American Politics Discussion Thread

[darrelljs]

Some people want to treat Covid like the flu.  While it may eventually have a similar profile, it doesn't yet and so this is a mistake.

Some people want to treat Covid like smallpox.  This is also a mistake.

Make vaccinations freely available (but not mandatory), and have practical restrictions to protect those most at risk from those who choose not to get vaccinated.

Further lockdowns or travel restrictions make no sense, because the mortality rate for those vaccinated are low enough that we *can* treat this like the flu, and those who have chosen not to get vaccinated aren't asking for protection.

Darrell

[T-hawk]

[quote removed by request]

What people worry about specifically for the Covid vaccines is that they aren't an inactivated virus as traditional vaccines are. The Covid vaccines inject mRNA to produce the spike protein inside your body in order to generate an immune response to it. This is biotechnology that has never been tested and observed on a long term basis yet. There are other Covid vaccines in testing that are a more traditional form of inactivated virus.

That said, I'll reiterate for everyone here: I'm not arguing against the vaccines on medical grounds at all. Only against mandates and the destruction of personal choice and bodily autonomy.

[Charriu]

Yes, but those are not the only vaccines available. We have mRNA (Biontech/Pfizer and Moderna) and there are classical vector based vaccines like (Johnson & Johnson and Astrazeneca). So at least from that point of view there is no reason to avoid vaccines.

EDIT: stupid me. You mentioned that in your last sentence

[T-hawk]

Military has required vaccinations for a while.

This is goalpost moving -- you just jumped from all of society to perhaps the most restricted subset.

The military is the one place where mandates kind of do make sense. Joining the military pretty much already involves signing away your bodily autonomy (at least where service is volunteer and not mandatory.) I really can't find grounds to object there. Particularly if you can still physically decline and just get discharged as a result.

That has nothing at all to do with the rest of society who didn't already choose to give up their body.

we also have a disease that is almost as contagious as chicken pox and has killed 2% of everybody that has had it. Add in the 30% that are long haulers and you have a huge drain on our healthcare system.

If you still think those numbers are anywhere near real, you are believing the fake news fear machine.

The death rate is absolutely nowhere near 2%. We thought that was true early on, before testing ramped up and we realized we were missing absolutely massive amounts of mild cases. We've figured out that we were undercounting by as much as 10x or 20x or even more. The real death rate is no higher than 0.15% as currently estimated by the CDC. And that's almost completely stratified by age and obesity and comorbidities.

As for "30% long haul", that's untruth cooked up by deliberately bad statistics. This is the right comparison: The long haul is defined by perception of symptoms like brain fog and muscle aches. What percentage of people would claim that even in contexts having nothing to do with Covid? Probably right around 30%. And besides that, the long-haul claims have been debunked quite a bit anyway: surveys of antibodies found that most long-haul claimants never even had Covid in the first place. It's all in their head, and the fake news reports it as if it's real to scare you.

As for a power grab, most of our laws center around not hurting each other. Can't drive drunk because you could kill someone.

This is a common analogy, and here's the mistake with it. Prosecuting drunk driving works because we prosecute the drunk drivers. Forcibly masking and vaccinating every citizen is the equivalent of forcing a breathalyzer interlock on every car because you might drive drunk.

A functional society punishes the guilty. It does not punish everybody on the suspicion some small part of them might become guilty.

The problem with all the people whining about personal freedom, seem to forget that freedom isn't free. In order to be free, you have to work to make a free society and part of that work is making sure your not a threat to your neighbors. And getting vaccinated helps prevent you from infecting others.This is public health, it shouldn't be politicized.

'To have freedom, you must give up freedom." This is literally 1984 Big Brother speak.

[T-hawk]

Yes continue to open up everything and not get vaccinated you stupid motherfuckers if you continue to kill you are selves

Do you realize that Florida did this a year ago, with absolutely no discernable bad results? Florida's outcome numbers are exactly in the middle of the pack among US states.

Virus gonna virus, the same everywhere, no matter what we puny humans think we're going to do to stop it.

Travel restrictions: Because the easiest way to protect everybody is to keep a disease from moving around

This is another instance of the mistake the leftists keep making. You just assume that doing whatever you want is automatically a function of government. Nothing in the Constitution makes acting against disease a government power at all.

If you want it to have that power, amend the Constitution to define that. Until then, "no law abridging the right of the people to peaceably assemble" is the supreme law of the land.

[Woden]

we also have a disease that is almost as contagious as chicken pox and has killed 2% of everybody that has had it. Add in the 30% that are long haulers and you have a huge drain on our healthcare system.

