I got an email today from a reader asking about this New York Times doozy. My old friend David Leonhardt is once again linking how counties voted for Donald Trump with their rates of Covid deaths.
Here was my answer.
This drives me nuts. Looking at the way counties voted tells you NOTHING about who is dying of Covid in them and/or whether or not those people were vaccinated and/or had other comorbidities. To be specific - many of those super-red Trump counties are probably rural Southern counties - they are poor and generally unhealthy - and even their Democratic voters are likely to be African-Americans, who unfortunately have the highest rates of morbid obesity of any demographic group. Those folks are at risk, vaccinated or not. David knows this, and he knows he's playing with the numbers.
If the vaccines worked, 2021 and this winter would have looked VERY different - not just in the United States, but in Europe.
There’s something in it for everyone to hate - I’m racist because I mention rates of obesity for black people! I’m a northern liberal (Jew) because I point out that rural Southern counties are “generally unhealthy”! - but the truth is what it is.
Unfortunately, the United States has become a deeply unhealthy society, and all the money we spend on healthcare seems to be making matters WORSE not better.
This chart tracks health-care spending per-person by country vs. life expectancy through 2018. The United States is an outlier in the worst possible way. We spend more than TWICE as much as most other countries, but we die on average about five years sooner. And the numbers have only gotten worse since 2018, thanks to the opioid crisis and now Covid.
The first step to fixing reality is acknowledging it.
I agree except it's not really obsession and anger; it's fear. And it's not really directed at Trump; it's directed at the people who dared to vote for someone other than the puppet they anointed.
It's more likely opposition to rampant silliness: transwomen are women; everything is racist; climate change is killing us; Fauci is God; Biden is moderate & bi-partisan; China isn't a threat; de-fund the police; "mostly peaceful protests."
The list goes on.
If anything good comes from the pandemic it's that rational people realize we must pay attention to the lunatics that spew this nonsense because those idiots are dangerous if left unchecked.
And who is the VICE president and the LIEUTENANT governor.
I am certain that Joe Biden would step down by the end of this year--after the mid-term elections--but the VICE president is even more ridiculous, so we're stuck with the demented fool.
It seems your Governor is more important than your President. However even our Governor’s can’t seem to stop illegal immigration, however I heard they could if they wanted to? Alex is so spot on. The virus gonna virus, no matter what state it is!
Do you know when I think about Trump? When the obsessed in the media bring him up! If they would not, Trump never would cross my mind. What is it with them??? Does he just generate that many clicks?
That may have something to do with promoting Joy Reid and her vile racism that she spews. The network cant hide from that even if its only an hour a day.
Perhaps. And perhaps a second year into this abysmal administration and there is less to report about a man who's been almost viciously silenced, unless there's something like yesterday's revelation that he and his children are being compelled to testify. I think that MSM is so busy obfuscating for Joementia that unless there is some Trump news, they're too busy.
look at the cnn website. Trump always has at least one headline (4 articles on the main site right now). He's nowhere to be found on fox. must be the clicks - why else would they keep giving him attention?
Durham has been working on this for years and has come up with NOTHING. I will believe it when I seen it. His resurfacing, IMO, is just theater and distraction.
My hope is that his careful and in depth investigation will yield an airtight, prosecutable case. But who knows?!? No one in DC ever seems to be held accountable for anything.
Unfortunately Trump is very much the swamp, dropped bombs on the Middle East as soon as he was elected in 2016, became a worse neocon than G. Bush and Obama. He talked tough before Nov. 2016, as he's doing in 2022, but once elected, became the opposite of what we voted for. He made Jared de facto president. Jared accepted a $250 million credit line from Soros in 2015. Ivanka became a Davos Young Global Leader in 2015. Trump merged his fundraising with the RNC in a for profit platform called WinRed. Jared runs and staffs all Trump groups and PACs. America First groups are filled with Jared's open borders, globalist cronies.
How do you find the list of alumi, a complete list I mean. I've seen some but I haven't found anything complete. For example, Canada's Trudeau is said to be a graduate but it doesn't look like it although he is a member of the WEF.
Justin attends Davos but wasn't crowned a Young Global Leader. Possibly because never did much before age 40. Per NY Times, he never had to earn a living because his grandfather made a fortune in fossil fuels. He has "a bachelor’s degree from McGill University and a teaching degree from the University of British Columbia, but despite his pedigree and inherited wealth, when he reached adulthood his life was remarkably unremarkable. He traveled the world and smoked marijuana and snowboarded and worked as a bouncer at bars, eventually ending up teaching high school in Vancouver." Pierre died in 2000. In 2008 Justin ran for parliament in a working class area of Montreal and won. At the age of 40 in 2011, that was the only thing of consequence he'd done.
From what you've written, it's obvious why Trudeau didn't make it to 'young global leader'. I read somewhere that you had to be accepted into the program. He wasn't, most likely as you say, not much in the way of accomplishments and I'll bet not much in the way of brains. Someone thought he'd be a good trophy for the Liberals after they lost the 2008 election and the rest is history.
You're right. An accurate list must be compiled and saved before they can scurry out of the light. Once they know enough of us are on to them to make a difference, the internet will be scrubbed.
They're following their programming. They were told Orange Man Bad as are any who voted for him, so he is, and we are.They were told to mask and vax everyone and hide from virus behind their laptops, so they do. These are not rational, but highly suggestible people. 🤪
Reposting from another stack to hear views: How does one counter the ‘but variants’ narrative? I’ve heard from so many believers that everything - masks, lockdowns, vaccines would have worked but for variants.
When I point out that vaccine evading variants can only exist if there’s a vaccine - I get blank looks
At the beginning of the pandemic, I remember hearing that we can't vaccinate ourselves out of a pandemic because vaccines essentially cause the virus to mutate.
You know, I remember someone telling me way back that the pharmaceutical companies regretted not trying to get a patent on Aspirin. Imagine the money they could have made on that. Everybody should be able to make money, this is America after all. But, I gotta say, if I get a hang nail, I’m popping an aspirin.
Actually covid, like other corona viruses that ordinarily cause the common cold(along with rhino viruses and adenoviruses) naturally mutate. Which is why we get colds every year instead of having immunity to the viruses that caused colds previous years.
This is why covid’s mutation could be expected. And, you’re right. Therapeutics and mask wearing only by vulnerable people would have been a much better response, with herd immunity naturally developing among otherwise healthy people (not obese, eat healthy, no chronic pulmonary or immune issues).
Although just last night I read — or tried to read because the details were over my head — an article that Omicron could well be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The Dutch scientist, Geert VB, explains in how it could evolve in highly vaccinated groups to cause considerable harm to the vaccinated. He showed that the idea of “more infectious, less virulent” is a myth, in other words.
(And as most here know, this is the man who predicted the variants in the first place and warned about using a nonsterilising “vaccine” in the middle of a pandemic.)
It looks like the triple jabbed have such a weakened immune system that even if omicron is mild it will take some of them out. My father in law was a horribly ill man for many years from a lifetime of smoking and drinking. we often said if he had stayed healthy he would have lived to 120, but three years ago a cold finally caused the pneumonia that ended his life. So I think of his situation with some of these people now.
If you have a single stranded RNA virus there will be variants. They mutate like crazy and once in a while one of the mutations really takes off. With a DNA virus there is built in error checking during replication and less variants. This is why a vaccine only strategy was destined to fail - any vaccine will likely be out of date by the time it's released.
My question is if the masks don’t work because of the Omicron variant, why would they have worked for the previous incarnations? It’s the same virus isn’t it? Did it reduce itself in size to slip through the cloth masks where the other variants were too big to slip through? I can never get an answer.
What the dependent media need to realize is that we are not 4-year-olds and we're capable of understanding a certain amount of nuance.
Everything on masks I've read says they're between not working and working a little bit. Then there are a bunch of factors. How long are You sitting in air with an infected person essentially filling the room up with virus. Does this person have symptoms and a high viral load? So it's really a spectrum of infection. The way the dependent media talks to us it's as if we just learned arithmetic.
My argument was masks has always been they wouldn't even be in the top 10 for closing the pandemic. In front of them you would have all the nutraceuticals and pharma drugs that can be used as prophylactics. You would have serious masks.... Like the shit they wear in labs. You would have things like adding humidity to the air. Better ventilation. These masks are about signaling you are easy to control. They are about signaling fear. They are about saying we are in a pandemic. If I was truly concerned about getting Corona they're about the least effective thing you can do.
My son is a PhD engineer/physicist who tested the masks for CO2. The OSHA legal limit is 5000 ppm over 6 hours. 15 minutes in a mask gives you almost 29,000 ppm of CO2. He presented it to his employers (a national lab) and they were dumbfounded yet dismissive.
Apparently something about the viral load being higher and therefore harder for the masks to stop - or something like that. In other words - its more contagious so a mask can't stop it.
