From the vantage point of September, 2026 it might seem like pointless assholism to kick cancer-ridden, senile old Joe Biden when he’s down.
After all, we’ve got a rancid dotard in Trump threatening to nuke Iran in the midst of what John Mearsheimer is calling the greatest geo-strategic disaster in US history, why both with ol’ black-hearted Joe?
The reason is simple.
Until Americans, particularly Democrats reckon with just how vile, stupid, and deadly the last three Democratic presidential administrations have been (yes, America’s neocon foreign policy starts with Bill Clinton blowing up Yugoslavia and turning NATO into an offensive alliance and has continued to warmonger ever since, regardless of which party was in power), we’ll keep getting stuck with more of the same “not quite as bad as the Republicans” bullshit and the end of the republic will only escalate.
There is currently a well funded counter-revolution occurring in the Democratic party in which centrist Dems and the MSM are aligning to destroy anti-genocide candidates like Graham Platner in Maine (got him) and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan (they’re still trying although he’s up in the polls).
If Dem voters don’t belatedly realize that their party establishment leadership is as corrupt as the GOP and actively push to purge them, we will not be able to vote our way out.
Never forget the Iron Law of Oligarchy.
So let’s look at the Delaware liar’s abysmal record as US President.
I’m going to argue that the senile asshole and the people around him actually running the country were responsible for not one, not two, but three mass death events that may or may not meet the legal definition of genocide, but certainly meet the moral one.
We’ll start with COVID.
Somehow Biden’s COVID Policies Were Worse Than Trump’s
An idiot like Trump, who’s openly an anti-science ignoramus could have been expected to bungle the response to a once-in-a-century pandemic like COVID. And of course Trump’s policies were a disaster. I don’t have time or space to litigate that here.
I’m just saying that as awful as Trump was on the issue, Biden managed to be even worse — when competence and sanity were key parts of his campaign pitch.
But Biden explicitly promised a return to best practices, “follow the science” and all that.
Instead we got “take the vax” and “get back to work.”
There was never a correction of the bad science of 2020 to clearly explain to people that COVID was spread via aerosols in the air, was rarely transmissable outdoors, and could be largely contained indoors with good ventilation systems and air quality monitoring.
There was also the huge lie that the vaccine would prevent transmission. That lie fooled a lot of people because many vaccines do prevent transmission (measles, polio, mumps, etc), but not for a corona virus like COVID. It shouldn’t have been a hard sell — people know that there’s no point in making a common cold vaccine because it’s a corona virus and changes too fast. We’ve accepted the need for new flu vaccines every year for the same reason.
But no explanations were forthcoming from the ghouls in the Biden administration. Just quiet announcements that data was going to be restricted2
It was the gaslighting of the Biden era that was the hardest thing to take (as long as his policies didn’t give you COVID that is). Four years of assholes insisting “he’s not senile, he’s got a stutter,” “the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine”, “the IDF is investigating” and all that crap. Was enough to drive a person insane. It certainly strained my relationships with friends and family and cost me at least one decade-long creative partnership.
The injury added to the insult was diverting money for COVID relief and prevention diverted to law enforcement3 and other bullshit.
Both figures are sums of CDC’s own weekly provisional counts of deaths with Covid-19 on the certificate (dataset r8kw-7aab, data as of 27 Aug 2026). 2021 alone — the administration’s first year — killed more Americans than 2020 did.1
The green series ends after 2022: CDC’s excess-death dataset stops at the week ending 16 September 2023 and was never resumed. The gap in the chart is the blackout, drawn to scale.
If Biden Was Out of It, Who Actually Did This?
Funny you should ask.
I happen to think it’s important to lay the blame where it belongs with murderous vermin like Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Obama’s ebola coordinator whose hiring was supposed to signal a return to competence.
Instead he pulled shit like retweeting MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle calling the OSHA vaccine rule “an ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations” which retweet was then cited by The Fifth Circuit as an endorsement when it stayed the rule, and Gorsuch pointed to it when the Supreme Court killed the mandate that January. The chief of staff’s own tweet helped sink the only workplace-safety rule the administration attempted.
