Political Roundtable Part XXX

[Dat2U]

I must be dumb because I've become republican. I'm disgusted by most of them but at least they aren't trying to mandate a leaky vax. The last year of hearing dems demanding my freedoms be taken away if I dont get vaxxed has left me completely disillusioned with democrats in general.

[FAH1223]

I must be dumb because I've become republican. I'm disgusted by most of them but at least they aren't trying to mandate a leaky vax. The last year of hearing dems demanding my freedoms be taken away if I dont get vaxxed has left me completely disillusioned with democrats in general.

Pick your poison..

If the Republicans kept the White House, I don't think we have nearly as many people vaccinated and the economy wouldn't have benefitted from the American Rescue Plan.

I have a lot of problems with the Dems governance this past year. They thought rolling out the vaccines would end the pandemic cause the vaccines were effective at getting the case numbers for the wild type strains down. They failed to account for variants which is inexcusable.

The vaccine mandate came cause of the reality of the Delta wave. Biden really had no other choice. It is either vaccine mandate or letting cancer patients and heart attack patients die so COVID patients (vast vast vast majority not vaxxed) can keep taking all the ICU beds.

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[RoyceDa59]

Biden needs to push through build back better before they lose the house and senate this year.

[FAH1223]

Biden needs to push through build back better before they lose the house and senate this year.

Not happening. Manchin won't let it pass.

[Wizardspride]

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[Dat2U]

I must be dumb because I've become republican. I'm disgusted by most of them but at least they aren't trying to mandate a leaky vax. The last year of hearing dems demanding my freedoms be taken away if I dont get vaxxed has left me completely disillusioned with democrats in general.

Pick your poison..

If the Republicans kept the White House, I don't think we have nearly as many people vaccinated and the economy wouldn't have benefitted from the American Rescue Plan.

I have a lot of problems with the Dems governance this past year. They thought rolling out the vaccines would end the pandemic cause the vaccines were effective at getting the case numbers for the wild type strains down. They failed to account for variants which is inexcusable.

The vaccine mandate came cause of the reality of the Delta wave. Biden really had no other choice. It is either vaccine mandate or letting cancer patients and heart attack patients die so COVID patients (vast vast vast majority not vaxxed) can keep taking all the ICU beds.

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I've realized that either political side is the wrong side at the time they are in office. But for now I pick freedom and the liberty to make my own choices. I know a mandated vax card eventually becomes the cheap chip implant later. It feels like we are speeding racing towards a worldwide dictator state faster than the conspiracy theorists could had ever envisioned. All in the name of a disease where unless you have co-morbidities, your probably going to be okay. If you told someone from 2.5 years ago that we'd suddenly become so trust worthy of the very pharmaceutical companies that had universally **** reputations, were litigated consitently and paid billions in lawsuits for bad products they produced that made people ill. Now we got folks calling themselves #modernamami & #pfizergirl ? Wild times. Media, polticans did one heckuva job selling fear.

[dobrojim]

IDK Dat

authoritarianism

+ Violence (~30% of pubs think violence is the answer to 'saving our country' from people who don't look like them)
___________________
= Fascism AKA as GOP2022

I guess I don't get the whole freedom thing you describe re vax

(vaccines save lives and are the greatest
tech advancement in the history of mankind's human health)

Why is covid (vax) different than prior mandated vaccines?
Seatbelts?

all that said, I'm frustrated with dems like a lot of other people but
when I think of all the major legislative advancements in my lifetime, (since ~1960)
the GOP has been opposed to all of them and in favor of none of them.

The GOP of 2022/tRump in power is a rampant kleptocracy waiting to happen.

[Zonkerbl]

TGW has secretly been a Republican all along???!?!1!

I'm shocked. Shocked!

[edit: oh, whoops confused Dat2u w TGW somehow, sorry!]