My question is : How do you know the masks stopped ANY virus? The early versions were less contagious and therefore BY DEFINITION spread less - and therefore you think masks worked?
By this time their brains are shorted and they default to "so many countries can't be wrong"
The story about the ineffectiveness of cloth masks coincided with the rise of Omicron. The variant has nothing to do with the ineffectiveness. How the press can be so clueless is normal.
How would a variant get caught by a cloth mask? Distance and masking is based on the fomites & droplets BS, which was never how this this (most, if not all) respiratory virus spreads. Aerosolized virus hangs around indoors for weeks, evading masks and distancing. Just like smoke.
I would reply the same way I replied since the clinical trials were available. There was no proof in the clinical trials that they worked on the original variance. 95% effective. At what? Reducing death? Stopping transmission? Preventing infection? Nope none of these were endpoints. I know it's crazy and ridiculous but it's true. It was 95% effective supposedly at reducing symptoms. And then you get into the math they used which I'm sure Alex has covered and some other people... I think it's Peter doshi in the British medical journal that wrote a great article on this very early.
Now unproven. Not proven that it doesn't work... But not proven that it does with those endpoints. So that's where we started. Essentially this 95% effective thing was a press release. And we still don't have all the data.
And as the vaccine rolled out it started failing. so in I believe May the CDC just stopped reporting most of the breakthrough cases that they were not looking for to begin with. And so it went off the rails very fast.
The argument that variants ruined this is just a bad one. First of all did they not know that viruses mutate? I know that. I'm not a virologist. It's like their argument is there was airtight evidence it worked on the original variant (there wasn't) But then this virus did something really weird we've never seen before. It changed. And that ruined it. That's a heaping bowl of lame BS with three teaspoons of granulated BS on top of it.
With viruses, and ESPECIALLY with RNA viruses, there are always variants. That these strategies "would have worked" was wrong from the start. And as someone else here said, that's why the focus should have been on therapeutics to parts of the virus that were more conserved. (Certain parts of a virus are very mutable (spike), and other parts are not, (otherwise you have a broken virus.))
Were they stupid or evil? Or maybe both? I lost a sibling who was denied early treatment. I treated myself with OTC stuff since I could not get Ivermectin or HCQ. I am very angry and frustrated about the failures (possibly intentional failures) of our "establishment".
Exactly. I looked at that and thought, now change that chart to age, with blue being 18 - 29… red 65+ and the graph will look the same, but at least on something that is based in science rather than poly-sci. But we don’t go by science anymore, just Science!™️
Yep, ever since Americans followed the CDC recommended food pyramid, we have become an obese nation. Thank goodness we have the CDC and all their guidance, otherwise we would be dead sooner.
Yes, and remember that the nutritional information on the packaging has that FDA garbage baked in underneath all the percentages as well. I've come to the point that, if a "food" has a nutritional label on it at all, it might not be not good for me!
FDA is responsible for the food pyramid but is there any difference? They’re just as corrupt and stupid as CDC and you’re 💯 percent right that the food guidelines have done decades of damage. A conspiracy theorist might think that our bureaucrats want us sick and dying. Until we reduce the size and scope of government, none of us are safe.
It's almost like a for-profit medical system contributes to ill health--almost. (And no I'm not for single-payer in this country, because they will not curtail the profits. They will simply bankrupt the entire country to keep one small group of people wealthy and nothing will improve for patients.)
You might reword to say when the cost of care is totally ignored as a reason to maintain individual health - living a healthy lifestyle - then care suffers. US eating habits are awful for health.
If you're happy with the way the feds have handled getting testing, PPE, monoclonal antibodies, the new therapeutics, the old therapeutics, etc. into the hands of citizens, then Medicare for All is the plan for you. Not to mention giving them the ability to use life saving medical as a lever (no vax no treatment, eh?). That's a hard pass for me.
Actually the reverse ought to be the norm. One can budget and plan routine care, insurance ought to only cover rare events. Insurance for routine care is imply pre-paying or care via the installment plan. Insurance for routine care increases costs for those who need little care and is a disincentive to staying healthy. Insurance for routine care increases costs by forcing paperwork for every transaction. That keeps those billing departments busy.
Everything you said PLUS Trump voters (and Republicans in general) skew older, and older people are at greater risk of dying (from COVID, the flu, any number of things) so the chart is meaningless unless you factor in all the demographic information. ... On another note, I had never seen that health care spending chart. I'm self-employed, pay through the nose for my own insurance because of Obamacare that caused my rates to skyrocket (quadruple over 4 years). No government benefits for me -- I make too much money, but not enough that I can "self-insure." Argh.
I paid out of pocket for my health insurance because my husband and I had our own business. I'm in very good health (and was), and my policy was 300.00 per month. I also put money away in a health savings account that would cover the large deductible. When Obamacare come into being I received a notice from my insurance company saying that my policy was not ACA compliant. The new policy, which had less coverage and a higher deductible would cost exactly double. I cancelled my insurance at that point. When I posted online what happened I was accused of being a Russian troll. My own cousin said I was wrong about the policy costing more, despite me showing her my previous life insurance, the letter from the insurance company, and the new policy with the cost difference. It was at that time that I realized that evidence was useless for a true believer. I no longer try to change people's minds that are already made up. This prepared me for the Covid vaccine experience.
Yes, mine was cancelled to and I was forced to get insurance that was supposed to be "better" at twice the cost (first year) and the only "better" was saving $5 on the co-pay and the deductible went from $10K to $7500K -- I didn't mind the high deductible of my original because we're a healthy family and I wanted a policy that would protect for something major (a "hit by a bus" policy). But the cost to save $2500 in a deductible increased my annual insurance by more than twice that the first year ... it was insane.
Yes, and there were a lot of other problems. For example, I have 5 kids (all of them were on my insurance at the time, now my oldest two have their own.) I was FORCED to get them dental insurance. I had no choice in the matter. It was a very specific insurance that the very good dentist my kids had gone to for their entire lives didn't take because it was California Care something or other. So I could drive my kids 30 minutes to downtown Sacramento to go to a dentist we didn't know in a crappy area to get "free" cleanings or pay out of pocket to go to the dentist I knew and trusted. I paid out of pocket.
That’s true for all insurance but Obamacare removes competition, incorporates more institutional graft, more who choose not to work at others’ expense etc.
How do you reconcile the idea of the healthy supporting the less healthy with the current thinking that unvaxed people should be denied medical care if they get Covid, regardless of their health status otherwise? I don’t care to pay medical expenses for morbidly obese people, alcoholics and junkies. The government needs to get out of healthcare, not further in to it.
This happened to us - our insurance went up to $1700 per month, so we went with a health sharing plan. It’s worked out wonderfully. 100% of acute care costs were covered - emergency appendectomy, for example.
For the 1st 5 years of Obamacare my husband and I paid 20k a year and all we got were free flu shots. Plus because of the $8500 each deductible we paid all health care expenses out of pocket. Then, thank goodness, we turned 65.
I will -- one thing about going from a government job for 13 years to being self-employed for the last 15 years, is that I realized how absolutely amazing government employees health care programs are. And we're all paying for them to have the best health care available, and their actions end up screwing everyone else.
I follow an account on Twitter (Woke Zombie) that uses data available to the public to debunk the official narrative. She is in NJ, as am I, so a lot of what she posts is about NJ. Yesterday she posted a thread of deaths that were counted as covid in NJ. Take a look at the link below.
Then realize this has been done in every state. It’s incredible and infuriating.
When asked a question she couldn't answer with the "narrative", Walensky finally indicated that 75% of Covid deaths had 4+ comorbidities. Likely even that's understated. This fact, of course, has yet to be emphasized by the media.
I'm pasting this here from a response I just made in the previous thread.
Why do people keep missing Alex's point?
Remember Ralph Nader? He made his initial big mark by writing a book called "Unsafe at any Speed" about the Corvair. The car had a one piece steering column that would push right through the driver's chest in the event of a collision. It was his book that got the Gov to require a multi link collapsible steering column in all cars. That change has saved millions of lives.
A lot of people owned Corvairs, never had accidents and loved them. Did that mean their Corvairs didn't have that same flaw?
All Alex is doing is pointing out simple factual data that shows, like the Corvair, these Vax's are not particularly safe. Some people will get vaxed and may never have any issues. but a lot of people are dying from them. Not everyone, but a lot.
Nader didn't say all cars had to go, and I bet he owned his share. Alex isn't saying all vaxes need to go. But like the Corvair, if you know there is a problem, and the data says there is, you better figure it out and fix it.
I'll add that if after reading Nader's book, car designs were limited to one piece steering columns and we were mandated by the Gov to drive them x miles a day, my reaction would be the same. Why is the Gov mandating I drive a car that has shown to be unsafe in a crash? Do they want me to die? Or is someone paying them?
