Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

[DrEvil]

Meanwhile in Denmark, where the vaccination rate is at about 80%, things are back to normal with all restrictions lifted as of two days ago* and covid no longer considered a threat to public health.

* Masks are still required in airports and on planes due to international rules.

And in Sweden?

Just over 70% vaccination rate and some restrictions still in place, and 14700 dead, compared to 2600 for Denmark.

[stickdog99]

the only supposed rationale for the mandates, which is reducing the rate of COVID-19 transmission

That's just incorrect. One of the most common rationales for the vaccine is reducing serious health consequences when infected.
You can't pretend ignorance that you haven't heard this daily in the MSM for the last several months.

Additionally, the report doesn't actually AT ALL DISCUSS TRANSMISSION. There is no way from the data presented to draw conclusions on transmission without making a large number of assumptions. You may not be wrong, but there is nothing in this data to say you are right.

Joe Biden: "We have to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated workers."

How is that not about transmission?

And second rationale has also been proffered, which is that the hospitals are overloaded with the unvaccinated. However, this "crisis" was to a large degree manufactured by as many as 25% of ICU nurses quitting their jobs over vaccine mandates even for those nurses who already had natural immunity.

[DrEvil]

^^Adverse reactions aren't mentioned in the paper, because that's not what it's about. There are already mechanisms in place for reporting suspected adverse events, as you already know since you keep posting those numbers.

Links are nice (hint hint):
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7034e5.htm

Where are the relevant data comparing the overall health outcomes of populations vaccinated (to any degree) to those of comparable totally unvaccinated populations? Please produce these links for us.

If you want the information go find it instead of demanding others do your legwork.

[stickdog99]

Sad you must go to such lengths BelSav. Fucking appalling actually. However, I'm uplifted by your determination and unwillingness to surrender. That so many always do, without even a murmer, is why we're having this conversation at all.

But, but, but, it's their sense of responsibility that makes surrender and that makes them demand and enforce totalitarianism!

[stickdog99]

Meanwhile in Denmark, where the vaccination rate is at about 80%, things are back to normal with all restrictions lifted as of two days ago* and covid no longer considered a threat to public health.

* Masks are still required in airports and on planes due to international rules.

And in Sweden?

Just over 70% vaccination rate and some restrictions still in place, and 14700 dead, compared to 2600 for Denmark.

You just can't stop spinning for mask, lockdown, and vaccine mandates. Can you?

What was the average age of mortality of the 14,700 "who died from COVID-19" in Sweden?

[stickdog99]

^^Adverse reactions aren't mentioned in the paper, because that's not what it's about. There are already mechanisms in place for reporting suspected adverse events, as you already know since you keep posting those numbers.

Links are nice (hint hint):
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7034e5.htm

Where are the relevant data comparing the overall health outcomes of populations vaccinated (to any degree) to those of comparable totally unvaccinated populations? Please produce these links for us.

If you want the information go find it instead of demanding others do your legwork.

Again, you just can't stop yourself from spinning for mask, lockdown, and vaccine mandates. Can you?

My obvious point is that these data are not available because they are not even being tracked. Can you tell me why not?

[stickdog99]

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/arch ... ng/620062/

Our Most Reliable Pandemic Number Is Losing Meaning

A new study suggests that almost half of those hospitalized with COVID-19 have mild or asymptomatic cases.

At least 12,000 Americans have already died from COVID-19 this month, as the country inches through its latest surge in cases. But another worrying statistic is often cited to depict the dangers of this moment: The number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United States right now is as high as it has been since the beginning of February. It’s even worse in certain places: Some states, including Arkansas and Oregon, recently saw their COVID hospitalizations rise to higher levels than at any prior stage of the pandemic. But how much do those latter figures really tell us?

From the start, COVID hospitalizations have served as a vital metric for tracking the risks posed by the disease. Last winter, this magazine described it as “the most reliable pandemic number,” while Vox quoted the cardiologist Eric Topol as saying that it’s “the best indicator of where we are.” On the one hand, death counts offer finality, but they’re a lagging signal and don’t account for people who suffered from significant illness but survived. Case counts, on the other hand, depend on which and how many people happen to get tested. Presumably, hospitalization numbers provide a more stable and reliable gauge of the pandemic’s true toll, in terms of severe disease. But a new, nationwide study of hospitalization records, released as a preprint today (and not yet formally peer reviewed), suggests that the meaning of this gauge can easily be misinterpreted—and that it has been shifting over time.

