The internet was sparkling with #8M hashtags and glowing tributes for International Women’s Day this week — but from Poland to Rwanda to the United States, reproductive rights are being decimated. 

The U.S. pharmacy chain Walgreens decided not to sell abortion medication in 21 states. It’s a blanket response to the various abortion restrictions that states are introducing after the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and to Republican attorneys who have threatened to sue pharmacies that distribute the pills. Rather than trying to navigate these choppy legal waters and sell meds according to the specifics of the law in each jurisdiction, Walgreens took the easy route by simply pulling the sale of mifepristone in every state where the company saw any risk of legal threats. California Governor Gavin Newsom responded by pulling a $54 million state contract with the drugstore giant. California will cut ties with “any company that cowers to the extremists and puts women’s lives at risk,” Newsom tweeted on Monday. “We’re done.”

Last week, a coalition of human rights groups urged U.N. experts to intervene in the restriction of abortions in the U.S. An open letter with 196 signatories, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch among them, asserted that “the US is in violation of its obligations under international human rights law.”

In Poland, which has been rewriting its abortion legislation since long before the overturning of Roe, the effects of the country’s abortion ban show what the future may hold for America. A Polish gynecologist’s patients have announced that they are filing a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights, after local authorities seized the doctor’s patient records as part of an investigation into reports that she aided an abortion.

And in Rwanda, where abortion is illegal except in cases of rape, forced marriage, incest or a danger to health, abortion rights are backsliding. The country’s Protestant Council directed all health facilities run by its members to stop carrying out all abortions, without exception. “For us, we have our belief, and our belief cannot be taken away by the law. We are not opposing the law, but our belief does not allow us to support abortion,” Laurent Mbanda, the head of the Anglican Church in Rwanda, told the Associated Press. The move will further curtail access to the procedure for the nation of 13 million people, most of whom are Christian.

LGBTQ students are scrapping plans to attend university in Florida. As the U.S. state continues to crack down on LGBTQ rights and push through new legislation to outlaw discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools, gay and trans students are opting for the West Coast instead. Students are worried about having access to hormone therapy while at college or are afraid they would become targets of homophobic attacks as anti-LGBTQ rhetoric reaches a fever pitch amid the flurry of proposals by state lawmakers that would put their safety and health at risk. 

Meanwhile, there seems to be a new wave of homophobia passing over East Africa. Kenya's new president William Ruto has fueled this by saying he will not allow “homosexual acts or same-sex marriage” during his term. In Uganda, an opposition member has put forward a bill seeking life in prison for homosexuality. Health experts in the region fear this rhetoric could scare people away from getting tested for HIV. 

And in Poland, the education minister is blaming a rise in attempted suicide on young people being “brainwashed by LGBT neoliberal and neomarxist ideologies.” The conservative Przemyslaw Czarnek says Poland is experiencing a “powerful crisis of the family” and that the solution is to preserve what he calls family values and help children to distinguish between good and evil. Experts, on the other hand, say the real issue is an underfunded mental health support system and the long shadow of the pandemic on young people’s lives. 

WHAT WE’RE READING 

• Advocacy groups are pushing TikTok to take a harder look at its content moderation policies after a study found that the app regularly pushes suicide, self-harm and eating disorder content on its young users. “You have chosen to deny the problem, deflect responsibility, and delay taking any meaningful action,” the two dozen signatories — including the American Psychological Association and the U.S. Eating Disorders Coalition — wrote to the tech giant. For context, take a look at this December report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

• An investigation by the LA Times found that a book by University of Southern California oncologist Dr. David Agus is riddled with plagiarized material. Reporters found that at least 95 passages were copied — sometimes word for word — from places like Wikipedia, blog posts and online articles.

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Sometimes two extremist political factions — each with their own set of conspiracy mythologies — meet on the picket lines and merge, creating a hybrid Frankenstein’s monster of a fringe group. We saw it happen when the Reichsburger conspiracy theorists who believe that Germany should go back to the monarchy of the 1870s met up with anti-vaccine adherents during the pandemic. Both groups were out campaigning against the Covid lockdown — and it was a sort of a conspiracy theorist meet-cute. 

This week, two groups I’ve been covering separately for a while got together: the anti-bike brigade and the QAnon, New World Order, anti-vaccine adherents. It would almost be heartwarming if it wasn’t so disturbing. 

The anti-bike movement, which I wrote about in November, is furious about the transformation of European cities into green, low-emission zones where they can’t drive their cars. Meanwhile, the QAnon types are convinced that the world is in the midst of a “great reset” and that we will soon all be confined to our homes in a permanent lockdown. 

So when the historic British city of Oxford introduced a new plan to make the center of town more walkable and bikeable, both groups kicked off. The city council proposed creating more “15-minute neighborhoods” — an urban planning term that aims to develop cityscapes where everything you need is a quarter-hour walk away and where cars become redundant for shorter journeys. But the two groups saw the plan as a dystopian ploy to keep us all locked inside.

Thousands joined a protest in Oxford, bringing the city (ironically) to a standstill. A speech by a 12-year-old girl, claiming that the “government has been hijacked by greedy and selfish imposters,” was the event’s highlight. The video was then tweeted by Children’s Health Defense, a U.S. anti-vaccine propaganda group chaired by the prominent vaccine conspiracy theorist, and John F. Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., where it got a million views. 

James Stafford, 37, a British campaigner for bike infrastructure, posted another video on TikTok about the protest. “This is what the 15-minute city protesters in Oxford are protesting against,” he said, posting idyllic videos of walkable cityscapes. “This is what they want,” was the caption for nightmarish footage of traffic gridlock and huge WalMart parking lots. 

Thousands of TikTokers accused him of wanting the world to become “North Korea” governed by a social credit system. Stafford said he watched as the anti-15-minute-cities campaign started as a simple opposition to low-traffic neighborhoods and “morphed into people talking about Nazi ghettos and open prisons.”

It’s bizarre to think that all this was spawned from one city council’s plans to make buses run faster and active travel feel safer. 

As negotiations for the European Union’s AI Act get underway, a whole range of different groups are campaigning to make sure it is the landmark piece of legislation that it has the potential to be. The AI Act is a proposed law to regulate the use of artificial intelligence in the bloc, and it’s the first of its kind anywhere in the world. LGBTQ+ groups want the act to outlaw gender and sexual orientation recognition technology. AI facial recognition systems often work by first sorting people into gender categories. For trans and nonbinary people, the technology can misgender them, meaning that at the airport they are more likely to get pulled aside. “In malicious hands, such as law enforcement in countries with anti-LGBT+ laws, these tools could lead to serious harm for LGBT+ people,” said Yuri Guaiana, the senior campaigns manager at All Out, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group.

Reports have emerged from Afghanistan that the Taliban had put a blanket ban on the sale of contraceptives, saying their use was a “Western conspiracy.” The Guardian ran it as their top story, reporting that the Taliban was threatening midwives and clearing pharmacy shelves of birth control pills and condoms. But when others followed up, the story didn’t seem to be quite true. An English-language paper from the UAE, the National, visited pharmacies in Kabul and found contraception freely available. Doctors Without Borders also said they hadn’t seen any evidence of the ban. The Taliban government called the story “fake news.” While it’s possible that certain zealous local Taliban enforcers banned contraception, it’s certainly not happening everywhere. The Guardian has yet to issue a retraction. That said, women’s health remains under constant threat in Afghanistan: Last year, the Taliban introduced new requirements that women had to be chaperoned by men to see a doctor. It’s had a major impact on women accessing healthcare.

The Environmental Protection Agency is on the ground responding to the damage caused by a train derailment in Ohio earlier this month. Several of the train’s cars were carrying hazardous materials and toxic chemicals, which were released into the atmosphere to prevent further explosions. But the EPA says that there are no concerns about them affecting air and water quality. That hasn’t stopped the slew of alarmist claims that the derailment was “planned.” The EPA has been criticized for its testing process for air and water quality, and some commentators compared the situation to the Chernobyl disaster. Amid the confusion and fear, people are struggling with knowing who to believe — and reaching for conspiracy theories as a knee-jerk response. Former President Donald Trump has visited the disaster zone and delivered “Trump water,” as well as “much lesser quality water. You want to get those Trump bottles.”

WHAT WE’RE READING 

• There’s a growing backlash against renewable energy projects in the U.S. with deep ties to powerful conservative players. And it’s spreading disinformation about solar power to try to stop new projects. NPR and Floodlight investigate. 

• “The Black List” is a platform for screenwriters to share unproduced Hollywood scripts. Its creator, Franklin Leonard, became a bizarre target for QAnon followers. Why? For Rolling Stone, Will Somner gets to the bottom of it. 

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The program pulses a signal into the ionosphere which is then studied. But for years now, conspiracy theorists have believed the Research Program can trigger earthquakes and extreme weather events — oh, and be used for mind control, of course. 

Every time there’s an earthquake or tsunami, conspiracy theorists make the same old claims that this obscure facility in deepest Alaska is behind the devastation. In 2016, two men from Douglas, Georgia loaded a vehicle with assault rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition and bulletproof vests and planned to blow up the place. There was a machine in the complex that they believed was “trapping human souls.” Luckily, police thwarted them before they even managed to leave Georgia.    

But conspiracies about HAARP are not limited to the outreaches of obscure fringe groups. In 2010, the then-president of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the UN that he believed floods in Pakistan were the fault of the HAARP program. The same year, Hugo Chávez, the former president of Venezuela, also blamed the Chilean and Haiti earthquakes on the program. 

Now, conspiracy Twitter has jumped on the bandwagon. A flurry of copy-and-paste tweets showed up this week, suggesting the U.S. and other NATO countries knew about the earthquake before it happened and evacuated their embassies. Disinformation researcher Marc Owen Jones found 300,000 tweets and 130,000 accounts tweeting about it — far more, he said, than he expected. 

“I get the sense that given the scale of this earthquake, the scale of the disinformation was much higher and the fact that there’s so much conspiratorial thinking now facilitates that,” he told me, saying how discussion of HAARP spiked dramatically immediately after the earthquake. “At this point it’s almost predictable,” he said. Those tweeting about HAARP and linking it to the earthquake were often anti-vaccine activists, right-wing, QAnon and MAGA-linked U.S. accounts, and anti-semitic conspiracy theorists. From examining the online conversation, Jones noticed that many of the narratives took on a Russia-aligned, anti-NATO slant, suggesting that NATO was using the earthquake to punish Erdogan for his ongoing relationship with Russia. 

“I am not saying this is a Russian influence operation — although as agitprop it works in their favor,” Jones tweeted. “It's also good for the Turkish government — potentially distracting some people from focusing on state responsibility in the disaster.”

Ever thought about eating French-flies? According to Bulgarian social media, you soon might not have a choice. A fast-spreading conspiracy theory asserts that the European Union is force-feeding people insects. The EU made a recent decision to approve certain insects as novel foods. And the news quickly warped into a bizarre example of disinformation, spread inevitably by those either sympathetic to Russia or outright propagandists. 

One fringe Bulgarian politician argued that the EU was intent on giving people cancer, as the powdered insects, he claimed, could create carcinogens. Interest in the supposed conspiracy spiked when one of Russia's most powerful media figures, Dmitry Kiselyov, picked it up and featured it on state TV as evidence of Europe’s cultural downfall. “Cultural transformation in Europe has been going on for a long time,” he said. “They are persuading Europeans to bathe less often and eat insects.” Do check out Radio Free Europe’s exemplary reporting of how this insect narrative has been weaved into Russia’s culture war propaganda. 

Russian propagandists are right about one thing though — thanks to the Ukraine invasion, we are having to scale back our energy use in Europe. Even if we aren’t all eating insects quite yet. And while households and businesses struggle to cope with rising bills, it’s been a bonanza year for energy companies, who have announced bumper annual profits in recent weeks after gas prices shot up. BP said its profits had doubled to about $28 billion, and that it would scale back its climate goals and cut its emissions pledge and produce more oil and gas over the next seven years than it had previously planned. BP vastly increased its spending on greenwashing social media ads in 2022, according to a report by climate disinformation campaign group Stop Funding Heat. The report calls on Big Tech to take more responsibility for the advertising it permits on its platforms and recommends a “‘tobacco-style’ ban on all advertising from fossil fuel producers.”

Azerbaijan has launched an environmental challenge against Armenia, claiming it devastated the natural environment of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region during its three-decade rule. Azerbaijan alleges that “Armenia caused widespread environmental destruction” over the last thirty years. In September 2020, the territory was recaptured in a surprise Azerbaijan offensive. The legal challenge has been brought under the Council of Europe’s Bern convention on preserving European wildlife and habitats, and it’s a landmark case: if Azerbaijan wins, it could set a precedent for securing compensation for environmental destruction. Ukraine has been recording the environmental devastation of Russia’s illegal war, with the hope of one day securing compensation.

WHAT WE’RE READING

• You must read atmospheric and environmental scientist John Morales’ fascinating piece on the reality of life as a meteorological scientist in a post-truth world. He speaks with granular insight about the decades-long conspiracy theories and misguided ideas about how humans can — or cannot — control weather events. Like the madcap theory that we can stop hurricanes by detonating a nuclear bomb in the eye of the storm, and how even U.S. presidents (ahem, Trump) never got the memo that it wasn’t a great idea. 

• Do take a look at Dmitry Uzlaner and Kristina Stoeckl’s open-access e-book, "The Moralist International," which came out in December, and looks at how Russia became a global player in the traditional values culture wars. 

The post Turkey-Syria earthquake was made in Alaska, say conspiracists appeared first on Coda Story.

Across Poland, women’s rights activists are holding their breath for elections later this year, when they hope to overturn the country’s ever more restrictive abortion laws. The fifth trial of Justyna Wydrzyńska took place at Praga Południe District Court in Warsaw this week, and the feeling in the capital is one of frustration and worry. The 47-year-old reproductive rights activist faces up to three years in jail for aiding a medical abortion in 2020, and if she’s convicted it will set a dangerous precedent for the criminalization of people who support those in need of a safe abortion.

Monday’s court heard testimony from “Ania,” a survivor of domestic abuse who asked Wydrzyńska to help her access abortion pills at the height of the coronavirus lockdown. She gave testimony in front of Ordo Iuris, an ultra-conservative group who are supporting the prosecution to represent the interests of the “fetus and its successors.”

In an election year, the issue of reproductive rights in Poland is a particularly urgent point of debate. In October 2020, the country’s government-controlled Constitutional Tribunal outlawed abortion in cases of fetal abnormalities. Poland has now become among the most difficult places in Europe to get a termination, but support for abortion remains high among Polish society — as many as 66% of people support abortion in the first 12 weeks, according to a recent poll.

However, recent preliminary estimates from Poland’s Central Statistics Office show that deaths in Poland continue to outnumber births, and the prospect of a shrinking population will likely be used by anti-abortion activists as an argument to further roll back reproductive rights. The leader of the ruling Law and Justice party, Jarosław Kaczyński, has said that Poles are “having far too few children,” shifting much of the blame on women.

In November, Kaczyński even blamed the low birth rate on young women’s alcohol consumption. “If we see a continuation of the situation where, until the age of 25, young women drink as much as men their age, then there will be no children,” he said.

Wydrzyńska’s hearing has been adjourned until March, when she faces a verdict.

IN GLOBAL NEWS

Between Poland and Florida, it’s a toss-up as to which place is more inhospitable for young women right now. Florida is certainly vying for the top spot, proposing a new regulation that makes the post-Roe climate in America feel bleaker than ever. Florida’s High School Athletic Association has floated the idea that female high school athletes should record their menstrual cycle histories and submit them to their schools. The committee claimed that collecting such information was simply good practice for monitoring girls’ physical health because period abnormalities could be a sign of “low energy availability, pregnancy, or other gynecologic or medical conditions.” In 2021, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill barring transgender girls and women from playing on public school teams. That bill, combined with the post-Roe climate, makes the menstrual history proposal feel all the more sinister. Critics have pointed to concerns that if the questions remained mandatory, it could lead to surveillance of high school students and their ability to access reproductive health care or out trans student-athletes participating in sports. Plus, there’s the simple question of privacy — both the old-fashioned kind of privacy, which means a person’s period is their business, and the new kind of privacy, that is concern for where all that menstrual data might end up, and who can get their hands on it. 

Two little stories for you on extinction. First up, a genetic technology company is trying to bring back the Dodo, some 260 years after the flightless bird went extinct. Perhaps one day, the phrase “as dead as a dodo” won’t carry quite as much weight. The project is spearheaded by Colossal Biosciences, a company described as the “headline-grabbing, venture-capital-funded juggernaut of de-extinction science” by Scientific American magazine. Colossal Biosciences has also tried to recreate the woolly mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger. Some biologists say it’s a waste of resources and more effort should go into preventing species from becoming extinct in the first place. 

