I can’t figure out if some health officials are stupid, crazy or lying. Meanwhile Governor Newsom of CA passed a 2022 statewide law banning “Covid misinformation at doctor’s office.” (I am drafting a letter advising CA MDs to not comply). And FDA website homepage announces misinformation as threat to public’s health. Yes, we desperately need a Covid Truth/Reconciliation Committee. Otherwise, officials will continue to view the practice of “Non-cooperation with public” as normal. We were lucky that the 2020 epidemic was relatively mild. Had 2020 Covid been more severe, I predict that officials would have panicked.
2020 epidemic mild? Compared to what? The 2021 epidemic? Are you fucking crazy? Here is a mandate for you. If you are not vaccinated don't show up at a hospital looking for a ventilator. Stay home and drop dead.
Dear user. This is Mr. Hepworth’s coroner. He took your advice and dropped dead. In his casket are three ventilators just in case he catches Covid on his journey between Earth and Heaven.
I just cannot understand any version of this sort of sentiment. For all the self-inflicted harms that we see in hospitals, for all the patients that have destroyed their lives (and the lives of others) that we welcome with open arms and take care of like they were our own family, for all that our medical oaths are worth...this is the line?
If someone hasn't gotten an injected with an experimental new technology with known and unknown side effects, some serious, that seems to provide some modest protection against a disease that mostly affects older and intrinsically unhealthy people...this is where the line is? Anyone on the wrong side of the line we're not supposed to help?
Not a Trump voter, but I did have an older patient with a massive stroke shortly after receiving one of the early shots, and the data on these shots is scary.
Correlation does not imply causation. The J&J vaccine was halted due to clotting concern. AstraZeneca vaccine was not used in the US. Strokes and clotting disorders are also complications of the COVID virus itself.
Norway study no increased risk of stroke of 1st 2nd and 3rd vaccination
If I understand correctly, your point here is that a similar vaccine was canceled for having side effects, but it is...unreasonable to worry about this one having side effects? Again, even taking all your premises as fact, the conclusion doesn’t follow at all. One study showing the absence of one side effect is not that reassuring. Many side effects take years to be discovered even in the absence of any obvious foul play by the drug companies. The myocarditis alone would have gotten any vaccine pulled from development in the pre-COVID era. Even the subjective experience of getting one of these shots (I’ve had three) is worse than any other vaccine I’ve ever seen.
And even if one takes that absolute most charitable view of COVID vaccination, the idea that refusing to get it is irrational is unsupported. Normal vaccines are in development for many years before they’re available to the general public. This was an entirely new technology, not a slight tweak of last year’s flu vaccine.
And even if it were a slight tweak of an existing safe product, many patients refuse to get immunizations of all sorts, and that decision has no effect whatsoever on whether we offer them medical treatment, including for the illness that was theoretically preventable. They also refuse all sorts of other medical interventions, and make all sorts of other decisions that lead to negative health outcomes. The argument that I’m responding to is totally off the deep end of medical ethics. As far as I know, no serious person made any such argument about any health condition before COVID-19. Refusing medical treatment to someone on the sole basis of one small and totally reasonable health decision they made is madness.
They believe the RFK Jr nonsense. Measles was almost wiped out in the United States, then the anti-vaxxer nonsense rose up. In Samoa measles vaccine skepticism resulted in deaths of children.
RFK often quotes a paper by Anthony Fauci that notes that most deaths during the Spanish flu epidemic was caused by bacterial pneumonia. He suggests that vaccines would not have helped during that epidemic. This nonsense ignores the fact that the virus weakened the lungs of those who died. A vaccine would have prevented the virus from weakening the lungs. His solution would be to wait and treat the pneumonia with antibiotics. He wants Big Pharma to make money off antibiotics not vaccines.
Another lunacy is RFK blaming the Spanish flu on a Kansas lab experimenting with bacterial meningitis. He confuses a bacteria with a virus.
We forget that there was nothing neither 'unprecedented' about this pandemic - they've defined and shaped all of human hinstory - and that we had some warning. President Obama wanted to prepare for it but the Republicans would have none of it:
To be fair, you can't hang it all on the Republicans or even the bleach-injecting idiot WE THE PEOPLE chose as President. We *all* share some blame in this. Not at all sure how funding billions for pandemic prevention/handling would have gone over with the constituents back home of any partisan stripe. Why would we put up that kind of scratch for something that'll probably never happen? Proof: Because it hasn't happened *yet*. And 1918 was so over a hundred a years ago.
