• star_wraith [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Getting hospitals to stop reporting on COVID cases was absolutely brilliant (in an evil genius sort of way). Even myself, I try to take COVID as seriously as I can but when the rest of the world doesn't care it makes it harder.

  • Weedian [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    :mission-accomplished-1: :biden-alert: :mission-accomplished-2:

  • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Malthusian overpopulation is obviously bullshit, but I really wonder if the ruling class fuckers believe in it.

    • MF_BROOM [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Bill Gates most certainly does, he routinely expresses concern about shit like Africa and their "rapid population growth" and the like, there's no way he isn't an ecofascist

      • TheModerateTankie [any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I'm sure it's a coincidence that bill gates was loudly against opening up mrna vaccine tech and how covid vaccines barely made it into Africa.

        https://nitter.net/fibke/status/1571102538111545346#m

        • MF_BROOM [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          It's real fun how Bill Gates is routinely referred to as an expert outside of his lane (intellectual property/stealing from workers), including pandemics, and he's probably the single person who should have the most blame in the catastrophic pandemic response. He's the one who convinced Oxford to sell their vaccine for big pharma, after they had the original intent to make it open source for the world.

          The fact that this business tyrant who was reviled by many in the public has now rebranded himself as a "good" billionaire really shows he has the best PR that money can buy.

          • star_wraith [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            You can buy a lot of PR when you have billions of dollars to burn

          • Owl [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Bill Gates is routinely referred to as an expert outside of his lane (intellectual property/stealing from workers),

            Don't forget sorting pancakes.

            • MF_BROOM [he/him]
              ·
              2 years ago

              The only thing that deserves to be pancaked into the ground is Bill Gates

      • TheModerateTankie [any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        They are saving money on retirement accounts. I'm sure in another couple years we'll see headlines like "Actually, the average lifespan going down is a good thing" or "the dark side of living into retirement age"

  • InevitableSwing [none/use name]
    hexagon
    ·
    2 years ago

    This kills people's interest in getting a booster now or in the future. And funding for prevention and treatment will vanish. Fuck.

    • TheModerateTankie [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Funding has already vanished, and the white house covid doctor was excited about everything being privatized.

      They did this with children's vaccines, too. Said schools were safe, didn't spread covid, it didn't harm kids... so of course uptake of the vaccines were poor.

      They dropped mask mandates and they are going "see, no one's masking. covid is over".

      It's like saying "no one's driving less, so climate change is nothing to worry about".

  • SovietyWoomy [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    How do you salvage a country where trump was the harm reduction candidate?

  • BigLadKarlLiebknecht [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Quite simply, I hope his wife and children die of Covid and he spends the rest of his days contemplating what he’s done. It’s the only way it’ll land for him.

  • MF_BROOM [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    I talked to my brother today and he more or less tried to pathologize my continued caution with COVID, so that was fun.

    On one hand, I think he meant well (he had the same risk calculus as me until a few months ago) and that it came from a place of care, and he said that staying cooped up isn't good for my mental health (I don't disagree). But uhh also, COVID is literally giving people brain damage, and we have no fucking idea about all the long-term ramifications of a virus that can affect all of our organs, and what we do already know is not good at all. And then just started saying shit how one of his friends told him there was a study about people saying they were suffering from long COVID and how many of them had actually never gotten infected at all, and I was like "dafuq, you actually believe that?". I'm not doing this shit because I like it, I'm trying to minimize the number of times I get COVID (ideally never) until we have universal vaccines and/or nasal vaccines that can seriously reduce spread and/or genuine treatment for long COVID.

    And regardless, me just engaging in higher-risk activities isn't necessarily going to clear up my mental health issues, I'm not just going to unlearn all the ways we've been repeatedly lied to over and over again about the severity of this virus just because I'm doing More Things™. I want to work toward doing more activities than I'm doing right now, so I think he does have a point. But I want to be smart about it, too. And living my life like it's 2019 still does not strike me as very smart.

