6.5.2022

The nostalgic propaganda that does not know history

Lataus käynnissä: 117533/117533 tavua ladattu.

Russia is running a vicious propaganda war to support its recent extended invasion in Ukraine. Second World War myths are repeated over and over again.

But Russian propaganda makers are remarkably poor in knowing their own history, or even recognizing what is Russian and what is not.

The samples are simply astonishing.

Here's the День Победы poster:

Kuva 

Soviet hero? No: a U.S. Marine fighting in Guam. You can probably figure out the Pacific location from the palm trees, and the weapon is not an SKS, it's an M2 carbine.

Kuva 

But this is nothing new.  Previous poster innovations include this one from 2020:

Kuva

 

This was not a Soviet soldier either - it's a Finnish official war photo from SA-Kuva, the man in picture is Klemet Halonen, photographed by Oswald Hedenström on 4.5.1944, carrying a KP/31 "Suomi" submachine gun.

http://sa-kuva.fi/static/50/27/145027_r500.jpg
 

The man's son was even found for an interview.

Or these brave Soviet pilots?

Kuva

 They are, of course, from a Heinkel He-111 crew attacking in Battle of Britain.



This pair of war veterans, used in TV broadcast on 9.5.2022, was... Bonnie and Clyde. 










But perhaps the most bizarre selection was for the Tobolsk war memorial, where the engraved soldier was a picture of... Werner Goldberg, who was in 1939 described as "the ideal German soldier" by Berliner Tagesblatt.





A similar blunder was that of the fiercely antisemitic Nazis already back in 1939 - the "ideal German soldier" was Jewish.

So what can we conclude? Russia is obsessed with its past heroism, but  does not know it. It is a legend that they think they are repeating, but now they are instead becoming a mirror image of the Nazis they say they are fighting. They do not know or understand the huge role of American help in their fight - T-34's were made of American steel and Russian logistics ran on American-supplied trucks and locomotives.

Russia did not face its past when USSR was dissolved in 1990's. There was no lustration. The old chekist structures picked up and continued and started to build another monster, even more mad if possible but also more corrupt.

And therefore, Russia is doomed to ridiculous failure. With nuclear weapons, it may become the failure of the whole mankind, but there is no Russian glory there. Just shame, shame, shame.

9.1.2022

The snake oil salesmen: ivermectin

 Social media is rife with bogus claims about ivermectin being used to treat covid-19.

TL;DR:

Japan

It is often claimed that Japan's good covid situation is because they use ivermectin. They don't. The list of accepted covid medications is listen on the Web pages of Japan's Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency (PMDA). https://www.pmda.go.jp/english/about-pmda/0002.html

Ivermectin is not there.

This is explained in plaintext by Japan Times:

"The drug, used globally to treat parasitic worms and skin conditions, has not been officially approved for use to treat COVID-19 in Japan, the U.S. or most countries in Europe. The health ministry says the drug should be used only in clinical trials in Japan. The use of potentially unsafe imported medications, which may be counterfeit or adulterated, is not subject to compensation provided by Japan’s drug regulator should any serious health problems arise."

The claims about Japan's use of ivermectin are usually based on one interview by one doctor in winter 2021, proposing its use. That's just one person, and you can find persons with silly ideas everywhere. 

Instead, Japan does use the well-proven methods:


 

India

India's declining death figures in mid-2021 have also been attributed to ivermectin. And India actually did promote ivermectin in early 2021. But the Indian authorities did follow up, and as case and death numbers were rising in spring 2021, the Union Health Ministry and Family Welfare's directorate general of health services (DGHS) revised guidelines to stop the use of Ivermectin in Covid-19 treatment at the end of May. The guidelines are available at DGHS pages.

The sharp fall in covid deaths in India happened after ivermectin was dropped by DGHS, although it is to be noted that both the registration and reporting of all deaths in India is not working very well, Indian death totals are undetermined, and statistics may be incomplete simply because bureaucracy is overloaded. 


Bottom line: don't use India as an example. The Indian authorities are not stupid and they are not promoting ivermectin. India is a developing country with incomplete statistics, so comparisons to OECD countries are not very relevant.

Instead, what India does is vaccinate the population. They are soon about to overtake the United States in coverage of first doses - despite having a much larger proportion of child population who is currently ineligible for vaccination. Think about that. The U.S. is about to fall behind developing countries.



