☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Saturday, September 25, 2021 ☙ Perma-Pandemic 🦠

We roundup some news about CDC’s latest word games, which is actually great news for a lot of employees facing vaccine mandates, the CDC’s approval of booster injections over its advisory panel ...

Happy Saturday, C&C family! As cool Fall weather languidly drifts into North Florida, we roundup some news about CDC’s latest word games, which is actually great news for a lot of employees facing vaccine mandates, the CDC’s approval of booster injections over its advisory panel’s recommendation against them, Ozzies see record numbers of cases in spite of record lockdowns, for some reason, Experts strike at kids again, Biden thinks up an awesome new plan to tax the rich to pay for all these Covid emergency handouts to well-connected political types, and terrific news about Covid performance in Florida, including a report on Miami hospitals and new weekly data from the state to analyze.

🗞 *THE C&C ARMY POST* 🗞

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🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

🔥 Fox News reported yesterday that on August 5, the CDC sneakily deleted all its official guidance about how schools can transition out of Covid-19 mitigation. The previous guidance told school administrators to lift mask and distancing requirements whenever community spread of the virus is low and vaccination rates were acceptable. But now, that language has been removed. Erased. Memory holed. It never happened.

Perma-pandemic!

So according to the CDC, there is no way out now. No “off ramp.” They’ll let us know when we can stop all this Covid theater nonsense.

Totally unconnected with anything in the report above, here’s a link to a neat website showing how mad dictator Stalin erased his former friends from photos whenever they became “enemies of the people:” [How Stalin’s propaganda machine erased people from photographs, 1922-1953 - Rare Historical Photos](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/stalin-photo-manipulation-1922-1953/).

🔥 Not satisfied with its “update” of the guidance for “off ramping” Covid mitigation measures, the CDC also mutated its long-standing definitions of the words “vaccine” and “vaccination” on its website earlier this month.

Before the change, the definition for “vaccination” was, “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.” Now, the word “immunity” has been switched to “protection:” “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce protection to a specific disease.”

Well, that just got a lot easier. I guess getting one of the current Covid injections that doesn’t produce any immunity can still be vaccination. Alrighty then. See how easy that is?

The term “vaccine” also got a marxist-style wordplay update. The CDC changed its definition from “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” to: “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.”

This is so great! Now, employees can legally attest that they are “vaccinated” as long as they are taking Vitamin D and zinc supplements, since those supplements are “preparations” that are “used to stimulate the body’s immune response against” Covid-19. It is completely legal, now, under the CDC’s new definition, to say you are “fully vaccinated” against Covid-19 as long as you take your supplements. So. Thanks, CDC!

🔥 The New York Times published an article yesterday headlined, “C.D.C. Chief Overrules Agency Panel and Recommends Pfizer-BioNTech Boosters for Workers at Risk.” The article reports that CDC director Rochelle Walensky overruled the near-unanimous recommendation of the FDA’s advisory panel that had refused to endorse booster shots of the Pfizer Covid injection for frontline workers.

The Times calls it “a highly unusual move” for the director. That’s one way of putting it. The decision concerned many scientists. “I am surprised that Dr. Walensky overturned one of the four A.C.I.P. votes today, and I believe others will be as well,” said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, an infectious disease expert at Stanford and the American Academy of Pediatrics liaison to the committee.

But don’t worry. Politics had everything to do with it. Even the Times reported that experts outside the C.D.C. said Dr. Walensky may have had “no choice” but to ignore the recommendation. “There’s a complexity here, because Dr. Walensky was part of the White House announcement” on boosters, noted Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.

A complexity. So that’s what they’re calling it now.

It it weren’t for ridiculous wordplay, what would these people actually have left, at the end of the day?

The members of the advisory committee recommending against the boosters had said there was little evidence to suggest that vaccinated teachers or health care workers were at any significant risk of repeated exposure to the virus. Their decision reflected their fears that a broad booster recommendation would throw the doors open to an all-adults booster campaign.

“My sense was that the committee felt that that was sort of a hole that you could drive a truck through,” Dr. Paul Offit, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the F.D.A.’s vaccine advisory panel, told reporters at an online briefing on Thursday.

The Times noted that “it was not clear how long additional protection from a booster would last, raising the prospect that boosters would need to be given repeatedly.” You don’t say. Great reason for using them then, I guess.

Currently, only people who have already received two doses of the Pfizer injection will qualify for the booster shots. But the Times said that “Moderna’s booster authorization may arrive in a few days to weeks.“ So. Get ready! Needles away.

🦘 Victoria, Australia officially became the most locked-down place on Earth, at the exact same time that Victoria Health announced its highest Covid case numbers since the beginning of the pandemic. Case numbers have been rising sharply in Victoria since the latest lockdown was declared. A similar situation is happening in New South Wales where extremely strict lockdowns are NOT stopping the spread of Delta. So.

Melbourne — the capital of Victoria — is the most-locked down city in the world, having been under lockdowns now for 234 days. Its current sixth consecutive lockdown won’t end until late October.

😷 The BBC published an article yesterday headlined, “COVID: Children may be more susceptible to common illnesses this winter.” The gist is that kids aren’t getting exposed to common childhood illness, plus Covid is “getting in the way” of dealing with a “huge backlog” of non-Covid treatments, as hospitals continue trying to catch up with a lot of routine patient care that was put on hold during the UK’s lockdowns.

A doctor who advises the UK government said that “We may have stacked up some immunity debt in the system where children have not been mixing with friends, and so they may be more susceptible to some of the illnesses that we traditionally see.”

Gosh. Who could have seen this coming? Kids may actually be SICKER because of Covid lockdowns. Thanks again, experts!

🤡 Former vice-president Biden has a new proposal before Congress to “tax the rich” that would drop the dollar threshold for transactions at which federal tax agents would be allowed to examine an individual’s private bank account from the present $10,000 to only $600. He also plans to hire EIGHTY SEVEN THOUSAND new IRS agents. That’s 1,740 new agents per state in the USA, or 25 new agents for every county in Florida.

Now, I’m just a lawyer, not a mathematician, but how many billionaires have bank accounts with only $600 in them? That sounds more like “taxing the poor” than the rich. Just saying.

🤥 CBS Miami published an article Thursday headlined, “Dramatic Drop In COVID Patients At South Florida Hospitals.” How about that? Who could have seen this coming? Because a lot of local Covid panic peddlers in the state and even here in Gainesville PROMISED that the hospitals in Florida were about to be completely overrun by Covid patients, any minute now. Fact check: Five Pinnochios.

There should be SOME kind of penalty for lying to the public like that, right?

CBS4’s Peter D’Oench (yes, I spelled that right) reported that the number of Covid patients at Jackson Health System hospitals were 189 this Thursday, compared with a summer peak of 445 on August 23, and an all-time peak of 485 patients on July 27 of 2020. So.

This reduction comes about a month after Governor DeSantis stood up statewide monoclonal antibody treatment sites that are 70% effective at keeping patients with serious cases of Covid out of the hospitals. Out of the hospitals where they can’t get monoclonal antibody treatments or ivermectin. But they do have a bunch of ventilators.

The article also reported that there is a nursing shortage. For some reason. ”I am also concerned that we have had a large turnover of nurses, some of whom have gone on to temporary jobs where they can actually go around the country and earn more money than permanent jobs or some are leaving the profession altogether or retiring,” he said. “That means the ones here who are meant to be working three shifts a week are sometimes working four to five shifts a week and that is very tiring and the burnout rate is very high.”

Now, why would they be leaving the profession altogether like that? What would make a bunch of nurses retire? Why are the nurses are going other places? Could the other places be spots where they aren’t required to take the Covid injections? Just asking. It would be great if some smart expert could figure this out for us lay people. Maybe ask the nurses?

📊 *COVID IN FLORIDA AND ALACHUA COUNTY* 📊

The new weekly figures for Florida are out, and I’ll give you one guess what they show. You got it! Rapidly falling Covid numbers.

US Covid admissions are basically flat, at 2,077.

Florida’s Covid-19 “in use” hospital beds are down, from 9,585 last week to 7,478 this week.

Florida’s cases are down again, from 75,906 last week to only 56,325 this week.

Alachua County’s cases are down 40% in one week — dropping from 985 to 579 for the week.

Florida’s positivity rate is down from 11.2% last week to only 8.6% this week.

Alachua County’s positivity rate is down from 8.5% to 6.5%.

Florida’s cases per 100K are down from 345 last week to 256 this week.

So!

Have a terrific weekend, and I’ll see you back here on Monday to kick off the week.

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