91–100 of 113 posts
Until people go on a summer holiday this season and fall ill. When people start dying they might ask themselves "why?" and realise that the virus is not actually gone. Just wishful thinking.
At some point people learn how to get back to life. Others can shut themselves in their house and have everything delivered to quarantine box outside their door.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Key takeaway is "mask requirement dropped". Everyone should feel free to protect themselves. Just don't mandate that other people do things to protect you.
So roughly, everyone should wear bullet proof vests and gas masks, because it's unreasonable to mandate that people not shoot guns into the air or spray mace whenever they want. We have mandates for how wiring and plumbing need to work in private homes, apartments, offices, etc to maintain safety. We have mandates for how fast cars can drive, which lanes they can use, how they need to signal turns to maintain safety.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t these kind of things happen whenever a war or pandemic happens? Showing your papers was important during WWI and WWII and I am aware of plenty of quarantines and mask mandates associated with previous cholera/TB/flu pandemics. Sure, I agree it sets a dangerous precedent, but we have been setting those kind of precedents for like 150 years. In that time we’ve had totalitarian states and liberal democracies.
Yes, humanity has normalised many problematic things before. We've set many poor precedents. I don't disagree! The issue here is that vaccine passports currently have no medical justification but are persisting purely as a punishment (I'd say incentive, but anyone here who hasn't yet been vaccinated will never be swayed by vaccine passports at this point). I of course do expect these to go even in my fairly strict ju…
I don’t think mask mandates punish in the same way as a vaccine mandate. You can change your mind and wear a mask instantly. A vaccine takes time and has greater consequences. Mask wearing is also an altruistic act; you put yourself through mild discomfort mostly to benefit those around you. It’s polite because it makes others feel more comfortable. A vaccine, especially when it comes to Omicron, protects you without really effecting risk of infection. So it’s more of a personal choice. Except at the population level where collective vaccine uptake have helped protect hospitals.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't have to eat during the flight, or you can delay eating to be out of phase. I've done that and so far it's been effective over a number of transatlantic flights.
I was under the impression that masks don't protect you that much, they protect other people from you?
That claim has been made but is questionable. The masks were designed to reduce exposure to the wearer, not so much from the wearer.
It's a matter of physics: When you inhale the suction generated automatically pulls the mask tighter on your face such that the air you breathe in essentially all has to pass through the mask but when you exhale, not so much.
In designing a mask there is a choice between a finer mesh or a looser one. If you pick a very loose mesh - say, cotton gauze - then air is easy to push through when you exhale but so are virus particles. On the other hand if you pick a very tight mesh - say, N95 or better - then air is much harder to push through but exhaling forces the mask slightly away from the face such that moist potentially virus-laden breath puffs out the sides and top. This is why your glasses fog up when wearing an N95 - moist air is escaping out the top of the mask completely unfiltered. (You can find youtube videos demonstrating this process with cigarette smoke). Double- or triple-masking doesn't help either - that makes it even harder for air to pass directly through the masks so even more air pushes out the side and top instead.
If your N95 is VERY well fitted and the strap VERY tight - tight enough to make your ears hurt - you'll get less escape, but wearing a mask that way is sufficiently uncomfortable that almost nobody does it.
In short, an N95 does plausibly filter nearly all the air you breathe IN, but if you want to filter the air you're breathing OUT, you really should be wearing a cleanroom suit.
Shame, I actually liked the idea of mandatory masks on public transportation. I always get sick on flights (pre-COVID; I haven't flown since COVID started) and it's really annoying to have a runny nose while on vacation. I'm sure I catch it in the airport or on the plane, because it always starts 1-2 after the flight.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are situations when it is appropriate to confirm one's identity. Going to the supermarket isn't one, and comparing it to voting - or any of the other situations vaccine passports were to be required - is a nonsense. I can agree with some of the other concerns you've listed, but if you're going to mix them in with reasonable actions by the government like protecting the integrity of elections , I wouldn't be sur…
Protecting the integrity of elections that have all been shown to have very little fraud? Mass fraud without IDs being something of a pipe dream. That doesn’t make much sense.
Regardless, election fraud has happened many times in the UK, most often from the politicians[1][2][3] (the links would be endless, I'll stop at three), and the idea that the Electoral Commission is going to produce investigations of any worth is sheer fantasy given some of their previous missteps[4].
However, an audit[5] was undertaken by Democratic Audit, who are funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (both are non-partisan), and here is what they found:
> The emergence of evidence of electoral malpractice in English elections during the 2000s ranks among the most concerning emerging developments identified by this Audit. Evidence of malpractice began to mount from 2005 onwards, after an election court convened in Birmingham found five men guilty of large-scale electoral fraud, involving thousands of postal ballots, at local elections in June 2004. In his written judgement, the election commissioner, Richard Mawrey QC, referred to ‘evidence of electoral fraud that would disgrace a banana republic.’
> While the Birmingham case represented the most systematic proven case of attempted ballot rigging, there have been numerous other convictions for electoral fraud in the UK since 2000. Court cases relating to large-scale fraud in local elections in Slough in 2007 and Peterborough in 2004 resulted in six convictions each. Following a lengthy police investigation and two re-trials, five men were eventually convicted in September 2010 for electoral fraud offences in the Bradford West constituency during the 2005 general election (the first relating to fraud in a UK general election for almost one hundred years). In total, more than 100 people have been found guilty of electoral malpractice in the UK since 1994. The vast majority of convictions have involved postal or proxy ballots, often in conjunction with attempts to manipulate the electoral registers by registering bogus electors or adding electors to the register at empty properties.
> The emergence of electoral fraud as an issue in UK politics cannot be divorced, therefore, from changes in electoral law since the 1990s, which introduced provisions for proxy voting and the widespread availability of postal voting. In particular, the introduction of ‘postal voting on demand’ via the Representation of the People Act 2000 created obvious opportunities for malpractice, especially when combined with a ‘rather arcane’ system of electoral registration.
They go into more detail but I would suggest alleviating yourself of the notion that the current system isn't being tested by those looking for unfair advantage. If you read the Election Commission's views on these incidents you might come away thinking they were small things, yet it's also become easy to see they are not entirely fair nor are they fit for purpose.
Bring on the improvements.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39289195
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutfur_Rahman_(British_politic...
[3] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/rahman-gets-the-gang-bac...
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/19/pro-brexit-...
[5] https://www.democraticaudit.com/2013/11/26/what-is-the-exten...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How does a minority protest stop the evil masterplan? This makes no sense at all. Either there is a master plan and you have to have 90% of the people on the street opposing this, or there was no master plan from the get go. Why can there not be a master plan that is difficult to implement where there is resistance? Why can the plan not have several stages and levels of implementation? Why can it not be that at dif…
I find the idea that some elite group are out there to take over the world makes even less sense. For what end? The elite already rule the world with a compliant society, who are all working on their "wage-slavery", with their aspirations of buying that new handbag or sportscar or graphics card because they think bragging about it on social media will fulfill them... But noo, there must be an insidious plot to make u…
However, my problem with the post above is the dismissal, it's incredibly reductive. I have issue lists longer than 2 items for programs that aren't comparable with the complexity involved in taking over the world, the idea that the grandest of all plans can be made black and white in a clearly absurd fashion is, well, absurd.
Or perhaps I should ask those making such out of hand dismissals to help me with bug fixes and architectural decisions, they're clearly masters who would probably be better employed hatching evil plans to take over the world but are at a loose enough end to spend time shooting them down.
Until people go on a summer holiday this season and fall ill. When people start dying they might ask themselves "why?" and realise that the virus is not actually gone. Just wishful thinking.
The virus will never be gone. It will continue to mutate in humans and animals and transfer between species. At some point people learn how to get back to life. Others can shut themselves in their house and have everything delivered to quarantine box outside their door.
So.. What's wrong with living life in masks for the foreseeable future then? Is that not "life" to you? If not then you are seriously privileged and need to realise that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have people already forgotten how much pressure the government was under in December to lock us down again? SAGE were predicting 6000 deaths a day, as if their modelling hadn't already been discredited ten times over, and all the usual suspects in the media and the Labour Party were screaming for more restrictions. If it hadn't been for partygate, the backbench Tory rebellion, and massive public resistance in the for…
About the NHS. I also thought that healthcare workers would most understand be behind vaccines. However an employment expert told me that healthcare workers are basically low paid workers, often from minority backgrounds, the exact same demographic that are vaccine hesitant. The vast majority of NHS staff are not doctors. It was, therefore a class / social / demographic issue, but there is indeed crossover with the f…
> I can't support the mandating of vaccines in this scenario
He goes on:
> If you want to mandate people to have vaccines you have a moral duty to provide evidence that it's necessary, and now the evidence isn't just lacking that it's necessary, but the evidence that is now coming out is demonstrating that it doesn't help reduce transmission from healthcare workers.
