Yesterday, Lili Loofbourow wrote a piece at Slate where she churned out a bunch of words about the Herman Cain Awards subreddit. Some if it is well observed, some of it is Slateish. I know some of you read the Herman Cain Awards subreddit because I saw a comment there referencing Balloon Juice. For those who aren’t familiar, it’s a place where Facebook posts of anti-vax morons are re-posted after that person gets sick (“Nominated”) or dies (“Awarded”). This got long and a little ugly, so read on if you have the stomach for it.
There’s a lot of talk, including in the Slate piece, about how the Hermies are “dark” and the goal of the HCAs is not to change minds so they’re somehow bad. Yes, it is dark to see a bunch of idiots sharing and re-sharing the same cookie-cutter memes that compare Fauci to Hitler, Fauci’s penis size to the size of Hillary Clinton’s penis, etc. Seeing those lies followed by tales of suffering and death is even darker. Still, if anything is clear from weeks of looking at Awardees, it is that these minds are not easily changed. Gentle persuasion is not going to do a fucking thing for a bunch of idiots stubbornly ensconced in a Facebook bubble.
I realize that the HCAs aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. But I refuse to be bullied into being the “responsible liberal” who has to work harder than Dr. Doolittle to talk kanga to these kangaroos, simply because their precious fee fees might be hurt when they learn that people are documenting their needless, stupid deaths (after personally identifiable details are blacked out). This god damned country has been catering to the hurt feelings of a bunch of undereducated, overprivileged white folks for 20 years — all we’ve gained is a clown President and wannabes like DeathSantis who wanted to kill liberals, but now are killing their own.
And, yes, some of the commenters on the HCAs do make fun of these fools. The reason is because there’s nothing left to do. I realize that some vaccine hesitancy and access can be addressed by persuasion and mobile clinics, but Awardees are neither hesitant nor do they lack access.
One of the insights of the Slate piece, though cast in a bothsiderism, was this:
Chilled though I’ve been by how this subreddit can rejoice at a death, I’m somehow no less chilled by how easily the bereaved normalize their losses. A 35-year-old man with three young children and a free vaccine available should not be dead! There is astonishingly little recognition of this.
It really is remarkable how many euphemisms these people have for death. People don’t die, they’ve moved on to a forever home. Once in a while an angry relative will lash out at the Facebook friends of an Awardee, but generally it’s tots and pears and here’s a GoFundMe. None of these idiots have life insurance to help pay for the needs of their quiverfull. And lots of their relatives don’t even specify how they died, because they are ashamed or don’t want to be cast out of the cult.
I don’t comment on the HCAs, and I really don’t get any joy out of them. The reason I read the HCAs is to see what isn’t being reported about these fools, and it’s a lot. They delay hospitalization out of a combination of shame and denial, so they arrive in the ED very sick. Sometimes that means that otherwise healthy young people die in a couple of days. If they make it past the ED to admission, they’re often intubated and put into what one nurse called the “vegetable farm” — the ICU. Once they arrive there, their relatives throw away their anti-science views and document the progress (or lack thereof) of their loved one in the ICU with detail that would make a nurse supervisor proud. Almost all of them are FULL CODE and code multiple times while relatives pray for an ECMO (basically a heart-lung machine). Once they finally die, the relatives often blame the medical staff for not providing Ivermectin or HCQ or genital bleach washing or whatever other stupid “cure” their Facebook fellow anti-vax travelers recommend.
In shot, they are the worst of us, and they are hogging resources and causing others to die. Still, local media (and national media) are self-constrained from reporting on them fully. The (good) media I’ve seen is more res ipsa loquitur, showing people gasping to death in the ICU and mentioning their vaccine status. I would love to see some local TV station in a hard-hit area just spend 5-10 minutes every so often showing memes juxtaposed with the bloated face of an almost-dead Herman Cain nominee being proned in the ICU. I’ll bet a few families would authorize that because the one legitimate emotion that these people sometimes have is crushing regret that they weren’t vaccinated. That regret is short-lived, because they’re sedated prior to intubation, so they can’t feel their beloved Jesus crush their lungs under his sandals. That, at least, is a small mercy.
Also, if you got this far and think I’m being too dark, check out this letter from a nurse to her patient, or this account by a 4th year med student who tried to save an immunocompromised, vaccinated organ transplant recipient.
rikyrah
The 35 year old didn’t care enough about his three young children to get his azz vaccinated.
Why should I care about the children more than him?
stop. just stop trying to make us feel bad for people who don’t give two shyts about the rest of us. they don’t even give two shyts about their family.
Why don’t you feel for the 6-8 people he probably infected before he went to the hospital.
Feel bad for them, cause he surely didn’t give two shyts about them.
West of the Rockies
Has Laura Loomer shed her mortal coil yet?
BGinCHI
You and Betty are serving aces the last couple of days.
I hope this shit plus the debt ceiling default plus the Manchin/Sinema black hole of sociopathy gets the left/center enraged enough to actually fucking vote in the midterms.
Chetan Murthy
Mistermix, you’re not being dark at all. You’re just shining a light to where we all live now.
dmsilev
“Daddy has moved to a farm upstate where he can run and chase squirrels all day long”
Anyway, yes you’re right. The people being “featured” on the HCA subreddit and other similar forums aren’t people for whom access to a pharmacy and the worry of missing a day of work from side effects are far more pressing concerns than the chance of catching the disease and missing far more than one day. Nor are they people with bad memories of the Tuskegee Experiment or similar. They are, by and large, Tucker Carlson viewers. They chose this.
dmsilev
@West of the Rockies: No, but if she’s on Ivermectin she’s probably shed the lining of her intestines.
trollhattan
This one’s simple: if you advocate dangerous practices that put not only yourself in danger but every other person you come in contact with, your sociopathy will be publicized for what it is. You will be made an example of, like the guy who smokes in the minivan filled with toddlers, the drunk driver, the Patriot(tm) who leaves loaded guns lying around the house. If you have a prominent platform, your crime is an order of magnitude worse, and it is criminal even if you believe the First Amendment says otherwise.
Nicole
I didn’t hate the Slate article as much as some; I think the writer was using the first half of the piece to set up the point of the second half, which was that there are few places that are paying attention to the full horror of what it is to die from Covid and the HCA is one of them, and possibly, it’s frightening people into getting vaccinated. I read the HCA daily, and there was a nice IPA post from someone who admitted they were anxious about being ridiculed or criticized by health care workers for waiting so long to get the shot, but the site scared them (obviously, they were not ridiculed by the health care workers and were celebrated by the commenters on HCA). I think the site may be, dare I say, making a bit of a difference- when you see what dying from Covid looks like, suddenly the fear of the shot is outweighed by fear of something else.
The comments section of Slate was overwhelmingly in favor of the site when I checked. As you said here also, someone there pointed out that the people on the HCA are not the quiet refusers; they are the ones who spend their time posting racist, sexist, homophobic crap in addition to their anti-vaccine nonsense. You have to be a public asshole to get on the HCA. These are not nice people, no matter how much their families grieve them.
Parfigliano
They deserve to be mocked laughed at and ridiculed. Fuck em. The world is a far better place without them spewing their antivaxx bullshit while literally infecting other people.
lee
As someone commented in a HCA thread in response to the Slate article:
We wouldn’t need the HCA if journalists would do their job and report on how these idiots are killing themselves and abandoning their kids.
As much as journalists used to love going on a ‘red state safari’ during the previous administration, they can’t be bothered to actually hold those same idiots accountable for their stupidity.
Anoniminous
The Herman Cain Awards are merely acknowledgment reality gives not two damns what people think — using the term loosely.
Mart
“undereducated, overprivileged white folks”. Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s new Surgeon General, is here to remind you a big segment of this problem is very educated.
Baud
https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/comments/psyp4w/for_those_who_say_the_hca_are_immoral_lets_see
mrmoshpotato
ED? Is that supposed to be ER?
Baud
bnateAZ
Love the HCA’s. Fuck the unvaxxed. I am done having mercy or sympathy.
