ITEP (Institute of Taxation & Economic Policy) posted an interesting article about an obscure topin of very high personal interest, namely hiding the truth. ITEP's article, Dismantling Access to the Truth is a Big Deal, says that MAGA hiding truth from the public is a big deal. This may seem boring as hell, but boring or not, this is damned important. (which is probably why our crappy, complicit MSM isn't reporting it properly)
ITEP point out the the standard partly true talking point. It says that a democratic society cannot make good decisions without knowing how prior decisions turned out, assessing the current situation, or developing reasonable predictions. Ah yes, the fantasy of the American democracy. An informed public? That ain't gonna happen.
Anyway, frustrated ranting aside, here's what's important. Elite MAGA thugs have blocked public access to all reliable, comprehensive, non-partisan federal datasets. That includes the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, historical data tables from Internal Revenue Service Statistics of Income, economic reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, scoring from the Joint Committee on Taxation, and Congressional Budget Office analyses.
Aw, that's cute, a bullshitted baby
The ITEP article points out that federal data is used as a stable reference point to calibrate analyses by lots of non-governmental organizations and businesses. Everyone worked from the same information, which was as reliable as possible and non-partisan. The data had been produced by non-partisan experts acting in good faith who understood their job was to be as accurate as possible. Now everyone is in the dark. We will get bullshit from incompetent, corrupt MAGA thugs. They will insult us with Trump's false, bullshit version of reality. We're going to get MAGAed on good and hard. That is here despite the damage to American society, our economy and our democracy MAGAfication will cause.
Aw, ain't that cute,
he's been MAGAed on
As ITEP feebly complains, "the current threats to that [producing reliable data] are inexcusable." Inexcusable? No shit Sherlock! Attaboy ITEP, you give 'em hell! 👍👏 /s
Who could have possibly seen this colossal, cynical stupidity coming?
Pretty much everyone paying any attention. Here is my first prediction out of seven from Nov. 13, 2024:1. Federal data collection functions will be (i) stopped entirely, or (ii) almost completely kept from the public, and spun into lies when the data is inconvenient. (That was a Ronald Reagan tactic -- I think he invented it)
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The BMJ, an highly respected publisher of biomedical research, published some research about an odd biological effect of COVID infections on the immune system in a paper, Why scientists are rethinking the immune effects of SARS-CoV-2. What is now clear is that a COVID infection often causes varying degrees of loss of immune memory of, or functioning against, past infections or pathogen exposures. The severity of immune response loss varies from person to person and from pathogen to pathogen. But in general most people after a COVID infection lose some or most of their ability to ward off new infections by one or more pathogens.
As is usual these days with MAGA and inconvenient science, there is a political, weaponized poison dart. As time passed in the COVID pandemic, doctors started seeing a rise in non-COVID infections, including rare infections in healthy people and children. Researchers came up with the "immune debt" concept. Immune debt hypothesized that increasing infections were caused by COVID lockdowns. In lockdowns children didn't normally encounter various pathogens as they normally would. That was hypothesized to prevent children from developing normal immunity without getting an observable infection. Those normal, very mild infections are called subclinical infections. That was real science in 2021.
But then came cynical, radical right authoritarian demagoguery. Once MAGA demagogues became aware of the immune debt hypothesis, they sunk their filthy, lying demagogue claws into it and weaponized it. MAGA used the hypothesis to criticize and help authoritarian confuse the public about most everything related to COVID infection, research, treatment and prevention. Their demagoguery got some innocent people killed. Now, several years later, the BMJ paper points out that the immune debt hypothesis is falling out of favor among real doctors and scientists.
The BMJ paper comments on the lingering effect of MAGA poison, calling it an awkwardness or hostility to less convenient explanations for the rare infections after a COVID infection:
Long covid remains a hot topic among the public and researchers and has certainly raised awareness of postviral disease. Yet there persists an awkwardness, even a hostility, when it comes to the idea of SARS-CoV-2 undermining immune health.
Clearly, the idea of COVID (SARS-CoV-2) undermining immune health is something that MAGA elites and demagogues do not want to talk about. It's too inconvenient. It makes past government efforts to deal with the pandemic look mostly like reasonable public health measures. Instead, MAGA demagoguery needs to portray anti-COVID measures as evil, lying, socialist, pedophile tyranny by Democrats.
The current science thinking is that a COVID damages or suppresses the immune cells needed to keep a pathogen exposure from progressing to a clinically observable infection. There's no name given to this concept in the BMJ paper, but it uses terms like (1) immunity disruption, (2) immunity reset, which hypothesizes that COVID causes effects reminiscent of measles, which can cause immune amnesia, (3) immune system scar, or (4) immune dysfunction. But the point is the immune debt hypothesis that cruel MAGA demagogues love to demagogue the public with probably isn't what is going on.
There's no solid data I could find about how common the decreased immune effects are after COVID infections. Pxy estimates a 5-25% range for immune damage in normal people and a 40-50% range for immunocompromised people, but those are just rough estimates.
Q: Does Germaine have MDS (MAGA Derangement Syndrome), or are MAGA politics and policy really as bad as Germaine argues they are?
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