100%. I've been posting this since July 2020 to anyone who needs to hear it:
The *real* reason why the US has Covid worse than any other country is due to the crappy American diet, and the fact the 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy. Remember: The four leading comorbidities for Covid are Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart issues, and everyone's favorite, obesity. What causes all of those underlying conditions? The greasy, carb-filled American diet.
Why is no one in a leadership position talking about how being healthy in the first place helps you resist and even beat Covid? Easy...because too many profit from:
also people are choosing (supported by the medical community) to take meds rather than eat healthy and exercise. I have a friend who actually said to me she'd rather take a pill for her high blood pressure than change her diet
I have many friends and family members with the same attitude. They believe that is the purpose of modern medicine - to provide pills that allow them to keep living their unhealthy lifestyle with no consequences.
Ah--I see she has fallen for the "argument dilution effect." Just like Big Pharma wants, she is ignoring the side effects of her chosen medication. Great job, Big Pharma!
"Why is no one in a leadership position talking about it?". They are actually PUSHING it. Take a look at the CDC recommended food pyramid - carbs are the foundation (largest) of the pyramid-6 to 11 daily servings of carbs recommended
Ah, got it! Yes, it's disgusting how the government, its agency minions, and the media all normalize being fat by upsizing clothes, widening seats on public transit and in cars, and presenting gigantic women in advertising as beautiful and to be admired.
Yeah...nah. I'll keep wearing my non-plus-sized clothes by doing my daily walks, bike rides, runs, and eating a meat-free diet, thanks!
There is no excuse for this inflammatory partisan nonsense. It serves to keep us all divided. It ensures that, by making Covid paranoia a political statement, many blue regions of the country will never move on from the faux-pandemic, with all its adverse mental and physical health effects. And dissenters in blue states will continue to feel ostracised and their liberties continually eroded.
The major fallacy is the assumption that averages apply to individuals. In every group, however arbitrarily assembled, some perform better than others. Competent people want to learn how the successful ones perform better, and to be more like them. Obsessing over averages is a trait of socialists, who demand that everyone fail together rather than anyone trying to excel. That's why socialism always fails.
It's so dishonest but Covid has unfortunately been political from the get go... I wish there had been a larger conversation about the health (or lack thereof) of Americans from the get go. Even thin affluent people are often malnourished (and I know a lot of educated, middle aged women with autoimmune disorders) because they are on crazy diets. I've lived in two affluent areas since college (Buckhead in Atlanta and Fairfield County in Connecticut) and I am always shocked at what these people feed their kids - just pure junk. And then the poor (and often middle class) eat cheap processed foods and so they are definitely malnourished. Most of our health care costs are because people have so much mitochondrial dysfunction. Obesity is just a byproduct of malnourishment.
I was recently diagnosed with an AI, Hashimoto’s. Researchers think the roundup we use to harvest wheat is a root cause, making people sensitive to gluten, which in turn triggers to body to fight the gluten.
I'm guilty of feeding my kids junk. Complicated long excuse, but I'm hoping that the good example of my own meals (which they refuse) and my teaching about how I keep myself healthy is making an impression on them that they will remember when they start to care about their health. They are not overweight but they are undernourished. I am positive that the current generation of teens and 20-somethings are going to have a much shorter lifespan than their parents.
I the suspect the reality is we have the most profitable health system in the world. We spend lots of money and get so-so outcomes. Probably somebody is writing about that. No one I've read.
I feel like people need to do the same thing they did with covid. Take things into their own hands. Government is never going to perform healthcare. And a profitable healthcare system is never going to reform itself.
They’ve been horribly wrong on COVID. Imagine how wrong they’ve been about other diseases, especially diseases that are expensive to treat. Especially diseases that affect people in rural and poor areas. Imagine the society level experimentation that has been going on for decades. And we pay for it.
Yes!! Here is a good example. You always hear people say that “plants replenish oxygen” or “plants clean the air”. This is based on a experiments done in the 60s I believe. Everyone parrots these statements and have for decades. Turns out it’s totally false but you still hear it constantly. Just one more random thing theater the brainwashed will never look into.
Plants are like every other organism -- chemical engines that consume some chemicals and expel others. Just like us. Plants consume co2 and expel o2, which is good for us. "Clean" air is a matter of perspective. Plants consider oxygen a contaminant. Democrat plants probably worry about a future with too much oxygen turning everything to rust and dust, and more likely to be eaten by over energetic animals.
He's a politician, not a doctor. Our real problem is doctors also tout the vax all day. Most know better but tout anyway. They do as they're told, just like politicians. The lemmings follow the science, as defined by the scientists.
Anyone who followed the “food pyramid” my generation grew up with in the 1980’s and 1990’s is not very healthy now……. Because public health is sooo right about so much
The Food industrial complex exists too as you know, and has for many decades as you mentioned. Like Pharma the major Food corps are bound at the hip with the FDA and other so called "protectors of the public" Government agencies. No coincidence...
Epidemiologists would call this “ecologic fallacy”. This is when aggregate data (state, country, etc) suggests an association between X and Y that does not hold once analyzed at the individual level. And yet, I guarantee you that morons with fancy public health degrees accept stories like this hook, line and sinker. TDS renders them incapable of reason. It truly, truly is mass formation.
Have been following the increased MSM media Pharma ads. Large increase in medications being promoted for treatment of AIDS (VAIDS), Neurodegenerative and Cancers. Coincidence?
Medicine is broken in the US and it has been for some time. It started to break when employers starting giving it as a benefit in the 1960s.. They did so because tax rates were such they couldn't pay people more. Obamacare was the final nail in the coffin construction that started in the 60s.....Pharma in particular has been particularly egregious with it's never ending loop of making people more sick with their "medicine" because they knew from the beginning the more sick people are the more money they make. That is their business model and it has always been their business model. Alex, research the changes in what constitutes high blood pressure and high cholesterol today versus what it was in the 1950s and 1960s. They have purposefully lowered the threshold so they can sell more pills. The whole thing is a scam. The BMI is also a stupid number because it doesn't account for muscle which of course is leaner than fat. Wake up folks. So called healthcare is a scam - always has been and always will be. There are good doctors but you need to pray heavily to find them - and some of the good ones don't take insurance.
Well said. I see so many overweight people when I'm out and about and wonder, how can they not understand the impact all those extra pounds have on their overall health? And yet, I see no campaign to talk about healthy lifestyle choices or eating right. Common sense stuff, but we have no common sense left in this country.
First of all, you likely got covid. For all the pain and sacrifice demanded by the pushers of NPIs, the measures completely and totally failed to stop the virus. And not just because of ‘selfish Americans’, they failed everywhere. Every life we ruined, every dollar we spent, every healthy person we tested, every second we were enforcing ‘the rules’ — all of it was for nothing. But somehow the equation gets worse.
If you were like many Americans, you got fat during NPIs, actually increasing your chances of bad outcomes from covid. Maybe staying inside gave you vitamin D deficiency, again increasing your risk from covid.
This drives me nuts too. You should check out an excellent article on the data misrepresentations presented to the state board of health to try to get them to add the C19 jab to the vaccine schedule for children to attend school and day care (even 3-5 year-olds with no EUA) with NO transmission data in this age group.
The lies about unvaccinated people having a higher risk of hospitalization from Covid and their misrepresentation about myocarditis and MIS-C (they said both were more often caused by the virus than the jab) are especially disturbing. Absolutely unbelievable! Check it out, https://nursevoice.substack.com/p/wsboh-criteria-6-rebuttal?utm_source=url
I wish your level of reporting, analysis, and integrity had been around when the FDA published their Food Pyramids that recommended carbs as the primary food group for a healthy lifestyle. This was and is a disaster for people with insulin sensitivity who tried to eat low fat and high carbs for years--ruining their agility to process sugar efficiently and gaining weight while desperately trying to follow the pyramid. Some people can eat according to the pyramid and be healthy, but for a large portion of the US population who is overweight, years of bad health recommendations from the FDA have created an almost impossible trap to escape.
I've been aware of the trend exhibited by this chart for some years. Our medical establishment is deeply corrupted and dysfunctional and has been for several decades. The problem is that most people treat medicine like a religion rather than as a science-based tool.
Damn, Alex. "The first step to fixing reality is acknowledging it." This is why I love you so much. You are my brother from another mother. Over the past 18 mo or so, the hardest part of all this covid crap for me has been my own returning awareness that when it comes to what I call "faithfulness to reality", most people have higher priorities. They allow all sorts of things to come between themselves and reality. I perceive and connect to everyone and everything through my relationship with reality. The painfulness of any truth doesn't make it less desirable--just more painful to experience. Suffering is pain multiplied by resistance. If we accept the painful, it hurts but it doesn't damage and distort us the way suffering brought on by resistance (denial, scapegoating, etc) can and does. That affinity for reality, no matter how ugly, made me a weirdo in the 90's, but then culture came my way and after a while I actually became convinced that I shared reality with a lot of other people for a long time. Turns out they were PRETENDING to be aligned with reality during that time--they were just aligned with the crowd. I've been thinking lately that perhaps what made me "this way" was the marijuana-induced psychosis I struggled with for a while, all alone and in secret, when I was 14 until I decided to ditch all my friends and hobbies, stop all intoxicants, and basically garden. That prolonged hell and near-loss of life convinced me completely that the path to hell is any loss of intimacy with and faithfulness to reality. I never read your book about marijuana, but this makes me wonder if you had a similar experience that made you "this way". Anyway...so grateful for who you are, and for the fact that you share yourself widely enough to reach me.
