...I have no idea where the resistance is coming from

If they have any, from exposure to a deadly disease.

And now I'll read the rest of the touching post.

In the previous administration, plans were made to vaccinate the prisoners at GTMO -- you might have seen a news story. Then, with the change of government, it became a popular among sado-populists to demand that the prisoners not be given the vaccine until, whenever. The plans to vaccinate them were shelved. There's a rumor -- we'll all learn someday whether it's true -- that the vaccine that was to be given to the prisoners cannot be gotten safely back to the mainland, and, everyone on the base who wants it having gotten it, the doses sent down for the prisoners will be destroyed. This is too perfect a story to be true, I think.

They should publish doses destroyed alongside doses delivered and doses administered so we can marvel at our own stupidity.
(Long term those should add up but hard to know at the moment how much we've wasted.)

||

'Their goal is to destroy everyone': Uighur camp detainees allege systematic rape

3: It occurred to me that the government gave prisoners the vaccine first, but pitched as "We're going to experiment on prisoners", the sado-populists would have cheered.

I was offered it but did not take it, because I am remote and now the health system is giving 3,000 doses back to the state for community health centers. I feel good about that choice because there are a lot of over 70's struggling to get appointments.

We don't want doses going to waste, but we should be ashamed that states don't have waiting lists and backup plans to get those doses to high priority people.

I took it. Similar thinking to ogged, except it wasn't through my wife's employer, it was through mine. Or rather, the federal agency I'm a contractor for. I assume that any unused vaccines would have been sold by Jared Kushner at a high markup.

My belief is that we should all be advocating hard for better distribution policies.

Jealous. Found out another friend with tenuous priority, under 40, healthy, got his first. He was eligible because he serves on the board of their small town hospital where his partner works (the partner got his second last week, relieved for him as he has risk of severe illness and has worked throughout). He said something like, "Sometimes I have to go in for Board duties" when someone asked about how he managed it. Maybe it makes me awful, but I registered in the county where I work while my employer waits to see whether they'll get an allotment as a distribution site (per employer instructions, FWIW). I tried to talk AJ into it as well, but he thought registering was more hassle than waiting.

I read some summaries of statistical analysis that found out it's best to have targeted vaccines when incidence and spread is relatively low, but as infection rates increase, it's better to vaccinate at semi-random after you vaccinate health care workers. There was a tipping point, and a few weeks ago, we were pretty close. It's better now, but if we don't work faster, we'll see a wave of the more contagious variants and health care workers will suffer another wave. I'm watching anxiously as we reopen and am hoping we get to 20-30% coverage to blunt the worst.

I know a bunch of people who have been vaccinated through working in the health care/health insurance sector who are nowhere near providing in-person patient care, and I am unproductively angry about that in a way that I try to keep to myself. From the outside, it looks as if the decision makers who control vaccine distribution, who all work in the health care/insurance sector, corruptly diverted vaccine to themselves and their coworkers in the absence of any rational reason to prioritize those specific people.

I keep my mouth shut about it mostly because the individuals getting vaccinated aren't to blame if they aren't making the decisions and it probably wouldn't speed up vaccination for other people if they all refused. But as someone who's very low on the vaccination priority list, it does burn me seeing young healthy people who work at home getting vaccinated first because of some notional connection to the health care sector.

I am veering unhelpfully among bafflement, anger and deep worry. Isn't massive overproduction what capitalism is supposed to be good at?

11: UPMC has taken some shit here for apparently taking that approach.

I'm far more angry at vaccines going to waste for lack of candidates who meet the criteria. It's good to prioritize front-line healthcare workers, essential workers, the elderly, but not if vaccines are going to waste. Just get the goddamned shots in the arms.

Here the plan is to have everyone over 50 and/or witch chronic conditions vaccinated by the end of March. I'll get mine as soon as I can.

witch s/b with

12: Not for good things.

Has anyone seen any reporting with numbers on shots going to waste? There was an upsetting story a week or two ago saying that about a third of the shots the feds said they had delivered to the states were unaccounted for, but I haven't seen any followup on whether people think it's fine, just bad or slow record keeping, or whether a whole lot of shots expired somewhere.

And this post could not be more timely for me.

In general my vaccine appointment follies continue and I have about a half-dozen irons in the fire, but most seem 4-6 weeks out. And I continue to fail in stupid old person ways, for instance last night I got deeper into the path for the big local grocery chain than usual but it was for a store a bit of a distance away. I played around a bit trying to see if I could get to a closer store but it became cleat it literally was just the one store (and only one day it turned out), and when I finally got to the place to make the appointment they were all gone. Probably would not have gotten one if I had just accepted the store offered, but the dithering undoubtedly lowered the odds.

But the most relevant item is my wife got a text last night from a former co-worker who works at a non-profit. Earlier that day they had gotten a fair number of doses that they were targeting for their underserved population. They began a process of contacting clients but somehow word had gotten out and they were flooded with calls. Decision was made to take anyone and she was letting us know that if I called at 9:00 AM (2 minutes away as I type these words) I had a decent chance of getting an appointment. Much anguishment by wife and me (which we are good at) but I am as of now not calling. But not settled in that. I am genuinely torn but my last words to my wife (15 minutes ago) were "No, I'm not fucking going to use personal connections to get in line for a vaccine in the fucking [insert underserved Pittsburgh community here]. Anger not at my wife.

In other life milestones I started my application to get Social Security payments last night.

I18: I have no sense that any of these vaccines will go to waste>

We're starting to see the beginning of a second spike. For months cases were around mid 100s to mid 200s but last two weeks they started climbing again. Hit over 400 today.

I got lucky for my mother, but haven't gotten an appointment for my father yet -- I've just been rechecking the statewide portal, and there aren't any appointments in Westchester.