[Ruzious]

I must be dumb because I've become republican. I'm disgusted by most of them but at least they aren't trying to mandate a leaky vax. The last year of hearing dems demanding my freedoms be taken away if I dont get vaxxed has left me completely disillusioned with democrats in general.

It's ironic that you say this on MLK Day - we have very different definitions of what the word freedom means.

[doclinkin]

I've realized that either political side is the wrong side at the time they are in office. But for now I pick freedom and the liberty to make my own choices. I know a mandated vax card eventually becomes the cheap chip implant later. It feels like we are speeding racing towards a worldwide dictator state faster than the conspiracy theorists could had ever envisioned. All in the name of a disease where unless you have co-morbidities, your probably going to be okay. If you told someone from 2.5 years ago that we'd suddenly become so trust worthy of the very pharmaceutical companies that had universally **** reputations, were litigated consitently and paid billions in lawsuits for bad products they produced that made people ill. Now we got folks calling themselves #modernamami & #pfizergirl ? Wild times. Media, polticans did one heckuva job selling fear.

Look, I get it. Under Trump I was saying: yes of course the deep state is real. Yes of course the Intelligence community tracks americans. But that he was destructive enough that I was happy the two sides were arrayed against each other, since an intel community that was under control of his narcissistic whimsy would equal death squads. A strange situation to be hoping the Intelligence community would be able to save us from a pandemic of malignant ignorance of which Trump was the primary infection vector.

OF course we have to distrust big pharma, and assume they have profit motive here. Like, hmm, could there be an inherent decay of vaccine effectiveness built in so that people will require yearly boosters?

Still. The question I would have to ask is: should there be a government response to a world wide pandemic. And if so what should it be. Should the government even bother to protect people with co-morbidities or you know **** em, let em die.

Consider that on average 40% of Americans have at least one co-morbid risk factor. In West Virginia statistics suggest up to 60.4% of state residents have one or more risk factors. What should the public policy be if you were governor of West Virginia? If you were director of state Health Department, what course of action would you recommend? Are there any "freedoms" that might be curtailed?

Risk factors are not limited to the usual deadly six (heart disease, cancer, lung disease, stroke, alzheimer's, diabetes, kidney disease) but include obesity, hypertension, asthma, sleep apnea, alcohol use, being elderly, and a long list of stress related illnesses. But whatever man, sucks to be them. If you didn't want to get COVID you shouldn't have been old, man.

851,000 people in the united states have been killed by this disease, directly or as a side effect complicating those risk factors. We can argue about the numbers if you want, up or down by 100K, cool, right it is important to be accurate. Let's explain that importance to the family of a dead truck driver whose job required him to sit on his fat ass all day bringing groceries and toilet paper to your supermarket. Explain it to 700,000 more times. Let's explain it to our overworked health care system. Doctors and nurses are not lying. My brother is an emergency room doc in Milwaukee. They keep getting crushed by waves of people who are struggling to breathe, the number of people crowding hospitals means that some curable illnesses become fatal while people are queued up waiting to be seen. Covid is killing car crash victims.

What is deadliest about COVID is not the direct effect of the disease itself. It is two factors: the R-naught and the fact that it is 'Novel' -- that we don't have any pre-existing immunity to it.

The R-naught is the rate of infectiousness. The basic reproduction number. How many people are likely to catch the virus off of one infected person. Generally speaking a disease can become a pandemic if it has a rate of infection of 1 or more.

The 1918 flu killed 675,000 people in the US. It had a rate of infection of 1.8 (where generally a flu has a rate of 1.3). That uptick of infectiousness helped spread swiftly. 1.8 is equivalent to the Ebola outbreak of 2014. Dangerous but containable. AIDS is 3.5 or thereabouts but mostly because it is incurable and as an infection of the immune system you cannot develop antibodies to battle it. And you can avoid it by not having unprotected and indiscriminate sex.

