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philip964 wrote: ↑Mon Oct 17, 2022 1:33 pm https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/arti ... -rate.html

Boston University creates new Covid strain with 80% kill rate.

Oh boy good for them.

I guess the good people in the Northeast Corridor have not yet learned the massive lesson of the past two years: Don't mess around with viruses in research labs.

I guess they think this is safe because there are no wet markets selling bats near them.

K.Mooneyham wrote: ↑Mon Dec 27, 2021 7:42 pm SNIP

philip964 wrote: ↑Mon Dec 27, 2021 6:11 pm Houston has dropped in half, but 13 people still die every day in the Houston area.

I am curious about one thing. How many people died on an average day in the Houston area pre-COVID? In other words, are those 13 per day proven to be excess mortality? And if not all of them are excess mortality, how many are?

Don't forget to subtract the increased murder rate when you make the comparison.

philip964 wrote: ↑Mon Dec 20, 2021 12:56 pm Some head of the NIH or some top govt. virus outfit just retired, an old guy. In his retirement speech he said that there was a group of virologists who felt that herd immunity was the best way to fight the virus. He resisted their approach, if they had gone that way hundreds of thousands would have died. He said that.

He apparently didn't realize 800,000 have died already in the US with more on the way until we reach herd immunity, as it appears that is the only way it will stop.

He also made a comment about regretting that the "lab leak theory" had become such a distraction with no evidence it ever could have happened.

powerboatr wrote: ↑Fri Aug 13, 2021 6:02 pm was just reading about this in my news brief magazine i get from nasa.
pretty darn cool 90 minutes and you know the know

That does sound interesting.

I have some problems with all of the hoopla and push from the administration. I freely admit to not trusting anything the federal government says, no matter who is in office, along with not trusting the media. I tend to believe in science but I need the data to analyze (I am very into data analysis).

I cannot say if there is an advantage to the shot or not. I got mine (both doses of the Pfizer vaccine) because I saw no real disadvantage to it and saw an immediate benefit (I got to go back to my office instead of working from home). In the recent statistics from some countries, the percentage of currently ill that have been vaccinated track closely with the percentage of people in that citizenry that have been vaccinated. This is not surprising to me for various reasons, but it does imply that the vaccine is not as effective against this variant as was claimed. The two problems are that the data from the US does not appear to match other countries in this area. Either we actually got a different vaccine or (and I think this is more likely) we are using a different process to determine who has COVID now. We may have different testing standards or definitions of a positive result. Without the definitions and processes involved, any comparison of statistics is not valid.

I know that most of the masks worn are totally useless. This is a combination of knowing what is involved in surviving a contaminated environment (ask any vet about MOPP IV gear) and knowledge of how filters work. If the holes in the fabric weave are larger than the virus cell, it stops nothing. Most of the media admits that wearing a mask is more to protect others from your spreading the virus than protecting yourself. This is based on the cloth masks not having a good seal against your skin so you inhale are from around the mask and not just through it, plus the hole size thing. Of course, if you do not have COVID (and note, I did not say whether you knew or not - just that you were actually negative) you cannot possibly spread it to anyone.

And this gets us to the point I want to emphasize the most. What is the infection rate in the population? What percentage of our population actually has COVID? They never actually tell us this because it really is the important number. But we can approximate it by taking the cumulative number of cases and subtracting the "recovered" and the deaths. Without debating definitions again, this leaves us with about 5.5 million people in the US who are currently active cases. With our population estimated at 331 million, that means that there are about 1.6% of the people in the US with active COVID cases. That means that 98.4% of the people being told to wear masks are wasting their time.

Further proof that this is a vast overreaction is that the CDC current standard says even vaccinated people should wear masks when there is a transmission level above a certain point. They try to hide what that point is and just say if you are in a substantial of high transmission rate area, then show the areas they consider those to be. But the definition is out there. A substantial transmission rate is 50 new cases per week per 100,000 people. That means they want us to go back to wearing masks if there are 0.05% of the people getting sick IN A WEEK.

So, COVID-19 is a real disease. I believe this to be true. It can be a serious illness. I also believe this is true. More people die from COVID than from the FLU, so it is worse than the flu. I believe this is true but I do not believe it is as bad as the media and government claim. If a person has a heart attack while he has COVID, and he might have recovered from the heart attack if he did not have COVID, did he die from the heart problem or the COVID. That is certainly a debatable point to consider. Masks are almost totally useless against COVID. Lock-downs are effective but have been shown to have ruined the US economy to a point where it will take years to recover if we ever do. That means that the government and the media have been over-hyping COVID, IMO, for a different reason than safety. I believe it is an attempt to control the people and force a radical change in our national philosophy of government.

