Wednesday, April 1, 2020

“Lions and Tigers and Rhinoceroses...



Oh My!”

On November 9th, 1874, The New York Herald’s front page headlines blared out, “Awful Calamity,” “The Wild Animals Broken Loose from Central Park,” “Terrible Scenes of Mutilations.” 

The eye catching and gut clenching article went on to describe in Pulp Fiction detail the mayhem wrought upon Gotham’s men, women and children when feral animals pull off a Great Escape. 

According to the news source 49 people had been killed and 200 more injured. Most readers dropped their newspapers and sought a safe refuse. Others grabbed their guns to try their aim at big game hunting. For the few who possessed a longer attention span, here’s what they read.



“Of course the entire story given above is a pure fabrication. Not one word of it is true. Not a single act or incident described has taken place. It is a huge hoax,”

We live in times of Fake News. Misinformation can now circle the globe faster than a speeding virus. There’s heaps of BS now being generated from the giants of social media.  Followers of these falsehoods can get sick or worse die. This is a good time to become a “Doubting Jeffy.”

I’ll use the social networking gargantuan Facebook as an example of how things can go awry. 
Remember it’s called Facebook, not Factbook.

You can be anything you want to be on Facebook. That being said, there’s folks who aren’t Doctors but play the role on Facebook. I’ll use the following FB post as an example.



Me being me, fact checked this report. (Remember the source is a Fox Fear Network station). I found this on the MedRxiv site. (A non profit preprint server for Health Sciences, which is supported by Yale University.) 



Basically, the above medical report has yet to be reviewed for accuracy and validity by fellow researchers. For now, don’t get worked up about the correlation of blood types and Covid-19.
Use common sense. Wash your hands, maintain social distancing and be civil and polite to your fellow humans from six feet away.

What we don’t need is someone in power referring to this malady as the “Chinese Virus. There is never an appropriate time for needless finger pointing. After all the 1918-1919 Spanish flu didn’t originate in the Land of Paella. 


BTW. There’s been a surge of hate crimes directed towards Asian Americans.


My dear readers, words and posts matter. Be truthful, be curious, be a seeker of fact and information. Worse comes to worse, you will bore people in conservations like I do! 

Check out this quote from James Gordon Bennett Jr. (Publisher of the New York Herald).





Lastly, folks we are going to be dealing with this for a long time. It won’t be over until Big Deborah sings.




Hang in there!
Jeff

4 comments:

  1. Absolutely correct. Thank you, Jeff!

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  2. Fake media. What about fake president?
    https://time.com/5808688/chloroquine-phosphate-coronavirus-death/

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  3. I wonder if anyone Jeffy mentioned grabbed their 'safe refuse' and took 'safe REFUGE' from the fake news hordes. Spell check will bite you in the (select your favorite word).

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