Cassandane's parents have both had their first shots. My parents haven't, they're just below the age cutoff where they live, but I hope it won't be too much longer.

Somebody should write long think pieces about how Gen X is now the squeezed generation, dealing with kids and parents both. Ideally, they should reference "Heathers" and "Reality Bites."

21: I think Como has been an ass, but at least you have a state-wide portal. Our House speaker said that they were pushing for more oversight over this, because the rollout is so confusing, and they are hearing from their constituents, and there is no easy central way to get information.

If I thought the vaccines were being perfectly distributed and someone were jumping an orderly queue of justice, then maybe I'd be mad about linejumping. But that was never gonna be true for anything that started under Trump. What is really at stake for people who are motivated to get the shot is, at most, several weeks. I wouldn't spend that much time feeling guilty for something that is going to be roughly evened out in six months.

17: Kevin Drum responded to a National Review story which aggregated various reports of vaccine waste: https://jabberwocking.com/vaccine-distributors-are-doing-a-great-job/

Overall, I'm with Barry. I'm much less concerned about who gets prioritized and more concerned about total numbers-- three months from now I* won't care who got vaccinated in February and who in March. I will care a lot about whether they solved logistical problems, and whether more people were vaccinated in each month than the previous month.

* easy for me to say; I'll be far back in line regardless, so of course my primary concern is the pace with which the line moves

25 I was genuinely angry about that Canadian casino CEO and his wife who flew by private plane to an small town and claimed to be hotel workers or whatever. But regular folks getting their shot a month or so earlier because they're maybe 50 or 60 and not over 65 or they work in non-frontline healthcare or whatever? Just get the shots in the arms.

No butts?

I'm on the Barry/Megan/Nick axis on this one. The only thing I can get genuinely worked up about is vaccine going to waste. Maybe I could be slightly vexed by genuine queue-jumping -- cheating to get your dose. Taking advantage of the way the system is set up? That's fine. Get doses in arms as quickly as possible. Make some effort to pick the right arms first, but get doses in arms.

(I lack the illness and age to get toward the early part of the line, and I have no complaints about that.)

I'm generally in favor of everyone get it as soon as possible no qualms required. however, the details of the opportunity in 18.2 were just a bridge too far on the UMC white privilege scale.

Put it on my gravestone.

I think you should call, but first we have to agree on a comment number system. I think you're talking about 18.3.

Yes. I forgot the re was an intro sentence.

Yeah, I think if you can get a slot for a vaccine without lying or going to great lengths, your taking it has a good chance of preventing one from going to waste.

I feel like I used up all

Stupid phone.

I'm with 27, I'm not even a little bit angry about that kind of thing. It makes sense to use organizations' existing infrastructure to do the vaccination, and it's a logistical nightmare to have them only vaccinate some of their employees. Keep the logistics simple and let hospitals vaccinate all their employees, regardless of whether they're working from home. The fastest and most efficient way to do things is to not worry so much about making fine distinctions.

not going anywhere and only seeing my own family has suited me so well that I feel guilty about it

As an already vaguely hermetic homebody, I feel this. My girlfriend moved in a few months before the outbreak started, then I got laid off and found a way better job working from home. 2020 was actually kind of a banner year for me, while I knew so, so many people who were having the worst year of their lives. But it would have been an entirely different experience were I alone in the house.

Also, having a decent-sized yard of my own (~2/3 acre) has been a real boon during this. Dense urban housing would have been very different as well.

I've been WFH and barely going out but my job and medical condition mean that I'd be in the next group for the jab. I know that means I'd probably get it before others who are less lucky and much higher risk than me, including many POC staffers who really need it. I don't personally feel guilt about this--it's another in the endless series of structural failures that individual choices can't fix. Given my state's rolling public health shitshow I'll be surprised if I'm in line before April anyway. But I wouldn't lift a finger to jump the queue, even if I could figure out how.

Living alone for the past year--quite possibly without touching another human that whole time--sounds very rough.

Yeah, that's me. It's excruciating, and I can't do another year this way.

The practice where my PCP is says they'll be contacting patients to schedule appointments as their priority comes up. I'm a phase 1c, and they're currently on phase 1b first tier, so it'll be a while.

I was talking to a friend a while back, early 40s, healthy, is a phase 1b tier 1 because of her Indigenous heritage. Hesitant because she's healthy, and her husband won't qualify for quite a while, nor teenage daughter living at home.

I'm (procrastinating on) job-searching atm, and it seems offered wages in my field here have jumped 10-15% in a year. Don't know how much of that is covid.

My wife's employer is mostly public-facing essential workers (transit operators), and they're spinning up an internal effort to vaccinate. They're sensibly setting up a priority order, with the real public-facing roles first, but I strongly suspect that between people not showing up and people refusing, there will be doses available for the white-collar, working-from-home end of the organization pretty quickly. I've been lobbying my wife to be ready to accept such an offer when it comes. I doubt they would include family members, though I'll likely be driving her there if she gets a chance.

Does MT make you buy PCP cookies and stuff or can you just smoke it straight?

Dense urban housing has actually been fine for me. That is, while I haven't been socializing, at least when I'm outside I see a lot of people, and there are still little interactions, which makes the whole thing feel less isolating.

I've cured my family of wanting to have me home more.

My niece, who works for a chain of shops which sells health foods, alternative medicine and a handful of mainstream meds which aren't legally regulated (Holland and Barrett, for the benefit of Ukians) has been designated an essential worker and had the shot because she sells vitamin supplements. Her parents are shit out of luck.

My niece, who works for a chain of shops which sells health foods, alternative medicine and a handful of mainstream meds which aren't legally regulated (Holland and Barrett, for the benefit of Ukians) has been designated an essential worker and had the shot because she sells vitamin supplements. Her parents are shit out of luck.

