Why is Israel vaccinating its population so fast relative to everyone else?
I am seeing some smol brain takes on this.
Sure, Israel might be a “small” country, but so is Belgium. Or US states like Massachusetts. But in the US it is those famous dense metropolitan centers of the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Alaska that are showing some of the highest Corona vaccination rates.
Also I would actually wager that getting vaccines through to the West Bank is logistically more inherently difficult than getting them to anywhere in the US.
I would imagine that physical transport problems are a very minor problem anywhere outside the most destitute Third World areas.
As for this:
IQ isn’t everything, but it’s not nothing. https://t.co/ZA0LIpGAcH
— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) January 2, 2021
It’s not like Israeli national IQ is exactly exceptional, though of course it does have a very nice smart fraction.
What’s less often mentioned is Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla’s friendship with Netanyahu and strong identification with his Jewish heritage; millions of doses were priority allocated for Israel. (Yes, Israel did pay more for them – but this is a choice that all but the most destitute of countries would have been both happy and rational to make).
It’s nice to have a high IQ and patriotic diaspora.
Still, that’s hardly the full or even most of the story either – the real scandal in many Western countries is that many vials of vaccines are lying about unused, while people keep getting infected and lockdowns continue. Some of them may go bad if left unused too long.
Nor can it be something uniquely American. The US is actually doing very well by the unexacting standards of the developed world, as both the statistics aggregation at OurWorldInData and perusing French/German media would suggest.
In France, the city of Nice just bragged that it had given a shot to 5 people thanks to what people described as "a huge logistical operation", by which they mean that a taxi was hired to bring the shots all the way from Paris, a 930km long drive 🙃 https://t.co/ED66DZTdoa
— Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) December 30, 2020
Perhaps it could be bureaucracy?
The efficiency of the Israeli bureaucracy doesn’t strike me as a likely explanation. What comparative statistics suggest (and acquaintances tell me) it’s a pretty typical Med country in that respect.
Another explanation is that all these rules and debates about whom to prioritize – front line workers or the elderly – are taking a toll and frankly much more bother than they’re worth. Bureaucrats anywhere will always prioritize their own skin. So perhaps another explanation is that in countries where there are penalties of some kind for vaccinating people outside of certain defined groups, the official response is to just taper down general vaccine availability to minimize the chances of such “mistakes”. Talk of perverse incentives.
This is just speculation and I have no idea what’s really going on.
But I will make one overarching point. Rapidly rolling out vaccines shouldn’t be hard. New York City vaccinated 6 million in a month in the late 1940s.
And I tend to agree with Richard Hanania’s take that rapidly rolling out vaccines is ultimately yet another test of state capacity, just as containing Corona was.
Here's the thing about the west and covid. Containing the virus and vaccine distribution are different problems. The west failed them both.
Beaten by Asia first, now by two Middle Eastern countries. Something very deep is broken. Story on Israel. https://t.co/6G6DgzV9SE pic.twitter.com/DYf9CnPLj0
— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) January 2, 2021
And it’s also one that most of the West is failing at. Once might be a fluke, twice is more likely to be a pattern.
Forget about measuring up to China. Do Western countries have lower state capacity now than in the 1940s?
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Yes
LOL.
https://twitter.com/LoicTheStoic/status/1345702070050021376
Affirmative action (Why locate something as important as the CDC in Atlanta?), average IQ reduction due to illegal immigration, replacement in universities of critical thinking with neo-Marxist anti-white propaganda, excessive litigation, government by lawyers, entrenched bureaucracies that did not exist in the 1940’s. Those cover most of the reasons why the answer to the question is “Of course” for the U.S.A.
That’s Britain for you.
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/01/01/01/37474320-9103595-image-a-18_1609464782399.jpg
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/01/01/00/37473188-9102889-image-a-280_1609462255824.jpg
So what are the real Russian vaccination numbers now?
In UK it is just poor admin. I twice accompanied elderly relatives in London (hospital staff, relevant illnesses and 80+ have access right now).
First time was comic – an Hispanic wrote down names on arrival with some mispellings. An Eastern European read out those names with quite a lot of mispronunciation. An African supervised and chased up missing names. All the names were traditional white or Asian.
2nd time they did at least hand out numbers to start which was much easier.
I reckon the 30 staff (cleaners, receptionists, senior staff nurses and doctors) could only process one new patient per minute. This was THE centre for SE London, I’d guess about 2 million people (so 12 years at this rate, given that they have decided not to give even the elderly the planned 2nd dose of the Pfizer vaccine).
Switching to the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine should make a big difference. No need to freeze supplies and one dose only.
So why does Russia have lower capacity than when the Sovoks ran the entire thing?
And why is China doing so bad?
Easy. Jews and Arabs scare easily so they flock to “salvation”. Everyone else pretty much understands its a nothing-burger (as someone once said a virus so elusive you have to take a test to know if you’ve ever had it). Now life can return to normal and the hysteria can die down…. though the signs aren’t encouraging.
One you unfreeze and dilute a Pfizer/BioNTech vial it’s good for 5 days in a medical fridge. And both vaccines need two doses, the U.K. has decided to relax the Pfizer/BioNTech 21 day interval along with the AZ/Oxford four week interval to up to 12 weeks. Pfizer/BioNTech has been pointing out the result of that is untested and thus undefined.
I note something like this might be required to get around the presumed cause for Oxford’s low 62% efficacy when two full doses are used at the designed interval, like Janssen’s backup plan if one dose isn’t sufficient to do the second dose 57 days later. The latter should be long enough for the “fight the disease!” large antibody titer to drop to normal levels; I’m assuming the memory cells won’t have enough time to prompt the production of antibodies to zap the virus vector before it does its very short term job of delivering its payload of DNA including what codes for the spliced in SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. Although that isn’t the only memory mechanism in our adaptive immune system.
Israel still has got the draft.
It has a leader, who is a former soldier and who saw combat.
Israel is living in good times, but its’ leaders are still overwhelming men/women from hard times.
No need to discuss IQ, ethnic tribalism etc.
The basic law of society applies. Hard times hard men. Good times weak men.
It’s that simple.
I suspect, in the UK, it’s a case of priorities; with such high percentages of people not really caring about being locked down for god knows how long, the government isn’t under that much pressure to speed things up and end the situation. Oxford vaccinations didn’t start until 4 days after approval as the healthare workers were off for the new year. Any deaths can be successfully blamed on “those pesky kids”; it’s a winning formula, so why do anything more.
Israeli society is quite martial in nature, being surrounded by hostile peoples who want you pushed into the sea must create an ethnic solidarity like no other, and the conscription is good for reducing class differences.
I think this Israeli mentality will continue long into the future, as Muslim populations grow fast around them. In this respect, Jewish power groups have an interest in inciting antisemitism to keep Jews on their toes and to maintain their Holocaust mentality, assimilation is equivalent to extermination in the eyes of many of them.
Because China knows that this virus is not that big of a deal, in fact they probably went down the herd immunity route.
The slowish US results are almost certainly in part reporting delays, that after all is the very least important part of the whole process, except as a double-check to make sure unused doses aren’t piling up somewhere, which should be handled up front by not ordering more until you’re looking to need them. If state and local public health people want to take holiday time instead of doing that, there’s little if any harm.
Another issue could be Pfizer’s last minute “Oops!” when they said supply chain problems were going to halve their early promised shipments, their total disdain for the BAD ORANGE MAN and his Operation Warp Speed (OWS) has only lessened in the last couple of weeks as OWS arranged for a second tranche of 100 million doses. This time from many accounts they’re now working with OWS and thus that second tranche is promised to be a quarter earlier than Pfizer was previously saying they could accomplish.
See the CDC’s New and Improved reporting page, and I now see it was updated yesterday as promised, we’ve gone from 2,794,588 first doses as of 9 am reporting to the CDC on Wednesday the 30th to 4,225,756, that’s 1.4 million doses in three days including New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, the latter an official Federal and most everyone else holiday.
For interpreting the CDC’s data, always read the fine print, a failure to bother with that is how that Johns Hopkins video maker is reported to have screwed up. Here’s the most relevant info:
Myriad learning curves are playing a role due to the US’s huge size which makes a degree of federalism inevitable, see also the PRC’s early response to COVID-19, city and province before central government, Russia’s got its own system, etc. etc. So Kansas for example, reporting the or about the lowest rate of inoculations per 100,000 residents, is at the executive level Democratic Party right now and is at war with most of the state, and is claiming a lot of their people are not up to speed on the reporting system.
See how per the last paragraph quoted above that we’re now implementing a particular Federal program to use CVS and Walgreens (huge US pharmacy chains) to travel to long term care facilities (the broader category which includes nursing homes), each new program will have its own learning curve. Our county and city public health departments, and pharmacies like the preceding two, Walmart etc. have plenty of experience in giving out vaccinations, but not en masse like this. But they’ll learn and adapt.
Look at the people who are in charge:
they’ve been under Covid panic-mania for months, so there is an almost universal acceptance of the need for vaccination (also, they have to put additional pressure on Israeli Arabs who are, as always, suspicious)
they have competent professionals in the areas where it matters; otherwise, bureaucracy is typically Mediterranean. Militarized, even democratic, societies work when it comes to the pinch. No tip-toe dancing about ethnic priorities & gender identities (they got their fair share of gays & freaks, but Israeli gays & freaks are not as insufferable as in other countries)
global Jewish- Israeli links work, so they’ve amassed enough vaccines
Minus-there are two very different & stupid fields: ultra-Orthodox super-spreader nutjobs & idiotic bickering about politics (the 4th elections in a year & a half).
https://media.makeameme.org/created/moments-before-this-5c1514.jpg
News articles report that Israel will not, in fact, be vaccinating Palestinians in the conquered West Bank: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/03/palestinians-excluded-from-israeli-covid-vaccine-rollout-as-jabs-go-to-settlers
News articles report also that Israel has been able to “secure a large number of vaccines”. Presumably we can put that down to diaspora power. Though they also paid more (more than 3x what America is paying, see above).
Israel’s dysfunctional political system may be another reason for their success. With coalitions constantly collapsing and new elections ever near, the government has a compelling reason to achieve. There is yet another election coming up in just a little over two months.
Made in South Carolina Mercedes and BMWs are not any worse than made in Germany ones. And lots of automakers have factories in the South, Boeing makes 737s in South Carolina.
https://tass.com/society/1241979
i.e. 0,55 vaccine per 100 Russians.
I know people tend to over-estimate Chinese abilities here, but do you really think they managed to eradicate the virus and that it wasn’t freely spreading around when they were having those pool parties in Wuhan? Do you really think it wasn’t just like.a seasonal flu, one in which you see people coughing and sneezing and wiping their nose during your commute to work?
Sweden is also doing all right, the people are wearing masks and life goes on. The otherwise intelligent people who are buying into this COVID narrative are doing it because it provides them with plenty of statistics porn to dissect and analyse.
They don’t make the same cars in the American South as they do in Germany.
I don’t have a lot of experience with Mercedes Benz, but I do with BMW. In general BMW sedans, which in the USA are imported from Germany, are more reliable than the SUVs assembled in South Carolina.
The X3 is okay on this score, but the X5 has a pretty poor reputation: https://abetterbmw.com/how-reliable-are-bmws-really/
BMWs of all kinds have long had problems with electronics, but of course this is generally not a problem with assembly quality.
Of course since few bad cars are made by anyone these days, reliability is no longer the selling point it was in the late 20th century. The German automakers thus no longer prioritize this as they did in the glory days of the of the bulletproof badass Benz W126 S-class famed for being able to clock half a million miles with not much more than regular fluid changes and brake service.
https://www.consumerreports.org/car-reliability-owner-satisfaction/who-makes-the-most-reliable-cars/
Reliability ratings also need to be taken with a grain of salt. Volkswagen for instance got badly dinged owing to dieselgate, which of course didn’t impact reliability at all. They simply chose to improve performance and fuel economy by violating the law.
more like jews and white europeans
Copy pasted from the Durocher blog:
Vaterland says:
January 3, 2021 at 9:56 am GMT • 1,200 Words
@Guillaume Durocher
Ultimately it doesn’t matter what the borders look like as long as we are dominated and colonized by the USA. When Jews in America can dictate what Europeans are allowed to say, what do borders matter to them? The German government arrests its own citizens for ‘holocaust denial’, the law of the victors of WW 2. Its mortal enemies dictate its history books and its mainstream culture; enslavement is the norm, true freedom an impossibility. We live in a state in which every degradation and insult against its own people is not only permitted by the state, but a sign of good conduct of its citizens. But insult a ‘protected group’ and you become unpersoned. And every alien, imported ideology which is full of hatred for Europe and its people becomes political mainstream. BLM being the last cultural revolution export from the Great Satan.
Do we have a domestic cultural industry rooted in our own history and genuine European values to rival and out-compete Hollywood and Netflix? No.
Do we have European companies which control the flow of internet information with laws that guarantee our freedom of speech? No.
Do we have an economic enthusiasm and capabilities only somewhere near China? No.
Common European foreign policy independent from the USA and Israel? No.
And there is something new identitarians do not seem to understand: there are no nations anymore! There is no America. There is no unified Europe. There is no rising China (which America’s real elite built up in the first place). There is no Russia. There is a global system of systems, the global capital system and its cosmopolitan elite; a global class of people. Larry Fink and Klaus Schwab are the same category. These are a people that know no homeland, let alone a fatherland. That jet today to Paris and tomorrow to New York, then to Shanghai and another day to London. Those are a people that are at home everywhere and nowhere. And the people will follow them as human resources. While a Merkel owes more allegiance to the Open Society Foundation, or only the headlines of the New York Times than to any notion of organic German history that wasn’t already synthesized into absolute evil by its worst enemies. The mentor of Klaus Schwab was Henry Kissinger, that of Joschka Fischer was Madeleine Albright.
