I. Glenn Cohen: A digital health pass, sometimes
referred to as a vaccine passport, is essentially a way of digitally
recording that someone has had a vaccination, and then details about the
date of vaccination, and potentially the kind of vaccine they were
given, to the extent relevant. It might be something created by a
governmental authority, or might be something created in the private
sector.
CR: How can these digital health passes help us get to a new normal?
Jana Shaw: Vaccine passports, or digital health
passes, let others know that you are safe and that you are keeping
others safe by getting vaccinated. Places that require digital health
passes are making sure everyone there is safe.
Lawrence O. Gostin: Essentially, the goal is to try to return to as normal as possible, as safely as we can, and as soon as we can.
And so the idea of a digital health pass is to make sure that
everyone in a given space is protected, and also has a diminished
potential for spreading the infection to others.
CR: Can you describe some of the scientific challenges associated with implementing digital health passes?
JS: There are numerous challenges to creating digital health passes.
Length of protection is one of them. However, that can be easily
addressed by including the date of vaccination. As we get more
information on length of protection from vaccination, vaccine passports
can be then used accordingly.
Another limitation is that the efficacy of various COVID-19 vaccines
differs. However, we recognize that the efficacy differs against
developing symptomatic disease, and all authorized vaccines are very effective against serious illness.
In addition, as we monitor the emergence of variants of concern,
there have been reports of decreased vaccine efficacy among certain
vaccines. However, that currently is being addressed by vaccine
manufacturers. They are developing vaccines that target the emergent
variants to ensure that their vaccines will continue to be effective as
variants evade vaccine-induced immunity.
We could not really talk about challenges and not talk about access
to vaccination. Universal access to vaccines has to be ensured before
digital health passes are rolled out, to mitigate the risk of
transmission and the risk of creating an equity divide for those who are
not vaccinated.
slate | The
second reason shame has been criticized is that many have conflated
shame’s worth as a tool with the norms some use shame to try to uphold.
The shame that accompanies sexually transmitted infections, for example,
has more to do with the problematic norms around sex that remain in our
society then shame itself. The shame that accompanies illness more
broadly has to do with the problematic norm that assumes, falsely, that
we will all remain able-bodied and healthy and that if we do not, it is
linked to some form of moral or behavioral failing. In both cases, the
shame isn’t the problem—the norms are. Instead of throwing out shame,
we should be more conscious of how we use it.
In
spite of the current uproar against it, Americans do routinely use
shame as a tool, quietly and comfortably. “We shame poor people all of
the time,” said Phuong Luong, a certified financial planner and educator
at Just Wealth (and also a friend). In her role as a financial planner,
Luong, has helped low-income people access public services. “If you’ve
ever gone into an office to apply for public benefits like welfare or
food stamps, it can be a really demeaning and stressful experience,” she
said. “The quality, tone, and respect in customer service between a
private service and a public service is so different. And I think we
make poor people jump through so many hoops to show effort and to show
motivation, to get what they need.” It’s as if the process was designed to evoke shame.
But
shame can work positively as a tool with people or institutions when
the thing happening is in fact worth punishing, and other forms of
punishment are out of reach. “In a system where formal punishment is
missing, that’s when the informal mechanisms step in,” said Jacquet. You
can, for example, incarcerate an individual but, “it’s much more
difficult, almost impossible to take away the liberty of an entire group
like Exxon Mobil,” she explained. You can, however, shame them as climate activists do when they troll oil companies on Twitter. It’s about depriving these companies of their social license and reputation, which, in many cases, they worked very hard to create.
