Can touching a barbell in the gym get you sick with the coronavirus?

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

It’s not the first time masculine ideology has driven resistance to a public health initiative.

In the midst of rapidly rising case counts and hospitalizations during the COVID-19 pandemic, a small but incredibly loud segment of U.S. society has adamantly refused to wear masks. Many of them are men, who seem to view masks as emasculating face condoms that must be rejected.

For example, a look at Donald Trump’s debacle of a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 20, shows that men in his base, like Trump himself, avoid wearing masks. Women like Ivanka Trump, by contrast, can choose a mask or not because they have no masculinity to protect.

In reality, whether it’s a mask or a condom, resistance to these barrier methods of protection—both of which keep the wearer from transmitting a virus to someone else—clearly presents a danger to public health. A man without a mask is willfully endangering people around him by refusing to block his spit and the viruses it could contain. Why would he take these risks to himself and to others?

When HIV emerged in the United States, a key part of the public health response was to urge consistent condom use. Although the advice made obvious sense, in some pockets of the population, people resisted it. Researchers began to dig into the social factors that motivated this resistance. They found that among men who were having sex with women, “masculine ideology” was associated with rejection of condom use.

At the time the research was being conducted, three factors were cited as the pillars of this ideology: status, toughness and anti-femininity. Today, the concept has been expanded a bit to encompass other features. The American Psychological Association has defined this ideology as a “particular constellation of standards” that demands that men ascribe to “adventure, risk, and violence.” Certainly, choosing not to wear the simplest of protective gear during a pandemic is both a risk and an adventure.

Perhaps not surprisingly, where this conceptualization of manliness prevails, the dominant avatars who embody it are white men with epic swagger. As one researcher described it, this “celluloid masculinity” muscling around on screens, perhaps most famously in the form of characters played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, represents a “dominant Western exemplar of manhood.” These characters, you see, despite the copious body armor and weaponry they tote around in their films, would never, ever don simple barrier protection devices because viruses can sense fear.

In today’s refusal to wear a mask, we see echoes of this condom rejection embedded in white masculine ideology. ...

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Debunking Bad COVID-19 Research
MIT Press and the University of California, Berkeley, are leading an effort to rapidly review research related to the pandemic and stop the spread of misinformation.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/06/29/new-mit-press-journal-debunk-bad-covid-19-research

MIT Press and the Berkeley School of Public Health are launching a new COVID-19 journal, one that will peer review preprint articles getting a lot of attention -- elevating the good research and debunking the bad.

The Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 journal will be led by Bertozzi, who will serve as the first editor in chief. Unlike a traditional journal, authors will not submit their work for review. Instead, the Rapid Reviews team will select and review already-published preprint articles -- a publishing model known as an overlay journal. Rapid Reviews COVID-19

Article authors will be notified if their research is selected for review, but the Rapid Reviews team will not wait for their permission to publish public reviews of their work. These reviews will be published as stand-alone articles using open-source publishing platform PubPub. The authors of research papers deemed to be high-quality will be invited to publish their work with Rapid Reviews in a more conventional journal format.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Bemoaning uneven individual and state compliance with public health recommendations, top U.S. COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci recently blamed the country’s ineffective pandemic response on an American “anti-science bias.” He called this bias “inconceivable,” because “science is truth.” Fauci compared those discounting the importance of masks and social distancing to “anti-vaxxers” in their “amazing” refusal to listen to science.

It is Fauci’s profession of amazement that amazes me. As well-versed as he is in the science of the coronavirus, he’s overlooking the well-established science of “anti-science bias,” or science denial.

Americans increasingly exist in highly polarized, informationally insulated ideological communities occupying their own information universes.

Within segments of the political blogosphere, global warming is dismissed as either a hoax or so uncertain as to be unworthy of response. Within other geographic or online communities, the science of vaccine safety, fluoridated drinking water and genetically modified foods is distorted or ignored. There is a marked gap in expressed concern over the coronavirus depending on political party affiliation, apparently based in part on partisan disagreements over factual issues like the effectiveness of social distancing or the actual COVID-19 death rate.

In theory, resolving factual disputes should be relatively easy: Just present strong evidence, or evidence of a strong expert consensus. This approach succeeds most of the time, when the issue is, say, the atomic weight of hydrogen.

But things don’t work that way when scientific advice presents a picture that threatens someone’s perceived interests or ideological worldview. In practice, it turns out that one’s political, religious or ethnic identity quite effectively predicts one’s willingness to accept expertise on any given politicized issue.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

GOLDMAN: “We find a national [facemask] mandate could .. cut the daily growth rate of confirmed cases by 1.0pp to 0.6% .. [and] could potentially substitute for lockdowns that would otherwise subtract nearly 5% from GDP.” [Hatzius] https://twitter.com/carlquintanilla/status/1277918178291658759?s=20

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[movingiron88]

@Michael Scally MD who is going to teach your kids to be a man and not scared little whimp?

 

[Michael Scally MD]