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Wednesday, September 01, 2021
Al Leiter, John Smoltz won’t appear at MLB Network studios after refusing vaccine
Hall of Famer John Smoltz and former Met and Yankee Al Leiter will no longer appear in-studio for MLB Network after refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine, The Post has learned.
MLBN has made it mandatory for all employees to be vaccinated, with the mandate going into effect Sept. 1. MLBN executives, Smoltz and Leiter made a compromise to keep them on-the-air, but not in the Secaucus studios. They will both appear remotely for the shows.
Smoltz will also still call a Division Series game on site in October. The two are regular in-studio analysts for the network.
RoyalsRetro (AG#1F)
Posted: September 01, 2021 at 12:27 AM | 153 comment(s)
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I wouldn't count on that.
If I’m Smoltz’s broadcast partner, my agent is on the phone right now to see what the options are in that October booth for distancing.
They've always been two of the sharpest minds in the game.
There is a Twitter account that comes up with Seinfeld plot lines for today's world, and one was George pretending he wasn't actually vaccinated so he doesn't have to go to work, which seems perfect.
Can someone translate this to English?
I know two Georges then.
Those provisions certainly exist from last year, when broadcast partners would sit 15 feet apart, have a plexiglass barrier between them, etc. I certainly wouldn't go out of my way to provide them for Smoltz at this point, though.
I trust all my medical decisions to Facebook, Twitter, and random dudes who "did their own research" over the random notions from medical professionals who have spent their adult lives researching and working with the issues.
Smoltz is young and thin - he’s probably at an almost unmeasurably small risk. He won’t die if he gets it and his antibody profile will be much better than just getting a shot.
I could be wrong because the data on this is very difficult to tease out. Even if you do the eye test, all these people who are pictured as “young and healthy” are all obese.
In other words, obesity is a risk factor, but hardly dispositive.
I heard the virus had a meeting at which it decided to only kill fat people. At the same meeting, they decided that heart, brain, and kidney damage would only go to ugly people.
If you are talking about actual studies please link them. If you are talking about someone who is not actually studying it but is looking at raw numbers and making bad extrapolations don't bother.
When you look at real data scientist looking at the numbers you see that the protection does fall but by maybe 10-15% (so 75-85% effective still). That is from data scientist that are looking at raw numbers, if you have the actual studies link them.
There are a lot of people that are looking at any raw numbers that help their case and making their own non-scientific conclusions. While I have seen it done by pro-vaccination people the majority of it is done by anti-vaccination people.
"I am badly brain-damaged & keep having to replace my keyboard because of all the drooling."
No one here felt that way about the flu 2 years ago. You’d all go to work, spread it around to your co-workers who would take it home to their parents who would die. Did anyone here feel bad about that ? Of course not.
What everyone here is saying is that this is a “pandemic” and therefore we can tell people what to do now, humiliate them if they don’t “follow the science” and sanction them if they don’t do what we tell them to do. Yet you were all trying to kill my parents with the flu just two short years ago and you couldn’t have cared less.
When was the last pandemic that we couldn't have cared less about who we killed?
It is a matter of scale. We seem to be WAY more worried about the rain and wind in Louisiana now then we were a couple of weeks ago. I mean if wind or rain damaged my house and hurt someone just two weeks ago the national guard would not have been called out at all.
Oh, and don't go to work with the flu, that is selfish and dumb. That was true 2 years ago too.
Here's some analysis of the Israel numbers (I believe I discovered it in the "Empty stadiums" thread). The effectiveness of the vaccines in Israel is still very high once you account for age and other conditions.
For the last time I want you to...... wait, you agree with me. holy ####
GIDP are strongly correlated with OBP. Once you adjust for context you can actually see that GIDP are a strong negative (which of course makes sense)
Yup, the same meeting where it decided it wouldn't be spread by two million, largely un-vaccinated people streaming across the southern border.
saying it is not a super spreader event is not the same thing as saying they cannot/are not spreading it.
Just his afternoon I got an alert from my local hospital that, starting immediately “ Individuals who test positive for COVID-19 and have underlying conditions may be able to avoid hospitalization or severe illness through outpatient monoclonal antibody therapy.” What are those co-morbidites - BMI index of 25 or higher or a supresswd immune system. So if you test positive and are fat they are immediately going to defcon 5 like they did with Trump.
None of this is particularly surprising. These viruses are natures way of culling the weak, old and sick from the herd
Doing a dumb thing two years ago is an argument for doing an even dumber thing now? You're going to have to sharpen that one up a bit before it's ready for sharing publicly, I think.
