The Wuhan virus—how are we doing? - Page 94 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Provision of the two UN HDI indicators other than GNP.
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#15167552
One of my favorite economists, Brad DeLong, was asked a pointed question about whether economists should get some blame for the 2008 crash.

'When did politicians ever listen to economists?'

Back in the 1980s, Nobel economist Lester Thurow tried to get people to listen to common sense. That was during the 'trickle up' days. Republicans were too busy robbing the country to pay attention.

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
but in ourselves"
#15167565
Isn't it interesting that we cannot have a thread about Covid 19 without it devolving to a debate about economics. Clearly there is an enormous economic effect from the pandemic but it certainly seems that republicans (as distinct from conservatives) want to make it primarily about that. Progressives want to make it about everything they can think about. If I hear one more story about how left handed gingers are not getting their fair share of vaccine I am going to throw up.

At the risk of making an on-topic post I would mention this: 46% of Republicans in a recent poll say they may not t get vaccinated. 26% they they definitely will not. This alone could keep people dying for many years to come. Why? Absolutely no other reason than that the Republican leadership considers this another useful, though murderous., political wedge issue. So why not kill another half a million people if it foils the conservatives that they label as liberal. Democrats.
#15167593
SpecialOlympian wrote:I also think like an economist, in that I reject empiricism and argue from first principles (this is called praxeology).


Praxeology is a concept from the Austrian school, no one else in the field takes that crap seriously.
#15167782
Trump MIS-managed the pandemic in the USA. Pretending he had something to do with the vaccine is pretty much lying to yourself.
#15167786
Godstud wrote:Trump MIS-managed the pandemic in the USA. Pretending he had something to do with the vaccine is pretty much lying to yourself.


He did sign off on operation warp speed. I hate the guy too, and want him in prison, but hey, he could have said no to operation warp speed. :eek:
#15167799
Rancid wrote:He did sign off on operation warp speed. I hate the guy too, and want him in prison, but hey, he could have said no to operation warp speed. :eek:


Exactly, he could have gone slower about it and leave the US muddling through like the EU and Canada are.
#15167801
What do you mean? Why wouldn't that be regarded as the good thing about his management of the pandemic?


Warp speed was a good thing. So how is it that Trump managed to fuck it up. Complicated unless you look at Trump from the start.

Trump's failure is that at the same time that he signed off on the vaccine production he began to construct the political position that:

1. Downplayed the severity of the pandemic in the face of overwhelming evidence.

2. Delayed while obfuscating the federal (non) response to the pandemic.

3. And most importantly, he sewed the seeds of distrust that made a large percentage of the population distrust the very vaccine of which he wishes to be proud.

Do you see that? They produced the vaccine and now 40% of his party faithful refuse to take it. This puts all of us in danger. Even those of us who have been vaccinated.

Here is the reality. We are doing a terrible job of putting this vaccine into arms in a great many countries. (Including the USA because of refusal to take it.) Every person who gets the virus, symptomatic or not, has the potential to spawn a variant that defeats vaccination or if frightfully more virulent. Because Republicans, it is entirely possible that the variant that wipes out the next three million people will be the "Alabama variant".

So Trump can't take credit for heroism in simply placing an order for vaccines. There are about 400,000 Americans dead today because of his failures. When I was a kid there was talk of something very much like this. Of Hitler we often said, "Yes. But he make the trains run on time".
#15167802
Drlee wrote: There are about 400,000 Americans dead today because of his failures. When I was a kid there was talk of something very much like this. Of Hitler we often said, "Yes. But he make the trains run on time".

Trump screwed up bad on a bunch of things with COVID, but you can't blame him for 400,000 deaths. There's a whole lot of blame to go around, including a lot of dumb Americans themselves, plus nutty governors, mayors etc.

Unfortunately the US has been the laughing stock around the world with COVID except for the vaccine production, but again many Americans are not going to take the vaccine.
#15167805
Drlee wrote:Warp speed was a good thing. So how is it that Trump managed to fuck it up. Complicated unless you look at Trump from the start.

