Covidiot News - How Antivaxxer Trumpanzee Covidiots Continue to Harm Their Gullible Supporters

Factors causing low COVID-19 vaccination have spilled over to lower flu vaccination rates | UCLA Health

A new study from UCLA researchers indicates a previously undocumented impact of widespread Covid-19 vaccine promotion on other public health behaviours. Adult flu vaccination rates have declined in states with low rates of Covid-19 vaccination, which the authors say may be a harbinger of declining trust in public health, suggesting that Covid-19 vaccination behaviour has spilled over to flu vaccination behaviour. The finding is published in The New England Journal of Medicine as a letter to the editor.

States with a low COVID-19 take-up are, of course, mostly red states where a majority of voters think Trump was a good president, so have been easy victims for the right-wing frauds who spread antivaxx disinformation and claim the pandemic was a conspiracy and the measure to combat it were unnecessary and an attack on their freedoms. These are also the fools who believed the right-wing political rhetoric of the pro-Trump evangelical white Christian churches who said it was all a plot to close the churches and to prevent Christians from practicing their faith.

It is alarming that controversy surrounding Covid-19 vaccination may be undermining separate public health efforts that save thousands of lives each year. Many Americans who never before declined a routine, potentially life-saving vaccine have started to do so. This supports what I have seen in my clinical practice and suggests that information and policies specific to Covid-19 vaccines may be eroding more general faith in medicine and our government’s role in public health.

Much as someone’s decision to wear or forgo a mask in public during the early pandemic was linked with their more general beliefs through the idea of ‘belief signaling’, we propose that ‘belief generalization’ may account for Covid-19 vaccine-specific opinions being generalized to other vaccines. People who feel compelled to oppose or support Covid-19 vaccines may feel that they should in turn oppose or support other vaccines.

Dr Richard Leuchter, MD, lead author
A resident physician at UCLA Health
And the David Geffen School of Medicine.

The letter to the editor of The New England Journal of Medicine points out how these fools have been victimised twice - one over the COVID-19 vaccine and again over the trustworthiness of medical science and in particular the flu vaccines which have done so much to prevent a serious flu pandemic by giving annual flu jabs to combat the latest, or most likely new flu variants.

According to the UCLA Health press release:

The authors used publicly available data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) collected through January 2022 to evaluate how flu vaccination rates changed during the pandemic based on state-wide rates of Covid-19 vaccination.

Flu vaccination rates for the first flu season of the pandemic (2020-2021), which pre-dated the widespread availability of Covid-19 vaccines, remained relatively stable across all states. However, in the second flu season of the pandemic (2021-2022), which was after widespread promotion of Covid-19 vaccines, flu vaccination rates dropped 4.5 percentage points (from 43.7% to 39.2%) in states with below-average rates of Covid-19 vaccination. Conversely, states with the highest uptake of Covid-19 vaccines saw increases in average flu vaccination rates of 3.8 percentage points (from 49.0% to 52.8%).

The authors say these findings taken together suggest that Covid-19 vaccination behaviors have spilled over to other public health behaviors, in this case flu vaccination. They explain that this relationship works in both directions: factors causing low Covid-19 vaccination rates (e.g., mistrust of Covid-19 vaccines, concerns about side effects, lack of trust in government) are linked to declines in flu vaccination compared to pre-pandemic times, whereas factors causing high rates of Covid-19 vaccination are spilling over to increase flu vaccination rates.

The authors propose that both of these trends may be explained by something called belief generalization.

It takes a special kind of stupid to think that, even if COVID-19 vaccinations are unnecessary and/or don't work or are part of some nefarious Satanic plot (which admittedly takes a high level of credulous gullibility in the first place) that this means flu jabs should be avoided too. But then we are still talking about people who think Trump was a good president, so for whom evidence is of no consequence and what they're taught to think from the pulpit is definitive truth.

The press release continues:

This is compelling evidence that the vaccination behaviors for flu and Covid-19 vaccines are inextricably linked.

Dr Richard Leuchter, MD

Rates of full vaccination against Covid-19 (i.e., both doses of a two-dose vaccine or one dose of a single-dose vaccine) varied from 50% (Alabama) to 81% (Rhode Island) through January 2022. Flu vaccination rates through January of the 2021-2022 flu season were also highly variable, ranging from 31% (Mississippi) to 59% (Connecticut). The study authors found that 60% of the variation in a state’s flu vaccination rate could be explained solely by that state’s average Covid-19 vaccination rate.

The authors note that these findings apply only to the general adult population. Flu vaccination rates among children fell uniformly and precipitously across both the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 flu seasons, regardless of when Covid-19 vaccines were introduced or state-wide rates of Covid-19 vaccination. The authors point out that previous studies have reported similar dramatic national declines in rates of childhood vaccination against measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR). Leuchter says that while belief generalization in the negative direction may partially explain why parents are opting out of routine vaccines for their children, the fact that childhood flu vaccination declined even among states with high rates of Covid-19 vaccination suggests that belief generalization from Covid-19 vaccines does not fully account for this trend. Reassuringly, flu vaccination rates among adults over 65 years of age remained relatively stable during these two flu seasons compared to the 2019-2020 season, albeit persistently underutilized in this population.

This study had some limitations. For instance, it did not directly measure individuals’ beliefs or reasons for forgoing vaccination. As an observational study, it does not prove that lack of trust of the vaccines or government caused the new decline in flu vaccination rates. In addition, the CDC reports flu vaccination rates based on self-report surveys and has not made county-level data for the 2021-2022 flu season available, so only state-wide data were used.

Despite these limitations, the researchers state that these findings should raise alarm and prompt rigorous study of the causes of decreases in non-Covid-19 vaccination rates to inform urgent action and corrective policies.