    Edit: it also seems like this continued aversion is hardly exclusive to a leftist like myself, I peruse the coronavirus subreddit and routinely see pro-caution articles/comments upvoted highly

      • MF_BROOM [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I'm sorry to hear that, I'm hoping for the best for you and your household! :meow-hug:

        Yes, that's the other thing, I've had the flu before and that fucking sucks, i.e. feeling sick for like a week, if not longer (and obviously not trying to equate COVID with flu, COVID is considerably more dangerous). Not sure what your experience has been like, but I see online anecdotes all the time from people who were young, healthy, boosted once or twice, who still say that COVID kicked their ass after the fact and that they were utterly miserable. Why would I want that to happen to myself up to a few times a year? Getting sick sucks.

  • hostilearchitecture [any]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Biden is essentially correct :biden-alert: in that SARS-CoV-2 has mutated and is continuing to mutate for infectivity and not for causing severe illness. I suspect he's saying it, and they started suppressing case reporting, because they know how badly the vaccine program was fucked up. If there's enough distance between the Dems declaring it's ended and 2024 though, they can pin the failures on Trump (who started the development and fast track approval bullshit that led to the massive fuck up) and hopefully some of the people who start noticing will forget the Biden admin's full hog approach to mandating vaccines through OSHA and whatnot.

    If it were going to be "stopped", it had to happen years ago, close to its emergence. Like the original SARS virus. At this point you'd need a neutralizing vaccine, which is infeasible especially with so much of the population already imprinted with leaky spike protein antibodies. Unfortunately regulators were sold on a vaccine development strategy which could never be neutralizing, and rather than invest in something effective they're just going to keep throwing money at private companies that develop shit. If I hadn't seen the foundations of it, I'd assume the COVID anti-vax movement were funded by one or some of these pharma companies specifically to discredit any whistleblowers who might have come forward. Hell, they might've, might explain why the former chief scientist and vice-president of the allergy and respiratory research division at Pfizer was one of the principal conspiracy theorists in the anti-mask/lockdown/vaccine crowd from its inception. But I think he's actually just crazy, it's just plausible, that's all.

    And I know a thing or two about that shit, because I work on it, as a member of a firm that does concerningly large amounts of the clinical trial data science for pharma companies... I'm not really interested in losing the ability to keep billing Pfizer for their shitty shit, but if mods want to verify my position I'm happy to do so.

    There's almost no way out of the current situation though. A lot of peoples' bodies have memorized an antibody response for a years-old version of the virus which does not exist in humans today. And those memories can't be updated or overwritten, it's just not possible to do that today. Some people will probably keep getting infected repeatedly in all likelihood. I've seen it myself, my vaccinated colleagues seem to contract COVID-19 like clockwork. Others at my firm had chastised them for ignoring decades of literature and clear indications that this virus would mutate quickly and out of the vaccines' ability to neutralize infection. Somehow they're still able to market it, despite to my knowledge the Emergency Use Authorization having expired and their biologics marketing licensing being for PREVENTION of COVID-19, something it very clearly does not do. That's off-label use, and that's actually illegal. But they're getting away with it.

    • MF_BROOM [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      Does this mean I shouldn't pin my hopes on a universal or nasal vaccine? :doomjak:

      I mean I know this shit is gonna be with us for the rest of our lives in some capacity, but I was hoping that a universal or nasal vaccine could reduce the spread (and hopefully get less virulent over time) and make it more akin to how we view something like the flu, but I also obviously have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about. I just see quite a few epidemiologists and people from other adjacent professions increasingly beating the drum on these kinds of vaccines.

      • TheModerateTankie [any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Nasal vaccines will be usefull because they can head off infection before it gets into your blood stream, so spread would definately be reduced. The current vaccines target the virus once in the bloodstream. Future vaccines may be able to get around the imprinting problem. It's being worked on anyway. Best bet is to not get infected at all, but the "urgency of normal" is making that nearly impossible.

        • MF_BROOM [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          That seems like it would be much better for preventing long COVID too, if it stops infection before reaching one's blood stream, or in theory anyways.

          • TheModerateTankie [any]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Covid getting into the bloodstream is what's causing so much organ damage, since it can attack pretty much every part of the body at that point. If we can head it off at the mucus membraines we would be much better off.

    • TheModerateTankie [any]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      From what I've read, we are seeing imprinting from repeat covid infections. Which is leading to people not developing antibodies to omicron variants leading to repeat reinfections within a short amount of time.

    • fitterr
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      deleted by creator