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This conversation should be near the end. Nothing has worked to prevent the spread. Not the vaccines, not the masks, not the closures, not the social distancing, not the bazillion dollars spent, not the fear tactics. Not anything. It’s here to stay and we will all get it. People shouldn’t lose their jobs over it and we shouldn’t divide the country any further.

if cloth masks don't work why is the DoD mandating them? asking for the Mayo Clinic

True. Instead, our government should be spending more time approving effective and affordable treatments that can be taken at home during initial symptoms (ie: India). They are out there. We all know what they are. Oher countries are using them effectively, but for some reason we aren't. Kind of makes you scratch your head.

Copy— you’re acknowledging the tool you advocate does not produce the results you desire, but you want the tool used anyway to produce the results you desire despite second order effects with collateral impacts. Makes perfect sense, you have a promising career in government. To answer your question: all of those people are following SECDEF orders. But at the JCS level they can have a conversation which would be inappropriate for other entities you listed. If I were JCS I’d have the balls to say: we’re losing more personnel to this mandate than the virus. Recommend we cease mandates, and treat religious objections to vaccine same way we treat conscientious objectors: find a way they can continue service. Here are my specific recommendations….. By the way, that is the logic I sent my boss. But we’ve decided to go full adversarial instead of empathetic, with predictable results. End state: we are weaker not stronger, and more divided as a country and military than ever. Congratulations.

A little levity...(and yes, I am aware of the misspelling. Not my meme!)

When did SMs take an MRNA vax before? Also the do it for country attitude is IMO an appeal to emotion— ya know pandering to the insecure— ‘real men would roll up their sleeve’. there are no mental black flips required to see that storming a beach is directly related to the mission of the armed forces. It’s honorable, brave, and those men had big brass ones. where you loose people is when you say taking a vaccine is roughly equivalent to storming beaches. Bottom line is the vaccine doesn’t prevent transmission so how is this a selfless act anymore? How is this the honorable thing to do on behalf of the mission?— Especially, if you’ve had the rona (pre omicron) and now that the omicron is out it appears to be similar to the seasonal cold. Good news and Hope that remains true with more omicron data coming out. 1.) promote physical activity, and non-pharma low risk preventative measures 2.) get after early treatment 3.) acknowledge natural immunity 4.) avoid having policy that you yourself don’t even follow (I.e. everyone mask, just not me) 5.) tell people not to come to work if they are sick 6.) acknowledge that the military is at extremely low risk 7.) avoid false promises armchair session over. Easier said than done.

An anecdote: I have not taken the jab. My company (Big Fortune 100 behemoth) is subject to the Federal Contractor Mandate. They have been spamming my inbox for weeks, warning that I need to submit my proof of vaccination, or else I'll "be subject to discipline, up to and including termination." The deadline was Tuesday. It's now Thursday. I'm still here. I have had no word from HR or management one way or the other.

But it did accomplish exactly what some of us said it would. Create more division, foster distrust, and ruin the credibility of "expertise." The failure to consider (and value) second- and third-order effects by the American Left is catastrophic in both scope and effect.

one person offended is too many #StopTheSpread

Noone is ever shocked when they catch the common cold, which typically has an R0 of 2-3. They are saying Omicron is around 7-10, approaching that of Chicken Pox and Measles. The only difference is, the Chicken Pox and MMR vaccines are highly effective against infection and the COVID vaccine is not.

@UCThopeful If I was a bettin man I’d put my money on you getting that CSO slot. For whatever that’s worth lol.

The question was never about masks working. It was about mask mandates working. We have an answer Watch them try to mandate properly-worn N95 masks and the entire charade end tomorrow. The mandates are very specifically crafted to be tolerable (only just), not to be effective.

Look we've been through this debate a bazillion times. We're beating a decomposed horse's corpse at this point. Do masks work? In theory, they should. I don't think anyone with an average or above IQ should be arguing that. However, are people wearing them correctly? Are they replacing them frequently? Are they using an N95 underneath their cloth mask or they just using a bandana over there face? I see so many people walking around with masks that are so loose they're hanging off their face. People have them below their noses as if covid can't come out of your nose and it only comes out of your mouth. It's like the Wild Wild West with the mask wear and we can't expect everyone to have the discipline to wear masks like a healthcare professional would. When you throw those variables into the mix, there's really no way to know just how effective wearing a mask actually is. In addition to that, just like any other airborne virus, COVID can infiltrate the body through the eyeballs. Very few people wear goggles or face shields.

@HeloDude It was more a joke than a serious question. That’s not to say your response is wrong. Having SA is 99% of the battle.

