☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Thursday, May 19, 2022 ☙ PROBED 🦠

The monkeypox messaging problem; Musk turns the tables on Twitter; cases are up, especially in certain areas; public schools try to figure out why they're losing students; and lots more...

It’s Thursday — another week in Pandemia almost in the vault. In today’s roundup: Covid cases rising around the US, in very interesting areas, and the CDC wants local officials to mask us up; Chicago’s covid numbers are bad for the jabs; you’ll never guess how 95+% jabbed Connecticut is doing; bad news for public school enrollment, except in some baffling areas; monkeypox poses a horrid messaging problem for US public health experts; Jankowicz is out at DHS; Montana’s new election laws upheld; Georgia’s new election laws defy democrat predictions; and Elon Musk runs rings around Twitter.

I’m speaking (remotely) at the Pensacola Doctors for Truth two-day conference for an hour this morning. Wish me luck!

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

🔥 Covid cases are increasing across the US. The New York Times ran a story yesterday headlined, “Biden’s Health Officials Warn Of A Substantial Increase In Coronavirus Cases.” (Why do they put always Biden’s name in the headline? He probably doesn’t even know what day it is.)

Anyway, the CDC reported that a third of the US is now in “high” covid territory, and encouraged local officials to re-order indoor mask mandates. No thanks. After reporting THAT unpleasant fact, the Times noted “The warnings from Dr. Walensky and other federal health officials seemed somewhat at odds with [Joe] Biden’s own stance…Mr. Biden no longer wears a mask in most settings.”

How about that.

Take a look at the Times’ covid maps. Is it just me, or do the higher covid areas seem to basically track with higher vaccination rate areas? Check out these two charts from the Times’ interactive covid tracker:

Covid:

Vaccinations:

Where’s that Geert Vanden Bossche guy when you need him? Maybe HE could explain this baffling coincidence.

(Facebook users: charts and inline graphics are available on the Substack version: LINK)

📈 Chicago public health data shows covid infections in vaccinated 5-11 year-old kids is significantly higher than infections in unvaccinated kids.

So … the kids missed out on two years of school only to get jabbed and then get covid anyway. Thanks experts!

🔥 95+% vaccinated Connecticut has the highest case rate in the country. Cases there have jumped +885% in the past two months. Experts are … you know. They have no idea what’s going on.

🔥 And … the experts are baffled yet again! More baffling. The New York Times published an article this week headlined, “With Plunging Enrollment, a ‘Seismic Hit’ to Public Schools.” Uh oh.

The alarming sub-headline reads, “The pandemic has supercharged the decline in the nation’s public school system in ways that experts say will not easily be reversed.” Supercharged. Not easily reversed.

But … why would you WANT to reverse it? Never mind.

The Times reported that America’s public schools have lost at least 1.2 million students since 2020, and the data shows “no sign of a rebound” to previous national levels any time soon. What do the experts think about this? The Times glumly reported, “No overriding explanation has emerged yet for the widespread drop-off.”

Baffled.

What they DO know is that bigger cities have seen worse student losses, but some entire states, like Florida, seem to be going the other way, for some reason. The NYT said in “Florida, for instance — enrollment has not only rebounded, but remains robust.” And, “private schools have also seen some gains in enrollment.” It’s such a mystery! Nothing about it makes any sense.

Even more oddly, California has been hit the hardest. Late in the article, the Times momentarily muses about a disappointing survey last month showing lots of Orange County parents who said they’d pull their kids from public school next year if covid vaccines become mandatory. I wonder if this could have anything to do with … nah.

Can anyone help these poor experts figure out what might be causing these horrible losses to public school funding, I mean horrible losses to free educational opportunities? Because the Times thinks this is really bad. It said, “educators and school officials are confronting a potentially harsh future of lasting setbacks in learning, hardened inequities in education and SMALLER BUDGETS[.]”

Not that. Not smaller budgets. Please, say it isn’t so.

🙈 And … more monkeypox! The Daily Mail UK reported a story yesterday headlined, “Monkeypox hits Europe: Five men in Portugal test positive as Spain probes eight suspected cases in men - as experts warn there could be ‘tens’ of cases in Britain.”

Probes. That’s pretty funny.

Experts theorize that the disease is spreading through SEXUAL CONTACT, since the thirteen new cases in Portugal and and Spain were detected at STI clinics in younger homosexual men. In fact the story says experts think it’s spreading in something called “sexual networks,” which must be something the kids have come up with because I don’t remember that one from the old college days, but I bet it involves probing.

El Pais reported TODAY that Madrid has now probed, er, identified 23 monkeypox cases — some retrospectively — and loquaciously reported, “the Director General of Public Health of the Community, Elena Andradas, has reported that 22 of the first 23 cases studied have explained that they have had relations with other men in recent weeks.”

Relations! Cue the euphemism team, we’re going to need them.

