Aspirating Mandated Breaking Chains: Ceding Labour Militancy to Managed Markets
Ceding Labour Militancy to Managed Markets
[Image: by the inimitable Mr. Fish].
Publication date: 2021-11-03
A recent interview between Jimmy Dore and Professor Wolff (see sources) raises a selection of interesting topics of political strategy, and COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
Jimmy Dore is a stand up comic who started producing a youtube show. Some shows are rants based on some recent hullabaloo often highlighting the hipocrisy of various sections of the media or political class, with other shows involving guests taking on a particular topic. The show which the this article begins is one of the later. Politically Dore is left wing, with strong elements of civil liberties. So, a left wing libertarian.
Prof Wolff is his guest. Wolff is a professor of economics having taught at numerous USA universities. He is an expert on Marx, and a proponent of non-capitalist economic policies, aligning strongly with the labour movement. He is a proponent of worker co-op businesses and was a strong advocate for a UK bill a few years back which forced business owners to offer the business for sale to its workers before being able to sell it to other parties.
The topic of discussion is the sequence of strikes and job quitting happening in the USA and if and how that relates to mandates to have a COVID-19 vaccination and how political factions can involve themselves in this.
Dore begins the show by introducing some study which he does not cite. A quick search provided a relevant sample, see sources. Cited are both the media discussion or press release and the academic article for two academic works related to the topic. The upshot of this is that for the Delta variant of COVID the transmission (i.e emission of viral "loads") is indistinguishable between vaccinated and unvaccinated communities. To translate that into "general speak", vaccination has no effect on reducing transmission. To translate into “policy speak”, vaccine mandates will have no effective public health impact on the transmission of the COVID Delta variant, at all.
It is important to note that vaccination does have one very important effect. It heavily decreases the likelihood that a person contracting whichever variant of COVID will have an extreme response. i.e. COVID will be like a cold, not pneumonia. This, of course, reduces potential pressure on public health services, which is good, and more importantly means that the vaccinated individual is better off. Dore has been at pains recently to clarify his position. "I'm not anti-vaxx, I'm anti-mandate".
This is the topic of discussion. However, other COVID related developments deserve some comment first.
Aspiration
Dr. John Campbell (PhD, not a medical doctor) a UK Staff Nurse (i.e a nurse who trains other nurses) published two videos discussing the application of COVID vaccines. Campbell describes the "proper" method for vaccine injections. A muscle with less surface large blood vessels is chosen, usually the deltoid, or possibly the thigh. The needle loaded with the vaccine is inserted and then the plunger is withdrawn slightly to extract a small amount of bodily fluid. This is for one, and only one reason. The nurse (or doctor) does NOT want to see any blood in that "aspirated" fluid. If they do, it means that the needle has connected with a significant blood vessel. If so, the needle should be withdrawn and discarded, and another used at a different site until no blood is seen. Then the injection can be made.
Why is this the "proper" method. I don't know, but I expect that the idea is for the vaccine to spread slowly, or diffusely, through the body. Thus, not be injected directly into a larger blood vessel which will mean that it is very rapidly spread in high concentration through the body to important organs, like the heart.
There have been recent significant cases of death and severe heart related responses to some COVID vaccinations. Campbell cites a study performed on mice where a COVID vaccine in deliberately "intravenously" injected into mice. This generates heart problems. So, it is possible (not certain) that there is a relation between poor vaccine injection methodology and some of the recently observed deaths or severe heart responses to vaccination.
He examines changes in methodology for vaccination, looking at the UK's "Green Book" (for nurses) and WHO recommendations. The "aspiration" is now optional. Viewers of his video make comments, some are doctors or nurses, and they respond with personal anecdotes. The change in WHO recommendations seems to be that with aspiration the injection is more painful, and seeing as children are the most common recipients of vaccines, reducing pain is a worthwhile goal.
Campbell tries to guess-timate the frequency of accidental intravenous vaccine injection and comes up with 1 in 2000 to 1 in 5000. But, this is just educated guessing. Funnily enough, he states the no experiments of this kind could be done because of the ethics behind medical experimentation, but a commentator corrects him. Campbell rightly acknowledges the correction. One could do this. Use saline. Declare the experiment about injection pain with all nurses told this. One group does aspiration, the other not, but the real study is how frequently the aspirating nurses get blood in their aspirated samples. As a sideline, you also get a qualitative indication of the difference in pain in the two methods of injection.
Treatment
In an interview by Global Research's Michael Welsh with Dr. McCullough two core issues are discussed, the death rate from vaccination and the evolution of effective treatment. McCullough has testified to various USA authorities (state legislatures and others) about COVID-19 and the response. He has also given many an interview to a wide range of outlets.
McCullough cites a study which declares 15 000 deaths from a COVID vaccination and then compares that to the Swine Flu vaccination drive some years ago. The Swine Flu vaccination was aborted with 25% of the USA population complete when there were 50 deaths due to vaccination.
He also mentions the evolution in treatment of COVID using some form of anti-bodies and a small collection of drugs. He claims that treatment is effective if intervention is made early after contracting the virus. He is arguing that "mandates" are not the right strategy. He is not arguing against vaccination, but that if presented with a chance of death from the vaccine or death from the virus, but with an effective treatment strategy, it is a difficult choice to make.
