US Government: Almost Nobody Wants the New COVID Shots and Obamacare Makes Getting One a Disaster if You Do.

US Government: Almost Nobody Wants the New COVID Shots and Obamacare Makes Getting One a Disaster if You Do.

According to Ars Technica, the US government says that only 7% of adults and 2% of children even got this updated “booster”.

Those figures were current as of a few days ago.

They say it’s “abysmal” and that if we even get to the “disappointing” figure of 17% from last year, they’ll be “amazed”, and that everything from scheduling to trying to pay for it is a disaster, if you even want one, thanks to this Obamacare nonsense.

I mean, you don’t have to have any conspiracy theories. This is them saying that.

Nobody wants it and Obamacare is a goddamned disaster even if you do.

They don’t say why nobody wants it, but the fourth shot put my spouse in bed from that Sunday to that Wednesday night and forced him to call into work and use sick time.

Then he gave COVID to me 6 weeks later when he got it.

Seven weeks after my fourth shot, I started showing symptoms, tested positive, started taking Molnupiravir, and as soon as I started coming back up from the COVID, my entire mouth turned white and blue and started aching so bad for the next month that I was popping pain medicine and Valtrex every 8 hours because it unleashed the Shingles on me.

It was constant pain and suffering for an entire month.

I mean, if the shots work and side effects are minor…. Let’s just say that this is true for the moment, purely for the sake of argument…. Then why isn’t anyone really trying to get this one?

Most people got COVID 2-3 times whether they got “vaccinated” for it or not.

Almost everyone I know that didn’t take any shots barely noticed it and it was basically over in a week.

There’s obviously not only just no/little vaccine durability, but it didn’t even work well during the time where it said I was at “peak protection”, and my spouse slept and couldn’t even eat anything for days after his fourth shot.

Pfizer’s laying people off and complaining about “sales” after it made the shots $200 each, $200, after it had been charging the US government $16.

But Pfizer is also working on a “combo flu and COVID shot”.

The US government recently admitted that getting both at the same time raises your risk of a stroke significantly vs. waiting two weeks between shots, but the advice continues to be to get both during the same visit.

Hmm…

It is the second study to find an elevated risk of stroke for seniors after Covid-19 and flu vaccinations given together. The US Centers for Disease Control and FDA issued a public communication in January explaining that one of their near real-time vaccine safety monitoring studies — called the Vaccine Safety Datalink — had picked up a small and uncertain risk of stroke for older adults who received a dose of Pfizer’s bivalent Covid-19 vaccine and a high-dose or adjuvanted flu shot on the same day. That study triggered the FDA’s broader look at strokes after vaccination noted in the medical records of seniors on Medicare.

That said, the risk identified in the FDA’s study appears to be very small — roughly 3 strokes or transient ischemic attacks for every 100,000 doses given[…]

–CNN

That’s nice. So let me get this straight.

They say your risk is less than 1 in a million for a stroke if you just get one or the other, but 1 in 33,333 by getting them both at once is fine?

Fine with them, I guess.

They’re not the ones who’ll be going from 1 in 500,000 (total) by waiting two weeks apart if you’re going to get both shots, to 1 in 33,333 by doing both on one visit.

Assuming their data is accurate.

There is no ethical way to recommend not making two trips to the pharmacy if you actually want both shots, except that they want as many people as possible getting dosed, and the government doesn’t really care about the extra strokes because that’s the problem for people who have a stroke, not the government.

There’s also the issue of personal choice.

The left has never had a really big problem with trying to control other people.

They started out small, like New York City Mayor Michael “Big Gulp” Bloomberg.

They freaked out about how many french fries were on someone else’s plate, or how many ounces of Coca-Cola they were drinking in one sitting.

Now the same group that says you shouldn’t be forced to have something inside of you that you don’t want, and that’s why abortion should be legal without any restrictions at all, are arguing that the ~90% that don’t want COVID shots should be forced to take them by the 10% who may eventually get this one.

