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More feelings and anecdotal evidence. Or maybe you should consider that having to care for folks that won't care for themselves - by and large the unvaccinated - drive unsustainable work schedules and made 30% of the healthcare force - and by the way, up to 48% of ICU workers - consider quitting in the last year! There is absolutely no evidence that doctors not being hired or being fired because they can't comply with hospital mandates is even close to that effect. In fact, firings are literally just starting now, which would drive almost no effect on these ICU shortages. Prove me wrong. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/31/covid-is-driving-an-exodus-among-health-care-workers.html Here's some more data for you to address some of your other points. In the South 25-40% of state ICUs are COVID-19 patients. Here's two articles, the second of which says that nationwide it's 28% of ICU beds. Which is a huge portion of ICU surge capability - i.e. it is basically taking all of it. https://www.benefitspro.com/2021/08/12/10-states-where-covid-19-has-filled-the-hospital-icu-beds-412-119893/?slreturn=20210809204237 https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/569368-three-quarters-of-icu-beds-across-country-are-full Onto your next fallacy. This one made me laugh. @brabusI will try to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you aren't just trying to straight up lie here, and instead you're forgetting your sources. But I can tell you misinterpreted the study when you read it. The actual study you quoted wasn't talking about ICU patients at all and only ever talked about positive infections. Which by the way, in a highly vaccinated society, even with breakthroughs, you can easily get to a point where the majority of infections are in the vaccinated population. You're falling for a standard base rate fallacy, which is pretty standard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy Here's your quoted study that you are saying we don't read. Well, ironically, you are the one that needs to read it. To be 100% clear, that study never, ever, talks about ICU rates. I've included it for your reading. And the CDC maintains that vaccination provides overwhelming protection against hospitalization and ICU admittance - just not simple infection. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7031e2.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7034e1.htm For the record, there is no state, city, county, or other area in America right now where a majority of COVID ICU patients are vaccinated. That is a bold, ridiculous, honestly stupid claim. In reality, in places where ICU beds fill up with COVID folks, they are almost entirely with unvaccinated folks. https://www.wabi.tv/2021/08/26/maines-icu-beds-fill-up-covid-surge-continues/ Here's the most recent study that shows that in a relatively vaccinated area, LA, 90% of ICU beds for folks with COVID were entirely unvaccinated individuals. 84% of hospitalizations were entirely unvaccinated. And 85% of deaths were unvaccinated. LA, for the record, has 59% of it's population fully vaccinated, with 66% having at least one dose. That means that 34% of the population - those who are unvaccinated - make up 84-90% of medical interventions that go to the level of admittance up to an ICU bed. https://data.news-leader.com/covid-19-vaccine-tracker/california/los-angeles-county/06037/ Tell me. Does any of this matter?

Story time. I had the privilege (or curse?) of being a deployed commander when the vaccine rolled out. I stood first in line with my SEL to get it along with a handful others (I’m very right of center yet pro vaccine, weird I know... At first contact, only about 32% of our Sq (mostly pilots - just a datapoint), got it. We did legitimately try to educate folks and got that number up to 50+. The turning point however, was discussion of our trip home. In order to stay off base in our foreign country fuel stop, we had to get MAJCOM A3 approval, and getting to that would mean only the vaccinated would be able to enjoy said privilege. So we decided to send those who chose not the be vaccinated home via rotator. When this became public knowledge; dudes were standing in line to be vaccinated. All but 3/90+ folks got the vaccine - mostly so they could party after a long deployment. Morale of the story? Non vaccinated folks are not necessarily driven by the convictions they preach, one could argue? Maybe, maybe not. At the end of the day, we didn’t call them non vaccers or science deniers or demean them. They saw the inherent advantage and got the shot. At the same time, the DOD smartly removed the mask mandate for those vaccinated and more people got the shot. Walking back on that was arguably the stupidest thing the DOD and POTUS have done apart from recent events in Afghanistan. You want more people vaccinated? Don’t insult them, incentivize it. Appeal to human nature. No one falls in line when you demean and insult them.

Kick out the people that are labeled obese from the hospitals and healthcare system first. Since being overweight is a a causal factor in many of the leading causes of death in the us. As well as covid deaths. We should attack being over weight and put a vaccine bandaid on those people if they choose. But being overweight is a far greater issue to this country than covid. But we aren’t doing hardly anything about it. Let’s lock down in a gym https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282929#alzheimers-disease

Dude cool it. Guy was very honestly inquiring about the veracity of the story which has been reported by multiple questionable outlets. It's quite clear he had his own suspicions already and was looking for more info, or as you so eloquently put it, was trying to sort through the bullshit. Noone fell for this story but you come off as a total ass hole with the tone of your post.

