The difference is the subject. It's not academic or philosophical. Go watch the videos linked in other comments to understand the intrusive nature.
I get it, the counter argument is that the stationary camera is no less intrusive. To which I counter that the stationary camera records my happenstance gross actions along with those actions of many others, I am literally lost in the noise. But the explicit camera on me records much finer detail of myself, and nobody else, there is no noise to be lost in.
Perhaps people who like attention do not see a problem being the center of attention. I personally don't mind if someone notices my presence but I do mind if they think that seeing me means that I can become the star of their next production.
I'll be the first to admit I think this protest is about a bunch of idiots with a victim complex. They should just get the vaccine like 90% of the rest of their profession have done. It's safe and is what anyone should do to help their fellow humans.
The Emergencies Act is law. If Edge wants to do business in Canada they have to follow it. I don't see this ending well for them.
Maybe I'm an old curmudgeon, but I also don't want to see ANY financial company using memes in an official press release.
As a mid-30s sw engineer, I’d say it’s a good look. I hate professional facades and meme’ing is how people communicate now. I’d also say the first part of your your last statement is probably correct, in that you might be an old curmudgeon ;)
Not OP but dropping a professional facade is often the first step on the road to actually becoming unprofessional. Not something you want from a company dealing in finance.
...in the US, there are ~40 (after counting the green squares twice it seems there are now 41) ongoing "national emergencies" declared since the passage of the "National Emergencies Act" in 1976.
The oldest one seems to be from 1979 and involve sanctions on Iran from the hostage crisis.
Biden has declared five emergencies; Trump declared nine (that haven't ended), Obama also declared nine (again ignoring ones that ended), GWB declared eleven, net, Clinton declared six, net, and surprisingly all emergencies between 1979 and 1994, roughly did come to an end.
Regardless of what one thinks of it, it's curious that for a couple of decades, the norm was for emergencies in the US to end and now it's not.
As far as I know, the law does not demand asset seizure, but freezing. And the frozen accounts will be unfrozen when the emergency order expires or is lifted. The goal is to prevent the use of assets right now to finance blockades, not to deprive people of their property forever.
People that argue this seem unaware of how dreadful freezing assets can be. 30 days without funds means you can't pay any debt, can't pay for food, can't use transportation, etc.
I don't believe "The goal is to prevent use of assets right now to finance blockades," it's clearly an intimidation tactic against "undesirables."
I do think that is the goal. These are protestors with heavy, portable living quarters, after all; if you can't move them, you've got to cut off the money they use to live.
If governments don't come down hard on using heavy vehicles for blockades, and don't do what they can to stop that being a financially supportable method of protest, it will be repeated everywhere, like the Gilets Jaunes model of protest.
But ultimately I think it would be better to make life miserable for them by degrees, rather than attacking their personal finances.
So the Spotify/Peterson idea was a sarcastic joke (which humourless people have downvoted), but why _not_ make it difficult for them to protest by making it hard for them to buy stuff, or by making it difficult for them to return to their cabs when they leave them? Why not make the protests less liveable?
The thing about non-vehicular protest is that it eventually fizzles out; people make their point, they endure some notable hardship, it makes the press, they make their point and they move on. Generally this is how protest brings about small changes. But it's inherent in the process that it's difficult, extreme and inappropriate to permanently disrupt.
There is a balance, and protests are designed to attract law enforcement; civil disobedience, arrest and being very publicly removed by the police is ultimately part of the modern mechanism of protest.
Road-blocking with a truck in which it is presumably quite routine to be able to exist in a little more comfort for a few days at a time is another matter, and if the response does not reflect that, it'll go on forever.
It's a clever idea, but just because it has clever and innovative advantages over e.g. chaining yourself to a fence doesn't mean that it should be granted a pass.
Either the protesters and the police come to some point of collusion about what their very public arrest and removal will look like, or something ultimately has to be done to stop them disrupting forever.
Protesting during multiple weeks in winter is already unliveable. I live in Canada and would probably not do that unless the issue is life-or-death. Using extra-judicial means to quell opponents is not what our government should be doing, be it by freezing assets, preventing exchange of goods or other. One of the basis of modern democracy is due process and executive/legislative separation.
It wouldn't have made a difference if the Emergencies Act was not invoked. There is a court order to freeze assets which does not rely on the Act, just existing laws. Even without the act and by the order of the judiciary, the funds would have been frozen.
That's a specific order, to a specifics individuals. Plus, this is a legal matter and can have a back-and-forth in court. The emergency act allows freezing assets of anyone without a judge having its say. The scale is not the same.
