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Buying masks for a masked ball

masks-masked-ball — Image: People queuing to buy face masks, San Francisco 1918. Wikipedia CC

I was cruising the supermarket aisles in search of Rapid Antigen Tests and P2 masks when a young woman opposite did that eye flash thing (above her mask). I was astonished – this last happened, what, in 1996? It’s quite a feat to demonstrate interest in the opposite sex with eye movement alone. Usually the mouth is used too, with either a shy smile or a naughty smirk.

The woman in question moved past, to her partner who had been behind me all the while. They moved on to the nappy aisle.

Time to take my temperature again, although this week I’m decidedly better. Before we get into a discussion about masks and how strange it is to see almost everyone wearing one, a small correction. Last week in my fevered state, I added an extra digit to the Covid cases numbers for Tasmania. It was 3,665.

As the majority of us are wearing face masks for the foreseeable future, what are the best masks and how should one go about preserving their integrity? When, dare I ask, is some entrepreneur going to launch a 2022 version of the 18^th century masked ball? These lavish social events were popular in Europe (Venice) and later in the UK (where the decadence got dialled down to a cup of tea and a biscuit level). You could drink standing up, too.

You’d have to adapt the costumes, though. In those days the preferred mask left the mouth uncovered (all the better for conversation and naughty smirking). One of the more common masks employed at these events was a sequinned eye mask mounted on a stick, so the damsel could hide behind it (if flirting), or maybe avoid the attentions of a rancid squire.

This could be a good time to observe that for nearly all masked comic book superheroes, the mouth is always visible. Most superheroes wear eye masks (with no visible pupils.) This, and the skin-tight costume (first popularised by Lee Falk’s The Phantom in 1936), are the popular hallmarks of superheroes.

Batman and Robin supposedly wear masks to hide their true identity, so even observant people will never see wealthy philanthropist Bruce Wayne in the street and go “Omigosh – it’s Batman.”

Back in the real world, circa January 14, 2022, you can walk past someone you know quite well, not recognising them behind the ubiquitous face mask.

“Crikey! Is that you, Barry?”

“Mhww fwhff gruff.”

The challenges facing two or more people trying to have a conversation while wearing a face mask has resulted in the Chinunder, a word I made up, which is what it implies.

Many women, it seems, prefer the little black face mask. Men in general and as usual, have no sense of fashion or flair. Some make their own masks (I did see someone with a hanky tied across his nose and mouth, like a baddie about to hold up the stagecoach).
While medicos will tell you a plain surgical mask is preferable to a bandanna or a mask with an exhaust vent, it (was) OK to make your own. You just need two or three layers of cloth, an adjustable bridge (for those who wear glasses), and elastic to hold the mask close to your face. A timely ABC report this week, however, has experts saying the cloth mask is worse than useless and instead we should wear N95/P2 masks.

This is despite the N95 masks I bought from a hardware store (for $4 per packet), clearly states ‘not for medical use’.

More information on cloth masks is available through the Infection Control Expert Group

Whatever. If you wear hearing aids, take great care when removing your mask as there is a 50/50 chance one of your hearing aids will go ‘ping’ into the nearest hedge or shrubbery.

If you don’t make your own, what kind of mask should you buy? The benefit of N95/P2 masks is they can be bought at hardware stores or chemists and can be re-used.

But even the simple job of shopping around for an appropriate mask carries risks. Chanteuse, an avid FOMMer, commented on an ABC interview with an epidemiologist, who was asked what you should put in your ‘someone in our house has COVID’ prep kit.

The answer included disinfectant, gloves etc plus two RATs per inhabitant, a thermometer and a pulse oximeter.

“I reckon you’d get COVID in the hours and hours you’d spend traipsing from shop to shop trying to get your hands on the last three,” Chanteuse said. Traipsing, now there’s a word.

Corona virus, as we know, can spread through droplets and particles released into the air by speaking, singing, coughing or sneezing.

A survey by the Melbourne Institute found that nearly 90% of Australians support the use of masks in public places to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Approval was also high (93%) for the 14-day quarantine period for people diagnosed with Covid.

