COVID-19: Conspiracy Theories

From Worldometer, I continue this table to show how new deaths best determine the phase of COVID-19:

DAY     China   Italy   USA   Spain   Germany   S. Korea  WORLD

Apr  21         ?    534   1481      430            86               1        5362

        22         ?    437     931      435          125               1        5008
        23         ?    464   1435      440            54               2        5033
        24         0?  420     718      367            78               0?      4200
        25         0?  415   1073      378            59               0?      4650
        26         0?  260     779      288            19               2        3102
        27         1    333     762      331              9               1        2816
        28         0?  382   1065      301            48               1        2983
        29         0?  323   1374      453            62               2        8471

Summary:

• Wait a minute, why such a jump in World deaths?  Well, turns out that the UK reported 4,419 new deaths to correct a miscount.
• The USA experienced a jump in new deaths.
• The USA had 13,666 new cases, the highest in the world.  Russia was #2 with 5,841.

Updates:

• Brad Pitt expressed optimism about Gilead Sciences' remdesivir.  No, looking at the photo, this actually looks like Anthony Fauci.  Important because this is the first actual drug to shorten the length of COVID-19 recovery.  Mind you, this only reduces 15 days to 11, but is at least a minor breakthrough.  Certainly not a game-changer.  On April 10 I said:

Gilead Sciences Inc. (GILD) is credible and intriguing, already in Phase 3 clinical trials with remdesivir, which is for treatment, not a vaccine.  Stock has risen 13.2% this year.

          Gilead was at 73.5 that day, and today should close at around 84.
          Fauci peremptorily dumped into a basket with other competitors
          that latest Oxford vaccine breakthrough.

• The large front page headline in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser this morning was:  ANTIBODY TESTING ON WAY.  Scroll down to my next posting.  Antibody testing is a mess and inaccurate.  "On the way" is a long way away.  This post-test, and a pre-test, would be a safe way for tourism to recover.  These tests need to be given to anyone who is boarding a flight to Hawaii.  Will this ever happen. No.  While instant testing will soon be generally available, there is a matter of cost, speculated to be from $10-$50/test.  We would need to give 500,000 tests/day for all incoming visitors and residents.   Since the beginning of testing, the U.S. is at around 6 million tests, total, or, over a two month period, 100,000/day.  Hawaii has one-half of one percent the population of the nation.
• The bottom line is that sufficient testing capability just won't be available, maybe forever.  Several of those entities loosening lockdowns will see a second wave, delaying their recovery.  The growing sentiment is that a few extra deaths in this war might be necessary for a quicker economic recovery.  After all, those who die will mostly be old, with pre-conditions anyway, and of an ethnic minority.

• He did it again.  There are COVID-19 hotspots, two being nursing homes and meat-packing plants.  Donald Trump went out of his way to convene the Defense Production Act to force these factories to stay open.  It's almost like he wants this sector of the community to sacrifice themselves for the good of the national food supply chain.  This he could regret, because the Hispanic vote (to be larger than African-American numbers) could well be the margin of difference on November 3.

Said Jimmy Kimmel last night:  You know the only reason he didn't wear a mask is because Trump won't wear one, right?  Mike Pence, he's required to keep his lips free at all times for kissing his master's ass.

Here is one top ten of COVID-19 conspiracy theories:

• Blaming 5G


• It is biologically impossible for viruses to spread using the electromagnetic spectrum.
• This conspiracy has taken off because the pandemic just happened to occur at a time when certain population centers had recently converted to 5G, including Wuhan, New York City and Milan.
• This fear was egged on by the Kremlin.
• WHO repeated that virus cannot travel on mobile networks.
• However, virtually everyone misses the point.  It is possible that certain concentrations of electronic signals could well affect your immune system.  This might apply to high radiation sources like communications antennae.  However, there is no medical proof that phones cause damage to your DNA or cause brain tumors.
• It doesn't help when celebrities like Woody Harrelson, John Cusack and Wiz Khalifa tweet their concern.
• In the UK and across Europe, arsonists are destroying cell phone towers.

