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theculturedmarxist · 1 year ago

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The Great Barrington Declaration was an open letter published in October 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns.[1][2] It claimed harmful COVID-19 lockdowns could be avoided via the fringe notion of "focused protection", by which those most at risk could purportedly be kept safe while society otherwise took no steps to prevent infection.[3][4][5] The envisaged result was herd immunity within three months, as SARS-CoV-2 swept through the population.[1][2][4]

Signed by Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, it was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), a conservative think tank, and drafted in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, signed there on 4 October 2020, and published on 5 October.[2][6] At the time, COVID-19 vaccines were considered to be months away from general availability.[4] The document presumed that the disease burden of mass infection could be tolerated, that any infection would confer long term sterilizing immunity, and it made no mention of physical distancing, masks, contact tracing,[7] or long COVID, which has left patients with debilitating symptoms months after the initial infection.[8][9]

The World Health Organization (WHO) and numerous academic and public-health bodies have stated that the strategy is dangerous and lacks a sound scientific basis.[10][11] They say that it would be challenging to shield all those who are medically vulnerable, leading to a large number of avoidable deaths among both older people and younger people with pre-existing health conditions.[12][13] As of October 2020, they warn that the long-term effects of COVID-19 are still not fully understood.[11][14] Moreover, the WHO said that the herd immunity component of the proposed strategy is undermined by the unknown duration of post-infection immunity.[11][14] They say that the more likely outcome would be recurrent epidemics, as was the case with numerous infectious diseases before the advent of vaccination.[13] The American Public Health Association and 13 other public-health groups in the United States warned in a joint open letter that the "Great Barrington Declaration is not grounded in science and is dangerous".[10] The Great Barrington Declaration received support from some scientists, the Donald Trump administration, British Conservative politicians, and from The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.

The Great Barrington Declaration was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian free-market think tank associated with climate change denial.[15][16][17]

Something about the fact Covid is being talked about like a common cold now is horrifying to me.

"Oh yeah I got covid again, gonna be resting for a week or so"

"Coworkers came in sick again, now I've got covid. Oh well, whatcha gonna do"

Its normal now. The new strains, the repeated catching, the fact its no longer a pandemic and is now a part of our daily lives.

A deadly disease that can and does permanently disable people who catch it is being treated like an inconvenient stomach bug.

And it was avoidable.

People are dying and being disabled in fucking droves and all anyone can say is "whelp, that's how it goes!" As if there wasn't/aren't vaccines, as if there wasn't/aren't methods that can help (masking, social distancing, etc), as if other places who took it more seriously didn't have better survival rates.

This outcome wasn't a guarantee. Selfish, ableist, racist, conspiracy loving ass-hats made sure it happened.

Looking at the numbers and then talking to people who didn't want to mildly inconvenience themselves to save lives is horrific.

Millions died.

Millions more will follow.

Thousands were disabled by it.

Thousands will follow.

And it. Was all. AVOIDABLE.

#covid 19 #great barrington declaration

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beardedmrbean · 3 months ago

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Few in the media seemed eager to attend a ceremony last week in Washington, D.C., where the prestigious American Academy of Sciences and Letters was awarding its top intellectual freedom award.

The problem may have been the recipient: Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

Bhattacharya has spent years being vilified by the media over his dissenting views on the pandemic. As one of the signatories of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, he was canceled, censored, and even received death threats.

That open letter called on government officials and public health authorities to rethink the mandatory lockdowns and other extreme measures in light of past pandemics.

All the signatories became targets of an orthodoxy enforced by an alliance of political, corporate, media, and academic groups. Most were blocked on social media despite being accomplished scientists with expertise in this area.

It did not matter that positions once denounced as “conspiracy theories” have been recognized or embraced by many.

Some argued that there was no need to shut down schools, which has led to a crisis in mental illness among the young and the loss of critical years of education. Other nations heeded such advice with more limited shutdowns (including keeping schools open) and did not experience our losses.

Others argued that the virus’s origin was likely the Chinese research lab in Wuhan. That position was denounced by the Washington Post as a “debunked” coronavirus “conspiracy theory.” The New York Times Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli called any mention of the lab theory “racist.”

Federal agencies now support the lab theory as the most likely based on the scientific evidence.

The Biden administration tried to censor this Stanford doctor, but he won in court

Likewise, many questioned the efficacy of those blue surgical masks and supported natural immunity to the virus — both positions were later recognized by the government.

