Clearing out the library books on a cruise ship with bumping nightlife to slow the spread of coronavirus is some real galaxy-brain stuff! pic.twitter.com/cB5BR23pa9
— Andrew Dunckelman (@andrewdunck) June 16, 2021
Seriously, on a Cruise Ship they take all the books out of the library to prevent Covid transmission, while they are having nightly dances, and the passengers and crews f%$#ing like bunnies.
Correlation of Biden vote share and adult Covid vaccination rate is now at .847. (CDC data) pic.twitter.com/J2hQHKYUIH
— Seth Masket (@smotus) June 14, 2021
Think of it as evolution in action.
Am I the only one not surprised that rich people behaved like complete turds throughout the pandemic?
In study after study, the rich are shown to be less charitable, less empathic, and more likely to cheat, so bad behavior is the rule, not the exception:
Heather checked her phone when a text arrived from her mom saying her wealthy cousin from Los Angeles had just flown to Puerto Rico; it was his annual weeklong fishing trip with the boys and the pandemic wasn’t stopping them. He jetted off to stay in a private house with a chef, housekeeper, and fishing guides.
It was the peak of the pandemic in California, when 1 in 5 people in LA County were testing positive for COVID-19 in January, and Heather, who is a nurse and asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her privacy, was working a busy shift. “I had double the amount of patients I was legally allowed and they were all on death’s doorstep,” she said.
………
As the pandemic revealed stark inequalities in American society, it also changed how many people view money and privilege. Sen. Ted Cruz was caught flying to Cancun while Texas buckled under both COVID and a power crisis during a deadly winter storm. Kim Kardashian hosted an island birthday romp for friends and family in Tahiti while the pandemic raged. They were just two of many wealthy people who were seen carelessly using their vast resources for their own pleasure rather than to help as millions struggled with the impacts of COVID: unemployment, displacement, poverty, and hunger. Meanwhile, essential workers like Heather stayed put to provide necessary services, sometimes for low wages.
………
Jacquelyn Delgado, a 53-year-old graduate student, said years of living in Mamaroneck, New York, an affluent area, prepared her for how the wealthy would respond in a crisis. “Rich people gonna rich people,” she told BuzzFeed News.
(Emphasis mine)
………
“I fully expected the wealthy to do what they always do,” said Delgado. “And it was the Trump era, so ‘Screw you, I got mine’ was just lived out loud.”
………
She’s not alone in seeing wealth impact her friendships. Sheeny Ng, a college student from Los Angeles, said a group of her high school friends started posting videos on Snapchat of their trip to Hawaii to celebrate a 21st birthday party before any of them had been vaccinated. “The wealthier ones are able to travel and not care whether it would impact low-income and marginalized communities that don’t have access to healthcare resources,” she told BuzzFeed News. “Wealth and money are so powerful, yet toxic,” she said.
………
Nikki, a 32-year-old teacher who lost her job because of the pandemic, watched in frustration as her siblings-in-law flew to Hawaii on the same day Los Angeles implemented a stay-at-home order. “They remind me of Daisy and Tom in Gatsby, not caring about the destruction they might leave in their wake,” said Nikki, who lives in San Diego and asked not to be identified by her full name. “I think the pandemic really actually unmasked us all,” she said. Nikki hasn’t allowed them to see her newborn baby due to safety concerns from their reckless travel.
(Emphasis mine)
………Watching people host parties maskless, eat indoors, and go to clubs while hundreds of thousands of people were dying and receiving little support from their government pushed Holly Bruneau, a 34-year-old from Minneapolis who works in nonprofits, deeper into progressive politics.
“I’ve always been a tree-hugging liberal, now I’m a pissed-off socialist,” she said.
Your mouth to God’s ear, Ms. Bruneau.
The Calvinist conflation of wealth and virtue has permeated the culture of the United States, and it’s an unalloyed evil.
F%$# the Pilgrims and their Plymouth Colony.
