'Most smokers wrongly believe vaping is at least as harmful as smoking'

 More than half of smokers in England wrongly believe that vaping is more harmful or as harmful as smoking, according to a new study led by UCL researchers.

The study, published in the journal JAMA Network Open, looked at survey responses from 28,393 smokers in England between 2014 and 2023.

The research team found that public perceptions of e-cigarettes had worsened considerably over the past decade, with an overall increase in the perceived harm of e-cigarettes since 2021, coinciding with a sharp rise in vaping among young people.

In June 2023, 57% of respondents said they thought vaping was equally as harmful as smoking or more harmful, while only 27% thought e-cigarettes were less harmful.

Lead author Dr. Sarah Jackson (UCL Institute of Epidemiology & Health Care) said, "These findings have important implications for public health. The risks of vaping are much lower than the risks of smoking and this isn't being clearly communicated to people.

"This misperception is a health risk in and of itself, as it may discourage smokers from substantially reducing their harm by switching to e-cigarettes. It may also encourage some young people who use e-cigarettes to take up smoking for the first time, if they believe the harms are comparable.

"Better communication about the health risks is needed so that adults who smoke can make informed choices about the nicotine products they use."

The researchers used data from the Smoking Toolkit Study, in which a different sample of approximately 1,700 adults in England (who are representative of the population) are interviewed each month.

In 2014, the study showed, public perceptions of e-cigarettes were more favorable, with 44% of smokers regarding them as less harmful than cigarettes, and only 11% saying e-cigarettes were more harmful (this doubled to 23% by 2023).

The perception of e-cigarettes' harm worsened sharply in late 2019 and early 2020, coinciding with an outbreak of acute lung injuries in the United States that was wrongly linked to nicotine e-cigarettes (the EVALI outbreak) but later attributed to illicit cannabis vaping products containing vitamin E acetate.

Though perceptions had recovered by late 2020, they declined again from 2021 through to 2023 amid growing concern about youth vaping, as large numbers of young people starting to use disposable e-cigarettes.

By 2023, only 19% of smokers who did not vape said they thought vaping was less harmful than smoking.

The rise in the proportion who said e-cigarettes were more harmful than cigarettes was most pronounced among those aged under 35, despite use of e-cigarettes being much more common in this age group.

Senior author Professor Jamie Brown (UCL Institute of Epidemiology & Health Care) said, "E-cigarettes are novel and so have attracted much attention in the media, with news articles often overstating their risks to health compared with smoking. There is relatively little reporting about deaths caused by smoking, even though 75,000 people die as a result of it in England each year.

"The Government plans to offer one million smokers a free vaping starter kit alongside behavioral support to help them quit. This initiative may be undermined if many smokers are unwilling to try e-cigarettes because they wrongly believe them to be just as harmful as cigarettes or more so."

In its online guidance, the NHS says, "Cigarettes release thousands of different chemicals when they burn. Many are poisonous and up to 70 cause cancer. They also cause other serious illnesses, including lung disease, heart disease and stroke. Most of the harmful chemicals in tobacco smoke, including tar and carbon monoxide, are not contained in vape aerosol."

More information: Sarah E. Jackson et al, Trends in Harm Perceptions of E-Cigarettes vs Cigarettes Among Adults Who Smoke in England, 2014-2023, JAMA Network Open (2024). DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.0582

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-02-smokers-wrongly-vaping.html

'China, Cal. researchers propose holistic framework for studying social emotions'

 The crucial role of social emotions in our lives and in society cannot be overstated. Empathy, guilt, embarrassment, pride and other feelings we experience in the context of other people govern and motivate how we act, interact and the countless decisions we make. This is why a more holistic approach, one that integrates the various ways these emotions are studied, is necessary to gain insight and address gaps in knowledge. That's according to researchers from UC Santa Barbara, New York University School of Medicine and East China Normal University.

"I think researchers are realizing more and more that there needs to be some change, and a holistic understanding has become a popular idea in the field," said UC Santa Barbara social psychologist Hongbo Yu, the lead author of a paper that appears in the journal Nature Reviews Psychology.