It seems you skipped over my first attempt to provide you clarification. Please post my statement where I said cases would not exceed 250K per day. You know what, nevermind. I'll do it for you. Here's the first re-attack again if you choose to read it. From this point forward, I'm going to have to defer to someone else on this forum to help explain to you that I was doubting the sincerity of the people in charge given the assumptive death-rate you panic-stricken posters seem to think is imminent. Not that we would get to some arbitrary number of infections per day. Anyway, I guess the big guy (and maybe #2 also?) is giving some speech right now about how Jan 6th was supposedly the end of America as we know it. I think you should keep screaming from the mountain tops, @Negatory, because it's not possible in my world for them to be so highly dedicated to political theater in the face of impending doom. I feel like you know something they don't. Hell, you probably do, and if so, you really need to be spending your time reaching out to people who can make some substantive change, rather than enlightening all of us air force pilots on this small corner of the internet called baseopsforums.com because I really feel that we're not your intended audience. You have received knowledge that needs to be delivered to the people at the top of our government, because it's obvious to me that they don't have the same information you purport to have. No one here is going to be able to implement any further societal restrictions, or enact a lock-down that will save us from the tidal wave of death that is headed our way. You're really wasting your time with us. Sorry to say, you have been standing in the wrong line at the DMV. By way of implication, you seem to believe that for a few weeks starting in ~ mid-January the USA is going to experience about 300-500K deaths, right? This approaches Civil War deaths. They PTB cannot both know that we're going to experience that level of pandemic death and destruction, and simultaneously be placing focus on a riot that got out of control a year ago to make a political stump speech. Or hell, maybe they can because they are that cynical. I guess we'll see. In the meantime, I'll continue to scoff their sincerity, competence, and your reading comprehension.

The female STO pipeline drama is getting good

Whoppie got it. And she was shocked because she said she did everything right. https://www.foxnews.com/media/whoopi-goldberg-stunned-testing-positive-covid

Maybe? Anecdotal of course, but in my herk experience, I’ve seen probably too many C-130 dudes screw up a VOR-A on local training rides. My scariest moments in the MAF were never on the employment end of stick either…but always in admin phases of flight. Particularly departures, recoveries, and approaches with poor airmanship on display in the formation. It’s tempting to focus on employment, sure. But successful employment requires some building blocks that you just have to get from reps attempting to fly that perfect VOR-A in UPT. Your final point is dead on. Set the bar high in UPT, keep the bar high in the ops world. Students will meet it. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Oh gmafb! Refusing a direct order to get vaccinated (especially after you’ve already rolled up your sleeve for a phalanx of them) is HARDLY the same thing as looking the other way as your army marches an entire race of people into death camps. The constant comparisons to Nazi Germany/Stalinist Russia/etc. are laughable at best and highly offensive at worst and they make it hard to take any of your arguments seriously. What do you think leadership would’ve told some marine who refused to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima on religious grounds? Seriously, if someone was pulling this shit on any other issue, you’d call them out for the whiny, entitled bitches they are.

Don't mean to derail this thread but this topic is something that interests and affects me. While I haven't seen a decrease in the quality of the UPT product, our community has gotten much, much younger in all positions, to include IPs (instructors in all crew positions really). In some ways this is a positive, since previously the time to upgrade to IP in AFSOC was sometimes excessive/out of whack with other communities. And honestly there's some high speed dudes that have both benefited from it and had good return on investment to the guys on the line. In other ways I think it's been a negative. In the last 3 years I've heard more incorrect/poorly considered techniques and sometimes downright wrong concepts/tactics than in my previous 15 years. I also think that the ops tempo, as you discussed, has led to a serious reduction in the amount of time IPs have to spend with new copilots. Finally, I think the airline hiring spree is about to crush the MC community. The AF got a reprieve for 18 months in the form of COVID, but now I'm seeing a large chunk of the O-4 IP/EP 2-3,000 hour guys either punching or on the verge of doing so. I've read/been presented the Shaw Class A. It was a tough read, especially as a senior IP. I wholeheartedly agree with your point about FTU instruction versus line instruction; the two just aren't the same. It's not cosmic, but how a line IP approaches student training versus an FTU IP is just a different mentality (and sometime skill set) that I didn't fully appreciate until I was an FTU IP. I'm absolutely not against improving/modernizing our UPT syllabus, but I'm of the personal opinion that actual hours in the airplane CANNOT be replicated, regardless of the level of technology present in whatever training device is being used. Back on topic, think the AF will bump the bonus back up to $35K this year?

How do you justify mandatory vaccination as the solution to this problem when ships that are 100% vaccinated are being taken out by mass illness?

In this training climate, it's a swing and a MIF! Regardless of a hit or RBI or goal!

Man I’d love to look into the parallel universe where a still President Trump overtly says in the media “we are under no obligation to protect Ukraine,” and then punts it to NATO to make the call on any response. I’m sure that would be totally respected and not met with raging criticism. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I kept getting these female underwear ads showing up whilst browsing (not that it irritated me)

It rotates based on which unit is doing the "large" centcom deployment, but realistically that only applies to LR and Dyess and both share the good and bad times. Who knows about Yokota cause it is new and Ramestein is a different animal with their longer TDYs and no centcom deployments. PCS lengths are similar to other airframes, no differences. Call it 3-4 years currently. Disclaimer: I left the Herk a year ago to fly the RQ-4 cause California and Italy deployments while sleeping in my own bed every night was more appealing than Texas, Afghanistan and overnights to Pope. I'm giving you the honest truth about the Herk and I bet there is someone with rose colored glasses that will sexy up all these opinions for you. Bottom line is if tactical flying in an aircraft that actually executes its primary mission in combat TODAY is appealing...and you track T-1, fly the Herk. and for copilot development Dyess is probably better than LR, but then again Texas...