Examples

Proponents of Ivermectin send screen shots (sometimes forged) of statistics and use pictures of ivermectin kits from India as evidence. But what do those kits actually say? This is one such kit:



But what does that instruction actually say? It says "ivermectin has been demonstrated to inhibit the replicating potential of SARS-COV-2 in cell culture system".

"Cell culture system" means "in vitro", in a petri dish. It's not "in humans".

Of course a substance can inhibit the replication of a virus in vitro; it can even kill it. Re regular bleach kills the virus in vitro. But don't inject bleach.

Not also that the box has a text: "For export only". Why? Because the seller knows it's not good for domestic consumption and is not approved for use. So this is a disclaimer to get off the hook while continuing to sell a parasite medicine to stop a virus for which it does not work.

The actual picture should be:




But it's a Big Pharma stopping IVM!

Conspiracy theorists claim that all the health authorities in all countries of the world have been bribed or pressured by Big Pharma companies so that they can sell covid vaccines.

But a vaccine dose is in between $2 to $20, while the alternative treatments proposed by vaccine opponents, e.g. monoclonal antibodies, can cost $500 to $5000 per treatment. Now which one is the better business? Obviously, drug companies make a lot more money per patient if they sell Ronapreve at $2700 per dose.

And while cheap ivermectin has not been shown to work against covid, another cheap generic drug, dexamethasone, is in the list of drugs to be used in many countries.  Why was it not stopped by the said Big Pharma conspiracy? It's because conspiracies don't work. It's because dexamethasone does work - not a miracle drug, but helps in some cases.


10.9.2021

The Gibraltar infections

 Gibraltar is often used as an example "look at the statistics, covid vaccinations do not work".

The data is misused grossly out of context.

Gibraltar has not vaccinated 100 % of its population, although such claims are common. no country or region has. They have given 79 000 vaccine doses to 35 000 people, but one needs to understand:

  • Gibraltar has a population of 34 000 (2020, according to Wikipedia)
  • there are about 13 000 commuters who come to work each day from Spain (according to LaingBouisson)
  • In normal times, there are about 30 000 tourists arriving each day (according to Statista). During epidemic this number is smaller, but Gibraltar still lives out of tourism. 
  • But there is covid testing, and infections are recorded.

 Thus, if you divide number of infections per day in Gibraltar with the number of permanent residents, you are making an irrelevant arithmetic operation. 

11.3.2021

Myths about Pandemrix and narcolepsy

 A common theme among Finnish anti-vaxxers is to exaggerate the risk of narcolepsy that followed the 2010 Pandemrix campaign against swine flu.

"Many people got narcolepsy", they claim. What are the actual numbers?

Before the Pandemrix campaign, in the previous year, 61 people got narcolepsy.

The swine flu jab was given to 2.7 million people.

In the following year, 109 people got narcolepsy. The difference was 48 persons, i.e. 0.0018 % of the number of vaccinated people.

At the same time, the vaccine prevented 80 000 infections and about 50 deaths, according to an article in Terveyskirjasto, published by Finnish association of physicians Duodecim. Those who would have got the influenza would also have had an increased risk of narcolepsy, because the autoimmune reaction was caused by a protein in the virus itself.

Thus, the vaccine prevented more deaths than narcolepsy increased. Which is worse? Death, of course. Even a failed vaccine campaign was better than no campaign.

----


Sama suomeksi:

Rokotevastaiset tahot levittävät myyttejä ja liioittelavat vuoden 2010 Pandemrix-rokotteiden sivuvaikutuksia, väittäen että se aiheutti paljon narkolepsiaa.

Narkolepsian on saanut huomattavan harva. Ennen Pandemrix-rokotuskampanjaa narkolepsiaan sairastui 61 henkilöä vuoden aikana, rokotusten jälkeen vuonna 2010 sairastui 109 henkilöä. Rokotteen sai 2,7 miljoonaa ihmistä. Ero siis on 48 henkilöä, eli noin 0,0018 % rokotetuista.

Samaan aikaan rokote esti 80 000 tartuntaa ja viitisenkymmentä kuolemantapausta. Tartunnan saaneilla olisi myöskin ollut narkolepsiariski, koska sitä aiheutti itse viruksen proteiini.

Rokote siis esti enemmän kuolemia kuin narkolepsia lisääntyi. Kumpi on pahempi, kuolema vai narkolepsia?