CNN aired a piece interviewing unvaxxed nurses who would rather quit (and do what, CNN never asks of course), then get vaxxed. Then the hospitals they work at are fucked. Fuck them the most. They are all cowards and fools. Sorry for the f bombs but every day I grow more and more angry with people and I hate it.
Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix
@lee:
In this Billings ICU, it may seem that the liberty of the intubated goatee-wearing white guys is limited. But, even though they’re sedated, they know that freedom is more than merely breathing.
Josie
@BGinCHI:
Amen!
RSA
I used to read HCA but now visit only occasionally. Sometimes the entries include family members’ reflections on a person’s death, and those can be devastatingly sad.
An interesting alternative is the nursing subreddit, which has a lot of talk about COVID and of course is much less superficial—it’s from people who are in the trenches doing something, trying to help. Many nurses are about to give up, unfortunately. And some have the same questions that have been raised here, e.g., about medical ethics. Worth a read.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nursing/comments/pslnmi/when_do_we_stop/
dmsilev
@Baud:
Amen.
Roger Moore
@mrmoshpotato:
Many hospitals call it the emergency department, not the emergency room.
mrmoshpotato
@dmsilev: Amen indeed.
mrmoshpotato
@Roger Moore: Ah. Thanks.
AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue team
@Chetan Murthy: Well said.
Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix
@Mart:
Also very vaccinated. Like Fucker Carlson, he makes the Kool-Aid, he doesn’t drink it. That’s for suckers.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Thank you for posting that.
WaterGirl
@mrmoshpotato: In some parts of the country, it’s the ER, for Emergency Room.
In other parts of the country, it’s the ED, for Emergency Department.
Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix
@Nicole:
I find it fascinating that some of the statements of grief are perfunctory at best, and few or no family chime in. Usually that’s how you know that the Awardee was a real asshole.
AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue team
@lee: great point. I wish this were shouted from the mountain tops.
Somewhere recently, maybe on Digbys blog, I saw an old news video from the days of anti seat belt resistance, and I swear to God it was identical to modern day diner safaris, down to every last detail.
matt
It seems like everything we read in our media these days is about how we need to hug coup attempting fascists and terrorists.
Fair Economist
If every evening new segment ended with a Herman Cain award we’d probably have something like half the death rate we currently do.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mart: Educated? I am not so sure. It is quite possible to go to very good schools and not get educated. One can get trained to do certain tasks well, and that allows people to appear educated. It starts to fall apart when actual thinking is required. This is why people like Pompeii can be first in their class at a prestigious institution and still be functional idiots.
matt
@rikyrah: Right, they deliberately exposed many, many other people to the tragic and fatal circumstances that killed them. Directly with their actions. Why are these fucking reporters too emotional in their feelings for the dead fascists to think about those others?
AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue team
@Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix: perfect for
https://twitter.com/DougJBalloon
brendancalling
I use my real name on Reddit (I think it defaults to that) so I tend to keep it less harsh than my usual on HCA.
I have no sympathy at all for those stupidheads. They’re dead by their own hand. I DO however feel bad for their survivors, especially the children, and i say so often.
lee
@Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix: There was one a couple of days ago whose FB was filled with the traitor’s flag and other racist crap.
Getting an HCA is almost always well deserved.
West of the Rockies
@bnateAZ:
I hear what you’re saying and feel similarly, but for your own well-being, find the time and space to smile and laugh and feel good.
Betty Cracker
I keep testing negative…for sympathy. I don’t like feeling this way, and if these belligerent morons were only killing themselves, I’d pity them like I pitied the Heaven’s Gate cultists.
But the COVID-denier cult’s stupidity affects all of us. The cultists are prolonging the pandemic and causing untold needless death and suffering. They’re tanking the economy. They’re making it impossible for children to get a decent public school education. They’re blighting the future of countless people. They’re forcing me to continue to wear a fucking mask, which I hate. So fuck them.
Old School
@AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue team:
It could have been The Daily Show.
WereBear
I think a lot of the Covidiots have cut themselves off from national news and don’t see the stories. Even if they did, they use thought-stopping phrases like “crisis actors” and “1% death rate!” to keep from thinking about what it means.
Aardvark Cheeselog
I didn’t look at the Slate article. I previously knew about the existence of r/HermanCainAward, but had never looked at it. I followed the two links (both superb posts, thanks OP) and looked at the comments on a few of the top posts right now.
It being reddit, I am not surprised by the tone of some of the comments. I can’t hate the delusional fuckheads like that, though I struggle a bit with finding compassion for them.
West of the Rockies
@WaterGirl:
Although the TV show was ER, not ED. Hmmm… would ED have worked? Might have been difficult to, uh, keep it up for 11 seasons.
Mike in NC
This pandemic will never end because roughly 1/3 of the people in this country swim in the sewers of social media where dumb racist uncles in their 70s reign supreme.
Roger Moore
@Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix:
If you notice, the educated liars are careful never to directly bash the vaccine. It’s never that the vaccine is no good or you shouldn’t take it, it’s that the vaccine isn’t the total solution. They’ll give perfunctory praise to the vaccine as safe and effective but go on and talk about all the other important ways of keeping yourself safe. The “other ways of protecting yourself” is straight out of the anti-vax playbook. Many of them dismiss the need for vaccines because they claim it’s more important to have a healthy lifestyle that boosts your immune system. This lets the educated anti-liar claim to people who believe in vaccines that they do too while still encouraging the anti-vaxxers. It’s classic dog whistling.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Betty Cracker: They’ve harmed us and don’t care enough to stop harming us. Why should I care about them?
zhena gogolia
@Baud: That’s very good.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Nicole:
Exactly right. And honestly? People can be “nice” selectively. Often so-called pillars of the community were/are KKK members who had families. People in general aren’t mustache-twerling villains 24/7.
What makes them bad people, despite being “nice”, is that they bad things they say and do are far worse in magnitude than any “good” they may do
lowtechcyclist
That’s one of the things that really drives me batty – the sheer irresponsibility of these parents who won’t get vaccinated, while their kids are still minors, at home, and depending on them. I swear, I want to drag them back from the afterlife just long enough to grab their shoulders and yell at them for not caring about their kids enough to take fifteen minutes to get a fucking shot.
This was their parental responsibility, and they swallowed a bunch of bullshit instead.
Ksmiami
@Anoniminous: id say; as I told my vaccine skeptical, anti-masking neighbors whose near and extended family has caught Covid and either died or been severely laid up, the virus really doesn’t care about your religious beliefs or your politics- it just sees you as a hearty meat sack for replication.
VOR
A second cousin just died from COVID. Her Facebook feed was all right-wing memes including anti-vax stuff. Her surviving husband and daughter were also hospitalized for COVID. The daughter is home now and still posting anti-mask and anti-vax stuff. No lessons learned apparently.
piratedan
just like any other profession, Medicine does have variations on the theme…. kind of like how X-Ray is now Radiology or an expansion on the evolution of the Laboratory to now be Clinical Laboratory. ymmv
Ksmiami
@Mike in NC: it will end – of course the death toll may exceed 2 million – which was my initial prediction in March, 2020 sans vaccine
laura
Who has the energy and emotional bandwidth left to cosset the feelings of the people who’ve gleefully spit in the faces of anyone “not them?” In what world are the rest of us expected to have a deathbed reckoning for the persons who arrogantly unashamedly denied the truths in front of their faces until the actual global pandemic comes for them? If you’re willing to open your skull on the daily for right wing and Facebook to take a shit in it and that’s your dopamine there is really little that can be done, and none of us are obliged to do the clean up. So while I do not seek out the HCA site, I’ve seen clips where I do my twitter lurking and it seems that the very existence of the site is to capture the irony and the truth that this is happening in our country but our media just can’t or won’t bestie themselves to cover it.
Dakota Expat
“I don’t comment on the HCAs, and I really don’t get any joy out of them. The reason I read the HCAs is to see what isn’t being reported about these fools, and it’s a lot”
Yup. It’s dark there, but I go to it, too, and exactly for what you say above. I don’t see this as a shaming of or celebratory hoot at the crazies. But a registration of frustration at the absurdity and lunacy of so many needless deaths. Maybe even an attempt to understand.
