COVID-19 thread

[Vijay]

I keep finding that in both Taiwan and the US, I'm worried that even the people who are strict about COVID are possibly not strict enough. Aren't you still potentially infectious for two weeks after getting your second shot or something? Is the chance of getting infected after both vaccines doses of the vaccine really that low, or is that just what US-specific data currently suggests?

[Travis B.]

I keep finding that in both Taiwan and the US, I'm worried that even the people who are strict about COVID are possibly not strict enough. Aren't you still potentially infectious for two weeks after getting your second shot or something? Is the chance of getting infected after both vaccines really that low, or is that just what US-specific data currently suggests?

From what I have read you do need two weeks after your second shot to be fully protected. About the chances of getting infected, at least with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, at least according to the testing prior to introduction they are both 95% effective. However, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is only 66% effective at preventing infection, even though it has "100% efficacy against hospitalization and death from the virus" supposedly. The only real reason IMHO for even using the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in places where keeping the vaccine cold is not an issue is the idiots who only get vaccinated once and then assume that they don't need another shot.

[Nortaneous]

I wish the federal gov't would overrule the damn Republicans in state governments on vaccine passports and require documentation of vaccination for a wide variety of things (the wider the better), specifically to make life as hard as possible for the unvaccinated, in an effort to convince as many of those to get vaccinated as possible, even if they don't want to.

That doesn't sound like a good way for the authorities to win back the public trust that they've so clearly lost!

The authorities haven't cared about winning and retaining the trust of the people in a long time. It would've been useful to have widely trusted authorities when COVID hit, but we didn't - they pissed too much of it away to provide broadly credible leadership, and burned even more of it by constantly lying, and sometimes (as with Fauci) publicly admitting to it.

I got the vaccine because I was already aware of mRNA vaccine research in 2019, and the people I know personally who have more actual subject matter expertise and patience for reading papers about the subject all said the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines looked reasonable to them, but it's hard to blame anyone who didn't - most people don't have anything to go on except the same authorities that have been lying constantly since at least the Iraq War, and kept on lying through the whole pandemic.

[Vardelm]

My prediction in the US is that things will seem normal during the summer with fewer hospitalizations & deaths due to people being outside more and the vaccines being available. However, given the number of people who refuse to get the vaccine, COVID will continue its transmission. Once we head back to cooler months, there will be another surge, primarily in red states. Perhaps that will remove enough people from the population that we finally hit that 80% vaccination rate for herd immunity, and also remove enough republican voters that the Dems maintain their majorities.

I'm curious how COVID sweeping through conservative populations will play politically. Conspiracy theories around "a Democratic virus designed to kill conservatives' doesn't seem all that far fetched.

[Travis B.]

That doesn't sound like a good way for the authorities to win back the public trust that they've so clearly lost!

The authorities haven't cared about winning and retaining the trust of the people in a long time. It would've been useful to have widely trusted authorities when COVID hit, but we didn't - they pissed too much of it away to provide broadly credible leadership, and burned even more of it by constantly lying, and sometimes (as with Fauci) publicly admitting to it.

I got the vaccine because I was already aware of mRNA vaccine research in 2019, and the people I know personally who have more actual subject matter expertise and patience for reading papers about the subject all said the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines looked reasonable to them, but it's hard to blame anyone who didn't - most people don't have anything to go on except the same authorities that have been lying constantly since at least the Iraq War, and kept on lying through the whole pandemic.

Remember, these are Republicans we are talking about. Anti-vaxxer sentiments w.r.t. the COVID vaccines aligns very closely with party identification, with refusing to get vaccinated being very closely tied to identifying as a Republican. Of course Republicans are not going to trust the authorities if the authorities are not Republicans, and why should we make an effort to gain their trust when such an effort is almost certainly going to be for naught? Hence why instead of trying to gently convince people to get vaccinated who cannot be gently convinced, taking a hardline carrot-and-stick approach may be more suitable - i.e. giving privileges to the vaccinated and taking away privileges from the unvaccinated to a degree that we may just convince some that those privileges outweigh any particular political alignment they have (and punishing those who are not convinced).