Tietenkin kuolema. Epäonnistuessaankin Pandemrix-kampanja oli parempi kuin ei kampanjaa.

24.1.2021

Covid myths and science


I'll collect here some of the silly claims about covid crisis, actions against it, and how to respond to these claims with science and facts.

Contents include debunking claims about things:

COVID

About the virus itself:

"It's just a flu"

No, it is not. It is much more dangerous. Let's trust established epidemic experts. Johns Hopkins explains:

Since December 2019, COVID-19 has killed more people in the U.S. than influenza has in the last five years. 

Influenza is a significant burden on the population, but COVID-19 has had a vastly larger effect.

https://www.jhsph.edu/covid-19/articles/no-covid-19-is-not-the-flu.html

"It only kills old people who would have died anyway"

This claim is often made in the form "the median age of those who died with covid is 84 years and life expectancy is 84 years, so they would have anyway died this year."

No. People who say this do not understand the concept of life expectancy. When we say that the life expectancy in our country is 84 years, it's the life expectancy at birth. But the life expectancy of someone who has lived to 84 years is not 84 years; it is considerably higher. If someone has survived to the old age of 85, we can expect them to live 6 more years. (5 for men, 7 for women). So life expectancy is 91.

This statistics is from Helsinki; rest of Finland has slightly higher life expectancies. Other West European countries are similar.


But how many life years were actually lost to one covid death? There are many studies that produce slightly different results, but usually the outcome is that a covid death shortens the life of the patient by about 10 years. The keywords for finding more information is "years of life lost to covid".


"The figures are wrong because they show death with covid, not of covid" 

Wrong. Research on autopsies done on people who died of covid in Berlin and Hamburg, and many other places, show that with the vast majority of those who died with a covid diagnosis, the infection was a directly contributing factor to their death. 

It was not decisive in all cases, but in >90 % it was. The patients often also had other diseases or conditions, but the decisiveness means: if they hadn't had the infection, they wouldn't have died. Autopsies reveal damage not just in lungs, but in many internal organs. The most usual "pre-existing condition" is obesity, which is very common in Western world.

This is also demonstrated by the huge excess mortality in many places. For instance in New York, the excess mortality is higher than the number of registered covid deaths.

Reported by New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/14/us/covid-19-death-toll.html

Moreover, we are going to have situations where hospitals are so full with covid patients that they have to turn down other patients, e.g. traffic accident victims. So shall we then say that because John did not get inside the hospital due to the hospital overload, and died, he died of covid although he did not die with covid?


"Infection rates come from population density"

Not really. This is just a fatalistic excuse. There is no clear recognizeable pattern that would show higher population density produces higher covid infections. If you put the numbers on a graph, the result is basically a shotgun shot: no trendline.



"The fear is worse than the virus"

Get real. Paul Coelho quotes are irritating, and this is beyond ridiculous.


Sweden

Perhaps the most strange phenomenon is that American Trumpsters have taken Sweden, a "socialist" feminist-run country, as their idol. "Look at Sweden! No restrictions! No increase in mortality!"

These claims are of course rubbish. Compared to its neighbours and traditional reference group, Sweden has done not well at all. This picture is from Our World In Data, which has reliable, easy-to-use grapsh about pandemic data.



"Sweden has no increase in mortality despite covid"

Not true. It has substantial excess mortality. The claim about normal mortality is usually presented with statistics screenshots that are either home-cooked and faked, or taken before end of 2020 from statistics aggregation sites like Statista, which have defective or imcomplete data.

A common claim is to use a screenshot from Statista with data "as of 18.12." and say it has practically all of year 2020 deaths. It does not. It's missing practically all of December, almost 10 % of mortality, because death statistics in Sweden are backdated to the actual date of death and arrive with a 2-3 week delay.

In reality, Sweden had 7.5 % higher crude mortality in 2020 than in 2015-2019. The source of this data is SCB, Sweden's central statistics bureau: https://www.scb.se/om-scb/nyheter-och-pressmeddelanden/scb-publicerar-preliminar-statistik-over-doda-i-sverige/




The Excel even has a plot for how deaths in 2020 compare to 2015-2019. Here I have emphasized the 7-day rolling average trendline:

You see how the excess mortality weeks and months match with the reported covid death weeks and months.

