oldmanfan

They are being drowned out by the nonsense. Our country was at its best when there were more liberal and more conservative individuals of each party.

I want our country to be our country again, and will not apologize for that.

I hope you're right. I really do. But I fear wehave gone so far over the edge we cannot retrieve the country. I live right in the middle of conservative middle America. The problem is there are no good conservatives or liberals anymore, just fringe elements destroying our country.

And you are weak, but act like a tough guy on the Internet to hide it. Folks like you want to see our country fail.

Thanks for providing perfect examples of what I'm talking about. We survived those very hard times because America was strong then, and because Americans back then realized there were things bigger than themselves. We got through those very hard times because we sacrificed for the greater good. Look at us today. We have a Secretary of Defense who says he can't extract our own citizens from Afghanistan. We have people around here who refuse to sacrifice for those around you and get a vaccine. Who don't give a damn about anyone other than themselves, not even their kids. And you are so myopic you can't even see that you've proved my point. America as a country, as the concept that made it the greatest country in the world, has given way. The folks that lived through the era from 1917-1941 would smack us all across the face and tell us, as a whole, to grow up and face our responsibilities. If they saw what's going on today they'd be ashamed. I've never done it and never will. I oftentimes wonder if historians will look back centuries from now (if there are historians or anyone around then) and say that social media was the beginning of the end of our society.

I hope you're right.

I would first put a lot of resources into developing an effective vaccine against RSV. And then follow the data; if there was a significant outbreak then I would absolutely have kids wear masks for prevention. For flu, yes I would mandate vaccines. I work or a health care organization, and everyone here must get the flu vaccine every year as a condition of employment. But from a public health perspective, you look at benefit and risk. The benefit to you and to the community at large from the flu vaccine far, far outweigh any risks associated with the vaccine. I don't make viral diseases political. I work in health care, I don't want people to die if they don't have to. Simple.

The truth hurts

Sorry, but there is no doubt about this. There are governors of certain states that are OK with putting people at risk to die. And the people who go along with them, and use their children as political pawns, are just as complicit.

Each year in the United States, RSV leads to on average approximately 58,000 hospitalizations1 with 100-500 deaths among children younger than 5 years old2 and 177,000 hospitalizations with 14,000 deaths among adults aged 65 years or older. As of today Covid has killed about 135 children less than 5 in the US, and there are increasing numbers of children in ICU beds right now. So I would dispute that RSFV is far more deadly to children. I advocate for vaccines because the science of vaccines has prevented millions of deaths and long term disease. The development of effective vaccinations is one of the great scientific and medical achievements of all times. You are absolutely correct that children, thank God, were not as likely, in fact far less likely, to die from Covid, and I advocated just a few months ago to just open schools up because they were at such low risk. But then the delta variant hit and it changed my perspective. In my experience, the kids overall adapt to the masks far easier than we adults do, except when parents use their own kids as political pawns as we're seeing now. Do I think vaccines should be mandated? Yes, for diseases that offer a high rate of death and disability for the country as a whole, and for which we have no treatments or cures. Look at the positive effect the polio vaccine, smallpox, measels and mumps vaccines have had for our society. I put Covid in that category. For other diseases that don't carry that kind of toll, don't think there should be mandates. Shingles, for example. I should get mine, but I haven't, and if I get shingles it affects me. If I choose to not get the Covid vaccine and I get infected, the data indicate I share it with on average 8 more people. So I have libertarian leanings on some things, but saving people's lives I don't. If we could quarantine off the idiot anti-vaxers and let Darwin do his work, fine. But we can't.

Turn on your goddam TV - they're showing it right now.

From what perspective? From a viral perspective, they are different viruses. But from how it shows the depths to which America has sank, it is a perfect comparison. The America of the 50's cared about things. They cared about their children, they put their children's well being above politics. There are literally politicians and just regular folk, some on this very board, who would rather see children die if it means they can cling to their political stance. Think about that - there are folks who would be OK watching their own child die if it means their political side claim claim some sort of bizarre victory. People believed in science back then too. They understood that back then, as well as now, people spent years in the education and training to become doctors and scientists because they felt called to eradicate disease. People understood back then that science is a process, and that when presented with data and facts you alter your approach to treatments as more data was obtained. Now, people think everyone who is trying to defeat Covid has some sort of sinister ulterior motive. People get on Facebook and plant crap like there are chips in the vaccines trying to control you. And they use that, again, as a way to try and kill more people to buttress a political philosophy. People used to care about each other back then, especially cared about the kids. They used to care about the truth, about their country. Not anymore. They only care about themselves. And before I get the "if you don't like it, leave crap", I'll say this. I'm not the one who hates this country. Maybe not you SCBills, but the people who do the crap that I talked about here. They hate this country, they hate what it stands for, and they should be the ones who get the hell out.

