Marjorie Taylor Greene is setting a new low. Here she is comparing the COVID-19 pandemic to cancer.
1. Every single year more than 600,000 people in the US die from cancer.
The country has never once shut down.
Not a single school has closed.
And every year, over 600,000 people, of all ages and all races will continue to die from cancer.
— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) December 4, 2021
Did you know that cancer is not generally contagious? Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t.
So she proposes that we should target fat people and take more ivermectin.
3. It’s time to take a different approach based on the facts.
Covid predominately targets obese & older people.
Shutdowns, masking, and vaccines are not stopping covid, that is just government control.
Ivermectin, monoclonal antibodies, & other treatments are saving lives.
— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) December 4, 2021
It seems to me that the effective solutions that she avoids mentioning — vaccines and masks and lockdowns — would be more direct in addressing the problem than vilifying fat people, taking useless drugs, or using relatively expensive post-infection treatments. But then, the stupid people run the country.
Comparing a transmittable disease with one that isn’t. Category error. Typical RWNJ misdirection and abject lying.
Very stupid. But they can also be very cunning and know their audience, judging that the approval they’ll get from their base for making an obviously inane statement will outweigh the damage it does them in the minds of anyone who pauses to think.
It’s a bit like the Nigerian 419 scammers, who deliberately send poorly-written emails to millions of people knowing that most recipients will see all the language errors and dismiss them out of hand, leaving just a few thousand of the more credulous or desperate readers ready to be fed to the ropers running stage two. MTG and her ilk don’t want to spend too much time on the phone soliciting donations unless the call is likely to pay off, so they only want to be able to harvest the details of the true believers from Facebook, Twitter et al. Say something vile or patently stupid then focus on getting closer to those who haven’t unfollowed or unsubscribed in disgust.
This is true but only partially. It also targets diabetics, high blood pressure, pregnant people, kidney failure, heart failure patients, and generally anyone with serious health problems.
If you add up all the people in the USA with risk factors,…it is the vast majority of the population. 36.5% of the US population is significantly overweight.
Pregnancy is also a huge risk factor for hospitalization and dying of Covid-19 virus.
Cottagehealth.com:Aug 27, 2021 — Data from thousands of pregnant women enrolled in research studies shows that those who got COVID were 15 times more likely to die from the disease …
There are also numerous examples of young and health people dying from the Covid-19 virus. There are many more who are permanently disabled by the long hauler effects.
This whole idea of comorbidities doesn’t really help very much.
The whole idea of just looking at dead people also doesn’t help at all.
Around 25% of the people who get Covid-19 virus end up permanently disabled. I know several by now. My friend lost parts of both lower limbs to blood clots. She now walks on artificial feet and is never going to get over Covid-19 virus infection.
raven, @3
“Around 25% of the people who get Covid-19 virus end up permanently disabled.”
I’m going to have to call bullshit on this. Where would you even come up with a number like that?
Around 95% of the people dying of Covid-19 virus these days are unvaccinated.
I would estimate that at least 95% of those are fundie xians.
They reject vaccines but also masking, social distancing, and modern medicine.
The fundies have the piles of dead bodies to show for it.
This virus has swept through their communities, killing multple members of many families.
They aren’t very good at thinking, especially in determining cause and effect.
The fundies see themselves dying often. They blame demons or Democrats for targeting them.
Kent Christmas also didn’t notice that big Republican politicians and donors are not dying from the Coronavirus.
The real explanation is real simple. Rich and smart people don’t want to die so they are all vaccinated.
I came up with it because I graduated from grade school.
I can read simple English. I can also use a search engine.
Here is one of 6 million hits off of a Google search. The ama is the American Medical Association.
More.
Do a simple Google search and read some of the basic articles in simple English.
The long hauler syndrome of Covid-19 virus infection was known by almost everyone 1 1/2 years ago.
So, for you, people who “sought treatment for COVID-related symptoms a month or more after being …”, are “permanently disabled”?
I’m going to gently suggest that you try seeking education beyond grade school. I am sorry about your friend.
How low can you go
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………………….singularity—> .
Disabled.
Unqualified, the word doesn’t really specify range of severity (mild to dead) though it does tend to conjure up images of Stephen Hawking.
I’m hearing that permanent impairments include diminished lung capacity, and cognitive muddiness among other things.
I presume the OP title is rhetorical.
“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”–Albert Einstein
We don’t know how long long hauler syndrome lasts, because the Covid-19 virus is novel and only 2 years old.
We do know that many of those month or more patients are still sick to this day though.
Some people have gotten over it. Some people have never gotten over it.
