Steve Austin is “stone cold”? No, Steve Austin is a pencil-necked, bleeding heart liberal weenie. Stalin was stone cold, and Beria made him look like Santa Claus.
Oh, definitely Sasse. I believe (too lazy to look up cites) that he at time has sounded like that rarest of unicorn’s, a reasonable Republican that occasionally pushes back against Trump. No reason to expect a sitting US Senator to be an asshole in public (although they have started saying the quiet parts out loud a lot lately).
I have the same fantasy but unfortunately the death rate is way too low for it to be of much effect. What I’m hoping for is that enough of them are too sick to go and vote come November but the timing’s not really right on that either.
If enough of them get sick, then all of a sudden mail-in ballots will be perfectly acceptable to them. As a curently overseas voter and previously military deployed voter, I’m rather peeved at their current attitude towards mail-in ballots.
Trump announces accelerated vaccine development program, names it Operation Warp Speed. So he’s named it after a science fiction trope, something that so far as we know is impossible. Will the program be led by people who have played scientists on TV?
**From The New York Times: Freed by Court Ruling, Republicans Step Up Effort to Patrol Voting Officials seek to recruit 50,000 poll watchers and spend millions to fight voter fraud. Democrats say the real goal is to stop them from voting. **
The state of Georgia put out a graph showing that the number of virus cases is going down. Until people looked closely and realized that the dates were not in chronological order.
They should rather have named the program Operation Infinite Improbability Drive because it takes you somewhere arbitrarily fast but you can’t predict where nor what species of animal you will be when you get there. So you should plan ahead and dress appropriately.
The object is to get a vaccine out there in mass production and mass distribution, with less regard over whether it is safe or if it actually works. We can address those question later. :smack:
I think the idea is that they will be manufacturing it before it is proven to be safe, so that if it is safe, then we don’t have to wait for it to be manufactured.
This is a wasteful idea, in that it means that there may be vaccines that are produced in the hundreds of millions that have to be discarded as they are discovered to have safety or efficacy issues. But, it’s not a bad idea if the goal is to have it as widely distributed as quickly as possible and you don’t care about the cost.
That said, it doesn’t matter what red tape you cut, biology don’t work like that. If there is a side effect that only effects 5% of the people and doesn’t show up for 2-3 years, then we will have no way of knowing that before putting it into hundreds of millions, possibly billions of people. Then, a couple years after we’ve started relaxing again after this pandemic, suddenly millions of people start getting sick from side effects.
Which will then be followed by a whole bunch of anti-vaxers gleefully crying “we told you so!”, leading to mass resurgence of measles and whooping cough that will make Covid look like a day in the park.
The Governor of Georgia has opened up the state, because there’s nothing to worry about, but it’s too dangerous to hold an election for a state Supreme Court position, so he’s going to cancel the election and appoint a Republican to fill the seat.
Nothing to do with Covid-19 - they just figured out that if they delay the resignation until after the November election, they can do a gubernatorial appointment that lasts two years, instead of one that only lasts until election day.
The woman who was in charge of reporting coronavirus data for the state of Florida claims she was fired because she refused to manipulate data to make the state’s numbers look better.