90 Miles From Tyranny

Sunday, November 28, 2021

South African Doctor Who Raised Alarm About Omicron Variant: 'Symptoms Were So Different And So Mild'

As Rebecca Downs reported on Friday, the Biden administration is restricting travel from eight African countries beginning Monday, after a new "variant of concern," known as omicron, was detected in South Africa. While there have been some extreme reactions, such as from Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY), who already signed an emergency order for New York State, the symptoms appear to be "so different," and "so mild." This is what Dr. Angelique Coetzee, the South African doctor who informed the country's vaccine advisory committee, told The Telegraph.

As Peta Thornycraft and Will Brown reported for the outlet on Saturday:

The first South African doctor to alert the authorities about patients with the omicron variant has told The Telegraph that the symptoms of the new variant are unusual but mild.
Dr Angelique Coetzee said she was first alerted to the possibility of a new variant when patients in her busy private practice in the capital Pretoria started to come in earlier this month with Covid-19 symptoms that did not make immediate sense.
They included young people of different backgrounds and ethnicities with intense fatigue and a six-year-old child with a very high pulse rate, she said. None suffered from a loss of taste or smell.
“Their symptoms were so different and so mild from those I had treated before,” said Dr Coetzee, a GP for 33 years who chairs the South African Medical Association alongside running her practice.
On November 18, when four family members all tested positive for Covid-19 with complete exhaustion, she informed the country’s vaccine advisory committee.
She said, in total, about two dozen of her patients have tested positive for Covid-19 with symptoms of the new variant. They were mostly healthy men who turned up “feeling so tired”. About half of them were unvaccinated.
“We had one very interesting case, a kid, about six years old, with a temperature and a very high pulse rate, and I wondered if I should admit her. But when I followed up two days later, she was so much better,” Dr Coetzee says.

There are some encouraging takeaways, such as that a significant portion of those who presented with symptoms of the new variant were unvaccinated, and that her six year old patients "was such much better" within days.

Dr. Coetzee's concerns about the variant also appear to be typical for all other variants, which is that the greatest worry is for the elderly and those with who already have co-morbidities.

Dr Coetzee, who was briefing other African medical associations on Saturday, made clear her patients were all healthy and she was worried the new variant could still hit older people – with co-morbidities such as diabetes or heart disease – much harder.
“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci is making headlines for what, unsurprisingly, may be fear mongering. Nicole Acevado for NBC News went with the headline in her Saturday coverage that "Omicron Covid-19 variant could already be in U.S., Fauci says." In her subheadline, however, she notes that Fauci did acknowledge "we have not detected it yet," going on to add that "but when you have a virus that is showing this degree of transmissibility," it will "go essentially all over."

As Acevado also wrote:

The Cynical and Dangerous Weaponization of the "White Supremacist" Label

In dominant elite discourse, no evidence is needed to brand someone a "white supremacist." The belief that it will produce political or personal gain suffices.

Within hours of the August 25, 2020, shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin — not days, but hours — it was decreed as unquestioned fact in mainstream political and media circles that the shooter, Kyle Rittenhouse, was a "white supremacist.” Over the next fifteen months, up to and including his acquittal by a jury of his peers on all charges, this label was applied to him more times than one can count by corporate media outlets as though it were proven fact. Indeed, that Rittenhouse was a "white supremacist” was deemed so unquestionably true that questioning it was cast as evidence of one's own racist inclinations (defending a white supremacist).

Yet all along, there was never any substantial evidence, let alone convincing proof, that it was true. This fact is, or at least should be, an extraordinary, even scandalous, event: a 17-year-old was widely vilified as being a white supremacist by a union of national media and major politicians despite there being no evidence to support the accusation. Yet it took his acquittal by a jury who heard all the evidence and testimony for parts of the corporate press to finally summon the courage to point out that what had been Gospel about Rittenhouse for the last fifteen months was, in fact, utterly baseless.

