COVID-19 Update

We're being warned again that the monster is still on the loose and things could get bad this winter if we're complacent and don't stick with the program.

So, of course, we're prob'ly in for some bad shit.

And here's more confirmation at WaPo for why you don't wanna fuck around and find out:

50 percent of people who survive covid-19 face lingering symptoms, study finds

At least 50 percent of people who survive covid-19 experience a variety of physical and psychological health issues for six months or more after their initial recovery, according to research on the long-term effects of the disease, published in the journal JAMA Network Open.

Often referred to as “long covid,” the adverse health effects vary from person to person. But the research, based on data from 250,351 adults and children, found that more than half experience a decline in general well-being, resulting in weight loss, fatigue, fever or pain.

About 20 percent have decreased mobility, 25 percent have trouble thinking or concentrating (called “brain fog”), 30 percent develop an anxiety disorder, 25 percent have breathing problems, and 20 percent have hair loss or skin rashes. Cardiovascular issues — chest pain and palpitations — are common, as are stomach and gastrointestinal problems.

Those affected by post-covid conditions, sometimes called “long haulers,” can include anyone who has had covid-19, even those who had no symptoms or just mild ones, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But additional research published in a subsequent issue of the journal found that cognitive dysfunction has occurred more often among those who had more severe cases of covid-19 and required hospitalization, and their brain fog issues have lingered for seven months or more. “One’s battle with covid doesn’t end with recovery from the acute infection,” one researcher said.

At the end of every weekend, the numbers fall off the cliff, and by Tuesday or Wednesday, they're back through the fuckin' roof again.

Jan6 Stuff

Basically, according to 45*, if you go along with his illegal schemes to seize power either by breaking the law outright, or by searching smarmspace for ways to manufacture loopholes and dodges - that makes you a "patriot".

But by standing up for the tenets of American democracy - ie: honoring your oath to follow the law in order to further the founding principle of the peaceful transfer of power - that makes you a pussy.

So many snakes in the nest.

ABC News:

Memo from Trump attorney outlined how Pence could overturn election, says new book

In a memo not made public until now, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows emailed to Vice President Mike Pence's top aide, on New Year's Eve, a detailed plan for undoing President Joe Biden's election victory, ABC News' Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl reports.

The memo, written by former President Donald Trump's campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis, is reported for the first time in Karl's upcoming book, "Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show" -- demonstrating how Pence was under even more pressure than previously known to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Ellis, in the memo, outlined a multi-step strategy: On Jan. 6, the day Congress was to certify the 2020 election results, Pence was to send back the electoral votes from six battleground states that Trump falsely claimed he had won.

The memo said that Pence would give the states a deadline of "7pm eastern standard time on January 15th" to send back a new set of votes, according to Karl.

Then, Ellis wrote, if any state legislature missed that deadline, "no electoral votes can be opened and counted from that state."

Such a scenario would leave neither Biden nor Trump with a majority of votes, Ellis wrote, which would mean "Congress shall vote by state delegation" -- which, Ellis said, would in turn lead to Trump being declared the winner due to Republicans controlling the majority of state delegations with 26.

The day after Meadows sent Ellis' memo to Pence's aide, on Jan. 1, Trump aide John McEntee sent another memo to Pence's chief of staff, Marc Short, titled, "Jefferson used his position as VP to win."

Although McEntee's memo was historically incorrect, Karl says, his message was clear: Jefferson took advantage of his position, and Pence must do the same.

What followed during that first week of January was an effort by Trump, both personally and publicly, to push his vice president to take away Biden's victory.

"I hope Mike Pence comes through for us," Trump said at a roaring Georgia rally on Jan. 4, a day before Republicans would also lose their Senate majority. "I have to tell you I hope that our great vice president comes through for us. He's a great guy. Of course, if he doesn't come through, I won't like him quite as much."

At a March 18 sit-down interview with Trump for the upcoming book, Karl asked the former president about a report from The New York Times that on the morning of Jan. 6, Trump pressured Pence with a crude phone call, reportedly telling his vice president, "You can be a patriot or you can be a pussy."

"I wouldn't dispute it," Trump said to Karl.

"Really?" Karl responded.

"I wouldn't dispute it," Trump repeated.

Later on the morning of Jan. 6, as Trump took the stage for his rally at the Ellipse prior to the Capitol attack, he publicly called on Pence to take action.

"If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election," Trump told the roaring crowd. "Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn't, that will be a sad day for our country."

Hours later, after rioters had attacked the Capitol and the building was being evacuated, rioters were heard shouting "Hang Mike Pence" as they left the complex. But Trump told Karl that he never contacted his vice president to check on his safety.

"No, I thought he was well-protected, and I had heard that he was in good shape," Trump told Karl. "No, because I had heard he was in very good shape."

