Maggie's Farm

Sweden and Covid:Sweden accomplished almost the same amount of shutdown voluntarily, which is interesting, but has nothing to do with most other countries. A friend studying in Sweden relates how he loved the friendliness of the place, reserved by genuine. He considered moving there after graduation until Christmas came. Every house in his small town was decorated exactly the same. He couldn't wait to come back to America where you could be garish or do nothing, as you chose.

Denisovan ancestry (see East Asia) depressed Covid, apparently on the contagion end rather than on the seriousness side. Governments can't fix that. Large gatherings indoors turned out to be the main problem elsewhere, but three foot distance seemed to work as well as six, so long as people weren't singing, cheering, shouting over the music, etc.

Mutations were the second problem, which a few people had foreseen and warned about. The vaccine clobbered the original disease, but has less effect on subsequent mutations that were either more contagious or more deadly.(None were both.) The researchers who held back because they didn't want Trump to get credit, and Kamala f-in' Harris saying she wouldn't trust any vaccine that came out under Trump occurred at one of the worst times in terms of spread. Additionally, the Democrats had to pivot and say the opposite of what they'd said only two months before, with predictable results.

No one wanted to say that masks only helped a little so they became performative which side you were on, ostentatiously wearing or not wearing them. No one cared what the numbers were anymore, because no one trusted anyone else's numbers. The same happened with the vaccines, where we made health decisions on the basis of what our politics were.

By that point it was all performative, and largely still is.

As I said, the vaccines worked well on the original; less well - though still on the order of 70% - on the mutations.

Your claim that most of the people who died had been vaccinated shows that you do not understand statistics. Sorry, but it's not my fault. To use simplified numbers for clarity: if 90% of a population has been vaccinated and 10% not, but half the deaths come out of each group, that is abundant evidence that the vaccines did work, just not completely.

Because polio and MMR vaccines are 99% effective, people got the false idea that if a vaccine doesn't do that it's not very good. Yet we all know that the flu vaccine every year is only partly effective 30-80%.

The vaccine was no more deadly than any other, which means a vanishingly small number of deaths. One of the favorite rumors was that it created cardiac problems in young men. But those were equally rare with and without vaccination, about 1 in 5,000. The difference was that beforehand we only thought "How sad, those pooir parents" and didn't attribute the deaths to anything in particular. But our attention once the rumors started went immediately to "Aha! Had the boy been vaccinated? See, I told you so!" Selection bias, confirmation bias.

I don't say this for your benefit, because you have already betrayed that you cannot reconsider your opinion, but for others who read here.