These are not the Tweets of the day:
The real poetry will come when the self-interested narcissist who weaponised falsehood realises he cannot inflict damage on the other self-interested narcissist who weaponised falsehood, because he undermined truth-telling as a functional quality in political discourse.
— Ian Dunt (@IanDunt) May 26, 2021
These are the two Tweets before the Tweet of the day.
The Tweet of the day is the one following, which I am quoting and Bowlderizing, because it reads, “It’s like Aesop’s Fables for c%$#s,” and I just don’t feel comfortable dropping the “C-Bomb” on the blog.
It is, however a perfect metaphor for Boris Johnson former senior political advisor, Dominic Cummings, testifying against the PM’s handling of the pandemic.
The man who made fecklessness the new normal in British politics is now complaining that Boris Johnson is a feckless git.
How I feel about our current precarious pandemic situation. Some wealthy countries think they got it under control… for now… what could possibly go wrong? 🤷🏻♂️ #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/yHGc8wgnr3
— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) May 24, 2021
This is marvelous metaphor for premature reopening.
Not joking, they just wrote an editorial suggesting that not only should Covid-19 vaccine IP protections be suspended, but that the US government should set up its own state owned vaccine plants.
They have gone full Pinko:
The United States is well on its way to protecting Americans from the coronavirus. It’s time to help the rest of the world. By marshaling this nation’s vast resources to produce and distribute enough vaccines to meet global demand, the United States would act in keeping with the nation’s best traditions and highest aspirations while advancing its geopolitical and economic interests. It is a moment of both obligation and opportunity.
………
Covax, the World Health Organization’s initiative to pool vaccine resources, remains profoundly underfunded and has failed to meet even its modest target of vaccinating one-fifth of the population in the Global South. Without a major course correction, the rest of the world will have to wait until 2023 or later for large-scale vaccination initiatives like the one underway in the United States. The consequences of this disparity are expected to be severe. Hundreds of thousands more people will get sick and die from a disease that is now preventable with a vaccine. The global economy will contract by trillions of dollars, according to the International Chamber of Commerce, and tens of millions of people will plummet into extreme poverty as the virus continues to fester and evolve in the world’s more vulnerable reaches.
………
President Biden can start by announcing that the United States intends to help and by appointing a vaccine czar to oversee the expansion of vaccine production. The federal government has ample legal power to compel the participation of the pharmaceutical companies, including the sharing of critical information and technologies. Congress has appropriated $16 billion to scale up production, most of which remains unspent.
Increasing manufacturing capacity has proved tricky. The global demand for vaccines may be high now, but once the coronavirus pandemic recedes, it will plummet back to normal levels. Increased public ownership, for its part, would ensure that vaccine-production capacity is ready for future pandemics, which are inevitable — potentially including new coronavirus variants for which routine boosters may be required.
To this end, the administration should consider taking a page from the Department of Energy playbook: Create publicly owned manufacturing facilities and contract with private companies to run them. (Several of the D.O.E.’s federally owned laboratories are run by private companies like General Electric and Bechtel.)
(emphasis mine)
I would note that the suggestion of federally owned manufacturing facilities is a good thing, and any future research or development contracts should require that these sites have a royalty free license.
But subcontracting to private companies to run them? Too much of an opportunity for the sort of rat-f%$#ery that has pharma paying generic competitors not to produce.
Drugs factories are not like nuclear weapons factories: Anyone can build one.
Have the government run these facilities.
Credit where credit is due, Democratic Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has just given right wing conspiracy theorists a reason to get a vaccine:
Go Get Vaccinated So You’re Alive to Vote against Me in the Next Election
This is one for the ages.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has finally bowed to reality and admitted that it can be transmitted as an aerosol, as opposed to just the larger droplets.
This has been obvious for months, but public health authorities have been steadfast in their opposition to this mode of transmission since the beginning of the pandemic.
