Tuesday, May 12, 2020

Herd Immunity is Bullshit

I was listening to Coast to Coast AM for the first time in over a year and I was so filled with rage that I had to spend the past full hour writing a rebuttal to the sheer amount of bullshit being spread by the professional bullshit artists on the show.

G. Edward Griffin is a charlatan, not an expert on anything.

*He believes in quack theories about cancer being an amygdalin deficiency that have been disproven

*He believes the HIV virus - which we have electron microscope pictures of - doesn't exist

*He believes that a mountain in Turkey that's 100% rock all the way through is literally Noah's Ark

Also, Coast staple Carnivora is a placebo. Reagan did not take it for coughing, he didn't take it at all, he took one of the ingredients in isolate for colon cancer and it didn't work because his cancer returned and he had to have several feet of intestine surgically removed.

To top it off, Griffin wants to infect 80% of the population with Covid. Even with a 1% fatality rate that's still 3 million people dead (and the 1% is me being generous, so far a full 16% of all resolved cases has ended with death). What's worse he wants to infect 300 million people at the same time to reach some magic bullshit called "herd immunity" (not real herd immunity, which would involve vaccinating tens of millions of people, but the magic bullshit variety of infecting 300 million people all at once and when the last person has died then everyone else will be naturally immune).

In South Korea they didn't sacrifice 500,000 people on the altar of herd immunity, they isolated the people who were sick, did contact tracing, implemented policies of basic respect for other people, and defeated the disease with only 10,000 people getting infected. That's just 0.018% of the total population - nowhere near the 80% professional bullshit artist Griffin wants to infect in the US. New cases are in the single or low double digits. Most of the population never had to come in contact with the disease and they've been able to relax restrictions to a sensible level and get the country up and running again. v With Smallpox we didn't sacrifice a billion people on the altar of herd immunity, we developed a vaccine to surround and contain outbreaks in ever smaller and smaller pockets, and when the last case was resolved it was over. Permanently. Most of the population never had to come in contact with the disease and now it's gone forever.

We could have taken sensible steps to defeat Covid in America like South Korea did, but this is 'Murica and we have freedumb and don't want to give up our freedumb necessary to do contact tracing and isolate potentially sick people! We got the 14th amendment or something. I don't know what any of the amendments are but I don't have to because I like to blow stuff up and look at big titties wrapped in the 'Murican flag and have other people's kids invade countries that are full of oil and die because this is 'Murica!

The herd immunity that Griffin believes in wouldn't even work because each time a virus divides it has the chance to mutate. Viruses divide millions of times inside each person they infect. Contact tracing and quarantining the potentially sick would afford the virus maybe a billion opportunities to mutate. Letting it infect 300 million people will give it a million trillion opportunities to mutate. What happens when the virus mutates? The immune system no longer recognizes it and a person who has recovered can get sick again. You would then have to re-infect EVERYONE to get the chance to develop herd immunity again. But oops! In infecting 300 million people again you've now developed five more mutations and everyone can get sick five more times and it infects everyone again and mutates again, and now the disease is permanent. You've now got a disease which wipes out 1% of the entire population of the planet every single year.

It's a heavy price to pay. I fully understand there are a lot of people living paycheck to paycheck who NEED to go back to work to put food on the table, and that NEED is translated in their minds to an erroneous DESIRE to work, but there are better solutions that letting 300 million people get infected at the same time. I also understand that there are rich people who either already work from home or are retired and want to send the wage slaves back into the economy because their 401k has depreciated, or because they've built up a reputation as big conservative with a puffed out chest and a bully pulpit, but fuck those people.

We can do contact tracing and quarantining the potentially infected, quarantine everyone voluntarily and let them go party out in the streets and go to golf courses and beaches and Mardi Gras and spread the infection, or we can sacrifice millions of people on the alter of bullshit and call it the new normal. I opt for the first choice, the puffed chests and charlatans opt for the third. And that's the way it is, 12 May 2020. Goodnight.