Covid Causes Clots!!

 A headline in the New York Post: "Why so many people are having strokes in their 20s, 30s, and 40s: We've never had patients so young." 

They report that, "Between 2020 and 2022, there was a 14.6% increase of strokes among people aged 18 to 44." Many of whom were "by all common standards, healthy." Their theories about the increase include birth control pills, stress, long working hours, physical inactivity, caffeine especially from energy drinks, and Adderall (although they add that most studies don't show a strong association between Adderall use and strokes). None of these have been shown to have increased that dramatically since 2020, but something else has. I stupidly read the comments on the article, which are all about "the jab" killing us. IT'S NOT THE VACCINE!!

There is, of course, absolutely no mention about an unmitigated brain-invasive virus doing the very type of damage researchers and doctors warned us about years ago. We knew that Covid stays in the body and forms blood clots since at least 2021, and it became widespread in 2022, which is why some wise doctors ask for a D-dimer test after a patient has problems post-Covid infection to check for clotting issues. Here are just a few: 

Canadian Broadcasting In Crisis

Does saying "Jeeeezus" and "oh my God" over and over as I scroll through the news count as praying? 

It's not just all the bizarre appointments in the US that will chase out any competent people leaving an empty husk as a gift for Russia - or something like that - but the CBC feels compromised. It's been a bit of a problem here and there for decades, but this latest mess of a "balanced" call-in show on Canada becoming the 51st state with flippin' Kevin O'Leary and David Frum hosting, feels like it's no longer Canadian at all. People are calling them, and the producers Quislings, and I think that word will become more and more commonplace. CBC News reported on the backlash and asks that we pretty please watch the show to make up our own mind. No thanks.

A Tale of Two Studies

I was confronted yesterday with the ubiquitous claim, "Lockdowns destroyed kid's ability to socialize. Now they're committing suicide because of it!!" Let's have a closer look again:

I posted this mini-thread a couple weeks ago that helps to understand the role media plays in propping up this claim:

"A tale of two studies: One study (October 2024 in School Psychology), picked up by the Toronto Star, gauged classroom incivility from anecdotal reports by teachers pre- and post-covid (handy they had data form Fall 2019) to conclude that lockdowns for three months in 2020 destroyed kids' socialization skills in 2022. The other study (October 2024 in an international medical journal), NOT picked up by the Star, assessed kids pre- and post-INFECTION, and against a control to find, 'more severe symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity-impulsivity, opposition, a wide range of emotional and behavioural problems, and poor school function.' Many studies have shown that SARS-CoV-2 affects the prefrontal cortex, which affects behaviour. Until mainstream media starts reporting on better studies, our children will suffer. A timeline of some studies on Covid's effects on the brain are here." 

Covering Up a Pandemic

Earlier today, Salvatore Mattera wrote this piece about the media silence -- or censorship -- around Covid. Otherwise known as propaganda by omission. This rest of this post is entirely from that thread:  

The 1918 flu is called the "Spanish flu" because in most places, the media censored it. Except Spain, where they reported honestly. This isn't a conspiracy theory - it's a historical fact. And I think it is occurring right now again with COVID: 

This article in The New Republic - "How America’s Newspapers Covered Up a Pandemic" - provides an overview of what happened in 1918. In short, the media either avoided talking about the flu altogether, or they blamed something else for the damage the flu was causing:

"the big-city newspapers...sugarcoated the truth, practicing an alarming level of self-censorship. Any article or headline suggesting more than casual concern about the disease would be open to attack. . . . Only by putting together the tiny headlines on page 11 of the Boston Post could a dutiful newspaper reader get a sense of the full extent of the epidemic"

Is this happening again right now with COVID? I think for the first few years of the pandemic, most of the press covered it honestly (indeed, some articles at the time noted the contrast between the media's early coverage of COVID and the censorship of 1918). But as time has passed, there's been a shift towards censorship. Articles that should obviously mention COVID now rarely do. In some cases, this is debatable, like a story on student absences. But for coverage of health trends, this is inexcusable. 

Living in a False Reality

Without testing or wastewater data warning us of rising cases of viruses in our regions ahead of time, we can only look to excess deaths after the fact. Bleak times.

This is a graph of Finland's excess deaths relative to pre-pandemic levels. Pay attention to that blue line.  It's the excess deaths of children aged 5-9. The dip in 2021 is when kids all wore masks and fewer died of  RSV and the flu. The current excess death rate for kids is 2.4 times pre-pandemic levels. More than twice as many kids are dying, and we're still not acting on this. 

