Octopus Overlords

No doubt there is some variation from state to state (especially in some states), but overall it's done.

Skinypupy wrote: ↑Wed May 26, 2021 1:22 pm Assuming it's legit, this is just...sad.

Father in Kentucky sobbingly promises daughter $2,000 to not get vaccinated

The damage conservative media have done is consistently horrifying.

Girl posts a video recording of her father crying to her about not getting the vaccine.

This is only because she knows she is right and he is wrong (IMO) and while I totally get and agree that this is sad, there is some silver here too.


I guess I am saying that this is better than a video of some father crying to his daughter, begging her to trust and get the vaccine, even though no one else in their family will. Right?

El Guapo wrote: ↑Wed May 26, 2021 10:37 pm

Blackhawk wrote: ↑Wed May 26, 2021 10:33 pm I did my 'browse' shopping trip today. I visited nine different locations. Mask usage was maybe 2%.

Honest truth: The mask era is over. The arguments are over. Some of us will continue to wear them for now, but the battle is done, and it is unlikely that we'll be able to go back if and when it is needed.

Masks are alive and well in my Boston neighborhood, FWIW. Definitely down outside, but in stores its still pretty universal.

Of course, the irony being that vaccination rates are probably near universal here too. I imagine the people most likely to wear masks are the people least likely to actually need to.

MA continues to lead among larger states, with 62% of adults fully and 77% partially vaccinated. Statewide new infections have been below 200 for the past couple of days. I like being a Masshole.

Mask use has become grudging and perfunctory in Braintree since Baker announced that the mandate ends on Saturday. We'll see what happens to our infection numbers a week or two after the great unmasking. Caution is advised until then.

Another milepost on the road to perdition:

Unagi wrote: ↑Wed May 26, 2021 11:16 pm

Skinypupy wrote: ↑Wed May 26, 2021 1:22 pm Assuming it's legit, this is just...sad.

Father in Kentucky sobbingly promises daughter $2,000 to not get vaccinated

The damage conservative media have done is consistently horrifying.

Girl posts a video recording of her father crying to her about not getting the vaccine.

This is only because she knows she is right and he is wrong (IMO) and while I totally get and agree that this is sad, there is some silver here too.


I guess I am saying that this is better than a video of some father crying to his daughter, begging her to trust and get the vaccine, even though no one else in their family will. Right?

My initial thought was, "Well this would make for an awkward Christmas Eve or New Years Eve celebration when the Dad realizes nobody died from the vaccine". Then my thoughts turned darker as I wondered if the Dad would be so crazy as to kill them in the fall/winter in order to preserve his manufactured reality. So I decided not to respond to the twitter asking for a followup Christmas video where they are all alive.

El Guapo wrote: ↑Wed May 26, 2021 9:37 pm Also agree that #4 seems hard to prove. Only way that seems plausible is if there are some records from lab workers who originally got sick or some testimony from lab workers involved, though even if that does exist I would assume that the Chinese wouldn't make any of that available - even in a #4 scenario that would be publicly embarrassing.

Another big article today covering the "lab leak" theory and the bigger picture implications:

Kristian Andersen, a virologist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, maintains that no strong evidence supports a lab leak, and he worries that hostile demands for an investigation into the WIV will backfire, because they often sound like allegations. He says this could make Chinese scientists and officials less likely to share information. Other virologists suggest that such sentiments could lead to more scrutiny of US grants for research projects conducted in China. They point to a coronavirus project run by a US non-profit organization and the WIV that was abruptly suspended last year after the US National Institutes of Health pulled its funding. Without such collaborations, says Andersen, scientists will have difficulty discovering the source of the pandemic.

The thing that gets to me about the video of the dad trying to pay the daughter not to get vaccinated is that he is a true believer. He's not doing this to "own the libs". He sounds like he really truly and honestly believes that the vaccine is extremely dangerous.

It is a bit terrifying. When you hear that they live in an alternate reality it is hard to understand what it means day-to-day. To then listen to someone *living inside the bubble* and its immediate impact on their families? Ugh. Heartrending stuff. The whole thing is a damn shame.

Yeah sometimes I try to flip the tables in my head and imagine someone trying to convince me vaccines are dangerous, and how difficult that would be to change my mind. It's frightening.

I have heard that the Indiana University system has told it's employees that they must provide proof of vaccination by Aug 1 or they would no longer be employees of Indiana University (with very narrow exceptions). I'm honestly shocked.

W.T.F. It is a party of people just acting out to be more outrageous and dangerous.

So...is Little going to reverse the order?

El Guapo wrote: ↑Thu May 27, 2021 4:57 pm So...is Little going to reverse the order?

