Sheep Pens Article

Here's kind of a shit article: https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/tasha-kheiriddin-the-unvaccinated-must-be-deterred-from-harming-others/ar-AASFX34?ocid=msedgntp 

The unvaccinated must be deterred from harming others

Looks like Postmedia is competing with the CBC to bring us junk Op-Eds.  I was going to avoid any more CoHIV blog entries, but like everyone else, I'm getting tired of the lack of thinking, or any kind of logic, from the current governments on their handling of this pandemic.  Or reading puff-pieces like the one we’re going to go through.  I do want to get something out of the way that might make things easier to take (not make things better): smart people don't go into politics.  They're too smart for that.  Wanna-be celebrities without any talents get into politics and that's why we're at where we're at.  This one’s a long one so on to the article (in italics):

What to do about the unvaccinated? As Omicron tears through Canadian society, this public health question has become a political wedge issue. The Liberals and Conservatives have chosen sides, ramped up the rhetoric, and polarized the debate, each playing to the base they think is most likely to support their point of view.

Not really.  The Conservatives are just as dumb as the Liberals; there's not a lot of difference between the two but if there is a side that's ramping up the rhetoric, it's the "Liberals".  I use quotes because they're not very liberal minded at all; must be a Merriam-Webster definition.  They're actually more like a Federal Quebecois party, and that's not a compliment.  Anyways, the rest of this Op-Ed is like this; kinda dumb since she agrees with trying to bully a group of people into getting a shot, the same group that has every good reason to be skeptical about getting it. 

With 88 per cent of Canadians over the age of 12 fully vaccinated, the Liberals figure they’re pretty safe siding with the crowd that favours the jab. Regrettably, they have chosen the strategy of demonization. On Friday, Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos speculated provincial governments would make vaccination mandatory, which he said could be needed to get “rid” of the virus. During the election campaign Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the unvaccinated “misogynists and racists.” He dialled that down a bit last week when he said that Canadians are angry at the unvaccinated who take up hospital beds, but his remarks caused a furor that has yet to subside.

Has this chick been under a rock?  88% got a needle because they wanted to keep their job, which is completely shitty and only pieces of shit would propose, let alone enforce, a vaccine mandate.  When I got mine, I didn't see anyone gleefully skipping out of the Vax centre.  I find it hard to believe that 88% of the population favoured getting a relatively untested shot; that's wishful thinking at best.  Oh, and the PM insulted the wrong group of people last week too, not just during his campaign.

The Health Minister obviously doesn't read anything about pandemics and vaccines.  If he knew what was going on, he'd know that you can't vax your way out of this pandemic.  At least that's what the guy who holds the patents on the mNRA technology says.  I'll take his word over a greasy politician who's on the take.  And the Health Minister thinks you can get rid of the virus.  Dumbass.  We're all going to get it, vaxxed or not.  St Fauci of the Sand Flies came out Thursday and said the same.  I read another story yesterday morning (I started drafting this Blog entry 3 days ago and new things just keep popping up) about a family who did everything the government asked/mandated (3 shots, masks, distancing, etc) and were wondering why the caught CoHIV.  So for you vaxxed people out there, you might want to be a little nicer to the unvaxxed because they're not a group of misogynists and racists.  They're probably more informed than you'd think.

The Prime Minister is so out of touch with what's going on he'd be better off with his mouth closed.  Canadians aren't angry at the unvaccinated, they're angry at how poorly the government is handling the situation, but it's never this guy's fault, eh?  I'll bet people were more angry that there was a full two years where not one new hospital/ICU unit was built.  And if he did his homework, hospitals are seeing vaxxed and unvaxxed, with either the Delta strain or Omicron strain.  Both are still out there; Omicron didn't replace just Delta yet.  So in two weeks now, will the Prime Minister say that all of the vaxxed people are taking up precious hospital space too?  It’s half vaxxed-half unvaxxed taking up ICUs (in Ontario) at the time of writing,  People are also angry because they're realising the shot wasn't what was sold to us at the beginning and we're constantly being lied to by the current PM/future Pfizer salesmen.  It’s not 100% effective like the CEO of Pfizer claimed two years ago.  And the big one: 66% of the country didn't vote for the PM.  That was a polite way of saying a majority of Canadians don't like him.  This is the same dingbat who calls an election during the pandemic only to see no change from the day before the election (but I’ll throw more blame on his advisors for that one).  It's impossible for him to know what Canadians are like when he doesn't even like people.  I thought the projection was funny though.  The guy, that does blackface more than when minstrels shows were around, is so self-unaware he’s still calling other people racist.

