Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
“Something Is Better Than Nothing” Reasoning
I read too much about Covid, clot shots, therapeutics, immunity suppression, to keep it all straight and properly document my arguments. But this story bubbles up all my frustrations about the public health response tyranny that has taken over all of our lives since 2020: CDC Issues New COVID-19 Guidance After FDA Makes Change.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued new guidance to people with weak immune systems, saying they should take extra precautions after a key COVID-19 antibody treatment’s emergency use authorization was pulled by another federal agency.
The guidance again calls for immunocompromised individuals to wear masks and engage in social distancing, the CDC’s revised guidance says, despite CDC-cited studies and data suggesting that masks provide little effectiveness in blocking the transmission of COVID-19. Some former federal officials have said that the six-foot social distancing rule adopted around the United States in early 2020 was arbitrary.
Last week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pulled its authorization of Evusheld, a combination antibody treatment that is given to people with weak immune systems. The agency said that it is not effective against most of the COVID-19 Omicron subvariants that are currently circulating around the United States, including the XBB subvariants and the BQ strain.
Of course, other reports indicate that a lot of people who received the initial Covid “vaccines” and “boosters” now qualify as “immunocompromised.” And there is the theory/observation that a leaky “vaccine” mass administered in the middle of a pandemic has made the virus more lethal.
We’re all screwed. I get it. And so it is that when you don’t know what to do, something is better than nothing. Is it? Is that science’s answer for us now?! Keep your distance — let’s say (wet finger in the air) six feet. Put those helpful plastic foot decals down in the cashier’s queue so people know how far six feet is. Put up a plastic shield (that make it so you can’t hear but you can still share your air). Wear a face diaper of any type — because as much as 3% protection is better than nothing, right? Don’t shake hands, don’t hug…just “don’t.”
See, we did so much better than Sweden, right? Except we didn’t. And now Sweden is screwed along with the rest of us because this “wet market” virus is mutating like a son of a b*tch and killing an “excess” amount of us. Climate alarmists should be delighted.
Sometimes something is not better than nothing. Sometimes it is just something. A pacifier. A control mechanism. A placebo. A distraction.
Published in General
And the governor of my state of Texas just extended covid emergency measures. Lots of small government conservatism going around.
You echo my own feelings, Rodin. I’m sick of all of it. The CDC and FDA have zero credibility with me.
Judging from the title this post could have been about gun control or any number of things now that I think about it. I guess it shows a certain mindset of those who support government intervention regardless of it’s effectiveness.
True that.
“Sometimes something is not better than nothing. Sometimes it is just something. A pacifier. A control mechanism. A placebo. A distraction.”
Yes, all of that. Also there are a lot of people who believe everything is under their control. In the pandemic, we saw it with people who judged others who got COVID: “Oh, you know, he went to the grocery store and didn’t wear a mask, he should have known better.” But it’s always been there.
The masks, etc., are just another way they can feel all-powerful. They’ve done the proper things and therefore, they’re smart and nothing bad will happen to them.
I always wonder what that shock must be like when they realize that, you know, sometimes things just … happen. That you’re not omnipotent.
Action bias is the psychological phenomenon where people tend to favor action over inaction, even when there is no indication that doing so would point towards a better result. It is an automatic response, similar to a reflex or an impulse and is not based on rational thinking.
In the field of medicine this is called intervention bias.
“Don’t just do something. Stand there.”
It is? Looks to me like cases (whatever a “case” looks like) and deaths “from COVID” continue to drop. In the U.S., in Sweden, . . . around the world. (Oh, sure, there are some tiny countries that have a 400% increase! Because they went from 1 case to 4.)
The trend-lines have been flattened. We didn’t even have the holiday spike of the last couple years.
I guess that’s why Pfizer wants new mutations, eh?
One of the controversies now is whether they are undercounting Covid deaths. After all you want your public health strategies to be a success (but not so successful that you completely lose control of the populations fear response). My MIL tested positive for Covid during her final illness. But she did not die until after the official illness period was over, she did not have shortness of breath. She was aged, suffered from dementia, had pains that were likely from her chronic back problem (but could no longer accurately articulate them), and so when she passed the cause of death was listed as “Alzheimer’s late onset”. But was Covid implicated? I don’t know.
Now that it’s all said and done (if it’s all done, and all said) I’ve been wondering just why they chose the most dangerous part of the virus (that is, the most interactive; that is, the spike protein; that is, the part that was (most) humanly engineered; that is the part that makes it the most virulent; that is, the part that actually adheres to human cells; AND the part with the inserted HIV coding) to be replicated by the human body. Instead of, say, part of the more general capsule surface.
That is to say, if I had the choice of dropping an unloaded gun into the fire, or the bullets, I think I’d drop the gun in.
It’s like having the body create the metal blade of the spear instead of the wooden shaft.
What were these guys really thinking?
Depopulation?
If I am using your analogy correctly they were making bullet casings with different loads that would be fired out of the same gun instead of manufacturing unique guns for each disease. They thought: one delivery system and we make loads of $$$$$$$$$$$$$.
Well, that’s one theory — both fast (sudden death) and slow (infertility).
I just read an article in the WSJ that said the govt. jumped on the mRNA vaccines because they could be manufactured quickly. Also, the J&J vaccine had less effectiveness up front, but provided protection for a longer time.