The irony is that if Trump voters were so in the tank for everything that Trump was saying and pushing, they all would have gotten the jab. After all, Trump is the father of the clot shot.
But in reality, if it is actually Trump voters who are the dreaded "anti-vaxxers" they are that way despite Trump's wishes. After all, he's been promoting his involvement with Operation Warp Speed for two years.
Its a repeat observation Alex made a while back. Putting the general health of the population aside, Republicans tend to be older than Democrats (I am a fan of general rules), and as such, as the details that used to be provided by NSW on a daily basis (what happened to that information by the way), Covid kills the elderly. The NYT and anyone else can cherry pick data to try and prove a point. Americans are not deep thinkers and expect others to do the thinking for them, so they believe what they read and parrot it in conversations. Its amazing how often this happens. Spend some time at a local bar and get in a conversation (try to avoid having it turn into an argument, which won't be easy) with a stranger and you will hear exactly what you read, without any additional observation.
Odd how much the graph of health expenditure per capita vs life expectancy looks like the graph of education expenditure per capita vs mastery of subject matter. Just a coincidence, i'm sure.
Hmmm, I wonder if the NYT will publish an article with all their pretty graphs showing how counties that went heavy for Biden are leading the nation in gun violence as compared to those that Trump won by landslide.
I would think this would make Dems extremely happy. The factors involved are too many to count and the chart is meaningless other than to say "Hey, we may have screwed up the world and created a generation of cowed humans, but, hey, we killed off Trump voters, so it's all good in the end."
The problem is we sell "health care" because people look for something outside of themselves, the easy fix - take a pill, get a vaccine, surgery, etc. There's money in "health care" vs. a system that stresses "healthy lifestyle", where there is less profit. But that involves effort - watch what you eat, move, get exercise, find methods to reduce stress, get out in nature, etc. Too many doctors are fearful of telling patients to lose weight, i.e. "fat shaming." So now you see articles about fat but fit. It's great for pharma and hospitals because when the chronic disease, etc. catches up with the bad habits, they can make money from bariatric surgery, knee and hip replacements, insulin, etc.
So incredibly true about how deeply unhealthy our country is. And it certainly isn't the fault of Trump. The blame can be shared by every politician that gains from Big Pharma, Big Sugar and Big everything else that lines pockets and destroys health. Now with the Covid economy we have millions of citizens ( many children) with lifelong mental health problems. It is time to fight back and Alex, we thank you for starting to do so!
The United States is not only the unhealthiness country in the world that spends the most money on health care or rather SICK CARE, the US has the most unhealthy children in the industrialized world.
Children in the United States are experiencing a serious and historically unprecedented burden of chronic illness. American children display consistently poorer health outcomes than children in other wealthy nations, notwithstanding substantially higher per capita health care spending on U.S. children.
Chronic Illness in Children—Who Is Sounding the Alarm?
Chronically ill children grow up to be chronically ill adults. Here is one reason:
The prevalence of obesity was 19.3% and affected about 14.4 million children and adolescents. Obesity prevalence was 13.4% among 2- to 5-year-olds, 20.3% among 6- to 11-year-olds, and 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds
I turn on cable TV just to be amazed by the incredible proliferation of pharma advertising in the US. Our European peers generally require pharma companies to show net benefits (including socioeconomic measures) of a drug for approval/coverage. Excludes several drugs approved/covered in the US. We love our sick people here! They’re walking dollar bills. And we love side effects! They’re a way to prescribe more drugs to counter them!
When our supposed "elites" want to start another war, they should be forced to look at this chart on health expenditure and deaths per capita. America is rotting from within. Similar to Rome but our leaders want to fight over Ukraine. 90% of America couldn't find it on a map. The jump in deaths in America from covid, the vaccine, suicide and drugs from 2019 to 2021 is absolutely staggering. It's up by 20%. That literally the same amount during war years. Haha and our leaders want to fight about Ukraine. What a clown world.
The obsession and anger towards Trump; tells you everything. They are threatened and continue to be so.
I agree except it's not really obsession and anger; it's fear. And it's not really directed at Trump; it's directed at the people who dared to vote for someone other than the puppet they anointed.
It's more likely opposition to rampant silliness: transwomen are women; everything is racist; climate change is killing us; Fauci is God; Biden is moderate & bi-partisan; China isn't a threat; de-fund the police; "mostly peaceful protests."
The list goes on.
If anything good comes from the pandemic it's that rational people realize we must pay attention to the lunatics that spew this nonsense because those idiots are dangerous if left unchecked.
Yeh that and who your governor is is VERY IMPORTANT. I'm never going to be dismissive of that again!
And who is the VICE president and the LIEUTENANT governor.
I am certain that Joe Biden would step down by the end of this year--after the mid-term elections--but the VICE president is even more ridiculous, so we're stuck with the demented fool.
It seems your Governor is more important than your President. However even our Governor’s can’t seem to stop illegal immigration, however I heard they could if they wanted to? Alex is so spot on. The virus gonna virus, no matter what state it is!
Don’t forget, “vaccines are safe & effective!”
Vaccines are "mostly safe." (Picture a spreadsheet on fire behind me.)
🤣lol
Succinct and perfect.
Do you know when I think about Trump? When the obsessed in the media bring him up! If they would not, Trump never would cross my mind. What is it with them??? Does he just generate that many clicks?
He does. Don't believe me? Look at the loss in viewership at MSNBCNN.
That may have something to do with promoting Joy Reid and her vile racism that she spews. The network cant hide from that even if its only an hour a day.
Perhaps. And perhaps a second year into this abysmal administration and there is less to report about a man who's been almost viciously silenced, unless there's something like yesterday's revelation that he and his children are being compelled to testify. I think that MSM is so busy obfuscating for Joementia that unless there is some Trump news, they're too busy.
look at the cnn website. Trump always has at least one headline (4 articles on the main site right now). He's nowhere to be found on fox. must be the clicks - why else would they keep giving him attention?
Trump is their honey pot. They know everything about the people that voted for him. Datapalooza
I expected more from my former profession. My mistake.
Trump still living rent free in so many heads.
And now rinse and repeat Hillary is back on the scene to promote that. Anything to deviate from what she has done.
because hes not part if the swamp. He knows what they were up to as Durham investigation is revealing
Emerald Robinson has a very interesting take on the Durham investigation. https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/what-is-durham-really-doing?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo1NzAwMTYyMiwicG9zdF9pZCI6NDg4MTY2NjUsIl8iOiJzcHJwWCIsImlhdCI6MTY0NTIwMDAwOCwiZXhwIjoxNjQ1MjAzNjA4LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMjYzMDYzIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.YTf1dPQI1YHgdYL9_vsd72q6-9YeZ5LVBZq895TPm-E&utm_source=url Bottom line: He hasn't done anything in 6 years and is continuing to run the clock out. I'd feel worse about it if Trump hadn't brought us Warp Speed and STILL hasn't mentioned a peep about vaccine injury.
Agreed Kim. Who is paying Durham and what department does he work for? Does he really still have a job?
Buzz,
Durham works for the DOJ and Garland recently said the dept is still funding his investigation.
Durham has been working on this for years and has come up with NOTHING. I will believe it when I seen it. His resurfacing, IMO, is just theater and distraction.
My hope is that his careful and in depth investigation will yield an airtight, prosecutable case. But who knows?!? No one in DC ever seems to be held accountable for anything.
I think his resurfacing is to discourage Hilary from running. I wonder who doesn't want her to run.
Unfortunately Trump is very much the swamp, dropped bombs on the Middle East as soon as he was elected in 2016, became a worse neocon than G. Bush and Obama. He talked tough before Nov. 2016, as he's doing in 2022, but once elected, became the opposite of what we voted for. He made Jared de facto president. Jared accepted a $250 million credit line from Soros in 2015. Ivanka became a Davos Young Global Leader in 2015. Trump merged his fundraising with the RNC in a for profit platform called WinRed. Jared runs and staffs all Trump groups and PACs. America First groups are filled with Jared's open borders, globalist cronies.
Wow. Ivanka was a Young Global Leader. Things just keep getting darker and darker. I saw a video of Schwab bragging that Putin was also one.
The group is Davos Young Global Leader. Others include Gavin Newsome, Trudeau, Macron, Jacinda Ahern.
