Cartoonistry fodder: Iguanas running amok among us, free-falling from trees in cold snaps

David Willson
Sun, February 6, 2022,

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When I first began cartooning for the Palm Beach Daily News, the severity of a winter cold snap in Florida was almost always measured by the amount of damage done to citrus crops. But times change and so have the number of orange groves remaining after the arrival of the incurable citrus greening disease from China in 2005.

Florida’s citrus crop these days is only about 20% of what it was at its peak. Therefore, the only thing newsworthy about Florida oranges anymore is the skyrocketing cost of orange juice. So obviously, we needed a new phenomenon by which to measure incursions from Jack Frost. Keep in mind that while orange crops were shrinking, the nation was developing a taste for the bizarre where Florida is concerned.

You can chalk that up to Palm Beach’s very own butterfly ballot in the 2000 presidential election. The ensuing political brouhaha was a pivotal moment that thrust Florida into the international limelight. Suddenly, our regional sub-genre of gonzo Florida crime novels became very popular worldwide. From there, it was just a hop, skip and a jump to “Florida man” becoming a regular feature in the national news and social media.

Fortunately, there was another invasive pest perfectly suited to satisfy the world’s newfound kink for "Floridinanity' — iguanas. It turns out the little green goblins become comatose in near-freezing temperatures, their muscles seize up and they fall out of trees. Simply put, when the north gets blizzards, Florida gets falling lizards. What could be more poetic?

Of course the little buggers had to get themselves entrenched here in noticeable numbers before this talent came to light. I’ve been cartooning about them since 2009, mainly portraying them as a gang of delinquents at first.

Iguanas are herbivores that love to eat flowering plants. To them, a nicely manicured flowerbed is a chef’s salad. Their claws rip awnings and scar up the bark of trees. And, while they are not potty-trained, they get a big kick out of swimming in backyard pools and hanging out on nice clean boat decks, lawn furniture and sea walls. This is no small problem seeing as a full-grown iguana can generate about a pound of lizard poop a day.

Local towns were already adding trap and kill programs to their budgets when in 2010 a couple of near freezing cold snaps hit, and suddenly we had our Kryptonite.

I enjoy drawing the little critters, so I’m not entirely miffed that they make a comeback after each occasional severe winter. State wildlife managers are miffed, however. Last year, they suggested not-squeamish Floridians “humanely euthanize” them with a bop on the head. That also rated a cartoon.

But mostly it’s the freeze-falling act that has caught the attention of the national news of late and provided me with more cartoon fodder. You could say, green is the new orange.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Cartoonistry: Frozen iguanas the perfect metaphor for 'Floridinanity'

END BULLYING

17-Year-Old Responds to ‘Disgusting, Disturbing’ Online Attack by Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s Campaign

Andi Ortiz
Sun, February 6, 2022

Ethan Lynne, a 17-year-old student from Virginia, is calling out Governor Glenn Youngkin, after he became the target of online harassment from Youngkin’s campaign on Twitter.

On Saturday, Lynne tweeted that “The historian tasked with teaching about slavery at the Virginia Governors Mansion just resigned after finding the Youngkins converted her classroom into a family room – and emptied her office,” calling the action “shameful.”

In a now-deleted tweet, Youngkin’s official campaign account responded by posting a photo of Lynne with former Virginia governor Ralph Northam, saying “Here’s a picture of Ethan with a man that had a Blackface/KKK photo in his yearbook.”

On Sunday, Lynne responded with a statement on Twitter, saying he has gotten “no communication from the Governor’s office” since the tweet was posted and taken down, and condemning it entirely.

“In school, we are taught how to spot bullying, and their tweet last night, perfectly fit that description,” Lynne wrote. “It is disgusting, disturbing, and unbecoming of the Commonwealth to see the Governor and his office stoop this low, especially on a public platform.”

Lynne continued: “We all know that Youngkin has an agenda to attack and endanger students, and last night proved that. I will not be intimidated by these attacks will continue to be a voice for students across the Commonwealth.”

Though that tweet was deleted, Youngkin’s Press Secretary Macaulay Porter responded to Lynne’s post from his own account, saying “Nothing was moved by the Youngkin administration staff and the space has not been transformed into a living room. The previous mansion director oversaw the moving of Deetz’s desk. The First Lady looks forward to finalizing the executive mansion layout and tours.”

Reps for Youngkin did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.

Fearing junta, hundreds of Myanmar parents disown dissident children






Sun, February 6, 2022
By Wa Lone

(Reuters) - Every day for the last three months, an average of six or seven families in Myanmar have posted notices in the country's state-owned newspapers cutting ties with sons, daughters, nieces, nephews and grandchildren who have publicly opposed the ruling military junta.

The notices started to appear in such numbers in November after the army, which seized power from Myanmar's democratically elected government a year ago, announced it would take over properties of its opponents and arrest people giving shelter to protesters. Scores of raids on homes followed.

Lin Lin Bo Bo, a former car salesman who joined an armed group resisting military rule, was one of those disowned by his parents in about 570 notices reviewed by Reuters.

"We declare we have disowned Lin Lin Bo Bo because he never listened to his parents' will," said the notice posted by his parents, San Win and Tin Tin Soe, in state-owned newspaper The Mirror in November.

Speaking to Reuters from a Thai border town where he is living after fleeing Myanmar, the 26-year-old said his mother had told him she was disowning him after soldiers came to their family home searching for him. A few days later, he said he cried as he read the notice in the paper.

"My comrades tried to reassure me that it was inevitable for families to do that under pressure," he told Reuters. "But I was so heartbroken."

