Archives for category: Science
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Dan Rather: Thank You, Dr. Fauci!

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2022 //
44

Dan Rather and his colleague Elliott Kirschner wrote a tribute to Dr. Anthony Fauci on his retirement. They noted that the anti-VAXX conspiracy theorists have been howling for Dr. Fauci’s scalp. Surprisingly, Elon Musk joined the anti-science mob with a hostile tweet.

They write:

One of the most dedicated public servants in this nation’s history is stepping down after decades of government service. That this same man is being scurrilously attacked by the world’s richest man on a rapidly degenerating social media platform is a sad but instructive snapshot of our times.

Dr. Anthony Fauci has served presidents since Ronald Reagan. He has led efforts against infectious diseases ranging from HIV/AIDS to Ebola to, of course, Covid-19. His work and dedication have saved countless lives. And for much of his career, he was viewed with great respect on both sides of the political aisle.

But we all know what happened. Fauci has become a target for the anti-science, conspiracy-theory-marinated movement stoked by the former president. And today, Elon Musk sent out a tweet that epitomizes the debasement. Like a smirking bully on the schoolyard, he wrote; My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.

Many online were quick to point out how Musk had earlier tweeted favorably about vaccines. And they noted how he has been staggeringly wrong about the pandemic, which he said early on would just disappear. Plus, for what exactly is Fauci supposed to be prosecuted? You have to be fluent in crazy conspiracy theories to start trying to answer that question.

But even to try to debate on the merits is to have already lost.

This isn’t about facts and the truth. This is about scoring political points. It is about flooding our global discourse with horse manure. It is about attacking the very notion of expertise. It is about saying everything can be true so nothing is true. It is about intimidating scientists and health officials. It is about feeding the MAGA crowd with the red meat of a sacrificial lamb.

Who is the real Elon Musk? With all his money and power, why does he pander to the MAGA crowd?

Categories Extremism, Health, Science

Republicans Demand Repeal of Vaccine Mandate for Military

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2022 //
29

Congress is poised to pass the National Defense Authorization Act, which funds the military. Republicans refused to support the bill unless the Biden administration dropped the COVID-19 vaccine mandate in the bill. According to the New York Times, the Republicans have the votes to eliminate the mandate.

Lawmakers unveiled an $858 billion military policy bill on Tuesday night that would terminate the Pentagon’s mandate that troops receive the coronavirus vaccine, a move that the Biden administration has resisted but that came after Republicans threatened to block the bill without it.

The decision to scrap the mandate, the product of negotiations between Senate and House leaders in both parties, was a victory for Republicans in a dispute that had added a politically charged and highly emotional issue to the annual military policy debate.

Top Republicans, especially Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader who is campaigning for speaker, have made getting rid of the mandate a top priority in the bill, arguing that the requirement amounted to federal overreach and eroded military readiness.

President Biden and the Defense Secretary pushed hard to retain the vaccine mandate, but Republicans adamantly opposed it.

A group of G.O.P. senators who pushed for the move, including Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, issued a triumphant statement praising the decision to include the provision “to protect service members” from the coronavirus vaccine. Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Rick Scott of Florida had also pushed hard for the repeal.

The military requires military personnel to receive a long list of vaccines, which Republicans do not oppose. But opposition to COVID-19 vaccines has become a culture war issue, and enough Republicans oppose it to block passage of the bill.

Biden administration officials have said they opposed a repeal.

“Vaccines are saving lives, including our men and women in uniform. So this remains very, very much a health and readiness issue for the force,” John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said on Monday.

Service members are required to be vaccinated against a whole host of viruses. Starting in basic training, recruits receive shots protecting them from hepatitis A and B; the flu; measles, mumps and rubella; meningococcal disease; polio; tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis; and chickenpox in addition to Covid-19, according to the Defense Health Agency, which oversees health care for the armed forces.

Those sent overseas are required to receive additional vaccinations based on where they are sent and any special duties they may perform, such as shots to protect against anthrax, rabies, typhoid and yellow fever.

