March 7, 2022

"Even as a parent we don’t know, straight off the bat, if our kids are medically fragile or compromised in some sort of way... That’s the scary part about COVID."

"You just don’t know how it’s gonna affect your children or how it’s gonna affect you. We don’t know enough about this virus to be like, 'Oh yeah, this person will have a mild [case] and this person will end up with long COVID suffering for years, decades of their life, or losing their life.'... All of the mitigation measures need to be there. And then, if we have the right ventilation, if we have all of the testing and we still have really low community spread that is data informed, then sure. We can talk about unmasking, that’d be great."

Said Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, a professor at the CUNY School of Medicine, quoted in "'I Don’t Feel Like This Is a Safe Choice Yet'/The end of NYC’s school-mask mandate is a relief for many, but some worry the move is premature" (NY Magazine).

She says her son will be going back to school, but "with a mask and with his five spare ones in all the different pockets in his backpack."

80 comments:

tim maguire said...

We demand of COVID a level of certainty and safety that we demand of nothing else in our lives. Her son is more likely to die in a bus accident on the way to school than from COVID caught in school.

R C Belaire said...

Masks yesterday, masks today, masks tomorrow.

Mike Sylwester said...

Kaliris Salas-Ramirez is a kook.

It's likely that she became a professor at the CUNY School of Medicine largely because she is a Hispanic woman.

gilbar said...

We don’t know enough about this VACCINE to be like, 'Oh yeah, this person will have a mild [case] and this person will end up with long suffering for years, decades of their life, or losing their life.'...
fify!

tommyesq said...

Even as a parent we don’t know, straight off the bat, if our kids are medically fragile or compromised in some sort of way... That’s the scary part about COVID [vaccines].

FIFY

Jersey Fled said...

This woman is psychotic.

Lucien said...

Well, at least she’s doing all she can to make sure he is crippled by fear and unable to weigh competing risks and benefits.
Does she make him wear a helmet in the shower? Because I bet more kids will die in their bathrooms than from COVID19.

rhhardin said...

Women are not taken as serious people because they're not serious people, in the context of large systems that have to function reliably.

They're great at small systems, say a loose one like a household.

gilbar said...

Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, a professor at the CUNY School of Medicine
and Where did she go to med school at? Oh, RIGHT! She's a PhD!

Her doctoral dissertation focused on studying how the adolescent brain is different than the adult brain by looking at the immediate and long-term effects of anabolic steroids on social behaviors and neurogenesis in a rodent model. These studies determined that the adolescent brain is more vulnerable to the long-lasting effects of steroids

That DOESN'T Seem, to have A LOT to do with severity of Virus...
But, on the other hand; she clearly is Every Bit as knowledgeable about viruses as Dr. Jill!

Narayanan said...

Said Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, who works as a professor at the CUNY School of Medicine,
===========
so almost equal = medical knowledge? or lack thereof

at least with janitorial duties they would know if the tables floors and bathrooms are clean

effinayright said...

Apparently this lady didn't study statistics or epidemiology in college or med school.

Ditto thinking that all kids need vaccines to "protect" them from illnesses that only affect a tiny few, and they being obese or otherwise suffering from other serious problems.

So her FEELZ have taken over, and her brains get buried in the ground.

What a dumbass.

James K said...

These people are crazy. Seasonal flu is much more dangerous to their kids than Covid. And you could substitute "vaccine" for "long COVID" and "this virus" in that statement and make it more accurate.

JAORE said...

If your parent thinks like this person, you are being trained to be fragile.

Extremely low chance your kid will be seriously ill versus near certainty your kid will be negatively affected by mask and Corona panic.

Achilles said...

"She says her son will be going back to school, but "with a mask and with his five spare ones in all the different pockets in his backpack."

This is child abuse.

Chaswjd said...

