CR: COVID-19 --Political Talk

[Brisketexan 104238]

You do you, but I'm going to care about the wellbeing of my countrymen.  That's going to be true even when they are actively trying to kill themselves.  I'm not a Christian, but I was raised to believe that caring was the Christian thing to do.  I continue to wonder exactly what it is that today's Christians believe, because it doesn't appear to have anything to do with loving thy neighbor.

American Christianity has as its sole belief “I can do what I want and fuck you and fuck your feelings.” I know that an ignoramus like you doesn’t realize that’s the central message of the gospels, but your ignorance is clearly because you haven’t sent in enough monetary prayer offerings to our bestest faith leaders, who just so happen to regulatory appear on Fox News and OAN.

Of course not. As long as you don’t mind not being able to access critical care or surgical treatment for you and your loved ones. One of the OR nurses at a surgery center I go to has a teenage child with asthma that started having SOB and they had to call an ambulance. Ambulance dispatch diverted them to an acute care clinic that had oxygen capability. Not a free standing ER, a doc in the box. Every ER in the area was on divert. She was there for 4 days with a bacterial double pneumonia exacerbated by her asthma. This was last week

The important takeaway here is fuck that kid. AggressivelyPussyCoach might feel bad for a few hours if he were to get vaxxed.

DNHC gets it. That kid is a libtard pussy who interferes with our freedoms and should be deported to commieland like Venezuela or Cuba or Commiefornia.

[Okie State 3747]

They had like 20 pages of one star reviews overnight lol.  FAFO lulz

Getting absolutely lit up with one star reviews.

[Francisco 2.0 32290]

 Of course, they can grift off GoFundMe.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/09/18/covid-hospital-bills-insurance-deductible/?utm_source=reddit.com

 

Quote

Jamie Azar left a rehab hospital in Tennessee this week with the help of a walker after spending the entire month of August in the ICU and on a ventilator. She had received a shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in mid-July but tested positive for the coronavirus within 11 days and nearly died.

Now Azar, who earns about $36,000 a year as the director of a preschool at a Baptist church in Georgia, is facing thousands of dollars in medical expenses that she can’t afford.

 

Quote

“I’m very thankful to be home. I am still weak. And I’m just waiting for the bills to come in to know what to do with them,” she said Wednesday, after returning home.

In 2020, as the pandemic took hold, U.S. health insurance companies declared they would cover 100 percent of the costs for covid treatment, waiving co-pays and expensive deductibles for hospital stays that frequently range into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

 

Quote

But this year, most insurers have reinstated co-pays and deductibles for covid patients, in many cases even before vaccines became widely available. The companies imposed the costs as industry profits remained strong or grew in 2020, with insurers paying out less to cover elective procedures that hospitals suspended during the crisis.

 

Spoiler

Now the financial burden of covid is falling unevenly on patients across the country, varying widely by health-care plan and geography, according to a survey of the two largest health plans in every state by the nonprofit and nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

If you’re fortunate enough to live in Vermont or New Mexico, for instance, state mandates require insurance companies to cover 100 percent of treatment. But most Americans with covid are now exposed to the uncertainty, confusion and expense of business-as-usual medical billing and insurance practices — joining those with cancer, diabetes and other serious, costly illnesses.

(Insurers continue to waive costs associated with vaccinations and testing, a pandemic benefit the federal government requires.)

 

A widow with no children, Azar, 57, is part of the unlucky majority. Her experience is a sign of what to expect if covid, as most scientists fear, becomes endemic: a permanent, regular health threat.

The carrier for her employee health insurance, UnitedHealthcare, reinstated patient cost-sharing Jan. 31. That means, because she got sick months later, she could be on the hook for $5,500 in deductibles, co-pays and out-of-network charges this year for her care in a Georgia hospital near her home, including her ICU stay, according to estimates by her family. They anticipate she could face another $5,500 in uncovered expenses next year as her recovery continues.

Bills related to her stay at the out-of-network rehab hospital in Tennessee could climb as high as $10,000 more, her relatives have estimated, but they acknowledged they were uncertain this month what exactly to expect, even after asking UnitedHealthcare and the providers.

“We still don’t know where the numbers will land because the system makes the family wait for the bills,” said Azar’s sister, Rebecca Straub.

UnitedHealthcare declined to comment specifically about Azar’s situation unless she signed a blanket waiver allowing release of all her health records — which she declined.

In general, a person with Azar’s type of plan would have an in-network deductible of $1,500 and an in-network out-of-pocket maximum of $4,000, said UnitedHealthcare spokeswoman Tracey Lempner in an email. Lempner declined to say what a patient’s out-of-network, out-of-state share would be at the Tennessee rehab hospital.

She did not respond directly to a question about why UnitedHealthcare chose Jan. 31 to stop waiving deductibles and co-pays for covid treatment.

“The cost-share waivers were just one piece of our overall response to the covid-19 pandemic,” Lempner said. “We have focused our efforts around helping our members get access to covid-19-related tests, vaccines and treatment, while providing additional support to our clients, care providers and local communities.” UnitedHealthGroup, UnitedHealthcare’s parent company, reported $15.4 billion in profits in 2020, up from $13.8 billion in 2019.

The charges Azar anticipates would be budget-crushers, Straub said. Her relatives are seeking help from the public on a nonprofit patient-fundraising website called Help Hope Live, which says it verifies the circumstances of each patient’s condition with medical providers.

In a Facebook video call from her hospital bed in Chattanooga last week, Azar cited prayer from family and friends for helping her maintain a positive attitude. Although she considers the change in insurance practices unjust for people who get sick this year, she said she harbors no personal animosity toward UnitedHealthcare.

“I got here a year late, huh?” she quipped. “Even though it may not seem fair or seem right, it’s where we are.”

She said her doctors surmised she may have already been exposed to the coronavirus when she received her Johnson & Johnson shot in July.

The lack of uniformity in covid insurance practices across the country this year is striking. In some places, because of differences in health plan policies, covid patients in the same hospitals and in the same ICU units could be facing completely different financial burdens.

“There was no federal mandate for insurers to cover all the costs for covid treatment. Insurers were doing it voluntarily,” said Krutika Amin, a Kaiser Family Foundation associate director who researchers health insurance practices.

Last year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 88 percent of people covered by private insurance had their co-pays and deductibles for covid treatment waived. By August 2021, only 28 percent of the two largest plans in each state and D.C. still had the waivers in place, and another 10 percent planned to phase them out by the end of October, the Kaiser survey found. Its survey this year of employer-sponsored plans reflected similar patterns.

“For some people, deductibles can be over $8,000 for a hospital stay,” Amin said. “It will really depend on what plan they have.”

Delta Air Lines to require that employees be vaccinated or pay health insurance surcharge

America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s lobbying and trade group, said insurance companies began to reinstate cost-sharing for covid treatment as vaccines became available and in recognition that the coronavirus will be an ongoing health challenge.

 

“After a year and a half, it’s pretty clear that covid is here to stay, that this is a continuing health condition,” AHIP spokesman David Allen said. “When it comes to treatment, we’re looking at it like we would treat any other health condition.”

The industry says it is not using the return of deductibles as financial incentive for people to get vaccines. To encourage vaccinations, the industry is focused on ``carrots, not sticks,” Allen said, with programs targeting education and making sure no one is billed for receiving vaccines.

In Painesville, Ohio, Becky Calderone, a hairdresser and graphic artist, has been contending with a steady stream of bills and collection notices for seven months, she said, after she and her husband were both stricken with covid in February. Her husband was hospitalized; she was not. Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, which was provided through her spouse’s employer, reimposed patient cost-sharing for covid treatment Jan. 31.

 

Calderone and her husband did not fit the criteria for early vaccine supplies, which were targeted in January and February toward the elderly. The couple did not get vaccinated until May, well after they got sick.

“We were stuck in this gap," Calderone said. Thirty days after her husband’s release from the hospital, she said, “the bills started coming in like a flood.”

Calderone described navigating a bureaucratic odyssey of emails and appeals with Anthem as well as contact with state insurance regulators. Now she is receiving letters “up the wazoo” from collections agencies. Anthem agreed to waive her husband’s deductibles, she said, but the bills from various providers are still inexplicably arriving. Her deductibles remain in place, she said, but she has not been told why.

Calderone said the financial hardships may mount even further. The couple has a new insurance company now, because her husband changed jobs, so they will have to meet another set of deductibles and co-pays this year as they battle long-hauler covid symptoms, including irregular heartbeats and chronic fatigue, she said.

A doctor called coronavirus vaccines ‘fake.’ Now he sits on an Idaho regional health board

Anthem did not respond to requests for comment specifically about Calderone’s claims. A spokesman said Calderone would need to sign a waiver to release medical information. Calderone declined.

 

In a general statement, the company said its waivers last year were one of a number of steps it took to help its members manage the impacts of the virus.

“These waivers ended in January as we all had gained a better understanding of the virus, and people and communities became more familiar with best practices and protocols for limiting COVID-19 exposure and spread,” the company said in a statement. “Also, at this time vaccines, which are proven to be the safest and most effective way to protect oneself from COVID-19, were starting to become readily available.”

Anthem took in $4.6 billion in profits in 2020, compared to $4.8 billion in 2019.

The reintroduction of cost-sharing mainly affects people with private or employer-based insurance. Patients with no insurance can have 100 percent of their expenses covered by the federal government, under a special program set up by the government for the pandemic, with hospitals reimbursed for care at Medicare rates.

 

Covid patients with Medicaid, the government plan for lower-income people that is paid for by states and the federal government, continue to be protected from cost-sharing, insurance specialists said. Patients on Medicare, the federal plan for the elderly, could face out-of-pocket costs if they do not have supplemental insurance.

For large commercial plans, the pandemic created an unusual dynamic in 2020. Hospitals stopped performing elective procedures, because of the risk of infection and because they were overwhelmed in many communities, so insurance companies had to pay out fewer claims.

“Insurers may have also wanted to be sympathetic toward pains patients, and some may have also feared the possibility of a federal mandate to provide care free-of-charge to COVID-19 patients, so they voluntarily waived these costs for at least some period of time during the pandemic,” the Kaiser Family Foundation report said.

Long-term-care facilities are using the pandemic as a shield, even in lawsuits unrelated to covid-19

Nationally, covid hospitalizations under insurance contracts on average cost $29,000, or $156,000 for a patient with oxygen levels so low that they require a ventilator and ICU treatment, according to data gathered by the national independent nonprofit FAIR Health.

“Insurers wanted to encourage people to get treatment. And this was something that, almost more than any illnesses and health conditions, was something that you have no control over,'' said Jack Hoadley, research professor emeritus at the Georgetown University Center on Health Insurance Reforms. “The insurers probably had a sense that there was a moral obligation to not put patients on the spot for this kind of thing.”

Insurance companies participating in Affordable Care Act marketplaces also faced the prospect of having to pay rebates to the government if their profit ratios exceeded certain levels.

The calculus in place in 2020 changed with the advent of vaccines, which now makes most hospitalizations preventable, Hoadley said.

In some cases, the patchwork of policies and plans is creating stark differences in circumstances for individual patients in the same facility.

Hospitals along the Connecticut River, the border between Vermont and New Hampshire, draw patients from both states. Vermont health plans are waiving deductibles and co-pays into 2022. In New Hampshire, where Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield has a dominant presence, insurance companies have reinstated cost-sharing.

Marvin Mallek, a doctor who treats covid patients from both sides of the river at Springfield Hospital in Vermont, said New Hampshire covid patients are now facing business as usual from insurers, suffering the same sort of financial stress that routinely affects patients with cancer, heart disease and other serious ailments.

“The inhumanity of our health-care system and the tragedies it creates will now resume and will now cover this one group that was exempted,'' he said. “The U.S. health-care system is sort of like a game of musical chairs where there are not enough chairs, and some people are going to get hurt and devastated financially.”

Hospitals also are in the position of having to resume billings and collections for individuals who may have been laid off because of the pandemic or been too sick to work, experts said.

“If you ever wanted a study in differential treatment, this is it,” said Ray Berry, chief executive officer of his own company, Health Business Solutions, in Cooper City, Fla., and a member of the North Broward Hospital board. “You can have people in beds right next to each other, and one can pay $3,000 and one can pay nothing. … The folks who do pay it are going to get sticker shock.”

 

 

 

[Bama Chick 28596]

Easy peasy.

Triple the hospital bills to the unvaxxed to cover the few vaxxed that have breakthrough cases.

Done. When do I get my seven figure job offer from BC/BS?

[Francisco 2.0 32290]

Yep, this makes perfect sense.  Skip a year old, "experimental" vaccine for a year old, "experimental" antibody treatment.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/health/covid-antibody-regeneron.html

Quote

Lanson Jones did not think that the coronavirus would come for him. An avid tennis player in Houston who had not caught so much as a cold during the pandemic, he had refused a vaccine because he worried that it would spoil his streak of good health.

But contracting Covid shattered his faith in his body’s defenses — so much so that Mr. Jones, nose clogged and appetite vanished, began hunting for anything to spare himself a nightmarish illness.

 

Quote

The answer turned out to be monoclonal antibodies, a year-old, laboratory-created drug no less experimental than the vaccine. In a glass-walled enclosure at Houston Methodist Hospital this month, Mr. Jones, 65, became one of more than a million patients, including Donald J. Trump and Joe Rogan, to receive an antibody infusion as the virus has battered the United States.

 

 

Quote

Vaccine-resistant Americans are turning to the treatment with a zeal that has, at times, mystified their doctors, chasing down lengthy infusions after rejecting vaccines that cost one-hundredth as much. Orders have exploded so quickly this summer — to 168,000 doses per week in late August, up from 27,000 in July — that the Biden administration warned states this week of a dwindling national supply.

 

 

Spoiler

The federal government, which was already covering the cost of the treatment — currently about $2,100 per dose — has now taken over its distribution as well. For the coming weeks, the government has told states to expect scaled-back shipments because of the looming shortages.

With seven Southern states accounting for 70 percent of orders, the new process has unsettled some of their governors, who have made the antibody treatment central to their strategy for enduring a catastrophic wave of the Delta variant.

More supplies are on the way. The federal government bought 1.8 million more doses this week, expected to arrive in the fall and winter. But for now, some hospitals are uncertain of supplies, state health officials said, even as patients keep searching for doses.

“We have providers struggling to get the necessary product,” Kody Kinsley, who leads operations for North Carolina’s Covid-19 response, said in an interview. “I think what has happened is a classic logistics issue, where all of a sudden there’s much more demand.”

Amid a din of antivaccine falsehoods, monoclonal antibodies have become the rare coronavirus medicine to achieve near-universal acceptance. Championed by mainstream doctors and conservative radio hosts alike, the infusions have kept the country’s death toll — 2,000 per day and climbing — from soaring even higher.

And after months of work by President Biden and Southern governors to promote the treatments, they have won the affection of vaccine refusers who said that the terrors and uncertainties of actually getting Covid had made them desperate for an antidote.

“The people you love, you trust, nobody said anything negative about it,” Mr. Jones said of the antibody treatment. “And I’ve heard nothing but negative things about the side effects of the vaccine and how quickly it was developed.”

Some Republican governors have set up antibody clinics while opposing vaccine mandates, frustrating even some of the drugs’ strongest proponents. Raising vaccination rates, scientists said, would obviate the need for many of the costly antibody treatments in the first place. The infusions take about an hour and a half, including monitoring afterward, and require constant attention from nurses whom hard-hit states often cannot spare.

“It’s clogging up resources, it’s hard to give, and a vaccine is $20 and could prevent almost all of that,” said Dr. Christian Ramers, an infectious disease specialist and the chief of population health at Family Health Centers of San Diego, a community-based provider. Pushing antibodies while playing down vaccines, he said, was “like investing in car insurance without investing in brakes.”

The government-supplied monoclonal antibodies, made by Regeneron and Eli Lilly, have been shown to significantly shorten patients’ symptoms and reduce their risk of being hospitalized — by 70 percent, in the case of Regeneron’s antibody cocktail. The treatments, given in a single sitting, use lab-made copies of the antibodies that people generate naturally when fighting an infection.

Patients and doctors alike overlooked the treatments during the wintertime surge of infections. But hospitals and health centers have now ramped up their offerings, transforming dental clinics, mobile units and auditoriums into infusion centers. In states like Texas, where elective surgeries have been postponed to make room for Covid-19 patients, operating room nurses have been enlisted to give infusions.

One factor driving the demand is that many patients, including vaccine skeptics, have been spreading the word about their seemingly miraculous recoveries.

“They’re like, ‘I have Covid, I want this treatment, my friend or family told me about this,’” said Jennifer Berry, the Houston Methodist nursing director of infusion services. “Now the word is out.”

At Houston Methodist, nurses administered nearly 1,100 treatments across eight sites in the first week of September, well more than twice as many as any week last winter. The hospital reduced the average time between orders and infusions to two days this month from three days in early August, giving patients a better chance of fighting off infections.

Juggling the infusions with more seriously ill Covid patients this summer forced the hospital, in one case, to move a monoclonal antibody clinic to a strip mall storefront.

But the Texas health department has helped, providing 19 nurses for a different Houston Methodist infusion clinic, said Vicki Brownewell, the lead administrator for the hospital’s program. The Biden administration has also invested $150 million in expanding access to monoclonal antibodies, and Houston Methodist has used federal money to arrange medical taxis for patients struggling with transportation.

Even so, the infusions remain inaccessible to many. Given the heavy demands on staff and the need to create separate infusion rooms for infectious patients, certain communities, especially in rural areas, do not have clinics.

In San Diego, Dr. Ramers said, some large, for-profit hospitals have decided not to administer the antibodies at all because of the logistical hassles, leaving wealthier, well-insured patients to hunt down doses at his publicly funded clinic. Some nurses that he hired for infusions left for short, better-paying assignments in hard-hit intensive care units.

“The natural, capitalist incentives for health care organizations that are for profit don’t really favor doing this,” Dr. Ramers said. “It’s a lot of work.”

Of the 2.4 million monoclonal antibody doses shipped nationally, at least 1.1 million have been used. Precisely how many are still sitting on shelves is hard to determine because of reporting gaps. Still, waning federal supplies and soaring demand from less-vaccinated Southern states have caused what several states have described as large shortfalls in deliveries.

