One good thing about my assignments is that I get to see different schools in our local districts from the inside. I know I’m not supposed to reveal their secrets; that’s the first part of my contract with them. But, due to President Trump outing our schools for their heinous acts, I feel compelled to confirm that I’ve seen with my very own eyes, to my extreme dismay, the presence of operating rooms in all the schools.

There is a very inconspicuous door, just around the corner in every school cafeteria, which leads students down a corridor right into a room full of overhead lights, an operating table, an anesthesia cart, a table full of surgical instruments, an oxygen tank, and additional tanks for some mysterious gases. There’s also a huge closet full of clothes of all sizes, for both boys and girls.

You could say that I’ve acted as a spy for Trump, and I’ve seen for myself how school kids are being led to that room by school officials, only to emerge as the opposite sex. Trump is right. It’s true that kids go to school as one gender, the school performs a gender-affirming surgery without the parents’ knowledge or consent, and then the kids go home as another gender. You should see the confused looks on the parents’ faces. In the morning, they say to their son, “Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day at school,” only to find out in the afternoon that Jimmy is now Janine.

Now, I hope you all know I’m just being facetious. There are no special operating rooms in schools. You need surgeons, doctors, nurses, and the rest to “operate” an operating room. Trump is full of [S-word], mocking us, his loyal supporters, making goofy sounds and weird faces when he lies about something so absurd anyone can see through it. That’s the problem, though: not everyone sees through it. There are people who actually believe him.

Our schools exist to educate our kids. There are laws to protect them and the rights of their parents. We don’t live in Nazi Germany—though maybe we would if Trump had his way—where people were treated horribly. We live in California, where individual rights are paramount. You have to ask yourself why Trump would fabricate such an obvious lie. He’s not worried because he has such gullible followers who swallow these blatant falsehoods. I mean, look at his utterly absurd, preposterous lies about “Migrants Eating Dogs.”

Although, that might explain the “mystery meat” we used to find in school cafeterias during lunch. With the influx of migrant children into our local schools, maybe that mystery meat is no longer mysterious. Remember Trump’s words during the debate: “They are eating dogs!” Maybe they’re eating dogs, cats, and, as an amazing coincidence, I don’t see any squirrels around the school trees anymore. There used to be plenty of them, but now, I hardly see any. Go figure.

We should all call our senators, just like the residents of Springfield, Ohio, called their senator, J.D. Vance—so he says—to report the “Dog Eating Migrants” story. Why should that city get so much attention when we have the same issue here? Why isn’t someone here posting such a claim on Facebook, getting it amplified by the Republican Party, and endorsed by our past, present, and future president, Trump? Why aren’t our lunatic influencers and grifters trying to cash in on this fringe idea?

Many say that Trump and Vance are telling this “truth” about migrants eating pets as a dog whistle (no pun intended) to their base. Some argue that this political messaging is racist, meant to rile up white supremacists against these migrants, and, by extension, against Kamala Harris. But I disagree. We all know that Trump is not racist. He has told us that many times. He doesn’t have a racist bone in his body. He did have racist bone spurs once, but that was a long time ago.

Politicians have used similar stories about migrants throughout history. It used to be Asians accused of eating dogs and cats. Now it’s the Haitians. Trump is using the same fear-mongering, but this time targeting migrants of color. It’s sheer coincidence (or is it?) that his opponent happens to be a woman of color, and he’s deliberately using this falsehood to achieve the same results as his predecessors.

I think Trump and Vance got the idea when Robert Kennedy Jr. joined their team. We all know that man loves to eat dogs and bears. They must have discussed his culinary tastes and decided to apply it to the migrants.

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A federal judge said Monday that he couldn’t make sense of a critical provision in a new law that punishes doctors for spreading false information about COVID-19 to their patients. Senior Judge William Shubb called its definition of misinformation “nonsense” during a hearing in the United States District Court in Sacramento. The Legislature approved the law, AB 2098, last year and it went into effect January 1. It says doctors who share false information about COVID-19 treatment options and vaccines, whether they did so deliberately or not, could be disciplined for “unprofessional conduct.” That could lead to them losing their license.

A group of doctors, along with two organizations, are suing state officials in separate cases, saying the new law violates free speech protections under the First Amendment. They asked Shubb, who has served on the court for over 30 years, to halt enforcement of the law until the cases are resolved in court. While not revealing how he would decide on that matter, Shubb on Monday foreshadowed what could become an argument for the law’s demise.

Specifically, the measure defines misinformation as “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care.” Standard of care refers to treatment that is widely accepted by medical professionals for a particular disease. Doctors following a “standard of care” is not new, Shubb said during the hearing. But following a “contemporary scientific consensus” is. Deputy Attorney General Kristin Liska represented Gov. Gavin Newsom, Attorney General Rob Bonta and representatives of boards that discipline doctors of medicine and osteopathy in the cases.

In court filings, and during the hearing, Liska said physicians would be liable for punishment only if they violated all three elements of the misinformation definition: false information, that is contradicted by a scientific consensus and goes against a doctor’s standard of care. When asked to more specifically discuss statements that could violate the rule, Liska declined to do so, saying it was dependent on the circumstances of each individual patient. Then how do you expect doctors to know what may violate the law? Shubb countered.