We have a trans-Atlantic and in reality already global elite of Davos and Bilderberg; Polish, Hungarian and Russian nationalism are pure illusions. Poland and Hungary are tolerated, for now, because they are irrelevant! And very, very kosher. Even in China I cannot see a true anti-thesis and real competitor for an entirely different world order. Power games by Sheldon Adelson and Huawei, or the Trump admin and Macron not once have challenged the primary paradigms and foundational principles of this world order. Neither has Brexit. All of these governments, ultimately, are nothing but the managerial class of the real and permanent elite. There is a vision for the world… and you’re not in it!
How many divisions do the identitarians have? In which major European country is any group ready and truly capable to take on the global institutions of power and come out victories? Golden Dawn? Ricoed and jailed. Sebastian Kurz? Honored guest at AIPAC and ally to Moshe Kantor. Macron? Rothschild banker. Nordic Resistance Movement? Can’t even keep their bitchute channel. The New Right, Alt-Right? It’s all just podcasting and blogging by people who have no institutional power and no political influence, but get occasionally used by foreign ics, all talk and some media events. Sellner didn’t gain the AfD a single %. Instead the AfD, Zionist in the first place, and by copying the US retard right, lost on all fronts. From years of Alt-Right and Identitarian activity absolutely nothing has materialized. Not one policy was changed. Not one non-European was kept out. And not one war was stopped. The culture? Hegemonic leftist-liberal globalism. Not one truly meaningful institution was established, of just the size of Fox News while our mortal enemies control all of the state media.
I know of a time when Europe was truly sovereign and we could speak of European world politics. When there was a group ready to take on the world, if it had to be and with the army, the system and the faith to carry it. Maybe the most advanced state in the entire world with some of the best engineers and soldiers it had ever seen. 92% of Americans were against participating in WW 2. And yet the masters of media and money and of real political influence managed to get millions of Americans and its entire military machine to fight at the side of Stalin to the death and kill and kill and kill until it was done. The ruins of Berlin in 1945 do tell a story, the story of the people who are truly in power and who are in power today and have only gotten stronger.
Again right this moment German citizens are in jail, jailed by their in name only own government, by decree of a foreign, hostile power, for nothing but speech. In the case of Horst Mahler a more severe sentence than rapists and most murderers receive. And as long as only that is the case, moving fantasy borders around, is like moving phantom divisions. The old right has mostly given up and are waiting for a collapse that never comes. Conservatives root for the king of Israel. Nazbol types foolishly root for China: ask Tibet how ethno-nationalists or “ethno-pluralists” are doing there. And the European identitarians and political New Right have no answers, no solutions, not even a real strategy! Except as a European tool to be used and discarded by Bannon, Dugin, Likud or the Kushners, I suppose. But they ended defeated, demonized and ultimately outlawed like the old post war NS which they looked down upon. Although Hans Ulrich Rudel and the DVU had achieved more than Dugin fanboy Sellner ever will. While the tower of Babel of the Bernard Baruch and Coudenhove-Kalergi EU grows and is here to stay. Unsurprisingly in growing alliance with communist China. While Bibi and Kushner create Middle Eastern facts. It is honestly shocking how utterly weak the right has become and how gullible the masses.
All I can see is a great kabuki theater to give the plundered and disenfranchised masses the illusion of choice and participation, as they are being replaced, and that leaves room for snake oil salesmen of all flavors. Including the New Right which was in many instances a big scam by failed existences. Including people I actually had reason to have hopes in, like Frauke Petry. And who of us is even truly ready to die for something he believes in? And for what? From Otto Skorzeny to shamefully posting merchant and coomer memes, utterly terrified of being doxxed? It’s pathetic!
Hitler was defeated, but Europe lost the war.
Sums up basically a lot.
The vast majority of Brits I know are strongly against this. Britain is not London.
He probably imagines it as a giant Indian fist.
Although note that Israel does not have enough supplies to continue vaccination campaign beyond January 10. So it will pause the vaccination campaign on January 10 for 2 weeks.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9104143/Israel-RUN-Pfizer-vaccine-doses.html
They hoped that they might receive vaccines from Moderna before then, but this apparently will not be.
Israel’s authorities were one of the earliest to buy different foreign vaccines, and they bought them from multiple different companies. For example, they bought the Moderna virus in June. https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-said-near-to-deal-with-moderna-to-supply-experimental-coronavirus-vaccine/
Israel also paid $275 million for doses of Arcturus vaccine, which was likely a failed gamble. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/arcturus-phase-iii-corona-vaccine-trial-results-prove-underwhelming-653791
Israel’s inefficient bureaucracy slowed trials of their domestic vaccine. https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-israel-covid19-vaccine-head-we-lack-support-1001351425
Israel didn’t prioritize import substitution with the vaccine, and they threw early money on the main foreign suppliers (Israel also bought early 10 million doses of Oxford vaccine from AstraZeneca). ,
Probably for a health emergency, that is the correct decision of authorities to prioritize speed, rather than focusing on import substitution.
If you look at neighbouring countries like Egypt, the authorities are very slow, and are only deciding to buy vaccines now (i.e. months later) https://egyptindependent.com/egypt-negotiating-with-astrazeneca-pfizer-to-obtain-coronavirus-vaccines/
Countries have different levels of state capacity in different areas.
Israel has comically low state capacity in many areas – for example, the state almost does not project power into Bedouin areas , as well as many Arab areas. For many years, Israel’s Southern border with Egypt was controlled by Bedouin tribes and local mafias, and thousands of people can be illegally trafficked into the country each month, without the authorities having any control of the border. In addition, much of South Tel Aviv, became a kind of unpoliced African “state within a state”.
For similar example. When it snows in Israel every several winters, half of the public transport will close, as it fails to manage with a few hours of snow. (On the other hand in Russia, most transport can all year with much colder weather).
So Israel has less state capacity than many developed countries, in many areas.
On the other hand, we discover that Israel has one of the world’s most effective mass vaccination delivery abilities,
I assume that mass vaccination delivery is an area which Israel has planned for in previous years as a disaster response, and this is the uninteresting explanation why they have the high level of organization for this campaign.
Israel is just vaccinating people over 60 and medical staff (and then some excess vaccines at the end of the day go to the general public so they are not thrown in trash).
This is the correct strategy for a virus which has much higher fatality rates in old people than young people – as it should allow the health crisis to be exited before (and possibly without) needing “herd immunity”.
In Russia, total 30 million doses will be produced domestically sometime in April/May. 30 million constitutes 95% of people over 60 in RF. So if 95% of people over 60 were vaccinated, then the health crisis might be exited during the Spring season.
This exit from the health crisis will be happening likely before herd immunity, as vaccinating 30 million will only provide herd immunity if the reproduction number of the virus is 1,25 (which sounds too low even in May or June weather).
Might pseudo-Marxist not be more accurate there? Would Marx have wanted anything to do with the insanity and depravity that is Wokeism?
(Might also note how critical the support of Woke Capital is here…)
~ ~ ~
@ 128:
At the risk of appearing presumptuous or patronizing, I will take the liberty of remarking that the post of yours that I linked above would have benefited greatly from standard use of the blockquote and MORE! HTML tags. (“1,200 words”)
~ ~ ~
Re: What the U.K. has become
https://www.flickr.com/photos/63342954@N07/31107706441/
Blackrod Kids (and a Policewoman)
From experience going down to Texas to a Toyota truck assembly plant for a line upgrade, the trouble with the South is that it lacks industrial infrastructure. The plants are located remotely, for tax reasons I should think, and the work is usually done by travelling workmen. They lack supply houses and machining capabilities. Even old Rust-belt towns like Detroit still have a lot of suppliers and small shops. I think most companies ultimately regret locating in these areas.
I disagree. Modern technology has given the state vast power and capacity to enforce their wills and desires.
Updated list.
https://twitter.com/redouad/status/1345779783347691531
The argument about Israel’s success would be entirely valid if Israel developed and produced a vaccine that vaccinates Israelis. Israel (absolutely deservedly) can be congratulated, but the more important test is the ability to quickly produce a vaccine on its own. The success of the United States and China was expected in this case, Russia (as well as, it seems, Iran and Vietnam) ” jumped above its head.” But continental Europe, with its vast scientific and industrial resources, has achieved far less than might have been expected.
From Operation Warp Speed to Operation Sh. Show. But since the US has apparently had the Moderna vaccine for a year already, the actual vaxx phase might not be all that urgent either.
Interesting, btw. I didn’t know.
I wonder if Israel has mandatory diversity training as a requirement to get started?
Seems like Europe needs more biowarfare labs.
another un-AK like post from an otherwise highly capable guy who normally analyzes things well. for some reason, when it comes to this virus, AK goes haywire. TDS? i don’t really know or understand. this is a guy who says right wing people in the US are the dumbest morons in the world. i can get that quality of analysis daily on CNN or MSNBC.
the US program is better than pretty much any other in the world. the ‘problem’ is that only like 600,000 people are getting the vaccine every week, so at this rate, it will still be a year before the vulnerable population is covered. covering 50% of the population is irrelevant – this virus just isn’t dangerous enough for some kind of emergency war effort to reach that goal.
sputtering nonsense from Biden and company aside, they couldn’t do any better – indeed, as is often the case, Democrat run states are doing worse. Joe Biden hid in his basement the entire year – how on earth would he do a better job exactly?
i’m old enough to remember when everybody mocked Trump and Pence for saying they could do the vaccine in a year. now the goalposts have moved again, as they usually do.
There seems to have been a massive fuckup by the EU commission (which was tasked with ordering vaccines), basically they got an offer from Biontech-Pfizer for 500 million doses, but only ordered 300 million. German media claim this was politically motivated, because it was seen as necessary to make an equivalent order from French pharma giant Sanofi (which may develop a working vaccine by the end of 2021…), due to “muh Franco-German axis”. They didn’t order additional doses either in November, when it was already clear that the Biontech-Pfizer vaccine was promising. German politicians are now trying to deflect all blame with their usual routine, claiming anything else would have been “vaccination nationalism” (hilariously enough that hasn’t kept the Italians from engaging in their usual Teutonophobic whining and coming up with claims that Germany’s breaking the common EU line and hoarding vaccines for herself).
Another failure by Merkel’s grotesquely incompetent government.
“Rapidly rolling out vaccines shouldn’t be hard. New York City vaccinated 6 million in a month in the late 1940s.”
gee, i wonder what the difference is.
AK bashing Trump and dumb moron rightists for NYC in 2020, a completely jewish run city filled with third worlders. somehow total leftist control screwing up everything is the fault of the few rightists remaining who are trying to keep things running at a first world pace.
leftist governments in europe are all doing worse, despite being much smarter i presume, per AK’s analysis. they’re not the dumbest people in the world, like Republicans in the US.
https://media.tenor.com/images/40ec51e8e221b3a9b9f547a2cc41570b/tenor.gif
There are very few genuine leftist governments in Europe, apart from Aleksandr Lukashenko. Almost all European traditionally left wing parties are run by centre right neoliberals, and of course there are many rightist governments like the UK.
It seems to me that none of the mass-used vaccines have been created in military laboratories.
As I understand it, the Pfizer vaccine was created by German scientists, but now Europe is buying this vaccine from the United States. This situation does not cause any criticism in Europe?
I can add that ordinary employees of the Gamalei center for the development of the vaccine were awarded prizes from 30 to 60 thousand rubles (somewhere 400 -750 dollars at face value). In place of US/ EU officials I would just buy the Gamalea center – it would be a reasonable investment.
China has like 1.4 billion people, it will take them some time.
Argentina is getting Sputniked, so its like Russian numbers. Russian stuff is cheaper so bankruptcy is not that big of a deal.
Trumpenreich pays $4 trillion a year for medical services. For this kind of dough, I expect vaccine to be delivered to me personally by a supermodel riding a gold winged unicorn.
300,000 doses of domestically produced vaccine (Sputnik V) were sent from Russia to Argentina. Although they only sent the first dose, which is currently produced in excess to the second dose.
Russia focused on import substitution with the vaccine – but there should have been in addition to the domestic development and production of vaccine, a mass purchase of foreign vaccines from early as possible (June) from all the foreign manufacturers, including paying multiple times higher prices (which would easily affordable) for faster delivery. That would now allow faster rollout of vaccine by this month with a mix of domestic and foreign vaccine. This is a basic diversification strategy, and buying the vaccines from many different companies very early, would have resulted in earlier deliveries. Earlier exit to the health crisis is the priority – it is a disaster response.
For zealous Cold Warriors™, they’d rather millions of people die if they can prevent the “bad guys” get a win, no matter how marginal. I no longer underestimate their sociopathy. They don’t give a shit about saving lives.
If China is doing as good as their official numbers say they are, or even within an order of magnitude of that, then there’s no rush. At least not in the same way it is for most other countries on that list.
Well, topic of vaccination aside. How has Germany’s management of the pandemic been overall?
I’m too lazy to check what the excess mortality data is for Germany, but according to official daily figures (for the little those are worth) it seems that it has more successful in controlling the pandemic than most of Europe? Would you say this is accurate?
For example, these countries couldn’t apparently prepare testing capacity over the summer. So they had positive test ratios of between 30 to 50% (Poland!) during the winter.
