Jul 31, 2021

Love Of Wisdom

If we should have government at all, what kind of government should it be?

How do we construct a just society? John Rawls, and The Veil Of Ignorance.

The Big Think - Intro to political philosophy, Tamara Gendler, Yale Univ:


Justice is the first virtue of social institutions as truth is of systems of thought.
A scientific theory, even if it's elegant, is useless if it's false.
A political structure, even if it's efficient, is illegitimate if it's unjust.
--John Rawls

This guy Nozick presents everything that's wrong with the way we've been doing things the last 40 years - all the toxic shit Nancy MacLean is trying to warn us about in Democracy In Chains.


Today's Pix

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COVID-19 Update

Yesterday, July 30th, 2021
9,360 people were killed by COVID-19
99.8 % of them were not vaccinated

World
New Cases:   643,321 (⬆︎ .34%)
New Deaths:      9,360 (⬆︎ .22%)

USA
New Cases:   99,470 (⬆︎ .28%)
New Deaths:       419 (⬆︎ .07%)

USA Vaccination Scorecard
At Least One Dose: 190.5 million (57.4%)
Fully Vaxxed:           164.2 million (49.5%)




So now the battle is joined, and we get to watch the freakies get freaky again over "the mark of the beast" or whatever the fuck they're going to cry about now - because they seem to think their full time vocation is freaking out and crying over the outrage du jour, as concocted at Wingnut Central.

But USAmerica Inc will only put up with that shit for so long. "You want democracy, go try to vote - this company is a dictatorship and if you wanna work here, then you'll fuckin' do what we tell you to fuckin' do."

The "run government like a business" gang is in for some rude surprises - not that they'll actually make the connection - the Newspeak mechanics at DumFux News are gonna be working overtime to make this one look like it squares up.

Anyway, the Vax Passport thing is kind of a thing now. I bought a badge holder and a lanyard, and it hangs on my front door so I don't leave home without it.



You’re going to be asked to prove your vaccination status. Here’s how to do it.

Congratulations, you’ve been vaccinated against the coronavirus. Now you have to prove it, and your smartphone can help.

Across the world, fears about the contagious delta variant are leading more businesses, schools and travel destinations to require vaccination. Like it or not, there’s a real chance that somewhere you want to go will ask to see proof of your shots.

Let’s say you are planning to visit Hawaii — you’ll need to be vaccinated or show a negative coronavirus test if you want to avoid quarantine. You’ll need proof to work in the federal government, at tech firms such as Google, Facebook and Uber, and a growing list of other companies. And in New York and San Francisco, you’ll need it to go inside a bar, get a seat at some restaurants, or take in a show on Broadway.

So, how do you do that without carrying your white card from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention everywhere you go?

There is a growing number of ways to store your vaccination record on your smartphone, though unfortunately no be-all-end-all app or system. We’re here to make sense of how different options approach your privacy, ensure security and try to spot counterfeits.

Just know this technology is still evolving, and places are making up their own rules about what they’ll accept as proof as they go along. So you still might want to carry that physical card with you when you’re headed somewhere super important.

Whether businesses or governments should ask you to prove your vaccination status is a deeply personal — and political — topic. Apps known as “vaccine passports” helped fuel a long-running debate over personal freedom vs. public health, and some places banned them before they were even developed. The first state-sponsored app, New York’s Excelsior Pass, failed to pick up wide traction this spring after infection rates dropped among other concerns.

The term vaccine passport may be out of fashion, but you still might have more digital options than you realize. Now states including California, Louisiana and New York offer portals to download fully authenticated vaccination information, and more are on the way. And millions across the United States have access to digital records from Walmart, CVS and Walgreens.

Why bother going digital? One concern is that as mandates increase, so might fraudulent paper records. A bouncer can scan an app a lot quicker than validate paper cards. An app is harder to lose than one super-valuable piece of paper that could slip out of your pocket. And digital records can also protect your privacy by passing along only the required information — thumbs up or down — instead of all the personal details on those CDC cards.

