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If Everything Fails, Anything Will Do
The latest insanity on the part of the Biden Administration is its promise to send out 500 million rapid tests with free delivery. (Our population is estimated to be 330 million.) This plan is so deeply disturbing and meaningless that I can’t find enough denigrating words to describe it. What in the world are they hoping to accomplish by sending out all these tests? Here’s part of the strategy:
A White House official said the administration would disclose more information about the type of tests it is purchasing after the procurement is finalized. The 500 million figure is based on what manufacturing capacity can handle, the official said.
The administration will continue using the Defense Production Act, a Korean War-era national security mobilization law, to ensure that the U.S. is producing enough tests to meet soaring demand, according to the White House.
So the number of 500 million is a guess, based on manufacturing capacity, not on how many they think they will need.
Although we haven’t received the details of sending the tests, the process on its face is a foolish gesture meant to convince the American people that at least the federal government is doing something. The feds have already struck fear in the hearts of most Americans that the latest variant will likely kill them if they are not vaccinated. That this information defies the evidence to date is irrelevant. (The variant appears less deadly but more contagious, with almost no hospitalizations to date.) And to think that testing is somehow going to help us out of Covid is a bewildering goal. Maybe someone can help me understand what the powers-that-be are trying to accomplish. So, let’s walk through the parts of the process that raise so many questions.
First, I wonder how they will choose households to send the tests to? How will they determine how many people are in a household? How will they decide how many tests to send? Will they allow only one per household? One per person?
Second, will they tell people only to test themselves if they have symptoms? Or should everyone test themselves, since they could have Covid and be asymptomatic?
Since rapid tests can produce a false negative, will people expect they should take at least two of them? Will they complain to the government if they don’t get as many tests as they think they need?
Third, what should they do if the test comes out positive but they have no symptoms?
Testing positive for COVID-19 means you have pieces of the virus in your body. However, a positive test does not always tell you whether or not you could spread the virus to other people. The test that uses a method called reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) to look for genetic material of the virus can return a positive result even after you no longer have an active infection but still have inactive (dead) pieces of virus in your body.
Or if the test comes out positive, will they be expected to get a PCR test? Where will they get that test? If they are asymptomatic, are they going to be expected to quarantine themselves? If so, for how long?
What will be the costs of sending out these tests? Let’s say a rapid test costs $25 and $5 to mail, that’s $30 per test. At 550 million tests, that is over $16 billion dollars. Then again, that’s just a drop in the bucket when you’re talking about trillions of dollars. They will probably need to assume that people will want more than one test, too.
Of course, we should all be reassured that the government will manage this process:
‘It’s going to be all about the details: how it’s implemented, how these tests are distributed across the country, and most important, how quickly it could happen,’ said Mara Aspinall, the co-founder of the Biomedical Diagnostics program at Arizona State University and board member of rapid test-maker Orasure Technologies Inc. ‘The concept here is great, but we have to be faster than Omicron.’
Right.
I do not understand the reasons for this mass mailing. Unless people have symptoms, they should behave normally. If they get Covid and aren’t vaccinated, that’s their problem. Testing will not stop the spread of Covid. Will it convince some otherwise resistant people to get the vaccine? I doubt it. I can hear the alarm bells going off all over the country.
I think I was correct from the start:
If everything fails, anything will do.
Edit: The government will send out tests on request through its website (which is already crashing). There will not be a mass mailing.
Published in Healthcare
It’s just another gift to Big Pharma.
I’m seeing it referred to as the COVID Testing Industrial Complex, over a $100 Billion a Year Industry.
Directly from the taxpayers to Big Pharma again. And with a revenue stream like that (and associated kickbacks to Congress) this garbage will never end.
Doesn’t spending like this need Congressional approval?!
That’s me! We have spent the last two years frittering away our liberty because of fear.
This must end. And the only way this ends is through mass non-compliance.
Thank the FDA.
This Scientist Created a Rapid Test Just Weeks Into the Pandemic. Here’s Why You Still Can’t Get It.
Too cheap, not enough opportunities for graft.
Jen Psaki Mocked Free At-Home Tests Three Weeks Before Omicron Testing Crisis Hit America
Will a media flack ask her about this?
She’s walked back so many statements already that I doubt if they’ll bother.