Others questioned the six-foot rule used to shut down many businesses as unsupported by science. In congressional testimony, Dr. Anthony Fauci recently admitted that the 6-foot rule “sort of just appeared” and “wasn’t based on data.” Yet not only did the rule result in heavily enforced rules (and meltdowns) in public areas, the media further ostracized dissenting critics.

Again, Fauci and other scientists did little to stand up for these scientists or call for free speech to be protected. As I discuss in my new book, “The Indispensable Right,” the result is that we never really had a national debate on many of these issues and the result of massive social and economic costs.

I spoke at the University of Chicago with Bhattacharya and other dissenting scientists in the front row a couple of years ago. After the event, I asked them how many had been welcomed back to their faculties or associations since the recognition of some of their positions.

They all said that they were still treated as pariahs for challenging the groupthink culture.

Now the scientific community is recognizing the courage shown by Bhattacharya and others with its annual Robert J. Zimmer Medal for Intellectual Freedom.

So what about all of those in government, academia, and the media who spent years hounding these scientists?

Universities shred their ethics to aid Biden’s social-media censorship

Biden Administration officials and Democratic members targeted Bhattacharya and demanded his censorship. For example, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) attacked Bhattacharya and others who challenged the official narrative during the pandemic. Krishnamoorthi expressed outrage that the scientists were even allowed to testify as “a purveyor of COVID-19 misinformation.”

Journalists and columnists also supported the censorship and blacklisting of these scientists. In the Los Angeles Times, columnist Michael Hiltzik decried how “we’re living in an upside-down world” because Stanford allowed these scientists to speak at a scientific forum. He was outraged that, while “Bhattacharya’s name doesn’t appear in the event announcement,” he was an event organizer. Hiltzik also wrote a column titled “The COVID lab leak claim isn’t just an attack on science, but a threat to public health.”

Then there are those lionized censors at Twitter who shadow-banned Bhattacharya. As former CEO Parag Agrawal generally explained, the “focus [was] less on thinking about free speech … [but[ who can be heard.”

None of this means that Bhattacharya or others were right in all of their views. Instead, many of the most influential voices in the media, government, and academia worked to prevent this discussion from occurring when it was most needed.

There is still a debate over Bhattacharya’s “herd immunity” theories, but there is little debate over the herd mentality used to cancel him.

The Academy was right to honor Bhattacharya. It is equally right to condemn all those who sought to silence a scientist who is now being praised for resisting their campaign to silence him and others.

#nunyas news

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covid-safer-hotties · 3 months ago

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Also preseved in our archive (Daily updates!)

By Benjamin Mateus

Stanford University held a conference last month with the misleading title, “Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past.” Given the utter bankruptcy of the US and global policy in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, one would conclude that a discussion on how the world can address the current and future pandemics is of immense importance and has significant relevance to international public health policies.

However, the one-day conference held at the prestigious university was funded through Collateral Global and supported by Brownstone Institute, promoters of pandemic misinformation and COVID-19 contrarians. It was the opposite of a serious discussion on pandemic preparedness.

To place these organizations into a proper perspective, it bears noting that Robert Dingwall, a British sociologist who has been heavily promoted by Collateral Global, wrote on his blog in March 2020 that the elderly would be better off to die from COVID-19 than to be protected and later die from a degenerative disease like dementia. This was a thinly disguised version of fascistic eugenics—weeding out the “unfit” from society.

The Stanford symposium showcased a panel of discredited scientists and supposed policy health experts associated with the reactionary Great Barrington Declaration, better characterized as a manifesto of death, set on promoting the notion that no broad-based public health initiatives should have ever been undertaken during the COVID-19 pandemic or when the next pandemic strikes.

At the core of the debunked “declaration” is the claim that there can be “focused protection” against the pandemic for those at high risk, which would allow those at minimal risk of death to lead normal lives while building up immunity to the virus through natural immunity.

Well-respected global health advocate Peter Hotez said of the conference, “This is awful, a full-on anti-science agenda (and revisionist history), tone deaf to how this kind of rhetoric contributed to the deaths of thousands of Americans during the pandemic by convincing them to shun vaccines or minimize COVID.”