If you're going to be this bad at your job, at least be a cool person.  His new bobblehead has more personality.

This is not accidental. The sad reality is that there is a subset of the unvaccinated who fit Trudeau’s description; since September, for example, some have been using the hashtag “Pureblood” on social media to self-identify as unvaccinated. You don’t have to scroll far to find tagged images peppered with shots of white supremacy gestures or MAGA hats. The Liberals’ dogwhistle is designed to conflate these people with mainstream Conservatives — and turn people off Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole’s call for “reasonable accommodation.”

Now, the creator of this piece, Tasha Kheiriddin, is throwing in her two cents (that's 1.6 cents Cdn).  I'm not sure what she was trying to accomplish but somehow all MAGA hat wearers are all white supremacists?  Maybe if you're in Grade 3 and your parents are sheep, you might have learned to think like that.  Or maybe Tasha was homeschooled.  Quite honestly, I've never seen a MAGA hat north of the border since 2016 but I've seen plenty of MAGA hats south of the boarder and it ain't all whites wearing them.  And what exactly is a white supremacy gesture?  Tasha should remember that her government of choice was caught fabricating the existence of White Supremacists about a year ago.  I'm not exactly sure if this was before or after we found out that the Canadian Government admitted to secretly surveilling its population’s movements during the lockdown by tracking 33 million phones.  Also, if she her homework, she’d find out that isn’t exactly that demographic that's hesitant; quite the opposite.  I'm trying to be polite here because I don't think your exterior shade means much but it's not the lighter shade of skin that's been shown to be the most hesitant to get a shot.

O’Toole is asking for “acceptance” of the fact that up to 15 per cent of the population will not get vaccinated. He favours using rapid tests to keep unvaccinated workers on the job, as opposed to shutting down to stop the spread of the virus. “In a population that is now largely fully vaccinated, in fact the action and inaction by the Trudeau government is normalizing lockdowns and restrictions as the primary tool to fight the latest COVID-19 variant.

But this approach is also wrong. First, it relies on unreliable technology. Rapid tests are not good at detecting Omicron infections, particularly in the early stage when a person is infectious but shows no symptoms. Second, it sends a double message. On the one hand, the Tories encourage people to “get vaccinated.” On the other, they make allowances for those who eschew the jab.

There's no double message; that’s not an on-the-one-hand kind of comparison.  The message is: the virus is real, we recommend you take at least one shot but if you refuse, we can't make you take it.  Look, I summed it up in one sentence for Tasha.  The only unreliable technology that anyone should worry about is the vaccines themselves, since they certainly don’t stop anyone from catching (and spreading) the CoHIV.  The good thing you can say about the Conservatives is they're not beating on particular, almost non-existent demographic.

The current governments don't base any decisions on silly things such as facts or statistics.  That's why we're still in a pandemic mess.  Lockdowns/curfews don't work; they only concentrate people in certain areas at certain times (I feel really bad for anyone living in Quebec - maybe it's time Quebec left the Commonwealth).  Giving people more money than they got when working didn't work (don't worry, the PM assured us the economy will fix itself); not allowing people, who didn't get a shot, to work was completely stupid.  So now there's a group of people who want to work but can't and a group of people who don't want to work but can.  Clever.  Proof of vaccination wasn't well thought out.  For starters, it shouldn't have happened in the first place, but that led to, at least in Ontario, a mandatory QR code to verify your vax status.  Somehow, that was better than me showing my second dose pdf from my phone.  Nobody really said how or why it was better.  And at time of writing, I can't even use my QR code because the day after I just had to get it, I'm in another lockdown.  Smart. 

