outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Lolol

To the pro-eternal shutdown cheerleaders, when your favorite government pals start canceling pride parades, we better not hear a peep out of you!!!

— Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) May 7, 2020

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/woodstock-occur-during-pandemic/

Snopes finally got around to the WOODSTOCK OCCURRED DURING A PANDEMIC article that the moron from AIER wrote.

Theirs is a cut above the rest as they actually received exclusive quotes from a scientist at the NIAID and an epidemiologist, rather than other fact checkers, who pieced it together solely from existing data, or quoting people who aren't experts in their field.

The AIER author is now bitching about Reuters calling his article misleading, citing US Today reporting it as "True" even though they picked his claims apart and ruled it true only because it is "technically" true

I've emailed AIER dickhead every debunk article as it arrives in my view. He was a complete evasive dick to me in his responses so it's no shock that he still insists he's right.

Get one brain, Dr. Morens!

Sorry

Haha

Kind of afraid I'm gonna get doxxed by this author now

Turns out that whole Fyre Festival thing the world laughed at was actually a prophetic allegory. Humans. Will we never learn?

Fuck the USA

Sanofi's CEO Paul Hudson said Wednesday that if its efforts to find a coronavirus vaccine pan out, he would supply the US government first because "it's invested in taking the risk", after it expanded a partnership with his company earlier this year....But Hudson's comments drew outrage from French health associations, not least since Sanofi has benefited from tens of millions of euros in research credits from the French state in recent years.

"For us, it would be unacceptable for there to be privileged access to such and such a country for financial reasons," deputy finance minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher told Sud Radio..."The head of Sanofi's French division confirmed to me that a vaccine would be available in every country and obviously... to the French as well, not least because it has production capacity in France," said Pannier-Runacher.

luckily people are working hard to reduce demand in the US

Communism is good:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/14/the-coronavirus-slayer-how-keralas-rock-star-health-minister-helped-save-it-from-covid-19

<3

i still struggle with where to post this stuff. sorry. "this stuff" meaning the rebellion in the united states against the idea that there is a problem. to an extent, this stupidity affects the rest of the world too, but it's also our special little dumb american problem. so i don't know. sorry.

On Monday, Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, issued an extraordinary rebuke of Republicans who said they would defy his shutdown orders.

“These folks are choosing to desert in the face of the enemy,” Mr. Wolf said.

Republican officials in half a dozen counties have said they would ignore a stay-home order recently extended to June 4 and allow some businesses to reopen on Friday. Mr. Wolf threatened those counties with the loss of federal relief funds, and businesses with the loss of liquor licenses and other permits.

Mr. Trump waded into the fight on Twitter, where he wrote: “The great people of Pennsylvania want their freedom now, and they are fully aware of what that entails. The Democrats are moving slowly, all over the U.S.A., for political purposes.”

Pennsylvania, a state Mr. Trump narrowly won, will again be an electoral battleground this year, and some analysts see a strategy by the president and his supporters to use gut-level anger over shutdowns to drive turnout in November. With most visits and presidential rallies on hold, the Trump campaign has been pouring resources into Pennsylvania, harnessing anger over the shutdown to digitally recruit and train more volunteers.

These folks are choosing to desert in the face of the enemy

More of this plz

meanwhile, a former top vaccine scientist (recently ousted from his position for telling the truth, of course) is currently testifying to congress about the likelihood of “the darkest winter in modern history” if the trump administration doesn't significantly step up their game

i feel like i've lost my mind, watching this hearing. i really do.

all the republicans are 1) making the case that the president did a great job, and/or 2) asking Dr Bright why the drug cocktail that their friend told them totally works against coronavirus isn't the number one drug.

meanwhile, the president is going to pennsylvania to urge everyone to go back to normal, and wisconsin's supreme court is doing the same, against the democratic governor's lockdown order.

it is just a gut blow, day after day. tens of thousands of people unnecessarily dying because of this. and no plan. as the guy testifying keeps saying: there is no comprehensive plan in the federal government. this is fucking madness.

I don't see why no one can explain it to him in four words:

Your voters will die.

They believe the other team's voters are the ones who will day, and in some ways they are right.

Do not underestimate the extent to which the GOP views this as a crude eugenics experiment with the end goal of reducing the voting base of their opponents

It's simple. They rely on voters who rely on FOX News (or even worse) for their information, which for them becomes The Truth About All This. Anyone who deviates from this version of The Truth instantly becomes The Enemy of Freedom. What happened in NYC, and Milan, and Barcelona, and Tehran is beside the point for the voters in Rhinelander, WI and Emporia, Kansas. Until it suddenly becomes The Crisis in the Heartland.

They believe the other team's voters are the ones who will day, and in some ways they are right.

i've seen this argument but i don't buy it. i mean i buy that maybe they believe it's true but i just don't see how the math works out. if the most vulnerable groups are the oldest, and older voters are the strongest and largest constituency for the republicans, then even if a higher percentage of marginalized voters are also at risk the massive numbers of elderly at risk should overwhelm that i'd think? i know someone said that in georgia (or maybe just atlanta?) they thought the numbers actually did work out in the gop's favor but even if that's true (and i'm skeptical) would it be true throughout the US? no area is going to escape coronavirus with the level of not locking down we've done.