The important thing is that we pretend that those in official positions know what they are doing and follow their guidance. We must treat the white-coat bureaucrats as high priests otherwise society will collapse.
And we have a lousy class of high priests. Roman priests accepted bribes from the father of the bride to find only good omens in the bird entrails. Priests of the old Indo-European goddess cults would advise young women to cavort in the nude under a full moon to let the moonlight induce pregnancy–no real harm and probably a good time for the priests and their buds hiding in the woods nearby.
Our high priests are more like the Aztec ones, if the sacrifices don’t work, just double down on the number of victims and never admit failure or the costs of the program.
Yes, this is what Fauci touted a month or two before the pandemic. IIRC he said that there could be a vaccine generator in every home in the world that just prints out the vaccine with every new epidemic before it goes pandemic. Starting in places, like oh, say, China.
But the speed of creating the vaccines was not just technical speed. He also said that they would need a pandemic to jump start the mRNA technology and bypass all the nations’ legal safety research requirements.
Oddly, that’s just what they did. And now we have these “excess” deaths and wide spread immune suppression.
But still, the HIV coding … spliced into a spike … engineered to be more functional (and virulent) than in nature … being the thing that the vaccine ultimately creates, is to this non-biologist, just incredibly stupid or else foreseeable and deliberate. And this is not just in hindsight, I wondered about it the very first time I read it.
This spike was what they wanted to reproduce within the body, and it was, as far as I know, the only engineered part.
Yes, I understand the thinking that “if everything works we can make specific vaccines targeted to each variant and deliver it in no time — a new vaccine every day if necessary” but still they chose the most dangerous part of the virus to be replicated.
It is worse, they wrapped it in a lipid envelope, which allowed it to pass into the brain.
I don’t think our immune systems are able to have immunity to everything all the time.
For many years I was a faithful reader of Wesley J. Smith‘s National Review Online column. I don’t read his work anymore because I can’t handle the truth of my fellow human beings’ behaviors and decision-making. One thing I got out of it was the knowledge of how difficult it is to define (a) a point and time of death and (b) a cause of death.
His foray into the once-noble organ donation program was so upsetting to me that I want nothing to do with it. It’s not clear for some organs that the hospitals are waiting as they should for actual death to occur. There’s pressure on them to get as many organs as they can, and those organs are best when the heart is still beating to keep them alive. Young accident victims are the most at risk for this treatment by the medical community.
There are some diagnoses such as Alzheimer’s–a word we throw around way too casually these days–that cannot be made without an actual autopsy. There are many causes for what looks like dementia–including simple depression and loneliness and not enough coffee (caffeine). We are hastily throwing people into memory care units rather than working to get to the root cause of the problem. The mass media has portrayed, and in so doing romanticized, cases of Alzheimer’s and dementia for years now, and, like the idea that every American is a racist, these ideas have stuck even though they are wrong. And they do harm to people.
Now the media is pushing the gallantry of hurrying to die. It’s for the young people’s sake, of course.
The politicization of the covid virus is not a new phenomenon. I watched the same thing happen with autism. We went from a very specific set of clinical symptoms–extreme to see and easy to assess–to creating “the spectrum.” Follow the money. It happened when school districts could charge Medicaid (the federal government pays half) for school assistance for anyone on “the spectrum.” I don’t blame the school districts. They were merely reacting to the federal laws mandating they pay whatever bills come along related to “special education.”
It’s a game we play.
Is you faith in Dr. Fauci wavering?
With each new revelation, I’m more thankful that I didn’t get the shot.
No, my benefit-of-the-doubt excuse-making for line microbiologists, immunologists, biochemists, virologists and physiologists is waning.
This is in belated reaction to people provocatively saying two years ago “Do you really think microbiologists and virologists want to kill everyone?” in defense of everyone who worked in labs to produce the specific covid vaccines. I say “provocative” because the question presupposes that any dangers were foreseeable and were ignored, and so people would automatically say, “No”. Now I’m beginning to think that the dangers must have been foreseen by professionals, both in detail and in principle, and ignored.
I mean if I was concerned about it, why weren’t the line professionals concerned about it? I had to take their word for it. My PA — ex-military and not given to conspiracy theories (and I’m pretty sure he’s older than I am) — has never gotten the vaccine, and got covid 2 years ago, and his antibody titers at one year and two years were positive. If he can guess about the possible risks and decline the vaccine, why can’t those who designed, produced and tested it be even more in the know? And why have nearly none of them spoken out about it, then or since?
You and me both. I keep thinking that if I had gotten jabbed with that poison, I’d be constantly worrying about when the heart attack would come. I’d feel like my days were numbered.
Well, any self respecting governor who becomes aware of any methods by which their state and perhaps by extension their own pocketbook could glom onto any of the 6 trillion to 17trillion bucks worth of US Fed governmental COVID monies would be an idiot to not do some glomming!
It’s the American way!
Just curious: what reasoning do you use when speaking with others? My quick and dirty excuse is my doc tried to push statins and BP prescriptions on me when I didn’t need them.
So my rule is that I don’t take medicine I don’t need.
Nobody’s really asked. I think someone asked early in 2021 (when they were still telling us these things were more than 90% effective) and because I’d had COVID already, I just said that we were enjoying natural immunity. But I can’t really remember anyone asking me much about it. Not for a very long time.