The next trick is to say "when you calculate population increase, mortality has not increased". But that is not true either. Here is mortality per 1000 population, and the data used for calculating it - and 2020 makes a substantial break in a decreasing trend. Note that the mortality figures are fetched 18.1.2021 so there will yet be a slight increase when more deaths from 2020 are taken to records.
 



Excess mortality can be compared between different countries in Euromomo:

Germany

Same arguments have been made with Germany, "no excess mortality". That is not true either.  Deaths and excess mortality in Germany can be conveniently seen in the data of destatis:

https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Cross-Section/Corona/Society/population_death.html

This demonstrates that currently (week 3 of 2021) there are almost 6000 more deaths per week than usual. That's 30 % more than usual.

Public Health England maintains an informative page that shows the registered covid mortality and excess total mortality. 



Russia

In Russia, excess mortality was reported at 230 000 people, already before the end of the year. The excess mortality in Russia is 13 %, and is six times higher than the recorded covid deaths. 

In 2020, Russia's population declined by half a million. Covid deaths account for half of this.

"There were no restrictions in Sweden"

Not true. There have been many restrictions in Sweden. Public gatherings forbidden, concerts cancelled, amusement parks closed all summer, restaurant opening times shortened and alcohol serving limited.

Typically, the restrictions were similar to neighbour countries but were initiated later and lasted longer. In fact, Sweden's covid actions have mostly been more stringent than in neighbours - they just started later as shown by the OWID Stringency index.

The list of restrictions and what is forbidden is currently (as of Jan 24, 2021) listed here:
https://www.krisinformation.se/detta-kan-handa/handelser-och-storningar/20192/myndigheterna-om-det-nya-coronaviruset/restriktioner-och-forbud


The restrictions include currently (24.1.2021):

  • Public gatherings of more than 8 people are forbidden - this applies to demonstrations, lections, religious activities, theater, cinema, concerts, and similar.
  • Private gatherings of more than 8 people in rented premises are forbidden, with exception for funerals where 20 people are allowed
    • Punishment for breaking these rules can be up to 6 months prison
  • Shops, gyms and sports facilities may not admit more than 1 person per 10 m² of space.
    • Schools and public transport are exempt.
  • Restaurants may only seat 4 people in one table; other restrictions apply
  • Alcohol may not be served after 8PM
  • Travelling to and from many foreign destinations is forbidden, except for re-entry of citizens
  •  It's forbidden to visit old people's homes.

In many areas, Sweden's restrictions have been more harsh than at neighbours; for instance, the amusement parks like Gröna Lund and Liseberg were closed all of 2020. In Finland, Linnanmäki and Särkänniemi were open, although with reduced capacity - which by the way actually made visiting them more enjoyable because you did not need to wait in queues.


Vaccines

There are also lot of myths spread about vaccines. 

"The vaccines do not prevent infection"

This is silly. The vaccines do not prevent infections 100%. They prevent them at a rate which is called efficacy, which is about 95 % for Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. And even for the remaining 5 % who do get an infection, they get it milder and usually avoid the severest form of disease.

In Israel, where the vaccinations are most advanced, we can now see clearly that the vaccinated population is having fewer infections and hospitalisations - and this will mean fewer deaths and injuries.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-sees-60-drop-in-hospitalizations-for-over-60s-in-weeks-after-vaccination/

"The vaccines do not prevent people from infecting others"

Again, this is silly. We just don't have much evidence on this yet. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

It is likely that the vaccines will reduce transmissions of the disease. We just don't have the evidence yet. We'll see it soon. Vaccines do not neet to completely eliminate transmission to help curb the pandemic.

And a BBC article from early February indicates that the AstraZeneca vaccine reduces transmission substantially.

"Many people have died after taking the vaccine"

That's just a bad-faith distraction. The vaccine doesn't make people immortal. They can still die of other causes. People may even die of covid, because as mentioned, the vaccine efficacy is not 100 %, it is only 95 % and some people may have contracted the disease already before they were vaccinated. Even though vaccinated people have a milder disease on average, some people might still die.

These meme says it:


Co-incidence in time is not same as cause and effect. If every Finn were today "vaccinated" with a saline solution - which does nothing - then during the next 4 months
- 16438 will get pneumonia
- 17736 will die
- 25 will get Guilllain-Barre syndrome
- 53 children under 15 will get cancer diagnosis
- 16 will be found with narcolepsy
- people will fall ill with other sicknesses
- autism spectrum will be more common than in 2010

None of this is caused by vaccines. 

