Farming Minnesota wheat in the labor-intensive world of old/Wikimedia Commons
HIGH ABOVE FLYOVER COUNTRY – Encased in a tube full of masked humans carried on the wings of a Boeing 757 some 35,000 feet above the lights of civilization spread around Alexandria, Minn., it is hard to believe how much more the world has been transformed by humankind in the past 200 years than in the 200,000 before, and how some things haven’t changed at all.
My late grandmother, Alma, and grandfather, Ralph, grew up in the country below in the age of the horse and buggy and lived to the dawn of the Information Age. Along the way, they survived the Spanish flu, the last great global pandemic.
They never talked about it.
The suffering of the flu – it killed about one in every 150 Americans and for a short time knocked life expectancy down by 12 years – was lost in the turmoil of World War I, which came along at the same time; the social-economic chaos of what was to follow in the forms of Prohibition and then the Great Depression; and finally the global nightmare of World War II.
This was their world. Grandpa and grandma were born into lives that were hard but which grew progressively easier over the years though the struggle to survive continued well into the middle of their lives.
They nearly lost their only child, Donna, my mother, to rheumatic fever in the 1930s when that illness was one of many untamed, infectious diseases regularly sweeping across the country.
The fever left her with a weakened heart, a common consequence, which would eventually kill her. Still, she lived to the age of 70, well above average for those born in 1928.
By the time I was born 24 years later, it had risen to 68.6 and by the start of the past decade was approaching 79, but with signs of finally plateauing after a steep and unbelievably steady rise for more than 100 years.
When grandpa Ralph was born in 1904, the average life expectancy in the U.S. was 49.6 years. That’s a little more than a decade longer than the country’s now median age of 38.4.
Most of us now live such easy and comfortable lives that it is easy to lose sight of this history from the near past.
It is equally easy to ignore or forget – especially for urban Americans living largely detached from nature – that death, as much a birth, is what drives the natural world on this planet, and though we might like to think we are now above the natural world, we clearly are not.
Evolution
The newly evolved SARS-CoV-2 virus is proving a stark reminder.
While we have been fretting about human-caused extinctions of flora and fauna, as well we should, nature has remained busy creating new life forms.
And we have since the spring of 2020 been witness to a demonstration of evolution in real-time.
Not only did a new virus emerge from nowhere, but it has since its arrival been constantly mutating before our eyes. Its exact origin remains undetermined and scientists tampering with known viruses cannot yet be dismissed as a possibility. (Are these the scientists were are now constantly preached to “listen to”?)
But since its first appearance, SARS-CoV-2 has been extremely active in its own evolution.
The fallout Alpha and its variants have caused in the world’s largest democracy have not been pretty, what with Americans fighting over face coverings, which do little to stop the spread of the disease, and vaccinations, which do much more but are still far from perfect.
Being the comfortably well-off society we are, we want the perfect and the easy. The vaccines were supposed to be it.
That didn’t happen.
Vermont, the most vaccinated state in the nation, is still in the middle of a surge of cases that started in early August and appeared to peak in mid-October, although the Worldometer’s tracker now shows weekly average case numbers of more than 200 per day, well above Vermont’s spring peak of 190.
But more than half of the people now dying in Vermont also happen to have been vaccinated. There is no magic bullet.
And almost no one wants to talk about, let alone do anything to help move forward, that which might well be most protective against the SARS-CoV-2 and has already shown itself to be protective against many of the other diseases that kill Americans:
Getting people fit and lean, or at least not fat.
Yes, Covid-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, has killed some fully healthy people. Lightning can strike anyone. That’s nature.
But there are also actions that can dramatically increase risks. In these days of SARS-CoV-2, the overweight and most especially the overweight with those chronic diseases now called “co-morbidities” are golfers playing in a thunderstorm.
That’s asking to get struck by lightning.
Public health
One might think the leaders of the American health care system would warn them this is not healthy, but the American health care system isn’t really about health; it is about medicine and money.