Sadly the letter in The New England Journal of Medicine is protected by copyright so can't be reproduced here. However, in their open paragraph, the authors make it clear that they place responsibility for this situation on the polarization of opinion over COVID-19:

The polarizing nature of vaccination against coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) within the United States threatens public health and has contributed to variable statewide vaccine uptake that ranged from 50 to 80% as of January 2022.¹ Given the divided national landscape and anecdotal evidence from our own patients, we hypothesized that low Covid-19 vaccination rates would be associated with decreases in influenza vaccination rates.

This polarization was a deliberate attempt by the Trump administration and his allies on the extreme right to politicise the pandemic, believing they would make political capital from such polarization. As things turned out, all they achieved was fooling their own supporters into risking serious illness and death from COVID-19, and now, as this article shows, from a seasonal flue epidemic.

The American Republican Pary is probably the first political party in history to promote policies that make their own supporters sick and take part in what some commentators have likened to a self-inflicted genocide of right-wing covidiot Trumpanzees, and Trumpanzee cultists are probably the first political faction who think policies which seem designed to harm them, are good things to vote for.

Democrat Voters are Healthier and Live Longer.

Trends in age adjusted mortality rates (AAMRs) per 100 000 population of residents of counties voting for Democratic or Republican presidential candidates by urban-rural location. Widening gaps in AAMR between Republican and Democratic counties are noted across urban-rural spectrum, from large metropolitan areas, medium metropolitan areas, and rural areas

Growing 'Mortality Gap' Detected Between Democratic and Republican Counties | BWH Press Release - Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH)

According to research just published, open access, in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Americans living in Republican-voting counties have a higher mortality rate than Americans living in Democrat-voting counties and this difference is widening. These are the findings of investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA, USA, led by assistant professor, Haider Warraich, MD, of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, who, according to the BWH press release:

…found what they call a “mortality gap” — a widening difference between age-adjusted death rates in counties that had voted for a Democrat or a Republican in previous presidential and governor elections. The team found that mortality rates decreased by 22 percent in Democratic counties but by only 11 percent in Republican counties. The mortality gap rose across top disease areas, including heart disease and cancer, and the mortality gap between white residents in Democratic versus Republican counties increased nearly fourfold during the study period.

The press release goes on to say:

In an ideal world, politics and health would be independent of each other and it wouldn’t matter whether one lives in an area that voted for one party or another, but that is no longer the case. From our data, we can see that the risk of premature death is higher for people living in a county that voted Republican.

Our study suggests that the mortality gap is a modern phenomenon, not an inevitability. At the start of our study, we saw little difference in mortality rates in Democratic and Republican counties. We hope that our findings will open people’s eyes and show the real effect that politics and health policy can have on people’s lives.

Assistant professor Haider Warraich, MD, lead author
Division of Cardiovascular Medicine
Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA, USA

Warraich and colleagues used data from the Wide-ranging OnLine Data for Epidemiologic Research (CDC WONDER) database and the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Election Data and Science Laboratory. They classified counties as Democratic or Republican based on the way the county had voted in the previous presidential election and adjusted for age when calculating mortality rates.

Overall, the team found that mortality rates in Democratic counties dropped from 850 deaths per 100,000 people to 664 (22 percent), but in Republican counties, mortality rates declined from 867 to 771 (11 percent). When the team analyzed by race, they found that there was little gap between the improvements in mortality rates that Black and Hispanic Americans experienced in Democratic and Republican counties. But among white Americans, the gap between people living in Democratic versus Republican counties was substantial.

The mortality gap remained consistent when the researchers looked only at counties that had voted Republican or Democratic in every presidential election year studied and when they looked at gubernatorial elections. Democratic counties experienced greater reductions in mortality rates across most common causes of death, including heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory tract diseases, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, and kidney disease.

The authors note that the widening gap in death rates may reflect the influence of politics on health policies. One of the inflection points detected in the study corresponds to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which was passed in 2010. More Democratic states than Republican states adopted Medicaid expansion under the ACA, which expanded health insurance coverage to people on a low income.

The study detects an association between political environment and mortality but does not definitively determine the direction of the association or the specific factors that may explain the link between the two. The authors did not study the effect of flipping political environments — that is, counties that switched from voting Democratic or Republican to voting for the other party — on health outcomes, which could be an area of future study. The study period ended in 2019, before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which may have had an even more profound impact on the mortality gap.

Trends in age adjusted mortality rates (AAMRs) per 100 000 residents of counties voting for Democratic or Republican presidential candidates. Widening gap in AAMR is noted between Democratic and Republican counties. Statistically significant inflection points in annual percentage change (APC) of AAMR occurred for Democratic counties between periods 2001-09 (APC −2.1) and 2009-19 (APC −0.8) and Republican counties between periods 2001-08 (APC −1.4) and 2008-19 (APC −0.2)

Trends in age adjusted mortality rates (AAMRs) per 100 000 residents of counties voting for Democratic or Republican presidential candidates by sex. Widening gap in AAMR is noted between male and female residents of Democratic and Republican counties. (Top lines) Statistically significant inflection points in annual percentage change (APC) of AAMR occurred for male residents of Democratic counties between periods 2001-10 (APC −2.2) and 2010-19 (APC −0.7) and male residents of Republican counties between periods 2001-07 (APC −1.7) and 2007-14 (APC −0.6) with no significant change noted after additional inflection point (straight line) between 2014 and 2019. (Bottom lines) Statistically significant inflection points in annual percentage change of AAMR occurred for female residents of Democratic counties between periods 2001-09 (APC −2.0) and 2009-19 (APC −0.9) and female residents of Republican counties between periods 2001-07 (APC −1.4) and 2007-19 (APC −0.3).