It makes dealing effectively with the virus more difficult, but more effective than ignoring reality:
Federal health officials on Friday updated public guidance about how the coronavirus spreads, emphasizing that transmission occurs by inhaling very fine respiratory droplets and aerosolized particles, as well as through contact with sprayed droplets or touching contaminated hands to one’s mouth, nose or eyes.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now states explicitly — in large, bold lettering — that airborne virus can be inhaled even when one is more than six feet away from an infected individual. The new language, posted online, is a change from the agency’s previous position that most infections were acquired through “close contact, not airborne transmission.”
As the pandemic unfolded last year, infectious disease experts warned for months that both the C.D.C. and the World Health Organization were overlooking research that strongly suggested the coronavirus traveled aloft in small, airborne particles. Several scientists on Friday welcomed the agency’s scrapping of the term “close contact,” which they criticized as vague and said did not necessarily capture the nuances of aerosol transmission.
………
The new focus underscores the need for the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration to issue standards for employers to address potential hazards in the workplace, some experts said.
This is probably one reason that both WHO and the CDC have been loath to support airborne transmission: It requires more extensive, and more costly measures to deal with the problem.
………
The new information has significant implications for indoor environments, and workplaces in particular, Dr. Michaels said. Virus-laden particles “maintain their airborne properties for hours, and they accumulate in a room that doesn’t have good ventilation.”
Yet more cost and disruption, particularly for things like reopening schools.
Aggressive action, and not reopening too soon, are required to deal with this even with vaccine rates well above 50%, and it’s going to be inconvenient as hell.
As I have been saying for a while, it has been obvious to anyone watching excess deaths data that Covid-19 deaths are at least 50% higher than reported.
It appears that the University of Washington’s University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) has come to the same conclusion, though their number is about 100% more than reported, or about 6.9 million deaths with a total world population of about 7.88 billion.
By way of comparison, the death toll from Spanish Influenza was somewhere between 20 and 50 million with a population of 1.80 billion.
A new analysis of the toll of the Covid-19 pandemic suggests 6.9 million people worldwide have died from the disease, more than twice as many people as has been officially reported, with the under reporting being highest in less developed nations.
The numbers are grim:
In the United States, the analysis estimates, 905,000 people have died of Covid since the start of the pandemic. That is about 61% higher than the current death estimate from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 561,594. The new figure also surpasses the estimated number of U.S. deaths in the 1918 flu pandemic, which was estimated to have killed approximately 675,000 Americans.
The analysis was conducted by scientists at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
“We’re probably not yet at the global toll of Spanish flu and certainly not at the death rate from Spanish flu. But given what’s unfolding in India right now, given our expectation of continued deaths, Covid is going to rival Spanish flu at the global level in terms of the count, likely, before we see the end of this epidemic,” the institute’s director, Christopher Murray, told reporters in a briefing.
………
The estimates are of deaths directly related to Covid, and do not include deaths that resulted from the pandemic’s disruption of health care — for example, people who did not seek care for heart attacks because they were afraid to go to Covid-swamped hospitals.
You can find the study here.
It’s a lot worse than the official numbers.
The day after the Biden Administration said that it supported suspending IP rights on the Covid Vaccine, Angela Merkel comes out against this.
I think that her motivation is pretty simple: Covid response is going pear-shaped in Germany, with Covid cases spiking, and by ginning up a controversy, she can avoid scrutiny of her handling of the pandemic.
This is not the first time that she has done this, it’s behind the whole policy of “othering” southern Europeans and spreading misery throughout the EU during and after the financial crisis.
She knows that if she’s seen as doing something, anything, with the argument that she is protecting Germans from the undeserving “other” she, and her CDU Party, can benefit, even if it provides no benefit to Germans, and may kill hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
Merkel is despicable:
The US and Germany are at odds on the issue of waivers for patents on Covid-19 vaccines, as Berlin argued that a waiver would not increase production and would inhibit future private sector research.
The disagreement is the first major rift between the two economic powers since Joe Biden took office, and threatens to deadlock discussions at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and sour relations within the G7 group of major industrialised democracies.