[Nortaneous]

Of course Republicans are not going to trust the authorities if the authorities are not Republicans, and why should we make an effort to gain their trust when such an effort is almost certainly going to be for naught?

I like how the "we" here includes both you and the entire regulation and enforcement capacity of the state. Maybe it would become clearer to you why the authorities should try to win the trust of the people if you stopped identifying with the authorities? (You are not the authorities.)

[Travis B.]

Of course Republicans are not going to trust the authorities if the authorities are not Republicans, and why should we make an effort to gain their trust when such an effort is almost certainly going to be for naught?

I like how the "we" here includes both you and the entire regulation and enforcement capacity of the state. Maybe it would become clearer to you why the authorities should try to win the trust of the people if you stopped identifying with the authorities? (You are not the authorities.)

Okay, let me rephrase it:

Of course Republicans are not going to trust the authorities if the authorities are not Republicans, and why should said authorities make an effort to gain their trust when such an effort is almost certainly going to be for naught?

I like how you identify Republicans with "the people", because the Republicans are certainly not the people as a whole, and in this case they are a bunch of anti-vaxxers (and anti-maskers) who would rather people die than their precious "freedom" to not get vaccinated and to not wear masks be taken away from them.

[Ares Land]

Low public trust in the authorities is a cross partisan issue, and not specific to the US.
I believe it's one reason Germany did a bit better than France, or why -- say -- Korea was able to do so much.


Both media and government bear a bit of responsibility. I think the journalists who blew up the Astra Zeneva side effects out of proportion should get an extra year of hard lockdown -- because that was what the consequences of their actions might very well have been.

People here have low trust levels over all, so the issue predates Covid by far. But they did treat us like cattle from the very beginning of the crisis and when you treat people like cattle, well, soon enough they start acting like cattle.

On the future of the pandemic: from the depths of my crystall ball I conjure the following prediction: we'll still get scared a few times along the way but it's pretty much over.
(Health authorities are understandably being prudent, but the evidence so far is that the vaccines are really efficient...)

[Vardelm]

Maybe it would be easier for the authorities to gain public trust if we didn't have 1 of 2 major political parties operating on the mantra "government IS the problem" and proceeding to say "no" to everything that might actually help people aside from billionaires.

[Vardelm]

On the future of the pandemic: from the depths of my crystall ball I conjure the following prediction: we'll still get scared a few times along the way but it's pretty much over.
(Health authorities are understandably being prudent, but the evidence so far is that the vaccines are really efficient...)

2 problems with that:

1) There is a significant portion of the population - at least in the US - that is going to refuse getting the vaccine, as discussed a bit earlier.

2) A large portion of the world still needs access to vaccines, so the question there is how quickly production & distribution can ramp up to meet the need.

Out of those 2 issues, will the virus be able to mutate such that it gets ahead of our ability to manufacture effective vaccines & boosters?

[Nortaneous]

I like how you identify Republicans with "the people", because the Republicans are certainly not the people as a whole, and in this case they are a bunch of anti-vaxxers (and anti-maskers) who would rather people die than their precious "freedom" to not get vaccinated and to not wear masks be taken away from them.

We're all familiar with the basic logic of the state of exception. If you don't support the TSA, the Patriot Act, and the Iraq War, you'd rather people be killed by terrorists than their precious "freedom" to bring jars of honey on planes be taken away. In an ideal world, the fully general argument for the state of exception would just be ignored - shouldn't America aspire not to be Schmitt's Germany?

Then again, in an ideal world, there wouldn't be any pretext for the declaration of a state of exception in the first place, because the US would've adopted the one policy that is both in accord with the republican ideals held by the good parts of our political culture and, if implemented correctly, 100% effective at preventing COVID within a country's territory: border closure. Or at least strictly enforced mandatory quarantine of the sort John Martin Poyer implemented. (American Samoa had no deaths from the Spanish flu and no deaths from the current plague; if they'd been stricter about boats, they wouldn't have had cases.)