Sorry, stupid phone.

Thanks Chris! You're so nice.

44 is what has changed dramatically for me in the past few months. Obviously where I live is lower density than NYC, but back when it was warmer it was pretty easy to see a lot of strangers by walking to pick up a coffee or just sitting out on my porch. Since it's gotten cold that's just gotten way harder, and it's been really hard for me. I'm just sad all the time now.

I spent hours last week trying to get appointments for my parents, and left slightly unhinged ranting messages in the voicemail boxes of the LA County DPH, CDPH, and my county supervisor. I'm sure I was real helpful and persuasive.

Anyway, my parents finally got appointments (and their first shot), but it left me wondering what people without internet, or younger relatives, or English skills, are supposed to do. If my grandmother was still alive and didn't have us, how on earth would she have gotten an appointment? There are a lot of people like that in LA -- elderly, limited English skills, little to no computer access. And even if these people are able to get an appointment, how will they get to the vaccination sites? My parents' vaccination appointment was an hour drive away.

I see all the other people on my street who have dogs more or less daily, and the retirees who walk up and down our fairly long cul-de-sac, so I do get to chat here and there. I'm ready for spring to get here, though.

40/42: Given the relatively large amount of intra-household spread, having one person vaccinated would be a very good thing, even without certainly that vaccinations completely block transmission (my guess is that they will be shown to significantly limit spread). It also keeps one person basically guaranteed to be able to take care of anyone else who does get sick.

I'm with everyone saying "shots in arms." Looks to me like states who are trying to be more careful about prioritization are moving more slowly. I care a lot about equity, and I have ideas about how to tip the scales, but at this point, I'd settle for anything that gets the most shots possible to the most people possible.

51: I don't know the answer to this, but I'd like to see something like the census - hire people to go door to door. Text campaigns (surprisingly effective to reach elderly people). Mailers. We have infrastructure to make things like this happen.

There are State sites you can call if you are 75. My hospital system is kind of randomizing the over 75s but also trying, allegedly, to allocate a certain number of slots to people from communities that have been affected.

When I was first offered the shot, they were trying to follow the rules and the state had not allowed them to expand to wfh folks, so I was to,d I had to go in to one of the offices a certain number of times. The office where I could have had a private office has no parking. Even with the vaccine, I did not want to take public transit if Tim's not vaccinated.

And changing my behavior just to get the vaccine felt too much like cheating.

50: Yesterday, I cried uncontrollably. I'm also miserable in my job and don't know what the next step to take is. My next team meeting we are supposed to have a discussion of team communication. But the bottom line is that one person got a promotion, supervising a portion of the team, and people don't like her . She's bossy and controlling and doesn't listen to other people's ideas. So, everybody keeps their mouth shut. I've always liked my boss but dislike my medical director. I don't see any opportunity to move to one of the other teams within my department and this person who is technically my equal is clearly being groomed to move up. I really don't ever want to report to this person.

Does anyone have tips on networking from home?

We have infrastructure to make things like this happen.

Maybe. But we've had nearly a year to set up some kind of service to reach out to residents who are elderly and not English-speaking/literate/mobile. In LA/CA, we've evidently decided they're not worth the trouble.

37
2020 was actually kind of a banner year for me, while I knew so, so many people who were having the worst year of their lives.

Yeah, it's complicated. For the past 10.5 months, when people have made small talk by asking how I'm doing, I've shrugged, grimaced, and said, "As well as can be expected." I and my family are healthy, my job can be done from home, and I'm generally an introvert (although as I've said, the limits of that are being tested) so that right there makes me better off than 90+ percent of people.

On the other hand, urban dwelling hasn't been great for me. Hard to enjoy all the usual advantages of it - restaurants, public transportation, etc. - and all the usual drawbacks of it are amplified. And Atossa is 5. A baby wouldn't notice pandemic-related changes and a 12-year-old might handle them as well as an adult, but telling a 5-year-old not to hug her friends or to take classes by Zoom is harder. I think the best two weeks in the past year for me were when we stayed at my parent's house. Not due to familiarity nearly so much as free child care, essentially being in a bubble with her cousin, and the rural setting.

Also, the kids still at home are 13 and 16, so can entertain themselves and don't require much in the way of active parenting.

There's just so much food involved with keeping a 14 year old boy in the house.

From say 1986 until last spring, I was always the person in the house so ate most of the food. Now, I bring in food and it just disappears.

Shorter me: I think I should have had some of the chips saved for me.

59: The amount of milk we go through is staggering, given that he's really the only one who drinks it.

Nobody but me uses milk here and even I don't drink it straight.

Just conceptually, milk is off-putting. You have to mix it into coffee or turn it into cheese to put some distance between it and its origins.

The kid absolutely won't touch milk except in cereal. She'll have juice whenever we allow it (which is fairly freely, since the only kind we have in the house is unsweetened fruit juice anyway), water more often than that, but refuses milk in a cup. Weird.

Agree with 60, although records in this house don't go back to 1986, but not with 61. If we shopped healthy, I'd eat healthy. I shop healthy. Cassandane doesn't. I buy fruit, nuts, and maybe crackers as snacks, she buys chips and cookies. Then she looks aghast when she realizes they're almost gone halfway through the week.

Harsh truth. Fruit is only good tasting compared to vegetables and whole grains.

Eh, I mean it. If they're equally convenient when I'm looking for a snack, I'm at least as likely to have an apple, some baby carrots, or some mixed nuts as anything you'd call junk food, and I shop healthy, if not always, then more often than Cassandane. I admit I'm not 100 percent virtuous about this, but this is on my mind at the moment because the last time we were at Costco, Cassandane picked out a box of bags of chips, and a quarter of them were this abominable "flaming hot" variety of Cheetos. Junk food might get thrown away in this house soon.

Regular Cheetos were good enough for Julia Child, they're good enough for me.

That was easy. Of the five people in the post-jab are-you-gonna-pass-out waiting area, three looked younger than I am, so whatever, give me all the doses.

A noisily jubilant toddler lives in the apartment next door. This is precisely the right amount of childcare for me.
Before I moved to the soysphere I drank straight milk all the time, because I'm not squeamish and weird.

AIHMHB, I'm also one of those who has become happily reclusive. It's definitely going to end and I'm not sure whether it will be difficult or not.

Also I can't imagine how much groceries will cost when the kids are teenagers, nor where we'll put the groceries.

You should probably put the perishable ones in a refrigerator.

Frito-Lay has really been pushing various not-Cheeto Cheeto flavors as of late, and its pissing me off. There is a display at my local Hannaford's that has Flamin' Hot and Cheeto Puffs and Valentines Cheetos and whatever, but never any actual Cheetos.

Now my arm hurts pretty good!

The very best type of Cheeto is Flamin' Hot Puffcorn. (Not Puffs -- the distinction seems slight but is actually crucial.) It's not at all easy to find. I'm not allowed to buy it more than a couple of times a year.

|| In case you were wondering what the Montana legislature is doing today, they're bringing 'the body shuts that down' explanation back for why there doesn't need to be a rape exception to their anti-abortion laws. If I hear someone talk about how wwc people voted R because of economic anxiety, can I punch them in the nose? Or at least hit them over the head with a bag of cheetos? |>

74: "pretty well."

it became a popular among sado-populists to demand that the prisoners not be given the vaccine until, whenever

Thank you for the term sado-populists; it is very apt. In Canada, conservatives are doing something similiar: whipping up anger and resentment over the fed govt's (entirely sane and reasonable) plan to vaccinate prisoners ahead of the general population (in order to, you know, slow the spread of COVID, since prisons are among the worst vectors of contagion). It is disgusting.

My sweetie and I have been *pretty* happy at home -- it would be nicer if we could physically bubble with any of our parents, but the logic has been that it will be ALL if ANY and ALL is too many, as it propagates through in-laws in all directions. So we're stuck with hollering porch conversations, which still leaves us luckier than almost anyone, so we're sighingly fine with being near the end of any reasonable vaccine list.

At which point my sweetie got sad when he realized that we should not just be at the end of the US list, but after (say) all the doctors and nurses in the world -- World is too big to think about, how about the one Central American country we have long-term sister-city experience with? They have ... approved the Russian vaccine, and are opening negotations to actually get some.

I got my first shot last night and feel reasonably good about the whole thing. I'm nominally 1B because of what my employer does, but employer is relatively low priority within 1B and I'm no more than middling priority within employer, so that was going to be another few weeks. Instead, I spent a couple of hours waiting in line outside the local large-scale vaccination site for any leftover doses at the end of the day, and being near the front of that line and in the 1B group was enough to get me the last shot. I'm happy to be that much safer when I'm in the office or the grocery store, but mostly just immensely relieved and heartened that I really will be able to safely visit my folks next month. They're getting their first shots this afternoon, so we'll all be good and immune in six more weeks. Now on to worrying about the spouse and youth.

I have, several times now, written and deleted a comment to the effect that the pandemic has been awesome for me, and that 2020 was particularly good in contrast to 2019.

The best version of that comment reads like one of those obnoxious holiday letters from people who tell you all the brilliant things they and their kids did in the last year. I wouldn't be able to look at myself in the mirror if I posted something like that mid-pandemic.

Instead, I'll just say that a tree fell on my house in June, and I'm hoping to be able to move back to my house next month.

That's a long time to be without your regular house.

I'm assuming that politicalfootball won, through exquisite virtue and in a way that made everyone happy, an extra house in 2020 that was even better than the tree'd house, but will be slightly worse when tree'd house is fixed.

Good of you not to gloat, politicalfootball. May it continue.

Vaccine roll out here is at 'over 80s will be called for their appointment soon'. On the plus side, those living in long term care and health care workers have had the vaccine. I read today they expect to receive most of the vaccine in April and have everyone done by September. Which. Ugh. Whichever company is supplying Canada keeps cutting their shipments and then shipping even less so that's not good.

We're almost back to single digits here. On the kind of hilarious side, two of the 11 cases are related to my tiny town. The post office was shut for a couple days because the person who works there was exposed (but tested negative) and it didn't spread at the school either.

Belatedly to 5: I've avoided clicking that link five times already and I'm not going to click it this time, unless you swear to me that I'll find some explanation of how the fuck to productively respond.

(anger is not at you, anonymous probably-Mossy, but at various structural forces and, obviously, the perpetrators)

84: Huh, Canada is being criticized for taking too much vaccine from covax.

85 I did click the link, and cannot finish the article. It's worse than you're imagining.

Yeah, at least one activist on Twitter described secondary trauma from reading the report -- i.e. it's one thing to hear rumors, another to have details. How is your friend the Uighur activist holding up, CC? There have been all of these condemnations and resolutions at a high level, but there's so much bureaucracy and contingency to filter through that I despair.

The linked article in 5 I cannot read. I did read the opening lines, but then my mind told me not to go there.

Why is the world so shitty, Jesus Christ?

89 -- Youtube link emailed.

Here's an excerpt from the CFU site about the article:

"I read it and I'm shaking". Ziba Murat, daughter of missing Uyghur doctor Gulshan Abbas, says she texted her friend who messaged her telling her not to read the report. She stated on Twitter that "As a daughter of an innocent Uyghur woman being detained, I want to ask if anyone still thinks it is fine to be bowing to China and turning their back on Uyghurs? That is equally complicit with those crimes." Other members of the CFU team also responded. "I read half of it and my heart is so broken that I stopped in the middle." said Akida Pulat, CFU Outreach Director, whose own mother, renowned Uyghur scholar Rahile Dawut, has been missing since 2017. Program Director Babur Ilchi stated, "I read it this morning and I haven't felt right since."

Gulshan Abbas is my friend's sister.

I'm 51, but my 86-year-old mother is undergoing chemo and my caretaking turn is coming up -- my three sisters have all been putting in time. Turns out that family caregivers are eligible for the vax in my county, so I just got my appointments -- 2/10 for the first shot and 3/10 for the second. I feel a little bit like I'm scamming, but I read the eligibility rules on the county website carefully, and, well, shots in arms.

Meanwhile, my wife is a cop in a high-crime city, having to interact directly on a daily basis with a large number of people who routinely make poor decisions, and the government of the county she works in would really prefer that cops just, y'know, not exist or something, so she still can't get vaccinated.

Hm, yeah. 2020 was better for me than 2019 in a bunch of ways. Weird I guess.

I am famously indoorsy but it would have been real nice to have a yard.

Two weeks from dose #2 of Moderna. A little nervous as I've heard the second one knocks you on your ass for a day or so.

- I am a bit baffled about the waves of complaints from the US about terrible vaccine distribution when actually the US is doing really, really well, better than any other country except us and a few tiny ME states. And given what it was starting from in health-care chaos terms, I think you could probably argue that the US is doing better on vaccination than anywhere else in the world.

- Firmly with Megan (for a change) - getting people vaccinated out of order is a tiny, tiny problem compared to letting doses go to waste. And hospital administrators and so on may not meet patients, but they spend all day meeting people who meet patients. They should, if anything, be ahead of (for example) the families of clinical staff, because if the doc's husband gets sick then he can only infect his wife, but if the hospital admin gets sick he can infect fifteen or twenty clinical staff. And it is all about keeping the health care system running and minimising deaths, remember. It's not about ending the pandemic quickly.

Of course, that hasn't stopped people complaining over here: teachers and police officers among them. Teachers, of course, are not at elevated personal risk themselves (assuming they're not chronically ill), and they spend their days around people who are in the lowest possible risk category. Police officers are young and healthy and deal overwhelmingly with other young people. But the awful Cressida Dick is declaring herself "baffled" why the Met isn't prioritised for vaccinations and the teachers' unions are moaning virtually constantly.

We are having a small but growing issue with vaccine refusal, especially but not exclusively from black and Muslim people who have been believing silly people online. But this isn't really a public health problem as long as the supply is the limiting factor, and hopefully once they've seen all their sensible friends get the vaccine and not die or become sterile or Cybermen or whatever, they'll quietly change their minds.
There has, after all, been a good natural experiment running over the last decade or so to answer the question "How likely are British Muslim people to do something suicidally antisocial just because they watched a video on Facebook telling them to" and happily the answer is "extremely unlikely indeed".

Meanwhile, for all of you with family members with embarrassing politics: it could be worse.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/feb/02/piers-corbyn-investigated-covid-leaflets-vaccination-to-auschwitz

61: Cultivate liking a kind of chip that no one else can stand.

71: Put them into the kids, obvsly.

55 that sounds horrible. No advice from me but much sympathy.

Excellent news for the UK's single dose strategy:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/03/one-pfizerbiontech-jab-gives-90-immunity-from-covid-after-21-days

Tl;dr - Israel and BioNTech/Pfizer ran analysis showing 90% protection after 21 days with a single dose. Not yet peer-reviewed, but hard to imagine they're mistaken when the consequences are tremendous.

95: The admitstrators and administrative staff people complain about getting the vaccine are the ones who don't go in to the hospital at all now and are working on their laptops at home. I think a cop deserves it more than I do and has less ability to socially distance.

95.1: I think people in the US are complaining (rightly) about the vaccine rollout insofar as delivery feels chaotic, haphazard, and unfair, regardless of how impressive the actual numbers are. If it were easier to make appointments, or to get on a list that you were confident was meaningful, or to be given a trustworthy timeframe and a plan, then I'd view the complaints differently.

I'm curious about something else, though. Did anyone see this report in Vice? https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgzmja/la-paid-dollar62-million-for-covid-tests-its-using-incorrectly

My state has been using these Curative saliva tests for free mass drive-in testing of anyone who wants them, and AIMHMHB I've been really impressed by the ease of testing and the swiftness of results. It's true that neither my state nor the company has done a great job of saying, "hey, this could be a false negative, and also it's only a measure at one period in time," but I would much rather have a good chance of positive Covid cases being detected in the wider community than no chance.

Did you all see the articles about how it seems to be the case that stretching out the time between doses seems to heighten their efficacy substantially? That seems like it should affect how we're doing things.

Wasn't that just for the AstraZeneca vaccine?

It feels like we're doing badly even if we're doing well compared to other countries. That just means they're doing even worse! It feels like we live in a failed world that's no longer capable of doing things. We've had a year to prepare for this and much of the economy is operating at reduced capacity, what else were doing the last year if not getting ready for this?

when actually the US is doing really, really well, better than any other country except us and a few tiny ME states

I saw this is true as a share of population, but what about vaccines administered as percentage of delivered? In other words, how much is due to us getting effective first dibs on vaccine production?

104: I had heard that the UK was doing pretty well compared to continental Europe and better than us.

My favorite vaccine story is that Salisbury Cathedral is a vaccination site and that they were playing organ music as people got their shots and waited.