Schools are the number one vector of infection. If we can halt transmission there, it will make a huge difference. We could have CO2 monitors in every room that beep at 500 ppm to alert the teacher to open doors and windows. And we could have super quiet and super cool CR boxes that run on computer fans. The CO2 monitor is a one-time buy at about $200 - likely far less in bulk, and the CR boxes are under $300 fully assembled or under $200 if you make them yourself - again, far less if in bulk. Those changes would be cheap and doable today, except opening windows and having CR boxes in class will get you in trouble in my neck of the woods. If we actually wanted to spend money protecting kids - and the rest of us by extension - we could add upper room UV!!

Two Steps Forward...

 It's amazing to get so far in our scientific advances, only to have it tossed aside by misinformation. 

A Daily Mail article explained the conclusion of a study that,

"They confirmed that the shots made by Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca are linked to significantly higher risk of five medical conditions - including a nerve-wasting condition that leaves people struggling to walk or think."

And anti-vaxxers are spreading the news far and wide.  

Climate Projections and Anticipatory Grief

Media aren't free to report on it honestly, and politicians won't act on it. How can we possibly remain optimistic?

Matthew Todd wrote about the possibility that the Gulf Stream could collapse in the next few years based on an study in Science Advances:

"The day has come when the Daily Mail is reporting climate change more accurately (on one story) than the BBC who have not even reported this story, despite it being real, and being the number one lead story on CNN on Friday. The BBC seems absolutely unwilling to tell its viewers the full magnitude of the threat we face - because of a mixture of political interference and a lack of editorial interest and understanding. For the still stupid: This is how the richest people on Earth conned you. Facts: NASA, Oxford, Met Office, Margaret Thatcher, and Stephen Hawking. Then the oil PR campaign against the facts. Same story from The Guardian." 

It looks like our reality has finally hit a high enough level of clickbait outrageousness to be carried by tabloids, but now it's too far gone for mainstream news.

They're Going Full Orwell: Sickness is Health

Lots of misinformation out there still. 

On Vaccinations

We know that vaccinations help reduce severity of Covid to keep people out of the hospital, and we know their effectiveness wanes after a few months so boosters are needed at least every six months. In Ontario, they've decided the next shot will be for over 65 and immunocompromised only, but the CBC spun it like this:

"Too many people need serious medical care for flu, Covid when we can prevent it, WHO says. The National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) released guidance on offering an additional dose of Covid-19 vaccines in the spring for people at high risk of severe illness from the pandemic virus."

See what they did there? They made it seem like the next booster of XBB coming in six month will be given in addition to the one people are getting right now for certain people, as an extra, as if those in the know haven't been scrambling to get vaccinated every six months already. An alternative media explanation could look like this:

"Don't expect to get another vaccination despite how well they can help keep you out of the hospital! The NACI has decided to restrict the spring booster to only about 20% of the population despite vaccine protection waning within months. It's unclear if the vaccines on offer right now will be the last that are accessible by the general public."

The Boiling Frogs Timeline

Globally, Covid cases rose by over 50% in the past month! 

This article that reported the stats, mistakenly says the WHO "officially declared the end of the coronavirus pandemic worldwide in May 2023." Here's what the WHO actually said last May: 

"I declare Covid-19 over as a global health emergency. That does NOT mean Covid-19 is over as a global health threat. Last week, Covid-19 claimed a life every three minutes, and that's just the deaths we know about." 

It was no longer emergent, but they were very clear that it's by no means over. At this point, over 7 million people have died of it. These organizations and the media have a lot of responsibility for how horribly things have gone, but we have to acknowledge when we misread their actual words. 

Sometimes they make accurate claims but just look at it in the most positive light, like 7 million deaths is less than a tenth of the number of deaths from WW2! Things could be worse! 

But we are creating an untenable number of people disabled by allowing Long Covid to flourish, perpetuated by disingenuous or outright dishonest media. One honest article reported, 

The Big Lie of Covid Herd Immunity

Why do some healthcare professionals still insist that herd immunity will work despite visual evidence to the contrary? 

A nicely explainer came out in Journal of Infectious Diseases March 2022: 

"As commonly understood, herd immunity thresholds are reached when a sufficient proportion of the population is vaccinated or has recovered from natural infection with a pathogen such that its community circulation is reduced below the level of significant public health threat. For example, this threshold has been met with polio and measles circulation in the United States. However, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is so different from polio and measles that classical herd immunity may not readily apply to it. Important differences include the phenotypic stability [tendency for the virus to remain the same] of polio and measles viruses, and their ability to elicit long-term protective immunity, compared to SARS-CoV-2."