By comparison UK seemed to have attained state capacity for sufficient testing from around May 2020 onwards. While in Poland and Czech Republic they have far too high positive test ratios (likely indicating still inability to sufficiently test the public) at the beginning of 2021.
https://i.imgur.com/MClMMlZ.jpg
COVID-19 has been stamped out in China, so they are not really in a hurry. However, Chinese government has promised that the whole nation will be jabbed for free.
The German state is much richer than those countries, so that isn’t a fair comparison.
imo the pandemic has been mishandled, Merkel mostly ignored the issue until mid-March (preferring instead to focus on racism as usual, after some nutcase had shot several people of Near Eastern origin in Hanau). Her minister of health even was dumb enough in February to come up with the flu comparison (“We shouldn’t forget how many people die of the ordinary flu, no reason for panic”). Nothing was done apart from handing out questionnaires (“are you feeling sick?”) to travellers from countries where Covid-19 was already running rampant.
Then they went into panic mode, but the lockdown was half-assed and they never managed to bring it really under control during the summer (nor did they close the borders, so travel to and from highly affected regions like the Balkans and Turkey was unimpeded, without anything like quarantine). Or do much to prepare for the winter (e.g. by trying to reactivate former personnel for hospitals).
By October it was clear things were going to escalate, but in early November they only took half-measures again (“We need to keep schools open as long as possible”), so it wasn’t effective and now they’ve shut almost everything down, probably at least until the end of January.
And now there doesn’t seem to be enough vaccine for a strong vaccination campaign, so the crisis might last well into the 2nd half of the year.
Total failure, once again.
Oh, and many right-wingers have become total nutcases with their Corona-denial, so they can’t even effectively criticize the government.
Karlin’s argument about Israel has weakness: as far as I know, the United States planned to vaccinate the black population as a priority. If blacks are actually vaccinated earlier than everyone else, will this be a sign of the special competence of the black population? The fact that Israel is vaccinated with the American vaccine (much better than America is vaccinated) has the same reasons as the priority of blacks over whites and Asians.
The run by Turks based in Germany company BioNTech developed the vaccine, 3 candidates of it in fact, and partnered with Pfizer to do the testing, manufacturing and distribution, the former two very expensive. It’s being manufactured in the US and Europe, so any Made in the USA doses that travel across the pond will be in excess of US commitments and whatever others Pfizer has made. Minus one half, they suddenly and recently announced they were going to miss their early promises world wide by that huge margin claiming supply chain issues.
For the US, Pfizer is now accepting help from our Operation Warp Speed (OWS), but that’s presumably predicated on those doses going to the US until Pfizer has fulfilled its 200 million dose commitment by the end of the second quarter, unless there’s some smallish thing the US can provide that doesn’t slow down Pfizer production for us and Moderna’s production. We did take a Manhattan Project style approach with OWS, that means lots of bets in parallel, so its OK if some don’t pay off.
A billion or so doses of vaccine and I’m not sure what else relevant to Pfizer’s plight has been contingently purchased, way in excess of our needs if a lot of the bets pay off, and that can of course be redirected as needed. Over half those doses were to be from the AZ/Oxford clown show, so who knows what will happen there, especially if Janssen’s near identical approach except trying for a single dose works, either that ambitious goal or their backup of two doses 57 days apart.
A bigger issue for Germany was how the EU’s equivalent of the FDA took their own sweet time granting their closest equivalent of an Emergency Use Authorization for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, way after the infamously cautious FDA did.
East Asian countries seem to be much slower than Western countries. South Korea and Japan have not yet started as far as I know.
Boy was that a bad all in bet vs. Manhattan Project style do it in parallel. Heh, in an iSteve discussion we’ve been talking about how Nazi Germany failed to get even close to having a working reactor, due to bad decisions and not trying hard enough enough parallel approaches, like giving up too early on graphite for a moderator.
Sanofi/GSK royally screwed up their Phase I/II trials, they couldn’t get good enough results for the elderly, I can’t imagine how unless their first tries at a vaccine just aren’t very good … which is probably the way to bet given how long before they’ll try again with humans. Note Pfizer/BioNTech’s is an active vaccine, much easier to get good efficacy if it works at all (ditto Moderna, AZ/Oxford, Janssen, and Gamaleya, but beware using the same viral vector for two doses if you use them). Sanofi is supplying a spike protein and GSK adjuvants, as far as I have learned this year that passive approach doesn’t work as well, does not I think invoke all the body’s systems for example to kills cells that are pumping out spike proteins.
They are so very far behind it won’t be until February or later that they’ll start new human Phase I/II trials, this time as ethics require with the control group getting an existing proven vaccine. As you note, that means Phase III trial plus approval will take until near the end of this year (2021). The only other protein plus adjuvant effort that’s anywhere far along is Novavax, they started with a U.K. based small 15,000 person Phase III trial and that must be seeing good results, for they started their 30,000 US Phase III trial exactly a week ago. You would think Sanofi and GSK’s vast experience with vaccines would have made a big difference, obviously the EU thought so….
Were there short term doses to be had by that point when Pfizer had proven efficacy right after the US election (that of course delayed by design)? And they had their safety data just a little later, made their application for a FDA Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) on November 20th, that made clear they were very sure it was safe and effective. Also note they recently announced they were going to miss their short term manufacturing promises by one half, so even if the EU had acted, and paid a premium for being late, they still wouldn’t be getting any more doses any time soon unless they convinced Pfizer to divert existing commitments.
Umm, no, you’re not even close, more like half a million a day December 30 to January 2nd, nor are you considering the speeds of the different phases due to their targeting different populations, each effort with its own learning curve. Hospital workers first so we don’t have to bend the curve so much, and CVS and Walgreens, US pharmacy giants, are now vaccinating workers and residents of long term care facilities which include nursing homes in the Federal Pharmacy Partnership for Long-Term Care Program.
Come to think of it, the recent numbers are absolutely meaningless except for vaccine distribution, because once every hospital worker who wants a first dose gets it, that phase is over except making sure everyone gets their second dose on time, which the U.K. is abandoning, I’ve been told long ago by a diplomat’s son that’s a common Third World problem.
So you might follow every other day the CDC’s tracking page, right now I’d pay attention to the new entries that page has for that long term care program, they’d given first doses to 167,000 people as of reporting to the CDC as of 9 am as of December 30th, then yesterday 289,000 people, more than double the number, and that’s including the New Year Day’s holiday.
That would be my somewhat educated guess, AK.
It’s my understanding that, rather than allow any vaccine to spoil before it can be used, a lot of the vaccine doses are given on a first-come first-served basis.
This isn’t rocket science.
Ok, I hadn’t heard of that, but even so it was a mistake to reject the offer of 500 million doses.
The EU agency responsible for authorizing use of the vaccine was also bizarrely sluggish, if I understand correctly they acted only in late December, and only because Germany and Spain insisted on it.
I agree with this about 90%
The 10% where I disagree is that I don’t expect the populations of countries bordering Israel to grow quickly over the next few decades. Birth rates have been declining in the Middle East.
Other than that, you make very good points that are important to keep in mind.
Because the post-Beria sovoks cared more about the Russian people than the oligarchs do.
The US didn’t have a proven vaccine until December 11th for Pfizer/BioNTech, and the 18th for Moderna. Sure, Moderna had a vaccine candidate with much better than BioNTech environmental constraints developed in literally a weekend by January 13th, but testing it, and first getting money on an emergency basis to do that, which took proof COVID-19 was going to be bad, took through November 30th when they submitted their Emergency Use Authorization Application to the FDA.
And we’re not going badly at all in reported vaccination rates as extensively discussed here. We certainly can’t match a county like Israel which paid a premium to buy so many doses so far in advance of their also proving to be safe and effective for the purposes of an EUA and then Israeli regulators who added their own delay. That number of doses for a country the size in every way of the US simply does not exist on the earth yet.
US blacks are much less needed for the vaccination of US blacks than Israelis for the vaccination of the population of Israel.
Is it state capacity, or state willingness to use that capacity. If you look at Cold War plans in Britain, there were plans to impose Martial Law and suspend normal liberties if war with the USSR was imminent, clearly the British Prime Minister has the state capacity to impose a state of emergency, declare a lockdown, and have the military and police impose them with force, like what China has done, but clearly he chose not to use that state capacity.
Why doesn’t Karlin talk about Australia and New Zealand’s response in detail, I mean they are islands too like the UK, with a lot of air links to the outside world. I believe the difference for China is that they treated as a war, with local governments ordered to go into a wartime footing in order to deal with this thing, whereas Western governments treated it as a public health issue.
You understand correctly. I didn’t try to figure out the details beyond falsifying a claim the European Medicines Agency (EMA) didn’t have anything like the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). They have a conditional marketing authorisation (CMA), although I suppose it might be stricter.
But to be weeks slower than the FDA in a pretty lethal pandemic is pretty amazing. Although now I might be remembering there’s an EU step above the EMA, but the EMA was supposed to be the cause of the delay.
Of course, Pfizer could have been slowing the process down due to their not being able to make their delivery promises, and there would be questions about giving priority to Israel (which also took some time after FDA EUA approval, but paid early and handsomely for a lot of doses)…. Germany was really angered because the vaccine was developed in Germany by BioNTech (albeit it being founded and run by Turks, even if one claims she’s a “Prussian Turk”), and it was tested in Germany along with the US.
Why not? Wuhan had a strict lockdown and China quarantines all people who test positive and all people entering China from abroad.
Do you believe the Chinese death numbers? At 4,782 deaths, China manages to just about equal the death toll of Guatemala. Furthermore, various Chinese regions are now very inter-connected, meaning that that between the time the virus started and when it was detected, the virus carriers likely travelled to other parts of China (Wuhan is a major transit city if I am not mistaken) where it would have also spread quite fast, and despite this, only ~5000 deaths and only 96,000 infections. Almost as if they just stopped counting after a while.
So either the Chinese are hiding the true figures or the virus is simply not that deadly. I think I actually contracted it back in January of last year and it was nothing special.
Or maybe quarantines and lockdowns actually work. COVID is a novel virus, I see no reason why strong measures cannot eradicate it from areas.
COVID isn’t particularly deadly to the non-elderly.
Apparently, Pfitzer CEO is a proud Jew, this is why Israel has such a lead. It’s a good old Jewish tribalism at work.
BTW, this makes me trust US vaccine even less. Think about it: vaccine made in record time, based on a new revolutionary RNA technology, that was approved in violation of US regulations, that ZOG wants everyone in the world to take, they even went to great lengths to destroy potential competition…Knowing Jewish businessmen, it is plausible, that shots administered to Israeli Jews contain a different substance to what the goyim will be getting.
I’m not saying they will be giving people sterilization shots, or anything like that. I’m saying you should be extremely cautious with “safe & efficacious” vaccine that Jew is trying to sell you.
Have you see the various politicians taking it on camera? Netanyahu also took it live. Could just be a saline solution though, and the nurses also kept obscuring the needle penetration with their hands.
Kudos, well said.
It should also be noted that the United States has more administrative health care personal per capita than any other nation on the planet (Maybe more than the rest of the world combined? Not sure, but I think it would be close). What the heck are all these people doing???!!!!
Indeed, worrying about prioritizing may be taking away from the bottom line of just getting as many vaccinated as soon as possible. Excellent point.
I do think that a lot of this comes from rot at the top. Our elites just don’t care, they live in a bubble, they fail and there are no consequences and indeed having failed mightily are feted as experts in the self-congratulatory echo chamber that our elites live in.
Look at how botched the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were. Not just the initial point of them but the execution. The US Army circa 1946 could have pacified even the unruly Afghans in a matter of months – but of course, the US elites in that era were far too wise to contemplate such a pointless exercise in the first place. But all our current administrators and ‘experts’ – have they paid any price for this most ludicrous and abject failure? In 1946 such failure would ruin careers. Now they are richly rewarded and showered with honors and lucrative contracts.
And we are surprised that something as simple as distributing vaccines is now beyond us?
It followed the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) process like many other drugs and biologics. The rest of your rant is evidently based on your assumptions that a Prussian Turk developed vaccine is not kosher because a Jew lead company helped with the testing and is doing the manufacturing. And that Pfizer/BioNTech is the only mRNA vaccine, how did you miss Moderna with its vastly superior protective lipid technology and massively faster vaccine candidate development (literally over a weekend, did not have to test 3 alternatives like Pfizer/BioNTech). Although I suppose it counts for something that Moderna is run by a Frenchman….
In general, while there’s grains of truth in AK’s take on this, the simple fact that Israel made a big and successful bet on Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine and has massively more vaccine to distribute per capita than anyone else explains 80% of it.
Is it normal for American pharma companies to not be legally responsible for the product they are offering?
Pseudo-Marxist would be more accurate.
Agreed. I’d actually say that Wokeism is anti-Marxist rather than pseudo-Marxist.
That’s a thought that right-wingers can’t even process without their heads exploding.
Better question is why many are so obsessed with prolonging the lives of those with one foot already in the grave? Making the rest of us pay for it in the process. I wonder how much the suicide and mental illness rate has gone up, but this is completely worth it according to some for saving some old people.
Lockdowns and quarantines didn’t work anywhere in the world, except (allegedly) China, which is a dystopian, totalitarian society that controls all information. For all we know there is a raging epidemic going, but Chinese army of internet censors (it’s a literal army with 2 million operatives involved in it!) scrubbed every evidence of it.
China isn’t a closed society like North Korea, there are Westerners and other foreigners resident in it, if there were a raging epidemic, we’d know about it.
The way some of these emigres are, their identities may fluctuate, depending on the day of the week.