Then there was Covid-19 Response Coordinator Jeff Zients, a management consultant and one-time Facebook board member with no public health background, wwho was somehow selected to run the response as a logistics problem for the entire vax-only stretch: the May 2021 unmasking, the Delta summer, the December 2021 rapid-test shortage, the blame-the-unvaccinated presser that December.
Criticized on the way out for rosy predictions of a Covid-free summer and for the test shortage; Public Citizen went after him on global vaccine access. He failed upward to become Biden’s chief of staff in February 2023 with God only knows how many American corpses ground under his wing-tips.
Somehow Zients’ Deputy Response Coordinator Natalie Quillian didn’t save the day, I guess her experience as Deputy Campaign Manager hadn’t really prepared her for handling a pandemic. Go figure.
And who can forget CDC Director Rochelle Walensky who wrote the May 2021 guidance telling vaccinated people to unmask at roughly 35% full vaccination, the statement that vaccinated people don’t carry the virus, the December 2021 isolation cut from ten days to five under airline pressure, and the February 2022 Community Levels metric that turned the map green. A regular magician of mass murder!
And then there’s Zients’ replacement as Covid-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha, who kicked off the “personal risk assessment” era and fobbed off the government’s responsibility to lead a united national pandemic strategy off on individuals left to fend for ourselves.
Jha’s October 2022 National Strategy for Improving Indoor Air Quality is the document that proves they knew what ventilation would take but for reasons that have always baffled me, the chance to do well by doing good (ie it would have been a massive honest graft and payoff opportunity, the kind good government runs on) and funding and leading a national campaign to improve indoor ventilation in schools, hospitals, nursing homes and workplaces….instead he declared the pandemic over while hundreds of thousands died.
And let’s have a special shout-out for the The Biden-Harris transition COVID advisory board: Co-chairs David Kessler, Vivek Murthy, Marcella Nunez-Smith. Members Ezekiel Emanuel, Michael Osterholm, Céline Gounder, Atul Gawande, Luciana Borio, Rick Bright, David Michaels, Julie Morita, Loyce Pace, Eric Goosby, Jill Jim, Jane Hopkins.
Special plaudits to board members David Michaels and Ezekiel Emanuel (older brother of disgraced ex-Chicago Mayor Rahm and UFC and WWE owner Ari Emanuel).
Michaels, an epidemiologist and Obama’s head of OSHA for eight years, who publicly called for an emergency OSHA standard covering inhalation hazards but was awful quiet when Biden (or someone not senile acting on his behalf) killed his own OSHA’s proposed rule.
Emanuel joined five other former transition COVID advisory board members in publishing three JAMA viewpoints calling for a “new normal” of life with COVID, explicitly rejecting elimination, just as Omicron peaked.
Dr. Emanuel boldly said “we’re not going to defeat the coronavirus. It’s here to stay.”
The White House distanced itself from the papers — and then adopted the posture seven weeks later with the Community Levels change.
But never fear, Zeke got his back when he was very early to distance himself from the Biden administration’s disastrous COVID policy. Family trait of the Emanuels to be on both sides of every issue.
Follow and support my work at NatWilsonTurner.com on Substack.
Notes
1. Four ways to count the dead
“Excess deaths” means different things depending on the baseline, and the answers differ by a factor of two.