Meanwhile, in India, geologists and paleontologists are worried they might soon get tangled up in a nightmare of red tape which will scupper their work in uncovering the country’s rich geological history. Last month, paleontologists discovered a staggering 92 titanosaur nests, along with hundreds of eggs “the size of volleyballs.” But a draft bill aiming to protect the country’s geological sites and fossils will give the central government all the power to control who gets access to these places. Many scientists are arguing that the bill puts too much power into the hands of the Geological Survey of India, which has been accused in the past of “losing” valuable fossils that then appeared on the black market. 

Kourtney Kardashian is facing a backlash from gynecologists following the launch of her gummies promising “vaginal wellness.” Kardashian claims vitamin-filled, pineapple-flavored candy, called “Lemme Purr,” can also change the taste of the vagina. "Give your vagina the sweet treat it deserves, and turn it into a sweet treat," she says. It’s another example of toxic wellness culture, say Kardashian’s critics, while gynecologists have slammed the product, saying that women should consult doctors — not Kardashians. “Anyone who suggests that your vagina isn't fresh or needs an improved taste is a misogynist and awful person," wrote gynecologist and author Dr. Jen Gunter on Instagram.

WHAT WE’RE READING 

• The U.K.’s leading Jewish organization, alongside a group of MPs, has called on U.K. TV channel GB news to stop peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories. The TV channel was launched in 2021 to emulate the style and content of Fox news, but with British accents, and has invited numerous anti-5G, anti-vaccine, and “Illuminati” conspiracy theorists since its launch. The Guardian reports. 
• Google is helping “fake abortion clinics” target low-income women. These “crisis pregnancy centers” outnumber abortion clinics in some southern states in the U.S., and lobby women to carry pregnancies to term. Often women looking for abortions accidentally end up here — and an investigation by the Tech Transparency Project has found that Google’s search algorithm is helping to dupe them. 

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The BBC came under fire for letting anti-vaccine conspiracies hijack a news broadcast last week. The corporation invited Aseem Malhotra, a fringe scientist, onto the program. He made an unevidenced claim that Covid vaccines were causing excess deaths from coronary artery disease. “If you’ll allow me to say this, what my own research has found, is that the Covid MRNA vaccines do carry a cardiovascular risk,” he said. Malhotra’s views are extreme: he has retweeted claims comparing the vaccine to the Holocaust. And based on his “own research,” he made the claims about cardiovascular risk. 

“We did it. We broke mainstream broadcast media ????????????,” Malhotra tweeted after the interview aired. Anti-vaccine activists celebrated, too. “Just WOW!...on BBC, the belly of the beast,” wrote a YouTube commenter. Russell Brand, the entertainer turned health guru turned conspiracy theorist, also celebrated the fact that Malholtra had bagged a slot on the channel. 

Nigel Farage retweeted the clip. I first spotted Farage’s anti-vaccine dog whistling back in 2020, when he told me in an interview that he was “skeptical” of the vaccine. “There’s a little bit of me that says, ‘Oh go on, Bill [Gates], you have it first,’” he told me at the time. 

Not so long ago, I was invited to speak on U.K. radio about “the Covid vaccine debate.” The broadcaster wanted me to debate a known, prominent anti-vaccine activist. After a bit of thought, I declined. Booking that radical anti-vaccine voice and giving them airtime, I told the producer, wasn’t about objectivity and balance. It wasn’t responsible journalism. And it wasn’t reflective of actual scientific conversations around vaccines. It’s false balance, skewing people’s perceptions of science, convincing them that being anti-vaccine is a legitimate academic position, and an equal and opposite view to supporting vaccines. In reality, the anti-vaccine movement is grounded in for-profit charlatanism, conspiracy theories, magical thinking and a total rejection of science and logic — and it’s also represented by an extreme margin of fringe conspiracy groups. While I do think we should talk about and confront anti-vaccine activism, it’s not “balance” to let an anti-vaccine voice on air every time we discuss vaccine rollouts. 

David Robert Grimes, a scientist and vaccine advocate, wrote in the Byline Times that inviting Aseem Malhotra to the BBC “exemplifies an unedifying trend during the pandemic: the fringe scientist, commanding huge audiences and, in some other cases, substantial profits.” When Malhotra speaks on a platform like the BBC, he sounds educated and convincing — and he has the credentials to match. Watching the clip could leave anyone feeling distrustful of the vaccine and the science. But, as Grimes says, “we should never forget that totality of evidence – not credentials – matter.”

IN GLOBAL NEWS

Climate change denial is a new favorite tactic of people and corporations who, until recently, sought only to delay climate action. That’s according to a new report on disinformation and the climate crisis, which monitored online activity, narratives and tactics during the November COP27 summit. Climate denialism was hot in 2022, the researchers found, and spread far and wide on Twitter in particular, with the hashtag #climatescam trending with hundreds of thousands of mentions. The narratives of climate denial have a lot of crossover with other conspiracy movements, “presenting climate action as part of a plot by ‘global elites’ to exert control and, conversely, claiming that climate change has been ‘engineered’ to destroy capitalism,” the researchers wrote. 

Flat earthers, Bigfoot, conversion therapy, young-Earth creationism, climate change denial. These are some of the extreme views and conspiracy theories that you can now study as part of a new university course called Psychology of Pseudoscience offered at the State University of New York at Cortland. As part of the course, students create their own bogus scientific claims and then make a game plan to convince as many people as possible of their beliefs. The course director, Craig A. Foster, writes: “I expect climate change denial, anti-vaccination and creationism to remain major points of contention in American society for decades. Educated people should understand the discussions that occur around these kinds of social problems.” 

In Greenland, the official attitude towards climate change is not denial — but a kind of forced optimism. The thought of all that land and of discovering what lies beneath the ice are appealing to some — particularly when it comes to the nation’s tourism prospects. Tourists are already dashing to the island to see the ice caps before they melt, and Greenland is building three new airports to accommodate them as the country emphasizes growing its infrastructure and its tourism industry. Others, though, are worried about the island becoming an amusement park. But for now, Greenland is trying to put a positive spin on climate.

WHAT WE’RE READING 

• How could journalists and digital rights organizations have covered the pandemic better? And where’s the line between giving a platform to conspiracy theorists and shielding governments and pharmaceutical giants from scrutiny? For the Disinformation Chronicle, Andrew Lowenthal writes about how the pandemic ushered in a new era in which governments were protected, rather than held to account, as they rolled out pandemic measures. 
  
• If you really want something to dig into with several pots of tea by your side this weekend, then you could do worse than reading behavioral scientist Caroline Orr Bueno’s latest monumental piece of research. She digs into how Russian influence operations targeted and inflated narratives about Canada’s “freedom convoy,” the anti-lockdown trucker movement, last year.

The post BBC platforms anti-vaccine scaremonger appeared first on Coda Story.

How does it happen? “It’s a decidedly simple, but dangerous and malicious process,” explained Alistair McAlpine in a useful thread this week, where he broke down how people become “red pilled.” He described how pushing certain popular but unproven treatments, such as Ivermectin, generate vast amounts of online revenue and attention on platforms like YouTube. Then in come the anti-vax speaking fees to give talks at events like Wakefield’s. “From obscurity, you’re now a name. You’re also making very good money,” McAlpine said. At a certain point, it’s too late to turn back: “The science community thinks you’re gone and won’t easily accept you back.” And YouTube is not the only way anti-vaccine influencers make money. Alongside selling supplements and telehealth services, there’s a new revenue stream for anti-vaxxers, according to author Derek Beres, who’s writing a book on new-age anti-vaccine trends. He revealed (ironically enough, in a Substack post) that four of the top 15 monetized political newsletters on Substack peddle anti-vaccine content, some of them raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars a month by pushing anti-vaccine propaganda.

It was Lunar New Year over the weekend, and China’s censorship bosses released a special set of instructions to try to dispel “gloomy thoughts” during the Spring Festival. There was plenty to be nervous about for people traveling home to their families for the first time since the zero-Covid restrictions were lifted, as the virus runs rampant in China. “Skepticism about official COVID death toll figures, China’s historic population decline, a disappointing economy, shortages of COVID medications, and increased medical debt for those who do contract the virus and require treatment” are all national concerns right now, writes Alexander Boyd for China Digital Times. Boyd translated the censorship instructions issued to censors to facilitate “a festive and harmonious atmosphere” during the festival. Censors were told to “crack down” on pandemic-related online rumors, fabricated reports about new pandemic control policies, fake miracle cures for the virus and spurious personal experiences with the virus during the Spring Festival period.

The notorious AI chatbot program ChatGPT can generate text that is able to pass a Business Master’s exam. And it can also write perfect abstracts for scientific papers that fool keen-eyed scientists. Northwestern University researchers tested the program by telling it to write fake abstracts by pulling from ten real ones from medical journals. When scientists reviewed the results, to try to identify if they’d been written by the program, they missed about a third of the AI-generated results. It’s a worrying result, considering the fake research papers industry is already booming, particularly in China — this program could make it all the easier for scientists to produce fake research.  

Women in Poland face up to three years in prison for providing abortion pills to pregnant people in 2020. After years of ultraconservative groups systematically targeting abortion legislation and lobbying for a crackdown on abortions, rights to terminations were stripped from Polish citizens in 2021 for 90% of cases. Even in the most horrific cases, abortion rights are systematically denied — as we saw this week, when a 14-year-old disabled girl who was raped by her uncle was refused an abortion in her hometown. Although incest and rape are two of the exceptions to the near-total abortion ban, the girls’ doctors still refused her case on so-called “conscience grounds,” and she was forced to travel to Warsaw to obtain the termination. “The conscience clause is a barbaric and inhumane law repeatedly exploited by doctors. It should be abolished,” Katarzyna Kotula, an opposition MP, told reporters. 

WHAT WE’RE READING 

• Indonesia has earned global recognition for its environmental policies to protect its endangered orangutan and rhino populations. But in order to protect this image, the country’s “green-minded” government has been censoring wildlife research by banning “negative” conservationists from abroad. Fred Pearce for Yale’s Environment360 investigates.
  
• What exactly are conspiracy theories, what are their consequences, and how are they spread? A new research paper by, in my view, one of the best academics researching conspiracies, was published this week. The paper, by Professor Karen Douglas at the University of Kent, is essential reading for anyone trying to understand conspiracy theories on a cellular level. And if you just want to know how to talk to a friend or family member about conspiracies, read her 5-step breakdown published this week in the Conversation.

The post Polish women face jail for abortion pills, anti-vax scientists rake it in on Substack, AI chatbot’s papers fool academics appeared first on Coda Story.

As I write this, news is breaking that Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister, has resigned. Arguably the face of global progressivism, Ardern’s strict Covid policies — dubbed “fortress New Zealand” — left her country deeply divided, albeit uniting the hard right and Covid conspiracy movements against her. A “Freedom Movement” against Ardern’s tough vaccine mandates grew in popularity, allowing the far right to pick up new members from the vaccine-hesitant community. For months now, the tag #resignJacinda has been spray painted on the walls and streets of Auckland. Ardern has said her government had tried hard to “have conversations with people and move through” vaccine hesitancy but that it remained a “fractious issue” in New Zealand. And, as Ardern said in her resignation speech, she no longer has “enough in the tank” to continue the fight. 

I have been trying in vain to avoid the gas stove insanity that has been dominating some of my timelines. So let me bring you a potted version of events in all their madness. It started when a study came out in December, attributing 13% of pediatric respiratory diseases to gas stoves. Cue panic. A member of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced that the agency was considering regulating gas stoves. “Products that can’t be made safe can be banned,” he said. This came as shocking news to foodies and right-wing politicians alike, not to mention my mother, who recently fitted a brand new gas stove, after decades of using electric. The debate escalated, with Republican politicians claiming that the right to cook on an open flame should be likened to the right to bear arms. “I’ll NEVER give up my gas stove. If the maniacs in the White House come for my stove, they can pry it from my cold dead hands. COME AND TAKE IT!!” tweeted Texas congressman Ronny Jackson. Gas stoves, all of a sudden, were the latest symbol of the American culture wars — and though there’s mounting evidence that they are indeed bad for the climate, and our health, it’s quickly become political poison to call for their regulation.

Even as China expects to see 36,000 deaths a day over the Lunar New Year, Chinese health officials have been accused of vastly underreporting virus-related deaths between December 8 and January 12. Rumors are swirling about overwhelmed funeral homes and astronomical fees at crematoria. A rather dark video has been doing the rounds on Weibo, garnering millions of views and showing a “departure board” that displays the progress of cremations to those waiting for the ashes of their loved ones. Meanwhile, Chinese citizens are scrambling for any protection they can get — and posts about the healing powers of canned peaches have been proliferating online, as Manya Koetse writes for What's on Weibo. One popular hashtag describes the sweet preserved fruit as the “Mysterious Power from the East.” Covid experts have told citizens that peaches have no power against the virus — but are less keen to dissuade them from taking Chinese traditional medicine, which Xi’s government regularly pushes as part of its ongoing public health policy. At the beginning of January, a new announcement from China’s Covid taskforce urged for greater use of traditional remedies alongside conventional treatments. In Hunan, health workers have been delivering free traditional medicine packages to the elderly. 

While China is busy letting go of its hardline Zero Covid policy, the same can’t be said for North Korea. Covid-19 is continually used as an excuse to crush basic human rights, and increased repression is exacerbating the existing humanitarian crisis in the DPRK, according to Human Rights Watch’s 2023 report. “The North Korean government, by sealing its borders, restricting imports, and limiting food distribution, is making life worse for North Koreans,” said Lina Yoon, senior Korea researcher at Human Rights Watch. Pfizer has offered to sell vaccines and medicine to North Korea at not-for-profit prices, but it’s unlikely Kim Jong Un will accept, having already turned down multiple offers of vaccines during the pandemic from both South Korea and the global Covax initiative. Meanwhile, the hermit country continues to prioritize its nuclear weapons program — it conducted no fewer than 30 long-range missile tests in 2022, a record number. 

WHAT WE’RE READING

• Simon and Schuster is set to release a book in March that, according to one AIDS activist, promotes AIDS denialism. Read Jason Rosenberg’s essay about it for “The Body,” which argues that we “cannot end the epidemic with major publishing houses choosing profit over public health.” 

• The Intercept has published an investigation into how drugmakers have pressured Twitter to censor activists who are pushing for low-cost, generic vaccine development at equitable prices. 

The post Jacinda Ardern’s post-pandemic burnout and fighting Covid in China with canned peaches appeared first on Coda Story.

Opponents of abortion in the U.S. have filed a lawsuit with the FDA intending to ban all abortion medication. The medication, mifepristone, has become a popular alternative in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade’s reversal, allowing people to remain at home and order pills by mail without having to go through the added trauma of confronting protestors or traveling hundreds of miles to obtain an in-clinic procedure. Should the FDA follow through on removing its approval of the medication currently prescribed by healthcare providers for medical abortions, it will affect even those seeking abortions in states in which abortions are legal.

German law enforcement has launched a nationwide crackdown on climate activists calling themselves the “The Last Generation.” Like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion in the U.K., the group has become known for its headline-making protests, like throwing soup — or in one case, mashed potatoes — on famous paintings and blocking traffic. Homes belonging to members affiliated with the group have been searched due to an investigation over disruptions at an oil refinery in eastern Germany. After recent protests at a Munich airport where people glued themselves to a runway, the city temporarily banned similar styles of protest. Another activist speaking out in support of the Last Generation over recent measures said that “the fight against climate protectionists is pushed forward so much more energetically than the fight against the climate crisis.”

Mexican archaeologists are sounding the alarm about a $15 billion tourist train slated to slice through the heart of the ancient Maya civilization. The railway, a flagship infrastructure project of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, will snake through more than 900 miles of jungle in the Yucatán. There are huge environmental concerns here — activists are worried the construction will trigger the collapse of cenotes and caverns along the route, destroying habitats and water access for animals living there. And it’s not just environmentalists that are worried. Archeologists are saying the train is endangering untold numbers of undiscovered Mayan treasures tucked beneath the thick rainforest canopy, including thousands of ancient sites. So they’re now trying to staunch the impending destruction by feverishly excavating as many ancient artifacts as possible ahead of the tracks’ construction.

WHAT WE’RE READING

• The Texas attorney general has attempted to compile a record of every transgender person in the state who has had their gender changed on their driver’s license, reveals this chilling investigation from the Washington Post.
  
• I’m still recovering from reading my colleague Erica Hellerstein’s remarkable piece for Coda and Noema Magazine about grappling with climate grief in California as the land is ravaged year after year by wildfires. It’s a story about nostalgia, about letting go of the past, the painful process of coming to terms with the charred present and facing up to the future of climate breakdown. Through in-depth reporting and intensely personal storytelling, Erica writes how we live in an era of magical thinking, and refuse, like children, to accept the severity of our own predicament. What would happen if we let go of the denial and opened ourselves up to climate mourning? If you read one thing this weekend, make it this. 

