ctual useful thing.

Who told you that first? Who's the first person who told you that the regular annual flu shot was... well I've been saying it. I've been saying it since the beginning of the pandemic because I never believed that people were dying from regular flu at least 50,000 a year. Yeah, whoever believed that 30,000 or 50,000 people a year were dying from the regular flu and then therefore you needed to get a shot so you maybe wouldn't die. I never believed that. To me that just always looked like, obviously. So I have not taken the regular annual flu shot for some years. I don't know how many.

All right. So it's good to see that Alex Berenson has caught up to me on the regular flu shots being completely useless. But in his article he had this statement that I thought perfectly captures my point of view. So this is from Alex Berenson, one of the most famous skeptics of the COVID shots. He says in his piece today, quote, we now have two years of real world data on the mRNA shots based on billions of doses. Putting side effects aside.

So he and I both accept that the mRNA stuff would have higher side effects than traditional things. So he and I have always been on the same side that the new technology is riskier. All right, so we always agreed on that. And he says, putting aside the side effects that he and I agree on, they work extremely well against COVID for about four months after the second shot. So the vaccinations only work well for about four months.

So by complete luck, complete luck, I got my second dose right before the Delta phase which turned out to be the perfect time to do it. Because if Alex Berenson is right that it was very protective but only for about four months, I hit the four months perfectly. The four months that I was most protected was during Delta. Now I didn't plan that but I had the best accidental timing.

Now you would argue that it would be better not to have any of it in you at this point and I agree. Do we agree on that? As of today if you didn't get any Delta or Alpha you're way better off if you just didn't get vaccinated. I think with below a certain age for sure. So I think Alex and I are on exactly the same page on all of this stuff. I would agree with him completely that getting vaccinated for Omicron would be a sketchy situation. I'm not sure why I would. I would agree with him and always have that I didn't understand why young people were getting vaccinated.

But apparently for older people and people with comorbidities and people who got the shot at exactly the right time it might have been a good insurance policy. And I did some research to see if the current thinking is if the vaccinations, so-called, not really vaccinations but if the shots actually had protective effect against long COVID. And the current thinking is yes, not complete protection but it would reduce it. So it looks like I hit it exactly by luck.

All right, let's talk about retail sales jump three percent. The news is crowing. What would cause retail sales to go up three percent in January? What, is there any macro large economic influence that's been happening lately called inflation? Inflation I believe is the word. Yeah. Can you believe that the news reported three percent higher retail sales without mentioning that that's sort of the rate of inflation? At least for a lot of items. It depends on the item but okay.

And this caused me to ask the following question. What happened to that supply chain emergency? Are docks still full of ships waiting for days? Did that just stop? How did the news just sort of peter down? What happened? Why is the news never reported about all those ships that used to be waiting to be unloaded but weren't unloaded? How in the world does a story that big just disappear?

Do you have, I mean seriously I don't know. I don't know how that could happen. Like what is happening there? There's something terrible happenin