Anyway, right with you on this.
trollhattan
Speaking of the mockable, how relieved are we this fucker is “former general Flynn”?
Still want to kick him in the yarbles for that RNC speech.
trollhattan
@piratedan:
“Department” just sounds so much more important than “room.”
Ksmiami
@Dakota Expat: “Zeds dead baby, Zeds dead.” – Butch from Pulp Fiction
Nicole
@Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix:
Very true.
On Sundays they allow shitposts, as they call them, and this parody of a post from an anti-vaxxer’s family made me laugh, because I am a bad person:
https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/comments/pr5hxm/ever_notice_that_friends_and_relatives_get_really/
Omnes Omnibus
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Yes, nice does not equal or even signal good.
Ksmiami
@laura: eventually stupidity Lays waste to most human civilizations
PurpleBabied
@rikyrah: Serious illness or death is often the only way people will acknowledge the truth, if that.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: That story is a great example of what the vaccines can and can’t do. In a super-high-exposure prison environment, most people vaxxed or unvaxxed got infected to the point of testing positive. Out of 42 unvaccinated people, 3 ended up in the hospital (7%) and 1 died (2%). Out of 185 vaccinated people, 1 ended up in the hospital (0.5%) and nobody died. Not bad considering the circumstances.
But, of course, the lead number is the more or less useless “79% of the infected people were vaccinated”.
Barbara
@rikyrah:
This, exactly is my sentiment. If someone is willing to engage in a grand experiment that pits their immune system against a known, and now largely preventable, infection, what’s it to me? It’s their responsibility to care for their children (in particular) and it’s not my responsibility to care more about THEIR children than they do, and I certainly don’t care more about their children than the other children who are being put in harm’s way by their display of reckless idiocy. No, nope, sorry, don’t care. It’s not on me to keep producing buckets full of empathy for people who refuse to get vaxxed because of thinly veiled political concerns and then lose their own game of Russian Roulette. It’s empathy enough that I don’t rejoice in their deaths, which I don’t. Too bad. So sad.
Steeplejack
I haven’t looked at the HCA Reddit page, but one thing I have noticed in reading the news stories of “Unvaccinated Area Man Dies of COVID” is how rarely the story mentions whether the surviving relative boo-hoo-ing to the reporter has gotten vaccinated. When it is mentioned, it’s usually “No, they haven’t.” ?
piratedan
@trollhattan: its an expansion…. we used to have so few emergencies, all we needed was a designated room, now with exponential stupidity, we need an entire department to handle it….
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@trollhattan:
“Stealing our precious bodily fluids!”
Nicole
@Roger Moore:
Boy, ain’t that the truth. I just had one of those conversations with a well-educated fellow parent at my kid’s school- their family had Covid, and so the parent is refusing to get vaccinated because they don’t feel it’s necessary. It was all “Cleveland Clinic study” and “super antibodies.” Took me some googling to find out their sources and also find out that the Cleveland Clinic is on record as supporting vaccination for everyone and that the “super antibodies” are triggered by having Covid and then STILL getting vaccinated (and possibly vice versa, it looks like). But man, you have to wade through a lot of well-educated word salads to get to where they think this info is coming from.
germy
Charles Stevens didn’t have Facebook. Imagine the harm he could have caused if he’d only had Zuckerberg’s app.
germy
@Steeplejack:
Too busy setting up a gofundme account to get vaccinated.
Shakti
@lowtechcyclist: I don’t understand people who won’t attempt mitigation efforts or attempt to foreclose really bad side effects for their child.
I had really bad chicken pox blisters over my entire body as a child. Vaccines for chicken pox did not exist when I got it. If I had a kid today that kid would get chickenpox vaccine because I don’t want them to be miserable.
Why are people fucking with covid? Do they also play Russian roulette?
Gravenstone
@mrmoshpotato: Emergency Department
germy
@Shakti:
Well, we know Herschel Walker does…
Another Scott
Too few in the press are asking cui bono? Who benefits from the vaccine deniers and the anti-maskers? And relatedly, why do we want to use our platform to amplify their messages without context?
Pointing and laughing and mocking and yelling and grrring has visceral appeal. I get it – I really do.
But it doesn’t help in most cases.
Like it or not, we have to live with these people. They have always been with us. We need to go after the monsters that are pushing this stuff for cynical political reasons. We need to make Fox News and OAN and FB toxic. The DoJ camped out in IBM’s offices for decades to enforce a consent decree vis anti-trust complaints. They should do the same for FB and prevent them from being a conduit for a single political party in violation of their claimed policies. We’re not helpless in enforcing the existing rules.
In the meantime, we need to keep pushing vaccinations – mandates, rewards, time off, enhanced access in poor areas, getting “influencers” more visibility, etc. Do it all and get the job done.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
brendancalling
@dmsilev:
Good. I hope taking a shit is sheer torture for that walking, anthropomorphized asshole.
waspuppet
50.
germy
Ksmiami
@Betty Cracker: you’re a good person- the Rightwingers are not. Don’t fret just save your compassion for those who deserve it.
Ksmiami
@Another Scott: disagree- these people are adults with agency. I’d say it is the opposite- the defiant anti-vaxxers seek media that caters to their idiocy because they hate liberals, the educated, non whites and modern America more than they love their own families.
Old School
@trollhattan:
I read they were secretly putting it in Chick-fil-A sandwiches.
matt the somewhat reasonable
@trollhattan: Vaccine may be stored in a freezer between -50°C and -15°C
Dumb fucking fuckers. Yeah, we’re going to sell a new salad dressing that you have to store in a special kind of freezer.
Doc Sardonic
Much like Ms. Cracker, I have a long run of negative tests for sympathy. It is a sad and depressing time for me as I normally am inclined to help people, and these Fuckers have stolen every last drop of empathy, sympathy and compassion that I have. My fields of shits to give have been harvested, plowed under and salted and my vast warehouses of fucks to give have been emptied and razed never to be rebuilt. If Ms. Mildewed Assloofah finds the HCA’s to dark for her preciousness, then maybe she needs to come sit and talk with those who have done what is necessary to try to survive this pandemic, who have had a significant part of their personas stripped away likely never to be restored and see what darkness really looks like.
Another Scott
@waspuppet: 115 or more.
FDA.gov – 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act:
There are always people trying to make a buck by lying to the public about health and the safety of items for sale. We have to try to be one step ahead of them.
Cheers,
Scott.
WereBear
@germy: and death from Smallpox is terrifying.
Dan B
@piratedan: You would know. Sobering news.
Thanks.
Mike in NC
A neighbor we’ve known for nearly 30 years was diagnosed with Covid, then pneumonia, and then with congestive heart failure and kidney failure. After a week in the hospital they finally discharged him. Not familiar with his politics, though he apparently wasn’t an Obama fan.
Steeplejack
Guess I’ll drop this in here: My brother and his husband, both vaccinated, caught a breakthrough case of COVID a few weeks ago. Both have pretty much recovered, but my brother reported last weekend that he has lost his sense of smell. Texted today that he and his daughter (still on the school D.L. because of exposure) had nachos for lunch at one of our favorite places (La Unión, Wilson Boulevard in Arlington, NoVA) and they tasted like cardboard. He’s a mega Tex-Mex hound, like me, so this really brings home the tragedy!
And for those you know who say a breakthrough case is no biggie, my brother (age 61) was sick as hell for a solid week. Coughing so much that his ribs and back hurt.
West of the Rockies
@VOR:
They’d rather be dead than proven wrong.
Bluegirlfromwyo
@Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix: …because freedom isn’t easy. The worst part is they’ll valiantly pass never knowing those who they gave a taste of that sweet freedom. //
I need a shower after typing that. Ick.
The HCAs are dark because the award winners are terrible people. We can’t pretend they don’t exist because Slate writers would rather our reality was different. I would too.
UncleEbeneezer
The HCA’s may not convince anti-vax assholes to do the right thing but it will help others who are maybe on the fence, look at these pathetic people and say: fuck it, I don’t wanna be that guy…gimme the shot! Mockery/ridicule/shaming is not about convincing the target.
