Alpharatz

That's how it went with me..never dawned on me that I might have gotten -19 until weeks later when I started hearing about it....and never did get the antibody test...so who knows...If I DID have the real thing I might have spread it globally for weeks. In any case a few months in.. the wife and I got the bugshot...I was just reading the local paper about 60ish years ago when literally everyone raced down to get the Polio vaccine..You had to be deep into devil worship or REALLY slow to pass up that one. Now the local farm supply places are selling horse de-wormer..it's the latest on the interweb...Would you fly with a dude/dudette who rocks with Ivermectin?! We had a squadron reactionary or three..but NOTHING like this...

"Cecil's Track of the Cat" as I recall..I was once in the dump...

I was talking to a gym rat about some t-shirt he had on..turns out he was a Navstar GPS operator. That's a good thing..

It's not really a science experiment..but it's a gold mine for multiple researchers covering subjects from abnormal psych to advanced biochem...statistics..you name it. It's not often that you get a huge cohort that will participate in a refusal of treatment that may save their life..when the endpoint may be death.....(but sooo hard on the medics) BTW my wife reported arm pain for a few weeks and a friend had it for a few days..

Sad as it is..THAT is exactly what I was telling the wife...Hero to bum in one nightmare mission..If Reservists..there might be pushback if such an investigation occurs..

The VFW..Legion and VA are-mailing comprehensive info to try and deal with just the possiblity of badly shaken vets..

Your discussion highlites the scariest part of this nastly little bug. It may be (is?) impossible to get the vaccination rate high enough..fast enough to prevent some really nasty mutation that will render the present vaccine a moot point...i.e. it will stop working...then it may be that ya got the DNA to save yourself or ya don't....Survival of the fittest has always been the rule. If humans have the technology to save themselves and decide that a big pi@@ing contest is more fun...well .....let's see...an aviation example...the worst (and last) nose gear first touch down ya ever made.......

Very interesting in depth article in a recent Vanity Fair (august..it has Dua Lipa in scanty duds on the cover) ......(don't ax)...........Extensive discussion on the evidence that strongly supports an accidental release of -19 ...Ya gotta wade thru it but it's pretty convincing...There will be a test. I never knew who Dua Lipa is....

I'm a Vishnu follower my own self....

i'm getting a real bad feeling about the next few months as fall and winter set in and schools re-start and counter to obvious evidence a large cohort still refuses the vaccine. And a large part of the world is still awaiting supplies. This bug could have been stomped flat but as usual a subset of the population won't cooperate. One of my pals has had every bugshot known to the military but squawks about one more.."it's made of poison and carries micro-chips". It's a volunteer military but these are the volunteers? You gotta be pretty old to remember when the airlines furloughed about every other pilot and guys were begging for alert lines...fighter drags..C-5 and 141 cargo jobs and temps with the FAA. I hear that yet again the airline biz is starting to fade. Fortunately a lot of the true business leaders are demanding that employees get the shot or adios. You have to believe that airline CEO's will be right in there. Who wants a herd of Captains and stews and rampies spreading the bug around the world OR bringing it back as some horrid mutation? Then all bets are off...Just asked the wife to begin stocking up again....Maybe this go around a heady little muscatel....

This whole Covid situation is gonna be a treasure trove of data to help deal with the "next time" All of the anecdotes like the above can be rolled into a conclusion about how to deal with another one..For example...Why waste vaccine supplies in states where refusal is grossly high? Like the old time test flying..ya lose some but make a lot of progress... It's mighty hard on the medics though...

I don't have the computer/math chops..but it would be interesting to run some numbers on what would happen if you could simulate a mass refusal of the Polio and Smallpox vaccines many years ago..but figure in the modern mass communication system...Since it appears that humans are suckers for just about anything that is presented with the skills of ? well...THAT is yet another study...Oh to be young..the PhD's will be flyin....and I ain't lyin...

It's gonna get mondo uglier in the near future if that bug changes shape enough to evade the present vaccine.....global misery at best. The vaccine refusenicks will either have the genetics to survive or die. I was talking to my sawbones this AM and we predict back to total masking within a few short weeks. And that is just the re-start...I truly hope we are wrong. Ma Nature swings a mean bat.

I was sort of under the impression that a big reason "we" were in the "stan" was to keep on eye on certain Paki items...maybe not..In any case Afghanistan was described 200 years ago as "the veritable home of murder, battle and sudden death...I think it was a "daddy thing" with Junior..

It's odd that guyz who likely have a page full of injection records from flu shots to the dreaded Gamma Globulin would be so worried about another vaccine. In any case the refusal cases are essentially a self selecting cohort whose data will be studied for years. Researchers pay big money for such folk.. They are a badly needed population full of data points that will really help to analyze this event and hopefully make the next time a lot smoother..There will be math..sociology..medical...religious..and all kinds of Phd's riding on this one for years..Hell...they may have it nailed before a new tanker makes the ramp...

A Pal of mine from HS 's old man was a bombardier in the 8th AF...He never got over it...for that matter my old man drank himself out of Guadalcanal...figured he would never get to Heaven..There's that pesky religion for ya...Another guy I know well came a mm of trigger away from shooting the wrong guy...still gets a wake up call time to time...

