6 ms·

Deaths attributed to covid were almost entirely "with covid" and not "from covid". The average age of the fatalities was at or above the average age at which pe

Deaths attributed to covid were almost entirely "with covid" and not "from covid". The average age of the fatalities was at or above the average age at which people ordinarily passed pre-covid and nearly all suffered from multiple serious comorbidities that would have been sufficient in themselves to precipitate one of any number of individual health crises that would have led to their passing. Much of the government response, particularly at the federal level, was aimed at terrorizing the public and, when they came online, coercing mostly low-risk people into submitting to experimental, liability-free vaccines that don't prevent spread and so do nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people. The government also financially incentivized refusal to treat covid in its early stages (allowing the patients to either recover on their own or, for elderly and already chronically ill, to become sicker), place patients on ventilators, and prescribe dangerous experimental treatments like Remdesivir that contributed to the death tallies. The federal government's meddling in some states' distribution of monoclonal antibody treatments was especially pernicious. Lawsuits targeting hospitals, local and state governments, and the federal governments for their conduct (everything from propagandizing to causing or contributing to deaths as in the use of Remdesivir) during the pandemic are in process throughout the United States now.

electrondood 4y ago
1.5m excess deaths in the US alone. "from COVID" or "with COVID," however you want to slice it. The obvious factor is the global pandemic from a novel airborne virus. The conspiracy thinking assuming some sinister ulterior motive from government actions is just a harmful trope, and wrong.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- briandon 4y ago
  Setting the injections aside for a moment, let's consider other pandemic-era government actions, like the non-pharmaceutical interventions. None of them worked and it was clear from the beginning that they were not going to ameliorate covid's impact. Loose-fitting surgical masks do not meaningfully impede the spread of aerosol-borne viruses. Even N95s have been found to show no additional benefit compared to surgical masks in pre-covid research that compared influenza rates among procedure-mask-wearing healthcare workers and healthcare workers wearing N95s. People seem to forget that the uselessness of masks against covid was known early on, then experts were trotted out to hypothesize (incorrectly but authoritatively) that covid was actually droplet-borne so that the mask-orders being imposed would have some air of legitimacy. Many deluded people still believe that surgical masks are useful against covid. Then there were the capacity limits for businesses and forced closures of non-megacorp businesses. And the stickers on the floor at arbitrary, pointless intervals. Pointless because covid is, as we knew from the beginning, pretended to forget for a while when "experts" falsely asserted the droplet nonsense, and know once more... aerosol-borne. Replication-competent covid virions can linger in the air for literally hours. And the contact-tracing charade. And forced quarantine (not a thing in the USA but did happen in many other nations that were supposedly following "the science"), sometimes simply for alleged exposure to a PCR-positive "case". During the covid pandemic, most citizens of nations that actively tried to "fight" the pandemic were deceived and abused relentlessly and shamelessly by those in authority, abetted by many experts. Those who dissented were falsely labeled kooks, deplatformed, and targeted for destruction. I cannot read the minds of government officials in every country that imposed these sorts of unscientific and harmful alleged public health measures on their populations and tell you why they did it but I can tell you that it was obvious to many with relevant expertise or a rational mind and a willingness to look into what was being done and compare it to most nations' preexisting response plans for epidemics of viral respiratory illnesses and with the published literature with an open mind, even at the time when some were panicking, and know that they did not make sense and would not help.
  - ninjagoo 4y ago