Barbara
I read the letters from the nurse and medical student, and the nurse makes the point that seeing her patient’s youngest daughter, literally, having a physical grief reaction, is what stops her from saying “too bad, so sad.” I respect that, I really do, but that dynamic is almost like a hostage situation, where the kidnapper tries to make the guy trying the raise the ransom responsible for the death of the hostage. This guy aimed a gun at his family’s heart. Of course, sympathies to the family, but never forget that their grief is on him, not the doctors and nurses trying their best.
Old School
@Steeplejack: Glad to hear they are getting better, but you’re right. Not requiring hospitalization does not necessarily mean no issues whatsoever.
eclare
@Steeplejack: I assume if vaccination status isn’t mentioned in an article, it’s because they weren’t.
Hob
A few commenters have been expressing anger and outrage specifically about this part: “…I’m somehow no less chilled by how easily the bereaved normalize their losses”, and acting like it’s the reporter telling us to feel sorry for those people. The rest of the article may be bad, but this one is not on the reporter; it’s a careless reading. “The bereaved” there are the relatives of the deceased idiot, and the reporter is saying that even those people, who have just lost someone they probably cared about (regardless of whether we ought to care), are still so deep in the denialist cult that they can’t react with the horror and regret that you’d expect. The reporter’s reaction there is not “how tragic, we should feel bad”, but “how creepy that even the people for whom it really is a personal tragedy are still blind to it – that’s the level of denial we’re up against.”
Mistermix read it accurately and commenters have been quoting his summary of that passage approvingly, so I’m not sure how they’re still missing the point, except that of course we’re all pissed off by the whole shitshow in general and we’ve probably all heard a bad take like that many times, so it’s easy to imagine that bad take even when it wasn’t said.
Steeplejack
@eclare:
That’s probably true. But I’d like to see it mentioned explicitly every time.
Nicole
@Steeplejack:
Ugh, I’m sorry and I’m glad they’re both on the mend. I hope your brother’s sense of smell/taste come back soon. Yeah, it’s the thing- for the medical field, a “mild” case is anything that doesn’t put you in the hospital.
On the positive, they both likely have superior immunity going forward: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/health/coronavirus-immunity-vaccines.html
(Most of the data is for infection followed by vaccine, but preliminary indicators are that vaccine followed by breakthrough infection will produce the same robustness.)
germy
@WereBear:
I didn’t know there were people who were anti-smallpox vaccine back then, but it’s not surprising.
Bmaccnm
@trollhattan: “Department” acknowledges that an entire subsystem of support is required to provide emergency care.
kindness
What is wrong with mocking idiots who are causing their own illness to be worse or the death they may end up getting?
It would be wrong to suggest liberals shouldn’t do such things as no one can completely define nor set borders on what is appropriate for liberal behaviour to be able to still call themselves liberals.
Screw those folk that think they are better by shaming us who enjoy the mocking. We didn’t wish them to die. We didn’t prevent them from looking after themselves properly. But finding comic relief in the karma of it all is pleasant.
The Moar You Know
The HCAs I find amusing, but more importantly, if you ever want to convince anyone that Facebook is a very advanced and effective method of mind control, send them to the HCA thread and tell them to just look at the posts.
It’s FUCKING SCARY how identical they are.
CaseyL
The Trumpers strike me as people who have accepted Trump as their personal savior, and I do mean that literally… in the sense that Trump/Trumpism fills that spot where most other people have religion: an unquestioning devotion to an external source of validation that tests your faith constantly by requiring you to do things that are counterintuitive if not outright insane.
So if their fervor is, really and truly, indistinguishable from a religious fervor, then it is quite possible they see their own deaths, and those of their families, as entries in a kind of Heaven Lottery, where they go to Paradise (when they die of Covid) or gain points that will get them into Paradise eventually (if they don’t die, but their kids and other relatives do).
trollhattan
“All
politics isplagues are local.” The county breakthrough case tally: 8,053; of those, the symptomatic tally: 1,867; the deaths: 37.Unknowable is from whom did these 8k people catch Covid? Odds seem to indicate from unvaccinated people, who are responsible for those 37 dead.
Get the damn shot.
Bupalos
@UncleEbeneezer: yeah this. The reality is that as sad as it is, the antivaxxers have created enough of a hubbub that regular Joe dummies start to think in “both sides” terms, and become hesitant. Very few committed antivaxxers are going to be swayed by anything. But loudly and mockingly turning them into terrifying warnings can have an effect on the overall culture.
Also the HCA posts really have given me a lot of horrid insight into how this virus tends to progress, as well as more insight into just how incredibly durable the opinions of these fundamentalist kooks are going to be. What with their prayer warriors and angel wings. It’s not like I didn’t know this, but to see both the uniformity and virulent popularity of this mindset has been eye opening.
RaflW
Given the thread directly below this, wherein we are discussing how the press is mad that Biden allegedly ‘stiffed’ them for one whole press conference, but lapped up being abused serially for 4 fucking years by Trump and a string of lie-spewing or entirely question-avoiding press secretaries, I’m gonna go very firmly with “fuck civility, mock at will, the HCAs are a totally appropriate response to fatally imbecilic twits.”
stinger
All these people worried about missing a day of work due to vaccination side effects — why don’t they get the shot on a Friday?
Kent
I have a whole cadre of elderly MAGA relatives who are anti-fax and all the rest. And some of them have been polluting my FB feed with their nonsense. Surprisingly none of them have died yet. But with Delta I suspect the clock is just ticking.
I have a very sympathetic FB response written up and ready to be copied into their FB feeds when the inevitable happens.
“Look on the bright side. At least he didn’t have to suffer from any complications or side effects from the vaccine”
I am so past giving a fuck and if a bunch of them unfollow me on FB it will be a win.
Ksmiami
@CaseyL: Covid is their rapture… as long as they die and leave the rest of us alone, I’m ok with it
RaflW
Part of my anger is fueled by seeing a post recently on FB from my MN healthcare network. They indicated that 15.7% of people in their hospitals for Covid are fully vax’d people (so, ugh, quite a bit higher than the national picture).
I very much blame the god damned vax-deniers. All of them, even the now dead ones. Esp the radio jocks and big-congregation RW preacher types. Rot into dust, you bastards.
Chetan Murthy
@Steeplejack:
Yesterday’s COVID link roundup had a link to an article about long covid: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-09-youre-covid-youve-vaccinated.html
TL;DR if you’re infected, being vaxxed halves your chances of getting long covid. That’s good, but it really isn’t enough, is it? With Delta flying around, the chance of getting infected is pretty high unless community spread is squashed. I cannot *wait* for booster shots and oral antivirals. And until then, I’m acting as if we’re in August 2020.
Kent
@stinger: Every pharmacy within a 50 mile radius of me has free walk-in vaccines. Takes all of 5 minutes. How fucking hard is that? What do these dipshits do when they run out of milk or need toothpaste. Do they just go without because getting to the pharmacy is too inconvenient? Sheesh. Enough with the excuses. There is no excuse for not being vaccinated in September 2021.
Kent
@RaflW: It is higher than the national average because MN has a higher vaccination rate than the national average. There is just a lot less chaff to burn through. In a scenario with 100% vaccination, only the vaccinated would ever catch Covid. But the total numbers would be very very low.
Ksmiami
@RaflW: for elderly and immunocompromised people, delta is highly virulent despite vaccination. That’s who I count every anti vax shock jock’s death with joy
Matt McIrvin
@RaflW:
That’s very likely a sign that vaccination coverage in their service area is higher than the national average. Remember, numbers like “X% were vaccinated” are dependent on what fraction of people were vaccinated in the first place. If everyone were vaccinated, 100% of the hospitalized sick people would also be vaccinated–but there might not be very many of them.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Your epitaph will be “He valiantly fought the base rate fallacy.”
Betty Cracker
Like I was saying downstairs, we are so fucked in Florida:
FFS. Hey, maybe they’ll get away with it. It looks like the Delta variant has peaked. Maybe they’re banking on that, hoping that by the time election day rolls around, everyone will have forgotten.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: Kent beat me to it by one minute.
germy
Yes, but bad enough covid to be hospitalized? That’s what I find troubling. I thought the vaccines were supposed to protect us from anything other than mild cases.
