OT - UK To End Covid Testing For Vaccinated Travelers

[Ian Mackenzie]

Can't see anything stupid about saying the obvious. Many don't believe that masks and vaccines don't make a difference in slowing the spread of covid. They do. The British government believes testing and quarantining fully vaccinated visitors isn't worth the effort. Can't we leave it at that?

Nope. I won't leave it at that. Cloth masks are a joke and vaccines are only around to maybe keep someone alive. Plenty of spreading through vaccinated people. Believe what you want, but if you think what the government (any) is telling you, or what the mainstream media is telling you, you may want to do more research. Saying "vaccines make a HUGE difference no matter what you want to believe" is stupid ... period. There's plenty of room for opinions outside the mainstream media and plenty of people have been silenced who have presented evidence to the contrary of lord Fauci.

This is a great scientific positioning for masks. What would YOU do if YOUR surgeon went "bare back" before he cut you open..?..;-)


https://www.tiktok.com/@waltermasterson/video/7053969546515991813?lang=en

[Jeff Taylor]

All you want or need to know about masks. Not a dynamic speaker but...


https://rumble.com/vt72ko-moving-on-from-masks-to-n95s-not-so-fast.html

[Mike Wagner]

Can't see anything stupid about saying the obvious. Many don't believe that masks and vaccines don't make a difference in slowing the spread of covid. They do. The British government believes testing and quarantining fully vaccinated visitors isn't worth the effort. Can't we leave it at that?

Nope. I won't leave it at that. Cloth masks are a joke and vaccines are only around to maybe keep someone alive. Plenty of spreading through vaccinated people. Believe what you want, but if you think what the government (any) is telling you, or what the mainstream media is telling you, you may want to do more research. Saying "vaccines make a HUGE difference no matter what you want to believe" is stupid ... period. There's plenty of room for opinions outside the mainstream media and plenty of people have been silenced who have presented evidence to the contrary of lord Fauci.

This is a great scientific positioning for masks. What would YOU do if YOUR surgeon went "bare back" before he cut you open..?..;-)


https://www.tiktok.com/@waltermasterson/video/7053969546515991813?lang=en

Do you really think this is a good analogy for what's happening in the world right now?

[Mike Sweeney]

  Getting vaccinated decreases the risk of both of those things.  Full stop.

Amol,


The information from Professor Cohen that I posted is in direct conflict with your statement:


https://unherd.com/thepost/israeli-vaccine-chief-we-have-made-mistakes/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups%5B0%5D=18743&tl_period_type=3&mc_cid=db4144a85c&mc_eid=f0748ee1b2


I work very closely with a family that travels frequently from NYC to Israel. They were fully vaccinated for last summers travel season. With all the information that they have now seen, they are not getting boosters, or have paused for now.


So can you please advise on how to handle Professor Cohen's interview? I am the son of an Infectious Disease doctor and have been studying this topic of vaccines for 20 years. Here is the history of the Polio vaccine, which my Dad helped bring to Philadelphia. It was a very complicated 50+ year journey for Polio - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine


I also received information over the holidays that a "friend of GCA" was boosted and died two weeks later from a cardiac event. I am sorry, but the vaccines do cause a reaction. Sometimes good for sure, and sometimes bad. And none of us know the implications long term - 5 years for this current version of mRNA, see the Polio vaxx history.


Obviously I am NOT giving medical advice, but I do stand for informed consent. Israel is the #1 country in the world at knowing how to survive, literally survive. I want more information please. I have two sons, on very different journeys in life. The one is fully vaccinated in the Military, but his Aviation Squadron had deep conversations about it. The Navy SEALs are on a different path - https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jan/24/navy-appealing-court-order-barring-action-against-/


I have no doubt that you see things that I/we can't imagine, so I have tried to post this with respect to what you do.


Peace.

[Ian Mackenzie]

Can't see anything stupid about saying the obvious. Many don't believe that masks and vaccines don't make a difference in slowing the spread of covid. They do. The British government believes testing and quarantining fully vaccinated visitors isn't worth the effort. Can't we leave it at that?

Nope. I won't leave it at that. Cloth masks are a joke and vaccines are only around to maybe keep someone alive. Plenty of spreading through vaccinated people. Believe what you want, but if you think what the government (any) is telling you, or what the mainstream media is telling you, you may want to do more research. Saying "vaccines make a HUGE difference no matter what you want to believe" is stupid ... period. There's plenty of room for opinions outside the mainstream media and plenty of people have been silenced who have presented evidence to the contrary of lord Fauci.