    Do you have any actual evidence for masks being ineffective? You keep saying they're ineffective, but you're not providing any evidence for that claim. Or for any of your other claims that non-pharmaceutical interventions are ineffective. Those are quite the extraordinary claims, in opposition to epidemiologists. You do know what extraordinary claims require, correct? In contrast, here is a report on the CDC's website on mask effectiveness for Covid: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7106e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7106e1.htm That report contradicts your claims of ineffectiveness ("uselessness of masks" etc.) as well as the relative effectiveness of various types of masks. On top of the lack of evidence for any of your claims, you accuse people of being deluded if they disagree. You call contact-tracing a charade, in opposition to epidemiologists. Those are just two examples among multiple others. So. Is there a reason for this incendiary rhetoric and gish-galloping in your posts?
    - briandon 4y ago
      You've lived through the past several years and seen the complete failure of all of the NPIs. Are you just refusing to acknowledge it? Clinging to a covidian version of the "stabbed in the back" myth where if some people had just masked harder or gotten injected sooner, covid could have been extinguished? Did you even search for any peer-reviewed papers about surgical mask effectiveness against covid? Here's a model study that aligns closely with what we've all observed in real life (i.e. rooms full of masked people spreading and getting covid): "Effectiveness of Face Masks in Preventing Airborne Transmission of SARS-CoV-2" https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mSphere.00637-20 https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mSphere.00637-20 "IMPORTANCE Airborne simulation experiments showed that cotton masks, surgical masks, and N95 masks provide some protection from the transmission of infective SARS-CoV-2 droplets/aerosols; however, medical masks (surgical masks and even N95 masks) could not completely block the transmission of virus droplets/aerosols even when sealed." Here's the clinical study that found no difference between N95s and surgical masks: "N95 Respirators vs Medical Masks for Preventing Influenza Among Health Care Personnel: A Randomized Clinical Trial" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31479137/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31479137/ "Among outpatient health care personnel, N95 respirators vs medical masks as worn by participants in this trial resulted in no significant difference in the incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza." Now, how many replication-competent virions need to make it around, through, etc. a face covering in order to initiate an infection? The answer is one. And you're aware that covid infections can be initiated via the exposed regions of mucous membrane around your eyes (ocular mucous membrane), right? Have you been wearing a full-facepiece respirator with N100 filters installed when you went outdoors? No, I know. You think that stopping some virions, 60% or even 30%, must be useful. And we'll all pretend that eyes aren't a significant route of infection because we can't get the rubes to all wear ski goggles everywhere all the time. As the saying goes, it's much easier to con someone than to get them to admit later that they've been conned.
triceratops 4y ago
> don't prevent spread Doesn't matter, as long as it keeps people out of the hospital. Dying of delayed cancer treatment because hospital staff is busy dealing with unvaxxed Covid patients isn't great.
- briandon 4y ago
  If you are reasonably healthy and not elderly, your chances of being hospitalized with covid have always been extremely low. You get none of the alleged benefits, but take on all the risks of adverse effects, including sudden death months later.
  - triceratops 4y ago
    What is the risk of "sudden death months later" compared to the risk of hospitalization for Covid? Serious question.
taylodl 4y ago
You know what datasets we have very good statistics for? Deaths. We know, to the person, how many people have died. We have that information year-in and year-out for decades. We know, for a fact, that in excess of 1 million Americans died during the pandemic than would have been expected. Also, please stop waving away these deaths as "comorbidities" and act like Covid wasn't involved in these deaths. If these people hadn't had a Covid infection then they wouldn't be dead. Period end. That's why 1 million more Americans than expected died. There are millions of Americans successfully managing their heart disease and diabetes who otherwise can expect to live long lives. Covid cut those lives short.
