Things that actually make sense are tightly regulating industrial agriculture, while shifting Ag Dept support over to small/medium size farms that focus on reducing petroleum inputs. (That would include strict limits on antibiotic use) Regain international monitoring that we had during the Bush/Obama years; and improving on it using Bill Gates GERM proposals.. Gain of function research. What we have now is a global petri dish developing superbugs. We do amazingly stupid things, this is one of them...
We had the masks by the end of 2020. More masks than anyone knew what to do with. And for 9 months they were withheld from healthcare workers and from the public. Intentionally. LOL. When did Obama order masks? The H1N1 epidemic was in 2009. He had both houses of Congress after H1N1 and didn’t buy masks. Why did he wait until the end of his presidency? LOL. Show me some evidence. I’ve supplied evidence for my claims. Let’s see yours. Before Covid Obama or Trump could have purchased any amount of masks. Neither did. When Covid hit, companies increased production and new companies were formed. By the end of 2020 there was an oversupply of N95 masks. And government and the healthcare industry were complicit in making sure the American people who needed them most couldn’t get them. Intentionally. Show me when Obama ordered masks and when they were to be delivered. Show me when Trump cancelled the contract. (I’m uninterested in your opinion.) Partisanship is meaningless. Both administrations refused to replenish supplies after being advised by PPE industry associations and internal infectious disease experts to do so. I’m also uninterested in coddling China. If you were prepared you would not need government to do it for you. I’m open to you sharing your level of preparedness. I say it’s unlikely you could be prepared because you subscribe to disinformation about epidemiology. It’s nearly impossible to prepare for something you know nothing substantial about. Of course I have concern for Americans. That’s why I spent the last two years educating Americans on effective means of protection to counter disinformation from the CDC, WHO, and NIH. I’m here using your denial of science and facts as a canvas to paint a picture contrasting real preparation with what you got and will get from government. If I didn’t care I would take the easy popular appeal to authority route and parrot the disinformation from government as you do. Trump is a dumb ass. Fauci and others in the public health sphere are not. Disinformation from public health officials is worse than misinformation from morons because public health officials know better and lie anyway. Not as bad as scientists and healthcare professionals intentionally providing disinformation and actively working to deny Americans quality masks. The CDC did not pursue evidence based medicine. Most of their recommendations were diametrically opposed to all known evidence. Most of the things I’ve brought up here were not mistakes. The original lie from Fauci that masks were of little use for public was intentional. The lie that 6 ft social distancing was “good enough” was intentional. The lie masks were essential in places where infection risk was low but unnecessary in places infection risk was highest was intentional. The lie masks were in short supply after late 2020 was intentional. The lie that it was more important that you wore a mask than what type of mask you wore was intentional. The lies of omission concerning the myriad ways to protect yourself with non pharmaceutical interventions was intentional. The lie that Covid could not possibly have come from a lab was intentional. The lie that mRNA and adenovirus vector Covid vaccines were the best vaccines for the immunocompromised was intentional. The lie monoclonal antibodies were withheld from use because they were no longer effective was intentional. The lie PCR tests were gold standard was intentional. The lie increased testing could seriously impact infection rates was intentional. None were mistakes. All were intentional. And you are never going to change that fact or remedy the cause. Terror? Who said anything about terror? I have no need to fear lies or incompetence because I’m informed and prepared. Back whatever you want. Did you back better planning after H1N1? After Ebola of 2014? Have you ever backed better planning to address our broken approach to seasonal influenza that kills over 100,000 Americans annually? Have I EVER hinted that this will be the last pandemic or bout with infectious disease? Why would I be encouraging preparedness if I thought that? We lose over 100,000 to influenza annually. We don’t need to wait for another pandemic to get with the program. I encourage people to avoid the disinformation from the CDC to protect themselves from that as well. Until we have honesty and integrity in public health asking for more preparedness is not productive.
Of course there were pandemics, but they moved much more slowly, and many communities were never impacted due to their ability to stay 'isolated' from neighbouring communities. Any 'worseness' was a result of the mortality rates of the particular infections, and lack of medical science. Imagine THOSE kinds of infections today, with our ADHD behaviour.
Do everything you can to avoid their game. Resistance has to come from us, obviously. Avoid multinationals, hold and use cash, stay off social media, don't order online, etc etc. There are SO many ways we can thwart them.
