COVID vaccine works - we're saved!

My wife and I are scheduled this week too. We got Pfizer for the 1st 3 shots but are going with Moderna this time.

Got a call and they rescheduled to Tuesday.

I ran across this article yesterday that seems to confirm my feelings of doubt about the reliability of the CDC. Watching the CDC become a propaganda instrument for the Trump Covid response during the first year of the pandemic was alarming to me personally. Trying to figure out what was actually happening inside the CDC was impossible because all we got was statements from a couple spokespeople about the severity and what we as individuals should do to protect ourselves that seemed to defy obvious public health guidelines. Facemasks clearly work to protect the wearer AND others.Anyway, my trust in CDC increased after Trump, but as the pandemic has continued, while strongly advocating vaccination their other guidelines kept raising doubts in my my mind. The CDC is beholden to corporations and lost our trust. We need to start our own
The People's CDC

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We’re epidemiologists, nurses and physicians, artists and biologists. We have come together with a common anger at the US government’s handling of Covid

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Anew omicron variant, referred to as BA 2, is taking hold in the US. Anthony Fauci and others have said they don’t expect a new surge in the US, but BA.2 is causing devastating surges elsewhere, and the policies and behaviors we might use to prevent a surge in the US have been widely abandoned, in part thanks to the CDC’s new system for measuring and conveying Covid risk.

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In late February, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) unveiled a new Covid-19 monitoring system based on what they call “Community Levels.” By downplaying the importance of Sars-CoV-2 transmission, the new system instantly turned what was a pandemic map still red from Omicron transmission to green – creating the false impression that the pandemic is over.

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Released four days before the State of the Union, the new CDC measures and the narrative they created let President Biden claim victory over the virus via sleight of hand: a switch from standard reporting of community transmissions to measures of risk based largely on contentious hospital-based metrics. The previous guidelines called anything over 50 cases per 100,000 people “substantial or high.” Now, they say 200 cases per 100,000 is “low” as long as hospitalizations are also low.

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The resulting shift from a red map to a green one reflected no real reduction in transmission risk. It was a resort to rhetoric: an effort to craft a success story that would explain away hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths and the continued threat the virus poses.

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These new guidelines are at odds with evidence-based and equitable public health practice in three fundamental ways.

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First, they do not intend to prevent disease spread. By minimizing the importance of new cases, and focusing instead on hospitalizations–a lagging indicator–the revamped warning system delays action until surges are well underway and the consequences of severe disease and death are already in motion. Making matters worse, at-home tests are not recorded in the US, so the only “early indicator” in the risk level calculation grossly undercounts the true number of cases.

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The justification for the shift is that the virus is mostly harmless– a claim which not only ignores that one million have already died in the US alone, but also completely erases the reality of Long Covid. Studies indicate that 10-30% of Covid infections deteriorate into multiple debilitating syndromes lasting months to years. Minimizing Covid’s risks to the public will only increase these harms in our communities.

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Some claim that the White House and the CDC are “following the science” and doing the best they can in these times. But if the goal is to prevent infection and suffering, the updated recommendations do not align with science or equity. It’s more accurate to say they’re following the money. They’ve put the desires of corporate America above the needs of our people, and especially our most vulnerable.

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We need a CDC that prioritizes the health of the people, not the health of big business. We need a People’s CDC. And so we formed one.

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We’re epidemiologists and physicians, artists and biologists. We’re children, parents, and grandparents. We’re living with Long Covid and losses of loved ones. We’ve come together with a common anger at our government’s disregard for social and public health responsibilities. Though many of us have just met, we inherit hundreds of years of resistance traditions.

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We greet this work with humility, recognizing there are still many uncertainties about new variants, Long Covid, and the future of therapeutics. Yet we know enough to reject, with certainty, ineffectual public health policies based on individualistic approaches. And we are certain that there is another way - that collective action has always and can now create a new way forward in responding to Covid and other deadly pathogens.

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In a country where nearly half the people don't even seem to accept the germ theory of disease, how successful can any CDC style organization be? And then there's the very human tendency to stop being prepared or at least as prepared for things that don't happen very often.Still, the CDC's handling of the pandemic was atrocious. True, they had to deal with Trump for the first year, and maybe Trump wounded them so severely that it greatly hindered their ability to deal with it since, but the sad truth, at least as I experience it, is that I don't agree with many of the CDC advisories. They've often served as enablers for efforts to roll back restrictions as things start to improve, instead of waiting until they've actually improved significantly. Their guidances often seem heavily influenced by what they believe people can be cajoled to do, rather than conforming to what actually needs to be done.It's no wonder people are confused. I think the CDC is itself very confused at this point. For example, maybe BA.2 is the last serious variant for a while, but maybe not. The CDC doesn't seem to be taking the new variants in China into account. True, we don't know whether they're serious or not, but if we don't treat them as if they might be serious now, then if they do turn out to be serious we won't be ready, and it is the CDC's job to make sure we're ready, not to do what is politically expedient.--Percy

I got #4 today. Moderna so the microchips are from google.

Just so long as the microchips are not from Apple. Those things are incompatible with everything!

And you can only run their software and you have to wear turtlenecks!

My big complaint is that they won't let you do the basic computer things that you need to do. Like connecting your phone to your computer and transferring files between them. When I needed a new phone a couple years ago I did consider and iPhone (my friend had just gotten one and I loved that we could read the screen outdoors), so I told the Genius at the Apple store what I needed to be able to do with the phone (namely transfer files between my computer and the phone). He assured me that I would not be able to do that, so I got a Samsung (which I just had to replace, this time with a Google Pixel (because it's supposed to not be bogged down with the kind of extraneous bloatware that killed my Samsung)).As for turtlenecks, dammit, Jim, I'm an engineer! My polo shirts need to have a pocket!

dwise1 writes: argh!yeah, that kinda kills the whole thing.maybe try emailing the file from the phone, then on the computer receive it? may not work for huge files and weak email services.

Fortunately all my phones still have some form of USB port and so I can transfer files that way even if not over WiFi.

To transfer a file from a Mac to an iPhone is easy (AirDrop is built into Apple products), so can I assume your computer is a Windows machine? If so you have to use iTunes. There's more clicking involved, but it still isn't that hard.Another way to go is to attach the file to an email, then open the email on your iPhone and move the attachment wherever you want. Or vice-versa.If you want something that's more specifically file-centric, try FileZilla. It runs on Windows, Macs and iPhones.--Percy

My arm aches like hell!!!!! And woke 2 hours early with a headache.I transfer files from my imaging computer to my phone and laptop via email, They are all ~1mb jpegs. The imaging computer is only connected to the web via cable and only when I boot up and start my Adobe Photoshop suite, download a new virus definition or want to transfer files.When I was working I had the only PC in the whole department (to run my imaging system), but they made me have a Mac laptop also. I kept it in a desk drawer and used it to enter my time sheet at the end of every month. I kept backups of my files on their server, but also on external hard drives so I could bring stuff home to work on it. Not a single IT person knew anything about PCs so I had to do all my own trouble shooting. The Apple network routinely deleted files and seemed like it fucked up productivity continuously. They tried to make me use an I-phone but I never charged it so they took it back. All that bullshit about Apple being better on graphics was a huge marketing lie. And no one writes software packages to connect Macs to instruments.One crazy thing though, they could update the Mac operating system on my laptop, even when it was turned off in my drawer, via the building Wi-Fi, spooky.

I'm a retired software engineer, mostly working in embedded programming. All our development computers ran MS-DOS and then later Windows, though we also worked a bit with Linux. But never with Macs because they wouldn't do the work. For example, besides editing, compiling/making programs, performing version control, etc, we also needed to do a lot of file management, including generating hex dumps of files. We learned very quickly that we could not do that on a Mac, because every time we had to try to do anything on a Mac it persistently made it extremely difficult if not outright impossible to perform the simplest, most basic, and very necessary computer tasks that we needed to do.The consensus among us engineers was that Macs are for people who don't know anything about computers and hence don't even realize what a computer can do. If you're happy with nothing more than doing email, surfing the Web, or using a word processor, then a Mac might be OK, but if you need to do meaningful work then that Mac becomes an albatross around your neck.But Apple was very smart about their marketing. Almost from the beginning, they either subsidized or donated Apple IIs (and later Macs) to schools so that the kids would grow up using Apple computers and hence would grow up to buy Apple computers as adults (not to mention school children getting their parents to buy Apple computers for the home). Of course, that didn't quite work out since businesses found PCs to be more productive and cost-effective, especially with networking as Microsoft developed a presence in the server market.I don't know his wife's story, but an engineer at work had to get a Mac at home for his wife because she insisted. Of course, he had to solve all the problems that she would have with it, which drove him absolutely crazy since Macs do everything completely differently and illogically. He's the one who decided that Macs are "user-friendly" only to those who don't know anything about computers.My ex-wife was a teacher (and hence worked with those donated Macs), so she lobbied me to get a Mac for the home. We could only afford one computer for the home and I would also have to be able to use it, so a Mac would not have worked. Besides, I had to tell her that if she had any problems with that Mac then I would not be able to help her. Our Windows box was the right choice, because she could never learn the most basic rule of using a word processor, which is to name your document and know which directory you stored it in. She would create a document and then come to me very upset because "your stupid computer lost my document!", and I had to find it for her. "OK, where did you save it?" "I don't know!" "OK, what did you name it?" "I didn't!" Fortunately, that was before Microsoft completely screwed up its file find utility (ie, pre-Vista/Win7) so I just did a search on *.doc files created/updated within the past day or days and I'd find it for her. And the moment I tried to explain to her how to keep this from happening again she refused to hear any of it (she clinged to her ignorance even more than a creationist does). Then to make matters even worse, after I replaced our Gateway computer's crashed WinME hard disk with Win2000 and each of us got our own account on the computer, she would take the computer over from our son without him logging off and her logging on and create a document which belonged to our son and not to her, so when she tried to use it later logged on as herself and she couldn't, then it was all my fault again ... and yet again she would refuse to learn how to keep that from happening again.If any of that had happened on a family Mac, she would have just been completely SOL ("sh*t out of luck") because I would not have been able to have helped her.Another Mac disaster was in ballroom class. At the end of every dance class (this is pretty much universal) someone, usually the teacher, demonstrates the steps or routine we had covered while everybody records it on our phones or cameras. At the start of one particular class, the teacher wanted us to review the previous class' routine, so I popped the card out of my digital camera and plugged it into the studio's new Mac. After finally figuring out how to open that device without benefit of a right mouse button (The Doctor's comment after restarting one of his two hearts that had stopped: "How do you ever manage with only one?"), I tried to open the appropriate WAV file ... and the stupid computer refused to recognized its file format which had been universally ubiquitous for at least a decade! F*cking stupid Apple was pulling "not invented here" crap on us? That had a definite attitude formation effect.This just occurred to me this morning. Almost every programming book or course starts with Brian Kernighan's (contributor to the creation of UNIX and co-designer of C (he's the "K" in "K&R C")) "Hello, World!" program. All it does is print out the message, "Hello, World!", but in doing that you must be able to successfully write the program, compile it, get it to run, and display output on the screen, basically everything you need to know to reach that first milestone in programming. IOW, once you have created your "Hello, World!" program, you know how to create any other program in that development environment.I am totally convinced that the Apple version of that program is "F*CK YOU, WORLD!" As per Bill Maher's segment, I can't prove it, but I know that it's true. Almost all my file transfers between computers have been via sneakernet using floppies in the beginning and later USB flash drives. Of course, larger file sizes presented problems for lower-capacity sneakernet media, so we needed to come up with more clever approaches. I think there was a shareware utility that would split a large binary file into segments, each of which could fit on a floppy, and then in the target computer reconstitute those segments into a copy of the original file. Later when email became available we could use that. The early flash drives had capacities less than 1 GB, but now you can get capacities of 64 GB and more for about $25.Here's a war story (USAF-speak; "sea story" in the Navy) which is also the only time I was ever able to do something useful on a Mac. My sister-in-law's husband, a PhD who had only ever used a Mac throughout his college career, had just bought a new eMac which came with the new OS X (which was the first to be built atop BSD UNIX, as I recall). He also bought a new hP laser printer and made the mistake of installing the printer drivers that came with the printer. Those drivers were for OS9 and overwrote the OSX drivers already installed in the computer (I would assume). So of course the printer didn't work and he called me for help.I found the proper drivers from the hP website, but the file was too big to fit on a flash drive (this was around 2001 and my largest flash drive was only 256 MB). So I got creative. I downloaded the file onto my Windows laptop and brought it with me to their house. On the eMac, I found the network settings and set the eMac up as an FTP server -- they used dial-up to connect to the Internet, so the computer's RJ45 connector was not in use. Assigning appropriate private network IP addresses to both computers, I connected my laptop to the eMac with a crossover cable and FTP'd the drivers from my laptop to the eMac using the command-line FTP utility. On the eMac I installed the drivers and verified that I had fixed their printer problem. Then I cleaned up after myself, mainly getting rid of that FTP server.Along the way, I stumbled upon the eMac's text editor hidden away deep down in some subdirectory. It appeared to be little more than Windows' Notepad (doesn't compare with my multi-file text editor where I do most of my work ... and which doesn't have a Mac version). While reporting the successful fixing of his printer problem I told him about my having found the text editor and his reaction was, "What's a text editor?" That PhD. I also had to explain to them what that second button on the mouse, the right button, was for. I could never understand how anybody could do anything useful with a mouse that only had a single button, but then years later someone told me about the "command key" on the keyboard meaning that you had to use both hands to right-click something, which makes even less sense to me. And that's not even counting the "you need to know the secret handshake that nobody's going to tell you about" factor.OK, Apple. Same to you, buddy!