But there are downsides to digital, too. Many of the apps we’ve seen are made by companies for whom creating secure health passes isn’t a sole focus. Some might try to get you to pay after you start using the app. Apps that are poorly or unscrupulously written could be used to violate your privacy. (We’ve grilled each of the services we name in this guide.)

The most secure digital systems can also be complicated, raising big concerns about access. For an upcoming trip to Hawaii, the all-digital vaccine proof process required us to navigate two different websites and a third app.

To help you sort through the tech, we’ve laid out your options below based on how secure it is, from snapping a photo of your card to getting a digital health wallet.

Of all the services we tested, the free Clear Health Pass was the most flexible and likely the most useful right now. (We just wish it didn’t come from a company that’s also in the business of selling subscriptions to get through airport security.)

We want to hear about your experiences via our Washington Post Help Desk, and we’ll update this article and investigate problems.

Simple enough, right? Fire up your phone's camera, make sure your vaccine card takes up as much space on your screen as possible without cutting anything off, and snap a photo.

Even if you wind up using other digital records, it’s always nice to have a backup. That said, it usually doesn’t take long before images get buried in your phone’s camera roll, so take a moment to put those vaccine card shots in dedicated albums for super-fast access.

On iPhones: Launch the Photos app, find the picture of your vaccination card, hit the Share button in the bottom-left corner, select “Add to Album,” tap “New Album” and give it a name.

On most Android phones: Launch Google Photos, find the picture of your vaccine card, tap the three-dotted menu sign in the top-right corner, tap “Add to album,” tap “New album” and give it a name.

You could stop right there if convenience is your main concern, but remember: Those images contain your date of birth and the location of your vaccination site. A hacker might not be able to break into your accounts with just that information, but it’s just personal enough to make it easier for that person. (That also means sharing images on social media — think: vaccination selfie — isn’t a good idea.)

iPhones don’t have the ability to “lock” photos, but you can prevent snoops from finding them by using iOS’s Hidden album. Meanwhile, many of Samsung’s Android phones include a “Secure Folder” right out of the box. (You can find the full instructions here.) And Google announced a similar “locked folder” feature for its Photos app, which should arrive on Android phones soon.

Store your scanned CDC card in an app

Use this: Clear, VaxYes and Airside.

Pros: They’re fast and work in places without digital records.

Cons: It’s still mostly an honor system, and it’s hard to tell where they’ll be accepted

Better than just keeping a snapshot, transform it into a digital record you can whip out as needed.

The three options we looked into —
VaxYes, Airside Digital Identity and Clear — have a few things in common. All three let you carry your digital vaccine cards free. They also all require you to upload images of your CDC card and government ID, and you’ll need to manually type in details about where and when you got your jabs.

VaxYes, created by a start-up called WellPay, converts your card into a fancy bar code known as a QR code. It offers different levels of “verification”: You’ll hit Level 1 just by uploading the files it asks for, which doesn’t do much to prove they’re legit. You’ll continue to achieve higher levels of verification as VaxYes continues its checks.

Airside is more straightforward and does a better job of spelling out who your selfie and ID will be shared with early on. (You can also revoke that consent at any time.) Once you give the company what it asks for, you’re given a digital version of your card that lives inside the Airside app — no scannable QR codes here.

Meanwhile, Clear offers the most comprehensive option: It uses your phone’s camera to check that you’re a living, breathing person, and makes it easy for venue staff to tell the difference between people who just scanned their paper card and people who uploaded a fully authenticated digital record. (More on that below.)

All three have potential issues. Clear is the only service we tested that works just as well on Android phones as it does on iPhones. It’s hard to tell where the proof from these apps will be accepted. VaxYes, which says it has more than 1 million users, told us it’s focusing on states such as Kansas, Texas, and South Carolina. And while Clear and Airside’s health passes should pass muster anywhere your paper card does, acceptance still depends on each destination.

Download an official digital health record

Use this: CommonPass, Excelsior Pass, Clear.

Pros: It’s 100 percent verified.

Cons: Every state and provider does it differently, and setup can be complicated.

