COVID-19 vaccine is available in Morris!

Good news! Of course, then I looked at the priority rankings.

  • Rank 1a are health care providers and nursing home residents.
  • 1b are essential workers (police, fire, teachers, etc.) and those over 75. (this might be me.)
  • 1c are those older than 65 and with underlying conditions.

I suspect I might be in 1b, although I don’t get exposed to as many people as public school teachers.

My wife is in none of the above, which does not make me happy. I suppose if I had the opportunity, I’d get the shot before my wife, with the understanding that I’ll be locking her in the house and doing all the shopping until they give it to her.

Parasites flooding the COVID-19 literature with toxic nonsense

A viewer of my video about the claim that viruses come from space noticed something I had ignored: the list of coauthors on the Steele/Wickramasinghe paper. Wickramasinghe always stacks on a long list of coauthors, which is probably one of the ways he manages to buy in support for his trash papers. Anyway, one of his coauthors is peculiar: a fellow named Robert Temple, who is affiliated with something called The History of Chinese Science and Culture Foundation, which appears to be nothing but a flashy website…an odd choice when you’re asked to list your prestigious associations. But then, Temple only has an undergraduate degree and exercises little discrimination in what he puts on his CV — I get the impression he’s one of those people desperate to get academic validation, but not so desperate that he’s willing to do the work.

His name seems to find its way on a fair number of Wickramasinghe’s papers, like this one, Growing Evidence against Global Infection-Driven by Person-to-Person Transfer of COVID-19, which tries to argue that you can’t get infected by contact with fluids from other people, so, by implication, everyone who has COVID-19 was directly infected by an infall of the virus from outer space. There may be some transmission through handshakes, he claims, but it’s primarily caused by a rain of viruses from space. This is irresponsible nonsense, and one could ask what the heck a guy with an undergraduate degree in Sanskrit is doing on the list of authors anyway. I guess if it also includes Brig Klyce, who my fellow old-timers from talk.origins will remember as the panspermia wackaloon who haunted newsgroups, they might as well chuck in any ol’ weirdo who voices support for their claims.

Jason Colavito has the full scoop on Temple. His claim to fame rests on a book called The Sirius Mystery: New Scientific Evidence of Alien Contact 5,000 Years Ago, in which he argues that “amphibious extraterrestrials from Sirius” provided advanced scientific knowledge to the Dogon people and to the Sumerians and to any random ancient culture he doesn’t believe was smart enough to actually have done the things they did.

Yeah, he’s one of those pseudoarchaeologists who believes in ancient astronauts. On the basis of those exemplary credentials, he’s now getting stuffed onto papers by the Panspermia Mafia. If you must, you can listen to him blather on for over an hour and a half on the Dogon people (I wasn’t able to listen to it — he’s one of the more goddamn boring and pretentious lecturers I’ve ever heard). Also, annoyingly, he calls himself “Professor Temple”, despite having no academic appointment anywhere. He obviously knows nothing about virology, epidemiology, or biology in general — he’s just a poseur who gets his name on papers he’s not qualified to critique. But then, I could say the same thing about Chandra Wickramasinghe.

When I tried to track down this coauthor, though, another discovery is that the Wickramasinghe group have gone on a disgraceful binge recently, taking advantage of legitimate concerns about the pandemic to flood various journals with bad papers about COVID-19. I’ll repeat what I said before: if a paper has Wickramasinghe’s name on it, it’s garbage. Use his name as a filter, and you’ll cull out a lot of dross. It’s too bad the scientific publishers haven’t figured this out yet and blacklisted him, as they should.

The COVID-19 crisis is an opportunity for charlatans on all sides

I’d never heard of Surgisphere before. Apparently, no one had. They just suddenly appeared out of nowhere with vast amounts of data from numerous hospitals, a gigantic database that they’d used to address the question of the utility of hydroxychoroquine in treating COVID-19, and came back with the expected answer: no, it’s not any good. They got quoted all over the place! Great PR! Suddenly, lots of people had heard of Surgisphere.