Thanks to Israelis for taking so much vaccine. In a few years we can learn about the longer term side effects.
How? It’s not like people are dropping dead in the streets.
African American people don’t have separate governments and health departments. But there is some difference of authorities between each of the states.
In terms of the US states, one’s which are vaccinating fastest are the majority white bourgeoisie states like Maine, Conneticut and Vermont, as a well as a couple rural (which are really small population) states like South Dakota.
https://i.imgur.com/1E673bm.jpg
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-global-distribution/
lol, and then you wonder why people think right-wingers are heartless Social Darwinists who’d gas the sick and disabled if given the chance.
For bad reactions from vaccines, liability by those individuals harmed? Yes, it is normal, for as you may have heard, our civil legal system is insane. It’s that, compensation from Federal “vaccine courts,” or no vaccines for children or emergencies.
iirc a year ago they did in Wuhan.
Don’t see how you could keep a “raging epidemic” with the resultant stress on the hospital system completely secret from long-term residents. And people who claim that about China never provide any evidence, they just argue it has to be.
The desire to artificially prolong life is a neo-liberal way of thinking, and features prominently as a meme metric in report by institutions like the World Bank and IMF. The truth is that not only have advances in medicine created a boom in the population of the Third World, they have also creates a top heavy population pyramid which threatens societal collapse. If anything corona is just a way of the higher power telling Man to stop with his delusions of playing God.
I can’t imagine rotting away in a care home for the last 10-15 years of my life while immigrants wipe my backside, people used to die dignified deaths not too long ago.
Expanding hospital capacity in US and Europe later last year eliminated stress on the hospital system, enabling them to record more deaths with less stress.
We’ve been making a catastrophic mistake in analyzing this data, for there are two major distribution strategies. Israel is from what I’ve skimmed here dispensing all the doses they’ve received or are receiving immediately, confident that they’ll get more from Pfizer’s Jewish CEO with his close ties to their nation and of course the mutually very beneficial contractual arrangement.
Can’t speak to other countries, but in the US it is very common for a location to receive enough for two doses for all their people, since we aren’t as trusting, are massively spread out, etc. etc. The wisdom of this was confirmed when Pfizer recently and suddenly announced they were going to miss their early promises by one half.
I can attest to this being done in my local area with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, one of our hospitals rented an ultra-low temperature (ULT) freezer (and dry ice is a fine emergency expedient if that fails), and got a lot of doses, said they were for both jabs. If you look around on the net, you can find other examples of this. So in terms of doses distributed compared to first doses administered, you may have to cut the former in half.
As usual, do not assume all countries’ statistics are directly comparable!
Surely, it sounds very incompetent.
But still Germany has been less effected by the pandemic, than some neighbouring countries, when we look at excess deaths.
Some of Germany’s neighbours are losing control of the epidemic more rapidly this autumn, according to excess deaths from the p-value.
https://i.imgur.com/982dLAY.jpg
If we add Spain to the excess deaths, as another example, we can see how Germany avoids the worst of the first wave (to much less extent than Spain), and also that the excess deaths are rising significantly more slowly in the second wave compared to many neighbouring countries (like Poland and Czech Republic).
https://i.imgur.com/VG7BH7k.jpg
Although note Germany has had less extreme rises in excess deaths than some countries in Europe like Switzerland, which are richer than Germany.
Also Germany has the highest median age in Europe (although only to an insignificant extent), and COVID-19 is more fatal in older age groups.
Maybe because of Red Tribe factionalism, the american right would rather believe all possible contradicting conspiracies as long as they’re ideologically opposed to The Libs.
You shouldn’t get vaccinated, but the virus is not such a big deal, yet China made it. Anything to avoid the reality that the US is an ideologically & ethnically fragmented polity incapable of inspiring even the most basic loyalty in its citizens.
For any outsider looking in, this has been a litmus test. The shining city on a hill failed, the totalitarian communist dictatorship passed with flying colors.
Dying empire, anyone?
Read experiences by anyone who’s been there. Even AK’s comment section has some Russians who’ve been to Israel, and reported that the society has anything but “ethnic solidarity”. There’s different cultural/ethnic groups, and most don’t see eye to eye. An ashkenazi, a mizrahi, a haredi, a beta Israeli have barely any “ethnic solidarity” among each other.
The military is closer to taiwan’s, you can avoid active military service and do volunteering/desk work instead.
The real reason is much more simply pervasive state power. An apartheid government has experience with herding large crowds and forcing medicine on them. I assume it’s not difficult to use the infrastructure meant to keep palestinians in check on the “whites”. If South Africa still had the old regime, they would have just as much success.
Germany doing comparatively well in the first wave was mostly due to luck imo, we just were hit later than some other European countries, so the shutdown and warmer spring weather prevented the worst.
Re excess deaths, I suppose that’s because Germany’s health care system is still better than that of Poland, Czech republic etc. (no idea though what’s going on in Switzerland, they seem to manage this very badly). I can’t know for sure, someone with better statistical skills would have to analyze it all. But I do know that Germany’s response to the crisis hasn’t been especially impressive, there isn’t much of a coherent strategy.
In Poland, there might be a situation where they did not have enough capacity of ICU beds, as excess deaths were spiking by the end of October.
Note the data only goes to the end of November for Germany (and excess deaths in Germany have likely increased a lot more above the 4 year level in December). In Germany, there are media reports of insufficient ICU beds from only December, but the websites haven’t update information about excess deaths for that month yet.
But it’s likely not just healthcare levels which can explain the differences. Austria likely has similar levels of healthcare to Germany, and there is an earlier spike of excess deaths in October compared to Germany.
I think the quantity of people infected was likely lower in Germany across September/October (although December will be the worse month in Germany).
https://i.imgur.com/GxQjSiV.jpg
The number of bureaucratic layers has an importance so a small country like Israel or Bahreïn without layers of bureaucracy above it (unlike Belgium or Massachusetts) can act more quickly.
Also, to vaccinate on a large scale and rapidly, you need to discard a number of usual rules and procedures and make sure that everybody acts with a sense of urgency, like in a war. A country which has been at war repeatedly in the recent past (and a war involving the home front) and has no calm about being fully sovereign (unlike EU countries) will tend to act more quickly.
As per Carl Schmidt, the sovereign is the one able to define the exception and transcend the rule of law in the name of the public good. In many EU countries, nobody knows who is the sovereign.
Interestingly, the European country doing the best by far is the recently Brexited UK.
Here’s something you might like to ponder. If the vaccines work and this whole business is over and done with by the middle of the year, and the vaccines turn out not to be an evil conspiracy, how do you think the right-wing anti-vaxxers with their crazy conspiracy theories are going to look?
And right-wingers wonder why so many people think they’re vicious selfish scum who value money more than people.
A good rant, better than what you get form Hitler fan boys (Vaterland is one of them) but still full of falsity and self-deception.
“Hitler was defeated, but Europe lost the war.” – True but false. Conflating Hitler fantasies with Europe aspiration is a blatant manipulation. Obviously Western European countries did not want to be dominated by America but they preferred it to the domination by Germany.
That Eastern Europe was very happy to be liberated from its liberators in 1990s which were the Soviets it does not mean that the Western Europe equally dreams of liberation from its American liberators.
“…and patriotic diaspora…” – The same diaspora did it in America for Orthodox Jews.
Did These New York Clinics Ignore Rules on Who Gets Vaccinated First?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/27/nyregion/ny-clinic-coronavirus-vaccine.html
“… people think they’re vicious selfish scum…” – They just do not get why they are called scum, deplorable,…. For them being selfish is the highest virtue.
Are the Israelis forcefully vaccinating the population? That would be a fascinating development.
All of modern medicine is an attempt to artificially prolong life and if you gave that up we would go back to the era where the average life expectancy was half of what it is now.
The thing I’m not sure about is whether we are increasing the life expectancy right now in exchange for a lower average life expectancy later. Generally speaking, people in wealthier countries live longer. Early lockdowns may have stopped the epidemic but locking down after the disease spread may be less effective and the costs may exceed the benefits. If long lockdowns result in making countries poorer, then that may decrease life expectancy in the future.
So rather than opponents of long lockdowns being selfish, it’s possible that the current generation that supports long lockdowns is being selfish by sacrificing future generations for their benefit. The elderly make up a powerful voting bloc but children and those yet to be born don’t have a say about what we are doing now.
They’ll have to once the ultra-orthodox refuse to take the vaccine for whatever bullshit reason.
I mean that was copy pasted from Vaterland
That deal has changed a lot since 1945, though. What we get now is domination by Germany that is dominated by America so the Americans have reversed their original promise.
Or maybe they do but the American “liberator” still appears strong and impossible to defeat.
Humans are good at lying to even themselves so when we are following a rule in fear of punishment or in expectation of rewards we tell ourselves that we are following some moral principle. If the fear of punishment or the expectation of rewards somehow disappears because the enforcers of the rule lose their power suddenly lots of people will discover that they never had such a moral principle after all.
That’s what happened to Marxist-Leninism and I suspect that belief in “liberal democracy” would similarly disappear overnight if the Americans were to lose their ability to reward and punish vassals.
The bottleneck in the UK, which is doing well, is getting people who need to be vaccinated to their appointments. This has so far been alleviated by jabbing anyone on hand (medical staff) when patients don’t turn up.
It therefore paid to pick the elderly as the people to jab first, as medical staff are always on hand anyway for the no shows.
I don’t know what system Israel has for contacting its citizens, but the NHS (National Health Service) has to send out letters to your last registered address with them. No idea what the US would use in its place.
I don’t like the government tracking everything but perhaps time for everyone to have an app on their phone that both maintains privacy and allows the government to contact them. Or even something as simple as a state mandated email address that only official services can write to (all else are filtered out) and that you are required to check.
You’ve spent too much time on the internet. Falling so far down the rabbit hole that “longer life expectancies” are a neoliberal corruption is just absurdly stupid. I get you have a rationale in your point but step back and really consider it. Have you not got lost in a loop of your own logic?
Also, not accusing you of this, but peak Unz.com would be a schizoid diatribe alleging a global Jewish conspiracy to help people to live longer in order to achieve the goals of the Learned Elders of Babylon or whatever
Also, if France lacks state capacity (with 55%+ of its GDP being the state) then I really don’t know what to say
There is no other options for people. The menu does not include anything else but dishes based on democracy as their main ingredient. Whether the democracy is served with the liberal sauce or not is secondary. The democracy is here to stay. It is possible that it could be spiced up with nationalism and populism. But no country will go back to something what Germany, Italy or Romania had before WWII.
On lack of vaccination.
Over here the basic problem seems to be that the government took opinion polls seriously but turns out people were lying about their willingness to take the vaccine. If you want a free vaccination, come to Helsinki, we have tons to spare as all the vaccination stations just have idle staff waiting for the people who said they would come… big boxes of vaccine are going to go bad if people don’t show up soon.
I think they made a miscalculation when they just managed to get most people here to wear masks voluntarily. They softened us up with months of pro-mask propaganda before the fall season, people in opinion polls started saying that they’ll wear masks if the government recommends it and indeed once the recommendation came most people did start wearing masks. Opinion polls seemed to indicate that the majority would rush to take the vaccine and they seem to have counted on it but it isn’t happening.
I think there’s two problems:
a) After a year of fearmongering people are now really scared of everything corona-related which spills over to being scared of this particular vaccine even among people who are generally not anti-vaxxers. Masks are just cloth so they’re not scary and people won’t have second thoughts over putting one on.
b) Once the majority wears a mask the social pressure becomes overwhelming to most. You have to be a sperg like me to walk into a subway car full of mask wearers and just ignore their stares but no one can see if you’ve skipped the vaccine. So social pressure won’t be possible and they will have to either invent another enforcement mechanism or just accept that most people aren’t actually going to take the vaccine.
Depends, in terms of sheer resources and manpower available to the government to use at will, the average Western state had a lot more power in the 40s than today, this was largely a result of WW1/WW2 I’d say, and this was probably even more true for Russia/Eastern Europe.
However, modern technology has given the government the ability to impose lock downs and micromanage peoples’ daily lives in a way that would have been impossible before short of martial law and checkpoints everywhere, and with facial recognition tech it’s only going to get even easier for governments to do this with minimal manpower.
Western governments have considerably less access to manpower and resources now than they did in the 40s, but equally modern tech has negated the need for large amounts of manpower in many cases.
True, Vaterland is a defender of National Socialism and seems to think the Nazis didn’t do anything wrong at all. Obviously that’s a dead-end and a view which will never command much support outside an extreme fringe of German nationalists. Talking of “Europe” in that context is disingenuous.
At my hospital the Jewish physicians are taking it but the many of the African aides are suspicious. But n your opinion, is this an Israeli strategy to harm its diaspora?
Wokism is neo-Marxism, not anti-Marxism. It is like Mormonism to Christianity. Or Nazism to Fascism (actually with its racial essentialism, Wokism adds a bit of Nazi flavour to its neo-Marxism).
1.5 million doses have been produced, so that 800 000 could include at least 500000 who have had the two doses, because we formally started our vaccination program earlier than everyone……..or it could just mean 800 000 people, as initially assumed!
It’s a legitimate debate which you’re refusing to acknowledge and resorting to emotional blackmail. A good proportion of deaths are in care homes; in order to go into one of those places (not assisted living or something similar) you generally need to have dementia advanced to such an extent as to have very little executive function left and practically no sort term memory. This will only get worse and worse until you generally die of… pneumonia if something else doesn’t get you first. The older generation not in such a poor state owns a majority of the decent housing stock, have generous pensions and can self isolate in comparatively greater comfort. Saying that the lives of such people ought to be weighed up against the absolutely ruined life years of the vast majority of the population who won’t die from this thing, including children in their formative years who’s development will very likely be stunted, is rational and utilitarian once the epidemic has advanced to this stage.