The California Medical Association supported the measure, which was introduced last year by San Jose Democrat Evan Low. It said the “spread of misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines has weakened public confidence and placed lives at serious risk.” When Newsom signed the bill in September he called it “narrowly tailored” in a letter explaining his decision. He then defended it with an eye towards a challenge under the First Amendment. “To be clear, this bill does not apply to any speech outside of discussions directly related to COVID-19 treatment within a direct physician-patient relationship,” Newsom said.

Still, opponents of the rule warned of its “chilling effect.” One of the doctors challenging the law is Dr. Tracy Høeg. After the hearing, Høeg said she was afraid doctors would hold back information when talking with their patients because of the potential to be disciplined. “If this really is about the standard of care then we already have laws in place that will enforce that and protect patients,” Høeg said. Jenin Younes, an attorney representing Høeg and five other doctors in one of the cases, said during the hearing that the law was “about silencing doctors that have a different view from the state.” Younes works for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a Washington, DC-based organization that strives to “tame the unlawful power of state and federal agencies,” according to its website. Both the northern and southern California affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union support the challenges to the law, saying the rule is unnecessary and could make doctors less likely to speak openly with their patients. The Medical Board of California and the Osteopathic Medical Board of California have not disciplined anybody under the new rule as of Monday, communications representatives said in emails. Shubb during the hearing also challenged arguments made by Younes and the attorney handling the second case. After Younes said the law would be used to target people who don’t follow along with what the government wants, Shubb replied that one couldn’t know that just by reading it. “The statute is not clear on its face,” Younes replied. “That’s true,” Shubb said, before chuckling.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Search for the word “climate” on Twitter and the first automatic recommendation isn’t “climate crisis” or “climate jobs” or even “climate change” but instead “climate scam.”

Clicking on the recommendation yields dozens of posts denying the reality of climate change and making misleading claims about efforts to mitigate it.

Such misinformation has flourished on Twitter since it was bought by Elon Musk last year, but the site isn’t the only one promoting content that scientists and environmental advocates say undercuts public support for policies intended to respond to a changing climate.

“What’s happening in the information ecosystem poses a direct threat to action,” said Jennie King, head of climate research and response at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based nonprofit. “It plants those seeds of doubt and makes people think maybe there isn’t scientific consensus.”

The institute is part of a coalition of environmental advocacy groups that on Thursday released a report tracking climate change disinformation in the months before, during and after the U.N. climate summit in November.

The report faulted social media platforms for, among other things, failing to enforce their own policies prohibiting climate change misinformation. It is only the latest to highlight the growing problem of climate misinformation on Twitter.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, allowed nearly 4,000 advertisements on its site — most bought by fossil fuel companies — that dismissed the scientific consensus behind climate change and criticized efforts to respond to it, the researchers found.

In some cases, the ads and the posts cited inflation and economic fears as reasons to oppose climate policies, while ignoring the costs of inaction. Researchers also found that a significant number of the accounts posting false claims about climate change also spread misinformation about U.S. elections, COVID-19 and vaccines.

Twitter did not respond to questions from The Associated Press. A spokesperson for Meta cited the company’s policy prohibiting ads that have been proven false by its fact-checking partners, a group that includes the AP. The ads identified in the report had not been fact-checked.

Under Musk, Twitter laid off thousands of employees and made changes to its content moderation that its critics said undercut the effort. In November, the company announced it would no longer enforce its policy against COVID-19 misinformation. Musk also reinstated many formerly banned users, including several who had spread misleading claims about climate change. Instances of hate speech and attacks on LGBTQ people soared.

Tweets containing “climate scam” or other terms linked to climate change denial rose 300% in 2022, according to a report released last week by the nonprofit Advance Democracy. While Twitter had labeled some of the content as misinformation, many of the popular posts were not labeled.

Musk’s new verification system could be part of the problem, according to a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, another organization that tracks online misinformation. Previously, the blue checkmarks were held by people in the public eye such as journalists, government officials or celebrities.

Now, anyone willing to pay $8 a month can seek a checkmark. Posts and replies from verified accounts are given an automatic boost on the platform, making them more visible than content from users who don’t pay.

When researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate analyzed accounts verified after Musk took over, they found they spread four times the amount of climate change misinformation compared with users verified before Musk’s purchase.

Verification systems are typically created to assure users that the accounts they follow are legitimate. Twitter’s new system, however, makes no distinction between authoritative sources on climate change and anyone with $8 and an opinion, according to Imran Ahmed, the center’s chief executive.

“We found,” Ahmed said, “it has in fact put rocket boosters on the spread of lies and disinformation.”

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By Amber Dance

Grassroots health organizations left out of COVID funding

The CDC is distributing almost $4 billion in public health grants, but community organizations that work in underserved areas say they’re being left out, despite their contributions to fighting the pandemic in the past, report Elizabeth Cohen and Lauren Mascarenhas at CNN Health.

According to the CDC, the new funds are meant to support government health departments and intended to remedy a “historic underinvestment” in communities that are marginalized, rural, or contain ethnic or racial minorities.