With measles and polio, once you get it, you won't soon get it again because, as they figured out in 1876, they "elicited long-term protective immunity that reduced or prevented epidemics, until cumulative births resulted in sufficiently large cohorts of susceptible children to support new waves of transmission." So vaccinating everyone as infants was enough to stop the virus in its tracks! With Covid, as we really really know, for sure, you CAN get it again over and over, right away. Some people have had it six and seven times. Some people have had two infections within 30 days. 

The article further explains why herd immunity doesn't always work:

Manufacturing Consent to Spread SARS-CoV-2

Like the political/media machine convinced citizens that invading Iraq was necessary, we're being convinced to spread a virus that will come back to destroy our own lives. 

Yesterday, Arijit Chakravarty, who specializes in applying mathematical modeling to drug discovery and development, and Martha Lincoln, assistant professor of cultural and medical anthropology, wrote about the ongoing existence of Covid that's often matched with ongoing minimization of a deadly and disabling disease in the US. Politicians are very worried about people panicking and freaking out and being hysterical! They largely don't seem concerned at all with people succumbing to disease repeatedly or tragically, and they really should be:

"If there's one thing we've learned, three and a half years into the current crisis, it's that--contrary to what the movies taught us--pandemics don't automatically spawn terror-stricken stampedes in the street. Media and public health coverage have a strong hand in shaping public response and can--under the wrong circumstances--promote indifference, incaution, and even apathy. A very visible example of this was the sharp drop in the number of people masking after the CDC revised its guidelines in 2021, recommending that masking was not necessary for the vaccinated (from 90% in May to 53% in September). As that example suggests, emphasizing the message 'don't panic' puts the cart before the horse unless tangible measures are being taken to prevent panic-worthy outcomes. . . . 

This 'moral calm'--a sort of manufactured consent--impedes risk mitigation by promoting the underestimation of a threat. Soothing public messaging during disasters can often lead to an increased death toll. Tragically, false reassurance contributed to mortality in both the attacks on the World Trade Center and the sinking of the Titanic. . . .Some experts and public figures have uncritically advanced the idea that if the public appears to be tired, bored, or noncompliant with public health measures, then the pandemic must be over. But pandemics are impervious to ratings. . . . History is replete with examples of pandemics that blazed for decades, sometimes smoldering for years befoer flaring up again into catastrophe. . . . A pandemic cannot tell when the news cycle has moved on. . . . 

Media Subterfuge

Want to be a respected news outlet? Stop writing horribly misleading headlines.

An article in The Guardian is causing a stir, not because of what the article says, but because of the heading and subheading: 

"Thousands of Covid generation under-fives excluded from schools in England: Nearly half of children in some areas arrive unable to talk and still not potty-trained as lockdown legacy take its toll, data show."

That's not actually what the data shows, however. The subheading is particularly ridiculous since these kids were infants during lockdown. They likely would have been home with mom anyway. 

This type of headline is not in the realm of clickbait or fake news, but it's still bullshitty and annoying, and it's got people on social media arguing about lockdowns now instead of discussing the real issues from the article: cuts to social services. It works to get people to discuss the piece, but few are clicking on it to actually read the thing anyway, so I'm not sure how well it pays off as a tactic. Unless, of course, the tactic is to get them to ignore the content. Can't spur on a socialist movement, now can we!

The article explains that the number of term exclusions in England last year were up 11% higher than pre-pandemic years, at which time they also had a problem with kids not yet school ready:

The Truth is Out There

Because it's harder than ever to discern fact from fiction means we have to work harder. Don't give up! 

Definitely not an example of Art Deco.

I once dated a guy I thought was absolutely brilliant. He seemed to know everything about every topic. He could answer and explain every question I had under the sun, and I had a lot because it was all long before the internet. 

But one day we went to an art gallery. He explained the style and history of each piece of artwork fluidly and confidently. Unfortunately for our relationship, I had spent four years studying art, and I knew that almost everything he said was just plain wrong. I gently corrected a few things, styles off by centuries, descriptions of depictions with no basis in scholarly discussion, but I let most things go. 

When we left the gallery he paid me a particularly arrogant compliment I'll never forget: "It's so nice to finally go to a gallery with someone who knows something about art so I don't have to teach them everything." 

Meanwhile, in my head, I was thinking backwards through all the many things he had "taught" me over the prior few months, trying to undo any damage the likely misinformation might have caused. 

