Medford is Number One.
Our local hospital catchment area shows the country's single highest increase in COVID hospitalizations.
A lot of my fellow citizens don't want to be vaccinated. They have their reasons.
Our hospitals are full-up. Patients are in the hallways. The ICU has no space. Just over half of local adults are vaccinated against COVID. People are catching and spreading it. New vaccinations are still slow.
In hindsight, I should not have gotten a haircut yesterday. My hair was tickling my ears and it bothered me. Everyone is back to masking indoors, but I just didn't think very hard about whether my barber would be exhaling infected air. I kept a mask on for the haircut. Noelle, who cut my hair at a franchise hair cutting place, kept hers on, too. She is in her 50s, I would guess. As the haircut ended our conversation turned to vaccinations.
"I believe in doing my own research. I believe in freedom," she said.
At that point I knew where this was going.
"I have heard that lots of people get sick from the vaccination. They get headaches. They feel punky for a day. I heard people die from it all the time, but the media covers it up. Two people died right here in Medford--from the vaccination. Nobody heard about it.
I did my research. There is lots of unknown stuff in the vaccines. It hasn't really been tested. I am really careful about what I put into my body. Do your research, you'll see. The vaccines are super dangerous."
A friend sent me this comic:
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I am not in the right loops, but I know there is widespread social media talk about the dangers of the vaccines and enthusiasm about medicines that treat COVID. Ivermectin works to treat parasites in humans, and is prescribed for that. It can be purchased without a prescription if one uses preparations designed for veterinary use, for sale in farm and pet stores. It is an effective treatment for parasites, including heart-worm.
Social media gives people an easy way to bypass the medical-industrial complex. A tweet:
People wishing to buy the human-approved version of the drug, without the hassles and cautions and refusals by their regular physician, can order it on-line from a doctor and associated pharmacy. No problem. They ask which prescription one prefers, ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine.
Do ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine work? Possibly so. Maybe not. A pre-print--an early release of an academic study-- appeared to show that ivermectin reduced COVID death rates by 90%. This circulated widely. Why fuss with masks and get vaccinated if a drug that has been around for decades will cure you if you get a bad case of COVID? Shortly after publication, problems with the study emerged and the pre-print server pulled the study on ethical grounds.
The idea was out there. Ivermectin works, but the authorities don't want you to hear about it. That is a message with powerful appeal. People are rushing to buy it while it is still available, and they are taking it, both as a preventative and cure. The FDA is warning that they are seeing an upsurge in cases of ivermectin overdoses. The amount suitable for a horse is too much for a human.
People oriented toward believing the FDA and established medical authorities need to be careful not to project unjustified certitude. People skeptical about the FDA presume that being critical of something the FDA didn't recommend is exactly what the FDA would say, because they want control. Possibly hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in fact do some good. It is possible.
Skepticism of do-it-yourself remedies projects contempt, which backfires. Real data on drug efficacy is slow and complicated--just like real data on the efficacy of masks and the origin of the virus in Wuhan. Anecdotes happen quickly. Most people who get COVID do not die from it. Some of those people who got sick, then survived, will have taken a social media home cure like ivermectin, thereby creating a persuasive story. A Facebook friend gets COVID, takes hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin or something else, gets well after a few days, then tells friends. That is a clear, simple story that people understand and share.
Some people understand and calculate statistics, and think rationally about them, but statistics do not motivate very many of us. Stories motivate us. People hear things and sometimes they ring true. Donald Trump sold an idea that rings true to a lot of people, that COVID was no big deal, that bad people manufactured the disease and hide that fact, and then other bad people profit by the efforts to mitigate the disease. His message includes the idea that the media is in on the con, partly to protect Democrats and to hurt Trump, so the media censor the views of the independent thinkers. People hear things from friends and acquaintances who have no apparent reason to lie. They have more credibility than corrupt authorities. Believe them. They have a better, more welcome story.
7 comments:
The Ivermectin mania highlights how misinformation can be spread by social media.
I spent about 15 minutes learning about Ivermectin. It's derived from bacteria so as a medicine it may be something like penicillin (ask your family biologist). It's poisonous to worms. Some studies are underway to learn if it is effective against COVID, but definitive results are years away.
The fundamental issue is that many existing drugs are being evaluated as a treatment for COVID, and there is stiff competition among researchers to discover one that works, (imagine the rewards!). When they put out preliminary findings it's gobbled up by social media, propagated by trolls, and becomes urban legend. The fact that responsible media avoids questionable data only fuels the fire.
The local situation is frankly embarrassing and infuriating. I can only attribute it to monumentally blind stupidity.
Even the Tulip Mania story is a myth.
https://www.history.com/news/tulip-mania-financial-crash-holland
This blog has been getting a rash of racist comments from supporters of Donald Trump. The comments reflect poorly on the GOP and Trump. Some are written in the style of Curt Ankerberg, who gets a near majority of Republican votes in Republican primary elections. Others simply plagiarize articles in Republican media outlets.
I will leave up intelligent non-plagerized comments from virtually all points of view. But I have too much respect for Republicans to allow obscene, racist stuff reflect poorly on that party.
Peter Sage
The result of the way the government and financial elites treated “the people“ over the past half-century has been a catastrophic loss of trust in those elites. They pushed globalization and destroyed family-wage jobs and local economies while lining their pockets with the results. More recently, they have attempted to enforce very strange cultural norms on people who have the right to their own decisions on cultural matters.
This well-deserved lack of trust in elites unfortunately extends far beyond the damage to places like medical issues. So we now have people refusing masks and vaccines because they have learned, rightfully, to distrust messages coming down from “above.“ It’s all very sad, but very predictable.
I understand that our elites would like to elect a new people, but it’s actually going to happen the other way around.
It's been said that a neurotic imagines an irrational world, but a psychotics lives there. It's also been said that you can tell a tree by its fruit. Too much social media is the tree, and too often psychotics are the fruit.
Time for holy water, to be anointed with oil, eat a wafer,receive the prayer cloth, puts your hands on the TV, hold a snake, poke a pin into a voodo doll, poke a hole in your cheek, receive the laying on of hands, beat a drum in a circle chant, do a primal scream, whip yourself, crawl up the church steps to the crucifix.
It all works much better than science.
Penicillin is derived from mold. Botox FOR FREEZING FACE WRINKLES is derived from the toxins of the Botulusm.bacteria.. Botox can migrate from the injection site to affect other nerves. Do people ever know what they are really putting in their bodies?Imagine the government MANDATING botulism.toxin to create beautiful (frozen faced) Americans. AMERICANS volunteer for injecting a poison, but reject a vaccine that may save their life. or those they love. By the way, ever eat a hotbdog?
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