Trends in age adjusted mortality rates (AAMRs) per 100 000 residents of counties voting for Democratic or Republican presidential candidates by race and ethnicity. Widening gap in AAMR is noted most prominently among white residents of Democratic and Republican counties, while the gap appears to narrow for Hispanic residents. AAMR gap for black residents of Democratic and Republican counties oscillates across the study period.

Trends in age adjusted mortality rates (AAMRs) per 100 000 population for counties voting for Democratic or Republican governors by state Group from 2001 to 2019. Group A=New Hampshire and Vermont; Group B=Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and Washington DC; Group C=Delaware, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Utah, Washington, and West Virginia; Group D=Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi; Group E=New Jersey and Virginia.

Trends in age adjusted mortality rates (AAMRs) per 100 000 population of residents of counties voting for Democratic or Republican presidential candidates by urban-rural location. Widening gaps in AAMR between Republican and Democratic counties are noted across urban-rural spectrum, from large metropolitan areas, medium metropolitan areas, and rural areas.

Age adjusted mortality rates (AAMRs) per 100 000 population for the 10 most common causes of death in Democratic and Republican counties in 2001 and 2019. Except for cerebrovascular disease, the gap in AAMR between Republican and Democratic counties increased for every cause of death over the study period driven by heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory tract disease, unintentional injuries (which include drug overdoses), and suicide.

As these charts show, this gap holds true for all demographic grouping, whether by sex, race, geography or age and even for the 10 most common causes of death. However the biggest gap is seen in the white population. This is significant because the Republican Party is increasingly becoming identified as the party of the white right.

On every measure, Americans living in red counties fare worse that those living in blue counties and the authors point out the study period ended in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic. They also point out that one of the inflections on the charts during which the health of those in Democrat counties improved more than the health of those in Republican counties coincided with President Obama's, Affordable Care Act, which was implemented disproportionately in Democrat counties and improved the health of poor people.

As these figures show, the Republicans who campaigned against 'Obama Care' were in effect campaigning against improving the health of their own supporters!

It will be interesting to see what happened during the later stages of the COVID-19 pandemic after vaccinations against the virus had become widely available, and especially during the omicron variant wave, when most Democrat voters had been vaccinated and were observing sensible precautions, and, following the disastrously incompetent lead of Donald Trump and his allies on the extreme political right, and in the white supremacist evangelical Christian churches, many covidiot Republicans failed to get vaccinated and refused to wear face-coverings or observe social distancing because they had all become seen as anti-Trump statements!

This deliberate division of American into partisan camps, for what Trump and his allies thought would be to their political advantage, resulted in hospital admissions and deaths from COVID-19 being disproportionately of Republican antivaxxer covidiots in what some commentators likened to a self-inflicted genocide of fundamentalist, covidiot Trumpanzees. Probably the first time in the history of democracy that a political party has actively pursued policies that seem designed to kill their own supporters and their supporters trotted dutifully along like lambs to the slaughter led by Judas sheep, and yet only a tiny handful of Republican politicians had the decency to back out of the rabbit hole they had dived into and take the poitical risk of admitting they were wrong.

The teams finding are published, open access, in the BMJ:

Abstract

Objective To assess recent trends in age adjusted mortality rates (AAMRs) in the United States based on county level presidential voting patterns.

Design Cross sectional study.

Setting USA, 2001-19.

Participants 99.8% of the US population.

Main outcome measures AAMR per 100 000 population and average annual percentage change (APC).

Methods The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention WONDER database was linked to county level data on US presidential elections. County political environment was classified as either Democratic or Republican for the four years that followed a November presidential election. Additional sensitivity analyses analyzed AAMR trends for counties that voted only for one party throughout the study, and county level gubernatorial election results and state level AAMR trends. Joinpoint analysis was used to assess for an inflection point in APC trends.

Results The study period covered five presidential elections from 2000 to 2019. From 2001 to 2019, the AAMR per 100 000 population decreased by 22% in Democratic counties, from 850.3 to 664.0 (average APC −1.4%, 95% confidence interval −1.5% to −1.2%), but by only 11% in Republican counties, from 867.0 to 771.1 (average APC −0.7%, −0.9% to −0.5%). The gap in AAMR between Democratic and Republican counties therefore widened from 16.7 (95% confidence interval 16.6 to 16.8) to 107.1 (106.5 to 107.7). Statistically significant inflection points in APC occurred for Democratic counties between periods 2001-09 (APC −2.1%, −2.3% to −1.9%) and 2009-19 (APC −0.8%, −1.0% to −0.6%). For Republican counties between 2001 and 2008 the APC was −1.4% (−1.8% to −1.0%), slowing to near zero between 2008 and 2019 (APC −0.2%, −0.4% to 0.0%). Male and female residents of Democratic counties experienced both lower AAMR and twice the relative decrease in AAMR than did those in Republican counties. Black Americans experienced largely similar improvement in AAMR in both Democratic and Republican counties. However, the AAMR gap between white residents in Democratic versus Republican counties increased fourfold, from 24.7 (95% confidence interval 24.6 to 24.8) to 101.3 (101.0 to 101.6). Rural Republican counties experienced the highest AAMR and the least improvement. All trends were similar when comparing counties that did not switch political environment throughout the period and when gubernatorial election results were used. The greatest contributors to the widening AAMR gap between Republican and Democratic counties were heart disease (difference in AAMRs 27.6), cancer (17.3), and chronic lower respiratory tract diseases (8.3), followed by unintentional injuries (3.3) and suicide (3.0).

Conclusion The mortality gap in Republican voting counties compared with Democratic voting counties has grown over time, especially for white populations, and that gap began to widen after 2008.