He'll look into it when he is back and make a statement. So no. He isn't.

stessier wrote: ↑Thu May 27, 2021 4:40 pm I have heard that the Indiana University system has told it's employees that they must provide proof of vaccination by Aug 1 or they would no longer be employees of Indiana University (with very narrow exceptions). I'm honestly shocked.

Apparently the State AG is saying it would be illegal for the university to require that anyone provide proof of vaccination. I'm guessing that does not shock you.

If you're interested in watching a short (~13 minutes) news piece on the origins of the pandemic from a respected source:



I know he's not a phenom with baseball statistics so you can't entirely trust his opinion on disease origins, but its still pretty good.

But seriously, F Nate Silver - still out there today trying to drive the discussion

I was at Costco today in CT. It was about 60/40 masks. We do have over 70% vacinated. We will not be back to normal until Costco and BJs start giving out fee samples again.

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Thu May 27, 2021 5:03 pmBut seriously, F Nate Silver - still out there today trying to drive the discussion

I was out there fighting the good fight. I got well over a hundred likes dunking on Nate today. It's easy when he is talking > 50% chances of a lab leak. Still it wasn't the fiercest response. That goes to a virologist who got challenged by a hanging change up by one of Nate's deep brains. He hit a grand slam off him.

Meanwhile, in Ontario Premier Ford continues to impress with his decisive leadership and strategic acumen.

Ford solicits advice on reopening Ontario schools, AstraZeneca doses undergo quality checks

Premier Doug Ford took the unusual step of publicly soliciting advice from medical experts, children's hospitals and health organizations on how Ontario could go about reopening schools before the end of the academic year next month.

In a letter addressed to 55 different groups and people, Ford reiterated that his government has struggled to find consensus on school reopenings, and that it needs input before moving forward with a decision.

Why Ford waited until May 27, and gave the recipients until 5 p.m. Friday to answer, is unclear.

If only he had advice available to him on an ongoing basis...

Earlier this week, Ontario's chief medical officer of health — who is also listed as a recipient of Ford's letter — said he would like to see students back in class before the province begins its formal reopening process in mid-June.

Dr. David Williams said most public health units in the province support the reopening of schools, which have been shut to in-person learning since early April.

"My position has been always like our public health measures table and our medical officers of health, that feel that schools should be the last to close and the first to open," Williams told a news conference on Tuesday. It was the same day that a group of researchers studying how the pandemic has affected children warned of a "generational catastrophe."

malchior wrote: ↑Thu May 27, 2021 5:08 pm I was out there fighting the good fight. I got well over a hundred likes dunking on Nate today. It's easy when he is talking > 50% chances of a lab leak. Still it wasn't the fiercest response. That goes to a virologist who got challenged by a hanging change up by one of Nate's deep brains. He hit a grand slam off him.

I had a Tweet all set up, but I deleted it. That virologist's response is indeed fantastic. There really is no point in challenging Silver as he's moved through the looking glass and can't even see how far gone he is at this point. His self awareness is gone.

I agree. It's bizarre. Nothing worse than someone who believes in their own bullshit.

The Hill

Idaho Gov. Brad Little (R) rescinded a ban on mask mandates that his lieutenant governor put in place while he was away and rebuked her for what he called an “irresponsible, self-serving political stunt.”
...
Little went on to slam McGeachin, who has announced she will be running against Little for the governor position.

“How ironic that the action comes from a person who has groused about tyranny, executive overreach, and balance of power for months,” Little said.

“The executive order also conflicts with other laws on the books,” Little stated. “This is why you do your homework, Lt. Governor.”

NOW things get interesting - guidance updated today:

K.1. Under the ADA, Title VII, and other federal employment nondiscrimination laws, may an employer require all employees physically entering the workplace to be vaccinated for COVID-19? (5/28/21)

The federal EEO laws do not prevent an employer from requiring all employees physically entering the workplace to be vaccinated for COVID-19, subject to the reasonable accommodation provisions of Title VII and the ADA and other EEO considerations discussed below. These principles apply if an employee gets the vaccine in the community or from the employer.

A couple of months ago MIT Tech Review published a good analysis of the leading hypotheses about covid-19's origins and the politics behind each idea. It's still valid today, after the report they were reporting on didn't solve anything.

(edit) I suppose I should disclose that the custom publishing arm of MITTR pays me money, but I don't work for the editorial side that produced this.

So this is a thing that a friend passed on to me (more or less asking me "Is this guy nuts?"):

@FrDaveNix wrote:Pfizer jab efficacy rate against CV is 0.84% according to peer review study published in "The Lancet." That means it does nothing EXCEPT harm you (and the babies that died to make its cell lines used in production.)

