People gettin' health misinfo from Joe Rogan 👎 ‘Tax Return To Office’ is a policy I would endorse. ✌️
Listen to my interview on TheLetterHack youtube channel discussing the ongoing political battle around masks and the expansive implications of it all.
Lots of people get health misinformation from Joe Rogan.
I didn't even know who Suzanne Humphries was and I wish I still didn't, and I've never listened to Joe Rogan, other than via clips typically by someone debunking bonkers crap that guy or his guests are saying. But Dr. Wilson of Debunk The Funk listened to the interview with Suzanne Humphries and oh my is there a lot to debunk. I couldn't even believe some of the outrageous stuff that people are being fed via a podcast that's absolutely not based in reality, not true, and even dangerously wrong.
Joe Rogan even brought up the absolutely not true right-wing conspiracy theory from early in the pandemic that people who smoked were supposedly protected from covid by nicotine. Like ivermectin or colloidal silver, and other qanon or right-wing misinformation quack cures, this is also one that made the jump from right-wing misinformation to left misinformation, or to people with Long Covid being enticed into trying experimentally or self-experimentally, and with seemingly no awareness of the origins of the "idea" they've newly discovered. At the time when prominent Long Covid twitter influencers started announcing they were trying nicotine, I had trouble pointing this out to even some otherwise sensible people, because the silos are such that if you're not in the right-wing milieu you won't know about all these things unless you are exposed to it through Right Wing Watch media coverage, Knowledge Fight podcast, Debunk the Funk videos, or other outlets covering these things. The nature of the algorithms keeps us blind to so much, that progressives often don't recognize right-wing concepts, and even anti-vax talking points sneak into pro-vax spaces many times. Just a couple months ago I found the "childhood milestone" pandemic conspiracy theory which started out as right-wing anti public health disinformation claiming the CDC had foreknowledge of childhood development issues supposedly caused by mitigation measures the right wing opposed like masks, vaccines, and remote learning, and it was being repurposed just recently into viral social media content that claimed it's evidence of a conspiracy that CDC had foreknowledge about effects of long covid on childhood development. In either case the supposed conspiracy is easily refuted by the timelines, but it's an excellent example of the jump and the misinformation zombies that just keep circulating because they have some hook to make them get traction. Though usually there are products involved and stuff based in anti-vax disinformation and wellness product sales are repurposed from being sold as bogus covid cures, and presented as hopeful long covid cures to the desperate.
🗞️ In the news
Confined Space - A newsletter of workplace safety and labor issues - Reflections on NIOSH - By Kathleen Rest - Apr 3, 2025 NIOSH is the world’s premier worker health and safety research institute, but it’s far from a research think tank. Its research is specifically designed to help keep workers safe and healthy — with a focus on relevance, quality, and impact. It is practical, translatable, and directly relevant to informing the establishment of occupational safety and health standards by OSHA and MSHA, the Mine Safety and Health Administration. It is sector and cross-sector based, with core programs in safety, hearing loss, respiratory health, injury prevention, and disease and injury surveillance. But there’s more than research in this small, mighty, and chronically underfunded agency.
CIDRAP - Vaccination cuts the risk of long COVID 27%, review suggests - Mary Van Beusekom, MS March 25, 2025 Six studies of adults overall found that full vaccination before infection significantly reduced the odds of developing long COVID compared with no vaccination. "These studies represented a range of recruitment settings (including both community and hospital settings), time period of infection (and consequently SARS-CoV-2 variant), as well as acute COVID-19 disease severity," the study authors wrote. "In addition, two of the three studies which did not find that vaccination reduced PCC had small sample sizes, particularly where symptoms were assessed in sub-group analyses."
Confirmed measles case traveled on Amtrak Northeast Regional train from NYC to DC: health officials Amtrak Northeast Regional train has several stops between NYC and DC, including in Philadelphia - 6abc Digital Staff Thursday, March 27, 2025 Health officials were notified of a confirmed case of measles in a person who visited multiple locations in Washington D.C. while contagious. The person visited multiple locations while contagious, including the southbound Amtrak Northeast Regional 175 Train and Union Station on March 19, as well as a MedStar Urgent Care in Adams Morgan on March 22, DC Health said in a press release on Tuesday. On Wednesday, health officials confirmed the measles patient is a Minnesota resident who recently traveled internationally.
CIDRAP - PAHO warns of increase in yellow fever cases - March 27, 2025 - Stephanie Soucheray, MA "In 2024, yellow fever cases were mainly reported throughout the Amazon region of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Guyana, and Peru. In 2025, however, cases have also been detected in the state of Sao Paulo in Brazil and the department of Tolima in Colombia, regions outside the Amazon region of both countries," PAHO said in the alert. Almost all cases in unvaccinated people. Brazil has 81 confirmed cases, 31 of which have been fatal. Only 1 of the confirmed case-patients had a history of yellow fever vaccination.
Retraction Watch - COVID-19 vaccine myocarditis paper raises questions about what earns post-publication peer review April 1, 2025 Author Ellie Kincaid “The Editor and the publisher were alerted to potential issues with the research methodology and conclusions and author conflicts of interest” and had undertaken an investigation of the article, the notice stated. According to one of the authors, the investigation involved two new peer reviews of the paper. We’ve reported on many cases of authors disagreeing with retractions other publishers issued after conducting post-publication review processes. The papers often involve hot-button issues – pesticide poisoning, the effect of vaping on smoking rates, an estimation of deaths from the use of hydroxychloroquine early in the COVID-19 pandemic, and President Trump’s role in spreading vaccine misinformation on Twitter before the company suspended his account.
CIDRAP - Fake CDC vaccine site linked to anti-vax nonprofit once headed by RFK - Mary Van Beusekom, MS March 24, 2025 The site was taken down on Saturday evening at Kennedy's direction after the New York Times asked about it and social media posts about it proliferated, the Times reported.
About mask bans, and the legislation to prevent mask bans containing a wrecking amendment.
Here is my interview on TheLetterHack youtube channel discussing the ongoing political battle around masks and the expansive implications of it all.
PRO-MASK BILL "POISON PILL" w/ Chloe Humbert — The Letterhack Apr 1, 2025
Poison pill in a pro-mask bill. Anti mask ban legislation shouldn't undermine the entire reason for the protection, and it definitely shouldn't introduce random "Stop and Unmask" checkpoints by law enforcement. Chloe Humbert Mar 30, 2025
Are the politicians who confirmed RFKJr fools, or do they think we're fools?
Reckless RFK Jr. Proves to be TOO MUCH FOR GOP TO CONTROL!!! - Brittany Page - Apr 3, 2025
‘Tax Return To Office’ is a political policy platform that can maybe go places.
HiFi - Welcome to WWIII, the stupidest internet war. Mar 11 at 1:56 PM Policy thought: If I were a politician, I’d tax corporations who required work from office at a higher rate, as their plantation mentality requires their employees to consume valuable resources such as petrol and time.
Quote:
“These under reported kind of unseen conflicts don't come out of nowhere there's usually decades that proceed of often nepotism and corruption and bad governance and inequitable distribution of resources that create a population of very frustrated desperate individuals, particularly young men, who often take up arms to try to to try to redress some of these problems. And what starts off as a kind of bad governance and corruption, ends up in war crimes.”
— Corinne Dufka
Confronting Evil: Genocide in Rwanda - Human Rights Watch Mar 28, 2014