Pandemic prevention wasn't a top concern for *me* in 2012; was it *yours*?
The campaign for reparations to black Americans for the injustices of slavery and historic discrimination brings up questions including the proper assignment of responsibility. Are the sins of the father to be visited upon the child? Are persons of mixed race guilty in proportion to the degree of their whiteness or entitled to reparations proportional to their blackness? Do the two cancel each other out to the extent of their proportional balance? To what extent are black Americans responsible for their ancestral kings and warlords having largely supplied the slaves to the Atlantic trade? Is the nation as a whole responsible? What amount of money would not be an insult against the enormity of the crime? And how do we prioritize our collective guilt for our many sins—our vast miasma of regret?
While discrimination against blacks has been endemic, many people of good will throughout our history have endeavored to transcend the attitudes and injustices of discrimination. The country at its inception inherited slavery as an established reality from a world where un-free labor in the form of slavery, serfdom, and indentured servitude had been from ancient times foundations of civilizations controlled by narrow elites. Persons living in those worlds would have seen slavery as the way of the world, and doubts as to the permanence of that order were not broadly held until changing economics came to favor free labor over coercion and made room for the emerging moral sentiments of the Enlightenment.
At the time of the Revolution attitudes were changing rapidly; by 1804 every Northern State had moved toward eventual emancipation. The fight over slavery was played out in the constitutional convention of 1787 with compromises between Northern and Southern states to insure ratification of the Constitution. The Constitution was ratified but the debate over slavery continued with growing bitterness through the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, only culminating in the blood sacrifice of over 700,000 men at places like Gettysburg, Shiloh and Antietam.
After the Civil War the dominant Republicans moved to decisively secure the rights of recently freed blacks through the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and through the administration in the South of Reconstruction, only to see those rights significantly eroded by Southern recidivism and the rise of Jim Crow. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial discrimination and sought the clarification and re-establishment of those rights. While today racial prejudice and the lack of equal opportunity remain as indictments of our past and present failures, we have made significant progress both as individuals and as a nation. All are not equally guilty.
The history of racial enslavement and discrimination will not be absolved by a symbolic gesture. The assignment of collective guilt to America, or to white Americans, or the stereotyping of blacks as victims is far worse than not useful. It says that race relations are essentially static, that the attitudes and actions of individuals and their relationships to each other are unimportant, that all politics are identity politics. We do not yet live in a color blind, post racial world, but it is important that we act as if someday we might.
If we would make a restitutive gesture, perhaps it might be in the form of a very large commitment to the mitigation of climate change in the name of humanity at large.
“Bottom rail on top, dis time.” Civil War remark attributed to a former slave, now in uniform, to his former master, now a Union prisoner.
Jefferson, Washington, and Madison were born to a world in which slavery was a given. It was largely within their own generation that it’s morality was broadly questioned, and even then, against the background of its perceived necessity within the manifold of cultural reality. Yet, in changing times, they could see with some degree of precocity beyond their moment. In saying that all men equal, Jefferson betrayed his class, yet they stuck with him at the polls, perhaps reflecting growing ambiguity.
Racism is a manifestation of how we can’t relate to one another. It’s a black and white symbol of the gulf between us all. Racialistic inquiry is the thought about difference, the meaning of those differences to the degree of their significance, within the balance of significances and of the degree of intransigence in their consideration.
‘Identity’ has the effect of conceptually reducing all to description in terms of simplified generalities suggestive of broad policy initiatives irrespective of the fact that no statistically generated model can accurately describe any individual. Indeed, human diversity is such that the model may be very limited in interpretive utility and, at great expense, an impediment to progress.
Race is real and there are differences. “But whether we like it or not, there is no stopping the genome revolution. The results that it is producing making it impossible to maintain the orthodoxy established over the last half century, as they are revealing hard evidence of substantial differences across populations.”[1]
Assumption of racism as underlying premise of American social structure is itself a premise of that structures reformulation, is consistent with or is an element of the indictment of Western Civilization, the mantra of ‘de-colonization is predicated on the assumption of the superiority of innocence to sophistication, of the primitive to that which is developed.