I am fiercely independent, and the article you cited about polio captures my emotions perfectly. America is dead because people who claim to be American have no idea what that means. They have no concept of country, of shared sacrifice, of anything other than me, me, me.

Can anyone be surprised?

I agree. Why in the hell the evacuations were not done first is absurd at best. Complete abdication of responsibility. For further comments I refer you to my post about how we no longer have an America.

I am Independent. You stand for weakness, people like you will allow our country to fail. I don't give a damn what you think Never have, never will. Biden has to get those people out of the country, and do whatever he has to in order to do so. if he does not he should have the decency to step aside.

Some good points here. I would say that if we had followed the advice of the public experts early on we would have avoided many of the economic issues. As for your concluding sentence, yes we will all die. But we need to save those would would not die otherwise. Should we close down cardiology offices and not treat heart failure? Should we not treat cancer? Where do you want to draw the line?

This will probably get lengthy, so my apologies up front. But the events of this past week, coupled with the events surrounding Covid and a host of other issues, have led to me to a stunning and difficult conclusion: America no longer exists I love my country, as do many on this board. But the America I love is gone. It has been replaced by a spineless, weakened shell of a nation, a nation that no longer stands as a beacon of liberty in the world, a nation that has abdicated its role as a superpower, a nation that used to stand together in times of struggle but now does its utmost to tear itself apart. The proximate cause of my statement was the announcement of the Secretary of Defense yesterday that our military cannot guarantee the safe passage of our own citizens to be evacuated. The finest fighting force that has ever been assembled in the world, and we cannot summon the courage and strength to remove our own citizens from a battle field. There are so many in our country that express jingoistic patriotism, that claim they stand for the military because they express out rage when an athlete decides to kneel during an anthem and such. But when push comes to shove, and we are challenged with a crisis such as we see today in Afghanistan, where did these people go? Oh no, we can't go in, it would be a blood bath, and so on. Now, this is the proximate cause, but to be honest our gutlessness as a nation began in 2001. Bush and Cheney went into the country they shouldn't have, and left the country that should have been destroyed (Afghanistan) intact. Obama drew his supposed red line in Syria, and when it was crossed shrank away like a coward. Trump Claimed he could negotiate with the Taliban and North Korea, while they sat and laughed at our ineptitude as did Russia. And now here we are. Instead of acknowledging our role as the world's superpower, instead of using our military might, the combined efforts of 4 administrations at least (and Clinton was no joy either) has left us in the eyes of the world as a paper tiger. Oh sure, we let out a mighty roar, but we do nothing. Make no mistake, our enemies laugh at us today, and our allies know we can no longer be counted on. We might as well disband our fighting forces because the world knows we won't use them anymore. American used to stand for good in the world, we used to stand against tyranny, against evil. We fought world wars for these beliefs. But we don't anymore. We can use diplomacy all we want, and we should exhaust diplomacy before using force, but we have fallen into this mistaken notion that you can use rational thought processes like diplomacy with irrational actors. You don't negotiate with the Taliban. You don't negotiate with Kim Jong Un. You destroy them. You destroy them before they destroy you. But we have abdicated our role as a power, and we can never get it back now. One of the reasons we have reached this point, of course, is because the people of this country no longer understand what America is supposed to be. America is an ideal. we started as a nation of disbanded citizens, spread across the 13 colonies with different political and other beliefs, But we were held together by concepts outlined in the two most important documents ever written, the Declaration and the Constitution. The country born under those remarkable documents grew into the finest country in the world, guided by those principals. We have led in so many areas. We were the leader in science and medicine, in brining economic growth to the world, leaders in innovation of so many kinds. and we did so because, despite our differences, despite our arguments, the American people understood we were in it together. We understood that in time of trouble, in times of crisis, what brought us together as a people was far more than what separated us. But no more. The response to a global pandemic in this country has shown that, as a people, we no longer can be counted on to put America first, to put our fellow man first above our own petty and self-absorbed interests. We literally would rather watch our fellow men, women and children die instead of banding together to help. We would rather adhere to some bizarre political fantasies than help the guy next to us. I am so goddam tired of reading about how masks are unconstitutional. The same people who claim you have to be originalists with respect to gun rights somehow think the Constitution mentions masks. People have willfully ignored actual scientific facts, they have ignored science and medicine, to believe in crackpot fantasies dreamed up on some Facebook page. And yesterday is yet another example of why the America I know is gone; governors of states who because of cheap political views are saying that, rather than have people wear masks, their citizens should get sick and then take treatments that costs thousands of dollars to hopefully cure them because they view it as a better political move. When the political leaders in the country would rather have you get sick than not in order to garner another vote, and we simply sit back and accept that, we are no longer America. When our politics are that warped, that repulsive, we can no longer effectively govern this country. I want the America back that I know and love. I want the America back of my youth, the America that was strong, that stood for good. The America where its citizens disagreed and debated, sometimes vigorously and violently, but inn the end knew we were all on the same side. I was a teenager during the Vietnam years, I drove by UB when it was burning, I watched the assassinations of King and Bobby K,. Those were dark days, the darkest in my life time other than 9/11 and the present day. But what I also remember was that night in July 1969 when our entire country, regardless of politics and such, watched as one as a brave astronaut named Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. We were all Americans that knight, and we were all proud. Some will no doubt read this and say I am being idealistic. To that I say, why not? Why not hold up the ideals of this country? Instead, the people of this country don't care about the ideals anymore. They only care about themselves. And that selfish instinct, and how it has affected our daily lives, our government, and our standing in the world, has led to an inevitable consequence. America is gone. We have let it slip away. The only question now is whether we can ever get it back.

