Daily Kos Elections said we’ve got work to do with suburbs. I have to believe that they (suburbans) don’t understand the mandates. I will be honest. I absolutely DO NOT understand how any responsible person in the country could vote for a republican after the insurrection which portends their (republicans) future intentions and their (republican) stances on the pandemic. I have to believe that these people understand that the pandemic (to say nothing of the eradication of our democracy ) is far more important than CRT or anything else because it affects their daily and can take the lives of their loved ones. Hence, I have to believe that somehow these suburban people especially suburban women who leaned republican and then turned to us because of Trump don’t support or understand the mandates. I suspect that these suburban women are mostly vaccinated and figure since they are vaccinated, everything should go back to normal.
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I wrote this on my Facebook page explaining why we need the mandates and how we can get back to as close to our past normal as possible. I am admittedly pretty frank and not very patient in my explanation because I feel that they should have already understood this.
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I said long before LP or anybody else that we need to nationalize every race and that every election is about two things and two things only: the insurrection/democracy and the pandemic. Every candidate needs to stay laser focused on those two topics and explain why the extra work now will mean less work and less pain later regarding the mandates and measures protecting people. Everything else is just noise. Voters in off year and midterm elections will have a different and more republican leaning electorate when we hold the White House. That’s why our messaging needs to be on just the pandemic and the insurrection/democracy.
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Candidates who do that well will win and those who don’t will fail. I speak before the public better than I write.
When a person speaks with conviction and passion with facts at their command while pursuing noble goals like protecting our democracy and protecting people in this pandemic , they will inspire confidence and attract followers. When I write, I tend to over-explain. I appreciate your patience as you read my post.
We’ve got a pandemic which has killed over 800,000 people. I am flummoxed that many people in the suburbs don’t want to more or less end the pandemic as much as possible and keep their family, friends, loved ones and communities safe and that this isn’t a greater priority for them than doing whatever they want even if it results in the death of others.
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If you got vaccinated because you understand that the pandemic is real and deadly, then you should understand why we had to go forward with mandates. I am extremely disappointed that some people in the suburbs don’t seem to understand this. We were at around 66% of adults vaccinated and we had simply stopped making progress on vaccinations.
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If you think, “So what I am vaccinated. Therefore, I am not worried !“ , then you’re not paying attention. If we didn’t increase the percentage of the people who were vaccinated, then the virus would continue to circulate more rapidly . This means several things.
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First, it will continue to mutate which means that each time one patient spreads it to another patient, then they are passing on an ever increasing viral load. That means it will be more contagious and it will be better at evading vaccine defenses.
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Second, it will remain active in the country. It will continue to be a threat and continue to take lives, especially the lives of the vulnerable.
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Third, the virus will remain active and mutating while you are relying upon your original vaccination to protect you. However, strong evidence tells us that within four to six months, protection from the vaccine wanes. So, now the virus will be circulating and mutating around you with ever increasing viral loads spreading while your vaccine protection is significantly weakening.
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Can you now see why that is trouble ? That’s trouble just for you, in case you’re the selfish narcissist who doesn’t care about anybody else. Say you’re vaccinated. Say you got vaccinated with a strong mRNA vaccine, the stronger type (compared to the J & J type) in March. When you were vaccinated, Delta had not come around you and you may have missed Alpha. Alpha was 50% more contagious than the original novel coronavirus. The virus kept circulating because not enough people were vaccinated. It mutated and we saw the Delta variant appear. It is 50% more contagious than the Alpha variant. 1.5*1.5=2.25 and so the variant now circulating around you is twice as contagious because of the increase in viral loads. And it is November now, some 7 months later. So, your vaccine protection has waned. That means you are at a much greater risk of a breakthrough case. That’s just you even ifcwe suppose you have no health issues.
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Suppose you’re not a narcissistic, self-centered jerk and you care about others in your life: your kids or your spouse or your partner, your extended family, your friends and co-workers. One or more of them most likely according to probability has some sort of co-morbidity or some condition that makes them even more vulnerable to the virus. Are you willing to simply consign them to whatever fate they may get if they catch it ? Why would you not support whatever measure that would help keep them safe ? If not, do you realize how many Americans you would be throwing away, many of whom have conditions as a result of their service for our country? We are talking about the lives of tens of millions of people.
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And even those who survive a stronger case may become permanently disabled and unable to work and may have difficulty breathing and simply walking for the rest of their lives. Long haulers will have profound health challenges for the rest of their lives.