The fact that European governments were criminally negligent between mid-January and mid-March is history at this stage, we are where we are and the young should not be scapegoated for their failure.
That European publics so comprehensively reject even considering such tradeoffs is a mixture of knee jerk sentimentality of the same type that argues for the right of people from every extremely poor and dysfunctional county to live and work here, the same selfishness they accuse others of and pure cowardice.
You rant on in most threads about Muslims in Europe (a permanent double-digit GDP drop and horrific unemployment will probably dissuade a good proportion of then mind) but defend Taliban level social distancing rules (that’s not an exaggeration; brutally of enforcement notwithstanding, in the UK, going on a date has been a criminal offence for the past four months with no indication of when that will change).
https://www.nzz.ch/international/qa-vergeigter-impfstart-und-impstoffmangel-nicht-fertig-ld.1594719?mktcid=smsh&mktcval=Twitter
Seems like back in summer the health ministers of Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands wanted to order 400 million doses of the Biontech-Pfizer vaccine.
Merkel intervened and had responsibility for ordering vaccines transferred to the EU commission. Which then ordered only 200 million doses (later increased to 300), because several member states apparently considered the Biontech vaccine “too expensive” (lol) and France pushed for an equivalent order from Sanofi.
What a farce.
I really wonder how people like you imagine a solution…just let it run through completely unimpeded (which will also kill lots of people in the 60-79 age range who aren’t yet with one foot in the grave), no matter the immense strain it will put on the health care system, with all its secondary effects? What exactly don’t you get about the fact that intensive care units in many European countries are already under great pressure, when we’re in mid-winter, with a new more infectious variant spreading and 2-3 months to go until spring and vaccination should improve the situation. Or are you one of those idiots who think it’s all made up anyway?
imo you’re childish, it’s pathetic how much whining there is from many right-wingers.
Holiday season for us in Russia lasts longer into the month , so there should be a mass public consciousness and desire to get vaccinated from the third week of January …. to accompany the much higher production of the vaccine that should be available then.
I’am assuming that Israel already having their Hannukah holidays, lasting 8 days in December, is one of the contributing reasons to their high vaccination rates – as like in Russia the medical motivation to receive it will not be much higher, or maybe lesser, than the practical reasons to have it for work or leisure purposes – so people don’t want to interrupt their holiday or rest time to get the vaccine, but will do so after that.
How do governments have less manpower? The population has gone up in most of the world.
Geronticide fetishists are getting hysterical. Vivid imagery: “ruined life years”, “stunted children”.
Someone needs to take your location and out a bullet to your head when you turn 80 or get on a wheelchair.
Well, it’s not completely made up, the present restrictions are undoubtedly hard on children and teenagers, and probably will have negative effects for many.
On the other hand though, I doubt it will do much good for children either if they pick up the virus in school or from their friends and then pass it on to grandparents who die painfully from it over several weeks, without anyone being able to visit them.
If the situation would last for years on end, imo at some point one would probably have to give up on most restrictions, given that Western countries have proved unable to effectively suppress the epidemic like in East Asia. But still going on with this “Just let the old ones croak” at the present time, when working vaccines exist and it’s just a matter to produce and distribute them in sufficient numbers, is simply idiotic.
I notice that young people nowadays do not even talk to each other much when they go out, just stare into their smartphones all day. How much travel is needed nowadays when you can just do videoconferencing, and for business travellers and diplomatic staff, they can just be quarantined for 2 weeks, I imagined if it would have taken a few years to develop a vaccine China would have been prepared to do that.
I wonder if you will volunteer to be euthanised if you turn 80 or somehow end up in a wheelchair.
While long term care homes do house people with advanced dementia (as if letting them die is acceptable) they also house people who do not have dementia but who can no longer live alone due to, for example, partial paralysis, or injury. I guess you are okay with grandfather suffocating to death from Covid because he had a stroke or fell on the ice and broke his hip. I know, it’s “for the children.”
In Eastern countries, they tend to treat dementia patients as young children or toddlers, which gives them a better quality of life.
That is great, and as it should be.
A very strange thing to say. Why? Even without judging Hitler’s merits, basically any (even temporarily) successful national figure will naturally be popular with nationalists.
Both Louis XIV and Edward III started wars against neighbouring European countries (with much less justification than Hitler), but still became well-known and popular national heroes.
Even a non-Nazi Germany not under the Liberal-Jewish yoke would (will?) eventually develop the same opinion of Hitler.
You’re wanting other people to pay a price for the dysfunctionality of the healthcare systems and failure to prepare.
AK has documented the FSU and red-srate America’s ability to stay open despite completely failing to contain this disiese with considerably milder, though not non-existent restrictions and seems to have grudgingly come to terms with the fact that this is a better course than endless lockdowns. No doubt western Europe would certainly find that harder politically, nevertheless, it is certainly not an impossible feat if the political will is there to balance life years lost due to Corona Vs life years made miserable by lockdowns and utter economic devastation.
Nobody lives forever, death rates in Germany increasing by 50% would give them the same death rates as the Baltics pre corona. You’d then probably have several years of below average death rates. Once again, not one mention of people who’s lives have been ruined by the restrictions, totally one sided. People can of course take their own percautions.
Just three more months, so that now makes it a year, how much longer would you consider it appropriate for people to accept this level of disruption to their lives? One more year, three years, indefinitely? It’s as valid a question as you asking about death rates, name a timeframe!
Germany has vaccinated 0.3 percent of its population, the UK slightly better, the speed of the rollout has been pathetic, and there’s plenty of scope for the goalposts to be moved and governments insisting on the whole population be vaccinated, not just the vulnerable before opening up; that would take the best part of 2021. If the vaccine stops serious disiese but doesn’t prevent infection then there’s scope for restrictions to drag on considerably longer.
I’ve tried to keep any comments made here civil and if you’d read properly what I wrote it would’ve been obvious that’s not the case. If you want examples of childish
right wing whinging then incessant complaining about Merkel allowing Arabs into the fatherland who’ve been displaced by stupid American wars for which German society is at least somewhat complicit would Probably be a better example than a reasoned objection to this dystopian nonsense coming inside the overton window in liberal democracies.
Eh, democracy can fairly easily be reduced to a nice ritual of affirmation without any deeper meaning. It has happened before, plenty of times, and at the moment it might well be happening in the US.
Off-topic, so I’m not going to discuss it extensively in this thread (short version below).
Suffice to say that Nazi pan-Europeanism was quite transparently fake (Nazis after all basically wanted to liquidate a major European nation like Poland), so most Europeans will never view it positively. Hitler’s project also had extremely detrimental consequences for Germany herself, so it’s unlikely he and his movement will be re-evaluated positively even within Germany. I understand that you’re a Holocaust denier and presumably pro-NS, but that’s a fringe view and will probably remain largely irrelevant.
I meant more in terms of their ability to commandeer factories and order large numbers of people to leave their normal jobs and work in certain roles to support an overall effort, as happened during WW2.
Today this sort of state control over private enterprise would be far more politically unacceptable.
There should be compulsory euthanasia at age 75, this would prevent the proliferation of the elderly and would free up labour for making a nation better for the coming youth, rather than tending for the people of yesterday. Even if you are aged 40-ish, you would still have almost half of your total life before you, most people get burnt out by age 60 anyway.
Correspondingly, the age of retirement should also be reduced.
At the cost of pretty significant excess mortality (so not just people who would have soon died anyway).
Britain is more complicit, so it would be nice if you offered to take a few hundred thousand of “our” Syrians and Iraqis.
And long-lasting demographic changes are a lot more reason for “whining” than temporary restrictions which will hopefully be relaxed during the course of this year.
What is your sense of this happening this summer? There is a conference in Germany I would like to attend.
I don’t know tbh, as I wrote above the vaccination campaign hasn’t exactly had a good start (still better than in France though), and there’s also that issue with the new more infectious strain (unclear how widespread it already is in Germany and how bad the consequences will be). I hope that things will start becoming more normal in summer, the worst should be over by then. But I don’t think anybody can say for sure right now.
As long as anyone anywhere has a single euro to spend and we can prolong the life of an old codger for a year, no week, no an hour, no ten seconds, then, by the ghost of Konrad Adenauer, we must spend it and starve happily in nice togetherness. As long as a billion euros remain unspent, that codger deserves it and we do not. However costly it gets and however short a moment is bought, the price, whatever it is, is definitely worth it. Nothing for us and all for the codger. That is just who we are.
Will not disagree
Hopefully they will be, though it’s now obvious that the overton window in liberal democracies has shifted to allow this kind of thing in the future so they’ll still be hanging over peoples’ heads. Fergusson pretty much said that explicitly in a times article. The double digit economic contraction will not be gone in a year though and, I’ll be willing to bet that if and when this is under control, the government niceties to stave off poverty and immiseration will abruptly stop.
In summary, it took just 11 months or so to approve the finished vaccine (and a few trillion dollars of stimulus while the economy was halted, not to mention the human costs). Warp speed indeed. Next, we shall see how well the vaccination process works out during OSS.
This “woke” ideology is not reconcilable for any kind of Marxism, although perhaps it exploits some of the same messianic hopes of mankind.
In Marxism, the theory is that culture is almost illusory byproduct of attempts to mystify the class relations, and that each historical stage is composed by man’s division into a particular regimentation, in its attempt to conquer nature.
Value is generated by the labour of mankind, and those who control the means of production can appropriate the surplus value generated by workers, without needing to work themselves.
In the current “Woke” ideology, the idea is that we need to have “sensitivity training” to not offend each other with “micro-aggressions”, or we need more black people to win Oscar awards.
Parts of this ideology is more similar to sensibilities of Jane Austen – e.g. that we shouldn’t clap in the lecture theatre, as it could upset people with hearing disabilities.
From a Marxist view, this will be attempt to re-introduce “feudal veils” and “mystifications”, over the reality of the unequal social regimentation, where people who control the means of production are appropriating value generated by the labour of the workers.
–
For example, Trump’s personality was like a crazy parody of undisguised bourgeois mentality, as Marx describes it in “Communist Manifesto”, i.e. “It (bourgeois capitalism) has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his natural superiors, and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment. It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. ”
By re-placing Trump, with politicians like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris (or Bernie Sanders), then a Marxist would view this as an attempt of bourgeois democracy to re-add some mystifications to the country’s social regimentation, or something like “making whores wear a longer skirt”.
Soviet ideology was incompetently written “pseudo-Marxism” created by the local hackers, after they brutally uninstalled an old operating system, and couldn’t restore many of the country’s basic functions. It was a local software packaged as being “with Marxist style” so it could be attractive to hipsters, and marketed around the world.
China’s ideology is something like “neo-pseudo-anti-Marxism”.
Current American ideologies, are just much more “pure anti-Marxism”. They are closer to the kind ideologies used by the elite in Latin American countries like Brazil, to create mystification around the country’s lack of public investment, and complicate any analysis (or attempt of the lumpen proletariat to develop class consciousness about) the wealth hidden inside the elites’ vast mansions which are not accessible to normal pedestrians.
That’s not to say, that attempts to apply any Marxism would be useful or desirable in America – it would crash the system.
Thank you, and stay safe!
There are likely to be other pandemics during this century, and possibly ones considerably worse than Covid-19 (think of something like the Spanish flu which was deadly for children and young people)…how exactly do you intend to deal with them? Right-wingers should make an argument that in future restricting international travel and closing borders at the earliest sign of a possible pandemic (like Taiwan did) need to be part of the package, to minimise the risks of damaging lockdowns lasting months. But instead many right-wingers are in total denial mode and drifting into bizarre conspiracy theories or are showing themselves to be pretty callous wannabe eugenicists who think the old and sick should just die anyway. imo that’s incredibly self-defeating behaviour.
Are you suggesting that true Marxism has never been tried?
I have noticed that recently the “Think of the children” rhetorical cliche is being deployed by the opponents of the counter-measures as if they all got the memo with new talking points recently. The same people who want as now to “Think about the children” not so long ago did not want us to “Think about the old” and who advocated for the de facto gerontocide. “Think about the children” and “Kill their grandparents” is what they are saying. They are morally obtuse. What else you can expect from libertarians?
Few weeks ago Anders Tegnell in interviews spent some time on the “Think of the children” meme.
The “Think of the children” meme is the last refuge of callous scoundrels.
This is where I can use the meme I learned here, “British Scientists Say….” And they deserve it, from The Lancet being obviously a rag by the end of the 1980, to the AZ/Oxford vaccine clown show, to lots of stuff better know.
In their favor, it has a larger collection of mutations than you normally see in COVID-19 with its unique among RNA viruses coronavirus family proofreading mechanism. It is assumed to have come from someone who didn’t clear COVID-19 well due to perhaps a not tip-top immune system, allowing an ecological battle inside one person’s body and thus selection pressure to out compete its brethren.
Then by bad luck it was passed on to other people, and if the unfortunately revealed to be political in reporting on COVID-19 Derek “Things I Won’t Work With” Lowe is to be believed, since he first wrote about it 12/22, “it’s become even more clear that yes, B.1.1.7 is indeed more infectious.”
He goes on to say there’s no evidence it won’t be covered by the current vaccines, “strain” is a word best reserved for something that’s sufficiently different existing methods of immunity no longer work. Note that could include everyone who’s already gotten natural immunity by getting COVID-19, although the natural reaction has been found to target the nucleocapsid protein in addition to the spike protein.