Contacted by Reuters, his parents declined to comment.

Targeting families of opposition activists was a tactic used by Myanmar's military during unrest in 2007 and the late 1980s but has been used far more frequently since the Feb.1, 2021 coup, according to Wai Hnin Pwint Thon, senior advocacy officer at rights group Burma Campaign UK, which uses the old name for the former British colony.

Publicly disowning family members, which has a long history in Myanmar's culture, is one way to respond, said Wai Hnin Pwint Thon, who said she was seeing more such notices in the press than in the past.

"Family members are scared to be implicated in crimes," she said. "They don't want to be arrested, and they don't want to be in trouble."

A military spokesperson did not respond to Reuters questions for this story. Commenting on the notices in a news conference in November, military spokesperson Zaw Min Tun said that people who made such declarations in newspapers could still be charged if found to be supporting opposition to the junta.

VIOLENT CRACKDOWN

Hundreds of thousands of people in Myanmar, many of them young, took to the streets to protest the coup a year ago. After a violent crackdown on demonstrations by the army, some protesters fled overseas or joined armed groups in remote parts of the country. Known as People's Defence Forces, these groups are broadly aligned with the deposed civilian government.

Over the past year, security forces have killed about 1,500 people, many of them demonstrators, and arrested nearly 12,000 people, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a monitoring group. The military has said those figures are exaggerated.

Journalist So Pyay Aung told Reuters he filmed riot police using batons and shields to break up protests and livestreamed the video on the Democratic Voice of Burma, a news website. After authorities came searching for him, he said he hid in different locations in Myanmar before fleeing to Thailand with his wife and infant daughter. He was disowned by his father in November.

"I declare I am disowning my son because he did unforgivable activities against his parents' wills. I will not have any responsibilities related to him," said a notice posted by his father, Tin Aung Ko, in the state-owned Myanma Alinn newspaper.

"When I saw the newspaper that mentioned cutting ties with me, I felt a little sad," So Pyay Aung told Reuters. "But I understand that my parents had fears of pressure. They might have worries of their house being seized or getting arrested."

His father, Tin Aung Ko, declined to comment.

Two parents who disowned their children in similar notices, who asked not to be named for fear of attracting the attention of the military, told Reuters the notices were primarily intended to send a message to authorities that they should not be held responsible for their children's actions.

"My daughter is doing what she believes, but I'm sure she will be worried if we got into trouble," one mother said. "I know she can understand what I have done to her."

Lin Lin Bo Bo said he hopes to one day go home and support his family. "I want this revolution to be over as soon as possible," he told Reuters.

Such a reunification may be possible for some families torn apart in this way, according to Wai Hnin Pwint Thon, the rights activist.

"Unless they do it properly with lawyers and a will, then these things don't really count legally," she said of the disowning notices. "After a couple of years, they can go back to being family."

So Pyay Aung, the journalist, said he fears his split with his parents is permanent.

"I don't even have a home to go back to after the revolution," he told Reuters. "I am so worried all the time because my parents are left under the military regime."

(Reporting by Wa Lone and Reuters staff; Writing by John Geddie; Editing by Bill Rigby )

Cambodian leader admits error over Myanmar prisoner release
SOPHENG CHEANG
Mon, February 7, 2022, 

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) — Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said Monday that Myanmar’s military government had released an Australian economist detained for the past year, but Myanmar authorities denied his claim. Hun Sen later acknowledged his error.

In a morning speech marking the inauguration of a road, Hun Sen said Sean Turnell was released from detention on Sunday in response to a request by the Cambodian prime minster to Myanmar’s leader, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing. Cambodia is the current chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and Hun Sen is leading the group’s efforts to ease Myanmar’s violent political crisis.

After a day of confusion, Hun Sen asked on his Facebook page to be forgiven for making a mistake, saying he had been given the wrong information.

Turnell, an associate professor in economics at Sydney’s Macquarie University, was arrested on Feb. 6 last year following the army’s ouster of the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, whom he had been serving as adviser. He and Suu Kyi and three of her former Cabinet ministers are now on trial on charges of breaching the Official Secrets Acts, which is punishable by up to 14 years’ imprisonment.

Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said late Monday that Myanmar authorities had advised the agency that Turnell remains detained. Several news reports from Myanmar said Maj.-Gen. Zaw Min Tun, a spokesperson for the ruling military council, also denied that Turnell had been freed.

The statement issued in Canberra said “the Australian Government repeats its call for Professor Turnell’s immediate release, and for his rights and welfare to be upheld.”

“Professor Turnell’s detention is unjust, and we reject the allegations against him,” Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne said in a statement Sunday marking the one-year anniversary of Turnell’s detention.

Hun Sen said he had asked Min Aung Hlaing on Saturday for Turnell’s release, and the Myanmar leader had replied that he “would consider it positively.”

A Cambodian Foreign Ministry statement confirmed that Hun Sen had erred, and said that he had raised Turnell's case with the Myanmar leader “and received from the Senior General the assurance that the latter would reconsider the case once the court process is over.”

In another case involving a detained foreigner, U.S. journalist Danny Fenster was allowed to leave Myanmar last year after nearly six months in prison, just days after being sentenced to 11 years of hard labor on a political charge. Former U.S. diplomat Bill Richardson helped negotiate his release after direct talks with Min Aung Hlaing.

According to Myanmar’s independent Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, there are more than 9,000 political detainees in Myanmar.

The most prominent, ousted leader Suu Kyi, is bring tried on multiple charges and has already been sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. The cases against her are widely seen as an effort to prevent her from returning to political life.

___

Associate Press writer Rod McGuirk in Canberra, Australia, contributed to this report.

