Anti-vax or vaccinate

 Found myself dealing with an anti-vax person, who will go unnamed. He went off on me saying the vaccine was killing healthy athletes, that it wasn't even a real vaccine, and that it didn't protect you from catching the disease. 

There have been several athletes and former athletes die recently, though all of those had underlying medical conditions, which is what killed them, and for many of those there was no evidence they were ever vaccinated. One died of a blood clot to the brain, which he had suffered a year before, though it failed to kill him that time. Another died of a drug overdose. Yet another had a history of heart problems and died of a heart attack. I could go on but check Politifact ot Factcheck, if you want more.

A lot of traditional vaccines used dead of weakened viruses to stimulate an immune response. The Pfizer and Moderna use mRNA which introduces a characteristic protein of Covid-19, so the body will recognize and react to that protein. In many ways that is safer, since occasionally the weakened viruses in some vaccines have caused an infection.

Many vaccines do not confer total immunity to all versions of the disease. That is why there are annual flu shots and why there are two different pneumonia shots covering multiple varieties of those diseases. What has been proven in peer reviewed scientific studies is that the Covid vaccine reduces the likelihood of catching the disease, along with strongly reducing the odds of being hospitalized or dying from it.

He also said that recovering from Covid confers greater immunity than the vaccine. Some studies have shown that to be the case, but they also showed that those who were vaccinated after recovering from Covid, had even greater immunity to it.

Everyone has to make their own choices. My wife, myself, my sister-in-law, and her husband have all been vaccinated. If you want to take your chances, it may kill you, but it may not. We don't want to take that chance.

Mass Insanity

 What in hell is going on in this country? We have people claiming the last election was rigged even though there is zero evidence of that. They claim Trump is the rightful president though he lost by millions of votes. A former Trump aide has called for a military coup to oust Biden. Another former Trump aide called for Hillary to be hanged though even after multiple investigations she was never charged with a crime, much less convicted. Yet when there is a grand jury investigation into Trump's financial dealings, they call it a witch hunt. And they seem to think that either Jan 6 was no big deal or else it was Antifa pretending to support Trump. Has a third of the country gone out of their fucking minds?

Time for unity and bi-partisanship?

 I have a friend who is basically saying that the Democrats need to play nice and be bi-partisan now.

Honestly, we just spent the last twelve years or more with the GOP being anything but bi-partisan. We had Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans doing anything they could to obstruct Obama. We had more than fifty attempts to repeal ACA with no healthcare plan from the GOP. We had birtherism and the GOP questioning whether Obama was a Muslim and questioning where he was born. The GOP Senate refused to even hold hearings on Obama's Supreme Court nominee.

Then we had Trump trying to overturn anything Obama accomplished. When Ruth Bader Ginsberg died, they rushed to put a conservative on the Supreme Court. Come the election, when Trump lost, he and much of the GOP claimed without evidence that there was massive vote fraud and that the election was stolen. Then Trump and his sycophants encouraged and abetted the invasion of the Capitol, including property damage and death. 

After all this, we Democrats are supposed to just play nice? Fuck that. Now we shouldn't be nearly as bad as they've been. We should not just pretend everything is wonderful and strive for unity. The GOP sure as hell didn't strive for unity for the last twelve or more years.