Across the armed services, a vast majority of service members are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, and nearly all are at least partially vaccinated, according to data released by the various branches.

The U.S. military has a history of vaccinating troops. It stretches back to Gen. George Washington requiring variolation, a type of inoculation, for his soldiers at Valley Forge in an effort to protect them against smallpox, according to Dr. John W. Sanders, a professor of medicine at Wake Forest University and an infectious disease specialist who served 23 years on active duty as a Navy doctor.

Calling the Covid vaccines “remarkably safe and effective,” Dr. Sanders said active-duty personnel take vaccines that pose greater risks — such as for yellow fever, smallpox and measles, mumps and rubella — “and do not bat an eye.”

“Being appropriately trained, equipped and vaccinated is part of having a strong military, and if people are in uniform, they need to take these vaccines,” he said.

So score a “victory” for the nutty right. They have succeeded, it appears, in “protecting” our military from a safe and effective vaccine against a deadly virus.

Categories Biden, Health, Science, Stupid

Dahlia Lithwick: The Long-Term Goal of the Anti-Abortion Movement

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2022 //
20

Dahlia Lithwick, writing in Slate, makes three important points about the ongoing controversy over abortion and the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. The anti-abortion movement is not satisfied because they want more than a decision that allows some states to offer abortions.

First, their real goal is a national ban on abortion and a declaration that a fetus has all the rights of a person. They want fetal personhood, in every state.

Second, since the Dobbs’ decision reversing Roe, large numbers of Republicans have expressed their opposition to the decision.

Third, post-Dobbs, expect to read frequent stories about women who died because they were denied an abortion; about women forced to carry dead fetuses for the full term of pregnancy; of children forced to give birth because they are “too immature” to have an abortion.

The only good news in this tragic turn of events is that Republicans who support abortion extremists may face a backlash.

She writes:

It’s being called “Roevember,” a reckoning around women’s rights and fundamental liberties that hasn’t been witnessed since the shaggy-haired days of the ERA. As Jeremy Stahl noted just last week, recent polling seems to show that women are pretty affirmatively pissed off about Roe v. Wade being overturned, and it’s affecting a set of key Senate races, in addition to down-ballot contests around the country. Mark Joseph Stern and I wrote recently that there is virtually no other way to assess the beatdown Kansas voters recently unleashed upon an amendment that would have removed abortion rights from their state constitution than as a repudiation of the Supreme Court’s recent Dobbs intervention, and a promise that even in ruby red states, and even among ruby red voters, only a tiny minority of female voters would endorse forcing teen girls to carry pregnancies to term. After Dobbs came down at the end of June, Kansas reported a 1,038 percent increase in voter registrations that week alone, compared just with the week before.

Yes, even Republican women get abortions. Even conservative women get abortions. Having had the “right” to an abortion and control of their bodies for almost half a century, many women will find it hard to give up their reproductive rights.

Categories Elections, Health, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Science

DeSantis Meddles in Local School Board Elections

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2022 //
25

Remember when Republicans believed in local control of schools? Those days are over, at least in Florida (and in other states where billionaires and Wall Street titans pour money into school board races to advance privatization).

In Florida, Governor DeSantis has endorsed candidates in more than two dozen local school board elections who are as irresponsible as he is. He can’t bear the possibility that anyone disagrees with him.

He is endorsing candidates who opposed any mask mandates, defying the advice of doctors, scientists, and the CDC.

DORAL, Florida — Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is working to line up a slew of loyalists on school boards across Florida as he seeks a second term in the nation’s third-largest state.

“We need help at the local level,” DeSantis said at a firefighters building before 430 enthusiastic supporters during a campaign event on Sunday. “You guys with your power going out and voting is going to make a huge difference.”

The governor has endorsed 29 conservative candidates ahead of Tuesday’s election for school board races, which typically don’t receive much attention and are technically nonpartisan.

School board members make decisions about spending, schedules, supplies, curriculum, and other matters. But in more than a dozen counties where DeSantis endorsed candidates, school boards defied the governor last fall by obligating students to wear masks.

