That’s a shockingly low number. Surely there must be more than 27 members of the Air Force who are refusing. Is this just a first pass at discharges?
To answer my own question:
All the members were in their first enlistments and had served less than six years, so their requests for vaccine exemptions did not go to a board
The Air Force has 7,365 unvaccinated service members; many of those cases are pending religious exemption requests.
So yeah, that’s far from the full number.
Although given that the US Air Force has over 329,000 active duty airmen, even the 7365-unvaccinated number is hearteningly low.
Spotted today on the THISTV network, scheduled for 8:00 AM broadcast:
STOP BRAIN FOG
Get whole-brain support with NeuroQ! NeuroQ is formulated to help maintain healthy brain function, clear thinking, and memory.
At least the blurb does not mention COVID. But it won’t take much for someone to make the connection for a new miracle cure…
And they have. The latest, from Germany:
As I mentioned in a previous thread, I hope Dr. Fauci’s security detail is on the ball.
Oof, that’s ugly. Saxony certainly doesn’t surprise me, though. The least-vaccinated state in Germany, home of “different-thinker” protests and the alt-right AfD.
Unvaccinated, wife with stage 4 colon cancer.
Middle son. Lives in Las Vegas, vaxxed but not boosted. Drove to the Chiefs/Chargers game and spent the weekend in LA - has some form of Covid, he and his fiance had to cancel plans to spend Xmas with her parents.
Sick, but not to the extent he can’t complain about it.
The New South Wales state government recently relaxed virtually all anti-Covid restrictions, saying they’d rely on something called “personal responsibility” to keep it under control. This despite numbers creeping up anyway, and of course the arrival of omicron.
Today - shockingly - they’ve had to reintroduce mandatory mask use indoors, density limits in public venues (although apparently not in politicians’ heads) and check-in via QR codes to all venues, after the case numbers have been exploding, including nearly doubling between yesterday and today.
Hospital admissions have started rising too; the only consolation is ICU numbers are steady - so far.
All RAT kits have sold out, 1,500 medical personnel are off sick (many with Covid), and there are hours-long queues at all testing centres - except those that have been closed due to the imminence of Xmas. A full-on fustercluck.
I’m not quite sure where to put this, but I guess this thread will do.
Candice Owens, who is certainly a Covidiot, recently interviewed Trump. She tried to link the increased prevalence of vaccines to the increased number of deaths this year compared to last year. Trump, to his credit, pushed back rather hard.
Yeah, there are not many issues on which I would argue that idiots need to be paying more attention to the pronouncements of Donald Trump, but the safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines is definitely one of them.
Gary Abernathy has an op-ed in WaPo with an amusing headline about this:
Trump touts boosters. Biden credits Trump. Trump appreciates Biden. Oh my.
The author of this piece makes a point I made in another thread.
Trump is NOT a leader. Trump does not have leadership skills. Trump “leads” from behind - he tells his audience what they want to hear. But he , has no influence to wield - he’s not the team captain developing the strategy, he’s the stupid mascot that works the crowd into a frenzy.
That’s why his administration’s Covid response was doomed. Even if Trump had wanted to take the virus seriously by promoting masks and lockdowns - he would never have convinced his base. They would’ve turned on him, and he knows it. That’s why he can’t say and do anything socially responsible, ever….it would expose his “leadership” as a fraud. His base would turn on him.
Another way to put it that I read recently:
Trump supporters don’t like him because they agree with his ideas. They support him because they think Trump agrees with them. And when they discover he doesn’t, it causes cognitive dissonance.
Other people sick with Covid say it’s not Covid. They were somehow poisoned with anthrax. 
That article links to another one describing RFK Jr’s attempt to get Jake Tapper of CNN to debate him about vaccine mandates.
It’s a typical antivaxer ploy.* Try to engage a well-known, rational person (especially a public health/vaccine expert) in a forum that’ll make it look like you have equal standing, perform a Gish Gallop (vomit a deluge of dubious studies and factoids that your opponent can’t possibly all respond to in a limited time, if he/she has even heard of them, and play for “gotcha” moments you can excerpt for videos. Win!
Antivaxers know how bad they look when their bullshit is calmly refuted point by point in print and online publications.
*earlier this year RFK Jr. tried to get N.Y. state senator Brad Hoylman (who’d called on Twitter to suspend RFK Jr.'s account) to debate him. It was a no go.
“(Kennedy’s response included) bizarrely quoting Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, challenging Hoylman to a Zoom debate on science, and peddling more debunked conspiracy theories about vaccination.”
Quoting Hoylman: “Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s rantings and citations of debunked pseudoscience add nothing to our national discourse. We won’t take the bait - and we are not going to give him a platform to continue to spread medical disinformation through a debate."
Have to disagree here. If Trump hadn’t been worried about how admitting Covid would affect his ratings, he could have gotten his base into masks. And if he said “look at this great vaccine that I got made. It’s going into my as you watch.”, most of the Magas would have done the same.
His problem is that he let vaccine opposition become a tenet of the base faith, and even they have a cognitive dissonance limit (I’m somewhat surprised to find that out, to be honest).
That is a bit of a circular disagreement, really. Trump was worried about how it would affect his ratings because he knew “the base” would not receive it well… and was not prepared or not willing to deal with that (after all, what was he gonna do to bring them around, insult them on Twitter?) so he did not bother.
Well, I think Trump tried to have it both ways. He wanted credit for the vaccine, and he also made the vaccine makers out to be his enemies because the vaccines were announced after the election. I think the latter is what stuck. If he’d continued to trumpet how the vaccine would solve everything, and he was responsible for it, it would have been interesting to see what developed.
Particularly as democrats were suspicious of a rushed vaccine from the Trump administration. Would the roles have been, at least temporarily, reversed? Would there be more vaccine uptake now overall? (I think probably.)
We hear crap like that in Canada (choose a province). And it’s usually preceded by something like “I/we trust that Canadians/Quebecers/Manitobans/whoever can be trusted to act responsibly…” even though they consistently and continuously display otherwise.