How do you find the list of alumi, a complete list I mean. I've seen some but I haven't found anything complete. For example, Canada's Trudeau is said to be a graduate but it doesn't look like it although he is a member of the WEF.
Justin attends Davos but wasn't crowned a Young Global Leader. Possibly because never did much before age 40. Per NY Times, he never had to earn a living because his grandfather made a fortune in fossil fuels. He has "a bachelor’s degree from McGill University and a teaching degree from the University of British Columbia, but despite his pedigree and inherited wealth, when he reached adulthood his life was remarkably unremarkable. He traveled the world and smoked marijuana and snowboarded and worked as a bouncer at bars, eventually ending up teaching high school in Vancouver." Pierre died in 2000. In 2008 Justin ran for parliament in a working class area of Montreal and won. At the age of 40 in 2011, that was the only thing of consequence he'd done.
From what you've written, it's obvious why Trudeau didn't make it to 'young global leader'. I read somewhere that you had to be accepted into the program. He wasn't, most likely as you say, not much in the way of accomplishments and I'll bet not much in the way of brains. Someone thought he'd be a good trophy for the Liberals after they lost the 2008 election and the rest is history.
https://rumble.com/vtau3w-klaus-...-infiltration-of-50-of-cabinet-trudeau-are-young-global-leaders.html This is Schwab saying not only Trudea is one, but more than half his cabinet.
You're right. An accurate list must be compiled and saved before they can scurry out of the light. Once they know enough of us are on to them to make a difference, the internet will be scrubbed.
From the horses mouth: https://rumble.com/vtau3w-klaus-...-infiltration-of-50-of-cabinet-trudeau-are-young-global-leaders.html Not only Trudeau but half his cabinet.
The vax-happy NYT would really be in a conundrum if a vaccine were developed for Trump Derangement Syndrome!
It's not a vaccine. It's a non-termination shot.
They're following their programming. They were told Orange Man Bad as are any who voted for him, so he is, and we are.They were told to mask and vax everyone and hide from virus behind their laptops, so they do. These are not rational, but highly suggestible people. 🤪
Total distraction. Trying to make it political. Trying to make it divisive. Get off that ride.
Reposting from another stack to hear views: How does one counter the ‘but variants’ narrative? I’ve heard from so many believers that everything - masks, lockdowns, vaccines would have worked but for variants.
When I point out that vaccine evading variants can only exist if there’s a vaccine - I get blank looks
I don't know how to explain it more clearly than that. The rise of variants was not just predictable but predicted
At the beginning of the pandemic, I remember hearing that we can't vaccinate ourselves out of a pandemic because vaccines essentially cause the virus to mutate.
Therefore, therapeutics were the answer.
Wasn’t enough money in therapeutics and how could you patent them.
That is the point. The NIH and St.Fauci owned the patents for the RNA primers used to develop the vaccines AND to test for covid. Ka-ching
You know, I remember someone telling me way back that the pharmaceutical companies regretted not trying to get a patent on Aspirin. Imagine the money they could have made on that. Everybody should be able to make money, this is America after all. But, I gotta say, if I get a hang nail, I’m popping an aspirin.
Leaky vaccines lead to vaccine evading mutations as described by Bossche.
Actually covid, like other corona viruses that ordinarily cause the common cold(along with rhino viruses and adenoviruses) naturally mutate. Which is why we get colds every year instead of having immunity to the viruses that caused colds previous years.
This is why covid’s mutation could be expected. And, you’re right. Therapeutics and mask wearing only by vulnerable people would have been a much better response, with herd immunity naturally developing among otherwise healthy people (not obese, eat healthy, no chronic pulmonary or immune issues).
Exactly. It took little research for me to learn that viruses typically evolve into more transmissible but less virulent variants.
Although just last night I read — or tried to read because the details were over my head — an article that Omicron could well be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The Dutch scientist, Geert VB, explains in how it could evolve in highly vaccinated groups to cause considerable harm to the vaccinated. He showed that the idea of “more infectious, less virulent” is a myth, in other words.
(And as most here know, this is the man who predicted the variants in the first place and warned about using a nonsterilising “vaccine” in the middle of a pandemic.)
Compare to the overuse of antibiotics. Creates a monster that is harder to quash. Very disturbing.
It looks like the triple jabbed have such a weakened immune system that even if omicron is mild it will take some of them out. My father in law was a horribly ill man for many years from a lifetime of smoking and drinking. we often said if he had stayed healthy he would have lived to 120, but three years ago a cold finally caused the pneumonia that ended his life. So I think of his situation with some of these people now.
Let me give this a read...
https://www.voiceforscienceandsolidarity.org/scientific-blog/omicron-a-wolf-in-sheeps-clothing
I saw that piece, too, via Steve Deace. It’s terrifying.
For Pharma that was a perk rather than a bug!
It was inevitable.
If you have a single stranded RNA virus there will be variants. They mutate like crazy and once in a while one of the mutations really takes off. With a DNA virus there is built in error checking during replication and less variants. This is why a vaccine only strategy was destined to fail - any vaccine will likely be out of date by the time it's released.
My question is if the masks don’t work because of the Omicron variant, why would they have worked for the previous incarnations? It’s the same virus isn’t it? Did it reduce itself in size to slip through the cloth masks where the other variants were too big to slip through? I can never get an answer.
Masks never worked, but they have to pretend like they did up until Omicron because otherwise why would they have made everyone wear them?
And we looked like China - everyone walking around with a face diaper on.
But I saw a beautiful black jeweled one on a lady at Costco yesterday! The prettier they are the better they work! lol
🤫 It's a secret. All those jewels deflect the virus.
😜
What the dependent media need to realize is that we are not 4-year-olds and we're capable of understanding a certain amount of nuance.
Everything on masks I've read says they're between not working and working a little bit. Then there are a bunch of factors. How long are You sitting in air with an infected person essentially filling the room up with virus. Does this person have symptoms and a high viral load? So it's really a spectrum of infection. The way the dependent media talks to us it's as if we just learned arithmetic.
My argument was masks has always been they wouldn't even be in the top 10 for closing the pandemic. In front of them you would have all the nutraceuticals and pharma drugs that can be used as prophylactics. You would have serious masks.... Like the shit they wear in labs. You would have things like adding humidity to the air. Better ventilation. These masks are about signaling you are easy to control. They are about signaling fear. They are about saying we are in a pandemic. If I was truly concerned about getting Corona they're about the least effective thing you can do.
My son is a PhD engineer/physicist who tested the masks for CO2. The OSHA legal limit is 5000 ppm over 6 hours. 15 minutes in a mask gives you almost 29,000 ppm of CO2. He presented it to his employers (a national lab) and they were dumbfounded yet dismissive.
I wore a "fake mask" on a plane. I am thinking these may be better CO2- wise. But all the masks suck.
I have been thinking about cutting fine slits in the paper masks when I have to wear one.
Go ahead and do it. it only takes a few seconds and it does help. Put them in the folds at the sides where no one can see them.
Or the masks are worse because you're breathing harder and pulling the virus deep into your lungs
Or you’re closer to people when you speak - cos you can’t hear them.
Apparently something about the viral load being higher and therefore harder for the masks to stop - or something like that. In other words - its more contagious so a mask can't stop it.
My question is : How do you know the masks stopped ANY virus? The early versions were less contagious and therefore BY DEFINITION spread less - and therefore you think masks worked?
By this time their brains are shorted and they default to "so many countries can't be wrong"
The story about the ineffectiveness of cloth masks coincided with the rise of Omicron. The variant has nothing to do with the ineffectiveness. How the press can be so clueless is normal.
We had no vaccine for the Spanish flu and it went away in under two years, since the same crowd always likes to bring the Spanish flu up.
How would a variant get caught by a cloth mask? Distance and masking is based on the fomites & droplets BS, which was never how this this (most, if not all) respiratory virus spreads. Aerosolized virus hangs around indoors for weeks, evading masks and distancing. Just like smoke.
I am with ya.
Smoke has larger particles
than an aerosol respiratory virus.
I remember CA officials in the summer of 2020 telling people in CA that their masks would not protect them from the smoke from the wild fires.
If you were a critical thinker you might have back then put 2&2 together???
And the masks increase CO2 levels to five times the legal limit. https://www.hughmctavish.com/post/masks-result-in-breathing-co2-levels-five-times-more-than-the-legal-workplace-limit
Leaky Non-Sterilizing Vaccines promote viral escape bringing new mutations into the world.
Great point I forgot to make.
I would reply the same way I replied since the clinical trials were available. There was no proof in the clinical trials that they worked on the original variance. 95% effective. At what? Reducing death? Stopping transmission? Preventing infection? Nope none of these were endpoints. I know it's crazy and ridiculous but it's true. It was 95% effective supposedly at reducing symptoms. And then you get into the math they used which I'm sure Alex has covered and some other people... I think it's Peter doshi in the British medical journal that wrote a great article on this very early.
