Silvaire wrote:
I’m not gong to comment on the validity of NY times versus Worldometer data specifically, because I have no additional facts, but I wouldn’t myself trust the NY Times to tell me what day it is accurately and without heavy bias.
You are right – I pasted the graph for USA deaths, Florida is of course much less – my bad, not the NYTimes.
Emir wrote:
Public health measures, including education about vaccination are definitely not fascism
It depends what those ‘public health measures’ are. Education, great. Coercion and de facto compulsion, not so much.
I don’t tend to use the word fascism because of how emotive it is, but ‘public health measures’ such as:
are certainly authoritarian in nature and almost unprecedented in countries that have been free for most/all of modern history. I get a bit shuddery every time I read in one of our newspapers a reference to some of the post-lockdown freedoms that our government now apparently ‘allows’. I remind myself that this is an odd form of words for a free country, and that my freedom to go out for a walk, see friends, go out for a meal / drink etc. exists on a much more fundamental level, at least in my mind, than simply because the government of the day allows it.
I said at the start of all this, and will continue to say, that attitudes to all this stuff varies mainly on historical and cultural factors. In some countries there is recent memory of authoritarian rule (most of Europe in living memory) and in other (particularly in Asia) populations are familiar with what you might describe as a ‘government crackdown’. To some populations, freedom and representative democracy forever are not necessarily a certainty – authoritarianism is ‘one of the options’.
eurogaguest1980 wrote:
You are right – I pasted the graph for USA deaths, Florida is of course much less – my bad, not the NYTimes.
Got it, thanks.
Obviously Florida has had less ‘measures’ in place (i.e. none) for many months than some other other states.
So the latest research shows that the unvaccinated and vaccinated have exactly the same viral load on initial infection. This is in the days when the are most likely to pass it on. So Vaccination does not stop the spread from the infected, so hardly much need for the total over reaction of Governments, especially cross border travel and lockdowns that statistically don’t work.
The latest research shows that in a household situation if a family member has Covid and you are Vaccinated you have a 25% chance of catching it. If you are unvaccinated you have a 38% chance of catching it. The vaccine doesn’t work as well as many on this forum suggest. I agree the vaccine works BTW and I am double jabbed.
The Vaccine wanes after 3 months. Much quicker than previously predicted
The latest Zoe data for symptoms are
Things like fever are now 8th on the list, the classic symptoms of loss of taste are way down the list. Virtually nobody is getting seriously ill.
So this has mutated to a bad cold. An Italian study showed that those who were hit hard had at least five comorbidities.
So we have shut the economy down, wrecked people’s businesses, caused huge damage to those with Cancer and serious disease, created societal division through the use of vaccine passports purely as 24 hour news/ Newspapers and the BBC have catastrophised this issue beyond belief to scare people. The real costs will be seen in the next few years. Controversial but that’s what I believe.
Peter wrote:
The problem is that you can’t reverse this “sinking into stupidity” of the human race. It means the world in which our kids grow up will be different to what we know today. But crucially it means that smart people will do very well – in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King. So if your kids are smart, they will end up running the world.
If they have a world they can grow up in. Several massive wars were started the way things are going right now.
Peter wrote:
The IQ curve tells us that most people are truly stupid, and always have been. What is changing is the visibility of it. 50 years ago, stupid people were doing jobs which stupid people have always done, and went down the pub afterwards. Today, these people are found in the facebook/twatter echo chamber and can pick up a lot of visibility.
And exactly this makes all the difference. Spreading fake news and conspiracy rubbish has never been easier and so effective. Social media are a plague attacking intelligence at least as bad as Covid goes for the lungs and other organs.
Silvaire wrote:
People in general are not actually stupid, particularly those who don’t work in government. The problem is that by being isolated from reality they are losing the ability to make good decisions based on experience. The solution is not to isolate them still more from reality and from the consequences of their decisions. That is a no win ‘death spiral’ direction.