“The funding often goes to states and doesn’t end up helping at a grassroots level,” said Denise Smith, executive director of the National Association of Community Health Workers. But those local groups, she said, are the ones best suited to ensure interventions are appropriate for the local culture.

Grassroots groups often assist larger organizations, but go unpaid for the work, added Venus Ginés, president of Texas health advocacy group Día de la Muher Latina. Her group failed to obtain a government grant from a Health Resources and Services Administration program in the fall, when more than $225 million went primarily to government health departments and other large organizations.

“There is no actual requirement that any of the (CDC) grant money trickle down to grassroots organizations,” write Cohen and Mascarenhas.

Infections on the rise as winter approaches

The omicron variant family that has dominated the globe for more than a year could drive yet another winter wave, writes Laura Ungar at AP News.

Nationally, COVID cases are up more than 20% over the last two weeks, though many infections go uncounted.

“It’s making a clear comeback,” said Dr. Nicholas Vasquez, an emergency physician in Phoenix, who said his hospital has reintroduced COVID-specific wards.

Just 12.7% of the eligible population has received the latest, omicron-specific booster shot.

In response, the Department of Health and Human Services is in the beginnings of a $475 million, six-week vaccination campaign, reports Annie Burky at Fierce Healthcare. The new effort will bring the vaccine to more parts of the country, including remote and rural areas.

The variant’s ongoing evolution is thwarting certain treatment options. Antibody therapies that could boost immunity in people at high risk are no longer a good match for the circulating variants and the FDA ended authorization for the last remaining antibody option on Nov. 29.

“Various companies are working on updated antibody therapies, but none appears close to being authorized,” writes Andrew Joseph at STAT.

Evusheld, an antibody treatment that helps protect people with compromised immune systems, remains authorized but has reduced efficacy against many current variants.

Holiday gatherings could further increase cases, as could international surges. In China, where strict lockdown policies have led to protests, “COVID-19 seems to be on the verge of exploding,” writes epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina on her blog. A surge there would provide the virus with more opportunities to mutate and evolve, and with global surveillance significantly diminished, “we won’t have a lot of warning” about novel variants, writes Jetelina.

White House advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, who intends to retire this month, told CBS’ Face the Nation that the U.S. pandemic situation is “much, much better than it was.” But, he added, daily death counts still number in the hundreds. “It’s still not a great place to be.”

COVID death rates highest among elderly

Nine out of 10 COVID deaths are now occurring in seniors — the highest proportion since the pandemic started, report Ariana Eunjung Cha and Dan Keating at The Washington Post.

“Now, more than ever, it is a plague of the elderly,” they write.

Some experts predict COVID will continue to be most deadly for older people, as well as those who are already ill or poor, raising questions about what level of loss is acceptable in the pursuit of normalcy.

The U.S. government is not pursuing the booster campaign and masking in health care settings as aggressively as it could, which smacks of ageism, said bioethics professor S. Matthew Liao of New York University.

Just under one-third of people over 65 have received the latest booster. That fact plus the vulnerability of older individuals to COVID underlies the death rates, reports Mary Kekatos at ABC News.

Death data also indicate the nation is no longer in a pandemic of the unvaccinated, according to an analysis by Cynthia Cox and colleagues at the Kaiser Family Foundation. As of August, 58% of deaths were in people who had received either a primary vaccine series or that plus a booster.

In part, that’s because much of the population is now vaccinated. However, vaccine-induced immunity wanes over time, and many people have yet to receive booster shots. At the same time, many unvaccinated people have built up immunity through previous infections.

The research “underscores the importance of staying up-to-date on boosters,” write the KFF authors.

Twitter stops policing COVID misinformation

COVID misinformation is running rampant at Twitter after the social media giant stopped policing it, apparently in accordance with new owner Elon Musk’s free speech policies, Donie O’Sullivan reported for CNN Business on Nov. 29.

Twitter’s previous policy of labeling or removing false or misleading content had received praise from physicians and Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy. The platform has removed nearly 100,000 items of content and suspended more than 11,000 accounts over COVID misinformation since January 2020.

Misinformation has continued to thrive on far-right social media platforms, such as Gab, that are not monitored like more mainstream social media networks, Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The New York Times reported last month.

A purported documentary espousing vaccine myths, called “Died Suddenly,” was released on Twitter and Rumble on November 21, and has been viewed more than 12 million times, reports Michael DePeau-Wilson at MedPage Today.

The change at Twitter is “certain to get many more people killed from COVID than otherwise would,” health sociologist Jon Shaffer of Johns Hopkins told Taylor Lorenz at The Washington Post.

Reports oversold the danger of a second COVID infection

An article in the journal Nature Medicine, published Nov. 10, was widely reported as suggesting that a repeat coronavirus infection was more risky than a first bout with the disease, but this is an erroneous interpretation, writes MedPage Today’s editor-in-chief Dr. Jeremy Faust.

“Second infections are far less dangerous than first infections,” writes Faust. “This is true regardless of vaccination status.”

He points to a 2021 study that found that among 1,304 reinfections, only four people had severe disease the second time around, and no one died.