Thorrez 4y ago
>don't prevent spread Do you mean don't reduce spread at all, or don't prevent it 100%?
- autoexec 4y ago
  Either way, the claim that "vaccines do nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people" is a clear lie. It's sad to see misinformation thrive here.
  - briandon 4y ago
    It's accurate and factual to state that getting all low-risk people vaccinated with covid with the current set of available leaky, quickly-waning vaccines does nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people. The cited values for time post-shot to peak efficacy and the subsequent time from there to whatever threshold of efficacy you choose (and on to negative efficacy after that) are based on studies of groups of individuals. For some of the individuals, the shots were more or less effective than the mean/median/this-many-standard-devs value in preventing infection and then, as their jabs' effects weakened, in reducing viral load and symptoms that are relevant to onwards transmission. In the absence of any widely-enforced way of measuring an individual's viral load at any given moment, many people who believe themselves to be under a covid shot's umbrella of protection are actually infected with covid and spreading it. Covid is aerosol-borne and can linger in the air for hours. For high-risk people not living in a one-person habitat at the bottom of the ocean or on the Moon, there is no avoiding covid, even if everyone around them gets a booster every three months. There are reasons that effective vaccines for the viruses that cause the common cold (rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, et al.) and for influenza have never been developed. And everyone should have been very skeptical of authorities' "If you get this (or that) shot, you won't get or spread covid!" claims about a bunch of experimental vaccines (some since withdrawn or abandoned due to lack of uptake in the face of adverse effects or realizations about the mildness of this disease for most people) churned out in a matter of months.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      > It's accurate and factual to state that getting all low-risk people vaccinated with covid with the current set of available leaky, quickly-waning vaccines does nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people. It's neither accurate or factual. Genuinely high-risk people who are vaccinated but get covid have much better outcomes than genuinely high-risk people who are not vaccinated. The vaccine can literally protect them from death. You'd have to be crazy to conclude that the vaccine "does nothing to protect" them.
benjaminwootton 4y ago
Wow, this comment has been here for 2 hours and hasn’t been downvoted to oblivion. We are getting there slowly.
- briandon 4y ago
  The amount of effort being expended even on a niche forum like this one to police the narrative and carry out a sort of rearguard action while "the science" around covid and covid-related pharma products and interventions continues to evolve towards what some conspiracy theorists have claimed all along is fascinating to behold.
  - Mountain_Skies 4y ago
    The amnesty they're already starting to beg for isn't going to be forthcoming if they keep fresh in everyone's minds what petty dictators they have been.
    - briandon 4y ago
      And the ones most responsible largely remain in their positions of authority and reserve the right to try to impose the same techno-fascistic abuse schemes again in the future.
  - ccn0p 4y ago
    Fear. We were pounded with flashing scroller death counts and stories of overrun ER's from every corner of earth for what, two years? I made a comment in a running forum about the outdoors being the safest place to be and to please leave the mask at home because of the risk of low blood-oxygen levels and I was downvoted into oblivion.
    - briandon 4y ago
      Whenever I've shared this link ("U.S. Field Hospitals Stand Down, Most Without Treating Any COVID-19 Patients" https://www.npr.org/2020/05/07/851712311/u-s-field-hospitals-stand-down-most-without-treating-any-covid-19-patients https://www.npr.org/2020/05/07/851712311/u-s-field-hospitals...) with members of the hospitals-overrun-youll-die-from-an-infected-papercut crowd, they usually want to change the subject. Same when I remind them of the demands for hospital ships which then weren't used.