These include discredited figures like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford public policy professor; Dr. Scott Atlas, former Trump administration adviser on the Coronavirus Task Force; and Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s former state epidemiologist, who advocated for a policy of mass infection to achieve “herd immunity” that had horrendous consequences on the population, in particular, the elderly and most frail. Tegnell’s most consequential remark during the conference gave the flavor of the event: “We have focused so much on mortality as a measure of outcome, but there are more important things.”

Included on the panel were Marty Makary, prominent Johns Hopkins University surgeon, who had repeatedly predicted that the population was on the verge of achieving natural immunity and the pandemic would thus come to an end. Also there was Oxford Professor of Epidemiology Sunetra Gupta, one of the original signers of the declaration with Bhattacharya, and Harvard University biostatistician Martin Kuldorff.

Graph compares COVID deaths in the US, Sweden and Norway (which adopted a far more rigorous pandemic mitigation program). [Photo: Our World in Data] Gupta has called for mass infection of the young and declared during the conference that her idea of focused protection had evolved into what she termed “individual risk reduction,” where each person would decide for him or herself the level of protection and mitigation they wanted to assume during a deadly outbreak. This is the literal opposite of public health, treating infection with a highly contagious and potentially lethal disease as a purely individual matter.

That institutions like Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Stanford are at the forefront of promoting such anti-science and anti-public health initiatives speaks to the deep political and moral decline in academic circles. Similarly, these “elite” institutions have embraced censorship and attacks on democratic rights of students protesting the US backing of Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza.

Closing remarks at the Stanford conference were given by John Ioannidis, professor of epidemiology and one of the principal investigators of the fallacious, non-peer-reviewed Santa Clara County study, released in April 2020, which suggested that COVID-19 was no deadlier than the flu and that the pandemic measures to protect populations needed to be lifted forthwith.

At the time of that study, the COVID-19 pandemic was inundating the healthcare system of New York City. The CDC had noted that close to 20,000 people had died in the three-month window (March through May) with an overall crude fatality rate of 9.2 percent. Also, 30 percent of hospitalized patients with laboratory confirmed COVID-19 were known to have died.

Bhattacharya, who had locked arms with AFT President Randi Weingarten in forcing students and teachers back into schools in 2021 and served as a pandemic adviser to Florida’s fascistic Governor Ron DeSantis, attempted to sell the conference as a forum for people with opposing views coming together to air out their differences.

“What can we do in the future? The pandemic was by any measure a disaster,” he declared. Although he cited the correct number of deaths and economic turmoil caused by the pandemic affecting the poorest in the world, he blamed these losses, not on the failure to carry out systematic public health measures but on the measures themselves. It was a translation into academic jargon of the notorious declaration by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that “the cure can’t be worse than the disease.”

Bhattacharya had the audacity to assert, “this conference was four years too late, but this is not too late, this is not the last pandemic the world will face.” The purpose of his efforts to codify the perspectives put forth by the Great Barrington Declaration is to ensure no real effort is taken by any government to address any threat, including the current bird flu outbreak that threatens to ignite another pandemic.

His ideas have nothing to do with the field of epidemiology or any scientific comprehension of the nature of pandemics. If he has a bone to pick with the Biden administration and its response to the pandemic is that Biden and Harris did not adopt the mass infection policy officially from the beginning, but only implemented it piecemeal.

Additionally, Bhattacharya has positioned himself as a fellow traveler with the anti-vaxxers promoting the false notion that the current mRNA vaccines are unsafe and the process through which they were brought forward violated safety measures which is patently false.

He wrote for the Brownstone Institute a report published on November 16, 2022, stating, “The Biden plan enshrines former president Donald Trump‘s Operation Warp Speed as the model response to the next century of pandemics. Left unsaid is that, for the new pandemic plan to work as envisioned, it will require us to conduct dangerous gain-of-function research. It will also require cutting corners in the evaluation of the safety and efficacy of novel vaccines. And while the studies are underway, politicians will face tremendous pressure to impose draconian lockdowns to keep the population ‘safe’.”

Scott Atlas blurted out the real purpose of the conference. Reading a prepared statement, he said that the lockdowns failed to stop the dying, and they failed to stop the spread. He blamed the economic lockdowns for the excess deaths rather than the virus. He blamed Dr. Anthony Fauci for implementing the lockdowns and not enforcing “targeted protection.”

Atlas later also called for complete US divestment from the World Health Organization and called for the termination of all middle-level scientists at the CDC, for which he received applause from his colleagues on the panel.