The former president of Elon Musk's Neuralink has invested in the rival company that beat it to human trials

Isobel Asher Hamilton
Mon, February 7, 2022, 

Ex-president of Neuralink, Max Hodak, said Friday he's invested in rival biotech company Synchron.

Synchron announced it had got permission from the FDA to begin human testing in July 2021.


Hodak told Bloomberg he didn't want his investment to be seen as a "knock" against Neuralink.

Max Hodak, cofounder and former president of Elon Musk's biotech company Neuralink, wrote in a blog post Friday that he's invested in a direct rival.

Neuralink is working on a device that it wants to embed in people's brains to monitor and potentially stimulate brain activity. The device comprises a microchip and wires that would be threaded through a patient's skull into the outer layer of the brain.

The company has yet to begin human testing.

Meanwhile, rival firm Synchron is also developing a neural interface device but, rather than being implanted inside the skull, it accesses the brain through blood vessels. In his blog post, Hodak called this an "elegant idea" and said he has been serving as an advisor to Synchron.

Synchron announced in July 2021 it had got the green light from the Food and Drug Administration to begin human trials for its device. It announced in December that one of its human test patients, a man with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – a neurodegenerative disease also known as Lou Gehrig's disease – had used the device implanted in his brain to send a Tweet that said: "Hello World."

Hodak did not say how much money he'd invested in Synchron.

"I really don't want this to be construed as a knock on Neuralink," Hodak, who departed Neuralink in April 2021, told Bloomberg in an email.

"I'm sure they will also get into humans soon too," Hodak told Bloomberg, adding he has not sold any of his stock in Neuralink.

Hodak did not immediately respond when contacted by Insider outside of normal working hours.

Neural interface technology has potential medical applications such as allowing paralyzed people to operate prostheses and devices with their minds, as well as studying and treating neurological conditions.

Read the original article on Business Insider

NOT GREEN BUT BROWN

How Beijing built Olympic ski slopes

‘from scratch’ on the outskirts of a desert

Henry Bushnell

Sun, February 6, 2022

YANQING, China — The slopes snake through jagged cliffs on the outskirts of a desert. Massive rock faces loom on either side. Snow rarely falls, but wind often whirls, and neither tourists nor residents ever ski here.

But Olympians now do, because when China won the right to host these Winter Games, it embarked on a three-year project to build the National Alpine Ski Center “from scratch.”

It was once uninhabited “steep mountain ridges,” as Li Changzhou, a deputy general manager with Beijing Enterprises Group, the property owner and constructor, said. Everything around it still is. Shrubby trees and barren hillside line the road that winds up Xiaohaituo Mountain. Everything outside the venue is some shade of brown.

But then there are thin ribbons of white, visible from airplanes and miles away, striking proof that the Olympics have ventured outside their natural habitat.

Beijing built them because it had no other choice. It bid for the 2022 Games without an Olympic-standard Alpine resort. So, shortly after winning an International Olympic Committee vote in 2015, it began blasting out massive chunks of its tallest mountain, near the Great Wall in this suburban district, Yanqing. It contracted dozens of foreign experts to turn rugged terrain into European-style slopes. Alpine legend Bernhard Russi designed them. American cowboy Tom Johnston manicured them.

But first, this water-scarce region had to provide him with snow.

So, local authorities began reaching far and wide for the natural resources to create it.

Most international Alpine skiing competition requires snow-making these days. Beijing’s Olympic operation, though, is especially intensive. China, working with premier artificial snow supplier TechnoAlpin, built miles-long networks of pipeline to connect reservoirs outside Yanqing to another reservoir at Xiaohaituo Mountain. That smaller reservoir stores the water being used to coat the Olympic slopes. Pumps and hundreds of snow guns then turn it into the white surface you’ll see on TV.

The skiers who’ll use it actually like it. The artificial snow, as U.S. star Mikaela Shiffrin said Friday, is “grippy” and “aggressive.”

The setting, though, looks and feels odd.

The IOC had warned that it would. A bid evaluation report explained long ago that “there could be no snow outside of the racecourse, especially in Yanqing, impacting the visual perception of the snow setting.”

Organizers seemingly sought to address these concerns. Trees were planted in rigid, uniform rows, in an attempt to lend a foresty feel to the scenery. The snow guns have tried to dress some of them in white. The Beijing Organizing Committee once released renderings that depicted the Olympic venue as a recreation of the European Alps.

A rendering of the mountain region that is hosting the skiing competitions at the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. (Beijing Organizing Committee)

The reality is much different. Small patches of leftover snow — perhaps fake, perhaps real — line some sections of mountainside. The rest of it looks dry and dead.

The finish line at the skiing events at the National Alpine Ski Center is surrounded by desert scape and little else. (Yahoo Sports)

A general view at the start of the downhill race (R) at the National Alpine Skiing Centre in Yanqing ahead of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games. (Photo by Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)

Slopes for the Beijing Olympics cut through jagged rock, with no snow in sight other than the artificial snow created just for these Games. (Yahoo Sports)

On the other side of these mountains is the Gobi, the sixth-large desert in the world, and the reason none of this is surprising. The climate is cold enough. But it is arid. Vegetation is parched. Forecasts suggest some snow could arrive next weekend. But nowhere near enough to change the visuals.

The most prominent element, instead, will continue to be wind. High-speed gusts postponed Sunday’s men’s downhill, one day after also cancelling a training session.

“I think it is always gonna be windy,” U.S. skier Bryce Bennett said here Sunday. “It's just how this place is.”

‘You will not believe what I’ve just found.’ Inside the Ivermectin saga: a hacked password, mysterious websites and faulty data.