103: But how different are the mechanisms between vaccines? Is it possible it extends to others?

My favorite vaccine story is that Salisbury Cathedral is a vaccination site

IT HAS A SPIRE 128 M HIGH!

/gru

what about vaccines administered as percentage of delivered?

We don't track this, at all, in the UK, as far as I know. To be honest it doesn't sound like a terribly useful metric because so much depends on the definition of "delivered" - has vaccine been delivered to Virginia as soon as the stuff is physically present inside the state borders, or does it have to be sitting in a freezer in a hospital? Plus what if the delivery is lumpy - and it is; then you look really inefficient the morning that your two weeks' worth gets in.
Plus it sounds very sensitive to time of day (if the delivery gets there first thing in the morning). I imagine that we're doing OK, though, because the limiting step for us is still very definitely supply, and the limiting step in supply is apparently lipid nanoparticle encapsulation, and that is an extremely tricky step that requires a lot of technical expertise and specialist machinery to do. A year isn't that long to set up an entire production line for something really complex like that, even if it's a matter of national urgency - read your Tooze and O'Brien.

We just broke the 3 million/week mark, by the way. Target is four million a week by April and I reckon we'll do it.

Teachers, of course, are not at elevated personal risk themselves (assuming they're not chronically ill), and they spend their days around people who are in the lowest possible risk category.

You're confusing a child's low risk of personal illness with a low risk of transmission to teachers. While children are less at risk of serious illness themselves, children ages 10-19 appear to be as effective as adults at spreading the disease to others. The fact that children are often asymptomatic or present only mild symptoms may exacerbate the risk for teachers, because asymptomatic children are more likely to come to school when they are shedding virus.

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-1315_article
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2770149

109: no, I am not confused: you misunderstand me. Teachers are not at elevated personal risk themselves, unless they are chronically ill, because they are generally under the age of 65. So if they catch COVID they will probably not get hospitalised.

And, because they spend their days around people in the lowest possible risk category, we shouldn't worry about their passing the virus on to other people - or at least we should not worry quite as much as we worry about people who spend their days around adults, especially older adults - because if they pass it on to a pupil, the pupil will almost certainly not get hospitalised. We should definitely be vaccinating supermarket workers, for example, before teachers, because supermarket workers come into contact with a lot more older people.

It feels like we live in a failed world that's no longer capable of doing things.

I certainly feel that way, but not regarding vaccines. We're putting effective vaccines in people's arms in February 2021, and that seems like a miracle to me. Mid-2020, if you'd told me that we'd be at this stage at this point, I would have thought you were Donald Trump.

I'm just fat and balding. Other than that, we look nothing alike.

Nah, 104 is right. We're fucking this up really badly. Well, Trump fucked this up really badly. Some states are fucking it up above and beyond. We've been dumb lucky in a lot of ways, but we are really behind where we should be.

How did I get an ear infection in the middle of a pandemic that has kept me from putting anything in my ear except my own fingers?

And fresh qtips.

How did I get an ear infection

Spider eggs.

114: Did you know your nose is connected to your ears? True story. What have you been putting in your nose?

Spider eggs.

I thought they couldn't hatch there.

114: Have you been listening to Bad Podcasts?

I now understand part of why we are screwing this up. Epic.

It's not my fault.

It's the fault of the spiders.

Clinicians scheduling appointments in a complex bloated medical record.

Clinicians scheduling appointments in a complex bloated medical record.

Have we all been advised not to M to Christopher Plummer yet? It's funny: I thought he was unusually attractive as a leading man while watching "The Sound of Music" with Elke some years ago, except for the actually romantic scene, which I couldn't watch. All the repartee with the Baroness, though? Guess she brought out the best in him. (Maybe because it was closest to his true attitude of contempt for the film.)

The Baroness was a better match.

Nah, 104 is right. We're fucking this up really badly.

My intuition is that people systematically underestimate how diffficult logistics is (are?) -- but of course, that's just a heuristic and I don't have any knowledge about this situation.

But as ajay says, compared to other rich countries, the US is doing well. What's your beef with the handling of this?

Except if she was a Nazi. I can't remember.

She wasn't a Nazi. She just wanted to send the kids to boarding school. Which, I don't even see why that was an unreasonable suggestion, given that the children's sole parent was gone all the time and their education to date had been entrusted to a stream of short-term tutors, the last of whom was barely older than the eldest child, and did not appear to have any teacher training or indeed much non-religious education of her own.

127 covers that.

126 reads oddly, and upon reflection the problem is that by "he was unusually attractive" I meant "he was, unusually, attractive." Apparently even that had limits. You all know that Baroness was 100% a Nazi though, come on!

Exhibit A. "The song was not used in the film adaptation, where instead the engagement is called off because Elsa is too rich and powerful, wanting an extravagant life in Vienna, and the Captain, who has fallen in love with Maria, wants a simple life in the country. The "political dispute [was essentially replaced] with a solely personal and individual squabble".

That reminds me of my own most difficult theatrical moment. I was a Nazi official and had to threatened Von Trapp with the coming of the Nazis except I could never pronounce "Anschluss".

I saw Plummer play Macbeth live in the late 80's opposite Glenda Jackson. The show as a whole wasn't amazing, but they were both terrific.

I saw Plummer play Macbeth live in the late 80's opposite Glenda Jackson. The show as a whole wasn't amazing, but they were both terrific.

Not that anybody every asked me, but I think Macbeth is a bit over dramatic.

It looks like we'll be vaccinated by the end of summer; that should coincide nicely with our own immunity from actually having had it wearing off, so that's good. My sister, a nurse practitioner who works with immune compromised cancer patients in a hospital setting, is fully vaccinated. My father-in-law has had his first dose. Who knows for my parents in CA - they're all late 60s/early 70s, and don't seem to have much of a chance at it yet. Rural area, though, so as my mom pointed out she thinks its right that they get it after people in LA/etc.

