Are you hunkering down?

I’m not into conspiracy theories...
Click to expand...
Maybe not, but you certainly stumbled into this one.

Judy Mikovits is a discredited scientist who now makes her living by being a darling of the anti-vaccine crowd. She is promoted by far right media folks who love to "uncover" government plots designed to undermine American liberty and God's natural order.
 
smckean (Tosca)":2skmpq0d said:
...and God's natural order.
Click to expand...

You'd think that they'd spend some time proving God's existence to be sure that there even is such a thing as "God's natural order".

Since there is no evidence to the contrary, perhaps the existence of God is another conspiracy.
 
I am not religious myself, but I once had a good friend who was an Christian evangelical. He and I took backpacking trips together and often talked philosophy.

In one of those discussions, we were discussing the power of prayer. I mentioned to him that I had read of a study where 400 patients in a hospital were divided into 2 groups. One group was prayed for and the other was not. The results showed that there was no difference in recovery between the 2 groups. I thought I had my friend in a logical disproof of the power of prayer. But no......he said such an experiment would be doomed to failure since God would insure that no difference could be measured because God can't be "tricked" in such a way. OK, I thought.....clever, I thought.....until it dawned on me that in order to keep himself a mystery, God allowed the X number of patients in the prayed-for group, who might have recovered due to prayer had the experiment not been conducted, to perish. Once again I found myself disappointed in God that he would allow those folks to die rather than to reveal himself.
 
I grew up in the church and now would consider myself a secular Lutheran.

Many years ago I dated a very beautiful Baptist girl. We often had very interesting discussions about religion and commonly about creation vs evolution. One day I brought up the topic of evolution and how do you explain all those dinosaur fossils that are found in Alberta, many being tens of millions of years old. She was steadfast that the world was created only 6,000 years ago. She decided to ask her pastor about this. The next week we went out again and she had an answer that her pastor had given her. All those dinosaur bones were petrified in the earth and put there by God at the time of creation to 'test our faith'. I never could convince her otherwise and I never did marry her.
 
I too, once had a relationship with a Southern Baptist girl for a few years. She was religious (more so as time went on) and I am not. One day we were having a discussion on religion. I said something that resulted in my girl friend saying that if I continued to say that "God will strike you dead." My answer was "No, He will strike you dead to demonstrate to me that He exists. If He struck me dead that wouldn't prove anything to me 'cause I'd just be dead. However, a lightning bolt coming through the window right now and striking you dead might convince me."

She did not believe that God would strike her dead just to prove a point. I said I couldn't believe in something without some sort of proof.

I'm still alive, and AFIAK she is still alive. But that doesn't prove the existence of God one way or the other.
 
ssobol":1ob2ng8e said:
SNIP ...that doesn't prove the existence of God one way or the other.
Click to expand...

I've held that 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'. Maybe just
because it has a sort of ring to it (?).

Simultaneously, on the efficacy of prayer, many would argue the Pope is
considered one of the most Holy human beings on the planet at any time
and that every Pope over time has prayed for world peace. You would think
these prayers would be of the highest value for mankind if heard 'above'.
You know the result.

Aye.
Oh, I once knew this girl...
 
On 'opening up' like switching 'ON' a light switch - it makes no sense.

On 'opening up' like a 'DIMMER' switch - makes more sense as an area
(community, state, country) demonstrates non-exponential spread of the
virus (Rt value below 1.0). We still are very much 'in-the-dark' about this
new virus.

On a recent learn, we lack a unified STRATEGY to eliminate COVID-19.

Instead, we have various TACTICS being implemented willy-nilly without
a focused goal. This is doomed to fail, the virus will win and attempts to
reopen the economy will become meaningless.

Aye.
PS: Watch for sewage testing as current 'testing' is partly 'merde' (FR)...
 
as an area
(community, state, country) demonstrates non-exponential spread of the
virus (Rt value below 1.0). We still are very much 'in-the-dark' about this
new virus.
Click to expand...

I believe that a Foggy means R0 or r0 value (pronounced "R naught". If the value is R1 it means that for every infection there will be spread of one more infection. If lower than one, less than one person,. iIf more than one, (for example R2, each infected will on an average infect two more--and those each will infect two more).