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What about those who have a legitimate medical contraindication for the vaccine? What about those who can’t yet get vaccinated, children? Anybody who has ever been a public school teacher will tell you that students are very efficient at spreading viruses. If child a catches the virus and passes it to child b, then it won’t stop with child b. Child b will spread it to their parents and to their friends at school.
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Vaccines for children ages 5-11 are now coming online. However, it will take a while to build up that vaccination percentage and there will be some parents who will be irresponsible anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists who won’t allow their children to be vaccinated. So, getting the percentage of the total population of the country up will take some time. In the meantime, the only protection for the children, students, is mandating that staff get vaccinated and students wear masks . The mandates are necessary until we get a strong percentage of children/students vaccinated.
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The alternative to the mandate is that the virus will mutate more so it can better attack children. This has already started. We are already seeing children catching the virus at much greater rates than we saw previously. So, if we didn’t have a mandate, then we would see children/ students spread it to each other even more often and rapidly and then to their parents and throughout the community.
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Finally, let me repeat the question I asked earlier, “Do you really want this virus to be circulating and active in this country and in your neighborhood for the indeterminate foreseeable future?”
Would you not like to return to a more normal life when you are not constantly thinking about or worrying about the virus? The way we do that is through building the vaccination percentage.
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The fact is that the CDC scientists looked at a study of 7,000 people across 9 states and those who had already caught the virus previously and had “natural immunity “ built up and then caught it again but were not vaccinated were 5 times more likely to need to be hospitalized and need to be be put on a ventilator due to the virus than those who were vaccinated. Thus, the “immunity “ you get from catching the virus does not protect you nearly as well as the vaccines do.
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We don’t want the virus to continue to be in the forefront of our thoughts as we go through day after day. The mandates are necessary in workplaces with over 100 employees because they need safe workplaces and this is the OSHA mandate, to keep employees safe, and it along with the mandates for all federal contractors and federal employees could and did greatly increase the vaccination percentage in adults to nearly 80%. This shows that the mandates worked; they did what pleas and bribes could not. They rapidly increased our vaccination percentage among adults. We were not making progress any other way. Vaccinations had slowed to a crawl. If President Biden did not act, then we would have remained at 66% among adults and that would have meant that the virus would have been far more active in killing and we would have seen increases in per capita daily death rates instead of decreases.
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Now, it’s good that we got the adult vaccination percentage to about 80%, but a large percentage of our population is 18 years of age or younger and that means that our overall vaccination percentage is only 60 something percent. It also means that the part of our population which is most efficient at spreading the virus is the least protected part of the population.
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That’s why we need the second set of mandates, the ones for public schools. As I noted previously , students are most at risk because the vaccines have not been available at all for ages 5 to 11 and the vaccines for those aged 12 to 18 have been available for less time than the vaccines have been available for adults . So, the most vulnerable part of our population (those with the lowest vaccination percentage ) is the most efficient at spreading vaccinations. Thus, not only are we thinking of the children [and we are seeing an increase in the number of severe cases among children ] but we are also thinking of those whom they may pass the virus onto. Again as I noted before , student A may pass it onto student B who may pass it onto their families. You may say, “But these family members are vaccinated and safe. So, it doesn’t matter!” However, when were they vaccinated? Many months ago . That means that their vaccine protection has waned ! And what about those who have family members with weakened immune systems like MS or cancer or those who are obese ? Again, are we really prepared to simply write off the lives of tens of millions of Americans simply because they had a health condition which made them more vulnerable to the virus?
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Furthermore, since children up to 18 are such a large part of our population, then without the mandates to keep us safe and increase the vaccination percentage, we would have to prepare to expect the pandemic to remain here indefinitely, for the foreseeable future. Few if any of us want the pandemic to stay with us for the foreseeable future.
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That’s why we need the mandates now until we have a strong 5-18 vaccination percentage . In a couple of months if we continue to raise our adult vaccination percentage and rapidly get children ages 5-18 vaccinated, then the pandemic should be creating few cases and we can return to a more normal America.
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The alternative is that we reject the mandates, but then the virus will keep circulating and mutating and we will see surges in hospitalizations and deaths and we will be forced to adopt even more strict and stringent measures while we suffer greater losses . Eventually, the losses will be so profound that they will overcome the resistance of the anti vaxxer conspiracy theorists and strict measures will be implemented because it will be apparent to almost all that they were necessary. These more strict measures would then be with us much longer than they otherwise would have .
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Therefore, we need to be patient and support the mandates and vote for candidates in the Democratic Party because it is the only party which supports implementing the measures which will keep people safe and counter-intuitively lead us back to normal [or as normal as possible] as quickly as possible.