But Eric Topol doesn't want to talk about that, because it doesn't fit the narrative.
He'd rather talk about Japan, which made "full return to baseline after their worst outbreak, by the combination of high level of vaccination and the continued use of masks and mitigation measures."
How did India do it, Eric?
In The Grauniad:
Noteworthy is Belgium with 74% fully vaccinated and one of the hardest-hit countries in the world, now at 79/100,000, currently 10th highest caseload globally. That alone tells us 74% isn’t enough, and that prior Covid (without vaccination, what some refer to as “natural immunity”) is unreliable for representing a solid immunity wall against the Delta variant. In fact, it has been projected for Delta that any country needs to achieve 90-95% of its total population fully vaccinated (or with recent Covid) in order to have population-level immunity that covers, providing relative protection, for the others.
Actually what it tells us is that the Pfizer vaccine, which is what Belgium overwhelmingly uses, does not stop the spread.
The CDC and Anthony Fauci have held since late in 2020 that the reproduction rate for COVID-19 of 2.5 means a 60% vaccination level should stop the pandemic.
The vaccines haven't done that.
The United States is 57.6% fully vaccinated to date, plus 13.9% who have survived infection to date, thus 71.5% "immune".
Yet here we are, into the sixth wave:
We have known since July 30th from the Provincetown, MA outbreak on July 4th that the vaccines do not stop the spread, but the insane powers that be continue to insist that the jab is all we need.
Since the CDC considers the basic reproduction number for this disease to be 2.5, herd immunity should have been achieved in Massachusetts at about 60% fully vaccinated/survived infection. This is why Anthony Fauci had kept insisting that getting the country to 50% would prevent a surge.
But on July 4th Massachusetts was already at 71.9% fully vaccinated/survived infection (692k total announced cases minus total announced deaths, 4.28 million fully vaccinated, population of 6.912 million).
If the vaccines work to inhibit spread, which is what people expect of a vaccine worthy of the name, Massachusetts shouldn't have had a Delta surge after July 4th AT ALL, let alone the high level of daily new cases it has experienced continuously since then.
And in the United States as a whole on July 4th, the fully vaccinated plus those who survived infection totaled 193.787 million, or 58.3% of the population of 332.4 million.
The Delta surge shouldn't have happened in the country at large either, if the vaccines work as INCESSANTLY sold to us.
They obviously do not inhibit spread, but because people commonly think that they do, the pandemic continues.
We're insane.
Almost 74% of the vaccine doses administered to date in Ireland have been Pfizer's.
FDA doesn't give a shit about saving lives in an emergency.
So what should we think of the FDA keeping the drug, called Paxlovid, out of the hands of the infected? The FDA’s advisory committee won’t meet to approve the Merck drug until after Thanksgiving, according to the FDA’s website . The meeting is an entirely virtual one, so this isn’t a matter of getting all the advisory committee members into one place. It’s just a matter of scheduling. The earliest we could get Paxlovid into doctors’ offices or pharmacies is mid-December.
More.
You see what he did there.
“If they think they are going back to the old ways of policing then we’re going to take to the streets again,” New York BLM co-founder Hawk Newsome said outside Borough Hall after the meeting.
“There will be riots. There will be fire, and there will be bloodshed,” he threatened. ...
“I am not threatening anyone. I am just saying that it’s a natural response to aggressive oppression, people will react.”
More.
The Obamas, you will recall, notoriously spent a lot of time and money jet-setting about the globe, spewing carbon everywhere. The travel was the thing, the issues just the pretext for it.
They are still at it, and Greta is growing increasingly fed up.
Ya think?
Last year's spending was an ORGY, and along comes this guy suggesting we take a break and he's public enemy numero uno to Democrats and the picture of conservatism to admiring Republicans.
We are so screwed.
From the story:
If Wisconsin political authorities had ensured law and order in Kenosha, none of this would be happening.
It's on them, but they'll still get away with it.
The young people who were children when Obama took office did not clear the way for a 750% explosion in crude oil exports, as he did just a few days after the Paris agreement was brokered in 2015. Nor did they boast proudly about it years later, as ever-more research mounted about the dangers of continuing to invest in fossil fuels. Speaking at a Houston, Texas gala in 2018, the former president proudly took credit for booming US fossil fuel production. “Suddenly America is the largest oil producer. That was me people,” he boasted jokingly to an industry-friendly crowd. “Say thank you.”
More, lol.
But the theme for today sure does seem to indicate that.