How a drug used to treat parasites for decades became the hot and controversial drug of the pandemic

Feb. 7, 2022 
By Jaimy Lee
MARKETWATCH PHOTO ILLUSTRATION/ISTOCKPHOTO

LONG READ

Last May, a graduate student named Jack Lawrence sat down in his apartment and began combing through a medical study about ivermectin for his coursework at the University of London.

The study, conducted by researchers at Benha University in Egypt and published in November 2020, had produced stunning results. It found that ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug that’s been around for decades, could reduce the risk of death among COVID-19 patients by 90%, among other findings.

“Suddenly, I started noticing something,” Lawrence said. “Although there [were] a lot of parts of the paper that were badly written, there are also a few sentences which had perfect grammar, perfect everything, and could have been plucked right out of another scientific paper. And, in fact, they were. I put them into Google. Each of these sentences got a hit.”

Lawrence, who is in his mid-20s and studying biomedical science, kept researching online. He clicked through to a file-sharing website, where the study’s dataset was housed. Lawrence paid $10.80 for a subscription to reactivate the link, which had expired in January 2021, only to find the file required a password. He made a few attempts, and then he tried “1-2-3-4.” It worked.

From there, Lawrence discovered that the issues went far beyond plagiarism. The number of deaths cited in the paper did not match the number of deaths in the database. Some of the patient data had been duplicated. Other patients included in the trial had been hospitalized before the study began.

“I was working in my room,” he said. “And I went out of my room to tell everyone, you know, my housemates, being like, ‘Oh, my God, you will not believe what I’ve just found.’ ”

Lawrence would go on to contact Research Square, the website that published the paper, which had not been peer-reviewed. Within 24 hours, Lawrence got a response from the editor, and the website withdrew the paper in mid-July.

It’s just one of several retractions and withdrawals of studies pointing to ivermectin as a viable COVID-19 treatment, and the impact of this kind of fraudulent research is still reverberating. During the pandemic, there has been a surge of demand for ivermectin, a drug commonly used to treat parasites in people who live in regions of South America and Africa, as well as in livestock.

The number of monthly ivermectin prescriptions in the U.S. jumped to a high of 454,000 in August 2021, from about 57,000 in January 2020, according to healthcare data firm IQVIA. This figure doesn’t take into account veterinary prescriptions, which also increased when people began to seek out novel means of gaining access to the drug. Research published in January estimates that health insurers spent about $2.5 million on ivermectin prescriptions for COVID-19 in one week of August 2021.

The Benha research was cited in a doctor’s congressional testimony before it was debunked, and the drug has been touted by celebrities and politicians, as well as a mysterious and popular website with no known authors. Ivermectin proponents describe the drug as cheap, safe and readily available, and say it can work as both a COVID-19 treatment and prophylaxis.

Yet no comprehensive clinical trials have found that ivermectin works as a COVID-19 treatment. To make this issue even more complicated, no “gold standard” studies have yet found explicitly that it’s useless against COVID-19 or that it’s harmful to people taking it.

The ivermectin saga shows how the American drug regulatory system has been overrun by the pressures of the pandemic, including the rush to put out new research and then act immediately on those findings. This led a graduate student hacking into a database to find the truth, and the Food and Drug Administration cracking online jokes to warn people that ivermectin was not a suitable COVID-19 treatment. “You are not a horse,” the U.S. regulator tweeted in August, in an attempt to stop Americans from using ivermectin, warning the drug could be toxic if taken at the highly concentrated doses given to large animals.

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an Australian epidemiologist who has become an expert on ivermectin during the pandemic, says it’s not unreasonable for the average person to think ivermectin is a solid COVID-19 treatment. After all, the public is watching trusted people recommend or take the drug. But he thinks they are being misled.

“A lot of the debate and discussion is driven by people who, for whatever reason, think ivermectin is a miracle cure, even despite the evidence that it probably isn’t,” Meyerowitz-Katz said. “It’s become incredibly politicized at this point.”

There will be new data coming soon from a pair of randomized clinical trials that may reveal just how effective ivermectin is as a COVID-19 treatment. Dr. David Boulware, an infectious-disease physician and scientist in charge of one of those ivermectin studies, says the whole point of testing drugs in people is to generate such definitive data.

“There’s tons of people prescribing [ivermectin], but there’s actually very little data,” Boulware says.


Ivermectin boosters: Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, and Dr. Pierre Kory. DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

A series of low-quality studies and a ‘miracle drug’

To really understand ivermectin’s roots as a COVID-19 treatment in the U.S., you have to look to Wisconsin, home to Senate Republican Ron Johnson, Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers and Dr. Pierre Kory. Each is a prominent American figure in the ivermectin story.

While Kory is not famous, he and an organization he helped found have played a big role in popularizing ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment. A critical-care physician, Kory practiced medicine at University of Wisconsin Health in Madison until he resigned over his frustration with the hospital’s COVID-19 care practices. Now he’s one of the founders of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, an organization known as FLCCC that promotes an outpatient, inpatient and long-COVID treatment plan.

Kory remembers when the first preprint assessing ivermectin’s viability as a COVID-19 treatment was published in April 2020. Preprints, which are studies that haven’t been reviewed by other experts, have long been used in economics and math, but they became widely used in the pandemic to speed up the dissemination of new medical and scientific findings. The ivermectin preprint that got Kory’s attention had been published by researchers in Australia. It described an in-vitro study, meaning it was conducted in a laboratory and not in people or animals. In very large doses, ivermectin demonstrated antiviral action against the virus.