If you still think those numbers are anywhere near real, you are believing the fake news fear machine.

The death rate is absolutely nowhere near 2%. We thought that was true early on, before testing ramped up and we realized we were missing absolutely massive amounts of mild cases.  We've figured out that we were undercounting by as much as 10x or 20x or even more.  The real death rate is no higher than 0.15% as currently estimated by the CDC.  And that's almost completely stratified by age and obesity and comorbidities. 

World-wide Confirmed Cases = ~249.9M. World-wide death toll = 5.05M. Last time I checked 5/250 = 0.02 or 2%. This is not some bias news source, this is actual numbers. I guess I can reword it to say it has killed 2% of people with confirmed cases.

[T-hawk]

That's the point - the "world-wide confirmed cases" number is fake news. Literally true by the numbers, but intentionally ignoring the context of the wider picture.

By every estimation that attempts to look at the whole picture (antibody surveys etc), we were undercounting by at least 10x and quite possibly much more early on before testing ramped up everywhere. Account for that and the real death rate plunges.

Seriously, do you understand this? The media deliberately ignores context to make the death rate sound scarier than it is.

This is like the most basic Fake News 101 lesson that could be given. The real death rate is not a matter of doing math from the official numbers, it's in realizing what got left out of those numbers.

[Jowy]

The death rate isn't very relevant. What makes Covid so dangerous is not the death rate, but how easily it spreads. When it infects so many people, some of them will "roll bad" and die. Odds are that you'll probably survive if you get it, but there are over 5 million people who didn't. That number is probably higher if you compare excess deaths in the pre-covid world to post-covid world, but in any case it's a lot of fucking people. As mentioned before, in the US Covid is the second leading cause of death. It is killing more people than Cancer. And these are the numbers with vaccinations in play, without them those numbers would be sky high. "The cure for cancer" is like the holy grail, but Covid is killing more people in the US than cancer, and you can actually get a free vaccine to protect you from Covid right now, yet some absolute idiots choose not to! Ask those 5 million dead if "it's not gonna happen to me" is a good excuse not to take 30 minutes out of your day to get the vaccine.

[Nicolae Carpathia]

And it's not like you just drop dead, you get so sickened by the respiratory virus that you need some kind of support to keep respiring. This progresses over time, puts burden on the hospital system (this was after all the original intent of the "flatten the curve" rhetoric early on). Many people who need but fail to get hospitalization die due to lack of support, many people who are hospitalized don't make it, those that survive are scarred by their encounter with the deadly respiratory virus.

And holy fuck at this RB dipshit who is taking credit for Florida having a low case and death rate right now, after a massive wave that dwarfed other states. Congrats fuckfaces you got your herd immunity. You could have gotten that herd immunity sooner using vaccines that don't replicate inside your respiratory tract and trigger inflammation and cytokine storms.

[Mjmd]

It isn't 2%, but I couldn't find any support for T-Hawks number and other than cool graphs the CDC website makes no sense to my 2 shot in brain. I can confidently say its above T-Hawks number as actual deaths over US population is .22% which is higher than his given .15%. I've seen 1%, I used .5% for my prior calc, which I figure is good enough working number for percents.

The problem with percents like this is that they are small, but the thing about small percents is that given enough of a population its quite a lot of actual lives being affected. Also, lets also throw out the not inconsequential pressures on healthcare systems or future mutation. The question I present to T-Hawk (or others) is how many actual lives are worth the government not doing anything? I know Darrel said its not really the flu, but for sake of some comparison we can confidently say the US government won't directly interfere if there are less than 61K deaths a year (2017 highest recent year) or 167 deaths a day, which it was for the flu. Currently the lowest rolling 7 average I could find for Covid deaths in US was about 1000 (1091 Nov 4; 365K deaths yearly). With holidays ect I don't see that number going down for a while. Mind back in July it was 224 per day (which yearly would be 81,760). For simplicity sake lets say long term its 150K a year with no further government meddling. THAT'S A LOT!!!! Especially considering the vast majority of deaths are avoidable by such a simple measure.

Mandates for military make sense to me. If we are saying the most at risk populations should be protected I would say health care and elderly care also make sense. So does the government contractor requirement go too far? Again, I will point out that there a lot of real lives being affected and even if you don't agree with those people, they are fellow citizens. Feels like its the Governments responsibility to try to save lives on this scale even if they won't thank you for it. If we can prevent half, that's still saving more people than were killed by the worst recent flu season...................