Lol. Liberals love to pretend they cherish your above stated core tenet. But there’s always an anti-freedom catch that forces others to comply. There’s a catch with owning guns, there’s a catch with free speech on campus, there’s a catch with medical care, posting on Facebook, abortion, church services, public schools, election law, immigration, etc. In fact there’s no subject where liberals actually live out your alleged core tenet. They’re just tyrannical hypocrites every time.

When POTUS says "show some respect" it's too late and he has lost the country.

It does matter. And another thing that matters to this specific article that was left out - staffing shortages. It’s not a literal bed/equipment shortage in many places, it’s a shortage of staffing. This has been a problem all over the country; so interesting that so many health workers have been laid off over the past year. Yet, such significant CFs as this are swept under the rug because the only thing being currently sold is the “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” which is complete bullshit. That is not to say there aren’t obese people with diabetes refusing to get the vaccine and ending up in the ICU (they should get the vaccine), but they are not the only people in the ICU. Remember that MA study the CDC conducted that I brought up where 75% of the ICU COVID patients were vaccinated…no you probably don’t remember, because you block absolutely everything out of your brain that doesn’t conform to your holier-than-thou opinion, even when it’s irrefutable data from credible sources.

Well, that's enough internet for today.

Are there only two groups in the discussion? Unvaxed vs vaxed? How about children? How about previously infected people? How about people sub 40 who are healthy?Isn’t it weird how every issue boils down to one group vs the other— almost like the media is fueling division… The infection fatality ratio for children under 12 is 3500X less than those 65 plus according to CDCs best estimates https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html it just seems a little simplistic to boil it down to two group. Also we know the long term risk of smoking, do we know the long term risk of covid or the vaccine? No.

Use your GI Bill for yourself and get your ratings. Have your kids join the ANG and get TA and their own GI Bill. Good luck!

Did the advertising on these forms just get a whole lot worse for anybody else? It seems like I have to click through five pop ups and banners now just to navigate to the next topic. I'm not sure I can browse the forums much longer like this, but I wanted to make sure it's not just my phone

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-therapies/recovering-from-surgery--intensive-care

Copy shot. My anger is misplaced. I am tired of misinformation permeating all aspects of everything. This was not a foul on @torquedwho literally asked 3 times if it was real. My bad.

In my personal corner of the AF (AFSOC) my squadron was sitting at over 85% vaccinated before it was mandatory. I do not know nor have I heard of anyone that’s planning to get out or request an exemption. I’m currently in an AETC MC-J transition course; yesterday we got an email saying the 19th AF/CC has dictated that any student in formal training that plans on requesting a COVID exemption will immediately be placed in an administrative hold status (frozen in training) until the exemption is processed and approved/disapproved; it went on to give a gist of if disapproved and the individual still refuses the shot they’ll be administratively separated from the service. If this truly is your sword make sure you’re ready to fall on it…