What we know about DeSantis. He is shrewd. He plays to basic racism, homophobia, and the most extreme rightwing tendencies of voters. He is a bully.

Categories Bigotry, DeSantis, Elections, Health, Lies, Science

Frankenstein Lives!

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2022 //
60

A recent study by scientists at Yale concluded that it was possible to bring a dead pig back to life by injecting them with a solution soon to be patented. Their goal is to create a source of organs for transplants. The heart valves of pigs, for example, are often used in heart surgery for humans.

If the solution works on pigs, it would probably work on humans. However, the scientists took care not to reactivate the pigs’ brains.

The ethics issues are complex and profound, far above my pay grade. But we all need to think about what could happen next, or after that, or after that.

Science writer Gina Kolata wrote in the New York Times:

The pigs had been lying dead in the lab for an hour — no blood was circulating in their bodies, their hearts were still, their brain waves flat. Then a group of Yale scientists pumped a custom-made solution into the dead pigs’ bodies with a device similar to a heart-lung machine.

What happened next adds questions to what science considers the wall between life and death. Although the pigs were not considered conscious in any way, their seemingly dead cells revived. Their hearts began to beat as the solution, which the scientists called OrganEx, circulated in veins and arteries. Cells in their organs, including the heart, liver, kidneys and brain, were functioning again, and the animals never got stiff like a typical dead pig.

Other pigs, dead for an hour, were treated with ECMO, a machine that pumped blood through their bodies. They became stiff, their organs swelled and became damaged, their blood vessels collapsed, and they had purple spots on their backs where blood pooled.

The group reported its results Wednesday in Nature.

The researchers say their goals are to one day increase the supply of human organs for transplant by allowing doctors to obtain viable organs long after death. And, they say, they hope their technology might also be used to prevent severe damage to hearts after a devastating heart attack or brains after a major stroke….

The work began a few years ago when the group did a similar experiment with brains from dead pigs from a slaughterhouse. Four hours after the pigs died, the group infused a solution similar to OrganEx that they called BrainEx and saw that brain cells that should be dead could be revived.

That led them to ask if they could revive an entire body, said Dr. Zvonimir Vrselja, another member of the Yale team.

The OrganEx solution contained nutrients, anti-inflammatory medications, drugs to prevent cell death, nerve blockers — substances that dampen the activity of neurons and prevented any possibility of the pigs regaining consciousness — and an artificial hemoglobin mixed with each animal’s own blood.

When they treated the dead pigs, the investigators took precautions to make sure the animals did not suffer. The pigs were anesthetized before they were killed by stopping their hearts, and the deep anesthesia continued throughout the experiment. In addition, the nerve blockers in the OrganEx solution stop nerves from firing in order to ensure the brain was not active. The researchers also chilled the animals to slow chemical reactions. Individual brain cells were alive, but there was no indication of any organized global nerve activity in the brain.

There was one startling finding: The pigs treated with OrganEx jerked their heads when the researchers injected an iodine contrast solution for imaging. Dr. Latham emphasized that while the reason for the movement was not known, there was no indication of any involvement of the brain.

The older I get, the more I am inclined towards vegetarianism. Pigs are intelligent creatures. Do they exist only to serve our needs? Can we do as we wish with other creatures?

Categories Ethics, Science

New CDC Guidance: No Quarantines, Less COVID Testing

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2022 //
10

Chalkbeat reports that the Center for Disease Control is easing up on its COVID recommendations:

Schools can end quarantines and regular screening tests for COVID, but students and staff should keep masks on in areas with high levels of COVID spread, according to guidelines released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The new, more limited recommendationscome as districts across the country are starting a new school year — and in many cases reflect decisions to ease up on COVID precautions that schools have already made. Almost no districts are starting the year with a mask mandate, and in-school quarantine rules are on the retreat.

“This latest guidance from the CDC should give our students, parents, and educators the confidence they need to head back to school this year with a sense of joy and optimism,” Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement. “While COVID continues to evolve, so has our understanding of the science and what it takes to return to school safely.”