In any case, we must be prepared in the near to medium term for the prevalent circulating variant of SARS-CoV-2 become new mutated strain that will require a new vaccine. Up to now, if we don’t count individuals with wonky immune systems, we believe that ecologically the current strain has not been under serious selection pressure. That is, it’s having absolutely no problems finding new hosts to make new viruses with, so a variant or strain that does this better is not expected to arise from that person to person spreading system.
Of course, if and when you can start talking about herd immunity, a strain that avoids that immunity will be favored, but it’s not axiomatic that’ll happen. Especially since SARS-CoV-2 is suspiciously already very well adapted to humans. For example, isn’t super lethal, nor did have to change from when it was first noticed and sequenced to spread like wildfire.
Note also the presumed source of B.1.1.7 emphasizes the dangers of letting a pandemic run wild. Marvin Minsky noted in the late 1980s about AIDS that the more “kilograms of viruses” that exist at any one time the more bad things like this can happen.
Because they hardly have an cases, no pressure. Also, there is not enough vaccine.
And, more centrally, that capital needs to be redistributed from White oppressors to Blacks.
You are describing some of the more frivolous proposals, not the ideology itself. Newdiscourses has a description:
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/complex-relationship-between-marxism-wokeness/
…Marxian but not Marxist, in that it continues the conflict theory-style analysis of Marx into a different realm and does so toward essentially Marxist ends. One could say this is a distinction without a difference, but that is incorrect. The consequence of this shift is profound. It means that rather than attempting to unite workers and seize the means of economic production, as the Marxists had envisioned, the neo-Marxists wanted to change culture itself. This led them to find multiple sites of the oppressor/oppressed dynamic in society and get inside peoples heads with it, which they derived from the intentional forced marriage of Freudian psychoanalysis into Marxian social theory. They led them to understood the importance of seizing the means of cultural production—education, media, arts, journalism, faith, and entertainment….
The neo-Marxists were critical of Marxism but not all that far from it, and they explicitly sought to agitate for a genuine Marxist revolution by means of agitating for it culturally instead of economically. That is, their goal was to use culture and ideology as a proxy by which they could effect the revolutions of the various underclasses. These they hoped to unite under a banner philosophy of “liberationism,” where by “liberation” was still very much meant liberation from the abuses of a capitalist post-Enlightenment society. Thus, the neo-Marxists merely moved the site of analysis a step back from economics to underlying culture, specifically targeting elite culture as bourgeois and middle or popular culture as a commodity produced by the elites to keep the masses dumb and content, thus not revolutionary. Their underlying assumption is that the elites define what constitutes the ostensibly “authentic” culture in a way that brainwashes the masses into working, voting, buying, and living against their own best interests, and the masses need their consciousnesses raised and made critical so they’d start hating their lives, as the Critical Theorists believed was right and proper for them, and then revolt.
One of the most central characteristic of Marxism, is that it presents itself as “non-normative”, and rather as a weather forecast that predicts History.
Communism can only happen in the most historically and economically advanced countries (likely England or Germany), as a result of the continuing industrial revolution, and the creation by the bourgeois of a proletariat that far outnumbers them, and achieves class consciousness, i.e. consciousness of the productive relations, and correspondingly of the imbalance of real power in their favour.
The activity of “scientific socialists” like Marx is only to try to give understanding of inevitable processes of History, and therefore to result in something like less violent struggle and crisis in the transition to the next historical stage as both sides understand the dialectic. (This belief in the importance of consciousness taken from Hegel).
Marxism has “never been tried”, in the sense that its predictions simply failed to occur. In countries like England, the next historical stage has been that the bourgeoisie starts to outnumber the proletariat. Where will be the engine for the communist revolution to happen, when the expropriators are now outnumbering the expropriated.
However, the vocabulary of Marxism was used by many governments and revolutionaries in the 20th century, so the language and theories of Marxism extremely influential, at the same time that the most of important of the processes he described fail to occur.
You read the article you linked.
He concludes exactly the same: “Marxism, though, which is conflict theory applied to Industrial Age capitalist economics, is more or less completely lost, except as a thing that people occasionally yell about without any apparent deep understanding”.
Although the article is not bad as it has the correct conclusion, the writer of the article still seems a bit uneducated, and writes things like “Postmodernism is a particular form of “post-Marxism,” which had given up more or less entirely on Marxism and thus everything else”.
Post-modernism is mainly influenced by Nietzsche. Marxism is not going to work with a “perspectivist” or relativist truth theory. Marxism is all based on belief in a very objective truth theory. The idea of Marxism, is that there is an objective reality, which is obscured by false consciousness.
There are the forerunners of post-modernism earlier in the 20th century, like André Breton’s surrealism, which was claiming to be influenced by Marx. But the main spirit of the forerunners of post-modernism (like Surrealism, Dada, and Futurism), are responses to Nietzsche.
Surrealism also integrated some ideas of Freud’s unconscious, which itself comes from Schopenhauer. Dada has a lot of ideas about using randomness and juxtaposition to satirize rigidity of bourgeois society – but this is a tradition of 19th century criticism of the bourgeoisie that came from literary writers like Flaubert.
Marxism does not want to re-distribute capital, and views European colonialism as necessary stage of historical development, if particularly undisguised in the economic relation of slavery.
In Marxism, there is nothing interesting about black people, except to the extent they might correlate with a particular type of work i.e. slavery.
Lenin was influenced by a lot of different writers, and Marxism is not necessarily even the greatest influence on him, although he used large parts of it like a child might construct something using pieces of lego combined with another brand of toy.
Lenin’s ideas about imperialism are written 40 years after Marx had died. These theories of Lenin was quite useful for the Soviet Union’s external policy, as rhetorical cover for the extension of the “Great Game” conflict with the West, and as a packaging for Soviet power projection into the third world, where the USSR is presented as “fighting imperialism”.
It’s funny to see an echo of this in forum user AnoninTN, who still uses the vocabulary of Lenin, in describing the American external policy as “The Empire”. When I first read his comments, I thought he was maybe a fan of Star Wars. But of course, reflects anti-imperialism rhetoric that was used until the end of Soviet times.
On the contrary, Israeli regime is helping Jewish company to sell its vaccine by becoming an early adoptee.
BTW what do you think of Ukrainian vaccination strategy: rejecting Sputnik V because it’s “hybrid warfare”, and not getting anything else.
Not exactly a critical question for China (as opposed to countries that failed to contain Corona and are in “Tier 5” lockdowns).
The debate between the Corona “hardliners” and “floomers” here seems highly ideologized and rhetorical. A reflection of general trends, I suppose.
Describing Wokeism as having anything to do with Marxism is dangerously misleading and is a deliberate obfuscation.
Wokeism and SJWism are tools of the Economic Right.
If you described Wokeism and SJWism as neo-capitalism or Cultural Capitalism you’d be much closer to the mark.
I think “absolutely ruined life years” is a bit of an exaggeration. In fact a wild exaggeration.
Unfortunately that’s the way debates on COVID always seem to go – both sides resorting to wild exaggeration.
But utu, for God’s sake won’t someone think of the children?
Will we be seeing heart-rending photos of all those stunted children?
Hysterical is the right word. But it’s a bit disturbing seeing so many right-wing men displaying symptoms of hysteria.
Why I adjusted my opinion (on a slider, not flip flopped):
That said, the faster than anticipated arrival of vaccines does dial the ideal response back in the direction of harder lockdowns – but only if we were fundamentally serious about a rapid vaccine rollout so that we can be finally done with it. But early signs not encouraging, in Europe even less so than in the US (as e.g. pointed out by German_reader, Philippe Lemoine on Twitter, etc). But either way, politically appropriate response – whatever it takes to avoid cameras videoing overflowing hospitals. BTW, that’s the actual policy that most Western governments have adopted anyway, LOL.
Some commenters perhaps an inflated view of what any of their barking on the Internet (mine included) can accomplish, and “care” far too much than is good for them.
I take no particular sides in this, but it is obvious the hardliners are much more rhetorical and ideological here.
.
Now apply that to life as a whole, and you will be a true philosopher 🙂
I don’t have a strong view one way or another on this topic & I try to avoid generational warfare but some of the comments here can shed light on why boomers are the only generation that is almost universally disliked by all the others.
/ doubt
For example, instituting Logan’s Run policies for over 75’s is on a power level I don’t recall seeing from any of the hardliners.
Regardless – the hardliners have won politically. “Floomerism” destroys approval ratings, “COVID hysteria” (even when it really is that) doesn’t.
PS. As for “IRL” world outside my comments section:
https://twitter.com/SamBraslow/status/1345921010139189248
Poor little snowflake. You go and have a good cry about it.
Suffice to say that Nazi pan-Europeanism was quite transparently fake (Nazis after all basically wanted to liquidate a major European nation like Poland), so most Europeans will never view it positively.
If the Nazis represented Europe then their nationalism wouldn’t have been so narrow as exclude most of the peoples who were conquered by them from attaining citizenship. Even when they were losing and could’ve reach out to somewhat sympathetic nations they remained ideologically inflexible. White Nationalists – most of whom are Americans – just ignore this and keep repeating “Europe died at Stalingrad”.
Yep.
That may have been true of neo-Marxists a long long time ago but it is definitely not true of Wokeism/SJWism. What Wokeism/SJWism aims for is a cultural revolution instead of a Marxist revolution.
LOL
I haven’t looked recently at IFR estimates but I suspect that the significant drop you observe by looking at daily infections and daily death data is partly due to the fact that they are not age adjusted. In other words as the epidemic progressed the most vulnerable managed to keep their infection rates below the average infection rates. But yes, there are also improvement in treatment and in respirator use protocols.
Europeans were very serious but inept and lacking the broad vision for virus eradication. The latter because they were subjected to the disinformation ‘warfare’ in which they were given only limited and false alternative early in spring. Their ‘unseriousness’ came later with the second wave when they mistook their ineptitude for futility because still nobody came to them to tell them we can do better. This was the point when they needed true leadership. Instead there were more voices advocating euthanasia and so on. I think only Israel showed political resolve to tackle the second wave while in other countries like Poland and Czechia the political deciders where quietly entertaining the Swedish solution. The same goes for all countries including Germany who knew that a second lockdown was needed but they were dragging their feet and saying not yet but later, next month or after Christmas which absolutely was not making any sense.
That’s because right wingers are mostly conservatives, dumb conformists in other words. In the early days before the pandemic was raging in the West, the media in the United States was downplaying any threat from the virus and claiming people should be more worried about flu. Conservatives, who are slower than liberals, have mostly stuck to this narrative. Liberals, who are less dumb than conservatives and who have very weak convictions, are quick to change their views to keep with the latest fashions. In case it needs to be said, rationality has little to do with either side’s behavior.
It can’t be emphasized enough how dumb conservatives are for taking the bait however. The mainstream liberal response to the pandemic, which in most countries is a combination of ineffective measures with moral panic, has done no one any good. But the right has to outdo the left, and come up with even dumber ideas.
If sufficiently harsh measures had been taken early on, the costs in dealing with the pandemic would have been lower. Travel bans, mandatory quarantines, shutting down very large scale activities(like sporting events) early on, and encourage of mask wearing, would have reduced the number of cases and made tracking and quarantining infections much easier. For example in the United States, just quarantining all returning travelers from Europe and doing literally nothing else would probably have made a significant difference. But the dumb leaders did nothing, and the sub-human health authorities gave people wrong advice.
What is so bad about quarantining boomer tourists from Italy, closing the borders, or shutting down globohomo sporting events?
Depends on who the enemy is.
“It can’t be emphasized enough how dumb conservatives are for taking the bait however. ” – True. The bait itself and who was doing the baiting deserve a closer look.
This is completely wrong. Modern medicine, to the extent that it increases life expectancy, is responsible for the reduction of infant mortality and fatal childhood diseases. While it is true that an inordinate amount of resources is spent on prolonging life for those close to death, not doing so would not have a significant effect on life expectancy stats. It amazes me how highly educated and otherwise intelligent people interpret “life expectancy of 35” to mean that nobody lives past that age.
Why? The ultra orthodox are despised by both the political establishment and large swaths of society at large. If they want to kill themselves, it’s unlikely anyone will make an effort to stop them, especially considering how virile they are.
Lol, it seems we have all learned today that there are trade offs in life, though some seem a bit grumpy about it. Let the healing begin.
Vaccines don’t work like that.
Don’t necessarily agree with this position. But I have to point out that all replies to this argument have been kneejerk and emotional. They follow the same pattern of moral outrage that anybody who proposes “hawkish” policies to a leftist is subjected to. In the same vein as various “how about we deport YOU instead”. My prediction is that the 3rd person to defend this view will be accused of having a small penis.
People in care homes are easier to isolate. There really isn’t much of a relation, much less trade-off, between large scale lockdowns and protecting people in care homes. In some places, governments have actually instituted lockdowns and increased risks for care home patients at the same time, which is (take your pick) stupid/crazy/evil.
Why are law enforcement so weak, they should have used batons and riots shield to evict or arrest them instead of allowing them to go all over the mall, assuming that some of them them may have it already.
You are the first who brought up the small penis here. Was it preemptive because of your insecurity? What about the handle size? Why is yours that long? Compensation? Some graphologists tell us that a lot can be said about a person from. his signature.