I miss getting to talk about public health with my dad, who once worked in New Mexico's public health department (to the point that I got lots of insider stories on Hanta, but not like, in charge of anything). Because it wasn't uncommon for us to go a few months without talking, I think now that it's been a few months (well, will be next week) since his death I'm starting to notice it more.

in a complex bloated medical record.

As you said, Epic. Even from a user side Epic can be a challenge. I have linked 3 hospital/providers systems in Epic and the feature set each implements in Epic don't always work well together. What it shows on the main page is an agglomeration of info regardless of which system I logged into. Some of that info is quite irrelevant. I haven't been to a Partners provider or facility in 3+ years. I don't care what care Epic thinks I need to get in Boston.

Plus, Epic was on the winning side in a recent employment law case before Scotus. It makes me less happy with them.

139: So, my boss got it as a hospital employee. She's also a so,I'd organ transplant patient, and she's gotten e-mails about getting it from the Transplant team. She continues to get the e-mails even after being vaccinated, and the vaccine is documented in her medical chart. Never mind trying to pull it from our State Immunization registry. Contacting people by phone who have already been vaccinated is a huge time suck.

My in-laws both got vaccinated today, which is a relief because my mother-in-law has two brothers with covid right now.

Was that at the Monroeville site where you had previously mentioned you had goten one but not both appointments?

No. My wife got a different appointment for the other, they both went and asked nicely if they could both get a shot. It was somewhere in their home county. There will be a cancellation in Monroeville.

Anyway, they got on a list they probably shouldn't have been on, but they're both pushing 80.

If you've been masturbating to Lou Dobbs' show, the SmartMatic lawsuit appears to have ruined your fun.

135-137: It's "the Scottish play," I believe. You're not supposed to refer to it by name.

Complaints about Canada over the COVAX agreement are just a bunch of BS, now amplified by the Canadian opposition parties, both Conservative and NDP (owning the Libs by attacking Canada's vaccination programme, sure...).

Last Sept 2020, Canada entered into an international agreement, where the wealthier nations (e.g., Canada) would provide millions of dollars upfront to aid in the development and distribution of vaccines. The wealthier nations were not just giving out charity: they wanted some of those vaccines for their own citizens, and that was always part of the deal. But they also agreed to help bankroll the vaccine efforts of less privileged countries, and that is what Canada has done (Canada is the second largest donor to the COVAX programme). Canada is not "stealing" vaccines from poor countries: it is taking its fair, agreed-upon share from a programme to which it has contributed about $440 miillion (which is about $440 million more than the infinitely more wealthy USA has contributed, I might add. The USA under Trump refused to sign on to the international agreement).

137 to 146.1

128: You want a comprehensive list? We'll be here a while. Topics of special ire: Trump admin - no plan, poor communication with states, no funding. States didn't know when deliveries would be or how much so they couldn't plan accordingly. State contracts with CVS and Walgreens for distribution - WV didn't contract and is moving significantly faster. IL just pulled 97K doses from contract distribution to do it via state channels due to poor turnaround times. Inequity - making seniors hit refresh multiple websites at 12:01 like it's a reservation at Minibar. Major cities with maps of vaccine coverage and COVID deaths that are inverse (hey, Gold Coast!) Making seniors wait in lines for hours (in a pandemic!). Manufacturers not getting clear and prompt info about where to ship. A couple weeks ago, warehouses here reported roughly 2 million doses in storage with nowhere to ship (!). Note none of my quibbles are even about prioritization. If one insists public health systems are too broken, OK, maybe, what about military contractors? Some places are calling up the Guard for assistance (good for them). Why not use Medicare data to reach eligible seniors? Why not use simple organizational strategies like "if your birthday is in November, birth year prior to 1965, enrollment opens for you the week of Feb. 8"?

I get demand is high and supply is low, but if supply were limiting, we'd see the uptake numbers at (let's say) 90% of vaccines distributed being dosed by Friday on Monday deliveries. Most states are in the 60-70% range. That tells me it's not supply from manufacturer to states that's the bottleneck.

Comparing us to the EU is kind of silly. Comparing our vaccination rate to projected wave of more contagious variants is the measure of success here, and it's a footrace. It's been two months. If we routinely average 1.5 million per day, that's adding 1% with a single dose every other day. We're at about 8% now, and 20-30% is where I think we need to be to avoid another devastating wave. So, we need (handwave) 10-20% more. That's 20-40 days until we have single doses out, and another 3 weeks to get the second assuming we don't start prioritizing first doses over second. So, 40-60 days. Have we got 1.5-2 months with the reopenings in many states? We had 4,000 people dying every day. Good thing we're ahead of other rich Western countries (that weren't so bad at response in the first place so their losses were much lower).

I think it's probably a good sign that I'm irate - it means I think we can do better.

134- Also my most difficult play, I was spotlight operator and had to simulate the Nazi boyfriend's flashlight when he's looking for the family in the graveyard.
For future plays I moved to pit orchestra which was a lot more fun because the music teacher who was also in the orchestra showed up drunk for several performances.
107- Delays showing better results are thought to be a feature of those vaccines (AZ, Sputnik) that use viral vectors because there can be immunity to the vector itself, so if you can time it to minimize vector immunity you get better immunity to the viral cargo. That's not the case for Pfizer or Moderna which are synthetically encapsulated.

Major cities with maps of vaccine coverage and COVID deaths that are inverse

We have this in Boston. We had no sites in Chelsea, Everett or Revere initially, and Chelsea was the hardest hit city during the spring surge. I think they are working on trying to address this, but it didn't start out that way.