Intensive care consultant Milena Chee[2]:
> What I’m against is the vaccination status to be tied to employment rights. I’m against the language of hatred, which is rampant. We are supposed to be such a tolerant society, but all of a sudden have become the complete opposite.
Professor of oncology at St George's and infectious diseases expert (notably, HIV, which has similarities to COVID-19), Angus Dalgleish:
> I think it is absolute madness to have a mandate for everyone to be vaccinated at this stage… The people who are not vaccinated have all given very good reasons.
> Just do an antibody and a T-cell test. If you did that in large numbers it would be cheaper than giving everybody a booster
He goes into more detail[3] which you may enjoy if you're interested in the immune system.
Dr Tony Hinton, retired consultant surgeon on the mandate[4]:
> It makes no logical or scientific sense whatsoever
> Many of the people I speak to have had their 2 jabs but do not want to take a booster.
From NHS100k's open letter to the government[5]:
> We as a collection of professionals pride ourselves on our ability to critically analyse fact based, evidence-based, and science-based information to apply in our practice.
> 1. Emerging scientific evidence that is contrary to the narrative of mandatory vaccinations:
> We point to the work of Dr. Gunter Kampf of the University of Greifswald published in The Lancet Regional Health Europe on 19 November 2021. In this published article Dr. Kampf pointed out: ‘It appears to be grossly negligent to ignore the vaccinated population as a possible and relevant source of transmission’.
> Weekly reports from the UK Health Security Agency3 consistently show that among adults, the number of cases of Covid 19 in vaccinated population greatly outnumbers that of the unvaccinated population since the rollout of the vaccine programme. We point to the work of Singanayagam et al published on 29 October 2021 in The Lancet Infectious Diseases which showed that people with breakthrough infections have the same viral load regardless of vaccination status. It further adds that regardless of vaccination status the rate of spread from an infected person is the same among household contacts.
> This is not an exhaustive list however we are highlighting these articles as examples to cast reasonable doubt on the assertions made by the Secretary of State, Sajid Javid. Mr Javid declared that our ‘Duty of Care’ towards our patients could only be discharged through the act of inoculating our bodies with a product, that there is now growing evidence of it being inadequate in preventing the transmission of this virus.
The letter is actually damning of the kind of narrative the mainstream media, along with the government, has fed the public. The letter to Chris Witty is similarly damning[6].
Lilith, a paramedic and founder of NHS100k[7]:
> What we're concerned about is the precedent it will set. If you can mandate these vaccines for the NHS, when will it start occurring to the public. When does our health become our choice or when does it become the government's choice? We're very much ralliers for the right to choose. It's such a core issue for healthcare professionals where we must respect patients' decisions
Mr Ahmad Malik, consultant orthopaedic surgeon[7]:
> On one hand we've got mandates and on the other hand we've got freedom, personal freedom, bodily autonomy, informed consent. If you think you can have both, you're gravely mistaken, because they're the exact opposite.
> [Consent] is the cornerstone of medical ethics. Having the ability to choose what's done to your body or what's not done to your body is something we've taken for granted for centuries.
> If we have this mandatary vaccination coming through, that's earthshattering, that demolishes that whole concept of personal bodily autonomy and we're opening a Pandora's box.
They underline your last paragraph, but I think your employment expert needs to familiarise himself with the actual people opposing this instead of making hasty generalisations that act as easy dismissals of a view that may by sincerely held by well educated people.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRApq2IRqn4
[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/body/nhs-medics-p...
[3] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1367946743636118
[4] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=274024381492297
[5] https://nhs100k.com/Resources/Static/NHS100k%20CEO%20Letter....
[6] https://nhs100k.com/Resources/Static/Letter%20to%20Chris%20W...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you considered taking steps to possibly improve your own health instead of wishing that a government or corporation would require everyone around you to wear a face covering indefinitely for your own personal benefit?
I'm not sure what you mean by that. In general I'm healthy. If you're implying I should wear a mask when flying, then the problem with that is that pre-COVID you would be seen as weird for going on a plane with a mask. I suspect it will go back to that status eventually if there are no rules forcing masks. Maybe that's the Nash equilibrium. An external rule can change the equilibrium to something that is better for e…
Wouldn't it be better to make it it the social norm to wear masks when you have an active respiratory illness - like it is in asia - or when you are at risk rather than forcing everyone to wear them?