This is a great scientific positioning for masks. What would YOU do if YOUR surgeon went "bare back" before he cut you open..?..;-)


https://www.tiktok.com/@waltermasterson/video/7053969546515991813?lang=en

Do you really think this is a good analogy for what's happening in the world right now?

No, I do not.
But you, sir, need something to laugh about and this sure fit the bill....;-)


Masks are worthless.
Why are all the surgeons of the world still wearing them.


They should listen more to you!!

[Jeff Taylor]

I encourage you to wear a mask if your daily travels put you in close proximity to people with open wounds.


The masks are worthless logic comes from scientific analysis regarding the size of COVID aerosols and the size of gaps that you find in cloth and "blue" masks. Understand that relationship and you will understand the logic of the statement.

[Tim Martin]

Please let this thread move into oblivion or let the moderators delete it.

+1

[Mike Sweeney]

Please let this thread move into oblivion or let the moderators delete it.

+1

If oblivion includes playing golf with Canadian Truckers, I agree!! Thank goodness for Comedians - Russell Brand -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itbSIqY4Nnw

[Bryan Izatt]

There's no comedy in the Brand video.  It is seriously misleading about no mainstream media coverage - the trucker convoy is all over the Canadian mainstream media including snippets that Brand used in his video.  In Ontario almost 90% of the population 12+ years old are vaccinated and are mostly resentful of the 10% for causing the lockdowns that we're under.  The great majority of the truck drivers are vaccinated yet the coverage goes to the minority.  In both the truckers and the population-at-large the small minority seeks to undermine the direction of governments both conservative and liberal and the desire of the majority.  The irony is that the truckers are protesting not being able to reenter Canada from the US unless they are vaccinated, but they can't enter the US because of US rules.


Following is a mainstream media article about the protest.  This from a writer who has routinely lambasted the conservative government's handling of the pandemic.


Angry and misguided, they roll onWe have to live with Freedom Convoy fringe. But politicians don’t have to lend them support[/color]Toronto Star28 Jan 2022BRUCE ARTHUR[/color][/font][/color][/size]RICK MADONIK TORONTO STAR[/font][/size][/size][/font][/size]

Supporters of the Freedom Convoy, a group of truckers protesting vaccine mandates, filled the parking lot at Vaughan Mills shopping centre on Thursday. Several convoys passed through the GTA on their way to Ottawa for a weekend rally.[/b][/font]

