COVID: Claims of Africa Information Suppression?

The Claim

Anti-vax folks I know shared an article with me from The Daily Reckoning, written by James Rickards. In this article, Rickards claims:

One of the reasons the per capita rate of infection and fatality in Sub-Saharan Africa has been so much lower than was expected at the start of the pandemic is because Africans routinely take hydroxychloroquine to prevent malaria.

Hydroxychloroquine is cheap and safe and seems to have excellent prophylactic properties against the COVID virus. Likewise, the drug Ivermectin, which is also cheap and safe, has had fantastic results in helping to mitigate a severe outbreak of the Delta variant of the virus in India…

Why have you not heard more about the role of hydroxychloroquine in Africa? Why have you not heard more about the role of Ivermectin in India? Why are both drugs not being more widely utilized to fight COVID?…

The answer is that Big Tech and Big Media have banned any discussion…

Is this true? What does a basic investigation turn up?

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Church of Conspiracy: the Fauci Patents

As many have experienced, the COVID disinformation engine has jumped the shark. It has become nearly impossible to talk to friends and relatives about medicine and science. Those categories have been replaced with the mislabeling of “politics,” which is bizarre when the state of scientific knowledge remains unchanged whether we are standing among Democrats and Republicans in the US, or in a completely different political landscape in Europe or Asia. I’ve tried to engage and generally met with failure. The experience has been oddly similar to interfacing with young-earth creationists. The disinformation crowd has gone full fundamentalist, mingling misunderstanding with belligerence and brimstone.

This article is an adaptation from an email I sent to some of the anti-vaxxers I know. That dialogue has been long and unhappy, and it has since lapsed. But I was encouraged by others to post some of the content (of which there is a great deal), in the hopes that it might help a reader or two. I’m not sure how much energy I will assign to this effort, but at the least, I’ll put forward this installment…

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Exponentials

Exponential functions are routinely underestimated, and coronavirus seems poised to instruct. She appears to have found another gear. Rather, she, like all exponential functions, does not operate based on gears at all. They grow larger based upon their current size. The larger the size, the faster the growth. There is no intrinsic upper limit. That sentence bears a second reading, because we seem not to have learned it.

The difficult part about watching this is that we actually could do something about it. It does not have to play out in this way. Most countries have done better, and some have done far better. But in America, we are experiencing a tyranny of the incompetent. The daily care exercised by many is nulled out by the indiscretions of the witless.

Growth functions like this one are conditional. Its movement reflects our decisions. The history of coronavirus in America is a measurement of collective action, not inexorable fate. Coronavirus is not an asteroid. We cannot chalk it up as a no-fault collision. Rather, this is the tale of a soccer team repeatedly kicking the ball into their own goal.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

Evidence-Free Zone: Nonsense Claims about Superiority of US Coronavirus Response

The following image shows per-capita coronavirus case counts for the US, Canada and Mexico. These per-capita rates are proportional to population size. This image was obtained from the Weather Channel mapping utility on September 27, 2020.

Let’s juxtapose that map against a few claims over the past month by Trump (here and here):

We’ve done a great job in Covid but we don’t get the credit. (August 31)

We’ve possibly done the best job.” (September 10)

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Jericho Brisance Re-Opened

Greetings to those who may still be subscribed to Jericho.

After three years of dormancy, I’ve decided to reopen and re-brand a bit. In the past, Jericho was largely focused on religion: Christianity, deconversion, atheism, and historical studies related thereto. Moving forward, Jericho will serve as a broader platform, featuring content divided into a few departments:

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