Any WTO decision on a waiver would have to be by consensus, so Germany opposition is a major obstacle to intellectual property rights on vaccines being suspended.
The Biden government’s announcement on Wednesday that it would back a waiver on vaccine patents was welcomed by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a step towards greater global equity at a time when poor countries have little access to vaccines and south Asia has been hit by a devastating outbreak. India accounted for 46% of the new Covid-19 cases recorded around the world over the past week, and there are signs the wave is spreading to Nepal, Sri Lanka and other neighbouring states.
But Angela Merkel’s government came out against a waiver on Thursday.
“The US suggestion for the lifting of patent protection for Covid-19 vaccines has significant implications for vaccine production as a whole,” a government spokeswoman said.
“The limiting factors in the production of vaccines are the production capacities and the high-quality standards and not patents,” she added, arguing that the companies were already working with partners to boost manufacturing capacity.
This argument about the difficulty of vaccines is patently false, as I noted yesterday.
You can mass produce mRNA viruses in a space smaller than the file room necessary to store the quality control documents, and Angela Merkel knows this; she got her PhD in Quantum Chemistry.
Unfortunately, there is no one in politics in Germany who is willing to call her out on her lies.
But in a good way.
In a moved that surprised me the Biden administration has announced that it favors waiving Covie vaccine patents.
I had hoped that they would eventually do this, but I expected that there would be 6 months of denials and alibis until the moral outrage forced them to take this move.
Happy to be wrong:
The Biden administration on Wednesday threw its support behind a controversial proposal to waive intellectual property protections for coronavirus vaccines, with liberals framing it as a necessary bid to speed the shots to billions in the developing world, while the drug industry warned of devastating effects to vaccine production.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said the United States will now move forward with international discussions to waive the protections for the duration of the pandemic. U.S. officials helped block a World Trade Organization proposal that was introduced last year to stop enforcing patents for coronavirus-related medical products. Dozens of developing countries have pushed for the proposal, arguing that it would allow them to rapidly produce their own generic vaccines, rather than wait months or years for sufficient doses.
………
The decision to go forward with the waiver after weeks of internal deliberations was finalized at a White House meeting on Tuesday with President Biden, said senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the deliberations. Staff at the meeting included Tai, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients, and Bruce Reed, deputy chief of staff for policy, all of whom supported the decision. But Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who had concerns about the waiver, was not included in the meeting, the people said. The Commerce Department declined to comment.
Of course Gina Raimondo wasn’t involved. She’s a complete corporate stooge, and she would always take the side of whoever is closest to Wall Street, much as she self-dealt to herself and her Wall Street buddies as Governor of Rhode Island.
………
Administration officials have acknowledged their uncertainty about whether the waiver will actually speed up production of coronavirus vaccines across the world. The mRNA vaccines, made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, require special technology that most countries do not have access to, raising questions about which countries will actually have the technological capacity to manufacture the complicated vaccines.
The reporter clearly doesn’t know the technology, as Cory Docterow observes, mRNA vaccines can pack most a whole vaccine factory in the space of a closet:
So, is it a lie? MRNA vaccines are super-new tech. Maybe their manufacture is so esoteric that only the richest, most powerful countries can make them?
Nope.
“Rapid development and deployment of high‐volume vaccines for pandemic response” (DOI: 10.1002.amp2.10060) is an open access, peer-reviewed paper in the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ Journal of Advanced Manufacturing and Processing:
https://aiche.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/amp2.10060
Its co-authors are an interdisciplinary team of chemical engineers, infectious disease specialists and vaccine specialists from Imperial College London and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative.
The authors aren’t specifically addressing themselves to the question of global development of mRNA vaccine production, but are instead concerned with any kind of generic rampup in production — either in response to a new virus, or because of an mRNA-based vaccine breakthrough for an existing virus. They reason that any kind of annual covid shot will occupy the majority of existing mRNA vaccine production facilities, so any new global vaccination project will require that new production sites be built.
