The 133rd Block: Medical misinformation, Covid, not over
Also, a prescription of deliberate ignorance
This week…
The Internet sleuths are at it again. The target? TJ “Pax” Hardy. The offence? Pretending to be a medical professional on social media. Among others things, he claimed to be a field epidemiologist and a certified nurse midwife.
When people began to raise suspicion, he tried to show his master’s degree in public health from Columbia University—except it’s from the degree mill, Columbia Southern University.
The worst part is that Hardy was a part of #TeamHalo, an initiative by the United Nations to combat misinformation online. Makes you wonder what kind of vetting process they have and how much this may have hurt the credibility of the others on the team.
And now, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
Twitter was influential in the pandemic. Are we better for it?
Carl T. Bergstrom’s opinion piece on NYT:
By early 2022, the value I found on Twitter had fallen off. It was harder to find productive scientific discussions. Posturing, virtue-signaling and name-calling increased. Some of my colleagues left or locked their accounts. Coordinated harassment quashed nuanced debate.
Covid Twitter is barely a trace of what it was two years ago. The all-hands-on-deck phase of the crisis has passed. A community formed, did some of what it needed to and then scattered to the four winds.
But Covid-19 hasn’t gone away. People suffering from long Covid may rightly feel abandoned. The immunocompromised are back where they were before the pandemic: largely forgotten and left to their own devices to manage risk. Many of the scientists and public health leaders they came to rely on for advice, information and advocacy in 2020 have adopted lower profiles.
Bergstrom is a biology professor at the University of Washington and a co-author of “Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World.”
Covid misinformation ignites a battle over blood in a Canadian province
Rebekah Robinson for Coda:
Doctors in Alberta have warned that it is becoming more common for patients to refuse blood transfusions from Covid-vaccinated donors, and they worry that this could develop into the next form of widespread protest. Timothy Caulfield, a professor in the Faculty of Law and School of Public Health at the University of Alberta, believes this trend is driven by misinformation, which is causing patients to refuse to consent to blood transfusions if the blood comes from a donor who had received the Covid vaccine.
Damaging myths surrounding blood purity cost countless human lives during the 20th century, and centering Covid vaccine opposition around the transfusion of blood would be a remarkable new chapter for the vaccine hesitancy movement.
Before even reading the article, you probably already know which province this is going to be about.
What’s the best way to deal with a flood of misinformation? Maybe it’s time for some deliberate ignorance
Joshua Benton for Nieman Lab:
There is literally, as Ann Blair once put it, too much to know. And what share of that overabundance hits your corneas is largely determined by others — what your friends share, what platforms’ algorithms slot into view.
Given all that madness, the need for critical thinking is obvious. But so is the need for critical ignorance — the skill, tuned over time, of knowing what not to spend your attention currency on. It’s great to be able to find the needle in the haystack — but it’s also important to limit the time spent in hay triage along the way.
Three prescriptions from a paper by Anastasia Kozyreva et al.
What I read, listen, and watch…
I’m reading a meta-analysis published in the journal Human Reproduction Update, which found that sperm counts dropped by around 1.2 per cent per year from 1973 until 2000, and after that, even faster at about 2.6 per cent per year.
I’m listening to “Chelsea Manning, in Her Own Words,” on CBC’s Frontburner.
I’m watching Malaysia’s 15th General Election results. 🥴
Reviews, opinion pieces and other stray links:
Tom Brady should definitely maybe not retire by Jason Rogers for The Mandate.
Covid-19 vaccination and menstruation by Victoria Male for Science.
Everything to know about Canada’s Online News Act hearings by Gabby Miller for CJR.
Chart of the week
Despite the global sperm count decline, the global population reached eight billion people this week. It took only about a dozen years to add a billion people, but it could take two years longer to hit the next billion, according to figures collected by Our World in Data.
And one more thing
From
was googling about pax and found your blog. man he's deranged, i think he needs mental health support or sum.