Matt McIrvin
@Chetan Murthy: It’s not great. Under conditions less extreme than a prison, the vaccines are probably also cutting down your chance of infection by a factor of… a few, which brings the chance of long COVID down some more. But get exposed over and over and you may well roll snake eyes eventually.
It’s the main reason why I’m still masking up in indoor public places and avoiding indoor restaurant dining entirely. I’m on the edge of going back to delivery shopping only, will do that if the case rates get worse.
brendancalling
That letter from a nurse is chilling. My mom died from cancer—well, TBH it was more the combo of chemo, radiation, her depleted immune system, and opportunistic infections that left her unconscious and on life support—and she was surrounded by family when we decided to turn off the machines.
It was basically exactly as described—it took about an hour or so for her to flatline, and the room was filled with one wail of grief after another—and I’m sort of having flashbacks to that miserable day. Telling my kid his grandma died—over a video call—was one of the worst things I’ve ever had to do in my life.
And that’s what makes me so unsympathetic to the Awardees: they’re thoughtless, pigheaded assholes who can’t seem to consider “what if?” As has been remarked upthread, most of these shitheads don’t have life insurance so their grieving families get stuck with a massive bill. I’d wager most of them died intestate as well—the WaPO had a very good article several months back about what THAT entails (this poor fellow died pre-vaccine).
And this Lili Loofbourow wants to chide people like me for bearing witness—that’s what reading the HCA is, bearing witness—to the plague that’s needlessly killing millions of people? GTFOH.
And that says NOTHING about the fact that the vast majority of HC Awardees are horrible people who sneer at public health, demonize doctors, nurses, and scientists, and don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves, including at the bitter end when they want the science they denied to save them now that it’s too late.
Fuck them right in the dick with a pickle-fork. I’ll save my sympathy for people that get covid through no fault of their own.
Spanky
You’re forgetting the negotiating it took to get Georgia and the Carolinas to sign the Declaration of Independence.
Cermet
@waspuppet: Uh? 50? Try since before it’s founding – exactly who do you think most of those asshole founder fathers were? Slavers (or supported it – many; all looked upon Indians as a less than human) and totally privileged whites
Spanky beat me to it
Enhanced Voting Techniques
So the political discourse in this county has degenerated into Hilary Clinton futah slash fiction. Lovely, I suppose it shouldn’t be surprise after Ben Shapiro’s AOC dom fantasy tweets( “hispanic, stern, leather clad and pro-progressive taxation rate”)
Matt McIrvin
@germy:
They do, pretty well. Not perfectly, and the risk is greater in elderly and immunocompromised people, which is why the discussion of boosters has focused on them. I think that by now there’s pretty good evidence that over-60 people could benefit from a third shot. Below that, there’s a gray area.
Those same groups are also very, very likely to be vaccinated in places where the antivaxxers aren’t really running amok, so that amplifies base-rate effects.
Some of those scariest numbers out of Israel about breakthrough infections turned out not to be adjusted by age–vaccine effectiveness against every kind of bad outcome can seem artificially low if vaccinated people are older on average than unvaccinated ones.
Soprano2
Jesus fuck, I just saw on Facebook that three of my nieces – 7, 6 and almost 3 – are waiting on results of a Covid and RSV test. No one else did, so I asked my niece-in-law if she and her husband had been tested too. I guess I’ll get an answer shortly. I saw her last night for about 30 seconds their front door so I’m not worried, but damn surely she realizes they need to get tested too? I don’t even know if she and her husband are vaccinated or not. I sure hope so!
germy
And the vaccine is free.
Cermet
Again, these covidiots were sold a bill of goods and have been for years. They have been conditioned like Palov’s dog to only consume the fake (aka fox) news and its clones. Most honestly don’t know the truth and have been told indirect and direct lies.
I find their deaths tragic because they allowed themselves to be conned by the elite wealthy class that knows the facts and is determined to do what ever to hold power no matter the deaths among their too stupid and our fragile, and likely doomed (thanks to white racism) our demonocracy.
Kay
Once you play a role in the demise of maybe 50,000 people is anything off limits? What would be worse than this?
Mary G
I just can’t do even Balloon Juice this week. Going to be working in my massively neglected and damaged by plumbers garden.
Here is a joyous tweet:
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I will say it again, there is way too much media obsession over the thinking of the self destructive and not enough focus on what works with the Virus. There is no media discussion about what the communities who are getting the pandemic right are doing, just why we must coddle the fuck ups and treat there bullshit seriously. The Media are just enabling the freaks with this Jerry Springer Show nonsense.
Percysowner
@Steeplejack:
I know. I made an appointment with my doctor and talked to her nurse, who had been on vacation. It turned out she had gone to the funerals of both her godparents, COVID related (that’s all she said, so probably not vaccinated) and that one of her good friends had also died, even though she was fully vaccinated. Statistically, you are in a lot less danger once you’re vaccinated, but it sucks to be part of the other .01%. Plus if everyone were vaccinated, the chance is this person wouldn’t have caught it at all.
stinger
@AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue team:
Heck, I’m so old I can remember anti-fluoridation activism (defined as writing angry, incoherent letters to the editor).
dmsilev
@Kent:
Well, sure, sending PDFs is so much nicer.
(I’ve had no luck training AutoCorrect to accept anti-vax as a thing, so my sympathies…)
Cermet
@germy: Really? You don’t realize that many people – esp. older – have immune systems that aren’t up to what a 27 year old healthy male has? That all people’s immune systems differ and some are better at bacterial rather than virus protection (blood type matters here)? Or that some people are more prone towards covid then regular flu? You need to read more about that subject – really.
Kay
“Blasted propoganda for months and months that killed thousands” – still in business, still accepted in society and (actually) paid very, very well.
Imagine if they get worse. It will be worse, because they never get “better”. It’s only “the same” or “worse” and the low water mark is now tens of thousands dead. They drop another couple feet, then what?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Having an impressive looking piece of paper and having an education are two different things. Trump is the poster child for that.
Chetan Murthy
@stinger:
Ripper: Mandrake. Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water, or rain water, and only pure grain alcohol?
Mandrake: Well it did occur to me, Jack, yes.
Ripper: Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?
Mandrake: Ah, yes, I have heard of that, Jack. Yes.
Ripper: Well do you now what it is?
Mandrake: No. No, I don’t know what it is. No.
Ripper: Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?
Just Chuck
@waspuppet: 150. And before that, it was educated overprivileged white folks.
Steeplejack
@Chetan Murthy:
One thing is that my brother was vaccinated (Pfizer) relatively early (December-January?), because he was a doctor seeing patients every day through the pandemic, so his resistance has maybe waned a bit, according to some reports. He retired in April. I don’t know exactly when my BIL was vaccinated, but it was after that. Plus he’s younger than my brother.
Chetan Murthy
@Cermet: On this note, I wonder how many of us vaxxed who go out-and-about in the world [most, I’m guessing] are checking their blood O2 regularly? B/c Cermet is right: we all hope our immune systems are up to the task, but we don’t *know* it. Checking regularly is a way of verifying that we’re still safe, eh? And if we’re unlucky, then we’ll know early — early enough that [at least, outside Fucking Tennessee] we can hie ourselves to the doctor for Regeneron.
I don’t check my blood O2 myself, b/c I’ve been isolating since mid-july, but assuming that cases go back down enough for me to feel safe going to the gym, I sure AF will be doing so.
bluehill
Anti-vaxxers have been radicalized. If they’re willing to die and let their family members die as well, who knows what else they would be wiling to do.
Kelly
Found out this weekend one our neighbors has been home sick with covid for a couple weeks. Unvaxed, with an unvaxed 16 year old son who is missing school while home quarantined. Quietly Trumpy, no signs or flags. They have been living the fearless, maskless, idiot life throughout the pandemic. The real kicker is the wife/mother has been hospitalized a couple times this year for serious anemia. No diagnosis so really worrisome, unknown extra risk. She is vaxed. Why she hasn’t strangled him in his sleep is a mystery to me.