Most states and health-care providers have databases of who has received the vaccine. Increasingly they’re opening them up to citizens so they can download a digital record — a.k.a. one that can’t be easily faked.

These records can take the form of a link to your pharmacy’s website or a QR code you download. California helped lead the way by introducing digital health records in June, and now they’re available from at least three states as well as at Walmart, CVS and Walgreens and health-care providers using medical records from Epic and Cerner.

Once you have this digital record, though, what do you do with it? Enter health verification and wallet apps such as CommonPass and Clear, which can confirm your information and store it so you can share it as needed. (Clear is unique in that it accepts either a scan of the CDC card or digital records.) The iPhone’s Health app will gain the ability to hold vaccination records with this fall’s iOS 15 update.

Pros: It’s 100 percent verified.

Cons: Every state and provider does it differently, and setup can be complicated.

Most states and health-care providers have databases of who has received the vaccine. Increasingly they’re opening them up to citizens so they can download a digital record — a.k.a. one that can’t be easily faked.

These records can take the form of a link to your pharmacy’s website or a QR code you download. California helped lead the way by introducing digital health records in June, and now they’re available from at least three states as well as at Walmart, CVS and Walgreens and health-care providers using medical records from Epic and Cerner.

Once you have this digital record, though, what do you do with it? Enter health verification and wallet apps such as CommonPass and Clear, which can confirm your information and store it so you can share it as needed. (Clear is unique in that it accepts either a scan of the CDC card or digital records.) The iPhone’s Health app will gain the ability to hold vaccination records with this fall’s iOS 15 update.

The angst over faking the Vax Cards seems pretty ridiculous. It's a lot easier just to get the jab, dummy - and you won't risk going to prison for falsifying official records.

Of course, I've not filled my head with all that silly Q-shit - I don't know their struggle - so I'll try not to be too harsh with a buncha fuckin' idiots who apparently can't stand prosperity, and if they can't have it then nobody can have it, so they have to fuck it up for everybody else.

Be kind.

Jul 30, 2021

Today's Quote

War is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.
--John Steinbeck

Todays' Tweet



COVID-19 Update

Yesterday, July 29th, 2021
10,464 people were killed by COVID-19
99.7 % of them were not vaccinated

World
New Cases:   661,997 (⬆︎ .34%)
New Deaths:    10,464 (⬆︎ .25%)

USA
New Cases:   92,485 (⬆︎ .26%) 🥳 Highest In Almost 6 Months! 🎉
New Deaths:       398 (⬆︎ .06%)

USA Vaccination Scorecard
At Least One Dose: 189.9 million (57.2%)
Fully Vaxxed:           163.9 million (49.4%)




The Delta Wave may not be quite as bad as this guy believes it could be. But there's no reason for me to take chances. I'm back to the basics.

Wear your mask
Keep your distance
Wash your hands
&
Get the vax dammit


Opinion: In vaccine-resistant Alabama, hospitals face a two-front war

All of us have suffered mightily from the covid pandemic during the past 18 months. Some of us have had the infection. Many more have provided support to a friend or colleague who fought the infection. More than 611,000 Americans have lost their lives to this global plague.

Through the spring and into the early summer, owing in large part to large-scale vaccine production and distribution, every American age 12 and over had access to the vaccine. Many received their “jab” as soon as it was available. As a result, the number of covid cases plummeted, the grip on our hospital systems relaxed, death rates fell and we began to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

But in many regions of the country, including the Southeast where I live, up to two-thirds of the population chose not to protect themselves. I’ve heard all the reasons: “The vaccines are experimental.” “I am young and healthy; I don’t need the vaccine.” “So what if I get covid?” “The epidemic is over.” “The vaccine will destroy my fertility.” “The vaccine is a government plot.” “I have the freedom to choose.” “Nobody can tell me what to do.” “The doctors are lying to me.”

Like most of my fellow health-care workers, these comments stunned and stung me. We had spent a year fighting a raging pandemic. We suspended activities in our usual disciplines of medical care, rolled up our sleeves and provided care to the more than 30 million people who showed up in our ERs, clinics and hospitals. Covid was more than disruptive; it was exhausting. Most of us survived. But we were also fatigued and battle-worn.

