Note: Please read the following, silently, to protect the other readers on the blog.
New COVID changes are coming down the pike. One must continue to wear a mask, maintain social distancing, frequently wash their hands and stay home as often as possible to slow the spread of the virus. Vaccination through the new, experimental mRNA platform is highly recommended, as summer could be on the chopping block for CANCELLATION if everyone doesn’t get one.
It is expected that everyone will pick up these new rules in no nime an all (in no time at all). It is recommended you carry around a white board for the first 6 months in case you are unable to properly annunciate these new sounds under your mask. If people respond by saying, “What?” “What??” “WHAT?!”, ignore the impulse to pull off your mask and scream at them. Instead, step back a few feet and write what you’re trying to say on your white board.
Well, I must say, this attempt at humor is disgusting! Shame on anyone, and especially Orthodox Christians, for endorsing something like this. A good and cherished friend of mine, a GOA priest whom I have known for 58 years, reposed at 6:30 pm December 24th after a brief and valiant struggle against COVID 19. The doctors and nurses in attendance wouldn’t take kindly to this drivel. Any guess as to what his wife and son would say? As I have remarked more than a few times over the brief past, folks tend to ignore, deny, etc., the deadly reality of what we are facing UNTIL someone they love, a member of their family, a good friend, is in an ICU with a tube down their throat and several IVs in their arms. Lord have mercy and may he bring us enlightenment.
Sir, let me get this straight: this “good friend” of yours, a priest of 58 years standing, was how old exactly?
I don’t mean to be sarcastic but according to the Canons a man should at least be 30 years old before he’s ordained. If so, that would make him 88 years old. For all we know he could have been 35, 40 or even fifty. I know of professional men who are semi-retired and get ordained at around those ages.
Let us be charitable however and look at the fact that because of no Orthodox phronema/matrix in America, the more normative age for ordination was twenty-five. That would make him 83 at the time of his death.
I’m most saddened that he died but I’m sorry, his age somewhat dampens my sadness. My mother died at 49 of cancer; she never saw her grandchildren and (except for me and then, barely) her three children never celebrated the normal landmarks that one associates with a full and productive life. How I wish she had died in her 80s of COVID.
I’ve beaten my own grievances to death around here regarding the death of my father due to COVID at 75. He, too, will never meet his grandchildren—who knows if he’ll ever have any—but that’s a story for another day.
May I suggest that instead of getting into arguments with each other regarding personal tragedies, we should lament the ripe old age that the Nancy Pelosies, Dianne Feinsteins, and Chuck Schumers of this world have lived to—and recall their own resistance to taking decisive steps to keep this virus from reaching our shores? These people do not deserve to exist. Sorry if that’s uncharitable and unchristian, but my bitterness is directed primarily toward people like them. Instead of advocating for Americans, they showed more concern for people outside our borders and set the stage for disaster.
I do feel disappointment toward positions like the one Mr. Michalopoulos has taken, although I understand where he’s coming from. Hopefully people of like mind won’t have to find out the hard way.
But even for this, I hold the Left accountable, with their hijacking of this tragedy for their own sick “social justice” war. This set the stage for contrarian denialism and showed that their pet causes—BLM chief among them—are more important than the safety of Americans and the memory of those lost to the Wuhan virus. Why was George Floyd, a degenerate criminal (who incidentally had COVID), allowed the spectacle of multiple memorials not even afforded some heads of state, while the rest of us had to fight tooth and nail to offer our loved ones anything approaching the dignity of a “real” funeral, in some cases being forced to dispose of them as hazardous waste?
May I suggest on focusing on some other things here, instead of whether or not this virus is real, or whether or not deaths related to it would have happened anyway—an argument that frankly could be used to trivialize practically any ailment? Didn’t Rahm Emanuel suggest that no one should live beyond 75? Guess who Biden appointed to his COVID panel? Who knows, maybe they wanted to kick my old man off—after all, he’d paid millions of dollars into the system (he worked 7 days a week for 30 of the 50 years he worked) and the Social Security check he no longer receives would pay for a lot of people who have no intention of working and probably don’t belong here either (and are also probably grandparents by an age most would regard as barely old enough to be parents) but I digress.