………
I know, I just blockquoted all of that, so it would be redundant to bullet it below, but JESUS F%$#ING HOLY GODDAMNED SH%$BALLS, does this ever bear repeating:
- New facilities will be 99–99.9% smaller than conventional vaccine facilities
- They will be 95–99.7% cheaper than conventional vaccine facilities
- You could use a single room in a conventional vaccine factory to make more vaccine doses of mRNA vaccines than the entire output of the rest of the factory
- New vaccines can be made 1,000% faster than previous vaccines
There’s more, like the fact that you only need part of the facility to be a high-spec clean-room, and the rest can be built on more conventional lines.
For $20m, they say they can build a facility where, for $100m/year, they can turn out 1b doses/year, using a single 5L bioreactor.
(%$# mine)
Run the numbers there. That’s a cost of $0.12/dose.
Add in the cost of regulatory compliance, packaging, maintaining a cold chain while shipping it a few hundred (as opposed to a few thousand) miles, and tracking lots, and you are still below $10/dose.
The Pharma powers that be are opposed to any sort of relaxation of IP regulations not because duplicating their instrumentality is hard, but because it is trivially easy, and said technology is publicly developed and publicly funded.
They want to continue to extract their rents and keep their ill-gotten gains, because they want another yacht to water-ski behind.
Once again making a joke of, “Protect and Serve,” police are some of the public servants least likely to get a vaccine.
This is a good thing: It is a canary in a coal mine.
When you tell a police officer, get a vaccine, or you are suspended, and they take the suspension, 9 times out of 10, they are right wing militia types who have infiltrated the police.
These are the cops who generate your problems with brutality, racism, and million dollar judgement.
Let them go:
Police officers were among the first front-line workers to gain priority access to coronavirus vaccines. But their vaccination rates are lower than or about the same as those of the general public, according to data made available by some of the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies.
The reluctance of police to get the shots threatens not just their own health, but also the safety of people they’re responsible for guarding, monitoring and patrolling, experts say.
At the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, just 39 percent of employees have gotten at least one dose, officials said, compared to more than 50 percent of eligible adults nationwide. In Atlanta, 36 percent of sworn officers have been vaccinated. And a mere 28 percent of those employed by the Columbus Division of Police — Ohio’s largest police department — report having received a shot.
“I think it’s unacceptable,” Joe Lombardo, the head of Las Vegas police and sheriff of Clark County, said of the meager demand for the shots within his force.
………
Police hesitancy also means officers may be vectors of spread to vulnerable people with whom they interact during traffic stops, calls for service and other high-contact encounters. That could thwart efforts to restore community trust in a moment of heightened scrutiny after last month’s conviction of ex-officer Derek Chauvin in the killing of George Floyd.
“Police touch people,” said Sharona Hoffman, a professor of law and bioethics at Case Western Reserve University. “Imagine having a child in the car who’s not vaccinated. People would want to know if a police officer coming to their window is protected.”
Make it mandatory and fire the cops who refuse. They are refusing to support public health.
You will end up with a better police force.
After putting his foot in his mouth,
Joe Rogan offers a pithy and apparently sincere apology.
He said some tremendously stupid things about Covid Vaccines, and when called out, he replied as follows, “I’m not a doctor, I’m a f—ing moron.”
In a world of mealy mouthed apologies, it’s kind of refreshing, though Joe Rogan remains, and will probably be, a f—ing moron:
Popular Spotify podcast host Joe Rogan on Thursday sought to clarify his recent controversial comments that young, healthy people don’t need a COVID-19 vaccine.
During a conversation on his most recent episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” the comedian made it clear that he wasn’t anti-vaccine, and people should not necessarily be looking to him for medical advice.
“I’m not a doctor, I’m a f—ing moron, and I’m a cage fighting commentator … I’m not a respected source of information, even for me. But I at least try to be honest about what I’m saying,” Rogan said.
