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It’s the Stupidity, Stupid
“The best way for people to prevent spread is to get vaccinated … second best is to wear masks.” – Justice Kagan
This is so stunningly counterfactual, so blindingly stupid that it is upsetting that a Supreme Court Justice deciding federal COVID policy made this statement. How can she not know that infection case numbers have not in any way declined anywhere on the planet as a result of large vaccination rates? How can she not know that mask mandates (even with actual high usage) have resulted in immeasurably small to nonexistent reductions in spread? How can she not know that federal “experts” have recently declared cloth and surgical masks to be useless — after two years hectoring us to use them?
How scary is it that this highly qualified, high-ranking federal judge is not only spectacularly misinformed but seemingly confident in her grasp of the issues? Does mere membership in the bubble-dwelling self-congratulatory elite excuse this kind of cognitive malpractice?
What does this woman read, watch and listen to—and what other spectacularly wrong opinions has she formed as a result? What the hell happened to America’s highly educated class that this kind of kneejerk partisan error is not an embarrassment but a norm.
It is healthy to have policy differences among Americans but when those we should be able to look to make the best-grounded, well-reasoned arguments for their side choose to be intellectually lazy to the point of absurdity, we have a real problem.
Published in General
That’s hardly relevant to the question of whether the vaccinated get infected at a higher rate than the unvaccinated, i.e. whether there is a higher risk of infection if you are vaccinated. That’s what I thought you had meant.
It’s shocking, to be honest. As well as Sotomayor apparently believing “100,000 children” are in hospitals because of the virus (it’s about 3,300), and Breyer saying about not allowing the order “if we delay it a day, if it were to have effect, then 750,000 more people will have COVID who otherwise, if we didn’t delay it, would not have.”
Shockingly stupid for our supposed elites.
By “trend” I just meant that of all infected persons, the percentage of vaxed infected will inevitably increase. Remember when this was considered an unexpected oddity called a “breakthrough” infection? Because we are obsessed with “cases” and pointless testing rather than sickness and death this will appear to matter more than it does, especially for people who believe Fauci.
Because we don’t have a great handle on transmission and because the asymptomatic are likely infectious for a much shorter period of time, a positive result is likely reported after infectiousness has passed. Contact tracing has not been a big success. Latency, dormancy, chains of asymptomatic transfer and mystery vectors (household cats and wild deer also test positive) mean that it is largely futile to try to isolate the infected in some systematic way. The consensus view in 2019 as reported by the Johns Hopkins pandemic experts was that quarantine for respiratory pandemics would not work. Only after there arose a political need to Do Something was this put into practice —with predictable results.
They count people as unvaccinated for 14 days after they get the jab. That’s when a lot of infections occur. It’s another reason why you have to be skeptical about the numbers.
That’s reasonable for most purposes. Maybe 11-12 days would be a better interval. The tests that were done on the Pfizer vaccine in order to get approval showed that the protection really didn’t kick in until about day 10-11. Maybe 14 to be sure. It takes your body that long to develop the immune response. It doesn’t happen instantaneously and isn’t expected to happen instantaneously. Well, I was planning for it to happen instantaneously when I got my shot, and was planning to go about my business as though I was vaccinated the minute I stepped out of the clinic. Then I looked at the graph from the Pfizer report.
That graph was floating around on the internet at the time, and it was the basis for some people saying we should go with the approach used in the UK, of giving one shot and worrying about the rest later. This was before we learned that there were a lot of people who didn’t want to get vaccinated, period, and we were also dealing with a shortage of supply of vaccine in response to the demand. In retrospect, it would have been better to to delay the 2nd shot and not go with a rushed two-week interval, and that wasn’t surprising to all immunologists either, but at the time we were trying to do as much as we could, as quickly as possible. It was a matter of short-term vs longer-term effectiveness.
Regarding “stopping the spread” and similar talk….
Here in New York, a textbook example of what not to do where the Wuhan coronavirus is concerned, we had signs on stores throughout 2020 imploring us to “help beat COVID.”
It has never been clear to me what “beating COVID” would look like. And lately I’ve been thinking that it would be fun to make a little video spoofing someone in officialdom trying to answer that question:
Q. You say “We have to beat COVID.” What does that mean, exactly?
A. We have to defeat it.
Q. Defeat…. Could you expand on that?
A. Vanquish. Crush.
Q. Okay, yes. But in terms of, you know, epidemiology, what are we talking about? What is our measure of success here?
A. We’re talking about winning. We’re talking about winning against COVID.
Q. But what does that mean? Does it mean completely eradicating the virus? Achieving some rate of infection? Some number of deaths? What, precisely?