According to a team of academics from Bangor University writing in The Conversation, mandated mask-wearing is not just something prompted by Covid-19. During the Spanish Flu in 1918, the Blitz in Britain in 1941, and the smog outbreaks in the UK from the 1930s to the 1960s, mask wearing was promoted as a patriotic act.

“However, the media’s scope in the first half of the 20th century was mainly limited to government-approved posters and newsprint in the 1910s. By contrast, today’s media landscape – especially social media – allows for individual and personalised voices to be heard to an extent unthinkable in earlier decades.”

Now, of course, we have Freedom rallies, people campaigning against lock-downs and mandates, scribbling slogans on footpaths… It’s nothing new – see Anti Mask League of San Francisco 1918.

If you see someone in public who is not wearing a mask, resist the temptation to try and change their mind. Avoid them like the plague, if you will, on the assumption that they are also un-vaccinated.

Which leads me to speculate about those masked superheroes who do such amazing things (while doubtless spreading viruses everywhere). Comic artists of the day must have decided that a black eye mask conveyed the necessary gravitas. Lips are drawn to look kissable.

Comics were banned from our house when I was a child – Blyton good, Phan-tom bad. I could never figure out why this ban was in force since our daily newspaper (which was in the house), commonly ran three or four comic strips including Andy Capp, Dagwood, The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician.

Despite the household ban, I was a big fan of Phantom, Ghost Who Walks, Man Who Never Dies. He’s still going in 2022. But The Phantom does not have superpowers – it’s a multi-generational story which has fed the myth of immortality. As the story goes, phantom babies are born in the Skull Cave in Bangall* and raised by wolves (and their mother, Diana Palmer). Devil and Hero stand by, not the least perturbed by the change in the pecking order.

“Diana! Not another girl!”

Successive Phantoms always seem to be gym fit and fearless, which means they have avoided jungle diseases like dengue, yellow fever and African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness). Perhaps Mr and Mrs Phan-tom take the kids to the clinic in town for vaccinations?

As they say of the 21^st Phantom (disguised as Mr Walker, wearing a hat, sunglasses and heavy overcoat (on a humid night in darkest Africa):

“The Phantom can be at many places at once” (old jungle saying).

*Fictitious African country.

And a joke for the ladies: Masks are like bras- they’re uncomfortable, you take them off as soon as you get home and if you see someone without one, you notice it. Ed

Angst in the time of Covid

polio-cholera-covid — Image: A young girl is given oral polio vaccine – Wikimedia CC

Amid reports of doubters who (still) believe Covid is fake news, this week we examine the history of public protest and vaccine hesitancy in times of contagion.

Those 3,000 or so people who mingled on Sydney’s streets a while back, protesting against the Covid lockdown, protesting about vaccines – it’s nothing new.

In the early 19^th century, Joe Public was getting riled up by the spread of cholera and the seemingly poor response by doctors and authorities. There was similar dissent shown when the UK government sought to make the smallpox vaccine compulsory in 1854. There was an ‘anti-mask’ movement during the Spanish Flu and much stigmatisation of polio victims in the first half of the 20^th century.

While the threat of cholera has been eradicated in countries with good drinking water and sanitation, there’s still a lot of it about in parts of Africa and Asia.

Cholera is a severe diarrhoeal disease which, if left untreated, can kill within hours. It is commonly transmitted via food or untreated water, particularly in countries with poor sanitation. Even now if you are travelling to Asia or Africa, your GP will advise getting vaccinated.

And here, dear reader, is where the great divide starts; the inevitable chasm between the majority who accept the science and medical advice and those who don’t. There are those who think the Covid vaccine is a plot to de-populate the planet or a conspiracy to control our minds by implanting microchips. Mine has already succumbed, as you can tell.

The first cholera epidemic (1831) emerged in Russia then somehow moved to Scotland, causing considerable angst and consternation. Just absorb this snippet from Wikipedia and put it in the context of Sydney’s Covid lockdown (and protests).