The post 15-billion-dollar train endangers Maya treasures, the wild theories of Meghan ‘truthers,’ US activists want ban on abortion meds appeared first on Coda Story.

China’s about-face on Covid restrictions is the gratifyingly direct result of the protests, with thousands of Chinese citizens telling the Communist Party enough is enough. Within days, we saw the famously zealous CCP mouthpiece and Global Times editor Hu Xijin displaying a complete vibe shift in his Covid attitude. He calmly announced on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, that he expects “to get Covid within a month.” On Twitter itself, he wrote: “Most Chinese people are no longer afraid of being infected. China may walk out of the shadow of COVID-19 sooner than expected.” On Dr. Li Wenliang’s “Wailing Wall,” the comment section beneath the famous whistleblower and Covid martyr’s final post from February 2020, people swarmed the page to pay tribute to the ophthalmologist, according to China Digital Times. Li has become a guiding light and hero for those suffering under China’s brutal zero-Covid regime. “Dr. Li, it looks like pandemic prevention measures are really coming to an end. Over the past few years, we’ve all posted a lot of comments here, and every time, it’s to vent or complain. This time, we can finally relax a bit,” one person wrote. 

The ultimate recycling program? More people are considering “human composting” as an alternative to burial when making their end-of-life plans. Five U.S. states have legalized turning remains into arable soil, and a few more states have similar plans on the horizon. Those concerned about environmental impact can rest a bit easier knowing that choosing this option would contribute less to carbon pollution than traditional burials or cremation. The death industry has its own carbon footprint — cremation, for instance, can use the same amount of energy a living person would use in an entire month. I’ve visited natural burial grounds in the U.K., and they really are the most beautiful places. People are buried in shallow graves (there are more enzymes in the topsoil) in coffins of wicker or cardboard, so their bodies go back into the earth faster. It’s all part of the circle of life, and many find peace in that. But it’s not for everyone — Queen Elizabeth II, for instance, was buried like all Royals in a coffin lined with lead to better preserve her remains. And embalming is a burial practice that goes right back to the ancient Egyptians.

NASA satellites have been tracking evidence of greenhouse gas “super emitters'' — but Iran’s not happy about it. One satellite mapped an enormous methane plume at least 3 miles long billowing into the air south of Iran’s capital, Tehran. The gas was coming from a major landfill site — as garbage decomposes, it leaks methane into the atmosphere. It’s not a problem unique to Iran: landfills are one of the world’s biggest methane polluters, and other “super-emitter” sites were identified in Turkmenistan and New Mexico. Currently, just a very small fraction of landfill sites in the U.S. capture methane and convert it into other energy sources. But Iran’s politicians refused to accept NASA’s images and denied the legitimacy of the research. Mehdi Chamran, head of the Tehran city council, said: "The photo published from the south of Tehran is not true and seems to be from another country." Meanwhile, the Mayor of Tehran, Alireza Zakani, said “everything NASA has said is a lie — and this is also a lie.” Last week, NASA announced it was canceling plans for a satellite that was going to intensely monitor greenhouse gas emissions over the Americas — citing costs and complications. 

WHAT WE’RE READING 

• Another brilliant healthcare investigation from ProPublica came out this week, on the “Wild West” that is the unregulated prenatal screening industry in the U.S. Families going in for prenatal tests to check for genetic abnormalities are given results without any oversight or regulation — with sometimes devastating results. Pregnant people have gotten abortions based on false positive results for genetic abnormalities, while others have carried children to full term while life-threatening disorders were missed by the test. It’s a shattering read.
• Iraqis are being forced to rely on fake drugs as endemic corruption in the medical supply chain means armed groups are seizing drug shipments, price gouging and selling expired drugs to desperate people. A report by Chatham House describes “the toxicity of Iraq’s post-2003 patchwork public and private healthcare system” in which drugs are sold for personal profit rather than distributed to patients.

The post Grab bag of conspiracies behind German coup plot, China’s Covid climb down, and methane cloud over Iran appeared first on Coda Story.

Elon Musk-led Twitter has quietly removed its ban on Covid-19 disinformation. Since the outset of the pandemic, Twitter had suspended more than 11,000 Covid conspiracy accounts and removed almost 100,000 Covid fake news posts. A Twitter transparency report published this summer discussed how the platform was prioritizing “removing or annotating potentially harmful and misleading information to ensure that users can readily find credible information.” But that was back in July — an eon ago. Open the report now, and there’s a new message right at the top:  “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy.” No public announcement or explanation accompanied the change. 

And as we’ve been tracking in this newsletter, the effects of the Musk takeover are clear to see as anti-vaccine conspiracists and QAnon adherents swarm the platform. This week, the main anti-vaccine news spreading on the platform was a trailer for a new conspiracy movie called “Died Suddenly.” The film makes various grisly and false claims about the vaccine being a depopulation tool, complete with smash-cut montages of people keeling over. The best, and most fulsome, takedown I read was by the University of McGill’s Jonathan Jarry.

But Twitter might not be able to continue operating this way — at least not in Europe. The EU warned Musk this week that Twitter could be banned in the bloc unless the platform abides by its content moderation rules. Twitter, he was told, was in danger of breaking the EU’s new digital services law. Under particular scrutiny is Musk’s highly publicized, laissez-faire attitude towards reinstating banned users and Twitter’s growing inability to “aggressively” combat disinformation.

IN GLOBAL NEWS

There are signs the unprecedented anti-zero-Covid protests in China are working. Dozens of districts in Shanghai and Guangzhou have lifted lockdown measures, after unbelievable scenes unfolded across the country over the past week. We’ve been tracking the online dissent and simmering resentment over the never-ending zero Covid policy for many months. But it’s rarely bubbled over into the physical world — until now. Among pro-government, nationalist influencers, conspiracy theories about the motives driving the protests have swept Chinese social media. Chief among them is the claim that the U.S. is funding the unrest with a $500 million budget to pay protesters. The unrest was sparked by an apartment fire in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, which had been locked down for 100 days. People were shut inside their apartments and firefighters couldn’t get past Covid barriers as the blaze raged. “After the fire tragedy, we were released last weekend,” my contact in Urumqi told me. “Now we’re in deep winter, and uncertainty fills the air. We don’t know when this policy will die.” 

Anthroposophy — a 20th-century spiritual movement founded by Rudolf Steiner — is growing in influence over Germany’s medical system. It’s inspiring doctors across Germany to believe that karma is the cause of some illnesses. “Anthroposophy is anchored much more deeply in society than many assume — in education, in medicine, in agriculture, in the financial world,” a recent German documentary explained, adding that the practice has had a boom in popularity during the pandemic. Anthroposophy has legal status as an alternative therapy in Germany, although many see it as pseudoscience. One head of an anthroposophy hospital in Berlin told journalists he believed that disease is a result of misconduct in a patient's past life.

Doctors around the world are witnessing a strange and scary phenomenon: hardline anti-vaccine adherents are refusing blood transfusions from those who have been vaccinated. Now, New Zealand is taking an anti-vaccine couple to court because they refuse to allow their sick baby to have surgery unless blood from unvaccinated donors is used. The baby urgently needs open heart surgery, so the New Zealand health service is seeking guardianship of the child. Because, of course, donated blood isn’t separated based on vaccination status. 

While we’re on the subject of blood, it’s a good moment to mention that the Food and Drug Administration has reduced restrictions on blood donations by gay and bisexual men. Previously, gay men had to be abstinent for a minimum of three months before they were allowed to give blood. But now the FDA is planning to allow donations from those in monogamous relationships. It’s hoped the move will help ease the strain on the shortage of donated blood in the U.S. But LGBTQ advocates say the easing of restrictions does not go far enough. “Bans and restrictions on blood donations from gay and bisexual men are rooted in stigma, not science,” Sarah Kate Ellis, president of GLAAD, told ABC. “This fight is not over until all LGBTQ Americans who want to donate blood are met with the same protocols as other Americans.” Some scientists argue that HIV risk behaviors — such as getting a tattoo, having unprotected sex, or taking drugs — should determine whether someone is allowed to give blood, rather than blanket banning people because of their sexual orientation.

WHAT WE’RE READING 

The New Yorker and ProPublica’s piece on how the hospice industry has become a 22-billion-dollar “hustle” in the US is a must-read. Ava Kaufman takes a horrifying dive into the world of end-of-life care in America, which is riddled with exploitation and fraud. It’s a shattering, disturbing investigation. 

The post Musk reopens door for Covid disinfo, Chinese trolls blame US for unrest and NZ couple reject blood from vaccinated donors appeared first on Coda Story.

Twitter has become perceptibly more troll-ridden since the Elon Musk takeover. That’s backed up by the stats, of course — over 50,000 tweets bombarding the platform with hate-filled content showed up within just a few hours of the billionaire taking control. By now, if you use the platform regularly, you will likely have noticed it yourself, with fights breaking out left, right and center and digital dumpster fires fed with more than usual regularity onto your timeline. 

One furious dialogue that’s blown up this week is over the price of insulin. It all started when an account with zero followers, but an all-important blue checkmark, posing as pharma giant Eli Lilly, made a false claim. “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.” It was a particularly painful lie — for a single vial of Eli Lilly’s product (of which many diabetes patients require 3-4 a month), it costs $274 in the U.S., and prices continue to skyrocket. 

It means some diabetics are forced to ration other necessities like food in order to afford their insulin. Companies like Lilly have been roundly accused of price gouging — so the fake tweet created false hope for real people in a desperate situation. That blue checkmark, formerly only available to verified accounts of public figures and organizations, but now available to anyone for $8, meant the tweet was much more likely to dupe people. “We apologize to those who have been served a misleading message from a fake Lilly account,” the company tweeted. 

Climate disinformation on Twitter has also proliferated during COP27. At one point, searching for “climate” on the platform brought up suggestions for #climatescam above any other results. On Wednesday, a new kind of climate troll showed up on Twitter. With an American eagle for a profile picture and another freshly-purchased blue check, the user began tweeting climate disinformation, claiming that “the Earth has been in a global cooling trend since 2016” and that “there were fewer climate deaths in 2021 than any year in recorded history. Most lame existential crisis ever.” Of course, these tweets would be of very little consequence prior to Musk’s takeover — but that all-important blue checkmark lent them a sheen of respectability. 

“An anonymous troll has bought himself a blue check and is merrily spreading climate disinformation. Yet we persevere: because everyone - including everyone here on Twitter - needs to know that climate change is real,” tweeted Nature’s chief scientist Katharine Hayhoe. 

IN GLOBAL NEWS

An Australian lobby group has conducted an anti-environmentalism blitz on Facebook during COP27. Advance Australia, which describes itself as a group fighting “stupid laws and woke ideologies like ‘net zero,’” has paid for at least a dozen Facebook adverts attacking climate policy, reaching an audience of millions. The group’s Facebook page has nearly 100,000 followers and pumps out a concoction of anti-woke talking points alongside anti-environmentalism rhetoric. The group sees itself as promoting Australia’s Judeo-Christian heritage and opposes the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools. In one recent article posted on its website it described Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg as a “nutjob” and told her to “go back to Sweden”. 

On TikTok, telemedicine startups are advertising ADHD medication. There’s an irony to this — TikTok’s recommendation algorithm is designed to keep you scrolling, drawing you further into the rabbit hole and away from whatever else you’re doing. It’s intended to keep you perpetually distracted. So it’s obviously the perfect platform to advertise ADHD pills. “When you start getting your ADHD medication, suddenly all those voices in your head are gone,” one advert runs. Neurodiversity runs in my family and I — along with most of my relatives — display many of the characteristics of ADHD. I’ve never gotten a diagnosis, though, because it’s a long and arduous process to go through the U.K. National Health Service’s referral system. But in the U.S., it’s a different story. Just chat to one of those TikTok telemedicine outlets for half an hour and they can issue you a remote prescription without the hassle of having to see a psychiatrist. No surprise, then, that there’s an Adderall shortage right now — and some experts are questioning whether ADHD is being over-diagnosed.

Anti-abortion groups, having pushed for years to get Roe v. Wade overturned, aren’t done yet. A leaked recording of a strategy session between Tennessee lawmakers and major anti-abortion groups shows that the lobbyists have IVF and contraception in their crosshairs in the coming years. “Maybe your caucus gets to a point next year, two years from now, three years from now, where you do want to talk about IVF, and how to regulate it in a more ethical way,” Stephen Billy, the vice president of state affairs for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told lawmakers. Fertility treatments lead to the destruction of numerous non-viable embryos — which is why some of the most extreme campaigners who call themselves “pro-life” rally against IVF treatments. The Tennessee state representative Ryan Williams has asserted that doctors discarding non-viable embryos are breaking the law and could be liable for criminal charges under Tennessee’s new Human Life Protection Act. The Tennessee attorney general said earlier this month that disposal of fertilized embryos not transferred to the womb isn’t punishable as a criminal abortion. But the leaked recordings suggest that such an outcome may not be far away. 

WHAT WE’RE READING 

Do check out the ProPublica investigation, which takes us inside that anti-abortion meeting with Tennessee’s GOP lawmakers. The leaked recording, writes Kavitha Surana, “provides the clearest examples yet of the strategy that the law’s architects are pursuing to influence legislators and the public amid growing national concerns that abortion bans endanger women’s health care and lives.” 

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Scrolling through the #ozempic on Tiktok, hundreds of videos with tens of thousands of views document the dramatic physical transformations of users who are not diabetic but taking a drug approved for managing type 2 diabetes to catalyze their weight loss. 

It's even been rumored that Kim Kardashian, who reportedly lost over 15 pounds in three weeks, took the drug to fit into her infamous Marilyn Monroe dress. Ozempic is not currently FDA-approved for chronic weight management, but the compound semaglutide, which can also be found in the brand name drug Wegovy, was approved last year to treat adults with obesity.  

Growing up, I became used to the pharmaceutical advertisements that seemed to fill every commercial break on cable television. The jingle that accompanied an advertisement for Ozempic sticks out in my head because it used the refrain “oh, ho, ho it’s magic” from the 1974 hit song by Pilot. But I also remember that the commercial was specific about Ozemipic not being a weight loss drug. 

But the drug is being promoted like a miracle solution for weight loss amongst Hollywood's elite, shared with users worldwide through TikTok, and even backed by billionaire Elon Musk. Its popularity, however, has made it increasingly difficult to access, making it especially challenging for people looking to manage their diabetes. 

My grandmother, currently fighting cancer and also a type 2 diabetic, told me that she experienced a delay in receiving the Ozempic medication prescribed to her. "I have two things going on. And if I gain weight, I need more insulin. Then my diabetes becomes uncontrollable, right? And so now I'm in a loop, because I need the oncology medicine to be sure that the cancer doesn't come back," she told me. 

Her doctor warned her at the outset that it could take a few months for her to get it. 

"It's wanted worldwide," she told me, "And it's wanted because I read that you can lose anywhere from 20 to 50 pounds and do nothing. No exercise. No change in your diet. Nothing. So it's like a panacea."

She described to me that, typically, she's able to access her prescriptions the same day after the doctor prescribes them. When she got to the pharmacy, she said that she was told the drug wasn't available. Luckily though, it took only a week for her to get her prescription filled. 

She's grateful that she has insurance to help cover the cost of the medication, but she's frustrated about the lack of access. "The selfishness that's worldwide is unbelievable, and diabetes doesn't just exist in a vacuum. I'm angry that the people who need this drug are not getting it."

IN GLOBAL NEWS

First up, a quick recap of the U.S. midterm results, QAnon edition. An estimated eight winning candidates, including Arizona State Senator Sonny Borrelli, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller and Arizona State Representative Leo Biasiucci, have all been linked in some way to the QAnon conspiracy movement. Biasiucci and Borrelli both spoke at a QAnon convention in Las Vegas last year (ticket price: $700), while Miller spoke at a similar event in Dallas. But it’s not all bad news, as my colleague Ellery Biddle pointed out from her home state of Pennsylvania in our sister newsletter, Authoritarian Tech. Two darlings of the digital disinfo scene — Christian nationalist and QAnon devotee Doug Mastriano and Covid skeptic celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz (known for pushing science-free fad diets, detoxes and cleanses) — both lost their bids for office.

