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Showing posts from November, 2021

Finally!! A Conservative I Totally Agree With

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 ... On Most things. Andrew Sullivan "Gave 'em hell" on Sixty Minutes Sunday night 11/14/2011.   He's a conservative author, editor and blogger. As a British-American, his style combines the perception of an outsider with the devotion of a native son. "Too many Americans  are no longer the citizens that the founders were counting on."    [On our current hyper-polarization]: "You wait and hope that will pass. So that we can get back to the pragmatic process of governing reality. And that's not what we're engaged in now. We're flying from reality. We're inventing abstractions and ideologies. We're fighting each other. We're demonizing each other. The system can still work. It's we who are broken." His whole interview strikes me as so important that everyone, on both sides of our Great Divide should give it a listen. He's a gay man and an AIDS survivor, which makes his commentary poignant on the subject of gay marria

How Good Are Boosters? Delta-plus in Norway

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The Good News (updated) I got my Moderna booster jab Nov 9th. Now I feel less "old fart vulnerability," but how much less?  I had not seen stats on how the “boosted” crowd is doing. Are we now bullet proof?  Slightly, somewhat, very? Googling the question, I found this New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) piece which is a thorough analysis of Israeli data on their experience with the Delta variant in their highly, and early, vaccinated population. Delta knocked the straw out of Israel. August 2021 So they went full barrel with Pfizer booster shots, with their over-65s first. Then they did an excellent job of tracking booster effectiveness. The study has this exciting headline: Protection of BNT162b2 (Pfizer) Vaccine Booster against Covid-19 in Israel (Link to the study) Bottom line of the research? Boosters do super.  Twelve days after your jab, you are  eleven times less likely  to get infected compared to a fully vaccinated peer, and  19.5 times less likely  to get a ser