If your point is that there would be benefit in being more nuanced in saying who should be vaccinated, you are right. In an idealistic world, you’d be able to do that. Just like how in an ideal world, I shouldn’t have to run my PFA if I ran a half marathon the week prior. But realistic employment of idealistic policy runs into several issues, and that’s why there is no way I can tell the PT monitor to accept my 1:27 half as a passing score. I still have to run the 6 laps. 1) How does the government assess if you’re not at risk to say that you probably don’t need the vaccine? You don’t even tell the flight doc the actual amount of whiskey you drink each week; how will big government know if a random 40 year old is actually an unhealthy risk factor that’s going to clog up a hospital? First, the government would have to get everyone’s health records, which would be seen as a gigantic breach of privacy, I am sure. There is no government mandated health screening. There is no government oversight of your medical records. Lets go down this path further. The gov mandates that all people over the age of 50 get the vaccine, because they can tell age with the SSA. I’m sure there’s still be bitching and moaning, but let’s pretend that this was popularly accepted. Okay, that solves this pandemic for a giant group that is at risk. Now they have to cover everyone under 50 that is high risk. They try to figure out how to mandate high risk under 50s to get the vaccine. They realize that 42% of Americans are Obese. 75% of Americans are overweight. And they can’t tell anything else about these humans individually based on privacy. Almost impossible to assess cardiovascular health by looking at someone. You can’t ask everyone to send in their BMI. People won’t tel you if they are smokers or drinkers. They also realize humans are notoriously bad at self reporting their health, especially if it’s about something they don’t want. The only way to capture a sufficient amount of the at risk population is to have everyone be vaccinated. Which it turns out makes sense anyways because the vast majority of Americans actually have risk factors because we are an extremely unhealthy nation. 2) This virus spreads quickly and in a shitty way that is not easy to control. It has an R0 value of 5-9. Yes, I wanted to say 6-9, but I feel that would have been nit picked. That means that if you send your healthy, not at risk, kids to school sick, they’re gonna end up getting a looooot of other people sick through secondary infections. You ever played the six degrees of Kevin Bacon? Where it almost always proves that we are way more interconnected as a society than you would ever assume? Well apply that to this scenario. Your kids - who won’t interact with any old people or at risk folks directly (other than tons of teachers, but we’ll ignore that) - will get kids of at risk people infected. They will get kids of caregivers infected. They will get people who work in critical industry infected. And it only takes 2-4 jumps to hit a huge percentage of a specific subset of society. It doesn’t have to just be kids. It can be young fighter pilots. They spreads it to an enlisted maintainer, who spreads it to the entire MXG. One of you is going to hit the commissary or the gym, which will open up the whole base. And everyone’s spouse and their place of work is now at risk. It quickly becomes unmanageable, exposing tons of high risk folks to the illness even though the first person was not “at risk.” Additionally, it spreads both asymptomatically and before symptoms emerge. So there is no real way you can stop this effect, no matter how well intentioned you are to keep your sick kids - or your sick self - at home. You cannot insulate the effects of spread via good intentions. 3) Human beings, whether you like it or not, are not as well intentioned as we wish. There is a natural range of support for individualism vs the collective across Americans, leaning more heavily on individualism than almost any other country. Here’s an anecdote. My parents, who are old, are at high risk for COVID. They aren’t healthy, they don’t take precautions, and they meet many other risk factors. Due to the politicization of this virus, instead of getting vaccinated, they have paid for fake vaccine cards. They may die for their insistence on listening to idiots on talk radio, and I think about that a lot, but the point is that folks don’t want to tell the government anything. They will go as far as intentionally obscuring truthful data if they think that it will give them a shred of liberty. Some people will do it just to give the democrats/republicans a middle finger. Doesn’t help public policy. How many people would lie about if they were actually at risk if we tried to implement a nuanced policy? The gods honest truth is that this disease is not easy to detect. It’s not easy to find symptoms. It has lasting health effects that are significantly worse than the vaccine. It randomly hits some demographics that we could not predict. And we don’t know everything about it. The worst part about this whole thing is that the vaccine didn’t end up providing nearly the protection from spread we were hoping it would. The only reasonable public policy decision is to include everyone, or the vast majority of society, because we have no realistic way for the government to comb through your records to say that you aren’t at risk based on limitations of privacy and manpower. Not to mention the exponential increase in work for almost no population benefit. Idealism is no reason to nitpick public policy that, by and large, does good for the public. Just like how I shouldn’t waste everyone’s time signing a waiver for my PFA to get my half marathon to count - I should just run it.

Joke is going to be on them now that any company over 100 employees has a vaccine mandate now. It’s a really dumb hill to die on folks especially people with multiple pages of immunizations and a slew of them being for anthrax. Like really who has seen anthrax besides that Daschle mail thing in like 2002? Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Your personal opinion is duly noted, but I'm just asking if it's true.

Engineering/maintenance where props and associated hardware are concerned are the kind of thing that keep people who understand them up at night. So many take their operation for granted.

@NegatorySo in spirit of attempting to have rational/unemotional conversation, here’s why I think much of this discussion is just stuck in a luftberry - we (and others on here) actually agree there are a lot of people in this country who should get the vaccine, and that by not getting it they are hurting others…filling up ICU beds, etc. There’s actually no argument there from me or a lot of other so-called-“anti-vaxxers”…what the discussion really should focus on so we’re not talking past each other is two-fold. The vaccination necessity for low risk people (<50, no underlying medical conditions, have natural immunity), especially with consideration to what the vaccine actually accomplished for that group, and the more difficult/subjective discussion of liberty, federal overreach, etc…where’s the line for “you do you.” When people just scream about “but muh ICU is full and it’s every unvax’d person’s fault!” or “the fuck I will get the jab…now back to my 15th slurpee and Big Mac for the week” there is no real conversation, because while there may shreds of truth/honest sentiment in statements, they are just pieces, not the entire picture, and it becomes a discussion based on omission of facts and not the whole enchilada.