Wow..I hesitate to respond to this high quality crowd..but here goes. To start, a fair number of officers are straight out of the military and tend to fit right in to the police system which at least profiles as a military operation in a lot of cases. (I love the four star general police chiefs). So...whatever "quality" problems exist likely existed in the military. Except , of course a crew chief likely hasn't dragged a deceased kid out of a swimming pool recently or waded into a street fight alone on some freezing dark night. I DID hear of a crew chief who manhandled a lead footed pilot who shredded a couple of tyres...unable to assess quality on that one. Dealing with who knows what problems that John Q dredges up on a daily basis is a challenge of course, but can also drain the personality pretty badly. Being a patrol officer can turn a guy into a hard case over time. And now with this increase in gun play nation wide one could get pretty hyper vigilant and quick on the draw or quick with a beat down or who knows? I do find it curious that peeps who rarely if ever see the blood and guts misery and sadness that officers do and are paid to deal with yap about "quality".

The dude is right ..Iraq was (still is?) a pointless goat rope...Anyway, let's assume the bug is a Chinese lab leak. There will be time to figure that out. What is needed NOW is to fight the spread with all of the science..protective equipment..social safety procedures that the science types can devise..instead we have non-stop political arguing, defiance of what the medical people suggest, politicians who can't tell the truth on a good day, and a better than even chance of the bug re-igniting as spring rolls around. I guess the only thing to do is get on the TV and jabber about a possible cause. Maybe we can crucify Fauci. No one yet knows exactly how to handle this. The Emergency Department types are begging people to comply with an educated guess bolstered by science so they don't get beat into puddles of spit yet again..Pretend that you have landing gear problems..you are on the phone to Boeing, the advice is iffy...but you gotta do something NOW..maybe work? maybe not..but NOW.. you get the blame if it's wrong.. BTW for those above..i'm A-neg got the shot, no side effects, nothing, tested negative all along, so who know's?

The fact that the lab rats are self selecting for a variety of roles in this grand experiment should make for excellent research results down the line...Not often that subjects will volunteer for a possibly fatal role in a great medical/sociological experiment like Covid.. The conclusions may very well save a lot of lives the next time.. We shall see....

It seems (from TV) that the top end virologists are beginning to worry that as this virus mutates they may not be able to control the mutations if they spread. The concern seems to be that herd immunity may not be all that effective as a cure and the resolution may devolve to (just like the old days) "survival of the fittest". (when a virlogist uses that phrase it gets your attention). What the medics can't control..Mother Nature will...

As an aside..being LEO (or a teacher for that matter) in any kind of minority community is likely going to be nearly impossible before too long. With a camera under every swingin pair the one with the best video wins. So one key might be to just let whatever it is slide. Ignore it and move right along. Answer the calls. Cook up a little activity for the books. Don't be cooking up trouble. Keep management happy.. After all, every contact with anyone by def. involves the presence of a deadly weapon...might as well minimize. To change things, training is of course the key, but so is how a newbie gets socialized into the police system. From the top down , Inspectors, Captains, Lt's, Sergeants, detectives all come up from the ranks (usually, outfits differ) soooo If there is misbehavior, poor judgement, drinking, nasty activity in general, the honchos know what's going on and tend to ignore it from top to bottom..since they were brought up the same way. Unless the hammer comes down from the top thru the ranks and hard, the way the average officer is socialized to the job will never change. Remember the old adage "a policeman's life is not a happy one". Join the Fire department.

As I recall...the US Army has had an office just for spotting pathogens like this Covid virus among others...warning the big system and starting response and prevention. Gotta wonder if they spotted this bug at the start and what the response was.

The impression that I am beginning to form is that because we live in a nominally free society...One subset swears to a course of action...another swears to the opposite. And many refuse medical advice altogether. The final outcome will be survival of the fittest...you got the right genetics..you win; just like 100 years ago. A few will survive because of heroic (probably unsustainable)medical intervention. Your G.I. may be a special case and some research might be worthwhile. You have a population that has had about every vaccine available at least once..including my fave gamma globulin (three times). Is it possible that such a person has a ramped up immune system all the time providing some protection against a bug like covid? If this Survival of the fittest does become reality it should show up in the third world fairly soon. On the hopeful side, the pandemic 100 years ago burned itself out "fairly" quickly. Probably due to herd immunity..So many probabilities and impressions and theories....but there ya go..do better next time..

I had a three building roofing job finished a few weeks ago by a crew from Acapulco of all places..in the northern tier...They were using some safety equipment and were paid OK..Two others I watched were OSHA nightmares...peaked roof, no safety, 30 feet down. The interesting one ..no safety balanced half way across an aluminum extension ladder, at least 30 ft up. They get the jobs by working cheap, working hard and long and blowing off safety and taxes. The PROBLEM is that no locals will DO roofing. The trades up here are screaming for help. Does it come from south of the border or not? There has to be a way to finesse this besides building some dumbo barrier... Meanwhile my cousins tell me the streets of Cali are filled with homeless...When you have the rich next to the dirt poor these things will happen..