Covid 19 CRISIS

The protesters are people, and I agree with those people as far as against another lockdown
The problem here is an undercomplex idea of "freedom" or "liberty" that has plagued the US for years and that a far-right movement longing for a new idea to cling to except for "weren't Hitler and Mussolini great" is trying to import Europe, which will hopefully not be fruitful.

Personal liberty ends where one's actions negatively affect other people's ability to excercise their freedoms. This is agreed upon within anarchist, liberatarian, (neo-)conservatives and classical liberal thinkers.

The problem with covid lockdowns is that they are proof of bad statecraft. We can see that you can steer througn the pandemic with more granular measures than lockdowns, but also without killing an excess amount of people (see: the Nordics, Canada) if you react early enough. From this point of view I can understand why people protest.

But that is not why those people protest. They protest because they believe that governments are taking their liberties away out of spite, in the name of "healthcare dictatorship", "government overreach", or even "international judaism." Most, if not all of them, are also vaccine refusers and deny covid exists/is as bad as, well, it is.
And here the undercomplex concept of liberty comes in: Unvaxxed people who get covid block hospital beds. If they die, they may well die, I hope they do, by now. But it's not only them that die. It's old people having a heart attack who can't get an ambulance because they are all out for covidiots. It's motorcyclists who had a bad accident and can't go into surgery because there's no ICU bed to keep them alive afterwards. It's young women with complications during childbirth.

So, as a society, we can chose between "mandatory vaccination", "covid control measures that in cases of bad statecraft include lockdowns", or "let innocent people die in the name of other people's freedom." The latter of the three options is the US model on school shootings, but it is, again, based on a stupidified, egosistic, deeply anti-social concept of freedom that is hard to defend, even within a Thatcherist "there is no society" framework.
 
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It's old people having a heart attack who can't get an ambulance because they are all out for covidiots. It's motorcyclists who had a bad accident and can't go into surgery because there's no ICU bed to keep them alive afterwards.

This is a very difficult topic, IMO.

You know my opinion about vaccines, but playing devil's advocate here: who says the motorcyclist should have any more right to the ICU than the covidiot? They picked a dangerous way of living by choosing one of the most dangerous modes of transport there is, just because they wanted "the freedom". Those are the exact words used by an old friend of mine when I asked him why he prefer to be cold and wet on a bike rather than comfortable in a car.

I don't exactly live a healthy lifestyle. Should my future heart attack still get me an ICU bed?
 
I don't exactly live a healthy lifestyle. Should my future heart attack still get me an ICU bed?
Yup. Metaphorically speaking, the motorcyclist chooses to juggle with knives and you are juggling with forks. Both can hurt you to varying degrees, but if you do it properly and aren’t unlucky, it’s reasonably safe.

The anti-vaxxers are juggling with subcritical blocks of Plutonium and demanding neutron reflectors.
 
I’m following a farmer from the US on youtube and apparently he’s been knocked out by covid for a couple of weeks. Not a word about any of it on his YT channel so far, but he posted a story on Instagram saying that he still is too weak to attach a tractor implement. Wonder if he has the balls to talk to his big YT audience about it.
 
Who says the motorcyclist should have any more right to the ICU than the covidiot? They picked a dangerous way of living by choosing one of the most dangerous modes of transport there is, just because they wanted "the freedom". Those are the exact words used by an old friend of mine when I asked him why he prefer to be cold and wet on a bike rather than comfortable in a car.

I don't exactly live a healthy lifestyle. Should my future heart attack still get me an ICU bed?
This is an argument that I've heard often, also from people who should know better (lawyers and ethicists): How I see it, refusing the vaccine is not a lifestyle choice like extreme sports or smoking, or even smoking crack, but not taking a preventive medical measure, like, say a regular dentist's appointment or a prostate cancer check (which is an even more intrusive measure, literally). And healthcare systems take the refusal of dentist's appointments as grounds to refuse coverage.
So this slippery slope argument has no ground to stand on.
 
This is a very difficult topic, IMO.

You know my opinion about vaccines, but playing devil's advocate here: who says the motorcyclist should have any more right to the ICU than the covidiot? They picked a dangerous way of living by choosing one of the most dangerous modes of transport there is, just because they wanted "the freedom". Those are the exact words used by an old friend of mine when I asked him why he prefer to be cold and wet on a bike rather than comfortable in a car.

I don't exactly live a healthy lifestyle. Should my future heart attack still get me an ICU bed?
Riding a motorcycle doesn't mean you are going to end up injured or in ICU; a better analogy would be riding a motorcycle recklessly while not wearing protective gear. Getting the vaccine is like wearing a helmet and other gear - being out in public at all during a pandemic is risky (just like riding a motorcycle) but getting the vaccine (wearing gear) helps to mitigate that risk. Gear doesn't prevent a crash but it severely lessens the chance of serious life-threatening injury, just like how the vaccine doesn't prevent breakthrough infection but it reduces the chance of death 14x over not getting the vaccine.

I'd argue that the guy riding a S1000RR-Race Edition S Super R in a t-shirt and backwards ball cap shouldn't get priory to the ICU either.
 
Not particularly surprising, but it's interesting to see the numbers. Counties that voted at least 60% for Trump in the last election have a death rate from COVID 2.7x higher than liberal or moderate counties.