If you want to make sense of the number of COVID hospitalizations at any given time, you need to know how sick each patient actually is. Until now, that’s been almost impossible to suss out. The federal government requires hospitals to report every patient who tests positive for COVID, yet the overall tallies of COVID hospitalizations, made available on various state and federal dashboards and widely reported on by the media, do not differentiate based on severity of illness. Some patients need extensive medical intervention, such as getting intubated. Others require supplemental oxygen or administration of the steroid dexamethasone. But there are many COVID patients in the hospital with fairly mild symptoms, too, who have been admitted for further observation on account of their comorbidities, or because they reported feeling short of breath. Another portion of the patients in this tally are in the hospital for something unrelated to COVID, and discovered that they were infected only because they were tested upon admission. How many patients fall into each category has been a topic of much speculation. In August, researchers from Harvard Medical School, Tufts Medical Center, and the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System decided to find out.

Researchers have tried to get at similar questions before. For two separate studies published in May, doctors in California read through several hundred charts of pediatric patients, one by one, to figure out why, exactly, each COVID-positive child had been admitted to the hospital. Did they need treatment for COVID, or was there some other reason for admission, like cancer treatment or a psychiatric episode, and the COVID diagnosis was merely incidental? According to the researchers, 40 to 45 percent of the hospitalizations that they examined were for patients in the latter group.

The authors of the paper out this week took a different tack to answer a similar question, this time for adults. Instead of meticulously looking at why a few hundred patients were admitted to a pair of hospitals, they analyzed the electronic records for nearly 50,000 COVID hospital admissions at the more than 100 VA hospitals across the country. Then they checked to see whether each patient required supplemental oxygen or had a blood oxygen level below 94 percent. (The latter criterion is based on the National Institutes of Health definition of “severe COVID.”) If either of these conditions was met, the authors classified that patient as having moderate to severe disease; otherwise, the case was considered mild or asymptomatic.

The study found that from March 2020 through early January 2021—before vaccination was widespread, and before the Delta variant had arrived—the proportion of patients with mild or asymptomatic disease was 36 percent. From mid-January through the end of June 2021, however, that number rose to 48 percent. In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease.

This increase was even bigger for vaccinated hospital patients, of whom 57 percent had mild or asymptomatic disease. But unvaccinated patients have also been showing up with less severe symptoms, on average, than earlier in the pandemic: The study found that 45 percent of their cases were mild or asymptomatic since January 21. According to Shira Doron, an infectious-disease physician and hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center, in Boston, and one of the study’s co-authors, the latter finding may be explained by the fact that unvaccinated patients in the vaccine era tend to be a younger cohort who are less vulnerable to COVID and may be more likely to have been infected in the past.

Among the limitations of the study is that patients in the VA system are not representative of the U.S. population as a whole, as they include few women and no children. (Still, the new findings echo those from the two pediatric-admissions studies.) Also, like many medical centers, the VA has a policy to test every inpatient for COVID, but this is not a universal practice. Lastly, most of the data—even from the patients admitted in 2021—derive from the phase of the pandemic before Delta became widespread, and it’s possible that the ratios have changed in recent months. The study did run through June 30, however, when the Delta wave was about to break, and it did not find that the proportion of patients with moderate to severe respiratory distress was trending upward at the end of the observation period.

The idea behind the study and what it investigates is important, says Graham Snyder, the medical director of infection prevention and hospital epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, though he told me that it would benefit from a little more detail and nuance beyond oxygenation status. But Daniel Griffin, an infectious-disease specialist at Columbia University, told me that using other metrics for severity of illness, such as intensive-care admissions, presents different limitations. For one thing, different hospitals use different criteria for admitting patients to the ICU.

...

Click the link if you wish to read the perfunctory why vaccines are still awesome propaganda the Atlantic requires in all of its articles that follows. My bet is that the hospitalization overestimates for the unvaccinated just keep getting worse and worse since the end of June. Any takers?

[stickdog99]

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/arch ... ng/620062/

Our Most Reliable Pandemic Number Is Losing Meaning

A new study suggests that almost half of those hospitalized with COVID-19 have mild or asymptomatic cases.

