Just chiming in that I am in this boat too. I find it easy to fast at the office, provided there's not some ridiculous snack brought in by coworkers. However, at home the sheer amount of food I see while I'm preparing it for the kids, who constantly want snacks, makes it difficult for me to resist eating. I've had a bit of success by "skipping" some meals and only eating the kids' leftovers.
Cuomo literally harrased his own highly competent NYC Transit director into resigning, for disagreements and stealing the spotlight. The LGA airtrain is an expensive boondoggle that is thankfully looking like it will be canceled. He was into large statement projects he could slap his name on regardless of actual need because he was clearly a huge narcissist.
The sensible way to get to LGA is to extend the N/W line. You get ~two more stations in the local neighborhood, plus the station at the airport itself, and it's a direct stop on the local subway anyways, no interchanges required (except as necessary to get to the N/W).
By contrast, the LGA Airtrain idea is to go the wrong way. This extra detour means that existing transit (i.e. buses) is likely to still be a faster way to get to the airport. It also requires a separate transfer, with a separate, steep (IIRC) fare for what it's doing.
Actually... Giving it another thought: Cuomo's salary is $250k annually.
Who - but the power seeking maniac - would agree to manage something bigger than Focker&Son corp in their right mind for such a humble amount of money?
I was shocked to discover, several months after the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were approved in America and trumpeted as proof of the speed and efficacy of our modern, capitalist medical system... that the Sinopharm and Sputnik V vaccines were both released much earlier, and they actually work very well.
All of those vaccines were created within weeks of the genetic sequence being released. The release dates you are referring to is only about regulatory oversight. Countries like the US and EU (and a long list of others) where Pfizer and Moderna targeted their sales are very careful to not allow the release of anything until they have evidence it works and is safe. For Sputnik V they released it before being sure it worked - which allowed them to release much faster, but there is a reason the rest of the world cried foul - even countries with few regulations didn't allow it to be used until more study was done - study that takes time.
This was 100% a decision based on regulations.
The first clinical trial for Pfizer was done in April of 2020, Sputnik was started in June. The difference was Pfizer went through far more and more time consuming clinical trials.
I don't know if you can blame FDA's risk adverse views on capitalism.
Do we know how well they work yet, really?
(Genuine question)
They were released earlier, though I got the impression they were released really without very much phase 2/3 testing at all. If you think the anti-vax folks are having a field day with the current western vaccines being given special accelerated roll-out...
Not being approved could very well be a political move on Europe's part - they have plenty of motives not to approve it, and equally they have plenty of reasons not to trust Russia's claims. In my country it was a running joke that if it's ever available here, the viles would be laced with novichok.
The paper is somewhat questionable though as it shows a 100% effectiveness against severe infection.
Most likely it is a similar effectiveness to other adenovirus based vaccines, which is less than mRNA vaccines, but still better than no vaccine. It has been reported that some countries are paying close to $20 per dose, so it's not any cheaper than mRNA vaccines.
Regardless of the merits of any particular one of those articles - this is scare mongering as it completely ignores that around 5 million people have died from COVID worldwide, while around 3 billion people have received the vaccine safely.
The original claim was a qualified 'impeccable' - "the current ones with an impeccable record" - that is the original response was that the current covid vaccines are as safe as the other safe vaccines we have.
The follow up was saying "the covid vaccine doesn't have a perfect safety record therefore it's not really impeccable is it!" while not comparing to other safe vaccines at all.
You can't use a broad definition in the original claim and then try and use a narrow definition when refuting counter claims.
> The original claim was a qualified 'impeccable' - "the current ones with an impeccable record" - that is the original response was that the current covid vaccines are as safe as the other safe vaccines we have.
They absolutely are not "as safe", not by a long shot. The Myocarditis risk is unprecedented, as is the risk for GBS, as is the risk for VITT, which is a disease that didn't even exist before. Those are just the side-effects we acknowledge.
Beyond that, the sheer number of adverse event reports for the COVID vaccines dwarf the reports for all other vaccines combined. You can argue that surely most of those reports must be unrelated to vaccination, but that is true for all reports.
Now, before you move the goal post, I'm not saying that these risks outweigh the benefits. That becomes highly subjective and speculative as we move into the younger age brackets. In its approval papers, the FDA itself calculated scenarios in which the risk of vaccination outweighs the benefit for males under 18, we just choose not to pay attention to that.
Here in Australia we held back from giving certain vaccines (the mRNA vaccines we have available here) to some demographics when the virus was suppressed here, until the risk from a new outbreak meant it was safer to get the vaccine than not. The adenovirus vaccine we have available was not held back in the same way.
The contention in this discussion, I think, is that we haven't established an absolute yardstick for an 'impeccable safety record'.
You rightly point out the adverse effects we're seeing from these new vaccines, and that they appear more frequent than adverse effects from past vaccines, but that doesn't make them significantly less safe.
Suppose we have an old vaccine that has adverse effects 1% of the time (this would be terrible, but still), and a new vaccine that has twice as many adverse effects. The old vaccine would be 99% safe and the new vaccine 98% safe - quite similar (though still terrible)!
When we start talking about the actual rate of excess adverse effects for the covid vaccines it's on the order of 10 per million doses [0]. Even if this is 10 times worse than old vaccines we're talking about vaccines that are 99.9999% safe vs 99.999% safe.
Based on the evidence we have these vaccines are extremely safe, and I would feel comfortable accepting the 'impeccable safety record' label even though I probably wouldn't choose it myself.
It is not ten times worse, it is hundreds of times worse. You would be hard pressed to find a death linked to any of the established vaccines over many years. In Australia, eight people died from VITT alone so far, but how many healthy young people died of COVID? The survival rate for COVID for under 30 without comorbidities is estimated at 99.999%. An impeccably safe infection, by your standard!
I'm fully vaccinated thank you, believing as I do that vaccines are a wonder, a victory of human ingenuity over disease. It saddens me that so many people of a similar view also have the nasty authoritarian streak so often evident in these discussions.
Any useful comparison of outcomes would need to consider deaths instead of case rates as we have a well-known more-transmissible variant in play now compared to the beginning of the pandemic. Most of your sources don't do that.
The linked articles regarding Iceland in fact contradict your assertion. They provide a very clear graph of cases over time vs deaths over time and it is trivial to see that during the recent spike in cases, deaths are much lower in proportion compared to earlier spikes, a clear indicator of the vaccine working well.
It is also logical that most COVID cases in places with high vaccination rates are breakthrough cases, there are simply less unvaccinated hosts for the virus to potentially infect. It does not follow that the outcome would be better with less vaccinated hosts.
Finally, you've posted links to 7 deaths and 28 complications following vaccinations. Regardless of the merits of any particular one of those articles - this is scare mongering as it completely ignores that around 5 million people have died from COVID worldwide, while around 3 billion people have been vaccinated safely. (Source- Google searches for worldwide covid deaths and worldwide covid vaccinations).
It's also important to note that Iceland has a population of 370K and tourists this year will likely peak at about 400-450K (way less than a typical year). Of the 34 deaths attributed to Covid from the beginning of the pandemic in Iceland at least 3 were visiting tourists. All the Icelandic statistics do not differentiate between those living in Iceland and tourists so any calculations based on population will be off.
I understand and am quite sympathetic to his argument, but Greenwald and many other posters here are ignoring the known fact that foreign actors are using Facebook at scale to sow division and misinformation throughout the US and other countries.
I live in NYC and have a friend in the funeral business. This was absolutely true in the beginning of the pandemic, although perhaps not at every hospital in the city as some were hit harder with patients than others. There was also a backlog in the ability to process bodies (e.g. Getting death certificates, funerals, burial sites or cremations).
The stress of raising kids doesn't help either.