 
This is a very difficult topic, IMO.

You know my opinion about vaccines, but playing devil's advocate here: who says the motorcyclist should have any more right to the ICU than the covidiot? They picked a dangerous way of living by choosing one of the most dangerous modes of transport there is, just because they wanted "the freedom". Those are the exact words used by an old friend of mine when I asked him why he prefer to be cold and wet on a bike rather than comfortable in a car.

I don't exactly live a healthy lifestyle. Should my future heart attack still get me an ICU bed?
Replace "motorcyclist" with "traffic participant" - people get hurt in cars, on foot, on bicycles, in busses, in trains, in airplanes, and yes, on motorcycles.
 
I don't exactly live a healthy lifestyle. Should my future heart attack still get me an ICU bed?
Two things I'd like to add:
1. The debate I outlined above is about keeping equal treatment even for covidiots.
2. If so many people would end up in hospital from motorcycling/extreme sports/smoking that it would put an undue burden on the healthcare system, we would have a debate on banning/limiting this activity. Just like with drunk e-scooter use in Helsinki.
 
Boostered ? props to the S-H vax sites, good throughput ... one criticism though, their camouflage suits with red santa hats look weird :lmao:

Excellent parking too :clap:
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Would have been great views if it wasn't dark :dunno: it's in the main building for the Gothenburg ferry.
 
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I’m curious what my experience at (officially) the “former vaccination centre”, which is now a centre where people can get vaccinated, will be. o_O

Note to all ze Germans looking for an appointment: do keep looking because apparently, they still open appointments in batches once the deliveries have been scheduled which seems to happen over the weekend. Who knows, you may be able to pull it forward.
 
I’m curious what my experience at (officially) the “former vaccination centre”, which is now a centre where people can get vaccinated, will be. o_O

Note to all ze Germans looking for an appointment: do keep looking because apparently, they still open appointments in batches once the deliveries have been scheduled which seems to happen over the weekend. Who knows, you may be able to pull it forward.
For SH at least, there are thousands of open slots over the next two weeks, hundreds of thousands over the next three months ... they dumped (almost?) all appointments until end of February onto ticket.impfen-sh.de - apparently around 500k doses:
 
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Boostered ? props to the S-H vax sites, good throughput ... one criticism though, their camouflage suits with red santa hats look weird :lmao:

TOTAL TANK.

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First data on Omicron immune escape is in.

tl;dr: Bad, but not catastrophic, pretty much as expected from computer modeling.
Caveat: Very small study (12 samples, all vaccinated with BioNTech, five with prior infection)

Key findings:
  • BioNTech double vaxxed antibodies take quite a hit (41-fold), but still should be enough to prevent severe, sometimes even symptomatic disease.
  • Protection was maintained in samples from all double vaxxed people with prior covid infection
  • There were no boostered individuals in the samples, so we can only guess. But since there is some antibody activity left, making more of those through boosters should help a lot, even without an adapted vaccine
On the downside:
  • A 41-fold drop in antibody activity is quite bad. Not as bad as some feared, but bad. We will need updated vaccines.
  • BioNTech and Moderna are the supercars of antibody production. We can expect the weaker vaccines to be hit even worse.
  • Some reports coming in about kids getting hospitalized, potentially moving Covid into RSV territory, so from "it's harmless to kids" towards "it puts some kinds in hospital"
What gives me the most hope is not only the clinical data coming in from South Africa and the UK, showing only mild infections in adults infected with Omicron. This may well be not because the virus itself has changed to causing less severe disease, but that it's key advatage over Delta is the ability to reinfect people - whose immune system then already know what to do and kicks the bugger right out again.
But my main takeway, what gives me most hope, from the whole Omicron mess so far is: We are gaining an excellent understanding of the virus. We identified this variant quickly, computer modeling pretty much predicted the immune escape, science still is awesome!
Delta really was a curveball no one saw coming, but Omicron has been linked to a "greatest hits" album not only by me, but also by Derek Lowe: The only thing surprising about Omicron was how quick it showed up, all mutations within it were well-know already. Hopefully, this means we've seen all that Covid can produce in terms of newness, and like with a washed-up band well past their prime, new combinations of the old hits are all we'll see from now on.
 
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Let me chime in again on Antivaxers.

My father in law had a stroke, after having chemotherapy. He needed Stents, and couldn't get them because all ICU beds were blocked. Took personal contacts (helps if you know the head of the department in the clinic because I am the Godfather of his granddaughter) to get him the life saving operation.

Fuck antivaxxers. Fuck them. Honestly, I am suprised sane people are not taking up violence against these cunts. If anything bad happens to my daughter because some cunts couldn't be asked to take a vaccine I will rent a truck from SIXT and drive to Saxony and run over the next protest march I find. Time for sane arguments is over.

Also, boostered, got the Biontech triple.
 
My father in law had a stroke, after having chemotherapy. He needed Stents, and couldn't get them because all ICU beds were blocked.
Fuck this. Same thing happened to a friend of Jules after a household accident (complicated fracture, needs ICU bed after surgery), had to be shipped to another hospital in another town ("only" from Mainz to Frankfurt, but never the less) due to lack of ICU capacity. This is a travesty.
 
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