It follows that the organizational, functional, structural, and moral elements of that society constitute a ‘white’ matrix that requires dismantlement in the name of social justice. White is historically coincidental with European. Europeans are White in terms of their general racial characteristics. And Europe was the continuation of Grecian culture married as it came to be with European technological and organizational fitness. That such is the face and fact of prominent aspects of the modern world should not be surprising. While it is for the established to embrace the promise of the new, it is for those who would ride the train to pay their fare and to respect the rules. While the dominant culture will be imbued with new strands, new racial admixtures, new ideas, it will not quietly, nor should it, continence its own demise.
A Corner of One’s Soul
A corner of one’s soul, still held in bondage,
long after the gate has fallen from its rusted hinges.
The lash bites deep, its memory to the current generation.
The shame of servitude, of dreams eclipsed,
a ceiling hung so low that one could touch it.
How expunge that from one’s sense of self
or of rage ingrained by layers of indignity.
How say, that was then, and
this is now, we’ll start anew?
Yet that is the very thing
that must be done—
Can’t live there anymore.
The bone’s been gnawed,
the bitter marrow sucked.
The ceiling and the walls
now burnt away, the sky so high,
so blue that one would yearn to touch it—
make more children for those lost,
those not forgotten,
but in whose name we carry on.
[1] Reich, Who We Are, p. 251
[2] Reich, Who We Are, p. 251
[3]Reich, p. 70
[4] Reich p. 253
Pay wall goes up July, 11th. Readers and conversationalists signing up before that date will be paid-up for life going forward. Existing free subscribers will also be always free to ride, wherever we may go. Tickets $5, once. Two hundred dollars buys you Founders status and an extra dose of gratitude.
Perfect Circle Press is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a subscriber.
Good post and thoughtful. But don’t waste our substance on the climate change hoax. If you believe floods are coming take action to mitigate the impact of the flood, don’t pretend you can stop the rain or hold back the tide.
If we had a truth and reconciliation committee for every fuckup of the governments we’d be neck deep in them. That would solve a lot wouldn’t it. You know how we avoid the mistakes of the COVID response?? Make the investments in public health infrastructure that are required INSTEAD of waiting for the next one - which is coming. Good luck with that. We’re too busy investigating laptops and climate change to worry about what absolutely will happen way before Bangladesh gets drowned out.
Good point about the need for preventive thinking, but climate change is somethign that will affect *all* of us - and that's becoming crystal clear now. Both are very serious, top-priority problems.
Sure - and regretted using that example as soon as I posted - my clumsy attempt at coming up with authoritarian and progressive projects / should have used another example of progressive overreach - take your pick
Yes, we need a COVID Truth and Reconciliation. If and until this happens, I won't trust anything that comes from our government or mainstream media. I know you didn't ask, but along those lines we need Nuremberg Trials, no mercy, for any who manipulated minors into having parts cut off and their endocrine systems messed up.
I love Jay but he has lived his entire life in the cloistered academia. Super nice guy and really well-meaning but millions of people died worldwide because of illegal gain of function research sponsored and funded by the United States driven by Dr fauci and a bunch of egg heads at different universities and labs. You Boomer academics love to circle the wagons shrug your shoulders and say oh well we were trying to do our best so please forgive us. Then you go off and retire and have great lives while millions of people suffer and die because of your crappy ideas and bad decisions. Like in Rome some generals need to fall on their swords and do it publicly... lose everything you have and then maybe you'll think twice when you're hubris gets the better of you. I have no sympathy for any of you that sat at home while the rest of us worked and delivered your food while you derided us as being ignorant.
Glen, in your comments with Jay about climate change, you might find this interesting...
CO2 emissions trends from Our World in Data...
Look at China... double the US emissions and climbing like a rocket:
https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels
There are some additional interesting ways to look at that data.
There are also graphs of per capita fossil fuel consumption, and per capital fossil fuel consumption by GDP.
I can’t figure out if some health officials are stupid, crazy or lying. Meanwhile Governor Newsom of CA passed a 2022 statewide law banning “Covid misinformation at doctor’s office.” (I am drafting a letter advising CA MDs to not comply). And FDA website homepage announces misinformation as threat to public’s health. Yes, we desperately need a Covid Truth/Reconciliation Committee. Otherwise, officials will continue to view the practice of “Non-cooperation with public” as normal. We were lucky that the 2020 epidemic was relatively mild. Had 2020 Covid been more severe, I predict that officials would have panicked.