Big oil is everywhere. It’s sponsoring climate newsletters. Its lobbyists are flooding the ongoing COP27 climate change meeting in Egypt. And, irony of ironies, the PR firm in charge of communications for COP27, Hill and Knowlton Strategies, also reps Big Oil. Specifically ExxonMobil, Shell, Aramco —  and that old favorite, Chevron. Hundreds of scientists have signed a petition calling on the firm to drop its fossil fuel clients. “We firmly believe that Hill and Knowlton’s work for these clients is incompatible with its role leading public communications at the annual United Nations climate talks,” their letter argues. Big Oil, they add, has “used Hill and Knowlton and other PR agencies to spin, delay, and mislead, in order to continue expanding fossil fuel production and thereby increasing heat-trapping emissions.” The letter accuses Hill and Knowlton of “enabling” fossil fuel-backed disinformation campaigns. “It’s an almost comical conflict of interest that Big Oil’s spin doctors are also in charge of communications for the UN climate talks,” Dr. Geoffrey Supran, a Harvard researcher who studies fossil fuel disinformation and propaganda tactics, told DeSmog, a climate news platform which, incidentally, you should definitely be following. 

Princess Martha Louise of Norway has renounced her royal duties in order to focus on her alternative medicine business with her husband. She’s engaged to an American shaman who is notorious in Norway for his pseudoscience practices and conspiracy theories. He’s said that having cancer is a “choice,” claims to be a reincarnated Egyptian Pharaoh, and believes 5G is a creation of “those who want to enslave the planet.” Princess Martha Louise, who says she can speak with angels, lost her “Royal Highness” title back in the 2000s after she did work as a clairvoyant. She said in a statement that she was “aware of the importance of research-based knowledge. I also believe, however, that there are components of a good life and sound physical and mental health that may not be so easy to sum up in a research report.”

WHAT WE’RE READING 

• “We continued deeper inside China’s quarantine apparatus, the kind of place that finds you, rather than the other way around.” You must read this gripping, chilling account of life on an island quarantine detention center in China, by the Financial Times correspondent Thomas Hale. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since reading it. Like our piece about the man who escaped locked-down Shanghai hidden in the back of a car, it reads like dystopian fiction. But it’s not. 

The post TikTok stars tout diabetes drugs as miracle weight loss aid, QAnon successes at US midterms, and greenwashing at COP27 appeared first on Coda Story.

Curiouser and curiouser — that’s all I can say about the covid news seeping out of China. The scenes get more bizarre by the week. Videos have emerged from Zhengzhou, in the central province of Henan, where authorities locked down an area surrounding an iPhone factory. People tried to flee the restrictions, breaking out of the industrial park, climbing over fences and wandering through wheat fields with their belongings to try to escape the restrictions. And at Shanghai’s Disneyland, my version of a Halloween nightmare went down: people were locked inside the Happiest Place on Earth while every visitor and worker was subjected to a covid test. They were forced to stay there for hours — but the rides were reportedly still operational while they waited for their results, so that was a plus. “We’ve entered a new phase of madness,” one Weibo user posted, when a video emerged of elementary school children singing a nursery rhyme. In the rhyme, they sing lines from classical Chinese poetry, and a new line: “let’s do PCR tests together.” The rhyme continues: “From a distance the waterfall looks like a hanging stream / Li Bai [a prominent Tang dynasty poet] is doing nucleic acid tests with me.”

As we predicted last week, QAnon adherents are returning to Twitter — in droves. “For anons, having a chance to return to the battlefield we were forcefully removed from on January 8th, 2020 is an opportunity to continue the war we fought so hard to win” wrote the owner of one Q Telegram group to his 46,000 readers. “Days before the election, we may be given an opportunity to fight.” The conspiracy theorists, who believe the world is secretly run by satan-worshiping pedophiles, thought Musk was communicating with them via his “satanic” Halloween outfit.

After months of violence targeting doctors and hospitals taking care of transgender young people, the Florida Board of Medicine has voted to ban gender-affirming care for all trans teenagers. As defined by the World Health Organization, gender-affirming care encompasses a range of social, psychological, behavioral and medical treatments designed to help people affirm their gender identity when it conflicts with the gender they were assigned at birth. Accredited medical groups, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association all support gender-affirming care for trans youth.

The Florida Board will start drafting a rule outlawing surgeries, hormone therapy and puberty blockers for trans people under the age of 18. Dr. Meredithe McNamara, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Yale School of Medicine who treats trans youth, told the board the state’s review had relied on the work of people who had no experience in the field. “Neither of the authors of the state’s review is a subject matter expert,” McNamara said. “One individual is a dentist. The other is a post-doctoral fellow in biostatistics. At a bare minimum, the systematic review should be conducted by those who are qualified to assess the literature. I wouldn’t trust a dermatologist review of the literature on a neurosurgical procedure, for instance.”

“Florida brought in some random people with no expertise in treating #trans youth to pose as experts,” tweeted trans youth mental health researcher Jack Turban. “This is truly something out of a dystopian novel, but it’s going to impact real lives.” The public testimony portion of the hearing was cut early — to shouts of protests from the crowd. Activists and trans youth, some of whom had staged a “die-in” outside the courtroom, were told to “email” the board if they had any more testimonies to share. We’re now hearing reports that trans teens and their families are considering fleeing the state as they’ll no longer be able to access their medication. 

WHAT WE’RE WATCHING

If you want to learn more about America’s gender wars, I highly recommend “The Problem with Jon Stewart,” which came out on Apple TV last month — it’s free to watch even if you don’t have a subscription. The first episode is devoted to the “war over gender” and it is forensic in its analysis and Stewart is stunning in his takedown of the anti-trans movement. 

The post Gender wars in Florida, scientists attacked in Belarus, and QAnon returns to Twitter appeared first on Coda Story.

Germany’s right-wing populist party, AfD, is putting pseudo-experts on display in official settings, giving credibility to scientific disinformation. The party has given these “experts” a platform during German parliament committee meetings to deny climate change and spread covid misinformation. Parliamentary party groups get to determine who they consider to be experts. “The problem is always that people who don’t come from the field at all and don’t even work scientifically in the field get a voice. And they are then put on an equal footing with real experts,” climate researcher Mojib Latif told Tagesschau.

QAnon conspiracy theorists are very excited about Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. “They think they will be unbanned and can reach normies again with their theories,” journalist Stuart A. Thompson tweeted. “We cannot disregard the importance of Elon getting control BEFORE the midterms,” one QAnon influencer wrote, hailing the prospect of being reinstated on Twitter. “The timing is simply too perfect to be an accident.” I took a look at the Telegram “truth pills” conspiracy group I follow — the sentiment was the same. “We have literally been digitally herded into a sheep pen, an echo chamber and censored into obscurity,” the channel’s owner wrote, while others readied themselves for a return to the bird website. 

Anti-trans activists strike again, and this time they’ve targeted Latino voters in Colorado. Spanish-language pamphlets with anti-trans messages are arriving in the mailboxes of voters ahead of the U.S. midterm elections. The mailers allegedly come from the America First Legal Foundation, which is run by former Trump aide Stephen Miller, architect of some of the previous administration’s most draconian immigration policies. Typical anti-trans messages in the flyers include references to the removal of healthy genitals and deliberate falsehoods. “Joe Biden and progressive politicians and their leftist allies in government are promoting radical and irreversible gender experiments on children,” the flyers assert.

“We knew this was disgusting propaganda," a Colorado voter who received the mailer told reporters, suggesting it was sent to her and her husband “because we both have Hispanic last names.” These targeted messages appear to be part of a larger trend of Spanish-language misinformation in the U.S., particularly on social media where significantly fewer resources are devoted to combating misinformation in languages other than English.

NEW MEDIA ORGANIZATION LAUNCHES CLIMATE NEWSLETTER BACKED BY CHEVRON

“Why on earth would anyone start a new media company now — in this economy?” My friend, a CNN producer, was side-eying the launch of Semafor, a news organization founded by former Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith and former New York Times journalist Ben Smith (no relation). Of course, at Coda, which soon turns seven years old (legacy media, here we come) we’ve heard the CNN producer’s refrain, and variations on the theme, all too often.

But there were high hopes for Semafor, founded with the modest intention of restoring public trust in the media. The site and its array of newsletters were launched last week with maximum fanfare, to the tune of $25 million in investor funding (we’re not bitter, honest), and the promise they would do things differently from the traditional news media.

Given the outlet’s stated mission, I was disappointed when it transpired that Semafor’s Climate newsletter was sponsored by…Chevron. You know Chevron, one of the world’s biggest oil corporations that’s reported record profits thanks to rising oil prices to become the Dow’s best performing stock this year. “We’re working toward a lower-carbon future,” the Semafor Chevron ad runs, accompanied by a cute picture of a cow’s nose. “At Chevron, we’re working with partners in California to convert the methane from cow waste into renewable natural gas.”

It reminds me of the spoof Chevron ad by “Don’t Look Up” director Adam Mckay, featuring cheesy footage of animals, babies and birds. “We at Chevron believe that nothing is more precious than life. And that the most precious life of all, is the dead kind, that has been compressed for hundreds of billions of years, until it becomes oil — oil that we can refine and sell as gasoline.”

The real Chevron ad on Semafor’s Climate newsletter caused outrage and disappointment across the media-watching Twittersphere. “Beyond parody,” wrote blogger Jack Mirkinson. “Outlets that purport to be part of the political middle seem to not be adequately fact-checking the claims of oil and gas companies that advertise in their climate newsletters,” wrote Gizmodo reporter Molly Taft.

The most in-depth criticism of the sponsorship deal was by HEATED newsletter writer Emily Atkin, who highlights how Chevron’s campaigns in the 1980s spread climate science denial. She describes how Chevron’s “lower carbon future” campaign on Semafor’s newsletter is misleading readers into thinking the company is effectively fighting climate change. “‘Lower carbon’ means almost nothing to the second biggest carbon polluter in the world,” Atkin writes, before explaining that turning cow waste into “renewable natural gas” is “not renewable, not natural, and not a large-scale climate solution.”

Biomethane, while made from natural waste, is still methane — a greenhouse gas that damages the climate. Atkin also described how Semafor refused to engage with her when she challenged them on the sponsorship deal. She told me that she asked Semafor whether it was “selling advertisers on opportunities to spread misinformation on its platform.” Cue crickets.

“Can you tell me how you, and Semafor, justify taking money from fossil fuel giants to sponsor a newsletter about the climate? The Semafor project was started with the aim of rebuilding public trust in the media, but how does this sponsorship deal align with that?” I asked Semafor in an email.

The response I got from their spokesperson, Meera Pattni read: “Advertisers have no bearing on our editorial coverage and we maintain a strict separation between news and third-party advertisement.” 

The subject of this week’s edition of the Semafor newsletter, also sponsored by Chevron? Greenwashing.

WHAT WE’RE READING AND LISTENING TO 

• This investigation by our editorial partners at Lighthouse Reports. Alongside Bellingcat, they created a vast, searchable, interactive database of social media posts by QAnon adherents in the U.S. and western Europe — meaning researchers and journalists can easily identify trends and expose the architecture of this shadowy world of conspiracy theorists.
• And don’t miss the latest offering from Serial and the New York Times, We Were Three. It’s a chilling story about a family destroyed by Covid lies and conspiracy theories, and it’s well worth your time.

The post QAnon celebrates Musk takeover, pseudoscience at the Bundestag, and Chevron greenwashing appeared first on Coda Story.

Two districts in Uganda have introduced their first Ebola lockdown while the country waits for vaccines. The World Health Organization has said the disease is “rapidly evolving” in the country, with 64 recorded cases and 24 recorded deaths. The online conversation about the disease is mimicking the fake news of the past. On Twitter, the most popular posts about the disease are made by influencers, not scientists or doctors. And the disinformation is dangerous: in Uganda, a vicious rumor is spreading that people who seek treatment for Ebola in hospitals could have their organs harvested. 

“People cannot steal your organs like that,” Uganda’s Health Minister Dr. Jane Ruth Aceng tried to reassure a crowd in Uganda this week. There’s also been a carbon copy of the “Ebola in Atlanta” hoax story of 2014 — spawned by Russia — except this time, Ebola is supposedly in Chicago. Rumors flew on social media that two cases were discovered in the windy city. “This is FALSE. We don’t have any Ebola cases here,” Chicago epidemiologist Katrine Wallace tweeted, explaining how the press release that sparked the rumors came from back in 2014, when all this began. 

IN GLOBAL NEWS

If you’re a young Russian man ripe for conscription, one of the most effective ways out of it is to forge medical papers saying you have HIV or hepatitis. A cottage industry has sprung up on Telegram to help Russian men avoid mobilization — pay $620 for an HIV diagnosis, or $820 for a hepatitis certificate, which would involve being added to the national database of those with the diseases. The report by Rest of World didn’t specify why the HIV diagnosis was cheaper — but it could be because of the long-running stigma and misinformation about HIV-positive people that accompanies a diagnosis in Russia. 

As Russia attacks Ukrainian civilians with missiles and kamikaze drones, several academic institutions in the country find themselves under fire. Rockets have blown out windows in the University of Kyiv’s science library, Institute of Philology, National Museum of Natural History, the Ministry of Education and Science, and the National Academy of Sciences in Ukraine. At Coda, we talk about reporting on the “war on science” but these attacks constitute, quite literally, a war on science. And whenever this war does end, Ukrainian scientists will likely struggle to persuade their colleagues and students to return from Europe, where many of them have fled. “We are glad our colleagues found shelter, but we must think about how to attract them to come back after the victory,” Anatoly Zagorodny, 71, the President of Ukraine’s National Academy of Scientists, told Science magazine, describing how fighting Ukraine’s brain drain will be an enormous challenge once the war is over. 

In Vermont, a town official working in a Richmond water department has quietly lowered fluoride in water levels for almost a decade. The employee, Kendall Chamberlin, told Vermont’s Water and Sewer Commission that he had reduced fluoride levels in water systems below state-recommended levels because he was concerned about the effects of “Chinese” fluoride, and didn’t think the argument for adding fluoride to water was scientifically sound. He separately told a Vermont local paper he believed Chinese fluoride was “poison.” For more than 70 years, conspiracy theorists have claimed water fluoridation was a “Soviet plot” or a government mind-control project. Fluoride is a naturally occurring mineral, and adding it to water systems is proven to reduce tooth decay in populations — as one of the greatest health achievements of the 20th century. 

WHAT WE’RE READING 

The environmental stakes couldn’t be higher in Brazil’s presidential race, with the make-or-break vote scheduled for the day before Halloween. If incumbent right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro wins, it could further erode Brazil’s scientific research industry, and spell irreversible disaster for the Amazon. Science magazine has the rundown we all need to read. 

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Jones was found liable for defamation after he claimed the attacks were a “government operation,” an elaborate hoax with no real victims that was intended to deprive Americans of their guns. The exchanges during the months-long trial were barely believable, with parents telling Jones that their children really did exist.  

“Jesse was real,” said Sandy Hook parent Scarlett Lewis in the courtroom in August. “I am a real mom.” Lewis, alongside other Sandy Hook parents, said she had been threatened repeatedly by Jones’s followers who told her that her child didn’t die in any shooting. The damage done by Jones, however, goes far beyond the horrific pain and trauma he has inflicted on Sandy Hook families. Jones’s distinctive style has been mimicked and exported the world over. Remember back in March, when the Russian Embassy in the U.K. accused victims of the Mariupol Maternity Hospital attack of being “actors?” Those claims were straight out of Jones’s playbook. “An official embassy blue-check account has gone full Alex Jones with crisis actor allegations,” Stanford disinformation expert Renee DiResta tweeted at the time. 

Jones’s devout followers — of which there are millions — continue to stand by the conspiracy theorist. One prominent Jones devotee is “Paper Planes” singer M.I.A., who during the pandemic became a vocal conspiracy theorist herself. “If Alex Jones pays for lying, shouldn’t every celebrity pushing vaccines pay too?” she tweeted, to the tune of 150,000 likes. 

M.I.A is just one of a raft of celebrities, who during the pandemic have used their enormous platform to peddle dangerous conspiracies and jump to the defense of Jones. You can read more about the company M.I.A. is keeping in this rundown of conspiracy-minded celebrities that I wrote last year. 

Other conspiracy theorists and “Make America Great Again” adherents are now claiming that the Jones judgment is evidence that he is being persecuted by the Biden “regime.” DiResta, the Stanford disinformation expert, unpacked this language best: “‘Regime’ rhetoric is a hyperbolic way of describing a government run by a party that isn’t yours,” she tweeted. “But populist propagandists want to extend it to anything holding a member of their ‘team’ accountable. Recognize it as what it is: an attempt to broadly delegitimize institutions.”

IN GLOBAL NEWS

The unvaccinated are “the most discriminated against group,” says Canadian politician Danielle Smith. Within hours of being voted in as premier of Alberta, she told the media that she was determined to enshrine human rights protections for the unvaccinated, whom she believes have suffered more from discrimination than any other group in her lifetime. She is over fifty years old. Her words have caused widespread outrage, with many pointing out that Smith has trivialized the struggles of indigenous people and ethnic minorities in her race to defend the rights of a tiny sliver of the population who choose not to vaccinate. Smith insists that wasn’t her intention, though she didn’t apologize either.  