On
the individual level, Jacquet points to the policies that some states
have publishing the names of residents who owe a significant sum in
taxes—in California, it’s more than $100,000; in Wisconsin, it’s $5,000, but those on the top 100 list all currently owe more than $400,000—as
another example of effective shaming. The late taxpayers are given
letters in advance of the list’s publication, with the expectation that
the threat of exposure will get them to pony up (or at least enter into a
repayment plan)—and it often does. When the state of Wisconsin launched its tax-shaming program in 2006,
it thought it would recoup $1.5 million in its first year of operation;
the state ultimately collected 15 times that in that year.
sciencebasedmedicine | As much as I used to admire him, since the pandemic hit John
Ioannidis has consistently disappointed me to an extreme degree. In the
last year, my disappointment with Prof. Ioannidis has gotten to the
point where it’s hard for me to avoid lumping him with the COVID-19
minimizers/deniers like those who published and continue to promote the Great Barrington Declaration,
one of whom was his co-author on his infamous Santa Clara
seroprevalence study. The Great Barrington Declaration, boiled down to
its essence, asserted that COVID-19 is not dangerous to the vast
majority of the population, leading to its writers and signatories to
conclude that governments should, in essence, let SARS-CoV-2, the
coronavirus that causes the disease, run rampant through the population
in order to achieve “natural herd immunity”, while putting in place
measures designed to protect only those viewed as “at risk”, such as the
elderly and those with significant co-morbidities. (Note that, at the
time the Declaration was published, there was as yet no safe and
effective vaccine against COVID-19, while now there are at least four.)
Of course, as many noted, it is not possible to protect the vulnerable
if COVID-19 is rampaging unchecked throughout the rest of the
population. Also, as I noted when I wrote about it, the Great Barrington Declaration was the product of the American Institute for Economic Research,
a right-wing, climate science-denying think tank, which recruited three
ideologically—shall we say?—amenable scientists to sign on as authors
of the declaration, which was basically, as I put it,
“eugenics-adjacent” and full of misinformation and half-truths.
Moreover, I’m not the only one who’s now soured on Prof. Ioannidis. For example, Scientific American columnist John Horgan, someone with whom both Steve Novella and I have had disagreements based on his downplaying of skepticism in medicine with respect to homeopathy:
Optimism has also distorted my view of the coronavirus. Last March, I
took heart from warnings by Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis that
we might be overestimating the deadliness of the virus and hence
overreacting to it. He predicted that the U.S. death toll might reach
only 10,000 people, lower than the average annual toll of seasonal flu. I
wanted Ioannidis to be right, and his analysis seemed plausible to me,
but his prediction turned out to be wrong by more than an order of
magnitude.
Horgan didn’t go quite far enough in his criticisms for my taste, but such is life.
Then there’s Alex Rubinstein:
“What a weird turn to see John Ioannidis pushing one of sloppiest
studies in the deluge of Covid-19 papers,” Alex Rubinsteyn, an assistant
professor of computational medicine and genetics at the University of
North Carolina School of Medicine, wrote on Twitter. “If he weren’t an
author I would expect [the study] to show up in one of his talks as a
particularly potent cocktail of bad research practices.”
Then, of course, there are all the scientists on Twitter criticizing
Prof. Ioannidis. In fairness, one has to acknowledge that there are
things Prof. Ioannidis has argued that have some merit. His estimates of
IFR were closer to the mark than some of the very high estimates early
in the pandemic, but they were still off considerably in the other
direction. He was not wrong about the poor quality of so much of the
data and research on COVID-19; it’s just, in an amazing feat of lacking
self-awareness, he himself contributed to it as well.
This brings me back to that discussion of Ioannidis’ paper claiming
that the NIH is too conservative and that only conservative, “safe”
science is funded. It was more than that, though. He claimed that the
scientists on NIH study sections were no better than scientists not on
NIH study sections. Before I get to that, though, I note that Ioannidis’
cardinal sin since the pandemic started is not to have been wrong, even
repeatedly so. It’s been his extreme arrogance:
Instead, Ioannidis sounded sure of himself. He was right; the others had
it wrong. He called out other research teams by name—Johns Hopkins,
Imperial College London—to berate their findings as “astronomically
wrong,” and “constantly dialed back to match reality.” Here he was,
about to come out with an exciting and important finding—if he were
right, it could change almost everything about how we deal with this
virus—and he seemed unworried by the possibility that something might be
amiss with the project.
