Who is benefitting?
Ignore my previous reply - bad copy-paste.
Vaccines boost natural immunity. Yes, you can roll the dice and take your chances with your own immunity, or you can “cheat” and increase the effectiveness of your own immunity.
Put another way, if there was something easy and cheap I could do that statistically decreased the chance of my engine failing, why would I not do that, even if the chances of it failing are pretty low to begin with? It seems like a no brainer to me.
If you don’t catch COVID at OSH, you might catch a cold, food poisoning, the flu, any of a number of exotic ailments brought in by pilots from all over the world. We can always stay home. But OSH is the premier event in the aviation world, it’s worth a sniffle to attend.
The only thing I ever came down with at OSH was blisters on my feet.
Quite right, Rich K… Although some of the words of someone that only identified himself with a single dot (.), contain, in my perspective (as an MD as I’m) a certain part of true, the Covid illness isn’t, for while, a simple endemic one and a lot of care must be taken for as members of a community. And, between those cares, the only one isn’t wearing face masks, even if we’re talkink on N95+.
You need to get better informed instead of just looking at political rants.
If you actually inform yourself, you will see that, for the most part, we were given the best knowledge available at the time. Our knowledge of the disease changed as we learned more and the recommendations changed.
Of course it wasn’t a dangerous disease. It was just a coincidence that hospitals were beyond capacity, and they had to obtain refrigerator trucks to act as morgues. The morgues were filled with people of all ages. That could happen any time. Covid just happened to come at the same time.
Yes, the disease is less serious now, but people are still going to the hospital. If YOU want to expose yourself and not take reasonable precautions, that is your choice. YOU can risk having symptoms for the rest of your life. Maybe a lockdown is not necessary now, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t take reasonable precautions. So, I would not eat indoors in a crowded restaurant, but one with just a few people is OK for me. The more people, the better chance of one of them carrying the virus. Also, the more people, the less distance between them.
The virus itself is rarely the actual cause of death. It’s usually the symptoms that kill people, often pneumonia or other respiratory illness (hence the “SARS” part of SARS-CoV-2: Severe Accute Respiratory Syndrom). But how do you determine with 100% certainty that the pneumonia was directly caused by COVID or something else? The simple answer is that you can’t, so you record it as “caused by covid” if they test positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, or “caused by not-covid” if they test negative.
+1
Well said.
How dare you not live in fear and bow in obedience to our overlords!!!
I was getting ready to fly one day and saw another pilot around his plane, by himself, wearing a mask. The dividing line definitely is not between pilots and non-pilots. I would say that it’s a different psychological aspect, the same one which tends to group people into two main political bents.
“We have no idea how many people died as a DIRECT result of COVID.”
Actually, we have a pretty good idea. The “Excess Death” rate is the number of people who actually died beyond what was expected.
Every year a certain number of people will die - old age, cancer, heart disease, accidents, viruses, and so on. It’s a fairly steady, predictable number. There are occasional blips due to natural disasters (hurricanes, heat waves, floods). Or a particularly big jump in 2018 due to a nasty strain of flu.
But these past two years have seen huge increase in excess deaths due to Covid-19. If all Covid-19 deaths were subtracted, then the Excess Death rate would closely match the expected death rate.
PS - I mention Jan 2018 flu season because some FaceBook posts seek to minimize “Excess Deaths” by cherry-picking the data, comparing Jan '18 to Jan '21 and claiming the two match. But if you look at a chart of Excess Deaths over several years, the truth comes out.
The Climate ALWAYS CHANGES, it’s not a static phenomena. The reasons for the climatological changes is not (despite what you hear) scientifically determined.
If you really want to know what the public/government debate on Climate change is about, ask them what they’d do with all the money that would be collected through a carbon tax? The answer is at the IPCC at the UN.
“At this point I have to wonder who is benefitting from this massive transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to moderna, Pfizer and others.”
Let me answer your question: moderna, Pfizer, the politicians to whom they donate, and bureaucrats like Fauci.
Where did Paul say “ignore risks”? Conservatives like Paul and me (and others) wouldn’t tell anyone to ignore risks. We would tell people to make their own decisions. You know, like people in a free country ought to do.
And just to cover the reply I’m likely to get from some, I suspect most of us would also encourage people to be respectful of others—i.e., if you know you’re sick, stay home or take precautions not to expose others.
+1
You’re missing the point. If someone went to the hospital because they were in a severe motorcycle accident, sustaining massive internal injuries, and also had COVID-19, and their death was documented as due do COVID-19, are you cool with that?
Take precautions!!! Bring good shoes!!!
Outside is most likely very safe. Inside I wore a mask; thus also very safe. No problem. My guess is that those who actually caught Covid at AirVenture were inside a lot and not wearing a mask.
So THAT’s where I got it … I spent a lot of time talking to the So Africans who flew the three Sling HW airplanes in Linda was slobbering on everything any time she talked about her airplane, too. Maybe I got too close to her? 
Do you have an example of that, or is it something you made up?
Here’s the funny thing about motorcycle accidents. You’ll never see a cause of death listed as “motorcycle accident”. The cause of death form usually lists multiple entries. So with your theoretical motorcycle accident the cause of death would show:
1: Massive Internal Bleeding
…due to…
2: Massive blunt force trauma
…due to…
3: injuries sustained from motorcycle accident.
Now, if that person had Covid-19 it might be noted on their death certificate as well, just like any other conditions such as obesity, or high-blood-pressure, or cancer.
Now, the person wouldn’t have died of Covid (or obesity, or cancer). UNLESS Covid (or obesity, or cancer) made them unable to recover from their motorcycle injuries. Then it might be listed as an additional cause of death.