At least 12,000 Americans have already died from COVID-19 this month, as the country inches through its latest surge in cases. But another worrying statistic is often cited to depict the dangers of this moment: The number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United States right now is as high as it has been since the beginning of February. It’s even worse in certain places: Some states, including Arkansas and Oregon, recently saw their COVID hospitalizations rise to higher levels than at any prior stage of the pandemic. But how much do those latter figures really tell us?

From the start, COVID hospitalizations have served as a vital metric for tracking the risks posed by the disease. Last winter, this magazine described it as “the most reliable pandemic number,” while Vox quoted the cardiologist Eric Topol as saying that it’s “the best indicator of where we are.” On the one hand, death counts offer finality, but they’re a lagging signal and don’t account for people who suffered from significant illness but survived. Case counts, on the other hand, depend on which and how many people happen to get tested. Presumably, hospitalization numbers provide a more stable and reliable gauge of the pandemic’s true toll, in terms of severe disease. But a new, nationwide study of hospitalization records, released as a preprint today (and not yet formally peer reviewed), suggests that the meaning of this gauge can easily be misinterpreted—and that it has been shifting over time.

If you want to make sense of the number of COVID hospitalizations at any given time, you need to know how sick each patient actually is. Until now, that’s been almost impossible to suss out. The federal government requires hospitals to report every patient who tests positive for COVID, yet the overall tallies of COVID hospitalizations, made available on various state and federal dashboards and widely reported on by the media, do not differentiate based on severity of illness. Some patients need extensive medical intervention, such as getting intubated. Others require supplemental oxygen or administration of the steroid dexamethasone. But there are many COVID patients in the hospital with fairly mild symptoms, too, who have been admitted for further observation on account of their comorbidities, or because they reported feeling short of breath. Another portion of the patients in this tally are in the hospital for something unrelated to COVID, and discovered that they were infected only because they were tested upon admission. How many patients fall into each category has been a topic of much speculation. In August, researchers from Harvard Medical School, Tufts Medical Center, and the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System decided to find out.

Researchers have tried to get at similar questions before. For two separate studies published in May, doctors in California read through several hundred charts of pediatric patients, one by one, to figure out why, exactly, each COVID-positive child had been admitted to the hospital. Did they need treatment for COVID, or was there some other reason for admission, like cancer treatment or a psychiatric episode, and the COVID diagnosis was merely incidental? According to the researchers, 40 to 45 percent of the hospitalizations that they examined were for patients in the latter group.

The authors of the paper out this week took a different tack to answer a similar question, this time for adults. Instead of meticulously looking at why a few hundred patients were admitted to a pair of hospitals, they analyzed the electronic records for nearly 50,000 COVID hospital admissions at the more than 100 VA hospitals across the country. Then they checked to see whether each patient required supplemental oxygen or had a blood oxygen level below 94 percent. (The latter criterion is based on the National Institutes of Health definition of “severe COVID.”) If either of these conditions was met, the authors classified that patient as having moderate to severe disease; otherwise, the case was considered mild or asymptomatic.

The study found that from March 2020 through early January 2021—before vaccination was widespread, and before the Delta variant had arrived—the proportion of patients with mild or asymptomatic disease was 36 percent. From mid-January through the end of June 2021, however, that number rose to 48 percent. In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease.

This increase was even bigger for vaccinated hospital patients, of whom 57 percent had mild or asymptomatic disease. But unvaccinated patients have also been showing up with less severe symptoms, on average, than earlier in the pandemic: The study found that 45 percent of their cases were mild or asymptomatic since January 21. According to Shira Doron, an infectious-disease physician and hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center, in Boston, and one of the study’s co-authors, the latter finding may be explained by the fact that unvaccinated patients in the vaccine era tend to be a younger cohort who are less vulnerable to COVID and may be more likely to have been infected in the past.

Among the limitations of the study is that patients in the VA system are not representative of the U.S. population as a whole, as they include few women and no children. (Still, the new findings echo those from the two pediatric-admissions studies.) Also, like many medical centers, the VA has a policy to test every inpatient for COVID, but this is not a universal practice. Lastly, most of the data—even from the patients admitted in 2021—derive from the phase of the pandemic before Delta became widespread, and it’s possible that the ratios have changed in recent months. The study did run through June 30, however, when the Delta wave was about to break, and it did not find that the proportion of patients with moderate to severe respiratory distress was trending upward at the end of the observation period.