Pressed about the chants, Trump told Karl that Pence made a mistake in certifying the vote.

"He could have -- well, the people were very angry," Trump said. "If you know a vote is fraudulent, right, how can you pass on a fraudulent vote to Congress? How can you do that?" Trump said.

Asked by Karl if, had Pence done as Trump wanted, Trump would still be in the White House, Trump replied, "I think we would have won -- yeah."

Trump also couldn't say if he would ever forgive Pence for certifying the election -- a rare act of dissent from an otherwise loyal vice president.

"I don't know," Trump said. "Because I picked him. I like him, I still like him, but I don't know that I can forgive him."

And asked by Karl if Pence was on his shortlist for vice president should Trump run again in 2024, Trump wouldn't say.

"He did the wrong thing," Trump said of Pence. "A very nice man. I like him a lot. I like his family so much. But ... it was a tragic mistake."

Today's GIF

via NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

Nature Bats Last

A rising tide lifts all boats.

Rising sea level drowns all coastal areas and low-lying islands.

Hank Green - The SciShow

The bit at the end - even brutally efficient predators like smilodons had enough sense (or maybe heart) to look out for the less fortunate among them.

Today's Tweet

Politics Girl, via MeidasTouch.com

Sorry, but if your platform is banning and burning books, bringing guns into the classroom, voting against universal pre-k and canceling Sesame Street, you are NOT the 'party of parents.' pic.twitter.com/rQ6hZ5BZet

— MeidasTouch.com (@MeidasTouch) November 11, 2021

Today's Beau

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

They're telling us who they are, and we'd best believe 'em.

COVID-19 Update

Seems to be an opportunity for lotsa people to get together and sue the fuck out of Qult45. And maybe that leads to another shot at bringing some of these pricks up on criminal charges as well.

There's also an element of Press Poodling here, in that an awful lot of reporters and pundits spent lots of air time shitting on CDC about - you guessed it - the messaging.

Rolling Stone:

Newly Released Documents Show Exactly How Trump Admin. Undermined CDC During Pandemic

Many CDC scientists felt they “were hamstrung by a White House whose decisions are driven by politics rather than science,” according to testimony obtained by the House select committee on the coronavirus crisis

Documents and interview transcripts released by a congressional committee shine additional light on how the Trump administration interfered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, undermining the agency’s efforts to communicate the seriousness of the pandemic to the American people as the virus began to spread throughout the country.

Emails and transcripts of interviews with former senior CDC officials released by the House select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis reveal just how far administration officials went to tamp down the CDC’s public health communication efforts in the face of an emerging viral threat.

“The Trump Administration’s use of the pandemic to advance political goals manifested itself most acutely in its efforts to manipulate and undermine CDC’s scientific work,” committee Chair Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) wrote to Trump’s former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield. “Through its investigations, the select subcommittee has uncovered a staggering pattern of political interference from Trump Administration officials in critical aspects of CDC’s pandemic response efforts.”

According to the committee’s interview of former National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Director Nancy Messonnier, she confirmed media reports that she had angered Trump when she told the media in Feb. 2020 that the virus could cause “severe” disruptions to daily life. Her remarks prompted phone calls from then-HHS Secretary Alex Azar and Redfield. Speaking about her call with Azar, Messonnier said that she was “upset” by the conversation.

“I believed that my remarks were accurate based on the information we had at the time,” Messonnier said. “I heard that the president was unhappy with the telebriefing.”

To distract from Messonnier’s remarks, the administration planned another briefing, former CDC Principal Deputy Director Anne Schuchat told the committee when she testified.

“The impression that I was given was that the reaction to the morning briefing was quite volatile and having another briefing — you know, later I think I got the impression that having another briefing might get — you know, there was nothing new to report, but get additional voices out there talking about that situation,” Schuchat said.

For three months after the February briefing, the administration banned CDC officials from conducting any public briefings at the very same time the virus was rapidly spreading throughout the United States. The administration additionally denied numerous media requests for interviews with CDC officials. Schuchat said that she and many of her fellow CDC scientists felt that they “were hamstrung by a White House whose decisions are driven by politics rather than science.”

Instead of having the CDC lead the federal response to the pandemic, the White House took matters into its own hands by holding its own briefings and refusing to allow the CDC to speak directly to the public. One Health and Human Services employee even ordered CDC employee Dr. Christine Casey to “put an immediate stop to” the publication of its weekly scientific reports, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). In an email to Redfield, then-HHS Science Adviser Paul Alexander accused the CDC of “writing hit pieces on the administration” in the reports.

In her testimony before the committee, Casey said she was instructed by Redfield to delete that email, a request she said “seemed unusual” and “made me uncomfortable.”