H1N1 was a nothing burger here. I can’t recall knowing anyone who had it. Well, symptomatically anyway. Yes the Obama advisory group was never effective. If it has survived the head of the thing would have been as hated as Pence because he was the same sort of character. All the other members stayed on in similar roles in different departments. I have no idea how if the group had existed in 2020 it could have magically made needed items appear. It didn’t during its existence.
I'm not going to go through this for you AGAIN. Why do you even care about masks? Trump berated the use of masks for months, berated our medical science community, berated vaccine development, promoted untested homeopathic solutions that had no scientific basis, failed to improve travel security, gave special permission for meat packers to ignore OSHA and CDC direction on hardening their businesses against COVID (the causing whole communities to contract COVID, defeating the operation of those plants he claimed to be important), etc. He used his power as president to DEFEAT our protection as a nation.
No, you did not. YOU evaded it. How much supply of equipment should we have stockpiled? Who is responsible for private enterprise for such supplies? You have never answered those, and I doubt you ever will. You seem to have this huge problem, and I am not sure if you are evading, or outright lying anymore. You never answered either of the above, like you almost never answer anything. And I am sure you are going to get all butt hurt yet again, but maybe if you stopped lying about answering a simple question, that would help. Talking about how much supply is not the same as answering how much supply should be held. You only said "a while", that is not an answer. That is an evasion, or a non-answer. This is why you keep failing in these science threads. Science demands precision and exact answers. Not fuzzy statements and evasions.
Then why have more died since the election, and we just passed through our second highest peak since it started?
I care about mitigations of all kinds. I’m not and never have been a Trump supporter. You are barking up the wrong tree. . I care about masks because advice about masks from Fauci and the CDC killed hundreds of thousands that didn’t need to die. Why don’t you care would be a better question. Why don’t you care about any of the lies told by those with expertise in pandemic management? Politicians are ignorant of epidemiology, immunology and virology. It’s no surprise both Trump and Biden have lied and provided gross disinformation. We should expect that from politicians that are stupid. I criticize both Trump and Biden for saying stupid things about science. The problem is we had epidemiologist, virologists, and immunologists providing disinformation that conflicted 100% with all evidence produced by the scientific method. This is unacceptable.
Why not just kill off 75% of the population at once? That would be just as effective, and result in the same kind of nonsense you just said.
Moving more slowly does not mean they did not move. And the interesting thing, is that slowness caused even more deaths as a region would get hit over and over again months or even years apart. But it did nothing to decrease the ultimate death rates, it might have even made them higher. And no, even still almost all communities were effected. It really helps if you actually know what you are talking about, instead of just trying to make things up.
Just as it was in 1976. Now, was it a nothing because enough were immunized, we just don't know. But in 2009 there were over 115k cases, and almost 3,500 died. I know of nobody that had it, because for one I was not even in the US at the time. And everybody I lived and worked with was vaccinated.
Hmmmm. Is that relevant to our discussion in any way? There are “dangerous viruses occurring” all the time. Seasonal influenza is one of the most dangerous statistically. And then there are things like common cold adenoviruses that are exacerbating the worst epidemic of all—obesity. Did Obama’s group do anything to combat that? Maybe after Biden cures cancer he will. Trump obviously didn’t.
Kind of like that retarded "mask mandate", and no quarantine. Allowing people who had COVID to wander around with a scarf over their face, as if that would do any good at all.
You do manage to stuff a great deal of that nonsense into an extremely short post. People have been saying industrial agriculture is unsustainable for a couple generations. But, as the Borg like to say, you will adapt. Please be less ridiculous in the future.
It wasn’t a nothing burger everywhere. It temporarily reversed the downward trend in cardiovascular deaths by triggering a lot of myocardial infarctions.
And then they went home and practiced NO mitigation in the environment where infection is most likely to occur.
I can only conclude that you have a vested interest in not demonising travel. Are you a travel agent? Maybe in tourism or something? Even the most prominent epidemiologists know that our profligate travel is a major part of the modern experience of pandemics.
Ah, a conspiracy theorist. Now I know exactly where to place your posts. There is a bit of truth in that, as it allows pandemics to travel faster. However, a hearty pandemic can still propagate, even if the only travel is mare's shank and wind vessels. That affects the speed of spread, but not that it spreads at all. As I have said before, we live in a very different era. Where bacteriological diseases are almost no threat at all, and the viral ones are of a huge concern. But short of cutting all links with other nations and reverting to a 14th century existence, you will not stop the spread. And even then, diseases still spread, just slower. And in the area of "modern pandemics", exactly how many have we had in the last century that caused large death tolls internationally? I can tell you that easily, exactly one. Long before "air travel" was even a thing.
