outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

I mean, one could argue that losing the election was a consequence, but I don't think that is nearly sufficient for the deaths he's caused.

yup, it really is almost entirely his fault. it's amazing and infuriating.

― howls of non-specificity (sleeve), Monday, November 16, 2020 5:38 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

challop: it's not almost entirely his fault, a lot of blame can be shared by our federal system (i.e. every state makes its own rules) and the craziness of our current streak of right wing quasi-libertarianism. Counterpoint: if Trump had had full control of the entire country, things actually would have been worse.

TBC, no question his messaging was damaging. But I could imagine a counterfactual where Obama is president and people in places like Texas and South Dakota rebel against his rational guidance.

silby is right unfortunately. what a vaccine trial like this can tell you is: if 100 people has been vaccinated and 100 people have not, and they all do exactly the same things in the same populations for the same amount of time, the vaccinated group will have 90% fewer cases of covid.

the trial on its own doesn't allow you to distinguish between these two possible reasons for that observation:

- 90% of the vaccinated group are perfectly immune but 10% have no additional immunity
- 100% of the vaccinated group have immunity that reduces their risk on each encounter by 90%

and those aren't the only possible reasons.

the upshot of this for individual behaviour is: if you are lucky enough to get the vaccine early, don't go around licking doorknobs. wait until lots of people have had it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_d7xzbGgWA

I don't think there's any way in which the USA wouldn't have gotten hit particularly hard by this but Trump withholding information, lying constantly about it, and turning this into a culture war made it so much worse than it had to be. Not to mention the fucking rallies!! The only largescale events to be held in an indoor space in the last 8 months!!!! I'm sure someone like Cruz or Rubio would've been horrible in their own way but it wouldn't have turned into this.

^^^

This probably killed 100K people:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67SnwhJQO_o

thanks caek for dn

On the ABC radio news this morning, and I'd love for someone to confirm also explain what this means - the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines produce an immune response that doesn't stop you from getting infected with the SARS-COV-2 virus, or from becoming contagious, but it does mean you are less sick from COVID-19

About 3 minutes in.

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/moderna-joins-pfizer-vaccine/12890220

The body counts really rise when conservatives are in power, it's just that this time, they're doing what they've always wanted: killing their own constituents.

Ed, as I understood it, in the Moderna study 100ish people got infected. 95 were in the control (placebo) group, 5 in the vaccine group.

Eleven of the infected individuals were classified as "severe." All were in the placebo group and none were in the vaccine group.

So that suggests that not only did the vaccine tend to prevent infection, it also made it so that the infections that DID occur were less likely to be severe.

Does that make sense?

That does make sense. Although it also sounds like once vaccinated one should still refrain from high risk activities (eg. hugging a South Dakotan)

BTW, I'm still trying to find the thing I read about vaccination programmes being more effective where there isn't a raging pandemic going on, but I can't find it.

I don't think there's any way in which the USA wouldn't have gotten hit particularly hard by this but Trump withholding information, lying constantly about it, and turning this into a culture war made it so much worse than it had to be. Not to mention the fucking rallies!! The only largescale events to be held in an indoor space in the last 8 months!!!! I'm sure someone like Cruz or Rubio would've been horrible in their own way but it wouldn't have turned into this.

― frogbs, Monday, November 16, 2020 5:58 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, this seems fair. It occurs to me that we have a robust anti-vax movement in this country, but that movement would still probably be a lot stronger if we had an anti-vax president.

I sincerely hope and believe we will not have an anti-vaccine president, ever. Trump has done enough to encourage them

me otm 4 months ago

obviously i think the current national administration has done about the worst job imaginable, and certainly any plausible democratic president would have done better...

but i do think the US is set up in a way that pretty much guaranteed this outcome. fractal federation, harmful incentives in the healthcare industry, extreme inequality, and a self-fulfilling culture in which people assume governments of all levels are incompetent. these are all bad!

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Friday, June 19, 2020 1:36 PM (four months ago) bookmarkflaglink

TBC, no question his messaging was damaging. But I could imagine a counterfactual where Obama is president and people in places like Texas and South Dakota rebel against his rational guidance.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Monday, November 16, 2020 5:54 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is true as far as it goes but is nuts in that it disregards national PPE and testing shortages that were major issues in Spring 2020.

And solely, 100% at the feet of Trump.

TBC, no question his messaging was damaging. But I could imagine a counterfactual where Obama is president and people in places like Texas and South Dakota rebel against his rational guidance.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Monday, November 16, 2020

sounds like an excuse for Trump's covid inaction. If this happened under Obama we would have had funding for on the ground support and clear coordinated rational advice from the CDC and medical experts

If Hillary had been President, we probably would have still had Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

You gotta work that into the equation somehow. In an election year are they giving her even the stimulus we did get?

don't know what you're talking about, but Obama (or Hillary) wouldn't have politicized it like this

It's an inherently political situation, but what I'm talking about is that the Democrats wouldn't have retaken the House in the midterms and now the Democratic President would have had to deal with Ryan and McConnell in an election year to get the funding that allowed our quarter-assed shutdown to start with. Note that now, without an election for two years, McConnell has zero interest in a stimulus that would benefit the incoming Democratic President. The anti-mask freaks would have been emboldened as much in opposition to Clinton as in support of Trump.

