Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

For the love of f**k being mistaken for Michael Reeves [had no idea who this was until earlier this year until ex pointed the resemblance out... yikes] was bad enough but you're not even the first to say I look like a mainlander. I don't see it and y'all be trippin. Of course it could just be denial

Amusingly one of my regular students was a big fan of Winnie the Pooh-- they had a whole wall covered in a painting featuring him and Tigger and the rest of the Hundred Acre Woods; given that she was presumably a mainlander I had a great deal of trouble keeping a straight face whenever we had classes.

Was having a conversation with a friend earlier and frankly, there is an uncanny level of disquieting disconnect when talking with most people from the mainland about policies and some social realities. Quoting aforementioned friend, she basically said that the brainwashing is very real and runs deep and it's hard to disagree given context.

 

Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.

 

Be afraid, very afraid. Classical Liberalism (i.e. "rights") is just not all that useful for public health policy, any more than it is useful for sewer design, or deciding whether everyone should drive on the left or the right. The simplistic "mortality rose after lockdown" means whatever its hearers want it to mean, which for the target audience is "nobody can tell me I have to get that there microchips inserted into me!".

Here in southern New Mexico, our hospitals are full of COVID patients. About 40% of them are from small towns and rural area's in our state, but 60% are overflow from low vax Texas. Our high vax rates are your benefit, and your gasping and dying are our hospital's $financial$ benefit.

We will see. The question is around the efficacy of "natural immunity" and the balance of these numbers with the vaccinated. Anecdotal evidence in our area suggests that there are too many cases of ICU/ventilated/dead among those who were relying on the fact they had COVID in the past.

 

FL on stats I do not trust the government #s. When I go outside I see people wearing masks is 50/50. Most have their shots and living their lives. That's why so many people are moving to FL and making COL becoming too much when comparing to salaries, sadly. Even employers don't want to raise salaries too much or else they aren't making $$$. Hard times for those who can't afford to pay salaries as a small business. My big bank employer had to raise starting pay at $18 for entry level bank jobs but even then they are getting priced out a bit since their competitors are paying $20/hr to start. It's a start, but that is before we get into the steep rental market increases due to demand.

You did say this earlier:

In FL during the Jeb Bush years they really love him. However, people wanted the FL Executive branch to have more powers. At the time the FL gov was one of the weakest governors in terms of power in the South. We had seven constitutional officers including the governors. When FL GOP taken over the whole state government they sold on the population that we can make Jeb Bush more awesome by getting rid of some of these constitutional officers and give more powers to the FL governor as a cost saving measure. Voters had to vote on it via a Constitutional Amendment. That passed super easy in the early 2000s. Yes it saved money, but it make the FL Executive branch more powerful since they taken some of the former constitutional officers powers. I guess foreshadowing??? People love their governor have more powers if they are on the same pollical party as they are.

Ah, that is true. Pensacola has a weaker job market than Jacksonville since it is still mostly a heavy military city. Also tons of money $ from other Southern states are hiting up Santa Rosa and other counties in the area for beach access. I almost went to UWF for college in Pensacola, but researched the job market and made a decision that I wouldn't get luckily with a job in that area of FL. Thus I went to Jacksonville, which has the biggest non-tourist job market in FL instead. That area of FL has the most amount of military retirees in the whole nation. So Matt Gaetz Congressional District? His district is the more heavy military retiree district in the whole country. It is also one of the most conservatives districts in FL since the heaviest consecration of conservatives in FL are based in NW FL (North Central FL and Northeast FL also has heavy conservative voting block).

Did you know that one of the two pure dry counties (for those outside of the US, areas where alcohol sales are banned) is in Matt Gaetz's district? That's Liberty County. The other pure dry country is Washington County that is right near Liberty County, lol. But that isn't in Matt Gaetz's district. It's 2021....yeah. Liberty County....Washington County.....WTF.

Maybe I am reading this wrong, but @crenca I am open minded to have a Surgeon General office in FL. However, the office itself is more/less a giant joke since they don't have powers to mandate anything (since the FL Legislature has final say on everything). Of course if you do something the governor doesn't like, your ass is gone. With the Covid mess the office became one giant joke where why we even have it in the first place? This "Surgeon General," provided if he accepted by the FL Senate, did a lot of writing with the WSJ about his stances that aren't popular. I do agree with him on some of it, it is just I think he only got the job not due to his qualifications but more on "getting his name" out there on the conservative media circuit. For me, I shake my head and cry that my tax money is being pooped on.

Maybe in other states that have a Surgeon General office aren't close to the drama and pollical baggage that FL has, and actually work as intended.

 

Yeah. No. There is nothing you can do or to make me happy or unhappy.

 

As someone in the medical field who will be entering residency next year, I can without a doubt say that our hospital ICUs are completely packed and 80% of the beds are occupied by unvaccinated COVID patients who are slowly dying. The amount of times we have had to turn away people in critical care to go die at home from the emergency department because we did not have any beds to take care of them is honestly so f'ing demoralizing. Plus, with the great divide of vaccination and lack of transparency causing a distrust in medicine, it's sad to see so many doctors becoming villainized because they are promoting vaccinations because they have literally seen countless people die from COVID and are helpless to stop them from dying once they reach a certain point in the hospital.