| Measure | 2021 | 2022 | Baseline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recorded Covid deaths CDC provisional counts, r8kw-7aab |
463,267 | 246,297 | None — a direct count of death certificates. |
| CDC excess deaths, all causes CDC xkkf-xrst, summed by year |
530,876 | 331,469 | Observed deaths minus the average expected from prior years. |
| Same, conservative version observed minus the upper bound of expected |
443,697 | 232,223 | The cautious read of the same CDC data — the floor. |
| Academic pandemic baseline Paglino & Stokes et al., Science Advances |
538,708 | — | County-level model, March-to-February years. Year one was 620,872. |
| Peer-country gap Bor et al., JAMA Health Forum |
1,098,808 | 820,396 | Deaths that wouldn’t have happened at the death rates of 21 peer countries. Only partly Covid. |
These measure different things and are not additive. Excess deaths include overdoses, missed screenings and untreated disease — everything a wrecked health system does to people, not only the virus. ↩
2. The order in which the counting stopped
| 1 May 2021 | CDC stops investigating breakthrough infections that don’t end in hospitalization or death. Everything milder goes uncounted — including the data that could have tested the claim that the vaccinated weren’t spreading it. |
| 20 Feb 2022 | The Times reports the CDC is withholding most of the data it collects — booster effectiveness for adults 18 to 49, hospitalizations by age, race and vaccination status, wastewater. The stated reason was fear the numbers would be misinterpreted. |
| 25 Feb 2022 | “Community Levels” replace community transmission, four days before the State of the Union. The threshold for a green county moves from under 10 weekly cases per 100,000 to as many as 200. Most of the map turns green overnight and the mask recommendations lapse with it. |
| Spring 2022 | Free testing winds down and reported cases detach from wastewater readings. From here the case count measures who can still get a test, not who is sick. |
| 18 Sep 2022 | Biden, on 60 Minutes at the Detroit Auto Show: “The pandemic is over.” The line complicated his own administration’s pending request for Covid funding. |
| 11 May 2023 | The public health emergency ends and the authority to collect goes with it. CDC stops reporting new cases nationally, loses the power to compel labs to report results, and electronic reporting of negative tests ends. Hospital reporting drops from daily to weekly. |
| 16 Sep 2023 | The last week of data in CDC’s excess-death dataset. The tracker simply stops, and was never resumed — which is why the chart above has nothing to show after 2022. |
| 30 Apr 2024 | Federal hospital reporting requirements expire and reporting goes voluntary. CMS reinstated mandatory reporting for Covid, flu and RSV on 1 November 2024. |
No single order shut this off. It went piece by piece over three years, each removal defensible on its own, the sum of them leaving the country unable to say what was happening to it. ↩
3. The Covid money that went to the police
This one isn’t an inference. The administration campaigned on it in public, and the spending was tallied by reporters.
| 13 May 2022 | Biden asks cities to spend more relief money on police. A Rose Garden event and a fact sheet urging state and local leaders to “deploy as many dollars as possible before the summer months.” By then $10 billion of American Rescue Plan money was committed to public safety, $6.5 billion of it from State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds across 300-plus communities — which the White House itself called one of the largest single-year federal commitments to state and local law enforcement on record. |
| 7 Sep 2022 | The Marshall Project tallies where it landed. Of $101 billion allocated by governments through the first quarter of 2022, $52.6 billion was booked as “revenue replacement” — and roughly half of that, an estimated $26.3 billion, went to criminal justice. The LAPD took over $300 million for officer salaries; Alabama put $400 million toward two new prisons. Community violence intervention, the program Biden kept naming, got $187 million — under 1 percent. The figure is a keyword tally of vague Treasury filings, so treat it as an estimate rather than an audit. More on the same flow: The Appeal, EPIC on relief money buying police surveillance tech, Prism. |
spud
Nat Wilson Turner:
so so so well said! you gotta name names if we are to ever recover, which is doubtful1
(yes, America’s neocon foreign policy starts with Bill Clinton blowing up Yugoslavia and turning NATO into an offensive alliance and has continued to warmonger ever since, regardless of which party was in power)
if clintons and bidens people, well, actually its all traceable back to clinton, were not in government, drunk with immunity, they would be in corporations drunk with limited liability.
pretending things just happen, and we need to fix them, is a distraction to cover up those who did it, and why.
in the end almost every time, names do get named and why they did it, and if some are still alive, its jail time.
try as hard as they can to bury the names, it still comes back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qsow_i13WpI&t=19s
he knew what he was doing.
Feral Finster
“Until Americans, particularly Democrats reckon with just how vile, stupid, and deadly the last three Democratic presidential administrations have been (yes, America’s neocon foreign policy starts with Bill Clinton blowing up Yugoslavia and turning NATO into an offensive alliance and has continued to warmonger ever since, regardless of which party was in power), we’ll keep getting stuck with more of the same “not quite as bad as the Republicans” bullshit and the end of the republic will only escalate.”
You realize that this is entirely intentional on the part of Team D.
To give one example, a few months ago, they were bewailing the MoU with Iran (which the United States never had the slightest intent to honor) and screaming that Trump was insufficiently aggressive.
Now they are doing their damnedest to destroy Team D nominees deemed insufficiently slavish towards Israel.
There is a reason so many neocon luminaries seamlessly shifted their allegiances towards Team D. Team D is just Team R for Front Row Kids, Team R, but with pronouns.
