Corona-zona

  A recent thread on Reddit's r/facepalm list claims that the Premier of Alberta Province in Canada, Danielle Smith, is taking Ivermectin. In the video that accompanies the thread she shows a box among other medications. She is coy about what it is, but it has to be Ivermectin given the things she is saying: It's a prescribed drug, that's all I can tell you. A prescribed drug. And there are some doctors who prescribe certain kinds of drugs. But as you saw the College of Physicians and Surgeons and pharmacists have said they're going to fire any doctor who tries to prescribe anything for treatment of symptoms. So maybe I got the last prescription in Canada that was available. But here I am in the United States taking an illicit drug. Can you believe it? In Canada you can take pretty well whatever you want. Go to a safe injection site an inject yourself with heroin. But you only break the law if you try to take something that will mitigate against blood clots in case you...

  I used to do these roundup posts more frequently, when pandemic news was coming in so fast and furious that even my (then) daily posts couldn't keep up. As it happens, the last couple of weeks has produced several tidbits that are too limited for their own post, but still worthy of sharing.  One Cable News Outlet (Guess Which One) Causes Vaccine Hesitancy A recent study  published in in Nature looked at how watching a certain cable news outlet causes increased vaccine hesitancy. The researchers used exogenous (i.e. not study related) geographical variation in the channel lineup to tease out the causal effects. They controlled for differences in partisanship, local health policies, local COVID-19 infections/death rates, and consumption of other major television networks.  The network in question is—wait for it—Fox News. I for one am shocked. SHOCKED!  Every one additional hour watching Fox News per week for the average household reduced the number of vaccinati...

  It's hard to believe, but it was two years ago today that our moron of a former president took to a news conference to share his awesome ideas about how to combat COVID-19 infections. He suggested we inject the victims with disinfectant, and put "powerful lights" inside their bodies (somehow) to cure them. Here is a  Sarah Cooper mime  of the performance in case you've forgotten how cringe-worthy it was. His poor pandemic expert Dr. Deborah Birx stood next to him, looking on in horror. She has since said that she didn't say anything at the time because her military background taught her to never make her commander look bad in public. Maybe that's a good reason not to have ex-military people in positions like hers. I say that because when a president says something ignorant there are plenty of gullible people who will take it seriously. Like the people who actually misted their body with, inhaled vapors of, gargled with, or drank cleaning products because o...

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...

  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. ...

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...

[ 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...

  Just when you think anti-vaxxers can't get any stupider, they find a way. The latest fad is trying to prevent coronavirus infections with Betadine, a form of iodine. According to an article in Rolling Stone, people are using the stuff by gargling, spraying it in their noses, and putting drops in their eyes. One ER physician quoted in the article, when he was told people were doing this, said “Fuck me! Of course they are.” Betadine is used almost exclusively as an external disinfectant for surgery, etc. It is not meant to be ingested, and can cause iodine poisoning if someone ingests too much.  Like they might do by, say, gargling with it regularly. Hey, I know! Why be so timid? I think these anti-vaxxers should inject it directly into their lungs.  T**** said  it would work.  That should be good enough for them. Now, boys and girls, let's review. The BEST way to prevent COVID-19 is to get vaccinated. There is no longer any reasonable question that the v...

Last week, I had a post about the fad amongst conservatives using ivermectin—a drug used mostly to deworm livestock—to treat/prevent COVID-19, rather than vaccines proven safe and effective over 367 million times in the U.S.  Since then things have gotten even more crazy.  Here are three items for your reading enjoyment. Amazon Search Go to the Amazon website and type "iv" in the search box, and voila, you get a bunch of autocomplete  suggestions for ivermectin. Yesterday The Verge claimed that Amazon was supporting COVID-19 disinformation because of this and wasn't planning on doing anything about it.  Apparently that story generated some heat. Today Amazon announced that it is planning to change the autocomplete behavior to address this. Judge Plays Doctor A judge in Ohio has ordered a hospital there to administer ivermectin to one of its patients. The patient in question is ill with severe COVID-19 and has been on a ventilator for weeks.   The patie...

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...