That’s really all this is about. COVID shots didn’t stop COVID when 80%+ were complying, and now that 7% have complied, it’s out there spreading at about the same rate.

Medicine is normally a trade-off between acceptable risk and actual, measurable benefits, and the government can’t just release data and show that the risk of COVID shots are acceptable or that the benefits are high, so it tells you that it needs 76 years to release safety data, and just trust marketing statements from the companies that make $200 a shot now.

We clearly never hit 95% efficacy or anything close to it during the height of compliance, and that’s all we’re left with now.

7% think that they’re right and everyone else is wrong, and you’re down to a 7% who are so stupid that they’ll believe anything the government tells them and wonder why 99.9% of the world isn’t wearing masks and 93% isn’t “vaccinated”.

Jamie Zawinski is really nasty about anyone who says anything other than towing the party line (they get blocked after he sends them a “Fuck it, Die then!” JPEG….well, at least it wasn’t a WebP I suppose…), and many others in the California land of nuts, fruits, and flakes, sound like a team of Pfizer salesmen, and really it’s none of their business how many french fries I eat or what I put in my body, and so people like this can go jump in the lake.

If you were harmed or got COVID and it was nasty anyway after the vaccines, why take more?

What will 5, 6, 7, and 8 do better than 1, 2, 3, and 4?

I think a lot of people that got hurt by the COVID shots (brain fog, sleeping for half a week, puking, heart problems) and then got COVID 3 times anyway, just realized what I eventually did about COVID shots.

(Thankfully we just got it the one time.)

Don’t take any more and pray whatever the last ones did isn’t permanent.

We both took our flu shots this year, like we always do.

All of the “news” (which, as Roy said, was basically dead by 2020 so what’s left is easy to control now) talks about are “tripledemics”.

They try to conflate flu, RSV, and COVID when they’re all very different, and the flu shot has been around for about 80 years and it’s known to work, to an extent, and to not be all that dangerous.

The reason they try to conflate is to sell failed experiments that nobody will stop.

My mom’s doctor asked her about the “RSV vaccine”, and she said, “No way! Nobody’s experimenting on me because I’m old and they think my life doesn’t matter.”

And the thing is, she wasn’t wrong about that.

Not only does the government not like people in their 60s, if they die it means there’s less Social Security and Medicare payments.

I’m not going anywhere near these “RSV shots”.

The FDA is so corrupt they’ll approve anything and never look at it again, and the media is so corrupt it lets corporations buy articles, and if you ever do get paid for an injury, the liability is on the government for anything they can call a “vaccine”.

All of this is not to say I’m an anti-vaxxer. We need hard data and years-long safety trials. They don’t do that anymore. They cook something new up in about a week and then the marketing team takes over. They don’t even know what it does. Roll up your sleeve and find out.

They didn’t develop (highly effective and safe) Hepatitis vaccines by winging it, lying to everyone, and having a marketing department make outrageous efficacy figures nobody questioned. These COVID and RSV shots are something else.

How dare anyone, how dare them, try to call me a “COVID denier” after how sick I got with it (after four shots!), or an anti-vaxxer! (After four shots!)

I think that vaccines developed under the previous regime of actual testing and an FDA and media that wouldn’t approve anything and run paid shit and government propaganda for “stories” really need to be taken.

We’re dealing with a Hepatitis outbreak right now in the Midwest, and it’s partially because many people will ever trust legitimate vaccines again after this spectacle.

Remember when the propaganda was “wear masks and vaccinate” and then everyone got sick anyway after laughing that “anti-vaxxers” and “Republicans” would get sick and die?

Pepperidge Farm Remembers.

Trust me, you’re not the 7% who got the “updated shot” (aren’t we on the 6th now?) and not the 93% that haven’t because you’re the smartest people ever.

You think highly of yourself, I’m sure. Most people do after inhaling their own farts that long.

The other problem with this setup is that if the left hadn’t fucked up our healthcare system so much worse than it was in 2009 with Obamacare, maybe people could get the “COVID vaccine” covered.

