Ever since noticing the weird confluence of all Smart People citing Alabama, unprompted, as part of their great crusade against Vaccine-Holdout MAGAheads, as THE go-to dummy unvaxxed state that was gonna kill us all, I like to check in with their numbers occasionally

Seems ok?
For avoidance of doubt this is not an argument that Alabama has a great 'policy', that 'vaccination doesn't matter', or that something bad can't/won't happen in Alabama the future.

Just an argument that Smart People have overly simplistic one-dimensional stories in their heads.
It's the Smart People who have the most confidence in their simplistic and one-dimensional stories. Regular ol' non-Smart People might be inclined to admit their ignorance, that there's things they don't know/understand, outside their paradigm. But not Smart People! They know all
And that explains why, couple months ago, I suddenly found myself talking to more than one Smart Person smh'ing about Alabama, how they had a tragically low vax rate, how terrible that was for us. Reality has nothing to do with it, they all 'knew' this

Must've read it somewhere?

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More from @soncharm

28 Jul
vaccine-pushing I see in covid-cult circles seems to really miss the point to me. Once the vax rate is 60 or 70 then pulling out all the stops to get it to 70 or 80 or whatever just seems obtuse and diminishing marginal returns esp if protection doesn’t last, breakthroughs, etc.
constantly running around in circles trying to solve yesterday’s problem. I don’t know what the vax-pushers think their endgame reward from it will be. eradication? it’s not gonna be eradicated guys. not via this
in a context of breakthrough delta and waning protection anyway, there is no Problem that gets magically Solved from nagging/goading/lawfaring some marginal cohort of Holdouts into getting the vaccine, too

that way doesn’t lie your paradise, guys
Read 5 tweets
28 Jul
Thread of things I’ve not been persuaded of. Not that I believe in their converse, just that I haven’t been persuaded of them, by anyone.
+
HCQ doesn’t help with the Wuhan Virus
The 2020 Presidential election was on the up-and-up, its outcome was consistent with what a perfect tally of valid voters’ cast-votes would show, were this possible
Read 48 tweets
28 Jul
One thing I’ll say about the vaccines is, from what I can tell, almost everyone on my TL appears to know more about the vaccines than I do. How effective they are/aren’t, how safe or not, whether they protect you from XYZ or just XY, etc.

I know very little of this stuff!
People also know a lot about ‘delta’. They know that its reproduction number, R0, the avg number of ppl each infection spreads to in the absence of (&c.) is 6, vs. R0 for Wuhan Classic which they know to be 2.5.

I don’t know those things, nor do I know how everyone knows them.
I don’t know whether it makes rational sense on a risk-benefit basis to vaccinate a given person of age T for all values of T. Others do, though. Very strong opinions. I don’t know how they did the calculation.
Read 6 tweets
28 Jul
Pretty rich to see people whining about 1/6 being a ‘threat to our democracy’.

Dunno if you’ve noticed, but we don’t have a ‘democracy’ (or republic, or democratic republic) at this time. We have a health-dictatorship. One cheered on by most of the people crying about “1/6”.
There’s nothing consistent with ‘democracy’ about a system in which bureaucrats can issue orders they call ‘guidance’, and then governors/executives implement them wholesale as diktats, saying they are metaphysically required to ‘follow’ them.
If you complain about the ‘guidance’, people say Hey, it’s not a law, just guidance.

If you complain that the diktat was issued, people say Hey they have to follow the guidance.

No part of this process is influenced by anything ‘democratic’.
Read 5 tweets
26 Jul
This raises something pro-lockdown types have (if only implicitly) accused me of since this all started: my lack of sunny optimism, essentially a failure of sufficient self-sacrificial ‘heroism’, in my (correct) belief that staying on the ‘golden path’ was a non-starter.
+
I’ll just say that hey, if you’d asked me to envision pre-2019 what our Pandemic Response Plan would’ve looked like, I too might’ve imagined sealed 3-ring binders being unsealed, and helicopters swooping down to unload a rappelling Dustin Hoffman in a hazmat suit, saving the day.
But instead what we got was, like, some lady in a giant scarf standing at a podium on TV telling us all to ‘wash our hands’.

I dunno, stuff like that just kinda seemed like a clue to me that no Super Awesome Pandemic Plan was in the offing. Maybe I’m just super-perceptive.
Read 4 tweets
26 Jul
Since (as I think more people are inevitably conceding) we’re not going to eradicate covid on anything less than a generational timescale, and vaccines are leaky, the best thing for it is early/regular exposure in kids so their immune systems are trained for it.

How am I wrong.
Vaccinate and protect older people who had no exposure to it as kids, as best one can. But meanwhile, neither lament nor freak out about exposures in kids. It can’t be avoided anyway, without massive vigilance & rendering them extra-vulnerable for their lifetimes.
One reason for peoples’ resistance to this is simple innumeracy. Yes it affects a small portion of kids horribly, no one wants that to be their kid, so, super-vigilance. But parents following the same rationale consistently must never let their kids leave the house. Too risky.
Read 14 tweets

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