And it got me thinking about Covid and the media. For most of my life I looked at media interpretation of events with a critical eye, but took most facts and sources at face value. I mean, I've been reading Chomsky since Manufactured Consent first hit the scene in 1988. I actually showed the three-hour long documentary on it to my class of 17-year-olds, and they all sat with rapt attention!! (That was also before the internet.) While I followed and agreed with most of Chomsky's claims around media bias, one foot was still in the camp that believes at least the facts presented must be true, right?? Distorted is different than just made up. Surely the big news outlets (distinct from "yellow journalism") aren't making things up!

Ignorance is No Longer a Defence

There is compelling evidence that vaccines work, with few serious side effects, yet they're still being demonized while media continues to suggest Covid ended. 

An Australian 8-year-old went into cardiac arrest but was saved due to her mum's ability to do CPR until an ambulance arrived. The Australian news mention that "cardiac arrest incidents are at the highest ever recorded," but their newscast is all about the importance of learning CPR. The comments on the article were divided. 

Covid Vaccinations Prevent Acute Symptoms

Of over 500 comments at time of posting, the vast majority blamed vaccinations for the heart attacks. They provided no compelling evidence.  

ETA: One recent study of over 4 million people determined the stroke rate after vaccination to be 0.05% which is not significantly different than the average stroke rate of a population tracked before the pandemic.

The Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine this year is being awarded to two people whose work enabled the development of mRNA vaccines, and I won't even hazard a peek at the comments there. 

Myths We Live By, and Die By

A brief but poignant thread by T. Ryan Gregory: 

It's painful to think about how much damage these myths have caused. 

Myth #1: Droplet vs airborne transmission.

Myth #2: Pathogens inevitably evolve to become more benign.

Myth #3: Endemic means mild.

Myth #4: Viruses quickly run out of evolutionary space. 

Myth #5: Children need to be infected with pathogens (vs. commensal microbes) to build up their immune system.

Not to mention all the new myths in the making that have arisien during this pandemic:
  "Immunity debt"
  "Robust hybrid immunity"
  "Respirators work at an individual level but not at a population level"
  "Targeted protections"
  "The virus doesn't transmit in schools"

I'd add that calling the Long Covid symptoms "brain fog" and "fatigue" led to people thinking they'd just be a little more forgetful than usually or a little sleepier than usual--no big deal--when the reality is some people can't get out of bed or sit up for long, and they need help to eat and go to the bathroom. 

Of course, we know now, and we knew back in 2019 as well, that most viruses that cause a pandemic are airborne; pathogens can get worse; endemic means it's continuing rather than rising and falling; viruses can evolve forever; and the more times we get sick - the more times our children get sick - the worse the outcome. 

We need to do everything possible to avoid getting this virus - or avoid getting it again. Well-fitting masks work. Cleaning the air with filtration units helps. Schools and hospitals are seriously exacerbating the situation since removing mask mandates, and policies must change to prevent such open transmission in public places that people need to be.

The New CPC

Image from this great Breach article

Remember back when Harper was PM, and he opened Canada's media to foreign ownership despite widespread protests? So now Poilievre all but owns Canadian MSM. Media is backing him and many pollsters are backing him, and Trudeau has little mainstream media on his side. Even CBC seems to be promoting Poilievre. When the polls show that everyone would vote in Poilievre if an election were tomorrow, don't believe it. Unfortunately enough people will believe the polls and then it might be enough to make it actually come true. 

Some people think it doesn't matter because MSM is so last year, but Twitter and FB are also owned by right-wing nutjobs. A friend was randomly barred from Twitter for absolutely nothing she can discern that comes close to breaking any rules, while many many hate-mongering abusive asshats are left to troll freely. 

If Peepee gets in, that online world is coming to a neighbourhood near you!

But we still have Tiktok (so far)!

From Lisa B. (abridged and highlighted below)

Over 90,000 Canadian Deaths and Counting

A JAMA article called out 52 medical health professionals who knowingly posted misinformation on social media. About a third of them are primary care physicians. It doesn't name any names, but the funny bit is that some of them have outed themselves on Twitter as they complain about the post. 

The really compelling bit, though, is the one comment on that journal article from a retired physician, Michael Holloway, PhD: 

"One of the more disturbing common characteristics across pseudoscience topics and campaigns is the reluctance of academics and institutions to speak out against even the most harmful and egregious falsehoods for fear of political backlash and spending significant time on work for which they are not supported. These authors are right: it is the job of medical and academic institutions to take strong and effective action against pseudoscience campaigns that are actively killing people. No single individual should have to be sticking their head up despite a few principled individuals doing so. 

How the Media Works

A new study just out that followed 548 people with Long Covid in Spain and found that only 7.6% of them recovered in the two years of the study. People think Long Covid means you're sicker a little longer, but this study suggests that most people possibly don't recover. Yet you can only hear about this if you follow sciency types on social media. It's not a mainstream newspaper headline despite the reality that it's having a huge effect on our workforce.

