Good morning, C&Cers, and Happy Wednesday! Our roundup today includes: a New York ethics panel sanctions ex-governor Andrew Cuomo for his “leadership”; Cornell locks down, again; the BMJ prints a feature article demolishing dashboards; you’ll never guess what a blockbuster new Ivermectin study concluded; Amtrak drops its jab mandate; and comments on Florida’s winter wave.

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

🔥 Yesterday, New York’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics voted 12-1 to order affectionate but manslaughter-ey ex-Governor Andrew Cuomo — the “Luv Guv” — to pay the state $5.1 million in book profits he made on his comedy book about pandemic leadership. Apparently Cuomo typed up the book during work hours — in other words, it was financed by taxpayers — during the worst of the pandemic when he was writing instead of leading.

Gosh. It all seems a little harsh. I mean, he was leading by writing about leading. But apparently he used a bunch of government staffers to help write the book. So he was leading by delegating writing about leading. That’s leadership. Or something.

“It is ordered that by no later than 30 days from the date of this resolution, Gov. Cuomo pay over to the attorney general of the State of New York an amount equal to the compensation paid to him for his outside activities related to the book,” the ethics panel’s resolution says. The $5.1 million total is mostly in advances and bulk purchases by aligned media, since his book was not exactly a pop favorite.

The money will go to state Attorney General Letitia James, whose investigative report led to the resignation of the three-term governor, who infamously accepted the creepy sex nickname from his similarly-disgraced brother, bragging “I am the Love Gov. I’m a cool dude in a loose mood. You know that. I just say let it go. Just go with the flow, baby.”

Well, the self-described cool dude in a loose mood flowed right out of the New York Executive Mansion and into the hectic ebb and flow of private life, where I guess he gets notices all the time and has to pay his bills. So.

Coffee & Covid failed to reach a variety of liberal reporters — male and female — who swooned over the Love Gov and publicly reported that they were hoping for romantic adventures with him. Well, actually I didn’t try that hard, to be perfectly honest, or really at all, but still I got the same response I would have otherwise.

Relatives of murdered nursing home residents said they feel SOME justice. “I’m super happy. It was a blood money book of lies written off the graves of 15,000 people,” said Tracey Alvino, whose dad, Daniel, died after contracting Covid in a Long Island nursing home. Haydee Pabey, whose mother, Elba died of Covid at the Isabella Geriatric Center in Washington Heights in April, 2020, said, “It’s a happy day for us.”

Haydee added, “Cuomo tried to make a profit off the deaths of our loved ones. He wrote a self-congratulatory book in the middle of a pandemic. He didn’t fix the problem. He made it worse with his policies. He killed people.”

Assemblyman Ron Kim, chairman of the Assembly Aging Committee, and whose uncle died of suspected Covid in a nursing home said, “This book deal establishes the criminal misconduct behind his suppression of nursing home data. While our families were experiencing complete panic and despair, this disgraced former governor was carefully crafting his public image in order to maximize his personal profit. Every dollar must be clawed back and given to the nursing home victims’ families for their pain and suffering.”

Cuomo says he’ll fight this in court. My guess is he’s going to have trouble finding a sympathetic judge. Good luck.

🔥 The highly-paid over-educated geniuses at Ivy League darling Cornell University have UTTERLY FAILED to stop the spread of Covid. An outbreak — of Omicron! — among 469 students — 469! — has caused a lockdown at the high-profile school. Just before finals, too.

Cornell is one hundred percent injected. 100% safe and effective.

Hapless Cornell President Martha Pollack, whose policies are obviously rubbish, and who should probably be promptly replaced with somebody who can get the job done, since she OBVIOUSLY can’t, admitted that none of the 469 students have any severe symptoms. Zero, zip, nada. But on the other hand, you can never be TOO safe in this world, can you?

The memo Cornell sent to its students announcing the lockdowns is unintentionally hilarious. At one point, it warns, “Being vaccinated, even with a booster shot, is not a license to let down our guards.”

Hahahaha! Suckers! You believed them when they said getting jabbed WOULD be a license to get you back to normal! Nope. Now you can’t let your guard down. EVER. NO MATTER WHAT. Cornell students are gullible idiots.

🔥 Yesterday, the BMJ published a Christmas 2021 feature article titled “The end of the pandemic will not be televised.” The article asks the rather important question, “By what metric, then, will we know that the pandemic is actually over?”

I guess that depends who you ask. The article’s main point is that all the charts and Covid dashboards probably aren’t the best way to tell when the pandemic is over. The researchers explained that “the notion, reinforced by dashboards, that a pandemic ends when cases or deaths drop to zero is at odds with the historical evidence that substantial influenza morbidity and mortality continues to occur, season after season, between pandemics.”

