> I am surprised news outlets are still trying to give life to this manufactured crisis.
The purpose of this particular manufactured crisis is to take out Joe Rogan, who does not kowtow to the COVID-19 zeitgeist.
> who abuse their voice and power to silence those who don’t share their ideology.
Reminds me of the quote, 'First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win' [0]. This is the 'fight you' phase of Humanity's rebellion against the charlatans (you used zealot [1], but I think charlatan [2] is more appropriate).
Two tweets about the attempted cancellation of Joe Rogan:
"This is a professional political attack. Three waves one right after the other is not a coincidence. Good spacing, good timing, so it's absolutely professional." - https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/149022042327069900... (thread ties the Rogan hatcheting to a Super PAC)
> Also in todays age where nobody remembers phone numbers anymore
~7 years ago my passenger called me from jail, because he'd memorized my phone number. I went to visit, got his gmail password, tried to call a few people for him. His bail was only $300, bailed him out myself... He promptly missed his next court date. Went to the bail revocation hearing, on my birthday, 7 years ago, and got most of that $300 back.
A few years later he got mickeyed up again, didn't even realize there was a warrant out for his arrest. I went to his hearing, judge was like, "you've really pulled yourself together... But I have to do something..." Think it was a few weeks in jail. I sent $ to buy snacks, he sent me a postcard (which I still have), which said how meaningful it was to have someone on the outside who cared enough about him to send $. He seems to be doing well now.
I consider it very important to have my important phone numbers memorized, on account of this story.
Anecdotally I've heard that oxygen is toxic at higher-than-atmospheric pressure. Your link does mention oxygen toxicity, but I didn't notice any discussion of the antidote.
After posting that I figured out how the antidote for oxygen toxicity got memory-holed. It was in the 1950's, and ... there was a little protest, circa 1959, saying the new guidelines weren't so great for carbon monoxide poisoning.
My email address is in my profile, drop a line with a link to this comment and I'll provide more references.
> the healthcare system not being able to service that amount of load.
At first the healthcare system was overwhelmed. Then Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell posted his rebellion video to YouTube, which said, essentially, “why are we following terrible advice to ventilate early? This is very bad medicine.” (I think Dr. Kyle-Sidell had previously only intubated patients who were actually in respiratory distress, and thought the non-distressed patients whose lungs he was damaging actually had something sort of like HAPE.)
After the rebellion video ventilations fell off a cliff. The media stopped telling us how many ventilators we were short, because they weren’t needed anymore.
> For example, if you don't understand the scientific method well enough to believe that Covid exists,
Lots of people are completely immune to the SARS-CoV-2: they're exposed to the virus, but their bodies shut down replication without even having to mount an immune response. Adequate Vitamin D is one factor that's gotten a wee little bit of coverage.
> you probably aren't going to like my policies for mitigating it.
> This whole thing seems like flamebait rather than a sincere attempt at curious discussion.
It's supposed to be lighthearted, though I suppose the downvoters I refer to as "Dark Helmets" won't appreciate the reference. I personally am judicious in my downvotes, while the Dark Helmets seem to vote down anything they don't agree with.
Besides COVID-19, there's a lot of group-think on other science topics that might not be right. We're human, it's what we do.
> Why do you care so much about your HN downvotes?
The 1% rule is such that only a small percentage of a forum's users comment [0]. I myself tend to comment only if I'm relatively early AND I have something unique to say that probably couldn't be said by someone else.
If I cared about downvotes I wouldn't post comments that I believed were likely/certain to elicit downvotes.
AFAIK, there's no way to tell if your downvoted comment was appreciated by some. I posted against another variant of science-faith recently, where I told one of my most favorite taxi driver stories that was highly relevant. I watched that comment's score carefully, and noticed it oscillating up and down. That comment finally ended up with a negative score. I wouldn't have noticed the oscillations if I'd only come back to look at the final score ~48 hours later.
> Why did a few downvotes turn into this screed?
This wasn't my first downvoted comment that challenged the conventional wisdom. I think there are plenty who agree, they just don't comment here.
> Isn't there a better venue for this, or maybe just someone in real life you can vent to?
Another purpose of this poll is to get people to consider whether it's actually settled science that oxygen is highly toxic when used in excess, that ventilation has been studied for pnemonia and found to not help, and that there's a simple antidote for oxygen toxicity that would completely change how 100% of the severe COVID-19 patients are treated, if only Medicine™ hadn't forgotten.