A Washington Post news article was published late last week that was designed to chide "both sides” for exploiting the Rittenhouse case for their own purposes while failing to adhere carefully to actual facts. Ever since the shootings in Kenosha, they lamented, "Kyle Rittenhouse has been a human canvas onto which the nation’s political divisions were mapped.” In attempting to set the record straight, the Post article contained this amazing admission:

As conservatives coalesced around the idea of Rittenhouse as a blameless defender of law and order, many on the left just as quickly cast him as the embodiment of the far-right threat. Despite a lack of evidence, hundreds of social media posts immediately pinned Rittenhouse with extremist labels: white supremacist, self-styled militia member, a “boogaloo boy” seeking violent revolution, or part of the misogynistic “incel” movement.

“On the left he’s become a symbol of white supremacy that isn’t being held accountable in the United States today,” said Becca Lewis, a researcher of far-right movements and a doctoral candidate at Stanford University. “You see him getting conflated with a lot of the police officers who’ve shot unarmed Black men and with Trump himself and all these other things. On both sides, he’s become a symbol much bigger than himself.”

Soon after the shootings, then-candidate Joe Biden told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Rittenhouse was allegedly part of a militia group in Illinois. In the next sentence, Biden segued to criticism of Trump and hate groups: “Have you ever heard this president say one negative thing about white supremacists?

Valuable though this rather belated admission is, there were two grand ironies about this passage. The first is that The Post itself was one of the newspapers which published multiple articles and columns applying this evidence-free "white supremacist" label to Rittenhouse. Indeed, four days after this admission by The Post's newsroom, their opinion editors published an op-ed by Robert Jones that flatly asserted the very same accusation which The Post itself says is bereft of evidence: “Despite his boyish white frat boy appearance, there was plenty of evidence of Rittenhouse’s deeper white supremacist orientation.” In other words, Post editors approved publication of grave accusations which, just four days earlier, their own newsroom explicitly stated lacked evidence.

The second irony is that while the Post article lamented everyone else's carelessness with the facts of this case, the publication itself — while purporting to fact-check the rest of the world — affirmed one of the most common falsehoods: namely, that Rittenhouse carried a gun across state lines. The article thus now carries this correction at the top: “An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Kyle Rittenhouse brought his AR-15 across state lines. He has testified that he picked up the weapon from a friend’s house in Wisconsin. This article has been corrected.”

It continues to be staggering how media outlets which purport to explain the Rittenhouse case get caught over and over spreading utter falsehoods about the most basic facts of the case, proving they did not watch the trial or learn much about what happened beyond what they heard in passing from like-minded liberals on Twitter. There is simply no way to have paid close attention to this case, let alone have watched the trial, and believe that he carried a gun across state lines, yet this false assertion made it past numerous Post reporters, editors and fact-checkers purporting to "correct the record” about this case. Yet again, we find that the same news outlets which love to accuse others of...

Those are people who died, died

Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Facebook's 'Race Blind' Algorithm Found 90% Of Hate Speech Directed Toward White People And Men

We now know why Facebook decided to change its "race-blind" hate speech detection algorithm last year to allow more anti-white hatred.

The Washington Post reported last week that an "April 2020 document said roughly 90 percent of 'hate speech' subject to content takedowns were statements of contempt, inferiority and disgust directed at White people and men."

They viewed this as a failure of the system because white people are supposed to be the targets of all hate.

From The Washington Post, "Facebook's race-blind practices around hate speech came at the expense of Black users, new documents show":

Facebook spokesman Andy Stone defended the company's decisions around its hate speech policies and how it conducted its relationship with the civil rights auditors.

"The Worst of the Worst project helped show us what kinds of hate speech our technology was and was not effectively detecting and understand what forms of it people believe to be the most insidious," Stone said in a statement.

He said progress on racial issues included policies such as banning white nationalist groups, prohibiting content promoting racial stereotypes — such as people wearing blackface or claims that Jews control the media — and reducing the prevalence of hate speech to 0.03 percent of content on the platform.

[...] These findings about the most objectionable content held up even among self-identified White conservatives that the market research team traveled to visit in Southern states. Facebook researchers sought out the views of White conservatives in particular because they wanted to overcome potential objections from the company's leadership, which was known to appease right-leaning viewpoints, two people said.

Yet racist posts against minorities weren't what Facebook's own hate speech detection algorithms were most commonly finding. The software, which the company introduced in 2015, was supposed to detect and automatically delete hate speech before users saw it. Publicly, the company said in 2019 that its algorithms proactively caught more than 80 percent of...