☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Saturday, February 19, 2022 ☙ RESCINDED 🦠

Vaccine mandates continue to fall, Trudeau forcibly ends the Freedom Convoy protest, Florida crushes tourism, Scotland hides its Covid data in jab shame, and more.

Happy weekend, C&C! Vaccine mandates continue to fall, Trudeau forcibly ends the Freedom Convoy protest, Florida crushes tourism, Scotland hides its Covid data in jab shame, and more.

🗞 *THE C&C ARMY POST* 🗞

🪖 I defended a client yesterday in a January 6 Committee deposition. I can’t say anything about the specifics, of course, for my client’s privacy, but I would like to note that the government investigators produced year-old text messages provided by the carrier, Verizon.

Although I’d been told that the carriers didn’t keep text messages longer than a few months, these were subpoenaed over a year after the fact. I would assume that ALL text messages are saved FOREVER. The carrier provides each text plus all the “metadata”; in other words, there is a lot of extra information attached to each text message. Examples include the specific date/time of each text, every phone number that received it, the legal name and billing address of every participant in the thread, and so on. I saw a flag for “deleted,” strongly suggesting that deleted texts are also retained, just marked as deleted.

Anyway. To slightly repurpose a slogan out of my attic of client advice, NEVER text or email anything that you wouldn’t want printed in a congressional report someday.

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

🚛 The Freedom Convoy got more serious yesterday after the Canadian Government sent massive numbers of police into Ontario and literally cracked down on the truckers. Although police tried to limit or restrain film of the police action, video that did escape the capital showed police throwing elderly people to the ground, riding over protest lines, and intentionally trampling women under horses, including a woman on a mobility scooter.

So much for Canadian politeness.

The Toronto Star published an op-ed this morning headlined, “Sadness Rules the Day as Ottawa Protest Comes to an End.” The subhead reads, “It was hard to watch what happened in Ottawa on Friday and not feel a huge sense of sadness.”

Many trucks have already been towed and intersections cleared. It appears the police operation was organized with military efficiency and seems to be effectively bringing the protest to a conclusion. Or at least, “phase one” of the protest is ending. What remains to be seen is how the world responds.

💉 Hahaha! Too bad, Washington Post! The liberal newspaper, headquartered in Washington DC, expressed profound sadness yesterday in an article headlined, “About 3 in 4 D.C. Residents Support Vaccine Rules Bowser Just Rescinded, Poll Finds.”

Apparently the WaPo was gobsmacked at Mayor Muriel Bowser’s surprise announcement yesterday that the city’s vaccine mandate had been cancelled, effective immediately.

Gosh. But WHY??, the WaPo screamed. It’s so unfair! Everybody in D.C. just LOVES the mandate!

The Mayor explained her unanticipated decision in a press conference saying, “we also know that people who have been vaccinated and others are wanting to get back to their normal lives and know what they need to do to keep themselves safe.”

Welp, we know who to blame. Joe Biden and his fabulous State of the Union. Get ready.

(Does it trouble anyone else that 75% of the people living in the nation’s capital have these authoritarian tendencies? Just asking.)

🔥 Meanwhile, in Boston, an appellate judge ruled against Mayor Michelle Wu, indefinitely extending the court-ordered halt on Boston’s employee vaccine mandate, as public-safety unions prevailed in their lawsuit against the city.

Also, late yesterday, Mayor Wu coincidentally ended Boston’s vaxx passport for indoor dining, gyms, and entertainment venues, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY. She explained the surprising decision by citing three Covid metrics that apparently have dipped beneath some threshold of some kind. “This news highlights how much progress we’ve made in our fight against Covid-19 thanks to vaccines and boosters,” Wu said.

You can’t stop progress. Thank vaccines for ending the jab mandate!

Boston still has an indoor mask mandate though. For now. Who wants to bet it also gets shredded before March 1?

🔥 Ed Jimenez, CEO of Shands Hospital in Gainesville, announced yesterday the healthcare giant was giving its final Covid-19 press briefing, ever. The announcement was bittersweet. The pandemic is over and done, apparently. Cases are falling, they’re less severe, et cetera, and so forth.