The R-naught of the initial outbreak of COVID averaged 2.9. About as infectious as Tuberculosis or the common cold. Spread by breathing. That's what scared scientists early, it was looking more virulent than previous coronaviruses. AND we have no antibodies, immunity, treatment. So it is likely to not only spread but morph. This has proven true:

The R-naught of Alpha variant: 4.5
The R-naught of Delta: 5.1
The R-naught of Omicron: 7 Or more infectious than Polio.

You can see where this is trending. Measles and Mumps are more infectious (R naught of 10), as is chickenpox.

There is a reason we require kids to get immunizations against Measles and Mumps. Because one kid infects 10 kids, and so on and so on, very swiftly. (Chickenpox too, but most people will live with the possibility of contracting itchy bumps).

Now here is the thing. We don't know if we can develop long term antibodies from infection. It looks like against Omicron even prior infection may not deter a 2nd case. The common cold morphs all the time, people get re-infected the next time it comes around. But even if we did get reliable long term immune resistance to COVID 19, with a R-0 of 7 we would require 86% of the population to get it before we developed herd immunity.

That's a **** of infections. And a truckload of deaths. So. We can argue about republican or democratic whateverthehell. But politically: what should the official response be to a fast moving infectious disease that has already killed 800,000+ americans?

Even if the vaccines don't prevent infection (early statistics clearly showed they did, though this number has decayed vs omicron) they do prevent hospitalization and death. Should encouraging vaccines be part of the political response? It worked for Measles, Mumps, Polio, etc. If not, then what is your response? People should be allowed to choose to get infected if they want? Die if they want? Crowd hospitals etc and make other preventable deaths more deadly due to ER wait times. lack of hospital beds, etc?

[Dat2U]

I must be dumb because I've become republican. I'm disgusted by most of them but at least they aren't trying to mandate a leaky vax. The last year of hearing dems demanding my freedoms be taken away if I dont get vaxxed has left me completely disillusioned with democrats in general.

It's ironic that you say this on MLK Day - showing no understanding of what freedom actually means.

No understanding? Based on what? Your defintion and it's relevance to you? Sorry bro, your opinion is just that. Just like mines is my own. I make decisions based off my worldview, not anyone elses.

[Ruzious]

I must be dumb because I've become republican. I'm disgusted by most of them but at least they aren't trying to mandate a leaky vax. The last year of hearing dems demanding my freedoms be taken away if I dont get vaxxed has left me completely disillusioned with democrats in general.

It's ironic that you say this on MLK Day - showing no understanding of what freedom actually means.

No understanding? Based on what? Your defintion and it's relevance to you? Sorry bro, your opinion is just that. Just like mines is my own. I make decisions based off my worldview, not anyone elses.

You're absolutely right. I changed my post.

[Pointgod]

I remember when posters when claiming that Glenn Youngkin was no different from Mccauliffe or that he was a normal Republican. I don’t know why you guys keep falling for the lies. Anyone that’s willing to lie about CRT and rail against life saving policies is not normal. Extremism is the new normal in the Republican Party.

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Remember these are executive actions so no way to block these. Congrats guys when your kids start getting sick and COVID outbreaks happen in school at least they won’t be learning about history, btw banning teaching of CRT is authoritarian.

Oh and this is perfectly normal. An AG just firing a whole bunch of people doing critical work.

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More banning history in the name of indoctrination. Also putting bounties on teachers. No one is concerned about dictatorships?

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Anyone whining that both parties are the same is an idiot. I don’t know what’s wrong with Americans that you wait until after **** has gone bad to then make a change instead of preventing it from happening in the first place. Now a Democratic Governor is going to come in have to clean up the mess made by Republicans. This is why the complaining about someone not being Progressive enough or too left needs to stop. The real problem is, has been and will continue to be Republicans. If you want forward Progress the only way is to keep the party in power that’s actually looking to make progress not dismantle everything to establish authoritarian rule.

