Posted on 07/21/2020 5:01:47 PM PDT by VictoryGal
Apparently Trump has decided that he does not have enough time to re-educate America on the real numbers.
I was referring to the groupthink of
a) using cloth masks or even medical masks that explicitly say they are not virus-safe - are quickly contaminated, even dirtied through daily use and a casual approach to washing or replacement or even no approach at all ie they are reused well past any point of effectiveness and may even damage the health of the wearer.
b) masks as the NEXT panacea. Lockdown anyone? Mid-March? Ring any bells? Flatten the curve? 15 days? 30 days? What was achieved? Less than nothing if you’re a virus fearmonger watching cases go up. Less than nothing if you’re a virus skeptic who knew then and knows now that a lockdown was not a stop button but merely a pause button.
Herd immunity remains the only true solution. Lockdowns and, to a lesser extent, masks delay herd immunity therefore they are not solutions but hindrances. Vaccines may speed up herd immunity but they are months or years away.
Of course the mask is a political strategy if only because it’s become the new false god of coronabros.
He may be a wise, honest leader but he wants very much to be reelected and to dispute the mask silliness would be political suicide. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to buy into it.
Masks most certainly DO hinder employment in certain sectors if the population have had the living hell scared out of them by a cynical media and a politically-slanted medical ‘expert’ community. Restaurants are already at 25-50% capacity but even those tables are mostly empty. Retailers are closing left and right despite Herculean efforts to sanitize and ‘follow protocol’ (what an Orwellian term) - because the public are living in a state of induced fear, convinced that to open their front door involves the risk of INSTANT DEATH.
Great question! In 2003 when SARS came out, work began on a vaccine. Candidates were developed and some of those candidates made it through phase 1 and phase 2 trials, meaning they seemed to work well without significant side effects for ~100 people and then ~1,000 people. However, SARS 2003 died out before phase 3 trials could get underway. With no market for a vaccine (i.e. nobody’s buying a vaccine for a disease that died out), funding was pulled.
MERS-CoV is another coronavirus similar to SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 that came out in 2012. The same thing happened with MERS as what happened with SARS 2003: they got to phase 3 trials, the disease burned out, and funding got pulled. Phase 3 trials are extremely expensive (you’re testing on ~100,000+ paid volunteers), so without a market for the vaccine, you don’t fund that.
When SARS-CoV-2 was discovered, some of those existing vaccine candidates were pulled off the shelf and modified to work for SARS-CoV-2, and put into immediate trials. I think something like 12 or 15 (out of around 140 worldwide) vaccine candidates for COVID-19 are just reworked versions of the SARS-CoV-1 vaccine candidates.
“I was referring to the groupthink of ...”
My main feeling about masks is that they are harmless compared with other measures being used to combat the virus spread.
I’m not going to object to politicians wanting us to wear masks.
I think you are correct thinking that masks don’t do a lot of good. I base that belief on a study that was in one of the prominent medical journals which says they are helpful only in hospitals where they’ve been used for years.
Also we could say that herd immunity is what’s kept us around for the last million or so years. That and natural selection.
I didn’t mean it that way.
But you knew that.
This is perfectly fine with me. He is asking - that is all.
And with regards to his reluctant “admission” that things will get worse before they get better - what does anyone expect him to say? That the numbers are bogus?
They ARE bogus!! (Reporting a spike in nominal “positives” without showing the proportional increase in overall testing is deliberate fear-mongering, pure and simple.)
But we can’t expect the President to singlehandedly set right every deep state lie the fake news media reports. Ultimately, it is up to We the People to either hold the MSM to account, or learn to ignore them.
For example, let’s say the OMB came out with two quarters of economic contraction, and officially reported a recession. If the OMB had deliberately doctored the numbers to hurt Trump’s re-election chances, would Trump be expected to contradict the government statistics?
Of course not. That would be like a CEO arguing with the results of the year-end Certified Public Auditor’s report. He would be laughed out of town even if he was 100% correct.
The President would have no choice but to weather the PR storm - knowing that the OMB could not hide the truth forever, and positive “adjustments” would be forthcoming.
It is the same with Covid19 fear-mongering.
The bad news: The “experts” will always be believed over the top executive, no matter what the truth.
The good news: The “experts” can only suppress the truth for so long with smoke and mirrors - at some point the truth becomes obvious and they can’t lie without losing all credibility.
I think the President is wise to play lip service to this out-of-context “spike in cases”, rather than contradict the “scientists”. If they are lying, the truth will have to come out when their predicted catastrophic death rate (again) fails to materialize.
That will be strike two for the CDC and their hyperbolic death predictions.
Hopefully, it will be right around October that strike three occurs, and people finally say “enough is enough” - and stop listening to these deep state fake-science bureaucrats.
The Democrats have been doubling down on these anti-Trump fake news narratives for four years straight - when you keep doubling down on a bad bet, you lose big. The Democrats’ day of reckoning is coming.
BTW, that’s pure Iron Law of Bureaucracy stuff.
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
There is certainly more decorum here, even in the worst of the occasional strife.
Well: it’s kind of difficult to find out anything about the ‘Bioscience Resource Project’ and ‘Independent Science News’.
I’m a little uneasy with the products of projects and people when I can’t discover any information about them that’s truly objective.
My first sentence in that thread: “This thread is intended to be a significant collection of scientific reports related to the issue. It is NOT intended for the casual reader, as some are quite long and complex. I am simply presenting an outline, including links you can follow for the details.”
If you’re not willing to follow the trails (links) and study the details, then of course it is not intended for you.
I always first look at the source of every article. In the case of the link you provided to me in post 357 of the thread, the source is ‘Independent Science News’.
Do you know anything about them?
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/about-independent-science-news/
Jonathan R Latham, PhD is co-founder and Executive Director of the Bioscience Resource Project and the Editor of Independent Science News. Dr. Latham holds a Masters degree in Crop Genetics and a PhD in Virology. He was subsequently a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Genetics, University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has published scientific papers in disciplines as diverse as plant ecology, plant virology, toxicology, genetics, and genetic engineering. Dr Latham is also the Director of the Poison Papers project which publicizes documents of the chemical industry and its regulators.
“Jonathan Latham always asks the next question, the one beyond the one that only seems to be trying to get at the right answer. His work is invaluable.” — Joan Dye Gussow (Prof Emerita, Columbia University)
Allison Wilson, PhD, his co-author of the paper I presented, is also co-founder of this project.
I note that page also lists many other articles they have published, if you want to study for more understanding of them.
This isn’t a game, this is about constitutional freedom.
I totally agree with you, but with the upcoming election and a lot of people wound tight, sometimes it’s prudent to address one issue at a time.
Yes, I can certainly find what is on their own website. But have you been able to find any objective critique of the site?
More importantly, That article is well presented, very logical, and well documented with many appropriate references and links to corroborating and additional information pertinent to the issues covered. Furthermore, I have not seen any challenge to anything in the article.
I am impressed, not only with his writing, but also with all the other authors and writings he links to in his article.
It's your choice: Read and learn, or ignore, as you please.
Well, I was just making the point that when an information/opinion source or website is highly regarded, you can usually find some independent commentary about it. (Sometimes the commentary is largely positive, sometimes largely negative, and that can tell you something, too – another instance where you must ‘consider the source’.)
I’m sure I don’t have the greatest expertise when it comes to internet research, but I could find very little (almost no) independent commentary regarding the website you referenced, either pro or con.
That’s all.
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