Billions of dollars wasted and a new resource constraint created on manufacturing capacity, as if this will have no collateral impact to other users. Classic bureaucratic tunnel vision. ‘Sure we can do that. We’re the government. We can do anything. What’s the manufacturing capacity. We’ll max it out and look like heroes.’ No consideration of the impacts of supply chain constraints on product pricing for nongovernmental customers. There is no way a testing program can get ahead of Omicron. Omicron is like the rumor that makes its way around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on. Just remember, those tax dollars spent to create new capacity , you taxpayers will never see that money again.
Unvaccinated people get symptoms when they are infected which give them a clear indication they either need to be tested or stay home, but vaccinated people who have waning immunity do not get advance warning when they might be infected because their symptoms (and some of their immune systems) are suppressed. So I would issue a couple of tests to every vaccinated person so they could self monitor themselves. Ignoring breakthrough infections is a conscious decision to perpetuate the spread of the pandemic using vaccinated people to spread new variants of Covid. Unvaccinated people will either self isolate or they will not pass on the virus if the have sufficient innate or acquired immunity from prior infection, making it less likely that they will contribute to extending the epidemic indefinitely.
??? I’m not sure where you are getting any of this. Vaccination doesn’t suppress the immune system. Quite the contrary. And I don’t understand about the “advance warning” at all.
Normal inmune response following vaccination becomes biased more toward the generation of antibodies to the spike protein and reduced responses from the parts of the immune system that normally initially encounter the virus. Antibodies are being forced to be produced by the mRNA transfections (‘vaccinations’), but in a normal healthy immune system a mild infection is dealt with entirely by NK cells and T cells. Antibodies don’t get produced unless the infection overwhelms the T cell response. That’s why it is a myth that antibodies are a correlate of immunity. Antibodies are more like garbage collectors cleaning up the bloodstream after a big infection. The rationale used to bias the immune system lower with the transfections is understandable however. In early Covid cases, many peoples’ lives were at severe risk of death from a cytokine storm, which is a response automatically generated by the body itself attempting to deal with massive infection. Reducing that response helps the body survive while undergoing treatment. But this effect could be accomplished with other treatments under a doctor’s supervision, it doesn’t need to be in the vaccine. I think it helps some people survive the initial injection and stimulation of spike protein, which is toxic most places in the body.
Covid symptoms are a body’s advance warning that you might be sick. No symptoms in vaccinated people means you get no advance warning you might have a sufficient viral load to be infective. Published studies documented that vaccinated people can have a viral load as high as unvaccinated people. Meaning they can be just as infectious to others as unvaccinated people. Therefore, vaccinated people ought to be tested as much, if not more than, unvaccinated people. Vaccination for Covid is not an effective means of controlling transmission.
I’m not aware of any measurable amount of reduced response on the part of the natural immune system following a vaccination. I suppose it’s possible, because there is a cost to developing a specific immune response to the vaccine, but until I see where the data on that are coming from, I’m going to assume it’s a negligible factor.
NK cells, yes, but not T cells. Those are part of the acquired immune system. And I would have to see evidence that NK cells are inhibited by a vaccine. I’ve been trying to get myself more educated about immunity in general and viral immunity in particular, and have never run across any suggestion that a vaccine inhibits your natural immune system. Do you have a reference?
But it’s almost the opposite. If you have antibodies, they go to work right away. And whether or not you have a good supply of them in your blood, your B cells will start producing them. No overwhelming of T cells is necessary, though I think there are mechanisms that your body uses to make sure it’s a response that’s really called for. The book Immunity refers to the Thymus as a Murder University where your T cells go for an education on what should and shouldn’t be attacked as foreign to your body. It does take time.
It’s not a myth. It’s a valuable measure that’s easily made in comparison to the difficulty of measuring T cells, but nobody is under the illusion that immunity is all about antibodies. It is definitely a correlate of short-term immune ability, but not a perfect 1.0 even for that.
It’s not just your bloodstream that needs to be cleaned up, and it’s not just a cleanup job that’s done after an infection. And it’s not antibodies that do it. Antibodies are relatively small molecules. They aren’t capable of being garbage collectors. They sometimes mark things (such as viruses) that need to be broken down and cleaned up as garbage, but they aren’t the collectors.
I’ve never heard anybody say anything in the vaccine cleans up the cytokine storm. That’s not its job. The vaccine’s job is to generate an immune response and immune memory to keep your body from getting to that point.
