H5N1

‘I hope you die’: How the COVID pandemic unleashed attacks on scientists

Via Nature News & Comment: ‘I hope you die’: how the COVID pandemic unleashed attacks on scientists. Excerpt:

Infectious-diseases physician Krutika Kuppalli had been in her new job for barely a week in September 2020, when someone phoned her at home and threatened to kill her.  

Kuppalli, who had just moved from California to the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, had been dealing with online abuse for months after she’d given high-profile media interviews on COVID-19, and had recently testified to a US congressional committee on how to hold safe elections during the pandemic. But the phone call was a scary escalation. “It made me very anxious, nervous and upset,” says Kuppalli, who now works at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland.  

She called the police, but didn’t hear that they took any action. The threatening e-mails, calls and online comments continued. The police officer who visited Kuppalli after a second death-threat call suggested she should get herself a gun.  

Kuppalli’s experience during the pandemic is not uncommon. A survey by Nature of more than 300 scientists who have given media interviews about COVID-19 — many of whom had also commented about the pandemic on social media — has found wide experience of harassment or abuse; 15% said they had received death threats.

Some high-profile examples of harassment have been well documented. Anthony Fauci, head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was assigned personal security guards after he and his family received death threats; UK chief medical adviser Chris Whitty was grabbed and shoved in the street; and German virologist Christian Drosten received a parcel with a vial of liquid labelled ‘positive’ and a note telling him to drink it. In one extraordinary case, Belgian virologist Marc Van Ranst and his family were placed in a safe house when a military sniper went on the run after leaving a note outlining his intentions to target virologists.  

These examples are extreme. But in Nature’s survey, more than two-thirds of researchers reported negative experiences as a result of their media appearances or their social media comments, and 22% had received threats of physical or sexual violence. Some scientists said that their employer had received complaints about them, or that their home address had been revealed online. Six scientists said they were physically attacked.  

Coordinated social-media campaigns and threatening e-mails or phone calls to scientists are not new: topics such as climate change, vaccination and the effects of gun violence have drawn similar attacks in the past. But even scientists who had a high profile before COVID-19 told Nature that the abuse was a new and unwelcome phenomenon tied to the pandemic. Many wanted the extent of the problem discussed more openly.  

“I believe national governments, funding agencies and scientific societies have not done enough to publicly defend scientists,” one researcher wrote in their survey response.  

Some researchers say that they have learnt to cope with the harassment, accepting it as an unpleasant but expected side effect of getting information to the public. And 85% of survey respondents said that their experiences of engaging with the media were always or mostly positive, even if they were harassed afterwards.  

“I think scientists need training for how to engage with the media and also about what to expect from trolls — it’s just a part of digital communication,” one wrote. Source: Nature analysis But Nature’s survey suggests that even though researchers try to shrug off abuse, it might already have had a chilling effect on scientific communication. Those scientists who reported higher frequencies of trolling or personal attacks were also most likely to say that their experiences had greatly affected their willingness to speak to the media in the future.  

That is concerning during a global pandemic which has been accompanied by a battery of disinformation and misinformation, says Fiona Fox, chief executive of the UK Science Media Centre (SMC) in London — an organization that collates scientific comment and organizes press briefings for journalists. “It’s a great loss if a scientist who was engaging with the media, sharing their expertise, is taken out of a public debate at a time when we’ve never needed them so badly,” she says.  

Tracking harassment  

In June, the Australian SMC in Adelaide asked researchers on its COVID-19 media lists about their experiences. The centre had been alerted to online bullying and hate campaigns directed at scientists, and wanted to know whether it was a broader problem, says Lyndal Byford, the centre’s director of news and partnerships.  

Byford shared the results with Nature. Fifty researchers answered the SMC’s informal survey. Nearly one-third reported experiencing emotional or psychological distress after talking about COVID-19; 6 people (12%) reported receiving death threats, and 6 said they had received threats of physical or sexual violence. “I think any organization involved in helping scientists communicate would find that quite disturbing,” Byford says.  

To get a broader sense of the scale of harassment, Nature adapted the Australian SMC’s survey, and asked science media centres in the United Kingdom, Canada, Taiwan, New Zealand and Germany to send it to scientists on their COVID-19 media lists. Nature also e-mailed researchers in the United States and Brazil who had been prominently quoted in the media.