Theoretically, insurance pays for COVID shots, but people are going up to the pharmacy counter and being told they owe $200 and just leave without getting the shot because it’s that or food.

Before the Democrats started fucking with the shit in the Obamacare-era, people didn’t have $10,000 deductible insurance, they were usually $1,000 or less, and doctor visits cost $50, not $400.

A third problem is that even if the FDA wasn’t corrupt, their budget isn’t big enough to handle what all they’ve been tasked with, and it is a lot.

You can drive half a mile from the FDA’s headquarters, and buy unlicensed viagra at a convenience store. Hell, they sell them at the Murphy Gas station out the Walmart.

What the Hell do you think is in those boner pills they sell at the counter? People have purchased those and had a lab analyze it you know.

Then there’s bath salts, Delta-8-THC, and all other kinds of garbage. Where’s the government? Nyaaah? Nyaah.

COVID and Vaccine Jingoism. The Politics of a Plague.

COVID and Vaccine Jingoism. The Politics of a Plague.

There was a strange phenomenon during COVID, well, a lot of them.

It wasn’t just every two-bit politician in America acting like a dictator with unlimited authority, sweeping the feckless courts and legislatures aside, ruling by “public health decree”. Forcing everyone into ineffective Hygiene Theater, including “sanitizing surfaces” and “masks”, whose sole purpose was psychological. (So the economy wouldn’t collapse.)

Oh no, there was a lot of noise in the “media”, like NPR, BBC, and NYTimes, regarding “Chinese” and “Russian” vaccines, and “What’s even in them? Who knows? They probably have lousy quality control because, again, Russia and China.”

In the mean time, as we in the Northern Hemisphere go into the Cold, Flu, and COVID season yet again, I’ve decided not to take any more of the “COVID shots”.

I’ve stopped calling them vaccines. I took four of them.

The fourth being the “bivalent booster”. So did my spouse.

Just 6 weeks after the bivalent booster (all doses were Pfizer), we both got COVID at the same time.

COVID actually made my spouse less sick than the COVID shot. The COVID shot made it impossible for him to get out of bed for nearly 4 days.

He ended up calling into work, losing most of his sick time, and then when he did get COVID, having to take unpaid Family and Medical Leave Act time off, which they only give you when you have COVID, not “COVID shot side effects”. Which they gaslight the public and claim don’t even exist.

I wasn’t even as lucky as him. I ended up very sick with COVID, and then developing chest pains that dragged on clear into this summer and didn’t stop for for EIGHT months.

We both took the “COVID antiviral pills”, he got the Pfizer ones, I couldn’t take them and had to take Molnupiravir. Just as soon as I was starting to come around, 4 days later, the COVID weakened my immune system to the point where I had a Shingles outbreak, and spent another few weeks taking pills to stamp that out, as well as painkillers three times a day (the maximum safe dose!).

I’ve decided this year, we’ll skip the shots, because they clearly do nothing and they can make you sicker than the damn bug.

I don’t feel like a repeat of last year where my spouse risks getting in trouble with his job, over a defective COVID shot, for absolutely no benefit.

So we will be taking the flu shot on Monday and calling it.

We are not anti-vaxxers. We have taken all of the CDC recommended vaccines. Most of them were put through a legitimate Scientific Process.

The clear and only point of Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID shots is to make money for Pfizer and Moderna, while the government sweeps all of the information under the rug about how badly they can hurt you.

This year, the Biden administration, allowed both companies to increase the price of each dose from $16, which the government paid and led to record profits for both companies, to $180 per dose, which is going to make insurance companies raise premiums again, to pay for shots that are dangerous and don’t even work.

Naturally, to grease the wheels on Phase II of the Great Heist, Moderna has said they’ll cover the shots for the uninsured, for now.

Given that these things very clearly don’t work, given the media gaslighting, which I’ll admit even got me until I had to experience the fact that they don’t work myself, and just the level of dishonesty and corruption about the entire thing (including anti-Russian and anti-Chinese propaganda that didn’t even leave the COVID shots out of it), I can’t justify accepting more.