The idea behind the study and what it investigates is important, says Graham Snyder, the medical director of infection prevention and hospital epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, though he told me that it would benefit from a little more detail and nuance beyond oxygenation status. But Daniel Griffin, an infectious-disease specialist at Columbia University, told me that using other metrics for severity of illness, such as intensive-care admissions, presents different limitations. For one thing, different hospitals use different criteria for admitting patients to the ICU.

...

Click the link if you wish to read the perfunctory why vaccines are still awesome propaganda the Atlantic requires in all of its articles that follows. My bet is that the hospitalization overestimates for the unvaccinated just keep getting worse and worse since the end of June. Any takers?

[Belligerent Savant]

^^^^^

That article is making its rounds around social media and other platforms. Hopefully it begins to open cracks wider.

Along similar lines, a few more promising developments that hopefully set precedents for more litigation/activity:

1.

Federal Judge Blocks New York State Health Care Worker Vaccination Mandate


A federal judge on Tuesday granted an emergency injunction blocking the state of New York from enforcing a new vaccine mandate for healthcare workers.
Seventeen medical health professionals had asked the court to enjoin enforcement of New York’s mandate that then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced on Aug. 16. The mandate required staff at hospitals and long-term care facilities such as nursing homes, adult care facilities, and other congregate care settings, be vaccinated for COVID-19 to continue to be employed.

The plaintiffs, including doctors, nurses, a medical technician, and a physician’s liaison, were facing termination, loss of hospital admitting privileges, and the destruction of their careers unless they consent to be vaccinated with vaccines in contradiction of their religious beliefs, the lawsuit argued.

Their religious beliefs compelled the plaintiffs “to refuse vaccination with the available COVID-19 vaccines, all of which employ aborted fetus cell lines in their testing, development, or production,” according to court documents.

The health care employees argued that the vaccine mandate would nullify protections for sincere religious beliefs under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, even though the prior state health order in effect just days earlier had afforded the same protections.

“What New York is attempting to do is slam shut an escape hatch from an unconstitutional vaccine mandate,” attorney Christopher Ferrara, Thomas More Society special counsel, said in a statement before the injunction was granted.

Judge David Hurd of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York, a Bill Clinton appointee, granted a temporary restraining order the morning of Sept. 14 in the case. The lawsuit was brought against New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D).

“The vaccine mandate is suspended” and the New York Department of Health “is barred from taking any action, disciplinary or otherwise, against the licensure, certification, residency, admitting privileges or other professional status or qualification of any of the plaintiffs on account of their seeking or having obtained a religious exemption from mandatory COVID-19 vaccination,” Hurd’s order states.

2.
https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2021/au ... ty-lawsuit

'Natural Immunity' Lawsuit Over COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate Ends in Surprising Result


A George Mason University (GMU) law professor who sued the school over its COVID-19 vaccine mandate was granted a medical exemption by the school on Tuesday.

The Washington Examiner reports Todd Zywicki, the law professor at the Fairfax, Virginia, school said he had COVID-19 and defeated it, therefore his natural immunity, he argued, should prevent him from having to get the vaccination.

GMU had a mandate requiring all attending students to be inoculated by Aug. 1. Faculty and staff had a deadline of Aug. 15 to be vaccinated. Those who did not comply with the mandate had to show a reason for a medical or religious exemption.

3.
https://wjla.com/amp/news/nation-world/ ... ssion=true

California professor sues university over vaccine mandate, citing natural immunity

A University of California professor is suing the school’s president and Board of Regents over a COVID-19 vaccine mandate, saying people with natural immunity shouldn’t be required to get the shot.

Aaron Kheriaty, professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the University of California, Irvine, says he contracted COVID-19 in July 2020. He points to scientific research showing that people infected with COVID-19 develop durable immunity to the virus and argues the university's vaccine mandate is unfair.

“I feel like I'm being treated unequally,” Kheriaty said. “If my immunity is as good, indeed, very likely better, than that conferred by the vaccine, there doesn’t seem to be any rational basis for discriminating against my form of immunity and requiring me to get a different form of immunity.”

