Lifting Masks = Back to Getting Down With The Sickness

[Agema]

So how sorry should people for this nurse, considering it will have affected people's interactions with their at risk loved ones?
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/11/1026863219/nurse-fake-covid-vaccine-germany-saline?

At minimum, this nurse needs to be struck off and never allowed to practice healthcare again.

She should probably also face criminal charges - certainly damage to property, plus others up to and including manslaughter, depending on circumstances.

 

[Seanchaidh]

At minimum, this nurse needs to be struck off and never allowed to practice healthcare again.

She should probably also face criminal charges - certainly damage to property, plus others up to and including manslaughter, depending on circumstances.

Naturally, nothing she did is anywhere near as harmful as that done by every leader who didn't pursue a zero COVID strategy.

 

[XsjadoBlayde]

As vaccine mandates spread, protests follow — some spurred by nurses

A new round of protests like last year’s has sprung up in recent days, fueled in part by nurses who have also been finding audiences on social media.

www.nbcnews.com

A few hundred protesters lined the sidewalk Monday outside Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego to rally against California’s impending vaccination mandates for health care workers. And to the disappointment of many medical professionals, some of the protesters were nurses wearing hospital scrubs.

It was the kind of protest that was common earlier in the pandemic but lost steam this year as restrictions eased. But a resurgent coronavirus and sluggish vaccine uptake have led to a push for vaccination mandates and masking rules — and renewed protests.

Vaccination mandates have given new focus to some Covid deniers and anti-vaccination activists, helping to align disparate “liberty” groups around a single cause, as lockdowns did earlier in the pandemic. Among them are nurses who have been vocal opponents of various pandemic mitigation efforts, some of whom have become adept at garnering social media attention, mainly on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.

It’s a dynamic that experts warn can have an outsize impact on vaccination discourse, particularly as the nurses’ messages can go far beyond the protests or their limited social media audiences and carry a veneer of medical industry credibility.

“It’s not that the nurses necessarily themselves have a really big reach, but their videos always seem to be found by people who are anti-vax, who then duet or reshare it and use the credibility of that medical professional to bolster the argument that they’ve been correct all along,” said Rachel Moran, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public who studies misinformation on the internet.

The protest in San Diego, where some participants chanted repurposed pro-abortion rights slogans like “our body, our choice,” was one of more than a dozen organized outside California hospitals in recent days, organized by a group called America’s Healthcare Workers for Medical Freedom and promoted through a new, anonymous Instagram account with 5,500 followers made up of a stable of registered nurses who are also anti-vaccination influencers on the app.

Other recent protests have gotten similar boosts on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. Calling themselves “freedom keepers,” at least six individual accounts have spent the last week promoting America’s Healthcare Workers for Medical Freedom protests, posting flyers for rallies, among other posts, which feature vaccination misinformation dressed in a feminine aesthetic well-known to wellness and lifestyle influencers, including pastel colors and trendy cursive fonts.

The individual accounts present a hodgepodge of vaccination misinformation, including distorted data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, to suggest that the vaccines are killing thousands of people.

A Facebook spokesperson said the company was looking into the accounts and would take action if they violated the company's policies.

As part of a sweeping set of mandates across the state, California’s Public Health Department has required its more than 2 million health care workers in hospitals, skilled nursing facilities and doctor’s offices to be fully vaccinated against Covid by Sept. 30. The pop-up protests come at a time when hospitals throughout the country are increasingly implementing mandates to combat stalled vaccination efforts among health care workers, even as the delta variant threatens to overload intensive care units again.

Like other protests against lockdowns, masks and other measures to mitigate Covid’s spread, the events, ostensibly for health care workers, attracted other participants, including some who are stringently against all childhood vaccinations and others who are seemingly politically motivated to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom. In livestreams from this week’s events, the protesters’ signs, which included QAnon slogans and the text of the Nuremberg Code (a guideline for ethical medical research), gave clues to the myriad motivations of participants.

The small but vocal group of activists behind America’s Healthcare Workers for Medical Freedom include the account’s newsletter host, Lauren Mochizuki, an emergency room nurse and personal finance blogger in Orange County, California, who also runs the Instagram account nurses4informedconsent, a private account with just 1,800 followers. Mochizuki, who made news at the start of the pandemic for bringing attention to the struggle of front-line health care workers, did not reply to a request for comment.

Heather Knapp, 35, a registered home health nurse in Riverside, California, posted videos from several of the protests to her 33,000-follower Instagram account, Nurses4freedom. She said the recent rallies were an effort to bring awareness to the concerns of health care professionals who, despite the scientific consensus, question the safety of vaccines.

“I’m not an anti-vaxxer,” Knapp said. “Our organization is anti-mandate.”

Health care workers have never been immune from anti-vaccination views. Online groups like Nurses Against Mandatory Vaccines were early participants in the modern anti-vaccination movement and have been known to rally behind health care professionals who refuse yearly flu shots. Since the pandemic began, Covid and vaccine misinformation has permeated mainstream nursing groups and led professional groups like the American Nurses Association to announce support for the vaccines and warn against online misinformation that erodes public trust.

Moran said viral videos of anti-vaccination nurses are “leveraging the credibility of medical professionals” to create a false impression that there is considerable debate about Covid vaccines among doctors and nurses when, in reality, there is a consensus about their efficacy and safety.

“There’s a hypocritical argument where anti-vaxxers for a long time have spread distrust in institutions and science and medicine,” Moran said. “But on the flip side, when there is a doctor or someone with an advanced degree or medical experience who says something that aligns with their anti-vax message — suddenly that institutional expertise is credible again.”

Knapp said that she and others were concerned about unknown “long-term safety effects,” including to women’s fertility, and that information about treatments like ivermectin, a drug used to prevent parasites in animals, was being “censored.”

Knapp also said her organization was expanding to include firefighters and law enforcement agents.

“We’re not giving in,” she said, adding that more rallies in additional states were scheduled for next week.

While more than 96 percent of practicing doctors in the U.S. have been fully vaccinated, according to an American Medical Association survey, some other health care workers are more hesitant. One in 4 hospital workers with direct contact with patients had not received a single dose of a Covid vaccine by the end of May, according to a WebMD and Medscape Medical News estimate using data collected by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Some health care workers are going online to evade the impending mandates. In HealthCare Workers for Freedom, a new, separate private Facebook group with 3,000 members, self-identified health care workers offer support and trade tips for filing requests for religious exemptions and contacts for lawyers who would represent vaccine refusers. The group was buzzing Wednesday morning about a proposed walkout to protest the mandates, although some members expressed hesitation. “I hope no one is abandoning patients to walk out,” a member posted.

Facebook and its photo-sharing app, Instagram, have struggled to curb the spread of misinformation about vaccines on both platforms, despite numerous policy updates and other measures aimed at removing anti-vaccination content.

TikTok has similarly tried to limit the spread of misinformation, but the app has also become an important outlet for people looking to push back against mandates and spread vaccine hesitancy.

Moran said the nurses are consistently going viral on TikTok, which anti-vaccination influencers scour for credible-seeming messengers and where use TikTok’s sharing function, called “dueting,” to expand their audiences.

Moran said TikTok creates a vicious cycle of disinformation and debunking on TikTok. The nurses’ videos are debunked by well-meaning users in duets, which are then rebutted by anti-vaccination proponents, creating a false sense of ambiguity and debate about the vaccines’ safety.

“At the end of the day, all it does is push this impression that there is this 1:1 argument that’s going on where 50 percent of nurses agree with this and 50 percent don’t, and it’s nothing of the sort,” Moran said

This certainly matches what I been observing. There's a distinct push to lift, exaggerate and accentuate people who are (or at least claim they are) nurses to weaponise their perceived medical legitimacy to the mainstream public. One of the main ppl behind the protests in the UK is a struck off nurse also.

 

[Agema]

This certainly matches what I been observing. There's a distinct push to lift, exaggerate and accentuate people who are (or at least claim they are) nurses to weaponise their perceived medical legitimacy to the mainstream public. One of the main ppl behind the protests in the UK is a struck off nurse also.

Yes, it's a common tactic. "30 US doctors say..."

Okay, fine. But what about the other 1,000,000 practising medical doctors in the USA?

Likewise, "10,000 scientists and engineers signed this petition..." So, including people who did a physics degree and then spent 40 years in finance and can't even remember what Brownian motion and Hooke's Law are? Okay then!

 

[Gergar12]

I heard from a nurse that as soon as the FDA clears the Covid-19 vaccines, mandates will start to roll out. This is good since I don't want to know what Delta plus feels like.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

I haven't been so yet.

How many times do I have to quote it? So, where's this evidence that masks worked during the Spanish Flu?

Funnily enough, there were mask mandates and when people bitched about them enough saying it wasn't worth it, they lifted the mandates and it immediately started spiking.

Like here where you think airborne means it literally flies through the dry air and have completely ignored where masked countries have done better than unmasked ones. You're just clueless.

What countries that masked (where covid got widespread) did better than countries that did not mask (where covid got widespread)? A country like Taiwan doesn't count because the reason they had very few cases is because they controlled the amount of virus entering the country. If you stop the virus from coming in, shocker, you'll have very few cases. I keep asking this and still nobody is giving any examples of such a thing happening.

Depends:

1) The upper limit daily recommendation is 4,000 IUs daily; depending on clearance, 50,000 IUs weekly might be an equivalent dose for steady state, if I could be arsed calculating it. If that were true, it might de facto be equivalent to a "standard" dose.
2) It might not be a "standard" dose in the sense of an official recommendation. It might just be something that someone did and wrote it up, and because they wrote it up, other people who read that article did it too and along the principle rolls. If this is the case, it might be "too much" (and I suspect some doctors will opine so if this is the case, again checkable if I could be bothered): a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Of course, the nut still gets cracked, you just might crack something else unintended too.

There are a lot of issues that could be considered: what the starting point of the patient is, how well the patient is likely to respond to treatment, what the desired end point it, etc.

You're still going of those "expert" recommendations for vitamin d, you can have far more than 4,000 IUs/day, there's so many documented cases of far more than that. If vitamin d levels go up nearly as fast you as say they do, then a doctor would just give someone with vitamin d deficiency one big dose like 50,000 IUs and tell them to take like 1,000 IUs a day after that, but that doesn't get the level up, which is why it takes large doses of a couple months to do. It's not like one doctor said this and everyone else followed. Doctors are competent enough to do follow level tests and if the 50,000 IUs/week for 2 months was giving people really really high vitamin d levels, that would be the standard treatment now would it?

Droplets are definitely a way of catching covid. In fact, I'm pretty sure when I caught it off my wife, there was a pretty good chance it was by direct oral fluid exchange. If you stand within three feet of someone, you can definitely slobber small blobs of phlegm straight into their mouth. Everyone here has probably experienced that slightly unpleasant feeling of moist spatter at some point - and that'll just be the particularly large ones you can feel.

I didn't say droplets weren't a way of getting covid, I said they aren't the main driver of how people are getting infected.

Imagine you were firing tennis balls randomly at a wall with 6-inch holes in. I can quite guarantee some of those tennis balls are going to hit the wall and bounce off, and others will go through the holes.

AGAIN, WHERE ARE THE REAL-WORLD RESULTS AT? I keep asking for real-world results showing masks work, where are they? I don't care about some tennis ball analogy, that was fine logic over a year ago for wearing masks, but when it's been over a year, where the fuck is the proof? Where is a study that's at least as good as the French nursing home vitamin d study (which isn't that good like I said every single post)? Where is a mask study that shows real-world results at least at that low-bar of a level? Shouldn't there be consistent data on countries that masked have at least better deaths per capita than countries that didn't? Even if masks don't prevent infections, they should lower average viral loads right? So shouldn't there be less severe covid in masked countries even if the cases are similar? Show me the data, stop with the analogies and mechanisms, that doesn't make it so something works. Many drugs have mechanisms that should work, guess what, they more than often don't end up working. If masks were a drug, there's no way they would be recommended.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

Because a country isn't masked, the people are, or atleast, are told they should be. And all you need is enough people to not follow the guidelines (which every country has plenty of) for something like this to spread. That's not even mentioning how modern architecture, like that of supermarkets, makes it pretty impossible to even follow those guidelines.

You can just look at America. The states with the most deaths per capita are the states where more people masked (aka blue states).

Have some fun super spreader events.

10 of the Worst Covid-19 Super Spreader Events So Far

Uhh... They are all indoor events or had lots of indoor components.

The particulate it hitches a ride on is what makes it airborne. It doesn't just fly through dry air. Jesus Christ, man. Is it really that hard for you to admit that you don't know literally everything?

I understand how airborne works. I don't care if it hitches a ride on tiny dragons and the tiny dragons steer into your nose. The fact is that if you're in a room with someone infectious for a prolonged period, you will catch it just from breathing regardless if you're masking or social distancing.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

I really detest this "framing people with different opinions from you as sub-human and worthy of death" thing that I've been seeing in recent years on the internet.
Especially on reddit and twitter, I've been seeing more and more people grave-dancing, demonizing, making thinly-veiled calls for violence and outright wishing of death upon other people. From both sides.

Please, have some compassion and empathy for your fellow human beings, even if you think they don't have the same for you. Love your enemies.

This Chappelle story says it all. He didn't start ripping into this woman and making the audience laugh at her and get her to leave, he didn't go on Twitter to "cancel" her or have her fired or whatnot. He treated her like a human being. There's a reason why I have never blocked anyone in my life on a forum or Facebook or real life obviously either. I don't care if what you said about X made no damn sense, I will listen to your opinion on Y with an open mind.

You equate lack of concern for their idiotic behavior with hate. That's your first false assumption. I don't hate them, but I have very little compassion for them anymore. When they willingly run headlong into their own idiocy. As to why I should be angry at them, it's because their idiocy doesn't just hurt them. As I stated in my response to you initially, they are fucking everything up for the rest of us. If you are fine with just looking at all that and just saying "well, bless their hearts, the poor dears" , well I'm not going to say good for you, because that kind of mentality is why they have been able to get away with so much.

You know what's not good for my health? Idiotic chucklefucks spreading a god damned plague across the planet. That's what you don't seem to understand, though your phrasing makes me think you might just be trolling, and typing from some high minded opinion, given your tone.

However, I lot of hate has been pointed at people not doing anything that would hurt them or other people. Like people having fun OUTSIDE at the beach is perfectly safe. People not getting the vaccine that already had covid is perfectly safe (every study says as much). People that didn't have covid not getting the vaccine is a problem for sure. However, calling them names and everything is only pushing them even farther away from getting the vaccine. There's a helluva middle ground between "fuck you" and "bless their hearts".

 

[Phoenixmgs]

As vaccine mandates spread, protests follow — some spurred by nurses

A new round of protests like last year’s has sprung up in recent days, fueled in part by nurses who have also been finding audiences on social media.

www.nbcnews.com

This certainly matches what I been observing. There's a distinct push to lift, exaggerate and accentuate people who are (or at least claim they are) nurses to weaponise their perceived medical legitimacy to the mainstream public. One of the main ppl behind the protests in the UK is a struck off nurse also.

Instead of vaccine mandates, there should be immunity mandates. There's no reason why someone that already had covid needs to get vaccinated, literally every single study on the subject says that.

 

[Gergar12]

Instead of vaccine mandates, there should be immunity mandates. There's no reason why someone that already had covid needs to get vaccinated, literally every single study on the subject says that.

Nah I like the double protection. Also if you are protected from the alpha variant you are not protected from the delta variant.

 

[Bartholomew]

This Chappelle story says it all. He didn't start ripping into this woman and making the audience laugh at her and get her to leave, he didn't go on Twitter to "cancel" her or have her fired or whatnot. He treated her like a human being. There's a reason why I have never blocked anyone in my life on a forum or Facebook or real life obviously either. I don't care if what you said about X made no damn sense, I will listen to your opinion on Y with an open mind.

That was great, thank you. I wish more people had a mindset like this.

 

[crimson5pheonix]

How many times do I have to quote it? So, where's this evidence that masks worked during the Spanish Flu?

You quoted things that are true. They masked up against the flu epidemic that was emerging to save the war effort, they stopped masking up after the war effort, the next wave hit and started wiping people out. They even tried masking up again, but people threw shitfits. They put up with it in war time, but not in peace.

If you knew history or could read, you'd have known this all already. You'd also know that areas that had stronger health guidelines generally did better.

What countries that masked (where covid got widespread) did better than countries that did not mask (where covid got widespread)? A country like Taiwan doesn't count because the reason they had very few cases is because they controlled the amount of virus entering the country. If you stop the virus from coming in, shocker, you'll have very few cases. I keep asking this and still nobody is giving any examples of such a thing happening.

"Pointing out countries that used masks to control infections doesn't count as countries using masks to control infections."

I'm not posting again that even continental SE Asian countries outperformed the rest of the world. As far as I can tell you're looking for an example of a country ravaged by COVID that "fixes" it with masks. Which is the stupidest, most idiotic, inane, moronic, brain-dead, ridiculous, ignorant, foolish, asinine, dopy, dim, vacuous, senseless position possible.

Don't let your brain get eaten by Tim Pool's beanie too. How do you stop a virus from coming into a country, especially one with land border that can be walked across?

WEAR A MASK TO PREVENT INFECTIONS IN THE FIRST PLACE, AND IT DOESN'T BECOME A PROBLEM.

Why is this hard?

 

[Bartholomew]

WEAR A MASK TO PREVENT INFECTIONS IN THE FIRST PLACE, AND IT DOESN'T BECOME A PROBLEM.

As I understand it, people got sick even when they wore masks. Nothing is 100% safe and effective.
But I'm not here to argue about covid or masks, so this is the first and last I'll say on the subject.

 

[Casual Shinji]

You can just look at America. The states with the most deaths per capita are the states where more people masked (aka blue states).

So?

First of all masks aren't 100% protective, just like washing your hands isn't. That doesn't mean it doesn't add up as a protective measure. Secondly, the amount of people, their proximity, and the amount of (international) transit is going to differ from state to state. Which is likely why New York is near the top and Texas is lower down - I'm no expert but I don't think Texas is too popular among tourists. Then there's the health care quality from state to state and how many people can actually afford it.

Nobody is making masks out to be the be all end all when it comes to preventing the spread of a pandemic, it's simply the easiest protective measure one can take. And when a pandemic is this aggressive it takes little effort to just put one on and help out in the easiest way one can.

 

[Kwak]

Do face masks work? Here are 49 scientific studies that explain why they do

Reasons for mask hesitancy and doubt include conflicting data from health officials, political biases and cultural unfamiliarity (studies showed mask wearing was lower in countries where face maski…

www.kxan.com

Effectiveness of Mask Wearing to Control Community Spread of SARS-CoV-2

This JAMA Insights CDC review summarizes accumulating evidence that mask wearing reduces spread of SARS-CoV-2 infection and that universal mandatory mask wearing policies reduce infections and deaths and emphasizes face masks are one component of pandemic control measures, including physical...

jamanetwork.com

 

[Agema]

You're still going of those "expert" recommendations for vitamin d, you can have far more than 4,000 IUs/day, there's so many documented cases of far more than that.

Yes, you can have more than 4000 IUs a day: some of those people also develop hypercalcaemia (kidney stones, high blood pressure, etc.). This is what we in the field call "therapeutic range": the dosage range between the minimum amount to deliver a therapeutic benefit and maximum amount to avoid adverse effects, and hence the recommended dosages.

If vitamin d levels go up nearly as fast you as say they do, then a doctor would just give someone with vitamin d deficiency one big dose like 50,000 IUs and tell them to take like 1,000 IUs a day after that, but that doesn't get the level up, which is why it takes large doses of a couple months to do.

I do not have the time and inclination to teach you pharmacokinetics on this discussion forum - it's a big topic. But you're making suggestions that don't necessarily make a lot of sense in the context of treatment.

It's not like one doctor said this and everyone else followed. Doctors are competent enough to do follow level tests and if the 50,000 IUs/week for 2 months was giving people really really high vitamin d levels, that would be the standard treatment now would it?

Are you sure about that? You shouldn't be.

It's very likely some doctors do not give their patients weekly vitamin D tests throughout treatment, and many do not thoroughly scrutinise the literature. This is why much of why treatment guidelines and clinical meetings exist - to give information to physicians so they can spend their very expensive time treating people rather than all reading mounds of articles on how to treat people. Let's also remember some otherwise seemingly competent doctors also believe stuff that is unsupported, implausible, or even outrageous. Pierre Kory, for instance, might in many ways be a good pulmonary physician but his attachment to ivermectin was irrational, and he's just a figurehead of a much wider irrationality amongst many other medical doctors. As we said before, this is why we often don't let individual doctors do their own thing: they work as part of clinical teams for extra advice, feedback, support.

I didn't say droplets weren't a way of getting covid, I said they aren't the main driver of how people are getting infected.

No, that's not what you originally said.

But this is a complex issue, as the relative risk of individuals depends on circumstances and behaviours and better viewed in that context.

AGAIN, WHERE ARE THE REAL-WORLD RESULTS AT?

You mean all the ones you've already been provided with and just ignored, and your simple reluctance to read recent scientific reviews?

 

[Agema]

As I understand it, people got sick even when they wore masks. Nothing is 100% safe and effective.

So then is your argument that if it's not 100% effective, no-one should bother?

 

[MrCalavera]

You can just look at America. The states with the most deaths per capita are the states where more people masked (aka blue states).

The Blue States? Those heavily urbanized states with larger population density? Those states?

 

[Buyetyen]

I understand how airborne works.

No you don't, or I wouldn't have had to correct you. Get the fuck over yourself.

 

[Agema]

The Blue States? Those heavily urbanized states with larger population density? Those states?

Yes.

Another trick here is that you can manufacture a specific result by selecting the cut-off point for what you consider as the states "with the most deaths per capita". For instance, if you decided that this meant the states above the US average, then there are more red than blue in the list.

And let's face it, it's pretty laughable to connect this claim to masks given the top two states in per capita deaths were the places the pandemic hammered first, with much of the infection spread before masking was recommended.