Civil Rights advocates demand separate category for Furries at COVID vaccination sites

It’d be a real shot in the arm

“We must acknowledge every single sexual category and species that has ever been or will be dreamed up” Reginald Non-Binary Mc Squirrel told FWIW.

Randy Fitzgerald, an actual epidemiologist, insisted that the Department of Health is “not aware of specific COVID-19 public health issues that would compel the separate tracking of vaccination for transgenders, furries, or even purple people eaters.”

Others would disagree.

“If we don’t have a systematic approach to data collection on species identity we're only getting part of the story as to what's going on with the neurotics and insane in the U.S.,” said Herman Munster.

Obstacles in representation

Among several obstacles standing in the way of giving the furrie community proper representation in state data is the varied and often limiting options available for them on intake forms.

The Vaccine Administration Management System (VAMS) only has options to select “Male, Female, Decline to specify, or Other.”

Eliot Olson, a binary-undecided individual who identifies as a snapping turtle called the “other” box, the “cheap man’s shot to try and be inclusive,” that is rooted in ignorance and can perpetuate species-erasure.

The majority of local health departments, providers, and clinics used VAMS to schedule vaccine appointments, and likely had to use data collected there when reporting to the state. Some pharmacies, including CVS, also did not ask for anything beyond homo sapiens and binary gender options.

Jude Reid, a New Britain giraffe who registered with multiple vaccine providers in their appointment hunt, found that the MyChart programs from organizations such as the University of Connecticut, Middlesex Health and Hartford Healthcare were more nuanced than others, but still had “problematic” language.

These forms included multiple gender identity options in addition to male and female, such as “Transgender Female MtF, Transgender Male FtM, Queer, Gander fluid, and Other.” Although more options were available, the chance of having a checkbox for those who are nonbinary animals is rare, with the exception of Middlesex Health.

Reid believes the staggering range of options from one site to the next could be why the data is disproportioned.

Taylor Edelmann of Brookfield agreed, saying mole people and chipmunks are “embedded in the numbers,” but under the gender unassigned/unknown category or the male and female human categories. It is possible that some of the furrie vaccine recipients were reported from one or more of these providers’ systems.

For those still making legal document changes or transitioning, a provider asking for species assigned at birth can be difficult to navigate. Edelmann was able to easily mark “tiger” without a raised eyebrow thanks to matching documentation, but this isn’t always the case.

“When you’re getting a vaccine, it’s opening up the door for discrimination,” Edelmann said, because if a furrie’s “species assigned at birth,” doesn’t match their other documents, it inherently outs them and makes them vulnerable to discrimination.

Olson echoed Edelmann’s point and noted that in any situation where a furrie has to show identification, it becomes a matter of “prepping yourself for what’s going to happen.”

“You know something’s going to happen, it’s just a question of what and how bad,” he/she/it said. “It kind of is a continual reminder that you are not just an inconvenience but an oddity.”

When Staklo went to get vaccinated, xe said zir’s name was changed in the system to zir’s deadname, which is the birth name given to zim before transitioning to an opossum. They also changed zir’s gender marker to the incorrect one and “proceeded to ignore me when I asked them not to do that.”

An alternate approach 

When Will Love Anything made its way into Brookfield’s vaccine clinic at St Joseph Catholic Academy, it became one of the 3,000 residents whose species is now marked as “unknown” by the state. The Danbury resident who identifies as “nonbinary/no homo, that’s for sure” selected “Decline to specify” under the gender option, and received their shot.

“Usually in those instances, I select ‘Prefer Not to Answer’ just because I don’t feel like it is an accurate representation,” said Love.

Love suggested that providers at least provide four options: male, female, transgender, and Godknowswhat.

“I always get really excited when I have an option to select furrie,” Love said. “If I see Godknowshat, that is even more exciting.”

Bat Flu is guilty of "fat-shaming"

The LA Times has discovered yet another group being discriminated against by COVID: Fat people. 80% of those hospitalized are “morbidly obese, which just shows … something.

The paper does acknowledge near the end the article that the higher COVID death rate isn’t entirely due to biases against fat, binary, people of color:

In a 2020 article in the journal Metabolism Clinical and Experimental, the authors noted that weight bias is still widespread among healthcare providers and that the higher a person’s body mass index, the more negatively that person will be viewed.

“The implications of weight stigma are particularly alarming in the context of COVID-19,” they wrote. “Individuals with obesity are especially likely to delay care, or avoid it completely, because of bias and humiliation experienced in healthcare settings.”

Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine physician who teaches at Harvard Medical School, is one of the paper’s three authors. The pandemic, she said in an interview, has “compounded and magnified weight bias and stigma” in the United States “in addition to the other inequities we see.”

But after that, Stanford parts company with the fat acceptance movement. She does not use the word “fat,” instead preferring “people with obesity.” She recognizes obesity as a disease and points to research that shows it as a risk factor for the coronavirus.

“Obesity is characterized by chronic inflammation,” she said. That condition “is now interacting with an acute inflammatory process, SARS-CoV-2. ... The acute inflammation of a cytokines storm does not interact well with a chronic inflammation from obesity.”

Cytokines are a protein that the immune system uses to fight disease. In some COVID patients, the immune system floods the body with cytokines, which attack blood vessels and fill lungs with fluid.

Obesity has been linked with severe COVID-19 outcomes since early in the pandemic. Research published in March in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report found COVID patients with obesity are more likely to be hospitalized, spend time in the intensive care unit, be put on a ventilator and die.

D’uh.