Farid Jalali is a gastrointestinal doctor who was an early advocate of cyproheptadine for COVID-19. His tweet-threads about why the SSRI Fluvoxamine and anti-serotonin drugs are helpful to treat COVID-19 are very informative:
Dr. Jalali said at some point that the anti-viral drug Remdesivir is basically worthless for COVID-19. Molnupiravir gets headlines, but I think it's a money-grab, as no one will pay to study repurposed approved generic drugs like cyproheptadine and fluvoxamine.
(Dr. Jalali blocked me after I said something about ventilation imploding lungs, but that is literally what happens, via "nitrogen washout", as mentioned in my blog post.)
It looks like an interesting idea, but my level of biology is not good enough to be sure. There are many things that look like good ideas on paper, but have no clinical effect. For example, as you say Remdesivir is not useful against covid-19, IIRC.
I remember a few clinical studies of the use of fluvoxamine against covid-19, so it's possible to study these drugs. For example see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28220574 (I'm not convinced, in particular because they use the number of hospitalizations instead of the number of death.)
> That's true. And they are dying at a higher rate than if they had gotten vaccinated. "COVID is the #1 killer of LEOs in 2020 and 2021" - https://www.odmp.org/ .
I know one of those LEO who died "from COVID". I think he probably would have survived if he hadn't been ventilated. This is my referenced -4 comment about him: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28890791
Your source does not specifically mention airline pilots as having any impact.
Your source does mention "any employee not fully vaccinated will need to take a Covid test weekly, as long as community case rates are high, and beginning in November, unvaccinated employees in the company’s healthcare plan will be subject to a $200 monthly surcharge because the average hospital stay for Covid-19 has cost the company $50,000 per person" - hardly some sort of complete capitulation or rejection of "vaccine passports."
That was just the top of the links when I searched. I think the important point about Delta pilots is they won't have to join Southwest and American Airlines' pilot rebellions against forced medical treatments from which they believe they will receive no benefit.
Some people don't like Mr. Berenson, but I think he's consistent:
> [...] The pilots I’ve heard from don’t want [systemwide flight cancellations] - they didn’t become pilots NOT to fly. But they also recognize they are speaking for tens of millions of working Americans who are furious with the choice the Biden Administration is forcing on them: your right to make medical decisions for yourself, or your job.
> So what happens next? The answer may come down to a delicate dance between the airlines - especially Southwest and American - and their employees. If the airlines signal that anyone who wants an exemption can get one, they may keep the anger to manageable levels.
Edit: Can't respond to the comment below. Don't care about Snopes, I think they mostly peddle whatever the consensus happens to be, even when provably wrong. Berenson's substack seems to support that there is a silent rebelion amongst airline pilots.
See also: URGENT: A Southwest Airlines pilot explains why you will not hear anything about vaccine mandates from his union - and why Southwest has more flexibility than it admits to stand up to the White House - https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/urgent-a-southwest-airli...
There was no "pilot rebellion" at SWA. I provide a link to Snopes.
Don't trust Snopes?
Here's SWA's press release: "On Friday evening, the airline ended the day with numerous cancellations, primarily created by weather and other external constraints, which left aircraft and Crews out of pre-planned positions to operate our schedule on Saturday. ... As a note, the operational challenges were not a result of Southwest Employee demonstrations." - from https://www.swamedia.com/releases/release-66d1c9ae7fd4aa2df0...
Don't trust corporate media or SWA management?
Here's the pilot union: "Southwest pilots' union president blames airline for cancellations ... When asked by CBS News if there was any chance the disruption could have been caused by pilots calling out sick over the company's vaccine mandate, Capt. Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, said that was not the case and that the airline's pilot sick rate for this weekend was "right in line with what was occurring this summer." - from https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/southwest-pilots-u... .
] Recently, a national news narrative arose falsely implying that Southwest Airlines pilots walked out on their passengers, forcing them to cancel important family plans and leaving them stranded all over the country. And the untrue rumors indicated that pilots did this over a protest from the airline’s vaccine mandate policy.
] As a Southwest Airlines pilot myself, I can tell you the truth. And the truth is, Southwest Airlines pilots did not cause our airline’s recent operational problems, and the data definitively shows this.
] To have a walkout, you must have a significant increase in pilots failing to show up to work. But the reality is, that data doesn’t exist. There has not been a dramatic spike in pilot sick call rates anywhere in the month of October. What actually happened was Southwest Airlines pilots and flight attendants were stranded away from their homes and families, right alongside our passengers. Much like our passengers, many of our crews were unable to find hotel rooms. That only exacerbated Southwest’s problems as numerous pilots were not legally permitted to fly due to a lack of rest before getting behind the controls of an airliner.