2020 epidemic mild? Compared to what? The 2021 epidemic? Are you fucking crazy? Here is a mandate for you. If you are not vaccinated don't show up at a hospital looking for a ventilator. Stay home and drop dead.
Dear user. This is Mr. Hepworth’s coroner. He took your advice and dropped dead. In his casket are three ventilators just in case he catches Covid on his journey between Earth and Heaven.
I just cannot understand any version of this sort of sentiment. For all the self-inflicted harms that we see in hospitals, for all the patients that have destroyed their lives (and the lives of others) that we welcome with open arms and take care of like they were our own family, for all that our medical oaths are worth...this is the line?
If someone hasn't gotten an injected with an experimental new technology with known and unknown side effects, some serious, that seems to provide some modest protection against a disease that mostly affects older and intrinsically unhealthy people...this is where the line is? Anyone on the wrong side of the line we're not supposed to help?
I just don't get that argument.
Side effects my ass. You Trump cult followers are looking for a fight. Any fight.
Not a Trump voter, but I did have an older patient with a massive stroke shortly after receiving one of the early shots, and the data on these shots is scary.
Correlation does not imply causation. The J&J vaccine was halted due to clotting concern. AstraZeneca vaccine was not used in the US. Strokes and clotting disorders are also complications of the COVID virus itself.
Norway study no increased risk of stroke of 1st 2nd and 3rd vaccination
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/STROKEAHA.122.040430
Strokes are not uncommon in the elderly especially when there are risk factors like diabetes, hypertension, obesity, or sleep apnea.
The J&J vaccine was halted.
If I understand correctly, your point here is that a similar vaccine was canceled for having side effects, but it is...unreasonable to worry about this one having side effects? Again, even taking all your premises as fact, the conclusion doesn’t follow at all. One study showing the absence of one side effect is not that reassuring. Many side effects take years to be discovered even in the absence of any obvious foul play by the drug companies. The myocarditis alone would have gotten any vaccine pulled from development in the pre-COVID era. Even the subjective experience of getting one of these shots (I’ve had three) is worse than any other vaccine I’ve ever seen.
And even if one takes that absolute most charitable view of COVID vaccination, the idea that refusing to get it is irrational is unsupported. Normal vaccines are in development for many years before they’re available to the general public. This was an entirely new technology, not a slight tweak of last year’s flu vaccine.
And even if it were a slight tweak of an existing safe product, many patients refuse to get immunizations of all sorts, and that decision has no effect whatsoever on whether we offer them medical treatment, including for the illness that was theoretically preventable. They also refuse all sorts of other medical interventions, and make all sorts of other decisions that lead to negative health outcomes. The argument that I’m responding to is totally off the deep end of medical ethics. As far as I know, no serious person made any such argument about any health condition before COVID-19. Refusing medical treatment to someone on the sole basis of one small and totally reasonable health decision they made is madness.
They believe the RFK Jr nonsense. Measles was almost wiped out in the United States, then the anti-vaxxer nonsense rose up. In Samoa measles vaccine skepticism resulted in deaths of children.
RFK often quotes a paper by Anthony Fauci that notes that most deaths during the Spanish flu epidemic was caused by bacterial pneumonia. He suggests that vaccines would not have helped during that epidemic. This nonsense ignores the fact that the virus weakened the lungs of those who died. A vaccine would have prevented the virus from weakening the lungs. His solution would be to wait and treat the pneumonia with antibiotics. He wants Big Pharma to make money off antibiotics not vaccines.
Another lunacy is RFK blaming the Spanish flu on a Kansas lab experimenting with bacterial meningitis. He confuses a bacteria with a virus.
https://youtu.be/rNA1Y3qTpuE
No doubt RFKJ will be trotted out in Loury's Crank Of The Week show in short order.
Lol.
The Stanford MD economist did admit “Sometimes I’m right, sometimes I’m wrong”. Sly Stone song worm began playing.
I don’t mind having an opinion that differs from Faux News, Bill Maher, Russell Brand, and the medical cherry-picker Dr John Campbell.