My response was to point her to this article: Instagram post misleads on vaccine efficacy by conflating two different measures

• A viral Instagram post claiming the COVID-19 vaccines are far less effective than advertised is conflating different measures of efficacy to leave a misleading impression.
• The COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective. The Pfizer vaccine’s 95% efficacy, for example, means that the people who received the vaccine in clinical trials had a 95% lower risk of becoming infected than those who received a placebo.
• A separate measure of vaccine efficacy was the subject of a Lancet Microbe commentary — not a peer-reviewed study. The commentary did not argue that the vaccines do not work, or that the widely reported efficacy figures were inaccurate. An author of the commentary told PolitiFact that the Instagram post misinterprets it.

Republican House Member calls Covid origin worst cover up in human history

Texas Rep. Mike McCaul on Sunday said it was "more likely than not" that the coronavirus originated from a lab accident, calling it the "worst cover-up in human history."

Bipartisan support has grown for a congressional probe into whether the virus originated in a Chinese lab following a Wall Street Journal report that three scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been hospitalized in November 2019 with symptoms consistent with the virus.

President Joe Biden last week ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct a 90-day investigation into the claims, which were once considered a fringe conspiracy theory.

McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called Biden's investigation "long overdue," on CNN's "State of the Union," but cautioned that it could be inconclusive because "they have destroyed everything at the lab."

A little bit of a cross-post but it is sort of amazing for this guy to say a China investigation is overdue but voted against the 1/6 investigation. Tapper confronted McCaul today in the same segment about backing multiple Benghazi investigations but not the 1/6 investigation. In other words, McCaul can get fucked. What a POS hypocrite. The Chinese are surely going to cooperate when they can see how nakedly corrupt we are. We're completely incoherent as a nation.

Who cares if they unleashed a virus? It's "just like the flu," and doesn't require masks.

Well the libs couldn't overreact to shut down the economy which allowed them to steal the election without the virus. Amirite!?!

My state is finally at a level that is trending down to a point where decreases are putting us on a better pace than we were at the same time last year both in the weekly trailing death toll and the new cases reported.

This is the final week of elementary school for my kids. They've somehow managed to get through the entire school year of in-person school without a single COVID-related shutdown, which is an absolute miracle.

Predictably, the school has decided to completely toss aside the mask mandate for the final week. They've been through an entire year, and have only just now started getting vaccinations for some of the 6th graders. Would it really hurt to keep them masked for 4 more days?

Skinypupy wrote: ↑Tue Jun 01, 2021 10:14 am This is the final week of elementary school for my kids. They've somehow managed to get through the entire school year of in-person school without a single COVID-related shutdown, which is an absolute miracle.

Predictably, the school has decided to completely toss aside the mask mandate for the final week. They've been through an entire year, and have only just now started getting vaccinations for some of the 6th graders. Would it really hurt to keep them masked for 4 more days?

Yegads. I'm really trying not to be cynical about our district potentially nuking masks for next year in the fall, since the elementary kids will likely either not yet be eligible for vaccinations or just have started getting them. But...

Zaxxon wrote: ↑Tue Jun 01, 2021 10:32 am

Skinypupy wrote: ↑Tue Jun 01, 2021 10:14 am This is the final week of elementary school for my kids. They've somehow managed to get through the entire school year of in-person school without a single COVID-related shutdown, which is an absolute miracle.

Predictably, the school has decided to completely toss aside the mask mandate for the final week. They've been through an entire year, and have only just now started getting vaccinations for some of the 6th graders. Would it really hurt to keep them masked for 4 more days?

Yegads. I'm really trying not to be cynical about our district potentially nuking masks for next year in the fall, since the elementary kids will likely either not yet be eligible for vaccinations or just have started getting them. But...

I should have bought a lotto ticket--just got word that next year our district is planning for full normality. No masks, no distancing, vaccines not required, visitors allowed.

Should be fun.

If you haven't heard - WaPo and Buzzfeed FOIA'ed Fauci's emails and released them. The right-wing went insane reading them like Q drops and they're talking about: how Paul Rand is right (Fauci at some point inquired about possible 'gain of function), Fauci knew that masks didn't work (early on he said they might not be effective in a FEBRUARY email when he was saying the same thing in public), and other interpretations where they just assume malicious intent but are better characterized as compromised reading comprehension ability.

A sampling of the crazy below:

Too bad COVID didn't kill enough of those people.

NYT looking at data around the CDC's mask change guidance.