If anyone should understand how the pressure to contribute to the
science of the crisis might lead to flawed work and exaggerated claims,
it ought to be Ioannidis, arguably the world’s most famous
epidemiologist. Who knows? Perhaps like so many of us, he’s just
stressed out by the whole damned thing. Maybe he’s just off his game.
The article from which this quote came dates back to May 2020. Now,
eleven months later with the benefit of hindsight, I don’t think you can
say that Ioannidis was “off his game”. With his attack on a graduate
student, he’s continued to double down and, in fact, has even gone
further than Freedman had previously described. That is what brings me
back to my previous discussion
of his article about those “safe” scientists at the NIH, with a funding
process that he’d characterized as “conformity” and “mediocrity”. I
wrote this over eight years ago:
In the end, as much as I admire Ioannidis, I think he’s off-base here.
It’s not that I don’t agree that the NIH should try to find ways to fund
more innovative research. However, Ioannidis’ approach to quantifying
the problem seems to suffer from flaws in its very conception. In light
of that, I can’t resist revisiting the discussion in my last post on the
question of riskiness versus safety in research, and that’s a simple
question: What’s the evidence that funding more risky research will
result in better research and more treatments? We have lots of anecdotes
of scientists whose ideas were later found to be validated and
potentially game-changing who couldn’t get NIH funding, but how often
does this really happen? As I’ve pointed out before, the vast
majority of “wild” ideas are considered “wild” precisely because they
are new and there is little good support for them. Once evidence
accumulates to support them, they are no longer considered quite so
“wild.” We know today that the scientists whose anecdotes of woe
describing the depredations of the NIH were indeed onto something. How
many more proposed ideas that seemed innovative at the time but
ultimately went nowhere?
And my conclusion:
However, the assumption underlying Ioannidis’s analysis seems to be that
there must be “bolts out of the blue” discovered by brilliant brave
maverick scientists. It’s all very Randian at its heart. However,
science is a collaborative enterprise, in which each scientist builds
incrementally on the work of his or her predecessors. Bolts out of the
blue are a good thing, but we can’t count on them, nor has anyone
demonstrated that they are more likely to occur if the NIH funds
“riskier research.” It’s equally likely that the end result would be a
lot more dud research.
Maybe the problem with Prof. Ioannidis was there all along, and I
just didn’t see it until the pandemic amplified it for all to see. He
seems, dating back at least to 2012, have had the belief that
conventional science is too “safe” and “conformist,” perhaps with a bit
of a self-image of himself as being the “brave maverick doctor” or iconoclast. Maybe that’s why, during the pandemic, he was so easily drawn to being a “rebel” or a “contrarian,” whose findings bucked the existing consensus, and maybe that’s why he can’t give that up. After all, it’s happened to greater scientists than he.
Moreover, Prof. Ioannidis seems to be an excellent cautionary tale at
how being a critic doesn’t necessarily mean that you can do what’s being
criticized that well. He’s very good at finding the flaws in studies,
but his studies during the pandemic demonstrate that, when designing
studies of his own, he’s prone to every bias and flaw that he criticizes
in others.
In any event, I should go back and read some of Prof. Ioannidis’ old
work in light of what I know about him now, with the realization that
the pandemic has done me a favor. I wonder what I might find.
caitlinjohnstone | A
new viral video calling on liberals to form “an army of citizen
detectives” to gather information on Trump supporters and report their
activities to the authorities has racked up thousands of shares and
millions of views in just a few hours.
The hashtag #TrumpsNewArmy is trending on Twitter as of this writing due to the release of a horrifying video
with that title from successful author and virulent Russiagater Don
Winslow. As of this writing it has some 20 thousand shares and 2.6
million views, and the comments and quote-retweets are predominantly
supportive.
