Nut Allergies Kill More Minors than COVID Each Year, Politico's Brazenly Bad Reporting Goes Unchecked, Modern Men Running out of Sperm (The Five for 07/20/21)
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Now, let’s get into the news.
[one]
Opinions are split on whether or not to require K-12 students to wear masks as schools nationwide open this fall.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends masks for all students, vaccinated and unvaccinated alike. As CNN pointed out, the AAP recommends masking indoors and outdoors (huh?) to prevent COVID and “other respiratory diseases.” (Huh?)
In part the AAP is pro mask because it prevents colds and flus. By that logic, all people should wear masks for the rest of time.
Meanwhile, the CDC guidelines include vaccinated teachers and students going mask free indoors and everyone going mask free outdoors.
To put student masking into perspective:
74 million Americans under the age of 18.
331 deaths from COVID in Americans under the age of 18. (Source)
While it’s tough to get a stat in the U.S., 2,400 children die of pneumonia every day (which is 724% of the total number of COVID deaths under 18 in the U.S.). That’s admittedly an apples to oranges stat, as there’s no good source I could find on deaths of U.S. minors from pneumonia, but it again raises the question I asked about the AAP recommendation…why not masks on all people for all time?
You might think I’m being hyperbolic here, but I’m only playing out the logical conclusion of the AAP’s recommendation.
One more set of stats for you to consider:
6,974 Americans age 30-39 have died of COVID (source).
3,000+ American have died of Anaphylaxis since COVID started (source).
Anaphylaxis is the rapid closing of the throat due to an allergic reaction, a condition I’ve lived with since age 5.
It’s fatal within a few minutes to a few hours without medical treatment.
By every available metric, it’s a more deadly condition than COVID, it simply impacts less of the population, so there’s no public outcry.
Anecdotally, I can tell you that people just don’t care if you have Anaphylaxis. I’ve had to give up my seat at sporting events because people in the section were eating peanuts. I’ve missed flights for work, because of airline errors on not telling me the flight was serving peanuts until I was at the gate. I’ve been hospitalized due to mistakes by friends and restaurants alike on mis-reporting what the ingredients of a dish were.
Of course, human fear and anxiety can’t be universally quantified, ranked or studied, so I can’t tell you how scared others are about COVID.
But I can tell you that, statistically, I’m much more likely to die of Anaphylaxis than COVID (and much more likely to die of Anaphylaxis than anyone reading The Five is to die of COVID), and this “personal pandemic” will last my whole life.
I say all this, not to invoke pity, but to point out that I live a rather normal life while enduring an incurable, deadly condition.
Like COVID, a reaction could come from anywhere (I’ve had allergic reactions in retail stores from someone opening a Snickers bar near me).
Unlike COVID, there’s no vaccine option.
How does that relate to the recommendation of masks for the American Academy of Pediatrics?
In school, I spent third grade eating lunch in the literal janitor’s closet, because there was peanut butter available on every lunch table. Like the airlines (and sports stadiums) today, my school decided that it was better to inconvenience a single student than alter the lives of the rest of the student body.
Now, a Bureaucratic body wants to force all students to wear masks despite a 0.0004% death rate for those under 18 who contract COVID.
If we’re going to do that…why not completely ban the sale, production and use of peanuts and tree nuts? Just over 1% of the population is allergic (and could die) from nuts, so why not a total ban?
This would save the lives of more American under 18 than a mask mandate in schools.
[two]
Don Samuels, a 72-year-old Jamaican immigrant and entrepreneur toy designer, has successfully sued the city of Minneapolis over defunding the police.
Late last year, Samuels and his wife, along with their neighbors, finally took action by filing a lawsuit against the city for failing to provide the minimum number of police officers per citizen in Minneapolis. On July 1, a judge ruled in their favor, ordering the Minneapolis Police Department to hire more officers. The department is now required to staff at least 730 officers by June 30, 2022, or .0017 sworn officers per resident.
The city council has also reversed its original decision to defund the police, approving $6.4 million in additional funding that the department requested to hire and train more cops.
“We are still a long way from the 888 [officers] that used to be our goal,” Samuels said. “But it will be a big improvement, by about 80, from where we are today. At least the council will not continue its defund strategy.”
Samuels said he is satisfied that people like him — minorities living in neighborhoods where violence escalated amid anti-police sentiment — are finally being heard.
[three]
The effects of shutting down schools during the pandemic will continue for years to come, and seem to have hit poor students harder than middle class or affluent ones.