• When Bill Gates criticized the defunding of the World Health Organization, he became the target of right-wing pundits and antivaxxers:
• is accused of causing the virus
• is part of a dastardly Gates plot to vaccinate the world
• who also wants to implant digital microchips to track and control people

• The virus escaped from a Chinese lab:
• After all, there is a virology institute in Wuhan, which has been long studying bat coronavirus.
• Epoch Times (an extension of the Falun Gong religious movement, which is a thorn in the side of the China leadership) produced a slick documentary (see the 36 minute alarm) calling it the CCP virus.  Media around the world picked this up and, just by reporting on it, gave it credibility.
• A leading bat dung expert and prominent virologist did some genetic sequencing and showed that the virus circulating in Wuhan was not related to the ones being studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  But there are those who would say...can you believe her?

• COVID-19 was created as a biological weapon:

• Acccording to Pew Research, three in ten Americans believe that COVID-19 was made in a lab as a biowarfare weapon and either intentionally (by the USA and released in Wuhan) or accidentally (escaped in Wuhan). 
• This theory picked up interest as a right-wing talking point from some dumb statement by Republican Senator Tom Cotton (above), who sounds like another Trump, and airing by the Washington Examiner (a highly conservative media outlet).
• This theory (and the previous one) was debunked by genetic sequencing proving that the origin was in bats.
• The Washington Examiner later admitted that this story is probably false.

• The U.S. military imported COVID-19 into Wuhan

• The Chinese foreign ministry widely circulated that Americans brought the virus during their participation in the 2019 Military War Games in Wuhan last October, when it all started.
• They called it the USA virus.

• Blame GMOs
• Anti- GMO (genetically modified crops) activists blame every possible ailment to GMO, including this coronavirus infection.
• The ultimate weapon will be a vaccine, which are all genetically modified virus-based.

• COVID-19 doesn't actually exist
• David Icke (on the left) and InfoWars Alex Jones say this made-up virus is just a plot by the global elite to take away our freedoms.
• The political right thinks any quarantine and lockdown is evil.

There were others, and you can find them if you click on the lead link.  However, isn't it interesting that Republicans, conservatives and related fringe-groups seem to be prevalent in all these conspiracies?  Here is a useful handbook by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky on how to recognize and debunk these wacko theories.  

Let's see, I'm up to the Top Songs of 1967.  Sure, it was more than half a century ago, and I remember then remembering that gasoline was as low as 10 cents/gallon in Los Angeles only recently, but did you know that:

Dow Jones Industrial Average 905
Average Cost of new house $14,250.00
Average Income per year $7,300.00
Average Monthly Rent $125.00
Gas per Gallon 33 cents
Average Cost of a new car $2,750.00
Movie Ticket $1.25

That year I had decided to return to graduate school, and C. Brewer not only sent me to work at the Hawaii Sugar Planters Association on Keeaumoku (where there is now a park) to prepare for my departure, but said it would continue to pay my salary while I was away.  Here, Hutchinson Sugar Company's manager Bill Baldwin wished us goodbye.

I'd like to close with a young superstar from the Netherlands and South Africa.  You probably don't know her, but Amira Willighagen, who is now 16, attained stardom six years ago when she won Holland's Got Talent.  In some of the "wonderful moments clips" people send around during this time of the Pandemic, she is misidentified as the granddaughter of Luciano Pavarotti.  

I compare her audition song, of O Mio Babbino Caro with that of Jackie Evancho.  Evancho appeared on America's Got Talent when she also was 10.

Amir has had a number of successful albums, and she dedicates half of the revenues to her Lucky Children Foundation, primarily to build playgrounds for poor children of South Africa.  She said when she first visited the country at the age of seven, she went out to play and was shocked to find that they only ran around and threw stones.

About Jackie, she is already 20, has issued eight albums and been the subject of three solo PBS concert specials.  She also tours, but with the coronavirus still virulent, her next appearance will be at The Villages in Florida in November.

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