electrondood 4y ago

1.5m excess deaths in the US alone. "from COVID" or "with COVID," however you want to slice it. The obvious factor is the global pandemic from a novel airborne virus. The conspiracy thinking assuming some sinister ulterior motive from government actions is just a harmful trope, and wrong.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
briandon 4y ago
Setting the injections aside for a moment, let's consider other pandemic-era government actions, like the non-pharmaceutical interventions. None of them worked and it was clear from the beginning that they were not going to ameliorate covid's impact. Loose-fitting surgical masks do not meaningfully impede the spread of aerosol-borne viruses. Even N95s have been found to show no additional benefit compared to surgical masks in pre-covid research that compared influenza rates among procedure-mask-wearing healthcare workers and healthcare workers wearing N95s. People seem to forget that the uselessness of masks against covid was known early on, then experts were trotted out to hypothesize (incorrectly but authoritatively) that covid was actually droplet-borne so that the mask-orders being imposed would have some air of legitimacy. Many deluded people still believe that surgical masks are useful against covid. Then there were the capacity limits for businesses and forced closures of non-megacorp businesses. And the stickers on the floor at arbitrary, pointless intervals. Pointless because covid is, as we knew from the beginning, pretended to forget for a while when "experts" falsely asserted the droplet nonsense, and know once more... aerosol-borne. Replication-competent covid virions can linger in the air for literally hours. And the contact-tracing charade. And forced quarantine (not a thing in the USA but did happen in many other nations that were supposedly following "the science"), sometimes simply for alleged exposure to a PCR-positive "case". During the covid pandemic, most citizens of nations that actively tried to "fight" the pandemic were deceived and abused relentlessly and shamelessly by those in authority, abetted by many experts. Those who dissented were falsely labeled kooks, deplatformed, and targeted for destruction. I cannot read the minds of government officials in every country that imposed these sorts of unscientific and harmful alleged public health measures on their populations and tell you why they did it but I can tell you that it was obvious to many with relevant expertise or a rational mind and a willingness to look into what was being done and compare it to most nations' preexisting response plans for epidemics of viral respiratory illnesses and with the published literature with an open mind, even at the time when some were panicking, and know that they did not make sense and would not help.
- ninjagoo 4y ago
  Do you have any actual evidence for masks being ineffective? You keep saying they're ineffective, but you're not providing any evidence for that claim. Or for any of your other claims that non-pharmaceutical interventions are ineffective. Those are quite the extraordinary claims, in opposition to epidemiologists. You do know what extraordinary claims require, correct? In contrast, here is a report on the CDC's website on mask effectiveness for Covid: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7106e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7106e1.htm That report contradicts your claims of ineffectiveness ("uselessness of masks" etc.) as well as the relative effectiveness of various types of masks. On top of the lack of evidence for any of your claims, you accuse people of being deluded if they disagree. You call contact-tracing a charade, in opposition to epidemiologists. Those are just two examples among multiple others. So. Is there a reason for this incendiary rhetoric and gish-galloping in your posts?
  - briandon 4y ago
    You've lived through the past several years and seen the complete failure of all of the NPIs. Are you just refusing to acknowledge it? Clinging to a covidian version of the "stabbed in the back" myth where if some people had just masked harder or gotten injected sooner, covid could have been extinguished? Did you even search for any peer-reviewed papers about surgical mask effectiveness against covid? Here's a model study that aligns closely with what we've all observed in real life (i.e. rooms full of masked people spreading and getting covid): "Effectiveness of Face Masks in Preventing Airborne Transmission of SARS-CoV-2" https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mSphere.00637-20 https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mSphere.00637-20 "IMPORTANCE Airborne simulation experiments showed that cotton masks, surgical masks, and N95 masks provide some protection from the transmission of infective SARS-CoV-2 droplets/aerosols; however, medical masks (surgical masks and even N95 masks) could not completely block the transmission of virus droplets/aerosols even when sealed." Here's the clinical study that found no difference between N95s and surgical masks: "N95 Respirators vs Medical Masks for Preventing Influenza Among Health Care Personnel: A Randomized Clinical Trial" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31479137/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31479137/ "Among outpatient health care personnel, N95 respirators vs medical masks as worn by participants in this trial resulted in no significant difference in the incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza." Now, how many replication-competent virions need to make it around, through, etc. a face covering in order to initiate an infection? The answer is one. And you're aware that covid infections can be initiated via the exposed regions of mucous membrane around your eyes (ocular mucous membrane), right? Have you been wearing a full-facepiece respirator with N100 filters installed when you went outdoors? No, I know. You think that stopping some virions, 60% or even 30%, must be useful. And we'll all pretend that eyes aren't a significant route of infection because we can't get the rubes to all wear ski goggles everywhere all the time. As the saying goes, it's much easier to con someone than to get them to admit later that they've been conned.

triceratops 4y ago

> don't prevent spread Doesn't matter, as long as it keeps people out of the hospital. Dying of delayed cancer treatment because hospital staff is busy dealing with unvaxxed Covid patients isn't great.

briandon 4y ago
If you are reasonably healthy and not elderly, your chances of being hospitalized with covid have always been extremely low. You get none of the alleged benefits, but take on all the risks of adverse effects, including sudden death months later.
- triceratops 4y ago
  What is the risk of "sudden death months later" compared to the risk of hospitalization for Covid? Serious question.

taylodl 4y ago

You know what datasets we have very good statistics for? Deaths. We know, to the person, how many people have died. We have that information year-in and year-out for decades. We know, for a fact, that in excess of 1 million Americans died during the pandemic than would have been expected. Also, please stop waving away these deaths as "comorbidities" and act like Covid wasn't involved in these deaths. If these people hadn't had a Covid infection then they wouldn't be dead. Period end. That's why 1 million more Americans than expected died. There are millions of Americans successfully managing their heart disease and diabetes who otherwise can expect to live long lives. Covid cut those lives short.

