A Concerned Scientist @BE@qoto.org

@Greengordon

It reminds me of Sam Bankman-Fried keeping a "fake" generous persona, by his own admission. I suspect that was simply trying to emulate the super rich people he'd seen and knew. He just let it slip that it was all fake.

@mcnado

You're think it would be self obvious, but it's always a mystery!

@Awknddragn @DidiQ

Their goal has always been to align Florida Universities with the Hillsdale curriculum they're putting in the K-12. People used to point out that eventually Florida high school students wouldn't be accepted to colleges outside of Florida. That was by design. Then it's a singular curriculum from K through college and you don't have any "outside ideas" getting into Florida.

@barney@mas.to @augieray @danvanmoll

I don't disagree with any of that except the "gaffe" was massive. I tend to think he thought that out and said it very purposefully because he didn't want voters scared off of in person voting in the mid-terms, but, that aside, it literally killed and disabled people who trusted Biden to tell them the truth. I promise you that it did.

But what do you do in a situation where you make rules and people don't want to follow them? Give up? How about the IBCC just quit making building codes. Builders don't like them. Or, as @augieray says(sorry for blowing up your thread) how about no more drunk driving laws? A lot of people ignore those.

I'm saying you can't capitulate when lives are at stake, and Democrats did. That's all.

That capitulation is going to continue killing and disabling people, too. The vaccination rate in my county has dropped under 90% overall. More than 1 out of every 10 kids entering the school system aren't vaccinated for *anything* anymore. It's a slippery slope issue and Democrats chose to give up on public health rather than fighting for it and even if they reversed course now I'm afraid it's too late. As a scientist and a citizen who has to live and work here I find that awful.

To be 100% clear, at the same time I can also agree that it would be way worse if Republicans ran everything.

We're mostly saying the same thing, but I just can't bring myself to say that abandoning public health after other people tried to destroy it is OK just because they didn't join in on actively destroying it. There was a window in which the CDC and the administration could have made bold choices for public health and chose not to.

@barney@mas.to @augieray @danvanmoll

None of that, except your last paragraph(I currently live in FL and that's not why he was reelected), is wrong. DeSantis won because, one, Floridians LOVE him and, two, the Democratic Party is almost non-existent here. People outside of Florida, particularly outside of the south, have a hard time understanding it, but him and people like Gaetz are ridiculously popular down here. Over 70% of people in the county in which I live voted for DeSantis. They LOVE him more than any politician in the world.

Now, that part of politics aside, tell me what Biden has done to make it better? He didn't help by saying it was over. I'm honestly grasping at straws trying to figure out something I can praise him for here. By multiple accounts that I've read even the First Lady apparently thinks he's lost his mind on COVID policy and doesn't take it seriously enough.

Or the CDC? Walensky didn't help by calling masks the scarlet letter of the pandemic, or sticking to the bogus green maps, etc.

On and on.

Democrats have had two years to make it better and haven't is all I'm saying. They've capitulated and given room to the right wingers to deny and minimize by *going along* with it, mostly via silence. That shouldn't get them parades and awards. Over 700 people a day above the previous baseline died in the US in 2022.

They're not doing a good job.

I'n going to try to declare nuance again here. Not a single thing Republicans have done has been good. No one is arguing that. But give me the giant list of great things that Democrats are doing right now that they deserve credit for.

@augieray

DeSantis said that Sweden and Florida handled COVID the best of anywhere in the world just a month or two ago. It's nuts that so many people believe this without doing any reading about how it's actually turned out.

@barney@mas.to @augieray @danvanmoll

We should keep in mind, too, that the mask mandate ruling that you're talking was from April of 2021. That was 21 months ago. The CDC did not even ask for a stay of the ruling. That was a political calculation. If they'd cared about the mask mandate they would have tried to keep it in place. This is all theater at this point.

@barney@mas.to @augieray @danvanmoll

Shades of horrible is all you're arguing in my opinion. Are Republicans worse here? Absolutely. Are Democrats bad? Yes! There's no defense for it.