It was the Democrats, as usual, who had such a horrible program, that they had to bribe and threaten people. Through their employers, naturally.

Take it, you get fifty bucks, don’t take it and potentially get fired.

Biden tried his best to make everyone who refused the heart damage and other oddities unemployed, during a recession, with hyperinflation.

This America is a dystopian Hell, and despite the rare media mention of COVID anymore (because they took their “emergency powers” and never gave them back, thank you very much), and now they want you out there shopping, rumbling of the Lockdown Fetishists are starting to make the news again.

This whole thing was an exercise in raw power.

After they eased up a little and like half of the jobs lost to the Lockdown came back, the corrupt New York Times spun up the KrugmanBot3000 to proclaim the Dead Cat Bounce as the Economic Miracle of Biden.

A “recovery” that brings back half the jobs, and puts the government in twice as much debt is a Miracle.

Hallelujah. Praise Be! I saw the light, I saw the light, no more darkness no more night! Then Jesus Biden came like a stranger in the night. Praise the Lord Joe Biden, I saw the light!

Ironically, after encouraging people who know how to knock a fence down and enter a place illegally to come to Chicago, ex-Mayor Lightfoot of Chicago was horrified when they did the same thing to her chain link fences around open air parks.

What public policy sense did it make to lock down open air state and local parks when there’s this germ going around mostly killing people who don’t even go out and walk?

(Of course, in Chicago, that’s defensible since not exercising is more healthy than being shot while exercising, I suppose.)

Also, true to Democrat form, we had to spill reams of digital ink, chiding people for going to church, and not say anything about the vandalism, looting, and the “house parties” where someone shows up with a machine gun, which were spreading COVID, but it wasn’t the people you CAN berate in the media doing it.

Excusing open and outright criminal actions while condemning people for engaging in their Constitutionally-protected right to freedom of religion did not weigh well on me. I think we deserve better than this from our government.

Calling rioting and arson and looting “mostly peaceful” while people are dying, the city is on fire, and businesses are being destroyed is never okay. But the Democrats and their pet media did this.

At the same time, the Civil Alert System was going off telling me not to enter Kenosha, Wisconsin or Downtown Chicago. Mostly peaceful, you know.

I’m planning to take my spouse to some Libertarian Party meetings.

It’s only right that if he’s planning to become an American that we should do this right.

I find it very ironic that the government universities, who basically load people up with so much debt they’ll never see the light of day again, most of them, and at only 18, would brand the faculty as such “Progressives” while actually promoting so much actual wealth inequality. Sure, yeah, finance it all and hand it to them. Whatever.

I don’t respect them. There’s nothing to feel good about when you’re a “university” and you load a bunch of rubes down with $60,000 in debt at 6%+ interest, knowing what you’re doing to them, and then you tell them that they’re a victim of “evil White people”.

Yeah, a lot of those “evil White people” are running the university. Ever stopped to think about it?

Those are the ones saying that the “evil White people” are the ones who are too poor to buy a bag of beans, and aren’t even threatening anybody.

The elitist “Left” is too stupid to realize that by openly mocking and slandering people who are on hard times, portraying Rural Americans as the Great White Satan, that they are making people like Trump and DeSantis more palatable.

They won’t do anything for the poor White rural voters, but they say they have the answer to everything, and point out how toxic and stupid the “Left” is all the time to score points because the last part is….not untrue.

You won’t like their answer to the problems though. Keep pushing, you’ll find out.

You thought Trump was bad the first time? Just wait and see what he does next. And if not him, someone like him.

Consumer products makers shift promotions into high gear to retain customers and change buying patters. Many exploit “Consumer Illiteracy”.

Consumer products makers shift promotions into high gear to retain customers and change buying patters. Many exploit “Consumer Illiteracy”.

Today I got a third “free” bottle of “Natean” toothpaste from iBotta. They keep putting it on iBotta to encourage people to take some, hopefully to permanently change their buying behavior.