I mean, Biden told businesses to vaccinate anyway even after the Fifth Circuit Court for Appeals stayed his OSHA mandate. Trump would have been lynched in a second for that.
I mean impeached.
So it goes.
Everything is horrible and I don't think it really matters.
Deconstruct that, Pete Booty Judge.
That's how powerful our future president really is.
The oceans are rising, or something, but not on Martha's Vineyard.
Receding hairlines remain unexplained.
All of it must be torn up, starting with the Interstate Highway Systemic Racism.
... the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its associated disruptions continue to cause a substantial undersupply of labor. ...
The labor market is still weak enough that workers are unable to demand substantial increases in real wages.
More.
2,400 abortions a day in 2017 was just chopped liver.
Hop on the bandwagon, people. :-\
smdh
Is $25 billion a year a big deal?
We're already paying $500 billion+ EVERY YEAR in interest expense on the debt.
Nobody cares.
How long will it take to recover? Seven years like it did under Obama-Biden?
Let's hope not.
The current trajectory looks like civilian employment will recover round about March 2023, a little more than three years after the Feb 2020 peak. That is slightly longer than the typical 2-3 years during recessions.
Foolish energy and vaccine policies could interfere with that, however.
'It was long and loud and impossible to ignore,' the source said. 'Camilla hasn't stopped talking about it.'
Ajit Lalvani, chair of infectious diseases at Imperial College London and lead author of the household-transmission study, said people in their 40s were at higher risk of breakthrough infection for two reasons. “Waning immunity plus pools of unvaccinated people acting as vectors of infection into the household where it transmits effectively to vaccinated parents,” he said. “Both are happening.”
Most people in their 40s received their second vaccination at least four months ago. ... They are also the most-likely age band to share a home with teenage children, a group that is still mostly unvaccinated in the U.K. and in which case numbers have been surging. The household-transmission study, which tracked 205 vaccinated and unvaccinated household contacts of a symptomatic case of Covid-19, found that around a quarter of those who were fully vaccinated went on to develop a breakthrough infection. The study, published in the medical journal Lancet Infectious Diseases last week, found that unvaccinated household members had a 38% chance of infection.
More.
Year over year Apr-Oct 2021 US COVID-19 cases are up 71% from 9.02m to 15.45m; deaths are down 14% from 226,208 to 193,877.
The bill was opposed in the House by almost all Republicans, and by six far-left Democrats who were outmaneuvered by thirteen moderate Republicans who threw their support to the plan, which 19 Republican US Senators had voted for earlier this summer.
The House progressives had insisted that the infrastructure plan be voted on together with Biden's social spending plan in order to force moderate Democrats to go along with the latter. The House Republican votes for the Senate bill ended up thwarting that linkage, making it even more likely that the House version of the social spending plan will have to be much less ambitious.
A small group of House Democrats have insisted the Congressional Budget Office score the impact of the separate social spending plan, which would have been standard operating procedure under Republicans but which Democrats under Pelosi have been avoiding until now. They don't give a damn about the true costs. They've even claimed absurdly a $3.5 trillion social spending plan will cost NOTHING. Ha ha ha ha ha.
That ranks among the most shameless attempts to change reality through a talking point ever attempted.
Whatever comes out of the House on that will face the hard scrutiny of Democrat Senators Manchin and Sinema regardless.
The bipartisan bill would reauthorize surface transportation and water programs for five years, adding $550 billion in new spending.
It includes $110 billion for roads, bridges and major projects; $39 billion for transit and $66 billion for rail; $65 billion for broadband; $65 billion for the electric grid; $55 billion to upgrade water infrastructure and $25 billion for airports.
WaPo:
The bill includes more than $110 billion to replace and repair roads, bridges and highways, and $66 billion to boost rail, making it the most substantial such investment in the country’s passenger and commercial network since the creation of Amtrak about half a century ago. Lawmakers provided $55 billion to improve the nation’s water supply and replace lead pipes, $60 billion to modernize the power grid and billions in additional sums to expand speedy Internet access nationwide.
Many of the investments aim to promote green energy and combat some of the country’s worst sources of pollution. At Biden’s behest, for example, lawmakers approved $7.5 billion to build out a national network of vehicle charging stations. Reflecting the deadly, costly consequences of global warming, the package also allocates another roughly $50 billion to respond to emergencies including droughts, wildfires and major storms.
What has any politician done for you and your kids in 20 years?
Still way off the (lousy) Trump peak of 50.4% in 2019.
Maybe the non-Hispanic white people at PEW should try that on the African Americans. I'm sure that would go over well.
It's not, but it sure as hell would be associated with another ice age.