(Again -- what's with the downvotes on your comment? You have a legitimate opinion; I don't understand why it was downvoted when it didn't even needlessly snark at Joe Rogan like mine)
All protests ultimately end when the protesters allow themselves to be arrested or come to an agreement with the state or police for a way to protest over the long term that is present but less disruptive. Usually the process of protest involves some acceptance that the police are going to make your lives a little difficult; it's the nature of the beast.
But this is at a more significant scale, because each invididual protestor has a seriously outsize impact.
What happens to civil society if a bunch of truckers who believe a bunch of Qanon nonsense (and that is largely what is at work here -- not legitimate belief but conspiracy theories) can repeat this, over and over again, because of access to finance from outside (and even from abroad)?
I personally do not think that portable roadblocks on the basis of fringe belief funded by foreign state and non-state actors, going unchallenged, is something society should just do nothing about.
This isn't a one-off. Governments need to figure out how to allow this kind of protest for short periods but not tolerate for long periods, because road blockades have real consequences.
(As it goes, in the UK, it's the government that blocks roads with long tailbacks of lorries for purely partisan reasons)
A bunch of idiots with a victim complex? That’s a rather jaded viewpoint.. how did we get to a place where being skeptical of habitual liars is seen as idiotic? Where fear is seen as a victim complex?
False. Individual liberty must be protected. Denying food shopping is a special kind of cruel and unusual punishment. It’s a personal choice, full stop.
Why should it be a personal choice? Living through this pandemic without getting vaccinated is at least as dangerous to public health as driving a car without wearing a seatbelt, and that is illegal.
Even if the vaccine did nothing to stop the spread of COVID (it does much more than nothing), it is still of vital importance to keeping ICUs free, which in turn is important for everyone.
Since your choice has an outsize effect on society, and since we have ample, overwhelming, incontrovertible evidence that the vaccine is safe and certainly hundreds of times safer than the disease, I see no reason why it shouldn't be considered mandatory.
I'm young, slim, healthy, unvaccinated, not tested positive for Covid once even after my housemates had it.
"There is not a single example of a country with less than 40% of the population overweight that has high death rates (over 10 per 100,000). Similarly, no country with a death rate over 100 per 100,000 had less than 50% of their population overweight"
Are we going to start banning overweight from consuming alcohol and eating fast food? They're putting tremendous pressure on our universal healthcare system, their choice to be unhealthy has an outsized effect on society; specifically the health systems that we are using as a reason to push vaccination on everyone, regardless of their risk category.
Why do you refuse to get vaccinated? There are plenty of young, slim, healthy, unvaccinated people who also died. Your "choice" is inconsiderate to others in society who may catch it from you, that it may mutate in you and cause a worse variant, to people who care about you, and to the EMS and healthcare workers who you feel entitled to lean on when they're already overworked. This isn't about self-righteous entitlement to your "rights", this is about your duties to others to be a respectable member of a functional community and society.
Sure I wear a seatbelt. It's not invasive in any way and wearing it poses no risk to my health. Not comparable to vaccination in the slightest, that has numerous risks and is still undergoing trials and studies related to safety and efficacy. Let me remind you that these therapies, have been approved for emergency use.
The young, slim, healthy unvaccinated that you're talking about are such a tiny amount of people that I do not consider myself at any real risk. Like I said, I've not tested positive once the entire pandemic and I suspect that's largely to do with having a good immune system, so will clear the virus naturally, plus taking other sensible measures like wearing masks and avoiding large indoor gatherings.
I take other measures to limit the spread. The vaccine is not a panacea, it helps reduce severity for the most vulnerable so let them take it. The virus can also mutate in vaccinated people, in other mammals, it is hyperbole to suggest unvaccinated are largely responsible for all the negative aspects of Covid, completely politicised. The people that care for me respect my decision and quite honestly at this point agree, the majority of vaccinated people that I know will not be getting boosters.
Regarding health workers, I have 3 cousins and an aunt that all work in healthcare (plus some friends). From a renal nurse, ICU nurse to doctors and radiologist. I don't want to put words in their mouth, but our healthcare system has been at critical levels for years prior to the pandemic. This can only be solved by improving our infrastructure. They all respect peoples right to choose what medical treatment they want to receive. If you want to talk about duty to be respectable, when you do not know me or my contributions, then perhaps you should think about your attitude and moral grandstanding?
As my previous comment highlighted, my country has 63% of adults overweight. America is 68%. Their burden on the health system is immense, far greater than the unvaccinated. Should we ostracise them and limit their access to parts of society for everyone elses benefit? If the population was <40% overweight, we would not be facing the crisis in hospitals.
So let's suppose there were an airborne, easily-transmissible hemorrhagic fever pandemic. Do you want "muh freedoms", or everyone following clear rules and not endangering the lives of others? When people aren't being reasonable enough to do what's essential for safety of others, force and consequences are needed to make them learn the lesson. Rule of law.
Not everyone is able to do that, for a number of reasons:
- not capable of using a mobile app or website for ordering
- low language proficiency
- not able to be at home to accept delivery during the day
- don’t have a means of payment compatible with online ordering
- live paycheck to paycheck and depend on going to the store “on demand” to make essential purchases (such as on payday). Often after normal delivery hours.
What does "worked" mean? Illness and risk lower, or simply people following orders? People have lost sight of the former after unrelenting emphasis on the latter.
It's time to turn critical thinking skills back on.
There were 1282 cases of measles in 2019. Around 90% were caused by anti-vaxx hermit communities who freeload off the protections of the police, military, healthcare system, and other services, but live here and put others at risk because magical beliefs makes them "special". If you reject vaccinations, then I suggest you should sign a waiver that you also reject healthcare. Can't have it both ways. "Ounce of prevention."
why? what is the benefit in covering the world in test, what difference does it make?
If I test myself tomorrow four times "for free" - how did that benefit anyone?
wouldn't it much better if the tests went to people that actually needed it? Giving out "free" test is basically a massive waste, most test are not used when needed.
If you deliberately waste the tests, yes, you'll see little benefit. On the other hand, you could be more grownup and use them in ways which do benefit other people such as:
1. Testing yourself before meeting friends or family because as a responsible member of society you don't want to risk infecting them. Since spread is possible before being sick and some people, especially when vaccinated, never have strong symptoms, and people can get infected between taking a sample for a PCR test and showing up in-person, this is a great move for peace of mind.
2. Test whether or not that runny nose your kid has right now are in fact allergies before sending them to school. Smarter school districts require this (“test to stay”) so improved test availability is great for parents.
3. Get a result faster than a PCR test when you're deciding how seriously to take symptoms you currently have. A negative test doesn't mean you're in the clear but a positive result does at least mean that you can stop wondering and start making disruptive changes to your plans.
Should we also distribute influenza tests to everyone for use every time they meet friends or family? If not, why not? Seasonal influenza has a somewhat lower fatality rate but it still kills thousands every year and can be spread by asymptomatic carriers.
We arguably should be taking influenza more seriously but influenza is not sending people to the hospitals at levels sufficient to cause overload, or increasing the death rates substantially. We also still have some gaps — for example, the COVID vaccines are more effective than the influenza vaccines (it is a famously mutagenic virus) but the flu vaccines are available to even very young children whereas children under 5 cannot be vaccinated.
Don't forget, this is not a permanent forever program but a reaction to a raging pandemic. If we had high enough vaccination rates to keep COVID patients from overwhelming the medical system, that would drive the stress down to something like influenza levels and we could relax measures accordingly.
Yes, but this is worse and global. Again, I’m talking about the current problem, not saying that we shouldn’t take precautions for the flu — we should be doing easy precautionary measures like mask mandates anytime things are getting overloaded, including improving capacity. The American health system being designed for profit maximization means we have less resilience even under non-pandemic conditions.
You’ll never get a good answer to this. All this testing does is further propel the panic and hysteria.
All these people who want this testing should be asking themselves what changes in the treatment of their viral infection if they know it was Covid instead of some other common respiratory virus? For the vast majority of the public the difference in treatment for Covid is the exact same as any other respiratory illness: stay home, get rest, and drink lots of liquid.
For a brief while after getting vaccinated, before Delta and Omicron, my friends, coworkers, and I felt we were out of the woods. We are actively going out together to our favorite hangouts and being normal. I didn't think we would need this site.
Finding out that my Governor let a million tests expire rather than give them out, make me happy this site is available. I'm glad I can rely on the federal government to fix what my state government is ruining.
You're out of the woods. If you're vaccinated then unless you have some high risk condition your real risk is extremely low.
More tests aren't going to solve anything. At best they might slow the spread down only slightly. In the long run everyone will be exposed regardless of whether they go to their favorite hangouts or not. That is our reality.
> In the long run everyone will be exposed regardless of whether they go to their favorite hangouts or not. That is our reality.
This can be said of every cold and flu season. Yet people still go out of their way to avoid those who are sick, and people who have symptoms stay home. You probably wouldn't want someone with the flu to cough in your face, even though the symptoms are mild and the mortality is low.
covid is much more infectious than the flu. it makes sense to test and quarantine if you are positive.
> "If you're vaccinated... your real risk is extremely low."
in the interest of precision: the risk of serious sickness/death is low for anyone without comorbidities (like age) regardless of vaccination status; vaccination just makes a small chance smaller, with the diminishing returns that that implies.
vaccination really matters for anyone with comorbidities (age, obesity, hypertension, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, etc.), where risk reduction is significant (whole percentages to fractional ones).
totally agree that testing doesn't change long-run exposure, especially given omicron. the big win for testing though, is knowing how many folks have natural immunity (with or without synthetic immunity), which likely offers broader spectrum immunological memory, imbuing a more durable herd immunity into the future. also, tests might help at the margin for those who have comorbidities, to perhaps allow the pursuit of treatments like monoclonal antibodies earlier.
The government is distributing antigen tests. They don't directly indicate anything about natural immunity, although of course most patients who recover from infection will retain a significant level of cellular immunity.
Doctors don't prescribe monoclonal antibodies or other anti-viral drugs based on a home test. That usually requires a clinical test, as well as some significant symptoms or risk factors.
yes, i wasn't trying to imply that monoclonals would be prescribed based on a home test, just that testing early would provide someone the opportunity to get more aggressive treatments if need be during the critical window of effectiveness.
not sure why the tests being antigen-based matters with regard to indicating natural/cellular immunity, since a positive test result still implies a covid infection in the recent past, which implies a conferral of natural immunity?
Physicians will generally not prescribe Paxlovid based on a home test, they want to see the results of a real clinical test. And Paxlovid supplies are very limited; it will typically only be given to symptomatic patients in high risk groups.
It still sucks to get Covid, based on my small sample size of a few breakthrough infected friends even "mild" omicron is on par with a bad flu. It's also about 10x as contagious. Most people don't want to infect all their friends if they can help it, so they test.
Also we all have friends and family members with high-risk conditions and don't want to give it to them either.
The virus isn't going away. No one will be able to avoid it without living as a hermit. The CDC estimated that about 44% of Americans had already been infected as of October 2021 and with the more contagious Omicron variant now circulating we're probably well over 50%.
If it's any consolation it's doing the rounds in my 7-year-old's class and none of them have had much worse than feeling a bit achy with a bit of a temperature. They've all had much worse from the usual bugs that do the rounds at school. Of course this is anecdata, and most people have family or friends who are vulnerable and need to be protected, but if it's just about your child then it's very unlikely to be a problem if they have no underlying conditions.
>If it's any consolation it's doing the rounds in my 7-year-old's class and none of them have had much worse than feeling a bit achy with a bit of a temperature. They've all had much worse from the usual bugs that do the rounds at school. Of course this is anecdata
You aren't crazy. Here's some actual data from the CDC: a child is at least 25 times less likely to be covid hospitalized than an adult under age 50, and 74 times less likely than an someone over age 50. Important caveat that this data is pre-omicron. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6915e3.htm
>most people have family or friends who are vulnerable and need to be protected
Are these kids vaccinated? One of the challenges we have now is making sure to make sure to correct for that since vaccination's protection against severe outcomes has been quite durable even in the face of Omicron's improved evasion.
44% reduction after 6 months is not great but that's still significantly better than under 20% for preventing symptomatic cases which you have for a 2 dose vaccinated person facing Omicron half a year later.
Thanks. I had seen this data but forgot about it. Appreciate you finding it. Definitely nice to see some protection against severe outcomes remains even if prevention of infection isn't quite as there as we'd like.
However I am not sure if we had started this pandemic with Omicron and a 44% effective vaccine, that we would have put all our eggs in one basket the way we have to date. Hindsight is 20/20, of course.
For the curious, Florida Gov Desantis revealed they'd let 800,000 to 1 million tests expire sitting in a warehouse. The federal govt granted an exception and they're being sent out to be used at testing sites. These aren't at-home tests.
They weren't over ordered. The evidence strongly supports that they were purposely held back by the DeSantis administration and the Florida Department of Health while pushing monoclonal antibodies [2].
> Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said last week that the tests weren't distributed because of "low demand." [1]
> Florida residents have also described months of difficulty getting tests, with long lines and few testing appointment available. [1]
I haven't filed the relevant FOIA requests myself, but Florida open government and transparency laws are fairly robust for those who are inquiring in this specific matter.
There's also a lot of evidence desantis 'hacked' test result reporting and nursing home deaths too.