“A major riot took place in Aberdeen on 26 December 1831, when a dog dug up a dead body in the city. Some 20,000 Aberdonians (two-thirds of the city’s population, although this number has been criticised as an exaggeration), protested against the medical establishment, who they believed were using the epidemic as a body-snatching scheme similar to the Burke and Hare murders of 1828”.

In the summer of 1832, a series of cholera riots occurred in various towns and cities throughout Britain, frequently directed against the authorities, doctors, or both. Of the 72 cholera riots in the British Isles that year, 14 made reference to body-snatchers (“Burkers”).

Burkers were people who believed that medical authorities were acting in co-ordination with the State to purposefully kill and reduce the population (weeding out the poor and weak). Sounds outlandish now, eh?

Despite oral vaccinations being in widespread use, the World Health Organisation (WHO) recorded 499,447 cases of cholera and 2.990 deaths in 2018, spread across 34 countries. About 75% of cholera cases were attributed to Yemen. As the WHO observes, cholera is most likely to re-emerge and spread in countries affected by war and civil unrest and/or where infrastructure has been damaged by natural disasters.

If you roll back 102 years to the Spanish Flu pandemic, it is not hard to uncover instances of public unrest. They ranged from people stigmatising those who had the virus to complaining about having to wear a mask in public.

Historian Humphrey McQueen says mask wearing was strenuously enforced in New South Wales.

“The demand for masks was so extensive that to prevent profiteering, the Commonwealth Government declared butter muslin and gauze to be `necessary commodities’ within proclaimed areas.”

Opponents of mask wearing saw them as breeding grounds for infection or as sapping the community’s ‘vital force’. A ‘Bovril’ advertisement alleged that anti-influenza masks were ‘like using barbed wire fences to shut out flies’.

McQueen said there was widespread support for inoculation throughout the country. By the end of 1919, 25% of people in in New South Wales had received two inoculations against Spanish Flu.

“Melbourne’s socialites reputedly arranged `inoculation parties’ where the guests ‘got the needle’ in turn to slow music and a prize was awarded to the shapeliest arm.”

Vaccine hesitancy is no surprise to David Isaacs, Professor of Paediatric Infectious Diseases, University of Sydney.

Writing in The Conversation, he explored the topic from smallpox through to the Covid vaccine.

“In 1853, concerned by pockets of poor uptake of smallpox vaccine, the British parliament introduced the Vaccination Act, making infant smallpox vaccination compulsory.

“Mandatory vaccination fomented opposition, something we should remember if considering making a modern vaccine mandatory.”
Protests quickly emerged, with more than 80,000 vaccine dissenters marching through Leicester carrying banners, a child’s coffin and an effigy of Jenner.

Eventually, the success of Jenner’s smallpox vaccine silenced the anti-smallpox vaccination movement.

I sometimes look at the smallpox scar on my arm (1955) and wonder why people were so scared of something that could spare you from a disease more contagious than Covid-19, with a 30% mortality rate.

In the first half of the 20th century, the ‘silent killer’, polio (infantile paralysis) swept quickly through the US and other countries.
The US was desperate for a polio vaccine and it got one, but not without an early setback. Virologists Albert Sabin and Jonas Salk, competed to develop the first polio vaccine.
Salk’s vaccine, made from killed polio viruses, was ready for a large clinical trial in 1954.

Five companies applied to mass produce the Salk vaccine, four major pharmaceutical firms and one Californian family firm called Cutter Laboratories. The trial results proved the vaccine worked, so vaccination began in 1955.

But within two weeks, children who received the Cutter vaccine (but not the vaccines made by the four other companies), started to develop paralysis. Of the 200,000 children given the Cutter vaccine, 40,000 developed polio, 200 were paralysed and 10 died.

“The polio vaccination program stalled due to the ‘Cutter Incident’, but the fear of catching polio was so great the public was soon reassured the other vaccines had not caused polio,” Prof Isaacs wrote.

I don’t remember being told this story as a child in the 1950s, lining up in a New Zealand schoolyard for the polio needle. New Zealand was as badly affected as Australia, with five polio epidemics from 1914 to 1954, resulting in many deaths and people my age being left with a lingering legacy.