Unfortunately, Surgisphere is a crock.

The World Health Organization and a number of national governments have changed their Covid-19 policies and treatments on the basis of flawed data from a little-known US healthcare analytics company, also calling into question the integrity of key studies published in some of the world’s most prestigious medical journals.

A Guardian investigation can reveal the US-based company Surgisphere, whose handful of employees appear to include a science fiction writer and an adult-content model, has provided data for multiple studies on Covid-19 co-authored by its chief executive, but has so far failed to adequately explain its data or methodology.

Data it claims to have legitimately obtained from more than a thousand hospitals worldwide formed the basis of scientific articles that have led to changes in Covid-19 treatment policies in Latin American countries. It was also behind a decision by the WHO and research institutes around the world to halt trials of the controversial drug hydroxychloroquine. On Wednesday, the WHO announced those trials would now resume.

Hey! Nothing wrong with citizen input from science fiction writers and adult-content models. There had better be more substance behind the claims, though. It turns out that there is confusion about how many employees the company has (100? 6? 3?) depending on the source, there don’t seem to be any people with the special skills need for the study — this is Big Data stuff, lots of statistics and computer science — and the data has been falling apart. The study claimed to be derived from “96,000 patients with Covid-19, admitted to 671 hospitals from their database of 1,200 hospitals around the world”, but various hospitals have reported that the data doesn’t match what they’ve reported.

And then, the big question: how did this company get access to so much confidential medical information?

One of the questions that has most baffled the scientific community is how Surgisphere, established by Desai in 2008 as a medical education company that published textbooks, became the owner of a powerful international database. That database, despite only being announced by Surgisphere recently, boasts access to data from 96,000 patients in 1,200 hospitals around the world.

When contacted by the Guardian, Desai said his company employed just 11 people [nobody seems to know how many people work there]. The employees listed on LinkedIn were recorded on the site as having joined Surgisphere only two months ago. Several did not appear to have a scientific or statistical background, but mention expertise in strategy, copywriting, leadership and acquisition.

What is clear is that there was a massive falsification of data. It also looks like the chief executive of the company, Sapan Desai, is a con artist with a history of pseudoscientific schemes.

What’s interesting about the story, though, is that it demonstrates how everyone is a bit gullible, and is willing to suspend skepticism a bit when the science, pseudo or otherwise, seems to support prior expectations. Lots of people got fooled by this one. Researchers even suspended ongoing trials because they thought Surgisphere had just provided the definitive answer! At first, it was only the hydroxychloroquine fanatics who were skeptical of the study, and embarrassingly, they were right, in this one case. But the real difference is that the real scientists, like David Gorski, will reassess their conclusions in the light of new information, admit to their error, and move on.

That’s the difference between the cultists and me. I’ll change my mind if they present new information that checks out when I dig into it. It’s also a lesson that a believer’s skepticism when examining something he disagrees with will always be far more rigorous than when looking at a study that goes against what he currently believes. Think of it as a somewhat embarrassing reminder to myself (coupled, perhaps, with a bit of self-flagellation) to remain humble in the future and not to be too fast to dismiss criticisms coming from even the cultists.

Surgisphere’s papers are getting trashed. The legitimate hydroxychloroquine studies have resumed — way too many studies than the treatment deserves, if you ask me. If they come back with positive information about the value of the drug (I don’t think they will, since the claims all originated from sources as quacky as Sapan Desai) then I’ll accept new treatment recommendations. The question is, will the drug’s proponents accept any evidence from any studies that show its efficacy is baseless?

In case you’d like to name names responsible for the COVID-19 disaster

Rolling Stone tracks all the errors leading to our current unprepared state, and names the names.

Robert Redfield:

The front-line agency built to respond to a pandemic, the CDC, was placed in unreliable hands. Dr. Robert Redfield is a right-wing darling with a checkered scientific past. His 2018 nomination was a triumph for the Christian right, a coup in particular for evangelical activists Shepherd and Anita Smith, who have been instrumental in driving a global AIDS strategy centered on abstinence.

Redfield’s tight-knit relationship with the Smiths goes back at least three decades, beginning when Shepherd Smith recruited him to join the board of his religious nonprofit, Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy (ASAP). The Smiths made their views plain in the 1990 book Christians in the Age of AIDS, which argued HIV infection resulted from “people’s sinfulness,” and described AIDS as a consequence for those who “violate God’s laws.” Redfield, a devout Catholic who was then a prominent HIV researcher in the Army, wrote the introduction, calling for the rejection of “false prophets who preach the quick-fix strategies of condoms and free needles.”

Alex Azar:

The CDC reports to the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Alex Azar, a former executive for the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly who gained infamy, in his five-year tenure, by doubling the price of insulin.

Azar is a creature of the GOP establishment: He cut his teeth as a Supreme Court clerk to Antonin Scalia, worked with Brett Kavanaugh on the Clinton-Whitewater investigation under special counsel Ken Starr, and served as a deputy HHS administrator in the George W. Bush era, before becoming Eli Lilly’s top lobbyist. Azar, 52, is the type of corporate leader Republicans have long touted as capable of driving efficiencies in the unwieldy federal bureaucracy. Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell praised Azar’s nomination in 2017, insisting, “Alex brings a wealth of private-sector knowledge that will prepare him well for this crucial role.”

Stephen Hahn:

Stephen Hahn had been on the job at the FDA for barely a month. A bald, 60-year-old of modest height, Hahn has an impeccable résumé — he served as chief medical executive at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center — but he had no experience running a government agency.

The need to engage the private sector for coronavirus testing was not only foreseeable, it was foreseen — by Trump’s first FDA commissioner, Scott Gottlieb. In a January 28th Wall Street Journal article, “Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic,” Gottlieb warned that the “CDC will struggle to keep up with the volume of screening.” He said the government must begin “working with private industry to develop easy-to-use, rapid diagnostic tests.”

If Hahn read his predecessor’s call to action, he did not act on it. Hahn did not lack authority; the FDA has broad discretion to relax the rules that were locked into place with Azar’s declaration. But Azar had, unaccountably, not included Hahn on the Coronavirus Task Force. By default, private test developers were now required to obtain an “emergency-use authorization” from the FDA to deploy COVID-19 testing. “Companies couldn’t make their own lab-developed tests,” Adalja says, “so you had Quest and LabCorp and the big-university labs on the sidelines.”

Donald Trump:

Having plunged the nation headlong and unprepared into the deadliest disease outbreak in a century, President Trump is now proving to be one of the greatest obstacles to an effective national response.

Sebelius ultimately blames Trump for failing to end the infighting and fix the testing failure. “The White House has a unique way to get agencies’ attention, by making it clear that they want a solution, and everybody at the table with that solution within 24 hours,” she says. “If the president wants this to happen, it will happen.” But on his visit to the CDC in Atlanta, Trump had made an extraordinary admission: That he did not want to let passengers from a cruise ship, then suffering an outbreak off the California coast, to come on shore because the tally of patients would rise. “I like the numbers being where they are,” Trump said.

There are many other players, like Mike Pence, but these four are singled out for having the greatest responsibility and potential ability to have addressed the problem early on, who then failed and continue to fail spectacularly. Given the US’s historical failure to be able to hold our leaders accountable for anything — we’re treating the war criminal George W. Bush like a statesman now — I suspect they’re all going to emerge from this debacle unscathed, with a hundred thousand dead (or more) at their feet, and they won’t be arrested and tried for malignant neglect of their duties.

I still hold Henry Kissinger guilty of being a monster, and yet he’s still advising governments on how to murder their citizens. He’s a walking, talking declaration to the world that there is no justice.

Irradiate yourself and drink poison, that’ll cure COVID-19

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Trump had another of his daily talks today.

After the presentation, Trump asked whether UV light could be used to help people with the virus, whether sunlight could be brought “inside the body,” or whether disinfectant materials could be used to cleanse bodies in the same way they disinfect surfaces.