Maybe we'll stop electing Republican governors who fail when they actually have to do a job. Normally the Dem supermajority just decides everything but when Baker actually had to manage something himself he sucked.

151: I'm not a fan of Baker at all and vote straight Dem, but I don't think Patrick was a great manager either. I think Sifu's mom said something about her disliking Romney's policies but that he was a better manager than Patrick. I've heard some first hand horror stories about the Patrick admin - especially about Bigby.

150: Pretty much everywhere does. Detroit is making more concerted efforts than most, and I think they've been better but can't find a map to check my impression.

140. In the hospital I'm in, all staff get the shot but no patients. You're tested when you're admitted and presumably carted off to another part of the building if you turn up positive. But no shot even if you're 80 with a dozen pre-existing conditions. That's somebody else's job. This is counter-intuitive but on reflection is probably right.

I drove by an Indian restaurant this afternoon, and we decided to get some samosas as a snack. We ordered online and picked them up at the door. Then we decided that after we did our shopping we would order dinner from the same place.

They had been busy, so I had to wait for a bit. I was on an angle where I could see a hallway that led into the kitchen. I saw 2 back-of-the house staff who were not wearing masks. I can't go back there. I guess that I should report it but I'm not sure to whom.

Thoughts, MA residents?

Was it a family-run place? Maybe they are unmasked because they don't get near customers and are around each other all the time in and out of the restaurant.

155: The front house staff looked darker skinned Indian. One of the people in the back looked like he might have been Latino - dishwasher maybe? The other guy had a dark beard and looked more middle eastern - almost like someone from Afghanistan.

Why not use simple organizational strategies like "if your birthday is in November, birth year prior to 1965, enrollment opens for you the week of Feb. 8
Indeed. Like the draft, except you want your number.

OT: I did not expect to see Honor Blackman in Midsomer.

I've seen this one before, but didn't notice.

Do British fly fishers really carry at little club to beat the fish to death with?

It's called a priest.

I guess they can't just shoot the fish like here.

159 et seq: Our favorite game with Midsomer Murders is to try to pick out people in each cast who "look familiar." Honor Blackman was easy. See if you notice the butler from Downton Abbey, or Maester Luwen from Game of Thrones. There's also the ritual of counting up the bodies: three is the minimum for most episodes. One can also count number of violations of standard police procedure: breaking into a home w/o a warrant is in almost every episode, as is interviewing multiple suspects at the same time, more or less in public.

163: the UK has famously strict gun laws, but almost every episode of MM has at least one shotgun. Lots of knives too, but that's to be expected.

155: This is not something I would concern myself with.

164: But they police aren't sleeping with witnesses like Inspector Morse.

||

"Why is there so much demand? A lot of half-finished pigs went to packing plants because of disease," he said.

Attila the Haig transformed into Peanuts
Called Schultz up on Capitol Hill
A dead ringer for the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz,
And we keep expecting to hear him say:
"We're off to see the Arabs
Off to see the Arabs
Off to see the Arabs."

NMM?

167. Thanks. I'm supposed to get out tomorrow.

Further to 168, it really was an extraordinary career, and while I was never a fan, I have to say that his VORR was probably decent.

169: Hooray! It's been ages and ages -- this is still from the injury last summer?

Here's the latest Vanity Fair article about Trump administration dysfunctional virus policy. This time about the vaccine rollout. I have to say the depiction of Azar as "master of office politics and backstabbing" is almost comforting because at least he was trying to get something done properly and then get all the credit for it, unlike the usual Trump cabinet secretary whose goal is to sabotage things and slink away.

172: Thanks. That's a good summary, but it still seems overly generous. It doesn't mention any pre-existing plans or playbooks . . .

Or how the flu vaccine ends up in all those arms.

I can totally see the military coming into the thing with a very particular view of what the mission was going to be, but, and I don't think the article make anywhere near as big a deal of this as it should, you can't simultaneously say 'states are going to do the heavy lifting' and 'states (in 2020!) don't need any additional money to do the heavy lifting.' Where was McConnell? Busy not giving states money, that's where.

As I've said many times before, I don't think I'll ever understand why Kushner (and his wife) chose 'it's way overhyped' over 'you're going to be a hero.'

My view is that they are seeking to optimize power and that they've decided to operationalize power as "how much shit I can force the other guy to eat."

If you use your power in other ways, the measurement isn't clean because people might have just been doing what you said out of their own interests.

174.2 Did you see the line where they compared goals? Military's goal was delivery of doses to state-specified location; CDC's goal was shots in arms and an end of the pandemic. No doubt, CDC is a hot mess at this point, but how did the military miss the point so badly? (I mean, I know, but yikes.)

Chatting with the 8 year old next door. Me: "So are you going to school in person or remote?"

Him: "We're not really doing school this year. There's too much virus in the schools, and my parents say, we're not teachers, so we're just not doing school."

I know it's going this way for just tons and tons of kids. There's nothing THAT remarkable here, just that the gulf between the haves and have-nots is really widening this year, and it's depressing.

Military's goal was delivery of doses to state-specified location

In their defense, that's exactly how it works with ordinance.

The administration tasked Army logistics without engaging medical? Sounds like they got the outcome I'd expect. Loggies get the stuff to specified places or units.

...of course Army generals know this (except for the Chief of Engineers, they don't wear branch insignia as they're supposed to be beyond that narrower focus) and shouldn't be operating with blinders. They should have said that the high-level orders were missing strategic intentions. Maybe they did and got told, shut up and just get the stuff to the states.

The comparison in the article to the war in Iraq rang for me.

Speaking of specificity, you aren't supposed to put gorilla glue in your hair.