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| What You Need to Know Fall In-person Instruction and Operations: Thanks to carefully developed safety plans, the UO remains confident and committed to welcoming students back to campus for in-person learning, living, and experiences for fall term. Our full suite of safety plans and tools include: requiring vaccinations for all students, faculty, and staff [except those with philosophical objections who watch a video], requiring face coverings [not really, see the FAQ below], activating a regular testing strategy [regular but slow – UO won’t promise testing results quicker than 4 days], and other measures. See the COVID-19 website for more information. Vaccination: More than 95% of UO students and employees who’ve submitted their information are fully vaccinated against COVID-19. If you have not already submitted, please take action now. Students are required to use myUOHealth to submit their records. Students in residence halls must do so by September 14; all others by September 27. Remember, students who submit by September 12 will be entered to win prizes.Employees are required to complete a secure online form. The form is mobile-friendly and can be completed using any device. The deadline is September 17.Learn more on the UO vaccine webpage. Information Session: UO Safety and Risk Services will be hosting an info session for university employees on the latest campus event regulations and UO event guidance. The session takes place Tuesday, August 31, at 1:30 p.m. Register for this session. See the regulation details. Help Wanted: The Monitoring and Assessment Program (MAP) K-12 testing program is hiring, with multiple immediate openings to help provide free testing to K-12 schools in southern Oregon counties. Complete details are on the K-12 testing webpage. |
 Featured FAQ Will classes be held in rooms at full capacity? Classes are scheduled at their pre-COVID capacities for fall 2021. Will students be required to wear masks in class? Yes, the university has an indoor face-covering requirement, including classroom spaces, for all individuals. The face-covering requirement will continue to follow CDC and other public health authority sector guidance for higher education and will be based on public health indicators, including campus vaccination rates, campus case rates, community case rates, CDC transmission rates, and hospitalization data. Can an instructor teach in-person classes without a mask if they can maintain at least 6 feet of distance from the students? Yes, a fully vaccinated instructor who is at least 6 feet away from an audience can remove their mask when all others in the room are masked. If the room cannot accommodate 6-foot distancing between an instructor and students, the instructor must remain masked. See more information for instructors and researchers on the Office of the Provost website. See all the UO’s COVID-19 FAQs. |
They and a lot of ither campuses really are in a hard place. Having mandated the vaxx, they are in no position to go remote at the last moment. If they do, I can imagine a massive loss of students, say 10%. How will they meet payroll then? (Hint: not by the equivalent of the old standby of cutting the military.) Or students demanding a discount. They have sirt of been promised in person in return for vaxx.
I feel bad for the admins, I really do. But not so bad that I won’t jump ship if I feel that I need to.
I like the story of the old prof who recently retired in class when a student refused to wear a mask properly.
I for one am relieved to see that I will not need to teach with a mask on in my large lecture classes. That was my biggest concern, and am glad to see that common sense prevails.
Yes, I agree. Others may feel that they need to be masked for their own safety. Let them do that then. Personally, I will probably do without the mask for myself. I’m more concerned about air flow and ventilation. Will be looking to keeping windows open where possible, and doors. I wish the university was providing more information about this. How well ventilated is a given room? What are the air filters like, have they installed updated filters that will trap the virus? I haven’t a clue!
Guessing that if they had done that they would have flaunted it. I know the HVAC in my building is not the best.
This strategy of reliance on masking/vaccination mandates has already failed at Rice, which has already gone back to remote learning: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/us/rice-university-online-classes-delta-variant.html
Interesting passage:
“I’ll be blunt: The level of breakthrough cases (positive testing among vaccinated persons) is much higher than anticipated,” Bridget Gorman, the dean of undergraduates, wrote in a letter to the school’s 8,000 graduate and undergraduate students. The university did not release figures on the breakthrough cases.
discussions are currently underway at Case Western University to
do the same thing.