We can hear the Team D nuthangers shout:
“But pronounds, humans! Pronouns!”
Nat Wilson Turner
Hell you could really go back to Carter…the first neo-con, it was the “Carter Doctrine” that declared we owned the Persian Gulf….then there’s LBJ…and JFK….and Truman….and FDR…..and Wilson…yikes.
bruce wilder
The authoritarian escalations undertaken by each successive Democratic Administration should be more widely noted.
Claiming that the vaccines prevented transmission was needed for Bill Gates’s vision of “vaccine passports” as well as the attempts to coerce people into accepting vaccination.
Forcing any medical treatment or procedure on someone is such an extreme violation of individual autonomy you’d think it would be recognized as such by Dems constantly bleating about the danger of “fascism”. But, no.
Genocide, torture, secret courts, secret foreign policy, pointless perpetual war— it is all a package deal, a plank in the Democrat’s platform nearly identical to the Republicans.
StewartM
Please. The vaccine WOULD HAVE STOPPED TRANSMISSION if there wasn’t vaccine resistance. No vaccine, nor treatment, works if the pathogen is allowed to continue circulating to evolve defenses against it. That’s what happened. That includes the vaccines which you admit “worked”, they worked because we mandated mass participation.
You cannot have effective health policy if everything is voluntary. Cannot. Be. Done.
I’ll put this down as yet another Trump apologist post, even though he and RFK is making things worse now.
ilpalazzo
Re Vile Biden, didn’t he let some covid assistance payments rule lapse instead of prolonging it right after taking administration?
different clue
The one most valuable thing that Lambert Strether in particular over at Naked Capitalism did was to spend 2-3 years tracking every aspect of Covid and the Covid-response/ Covid-antiresponse as best he could, which was pretty good. His work inspired some smart and knowledgeable commenters over there to add their own high-value speculations and observations and knowledge.
The Strether Covid-tracking reports are easy enough to find. But the comments are randomly sprinkled through all the millions of words over at NaCap.
A better Blog-Citizen with more time and energy than me would spend the hundreds of hours needed to copy-paste every single Strether posting on Covid and every single findable comment on Covid into one huge long-running ” near-endless Covid scroll” and offer it here in one unbroken scroll, in case Ian Welsh were to care to host and post it here.
different clue
Here is a Belle of the Ranch video tangentially addressing certain aspects of the “voting our way out of this” issue. It begins by describing a letter Senator Slotkin sent to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Kaine about ” Federal soldiers at or around polling places”.
Kaine’s response sure seems to be that since the FedGov has zero legal role in handling elections, there is probably zero chance that Federal soldiers would show up to do that.
I know it has long been de rigeur for the politically fashion-forward left to be anti-military, anti-soldier, etc. But it sure looks like the military itself intends to be a passive obstructive barrier against TrumpCo Incorporated trying to steal the upcoming elections by anti voter aggression at polling places.
Belle then goes on to address the possibility of PapaDoc Trump sending his TonTon ICEmacoutes to aggressionize and terrorise wannabe-voters at polling places. She seems to consider this a borderline-real but very small possibility.
Here is the title and link.
Let’s talk about Trump’s troops at polling stations….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Psm63PGqOXQ
bruce wilder
“The vaccine WOULD HAVE STOPPED TRANSMISSION if there wasn’t vaccine resistance.”
A counterfactual with no actual fact to support it.
The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines were pretty good at reducing the severity of disease once infected, but they were not terribly good at preventing infection altogether and such effectiveness as they did achieve, peaked early after a booster injection and faded fairly rapidly, in a matter of weeks. Too fast a fade and once infected, the vaccinated were contagious.
Israel achieved very high rates of vaccination early on and the rates on infection among the vaccinated reported then should have made it obvious that the COVID-19 vaccines were not capable of stopping transmission altogether.
Encouraged to be overconfident about their partial and rapidly fading immunity to infection by being granted their special privilege to travel and gallivant, the vaccinated were, by their sheer numbers, frequent vectors of continued transmission in the U.S.
Biden himself infamously lied about the vaccines granting immunity to infection.
Moreover, the vaccinated were the most likely incubators or filters of variants, providing as they did an environment against which variants could test fitness to overcome vaccine immunity.