That said, a repeat infection is not without its risks. The Nature Medicine paper indicates that for certain patients who sought medical attention after reinfection, they had more health consequences compared to people who did not get a reinfection, or who did get infected again but did not seek medical attention.

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TikTok may be the platform of choice for catchy videos, but anyone using it to learn about COVID-19, climate change or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is likely to encounter misleading information, according to a research report published Wednesday.

Researchers at NewsGuard searched for content about prominent news topics on TikTok and say they found that nearly 1 in 5 of the videos automatically suggested by the platform contained misinformation.

Searches for information about “mRNA vaccine,” for instance, yielded five videos (out of the first 10) that contained misinformation, including baseless claims that the COVID-19 vaccine causes “permanent damage in children’s critical organs.”

Researchers looking for information about abortion, the 2020 election, the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, climate change or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on TikTok found similarly misleading videos scattered among more accurate clips.

The amount of misinformation — and the ease with which it can be found — is especially troubling given TikTok’s popularity with young people, according to Steven Brill, founder of NewsGuard, a firm that monitors misinformation.

TikTok is the second most popular domain in the world, according to online performance and security company Cloudflare, exceeded only by Google.

Brill questioned whether ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, is doing enough to stop misinformation or whether it deliberately allows misinformation to proliferate as a way to sow confusion in the U.S. and other Western democracies.

“It’s either incompetence or it’s something worse,” Brill told The Associated Press.

TikTok released a statement in response to NewsGuard’s report noting that its community guidelines prohibit harmful misinformation and that it works to promote authoritative content about important topics like COVID-19.

“We do not allow harmful misinformation, including medical misinformation, and we will remove it from the platform,” the company said.

TikTok has taken other steps that it says are intended to direct users to trustworthy sources. This year, for example, the company created an election center to help U.S. voters find voting places or information about candidates.

The platform removed more than 102 million videos that violated its rules in the first quarter of 2022. Yet only a tiny percentage of those ran afoul of TikTok’s rules against misinformation.

Researchers found that TikTok’s own search tool seems designed to steer users to false claims in some cases. When researchers typed the words “COVID vaccine” into the search tool, for instance, the tool suggested searches on key words including “COVID vaccine exposed” and “COVID vaccine injury.”

When the same search was run on Google, however, that search engine suggested searches relating to more accurate information about vaccine clinics, the different types of vaccines and booster shots.

TikTok’s rise in popularity has caught the attention of state officials and federal lawmakers, some of whom have expressed concerns about its data privacy and security.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold a hearing Wednesday on social media’s impact on the nation’s security. TikTok’s chief operating officer, Vanessa Pappas, is set to testify alongside representatives from YouTube, Twitter and Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook.

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Soon after the Russian invasion, the hoaxes began. Ukrainian refugees were taking jobs, committing crimes and abusing handouts. The misinformation spread rapidly online throughout Eastern Europe, sometimes pushed by Moscow in an effort to destabilize its neighbors.

It’s the kind of swift spread of falsehoods that has been blamed in many countries for increased polarization and an erosion of trust in democratic institutions, journalism and science.

But countering or stopping misinformation has proven elusive.

New findings from university researchers and Google, however, reveal that one of the most promising responses to misinformation may also be one of the simplest.

In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, the researchers detail how short online videos that teach basic critical thinking skills can make people better able to resist misinformation.

The researchers created a series of videos similar to a public service announcement that focused on specific misinformation techniques — characteristics seen in many common false claims that include emotionally charged language, personal attacks or false comparisons between two unrelated items.

Researchers then gave people a series of claims and found that those who watched the videos were significantly better at distinguishing false information from accurate information.

It’s an approach called “pre-bunking” and it builds on years of research into an idea known as inoculation theory that suggests exposing people to how misinformation works, using harmless, fictional examples, can boost their defenses to false claims.

With the findings in hand, Google plans to roll out a series of pre-bunking videos soon in Eastern Europe focused on scapegoating, which can be seen in much of the misinformation about Ukrainian refugees. That focus was chosen by Jigsaw, a division of Google that works to find new ways to address misinformation and extremism.

“We have spent quite a bit of time and energy studying the problem,” said Beth Goldberg, Jigsaw’s head of research and one of the authors of the paper. “We started thinking: How can we make the users, the people online, more resilient to misinformation?”

The two-minute clips then demonstrate how these tactics can show up in headlines, or social media posts, to make a person believe something that isn’t true.

They’re surprisingly effective. Subjects who viewed the videos were found to be significantly better at distinguishing false claims from accurate information when tested by the researchers. The same positive results occurred when the experiment was replicated on YouTube, where nearly 1 million people viewed the videos.

Researchers are now investigating how long the effects last, and whether “booster” videos can help sustain the benefits.

Earlier findings have suggested that online games or tutorials that teach critical thinking skills can also improve resiliency to misinformation. But videos, which could be played alongside online advertisements, are likely to reach many more people, said Jon Roozenbeek, a Cambridge University professor and one of the authors of the study.

Other authors included researchers at the University of Bristol in the U.K. and the University of Western Australia.

Google’s effort will be one of the largest real-world tests of pre-bunking so far. The videos will be released on YouTube, Facebook and TikTok, in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. All three countries have accepted large numbers of Ukrainian refugees and their citizens could be vulnerable to misinformation about refugees.