[Dat2U]

I've realized that either political side is the wrong side at the time they are in office. But for now I pick freedom and the liberty to make my own choices. I know a mandated vax card eventually becomes the cheap chip implant later. It feels like we are speeding racing towards a worldwide dictator state faster than the conspiracy theorists could had ever envisioned. All in the name of a disease where unless you have co-morbidities, your probably going to be okay. If you told someone from 2.5 years ago that we'd suddenly become so trust worthy of the very pharmaceutical companies that had universally **** reputations, were litigated consitently and paid billions in lawsuits for bad products they produced that made people ill. Now we got folks calling themselves #modernamami & #pfizergirl ? Wild times. Media, polticans did one heckuva job selling fear.

Look, I get it. Under Trump I was saying: yes of course the deep state is real. Yes of course the Intelligence community tracks americans. But that he was destructive enough that I was happy the two sides were arrayed against each other, since an intel community that was under control of his narcissistic whimsy would equal death squads. A strange situation to be hoping the Intelligence community would be able to save us from a pandemic of malignant ignorance of which Trump was the primary infection vector.

OF course we have to distrust big pharma, and assume they have profit motive here. Like, hmm, could there be an inherent decay of vaccine effectiveness built in so that people will require yearly boosters?

Still. The question I would have to ask is: should there be a government response to a world wide pandemic. And if so what should it be. Should the government even bother to protect people with co-morbidities or you know **** em, let em die.

Consider that on average 40% of Americans have at least one co-morbid risk factor. In West Virginia statistics suggest up to 60.4% of state residents have one or more risk factors. What should the public policy be if you were governor of West Virginia? If you were director of state Health Department, what course of action would you recommend? Are there any "freedoms" that might be curtailed?

Risk factors are not limited to the usual deadly six (heart disease, cancer, lung disease, stroke, alzheimer's, diabetes, kidney disease) but include obesity, hypertension, asthma, sleep apnea, alcohol use, being elderly, and a long list of stress related illnesses. But whatever man, sucks to be them. If you didn't want to get COVID you shouldn't have been old, man.

851,000 people in the united states have been killed by this disease, directly or as a side effect complicating those risk factors. We can argue about the numbers if you want, up or down by 100K, cool, right it is important to be accurate. Let's explain that importance to the family of a dead truck driver whose job required him to sit on his fat ass all day bringing groceries and toilet paper to your supermarket. Explain it to 700,000 more times. Let's explain it to our overworked health care system. Doctors and nurses are not lying. My brother is an emergency room doc in Milwaukee. They keep getting crushed by waves of people who are struggling to breathe, the number of people crowding hospitals means that some curable illnesses become fatal while people are queued up waiting to be seen. Covid is killing car crash victims.

What is deadliest about COVID is not the direct effect of the disease itself. It is two factors: the R-naught and the fact that it is 'Novel' -- that we don't have any pre-existing immunity to it.

The R-naught is the rate of infectiousness. The basic reproduction number. How many people are likely to catch the virus off of one infected person. Generally speaking a disease can become a pandemic if it has a rate of infection of 1 or more.

The 1918 flu killed 675,000 people in the US. It had a rate of infection of 1.8 (where generally a flu has a rate of 1.3). That uptick of infectiousness helped spread swiftly. 1.8 is equivalent to the Ebola outbreak of 2014. Dangerous but containable. AIDS is 3.5 or thereabouts but mostly because it is incurable and as an infection of the immune system you cannot develop antibodies to battle it. And you can avoid it by not having unprotected and indiscriminate sex.

The R-naught of the initial outbreak of COVID averaged 2.9. About as infectious as Tuberculosis or the common cold. Spread by breathing. That's what scared scientists early, it was looking more virulent than previous coronaviruses. AND we have no antibodies, immunity, treatment. So it is likely to not only spread but morph. This has proven true:

The R-naught of Alpha variant: 4.5
The R-naught of Delta: 5.1
The R-naught of Omicron: 7 Or more infectious than Polio.