Here's the thing. The phone has its own file system with directories. Those directories include support for the camera and photo gallery, file downloads, text and PDF files. I need to be able to not only save off photos and videos, but also to load graphics files from my computer onto my phone. I also need to be able to copy text and PDF files onto my phone so that I can read them on my phone.Most of my requirements are for loading files into my phone, not from it. I'm having difficulty imagining email files from my computer to my phone; that entire approach just feels so contrived and convoluted. And, yes, attaching large files to an email has proven problematic in the past just in sending said files to somebody else (eg, real estate sales papers that needed to be signed and returned).Rather, the simple and direct method which I have used with my two past Android and my one past Windows phones has been to connect the phone to my computer (Windows, of course, because I need to be able to do useful things) with a USB cable, opening the phone as a device/directory in File Explorer (FE). From there, I navigate to the appropriate directories on the computer (running a second instance of FE) and the phone, select the file(s) I want to copy, and paste it/them in the other directory exactly as one would in any file copy operation. Clean, simple, couldn't be any easier. Yet Apple wants to make it extremely complicated and nearly impossible.BTW, I have had to resort to email to extract some photos and videos, especially videos of my grandsons that my son sends in text messages where they are too small to be able to see much. I have used the texting app's share feature to email them to myself, but that only reinforces my complaint that we have to use workarounds to perform common desired tasks.A side complaint is how they never tell you how to do these things. I really liked my iPod Nano (last of that product line I ever got since after that Apple dropped the best and most genius idea they ever had, that track-wheel control (though I think I saw that the new Apple streaming device's control has one)), which did a very great many things including a camera, video recording, pedometer, etc. The problem was that all they told you was how to charge it, turn it on, and what the symbols on the trackwheel meant. You could go to those other features through the menu, but they didn't tell you how to do anything else. In particular, I needed to delete some of the videos and I could not figure out how until I found a third-party users guide online that told me how.A common response to my complaining about that glaring lack of customer support has been that "exploring your device for what things you can do and how to do them is all part of the experience. Being told how to do things just ruins the experience." My phone is not a damned experience, but rather a tool for performing tasks! It is not a game!Part of my smartphone experience is for me to revert to practicing my German by cursing. Especially as I'm trying to navigate my calendar to another month when it suddenly exits the app and then, when I go back into the app, it returns me to the current month thus erasing any progress I had made. Scheißeschweinerei!

Of course I have a Windows machine; I also use some Linux, but as a virtual machine on one of my laptops. I could never use a Mac both because they are so user-hostile towards computer professionals and because I need to be able to do useful things with my computer. And because if I'm going to drive myself insane then it should at least be for a good reason. And since Netflix now provides me with plenty of German content, I no longer need to resort to cursing to keep current with the language.As for "easy", why must we resort to work-arounds in order to perform the most basic of computer tasks? A useful tool would be one that enables you to perform the tasks it is supposed to support, not to block you from being able to perform those tasks. If the only way to do your job with a given tool is to find convoluted ways of working around the tool, then that is not an acceptable tool. Time to find a better tool, one that actually does the job.I have it, having loaded and used it with my iPod and iPod Nano (I never upgraded to the iTouch since they had removed its essential feature, the track-wheel control). One benefit is that it created its own sandbox such that it did not mess up the rest of the computer's file system (at least not to my knowledge). The disadvantage is that it would sync the entire device, though at least it restricted itself to the iTunes sandbox (at least to my knowledge).My first smartphone was an Android, the HTC Thunderbolt. When I connected it to my computer it installed an HTC Sync utility (I forget the details of that). Many years later, it's still there in my taskbar, though I used it only once much to my horror. It went throughout my computer's file system and pulled out stuff to load into my phone. I have no idea in what manner it had otherwise violated my file system, but it does raise my hackles to be given such a rogering without a dinner first or at least a kiss, but the bottom line is that it was not consensual!The best I could find about how an iPhone would give a Windows computer a rogering (I would not call it a "good rogering") is that it would "perform a sync." Would it have defined a sandbox as iTunes did, thus keeping its damned dirty paws off the rest of the file system, or would it just go out and violate the entire file system wantonly? I could find no more "information" than that it would "perform a sync." 
"Easy" is just being able to connect the phone to the computer, open the phone's file system in the File Explorer, selecting the file(s) to be copied, and pasting that copy in the target directory. Now that is easy. But that is not the Apple way.Edited by dwise1, : Typo: "without a dinner first", not "with"