Bullshit.

I have family members all the way up the Fox News Facebook misinformation hole, and they didn’t get vaccinated because they felt respected; they got vaccinated because their children told them they wouldn’t get to see their grandchildren until they got vaccinated.

They're talking about a military coup right now and if it doesn't happen we're going to be told the best way to heal is pretending it never happened.

This is how abuse works.

3,000 people are dying a day and after nearly a year of this Congress is releasing the barest fraction of the economic relief needed to keep people safe and only in exchange for the promise that we can't sue those who endangered the dead.

This is how abuse works.

We have a president who spent 4 yrs lying every time he opened his mouth, obvious lies everyone knew were lies, which his followers believed mostly because the sight of them believing lies caused the rest of us distress, and they loved our distress.

This is how abuse works.

We've endured the sight of police brutalizing our fellow citizens for years, a horror magnified by the knowledge that for Black people this brutality has been a constant way of life, but we're told change must wait, because we aren't asking right.

This is how abuse works.

We have been menaced and lied to and confronted with a daily litany of atrocity that has only made the Republican rank and file happier, and the only message we ever get is that we need to be better at relating to the feelings of people who find comfort in suffering.

It's abuse.

The Great American Forgetting Project starts today. They're going to simultaneously try to tell us the last four years were an aberration that is over, and that it never happened.

And it's natural to want to forget these awful years.

It's our moral duty not to.

Those who benefit from our country's malicious priorities will do everything they can now to get us to forget how incontrovertibly Trump exposed those priorities.

Many of us thought we were something better than we were, but now we know.

We've seen our nation's face.

And many among us knew the truth all along. Many of us always saw our nation unmasked, because they were the ones who suffered it.

They told us all along, and the rest of us didn't listen.

Now that they've been proven correct, we're going to be asked to not listen again.

We can't deny anymore, that there are people among us, everywhere, for whom no lie is so obvious they won't believe it, as long as they think it serves their ends.

They don't care about truth, and never did.

We should care about truth, and speak it plain.

This is us.

We've seen our national tolerance for open racism, for cruelty, for corruption, for false equivocation.

Not just the tolerance, but the enthusiasm.

Trump didn't create it. It was there. He exploited it.

We'll never become what we want to be if we don't admit what we are.

Yesterday was the deadliest in U.S. history, a situation created by Republican leadership, who continue to actively fight against any remedy, while our media covers the president's unlawful attempts to overturn an election as a "gambit"

I see the cause of our "political divide."

The idea astonishes, that there still exist opinion pieces suggesting those directly responsible for a rolling series of the deadliest days in U.S. history should face no consequence. The belief that a few people matter and the rest do not has never been more nakedly exposed.

Killing people because you want them dead is divisive.
Abandoning them to a virus when you could save them is divisive.
Making them die of cancer when you could give treatment is divisive.
Making them starve when you have food is divisive.

Yelling at the people doing it is not.

Lying is divisive.
Forcing people to live in your lie is divisive.
Convincing their friends and family that the lie is truth, until they no longer resemble themselves, is divisive.
Creating a media ecosystem to launder lies into truth is divisive.

Insisting on truth is not.

Corruption is divisive.
Profiting from your office is divisive
Breaking laws you still enforce upon others is divisive
Making law enforcement a profit center for the demolition of human lives is divisive

Seeking to punish corrupt actors and demolish corrupt institutions is not.

I've been wanting to write this thread for a while. It has been inspired by hearing a common thought: why can't people just "listen"? If people just followed the rules, we wouldn't be in this mess. I think this is oversimplification of the problem with COVID: 1/

It is true, there are people who haven't been following guidelines (by definition that happened a LOT at Christmas/NYE in my region), but even before, we know transmission in private gatherings happens. 2/

These private gatherings are pictured to be big raucous parties, but in reality, even before lockdown, this is just people having dinner, watching TV, doing things we did before on a daily basis. These little ripples when added across the country make a big wave.. 3/

...and little can be done about this apart from positive messaging. You can't very well have police patrolling neighbourhoods across the country. 4/

Next thing is we keep hearing over and over and over, stay home. There are diminishing returns with this advice, but also, most people who can stay home ARE. So what's the issue? There are a HUGE # of people who can't stay home because they work in essential jobs 5/

NEW: people worry when they hear "40% of hospitalisations are fully vaxxed", but this chart shows that's actually good news.

The more people you vaccinate, the higher their share of hospitalisations, but the *total* number in hospital is a fraction of what it would otherwise be

If fewer people are fully vaccinated, a smaller share of hospitalisations will be fully-vaxxed too, but this is not a good thing:

Overall there will be a lot more people in hospital because far more of the population is unprotected.

In other words: if you want to know whether the vaccination program is working, don't focus on whether the fully vaxxed make up 40% or 12% of hospitalisations.

Focus on whether the hospitalisation rate is 270 per million or 684 per million.

And since this is Twitter, I've prepared the same thing in meme form

But back to charts:

All the data we have suggests vaccines are working remarkably well. Far beyond what had been hoped for a year ago.

For example, a fully-vaxxed 80-year-old now has the same risk of dying from Covid as an unvaxxxed 50-year-old. That's an enormous drop in risk!

@PeterSchorschFL @CDCgov @NikkiFried Just now 6 kids are in hospital with Covid in Fl pneumonia is a given, here’s what a 9 yr old with pneumonia looks like. He spent 3 days in P-ICU 6 days in all in the hospital. If you could prevent a child from going through this just by wearing masks why the hell wouldn’t you?