More to the point - and this IS a point that is made over and over again - the true point where we decide, collectively, in civil societies, to enforce these kind of restrictions is quite simply the point at which the healthcare system risks collapse. The fact that New Orleans hospitals had a hard time being evaluated before the approaching hurricane because surrounding hospitals were full of Covid patients is pertinent here. At the point where anyone who wants to get vaccinated can get vaccinated, and the point where the choices of the unvaccinated don't actively threaten to destroy available hospital capacity for the rest of us, the restrictions go away.
And that's not a theoretical argument. Almost all Western societies have activated and deactivated suppression techniques when they thought they could, not when Covid cases, hospitalisations, or deaths were down to zero. They relaxed social distancing, re-opened sporting event attendance, and so on when they believed that doing so would not overwhelm medical care facilities. We have the evidence over the past 15 months or so to show it. Exceptions are countries like New Zealand that are a long way behind in vaccination and have, due to geographical isolation, a hope in hell of interrupting new Covid waves before they become significant.
Posts like 8 and 11, of course, actively make the problem worse by increasing the pressure on healthcare systems as the unvaccinated continue, out of a combination of cowardice, gullibility, and the need to reflexively troll, to prolong the problem. Perhaps they actually love lockdowns and want to sustain them. It would make more logical sense than almost anything else they post.
Did the flu kill 650,000 Americans 2 years ago?
Thank you. Lordy.
In the UK, as of 6 August, 88.8% of the adult population had at least one jab, while 73.8% were fully vaccinated. However, 55% of those hospitalised - not those testing positive - were unvaccinated.
Since older and less healthy people are far more likely to be vaccinated, due to prioritisation, than younger and healthier people, we can safely conclude that hospitalisations are not only disproportionately affecting those who haven't gotten the vaccine, but also those considered least at risk from Covid and therefore not prioritised by the UK health service.
I'm sure there will be some fascinating facts on why these figures don't count or UK obesity is spelled differently or it's all a conspiracy by the BBC or all the old fat sick people got together and decided not to get vaccinated just to stick it to the statistics authority or something, but at least that will be more entertaining than the usual anti-vax lazy falsehoods.
JFC, hospitals all over Texas and neighboring states -- and I'm sure we're not alone -- are full with COVID patients such that non-covid emergency patients for all the other time-critical causes like heart attacks and car wrecks and allergic reactions have nowhere to go because a bunch of infantile meatheads are conned into believing that getting their antibodies the old fashioned way is somehow preferable. No, no issue at all with their altruistic selflessness.
Geez, are there still people who haven't seen Wargames a few dozen times?
In this same meeting, they decided that this should cause apocalyptic conditions only in Texas, Florida, and Missouri, and not Arizona or California.
"After very careful consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks."
I can't believe General Beringer doesn't get cited more often among movie badasses.
1. Unvaccinated people are easier for the virus to infect, which gives more opportunity for mutation, as Nieporent said.
2. It is not the plague, but it sure as hell is not the flu.
3. From the beginning back in 2020, keeping hospital ICUs from overflowing was always one of the key goals. It is a real problem in some states now.
4. Delta spreads faster than Alpha and vaxxed people can still get it and spread it, even asymptomatically. But they are less likely to to get it and far, far less likely to get really sick or die.
5. Masks are not foolproof for fine particulates, but they do clearly help.
6. It is all about risk mitigation, not elimination. There will always be some risk. More people vaxxed=less risk and eventually very little collective risk, or "normal life." We are a long way from that now.
As to Leiter and Smoltz, I think not getting vaxxed unless you have a legit medical exemption, and certain types of religious exemptions, is dumb, and both Smoltz and Leiter are Hard Right ideologically even by baseball player standards, so this is no surprise. But if people have religious or medical exemptions and are able to work remotely, then fair enough, from a legal POV. We have people at the college I work at who are doing exactly what Smoltz and Leiter are doing.
Covid is working this way more so than not but historically viruses have a way of being pretty damn random (from our point of view) as to who they decide to take and not take.
Your eugenics way of looking at it is pretty disturbing.
It used to be important for people to protect those who cannot protect themselves, now it seems we are way more interested in not doing things that are slight discomforts to us to protect anyone.
(And the thing that really sucks about it is that, even though they did it for a mixture of stubbornness and rightist paranoia/brainwashing, if there is booster shot overreach, the Smoltzes and the Leiters of the world will say, "See, I was smart -- there was no way I was going to get myself involved with a jab every six months, the people who got them in the spring were complete suckers.")