You can see where this is trending. Measles and Mumps are more infectious (R naught of 10), as is chickenpox.

There is a reason we require kids to get immunizations against Measles and Mumps. Because one kid infects 10 kids, and so on and so on, very swiftly. (Chickenpox too, but most people will live with the possibility of contracting itchy bumps).

Now here is the thing. We don't know if we can develop long term antibodies from infection. It looks like against Omicron even prior infection may not deter a 2nd case. The common cold morphs all the time, people get re-infected the next time it comes around. But even if we did get reliable long term immune resistance to COVID 19, with a R-0 of 7 we would require 86% of the population to get it before we developed herd immunity.

That's a **** of infections. And a truckload of deaths. So. We can argue about republican or democratic whateverthehell. But politically: what should the official response be to a fast moving infectious disease that has already killed 800,000+ americans?

Even if the vaccines don't prevent infection (early statistics clearly showed they did, though this number has decayed vs omicron) they do prevent hospitalization and death. Should encouraging vaccines be part of the political response? It worked for Measles, Mumps, Polio, etc. If not, then what is your response? People should be allowed to choose to get infected if they want? Die if they want? Crowd hospitals etc and make other preventable deaths more deadly due to ER wait times. lack of hospital beds, etc?

Doc, I'll start by saying there's no easy answer. There's also no answer that would have likely prevented a significant loss of life. I'm also not anti-vaccine. But I'm confident that not enough research has been done with MRNA technology and its impact on the human body. (I won't even get into that trash ass J&J shot). As regular boosters have become a part of regime, i feel even less comfortable with the vax option. There is no long term study showing the impact of continued boosters on our bodies. Its as if were going along with the 'best' choice at the moment with zero consideration to what the long term implications could be... especially since we've learned its a leaky vax. As we should know, not all vaccines are created equal. Some are much better than others. A vaccine that doesn't protect you from infection and whose effectiveness wains after a few months is not an ideal vax and can create more problems than it's worth.

Does the vaccine reduce serious illness? It appears so. Did a flu shot help the flu? Yes. Did we mandate flu shots and fire people from their jobs for not taking a flu shot? No.

Does a healthy diet significantly reduce the chance of illness? Yes. Do we mandate people to eat healthy to reduce the burden of care for doctors, nurses, hospitals and insurance companies? No.

Smoking causes major health issues and kills 8 mil yearly. Yet its legal. There's no campaign to make it illegal and no one really cares if these people die but 5.5 million in nearly 3 years due to covid causes worldwide lockdowns, destroyed businesses and forced mandates throughout the world.

There's never an easy answer for everything but the current response sceams overreach from governments across the world.

[Zonkerbl]

It's ironic everyone is giving up on the Dems because they can't deliver. I mean, I get it. I think our one big chance to save democracy was in 2020 and we fell literally two senators short, and now we're just watching the Titanic sink.

Nevertheless, if the Dems were to hold onto the house in 2020 and pick up two seats in the Senate, then it would actually be possible to make the changes that everyone is giving up on the dems for not being able to do. I think the most important change is to not let Republicans pass laws that let them just pick the slate of electors regardless of their states' votes. I haven't checked up on it but my intuition is that Republicans have mostly backed off.

[edit: yeah - https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/jul/14/are-state-legislators-really-seeking-power-overrul/]

On a related note, heard an incredibly stupid question on Morning Joe this morning - "Do you think all this talk about wokeness is distracting from the need to keep Republicans from burning Democracy down"

Wokeness is why Republicans are burning Democracy down. Republicans do not want black people to stop being the oppressed minority in America, because that is how they fool uneducated white people into voting against their own interests, pitting poor white people against black people.

If you stop working for the constituents that are the ONLY REASON YOU EVER WIN ANY ELECTIONS then the terrorists have won. And, getting back to my original point, Dem apathy towards "wokeness" is kinda the reason why the Republicans are poised to win the house in 2022.