But how many of those unvaccinated people would be in the ICU if they’d made more healthy life choices prior to their choice to not get an experimental vaccine? If they weren’t obese/diabetic/heart disease/etc due to an unhealthy diet promoted for decades by the USDA and immensely influential corporate entities, would their vaccine status matter as much? We should always look beyond first-order effects. Sent from my iPhone using Baseops Network mobile app

How do you drop a virtual mic?

Yeah, in our system, money-making is inherently tied to everything. That's just something we need to get over. My overall and most fundamental problem, if I could state it clearly, is the externalization of cost (consequence). This always involves three parties. Two of them are engaged in the actual transaction (healthcare / patient), the third party is a bystander, which is usually you - the taxpayer. This is ultimately why I think there should be fundamental and emergency medical care widely and instantly available, but when we get into things that are services designed to remedy the consequences of a long life of poor decisions, I fall off the wagon. Student loans (school / student) Healthcare (hospital / patient) Homelessness (CDC / renters) It's everywhere. If we could remove the third party from the transaction, we'd actually get people to put their skin back in the game (which is a decent book) and a lot of this would work itself out, since people tend to be the best judges of what risk they're willing to accept. In a lot of these cases this means pulling the government out of the equation. In some, it means keeping them involved, but changing their function.

So, you didn’t read the opinion, yet claim it “it’s doesn’t matter” because it doesn’t fit your narrative. Suggest you go look up what stare decisis means. The only thing that’s weak is the subjective blabbering you posted stating it’s wrong because it doesn’t support your narrative/opinion.

Another fantastic video.

You live in America dude. That means there are people who are going to do things you don't like and can't control, for reasons that are wrong, and you don't agree with. Some of those things are going to have actual, real, negative consequences on you and/or people you love. As awful as that reality is, it's not an excuse to trample on people's rights. It's a reality check that you need to take care of yourself and be responsible for your actions. Note also, that if you lived under any other system, people would still be doing things you don't like or agree with. There is not a single nation on this planet that COVID isn't "ravaging." So no matter where you live or under what system you (a human) are stuck with, your experience of this situation won't be different, so try to keep perspective on that. Let's not destroy America, or lose our conception of what freedom means.

Buddy of mine at Macdill had his neck surgery cancelled twice due to lack of available ICU’s in Florida due to COVID patients.

Those positions are political appointees, so it's not surprising. A better question would be why are they needed in the first place?

One of the most important tenets of liberal thought is: you should be able to do what you want unless it impacts someone else A lot of anti vax people think their choice to not get the shot is solely a personal one with little to no ramifications on others. After all, if you're vaccinated why would you worry about getting covid from an unvaxxed person. Except there's a catch. Healthcare is a finite resource and non vaccinated people are taking up almost all of the bandwidth. Across all age groups, the unvaccinated are far more likely to contract severe illness and require hospitalization. When your trash decision puts you in the hospital and you take an ICU bed from someone needing urgent care for something that wasn't preventable, your decision just hurt someone else. I'll say the same for obese people and smokers. Your trash lifestyle and decision making has upped your risk factors and you are negatively impacting others.

Vaccinated spread it at the same rate as unvaccinated IF THEY GET INFECTED. But the vaccines help reduce the total number of infected people, which helps prevent the spread to others.

No it is not, the FAA has no authority here. We are set up in a Group with AMXS Sq's for each MDS. Standard USAF MX rules as per AFI 121-101. Backshop units are in a Commodities Sq. Buffoonery and Fuckery in abundance, some of us actually fix jets to so we can sleep at night. If these jets were at other contractors sights they would go by part 145 rules and have also a GFR (for tool control)and DCMA witnessing and signing after each critical phase of MX. But most of us have a Airframe and Powerplant certificate to at least get us a job. Was working the part 145 side for awhile but I prefer steady work and paychecks, chasing contract after contract gets old. But fret not there are scores of us who care about what we do and we know who doesn't, with the civil servant rules it takes ages to fire a employee.