The question is what can be done to improve this. You may be right with the death spiral: The more people fall into the fake news and CT trap, the more will radicalize and not believe anything anymore. Even now it is obvious that people who see the same thing draw diametrically opposite conclusions. The radicalisation is getting worse and worse and I honestly fear that if things continue like this, violence is not far beyond. Then what? Some will applaud, some will see themselves proven right.
Archer-181 wrote:
So Vaccination does not stop the spread from the infected
When I said that a few months ago I was almost lynched for it.
Archer-181 wrote:
so hardly much need for the total over reaction of Governments, especially cross border travel and lockdowns that statistically don’t work.
Wrong. They do. The third wave in Europe was almost exclusively caused by travel. So will the 5th be. All of them coincided with end of the summer vaccation where people threw caution in the wind and travelled into hotspots. I am guilty of this myself, even though so far I did not get it, but I did put myself at risk massively by caving in to family pressure for travelling.
Archer-181 wrote:
The Vaccine wanes after 3 months. Much quicker than previously predicted
Not for serious illness and death.
Archer-181 wrote:
So this has mutated to a bad cold.
For vaccinated people it has. For non-vaccinated, it is as deadly as ever.
Archer-181 wrote:
So we have shut the economy down, wrecked people’s businesses, caused huge damage to those with Cancer and serious disease, created societal division through the use of vaccine passports purely as 24 hour news/ Newspapers and the BBC have catastrophised this issue beyond belief to scare people.
The main mistake was to go half measure and to release measures too early. Not to make them. If nothing had been done, the human toll of this would have been MUCH worse than it has been. Mind, that train has not left the station: It can still come that way if more reach your conclusions. Unfortunately many do.
Right now I am confronted on a daily basis with sick people out of my immediate vicinity, almost all of them unvaccinated. Some will die, some will never be back to their former self, some will lay on the state for handicapped pay for ever.
The longer I look at it, my gut feeling is that the worst is yet to come.
Right now I am confronted on a daily basis with sick people out of my immediate vicinity, almost all of them unvaccinated. Some will die, some will never be back to their former self, some will lay on the state for handicapped pay for ever.
Let them die… You can’t fix stupidity even in just 1 person, and fixing the whole world is even harder – even over a beer 
Some can’t be vacced for genuine medical reasons but the numbers are miniscule.
Peter wrote:
Let them die…
Easier said then done. Despite the fact that I despise their stupidity and ignorance, some are close friends of 30 years and more. Others are relatives.
Peter wrote:
You can’t fix stupidity even in just 1 person, and fixing the whole world is even harder – even over a beer
It is very hard to see people you like(ed), respect(ed) or even love split away from you in such a way. I am telling myself, I should be cynical and hard to them and just let them go to hell…. but there is a human side in me which won’t let me do that.
Peter wrote:
Some can’t be vacced for genuine medical reasons but the numbers are miniscule.
We lost one of those at age 29. Because his family including his parents snubbed the vaccination. All of them are critically ill now.
The situation in Romania. From what I hear, Bulgaria is the same. And most of the Balkans may well follow.
Silvaire wrote:
And about the US media, which has largely become a propaganda arm of an increasingly ignorant and naive Federal government.
I don’t think that’s a recent development.
Many years ago, just before the start of the Iraq war, I was travelling to the USA to visit a friend.
I was watching TV news at a departure lounge in London while I waited on a connection. A speech by Jacque Chirac, the then French president, was being reported on. President Bush was trying to get the French to be part of a collision to invade Iraq. Jacque Chirac’s speech was very nuanced. He made it obvious that he was willing to join the coalition, but that he wanted things done ‘by the book’. He said that first the coalition must go the UN and get a mandate for the military interaction. Then they must create a formal plan both for the war and what follows. Then France would be a willing partner. It never quite said it, but it was obvious from the phraseology that France was a willing player in the conflict, but that it must go through the proper channels first.
About 12 hours later I was waiting in Denver waiting on my last connection again watching the TV news. The headlines on the news there was…and I quote it verbatim “France stands shoulder to shoulder with Saddam Hussein”.
I quickly realised how little truth mattered to American TV news. Sadly I think that type of journalism has increasingly moved around the world.
