WTF Community

🤮 Coronavirus (Community Thread)

Sinclair is behind this. They at first made excuses and now are backpedaling away hard due to the anger against them.

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Wow…great advocacy for gettng out the vote and helping patients. It is phenomenal how many people are pushing for change…:trophy:

The sign is easy to miss in the waiting room of the emergency department at Massachusetts General Hospital, next to the reception desk and a hand sanitizer pump. “Register to vote here,” it says, above an iPad attached to a podium.

The kiosk has stood there since November, before the pandemic began and stayed there through the worst weeks of April, when 12 gasping patients were put on ventilators during a single grueling 12-hour shift.

Now, as the number of coronavirus patients has slowed to a trickle, Dr. Alister Martin, the 31-year-old emergency room doctor who built the kiosk, is determined to keep trying to register voters.

Dr. Martin’s project, VotER, has taken on new urgency as the pandemic has curbed traditional in-person voter-registration efforts, and as the link between public policy failures and death has become especially clear.

Now, despite a global pandemic — or perhaps because of it — his project is spreading across the country. Since May, more than 3,000 health care providers have requested kits to register their own patients to vote, including at flagship hospitals across the country in Pennsylvania, Kansas and Arizona.

VotER is part of a larger movement that pushes medical professionals to address the underlying social conditions — such as hunger, drug addiction and homelessness — that make their patients sick in the first place. At its core, it amounts to nothing less than an effort to change the culture of medicine by getting doctors and nurses to view the “civic health” of their patients as part of their professional duties.

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:sob:

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Some commentary from a columnist at The Intercept

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Cross Posting (does this look right @Pet_Proletariat?)

Article also highlights there is a smaller Coronavirus Task force, ie Dr. Birx and Jared Kushner. WHere’s Pence’s group?

One question still dogs Trump: Why not try harder to solve the coronavirus crisis?

Both President Trump’s advisers and operatives laboring to defeat him increasingly agree on one thing: The best way for him to regain his political footing is to wrest control of the coronavirus.

In the six months since the deadly contagion was first reported in the United States, Trump has demanded the economy reopen and children return to school, all while scrambling to salvage his reelection campaign.

But both allies and opponents agree he has failed at the one task that could help him achieve all of his goals — confronting the pandemic with a clear strategy and consistent leadership.

People close to Trump, many speaking anonymously to share candid discussions and impressions, say the president’s inability to wholly address the crisis is due to his almost pathological unwillingness to admit error; a positive feedback loop of overly rosy assessments and data from advisers and Fox News; and a penchant for magical thinking that prevented him from fully engaging with the pandemic.

In recent weeks, with more than 146,000 Americans now dead from the virus, the White House has attempted to overhaul — or at least rejigger — its approach. The administration has revived news briefings led by Trump himself and presented the president with projections showing how the virus is now decimating Republican states full of Trump voters. Officials have also set up a separate, smaller coronavirus working group led by Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, along with Trump son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner.

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A big announcement today on starting Phase 3 of Moderna’s vaccine trials. It comes as part of the government’s Operation Warp speed. But Fauci had been a bit tentative earlier on what some of these early results could mean, and it may create some early expectations that THIS maybe the answer. (see STAT headline - behind paywall)

(CNN)Much of the world has pinned its hopes on a vaccine as a way out of the Covid-19 pandemic that has infected more than 15 million and killed more than 630,000 people globally.

The World Health Organization says there are 25 potential coronavirus vaccines in clinical trials internationally.

Here in the United States, the government has put its money behind several different vaccine candidates through Operation Warp Speed.

Even once a vaccine gets approved, big hurdles remain for distribution

One of those vaccines is being developed by the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in partnership with the biotechnology company Moderna. The vaccine is expected to enter Phase 3 testing next week. This phase of the trial is expected to involve 30,000 volunteers and will test whether the vaccine protects people against the coronavirus.

More reactions from Dr. Fauci

In early June 2020

  1. STAT HEADLINE

Fauci 'didn't like' Moderna Covid-19 vaccine data release - STAT

Why COVID-19 vaccine trials could move quickly

Dr. Fauci said two or three more phase 3 trials may launch in late summer, creating a pool of vaccine candidates for possible manufacture and distribution.