Staying in Canada for a moment, doctors in Smith’s province, Alberta, are noticing a worrying new trend: an uptick in people refusing to take blood transfusions, Jehovah’s witness-style. But they’re not spurning blood because of their religious beliefs. They don’t want to accept blood from donors who have been vaccinated against Covid. This may be a new phenomenon in Canada, but doctors in the U.S. have been encountering this problem for the past year. They’ve dealt with patients who are mistakenly afraid of “tainted” blood; who harbor fears of being infected with the virus themselves, or of contracting side effects from the vaccine. “A lot of people think there’s some kind of microchip or they’re going to be cloned,”  Dr. Geeta Paranjape, medical director at Carter BloodCare, told Kaiser Health News. To the handful of patients requesting blood from unvaccinated donors, the answer from doctors has been a resounding “no.” 

Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson is tipped to give special honors to prominent climate deniers by giving them seats in Britain’s House of Lords, according to a leaked list published by the Daily Telegraph. Among Johnson’s nominees are billionaire Michael Hintze and political economist Ruth Lea. The latter has openly opposed the control of greenhouse gases, saying that the idea that cutting carbon emissions will reduce global warming is “ridiculous.” Hintze, meanwhile, has funded a lobby group pushing for the U.K. government to scrap its pledge to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. 

WHAT WE’RE READING 

COP27 will be held in Egypt in less than a month. Naomi Klein suggests that the event will allow the Egyptian regime to brush over its appalling human rights record and urges attendees to be bold in criticizing the regime. Because ultimately, she argues, “Unless political freedoms are defended, there will be no meaningful climate action.”

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“Watch your kids’ candy this year. The new thing is rainbow fentanyl. Looks like sweet tarts,” one viral tweet runs. News coverage of 15,000 multihued fentanyl pills, hidden in a Lego box, seized in New York City last week exacerbated the panic. “This is every parent’s worst nightmare,” a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent told reporters.

But toxicologists and disinformation experts are calling out the agency for “fear mongering” and inciting moral panic over drugs as the midterms loom. It started when the DEA put out a notice, warning families about a “trend” of rainbow-colored fentanyl pills that looked like candy. The colorful pills, claimed the DEA, were “a deliberate effort by drug traffickers to drive addiction among kids and young adults.”

Suddenly schools, health authorities, and media outlets were all filled with warnings about how drug cartels were targeting children at Halloween.

Opioid safety advocates have pointed out that drugs are colored differently to differentiate between products, which has nothing to do with marketing to kids at all. This misleading information, says toxicologist Dr. Ryan Marino, is part of an agenda to strengthen support for the war on drugs by spreading outrage. 

“Colored drugs exist for a lot of reasons to mark a certain product, and maybe even signify it’s not a real pill (it seems adults also like colorful things),” he tweeted, “but none of the reasons are to ‘trick kids.’”

“It is alarming how many U.S. senators choose not to access any reliable information on drugs before making policies about drugs,” Dr. Marino told me. Lawmakers continue to push policies that focus on criminalization over harm reduction. But those who say the war on drugs has failed argue that federal funds are better spent on decriminalization strategies grounded in science and human rights. “It’s much easier to blame fentanyl for things than it is to have deeper conversations and examine where we have failed people who use drugs. It’s also become heavily politicized, which helps no one,” Dr. Marino said.

Media Matters, a nonprofit misinformation research center, highlighted how the DEA’s statements, coupled with uncritical reporting, serve only to incite panic. As the elections draw closer, conservative politicians have used largely manufactured panic around fentanyl being marketed to children to create further panic about the threat posed by migrants at the border. 

The Halloween panic is age-old. Urban legends about “Halloween sadism” have been around since the 1970s — we all remember those tales of razor blades or poison that could be lurking in our pumpkin-shaped buckets. It’s a symptom of public fear. Fentanyl-laced candy is just another example of fear and prejudice being stoked by rhetoric that is rarely grounded in evidence or reason. 

IN OTHER NEWS

At least 200 environmental defenders died in 2021. The most dangerous country for environmentalists is Mexico with 54 murders taking place last year, according to a new Global Witness report. Overall Latin America is by far the most dangerous region with three-quarters of attacks being recorded conducted there. But these lethal attacks, alongside smear campaigns carried out by forces within governments and companies, are occurring across every region of the world. One of those killed in 2021 was the “wonderfully bonkers" Joannah Stutchbury. The British activist, who was an ardent defender of the Kiambu forest, was shot dead on the outskirts of Nairobi.

Brazilian election runoffs loom on October 30, a disappointing outcome for Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, former president and leftwing challenger to the incumbent Jair Bolsonaro. Scientists see Lula as the “science-friendly candidate” for his track record of investing in research and promoting policies that substantially reduced deforestation in the Amazon. If Lula manages to win, though, it could take years for the new president to undo the work of his predecessor and the effects of the crisis in funding Brazil’s scientists have endured. As for the Amazon, it may already be too late: according to new research published last month, vast swathes of the rainforest have already reached a tipping point, and may never recover from Bolsonaro’s reign of destruction. 

MESSAGES FROM XINJIANG

Every few days, my phone pings with a message from Urumqi, Xinjiang. It’s rare to have this sort of direct line into a region that is subject to an all-encompassing communications blackout. Uyghurs, the mostly Muslim group native to the region, are banned from making contact with people abroad. But one person finds a way to write to me intermittently to tell me about China’s covid measures, which feel like just one more tool of repression in a region that continues to suffer human rights abuses that some argue amount to genocide. 

Xinjiang has been under harsh lockdown conditions for much of the summer. Last week, Urumqi residents were briefly allowed out of their homes, but their freedom was all-too-short lived. “They locked us up again,” my contact messaged me over the weekend. “We are in a darker moment than ever before. Our mental health is on the edge of collapse.” This time, the lockdown appears to have little to do with covid. Year-long preparations for the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party Congress — beginning on Sunday, October 16, and at which Xi Jinping is expected to be given a third term in power — are nearly over and the authorities are determined to maintain total control. “We are guessing they are worried people from Xinjiang will cause problems before the Congress. So they locked us down in the name of pandemic control,” my contact wrote. “What’s wrong with this world?” 

WHAT WE’RE READING 

Bitcoin is a disaster for the planet, according to a new study in Nature. Its impact on climate change is on par with beef production. “While proponents have offered BTC as representing “digital gold,” from a climate damages perspective it operates more like “digital crude,” the report’s authors write. 

This newsletter is curated by Coda’s senior reporter Isobel Cockerell. Frankie Vetch contributed to this edition.

The post Fear and panic stoked over fentanyl-laced Halloween candy, as US midterms approach appeared first on Coda Story.

This wave of violence began in August when Boston Children's Hospital received a barrage of abuse for offering a pediatric and adolescent and transgender health program. Much of the hostility was provoked by misinformation that the program offered children gender-affirming surgery. Anti-trans activists harassed doctors. Police sent a bomb squad to the hospital after it reported an anonymous threat. 

Leading this campaign of hate is the far-right social media account “Libs of TikTok,” which has more than a million followers. Now it has turned its attention to the Johns Hopkins All Children Hospital in Florida, characterizing it as a place where healthcare providers take advantage of children. This absurd accusation has led to reams of comments on social media describing the healthcare providers as “groomers.” Some commenters have threatened to shoot hospital staff.

And now anti-trans activists can access an interactive Google map with pins on every LGBTQ community center, nonprofit organization and transgender care clinic in the country. 

“It's a one-stop shop for someone who wishes to do harm,” said Alejandra Caraballo, a civil rights attorney and clinical instructor at Harvard University, who recently drew attention to the fact that Google had not yet removed the map. Caraballo described how the building of the map was a tactic straight out of the anti-abortion playbook, which resulted in violent attacks on doctors and abortion providers long before the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in June. In the 1990s, a website called the “Nuremberg Files” served as a resource for militant anti-abortion activists, publishing the names and addresses of abortion providers and exposing them to violence. 

Dr. Jack Turban, a trans youth mental health researcher, argued online that attacks on trans people amounted to attacks on science itself. "Conservatives going after healthcare and academic medicine is a scary thing. It's taking anti-science to a whole new dangerous level," he tweeted. Last year, in a column, he and Jules Gill-Petersen, a historian of medicine, wrote “transgender people are not ‘denying science’ by virtue of existing. On the contrary, the medical and scientific consensus is that being trans and transitioning are healthy, natural manifestations of human diversity.”

But the attacks on trans people and healthcare providers seem only to be rising. "Trans people are being cut off from not only lifesaving care but also routine medical care, therapy, and support groups,” Alejandra Caraballo told me. “This is the goal of anti-trans extremists — to make life unbearable for trans people.”

IN GLOBAL NEWS

Zimbabweans are secretly vaccinating their children in defiance of powerful religious groups. An outbreak of measles was first reported in Zimbabwe in April, and since then 700 children have died, many because they are unvaccinated. Groups within the apostolic church, which has around 2.5 million followers in Zimbabwe, oppose vaccines. Other groups within the church who are more open to modern medicine are seeking to change attitudes, while at the same time helping women to defy church rules. Some of these women are vaccinating their children without their husbands ever knowing, often going to clinics in the middle of the night and sneaking in through the back doors.

The Indonesian government has banned a Dutch orangutan expert from entering the country’s nature reserves for criticizing Indonesia’s conservation policies. Erik Meijaard, who studied orangutans in Indonesia for 30 years, co-wrote an article in The Jakarta Post a couple weeks ago in which he said Indonesia’s environment and forestry minister Siti Nurbaya had painted an unduly rosy picture of the country’s orangutan population — which is actually declining. Meijaard and the four other scientists who co-wrote the article were accused of discrediting the government.

Oh dear. Anti-vaccine activists have now created a new detox program. It’s designed to “clear viral and vaccine-induced spike proteins from the body.” Of course, it is not possible to “detox” from a vaccine, nonetheless videos and posts about how to take post-vaccine detox baths are trending throughout the internet. The most recent “detox program,” advertised by a pseudoscientific website calling itself “the World Council for Health,” recommends that people take herbs, supplements, and ivermectin, the anti-parasitic drug that is hailed as a cultish cure-all by anti-vaccine devotees. 

WHAT WE’RE WATCHING

Conspiracy theories like QAnon are destroying families and killing people. But Donald Trump is embracing them with fresh vigor. NBC news tells the tragic story of a young woman whose father shot her sister and murdered her mother after he became obsessed with QAnon during the pandemic.

This newsletter is curated by Coda’s senior reporter Isobel Cockerell. Liam Scott and Frankie Vetch contributed to this edition.

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But what happens when you do just want a book — and you happen to want one about vaccines? Chances are, Amazon’s algorithm will serve you up some top recommendations for anti-vaccine propaganda. And if you’re searching for books about cancer, expect a barrage of titles promoting pseudoscientific cancer treatments. 

Amazon has been heavily criticized in the past for selling badly researched, agenda-driven books as science, but it doesn’t appear to have made any difference. 

When I did a search for “vaccines,” a recently published work, The Vaccine Watchman comes up as a top result just below a banner that says “Learn more about COVID-19 vaccines” that links to a CDC website. Despite that disclaimer, a quick perusal of the book’s blurb and introduction brings up claims that the smallpox vaccine is actually more harmful than the disease itself, as well as suggestions that natural remedies are better. 

Other books I found also promoted natural remedies over vaccines. At least half of the top eight featured books in my search results contained anti-vaccine messages or support from authors who have had their medical credentials revoked or are known to spread misinformation and promote conspiracy theories. One book, Turtles All the Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth, a bestseller ranked at the very top of the bestseller list for books about public health administration, was written anonymously. A typical question this book purports to answer is: “Why would researchers want to skew vaccine research, and how could skewed results be promulgated by the scientific community?”

A similar round-up of books graced the top of my search page for books on cancer cures touting alternative medicine and natural remedies, which we have looked at in previous editions of the Infodemic newsletter. 

Marco Zenone, a researcher of public health and misinformation, recently posted on Twitter about books listed on Amazon Marketplace that have co-opted medical terms in their descriptions and titles to appear more legitimate.

Because Amazon self-regulates, they have the power to decide what content they'll keep or remove, and Zenone told me, "Amazon is making money from these products, they have a duty to make sure that the products they sell don't cause harm. And I think, in this case, offering false hope, and fake cancer treatments cause harm, especially to a very vulnerable group."  

When thinking about the harm in having claims like these so easily accessible, writer and researcher David Robert Grimes told me, "The peddling of misinformation is hugely harmful. Medical fictions rely on simple narratives or scaremongering, and as we tend to emote before we reflect, they are extremely difficult to reverse. This is especially amplified in people with low health literacy, who are far more susceptible to such misinformation and more likely to reject conventional medicine."

I asked Amazon why anti-vaccine books and questionable cancer cures were so heavily promoted on their site. An Amazon spokesperson told me the site had strict guidelines about which books could be listed for sale, and “promptly investigate any book when a concern is raised.” 

Amazon's content guidelines include a section on offensive content, which limits the sale of books that include content that promotes abuse, hate speech, or other themes that they deem "inappropriate." The spokesperson did not indicate whether books containing misinformation or pseudoscience violate its guidelines. 

IN GLOBAL NEWS

Sexually transmitted diseases are on the rise. Syphilis rates are the highest they’ve been in 70 years. And last week, the Los Angeles Department of Health confirmed a monkeypox fatality — possibly the first in the U.S. At the same time, conservatives are signing into law bills banning classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, and restricting discussions of certain topics deemed inappropriate for the classroom, including sex and sexuality. And let’s not forget the book bans: in Florida in July, a school board voted to ban two sexual health textbooks from the system’s classrooms. Sex education is a crucial tool for young people to learn about safe sex — but its teachers are being silenced.

A joke TikTok video (I hope) that demonstrated a truly disgusting recipe for chicken marinated in cough syrup, once lived in the fairly obscure recesses of the internet. Then, the FDA issued a warning. Ahem, don’t — repeat don’t — marinate your chicken in Nyquil, it said. The warning went viral, and suddenly the grim concept was all over the web. It is an example of the FDA propelling what was a once unheard of, fringe, joke-recipe for “sleepy chicken” into the mainstream. It’s unknown how many people, if any, have eaten chicken a la Nyquil since 2017, when the video was made. But after the FDA warning, the topic began trending on TikTok with hundreds of Gen-Z teens racing to try the recipe out for themselves. 

Monkeypox has made it to Ukraine. Ukraine has recorded its second case of the virus, with the first appearing just four days earlier on 15 September. Last month, the Kremlin claimed monkeypox could be a secret U.S. bioweapon engineered in military labs. It was the latest addition to a long-running disinformation campaign by Russian authorities, dating back to the Soviet era, that claims America is manufacturing and spreading bioweapons in the form of diseases. Back in the 1980s, Russia claimed — in a propaganda op called “Operation Infektion” — that the U.S. was behind the AIDS crisis. We’re watching closely to see if the Ukraine monkeypox cases will be leveraged as part of this campaign in the Russian media. 

WHAT WE’RE READING 

While healthcare professionals are trying to understand the impact of long Covid, research is still a long way away from determining how widespread long covid is within minority communities. Elaine Shelly writes in The MIT Technology Review how gaps in the healthcare system and implicit biases make it difficult to determine the full extent of a mass disabling crisis.

This newsletter is curated by Coda's senior reporter Isobel Cockerell. Erica Hellerstein and Katia Patin contributed to this edition.

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At the beginning of this year, we heard stories of people starving and sleeping on the streets in quarantined Shanghai. But the lockdown in Xinjiang is even more of a cause for concern. The region, which is home to the Uyghurs and other Turkic, mostly Muslim ethnic groups, has been subject to a years-long crackdown before Covid even came on the scene. As many as a million Uyghurs have been corralled into concentration camps for so-called “re-education,” and now the implementation of Covid restrictions sees millions more imprisoned in their homes. 

There’s usually an almost complete blackout on communications coming out of Xinjiang.

“While everyone in China is afraid to criticize the government, this is particularly true for Uyghur and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, because even the slightest perceived dissent could send one to a political camp or prison,” Yaqiu Wang, a Senior China Researcher at Human Rights Watch, told me. 

But now, Uyghurs are breaking the silence. They’re taking to social media to describe how they’re running out of food, being denied medical care, and collapsing on the streets. At one point, 100 new posts per minute were being uploaded to a hashtag on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, about the Yili region of Xinjiang near the border with Kazakhstan, where conditions seem to be worst of all.

Censorship personnel working for the government have gone into overdrive to quell the outburst. They were directed to “flood” Weibo with unrelated content to try to drown out the dissent, according to a leaked censorship directive published by China Digital Times. “Content may include domestic life, daily parenting, cooking,” the directive read. “But do not touch on the pandemic situation, pandemic volunteers, pandemic prevention policies, etc.”