My sympathies to your friend and to you on the death of his dad. This is not easy on anyone. I get frustrated with this because there is so much false information put out, especially on social media.

Why don't you just once provide an original thought instead of just posting drivel that you copy and paste? Biden screwed this up completely, but you think it's a funny thing. It's not, it's a tragedy.

Do not insult the over 600,000 people that have died from Covid by trotting out the argument that they are exacerbated. If you are one of those who want to say that only 6k died from Covid because that was the only thing on their death certificate, that is an insult not only to the over 600k that have died but to all the health care providers that have given everything they have to take care of them. I work for a big health care organization. If we conflated death certificates, if we made up false diagnoses to upcharge for Covid, not only would that be an unethical thing that our CEO would not countenance, he would not countenance it because the amount of fines and such we would incur would be such that we'd have to close. Continuing, to suggest that no one really dies from the flu or from Covid is ridiculous that I don't know where to start. I teach medical physiology, and one of the things I teach my students is that ultimately what causes death is that your heart stops. The questions is what causes your heart to stop. In the flu, it is because your ability to breathe, and thus take in oxygen, is so depleted that not enough oxygen is delivered to the heart muscle so the heart stops functioning. In Covid, the pathology reports all show that there is extensive damage to the lining of your capillaries in the lungs and elsewhere and in the alveoli; these events again cause lack of oxygen to the tissues and organs, your heart stops, you die. To suggest no one really dies from either the flu or Covid is so sophmoric it defies explanation. I have over 40 year's experience in medical and scientific research. I understand this very well. You ae a fool. A complete and utter fool. Let's take someone with Stage 2 diabetes that gets Covid. Up until Covid their disease is managed by medications and diet. But then Covid hits. The underlying pathology of diabetes is that it is a vascular disorder. The elevated blood glucose levels alter the endothelial lining of you blood vessels, especially the smallest blood vessels or capillaries. That is one reason why kidenty disease is a common complication of diabetes. But you're managing you diabetes, and then you get Covid. As stated above, Covid wreaks havoc on the lining of blood vessels and the lining of your lungs,. so now the diease that you had controlled is no longer such. Your kidneys start to fail. Other organ systems start to fail because of inadequate oxygen supply. And eventually you die. Ot because of your diabetes, because you were dealing with that. But because the virus threw in a monkey wrench that you could not overcome. This is why Covid deaths occur in a lot of people with co-morbidities, becuase while they can handle on control thos eco-morbidities, Covid puts it over the top. That is how this works. I don't expect you to understand, because the bottom line is you don't want to understand. You want people to die. You want people to die because you think this is about politics and not people.