At Texas A&M, colleagues report that on the first day of classes
some students showed up covid infrected but since this is texas,
the same students will likely get elected to the texas legislature
An interesting follow-up to Rice’s high initial positives–they were mostly false positives from their testing provider switching to a new test. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/23/education/rice-university-covid-testing.html
My prediction: we will be remote after two weeks of instruction and remain so through the winter. In the meantime, many in Lane county will get sick, and some will die, as the current outbreak has a section surge when classes start.
I agree with this and then wonder what is the point of a physical start in the first place …?
I wonder if the upcoming duck game will be a spreader …
It will be for the County and Eugene but not the student population. They aren’t here yet. But they will be soon enough at Autzengrad, the Dorms, the full capacity Classrooms.
Three things.
1. Right now cases have peaked and have begun to fall from Delta. This gives me hope that Delta is not as contagious as we feared and vaccines might be more effective than some observational studies have estimated (there’s good reason they might be due to Simpson’s Paradox and the timing of vaccination in Israel which was correlated with age and wealth) https://covidestim.org/us/OR
2. Covid will be endemic for a while, maybe for ever. Regardless of classes being in person, students will come and whatever community spread they bring will happen regardless of whether classes are in person because the worst actors will party.
3. If we are remote, are classes will get smaller again, and this will result in continued pay freezes which = pay cuts when there’s 4-6 percent inflation a year, and NTTFs will lose jobs due to non renewals. If this happens to me for another year or two, I’m going to take a leave of absence and work for Amazon remotely to recover my lost earnings, and then may or may not be back depending on how stuff looks.
4. Whatever other schools in west coast do, we will copy and follow because our leadership is not gutsy enough to try anything different. So look to Cal and UCLA for a prediction of what we will do.
Schill did say he would take responsibility for his decision and would personally speak to the families of any deceased students due to Covid from in-person classes. Now will he commit to do the same for faculty, staff, ot outsiders? Or can we expect to be thanked for our shared sacrifices in a newsletter?
Will Schill take on the responsibility for the live long medical and living expenses for those with long term COVID problems? No? Didn’t think so. Can’t eat words, words don’t provide physical therapy, words don’t keep you dry and warm in the winter, words don’t physically carry you, …. etc … etc … etc.
Will you take responsibility for those who are forced to take the vaccine and are permanently injured or die from it? Especially younger people (students) who have little chance of dying from it. These vaccines are off the chart when it comes to death and injury.
This is misinformation. There are always some adverse effects for some people but they are no worse than any other vaccine, very rare, and for most specific side effects the virus itself is a much larger threat. Please consume information responsibly.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html
I think you’d be hard pressed to find any age group where hospitalization is higher for vaccination than Covid, even young and healthy people.
The better comparison is self driving cars (if they actually worked). Self driving cars will undoubtedly make some mistakes and crash. But in aggregate there will be way fewer crashes than all of us would make together.
There’s instances where airbags have killed people. Are they bad? No!!
Get out of here with your non specific antivax Alex Berenson bull shit.
Serious question, “Anonymous”: You know this isn’t true. There is abundant information explaining why it couldn’t possibly be true.
Yet you not only continue to shut all that information out, you also felt the need to post this misinformation here. Why?
“Misinformation”? Really? I’m a scientist, so I choose not to take the CDCs’ statement “COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective” at face value. This is the information that you are choosing to “shut out.” There are now almost 14,000 deaths from the Covid vaccines this year reported on VAERS, the CDC’s voluntary Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System. This compares to a total of less than 9,000 deaths from all other vaccines in the 30-year history of reporting to VAERS (1990-2020). That’s a yearly average of ~300 compared to 14,000 through August of 2021. The number of Covid-related vaccine reported hospitalizations this year is ~57,000 compared to ~78,000 for all vaccines for the previous 30 years from. VAERS is thought to reflect only 1-10% of actual adverse events. So yes, death and injury from these vaccines is off the chart. It’s riskier for young people to take the vaccine than to get and survive Covid. Most Covid cases are mild. Their chance of surviving Covid if they get infected is 99.997% (0-19 year olds) and 99.986% (20-29 year olds). Their chance of surviving the delta variant is even higher since this is a much less virulent strain compared to the original alpha variant: 0.1% IFR – infection fatality rate – the chance that you will die if infected, which is on the order of the seasonal flu.
