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Fauci Moves the Goalposts
This is brutal, and it sums up what I think of the public health profession. Were they ready for any aspect of this pandemic?
I'm not an expert on this, and neither is Fauci, but my guess is that consciously moving the goalposts IS NOT a way to instill trust in public health officials and their pronouncements. https://t.co/E28L3rKnPk
— Howard Wall 🔕🏆 (@HJWallEcon) December 24, 2020
BTW, Howard Wall has a great Twitter account.
Published in Healthcare
Well said.Â
Are you familiar with the Nero Wolfe detective stories, and the great man’s mastery of language?
Same reason Bill Gates was given 10 minutes of prime time air time on German television.
Who’s face is Morticia’s?
To your doctor friend, I say, “[Expletive] you.”
The fake woman Surgeon General of Pennsylvania I think.
I think she’s Grandmama. I mean the one standing next to
CuomoGomez.That’s the Los Angeles county public health executive.Â
RUMOR: For Entertainment Purposes Only
Per RumorMillNews.com (it really is rumors) says that no one has been able to speak to Tiffany Dover, the ICU Nurse Manager at CHI Memorial in Chatanooga TN, since she was filmed fainting. The rumor is that her friends have been trying to contact her and haven’t been able to. There’s more rumoring involved.
It’s probably just embarrassment and wanting to avoid the Press.
You are missing the point. Fauci is making it clear that government is no longer accountable. We get to hear what they need us to hear. We are not participants, we are not empowered. There is no price to be paid for lying because that’s what they decided was best for us to believe at the time.
It was clear in July that Fauci had a political, butt-covering agenda. Rand Paul asked in a hearing if some kind of herd immunity had been reached for the obvious reason that cases had dropped in the normal fashion for an outbreak. NY’s curve was identical to MA and NJ (and Sweden and Italy…) and all declined in the same fashion at the same rate. Fauci sputtered that “you are alone” believing  22% (I did not know the feds were admitting the case incidence in NYC was even that high) was herd immunity. And that the the big drop in daily cases was entirely due to Gov. Cuomo following CDC advice(!!?) No admission that we were looking at a Gompertz curve like any other epidemic. This was a week after he speculated that T-cell immunity from similar coronavirus exposures made 60% to 80% of us highly resistant, if not fully immune which makes it highly unlikely that it can spread unchecked and therefore a 20% incidence would be close to functional herd immunity.
Fauci knows that all of the government interventions have had little effect, certainly not worth the cost in dollars, sanity and general health. He knows that he is simply providing cover for disastrously wrong policies he helped to foster. I hate the guy. He is a complete weasel.
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Parents stopped eating? A sign of cancer?
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It’s all a lie.
I, 64 years old, hypertensive, diabetic, and an unemployed cancer survivor, had Covid three weeks ago, you can see my post about it.  So did my 66 year old immune-compromised wife.  We were rather sick for about a week, like a bad flu.  We cared for each other and stayed out of the hospital. Now we’re both well, although Mrs Dr Robert still has reduced sense of smell and taste (but these are recovering).
It’s all a lie.
We don’t doubt the US has suffered 100,000-150,000 deaths due to Covid.  But as everyone knows, these were almost entirely in the very high risk population, such as people sent to nursing homes by governors Cuomo and Baker.
It’s all a lie.
Our shutting down the economy for more than a week or two in March has been the cause of orders of magnitude more suffering and death than has the virus.
It’s all a lie.
One must ask, why would our “public health”, journalism and political establishments collaborate in such a lie?
To know why, check out the events of February 4-5, 2020.
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The Iowa caucus was delayed by “technology issues” on the 4th. Congress acquitted PDT of both articles of impeachment on the 5th.Â
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To prevent President Trump from being re-elected.
The Democrat/Deep State axis of evil caused death and suffering on an enormous scale — and continue to do so — in order to ensure that the President not be re-elected.
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They’ll do anything to acquire power. Anything.
I completely agree with this. Republicans and libertarians that are idealistic about civics are morons.Â
The train left the station during Woodrow Wilson. I posted a Judge Learned Hand quote and a video, earlier. Look at it.Â
We don’t have “shovel-ready” health care professionals. Meaning if we found a giant pile of Aztec diamonds buried in a secret vault under the Capitol building, you can’t buy into reality tens of thousands of people with the requisite skillset you might want or need, in the space of months, or years. This is true for armies as it is for accountants.
So – when demand for resources exceeds supply, you slap more hours onto the backs of people already in those roles, and create incentives for more people to start entering the pipeline for that future need, assuming it will exist in perpetuity. Once COVID dies down, the resources you put in the pipeline might find themselves idled or eventually let go, because the demand has decreased, and no one, including hospitals, likes to pay for things unused.