Then you stand up and be America. You tell the Taliban that US forces will be there to execute a peaceful extraction of those people, and if the Taliban take any aggressive action against such you wipe them out. I cannot believe the weakness of this administration over this. I cannot believe the weakness of the 3 prior administrations over this. I cannot believe the weakness of so many on this board who just want to complain about this, who like to preach their false patriotism about America First and all that, but when push comes to shove think that America should cower in the face of its enemies. Yes, I know I'll be criticized for wanting to put soldiers lives on the line, but we have Americans on the ground in harm's way right now. Once we get them out, then we are going to have an evil force in Afghanistan who will commit genocide and start allowing terrorists to plot to destroy our country. We have the best fighting force that has ever been assembled in the world. When I talk to folks in the military, they want to be given a defined mission, they want to be given the materials necessary to complete the mission, and then want to know they have the support of the people of their country. They have a job to do. Let them do it, support them. Quit waving faux patriotic issues around like kneeling before an anthem and all that crap and get behind our fighting men and women. If we stand by and allow Americans to be held now by the Taliban because we say we don't have the capacity to get them out, or allow our allies that have stood with us in that country to be slaughtered, then let's just admit America does not exist anymore. Because it won't.

Following up, here are the data from the CDC on estimated mortality rates (with ranges) rates from influenza: Table 1: Estimated Influenza Disease Burden, by Season — United States, 2010-11 through 2019-20 Influenza Seasons 2010-2011 37,000(32,000 – 51,000) 2011-20129 12,000(11,000 – 23,000) 2012-2013 43,000(37,000 – 57,000) 2013-2014 38,000(33,000 – 50,000) 2014-2015 51,000(44,000 – 64,000) 2015-2016 23,000(17,000 – 35,000) 2016-2017 38,000(29,00-61,000) 2017-2018 61,000 (45,000-95,000) 2018-2019: 34,000 (26,000-53,000) 2019-2020: 22,000 (18,000-29,000)

Bull crap. Absolute and total bull crap. The over 600,000 deaths from Covid are valid, and if anything the number is probably low because of folks early on who died from it but were not diagnosed with Covid because they weren't able to be tested. If you're going to be one of those mouth breathers who say that there are only 6000 people who have died from Covid don't waste my time or anyone else's around here, because at that point it would be clear you have no clue, and don't want to have a clue. And while flu is not tested for perhaps as extensively as for Covid, there is in fact a test for the flu that is run when you present with the classic and well understood symptoms of flu that are well understood by physicians. As for the denominator, if you want to extrapolate out for 19 months of flu, taking the data from the CDC on flu rates over the past decade it would be on average around 50,00 deaths, again still 10 times or more less than Covid. Covid has killed and will kill a lot more people, hopefully fewer as we get more and more people vaccinated, and hopefully as the virus continues mutating its ability to kill will decrease as is seen in many viral outbreaks, i.e. the more the mutation the less the effectiveness. Meanwhile we should be doing everything we can to beat this thing, because not only is it killing people but there are long term morbidity effects that everyone ignores, but will be significant. But instead we have science deniers all around the country, and we see them on this board, who would rather have people die and suffer so they can play their ridiculous political games.

Yes it is. In the worst, the worst, year of flu in the past decade there were about 80k deaths in the US. The average over the past decade is about 30-40k. Covid has killed almost 650 k people in the US so far. You are completely and totally wrong, and I don't know if that's just because you haven't had the education to understand the data, or because you willfully choose to ignore the data. Again, the amount of ignorance on this board is staggering. I am Independent, but I'll make you a deal. You Trumpists (because you're not Republican by any stretch of the imagination) find a place (South Dakota seems appropriate, or Texas), all move there, all spread the virus among yourselves, and let Darwin work. What needs to be done and what should have been done from the get-go is to follow the recommendations of the public health officials who have made it their life's work to understand how to combat pandemics.