In so many shows and movies about journalists, someone gets wind of a story, begs their editor for the scoop, has to fight and plead to show that it'll be big, then spends weeks -- the rest of the movie/series -- hunting down the story details. Former journalist Nate Bear wrote a thread that suggests otherwise:

"If I hadn’t spent the last 15 years working in media and public relations, I too would interpret the media silence around covid and new covid research/science as a sign that there is nothing to worry about. But I have. So here are some things you should know:

Google on C-18

 It's a bill, not a virus. 

The gist of it is that it requires American tech companies to pay Canadian news organizations for content that appears on their platforms. The hope is that the law will help Canadian news agencies. But Google and Meta responded that they're just going to block any Canadian news so they don't have to pay for it. That very much sounds like the bill is having the opposite effect as intended. But the legislators knew of this possibility back in February, andAustralia already went down this path and were successful at negotiating the deals necessary to get compensation to their news agencies. It appears to be a waiting game. 

Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland, who negotiated a flippin' NAFTA deal with Trump, commented on the Google/Meta response to bill C-18,  

"I really believe that the way to get a good deal for Canadian journalism and for Canadians is to be firm, clear, polite and at the end of the day to stand up for national interests"

Many people are wary, including John Ibbotson:

"Such boycotts could harm the news operations the legislation was intended to help. And this purported help has probably come to an industry that, in its current form, cannot be rescued. . . . Today, the physical newsroom [at the Ottawa Citizen] is shuttered. A small remnant of reporters and editors work heroically to put out a paper and sustain a website. . . . It's hard to imagine that any injection of revenues from Google, the federal government or anyone else could restore those papers to their former glory. . . . Many magazines are in dire shape. National Geographic laid off the last of its staff writers this week. . . . 

Quality journalism requires more than a few columnists offering opinions, or a few reporters covering local crime and traffic accidents. It can involve weeks or even months of effort by a team of journalists to uncover and document abuse, corruption, conflict-of-interest or other misdeeds. We cannot and should not ask taxpayers to sustain newspapers as they were in the glory days. It may not even be worth asking them to prop up what's left." 

Some people are advocating boycotting the boycotters by using DuckDuckGo, Bing, or Yahoo. I don't expect enough people will be in the know or care enough to have any effect on these international companies. 

I don't know how much it will help, but consider a subscription to any magazine or paper you hope to save. Check out The Narwhal, The National Observer, iPolitics, The Line, The Walrus, The Tyee, The Local, The Trillium, The Logic, and IndigiNews for starters. Also directly follow reputable journalists on social media to access their work. Good news is absolutely vital to a good democracy. We're on shaky ground these days! 

And happy Canada Day from Google!

It's all the Scientists' Fault!

We're at the stage in climate change news that it's time to blame scientists for not telling anyone about it before now. Headline from The Hill: "Catch-22: Scientific communication failures linked to faster-rising seas"

"Scientists failed for decades to communicate the coming risks of rapid sea-level rise to policymakers and the public, a new study has found. . . . Scientists have soft-pedaled the kinds of catastrophic risks most easily headed off by cutting emissions. While scientific communication has improved in the 2020s, this trajectory led policymakers to make decisions based on risks that are better understood, easier to quantify--and also easier to write off as an acceptable long-term risk."

This is so totally bananas!! 

I'm a nobody with a flippin' philosophy degree. I've blogged about the environment since May 2009, when I start a blog for the explicit purpose of trying to get other environmentally-minded high school teachers and students involved in an amazing collaboration of ideas to help green our schools. I tried valiantly, writing at least once/week for two years, with few commenters and no joiners, then slowly gave it up. I get few commenters here, too, but I'm just barfing out my outrage now, not hoping to actually work with people on a solution. It's too painful when it's so fruitless.

Anyway...

Even I knew all about the causes and solutions around climate change. Heck, I remember learning all this from my grade six teacher, worried about global CO2 rising ONE degree back in 1976! Aw, so cute. 

The information was always out there for the taking, so if policymakers chose poorly, they have NOBODY to blame but their own idiocy.  

The study they cite, big surprise, doesn't slam scientists for failing to communicate coming risks. It's very specific to communication of "sea-level projection uncertainty." Analyzing how best to explain types of uncertainties is very different than claiming a failure to communicate! A better news article here. 

The article does get to the meat of the study, but later in the article, and it's definitely not indicated by the headline. And all too often, people don't read much past the headline.

Hey, mainstream media! Maybe it's time to look in the mirror, and consider how well you communicate.