KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Lying Democrats Are Anti-Vaxxers and COVID Superspreaders. “The nonstop COVID drama is a bit much. Didn’t we all get enough of that last year? Social media is flooded with variant and vaccination news and harassment. It’s on the other side of tedious at this point. If you listen to Team Biden and their flying monkeys in the mainstream media it’s only Republicans who are bringing everybody’s least favorite plague to new people.”
ARE COLLEGES Covid Superspreaders? “The analysis of 30 large U.S. universities indicated that in 18 of them, a peak in campus infections preceded a peak in the surrounding county by less than 14 days, suggesting infections were translated from the campus to the nearby community. In some cases, the home counties of these large colleges had infection rates much greater than the rest of their state.”
So here’s a thought: What elevated this in my mind from “oh, the annual rumors of a new disease outbreak in China” to “holy crap, better pay attention” was the Chinese government’s own rather dramatic response. Hypothesis: They knew it had leaked from the lab, but weren’t sure yet which infectious agent had leaked from the lab, hence the dramatic response, more appropriate to a much deadlier disease. Second hypothesis: From this, we can assume that there is a worse infectious agent in that lab. Or at least that there was.
Senate Democrats, some of whom have decried their G.O.P. colleagues’ lenient attitude toward masking, have adopted an unofficial “Don’t Test, Don’t Tell,” protocol of late, particularly as they endeavor to pass the historic Inflation Reduction Act this weekend. One senior Senate aide told me, “They’re not going to delay it if a member has gotten Covid. Counterparts are saying they’re not going to test anymore. It’s not an official mandate but we all know we’re not letting Covid get in the way. The deal is happening. Less testing, just wear masks and get it done.” When Chuck Schumer was asked about a plan B today in case someone drops out with Covid he said: “We’re not talking about a plan B. We’re going to stay healthy.” Another source said that if you catch Covid “you can bring your ventilator and still vote…”
MAYBE NOW THEY’LL ADMIT THAT FOR MOST PEOPLE, OMICRON ISN’T A BIG DEAL: Schadenfreudelicious! Swanky Soirée Turns Swamp Superspreader. “At least three cabinet secretaries, several members of Congress, multiple White House officials and a large number of journalists are among the dozens to test positive.”
Several BuzzFeed staffers have been infected with Covid-19 following the company’s Holiday party in Manhattan last week, according to a report from Insider.Three BuzzFeed employees who tested positive following the party told Insider that they were vaccinated and received their booster shots prior to contracting Covid-19 at the event, and are experiencing mild symptoms.
BuzzFeed has reportedly strengthened Covid-19 protocols following the party and amid a surge of cases in New York City, including putting a temporary freeze on group meetings over six people, requiring masks in the office until further notice, and freezing all non-essential business travel until the new year.
The company is also conducting contact tracing, as well as offering free testing for close contacts.
The rules were strict, but did not stop the #SuperspreaderEvent:
“BuzzFeed requires vaccinations for staffers, and partygoers had to present their vaccination cards to get into the event,” Perlberg reported, noting that CEO Jonah Peretti was in attendance. “Two days before the party, BuzzFeed updated its rules to require masks ‘unless you are actively eating or drinking.'”
Related: Ben Shapiro asks, “What if I told you there was a variant nearly everyone would get, but that would kill almost no one. Would you shut down society over that? Because that appears to be Omicron. And for a lot of people, the answer appears to be yes.”
Especially now that New York-based media is getting Omicron; their job was to create fear porn even before COVID; they’re going to be doubling their efforts now: As Jon Gabriel writes at Ricochet:
BuzzFeed hosted a staff holiday party in Manhattan that turned into a super-spreader event among the 100-percent vaccinated and boosted attendees. Other Gotham CEOs canceled their soirées and opted for yuletide classics like online yoga and meal delivery.
The Atlantic published a piece, “I’m Starting to Give Up on Post-pandemic Life,” with the subhead “Despair is not a mild symptom.” CNN’s Chris Cillizza wrote about his “long December” and how his “Covid anxiety is spiking.” Neurotic journalists keep using their day jobs as free therapy and insult readers for not being as miserable as they are.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom stopped attacking Ron DeSantis long enough to announce yet another state mask mandate. Politico noted that “many Californians have already reconciled themselves to a perpetually masked lifestyle.”
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The shrieking reports from coastal media bewilder those of us in free states. Outside of doctor’s appointments and air travel, I haven’t worn a mask since … I don’t know … May 2020? A handful of my neighbors wear masks while shopping, perhaps 5 percent and nearly all elderly. The rest? We moved on a year and a half ago.
A NYC-based journalist friend was dumbfounded when I told him this, and more than a little envious. The national media is stuck in a different world, and a different time. It’s like the White Witch’s Narnia, but with the additional horror of online yoga.