The results are not a random sample of researchers who have given media interviews on COVID-19, because they represent only the experiences of the 321 scientists who chose to respond (predominantly in the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States). But the numbers reveal that researchers in many countries are facing abuse related to the pandemic, and the proportions reported were higher than in the Australian survey. More than one-quarter of respondents to the Nature survey said they always or usually received comments from trolls or were personally attacked after speaking in the media about COVID-19. And more than 40% reported experiencing emotional or psychological distress after making media or social media comments.

Politicized science
To some extent, this harassment of scientists reflects their rising status as public figures. “The more prominent you are, the more abuse you’re going to get,” says historian Heidi Tworek at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who is studying online abuse of health communicators in the pandemic. Most US public-health departments have also received harassment directed at staff and officials, adds Beth Resnick, a public-health researcher at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, who has surveyed 580 departments in a study that is not yet published.

And such attacks might have little to do with the science itself and more to do with who’s talking. “If you’re a woman, or a person of colour from a marginalized group, that abuse will probably include abuse of your personal characteristics,” says Tworek. For instance, Canada’s chief public-health officer Theresa Tam is Asian Canadian, and abuse levelled against her included a layer of racism, Tworek says. Kuppalli, a female scientist of colour, says she also experienced this. Abusers told her she “needs to go back where she came from”.

COVID-19: Thoughts at the end of Year 1

Precisely one year ago today, to the hour, I was sitting here at the kitchen table doing my usual morning scan of Google alerts, email, and new posts from other bloggers. After a few minutes, at 7:48 a.m. I made my first post about what became known as COVID-19:

Hong Kong: CHP closely monitors cluster of pneumonia cases on Mainland

Thanks to Mike Coston, Giuseppe Michieli, and Ian Mackay for alerting me to this report by the Centre for Health Protection: CHP closely monitors cluster of pneumonia cases on Mainland. Excerpt: 

The Centre for Health Protection (CHP) of the Department of Health is today (December 31) closely monitoring a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, Hubei Province, and has contacted the National Health Commission for further information.

According to an announcement from the Health Commission of Hubei Province, a number of pneumonia cases related to a local seafood market was recently reported in Wuhan. The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission has commenced investigation and so far identified 27 cases. Among them, seven cases were serious and the remaining were stable. Symptoms were mainly fever while a few had presented with shortness of breath. All patients are isolated and receiving treatment. Contact tracing of close contacts and medical surveillance are ongoing.

The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission announced that assessment by relevant experts revealed that the cases were compatible with viral pneumonia. For the time being, no obvious human-to-human transmission has been observed and no healthcare workers have been infected. The causative pathogen and cause of infection are still under investigation.

Locally, while surveillance, prevention and control measures are in place, the CHP will remain vigilant and work closely with the World Health Organization and relevant health authorities to monitor the latest developments.

The CHP's Port Health Division conducts health surveillance measures at all boundary control points. Thermal imaging systems are in place for body temperature checks on inbound travellers. Suspected cases with serious infectious diseases identified will be immediately referred to public hospitals for isolation, treatment and follow-up. The CHP has also informed the Hospital Authority about the cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan.

Travellers are reminded to wear surgical masks and seek medical attention if they present with respiratory symptoms, and reveal their travel history to doctors. The CHP will continue to closely monitor the latest situation of the cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan and update the surveillance criteria and testing strategies accordingly. 

Mike Coston has three posts on the outbreak and the response in Hong Kong and Taiwan. A quick check of Wuhan media didn't turn up anything, but I'll keep looking around.

I posted several items that morning. Far more knowledgeable people than I were clearly worried, and this "unxplained pneumonia" stirred echoes of SARS—the outbreak that first got me interested in emerging diseases and blogging. If this was like H5N1, H1N1, H7N9, cholera, MERS, and Ebola, the Wuhan outbreak would tell us a lot about the society dealing with it. China had tried to suppress news of SARS, and suffered for it. Its response to H7N9 avian flu had been far more open, and earned China new respect as a country with a vastly better public health system. 

Well, we learned China will still suppress news when it wants to, and will respond with breathtaking decisiveness when it wants to. And we've also learned that a real pandemic tells us a lot about every society it affects—including our own. These have been unpleasant insights, especially into those countries that fancy themselves "advanced." 