Fox Baltimore reports that 4 in 10 students in the city now have a GPA below 1.0:
Project Baltimore obtained a chart assembled by Baltimore City Schools. The chart shows the average GPA for every high school grade in the city — freshman through senior. In the first three quarters of this past school year, according to the chart, 41% of all Baltimore City high school students, earned below a 1.0 grade point average. In other words, nearly half of the 20,500 public high school students in Baltimore earned less than a D average.
On the other end of the chart, 21 percent of city high school students earned a GPA of 3.0 or better; a B average. That’s about half as many who earned below a D. We can also see the district lost 706 high school students during the first three quarters of the year.
According to the American Psychological Association, students facing family and community poverty are more likely to drop out. When poor academic performance is added to those two factors, students are at an even higher risk of leaving high school without a diploma.
Students who fail to finish high school are twice as likely to live in poverty as adults.
It will be years before the long term effects of the COVID shutdowns are tabulated and studied, but the early data certainly points to the possibility that more students from poor families will go on to become impoverished adults because their schools were shut down for more than a year.
[four]
According Professor Shanna Swan, a leading expert in reproductive health, the human race could be facing extinction by 2050 except for the aid of modern technology, due to rapidly falling sperm counts in modern men.
A disturbing new book outlines the research showing links between these chemicals and a dramatic decline in sperm counts. Its author, Professor Shanna Swan, predicts most couples will have to resort to IVF by 2050 if this decline continues.
Swan is a high-profile professor of environmental medicine and public health at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where she has studied fertility trends for some 30 years.
Her book ‘Countdown: How our modern world is threatening sperm counts, altering male and female reproductive development, and imperilling the future of the human race’ grew out of an alarming study she published in 2017. Her research, which made international headlines, found that the concentration of sperm in men’s ejaculate had fallen by an average of 1.4% worldwide between 1973 and 2011.
“That’s an overall decline of 52% and it shows no sign of tapering off,” Swan tells Feelgood. “If it continues at this rate, the human race will be unable to reproduce itself and by 2050, many couples will have to turn to technology.”
Her book examines what might be causing this decline and other related fertility issues. “There are many factors, including delayed childbearing and lifestyle issues,” she writes. “Chemicals in our environment are a major one. The worst offenders are endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs).
Normally, I’d temper bad news with “it’s not the end of the world.”
Uhh, kinda is this time.
[five]
Hang with me…this is a weird one.[
In last Friday’s edition of The Five, the lead story covered a feature from Politico, which claimed that the Biden Administration would be fighting COVID vaccine “misinformation” with the help of SMS carriers (Verizon, AT&T) etc., which leads to the natural assumption that the government would be reading the text messages of private citizens without a warrant.
Politico is a pretty left-leaning outlet, so I assumed this was given to them directly from someone at the administration.
Shortly after the Friday publication of The Five, dozens of websites reported that the SMS part of the story was “fake news.”
A few include:
No, Jo Biden and the DNC are Not Reading Your Private Text Messages (Oregon Live)
Fact Check: Biden Doesn’t Want to Monitor SMS Messages for COVID Misinformation (USA Today)
Several commentators also hit back at Tucker Carlson (who covered the original Politico story) as pushing fake news…but I can’t find an outlet that’s been critical of Politico, the left wing source that started this rumor.
When I checked back on the story this morning, Politico had only issued one correction:
The correction does not include any sort of statement clarifying that the Biden administration isn’t checking private SMS messages for COVID “misinformation.”
At this point, I’m going to go ahead and assume that SMS messages aren’t being scanned…but now the real issue is how a major mainstream media outlet published a glaring error, did not (at last at the time of this publishing) correct it and has essentially received no criticism from mainstream outlets over recklessly bad journalism.
It’s not the bad reporting that concerns me…it’s the fact that no one seems to care about the bad reporting.
This is a prime example as to why I write The Five.
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[epilogue]
Konrad Schumann was an East German soldier who realized he couldn’t serve in a role that involved shooting those who tried to free the oppression of Communism.
On August 15, 1961, Konrad showed up to work as a border guard along Iron Curtain at 4:30am to witness a young woman handing a bouquet of flowers through the barbed wire to an older woman, and wishing her a happy birthday. Over the course of a single day, this simple act of kindess and generosity changed Konrad’s outlook on life.
Twelve hours later, Konrad gathered the courage to jump the barbed wire and defect to West Germany. He married, had a son and worked in a factory assembling Audis for more than 30 years.
When the country was reunited, Konrad rarely left Bavaria in West Germany to visit the place of his birth in the eastern region, due to constant harassment and bullying from former East German soldiers, who had labeled him a traitor and kept up their abuse for decades.
This psychological torture led Konrad to suicide in 1998.
A sculpture named Mauerspringer (“WallJumper”) can be found in Germany today, memorializing the teenager who had the courage to do the right thing and leap to freedom.
Until the next one,
-sth