In other words, we’re ALWAYS going to have Covid cases and deaths. Forever. So we’d better figure out when to pull the plug on the hysteria.

The writers pointed out that in previous — worse — pandemics, things got back to normal a lot faster than this time. “Even for the catastrophic Spanish flu — which killed three times more people per population in the US than Covid-19, with an average age of death of 28 years — lives returned to normal in a short time, perhaps only because there was no other option.“

Maybe the dashboards and the daily media updates aren’t the solution. Maybe they are the PROBLEM. According to the article, “dashboards—which do not measure mental health, educational impact, and the denial of close social bonds—are not the tool that will tell us when the pandemic will end. Indeed, considering how societies have come to use dashboards, they may be a tool that helps prevent a return to normal.”

Great point.

In other words, Covid will be over when the news stops hyping it. “Some historians have observed that pandemics do not conclude when disease transmission ends ‘but rather when, in the attention of the general public and in the judgment of certain media and political elites who shape that attention, the disease ceases to be newsworthy.’”

They concluded:

“Deactivating or disconnecting ourselves from the dashboards may be the single most powerful action towards ending the pandemic. This is not burying one’s head in the sand. Rather, it is recognising that no single or joint set of dashboard metrics can tell us when the pandemic is over.”

It’s an interesting idea. Maybe now we need to start focusing on news media instead of politicians. Maybe the message now should be: “quit covering Covid.” Maybe we should tell our state governments to just shut down the dashboards and quit reporting the numbers to media. What do you think?

💊 Welp, the wait is over for anyone who was still “waiting” for results of competent studies on ivermectin to come in, and who has somehow failed to notice the scores of prior studies finding the drug helps with Covid. A new, blockbuster study of over 220,000 people in Brazil just published, with the title “Ivermectin prophylaxis used for COVID-19 reduces COVID-19 infection and mortality rates: A 220,517-subject, population-level retrospective citywide.”

Itajai, a city in the Southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, implemented a population-wide government program for Covid prophylaxis. Thank goodness somebody did it, since we don’t have any well-funded public-health agencies in THIS country. Anyway, a total of 133,051 Brazilians got ivermectin before being infected. A total of 87,466 people did not receive or did not want to receive the ivermectin during the program, either as a prophylactic, in outpatient or inpatient therapeutical treatments, or after having the virus.

The study concluded that the ivermectin users had an infection rate -7% lower than non-users and a mortality rate -48% lower than those who didn’t take the horse dewormer. The researchers said:

“In a city-wide ivermectin program with prophylactic, optional ivermectin use for COVID-19, ivermectin demonstrated to significantly reduce COVID-19 infection rate and death rate from COVID-19, and mortality rate if infected.”

So. How many of these studies do we NEED?

🔥 Government-subsidized passenger railroad Amtrak says it has temporarily suspended its employee jab mandate, and therefore no longer expects to be forced to cut some services in January. In a memo to its workers yesterday, Amtrak said it will now allow uninjected employees to get weekly tests instead, citing litigation over Joe Biden’s Mandates.

Good news for Amtrak workers.

🦩 It’s only two weeks into the first little stirrings of Florida’s winter wave and the media is already pouncing. Hysterical reports of Florida’s “surging” numbers can be found everywhere. Even though our numbers ARE creeping back up — completely as expected and in time with last year’s winter wave — Florida still has one of the lowest infection rates in the country.

I noticed that even C&C got a heckler in the comments yesterday. It was encouraging to see because I started to think the critics stopped reading. I guess they just haven’t had much to say for a while.

Anyway, Floridians need to focus on early prevention through Vitamin supplementation and keeping a “Covid kit” around the house in case of infection. There’s no need to rush to a pricey testing center if it’s inconvenient since inexpensive at-home test kits are available at CVS and Walgreen’s. And folks experiencing trouble breathing should promptly try monoclonal treatments rather than going to the hospital, if it can be avoided, where only extremely invasive treatments are available.

Use telemedicine! There are a lot of providers for at-home Covid treatment these days. In case you need it, you might bookmark this link to a website where a doctor can assist with setting up real at-home Covid care so as to help avoid “overwhelming” the hospitals: https://jamesclinic.com. They even help transition people OUT of hospitals back home.

Finally, keep in mind that widespread anecdotal reports from hospital patients suggest that you might not receive the very best standard of care in large hospitals at this point, especially if you are unjabbed.

Have a wonderful Wednesday, and I’ll grab a refill with you tomorrow morning, right here at C&C HQ.

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