I wish a Merry Christmas to the vast majority of the country and a Dreary Covidmas to those unquestioning minds trapped in locked-down cities. If these New Yorkers, Angelenos, and Washingtonians happen to own an old wardrobe, perhaps they could step through it to celebrate Christmas with the rest of us.
“The president was seen inside Murray’s Toggery Shop on the island of Nantucket Saturday with his mask around his neck and not covering his mouth despite a visible sign outside the door instructing patrons to wear a mask,” Fox Newsreports. “According to the White House press pool, Biden walked out of the shop at 4:45 p.m. with his mask down and drinking what appeared to be a milkshake.” (The store’s sign doesn’t say “unless you’re drinking.” It says to wear a mask.)
In the still frame shown above, you can clearly see the president maskless while others inside are wearing masks—including a young child almost certainly at far less risk from COVID-19 than Biden.
This isn’t Biden’s first time flouting COVID-19 mask requirements. In October, the president and his wife violated Washington, DC’s mask mandate when visiting the posh Georgetown restaurant Fiola Mare. Video shows them walking through the restaurant maskless while staff clad in black masks surround them.
The Bidens are, unfortunately, no outliers. Literally dozens of politicians have been caught violating their own pandemic policies and mask mandates. So, too, media figures that have advocated mask mandates don’t always practice what they preach, as recently exposed by FEE’s Jack Elbaum.
In 2020, as mass urban riots were cheered on by hospital employees who only a month prior urged us all to lockdown and “social distance,” it was obvious that COVID was smart enough to avoid Democrats, so such a maskless Joe Biden was fine. Then came the superspreader event a few months ago that was Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard birthday party. Given Kamala’s poll numbers, I hope (P)resident Biden’s handlers are looking out for him.
Back in the 1980s, Fauci was a superspreader of the myth that an important vector for the transmission of HIV was heterosexual intercourse.
For the last couple of years, he has been terrifying the public with tales from the crypt about the virus he helped develop with American taxpayer money for “gain of function” research in a Chinese virology lab in Wuhan.
The fact that this Bela Lugosi of the medical establishment is also a publicity addict who can’t pass a television camera without primping and dispensing contradictory but depressing dicta makes him a public nuisance.
You see his baneful influence everywhere.
In our former newspaper of record, for example, The New York Times.
Deploying their signature mixture of nauseating human interest pabulum and tendentious statistics, they paid homage to the CCP virus for giving them something to write about now that Donald Trump is, for the time being, off the menu.
According to the Times, the fact that the deaths of 700,000 people in the United States have been attributed to the virus means that it is now officially more deadly than the Spanish ’flu epidemic of 1918, which killed about 675,000 people in the United States.
Remember the old saw about “lies, damned lies, and statistics”?
The Timesspecializes in that wheeze.
The CCP Virus can be serious, no doubt about it. But it represents a significant threat to a tiny part of the population, mostly the elderly, especially those with certain co-morbidities like diabetes and obesity.
The Spanish ’flu, by contrast, cut a wide swathe through the young and healthy.
The so-called Delta variant seems to be more infectious but less virulent than the original.
It has affected some younger people, much to the delight of the Times and other members of Fauci fan club.
But the Timesstory is just the Gray-Lady version of a domestic-strife story like those in the sensationalistic rags you see in the supermarket checkout line. “Betts and Andy on the Rocks: What Really Happened On Their Honeymoon.”
Fauci has since clarified his comments to suggest that he didn’t say what he said. “I will be spending Christmas with my family,” the doctor confessed. “I encourage people, particularly the vaccinated people who are protected, to have a good, normal Christmas with your family.” This walk-back suggests that the administration Fauci serves understands his level of risk intolerance is sapping him and the White House of credibility.
Dr. Fauci’s tenuous grasp of elementary political realities has become impossible to ignore. Millions of Americans have acquainted themselves with a new status quo in which pre-vaccine mitigation measures like masking and social distancing are reserved primarily for the unvaccinated. Mass gatherings are no longer forbidden—they’re not even uncommon. Third booster shots are being administered to older Americans because an American administration must serve the American public before it concerns itself with the long-term interests of the globe. And no bureaucracy ever conceived has been able to stop Americans from getting sick.
A first-term administration has one prime political directive: Convince voters that they are better off today than they were during the previous presidency. Rising rates of inflation have robbed Joe Biden of confidence in his ability to steward the economy. The historic debacle his administration engineered in Afghanistan has led to deteriorating faith in Biden’s capabilities as a commander-in-chief. And now, Biden faces a “trust deficit” when it comes to combating the disease. If the public face of the administration’s public health program continues to view basic human nature and tangible political imperatives as abstractions that can be safely disregarded, the administration’s precarious position will only get worse.
And they’re stuck with him — and alas, so are we. On Wednesday, Hugh Hewitt asked Fauci, “Is there a point where you will say I do more harm than good because people don’t listen to me anymore and step aside?” To which Fauci replied, “No, absolutely, unequivocally no, Hugh.”