Social emotions are complex, and according to the paper, multiple psychological and neurocognitive processes might be acting simultaneously during social interactions, requiring a framework that can analyze these emotions along different dimensions.

There are three major domains of empirical research on social emotions in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, the authors assert. One examines why these emotions exist and their role in survival and reproduction. Another investigates the cognitive operations and psychological processes behind social emotions, looking for rules that determine which emotion one feels and at what intensity. The third measures how biological processes in the brain and body give rise to these emotions.

These domains correspond easily with a framework advanced by late 20th-century neuroscientist David Marr. He proposed a three-level analysis approach to studying cognitive processes, with a computation level that in the case of social emotions would examine goals and functions, or why the emotions exist, an algorithm level that looks at underlying cognitive operations, and an implementation level that looks for evidence of these emotions in the body.

Originally formulated for visual processes, the framework has since been applied to a variety of areas that require the processing of complex information.

In this way, the researchers say, it becomes possible to connect external stimuli to internal processes and vice versa, or to tease apart inherent processes from context-dependent ones.

"It's important because changes in a process at one level may change the process at another level," Yu said. "And there are dependencies and constraints across levels."

Take guilt, for instance, the moral pain experienced at having harmed someone else. Without knowing its adaptive purpose (the computation level)—for instance, the maintenance and repair of important relationships—it becomes a challenge to design experiments that create the context for that emotion, Yu said.

"With the guidance of a clear understanding of the goal, we can then design a game in which the participants interact in real-time," he added. In the context of social emotions, he added, real-time interaction is particularly important, rather than tasks that require participants to imagine situations that could elicit the feeling (in this case guilt) but not the necessity or opportunity to follow through on the social aspect of the emotion (such as restore the relationship). "The psychological and the brain processes that engage may be different than when there is an actual interaction."

From there, suggest the researchers, investigators could analyze the emotions that arise using mathematical models in combination with neuroimaging techniques to understand the psychological and brain processes in a more quantitative and precise manner (algorithm), as well as the biological signals (implementation).

"There are many different measures and tools for different brain processes, and they all have different tradeoffs between their temporal precision and spatial precision," Yu added, "so researchers need to find the best approach for their research question."

Implementing this framework will take a little work, Yu said. Currently, researchers in the field tend to specialize in one or two domains, and social psychology in general—and social emotions in particular—have relied mainly on verbal theory and verbal hypothesis. This framework, according to the researchers, can not only add levels of precision to future studies but also shed new light on existing evidence. "We may be able to confirm previous verbal hypotheses, or perhaps resolve conflicts between multiple hypotheses," he added.

"What we propose is that first we need to have more conversations," said Yu, who as a cognitive neuroscientist dwells primarily on the implementation level of the framework. But he has seen the potential gain of incorporating computational modeling, and has found his horizons broadened when studying the goals and functions of social emotion.

"I think researchers with more expertise at different levels should pay attention, and be open-minded with other researchers," he said.

More information: Hongbo Yu et al, A levels-of-analysis framework for studying social emotions, Nature Reviews Psychology (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s44159-024-00285-1

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-02-holistic-framework-social-emotions.html

Biden Blasted After Claiming Crime Rate Has Fallen To 50-Year-Low

 by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

Joe Biden was slammed online after claiming that the crime rate in the US has fallen to the lowest point its been in half a century.

Biden has claimed that during the Trump Administration, “America saw the largest increase in murders ever recorded,” while “Under the Biden-Harris Administration, there has been a significant decrease in crime — including one of the largest yearly declines in homicides ever.”

Respondents noted that Biden completely ignored a huge spike in violent crime in large, mostly Democrat run, cities.

Biden made the comments while touting a fact sheet on what he’s done to “fight crime.”

Others noted that the drop in overall crime can be attributed to a massive reduction in reporting of crime stats and simply making things that were previously criminal no longer crimes.

Meanwhile, when you glance at the news…

More...

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/biden-blasted-after-claiming-crime-rate-has-fallen-50-year-low

Election Embezzlement: Harris Says Administration To Pay College Students To Register Voters

 Like the increasingly brazen thievery in America's cities, the Democrats' use of government resources to reinforce their hold on power is becoming more blatant by the day. 