Warraich H J, Kumar P, Nasir K, Joynt Maddox K E, Wadhera R K.
Political environment and mortality rates in the United States, 2001-19: population based cross sectional analysis
BMJ 2022; 377 :e069308 doi:10.1136/bmj-2021-069308

Copyright: © 2022 The authors. Published by BMJ Publishing Group Ltd.
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

I would suggest to my American readers in particular, that a party which is actively and knowingly pursuing policies designed to make their people sicker with a lower life expectancy, is a party which should never be trusted with the power to implement those policies at any level of government.

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Tory Corruption News - Sue Gray Report in Full

The full report into partying at 10 Downing Street, under Boris Johnson's leadership, during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, when such gatherings were illegal. Johnson misled parliament when he stated that there were no such parties and that all the rules were followed at all times.

The full Sue Gray Report into illegal partying at 10 Downing Street.

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QAnon/COVID Conspiracy News - The Flights of Fancy Go Stratospheric

Dr Bryan Ardis, Chiropractor and acupuncturist.
"Covid-19 is not a virus, it's snake venom" [sic]

The King Cobra Venom Pandemic: Stew Peters Unveils a New COVID-19 Conspiracy Theory | Right Wing Watch

It's amazing how, the more QAnon's ludicrous conspiracy theories are debunked, the more risible they became in trying to justify them, like toddlers caught with their hands in the cookie jar, rather than admit the game's up and they've been rumbled.

The even more amazing thing is that adults, even adults holding responsible positions, like Representative Marjorie Taylor-Green (R-GA 13) and Senator Doug Mastriano (R-PA 33) continue to fall for these tactics.

One example of how far into the stratosphere QAnon conspiracists have gone in the justification for opposing measures to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic, which is about to achieved its millionth American death, on the grounds that it's all a plot, somehow linked to a Satanic, cannibalistic paedophile, deep state conspiracy run by Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama and the Pope, and including Bill Gates, Andrew Faucci and others, is the so-called 'explosive report' by medical quackticioner, Dr. Bryan Ardis.

His 'explosive' report which he revealed on the far right Stew Peters Show, is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 is not a virus at all but a modified snake venom which is passed on deliberately in drinking water. Seriously!

Here is how he arrived at that conclusion, not by analysis of drinking water, or by subjecting samples of the virus to biochemical analysis, but by a form of logic of which any self-respecting toddler might be proud, until they grew up enough to cringe in embarrassment at their childish thinking.

Here is his 'reasoning':

SCOTUS Now Represents Only a Small Minority of American Religious Extremists.

Attitude towards abortion by religiosity and political leanings. States set to make abortion illegal in all circumstances will be complying with the opinion of Americans who attend church every week, especially Republicans.

Source

Personal Religiosity and Attitudes Toward Abortion

The evidence from Gallop is that, if SCOTUS as expected overturns the 1973 ruling in Roe v Wade and allows the criminalisation of abortions in all or most cases, they will be empowering states to impose the views of a small minority of religious extremists on the rest of America, as the following charts show.

SCOTUS, whose prime purpose is to uphold the Constitutional constraints on government action, will be explicitly endorsing a flagrant imposition of Conservative Christian dogma by incorporating it into state laws.

On every measure, the opinion that abortions should be illegal in all circumstances - including where pregnancy is the result of rape or incest or the woman is very young, and even when there is severe foetal abnormality such that independent life will be impossible or there is a serious risk to the woman's life - is an opinion not shared by most Americans. It's not even the majority opinion of those Americans who go to church every week.

Lying Christians News - David Barton Just Can't Stop

David Barton, pseudo-historian and Talibangelical liar

David Barton Falsely Claims Voter Turnout 'Was 100 Percent' in Early America Because 'Churches Ran the Communities' | Right Wing Watch

How can you tell when pseudo-historian and Talibangelical Christian extremist David Barton is lying again?

Well, I'll leave you to fill in the obvious punchline, but Barton epitomises the old adage that when you show the world you know you need to lie for your faith, you show the world you know your faith needs fools to believe falsehoods. As Mark Twain said, "Lying is trying to fool someone into believing something you know ain’t so!"

The question is, why does David Barton and his extremist Christian supporters need Americans to believe something they know ain’t so? The answer is because they don't want them believing things they know are so, of course.

The Lunatics Are Now Running the US Asylum

The impending SCOTUS ruling overturning the 1973 Roe vs Wade ruling that legalised abortion in all US states is a sign that the lunatics have taken over and are now running the asylum.

As I reported yesterday, the decision was based, at least in part on the false idea that a foetus suffers during the procedure. This claim was based on a 2020 discussion paper by British scientist, Dr Stuart Derbyshire, that wrongly claimed the work of the Italian professor of neuroscience, Giandomenico Iannetti, had shown that the foetus could feel pain even before its cerebral cortex had developed at 24 weeks.

SCOTUS were not told by the Lawyers representing evangelical Christian extremists that Professor Iannetti strongly refuted Derbyshire's claim, and he was not called to testify to that fact, nor even told that his work was being (mis)used to argue against a woman’s right to abortion - something of which he is strongly in favour.

A highly selective piece of scientific 'evidence', refuted by the majority of neuroscientist, was presented as the mainstream, consensus view of relevant medical experts. SCOTUS seems to have swallowed that, hook line and sinker and failed to consult expert medical opinion which could have given them a balanced view and corrected their misapprehension. They lapped up the pap they were fed because it told them what they wanted to hear to 'confirm' their preconceptions.

Their opinion is not a scientific, evidence-based ruling, but a prejudiced, preconceived religious opinion based on falsehoods and misrepresentation of the real science. The lunatics have taken over SCOTUS.