Rogan’s initial comments drew backlash from multiple critics as harmful and irresponsible, including from many infectious disease experts and even Biden administration officials.
For someone who says outrageous crap for a living, it’s kind of refreshing when they quickly recognize that they f%$#ed up.
I’ve been talking about how excess deaths is the best measure of Covid-19 mortality, (see here and here) and now the New York Times has discovered the statistical measure.
It only took them a year, though the graph surprised me.
It turns out that Covid is worse than the Spanish Influenza epidemic:
A surge in deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic created the largest gap between the actual and expected death rate in 2020 — what epidemiologists call “excess deaths,” or deaths above normal.
Aside from fatalities directly attributed to Covid-19, some excess deaths last year were most likely undercounts of the virus or misdiagnoses, or indirectly related to the pandemic otherwise. Preliminary federal data show that overdose deaths have also surged during the pandemic.
………
In 2020, however, the United States saw the largest single-year surge in the death rate since federal statistics became available. The rate increased 16 percent from 2019, even more than the 12 percent jump during the 1918 flu pandemic.
These numbers are really f%$#ing scary.
I have called Bill Gates a mass murderer for his efforts to prevent open source vaccines from being released, and now that there is a rising call for freeing up vaccines, the Microsoft founder is doubling down on his extremist mass-murdering agenda:
Bill Gates, one of the world’s richest men and most powerful philanthropists, was the target of criticism from social justice campaigners on Sunday after arguing that lifting patent protections on COVID-19 vaccine technology and sharing recipes with the world to foster a massive ramp up in manufacturing and distribution — despite a growing international call to do exactly that — is a bad idea.
Directly asked during an interview with Sky News if he thought it “would be helpful” to have vaccine recipes be shared, Gates quickly answered: “No.”
Asked to explain why not, Gates — whose massive fortune as founder of Microsoft relies largely on intellectual property laws that turned his software innovations into tens of billions of dollars in personal wealth — said: “Well, there’s only so many vaccine factories in the world and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines. And so moving something that had never been done — moving a vaccine, say, from a [Johnson & Johnson] factory into a factory in India — it’s novel — it’s only because of our grants and expertise that that can happen at all.”
………
Nick Dearden, executive director of Global Justice Now, one of the lead partner groups in an international coalition calling for WTO patent waivers at a crucial meeting of the world body next month, characterized Gates’ remarks — and the ideological framework behind them — as “disgusting.”
“Who appointed this billionaire head of global health?” asked Dearden. “Oh yeah, he did.”
Bill Gates has always been an asshole.
He was a bully as a boss, and he has spent the past few decades trying to launder his reputation through charity actions that frequently, as in the case of Covid vaccines do more harm than good.
By the time this pandemic is over, he will probably be responsible for more deaths than Saddam Hussein, and perhaps more than Pol Pot.
It kind of went like this (Not really)
Not kidding about the liquor store
I just got my vaccine, singular, as in the Johnson and Johnson vaccine.
We got it because it was the only vaccine which would definitively tell us it was corn free, and Sharon* and Nat have some fairly severe corn allergies.
No issues to speak of, except for the fact that the Rite Aid Pharmacy is right across the street from the Rite Aid Liquor Store.
I was in the door, got the shot, and was out in less time than it takes to read this article and laugh at the Peanuts strip.
Of course, then I had to cool my heels for 15 minutes before leaving.
Then we all went and got rolled ice cream (Thai: ไอศกรีมผัด or ไอติมผัด), except for Nat, who got sushi because the ice cream place did not have anything non dairy.
Rolled ice cream is created by taking liquid ice cream adding fixing, and mixing it and spreading it out on an anti-griddle to freeze, and then peeling it off in a roll and adding toppings.
I had never heard of the stuff before, but I liked it.
Mine had lots of caramel, and, of course, whipped cream.
I think that going out for an ice cream after doing my part to vanquish a scourge upon the world is a good arrangement.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
I never thought that I would agree with Elmer Gantry wannabee Franklin Graham, but his support for vaccines is unequivocally correct.