We usually have a running count of number of COVID patients in the hospital and the percentage that are in the hospital that are unvaccinated is usually around 90-95%, which is pretty consistent across the board.

 

This is key. If we had real leadership and we're not so f'ing "live and let live" and overly concerned with "privacy" we would be marching these anti-maskers/anti-vaxers through the ICU's like the US army did with the German citizenship through the Nazi death camps, denial being such a powerful thing. Marv and others have argued that folks should make their own risk assessment, but the vast majority of folks simply do have the tools they need to do such a thing. That said he is right we are ungovernable.

Doctors need a union, one that will back them up when they refuse to treat the spreadnecks...

 

I'm stealing this one. Thanks!

Also, a neat tool to estimate risk:

https://www.microcovid.org/?distanc...e&topLocation=US_51&voice=normal&yourMask=n95

Of course, I expect several-to-dozens of responses to that link extolling why I'm an abject asshole for sharing such a fear mongering device based on unfounded satan-science. Go for it. I wish everyone the best. Cheers!

 

I'm sorry you have to experience this. Hang in there.

If I could do it all over I would dedicate myself to the epidemiology of contagious narcissism and mass psychosis.

 

The problem with relying on natural immunity is just how many people it would kill to get there.

The whole-population case fatality rate for unvaccinated people is still no less than 2%. Yes, it's way higher in old folks, and way lower in young folks. But the low risk for young people does still rely on functional hospitals. Fatality rates in younger people skyrocket if the margininal cases can't get a hospital bed.

And what were seeing in Canada (Alberta and Saskatchewan specifically), if you cut all control measures and just treat the virus as if it were the flu.... well, even 70% adult vaccination rates aren't enough to stop the hospitals from being completely overwhelmed by unvaccinated people.

So yeah, TLDR, the road to natural immunity is ripe with the smell of corpses.

 

The AMA is not a union, it's a lobby organization, or even more accurately a PR organization. Actually that's not even it, it's more like an NGO that serves some politicians/government and their idealist donors. Like most of these sorts entities it long ago succumbed to the "long march of through the institutions" of the baby boomer progressives. Out of habit and vague sense of civil duty we used to send them our $500 dues every year, but I stopped that after they openly supported the unaffordable-health-care-act before its ultimate passage. The state wing of the AMA (New Mexico Medical Society) however was able to milk us for another few years (another $500 a year) because they managed to get it passed into administrative law that you had to be a member of their organization to be eligible for malpractice insurance. However a few years back they pissed off our insurance company (not sure how exactly, probably by only half heartedly supporting tort limits) that they stopped collecting the dues for them, and they are too disorganized to collect from me directly.

If we actually had a libertarian system that flowed both ways then I could perhaps tolerate it, but we don't. We give individuals the choice to not be vaccinated, but we do not give physicians, hospitals, and "the standard of care" the freedom to let these fools actually suffer the consequences of their choice. On the contrary, we (doctors and hospitals) are as liable as we ever were, and these fools get the same care as if they had made the right choice. The strain and utter exhaustion that @GettingBuckets spoke about is very real. For Darwin and "free choice" to actually work, we would have to utterly change the basic way we think about and deliver medicine in this country, and that is simply not going to happen. In other words, the wrong consequences are flowing from the freedom not to be vaccinated. Sure, these fools are gasping for breath for a few weeks before dying (and in an individualistic way "paying the price") but the collateral damage to the medical system, to society in economic and personal terms is in my opinion too high for us to keep making this basic category error - of indulging in the fiction that viruses, vectors, and vaccines are in the main a private choice.

All that said, it's as you say and all this is academic because the sad fact is that this deadly pandemic is not quite deadly enough, and things are going to stay more or less the same for the foreseeable future.

 

My best friend is a doctor in rural PA. His words: "I simply can't compete with the disinformation out there. The unvaxxed/unmasked keep dying and I keep filling out the death certificates. Doesn't bother me anymore."

 

Forced medical procedures, Nazis and “real leadership” probably aren’t where you wanted to go with that one.

That’d be fine as long as we treated every other factor the same way. Overweight? Smoker? Drinker? Old? Sorry dudes, we got to have the beds for real patients.

Good news though… Pfizer is close to EUA status on their new oral covid medicine (which shares a curious similarity in function to the horse dewormer those spreadnecks were overdosing on and causing all those gunshot victims to go wanting). Though come to think of it, if we add gun owner to the list above… more free beds!

 

https://fullfact.org/online/new-protease-inhibitor/

https://twitter.com/sgriffin_lab?lang=en

 

The difference between that and getting COVID is the fact that many chronic conditions are often due to many factors including your family history, environment that you grew up in and currently live in, and they aren't often preventable.

With COVID, people are consciously making a decision to not get the vaccine, so no I don't agree that you can treat every other factor the same way because unlike every other factor, there is such a clear and simple solution and is freely f'ing offered all over the country.