The Stanford conference was entirely divorced from the actual history of the pandemic, particularly its early weeks. The initial outbreak of COVID in Wuhan showed it was propagated by airborne transmission and was both highly contagious and lethal.

When, on January 30, 2020, the WHO declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, Europe, the US, and other countries chose not to act. They could have rapidly eliminated and eradicated the virus but did nothing until the virus had spread globally and began its deadly rampage.

It was in early March, six weeks later, with the horrific scenes emerging out of Italy that prompted the working class to demand a shutdown. Auto workers took the lead in many countries, including the United States and Canada, and it was only out of fear of a mass rebellion among workers internationally that the ruling elites were forced to respond with limited lockdowns to stem the tide of infections.

The Great Barrington Declaration, the right-wing campaigns against mask and vaccine mandates and last month’s conference at Stanford were essentially rooted in fear of the independent initiative of workers insisting on serious in public health measures. The populist demagogy about allowing people the “freedom” to work in the midst of a deadly pandemic cannot disguise what is a fundamentally anti-working class perspective.

The maliciously false point being driven home by the organizers of the conference was that social interventions—masking, closure of schools and businesses, lockdowns, and maintaining social distancing—were worse than the disease, despite studies that have shown when such policies were actually implemented, they saved many, many lives.

As one 2023 study published in The Lancet found, in the period from January 1, 2020, to July 31, 2022, Hawaii, with stricter anti-COVID measures, saw 147 deaths per 100,000 compared to 581 per 100,000 in Arizona and 526 per 100,000 in Washington D.C. The national rate was 372 deaths per 100,000.

Similar conclusions were reached in a more recent comprehensive study that evaluated state by state in the US comparing restrictions in place and impact on excess deaths. As the authors of that study noted, “COVID-19 restrictions were associated with substantial reductions in excess pandemic deaths in the US. If all states had weak restrictions, as defined in the Methods section, estimated excess deaths from July 2020 to June 2022 would have been 25 percent to 48 percent higher than if all had imposed strong restrictions. Behavioral responses provided a potentially important mechanism for this, being associated with 49 percent 78 percent of the overall difference.” This last part of the statement underscores the importance of open channels of communications and an all-in approach to such matters. Public health is first and foremost a social concern.

And still another study published in January 2022 found that the impact of the limited measures employed saved between 870,000 to 1.7 million Americans.

The most insidious issue that the COVID-19 contrarians fail to mention is that herd immunity is not achievable with a virus like SARS-CoV-2, which mutates so rapidly, and the issues raised by Long COVID and reinfections with the concomitant long-term health impacts that will debilitate the population are not even considered. Current estimates place the number of those suffering from Long COVID across the globe at over 410 million as of the end of 2023.

The response to pandemics requires a social investment in public health on an international scale. The global nature of the economy poses that a national approach as was seen in China and its Zero COVID policy cannot withstand an anti-public health policy that is imposed on the global population. This raises the need for a socialist perspective not only to the global economy but to the global health of the working class.

#mask up #covid #pandemic #public health #wear a mask #covid 19 #wear a respirator #still coviding #coronavirus #sars cov 2

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mariacallous · 5 days ago

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President Donald Trump’s nominees to lead the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary, are among the editorial board members of a newly launched scientific journal that includes a group of scientists who promoted herd immunity for Covid-19, criticized pandemic-era public health measures, and downplayed the virus.

Some experts are worried that the journal, which has links to the right-wing news site RealClearPolitics, could become a scientific mouthpiece for the Trump administration and a platform that these experts allege could publish dubious research. Dubbed the Journal of the Academy of Public Health, it was cofounded by Bhattacharya, a health economist at Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff, formerly a professor of medicine at Harvard University and biostatistician at Mass General Brigham. The journal is associated with the newly formed Academy of Public Health.

“This seems like more of a club newsletter than a scientific journal,” says Gigi Gronvall, an immunologist and professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Bhattacharya and Kulldorff were two of the three authors of the “Great Barrington Declaration,” a manifesto published in October 2020—months before a Covid-19 vaccine was widely available in the United States—in response to the Covid pandemic that called for an end to lockdowns and school closures in favor of pursuing a policy they called “focused protection.” It advocated for herd immunity by allowing those at minimal risk to immediately resume life as normal. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff also publicly objected to Covid vaccine mandates, a position Kulldorff claims led to his dismissal from Harvard and Mass General in 2024.

