evilweasel posted:

and it was a significant improvement for millions to tens of millions of people, including many people whose lives were saved as a result

hopefully, you care about that!

zoux posted:

https://twitter.com/ZTPetrizzo/status/1389016002072137735

Just filing this away for one year hence when Lindell is forced to issue a public apology to Dominion Voting Systems in addition to an undisclosed financial settlement.

friendbot2000 posted:

Also...in other news. I GOT MARRIED. WOOOO. Officially a marriedbot now

Grammarchist posted:

The EPA is proposing a rule to phase down HFC emissions by 85% over the next 15 years. It's actually got some strong support in the business community, so hopefully it actually goes smoothly without a mess of lawsuits.

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/overnights/551432-epa-to-propose-rule-slashing-hydrofluorocarbons-use

Willa Rogers posted:

Willa Rogers posted:

friendbot2000 posted:

Also...in other news. I GOT MARRIED. WOOOO. Officially a marriedbot now

quote:

On Jan. 11, Mr. Nearman, wearing a mask, read a prepared statement on the floor and agreed to rescind his badge access to the Capitol.

He also agreed that he would give 24 hours’ notice to the legislative administrator and the Legislative Equity Office so that “arrangements can be made to allow me to enter into the building and to provide notice of my presence to all Capitol occupants.”

“I will not allow any nonauthorized personnel into the Capitol,” Mr. Nearman said.

Ms. Kotek said the safety measures imposed on Mr. Nearman “will allow notice to be provided to all Capitol occupants so they can adjust their plans if they do not feel safe working in the building while he is present.”

spacetoaster posted:

Obama really was, and continues to be, a real garbage person.

It'd be nicer if he would just disappear like Trump has, but he keeps sticking his nose into current politics to voice his horrible views (especially on war).

Zwabu posted:

being in jail

Antifa Turkeesian posted:

How did Clinton poll six months after losing in 2016? I assume it was much worse than Trump's numbers now, but there's probably something to be said about the inertia of just being a name that people know, especially when there's not a clear successor getting media attention.

small butter posted:

As someone with a wildly fluctuating income year to year who has used the ACA since its inception, you get subsidized based on your income. Per month, I have paid full price, $0, $20, and anything in between some years. Once they put me on Medicaid automatically.

friendbot2000 posted:

Amanda Chase is going to win the Primary and lose by 30 points to T-Mac lolololol

quote:

RICHMOND — An aide traveling with Republican Virginia gubernatorial candidate and state Sen. Amanda F. Chase brandished an AR-15 pistol this week at a man who Chase said threatened them during a "road rage" incident.

Audio from Chase’s campaign van was captured as the episode unfolded because Chase (Chesterfield) was participating by phone in a candidate forum put on by the Virginia Citizens Defense League, a gun-rights group. She was touting her staunch support for the Second Amendment when she abruptly excused herself.

“I’ve consistently voted against disarming law-abiding citizens, especially this patchwork — okay, we gotta go. I’m sorry, y’all,” she tells the VCDL audience before she’s heard sternly addressing the alleged road rager: “No. Stop.”

There’s a metallic clicking sound in the background and then a man in the van with Chase can be heard saying, “That’ll get your b---- a-- in the car, won’t it?”

Velocity Raptor posted:

Speaking of, has anything new come out regarding the investigations into the Fanta Menace? Either the tax stuff or sedition?

Antifa Turkeesian posted:

Did they do those "who should democrats run in 2020" polls in May or June of 2016? I feel like some of the weird answers for republicans are the result of them not having a standard-bearer (aside from trump) and of people just giving names of people they know. I'd be interested to know if Clinton showed up on those polls or if it was just "Michelle Obama 63%" "Jon Ossoff 14%" "Al Gore 3%"

friendbot2000 posted:

Also...in other news. I GOT MARRIED. WOOOO. Officially a marriedbot now

And...who wants a live look at the trashfire that is the VAGOP?

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/lot-confusion-virginia-republicans-stumble-over-their-own-voter-id-n1265887



Amanda Chase is going to win the Primary and lose by 30 points to T-Mac lolololol

zoux posted:

It was basically Bernie, Biden, Booker and Warren in various orders.

zoux posted:

It was basically Bernie, Biden, Booker and Warren in various orders.

zoux posted:

It's funny to go back and look at the "2020 Dem probables" articles from 2017 because they basically named 20 Democrats and they were all right because every elected Democrat in America ran. Oh also "Oprah" for the clicks.

cgeq posted:

Congrats!

A bit peeved they seem to poo poo on ranked voting, though.

What's the deal with the armed guards? Are they there because GUNS! VOTING SECURITY! or to intimidate the people doing the counting? That Amanda person says she'll have people verifying the integrity of the count. Will some of the armed guards be her supporters?

Youth Decay posted:

Amanda describes herself as "Trump in heels" and if anyone else gets more votes than her the election is clearly RIGGED. By "verifying the integrity" she means ensuring that she wins, and if it takes her own armed supporters to get that then that's what she'll do.

