It allows her to take her show on the road – virtually as well as literally – and also discuss the potential of telemedicine.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
It allows her to take her show on the road – virtually as well as literally – and also discuss the potential of telemedicine.
Some of the people who are rejecting medical recommendations about safety practices during the pandemic are resorting to all manner of ugly behavior to make their point
A Michigan man wiped his nose and face on the shirt of a store employee who was trying to enforce a mask-wearing requirement. The 68-year-old man was charged with misdemeanor assault and battery and, if convicted, faces three months behind bars and a $500 fine.
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Seth Meyer discusses what the government scientist Rick Bright who was working on the vaccine program told Congress.
When I talk to my friends and relatives all over the world, I find that every single country in which they live has a government that is dealing with the pandemic rationally and based on the best expert knowledge even though the strategies have differed in details during to the local context and the resources available. One common reaction is that they marvel at what an idiot Trump is and feel sorry for me that we have to live with someone as incompetent as him at the helm of combating a dangerous and difficult situation. That view of how the rest of the world views us is not purely anecdotal
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America is a fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories and Trump is a fervent promoter of many of them. It appears that medical conspiracy theories are more likely to be believed.
Professor Eric Oliver, author of a book about conspiracy theories and the spread of false information, Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics, said those about medical issues are the most widely circulated and believed.
“When we’ve done surveys we’ve consistently asked a question: do you think the Food Drug Administration has been deliberately withholding natural cures for cancer because of secret pressure from the pharmaceutical industry? Typically we get about 40% of people in our surveys who agree with that, and that is by far and a way the most commonly held conspiracy theory,” he said.
“Medical and health conspiracy theories do well because oftentimes they’re not explicitly ideological in the way that other conspiracy theories are. They tend to cross ideological domains. The FDA conspiracy theory is endorsed as much by conservatives as it is by liberals.”
…A study of millions of Facebook users in the journal Nature released this week found that groups opposed to vaccinations were much more effective at penetrating discussion among those who were undecided than those who support the science. It said growing distrust in scientific expertise “could amplify outbreaks” of coronavirus.
This short video looks at the life cycle of the California floater mussel and how in its infancy it hitches rides on fish to get around.
Growing up in Sri Lanka, I had never encountered these creatures. My only knowledge of them was that sweet Molly Malone would sing out “cockles and mussels, alive, a live–o” as she wheeled a barrow of them through the streets of Dublin, home of pretty girls. Now I know what mussels are, I looked up what ‘cockles’ are too and they seem very similar to mussels.
We learn that people in the White House are very frequently tested for covid-19 and as a result more and more people working there have been found to have it. It was because of such infected people that Dr. Anthony Fauci (head of the NIH’s infectious disease program and a member of the coronavirus task force), Dr. Stephen Hahn, (commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration), and Dr. Robert Redfield (director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) were quarantined because they were found to have been in contact with some of them.
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Three of the US’s top health officials, Dr. Anthony Fauci (head of the NIH’s infectious disease program and a member of the coronavirus task force), Dr. Stephen Hahn, (commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration), and Dr. Robert Redfield (director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) have gone into two weeks quarantine after having come into contact with people who have tested positive for covid-19.
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Brian Melican has an interesting article in the April 20, 2020 issue of the New Statesman about three cities and how their failed responses to previous pandemics led to sweeping changes in the structure of the cities: Marseille, France in 1720 during the plague; Hamburg, Germany during the cholera epidemic in 1892; and Östersund, Sweden during the flu pandemic of 1918. It is a familiar story that resonates today about how business and civic leaders put the interests of commerce and low budgets ahead of the best scientific advice of the day, that overcrowding, poverty, unsanitary conditions, and lack of access to clean water and health services contribute to the widespread outbreaks of disease.
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