On its website, the Academy of Public Health says it is “an international association of public health scholars, researchers, and practicing professionals in the field of public health and its many specialties.” The Academy and its associated journal are both funded by the Real Clear Foundation, which also owns RealClearPolitics and awarded Bhattacharya its first annual Samizdat Prize in 2023, an award “for journalists, scholars, and public figures who have resisted censorship and stood for truth,” according to the organization. Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, is among this year’s winners.

In a February 5 press release, the Real Clear Foundation calls the journal “revolutionary,” saying it will publish “cutting-edge, peer-reviewed, and open access research from the world’s leading scholars of epidemiology, vaccinology, global public health, health policy, and related disciplines.” In its bylaws, the Academy of Public Health says only members can publish in the new journal. To join, you must be nominated by a current member.

Articles published so far include a review of a paper examining the association between vaccines and asthma, a critique of Covid vaccine trials, and a study that concluded that masks were not associated with lower Covid case rates. The journal also published an editorial from Kulldorf arguing that in some ways scientific journals “are now hampering rather than enhancing open scientific discourse.”

Carl Bergstrom, a theoretical and evolutionary biologist, believes the journal is part of an ongoing effort to cast doubt around established scientific consensus. “If you can create the illusion that there is not a predominance of opinion that says, vaccines and masks are effective ways of controlling the pandemic, then you can undermine that notion of scientific consensus, you can create uncertainty, and you can push a particular agenda forward,” he says. Peer-reviewed papers, he says, can provide cover to politicians who want to make certain decisions and they can also be used in court.

When reached by phone on Thursday, Kulldorff said Bhattacharya and Makary were approached to be on the editorial board before their nominations by President Trump. “Right now, they are not active members of the board,” he said. (The journal’s website lists Bhattacharya and Makary as “on leave”.) He added that there is “no connection” between the journal and the Trump administration.

Kulldorff told WIRED that the journal will be a venue for open discourse and academic freedom. “I think it’s important that scientists can publish what they think is important science, and then that should be open for discussion, instead of preventing people from publishing,” Kulldorff says.

Kulldorff and Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at UC Irvine who has been a proponent of the lab leak theory of Covid’s origin, are named as the journal’s editors in chief. Scott Atlas, who was tapped by Trump to serve on the White House Coronavirus Task Force in 2020, is also named as an editorial board member. Atlas, a radiologist by training, has made false claims that masks don’t work to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

In January, Noymer wrote an op-ed supporting Bhattacharya’s nomination for NIH administrator. In it, he praised Bhattacharya for his open-mindedness to different points of view. That op-ed was published in RealClearPolitics.

Angela Rasmussen, an American virologist and research scientist at the University of Saskatchewan, says she worries that the journal could be used to prop up and legitimize pseudoscientific and anti-public health views. “I don’t think this is going to give them any credit with real scientists. But the public may not know the difference between the Journal of the Academy of Public Health and the New England Journal of Medicine,” she says.

Taylor Dotson, a professor at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology who studies the intersection of science and politics, says there is a “legitimate concern” that the journal could become a repository for evidence that bolsters arguments favored by people in the administration. If confirmed, Bhattacharya and Makary’s boss could potentially be Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, who is known for promoting a wide range of debunked scientific beliefs, including that there is a link between vaccines and autism and that AIDS is not caused by the HIV virus.

Dotson warns that there is a risk that the existence of journals closely aligned with a certain political view might deepen the politicization of science. “The worst-case scenario is you start having the journals for the people who are kind of populist and anti-establishment and the journals for the people who also read NPR and The New York Times.”

The Journal of Public Health is an open-access journal, which means that the articles are free for anyone to access. It also uses open peer review, where the names and comments of scientists who check articles prior to publication are also published along with the article.

“These are good steps,” says Dotson. “It’s good that it is trying to push against the power of the big scientific publishers.” But the researcher also warns that open-access studies might be more prominent and widely cited in the media just because they are easier to find and not because they are necessarily more scientifically rigorous.

Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, the third author of the “Great Barrington Declaration,” published a controversial paper in March 2020 that argued that half of the UK population may have already been infected with Covid-19. That paper was a preprint that had not been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal but was widely shared in the media and within government, despite proving later to be incorrect. Gupta is also on the editorial board of the Journal of the Academy of Public Health.