Bobby Thomson
The Hermies are tame compared to some of the Facebook tag groups.
Anyway, the routine is boring.
1. It’s a hoax.
2. Don’t be a sheep/stand up for freedumb
3. Thoughts and prayers needed
4. Visit our GoFundMe.
Each anti-vaxxer who dies is one less node in the disinformation network.
germy
@Kay:
Murdoch, Tucker, Hannity and the rest of them were probably first in line for their vaccines. And I bet Murdoch has gotten a booster by now.
eclare
@Mary G: So adorable, thank you!
Matt McIrvin
@stinger:
Bad news… that still exists today.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@WereBear: Yes, but something gloating about their pain is like the Herman Cain Awards is going to penetrate their bubbles because they folks live for outrage. That’s why mockery is effective when appeals to reason aren’t.
Starfish
I don’t know if harassing a woman after her child and grandchild died of COVID-19 is great. There are people harassing the family members who are burying their loved ones.
The picture where the woman and her child area wearing their “Jesus is bigger than COVID-19” t-shirts, and someone wrote the word “Video” on the woman, and “Radio Star” on the daughter was pretty funny though.
UncleEbeneezer
@brendancalling: My mom died, almost exactly as yours did (peritoneal cancer->chemo->pneumonia->life-support etc.). Which is why I am absolutely furious that my Dad still isn’t vaccinated. I think…I’ve basically stopped talking to him but recently decided that if he ever wants to see me or my wife again in person, he’ll need to show me proof of vaccination first.
Wapiti
@stinger: Portland, Oregon, still does not fluoridate their water. Apparently it’s the largest city in the US that still does not.
rikyrah
@Kay:
But, they want to be brainwashed. That’s the thing.
Kelly
@Matt McIrvin:
@stinger:
Yep, Portland,OR has decisively rejected fluoridation a bunch of times, the most recently 5~10 years ago.
brendancalling
@germy: Remember, this fellow got sick BEFORE there was a vaccine.
rikyrah
@germy:
We know they were. Well, Murdoch.
The other two have it because Fox MANDATES vaccines.
Just like these muthaphuckas were on the air talking about ‘ open the economy’, all the while they were taping in their basements.
JoyceH
@germy:
I watched a Zoom recording of a town hall put on by my local hospital system a week or so ago. At that time, the hospital had 64 COVID patients, of which 4 were unvaccinated. One of the doctors said that all the vaccinated patients were immunocompromised. They got vaccinated but because of their condition, their bodies couldn’t make sufficient antibodies.
I looked at a chart they put out the other day, and now there are 69 COVID patients of which 13 are unvaccinated. But ALL the COVID patients in the ICU and on ventilators are unvaccinated.
I think there are a lot more immunocompromised people in our midst that we realize. Just think about how many people you know of personally who are on or have had chemotherapy. And that’s just one cause of being immunocompromised.
CaseyL
Mph. I’m in the group that will shortly be approved for a booster shot (>60, Type II diabetes) and my vax was back in January, so I also hit the 8-month mark.
I’m going to Maine anyway. I have been out and about over the last few months, though only in Seattle, and have been masked indoors nearly the whole time (experimentally didn’t wear a mask a few times during those halcyon days in June-July when we thought we had this thing licked). I’ll rely on a good supply of real N95s while in airports, and keep my fingers crossed.
germy
That was my local sinclair station, as well. Month after month of “Open Up!” stories, while the anchors were sitting in their living rooms.
RaflW
@Matt McIrvin & @Kent: Yeah, I get that with a metro population that is pretty highly vaccinated, the chances of being a breakthrough within the hospitalized cohort go up.
But the chances that the virus is in circulation are higher because antisocial aholes won’t vax and won’t mask. And our total hospitalization is still rising. (Yes vax’d people can also transmit, but since they’re less likely to get infected, they’re less likely on any given day to be a germ factory.)
Spanky
Welp, there’s about 25 minutes left before the sun sinks below the celestial equator and this interminable summer is finally over. Fall is my favorite season.
TheTruffle
@Betty Cracker: Won’t they have killed off a lot of their die hard supporters?
Steeplejack
@Percysowner:
Good point: A lot of our conversation is about “What are your odds if/when you catch it,” which sort of skips past the fact that the odds of catching it should be much, much lower—and would be, if more people were vaccinated. Grr!
geg6
@Kent:
This. So sick of this excuse. Not only can you walk into any pharmacy nationwide at any time and get a vaccine, there are popup clinics in urban neighborhoods and rural towns all the time. I see them advertised on local news and radio and through FB neighborhood/community sites. Steeler and Pirate games have clinics and Pitt and Penn State games do, too. Most of the large national and regional grocery and big box stores have vaccines available. AND THEY ARE ALL FREE! There is simply no excuse at this point and I don’t want to hear it about those who use the excuse that they can’t take time off. If you can go to the grocery store or pharmacy or Walmart, you can get the fucking vaccine. And you may have to suffer a day or two through work feeling like crap from the side effects, but that’s sure a lot better than being on a ventilator, giving your kids long COVID or making them orphans.
SO FUCKING SICK OF ALL THIS CODDLING OF IDIOTS. I WILL NOT DO IT ANY MORE AND YOU SHOULD ALL FUCKING STOP IT.
Tenar Arha
@Chetan Murthy: Yeah. I’ve been checking my temperature & O2 twice/day before I was fully vaccinated. Now I do it once a day.
I started at the beginning of the pandemic because I figured since I live alone, no one’s going to notice if I’m sick but me, might as well know my baselines & have a good reality check all at once. Plus, with my allergies, a slight sore throat/sneezing/coughing is too regular a thing, I just don’t notice them.
Arclite
Even better than HCA is the site https://www.sorryantivaxxer.com/ (which I linked to in a Mr. Mix post the other day). It’s a daily visit for me these days, just to see the myriad of ways that some people avoid getting vaccinated while at the same time understanding that most of them are cookie cutter imitations of each other: same exact memes (no creativity there), same belief God and ivermectin will save them, same sources of information, same contempt for Liberals and the MSM. Many of them are young-ish: 30s-40s, even 20s. Sad, and frustrating since it’s all completely preventable.
Kaiser estimates we’ve spent $5.7B in the past three months treating unvacc’d COVID patients. That’s money which could have been used for so many other things.
The Moar You Know
@Kay: Exterminating any of their neighbors that they don’t like.
Not a joke.
jeffreyw
@Old School:
They are putting it into the dipping sauce to get it to where it is most needed.
Kay
@JoyceH:
I heard the director of a rural hospital here yesterday on the radio and he said their ICU is “full with covid patients who aren’t vaccinated”. He supposedly said it by way of warning the community that the ICU isn’t available – just FYI, hope you don’t need an ICU bed – but my sense was he is frustrated and pissed off – it sounded like “we warned you this would happen”.
Arclite
What do the comments on that Slate article say? It’s behind a paywall for me. I can’t imagine they agree with the author. We’re sick of anti-vaxxer bullshit. There’s no room left empathy any longer for those idiots.
Aziz, light!
@Wapiti: Our crunchy granola new age woo woo crowd in Portland keeps voting down fluoridation every time it makes the ballot. I suspect there’s a lot of overlap in this mindset with anti-vaxxing.
The Moar You Know
@Wapiti: San Diego does not either.
Kay
@The Moar You Know:
I think one has to consider it. This is a descent and it keeps going lower. Each lurch downward makes the next lurch downward easier. There’s not even real friction. Just sledding along to the bottom.
Nicole
@Arclite:
The ones yesterday, when I read the article, were overwhelmingly in favor of the HCA. The author points out in the article, very briefly, that we don’t see much of liberals expressing their rage the way conservatives do, and here’s where it happens. And the commenters were happy to express theirs, too. As one of the said, the people on HCA spend their lives posting all kinds of terrible things besides their anti-vax bullshit; it’s hard to feel sympathy for mean people.
