Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
I’ve opened a new “Sandbox” thread as a post as the new “ignore commenter” plug-in only works on threads started as posts.
Well, less , In 2020 life expectancy dropped by 1.6 years in the US ending a steady rise . Some ,who do not believe the drop is the result of shadowy cabal and the flu , attribute it to a Worldwide pandemic .
You mean some people think it is possible to design a virus in a lab? Surely a shadowy cabal do such a thing in their hidden laboratory in a dormant volcano.
I can’t actually find a single news article or reference to this “fact”. J-Mac, care to share?
OMagain,
Nah, OMagain, J-Mac is indulging in the ever popular “People are saying” or “People tell me, lots of people, smart people, and they’re telling me… [random tinfoil rubbish]”
Facts don’t enter into it. They never have.
J-Mac? Say it ain’t so!
If there’s a lab out there releasing these variants I’d like to bring news of that to the security services, could you give further details J-Mac?
I imagine the FBI, who use PSI all the time, might be able to find the lab in question via remote viewing! We just have to work together to solve this!
So, deets?
There’s speculation that omicron evolved in one person who had HIV.
The reasoning is that HIV is common in Southern Africa, that the variant seems to have emerged fully formed from an unmonitored place, with no known cousins.
So my thought is, maybe it festered in one person and evolved slowly to keep pace with a compromised immune system.
If it had turned deadly, it would have killed the patient and itself. Maybe it often does that. If it hit the sweet spot in one person, it’s a poster child for selective breeding.
The result is a bug that is both less deadly than it’s precursors, and evolved to bypass immunity.
I wonder if this is a common route to the evolution of bugs that are more infectious and less deadly.
velikovskys,
It looks like Europe had more or less the same wave patterns in the past with similar numbers of excess deaths going all the way back to 2012 but EUROMOMO shows only 2017. Considering that influenza has “vanished” since April 2020, the same wave patterns previously attributed to influenza excess deaths were just replaced with covid-19…
When you consider that the stats for co-infections with influenza, and other viruses, have been missing, one seasonal “pandemic” has been replaced with the other.
On the top of that, the strongest risk factors for death with covid-19 were obesity and anxiety and fear-related disorders .
Media fear-mongering surely helped…
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/#excess-mortality
Do you know the term Mass Formation Psychosis means?
BTW: Going skiing for unvaxxed only… 😉
It turned out that you were the problem all along!
https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/
There are plenty of other people who think like you who are now 100% immune to covid. Because they are dead.
Loads and loads of people put up the sort of nonsense you are, that it does not even exist at all and is just a conspiracy. Many are dead now.
Let’s hope you don’t bring it back from your jaunt and infect others you care about and cause their deaths because you did not even want to do a tiny thing to protect others.
That you are one of the selfish surprises me not at all.
The link you supplied shows the last two years excess deaths are substantially above the baseline prior to covid. If one pandemic has simply replaced another, why the rise?
Of course, I’m not seriously asking just like you are not seriously trying to make an actual case for your “conspiracy”. You just feel good thinking you know more then the average Joe, even if it’s pure BS.
Enjoy your ski trip! Imagine sitting in a train or cable car unvaxxed at this point!
I’ve missed some of the discussion. Has anyone argued that obesity accounts for a lot of the difference in mortality between nations and regions?
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates
This is paywalled, but The Economist has been speculating that China, Russia and India are not reporting true covid death numbers. That is, fudging more than typical.
That reminds me of something Alan Moore said (after having spent some time investigating actual conspiracies vs conspiracy theories):
“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that
conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is
more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The
truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey
aliens or the 12 foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in
control. The truth is far more frightening, nobody is in control. The
world is rudderless.”
CDC has:
Underlying Medical Conditions and Severe Illness Among 540,667 Adults Hospitalized With COVID-19, March 2020–March 2021Results
Among 4,899,447 hospitalized adults in PHD-SR, 540,667 (11.0%) were patients with COVID-19, of whom 94.9% had at least 1 underlying medical condition. Essential hypertension (50.4%), disorders of lipid metabolism (49.4%), and obesity (33.0%) were the most common. The strongest risk factors for death were obesity (adjusted risk ratio [aRR] = 1.30; 95% CI, 1.27–1.33), anxiety and fear-related disorders (aRR = 1.28; 95% CI, 1.25–1.31), and diabetes with complication (aRR = 1.26; 95% CI, 1.24–1.28), as well as the total number of conditions, with aRRs of death ranging from 1.53 (95% CI, 1.41–1.67) for patients with 1 condition to 3.82 (95% CI, 3.45–4.23) for patients with more than 10 conditions (compared with patients with no conditions).