“So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light and I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way,” Trump said, adding it “sounds interesting.”

He turned to the power of disinfectants, ad libbing about what it could do inside the human body.

“And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out [from a surface] in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that [by] injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets on the lungs and it does a tremendous number,” Trump pondered.

Good god. Our best hope anymore is that Trump and his trumpkins start shooting up bleach or gargling isopropyl alcohol. Please, start a rumor that cyanide is an effective anti-viral.

That man is spewing criminal misinformation. He’s killing people.

Unimaginable stupidity.

Aw, jeez. South Dakota has COVID-19?

It’s cutting close to home now. South Dakota has reported FIVE putative cases of COVID-19 with one death scattered across the state, among people who had no contact with each other.

It’s entirely possible that this is a case of paranoia and misdiagnosis, since adequate testing kits have not been available, despite the fact that Trump officials keep saying it is contained. We can’t know. That’s a big part of the problem, that when science denialists are running the government they interfere with getting good information and allowing us to manage a disease effectively.

Here’s Richard Lenski’s take on the situation.

The news just came out that South Dakota — South Dakota! — has 5 presumptive cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections, including 1 death. South Dakota has lovely people and places, but it’s not exactly the center of the universe, or even of the midwest. It has ~885,000 people in total … roughly 0.3% of the US population. So a simple extrapolation to ~330 million people would imply something like 1,800 infections over the entire USA.

There’s good news and bad news. Good news: there weren’t 5 cases reported in North Dakota, which has an even lower proportion of the US population.

All the rest is bad news. We’re assuming all potential infections have been tested and discovered. We’re also looking in the rear-view mirror, time-wise. In most cases, it takes a few weeks for an infection to lead to death (when it does, which fortunately is not usually the case). Maybe a week or so to develop symptoms that would lead to someone being tested. So let’s call it a week. Well, this virus typically doubles in a week or so. So 1,800 infections a week ago (ones that have become symptomatic today) implies ~3,600 infections at present in the USA as a whole.

It’s personally worrisome, because Morris, where I live, is way out on the western edge of Minnesota, physically closer to South Dakota than we are to Minneapolis. Isolated rural communities aren’t supposed to be hotspots for pandemics, don’t you know — we leave that to the big city folks. Yet here we are, where we might have to deal with this at home.

We’ve received some concerned messages from the university administration, too. We’re supposed to develop a plan for how we’d complete lab courses if we go on lockdown, which isn’t exactly reassuring. I’ve been thinking about it, and have some less-than-satisfactory ideas about how I could wrap up the genetics course, and we’re supposed to have a meeting to discuss biology’s response tomorrow.

Our goal has to be to slow the spread of the disease to prevent medical services from being overwhelmed. Nobody is panicking — I’m already seeing conservatives mocking any response as panic — but taking necessary steps so that we don’t reach a situation that is unmanageable.

We already have examples we should be learning from, in China, in South Korea, in Italy. This rather cluttered infographic summarizes the lessons from Italy. It’s like a tsunami.

There’s a lot of medical jargon in that — I hope my local clinic is paying attention.

Do the COVIDiots even understand actuarial statistics?

Because I find this rather convincing that COVID-19 is much more than “just a flu”.

The Minnesota numbers are in, and they don’t look good.

Minnesota suffered more than 50,000 deaths in a year for the first time in recorded state history in 2020, mostly because of COVID-19 but also due to rising drug abuse and worsening racial health disparities.

A 15% increase in mortality from 2019 to 2020 demonstrates that the pandemic actually caused more deaths in Minnesota and wasn’t just a substitute cause for people who were likely to die anyway.

Hey, can we simplify that and just call all the deaths due to the neglected pandemic response, the erosion of our social safety net, and racism the Republican death toll?

Irony gasps back to life! Thanks, Florida GOP.

Florida, America’s poxed appendage

Their finances are in a shambles now, because one man held the keys to all of the accounts.