I think your comment is misinformation and while I’m all for skepticism about everything, you’re not doing that cause much good with junk numbers. I checked the VAERS database – easy – and found 4996 deaths, 78 of them in the 6-29 age categories. The CDC explains more about what VAERS data is and is not (deaths associated with vaccination e.g. following it, with no necc. causal connection) here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html
Not misinformation. I use the open VAERS website (https://www.openvaers.com/). Easier to navigate. The CDC website currently reports 7,218 covid vaccine-related deaths from Dec 14, 2020 – Aug 30, 2021. They used to report all vaccine related deaths on their main webpage but are now excluding deaths labelled “foreign” which account for ~half the deaths. No one can get a response from the CDC when asked what this label means. The “foreign” reports look just like the other reports. Even if you don’t count those deaths, the deaths and injury from this vaccine are still extraordinarily high compared to any other vaccine. The same is true of the European databases. If you or anyone else wants to get a sense of these deaths, type in age 20-29, deceased, and covid19, an age range with few co-morbidities. You’ll get 125 reports. You be the judge of lethality and possible causality.
OK, let’s go local and just look at the Oregon data. OHA reports 18 Covid deaths so far for age 10-29. https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/oregon.health.authority.covid.19/viz/OregonCOVID-19CaseDemographicsandDiseaseSeverityStatewide/DemographicData
(And most agree Covid deaths are underreported – read the “excess deaths” analyses.) VAERS reports just 1 death “associated with” vaccine for the same age group in Oregon. https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D8;jsessionid=BC272C246DBC0CAFEA6B04962AB3 The VAERS data may well be problematic for adverse events – e.g. coughs – but it’s not at all clear it doesn’t *overreport* vaccine deaths considering that they require health professionals to report even when the link is just associational, not assumed causal.
.
So my quick takeaway is the odds of survival are far higher if you take the vaccine than if not, *even for the young, the age group with the least chance of developing serious Covid.*
Run the same numbers for any other age group and the conclusions are even more overwhelming. Much more overwhelming.
.
You’re right, don’t trust the CDC and FDA! It took them a year just to authorize emergency use of these vaccines. They’re still boasting about that one good thing they did delaying Thalidomide 60 years ago, while delaying approvals that will save hundreds of thousands of lives, net.
Here’s the explanation for foreign reports (which was not hard to find):
https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-vaers-deleted-idUSL1N2P91JS
If you want to include adverse reactions from outside the U.S., then you’d need to include vaccines administered outside the U.S. as well.
VAERS is simply low-quality data. As others have pointed out, groups can flood the system with negative reports — and given the political energy around Covid, it’s likely some are. It will be interesting to see the results when somebody actually does an analysis of the data quality. In any case, as the VAERS site itself points out: “The report of an adverse event to VAERS is not documentation that a vaccine caused the event.”
Low-quality is far too kind a description of the state of US health care data. I got my Covid jabs at Walgreens in March and April. My PCP (Peacehealth) still does not have any record of this. My only proof is a piece of cardboard that doesn’t even fit in my wallet. They also don’t know the last time I got a tetanus booster, even though it was at a Peacehealth ER 3 months ago. That said our country has nailed the online billing part of health care – frequent email reminders and they take google pay.
.
FWIW you can get the fillable pdf VAERS form here – no proof of identity or SS number required. https://vaers.hhs.gov/uploadFile/index.jsp
If this is typical for scientists at the UO, we are doomed! You failed the part of the midterm where (age, risk)-adjusted rates are compared for treatments and control.
Holy cow, “Anonymous” – you pretend to be a scientist but rely on a well known false information website for your data? No one can possibly take you seriously.
https://www.logically.ai/articles/california-woman-anti-vax-site-openvaers
You didn’t answer my question. Assuming you buy food and take medications once in a while, you’ve trusted the FDA thousands of times in the past. So what makes you think they’re lying to you now specifically about this?