1. The Chinese element, which could also segue nicely into a discussion of American double standards regarding Russia and China. “Evil Empire,” “Most Favored Nation,” and all. This dichotomy is nothing new but no one really seems to want to take it up, save for a few folks at Katehon and The Saker (although there are more than a few Sinophiles at the latter, which is bewildering).
2. Why our country needs immigration reform and how secure borders and travel restrictions could have helped mitigate this disaster—or why locking down the country from the outside would have rendered an internal lockdown unnecessary or at least very much abbreviated.
3. How closing restaurants and churches doesn’t make sense if that means ten times as many people are now at the grocery store; how this is all arbitrary nonsense to give the illusion of concrete action against something no one wants to admit they have no grasp of.
4. Why the medical establishment is willing to use the general population as a testbed for a vaccine whose development has by all accounts been rushed and is admitted likely to have limited efficacy, yet therapeutic agents—whose efficacy is also admittedly unproven but at least makes theoretical sense—are denied to those who will surely die without any intervention on grounds that “there isn’t enough evidence” to warrant their use. Anyone else want to take a crack at the blatant duplicity of such an argument, beyond the obvious cover-your-ass ones?
‘…therapeutic agents—whose efficacy is also admittedly unproven
but at least makes theoretical sense—are denied to those who will surely die
without any intervention on grounds that “there isn’t enough evidence”
to warrant their use.’
Catch 22: “You can’t use them because there is no proof they will work.”
“But unless we use them, there will never be any proof they will work.”
I repeat: “You can’t use them because there is no proof they will work.”
Why is this argument always applied to cheap
therapeutics but never to expensive vaccines.
Yes Brendan ~ And sad to say these caring and much-published physicians and researchers DO have data — just can’t get it published by JAMA types or analyzed by NIH as they have implored them to do (most recently in the December 8 hearing). To me preventable death hurts the most. Every time someone older or with a pre-existing condition dies, I wish they had known about their alternatives which are legal and available via the https://aapsonline.org website. The Senate hearings are 5 hours in toto, less than the time of the upcoming Superbowl. The handbook is short. PLEASE DON’T LET PEOPLE GET TO THE ICU IF WE CAN HELP IT! The NIH continues to research expensive new pharmaceuticals for people in the hospital not ways to keep them out of it! I entreat you, take time now. And please spread the word.
That’s the point I’m getting at. From my perspective, from someone “who was there,” from someone who is a healthcare provider, there’s no better time to experiment than when there’s almost no hope left.
I’m a dentist, my mom is a retired RN, and my dad was a hospital administrator with a background in x-ray. His sister is a family practice doctor, his brother-in-law is a retired thoracic surgeon, and most of my cousins are MDs of one specialty or another, in addition to a host of other clinical occupations. Everyone was on the same page EXCEPT the attending ER physician. At first I kept my mouth shut and let her do her thing, but my dad was frustrated at her lack of communication and not being able to speak with a pulmonologist about his condition. I dropped a mention of HCQ (in addition to remdesivir, vitamin C, zinc, Z-pak, inhalational NO supplementation) and she was completely dismissive and said I was “buying into media hype.” Nothing but supplementary oxygen for 41 hours. Then a pulmonologist was called in and he was put on the ventilator. The pulmonologist is a friend of the surgeon uncle I mentioned, so my thoughts were relayed to him. His response was something to the effect of, “This is excellent reasoning. I don’t have a few of those things available, but we have nothing the lose so yeah, what the hell have we been waiting for?” There was still resistance from the attending ER MD, but she finally backed off and started to take a clear damage-control approach. I called her out, telling her that I would hold her accountable for inaction with an adverse outcome (which was clearly the trajectory things were taking), not reasonable action that was unsuccessful. While I can’t say that the outcome would have been any better, I am convinced that her approach didn’t help, and that thinking like hers needlessly contributed to the deaths of many thousands.
