COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Tuesday / Wednesday, Jan. 4-5

Posted on | by Anne Laurie



Actual doctors are reporting Ron Johnson’s tweets for misinformation. I like this analogy:

There are two ways you can learn that sticking your head in a campfire will hurt you. One is that you can be told that doing so will, at a minimum, catch your hair on fire and, more likely, cause extensive burns that will almost certainly demand medical attention. The other way you can learn this is by sticking your head in a campfire.

In both cases, you get to the same point: You have learned that this is a bad idea. You have been immunized against sticking your head into fires in the future, if you will — your body will now be resistant to doing so. But you got to that point through two very, very different paths. Perhaps in one you simply got part of your hair scorched off. Isn’t it still the case that simply having someone explain the dangers to you would have been better than taking that risk at all?..

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What’s the correct French for ‘snowflake’?

French parliament suspended debate on a new COVID-19 law early on Wednesday as opposition lawmakers demanded explanations from President Emmanuel Macron about comments in which he said he wanted to “piss off” unvaccinated people.

With a presidential election looming in April, in which he is expected to run, Macron may have calculated that enough people are now vaccinated – and upset with those who have not been vaccinated – for his comments to go down well with voters…

The draft bill will make it mandatory for people to show proof of vaccination to enter a restaurant, cinema, or take the train.

In the interview, Macron also said unvaccinated people were “irresponsible” and that he planned to make their lives so complicated that they would end up having a vaccine.

“Irresponsible people are no longer citizens,” he said, in another comment criticised by the opposition…

France has historically had more vaccine sceptics than many of its neighbours, and pandemic restrictions have triggered many street protests, but it now has one of the highest COVID-19 vaccination rates in the European Union. Nearly 90% of French aged 12 and over have been vaccinated…

The “piss off” comments – “emmerder” is a slang verb that can also be translated as “annoy” – was made in response to one of these readers, a nurse, who asked him about surgeries postponed for some vaccinated people because hospitals are busy treating non-vaccinated sick with COVID-19.

For months, people have had to show either proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test at many public venues. But as infections with the Delta and Omicron variants surge, the government has decided to drop the test option in the new bill.

Well worth clicking over to read John Burn-Murdoch’s long, data-intensive thread:

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