Sorry, I thought you meant "powers TO be" as a reference to some known future power, as opposed to powers that be.
Canada also has a large rural population and plenty of space, but again, I don't think this idea of just going outside works for the cities of the world, where most people live.
And, I think one of the things that bugs me about much of the outrage of how COVID was handled is the seeming lack of nuance - call it retrospective falacy, maybe. COVID was an unknown quantity, we didn't know how it was going to play out or evolve or what we were really dealing with. Now that we have learned some things, and after the virus mutated multiple times, it's all too easy to look back and say we were dumb. I'd say more than being dumb, we were ignorant. As in, we didn't know.
No doubt, that sounds pretty reasonable. However, I don't think there are too many situations like that for most people on the planet. For your average citizen of Hong Kong, or Moscow, or whatever, even just GETTING to the small business food vendor (if it even exists) likely requires the use of public transportation and walking around in small, densely-populated areas.
I remember this, indeed. I don't know the answer to this question, but I do think it' the fundamental question: Did we have reason to believe that vaccinations WOULD reduce the likelihood of transmission, and that turned out to be not true after we had collected data? - OR - did the so-called experts all know this was bullshit all along and somehow got everyone on board with this big lie in order to... kill grandmothers and increase uptake of a useless vaccine? I think the latter of these options is far more unlikely, and requires a pretty massive suspension of disbelief to think the relevant experts in all countries were so easily bamboozled. I do not for one second disbelieve that big pharma would do what it could to make as much money as possible, but I don't know that I go the extra step of believing there was a coordinated intentional misinformation campaign.
Thank you for the condolences. She was quite demented and was taken care of very warmly by the staff at the nursing home, so as far as these things go, at least we've that to be thankful for. She was a very gentle soul, and was easily cared-for at the end.
Yes. I'm unfamiliar with these specific happenstances, but of course they are horseshit. Again, though. I can pretty easily understand this as a manifestation of global corporate capitalism. We see nasty shit happening like this every fucking day, virus or not, because of the way the system is set up. Call me jaded, but I dont think it's too hard to believe that a pharmaceutical company did its best to exploit a historically unprecedented "market opportunity" - that's what they are designed to do.