I do not care if you wear a mask or not. I do not care if you get the shot or not. I urge you to take whatever precautions you believe are justified and necessary. I do want you to be as safe s you feel important. But I am dead set against anyone forcing me to take precautions I do not think are necessary. I know that freedom is a dangerous thing and I might make a bad decision. I insist that I am an adult and can make that decision either way. I value freedom highly.

03Lightningrocks wrote: ↑Sat Jun 19, 2021 9:02 am

TxRVer wrote: ↑Sat Jun 19, 2021 8:43 amMy grandkids went to school and daycare the entire year. The one in school had to wear a mask while the other one didn't. With the precautions taken in both facilities, neither one of the kids came down with even a cold this past year. It was the first year that's ever happened.

That is the same thing that happened with my grand daughter. She was in kindergarten all day every day of the school year. The year before covid, she was always getting stuffy noses, colds and even the flu. My SIL said he almost liked the masks and extra cleaning they did. My bet is that the social distancing, constant hand sanitizing and continual disinfecting of the desks, water fountains and such all combined to do this. I wondered if others experienced the same reduction in colds. She had MAYBE one cold all year.

I am actually concerned about the extra hand sanitizing and cleaning. It is definitely a short term help in reducing many illnesses. I don't see any way to disagree with that. But is it a good thing in the long term? One of the ways kids improve their immune systems is by the constant exposure to these less deadly diseases. As they develop them, they start building up their immunity to all sorts of related things and I am concerned that this will leave more people with weakened immune systems later in life.

I could be wrong about this, but I believe that it has been demonstrated with food allergies. We know that early exposure to these foods reduces the allergies and that we are seeing a sharp increase in food allergies. It may only be a correlation, but as schools adopted more bans on foods because someone might be allergic, we see those allergies grow. I am convinced the same thing will happen with bacteria and viruses.

And yeah, I know I am not trained in these fields so my opinion isn't worth much. But it doesn't change my concern.

Paladin wrote: ↑Wed Jun 16, 2021 2:51 pmI'm not opposed to people voluntarily taking the vaccine, but against mandating the public from being forced to take a novel experimental vaccine that was approved under a special "Emergency Use Authorization".

I have a slightly different opinion. I am not opposed to people trying any vaccine or medication they want to try, but I am opposed to mandating anyone take any vaccine, no matter how well proven or how approved.

I have been thinking. Fauci sent US money to the Wuhan lab in China to help the Chinese develop a virus that is better at attacking humans. One of the reasons for doing this research is to better understand how to fight the virus if it does attack people. But a second reason for this research is to develop biological weapons for use in war. This means that Fauci was helping the Chinese develop biological weapons. As I understand it, China is a our primary enemy in the world right now.

The Constitution defines treason as waging war on the US or adhering to our enemies and giving them aid and comfort. It is important to note that the Constitution does not forbid aiding our enemies only during times of direct war.

Doesn't this, especially combined with his assistance in covering up the lab research, make Fauci a traitor? I find it hard to see a way out of saying his behavior was treasonous. I know that word gets thrown around a lot lately, but I think it is true in this case.

03Lightningrocks wrote: ↑Thu Mar 11, 2021 10:44 pm That story of the girl dying after getting her second shot is scary! From the sequence of events it is pretty obvious the vaccine killed her. I have my second shot appointment for the Pfizer vaccine in the morning. I was already a bit worried about getting sick from it. This story really gives me pause.

I just want to warn you of the logical fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc. This fallacy says that just because action B followed action A does not mean it was caused by A. We may be more susceptible to this because of a confirmation bias that all people have. We are more likely to believe things we already tend to believe in instead of looking for further evidence.

I am not saying she did not die from an adverse reaction to the shot, but there is no evidence to show that she did either. I would be more inclined to believe this if there were any other documented cases of kidney problems caused by the shot. And I am not discounting the fact that I do not have access to all of the medical records and cannot trust the media to report the truth to us at all.

Flightmare wrote: ↑Sun Jan 31, 2021 9:08 pm https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/30/politics ... index.html

Hopefully this does not mean the Pfizer vaccine is ineffective.