Bobby Thomson
@The Moar You Know: Rwanda isn’t the only country with radio
Kay
That Dominion lawsuit is going to be epic. Please, please, don’t settle. Take it to trial and televise the whole thing as a public service.
It may be the only opportunity for the public to find out what happened.
Nicole
The meme they love to use, by the way, that really fascinates me is something like, “If the vaccine is free, and it’s so great, why do we have to pay for insulin and chemo?” And I think, “Oh, man… you are SO CLOSE to getting it…”
(Seriously, they have about 20 memes that they ALL use. It gets boring and one skips ahead to the inevitable conclusion on the last image.)
Bobby Thomson
@Steeplejack: they don’t care. A lot of their deaths are happening in places that are never going to vote Democratic, so it probably doesn’t matter much at the margins in those elections. At the same time, the more people who die in ICUs, the harder it is for Joe Biden to be president.
Baud
@Kay:
I hope they don’t settle. Dominion is going to make bank.
Roger Moore
@stinger:
A lot of people, especially people in service industries, don’t have nice 9-5, M-F schedules. Their employers deliberately give irregular schedules. Also, many of them work multiple part-time jobs that wind up having them on the clock every day of the week. People earning minimum wage have to work a lot more than 40 hours a week to get anything close to enough money to live on.
Kay
Everyone should read the Trump campaign “memo” because it shows what liars they all are, but also because of what absolute garbage work they produce.
Low quality hires, each and every one of them and not even CHEAP low quality hires. A moderately hard working high school junior could produce better work than this, and they raised and spent MILLIONS on it.
Baud
@Nicole:
They’re not close to getting it.
Almost Retired
I am totally frustrated with employers who are offering twice-a-week testing, or some such thing, as an alternative to mandatory vaccination. How does that work? Test negative Monday afternoon, get infected Monday night, come to work Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday spewing virus, and then test positive on Friday and get sent home?
You wanna testing regimen as an alternative to a vaccination before returning to the office? Fine. Every fifteen minutes, Corporate Staff Nurse Ratchet is going to shove a Q-Tip so far up your nostril that it tickles the back of your eyeball.
Baud
@Almost Retired:
I believe it takes a few days after getting infected to become contagious.
Kay
@Baud:
Imagine the witness list. They cannot take this trial from us. We deserve that compensation for our pain and suffering.
Almost Retired
@Baud: Please don’t use actual science and facts to undermine my rant. OK, but can we still do the Q-Tip shoving regimen as a vaccination incentive?
Spanky
Bye, summer.
Sloane Ranger
My Social History Group is still meeting on Zoom. Some members were complaining about this during our meeting this morning on the basis that now we are fully vaxed we should no longer live in fear and just get back to living our normal lives and meeting in person. They were boasting about going to the cinema and to shows and eating out regularly, all without masks.
I pointed out that being vaxed didn’t totally protect against getting infected and, even if they were willing to take the risk for themselves, what about others they might infect, especially children who aren’t vaccinated.
One replied that most children didn’t get seriously ill from the virus and only a small number died. I said that was true. It’s all a statistic, until its your grandchild who’s in ICU.
Kay
Guffaw. The ONE document the Trump Campaign produced was the smoking gun document that implicates all of them.
Ken
How polite. I would have been tempted to say that Westley Allan Dodd also killed only a small number of children.
Baud
@Kay:
Trump forgot to eat that one.
eclare
@Sloane Ranger: So true. My relatives, some of them elderly, all have the attitude “I’m vaxxed, I’m invincible!” I don’t argue or try to convince them, but I am going to lose it if one of them suggests going out to eat one more time.
RaflW
@JoyceH: Health Partners & Park Nicollet in the Twin Cities, which operates a couple hospitals, says as of Sept 20:
Total hospitalized: 285 not vax’d / 53 fully vax’d.
ICU: 46 not vax’d / 6 fully.
Vent: 31 not vax’d / 2 fully.
As you say, I’d expect the right hand column to largely be people with conditions that reduce vaccine efficacy and/or have general health well below par.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Hilarious! I hope Dominion and Smartmatic sue until they pauperize every one of those goons.
Chetan Murthy
@Roger Moore:
these are people *facing* customers? No excuse for not getting the shot. These are the same people who expect us all to sympathize with their plight when it comes to pay, benefits, etc? And they can’t be fucking bothered to get the goddamn shot in the face of a deadly global pandemic? Fuck. Them.
Kent
@Aziz, light!: Yes, there is a certain west coast version of anti-science dipshittery that usually expresses itself in anti-fluoridation and anti-vaccine politics. I grew up here and it has been around as long as I can remember going back to the 1970s.
Ruckus
@AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue team:
Aw yes, seat belt resistance…
Some people think that they are special and nothing bad is going to happen to them – because something, something BS. I’d bet it has always been so and will always remain so. I have no idea what anyone’s idea of special is but it is always wrong when it comes to life crapping on them. Life and harm take zero notice of your specialness. Life takes no notice of your specialness, your charm, your looks, your sparkling personality… It does however often take notice of your unnecessary stupidity, especially when far less stupid information is available, like seat belts or vaccines.
Bill Arnold
@RSA:
Re reddit nursing (/r/nursing), here’s another thread. (Seriously emotionally difficult to read.)
Am I talking to a dead person?
Anoniminous
@germy:
Nothing in Biology is 100%. There will always be outliers. Remember, we are all individuals* meaning the mRNA of the vaccine must work with & within the specific molecular biology of the vaccinated. If a person is extremely unlucky it is conceivably possible to be vaccinated and still have to be hospitalized but that’s in the range of 1 in 10,000,000. Putting that in perspective it’s a 1 in 500,000 chance to be struck by lightning. And even a hospital case is going to be way milder than those requiring ICU/ventilator treatment … which is shorthand for “Kiss Their Ass Goodbye.”
* I’m not
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
I want Dominion to depose GOP bds of elections members. They cannot use Dominion or their insane base will riot. Ask them! 25 red states, say roughly 50 counties in each…
Measurable, concrete damages.
Another Scott
@Chetan Murthy:
PewTrusts:
It’s not all privileged people saying no to be spiteful. It still needs to be easier, and still needs more nudging from people they trust. And more mandates – most of which still haven’t taken effect yet.
Cheers,
Scott.
germy
@Anoniminous:
I’m in the “vaccinated and still very very careful” camp.
Chetan Murthy
@Bill Arnold: Oh god, this one really shook me. That poor woman and her poor, poor son. I really hope they get thru this. Honestly, I don’t know why this woman didn’t just tell her school where to get off, and demand an empty single room for her son. I sure AF would have.
Steeplejack
@Sloane Ranger:
Of my brother’s two children, the daughter (almost age 7) tested positive and the son (age 5) tested negative. Both are asymptomatic. My brother said that if they both test positive but remain asymptomatic that might be the closest thing to a kid vax at this point. But there’s some ??? energy at work there.
Kay
@Bill Arnold:
It’s horrifying how they all say “air hungry” or “oxygen hungry”. Hungry.
Shana
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Kind of like the Kochs giving money to the Met in NYC…
Anoniminous
@germy:
Everybody should be. I’ve never seen a study yet about vaccinated people catching Covid that controlled for basic Personal Protection: masking, hygiene. So those studies have a basic flaw. How that flaw affects the conclusion(s) is anybody’s guess.
VeniceRiley
@TheTruffle: Die hard! lol 5 evah!
Is reddit down? Won’t load for me anymore. Rest of my internet is fine
Fair Economist
@Steeplejack:
Still worth it to check their O2 sat, even if otherwise asymptomatic. The very first child with recorded COVID was an elementary age boy in China who was asymptomatic – but had significant pneumonia visible on CAT scan all the same. They’ll probably be fine on a pulse oximeter, but still, it’s so easy to check, it’s worth it.
IMO now that COVID is likely to remain endemic indefinitely a pulse oximeter should be part of every home’s medical supplies, just like a thermometer has been for decades.
Steeplejack
@Fair Economist:
My brother is an M.D.; pretty sure he’s doing that. And keeping an eagle eye on them.