The comment reflects a miscomprehension of the risks of COVID to a child. As of today's writing, there have been 944,000 deaths ascribed to COVID in the U.S. Of those deaths, 331 have been of children. While the statistics are not further broken down, no doubt many of the deaths are of those children with co-morbidities. While the author argues that one cannot be sure that one's child is free of a comorbidity, that assertion is just that. I am willing to bet that many of the children with co-morbidities had been diagnosed with them before even catching COVID. As a matter of pure statistics, the author's child is more likely to die in a car accident. The child is more likely to die of non-COVID pneumonia. The steps that the author is taking appear to be a function of her own anxiety rather than actual science.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
MadisonMan said...

I hope the parent in this case is not transferring all their worry onto their kid. That's one of the more difficult things of being a parent: shielding them from your own fears. I suspect some of that is happening, however, given the abundance of masks the child has. And that's unfortunate. The child will grow up trying to shield his Mom from heartache, and that's an inversion of the parent-child relationship.

Achilles said...

This is a comment on the parts of America that work and the parts that are parasites.

One company is trying to make a space delivery system.

University professors are torturing their own kids and anyone that gets sent to their system.

Our medical system has been corrupted by party apparatchiks.

Michael K said...

The idiots are taking over the medical schools. God help us.

dgstock said...

I look forward to further research into the pathophysiology of long COVID. The symptoms of fatigue, “brain fog”, breathlessness, myalgias are remarkably similar to those seen in (largely discredited) chronic EBV, chronic candidiasis, and chronic Lyme disease for which there is no objective evidence. These symptoms are also the defining characteristics of fibromyalgia/chronic fatigue syndrome, again for which there is little to no objective evidence aside from an association with some affective disorders and sleep disturbance. There’s a Venn diagram out there somewhere waiting to be drawn.

PM said...

There's that 'feel' verb again, the one that is the inarguable replacement for 'think'.

Joe Smith said...

This poor kid will end up like the main character in Pink Floyd's 'The Wall.'

'Hush now, baby, baby, don't you cry
Mamma's gonna make all of your nightmares come true
Mamma's gonna put all of her fears into you
Mamma's gonna keep you right here, under her wing
She won't let you fly, but she might let you sing
Mamma's gonna keep baby cosy and warm

Ooh babe, ooh babe, ooh babe
Of course, Mamma's gonna help build the wall'

Scott said...

oh that poor son

Roger Sweeny said...

If everyone is in prison, there will be no crime.

You can never be too sure.

Sebastian said...

"You just don’t know how it’s gonna affect your children or how it’s gonna affect you."

Actually you do, better than for most conditions. Check out the Oxford U individual risk calculator, still partly Delta-based, so overstated.

"We don’t know enough about this virus to be like, 'Oh yeah, this person will have a mild [case] and this person will end up with long COVID suffering for years, decades of their life, or losing their life.'"

We still don't know enough about driving to be like, oh, this person will get home safely, and this person will end up maimed.

"All of the mitigation measures need to be there."

All the oppressions of all the people who have very different risks and risk tolerances.

"She says her son will be going back to school, but "with a mask"

Might as well wear a scarlet C. Or should that be K?

Which I write from a place that shall remain nameless where there is not a mask in sight, anywhere, except on transit.

Rob C said...

You have to wonder if she was concerned about her child being stuck down by the flu in the pre-COVID years. Mortality rates for children for the flu are much higher than for COVID.

Real American said...

Often wrong, never in doubt.

David53 said...

Tasmanian devils may soon become extinct because of a communicable cancer known as devil facial tumor disease. Australians had high hopes that masking the devils would slow the spread of this deadly disease which generally kills within 6 months. Predictably, the masking effort failed. The Australian government then implemented a forced social distancing program by sending uninfected devils to various zoos located on other continents in hopes of saving the species.

madAsHell said...

The masks are a political stunt, and NO ONE has shown them to be effective.

medically fragile, or compromised

This sounds like something Joe Biden would say. What in the hell does that even mean?? She wants to create Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD).


By the way.........straight off the bat

Hilarious!!