The problem (for them) is that toothpaste is basically toothpaste and I’m no idiot.

As soon as the “free after rebate” or “half price” rebates on something end, I switch and stock up on the competitor’s product, if they have rebates.

I told Roy in #Techrights that I’m on to the schemes and I have at least a dozen varieties of just toothpaste (not counting other things) in the top shelf of my kitchen pantry. A mountain of consumer products.

If I had to pay $5.97 plus tax for a 4.7 ounce bottle of toothpaste, I’d just go back to the bargain brand. Because those tend to be a little over $1 and they still give you over 6 ounces.

The company that makes Natean toothpaste (it’s a Walmart-exclusive according to their press release) is GlaxoSmithKline. Which is a major pharmaceutical company. They also already have toothpaste brands, like Sensodyne.

What they’re doing with Natean toothpaste is essentially to hoodwink “health conscious” consumers.

A deeply disturbing trend towards scientific illiteracy has been unfolding in America for decades, and now we’re to the point where a “food mommy” with a blog can literally target random chemicals that she can’t pronounce and, without a relevant degree hanging on her wall of any field of science, much less not having any clinical studies in support, claims that they all cause cancer or something.

When she collected her first “scalp” it was to go after Subway for having Azodicarbonamide in the bread as a trace ingredient. Without any evidence, she “linked” it to a whole host of health conditions, and then shamed them into getting rid of it by having the media refer to it as “the yoga mat chemical”.

Seeing an opening, corporate America immediately flooded store shelves with reformulated products. Which contain completely different chemicals that she hasn’t gone after yet, which are also usually a tongue-twister, and if that’s not bad enough, GSK is now pandering to the anti-fluoride crowd too.

To make things even worse, the box of Natean toothpaste I got says it has “the best that science has to offer”.

I doubt that scientists would agree.

Dentists surely wouldn’t, although some chiropractors might.

See, the majority of Natean (which was interestingly, the name of a villain in the Lucian Alliance in Stargate SG-1), toothpastes say they are fluoride-free.

Fluoridation of toothpaste was a miracle of scientific accomplishment, in the 1950s, when it hit the shelves, as was fluoridation of public drinking water.

Tooth decay was arrested to the extent that dental caries in children (who are most at risk, you see) went down by over 85% over the next decade.

However, an anti-science movement sweeping America like a plague is leaving some towns without fluoridation, which costs only pennies, and is scaring the hell out of parents into buying expensive toothpaste that does a really shitty job at preventing decay of teeth.

Toothpaste literally has one job. To prevent decay of teeth. Manual removal of plaque is really all non-fluoridated toothpaste has left, and this alone is far from enough.

Some of your hillbilly relatives out in the sticks might brush with baking soda. Notice what the consequences of that are? In a pinch, it might get you by for one night if you just didn’t remember toothpaste at the store, but it’s not a habit to get into.

It costs a lot of money to go to the dentist, and the victims of anti-fluoride movements are often poor and uninsured. They end up flocking into hospital emergency rooms across America getting emergency dental extractions and walk around missing teeth.

Horrifying!

I’m not rich, I have no insurance for my teeth, yet the only teeth I’m missing are my wisdom teeth, which I had them remove because they were impacted when I was 16.

I’m almost 39 years old and my teeth still get excellent check-ups (and a fluoride treatment!) every 4-6 months at the local dental college.

My parents were very well to do in the 1990s.

The money was worth more than 2.5 times what it is now, and they were pulling down nearly $250,000 a year then. We were not poor, but dad is infamously cheap.

Case in point, he sent me an email in 2013 asking if I knew how to get kernelex working so that he could make his wife’s Windows 98 computer run Firefox again.

We were not using $6 tubes of toothpaste in his house, and even as an adult, I’ve rarely strayed north of $1.50. My teeth are fine.

But I guarantee you if you run the idea of skipping the fluoride and a “fluoride removal water filter” past any dentist, they’ll say “They’re your teeth, but I cannot advise that.” and it’s because it’s good advice.

