Nothing new from me at the Athletic this week as I’m still dealing with an illness in the family, but I hope to have my next piece up on Thursday of this upcoming week.
I reviewed the board game adaptation of Red Rising for Paste this week, and also reviewed the book from which the game is derived.
I created a T-shirt celebrating the #umpshow to raise money to help Afghan refugees who are settling in the Wilmington area. Proceeds will go to Jewish Family Services of Delaware – they’re aware a donation is coming – and possibly a second group depending on how best we can help. We’re over $650 raised through T-shirt sales, not counting the handful of you who’ve donated directly to JFSD, so thanks to all of you who’ve bought the shirt or donated.
On The Keith Law Show this week, I spoke to CHVRCHES’ Lauren Mayberry about their new album, Screen Violence, which came out yesterday; as well as the toxic environment of social media, working with Robert Smith, and more. You can (and should!) subscribe on iTunes and Spotify. I also appeared as usual on the Friday edition of the Athletic Baseball Daily show.
I’ll be back with an email newsletter and I hope a chat this upcoming week. And don’t forget that my second book The Inside Game is now out in paperback.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: R.J. Anderson reports on the pushback and near-strike that took place after MLB pushed changes on the Atlantic League, particularly the choice to move the pitcher’s mound back a foot.
- The New Yorker profiled my colleague Katie Strang, who has become the industry’s leading writer on athletes and coaches accused of domestic violence or sexual assault.
- Dr. J. Stacey Klutts, a clinical associate professor of pathology and clinical microbiology at the University of Iowa, wrote a great primer on what we know now about the Delta variant. The Des Moines Register should have asked him to write an editorial, not the unqualified grad student and COVID-19 minimizer they invited instead.
- STAT reports on the complete lack of evidence that Ivermectin is effective against COVID-19. It’s all junk studies and anecdotal reports.
- Dr. Doreen Dodgen-Magee explains why it’s so hard to get people to back down from their misinformed beliefs: commitment bias.
- This April piece from McGill University’s Office for Science and Society exposes RFK Jr. for the dangerous anti-vaccine charlatan he truly is.
- Many professors are leaving their jobs rather than teach in-person, especially at schools that won’t require masks or vaccines. Some schools are, of course, prevented from issuing such mandates because of the death cult running their states.
- More U.S. police officers died of COVID-19 in 2020 than from all other causes combined. Yet I keep seeing reports of officers and even union chapters fighting vaccine mandates.
- A new lawsuit accusing Horatio Sanz of grooming and abusing a teenage girl that names him, Saturday Night Live, and NBC may blow the lid off a bigger story about the culture on that show and impugn other cast members from that time, notably Jimmy Fallon.
- Louise Godbold, who identifies herself as a “Harvey Weinstein survivor,” wishes media outlets would stop asking her the same questions about what should happen to the serial rapist and sexual abuser.
- The BBC has the story of a former Angolan child soldier who survived a near-fatal shooting to his head and is now a popular restaurant manager in London.
- Facebook refused two Representatives’ request for more information on the company’s (minimal) efforts to fight COVID-19 misinformation on its platform. I found multiple groups dedicated to the deworming drug Ivermectin, including at least two that purport to help people get prescriptions for it, active on Facebook just this week. Reporting them has had no apparent effect.
- The school board in Waukesha, Wisconsin, hometown of Jarred Kelenic, turned down state funding for free lunches because people might get “spoiled” by it.
- Board game news: The Price of Coal, a board game about coal mining and labor rights, is just about to hit its funding goal over at Kickstarter.
- Eagle-Gryphon Games has brought us a new(ish) title from the late designer Sid Sackson, combining elements of his games The Great Race and Can’t Stop into Route 66 The Mother Road, now on Kickstarter and already well past its funding goal.
As a public school teacher, pretty appalled that we have districts turning down the opportunity to give students *checks notes* food. It’s not like school lunches are steak and lobster. We don’t exactly give students the best school lunches in this country as is, and it’s awfully hard for hungry students to learn.