Polio Australia says there are 400,000 Australian survivors of the childhood polio epidemic. At its peak between 1944 and 1954, the virus killed 1000. The highly contagious virus, spread via faeces and nasal mucous, resulted in poor people and those living in overcrowded situations being stigmatised. Then as now, outbreaks were dealt with by closing schools, borders and public facilities like swimming pools. Victims were quarantined and newspapers published a daily tally of polio cases and deaths.

Prof Isaacs compares these stories with the public concern which arose in 2020 about the Covid vaccines, primarily because of the risk of blood clots. He concludes with the ‘greater good’ argument.

“In Australia, a concentration on individual risk at a single point in time ignores the benefits to the community of widespread vaccine uptake.

“History tells us the public can tolerate risk of harm from vaccines when the severity of the disease warrants the risk.”

I don’t know about you, but my second AZ shot is due tomorrow. I’ll run the risk.

More reading:

The Cutter incident

Queuing up for the Covid vaccination

Suddenly, getting your Covid vaccination is becoming a hot ticket item on social media. By that I mean ‘normal’ social media posts from people who actually believe in the science. I got my first shot last Thursday evening, 35 minutes later than the allotted time, but hey, I’m retired. I can watch Antique Roadshow later on catch-up.

I spent the time sitting in a packed waiting room with 50-60 other people in my age group (70+). I traded witticisms with a couple of people who seemed sceptical, but all the same sat and waited to be called.

Once I’d been injected (by my own doctor, no less), a nurse stuck a green sticker on my shirt and told me to ‘sit-stay’ for 15 minutes, to make sure I didn’t have any adverse reactions.

I came back out and sat next to a man who had previously been saying things about the government and their ‘jab campaign’.

“So is Bill Gates tracking us now?”

Apart from a slightly sore arm, it’s just another vaccination to add to the certificate from Medicare which lists them all from 2017. I didn’t even know they were doing that until I noticed an email when logged in to MyGov.

The Covid vaccination rollout may have been on the agenda for talks between Prime Minister Scott Morrison and NZ’s PM, Jacinda Ardern, but the media focused on other issues.

Morrison, who in April claimed Australia was ahead of NZ, has come in for trenchant criticism over the government’s handling of the vaccination rollout. The debate continues about the government’s decision to restrict the Pfizer vaccine to people aged under 50. The reasoning behind this decision is that the AstraZenica vaccine (for the over-50s), which has been linked to a rare clotting disorder, is too risky for younger people.

The online news source ‘The Conversation’ sent out a well-researched piece this week asking was it possible to ‘mix and match’ vaccines.

The premise of research out of Germany is that allowing people to have, say AstraZenica for the first shot and another brand for the second is to speed up the vaccination programme when it stalls due to a vaccine stock shortage

It makes sense to allow the general population to have whatever vaccine is available at the time. But talk of risks and side effects may only serve to increase what is known as ‘vaccine hesitancy’.

The government’s chief medical adviser Brendan Murphy told a Four Corners investigation last week that vaccine hesitancy was having an impact.

“We would have expected at this stage to have had a greater uptake because we’ve now got 5,000 points of primary care presence and we are supplying excess vaccine and we have seen a slight flattening, when we expected growth.”

But Professor Murphy said much of the blame lay with the media.

“I think the biggest impact on hesitancy is, frankly, sensationalist media reporting.”

“We want to be transparent, but we want people to understand that the risk of this blood clot is really tiny, and if you’re a vulnerable person, the risk of severe COVID is high.”

Apropos of which, perhaps, a few weeks ago we started binge-watching Season 17 of the long-running medical soap. Grey’s Anatomy. Despite cries of derision from the gallery (it’s a textbook, isn’t it?), Grey’s is the 8^th longest-running primetime TV series. A long way behind The Simpsons (32) and Law & Order – Special Victlms’ Unit (22), but not bad for a series labelled – ‘opera, melodrama and medical procedures’.