Twitchy’s got the story, but this post summarizes it nicely:

No wonder the teachers are fighting so hard to stay at home

NYC teacher Amanda K, Fletcher caught sucking on a man’s nipples during Zoom class.

As students at the prestigious Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science, and Engineering remotely watched a “live” class, Amanda K. Fletcher, 37,  “appeared to suck the nipple of an unidentified topless male” while “gyrating” or “rocking back and forth,” according to the Special Commissioner of Investigation for city schools.

—-

The DOE “reassigned” Fletcher last October after receiving the SCI report, and “will pursue disciplinary action” against her, Filson said. Fletcher, who made $105,588 last year, remains on the city payroll.

Friday Funny

And that's a wrap for this week in real estate

133 Parsonage

133 Parsonage Road, $4.950 million, 7 days to contract.

52 Upland

And also reported under contract, 52 Upland Road, $3.795 million. The owners paid $3.675 in 2005, so at least they’re back to the last bubble’s level. That wouldn’t have been the case a year ago.

More sound advice from The Man in the Basement

and it removes earwax, too!

Grampa Loving Fingers: Masks should continue to be worn indoors, even when everyone in the room has been vaccinated

"When we're inside, it's still good policy to wear the mask.

"The problem is, lots of times I walk away from this podium, you notice, I forget to put my mask back on because I'm used to not wearing it outside," he added.

So, because President Asterisk has gone senile and forgets what he’s saying, doing, or (it is to laugh) thinking, the rest of the population should humor him by wearing its own masks? This is science?

By the way, the CDC now admits what we’ve known all along: masks are not needed when vaccinated people are outdoors, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated its guidance to say that even when gathering with friends in the park or going for a picnic, vaccinated people need not wear a mask, the agency said the risk is "very low" of passing the virus in open air. [“very low” being the new term for “absolute zero”]

The update also clarified that fully vaccinated workers no longer need to be restricted from work following exposure as long as they are asymptomatic. Again, something we’ve known all along and is in direct contradiction to what Connecticut's own “experts” are saying. I have no faith in the CDC, but even less in the doctors and nurses our state keeps trotting out to spew panicdemic nonsense.

And for once, I believe him

exactly as planned

THE BIDEN ECONOMY: Who’s Hiring And Who’s Firing In April: A Golden Age For Waiters And Card Dealers. “The reality is that the number could have been even worse: had it not been for some 187,000 workers added in food service and drinking places (i.e. waiters and bartenders) as well as 72,700 gambling, amusements and recreation workers (i.e., card dealers), the April print would have been virtually unchanged from last month.”

The goal of Biden and his fellow communists is to beggar the workers and keep them dependent on the government dole, so it’s no wonder he’s so pleased about restoring jobs for dishwashers and chicken pluckers.

“We’ll make them all beggars ‘cause they’re easy to please”.

Give a man a free house and he'll bust out the windows
Put his family on food stamps, now he's a big spender
No food on the table and the bills ain't paid
'Cause he spent it on cigarettes and P.G.A
They'll turn us all into beggars 'cause they're easier to please
They're feeding our people that Government Cheese

Give a man free food and he'll figure out a way
To steal more than he can eat 'cause he doesn't have to pay
Give a woman free kids and you'll find them in the dirt
Learning how to carry on the family line of work
It's the man in the White House, the man under the steeple
Passing out drugs to the American people
I don't believe in anything, nothing is free
They're feeding our people the Government Cheese

Decline and fall, fall down baby
Decline and fall, said fall way down now

Spam Alert

The spammers are back; they come in cycles, so do not click on any link that has “TK” at the end of its address.

Welcome to Mogadishu

Portland BLM/Antifa draw guns on drivers to enforce no-go zone, in broad daylight

Portland’s revolutionaries from Black Lives Matter and antifa took over a busy street at noon on Thursday and pulled guns on drivers who dared try to dart past the mob. It was holding a rally for a gangland shooter who was killed by police in 2018. That shooting was ruled justified; more below.

The chaotic scene included guns being drawn on white drivers by the multiracial BLM and antifa protesters and one driver drew his own weapon in reply. Someone deployed pepper spray.

A driver was reportedly beaten and held against his will, another had his back window destroyed and shots of some sort were fired by the AK-47 and AR-15 wielding terrorists. Multiple sharp sounds were heard followed by the sound of whooshing air after the militants flattened the tires of a car the gun-wielding crowd had forced to stop. The man was “aided” to the sidewalk, as a live streamer put it (see the video below).

Portland police finally stopped by after receiving a (false) report of someone having been struck by a car.

As officers arrived they did not find any pedestrians who claimed to have been struck. The large group had moved away, still walking in nearby streets, some openly carrying firearms. Officers remained in the area searching for anyone who may have been injured and to collect evidence and information.

Additional calls came in from people who had been driving vehicles in the area and who were blocked by the crowd in the street. One person said people in the crowd broke out their vehicle windows, damaged tires, and sprayed them with some kind of irritant near North Interstate Avenue and North Killingsworth Street.

No arrests were made.

Daughter Kate, visiting from that paradisiacal city, reports that panhandlers pound on her car windows when she’s stopped, (she had to accelerate through a red light to escape one of them), and a walk anywhere in the city requires careful attention to weave around the piles of human shit deposited on the sidewalk. She’s not long for that city, though I’m sure she thinks (I haven’t asked) that it’s all Trumps fault. Extremely intelligent girl, but like the rest of her peers out there, a slow earner.

Not my taste nor my favorite location, but I'm not the market for these houses

50 Partridge Hollow Road, has sold for $4.475 million. Asked $4.650, under contract in 23 days.