Jigsaw CEO Yasmin Green said the work on prebunking is intended to complement Google’s other efforts to reduce the spread of misinformation: “As the scourge of misinformation grows, there’s a lot more we can do to provide people with prompts and features that help them stay safe and informed online.”

While journalistic fact checks can be effective in debunking a particular piece of misinformation, they’re time and labor intensive. By focusing on characteristics of misinformation in general instead of specific claims, pre-bunking videos can help a person spot false claims on a wider variety of topics.

Another method, content moderation by social media companies, can often be inconsistent. While platforms like Facebook and Twitter often remove misinformation that violates their rules, they’re also criticized for failing to do more. Other platforms like Telegram or Gab boast a largely hands-off approach to misinformation.

Social media content moderation and journalistic fact checks can also run the risk of alienating those who believe the misinformation. They might also be ignored by people who already distrust legitimate news outlets.

“The word fact checking itself has become politicized,” Roozenbeek said.

Pre-bunking videos, however, don’t target specific claims, and they make no assertions about what is true or not. Instead, they teach the viewer how false claims work in general — whether it’s a claim about elections or NASA’s moon landings, or the latest outbreak of the avian flu.

That transferability makes pre-bunking a particularly effective way of confronting misinformation, according to John Cook, a research professor at Australia’s Monash University who has created online games that teach ways to spot misinformation.

“We’ve done enough research to know this can be effective,” Cook said. “What we need now is the resources to deploy this at scale.”

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By Amber Dance

COVID is devastating Black oral history

People of color are at least twice as likely to die of COVID as white people. In the Black community, the loss of so many lives also means the loss of oral history, as Janell Ross writes at Time.

“As we mark Black History Month, we know that a crucial part of that history has, in these last few years, been lost,” Ross writes. “Eyewitness accounts of the civil rights movement go un-gathered. Recipes passed down through the generations but never written down will never be cooked again.”

And the Black midwives she focuses on won’t be able to learn about post-birth rituals from their elders.

Oral history is essential to Black communities, tracing back to the time when Black people were not allowed to read or write, Ross explains.

“Oral history can tell us things that written records often cannot,” said Kelly Elaine Navies of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. “Not just when something happened or that someone was at a certain place but how did they feel about it?”

FDA seeks to speed up vaccination of youngest children

The FDA wants vaccines for younger children, and it wants them ASAP. In a move that’s been described as “highly unusual,” “extraordinary” and “bizarre,” the agency asked Pfizer to request emergency authorization for its two-dose protocol for children younger than 5 — even though the trial didn’t meet its goal for robust antibody production the 2 to 5 age group. 

Pfizer’s original plan, back in December, was to try a third dose in those children to boost immunity, with data expected in late March.

The new plan is to authorize two shots now, with the assumption that a third will be necessary, effective and authorized shortly after the trial data arrives.

What’s changed? Omicron, an FDA spokesperson told STAT’s Helen Branswell.

More than 3.5 million children tested positive for COVID in January, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Omicron also tends to settle in the upper respiratory tract, causing mucus and swelling to clog kids’ smaller windpipes, leading to wheezing and croup, reports Marla Broadfoot at Scientific American.

But all those cases might have made it easier and faster for Pfizer to collect data on the vaccine’s real-world efficacy in kids who fell ill.

“Maybe Pfizer found that fewer kids among those who received the actual vaccine in the trial were getting infected or sickened by the virus,” speculates Katherine J. Wu at The Atlantic.

We don’t know yet, because the data have not yet been made public. But an anonymous source told The New York Times that efficacy against infection was 50% for children between 6 months and 2 years old, and 57% for children between 2 and 4. This was based on fewer than 100 symptomatic cases total in the study, add Times reporters Sharon LaFraniere and Noah Weiland.

The FDA’s vaccine advisory committee will meet Feb. 15. Thus far, the committee has been conservative about giving the nod to vaccines without strong evidence of benefits outweighing risks.

Side effects from Pfizer’s two-dose study in this age group, such as fever and chills, were generally mild and comparable to those of other childhood vaccines.

Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the vaccine committee, told Kristina Fiore at MedPage Today that the group will want to see “clear evidence” that two doses provide protection. “We wouldn’t say yes on the promise that three doses [will be] of value.”

But the plan has potential to backfire if parents think the vaccine was rushed through without all the proper testing. Parents are already skeptical about vaccinating their children.

Vaccine uptake in older kids has been lackluster. Only one-third of parents say their 5-to-11-year-olds have had at least one shot, according to the latest data from the Kaiser Family Foundation Vaccine Monitor, and Pfizer’s vaccine has been authorized for that age group since November. And 31% of parents of children younger than 5 said they’d schedule a vaccination as soon as possible. (That was before this authorize-first, data-later plan was on the table, though.)

“The FDA must be crystal clear and leave no gaps or uncertainties,” wrote the Editorial Board of The Washington Post. “A vaccine should never be a shot in the dark.”

The story of kids’ vaccines overshadowed other vaccine news last week: Moderna’s vaccine, Spikevax, is now fully approved for adults, though still delayed for teens and younger children while the agency assesses risk of myocarditis.

