Religion, Creationism, evolution, science and politics from a centre-left atheist humanist. The blog religious frauds tell lies about.
Saturday 6 August 2022
Trumpanzee News - More on the Dangerous Legacy of Donald J Trump
Tuesday 2 August 2022
Covidiot News - Trump's Legacy: More Americans Now Think it is Right to Harass and Threaten Public Health Officials and Scientists
One of the more enduring and insidious legacies of the disastrous single-term US president, Donald J. Trump, is that distrusting public Health Officials who tried to explain the science behind the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures to mitigate it, and by extension, all scientists, to the extent of harassing them, attacking them, and even making death threats against them when they deliver unwelcome news, has now become acceptable to a significant proportion of American adults.
That proportion appears to be growing according to an investigation by scientists from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, the University of Colorado, Aurora, Colorado, USA, the Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, New York, USA and the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, Ithaca, New York, USA. Their findings are published open access in the online Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Open Network.
Their key findings were:
Key PointsThey give more detail in the abstract to their paper:
Question What factors shape US adults’ beliefs regarding whether threatening or harassing public health officials was justified during the COVID-19 pandemic?
Findings In this survey study of 1086 US adults, the share who believed that harassing or threatening public health officials because of business closures was justified rose from 20% to 25% and 15% to 21%, respectively, from November 2020 to July and August 2021. There were increases in negative views over time among higher earners, political independents, those with more education, and those most trusting of science.
Meaning These findings suggest that restoring trust in public health officials will require strategies tailored to engage diverse viewpoints.
Wednesday 13 July 2022
Why People Are Anti-Science - And What We Can Do About It.
Under the influence of his scientific illiteracy and political incompetence during the COVID-19 pandemic, former President Donald Trump's lasting legacy is likely to be a large and growing number of Americans who now distrust science and so represent a danger to the rest of us.
The result is a growing resistance to measures to combat climate change and vaccination campaigns to eradicate or control pandemic such as the current coronavirus pandemic or life-threatening epidemics such as measles, mumps and rubella.
This level of anti-science attitude in a major country is a clear danger to the world as a whole, since climate change and viruses are not limited by national borders.
Now three researchers at Ohio State University who study attitudes and persuasion, have published a paper in Proceeding of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) which explain the rise in anti-science beliefs today and outlines what can be done about it. Sadly, the paper itself is behind an expensive paywall, but the abstract is available, open access, under a Creative Commons licence.
Saturday 25 June 2022
Fake News - Why People Believe False Stories and Disinformation
In a report published recently by the US Center for Naval Analysis (CNA) a team of psychologists analysed the reasons why so many people are falling for disinformation. The problem us due to the way we have evolved to deal with information and the fact that this has ill-prepared us to deal with the vast amount of information now being directed at us by modern technology.
In fact, some of the time-tested tools make us dangerously vulnerable to disinformation, especially disinformation designed to mislead and garner support for extremist groups for whom the truth would be toxic. We see this today in the form of disinformation about, for example, COVID-19, the measures to reduce its spread and the vaccines designed to protect us from it. We also see it in relation to politics, political movements and parties, international affairs, religious fundamentalism and anti-science propaganda, such as climate change and evolution, and especially conspiracy theories such as those promulgated by QAnon and former President, Donald Trump's supporters, intended to radicalise, undermine confidence in institutions, and garner support for extreme solutions to non-existent problems.
In other words, disinformation campaigns are designed to benefit those whom the report calls 'malign actors', for whom the truth would be dangerous and who know they need their target marks to believe falsehoods and mistrust the evidence.
In the abstract to their report, the psychologists, Heather Wolters, Kasey Stricklin, Neil Carey, and Megan K. McBride, say:
Friday 24 June 2022
Confidence in U.S. Supreme Court Sinks to Historic Low
According to the latest Gollop Poll, the damage the disastrous president, Donald Trump, did to American democracy continues to fester.
This time it is a dramatic collapse in the level of trust in the Supreme Court that Americans have, since Trump appointed overtly partisan Republican placemen to SCOTUS while in office. A flourishing democracy needs an independent judiciary, not an overtly partisan one, but SCOTUS is now expected to deliver verdicts demanded by the right-wing political fringe and religious fundamentalists, while ignoring the wishes and opinions of mainstream Americans. Consequently, the percentage of Americans who say they have a great deal or quite a lot of trust in SCOTUS has fallen to a new low of just 25%, an 11 percentage point fall in just the last year.
Wednesday 22 June 2022
Covidiot News - More Figures Show How Antivaxxer Covidiots Were Culling Their Own Supporters with COVID-19
Figures published yesterday in eLife, show that, during the Delta variant wave of COVID-19 in the summer of 2021, areas with a high level of vaccine take-up in the USA had a lower peak of hospitalisations and deaths, and a shorter duration of the wave, compared to areas where the take-up was low.
The summer of 2021 was of course when pro-Trump QAnon, antivaxxers and evangelical Christians were loudest in campaigning to mislead people about the severity of the pandemic and the effectiveness/harmful effects of the COVID-19 vaccine, as a direct consequence of then president Trump's incompetent response to the crisis where he was out of his depth, so sought to minimise it to justify his inaction and indecision, so setting the scene for his supporters in the far right Trumpanzee cults. Consequently, those parts of America where a large number of people, mostly Trumpanzee Republicans, were refusing to get vaccinated or take sensible precautions against catching the virus and passing it on to others.
Now figures are showing the harm that did to those who fell for the lies emanating from the White House, and so made themselves vulnerable to the potentially life-threatening condition.
As the eLife press release says:
Thursday 16 June 2022
Covidiot News - How Antivaxxer Trumpanzee Covidiots Continue to Harm Their Gullible Supporters
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.