The latest: On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris announced the federal government will start paying college students to register voters and serve as poll workers. College students and young people in general historically lean heavily Democratic: Biden received 65% of votes cast by 18- to 24-year-olds in the 2020 election, compared to 51% overall. 

“We have been doing work to promote voter participation for students,” said Harris as she met with activists representing more than 20 voting rights groups. “For example, we have under the Federal Work-Study program now allow students to get paid through Federal Work-Study to register people and to be non-partisan poll workers. As we know, this is important for a number of reasons. One, to engage our young leaders in this process and activate them in terms of their ability to strengthen our communities.”

"Curious how they chose college students and not veterans,” said New Hampshire state Rep. Ross Berry. “Almost like this is just a scheme to register Democrats and not actually increase participation of all voters. In most states, the areas they are targeting already have these programs under the National Voter Registration Act, so why the sudden interest in injecting college students? I think we know the answer.”

Further tipping the self-serving slant of its taxpayer-funded voter-registration machinery, the Biden administration chose the Juneteenth holiday -- which commemorates the abolition of slavery -- as one of three occasions on which it will have registration blitzes, Axios reports. Biden won the 2020 black vote by a 92% to 8% margin. Another push will come on the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act.

It doesn't stop there. Harris said the administration has also ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to send voter registration solicitations to Americans who've obtained health insurance via the Affordable Care Act marketplace. According to a 2017 Cal-Berkeley study, "Republicans are fully 12 percentage points less likely to purchase marketplace plans than Democrats."

Students promoting voter registration at North Carolina historically black colleges and universities in 2022 (via Common Cause)

Federal employees, whose 2019 party identification skewed Democratic by a 50% to 26% margin, get free time off to vote -- even if they choose to do so during early voting. 

The announcement that taxpayer funds will be used to pay a Democrat-leaning demographic to find new voters to register comes a week after Biden, defying the Supreme Court, cancelled another $1.2 billion in student debt -- in a thinly-veiled scheme to use your money to buy votes.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/broad-daylight-kamala-announces-administration-pay-college-students-register-voters

A Global, Digital Coup d'État

by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

There was a time.

What seemed to be unfolding was a huge intellectual error for the history books.

 A new virus had come along and everyone was freaking out and smashing all normal social functioning.

The excuse turns out just to be the cover story. Still, it bears examination.

Even though plenty of outside commentators said the pathogen should be handled in the normal way—with known treatment and calm while those most susceptible stayed cautious until endemicity—some people on the inside fell prey to a great fallacy. They had come to believe computer models over known realities. They thought that you could separate everyone, drive down infections, and then the virus would die out.

This was never a plausible scenario, as anyone who knew something about the history of pandemics would report. All known experience stood against this cockamamie scheme. The science was very clear and widely available: lockdowns do not work. Physical interventions in general achieve nothing.

But, hey, they said it was an experiment born of new thinking. They would give it a whirl.

When it became clear that the lockdowners had gained sway over policy, many of us thought, truly, how long can this really last? A week, maybe two. Then we would be done. But then something strange happened. The money began to flow. And flow. The states thought that was awesome so they kept it up. The money printers got to work. And general chaos broke out: social, cultural, educational, economic, and political.

It all happened so fast. The months rolled on with no break in the narrative. It became crazy after a time. There were so few critics. We didn’t know it but they were being silenced by a new machinery that had already been constructed for this purpose.

Among that which was censored was criticism of the inoculation potion that was being rolled out and which would eventually be forced on populations all over the world. They said it was 95 percent effective, but it wasn’t clear what that could mean. No coronavirus had ever been controlled by any vaccination. How could this be true? It wasn’t true. Nor did the shot stop the spread.

Many people said this at the time. But we couldn’t hear them. Their voices were muffled or silenced. The social media companies had already been taken over by government-connected interests working on behalf of intelligence agencies. We had believed that these tools were designed to increase our connections with others and enable free speech. Now they were being used to broadcast a preset regime narrative.

Strange industrial shifts took place. Gas cars were deprecated in favor of a new experiment in electric vehicles, thanks to intense consumer demand caused by shortages owing to supply chain breakages. Digital learning platforms got a huge boost because physical classrooms were closed. Online ordering and doorstep delivery became the rage because people were told not to leave their homes and small businesses were forcibly closed.