And Novavax, after its own series of delays, has now officially requested emergency authorization — only for adults at the moment, though trials in children are underway.

Spotify mired in misinformation mess

Musician Neil Young headlines a growing list of artists and podcast hosts departing Spotify’s streaming service over the COVID misinformation aired by the platform’s Joe Rogan podcast.

Among the claims made on Rogan’s popular podcast: that a COVID vaccine will alter a person’s DNA, that ivermectin cures the disease, and that young people risk more from vaccination than COVID infection. None of those are true, notes BBC News’ Reality Check team.

But the misinformation out there has real effects; Adrianna Rodriguez at USA Today reports that hundreds of doctors are still prescribing ivermectin for COVID. And according to a recent paper in JAMA, insurers are bearing the cost.

Reuters also landed in hot water last week when it mistakenly reported that a Japanese clinical trial found ivermectin works on COVID; the error was swiftly corrected.

In response to the outcry from the likes of Joni Mitchell and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, not to mention hundreds of medical experts, Rogan says he’s “not trying to promote misinformation” and Spotify has promised to put a content warning, linking to factual information, on all podcasts that touch on COVID-19.

The creators of the “Science Vs.” podcast, also hosted by Spotify, called the lack of sanctions for Rogan’s program a “slap in the face.” They promised to focus all new episodes on debunking misinformation from Rogan and other Spotify hosts until the company makes bigger changes.

As Mathew Ingram explains at Columbia Journalism Review, the issue comes down to whether Spotify is a platform, with no remit to moderate or censor content, or a publisher that should selectively curate its content.

Other platforms-cum-publishers have come up against the similar issues with COVID misinformation, and there are big bucks at stake. Anti-vaccine newsletters hosted by Substack earn the company about $2.5 million annually, reports Kristina Fiore at MedPage Today. Rogan’s exclusive deal with Spotify is reportedly worth more than $100 million.

“In that sense, Spotify is his publisher,” writes Ingram.

It’s the financial stakes that complicate Spotify’s position as a platform, write Lauren Hirsch and Michael J. de la Merced in The New York Times. While other hubs like Facebook don’t pay people to post less-than-verifiable ideas, Spotify does. “To some,” the pair write, “that puts an extra onus on Spotify to act like a media company and take responsibility for content.”

And it seems like the company is taking some publisher-like responsibility: it was reported over the weekend that Spotify has quietly removed dozens of episodes of Rogan’s podcast over his past use of a racial slur.

Opinion writer Roxane Gay has also removed her podcast from Spotify. “Spotify does not exist in a vacuum, and the decisions it makes about what content it hosts have consequences,” she writes in The Times. “To say that maybe Mr. Rogan should not be given unfettered access to Spotify’s more than 400 million users is not censorship, as some have suggested. It is curation.”

White House, HHS Secretary under fire for pandemic response

A handful of articles last week criticized the federal government’s pandemic approach.

Steven Phillips, vice president of science and strategy for the COVID Collaborative, writes in Time that ongoing “chaos and conflict over the reopening of American institutions and commerce reflect the absence of a coherent national plan.” The first step, he suggested, was to set a clear definition of what “public safety” even means.

In The Washington Post, reporters Dan Diamond, Yasmeen Abutaleb and Tyler Pager take aim at Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, who has been widely criticized for his job performance during the pandemic. Physician-scientist Eric Topol told the trio he’s been “like a ghost” during the pandemic. 

Unlike past HHS secretaries and other top officials in the COVID response, Becerra hasn’t appeared on any Sunday morning television programs, and the Association of Health Care Journalists complained in November that Becerra wasn’t making himself available for questioning during regular press briefings.

According to Post reporters, White House officials have never had a tight relationship with Becerra and his role in the pandemic response was never fully delineated.

“It is sometimes unclear who makes final decisions or is in charge of carrying out initiatives, with [White House COVID coordinator Jeff] Zients absorbing much of the portfolio that would have gone to an HHS secretary in previous administrations,” they write.

White House support for Becerra has reportedly diminished. Despite these criticisms, Biden is reportedly unlikely to fire anyone.

Meanwhile, Biden’s nominee to head the FDA, Dr. Robert Califf, has hit stumbling blocks in Congress. Senators have questions about his past record on abortion drugs, the opioid crisis, and his financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

Free COVID tests for Medicare beneficiaries coming soon

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced last Thursday a promise to provide up to eight at-home rapid tests per month to people enrolled in Medicare.

The move closes an important gap because people with private insurance are already able to have the tests paid for or request reimbursement. The Medicare change is expected to come in spring.

Medicare doesn’t do reimbursement, but the upcoming plan will pay pharmacies directly for the tests, reports Joyce Frieden at MedPage Today.

Scientists deliberately exposed people to COVID

Researchers in the U.K. intentionally exposed 34 young, healthy adults to the coronavirus in an attempt to understand the course of disease from beginning to end.

Only half of the subjects got infected, and there was no serious illness.

The results, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, suggest that similar human-challenge trials can be done safely, perhaps to test vaccines and antiviral medicines, reports Ewen Callaway at Nature.

