The Coronavirus Thread

[Joe]

100% conformity may be unwise. Of course if the only people not getting vaccinated are Trump supporters it's six of one, half a dozen of the other... --too crumplesque?

I suppose that we could look at it as fighting fire with fire. The virus adapts via natural selection, and most of us adapt with science and intellect.

It appears some of us a going the natural selection route.

It does look that way. However, most have probably already had kids...

That raises an interesting question; is Trump support an inheritable trait?

[Hermit]

While vaccinations do not stop all coronavirus infections, they do stop 80% of them. It's a bit like wearing seat belts while travelling in cars, but the difference between vaccinations and seat belts is that the latter only affect you, while the former also affect the people around you. The 80% of vaccinated people who do not get infected because they are vaccinated are obviously no longer part of the demographic that passes the virus on to others they mingle with in supermarkets, at work, at home or wherever. It's a point I made in two previous posts yesterday. You appear to have a problem acknowledging it.

I think Cunt's issue is an automatic unwillingness to accept such a thing as a collective benefit of vaccination to society; it must have nasty socialistic connotations for him and others from the right...

They like to recite the "Your freedom stops at the end of my nose" mantra, which is fair enough. Maybe they ought to regard passing the coronavirus through the noses of people near them because they refuse to be vaccinated as going beyond the limits of that freedom*.

*Making allowance for people who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons, and acknowledging that around 20% of vaccinated people get infected regardless and that 20% of vaccinated people that have become infected despite being vaccinated do infect others.

[Cunt]

Maybe the unvaccinated should just be left to die. But maybe that's true for smokers, drinkers and the obese, too.

[JimC]

I have never advocated that the wilfully unvaccinated should be denied health care. It is still reasonable that they are not able to take certain jobs, or that they have to cope with more restrictions to their freedoms (in travel, for example) than the sensible majority, but all people, even those who have made poor choices, deserve health care.

[Cunt]

Me neither. I believe in as much individual liberty as possible.

Even the right to choose a way I think is wrong.

Is it true that the mid-century German problems included propaganda saying the jews were spreading sickness?

Makes me a bit gunshy about treating the unvaxxed as a group.

Where I settle is, get it or don't, but one should not have to disclose such information to others.

[Seabass]

Is it true that the mid-century German problems included propaganda saying the jews were spreading sickness?

Makes me a bit gunshy about treating the unvaxxed as a group.

This is too dumb to come from an adult human with a fully developed, fully functional brain.

[Hermit]

Maybe the unvaccinated should just be left to die. But maybe that's true for smokers, drinkers and the obese, too.

It is not something I have expressed an opinion on. What I do argue is that vaccination is not a matter of individual choice because unvaccinated people pass the virus on to other people at five times the rate of vaccinated people.

That said, triages are conducted whenever a choice must be made.

There have been occasions in previous waves of infections where old people missed out on ventilators because younger ones were given precedence. This may just happen again very soon. The occupancy rate of ICU beds are reaching the critical states. Across Texas it stands at 96% right now. Choices will have to be made if it rises past the 100% mark.

A work colleague had a customised beeper with him at all times for two years. It was issued to him by the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. He had hepatitis. The idea was that once the beeper beeped he'd drop everything he was doing wherever he was and make a bee-line to the hospital in order to get a new liver, provided the dark spot that showed up on the x-ray was not cancer. One day the beeper beeped. My colleague went under the knife. The dark spot was revealed to be cancer. He was sewn back up. The liver went to another person who had better chances of survival. My colleague died three months later.

A similar situation applies to smokers who need heart transplants.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Is it true that the mid-century German problems included propaganda saying the jews were spreading sickness?

Makes me a bit gunshy about treating the unvaxxed as a group.

This is too dumb to come from an adult human with a fully developed, fully functional brain.

It's a standard trope coming from the right wing though. I think it may have been you who posted something about the shamelessly repugnant co-opting of the yellow Star of David by these malignant buffoons as a badge of 'protest.'

