Shooters parrot is back

 

Oh, now shooter likes that!

 

Too bad shooter needs support from a parrot.

 

Shooter's little parrot.

 

Sad that shooter needs a parrot to defend him.

 

Does shooter pay you to defend him?

 

What you say:

 

Both you and shooter need to put your big boy pants on.

View attachment

 

Obviously some people around here are just really shitty investors.

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Priceless. Oh fuck that is funny.

 

Vaccine politics may be to blame for GOP excess deaths, study finds

13.8k
David Ovalle
Updated Tue, July 25, 2023 at 6:26 AM MDT·4 min read




The political maelstrom swirling around coronavirus vaccines may be to blame for a higher rate of excess deaths among registered Republicans in Ohio and Florida during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published Monday.

The report in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine underscores the partisan divide over coronavirus vaccines that have saved lives but continued to roil American politics even as the pandemic has waned.



Yale University researchers found that registered Republicans had a higher rate of excess deaths than Democrats in the months following when vaccines became available for all adults in April 2021. The study does not directly attribute the deaths to covid-19. Instead, excess mortality refers to the overall rate of deaths exceeding what would be expected from historical trends.


The study examined the deaths of 538,139 people 25 years and older in Florida and Ohio, between January 2018 and December 2021, with researchers linking them to party registration records. Researchers found the excess death rate for Republicans and Democrats was about the same at the start of the pandemic in March 2020.

Both parties experienced a sharp but similar increase in excess deaths the following winter. But after April 2021, the gap in excess death rates emerged, with the rate for Republicans 7.7 percentage points higher than the rate for Democrats. For Republicans, that translated into a 43 percent increase in excess deaths.

Researchers said the gap in excess death rates was larger in counties with lower vaccination rates and noted that the gap was primarily driven by voters in Ohio. The results suggest that differences in vaccination attitudes and the uptake among Republican and Democratic voters "may have been factors in the severity and trajectory of the pandemic" in the United States.

In their paper, Yale researchers Jacob Wallace, Jason L. Schwartz and Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham cautioned the data did not include individual causes of death or whether someone had been vaccinated. The data did not look at voters who had no party affiliation and was limited to Florida and Ohio, which aren't neat comparisons to other states.

The excess death rates between groups could be affected by other factors, such as differences in education, race, ethnicity, underlying conditions and access to health care, said Wallace, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health and the lead author.

"We're not saying that if you took someone's political party affiliation and were to change it from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party that they would be more likely to die from covid-19," Wallace said.

Researchers also pointed out that more than 50 million Americans have yet to get an initial coronavirus vaccine, and reasons often extend "beyond political beliefs or party affiliation alone." Surveys have shown Republicans lagged in vaccination rates, including for booster shots. KFF estimated that between June 2021 and March 2022, at least 234,000 covid-19 deaths could have been prevented if people had received a primary series of vaccinations.

The Yale study adds to a growing body of research indicating that Republican messaging on vaccines and other public health measures such as mask-wearing, limiting crowds and social distancing may have led to preventable deaths.

Last year, a study from researchers at the University of Maryland and University of California at Irvine published in Health Affairs concluded that Republican-majority counties experienced nearly 73 additional deaths per 100,000 people relative to majority Democratic counties through October 2021. The study suggested that vaccine uptake accounted for only 10 percent of the Republican-Democrat gap in deaths.

"We have all these data points that really highlight the relevance of sound public health policy," said Neil Jay Sehgal, who led the Maryland study and is now an associate professor at the University of Washington School of Public Health.

The release of the Yale study comes as the vaccine rollout and policies under President Biden have faced criticism by some Republicans, including members of the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) pushed the rollout of vaccines early in the pandemic. But as he prepared to mount a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, DeSantis displayed increased hostility toward vaccines, petitioning for a state grand jury to investigate supposed wrongdoing related to vaccines. Florida's health department even issued a "health alert" on mRNA vaccine safety, which drew sharp rebukes.

Public health officials fear mixed messaging on coronavirus vaccines by Republicans is shaping attitudes toward the vaccine in dangerous ways.

In a nationwide survey published in March by the University of South Florida, only 49 percent of Republicans said they were "very" or "somewhat confident" that coronavirus vaccines are safe, contrasted with 88 percent of Democrats. Stephen R. Neely, a professor at USF's School of Public Affairs who conducted the survey, said the Yale study was important because it highlighted how sharply partisanship over coronavirus vaccine safety and efficacy has led to unnecessary deaths.