Now we begin Year 2 of COVID-19, and I do not expect a sudden news story to announce its end. It will go on for a long time, driven into corners and then resurging again and again—not because it's so malevolent, but because we are so stupid, and we insist on paying high tuition fees for very simple lessons.

How China censored Covid-19

Via The New York Times: How China Censored Covid-19. Excerpt:

In the early hours of Feb. 7, China’s powerful internet censors experienced an unfamiliar and deeply unsettling sensation. They felt they were losing control.  

The news was spreading quickly that Li Wenliang, a doctor who had warned about a strange new viral outbreak only to be threatened by the police and accused of peddling rumors, had died of Covid-19. Grief and fury coursed through social media. To people at home and abroad, Dr. Li’s death showed the terrible cost of the Chinese government’s instinct to suppress inconvenient information. 

Yet China’s censors decided to double down. Warning of the “unprecedented challenge” Dr. Li’s passing had posed and the “butterfly effect” it may have set off, officials got to work suppressing the inconvenient news and reclaiming the narrative, according to confidential directives sent to local propaganda workers and news outlets.  

They ordered news websites not to issue push notifications alerting readers to his death. They told social platforms to gradually remove his name from trending topics pages. And they activated legions of fake online commenters to flood social sites with distracting chatter, stressing the need for discretion: “As commenters fight to guide public opinion, they must conceal their identity, avoid crude patriotism and sarcastic praise, and be sleek and silent in achieving results.”   

The orders were among thousands of secret government directives and other documents that were reviewed by The New York Times and ProPublica. They lay bare in extraordinary detail the systems that helped the Chinese authorities shape online opinion during the pandemic.  

At a time when digital media is deepening social divides in Western democracies, China is manipulating online discourse to enforce the Communist Party’s consensus. To stage-manage what appeared on the Chinese internet early this year, the authorities issued strict commands on the content and tone of news coverage, directed paid trolls to inundate social media with party-line blather and deployed security forces to muzzle unsanctioned voices.  

Though China makes no secret of its belief in rigid internet controls, the documents convey just how much behind-the-scenes effort is involved in maintaining a tight grip. It takes an enormous bureaucracy, armies of people, specialized technology made by private contractors, the constant monitoring of digital news outlets and social media platforms — and, presumably, lots of money.

Should we ‘publish less’ on the pandemic?

This may help to explain this may help to explain this blog's falling traffic numbers. Via the Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop writes: Should we ‘publish less’ on the pandemic? Excerpt:

Yesterday, Neal Rothschild and Sara Fisher of Axios, shared some troubling data from NewsWhip, a social-media analytics firm. “New coronavirus cases in the US have never been higher,” they wrote in summary, but “online interest in the pandemic has never been lower.” 

In the last two weeks, news stories about covid-19 saw their lowest level of engagement on social media (likes, shares, and so forth) since early March, when interest in the pandemic was on an upward trajectory. 

That’s not because there’s less covid journalism to engage with: the number of stories appearing now is comparable to the summer months, Rothschild and Fischer report, and cable-news mentions of the pandemic have persisted at a high level. (Surprise! Trump’s claim that mainstream outlets would stop covering “covid, covid, covid… covid, covid, covid” once the election was over was wrong.) Rather, they conclude, “lower interest—not less media coverage—is responsible for the lower engagement.” 

Engagement, of course, is not the only way of measuring news consumption and interest, both of which elude easy quantification. Still, as the pandemic has progressed, other data points have driven at a similar conclusion. In March, news sites benefited from a pronounced covid traffic bump, but it quickly dissipated. As spring turned to summer turned to fall, other big stories—the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent protests; the election—frequently overtook the pandemic in terms of interest and media attention. 

According to surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center, the percentage of respondents who said they were following covid news “very closely” declined from nearly sixty percent in March to thirty-five percent in September, with the latter figure further declining to twenty-six percent among people who support or lean toward supporting the Republican Party—a partisan attention gap that has widened considerably over time. 

Overall, more people—and many more Republicans than Democrats—think the pandemic has been overhyped than think it has been minimized or treated with an appropriate level of attention.The US isn’t alone here: research published over the summer by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found a sharp rise in “news avoidance” in the UK, with most avoiders saying that covid news put them in a bad mood.  

