because, being the smallest number, I decided it was the one least likely to be rejected out of hand.

Those people are starting to die now. None of it's being called COVID, but it's showing up in excess-death numbers, like that 140% excess-deaths rate reported by insurance companies in January 2022.

These are all people whose long-term health has been weakened.

For some, it's becoming fatal.

For a larger number, it's not fatal - yet - but it's symptomatic, in many different ways, all bad. All weakening. All enfeebling.

Some are far more easily tired than before. Some are weaker. Some get short of breath, sometimes at random. Some have a hard time thinking, or concentrating, and some have memory issues. Some can't smell or taste anymore. Some have blood circulation problems.

Some throw clots and have strokes.

Some do all of the above.

They have all been made one degree or another of feeble. It might be showing up now; it might show up later; it might not even show up at all - though there was a study out last month showing symptoms increasing over time, rather than decreasing. Lives getting worse, not better.

Enfeeblement.

COVID makes you feeble.

As I said just above, fascists and fundamentalists don't care about death. The former want to deal it en masse; the latter seek it out. In their own words, death from COVID-19 is good, and not to be feared.

But enfeeblement?

Oh, they hate the feeble. Loathe them. Despise them. And they fear - existentially fear - becoming one of them.

They are terrified of becoming feeble themselves.

And now, assuming today's study holds up, we know something new.

We, the vaccinated... we might get COVID, sure... but we don't get Long COVID.

Symptoms of Long COVID go to zero.

We don't become feeble from getting COVID... and they do.

You want to strike some fear of god in the fundamentalist, in the fascist?

That's how.

It won't happen to all of 'em. Not even most. But let's say one in five.

Ask them. Present it as a hypothetical. As an "okay, you won't get vaccinated against COVID because it doesn't stop you from getting the disease, but what about this other case?" example.

"So there's a new disease, doesn't kill anybody - well, not much of anybody - but it fucks people up pretty bad. Once it's over, one out of five are tired all the time, get weak, they have breathing problems, can't think right - a lot of them can't concentrate, they forget things constantly. Their immunity gets broken, too, so they get sick again a lot. Long term stuff."

"But there's a vaccine. Doesn't stop you from getting it, but it does stop you from getting fucked up for life."

"Would you get a vaccine against that?"

And of course, modulo the omission of death, I just described COVID-19.

I mean it. They don't care about death. They particularly don't care about the deaths of others. They really do not give a single fuck.

But enfeeblement?

And the unstated but omnipresent backdrop, becoming unworthy by becoming ill?

Yeah. About that, they care. And they already fear it, all the time.

And getting vaccinated is the way out.

Put that to them, and let's see what they say.

Current Mood: thoughtful

hooooooooly fuck EXTREMELY GOOD COVID NEWS holy fuck

Chise - @sailorrooscout · 11:55 AM · Jan 17, 2022
Does COVID-19 vaccination have a protective effect against Long COVID? Answer: YES.

“Vaccination with at least two doses of COVID-19 vaccine was associated with a substantial decrease in reporting the most common post-acute COVID-19 symptoms, bringing it back to baseline.” [THREAD]

Keeping in mind that there are always exceptions and that this is speaking statistically across large numbers, a reasonable-population study just out (and linked in the thread) shows extremely clearly that statistically speaking, breakthrough case patients who had previously received the complete initial course of two-dose vaccination DO NOT GET Long COVID.

Not even the booster. Just the initial two doses.

Again, there will be some exceptions because there always are and there will be, for lots of reasons, including pre-existing immunodeficiency which I am not ignoring, but these numbers are so strong that I'm pretty sure the odds for even worst-case patients are going to be dramatically - dramatically - improved.

Seriously these are some "NOPE! [slams book closed] YOU'RE GOOD!" numbers.

For those of us who have been going on about long-term damage from COVID (including not just Long COVID but the extended systemic bodily damage) this is ... holy fuck this is good news.

Look, in the unvaccinated, omicron still causes Long COVID in large numbers. It still trainwrecks immune systems by fucking T cells. Less so, we think, than previous variants, but even less are still some ugly odds.

But it's not too late to get vaccinated. Half-vaccinated isn't enough, the numbers are really clear on that, you need both shots.

But it's not too late.

Get your shots. For fuck's sake, get your shots.

Because if this holds up against new variants we haven't yet seen so can't speculate about, and if you're fully vaccinated, then that light at the end of the tunnel?

It's actually the end of the tunnel.

And it isn't secretly a train.

Current Mood: shocked

This is California, not Washington State, but in the context of yesterday's post on r₀<<1, I give you:

California hospitals predict COVID crisis will last until the end of February

Current Mood: busy

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Page Summary

measles, mumps, rubella, polio, and the party of plague
Instead of this shitshow of a debate…
the party of plague is still a party of plague
A new study on CO2 levels indoors vs. infection rates
Fascism Watch for 9 May 2023: the Bad Statistics But It’s Still Bad edition
COVID-19 can cause Lewy Body Syndrome
gosh, I wonder why
what the psychotic fuck
First good news on COVID in a while
I don't even know how to start with this weekend with Musk Twitter
high-volume air-exchange defeats covid
Bad news for the the Get Lucky scenario
An anti-vaccination Trumpist comes at me on Tumblr
the worst part about the party of plague
As the GOP turns entirely against vaccination against disease
this is what i've been afraid of
new paper in the lancet
Have I finally found the right word?
don't get to type this much
in the context of yesterday's post

収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

cheers, love - the cavalry's queer!

Entries tagged with covid19

measles, mumps, rubella, polio, and the party of plague

Instead of this shitshow of a debate…

the party of plague is still a party of plague

A new study on CO2 levels indoors vs. infection rates

Fascism Watch for 9 May 2023: the Bad Statistics But It’s Still Bad edition

COVID-19 can cause Lewy Body Syndrome

gosh, I wonder why

what the psychotic fuck

First good news on COVID in a while

I don't even know how to start with this weekend with Musk Twitter

high-volume air-exchange defeats covid

Bad news for the the Get Lucky scenario

An anti-vaccination Trumpist comes at me on Tumblr

the worst part about the party of plague

As the GOP turns entirely against vaccination against disease

this is what i've been afraid of

new paper in the lancet

Have I finally found the right word?

don't get to type this much

in the context of yesterday's post

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