MAGA pastor/Trump cultist Shane Vaughn declares that conservatives are "always right." Why? "They're just smarter than liberals. Liberalism is a mental disease." pic.twitter.com/AsF43AzV3L

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) May 5, 2022

Another lunatic who wants to be running the show is MAGA/QAnon Trumpanzee cultist, Pastor Shane Vaughn, who has recently announced that "Conservatives are always right" because they are smarter than liberals who are suffering from a "mental disease". Why does he think they are smarter than liberals? Because they are always right, of course. Why are they always right? Because they are smarter than liberals. A neatly circular, self-referencing argument, not grounded at any point in reality, typical of the mental disorder we call narcissistic personality disorder or delusions of grandeur.

Famous examples of Shane Vaughn (real name, John Vaughn) always being right are:

• Being convicted of multiple instances of identity theft, fraud and other felonies when, as an insurance agent in Baton Rouge, he stole the identity of a child who had died aged 4 years, and defrauded, banks, pensioners and others. He had his licence to operate as an insurance agent revoked and was slapped with a $100,000 fine and a 3 years spell in jail. During the trial he was described as "a chameleon, changing his look and name repeatedly". In other words, a shyster and con artist - just the sort to start a megachurch and declare himself to be God's spokesperson.

Talibangelical News - Evangelical Christians Now Control SCOTUS

On abortion, few Americans take an absolutist view| Pew Research Center

The much trumpeted impending SCOTUS ruling effectively striking down Roe vs Wade and so making abortion illegal in America unless specifically decriminalised at state level, is widely at odds with American public opinion, but largely in line with the views of white evangelical Christians, showing the degree to which entitled white evangelical Christianity, with Donald Trump's help, has subverted SCOTUS.

While 61% of Americans are in favour of legalised abortions, only 37% oppose it. SCOTUS is representing only a minority of American extremists while ignoring the views of the vast majority. On this issue, if no other, SCOTUS can be seen to represent only a minority of Americans, who nevertheless feel entitled to have their views predominating.

This Pew Research survey show that, of all the religious groups in the USA, only the White Evangelicals back a ban on abortion. 73% of white evangelicals say their almost universal opposition to abortion is shaped by their religion, while only 28% of white, non-evangelical Protestants say their views have a religious basis and 7% of non-affiliated cite religion as shaping their views.

Religious War Crimes News - How the Russian Orthodox Church Backs Putin's War on Women & Children

Patriarch Kirill and Vladimir Putin.

War on Ukraine is "an active manifestation of evangelical love for neighbours" - Patriarch Kirill

How Putin's invasion became a holy war for Russia

Fulfilling the Christian Churchs' historic roll of supporting right-wing totalitarian nationalism, the Russian Orthodox Christian Church is backing Putin's murderous and unprovoked attack on Ukraine and the territorial ambitions of Vladimir Putin.

For Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church, the war against Ukrainian democracy is wrapped in the Russian flag and shrouded in religious zeal, since Kiev is the home of Prince Vladimir the Great of Kiev, the legendary founder of the Russian Church who , in about 978 AD, was responsible for making Byzantine Christian Orthodoxy the official religion of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

The Hagia Sophia, Istanbul
Legend has it that Prince Vladimir the Great of Kiev was so impressed he adopted the Orthodox Christianity of Byzantium as the state religion for Russia, Ukraine and Belorus.

The legend is that he invited missionaries from Eastern (now Orthodox) Christianity, Western (now Catholic) Christianity, Judaism and Islam to persuade him to adopt their religion. He rejected Islam because of the prohibition on alcohol and pork, saying that the Rus couldn't do without alcohol and Judaism because 'God had allowed the Jews to lose Jerusalem'. He eventually settled on Eastern Christianity when his emissaries reported the magnificence of the Hagia Sophia Church in Constantinople (now Istanbul).

On Russian National Unity Day, 4th November 2016, with Patriarch Kirill, the oleaginous head of the Russian Orthodox Church, at his side, smiling and applauding enthusiastically, Putin unveiled a huge statue of Vladimir the Great outside the Kremlin. On the day that Putin ordered his troops into Ukraine, Patriarch Kirill published a grovelling and nauseatingly obsequious statement which read:

Creationism Failure News - A Significant Majority of Young Americans Don't Want Creationism Taught in US Public Schools

Mood of the Nation: How Americans think schools should teach about race, evolution and sex — APM Research Lab

The results of an interesting survey into American opinion on several hot topics was published a few days ago. The interesting thing from the perspective of what, almost unbelievably is still a controversial topic in the USA - the teaching of scientific evolutionary theory versus teaching Creationism in American public schools - was the difference between young and old, between the higher educated and the relatively less educated and between those with different political leanings.

Perhaps the most significant of those and the one that holds out most hope for the future of science education in the USA, is the difference by age group between those who believe only the scientific theory of evolution should be taught, those believing both the science and a 'biblical perspective' should be taught and those believing only biblical Creationism should be taught.

Trumpanzee QAnon Fruitloop News - Update on Covidiot Cirsten Weldon's COVID-19 Death

Cirsten Weldon, Pro-Trump, Antivaxx QAnon conspiracist.
Died of COVID-19, 04 Jan, 2022.

Cirsten Weldon, a prominent Trumpanzee and QAnon conspiracist and antivaxxer, who earned her living tell gullible fools that only idiots get vaccinated, died of COVID-19 on January 4, 2022, in Camarillo, California.

Her fellow conspiracy theorists have now dreamed up an even more preposterous conspiracy theory: that she is still alive and in 'protective custody' having faked her own death. I wonder if, like Elvis, she'll turn up working in a chip shop near you, in the not too distant future.

Is there no lower limit to the credulity of these idiots? Certainly QAnon hasn't found it yet. They even think Trump was a competent POTUS!