I’d best not reveal too many spoilers for fans of Grey’s who have not yet discovered it on the Disney Channel. I had to register for adult content to watch this series, so careful is Disney about protecting kids from M or R-rated content. There’s not too much spicy action in sex scenes which are more about the before and after. But the well-researched scripts are full of what censors call ‘adult themes’ including sex trafficking, drug addiction, psychiatric disorders and patients presenting with the most complex (and gruesome) medical emergencies.

What is illuminating about Season 17 is the setting (Seattle 2020) with all episodes so far completely immersed in the emergence of Covid and its effect on frontline medical staff.

Executive producer and chief writer Shonda Rhimes has a lot to say through the characters about the disproportionate affect of Covid on black people (poor black people specifically), often living in overcrowded conditions.

It’s no accident Rhimes is known for a social conscience – in 2019 she was involved in a campaign with Michele Obama and others to encourage people to vote in the 2020 presidential election.

Rhimes and her Grey’s Anatomy star, Ellen Pompeo, have been with the show from the start. Pompeo, now 51, shares credits in Season 17 as a producer, as well as remaining as the main actor/narrator.

Pompeo is also one of America’s highest paid actors, earning $19 million a year from syndication rights and her $550,000 per episode salary.

You might recall Grey’s Anatomy (which, BTW, is a famous textbook on human anatomy first published in 1858), getting a panning in this blog. We focused on the now-infamous opera episode, where the story was told in song, over operating tables and in hot sweaty linen cupboard clinches.

This is called ‘jumping the shark’ in TV series’ parlance and usually points to writers and producers running out of ideas.

We let some seasons go by and tuned in again about series 15 when you could watch it on catch-up.

Our bizarre attachment to medical soaps aside, I feel some degree of social responsibility to warn that we have some way to go with the goal of vaccinating all Australians against Covid-19 by October (which October?). Not the least of it is the constant presence on social media of anti-vaxxer scare campaigns, most of them debunked long ago.

It’s not just Australians who are hesitant.

Nature Magazine published a survey of 13,426 people in October 2020 indicating that 71.2% of respondents were willing to be vaccinated against Covid-19 if it were proven safe and effective.

“The far-from-universal willingness to accept a COVID-19 vaccine is a cause for concern. Countries where acceptance exceeded 80% tended to be Asian nations with strong trust in central governments (China, South Korea and Singapore)”.

In April, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) published a survey of 1,090 people which found just 43% of Australians thought the rollout was being done efficiently (down from 63% in March). About 63% thought it was being done safely, down from 73%; and just over half (52%) were confident the vaccines will be effective at stopping COVID-19.

The slow rollout and changes to the plan also appear to have given rise to vaccine hesitancy. One in six people (16%) said they would never get vaccinated against COVID-19, up from 12% in March. It’s a small sample, but nonetheless a demonstration of how confidence in the administration has waned during the vaccine rollout.

Meanwhile the Covid vaccination tally is two for two in this household. Tip from a friend – ask for a lollypop afterwards!

Conspiracies, Daffodils and Tulips

In spring, as the poet said, a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of conspiracy. Wait! I just misquoted Alfred Tennyson and there’s a one in eight chance that someone under 34 will believe the quote is authentic.

While the new season takes tentative steps towards summer (tulips and daffodils flowering), imported conspiracy theories have taken root in Australia. The media noticed; with The Australian, the New Daily, The Guardian and 60 Minutes among those to investigate. Satirists weighed in, mocking the worrisome ideas fomented by the mendacious QAnon. While satire has its place, conspiracy theories can cause a lot of damage if people act on them.

During the lockdown of public housing towers in Melbourne, some 10,000 people refused to take a covid test. Victorian Health Minister Jenny Mikakos said some had declined believing that Coronavirus was a conspiracy, its effects overstated, or simply with a misguided faith that it would not affect them.

More recently, News Corp reported that people are being “actively investigated” by police for encouraging Melbourne residents to protest against Stage Four lockdown. Anti-lockdown protesters clashed with police in the Victorian capital on Sunday night. The anti-lockdown lobby has been very active on Twitter and other social media outlets before and after those events.