There is little money to be made by the medical establishment in prescribing exercise, and many of those – maybe most – in need of the prescription don’t want to hear it because it requires some effort, and we have become a society accustomed, and now conditioned, to avoid effort.
We have leaf blowers, so we don’t need to rake the leaves. We have TV remotes so we don’t have to get up from the sofa to change the channel. We have Alexa, or some variation thereof, so we can verbally order the lights on or off without needing to walk across the room to hit a switch.
These conveniences have only added to a fundamental health problem that began decades back.
He went on to observe that the “old, previously adaptive fat genotypes that evolved during the Palaeolithic-era materialized into the crippling, plus-sized problem that we have today… (in) such a tiny sliver of time in our species’ evolutionary history that it can hardly be expressed mathematically, but needless to say, it is not enough time for natural selection to counteract what was, for so long before, clearly adaptive. (That’s not to say that natural selection isn’t operating against obesity today.)”
Against the backdrop of today, that last sentence seems positively prophetic.
Natural selection, the driving force in evolution, isn’t limited to the constantly evolving SARS-CoV-2. It is also playing out in who falls victims to the virus.
Almost since the pandemic again, death rates have been linked to co-morbidities – most related to too much body fat and too little exercise. This is especially true, and sadly so, in children.
Childhood obesity
Even more troubling, however, is the sixfold increase in severe obesity from `1 percent of children at the start of the 1970s to 6.1 percent as the 2010s were drawing to an end.
The rise was especially bad for boys, who shared the 1 percent status with girls in the 1970s, but began to pull away in the new Millenium. The CDC now reports that one in five boys – an alarming 20.5 percent – are obese, and 6.9 percent are severely obese.
I can’t remember knowing any obese kids when in elementary school in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and I remember only a couple of overweight classmates from high school. They were what was then considered “chubby” and would now be considered pretty much normal as reflected by the U.S. military’s recruiting problem.
The study also noted that “a cluster of 10 states from the south and southeastern regions (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas) produced male or female recruits who were significantly less fit.”
In a rabidly partisan U.S., some have tried to tie these differing death rates to political party affiliations, but there would appear to be more to it than that.
“The region’s dubious rankings in these regards are closely related to – indeed, inter-correlated with – similar rankings regarding per capita income/wealth, poverty, educational achievement, and other socio-economic indicators.”
Only one thing has changed, and changed mightily, in those 150 years, he added; “whereas the principal reason for rejecting southern males for military service in 1898, in World War I, and in World War II was failure to meet minimum weight requirements, the authors of the new study emphasize obesity.
“One of the most dramatic changes in the relationship between nutrition and income in the U.S. in recent decades has been the reversal of the historical relationship between income/wealth and weight.
“Basically, poor people buy cheap, high-caloric foods in order to survive and don’t have the time or resources to burn off the fat.”
Lifestyle changes
Once finding that “time or resources” to burn off fat was unnecessary because of the way people lived. Far more of them were engaged in calorie-burning manual labor. Far more of them walked rather than drove to get from point A to point B.
And, of course, the governmental support systems that enable the less fortunate to buy cheap, high-calorie food were lacking.
Government-backed social support systems are relatively new. They didn’t exist when my parents or grandparents were born. They, in fact, didn’t come into existence until 1935 and then only in the very limited form of Social Security.
How people lived in American before that, both in how they traveled and how the struggling were cared for, is well illustrated by a story published by The Dakota Icelanders Project dedicated to the immigrants from Iceland who settled in that state in the late 1800s.
When Gudrún Long wanted to visit a friend six miles away in March of 1881, she set out on foot with her two children, 9-year-old Borghildur and 7-year-old Vilhjálmur. It was cold. There was still snow on the ground, the project recounts. She was discouraged from making the trip, but countered that a six-mile hike for the family was no big deal.
They didn’t. Gudrún was found dead, the children alive beneath the coat with which she’d covered them after digging them into a snowdrift:
“The bereaved children told how their mother had removed her own coat and other wraps to bundle them up in and then buried them in the snow, admonishing them not to stir until she returned. She was going to find her bearing before going farther.