Now unproven. Not proven that it doesn't work... But not proven that it does with those endpoints. So that's where we started. Essentially this 95% effective thing was a press release. And we still don't have all the data.
And as the vaccine rolled out it started failing. so in I believe May the CDC just stopped reporting most of the breakthrough cases that they were not looking for to begin with. And so it went off the rails very fast.
The argument that variants ruined this is just a bad one. First of all did they not know that viruses mutate? I know that. I'm not a virologist. It's like their argument is there was airtight evidence it worked on the original variant (there wasn't) But then this virus did something really weird we've never seen before. It changed. And that ruined it. That's a heaping bowl of lame BS with three teaspoons of granulated BS on top of it.
With viruses, and ESPECIALLY with RNA viruses, there are always variants. That these strategies "would have worked" was wrong from the start. And as someone else here said, that's why the focus should have been on therapeutics to parts of the virus that were more conserved. (Certain parts of a virus are very mutable (spike), and other parts are not, (otherwise you have a broken virus.))
Were they stupid or evil? Or maybe both? I lost a sibling who was denied early treatment. I treated myself with OTC stuff since I could not get Ivermectin or HCQ. I am very angry and frustrated about the failures (possibly intentional failures) of our "establishment".
stupid or evil or both? wow. who knows. it's easy to make the argument for each of these possibilities. Very sorry about your sib.
So many people make excuses for why we failed to "contain" a respiratory virus pandemic. We live in a modern, scientific world, don't we?
Well, we just can't. It's that simple. Simple escapes a lot of people.
You can't reason with those who think a computer screen is window. Hence war.
The NYT relying on cherry-picked data? No way.
I know, right!! Lol
Don’t forget to mention the age difference of the average voters per candidate. The under 30 crowd voted heavily against Trump.
If the college football stadiums are any indication, that will hopefully change this year. Let's Go Brandon!
This^^^
2 years of college Ruined for almost every student.
I hope they chant this phrase inside their head when they vote.
Exactly. I looked at that and thought, now change that chart to age, with blue being 18 - 29… red 65+ and the graph will look the same, but at least on something that is based in science rather than poly-sci. But we don’t go by science anymore, just Science!™️
Well, our own government endorses a diet that is unhealthy at best, will kill you at worst...
Yep, ever since Americans followed the CDC recommended food pyramid, we have become an obese nation. Thank goodness we have the CDC and all their guidance, otherwise we would be dead sooner.
Yes, and remember that the nutritional information on the packaging has that FDA garbage baked in underneath all the percentages as well. I've come to the point that, if a "food" has a nutritional label on it at all, it might not be not good for me!
FDA is responsible for the food pyramid but is there any difference? They’re just as corrupt and stupid as CDC and you’re 💯 percent right that the food guidelines have done decades of damage. A conspiracy theorist might think that our bureaucrats want us sick and dying. Until we reduce the size and scope of government, none of us are safe.
Ha, yes, of course it's FDA (same corruption, different letters). My anger must have given me brain fog.
It's almost like a for-profit medical system contributes to ill health--almost. (And no I'm not for single-payer in this country, because they will not curtail the profits. They will simply bankrupt the entire country to keep one small group of people wealthy and nothing will improve for patients.)
When the cost of care is a major determinant of care, care will inevitably suffer.
You might reword to say when the cost of care is totally ignored as a reason to maintain individual health - living a healthy lifestyle - then care suffers. US eating habits are awful for health.
If you're happy with the way the feds have handled getting testing, PPE, monoclonal antibodies, the new therapeutics, the old therapeutics, etc. into the hands of citizens, then Medicare for All is the plan for you. Not to mention giving them the ability to use life saving medical as a lever (no vax no treatment, eh?). That's a hard pass for me.
I think single payer for catastrophic events is a good thing, insurance or out of pocket can cover routine issues.
Actually the reverse ought to be the norm. One can budget and plan routine care, insurance ought to only cover rare events. Insurance for routine care is imply pre-paying or care via the installment plan. Insurance for routine care increases costs for those who need little care and is a disincentive to staying healthy. Insurance for routine care increases costs by forcing paperwork for every transaction. That keeps those billing departments busy.
I would love a catastrophic plan. But Obammy made sure that I can't do that.
This is exactly how health sharing plans work.
Wait...doesn't NYC account for a hugely disproportionate amount of total US covid deaths...????
Everything you said PLUS Trump voters (and Republicans in general) skew older, and older people are at greater risk of dying (from COVID, the flu, any number of things) so the chart is meaningless unless you factor in all the demographic information. ... On another note, I had never seen that health care spending chart. I'm self-employed, pay through the nose for my own insurance because of Obamacare that caused my rates to skyrocket (quadruple over 4 years). No government benefits for me -- I make too much money, but not enough that I can "self-insure." Argh.
I paid out of pocket for my health insurance because my husband and I had our own business. I'm in very good health (and was), and my policy was 300.00 per month. I also put money away in a health savings account that would cover the large deductible. When Obamacare come into being I received a notice from my insurance company saying that my policy was not ACA compliant. The new policy, which had less coverage and a higher deductible would cost exactly double. I cancelled my insurance at that point. When I posted online what happened I was accused of being a Russian troll. My own cousin said I was wrong about the policy costing more, despite me showing her my previous life insurance, the letter from the insurance company, and the new policy with the cost difference. It was at that time that I realized that evidence was useless for a true believer. I no longer try to change people's minds that are already made up. This prepared me for the Covid vaccine experience.
Yes, mine was cancelled to and I was forced to get insurance that was supposed to be "better" at twice the cost (first year) and the only "better" was saving $5 on the co-pay and the deductible went from $10K to $7500K -- I didn't mind the high deductible of my original because we're a healthy family and I wanted a policy that would protect for something major (a "hit by a bus" policy). But the cost to save $2500 in a deductible increased my annual insurance by more than twice that the first year ... it was insane.
With Obamacare, I think once you average in everyone, the premiums of the healthy people go up to pay for those who less that healthy.
Yes, and there were a lot of other problems. For example, I have 5 kids (all of them were on my insurance at the time, now my oldest two have their own.) I was FORCED to get them dental insurance. I had no choice in the matter. It was a very specific insurance that the very good dentist my kids had gone to for their entire lives didn't take because it was California Care something or other. So I could drive my kids 30 minutes to downtown Sacramento to go to a dentist we didn't know in a crappy area to get "free" cleanings or pay out of pocket to go to the dentist I knew and trusted. I paid out of pocket.
That’s true for all insurance but Obamacare removes competition, incorporates more institutional graft, more who choose not to work at others’ expense etc.
How do you reconcile the idea of the healthy supporting the less healthy with the current thinking that unvaxed people should be denied medical care if they get Covid, regardless of their health status otherwise? I don’t care to pay medical expenses for morbidly obese people, alcoholics and junkies. The government needs to get out of healthcare, not further in to it.
This happened to us - our insurance went up to $1700 per month, so we went with a health sharing plan. It’s worked out wonderfully. 100% of acute care costs were covered - emergency appendectomy, for example.
For the 1st 5 years of Obamacare my husband and I paid 20k a year and all we got were free flu shots. Plus because of the $8500 each deductible we paid all health care expenses out of pocket. Then, thank goodness, we turned 65.
My story is similar to yours. For someone self employed, everything went up under ACA. "Affordable", my ass. I've been without insurance since.
1) I love your kitty
2) Might want to look into the National Association for the Self-Employed (NASE)
I will -- one thing about going from a government job for 13 years to being self-employed for the last 15 years, is that I realized how absolutely amazing government employees health care programs are. And we're all paying for them to have the best health care available, and their actions end up screwing everyone else.
We are retired now, but thanks for the advice. Have Medicare and I immediately got medigap which pretty much takes care of everything.
That was for AB above, but I love your kitty too! :)
I don’t believe the death from covid numbers and I am always amazed at the ways the left finds to show their hatred toward Trump and his supporters.
I follow an account on Twitter (Woke Zombie) that uses data available to the public to debunk the official narrative. She is in NJ, as am I, so a lot of what she posts is about NJ. Yesterday she posted a thread of deaths that were counted as covid in NJ. Take a look at the link below.
Then realize this has been done in every state. It’s incredible and infuriating.
https://twitter.com/awokezombie/status/1494137444442296323?s=12
When asked a question she couldn't answer with the "narrative", Walensky finally indicated that 75% of Covid deaths had 4+ comorbidities. Likely even that's understated. This fact, of course, has yet to be emphasized by the media.
Good grief! I read the list! Still it would be fair to say those suicides may well have been "from Covid."
But what they failed to report - after all those people died, they became Biden voters.
LOL!
I'm pasting this here from a response I just made in the previous thread.
Why do people keep missing Alex's point?