The Weibo platform has also set Xinjiang’s food and scenery as trending topics to try to drown out cries for help on the site so that anyone searching for news of the lockdown is inundated with noodle shots and tourism tips. Weibo users noticed the sudden inundation of irrelevant recipe posts on the Xinjiang hashtags. “All of today’s food posts are a political task. Everyone knows this, yet they still won’t let us comment,” one person wrote. 

And when the Queen died, eight of 10 of the top topics on Xinjiang then became about the British royal family. “The Queen has saved Weibo,” tweeted China researcher and journalist Chu Yang. 

Things are no better, it seems, in Tibet. Following Xinjiang’s lead, Tibetans have also been breaking their silence and taking to social media to air their frustrations over the zero covid policy. There are reports that the city of Lhasa has been under lockdown for over a month, and those housed in quarantine facilities have posted videos documenting spartan conditions, with rotten food and no one to check on them. A Weibo hashtag on Tibet’s Covid situation has repeatedly surged up the trending topics on Weibo — only to be deprioritized again. 

IN GLOBAL NEWS

We’ve been covering in this newsletter how one Boston hospital, which offers care to transgender youth, has been targeted by vicious death threats and bomb scares from anti-LGBTQ far-right groups. Now this campaign, orchestrated by the extreme right-wing “Libs of TikTok” Twitter page, has a new target in its sights: the American healthcare company Kaiser Permanente, which has been running special Zoom workshops to help transgender kids and their families. The workshops are focused on mental health topics, and helping kids between 12-17 with gender dysphoria navigate their emotions, explore their gender identity, and “learn ways to comfortably express themselves.” A post on Libs of TikTok’s substack falsely claimed that the workshops were being held “without parental consent,” despite the workshops being designed for both parents and kids. “Libs of Tiktok is now pushing misinformation around Kaiser Permanente to stoke another campaign of terror against medical providers,” Harvard Law instructor Alejandra Caraballo tweeted. 

As the cost of living soars amid predictions of energy shortages this winter, there’s a panicked rumor going around in Switzerland, claiming that people will face jail time if they heat their homes higher than 66°F. It’s been published in a number of tabloids and online news sites — and though it’s not true, it’s not entirely false. Plans are being proposed in the country to cap heating temperatures, and potentially issue large fines to those that refuse to comply. Whether they’ll go to jail for three years, though — as the rumors claim — is highly unlikely. The rumors are, it seems, a side-effect of the tense geopolitical situation and the likelihood of gas shortages in the coming months. 

The ripple effects of the Roe v Wade ruling in the United States are being felt in authoritarian-minded countries all over the world. In Hungary, where abortions have been legal since the 1950s, women wanting an abortion will now be forced to listen to the fetus’s heartbeat before going through with the procedure. “The only achievement of this amendment will be that people trying to access abortions will be more traumatized and more stressed,” an Amnesty International representative told the media. Opposition MP Timea Szabo said this week that the government is “banning abortion quietly, without consulting women.” Since the overturning of Roe, we’ve noticed a significant uptick in the amount of abortion-related misinformation online. For instance this week, a tweet by the evangelical American lobby group the Family Research Council tweeted a false claim that “abortion is never medically necessary to save the life of a mother.” The tweet brought in thousands of likes and retweets, and despite numerous doctors weighing in to disprove it, has yet to be removed by Twitter. 

WHAT WE’RE READING 

At an Amazon delivery hub in California, which has been struck by a crippling heatwave, nearly half the Amazon drivers vomited from heat-related illness in recent weeks. For the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Avi-Asher Schapiro writes about how drivers are under huge pressure from Amazon’s strict measures to push themselves to work beyond safe limits — because taking a break, even when your nose is bleeding from being so hot, could affect your “productivity score.”

Rebekah Robinson contributed to this edition.

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Scientists and doctors then chimed in to debunk the misinformation on the thread. Dr. David Robert Grimes, a cancer researcher, was one scientist who responded, challenging some of its claims. “This kind of advice doesn’t help patients, and often shames them needlessly, or drives them to dangerous restrictive diets,” he wrote, describing how “dietary quackery” for cancer is a huge, widespread problem that can push patients into dangerous choices. 

Grimes told me last year that anyone with cancer is especially vulnerable to “snake oil.”

“In those circumstances, even the most sober-headed realist can be taken in by those who promise miraculous cures with no side-effects,” he said.

On the thread, scientists predictably became the targets of attacks, being told to “stop poisoning cancer patients with chemo.” The “alternative” cancer treatment movement is a massive, multi-million dollar industry dealing out false hope. It’s a topic we’ve been tracking at Coda for years — from the global campaign to discredit the HPV vaccine against cervical cancer, to the myriad bogus cancer treatments, such as light therapy and ozone treatments, that are peddled to vulnerable cancer patients and their families.

I’ve written before about Ty and Charlene Bollinger, the former bodybuilder and ex-model who built an empire by promoting unproven cancer treatments, and who held an anti-science “Make America Great Again” freedom rally on January 6, 2021. They believe chemotherapy is “poison” and push vitamin C injections and “vibrational therapy” onto their 22 million viewers. They told me in a statement last year that they’re “pro-science and pro-choice when it comes to cancer treatments and vaccines.” 

There’s a growing movement of scientists and doctors dedicated, like Grimes, to fighting back against this kind of cancer misinformation. A London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine researcher, Marco Zenone, posted a devastating series of screenshots showing comments from people who paid thousands of dollars to check into Mexico’s myriad cancer treatment centers, which sell unproven and unapproved treatments to desperate patients who’ve run out of options. 

“When doctors tell you that your loved one has no chance of living due to cancer,” wrote the daughter of a man who paid over $35,000 for alternative treatments in a Tijuana clinic, “we all just want hope. Unfortunately this place sometimes gives false hope and takes advantage of people who are vulnerable.” Her father went into septic shock and died within a fortnight of starting the alternative treatments.

IN GLOBAL NEWS

Last year, Hungary promised to open a “National Covid Vaccine Factory” by the end of 2022. It’s now September, and construction on the factory has barely progressed — and it’s also shrouded in mystery. Recently the Hungarian government has been opaque about what vaccines will be produced there — simply saying it will be “a vaccine” and the final cost of the factory is unknown. Before the invasion of Ukraine, Hungary’s foreign minister promised to take vaccine cooperation with Russia “to a new level” with domestic production of Russia’s Sputnik shot. But since the war, there’s been silence. Hungary was the first to break ranks with the EU in 2021 to buy Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, a decision that came hand-in-hand with discussions of new, long-term gas shipments from Russia’s Gazprom. It now looks like the war in Ukraine is upending Russian vaccine diplomacy even as Hungary continues to step up its imports of Russian gas.

Staying in Hungary for a moment — last month we brought you news of two meteorologists who were fired by Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government for getting the forecast wrong ahead of a patriotic event. Now weather announcers in Germany and Sweden too are facing a backlash. As Sweden prepares for elections on Sunday, a right-wing MP is accusing weather broadcasters of “climate hysteria,” falsely claiming that announcers are manipulating the graphic design of weather to exaggerate global warming. In Germany, a meteorologist who feels compelled to bring climate change into his forecasts has been facing accusations from climate deniers that he is “secretly campaigning” for the country’s green party. The weather reporter, Ozden Terli, told Politico he believes tracking climate change will increasingly become part of the meteorologist’s daily job. “Perhaps weather reports won’t exist anymore. Maybe we’ll have climate reports instead, with the weather on the side,” he said.Nearly 70% of South Africans oppose trophy hunting, the sport where animals are killed for fun, not food. Participants pay up to $150,000 to take part and bring a “trophy” back home with them. But the South African government has made repeated claims that “regulated and sustainable hunting is an important conservation tool for South Africa.” It’s also a big tourist industry, worth more than $340 million to the country’s economy with South Africa exporting more than 4,000 trophies a year. But the government’s claim that the practice is a helpful conservation tool has been widely disputed by experts. Only a quarter of the species hunted are managed under the national conservation plan, and earlier this year, South Africa announced it would allow the hunting of leopards, endangered elephants, and critically endangered black rhinos. Trophy hunting’s conservation claims made by the government are based on “extremely little evidence,” according to a recent report. 

WHAT WE’RE READING 

If you read one piece this week, make it Merope Mills’s devastating account of losing her daughter in a leading NHS Hospital in Britain, after a litany of shocking mistakes were made by the doctors caring for her. This newsletter champions the voices of doctors and scientists. It celebrates experts and evidence. But, as Mills writes for the Guardian, our blind faith in doctors should have limits. “Educate yourself, ask questions, and, if you are unsure, insist on a second opinion, or a third,” Mills writes. “However indebted you feel to the NHS, don’t be afraid to challenge decisions if you have a good reason to.”

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In China, the inverse is true. The country is experiencing a drought unlike any in living memory. Images of parched and shriveled river basins have been circulating on social media, alongside pictures of ancient Buddhist statues that have been revealed in the Yangtze River as water levels dwindled.

But state media coverage of the climate-related disasters in China has been noticeably light-hearted. In southwest China, where the countryside has been engulfed by wildfires, media coverage has centered on the bravery and heroism of Chinese firefighters and volunteers rather than the damage done and the suffering of people. 

“Critical reporting on the human rights issues associated with the drought can be hardly found on domestic media,” Yaqiu Wang, a Senior China Researcher at Human Rights Watch told me. She said that media coverage has mostly just focused on the government’s “competent” response. People, she added, are also afraid to post about the realities of their experiences on social media, fearing censorship and repercussions from the state. 

Wang described how the Chinese Communist Party is deeply afraid of letting people tell their stories. “The CCP constantly boasts about its efforts in addressing climate change,” she said, but if the media was allowed to report freely on the droughts, “the facade of CCP competence would be torn down.”

Some people, though, have spoken out on Chinese social media.  “Forest fires are raging in Chongqing,” one person wrote, “old people aren't going to survive this hot summer, hospital emergency wards have a constant stream of patients coming in with heatstroke.” Commentators online have also drawn attention to the lack of international coverage of the catastrophe in China, which is now enduring the most severe heat wave ever recorded. 

This lapse in media attention has been dubbed “The Great Silence” by the environmental columnist George Monbiot. Director and screenwriter Adam Mckay tweeted that the lack of coverage of China’s drought was “a failure of communication that can’t be rivaled by anything in human history.” 

Meanwhile, the race is on among climate change deniers to find new and ever more outlandish ways to distort these unprecedented disasters and portray them as just a normal part of the meteorological ebb and flow. For instance, lakes in Switzerland are at their lowest-ever August levels, with boats being evacuated on Lake Constance as the water disappears. But on Facebook, climate deniers drew attention to a drought in the summer of 1540 when the lake also experienced low levels. 

This is a typical tactic among climate conspiracists, who repeatedly dredge up extreme events from the past to claim that climate change is a myth, that what we see around us – in Pakistan, in China, in Switzerland — is just business as usual for the planet.

IN GLOBAL NEWS

A new global conspiracy theory is gaining currency online, exploiting public fear over both Covid and monkeypox to spread yet more vaccine disinformation. This theory asserts that the Pfizer vaccine is the cause of monkeypox. The “evidence” is that every country that has offered the Pfizer injection is now experiencing monkeypox cases. Anti-vaccine activists and conspiracy theorists claim that mRNA vaccines impact immune systems and that an “outbreak of monkeypox after massive covid vaccination campaigns is no coincidence.” The theory appears to be gaining traction in Austria, home to a particularly aggressive, even violent contingent of Covid deniers. It’s also resonant in a number of African countries, where there are better reasons to be suspicious of Pfizer. WHO Africa had to put out a fact-checking video debunking the claim, and reminding viewers, once again, that “correlation does not equal causation.” Related false claims link the Covid vaccine with HIV, too. 

Three years on, millions of long Covid sufferers are still waiting to get their lives back on track. As many as 16 million Americans are still suffering with the condition today, with about a quarter of those people now unable to work, according to a new report by the Brookings Institute.  Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci for the New York Times described how millions of people are running out of money, treatment options and hope. She also found their condition is often treated as “fantasy” by doctors. This collective gaslighting is something we’ve reported on, too — even doctors themselves suffering with long Covid find that their colleagues are dismissing the illness as psychosomatic.  

Police have been investigating a bomb threat at Boston Children’s Hospital, the institution targeted by anti-LGBTQ activists who rally against its treatment program for transgender young people. Police found no explosive device after the hospital was put on temporary lockdown — the culmination of weeks of targeted harassment and abuse against the hospital and its staff. 

WHAT WE’RE READING 

Yangyang Cheng for WIRED describes the “hollow victory” that has occurred after western countries decided to boycott Russian science. Particularly after thousands of scientists have rallied against Putin’s war. Cheng argues the ongoing boycott can only harm the scientific community.

The post Chinese state media’s rosy coverage of the most severe heat wave ever recorded appeared first on Coda Story.

Doctors provide vitamin K injections to newborns as a means of life-saving blood clotting to stop bleeding, which could lead to brain damage and death.

Recently, a Boston pediatrician, Dr. Michael O'Brien, discussed his experience working in a newborn nursery at his hospital. After months working there, he said, he had “met many parents either hesitant about giving their newborn vitamin K, and a few refusing it altogether.”

He wrote a thread on the trend he was seeing amongst parents and caregivers expressing concern about providing their newborns with the injection to prevent a condition known as Vitamin K Deficiency Bleeding (VKDB). 

So, where does this hesitation come from? Something we have been tracking and has become all too common is medical misinformation and distrust of medical professionals. Longstanding issues before the pandemic have continued to be exacerbated by anti-science conversations in the media and among public officials. 

This refusal of vitamin K isn't new, but earlier this year, the American Academy of Pediatrics warned that there had been a recent increase. The AAP also cited a study that found a strong association between parents that refused vitamin K at birth and the hepatitis B vaccine. 

Dr. Alyssa Burgart, board-certified pediatric anesthesiologist and bioethicist, told me, "Anti-vaccine sentiment and vaccine skepticism goes hand-in-hand with people who refuse vitamin K."

She shared that during her medical education, the "natural" health trends in places like California had parents wading through masses of medical misinformation. It has moved beyond small localities and impacted healthcare providers on a national scale. 

"Pediatric practices nationally are experiencing a collective, new and growing 'strained' relationship with many families primarily driven by the 'Anti-Vaccine Industry,'" Dr. Todd Wolynn, a pediatrician committed to combating medical misinformation on social media, told me. "In my opinion,” he added, “this has resulted in most pediatric practices experiencing new and recurrent unease and outright hostility,” especially when it comes to vaccinations and other public health measures.

We see this strained relationship between the public, pediatricians, and the anti-vaccine industry play out with current health crises like tackling monkeypox ahead of going back to school season, the rise of polio in certain parts of the United States, and of course, our ongoing battle with covid. 

Doctors continue to take to their social media platforms to meet those looking for answers where they are and dispel medical misinformation, even if it is one tweet at a time.

IN GLOBAL NEWS

Along with much of Europe, the Czech Republic has suffered devastating wildfires and drought this summer. The country is now facing a reckoning — it has some of the EU’s worst climate policies, and like the wildfires, populist climate skepticism is also out of control. For a moment, it looked like the fires might trigger even the most climate-skeptic politicians to change their mind — the famously conservative Prime Minister, Petr Fiala, a big opponent of the EU’s climate agenda, admitted that the link between the fires and global warming can’t be overlooked. But it’s a blip in the country’s otherwise lack of enthusiasm for supporting climate change policy or the transition to clean energy. The Czech Republic is now holding the rotating EU presidency — which is bringing extra attention to the fact that they are generally reticent on climate change. 

Where did the pandemic start? Anywhere but China, claim papers by Chinese scientists forced to toe the Communist Party line. The official narrative is now that the pandemic didn’t start anywhere within China’s borders — and China is churning out “research” to make that case scientifically. I’ve written about the academic pressures influencing the Chinese scientific paper industry in the past. Overworked doctors and scientists, pushed to produce academic research, can end up resorting to paying so-called “paper-mills” to produce peer-reviewed papers on their behalf, using cloned results that can be found across hundreds — sometimes thousands — of similar research papers. Foreign researchers are not allowed into the country to conduct independent investigations into the virus’s origins, either.

Two Hungarian meteorologists have been fired by the government after they wrongly forecast bad weather, prompting a major patriotic fireworks display to be canceled. The fireworks extravaganza, in celebration of the “thousand year old Hungarian state,” was billed as one of the most lavish in Europe and was due to take place over the weekend. It was then canceled after the head of the country’s forecasting service, Kornelia Radics, along with her deputy, anticipated thunderstorms and strong winds. When their forecast turned out to be wrong, they were summarily dismissed, for “giving misleading information about the extent of the bad weather,” according to Hungarian media. "They couldn't produce the desired weather, they were fired. No, this is not a dictatorship in Central Asia; this is the Hungary of Fidesz," Andras Fekete-Gyor of the opposition Momentum Movement said on Facebook, referring to Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s ruling party. The display will now take place this weekend.