Just different,
The FDA is not following normal procedures for vaccine approval that have been in place for more than 50 years to avoid atrocities like thalidomide. This includes no public hearing or release of data that supported their decision, no independent review board for vaccine safety, approval only 6 months into a phase 3 clinical trial that would have ended late in 2022 or 2023. There’s also the fact that Pfizer unblinded the placebo group. The FDA also just explicitly removed liability from the newly licensed Pfizer vaccine (Comirnaty).
I’m not going to use this space to debunk your claims (although I think I know where you’re getting this misinformation from), but you’re still just begging the question.
Let’s pretend for the sake of argument that it’s true that the FDA has substantially deviated from its past procedures in approving Comirnaty. Those procedures weren’t bequeathed by divine commandment, they were the product of expert opinion about safety and acceptable risk. The natural assumption is that whatever was involved in the FDA approval of the covid vaccine, it adhered to the same safety standards derived from the same level of expertise even if the specific procedures were different.
Unless, of course, one believes that the FDA is intentionally trying to put one over on the American people for some reason, and that every major hospital and public health department in the country is abetting this deception. Is this what you believe? If so, why?
VAERS data is unverified and anyone can submit to it. It’s pretty clearly being abused by antivaxxers. You say “VAERS is thought to reflect only 1-10% of actual adverse events”: supported by exactly as much evidence I say it is thought to reflect 999,000-1,000,000%. Nothing like a passive verb to pass the buck on source citation.
Heraclitus,
Most VAERS reports are from medical personnel. Not easy to file a report. Regarding the percentage of adverse events these reports represent, there’s the well-known Harvard report funded by NIH that estimates that VAERS reports represent only 1% of the actual adverse events. In the past, vaccines were taken off the market after between 25-50 deaths (e.g., swine flu vaccine). Not so with these experimental vaccines.
Haha, well known *Harvard Pilgrim* study! Ok, nice troll. You got a bunch of us. I’m out.
Anonymous,
VAERS is endlessly fascinating and deeply flawed as a source of medical data. Pharma Cos. and healthcare workers are required to file reports, but it’s open to anybody, patients, family, friends. Not that hard to file. Useless in determining causation. Like so many other things these days, VAERS got politicized — the news is old now but check this out: https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/misinterpretation-of-vaers-database-leads-tucker-carlson-to-wrongly-suggests-that-covid-19-vaccines-are-linked-to-higher-mortality-on-fox-news/
Schill should tour all the large lecture halls to show his belief in how safe it is – starting with the current Law courses where students are eating and drinking and one instructor has already contracted Covid in the first week.
1. unproven we don’t know.
2. assumed.
3. unknown but likely.
4. true: leadership vacuum.
What I find appalling is Admin disconnect to county hospital capacity to handle the numbers of cases. Today timestamp. And now loss of nurses etc. And we have K-12 to consider to the county.
That originally was a metric, county hospital capacity, for closing or opening. Reload Eugene w/20,000+ students, several 1000 GE’s/GTFs/Instructors/Fac. And then our Staff. Will the institution be responsible? Ideas?
1. True but real time data suggest it’s peaking, and more studies are calling to question estimates about vaccines efficacy with observational data last year.
2. It is exactly what happened last year. What do you think will happen this year when most of them are vaccinated and there are no state or city regulations against group gatherings on private property (parties).
3. true
4. true
The risk of hospitalization is about 1/100 for cases for most age groups (get slightly higher in age), so 1/300-1/400 per infection, unvaccinated. You then multiple by .05 and you get 1/6000-1/8000. So if people are vaccinated, even all 20,000 students getting sick = about 2-3 hospitalizations if all are vaccinated. Multiple by 3 or 4 for faculty over 50.
So among the vaccinated the risk of hospitalization is not high. But is our vaccination rate 96 percent? Or is 96*(.5)+0*5 and only at 50 percent or so, given only around 50 percent had reported their vaccination status?
So I don’t think the risks are 0, but I think the marginal contribution of classrooms to community spread will be small, relative to tinder and party spread of the virus which I think will likely happen whatever we do.
uomatters,
I don’t agree with your statement that covid deaths are under reported. There’s a financial incentive for hospitals to count deaths as Covid deaths. The vast majority of covid deaths (where covid was a contributing factor) are in people with co-morbidities (all the underlying causes of death should be listed, rather than just covid, but the CDC changed the reporting rules last year) and many are listed as covid deaths simply because a person tested positive (false positive). There is no way to know actual covid deaths but you can get a sense from the CDCs all-cause mortality excess deaths data. Vaccine deaths and injury, are definitely under reported. There’s an incentive here as well to not highlight problems so that the government achieves its goal of getting as many people as possible vaccinated. Regarding risk-benefit, Pfizer’s 6-month study failed to show any evidence of a net mortality benefit from the vaccine and there was a significant increase in all cause severe morbidity (severe adverse events) compared to the placebo group. Despite all of this, I think that it should be a personal choice as to whether or not you choose to get vaccinated. Voluntary informed consent!
“But there are several myths out there too. We need to set the record straight.
Hospitals do not receive extra funds when patients die from COVID-19. They are not over-reporting COVID-19 cases. And, they are not making money on treating COVID-19.
The truth is, hospitals and health systems are in their worst financial shape in decades due to the coronavirus. In some cases, the situation is truly dire. An AHA report estimates total losses for our nation’s hospitals and health systems of least $323 billion in 2020. There is no windfall here.
Further, hospitals and health systems adhere to strict coding guidelines, and use of the COVID-19 code for Medicare claims is reserved for confirmed cases. Coding inappropriately can result in criminal penalties and exclusion from the Medicare program altogether.
According to the CDC, there have been as many as 223,000 more deaths this year compared to a typical year. There have been 180,000 deaths due to COVID-19. There is no reasonable explanation for the increased deaths other than the coronavirus.”
https://www.aha.org/news/blog/2020-09-03-covid-19s-death-count-real-so-financial-strain-life-saving-hospitals
And here I thought it was international news when someone dies and the vaccine is thought to be the smoking gun.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58380867
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-57173286
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/cdc-is-investigating-oregon-woman-s-death-after-j-j-vaccine-1.5398821
Speaking of our neighbors to the north they have some interesting clean data:
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/covid-19-in-the-u-s-how-do-canada-s-provinces-rank-against-american-states-1.5051033
With their socialist national health care system, only 38million people, 78% of eligible population fully vaccinated… Their data seems simple and easy to read. I am sure we can do the same thing for many of those commie socialist nations that have national heath care with good data. I have no reason to second guess their data; however, with a global conspiracy of the magnitude you seem to believe in, I guess only those things that align with your view are correct authoritative sources?
Here is Canada Vaccine Bad Shit Happens report:
https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/vaccine-safety/
The “Summary and Background info” top link is very useful. And yes bad shit happens… Note, Canada used some drugs that were not good enough for an American (AstraZ)!
Here is Canada Virus report:
https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-summary-covid-19-cases.html
It is chock full of information easy to digest. Near the bottom is Covid deaths by age.
Just comparing this data… It seems to me that, although disputed, even if all 190 deaths that were reported (up to a month) after the vaccine, were caused by the vaccine. It is still be better to get the vaccine. So just get theF*ing shot.
It is not about personal choice, it is about common good. By any measure, it a farce to think when you as an individual walks in to get a shot you fear dying… Death by vaccine odds are less or same as the odds of dying by lightning or dog attack (Or A dog attack while being burned to death by ODonald’s Coffee while being stung by a bee). { ~ 1 in 119,000 or 237,000 depending on per dose or per person, Canada implemented a 4 month delay between shots} So just get theF*ing shot.
The data can be read to say that: predicated on the 75+% of citizens who did their duty for the common good and got the shot and given your select special myopic demographic slice, which may fare better than all those suckers keeping you safe today, you could be lazy and be just fine.
But that is only this year, what about the next, and the year after and the decade after that? And your grandma, and your kids if you have any? If this becomes endemic (see below superbug), if the virus is not stopped it could get so much worse… So just get theF*ing shot.
I could go off on tangent how there is a chance that the MRNA vaccine may have a a fatal flaw limiting is usability timeline and potential to breed a superbug, but that is a problem if everyone does not (did not) get the vaccine, and we reach some level of that unicorn heard immunity. So just get theF*ing shot.
Perhaps you believe the lab leak theory, then since China was reported to be literally locking people in the early days to stop the spread. Then surely they must know something we don’t and are covering it up; exactly how bad this could be and how much it could cost.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/coronavirus-china-deception-accountable-congress-chris-smith
So just get theF*ing shot.
I mean sure I suppose I could say that granny and all those septua/ocata-genarians dying off was a great boon to the healthy beautiful snowflakes and millennials unlocking all grannies cash to plow into Gamestop, Dogecoin, and the hot housing market! An economist out there would probably know more about this and if it really is better for society to wave grandma off at the ice flow, but again I think this logic is predicated on myopic self interest. I would say that some day everyone will become a septuagenarian but that may not be the case. So just get theF*ing shot.
The shot will hurt far fewer than the number it could protect… Which is damm near everyone for all of time like other vaccines for Small Pox and polio… If only we can knock it out and soon.
SO GET THE FUCKING SHOT!
Or maybe, in the end, like climate change, it is too late. The forever pandemic is baked in, reaping the old, the poor, the fat, the unhealthy; sparing the young, the beautiful, the rich, and the powerful.
Please be better, try, just be kind, and get the shot.
just different,
Everything I listed regarding the FDA is true. So, debunk away!
I assume you know that the FDA gets trillions of $ from big pharma, so if safety is their primary concern, they would follow normal safety protocols. Normally new vaccines would have animal trials and full phase 3 human clinical trials before full approval. Not so here. The candidate corona virus vaccines (using the same technology as the current covid vaccines) developed after the 2002 coronavirus out breaks (SARS and MERS) all failed the animal trials – the animals developed ADE (anti body dependent enhancement). Given that history, why depart from normal protocol?
Regarding hospitals, they get financially reimbursed for covid patients and for the use of ventilators. Many of them are also rigidly following treatment guidelines (e.g., use of Remdesivir which is linked to kidney and organ failure and has not been shown to be effective in treating covid) rather than other treatment options because they are immune from legal action under the PREP Act only for the small set of treatments (Remdesivir, dexamethasone, oxygen, and a ventilator) prescribed by the federal government.
Your question as to why, well that’s the big question. Too long to discuss here.
OK, so the FDA and the hospitals are on the take and they’ve sold us all out. What about thousands of local public health officials?
_
Again, I’m not going to debunk, but everything you said is either factually incorrect or misleading, as well as a dead giveaway about who you’re listening to. To restate the crux of my question–which you still haven’t answered–why do you find them more trustworthy than the people whose 24/7 job it is to safeguard our health? Don’t you think your sources are profiting from spreading misinformation as well as immune from liability from the damage they do?
I’m listening to and reading articles by scientists and doctors – epidemiologists, vaccine experts and developers, doctors who have treated 1000s of Covid patients … You keep making statements that everything I’m saying isn’t factual or is misleading. Really, not good enough. What I don’t listen to is MSM. I’ve turned off my TV in the last year because it’s just a stream of propaganda. I’ve taken a deep dive into the science and politics of covid and current events. Regarding your question of why I think the government is so desperately pushing these dangerous “vaccines” that are failing to protect against the delta variant, why there is a suppression of effective alternative early treatments, why big tech is suppressing anything that goes against the narrative, well, in a nutshell, it has to do with instilling fear for the purpose of social control. We’ve seen it before in history. But so many of you are completely blind to the manipulation. Book smarts but no street smarts!
The problem with the Institute of Advanced YouTube Research is that its graduates don’t pass the test. As I mentioned above, you failed the midterm, where relevant adjusted rates are compared to evaluate vaccine safety. Also you failed the part of the final wherein low-powered, poorly designed, observational studies are evaluated for the ability to produce anything beyond noise. (By “effective alternative treatments” I assumed you are referring to internet podcaster favorite Ivermectin, nee hydroxychloroquine.) You get an F for the course, but better luck the next time.
OK, thanks for taking the time to answer.
_
Hey hUB, do you get it yet? “Vaccine skepticism” is not about vaccine skepticism, at least with respect to covid. The “skepticism” is a rationalization (and often a very complicated one) marshalled in support of the conclusion.
Anon-
It sounds like you believe incentive and profits motivate people and corporations to do bad things?
Then if I were trying to analyze incentive, I would say that the mega-low hospitals, the big-mega-low-Pharma, and the Assakeler type families and cabals behind them self interest is to KEEP THE GRAVY FLOWING (kind of like a ‘war’ in the middle of a poppy field in a high mountain desert on the other side of the world for two decades).
Incentive would lead not to a bad product but rather not wanting a pandemic to end… to become an endemic pandemic. The easiest way to achieve this would be to spread mis-information, to prevent 100% uptake of the vaccine. That would be a win-win: all the shots for this round are probably pre-paid for by governments, and thanks to the 30-40% that don’t get the shot they will be able to sell new ones every year; while the people do fall ill–most of which who did not get the shot–will show up in the ER for some pure profit for the hospital-industrial complex to stack on top of their other mountains of procedures.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/when-cancer-screening-stopped/619994/
I do not buy your argument that it is in their interest to create a non-functional product; that is not the way consumerism works your cell phone has to work, or else you would not buy one every year; however, it does need to have planned obsolescence so you can keep selling it every year with a minor tweak to meet the new needs of the same client.
Of course if you really want to get down in the fog then you would ask why it is taking so long for the vaccine to be approved for the school aged children, and at the same time there is a rabid mob and questionable politicians adulating to pass laws (along with ‘voter rights’) to send those same children to overcrowded, poorly ventilated schools without masks, and without social distancing. What is that about 30 million people, which could contact ? 10-25% of the households in the US? (data not exact used ~1/3 of the 40% of households with under 18.). https://www.statista.com/statistics/183790/number-of-families-in-the-us-by-number-of-children/
What is a mystery to me is what the incentive is of politicians to force anti-mask laws?
Your last question is easy: They’re picking sides.
_
Like every culture-war issue, it’s a proxy for who should be in control. Winning a battle in the culture war never makes anyone’s life better (although it sometimes makes some people’s lives worse), but it’s a symbolic victory. If those are the only kind of victories you have any realistic chance of achieving, they become extremely important.
Stumbled on one more stat to put a pin in this long dead link… Alberta is Canada’s Anti-vax Texas so they should have no reason to fix the number is a ‘pro-vax’ light.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-severe-outcomes-covid-vaccination-1.6178449
This gets to a little finer detail about who is paying the price of not getting vaccinated. And it states again, for grandma, get the shot…. And if this becomes endemic, year over year, morphing and changing, perhaps there will be no more grandma’s and grandpa’s over 70?
1/5 of Oregon deaths are fully or partially vax’d 1/6 of Oregon hospitalizations for Covid are fully or partially vax’d
As Frank Cappuccino said “protect yourself at all times”
Kingeider,
I take it you are referring to the Oregonian article that has much more info than just that stat?
https://www.oregonlive.com/coronavirus/2021/09/nearly-80-of-fatalities-in-deadly-august-covid-surge-among-unvaccinated-partially-vaccinated-oregonians.html
Meanwhile, further south of here: “SOU will reopen campus as soon as it is safe to do so during fall 2021! Classes will be primarily remote to begin fall term, and will shift to largely in-person on Oct. 11 or soon thereafter.” Linky (Emphasis mine)
Still south of here, but much closer to home: “Recent conditions related to the surge in cases caused by the Delta variant have caused LCC to re-evaluate planned in-person instruction for Fall 2021. For fall term, through at least October 24, we will be operating in a mostly remote learning environment. Many courses that had scheduled in-person activity may move to Zoom (during the same scheduled time) until October 24, or perhaps be moved to Zoom for the entire term.” Linky
Super spreader events before Delta were the parties, dorms, Duck games. But with Delta and full classrooms those classes will be the new super spreader event. Everyday all day long.