A resident physician at UCLA Health
And the David Geffen School of Medicine.
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.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.
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.
The press release continues:
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.This is compelling evidence that the vaccination behaviors for flu and Covid-19 vaccines are inextricably linked.
Dr Richard Leuchter, MD
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.
Saturday 11 June 2022
Democrat Voters are Healthier and Live Longer.
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:
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.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.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
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.
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:
AbstractI 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.
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)
Monday 9 May 2022
The Lunatics Are Now Running the US 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
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.
Tuesday 19 April 2022
Talibangelical Christian Theocracy News - Pastor Tony Spell Spills the Beans
It is unusual for a Talibangelical Christian pastor to be so honest (and lacking in nouse) as to admit their political ambitions in public, knowing full well that they need to pretend to be good democrats and supportive of US democracy if they are to keep fleecing their dupes, but extreme right-winger, Pastor Tony Spell, of the Life Tabernacle Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has no such qualms. He wants to run the government, or at least have the right to veto government policies he doesn't like and command others instead.
Not to put too fine a point on it, he has ambitions to be the American equivalent of the Iranian Supreme Leader or the equivalent of a Taliban Caliph. Unelected, accountable to no-one but himself and having the power to meddle in every aspect of public and private life in the USA.
Monday 14 February 2022
Trumpanzee QAnon Fruitloop News - Update on Covidiot Cirsten Weldon's COVID-19 Death
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:
Sunday 30 January 2022
Covidiot News - Antivaxxer Claims Are Becoming Indistinguishable from The Claims of Lunatics
Is fanatical Trumpanzee covidiocy a form of insanity?
I pose this question because Dr Sherri Tenpenny, an osteopath and self-proclaimed expert on the anti-COVID vaccines, who has had no formal training in immunology or epidemiology, puts me in mind of a distressing incident I and my crew mate had to deal with as ambulance Paramedics many years ago. It involved the lawful detention of a female doctor and pathologist under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act (MHA).
The unfortunate lady was being held under Section 136 of the MHA in a local police station as a place of safety, having been apprehended running around the town stark naked and shouting hysterically for people to take cover from an invisible, odourless gas that was pervading the streets and turning them into automatons.
Saturday 29 January 2022
Covidiot News - New York Unvaccinated 26 Times More Likely to Die of COVID-19 Than Vaccinated
Antivaxx covidiots, scraping around for something to support their selfish stupidity will often point to the fact that vaccinated people are still catching the omicron variant of COVID-19 as evidence that the vaccines don't work. At least only the lunatic fringe conspiracists are still coming up with the more insane claims such as that the vaccine is designed to turn you gay, or make you magnetic so you can be controlled by Bill Gates, or that it is designed to kill you as part of some nefarious eugenic population control.
But what are the merits of this claim of non-effectiveness, as though governments worldwide are spending vast sums of money to give their people something that doesn't work, as well as being in on a vast global conspiracy involving tens or hundreds of millions of people?
The facts are, as explained in this Newsweek report, not on the side of the antivaxxers, not because they are wrong to claim that vaccinated people can still catch COVID-19, but because they are wrong to claim this means the vaccines are not effective.
In fact, the evidence is that, as the vaccine manufacturers always claimed, that, while not 100% effective and while not giving permanent protection as immunity was likely to decline over time, so top-up boosters will be needed, the vaccines give you a very significantly increased probability of avoiding serious illness and death. And this is borne out by the facts, both in the USA and in the UK.
Tuesday 25 January 2022
Covidiot Antivaxx News - The Child-Like QAnon Dupes are Turning to Violence to Avoid Facing the Truth.
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:
Wednesday 19 January 2022
The Self-Inflicted Cull of Covidiot Americans is Working Best on Young, Uneducated Republicans
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.
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.
Saturday 15 January 2022
Covidiot News - SCOTUS Does Its Bit to Keep the Covidiot Trumpanzee Cull Going
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.
Friday 14 January 2022
Trumpanzee Insurrection - How Close They Came to a Full Coup D'etat on 6th Jan 2021.
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:
Thursday 13 January 2022
Talibangelical News - A Fundamentalist Christian Theocracy is a Little Closer in South Dakota
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.
Thursday 30 December 2021
The Covidiot Cull is Forging Ahead in the USA
The prominent, right-wing, MAGA-hat wearing Trumpanzee and anti-vaxx campaigner, Doug Kuzma, is reportedly seriously ill, sedated and on a ventilator, in a Virginia hospital, with COVID-19, after attending a QAnon rally in Texas. Several other attendees at the rally also became unwell but have claimed they were suffering from 'anthrax poisoning'. Anthrax is a bacterial infection, unlike COVID-19 which is viral, so is easily distinguished from it.
Kuzma is in many ways an example of what happens when you, consciously or unconsciously, buy into a cult and adopt cult-think in place of rational thought. He has a long history of recruiting into the Trumpanzee cult by uncritically repeating any QAnon-originating conspiracy theories and campaigning to persuade the gullible dupes who listen to his raving right Frog News spots, not to get vaccinated. As a right-wing evangelical Christian he has no hesitation in risking the health and welfare of others to serve his ego-tripping self-promotion.
Sunday 5 December 2021
Covidiot GOP Representative, Marjorie Taylor Green, Sets a New Low in Ignorant Stupidity
In what could rank as one of the most stupidly ignorant and dangerous tweets by a senior Trumpanzee, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, (R- Georgia) implied that COVID-19 is no more contagious than cancer. And, as though to prove it wasn't a mistake, promptly followed it up with a second tweet which made the same idiotic comparison.
She clearly has missed the widely available information about new variants such as δ which gave rise to the massive surge of cases starting in autumn, 2020 and now the ο variant currently causing yet another wave of infections, especially amongst the unvaccinated.