To begin with, as I reported at the time:

Covidiot Antivaxx News - The Child-Like QAnon Dupes are Turning to Violence to Avoid Facing the Truth.

Kirsten Weldon, Pro-Trump, Antivaxx QAnon conspiracist.
Died of COVID-19, 04 Jan, 2022.

'It's Gonna Get Bloody': Anti-Vax QAnon Conspiracy Theorist Scott McKay Threatens to Put 'Bullets Inside' Health Care Providers | Right Wing Watch

A couple of weeks ago, Cirsten Weldon, a vociferous Pro-Trump QAnon conspiracist and antivaxxer, died in hospital of COVID-19, another in a long line of similar covidiot antivaxx nutters, so doing their bit for the self-inflicted genocide being waged by Trumpanzee cult loons against their own core supporters.

According to this report in the Daily Beast:

Fruitloop Loon News - Is David Barton Paranoid or is His Lying a Pathological Condition?

David Barton
Bigger and better lies or increasingly paranoid?

David Barton and the Evolution of Lies | Right Wing Watch

It's difficult to know whether professional liar and pseudo-historian, David Barton, is just becoming more imaginative and creative in his lies, or whether he is becoming paranoid, believing himself to be the victim of conspiracies, but his lies are certainly becoming more and more elaborate. Perhaps he just ratchets them up a notch every time he gets away with them, hoping to fool more fundamentalists with them, or perhaps he really does believe people are out to persecute him.

For example, here he is telling the right-wing Christian organization, City Elders, two lies that have gotten more lurid over the years:

1. 'They' [Wikipedia] literally spent a million... er... millions of dollars a year to discredit me and keep my name high on Google searches.
2. Congress placed me on a domestic terrorism watch under Obama.

The first has grown since he first tried it in 2011 when he said he had been told that the ACLU had spent a million dollars trying to discredit him. It has now metamorphosed into the bigger and better lie, that Wikipedia spends millions of dollars a year to discredit him. A brief glance at his Wikipedia entry probably explains his eagerness to try to discredit it.

The second has grown since 2012 when the Southern Poverty Law Center included him in a list of "30 New Activists Heading Up the Radical Right", which Barton claimed was a terrorist watch list. By 2016 this lie had become that the FBI had put him and his "WallBuilders" organization on a list of hate groups. Now he claims Congress under Obama included him in a domestic terrorist watch list.

Barton, who has no formal training as a historian (his degree is in Christian education from Oral Roberts University, where he appears to have been taught that Christian education requires lies to be taught to Christians as fact) but, because he tells the lies they require their supporters to believe, he is adored by the Republican Party and plays a leading part in developing policies and campaign platforms. One of his best-selling books, with the deliciously ironic title The Jefferson Lies[sic] was pulled and pulped by the Christian publishers, Thomas Nelson, because it was full of inaccuracies, misleading quotes and unsubstantiated claims, and had been slated by real historians.

Showing his customary disregard for the truth, Glenn Beck, who wrote the forward to Barton's book, published it under his Mercury Ink imprint and then with their traditional penchant for publishing lies, disinformation and conspiracy theories, the extreme right-wing 'fringe' publisher, WND Books published a 'revised edition' of Jefferson Lies in 2016.

Barton's aim is to fool people into believing America was founded as a fundamentalist Christian nation as a prelude to the creation of a self-appointing Taliban-style evangelical theocracy in the USA, despite the expressed intent of founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson, who explicitly intended to build a 'wall of separation' between church and state, in order to prevent exactly what Barton and his extreme right-wing allies would like to establish.

Every time he opens his mouth, Barton discredits himself and unwittingly proves the old adage:

When you show the world you know you need to lie for your faith, you show the world you know your faith is a lie that requires fools to believe falsehoods

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The Self-Inflicted Cull of Covidiot Americans is Working Best on Young, Uneducated Republicans

Global Vaccine Tracking

The astonishing situation the Trumpanzee Republicans have gotten themselves into where the antivaxx fears they've spread to their credulous supporters is encouraging them to die of COVID-19 rather than accept the minute risk of an adverse reaction (many of which have been exaggerated or imagined anyway) is paying off in the USA, where the anti-COVID vaccine take up is lower than any country other than Russia.

As the latest weekly survey of 52,222 Americans shows, vaccine scepticism is at 28% with vaccine take-up at only 66% with just 6% saying they still plan to get vaccinated, although with no shortages and no difficulty getting the vaccine, and with infection levels at a record high, it is unclear why that 6% still haven't done so.

The real success for the right-wing antivaxx movement has been in deterring 20% of Americans from ever getting the undoubted protection that the vaccines give against serious illness and death and making a further 8% hesitant.

Let's recap briefly on how the Trumpanzee right in America got themselves into the idiotic position of encouraging their own credulous supporters to die of COVID-19 in what amounts to a cull of the most gullible and, as figures show, the least well educated of them - in other words, the bedrock of Republican voters:

In the early days of the pandemic, in February, 2020, the acutely narcissistic and notoriously incompetent president Donald J Trump was hopelessly out of his depth and beginning to panic because he had, early in his presidency, in his fanatical zeal to undo everything the first black (and therefore in Trump's white supremacist eyes, illegitimate) president Barak Obama, had achieved in Office, had dismantled the contingencies for just such a pandemic, including stockpiles of PPE for health-care personnel.

Being psychologically incapable of accepting that there were experts in health care and epidemiology who knew more then he did because his narcissistic personality disorder meant he had to pretend to be the best at everything, Trump panicked and began to try to explain his inaction by claiming, despite the evidence, that the growing pandemic was variously, a Democrat Party hoax, a Chinese Communist plot, a mild condition that was no worse than influenza, a virus that would be killed off when the weather got hotter in summer (because either the virus was only in the USA, or the whole world has summer when the USA does, obviously), and a short-term problem that would all be over by April.

