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COVID Surges Amidst 118% Vax Rate; Better News Sources; What I Regret

Gibraltar has canceled official Christmas celebrations over surging COVID cases. Its >100% vaccination rate is due to "doses given to Spaniards who cross the border to work or visit the territory every day," according to RT. 

The article continues, "Similarly well-vaccinated countries have also reported surges in Covid-19 infections recently. In Singapore, where 94% of the eligible population have been inoculated, cases and deaths soared to record highs at the end of October, and have since subsided slightly. In Ireland, where around 92% of the adult population is fully vaccinated, cases of Covid-19 and deaths from the virus have roughly doubled since August."

As I said months ago, if you can get COVID, you can spread COVID, and vaccinated people are obviously getting and spreading COVID. This study in The Lancet found vaccination only reduced household transmission of the delta variant from 38% to 25%. This preprint of a huge study found vaccination modestly reduced transmission, but the protective effect waned "alarmingly at three months." 

Yet Healthline's recent headline reads, "You're Far Less Likely to Spread the Coronavirus if You're Vaccinated." It's not the official title of the article, but it's what shows up in the search and appears as the title in the browser. An Atlantic article hems and haws for several paragraphs over this simple question. The CDC is still saying, in a briefing last updated way back in September, "Early evidence suggests infections in fully vaccinated persons caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 may be transmissible to others." You think? "Fact checkers" say "False! Vaccination isn't worthless for stopping spread!" instead of admitting that's just a mild exaggeration. 

Even the Wall Street Journal's articles on COVID have beggared belief as shown in the comments sections. When they reported on Biden's vaccine mandates for employers but forgot to mention OSHA had paused plans for enforcement after a federal court stayed the order--a fact that was on OSHA's website and vital to readers--that was the last straw. I let my subscription expire--my last subscription to a legacy media source. Almost all of them now are just junk. It's frustrating and disappointing--I used to like the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic and the Indianapolis Star. No good replacement has come along for any of them. 

Someone in that comments section asked where to get good reporting on COVID. Reason has had good reporting on court cases. Alex Berenson and Eugyppius have excellent substacks and Dr. Suneel Dhand is on Locals. There's also dashboards, studies and news from other places showing results of different approaches. Odysee and Rumble host videos that YouTube takes down. 

Jay Bhattacharya is on Twitter--and his interview with the Hoover Institution reminded me of someone who's no longer active there: Professor Richard Epstein. He's a law professor who was against the lockdowns from the beginning but got so much blowback--he said he'd never felt so alone--that that must have been the reason he abandoned Twitter. I regret that I didn't speak up for him. He's still going, though, and was recently was on a podcast where he talked in legal depth about Biden's vaccine mandate and even got into ivermectin. 

I said some months ago that I missed the days of smaller, chattier, more numerous websites, and that's what's turning up now. The mainstream media has done no better job reporting on COVID vaccines than it did on low-carb diets or diabetes, and the vaccine fanatics are more vicious than the vegan trolls ever were. But we prevailed then; we'll prevail again.

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