“A lot of the debate and discussion is driven by people who, for whatever reason, think ivermectin is a miracle cure, even despite the evidence that it probably isn’t.” 

— Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, University of Wollongong

Some researchers had immediately disregarded the study, despite its being well-designed, based on the dosing.

“I saw that when it came out, and I did the mathematical calculation of, is this a drug level you can achieve?” Boulware told me. “I quickly realized, no, this is 50 to 100 times higher than you’d ever get in a human. It took me about 15 minutes to figure out that this was not going to be useful as an antiviral. I set it aside and moved onwards.”

There was little interest in ivermectin in the U.S. in those days, though the FDA began warning people that same month not to self-medicate with ivermectin formulations intended for animals. Ivermectin is considered a very good and safe treatment for parasitic worms that can cause diseases in people like river blindness, and is also used to treat worms in livestock and pets.

In the spring and summer of 2020, much of the nation’s focus was on three other therapies: hydroxychloroquine, a drug that received emergency-use authorization as a COVID-19 treatment in March 2020; convalescent plasma, which received an EUA of its own in August 2020; and Gilead Sciences’ GILD, -0.22% remdesivir, an antiviral that was eventually approved by the FDA and is now considered part of the standard of COVID-19 care for very sick patients.

“What then happened was a series of very low-quality studies published towards the end of [2020], and they reported huge benefits for ivermectin,” Meyerowitz-Katz said.

It was around October of that year that Kory, back in Wisconsin, says he saw promising preliminary data out of research conducted in Bangladesh, the Dominican Republic and Peru. He began prescribing ivermectin to COVID-19 patients.

At that time, Roche Holding’s ROG, -0.13% “tocilizumab was not looking good. Hydroxychloroquine from the randomized control trials was not looking good. Convalescent plasma. … These are all things that were being used therapeutically,” Kory said. “And when we saw ivermectin — this is mid-October 2020 —w e were just astounded by the consistency and reproducibility from a number of different trials from countries around the world.”

Within a month, the FLCCC published its first outpatient COVID-19 protocol, which included ivermectin. Then Johnson extended a second invitation to Kory to testify before Congress.

At a Senate hearing on Dec. 8, 2020, three days before the first COVID-19 vaccine was authorized in the U.S., Kory’s testimony described ivermectin as a “miracle drug” that could be used more quickly than the vaccines, which would take months to roll out. His testimony several times referenced the Benha University preprint promising major clinical benefits, and video of the testimony went viral on YouTube.

“Nearly all studies are demonstrating the therapeutic potency and safety of ivermectin in preventing transmission and progression of illness in nearly all who take the drug,” Kory wrote in his prepared testimony.

The video of the testimony was removed from YouTube, but ivermectin’s ascension into the mainstream had begun. The number of ivermectin prescriptions in the U.S. doubled in a single month — to nearly 154,000 scripts in December 2020, from 72,000 in November 2020, according to the IQVIA data.

From that point on, it became clear that there was a fan base dedicated to ivermectin and its purported COVID-19 benefits. Politicians like Johnson and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a first-term Republican from Georgia, touted it. Rodgers, the famous quarterback, and conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck both said in interviews that they had taken it after testing positive for the virus. So did Joe Rogan, who also talked about the benefits on his popular Spotify SPOT, -1.67% podcast, where he described getting a recommendation for ivermectin from Kory.


Pandemic prescription: Ivermectin has become a popular COVID-19 treatment amid an absence of good data. AP PHOTO/MIKE STEWART

‘Studies that probably never happened’

The ivermectin story changed as Jack Lawrence, the University of London graduate student, started contacting other researchers to verify his initial findings in the flawed Benha preprint.

In June 2021, he reached out to Nick Brown, a psychologist and researcher at Linnaeus University in Sweden known for hunting fraud in research, who connected him to Meyerowitz-Katz, the Australian epidemiologist. Lawrence essentially asked them to double-check his work before messaging Research Square about what he’d found. He was just a graduate student and wanted to make sure he hadn’t missed something.

“I’d read about [Brown] before,” Lawrence said, “so I sent him that, and he immediately found a whole range of different duplicate values, far more than I could ever have found.”

Michele Avissar-Whiting, Research Square’s editor in chief, said in a statement that, “based on what Jack found, we have reason to believe the preprint’s conclusions are compromised, so the withdrawal was done to stop its propagation as sound science.”

It was one of the most high-profile retractions of ivermectin research to date, but it was not the first. The problems have also extended to peer-reviewed work. In mid-2020, an ivermectin study published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine was retracted. It included data from Surgisphere, a company that also provided inaccurate patient data to a study about hydroxychloroquine, which was retracted, as well. Experts say the peer-reviewed study was especially problematic because its findings had been used to inform Peru’s decision to allow ivermectin as a COVID-19 drug in the early months of the pandemic. (That approval was revoked in 2021, according to the Guardian.)

Then came the Benha retraction. Next up was a meta-analysis of trials that treated COVID-19 patients with ivermectin, published last summer in Open Forum Infectious Diseases. It had to be corrected in August 2021 as having cited a fraudulent study. (Andrew Hill, one of the paper’s authors and a researcher at the University of Liverpool, wrote last fall in the Guardian that he received death threats after he revised his research.)

The Journal of Antibiotics in September retracted a study published in June, saying the editor was no longer confident in the research’s findings. This was followed by the October retraction of a study conducted by researchers in Lebanon and published in the journal Viruses that said ivermectin reduced symptoms and lowered viral load. In November, the Journal of Intensive Care Medicine retracted research published by FLCCC physicians over concerns about the accuracy of some of the data.