It's more complicated than a headline, but it's a really bad look to raid someone who was trying to get info out - even if their goal was political it should have been public information and that just intimidates future whistleblowers.
How would they know to use the antibodies if they didn't test people first? The [2] article you linked refer to vaccines not tests. I think you're missing something in your explanation here.
>For a brief while after getting vaccinated, before Delta and Omicron, my friends, coworkers, and I felt we were out of the woods. We are actively going out together to our favorite hangouts and being normal. I didn't think we would need this site.
You seem to be describing what journalist Alex Berenson has coined the "happy vaccine valley":
>the three-to four-month period following the second dose when antibodies are high enough that the vaccines actually appear to work. (For those of you keeping score at home, that’s two weeks of negative efficacy after the first shot, a month of maybe 50% efficacy, three months of near-complete protection, and then a rapid fall to what looks like 0% protection within three months. https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/so-you-understand-whats-...
See Figures 1 and 2 above. This study from California in December shows much lower protection from the current vaccines against Omicron compared to Delta: 0% effectiveness of a 2-dose regimen at 6+ months, and 49% effectiveness of a 3-dose regimen at ~2+ months.
Alex Berenson is not a journalist but a conspiracy theorist with no relevant training or experience. He is not a good source of advice on vaccination.
The Kaiser-Permanente study you linked is by actual medical experts and it paints a more nuanced perspective which is why it contradicts his claims — for example, they have the two dose effectiveness at preventing infection by Delta over 50% even a year out.
Most importantly, and the main reason I'm replying to this, is that it's _really_ important to also remember that there are two reasons to get vaccinated. One is to prevent infection entirely (largely a product of neutralizing antibodies, which fade relatively quickly) but the other is to lower the severity of an infection (a product of T cells, which is longer lasting) and the data continues to show that vaccines remain highly effective considerably longer than 3 months:
Promoting the voices of antivaxers like Alex Berenson is the single most effective way to prolong the pandemic since the thing which will allow us to return to normal will be high levels of vaccination reducing the severity of an infection to manageable levels.
Berenson did a turn on the pharmaceutical and healthcare beat at the New York Times, that has to count for something. However I will remember to censor myself better in the future. bows reverently to a shrine of the approved narrative
Thanks for at least looking at the data and not dismissing it out of hand.
The article you link above to support vaccine effectiveness refers to three studies, all of which are pre-Omicron (the first looks at Jul '21 to Oct '21, the second specifically at Alpha and Delta variants, and the third from Dec '20 to Sep '21). A key point of my comment was do show that, with the advent of Omicron, the playing field has changed substantially, which your data do not address - but my data did.
I didn't and wasn't telling people not to get vaccinated. I believe, though, that there is a world where we can simultaneously talk about how the vaccine doesn't work as well as it should or could, and look to better solutions, including a new or improved vaccine.
> Berenson did a turn on the pharmaceutical and healthcare beat at the New York Times, that has to count for something.
Not really, he was a business reporter with no medical training — he came to the NYT from The Street, and after he left to become a novelist his only subsequent non-fiction (kind of) work was a book alleging that cannabis usage causes psychosis, which got him considerable criticism from actual scientists.
> However I will remember to censor myself better in the future. bows reverently to a shrine of the approved narrative
It's not censorship to suggest being less credulous and finding people who know what they're talking about to get advice from. It's not hard to find scientists who disagree with each other — it's a defining characteristic! — but he's not a scientist or even amplifying a significant group of scientists, and the ones who mention him do so to say that he's dangerously wrong. The most obvious giveaway is that he started with a paranoid conclusion rather than a falsifiable theory and when whatever he's saying is debunked he switches to something else which conveniently still supports the same conclusion. Even Fox News backed away from giving him a pulpit!
Measuring vaccine effectiveness in terms of protection against infection (as in the article you linked) is pointless. We expect almost everyone to get infected. What actually matters is protection against severe symptoms, and even with the Omicron variant the vaccines are still pretty good at that.
I was responding to a specific comment, which seemed to be referring to rising case counts. I agree it's likely that almost everyone will get infected, many have been saying this for two years.
As for "what actually matters," that entirely depends on the problem you are trying to solve, the solutions you are putting on the table, and the human value systems at play.
From the paper:
Conclusions: VE of 3 mRNA-1273 doses against infection with delta was high and durable, but VE against omicron infection was lower. VE against omicron infection was particularly low among immunocompromised individuals. No 3-dose recipients were hospitalized for COVID-19.
Did people who wanted to get vaccinated not find doses in stock?, just because tests in some warehouse expired doesn't mean they were hidden to stop their usage.