WHAT WE’RE READING 

I’ve been following Economist finance journalist Don Weiland’s Twitter for his chilling and often absurd accounts of traveling in China and coming face-to-face with its grueling covid policies. He’s been beset with phone calls from the police asking if he’s ever had covid, been forced to scan his permissions code upon entry to every service (food, taxi, hospital, even entering his own home). On arrival in Shanghai, he was issued a dense, ten-page list — covered front and back with solid text — of every single high and medium risk area in the country, which he had to sign attesting he hasn’t visited any. “The dangers of techno-authoritarianism are on full display,” he writes of the zero-Covid system. “When we try to total up the cost of China’s zero-Covid machine I think it’s safe to say we’re undercounting.”

This newsletter is curated by Coda’s senior reporter Isobel Cockerell. Katia Patin contributed to this edition.

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As the fish story demonstrates, China’s efforts to curb the virus are increasingly desperate. Last week, China censored DXY, a leading health information platform — which, in the early days of the pandemic, was a go-to resource for tens of millions of people wanting to monitor the spread of the virus. The platform frequently debunks medical misinformation, and is known for being critical of unproven Chinese Traditional Medicine remedies, a key part of the government’s Covid-fighting strategy. The platform has also been targeted in the past by nationalist bloggers, who claim it’s too critical of China’s healthcare system.

Chinese citizens live under constant threat of yet another Covid lockdown. And for those in Shanghai, that prospect is particularly harrowing. Covid is far from a distant memory in the sprawling megalopolis — one district announced it would be deploying drones to inspect neighborhoods and monitor people in the name of “epidemic prevention and control.” If people are seen gathering together, they will be commanded to disperse via a megaphone attached to the drone, while  “ground forces will be linked in real time.”No wonder Shanghai residents are edgy. A video did the rounds on Weibo last week of dozens of people running flat out, fleeing a building in Shanghai last week. People joked it looked like a zombie apocalypse — but the real source of everyone’s terror? An alleged abnormal Covid test result.

IN GLOBAL NEWS

Twitter has facilitated the spread of homophobic monkeypox disinformation, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. When the first children in the U.S. were infected, right-wing commentators suggested they must have been infected by sexual interactions with LGBTQ men. The accusations play on homophobic stereotypes about gay men grooming children and take advantage of the fact that monkeypox is disproportionately affecting the gay community. The disinformation was fueled by Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a known QAnon supporter. She set off a wave of so-called ‘just asking tweets’, by disingenuously asking “If monkeypox is a sexually transmitted disease, why are kids getting it?” As early as May, the UN AIDS program flagged that stigmatizing language about the disease could reinforce anti-gay tropes that hark back to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. That’s now become a reality. “We learn nothing from our history,” Jason Farley, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, told NBC this week. 

A children’s hospital in Boston has been inundated with violent threats and harassment over its care for transgender children and teens. The hospital was already snowed under by right-wing abuse including phone calls and harassing emails after an influencer account called  “Libs of Tiktok,” directed its 1.3 million followers to “doxx” the hospital and target the institution and anyone who works there with abuse. The leading New England hospital runs the first transgender health program for pediatric and adolescent patients in the U.S. Anti-transgender commentators claimed the hospital was mutilating children and providing hysterectomies to young girls. The hospital made a statement on Tuesday denying it performed genital surgeries on patients under the age of 18, and that underage patients were only allowed to receive surgical consultations. The statement did not quell the abuse — and doctors began receiving death threats. Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson then added fuel to the fire, by claiming the hospital was engaging in “the sexual mutilation of children.” “He knows exactly what he’s doing,” tweeted Alejandra Caraballo, an instructor at Harvard’s Cyberlaw clinic. “He’s inciting further violence to carry out his goals of eliminating trans people.”

Actor and entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness website Goop posted a new article last week answering a question on all our lips — why people believe in conspiracy theories. “You may have witnessed it firsthand, watching the viral documentary Plandemic,” the post says, before featuring an interview with Daniel Jolley, a U.K. expert on conspiracy theories. But the very fact that this discussion of conspiracy theories was posted to Goop of all places struck a note of irony with doctors and scientists online — Paltrow’s wellness empire has been slammed in the past for promoting unproven cures and making unsubstantiated medical claims while promoting alternative treatments. Remember Jade-Egg-Gate? In 2017 Goop sold a $66 Jade egg, claiming that when inserted into the vagina, it could improve orgasms and hormonal imbalances. Goop had to cough up a $145,000 fine for making false marketing claims. Commenting on Goop’s coverage of conspiracies, Canadian health law professor Timothy Caulfield tweeted: “Well, Goop, YOU spread and exploit them and legitimize magical thinking. And YOU promote the fearmongering and anti-science ethos that drives conspiracy theories.”

WHAT WE’RE READING 

The Venice Film Festival is coming up. But have you heard of the Prague Film Festival? No? That’s because it doesn’t exist. Chinese propaganda agencies have been inventing fake film festivals and lavishing their own films with awards from them. One such film which won a “Best Documentary Award” at the (fake) Prague Festival was called “Spring, seeing Hong Kong again,” a dewy-eyed look at how the city is apparently recovering from both Covid and political chaos. China Media Project has done a fascinating investigation into China’s propaganda documentaries and their appearances at entirely fake international film festivals. It’s a must-read.  

This newsletter is curated by Coda’s senior reporter Isobel Cockerell. Frankie Vetch contributed to this edition.

The post Drones, PCR testing for fish, Zombie apocalypses — China’s Zero Covid policy limps on appeared first on Coda Story.

These types of articles — lauding China for bringing clean water to rural Cambodia — are relatively common in Chinese and Cambodian state media alike. Ironically, but unsurprisingly, another similarity is what Chinese and Cambodian state media both leave out: the widespread and serious environmental harm that Chinese development has brought to Cambodia. 

Xinhua, for one, has published several articles celebrating China-aided rural water supply projects. One headline reads, “Crystal clear, Cambodians thank China for wells, ponds of healthy water.” Another Xinhua story from 2020 bears the headline, “Chinese clean water project helps improve livelihood in Cambodia’s rural areas.” 

China is indeed supporting clean water initiatives in rural Cambodia, but, to varying degrees, China is also tied to environmentally destructive projects, Alex Gonzalez-Davidson, a co-founder of the environmental group Mother Nature Cambodia, told me. 

Hydroelectric dams are particularly destructive, he said. Most infamously, the development of the massive Lower Sesan 2 dam in Cambodia’s Mekong River Basin has displaced thousands of people. Fishery yields also plummeted. 

Moreover, China is tied to rampant illegal logging, which contributes to deforestation and is also often linked to poaching. Some of these projects have caused Cambodians to lose their land and their livelihoods. 

“Many of them have not treated the environment very seriously,” Ian Baird, a geography professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, told me about these damaging projects. “They haven’t set up robust systems to mitigate impacts or look for alternative plans that would reduce impacts.”

A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. responded to my questions by saying he was “not aware of the details. “But, he added, “China’s projects in other countries have always focused on environmental protection and sustainable development.”

By focusing on the good, state media are likely looking to distract readers from the bad, Gonzalez-Davidson told me. But this kind of media coverage skews what’s happening on the ground, painting an unduly rosy picture over the grim reality, he added. 

Water, the Chinese embassy spokesman said, relentlessly focusing on the good, “is a resource on which people depend for their survival. It is natural that the development of clean water resources benefits people’s livelihood and attracts attention.” 

According to Wisconsin professor Baird, the media reports are not “fabrications, but they’re focusing on certain things, and not on other things. And that’s manipulating people’s understanding of what’s going on.”

It’s hard to say whether this is propaganda in the form of a concerted media campaign. Even if it’s not, this overly positive press still underscores the desires of Chinese and Cambodian elites to forge ahead with development at all costs. The Cambodian public largely opposes Chinese development, according to Gonzalez-Davidson, but these elites want to continue lining their pockets — the environment be damned.

IN GLOBAL NEWS

The anti-vaccine movement is not going away. A video circulating on Facebook alleges that Pfizer’s CEO wants to halve the world’s population by 2023. But it’s just a doctored clip — the video was manipulated and edited to scramble his words. The original video shows that he wants to reduce the number of people unable to afford Pfizer’s medicines. The ripple effects of anti-vaccine conspiracies like these can be seen everywhere — in New York City, where the polio virus may have spread to hundreds of people, the Health Department is begging people to get vaccinated. Disability rights activist and writer Imani Barbarin put it aptly on Twitter this week: “I just saw a TikTok comment considering having ‘monkey pox parties’ in the same way people have had chickenpox parties and I can’t emphasize enough how the anti vax movement will be the death of us.”

Tobacco companies are aggressively promoting their wares to kids in low and middle income countries. They lure children with targeted marketing at the point of sale — a tactic to get around advertising regulations. They push tobacco on kids using ploys like selling cigarettes near playgrounds and schools, offering incentives to retailers to display them near sweets and place advertisements at kids’ eye level. The research, carried out at Johns Hopkins University, concluded that the ‘Big Four’ Tobacco companies all deploy these marketing strategies with a “ specific intention to attract and addict children and youth.” Existing research is clear: if kids are frequently exposed to tobacco marketing from a young age they are more likely to grow up to smoke in the future. Desperate cancer patients in Myanmar are being exploited by charlatans who promise panaceas with traditional medicine. “This drug can completely cure cancer,” reads an advertisement on social media in the country, claiming cancer patients can be immediately revitalized by two doses of an unproven, “traditional” treatment. Frontier magazine looks at the story of one family who fell for the advertisement and traveled to the clinic, only to become more ill. Bogus cancer cure peddlers are not just a problem in Myanmar – you can find them all over Europe, North America and Mexico. I’ve been tracking them for years – they’re the scourge of every oncologist I speak to. Stay tuned as we’ll be covering the issue in upcoming newsletters.

WHAT WE’RE READING 

Lilly Simon, a 33-year-old Brooklynite, has neurofibromatosis type 1, a condition that causes tumors to grow all over her body. She was filmed on the New York City subway without her permission. The video, which claimed Simon had monkeypox, was posted to TikTok where it went viral. She hit back at hysterical TikTok users in a video response – and gave a powerful interview to the New York Times, which we recommend reading. 

This newsletter is curated by Coda’s senior reporter Isobel Cockerell. Erica Hellerstein and  Rebekah Robinson contributed to this edition.

The post China’s destructive development in Cambodia celebrated by state media appeared first on Coda Story.

"If we go down then we go down together," a line from the song “Paris” by the Chainsmokers plays in the background while white-lettered captions pop across the screen. TikTok users of varying ages mouth the words to the song while the captions offer a room to stay in. Others offer to drive those who want to go "camping" if camping is illegal in their state. Some use “camping,” others use “learning to knit,” but the intention is the same.

They're not talking about spending time in nature or taking up a hobby, they're using coded language to help those on the platform who are seeking support to access abortion-related care. 

Using coded language to talk about abortions isn't new. In the 19th century, for instance, newspapers would use a variety of euphemisms and supposed cures to stop menstrual cycles to advertise abortion options. 

There's a growing concern about digital tracking and privacy around abortion access, which has prompted the development of a new coded language. But how effective can such a code be when anyone can access it on an open social media forum, when anyone can see what's being shared and who is sharing this information. 

These videos, shared thousands of times with hundreds of thousands of likes, feature people offering support to help total strangers. While some get swept up in social media trends to demonstrate their support and generate views, many organizations work diligently with resources to provide the support that keeps individuals' privacy and health at the forefront. 

Groups like Apiary for Practical Support, a non-profit that trains volunteers to help support those seeking an abortion, advise prospective volunteers that it can take months to complete a training and vetting process to ensure client safety. Additionally, for those wishing to volunteer housing support, the Apiary’s administrative team cautions that "most organizations will not be able to accept it," to protect individuals' privacy and based on some requirements from clinics to have patients "stay in a particular radius." 

The warnings are not meant to dampen the enthusiasm of volunteers but to show that supporting those seeking abortions is a sensitive, complex task that requires a certain level of training and commitment. A thread on Twitter outlines the risks that could come with trusting strangers with such sensitive information, warning those to do their research before connecting with those who may be "putting their hero complex before your safety."​​

Groups that support communities that need help accessing abortion argue that coded language, however well-intentioned, is less effective than supporting and funding existing networks. An Indigenous Women Rising spokesperson said, "The safety and priority should be focused on the people trying to access the abortion care they need. We can start by destigmatizing the word abortion itself, saying it loudly and proudly and often." 

Check out our additional coverage of abortion content moderation policies from our newsletter and other ways of combatting censorship and disinformation with coded language on social media.

IN GLOBAL NEWS

An Austrian doctor has taken her own life after she became a target of anti-vaccine death threats. Dr. Lisa-Maria Kellermayr, who was 36, had faced months of harassment and threatening letters from extremist campaigners. Kellermayr spoke to us just a few weeks ago. “This is not going to end soon,” she said. “I don’t know if in a few years, I can live a normal life without looking left and right before going out the door.” On Twitter at the end of June, she said her family practice had had to shell out more than $100,000 on security costs after the surgery was inundated with threats, and that the situation was so untenable that she was closing her practice for the time being. Austria is home to a virulent anti-vax community, which became more hardline after Austria became the first country in Europe to make vaccines mandatory — a move which was later scrapped. If you read one thing today, make it Emily Schultheis’s piece about her here, published yesterday. 

Under President Bolsonaro, academics in Brazil are muzzling their own research, terrified of having their funding pulled. Those who study gender, ecology, and biochemistry — among other subjects — are particularly concerned. The government has tightened its grip on the academic sphere by cutting funding to universities on grounds of ideology. In recent years, Bolsonaro has expanded his authority over the appointment of university rectors, while academics have been subjected to criminal investigations after publicly criticizing him. A new study, canvassing over 1,000 Brazilian scientists, found that almost half of academics now restricted the content of their classes to avoid being punished. 

China is, very gradually, opening up to the world again. The Chinese carrier Hainan Airlines announced this week it would resume a route from Beijing to Berlin next week — its fourth intercontinental route since the outbreak of Covid — after Moscow, Belgrade and Brussels. I was interested to note that the China-Russia route was one of the first to open back up, as well as flights to Serbia, which has an ironclad trading relationship with Beijing. The Chinese capital has been kept sealed off from international visitors for years, and guarded with zealous caution. Those flying into China from international destinations have had to first quarantine in third cities like Shanghai before being allowed into Beijing — a policy which has had disastrous consequences for those who then found themselves trapped in Shanghai’s brutal lockdown. 

WHAT WE’RE LISTENING TO 

Amazon is buying primary care organization One Medical in a nearly $4 billion deal, as part of its move to expand its reach into the healthcare industry. Slate’s What Next: TBD podcast discusses the purchase and asks: are they disrupting health care, or just collecting more data?

This newsletter is curated by Coda’s senior reporter Isobel Cockerell. Rebekah Robinson contributed to this edition. 

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It got me thinking about how conversations around climate change and those that deny or minimize its effect have popped up in the media.

According to Erin McAweeney, Director of Analysis at Graphika, a network analysis firm, climate conspiracists have latched onto the global attention on climate issues to push their anti-regulation agenda. 

For instance, Dutch farmers continue to protest over regulations that require cuts to nitrogen emissions. The farmers argue that the policy will adversely impact the Netherlands' agricultural industry by limiting food production. Right-wing media have picked up on these protests to claim that green policies are disrupting livelihoods. Some far-right leaders, like Marine Le Pen in France and former U.S. President Donald Trump, have voiced support for the Dutch farmers’ cause, with Trump even going as far as to describe the situation as “climate tyranny.” 

McAweeney told me that her firm had “noted an uptick in content related to the ‘Great Reset’ throughout covid, and it appears to have converged with these longstanding climate conspiracy theories about governments using these policies for authoritarian control.”

The Netherlands is not the only place reeling from farmers protesting green regulations. Earlier this month, Sri Lankans faced economic devastation, spilling out on the streets in the tens of thousands to force President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to resign. His policy to ban synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, some analysts said, was disastrous, leading to food insecurity and poverty. Climate change deniers have seized on this analysis to argue that Rajapaksa was acting to appease international green lobbies.

Earlier this year, the International Monetary Fund published a paper about how Covid-19 has impacted people's reaction to climate change and policies meant to mitigate its effects. The researchers found that people were "significantly less likely to support green policies when faced with job income loss during the pandemic." It highlights how economic precarity, political panic, and the need to protect livelihoods works to reduce popular support for climate recovery policies.

