when a vaccination shot kills people

I've already argued that we should allow people to make up their own minds about whether to be vaccinated against COVID, because all the vaccines currently available were approved on an emergency basis, without going through the full set of clinical trials and regulatory reviews.

This is different from whether parents should be able to refuse the measles shots for their kids, because the measles shots have a long history and scientists fully understand how they work, how well they work, and what their side effects are.

So I think it is unfair to apply the term "vaccine denialist" to somebody who is hesitant to take the COVID vaccine, and I don't think the government should be rolling out a Coca-Cola sized ad campaign to persuade people to take the COVID vaccine.  Offer it to everybody, make sure that people of every location and economic group and ethnic group have a chance to get the shot, but then let people make up their own minds.

Now it turns out the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, which use the same technology, are killing people by causing blood clots to form in their brains.  This side effect is rare, somewhere on the order of 1 per 100,000 or 1 per 1,000,000 -- but we're not sure exactly how rare yet, we're not sure which subgroups of people are more at risk, and we're not sure whether this fatal side effect can be prevented in some way.

I've already heard from one reader who received the AZ vaccine, and he's fine, and he thinks the risk is worth it.  He weighed his personal risk of dying from COVID against this 1 per 100,000 or 1 per 1,000,000 risk and thinks the shot is worth it.  But not everybody will agree, especially where there are alternative shots that don't have this fatal side effect.

There is a serious danger that we are undercounting the risk of the AZ/J&J shots because people and their doctors didn't realize that cerebral blood clots were a potential danger.  This is why the FDA in the US has pressed the pause button on J&J, to allow time to gather more information and then distribute more information -- so public health officials can make an educated decision on whether to proceed with J&J vaccinations and if so among which subgroups of the population.

Some opinion writers are concerned that the FDA is overreacting and will add to people's hesitancy to get the shots.  Well, I think there's nothing wrong with people who feel hesitant to get the shots.  COVID doesn't kill everybody, it kills perhaps 0.6% of those who catch it, but this percentage skews very much toward older people.  Younger adults have very little risk of dying from COVID, which is why it's become difficult to enforce the Quarantine in many countries, people rationally have no fear of COVID and want to resume their normal lives.

We could've gone the eradication route early on like New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan, Iceland, and other countries have.  But we didn't, so COVID is here to stay and now public officials have put all their bets on the vaccines to create herd immunity -- but you can only get to herd immunity if over 90% of your population takes the shots, and you can only get the numbers that high if you make the vaccines mandatory, and we CAN'T make the vaccines mandatory when they've only been approved under emergency conditions.

So, when it turns out a vaccination shot kills people, we need to pause and investigate, and we may need to take those brands off the market.  I think the US has been rightfully cautious with respect to the AZ vaccine -- their leadership has lied about the safety and effectiveness of their vaccine, so we haven't approved it yet.  And now the US is being rightfully cautious with respect to the J&J vaccine -- pausing its deployment while we investigate how many people are dying from it.

partisan what comes around goes around

Anybody who knows some history views current politics with some perspective and can see the hypocrisy on both sides.

Democrats are currently complaining vehemently about Republicans trying to curtail voting rights in the states Republicans control, because Republicans have decided that fewer voters is better for continued Republican control.

Yet it was not long ago when many Southern states were de facto one-party states controlled by Democrats.  Republicans weren't even allowed on the ballot in many cases, and of course black people were plainly denied the vote.

Democrats used this lock on the South to control the White House, the House, and the Senate for most of the period between 1932 and 1980.

But Democrats shot themselves in the foot by championing voting rights in the 1960s.  Ironically, as elections became more free in the US, Republicans became more competitive in the South.  Now it is the Republicans who are trying to overturn voting rights, at a time when Democrats are nominally ascendent -- if we had a pure democracy, Democrats would presently have a clear edge.

For decades it was Democrats who counted black people solely for purposes of allocating Electoral Votes and Congressional Districts, while not allowing them to vote.  It's weird that Democrats can so easily get away with ignoring their own history while calling out Republicans for taking baby steps in the same direction today.

In 1919, it was Republicans in the House and Senate who voted to allow women to vote.  Most Democrats either opposed the Constitutional Amendment, or abstained.  Yet do women today remember the Republican Party as their heroes for expanding the franchise?  And, yes, it was Republicans who freed the slaves, the Republican Party was literally founded to oppose slavery.

It's weird how things can turn around.  A political party that cared about voting rights in the past, tries to get rid of them now.  A political party that opposed voting rights in the past, supports expanding them now.  And we're not supposed to think about how they've traded places.  Maybe the only principle in US politics is that parties generally support whatever voting rules will keep them in power.  Trump is more willing to say this quiet part out loud.

confidence

I feel more confident giving these Zoom interviews after cutting my hair.  It's not a perfect cut but it's good enough for Zoom.

Exercise can save your life!

British Journal of Sports Medicine found that people who exercise at least 150 minutes per week had half the chance of hospitalization or death from COVID, after correcting for other known risk factors.