Any Democrat would have been better than Trump - but they would have been concerned with keeping the economy open as well, and they would have been hamstrung by a Republican Congress and Republican state governments as well.

it's not an inherently political situation, it's public health

Who lives and who dies is always subject to politics tho

Which is as political as it gets - Medicare For All, Obamacare, vaccines, abortion, Planned Parenthood, birth control, sanitation of urban areas, clean drinking water, elder care, ad infinitum.

Even in terms of their own internal response, Democratic centrists' first move wasn't (and, uh, still isn't) "pay everyone to stay home," it was tax credits.

I'm out of my depth with these political arguments but we've never just decided to let such a huge number of people die of disease like this without addressing it

Well I’m not gonna argue the numbers but uh

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_the_United_States

But we do, every single day. Not from a pandemic but from poverty, lack of healthcare, deaths of despair, pollution.

(https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/subtopics/coronavirus-and-pollution/)

silby you are right, it has been the thing that has had the most impact on my life

the Democrats wouldn't have retaken the House in the midterms and now the Democratic President would have had to deal with Ryan and McConnell in an election year to get the funding that allowed our quarter-assed shutdown to start with.

Maybe your alternate version with HRC winning would have played out as you state. There is no way to know. Nut HRC did not win and it was Trump who in 2020 was situated as the head of state, was leader of his party, and held most visible and powerful position in the nation. He chose his irresponsible words and actions. If Ryan and McConnell had been the ones who abused their power as Trump did, then in that alternate universe they would have deserved the revulsion now aimed at Trump.

I blame Trump for the simple reason that he deliberately screwed the entire country for totally selfish reasons. He was given ample good advise by experts that he simply kicked to the curb and ignored.

we've done nothing about this except to provide some minor economic relief from the fallout. there has been no coordinated effort to help with the pandemic, but instead active disinformation which has been broadcasted by the administration for partisan political reasons, and which has been really damaging

silby and milo arguing that hypothetical dem responses would have been as bad as Trump is so on brand it's funny. Keep up the fight!

Did I say that? I don’t think I said that.

I took issue with the idea that public health “isn’t political”

If I’ve gotten to the point where I seem to have a predictable shtick I guess I need to change it up a bit, I guess I could try blaming Bernie Bros for Joe Biden’s loss to Donald Trump?

I guess what I meant was that public health *shouldn't be political, and agree that what happened with AIDS in the 80s was devastating

that hypothetical dem responses would have been as bad as Trump

You should probably wait until posts that directly contradict you are off the page before you say dumb shit?

"Any Democrat would have been better than Trump - but they would have been concerned with keeping the economy open as well, and they would have been hamstrung by a Republican Congress and Republican state governments as well."

Even in the best-case scenario of American politics facing this pandemic, we were still going to - by some leaps and bounds - do worse than our peers among the wealthiest nations. Why? Federalism, Republicans, American Protestantism, capitalism and the lack of a social safety net.

Please go shit up a different thread. Please.

Truly don’t know what milo is doing to “shit up” the thread rn I think you’re just knee-jerk reacting to a poster you don’t like

I still can't see this a political. I'm long since used to gay men being dismissed in any conversation about public health, but this affects everyone, and the callousness of this administration has been notable

as political

ftr as much as he drives me up a wall I don't even dislike milo but why does every thread have to be the milo show, particularly a thread reserved for updates about the pandemic.

Anyone can post

Dan, it is absolutely political. Who lives and who dies, who gets care and the quality of care they receive if they receive it, who profits off of that care, who profits and who loses when millions of people are told to stay home, and the list goes on.

To even call what the US government has done ineffective would be the height of understatement. The response has been to let the population starve and die.

particularly a thread reserved for updates about the pandemic

Except for the 30 posts above mine about our response?

Yes, public health is always political on some level, but Trump's COVID response was only political and completely ignored public health altogether. There's a difference.

The gall of these governors, like the asshole in Iowa, who spent months obnoxiously resisting even the most minimal of mitigation efforts and now, with cases surging and hospital capacity shrinking, are pleading with their populations to wear masks, social distance, etc. And yet, having long ago backed themselves into a political corner, they're *still* unable or unwilling to fully commit to that position even in the face of disaster. I wonder how many of these dickheads secretly look forward to Biden? I guess it doesn't matter, because it'll probably remain their little secret while they publicly keep up the same disingenuous front of BS.