[dckingsfan]

...Does the vaccine reduce serious illness?...

Spoiler:

Don't get vaccinated, just get Covid - The natural immunity I get from being sick with COVID-19 is better than the immunity I may get from COVID-19 vaccination.

COVID-19 vaccines cause variants.

All events reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) are caused by vaccination.

The mRNA vaccine is not considered a vaccine.

COVID-19 vaccines contain microchips.

COVID-19 vaccines can alter my DNA.

A COVID-19 vaccine can make me sick with COVID-19.

The vaccines aren't safe because they were developed quickly.

People with underlying conditions shouldn’t get vaccinated.

People with suppressed immune systems shouldn’t get vaccinated.

If I’m pregnant or breastfeeding, I shouldn’t get vaccinated.

And then there was Ivermectin, Chloroquine, et. al.

All of these arguments are meant to obfuscate that the vaccines reduce serious illness and hospitalization.

Vaccines are responsible for ~1.1 million less US deaths and 10.3 million less hospitalizations.

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2021/dec/us-covid-19-vaccination-program-one-year-how-many-deaths-and

[dckingsfan]

Does a healthy diet significantly reduce the chance of illness? Yes. Do we mandate people to eat healthy to reduce the burden of care for doctors, nurses, hospitals and insurance companies? No.

Count me in if we are going after this - our healthcare system is truly f'd now. We could keep up with those with unhealthy eating habits before - now, not so much. What does that mean? It means that there will be reduced efficacy in treatment for the healthy going forward.

That we haven't addressed this issue is truly mindboggling - I guess it takes a pandemic for folks to actually see how big a problem this is?

[nate33]

I must be dumb because I've become republican. I'm disgusted by most of them but at least they aren't trying to mandate a leaky vax. The last year of hearing dems demanding my freedoms be taken away if I dont get vaxxed has left me completely disillusioned with democrats in general.

Pick your poison..

If the Republicans kept the White House, I don't think we have nearly as many people vaccinated and the economy wouldn't have benefitted from the American Rescue Plan.

I have a lot of problems with the Dems governance this past year. They thought rolling out the vaccines would end the pandemic cause the vaccines were effective at getting the case numbers for the wild type strains down. They failed to account for variants which is inexcusable.

The vaccine mandate came cause of the reality of the Delta wave. Biden really had no other choice. It is either vaccine mandate or letting cancer patients and heart attack patients die so COVID patients (vast vast vast majority not vaxxed) can keep taking all the ICU beds.

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That's a good tweet storm by Stoller.

He's one of the few journalists who seems to hate both Republicans and Democrats. I like that.

[TGW]

Biden needs to push through build back better before they lose the house and senate this year.

Not happening. Manchin won't let it pass.

But Eurodweeb kept saying Manchin and Sinema types were needed in the Democratic Party.

What a pathetic administration.

[dobrojim]

Doc wrote

Even if the vaccines don't prevent infection (early statistics clearly showed they did, though this number has decayed vs omicron) they do prevent hospitalization and death. Should encouraging vaccines be part of the political response? It worked for Measles, Mumps, Polio, etc. If not, then what is your response? People should be allowed to choose to get infected if they want? Die if they want? Crowd hospitals etc and make other preventable deaths more deadly due to ER wait times. lack of hospital beds, etc?

So the responsible govt response has to be try to get as many vaccinated as possible.
It will save lives and save huge amounts of money too.

BTW, I may not know all the finer details of the mRNA vaccines but I'm pretty sure
that mRNA does not have a particularly long lifetime in the body before it is degraded.
I don't know if the mRNA vaccines are somehow modified to extend their lifetimes.

RNA was the first genetic material. DNA came second and was an improvement
for most organisms because it is a LOT more stable and not subject to degradation
to the same degree RNA is. RNAses (enzymes that degrade RNA) are everywhere.