I asked McAweeney where she sees the future of climate and covid conspiracies going, and she told me that they would “continue to converge under the widening umbrella of the Great Reset, 'anti-globalist' narrative,” especially in the face of newly proposed sustainable policies meant to curb climate change. 

IN GLOBAL NEWS

A landslide win for Japan’s ruling coalition in the recent upper house election has left some scientists concerned that their research could be used in military applications. Following the assassination of former prime minister Shinzo Abe, his party has said it will pursue his vision for Japan by investing in technological research and development, increasing defense spending and eventually rebuilding a muscular and evident Japanese military presence. 

While the war continues in Ukraine and China becomes an ever more assertive super power, Japanese scientists have expressed their unease at their government’s growing attachment and investments in dual-use technologies and research that has obvious if unstated military implications. Coda has previously covered how China weaponizes scientific research to suit geopolitical narratives, particularly the undermining of Japan. 

But for Japanese scientists, long used to Japanese pacifism, there are questions to be answered about dual-use technologies and whether the government will impose data sharing restrictions in the name of national security that make it more difficult to collaborate on research. 

Covid vaccines were linked to new stats on the low number of live births in Germany. The claims shared across Twitter are the latest example of covid vaccine misinformation linked to infertility. The actual data from the Federal Statistical Office does indeed show that the number of live births has decreased in the first quarter of 2022 compared to previous years. But some Twitter users have attributed the low numbers to the campaign to vaccinate young adults. Research continues to indicate that vaccines do not adversely affect fertility. Take a look at Coda’s additional reporting on the power of infertility myths.

YouTube cracks down on abortion-related misinformation. The video platform plans to remove content from its site that promotes attempting at-home abortions or false claims about abortion safety. YouTube continues to target medical misinformation, especially since the Supreme Court decided to roll back its decision on Roe v. Wade. Earlier this month, our Authoritarian Tech newsletter dove into Meta’s content moderation policies around abortion.

WHAT WE’RE READING: 

Immigrant communities were hit particularly hard during the pandemic as many carried out essential work yet were excluded from federal relief plans. A new report from the Migration Policy Institute digs into strategies used by two seemingly disparate communities in Minnesota and Texas that incorporated immigrant families in crisis planning. One key takeaway from their research is to empower culturally competent and trusted volunteers that can help curb misinformation in the community. The researchers hope that their approach can serve as a model for future emergency plans.

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But for some, namely migrant workers who took the brunt of the spring lockdown, the nightmare never ended.

On July 11 an article about a female migrant in Shanghai went viral on WeChat. Afen had arrived in the city just before the lockdown, and since recovering from Covid has been unable to find a job. Her experience is not uncommon, as many job listings on recruitment sites are now indicating that they will not hire people who have tested positive for Covid. Not just recently, but ever. 

With no income, migrant workers are left with nowhere to go but the streets. The plight of Afen, and others like her, garnered widespread sympathy on social media. Even Chinese state media declared that “such practices are outrageous.”

But after two years of excessive restrictions under the state’s Zero-Covid policy, it is no surprise that employers are in a heightened state of panic. There is a realistic fear that just one covid positive employee could send entire teams and offices into isolation. Or even worse that a small cluster of covid positive employees could result in an entire city locking down.

Blame for this atmosphere of fear lies with an authoritarian state that has utilized technology in an unprecedented way in the name of tackling covid. Employers are only able to see which applicants have had covid because of a highly meticulous data collection process run by the state. A collection process that many fear is going beyond the bounds of covid prevention, further entrenching a system of extreme surveillance. 

We also covered the issue of Chinese surveillance in this week's Authoritarian Tech newsletter.

“The institutionalization of covid-prevention technologies is certainly one of the biggest concerns going forward,” Vincent Brussee, an analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, told me over email. “And even if the health codes themselves are at some point disbanded, their underlying location tracking capabilities will almost certainly continue to be used in one form or another.”

Despite the state’s severe policies and repressive crackdowns on speech, examples of dissent have become common. For instance, residents in Beijing were recently allegedly asked to wear an electronic monitoring wristband while in quarantine.

The policy received significant pushback and negative commentary on Weibo, the popular Chinese equivalent to Twitter. City authorities later retrieved the wristbands and put out a statement saying they were not compulsory, leaving some to ponder whether the state had caved in the face of public pressure.

These are small acts of defiance, but they matter. Especially when they lead, however rarely, to tangible results and changes in policy.

IN GLOBAL NEWS

Heatwaves in Europe have been fuelling some wild conspiracy theories on social media. Temperatures soared to as high as 104 F in the U.K., with wildfires tearing through grasslands and destroying homes and shops and cars. Roads and train tracks literally melted in unprecedented heat. Shayan Sardarizadeh, a BBC journalist who monitors conspiracy theories, tweeted that some people have been claiming that coverage of the extreme weather is being used to distract people from the real problem: coronavirus vaccine related deaths. Coda has reported before on the ways in which covid and climate change conspiracy theories overlap. But it is getting harder to deny the impact of climate change as a heatwave wreaks havoc across Europe.

Monkeypox is being branded as a “gay disease” on social media, echoing the homophobia of the 1990s AIDS crisis. Conservative political commentator Matt Walsh lashed out on Twitter at gay men: “If we could be expected to give up our regular lives for a year, and our kids were expected to give up their education, can't we expect gay men to stop having orgies for a few months?” Seemingly his implication was that gay men having sex was the sole cause of the monkeypox spread. But experts have debunked the claim, arguing that simply touching objects or skin contact with sores can cause the disease to spread. Seattle Times columnist Naomi Ishisaka argues that the way monkeypox has been framed by the media is “eerily similar” to the way the AIDS crisis was framed. And once again misinformation about the way the disease spreads risks causing more deaths.

Just two months after admitting covid was present in the country, North Korea has claimed its covid crisis is nearly over. The country had claimed it had managed to contain the disease for two years, but in May declared a national emergency. The World Health Organization doubts the claim that the pariah state is nearing the end of a covid crisis, saying that there is an absence of independent data and that the situation is actually getting worse. Experts warn the state is using the crisis to tighten control on its population. Meanwhile, North Korea has taken aim at its neighbor and archnemesis, South Korea, blaming the spread of the disease on balloons flying over the border; balloons that are in reality carrying supplies to help with the covid emergency. It probably doesn’t help that the balloons are carrying messages criticizing the state.

WHAT WE’RE READING 

Despite being at the forefront of the fight against abortion, Texas offers one of the shortest periods of Medicaid care to pregnant women of any state. The U.S. already has more pregnancy related deaths than any other developed nation, but Texas ranks amongst the worst ten states for maternity mortality. One woman says, “It’s like, ‘Have that baby, but then we’re throwing you to the wolves.’” Pro-Publica’s Lomi Kriel explores the issue in her feature.

The post Homelessness and surveillance: the cost of China’s zero-covid policy appeared first on Coda Story.

“The Threat of Self-Spreading Vaccines” reads the headline of one article that is doing the rounds on social media. It claims scientists are developing a new form of vaccination that requires only a fraction to be inoculated for the vaccine to  spread through the whole population. 

Before we start debunking the actual texts of these pseudoscientific articles, let’s first examine the concept of self-spreading vaccines. It’s the idea that vaccines themselves could be as contagious as the diseases they fight. Researchers are developing self-spreading vaccines for use on wildlife, to enable the spread of the vaccine through a given animal population while only having to vaccinate about 5% of animals. But such vaccines have never been used on humans.

The research into self-spreading vaccines first emerged in the 1980s, when a small number of scientists started thinking of ways to fight viruses at the source — by stopping them spreading among animals, with a mind to stopping animals transmitting these viruses to humans. 

The first and only field trial of transmissible vaccines was conducted in 1999 by José Manuel Sánchez-Vizcaíno who led a team of researchers to Isla del Aire in Spain. The vaccine was tested against two viral diseases in rabbits: Rabbit hemorrhagic disease and myxomatosis. Some 56% of the rabbits developed antibodies to both viruses, indicating that the vaccine had successfully spread.

I asked James Bull, a Professor in Molecular Biology at the University of Texas about this experiment. He noted that “There was nothing to suggest that the vaccine was harmful, but I doubt that the rabbits were studied in such detail that subtle effects would have been identified.”

Either way, due to the lack of interest and funding, the research around transmissible vaccines died out. Until a few years ago, when a small number of scientists, like Bull himself, revived the idea.

Scott Nuismer is a professor at the University of Idaho who conducts mathematical modeling studies of self-spreading vaccines, he has previously worked with Bull on an article that generated major media interest in the subject.

I asked him how close we are to developing safe self-spreading vaccines. He wrote back the following: “My best guess is that it will be at least five years until an effective self-spreading vaccine for ANIMALS can be developed. There are many challenges to making this technology work.”

Nusimer used his caps lock key to make an important point. Anti-vaccine groups are spreading false information that these vaccines are targeted at humans.

Neither Bull nor Nuismer have heard of anyone working on transmittable vaccines for humans. 

In the articles mentioned above, there are two main claims on which the misleading information is based.

One of the articles I came across claims that the "Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is examining this technology for the U.S. military to protect against the West Africa Lassa fever, a virus spread by rats to humans. This project, it should be noted, does not require the consent of our military service men and women."

Bull was a consultant on this project. “The plan is to engineer a rat virus to protect rats from acquiring the Lassa fever virus,” he says. “Humans would not be infected by the vaccine because they are not infected by the rat virus that would be used in the engineering. The rat vaccine has been made and is undergoing cage trials with the rats to see if it works.” He also clarified that this experiment is being done inside contained lab environments with “no chance of the virus getting out.”

Another of the articles claims that "in 2019 the U.K. government began exploring this technology to address seasonal flu. A research paper from Britain’s Department of Health and Social Care advised that university students could be an obvious target group."

Nuismer told me that even though he has seen this being referenced repeatedly on websites spreading disinformation, he has "never seen any actual evidence that this paper actually exists.” Despite the theories proliferating online, there is simply no evidence to suggest that scientists and governments are plotting to use self-spreading vaccines on humans as a covert means to overcome opposition to vaccines.

IN OTHER GLOBAL NEWS

The Shanghai government is calling on citizens to share “heartwarming” stories and photos about the grueling two-month lockdown they endured in the spring. The materials will then form a propaganda exhibition in August. During the lockdown, barely-suppressed fury and indignation at the seemingly endless containment measures flared up on social media. We covered the Shanghai lockdown as it happened — tracking the journey of one man as he made his frightening, desperate escape from the city, where people were starving, sleeping in tunnels, and locked in their homes for weeks on end. The city is currently living in fear of a new lockdown as millions of locals took mandatory tests this week in the sweltering heat, after a single case of the new Omicron subvariant was detected on July 8. 

Russia has triggered a special session of the Biological Weapons Convention, arguing — once again — that the US is running bioweapons labs in former Soviet countries. The decision will force international governments to discuss Russia’s debunked claims, which have formed a longstanding narrative in Russia’s disinformation offensive for years. Russian Channel One recently aired a story propagating a wide array of myths about American labs in Georgia; including the claim that tropical fever cases in Georgia were being spread by mosquitoes bred in a Tbilisi lab. We’ve been investigating this particular narrative for years — check out our story from 2018. Meanwhile, Ukrainian scientists and environmental groups are accusing Russia of “ecocide” — the massive destruction of habitats and biodiversity — and are looking for ways to prosecute Russia under international law for the ecological effects of its invasion. There is an ongoing fear that “the Russian army is trying to ‘poison and burden the civilian population with environmental disasters.’”

A German law firm has pushed out a press release claiming that mRNA vaccines could lead to a completely made-up disease called V-AIDS (Vaccine-Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome). The release was picked up by a leading German press agency, and then automatically disseminated to a number of leading media outlets before they were removed. The claim that Covid vaccines cause immune deficiency has been circling since the outset of the vaccine rollout, with anti-vaccine activists co-opting the AIDS crisis to spread fear and panic about immunization. The crushing irony about it — as we have previously discussed in this newsletter — is that often, anti-vaccine activists are also AIDS deniers, regularly sharing platforms with those who dispute and distort the facts around the disease. 

WHAT WE’RE READING 

Covid bereavement could be its own looming health crisis. In the U.S., more than 9 million people have lost a close relative due to Covid, according to a new investigation by researchers at several U.S. universities. They describe Covid-19 as a “bad” death: “those that involve pain or discomfort and happen in isolation. Their unexpectedness also makes these deaths more distressing.” The collective grief experienced as a result of COVID-19 bereavement increases people’s risk of depression and can make them uniquely vulnerable to mental distress.

This newsletter is curated by Coda’s senior reporter Isobel Cockerell. Frankie Vetch contributed to this edition.

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Crimo, who goes by the stage name “Awake the Rapper,” posted numerous albums on Spotify, YouTube and Apple Music, including those with apparent references to the QAnon movement. The streaming giants have since raced to scrub his music from their platforms. 

QAnon influencers were quick to distance themselves from Crimo. One called TruthHammer888 claimed that the suspect had “liked tons of CDC posts and the vaccines on his Twitter account. He was not one of us.” Experts who study QAnon and conspiracy theory movements said Crimo’s social media diet, while extreme, was distinct from the realm of QAnon. “Our attempts to make it make sense aren’t landing,” tweeted Mike Rothschild, an author who has written books on QAnon and grew up just a few miles away from Highland Park. 

He told me that “the world Crimo lived in was pretty far off Q. He was in a 4chan bubble of ironic Nazi and anime memes, fascist-inspired music, and mass shooter ideation that basically consumes nothing but irony and sadness.” He explained that this nihilistic media diet exists on a different plane to QAnon which is “ultimately a hopeful movement that claims once the evildoers are done away with, we’ll live in a free and safe world.” 

A pseudoscience narrative has also emerged in the fallout of the shooting. On Tucker Carlson’s nightly Fox News show, the presenter claimed Crimo was likely “numbed by the endless psychotropic drugs that are handed out at every school in the country by crackpots posing as ‘counselors.’” Carlson was echoing the opinions of a movement aimed at denouncing psychiatry, according to David Gorski, a surgeon and scientist who has devoted his career to exposing anti-science misinformation. “It’s long been a quack anti-psychiatry trope to blame mass shootings on psych meds without evidence,” he tweeted. It happened after the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, when anti-vaccine and anti-science activists said “big pharma” was to blame for the mass shooting. The shooter Adam Lanza, they said, was “likely on meds.” “Gun control? We need medication control!” said anti-vaccine blogger and pseudoscience entrepreneur Mike Adams at the time. 

“One of the more odious byproducts of mental illness denial is a depressing eagerness among the anti-psychiatry quack crowd to leap on any mass murder that occurs as an excuse to blame the crime on psychiatric medications,” Gorski wrote in a blogpost after Sandy Hook. Now, a decade later, the same thing is happening again –– all too predictably. 

IN GLOBAL NEWS

Dandong, a Chinese city bordering North Korea, has been under intermittent –– though seemingly interminable –– lockdown since April 25. The municipal government prefers to use the euphemism “static management” to describe the state of the city, which is characterized by pandemic overreach, manipulation, and abuse, according to the China Digital Times. The lengthy lockdown has led to a number of clashes between residents and pandemic policy enforcers, as well as between different authorities themselves. The situation in Dandong underscores the central government’s strict COVID-19 policies around the country — and it may prompt a mass migration from the city when the lockdown ends.

In just 12 months, Latin America went from being a “symbol of pandemic failure” to having higher vaccination rates than many industrialized countries. This success is largely due to public trust, writes Inter-American Development Bank president Mauricio Claver-Carone in the Americas Quarterly. “Despite a torrent of misinformation on social media, highly polarized politics and surveys that indicate nine out of 10 people in the region distrust each other, Latin Americans showed relatively low levels of vaccine hesitancy,” which Claver-Carone attributes to decades-long vaccination programs in many of the region’s countries. While vaccination rates rose, so did the volume of the region’s drug trade. A recent United Nations report found that the pandemic hardly hurt Latin America’s drug trade. If anything, it thrived.

The U.S. must be held financially accountable for the millions of sick and dead from Covid-19 around the world. That’s what the speaker of Russia’s Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, announced this week on his Telegram channel. Volodin blames U.S. military biolabs for creating the virus and declared that “the United States is obliged to compensate for the losses incurred” and shut its labs down, giving more fuel to the popular conspiracy theory that coronavirus was released by the U.S. military.

WHAT WE’RE READING

What Can Menstrual Blood Teach us about Health and Disease? A biomedical researcher, Christine Metz, is investigating whether samples of menstrual blood can be used to test for conditions like endometriosis. When she started out, she was met with resistance and stigma from her colleagues. “There was definitely a ‘yuck’ factor,” she told Undark Magazine.

 Liam Scott, Erica Hellerstein and Katia Patin contributed to this week's Infodemic.

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