The eagerness with which self-regarding idealists can come with faulty rationales to bully and coerce others never ceases to amaze me.
Nat Wilson Turner
@Stewart M You are right about one thing, refusal to do things right did lead to mutation, which did make the vaxxes even less effective. But being vaccinated by itself did not stop spread.
And Biden’s terrible COVID messaging and even worse practices only fanned the flames of resistance to the vaccine and anything else having to do with the government’s approach to COVID. It was clear that what we were told early on — droplets, six feet of distance, plexiglass shields, wash your groceries — was stupid but because no one from the CDC or the administration ever came forward and told people how science’s understanding of the disease had evolved since the first weeks of the pandemic, people just stopped believing anything the government said.
But on the whole, you’ve got it backwards. These vaccines were never capable of stopping transmission — not at 50% uptake, not at 100%. That isn’t a claim about resistance, it’s about the route of administration.
An intramuscular shot produces systemic IgG, which is why it prevented severe disease so well. It does not produce mucosal IgA in the upper airway, which is what you’d need to stop someone catching and shedding a respiratory virus. Akiko Iwasaki and Eric Topol — nobody’s idea of vaccine skeptics — laid this out in Science Immunology and called the shots “leaky” for exactly that reason. It’s why they spent 2022 pleading for a nasal vaccine.
The data matched the mechanism. Imperial College and UKHSA found fully vaccinated people with breakthrough Delta infections had the same peak viral load as the unvaccinated, and passed it to household contacts at 25% versus 23% for unvaccinated index cases — statistically indistinguishable.
In the NEJM, Eyre’s study of 146,000 traced contacts found the transmission benefit was already smaller for Delta than for Alpha, and faded within months.
Rochelle Walensky said it on CNN in August 2021: “They continue to work well for Delta, with regard to severe illness and death — they prevent it. But what they can’t do anymore is prevent transmission.”
And it was never tested. Pfizer’s and Moderna’s Phase 3 endpoint was symptomatic disease. Transmission was not an endpoint, and the FDA’s own briefing document said further study would be needed to assess it.
Smallpox and measles were eliminable because those vaccines block infection and those viruses have no animal reservoir. SARS-CoV-2 established itself in white-tailed deer — over 100 separate spillovers from humans, sustained deer-to-deer spread, and documented spillback to people (via Nature).
The vaccines did the thing they could do: they cut death, substantially. The mandates were sold on a thing they were never able to do.
Nat Wilson Turner
@different clue I wrote this post by hand and then used Claude AI to scrape Lambert’s posts for supporting links, facts, etc. I may not believe in their business model and I don’t care for AI slop, but it’s a damn good research tool
Nat Wilson Turner
@ilpalazzo yes he did and I linked to a few examples of that in the post I believe.
different clue
@ Nat Wilson Turner,
Thank you for that.
If I had the energy and commitment, I would still copy-paste every single word of Strether’s reports and also the findable comments and offer it here in case Ian Welsh wanted to run the whole thing. They contain so much aggregately-building information that people could benefit from a sense of the building info-patterns as well as the info itself. But unfortunately, I am not the patient diligent iron-butt hero to do it. Maybe when I am retired, if NaCap or even the internet itself still exists by then.
Not just the CDC tried to suppress the knowledge of micro-to-nano droplet aerosol spread. The WHO very actively and maliciously tried to suppress it, censor and keep it off all its own websites, etc. It was certain truth-in-science type people who kept writing about it on their own twitter spaces which dragged it out from under the Dropcloth of Coverup under which CDC and esPECially WHO kept trying to keep it hidden.
I cherish the cynical conspiracy theory that Gebreyesus at WHO did his hardest to prevent proper alarm over the spreading Covid so he could turn it into an unstoppable pandemic and when he was satisfied that it was finally beyond stopping, he knew it was safe to call it a pandemic once calling it one could no longer delay or deny his agenda of turning it into one. Why? Quite possibly to give China a head start in the Global Hegemony race between a rising China and a falling US.
different clue
Of course there was another reason for all the malicious actions taken to further and permanentize Covid’s spread. And that would be Operation Long Jackpot.
different clue
Now . . . here is some evidence to indicate that the Republicanfederates are afraid that voting can indeed vote our way out of this, at least maybe.