Needless to say, his wacko, my parents are first cousins, X-Files wannabe, black helicopter, tinfoil hat wearing, stupid, dim-witted, thinks pro wrestling is real* fellow travelers, were not so sanguine about his statement. (By that I mean that they went nuts)
So, Franklin Graham was right about a matter of both public health and the overall public good.
I cannot believe that I just said that.
*Sorry, I think that I just channeled the comedian Denis Leary.
People don’t fear Andrew Cuomo any more, and so more and more people are dropping a dime on his corrupt behavior. Case in point, people are now telling reporters that Cuomo arranged for family members and close associates to get special access to Covid-19 testing.
We are going to see more and more of this:
As the coronavirus pandemic swept through New York early last year, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration arranged for his family members and other well-connected figures to have special access to state-administered coronavirus tests, dispatching a top state doctor and other state health officials to their homes, according to three people with direct knowledge of the effort.
As part of the program, a state lab immediately processed the results of those who were tested, the people said, even as average New Yorkers were struggling to get tested in the early days of the pandemic because of a scarcity of resources. Initially, the lab was capable of running only several hundred tests a day for a state with 19 million residents.
The use of state resources to benefit people close to the governor raises serious ethical questions, experts said. New York law prohibits state officials from using their positions to secure privileges for themselves or others.
Drip, drip, drip.
Cuomo’s career is toast, and only bad thing about this is that it did not happen a decade ago.
It appears that as a result of Covid-19, efforts to reduce the population of feral goats has been curtailed, and so feral Llandudno Goats have been running rampant over portions of Wales.
Is it just me, or does anyone else have an image of some poor bureaucrat trying to convince goats to wear a condom?
The goats of the Great Orme headland in Wales were a worldwide sensation during the first Covid lockdown last year after they were pictured roaming brazenly around the deserted streets of nearby Llandudno.
This year there has been a population explosion of the kashmiri goats in their north Wales headland home after the Covid crisis forced countryside wardens to cancel a planned contraception campaign.
………
Sally Pidcock, warden of the Great Orme country park, said there were estimated to be about 30 billy goats – the males are the ones that tend to travel – at large Llandudno and roughly 150 less adventurous males, plus females and kids, back on the Great Orme.
Pidcock said a campaign to give contraceptive injections to nanny goats last summer had to be postponed because of Covid. “It means there are more kids being born on the Great Orme now than there would have been,” she said. As long as Covid allows, a contraceptive vaccination campaign will take place this summer.
We live in strange times.
*This is Welsh for, “Which one of you boys been f%$#ing the sheep?
In response to raucus partying and a refusal to engage in proper social distancing, Miami Beach has announced a curfew.
Who could have possibly known that a bunch of drunk college students on spring break would take of their masks and swap bodily fluids?
The answer to this question is, “Anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together.”
One day after the spring break oasis of South Beach descended into chaos, with the police struggling to control overwhelming crowds and making scores of arrests, officials in Miami Beach decided on Sunday to extend an emergency curfew for up to three weeks.
The officials there went so far as to approve closing the famed Ocean Drive to all vehicular and pedestrian traffic from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. — the hours of the curfew — for four nights a week through April 12. Residents, hotel guests and employees of local businesses are exempt from the closure.
The strip, frequented by celebrities and tourists alike, was the scene of a much-criticized skirmish on Saturday night between at-times unruly spring breakers who ignored social distancing and masking guidelines, and police officers who used pepper balls to disperse a large crowd just hours after the curfew had been introduced.
The restrictions were a stunning concession to the city’s inability to control unwieldy crowds of revelers that the city and the state of Florida aggressively courted amid the continuing coronavirus pandemic.
Florida, man.
*Pronounced in Japanese, “baka ni tsukeru kusuri wanai”, which means, “There is no medicine for stupidity.” Apologies for any inaccuracies in the text, I do not know Japanese.