Students in my district start in person on Monday. Of course, we don’t have an insane governor, so masks are required of all students. I feel pretty good about classroom safety. Lunch is the cafeteria may be another matter…
If you trust the CDC, masks in schools accomplish nothing. That’s per the CDC study of roughly 100,000 elementary school students from last November/December.
Here’s a link to an article from one week ago: https://tallahasseereports.com/2021/08/22/report-cdc-downplayed-scientific-finding-that-masks-are-not-effective-in-schools/
In it you will see that the CDC study found that mask mandates in schools achieve nothing positive for student health.
But the real punchline to the story is that the CDC themselves elected NOT to publicize their own findings re students and masks, NOT to include it in the study summary. It took New York Magazine to bring this study and its results to people’s attention.
There’s a reason that most of Europe does not require masks for students. Europe isn’t anti-child or anti-science. And they are not insane.
This country is so messed up. The people on the Right hates vaccines and masks, while those on the Left love them both. Well, the fact is, vaccines are great and save lives. But masks are useless at best, and maybe much worse, both physically and psychologically (esp. for children) if imposed for a protracted period of time.
That is not what the study says. It’s just wrong.
This is from the study, however, and I encourage everyone to read the original paper rather than these inaccurate summaries:
Your claim that “masks are useless at best” is not supported by evidence, and comparing that to vaccines is a false (inverse) analogy.
“A year ago, I said, ‘Masks are not the end of the world; why not just wear a mask?’” said Elissa Schechter-Perkins, the director of Emergency Medicine Infectious Disease Management at Boston Medical Center. “But the world has changed, there are real downsides to masking children for this long, with no known end date, and without any clear upside.”
She continued, “I’m not aware of any studies that show conclusively that kids wearing masks in schools has any effect on their own morbidity or mortality or on the hospitalization or death rate in the community around them.”
With regards to the Delta variant, Schecter-Perkins said, “I don’t think that Delta changes the calculus because it still seems clear that it doesn’t cause more severe disease, so it still doesn’t change the fundamental question of ‘What are we trying to achieve by masking kids when they are still extremely unlikely to suffer from severe illness or death if infected?’ And the adults in their lives have the opportunity to be vaccinated and also protected so we don’t need to worry about transmission.”
The above is one of the salient quotes from prominent healthcare professionals in the article. Again, the full article, which also links to the New York Magazine expose: https://tallahasseereports.com/2021/08/22/report-cdc-downplayed-scientific-finding-that-masks-are-not-effective-in-schools/
Maybe the director of Emergency Medicine Infectious Disease Management at Boston Medical Center is underinformed. Maybe there really IS a study that shows that kids wearing masks in schools has some value.
Care to provide a link to such a study, Keith?
I did provide a link to such a study, and rather than read it, you’re quoting other articles that misinterpreted it. Here’s another. Here’s a list of studies on masks’ effectiveness, not limited to children. What we do not have is an actual study showing that masks are ineffective for children, as you claim. Vaccinations, improved ventilation, and masks combined are the best mitigation strategy we have.
As for explaining mask usage to kids, that’s really not that hard. I have three kids, two unvaccinated. Those two wear masks when playing indoors with other kids. The oldest is vaccinated and chooses to wear a mask indoors with friends, although if they’re both vaccinated I have told her she may take hers off if she wants. (She has at least two friends whose parents have refused to vaccinate them, citing the usual anti-vax nonsense.)
Here’s some solid coverage, from last week in the Chicago Sun-Times: https://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/2021/8/24/22639764/mask-effectiveness-studies-cdc-jacob-sullum
Quoting:
…the evidence that the public health benefits of “universal masking” in K?12 schools outweigh its costs is far less impressive than president Biden suggests.
Other governments seem to recognize that fact. As David Zweig notes in New York Magazine, “many of America’s peer nations around the world — including the U.K., Ireland, all of Scandinavia, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy — have exempted kids, with varying age cutoffs, from wearing masks in classrooms” without experiencing more school-related COVID-19 outbreaks than the U.S. has seen.