Victorian Premier Dan Andrews’ attempts to hose down the second phase of COVID-19 are being defied by those including followers of the social media conspiracy spreader, QAnon. If you hear someone utter the words ‘sovereign citizen’, its a sure sign they follow one of the far-right conspiracy groups in the US (and now, it seems, in Australia).

QAnon believes the world is being controlled by a ‘deep state’ of Satan-worshipping paedophiles and people traffickers. The plot (there always is one) is that the deep state wants to overthrow the incumbent president, Donald Trump. Even though QAnon has previously turned on Trump, at this stage in the election cycle it appears they think he’s the right man to fix what ails the US.

There’s more available, if you want to go looking for it, on Facebook and bulletin boards like 4Chan and 8kun (known as 8Chan before the Christchurch mosque massacre). The latter was in the news again this week as the perpetrator was jailed for life without parole.

The shooter posted simultaneous footage of the massacre on social media forums and investigations since showed him to be active on right-wing bulletin boards like 8Chan.

The London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which tracks extremism around the world, detailed the rise of QAnon across social media platforms. Its report, The Genesis of a Conspiracy Theory, shows that interactions with content in social media groups more than tripled, from 2.35 million in February to 7.26 million in June.

The ISD report shows a marked increase in discussions on social media platforms between March and June. Unique users discussing QAnon jumped by 12.02 million, or 63.7% on Twitter, 188,855 or 174.9% on Facebook and 96,894 or 71% on Instagram. One should hope that some of those discussions were rebuttals posted by people who know that it is just so much hokum.

Little wonder that the FBI and ASIO warned that extreme-right radical groups are a domestic terrorism threat.

The definition of a conspiracy theory is that which is promulgated as fact yet cannot be supported by evidence. Or as Daniel Pipes (a US historian and writer) was quoted in a Senate report:

“Like alchemy and astrology, conspiracism offers an
intellectual inquiry that has many facts right but goes wrong
by locating causal relationships where none exist.”

Australia has always had an element of conspiracists; holocaust deniers, anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers, mask-deniers, Islamaphobes and those who subscribe to (US) theories that the world is controlled by a cabal of (Jewish) financiers (and that aliens are being kept in a secret underground facility in the desert somewhere, for breeding purpose, perhaps). The adherents may be small in number but they wield a disproportionate amount of influence.

People aged 18-34 appear to be susceptible to being swayed by conspiracy theories. About 20% of this cohort told pollsters they believed the 5G mobile network was being used to spread coronavirus (a widely debunked and baseless theory).
The better news is that 5G theory beliefs decreased in older age groupings. About 13% of 35 to 54-year olds responded positively to the theories, and between 4% and 8% of the 55+ cohort.

The rapid growth of QAnon appears to have started with the emergence of the Coronavirus in March. Those who believe that vaccinations cause more health problems than the specific ones they are forestalling, were the obvious target.

ASIO’s annual threat assessment released in February outlined the threat of right-wing extremism as “real and growing”, according to a Lowy Institute report. A June update revealed that right-wing extremist investigations now make up a third of ASIO’s domestic caseload. ASIO warns that far-right groups are using Covid-19 as a cover to push ideologies and gain recruits.

In Australia, this manifested itself in a series of rallies in May, with protesters calling Covid-19 a scam and protesting against vaccines, pharmaceutical companies, fluoride and 5G.

As if this was no disturbing enough, a meme being circulated (again), purports to claim that Australia does not exist. I thought it was satire, and so did the person who brought it to my attention. No, it is a conspiracy theory/hoax that’s been around long enough to have its own hashtag, #australiadoesntexist.

So, enough of this nonsense; let’s just enjoy the daffodils and tulips, the pardalote chit-chitting away, the smell of jasmine…

If you see Junior thumbing away at his phone or tablet when it’s supposed to be family time, share the real quote from Tennyson: “In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”

Or if you prefer a poem with an Australian flavour:

And jolly Spring, with love and laughter gay
Full fountaining, lets loose her tide of bees
Upon the waking ember-flame of bloom
New kindled in the honey-scented trees.

Hugh McCrae