Get out there and dance, people!

reading poetry can be quick

The book contains five chapters, and I've decided to read no more than one chapter per day.  Now I've read two chapters.  The second chapter is one poem, but its pages are mostly whitespace, each page turn becomes part of the poem, each page switches point of view from the last.

A major theme of his poetry (so far) is the loneliness of unreturned love.  The first time I started this book, I felt his capacity to love, and his capacity for loneliness, both so strong, that I wanted to love him, I wanted to become the one who loved him back and would not leave.  That's my dominant emotion while reading these poems.  I want to become the one who will not leave him.

And look at where I am, look at where I work, look at the past two decades of my life, I've been the person who doesn't leave, even as the world and its population change around me.

I keep saying I'm going to leave, however.  The pets will pass, the career will end, I will figure out what to do with this house and how to hand off T to the rest of the universe.  It's not that I don't leave ... I'm leaving imperceptibly slowly ... I've selected natural endpoints that approach me faster than I approach them ...

But if somebody were to miss me as intently as Jacob Steinberg writes about missing his lovers, perhaps I'd never leave.  Or if somebody were to express how he misses me as poetically,

Can you trap me with your verse?  Your verse, and your cock, your fingers, and your lips, your eyes, and the warmth of your back against my chest; I am trappable, dominable, I am susceptible, able to feel passion, and able to decide that this next chapter of my life will not leave anyone until my body is finished.  But I am not feeling that passion here, or now.  Neither within, nor directed toward me.  And I will not miss this present so painfully as Steinberg's poems miss their past.

I want to miss my future so painfully as Steinberg's poems miss their past.

agender rambling

The more I settle into the idea that Gender is Fake, the less LGBTQ+ identities appear -- to me -- to be anything special or worth remarking about.  Certainly not worth discriminating against.  Yet also not worth adopting.  Coming out feels unnecessary, or at least no more important than which type of bread I choose when I'm at a Subway (9-Grain Honey Oat), or which bread you choose.  Because if there is no gender, then misgendering doesn't exist, and all pronouns are equivalent, and even transgendering does not exist.  There's no such thing as bisexual if there's no gender.

I remember at times in my life feeling like I was "post-gay" because it no longer felt like a big deal to be gay, having come out to everybody and having lived with and/or slept with men for decades.  Most of the people I'm sexually attracted to are males, so what.  Why should anybody give a damn who I'm sexually attracted to, unless they want to have sex with me, in which case it matters whether I want to have sex with them, but there's a whole lot more to my sexual attraction than your gender.  I would not have sex with most men.

If I wouldn't have sex with most men, in what way am I sexually attracted to "men"?  I'm not sexually attracted to men, per se!  I'm sexually attracted to something else, not to the "man" category, but to something more specific.  To my type or subtypes.

If you're in a monogamous relationship, you aren't gay or lesbian or bi or straight, you're oriented on one human.  If her name is Gloria you're a Gloriasexual.  If his name is Luke you're a Lukosexual.  If you're poly then you're polysexual.  This notion of gay, lesbian, or bisexual is an exaggeration.
 
And you are neither cisgender nor transgender, you're just you.  There's no need to categorize.  You are you.  You're pronouns are you/yours, or my/mine, or ...

I got to thinking about this because a person posted to the Nonbinary subreddit about not liking her breasts, but otherwise being OK with people viewing her as female.  She wondered whether maybe she was nonbinary.  I didn't engage with her, but I thought about -- why does having a gender matter?  You don't like your breasts, that's fine.  I don't like my belly.  I kind of wish my cock were bigger, even though it is usually locked up and hasn't been touched sexually in over six months (not even by myself in over three months).  I wonder about -- at this age -- spending money on orthodontia for nicer teeth --

Why does disliking your breasts have any greater descriptive, cultural, or psychosocial weight than disliking your nose?  This cultural obsession with assigning gender to people at birth makes it far more transgressive if you dislike something related to your assigned gender, than if you dislike ANYTHING ELSE about yourself or the universe.  I don't like capitalism, I'm transideological.  I was assigned Catholicism at birth, but I rejected it, I experienced religious dysphoria.

If I wanted to play on the girls team instead of the boys team, or if I wanted to mix up the boys and the girls on the same team, this is viewed as so destructive to society that it must become illegal.  But if I don't like my shoes nobody is going to pay much attention to me, just wear different shoes.

Culture has decided there are things I may easily and regularly choose for myself, and things I may not.  This is the root of the issue.  If you can ignore culture, and choose whatever you want for yourself, then so what?  I feel this meditation is a kind of anarchism.  Nonbinary is the anarchism of gender.  Transgender identities are a kind of opposition to the system of assigning genders at birth, but they still believe in the concepts of male and female genders.

T was telling me a joke about how parents of newborns should have "Gender Conceal" parties instead of "Gender Reveal" parties, but I'd support having "Gender is Fake" parties.  Welcome into this world, Pat, you're neither a boy nor a girl and you never will be, and all these societal gender traps signify nothing, they are empty and powerless,

As I am now powerless before the Monarch of Sleep.  We'll see what I think of these words in the morning.