Enter delta. We knew variants had emerged elsewhere in the world. The alpha variant entered the United States as the vaccines were rolling out and, fortunately, was well neutralized by the vaccine’s immune response. Delta, we thought, would be similar. It is not.

As we entered into the July Fourth weekend, many Americans celebrated as if the epidemic had ended: traveling in record numbers and engaging in large gatherings with no masks and no social distancing. All the while, many of those celebrating were unvaccinated and immunologically vulnerable. With the delta variant going from zero cases in March to 60 percent of cases by mid-July, we were approaching a near-perfect storm.

Now we are in it. Cases are exploding. Here in Alabama, the state with the lowest vaccination rate (less than 35 percent), rates of infection have risen from less than three cases per 100,000 people four weeks ago to more than 54 cases per 100,000 this week. Suzanne Judd at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public Health generated models that show, by Labor Day, cases will skyrocket to two to three times the peak we experienced in January. At our 1,157-bed hospital in Birmingham, Alabama’s largest, we have risen from three cases in-house in mid-June to more than 67 cases on Wednesday.
Statewide, the rise exceeds 500 percent since July 4.

These trends are terrifying and, as a virologist who had covid-19 last spring, I can say they induce a kind of pre-traumatic stress in our health-care workers. We know what’s coming. We’ve experienced this trauma before. We don’t want to do this again, but the die is already cast. My fellow health-care workers are being thrown back into the fire, like servicemen and women going back for a third tour of duty in a war zone. This week alone, one infectious-disease colleague and four ER physicians, all fully vaccinated, have become ill with the variant. This is very different from what we experienced before. Delta is different.

With the current spike of cases, 99 percent of deaths are occurring in unvaccinated people. Almost all of these are preventable. That is particularly troublesome to health-care workers who struggle valiantly to save the lives of those who now present to the hospital, the vast majority of whom chose not to be vaccinated.

Making it worse is the hate we experience from a small, but very real, group of people who seek to undermine our efforts through the steady release of misinformation in social media and elsewhere. I received an inquiry this week from a person who claimed to be a CNN reporter, initially asking me for information about delta and then demanding “proof” that delta is here. Despite my best effort to explain, I was berated with accusations that I was making this up. (He later posted most of the exchange on Facebook.) I am not alone in suffering these types of attacks. It is this sort of behavior that has led to poor vaccine uptake among many people and resulted in this new spike of cases.

Despite the static and misinformation, we will get it done. It will be helpful, however, if this time around we pull together as a country, ignore those who spew hate and sow mistrust of those trying to serve the public. The virus is a formidable enemy and terrifying enough. We can’t afford to be fighting a two-front war.

Cynical Mike says: Fewer dumbass rednecks in the world that I have to deal with? Fuck 'em - I'm a happy guy.


The problem though is that those stupid worthless fuckers are gonna take some of the good smart ones with them.

So we keep fighting.

Jul 29, 2021

Today's Brian

Brian Tyler Cohen


Republicans continue to rail about masks and changing guidance and how they're sure Democrats are just trying to make people jump thru hoops and blah blu-blah blu-blah blu-blah fuckin' blah.

Here it is, Dub - if you want the pandemic to end, then you have to start doing the things that'll end the pandemic.

And the first thing is:
stop being a buncha fuckin' crybabies about every-goddamned-thing.

Today's Tweet



Winner

COVID-19 Update


Yesterday, July 28th, 2021
10,136 people were killed by COVID-19
99.6 % of them were not vaccinated

World
New Cases:   659,885 (⬆︎ .34%)
New Deaths:    10,136 (⬆︎ .24%)

USA
New Cases:   84,534 (⬆︎ .24%)
New Deaths:       383 (⬆︎ .06%)

USA Vaccination Scorecard
At Least One Dose: 189.5 million (57.1%)
Fully Vaxxed:           163.6 million (49.3%)




Ezra Klein tries to tell us it's all our own fault that the rubes refuse to participate in reality.

