Never Forget We Have Forgotten and the 99%

A friend texted me over the weekend. “Doesn’t CRT and BLM mean we have forgotten?” He has a point.

On September 11, 2001, we were one people. Firefighters rushed in to help Americans. Race and ethnicity did not matter. Young men, regardless of race or ethnicity, signed up to go to war to avenge the nation. People, as Americans, went to church together, comforted each other, prayed together, etc.

Twenty years later, Americans riot in the street, burn down buildings, bash in the doors at the Capitol, and treat each other as the enemy while the press treats only one side as the enemy. Academics reimagine 9/11 as an attack on the “heteropatriarchy” of the United States. Kids are taught the United States is an oppressive bastion of white privilege where no one can get ahead except white people and non-white people who pretend to be white.

We have turned inward and against each other and the cultural elite egg it on. I think we have forgotten. Even the press has played a role in revising history to make themselves “the moral authority” of 9/11.

Brian Stelter @brianstelter

Network TV anchors were "the closest thing that America had to national leaders on 9/11. They were the moral authority for the country on that first day," especially with political leaders in bunkers or otherwise out of sight...

apnews.comOn TV, 9/11 was last huge story for ‘Big 3’ network anchorsNEW YORK (AP) — “Turn on your television.” Those words were repeated in millions of homes on Sept. 11, 2001. Friends and relatives took to the telephone: Something awful was happening. You have to see.

Only vain and narcissistic people, self-absorbed and oblivious to the world around them, can get to this point. The United States has.

The 99%

Do you remember Donald McNeil? He was fired as the science reporter for the New York Times for using the “N-word.” Except McNeil did not use it as a pejorative. He uttered the world while babysitting white privileged kids on a tour of Central America on behalf the New York Times. He wanted to confirm a kid on the trip had said that word before taking action. For the audacity of confirming something as fact, he was fired.

He now has a new personal column and it tends to be far more informative than the drivel with which the Times replaced him. He included this statement in a piece last month:

In this country, 99 percent of Covid deaths are now among the unvaccinated. Data doesn’t get more convincing than that. Death has a false-positive rate of zero.

The hospitalization and death rate actually varies by state and some people are quibbling with McNeil’s number because it lacks a state-by-state nuance. But it is a compelling number. The New York Times actually does have a helpful chart from last month. In Georgia, where I am, an unvaccinated person is 87 times more likely to die of COVID than a vaccinated person. In Indiana, an unvaccinated person is 7 times more likely to die, but that has everything to do with fewer people getting COVID there than in Georgia, so the numbers are skewed.

Now, a month and a half after McNeil’s 99% statement, we have full studies out and a person without a vaccine is generally 11 times more likely to die of COVID.

From Ars Technica:

For hospitalizations prior to delta, fully vaccinated people were 13 times less likely to wind up in the hospital than the unvaccinated (confidence interval of 11.3 to 15.6). After delta, that ratio dropped slightly to 10 times less likely (confidence interval of 8.1 to 13.3). The fully vaccinated were 16.6 times less likely to die of COVID-19 prior to delta (confidence interval of 13.5 to 20.4) and 11.3 times less likely to die after delta (confidence interval of 9.1 to 13.9).

All of that is to say the data remains compelling that the vaccines work, even if they are less effective against the Delta and coming other variants. They still save lives.

I still oppose vaccine mandates and think President Biden’s speech last week will do more harm than good in terms of getting people vaccinated. Even Delta Airlines is admitting that its insurance surcharge has induced only 20% of its unvaccinated employees to get the vaccine. They’re calling it a big increase because it is 4,000 employees. But 20% doesn’t sound like a big increase to me. Nonetheless, while I think Delta could have taken a better approach, I think it is far more reasonable for a private-sector employer to do what Delta did than force the private sector through dubious government regulation.

At some point, if the data won’t convince people, they are not going to be convinced.