Quite pedaling your falsehoods.
If you can't fact check something as simple as this - even after I linked you to the Snopes page - why should anyone trust you with something more complex?
Had a friend from college who became a police officer. He probably would have survived COVID-19 if he could've waited a week before going to the hospital. He certainly went along with getting ventilated because he believed the doctors knew what they were doing. Ventilations fell off a cliff a week later (in April 2020) when the doctors started to ignore the official guidelines for COVID-19.
Whatever happened to those ventilators that President Trump ordered? None of them got used, because front line doctors figured out that following the official guidance to ventilate their patients ASAP were death sentences.
My LEO-friend is certainly listed as a COVID-19 fatality, not an iatrogenic one. Inconvenient for the powers that be to consider that he was medically deteriorated with ventilation & oxygenation.
Oxygen is known to be toxic [0], but modern doctors seem to just figure "what else can we do, when the patient's oxygen saturation level crashes?" (because their training doesn't cover the antidote that makes supplemental oxygen non-toxic).
The technical terms for damage done to lungs with ventilators is barotrauma. Sometimes ventilation is justified for short duration [surgery, etc]. Ventilation has never been found helpful for pneumonia.
I'm trying to coin Medical Hyperventilation as a term of art [1]. My term hasn't taken off yet, but the science is entirely settled about everything in my writeup.
[1] The folly of medical hyperventilation - https://www.taxiwars.org/2021/06/folly-medical-hyperventilat... (I've since figured out how Medicine was tricked into no longer using the antidote for oxygen toxicity. The turning point from science-based oxygenation to our modern science-free practice was in 1955.)
Thanks for the feedback. I am not overly familiar with ventilation protocols, I just understand that some ventilation strategies are more aggressive than others. I will edit to clarify.
Why would you make any claims about medical practice without understanding the 5 minute basics?
You talk about refusing ventilation to survive hospitalization, but your whole premise (toxicity of pure oxygen) has nothing to do with modern medical practice!
My premise is that any amount of supplemental oxygen without the antidote for oxygen toxicity worsens outcomes. For example, I mentioned how doctors are realizing that COPD patients don't necessarily benefit from supplemental oxygen.
(Edit: editing my piece I understood what you meant. I have reworded that opening paragraph to say "Modern doctors sometimes decide their patient's tissues are low on oxygen and prescribe various amounts of supplemental oxygen.")
> modern medical practice!
Aggressive use of oxygenation has been studied and is consistently found to worsens patient outcomes [0]. There should be no controversy, but aggressive oxygenation is a common treatment in modern medical practice. Maybe you know why this is the case?
> "kids these days don't know anyone's phone number!" If it works it works
My passenger had my phone number memorized. I went to visit him when he called me from jail. I used his gmail password to get his contacts' phone numbers to try to get someone else to bail him out, but it was only $300. After a few days I paid up to bail him out. He missed his next court date. I went to the bail revocation hearing a couple months later, and got $200 of that $300 back (iirc).
I make an effort to regularly exercise my mental phonebook, on his account.
That story reminds me of this homeless guy I helped out one night. He was wearing a suit, which is why I believed him, actually. He said he was a pilot, who just moved into a house but locked himself out with his wallet inside. So he attempted to break into his own house. The neighbors called the cops and he was arrested. Now he was “homeless” until he got things sorted out. I ran into him a few days later, he taught me how to fly and became a friend that I still email from time to time.
Are these blobs of text being generated by some language model or something? They seem like wildly incoherent generated stories 100% unrelated to the content of the article or this thread.
The purpose of this particular manufactured crisis is to take out Joe Rogan, who does not kowtow to the COVID-19 zeitgeist.
> who abuse their voice and power to silence those who don’t share their ideology.
Reminds me of the quote, 'First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win' [0]. This is the 'fight you' phase of Humanity's rebellion against the charlatans (you used zealot [1], but I think charlatan [2] is more appropriate).
Two tweets about the attempted cancellation of Joe Rogan:
"This is a professional political attack. Three waves one right after the other is not a coincidence. Good spacing, good timing, so it's absolutely professional." - https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/149022042327069900... (thread ties the Rogan hatcheting to a Super PAC)
"This is not organic. It's a political hatchet job" - https://twitter.com/esaagar/status/1490773485056057344 (this one credits @wokal_distance)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Klein#Address_to_the_...
[1] "Zealot ... means one who is zealous on behalf of God" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zealots
[2] "A charlatan is a trickster or con artist" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlatan_(disambiguation)