“We can say with some confidence at this point that the very large benefits that people were proposing for ivermectin were based on studies that probably never happened,” Meyerowitz-Katz said. “There may still be benefits for ivermectin, but they’re probably going to be quite a bit smaller than many people had hoped earlier [in 2021], when they were relying on this potentially fabricated research.”

What is unclear is whether the retractions and withdrawals of some of the key scientific data underpinning the case for ivermectin will change anything for the people who believe in the drug’s potential.

“What people are doing [is] essentially weaponizing the scientific self-correction process, which, by the way, is a very flawed process,” said Ivan Oransky, a longtime healthcare journalist and co-founder of Retraction Watch, a site that tracks retractions in scientific research. “What they’re doing is sort of weaponizing any corrections or any retractions or any sort of doubt — the kind of skepticism you want — and turning it into why they’re right.”

Kory now says the Benha study is deeply flawed — “that paper stinks,” he told me — but he puts the blame for the wave of retractions and withdrawals of ivermectin studies on pharmaceutical companies that he said have spent decades developing disinformation campaigns that aim to restrict the repurposing of cheap generic drugs.

“It would dry up the sales of remdesivir and Paxlovid and molnupiravir,” said Kory, referring to some of the most prominent therapeutics, developed by Gilead, Pfizer PFE, +0.40% and Merck & Co. MRK, -1.25%, which have been authorized to treat COVID-19. “You name it. Monoclonal antibodies. It literally threatened the market value of almost anything out there on a global pandemic.” Kory added: “What we’re talking about, a historic corruption, the disinformation campaign waged against a repurposed drug.”

Still, even simple scientific information has been falsely used to promote the effectiveness of ivermectin. For example, some ivermectin proponents, including House Republican Greene, cite the fact that the scientists who discovered ivermectin won a Nobel Prize in 2015, without making clear the prestigious award was given in recognition of the drug’s effectiveness against parasitic disease, and had nothing to do with COVID-19.

“People who are drawn to these sorts of ideas like doing their own research and like happening upon these very convenient Easter egg–type facts,” said Philip Corlett, an associate professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine who has researched paranoia in the pandemic. “They’re like, ‘I found it. The mainstream medical establishment and the media ignored it.’ … It becomes something that you’ve cultivated. You’ve uncovered it. You’ve helped propagate. You feel a real sense of belonging over it, too.”

For those who have been involved in ensuring the scientific data about ivermectin is up to snuff, the combination of the pandemic and armchair epidemiology has at times been unsettling. Retraction Watch’s Oransky says he’s worried about the tone of some tweets that have mentioned an old home address, which is where he had originally registered the organization that houses Retraction Watch. “You get scared a little bit,” Oransky said.

TERRENCE HORAN/MARKETWATCH

A mysterious website

There’s one website often cited by ivermectin’s supporters: c19early.com. It’s got a clean, white layout and says it has pulled together “real-time analysis of 1,387 studies” for a wide-ranging list of potential COVID-19 therapies that can be used for early treatment, as of Feb. 7. It includes URLs like Ivmmeta.com and Hcqmeta.com.

No one I spoke with, including Kory, knows who runs the website. The website’s Twitter account has been suspended, and emails asking for information about who owns or operates the site were not returned. Some of the treatment protocols listed are provided by the FLCCC.

“It would be fascinating to know who’s behind such a massive effort,” Meyerowitz-Katz said. “It’s pseudoscientific nonsense, but it is also absolutely a huge effort.”

When I first dropped a sentence written several times on the site — “Elimination of COVID-19 is a race against viral evolution” — into Google, several websites with URLs that have nothing to do with COVID-19 or healthcare pop up with that description. Many of the top search results lead to online pages that have been moved or deleted, but one link redirects to a website selling Stromectol, the brand name for the form of ivermectin marketed by drug giant Merck to treat parasitic worms. That site, which says it is owned by Canadian Pharmacy Ltd., lists phone numbers in London and New York City. Both go directly to a generic voicemail.

Boulware, who is based in Minneapolis, said he messaged a website promoting ivermectin about a year ago, to see if it would accept his help with the medical information being put out. The site has some great charts, he said, but, in some cases, the data were not valid. When the responses to his emails were returned in the middle of the night, it made him wonder if the site’s operators were based in a foreign country. He speculated that maybe the website could be Russian disinformation or coming from a generic-drug maker in India trying to skirt FDA regulations.

“Those websites are a lot of effort. They’re really detailed,” Boulware said. “So it’s got to be either someone who has a lot of free time on their hands, or someone’s got a financial motivation or a political-disinformation motivation.”

It’s become virtually impossible for anyone without a scientific background or a working knowledge of misinformation and disinformation to make sense of the sheer volume of information about the virus, treatments and vaccines that is generated every day — real or not.

About half of the 6,785 studies published in 2021 on the preprint server MedRxiv had to do with the pandemic.

“Every fact in COVID-19 context is being contested,” said Kasisomayajula Viswanath, a professor of health communication at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Facts are changing constantly because the science is changing. And that has provided room for people to interpret it from their own perspective. I think that’s one reason. The second is because it has become extremely politicized.”

The people who believe ivermectin is a safe and effective COVID-19 treatment tend to be white men who are not vaccinated and identify as Republican voters, according to Liz Hamel, the director of public opinion and survey research at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is conducting ongoing research on attitudes about COVID-19 during the pandemic.

“It seems to peak among 50- to 64-year-olds,” she said. “We do see that people over 65, regardless of partisanship, have been taking this disease more seriously. And young people tend to have more liberal political attitudes. So we often see that it’s people in the middle-age categories who stand out.”