I originally reported a few days ago about a couple cases in the UK; that number is now up to seven, and like the others, at least four are known gay folks. The Telegraph’s headline reads, “Monkeypox ‘spreading in sexual networks’.” Again with the networks.

The Daily Mail reported that the cases don’t appear to be linked to each other, which makes experts think the virus is already widely spreading in the community. The probe is out of the medical bag, as it were. But if it IS sexually transmitted, as it appears, then it should be easy to get the outbreak under control if people will just press “pause” on the sexual networking, whatever that is. Don’t tell me — I don’t need to know.

Late yesterday, Massachusetts public health confirmed the US’s first case in a Boston man who recently returned from a trip to Canada.

That’s the good news. The bad news is the potential fatality rate: one in ten, if infected. Of course, that’s in Africa, where monkeypox has always been found until now. Even if not fatal, it’s still pretty gross, part of the smallpox family, featuring nasty skin rashes and lesions, or “pox.”

The UK’s CDC is warning gay men to watch for skin pox, and advises seeing a doctor if you get symptoms, in case that’s not obvious. Here in the US, public health twitter experts are busily virtue signaling and scolding any mention of sexual orientation related to monkeypox and straining their imaginations to come up with alternative explanations. You know, it could just be that gay men have better health clinics because they’re fastidious or something and so they’re the ones finding it first. Or something.

For example, Twitter pandemic expert Dr. Eric Feigl-Dingle, I mean Feigl-Ding-Dong, I mean Feigl-Ding, sorry; he was quite stern about all this “gay networks” talk. He tweeted, “I don’t like the reporting that implies LGBT or sexual clinics. Too early to say. They have good screenings and it could just be picked up there first.”

But Eric, the European reporting isn’t IMPLYING a gay connection. They’re SAYING IT. And, just offhand, I wonder how Eric knows so much about the quality of screenings in gay clinics. Never mind. The most important thing THIS TIME is we don’t hurt anyone’s feelings. You can call them anti-vaxxers but don’t say gay sex networks spread monkeypox.

If the mode of transmission IS what it appears to be, and if people will just be reasonable in adjusting their lifestyles, and it doesn’t mutate into something more infectious, monkeypox won’t amount to any wider public health problem. What is more interesting about the story is the timing of the outbreak, its novel mode of transmission (monkeypox has never been an STD before), and that it is infecting otherwise healthy young men, showing another novel vector.

What we’d all like to know the most is: what’s their jab status? How’s their immune system holding up, overall? I’m just asking.

🔥 Chipper 33-year-old TikTok star and head of Homeland Security’s brand new Orwellian Disinformation Governance Board Nina Jankowicz abruptly resigned yesterday, as the White House announced the new sub-agency will be “paused” for re-tooling. Buh bye.

🔥 This week, the Montana Supreme Court overruled a lower court, restoring Montana’s voter ID law, and ending Election Day voter registrations. The two laws were passed by the state’s Republican majority in 2021, intended to increased election efficiency and security.

🔥 Fox News ran a story yesterday headlined, “Georgia early voting shatters records despite election reforms Dems labeled ‘voter suppression’.” “Shatters” might be an understatement. 540,000 people cast ballots as of Tuesday, far surpassing the 182,000 votes by the same point in the 2018 midterm primary elections, and even shooting past the 2020 presidential election numbers by +156%.

Democrats and woke corporations like the MLB, Coca-Cola, and Delta had complained bitterly about the Republicans’ new voter laws aimed at increasing voting efficiency and security, and argued bitterly that the new laws would unfairly frustrate some voters. Apparently not. Apparently just the opposite. Which is supposed to be a good thing, right?

The Abrams campaign, the MLB and the White House “did not immediately respond” to a Fox News request for comment.

It should be easy to vote and hard to cheat.

🤡 I hardly know what to say about this story except Elon Musk is a Trump-level media troll. Axios ran a story yesterday headlined, “Twitter Turns The Tables On Musk, Will “Enforce” Merger.”

Hahahaha! You can’t make this stuff up! Somehow, with a handful of mean sarcastic tweets a day, over the space of two weeks or so, Musk has somehow manipulated the Twitter board from resisting his buyout into now insisting that he go through with it. It looks to me like the tables are turned the OTHER WAY.

In a written statement to the New York Times, Twitter’s board said, “The board and Mr. Musk agreed to a transaction at $54.20 per share. We believe this agreement is in the best interest of all shareholders. We intend to close the transaction and enforce the merger agreement.”

Oh man, this is rich. How things change. On Monday, Musk questioned whether Twitter’s official numbers of “live users” was accurate. Live users are distinct from and better than what are referred to as “bots,” which are useless fake throwaway accounts used by psyops teams and trolls. Musk said sadly that a viable deal wasn’t out of the question, it’s still possible, but maybe at a lower price.

Cue the Twitter board freakout. A lower price! Never!

Touché Elon, touché.

Have a terrific Thursday! I’ll see ya’ll back here in the morning.

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