Could they be right?
Just to make sure, they don’t want to take any chances.
‘Republicans f–ked us’: Texas Democrats furious over polling-place closures
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1w5ddvl/republicans_fked_us_texas_democrats_furious_over/
Now . . . one would hope that Texas Texans of all parties or no party at all are equally furious, just on general principles.
spud
Nat Wilson Turner:
you are certainly correct about carter, a terrible human being, and a lousy president. who was really the starting point for neo-liberalism.
but the others, i am not carrying any water for them on this subject, but show me a country that is constantly in its history at peace. and for the size and power on america, prior to bill clinton, we acted pretty much as most large powers do, throw their weight around.
however, it was bill clinton that super charged american warring and arrogance.
———-
Bill Clinton’s regime change policies, particularly in the Balkans and interventions in places like Haiti, contributed to ongoing military engagements and criticisms of U.S. foreign policy. However, the effectiveness of such interventions has been widely debated, with many scholars arguing that they often fail to achieve their intended goals.
Cato Institute washdiplomat.com
Bill Clinton’s foreign policy included several interventions aimed at regime change, particularly in the Balkans and Haiti. These actions were part of a broader strategy to promote democracy and stability in regions experiencing conflict.
Key Interventions
Balkans: Clinton’s administration intervened in the Yugoslav Wars, notably through NATO’s bombing campaign in Kosovo in 1999, aimed at stopping ethnic cleansing.
Haiti: The U.S. intervened in Haiti in 1994 to restore the democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide after a military coup.
Criticism and Consequences
Despite these interventions, Clinton’s regime change policies faced significant criticism:
Effectiveness: Many scholars argue that these interventions often failed to achieve their intended goals, leading to ongoing instability rather than lasting peace.
Endless Engagements: The military engagements initiated during Clinton’s presidency contributed to a pattern of U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts, which some critics label as “endless wars.”
Research indicates that regime change operations frequently do not succeed as planned. The historical record shows that such interventions can lead to unintended consequences, including prolonged conflict and instability in the affected regions.
Clinton’s approach to regime change, while aimed at promoting democracy, has been linked to ongoing military engagements and debates about the effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy. The legacy of these interventions continues to influence discussions on American military involvement abroad.
Wikipedia washdiplomat.com
Nat Wilson Turner
Absolutely Clinton is when the neo-cons took over so he’s a whole new era of awful. It’s just when I got to thinking about the prior Dem administrations…JFC they’ve never been good, except maybe JFK was going to try to be and he got got for it (maybe).
mago
Jesús. It’s over now until the next time. Those defending the Covid vaccine scam should visit the Acme Head Extraction website, which link I don’t have, and pull their heads from the nether regions.
It’s 2026. Monsters rule, yet they’re those still arguing in support of aged propaganda and obvious bullshit. Wake up and get a clue. The coffee’s percolating.
Anthony Noel
I’d also add that during the VP debate Kamala Harris said she’d not take any vaccine that Trump put forward. Yes she also said if Dr. Faucci told her to take it she would, but she knew full well how modern media works, and that the majority of people would only see a headline saying, basically, democrats don’t take the vaccine unless we win and tell you to.
ChrisK
Welp when Stewart M posted what he did I knew the anti vaxers would come out in force. I can say this, I got all the vaccines when they came out. My brother didn’t, he got COVID, we live in the same house, I did not get COVID. The vaccine certainly worked for me.
Nat Wilson Turner
@ChrisK
You’re not much of a reading comprehender, are you?
I’m the furthest thing from an anti-vaxxer. I already got my flu vaccine this year and have gotten every version of the COVID vaccine that’s been released. Also I’m upset and concerned that they don’t have a new COVID vaccine ready already this year.
We are critiquing the way the vaccine was presented — it does NOT prevent transmission, what is DOES is reduce severity of symptoms.
I’m happy to have that last part but people were lied to and told it would do the first part which caused people to become cynical and doubt the claims and evidence about what the vax was good for.
Now look at the informational climate. I’m far more likely to hear people spreading conspiracy theories about the vax than any kind of sensible discussion about it’s pro’s and cons and the need for seasonal updates to match the transmissions.