We forget that there was nothing neither 'unprecedented' about this pandemic - they've defined and shaped all of human hinstory - and that we had some warning. President Obama wanted to prepare for it but the Republicans would have none of it:
https://www.ajc.com/news/obama-warned-pandemic-threat-2014-but-republicans-blocked-funding/dh2H9HxiuBY05T5uPqtqpI/
To be fair, you can't hang it all on the Republicans or even the bleach-injecting idiot WE THE PEOPLE chose as President. We *all* share some blame in this. Not at all sure how funding billions for pandemic prevention/handling would have gone over with the constituents back home of any partisan stripe. Why would we put up that kind of scratch for something that'll probably never happen? Proof: Because it hasn't happened *yet*. And 1918 was so over a hundred a years ago.
Pandemic prevention wasn't a top concern for *me* in 2012; was it *yours*?
On Reparations
The campaign for reparations to black Americans for the injustices of slavery and historic discrimination brings up questions including the proper assignment of responsibility. Are the sins of the father to be visited upon the child? Are persons of mixed race guilty in proportion to the degree of their whiteness or entitled to reparations proportional to their blackness? Do the two cancel each other out to the extent of their proportional balance? To what extent are black Americans responsible for their ancestral kings and warlords having largely supplied the slaves to the Atlantic trade? Is the nation as a whole responsible? What amount of money would not be an insult against the enormity of the crime? And how do we prioritize our collective guilt for our many sins—our vast miasma of regret?
While discrimination against blacks has been endemic, many people of good will throughout our history have endeavored to transcend the attitudes and injustices of discrimination. The country at its inception inherited slavery as an established reality from a world where un-free labor in the form of slavery, serfdom, and indentured servitude had been from ancient times foundations of civilizations controlled by narrow elites. Persons living in those worlds would have seen slavery as the way of the world, and doubts as to the permanence of that order were not broadly held until changing economics came to favor free labor over coercion and made room for the emerging moral sentiments of the Enlightenment.
At the time of the Revolution attitudes were changing rapidly; by 1804 every Northern State had moved toward eventual emancipation. The fight over slavery was played out in the constitutional convention of 1787 with compromises between Northern and Southern states to insure ratification of the Constitution. The Constitution was ratified but the debate over slavery continued with growing bitterness through the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, only culminating in the blood sacrifice of over 700,000 men at places like Gettysburg, Shiloh and Antietam.
After the Civil War the dominant Republicans moved to decisively secure the rights of recently freed blacks through the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and through the administration in the South of Reconstruction, only to see those rights significantly eroded by Southern recidivism and the rise of Jim Crow. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial discrimination and sought the clarification and re-establishment of those rights. While today racial prejudice and the lack of equal opportunity remain as indictments of our past and present failures, we have made significant progress both as individuals and as a nation. All are not equally guilty.
The history of racial enslavement and discrimination will not be absolved by a symbolic gesture. The assignment of collective guilt to America, or to white Americans, or the stereotyping of blacks as victims is far worse than not useful. It says that race relations are essentially static, that the attitudes and actions of individuals and their relationships to each other are unimportant, that all politics are identity politics. We do not yet live in a color blind, post racial world, but it is important that we act as if someday we might.
If we would make a restitutive gesture, perhaps it might be in the form of a very large commitment to the mitigation of climate change in the name of humanity at large.
“Bottom rail on top, dis time.” Civil War remark attributed to a former slave, now in uniform, to his former master, now a Union prisoner.
Jefferson, Washington, and Madison were born to a world in which slavery was a given. It was largely within their own generation that it’s morality was broadly questioned, and even then, against the background of its perceived necessity within the manifold of cultural reality. Yet, in changing times, they could see with some degree of precocity beyond their moment. In saying that all men equal, Jefferson betrayed his class, yet they stuck with him at the polls, perhaps reflecting growing ambiguity.
Racism is a manifestation of how we can’t relate to one another. It’s a black and white symbol of the gulf between us all. Racialistic inquiry is the thought about difference, the meaning of those differences to the degree of their significance, within the balance of significances and of the degree of intransigence in their consideration.
‘Identity’ has the effect of conceptually reducing all to description in terms of simplified generalities suggestive of broad policy initiatives irrespective of the fact that no statistically generated model can accurately describe any individual. Indeed, human diversity is such that the model may be very limited in interpretive utility and, at great expense, an impediment to progress.
Race is real and there are differences. “But whether we like it or not, there is no stopping the genome revolution. The results that it is producing making it impossible to maintain the orthodoxy established over the last half century, as they are revealing hard evidence of substantial differences across populations.”[1]
Assumption of racism as underlying premise of American social structure is itself a premise of that structures reformulation, is consistent with or is an element of the indictment of Western Civilization, the mantra of ‘de-colonization is predicated on the assumption of the superiority of innocence to sophistication, of the primitive to that which is developed.