I haven't figured out yet exactly what I think yet, and there's some unknown about future events, but my first pass at this is that the unvaccinated should be mandatorily quarantined (*) before those of us that got vaccinated should have to submit to mandatory boosters for the indefinite future. Nor do I see any ethical dilemma in giving finite Covid hospital beds to the vaccinated. This is all heading to a ... not good place. The patience of the vaccinated with the unvaccinated is already rightly low; if it turns out that their bullshit has had the effect of subjecting the vaccinated to indefinite mandated or quasi-mandated booster shots, the patience will fray entirely.
(*) Or the like.
Yes. Never sounded remotely interesting to me.
This is just a bad flu, that’s all it’s ever been. Yet we act as if it’s completely different animal. We’ve always had vaccines for that flu and we could mask up like the Asians do when we get sick. But we don’t. Why should we now ?
One argument is so virtue signallers can get a hospital bed if they need one for their cosmetic surgery. I guess that’s one way to look at it.
If you're not going to argue honestly, could you at least come up with more entertaining falsehoods? The ones you're trotting out are stale. Covid is approximately 20 times more dangerous than flu, it's a 'bad flu' in the same way that China is 'just a large Spain'.
This pretty much says it all.
in what way is this a bad flu? I mean what is your cut off from bad flu to something completely different.
The biggest difference between this and the flu in terms of protecting the vulnerable is the fact that you are almost always symptomatic when you are spreading the flu and that is not the case with Covid.
If you are sick with the flu, again, don't go to work. That was never acceptable.
No one said anything about any number of deaths being meaningless so quite that argument or save it for someone that says it is.
I am honestly not sure if you are being real with this quote.
If you have to make up scenarios to fit your view you might need to re-evaluate your views. ICU's are never used for cosmetic surgeries and the fact that you think they are either means you are not being serious or you are trying as hard as you can to find reasons not to care.
Can I ask why you are putting pandemic in quotes? Do you not believe this is effecting multiple countries, crossing borders and affecting a large amount of people?
The 1919 influenza tended to kill the young and healthy more as the immune response went into overdrive.
Fight the power, Bob!!!
Tell 'em you want the Apple Ivermectin and NOT the Microsoft chip!
It doesn't seem that kind of fighting spirit was passed on to his boy, who said he was vaccinated back in March.
At this point, people like Boone, Smoltz, and Leiter are parasitical free riders. #### them.
It’s exactly the same thing in its presentation and it’s affects as Covid. Covid is more contagious and more deadly. It’s a bad flu. Once everyone gets antibodies it will recede from our discourse. Each year a new Covid vaccine will be mixed with the new flu vaccine and that will be that. Then all of you can proceed to go back to work when you are sick and killing your elders like you always have.
This “pandemic” is nothing like what happened 100 year ago. Nothing. “ Two years later, nearly a third of the global population, or an estimated 500 million people, had been infected in four successive waves. Estimates of deaths range from 17.4 million to 100 million, with an accepted general range of 25-50 million, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in human history.” There were about 2 billion people back then and 8 billion now. So to qualify as a real pandemic we’d need deaths worldwide to be about 100 million.
Our “ pandemic” is a rounding error.
It’s human nature to think you are living in some pivotal time. People always exaggerate the importance of what they are going through - how else could you sell newspapers.
Mine has a vaccine mandate (applies to 98% of employees) and unvaccinated persons are not going to be allowed on campus (healthcare business campus, I don’t work for a school), absent checks, etc… Masks are also mandated in most situations. For that matter, said campus has been off-limits to most employees (apart from those who can’t work remotely) since … April of late year? (It will reopen in a month or so.)
It is true that the 1918 pandemic killed people in their prime which makes it a far worse situation than today. Most Covid deaths, at least early on, were people who didn’t have long to live.
As to hospitals, I live in one of the very worst areas for Covid. Our positive test rate a week ago bounced over 20% and our hospitals are bursting at the seams. I just had outpatient surgery and wasn’t affected at all. Life is going on. The military has been brought in to several places to provide support - its not ideal but the system is handling it. None of the medical people in my surgical area are using Covid masks. They masked up in the operating room but not in any other areas. I found that interesting. Not sure what to make of that.
Not like killing grandma, at least.
Of course, some Americans think they caught the virus when it was allegedly circulating in November 2019. If the virus was circulating then, then antibodies for old variants may not be much of a defense.
Thanks to the precautions and the vaccines that you hate. But yeah sure.
Hiroshima was a fire, like Chicago in 1871, 9/11 was a plane crash into a building, like Cory Lidle. This is fun.
Details still to be worked out with the unions on full return (I'm a consultant though and they can just tell me what the rules are and I can accept them or move on), but right now it looks like vaccination mandatory for return to office, with some options to work from home. Though if your manager believes you need to be at the office and you're not vaccinated ... well they're working those things out. And no large scale returns until all of these things are worked out.