He makes one glancing mention of one idiot on the radio in Nashville, but otherwise ignores the effects of having almost the entire bloc of Wingnut Media countervailing everyone's best efforts to get people educated and vaxxed.

The saving grace may be that companies finally get fed up with this childish nonsense and tell people to get the vax or get the fuck out.

Anyway, here's Ezra Klein performing his standard navel-gazing stunt that the Sulzberger family pays him so well to do.

NYT: (pay wall)

What if the Unvaccinated Can’t Be Persuaded?

I hate that I believe the sentence I’m about to write. It undermines much of what I spend my life trying to do. But there is nothing more overrated in politics — and perhaps in life — than the power of persuasion.

It is nearly impossible to convince people of what they don’t want to believe. Decades of work in psychology attest to this truth, as does most everything in our politics and most of our everyday experience. Think of your own conversations with your family or your colleagues. How often have you really persuaded someone to abandon a strongly held belief or preference? Persuasion is by no means impossible or unimportant, but on electric topics, it is a marginal phenomenon.

Which brings me to the difficult choice we face on coronavirus vaccinations. The conventional wisdom is that there is some argument, yet unmade and perhaps undiscovered, that will change the minds of the roughly 30 percent of American adults who haven’t gotten at least one dose. There probably isn’t. The unvaccinated often hold their views strongly, and many are making considered, cost-benefit calculations given how they weigh the risks of the virus, and the information sources they trust to inform them of those risks. For all the exhortations to respect their concerns, there is a deep condescension in believing that we’re smart enough to discover or invent some appeal they haven’t yet heard.

If policymakers want to change their minds, they have to change their calculations by raising the costs of remaining unvaccinated, the benefits of getting vaccinated, or both. If they can’t do that, or won’t, the vaccination effort will most likely remain stuck — at least until a variant wreaks sufficient carnage to change the calculus.

You can see the weakness of persuasion in the eerie stability of vaccination preferences. The Kaiser Family Foundation has been surveying Americans about their vaccination intentions since December. At that time, 15 percent said they would “definitely” refuse to get vaccinated, 9 percent said they would get a shot only “if required,” and 39 percent wanted to “wait and see.”

Six months later, Kaiser asked the same question. By then, most of the wait-and-see crowd had seen enough to get vaccinated. The only-if-required crew shrank, but only by a bit: 6 percent of Americans were still waiting on a mandate. But the definitely-notters had barely budged: They numbered 15 percent in December and 14 percent in June.

I don’t want to overstate my case. There was movement between groups. Some people who said they would definitely refuse a vaccine in December had gotten one by June. About a quarter of those who intended to watch and wait decided firmly against getting vaccinated. But the surprise in Kaiser’s data is the consistency of people’s views. In December, 73 percent of American adults said they were eager to get vaccinated or were at least open to the possibility. Today, 69 percent of Americans over the age of 18 have gotten at least one shot. “Most vaccine behaviors match what people planned to do six months ago,” Kaiser concluded.

With Delta supercharging transmission among the unvaccinated, the debate now is how to persuade them to get a shot (or two). I’m sympathetic to most of the ideas people have offered. The F.D.A. should give the vaccines full approval, not just emergency authorization, as the agency’s absurd process has created mass confusion and fed mistrust. We should respect people’s concerns and their intelligence. We should admit that the medical system has failed many of us before, and treated Black Americans with particular callousness. We should be honest that many are making a risk calculation for themselves, rather than indulging a conspiracy theory. We should support leading Republicans who are trying to ease the barriers of partisan identity. If Sarah Huckabee Sanders wants to call it “the Trump vaccine” and sell shots as a way of sticking it to the media and the Democrats and Anthony Fauci, I wish her the best.

We should also, of course, do everything we can to make vaccination frictionless. It’s easy to get a shot in a big city, but many people still live far from medical providers and cut off from the internet. Others lack transportation, or have jobs that make it hard to take a day off to recover from the fluish side effects, or have physical or mental impairments that make treatment difficult.

