Corona-zona

  Image by  cytis   from   Pixabay Last week most people were focused on hearings about the former president's (FP's) corruption and malfeasance with respect to a plot to overturn then 2020 election (until the Supremes cancelled a constitutional right on Friday). But there was another hearing going on. On Thursday the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis held a hearing on the FP's corruption and malfeasance in the pandemic domain. It featured Dr. Deborah Birx, his lead on the pandemic response. I blogged about Dr. Birx earlier this year on the anniversary of the FP's inject-them-with-disinfectants  comment. I noted how she was soldiering when she failed to call-out his crazy ideas and suggested this is a good reason not to have ex-military people in positions like hers.  That notwithstanding, she was very qualified for her job. She coordinated responses to other epidemics, including AIDS, Ebola, and Avian Flu. The hearing made it clear she k...

I—and I assume, readers of this blog—have never thought of ivermectin horse paste as an effective treatment for COVID-19. That's because we are not the kind who swallow conspiracy theories that the medical establishment is somehow involved in a conspiracy to keep an effective treatment from the public. I would bet my bottom dollar that if ER physicians thought it was effective, they'd have been handing it out like candy during January.  People who do believe such things have gone bonkers, as has been well documented in this blog. Medical professionals have received threats of deaths and physical or sexual violence over their refusal to administer a drug unapproved to treat the disease that had no known effectiveness for that purpose. Not that facts will matter to the COVIDiots—because, y'know, the whole medical establishment is in on the conspiracy. But we now have a study just published in the New England Journal of Medicine proving that ivermectin is ineffective at pre...

  Those whacky anti-vaxxers. They're getting forced into being vaccinated by employer mandates. But they're not taking it lying down! They're turning to a whole slew of folk remedies to "detox" their bodies, as well as more extreme measures.  There is an instruction manual for sale on Amazon. Chiropractors are getting in on the act , advising people to take supplements like glutathione, and to eat stuff like activated charcoal, chlorella, cilantro, and garlic to "help grab those heavy metals and bring them with when they exit the body." Others are turning to detox baths. Recommended formulations include "baking soda, epsom salts, and benonite [sic] clay to remove radiation, unspecified poisons, and nanotechnologies." Needless to say there are more extreme options. One is to add borax to the bath. But that is dangerous . Borax is used as "a cleaning agent used in detergents, enamel glazes, insecticides and mould treatments" and is “...

[ I dedicate this post to my sister, who hates Aaron Rodgers with unbridled passion. ] As you may have heard, Packers Quarterback Aaron Rodgers is in hot water. He was asked at a press conference if he was vaccinated, and he said "yes I'm immunized." Last week he was diagnosed with COVID-19. That's because he was lying. He wasn't really immunized. Instead he took a homeopathic treatment to "raise his antibody levels."  He asked the league and players association to accept this treatment, but they wouldn't . That's because homeopathy  doesn't work . It's quackery par excellence . Even the Russians (who are no strangers to questionable medical practices)  say it's BS .  So Rodgers got caught. Now he's being called out for his dishonesty, not least by Terry Bradshaw . And he's none to happy about being held accountable. He insists he didn't lie—as if the only way he could have lied was to say he'd had the vaccine. He li...

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...

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am a big proponent of getting vaccinated against the virus. I did so myself at the soonest possible opportunity. But there remains a too-large portion of the population that is choosing not to be vaccinated. Unless many of them can be persuaded, this group will prevent us from achieving population immunity.  I have a proposal for persuading them that I've mentioned in passing before. This post is to flesh it out. First, are people resisting the vaccine for good reasons?  According to some researchers I know who recently completed a nationwide survey, the most common objections of never-vaxxers are as follows: They worry that vaccines are not safe . This is an unreasonable belief . In the U.S., 305,687,618 doses of the vaccines have been administered. If there were something really dangerous about the shots, we'd know it by now. Nobody—except maybe a few people who developed blood clots after taking the J&J vaccine—has died from bein...

  Earlier this week, NPR Morning Edition aired a story about the AIDS epidemic. The first news that a mysterious disease was killing gays appeared forty years ago.  The reaction at the time was similar to the reaction to COVID-19 today. People preferred not to have their lives impacted so they pretended like the disease wasn't real. Government officials and world leaders questioned the facts.  So did medical experts. One, interviewed for the story, published an op-ed saying rumors of a gay plague were unfounded.  Another published an article in a well-respected scholarly journal saying there was no evidence that HIV causes AIDS. Sound familiar? The story raises the question of whether events forty years ago set the stage for the anti-science discourse and disease denialism we have seen over the past year.   It's an excellent piece, well worth 11 minutes of your time.  You can listen here .