However, this trial did not test such interventions, leading some to question whether it was ethical to infect people just to learn about the disease process.

The study also found that people developed their first symptoms and tested positive by PCR within two days of exposure.

Subjects’ viral loads peaked around five days in, and antigen tests reliably identified when people were likely to be contagious, report Josephine Mason and Jennifer Rigby at Reuters.

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Here are a few of the lies Californians are being told in an effort that surely has helped sicken many:

Take a COVID-19 vaccination and your life span will be shortened. Get the shot and you will be sterilized or become impotent. Shots include the insertion of tracking bots. The pandemic is a government-created conspiracy.

These are absolute falsehoods, pure shibboleths, but in the parts of California with the lowest average levels of educational attainment, they and other falsehoods are in large part responsible for holding down vaccination rates and keeping caseloads high.

They have made COVID-19 — in the age of some of history’s most effective vaccines — mostly a disease of the gullible and the fearful.

Two neighboring counties show how this plays out:

As of mid-December, Riverside County, with 2.47 million population, had seen 5,402 COVID -related deaths over the last two years, while Orange County, with 3.5 million persons, had 5,746 deaths. That’s about 225 deaths per 100,000 population in Riverside County to only about 164 deaths per 100,000 population in a next-door county.

No one can be absolutely sure, but some information suggests that folks in Orange County might be better trained to see through lies than those in Riverside County. U.S. Census figures show 40.6% of Orange County’s adult populace with college degrees compared with about 22% in Riverside County.

This may be a key reason only 55.6% of eligible Riverside County residents were fully vaccinated (two doses), compared with 63.9% in Orange County.

For sure, vaccinations are saving lives in both counties. It is primarily the unvaccinated who are dying today from this now-preventable virus.

The difference is even more striking in Kern County, with lower educational attainment rates than either Riverside or Orange counties, and a fully vaccinated rate of only about 44%. So far, about one in every six Kern County residents has contracted COVID within the last two years.

All this raises a vital question: Since educational attainment takes many years to achieve, how can less educated Californians best be inoculated against the anti-vaccination propaganda spewed daily, almost hourly, on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and TikTok?

One way could be via government censorship of those sites. But that runs counter to the First Amendment, which gives anyone the right to prevaricate, even when their lies prove fatal for others.

Best would be to launch a torrid, carefully-timed campaign of pro-vaccination information. One tactic might be to place public service ads on virtually every TV show and social media outlet, juxtaposing their messages with the anti-inoculation lies and vivid illustrations of their consequences.

California government is already set up to do this kind of thing, its anti-tobacco campaign many years old and with proven results including a far lower smoking rate among teenagers than 20 years ago.

Those ads often feature videos of lung cancer, asthma and emphysema victims coughing and wheezing while they bemoan their onetime smoking habits.

Why not imitate this, making videos in COVID intensive care units around the state, with terminal victims on ventilators relieved of their breathing tubes just long enough to say how much they regret believing the anti-vax propaganda.

Another might be thorough newspaper and television analysis of anti-vaccination articles posted frequently by organizations like the national Children’s Health Defense group, headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who uses his name and pedigree to peddle misleading information about COVID vaccines, just as he has through many years of lying about immunizations for other diseases like rubella, mumps, measles and polio.

It would help to show graphically how anti-vaxxers often lift numbers from reports of the Centers for Disease Control and use them out of context. Newspaper ads or TV commercials could show how apparently adverse statistics may at first appear large, but are actually minuscule, extremely tiny compared to the total number of vaccinations given.

So far, there is no steady campaign to debunk the lies and half-truths purveyed by anti-vaxxers. Meanwhile, the numbers from various California counties demonstrate how dangerous and damaging those untruths are, even today, when the combination of vaccines and masks make COVID pretty much an optional disease, mostly victimizing the gullible.

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“I went online because we thought the worse when a kid goes missing,” said his sister Angelica Martinez. “He could have been kidnapped or tricked into meeting people (from) online.”

While the family filed a missing person report the following day on Oct. 30 police struggled to find any sign of Torres — until a tip from social media helped authorities locate the boy.

Torres was involved in a traffic collision about a quarter-mile away from his home, only 30 minutes after he had ridden off from his mother’s home.

The teen suffered a major head injury and was transported to a Moreno Valley Hospital, however, since he had no ID on him, he was admitted as a John Doe. While police checked with local hospitals, they could not locate the teenager since Torres was listed as a John Doe and since doctors and nurses believed he was much older, around the age of 20 or 21 years old.

He laid in his Riverside University Health System hospital bed alone for five days before his family and police found him.

“He’s never been awake since the accident,” said his sister. “I’m sure that he could feel that none of us were here for him. He’s just a baby.”

On the day that he was found the Hemet Police Department released a statement regarding the teenager.

“Follow up measures were taken by Hemet Pd and local area hospitals were contacted,” the statement said. “Although several hospitals were contacted the juvenile was not located due to being admitted as John Doe.”

Five days after Torres went missing a Riverside Sheriff’s deputy saw the missing juvenile report and notified the family that the John Doe at Riverside Medical Center was in fact the missing Torres.

“It’s just hard to think that he was alone,” said his sister.

