Donald J. Trump (For everyone else)

Please this is absolutely trash. Vaccines and lockdown protocols saved millions of lives and thats not debatable. Obviously there were also costs and harmful effects to society but calling it a wash is ridiculous. We also got lucky that COVID didn't end up on the more extreme outcomes.

Governments trying to understand and fight an emerging threat like a pandemic is not the oppression you people think it is. Being imperfect in hindsight while enacting evidence driven policies to help and protect people against possibly cataclysmic outcomes is not corruption. Saying it was worse than doing nothing is not even results oriented because its not true. Its just moronic.

I can just grant that list of cons, but you can’t really evaluate a cost-benefit without also supplying the benefit. Anything at all could look bad if you only talk about the bad parts.

you can count any improvement to Americans well being as a benefit

this is how you develop antivax sentiment.

vaccines saved a huge amount of lives, lockdowns absolutely, provenly didn't, you want to claim both did and put both into the "undebatable" label, even if lockdown actual benefits are being debated to this day in the literature itself without any consensus at all.

it is just automatic for people who know as a fact lockdowns were a disastrous choice then to just give up on your other claim as well and start doubting vaccines.

people like you are the main reason antivaccinism is rising

countries without horrific leftists or pseudo leftists (like some "center-right" parties are in the west) in power, like Japan, didn't even close brothels by law during the "worst pandemic in a century".

and they didn't mandate masks or vaccines.

yet even if they are the oldest (or one the oldest) countries in the world and never locked down anything (a part for schools for 6-8 weeks) nor mandate anything... had very low overall mortality.

and we have to sit here believing what the Fauci team of horrific monsters did was "evidence based"

The most famously not locked down country was Sweden and their PM at the time was from their Social Democratic/Workers party - the left side of the spectrum even in Sweden.

they became a worldwide case because of media narrative but they locked down almost identically to Denmark and Norway (which means not too much, but more than say north Dakota).

most of the Sweden talk was made up media narrative because Boris Johnson early remarks to "do like Sweden" before he changed his mind.

I doubt you have any idea what the lockdown was like in North Dakota. You were very wrong about what it was like in California.

what did I say that was false for CA? I just said it was a lot worse than Florida and rococo confirmed.

I followed obsessively every place in the world during COVID to try to know what worked and what didn't, I am very aware of what SD did specifically which was possibly the lowest amount of state violence in all the first world at least at the state level.

which you know is why Noem became a hero for us.

sorry I wrote ND before, it was SD ofc

The author doesn't matter. Hasn't been peer-reviewed or published. It's no better than a blog. gtfo of here with that crap. This might fool your conservative buddies or you (apparently), but most of us are smarter than that.

And yet you haven't proven it. You've merely asserted it.

of course it did. Look at the slowdown of all other contagious disease rates during those times. Lockdown measures clearly and obviously reduce transmission rates. It's fair to argue that they have a huge cost to them and and to debate the cost/benefit in retrospect. It's results oriented and very difficult to measure but a reasonable topic. They still saved millions of lives.

You said we were under house arrest.

Jesus Christ, get your Dakotas straight if you're going to participate in a USA forum.

no, that was a comment about italy. I know your lockdown wasn't militarily enforced like ours, ffs my dad lives in Santa Clara

****, you mentioned that. Does that make you a US citizen? ****. The one person I want the borders closed to.

the flu and other respiratory viruses almost disappeared even in non-locked down countries, did you check that?

it's fairly possible that when the virus isn't seeded yet and cases are very low, locking down fan actually have cases die. it happened in Australia and NZ for sure more than once.

but with the virus seeded? lol everyone is exposed anyway unless you go full north Korea.

I mean they locked down Bergamo where everyone was exposed already.

literature was clear, you can do cordone sanitaires (interrupt all entrance if you don't have cases), but in the areas where the virus is widespread there is absolutely nothing you can do, everyone will get exposed anyway.

locking down when cases are high is absolutely, demonstrably ******ed.

and that's before we discuss the tradeoffs and so on

ofc the politics of letting people live absolutely normally if they have a lot of cases while dramatically reducing their freedom of they don't have almost any cases are impossible , so no one did that.

most places did the opposite closing down when cases were high, and reopening when under some threshold, pretty much the absolute worse strategy (again, pre tradeoffs)

I didn't take citizenship because the hell I am going through the torture of FATCA and the IRS believing your worldwide income is theirs

phew

Luciom,

Did you break the law to evade the Italian lockdowns?

(you should have/did if you have any spine at all - considering your principles, such as they are)

Sure, like improving protocols for crisis situations, auxiliary medical research, providing jobs, creating that warm fuzzy feeling that millions of lives are saved, increasing and improving American reach on the world stage, etc.

In the case of global vaccine, health, and infrastructure programs we reduce the chances of global pandemics and shore up supply chains by decreasing instability.

There’s also the added bonus that our covert operatives can slip in and out of these programs and improve our intelligence and surveillance capabilities, which I’m sure happens.

Those diseases are global so obviously transmission would slow down in all countries to varying degrees. Also these measures were about not overwhelming the hospital systems that were stretched to the max. You can keep creating the narrative you want to spin but you are wrong. FWIW my wife is a doctor who runs a clinic and lockdown measures were absolutely vital to balancing resources and keeping people alive. Again there is a cost but stop denying basic reality because it undermines the points you have.

no, but I dodged it. I furiously studied the details of the regulations as soon as I could and talked around as much as possible with smart people, then decided to get me and wife fake-hired by a realtor friend as assistants.

for some reason realtors (and employees connected to that) were completely free to roam around (I suppose to show houses to people?) at least in my area (which has many hospitals and is a tier 1 hcare area so I suppose the idea was that people could need a house to stay near their hospitalized relatives or something).

so I was always ok in case the armed militaries stopped me (which actually never happened).

but there was nothing I could do with schools, or with the fact that all restaurants were closed.

a year later in a other a bit softer lockdown, restaurants could open for business clients "on travel" (not to anyone else, and you needed proof of being an employee from another city on travel), got fake hired as a seller by a friend in another city.

I say "fake hired" to give the meaning but it was all perfectly legal and I had to pay some min taxes even with no income for that

oh the "hospitals are overwhelmed" narrative. sorry we will derail too much but that as well was complete fraud. hospitals during COVID were underutilized historically, with the highest % of free beds in decades, because you guys interrupted a lot of other procedures "because COVID"

LOL go back to the depths of conspiracy youtube. This is insulting nonsense to someone who is surrounded by healthcare professionals and lived it. Not everything is a ****ing lie and you would be wise to learn some humility.