Vaccine Mandate Politics during Labour Unrest
Wolff makes a sequence of points which I found engaging during the interview:
if a labour militancy is developing during a rejection of vaccine mandates the left should be there, supporting these workers, not rejecting their action out of some poorly argued medical position. Doing so, cedes the position to those forces representing the employer political class.
if the government has done such a poor job of managing the COVID pandemic why should we then say (paraphrasing) "sure, lets have new rules on employment declared by the people who screwed this whole thing up?"
Dore jumps on one of his righteous topics, public healthcare or "Medicare for All", as they call it in the USA. He refers to a study which showed that of the 600 000 deaths from COVID, 200 000 would have been saved if there was a public healthcare system.
Wolff returns reminding the viewership that the USA, "we" from his point of view, have been closing hospitals for decades because it is "efficient". Wolff then continues with an item which I feel receives far too little attention in the USA space. What the hell is a mandate on a vaccine for which the drug companies have been granted indemnity? That is a way to print money.
Breaking Efficient Supply Chains
One part of the "globalisation" agenda for cost cutting in developed world businesses, was of course, the off-shoring of labour costs to countries with lower wages and less effective labour market regulation. Another lesser seen part of that was reduction in warehousing; the storing of core supplies in a "cache" to mitigate supply disruptions. When the supply chains are operating well, money can be saved by reducing the costs of maintaining that cache of reserve supplies.
Back in July I read an article by the ever interesting F. William Engdahl about the changes in costs of shipping, particularly between east Asia and the western USA. To add to that, it has recently been seen that some major ports on the USA's west coast are unable to handle the offloading of containers due to a collection of factors. One of these is certainly that road freight container delivery workers ("truckers") get paid by the container delivered. Thus, spending hours waiting doing nothing while a potential container is made available has a serious impact on their livelihood. This creates a disincentive to service the backlogged ports. In turn, what little warehoused "cache" existed is depleted and various business either are unable to sell goods or produce goods, missing either completed products or essential components.
This was seen early in the COVID pandemic in the USA, not due to supply problems, but due to an excess of global demand. The USA wanted masks, but so did every other nation, and naturally, the producers were co-opted to supply the nation under whose laws to which they were subject. Little ol' USA’s major producer of high quality masks could not "upscale" their production to meet demand in a short space of time. The hospitals and state governments had not maintained anywhere near sufficient warehousing of emergency medical supplies.
A related problem is seen in the current imbroglio around natural gas and liquid natural gas in the European energy market. The European Commission's strategy was to move from long term contracts for which infrastructure costs can be defrayed over the period of the contract, to "spot market" prices based on short term contracts. That's all well when you don't experience a sudden increase in supply demand. This seems to have happened during 2021 from a combination of factors. The winter leading into 2021 was a little colder than normal, and the summer period was low in average wind strength leading to under production of wind turbines. The combination placed pressure on existing gas reserves as coal and nuclear based energy production had been reduced due to environmental concerns. Finally, energy demands in eastern Asia were high and they were paying higher prices. The end result is that filling European gas reserves to prepare for the coming winter was both difficult and expensive. The lovely irony is that Germany's project will Russia, the NordSteam II pipeline, may well warm their cockles.
Societal Stability
There is a lesson here for governments. Whatever a government considers to be essential for its society needs to have its stability of supply prioritized. There are obvious candidates like energy and food. Immediate secondaries would be transport and communications services. The militaries would argue that they belong in their too, as would medical care and educational services.
What are these policies? Where are they published? How does an electorate choose between competing policies on core public service stability? Or, can I 'phone my grandma, and can she eat? Or, can my kids go to school, and will the lights turn on?
Sources
New Lancet Study Has Interesting Finding About Covid-19 Transmission Among the Vaccinated, Leah Barkoukis, Townhall (publication), 2021-11-01
Community transmission and viral load kinetics of the SARS-CoV-2 delta (B.1.617.2) variant in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals in the UK: a prospective, longitudinal, cohort study, Anika Singanayagam, PhD et al, The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 2021-10-29
Viral Loads Similar Between Vaccinated and Unvaccinated People, Andy Fell, University of California Davis, 2021-10-04
No Significant Difference in Viral Load Between Vaccinated and Unvaccinated, Asymptomatic and Symptomatic Groups Infected with SARS-CoV-2 Delta Variant, Charlotte B. Acharya et al, MedRXiv, 2021-09-28
Inadvertant intravenous injections, Dr. John Campbell, his youtube channel, 2021-09-26
Aspiration, more information, Dr. John Campbell, his youtube channel, 2021-09-30
Video: The Vaccine is More Dangerous than COVID-19: Dr. Peter McCullough, Michael Welch interviews Dr. McCullough, Global Research, 2021-10-26
Workers Rebelling Against Vaxx Mandates w/Professor Richard Wolff, Jimmy Dore and Prof Wolff, Jimmy Dore Show, 2021-11-02
Global Shipping Crisis Far Worse Than Imagined, F. William Engdahl, New Eastern Outlook, 2021-07-21
The shipping crisis in California is now so bad that officials should consider declaring a state of emergency, the head of the California Trucking Association says, Mary Hanbury, Business Insider, 2021-10-21
How Poland Tried To Win But Lost The Gas Game, b., MoonOfAlabama, 2021-10-29
Culture
Money, by Pink Floyd from their Dark Side of the Moon album, released on 1973-03-01 by Harvest Records
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