But I suspect all of this will change a depressingly modest number of minds. There are no speeches more powerful than the fear of disease and the grief of loss. That’s evident in the vaccination data now. Delta does appear to be driving a surge in vaccinations. But is this really our strategy? More death will lead to more shots in arms? One of the most heartbreaking stories I’ve read lately came from a Facebook post by Brytney Cobia, a doctor in Alabama. She wrote:

I’ve made a LOT of progress encouraging people to get vaccinated lately!!! Do you want to know how? I’m admitting young healthy people to the hospital with very serious Covid infections. One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late. A few days later when I call time of death, I hug their family members and I tell them the best way to honor their loved one is to go get vaccinated and encourage everyone they know to do the same. They cry. And they tell me they didn’t know. They thought it was a hoax. They thought it was political. They thought because they had a certain blood type or a certain skin color they wouldn’t get as sick. They thought it was “just the flu.” But they were wrong. And they wish they could go back. But they can’t. So they thank me and they go get the vaccine.

Phil Valentine, a conservative radio host in Nashville who said he wouldn’t get vaccinated and made parody songs about “the Vaxman,” caught the virus, and his condition quickly turned critical. He’s now in the hospital, on a ventilator. “He regrets not being more vehemently ‘pro-vaccine,’ and looks forward to being able to more vigorously advocate that position as soon as he is back on the air,” his radio station said in a statement.

This is one problem with trusting our rationality: The choice we make now, before we catch the virus, may not be the choice we will wish we had made once we get sick. Then there’s the stubborn fact that individual decisions have collective consequences. It may indeed be the case that a healthy 19-year-old American has little to fear from the coronavirus. But his immunosuppressed grandfather has much to fear from him. Whether it is a more severe imposition on liberty to ask someone to get vaccinated or regularly tested than to ask all immunosuppressed people in the country to effectively shelter in place for the rest of their lives is a collective question that demands a collective answer.

Other countries are offering that answer, and seeing results. Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, proposed a law requiring either proof of vaccination or a negative test result for many indoor activities. The mere prospect of a vaccine mandate set off mass protests. It also led to a surge in vaccinations. On July 1, 50.8 percent of the French population had gotten at least one shot — putting France 3.5 points behind America. By Sunday, 59.1 percent of France had been at least partially vaccinated, putting it 2.7 points ahead of us.

A number of American employers are following suit. On Thursday, the Biden administration is expected to announce a directive requiring all civilian federal workers to get vaccinated or face routine testing and restrictions. California and New York will require proof of vaccination or routine negative test results for all state employees. New York City is imposing the same requirement for its public employees. Around 600 college campuses have announced that they’ll require vaccinations for students returning in the fall. There’s no hard count of how many businesses are requiring vaccinations or test results to come back to work, but the anecdotal answer appears to be “a lot.”

There is nothing new about this. We do not solely rely on argumentation to persuade people to wear seatbelts. A majority of states do not leave it to individual debaters to hash out whether you can smoke in indoor workplaces. Polio and measles were murderous, but their near elimination required vaccine mandates, not just public education. When George Washington wanted to protect his soldiers from smallpox, he made vaccinations mandatory. It worked. “No revolutionary regiments were incapacitated by the disease during the southern campaign, and the mandate arguably helped win the yearslong war,” wrote Aaron Carroll.

The objection I find most convincing to any kind of vaccine mandate is that we have not built the infrastructure to make it work. What if someone who received a vaccine has lost her card, or her information was wrongly recorded when she got her shot? If we try to carry this out through smartphones, what if you don’t have a smartphone, or you lose it? If you want to choose frequent testing, how do you get access to those tests, and who pays for it, and how are the results recorded? If you have a problem, who do you call to solve it? How long are the wait times when you call? What if you need an answer quickly?