Citizen Alan
@bluehill:
Morally and ethically, I consider anti-vaxxers/anti-maskers to be the equivalent of suicide bombers. I read the HCA every day because it pleases me to see demonstrably bad people get what they deserve, and I really don’t care what some journo-cretin thinks of me for it.
Chetan Murthy
@Citizen Alan:
Terrorists. Terrorists.
Matt McIrvin
@Almost Retired: My wife’s employer does twice-a-week testing as a SUPPLEMENT to mandatory vaccination. Seems sensible to me.
Chetan Murthy
@Matt McIrvin: Wow, that’s great! Her employer actually cares about their workers’ lives!
bnateAZ
@West of the Rockies: Oh I do. College Football, What We Do in the Shadows, etc help immensely. And video games. :P
Shana
@Kay: I’m sure I’m not the only one who read that 6 point memo and immediately thought of the Underpants Gnomes.
Roger Moore
@TheTruffle:
Unfortunately not enough to make a big difference. As bad as COVID is, even in the worst hit states it’s only killed about 0.3% of the population. Those are not by any means all Republicans, so it’s not going to shift the vote very much just by demographic effects. If it has much effect, it’s going to be by convincing people to vote differently, e.g. parents hating their Republican governor for their kid getting infected in a school where masks weren’t required.
germy
Ksmiami
@Chetan Murthy: What would you call a certain senate leader that would bankrupt the country for a perceived election advantage… ?
Chetan Murthy
@Ksmiami: Traitor, of course.
Kent
@Another Scott: Oh for Fuck’s sake. Do these poor people who fear public transportation never step outside their houses to go to Wal-Mart or CVS for a gallon of milk or a carton of smokes? Do they get everything delivered by InstaCart or whatever? I seriously doubt it. I bet 99% of them have walked right past free no-appointment necessary shot clinics at their local pharmacy or grocery many many times over the past 6 months.
Very few people are complete invalids and unable to do things for themselves. We are talking about adults with agency here. I’m almost as sick of this sort of apologia as I am with the anti-vaxers
Honestly. This is why vaccine mandates are necessary. People need a kick in the butt sometimes.
cain
I read one disturbing one where this wife after her husband died, as well as his mother and his brother – struck up a birght tone at the end telling the relatives on her end to enjoy their extended family REUNION – and she’s sorry she can’t come – like the family got a stomach flu or something.
Continuing to encourage meeting each other despite all this death around her! Fuck me.
ETA I’m a big fan of that subreddit – people there are quite sympathetic and the popular ones are the redemption awards. Some posts are heartbreaking especially from nurses and others. The letter from the nurse to her dead patient made me weep.
cain
It’s not just that – check those posts, it is the same memes repeated repeatedly. You get the same parade of memes and then death. One of the things that is happening is that we have “media influencers” who spread and augment untrue things and it gets passed along. The rest of us need to stop giving these people power – and that includes our own media influencer. Everyone is bought into the system.
Facebook in this country and Whatsapp in the rest. All of course owned by Facebook.
cain
@laura:
I wil tell you this – if this virus mutates again and we are back to square one? The anger that is going to come at not just at the anti-vaxx but the entire system – medical, political, and media – for giving these people the power to fuck with the rest us that we are once again back in the breach fighting to live.
Chetan Murthy
@cain: Yes indeed. I sure hope we don’t have to find out. That. Would. Suck.
Will
@rikyrah: Not only that, but that dead moron HATED you. Opposed your right to vote. Called you names. Yah, maybe those 30 or so memes are ‘cookie-cutter’, but they’re also cruel, and mocking, and stupid. I love the HCAs. Death’s too good for these evil pieces of shit.
Roger Moore
@Chetan Murthy:
These are people who are working three jobs just to scrape by. We hear a lot about people who have less than $400 in savings, and that’s who we’re talking about. There are a shocking number of people in the US who are one bad break away from being homeless. They are quite reasonably worried that missing one day of work would get them fired, and that would be enough to completely upend their lives. We need to make sure there’s actually enough of a safety net that they can afford to get vaccinated before we scold them for failing to do it.
Will
@mrmoshpotato: Emergency Department is also commonly used.
EthylEster
Re: I would love to see some local TV station in a hard-hit area just spend 5-10 minutes every so often showing memes juxtaposed with the bloated face of an almost-dead Herman Cain nominee being proned in the ICU.
I am late to this thread so sorry if this duplicates someone’s comment. A local station in Spokane showed exactly this last week. They are getting ID idiots now and seem to be losing patience.
Also too, I have only recently discovered SorryAntivaxxer.com.
Another Scott
@Kent: Per capita income in Holmes county Mississippi is around $11,000 a year. It’s easy to forget that crushing poverty still exists in this country, but it does. And poverty makes people make decisions that those of us who can jump in our car and go to the 24 hour Whole Foods don’t have to make.
Yes, mandates are good and necessary. It’s not enough. More needs to be done to get shots in arms, even in places that hate our politics or don’t have time for politics of any sort.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ksmiami
@Another Scott: the issue is the state governments that don’t build up their citizens or provide them with first world infrastructure- in many predominantly African-American southern neighborhoods, they don’t even have sewer and water infrastructure let alone public health and its by design
sab
@Kay: dream on, lawyer lady.
J R in WV
My Wife had cataract surgery not long ago. Her new implanted lenses provide her with great distance vision, and so far she’s be relying on cheap “readers” for close up vision, reading and seeing her laptop monitor. Today she took her script for close up vision from her eye doctor to an optician shop to get trifocals with transparent vision for the distance parts of the lenses.
On the door of the shop, which was quite busy, was a big sign “Due to the resurgence of the Delta-version of Covid, Masks are Required to come into G-R Optical” — this was really good news for us as Wife is disabled and has a somewhat less than optimal immune system. So after just a few minutes an older guy comes in with his mask over his mouth, but with his nose fully exposed. As he sat down just a few feet away from me, I asked politely if he could pull his mask up over his nose.
“No, I won’t” he said. “It makes it hard to breathe and fogs my glasses up!” I tried to stay polite, said it fogs my glasses too, but I do it for the others around me, and he continued to whine. In retrospect I should have said, “You poor infant, hard to breathe? Fogged glasses? While people are dying in the hospitals you’re too weak to breathe through a protective mask? While my disabled wife sits here right beside you?” Or just punched him out as best as a 70 y o not so able dude could.
What a feeble prick that guy was. Evil walking around within the herd!
WaterGirl
@stinger: Not everyone works Monday thru Friday!
Caphilldcne
@germy: there was deep resistance to the smallpox vaccine. In its early incarnations it could wither an arm which essentially meant a working class man could not use it and often lose employment resulting in extreme deprivation for him and his family. Interestingly in the early days smallpox vaccines were enforced by the marines, in some cases at gunpoint. The branch of the marines that performed these duties eventually evolved into the US Public Health Service (of which the Surgeon General) is the head. (The SG is now an office under the Secretary of Health and Human Services). That’s why USPHS service officers still wear uniforms. Check out: Pox: An American History, by Michael Willrich: Used – Like New (2011) | Powell’s Bookstores Chicago, ABAA. It’s absolutely fascinating. Anti-vaxx has existed a long time in this country but it did not used to be in such bad faith as it is now.
Caphilldcne
@Caphilldcne: PS had we not resorted to force and mandates we could not have eradicated smallpox. That disease was a scourge. In its final hundred years it killed between 300-500 million people. Considering that it has been estimated to have existed for between 16-68000 years it must have killed multiple billions. The mummy of Ramses V (1100 BCE shows scarring/pustules from smallpox. It was eradicated in 1977. Anyway, COVID is quite fearsome enough. Alas, I don’t think we have the will (and we have an active, well-funded opposition) to taking the measures necessary to eradicate this disease. It is possible that given the ignorance (and lack of the order from the post WWII era) we will never eradicate a disease again. (Polio for example).
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Kay:
Right now, those deaths are from a disease, not violence. What is worse than that is Rwanda. That is my biggest fear.
smintheus
The Slate piece managed to ignore the fact that the unvaccinated are trying and sometimes succeeding in killing or at least making other, more humane people very sick. Their deaths mean an end to that campaign to harm others.