Personally, I believe it means that the tests for COVID are faulty. I think they are not as reliable as people thought and produce both false negatives and false positives. This is an easier explanation to believe than the vaccine is ineffective or that people who had the virus and were pronounced cured came up with a second infection. To believe that the vaccine is bad or that people got reinfected requires me to believe that the virus is not dying when attacked by the antibodies our immune system produces. This means our theory of immunity is shot and will not longer work. It also means the virus is here forever. Occam's razor says the answer with the least assumptions is most likely to be the correct one and people making a bad test is the most likely assumption I can think of.

And yes, I do realize the amount that wishful thinking colors my belief here. But the alternative is to believe that the virus was human engineered for rapid mutation and defeating immune systems (which is not that hard to believe). This means also that it was designed as a bio-weapon (again easy to believe). But that implies to me that it was released deliberately as an attack and I still find that hard to believe. Again, this reflects my desire to think good of people (another old saw I try to live by is to never attribute to evil that which should be attributed to incompetence) and might all be wishful thinking on my part.

If you think about it, if you truly can catch it twice, it means that not only is herd immunity a pipe dream, but the vaccinations are also absolutely useless, well other than as a placebo. The principle of a vaccination is that they will help your immune system "learn" to recognize the virus and develop the antibodies to fight it. But if you already had COVID, your body has already developed the antibodies and should be able to do them again. That is the immunity.

I find it much easier to believe that the tests for COVID are faulty and are producing false negatives and false positives. A false negative means that the people were never really recovered from COVID, it just went into a period of remission. Then they had another flareup and, since they believed they had recovered, thought they caught COVID a second time.

I have no evidence that I am right about this, It just strikes me as much more plausible than the disease not producing antibodies and immunity. And I am not a doctor or biological researcher, so I have no qualifications to even make this decision. That doesn't stop me from having this opinion though.

03Lightningrocks wrote: ↑Fri Dec 04, 2020 9:40 amIt is not the governments job to protect us from ourselves.

I have come to the conclusion that this is the biggest difference between conservatives and liberals.Conservatives believe the job of the government is to protect us from others who would prey upon us (either criminals or other nations). The more strongly you believe in this philosophy, the more libertarian you tend towards.

Liberals believe the government's job is to protect us from ourselves and take care of us like a parent does. The more strongly you believe in this, the more you tend towards communism and socialism.

And this explains why we can never unite with the current extreme left government. And why they can never unite with us. If you cannot agree on the basic function of government, how can you ever work together. Our country always worked out before because the two sides never went to the extremes and we could usually meet in the middle and produce a functioning country. As each side moved away from the center, the other responded by moving further in the opposite direction and we end up where we are. This is why I see a violent restructuring of our country in the near future.

Rafe wrote: ↑Wed Sep 02, 2020 12:27 amAnd I'm not quite sure what the hullabaloo is from Fox News or any other sources, really.

From what I have seen, the hullabaloo recently is about how to define a COVID death and the way CDC reports it. The CDC recently reported that 94% of the people who had died from COVID also had some co-morbidity. People who want to say that COVID is not as serious jumped on this to say that COVID really only killed 6% of the deaths and the co-morbidities would have killed the rest. People who want to show COVID is more serious say these people would have lived with their other problems anyway if they had not caught COVID.

I believe that the truth on COVID is probably somewhere in the middle. Some of the people with COVID and co-morbidities certainly would have died anyway. I am also certain some of them would have lived for years anyway. One of the best examples of the problem is when they list obesity as the existing condition. A person can be as few as 20 pounds overweight or as much as 100 pounds overweight and still be obese. I think the guy with the extra 20 pounds would probably last a long time, but the guy with the extra 100 pounds is probably close to a life threatening condition already.

The real problem is that by listing the existing conditions, it confuses how serious COVID is. This happens with other diseases also. Flu for example is much more deadly in the elderly and in people with compromised immune systems than it is in healthy younger people.

I remember one statement from an author asking if a person who is more than 80 can really be said to have died from anything other than old age.

Rafe wrote: ↑Sat Aug 15, 2020 2:48 pmThis may seem really off the wall weird, but it might be possible that it's because sub-Saharan Africans have a minuscule amount of Neanderthal DNA, from 0 to 0.3% of their genome, while all populations outside Africa show between 1.5% to 2.1% Neanderthal DNA.

There you go trying for real science instead of sarcastic observations of society. You may have a real point there, and it makes sense to me. But it does take some of the fun out of things.

philip964 wrote: ↑Sat Aug 15, 2020 11:52 am https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6505/756

Africa may have some kind of immunity from Covid.

Perhaps it is because most of sub-Saharan Africa does not have a lot of mass media feeding the frenzy? Just a thought.