I don’t know that it’s toxic. Spike proteins are broken down by your immune system, as they are something that’s identified as “other” than your body, but I haven’t seen any reason to believe they are toxic other than that they don’t belong and might cause an inflammation in the process of being attacked and removed. The inflammation can be dangerous if it causes something like myocarditis, but it’s not as dangerous as the inflammation that comes in response to full-blown sars-cov-2.
Nobody gets an advance warning until an infection is underway (unless you call a known contact with an infectious person a warning). The symptoms are caused by inflammation and residues from the battle between your immune system and the virus–a battle that takes place inside and outside of your cells.
Can have? Sure. Anything can happen. Everybody’s immune system is different, and in some people in the right circumstances, that might happen. But in the usual course of events in the vast majority of the population? Not likely.
It’s probably effective in reducing the overall rate of transmission, though of course it doesn’t eliminate it. But we can do better than relying on vaccines for protecting people on airline flights, in the workplace, etc. Vaccine mandates are somewhat off target for that, but one suspects that for some people, the mandate is more important than the vaccine.
I am reading Scott Atlas’s book, A Plague Upon Our House. It is excellent and gives a pretty good idea of what is happening now. Fauci and Birks seem completely unable to differentiate between AIDS in which they both worked during its epidemic and Covid. AIDS, of course, is contagious during the period when it is asymptomatic. That is why it was so insidious and such an effective spreader. Covid on the other hand, as I understand it, has to be pretty much in full bloom to spread. In order for a infected person to spread the airborne particles he/she has to have an overabundance of the virus in their airways. That can only happen when the person is symptomatic, or, possibly, just before the symptoms appear. This is the reason why testing became so important to them early on in the pandemic, and likely why it continues to be a fixation in the public mind now.
In any event, it does seem that Fauci and Birks and the rest of the crew that served in the Trump administration did all they could to undermine his presidency, including badmouthing the vaccines when Trump trumpeted their arrival. I have ceased to feel that the Covid epidemic is anything but a political dodgeball that has been thrown around by a herd of incompetent physician/politicians more intent of political gamesmanship than actual public health. They have caused incalcuable damage to children, businesses, and the whole culture and economy of the country while doing very little to protect the most vulnerable.
Trump, had he had more guts, could have fired Fauci, Birks and company, and hired people who were far better equipped to do the job. His inexperience and his unwillingness to have real face-to-face confrontations with that crew may be as big a failure as January 6th. He found it easy to banter with the press. They were an easy target. However, going after the real enemy within, the leftist bureaucrats running the pandemic response and simultaneously undermining, not only Trump but anyone in his administration who said anything contrary to their party line, comes down to pure cowardice. Trump is a typical bully, and that characteristic cost him the election and the country dearly.
Let me say something that may not be popular. Trump did some great things while in office, but he was a rank amateur with little or no real understanding of leadership and even less real character. His obvious failures kept him and will, very likely, keep him from being reelected. We need to find someone with more real experience and character to lead the country out of the wilderness that Biden and his trained monkeys are creating.
Ray, I have read that with the two-shot version of this vax, the period between the vaccines is a period where your immune system is suppressed, and when many end up getting COVID anyway. I believe this has been documented, but I don’t have time to chase it down. But there seems to be a correlation between when vaccines kicked off in many countries, and a sharp increase in cases (which is to say, after initial vaccines began, cases rose sharply indicating that people were getting COVID after one shot but before the second).
It’s a shame that people who actually know this stuff are being silenced and called “kooks” because they won’t mouth the official party dogma. Galileo would understand. The ruling class tells us to “trust the science” but they’re not doing science. If you won’t allow different views and different approaches to a problem and you have your buddies in the media and big tech conglomerates censor people, you’re not doing science.
Fauci is never going to say or do anything that will contradict that which he has already said and done. That’s bureaucratic butt-covering, not science. Dissent is actively suppressed. Some of the dissent is hogwash. Some of it (the Great Barrington Declaration) is mocked, but it has 900k signatures.
Took Monday and then Friday driving to kids got results that were inconclusive. Returned home.
Following Monday: Quick test, long test from health department. Both negative.
Tuesday next day: Test for an unrelated medical procedure. Positive. Same day antibody test. Positive
Good grief, David. You must be going nuts! What is a person supposed to trust anymore? What are you concluding? Or are you going to ignore the whole thing?
And some have 15,000 signatures.
Just when you think it can’t get any worse . . .