The pharma companies were riding high of course, gradually acculturating the population to a subscription model. There were attempts to convert whole countries to a health passport system. New York City tried this, along with actual physical segregation of the entire city, with the vaccinated considered clean while the unvaccinated were not allowed into restaurants, libraries, or theaters. The digital app didn’t work however, so that plan fell apart quickly.

All of this happened in less than one year. What began as an intellectual error in public health ended up looking like a digital coup d’état.

Coups of the past featured rebel armies from the hills storming the cities and joined by the military as they invaded the palace and the leader and his family fled in a carriage or helicopter depending on the epoch.

This was different. It was organized and planned by intelligence agencies within the structure of the global state, a great reset to reject the forms of the past and replace them all with a new dystopia.

Initially, the people who said this was a great reset were derided as crazed conspiracy theorists. But then it turned out that the head of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Klaus Schwab, had written a book by the very title that you could buy from Amazon. It turns out to be H.G. Wells’s “The Open Conspiracy” updated for the 21st-century technology.

There turns out to be much more than that. There was an angle to all of this that impacts the mechanisms we use for democratic control of societies. Buried in the flurry of bills shoved through in March 2020 was a liberalization of balloting and voting that would never have been tolerated before. In the name of social distancing, mail-in ballots would become the norm, along with the known irregularities they introduce.

Implausibly, this too was part of the plan.

Researching and realizing all of this in real time has been a bit much. It has shattered the old ideological paradigms. The old theories no longer explain the world as it is unfolding. It causes all of us to revisit our priors, at least those with minds adaptable enough to pay attention. For vast swaths of the intellectual class, this is not possible.

Looking back, we should have known something was up at the outset. There were too many anomalies. Were the people in charge really so stupid as to believe that you can make a virus go away by making everyone stay home? It’s absurd. You cannot control the microbial kingdom this way, and surely everyone with a modicum of intelligence knows this.

Another clue: there never was an exit plan. What exactly was fourteen days of frozen activity going to achieve? What was the benchmark of success? We were never told. Instead, the elites in media and government simply encouraged fear. And then met that fear with ridiculous protocols like dousing ourselves with sanitizer, masking while walking, and presuming every other person is a disease vector.

This was psychological warfare. To what end and how ambitious are these hidden plans for us?

Only four years later, we are grasping the fullness of what was going down.

For those of us schooled in the persistent incompetence of government to get anything right, much less deploy a plan with anything like precision, elaborate conspiracy theories of plots and schemes always seem implausible. We just don’t believe them.

This is why it took us so long to see the fullness of what was deployed in March 2020, a scheme that combined a plethora of seemingly disparate governmental/industrial ambitions including:

1) rollout of subscription/platform model of Pharma distribution,

2) mass censorship,

3) election management/rigging,

4) universal basic income,

5) industrial subsidies to digital platforms,

6) mass population surveillance,

7) cartelization of industry,

8) shift in income distribution and entrenchment of administrative state power,

9) crushing of ‘populist’ movements worldwide, and

10) the centralization of power generally speaking.

To top it off, all these efforts were global in scope. This whole model truly stretches the bounds of plausibility. And yet all the evidence points to exactly the above. It just goes to show that even if you don’t believe in conspiracies, conspiracies believe in you. It was a digital-age coup d’état unlike anything humanity has ever experienced.

How long will it take us to process this reality? We seem to be only at the early stages of understanding, much less resisting.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/global-digital-coup-detat

Vancouver hospital asked wrong family whether to pull the plug on patient

 The family of a Vancouver man faced a heavy decision after an unexpected phone call in the middle of the night. Their loved one was on life support, hospital staff told them, after a horrible choking incident.

“They said, 'He’s basically brain dead,'” explained Debbie Danielson. “'Do you want us to keep him on life support or do you want to pull the plug?'”

After a brief discussion with her husband, Danielson told the hospital to pull her 60-year-old brother off life support.

“Michael A. Beehler, 60, Vancouver, died August 9, 2021,” read a death notice posted in The Columbian newspaper.