This is looking at the response to the CDC updating its guidance to allow vaccinated people to go unmasked. I've only skimmed it, but the preliminary conclusion seems to suggest that it's not linked to a rise in cases, and may be linked to an uptick in vaccinations. Not sure what others make of this - I'm sure that this is a hard thing to tease out in data, and the conclusions are pretty tentative, but it's more consistent with the optimistic scenarios than the pessimistic ones.

Everything is going sideways. 41% of Americans fully vaccinated. Schools removing mask mandates for children, states fully opening businesses and making mask mandates illegal. We get what we deserve. Also, this is apparently happening now too:

Just letting y’all know that wonky providers are now prescribing prophylactic HCQ (200mg weekly) to children to offset the shedding that’s happening from the vaccinated folks around them, and that’s where we are now.

If you're not sure what that means, there's a belief (among idiots) that after vaccination you "shed' viral proteins and the people around you experience weird side effects (menstrual bleeding, illness, infertility, etc...). So apparently parents are vaccinating themselves and asking doctors to prescribe hydroxychloroquine to their children to help protect them while the parents are being vaccinated - and doctors are doing it.

I give up.

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Wed Jun 02, 2021 11:44 am Everything is going sideways. 41% of Americans fully vaccinated. Schools removing mask mandates for children, states fully opening businesses and making mask mandates illegal. We get what we deserve. Also, this is apparently happening now too:

Just letting y’all know that wonky providers are now prescribing prophylactic HCQ (200mg weekly) to children to offset the shedding that’s happening from the vaccinated folks around them, and that’s where we are now.

If you're not sure what that means, there's a belief (among idiots) that after vaccination you "shed' viral proteins and experience weird side effects (menstrual bleeding, illness, infertility, etc...). So apparently parents are vaccinating themselves and asking doctors to prescribe hydroxychloroquine to their children to help protect them while the parents are being vaccinated - and doctors are doing it.

I give up.

Ivory tower much? FOXNews says it's the way to go. What do you have to say to that, smarty-pants? FOX!

New study reveals success of hydroxychloroquine as COVID treatment.

Jun. 02, 2021 - 4:24 - Infectious disease specialist Dr. Stephen Smith says 100k lives could have been saved had the 'experts' not dismissed it

Better safe than sorry. And by safe I mean pumped full of an off-label drug and by sorry I mean not pumped full of an off-label drug.

They used to call it the information age. It is properly the information overload age. And in this age it is all too easy to pump bad information into the pipeline and destroy societies.

We're gearing up for back to office. I've officially received my (requested) designation of "Office", which means an expected 3-5 days in the office (although whatever - my boss doesn't really care). Communication came out that fully vaccinated people do not have to wear masks or socially distance in the office, unless required by state or local mandate. I'll probably start transitioning back to the office at the end of June. I'll likely wear a mask unless I'm actually in my office, at least at the onset. Probably the trickiest part will be taking the L to and from work - I'll definitely be masking there and sanitizing/washing hands at the end of the ride. I know there's a risk that I could still get COVID even though I'm fully vaccinated, but I'm hoping that my vaccination plus masking plus having a relatively uncrowded office environment where people are likely to be vaccinated will help. I can't get to zero risk, but I think I'm still keeping it pretty darn low.

FWIW, I've been back in the office for a year as of yesterday (the joys of supervision) but we only required everyone back as of May 1 this year. Even before that there were a fair number of people around. We've had a decent number of cases and close contacts over that year (reported weekly, the combined number was in the teens from June through March of this year), but we never had evidence of a case of spread within the site (and we followed up on every case and close contact). It may have helped that we rapidly instituted social distancing, hand washing, and cleaning protocols and in mid-summer, got access to N95s for all our production personnel who had difficulty maintaining 6' due to the nature of their jobs and required face coverings for everyone else. We also did air flow measurements and, where possible, increased air turns or limited the number of occupants in a room where the turns were too few. We distributed air purifiers and required they be on 24/7 in all the cubes and conference rooms (I have forgotten what silence is).

It's been quite a year. The original corporate plan required a 80% vaccination rate country wide before we could start to pull back on our measures. Recently there has been talk of a more local approach looking at the situation in each county a site is located and basing the measures off those specific numbers. Given that 80% seems like pie in the sky, I'm hopeful the local numbers could get us out of masks by September. It doesn't seem like any special consideration is going to be given for vaccination status, which is kind of a bummer.

We are a voluntary hybrid internment as of last Friday unless your job necessitates you be in the office. Masks are required when moving about the office and when distancing is not an option. No more than three people may occupy an are at a time (office, meeting room, kitchen, open cube area, lab, etc...). Eating in your work area is encouraged. (In the before times it was discouraged)