Free Republic

Americans are misinformed about the risks of COVID. That’s a fact.Earlier this year, a Franklin Templeton/Gallup study found that when people were asked what “percentage of people who have been infected by the coronavirus needed to be hospitalized,” more than a third, 35 percent, said the risk was 50 percent. It’s actually somewhere between 1 and 5 percent. As you might expect, political affiliation influences that perception. “Democrats were much more likely to overestimate the harms of COVID-19, according to the Franklin Templeton/Gallup study, with 41% believing over half of coronavirus patients would require hospitalizations, compared to 28% of Republicans.”...

< snip >In "The Black Swan"--a kind of cri de coeur--Mr. Taleb struggles to free us from our misguided allegiance to the bell-curve mindset and awaken us to the dominance of the power law. The attractiveness of the bell curve resides in its democratic distribution and its mathematical accessibility. Collect enough data and the pattern reveals itself, allowing both robust predictions of future data points (such as the height of the next five people to enter the room) and accurate estimations of the size and frequency of extreme values (anticipating the occasional giant or dwarf. The power-law distribution, by contrast,...

VIDEOOn September 5, 2021 a black swan appeared in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and attracted a lot of attention as you can see. Does this very rare appearance of a black swan in the very center of China portend a Black Swan event? By strange coincidence, on the very same day the black swan appeared in Tiananmen Square, a fascinating documentary about Black Swan Events, "The Worst Kind of Surprise: Black Swan Theory," was uploaded to YouTube. You can see a few excerpts of it in this video but I highly recommend you watch the entire documentary in the link below.The...

Would you hire a money manager that manages your wealth on false assumptions? It seems like a bad idea, but many people unknowingly opt for such a management style in their retirement plans.Target Maturity Funds are one of the fastest-growing mutual fund sectors of the last decade. These passive strategies are most popular in 401k and other retirement plans with limited options and long investment time horizons.Wall Street nicknames them “set ‘em and forget ‘em” funds because their strategy purportedly adjusts risk lower as you age. At first blush, such a strategy makes sense as risk tolerance is often a...

A small number of people (eight) had signs of previous natural covid-19 infection. Compared with those without previous infection, their antibody and T cell responses after the first vaccine dose were significantly higher (691-fold and fourfold, respectively). The study also found stronger T cell responses in people who had received the AstraZeneca vaccine, with 31% of this group producing detectable T cell responses compared with 12% of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine group. The researchers said that the clinical importance of the difference in T cell response was not yet clear, but it could be important when dealing with variants of covid-19....

Among the funnier things that I have been able to do over the last several weeks, is look back at my social media posts from a year ago as the pandemic was in its infancy. Whether it is snarky posts about government overreach or frustration with the lack of intellectual honesty by which restrictions were being placed, I get a chuckle out of my own child-like ignorance of the year I was about to endure. A few days ago, I wrote a piece showing my analysis of the data from the Diamond Princess COVID-19 outbreak from a year prior. This...

Source: Townhall Media/Julio Rosas"This is not politics," President Joe Biden said last week. "Reinstate the mandate if you let it down." Give him credit for consistency: When Gov. Greg Abbott ended Texas' mask mandate last month, Biden called it "Neanderthal thinking." But maybe the Neanderthals got it right. COVID-19 deaths in Texas plunged in March, and as National Review's Philip Klein points out, there's no relationship between mask mandates and coronavirus levels. Biden is clearly wrong on another point. This is not "not politics." America's constitutional federal system, and the latitude that both former President Trump's administration and the Biden...

Abstract Aims of the study: Patient comprehension is a critical part of meeting medical ethics standards of informed consent in study designs. The aim of the study was to determine if sufficient literature exists to require clinicians to disclose the specific risk that COVID-19 vaccines could worsen disease upon exposure to challenge or circulating virus. Methods used to conduct the study: Published literature was reviewed to identify preclinical and clinical evidence that COVID-19 vaccines could worsen disease upon exposure to challenge or circulating virus. Clinical trial protocols for COVID-19 vaccines were reviewed to determine if risks were properly disclosed. Results...

It's has begun. Today Webull is throwing ETC under the bus, trying to justify why you can SELL a stock and not buy it. The source link contains an explanation of what a Clearing Firm does. ETC is the near-monopoly player in the industry.

Nursing home with zero COVID deaths reports residents dying after new outbreak, vaccineAt The Commons, COVID deaths are reported to have occurred only after residents began receiving coronavirus vaccinations.January 14, 2021 (Ron Paul Institute) — Things seem to be working backwards at The Commons on St. Anthony nursing home in Auburn, New York. Vaccinating people is supposed to reduce or end coronavirus deaths. Right? But, at The Commons, such deaths are reported to have occurred only after residents began receiving coronavirus vaccinations.James T. Mulder wrote Saturday at syracuse.com that until December 29 there had been no coronavirus deaths at The...

