Corona-zona

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...

  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...

 I have become aware of a couple of websites that are cataloging anti-vaxxers who are victims of COVID-19. Some of the people are sick, others have died. The first site is sorryantivaxxer.com , a blog. It describes itself and its purpose thus:  The purpose of this site is educational,  everyone listed on this site was/is an anti-vaxxer activist who helped spread COVID-19 misinformation on social media. Share to stop others from making the same mistake. GET VACCINATED!  As of this writing, it lists 171 cases. For each one, the author provides a picture of the person in question, summarizes their anti-vaxxer bona fides , and provides a link to a story where that information was obtained.  The blog posts allow comments. Some of these provide additional information and quotes from the victim and leave it at that.  Others are sometimes snarky, as we should expect. The second site is a subreddit called HermanCainAward .  Herman Cain, you may remember, was a ...

  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 ...

  The other day there was an article in The Guardian about an anti-vax group called the Informed Consent Action Group (ICAN). It is using threats of litigation to intimidate schools, employers, and other organizations who require their members to have vaccinations. As a lawyer quoted in the article said, they do not need to be able to win court cases on the merits. They only need to convince organizations it's too risky to resist their demands: “If you have a limited budget to deal with litigation, it doesn’t matter if you might win at the supreme court level. The costs of that litigation are so existentially threatening that you’re not going to take the risk.” It's a shame that tactics like that work. So far when these things have gone to court, the anti-vaxxers have lost .   What is behind these attacks on vaccinations? It appears it may be another case of anti-vaxxing for dollars .  The Guardian reports that in 2019 ICAN raked in and spent $3.5 million....

  This blog will be off until next weekend as yours truly will be taking a much-needed vacation. But I just can't leave for a week without calling out Facebook (FB) for trying to play the victim the Biden administration's efforts to shame it for spreading anti-vax disinformation. First let us remember that FB has been trying to gaslight us  on this topic for months. They periodically announce new "crackdowns" on anti-vaxxers whenever the political heat gets too high. If any of these "crackdowns" had actually been effective, there would be no need for another one.  And make no mistake: If FB wanted to stop this garbage, they could. They have all the tools—the data, the graph analysis, the natural language processing, the machine learning algorithms, the compute power—to track down the vaccine mis/disinfo and get rid of it.  But FB doesn't want to do this. They want to appear to be doing it while continuing to make money off the traffic that mis/disinfo ...

  Two figures from the anti-vax community recently died of COVID-19. On one hand, I feel for the friends and families of these people because they needlessly lost a loved-one.   On the other hand, they killed themselves by placing politics above their personal well-being—and that of their friends and loves ones, whom they could have infected. They dug their own graves, so to speak, and are now laying in them. It's hard to see this as anything but just deserts.  The first case is Scott Apley, a member of the Texas State Republican Executive Committee and Dickinson City Council. Two days after making an anti-vax post on Facebook, he was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia-like symptoms and died a couple days later. Apley had previously voiced opposition to mask and vaccination mandates, and publicized a mask-burning event. He also trolled Dr. Leana Wen on Twitter after she tweeted about the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine, saying "You are an absolute en...

Over the weekend anti-vax protestors showed up at Los Angeles's Dodger Stadium, the largest vaccination site in the country, and staged a protest . Police said the protest was peaceful.  But the fire department closed the entrance to prevent them from moving onto the grounds or getting killed by traffic. In the end they didn't prevent anyone from getting a vaccination who had an appointment, but they did hold up the line for about an hour. In my option, these protestors are very lucky the people waiting in line didn't jump out of their cars and beat them senseless.   You have to wonder what these crackpots thought they would accomplish with their protest. People who are there already accept the truth that vaccines are protective, and don't think COVID-19 is a hoax. Did they think they would win converts? It was a fool's errand, kind of like holding an atheism demonstration outside the entrance to St. Peter's. Now it seems that the anti-vaxxers are increasingly j...

  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 topics recently covered in this blog. No Vax Could Cost You "Unvaccinated individuals have potential to cost the employer more from a health care spend perspective," Symons told CBS MoneyWatch. "They could get COVID and incur expensive hospital costs up to $50,000 for an individual with a tough COVID case." Back in June I blogged a proposal to make people who refuse vaccinations pay their own way if they get COVID-19. It's only fair: If people exercise their freedom to forego the vaccine, they should also be responsible for the consequences of that decision.  As it is they freeride. They can refuse the vaccine for childish and/or political reasons, then depend on those of us who have made the responsible choice to save their bacon with expensive hospital care that everyone pays for through insurance premiums. Incredibly, nobody has rushed to implement my proposal, but insurance providers may be taking a step in that direction. They...

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...