After spending months railing against COVID-19 precautions and criticizing Dr. Anthony Fauci, a Republican Party official in Florida passed away this week — leaving his county-level GOP organization without access to critical financial accounts.

Gregg Prentice, 61, served as accountant for the Hillsborough County GOP and also chaired the organization’s committee for election integrity. A software engineer by trade, Tampa Bay’s local Patch outlet reported that he built and maintained the local Republican party’s campaign finance software last year and was responsible for filing its monthly reports to the Federal Elections Commission.

A FEC filing from the surviving members of the organization claims that Prentice died without sharing login information for these accounts, or any sort of instructions for how to use them. The letter also tells the regulatory agency it will likely need more time to complete a report on its August fundraising numbers, and foreshadows trouble compiling the local party’s financials for future months as well.

Can you guess how he died? Can you? Guess! The Republicans are frantically straining to get extensions, so they explained how.

As a Political Party Committee, we file our FEC reports on a monthly basis. For several years we have been submitting the reports electronically, and for over a year we have done this with software developed by one of our members, Gregg Prentice. Gregg’s software converted data from our Quickbooks accounting software to supply the information needed by the FEC.

Unfortunately, Gregg passed away suddenly from Covid 19 on Saturday, September 11, 2021. Gregg did not share the software and instructions for its use with our officers. We will have to enter the August data manually, and according to the information we have received from our FEC analyst, Scott Bennett, we may likely have to re-enter the data from our first 7 months of 2021. We will be struggling to get all of this entered in the proper format by our deadline on September 20, but we will try to do so with our best effort.

Killed by a virus he had denied. It would be sad if it weren’t so fitting.

In addition to his role compiling the Hillsborough County GOP’s financials, Prentice spent most of the past year fearmongering about COVID-19 vaccines, mask mandates and other pandemic safety measures. Like many other conservatives in public life, he took aim in particular at White House COVID-19 adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, writing on Facebook that America needed to “End Faucism.” He also argued that “we need more socialist distancing than we do social distancing.”

Think of all the work the party would have been spared if only Gregg had taken a few minutes to get vaccinated. The pandemic is going to not only cull Republican voters, but is going to disrupt their organization. I hate to suggest it, but in the name of our common humanity, go get the shot, Republicans and other kooks.

Who is letting these frauds prosper?

Here’s a list of organizations you must not ever trust:

  • Children’s Health Defense
  • Informed Consent Action Network
  • Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance
  • America’s Frontline Doctors

Look at those names! How can you not support them? Those titles are all lies, though — these are fronts for quacks and medicine denialists that are raking in millions of dollars promoting anti-vaccine bullshit. They are busily undermining health care in this country, and somehow they avoid the criminal charges they deserve. They’re big money sinks used to spread misinformation, and perhaps the only salvation we have is that they’re all run by venal grifters who siphon off much of their money to pay themselves overblown salaries.

One of the most prominent grifters is Joseph Ladapo, the stunningly incompetent Florida Surgeon General. Florida is experiencing a measles outbreak — a serious, potentially disfiguring and even fatal disease that is extremely contagious — and Ladapo is basically doing nothing.

Amid an outbreak of measles at a Florida elementary school, the state’s surgeon general has defied federal health guidance and told parents it’s up to them whether they want to keep their unvaccinated child home to avoid infection.

In a letter to parents of children attending Manatee Bay Elementary school in Weston, where six cases of measles have already been reported, Florida surgeon general Dr. Joseph Ladapo said the state health department “is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance.”

That advice runs counter to what Ladapo acknowledged in his letter was the “normal” recommendation that parents keep unvaccinated children home for up to 21 days — the incubation period for measles.

This is not the first time that Ladapo has challenged health recommendations from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Last month, he called for halting the use of COVID vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna.

Ladapo is supported by Republican conservatives who fast-tracked him into his current position, and…he has an MD and PhD from Harvard! Harvard seems to be losing what reputation they had as a prestigious university, and are fast becoming the MAGA equivalent of a diploma mill.