So as a healthcare professional, I feel a lot of bitterness toward the medical and scientific community with regard to ethics and dogmatic protocols that are useless in a situation like this. Their approach is two-faced, inconsistent and clearly malleable insofar as it suits their own objectives, and the prospect of litigation is given more consideration than the lives of human beings.
Why use healthy people as guinea pigs? I’m not sure I’m convinced that there’s anything nefarious going on with vaccine development, but I’m not convinced it’s totally benign either. There are too many unknowns to go about advocating its use so willy-nilly. I think each person should be allowed to weigh the potential benefits against the potential risks in relation to their own circumstances. It’s a gamble.
For me, this nightmare is a culmination of so many patterns I see with regard to official narratives (and it doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking Side A or Side B–they both have their issues) juxtaposed against reality, and I refer back to that list I enumerated in my last reply here.
Anyone else want to take a crack at the blatant duplicity of such an argument, beyond the obvious cover-your-ass ones?
I submit that there are none.
An interesting tidbit about another cheap therapeutic – aspirin…
“The first evidence that aspirin could protect the heart did not come from an academic medical center but from a general practitioner. Beginning in the 1940s, Dr. Lawrence L. Craven advised all his male patients between the ages of 40 and 65 to take aspirin every day to prevent coronary thrombosis (clots in the heart’s arteries). It seemed to work; Dr. Craven reported that surprisingly few of his patients had heart attacks or strokes.”
(This, of course was a time when medical practitioners were free to care for their patients in accordance with observed results rather than being subjected to impersonal, albeit often well-intentioned, protocols – the violation of which can subject a practitioner to litigation.)
“Dr. Craven’s observations were astute, and they support Yogi Berra’s belief that you can observe a lot just by watching. Still, even the most careful clinical observations must be confirmed by scientific research. It took some 40 years, but in 1989 Harvard’s Physicians’ Health Study provided impressive evidence that aspirin can indeed protect a man’s heart. More than 22,000 men between the ages of 40 and 84 volunteered to take either a standard 325-milligram (mg) aspirin tablet or a placebo every other day. Over the next five years, the men taking aspirin suffered 44% fewer heart attacks than their peers taking placebo. That would make low-dose aspirin seem like a sure winner, but the Harvard researchers noted some nuances: although aspirin protected against heart attacks, it did not reduce the risk of cardiac death, and all the benefit was confined to men older than 50. And even in low doses, aspirin increased the risk of bleeding.
“Scientists have continued to learn a lot about aspirin. Although the research has confirmed some findings of the Harvard study from the 1980s, it has also produced many complexities. Doctors still have a lot of questions about aspirin, and since every man must decide if aspirin for prevention is right for him…”
https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/aspirin-and-your-heart-many-questions-some-answers
Question: How is it that every man can and “must decide for himself” if there are still “many complexities” surrounding aspirin’s use? Why the double standard, as aspirin clearly has risks every bit as serious as those of the Covid therapeutics in question?
I too, lament the longevity of our kakistocracy. Geo Soros just hit 90.
This is one of the better, more readable commentaries I’ve been exposed to . I was wearing a mask as I read it. Correction: My ears were reading it. The intelligent usage of the British accent is one of God’s gifts to civilization.
Thank you for the clip, Sam.
Some mistakenly believed we were making fun of people who have suffered from COVID, as if we would really do that.
I’m guessing others see the similarly between the clip and the effort to “humanize language.” Crazy ideas.
https://fortunesociety.org/wordsmatter/
Indeed. Why use two syllables when we can use thirteen?
That’s not a spade. It’s a hand-operated earth-turning implement.
And. of course, we did not kill that man.
We terminated the person with extreme prejudice.
You’re right! I always forget the rules.
Dear Yannaro:
I grieve for you and Johann Sebastian and George for those you loved and lost. Christ wept for his friend Lazarus, even knowing He would revive him quickly and knowing He would offer us all Resurrection if we follow Him, because Death is wretched and painful to the living and to God Himself ~ not what God in Three Persons intended or wishes to happen.