But it's all a burden on the hospital staff, is the excuse.  Governments were the ones who single-handily understaffed the hospitals.  It's their fault, not the unvaxxed. 

It’s like saying “wear your seatbelt, but if you don’t, that’s OK.” Well guess what — it’s not. If you get in an accident, it will cost up to three times more to treat you in hospital than if you were buckled up. Sound familiar?

While I don't mind the seatbelt analogy, it's too simple to be accurate.  People wearing their seatbelts can wind up in the hospital and/or get killed too and not every car accident sends people to the hospital.  I'm sure that there have been times where the person wearing the seatbelt goes to the hospital, and the person that didn't wear a seatbelt didn't.  That would mean the seatbelt wearer would be costing the hospital 3 times as much.  A blanket statement like everyone who doesn't wear a seatbelt at the time of an accident automatically cost 3 times more to treat is naive at best.  Sound familiar?

The reality is that we restrict plenty of behaviours where we judge the harm to others, including economic harm, outweighs the limits to individual liberty. We don’t allow people to smoke in workplaces or public buildings. We forbid drinking and driving. And we mandate vaccination for contagious diseases such as measles if children are to attend public school.

Why? Because otherwise your actions, or inaction, present a real risk of harm to someone else. They can cause quantifiable loss, in the form of sickness, suffering, even death (yes, last year 200,000 people worldwide died of measles , mostly children under five).

If that were true, going back to the seatbelt analogy, then cars would be banned.  Also, comparing the measles vaccine with the Pfizer shot is a bad comparison.  Two measles shots and you'll never get measles again, compared to three shots (so far) that are ineffective after a year: Tasha, one shot actually immunizes, the other wishes, so let's keep things honest.  Also, 200,000 out of almost 8 billion people dying of measles, as terrible as that is in third world countries, is still 0% rounded up.  0%.  That's the same percentage as online hate speech.

People don’t live in a vacuum. A liberal would cite Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract, which called for government by popular consent; a conservative would point to Edmund Burke, who rightly observed, “Men are never in a state of total independence of each other.” In other words, there is no freedom without responsibility, no liberty without duty.

Ironic since a mandate would be antithetical to liberty, but sure.  Rousseau's "collective need of all to provide for the common good of all" didn't mention anything about government mandates.  The current mandates aren't for the common good and they weren't developed by the people.

When it comes to vaccination, we should protect those who understand this truth from those who disdain it. Vaccine passports, restrictions on interaction and withdrawal of privileges are preferable to calling people names, forcing them to get the shot, or conversely accommodating a choice that puts others in harm’s way. Obliging those who opt out of vaccination to pay a penalty, such as the Quebec government is suggesting, is also a possibility. Such measures are not about cajoling or compelling, though if they do result in more vaccinations, that’s a good thing. They are meant to protect all of us who just want to move on from this once-in-a-century public emergency and get back to living our lives.

Actually, all of these measures are about cajoling and forcing people to do something they really shouldn't have to do.  I think it’s called Bullying.  If she doesn't understand why there's a pushback, she would fit in great at the Federal Parliament level.  I found over the years, if you want someone's help, you don't insult them, because if you do, they'll probably tell you to go fuck yourself and not help.  It’s been like that for centuries.  It's just how people are.  Shaming works but that's usually to get a better performance out of people.  A withdrawal of privileges is not preferable to forcing people to get the shot.  It's pretty much the same thing.

Things are going to be changing rapidly though.  The CBC, in an attempt to look neutral, put out a natural immunity article, except the more you read, it's another pro vaccine article, praising the Federal Government's handling of the pandemic but I was surprised to see the CBC said the booster is outdated: "Right now, the boosters that we have are matched to a strain long gone". 

That's why me, and millions more, are asking, what's a booster good for, and why do you want to force me to take something that clearly isn’t going to help?  I'm at the point where two shots were enough.

Once it gets out that we didn't really have to go through what we went through over the last two years, there's going to be a lot of angrier people out there.  I can't wait for another empty apology from the empty PM.