"It's one of the most telling metrics I've seen in how the politicization of the pandemic has played out in the real world," Neely said.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/vaccine-politics-may-blame-gop-154158657.html

 

And Trumptards really should google "The great recession" They might actually learn something.

The Great Recession of 2008 to 2009 was the worst economic downturn in the U.S. since the Great Depression.

That was what Obama had to deal with. Trump has it easy compared to Obama.

 

They hate to look into the Great Recession because it was just a continuation of what always happens when treasonous conservative/America Hating/Republicans get into power. They cut taxes and regulations and then their rich buddies pocket the tax cuts and loot the economy. Then when their greed and corruption collapses a sector or in the Great Recession the entire economy they run to the government to get bailed out by the taxpayers.

And then the Democrats have to come in and clear up the mess. And in the case of the Great Recession the first thing President Obama and the Democrats had to do was stop the economic free fall and keep it from turning into another Great Depression and it was close.

 

We see this around here all the time. And an example is global warming/climate change deniers who claim scientists predicted an ice age back in the 70's and since that was wrong scientists don't know anything so human caused global warming/climate change is not happening. Now if you actually go back and look even in the 70's only a fraction of scientists were predicting an ice age, while the vast majority were predicting global warming/climate change. And as time progressed the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists all over the world was burning fossil fuels is causing global warming/climate change that actually threatens human existence. But 50 years later we still have people pointing to the prediction of an ice age by a minority of scientists to claim it proves global warming/climate change is a hoax and conspiracy. And they don't have to listen to the overwhelming scientific consensus because they can always go to Youtube and find some random person that will tell them what they want to hear.

And we also saw that during COVID. Instead of listening to the scientific and medical experts people on the right wanted to believe it was just some hoax to let the government control them and take away their rights. And that was fueled like a wildfire because we had a president that would not go before the American people and say we need to listen to the scientists and medical experts. They might not always be right but the scientific method is the best thing we humans have to study things. We had a president that did the opposite of what the medical and scientific experts were saying. A president that pushed fake cures including ingesting bleach. A president that embarrassed the .oo52% of crackpot doctors. A president that instead of saving as many American lives as possible helped kill more than a million of them. And especially his own voters who were stupid and ignorant enough to believe him. And yes he deserves the blame for that.



Among those spreading medical misinformation during the pandemic: 52 doctors
Karen Weintraub, USA TODAY
Updated Tue, August 15, 2023 at 11:51 AM MDT·7 min read
2.4k



Medical misinformation swirled across social media during the pandemic, but some of it was in a class of its own: It came from medical doctors.

Doctors, of course, are just as human and error-prone as everyone else, but because they spend years studying science and how the body works, presumably they know more than average about how to interpret medical information. So why were they the sending out stuff that wasn't true?

A new study can't answer that question with any certainty, but it does try to quantify how many doctors were misleading the public, where they came from and what their specialties were.

Most surprising, perhaps, is that there were only 52 of them found in a fairly exhaustive search of social media sites.


"This was actually comforting to see that they didn't find more," said Dominique Brossard, chair of the department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved in the new study but studies medical misinformation.

Roughly 1 million Americans hold medical licenses in the United States, so 52 is a tiny fraction of the total.

It's not clear how far that misinformation spread, but once false impressions take hold, it can be very hard to change them, said John Robert Bautista, who conducts research on health misinformation at the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin.

Misinformation that comes from doctors can be particularly damaging, he and Brossard said, because of the trust associated with medical credentials.

Even if another doctor corrects the misinformation, "people will get confused about who to believe and it's the profession that suffers," Bautista said.



What the 52 said
According to the new study, most of the 52 sent out information that was false or misleading about COVID-19 vaccine safety and effectiveness ‒ despite tens of millions of doses delivered safely worldwide and millions of lives confirmed saved ‒ or promoted treatments that lacked scientific evidence.

A few disputed the effectiveness of wearing masks, which aren't perfect but are far better at preventing infections than wearing nothing, particularly when they're high quality and well fitting.

Some others promoted unsubstantiated claims or conspiracy theories about the government or the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19.

This kind of information caused real harm to people who suffered or died unnecessarily as well as to people who lost their faith in science when presented with misinformation about vaccine and drug development, said Dr. Sarah Goff, the paper's senior author.