Trump's failure is that at the same time that he signed off on the vaccine production he began to construct the political position that:

1. Downplayed the severity of the pandemic in the face of overwhelming evidence.

2. Delayed while obfuscating the federal (non) response to the pandemic.

3. And most importantly, he sewed the seeds of distrust that made a large percentage of the population distrust the very vaccine of which he wishes to be proud.

Do you see that? They produced the vaccine and now 40% of his party faithful refuse to take it. This puts all of us in danger. Even those of us who have been vaccinated.

Here is the reality. We are doing a terrible job of putting this vaccine into arms in a great many countries. (Including the USA because of refusal to take it.) Every person who gets the virus, symptomatic or not, has the potential to spawn a variant that defeats vaccination or if frightfully more virulent. Because Republicans, it is entirely possible that the variant that wipes out the next three million people will be the "Alabama variant".

So Trump can't take credit for heroism in simply placing an order for vaccines. There are about 400,000 Americans dead today because of his failures. When I was a kid there was talk of something very much like this. Of Hitler we often said, "Yes. But he make the trains run on time".


I agree Trump downplayed it (although I know for a fact many governments did), messed the Federal response to it and pandered to the anti-vaxxers way too much since they are part of the GOP's base, but other Western countries don't even have vaccines. THE good thing about the Federal response was to act promptly on vaccine development and procurement, no matter what.

We'll have to see how bad will hesitancy be (it seems to be too early to see) but Europe is even worse in this regard than the US (this is model-based aggregation of different global surveys on the matter, done before the pandemic):

Image

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanc ... 40-6736(20)31558-0/fulltext

A similar pattern can be seen regarding the COVID vaccine:

Image

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591- ... /figures/1
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1124-9

As such, stuff like what's going on with AstraZeneca in the EU is basically playing with fire. Unfortunately, it's not simply a Trump thing.
#15167806
wat0n wrote:Exactly, he could have gone slower about it and leave the US muddling through like the EU and Canada are.


Even considering how slow the rollout has been everywhere else. This vaccine development and roll out is a fucking marvel. I don't understand how the WHO for example, can bitch and moan about rollouts being unacceptable in certain parts of the world. Dude, shut the fuck up, this is breakneck global deployment. THIS HAS NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE, AND IT'S GETTING DONE. FULL STOP.

Unthinking Majority wrote:Unfortunately the US has been the laughing stock around the world with COVID except for the vaccine production, but again many Americans are not going to take the vaccine.


You sure about that? It was reported over the weekend that half of adults in the US have received at least their first shot.
#15167811
Unthinking Majority wrote:I bet US will have lowest vaccine rate per capita among all NATO countries. Let's check the numbers a year from now.


Caca, ok.
#15167816
@wat0n Canada is muddling thru? They have over 25% the population already vaccinated. How is that muddling? USA isn't even there yet.

Canada also had far less deaths, per 100,000 than the UK and UK. Get your facts straight, dude. :lol:
#15167818
Godstud wrote:@wat0n Canada is muddling thru? They have over 25% the population already vaccinated. How is that muddling? USA isn't even there yet.

Canada also had far less deaths, per 100,000 than the UK and UK. Get your facts straight, dude. :lol:


At least Oxford's Our World In Data has Canada as having fully vaccinated 2.41% of its population (for the US, the figure is 24.66%):

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

Canada has caught up on the first dose (it's now standing at around 25%), so it will be catching up on full vaccinations soon.

Canada has indeed had less per capita deaths than the US and the UK, but it seems its caseload has really shot up lately, although nowhere close to the US and UK peak.
#15167824
So it was not accurate, @wat0n.

In Canada, 7,290,869 people (19.18% of the population) have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

6,481,251 people (17.05% of the population) have received only one dose.
809,618 people (2.13% of the population) have received two doses.
An additional 1,505,471 people (3.96% of the population) have received their first dose since our report last week.

https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid ... -coverage/

Covid deaths:
USA........... 567,000, 330 million people
UK............. 127,500, 68 million people
Canada...... 23,611, 38 million people
Thailand.... 97, 68 million people

Thailand's doing very poorly on the vaccination front(having vaccinated less than 1% of the population), but it's not nearly in as dire a situation, Thankfully.
#15167829
:roll: If they've already had the first done, then they are in the process of being vaccinated, and your statement about EU and Canada "muddling through" was utter stupidity. :knife:
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