There were so many Canadian flags. People carried them, hung them from their trucks, wrapped them around their shoulders. The Bass Pro Shops parking lot in Vaughan was filled with people who wanted to see the Freedom Convoy, and to bathe in giddy, misguided, collective rage.
They honked their horns and hooted and hollered and yelled more at CBC journalists than anybody else. A mother stood to the side, her two-year-old bundled in a stroller. Her name was Dasha, and she wouldn’t give her last name. She was unvaccinated. I asked her, what was this for?
“Freedom,” she said, “for the people.”
How do you define freedom, I asked.
“To do anything we’d like to do. Like we did before. To go back to normal.”
The truck convoy was started to oppose the federal vaccine mandate for truckers to cross the U.S.Canada border. It is being organized by extremists with some deeply noxious anti-Islam, anti-Semitic, racist views and who have also written a document in Crayon legalese demanding the removal of the government. The convoy has become a bug light for anti-pandemic, anti-lockdown, anti-vaccination, right-wing grievance, to the point that Donald Trump Jr. has made a video about it. People at the rally yelled, Freedom!
“They put graphene oxide in the vaccines, they suck the air from your bloodstream, that’s why they can’t breathe,” yelled one woman who walked beside me. It’s not true.
The convoy features people who threaten journalists, or spit on them, or threaten violence in general. Thursday night, in Ottawa, the parliamentary Sergeant-at-Arms sent out a memo to members of Parliament that attempts had been made to discern their home addresses. It said they should lock their doors.
How do we go back to normal, I asked Dasha.
“If the government lets us,” she said.
But the hospitals are full. Vaccines help keep people out of hospitals. She laughed.
“Well, if you go online, you’ll see that there’s a lot of videos, a lot of doctors speaking up. If you go online and listen, it’s very easy to see.” She mentioned the recent anti-vaccine rally in Washington, D.C.
“The hospitals are full of s---, that’s what they’re full of.”
This was one of several convoys converging on Ottawa, though the figure of 50,000 trucks being thrown around is pure fantasy. This parking lot was jammed; there were crowds on every highway overpass south of Vaughan and across the top of the GTA, and beyond.
There were anti-vaccine signs, those F--- Trudeau flags you can find in any town in the country, the Gadsden flag that American conservatives love.
It was a clarifying day in Canada, and hopefully it’s the worst we see this week. Conservative influencer and former “Dragons’ Den” panellist W. Brett Wilson tweeted what seemed to be a coded reference to murdering your enemies in reference to the prime minister.
Former Conservative party leader Andrew Scheer called Trudeau “the biggest threat to freedom in Canada.”
Why would they exaggerate the hospital numbers, I asked Dasha.
“Well, maybe you should ask Trudeau about this.”
But Trudeau isn’t in charge of hospitals.
“This is the whole plan, OK? Plan?
“I don’t know exactly. I don’t know why you’re asking me. I’m just a regular person that wants to go back to normal. Why can’t we just call it a day and say this is a regular flu just like any other flu?”
She turned away to watch the people in the parking lot. Later that day, Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole said he would meet with the convoy.
Freelance journalist Justin Ling asked him what he was thinking, twice, and O’Toole couldn’t say, trying to placate a part of the base.
Look, everyone’s tired. This is hard. The anti-vaccine movement does not encompass the entire unvaccinated population. There are still many unvaccinated people who lack institutional trust for good reason, or who find the barriers to vaccination still difficult, or who just need a trusted voice to tell them the truth.
But true anti-vaxxers simply cannot be made to see that vaccines are exceedingly safe, or that vaccines are the best tool to push society back toward normal, and they’re all over this convoy. The call to remove lockdowns came as Ontario approached a record for daily deaths in the province.
No prominent conservative seems to mention that the Americans have the same rule.
“I see it as pointless, because the U.S. has the exact same regulation for crossing south, and you have to cross south before you can come north and deal with the Canadian regulations,” said one vaccinated trucker who requested anonymity. “So what’s the point of it? You can’t go down to protest at the White House, because you’d need to get them to change their regulation first.
“I think you’re seeing a small proportion that are anti-vaxx that are involved in trucking, and what scares me is all these other fringe groups that are latching onto it, and if something does go wrong, it’s another black eye for truckers. There are so many other things in trucking they could be protesting.”
It is no surprise that Canada has a segment of the population that are victims of misinformation, or of hatred. It’s no shock we have media, mainstream and otherwise, that feed both. And sadly, it’s no shock that the Conservative party considers that group as potential voters.
In a way, it’s like COVID in reverse. You don’t need a big percentage of people to get really sick to overwhelm the hospitals; you don’t need a big percentage of people to oppose vaccines to overwhelm the parking lot of Bass Pro Shops. We have to live with this fringe, whatever it is. Sure.
But we also have a major party embracing the giddy inchoate rage of our angriest citizens, and it doesn’t take too much imagination to see where that could go next. You know why those flags were everywhere? Because this is Canada. And we have to find a way to live with that.
‘‘
What scares me is all these other fringe groups that are latching onto (the rally), and if something does go wrong, it’s another black eye for truckers.
VACCINATED TRUCKER

[Wayne_Kozun]

Encouraging news:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-24/u-k-to-end-covid-testing-for-vaccinated-travelers

Not sure if/when Scotland buys into the plan.

If you fly through LHR does it matter what the policy is in Scotland?  Will they impose it on domestic UK flights?

[David_Tepper]

Wayne -

Here is the latest info for international visitors heading Scotland:

https://www.visitscotland.com/travel/getting-to-scotland/overseas/

https://www.visitscotland.com/about/practical-information/covid-19-recovery-phases/

I flew San Francisco to Heathrow to Inverness this past August. I did have to complete a passenger locator form before leaving SF to say where I would be staying in Scotland. When landing in Inverness there was no attempt to screen arriving passengers or separate domestic visitors from overseas visitors.

DT

[Wayne_Kozun]

Thanks David.  So coming from the US and Canada the restrictions are gone in Feb.

[David_Tepper]

Wayne -

Yes, the restrictions will be lifted for those who are vaccinated.

DT