More immediately, the NewsWhip data chimes with a broader sentiment that has been much covered recently: covid fatigue. Clearly, our collective engagement—in the broader, non-social-media-specific sense of the term—with the pandemic story has not risen and fallen with the severity of the scientific facts on the ground; rather, it has responded to a complex mix of social, political, and, simply put, very human factors. 

As Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton wrote in April, addressing the decline of the initial covid traffic bump, “Sustained attention is hard to maintain over time, no matter how objectively important a topic might be. The lives of nearly every American (and, of course, billions elsewhere) are now starkly different than they were a couple months ago—but their interest in news has rapidly regressed toward the mean.” 

While coverage has continued at a high level—and some of it has been excellent—much of it has become routine, settling into familiar, circular grooves. Of course, living and working in the permanent state of high-pitched, anguished fury and grief that the facts here demand is hardly sustainable. The covid story is many things at once: persistently tragic, but also deeply uncertain and, sometimes, boring, all of which complicates the production of journalism. We shouldn’t be in the business of sugar-coating and false hope, nor of contriving excitement.

The messaging mess among Trump’s top health officials

Via the Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop writes: The messaging mess among Trump’s top health officials. Excerpt:

Deathmilestones always feel arbitrary and inadequate; when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic, they’re also hard to measure. So it is with the latest grim statistic: the US has—or is about to, depending on your source—hit 200,000 confirmed deaths from COVID-19. Time magazine unveiled a black-bordered cover marking the 200,000 figure nearly two weeks ago; as of this morning, the Johns Hopkins dashboard, a trusted source for many news outlets, still listed 199,865 deaths; in any case, we’ve known for a while that the true, if unconfirmed, total count is likely way higher that official estimates allow. (The New York Times was confident enough to report that the 200,000 marker had been surpassed all the way back on August 12.) We clutch at numbers of apparent shared significance, but they’ve already gone by. And the deaths go on. 

Amid all the tragedy is a lot of farce. That word could reasonably be applied to almost any aspect of America’s official pandemic response, but it feels especially applicable to the bungled, contradictory, often-dishonest coronavirus messaging coming out of President Trump and his allies, via the news media and the federal health bureaucracy itself. 

Nearly two weeks ago, we learned, via Bob Woodward’s new book, that Trump knew the virus would be bad back in February, but downplayed it publicly anyway. Since then, a series of stories—which, individually, excited less enraged media coverage than the Woodward revelation—have shown, collectively, that duplicitous messaging remains a central problem today.

Two days after the Woodward story dropped, Politico’s Dan Diamond was first to report that Trump appointees within the Department of Health and Human Services—including Michael Caputo, a Trump campaign official turned departmental spokesperson, and Paul Alexander, an adviser to Caputo—routinely sought to meddle with weekly scientific reports that are issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and are not typically subject to political review. The meddling, Diamond wrote, had been interpreted by agency officials as an effort “to intimidate the reports’ authors and water down their communications to health professionals,” with the end goal of boosting Trump’s optimistic coronavirus narrative. 

CDC officials pushed back on the interference, but “increasingly agreed to allow the political officials to review the reports and, in a few cases, compromised on the wording,” Diamond added.  

Two days later, things got weird. Caputo went on his Facebook page, started live-streaming, and unleashed a barrage of unhinged claims. He accused CDC officials of “sedition” and of belonging to an anti-Trump “resistance unit” that meets at coffee shops (them again) to discuss how to undermine the president. (“To allow people to die so that you can replace the president [is a] grievous sin. And these people are all going to hell.”) 

He spoke of a supposed threat from leftist “hit squads” should Trump win the election—“You understand that they’re going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going”—and advised those watching to stock up on ammunition. He also said that he was struggling with his mental health, in part because he has been “waking up every morning and talking about dead Americans.” He insisted that he was planning to stay in his job as HHS spokesperson, but three days later, he announced that he would be taking a leave of absence, citing medical grounds and violent threats against his family. At the same time, Alexander, Caputo’s adviser, quit the department. 

That was last Wednesday. The same day, Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC, testified before Congress; among other things, he said that even if a COVID vaccine were forthcoming, most Americans wouldn’t have access to it until next year, and that masks are “more guaranteed” than a vaccine to protect against the disease. 

Soon after, Trump, who thinks a quick vaccine would be good for his election prospects, publicly rebuked Redfield who, Trump said, had likely misunderstood the question he was being asked. Later in the day, a spokesperson for Redfield put out a statement conceding Trump’s point and walking back Redfield’s earlier comment—but the spokesperson then tried to retract that concession. Tweets by Redfield himself sowed further confusion.