Estimates are that maybe half of all long hauler patients will eventually recover. But the data that supports that estimate doesn’t yet exist.
We know for a fact that many of them will never recover. Some of them are dead within a year.
I’m not going to waste any more time on an ignorant and illiterate troll.
You’ve got nothing worthwhile to say and no data to back up your assertions.
Between 0% and 100% of all the people in the world will be killed by sharks today.
MTG is what you get after someone grows up listening to far-right media and believes it instead of just parroting it to appeal to voters..
I can see how I’m coming off as dismissive of the dangers of Covid-19, both from the risk of death and from the risk of long-term and permanent effects. I’m not. At all. I just believe there isn’t any use in a bunch of people who don’t know what they are talking about spouting off about it as if they do. It’s misinformation and just creates more confusion.
I am genuinely sorry for raven’s people. I want to understand this just as much as anyone. Feel free to rip on me and I’ll check it out tomorrow.
We know that people die of covid. Mild is not 0%. Overly broad? Yeah. Insignificant? No.
That is the whole point.
The long hauler syndrome includes a vast array of symptoms and conditions, many of which aren’t well defined and that we don’t really understand all that well.
The brain fog is one of the more common ones and it is serious. Who wants to spend the rest of their life trying to find their car keys and struggling to hold down a simple job?
It’s not even hypothetical for most of us by now.
I know several long haulers. My friend got Covid-19 virus in March, 2020. Here it is almost two years later and she has gotten better but is still sick.
“Covid predominately targets obese & older people.”
That was earlier in the pandemic. Now it mostly targets moronic fuckwits like MTG.
Raven @17
I agree absolutely. No question.
One of the long hauler syndromes that hasn’t gotten too much attention is one that people don’t recover from. It is death. Some long haulers just die.
Around half of all ventilator/ECMO patients die. The ones that recover are almost never what they were. Many of those never leave an assisted care facility again. Within 90 days roughly 30% of those released patients will either die or be readmitted. This study below has 9.1% dying at 2 months after release.
Thank you for using the word “stupid”. It’s way overdue. “Creeps and ghouls” would also be appropriate.
How stupid can a congressperson be?
Is there a theoretical maximum?
I like how she takes a CUMULATIVE graph of Covid deaths to prove how more USAians have died in 2021 than in 2020. So if I add up all the horse-related deaths in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, I can “prove” that horses are a worse cause of death today than they were in Victorian times.
I reckon that about 20% of the American electorate is seriously mentally ill or morally sick, but somehow they’re running the country anyway. As a Christian I cannot recommend a Star Chamber approach to justice, but it’s beginning to wear on me.
@zagnut #15:
I don’t think you have anything to apologise for here. Raven seems to be placing emphasis on uncommon interpretations of the words ‘permanently’ and ‘disabled’. The tragic case of their friend undoubtedly qualifies for this dual category; claiming that other sufferers who are at risk of not getting over their current Covid-induced sequelae also fully qualify is jumping the gun.
If anyone wants to get a better grasp of the Long Covid assessment problem, I can offer this commentary from the UK’s Office of National Statistics.
@ Raven
I have one data point. A friend of mine caught Covid last year. Severe flu symptoms, loss of smell and taste but did not require hospitalization. Recovered physically in about six months; less fatigue, dizziness, etc.
However, now the smell of cooking meat and some cooked foods makes her nauseous to the point she can no longer eat beef, pork or lamb. Chicken has to be boiled. Some fish is ok. Pizza is out as are cooked mushrooms. These foods cause her to retch. I don’t know where on the disability spectrum something like this falls, but it is certainly a burden.
What does target even mean? Like okay, those are risk factors that mean you might get sicker than you otherwise would, but vaccines also mitigate a lot of that.
And in terms of actually being more likely to catch or spread the disease, I haven’t seen anything to indicate that that would be the case.
moarscienceplz @ 23 — “…she takes a CUMULATIVE graph of Covid deaths to prove how more USAians have died in 2021 than in 2020.” Is that what she’s doing? I’ve heard this claim before, but I’m having difficulty finding the cumulative deaths in the US as of 1/1/21. Per the Global COVID-19 Tracker cumulative deaths as of 01/01/21 seems to be around 400k while I thought it was about 500k at the end of the year. As the current cumulative deaths are ~800k, then the claim of “more deaths” this year over last may be valid. Of course, the glitch in her stupid thinking is that the deaths would have been a lot higher without vaccines, masks, and social distancing.
Here is a recent study on Covid-19 long hauler syndrome. It is a meta-analysis of 48,000 patients from multiple studies.
It was estimated that 80% of the infected patients with SARS-CoV-2 developed one or more long-term symptoms. The five most common symptoms were fatigue (58%), headache (44%), attention disorder (27%), hair loss (25%), and dyspnea (24%).
To understand this sentence, you need to have finished the first grade and know how to count.
They are stating 80% of SARS-Cov-2 patients are long haulers.
@2, Rich Woods
I’ve seen more than a few senators and congress people claim that Marjorie Greene believes in her own BS, and her antics before she was in politics seems to support that idea. Shouting into AOC’s mail slot, for example, as well as her being one of the more visible posters to the Q-Anon groups. Ignorant, unhinged, and charismatic to certain groups, much like the twice impeached Orange Julius Caesar.
The best thing about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s twitter feed is how much money it saves Marcus Flowers on advertising. All he needs are 10 second spots saying “I’m running to get her out of congress.”
@22
maybe there is . It might be if you are so stupid that you walk right off a 200 ft cliff knowing it is a cliff and dangerous but not for you. there is ignorance which is at least as common as stupidity and may look the same from the outside, there are also people operating in a delusional state. then there are those who arrogantly lie and do not care a fig for any negative consequences of their lies, and only say what they say so people will look at them and praise them.
Is there an internationally recognised SI unit of stupidity we can use to make a precise estimate?
As to deaths 2020 vs 2021, it must be remembered that at the end of March 2020 there were, according to Worldometers, 5,299 Covid deaths in the USA. Comparing year to year is “lying with statistics”. By the same graph, there were 319 deaths up to March 20, 2020.
Re: cartomancer @ #33…
I don’t think there is, at least, not yet. Might be possible to find a prime example of stupidity and then do a variant on the standard unit of female pulchritude…the “millihelen”, which is enough to launch one ship.
US congressman sends xmas photo of his family all fondling guns ,that’s pretty stupid.
“How stupid can a congressperson be?”
Just a little less stupid than the people that vote for them.
Is that a trick question?
“Stupid”, of course, isn’t quite the right term here,
at least when employed in such a general sense.
I was a National Merit Scholar in my promising youth (a promise
that, alas, went largely unrealized ;-> ), and managed to make
a living as a computer programmer right through to retirement.
But there is no conceivable set of circumstances under which
I could ever have been elected to Congress (or, for that matter,
have been elected Prom King or Senior Class President).
In that sense, I am stupider than the stupidest congressperson,
and I’m fully aware of that fact. I totally lack the social
intelligence (regarded either positively — i.e., “leadership”,
“vision”; or negatively — i.e., “ruthlessness”, “Machiavellianism”)
to have ever risen in any human hierarchy.
So any lack of stupidity I may possess was channelled into
severely constrained roles and behaviors, just as the “non-stupidity”
of a socially-dominant person may be equally limited.
Of course, to the extent the human world works at all (the lights
stay on, the toilets flush, the wheels on the bus go round and round),
it’s because, at least in the aggregate, all the various kinds of
non-stupidity manage to get harnessed in useful (for some value
of “useful”) directions in the social collectives that humans form.
It’s also true that the “vector sum” of all these kinds of non-stupidity
may not, ultimately, be sufficiently congruent with reality to prevent
the whole human race from going over a cliff.
Stay tuned, sportsfans!
No shame in lacking high intelligence. Or ignorance, there are remedies for ignorance. But stupidity; intelligent people can do stupid things, or exist in a state of willful stupidity and ignorance.
No special requirements to be a congress critter either. If you are a bottom feeding Pakled living in a district dominated by bottom feeding Pakleds, all you need to do is ask a bunch of fellow bottom feeders to vote for you and Bob’s your uncle.
Historically civilizations eventually collapse, in some sense anyway, but on a global scale, with resource depletion, pollution, and climate change, and factoring in the crazy?
Yikes.
I’m with Rep. Greene on this one. Since wearing a mask and social distancing I have not contracted Covid19, or cancer, or had a heart attack or stroke, or been struck by lightening. Can’t just be a coincidence.
It also seems to me that if America had a decent health care system open to all there would be a lot less people dying of cancer because early screening would detect it when it was readily treatable. Also if vaccines, masking, social distancing and quarantine could prevent the spread of cancer you can bet the MTGs of this world would be all for it.
MTG is just stupid . She has a type of low cunning which gets her elected . Loved Randy Rainbow’s parody of her. Evergreen( or the parody thereof) is not easy to sing
Besides being a Q Anon devotee, Greene is also a member of the CrossFit cult and follower of other fitness and exercise gurus. She brings up co-morbidities to try to blame COVID deaths on the victims: If you fat weaklings had spent some time in the gym like I do, you wouldn’t need some evil government vaccine or be dead.