‘It was such a long night,’ wailed the tearful children. ‘We were so scared we couldn’t sleep and we prayed constantly as mother told us to do.’
‘Now the long night was over, but there was no living mother to cling to.
“Thorlákur Jónsson assured the nine-year-old Borghildur that she could be a member of his household. She remained there until she married at the age of 18.
“The seven-year-old Vilhjálmur was adopted by Björn Thórlaksson.”
I remember my grandmother talking about these North Dakota storms, and how it was sometimes unsafe even to go from home to the barn because one could lose sight of everything in the blowing snow, wander off and freeze to death.
Such was the nature of life in those times in the country where Grandma Alma was reared. About her family, the Jacobsons, I know little other than they were immigrants and that she grew up speaking Swedish not far from where Gudrún died.
Immigrants from Scandanavia started arriving in North Dakota in the late 1860s, according to the State Historical Society of North Dakota, and “from 1892 to 1905, almost half of all the immigrants in North Dakota were Scandinavians.”
Due to crop failures, 330,000 Swedes were reported to have fled their homeland for the U.S. in the decade of the 1880s. Most of them were farmers who gravitated to the Midwest.
If family stories can be believed (and the PBS show “Finding Your Roots should make anyone skeptical about believing them too much), Alma grew up just across the state line to the northwest.
She hardly ever talked about her childhood, but what little she said made it pretty clear it wasn’t easy. It seldom was for Americans in those days.
She met Ralph on the cusp of the Great Depression. Ralph’s family appears to have been living in Grand Forks, N.D., at the time, where his father worked for the Northern Pacific Railway.
They never talked about how they met. According to records compiled by The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormons, they were married Aug. 27, 1928, in Marshall, Minn.
Alma was a teenager. Ralph was not much older. Donna was born four months and a few days later, something unknown to me until some family medical issues sparked a search through the genealogy records.
The Great Depression is generally considered to have begun with the stock market crash of October 1929. Grandpa never talked much about what he did in those days to keep the family alive, but my mother said he spent some time riding the rails looking for work.
He didn’t talk about that, either, but I do remember both my grandfather and grandmother reminiscing about the problems rationing caused for businesses during World War II, and how they struggled at times running both bars and restaurants.
By the time I was born, however, they seemed to have figured it out and were living quite comfortably in the small town in central Minnesota where they co-owned a successful bar.
Ralph knew a lot of people in the liquor business in the Twin Cities, some of whom it seemed were in the liquor business before liquor again became legal at the end of Prohibition.
My mother, now long dead, used to talk about some sketchy times when she was a kid growing up in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area before the family moved north to Staples, where Ralph’s father, my grandfather, also lived.
Memories of great-grandpa Lawrence are vague. When he died in 1961, I was but nine years old, and by then already under the impression that he and Ralph didn’t get on so well.
Who knows what happened. It’s possible Lawrence, who worked as an engineer for the North Pacific up until his retirement, wasn’t happy with his son’s bootlegging or the young Swedish girl he’d married, or maybe Lawrence simply knew something the rest of us didn’t know.
On his deathbed, Ralph confessed to my mother that he’d been married once before and never bothered to get divorced. That just about floored my poor mother, who knew only that Ralph met Alma Mathilda Jacobson when she was still a teenager, and they married soon after.
Times were different then and a whole lot harder. An old Associated Press reporter, John Greely, and I once got into a rollicking debate about whether these times made people inherently tougher. We were tied up aboard a sailboat and had been drinking a bit.
He argued hard work made people both physically and mentally stronger. I rather vehemently countered with the opposite, citing sports records that clearly show humans getting faster and stronger through time.
He was right; I was wrong.
The norm should be judged not by the exceptional but by the average. People were tougher than and most certainly leaner. On average, we are weaker now and fatter, and in this pandemic, we are paying the price for our own physical devolution.
Still, we are blessed in that our technological achievements have continued to outpace our increasing physical neglect. Were it not, this pandemic might look every bit as bad as that of the Spanish flu.
At the moment, it is thankfully not. As of this writing, the Worldometer tacker counts 772,315 Americans unfortunately and prematurely dead of Covid-19. That’s about one of every 431 people among us.
This is a staggering number, no doubt, but only about a third the rate of the Spanish flu. We should all be thankful for that in the sense that things can always be worse.
Categories: Commentary, News
On a more important note I just heard Kyle Rittenhouse was found inbocent today. The truth shall set you free…
Never should have gone to trial. District attorney should have declined to press charges. The state should be sued for kyles wasted time pain and suffering.
It was obvious kyle was innocent.
What a waste of time.
Funny how rabid Democrats always talk about “innocents” in prison and want to abolish the Death Penalty, while actively trying to put an innocent young man (whom they knew was innocent) in jail with hopes of throwing away the key. Hope Kyle sues for millions and never has to work a day in his life. I hope Kamala’s thug soldiers meet jail time.
Bryan,
Did you hear that from the same folks telling you that the vaccines don’t work, Ivermectin is the cure, and covid deaths aren’t covid deaths?
The Rittenhouse trial is still on going. The picture of one of the guys he shot holding a pistol in his face pretty well wraps it up though. Had the guy Rittenhouse shot holding the gun in his face shot Rittenhouse instead would there be a trail right now, and if there was would it be that guy on trial?
Don’t forget the rigged stolen election..hillary’s email server in Crowdstrikes possession.Rudy’s Biden dossier.
And the coupe de grace,peacefull patriots assembling in our capital.A first since 1812
Steve-O, the Rittenhouse trial is only on going to increase hos payout. All political theater.
Dave Mc, you do realize the whole and I mean every bit of the Trump Russian collusion was a CNN, Hillary, Democrat made-up lie right? I mean they still are peddling that lie. Problem is morons believe it when all along it was Hillary in bed with Putin..I know if I was a Democrat I’d feel stupid..
https://jonathanturley.org/2021/11/08/strzok-in-denial-fired-fbi-agent-denounces-durham-indictments-for-dog-whistles/
here is some reality:
U.S. life expectancy dropped by 1.5 years in 2020 the biggest decline since at least world war II
An appeals court ruled on Saturday to temporarily halt President Biden’s coronavirus vaccine mandate for businesses with 100 employees or more, according to Reuters. #FJoeBiden
Thats a start. Our system is interminably slow yet still has a system of checks and balances.
Hopefully more and more states and attorney generals pile on. Push harder Mr. Dunleavy.
Don’t leave Texas hanging in the wind .
Go Brandon !
“Temporarily”
Nice story, Craig. I sometimes think that COVID19 is a blessing in disguise, because it reminded us what a pandemic can do while not being catastrophically serious. Although I think that the reaction to COVID19 is in some ways overblown, there is no question that despite it mainly being a deadly disease for the very old (85+) and those with comorbidities, the ICUs have been filled to overflowing as a result of the pandemic and it certainly cut back on medical help for a lot of other pre-existing issues.
Perhaps we will invest more in preventing the next pandemic while we can– back in the early 1990s SARS COV1 killed about 30% of those infected and had its greatest lethality in those in the 30-40 yr old range, so far more years of life were lost. What saved us back then was that infectivity was much lower and the medical system managed to get on top of the spread and it petered out as a result. That’s not going to happen with this virus, so count our blessings that it isn’t taking out the young and healthy as the Spanish Flu did in 1918-19 and that we are fortunate enough to have developed mRNA technology just (barely) in time for use with this virus.
Well written Craig. Brought back a lot of memories. My pops was a proud Canadian Sailor in WW2 and my Father in-law was a 3 world war survivor to include a guard at the Nuremberg Trials and a Pearl Harbor survivor. Both really never shared much of there history until right before there passing.
Tough times make tough men.
Fitness = game changer . Choices = Difference
BRIT OF A COUP Strike squad of just 100 Brit Marines smashed 1,500 US troops in war games drill
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/14397623/100-brit-marines-smashed-1500-us-troops-war-games/
I think it is fair to say 772,315 Americans did NOT die as a direct result of Covid.
The CDC wrote, “For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned.” 6%. This means that only about 9,857 of the 164,280 deaths were caused by coronavirus alone.
But that’s not all. The disease control agency continued, “For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death.”
The other 94% who were marked as coronavirus in fact died with an average of more than 2.5 comorbidities. Among the most common pre-existing conditions the CDC found were deadly health problems such as varying heart diseases, respiratory illnesses, influenza and pneumonia, organ failure, cancer, obesity, and cognitive diseases.
Yet, every single one was still added to the overall COVID-19 death count because they had coronavirus in their system at the time of death. Sadly, these people who had two to three deadly comorbidities were already dying or on the brink of death. To include them in the coronavirus death count is a gross misrepresentation to the public of how fatal contracting coronavirus really is.
Plus, the Democrats political response to Covid will kill more Americans than the actual virus ever will.
Keep in mind these same liars are putting out the bogus Covid data:
“Special Counsel John Durham’s indictment Thursday of “dossier” source Igor Danchenko revealed the first real evidence of “Russia collusion” — and it was linked to Hillary Clinton’s associates, not to Donald Trump or his presidential campaign.”
I think it’s fair to say had those people not had covid they wouldn’t have died when they did. People, lots of people, live with comorbidities on a daily basis. We’ve been over this before, and you were the one who initially provided the information here, the CDC guideline says “COVID-19 should not be reported on the death certificate if it did not cause or contribute to the death.”
It’s time to move on from that failed talking point Bryan, everyone else already has done so.
I think its fair to say if those people had not had cancer , obesity, heart disease, ect ect they would not have died when they did.
People,Lots of people live with covid on a daily basis.
Its time to move on from your failed talking point steve o, every one else already has done so .
😉
Who is every one else? Have you got a mouse in your pocket?
Come on Steve-O, I get the “hair splitting”, but this is a bit “general or all encompassing” no? “As of this writing, the Worldometer tacker counts 772,315 Americans unfortunately and prematurely dead of Covid-19. That’s about one of every 431 people among us.”
We know a huge majority of those listed deaths we not the result of Covid, but that people merely carried antibodies in their bloodstream whether they knew it or not.. Kind of like the “our hospitals are “full of Covid patients” when in reality people were there for totally different reasons and merely tested positive. All sensational, political smoke and mirrors for control and to push an agenda.. So, it is not “dead of Covid”, but merely died with Covid antibodies (if they really even had it to begin with”.
It’s certainly possible that 725,976 (94% of 772,315) death certificates from all across the nation were falsified by thousands and thousands of doctors and that those who reviewed the death certificates simply signed off on the falsified death certificates, it’s not very probable but it is possible. However it is not only possible, but also probable that 772,315 death certificates from all across the nation were not falsified by thousands and thousands of doctors and that those who reviewed the death certificates signed off on the death certificates in accordance with CDC guidelines that state very clearly how deaths are to be recorded “COVID-19 should not be reported on the death certificate if it did not cause or contribute to the death.”
Steve o , the piece of your statement “contribute to death” is true . Therein lies the rub . That piece makes it ambiguous. It opens the door to say if you died with covid you died from covid on a sheet of paper. ( its not purely death by covid and in a pure sense should not be listed as cause of death when they already had a fatal disease) what causes mosts aids deaths? Bacterial infections or other opportunistic infections- cancer tge flu ect . Then ask yourself what fatal disease did he already have ? What put him on the path to death? Aids patients rarely die of aids itself but usually from opertunistic infection yet in reality aids killed them . Right ? Thats commonly accepted fact in America.
So ask yourself- what else contributed to death?
Generally speaking the co morbidies are usually more dangerous than covid. Cancer and heart disease is considered more often fatal than Covid.
Less than 2% of people who catch covid die . Most of the dead had comorbity. The people who were healthy and caught covid almost never died. So on a clean baseline of -healthy person catches covid- what is their death ratio? Thats the specific pure way to determine a person died of covid. Pretty low percentage.
So what you are promoting is CDC twisting the definition of death.
I understand what you mean though. Had fatal heart disease could die at any moment from additional complication factors.( opertunistic infection?) Covid stepped in and boom . He dies a minute or a year early. “Contributed to death”
Sure did but not as much as his heart disease. Aids ect .
Its not right to say died of covid in those cases.
I don’t think we can hazard or pretend a guess on real number.
No one thinks the death certificates were falsified. Some of us think the wording allowing covid to be listed as primary is misleading. How much ? Who knows. A careful study would be needed. A couple countries recently downgraded their death by covid massively .
It reduced the numbers significantly.
Its just a matter of a twisted definition. Allowing inaccurate numbers or information to be presented. How much ? Does it matter? Covid is dangerous like many things in life and we should stay fit and healthy to have the longest happiest life possible.
Steve-o, we both can agree to follow the money and Covid, bless it’s 99.987% survival heart, is a cash cow.
We are talking TRILLIONS $$$$ up for grabs. Biggest scam in the history of mankind.
DPR,
I’m not sure what is ambiguous about the “contribute to death” part of the CDC guidelines. “COVID-19 should not be reported on the death certificate if it did not cause or contribute to the death.” sure seems pretty straightforward to me. Your AIDS and cancer comparisons further back up how covid related deaths are being counted correctly when dealing with comorbidities, there are multiple factors leading to death that’s why they are listed on the death certificate and called “comorbidities”.
We’ve been down this road before, remember the whole trailer and bearing causing the wheels to fall off analogy? If they didn’t have covid would they have continued to live with the other comorbidities, if the answer is yes then covid caused or contributed to their death…full stop.
Steve o ,
Just because you don’t understand reality doesn’t mean everyone else has to swallow your nonsense.
If you have fatal cancer, heart disease aids ,or bullet wound and you catch covid it doesn’t mean you died of covid. It means you you died of those health problems that may have been complicated by covid. regardless of how cdc temporarily classifies it . Used to be they would say died of aids ect or cancer and related complications . For your sake lets say a man dies of covid after years of battling cancer . (he dies a month early when his doctors said he might have a year to live . At best thats 8% covid and 92% cancer . Yet really more weighted towards cancer because he wouldn’t have died of covid whatsoever without cancer ! Yet he would have lived just fine with covid therefore technically is cancer that killed him .
Yet take your full stop with you .
As to a few others we prefer common sense versus temporary in accurate classification methods.
Gotta go have great day .
DPR,
I would love to play poker with you, you have certain tells that just give it all away.
THE reality is there are 700,000+ dead Americans because of covid. Downplay it all you want and make all the excuses you need for the Communist Chinese, all those 700,000+ dead Americans are dead because of the way the CCP handled the early stages of this disease. All of the brain damage caused by covid is due to the Communist Chinese and the way the CCP handled the early stages of this disease. The long term ramifications of this disease are only just beginning to be seen, 1/4 of those infected with covid have very serious memory issues. You, as someone who has admitted to being infected twice, should be taking this much more seriously than you seem to be.
Steve o,
As to covid-
Didn’t effect me effect me effect me effect me 😉.
Steve o , I would love to play you poker .
Who knows- perhaps someday we shall.
Have a wonderful evening.
DPR,
your putting a jaunty angle on your Ass Hat again, just sayin…
Talk to somebody who works in an ICU,its not that hard to do.
My sister has long covid.Im all vacced up and will get a flue shot and 5G bill gates booster if I can soon.
Its not about me,I could care less if I get covid,Im “Strong Like Bull.”
But Im going to visit my 80 yr old mom in OR,with comorbids.
