Corona-zona

  Governor Ron "Florida Man" DeSantis, no doubt ginning-up for a presidential run, has decided he needs to do some pandering to extremists who don't think he's conservative enough. So he's turning to his superpower, spreading pandemic disinformation. DeSantis's COVIDiocy has been  well-covered  in this blog. Who can forget his  lying about case numbers in this state? Or his refusal to preorder pediatric vaccine? Or his hiring a guy as State Surgeon General who distributes pandemic misinformation? I could go on at length. Now he wants to empanel a grand jury to investigate "'wrongdoing' linked to the Covid-19 vaccines, including spreading false and misleading claims about the efficacy of the doses." His petition to the Florida Supreme Court says: "the pharmaceutical industry has a notorious history of misleading the public for financial gain,” and asks for a grand jury to probe “the development, promotion, and distribution of vaccine...

Florida has chosen not to preorder pediatric doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Governor Ron "Florida Man" DeSantis says doctors, clinics, and hospitals can just fend for themselves without getting the state involved. That's interesting, because every other state besides Florida has decided that they should not fend for themselves and have preordered the vaccines. Every other state.  "To do an emergency use for a 6-month-old or a 1-year-old simply to placate anxiety, that's not the standard when you're doing this," said DeSantis , the pediatric medicine expert. He's right. It's to placate anxiety resulting from the needless death of a child. Over 900 of them have done so in the pandemic to date. DeSantis's sycophant state Surgeon General Joseph Lapado agreed: "From what I've seen, there is just insufficient data to inform benefits and risks in children." It's a pretty safe bet that what he's seen comes from ant...

  Here are some updates on previous Corona-zona posts. COVID Dick is Real In July of last year, I blogged about a reason males should be afraid of COVID-19: Erectile dysfunction. At that time the reports were anecdotal. Not anymore. This report from Gizmodo covers all the latest research, and the short story is that it's real. Not only can in infection impair one's ability to get it up even after recovery, it can also shrink your member. Yikes! Also there have been reports of sexual dysfunction in women. Disappointing Arizona Booster Uptake That update makes it even more puzzling that booster shot update in Arizona is so low.  Back in December, I reckoned that only about 11% of Arizona residents had gotten their booster shot (depending on what you used as the divisor). Now AzDHS is reporting actual numbers and they are not much better. Only 37% of eligible people have gotten their third jab. Why would you get two shots then skip the third?! Urine Drinker Lives by His Own R...

  Governor Ron "Florida Man" DeSantis is picking a new fight with the Biden administration over antibody treatments. Whereas before he was bitching about not being allowed to hog them, now he's bitching about not being allowed to waste them. Antibodies treatments for COVID-19 are a big deal in Florida. That state has a surplus of politically-motivated individuals who refuse to be vaccinated, and there is a huge overlap between this group and the group of people who vote for the governor. Last year DeSantis and other Lemon Socialist governors were hawking antibody treatments  as the perfect solution for saving their COVIDiot supporters. Florida was hoovering up all the Regeneron doses it could get, way more than its share. Then back in September the Biden administration took steps to ensure more equitable distribution of these doses among states. DeSantis promptly threw a hissy-fit . Fast-forward to the past week, when the FDA has rescinded its Emergency Use Authorization...

  A recent statement in the Washington Post (may be paywalled) by Governor Ron "Florida Man" DeSantis caught my eye.  He said: We’ve seen huge declines. Right now, Florida has the lowest covid-infection rate — case rate and infection rate of covidestim — in the country. I had no idea what "covidestim" was, but thankfully WaPo linked it . Turns out it is a project by Yale, Harvard, and Stanford medical schools to model pandemic numbers in the states.  They try to estimate the likely number of actual infections, etc., based on reported data. The raw data don't tell the whole story because (for example) some people get COVID-19 and don't know it or report it, meaning the reported cases underestimate the true numbers. The researchers do complicated statistical modeling to estimate the true numbers. I did not know about this project and website, so I suppose I need to thanks DeSantis for bringing it to my attention. If only he hadn't done that in the proces...

UCLA health policy researcher and physician  Governor Ron "Florida Man" DeSantis has appointed a new surgeon general , Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo. He came from California where he was a UCLA health policy researcher and physician. Dr. Lapado is right there with his boss in terms of questioning the effectiveness of vaccines and the value of mandates and other mitigation measures. He complained that people are "being forced to, you know, to sort of put something in their bodies that we don't know all there is to know about yet, no matter what people on TV tell you."  That's a variation of the "I need more time to see if it's safe" excuse routinely used by anti-vaxxers. Can you blame them for having doubts? The vaccines have only been proven safe and effective 6.82 billion times  so far. He also questions whether the vaccines work. "So sure they reduce the likelihood of transmission, and even that is sort of questionable depending on how far out y...