The average rate has been R2.2 (2 to 2.7) in the US at height. Some areas, for example New York City have been much higher, and many areas far lower. There are demographic reasons, as well as social distancing, hygiene, masks all help to keep the infection from spreading.

Public health experts are keeping graphs of each state, county, zip code etc. These are where the decisions to open or not open businesses should / are being made. Actually it is far better to have local plans. Where Jay lives in a very rural area vs someone in New York City is vastly different. There are a number of small enclaves where there has been minimal if any COVID 19 spread, and some of those have continued almost business as usual.

My worry (and I am observing this, in Pensacola, Florida, as is my son in San Clemente CA) that as business open up, people forget about the social distancing and masking. Both of these are essential to keep the R0 low and prevent another spike in the infections.

Opening Business can be done safely, but all people must comply or it may be fraught with dangers of wider spread of the virus.
 
As Foggy has mentioned a couple of times, the R(t) number [not to be confused, as it often is, with R(0)] is very interesting to track since it is calculated to reflect how quickly a contagious disease is currently spreading in a particular population. To that end, here is an excellent and fascinating website. Have a look at your state.

https://rt.live/
 
Sandy,
You are correct--and Rt is in "real time"--although it is really about 6 days behind because of incubation period.

Thanks for correcting tha.
 
thataway,

Actually my post was not meant as a correction (altho R(0) and R(t) are 2 different things, that's true). I was writing my post when you posted yours; so I had not read your post when I wrote mine.

P.S. Note R(t) does not just vary in time in relation to R(0); R(t) takes in lots of variables: time, place, population being evaluated, people's mitigating actions. In epistemology circles, R(0) is defined as “the number of secondary cases one case would produce in a completely susceptible population"; whereas R(t) is the actual rate of transmission now, in this place, in this population, under these circumstances.
 
Wyoming in the red with a RT 1.03 with a total of 6 deaths & zero deaths since April 24 with zero deaths projected into August vs New York & other states with RT of O.80 or less with hundreds still dying daily & many more projected into August. I’ll take Wyoming & happily travel here rurally to my outdoor destinations.

Jay
 
Yes indeed, Wyoming is certainly less populated than say NY or my state of Washington. None the less, if in your travels you happen to stop at McDonald's for lunch, then assuming that there are approximately the same number of people inside a MacDonald's at lunch time wherever you are, you are more likely to catch the virus in the Wyoming Micky D's than you are at Micky's in either NY or Washington state.

Alternatively, stay away from all people, all the time, and you are guaranteed not to get the virus.
 
Sandy, thanks for clarifying. I agree that both have their use. but in the modeling the (Rt) is better for prediction.... But the time delay is really an issue currently. I feel we will not really know what the effect of opening up business will be for at least 3 weeks.

I was out and about Monday, and today. Today people are taking even less precautions than they were on Monday. There is still limiting number of patrons. Ace hardware allowed 6. The hydraulic shop allowed only 2. So there were lines at each. But I was the only person I observed wearing a mask, and strictly keeping the distance of over 6 feet (at least trying)...

MacDonald's where Jay lives??? I think it is more likely a moose on the hoof.. (kidding)
 
For those of you who were interested to go to the website I posted earlier:

https://rt.live/

note there is a button for each state titled "show/hide new cases". Click on that button for NY and for Texas. The resulting solid black line graph is extremely interesting......and I suspect in a trained epidemiologist's hands, tells quite a story.
 
Posted May 7
smckean (Tosca)":2i81b50n said:
For those of you who were interested to go to the website I posted earlier:

https://rt.live/

note there is a button for each state titled "show/hide new cases". Click on that button for NY and for Texas. The resulting solid black line graph is extremely interesting......and I suspect in a trained epidemiologist's hands, tells quite a story.
Click to expand...

Posted May 4
Foggy":2i81b50n said:
This is the most reasonable way to determine "opening up" vs staying "hunkered"
w/o a vaccine or therapeutic medication. Difficult for some since it involves data
and science. It removes opinions, politics and guessing; hence reasonable. It also
can be calculated for the nation, states or smaller areas.


The Metric We Need to Manage COVID-19
Rt: the effective reproduction number
(Partial quotes from reference)
There’s one metric, however, that has the most promise. It’s called Rt – the effective reproduction number. We can estimate it, and it’s the key to getting us through the next few months.