This will boil down to reimbursement rates, for government health care and private. Because if you want more ICU beds available during emergencies, pandemics, Godzilla attacks, etc, then you can have as many as you want, but you’ll have to be willing to pay for them. Considering Medicare/Medicaid’s cost transfers onto private insurance rates, this would cause private insurance rates to jump even higher, annually.
Hospitals budget like any other business operation, generally. They look at historic caseload levels, the types of cases, how many treated, by department, including all the labor components (doctors, nurses, PAs), and overheads (HR, IT, etc), as get allocated across all the cost centers. Then they guesstimate what it’ll be next year, and boom – next year’s budget. Most states also set percentage budget increase levels, so whatever is guesstimated, will have to fall under that cap, and if/when it’s approved, you get what you get, and make do.
In other words, if you’re looking for long-term strategic thinking, our system is not set up that way, and will not be successful in every instance.Â
Oh, and all states do this stuff differently, even down to county levels, different hospital groups, and different ways of analyzing data to form their budgets.
Texas, I assume?
https://dshs.texas.gov/coronavirus/schools/texas-education-agency/
If all the schools have been open since Labor Day, that means (if I’ve got this right) that close to 3 million K-12 students have been broadly exposed to the virus. The math says 2.2% of them have the virus, and that 4.5% of teachers have it.
Unless I’ve missed something in the news (and I don’t watch TV news, and I only scan headlines), I don’t recall tens of thousands of children dying in Texas, nor tens of thousands of teachers. If you *do* catch the virus, the death rate is 1.6%, overall.
Conclusion: You can safely open up the schools. The infection rate is tiny, you quarantine those who have it, vaccinate the rest, and move on.
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They were only empty b/c that idiot Cuomo (but I repeat myself) insisted on sending COVID positive nursing home patients  back to the nursing home (and he mandated they accept them). He should have sent them to the empty Javits Center or the empty USN Comfort to recover until COVID negative- but rather than admit his error he sent patients infected with a highly lethal virus INTO the nursing homes. This lead to thousands (perhaps 10,000) avoidable deaths. Or he could have kept them in the hospitals and used the Javits/Comfort to take care of patients displaced from the hospitals (by the elderly COVID+)  who didn’t require intense care. But Cuomo’s narcissist personality would rather accept deaths than alter his policy.
Is there a way to understand Cuomo’s behavior apart from narcissistic personality disorder? Sincere question. What (the hell) was he thinking? Was he “just following (CDC) orders?” I get very confused by people who do such obviously foolish things. We all make mistakes and act foolishly sometimes, but we rarely kill thousands of people with them.
There are a few cases of good strategic thinking on pandemics over the last quarter century-but since they reflect well on the GOP & poorly on Democrats you are unlikely to read about them. To wit:
1) After the anthrax scare GWB created the national PPE stockpile- but during the H1N1 pandemic worry the Obama-Biden administration used the supplies but did NOT replenish them. They deemed it more impressive to waste $ on Solyndra.
2) Gov Terminator in California prepared an emergency medical system with 2000 ventilators and 2 mobile field hospitals for the state to have in case of medical disasters. But Gov Brown get rid of it b/c he didn’t want to spend the required money on maintenance and warehousing- b/c we should spend the money. I suppose, on a high speed rail line to nowhere or something.
3) The state of NY appointed a medical commission to look into preparing for medical emergencies and in 2015 it clearly outlined the likelihood of a severe ventilator shortage (16000 more needed) in a severe pandemic. But instead of purchasing ventilators the state came up with a strategy to ration them. The cost of the ventilators is estimated to be less than how much NY state lost on the stupid solar cell factory in Buffalo.
I got attacked personally on another thread about this stuff and I am now being totally vindicated and I love it.Â
All it takes is the understanding of the definitions of words and the existence of space-time. It’s not that hard. lol
If the story of COVID were about some overreach in March of April followed by more targeted, far less costly prudent measures, it would be a salutary outcome. Like doubling down on the Westmoreland strategy in Vietnam or the War on Poverty, the real crime was not having the integrity and humility to change course when it was clear that not only was the policy failing but doing so at great cost. Eight months of social and economic disaster solely to protect the image and egos of those who promoted this garbage.
Ongoing business costs – some of the first things to go in budgets are these. It’s short-sighted and ultimately costs much more in the longer run.
Having been in a business where lots of things were funded by government grants and by private grants, I learned early on that you can get money to build lots of new things. Nobody is going to give you money to maintain existing facilities.
Our pastor was head of some YMCA committee that was doing a big expansion project. The common saying in his group was, “We could get the money to build a glass dome over the city of Battle Creek. But we could never get the money to maintain it.”
People who give out money, whether government money or private foundation money, want to change the world. They want to make a big splash with their money. They have no motivation to spend money to maintain anything. In the case of government money, the public will not usually provide the necessary political support for just doing the maintenance. Â
Maybe it’s different with the military, where the consequences of not maintaining things will come to bite us sooner. I don’t know very much about that world.