Corona-zona

  About a month ago I blogged about the latest efforts of the anti-vaxxer asshats, who've been trying to claim that any unexplained, sudden death is because of vaccines. Today I learned that this effort is a lot more organized than I thought. According to an AP investigation , the trend is being driven by a dark web film that features a montage of headlines found on Google to falsely suggest they prove that sudden deaths have “never happened like this until now.” The film has amassed more than 20 million views on an alternative video sharing website, and its companion Twitter account posts about more deaths and injuries daily.  An affiliated Twitter account has been flogging the hashtag #diedsuddenly, posting new cases as it finds them. The problem is that the film and posts are straight-up lies.  AP uncovered case after case where the cause of death was unknown or attributable to other known medical conditions. They even list people who died but were unvaccinated as vic...

 The anti-vaxxer deplorables are at it again—or still. I have two recent incidents to tell you about.   The first is an article published by a outlet that I won't name here because I don't want to promote it (if you must know, you can find the name in the first link below). The outlet has published vaccine disinformation multiple times. This time, they used the headline: “Secret CDC Report reveals at least 1.1 Million Americans have 'Died Suddenly' since the COVID Vaccine roll-out & another Government Report proves the COVID Vaccines are to blame.” As USA Today reports , this is 100% Grade AA bullshit. As is usually the case with these asshats, there is  a report, but it doesn't say what they claim. The data in question come from a CDC report on excess deaths during the pandemic.  They get that number by comparing death rates during the pandemic to death rates when there was no pandemic (studies I've seen compare 2020-2021 to 2018-2019).  It's like...

  I have blogged a lot about anti-vaxxers and their efforts. The main players are scumbags who are in it for the money .  They frighten people about COVID vaccines that have been administered to over five billion people by now (with, by the way, zero cases of spontaneous combustion or limbs falling off). They do this so they can sell people quack cures, raking in millions. It would be bad enough if they were just stopping people from getting a life-saving COVID vaccine. But  recent polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that there is a spillover effect to vaccinations for other diseases. Here is a table showing a decrease from pre-pandemic to present in the number of people who say the benefits of childhood vaccinations outweigh the risks: As noted in the caption, the good news is that most people feel like the benefits outweigh the risks. On the other hand all the figures have decreased, and 20% parents of children who are young enough to get vaccinations don't...

  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...

  Health officials have  announced the discovery of three cases of measles in Maricopa County. "One case is an adult and the other two are in minors. One case was hospitalized. All three are unvaccinated, and they are all recovering." This isn't exactly shocking. Back in 2015 the CDC said Arizona had the worst vaccination rate of any state in the country. I can't find any more recent state ranking data, but this story says the rate continues to decline and now stands at around 90% in Arizona. That's 8% below the level necessary for population immunity. This development comes in the wake of the pandemic. Anti-vaxxers have treated it as a golden opportunity to grow their brand , leading to  increased sales of their quack cures and remedies.   Now, more parents are holding back on vaccinations of any kind. Jason Terk, MD, a pediatrician practicing in Keller, Texas said : “It’s becoming much more challenging for me to convince people to get their kids vaccinated...

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas used vaccine disinformation to justify his opinion in a case before the Supreme Court. It appeared in a dissent in the ruling on DR. A., ET AL. v. KATHY HOCHUL, GOVERNOR OF NEW YORK, ET AL., where the majority opinion upheld New York's vaccine mandeate for health care workers. In his dissent Thomas said, in part,  Petitioners are 16 healthcare workers who served New York communities throughout the COVID–19 pandemic. They object on religious grounds to all available COVID–19 vaccines because they were developed using cell lines derived from aborted children.    Thomas cited this as a sound reason for objecting to vaccinations on religious grounds. The only problem? It's not true, or more accurately, it's only 1/3 true. Of the three major vaccines, only Johnson & Johnson adenovirus vaccine requires fetal cells for production. Moderna and Pfizer only used the cell lines in testing.  But still the cells were used for...

The other day I ran across this article commemorating the dubious milestone of one million U.S. deaths from the pandemic. A table in the article lists the "preventable deaths per million adults" for each state. I counted down to the Arizona slot, finding us 36th places down from the best. Wait a minute, I thought, isn't that the same ranking Arizona had among states for percent fully vaccinated the last time I calculated it? Why yes, yes it is . Is that a coincidence, or do these preventable death numbers line-up with vaccination percentages for all the states? To find out, I took the vaccination percentages on April 13th (data from JHU Dashboard  with Arizona rate corrected) and plotted those against the preventable deaths numbers in the above article: That, dear readers, is a very strong correlation (the outlier case on the right is DC). Like, you rarely see correlations that large for anything involving human behavior. The percent vaccinated accounts for about two-th...

The other day I ran across this opinion piece in The Guardian . In it a Columbia sociologist tries to explain why it's perfectly understandable that people would resist vaccinations against COVID-19. He repeatedly refers to "Left-leaning people" and "progressives," and practices whataboutism with respect to T****'s mishandling of the pandemic. So he has a right-wing agenda.  Another thing that makes me think that is the tone of the piece, which is condescending and smarty-pants.  He gives 13 reasons in all why people might reasonably resist vaccines. I won't go through these one by one, but rather address three categories into which they fall.   Several points focus on the novelty and speed of production of the vaccines. Several more focus on side-effects of the vaccines. While these might have been reasonable concerns a year ago, today they are nothing short of ridiculous.  Bloomberg estimates that more then 10.4 billion doses of the vaccines have be...

  Legislators in the Arizona House are pushing a law that would punish businesses that fire workers for refusing vaccine mandates. The bill is only 16 lines long, and the main part says: Notwithstanding any other law, an employee who is terminated for not receiving a covid-19 vaccine as a condition of employment shall receive either of the following: (1) Severance compensation paid by an employer in the amount of the employee's annual salary in one lump sum or installment payments over twelve months. (2) Reemployment with the employer at the same or similar position held on the date the employee was terminated and a reasonable accommodation provided by the employer to the employee. So basically if you require your employees to be vaccinated and they refuse, then if you fire them you have to pay them one year's salary as severance. The bill is retroactive to last November. This is obviously an anti-vax measure. I suppose they think it's necessary because the governor's ...

  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...

  Cochise County (CC) is in the Southeastern-most part of the state and encompasses Bisbee, Sierra Vista, and Wilcox. A story  recently published on tuscon.com about pandemic relief funds came to my attention the other day.  For a little context, CC was particularly hard-hit by COVID-19 over the fall. Its cases per 100K  exceeded those for Maricopa County (MC), according to the ASU dashboard .  Now, whereas case rates in MC and the state overall appear to have peaked , in CC they are still increasing. Today it has about 27% more cases per 100K (seven-day average) than the state's largest county. Against this backdrop the CC Board of Supervisors were considering an intergovernmental agreement with the Arizona Department of Health Services that would have provided them $1.9M in funds to help deal with the pandemic. The CC Health Services Director explained that the money was needed for things like additional personnel, equipment, mobile community health services,...

  I have covered a lot of anti-vaxxer craziness in this blog, but this takes the cake. An anti-vaxxer who styles himself as the "vaccine police" is advocating drinking urine to prevent COVID-19. This guy Christopher Key, who doesn't look crazy at all, drives around with weapons like a flame thrower and multiple assault rifles, delivering packets of information that he says prove that the vaccines are bioweapons. He was recently arrested for trespassing at an Alabama Whole Foods, where he refused to wear a mask. Because those are bioweapons too? He's now out of jail telling people to drink their own urine to prevent COVID-19, well sort of: The antidote that we have seen now, and we have tons and tons of research, is urine therapy. OK, and I know to a lot of you this sounds crazy, but guys, God’s given us everything we need. ...We've got research after research, documented peer-reviewed research on urine. ...This vaccine is the worst bioweapon I have ever seen. ...

  If you're like me and millions of other people you have recently bought something from Amazon. You're also probably not aware that they are a major supporter and enabler of the anti-vax movement. According to the blog Popular Information , Amazon directly donated more than $40,000 to one of the nation's leading sources of vaccine misinformation, the so-called National Vaccine Information Center. The amount donated has increased each of the last three quarters. According to an article in the  The Guardian , in addition to endorsing and legitimizing the anti-vax movement with these donations, Amazon supports the movement by selling books by anti-vaxxers. It then uses its recommendation algorithm to push more anti-vax books to people who have bought them.  In September of this year NPR reported that a book by Joseph Mercola was the number one recommendation when they did a search on "COVID-19." In the spring of 2019 the American Medical Association sent  a lett...

  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 “...

 A couple quick updates on two recent Corona-zona posts. Brynovich Has to Start Over About six weeks ago I blogged about how AZ Attorney General was pandering to the MAGA crowd by filing suit against upcoming vaccine rules by the Biden administration. This week a federal district court judge  denied  his request for an injunction.  Basically the court ruled that he jumped the gun by filing the suit before the actual rules were formulated. Now if he wants to persevere he will have to start over and and include those in a new complaint. This guy is not a very good lawyer. Also the link above describes the rules as a vaccine mandate. But damn it, it's not a vaccine mandate. It's a rule that you must either get vaxxed or be tested regularly (if you work for a company with over 100 employees). That's a choice, not a mandate. The press should stop framing this in a way that is both misleading and helpful to the COVIDiots. Rodgers Sort of Tries Apology, Gets Slapped on F...

[ 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...

  The avalanche of news about Facebook's misdeeds continues apace. All the stories have a similar form.  One or more employees notice harmful conversations about some topic growing on the platform. They become rightly concerned that if they grow too much there could be harmful social consequences.  They notify their superiors with emails like "surely we're going to do something about this, right?" Their bosses ignore the emails or do next to nothing because doing something could impact the bottom line. This time the same story plays out with regard to vaccine disinformation . Back in March, FB employees noticed that claims that the vaccines are dangerous and ineffective were spreading across the platform.  The reckoned that by adjusting how these posts were ranked by the algorithm, they could curtail their spread. In their place they could promote posts from legit outlets like the CDC and WHO.  Others suggested disabling comments on vaccine-related posts, about ...

  The San Francisco Chronicle reports that an In-N-Out Burger in Fisherman's Warf has been shut down by the city. The sanction is because of the shop's refusal to enforce a city requirement to check customers' vaccine cards. The company's attorney called the ordinance “intrusive, improper, and offensive” and an example of government overreach.  He whined further: We refuse to become the vaccination police for any government. It is unreasonable, invasive, and unsafe to force our restaurant associates to segregate customers into those who may be served and those who may not, whether based on the documentation they carry, or any other reason. It is not surprising that this would happen at In-N-Out. The lawyer's comments about government overreach and "vaccination police" are standard MAGA pandemic boilerplate.  That crowd is (predictably)  up in arms . So much for conservative values about respect for the law. The chain's 2020 political donations includ...

  Some anti-vaxxers are (finally) facing significant consequences of their actions. To date the most they have faced—if anything—is the inconvenience of being unable to attend some event or go inside some establishment. Now those who need transplants are being told they can't receive them unless they have been vaccinated. The American Society of Transplantation and the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation released a joint statement saying that transplant patients, as well as their donors, families, and immediate contacts should be vaccinated. The reason is that transplant patients must take immune-suppressing drugs to prevent rejection of their transplants. This makes them more susceptible to COVID-19. It also suppresses their immune response to a post-transplant vaccination, making a before-the-fact vaccination the best hope for prevention. Needless to say, anti-vaxxers getting kicked off transplant lists take a dim view of this requirement. One woman in Color...

  TikTok user Linda McAffee posted a brief video of her COVID-19 Halloween display. It's brilliant.  She has plastic skeletons holding signs that say "I refuse to live afraid," "I don't know what's in it," "personal freedum," "bathed in the blood," (with Christian symbols), "government conspiracy" (with pictures of sheep), and my personal fave "I did my own research" (with social media icons). It has 391K likes and 74K shares. Comments include those from people who say they intend to steal the idea. A similar display went up in  North Carolina . It features a 13 foot skeleton with a sign "Not vaccinated, see you soon, idiots!"  There is also a tombstone with signs "I listened to T****" and "I got my news from Fox." A guy in a Chicago suburb erected a display  with tombstones carrying messages like “Proudly anti-vax,” “I’d rather die than comply,” “Ivermectin believer,” “Yes, honey, I ...