Does GSK warrant that their fluoride-free Natean toothpaste will provide the same level of cavity protection? No.

Who pays for fillings and extractions if it doesn’t? Not them!

Fortunately, the “Free After Rebate” offer applied to their version with sodium fluoride in it too. I would absolutely never consider skipping fluoride, or paying MORE for a toothpaste that did less than the bargain brand to protect one of the most important parts (and the uninsured part) of my body.

That would be absurd and certainly not the best product that science has to offer.

Unfortunately, my mother is a nurse who also falls in with the “anti-science” crowd.

Mom never gets her vaccines. In a single year, she managed to fall out of the vaccine-preventable respiratory illness tree and hit every single one (pneumonia, flu, and COVID) on the way down. She fought with me to the point where I thought we weren’t going to speak again for 10 years before she marched down to the doctor and got Paxlovid and then said “I feel much better now. Thank you!”.

On top of making fun of me for getting my vaccines and skipping over all of that, mom also makes fun of me for taking my Crestor to keep my cholesterol down (very small dose). She actually says things like, “Cholesterol levels don’t matter.”.

I told her, “And you can pour all of the hamburger and bacon grease you want down the drain until you can’t. What’s your point?”.

She was telling me all about Crestor and how it was going to screw up my brain, and then she left her Instant Pot on the stove and turned the stove on and destroyed her Instant Pot with the stove.

There are people who get the facts and there are people, including nurses, who tune into some nut on Facebook that says this and that.

They say that nurses make the worst patients. Why? Just an observation, but I’ve seen an awful lot of them who are skeptical of medicine get into the medical field because the money is good.

Makes you wonder about all those “Dial-a-Nurse” lines the health insurance companies have, doesn’t it?

Mom and my brother both got COVID days before we were supposed to go on vacation.

Mom and my brother both got COVID days before we were supposed to go on vacation.

First, some background. My mother and my brother don’t believe in vaccines, or most medicine in general. Yes, she’s a nurse.

They both voted for Donald Trump twice, even when it was clear that he was grossly incompetent and telling his followers to literally commit suicide to try to boost his approval ratings going into the 2020 election.

Mom repeated pretty much all of the Trump/Republican propaganda about COVID-19. That it was overblown, that the Democrats were making it all up. That it would be gone by August of 2020. That the vaccines were dangerous, and “don’t work anyway” despite evidence to the contrary that they were at least a lot better than nothing.

Also, that the FDA was “involved in a conspiracy” to deny people Hydroxychloroquine and a Z-Pack (despite the study where the people who got it had many more deaths than the placebo group) and then, later, Ivermectin of course.

I begged with her to get a vaccine, I pleaded with her. I even set up an appointment at an Indiana pop-up vaccine clinic, and she failed to appear after telling me she’d go, and said COVID wasn’t that big of a deal and the vaccines were “causing people to develop heart problems”.

(It has been proven that heart problems from the vaccines are very rare, and that COVID causes over 1,000 times more people who get it to develop heart inflammation than the vaccines, and now she and my brother have COVID instead of a COVID vaccine.)

She wasn’t having any of it. She’s a Christian, and it’s not mainline Protestantism where you just show up and there’s nothing radical going on and you bring a slow cooker full of meatballs every now and then, and everyone’s pretty level headed like most churches in Indiana were just 25 years ago when I was a kid and lived there.

In her church they believe some pretty far out stuff, like that if you grow long hair you can cast out demons and shit.

It’s….appalling, it’s hardly believable that in the 21st century that so many people like this exist, but they do. They’re out there. And they’re the reason why the United States of America has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the whole world.

And she doesn’t just attack COVID vaccines, she attacks ones that have been around for decades and prevent some pretty terrible stuff, like Hepatitis A and B, and Pneumococcal Pneumonia.

In fact, when she called me yesterday to say our vacation was off, leaving me with an expensive two bedroom condominium that I can’t get refunded, so I might as well go and enjoy it now with my spouse, she said that she also has the flu. I suppose it goes without saying that she never gets vaccinated for the flu either.