But Kory said support for ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment is not driven by political affiliation. “We’re not some right-wing conservative group,” Kory said. “In fact, the opposite. However, I don’t know whether it was the era of Trump that did it because he spoke well of hydroxychloroquine, but my take on the politicization of the science is that because our recommendations run contrary to the prevailing ones from the agencies, that means we’re a contrarian group.”

Even people who work in healthcare and medicine have had to learn how to interpret scientific research differently. In the past, companies or researchers conducted studies and then submitted the research to a medical journal, where it was peer-reviewed and then eventually published. Before the pandemic, the scientific process was much slower, usually taking months or even years to lock down a standard of care or scientific consensus. Now companies sometimes share snippets of data in news releases, and much of the pandemic research has been published first as a preprint and is only peer-reviewed later.

For people who are inexperienced with medical research, fragments of data and half-baked preprints can be even harder to decipher. They can be strung together and shared online with a link, and then picked up by politicians or media outlets. At the same time, algorithms are tracking what users are watching and reading and then serving up similar content to them.

“That’s what I call a spiral of amplification,” Viswanath said. “It starts small in some obscure corner — one study, one preprint — and or one person [or] group saying something, and a few groups talking about it on social media. Somehow it is picked up by certain political actors. And then it starts going mainstream. And that’s what has been happening with hydroxychloroquine, and that’s what has been happening with ivermectin.”


Last week Joe Rogan sent and deleted a tweet citing an incorrect report that a Japanese trial showed ivermectin to be clinically effective against COVID-19. 

CARMEN MANDATO/GETTY IMAGES

Good data on ivermectin coming soon

Sometime this winter or early spring, a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health that is testing ivermectin in 1,000 patients is expected to produce results, says Dr. Susanna Naggie, the vice dean for clinical research at Duke University’s medical school and the researcher running the trial.

The University of Minnesota’s randomized study has enrolled 1,196 participants, one-third of whom received ivermectin. (Both trials are evaluating several repurposed drugs as possible COVID-19 treatments.) Within the next few weeks, the Minnesota institution is expected to share the first findings from the ivermectin part of its trial, nearly two years after the first preprint examining ivermectin’s viability was published.

In pandemic time, this may feel overly slow, but, for the scientists conducting these trials, it’s still a pretty quick turnaround. The experts I spoke to seem to think that ivermectin could demonstrate a small benefit for some COVID-19 patients, but none think it’s likely that it will produce any of the major benefits promised by the fraudulent trials.

Edward Mills, a health-sciences professor at Canada’s McMaster University, is co-investigator of the Together clinical trial, another rigorous study that is evaluating nine different repurposed drugs as COVID-19 therapies, including ivermectin. It recently completed the ivermectin analysis but found it “did not demonstrate an important benefit,” Mills said in an email. The research may be published this month, he said.

Nevertheless, there is an idea circulating among scientists like Mills that ivermectin may be more likely to benefit COVID-19 patients in areas of the world with a high prevalence of parasitic worms. “What is possible is that co-infection of parasites with COVID may worsen health outcomes,” Mills said.

This is an idea also raised by Boulware, the scientist working on the University of Minnesota’s ivermectin study. Corticosteroids, like dexamethasone, are now considered the standard of care for severely ill COVID-19 patients; however, these drugs can cause what is called a “hyperinfection” and sometimes be fatal in a patient who has a parasitic infection. It’s possible that additional data about ivermectin gathered from different patient populations could show the drug being more beneficial in people who live in parasitic regions of the world, they say.

However, most native-born Americans don’t have parasites. And, since 2005, the U.S. policy has been to recommend that refugees from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean receive treatment or presumptive antiparasitic treatment — including ivermectin — before arriving in the U.S.

“In certain patient populations, if you have a parasitic infection, it certainly can be beneficial if you’re giving steroids,” Boulware said. “Does that mean [as an] outpatient-setting early therapy in the U.S. that there’s a benefit? We don’t know that, and so I think that is an unknown question.”

For now, the healthcare professionals who have been put in the position of saying “no” to prescribing ivermectin are waiting for the data from the U.S. trials. Dr. Rani Sebti, an infectious-disease physician at Hackensack Meridian Health hospital system in New Jersey, says he’s been fielding calls from primary-care doctors in the U.S. and abroad about whether to prescribe ivermectin when patients ask for it.

“I cannot sit here and tell you ivermectin is the worst drug in the world,” he said. “I need to see a good prospective, double-blind, placebo-controlled study. And then when we get that study, it will answer the question for good.”

DIRECT ACTION GETS THE GOODS

MMG may halt Peru Las Bambas mine operations by Feb 20 after latest blockade


FILE PHOTO: Peru's Andean rural residents complain of negative effects of mining activity

Sun, February 6, 2022, 6:52 PM·1 min read

(Reuters) - MMG Ltd said on Monday that production at its Las Bambas copper mine in Peru may stop by Feb. 20 after a local community blocked again a road used by the miner, causing the company to curtail operations.

The Chinese-owned mine has been a flashpoint of protests and road blockades since it started functioning in 2016, with operations last suspended in December due to a similar blockade.

Despite an agreement being reached in December to restart operations, leaders of a group of Peruvian communities later rejected a government proposal to prevent future blockades.

The Chumbivilcas communities - mostly indigenous citizens of Quechua descent - have repeatedly accused the Chinese company of failing to provide jobs and money to the region, one of the poorest in Peru, despite the vast mineral wealth.

In the latest development, MMG said the local community had erected a new blockade of around 100 kilometres from the copper mine.