A. What does it mean? It means doing whatever it takes to prevail.
Q.
A. Next question.
Increased spread of COVID despite high vaccination rates is due to the advent of a more infections variant, Omicron, not because vaccines don’t work. Vaccines reduced the chance of infection even with Omicron and make infections milder. Masks help, but only at the 25% reduction rate or so. They are worth using but there are too many other factors at work to conclude anything from aggregate infection rates.
I can see how one might reasonably expect a marginal benefit from masks but it has not worked out that way. The recent backtracking by “experts” about the efficacy of cloth and surgical masks is a belated acknowledgment of statistical reality.
Clearly, a lot of people (including many clinicians) cling to the paradigm that COVID transmission must be all or mostly sick-to-healthy transmission so models of blocking sneezes and coughs must somehow translate into measurable reductions. A (very optimistic) reduction of 25% in instances that account for only part of the spread isn’t going to amount to much, especially if it cannot realistically be sustained.
It is not that a cough in the face is not an infection opportunity. It is that this is clearly not the primary way this bug gets around. Masks offer limited control over one infection scenario that is likely not the main one.
A major point of the 1992 Hope-Simpson book and his detailed review of past pandemics is that if you think respiratory viruses are mostly sick-to-healthy transmission then the actual simultaneous regional incidence of the pandemics makes no sense. The damn things get around regardless of NPIs and we clearly do not have a handle on the range of transmission modes and vectors or requisite viral load or the role of dormancy.
That is also why quarantines, contact tracing, border closings, lockdowns do not work. Those methods would be effective against Ebola or some other explicitly sick-to-healthy transmitted disease but not respiratory pandemics.
Most states in Germany moved to mandating N95s early. Compliance pct is consistently in the nineties. Germany has had identical case curves and a higher COVID death rate than maskless Sweden. You would think that there would have been some departure in trend lines given the duration of policy differences. The argument that we will not see the true benefit of masks in the “aggregate” is pretty lame by now.
Studies seem pretty unanimous that mask use by medical professionals is more effective than use by laymen. Knowledge, quality, fit and better practice are key. I would also state with confidence that masks properly deployed in conjunction with a comprehensive set of protocols and behaviors to build a protected space are invaluable. The Great Barrington guys were right—focus on protection strategies for the vulnerable rather than general suppression strategies that can never work. Masks used right in building a safe space for Granny make a hell of a lot more sense than wearing a bandanna in the checkout line (dutifully six feet behind the person in front).
I am excited about this type of vaccine, and I am an adventuresome person anyway so I don’t mind that it is new. I’m happy to participate in this experiment. I am also a fan of Moderna. I think it is a good company with a solid purpose, and I always admire that kind of mission clarity in an organization.
But I am against the mandate with every fiber of my being.
I’m sure the justices are considering this from two angles: One, if they toss out the mandate on human rights grounds, it will set a precedent. What if a far worse contagion comes along? Two, if they toss the mandate on human rights grounds, it will end the mandatory vaccines for entrance to school and the military too.
The right answer to the first problem is, Trust the people to understand that. Talk to them. Sell them the treatment or medicine or vaccine. Do not use force. The government created by Adams and Jefferson was an attempt to formalize trust of the average person. Although I cannot find the quote right now (I stumbled upon it when I was working with our local school committee years ago), Thomas Jefferson was once asked if he could have only one, public schools or public libraries, which would he prefer. He was a lifelong staunch advocate for excellence in public schools, but his answer was public libraries. :-) He believed in us. We owe it to him to believe in each other. Talk to me. Don’t force me.
The right answer to the second problem is, Trust the parents or guardians to make those decisions. There is no threat of polio now. If there ever is one again, parents will get their children vaccinated. End of problem.
This decision the Supreme Court is making may be the most important in our country’s history.
Then they should just toss it as not allowable under the law creating OSHA.
Or, a ruling that while there is zero legal authority it is still ok if enlightened people think it is a good idea. Ruth Bader Ginsburg would have readily written that opinion.
