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COVID Face Masks Didn’t Stop Infections After First Omicron Wave — Report
The wearing of face masks on public transport and airplanes was federally mandated in the United States in February 2021 in a bid to stop the spread of COVID-19. However, in April 2022, the mandate was ruled unlawful. But did it actually help stop the spread of the virus?
In late November 2021, the Omicron variant was first identified, becoming the dominant strain in the U.S. by late December. “[But] after the first wave of Omicron there was no significant difference in people always wearing a mask from those never wearing them and, in children, maybe even a slight reduced risk of testing positive if never wearing a mask.”
In a new study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, Paul Hunter, a professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia in the U.K., and colleagues from the University of East Anglia analyzed official data from the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics from November 2021 to May 2022 to explore how infection risk factors changed before and after the first Omicron wave. Risk factors included history of foreign travel, household size, employment status, contact with children and wearing a face mask.
“If masks can reduce transmission by about 20 to 30%, then if the virus becomes much more infectious, as was the case with Omicron, 20 to 30% isn’t going to ultimately be enough to slow the infection that much,” Hunter said. “But the more important issue is that COVID does not generate long-lasting immunity.”
He continued: “For highly infectious viruses like COVID with a short duration of immunity, once they have spread through the population once, then the number of infections that occur in a population is more affected by the rate at which immunity is lost [rather] than by changes in behavior intended to reduce exposure [like wearing masks.] And people who wore a mask really rigorously throughout the first two years will likely be more susceptible to infection [less immunity] than people who didn’t.”
WHO Accuses Nigel Farage of Spreading Misinformation About Pandemic Treaty
The World Health Organization has accused Nigel Farage of spreading misinformation after he launched a campaign to block an international treaty designed to improve global pandemic preparedness.
WHO member states are negotiating a deal to shore up cooperation against new pathogens. If adopted, the legally binding treaty would commit countries to helping each other in the event of a pandemic, increase research and sharing of data, and promote fair access to vaccines. But populist figures including Farage and a number of Tory MPs are lobbying the U.K. government to block the deal, claiming that it will give the WHO power to enforce lockdowns on countries, dictate policy on mask-wearing and control vaccine stocks.
The U.K. health minister Andrew Stephenson urged MPs in parliament this week to dismiss what he described as myths being spread about the treaty, which the U.K. is considering whether or not to support.
Lockdown mandates are not part of the deal and a claim by Farage that the treaty would require countries to give away 20% of their vaccines was “simply not true”, said Stephenson.
Meta Faces EU Investigation Over Child Safety Risks
Meta Platforms’ (META.O) social media sites Facebook and Instagram will be investigated for potential breaches of EU online content rules relating to child safety, EU regulators said on Thursday, a move that could lead to hefty fines.
Tech companies are required to do more to tackle illegal and harmful content on their platforms under the European Union’s landmark Digital Services Act (DSA), which kicked in last year.
The European Commission said it had decided to open an in-depth investigation into Facebook and Instagram due to concerns they had not adequately addressed risks to children. Meta submitted a risk assessment report in September.
“The Commission is concerned that the systems of both Facebook and Instagram, including their algorithms, may stimulate behavioral addictions in children, as well as create so-called ‘rabbit-hole effects’,” the EU executive said in a statement.
Google’s Call-Scanning AI Could Dial Up Censorship by Default, Privacy Experts Warn
A feature Google demoed at its I/O confab yesterday, using its generative AI technology to scan voice calls in real-time for conversational patterns associated with financial scams, has sent a collective shiver down the spines of privacy and security experts who are warning the feature represents the thin end of the wedge. They warn that once client-side scanning is baked into mobile infrastructure, it could usher in an era of centralized censorship.
Google’s demo of the call scam-detection feature, which the tech giant said would be built into a future version of its Android OS — estimated to run on some three-quarters of the world’s smartphones — is powered by Gemini Nano, the smallest of its current generation of AI models meant to run entirely on-device.
This is essentially client-side scanning: A nascent technology that’s generated huge controversy in recent years in relation to efforts to detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM) or even grooming activity on messaging platforms.
Apple abandoned a plan to deploy client-side scanning for CSAM in 2021 after a huge privacy backlash. However, policymakers have continued to heap pressure on the tech industry to find ways to detect illegal activity taking place on their platforms. Any industry moves to build out on-device scanning infrastructure could therefore pave the way for all sorts of content scanning by default — whether government-led or related to a particular commercial agenda.
Responding to Google’s call-scanning demo in a post on X, Meredith Whittaker, president of the U.S.-based encrypted messaging app Signal, warned: “This is incredibly dangerous. It lays the path for centralized, device-level client-side scanning.
Google Is About to Change Everything — and Hopes You Won’t Find Out
It’s difficult to overstate the magnitude and impact of the changes Google has been making to its search engine and overall product suite this month, some of which were laid out during Tuesday’s I/O 2024 conference. The reason is not just that parent company Alphabet is determined to shove some form of “artificial intelligence” and machine learning software into your Chrome browser and your phone calls and your photo galleries and your YouTube habits. It’s that the central tool that powers and shapes the modern internet is about to permanently change — and it may make for an even worse search experience than that which has defined Google’s most recent era.
Google Search, that powerful, white, oblong textbox that became the default portal for organizing, showcasing, platforming, exploring, optimizing, and determining the ultimate reach of every single webpage across the entirety of cyberspace (often by paying other gatekeepers to favor it over other search tools), is becoming something else entirely: a self-ingesting singular webpage of its own, powered by the breadth of web information to which it once gave you access.
Google is attempting to transform itself from a one-stop portal into a one-stop shop via “search generative experience,” where the Gemini chatbot will spit out a general “AI Overview” answer at the top of your search results. These answers will be informed by (or even plagiarized from) the very links now crowded out by a chatbox.
Yet the company doesn’t seem to want you to know anything about that. As Will Oremus noted in the Washington Post, this could also affect the way Google is perceived by regulators: If it’s directly writing results for you instead of just boosting other editorial options, Google could be judged legally as a publisher, not just a platform, and thus be held accountable for what Gemini says.
West Virginia GOP Senate President, Doctor Who Opposed Drawing Back Vaccine Laws Ousted in Election
West Virginia voters ousted the Republican state Senate president on Tuesday, as well as a doctor who drew fire for breaking with his party over school vaccination policy. They were among at least eight incumbent GOP legislators who lost in the state’s primary elections.
In the state’s eastern panhandle, U.S. Army Special Forces Green Beret veteran Tom Willis defeated Republican Senate President Craig Blair, who has helmed the chamber since 2021. And State Health and Human Resources Chair Sen. Mike Maroney was defeated by Chris Rose, a utility company electrician and former coal miner.
Maroney’s loss came after he publicly advocated against a bill pushed by the Republican caucus that would have allowed some students who don’t attend traditional public institutions or participate in group extracurriculars like sports to be exempt from vaccinations typically required for children starting daycare or school.
West Virginia is only one of a handful of states in the U.S. that offers only medical exemptions to vaccine requirements. Maroney, a radiologist from Marshall County, called the bill “an embarrassment” on the Senate floor and said he believed lawmakers were harming the state.
COVID, Other Misinformation Varies by Topic, Country on Social Media
PLOS One has published a study noting that the spread of COVID-related and other misinformation on social media varies by topic and by country in Europe.
The study was conducted by analyzing news activity on Twitter (now X) in France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom from 2019 to 2021, noting misinformation on major news topics including Brexit, coronavirus, and COVID-19 vaccines.
The authors found the United Kingdom maintained a relatively stable proportion between questionable and reliable retweets across different topics. Germany, on the other hand, had the highest ratio of questionable news retweets on each of the three topics analyzed, followed by France.
“Monitoring the information landscape at both national and European levels is indeed crucial to understanding the state of public discourse on contentious topics and detecting the emergence of new and divisive narratives within the European context,” they said.
B.C.’s COVID Vaccine Mandate for Healthcare Workers Survives Court Challenges
B.C.’s ongoing mandate that healthcare workers be vaccinated against COVID-19 survived a legal challenge this week, though the judge in the case remitted part of the provincial health officer’s order back to her for reconsideration.
Issued Friday and published online Monday, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Simon R. Coval’s ruling dealt with three separate lawsuits brought against Dr. Bonnie Henry in her role as the provincial health officer. All three cases sought judicial review of Henry’s most recent order regarding vaccination requirements for healthcare workers, which she issued on Oct. 5, 2023.
By that time, B.C. was the only province in Canada that had not lifted its vaccine mandate for such workers, though “certain hospitals” in Ontario and Nova Scotia retained similar rules, according to Coval’s decision.
The decision indicates more than 1,800 healthcare workers lost their jobs in B.C. because they chose not to be vaccinated after the mandate first took effect in 2021.