But ultimately, Dotson says, the journal should be judged by the science it publishes and the editorial decisions of the people in charge. If they encourage their reviewers to be rigorous and publish a wide range of high-quality papers, these should be seen as positive signs. “We need to wait and see, but there are reasons to be worried in our political environment,” Dotson says.

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3nding · 3 months ago

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Ettore Meccia, fb

Una selezione minima, solo per avere qualche riferimento.

Il 4 ottobre 2020 scrive, assieme a Martn Kulldorf e Sunetra Gupta la Great Barrington Declaration, un documento in cui sostiene che per fronteggiare al meglio l'emergenza da Covid-19 la vita deve andare avanti come se niente fosse meno che per i vulnerabili che dovranno ricevere una focused protection (non riuscendo a definire né chi siano i vulnerabili né cosa sia la focused protection se no portare la spesa a casa agli anziani). In questo modo la popolazione infettandosi raggiungerà in fretta l'immunità di gregge e ci lasceremo la pandemia alle spalle. Quattro anni dopo contiamo milioni di decessi, un virus che continua a circolare e mutare originando ancora nuove varianti infettando e reinfettando la popolazione, è sempre più chiaro il rischio da infezioni cumulative e milioni di persone stanno ancora combattendo con gli esiti del Long Covid.

L'11 gennaio 2021 sostiene in un articolo su The Print che ormai la maggior parte degli Indiani ha raggiunto l'immunità naturale e non è il caso di vaccinarli per Covid-19, anzi potrebbe essere pericoloso. L'11 gennaio è dove c'è la freccia rossa nel grafico qui sotto con l'andamento cumulativo dei casi per milione (dati Our Wold In Data). Due settimane dopo in India emerge la variante Delta con 300.000 morti, più tutti quelli che farà in giro per il mondo.

A maggio 2023 viene presentato come un eroe in un'intervista pubblicata sul sito della Hoover Institution, il Think Tank conservatore e neoliberal che ha sede da sempre nella sua università (Stanford) per essersi opposto alle politiche di prevenzione del governo durante la pandemia. La Hoover Institution non ha nulla a che spartire con scienza e ricerca biomedica ma solo con politica e economia.

La comunità scientifica internazionale si prepara ad accogliere il prossimo direttore del NIH, Jay Bhattacharya. Sperando che H1N5 continui ad infettare solo oche selvatiche polli e mucche e non si faccia venire strane idee.

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didanawisgi · 3 months ago

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darkmaga-returns · 1 month ago

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Over 2/3 of California's 984 dairies already affected

Meryl Nass

Dec 31, 2024

Since the first identification of three infected herds there in late August, California authorities have found the virus in 659 of the state’s 984 dairies — one-quarter of them in the last month alone.

But some experts suspect that the end-of-summer slowdown had more to do with the virus running out of new, immune-naive herds to hop into. In Colorado, for instance, H5N1 went through 74% of the state’s herds before it began to peter out. Payne believes that even with all the measures California farmers are taking, the virus won’t slow down until it has infected 80% to 90% of the state’s herds.

The government can’t afford to cull most of the dairy stock in this country or even just in California (which produces the most milk of any state). The vast majority of cows get over the infection and return to good milk production. Cows are expensive.

I heard via the grapevine that California’s Raw Farm has tested negative on PCR tests for bird flu for a few weeks but has not been allowed to start shipping milk again.

If bird flu does simply transit through the dairy farms, resulting in a nation of immune milk cows, will that put a crimp in federal plans to roll out a bird flu pandemic or a vaccine, or both? Will the federal government follow the advice of the Great Barrington Declaration and traditional public health practice and stop the hype and fear?

Will Trump’s election and Mr. Kennedy have a massive effect on public health policy? I don’t know the answer.

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blindedbythedarkness · 2 years ago

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Man everything just feels so shit. I mean it IS so shit. Life is an utter dystopia and I'd like to say I can't imagine it getting any worse, but I'm sure it'll find a way.

This is just statewide eugenics and mass murder now. It's not even safe to seek healthcare. It's so incredible to me how we got to this point- I honestly half expect people to point out the hidden cameras any moment because surely so many people can't be this stupid?

That's what they are. Stupid. I'm not supposed to say that outloud or on any of the social media where I'm even halfway identifiable. It wouldn't be "nice" or "professional". But these people are stupid, selfish, inhumane, single brain-celled, murderous cunts. And that only goes about halfway to describing them. I never thought I could hold so much sustained hate for so many people, but it just keeps growing. I fantasize about hurting every one of them, to be quite honest- they have no qualms with actually hurting me.

Unlike most mass murdering-type scenarios I've heard about, in this case I can't even fantasize about moving away from it. Where would I go? More or less the whole western world has become like this (thank you Great Barrington Declaration etc etc) and I have no idea how I'd even begin to learn the language in the few good places left.

The only way out of this is through, if I'm lucky enough to survive that long. Time is the only parameter that might offer any kind of relief, since location seems off the table. Small steps are being made, I'm pushing some of them myself (though I can't really talk about them publicly), but its slow progress. It feels like one step forwards, two steps back. Maybe there'll be a better vaccine? Maybe places will properly clean the air? Maybe enough people will realise they hate getting sick enough to wear a mask? Maybe a whole new pandemic will arise and it'll be so bad that the protections from that will wipe out SARS2 in the process? Either way, more people are gonna die and worse in the meantime.

I really am so deep in depression now. It's not even depression, it's survival mode. It's just constant stress from constant threats to my existence, sometimes even without stepping out the front door. It feels like PTSD waiting to happen, only I wish it would happen because then at least we'd be "Post". I just feel totally numb and lonely and just in total despair. The pain and lumb in my chest never goes away. I'd say I don't know how much longer I can go on like this, but what choice do I have?

I'm so ready for this to be over. Properly, really, truly over. I'll never forget what people did and likely never forgive. But to be able to live a life feeling actually truly safe would be a dream. I long to be able to have the emotional capacity again to actually just feel happy.

I saw a post on here not long ago that said something like "'this too shall pass' but I really wish it'd pass a bit quicker". That is entirely the mood right now.

#mental health #grief #chronic illness #trauma #covid #pandemic #ptsd #long covid #chronic pain #grieving #mourning #loss #wear a mask #covid isnt over #covid is airborne #covid19 #plague island #endurance

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thoughtlessarse · 23 days ago

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“Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine on a grand scale.”—Dr. Rudolph Virchow, known as “the father of modern pathology” and the central figure in the emergence of public health in Germany. “I see the disinfectant which knocks it out in a minute … is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside for almost a cleaning? … Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light … supposing it brought the light inside the body, which you can either do through the skin or some other way.” —Donald Trump, April 2020 *** Five years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in January 2020, Donald Trump will return to the White House on Monday. More so than any other figure, Trump is identified with the disastrous official response to the pandemic, initiating a war on science and public health epitomized in the murderous “herd immunity” strategy of deliberate mass infection and death. Over the course of 2020, Trump set into motion a basic pattern of lies, denial and anti-science disinformation. In his return to power, Trump II will likely be accompanied by the notorious purveyor of pseudoscience and anti-vaccine disinformation, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., slated to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health, recently compared Kennedy heading the HHS to “putting a flat earther in charge of NASA.” A letter to the US Senate signed by more than 15,000 physicians warned: The health and well-being of 336 million Americans depend on leadership at HHS that prioritizes science, evidence-based medicine, and strengthening the integrity of our public health system. RFK Jr. is not only unqualified to lead this essential agency—he is actively dangerous. On Friday, the New York Times reported that Kennedy filed a petition with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to revoke its authorization of all anti-COVID-19 vaccines in May 2021, as thousands of Americans were still dying from the disease each week. Trump’s other public health appointees—Great Barrington Declaration co-author Jay Bhattacharya to head the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Mehmet Oz to head the Department of Medicare and Medicaid, anti-abortion fanatic Dave Weldon to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Fox News television doctor Janette Nesheiwat as Surgeon General, and Marty Makary to head the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—amount to a rogue’s gallery of some of the leading anti-science advocates throughout the pandemic. They have all denigrated or cast doubt on the COVID-19 vaccines and vociferously opposed virtually every public health measure that saved lives. Their aim is to put the final nail in the coffin of public health in the US, which will have vast global ramifications. Under the banner “Make America Healthy Again,” Trump, Kennedy and this gang of quacks will do everything in their power to facilitate the spread of disease, including previously eliminated pathogens like measles and new existential threats like H5N1 “bird flu.” Biden, having won the 2020 election in large part due to his pledges to “follow the science,” steadily eviscerated every limited public health measure in place during his tenure in office. Over the past four years, Biden and the Democratic Party have implemented a bipartisan “forever COVID” policy of perpetual mass infection, debilitation and death, in the process overseeing the excess deaths of nearly 1 million Americans.

#us #ongoing covid19 pandemic #trump health picks #kooks and quacks #us pol

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keep-both-eyes-on-trump · 2 months ago

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Trump Watch #10

More nominations by Trump:

Massad Boulos as senior advisor on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs.

Boulos is a Lebanese American billionaire businessman and father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Tiffany.

His appeal centers on his ability to engage with different factions within Lebanese politics including Hezbollah and Lebanese Forces Party.

Chad Chronister to lead the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Chronister is a sheriff from Hillsborough County, Florida. He has a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and a masters’ in criminology.

Florida Attorney General, Ashley Moody, has praised his work on the opioid crisis.

He arrested a pastor for holding church services while under stay-at-home orders in March 2020 and is facing MAGA backlash for it.

Kash Patel to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Patel is a former public defender who spent several years as a Justice Department prosecutor before serving as a staffer for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence where he ran the committee’s investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 campaign.

He has embraced Trump’s rhetoric about a “deep state,” called for a “comprehensive housecleaning” of government workers who are disloyal to Trump, and referred to journalists as traitors.

Charles Kushner to serve as US ambassador to France.

Kushner is a real estate billionaire and father-in-law to Ivanka Trump.

He was pardoned by Trump in December of 2020 after serving two years in prison for tax evasion and retaliating against a federal witness. Chris Christie, a US attorney, called it “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes” he prosecuted.

John Phelan as secretary of the navy.

Phelan is the founder and chair of Rugger Management LLC, a private investment firm in Florida, and donor to the Trump campaign.

He has no military experience, and would be the first permanent Navy secretary without military experience since 2009.

He serves in an advisory position for Spirit of America, a non-profit that supports the defense of Ukraine and Taiwan.

Keith Kellogg as Special Envoy to Ukraine and Russia.

Kellogg is a decorated three-star general who is a staunch supporter of an “America First” national security agenda.

He has been Trump’s top advisor on defense issues and served as chief of staff on Trump’s National Security Council during Trump’s first term.

He is co-chairman of the American First Policy Institute’s Center for American Security and wrote chapters in the group's policy book which lays out a Trump national security agenda.

He has shown support for Ukraine, but states it is in the best interest for Ukraine and America to seek a ceasefire and negotiate a peace agreement with Russia.

Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health.

Bhattacharya is a physician and Stanford University health researcher who criticized pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

He was one of three authors of the The Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter released in October 2020 that challenged lockdowns and mask mandates and called for speeding herd immunity by allowing low-risk individuals to get infected with COVID-19.

He faced restrictions on social media platforms because of his views and was a plaintiff in Murthy v. Missouri, a supreme court case that contended federal officials improperly suppressed conservative views in their efforts to combat misinformation.

Jim O’Neill as deputy secretary of HHS.

O’Neill previously served in HHS under George W. Bush, and he was considered by Trump to head the FDA in 2016.

He has expressed disdain for federal regulation and called for the FDA to only consider safety of a drug to approve it for use rather than safety and efficacy.

Brendan Carr to lead the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Carr would be elevated from commissioner to chair of the FCC; he will not require Senate confirmation.

He has stated “combating tech censorship is going to be one of the top priorities” for him in order to “restore Americans’ right to free speech.”

He penned Project 2025’s chapter on the FCC calling for restricted immunity offered by Section 230 for tech giants and tamping down on businesses’ ability to censor protected speech. He also wants tech companies to be more transparent about algorithm changes and decisions to block or demonetize users.

Like Trump, Carr has taken aim at broadcast media and indicated he will take Trump’s complaints about various news outlets like CBS, NBC, and ABC seriously.

Howard Lutnick for commerce secretary.

Lutnick is a billionaire investor and Wall Street CEO.

He will be responsible for enforcing the tariffs Trump campaigned on, for which he has expressed support. He has also expressed support for tax cuts and cryptocurrency where, like Trump, he has business interests.

#democrat #democratic party #republican #republican party #donald trump #us politics #trump #politics #trump 2024 #democracy #liberals #conservatives

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