Who knows how many Democrats have died because Biden said it's over and NPR repeated it? One was in my family. I know that much. I don't like to make scientific arguments personal, but, deaths are deaths and both Democrats and Republicans have blood on their hands here, IMO. Failed public health is failed public health. We shouldn't be arguing how much public health failed. It failed. Under Biden's watch and Trump's.

Agree to disagree on that point, but I'm not going to say that COVID has been handled well the last two years.

@flavia_feijo_epi

Really shows how hard this type of science is and why we shouldn't be letting viruses run rampant.

@ahimsa_pdx

Very glad to see more people figuring out that the way it's being covered by news organizations is not correct. They're very much understating the magnitude of the problem as presented.

7.5% of people were already estimated to have Long COVID in the US by last June. The problem is not getting better with subsequent infections and more waves!

@barney@mas.to @augieray @danvanmoll

I think the nuance here is appropriate.

One side politicized it and is actively encouraging anti-vax and mass infection. No doubt. None of that is good.

While DeSantis is enacting these things, as you say, his kids are homeschooled and the public tours of his house(the Governor's mansion) were cancelled for years and now only allowed when him and his family aren't there. As with many politicians he's a hypocrite.

All of that is true.

The other side capitulated. Biden said it's over. Jha says he lives life like 2019. Becerra said it's over. "You have the tools" when we really don't and they're about to get really expensive to boot. The CDC under Biden's a total mess.

That's true, too.

Neither "side" has the moral high ground here. I don't think there's any need to defend *any* of them here. They all failed public health.

@gemelliz

It was the same thing for the Sun Valley Conference aka "billionaire summer camp" the past two years.

@bhawthorne

I really appreciate the response! It honestly has been shocking to me to find out that so many people are, in fact, seeing the same thing, but somehow society at large isn't reacting to it. Thank your wife for helping teach the next generation for me, please! I honestly don't know how anyone manages it in a classroom setting these days. It was already a hard job and now it's incredible to me that people are managing to get through.

Hang in there, keep masking up and hopefully some Long COVID relief comes for you.

@gwagner

Not your fault and not just you, but I'd like to point out that everyone is using this as an about 10%, when it actually says "at least 10%" right up front. That also only accounts for "severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections" when it then states "The incidence is estimated at 10–30% of non-hospitalized cases, 50–70% of hospitalized cases and 10–12% of vaccinated cases."

It's almost certainly on the low side given that an estimated 7.5% of US adults already had Long COVID last June.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/20220622.htm

Bottom line, 10% is a bare minimum and the chances of us escaping with "only" 10% of people having Long COVID has likely already long passed us by.

@ThisAccountKillsFascists @dangillmor

I think you're onto something here. I grew up in a very liberal community and about 15 years ago now I moved to the deep south for a job. Particularly over the last 6 years I'll tell friends and family out west about political goings ons here and the reaction is usually a variation "Oh well. Move?" or "Florida man does Florida things." Asking someone from Washington or California to care about Missouri or Florida is a stretch for most people, apparently.

@augieray

The slippery slope is, sadly, real. I've been told multiple times "Who cares if there's polio circulating? The death rate's only 1%."

I'm already seeing the exact same argument for "who cares about measles?" online now. It's going to continue until the burden is, literally, medieval probably.

@pixplz

If a 75% asymptomatic rate held up across schools just imagine how many cases are going totally undetected when we see that often schools are shutting down due to mass illness and/or have half of the students out sick at a time occasionally.

@rchusid

The really sad thing, to me, is that no one seems to care day to day but some celebrities get COVID and it's news worthy, suddenly.

@carnage4life

True for me. 1899 was the last new show I'll ever watch on Netflix.

@aetiology

OK, fine then, good bye. I point out the issue with something that you, as an infectious disease epidemiologist, are publicly posting that's clearly wrong, I believe dangerous, and you block me.

This is why we're going into the 4th year of a pandemic FFS.