Most people are more familiar with R0. R0 is the basic reproduction number of an epidemic. It’s defined as the number of secondary infections produced by a single infection. If R0 is greater than one, the epidemic spreads quickly **. If R0 is less than one, the epidemic spreads, but limps along and disappears before everyone becomes infected. The flu has an R0 between one and two while measles sits in the high teens. While R0 is a useful measure, it is flawed in an important way: it’s static.

Tracking Rt also lets us know when we might loosen restrictions. Any suggestion that we loosen restrictions when Rt > 1.0 is an explicit decision to let the virus proliferate. At the same time, if we are able to reduce Rt to below 1.0, and we can reduce the number of cases overall, the virus becomes manageable. Life can begin to return to ‘normal.’ But without knowing Rt we are simply flying blind.
http://systrom.com/blog/the-metric-we-n ... -covid-19/
Click to expand...


See https://rt.live for current updates.

Aye.
Oh, "flying blind" is akin to opening up while the virus is spreading exponentially;
driving your boat in dense fog at WOT.
Click to expand...

On the same page now?

Aye.
 
kennharriet":1cbzl846 said:
Another interesting listen. I’m not into conspiracy theories but hope there is an honest investigation at some point.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=you ... si9csLNb-Y
Click to expand...

Well, here's one investigator's response. I have misplaced her name, but submit her response for your perusal

"Ok friends, let's chat about the "Plandemic" video with Dr. Judy Mikovits which I've also seen with a header including "Dr. Tony Fauci's ex-employee." I have a few points I'd like to make as someone who has worked at the National Institutes of Health and is a current PhD candidate in biomedical research. Views are my own but those are my "credentials."
1) The 2009 Science paper (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/ ... 5.abstract) mentioned in the first minute was retracted in 2011. Retraction means enough scientists raised concerns about the validity of the work and when given the chance to respond, the original authors were unable to reliably support their work. It is believed the original findings were due to lab contamination (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3426297/). The description in the video that her work found "the common use of animal and human fetal tissues were unleashing devastating plagues of chronic diseases" is not even an accurate description of what the retracted paper described.
2) Dr. Judy Mikovits never worked for Dr. Tony Fauci. He has been the head of NIAID since 1984 and that institute is one of 27 institutes and centers of the National Institutes of Health. Potentially the NIAID provided extramural grants that funded some parts of Mikovits' research at some point in her career, but that doesn't mean she was an employee of Dr. Fauci. Furthermore, the grant that funded the retracted Science paper was actually from National Cancer Institute.
3) I am not an expert in legal matters but she seems to be exaggerating her legal troubles. A private medical research institute, Whittemore Peterson Institute, fired her for not sharing a cell line with another researcher there. She was accused of taking computer data, equipment, etc from the institute. You can read more from the journal Science https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2011/11 ... researcher and the journal Nature: http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/12/in ... ovits.html.
4) Around 4:00 she states, "Everybody else was paid off and paid off big time, millions of dollars in funding from Tony Fauci and Tony Fauci's organization NIAID." Let me explain how NIH extramural funding works. Investigators don't get paid by the NIAID or Dr. Fauci. They are awarded funding based on grant applications they write, typically proposing detailed study aims. These grants are evaluated by a panel of established experts in a given field who convene from universities across the country to score the grant applications based on scientific merit. Funding is quite competitive! Program officers employed by NIH then check up that researchers are progressing in their scientific aims which they receive federal funding to pursue. You can read more about NIH peer review here: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/peerreview22713webv2.pdf (Edit Note: I realized at 7:45 p.m. on May 7 I had incorrectly repeated the link from #3 above instead of the intended link, which is now represented here)
5) Around 6:00 she talks about her work with Dr. Ruscetti and accuses Dr. Fauci of holding up publication of a paper which led to the delay of confirmation of HIV as the virus causing AIDS, and therefore Dr. Fauci is at fault for the virus spreading and killing millions. The governmental responses to HIV/AIDS is an important topic with a rich history of debate, but to address her accusation, one scientist cannot just "hold up a paper for publication" in this manner. Scientific journals ask experts to peer review research before publication, and sometimes papers go through a slow peer review process to ensure the robustness of finding. But she does not even use this language when describing the situation. On Pubmed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) where you can search scientific papers, the papers from 1986 with Dr. Ruscetti and Dr. Mikovits as co-authors cite affiliations with the National Cancer Institute so again, not even under the same institute as Dr. Fauci.
6) Around 12:00 she says Ebola couldn't infect human cells until scientists taught the virus how in the laboratory. She is seeming to imply that her work in 1999 made Ebola infectious...but the first Ebola outbreaks were in 1976 in Africa: https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/about.html
7) Around 14:00 they discuss an alleged artificial inflation of COVID-19 death tolls to make the pandemic appear worse than it is. Defining COVID-19 deaths for death certificates is a difficult challenge for sure! But if we just consider all-cause mortality and remain agnostic to whether deaths are due to COVID-19, we can compare deaths in April/March to what we historically see. It is obvious there is quite a tragic loss of life. The CDC allows visualization of these excess deaths (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covi ... deaths.htm) and the NY Times looks state by state (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... ll-us.html). A caveat: "All of these numbers are likely to be a substantial undercount of the ultimate death toll, since death counting takes time and many states are weeks or months behind in reporting." (Edit Note: It was brought to my attention it isn't clear this quote is from the NY Times article linked before it)
8) Around 15:00 Dr. Mikovits states that hospitals get a lot more money from Medicare with a diagnosis of COVID-19 and if you use a ventilator for treatment. The CARES act does provide for this higher allocation of funds to treat COVID-19 patients, who on average have 11 day hospital stays which is double that of the flu (https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandso ... -different). But there is no evidence that hospitals are creating fraudulent diagnoses or putting patients on ventilators that shouldn't be placed on ventilators just for the money. You can read about this here: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/fac ... 000638001/
I could go on and on finding evidence to prove Dr. Mikovits is just spouting every conspiracy theory and piece of misinformation floating around the internet. But to be honest, I have actual research to do. So let me give you some tools to gauge authenticity in the future. Any PhD trained scientist with credibility would be showing citations for past papers they are discussing or present data and figures to back up their claims. Good scientists rarely speak in absolutes, but usually explain caveats and nuances of their conclusions. In the video she moves from tangent to tangent with no real thesis, consistent narrative, or evidence. If the production team were real journalists there would be interviews with other sources to corroborate her stories, not just clips lacking context or names/affiliations/citations. Also, this wouldn't come from some sketchy account on YouTube. PLEASE think before you share content. Do some googling and look for articles by reputable sources that seem to converge on the same facts. I know we may disagree about what constitutes a reputable source, but .edu, .org., .gov are usually solid. Finally, we are all prone to bias and you may do well to learn about confirmation bias: https://catalogofbias.org/biases/confirmation-bias/.
Listen, I'm not saying people in power should be explicitly trusted, but Dr. Tony Fauci has a demonstrated track record of public service that spans administrations of both parties and multiple public health crises. To latch on to conspiracy theories instead of uniting to work on the COVID-19 crisis at hand is an awful waste of passion and energy."
 