The Riverside University Health System Medical Center released a statement about the incident but denied to comment on Torres and his case.

Newsbreak | Contributed

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WASHINGTON (AP) — A former Facebook data scientist told Congress on Tuesday that the social network giant’s products harm children and fuel polarization in the U.S. while its executives refuse to change because they elevate profits over safety. And she laid responsibility with the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Frances Haugen testified to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection. Speaking confidently at a charged hearing, she accused the company of being aware of apparent harm to some teens from Instagram and being dishonest in its public fight against hate and misinformation.

“Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy,” Haugen said. “The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people.”

“Congressional action is needed,” she said. “They won’t solve this crisis without your help.”

Haugen said the company has acknowledged publicly that integrity controls were crucially needed for its systems that stoke the engagement of users, but then it disabled some of those controls.

In dialogue with receptive senators of both parties, Haugen, who focused on algorithm products in her work at Facebook, explained the importance to the company of algorithms that govern what shows up on users’ news feeds. She said a 2018 change to the content flow contributed to more divisiveness and ill will in a network ostensibly created to bring people closer together.

Despite the enmity that the new algorithms were feeding, she said Facebook found that they helped keep people coming back — a pattern that helped the social media giant sell more of the digital ads that generate most of its revenue.

Senators agreed.

“It has profited off spreading misinformation and disinformation and sowing hate,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., the panel’s chairman. “Facebook’s answers to Facebook’s destructive impact always seems to be more Facebook, we need more Facebook — which means more pain, and more money for Facebook.”

Haugen said she believed Facebook didn’t set out to build a destructive platform. But “in the end, the buck stops with Mark,” she said referring to Zuckerberg, who controls more than 50% of Facebook’s voting shares. “There is no one currently holding Mark accountable but himself.”

Haugen said she believed that Zuckerberg was familiar with some of the internal research showing concerns for potential negative impacts of Instagram.

The government needs to step in with stricter oversight of the company, Haugen said.

Like fellow tech giants Google, Amazon and Apple, Facebook has enjoyed minimal regulation. A number of bipartisan legislative proposals for the tech industry address data privacy, protection of young people and anti-competitive conduct. But getting new laws through Congress is a heavy slog. The Federal Trade Commission has adopted a stricter stance recently toward Facebook and other companies.

The subcommittee is examining Facebook’s use of information from its own researchers on Instagram that could indicate potential harm for some of its young users, especially girls, while it publicly downplayed the negative impacts. For some of the teens devoted to Facebook’s popular photo-sharing platform, the peer pressure generated by the visually focused Instagram led to mental health and body-image problems, and in some cases, eating disorders and suicidal thoughts, the research leaked by Haugen showed.

One internal study cited 13.5% of teen girls saying Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse and 17% of teen girls saying it makes eating disorders worse.

Because of the drive for user engagement, Haugen testified, “Facebook knows that they are leading young users to anorexia content. … It’s just like cigarettes. Teenagers don’t have any self-regulation. We need to protect the kids.”

Haugen has come forward with a wide-ranging condemnation of Facebook, buttressed with tens of thousands of pages of internal research documents she secretly copied before leaving her job in the company’s civic integrity unit. She also has filed complaints with federal authorities alleging that Facebook’s own research shows that it amplifies hate, misinformation and political unrest, but the company hides what it knows.

“The company intentionally hides vital information from the public, from the U.S. government and from governments around the world,” Haugen said. “The documents I have provided to Congress prove that Facebook has repeatedly misled the public about what its own research reveals about the safety of children, the efficacy of its artificial intelligence systems and its role in spreading divisive and extreme messages.”

The former employee challenging the social network giant with 2.8 billion users worldwide and nearly $1 trillion in market value is a 37-year-old data expert from Iowa with a degree in computer engineering and a master’s degree in business from Harvard. Prior to being recruited by Facebook in 2019, she worked for 15 years at tech companies including Google, Pinterest and Yelp.

After recent reports in The Wall Street Journal based on documents she leaked to the newspaper raised a public outcry, Haugen revealed her identity in a CBS “60 Minutes” interview aired Sunday night.

As the public relations debacle over the Instagram research grew last week, Facebook put on hold its work on a kids’ version of Instagram, which the company says is meant mainly for tweens aged 10 to 12.

Haugen said that Facebook prematurely turned off safeguards designed to thwart misinformation and incitement to violence after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump last year, alleging that contributed to the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.

After the November election, Facebook dissolved the civic integrity unit where Haugen had been working. That, she says, was the moment she realized “I don’t trust that they’re willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous.”

Haugen says she told Facebook executives when they recruited her that she wanted to work in an area of the company that fights misinformation, because she had lost a friend to online conspiracy theories.

Facebook maintains that Haugen’s allegations are misleading and insists there is no evidence to support the premise that it is the primary cause of social polarization.

“Even with the most sophisticated technology, which I believe we deploy, even with the tens of thousands of people that we employ to try and maintain safety and integrity on our platform, we’re never going to be absolutely on top of this 100% of the time,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of policy and public affairs, said Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”

That’s because of the “instantaneous and spontaneous form of communication” on Facebook, Clegg said, adding, “I think we do more than any reasonable person can expect to.”

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