Remember Ralph Nader? He made his initial big mark by writing a book called "Unsafe at any Speed" about the Corvair. The car had a one piece steering column that would push right through the driver's chest in the event of a collision. It was his book that got the Gov to require a multi link collapsible steering column in all cars. That change has saved millions of lives.
A lot of people owned Corvairs, never had accidents and loved them. Did that mean their Corvairs didn't have that same flaw?
All Alex is doing is pointing out simple factual data that shows, like the Corvair, these Vax's are not particularly safe. Some people will get vaxed and may never have any issues. but a lot of people are dying from them. Not everyone, but a lot.
Nader didn't say all cars had to go, and I bet he owned his share. Alex isn't saying all vaxes need to go. But like the Corvair, if you know there is a problem, and the data says there is, you better figure it out and fix it.
I'll add that if after reading Nader's book, car designs were limited to one piece steering columns and we were mandated by the Gov to drive them x miles a day, my reaction would be the same. Why is the Gov mandating I drive a car that has shown to be unsafe in a crash? Do they want me to die? Or is someone paying them?
100%. I've been posting this since July 2020 to anyone who needs to hear it:
The *real* reason why the US has Covid worse than any other country is due to the crappy American diet, and the fact the 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy. Remember: The four leading comorbidities for Covid are Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart issues, and everyone's favorite, obesity. What causes all of those underlying conditions? The greasy, carb-filled American diet.
Why is no one in a leadership position talking about how being healthy in the first place helps you resist and even beat Covid? Easy...because too many profit from:
1. Big Food (which loves fat people) and
2. Big Pharma (which loves unhealthy people)
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/what-does-it-mean-to-be-metabolically-healthy
also people are choosing (supported by the medical community) to take meds rather than eat healthy and exercise. I have a friend who actually said to me she'd rather take a pill for her high blood pressure than change her diet
I have many friends and family members with the same attitude. They believe that is the purpose of modern medicine - to provide pills that allow them to keep living their unhealthy lifestyle with no consequences.
The system supports it. Everything else is fat shaming Dontcha know.
Ah--I see she has fallen for the "argument dilution effect." Just like Big Pharma wants, she is ignoring the side effects of her chosen medication. Great job, Big Pharma!
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-drug-company-ads-downplay-risks/
"Why is no one in a leadership position talking about it?". They are actually PUSHING it. Take a look at the CDC recommended food pyramid - carbs are the foundation (largest) of the pyramid-6 to 11 daily servings of carbs recommended
When I said "it," I meant combatting Covid by BEING HEALTHY IN THE FIRST PLACE. Sorry if that wasn't clear. I'll edit my comment if I can.
It was clear, I am supporting your comment....just expanding on "the greasy, carb-filled diet"; being pushed by the CDC.
Ah, got it! Yes, it's disgusting how the government, its agency minions, and the media all normalize being fat by upsizing clothes, widening seats on public transit and in cars, and presenting gigantic women in advertising as beautiful and to be admired.
Yeah...nah. I'll keep wearing my non-plus-sized clothes by doing my daily walks, bike rides, runs, and eating a meat-free diet, thanks!
There is no excuse for this inflammatory partisan nonsense. It serves to keep us all divided. It ensures that, by making Covid paranoia a political statement, many blue regions of the country will never move on from the faux-pandemic, with all its adverse mental and physical health effects. And dissenters in blue states will continue to feel ostracised and their liberties continually eroded.
Part of a long term plan perhaps.
First, divide and ostracize.
Exactly. It taps into the distrust and division that already exists. Tying politics to healthcare decisions. Propaganda 101. I'm not having it.
The major fallacy is the assumption that averages apply to individuals. In every group, however arbitrarily assembled, some perform better than others. Competent people want to learn how the successful ones perform better, and to be more like them. Obsessing over averages is a trait of socialists, who demand that everyone fail together rather than anyone trying to excel. That's why socialism always fails.
It's so dishonest but Covid has unfortunately been political from the get go... I wish there had been a larger conversation about the health (or lack thereof) of Americans from the get go. Even thin affluent people are often malnourished (and I know a lot of educated, middle aged women with autoimmune disorders) because they are on crazy diets. I've lived in two affluent areas since college (Buckhead in Atlanta and Fairfield County in Connecticut) and I am always shocked at what these people feed their kids - just pure junk. And then the poor (and often middle class) eat cheap processed foods and so they are definitely malnourished. Most of our health care costs are because people have so much mitochondrial dysfunction. Obesity is just a byproduct of malnourishment.
It seems everyone I talk to has an autoimmune disorder. Never ask what but it seems to be a lot more
I was recently diagnosed with an AI, Hashimoto’s. Researchers think the roundup we use to harvest wheat is a root cause, making people sensitive to gluten, which in turn triggers to body to fight the gluten.
I'm guilty of feeding my kids junk. Complicated long excuse, but I'm hoping that the good example of my own meals (which they refuse) and my teaching about how I keep myself healthy is making an impression on them that they will remember when they start to care about their health. They are not overweight but they are undernourished. I am positive that the current generation of teens and 20-somethings are going to have a much shorter lifespan than their parents.
Don't forget those just sitting on their fat a$$e$.
I the suspect the reality is we have the most profitable health system in the world. We spend lots of money and get so-so outcomes. Probably somebody is writing about that. No one I've read.
I feel like people need to do the same thing they did with covid. Take things into their own hands. Government is never going to perform healthcare. And a profitable healthcare system is never going to reform itself.
They're paid by the hour, not outcomes.
They’ve been horribly wrong on COVID. Imagine how wrong they’ve been about other diseases, especially diseases that are expensive to treat. Especially diseases that affect people in rural and poor areas. Imagine the society level experimentation that has been going on for decades. And we pay for it.
It's not just disease. We've been wrong about many things. Weather, energy, diet, foreign relations, genders ... long list.
Yes!! Here is a good example. You always hear people say that “plants replenish oxygen” or “plants clean the air”. This is based on a experiments done in the 60s I believe. Everyone parrots these statements and have for decades. Turns out it’s totally false but you still hear it constantly. Just one more random thing theater the brainwashed will never look into.
Plants are like every other organism -- chemical engines that consume some chemicals and expel others. Just like us. Plants consume co2 and expel o2, which is good for us. "Clean" air is a matter of perspective. Plants consider oxygen a contaminant. Democrat plants probably worry about a future with too much oxygen turning everything to rust and dust, and more likely to be eaten by over energetic animals.
Too long
How do they explain the fact that Trump touts the vaccine to this day? If we were such lemmings all the Trumpers would be vaccinated.
More obfuscating to cover the real story on the deaths.
He's a politician, not a doctor. Our real problem is doctors also tout the vax all day. Most know better but tout anyway. They do as they're told, just like politicians. The lemmings follow the science, as defined by the scientists.
Anyone who followed the “food pyramid” my generation grew up with in the 1980’s and 1990’s is not very healthy now……. Because public health is sooo right about so much
The Food industrial complex exists too as you know, and has for many decades as you mentioned. Like Pharma the major Food corps are bound at the hip with the FDA and other so called "protectors of the public" Government agencies. No coincidence...
100% agree. And the military industrial complex
Notice that they never compare unvaccinated vs. vaccinated by race.
Epidemiologists would call this “ecologic fallacy”. This is when aggregate data (state, country, etc) suggests an association between X and Y that does not hold once analyzed at the individual level. And yet, I guarantee you that morons with fancy public health degrees accept stories like this hook, line and sinker. TDS renders them incapable of reason. It truly, truly is mass formation.
My dad, who was born in 1913, and worked as an accountant, had a phrase which is very applicable to today. "Figures lie, and liars figure."
Damn we need more GREAT dad's these days don't we! Logical and reasoned and non coddled or entitled!
as Dennis Prager would say “truth is not a left wing value” just listen to HRC lately!
communism cannot exist if its main premise of "deception and lies" is not intact
Have been following the increased MSM media Pharma ads. Large increase in medications being promoted for treatment of AIDS (VAIDS), Neurodegenerative and Cancers. Coincidence?
OMG! Yes! You may be onto something.
Medicine is broken in the US and it has been for some time. It started to break when employers starting giving it as a benefit in the 1960s.. They did so because tax rates were such they couldn't pay people more. Obamacare was the final nail in the coffin construction that started in the 60s.....Pharma in particular has been particularly egregious with it's never ending loop of making people more sick with their "medicine" because they knew from the beginning the more sick people are the more money they make. That is their business model and it has always been their business model. Alex, research the changes in what constitutes high blood pressure and high cholesterol today versus what it was in the 1950s and 1960s. They have purposefully lowered the threshold so they can sell more pills. The whole thing is a scam. The BMI is also a stupid number because it doesn't account for muscle which of course is leaner than fat. Wake up folks. So called healthcare is a scam - always has been and always will be. There are good doctors but you need to pray heavily to find them - and some of the good ones don't take insurance.