Usually phase 3 can take several months to yield results but one or more of the summer trials could be ready much sooner, he noted.

If you start the phase 3 and then when you are a month or two into it, and you are in an area that you have highly vaccinated where you have a big outburst and a surge of cases, you could get your answer pretty quickly,” he said.

Adding this -

Follow along with this timeline and developments on vaccine trials

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White House National Security Adviser O’Brien Tests Positive For Coronavirus : Coronavirus Live Updates : NPR

k

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Yes. There’s a lot to unpack in this piece from WaPo but this quote is quite telling, read. :exploding_head:

In the past couple of weeks, senior advisers began presenting Trump with maps and data showing spikes in coronavirus cases among “our people” in Republican states, a senior administration official said. They also shared projections predicting that virus surges could soon hit politically important states in the Midwest — including Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, the official said.

One question still dogs Trump: Why not try harder to solve the coronavirus crisis?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-not-solve-coronavirus-crisis/2020/07/26/7fca9a92-cdb0-11ea-91f1-28aca4d833a0_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-high_trumpfix-650am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans

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The actions of someone planning on stealing, not winning, an election. Love this garbagefire timeline!

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Just another recognition of the beastly nature of Covid-19, and this was one more casualty from the front lines. Sad news always…:sob:

While it’s not clear how Costa contracted the virus, his death was a blow to a medical community grappling with the biggest medical crisis of modern times. Dozens of people responded to news of Costa’s death on social media Monday, some referring to the doctor as a “hero.”

In a tweet Monday, Neda Frayha said she worked with Costa during her residency.

“I vividly remember being on call overnight, caring for very sick patients on the floor, & feeling so much calmer when Dr. Costa came to help,” Frayha said in the tweet. “He was kind and brilliant. This weekend he died of covid in his own ICU.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least 576 healthcare workers have died from complications caused by COVID-19 — a figure that is likely low due to incomplete data.

And Maryland’s case counts appear to be climbing again, with more than 1,000 new cases confirmed Monday. The state reported that 536 people are hospitalized, up from 385 earlier this month.

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Breitbart is spreading a video by a group calling themselves American’s Doctors that makes spurious claims about the coronavirus and treatment of it. They made the video in front of the Supreme Court and Trump re-tweeted it personally.

Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube have all worked to purge it, but MAGAs are perpetuating it:

Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube scrub platforms of viral video making false coronavirus claims

A video featuring a group of doctors making false and dubious claims related to the coronavirus was removed by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube after going viral online Monday.

The video, published by the right-wing media outlet Breitbart News, featured a group of people wearing white lab coats calling themselves “America’s Frontline Doctors” staging a press conference in front of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC.

President Trump shared multiple versions of the video with his 84 million Twitter followers Monday night despite the dubious claims running counter to his administration’s own public health experts. Spokespersons for the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

During the press conference, a speaker who identifies herself as a doctor makes a number of dubious claims, including that “you don’t need masks” to prevent spread of the coronavirus, and that recent studies showing hydroxychloroquine is ineffective for the treatment of Covid-19 are “fake science” sponsored by “fake pharma companies.”

“This virus has a cure, it’s called hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and Zithromax,” the woman claims. “You don’t need masks, there is a cure.”

The claims run contrary to multiple studies on the anti-malarial drug and advice from public health officials to prevent spread of the virus.

A study found that neither hydroxychloroquine alone nor hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin appeared to affect the condition of patients at the 15-day mark. Additionally, unusual heart rhythms and elevated liver-enzyme levels were more frequent in patients receiving hydroxychloroquine alone or with azithromycin, according to the study.

The video quickly went viral on Facebook, becoming one of the top performing posts on the platform with more than 14 million views before it was taken down Monday night for promoting misinformation. It was shared nearly 600,000 times, according to Crowdtangle, a data-analytics firm owned by Facebook.

“We’ve removed this video for sharing false information about cures and treatments for COVID-19,” a Facebook spokesperson told CNN, adding that the platform is “showing messages in News Feed to people who have reacted to, commented on or shared harmful COVID-19-related misinformation that we have removed, connecting them to myths debunked by the WHO.”

Twitter worked to scrub the video late Monday night after Trump shared versions of the video that amassed hundreds of thousands of views.