Though there's an election going on now and things might change if there's an upset and the Liberals don't end up in power.
My employer has made vaccination a condition of employment effective later this year. I am glad about this
I showed up to get a shot that was advertised to make me live forever, but it did not appear to be a licensed medical facility, so I declined. I apologize if my mortality is spread to anyone who would otherwise live forever.
No, not the essence of natural selection unless you think the predator/prey relationship is the entirety of natural selection. You are looking at strength of gene pool entirely wrong here. natural selection also gave us sickle cell anemia which at one point is a strength and another a weakness. Strength and weakness is dependent on what is being faced, so todays strength in natural selection is tomorrows weakness faced under different pressures. In fact if we do not see Covid again for 50 years it will be the elderly that will be more protected than the young.
It could be argued that protecting the elderly and the weak is part of our natural selection. They were able to live longer than maybe they should and were able to pass on knowledge that was not needed for every generation.
You treating this as natures way of naturally selecting is a eugenics argument. The herd doesn't sacrifice the weak so they can live their lives they form groups to protect their weak sometimes it works, some times it doesn't.
It's always annoyed me that Bucky killed Tony Stark's parents and basically got off scott-free. (I refuse to watch "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" because of that.)
Probably my favourite movie as a teenager. (Oh, and in the movie Gen. Barrenger declares DEFCON 1, which in real life only the president can do.)
You're allowed to put a word in quotes if you want to denigrate it...you know, like the smart set did to the word "president" from 2001-09 and again from 2017-21. (Apparently, it's improper to do that now.)
This is really funny. From someone who has come across as self important enough to make their own definitions of what a pandemic is and is not, what constitutes an over worked hospital system, and states what is significant and what is a rounding error you seem to think we are the ones making things up.
This fits the definition of pandemic (sorry you were not in the room when they defined it)
The hospital systems says they are overwhelmed (you should give them their number so you can tell them that with the aid of the military they are just fine)
600,000 - 800,000 people are a rounding error (3rd or 4th leading cause of death last year is now a rounding error. So with you it's heart disease, cancer or a rounding error)
You are quite literally deluding yourself.
It's an ego trip not a desperate bid for attention -- though of course there's an aspect of that.
And COVID is much more deadly than the flu. I can’t believe people are still making this argument in Sept 2021. In a typical flu season, 50% of the population gets vaxxed and 35k die (~200 per day if you define flu season as 6 months). Right now, about 50% of the US population is vaxxed against COVID and we are taking stronger other preventative measures and we are still losing over 1,000 per day.
And yes, the ignore button is your friend.
I saw it When it came out -- almost 40 years ago -- and it was quite an enjoyable film. I don't know that it has aged well as a movie, but it is definitely part of the culture, and gets referenced all the time -- particularly "How about a nice game of chess?"
Ignore him, either using ignore, or using self-control.
But please don't feed him. We don't need to have the pool contaminated with Duck shit.
Sometimes, I *really* kick myself for missing the obvious joke sitting there for the taking.
"The Duck of Death", indeed ...
Well, that and "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." which would *also* reference #93 ...
Please don't underestimate the stupidity of an enormous number of our fellow Americans.
In addition to, or instead of, looking to Israel as the prototype, people should read about the success that the Danes have enjoyed. Then again, those who can read, are probably not the ones lying in hospital beds on respirators berating hospital workers that Covid is not real.
Sorry, not the slightest shred of sympathy......except for the health care workers, of course.
1. Smoltz shouldn’t be shamed or canceled because he doesn’t feel he is at risk and prefers not to get the shot. Who cares ? Why is he an idiot? It’s a personal choice
2. The govt and the press love this story - it’s a way to create all kinds of pressure points to exert more control over you. Vaccine passports, shunning the deplorables, Etc etc.
3. Covid is just a bad version of the flu. It’s more lethal and more contagious but basically the same thing. I’m not sure why people argue it’s different. Yes it’s killing more people but it’s got the same general characteristics. A respiratory illness that can be mitigated by social distancing and hygiene and has an annual vaccine that will need to be tweaked to protect against new variants.
4. This is what diseases do - they kill the weak, the old and the infirm. Upending our whole society to try to beat Mother Nature is an economic and social disaster. That’s not some crazy right wing theory - thats life.
I, and everyone in my family, got vaxxed on day 1 and I will get a booster as soon as it becomes available but if that’s not something my neighbor feels comfortable with I’m not calling him an idiot like all of you. Three older members of my family died within a month of vaccination - could have been lots of other things that did that but no one will ever know. We shouldn’t condemn people who don’t want to do this.
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