Again,the vaccine isn’t about YOU,its about the person next to you.
Again,as the Roman Legionares used to say 2000 yrs ago, “Have the shield of the man on your right.”
Thats the true meaning of society……
Dave Mc, you get the triple, quadruple vaxx yadda, you still contract Covid and give it to your 80yo mother what then? How about you get Covid because of the vax – what then? We have clearly seen both, so if you can get and still transmit Covid while vaccinated where is this vax “shield” you speak of to protect your mother?
Bryan,its nothing more than a numbers game.Increase the odds that I dont spread the virus.And increase the odds that I won’t get sick.
The vaccines efficacy is irrefutable now.But you continue to cling to small numbers of breakthrough cases as proof that they dont work.
IF I get my mom sick,atleast I did my best to protect her and myself.Inother words, Ive been Pro active, rather than Re active.
Here’s food for thought.Like many my age(and perhaps the majority of people in generel),Ive had chicken pox when I was perhaps 5-7.
The virus in my body have been floating around dormant for 55 yrs or so.But now as a 60 yr old, my risk goes up for shingles.The vaccine is at best 50-90% effective.So do you get the shot or not?
“Perfect is the enemy of the good”-voltaire
Dave Mc,
“You know,We dont have vaccines that block transmission we have vaccines that help you with your health , but they only slightly reduce transmission”. “We need a new way of doing vaccines” ~ Bill Gates. ( Bill gates a major funder of vaccines is ahead of voltaire in regards to epidemiology and vaccines)
That was this last Tuesday-gates during an interview with Jeremy hunt /health select committee.
Gates isn’t looking for something perfect he’s looking for a vaccine that ends up working more than a small percentage of the time . Currently vaccines give a false sense of protection which arguably makes them more dangerous than no vaccine at all in regards to spread.
( it makes a significant increase in odds of survival but may cause more infections and cause the virus to mutate in ways our current vaccines dont protect against.) if your car repairs are not yet finished at an auto shop would you take it on the freeway?
Dave ect- what you don’t relize is you are 5 steps behind. Science now says current covid vaccines drop their efficacy very fast and within 13 % or worse spread the disease just as quick to close contacts. The kicker is the marginal vaccines promoted the spread via a false sense of protection that offset any benefit of reduced chance of spread .
Break through cases are not rare . They are now the norm. Over 80% of people who I know got the vaccines are now infected with cov2 / covid .
I personally know 20 people who had the vaccine that got sick from covid.
It is false to say break through cases are rare .
It’s possible you could say break through cases rarely die . That’s accurate. Bryan is 100% correct.
Dave I extremely respect you for trying hard to do the right thing. Protection of your fellow man . You are clearly an honorable man .
In this case sadly its not as simple as you think.
Dave Mc
11/08/2021
“The effectiveness of all three coronavirus vaccines available in the United States has dropped substantially after six months, new research published in the journal Science reveals.
The most dramatic drop was from Johnson & Johnson’s shot, whose effectiveness plummeted to 13.1 percent in September from 86.4 percent in March.
During the same time period, Pfizer’s vaccine also fell below the 50 percent effective mark to 43.3 percent from 86.9 percent when it was first administered.”
Moderna stayed around 58%
There’s money in obesity, and a helluva lot less money to be made on healthy people. Think about it. People get rich making other people fat. And others get rich trying to turn those fat people skinny. It’s the perfect money machine, cash coming out of both ends. Now go to a nation with socialized medicine and you find government agencies with programs aimed at encouraging sports and recreation. Why? Because exercise, hard work, etc. are the best ways to stay healthy, and thus the cheapest medicine. They bring down health care costs like nobody’s business. Obesity, meanwhile, is the manifestation of capitalism run amok.
Yep, Thomas, the great thing about communism is you can’t grow fat off eating tree bark. So, Capitalism is to blame for stuffing a Big Mac in one’s mouth several times a week? Um, ok…. R U serious or just under age 35?