So after President Biden said that he was going to make it mandatory for healthcare workers, she became even more insistent that she’d just sign religious exemption forms at her employer and go around putting the health of herself and those around her at more risk than was ever necessary, pretty much because she didn’t like President Biden.

I even tried to mention that Trump himself (after he recovered from COVID-19), slinked off and took the vaccine himself, quietly.

In fact, by the time Trump came around and said at one of his rallies that his supporters should just get vaccinated and that there was nothing wrong with it, and they should just do it, they started booing him. He created a monster, and then he couldn’t escape that monster himself, and so after dipping his toe in the water, he never brought it up again.

So, then it gets worse, right? I asked my mom now that she was sick with nausea, vomiting, fatigue, headache, chills, and a temperature of 103 F, if she would go take the pills, and she said no, and then I had to get my cousins after her.

Then finally after I leaned on her and told her that the government pays for Paxlovid (the pills that keep most people who get COVID from going to the hospital, ending up on a ventilator, and dying) and that I didn’t want “two funerals” next week where I was in Indiana burying her and my brother (who has many underlying medical issues), she finally got up and went and got the Paxlovid, and the Nurse Practitioner is calling some in for my brother that he’s supposed to start taking tomorrow.

War breaks out over the telephone, between me in Illinois, and mom in Indiana, because some people would almost rather die than eat crow and admit that they were so horribly wrong and they need to do something now before this really turns into an emergency.

My spouse and I have both gotten our flu shots every year, and we’ve been vaccinated and boosted with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.

I had a small argument with him that we were going to the pharmacy to get the booster, but it wasn’t anything like what I’m going through with my mom and brother. I don’t hate them. I just wish they’d knock this off and admit, finally, that their blind political devotion to a failed politician and Facebook conspiracy kooks nearly cost them their lives and that if they somehow pull through having COVID and the flu, they have the scientists and doctors that they were ridiculing throughout the past few years who created the antivirals and prescribed them to thank for this.

Their church didn’t seem to help them. Everyone in church shamed her for watching their livestream while COVID was raging on hard for the first few waves. Then she even admits you go there and someone is always sick with something and wants to hug you anyway.

Very nearly everyone in her church has had COVID, sometimes three times.

A friend of hers there and her husband, who are both a couple of real dimwits, said they’d never get tested again because “the health department was asking all of those nosy questions”.

We need higher standards for healthcare in America, sure.

The fact that you have nurses who don’t believe in medicine and so many doctors who are incompetent and with the bedside manner of a tarantula who just don’t care is frightening.

The only reason I have hesitancy to get medical attention is because there are so many errors, and so many doctors with no skin in the game, who keep the cash register running while they say “We’ll wait and see if this thing that’s bad today while you’re here gets worse before we begin to think about prescribing medicine.”.

In fact, last Christmas, we went to see mom and my brother and eat dinner with them. My spouse was vaccinated for Pneumococcal Pneumonia and I wasn’t (although I did get Prevnar-13 the next month and plan to get Pneumovax-23 in January). I was around mom who insisted she just had a post-viral cough.

Then I got back to Illinois and came down with Pneumococcal Pneumonia. I spent a month with it, on the couch, blowing my nose, wheezing, hacking up green stuff, running a fever, and trying to find a doctor that would give me antibiotics, and finally one gave me azithromycin and it went away. (Negative for strep, flu, and COVID of course, which I told the doctor at the Urgent Care right away.)

My spouse, vaccinated for Pneumococcal Pneumonia, never got it. That was the one vaccine I did not have, and it’s not because I’m a nutcase, but rather because the CDC didn’t recommend it for my age group.

So I went to the pharmacy when I got better and started the series. I lied and said my doctor told me that I have risk factors for Pneumococcal Pneumonia and that I should get the vaccines.

Most of the doctors I ran into at the Lake County Illinois Health Department should lose their license, honestly. And with walk-in clinics it’s hit or miss.

