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Twitter Is Fine With Pfizer Propaganda, but Comic Books About the U.S. Border Crisis Are Not Allowed
Only a couple of weeks ago, corporate Pharma giant Pfizer partnered with Marvel and widely promoted a new one-shot comic book featuring classic Avengers heroes leaping into action as children watch from the sidelines in a hospital.
The children learn that in order to become like the Avengers they don’t need to fight villains, all they need to do is get their new COVID mRNA vaccines. The propaganda campaign was all over Twitter‘s social media platform and the ethics of the source was never questioned.
The book has been immediately dated due to Pfizer’s recent admission under oath at the EU Parliament that their COVID vaccines were never tested in the prevention of viral transmission, upending months of claims that getting the vax meant saving grandma and grandpa from exposure to the disease. The claim that the vaccines were “proven” to prevent transmission was also used as the basis for COVID passport schemes in nations across the west, trampling the personal rights of millions.
Pfizer essentially gets to say and do what they want on Twitter, and Marvel has the same luxury. Neither company has anything to fear in terms of their voices being censored due to the political leanings they might exhibit, the issues they address or the fallacies they might spread. Some groups are protected because they have the “correct” politics.
In Columbus, Surgeon General Calls Youth Mental Health the Nation’s ‘Defining Challenge’
The Columbus Dispatch reported:
As the COVID-19 pandemic winds down, one of the nation’s top doctors is warning Ohioans to prepare for a crisis exacerbated by years of social distancing and shuttered schools — youth mental health.
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy visited Columbus on Tuesday to meet with leaders and hear from young people at local colleges and hospitals about mental health. In an interview with The Dispatch, he called youth mental health “the defining challenge of our country.”
“How do we answer the question: Are we taking care of our kids?” said Murthy, a doctor and vice admiral who was the first surgeon general of Indian descent when he first served as U.S. Surgeon General under President Obama. “… Right now, our kids are telling us very clearly that they are struggling and it’s up to us to collectively respond.”
Health System Ransomware Attack Highlights Patients’ Vulnerability
A crippling ransomware attack on the second-largest U.S. nonprofit health system is showing how much patients can be left in the dark when critical healthcare infrastructure goes down.
Why it matters: The attack earlier this month on CommonSpirit Health, which has 142 hospitals in 21 states, left IT locked, delayed surgeries and caused widespread disruptions in patient care.
It also left millions of patients waiting at least two weeks to learn if their personal information was compromised, experts say.
This latest attack comes as the Biden administration examines how to beef up minimum cybersecurity standards within critical infrastructure like healthcare, the Washington Post reports.
Half of Americans Believe Social Media Companies Are Biased in Applying Rules on Censorship, Fact-Checking: Poll
Half of Americans think social media companies are biased when it comes to fact-checking and censoring posts, new research shows.
Polling by YouGov conducted from Oct. 12–14 among 1,000 U.S. adult citizens asked respondents, “Do you think social media companies are fair in applying the rules for fact-checking and censorship or do you think they are biased?”
An overwhelming 50% of Americans responded “yes,” while 29% said they are unsure. Another 21% said they believe social media companies are fair when it comes to applying such rules.
The poll also sought to find under what circumstances Americans think social media companies should step in and suspend a user’s account. It found that the majority of respondents agreed that companies should do so when the accounts post content that falls into a category of violent content (77%), content that promotes racial division (75%), anti-Semitic content (74%), hate speech (73%) and disinformation (65%).
Reports of Teenager Dying in COVID Quarantine Cause Outcry in China
Reports that a 16-year-old girl has died in a COVID quarantine center after pleas from her family for medical help were ignored have caused anger in China, where ongoing tight pandemic controls have started to take their toll on a weary population.
Videos of the girl have spread across Chinese social media in the last 24 hours. The distressing footage, which The Guardian has not been able to independently verify, shows the teenager ill, struggling to breathe and convulsing in a bunk bed at what is purported to be a quarantine center in Ruzhou, Henan province.