Honestly do you think it was good science to stop data collection and reporting on excess deaths, COVID transmission etc? Those were all moves made by the Biden administration that honestly are completely consistent with the kind of nonsense coming from RFK, Jr in the Trump admin.
Biden’s lies and cover ups (and mass casualties) led directly to the public being primed for RFK’s nonsense.
Rick
Thanks for the post, a great roundup. I read all of Lambert’s updates at the time, and had my own web site that tracked my state’s situation until the state shut off the data on May 3rd, 2023.
Also, though, the comments about Democrats. Many articles have been written about “dealing with family and friends who are Trump supporters”. I have the same problem with Democrats. People simply will not consider the possibility the whole crew has bad policies.
Does it boil down to appearances? Seems that many support Trump for the way he speaks and persona he projects. I have seen the same effect on the Democratic side, especially with Obama, Clinton, and Carter.
Maybe people just don’t notice or care about what policies elected politicians pursue. Might be for the best since there’s little difference between the parties anyway.
different clue
When flu season resumes and its time for the annual flu shot, I will go ahead and get it same as always . . . IF it is the classical flu vaccine.
If it is one of those newfangled MRNA para-vaccinoids that I am hearing about, I will opt out ( if we are going to be allowed to do that at work as long as we ALways always ALWAYS wear a mask.
Am I a victim of the TrumpoBiden disinformation climate we all swam in? Perhaps.
” If its a classical vaccine, I remain keen. It its Boeing, I’m not going”.
ChrisK
@Nat Wilson Turner, for fuck sake I wasn’t referencing you. I was referencing some of the commenters on this thread. I guess you missed the part where I lived in the same house with someone who got it but I didn’t.
“Honestly do you think it was good science to stop data collection and reporting on excess deaths, COVID transmission etc? ”
Nothing in the comment I made would suggest I think it’s good science to stop data collection.
Nat Wilson Turner
Hear! Hear! I’ve been nearly exiled from my household and extended family for being critical of the Democrats over and over again. Yes Trumpers are obnoxious but there are very few in my life. BlueAnon on the other hand….
Nat Wilson Turner
Apologies, but who are the anti-vaxxers, if you’re going to throw insults, name fucking names. I haven’t seen any antivaxer comments.
different clue
@ChrisK,
There is the possibility that you also “got” Covid but since you got the mRNA para vaccinoid, your case of Covid, if you got one, stayed asymptomatic. If so, you would have been a potential spreader if you were not suitably and properly masked up.
Its just a possibility, though.
When I got the two Modernas and then a Pfizer, I had a feeling that it was only to keep me from getting ” as sick” as if un-vaccinoided. At my age and certain health conditions, I chose to run the risk of vaccinoided rather than not. I haven’t gotten any booster vaccinoids since. I sometimes think of bestirring myself to get the neoclassical semi-vacCINE called Novavax. Maybe maybe . . .
different clue
One of the unique talents of the Covid virus is its ability to find and kill all the particular type of T-cells involved in counter-cancer activity within the body.
Since millions of people got Covid but seemingly recovered, if they are all walking around with zero Cancer Killer T-cells in their body, millions of them should be getting cancer within the next ten years or so. That’s just a hypothesis so far, to be sure. But I kind of expect it.
Just some more Delayed Onset Jackpot, I guess.
different clue
As America slow-rolls down the long staircase to possible oblivion, I can see that people who went from Senior Bush to Clinton to Junior Bush to Obama can see little difference between Parties and Outcomes.
Unfortunately, election 2024 was a poor time to be “plague on both their houses”. I took the election as a choice of more slow-grinding Brezhnevian Stagnation versus hyperspeed Yeltsinian Burndown , in terms of the outcome to be recieved.
But after a term of Yeltsinian Burdown, I suspect that ” Return to Normalcy!” may not be sufficient. ( And actually not possible either). ” What rough Warren Harding slouches toward Washington waiting to be born?” People may want Deep and Long Revenge. I know I will, and that’s just for starters.
Nat Wilson Turner
I think once a Republic is in its death throes like this, we will just witness the system break down further and various strong men arise — Marius to Sulla to the First Triumvirate to Caesar to the Second Triumvirate to Augustus to Tiberius to Caligula….
Feral Finster
@NWT:
“I think once a Republic is in its death throes like this, we will just witness the system break down further and various strong men arise — Marius to Sulla to the First Triumvirate to Caesar to the Second Triumvirate to Augustus to Tiberius to Caligula….”
That much is obvious, and it doesn’t matter who the Populares or the Optimates put forth for the consulate.
Each side will use any means, legal or extralegal to hand, to destroy the other side before the other side can use those means to destroy them.
Although we seem to have gotten a Caligula before the Republic even had a chance to be replaced. Of course, the Roman Empire kept up a lot of republican trappings, long after the republic was a dead letter.
Nat Wilson Turner
@Feral Fenster I think we’ve been an Empire since 1946 and the formation of the CIA. The trappings held up for a while but inverted totalinarianism is the best description for our current state. Trump is just the mask off moment and maybe a herald of civil conflict. God I hope not.
Jan Wiklund
What you say may well be true – but it seems that the US numbers for excess deaths don’t diverge from most other countries, see https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
Oakchair
According to blood antibody tests Covid was world wide by at least late 2019(1)(2). Mortality rates didn’t start increasing until around 4/2020 and in many countries they didn’t start increasing till 2021. 2021 had more deaths than 2020 and 2022 had a similar amount of deaths. The age of people dying in 2021 and 2022 was younger than 2020 where the average age of those dying was around 80.
If we start with the conclusion that Covid is entirely responsible we’d have to do some mental gymnastics to explain what happened. If we started with the evidence we’d ask ourselves what happened around 4/2020 and 2021 that could explain what happened.
Around 4/2020 the the use of antibiotics fell off a cliff. In the only study on the topic 83% of people who died with Covid in 2020 had untreated bacterial pneumonia(3).
That combined with panic, social isolation, staying inside (avoiding the sun, exercise and gorging on junk food in front of a TV), improper ventilator use, increase use of opioids and benzos for palliative care and mass fear would be enough to explain almost all the increased mortality in 2020.
Everyone knows what happen in 2021.
Go read Pfizer’s clinical trial. Read both the 2 and 6 month releases. Specifically look at how much grade 3, 4, 5 and serious adverse events are increased by the vaccine(4)(5). Grade 3 events are defined as preventing someone from doing every day tasks. Grade 4 and 5 are and Serious events are defined as life threatening.
After doing that read the paper link at (6)
(1) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-020-05926-8
(2) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11257073/
(3) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10172968/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10172968/
(4) https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577
(5) https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa2110345
(6) https://correlation-canada.org/covid-19-vaccine-associated-mortality-in-the-southern-hemisphere/
Oakchair
The vaccine WOULD HAVE STOPPED TRANSMISSION if there wasn’t vaccine resistance
—–
Instead of starting with the conclusion let’s start with the evidence.
Randomized studies: The 2-6 month randomized studies claimed 90% effectiveness. In order to make this claim they cherry picked by 1) excluding the first 6 weeks of data 2) excluding more people in the vaccine group than the total number of people with a covid infection at 2 months 3) excluded 80% of people with infectious symptoms 4) tested people with infectious symptoms in the placebo group at higher rates. The randomized studies provide only evidence of corruption, junk science and fraud. No evidence of effectiveness.
Prospective studies:
8 have been down. They all show the vaccine increases Covid infections in a dose dependent manner(1).
The first of these studies which was performed by the Cleveland clinical health system on over 50,000 of people found:
a 1.91, 2.22, 2.69 and 2.94 increased rate of covid infections respectively for those who received 1, 2, 3 and 3+ covid vaccinations compared to 0 vaccinations (1).
Observational studies:
“In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases”
(1) https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/breaking-eighth-study-confirms-mrna
(2) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/
Nat Wilson Turner
@Jan Wiklund I’d argue that the US set the tone for much of the world’s response and screwed it up for everybody.
anon
Thank you for not forgetting the millions of people who died or continue to suffer from the effects of Covid-19. I still hear and read about the victims of 9/11 daily but the genocide that took place during Covid-19 has largely been forgotten about by the media and public. It is shameful.
bruce wilder
I spent roughly 30-45 minutes in a shopping mall storm shelter as a tornado-bearing storm front passed. Lots of people, high humidity, poor ventilation. This morning I woke up with a mild, dry cough. It would be interesting to know what was being passed around.