Glenn Beck might as well be another AOC.
The kooks on the left scared the normies.
It could have easily gone the other way.
Conservatism keeps redefining itself leftward.
Amazing he can spell "Kaepernick" but can't come up with "equates".
Halloween candy.
Not a serious country.
And of course, pretty much every morning, what we had assumed was a joke turns out to be entirely real. It's actually happening. The Biden administration really is that crazy. They really are firing thousands of nurses in the middle of a pandemic, firing thousands of cops in the middle of a crime wave. No, they're not kidding, even in the slightest, when they tell you that's a genuine female four-star admiral standing right there. Joe Biden isn't giggling. He tells you Rachel Levine's promotion is a victory for women everywhere, and he means it when he says it.
More.
Like the full court press by the federal government to exaggerate the January 6 debacle as an insurrection, the "reparations" scheme is designed to do just one thing: Paint the record of Donald Trump in the worst possible light.
One of the most distinctive features about America is how its leadership on both sides fails to take seriously the real problems facing the country while taking too seriously merely imaginary ones.
This is how a nation declines and falls.
Somewhere, out there, there's an iceberg, waiting for its moment.
In the end, what I believe doesn’t really matter. History will out. Ten or 15 or 25 years from now there will a reckoning, deep research, a spate of biographies and memoirs from the people who spent 2020-21 under the sway of gurus. News media that trumpeted their wisdom and methods will issue brisk, researched, documentary-style reports. People will swarm out of the shadows to claim they didn’t really believe the experts embodied science and were secretly resisting all along; even those who preached their gospel and strong-armed the public’s obedience will insist they actually did not.
Draco will have to do better than that.
There were roughly 17.5 million students enrolled as of the last tally.
Combined with last autumn’s declines, the number of undergraduate students in college is now down 6.5% compared to two years ago — the largest two-year enrollment drop in the last 50 years, the report found. ...
Only the most selective colleges notched enrollment gains — up 4.3% — to return to pre-pandemic levels. ...
Community colleges remain the most adversely affected sector, experiencing a 14.1% total enrollment decline since fall 2019. ...
Community college students likely are older, lower-income and often balancing work, children and other obligations — and they are also disproportionately students of color. These are all groups that the pandemic hit especially hard.
More.
Breakthrough hospitalizations and deaths showed modest declines compared to August proportions of 14% and 17% respectively. Since hospitalizations and deaths are lagging indicators, however, the rise in breakthrough cases from 14% to 16% may be a harbinger of more bad news in Tennessee.
The data isn't presented in a straightforward manner. Subtract the percentages shown in the table from 100 to get the breakthrough figures. I can imagine some idiot looking at that table, wondering what the hell he's lookin' at.
Vaccines do not make one bulletproof, as story after story makes plain. This is especially the case for the elderly, for whom the risk of death is the highest, vaccinated or not. Waning vaccine effectiveness is only the second biggest concern facing this group.
But in Tennessee you wouldn't know risk of death is highest if you are old anyway, if you relied on Tennessee's COVID statewide dashboard, hilariously entitled "unified command". You won't find death information visualized anywhere, let alone by age. Cases are visualized by age, which is even more misleading to the elderly since cases abound among the younger tranches, not the older.
You really have to hunt for the death data on a different page and download the data in XLS format from a long list of available data sets entitled "Daily Age Group Outcomes- Statewide case outcomes by age group", and then do the math. And do you see the word "death" in there anywhere?
It's really irresponsible. It's almost like Tennessee is trying to hide the deaths from its old people, and throw shade on the vaccines, by publishing the breakthrough data in a weird way, at the same time. A conspiracy theorist would say they're tryin' to get rid of 'em, real quiet like.
I count 13,119 deaths in TN to date from COVID in people 61 years of age or older, which is about 82% of all the pandemic deaths in the state.
Tennessee really, really sucks at this.
Last week's PROPORTION OF BREAKTHROUGH CASES BY MONTH OF ONSET AS OF OCTOBER 11, 2021 showed the percent of cases vaccinated for October to date at 9.8%, the highest for any month yet.
This week the table is missing, with this message:
At this time, we are currently working on refining the process for identifying breakthrough infections and reinfections. Once we have finalized this process, we will resume providing tables on breakthrough infections and reinfections.
I'm sure it's nothing.
While neglected, the STI crisis presents a serious public health problem. ...
But Harvey warns that a coordinated effort by national health agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is needed to combat the waning STI crisis.
Here.
You can always count on THE GRAUNIAD to be clear as mud.