It’s just Social Darwinism applied to a pandemic.
The good thing about MTG is, she is living evidence of the decay of the crook party.
She should hang out with the Jewish laser lady and the Demon Sperm lady.
If you can pull it off you should get them on a cable TV show.
birgerjohansson at 45,
MTG is the Jewish laser lady.
@29 Raven
Thats one for the bookmarks. Thanks. Most of my coworkers got covid because they are Roganesque meatheads. This also means they are young and very healthy, but I also wonder how many of them are hiding their symptoms out of stubborn commitment to the narrative they believe in.
Funny how those insisting the 782,000 (and counting) American deaths aren’t much to worry about are the same people who frothed with rage over the 3,000 American deaths from 9/11 when anyone dared suggest we shouldn’t set up LEOs like Homeland Security and TSA or start wars that killed more people, even counting just Americans, than Al Quaeda ever did.
chrislawson #48
Benghazi.
raven, @29
Your post is a perfect example of misinformation. I don’t know whether it is due to you intending to be deceptive or simple carelessness and ignorance. The authors freely acknowledge that the limitations of their meta-analysis make it impossible for any results to be generalized to the general population. I’m tempted to go through the study and show you exactly why the figures are preposterously exaggerated as you have framed them, but you seem inclined towards Gish Galloping all over in a frenzy, so there is probably no point.
I’ll suggest that the ability to google studies isn’t sufficient for understanding phenomena this complex. Keep doing your ‘research’ if you feel you have to, though.
Not sure if anyone covered it above, but this is my hot take.
I think the major difference between COVID-19 and cancer is: The death toll from COVID-19 would be a hell of a lot higher if we took no mitigation strategies at all. By taking these simple mitigation strategies, we saved probably millions of American lives already. This is compared to a hypothetical world where no one wore masks, got vaccinated, or socially distanced. That 500,000 number or whatever is the result of having done mitigation strategies. It’s so low – that’s a sign of success of our mitigation strategies.
If there was such a relatively easy mitigation strategy for cancer deaths with similar reductions in cancer deaths, then I would argue that we should be doing those too.
Gerrard:
You think the death toll from cancer would not be likewise, without mitigation strategies?
Silly perception, that.
PZ noted the salient difference: cancer is (mostly) not contagious.
Leaving aside cancer is not a single thing (it’s a number of diseases featuring runaway cell growth), there are plenty of mitigation strategies already in place.
(Including regulations applicable to radioactive sources!)
They can also be this stupid
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-59543735
@cartomancer #33:
After a lot of thought and a fair bit of Googling in a desperate attempt to shore up my flakier memories, I’ve come to the conclusion that the SI unit of stupidity is the Bachmann.
The competition was intense, from the likes of George W Bush and Dan Quayle, but Michele Bachmann won thanks to her grasp of American history (“the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.”), basic physics (“carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.”), basic biology (“Where do we say that a cell became a blade of grass, which became a starfish, which became a cat, which became a donkey, which became a human being? There’s a real lack of evidence from change from actual species to a different type of species.”) and her association of breast cancer with sexuality (“This may be an opportunity for her now to be open to some spiritual things, now that she is suffering with that physical disease. She is a lesbian.”).
I have refrained from quoting any of her more bizarre religious statements for reasons of space.
The abbreviation for the Bachmann is ‘Ba’, pronounced as either ‘baa’ or ‘bah!’ according to the degree of revulsion inherent in any given example of stupidity.
Cervical cancer is contagious in a way, as it’s generally caused by HPV.
Vaccination is pretty effective in its prevention, but the usualparade of nut jobs objected to that as it (obviously) would make for greater promiscuity.
No doubt in her low-brow “thinking”, the more than 50,000 killed annually in the US by cars (38,000) and guns (14,000) is a non-issue. They ARE like COVID-19, in that many of those deaths were inflicted on other people by the selfish and the stupid.
Larpar @ 46
Thank you. I am no longer able to keep track of the crazies.
Recently, a kook at the Jim Bakker grifter show claimed a demon had impersonated her husband. This is the level of crazy that is being normalised.
Let us not forget that “luciferase” proves the pharmaceutical companies are run by satanists.
Jesus Christ John. Go fuck yourself.
Silly John! Don’t you know that gargling with plutonium considerably reduces your chances of dying from Covid?
The irony is that some viruses contribute to the development of cancer. So vaccines, such as the HPV vaccine can prevent cancer