As the Washington Post noted last year in an article headlined, “Trump says he might fire Fauci. Technically, he can’t,” “Technically, the president of the United States cannot directly fire Fauci, let’s say by a tweet, mainly because he is not a political appointee. As a career federal employee and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, Fauci is protected by federal civil service regulations that shield him from being fired or demoted for political reasons. Fauci could be removed, but it would imply a complicated process layered with civil service protections that require the government agency to provide evidence that there is a just cause for dismissal, including failure to follow orders or misconduct.”
RULES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: More COVID-19 Hypocrisy: San Francisco Mayor London Breed Partied Maskless at a Jazz Club. “Breed is in good company of course: Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser has repeatedly attended events while unmasked—including a birthday party and a wedding—despite her own orders forcing masks on citizens in a variety of unnecessary circumstances. When D.C. gyms asked if they could require vaccination instead of masks, the city said no. As Monday’s Met Gala made abundantly clear, mask mandates are for the commoners. The ruling class is doing whatever they want.”
Pics and video of this superspreader event at the link.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama did all that just to give Biden some more headaches. As Kyle Smith at NRO notes, Biden gave a very lame excuse for not attending, and Obama has said some really mean things about Biden over the years. I wouldn’t want that old coot around either. Who needs an octogenarian creep wandering around groping all the women and sniffing all the little girls’ hair?
If the Sturgis Rally wasn’t a superspreader event last year, before the vaccine, why are we supposed to assume this one will be? Fauci just loves being on camera and saying any old $#!+.
I really don’t like the Obamas, but they should be able to party however they want, with whomever they want. And so should the rest of us. If you don’t like it, go Fauci yourself.
Having now read through it, I have the same reaction as Greg Pollowitz: “[W]hat the CDC data on Provincetown actually shows is that even under perfect conditions for a superspreader event, the vaccine works spectacularly well.”
The study tracks a nasty outbreak in P-town over the first two weeks of this month. On July 3, cases in Barnstable County were rock-bottom at zero per 100,000 residents due in large part to the state’s high vaccination rate of 70+ percent partially immunized and 60+ percent fully immunized. Two weeks later, after locals partied on July 4 and attended a series of summer events, cases had exploded to 177 per 100,000 over the previous 14 days. Many of those infections were afflicting fully vaccinated people.
That’s not good news. But is it as terrible as the reporting has cracked it up to be?
Approximately three quarters (346; 74%) of cases occurred in fully vaccinated persons (those who had completed a 2-dose course of mRNA vaccine [Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna] or had received a single dose of Janssen [Johnson & Johnson] vaccine ≥14 days before exposure). Genomic sequencing of specimens from 133 patients identified the B.1.617.2 (Delta) variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in 119 (89%) and the Delta AY.3 sublineage in one (1%). Overall, 274 (79%) vaccinated patients with breakthrough infection were symptomatic. Among five COVID-19 patients who were hospitalized, four were fully vaccinated; no deaths were reported. Real-time reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) cycle threshold (Ct) values in specimens from 127 vaccinated persons with breakthrough cases were similar to those from 84 persons who were unvaccinated, not fully vaccinated, or whose vaccination status was unknown (median = 22.77 and 21.54, respectively).
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Which brings us to the first wrinkle in the data. How much of the P-town outbreak is due to the circumstances being absolutely ideal for a mass outbreak?
Click to enlarge.
As Byron York tweets, “Not a Trump hotspot. The proper response is not to blame Blue America for outbreak but for those finger-pointing commentators to be a little more circumspect, a little less Trump-obsessed, a little more reasonable. Would be good idea.”
Andrew Cuomo’s hometown paper took a similarly sanctimonious tone. ‘In Tampa, Super Bowl Celebrations Bring Superspreader concerns’, a New York Times headline screamed this morning. Back when Biden won, the paper’s super-spreader concerns were curiously absent: ‘A Rollicking NYC Celebration for Biden’s Win, Well Into the Night’.
So what’s behind the open and naked double-standards being pushed in both corporate and social media? There isn’t some grand diabolical strategy. It’s pretty simple actually. They are allowed to flaunt the rules and change how COVID affects a population based on the social causes they and political lines they espouse — and you aren’t. It is that simple. COVID-19 doesn’t affect racial protests or Democratic victories. It will however kill everyone who attends a football game or has a private gathering in their home.
No one is denying this is a deadly virus worth taking seriously; therein lies the problem with politicized public health experts who wag their fingers at people trying to get out and enjoy an event, but who explain away mass gatherings in the name of social justice. The virus doesn’t care why crowds have gathered. It spreads indiscriminately.
So does hypocrisy. If you are a public person with a byline, or an activist or a politician who ignores COVID in favor of your cause, you deserve to be ridiculed while lecturing others — you deserve to be ignored. Enjoy the parade, Tampa Bay.
● “The great theme of the Trump years, the one historians will note a century from now, was the failure of America’s expert class. The people who were supposed to know what they were talking about, didn’t.”
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