“They follow the same pattern of moral outrage.” – Guess what, moral outrage does work. Not always it is a trick or manipulation as the tone deaf rightoids may think. For majority of people it is an expression of genuine feeling in response to injustice like a response to inhuman callousness. To formulate what is just and what is justice our civilization has been working for thousands of years and got pretty good at it. Majority of children if properly acculturated get the handle of it pretty quickly.
The problem with the rightoids, which you exemplify here, is that they are unable to formulate and sustain moral arguments as if they thought that morality belonged to a fictitious realm that they as members of animal kingdom had nothing to do with. Animals do not need morality, right?
Basically rightoids dismiss all moral questions with the “might makes right” phrase. By doing so they deprive themselves of the most powerful weapon in fight against the injustice. If the rightoids were the top dogs the “might makes right” would be somewhat rational, but in the current day and age they are powerless defeated bottom dogs who otherwise would deserve pity which they won’t get as long as they will be spouting their “might makes right” rants.
Anatoly,
The genius behind MRNA vaccines is a Hungarian lady who did her breakthrough research in the US and is a senior executive with BionTech, she’s going to get the Nobel for medicine should these vaccines work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3
Talk Radio UK was taken off Youtube in an obvious act of censorship. It has had many items criticising lockdowns and no doubt somebody complained. Listening to them live elsewhere, they replayed a clip from a caller named Mick, a taxi driver whose work and family life have been ruined by tiers and lockdown.
https://talkradio.co.uk/radioplayer/live/talkradio.html?popup=1
It’s a 7 week harsh lockdown in UK, man that’s brutal. Also hard for our company we paid two critical suppliers for oilfield equipment from UK and we’re fucked these products were supposed to arrive by the 3rd week and that’s not going to happen now, we’ll end up with huge penalties.
OTOH, Bolsonaro used to be a paratrooper, like Bibi, so I do not think IQ is the problem alone.
Crops rotting in the fields without Mexican labour?
Most conspiracy theories about NWO depopulation and extermination programmes seem to originate in Anglo countries. I think because most Anglos can’t fathom that there are countries that exist with governments/elites who don’t hate the common people. Most Anglos assume that elites generally are like their own elites when in reality I think it’s Anglo countries that are the outliers.
All government intervention is violent, and during a pandemic, no government intervention is violence as well.
I too would like to pretend there’s a solution that causes nobody to get hurt, infringes on nobody’s freedoms, contributes economically and unites all social classes to sing kumbaya. When I get back to reality (not so sure about you), I have to face the fact that there’s no obviously correct solution. And in this case utilitarian thinking starts making sense.
I’ve seen the position promoted elsewhere, even on this site. The only reason you’re so morally outraged is that SOEP formulated it in a provocative manner. Had he been more tactful, most of those lambasting him would be considering his ideas rationally, if not agreeing.
This focus on rhetoric over substance makes midwits feel good, but doesn’t produce much results. The midwit-ruled western bureaucracy had such a lunatic response because it’s mired in ideology and moral feel-goodery.
It is more due to Hollywood rotting the minds of entire generations. They can only think in terms of evil plots by a small cabal, plots that set out to achieve some cartoonish goal.
This is chiefly American phenomenon which because of the common language got traction in other Anglo countries first before spearing around the world. The origin of anti-government conspiracy theories are libertarian in nature to sow the distrust in government to prevent people from seeking in government protection against the big business and oligarchy. It preys on the pathological individualism, false mirage of self-reliance and extreme anti-communitarian sentiments. This is America for you. But not exactly UK, Canada or Australia.
Other Anglo countries had completely different history from America. The most striking difference you find is New Zealand which probably is the most civil and rational society among the Anglo countries. New Zealand colonization was planned and coordinated by people who explicitly wanted to avoid America’s fate. The other day I read about Edward Gibbon Wakefield who was responsible for outlining and implementation of the plan for rational colonization of New Zealand in the beginning of 19th century.
Here he writes having America in mind that in such societies people “become rotten before they are ripe”. It is interesting that Henry James in 1878 wrote something very similar to what Wakefield wrote 30 something years earlier:
And here he outlines colonization of New Zealand:
While the paranoid anti-communitarian individualism existed in America from the day one it was moderated by traditionalism and Christianity. But then the final nail in the coffin of America’s human soul was driven by the Jewess Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum whose books irreversibly devastated souls of American youths. The most crude deplorable voices you may encounter here are the direct products of Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum demoralization project.
Australia, the Canadian Maritimes?
Much of Australia was a place to send convicts. Perhaps Victoria, which wasn’t, was comparable to New Zealand. Maritimes were largely settled by Loyalist refugees fleeing the American Revolution, it doesn’t seem to have been a planned model colony like New Zealand AFAIK.
What did Romania have? The National Legionary State was a blip in time, the royal uniparty dictatorship of Carol II was the same. They literally could not survive the various internal forces. The country had had constitutional monarchy since we brought in the Hohenzollerns in 1866 (promoted to King in 1881, with the full independence gained in 1878), and an elective monarchy in the brief period before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJNm9w3yP08
Andre Walker, one of the Talk Radio presenters, comments on the Youtube ban.
I smell the globalist marketing department all over this:
Marketing Guy – “Surveys show Israeli’s are perceived as ‘smart’ by our target demographic.”
Marketing Gal – “We’ll tell them Israeli’s are lining up to get the vaccine!”
Marketing Guy – “That may help with this ‘hesitancy’ challenge that came outta’ nowhere.”
Marketing Gal – “What if those angry nerds on the internet start digging into the numbers?”
Marketing Guy – “No worries! Our tech nerds will fake up the stats. We do it all the time on Youtube and reddit!”
Marketing Gal – “Google’s got our back!”
It looks like they are back on Youtube, according to another Andre Walker Youtube comment released about an hour ago. Talk Radio may have fallen victim to a Youtube algorithm, with no actual human brain involved.
Good thread on the EU commission and vaccine procurement (somewhat corrects my earlier comments regarding Sanofi):
https://twitter.com/bopanc/status/1346436856343367680
See what he says in his 6th Tweet:
Anyone who’s bothered to use Wikipedia, albeit on the Operation Warp Speed page, knows Sanofi/GSK abjectly failed in their initial clinical trial, their vaccine at the doses they tried produce insufficient responses from the elderly. Someone generally following this topic should know they’re going to try again starting with Phase I February or April, and won’t have finished Phase III trials prior to near the end of 2021.
But if you had as much investigative gumption as in my little finger, you’d check dates, here’s the Phase I/II trial registered on ClinicalTrials.gov. Both Estimated Primary Completion Date and Estimated Study Completion Date is October 2021, which is what you’d expect for this kind of trial that actually started September 3rd. You’re of course always checking safety, but Phase I is all about dosing, and you must use surrogate endpoints like “To describe the neutralizing antibody profile at Day 1, Day 22, and Day 36 of each study intervention group.”
And here’s a Sanofi press release saying they were indeed starting this trial on that above date, and why it’s in the US? They’re multinationals, do a lot of business in the US, and Operation Warp Speed just happened to allocate up to $2.1 billion dollars towards their vaccine effort. Really, seriously, prior to that pesky human testing everyone believed they could pull it off, this is freaking Sanofi Pasteur after all. But by November 17th the EU could have known it wasn’t looking good, although the official release of the bad results was December 11th.
And what do you know, going back to ClinicalTrials.gov, CureVac the company plus Covid search, you see they’ve stopped recruiting their Phase I trial, which is excellent when they are in the recruiting stage of their Phase II trial which actually started September 28th, as well as their 2b/3 trial of 36,500 people which actually started December 14th. And it should be FDA strength, although there’s an indication they’re not at this time looking at the US market.
That Phase II start date, and what went into their Phase 2b/3 start decision to spend a billion dollars or more, suggests the EU would have known they think they have a good chance of getting a working vaccine. A mRNA vaccine, which we knew could work in the first week of November, and the really hard thing, protecting the mRNA which BioNTech isn’t as good at as Moderna, would have been known to have worked very early in the Phase I trial, as well as in any preceding animal studies.
So I would guess the EU made the best very late in the game purchase decision, assuming they believe in CureVac’s manufacturing plan, and that it wasn’t already booked up like Pfizer and Moderna. (There are virus vector options, but are probably not as certain to work as CureVac’s except for Sputnik V, plus one protein plus adjuvant option like Sanofi/GSK being Phase III tested in the U.K. and now the US, also OWS subsidized so the US has first call on their output if needed.)
One other thing? Probably as part of a fundraising scheme, it was claimed that Trump was offering to buy CureVac, move it to the US, and have it exclusively make vaccines for the US. Totally insane, especially with, you know, look at the above Pfizer/BioNTech timeline, Moderna had their candidate January 13th, and until the FDA demanded they enroll more diversity, was ahead of them. And even then finished to the FDA Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) level only 10 days later, for vaccine development and testing that’s pretty much a tie.
I still find it baffling why they rejected the offer of 500 million doses from Biontech-Pfizer. imo in such a situation they should have ordered as much as possible from all available offers, to increase the chances of having enough vaccine for a rapid vaccination campaign. Sure, there would be a risk that you ordered more than eventually turns out to be necessary, but the “wasted” money would have been much less than the economic damage from those endless lockdowns.
Well, maybe they had inside information that Pfizer was going to miss their early production promises by one half, and took that as a generally bad sign for the company’s future production. But:
That’s the really big question. I hope they don’t hate Trump enough to decide that his Operation Warp Speed (OWS) was axiomatically the wrong thing to do, Manhattan Project style do a lot of up front offering and spending on multiple options so you’re not screwed if one of them fails like Sanofi/GSK.
OWS made huge, up to above $1 billion bets on 5 vaccine candidates including Sanofi/GSK, plus the above mentioned purchase from Pfizer, $2 billion per Wikipedia for 100 million doses contingent on their getting FDA EUA approval by the end of the year. Which was cut a bit fine, December 11th as I recall. And in the last week or so $1.8 per my memory for a second tranche of 100 million doses by the end of the second quarter with supply chain help from OWS which Pfizer had refused and boasted about refusing prior to a few weeks ago. (The AZ/Oxford big bet also isn’t looking good, of course, but might pay off well for other countries someday.)
With this tale of woe, I can’t imagine the EU being farsighted enough to make huge supply chain investments independent of any company. OWS made a number, including some obvious like a bit over $200 million to Corning for special glass for vials. So that sped up by one quarter extra Prizer production will presumably happen in the US (they also make it in Europe), and depending on exactly what that help is, the EU could only benefit from it starting in the third quarter.
Hence their making a big bet on CureVac’s vaccine working; they knew Pfizer/BioNTech’s worked when they placed their 200 million dose offer November 11th, although not enough safety data for the FDA was ready until another nine days.
No reason for it to be wasted, or entirely so, lots of other counties need doses. Although perhaps here BioNTech’s less effective protective technology discouraged cheapskate EU bureaucrats, it’s extreme albeit only dry ice freezing requirement probably makes it one of the hardest vaccines to resell.
Yeah, just looked CureVac up on Wikipedia, it only requires 5 C (41 F) for which it’s good for three months. That’s actually amazing if Wikipedia got it right, BioNTech and Moderna’s vaccines are physically fragile once defrosted, you can’t for example shake them. There’s also this line: “In November 2020, CureVac reported results of a Phase I-II clinical trial that zorecimeran (CVnCoV) was well-tolerated, safe, and produced a robust immune response.”
But my bottom line is what’s wrong with the EU? Anyone up to conspiracy theories about it, like all the talk in Europe about Corona-chan enabling a “Great Reset?”
They’re used to paying peanuts for drugs, benefiting from Uncle Sam paying top dollar for R&D and testing via high drug prices. They recoiled from the numbers the drug companies were quoting them, figuring that they’d renegotiate as prices came down. This virus waits for no bureaucrat or politician. So the consequences were as predictable as they were inevitable, given the business as usual attitude adopted by the people in EU governments. They were willing to spend trillions on shutdown aid, but not billions on vaccines.
The last thing I’ve read why they didn’t order the 500 million doses from Pfizer is that unnamed countries from “East central Europe” thought it was too expensive.
Germany should just have offered to take over much of the costs, would have been better and less expensive for everyone than this farce.
I was being facetious aboutmaybe right wing Israel using the deadly vaccine to kill the leftist Jews in the USA. The one Jewish physician I know who isn’t taking the vaccine is a right-wing immigrant from Russia. The American Democratic ones have taken it.
Proper instinct, wrongly applied. However Ukraine is getting vaccines in February:
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-ukraine-vaccine-idUSKBN28S12C
So far Ukraine has about 10 million doses lined up:
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/ukraine-to-buy-19m-doses-of-china-s-sinovac-vaccine/2094864
Anyways you seem to be gloating, as usual, at the misery of the more people-Russian electorate in Ukraine who are older and more likely to suffer
No vaccine is coming to the Ukraine. President Ze lied to you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBLe2RzZYek
It’s not even the proper instinct from the point of view of domestic politics as it will only increase divisiveness. Ukrainian politics is so dysfunctional that the country’s leadership does Russia’s dirty work for it. And it’s the populace that pays the price.
No, the vaccine is coming to the Ukraine, but only for a select few and at EUR 2500 a pop.
https://www.gazeta.ru/politics/2021/01/06_a_13427594.shtml
The Swiss are usually very competent, but with COVID-19 they apparently lost some 20 IQ points. I could foresee in July that the numbers were about to explode, yet they did nothing. Then when their hospitals became overloaded with COVID-19 patients in October and November, they started an increasingly stringent partial lockdown, until they almost fully locked down on December 22. Somehow they managed to behave as if they were floomers, only to lock down eventually, so that they got the worst of both worlds.