[Hermit]

Is it true that the mid-century German problems included propaganda saying the jews were spreading sickness?

Makes me a bit gunshy about treating the unvaxxed as a group.

You must be fucking kidding. The unvaccinated as a group are spreading sickness. That's why vaccinations have been done since 1798.

[pErvinalia]

Is it true that the mid-century German problems included propaganda saying the jews were spreading sickness?

Makes me a bit gunshy about treating the unvaxxed as a group.

This is too dumb to come from an adult human with a fully developed, fully functional brain.

(sorry, just had to acknowledge that)

[Seabass]

It's just like obesity!


A Texas hospital is so overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases that a man shot six times has waited a week for surgery

[Scot Dutchy]

Maybe the anti-vaxxers need a bit of reminding how life was before vaccinations:

‘No concept of how awful it was’: the forgotten world of pre-vaccine childhood in Australia

Until relatively recently, lethal infectious diseases stalked the lives of Australian children – including my father, Tom Keneally. Vaccines have saved millions

t’s 1940, and a five-year-old boy lies in an oxygen tent. He struggles for breath and hallucinates that his leaden toy soldiers are alive and marching around the room, monstering him with their bayonets.

He has diphtheria, a disease also known as The Strangling Angel. There is a vaccine, but not every child has been inoculated. The bacterial infection creates a membrane across the back of the throat, cutting off air supply.

The little boy’s mother, sitting a desperate vigil next to the oxygen tent, has seen diphtheria take other children.

It will not, in the end, take her son. The membrane will fail to fully close off his airway, and he will emerge from the oxygen tent. He will attend the funerals of classmates who die of diphtheria and polio. He will, in time, run alongside his friend , a fine athlete born blind after his mother contracted rubella during pregnancy. He will rattle a stone in a can to guide his friend to the finish line.

Throughout his schooling, children he knows will die from disease.

They take it so for granted.

[rainbow]

Maybe the unvaccinated should just be left to die. But maybe that's true for smokers, drinkers and the obese, too.

Can you catch smoking, obesity and drinking?

[Brian Peacock]

One can understand that view only if one believes, at some basic level, that everything that happens to you in life is solely your responsibility or the result of one's own action, or lack thereof. 100 years ago it was not uncommon for people to believe that a congenital disability was punishment for sin. We also saw how Fred Phelps et al blamed the 9/11 outrage on manly bum sex. It's magical thinking.

When I was a lad a yearly treat was to watch the Grand National steeple chase - and my father would ask each of us to pick a horse before the race and then he'd pop down to the local bookies to put 50p on each horse. My pick, I think it was called Alverston, fell a Becher's Brook and broke it's leg and had to be destroyed. I remember brief background shots of it thrashing around on the ground unable to get up as the race continued. As silly as it seems now, at the time I was consumed with guilt, somehow believing that picking it as 'my horse' had sealed it's fate. In my mind Alverston's death was intimately tied to my action of picking it out of the list. That was childish magical thinking of course, but at that age one's lack of life experiences predisposes you to seeing yourself as the reference point for all things.

I think anti-makders/vaxxers may similarly see themselves as the reference point for all things they experience in life. For one, they're obviously all people who haven't died from the virus - so in some sense a raging pandemic is not something that has effected them. What has effected them is the fallout: the lockdowns, the mandates, the lay-offs, and the other things that have negatively impacted on them and ability to make the kind of choices they want to make. They may also believe that individually each of them is in total control of everything that happens to them, and so the fact that they're not fighting for breath in an ICU is a vindication that they've made the right choices - at least so far. If they believe, on the basis of personal experience, that Covid is something which happens to other people then why should they wear masks or have a vaccine(?) - at the end of the day that's someone else's problem not theirs, and trying to force them to wear a mask or take a vaccine is to remove personal agency from them; to make them do something to mitigate problems that other people are having.

[Sean Hayden]

I think Cunt should forgive his former fat self.