I covered both the debacle of the HealthCare.gov launch and the now-multidecade failure to transition to electronic medical records. We just watched state unemployment insurance systems nearly collapse under the demands of the pandemic. Perhaps we don’t have the capacity to do this well. But with so many public and private employers mandating vaccination for their workforces, we’ll know soon enough. Either they’ll build models that can scale or they will fail spectacularly enough to settle the question. And either way, this suggests a step the government could take right now: Funding, building and deploying an excellent vaccination passport infrastructure — backed up by ubiquitous rapid-testing options, for those cases when the passport fails — that private and public employers can use to implement their own policies.

Though I’d like to believe otherwise, I don’t think our politics can support a national vaccination mandate. The places that would most benefit from a mandate would be those most opposed to following one, and deepening partisan divisions here would be catastrophic (this is a problem that also afflicts the C.D.C.’s new masking guidance, as my colleague David Leonhardt notes). A high-stakes showdown between, say, the federal government and the State of Florida over a mandate would be a distraction we don’t need. Quickly building the records and testing options for individual employers to take the first steps seems like the right middle ground, at least for now.

Making it more annoying to be unvaccinated won’t persuade everyone to get a shot. But we don’t need everyone. According to Kaiser’s data, 16 percent of American adults are still in the wait-and-see or only-if-required categories. If they all got vaccinated, we’d hit herd immunity in most places. If more of the unvaccinated were routinely getting tested, that would help, too. And if cases then fell, the restrictions could lift.

The Delta strain is fearsome enough, but if we keep permitting the virus to dance across the defenseless, we could soon have a strain that evades vaccines while retaining lethality, or that attacks children with more force. Over and over again throughout this pandemic, the same pattern has played out: We haven’t done enough to suppress the virus when we still could, so we have had to impose far more draconian lockdowns and grieve far more death, once we have lost control. For this reason among many, I urge those who object to vaccination passports as an unprecedented stricture on liberty to widen their tragic imagination.

Jul 28, 2021

Todays Spiel

Everybody wants a piece of the action.

Imagine your sweet little ol' grandma buying into the argument, "No, really - marijuana's OK now - the bible says so."

Arrived today in my email:

I can get with that - kinda - a little pot can go a long way in helping some people relax and keep their spirits up and improve their tolerance for certain therapies (chemo being the one most noted). But there's nothing in the literature that says anything about a link between CBD and living to be 180 years old.

In fact, the jury's still out on CBD having any clinical efficacy for anything, but it remains "promising".

Here's an abstract (via PubMed) from Journal Of Clinical Medicine Research:

Considering data from in vitro and in vivo studies, cannabidiol (CBD) seems to be a promising candidate for the treatment of both somatic and psychiatric disorders. The aim of this review was to collect dose(s), dosage schemes, efficacy and safety reports of CBD use in adults from clinical studies. A systematic search was performed in PubMed, Embase and Cochrane library for articles published in English between January 1, 2000 and October 25, 2019. The search terms used were related to cannabis and CBD in adults. We identified 25 studies (927 patients; 538 men and 389 women), of which 22 studies were controlled clinical trials (833 patients) and three were observational designs (94 patients) from five countries. Formulations, dose and dosage schemes varied significantly between studies. Varying effects were identified from the randomized controlled trials (RCTs), more apparent effects from non-RCTs and minor safety issues in general. From the controlled trials, we identified anxiolytic effects with acute CBD administration, and therapeutic effects for social anxiety disorder, psychotic disorder and substance use disorders. In general, studies were heterogeneous and showed substantial risks of bias. Although promising results have been identified, considerable variation in dosage schemes and route of administration were employed across studies. There was evidence to support single dose positive effect on social anxiety disorder, short medium-term effects on symptomatic improvement in schizophrenia and lack of effect in the short medium-term on cognitive functioning in psychotic disorders. Overall, the administration was well tolerated with mild side effects.

The lack of well-designed studies (ie: Randomized, Double Blind, Placebo Controlled) is frustrating for clinicians, who generally take an attitude that as long as it does no harm, and it provides some added comfort for the patient, why not?

But that "does no harm" part is kinda tricky. It can't be harmless if it diverts attention or resources away from therapies that've been proven effective.

My complaint is that decent folks are being suckered into another snake-oil scam by bible-thumpin' hucksters.