I'm not completely convinced it works out either, especially as we continue to see spikes in rural areas. It absolutely could backfire. But then you look at 2016 vote differentials in a place like Michigan and it's clear that it doesn't take much.

I imagine they're hoping not enough of their voter base dies to make a significant electoral difference in November, when balanced against the fact that sensible people (more likely to be Democrats) wouldn't go anywhere near a polling station due to the risk - which will undoubtedly still be high even then.

When all your politics are reactionary and feed exclusively on a sense of crisis, then preventive measures make no sense, except as a thing you are reacting against. As soon as the crisis moves into republican strongholds then the messaging will shift from outrage over tyranny to embracing police state measures to control it.

xposts

i agree with mordy, the "reduce voting base of opponents" angle for the GOP just...makes no sense. anyone with a passing familiarity with covid19 understands that the elderly are particularly vulnerable. he's killing off his own base, not his political enemies.

but also, i think much more important: let's not minimize how COMPLETELY FUCKED UP it is to let political calculations influence the public health response to covid19. i mean, holy shit. this is not hypothetical or abstract or indirect, this is just straight up negligent murder, it really is

we're sitting here thinking about how it might influence the election if trump kills off more of one group vs the other

i mean, that's all we can do, i guess, but seriously. i don't know what else to say, it boggles the mind

It's not just that old people are more vulnerable - it's that Trump's asshole cultists are more likely to go out unmasked and stand too close to other asshole cultists in groups, etc., etc. Their performative rebellion is gonna bite them in the ass; after the protest outside the governor's mansion in Wisconsin, 72 people came down with COVID.

This is exceptionally ugly--going after Bright right now for his salary and questioning the legitimacy of his health issues.

and trump went after him this morning, too! before he even fucking testified!

It's gruesome, but I genuinely think that's a big part of their reasoning, that it is killing off people they do not care about and that it's voter suppression by other means.

But yes, MAGAs are also killing themselves with their greed and stupidity.

xposts

if the most vulnerable groups are the oldest, and older voters are the strongest and largest constituency for the republicans, then even if a higher percentage of marginalized voters are also at risk the massive numbers of elderly at risk should overwhelm that i'd think?

older people are the most at risk from covid, yes, but they're also the ones most likely to hunker down and avoid taking risks. marginalized groups are less financially secure and are more likely to be in situations where they contract the disease. there's also a bit of intersectionality here, as the most likely to contract the disease and die from it are elderly voters from marginalized groups (reliable democratic voters)

are trump voters the ones most likely to hunker down and avoid taking risks?

Republicans are death cultists, and they just like it when anyone dies

are trump voters the ones most likely to hunker down and avoid taking risks?

― Mordy, Thursday, May 14, 2020 11:36 AM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

older ones more likely than younger ones, i would say.

you've seen the "kill me to save the economy" people, lots of them are excited to die themselves

there are quite a few nursing homes full of hunkered down, risk-averse, consistent voters that are nonetheless afflicted with covid19

personally, i hope my death is so seismic that it craters the economy for years on end

It isn't a sensible political calculation, it's genocidal flailing backed up by the faulty belief that COVID only kills people that aren't on their side.

you've seen the "kill me to save the economy" people, lots of them are excited to die themselves

Catherine Mayer, Andy Gill from Gang of Four's widow, has a post up discussing the strong possibility he was an early victim of COVID-19 and some of what that might have meant (and could still mean)

https://www.catherinemayer.co.uk/post/2020-vision-14-may-16-00

at this very moment, congressmen billy long of missouri ("William Hollis Long II is an American auctioneer and politician serving as the U.S. Representative for Missouri's 7th congressional district since 2011" is spending his 5 minutes trying to trick Dr Bright into inferring that Dr Fauci can't be trusted. i'm not even joking.

Crazy how a tiny group of paid morons is driving us toward mass death.
https://kottke.org/plus/misc/images/xkcd-polling.jpg

Strangely, it's also a tiny group that owns the means of production

i personally know at least a handful of idiots that own very little but are still gung ho to reopen society

There are certainly some credulous people out there

the worst are the ppl who are like "why do we unquestioningly accept what the experts say this is too much overkill" and then when you ask "how much do you want to reopen society how many deaths do you foresee from that reopening and how much do you think is tolerable" they retreat to "i'm just asking questions we need to have a discussion" they don't have a fucking clue they're just mad and too emotionally immature to deal with their anger at god and the virus.

a handful of idiots that own very little but are still gung ho to reopen society

I'd class them more as the driven than the drivers, but they occupy the figurative space of the dogs hanging out the window and loving the breeze as they are taken to the death shelter.

otm

it's like with anti-vaxxers. the ppl who make free speech "stop insulting ppl who disagree with you" arguments are secret anti-vaxxers but are embarrassed to come out and say it.