Unfortunately, we do not live in the ideal world - anti-border ideologues got a lot of people killed, and now American authorities have to figure out how to deal with an ongoing pandemic. Infectious disease is not something American authorities have zero experience with. How many national states of exception did it take to eliminate polio and measles? How many people did the police seal in their houses? If you're a competent, high-trust country, you can just do things. If you're not, you can't.

Speaking of polio, one of the major setbacks to the (America-led!) global polio eradication effort was the time the CIA used vaccination campaigns as a front for CIA stuff in Pakistan, a country which now has the highest rate of polio in the world. Trust is hard to win and easy to lose. In the USA, the (mostly Democrat-aligned) authorities spent months campaigning against masks before deciding they were for them and burned trust shutting down concerns about protests because "racism is a virus too" or whatever, Andrew Cuomo killed people on purpose, and Pfizer slow-rolled the vaccine so it wouldn't be ready in time for the election. The authorities had plenty of opportunities to burn trust for short-term political gain, and they took them all.

If you want to be truly tinfoil-hat about it, maybe that wasn't entirely unintentional - look at this, for example:

Once we head back to cooler months, there will be another surge, primarily in red states. Perhaps that will remove enough people from the population that we finally hit that 80% vaccination rate for herd immunity, and also remove enough republican voters that the Dems maintain their majorities.

This is phrased as a prediction, but it's not hard to imagine it as a fantasy, and a sufficiently widespread fantasy can become policy. It's not even implausible - it's what Reagan did with AIDS!

And maybe what Obama did with fentanyl. I kept seeing Democratic local elite types talking about how 1) opioid overdoses were killing the outgroup and 2) this was good, because 3) it meant a political advantage for the Democrats and 4) those people just need to die out. This was probably delusional - how many junkies vote, much less vote Republican? - but it was a sentiment I heard a lot and can easily imagine being widely shared, and it'd explain why it didn't become a major political issue until 2016 despite killing more people than AIDS. (One guy I know, who at the time ran a PAC dedicated to supporting Democrats in state elections, actually used the phrase "fifth-generation warfare".)

I don't think the tinfoil bankshot - that they fucked it up on purpose to disproportionately kill the less obedient - is true, and I don't think it'd work on something with a death rate of rounding error for under-50s (although I've seen plenty of columns about how old people need to hurry up and die already - including from Ezekiel Emanuel, who Biden appointed to his COVID-19 advisory board), but now that we know what happens when the authorities fuck up, it's worth keeping on the shelf for next time.

(One of the policy decisions that motivated Boko Haram was that foreign educational intervention in Nigeria had, as one of its stated goals, making there be fewer Nigerians.)

[Travis B.]

Um these sound like talking points aimed at deflecting blame for deaths from COVID from antimaskers and antivaxxers and onto Democrats to me. E.g. the talking point that "anti-border ideologues" were responsible for COVID spreading to the US, when by the time that we might have closed the borders the virus was already in the US. Or the idea that the George Floyd protests were a substantial source of viral spread, while ignoring the fact that Trump events, at which people actually did not wear masks, were indeed "superspreader" events. Or the conspiracy theory that Pfizer deliberately delayed the vaccine so as to hurt Trump...

Anyways, is a lack of "trust" in government by death cultists an excuse for not doing the needful, as my Indian colleagues would put it? The goal should not be to "gain their trust" - the only people they will trust are Trump and his lackeys in the first place. Remember - these are death cultists - they believe that their ability to infect people as they please is empowerment. Why should we coddle these people? Rather, we should be doing our best to make life as difficult as possible for them, e.g. by making vaccination a prerequisite for stepping outside their own homes.

[Vardelm]

This is phrased as a prediction, but it's not hard to imagine it as a fantasy, and a sufficiently widespread fantasy can become policy. It's not even implausible - it's what Reagan did with AIDS!