In the video, a woman who claims she is the girl’s aunt says her niece died after exhibiting a fever, experiencing convulsions and vomiting. She said the family had been asking for medical help but none came for days and calls to official phone lines went unanswered.
Last week, in a rare protest in Beijing, incendiary slogans against Xi Jinping, including references to anger at strict COVID policies, were hung from a central overpass. The same slogans have begun to appear in other locations.
Shanghai Island to Host 3,250-Bed COVID Quarantine Facility
Shanghai plans to build a 3,250-bed COVID-19 quarantine facility on a small island close to its city center as China stands by its stringent zero-COVID controls, rather than relaxing curbs as many other countries have done.
The city awarded a 1.38 billion yuan ($191 million) contract to build the center on Fuxing Island, located in the Huangpu River, to state-owned builder China Communications Construction Corp (601800.SS), according to a government document.
The document said the site, which will take in positive cases and their close contacts, would be 140,000 square meters large and have 3,009 rooms. It did not give a timeline for the project’s completion.
Chinese Artist Speaks out Against Zero-COVID Policy by Wearing 27 Hazmat Suits in Times Square
On Sunday morning, a puffy, Michelin Man-like figure trudged through Times Square in New York, panting from the exertion of trying to move while wearing 27 hazmat suits. Inside the white cocoon was Zhisheng Wu, a Chinese artist who staged the street performance to criticize China’s unrelenting zero-COVID policy.
“Protective suits have become a visual symbol in the collective experience and collective memory of every Chinese person,” said Wu, a 28-year-old graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
With the suits’ hoods wrapped tightly around his head, exposing only his nose and part of his eyes, Wu said he had been transformed into a “monster” with dulled senses. Originally he had planned to wear 100 of them but discovered 27 was the most he could fit into. As he staggered on, the artist stooped lower and lower until he had to resort to crawling. Eventually, he collapsed onto the ground and was helped by his assistant to break free from the suits, his face flushed and drenched in sweat.
In China, COVID workers dressed head-to-toe in hazmat suits are still omnipresent almost three years after the virus emerged. Dubbed “dabai,” or “big whites,” they toil at COVID testing sites and quarantine camps, guard airports and train stations and spray clouds of disinfectant in the streets and residential communities.
IDtech Is the New Fintech
Fintech is one of the greatest technology revolutions in recent years — over 20% of “unicorns” (startups that have reached over $1 billion valuations) are considered fintech companies. Because of this trend, any company can be a financial services company, giving consumers and businesses more ways to manage their finances than ever before.
A similar revolution is emerging in the field of digital identity. The convenience, optionality and accessibility that fintech brought to money is happening to the archaic, paper-based world of personal identity. Identity today is where financial services were 15 years ago — and, therefore, represents one of the largest opportunities of this generation.
The COVID-19 pandemic struck a reservoir of pent-up distrust from consistent data breaches and misuses like Cambridge Analytica and Equifax, and virtually overnight, entire industries were unable to conduct business in person. It was the shock the identity industry needed to create the first category of identity-specific products to solve an urgent problem.
The products were commonly called “vaccine passports,” but the simple function was to enable consumers to prove they were vaccinated or recently tested so they can return to travel, work, dating and so forth. We saw products emerge from every continent (except Antarctica), for various use cases, targeting this problem.
TikTok to Ban Children From Live Streaming
TikTok is raising its minimum age for live streaming from 16 to 18 starting next month. A BBC News investigation found hundreds of accounts going live from Syrian refugee camps, with children begging for donations. Some were receiving up to $1,000 (£900) an hour — but when they withdrew the cash, TikTok had taken up to 70%.
It is unclear how TikTok will enforce these age restrictions, however.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and Google, which owns YouTube, have a minimum live streaming age of 13 and already allow users to age-restrict content they upload.
TikTok is the world’s fastest-growing social media app and has been downloaded more than 3.9 billion times. It has made more than $6.2 billion in gross revenue from in-app spending since its launch in 2017, according to analytics company Sensor Tower.