The CDC wasn’t done for the week. On Friday, the agency took two seemingly positive steps. It reversed its advice—issued last month, reportedly by political appointees rather than scientists—that people who have been in close contact with a known COVID carrier needn’t bother getting a test unless they have symptoms. And it added language to its website acknowledging that the virus can be transmitted by small airborne droplets. Outside experts praised both developments as good science—but then, yesterday, the CDC did another U-turn, deleting the new language on droplets. Observers were incredulous. (“HOLY HELL,” Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist, tweeted.) Critics of the CDC’s recent performance smelled fresh political meddling—but an agency scientist told Lena H. Sun, of the Washington Post, that on this occasion, CDC staff “shot our own foot.” A CDC spokesperson said that draft language had been posted “in error.”

Then, later yesterday, things got so weird that they made the Caputo video look routine. Lachlan Markay, of the Daily Beast, reported that William B. Crews, a communications staffer at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also blogs for RedState—a right-wing website where, under the pen name “streiff,” he has routinely disparaged his boss, Dr. Anthony Fauci, as an “attention-grubbing and media-whoring” “mask Nazi,” and spread ludicrous misinformation about the pandemic. (“It is safe to say that the entire Wuhan virus scare was nothing more or less than a massive fraud perpetrated upon the American people by ‘experts,’” Crews/streiff wrote in June. “If there were justice, we’d send [a] few dozen of these fascists to the gallows and gibbet their tarred bodies in chains until they fall apart.”) After Markay brought streiff’s true identity to the attention of NIAID officials, Crews abruptly “retired.”

COVID-19 disinformation adds conspiratorial fuel to a volatile Middle East

Via the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Coronavirus disinformation adds conspiratorial fuel to a volatile Middle East. Excerpt:

If some sources in the Middle East and North Africa are to be believed, China has declared nuclear war on the United States as retaliation for the latter creating the coronavirus to destroy the Chinese economy. Other equally dubious sources could lead a person to believe that 5G technology is responsible for the virus, or that COVID-19 spreads the most in countries located on the 40th parallel north. 

When the first cases of COVID-19 were recorded in the region in late January, many Middle Eastern and North African governments responded quickly and decisively to the pandemic by instituting lockdowns and other measures to prevent the spread of the virus. Yet, as part of a Princeton University project to track COVID-19 disinformation narratives, we can say these physical containment measures have done little to contain the spread of misinformation. 

Misinformation has been a part of political life in the Middle East and North Africa for years; the coronavirus era has proved no exception. In the past eight months, we recorded 403 independent COVID-19 misinformation narratives in the region. These narratives, which represent general storylines which then get repeated in tweets, posts, or online articles, make up a little over 16 percent of the 2,471 storylines our project has collected from countries around the world so far. 

The  sources of misinformation—ranging from social media users to heads of state—painted either a bleaker picture than is actually warranted by the facts or gave false hope that the containment and eradication of the virus was at hand.  

On the bleak side of the spectrum: In Algeria and the Palestinian territories, fake news on social media suggested that some cities or jurisdictions had extended a lockdown. In Egypt, false rumors claimed that newspaper presses were stopped and schools were turned into field hospitals. Again in Algeria, social media users falsely claimed that the state had instituted a moratorium on marriages. In the UAE, social media users falsely claimed that malls and dressing rooms were shuttered due to the spread of the coronavirus.  

Over the summer, celebrities in the region were allegedly testing positive for or dying from the coronavirus with alarming frequency. But Egyptian singers Hany Shaker and Tamer Hosny, Iraqi actress Inaam Al-Rubaii, and Algerian singer Cheb Khaled have all denied rumors about their health, countering misinformation about them. 

Regular people weren’t spared, either. In Bahrain, one false story alleged that more than 70 delivery drivers had tested positive for the virus. In Egypt rumors spread on social media that students were getting infected during school exams. Some stories even falsely claimed that students sitting for thanawaya a’mma exams, or the national college entrance exams, were passing out or dying in testing rooms.