🦩 Florida’s 2021 tourist season set an all time record last year. “In 2021, we had the most domestic visitation in the history of our state,” Governor DeSantis said, reporting 118 million people vacationed here last year. To put that in perspective, the entire population of the United States is about 350 million. And, also for the first time, in 2021 Florida had a higher share of international tourists than did New York.

This doesn’t make sense. Are they saying that, for some reason, people wanted to go to a state that DOESN’T make you show papers and gag yourself to enter a restaurant? So. Weird. What could have caused this?

And Florida did it without a mask mandate! How did all those people survive?

🔥 The Glasgow Times published an article this week headlined, “Covid Data Will Not Be Published Over Concerns Misrepresented by Anti-Vaxxers.” Hahahahahaha! When the data doesn’t look good, just hide it!

This is ANOTHER good reason why the governments may be in a hurry to stop tracking “cases.” Because the data is making the jabs look terrible, to the point that Public Health Scotland is going to just quit publishing its carefully-acquired data. Officials said they will focus instead on publishing more “robust and complex vaccine effectiveness data.” Maybe they’ll use models!

Here’s what happened. Last week I reported about how many people noticed Public Health Scotland’s latest Covid report and how, if you dig into the numbers, it shows that boosted people are getting CRUSHED by Covid lately. Well, Public Health Scotland apparently didn’t like all that attention. And it doesn’t like its data, either. So they’re changing the definitions and how they report the numbers, of course!

PHS defended the change with this witless explanation:

COVID-19 rates do not account for potential differences between populations such as behaviour towards social distancing, underlying health issues, or approaches to testing and how much they contribute to COVID-19 rates. For example, a study found that people with two doses of vaccine were more likely to test themselves for COVID-19 compared to those unvaccinated or with one dose of COVID-19 vaccine. This means that unvaccinated people may be less likely to test and report as a case resulting in lower infection rates among the unvaccinated. Comparison of case rates is therefore now inappropriate.

Let’s get this straight. The PHS “experts” are pushing a theory — without any evidence — that unvaccinated people test less often? And THAT’S why the PHS numbers show more boosted people than anyone else positive for Covid? Essentially, they are saying that, because of uncontrollable confounders, their own data is unreliable.

But the “unvaxx don’t test much” theory doesn’t explain hospitalizations. So they had to cook up a whole different theory to explain that problem:

For example, some of the older individuals who have exceeded the recommended time will have not received their next vaccine dose because of frailty or ill health. They may, therefore, be more likely to be hospitalised or die if they get COVID-19. Comparison of hospitalisation and death rates is therefore inappropriate.

I THINK what PHS’ experts are saying is that since older people tend to forget to take their booster shots on time, they are dying from Covid. I get that they explicitly blame not getting the booster on “frailty or ill health,” but imagine what that means. So the old people are frail. How does that stop them getting a booster? The boosters usually come TO the nursing home patients. So all I can figure is they are saying the old folks are forgetful. Or that medical staff think the boosters will kill frail elderly people, which isn’t much better.

Either way, it’s just another stupid theory.

🔥 Triple-jabbed US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has caught Covid, along with his whole family. He vomited up a huge twitter thread about how they’re all doing fine, just cold symptoms, and thanking everybody for well-wishes. But he included a fascinating tweet about the MORAL dimension of his illness that give us insight into how pro-lockdowners see the world:

“When you’ve been as safe as you can, getting COVID-19 can be frustrating and disappointing. I’ve felt that. It can also be a source of shame. Many people assume you must have been careless to get sick. Our safety measures reduce risk but they can’t eliminate risk. Nothing can.”

Covid can be a source of shame, apparently, for some people in Murthy’s circles. This is apparently even more problematic than worrying about dying from the disease. I feel like there’s a cautionary principle here somewhere, like shame and feelings of failure is the inevitable product of virtue signaling. Or something.

Have a super Saturday! I’ll see you tomorrow.

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