“That whole week was kind of a blur. Trying to come up with funeral arrangements, letting family members know that he passed away,” explained Danielson.

Then came the phone call no one expected. It was her brother, Mike. He wasn’t dead. Instead, he was very much alive.

“I said, ‘You can’t be alive. You’re dead!'” explained Danielson.

In a terrible case of mistaken identity that has never been publicly disclosed, KGW found PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center in Vancouver allowed a family to pull the plug on the wrong man.

“We made life-ending decisions for a person we don’t even know,” said Danielson’s husband, Gary.

The medical mix-up started with a 911 call on August 8, 2021. Medics responded to an apartment in Vancouver. Mike Beehler said his roommate choked on a piece of steak at dinner. The man was not breathing and unconscious, according to an emergency dispatch log.

“He fell over a chair,” said Beehler. “I thought he was dead then.”

An ambulance transported the man to PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center in Vancouver. But, somewhere along the line, the roommate was misidentified, and the hospital incorrectly treated him as Mike Beehler.

“How do you misidentify somebody?” asked Danielson.

His family claims Beehler had previously been treated at PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center and had medical files on record, which may help explain why the hospital knew to call his sister with dire news.

PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center called the county medical examiner’s office to report the death, then sent the misidentified body to the funeral home, according to emails from the Clark County Medical Examiner’s Office obtained through a public records request.

The funeral home asked the wrong family about final wishes, cremation and organ donation.

“When we went to the funeral director, I was like, ‘Don’t we need to identify him?’ 'No, we’ll just take it from here,'” recounted Beehler’s brother-in-law, Gary Danielson. All County Cremation and Burial Services declined to comment.

It wasn’t until Beehler made that unexpected call to his sister a week later, concerned because his cell phone account had been shut down, that anyone realized the roommates had been switched at death.

“He’s dead and I’m supposed to be dead. Who knows what’s going on,” explained Beehler.

On Saturday evening, August 14, 2021, Beehler’s family called police non-emergency to notify authorities about the mistake.

In an email to the medical examiner’s staff, a death investigator summarized the situation and explained how any errors couldn’t be corrected immediately due to the weekend and limited staffing.

“I am a little uncertain on how to proceed with this unfortunate mix-up,” wrote death investigator Michelle Rodrigue.

The Clark County Medical Examiner’s Office said it later retrieved the body from the funeral home, conducted an external examination and used fingerprints to confirm the person’s identity. Indeed, it wasn’t Beehler, the medical examiner found. It was his roommate who died.

A new death notice was published in the newspaper remembering the roommate. “David C. Wells, 69, Vancouver, died Aug. 9, 2021,” read the notice.

The Clark County Medical Examiner’s Office then notified Wells' next-of-kin, his son in California.

“They basically told me there was a medical emergency regarding my father. He had been pronounced dead,” said Shawn Wells.

At the time, nobody told him about the mix-up — not the medical examiner, not the hospital or the funeral home, explained Shawn.

He travelled from his home in San Jose to make funeral arrangements in Vancouver. Shawn said he paid All County Cremation and Burial Services to retrieve the body so he could spend a few precious moments with his late father. He said a prayer. Then, he held the phone near his father’s body so other family members could say their final good-byes.

Shawn returned to California with his father’s cremated remains — unaware of the mix-up.

It wasn’t until KGW senior investigative reporter Kyle Iboshi contacted Wells’ family, more than two years after his death, that they discovered their loved one had been misidentified. He was taken off life support by strangers.

“I'm at a loss for words how badly they handled this,” said Shawn. “I'll never be able to get that decision back.”

Shawn explained his father had a distinct tattoo on his arm, which could have raised red flags if comparisons were made between the patient and medical files.

“It would have been a very easily identifiable mark on his body. Even if there was any slight confusion about his identity, I think it would have been quickly resolved,” said Shawn

Shawn said he’s since gone back and looked through paperwork surrounding his father’s death. The only mention of misidentification he could find was in the coroner’s report, which he hadn’t previously opened fearing the grim details of his father’s death. Beyond that, Shawn said, there’s been no explanation or apology.