Whatever the benefits of vaccination (and I don’t see any data-grounded reason why anybody aged 50 and up or immuno-compromised or metabolically impaired would not voluntarily choose to get the shot), it doesn’t do much to inhibit spread. The Fauci Vaccine Assumption was flat wrong.
I don’t think your opening phraselogy helps at all.
Why can’t we be told why there should be a mandate, in other words, how does a mandate improve conditions in society.
Those not being vaccinated have their own reasons and they don’t intersect.
Seventy percent turned out to be wrong with the last two big variants, but at the time it seemed plausible to me, especially if you consider that part of the remaining 30 percent of the population had immunity from infection. I don’t listen to Fauci so don’t know the context in which he originally stated it, but it sounds as though he didn’t lay out any caveats or conditions with his statement. Government doesn’t do nuance very well.
I listened when Trump was POTUS and I think Fauci was projecting that vaccinated people would not be infected and would not transmit the virus.
If he was looking at the data submitted to the FDA, he would have known that some vaccinated people would be infected and therefore would likely transmit. (With the latest variants it’s a higher percentage of people than under those original phase 3 tests.)
When I wrote that last comment I almost added “at a rate high enough to be notable” or some such.
I guess I have a high standard for people who get to make forever decisions about my liberties. I want that one in a million smartness and wisdom.
I’m not going get into how masks were sold to us as stopping coughing and sneezing a distance up to six feet, but that masks and physical distancing don’t work. I’m not going to get into how vaccines were sold to us as a means of stopping mask wearing, that they were supposed to prevent infection and transmission, but they don’t work. Or how vaccines are now touted as ameliorating symptoms and illness and death, but treatment modalities are still banned.
Instead, what I’m going to say it that in my part of the world everyone is dutifully complaint with masks. And yet yesterday I went to the range to recertify, and went indoors and didn’t wear a mask. And no one said anything. And I went out and popped off fifty rounds and never wore a mask. And I talked to people only some of whom were masked, and I never wore a mask, and people noticed that I had such a sparkling personality, which is a first.
It was a very good day.
The use of the passive voice (in bold) doesn’t move the discussion forward. It doesn’t provide anyone with information they can use or present arguments they can use.
It’s true, though, that masks and social distancing haven’t cured cancer. Nor have they facilitated space travel. So you are right to say that they don’t work.
This is just lame.
I’m glad you approve.
Even lamer.
We have a problem with Supreme Court justices making vague, inaccurate statements about covid and what the vaccines are capable of doing. If they would be more accurate and precise in their language, our liberties would not be in such danger. The same is true when people here on Ricochet make vague, inaccurate statements about what “we were told” or what was “sold to us.” Our liberties are not going to be safe unless they can be more specific.
The passive voice was given as a gift to me within the language. I use it. If you don’t know who I’m talking about, you didn’t hear or don’t remember the various remarks made by government officers over the last two years.
The passive voice is great for avoiding the identification of the cause or source of the action. It’s appropriate in some cases. But no, I don’t listen to government officers. Life is too short for that. I listen to scientists and physicians who have demonstrated that they know what they’re talking about. I don’t trust government officers any more than I trust people who use the passive voice to avoid identifying the players and actions they are talking about.
I heard and remember everything you recalled. Biden definitely did not use the passive voice when informing Americans what he would do as POTUS, none of which has happened.
Since you keep belittling us who sometimes use the passive voice when describing what many of us heard virtually every government official and major media outlet telling the public in early to mid 2021 (get vaccinated just once (two shots) and you won’t get sick, and you won’t spread disease so you can resume normal life), you could help us by pointing out the apparently many government officials and media sources that at the time that were offering up a different message – saying Covid vaccines would not prevent us from getting the disease, would not prevent transmission of the virus, and would have to be repeated on a frequent schedule.
I know that I witnessed Joe Biden after he was elected POTUS tell the American people in answer to a question from the press corps that the vaccines that were just being authorized on an emergency basis would not be mandated by him. No one thought his position didn’t match his record at that point.
The evidence is out there that his family members have received large monetary payoffs absent any evidence that they were earned or justified in any way. This makes me wonder what is behind his reversals on statements that previously we would have thought they matched his historic political positions now change to something most think he would never have stated before occupying the White House. Is he indebted by previous actions to go along with positions being dictated by globalists wedded to climate change and the great reset? Is he bought and paid for?