Thorrez 4y ago

>don't prevent spread Do you mean don't reduce spread at all, or don't prevent it 100%?

autoexec 4y ago
Either way, the claim that "vaccines do nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people" is a clear lie. It's sad to see misinformation thrive here.
- briandon 4y ago
  It's accurate and factual to state that getting all low-risk people vaccinated with covid with the current set of available leaky, quickly-waning vaccines does nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people. The cited values for time post-shot to peak efficacy and the subsequent time from there to whatever threshold of efficacy you choose (and on to negative efficacy after that) are based on studies of groups of individuals. For some of the individuals, the shots were more or less effective than the mean/median/this-many-standard-devs value in preventing infection and then, as their jabs' effects weakened, in reducing viral load and symptoms that are relevant to onwards transmission. In the absence of any widely-enforced way of measuring an individual's viral load at any given moment, many people who believe themselves to be under a covid shot's umbrella of protection are actually infected with covid and spreading it. Covid is aerosol-borne and can linger in the air for hours. For high-risk people not living in a one-person habitat at the bottom of the ocean or on the Moon, there is no avoiding covid, even if everyone around them gets a booster every three months. There are reasons that effective vaccines for the viruses that cause the common cold (rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, et al.) and for influenza have never been developed. And everyone should have been very skeptical of authorities' "If you get this (or that) shot, you won't get or spread covid!" claims about a bunch of experimental vaccines (some since withdrawn or abandoned due to lack of uptake in the face of adverse effects or realizations about the mildness of this disease for most people) churned out in a matter of months.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    > It's accurate and factual to state that getting all low-risk people vaccinated with covid with the current set of available leaky, quickly-waning vaccines does nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people. It's neither accurate or factual. Genuinely high-risk people who are vaccinated but get covid have much better outcomes than genuinely high-risk people who are not vaccinated. The vaccine can literally protect them from death. You'd have to be crazy to conclude that the vaccine "does nothing to protect" them.

benjaminwootton 4y ago

Wow, this comment has been here for 2 hours and hasn’t been downvoted to oblivion. We are getting there slowly.

briandon 4y ago
The amount of effort being expended even on a niche forum like this one to police the narrative and carry out a sort of rearguard action while "the science" around covid and covid-related pharma products and interventions continues to evolve towards what some conspiracy theorists have claimed all along is fascinating to behold.
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  The amnesty they're already starting to beg for isn't going to be forthcoming if they keep fresh in everyone's minds what petty dictators they have been.
  - briandon 4y ago
    And the ones most responsible largely remain in their positions of authority and reserve the right to try to impose the same techno-fascistic abuse schemes again in the future.
- ccn0p 4y ago
  Fear. We were pounded with flashing scroller death counts and stories of overrun ER's from every corner of earth for what, two years? I made a comment in a running forum about the outdoors being the safest place to be and to please leave the mask at home because of the risk of low blood-oxygen levels and I was downvoted into oblivion.
  - briandon 4y ago
    Whenever I've shared this link ("U.S. Field Hospitals Stand Down, Most Without Treating Any COVID-19 Patients" https://www.npr.org/2020/05/07/851712311/u-s-field-hospitals-stand-down-most-without-treating-any-covid-19-patients https://www.npr.org/2020/05/07/851712311/u-s-field-hospitals...) with members of the hospitals-overrun-youll-die-from-an-infected-papercut crowd, they usually want to change the subject. Same when I remind them of the demands for hospital ships which then weren't used.