The latest guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, by contrast, recommends that everyone, regardless of age or vaccination status, wear face masks in K?12 schools. But the studies the CDC cites to justify that stance generally were not designed to test the effectiveness of mask mandates.
One problem with those studies is that the schools they examined typically implemented several COVID-19 safeguards simultaneously, so there was no way of knowing whether any perceived benefits could be attributed specifically to masking. Another problem: Almost none of the studies compared schools with mask mandates to otherwise similar schools without them, again making causal inferences impossible.
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The entire Sun-Times commentary is worth a read. But here’s one last notable excerpt:
In Florida, where many districts did not require masks, the CDC found that less than 1% of students were infected in schools during the first semester after they reopened in August 2020. During the same period, school-related COVID-19 outbreaks were likewise a minor problem in England, where students were not required to wear masks.
But assuming that mask mandates in schools do make a difference, the benefits are likely to be small. Adults and older students can more effectively protect themselves by getting vaccinated, and life-threatening COVID-19 symptoms are extremely rare in children and teenagers: The CDC’s “current best estimate” of the infection fatality rate among people younger than 18 is 0.002 percent.
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Anyway, for whatever it’s worth in people’s eyes, I’m a lifelong registered Dem and I despise all things Trump. But I despise BS just as much, and the evidence is in. Compulsory masks on children is BS through and through.
Just one quick question for those parents out there who want their kids — and everyone else’s kids, of course — masked all day at school: What happens when the kids come home?
How do you explain to your kids that they must wear a mask because school is so dangerous and so are their school friends? “The school is dangerous, and you are a danger to your friends, and they are a danger to you. So you must wear a mask.”
And then when they get home, how do you turn around and tell them, “Go ahead and have fun, play with your friends now. No need for a mask. Sure, you can hug your friend. Perfectly safe now that you’re back in your own neighborhood.”?
Even a child realizes this makes zero sense. All it does is create confusion and frustration and fear.
August of 2020 is inherently different than August of 2021 due to the much higher infectivity of Delta, where there is now evidence for the potential of extensive community spread within schools (see the recent CDC case report on an unvaccinated, maskless teacher in Marin County, CA). There are numerous papers that speak to mask efficacy and a paucity that actually show any negative effects on child development or well-being. The exceptions to the latter include language development (which is not generally applicable to elementary-age children) or for hearing-impaired children (who can and should be accommodated with transparent masks and/or videos). As to your final question, my young elementary-age children don’t mind wearing masks indoors and see no confusion there, and it’s adults acting like toddlers on this issue. I find your perception of harms to be completely overblown, and I would much rather make the error of using masks when they’re useless than not using them when they actually reduce harm.
I appreciate your links article every week, Keith, but I really need to stop reading them when I’m a little depressed. I honestly can’t believe some of the things I see here every week.
The Ivermectin stories have really been weighing on me this week. I mean, I turned 40 this year, so I have to realize that I’m an “adult” now. But I still remember what I thought when I was a kid. And one thing that never occurred to me when I was a kid is that adults would take FUCKING ANIMAL PILLS TO TREAT A HUMAN VIRUS!!! WHEN DID WE BECOME SO FUCKING STUPID IN THIS DAMNED COUNTRY?!?!?
OK, I’m sorry for the rant. I’ll show myself out.
Here’s the other thing. Dosing is by weight, so of course you risk overdose if you’re taking ivermectin for horses. But, one of the major brandname heartworm medications for dogs is ivermectin. So you can get a dose for large dogs and not OD, plus, it’s apparently pretty damned tasty judging from how much the dogs I’ve owned loved to take their meds. Of course I would never take Heartgard for COVID because it doesn’t fucking work.
It’s kind of scary to think there are people who watch Dr Pol, the Michigan veterinarian, looking to get medical advice for themselves and not as entertainment. I think there was a Seinfeld episode where Kramer visited a vet because he thought a dog had the same cough as him.