'Sheer fear': Mental health impacts of Covid-19 come to fore

Via The Guardian: 'Sheer fear': mental health impacts of Covid-19 come to fore. Excerpt:

Two months after falling ill with Covid-19, Julie had her first hallucination. “It started slowly. I was struggling to track the plot of a TV show, then I couldn’t read the words on my phone screen,” she said. 

Things deteriorated, with an overwhelming sense of her mind and body being consumed. “I know it sounds crazy, and I don’t know how to properly articulate it, but in the moment it really felt like something was taking over my brain and my body. 

“I was so convinced that was happening that I made my sister promise to remember a code word so she’d know if I was still in my body.”  

Amid these delusions, Julie, 36, from Minnesota, was eventually taken to hospital by her family. “My mom told the ER doctor that I was recovering from Covid and that they were concerned this was a strange side-effect. He agreed it was possible, but didn’t seem to have any treatment to suggest.” 

Julie is not alone. As the long and lingering effects of Covid on physical health are emerging, so too are its impacts on mental health.  

NHS England has announced that more staff are being trained to treat people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in preparation for a potential increase in demand for mental health services as a result of the coronavirus crisis.  

Almost 3,000 trainees are expected to start courses in psychological therapies and former staff are being asked to consider returning to frontline roles in preparation for growing numbers of people suffering from anxiety, depression and related conditions. 

NHS England said it hoped to boost the number of advanced clinical practitioners, psychiatrists and mental health nurses over the next few months.  

Research from Italy found that more than half of those admitted to hospital with Covid-19 had a psychiatric disorder a month later, with 28% showing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 31% depression and 42% anxiety. Insomnia and obsessive-compulsive symptoms were also common. 

A study by researchers at University College London (UCL) also flagged psychiatric and neurological problems following Covid infections. The husband of one woman discharged from hospital found her behaving oddly, taking her coat on and off repeatedly and saying she saw lions and monkeys in the house.  

It is not only those ill enough to be admitted to hospital who are affected, as members of a Covid-19 group on the social media platform Slack, who include Julie, attest. 

Before Covid struck, Dawn, 48, also a member of the Slack group, was an organ transplant coordinator in Philadelphia. Now she is unemployed, and on a recent visit to friends took half an hour to feel comfortable getting out of the car.  

After Dawn was diagnosed with Covid, her anxieties about the disease grew. She experienced chest pains and panic attacks. “I would walk around the house [at night] and make sure everyone was breathing,” she said. In June, as her younger daughter became increasingly concerned and physical causes were ruled out, Dawn sought mental health services. 

She has since been diagnosed with PTSD, generalised anxiety disorder and major depression, and is undergoing an intensive outpatient therapy programme. “I am two months into my therapy and … still having quite a difficult time getting out of my house,” she said.

The epistemic tragedy of COVID-19 misinformation

Via Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop writes: The epistemic tragedy of coronavirus misinformation. Excerpt:

Yesterday, four of the most powerful men on earth—Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook; Jeff Bezos, of Amazon; Tim Cook, of Apple; and Sundar Pichai, of Alphabet, which owns Google and YouTube—were dragged to Capitol Hill (well, a videoconference) to answer to a subcommittee of the House of Representatives. As well as allegations of monopolistic practices, abuses of privacy, and political bias, lawmakers asked about the spread of misinformation on social media, including content related to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. 

Rep. David Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat who chairs the subcommittee, grilled Zuckerberg on a nonsense-stuffed COVID video that went massively viral earlier this week before Facebook pulled it down. Cicilline accused Facebook of exploiting such harmful content to juice engagement. Zuckerberg denied this. 

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, also asked about the incident. He described a claim from the video as “a legitimate matter of discussion,” and wanted to know why Facebook had punished Donald Trump, Jr., for sharing it. Zuckerberg gently replied that Twitter, not Facebook, had acted against Trump, Jr. So such hearings go. 

The content that perturbed Cicilline and Sensenbrenner, for different reasons, was published on Monday by Breitbart, and featured a group of doctors, in immaculate medical garb, making far-from-immaculate claims, including that masks don’t work against COVID-19, and that hydroxychloroquine, the antimalarial drug beloved of the president and his boosters, is a COVID “cure,” which, by all credible accounts, it is not. 

As the Daily Beast’s Will Sommer has reported, one of the doctors in the video—Stella Immanuel, a physician and religious minister in Houston—has claimed, in the past, that having sex with demons and witches can cause gynecological problems, that alien DNA is used in human medicine, and that aliens and reptiles help run the government, which, by the way, is working to vaccinate us against religion. 

