Tag Archives: Carnegie Mellon University

Exactly Who Is Unvaccinated?

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The mainstream media is telling us that a large percentage of the people who have not received the Covid vaccine are Trump supporters. This is somewhat illogical since President Trump was the one who cut through the red tape to make the vaccine possible. It is also interesting that President Biden and Vice-President Harris both badmouthed the vaccine during the Trump presidency–stating more than once that they did not trust it. So where are we now?

The American Thinker posted an article today with some of the statistics on who is vaccinated and who is not.

The article reports:

At present, the U.S. is 51 percent fully vaccinated. While that may not seem like success, if you break it down the numbers are more favorable. 62 percent of adults and 81 percent of the elderly are fully vaccinated. Another segment of the population has natural immunity based on having had COVID. Given natural infection as a second and more robust pathway toward herd immunity, America has done well.

For whatever reason, the media and much of the medical profession has consistently downplayed the immunity based on having had Covid.

The article continues:

Who isn’t yet vaccinated in America and why? There is vaccine hesitancy, which according to Wikipedia “is a delay in acceptance, or refusal of vaccines despite the availability of vaccine services.” It’s not simple and straightforward, either. “Vaccine hesitancy is complex and context specific, varying across time, place and vaccines. It is influenced by factors such as complacency, convenience, a fear of needles, or a lack of understanding about how vaccines work.”

Last March, Forbes reported that 49 percent of Republican men and 47 percent of Trump supporters will refuse any vaccine, setting the narrative for who is to blame now for the delta variant surge. Unknown then but known now is that the vaccines don’t prevent infection or transmission. According to CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky: “Vaccinated people infected with Delta can transmit the virus.”

Former CIA and NSA Director General Michael Hayden agrees with Forbes and his intelligence expertise leads him to conclude that Trump supporters are “our Taliban” and that “the MAGA wearing unvaxxed” deplorables should be sent to Afghanistan, presumably to be left to the whims of the real Taliban. I wonder if he wants unvaxxed Democrats, including blacks, of whom the majority are unvaxxed, to be sent to their deaths in Afghanistan?

Sounds like a really nice guy. I wonder if he has ever read the U.S. Constitution.

The vaccines do however reduce the risk of severe illness and death, allowing many to suffer milder infection, gaining natural immunity, and pushing the country closer to herd immunity where COVID becomes a seasonal nuisance like influenza.

What is the media not saying about the vaccine-hesitant?

As reported in Summit News, “A new report by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh has found that the most highly educated Americans are also the most vaccine hesitant.” This was not a survey of a few hundred, but of 5 million Americans.

They found a U-shaped curve with the greatest hesitancy among the least and most educated. “The most common concern for those who are hesitant to take the vaccine is potential side effects, with a lack of trust in government close behind in second.”

So much for the media narrative that only the missing-teeth, knuckle-dragging, Neanderthal Trump supporters are against vaccination.

Someday I hope the media will start telling us the truth about vaccines and herd immunity. Until then, Americans have the right to be skeptical.

Manufacturing A Phony Crisis

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In recent years we have had a number of very disturbing incidents involving guns. While those incidents are horrific, they are not an indication of where things are in relation to guns in the United States.

CBN News reported today that the Justice Department released a report on Tuesday showing that gun violence in the United States has decreased 39 percent since 1993.

The article reports:

Another report by the Pew Research Center found a drop of 49 percent. Both studies indicate non-fatal crimes involving guns were down by about 70 percent over that same period.

The article also reminds us:

“The public doesn’t get its feelings out of crime statistics,” Alfred Blumstein, an urban systems professor at Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, noted. “The public gets its feelings from particularly notorious events, and what the press talks about.”

If we choose to watch the mainstream media, we need to remember that they have long since departed from the idea of reporting the news impartially.  The fact that gun violence has decreased rather than increased would be news for most Americans. The question remains as to whether or not they will ever hear that news.

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Something To Think About As The Temperature Drops

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I am not a cold weather person. I think New England is a beautiful place, but I really am not a cold weather person. I’m not real fond of intense heat either–I enjoy my creature comforts. Thus, I love the following story.

Yesterday’s Washington Post posted a story about a study by Tulane University, Carnegie Mellon University, the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showing that air conditioning has played a major role in reducing deaths of Americans on extremely hot days by keeping them cool. That makes perfect sense.

The article reports:

The likelihood of a premature death on an extremely hot day between 1929 and 1959 was 2.5 percent, the academics found, dropping to less than 0.5 percent after 1960. The paper, which is under review at an academic journal, compared days on which temperatures exceeded 90 degrees Fahrenheit with days when they ranged between 60 and 69 degrees Fahrenheit.

Because the article is in the Washington Post, the article goes on to explain how air conditioning will help all of us survive global warming. Putting that aside, isn’t it ironic that the thing the global warming camp criticizes as being one of the causes of global warming also saves lives.

The article reports:

The study’s results could be particularly important for nations such as India, where only a small portion of the population has residential air conditioning. The typical person in India experiences 33 days per year where the temperature rises above 90 degrees Fahrenheit; that could increase by as much as 100 days by the end of the century, according to some climate projections.

Anand Patwardhan, a visiting professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland in College Park, said he expects home air conditioning to become more common in India, but not as a conscious response to global warming.

“While it is certainly the case that residential air-conditioning helps in reducing mortality due to temperature extremes, the rapid growth of air-conditioning in the past is perhaps more due to rising incomes and increasing affordability of air-conditioning,” he wrote in an e-mail.

First of all, global warming is a political hoax designed to take money from economically successful countries and give it to third world dictators who will spend it on themselves while their people starve (remember food for oil–it worked the same way). The best scientific source of information on global warming is a website called wattsupwiththat. I strongly recommend it.

Anyway, the fact is that as countries become more wealthy, they consume more energy. The only real way to lower energy consumption is to lower standards of living. Americans who buy into unproven global warming theories might want to consider whether it is worth lowering their standard of living based on an unproven theory.

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