Category Archives: Stupidity

Crime/Corruption, Public Health/Coronavirus, Stupidity

Astrology disease modeling

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Note the range of the disease models goes from zero to infinity.

Forecasts for new cases for the state of Vermont, October 20, 2021:

Source: Vermont reports 318 new Covid-19 cases, 2 new deaths – VTDigger

Astrology is more accurate than these disease models; they are really that awful yet have become the basis for errant public policy. Per the linked story, Vermont is now using disease models to look ahead one week recognizing how useless the disease models have shown themselves to be.

Uniquely, the reporter on this story appears to have the necessary background to understand data (unlike most reporters). This is good news and glad to see this.

Reminder: In my state, from late October 2020 to late February 2021, OHA’s 3-week disease models had the wrong sign 11 out of 13 projections. Flipping a coin would have been more accurate.

Oregon disease model

Diseases models have proven themselves to be worthless – and likely causing harm, not benefit. My state shut down non-emergency health care access in the spring of 2020 due to a shitty model from the UW IHME that was badly incorrect. I had to wait 13 weeks to get a diagnosis of a broken foot and torn tendon, by which time there was not much that could be done. Disease modelers can go to hell.

Policy/Government, Stupidity

Oops: Oregon inadvertently sends spreadsheet containing vax status of 40,000 employees – to state newspaper

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Oregon’s Department of Administrative Services on Monday mistakenly sent individual vaccination statuses to The Oregonian/OregonLive and the Statesman Journal, instead of the agency-level vaccination and exemption percentages the news organizations requested.

Source: Oregon government agency inadvertently releases 40,000 state employees’ vaccination status – oregonlive.com

Healthcare, Public Health/Coronavirus, Stupidity

Fully vaccinated Stanford University students are 2x more likely to wear a face mask while bicycling outdoors than to wear a bike helmet

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Seriously: Review Analysis: Stanford students are more likely to wear masks on bicycles than helmets

This is illustrates how screwed up public health messaging delivered the wrong messages. More students, who are fully vaccinated, wear face masks while cycling outdoors than wear a bike helmet.

Note – I fractured my skull in a bicycle accident (5″ long fracture). I have broken bike helmets twice in crashes that broke other bones and knocked me out. I also broke my right wrist in a fall that did not impact my head. When I say I am a traumatic brain injured idiot, I am not entirely joking.

Crime/Corruption, Healthcare, Policy/Government, Public Health/Coronavirus, Stupidity

New York hospitals fire unvaxxed staff

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18 months ago, we locked down my own state to protect hospitals for becoming overloaded.

We lauded health care workers as “heroes”.

18 months later, the state of New York is about to fire up to 25% of their hospital staff because they have not been vaccinated.

This makes senses to whom?

New York hospitals on Monday began firing or suspending healthcare workers for defying a state order to get the COVID-19 vaccine, and resulting staff shortages prompted some hospitals to postpone elective surgeries or curtail services.

Source: New York hospitals fire, suspend staff who refuse COVID vaccine | Reuters

Also, the hospitals do not recognize prior Covid infection and having antibodies as being protective (that’s actually how the immune system works and it is recognized by the EU countries).

Update: The “25%” figure was yesterday’s news report. Reports today say it might be 8%, and that many workers got vaccinated in the last few days.

Public Health/Coronavirus, Stupidity

Follow up: Fiegl-Ding says UK is killing people

Fiegl-Ding’s claim did not age well.

In mid-July, Eric Feigl-Ding, a nutritionist who fashioned himself as an epidemiologist, said the UK’s Covid plans would kill people in this superlative laden social media post.

Here is what actually happened, as of September 18, 2021:

Continue reading Follow up: Fiegl-Ding says UK is killing people →
Public Health/Coronavirus, Stupidity

Doctor says “Travel is not a constitutional right”

The doctor who used to run Planned Parenthood, where “My body, my choice” was an associated tag line, says “Travel is not a constitutional right“, in discussing travel bans for those who are not vaccinated.

She needs to stay in her lane. She is wrong. This illustrates the unfortunate arrogance of those in pandemic public health and why they have lost the trust and confidence of the public.

Environment, Public Health/Coronavirus, Stupidity

Random correlations are not science conclusions

About as weak a study as you can find: Link between wildfires and COVID cases established. This poor quality paper is receiving mountains of press coverage purporting to link the number of Covid cases to wildfire smoke. Harvard’s own press release calls the link “established” when this correlation-only is an hypothesis.

This looks like they decided on a conclusion, rounded up lots of data, threw it into the Stat-O-Meter and out popped a “correlation”. The authors said its correlation without causation, making it an hypothesis.

There are so many things wrong with this paper that I won’t try to explain it.

If you do not understand the problem with this kind of nonsense science then consider how I showed last year that Covid wave peaks correlate with solar sunspot numbers.

Stunning: Cause of Covid-19 pandemic waves revealed

This pandemic has seen a flood of shitty papers that have cherry picked data or drawn random correlations to “prove” their desired point.

Perhaps we could write a paper documenting a correlation between pandemics and shitty research papers?

Business, Crime/Corruption, Public Health/Coronavirus, Stupidity

Parody: “Counterfeit COVID-19 vaccination cards bound for New Orleans seized by U.S. Customs”

The level of idiocy in the country is amazing.

Last spring you could download the PDF file from official government public health web sites and print them yourself. You can still do that, although the public health idiots eventually removed the PDF files from their own web sites. The file remains widely available if you look around. I even have a JPG image of the card on this blog.

Update: I still have the PDF file I downloaded from an official public health web site run by the government.

Now we have major police operations stopping fake cards that anyone can still print out for themselves because public health in the U.S. never developed a verifiable, authenticated vaccination record.

Quack, quack, quack.

The idiocy and incompetence on display is stunning. Today, Sen. Schumer acknowledged publicly that he too is a moron, calling for a Federal crackdown on distribution of fake cards – literally, the ones printed out from PDF files the government itself was making available. Rather than a federal crackdown that accomplished nothing, how about defining a verifiable, authenticated vaccine record?

Source: Counterfeit COVID-19 vaccination cards bound for New Orleans seized by U.S. Customs | Crime/Police | nola.com