Immanuel thanked the Daily Beast for Sommer’s story, which she said did “a great job summarizing our deliverance ministry and exposing incubus and succubus.” (Don’t ask.) She also invited the Beast (italics definitely necessary) to contact her should it ever find itself in need of “deliverance from these spirits.”

I digress. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter all removed the video, citing various violations of their COVID-19 misinformation policies and general terms of service, but not before it had found some high-profile fans. Madonna shared it, and called Immanuel her “hero.” President Trump shared variants of the video; Twitter eventually scrubbed it from his account, though it didn’t temporarily block the president from tweeting, as it had done with his son, because the president only retweeted the video, whereas Trump, Jr., uploaded it himself. 

At a briefing on Tuesday, the president declared himself “very impressed” with Immanuel. When CNN’s Kaitlan Collins pressed him on Immanuel’s past claims, Trump walked out. And so such briefings go.  

Junk about the coronavirus keeps cycling through our information ecosystem. The news media bears responsibility for that; as David Leonhardt, of the New York Times, put it yesterday, there are many reasons why the US has a worse COVID outbreak than any other rich country, “but one of them is the size and strength of right-wing media organizations that frequently broadcast falsehoods.” Flotsam washes from dark corners of the web right into conservative institutions—to cite one recent example, a COVID conspiracy video called Plandemic went viral online, leading Sinclair, the local-news chain, to interview one of its stars for a segment it planned to broadcast to millions of Americans. Under immense pressure, it reversed course. 

Such dynamics invite coverage from the reality-based media; we make clear that the claims we’re covering are bogus, but we are still, in the eyes of many information experts, contributing to a form of seepage. By the time one cycle is done, a new one has begun. As Casey Newton, of The Verge, pointed out this week, the Immanuel video “racked up nearly three times the views that the most-shared Plandemic video did in half the time.” We covered that. Then Congress got involved, and we covered Congress getting involved. Rinse. Repeat.  

Despite their COVID misinformation policies, social media companies could act much more quickly to remove harmful content, or at least limit its virality. The many calls for such action come amid a broader period of reckoning for the tech giants. Facebook, in particular, has faced loud complaints, including a staff walkout and a boycott by advertisers, about its laissez-faire approach to hate, including posts by Trump; others, including Zuckerberg, have argued that it isn’t Facebook’s role to interfere with political speech. 

In many ways, the problem of COVID misinformation is part of the same conversation. The threatened shooting of protesters and the threat of the virus both involve potential harm, albeit in different ways. And medicine is inseparable from politics, especially right now.

COVID-19 outbreak in Xinjiang spreads to second Chinese city

Via The Guardian: Covid-19 outbreak in Xinjiang spreads to second Chinese city. Excerpt:

A coronavirus outbreak in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang has spread to a second city, one day after authorities announced “wartime” anti-pandemic measures in a district in the city of Urumqi. 

On Monday, the national health commission reported 22 new cases, five of which were imported. One case was reported in the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar, in north-western Xinjiang, while the rest were in the capital city of Urumqi. 

At least 47 people diagnosed with Covid-19 in Xinjiang were in the city of Urumqi. However, the Urumqi city government has not provided a public update since 15 July.  

On Sunday, the national health commission said 13 people in Xinjiang were reported to have the virus, 16 on Saturday, and one on Friday. 

Measures announced on Sunday for the Tianshan district of Urumqi included mass health screenings, and some public transport and most flights into the city were stopped on Saturday. Group activities have been suspended and people were warned against unnecessary travel outside the city. 

District authorities have also “strengthened [housing] compound management”, including tighter controls over who goes in and out, carrying out a comprehensive disinfection of the public areas of the community, providing contactless delivery services and help purchasing daily necessities. 

According to the publicly released reports by Chinese health authorities, Xinjiang – a sparsely populated region – has been largely spared from the outbreak, which began in Hubei province and spread rapidly.  

The sudden rise in cases has prompted speculation online that authorities were covering up an outbreak in Xinjiang, a province that continues to be the subject of international focus due to the persecution of its Uighur minority.  

Chinese social media users pointed out there had been no reported cases in Xinjiang for 149 days until 16 July. 

