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Consider this: the earliest treatment (variolation) for smallpox was a live pathogen treatment which was capable of causing infectious epidemic breakouts on its own. It was quite literally intentionally infecting people with a minimally weakened dose of actual smallpox (because they didn't know...

Again, forced vaccination of the general population was settled by Jacobson v. Massachusetts. I merely mention Washington as a supplementary anecdote -- and note that the variolation that he ordered had itself a fatality rate of five to ten percent, which was only slightly better than the 16%...

On the contrary, the Constitutionality of vaccine mandates has been a settled issue since 1905. See Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11. The United States as we know it wouldn't even exist were it not for mandatory vaccination, when George Washington personally ordered the mass vaccination...

400K is not "a flu season and a half" of deaths, it's over a decade of flu. U.S. flu deaths in the past decade have ranged from 12K to 61K a year, and average to 36K.

Absolutely; HIPAA only applies to patient healthcare records being kept by healthcare professionals, health plans, and covered health care providers. The only HIPAA rule with regard to other people asking for your medical records is that they cannot obtain them directly from covered healthcare...

It doesn't. HIPAA doesn't in any way restrict asking for medical information; it is a very harshly enforced but also very narrowly specific set of restrictions on sharing medical information that *only* apply to healthcare professionals. If your obnoxious mother-in-law shares all of your private...

I'm going to point out that this is completely normal. All publicly traded corporations are required to have a board of directors elected by the shareholders, consisting of a mix of inside directors who are employees of the corporation (typically senior executives) and outside directors who are...

I haven't seen reliable statistics on the changes in mortality, but the Delta variant is definitely recorded as being *far* more infectious. That makes it a public health concern even if it's not any deadlier, and I would argue that the death rate alone is not the only thing to worry about given...

I wasn't the one who made that assertion. I'm saying that the difference in vaccine effectiveness is a standalone answer to your "Why?" -- that's why getting a booster shot of one of the mRNA based vaccines is a good idea if you've only had the inferior J&J.

The numbers I've seen are that Pfizer is about 84%-88% effective against Delta once you've gotten both doses and Moderna is similar. There are no published numbers for J&J, but the AstraZeneca vaccine which uses the same technology is only about 60-66% effective.

From a purely medical standpoint, it's not without merit -- while immunity can indeed be developed through previous infection, intentional exposure to wild-type virus is not an effective strategy for developing herd immunity. The only notable disease that intentional exposure has been a...

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It's pretty absurd to accuse me of partisan bias when I actually went out of my way to not mention the party affiliation of the individuals involved, and was focused on this being a matter of local corruption.

And just to remind everyone that corruption occurs at all levels of government: a Florida county commissioner in Manatee County held a vaccine drive exclusively for the two richest ZIP codes in the county, then also put herself and four other people on a special "VIP list" to get the vaccine...

It wasn't the Trump Administration's fault when state governments couldn't keep track of the vaccine doses they were entrusted with, and it isn't the Biden Administration's fault either. If the states continue to be unable to get their act together, that might be a compelling argument to set up...

To be fair, a fair number of the Gitmo detainees have been held on little or no evidence, and some of the procedural stonewalling that the United States has engaged in is entirely ridiculous -- to wit, "We concede that there's no evidence this individual was actually radicalized, but since we've...

Because he's a Gitmo prisoner. The United States has been completely unyielding about, "Gitmo prisoners have no right to trial", but has also been squeamish about executing any of them *because* of said lack of trials. The problem is that it's far too late to quarantine the prisons, and...

I would point out that this is not a new thing but a longstanding paradox in the American mindset: when the government imprisons someone, they are by definition responsible for the health of that person in a way that they are *not* responsible for free citizens. As a result, the government is...

Ehhhh. The imprisonment of quarantine breakers in a pandemic situation is pretty much standard government business, and is well-established in Western legal precedents as *not* a violation of civil rights.

If it makes you feel better, the vast majority of star influencers are a flash in the pan whose "easy money" is gone about as fast as lottery winnings. The ones that actually manage to make a sustained career out of it are putting in a *lot* of work behind the scenes. They draw a lot of hate...