"Due to the restrictions to both inbound and outbound transportation, Las Bambas has been forced to progressively reduce mine operations," the company said in a statement, adding that it was working with the government and community to deliver the December agreement.

The miner said production will be halted circa Feb. 20 if the roadblock does not end.

(Reporting by Nikhil Kurian Nainan in Bengaluru; Editing by Sherry Jacob-Phillips)

Americans exposed to toxic BPA at levels far above what EU considers safe – study

Tom Perkins
Sun, February 6, 2022,

Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

A comprehensive review of recent studies into a chemical often used in plastics and resins has revealed that the average American is exposed to levels of the dangerous compound that are 5,000 times higher than what the European Union now considers safe.

The main exposure route for bisphenol-A (BPA) is via plastic and metal food packaging, and that has prompted a call for strong new limits on its use.

In a petition sent last week to the US Food and Drug Administration, consumer advocates and food safety scientists led by the Environmental Defense Fund warned that the European Food Safety Authority’s (EFSA) December review clearly shows that BPA exposure levels in the US represent a “high health risk” for Americans of all ages.

“The FDA has an obligation to protect us from toxic chemicals that can come in contact with our food,” said Maricel Maffini, a petition co-author. “These new findings should be a wakeup call to the FDA and all of us that our health is in jeopardy unless we take swift action to limit the amount of BPA that can come into contact with our food.”

The chemical mimics estrogen and is linked to a range of serious health problems, including cancer, immunotoxicity, neurological toxicity, mammary gland disease, behavioral changes and decreased sperm counts, among others.

Male and female brains in mammals are physically different, and Maffini noted a study that found BPA exposure altered male brains to look more like female brains. EFSA’s research pointed to evidence suggesting harm from BPA exposure can occur at levels 100,000 times lower than previously thought, and scientists have found immune system disruptions occur at particularly low levels.

“What we are seeing now is that the levels that we thought were safe – they don’t seem to be safe, and the levels that we identify as causing problems in the immune system are incredibly low,” Maffini said.

Related: Bisphenol: what to know about the chemicals in water bottles and cans

In food packaging, BPA is typically used to line metal cans to prevent corrosion, though plenty of safer alternatives exist, Maffini said. It’s also mixed into polycarbonate plastic, which is a clear, shatterproof material used in multi-use water bottles, containers that hold pre-prepared foods or containers used to hold ingredients during food prep, among other uses. The petition asks that those applications be prohibited.

The FDA has 180 days to respond to the petition, though it can take longer on complex issues, Maffini said. Consumer groups’ petitions have led to some success in recent years. The FDA agreed with a 2016 petition led by the Environmental Defense Fund to ban the use of long-chain PFAS in food packaging, though it has yet to respond to a 2021 petition to ban all PFAS. A 2015 EDF-led petition to prohibit seven carcinogenic food flavorings resulted in the FDA banning the substances in 2018.

However, the FDA’s science and position on BPA has often been at odds with that of academic scientists, consumer advocates, the US National Toxicology Program, and the FDA’s own advisory committees, Maffini said.

While those groups have consistently found BPA to present a dangerous health threat, the FDA has downplayed the dangers and often relied on inadequate scientific methods to arrive at its conclusions, Maffini said.

However, the FDA banned BPA from baby bottles, sippy cups and infant formula packaging in 2012. The agency said in a statement that it doesn’t comment on pending petitions.

Texas professor dismissed after recommending students mask


Michael Mooney
Mon, February 7, 2022

A professor at Collin College says his contract won’t be renewed because he spoke publicly about the school’s COVID-19 protocols.

Michael Phillips, who teaches history and wrote the book “White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001,” also received warnings from college administrators after writing an op-ed calling for the removal of Confederate monuments.

Why it matters: North Texas has become a flashpoint in the national battle over free speech in public education, with an increase in calls to ban books and strife over restrictions on how teachers can discuss racism.

What happened: Last August, Phillips tweeted a photo of a presentation from the administration that said faculty and staff could not request, require or recommend students wear a mask.

While lecturing about the 1918 influenza epidemic, Phillips says, he instructed students to “think about the consequences of what you’re doing and the risks you might pose to your community.”

Phillips tells Axios that school administrators suggested he say he was leaving voluntarily to “construct a narrative” that avoided negative attention.

What they’re saying: “You can’t have an environment of learning in a situation like that. It has such a pernicious effect both in and out of the classroom,” Phillips says.

“It’s become the panopticon. Faculty members are even afraid to speak to each other.”

The other side: Collin College has said it won’t comment on personnel matters.


“Given that the renewal or non-renewal of faculty contracts is a routine operational matter at the college, we are dismayed at the efforts of some individuals to present this as anything other than what it truly is,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

Zoom out: Last week, the Academic Freedom Alliance called on the school to reverse its decision to dismiss Phillips.

"Professor Phillips is being retaliated against for his constitutionally protected criticism of the college’s administration," Keith Whittington, chair of the AFA’s academic committee, wrote in an open letter to Collin College District President H. Neil Matkin.

Context: Phillips is the fourth Collin College professor to not have a contract renewed amid concerns over free speech and academic freedom.

Phillips was notified about his dismissal just two days after another professor, Lora Burnett, settled a lawsuit with the college for $70,000. Burnett was dismissed after she tweeted that then-Vice President Mike Pence had a “little demon mouth,” according to the Dallas Observer.

A lawsuit from another professor, Suzanne Jones, is ongoing.

Last year the The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a particularly unflattering profile of Matkin.

Of note: Collin College doesn’t have faculty tenure. Full-time professors sign multi-year contracts with the school.

What’s next: Phillips has legal representation.

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