“On orbefore
January 20th, Donald Trump will no longer be the Commander-in-Chief: he
will lose control of the Army, Navy, Airforce, Marines, Special Forces
and America’s nuclear arsenal,” Winslow’s voice begins ominously. “On
January 20th Donald Trump will become Commander-in-Chief of a different
army: this army.”
Viewers
are then shown footage from Trump rallies while being told that they
are looking at “radical extreme conservatives, also known as domestic
terrorists”.
“They
are hidden among us, disguised behind regular jobs,” Winslow warns.
“They are your children’s teachers. They work at supermarkets, malls,
doctor’s offices, and many are police officers and soldiers.”
Winslow
talks about white supremacists and the Capitol riot, warning that Trump
will continue escalating violence and fomenting a civil war in America.
“We
have to fight back,” Winslow declares. “In this new war, the
battlefield has changes. Computers can be more valuable than guns. And
this is what we need now more than ever: an army of citizen detectives.
I’m proposing we form a citizen army. Our weapons will be computers and
cellphones. We, who are monitoring extremists on the internet and
reporting our findings to authorities. Remember, before the Navy Seals
killed Osama Bin Laden, he had to be found. He was found by a CIA
analyst working on a computer thousands of miles away. It’s up to you.”
The
viral video is being loudly amplified by popular #Resistance accounts
like Majid M Padellan (better known as Brooklyn Dad Defiant) with
frighteningly paranoid and HUAC-like rhetoric.
influencewatch | The National Education Association (NEA) is America’s largest labor
union representing nearly three million employees, principally teachers.
With affiliates in every state across 14,000 communities [1],
NEA represents teachers, education support professionals, retired
teachers, education faculty and staff, substitute teachers, and
administrators.[2] It exercises enormous political clout in everything from contract negotiations to issue advocacy and lobbying.[3]
The NEA is a major political player, with its associated political
action committees contributing nearly $143.5 million to federal
candidates and committees—97% of which supported Democrats and
liberals—from 1990 through February 2019. [4]
The NEA is also deeply entangled in state and local politics and is a
major contributor to left-of-center nonprofit organizations.[5]
influencewatch | The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is the second-largest
teachers’ union in the United States. The union represents roughly 1.5
million members, most of whom work in teaching and education-related
jobs as well as nursing.[1] The union is a member of the AFL-CIO.
The AFT, like most public-sector unions, is a major player in liberal
policy and Democratic Party politics. The union and union president Rhonda “Randi” Weingarten are associated with the Democracy Alliance network of liberal mega-donors.[2]
AFT and its associated political committees are also substantial
contributors to Democratic candidates and party committees: According to
the Center for Responsive Politics, those committees have spent upwards
of $80 million on federal elections, with $79 million going to
Democrats and left of center groups.[3]
The union’s political positions focus on preserving privileges for
teachers largely regardless of teacher quality. The AFT is a staunch
defender of “tenure” policies that make it exceptionally difficult to
remove ineffective teachers from the classroom.[4] Additionally, the union opposes many efforts to bring pension contributions and expenditures into long-run balance.[5]
Numerous AFT local unions have been affected by serious corruption committed by senior officers in the local unions. The Washington Teachers Union, the United Teachers of Dade, and the Broward Teachers Union all suffered substantial financial losses from financial corruption committed by their officers.[6] The AFT locals in Chicago and New York City have also been embroiled in highly controversial local politics.
Union president Randi Weingarten is a longtime union official, having
served previously as president of the AFT-affiliated local teachers
union in New York City, the United Federation of Teachers.
In her work as New York’s teacher union president, Weingarten gained
infamy for her aggressive defense of teachers awaiting dismissal
hearings for misconduct in the city’s “rubber rooms.” One principal went
so far as to suggest Weingarten “would protect a dead body in the
classroom.”[7]
Begrudgingly Acknowledged Country Bangers
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When someone says they hate country music, they’re typically referring,
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A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...