Here are updates on some recent Corona-zona posts. Anal Swabs After being scooped by Corona-zona on Chinese anal swab tests for SARS-CoV-2, Stephen Colbert did a bit on them during his monologue last Thursday (that part starts around minute 6:00). He makes some very funny jokes (if you enjoy scatological humor, which I do).  But in an additional tidbit, he reported that that U.S. officials in China told the State Department that they had been so tested.  The Chinese are denying it, naturally. But, come on, don't you think the U.S. officials would know if they had been anally probed by some Chinese dude?  DeSantis Has No Plan and Is Proud of It In mid-February I had a post about Governor Ron "Florida Man" DeSantis whining that he didn't get enough credit for his state's recent pandemic performance. I showed that Florida only looks good if you cherry-pick recent numbers, and that overall its performance has been terrible. Last week Salon.com ran  story  pointin...

  CDC and Kaiser Permanente analyzed the health records of 6.2 million members of 8 participating US health plans. They found that no serious health effects could be linked to either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines. The study was recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It looked at cases of serious outcomes, including acute myocardial infarction, Bell palsy, cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, myocarditis/pericarditis, pulmonary embolism, stroke, and thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome within 21 days of vaccination.  It compared those outcomes to the same ones in people who had not been recently vaccinated. Though there were instances of these conditions, they were extremely rare, measured in the tens to hundreds of cases per million person years (MPY). More importantly, none of the differences between those vaccinated and those not vaccinated in the same time period were statistically significant. That...

  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...

  Here are three AZ stories making the news. Supreme Court Upholds Decision Against Ducey Public Illness Laws Yesterday the Arizona Supreme Court confirmed the obvious. They took all of two hours to make and write a decision  upholding a lower court ruling that public illness measures (mainly anti-mask) conceived by the Governor and tacked on to budget bills this summer are unconstitutional.  I mean, even to a non-lawyer like me this was a no-brainer. The constitution plainly says you can't just throw random shit into a bill that, on the surface, is about budgets.  Apparently the legislature has been doing this kind of thing for a long time. So a side benefit of the ruling is that it will put a stop to the practice for non-pandemic issues as well.  It's yet another legal defeat for Attorney General and would-be next governor Mark Brynovich. If he's not even a good lawyer how can he be a good governor? Nursing Students Demand Freedom to be COVIDiots Two nursing ...

  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...

  Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers and graph of statewide cases for the seven day period ending yesterday: Given that most counties in Arizona are now under high community levels , I was expecting the table to look a lot worse. But case rates, while up in the state overall, are actually down a little in Maricopa County.  On the other hand, the graph shows that May-June this year is looking a lot like July-August last year. That is, to the extent we can even take case rates seriously anymore. Deaths are down and hospital beds utilization is up. However as noted before the latter is not skyrocketing like it has in previous waves. Wastewater detections are setting records again in Pima and Yavapai counties. They are down in Mohave County and Tempe, but only slightly. The high community levels come with a recommendation to wear masks indoors.  So mask up! Posts from the Last Seven Days you May Have Missed Long COVID Might be Caused by Virus Hanging Out in Your Gut Claren...

Scores of stories are appearing on mainstream and social media about people who are sick with COVID-19 because they didn't get vaccinated. Predictably, they now regret their choices. Among the cases: An Alabama mom watched her son die and got seriously ill herself. "It took watching my son die and me suffering the effects of covid for us to realize we need the vaccine. We did not get vaccinated when we had the opportunity and regret that so much now.” A Florida mother of eight  nearly died, spending six days in the ICU. "I was one of those people that was like, ‘I can’t believe people are just going to inject their bodies with this medication. We don’t know enough about it.’ Now I’m just like it’s just a shot. Just get the stupid shot. That vaccine could have stopped all of this. Just one little shot. I feel foolish that I didn’t get it. I wish to God I would have got it because it’s not just about what it could have prevented me from experiencing physically in my life r...

  The other day I got curious about how many people were getting the booster shots in Arizona. So I decided to check into it. Pandemic reporting by AZDHS is basically terrible. Their dashboard says the "percent of people vaccinated" is 63.5%. There is no explanation of whether this means one shot or fully vaccinated, or what is the basis for the percentage (population? eligible?). There is a footnote that says "vaccination numbers are displayed by the county or residence" even though the number so-footnoted is for the state.  This seems like a possible attempt to make the vaccination numbers look better than what they are. According to Johns Hopkins just 57.5% of Arizonans are fully vaccinated. I comes a no surprise, then, that AZDHS does not offer data on how many people have gotten a booster statewide. Fortunately, Maricopa County (with over 60% the state's population) does a better job of reporting, and offers this data. According to to their dashboard ,  25...