Categories Health, Science

Brown University: Hundreds of Thousands of Lives Could Have Been Saved…

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2022 //
42

Brown University released a study showing that hundreds of thousands of lives might have been saved if everyone had gotten vaccinated.

Categories Health, Science

Washington Post: Abortion Foes Want to Eliminate Exceptions for “Life of Mother”

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2022 //
78

With the likelihood that the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, a number of states are taking steps to make the punishments for abortion stricter and to eliminate any exceptions, such as rape, incest or the life of the mother. some states will treat abortion as homicide, with criminal penalties for those who perform them.

The Washington Post reported a recent incident where medical staff at a Cleveland medical facility worked feverishly to save the lives of a pregnant woman and the child she very much wanted.

The pregnant woman was bleeding heavily by the time she arrived at the hospital.

Maria Phillis, an obstetrician/gynecologist, and other doctors on duty at the Cleveland medical facility transfused her with bags of blood, but her condition deteriorated rapidly. It wasn’t long before the mother faced an awful choice: Her placenta, a part of the womb, had attached in the wrong place, wreaking havoc in her body. But the baby was far too young to survive on its own.

The pregnancy was terminated to save the woman’s life — an outcome painful for all involved. “This was a very desired pregnancy,” Phillis said.

Now Phillis replays the recent medical crisis in her head, wondering about the implications in a world where Roe v. Wade is overturned and abortion becomes illegal in her home state of Ohio. State lawmakers are weighing a bill to make performing the procedure a fourth-degree felony. Might she be charged with a crime for providing care she believes is moral and necessary?…

Anti-abortion laws frequently make exceptions for women whose lives are in danger.

Emboldened conservatives in some states are pushing to narrow and in some cases eliminate such exceptions, arguing that they create loopholes that are easily exploited. Doctors say such restrictions will complicate medical decisions for pregnant women, increasing the risk of death in a country that already has the highest rates of maternal mortality in the industrialized world.

Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin on Monday called for a special legislative session to remove most exceptions from that state’s “trigger law” banning abortion. In Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, leading Republican gubernatorial candidates have teamed up with antiabortion groups to push bans that would not allow the procedure even if the mother’s health is endangered. In some states, exceptions for the “life of the mother,” rather than the “health of the mother” have been written into trigger laws or proposed measures, significantly limiting the scope of when they can be used.

“What we are calling for is a total ban, no exceptions,” Matt Sande, legislative director of Pro-Life Wisconsin, said in an interview. “We don’t think abortion is ever necessary to save the life of the mother.”

If a woman dies because of such anti-abortion zealots, they should be held criminally responsible for her death.

Categories Cruelty, Health, Ohio, Science

Politico: “1 Million Deaths Was a Choice”

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2022 //
89

Myah Ward of Politico Nightly interviewed Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine about the depressing fact that one million Americans have died due to COVID. It’s fair to say that he was outraged by the many thousands of unnecessary deaths, encouraged by Republican politicians and by hostility to science. One man, not mentioned here, could have persuaded his followers to get vaccinated and boosted, as he did. Donald Trump. But while he rightly took credit for the rapid development of vaccines, but did nothing to discourage the anti-vaxxers.

1 million deaths. Did you ever think we’d get here?

For me, the big reckoning was the fact that we’ve not really come to a real national dialogue about what happened after May 1, 2021. That was the day the White House announced that there are so many Covid vaccines that any American who wants to get vaccinated can get vaccinated. Yet we lost another 200,000-300,000 Americans after that date. Those who were defiant to vaccines were overwhelmingly in red states, and the redder the county as measured by Trump voters in the 2020 election, the higher the vaccine refusal and the greater the loss of life.

It wasn’t by accident. It was a deliberate effort by members of the House Freedom Caucus, in the House, some U.S. senators, amplified nightly on Fox News.

I don’t even call it misinformation or disinformation anymore. I call it anti-science aggression, to convince millions of Americans not to take a Covid vaccine. And at least 200,000 Americans between May 1 and the end of 2021 died needlessly from Covid because of it. And everyone’s afraid to talk about it because it’s very unpleasant to have to point out that these deaths occurred along such a strict partisan divide. Even the White House won’t talk about it in that way.