“We’re taking action in line with our Covid misinfo policy,” a Twitter spokesperson told CNN.

Twitter took action against the videos that Trump retweeted. By early Tuesday morning the videos were no longer able to be viewed on his account. Twitter also took action on a version of the video posted by Donald Trump Jr. and others shared by Breitbart News.

The video was also removed by YouTube, where it had been viewed more than 40,000 times. Users attempting to access the video late Monday were greeted with a message that said it had been removed for “violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.”

A Breitbart spokesperson did not immediately respond to a CNN request for comment.

According to the website for America’s Frontline Doctors, the group is led by Dr. Simone Gold, a Los Angeles-based emergency medicine specialist who has previously been featured on Fox News for her views that stay-at-home orders are harmful. Gold told the Associated Press in May she wanted to speak out against stay-home orders because there was “no scientific basis that the average American should be concerned” about Covid-19.

America’s Frontline Doctors could not be reached for comment late Monday.

As of Monday, the virus has caused nearly 150,000 US deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University, and is on track to become a leading cause of death in the country.

This site has a transcript of it:

Facebook apparently removed one of the members of this group from its site and she has threatened them with Jesus.

I think Facebook will probably be okay with that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VmkOEhSo-o


Trump’s re-tweeting of this video comes even as hydroxychloroquine just flunked a Phase III trial in mild-to-moderate Covid-19.

Results of the new clinical trial published late last week have found that hydroxychloroquine not only failed to improve outcomes in those with mild-to-moderate disease, but also produced a higher rate of cardiac and liver side effects.

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Trump reportedly changed his coronavirus messaging after being told new cases were spiking among ‘our people’ in red states

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Remember that quack who threatened Facebook with Jesus? Yeah…

Trump’s New Favorite COVID Doctor Believes in Alien DNA, Demon Sperm, and Hydroxychloroquine

The president is pushing the coronavirus theories of a Houston doctor who also says sexual visitations by demons and alien DNA are at the root of Americans’ common health concerns.

A Houston doctor who praises hydroxychloroquine and says that face masks aren’t necessary to stop transmission of the highly contagious coronavirus has become a star on the right-wing internet, garnering tens of millions of views on Facebook on Monday alone. Donald Trump Jr. declared the video of Stella Immanuel a “must watch,” while Donald Trump himself retweeted the video.

Before Trump and his supporters embrace Immanuel’s medical expertise, though, they should consider other medical claims Immanuel has made—including those about alien DNA and the physical effects of having sex with witches and demons in your dreams.

Immanuel, a pediatrician and a religious minister, has a history of making bizarre claims about medical topics and other issues. She has often claimed that gynecological problems like cysts and endometriosis are in fact caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches.

She alleges alien DNA is currently used in medical treatments, and that scientists are cooking up a vaccine to prevent people from being religious. And, despite appearing in Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress on Monday, she has said that the government is run in part not by humans but by “reptilians” and other aliens.

Immanuel gave her viral speech on the steps of the Supreme Court at the “White Coat Summit,” a gathering of a handful of doctors who call themselves America’s Frontline Doctors and dispute the medical consensus on the novel coronavirus. The event was organized by the right-wing group Tea Party Patriots, which is backed by wealthy Republican donors.

In her speech, Immanuel alleges that she has successfully treated hundreds of patients with hydroxychloroquine, a controversial treatment Trump has promoted and says he has taken himself. Studies have failed to find proof that the drug has any benefit in treating COVID-19, and the Food and Drug Administration in June revoked its emergency authorization to use it to treat the deadly virus, saying it hadn’t demonstrated any effect on patients’ mortality prospects.

“Nobody needs to get sick,” Immanuel said. “This virus has a cure.”

Immanuel said in her speech that the supposed potency of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment means that protective face masks aren’t necessary, claiming that she and her staff had avoided contracting COVID-19 despite wearing medical masks instead of the more secure N95 masks.

“Hello, you don’t need a mask. There is a cure,” Immanuel said.

Toward the end of Immanuel’s speech, the event’s organizer and other participants can be seen trying to get her away from the microphone. But footage of the speech captured by Breitbart was a hit online, becoming a top video on Facebook and amassing roughly 13 million views—significantly more than “Plandemic,” another coronavirus disinformation video that became a viral hit online in May, when it amassed roughly 8 million Facebook views.

“Hydroxychloroquine” trended on Twitter, as Immanuel’s video was embraced by the Trumps, conservative student group Turning Point USA, and pro-Trump personalities like Diamond & Silk. But both Facebook and Twitter eventually deleted videos of Immanuel’s speech from their sites, citing rules against COVID-19 disinformation. The deletions set off yet another round of complaints by conservatives of bias at the social-media platforms.

Immanuel responded in her own way, declaring that Jesus Christ would destroy Facebook’s servers if her videos weren’t restored to the platform.

“Hello Facebook put back my profile page and videos up or your computers with start crashing till you do,” she tweeted. “You are not bigger that God. I promise you. If my page is not back up face book will be down in Jesus name.”

image

Immanuel is a registered physician in Texas, according to a Texas Medical Board database, and operates a medical clinic out of a strip mall next to her church, Firepower Ministries.

Immanuel was born in Cameroon and received her medical degree in Nigeria. In a GoFundMe legal defense fund, which swelled from just $90 to $1,616 hours after her speech, Immanuel claims without offering any proof that members of a Houston networking group for women physicians are scheming to take her medical license away over her support for hydroxychloroquine.

It’s not clear whether anyone is actually trying to take Immanuel’s license. But many of her earlier medical claims are definitely ludicrous.

In sermons posted on YouTube and articles on her website, Immanuel claims that medical issues like endometriosis, cysts, infertility, and impotence are caused by sex with “spirit husbands” and “spirit wives”—a phenomenon Immanuel describes essentially as witches and demons having sex with people in a dreamworld.

“They are responsible for serious gynecological problems,” Immanuel said. “We call them all kinds of names—endometriosis, we call them molar pregnancies, we call them fibroids, we call them cysts, but most of them are evil deposits from the spirit husband,” Immanuel said of the medical issues in a 2013 sermon. “They are responsible for miscarriages, impotence—men that can’t get it up.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJrJG9xymts&feature=emb_logo

In her sermon, Immanuel offers a sort of demonology of “nephilim,” the biblical characters she claims exist as demonic spirits and lust after dream sex with humans, causing all matter of real health problems and financial ruin. Immanuel claims real-life ailments such as fibroid tumors and cysts stem from the demonic sperm after demon dream sex, an activity she claims affects “many women.”

“They turn into a woman and then they sleep with the man and collect his sperm,” Immanuel said in her sermon. “Then they turn into the man and they sleep with a man and deposit the sperm and reproduce more of themselves.”

According to Immanuel, people can tell if they have taken a demonic spirit husband or spirit wife if they have a sex dream about someone they know or a celebrity, wake up aroused, stop getting along with their real-world spouse, lose money, or generally experience any hardship.

Alternately, they could just be having dream-sex with a human witch instead of a demon, she posits.

“There are those that are called astral sex,” Immanuel said in the sermon. “That means this person is not really a demon being or a nephilim. It’s just a human being that’s a witch, and they astral project and sleep with people.”

Immanuel’s bizarre medical ideas don’t stop with demon sex in dreams. In a 2015 sermon that laid out a supposed Illuminati plan hatched by “a witch” to destroy the world using abortion, gay marriage, and children’s toys, among other things, Immanuel claimed that DNA from space aliens is currently being used in medicine.

“They’re using all kinds of DNA, even alien DNA, to treat people,” Immanuel said.

Immanuel’s website offers a prayer to remove a generational curse originally received from an ancestor but transmitted, in Immanuel’s telling, through placenta. Immanuel claimed in another 2015 sermon posted that scientists had plans to install microchips in people, and develop a “vaccine” to make it impossible to become religious.

“They found the gene in somebody’s mind that makes you religious, so they can vaccinate against it,” Immanuel said.

Immanuel elaborated on her fascination with witchcraft in her 2015 Illuminati sermon, claiming that witches were intent on seizing control of children.

In her 2015 sermon on the Illuminati’s supposed agenda to bring down the United States, Immanuel argues that a wide variety of toys, books, and TV shows, from Pokémon—which she declares “Eastern demons”—to Harry Potter and the Disney Channel shows Wizards of Waverly Place and That’s So Raven were all part of a scheme to introduce children to spirits and witches. Immanuel warned that the Disney Channel show Hannah Montana was a gateway to evil, because its character had an “alter ego.” She has claimed that schools teach children to meditate so they can “meet with demons.”

In the sermon, Immanuel preserved special vitriol for the Magic 8-Ball, a toy that can be shaken up to “reveal” any answer. Immanuel claims the otherwise innocuous Magic 8-Ball was in fact a scheme to get children used to witchcraft.

“The 8-Ball was a psychic,” she said.

Immanuel’s oddball claims about the world extend to politics. She didn’t bring up this allegation publicly in Washington, but she has claimed that the American government is run in part by non-human reptilians.

“There are people that are ruling this nation that are not even human,” Immanuel said in her 2015 Illuminati sermon, before launching into a conversation she had with a “reptilian spirit” she described as “half-human, half-ET.”

Immanuel has also used her pulpit to preach hatred of LGBT people. Shortly before the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage, Immanuel warned her flock that gay marriage meant that “very soon people are going to be seeking to marry children” and accused gay Americans of practicing “homosexual terrorism.” In the same sermon, she praised a father’s decision to not love his transgender son after a gender transition.

“You know the crazy part?” Immanuel said. “The little girl demands he must love her anyway. Really? You will not get it from me, I’d be like ‘Little girl, when you come back to be a little girl again, but you talk—for now, I’m gone.’”

Unusually for a pediatrician, Immanuel has praised corporal punishment for children. The American Academy of Pediatrics opposes corporal punishment, and claims that the “vast majority” of pediatricians do not recommend it.

“Children need to be whipped,” she declared in a 2015 sermon, before adding that she didn’t think children should be “abused.”

It’s also not clear that Immanuel has abided by her claims that face masks aren’t necessary. In her Washington speech, Immanuel claimed that she and her medical staff had avoided any COVID-19 infections while wearing only medical masks. But in two videos shot at her clinic, Immanuel appears to be wearing an N95 mask, which offers more protection.

Immanuel has also alleged that masks of all kinds are superfluous, because she says COVID-19 can be easily cured with hydroxychloroquine. But in a Facebook video advertising her clinic, Immanuel said anyone seeking treatment should wear a face mask before entering the clinic.

“Wear a mask, or a scarf, or anything to cover your face,” Immanuel said in the video.

Immanuel has seized on her newfound celebrity, tweeting a video demanding that CNN hosts and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Anthony Fauci give her jars of their urine so she can test if they’re secretly taking hydroxychloroquine even as they caution against its use.

“I double dog dare y’all give me a urine sample,” Immanuel tweeted in her challenge.

Now Immanuel is angling for the key rite of passage for any budding MAGA-world personality: a visit to the Trump White House. Late Monday night, Immanuel tweeted that she was open to meeting the president.

“Mr President I’m in town and available,” she tweeted. “I will love to meet with you.”

Oh, and there’s this:

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:eyes:

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Mitch McConnell Says No More Pandemic Aid Unless Corporations Are Allowed To Make Their Workers Sick

“No bill will be put on the Senate floor that does not have liability protections.”

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WTAF
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/28/trailer-democrats-continue-coronavirus-quarantine-while-republicans-get-back-campaigning-like-normal/

At the Republican meet-and-greet here on Sunday night, masks were optional. Dinner was served from buffet trays, and taken back to tables where dozens of party activists sat next to each other. When it was over, candidates walked around the room, shaking hands.

It’s Buffet the Republican Slayer. :mask: :scream: :face_vomiting:

Texas hospital forced to set up ‘death panel’ as Covid-19 cases surge

Starr County Memorial hospital struggling to cope with virus

Officials blame social gatherings for rise in local cases

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this just made my entire damn day even thru the burn of the nose-snort of my coffee :joy_cat:

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Check to see if you can do exposure and tracking for Covid-19 - it is the ‘big brother’ aspect of all of this…but it worth a look.

I tried it on my android - look under Play Store (google) and look for Exposure Notifications Systems. I found it, but there is no exposure counting in my part of town.

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:raised_hands::raised_hands::raised_hands: yes! Just give everyone masks.

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