North Carolina providers have requested 15,000 weekly doses, the health department there said, more than double what the federal government has allocated. Florida said its latest weekly allotment left clinics there 41,000 doses short of what they wanted.

Hospitals had previously been able to order the drugs themselves. But the Department of Health and Human Services will now decide how many doses each state receives based on case rates and use of the treatment. State governments, in turn, will decide on doses for individual sites.

The new ordering process, which the Biden administration said would ensure “equitable distribution,” has unsettled some backers of the drug. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, warned on Thursday that state officials were unprepared for the new responsibility of parceling out doses.

And in heavily vaccinated states, like New York, people coordinating treatments fear that shipments will plummet because of low case rates, leaving hospitals with so few doses that they shutter their programs. Some hospitals recently reported growing numbers of vaccinated patients receiving infusions.

Diana Berrent, the founder of Survivor Corps, which has worked to help patients find monoclonal antibody treatments, said that involving state governments would create delays: “You’re layering in 50 new layers of bureaucracy,” she said.

Doctors have warned that antibody treatments alone cannot keep pace with ballooning outbreaks. Whereas any one vaccination protects untold others from exposure, a single infusion only helps a single patient. Infusions must be given within 10 days of symptoms; they are unhelpful to most hospitalized patients. And receiving the antibodies once does not keep people from becoming seriously ill if they catch the virus again later.

“Something like that just doesn’t scale,” said Dr. Howard Huang, the medical leader for Houston Methodist’s infusion program.

As a result, health officials have warned that vaccine skeptics may become so enamored of monoclonal antibodies that they become even more resistant to getting a protective shot.

Within days of his infusion, Mr. Jones, the patient in Houston, had left the bedroom where he had been quarantined and returned to his work as a landscape architect. But he was still weighing whether to be vaccinated.

His doctor was pushing for the shot, he said. But the monoclonal antibodies had worked so well that he was tempted to simply return for another infusion if he caught Covid-19 again.

“If I can go get an infusion and feel as good as I do right now, man, I’d rather not take a vaccine that has just been developed,” he said. “That makes me nervous, still.”

 

[Neonmoon 38127]

Finally. 
 

 

Says 1/3 of adult dose used

[Francisco 2.0 32290]

Narrator:  Nah, the left isn't that organized.

 

 

 

[Goredho 17273]

But... but what about my daily dose of FAAFO?  

[Goredho 17273]

Come on, evil Dems!   Put in vaccine requirements as restrictive as the right’s restrictions to vote.  One conservative COVID vaccine center for all of Travis county should be fine.

[Post Oak 20174]

1 hour ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Narrator:  Nah, the left isn't that organized.

 

 

 

 

[Chewy's Hairy Horn 868]

Or something similar to Abbott’s abortion law.  I want to collect bounties on the unvaccinated. 

[heso 2748]

1 hour ago, Neonmoon said:

Finally. 
 

 

Says 1/3 of adult dose used

Good, now approve it.

[Horn Under a Bad Sign 20338]

 

[brakeman 28202]

[brakeman 28202]

Fox News poll numbers on masks & mandating vaccines, etc.

[jimmyjazz 45430]

 

Uhhh . . . it IS all over the place.  Maybe not the 99.5% number, more like 95% in most cases, but there is no librul ploy to keep Trump supporters from getting the vaccine by downplaying its effectiveness.  Quite the opposite.

[Celery Man 20832]

1 minute ago, jimmyjazz said:

 

Uhhh . . . it IS all over the place.  Maybe not the 99.5% number, more like 95% in most cases, but there is no librul ploy to keep Trump supporters from getting the vaccine by downplaying its effectiveness.  Quite the opposite.

yeah but the libs at fox news/oan/etc haven't been reporting it, how are we to know?

[Francisco 2.0 32290]

1 minute ago, Celery Man said:

yeah but the libs at fox news/oan/etc haven't been reporting it, how are we to know?

And you can't trust those fuckers on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Tik Tok, no sir.  Only the true GunsEagleFreedomHorsePaste patriots that post there.

 

 

[wildcat09 29146]

That Breitbart shit is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.

[brakeman 28202]

Meanwhile, in Idaho...

 

[HenryJames 65852]

1 hour ago, Chewy's Hairy Horn said:

Or something similar to Abbott’s abortion law.  I want to collect bounties on the unvaccinated. 

Dead or alive.

[The Royal We 3059]

7 minutes ago, brakeman said:

Meanwhile, in Idaho...

 

Jesus.  The scary death panels are here!

[Brisketexan 104238]

50 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

 

Uhhh . . . it IS all over the place.  Maybe not the 99.5% number, more like 95% in most cases, but there is no librul ploy to keep Trump supporters from getting the vaccine by downplaying its effectiveness.  Quite the opposite.

It speaks perfectly to their echo-chamber worldview.  "This should be all over the place!  And by 'all over the place,' I mean 'on the only two news sources I consume, Fox and OAN!'"

Jimmy has it perfectly correct -- it IS all over the place.  Just no place that the Fox News insular safe-space news consumers look.

[C-Man 26937]

[jimmyjazz 45430]

Interesting metaphor . . . the problem is that those who refuse to get vaccinated don't see getting the jab as completely benign, even just considering physical response like side effects.

[C-Man 26937]

Interesting metaphor . . . the problem is that those who refuse to get vaccinated don't see getting the jab as completely benign, even just considering physical response like side effects.

Some of them perhaps but I suspect there are still a portion of people -- like my dunderhead BIL -- not getting it out of general principle at this point.

[dingleberryswitzer 2724]

20 minutes ago, C-Man said:

Yep.  They should add you walk out of the room with a bill for thousands of dollars along with your ass beating.  
 

hell I know someone who got it and is now basically paralyzed due to what is assumed brain damage from low oxygen levels for a sustained time.  Sure she didn’t die but she’ll be in a nursing home the rest of her life.  

[Aqua Buddha 14464]

2 hours ago, brakeman said:

Fox News poll numbers on masks & mandating vaccines, etc.

Silent majority.

[Bevo14 8226]

5 minutes ago, Aqua Buddha said:

Silent majority.

By now, every Republican must have at least a tertiary connection to someone that FAAFO.

[Don Johnson 4744]

36 minutes ago, C-Man said:

If we are honestly critiquing this analogy, the 2nd choice isn't that you don't go into the room at all.

Its more that you may be in the room and not know it.  Or instead of drawing the green or yellow marble you get a red or blue one.

I think every single person who refuses to get to get the vaccine has the talking point of "you can still get it", so this analogy doesn't work for that crowd.

 

[Huckleberry 32663]

Correct, the analogy fails because you can still be in a room, but the number of each color marble changes. The rooms are different, so then the analogy gets even more cumbersome and counterproductive.

[F250 28623]

15 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

American Christianity has as its sole belief “I can do what I want and fuck you and fuck your feelings.” I know that an ignoramus like you doesn’t realize that’s the central message of the gospels, but your ignorance is clearly because you haven’t sent in enough monetary prayer offerings to our bestest faith leaders, who just so happen to regulatory appear on Fox News and OAN.

I think this is a consequence of Sola Fide that began with the Reformation. Initially the concept was tied to "works" and as a result Mainline Protestants reject the notion of the "Born Again - Mission Accomplished". But over the last 100 years the idea of repeating a few words without "works" has taken root in American Christianity. Say a few words and all is well for life and ever after there are no consequences to being an asshole. 

 

 

[NameAlreadyInUse 5102]

The easier way is still to say, "Would you get on an airplane if you knew you only had a 99% chance of surviving the flight?"

[Anastasis 23329]

5 hours ago, Neonmoon said:

Finally. 
 

 

Says 1/3 of adult dose used

 

 

This is good news, but a few wrinkles.  There were apparently not enough cases to resolve a difference in terms of clinical effects.  The sample size was too small to yield insights on safety events (in particular myocarditis). So we are left with immune response as a proxy and insufficient safety data to draw conclusions wrt either safety or efficacy.  Which is fine, and not exactly surprising. It will require authorization and broad roll out to assess for safety signals.  We could gotten here months ago and had an authorization in place before school started.  But now we'll wait a few weeks for Pfizer to submit, and who knows how long for the FDA to review, and maybe by late October or November we can roll out vaccines that will probably be too late to suppress Tday spread among kids gathering at family functions.  

[Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand 13530]

1 hour ago, dingleberryswitzer said:

Yep.  They should add you walk out of the room with a bill for thousands of dollars along with your ass beating.  
 

hell I know someone who got it and is now basically paralyzed due to what is assumed brain damage from low oxygen levels for a sustained time.  Sure she didn’t die but she’ll be in a nursing home the rest of her life.  

Opting for the pound of cure (that one never pays but just passes on to the rest of society) over the ounce of prevention is the heart of fiscal conservatism.

[BrickHorn 18134]

3 hours ago, brakeman said:

Fox News poll numbers on masks & mandating vaccines, etc.

The dummies are slowly, quietly conceding. Just like they did with gay marriage and marijuana and civil rights. 

None of them will admit they were reckless dumbfucks who fought like hell to preserve disease and death in the face of overwhelming factual evidence of their stupidity. They’ll just quietly slink over to the right side of history, never acknowledging the misery caused by their delay.

And they’ll do it again on whatever the next dumb wedge issue is. They’ll be wrong, and belligerently so. They’ll stymie progress and cast votes for psychopaths who pander to a wrong-headed position that they believe so strongly at the time, but will inevitably quietly abandon when enough of their fellow travelers in stupidity jump ship. They’ll generally fuck things up and create problems that grown-ups will spend generations unfucking, all in the service of some god damned nitwit bullshit that gets them all riled up until they finally catch up to the rest of the class and experience a fleeting moment of self-realization before moving on to the next dumb line in the sand.

Dumb America’s unceasing war against reason is exhausting. 

 

[Grandioso 2592]

We are all Willy Wonka at this point in trying to reason with anti-vaxxers.

 

[Brisketexan 104238]

37 minutes ago, BrickHorn said:

The dummies are slowly, quietly conceding. Just like they did with gay marriage and marijuana and civil rights. 

None of them will admit they were reckless dumbfucks who fought like hell to preserve disease and death in the face of overwhelming factual evidence of their stupidity. They’ll just quietly slink over to the right side of history, never acknowledging the misery caused by their delay.

And they’ll do it again on whatever the next dumb wedge issue is. They’ll be wrong, and belligerently so. They’ll stymie progress and cast votes for psychopaths who pander to a wrong-headed position that they believe so strongly at the time, but will inevitably quietly abandon when enough of their fellow travelers in stupidity jump ship. They’ll generally fuck things up and create problems that grown-ups will spend generations unfucking, all in the service of some god damned nitwit bullshit that gets them all riled up until they finally catch up to the rest of the class and experience a fleeting moment of self-realization before moving on to the next dumb line in the sand.

Dumb America’s unceasing war against reason is exhausting. 

 

Oh.....so you DO understand the GQP, and the entirety of their worldview.

[The Royal We 3059]

40 minutes ago, BrickHorn said:

The dummies are slowly, quietly conceding. Just like they did with gay marriage and marijuana and civil rights. 

None of them will admit they were reckless dumbfucks who fought like hell to preserve disease and death in the face of overwhelming factual evidence of their stupidity. They’ll just quietly slink over to the right side of history, never acknowledging the misery caused by their delay.

And they’ll do it again on whatever the next dumb wedge issue is. They’ll be wrong, and belligerently so. They’ll stymie progress and cast votes for psychopaths who pander to a wrong-headed position that they believe so strongly at the time, but will inevitably quietly abandon when enough of their fellow travelers in stupidity jump ship. They’ll generally fuck things up and create problems that grown-ups will spend generations unfucking, all in the service of some god damned nitwit bullshit that gets them all riled up until they finally catch up to the rest of the class and experience a fleeting moment of self-realization before moving on to the next dumb line in the sand.

Dumb America’s unceasing war against reason is exhausting. 

 

A little bit too on the nose.  Damn.

[MissingInAction 24748]

My friends cousin, a marathon runner, caught it early on last year. She was of the mindset that she is very healthy, even if she gets it, blah blah.

We she has asthma now from covid and won't be running anywhere any more.

[heso 2748]

2 hours ago, NameAlreadyInUse said:

The easier way is still to say, "Would you get on an airplane if you knew you only had a 99% chance of surviving the flight?"

And also some higher percentage of long term complications of you do survive. 

[BrickHorn 18134]

14 minutes ago, MissingInAction said:

My friends cousin, a marathon runner, caught it early on last year. She was of the mindset that she is very healthy, even if she gets it, blah blah.

We she has asthma now from covid and won't be running anywhere any more.

Is that really a bad thing? She still has the same home, presumably. So she’ll be in the same place that, if she were to run, she would start from and end up at: home sweet home. Covid hasn’t changed that. The only thing Covid takes out of the equation is the running part, which isn’t any fun anyway.

Seems like Covid did her a favor.

[Beau Vine 53866]

1 hour ago, BrickHorn said:

The dummies are slowly, quietly conceding. Just like they did with gay marriage and marijuana and civil rights. 

None of them will admit they were reckless dumbfucks who fought like hell to preserve disease and death in the face of overwhelming factual evidence of their stupidity. They’ll just quietly slink over to the right side of history, never acknowledging the misery caused by their delay.

And they’ll do it again on whatever the next dumb wedge issue is. They’ll be wrong, and belligerently so. They’ll stymie progress and cast votes for psychopaths who pander to a wrong-headed position that they believe so strongly at the time, but will inevitably quietly abandon when enough of their fellow travelers in stupidity jump ship. They’ll generally fuck things up and create problems that grown-ups will spend generations unfucking, all in the service of some god damned nitwit bullshit that gets them all riled up until they finally catch up to the rest of the class and experience a fleeting moment of self-realization before moving on to the next dumb line in the sand.

Dumb America’s unceasing war against reason is exhausting. 

 

[Francisco 2.0 32290]

47 minutes ago, MissingInAction said:

My friends cousin, a marathon runner, caught it early on last year. She was of the mindset that she is very healthy, even if she gets it, blah blah.

We she has asthma now from covid and won't be running anywhere any more.

Your friend's cousin can still run, even marathons, with asthma.

Signed, the husband of a wife who has asthma and completed several marathons, including (humble brag) one in 3:46.

 

 

[MissingInAction 24748]

2 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Your friend's cousin can still run, even marathons, with asthma.

Signed, the husband of a wife who has asthma and completed several marathons, including (humble brag) one in 3:46.

 

 

It may be worse than asthma because I out ran her on a trail a few weeks ago.

 

[Bevo14 8226]

2 hours ago, BrickHorn said:

The dummies are slowly, quietly conceding. Just like they did with gay marriage and marijuana and civil rights. 

None of them will admit they were reckless dumbfucks who fought like hell to preserve disease and death in the face of overwhelming factual evidence of their stupidity. They’ll just quietly slink over to the right side of history, never acknowledging the misery caused by their delay.

And they’ll do it again on whatever the next dumb wedge issue is. They’ll be wrong, and belligerently so. They’ll stymie progress and cast votes for psychopaths who pander to a wrong-headed position that they believe so strongly at the time, but will inevitably quietly abandon when enough of their fellow travelers in stupidity jump ship. They’ll generally fuck things up and create problems that grown-ups will spend generations unfucking, all in the service of some god damned nitwit bullshit that gets them all riled up until they finally catch up to the rest of the class and experience a fleeting moment of self-realization before moving on to the next dumb line in the sand.

Dumb America’s unceasing war against reason is exhausting. 

 

[RomaVicta 29704]

8 hours ago, Neonmoon said:

Finally. 
 

 

Says 1/3 of adult dose used

Children? Children, Mandrake?

[RomaVicta 29704]

On 9/19/2021 at 10:07 AM, Celery Man said:

On the "give a shit about what other people do" front, I honestly don't really care if they live or die.

You're a better person than I am. I drift from the placid waters of indifference to seas more hostile.

[Francisco 2.0 32290]

14 minutes ago, MissingInAction said:

It may be worse than asthma because I out ran her on a trail a few weeks ago.

 

 

Highly possible, since there's so much unknown on what Covid can do to a body, especially long term.  But asthma alone should not stop her from running, perhaps at a slower pace at what she had done previously.

 

 

[sidis 9686]

2 hours ago, BrickHorn said:

The dummies are slowly, quietly conceding. Just like they did with gay marriage and marijuana and civil rights. 

None of them will admit they were reckless dumbfucks who fought like hell to preserve disease and death in the face of overwhelming factual evidence of their stupidity. They’ll just quietly slink over to the right side of history, never acknowledging the misery caused by their delay.

And they’ll do it again on whatever the next dumb wedge issue is. They’ll be wrong, and belligerently so. They’ll stymie progress and cast votes for psychopaths who pander to a wrong-headed position that they believe so strongly at the time, but will inevitably quietly abandon when enough of their fellow travelers in stupidity jump ship. They’ll generally fuck things up and create problems that grown-ups will spend generations unfucking, all in the service of some god damned nitwit bullshit that gets them all riled up until they finally catch up to the rest of the class and experience a fleeting moment of self-realization before moving on to the next dumb line in the sand.

Dumb America’s unceasing war against reason is exhausting. 

 

the craziest (or maybe the most recent so it is just in my mind) example of this that has legitimately blown my mind is the flip flop on the iraq and afghanistan wars.  along with the 2000 elections insanity, the polarization of society really started ramp up then.  i was legitimately threatened numerous times on top of being just generally accused of unpatriotic, hate the troops bullshit back in 2002 - 2004 when objecting to the american asian adventurism that suddenly became the zeitgeist at the time.  the bloodlust after 9/11 was enough to make any objectors to afghanistan a seriously irrelevant minority but there were enough of us in the lead up to iraq, that it became politically inflamed and was really the beginning of the fox crowd going insane.  republicans were

since trump, these people would have you believe that it was the liberals that ran us into that war guns ablazin'.  it is utterly fascinating.  and yes, i am fully aware that many prominent democrats voted and advocated for both invasions but they were not driving the bus at the time and did not have control.  wolfowitz, rumsfeld, cheney, and the rest of the gang drove that whole thing and the objectors were dismissed as traitors, unpatriotic, hate the troops, why don't you wear the yellow ribbon, etc...

now they act like they were a bunch of objecting isolationists the whole time...and as someone who was relentlessly attacked for dissent, that has been utterly fascinating.