Let me add, they didn’t order enough vaccines, because they thought it’d be expensive. (Not as expensive as two more months of lockdown, morons.)
How cute, someone believes Sharij.
China lying and/or fooled by Zelensky too?
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202012/31/WS5fed8fd9a31024ad0ba9fe17.html
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-12/31/c_139630909.htm
KIEV, Dec. 30 (Xinhua) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky informed about signing the contract of over 1.9 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine manufactured by China’s SinoVac Biotech, while the state is working on obtaining more vaccines, reported the president’s press service on Wednesday.
“We signed the first contract for the supply of the vaccine – no longer a memorandum, but a contract for more than 1.9 million doses,” said Zelensky.
The head of the state said that Ukraine already has an agreement on 8 million doses of the vaccine under the COVAX program, which the state will receive for free, but the authorities are trying to increase this number.
The president noted that the Ukrainian government is purchasing only high-quality vaccine that has proven its effectiveness.
Signing the contract opens the way for the supply and use of the Sinovac Biotech vaccine after official registration
I’d say far too much can be made of these formal 19th century immigration schemes to the Antipodes . Sure they were made and some early settlers immigrated as a result. But people basically went where they had contacts , where there were job opportunities and , especially , where good ( priced) land was available .
Incidentally, of the 7 Australasian colonies South Australia was the most planned and the only convict free one . It also had the only significant non Anglo-Celt population – German Lutherans -and was very progressive -it made no legal distinction between Settlers and Aborigines for instance .
But none of this mattered much in even the medium term ( I’m from Victoria by the way )
Can’t help but think that a lot of these references to Australia &/ New Zealand in these pages are the result of an article- or maybe even two – read by some outsider determined to make a point by stating that the evidence backs his thesis . There was just too much mobility right from the beginning of settler history ( maybe that’s different to North America -not my subject )
Sharij has more credibility, than some Jewish comedian, wouldn’t you agree?
It’s not uncommon for China state media to copy and republish Western news articles, without fact-checking. Note, how this article simply quotes Zelensky’s press service. Nobody in China confirmed that this deal exists.
I wonder why Russia’s coronavirus stats are much worse than East Asian countries, considering I would have thought Russia would be closer to East Asia politically and in terms of state authoritarianism than to Western Europe.
I guess it’s because Russian “machismo” is not very conducive to mask wearing and observing social distancing? I assume that a lot of Russian men in particular would see such behaviours as “weak” and make a point of not observing them?
“Somehow they managed to behave as if they were floomers…” – I somewhat understand when countries like Poland or Czechia do it who probably were waiting for what Germany would do but I am disappointed by Switzerland. There is no valid argument for delaying a lockdown. Sooner you do it better off you are. Basically the moment your contact tracing can’t keep up with new cases you must go to some sort of lockdown to bring the infection rate down to within the manageable range.
I think only Israel responded with a timely lockdown in the second wave however they lost control again in the end of November.
It seems that Norway and Finland do know how to do the contact tracing while most counties are lousy at it. Having low population density helps.
Read Edward Gibbon Wakefield. See comment #186. Try to find information how colonists to NZ were screened.
To your comment on the other thread I gave you links to Wakefield with excerpts.
With enough dosages for ~12% of the population the rich (who will be first to get it) and most vulnerable will be covered in a few months.
It’s proper instinct by Ukrainian authorities to mistrust the Russian state’s good intentions towards Ukraine. On the Russia issue, Ukraine’s electorate is divided 70/30 not 50/50 so rather than divisiveness such a move involves shoring up support at the expense of a scapegoat. It is wrong because it is wrong to promote policies that will lead to deaths of people, including those who are more likely to vote for the pro-Russian party. But some of the gerontocides on this forum might appreciate such a move.
It’s cute that you believe so.
About China?
Articles didn’t hedge in their descriptions.
So Chinese press vs. Shariy lol.
Well all I can say is that I consider myself reasonably well read in Australian history . But, as we all know, historians can and will disagree about almost everything .
What is that supposed to mean? You’re latching at straws to convince yourself that the Ukraine isn’t as sucky as it really is.
It means that the headlines from the Chinese news outlets were “Ukraine to buy 1.9 mln doses of SinoVac COVID-19 vaccine” and not “Zelensky claimed a contract was signed.”
Russian media accounts of Ukraine are analogous to American ones about Russia. Exiled “dissidents” such as Shariy are like Masha Gessen. Occasionally they point out actual problems but for the most part they offer exaggerations, selective cherry-picking, or falsifications. People gullible or desperate enough to believe them wholesale, as you are, end up having a bizarre image of Ukraine as a sort of Somalia or Afghanistan, as you do.
“Well all I can say is that I consider myself reasonably well read in Australian history.” – Too bad that your expertise does not include immigration history of New Zealand.
What’s the big deal about China selling vaccines to Ukraine? It’s had important and separate dealings with Ukraine, ever since Putler decided his ripoff and kill campaign there since 2014. It’s in their best interests to have an independent Ukraine, and not some sort of Little Russia to deal with.
Based on this map the Ukraine is helluva closer to Somalia, than to Russia, or any European country. And dismissing opposition voices is, frankly, a stupid stance to take. It’s part of the reason why the Ukraine finds itself in such a hole.
https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/map-vaccines-corona-timeline.jpg
Based on that map so are Vietnam and Mongolia closer to Somalia. The map is btw rather obsolete.
So in you opinion is dismissing Masha Gessen or Julia Ioffe a stupid stance to take, regarding Russia?
Occasionally those two, or their counterpart Shariy, might have something correct to say but believing rather than dismissing such creatures as a whole is a sign of desperation.
The unneeded quantities could have been sent to the third world later on. Unlike most dogoodism, this would actually have helped to prevent pockets of endemic COVID-19 from persisting in large parts of the third world, so would’ve been beneficial to the rich countries. I’m baffled by the idea that any of this would have been “wasted,” it’s just idiotic.
The Swiss case was even worse in that afaik they never even seriously tried contact tracing and contact testing, where finding the contacts was easy. Even while the number of cases was so low that it would’ve been easy to do.
So apparently the Swiss chose the “strategy” of intensely wishing that somehow it will all be alright.
Coronavirus: SwissCovid app and contact tracing
https://www.bag.admin.ch/bag/en/home/krankheiten/ausbrueche-epidemien-pandemien/aktuelle-ausbrueche-epidemien/novel-cov/swisscovid-app-und-contact-tracing.html
Go.Data supports COVID 19 case and contact tracing in Canton Vaud, Switzerland
https://extranet.who.int/goarn/content/godata-supports-covid-19-case-and-contact-tracing-canton-vaud-switzerland
Swiss ramp up contact-tracing in face of COVID surge
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-swiss-tracers/swiss-ramp-up-contact-tracing-in-face-of-covid-surge-idUSKBN27F1N4
The most import part of the contact tracing is to effectively isolate potential carriers. No fancy app will do it for you.
You do testing and contact tracing in order to quarantine potential virus carriers. If you do not quarantine them there is no point of testing and contact tracing. I am afraid that in many places they did not get it and were just going through the motions of contact tracing without effective quarantining. This is like the difference between taking a reservation and holding it as Seinfeld explains it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-brgkkjnHc&feature=emb_title
I agree, it’s in our own interest to bring it as quickly under control in the “third world” too, because of the risk of mutations. The news about that variant found in South Africa (potentially resistant to vaccines) is very concerning after all.
Anyway, since this thread is about Western incompetence, a fitting story from “competent” Bavaria:
https://www.merkur.de/bayern/corona-bayern-soeder-impfstoff-biontech-huml-campingboxen-panne-news-aktuell-zahlen-zr-90160295.html
Several hundred doses of Biontech-Pfizer vaccine had to be discarded…because the Bavarian ministry of health apparently acquired cooling boxes meant for preserving food on camping trips for their transport, which aren’t suited at all for medical purposes.
The SwissCovid app is not used by the vast majority of the population. It’s not mandatory and the majority of smartphone users fear for their “privacy.” (Yes, the covid app is going to destroy their privacy, which is apparently left intact by Facebook, Google, Apple, and all the others.)
The Swiss didn’t have mandatory testing of all people in contact with someone who tested positive. They let people out of the quarantine without testing them, they didn’t even check if or when their symptoms disappeared. Etc. etc.
I know Switzerland to some extent as I lived and worked there and this what you are telling us is not congruent with my impressions of Switzerland. They can get thing done. They have a lot of smart people there who are not that easily succumbing to conspiratorial thinking and denialism as American libertarians. So they did not do the libertarian self-sabotage as America did. So what is left?
I must be wrong about the Swiss.
Weird. In the US, they’re shipping in special boxes designed by Pfizer, at rest in room temperature, good for a week when filled with dry ice. The boxes also come with a device than can email and text out to four people in case it senses it’s going to get too warm.
Mainly because the government has decided to prioritize the economy, and trying to “keep the economy from falling too much”. Moreover, the public wasn’t happy with the non-working holiday earlier in the year, and the lack of government support for peoples’ income loss.
This is one of reasons it is in the interests of the authorities to allow a lack of reporting of deaths. I would disagree with the claim that it is “machismo”. Rather it is an uninteresting combination of the government’s economic prioritization, and also various local authorities try to cover their ass.
For example, in Novosibirsk there is 90,5% increase in excess mortality in the month of November, but officially there was reported only 160 deaths from coronavirus in the month.
Apparently 93,5% of the 90,5% increase in excess mortality is not reported as coronavirus deaths in the daily stats. However, Golikova said last week that she thinks that 81% of excess mortality in generaly in the country, is from coronavirus. So if Golikova cooments applies to Novosibirsk in November – proportion of deaths from coronavirus there, relative to population, was something a bit like New York in April. (When in New York State they ordered quarantine).
China didn’t provide accurate statistics.
I assume because Israel’s economy is collapsing from the lockdowns – they re-opened from the last lockdown too early from the anti-epidemic point of view, while the positive test rate was still around 2%. Israel has now lost control of a third wave of the pandemic, and will begin from tomorrow, a 2 week lockdown.
And now Poland is currently inside 3 week lockdown. Czech Republic is in full lockdown for 4 weeks. Hungary has been on lockdown since November.
It’s possible that Israel will be able to order a stronger short lockdown than in those other countries, because the authorities seem to have legal ability to add police and soldiers to stop people moving more than 500 metres from their apartment.
The second lockdown (23 September-18 October) seemed superficially to have worked to moderate the rise in excess mortality caused by the second wave in Israel, at the same time it was starting to climb in Czech Republic, Poland, et al.
https://i.imgur.com/6rsBEwF.jpg
This thread, German_reader’s link, and That Would Be Telling’s comments have indeed been… very telling.
EU as a whole to do no better than Ukraine in timeliness of vaccines provisions, despite being 10x richer?
I suppose that’s result of rule by committee: Many people, many vetoes, no individual responsibility. Also, no appreciation of costs/benefits in novel situations – clearly spending even tens of billions on vaccines is superior to trillions on lockdowns.
General point: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/abs/myopic-voters-and-natural-disaster-policy/039708A3223EC114365ADF56F1D26423
Whether Chinese deaths are the official 5k, the 20-25k pushed by some skeptics on crematoria observations, or even 50k, its clearly that it has been consistently contained there with likely no excess mortality outside Wuhan.
China really showed a success of interregional quarantine, which was one of the main policies (supposedly) in the Soviet Union prepared for epidemic control.
You can lockdown for longer and more strictly in Wuhan, precisely because interregional quarantine means the rest of the country’s economy can continue as normal. This was a method that could have been used in the Russian Federation, Brazil and the USA. The city in which there is an epidemic, can be quarantined by surrounding it by the army, and then lockdown far more strictly imposed inside the city, as the economy in the rest of the country could continue to support that city.
On the other hand, for smaller countries, like Hungary or Czech Republic, this was never something available for them, as the economy of the small country does not allow for this. You cannot strictly lockdown (in Wuhan degree of stopping everything) Budapest or Prague, for 2 months, as the economy of Hungary or Czech Republic would collapse from it.
In case you had any doubt of Obama’s “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up,” or that the US was becoming a Third World country—a diplomat’s kid told me long ago they were infamous for botching vaccination campaigns through failing to administer required second doses—”Joe Biden to speed release of coronavirus vaccines, ending Trump practice of holding back shots for second dose.”
This is in the context of Pfizer suddenly announcing they were going to miss half their early production promises, and if you have any experience with manufactures who pull that stunt, you know often that’s just the first dose of bad news. Only good thing about this is that there aren’t that many doses available right now to waste on the scale of the US.
And probably a good thing our existing Pfizer and Moderna orders will put us substantially over the total US population, and that’s before any in progress Operation Warp Speed (OWS) subsidized development vaccines become available from Janssen perhaps fairly soon, Novavax sometime later (just started US Phase III trial after what should be a successful so far 1/2 size one in the U.K.), and even the AZ/Oxford clown show if it ever gets straightened out (for example, the Janssen backup schedule of 57 days between two doses, vs. their ambition that one dose will work).
Combine all this with lots of reluctance to get vaccinated—wonder how long Biden/Harris will retain that policy—we’ll do OK, but perhaps with more deaths. We know first doses have some quick utility, so there’s no way to model this out, see the U.K. for doing it deliberately.
I agree that this is not typical of them. Somehow they couldn’t handle COVID-19 while they could handle lots of things. Switzerland is very well organized, but their response to this pandemic was anything but.
Our media, as usual, has not told us how and why China succeeded.
Two Harvard Med School professors explain:
https://youtu.be/IagPfWMyig4