He then began promoting wackadoodle 'cures' and preventative measures such as taking antimalarial drugs with known dangerous side effects and no proven efficacy, bullying the epidemiologists and medical experts who contradicted his claims and who were advocating a lockdown and other measure to mitigate the growing disaster, swallowing or injecting bleach and inserting a UV light source into various bodily orifices.

New cases by country (19 Jan, 2022)

Source: Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center

Any concern for the welfare of their fellow Americans was swept aside by Republican Party politicians when they realised Trump was deliberately polarising America and making the pandemic a political issue and so threw their weight behind Trump's disastrous and dangerously muddle-headed policies and tried to present them as the right response - i.e., minimise the risks and encourage people to ignore the advice of the experts because they were clearly on the 'other side'.

On top of that, the Christian evangelical megachurches run by unscrupulous, multi-millionaires, were panicking over the loss of income that any lockdown would cost them if they couldn't preach to crowded churches and hector gullible attendees into giving more money. So, the evangelicals, who supported Trump already, believing he would give them the political power they craved, threw their lot in with the anti-science position of the Republicans and began inventing 'religious' reasons not to wear facemasks or observe social distancing. So, not wearing a mask and not getting vaccinated 'on religious grounds' became a prime cause of vaccine scepticism and courts fell into line, declaring it to be unconstitutional to mandate vaccines because that violated the right to religious freedom! After 60 years of campaigning for greed and selfishness by the political and religious right in the USA, the notion of collective responsibility and regard for the welfare of others was presented as somehow 'Socialist' or 'Liberal' and even 'Communist'. And unscrupulous Republican politicians were able to present their opposition to anti-COVID measure as a defence of religious freedoms, and ‘American values’.

Despite catching the virus himself and spending time in ICU where his life was saved by the experts he despised using expensive medication not available to ordinary Americans, Trump's White House became a dangerous COVID hotspot and his disinformation campaign culminated in his doomed re-election rallies turning into super-spreader events where social distancing and wearing a face mask was seen as a sign of disloyalty and an anti-Trump political statement, and so the pandemic ran out of control and the body count mounted until Trump was thrown out of the White House by the largest majority in US polling history, as the first presidential candidate to lose the popular vote twice and one of the few sitting presidents not to win a second term.

And we all know of the failed coup d’état by Trump and his extremist cult to overturn the democratic vote and continue the incompetent reign of someone who is probably the worst American President in history.

So, we now have the situation where, despite the abundant evidence that the vaccines are safe and hugely reduce the risk of serious illness and death, and the evidence that any side effects are exceedingly rare and usually short-term in nature, and the evidence that unvaccinated people are more infectious to others, the political and religious right are supporting and encouraging policies that will harm their own supporters because the political risks of backing out of their rabbit hole and admitting they (and by implication, Donald Trump) got it disastrously wrong and so have been culpable for the deaths of over 850,000 Americans and actively hampering the attempts of the Biden administration to contain the pandemic.

It is clear too that the ludicrous Republican campaign to encourage the self-genocide of its own supporters had been most effective on the younger and least well-educated demographic.

The final chart above shows what little success there has been in countering the disinformation and antivaxx lies coming from the political right and their allies in the pro-Trump QAnon propaganda machine and the extremist evangelical churches, especially with those who had decided not to get vaccinated. There has been some slight movement in those undecided but the 'unwilling' proportion has remained fairly consistent across all demographics.

It seems that this ludicrous self-genocide campaign the Republican's under Donald J Trump's disastrous leadership has blundered stupidly into, may be amongst the most successful political campaigns in recent history. Never before have so many credulous idiots allowed themselves to be fooled into risking serious illness and death to save the face of a handful of cynical political incompetents who put their own political self-interest above the health and welfare of their own supporters.

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Covidiot News - SCOTUS Does Its Bit to Keep the Covidiot Trumpanzee Cull Going

Donald Trump, Republicans Rejoice as Supreme Court Knocks Down Biden Vaccine Mandate

Donald Trump's efforts to turn SCOTUS into a partisan, Repugnican tool, paid of yesterday as his appointed majority voted as a block to overturn President Biden's rule requiring employers with more than 100 employees to mandate their employees to either be vaccinated against COVID-19 or submit a weekly negative test before being allowed to enter the workplace. As expected, SCOTUS voted along partisan lines with Trump's appointees doing their master's bidding and voting to thwart efforts to control the spread of the virus. The mandate for workers at federally-funded healthcare facilities will be allowed to continue.

Trumpanzee Insurrection - How Close They Came to a Full Coup D'etat on 6th Jan 2021.

Elmer Stewart Rhodes III,
Founder of the American neo-Nazi 'Oath Keepers' domestic terrorist group
Charged with sedition

“Seditious Conspiracy” Charges Against Oath Keepers Mark a Major Advance in January 6 Investigation – Mother Jones

According to this report and the US Department of Justice, FBI agents have arrested the founder and leader of the neo-Nazi terrorist group, the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, 56, of Granbury, Texas, on a charge of sedition in connection with the failed coup d’état at the Capitol on Jan 6th, 2021. FBI agents also arrested Oath Keepers member, Edward Vallejo, 63, of Phoenix, Arizona, on the same charges.

According to the Department of Justice:

Talibangelical News - A Fundamentalist Christian Theocracy is a Little Closer in South Dakota

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem delivering the State of the State address on Jan. 11, 2022.

Photo: Erin Woodiel/The Argus Leader via AP

Noem to push abortion ban after 6 weeks, conservative vision

The dream of every American evangelical Christian is to have control of the entire United States, at least in the short-term with world-domination to follow, backed up by a nuclear arsenal capable of destroying the world several times over.

