Censored! Success in the slums of Mumbai

Censored! Success in the slums of Mumbai

Tatiana Prophet
Covid-19

By TATIANA PROPHET

In July, the World Health Organization highlighted the success of two former Covid danger zones in India, Dharavi and Worli in south Mumbai, as examples that Covid can be “controlled.” Secretary General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus cited the government’s aggressive action as key in the outcome. But he left out a key component that has been absent from other areas around the world that have not seen as dramatic a drop in cases and deaths: the use of anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine plus zinc and vitamin D given to thousands of residents and first responders in those slums.

The biggest problem with the latest Covid stats

The biggest problem with the latest Covid stats

Tatiana Prophet
Health Care

By TATIANA PROPHET

Many people are sharing on social media some charts showing a massive step up in cases in the United States, proclaiming doomsday. Some media are even calling this “America’s Chernobyl.”

Except there’s one thing missing: America has tested more people for SARS-Cov-2 than any other country (except apparently China — a relatively new data point). Sure, it’s easy to discount the massive testing numbers because President Trump is the one who said it; but the data bears it out.

Yahoo! News notices a minor change in wording on CDC site and it dominates the news cycle

Yahoo! News notices a minor change in wording on CDC site and it dominates the news cycle

Tatiana Prophet
Health Care

STAFF REPORTS

Two days ago, Yahoo!News put out a scoop. It seemed the CDC had back-pedaled in their guidelines about how SARS-CoV-2 spreads. The story was technically accurate, but rather than uncovering a shift in policy, the change appears to be a simple reshuffling of the same sentence regarding surfaces (this is the current link) and placing “contaminated surfaces and objects” solidly under a subject header “The virus does not spread easily in other ways.”

Back to Facts examined the Internet Wayback Machine and found the page version when it was first generated on sometime in late February or early March. The wording about contaminated surfaces and objects is identical, but it was placed under the main headline “How Covid-19 spreads” and certainly looked like a more ominous, highlighted factoid.

FOX News and Lifezette predictably put the CDC in as bad a light as possible, stating now you might not have to wipe down your groceries, which actually might not be a bad idea considering that many people found this a tough task to do every day. Most of the articles, including the Washington Post, quoted experts as stating it was concerning that CDC made this change, and others stating that as long as you wash your hands after touching something, you should be safe from contracting the virus.

Incomplete facts: Washington Post says anti-malaria drug increasingly linked to deaths, omitting available screening protocols

Incomplete facts: Washington Post says anti-malaria drug increasingly linked to deaths, omitting available screening protocols

Tatiana Prophet
Health Care

Friday May 15, 2020.

The Washington Post, always on the lookout to protect your health, published a pre-emptive strike against anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, citing as the news hook “a growing cache of data linking the anti-malaria drug to serious cardiac problems.” (Oddly, they must have expected Trump to “tout” the drug at least one more time, and he did not disappoint, announcing to a gobsmacked press corps on Monday May 18 that he himself had been taking the drug under the guidance of the White House doctor, for a week and a half as a preventive measure).

Read the article here: Drug promoted by Trump as coronavirus ‘game changer’ increasingly linked to deaths

Alarmed by this growing data cache, “some drug safety experts are now calling for even more forceful action by the government to discourage its use,” the authors wrote. Several have called for the FDA to revoke its emergency use authorization, given hydroxychloroquine’s documented risks.” The first forceful action was when the FDA on April 30 warned against use of the drug outside a hospital setting due to the potential for cardiac problems.

That warning came on the heels of a study from the Veterans Administration hospital that was widely publicized by multiple media outlets. The study was observational and not double-blinded, randomized or controlled as the medical community has been calling for. And it was retrospective, meaning it looked at records after resolution of a patient’s case.

Legacy media finally catches up: Covid patients are oxygen-starved and do poorly on ventilators

Legacy media finally catches up: Covid patients are oxygen-starved and do poorly on ventilators

Tatiana Prophet
Health Care

By TATIANA PROPHET

Doctors at Providence Hospital in Seattle observed that the very first known U.S. patient to have Covid-19 was suffering from a lack of oxygen. That was back in January 2020.

The unnamed patient, who reported to urgent care after four days of fever and a dry cough, was tested due to having just returned from Wuhan, China. After testing positive for 2019-nCoV, he was hospitalized on January 21 in an isolation room.

At first, his blood-oxygen saturation levels were within the normal 96%-98% range, and he did not have shortness of breath, but did have a cough and two days of nausea and vomiting, according to the New England Journal of Medicine. A chest x-ray on day 3 showed no abnormalities.

Patient zero was never put on a ventilator; instead, his doctors noted growing evidence of pneumonia couple with low blood-oxygen saturation rates. He received supplemental oxygen, two kinds of antibiotics for a possible hospital-derived infection — and experimental drug Remdesivir for compassionate use.

Politifact: Test kit refusal by U.S. rated false

Politifact: Test kit refusal by U.S. rated false

Tatiana Prophet
Health Care

Victoria Knight and Jon Greenberg, PolitiFact

During Sunday night’s debate, while leveling criticism at President Donald Trump’s handling of the national response to the coronavirus pandemic, former Vice President Joe Biden said the Trump administration refused to get coronavirus testing kits from the World Health Organization.</p><p>“Look, the World Health Organization offered the testing kits that they have available and to give it to us now. We refused them. We did not want to buy them. We did not want to get them from them. We wanted to make sure we had our own,” Biden said.

Apocalypse Amazon: How the media feeds a 'first world' doomsday fix

Apocalypse Amazon: How the media feeds a 'first world' doomsday fix

Tatiana Prophet
The Amazon Rainforest

Brazil’s new president has emboldened loggers, but the destruction is far less than in decades past

By Tatiana Prophet
editor@back2facts.com

Reuters actually ran a correction on the story, qualifying the “record fires” statement with an added “since 2010.” Other articles stated “since record keeping began.” But many sites carried the original story, and in the case of Euro News, the error is still up. So is Emmanuel Macron’s tweet below, which contains a photo from 1999. (Celebrity Jaden Smith shared a photo from 1989).

Media critique: Russia 'targeted' all 50 election systems, Senate intel committee says

Media critique: Russia 'targeted' all 50 election systems, Senate intel committee says

Tatiana Prophet

By TATIANA PROPHET
editor@backtofacts.com

Sound the alarm, Russia interfered in all 50 state election systems, say Senators from both political parties in the Senate intelligence committee. But the evidence is all redacted. Let’s just get that out of the way right now. You can read the report here.

So the day after Robert Mueller’s testimony before the House Intel and Justice committees, and the day that Mitch McConnell has blocked not one, but two election protection bills, this news hits:

The Senate Intelligence Committee has reached a bipartisan report stating that Russia interfered in the 2016 election "in all 50 states." But it's heavily redacted at the request of "the intelligence community," according to The New York Times in their urgent headline:

"Election systems in all 50 states were targeted by Russia in 2016, a Senate report said, showing a more far-reaching effort than previously known."

NYT omits: Trump's 'decade in the red' was bad for everyone

NYT omits: Trump's 'decade in the red' was bad for everyone

Tatiana Prophet

By TATIANA PROPHET

Well, The New York Times finally got its Trump tax bombshell — ten years of ‘tax transcripts’ and boy, does it make him look like a loser.

There’s just a small detail: developers in New York City and around the country suffered tremendous losses right in the middle of the relevant time period. But there’s no context to The Times’ report; it focuses squarely on Donald Trump. And what a loser he is. This is not to suggest that Trump made great decisions through that decade; but in his testimony to Congress in November 1991, he discusses making decisions based on one set of rules, and then with the tax cut of 1986, the wealthy whose taxes were slashed had no incentive to invest in real estate, he told the panel (see video below).

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