We absolutely did have very serious mask shortages. The POINT of that is that one of the benefits of planning is that we would have a response for that problem. Your comment on China is just plain self defeating. China has the natural repository for tens of thousands of SARS variants. The next SARS related pandemic is highly likely to come from that source. We need to be working WITH China on that problem. So, berating China (to the point of inspiring violence against Americans of Asian decent) is not only monumentally disgusting, but also self defeating. We closed off the best direction of defense against future pandemic from that source.
So we need to make sure we have masks. Great. But you want the same dolts that withheld AVAILABLE masks from the public and healthcare workers to make those preparations. You want people who intentionally killed people to prepare us for the next pandemic. That’s insanity. Clean up the human refuse that intentionally lied to people about N95 mask availability and killed people with that lie. That should be the priority at this point. Supplies are useless when those distributing them intentionally deprive citizens and frontline medical workers of them. Work with China to prevent pandemics? Isn’t that kind of like working with Coca Cola Co. to prevent diabetes or Anheuser-Busch to prevent cirrhosis of the liver. The big pandemics come from China. That’s nothing new. You know, like Spanish Flu (H1N1) that is still killing people every year and killed 50,000,000 people in a couple years. I’m talking about plague—that still kills 100 or so annually and killed up to 200,000,000 globally at its heights. There is evidence H2N2 originated in China before spreading toSingapore. SARS1 originated in China. The last two outbreaks of SARS were the result of poor lab practices. China told us Covid didn’t spread human to human. They are the humanitarians that vaccinated young healthy people first for Covid and elderly people last. They are not sharing information even with the WHO which has been tight with China for some time. Do you see any indication China is interested in preventing pandemics? Or that they would work with competitors to do so? It’s not generally wise to partner up with those who have completely different goals and priorities. I said I was uninterested In coddling China. That’s not the same as inciting violence against Asian Americans or tourists. But I guess you need your strawmen. Your own government doesn’t care enough about you to prepare for or handle a pandemic properly. I’m really going to break your heart now—China doesn’t either.
Then why was I packing up 10 cases of N95 masks today? Ones that had been sitting in our warehouse, and we only pulled out because our company is moving to a new location? And we are not even in the medical field. Those were all acquired in 2020, as it was the only way they could stay open if they provided their employees N95 masks. If my company had no problem acquiring 12 cases of them in 2020, the shortage must not have been all that great. Please confirm that, and give us a link that is at least in the last 3 months that says there is a shortage.
Why? No, and I mean that serious, why? The evidence is point to the fact that China knew they had a pandemic on their hands as early as the middle of 2019. When exactly were they going to tell the world of this? China tried to deny there was a problem at all until after it finally broke out and started to spread Internationally. Now I am all for helping other nations, but the first thing they have to do is actually admit they have a problem, and ask for help. We have sent people all over the world to help with diseases, including Ebola many times. And in each of those cases, the countries where that occurred admitted right away they had a problem, and asked for help. China to this day is still in many ways a "closed country", that will deny for as long as they can that they ever even have a problem. You really can't help a country with that mindset, because they think that anything negative at all is bad for them. Not unlike the USSR in the early 1980's which tried to say they had no cases of AIDS in their country (and even that it was invented by the Pentagon). Of course, the entire world knew that was all a lie when the Soviet Union collapsed. Oh, and as an "FYI", what I say about helping other nations is actually the standard approach to dealing with alcoholism and substance abuse. You can't do a damned thing for an addict until they admit they have a problem. I am all for helping anybody that asks us for help, even nations like Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, and China. But here is the thing, they have to actually admit they have a problem (and not scream that it is all our fault), and that they are willing to accept our help. If any remember back to the early days of the Pandemic, the President put on a travel ban from affected areas. And people lost their freaking minds, screaming it was racist. Even China screaming it was racist, and they did not have a problem. At that, I shake my head and simply sigh. With out admitting they have a problem, there can be no help.
During the last 2 years, how many actually wore N95 masks? I can tell you, damned few. And I live in one of the states that was the last to lift mask mandates. And the mandates were a complete freaking joke. Wear a scarf, that was good enough. Wear a particle mask for stopping sawdust, that was good enough. Not a single one of those or 90% of the masks worn would do a damned thing for a virus, but that did not matter. It was all a placebo. If you ask me the biggest failure, it was the absolute refusal to quarantine people who actually had the virus.