So, with an exhausted public, how would you re-engage Americans at this point? Is it by having these “unpleasant” conversations?

You can understand the first wave of deaths in New York in the spring of 2020. You can even start to understand the second wave of deaths in the summer of 2020, in Texas, in the southern U.S. when we’re just trying to understand it. But then as you move forward, you have to start to come to terms with the fact that a majority of the deaths were probably preventable. And certainly just about all of the deaths after May 1 were preventable. And I think that needs to be front and center. That these are not accidental deaths. The people who lost their lives and died after May 1 were themselves victims of anti-science aggression. If you look at the big-picture threats to the U.S. that we spend billions of dollars every year to combat, like global terrorism, nuclear proliferation, or cyberattacks. Anti-science aggression kills more Americans than all those things combined by far. And yet we don’t recognize it as such. That’s critically important to point that out.

Alongside Americans being “done” with the pandemic, there’s also the concern about Covid funding running out if Congress doesn’t act. How important is this money in your view?

We have to recognize that the mRNA boosters are not holding up as well as we’d like. We’re going to have to probably go — unless we come up with a better technology, which I think we should, but that’s a different matter — we’re gonna need to ask the American people to get boosted yet again. And we’re gonna have to provide those vaccines.

And we’re going to need an ongoing amount of Paxlovid, for instance. I mean, why am I talking to you right now? I’m talking to you right now because I’m the beneficiary of Paxlovid, which I’m on right now, and I’m the beneficiary of having my second booster. And even though it’s not ideal to ask Americans to continue to boost, it’s still going to be essential.

The White House is warning we could see 100 million infections this fall. How do you see this fall and winter unfolding?

I know that’s what the White House is doing, but I don’t quite understand the logic of jumping to fall and winter. We still have two big peaks that are hitting us before fall and winter. We have this current BA.2.12.1, which is now about to become the dominant variant. It’s so transmissible, all you need to do is give a dirty look to that subvariant and you become infected. It’s up there with measles. So that’s issue No. 1. And issue No. 2 is we’ve had a terrible wave of Covid-19 both for the last two summers in Texas in the southern United States. I’m expecting that again. Even before the fall, we’re going to have another wave over the summer from variant TBD, to be determined.

Categories Accountability, Health, Politics, Propaganda, Republicans, Science, Stupid

Latest Study: Ivermectin Is a Medicine for Fools

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2022 //
29

Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times reports on the latest study of Ivermectin, a veterinary drug for animals with parasites. The study found that Ivermectin is useless as a treatment for COVID-19. It is a quack treatment that became popular among Republicans. Anything, anything at all, was acceptable to Trumpers except vacccinations developed by reputable companies.

He writes:

The final results are in, and they’re incontrovertible: Ivermectin, that nostrum assiduously promoted by anti-vaccine advocates and conspiracy-mongers, is utterly useless against COVID-19.

That’s the conclusion of a peer-reviewed studyof more than 1,350 COVID patients treated with the drug, which is customarily used to combat parasitic diseases in humans, livestock and pets.

The study was published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, but we reported on it last August.

That’s when one of its principal investigators, Edward J. Mills of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, disclosed the preliminary results during a research symposium. The data he presented then are essentially the same as the final results published by the NEJM.

Mills said then that ivermectin had “no effect whatsoever” on COVID.

Half were given ivermectin for three days and half received a placebo. The goal was to find whether ivermectin reduced the prospect of hospitalization or an emergency room visit due to a worsening of COVID symptoms. The bottom line is that ivermectin had no statistically significant effect.

“We did not find a significantly or clinically meaningful lower risk of medical admission to a hospital or prolonged emergency department observation … with ivermectin,” the study says.

These findings are important because ivermectin has been so assiduously touted by anti-vaxxers and credulous, irresponsible fools such as Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who has also used Senate hearings to promote hydroxychloroquine, another useless COVID treatment

Categories Health, Science, Stupid
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »