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...

  Facebook's parent company Meta is considering easing up on the rules it has banning the distribution of misinformation and disinformation about the pandemic. Because we need more misinformation and disinformation about the pandemic, I guess. In a blog post Meta's President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg says: Meta remains committed to combating COVID-19 misinformation and providing people with reliable information. As the pandemic has evolved, the time is right for us to seek input from the Oversight Board about our measures to address COVID-19 misinformation, including whether those introduced in the early days of an extraordinary global crisis remains the right approach for the months and years ahead.  Rather than banning transmission of false information outright, they're thinking about "labeling or demoting it either directly or through our third-party fact-checking program." So let me get this straight. Meta remains "committed to fighting" misinfor...

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...

  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...

In a controversial and widely-read essay  published recently, Jonathan Haidt argues that during the last ten years politics have become "uniquely stupid" because of the internet. If that is true then the last three years of pandemic politics is the poster child. Most of the COVIDiocy we've seen has taken place on the internet, and whatever has happened in person was organized on the internet. It's where anti-vaxxers denounce a miracle of modern medicine and get rich selling their supplements and quack cures. It's where anti-maskers organize rallies to rail against mask mandates. This is happening despite the efforts of search services to demote links to fake news. I challenge you try and find an anti-vaxxer link on Google using keywords like "COVID vaccine side effects" or "COVID vaccine dangers." If you get anything it will be buried deep in the results. So why does this garbage continue to circulate and influence people? An article just o...

  Chinese Police Parade Pandemic Violators (2021) You have probably seen the video images of desperate residents of Shanghai , China. The entire city has been placed under quarantine for weeks in an attempt to stem a COVID-19 wave there.  According to reports, people are not allowed to leave their residences for any reason—not to shop, walk pets, fill prescriptions, get medical treatment—and they are arrested if they do.  There is no end in sight and people are running short on food and medicine. I have been surprised that the Chinese government would allow images like these to circulate. Normally they maintain tight control over the narrative, so they must intend for these scenes to get out into the wild. A guy writing an op-ed at Forbes  says the Shanghai shutdown is strategic, but for non-pandemic reasons. The idea, he claims, is to squeeze Western economies by shutting down China's biggest manufacturing and shipping port.  Corona-zona Senior Southeast Asia ...

  Just when you think people can't get any crazier, there's this. Mask-hole parents are bombarding schools with fake notices of claim, threatening to file them against their surety bonds if the schools don't do what they want. This includes ending masking policies and various other things. They're being egged-on by a website and Telegram group called "Bonds for the Win." The website is run by this fruitcake woman in Scottsdale named Miki Klann who thinks the Earth is flat and that AIDS is a hoax. Here is an example of one of their documents served in Michigan. It lists 15 violations of state, federal, and international law—including the Nuremberg code, naturally—that the school has supposedly committed. All legal experts agree that these claims are 100% bullshit. This type of bond fraud   is a form of paper terrorism and was innovated by the sovereign citizens movement . They flooded courts with invalid pseudo-legal documents claiming they are not subject t...

I've been doing this blog for just about a year now. The first regular post was January 6, 2021. I'll reflect on that in a few days. Meanwhile, what kind of a media outlet would this be if I didn't do a year-in-review post? Looking back over the year's posts, it's amazing how much has been going on, and how much there potentially is to review. I can't spend all day on a detailed summary.  So I will try to focus on a bird's eye view. Vaccines & Anti-Vaxxers Vaccines have to be the biggest topic on this blog over the past year. Vaccines were very hard to get this time last year. A lot of people wanted them and the distribution was just getting started.  People had to navigate really crappy systems, like one in Arizona , to make reservations. There were " vaccine tourists " who would travel from other states and even countries in an effort to get jabbed.   Then, around March last year, those who wanted the shots had largely gotten them, and incre...

  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 ...

China-linked social media accounts are pushing a new conspiracy theory about COVID-19. See, it didn't originate in Wuhan at all. Instead it just appeared to originate there because it was riding on live lobsters imported from the US!   The disinformation campaign was spotted by a researcher at the University of Oxford who regularly monitors Chinese state media and diplomatic accounts.  A Chinese diplomat in India first tweeted the theory. But it didn't end with the tweet from the diplomat. Investigating further, the researcher found that the claim was flogged by a network of 550 Twitter accounts. They spread the same message at times equivalent to 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. China Standard Time.  Some of the accounts were so-called sock puppets  whose sole purpose is to amplify messages in order to get them promoted by social media platforms' algorithms. The messages were translated into English, Spanish, French, Polish, Korean and even Latin.  Wait...what?...

  Most posts about Florida on this blog are about the dumb things their governor regularly does. But today, there is a new example of Florida COVIDiocy, this time from a school. Center Academy, a private school in Florida, has enacted a policy saying that students who get vaccinated must quarantine for 30 days afterward. Google has several listings for Center Academy in Florida, and the news story doesn't single out one. So I assume the policy applies to all of them. The policy says kids have the be quarantined after each shot. They are urging parents not to get their kids vaccinated until next summer so they won't have to miss two months of school under this policy.  The school said the "policy was enacted as a prudent precautionary measure after much thoughtful deliberation." One wonders how thoughtful the deliberation could have been, given that the vaccines neither contain nor produce any virus that can be spread.  Had their thoughtful deliberation included look...

  I know I've said this before, but just when you think people can't get any crazier, they find a way.  According to a story by NBC , there is a movement afoot among anti-vaxxers to convince people that hospitals are killing their loved ones on purpose . Or at least the hospitals are keeping them from getting life-saving "miracle cures."  Naturally, they're organizing on that cesspool of social media, Facebook. Groups have sprung up urging people to get their loved ones out, and providing advice on how to do so. Once out, they can receive treatments like ivermectin horse paste , iodine gargles , and (a new one to me) inhaling nebulized hydrogen peroxide. A physician quoted in the article calls this "vigilante medicine," and it's an apt metaphor.   The vigilantes are trying to science-up this course of treatment by calling it a "protocol." Any day now I expect injections of disinfectants and powerful lights inside the body to be added to the...

  Today, several updates on matters previously discussed on this blog. Florida Fires Back at Idaho Last week, I reported that Idaho was challenging Florida for the title of top COVIDiot state by appointing to a health board a medical doctor who opposes masks and vaccines and supports ivermectin.   Well, Florida was not about to take that challenge lying down! Governor Ron "Florida Man" DeSantis did them one better by making another such medical doctor the state's surgeon general . Take that, Idaho! Doctors Who Spread Misinformation Are Starting to Face Discipline I have never understood how medical professional organizations have been able to look the other way while their members dispense disinformation about pandemic-related topics like masks and vaccines. As noted earlier, many of these physicians are doing it to make money . Idaho even  appointed one of them  to a medical board. It seems the professional organizations are finally losing patience with t...

It seems that some people, instead of taking a vaccine proven safe and effective hundreds of millions of times, are taking horse medicine instead. That's a special kind of stupid, and as comedian Ron White reminds us, you can't fix stupid . The horse medicine in question is ivermectin, a drug used to treat parasitic worms. It apparently has approved uses and dosages in humans, but horses are, y'know, a lot bigger than humans.   The FDA says it "has received multiple reports of patients who have required medical support and been hospitalized after self-medicating with ivermectin intended for horses."  They are so concerned about this they are tweeting at people to knock it off: The "treatment" has become especially popular in the U.S. South. A state health officer in Mississippi  called  the practice "kind of crazy" and likened it to getting chemotherapy at a feed store. I've not been able to track down where the idea to use ivermectin for...

  I swear I am not making this up. Some anti-vaxxers believe that people who took "experimental" vaccines will suffer horrible consequences over time, causing society to crumble.  At this point, semen from unvaccinated males will soar in value because it will be needed to reconstitute the human race. Semen from unvaccinated men will become the next bitcoin, and they will be able to put themselves out to stud. Sounds like a fun way to make a living, but of course all of this is bullshit. People who have been vaccinated are not experiencing any effects except staying safe from COVID-19. Another important detail is that there is no such thing as vaccinated/unvaccinated semen, because the vaccine doesn't affect genetics or sperm production. As they are wont to do, these fruitcakes find and misapply sciencey concepts to make their crackpot theories sound credible. In this case it's the idea of "vaccine shedding" which only happens with live virus vaccines. Non...

  I find it hard to muster any sympathy for anti-vaxxers, and have said before that I think they are asshats .  That is not to say they are all evil.  I'm willing to believe some people are fearful and/or uninformed and/or have been  misled . But this makes them no less wrong. Like the rest of us, one of the main reasons they are alive is that vaccines have saved them from smallpox, polio, tuberculosis, tetanus, etc. But some anti-vaxxers are using their "advocacy" to line their pockets.  For example, in 2019 The Washington Post detailed (paywalled link) donations of $2.9 million to an anti-vax groups (whose name I don't want to publicize) by Joseph Mercola.  His donations accounted for about 40% of the group's funding.  Mercola's enterprises sell "natural" heath products and quack cures, some of which are marketed as alternatives to vaccines. His enterprises are estimated to bring in about $15 million annually. According to a investigation  by ...

  Last month I did a post about some guy trying to "debunk" masks by providing us with all the devastating scientific evidence that masks don’t work. Turns out that, on careful examination, his scientific evidence was bunk.  People like this try to " baffle 'em with bullshit ," counting on most people not knowing how to read the studies they cite and/or being too lazy to do so.   A few days ago I saw a story about a study proving that masks are harmful.   It was published in an outlet called Medical Hypotheses. That journal publishes ideas, not actual research, so their articles don't "prove" anything.   The author claimed to be affiliated with Stanford.   Stanford has said he is not affiliated with them. You can draw your own conclusions regarding what that says about his credibility. I looked at the abstract, which says there is no scientific evidence of masks’ effectiveness. That is straight-up wrong.  Look here . Readers, I don’t have...

This morning I was once again treated to a  story  in my news feed about how hard Facebook is working on our behalf to rid it's site of anti-vaxxer disinformation. This time the claim is from Carolyn Everson, VP of Facebook's Global Business Group. They are taking very aggressive measures! It's a top priority for the company! It's a major cultural pivot! What a steaming load of bullshit! I just went on to FB and typed "vaccine" into the search box and filtered the results for groups. The top two items were Vaccines Save Lives and Nurses Who Vaccinate . Good. Then came two groups dedicated to reporting side effects, Report COVID-19 Side Effects  (8400 members, 200 posts a day) and  COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects (137K members, 1100 posts a day). I had a look at the latter, and it contains a mix of good and bad reports. But it also contains posts like "But a very good friend of mine was rushed to hospital with blood clots, nearly died, that’s not been repor...

  One day after the terrible massage parlor shootings  earlier last week, a study appeared in the American Journal of Public Health. It links the former president's use of the phrase "Chinese Virus" in a tweet to an uptick in the #chinesevirus hashtag on Twitter.  The paper must have been under review and in production for quote some time. It's quite the coincidence that its publication coincided with the shootings of multiple Asians. The implication is that T****'s rhetoric contributed to a recent surge in anti-Asian racism. To be perfectly clear, I think he is a racist and that his rhetoric no doubt is a contributor. But we have to be careful not to over-interpret the results. The study compared tweets containing the neutral hashtag #covid19 to those containing the racist hashtag #chinesevirus. Comparing the week before T****'s March 16 tweet to the week after, they found a large increase in the number of tweets with the latter compared to the former, and a...