Amanda would be utterly terrifying if she was running in a deep red state. Virginia as a whole is blue enough to keep her out of a national office and as long as the Dems have the trifecta she can't do much harm in the state legislature. If this was Alabama or something she'd be en route to becoming one of the "rising stars" of the Trump wing of the party (which is to say, the entire party).

Antifa Turkeesian posted:

Did they do those "who should democrats run in 2020" polls in May or June of 2016? I feel like some of the weird answers for republicans are the result of them not having a standard-bearer (aside from trump) and of people just giving names of people they know. I'd be interested to know if Clinton showed up on those polls or if it was just "Michelle Obama 63%" "Jon Ossoff 14%" "Al Gore 3%"

Tibalt posted:

You're right, gently caress all those people that ACA helped, better they be sacrificed so that hypothetically a better thing could have happened in...

You know, the craziest thing I just noticed about US politics since 2010...

hanales posted:

Literally no one is making this argument and y’all are just ignoring the real world experiences of people. The ACA is a nightmare for a lot of people, it drove my family to bankruptcy. I’m happy it’s there, I know it’s better than before, but it has been consistently watered down for the last decade and pretending it’s not prevents meaningful dialogue with people about fixing it or replacing it with something better. So stop reducing people’s arguments to things they aren’t saying, it’s really frustrating to read. There’l are many reasons people are passionate about changing it and it’s not always “gently caress the people it helped and also gently caress minorities”.

Bishyaler posted:

"Good things aren't possible, so we have to settle for spending enormous amounts of effort and money on the bad thing that only looks good compared to a worse thing. Also the bad thing will be repeatedly used to justify why we don't need the good thing."

Pakled posted:

Don't forget Zuckerberg, he was trying to position himself to run as a Dem in 2020 before the role of facebook in spreading trumpian fake news became common knowledge.

friendbot2000 posted:

She wont carry Northern Virginia in the general therefore she will not win. Northern VA will not turn out for someone who was present at Jan 6th and thus, we hold the suburbs. The convention was orginally designed to keep her out, but it has been bungled to the point where I am pretty sure she is a lock now for the GOP's choice. They also refused to allow a religious exemption for conservative Jews because the convention is on the Sabbath so uh....what does that tell you?

In statewide elections the rule of the thumb for VA is "So goes NoVA, so goes the election"

evilweasel posted:

w/r/t Amanda Chase - fortunately for everyone's emotional well-being, we already have an object example of what happens when a moderate but uninspiring democrat goes up against a UP WITH THE CONFEDERACY DOWN WITH ... LIBERALS type in virginia so we don't need to even be concerned there

zoux posted:

zoux posted:

quote:

Reaching ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Unlikely in the U.S., Experts Now Believe

Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term “herd immunity” came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so we could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim our lives.

Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.

Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.

How much smaller is uncertain and depends in part on how much of the nation, and the world, becomes vaccinated and how the coronavirus evolves. It is already clear, however, that the virus is changing too quickly, new variants are spreading too easily and vaccination is proceeding too slowly for herd immunity to be within reach anytime soon.

Continued immunizations, especially for people at highest risk because of age, exposure or health status, will be crucial to limiting the severity of outbreaks, if not their frequency, experts believe.

“The virus is unlikely to go away,” said Rustom Antia, an evolutionary biologist at Emory University in Atlanta. “But we want to do all we can to check that it’s likely to become a mild infection.”

The shift in outlook presents a new challenge for public health authorities. The drive for herd immunity — by the summer, some experts once thought possible — captured the imagination of large segments of the public. To say the goal will not be attained adds another “why bother” to the list of reasons that vaccine skeptics use to avoid being inoculated.

Yet vaccinations remain the key to transforming the virus into a controllable threat, experts said.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Biden administration’s top adviser on Covid-19, acknowledged the shift in experts’ thinking.

“People were getting confused and thinking you’re never going to get the infections down until you reach this mystical level of herd immunity, whatever that number is,” he said.

“That’s why we stopped using herd immunity in the classic sense,” he added. “I’m saying: Forget that for a second. You vaccinate enough people, the infections are going to go down.”

Why reaching the threshold is tough

Once the novel coronavirus began to spread across the globe in early 2020, it became increasingly clear that the only way out of the pandemic would be for so many people to gain immunity — whether through natural infection or vaccination — that the virus would run out of people to infect. The concept of reaching herd immunity became the implicit goal in many countries, including the United States.

Early on, the target herd immunity threshold was estimated to be about 60 to 70 percent of the population. Most experts, including Dr. Fauci, expected that the United States would be able to reach it once vaccines were available.

But as vaccines were developed and distribution ramped up through the winter and into the spring, estimates of the threshold began to rise. That is because the initial calculations were based on the contagiousness of the original version of the virus. The predominant variant now circulating in the United States, called B.1.1.7 and first identified in Britain, is about 60 percent more transmissible.

As a result, experts now calculate the herd immunity threshold to be at least 80 percent. If even more contagious variants develop, or if scientists find that immunized people can still transmit the virus, the calculation will have to be revised upward again.