https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2021/21_0123.htm
I don’t know how much you can trust the CDC, which claims the #1 risk factor for death in the viral pandemic is OBESITY and NOT an immunocompromised natural defence system. We’ve calculated the odds. It turns out that you are just as likely to die with covid-19 if you are immunocompromised or if you are wearing a red dress…
Go figure! This casedemic is full of surprises…
I’m sure it had nothing to do with the lockdowns:
Gordon Davisson,
Have you been to a hospital ward during this panicdemic, like an ICU, or an ACU, or even a covid-19 unit? Have you ever used a BioFire system? Have you ever been able to distinguish the symptoms between an influenza and a corona virus?
Do you know what a cytokine storm is? Do you know what can cause it?
If even one of the answers to the above questions is “NO”, you should probably move on to another discussion of bureaucrats who know nothing about the real life and teach shit to people…
If I were one of the men who like to wear a red dress, I’d be worried, because one the reasons why many governments support The Great Reset and seem to use Covid-19 “casedemic” as an excuse, is that they don’t want to make the adjustments to the society to accommodate the neutral gender, with special washrooms and another special olympics for women that used to be men…
I find that enormously comforting. But then I find Darwin and Adam Smith comforting.
I also believe that cabals and conspiracies exist, but they are, in the long run, noise.
Of course, movies love them . Add a plucky but damaged hero and Nakatomi Plaza and you are good to go.
Wow , let that freak flag fly. So many governments support hundreds of thousands of folks dying instead of having to put up some new signs on bathrooms and every four years having to watch transsexuals compete in track and field.
Now that is an agenda .
I am open to new ideas , how did the cabal do it? Italy closed down completely , how where their numbers , stay the same despite lockdown ?
I do, one might apply it to not getting a proven vaccine during a pandemic in the name of paranoia. Hear most skiers now wear helmets, do the unvvaxed ski club crash into trees to show helmets are unnecessary?
“Positivity rate in Republic almost at 50 percent as another 6,735 cases recorded”
1 in 2 people tested for Covid-19 get a positive result in fully vaccinated and boosted Republic.
“It is estimated that 87 per cent of reported cases in the south are the result of the Omicron variant.”
https://www.irishnews.com/news/northernirelandnews/2021/12/28/news/positivity-rate-in-republic-almost-at-50-percent-as-another-6-735-cases-recorded-2545743/
How did the Omicron variant travel from South Africa and spread so quickly in the Republic with the travel ban???
Perhaps the time has arrived for another theory of the origins of new variants to be allowed to be published in the mainstream media, such as convergence, that long ago predicted the appearance of new variants due to mass vaccination..
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867421010503
Perhaps more people should be paying more than the usual attention to the great and encouraging guidelines for the vaccinated from CDC?
There is nothing better than starting a new year with great news…
It wasn’t resurrected you idiot, cases increased because people were feeling safer from covid and were tired of the safety protocols. There never was a 100% elimination of the flu.
I was. It wasn’t nice. Relatives of mine got the covid. Most had minor loss of smell and taste, one had to be hospitalized. Got better, no ventilators. Still no joke.
The flu viruses are also coronaviruses you idiot.
Out of interest, who do you think it is that “decides” to allow some stories to be published and suppresses others?
The title of that paper you link to is “The emergence and ongoing convergent evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 N501Y lineages”.
But you are on record as a believer in Adam and Eve and Noah’s ark etc and in that world evolution is unnecessary. God does everything that is required.
So which is it, do you rely on the papers produced by scientists who use demonic methods like:
Or the truth as written in the bible? You can’t surely use the conclusions from a science based in evolution to make claims about COVID-19 and how it’s changing and promote a Noah’s ark approach?
Bravo! Good one!
You should contact CDC or Health Canada. They forgot about that…Or they don’t want to remember… because of $?
You are my hero even though I don’t have much respect for people like you…
BTW: CDC confirms that unless RT- PCR tested nobody can distinguish the influenza and covid-19 symptoms, or if a co-infection happens.
Do you know what that means?
The loss of smell or taste is not a new symptom in influenza infections.
But, it just hit me: you wouldn’t know anything about that because your only visits to hospitals are bedside visits to friends… lol
I’ve heard that there is a new variant circulating in some regions of the world: OM-a-gun… It is suspected to be very contagious and virulent. Evolutionary scientists are quite certain it is a product of OM-a-gain of function…
So, beware…lol
This is a problem when layman like you assume something that isn’t true…
Of course flu was never eliminated, you dummy… It was rebranded into covid-19 with corona virus infection that amount for up to 15% of upper respiratory infection each influenza season.. If you ever had contact with those cases, you’d know a thing or two about it.. Unfortunately…
ROFL. J-Mac’s greatest hits! Yet more stuff that is obviously wrong. I am willing to forgive your confusion of some viruses that cause the common cold (coronaviruses) with viruses that cause influenza, but suggesting that only RT-PCR can tell COVID apart from flu is stupendously dumb!
Are you willing to defend this claim, or do we have another “Pfizer vaccine caused seven deaths in its trial” run-away-and-hide fiasco on our hands?
“CDC confirms”, my ass.
We should have absolutely no reasons to worry… Our health is in really good hands of pharmaceutical companies with great records of supporting the humanity and their health… Why should anybody lose sleep over this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical_settlements
I’m not sure how to interpret this CDC info but I guess the only way to protect kids from the panicdemic that is less likely to cause deaths among children than the flu is to vaccinate all of them including the unborn…
How and who ? Flu season for most part ends about April , Covid kept killing lot of folks all summer. Much more than even bad flu seasons . Are these deaths also causes of death rebranded as well?
.
Please continue, what thing or two do you know? For instance know why so many excess deaths were recorded? Just rebranding cause of death would not increase the number.
They are in it for a profit, an efficacious product is makes more money . Killing all your customers is bad for repeat business . Some governments actually frown on killing their citizens . “Many “ are obsessed with transgender athletes. I prefer the former.
Come on, this is silly. Kids don’t live alone, they go home to households full of other people.
This article’s point is so disingenuous, that it mkes one wonder are they being intentionally dumb (or accidentally?).
Yea, if the whole world was made up of only kids, maybe we wouldn’t have to worry about the death toll. But its not.
Kids have been getting vaccines for decades upon decades. Again, why the sudden panic about doing something we have done since both of us have been alive?
They clearly distinguish between the coronaviruses, they use different names for each. The covid-19 one is called sars-cov-2. Not only that, most explanations about covid-19 start by explaining coronaviruses in general and mention the flu. So, if they were trying to hide this fact, their method wasn’t precisely the right one for starting a conspiracy.
Before the first quarantine I told my students I had a coronavirus, just not the one everyone was worried about (I had the flu just before the large seclusion). We’ve known all along that sars-cov-2 is not the one and only coronavirus in the planet.
Of course I’m your hero, I gate to call you an idiot and you further demonstrate your idiocy just for me. Thanks.
Both attack the respiratory system, so why should I be surprised? Only the part where things get awful are a tad different.
Yes, that at first the symptoms are bound to be similar given that they attack the respiratory system.
The degree in loos of smell and taste is. My relatives told me about such difference. Yeah, as surprising as it might sound to you, those who got the covid-19 had flu infections before, and they noticed quite a difference in that regard. Those who experienced loss of smell/taste did not regain those senses for a very long time. That doesn’t happen with the flu.
Look idiot, the sars-cov-2 has that number 2 appended because there was a sars-cov-1. So, tose health institutions were hiding the fact that there’s other coronaviruses by openly admitting that there’s other coronaviruses. Evil as they are.
Not only that, the genome of sars-cov-2 and its mutants are different to those of the flu. The databases are public. Anybody can go and find coronaviruses from NCBI, or EBI, for example, or even from developing countries web-sites dedicated to following the spread of different mutants of the virus. So, this conspiracy to keep things hidden must be the worts in known history.
I think you should not assume that I’m a layman. You lack any background to judge, as you are so happy to show.
The symptoms, genome sequences, and seasonalities, or lack thereof, disagree with your claim.
Again, I had contact with some of those cases. Some from afar, some much closer. Again, you lack the foundations to make any claims about who’s a layman and who isn’t.
Those evil CDC people hiding the fact that there’s coronaviruses other than SARS-CoV-2!
Playing the credentials game is a bit difficult when one is commenting under a pseudonym. Your comments do not betray any relevant expertise either, I am sorry to say.
So tell us, what is the nature of your “affiliation with hospitals”? I am pretty confident that you are not an MD. Are you a nurse perhaps?
I am of the opnion that any country where the citizens have easy access to a vaccine, should now say, “Ok, the choice is yours, we are going to return completely to normal, no masks, no quarantine rules, and just take your chances. But if you get the virus and you aren’t vaccinated, your health care access is going to be low priority.” And then just let it be.