The evidence also shows that the administration made changes to CDC recommendations on how to slow the spread. The White House instructed the CDC to soften language giving guidance to meatpacking plants on how to protect their workers from getting the virus after the virus disrupted production at a number of plants. And Dr. Scott Atlas, who was a special advisor to Trump, abruptly changed the CDC’s testing guidance to recommend asymptomatic people do not need a test even after they were exposed to the virus.

This recommendation was not the correct public health response, Dr. Deborah Birx testified to the committee, and she believed the administration made the recommendation in order to reduce the number of positive Covid tests. “This document resulted in less testing and less — less aggressive testing of those without symptoms that I believed were the primary reason for the early community spread,” Birx told the committee, adding, “I did not agree with the guidance as it was written.”

Today's Amaze

Yosemite National Park

Nature is magic

Today's Pix

click

COVID-19 Update

Let's be sure we have a good stranglehold on the obvious.

WaPo:

Why vaccinating kids for covid-19 makes sense — just like it did for polio

Seventy years ago, a virus terrorized Americans. Parents kept children indoors rather than risk exposure, and U.S. cities where cases were detected imposed severe curfews. What terrified Americans — especially parents — was that the disease could paralyze its victims. Many of these children could be kept alive only through immense artificial respirators known as “iron lungs.”

The virus in question was, of course, poliomyelitis, which the public rallied to defeat. It didn’t matter that only 0.1 percent of those infected develop serious complications. Americans embraced the highly effective vaccine developed by Jonas Salk. We continue to mandate the vaccines for children to this day.

This history may help parents make the decision about vaccinating their children against covid-19. Many parents and kids have eagerly filled up available appointments over the past week since shots first became widely available for 5- to 11-year-olds. But news reports also have highlighted considerable reluctance among other parents around shots for their kids in this age group — even including parents who have been vaccinated themselves.

This reluctance is understandable. Parents have repeatedly heard that covid-19 is no big deal for kids. This is true for most children, just as it was for polio. For both covid-19 and polio, three-quarters of those who become infected never develop symptoms, and most who have gotten sick made a full recovery after flu-like symptoms. Children are less vulnerable to covid-19 than adults, but to some extent, that was also true for polio. While polio primarily affected children, when it did infect adults, they often had worse outcomes.

There are some important differences. Salk’s original polio vaccine used an inactivated virus. Given imperfections in the inactivation process, it would occasionally cause polio itself. Vaccines for covid-19 are different; they don’t use the coronavirus, so it is physically impossible to get the disease from the shot. In that way, coronavirus vaccines are far safer. And the coronavirus vaccines have been rapidly given to more than 4 billion people around the world, including to tens of millions of children, with a safety profile that far exceeds those of the original polio vaccine. In fact, it is greater than any vaccine in our nation’s history.

The comparison has other limits, of course. Polio was a devastating disease that in the 1950s caused as many as 3,000 deaths annually. There was no capacity to do screening testing — kids were tested for polio only after they showed symptoms and were likely already on the way to serious illness. It would be like waiting to test our children for covid-19 until the virus had already led to hospitalization.

Mercifully, covid-19 has led to only about 700 deaths among children in the United States, a tiny proportion of the overall death toll. Nonetheless, it has closed schools and canceled major public gatherings. And as with polio, thousands of children have been hospitalized with severe illness, and thousands have developed multisystem inflammatory syndrome, a life-threatening condition. Meanwhile, the number of infected children who suffer from long covid is unknown, as is their prognosis.

There’s another difference between polio and covid-19: We eradicated polio, but given the highly infectious nature of the coronavirus, it will become endemic in the United States. Vaccines will likely become a regular part of our lives to keep the virus under control and the consequences of getting infected mild. Without the vaccines, children will remain vulnerable to potentially poor outcomes for years, if not decades.

Misinformation and anti-vaccine rhetoric make it easy to turn away from the impact of the coronavirus in children, particularly as we are still coming to understand the longer-term consequences of infection. Polio could not be ignored. In the 1950s, almost everyone knew someone paralyzed because of polio; their lives were shaped by wheelchairs and crutches. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was the most visible victim of the virus, leading the famous “March of Dimes” campaign to eliminate polio. When Salk’s vaccine became available, parents eagerly took the chance to protect their children from a disease whose impact was unmistakable.

If today’s misinformation, politicization and anti-vaccine sentiment existed in the United States in the 1950s, would the polio vaccine have received the same level of uptake? Would we have heard the same argument that most kids are not at risk? That a vast majority are asymptomatic? Or that only a tiny minority dies?

Fortunately, none of those arguments had much purchase back then. And we must not pay much attention to those arguments now. With holiday travel and family gatherings on the horizon, we need to vaccinate all eligible children as soon as possible so that both children and adults can start to put the pandemic behind us and look to a better future ahead.