Macrohistory

When we disappear, we're going to meet with Fauci to discuss further measures for implementing the Plandemic and suppressing freedom. We're also discussing how to promote vaccines and cancel the good news about ivermectin.

There are no favorable trends -- that's a self-deluding pipe-dream on your part and a willfully twisted interpretation of the data, as many on here have patiently pointed out many times before. What the Thai people "desperately need" is health and life. No significant easing of the lockdown measures will come before 75% of the population is vaccinated. All the whinging in the world will not change this basic fact.

There is zero reason to believe that actual recoveries are exceeding new infections at this point. What we have instead is a swamped hospital system releasing still-somewhat-sick (and possibly still-infectious) people back into the community. And we have vast undercounting of new cases.

I can see it now -- coming in October: Brewster & Kadilo's All-Star Hua Hin Bar! LIVE MUSIC! NUDE DANCING! NACHOS!

Why doesn't the legal system deter all crimes? Okay, let's abolish the legal system. It doesn't do any good anyway.

Andrographis, I believe. I looked it up on PubMed a few weeks ago. It does have some antiviral properties.

Reuters Peru study finds Sinopharm COVID vaccine 50.4% effective against infections By Marcelo Rochabrun and Roxanne Liu LIMA/BEIJING, Aug 13 (Reuters) - ...The study involving Sinopharm's BBIBP-CorV vaccine, which looked at data from February through June at a time when Peru was fighting a brutal second-wave of infections fuelled by the Lambda and Gamma variants of the coronavirus, was conducted on nearly 400,000 frontline health workers in live conditions. "The efficacy to prevent infection is not high and this is something to consider once a high percentage of the population receives its two doses, (the) moment when boosters can be considered to optimize the protection of frontline health workers," said the study published last week from scientists at Peru's National Institute of Health and two other research institutes. The vaccine, however, was 94% effective at preventing deaths after two doses... https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/peru-study-finds-sinopharm-covid-vaccine-504-effective-against-infections-2021-08-13/

That's pretty good for a Saturday (yesterday). Must even be a weekend record.

Already jumped the shark.

Bloomberg News Indonesia Says Sinovac Shot Effectiveness Fell in April-June By Arys Aditya August 13, 2021, 7:04 PM GMT+8 Updated on August 13, 2021, 7:46 PM GMT+8 Indonesia found that Sinovac Biotech Ltd.’s Covid-19 vaccine was less effective at protecting against death and severe illness in April to June, compared with the previous three months. The shots prevented 79% of deaths and 53% of hospitalization in April to June, compared with 95% and 74%, respectively, in January to March, Siti Nadia Tarmizi, spokeswoman for the government’s Covid-19 task force, said in a briefing on Friday. She didn’t give a reason for the drop in the vaccine’s effectiveness... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-13/indonesia-says-sinovac-shot-s-effectiveness-fell-in-april-june

I'm betting most of us know someone or know of someone who was discharged from the hospital even though they were still sick. Maybe given a couple of weeks worth of favipiravir and paracetamol and told to take it easy. If the authorities are counting these people as "recovered," they they're juking the stats. (Which would be s-h-o-c-k-i-n-g! 55)

Fast Company 08-11-216:00 AM How BioNTech created a new delta-focused COVID vaccine in just a few weeks BY ADELE PETERS As the super-contagious delta variant began to spread widely, scientists at BioNTech, the Germany-based company that partnered with Pfizer to make the first approved COVID-19 vaccine, went into the lab to quickly create a new version of the vaccine that specifically targeted the variant. Because the company uses mRNA technology—a type of vaccine that uses the genetic code for a key protein in the virus to teach the body to make that protein and learn how to fight it off—editing the vaccine involves a relatively simple change in the code. “The vaccine we are using now has the original spike protein, and the only thing we basically need to do is cut out this part and take the spike protein of the delta variant,” says Özlem Türeci, co-founder and chief medical officer of BioNTech... https://www.fastcompany.com/90664662/how-biontech-created-a-new-delta-focused-covid-vaccine-in-just-a-few-weeks

The problem is that allowing day to day life for most people to get back to normal is impossible. At least under current conditions when Delta hasn't burned itself out yet, relaxing restrictions will just lead to an explosion in COVID cases, which is the opposite of life getting back to normal. This is just a cold, hard, inescapable reality. Thailand isn't vaccinated like the UK is. What's more, I'm not convinced the UK won't itself start slowly seeing an increase in cases again now that "freedom" has returned. As to how long Thailand's lockdown will last, no one can possibly know. Hopefully the burnout that Bkk Brian talked about will occur after some months. Two? Four? Impossible to say.

The lockdown is working as expected to slow the transmission of the virus -- to the extent a lockdown is actually being implemented. In any (modern) country, there is always a large category of public policies working invisibly to (1) facilitate some things while (2) stopping other things from happening. But you would only know this if the policies were suddenly removed, shocking the system. This is exactly what the soft Thai lockdown is doing. Remove it and virus transmission would explode, thereby killing people directly (the healthcare system would be mauled) while wrecking the economy and shattering the lives of the survivors. If anything, the lockdown should be tightened until mass vaccination can be achieved. Meanwhile, a wealth tax on the super rich should be imposed so that resources could, during this emergency, be transferred to the poor and middle classes. Sparsely populated, rich, and socialist Sweden makes for a poor comparison with Thailand. According to Worldometers, Sweden has suffered 108,845 COVID cases per million people, by far the worst performance in all of Scandinavia. By comparison, Norway has suffered only 25,907 cases per million. Sweden's death rate of 1,438 per million is nearly 10 times Norway's death rate of 147 per million. But Sweden's death rate would be even higher still if it weren't sparsely populated, rich, and socialist. Transfer the Swedish "model" of dealing with COVID to crowded (at least in Bangkok), poor, and wildly unequal Thailand and the results would be horrific. There is unfortunately no cost-free way of stopping Thailand's COVID catastrophe. The lockdown (such as it is) will likely remain in place for many more months to come.

Right, but that's also going to happen with uncontrolled COVID transmission, so what's the solution?

What would the death of the economy look like?

All the countries that got an early start on vaccination will now face the problem of waning efficacy, especially when confronting Delta. I believe Israel is now starting to offer vaccinated elderly people and those with preexisting health conditions booster shots. The U.S. will probably soon do the same. Meanwhile, the data continue to show that vaccinated people may well contract COVID but they will be much, much less likely to get seriously ill and die. Any anti-vaxxer who wants to use this new CDC advice as a tool to bash vaccines has their head screwed on backwards.

What, do you manage a bar or something?

NYT Vaccine reduces risk of infection even in people who’ve already had Covid, the C.D.C. says By Roni Caryn Rabin Aug. 6, 2021 Unvaccinated people who have had Covid-19 may be more than twice as likely to get infected again than those who tested positive and bolstered their natural immunity with a vaccine, according to a small study that assessed the likelihood of reinfection. The study, published on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, examined the risk of reinfection during May and June among hundreds of Kentucky residents who tested positive for the virus in 2020. Those who did not get vaccinated this year faced a risk of reinfection that was 2.34 higher than those who did get their shots. Released on Friday, the study suggests that for those who had overcome an infection, the addition of a vaccine offered better protection than the natural immunity generated by their original bout with the virus alone... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/06/health/covid-vaccine-reinfection.html