It is probably sensible to not vaccinate those who are extremely sick already, because the mild symptoms of immune response building up may weaken them, and this could indeed kill someone. But this impacts only the very small number of people who are at risk of immediate death. Others should get the vaccine, after assessing for risk factors.

Restrictions and actions

"Restrictions destroy the economy!" 

No, they don't. The current pandemic repeats the learning from 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, where cities and regions that acted more robustly had stronger economic recovery after the pandemic was over. Economy is distracted by people not wanting to get sick. This has an impact that is at least as large as the impact of restrictions.

MIT has a good report on this: https://news.mit.edu/2020/pandemic-health-response-economic-recovery-0401

"Restrictions kill more people than the pandemic. People commit suicides!"

No, they don't. The data is not very conclusive, and there are some reports that suicides would have increased in some places during the pandemic or lockdown actions. But British Medical Journal summarizes it like this: 

A reasonably consistent picture is beginning to emerge from high income countries. Reports suggest either no rise in suicide rates (Massachusetts, USA; Victoria, Australia; England) or a fall (Japan, Norway) in the early months of the pandemic. The picture is much less clear in low income countries, where the safety nets available in better resourced settings may be lacking. News reports of police data from Nepal suggest a rise in suicides, whereas an analysis of data from Peru suggests the opposite.

Any change in the risk of suicide associated with covid-19 is likely to be dynamic. The 20% decrease in Japan early in the pandemic seemed to reverse in August, when a 7.7% rise was reported. Evidence from previous epidemics suggests a short term decrease in suicide can occur initially—possibly linked to a “honeymoon period” or “pulling together” phenomenon.

https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4352

This is not so strange. Suicide rates often decrease at hard times, e.g. during wars.

"Countries that have women leaders are performing better under the pandemic"

This myth, spread by think-tanks and feminist-posing politicians, is bunk. The gender of a country's leader is not related to how well the country is going through the pandemic. Some of the well-performing countries have had women leaders. But so had Belgium. 

The claims are not supported by solid science. They are supported by cherry-picking. There are no statistically significant differences in mortality etc between countries lead by women and men.

This study is the first to comprehensively address the roles of women leaders and women legislators in mitigating the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic. Similar to Bosancianu et al., we find that there are no differences in reported fatalities between women-led and men-led countries.

 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0244531

"Masks don't protect you, the virus is small, mask cannot filter all viruses"

Masks do ne need to be perfect to be useful. It's all about the viral load. Doses are important. To help slow own and stop the pandemic, the mask does not need to stop all virus particles. If it can reduce the load, it can give the body of an exposed person the possibility to withstand the attack. Many doctors and other health care professionals who have died of covid have been exposed to very large doses of the virus. Lacking personal protection equipment is a big risk for health care professionals.  

Masks are also not there just for protecting the wearer. The more significant impact is that it protects others. Covid disease spreads often via asymptomatic transmitters. People who have been infected but do not have symptoms (yet, or will not even get them). Mask reduces the risk of transmitting the virus to others.

Better masks (FFP2) are better than cheap surgical masks, but even the cheapest masks help.

"Wear the mask if you want, I won't"

Because the mass protect both ways, it is important that all use them. That reduces the risk of cantagion much more than just one person wearing a mask. So if you don't want to wear a mask, stay home, do not risk others.

The masks work, but they are not infallible. 



15.4.2020

Was Dr. Guillotine guillotined?

A popular meme says that Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotine invented the execution device for the French king, and then the king tested it on the doctor himself, who did not need payment because the machine was effective.

However, this story is not true. Dr. Guillotine did not invent the machine.

He was a member of the Estates-General Assembly, and as a humanist he proposed a more egalitarian form of execution -- before that, the noblemen were executed by sword and others were hanged, both of which methods the French executioners often botched, apparently not having enough practise with the sword and not having a well-researched Official Table of Drops. But in fact Dr. Guillotine was opposed to the death penalty.

The actual "guillotine" machine was designed by a man called Tobias Schmidt. Doesn't that sound very German? Always causing trouble for the French.

After the revolution, Dr. Guillotine resumed his medical profession, studied the works of Edward Jenner and became the President of the Committee for Vaccination in Paris.