An Israeli study, which was published last week and hasn’t been peer-reviewed, shows uninfected, vaccinated people are around 6 to 13 times more likely to get a future infection than those who are unvaccinated and recovered from COVID-19. The vaccinated group is also 7 to 27 times more likely to develop a symptomatic future infection than the COVID-recovered group. Several other studies also have pointed to the durability of natural COVID-19 immunity.

(Side-note: appreciate the kind words, Harvey/KMatterz. I agree we should share -- those willing to do so -- anecdotes or locations where mandates aren't enforced, ignored, or never instated [or recently lifted]. I may well relocate within the next 6 months if it continues along a worsening trajectory. This insanity is far less tolerable for those with school-aged children, as KMatterz alluded. Infuriating/tragic, what we're doing to the youthful generations right now. Long-lasting damage. The silver lining is that it may help them prevent any future attempts at power grabs. Or less optimistically -- and clearly part of current plans -- it may condition them to accept these despicable policies as the norm, with minimal pushback.)

[Harvey]

Two short videos and between them lies a grand tale of mass murder in the age of global media. And it was easy. Nobody dared pay too much attention, their friends and relatives would call them names, like 'conspiracy theorist.' They would have lost their jobs, been ostracised, looked bad in front of the boss. It was just too far beyond the narrative for anyone to believe. Poor lambs. And the fuckers who did it will most likely get away with it.

https://www.bitchute.com/video/KIu0XdQDf46w/

https://www.bitchute.com/video/kaanD3qrsn0b/

[stickdog99]

[stickdog99]

[Harvey]

[liminalOyster]

.Good God, man. We are NOWHERE in the same universe of 50% mortality, for chrissakes.

No. Of course not. That's why in trying to prompt a more nuanced discussion of the ACLU position which seems insane on the surface I tried to propose a hypothetical number much higher than anything remotely near COVID.

Hell, if a quarter (25%) of the population can die from a virus and a vaccine -- with less lethality than 25% -- was available, then yes, an argument can rightly be made to mandate shots.

I find this pretty interesting and not what I would have expected from you, TBH. Because despite seeing COVID so differently, I still see the same question - is body autonomy absolute - at play even in that scenario. I doubt I'd fight a mandate but I can imagine I'd be a bit ambivalent. The state puts needles in arms to kill prisoners and medicate undesirables and political prisoners into submission. To support a federal mandate, for me, would take a great leap of faith I can't imagine making. But I'm a little surprised that what you're saying here is that you more more or less agree with the ACLU's logic (protecting the freedom of the vulnerable by mandating shots for the larger social body), just vehemently disagree with their assessment of the scale of COVID's risk and certainly in so far as it justifies this step.

An argument wouldn't be necessary: I'd imagine a majority of those currently hesitant wouldn't be hesitating under such circumstances.

You're assuming, as I read it, that those currently hesitant to receive vax share your view and/or rationale. Some do. But lots of others don't. I doubt you're in arms with the fundie pastor where I live who are resistant to vaccinate because they truly expect their faith will protect them, even those who think COVID is much more dangerous than you do.

This is all nonsense anyway as govts/corporations are mandating them NOW for a virus with over a 99.5% survival rate. For those under 70, the median IFR is 0.05%.]

COVID's overall IFR, it's geographic variability and its demographic variability remain disputed (despite the July 13th report you post) and hard to reliably pinpoint. Long COVID (and long-term vax effects) as well.

Despite you pushing it aside, there ARE viable alternative treatments, actively suppressed by many of the same entities pushing forced vaccination, to say nothing of outright censorship efforts against doctors/scientists advising against dominant narratives.

I'm not some generic party-line enemy here. And I am 100% in no way "pushing aside" viable alternative treatments. I've read more than my fair share of papers on Vitamin D, Remdesevir, Nicotine, Melatonin, Hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, etc. I asked a hypothetical question about the ACLU and whether or not bodily autonomy is absolute. There's not a lick in that which suggests I'm opposed to "alternative" treatments (aka, actually, "treatments'). They're obviously the future of managing COVID and I am quite certain that different modalities have worked for some and not others, etc.

The vaccines are showing themselves -- if we observe israel and other early vaccine* adopters -- as potentially exacerbating and prolonging infection prevalence as more time elapses, due in large part (in probability) to coerced mass vaccinations, rather than voluntary or recommended vaccination among those most at risk (the old, the co-morbid). See Sweden as Exhibit A of the latter. See Australia, Israel, New Zealand as examples of the former -- disastrous. Let's see what happens in the States this Fall/Winter.

So yeah. That's an extremely debated argument presented as impassioned fact. I'm not even arguing the other side so much as saying there are other ways to explain even just Israel for example which reach a conclusion that doesn't fit your narrative. Among other things, there's a simpler old time Lefty argument - Big Pharma has been waiting for ages to unleash MRNA tech and seized on the opportunity to do so at scale envisioning the extreme resulting profit. Even the best meaning states are largely at their behest minus a perfunctory almost symbolic review process. And MRNA tech turns out to be much much less successful than expected. This will be very clear over time and, from my vantage, is a much bigger factor in the Israel story than anything else. Presumably vax which rely on older tech will 1) be pushed out of the market by the big pharma mob, justifying boosters etc and 2) also prove to be much more effective long-term.

We're dealing with, right now, real human rights violations. Criminal Acts perpetrated by some of the more egregious players, and you're offering up fantasy scenarios that do not in any way relate to current circumstances.

It's not much fun to be addressed with so much hostility, friend. I literally and clearly stated I was offering up a hypothetical because I wanted to explore my own biases, in this case a bias (against mandatory vax!) that I apparently hold more strongly than you. And I'm not offering up a "fantasy scenario" but one that people have predicted and prepared for for decades. That scenario is absolutely related to current circumstances if only in the degree to which all of the current mise en scene sets the stage for what happens *when* a much higher IFR viral pandemic hits us.

At this point, after over 18 months of incremental escalations, if one remains an apologist for State actions they may never see it any other way. To the detriment of the majority.

Um, am I now an apologist for state actions? Or is that the ACLU?

I wonder to what degree you've traveled in the past 18 months. I live in the Deep South and other than bars and restaurants being closed for a few months in Spring 2020, have seen next to no meaningful measures even interpretable as escalation, incremental or otherwise. OTOH, when I visited the NE this summer, the tenor was 100% different. Here, even when we have mask mandates, they're not enforced by businesses. Even some of our legislature doesn't wear them. Thus far, from a totally selfish angle, state actions just affecting me personally have meant two George W style checks, student loan deferment and a little child credit every month. No one has forced me to get a vaccine. Only on the rarest of occasions (usually at the post office or FedEx, TBH) have I felt like they'd have kicked me out if I wasn't wearing a mask. And I categorically oppose any vaccine mandate without a pretty wide berth for exemption. So how I'd possibly be an apologist for state (and they're not state, they're private in a thin veneer of public) actions is lost on me.

Naturally acquired immunity is showing to be far more resilient and yet the WHO, CDC and many govts never even mention it at all as an option. WHY IS THAT?

Mostly because it doesn't seem to be true. It's not currently looking like natural immunity (across the board) appears to be far more resilient, rather a sentiment (much like, well there must be a simpler solution than all this big ol' complicated medical shit,) that neatly aligns with "common sense" and folksy wisdom. Might be true in the long term still. But we don't know yet. Second, that [all the media and bodies etc] never mention it is also not true. It's one of the most commonly discussed aspects of COVID from those very sources this month in fact.

Sorry - my laptop was in repair and then FedEx lost it or I would've responded sooner. But, I have once again learned my lesson and I will do my best to not post again. I have tried to stay away from RI because of what feels like a constant stifling and pigeonholing of people who are much less different in view about COVID than this thread's dominant posters imagine them to be.

It's deflating and hostility sucks. Peace out.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

Liminal - without resorting to a back-and-forth barrage, particularly since i later acknowledged, in an immediate follow-up reply in that same page, that I allowed myself to (unfortunately) get heated, i will focus on one specific bit in your reply that's simply flat-out incorrect. This comment of yours also helps explain, in part, your stance on this topic, as you're misinformed on at least 1 critical point: the -- science-based, not "folksy" -- benefit and value of natural immunity.

I'll be back a bit later with science-based data on this, though some of it has already been shared here.

You may benefit from re-assessing your current beliefs on this topic. It's certainly not static.