"It was a concern about potential harm that really prompted me to get my students engaged in this study," said Goff, a primary care doctor and health services researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Although a small percentage of people might not be able to take vaccines or have a bad reaction to a shot, there is no debate about the safety of vaccines at a population level.

"We used the scientific standards at the time we were looking at," Goff said. "If you don't trust science and you don't trust the CDC, you won't trust that it's misinformation."

The team defined misinformation as "assertions unsupported by or contradicting U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance on COVID-19 prevention and treatment during the period assessed or contradicting the existing state of scientific evidence for any topics not covered by the CDC."

The 52 were identified by communications they made on social media platforms between January 1, 2021, and May 1, 2022, after scientific studies had established that vaccines were safe and effective and that treatments such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were not.

Goff said the study specifically refers to "misinformation," which is inaccurate information, rather than "disinformation," which is deliberately misleading information, because researchers did not try to determine the motives of the medical professionals spreading the information.

Still Brossard and several other experts in the field said information was changing so quickly during the pandemic and government messaging was often poorer than it could have been, leaving many people ‒ even doctors ‒ legitimately confused.

"The guidance kept on changing," she said. "Communication around the vaccine was horrible."

Public health experts concerned as Twitter stops enforcing COVID misinformation policy

Controlling the message
Goff said she could not speculate on the motives of the doctors spreading misinformation. Several offered telehealth visits and charged patients for providing therapies that were not supported by science, so perhaps they had a financial motive, Goff said. Some may also have earned money by growing their online presence, she said.

She and her co-authors chose not to name the 52 doctors, because they did not want to give the medical professionals more attention for their behavior. "Our purpose wasn't to call out specific people, more to call out the phenomenon," she said.

In March 2021, the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate published a report finding than 12 anti-vaxxers were responsible for the majority of anti-vaccine content on social media. The report called out Facebook and Twitter in particular for not doing enough to control the false messages spread by this "dirty dozen."

It's not clear whether any one social media platform is worse than any other for spreading misinformation. They're all equally challenging, though Twitter ‒ now renamed X ‒ has been the most studied, said David Novillo-Ortiz, European regional adviser on data and digital health for the World Health Organization.

YouTube on Tuesday announced changes to its policy to rein in misinformation, particularly related to cancer treatment.

Bautista said he is particularly concerned now about misinformation spread on TikTok, a platform that largely reaches adolescents and young adults. Instead of a rapidly typed response as can be done on other social media platforms, correcting misinformation on TikTok requires someone to produce another TikTok video, which is time-consuming and may be outside the comfort zone of older professionals, he said.

There's no question that trust in government and public health officials declined during the pandemic, Novillo-Ortiz said. "We have a challenge ahead of us in how we can rebuild this trust."

He hopes for more investment in digital health literacy for both health professionals and the general public. "We are leaving people behind because we are not investing enough in digital health literacy," Novillo-Ortiz said.

Consequences?
Should there be consequences for doctors who spread misinformation?

That's a tricky question, all the experts said, in part because it's not always clear which facts are scientifically established and which are open to dispute.

The American Medical Association adopted a policy in June 2022 to limit medical disinformation, including ensuring that medical licensing boards can take disciplinary action against health professionals who spread health-related disinformation.

But a judge ruled in January that the state of California, where the study found the highest number of misinforming doctors, does not have the power to penalize doctors who spread misinformation or disinformation. "COVID-19 is a quickly evolving area of science that in many aspects eludes consensus," the judge decided.

Brossard of UW-Madison said she'd draw the line if a doctor used their professional standing to convince people of the accuracy of their information.

"If they use the title, you could construe that there should be consequences," she said.

As a professor, she cannot use her professional email to express a political opinion, though she can do that as a private citizen, she said.

"When does 'professional' stop and 'citizenry' start? That's something that hasn't really been defined yet and is certainly a conversation that people should have."

There's no question that mis- and disinformation have consequences for the public, Novillo-Ortiz said.

It can increase mental and physical fatigue, promote fear and panic, polarize the public and decrease the credibility of legitimate information.

"All of us play a role in fighting misinformation," he said. "This is something we can definitely do better to leave no one behind."

https://www.yahoo.com/news/among-those-spreading-medical-misinformation-162257426.html