Vaccine Insanity
A series of reports show just how extreme the vaccination issue has become.
This montage of stories at the memeorandum aggregator is really something:
The first is the most interesting, as it raises legitimate ethical issues. I’ll address those in a separate post.
The second and third stories are the most outrageous.
We’ve been railing at the politicization of this virus by Trump and his followers since last February, so I’m not shocked that large numbers of people believe wild conspiracies about the vaccines. But I didn’t think we’d come to the point where people are getting killed for administering them. Although granted, if a man killed not only the pharmacist brother but also the presumably-not-pharmacist sister-in-law, maybe something else is going on.
Idaho’s lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin, seems to be a lunatic and repeat offender at abusing her acting powers. The Republican governor, Brad Little, has already promised to rescind this order as soon as he returns from his out-of-state business. But this isn’t the first report we’ve seen of these sort of shenanigans. States are going to have to rewrite their laws and/or constitutions to preclude those in a short-term acting capacity from issuing major executive orders—which will almost surely bite them in the ass come a real emergency.
The least shocking of the stories is the last one: Los Angeles was part of the first wave of COVID in the United States and has been very aggressive in responding to it.
The Maryland man, Jeffrey Burnham, who shot his brother and sister-in-law had a day earlier stabbed to death an 83-year-old woman and stolen her car.
Burnham’s mother, with whom he lived, had called police twice last week to report her son was mentally unstable. I’ll say.
A long way of saying he was a trumpster.
You mean like that the vaccines confer sterilizing immunity or that they prevent spread of the virus by the infected vaccinated person? Those were wild conspiracies that never had any science behind them.
It is certainly not a conspiracy that the vaccines cause a significant number of myocarditis case in those who receive it and myocarditis has a high chance of killing someone who is a heart transplant candidate.
@JKB: The US has about 2000 heart transplants per year. That’s a very small number compared to the number of covid deaths, let alone cases. I’m pretty sure all the persons refusing vaccination aren’t potential candidates for heart transplants.
But you give them a reason to fear the vaccinations even more, and resist it, and get sick, and spread it to other people who are their friends who also haven’t been vaccinated.
I mean, this has more impact on you than me, I’m vaxxed, so is everyone I have social contact with, and I limit contact with strangers, mask, and expect them to be masked. My county is doing pretty well now. So, if you insist on spreading vaccine scare, even under the flag of “I just want all the facts out there”, you’re harming yourself and people you know more than you’re harming me.
At the same time, I still believe that we’re all in this together, and I’d really rather you didn’t do stuff like this.
@JKB: You’re playing fast and loose with the English language again.
There were approximately 1,226 reported cases of myocarditis between Dec. 2020 – June 2021. During that time, 296 MILLION doses of mRNA vaccines were administered.
Your use of “significant number of myocarditis cases” is…questionable at best. Now, this isn’t to say that it’s not important to monitor for this, of course it is.
And, once again, people who are vaccinated are far less likely to spread covid than those who are not vaccinated.
In Israel, out of 2.5 million vaccine recipients, 54 were diagnosed with myocarditis. Seventy-six percent of the cases were mild; 22% moderate. One person has died.
@Jen:
@CSK:
What’s the mental disease that makes people terrified of tiny risks and calm about large ones? Can it be treated with ivermectin?
@JKB:
You know, if you’re just scared of needles, it’s OK to admit it. We won’t think less of you. That, in the immortal word of Ralph Wiggum, would be unpossible.
@JKB:
This is not significant.
@Kathy:
How to evaluate risk is a huge problem for this country and, I suspect, for most human beings. In the same category is the rational ability to accept risk of any kind.
@Jen:
To put that into context: In an average year 2,500 people die from “a fall on a level, non-elevated surface”, and another 2,500 die from “a fall from furniture”.
@JKB: You’re missing important context: the rate of myocarditis among people who contract COVID. Luckily this has been studied. The link below states that 0.146% of the patients with COVID experienced myocarditis.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34473684/
The paper “Myocarditis after Covid-19 Vaccination in a Large Health Care Organization” (the name of the paper that CSK mentioned above) states that the chance of someone experiencing myocarditis after getting the vaccine is in the neighborhood of 0.00213% (unless I did the math wrong, which is always a possibility).
@Scott: I think that’s part of it, but it’s also a question of imposed risk vs. voluntarily accepted risk. They think they’re doing a better job of controlling their risk by “doing research”, but if they accept what doctors say, then they’re putting their lives in the hands of people they don’t necessarily trust, or at least can’t check themselves.
@Scott:
We don’t spend much time evaluating every day risks.
As regards an epidemic disease, it’s obviously evident that the vaccine reduces overall risk of disease, severe disease, hospitalization, and death, to such a degree that it’s not even worth worrying about the risks form the vaccine.
@JKB:
2.13 out of 100,000 vaccine recipients is a “significant number?” Sure, so long as the term “significant” has no meaning whatsoever your sentence is definitely accurate.
It’s amazing that, no matter how many times you’re shown to be an absolute idiot, you still come back here for more.
It always throws me for a loop when I see people trotting out actual facts to a Trumper. It makes as much sense as showing a dog a Public Hygeine textbook to explain why they shouldn’t sh*t on the carpet.
@MarkedMan:
Well, maybe. But dogs, at least, as anyone who’s housebroken a puppy can attest, do develop a healthy respect for the printed word.
A minor quibble: COVID causes far more cases of myocarditis. Not that will ever change your math.
Josh Archibald, an anti-vax NHLer, got myocarditis. His year and maybe career is over. And his story is being co-opted by anti-vaxxers who are now suggesting he actually got the vaccine and the condition resulted because of it. Just so much dishonesty.
Myocarditis is the new bogeyman for anti-vaxxers. Next week it will be something else.
@MarkedMan: My dog listens better, which may well be why I try. 😀
@Jen:
I’m pretty sure my dog’s vocabulary was larger than Trump’s.
@CSK: Having a larger vocabulary than FG is not much of a bar to jump. Not even for a dog.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I agree, but I sometimes wonder of he saw how well Sarah Palin’s babble worked for her, and decided to emulate it.
@CSK: I’m cautious about saying FG is aware of the actions and success of others, but it may be that he saw what Palin was doing and emulated it. I don’t think that he approached the run any differently than he would have another season of The Apprentice. He wasn’t different on the stump than he’d been on the seasons of the show that I watched. (It was a guilty pleasure thing for me. Also, I was amazed over and over at the kinds of people who applied and the ones the producers selected. I wouldn’t hire most of them to manage a kid’s lemonade stand. It reminds me of a conversation that I had with a teacher at the Culinary Institute at Woosong who noted that a given percentage of the chefs on Hell’s Kitchen had to be selected specifically because they were f**k-ups to get the events on the show to have drama and have people to fire every week.)
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I never watched The Apprentice (I’m not sure I knew it even existed before 5 or 6 years ago), but it makes perfect sense that they’d hire fuck-ups. Why else watch? I knew who Trump was when he was the joke of Manhattan.
McGeachin is auditioning for a role in Trump Admin II. She has no business being anywhere near power.