Trump and O’Reilly got booed during their idiotic onstage tour in Houston because they got vaccinated. False consciousness has reached a new high, as O’Reilly amplified the clip on Twitter.
Anti-vaxxing has now transcended any idea about herd immunity and is simply an illusion about identifying with a ruling class that vaccinates itself, because… Freedom of ignorance. Red-state anti-vaxxing is right wing ideology framed as quasi-quantum junk science.
Former President Donald Trump and his old friend Bill O’Reilly revealed to an audience before them that they were both triple-vaccinated, which was received by a smattering of boos. Or at least the reaction of the crowd was enough to get both Trump and O’Reilly to react, in a laughing matter.
The 45th president and former Fox News prime time star spent the past two weeks engaged in something called the “History Tour” — a series of conversations in arenas across the nation. Last night during the tour’s final show in Dallas, both revealed that they had received the vaccine booster shot, a clip of which was shared by O’Reilly’s “No Spin News” Twitter account:
www.mediaite.com/...
At this stage in the fight against vaccine-preventable diseases, responsible governments should not allow such efforts to go wasted on the altar of freedom of choice. Although vaccination programmes should not take their relevance for granted, legal frameworks placing the health of the community above the individual choice should be established or clarified. Just as parents cannot choose to not educate their children for whatever reason, they should not be given the choice to opt-out their children from vaccination. The most successful public health intervention of all time should be more vocal than anti-vaxxers.
www.thelancet.com/...
But there is nothing new about this current wave except its intensity, its temporal concentration. And there is nothing new about Covid either. In this country there is always a low hum of death, often just quiet enough to ignore. It of course wears on us, but we usually cannot name it—the car crashes, the preventable cancers and slow-moving environmental catastrophes, the suicides and overdoses—always there, but rarely loud enough to disrupt our lives fully, instead building day by day until it mutates into things detached from their cause (depression, DSM disorders, the things that bring you to a therapist or yoga studio).
So we learn to live with the hum, and that has, until now, perhaps been one of the most genius characteristics of American capitalism—its ability to abstract the inherent death enough, to put noise barriers around it like a highway through a residential neighborhood, so that it does not, in most times, feel unbearable.
Covid has broken down the noise barriers, or maybe just made them ineffective, the traffic is too loud, made the low hum high, made it plain how little our government cares, how actively it promotes death for the sake of profit. And so we have now been able to name our anxieties and depressions and states of shock for what they are—logical responses to the world we live in.
mentalhellth.xyz/...
Amidst the global pandemic, strategies for containing the virus have varied worldwide. Natural herd immunity, while not much of an actual strategy, has been discussed as a way to stop the spread. However, an estimated 70 to 90% of a given population would have to be infected, which would most likely result in significant mortality. Since natural herd immunity is unfeasible under most circumstances, an article (the first link below) studied a form of population protection in Taiwan, using the term “quasi population immunity” to describe “temporary immunity […] at the population level.”
For months, the outbreak has remained under control in Taiwan without a widespread economic shutdown or physical lockdown. The relatively quick response of its government is largely credited to previous experience with the 2003 SARS epidemic and a 2016 flu outbreak, but to really understand how “quasi population immunity” happened, let’s take a look at the basic reproductive number, R0. In class, we learned that R0 = k * p, where k = the number of contacts an infectious person has and p = the probability of transmitting the disease to a contact. To prevent an infectious disease from spreading infinitely, k and/or p should be lowered enough so that R0 is less than 1.
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If natural herd immunity seems an unfeasible goal, strategies to create “quasi population immunity” can be used to control diseases before vaccine-based herd immunity is achieved. In Taiwan, enforced quarantines and contact tracing helped lower k, while wearing masks (among other NPIs) lowered p. Together, R0 was brought down to below 1 so that the virus is contained. Of course, all this would have been much harder without taking action early on, before the disease became widespread enough to warrant a total lockdown. Even if the world was caught unprepared this time, we have to learn from the experience to develop infrastructure that can effectively respond to emerging infectious diseases, and ensure that correct information about prevention measures reaches the public.
blogs.cornell.edu/…
Quasi-quantum homeopathy