On 17 July, the hashtag “Xinjiang Urumqi epidemic” reached 34m views on the Chinese social network Weibo before dropping sharply. Some commenters accused Xinjiang state media Tianshan of blocking comments on its posts.

Kazakhstan's great 'unknown pneumonia' scare

Via Kazinform, a July 9 report: Nur-Sultan sees almost 4-fold rise in beds for COVID-19 patients. The full report and then a comment:

NUR-SULTAN. KAZINFORM - The total number of beds at infectious hospitals in Nur-Sultan has been increased from 1,000 to over 3,700 since the start of the pandemic, Kazinform reports. 

According to the capital's administration press service, there are 13 hospitals to treat COVID-19 patients in the city.  

The National Scientific Medical Center has opened an infectious unit for 240 COVID-19 patients, while the city's multi-purpose hospital No.1 has been converted into an infectious hospital. The Ramada Plaza hotel has also provided 500 more beds to receive COVID-19 patients.  

The press service said a perinatal hospital for pregnant women diagnosed with the coronavirus infection had been opened as well as the number of medical facilities treating pneumonia patients had risen from 1 to 7 in the capital.  

According to Altai Kulginov, Nur-Sultan mayor, 1.5 thousand beds are on standby to prepare for the possibility of a surge in COVID-19 cases. 800 more equipped medical beds are being obtained to that end.  

It is also said that the city administration is working on expanding the availability of CT scans for the citizens to prevent severe pneumonia cases.

The Great Unknown Pneumonia Scare drew a lot of attention to Central Asia today. It started with a report on a statement by the Chinese embassy to nationals living in Kazakhstan. Granted the uncertainty of Google translation from Chinese to English, a careful reading of the statement doesn't say anything about an unknown pneumonia; it simply refers to the "new coronary virus," which currently spiking in the country. It clearly means COVID-19.

But the Global Times, an official Chinese government news outlet, published a story on a "local pneumonia of unknown cause" with a "much higher" fatality rate. Here's an excerpt:

The unknown pneumonia in Kazakhstan caused 1,772 deaths in the first six months of the year, including 628 people in June alone, including Chinese citizens, the embassy said in a statement on its WeChat platform on Thursday.

"The fatality rate of the disease is much higher than COVID-19," read the embassy's statement.

Organizations including Kazakhstan's health department are studying the "virus of this pneumonia", the embassy said.

There hasn't been any indication whether this disease is related to the COVID-19.

Some Chinese experts said that measures should be taken to prevent the pneumonia from spreading into China. Kazakhstan borders Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

The embassy is reminding Chinese citizens in Kazakhstan to raise their awareness of measures to prevent the spread of the virus.

The embassy quoted local media as saying that since mid-June, almost 500 people have been infected with the pneumonia in three regions of Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstan's healthcare minister said on Wednesday that the number of patients sickened by the pneumonia is two to three times more than those who have been infected with COVID-19, Kazakh news agency Kazinform reported.

I don't use WeChat, but it's strange that the embassy would release such news on a social-media platform but not on its own website. Moreover, I don't find any reference in Kazinform to this "unknown pneumonia."

It also seems highly unlikely that this pneumonia had been distinguished for six months from routine COVID-19 cases, and had killed precisely 1,772 unlucky Kazakhs and Chinese nationals, without having been identified as a distinct virus, without mention of a test for it, and without reporting it to WHO. And how many non-fatal cases have been identified as "unknown pneumonia"? WHO's Kazakhstan office has nothing about it. Its most recent article, dated February 27, has to do with improving care for patients with chronic diseases.

But the Global Times story also has this to say, with my bolding:

The unknown pneumonia has stirred heated discussions among Chinese netizens who remain anxious about the coronavirus pandemic.

As of press time, more than 370 million netizens read posts with the hashtag "pneumonia of unknown cause reported in Kazakhstan" on China's Sina Weibo. "What has happened to earth in 2020? First, the COVID-19 and now another pneumonia? All we want for the year is to live safely," wrote a netizen.

So a quarter of China's population picked up this report, which in itself should have made it a big international story. But only Reuters carried it, in a brief article repeating the Global Times without any additional information or confirmation.

Both Kazakhstan and China make dire threats against anyone passing along false information over social media, but this looks like a genuinely bogus report from a major Chinese news medium. Maybe the Kazakh government will confirm it within a day or two, with explanatory details. I'm not holding my breath.