This much was obvious from a the PRRI 2021 American Values Survey in which 57% of white evangelical Protestants stated a preference that Christianity should be the predominant religion in the USA. Only 13% had a preference for religious diversity.

Power at Any Price - The Lengths Christian Extremists Will Go To To Grab Power

Michael P Farris, Conservative Christian President and CEO of Trump-supporting Alliance Defending Freedom

How Michael P. Farris Tried to Block 2020 Election Outcome - The New York Times.

As students of Early 20th Century European history will be aware, the Christian churches were often amongst the most enthusiastic supporters of the extreme right-wing parties that overthrew democracy and installed odious, racist, misogynist and criminal fascist government in countries such as Portugal, Spain, Italy, Hungary and Germany. Not surprisingly then, they are amongst the most enthusiastic supporters of attempts by the extreme right-wing in the USA to overthrow democracy, reverse the stunning victory of the Democrats and reinstall the odious racist, misogynist and criminal Donald J. Trump in the Oval Office.

One such would-be autocratic theocrat, is lawyer, Michael P. Farris, President and CEO of Christian extremist organization, Alliance Defending Freedom [sic].

How Religion Keeps the Poor Poor.

Religious belief really does seem to draw the sting of poverty | The Economist

The problem with religion is that it teaches poor people to accept their 'place' in society and not to aspire to something better. This is the obvious conclusion to be drawn from a piece of research carried our recently by a group of sociologists and psychologists led by Jana B. Berkessel of the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany.

The team found that, contrary to accepted ideas, people with a low socioeconomic status (SES) in a developed country carry a higher psychological burden than their counterparts in developing countries. The assumption had been that the psychological burden would ease as society developed and became more prosperous. However the research showed that there was an inverse relationship between the psychological burden of SES and the religiosity of the society and there was a similar relationship between religiosity and economic development.

In other words, as society develops economically, so religiosity falls, removing the religious norms that ease the burden of low SES.

This conclusion came as a result of statistical analysis of three surveys covering 3.3 million people in 156 countries.

This teaching to accept your place is not confined to Christianity either but can be found in almost all major religions. The team say:

Among the religious norms that enable cultural groups to thrive is a set relevant for SES. That set eases the burden of lower SES (“The poor are admitted into Paradise before the rich, by five hundred years;” Vol. 5, Book 37, Hadith 4261, The Qur’an; “For those who are poor and destitute; May I turn into all things they could need;” Ch. 3, Verse 10, Bodhisattvacharyavatara) and it does so in part by casting a bad light on higher SES [“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God;” Matthew 19:24, The Bible, “The demoniac person thinks: So much wealth do I have today, and I will gain more;” Ch. 16, Verse 13, Bhagavad-Gita (16, 29)]

Their open access paper is published in PNAS:

Significance
According to a fundamental assumption in the social sciences, the burden of lower socioeconomic status (SES) is more severe in developing nations. In contrast to this assumption, recent research has shown that the burden of lower SES is less—not more—severe in developing nations. In three large-scale global data sets, we show that national religiosity can explain this puzzling finding. Developing nations are more religious, and most world religions uphold norms that, in part, function to ease the burden of lower SES and to cast a bad light on higher SES. In times of declining religiosity, this finding is a call to scientists and policymakers to monitor the increasingly harmful effects of lower SES and its far-reaching social consequences.

Abstract
Lower socioeconomic status (SES) harms psychological well-being, an effect responsible for widespread human suffering. This effect has long been assumed to weaken as nations develop economically. Recent evidence, however, has contradicted this fundamental assumption, finding instead that the psychological burden of lower SES is even greater in developed nations than in developing ones. That evidence has elicited consternation because it suggests that economic development is no cure for the psychological burden of lower SES. So, why is that burden greatest in developed nations? Here, we test whether national religiosity can explain this puzzle. National religiosity is particularly low in developed nations. Consequently, developed nations lack religious norms that may ease the burden of lower SES. Drawing on three different data sets of 1,567,204, 1,493,207, and 274,393 people across 156, 85, and 92 nations, we show that low levels of national religiosity can account for the greater burden of lower SES in developed nations. This finding suggests that, as national religiosity continues to decline, lower SES will become increasingly harmful for well-being—a societal change that is socially consequential and demands political attention.

Berkessel, Jana B.; Gebauer, Jochen E.; Joshanloo, Mohsen; Bleidorn, Wiebke; Rentfrow, Peter J.; Potter, Jeff; Gosling, Samuel D.
National religiosity eases the psychological burden of poverty
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Sep 2021, 118 (39) e2103913118; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2103913118

Copyright: © 2012 The authors. Published by the National Academy of Sciences.
Open access Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

It looks as though both Seneca and Napoleon were right in that religion is used by the ruling class to keep the poor happy and contented so they never aspire to anything better. The priesthoods are complicit in this deception in return for protection and special status within the state.

This much was evident in the repose of religions to a Pew Research forecast a few years ago that support for religions will grow in coming years as the populations of third-world and developing countries is set to increase. They were jubilant at the though that the number of poor people in the world was going to increase and that they would benefit from this growth, part of which, with their teachings against contraception and family planning and for female subservience, they were responsible for.

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US Christians Targeted by Eastern European Troll Farms

White Evangelical Christians at the Capitol, 6 Jan, 2021
Targets of Eastern European troll farms.

Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election | MIT Technology Review

According to an internal Facebook report, leaked by a former employee to MIT Technology Review, in the run-up to the 2020 elections in the USA, Christians were amongst those specially targeted by Eastern European troll farms intent on interfering with the elections, to the extent that 19 of the 20 most popular Christian groups on Facebook were run by these troll farms.

The report found that, after the 2016 election, Facebook: