A university president makes a case against cowardice

He is making a stink about Covid vaccine requirements during a period where hospitals were overflowing and bodies were being stacked in refrigerated trailers.

There are no stories about this outside the first month. The hospitals were initially ill equipped but were so well equipped after March/April that the giant boat they sent as a backup to New York was barely used.

Almost no healthy people died from COVID, most had co-morbidities and they should have been the only ones forced to vax and stay home.

Vaccines were a miracle. The state medical examiner converted one nearby university’s arena to a temporary morgue at one point in 2020. It’s mind boggling that people were and still are in denial about how bad it got before large parts of the population started getting vaccinated

For real. The sibling comment is flagged now but people seem to have memoryholed the impact of COVID on the healthcare system.

Hospitals were absolutely overwhelmed at many points during parts of the pandemic, outside of the first month. That was a major concern during the "surges" and spread of new variants.

I know this because my state routinely publishes hospital census levels and at many points during the pandemic elective and even non-elective procedures had to be cancelled due to lack of bed and staff capacity. The facility I work at was regularly impacted.

Search hospital related COVID stories during 2021 and 2022 and you'll find plenty.

> memoryholed

The people who voluntarily glued themselves to propaganda TV never paid attention to it in the first place. They'll believe whatever they need to because they're mad about lockdowns.

Are we living in the same world? I had a child born about that time which was one of the few ways to actually get into a hospital. When I went in the fucking place was barren. A bunch of medical professionals shaking in their shoes waiting for something that never came. I knew then and there I knew i was being sold a lie and the news was carefully orchestrating snippets of misrepresented footage. And then went about my business as normal.

Look at the timeline of literally any plague, as they all follow a very similar pattern. For instance here [1] is the one for the Spanish Flu. There are a number of peaks and valleys that gradually recess to noise as viruses tend to evolve to less virulent forms while people also simultaneously develop broader immunity. This makes observational data highly unreliable for determining the efficacy of a vaccine during a plague.

The same is true of mortality/severity rates by vaccination status in hospitals. People who opt in to a vaccine are generally going to be more inclined to seek hospital treatment than those who opt out of such. So if somebody unvaccinated went to the hospital for COVID it would naturally be, on average, a much more severe case than a vaccinated person going to the hospital, with worse overall outcomes. And so you skew the results when looking at hospital data.

These biases and trends are facts most people may not be aware of, but big pharma certainly is.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#/media/File:1918_s...

> I knew then and there I knew i was being sold a lie and the news was carefully orchestrating snippets of misrepresented footage. And then went about my business as normal.

It’s extremely poor reasoning to rely on your individual anecdotal experience of your hospital visit to conclude that there is a global conspiracy on a massive scale. Was all the footage of overflowing hospitals and makeshift morgues fabricated?

Fwiw, I went to a Boston hospital in April or May of 2020 to get tested for a Covid exposure and they kept non-covid patients quite separate. They relocated entire offices to different buildings to avoid cross-exposure. They don’t want to put Covid patients near people giving birth or their infants for obvious reasons. Also our emergency department had a million signs up telling people who had certain respiratory symptoms to go to a different location (which I went to and was indeed much busier).

…But I didn’t base my belief on the things I was hearing from literally every source on that experience. I did it because that many people simply can’t coordinate a lie on that scale that convincingly. Skepticism is good, but respectfully and in my opinion, believing it was all a hoax requires a great deal of arrogance and gullibility.

They were not putting COVID patients anywhere near the maternity ward and you certainly were not allowed to leave the maternity ward so I'm not sure what you were expecting. A busier than usual maternity ward?

For inexplicable reasons I was about the only one there with free reign of the hospital. They seemed so starved of guests and happy someone was there for good reasons that the hospital didn't stop me from walking around most the hallways, so I did. Small town hospital with few enough security that they all knew who I was.

There was so much bad data and propoganda coming in at the beginning thar ultimately the only thing I could depend on was what I personally investigated. I'm not using it to sign off on a research paper.

Those protocols were apparently not in place yet, or security wasn't aware of them, or no one wanted to stop me. I walked around damn near every hallway of the hospital, which was smallish.

> Small town hospital

And you generalized this to the world as a whole? I admit I don’t have a citation for this, but I’d be shocked if small towns didn’t have markedly slower spread rates than cities. I feel like this was brought up frequently during the pandemic.

> There was so much bad data and propoganda coming in at the beginning thar ultimately the only thing I could depend on was what I personally investigated.

How and which things did you decide were propaganda and bad data?

Perhaps so but I ultimately use data I collected to make my own choices in my own environment, not to force choices upon you. If you had different data I would not judge you for acting differently.

What month was this then? Because there was a time when you were not even allowed to be with your wife at the hospital

No one exists alone in a society. People who ignored the overwhelming evidence of the pandemic’s severity were more likely to spread the disease to other people because of their poor judgement.

April

The evidence being peddled by our state health director at the time to justify lock downs was largely computerized projections that were not based on overwhelming evidence and were ultimately wildly wrong even without vaccines.

> These biases and trends are facts most people may not be aware of, but big pharma certainly is.

I have a hard time believing that “most people” also means “most epidemiologists” or “most medical organizations” would be unaware of such an obvious problem. It seems like it would be day one of school stuff.

It seems trivially obvious to me, someone whose closest qualification to being able to debate the actual science here is having a bachelor’s in physics and very technically being involved in some academic research. I’m not going to second guess the overwhelming majority of scientists and medical professionals I’ve heard comment on this because of something like that.

Sorry, I’m not an expert in the field, but are computerized projections not the norm in disease spread modeling?

I don’t really feel like continuing this argument, so the last thing I’ll say is that I don’t know how else experts are supposed to have made decisions at the time. Makeshift morgues were opening to handle the overflow of bodies. They acted on the evidence they had at the time, and readjusted recommendations as new evidence came to light. This is part of why social distancing protocols changed so much during the first year of the pandemic.

My contention was never so much experts making recommendations based on projections built on weak evidence, but rather experts issuing orders on these wildly false projections that imprisoned and fined people for something as simple as dancing on a sidewalk in protest.

Experts should be free to advise the public. Thankfully the health director issuing the order that jailed and charged this man with a felony had to resign in disgrace.

https://archive.is/KhIQx

The graph here could be instructive:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-coronavirus-hospitalizat...

It varies widely by state/county, etc, but in most of the US, hospitalizations were pretty low still in April. The first peak was around August which was my experience, and the second peak was around January 2021.

So as far as "A bunch of medical professionals shaking in their shoes waiting for something that never came", they were waiting for what was actually coming.

The chart you posted conveniently cut off april, which was higher than August.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/figures/mm7112e2-F1-l...

Your chart only includes a subset of states. Again, when things peaked varied widely by state. Here's a good one from California that includes April:

https://calmatters.org/health/coronavirus/2020/06/california...

Number of patients in April peaked around 3000, then August around 7000, then Jan 2021 around 21,000.

I mean laymen. All epidemiologists and the like are certainly aware of such problems. You'll see these biases and many others buried in the discussion/limitations or other such section in any study. Here's [1] a random one from the CDC:

- "confounding might exist because the study did not measure or adjust for behavioral differences between the comparison groups"

- "these results might not be generalizable to nonhospitalized patients who have ... different health care–seeking behaviors"

Along with many more. The problem is that there was no meaningful public debate whatsoever. You were on board with absolutely anything and everything, or you must be an "anti-vaxer" and just wanted everybody's grandmother to die, and probably also thought COVID was caused by 5G.

[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7044e1.htm

I did a Google search because a wife not being allowed to have her husband present during childbirth sounded too egregious to be true. I found a single Today article about one specific hospital in New York enacting that policiy (NewYork-Presbyterian). That's not nearly widespread enough to apply to any story of a COVID-era childbirth you hear about, FYI.