Pope Francis calls on ‘everyone’ to take COVID vaccine: ‘it must be done’The Pope said he himself would be taking the vaccine and that it is 'ethically' acceptable that everyone else take it as well.anuary 9, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – In an interview scheduled to air Sunday night with the Italian television station Canale 5, Pope Francis has opined that “everyone” must take the COVID-19 vaccine. “I believe that, ethically, everyone should take the vaccine,” he said, according to a transcript released in advance of the airing of the interview. The Pope added that he would be taking the vaccine himself...

The new COVID-19 variant detected in South Africa poses an even greater risk than the highly infectious strain that turned up in UK patients, the British health secretary said on Monday. Secretary Matt Hancock called the South African variant a “very significant problem” in a Monday interview on BBC radio.

Normalcy doesn’t proceed naturally from the moral universe we’ve generated over the past several months. We much change our minds to change our circumstances.Amid the latest wave of COVID-19, those who believe in the necessity of lockdowns and masks are insisting the non-compliant minority is “the reason we can’t get back to normal.” That makes sense as long as you don’t take into account the history of COVID restrictions and their loose relationship with both the science and the metrics of the pandemic. Most of the statewide mask mandates went into effect in the summer, for instance, when cases were...

Health officials have been warning about the need to limit gatherings amid the coronavirus pandemic – but a new interactive tool drives home the point by showing the risks of catching the deadly bug at any given location, according to a report. The peer-reviewed COVID-19 Risk Assessment Planning Tool, created by researchers at Georgia Tech, is designed to help people understand the risks associated with gatherings of different sizes throughout the US and around the glove, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Scientists have developed a blood test and new scoring system that may help doctors predict which COVID-19 patients are at risk for severe disease and therefore in need of more intervention, according to a new study published in the journal EBioMedicine. A blood test and scoring system could help doctors predict which COVID-19 patients are at risk for severe disease. (Photo: Getty Images) In the study, scientists performed blood tests on 80 patients hospitalized for COVID-19 and then measured the patients’ levels of two different cytokines — IL-6 and IL-10 — which act as messengers for the immune system. The...

In between Donald Trump’s exit from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and the vice-presidential debate, let’s turn to an apolitical analyst to understand what’s happening. Vaclav Smil, 76, native of communist Czechoslovakia, University of Manitoba professor for four decades, has written 39 books on energy, technology, and demography. “Nobody,” says Bill Gates, who has read every one, “sees the big picture with as wide an aperture as Vaclav Smil.” What he sees now, he writes in a characteristically terse IEEE Spectrum essay, he finds puzzling. The COVID-19 death rate per million is about one-fifth that of the 1957-58 Asian...

If you were world-renowned in your field, contributed decades to improving public health, were given commendations by multiple presidents and medical organizations for your work, led the country through major pandemics, would you want to stay in a role where you were suddenly constantly criticized and undermined by your current administrator and were receiving death threats? Anthony Fauci MD, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is in that position. The Trump administration has continually tried to silence or discredit Fauci. Fauci stated that the White House Coronavirus Task Force met on August 20th about the Centers...

Keep in mind, no studies have been done to demonstrate that either a cloth mask or the N95 mask has any effect on transmission of the COVID-19 virus. Now that we have established that there is no scientific evidence necessitating the wearing of a face mask for prevention, are there dangers to wearing a face mask, especially for long periods? Several studies have indeed found significant problems with wearing such a mask. This can vary from headaches, to increased airway resistance, carbon dioxide accumulation, to hypoxia, all the way to serious life-threatening complications. While most agree that the N95 mask...

Just think of that: We can save nearly 2 million lives every year with these personal and collective sacrifices. In addition, we can prevent an estimated 100 million sicknesses and injuries! Those of us who have raised concerns about the tradeoffs of shutting down the nation indefinitely based on speculative models lacking essential data have been told we’re heartless, pro-death, un-Christian sickos who should be ejected from society and banned from all platforms.How dare we worry about things like money, the next generation’s education, the carnage of a destroyed economy, the deliberate wreckage of all non-pandemic medical services, the desolation...

AUSTIN, Texas (CBSDFW.COM/CNN) — On Monday, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick insisted he’s “all in” on lifting social distancing guidelines amid the coronavirus pandemic in order to get the economy back up-and-running — despite the fact that he and other senior citizens remain at high risk of contracting the deadly disease. Patrick, who said he turns 70 next week, said people like him have to weigh the hazards to their personal health that the virus poses with the challenges to health of the American economy brought on by social distancing guidelines “No one reached out to me and said, ‘As...