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...

  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...

  You can't fix stupid. There's not a pill you can take; there's not a class you can go to.  R. White Anti-vaxxers continue to exploit their Big Chance with the pandemic and are amping-up rhetoric to dangerous levels.  Their latest move is to claim that people administering vaccinations are violating the Nuremberg Code and are therefore international war criminals.  They are posting videos and notices like this on social media: Their "theory" is that the SARS-CoV-2 is "experimental" and therefore prohibited under the Code.  This is such a stupid argument because the vaccine is a, y'know, vaccine, not an experiment. Numerous debunkers have gone into detail debunking this asshatery, like here , and here , and here .  It would be funny if it weren't also dangerous. As noted in an earlier post , COVIDiots have already been harassing a nurse who they're sure died from the vaccine. But this war-crimes frame turns things up a notch or two. As a pr...

  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 ...

  To be honest, I thought (and hoped) I would be running out of things to blog about by now. But damn, interesting/important news just keeps coming.  Here are three brief items for your reading enjoyment. If You Have a Fake Vaccine Card, Don't Do This Dumb blonde, Tik-Toker, and Anti-Vaxxer, and Biden hater @notsamantharose17 thought it would be cool to troll the libs by showing off her fake vaccine card . She proudly did so while lip-synching the song What You Gonna Do About It? Only one problem. Her actual identifying info was plainly shown on the card she was displaying. Oops! A user named @thatdaneshguy (whose hobby is apparently reporting online criminals ) decided what he would do about it is report her to the FBI. Having a fake vaccine card is a felony . YouTube Bans Top Anti-Vaxxers—Too Little Too Late YouTube has  banned top anti-vaxxers like Joseph Mercola and Robert Kennedy Jr. and deleted 30,000 of their videos.  Good move guys, but you should have ...

The phrase "herd immunity" pops-up regularly in public discussion of COVID-19.  The idea is that if enough people get infected, recover, and become immune (or get immunity through vaccination), the pandemic will end because the virus will have nowhere left to spread.   There was a huge argument—sorry, row —in the UK last spring when officials implied they might protect old people and let nature take its course with everybody else. Sweden flirted with the strategy by foregoing lockdowns, but has seen  no benefit .  Letting people get sick is just dumb.  Right now in Arizona there is about a 7% chance that if someone gets infected they will wind up in the hospital.  The do-nothing strategy is based on the incorrect notion  that only old people can be harmed by COVID-19. According to a paper by David Jones and Stefan Helmreich in The Lancet , the phrase "herd immunity" has its origins in the early 1900s.  It was used by livestock veterinarians...

  For years now Russia has been running Soviet-style dysinformatzia campaigns on people in the West, especially the United States. During the 2016 election, they promoted ads on Facebook designed to inflame both sides of just about any controversial issue, just to get us good and pissed off. Now they're doing a similar thing with vaccines. The New York Times ran a story  yesterday exposing a propaganda operation by Russia to spread negative disinformation about vaccines produced in the West, and promote a positive image of their Sputnik 5 vaccine.  The efforts target Central and South American countries, particularly Mexico and Brazil, which are only now ramping-up vaccine purchases for their populations. “Every negative story or issue that has come out about a U.S.-made vaccine is amplified, while they flood the zone with any positive report about the Russian vaccine,” said a researcher quoted in the story.  They are supporting these efforts with social media posts...

  Today, I offer for your reading enjoyment updates on some topics discussed previously in this blog. Surges I've recently written about worries over new surges .  A piece in today's NYT declares the pandemic out-of-control in Michigan.  Sadly, the governor there has been cowed into tepid pleas for responsible behavior in lieu of concrete action. Hard to blame her after armed covidiots plotted to kidnap and execute her. I hope those assholes are on ventilators right now.   The surge there is blamed on the UK variant, which is apparently taking over the country .  The good news is that the vaccines seem pretty effective against it. The vaccine makers are also working on boosters , expected by the end of the year.    That's good news.  The bad news is that there's a... Vaccine Wall As predicted here a month ago, vaccination rates are hitting a wall. We're starting to run out of people who want the shots. It's starting to show, especially in...

  In a development that should surprise absolutely no one, a black market is flourishing for fake vaccination certificates and tests results, and probably fake vaccines.  Cyber-security firm Check Point has released an analysis showing a booming business in all three, with "Dark Web" advertisements up 300% in the past three months. According to their report: Fake COVID-19 negative tests can be had from various sellers for about $25 Fake vaccination certificates can be bought for $250 Various vaccines can be purchased for $500-$1000 per dose. Fake Records The tests and certificates are so easy to fake I'm surprised anyone would spend money to buy them.  My test results come to me as an email.  It would be child's play to change the name on mine to someone else's.  There is an "id number" and "order number" that could reveal the name had been tampered with. But the average consumer of test results (say, an airline) would have no way to check up ...

Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers and graph of statewide cases for the seven day period ending yesterday: The row for Maricopa County cases is incomplete because there is a notice on their site saying that "due to a reporting delay" they won't be updating their case numbers until tomorrow. I will update the table when the numbers are available.   I expect a decline there too, because CDC has changed the community level for the county back to low . The table has been updated. There is a decline for Maricopa County, as expected. Most everything else is looking good. Cases, deaths, and hospital beds for the state are down.  Wastewater is up for Pima County and up just a little for Mohave, but is down quite a bit for Yavapai and Tempe.  It's worth remembering that there is quite a reporting lag for many of these measures. All the wastewater figures are from 7-10 days ago.   I have also learned from @willhumble_az on Twitter that AzDHS is at least seven wee...

  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...

  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...

Last Friday a group of COVIDiots held a mask-burning in Boise, the state capitol. Not content to merely be stupid themselves, these people got their kids in on the act, teaching them to be stupid as well. Nice!  There was a Facebook post claiming such an event in another Idaho town, but the post was gone by the time I got there.   The organizer of the event, the wife of a state legislator, was quoted as saying We're not against face masks. You know, some people might need to protect themselves. There are certain portions of the population that are elderly ... they have issues. For healthy-bodied people, we want to go back to work. Our livelihoods have been put in jeopardy because of all the executive orders and mandates. Hmm.  I'm not quite sure how you claim not to be against face masks when you're sponsoring a mask burning event.  Also, nobody's livelihood is placed in jeopardy because of a mask mandate. Twitter users were generally  horrified ...

  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 ...

 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'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...