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

So even a professor at a medical school can act like an paranoid idiot under duress of the COVID Karens running our Public Health apparatus. Facts mean so little to these emotional schizophrenics that I fear for the patients who will suffer from the “care” graduates of this alleged “medical” college.

Hey Skipper said...

From the article:

The impending end of mandatory masking in New York City’s schools has been particularly stressful for those who know they are vulnerable to COVID-19, such as Liat Olenick, an elementary-school teacher in Brooklyn.

“As someone who is immunocompromised and more vulnerable, despite being vaccinated, I really identify with other people in that situation,”


I can't count the number of times the immunocompromised have trotted out to prolong or intensify mandates of all kinds.

However, the assertion that the immunocompromised are more vulnerable doesn't pass the sniff test. After all, it isn't the virus that kills, but rather the body's reaction to it:

However, the association between COVID-19 and intense cytokine release [5] raises the possibility that immunosuppression may actually temper the exuberant inflammatory response in this infection. Severe COVID-19 disease has features of cytokine release syndrome and secondary hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis seen in patients with other viral infections (SARS-CoV, Middle East respiratory syndrome, Epstein-Barr virus) and patients receiving chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy due to innate immune activation by SARS-COV-2 [6, 7].

A review of various studies of immunocompromised C-19 patients yields this conclusion:

From our review of the existing literature to date, we can draw several preliminary conclusions about COVID-19 in immunocompromised patient populations. First, immunocompromised patients seem to have typical clinical manifestations of COVID-19. Second, patients with cancer and SOT recipients may be at higher risk of more severe COVID-19 disease. Third, patients taking biologics may not be at higher risk of severe disease based on current data; whether they are actually at lower risk of severe COVID-19 is not yet clear. Fourth, the current data in PWH are inconclusive regarding whether HIV imparts a higher risk of severe disease.

But wait, there's more! From the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health:

A large, nationwide study of COVID-19 cases led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has found that people taking medications that suppress the immune system—for example, to prevent transplant rejection or to treat cancer—overall do not have a higher risk of dying from COVID-19 or being put on a ventilator than non-immunosuppressed hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

The researchers analyzed electronic health records of adults hospitalized with COVID-19 from January 2020 to June 2021, covering 222,575 individuals, including 16,494—7 percent of the total cases in the study period—in which patients had been on immunosuppressive medications prior to hospitalization. The researchers separated these medications into 17 classes and found that none were associated with a significantly increased risk of being put on a ventilator—an indication of severe COVID-19 illness.


It seems that the vaunted journalist class is incapable of asking even the most obvious questions.

And it is high time the immunocompromised stop the emotional blackmail.

Eric said...

Does the professor allow her son to cross the street?

Balfegor said...

As a medical professional of some sort, she probably has a supply of real masks. But there's a fundamental disconnect, in talking about the mask mandate as a mitigation measure, where -- to make up hypothetical numbers -- 5% of masks are N95 and thus effective, 10% of masks are surgical masks and somewhat effective, and 85% of masks are cloth masks and almost completely ineffective. The mask mandate isn't going to do much of anything to retard community spread in the first place, if that's the distribution, so ending it just lets people who were wearing mostly ineffective cloth masks stop pretending.

Trying to make it about the children is just a cheap, tawdry, dishonest emotional ploy. Honestly, it disgusts me. Children are at minimal risk, and she knows that (hence the appeal to the possibility that your child might be the one in a million who is "medically fragile").

Static Ping said...

Mentally ill person tries to sound reasonable. Film at 11.

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...

""You just don’t know how it’s gonna affect your children or how it’s gonna affect you."

Emphasis on "you" (herself, that is). When the Democrats decided that fanning hysteria was the best method for getting rid of Trump, they spawned many a fragile monster. Now, as public opinion makes COVID hysteria no longer politically viable, these terrified ninnies are left defenseless, with their emotional investment no longer of value to anyone. And profoundly harmful to their children.

n.n said...

she became a professor at the CUNY School of Medicine largely because she is a Hispanic woman

That would be othering someone by virtue of their ethnicity. If they did it because she is a woman... female, of feminine gender, that would multiply their fault to exercise liberal license to indulge diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry). A wise something, indeed.

harrogate said...

rhardin bypassed systems and went straight to feelings.

Brent said...

The only disease that requires everyone else around the potential risk person to act. If she fears then for her child being at risk then it is she who should spend the time and money and keep her at risk child at home.

Done with the superior virtue crap.

Brent said...

Trying to make it about children is just a cheap, tawdry, dishonest emotional ploy. Honestly, it disgusts me.

Same. These are the people that ruin the daily lives of Americans.

Brent said...

Meant to use quotes symbols in the last comment for Balfegor's statement.

Caroline said...

I’m starting to notice that the branch covidians in my family seem to be sick with one thing after another. Almost as though 2 years in a mask/distanced Covid bubble had substantially weakened their immune systems or something. I have been waiting and waiting for someone out there to notice this.

jim5301 said...

"Women are not taken as serious people . . ."

Grow up.

Gospace said...

tim maguire said...
We demand of COVID a level of certainty and safety that we demand of nothing else in our lives. Her son is more likely to die in a bus accident on the way to school than from COVID caught in school.


In NYC also more likely to die in a random act of violence.

Iman said...

#HelicopterParentsRock

gilbar said...

her son will be going back to school, but "with a mask and with his five spare ones in all the different pockets in his backpack."

Wait a Minute! I'm getting confused. Is a mask to protect YOU, or to protect OTHERS?
Is she saying that Her kid is a Covid Carrier?
Because, i Thought; that *i* was supposed to have to wear a mask, TO PROTECT OTHERS?
I thought it was MY PATRIOTIC DUTY to wear a mask.. TO PROTECT OTHERS

IF having her little Jimmy wear a mask, with five spares, protects HIM..
Then Why The F*ck did *I* have to wear one for the last two years?


Serious Question: Does a mask (and 5 spares) work as a Placebo or a Talisman ?

Josephbleau said...

Sounds like an old Jody the Grinder lyric, "He had nine bad masks, an he had all of em on... one hangin behind. He had one danglin in front like a baseball bat, an he had a gatlin gun up his scraggly..."

Night Owl said...

Using her logic she should never allow her child to ride in a car again.

Virgil Hilts said...

OK, I write this before doing a GIS for this crank - I am willing to bet $100 bucks that this Kaliris Salas-Ramirez nut is overweight. 5 minutes later - yep.

Bruce Hayden said...

Odds are good that her son has already had COVID-19, likely the Omicron variant, and the symptoms were so mild that he didn’t miss much, if any school. At a minimum, she should have him tested for the antibodies before imposing that nonsense on him.

Amadeus 48 said...

Neurotic.

Jupiter said...

She's an AA hire, but does seem to have some scientific background. It's kind of bizarre how her political leanings completely override her scientific training. She apparently thinks that Birx and Biden know more about epidemiology than she does.

Iman said...

Neurosis is not just a Woody Allen thing…

exhelodrvr1 said...

That's a lifetime of insecurity waiting to happen.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

It's never a good thing to be sick with anything. The long-term consequences are usually slight, but even people who have more frequent colds have reduced life expectancy. We forget how people used to have shortened lives because of an accumulation of diseases and illnesses, so we get to pretend it's not true.

History did not start in 1950. Nor did ignoring history.

tommyesq said...

her son will be going back to school, but "with a mask and with his five spare ones in all the different pockets in his backpack."

By day 3 the kid will have six masks in different pockets of his backpack, at least 'til he gets back home.

Michael K said...

Making kids is child abuse. Injecting them with an experimental mRNA drug is a crime.

gilbar said...

Jupiter said...
She apparently thinks that Birx and Biden know more about epidemiology than she does.

she's a Psychologist. They Probably DO know more about epidemiology that she does

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I forgot to mention that the comments here are entirely focused on whether little Billy and Susie are going to die this week, as if that were the only issue. How convenient.

People who have had covid have more heart issues of all types in the following year. The same cannot be said for the vaccines. You would think reality would matter, but apparently showing that you are smarter than all those sheeple out there (taps temple) and can't be taken in like the others is more important. Feels good, doesn't it, to look down on others without the facts. That used to be the province of liberals, but conservatives joined them over the last two years. Shameful abandonment of reasoning.

Fustigator said...

I dont see a problem. If they are worried about it, they can mask up to their heart's content. Hell, wear a protective suit and N-95s all day every day.

But don't tell everyone else what to do. There has been plenty of time for high risk people to take whatever measures they are comfortable with and for the rest of us to assess the risk and respond as we see fit.

Govern yourself accordingly.

Maynard said...

Making kids is child abuse.

That seems a bit extreme, Michael. Spousal abuse may have been involved in some cases, but making kids is generally a good thing.

MadTownGuy said...

Anecdotally, I've experienced 'brain fog' - short term - from bouts of respiratory flu. An American Psychological Association article from 2003 indicates that cognitive impairment of some degree accompanies colds and flu.

"Research suggests that cold viruses cause sluggishness by interfering with neurotransmitters, perhaps affecting the transmission of noradrenaline, choline and dopamine. Noradrenaline is associated with reaction times. Choline has been linked to the encoding of new information, while dopamine affects working memory speed."

Not mentioned in the article is the role of fatigue from lost sleep. In any case brain fog is not a new phenomenon.

n.n said...

Covid-1, 2, 3... 19, 20, 21, and 22. Anyone who removes their mask, or leaves their cell, is a clear and progressive risk to granny in planned parent/hood.

Hey Skipper said...

Assistant Village Idiot: People who have had covid have more heart issues of all types in the following year. The same cannot be said for the vaccines. You would think reality would matter, but apparently showing that you are smarter than all those sheeple out there (taps temple) and can't be taken in like the others is more important.

What is the population of people who have had covid, and had heart issues in the following year?

What is the population of people who have been vaxxed?

(Hint: they aren't even remotely the same. But, being smarter than everyone else, I'm sure you already knew that.)

TheOne Who Is Not Obeyed said...

"[Older]People [and those with comorbidities] who have had covid have more heart issues of all types in the following year. "

FIFY.

Risk profile for heart issues is the same as the overall risk for the disease. Kids are not at any particular risk and are well-documented as not spreading the disease to adults or peers.

The topic is also masks, not vaccines.

But yeah, let's talk about a shameful abandonment of reasoning. Matter of fact, let's just start with basic reading comprehension.

Odi said...

I feel really sorry for her. To be so constantly afraid must be exhausting. She's demanding a level of control over Life's outcome that is impossible to meet.

Balfegor said...

Re: MadTownGuy:

Anecdotally, I've experienced 'brain fog' - short term - from bouts of respiratory flu.

Not sure whether we're all talking about the same thing, but the last time I had a serious bout of flu (more than ten years ago), I certainly experienced wooziness and disorientation. "Brain fog" is as good a description of it as anything.

jg said...

Given the inevitability of exposure to the pathogen, I challenge such people to consider carefully the psychological effect their fear-worship/ritual has on their kids, along with of course the long term effects of decreased face-reading experience during formative years.

Balfegor said...

Re: Assistant Village Idiot:

People who have had covid have more heart issues of all types in the following year. The same cannot be said for the vaccines. You would think reality would matter, but apparently showing that you are smarter than all those sheeple out there (taps temple) and can't be taken in like the others is more important. Feels good, doesn't it, to look down on others without the facts. That used to be the province of liberals, but conservatives joined them over the last two years. Shameful abandonment of reasoning.

So you think the mask mandates, as applied in the United States (not, say, Taiwan) have been effective? For heavens' sake, even a lot of the people who have made a great, theatrical show of their dedication to mask wearing (e.g. the mayor of DC) have regularly been caught violating their own mask mandates. As written (cloth masks suffice) and as implemented (haphazardly) it's been a complete joke.

