Florida veers off into fantasy land

Katelyn Jetelina responds to the nutso declarations of Florida’s (politically appointed) “Surgeon General” Joseph Ladapo, who when appearing on Fox News said “With the questions about negative efficacy, the persistence of spike protein, and then the stuff we’ve seen related to thromboembolic events like strokes and cardiac injury, I don’t feel comfortable … recommending [the vaccine] to any living being on this planet.”  Say what?

Jetliner goes through his arguments one by one and concludes, rightfully, that:

“Health policy decisions need to be grounded in an accumulation of evidence that provides a comprehensive picture of reality. He [Ladapo] combines legitimate points with profoundly foolish ones, which muddles the picture, creates a sense of false equivalency, and makes it difficult for the general public to discern the truth.”

In a related article, see differences in mortality data from 3 adjacent counties in 3 different states, each with different approaches to health care and public heath in a well-done Washington Post article by Lauren Weber, Dan Diamond and Dan Keating.

2023-10-08T15:55:42-05:00October 8th, 2023|HomeRecommended|

Heather Cox Richardson on why we’re divided

• Heather Cox Richardson discourses nicely on another reason why the U.S. is so divided (and why Congress is so dysfunctional) – the republican Operation REDMAP.  An excerpt”

“This Operation REDMAP, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project, was a plan to take control of state houses across the country so that Republicans would control the redistricting maps put in place after the 2010 census. 

It worked. After the 2010 election, Republicans controlled the legislatures in the key states of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and they redrew congressional maps using precise computer models. In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. And yet Republicans came away with a thirty-three-seat majority in the House of Representatives.”

2023-09-27T18:32:59-05:00September 27th, 2023|HomeRecommended|

Masks, yes they work for individuals

Katelyn Jetelina talks about the evidence showing that masks do work – especially for individuals who wear a high quality mask (N95 or KN95) correctly.  She summarizes the pros and cons well in her Substack post.

Odds Ratios and 95% confidence intervals of a subset of eligible included studies comparing masked versus unmasked.
Source

2023-09-27T18:27:47-05:00September 27th, 2023|Home, Musings|

House Republican Idiocy Continues

It seems there is no end to the idiocy displayed by some members of the US House of Representative’s Republican caucus, who are opposing renewing the funding for PEPFAR.  This was undoubtedly encouraged by the even greater demonstration of irrational thinking displayed in this Heritage Foundation report. Richard W. Bauer, a Roman Catholic priest who spent 25 years working on the ground in clinics for people with H.I.V. in Kenya, Tanzania and Namibia describes the issue in his NYT opinion piece, It’s Not Pro-Life to Oppose a Program That Has Saved 25 Million Lives. An excerpt:

“Despite the impressive successes of PEPFAR, we still have a way to go in the fight against AIDS. Around the world, someone dies from an AIDS-related illness every minute, and only about half of H.I.V.-positive children who need treatment are receiving it. AIDS persists as a leading cause of death among young women in sub-Saharan Africa. Experts warn that we have fallen off track in the quest to end AIDS by 2030. Weakening PEPFAR would all but guarantee we fail to do so.

I remember the days before PEPFAR. We cannot go back to an era when nearly an entire generation was wiped out across Africa. We have come too far in the effort to end AIDS to abandon the course now. Letting PEPFAR lapse would fail to honor the teaching that all human life is sacred and worthy of protection.”

2023-09-05T13:00:24-05:00September 5th, 2023|Home, Musings|

Yes, masks and physical distancing probably did have some COVID benefits

The Royal Society in the UK looked at multiple studies of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) against COVID-19 and issued a report (and summarized here in the BMJ):

“The report is non-judgemental on the timing and manner in which NPIs were applied in different regions and countries around the world. It focuses on understanding the impact of NPIs on SARS-CoV-2 transmission and makes no assessment of the economic or other societal impacts of the different NPIs…

The weight of evidence from all studies suggests that wearing masks, particularly higher quality masks (respirators), supported by mask mandates, generally reduced the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Studies consistently, though not universally, reported that mask wearing and mask mandates were an effective approach to reduce infection…

Stay-at-home orders, physical distancing, and restrictions on gathering size were repeatedly found to be associated with significant reduction in SARS- CoV-2 transmission, with more stringent measures having greater effects…

There is room to debate the societal risk/benefit ratio of the application of these measures; that’s not the point of the paper. What it does suggest is that blanket statements that “these measures are ineffective” are not true, and they must be weighed carefully in the face of the expected future respiratory pandemics we’ll face.

2023-09-05T12:59:53-05:00August 31st, 2023|Home, Musings|

Climate is complicated

• More excellence from David Wallace-Wells, writing in the NYT about how air pollution acts in some ways to mitigate temperature rise. No, he’s not advocating for increased air pollution, but pointing out that some measures to improve pollution and CO2 emissions may contribute to location-specific rising temperatures.   Climate is complicated, lots of work to be done to understand how best to mitigate global warming.

2023-08-31T14:48:18-05:00August 31st, 2023|HomeRecommended|
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