Science? Reason? Stop sending money and children to these Gulag's!! Do not give to their foundations or their sports teams. The pollyanna BS that is emitted by alumni is not laughable, it is pathetic. I have stopped contributing to my grandchildren's 529 plans and redirected to Gift to Minors accounts as I will not give a dollar to one of these political indoctrination centers.
Those who are so quick to behave egregiously in the promotion of wokeness are now afraid to protest in the name of a cause that actually has merit. Clearly their willingness to protest has little to do with the merit of the cause and much to do with the likelihood of suffering consequences.
Thank you for writing this Dr. Makary, and thank you Bari for having him as a guest post. I am soon completing my graduate degree soon and my school has us still doing once per week testing. I am a commuter student and therefore not subject to any dorm room “rules” but the campus still requires masks in classrooms and in some indoor spaces, although i am waiting for renewed guidance soon prior to the spring semester. I believe the school was probably involved in a longitudinal study of some type(not IRB level, more just within the college). It’s a private college so they can set their rules, we are also all required to be vaccinated. Our student ID is checked electronically at the entrance to the campus to ensure we are in compliance with testing and vaccination requirements. The testing is not pleasant but not a big deal to test (although there is an added cost to our semester bill to support this). I find it odd though that they are not using a random schedule, it’s all in-residence students/staff/etc which must be very taxing on the lab that is processing these tests. It seems to be a waste at this point as I’m not sure what more evidence they hope to gather. The science does not seem to add up anymore and it would be great to know I’m in my last semester, but i am almost contemplating going remote because I find the rules not making sense anymore since there does not seem to be much new information being garnered.
Anyone know if this article is 'tweetable" or "linkedinable" without censorship? I suspect the real issue is "liablity". Noone wants to admit that places will make choices because of "liability". Noone wants to discuss the stages of the liability of the makers of the vaccine though.
Are alumni paying attention? There is no way I would give these universities any money. In fact, I am fighting back against WOKE and CRT in a small way. When I get solicitations from some charities that have been 1) supporting CRT and WOKE through their training materials and HR departments, and 2) lying about it when caught, I reply to their solicitations by being clear I will not support these racist and bigoted efforts. Then there are the NGOs which take Federal money to clandestinely move illegals from the border into the interior of the country. I have been replying to their requests for money the same way. I will not support any group or organization that is working to destabilize the country and implant crime into communities. It is time for more people to become vocal.
My children have graduated but if they were considering college or in college I would find alternatives. There are alternatives. College no longer prepares students for much of anything other than rioting, looting and mindless support of communism. Better for young adults to go to technical school and learn real, marketable skills.
Check out Isaac Moorehouse founder of Crash. He has a plan as an alternative to college.
It brings me great joy knowing that the modern Neo-Liberal, Ethno-Marxist is 80% of college and University students and are nearly all going to be facing crippling, miserable debt that they’ll never escape.
The excessive testing of those least at risk of severe illness and death out of an abundance of caution is a spectacular failure of the calculus of negligence test.
PL>B
If: Probability x Degree of harm (loss) > Cost (burden) then you pay the cost.
.001% risk of severe harm at the cost of denying tests to those in high risk categories is a no-brainer. These colleges are acting negligently.
I knew law school would one day be worth it... wait... that prolly failed the test too.
I'm an educator teaching at a private school. We missed two months in 2020, basically from Spring Break to summer - went back in August and never wavered. Almost no one wears masks, particularly the cloth ones (i.e., facial decorations). As of today: zero deaths, no serious illnesses, kids behaving normally, etc. The left, allegedly the 'party of science,' wants a forever pandemic so that they can maintain their top down, authoritarian control - they don't care an iota about kids, and as George Carlin once sagely said, whenever politicians or bureaucrats spout the cliche that they're 'doing it for the kids,' you know immediately that it's all bullsh*t.
"According to the CDC, the risk of a fully vaccinated adult ending up in the hospital for Covid was 1 in 26,000 for the week ending in November 27. Who was that one person? Not a college student."
I would like to address some of the claims of this article, which is clearly backed up by scientific data, which, as a nonscientist, I would not dream of disputing.
Yes, it sounds like some universities are going overboard on Covid policies. However, masking policies are not there just to protect mask users, in this case students. They are also there to prevent the spread of the virus into society at large. Hospitals are filling up, including ICUs. Asymptomatic carriers can spread the virus to more vulnerable populations. I spoke to a young graduate student after a flight a few days ago. She said she went back to her home state for the holidays (a state in the grips of winter), and was enjoying seeing her old friends, and then, as she said, "They started dropping like flies." Everyone had Covid. The Omicron variant is very transmissible. My 35-year-old daughter is home suffering from it in isolation, having caught it from her boyfriend, a chef who interacts with coworkers who are serving unmasked indoor diners. Yes, it is a mild variant; she will probably be back at work on Monday. But, if I (aged 61) had interacted with her, and then caught it, I might have passed it on to my parents-in-law (aged 83). I would probably be fine if I came down with it, but I'm not sure they would have been. Professors and other university workers, along with their families, should be protected from this virus.
We are an interconnected society. If everyone in North America had followed masking requirements from the beginning and when cases began soaring, the new variant might not have taken hold. I think that a few weeks of virtual classes in university are a small price to pay, and yes, some things like outdoor masking should be eased up on. But wouldn't it be nice to just actually get rid of this virus?
1. The CDC and most medical professionals know that cloth masks do almost nothing against this virus, yet people are still being required and encouraged to wear them.
2. Are you and your parents vaccinated? If so, and if the vaccines work, then you have no reason to be worried since your symptoms will resemble a cold. Those who are vaccinated need to move on with their lives (that is nearly the entirety of elite college campuses), and those who are unvaccinated have made their decision and also need to move on with their lives. File that away with "personal responsibility".
3. As for the hospitals being overwhelmed, they are always hit hard at this time of year for a variety of reasons outside Covid, and they might not be as overwhelmed if hospital boards hadn't decided to let go perfectly capable staff members who did not want the vaccine and were healthy individuals to being with.
4. New variants are unavoidable. The more there are, the weaker they are, and that is a good thing in the long term! Covid is about to be endemic (meaning it will never go away). No amount of mask wearing, lockdowns, mandates, etc. would have prevented that!
I hope you are right. And yes, everyone I mentioned in this comment is fully vaccinated. They could still catch it as my daughter and her boyfriend did. If she can, then my elderly parents-in-law could as well. As for people who are young and healthy and who refuse to be vaccinated, I have no sympathy for them. I believe that hospitals who fired them were perfectly justified. They could be asymptomatic carriers and spread the virus to truly vulnerable populations.
The young and healthy unvaccinated do not need your sympathy. They do need just a teeny bit of your compassion. Obviously...there are no studies on the long-term effects of these vaccines (or the actual disease itself) and they have every right to be concerned as they have the most to lose from vaccine injury. I would hope that it is blatantly obvious that being vaccinated in no way prevents you from getting and/or spreading the disease - yes, even vaccinated people can (and perhaps are more likely to) be asymptomatic and spread disease. Unless they test every blessed day they will not know if they have COVID. Even at that point that they test positive they probably have already spread it.
Please, just remember that the opposite of fear is love.
Yes! We all have room (and the need) to learn. It's best to keep an open mind and look at data from all sides before coming to any conclusions as well as being able to see the point of view of others. Thanks for your comment!!
1) I hope students and parents can one day sue the universities for all this insanity 2) Do they even have faculty that teaches epidemiology? How is the class and would a real professor agree with this?
On Sunday night, the principal of my children’s elementary school sent out an email. In it she described what my county’s DOH was calling “best masking practices”. It was wearing an n95, kn95 or a cloth mask over a paper one. I told my husband that if this was enforced at school, he’d be taking a leave of absence in order to homeschool them.
Come Monday, my daughter informed me that the only person in the school double masking was the principal and 1 student (who is high risk and immunocompromised).
Besides the basic issues of kids in masks, I find it interesting that I work in a hospital (anesthesiologist) and my hospital doesn’t even require that level of mask wearing. It’s a 3 ply procedure mask or an n95 if working with a. PUI/COVID + patient. Our local county heath commissioner (a pediatritician) has earned herself the nickname Dr. Overtime. Because, although salaried, she has been earning overtime pay since the pandemic started (to the tune of almost doubling her salary).
People are reaching their breaking point. ANd the fact that every new variant is given the Chicken Little treatment is starting to wear really thin.
Science? Reason? Stop sending money and children to these Gulag's!! Do not give to their foundations or their sports teams. The pollyanna BS that is emitted by alumni is not laughable, it is pathetic. I have stopped contributing to my grandchildren's 529 plans and redirected to Gift to Minors accounts as I will not give a dollar to one of these political indoctrination centers.
The answer is not complex, or veiled, but those in the control seats have WAY too much to lose. The point is moot.
The only real college experience I think I will have in my life is Fall semester 2019.
Those who are so quick to behave egregiously in the promotion of wokeness are now afraid to protest in the name of a cause that actually has merit. Clearly their willingness to protest has little to do with the merit of the cause and much to do with the likelihood of suffering consequences.
Thank you for writing this Dr. Makary, and thank you Bari for having him as a guest post. I am soon completing my graduate degree soon and my school has us still doing once per week testing. I am a commuter student and therefore not subject to any dorm room “rules” but the campus still requires masks in classrooms and in some indoor spaces, although i am waiting for renewed guidance soon prior to the spring semester. I believe the school was probably involved in a longitudinal study of some type(not IRB level, more just within the college). It’s a private college so they can set their rules, we are also all required to be vaccinated. Our student ID is checked electronically at the entrance to the campus to ensure we are in compliance with testing and vaccination requirements. The testing is not pleasant but not a big deal to test (although there is an added cost to our semester bill to support this). I find it odd though that they are not using a random schedule, it’s all in-residence students/staff/etc which must be very taxing on the lab that is processing these tests. It seems to be a waste at this point as I’m not sure what more evidence they hope to gather. The science does not seem to add up anymore and it would be great to know I’m in my last semester, but i am almost contemplating going remote because I find the rules not making sense anymore since there does not seem to be much new information being garnered.
Anyone know if this article is 'tweetable" or "linkedinable" without censorship? I suspect the real issue is "liablity". Noone wants to admit that places will make choices because of "liability". Noone wants to discuss the stages of the liability of the makers of the vaccine though.
Are alumni paying attention? There is no way I would give these universities any money. In fact, I am fighting back against WOKE and CRT in a small way. When I get solicitations from some charities that have been 1) supporting CRT and WOKE through their training materials and HR departments, and 2) lying about it when caught, I reply to their solicitations by being clear I will not support these racist and bigoted efforts. Then there are the NGOs which take Federal money to clandestinely move illegals from the border into the interior of the country. I have been replying to their requests for money the same way. I will not support any group or organization that is working to destabilize the country and implant crime into communities. It is time for more people to become vocal.
My children have graduated but if they were considering college or in college I would find alternatives. There are alternatives. College no longer prepares students for much of anything other than rioting, looting and mindless support of communism. Better for young adults to go to technical school and learn real, marketable skills.
Check out Isaac Moorehouse founder of Crash. He has a plan as an alternative to college.
It brings me great joy knowing that the modern Neo-Liberal, Ethno-Marxist is 80% of college and University students and are nearly all going to be facing crippling, miserable debt that they’ll never escape.
The excessive testing of those least at risk of severe illness and death out of an abundance of caution is a spectacular failure of the calculus of negligence test.
PL>B
If: Probability x Degree of harm (loss) > Cost (burden) then you pay the cost.
.001% risk of severe harm at the cost of denying tests to those in high risk categories is a no-brainer. These colleges are acting negligently.
I knew law school would one day be worth it... wait... that prolly failed the test too.
I'm an educator teaching at a private school. We missed two months in 2020, basically from Spring Break to summer - went back in August and never wavered. Almost no one wears masks, particularly the cloth ones (i.e., facial decorations). As of today: zero deaths, no serious illnesses, kids behaving normally, etc. The left, allegedly the 'party of science,' wants a forever pandemic so that they can maintain their top down, authoritarian control - they don't care an iota about kids, and as George Carlin once sagely said, whenever politicians or bureaucrats spout the cliche that they're 'doing it for the kids,' you know immediately that it's all bullsh*t.
Very good points. It is always Betty to try to understand than to condemn. Thank you.
"According to the CDC, the risk of a fully vaccinated adult ending up in the hospital for Covid was 1 in 26,000 for the week ending in November 27. Who was that one person? Not a college student."
I would like to address some of the claims of this article, which is clearly backed up by scientific data, which, as a nonscientist, I would not dream of disputing.
Yes, it sounds like some universities are going overboard on Covid policies. However, masking policies are not there just to protect mask users, in this case students. They are also there to prevent the spread of the virus into society at large. Hospitals are filling up, including ICUs. Asymptomatic carriers can spread the virus to more vulnerable populations. I spoke to a young graduate student after a flight a few days ago. She said she went back to her home state for the holidays (a state in the grips of winter), and was enjoying seeing her old friends, and then, as she said, "They started dropping like flies." Everyone had Covid. The Omicron variant is very transmissible. My 35-year-old daughter is home suffering from it in isolation, having caught it from her boyfriend, a chef who interacts with coworkers who are serving unmasked indoor diners. Yes, it is a mild variant; she will probably be back at work on Monday. But, if I (aged 61) had interacted with her, and then caught it, I might have passed it on to my parents-in-law (aged 83). I would probably be fine if I came down with it, but I'm not sure they would have been. Professors and other university workers, along with their families, should be protected from this virus.
We are an interconnected society. If everyone in North America had followed masking requirements from the beginning and when cases began soaring, the new variant might not have taken hold. I think that a few weeks of virtual classes in university are a small price to pay, and yes, some things like outdoor masking should be eased up on. But wouldn't it be nice to just actually get rid of this virus?
I'd like to bring up a couple of points.
1. The CDC and most medical professionals know that cloth masks do almost nothing against this virus, yet people are still being required and encouraged to wear them.
2. Are you and your parents vaccinated? If so, and if the vaccines work, then you have no reason to be worried since your symptoms will resemble a cold. Those who are vaccinated need to move on with their lives (that is nearly the entirety of elite college campuses), and those who are unvaccinated have made their decision and also need to move on with their lives. File that away with "personal responsibility".
3. As for the hospitals being overwhelmed, they are always hit hard at this time of year for a variety of reasons outside Covid, and they might not be as overwhelmed if hospital boards hadn't decided to let go perfectly capable staff members who did not want the vaccine and were healthy individuals to being with.
4. New variants are unavoidable. The more there are, the weaker they are, and that is a good thing in the long term! Covid is about to be endemic (meaning it will never go away). No amount of mask wearing, lockdowns, mandates, etc. would have prevented that!
I hope you are right. And yes, everyone I mentioned in this comment is fully vaccinated. They could still catch it as my daughter and her boyfriend did. If she can, then my elderly parents-in-law could as well. As for people who are young and healthy and who refuse to be vaccinated, I have no sympathy for them. I believe that hospitals who fired them were perfectly justified. They could be asymptomatic carriers and spread the virus to truly vulnerable populations.
The data on "asymptomatic carriers" is abysmally low.
But it is a possibility. I guess hospitals are trying to do their best to prevent spread.
The young and healthy unvaccinated do not need your sympathy. They do need just a teeny bit of your compassion. Obviously...there are no studies on the long-term effects of these vaccines (or the actual disease itself) and they have every right to be concerned as they have the most to lose from vaccine injury. I would hope that it is blatantly obvious that being vaccinated in no way prevents you from getting and/or spreading the disease - yes, even vaccinated people can (and perhaps are more likely to) be asymptomatic and spread disease. Unless they test every blessed day they will not know if they have COVID. Even at that point that they test positive they probably have already spread it.
Please, just remember that the opposite of fear is love.
Yes, you are right. It is better to try to understand rather than to condemn. Thank you.
Yes! We all have room (and the need) to learn. It's best to keep an open mind and look at data from all sides before coming to any conclusions as well as being able to see the point of view of others. Thanks for your comment!!
dr M... WHY WHY WHY are the universities doing this? who is making these decisions and who are they listening to ? Have they lost their minds?
Can someone do a FOIA on the universities emails regarding these policies?
1) I hope students and parents can one day sue the universities for all this insanity 2) Do they even have faculty that teaches epidemiology? How is the class and would a real professor agree with this?
On Sunday night, the principal of my children’s elementary school sent out an email. In it she described what my county’s DOH was calling “best masking practices”. It was wearing an n95, kn95 or a cloth mask over a paper one. I told my husband that if this was enforced at school, he’d be taking a leave of absence in order to homeschool them.
Come Monday, my daughter informed me that the only person in the school double masking was the principal and 1 student (who is high risk and immunocompromised).
Besides the basic issues of kids in masks, I find it interesting that I work in a hospital (anesthesiologist) and my hospital doesn’t even require that level of mask wearing. It’s a 3 ply procedure mask or an n95 if working with a. PUI/COVID + patient. Our local county heath commissioner (a pediatritician) has earned herself the nickname Dr. Overtime. Because, although salaried, she has been earning overtime pay since the pandemic started (to the tune of almost doubling her salary).
People are reaching their breaking point. ANd the fact that every new variant is given the Chicken Little treatment is starting to wear really thin.