I have decent insurance, so I’m lucky in that I can just try again until I get a doctor that knows what they’re doing and agrees to treat the problem.

Luckier than a lot of people in this country.

It’s easier to tell a little white lie to get the Pneumonia vaccine in your 30s than it is to get Pneumonia, run into a stack of doctors who don’t want to help you and tell you to go to the ER if it gets worse, and then end up with a $12,000 ambulance bill and $50,000 to the hospital when the doctor could have treated you with $15 worth of antibiotics and chose not to.

What blew my mind this week is my mother has Medicare starting yesterday and my brother has totally free healthcare (Medicaid), and they admitted that the plan was to wait around for this thing that’s killing everybody like them to mop the floor with them and then end up in the hospital where it’s a coin toss rather than to take some free medication that’s actually quite good at shutting down severe illness.

As for the vacation, hopefully things turn around by next week. I mean, it ruined their trip to the state park, which I was paying for, but hopefully it won’t get a hell of a lot worse for them than that and my spouse and I will be hiking in the park and watching the bald eagles while mom and my brother just have a shitty month instead of dying.

I’ll let you know.

But for the record, please take your vaccines, or at least don’t wait to start the antiviral medications if you get it.

You’re someone’s family member, and very few people really have to die of COVID-19 at this point. If you choose to die of COVID-19 simply to prove a point, it’s like putting your family members through a suicide.

It’s a choice you make that’s selfish and it’s wrong of you.

As for my family, it seems like every time we plan something, mom and my brother are sick. They even got me with Pneumonia last year. I guess we’ll still go and visit, but I’ll be up to date on my shots this time around.

The really sad thing about my mom and brother and Donald Trump and Joe Biden is that if they absolutely insisted on dying over Donald Trump’s lies, Joe Biden wouldn’t know, and they’d be victims of the 2020 election conspiracies that Trump was engaged in, like the last Japanese soldier on the island who refused to admit that World War II was over, and kept shooting at people until 1973.

Trump sees his supporters as pawns. If he gets them killed, he doesn’t care. He’s an immoral person to say the least.

Thanks to Donald Trump and various Facebook cranks, my life traded paint this week with the possibility of burying my mom and brother.

He doesn’t care that people like my mom, who couldn’t answer half the questions on the practice citizenship test, didn’t really, honestly, and truly believe in COVID despite the fact that she’s a nurse and has seen it wipe out nursing homes,, and even when she got it herself, she was still in this state of denial while the hourglass was running on doing something about it.

This country really went wrong when people like her and my dad let a failed businessman take hold of the highest office because they made decisions based on emotions and prejudices instead of the facts at hand.

They’ll always be my family, and I love them. I just wish they could see that when they give in to fear, and ignorance, and hatred…they suffer for it as well.

As for whether religion is to blame?

Religion is crazy stuff, but it’s the result of of all of these things, not the cause. Even if we were lucky enough to have religion disappear tomorrow, we’d still have bigots.

There’s plenty of bigots who don’t believe in God, I’m sorry to say, but the truly disgusting thing is that most of the bigots are religious because it makes it easier to play it off as “It’s not me, man….It’s all here in the book, yo!”.

Religion is a problem in the family that I’ve been dealing with since a long time before COVID came around and is a completely different subject entirely. But one of the problems is that it really messes with people’s heads, and then they think they can just, like, pray, and stuff will get better on its own without medication, or effort, or work, or a drive to improve themselves.

Self-improvement is the only way people grow. Religion is truly evil because it stops people from growing and makes them fine with how things are and should not be.

I’ve never been happy with the way my life was, and I suspect most people aren’t. Some turn to drugs and alcohol, others to sex and gambling or cutting themselves, but religion is in that group. And they hate it when you say that, but it’s there.

I liked how Rick Sanchez put it. If I recall correctly, “Passively accepting that horrible things are happening is a quality I admire in my food animals. When I don’t like how things are, I change them!”.

Every day above ground is a small victory.