Views from the Outside

  https://nypost.com/2023/12/28/opinion/oh-now-our-public-health-poohbahs-tell-us-our-covid-approach-was-narrow-minded/ I like the "poohbah" in the URL Clipped in case the URL breaks (by Rich Lowry) Our public health officials are getting around to admitting the fallibility of public health officials.  Francis Collins, the former of the National Institutes of Health during the pandemic and current science adviser to President Biden, noted that he and his colleagues demonstrated an “unfortunate” narrow-mindedness. This is a welcome, if belated, confession. Not too long ago, anyone who said that epidemiologists might be overly focused on disease prevention to the exclusion of other concerns — you know, like jobs, mental health and schooling — were dismissed as reckless nihilists who didn’t care if their fellow citizens died en masse. Now, Francis Collins has weighed in to tell us that many of the people considered close-minded and anti-science  during COVID  were advancing an a

 As of December 24 2023, the Coronavirus seems to have completely vanished from the public consciousness.  That is to say, COVID-19 is still present, but no one seems to be worried about it.  The Texas DSHS has the coronavirus weekly update buried somewhere in the depths of its site and the news rarely mentions it.  It's still the #1 topic on the CDC's site, with the lonely bureaucrats probably longing for the heady days of 2020 and 2021 when they were rockstars, but the general public has just lost interest. Personally, I notice people at work occasionally wearing masks, but not consistently. It's hard to know what criteria they are using to wear a mask or not since there's no clear way to know if cases are going up or down.  Perhaps there's another reason like allergies.  I only ever got the 1st two rona shots and never got boosted for subsequent variants and, from what I've seen, no one else is, either. Pfizer and Moderna's stocks have been on a downward