Polls show that about 30 percent of the U.S. population is still reluctant to be vaccinated. That number is expected to improve but probably not enough. “It is theoretically possible that we could get to about 90 percent vaccination coverage, but not super likely, I would say,” said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Though resistance to the vaccines is a main reason the United States is unlikely to reach herd immunity, it is not the only one.

Herd immunity is often described as a national target. But that is a hazy concept in a country this large.

“Disease transmission is local,” Dr. Lipsitch noted.

“If the coverage is 95 percent in the United States as a whole, but 70 percent in some small town, the virus doesn’t care,” he explained. “It will make its way around the small town.”

Herd immunity can fluctuate with “population crowding, human behavior, sanitation and all sorts of other things,” said Dr. David M. Morens, a virologist and senior adviser to Dr. Fauci. “The herd immunity for a wealthy neighborhood might be X, then you go into a crowded neighborhood one block away and it’s 10X.”

Given the degree of movement among regions, a small virus wave in a region with a low vaccination level can easily spill over into an area where a majority of the population is protected.

At the same time, the connectivity between countries, particularly as travel restrictions ease, emphasizes the urgency of protecting not just Americans but everyone in the world, said Natalie E. Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Any variants that arise in the world will eventually reach the United States, she noted.

Many parts of the world lag far behind the United States on vaccinations. Less than 2 percent of the people in India have been fully vaccinated, for example, and less than 1 percent in South Africa, according to data compiled by The New York Times.

What the future may hold

“We will not achieve herd immunity as a country or a state or even as a city until we have enough immunity in the population as a whole,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, the director of the Covid-19 Modeling Consortium at the University of Texas at Austin.

If the herd immunity threshold is not attainable, what matters most is the rate of hospitalizations and deaths after pandemic restrictions are relaxed, experts believe.

By focusing on vaccinating the most vulnerable, the United States has already brought those numbers down sharply. If the vaccination levels of that group continue to rise, the expectation is that over time the coronavirus may become seasonal, like the flu, and affect mostly the young and healthy.

“What we want to do at the very least is get to a point where we have just really sporadic little flare-ups,” said Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “That would be a very sensible target in this country where we have an excellent vaccine and the ability to deliver it.”

Over the long term — a generation or two — the goal is to transition the new coronavirus to become more like its cousins that cause common colds. That would mean the first infection is early in childhood, and subsequent infections are mild because of partial protection, even if immunity wanes.

Some unknown proportion of people with mild cases may go on to experience debilitating symptoms for weeks or months — a syndrome called “long Covid” — but they are unlikely to overwhelm the health care system.

“The vast majority of the mortality and of the stress on the health care system comes from people with a few particular conditions, and especially people who are over 60,” Dr. Lipsitch said. “If we can protect those people against severe illness and death, then we will have turned Covid from a society disrupter to a regular infectious disease.”

If communities maintain vigilant testing and tracking, it may be possible to bring the number of new cases so low that health officials can identify any new introduction of the virus and immediately stifle a potential outbreak, said Bary Pradelski, an economist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Grenoble, France. He and his colleagues described this strategy in a paper published on Thursday in the scientific journal The Lancet.

“Eradication is, I think, impossible at this stage,” Dr. Pradelski said. “But you want local elimination.”

Vaccination is still the key

The endpoint has changed, but the most pressing challenge remains the same: persuading as many people as possible to get the shot.

Reaching a high level of immunity in the population “is not like winning a race,” Dr. Lipsitch said. “You have to then feed it. You have to keep vaccinating to stay above that threshold.”

Skepticism about the vaccines among many Americans and lack of access in some groups — homeless populations, migrant workers or some communities of color — make it a challenge to achieve that goal. Vaccine mandates would only make that stance worse, some experts believe.

A better approach would be for a trusted figure to address the root cause of the hesitancy — fear, mistrust, misconceptions, ease of access or a desire for more information, said Mary Politi, an expert in health decision making and health communication at Washington University in St. Louis.

People often need to see others in their social circle embracing something before they are willing to try it, Dr. Politi said. Emphasizing the benefits of vaccination to their lives, like seeing a family member or sending their children to school, might be more motivating than the nebulous idea of herd immunity.

“That would resonate with people more than this somewhat elusive concept that experts are still trying to figure out,” she added.

Though children spread the virus less efficiently than adults do, the experts all agreed that vaccinating children would also be important for keeping the number of Covid cases low. In the long term, the public health system will also need to account for babies, and for children and adults who age into a group with higher risk.

Unnerving scenarios remain on the path to this long-term vision.

Over time, if not enough people are protected, highly contagious variants may develop that can break through vaccine protection, land people in the hospital and put them at risk of death.

“That’s the nightmare scenario,” said Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University.

How frequent and how severe those breakthrough infections are have the potential to determine whether the United States can keep hospitalizations and deaths low or if the country will find itself in a “mad scramble” every couple of years, he said.

“I think we’re going to be looking over our shoulders — or at least public health officials and infectious disease epidemiologists are going to be looking over their shoulders going: ‘All right, the variants out there — what are they doing? What are they capable of?” he said. “Maybe the general public can go back to not worrying about it so much, but we will have to.”

zoux posted: