To Err is Human...

I went through that phase of growing up where we start being called adults with a saying that started like that, but instead of ending with "to forgive, divine" it went:

To err is human but to really foul things up requires a computer.

Yes, it was the early days of computers, when the first microprocessor chips were coming out and as part of my daily job, I might have to enter a boot loader program in octal with toggle switches on the front panel, and once that was loaded, it would read its real program in with a paper tape machine.  It was even before the days of the sausage failure I wrote about in November of '20 (and is now, strangely enough, the #2 most read post in this blog's 13-1/2 years).  

Over the years, that has gotten used less and less - I suppose because we've gotten used to programmer's mistakes.  Nowadays, I say that quote as

To err is human but to really foul things up requires government.

Look no farther than Maui and how government at every level from Lahaina city to Maui island, to the state of Hawaii, to the fed.gov has a record unblemished by never doing anything; anything down to the smallest decision, right.  "No farther?"  I suppose that depends on where you live, but from where I live Maui is quite a bit farther away than the southern border, where, again, the feds have a record of not doing anything, down to the smallest decision, right.  Or just look at how the feds and most states handled Covid with lockdowns, masks and mandatory experimental vaccines.

Let me to be full of grace and append "that I know of" to those two statements.  Unnecessary, but I hate to be like them by making obvious mistakes. 

That said, what I want to make sure people know about what the coming "Covid crisis" means - and possibly transfer some thinking about it that I think is important.  Let me start with an example of the kind of things we know now that we didn't know "the first time".  This sort of data has been flowing as more and more countries are looking at how they managed the emergency and how badly they did.  

1 in 482 means 0.2% of the people in England that received a vaccine died within one month.  1 in 246 means 0.4% died within two months (60 days).  The last one I hesitate to include with this because it's open-ended.  It means 1.4% were dead by May 2022 with no separation by how long it had been since they were vaccinated.  Some of those were probably in the one month 0.2% and some were similarly in the 0.4%.  The whole thing depends on those deaths being from the vaccine and not from something else, but with a summary like this, we have no information.

It's important to know that every drug, and every other thing we put in our bodies has some fatality rate.  The question is always risk vs. benefit.  How many of those people would have died without the vaccine?  We don't know and those records are so contaminated (at least here in the US) that I think we can't know.  I've seen several estimates for the fatality rate of the virus and don't know if any are trustworthy.  The numbers I've seen have been in the same range as these percentages. 

Would you take a vaccine with a 1.4% chance of killing you to avoid a virus with a 0.2% chance of killing you?  That seems like a bad choice.  Note that it's a totally different decision in the case of something like an Ebola virus or something with an over 90% chance of killing you.  It certainly seems like overreach to tell people they will be cut off from everything and everyone if they don't take the 1.4% chance of being killed by the Covid vaccine and that's ignoring other things we've learned the vaccines have caused.  Not just Bell's palsy - Bell's was getting off easy, I'm talking the "died suddenly" epidemic, along with stillbirths, pregnant mothers dying, cancers now showing up and far more.

Masks?  In a summary of 14 mask studies, the CDC concluded that any benefit from masks is indistinguishable from random differences between groups of people.  At the same time, the leadership was mandating everyone wear masks to protect each other.  I did a post on this back in the earlier days of Covid, November of '20 (Original article at CDC).  I've done a few posts on masks and the studies they're based on really seem to say there might be a small positive effect but they're not what most people think.  The 2020 CDC study said as much in it's first page conclusions.  In bright red. 

Screen capture of the top of the first page of study, but I've lost track of where this came from.  It's clearly a YouTube video.