“It’s disturbing. I don't know if I'm going to get over it. They dropped the ball so egregiously,” said Shawn.

Beehler’s family explained that they too have been met with silence.

“I still don’t know what happened,” said Gary Danielson. “We never got an explanation. We never got a sorry or anything.”

PeaceHealth declined to answer any questions or explain the mix-up, citing federal patient privacy law.

As a result of the case, the Clark County Medical Examiner’s office changed its internal policy, according to a county spokesperson. It now requires funeral homes, health care facilities or other providers requesting death certification to have family members identify their loved ones. If family identification isn’t possible, the decedent is brought to the medical examiner’s office for other forms of identification, including fingerprinting.

When health care mistakes are made, it is important to apologize, explained Dr. Thomas Gallagher, a practicing internist and researcher of patient safety and medical ethics at the University of Washington.

“Anytime something goes wrong in healthcare, it really is important that the practitioners and the organization proactively reach out to the patient and the family to let them know what happened, to explain what took place and to apologize,” said Gallagher.

Traditionally, health care organizations have avoided disclosing errors following the advice of their risk managers and attorneys worried about litigation, embarrassment or damage to reputation.

Gallagher believes health care providers are obligated to do their own internal reviews when something goes wrong to determine if anything could have been done differently going forward to prevent recurrences.

“You can really tell pretty quickly whether organizations are committed to learning and transparency and accountability or more interested in hiding things and protecting their reputation when you look at how they respond to harm events,” said Gallagher.

A PeaceHealth spokesperson wouldn’t say if there was any type of internal review into the mix-up between roommates.

Serious medical errors can be investigated by the Washington Medical Commission and the Washington Department of Health, but those events typically must meet the definition of an adverse event. Since the misidentification wasn’t associated with a surgery or invasive procedure, it likely wouldn’t count as a serious reportable event triggering a state investigation. Both the Washington Medical Commission and Washington Department of Health found no record of an investigation.

This medical mix-up came to light after Beehler’s family saw a KGW report involving the misidentification of another deceased man in Portland. In September, the Multnomah County Medical Examiner’s Office notified the family of Tyler Chase, 22, that he’d died of a drug overdose. Three months later, the office discovered the Portland man was still alive.

The Multnomah County Medical Examiner said misidentification occurred because the dead man, later identified by his family as Matthew Taylor, 30, was carrying Chase’s wallet and temporary driver’s license.

Patient misidentification can happen for a variety of reasons. Some patients arrive at the emergency room with no identification or can’t tell hospital staff their name because they’re unconscious or dealing with mental health challenges. In some situations, patients don’t want to give a name or provide the wrong name on purpose due to law enforcement or immigration concerns.

“Health care organizations go to great lengths to try and make sure they have the appropriate patient identification,” said Gallagher. “Most patients get a little tired of being asked, ‘What’s your name? What’s your date of birth?”

Incidents involving misidentification of the dead are rare, although there have been headline-grabbing cases reported in California, New York, Illinois and Indiana.

The number of people involved in a patient’s treatment — including police, firefighters, medics, doctors and nurses — can also lead to mistakes.  

Beehler and his family theorize that someone may have mixed up the identities of the two roommates while responding to the initial 911 call.

“They checked my ID. That was about it,” recalled Beehler.

According to the 911 dispatch log, several people could be heard talking in the apartment. A neighbor tried to help.

“We ran around like chickens with our heads cut off,” said Beehler, describing the chaotic scene before medics transported his roommate to the hospital.  

“If patients come into our Emergency Department as a trauma or directly from EMS, and they have no ID, they are given a trauma name until proof of identity is confirmed,” wrote Debra Carnes, spokesperson for PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center in an email to KGW. Carnes declined to provide specific details.

Beehler’s family thought they’d lost their loved one for good, taking him off life support; only to learn the shocking truth: it was a stranger. Yet nobody will explain how it happened or why.

“It’s a pretty messed up situation,” said Beehler. “Somebody messed up.”

https://www.kgw.com/article/news/investigations/peacehealth-death-mistaken-identity-vancouver-life-support-misidentification/283-910eaf65-3676-42f9-b21e-59cc2070c76e