That said, the end of mask mandates also opens up opportunities for even more effective self-protection, for those who are genuinely worried about the risk of infection. Currently, most places implementing mask mandates ban the use of vented masks, e.g. the half-masks with the disposable N99 filters. I bought one in February 2020 (while Fauci, the Surgeon General, and the CDC were still lying that masks won't work for a respiratory disease), but I didn't bring it back with me when I had to return to the US because vented masks were banned everywhere here. If you're worried about infection, though (1) N99 filtration is significantly better than N95, (2) the half-mask (or full mask) has a much better seal than any N95 that doesn't leave welts on your cheeks, and (3) the vented mask is quite easy to breathe in. If there's no more mask mandate, you should no longer have to confine yourself to off-the-shelf N95 masks. Time to upgrade.

Tom said...

I’m a certified safety professional with over 20 years of experience. Let me make this clear.

Cloth 👏 masks 👏 do 👏 very 👏 to 👏 stop 👏 covid

An N-95 respirator would do some good if it’s properly worn (uncomfortably tight) but you need to have a pulmonary function test and an medical exam before being cleared for wear an N-95 and they’re not made for children. A large number of children don’t have strong enough lunch capacity to wear an N-95.

This country has gone insane.

Eric said...

By day 3 the kid will have six masks in different pockets of his backpack, at least 'til he gets back home.

And then he will have learned the most important lesson here.

Yancey Ward said...

Here in east Tennessee we have a ridiculous battle going on in the Knoxville public school system. The governor of the state issued an order that masks were to be optional- optional. Some parents and teachers went to a federal court judge and got an order that the the masks be mandatory, not optional. The schools mostly refused to do much enforcement, so the same plaintiffs went back for another court order from the same judge that order the school administrations to enforce his mandate. Where exactly is the off-ramp for this judge, who no elected to this office?

LA_Bob said...

jg said, "...I challenge such people to consider carefully the psychological effect their fear-worship/ritual has on their kids, along with of course the long term effects of decreased face-reading experience during formative years."

Especially after reading the recent mask post and comments (yesterday?), I'm coming around to speculation that the face-reading stuff is the least of our concerns. The biggest impact is that masking kids probably correlates with willingness to vaccinate them. And, as Michael K notes, doing so with an experimental mRNA injection is just criminal.

~ Gordon Pasha said...

"Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?" Sgt Major Dan Daly, USMC

Michael K said...



Making kids is child abuse.

That seems a bit extreme, Michael. Spousal abuse may have been involved in some cases, but making kids is generally a good thing.


Since I have five, I agree. Skipping the "s" was unnoticed.

Doug said...

Maybe some day, her son will repay her in kind when she is dependent on him for care.

It's nice to think about, anyway.

wildswan said...

She's studying the effects of cocaine on the developing brain and she's found long-term effects on cognition in the rats she studies. So it's not too surprising that she fears other unknown impacts on the developing brain from unknown causes such as Covid. But what's unfortunate is that she just blindly accepts that masks can protect from these dangers when cloth masks can do nothing and, in fact, nothing much can be done to prevent Covid except caving-up for the rest of one's life. As others have pointed out, she's inculcating overwhelming fear into her child, fear of something unavoidable - and we can be quite certain how that will work out. She's an example of a victim of the consequences of listening to Fauci. (And where in the world is Fauci?)

wendybar said...

Wear it for life. Nobody cares. Your body, your choice. Just don't get into my face and tell me I HAVE to wear a face diaper that doesn't work just to make yourself feel better.

Bill R said...

"with a mask and with his five spare ones in all the different pockets in his backpack."

Where they will remain.

Kirk Parker said...

If New York were a same place, she would be up for a hearing on terminating her parental rights. What ghastly child abuse...

Kirk Parker said...

Yancey,

The off-ramp for that judge is Rule 303. I see it may come to that, and it seems likely that this judge is entirely clueless as to what kind of future he is angling for.