To be transparent, this was prediction:

My prediction in the US is that things will seem normal during the summer with fewer hospitalizations & deaths due to people being outside more and the vaccines being available. However, given the number of people who refuse to get the vaccine, COVID will continue its transmission. Once we head back to cooler months, there will be another surge, primarily in red states.

This strays into (dark & morbid) fantasy:

Perhaps that will remove enough people from the population that we finally hit that 80% vaccination rate for herd immunity, and also remove enough republican voters that the Dems maintain their majorities.

And IF there is a surge in red states, then this point is of interest/worry:

I'm curious how COVID sweeping through conservative populations will play politically. Conspiracy theories around "a Democratic virus designed to kill conservatives' doesn't seem all that far fetched.

I see the conspiracy theories (essentially a type of fantasy) being far, far more likely to be reality than a fantasy about reducing the conservative population to become a policy of withholding vaccines from conservatives.

[Vijay]

If you don't support the TSA, the Patriot Act, and the Iraq War, you'd rather people be killed by terrorists than their precious "freedom" to bring jars of honey on planes be taken away.

That is one of the most ridiculous and absurd sentences I have ever read in my life.

In an ideal world, the fully general argument for the state of exception would just be ignored - shouldn't America aspire not to be Schmitt's Germany?

Schmitt?
...Carl Schmitt? So Hitler's Germany?

anti-border ideologues got a lot of people killed

[citation needed]

and now American authorities have to figure out how to deal with an ongoing pandemic.

They always have had to.

If you're a competent, high-trust country, you can just do things.

What is a "high-trust country"?

It's not even implausible - it's what Reagan did with AIDS!

Wait, what?

now that we know what happens when the authorities fuck up, it's worth keeping on the shelf for next time.

Again, ???

(One of the policy decisions that motivated Boko Haram was that foreign educational intervention in Nigeria had, as one of its stated goals, making there be fewer Nigerians.)

And again

[Ares Land]

2 problems with that:

1) There is a significant portion of the population - at least in the US - that is going to refuse getting the vaccine, as discussed a bit earlier.

2) A large portion of the world still needs access to vaccines, so the question there is how quickly production & distribution can ramp up to meet the need.

Out of those 2 issues, will the virus be able to mutate such that it gets ahead of our ability to manufacture effective vaccines & boosters?

Oh, of course, there's plenty of uncertainty still! I think there's enough reason to hope we're seeing an end to this; but of course things can still go wrong in a number of ways.

****

Most of the issues here aren't specifically American. The USA, EU and Britain all fucked up to a comparable extent and in very similar way.
i'm happy to report that we have about as many antivaxxers.as you guys do. Plus since we got four different vaccine brands, everybody's a fucking vaccine connoisseur now. I hear the house Moderna goes exceptionally well with blue cheese and red meat. Nobody wants Astra Zeneca, it's so terribly vulgar.

In France is that the government at one point advised against masks. Fauci did the same, on the same week even, I believe.
Ditto with closing borders.

So our boring right of center governments in Europe failed to close the borders on time: this has nothing to do with 'no border ideologues.' I doubt the 'closed borders, zero immigration' crowd ever had businessmen returning from business trips in Wuhan on their mind much either.
(I note there's much less hand-wringing about the Ceuta crisis then there was about controlling flights from Brazil...)

It's pretty amazing to see that several governments make the same mistake. It's tempting to assume a dark international cabal was at work. And that's entirely correct: we initiates call it the WHO.
Not closing the borders and advising against masks was in line with WHO recommendations at the time.

Why did the WHO fail so much? I'd love to know why, but I suspect Dilbert's principle is at least partly responsible.
(Our former minister for health underestimated the crisis, lied about it and then quit as the going got rough. Guess where she works now?)

EDIT: that'.s perhaps too harsh on the WHO though. I mean, to get the epidemic under control, we should've closed the borders around Jan 21 or 22... We barely knew anything then.


****
Oh, here's why liberals should be careful about mask mandates or vaccine passports or generally empowering authorities too much: Today I met the only person I know who got fined for not wearing a mask outside. You get exactly one guess as to her skin color...

(She was just getting out of her house, in case you're wondering.)

[Jonlang]

Just got my first Covid vaccine this morning (Pfizer). Two hours later I feel fine, no side effects (yet).

Congratulations and Good Luck!

I felt a bit rough yesterday but I seem to be okay now. I'll take this over 8 days of Covid again any day of the week.

[Vardelm]

I'm not sure how much my 2nd vaccine dose affected me. I had the 1st shot with just a tiny bit of soreness in the arm: pretty much expected. 2 weeks later on April 27 I had the 2nd.

I woke up the morning I was scheduled to have my 2nd dose and had vertigo. 2 years prior, I had vertigo at the end of a vacation & dealt with the effects for a couple weeks as it subsided. The doctor recommended lots of water, antihistamines & decongenstants, no caffeine, no alchohol, and no dairy. That worked fairly well, and I followed that routine when I had another case a couple months later. Fast forward to vaccine dose day #2, and I decided to get the shot since I was going to spend at least 1 sick day from work either way, so why waste it? I ended up feeling awful for at least the next 2 week, but I don't know if it was from the vaccine, lingering effects of the vertigo, caffeine withdrawal, or all of the above.

That's thankfully over, so all's well as ends well.

[Nortaneous]

If you don't support the TSA, the Patriot Act, and the Iraq War, you'd rather people be killed by terrorists than their precious "freedom" to bring jars of honey on planes be taken away.

That is one of the most ridiculous and absurd sentences I have ever read in my life.

Yes, that's the point.

In an ideal world, the fully general argument for the state of exception would just be ignored - shouldn't America aspire not to be Schmitt's Germany?

Schmitt?
...Carl Schmitt?

Yes, Carl Schmitt. If you're not familiar, here's SEP's summary:

No legal norm, in Schmitt’s view, can govern an extreme case of emergency or an absolute state of exception. In a completely abnormal situation, the continued application of the law through the normal administrative and judiciary channels is going to lead to haphazard and unpredictable results, while preventing effective action to end the emergency (PT 13; GU 44–114; Scheuerman 1996; Hofmann 2002, 17–33). If the applicability of material legal norms presupposes a condition of normality, Schmitt assumes, a polity must be entitled to decide whether to suspend the application of its law on the ground that the situation is abnormal. Hence Schmitt’s famous definition of sovereignty, according to which the sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception: If there is some person or institution, in a given polity, capable of bringing about a total suspension of the law and then to use extra-legal force to normalize the situation, then that person or institution is the sovereign in that polity (PT 5). Any legal order, Schmitt bluntly concludes, is based on a sovereign decision and not on a legal norm (PT 10, 12–3).

One might reply to this line of thought that it is perfectly possible to establish legal conditions for the declaration of a state of emergency as well as legal constraints on the permissible means of dealing with an emergency. Schmitt argues, though, that attempts to legalize the exceptional situation are doomed to failure. It is impossible to anticipate the nature of future emergencies and to determine in advance what means might be necessary to deal with them. As a result, the positive law can at best determine who is to decide whether there is an emergency that requires a wholesale suspension of the law. But the sovereign decision cannot be guided by existing material law (PT 11–2). In Schmitt’s view, it is not even necessary for the law to determine who can take a decision on the exception. There can be a sovereign authority, in a jurisprudentially relevant sense, even where such an authority is not recognized by positive constitutional law. All that matters is whether there is a person or institution that possesses the ability, as a matter of fact, to take a decision on the exception. If a sovereign, so understood, exists, its authority to suspend the law does not stand in need of positive legal recognition, since the law’s applicability itself depends on a situation of normality secured by the sovereign (PT 12–3). What about cases, though, where sovereignty is not just unrecognized in positive law but where there is no one, as a matter of fact, who could successfully take a decision to suspend the law altogether? This condition seems to apply in many contemporary western democracies.