It follows that the organizational, functional, structural, and moral elements of that society constitute a ‘white’ matrix that requires dismantlement in the name of social justice. White is historically coincidental with European. Europeans are White in terms of their general racial characteristics. And Europe was the continuation of Grecian culture married as it came to be with European technological and organizational fitness. That such is the face and fact of prominent aspects of the modern world should not be surprising. While it is for the established to embrace the promise of the new, it is for those who would ride the train to pay their fare and to respect the rules. While the dominant culture will be imbued with new strands, new racial admixtures, new ideas, it will not quietly, nor should it, continence its own demise.
A Corner of One’s Soul
A corner of one’s soul, still held in bondage,
long after the gate has fallen from its rusted hinges.
The lash bites deep, its memory to the current generation.
The shame of servitude, of dreams eclipsed,
a ceiling hung so low that one could touch it.
How expunge that from one’s sense of self
or of rage ingrained by layers of indignity.
How say, that was then, and
this is now, we’ll start anew?
Yet that is the very thing
that must be done—
Can’t live there anymore.
The bone’s been gnawed,
the bitter marrow sucked.
The ceiling and the walls
now burnt away, the sky so high,
so blue that one would yearn to touch it—
make more children for those lost,
those not forgotten,
but in whose name we carry on.
[1] Reich, Who We Are, p. 251
[2] Reich, Who We Are, p. 251
[3]Reich, p. 70
[4] Reich p. 253
Pay wall goes up July, 11th. Readers and conversationalists signing up before that date will be paid-up for life going forward. Existing free subscribers will also be always free to ride, wherever we may go. Tickets $5, once. Two hundred dollars buys you Founders status and an extra dose of gratitude.
Perfect Circle Press is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a subscriber.
Good post and thoughtful. But don’t waste our substance on the climate change hoax. If you believe floods are coming take action to mitigate the impact of the flood, don’t pretend you can stop the rain or hold back the tide.
If we had a truth and reconciliation committee for every fuckup of the governments we’d be neck deep in them. That would solve a lot wouldn’t it. You know how we avoid the mistakes of the COVID response?? Make the investments in public health infrastructure that are required INSTEAD of waiting for the next one - which is coming. Good luck with that. We’re too busy investigating laptops and climate change to worry about what absolutely will happen way before Bangladesh gets drowned out.
Good point about the need for preventive thinking, but climate change is somethign that will affect *all* of us - and that's becoming crystal clear now. Both are very serious, top-priority problems.
Horse hockey. Another ploy to control and impoverish the nations.
JasonT, you're quite hilarious. No common sense. I once had a Ph.D. assigned to me who didn't know his mouth from his asshole. Lol!
Man, they didn't teach science where you lived, did they.
I was actually taught to consider the evidence and derive conclusions from other than media hype. Sorry you missed out on that.
Sure - and regretted using that example as soon as I posted - my clumsy attempt at coming up with authoritarian and progressive projects / should have used another example of progressive overreach - take your pick
Oklahoma teaching the Tulsa massacre while saying race was not a factor seems like an authoritarian move.
No Progressives in sight.
Do we need a COVID Truth and Reconciliation Committee?
Yes!
Yes, we need a COVID Truth and Reconciliation. If and until this happens, I won't trust anything that comes from our government or mainstream media. I know you didn't ask, but along those lines we need Nuremberg Trials, no mercy, for any who manipulated minors into having parts cut off and their endocrine systems messed up.
I love Jay but he has lived his entire life in the cloistered academia. Super nice guy and really well-meaning but millions of people died worldwide because of illegal gain of function research sponsored and funded by the United States driven by Dr fauci and a bunch of egg heads at different universities and labs. You Boomer academics love to circle the wagons shrug your shoulders and say oh well we were trying to do our best so please forgive us. Then you go off and retire and have great lives while millions of people suffer and die because of your crappy ideas and bad decisions. Like in Rome some generals need to fall on their swords and do it publicly... lose everything you have and then maybe you'll think twice when you're hubris gets the better of you. I have no sympathy for any of you that sat at home while the rest of us worked and delivered your food while you derided us as being ignorant.
With friends like you, who needs enemies?!?