Then again, I’m not sure I’d trust my dogs sense of taste. He likes smelling goose shit after all.
My local high school stopped taking federal funding for lunches about 8 years ago when the feds changed the program. Too many kids were throwing away food that they didn’t want and others weren’t getting enough to eat. They now have a food court style serve provided by a national company. The kids order whatever they want and seem a lot happier. The cafeteria now makes a profit instead of running deficits. They still provide free lunches for the kids who would have qualified under the federal guidelines.
T-shirt status: Purchased.
And my sister is a riding instructor who also boards horses, so they use ivermectin somewhat regularly. She was complaining about the price of it doubling ar Tractor Supply.
serious question to which i can find no reasoned answer:
Why are those with PhD’s the most vaccine-hesitant group? facebook and twitter tell me its just dumb trumpsters that won’t take the jab. https://www.upmc.com/media/news/072621-king-mejia-vaccine-hesitancy
They’re not. Read the current version of that pre-print.
Also, it’s definitely NOT just “dumb Trumpsters.” Many anti-vaxxers are politically quite liberal. There’s also a significant gap in access to the vaccines – it’s much easier to get to them if you’re white, affluent, live in the suburbs, or have a job that makes taking time to get a vaccine easier.
Considering that Facebook was used to survey, I’m not sure that the sampling is representative. There is also the potential that some of the respondents who checked “doctorate” were not being truthful, and because doctorates are a relatively small percentage of the population, misreporting would have an outsized effect. It’s also very hard to reconcile with a CDC survey showing that 91% of those with an educational status “above college graduate” received at least one dose as of April/May 2021: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/imz-managers/coverage/adultvaxview/pubs-resources/sociodemographic-factors-covid19-vaccination.html
Just looked at the updated paper in more detail. And that’s a bingo on the false responses, which frankly makes me question any conclusions.
From the footnote: “A new exclusion criteria, applicable to <1% of survey responses, was applied to the analysis sample. Specifically, participants who selected "prefer to self-describe" for gender were excluded because the majority of fill-in responses for self-described gender were political/discriminatory statements or otherwise questionable answers (e.g. Apache Helicopter or Unicorn), and that as a group, those who selected self-described gender had a high frequency of uncommon responses (e.g., Hispanic ethnicity [41.4%], the oldest age group [23.2% ?75 years] and highest education level [28.1% Doctorate]), suggesting the survey was not completed in good faith. A sensitivity analysis including these participants is provided in supplemental material."
how does a paper by upmc and carnegie mellon researchers change so drastically from “Hesitancy held constant in the most educated group (those with a Ph.D.); by May Ph.D.’s were the most hesitant group” to “yeah we’re not gonna mention that but look at this graph where the PhDs are in the middle now”? The obvious anti-vaxxer in the comments calls them out for deleting a bunch of responses also. Is this science now, make it show what you want it to? Am I to believe upmc and carnegie mellon PhD researchers are a bunch of dolts? This just makes it worse. I got the double jab, im no anti-vaxxer, but this is really making me question the state of science in this world even more now. Help! I’m drowning in moving goalposts and shoddily-written science findings. This is honestly making me sick that upmc and carnegie mellon put this out.
Read my last reply–they found a bunch of faked responses. Which they frankly should have expected from a Facebook survey.
I just re-read the salty scientist response and that does help clear some things up. Thank you for taking the time to look into it and post that. I really wish i never saw the initial pre-print that went out before they eliminated the clownish surveys.
That’s the blessing and curse of preprints. You fuck up royally, and it’s there for the world to see.
I’m pretty sure I participated in this survey. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen post graduate education broken out like that before in a survey. It seems whomever did the survey figured a large volume of data could overcome some people lying. And when it comes to the larger sample sized conclusions that may be true. But the more they sliced the data the more likely the false responses were going to cause an issue. They seemed to have fallen in love with the data instead asking questions of it.
I don’t think it’s possible for a Facebook survey to be representative, false responses aside. There’s a reason that the best election pollsters actually call people, and even election polling has had large error bars in recent years.