That is what Emmanuel Rahm and utilitarians like him do not know. They do not know Christ or who they were made to be. Most pitiable.
I also have many empathic failures myself when angry or upset and momentarily lose empathy for the other. And I have become aware that ~ for me and most icons of Christ ~ grief and sorrow often underlie that anger, not cruelty or an intent to cause pain in the other.
We all know how much George and Gail care and suffer for us and for Orthodoxy. Please let’s not let the evil one turn us against one another in any meaningful way.
And please forgive me for entreating everyone yet again to acquaint yourself with what might save another beloved icon of Christ of any age early in the process. Because the pain of loss by us for them is heart-breaking and by the doctors and nurses trying valiantly in the ICU soul-breaking.
Memory eternal for your mother George and your friend Yannaro and your father Johann Sebastian. If you are ever comfortable sharing first names (Orthodox or otherwise), I would love to pray for them by name.
May Panagia console your hearts! Kalo Paradiso for your dear ones!
“The doctors and nurses in attendance wouldn’t take kindly to this drivel. Any guess as to what his wife and son would say?”
Blessed is the Lord? In any case, we don’t need to guess what this nurse says; who will literally never be able to smile again, because her face is mutilated. “I want everyone to know that, I think this vaccination is the worst thing ever. And I would not give it to anybody, even my worst enemy. Please America, they don’t care about us, don’t take this vaccination.”
https://www.bitchute.com/video/YXfkFa38pRq5/
“It is recommended you carry around a white board…”
White Boards Matter!
[Sorry: While Boards Manner!]
Here is a 22 minute video from Ivor Cummins
demonstrating that lockdowns do not work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cjgicrA504
I didn’t say he was a priest for 58 years. I said I knew him for 58 years. He was 78 when he died and had been a priest for about 50 years. He was healthy and active as a full time priest up until the end in the only parish he ever served. This is a very difficult loss for the parish. As for the canons, check out what all the bishops do. Even if you believe your bishop is ok about everything don’t forget that you, through your bishop, are in communion with every bishop your bishop is in communion with, including patriarchs, etc. And you know very well that the age for ordination is probably the least of what you should be concerned about when speaking of the canons.
You seem to have missed my point as I expressed it in my comments. Certainly, we all experience loss and grief in our lives, in different ways, some in more difficult circumstances and certainly more difficult to understand, much less accept.. BUT, I was reacting to the use of humor and satire to address the situation. The article displays an extraordinary lack of empathy. Let me express my point in a way which, unfortunately, may be easier for you to understand but certainly not to accept. Would your feelings be different if the focus of such an attempt at humor was cancer? It is not my intent to insult or hurt but the author of the article should be aware of what the article stirs up in others.
The focus was never about cancer or COVID. The focus was “stupid rules.” Like renaming everything to do with prisoners (which we’ve mentioned), like lockdowns when data exists that lockdowns actually increased the number of cases, like closing down churches but allowing people to go to Walmart. It is the RULES that are laughable; not COVID victims.
You’ve got your 10 minutes, Michael. Time to move on. . . again.
Thank you Gail
Here is another 13 minute video from Ivor Cummins
explaining exactly what happened in Sweden.
He uses published government data to nail it down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3vDsKEOIQI
My guess is if she is not listed as a licensed nurse in the state that she could be a nurses aid, who are certified, but not licensed. Many nurses aides refer to themselves simply as ” nurses”.
I have known more than a few that insist that they are “licensed” by the state. It’s a matter of improper use of the term.
…a loose use, so to speak;
which is how most people use language.
Quick! Give this man another Emmy!
https://reason.com/2021/01/08/cuomos-new-york-is-just-throwing-away-vaccines-rather-than-distributing-them-competently/
Unbelievable.
You know, 1984 was a warning, not a “how-to” book:
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/01/15/no-vaccine-no-job-declares-anti-brexit-pimlico-plumbers-boss/