I think the likelihood of dying from this, after having had two doses of the vaccine, are so low, that most countries could just return to normal. For the people who choose to do nothing, well, best of luck.
I completely understand the sentiment, but this is an undesirable course of action. Quite apart from medical ethical considerations: Letting the disease run freely will also affect a lot of people who are vulnerable because of no fault of their own (e.g. immunocompromised individuals) and the disease burden is bound to be very disruptive for the whole of society.
I like to think of myself as a liberal, but this requires some confidence that my fellow human beings will not be acting like morons or complete jerks. I confess this confidence has been put to the test the last year. In my weak moments, compulsory vaccination sounded like a splendid idea.
Corneel,
Agreed. And, from a purely selfish standpoint, there is also the risk of immune escape variants, and/or more virulent variants. Every viral replication is a “shot on goal”.
Corneel,
You don’t think that everyone on the planet is going to be exposed to this eventually? If it comes in the form of omicron, it probably means for most everyone (and almost certainly virtually everyone with any kind of a vaccine, even just one) that it is just going to be a cold or flu at most. We gave up trying to keep everyone from getting the flu. We don’t shut down the world for flus.
And, as I predicted really, it looks like more mutations means the virus kind of fizzles out, it doesn’t become a superbug, like we were always told would take over the world if we took too many antibitoics, but in 100 years of taking them hasn’t happened.
If you are immunocompromised, you are still going to get this virus one day. Get vaccinated, maintain a good healthy lifestyle-the same thing you do to protect yourself from everything else out there waiting to get you.
And save the hospital beds for the people who made an effort to not get sick but got sick anyway. Not for people who were too selfish to go along for the good of society.
Not yet anyway: The next pandemic may very well be influenza. The flu is seriously underestimated IMO.
You underestimate the risks: For example, we have had several occasions in the past where strains of influenza A were (re)introduced from animal reservoirs and caused deadly pandemics. But it’s true that past zoonotic introductions of coronaviruses, if they ever were dangerous, are relatively harmless nowadays. Few people know that a considerable portion of common colds are caused by infection with human coronaviruses; distant relatives of SARS-CoV-2.
The problem is: this process takes time and we are not quite there yet. Right now, SARS-CoV-2 including the omicron variant can be very virulent. If we allow it to rage unchecked, this will cause considerable more harm than any other contemporary infectious disease we know of. We need to be a little more patient still.
Compulsory vaccination is something I am truly in two minds about. The price we are paying for respecting the right to physical integrity might be so high. And what will the government be forcing onto people? Protection against one of the most dangerous diseases of the last century with miniscule risk of side effects! How awful.
Slow hand-clap for phoodoo everyone. Antibiotic resistance is a real problem in a number of areas but you know what you know so we won’t bother with the actual facts of the matter.
However I would note that phoodoo’s comment is in line with his paymasters wishes:
Nothing to see here folks, move along please.
This always baffles me. When all is said and done, ALL laws restrict the liberties of some to protect the integrity of the community. One could argue that civilization is a term that literally means, a group of people operating under a common set of restrictions. One of the primary purposes of government is to protect the polity from inimical behaviors by irresponsible individuals. And in this sense, vaccine mandates are functionally equivalent to laws forbidding drunk driving. Yeah, the drunk’s liberty is curtailed.
(On second thought, maybe not so much. Commonly-broken laws like drunk driving or speeding can be enforced only selectively…)
Does compulsory vaccination even exist? It seems that vaccination of children, for example, is simply common and uncontroversial – made super-easy, not compulsory. Had your parents wanted, you’d probably have grown up unvaccinated. (And then you’d get something like smallpox as an adult and suffer terribly from it.)
What are the punishments for refusing “compulsory” vaccination? You just don’t get to go everywhere you want, but there are no fines or jailtime as far as I know. The idea behind Biden’s mandates is as follows: “OSHA’s rules, which are planned to take full effect on January 4, require that employers with 100 or more employees vaccinate their employees against Covid, or test those who choose not to be vaccinated.” https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2021/12/mark-brown-legality-biden-osha-vaccine-mandate/
Technically, nobody has to get vaccinated. Everybody can just do the tests. What is there to be in two minds about?
The simple point is: Is the pandemic real or not? If it’s real, then the government should perhaps have done quite a bit more than it has done.
Where? What is the end goal?
The difference being that bodily integrity is grounded in the constitution and the right to drunk driving is not. Overriding the former needs more pressing arguments.