We don't have a total suspension of the law, but we do have, like, Rhode Island enforcing its borders. Can they do that? Probably not. Does anyone care? No. There was some degree of emergency, and it produced some degree of Schmitt's state of exception.

But if you want the sovereign to suspend the law and institute extralegal action, you can just argue that it's an emergency that justifies a state of exception. For example, you might be Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta and want a fat new jobs program under your department. Or you might be an anarchist and want the government to weld hicks into their trailers until they get Microsoft's XR soy isoflavone cocktail jabbed into their triceps. (This would never happen - it'd be easier and more effective to juice the water supply with estradiol, but age-corrected T levels have halved since the '80s already so what's the point. In part due to widespread groundwater contamination with endocrine disruptors like atrazine! My generation's gonna have brutal osteoporosis when we're old.)

anti-border ideologues got a lot of people killed

[citation needed]

Travel bans have proven 100% effective when instituted early enough. There are some countries that still have zero cases!

The natural experiment of Samoa in 1918 showed that sufficiently strict quarantines are also effective. Western Samoa, governed at the time by Robert Logan of New Zealand, didn't enforce quarantine procedures on the SS Talune and lost over a fifth of its population to the Spanish flu; John Martin Poyer, the governor of American Samoa, heard about the flu on the radio and decided to train Samoans to patrol the shore in boats and route all ships to Pago Pago, where their passengers were placed under house arrest. American Samoa had zero deaths from the Spanish flu.

We didn't do any of that because closing borders is, like, totally gross - so every Western country had a worse pandemic response than Nauru, a country with a lower population than my hometown and an economy of "we used to mine bird shit". Millions of people are dead because the world's governments chose not to end international travel in December.

It's not even implausible - it's what Reagan did with AIDS!

Wait, what?

This is standard Democrat lore (and, unusually for the genre, true) - I'm surprised you're confused by it.

Getting back to Nazi Germany, a lot of the deaths in the Holocaust were caused by disease and malnutrition in the camps. This does not necessarily mean they were unintentional. It just wasn't high on anyone's list of priorities. If some Jews at Buchenwald die of typhus, who cares? Maybe it's not even a bad thing. Thus also Reagan - if some fags who can't keep it in their pants die of AIDS, who cares? It's not a priority. Maybe - plenty of people actually thought this! - it's not even a bad thing.

(As a card-carrying fag, I'm pretty sure the people who thought that were wrong.)

These days, though, Buchenwald is considered impolite. You can't do that anymore. (At least, you have to replace "concentration" with "internment". Or "FEMA" if you trust Alex Jones. Who was right about the frogs - see above re: atrazine.) So if you want to plausibly-deniably kill a lot of people on purpose, you have to be creative.

Try thinking like a political operative who wants to kill a lot of people on purpose, in a targeted manner. Better yet, try thinking like a political faction, whose operatives are capable of the natural human faculty of hating their enemies and the unnatural human faculty (for which they've been selected) of manipulating procedural outcomes, and have, at least at the high levels, favor banks and fat Rolodexes.

I don't think the pandemic response was juked to produce an unnaturally high death count. Except in New York. But if a new wave in red states manifests out of contrarianism (or just buying the narrative on prerelease and refusing to update - official sources were anti-mask before they were pro-, and I've seen anti-maskers cite that), that'll be a lesson that people can and will learn. Plenty of people will loyally follow nonsense - the new Star Wars movies have no shortage of fans - so if the correct response to the next plague is made nonsensical, or (more likely) juked to play poorly in Peoria on purpose... isn't that something our imaginary operative would see some potential in?

(One of the policy decisions that motivated Boko Haram was that foreign educational intervention in Nigeria had, as one of its stated goals, making there be fewer Nigerians.)

And again

Lowering the fertility rate of African countries is an extremely public goal of Western philanthropy. One of the most important and notable ways they are trying to do this is by investing in education, especially female education. This is known to lower the fertility rate, and Western philanthropists frequently mention this in public. It is not unreasonable to suspect this as a motivating factor of a movement based around rejecting colonialist Western education.

I think I had a source that made the connection explicit at one point but can't find it now.

Or the conspiracy theory that Pfizer deliberately delayed the vaccine so as to hurt Trump...

It's a "conspiracy theory" in the same sense that the lab leak hypothesis was. See here:

In their announcement of the results, Pfizer and BioNTech revealed a surprise. The companies said they had decided not to conduct the 32-case analysis “after a discussion with the FDA.” Instead, they planned to conduct the analysis after 62 cases. But by the time the plan had been formalized, there had been 94 cases of Covid-19 in the study. It’s not known how many were in the vaccine arm, but it would have to be nine or fewer.

Gruber said that Pfizer and BioNTech had decided in late October that they wanted to drop the 32-case interim analysis. At that time, the companies decided to stop having their lab confirm cases of Covid-19 in the study, instead leaving samples in storage. The FDA was aware of this decision. Discussions between the agency and the companies concluded, and testing began this past Wednesday. When the samples were tested, there were 94 cases of Covid in the trial. The DSMB met on Sunday.

Why did they decide - "after a discussion with the FDA" - to deviate from their published protocol?

Anyways, is a lack of "trust" in government by death cultists an excuse for not doing the needful, as my Indian colleagues would put it? The goal should not be to "gain their trust" - the only people they will trust are Trump and his lackeys in the first place. Remember - these are death cultists - they believe that their ability to infect people as they please is empowerment. Why should we coddle these people?

Death cultists? Really?

[Raholeun]

Hear, hear!

[Ares Land]

But if you want the sovereign to suspend the law and institute extralegal action, you can just argue that it's an emergency that justifies a state of exception.

Yup. We've been in a near constant state of exception here in France because of the terrorist attack, and then the pandemic.
As it happens, states of emergency are terrible at stopping pandemics -- but very good at curtailing pesky things, such as civil rights or demonstrations that stand in the way of good governance.

anti-border ideologues got a lot of people killed

[citation needed]
Travel bans have proven 100% effective when instituted early enough. There are some countries that still have zero cases!
(...)
Millions of people are dead because the world's governments chose not to end international travel in December.

I can't follow you here. There's no such thing as pro-border and anti-border. What there is pro-immigration and anti-immigration. No, strike that, there's no such thing as being anti-immigration.
There are people who oppose population movement from poorer countries into richer countries.
And that issue has absolutely nothing to do with banning business trips to Wuhan.

I suggested that around January 20-22 would have been a good time to end international travel -- but recommanding that at the time would've required some seriously impressive forethought.

But December? That would have required some eerie powers of prescience!
(Unless you buy into the theory that bad shit was going on in labs at Wuhan and that everybody had intel on that, which I don't.)

We didn't do any of that because closing borders is, like, totally gross - so every Western country had a worse pandemic response than Nauru, a country with a lower population than my hometown and an economy of "we used to mine bird shit".

Forbidding international travel to a place nobody ever heard about is a little easier than forbidding all travel to major world cities. Who could've guessed?

It is not unreasonable to suspect this as a motivating factor of a movement based around rejecting colonialist Western education.

I think I had a source that made the connection explicit at one point but can't find it now.

I'm afraid that theory would need some extra backup.
Western conservatives are obsessed with demographics right now -- but, you know, nobody else is.

It's a "conspiracy theory" in the same sense that the lab leak hypothesis was.

So definitely a conspiracy then?
Pfizer and BioNTech had other customers; European leaders don't give a damn about Trump's reelection, and we didn't get the vaccines any sooner.
For what a real vaccine conspiracy looks like: check out Sinovac or Sputnik-V. That's what sensible politicians with too much power do: they cobble together something barely adequate, rush it through testing and proclaim the crisis is over. (If you ever admitted there was a crisis in the first place.)

Plus, elaying vaccines and causing thousands of unnecessary death just to make Trump look bad?. Man, talk about overkill. The one thing you have to do to make Trump look bad is let him talk.