The Great Barrington Declaration didn’t need 900K signatures to be believed. Anyone with half a brain and any background in biological sciences who is unwilling to get pulled into the Orson Welles War of the Worlds panic realizes that the media, Fauci, and Birks, and Francis Collins all conspired at some level to destroy the Trump presidency. They did so using statements that denied basic science and reality as anyone who has lived five minutes experiences it. From the very beginnings of this mess we were lied to. Instead of accumulating data on spread and natural immunity and how many people were actually infected and symptomatic wildly inaccurate numbers were thrown out at the public to incite panic. When Trump was still in charge we were told that the vaccines were dangerous and rushed. Then suddenly we were told under Biden that they were not only safe but completely effective and mandatory. The endless barrage of lies on all sides has been outrageous.
My Bachelor’s degree is in Biology. I graduated with twice the number of credits in Biological Sciences that were required for my major. I had wanted to be a doctor, but that changed. However, over the years I haven’t lost my understanding of science, particularly having to do with disease and health. When I first saw the ridiculous response to the pandemic, idiocies like people being concerned about catching the disease from the expelled air from a passing car and a host of other superstitious nonsense, what I saw was herd panic. Otherwise rational people were surrendering their normal, rational thinking to that of a stampeding herd. Their fear and panic were exacerbated by a media that was acting out of political motives, but also out of a simple-minded desire to watch the show and feed the absurdity. A bit like people in a Halloween haunted house feeding into each others’ fears to heighten the experience. I found and continue to find the entire farce to be just that. I am not denying the nastiness of this disease, but this isn’t 1918, and this disease isn’t that deadly flu. So long as people allow this to continue in its current mode it will. We all need to stand up and yell, Enough is Enough, I am mad as hell, and I won’t take it anymore! Then, maybe, we can go back to normal life again. Merry Christmas.
Vinny Prasad just yesterday put up an article (“At a time when the U.S. needed Covid-19 dialogue between scientists, Francis Collins moved to shut it down”) about the Francis Collins e-mail to “Tony and Cliff” that was obtained by FOIA:
After seeing your comment I went to look at the date. Yes, Trump was still President then: 8 October 2020.
I think we make a big mistake when we think they do all this just so they can be seen to be doing something.
I think if you follow the money, you’ll see that almost all government action is about the Benjamins.
At the highest levels, there are puppeteers. But the people on the ground, I believe, want to do things to maintain power. So the top and bottom folk ultimately are on the same page. I believe.
This was last May and I do believe I had Covid then. About two weeks before all this, I had some symptoms but was since cleared to go back to work.
Thanksgiving we had a repeat with the false positive for my wife. So, no I don’t put a lot of stock. The test I trust the most is the antibodies test but my medical authorities don’t like that test because there is no real data as to how to advise – does having antibodies mean I don’t have to get vaccinated. If so what level? But with the home test I don’t trust. It said my wife either had Covid or was pregnant. (:o)
The results you reported sound like the home tests were working, don’t they? Except I’m not aware of any home test that doubles as a pregnancy test. (If it weren’t for home pregnancy tests, we might never have gotten home covid tests. The pregnancy tests also had to go through a lot of resistance at the FDA, so they sort of broke the ice.)
No. Got a positive and negative within an hour last Thanksgiving. Even if they are 70% accurate you really don’t know.
In the sense that they both know that it’s all an act?
So they are mailing a kit to everyone? Is that the plan? It is ludicrous. And a waste of money.
I now understand they’ll mail on requests thru a new website. I expect it will be disastrous.
I have a vague recollection of reading that it is being done that way in one or two European countries, but I don’t know any details or how it is working in practice. I have confidence that the Biden administration will find a way to do it badly.
There have been multiple recent studies, the most recent noteworthy one from Denmark shows vaccine efficacy declining to negative numbers against Omicron. There’s also a UK study that show interference of the vaccine at 42 weeks with those who got the vaccine before getting Covid producing a weaker T cell response. Steve Kirsch on his substack Dec 24 has an excellent article [“New studies show that the COVID vaccines damage your immune system, likely permanently,” https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/new-study-shows-vaccines-must-be], including links to the Denmark study.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.20.21267966v2
Here is a link to a review by Jonathan J Couey, “5+1 Concerns about SARS-CoV2 Biology: A Call to Pause, Deliberate and Revise Policy,” which includes 62 references. He puts out a stream on Twitch multiple times per week. [https://m.twitch.tv/gigaohmbiological/home]
https://gigaohmbiological.com/review
If that’s accurate, the solution to COVID is to stop vaccinating people immediately.