To latch on to conspiracy theories instead of uniting to work on the COVID-19 crisis at hand is an awful waste of passion and energy."
Click to expand...

Thank you sir. I agree 100%. I have not done much basic research, but I did chair the research committee at an academic institution hospital for a number of years. What you said about grants, payments, publication, peer reviews etc is spot on.

Maybe, if you are not able make a living as a scientist, there is money to be made selling books about conspiracy theories! "Plague of Corruption" is the # 1 book by sales on Amazon currently!
 
Another wonderful Wyoming weekend spent with my youngest son & daughter in law & 9 year old grand daughter. We used our Kaboat rubber inflatables to float under power down the Green River 30 miles, starting at the town of Green River, WY & stopping to sit by the camp fire & then spend the night at the confluence of the Black Fork & Green River on Flaming Gorge Reservoir. Saw more Pelicans in one place then ever before, along with many other varieties of wildlife. It’s also a place of amazing scenery. All talk & even thoughts of COVID19 were totally gone. I feel sorry for those going through tough financial times & the ones who are sick or worried about becoming so & all who are hunkering down either by choice or force. Next Weekend, the plans are to run the Green River the same way from just below the Fontenelle Dam, through the Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge.

We are all self contained & can make these trips if desired without involving anyone else or at least none that don’t want to be. Much like what ’ve been doing most of my life.

Jay
 
Back
Top