Well said. I see so many overweight people when I'm out and about and wonder, how can they not understand the impact all those extra pounds have on their overall health? And yet, I see no campaign to talk about healthy lifestyle choices or eating right. Common sense stuff, but we have no common sense left in this country.
https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/leaders-want-credit-for-npis-lets
What did you get with NPIs?
First of all, you likely got covid. For all the pain and sacrifice demanded by the pushers of NPIs, the measures completely and totally failed to stop the virus. And not just because of ‘selfish Americans’, they failed everywhere. Every life we ruined, every dollar we spent, every healthy person we tested, every second we were enforcing ‘the rules’ — all of it was for nothing. But somehow the equation gets worse.
If you were like many Americans, you got fat during NPIs, actually increasing your chances of bad outcomes from covid. Maybe staying inside gave you vitamin D deficiency, again increasing your risk from covid.
That healthcare chart is great! That alone should be enough to dismantle (at a minimum) the CDC, FDA, NIH, etc.
Alex what about the new Project veritas under cover report of the snake from the FDA ???
It was damming to say the least as a father of two daughters under 5 I’m sick to my stomach!
I saw that as well…..made me want to throw up.
This drives me nuts too. You should check out an excellent article on the data misrepresentations presented to the state board of health to try to get them to add the C19 jab to the vaccine schedule for children to attend school and day care (even 3-5 year-olds with no EUA) with NO transmission data in this age group.
The lies about unvaccinated people having a higher risk of hospitalization from Covid and their misrepresentation about myocarditis and MIS-C (they said both were more often caused by the virus than the jab) are especially disturbing. Absolutely unbelievable! Check it out, https://nursevoice.substack.com/p/wsboh-criteria-6-rebuttal?utm_source=url
They're stopping publishing the Scottish data because of you, Alex - you right wing anti-vaxxer American talking head! LOL
https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/19931641.amp/
I wish your level of reporting, analysis, and integrity had been around when the FDA published their Food Pyramids that recommended carbs as the primary food group for a healthy lifestyle. This was and is a disaster for people with insulin sensitivity who tried to eat low fat and high carbs for years--ruining their agility to process sugar efficiently and gaining weight while desperately trying to follow the pyramid. Some people can eat according to the pyramid and be healthy, but for a large portion of the US population who is overweight, years of bad health recommendations from the FDA have created an almost impossible trap to escape.
The last vestiges of good faith and intellectual honesty departed from the NYT years ago, probably at around the same time Alex did.
I've been aware of the trend exhibited by this chart for some years. Our medical establishment is deeply corrupted and dysfunctional and has been for several decades. The problem is that most people treat medicine like a religion rather than as a science-based tool.
The ugly union of our medical establishment with insurance companies.
Made worse by Obamacare.
Damn, Alex. "The first step to fixing reality is acknowledging it." This is why I love you so much. You are my brother from another mother. Over the past 18 mo or so, the hardest part of all this covid crap for me has been my own returning awareness that when it comes to what I call "faithfulness to reality", most people have higher priorities. They allow all sorts of things to come between themselves and reality. I perceive and connect to everyone and everything through my relationship with reality. The painfulness of any truth doesn't make it less desirable--just more painful to experience. Suffering is pain multiplied by resistance. If we accept the painful, it hurts but it doesn't damage and distort us the way suffering brought on by resistance (denial, scapegoating, etc) can and does. That affinity for reality, no matter how ugly, made me a weirdo in the 90's, but then culture came my way and after a while I actually became convinced that I shared reality with a lot of other people for a long time. Turns out they were PRETENDING to be aligned with reality during that time--they were just aligned with the crowd. I've been thinking lately that perhaps what made me "this way" was the marijuana-induced psychosis I struggled with for a while, all alone and in secret, when I was 14 until I decided to ditch all my friends and hobbies, stop all intoxicants, and basically garden. That prolonged hell and near-loss of life convinced me completely that the path to hell is any loss of intimacy with and faithfulness to reality. I never read your book about marijuana, but this makes me wonder if you had a similar experience that made you "this way". Anyway...so grateful for who you are, and for the fact that you share yourself widely enough to reach me.
The scam that is our food supply is greater than the scam that is our Covid vaccines.
The irony is that if Trump voters were so in the tank for everything that Trump was saying and pushing, they all would have gotten the jab. After all, Trump is the father of the clot shot.
But in reality, if it is actually Trump voters who are the dreaded "anti-vaxxers" they are that way despite Trump's wishes. After all, he's been promoting his involvement with Operation Warp Speed for two years.
no one has ever accused the left of being logical. I'm trying to give up working so hard to make logical sense of all of the things happening.
Its a repeat observation Alex made a while back. Putting the general health of the population aside, Republicans tend to be older than Democrats (I am a fan of general rules), and as such, as the details that used to be provided by NSW on a daily basis (what happened to that information by the way), Covid kills the elderly. The NYT and anyone else can cherry pick data to try and prove a point. Americans are not deep thinkers and expect others to do the thinking for them, so they believe what they read and parrot it in conversations. Its amazing how often this happens. Spend some time at a local bar and get in a conversation (try to avoid having it turn into an argument, which won't be easy) with a stranger and you will hear exactly what you read, without any additional observation.
Older people tend to be smarter than young people. That's why they tend to vote repub.
Common wisdom says if you're not liberal when young, you have no heart, and if not conservative when old you have no brain.
Odd how much the graph of health expenditure per capita vs life expectancy looks like the graph of education expenditure per capita vs mastery of subject matter. Just a coincidence, i'm sure.
We seem intent on learning precisely the wrong lessons over and over and over.
Finally, the Elephant in the Room has been spoken about!!!!
Hmmm, I wonder if the NYT will publish an article with all their pretty graphs showing how counties that went heavy for Biden are leading the nation in gun violence as compared to those that Trump won by landslide.
I would think this would make Dems extremely happy. The factors involved are too many to count and the chart is meaningless other than to say "Hey, we may have screwed up the world and created a generation of cowed humans, but, hey, we killed off Trump voters, so it's all good in the end."
TDS was the first Mass Formation Psychosis
The problem is we sell "health care" because people look for something outside of themselves, the easy fix - take a pill, get a vaccine, surgery, etc. There's money in "health care" vs. a system that stresses "healthy lifestyle", where there is less profit. But that involves effort - watch what you eat, move, get exercise, find methods to reduce stress, get out in nature, etc. Too many doctors are fearful of telling patients to lose weight, i.e. "fat shaming." So now you see articles about fat but fit. It's great for pharma and hospitals because when the chronic disease, etc. catches up with the bad habits, they can make money from bariatric surgery, knee and hip replacements, insulin, etc.
So incredibly true about how deeply unhealthy our country is. And it certainly isn't the fault of Trump. The blame can be shared by every politician that gains from Big Pharma, Big Sugar and Big everything else that lines pockets and destroys health. Now with the Covid economy we have millions of citizens ( many children) with lifelong mental health problems. It is time to fight back and Alex, we thank you for starting to do so!
The United States is not only the unhealthiness country in the world that spends the most money on health care or rather SICK CARE, the US has the most unhealthy children in the industrialized world.
Children in the United States are experiencing a serious and historically unprecedented burden of chronic illness. American children display consistently poorer health outcomes than children in other wealthy nations, notwithstanding substantially higher per capita health care spending on U.S. children.
Chronic Illness in Children—Who Is Sounding the Alarm?
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/news/chronically-ill-children-who-is-sounding-the-alarm/
Chronically ill children grow up to be chronically ill adults. Here is one reason:
The prevalence of obesity was 19.3% and affected about 14.4 million children and adolescents. Obesity prevalence was 13.4% among 2- to 5-year-olds, 20.3% among 6- to 11-year-olds, and 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds
https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html
Many children already have comorbidities which is a major reason NOT to give the gene based therapy shots to them.
Great points, Alex, about our problem of obesity. We are destroying ourselves with our addiction to food. We are eating to fix our empty hearts.
I turn on cable TV just to be amazed by the incredible proliferation of pharma advertising in the US. Our European peers generally require pharma companies to show net benefits (including socioeconomic measures) of a drug for approval/coverage. Excludes several drugs approved/covered in the US. We love our sick people here! They’re walking dollar bills. And we love side effects! They’re a way to prescribe more drugs to counter them!
When our supposed "elites" want to start another war, they should be forced to look at this chart on health expenditure and deaths per capita. America is rotting from within. Similar to Rome but our leaders want to fight over Ukraine. 90% of America couldn't find it on a map. The jump in deaths in America from covid, the vaccine, suicide and drugs from 2019 to 2021 is absolutely staggering. It's up by 20%. That literally the same amount during war years. Haha and our leaders want to fight about Ukraine. What a clown world.
Most Americans couldn't find America on a map. Failure of the education system.
Shut down the media for 30 days and watch how fast 90% of our problems disappear.