Health and Sanity category archive

Aside:

What flummoxes me most about the anit-vaxxers is that they are able to ignore over three two centuries of history, since the creation of the first smallpox vaccine through polio to measles to mumps, that prove vaccines work.

I’m old enough to remember pictures on my telly vision of children in iron lungs because of polio, then the vaccines came along and polio went away, for Pete’s sake.

We are a society of stupid.

Rebecca Watson finds the notion of anyone’s trying to have a serious debate with anti-vaxxer RFK Jr. to be–er–ludicrous.

Or you can read the transcript.

Rebecca Watson looks at some recent reports about two apparently unrelated topics: UFOs and COVID. She argues that, as dissimilar as the topics may seem, the news reports have something in common: they are not “news,” they are warmed up leftovers. A bit:

1. Both are masquerading as “news” when in fact there doesn’t appear to be any new information we didn’t already know for at least a year
2. Both have no solid evidence to back them up . . .

Follow the link for solid evidence of the lack of evidence.

Laurie Roberts reports on the Arizona state legislature’s decision to convene a coterie of COVID charlatans “examine federal, state and local efforts to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic.” She is not sanguine.

Here’s a tiny bit from her article; follow the link for her reasoning.

Looking at the lineup of elected leaders and “expert panelists” — not to mention the cryptic callout to QAnon — I’m guessing this august study group won’t be examining the nexus between Arizona’s low vaccination rate and our highest-in-the-nation death rate. One that rivals Peru.

Rebecca Watson discusses the campaign of Robert Kennedy, Jr., a long-time anti-vaxxer, for the Democratic presidential nomination. An excerpt:

But Donald Trump proved that we absolutely cannot sit back and assume someone is too ridiculous to win the presidency.

. . . or you can read the transcript.

Rebecca Watson discusses a study that indicates that, when a scientific journal and individual scientists endorsed Biden over Trump, Trump, Trump supporters reacted by trusting scientists (and science) less. Here’s a bit of what she says:

The truth does not matter to these people, because Tucker Carlson already told them something and they’ve built their entire personalities around it. They are, for the most part, unreachable by facts alone. It’s not impossible to change these people’s minds, but we absolutely will not find a statistically significant result by throwing reality at them and seeing if they immediately change their minds. About ANYTHING that is even tangentially related to politics, which is anything that the talking heads tell them on Newsmax.

Or you can read the transcript.

Who coulda knowed?