Why Is There Such Reluctance To Discuss Natural Immunity?

(Source: zerohedge.com)

BY TYLER DURDEN
FRIDAY, JUN 04, 2021

Authored by Jon Sanders via The American Institute for Economic Research,

If you’re among those of us who aren’t tribally invested in Covid politics but would like good information about when life will resume as normal, chances are you’re interested in herd immunity. You’re likely not interested in having to rely on the Internet Archive for good information on herd immunity. Alas, it’s become a go-to place for retrieving, as it were, previously published information on herd immunity that became inconvenient post-vaccine and then virtually Memory-Holed.

Over the past 15 months, the litany of Experts’ True Facts and Science regarding various aspects of SARS-CoV-2 has changed more often than the starting lineup of a bad minor league ball club. Covid-19 is spread by droplets, especially from asymptomatic people, until one day it was airborne all along and people who weren’t sick in all likelihood weren’t even sick. Stay at home, you’re safer indoors, even stay away from parks and beaches; well, actually, outdoors is the place to be. Masks don’t work against viruses and are actually unhealthy to wear if you’re not sick, then suddenly they did work and without one you might as well be shooting people. Everyone knows and PolitiFact verified that the virus couldn’t have been created in the prominent infectious disease lab doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in bats coincidentally at Covid Ground Zero until, one day, PolitiFact had to retract the entire “Pants on Fire!” article. And so forth.

Unfortunately, information about herd immunity has also not been immune to this kind of meddling. Until recent months, people readily understood that active immunity came about either by natural immunity or vaccine-induced immunity. Natural immunity comes from battling and defeating an actual infection, then having your immune system primed for the rest of your life to fight it off if it ever shows up again. This immunity is achieved at a sometimes very high personal price.

Vaccine-induced immunity is to prime your immune system with a weaker, non-threatening form of the invading infection, so that it’s ready to fight off the real thing should you ever encounter it, and without your having first to risk severe illness or death.

Those interested in herd immunity in itself likely don’t have a moral or political preference for one form of immunity to the exclusion of the other. Immunity is immunity, regardless of whether a particular person has it naturally or by a vaccine. All immunity contributes to herd immunity.

Others, however, are much less circumspect. They seem to have forgotten the ultimate goal of the public campaign for people to receive vaccination against Covid-19. It’s not to be vaccinated; it’s to have immunity. People with natural immunity — i.e., people whose immune systems have faced Covid-19 and won — don’t need a vaccine.

They do, however, need to be considered in any good-faith discussion of herd immunity. There are two prongs to herd immunity, as we used to all know, and those with natural immunity are the prong that’s being ignored. It’s not just mere oversight, however. Fostering such ignorance can lead to several bad outcomes:

• People with natural immunity could be kept from employment, education, travel, normal commerce, and who knows what other things if they don’t submit to a vaccine they don’t need in order to fulfill a head count that confuses a means with the end
  
  
• The nation could already be at herd immunity while governors and health bureaucrats continue to exert extreme emergency powers, harming people’s liberties and livelihoods
  
  
• People already terrified of Covid — including especially those who’ve already had it — would continue to live in fear, avoiding human interaction and worrying beyond all reason
  
  
• People could come to distrust even sound advice from experts about important matters, as they witness and grow to expect how what “the experts” counsel diverges from what they know to be wise counsel while it conforms to and amplifies the temporary needs of the political class

Those of us wanting good information certainly don’t want any of those outcomes. But others seem perfectly fine to risk them. They include not only elected officials, members of the media, political talking heads, self-important bureaucrats, and their wide-eyed acolytes harassing shoppers, but strangely also highly prominent health organizations.

For example, late last year Jeffrey Tucker showed that the World Health Organization (WHO) suddenly, and “for reasons unknown,” changed its definition of “herd immunity.” Using screenshots from a cached version on the Internet Archive, Tucker showed how the WHO altered its definition in such a way as to erase completely the role of natural immunity. Before, the WHO rightly said it “happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection.” The WHO’s change stated that it happens “if a threshold of vaccination is reached.” Not long after Tucker’s piece appeared, the WHO restored natural immunity to its definition.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), seemingly apropos of nothing, on May 19 issued a “safety communication” to warn that FDA-authorized SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests “should not be used to evaluate immunity or protection from COVID-19 at any time.” The FDA’s concern appears to be that taking an antibody test too soon after receiving a vaccination may fail to show vaccine-induced antibodies, but why preclude its use for “identifying people with an adaptive immune response to SARS-CoV-2 from a recent or prior infection?” Especially after stating outright that “Antibody tests can play an important role in identifying individuals who may have been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and may have developed an adaptive immune response.”

Then there is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, that ubiquitous font of fatuous guidance. He had told people that herd immunity would be at 60 to 70 percent immunity, and then he started publicly cinching those numbers up: 75 percent, 80 percent, 85 percent, even 90 percent (as if Covid-19 were as infectious as measles). He is quoted in the New York Times admitting to doing so deliberately to affect people’s behavior:

“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Dr. Fauci said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.“

Now — or better put, as of this writing — Fauci has taken to arguing herd immunity is a “mystical elusive number,” a distracting “endgame,” and therefore not worth considering. Only vaccinations are worth counting. As he put it recently, “We don’t want to get too hung up on reaching this endgame of herd immunity because every day that you put 2 million to 3 million vaccinations into people [it] makes society be more and more protected.”

While composing an article about natural immunity and herd immunity for my home state of North Carolina, I happened to notice that the Mayo Clinic had removed a compelling factoid about natural immunity. It’s something I had quoted in an earlier discussion of the matter and wanted to revisit it.

Here’s what the Mayo Clinic once wanted people to know in its page on “Herd Immunity and COVID-19” with respect to natural immunity: “[T]hose who survived the 1918 flu (influenza) pandemic were later immune to infection with the H1N1 flu, a subtype of influenza A.” The Mayo Clinic pointed out that H1N1 was during the 2009-10 flu season, which would be 92 years later. That finding attested to just how powerful and long-lived natural immunity could be.

As can be seen from the Internet Archive, however, sometime after April 14 the Mayo Clinic removed that compelling historical aside:

The Mayo Clinic also reoriented its page to feature vaccination over “the natural infection method” (method?) and added a section on “the outlook for achieving herd immunity in the U.S.” This new section stated that “it’s not clear if or when the U.S. will achieve herd immunity” but encouraged people nonetheless that “the FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective at protecting against severe illness requiring hospitalization and death … allowing people to better be able to live with the virus.”

Why, from people who know better, is there so much interest in downplaying or erasing natural immunity?

Is it because it’s hard to quantify how many people have natural immunity? Is it out of a mix of good intentions and worry, that discussing natural immunity would somehow discourage (“nudge,” in Fauci’s term) people from getting vaccines who otherwise would? Is it simple oversight, being so focused on vaccinations that they just plain forgot about natural immunity? Or is something else at work?

Whatever the reason, it’s keeping Americans in the dark about how many people have active immunity from Covid-19. It’s keeping people needlessly fearful and suspicious of each other. It’s empowering executive overreach. Worst of all, it’s tempting people to consider government and business restrictions on the unvaccinated, regardless of their actual immunity.

Robinhood IPO: What to Know Before Investing

(Source: money.com)

Robinhood transformed the stock market for many everyday traders, popularizing zero-commission trades and making day trading and cryptocurrency a suddenly hip hobby for millions of Americans. In recent years, the trading app has seen tremendous growth and become a significant part of the investing news cycle. But the favorite of young investors has also faced its fair share of criticism, from how the company makes money to how it’s made investing akin to gaming.

Now, all the highs and lows of Robinhood’s journey are culminating in an upcoming initial public offering (IPO), when most investors will be able to buy stock in the company.

Should you invest in Robinhood when it goes public? Here’s everything you need to know about the company’s IPO.

When is Robinhood’s IPO?

Robinhood filed the paperwork necessary for an IPO to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) back in March. The company is keeping the IPO confidential, meaning that it can keep sensitive details a secret from competitors, employees and customers until closer to the date that it goes public, and may have a more flexible timeline.

The company plans to reveal those filings soon and is targeting late June for its debut on the public market — although the plans are advanced and could change, Bloomberg News recently reported.

Why is Robinhood so popular?

Vlad Tenev, Robinhood CEO, founded the Menlo Park, California-based company with Baiju Bhatt in 2013. Since then, the trading app has seen explosive growth, with more than 13 million users as of 2020.

The company — named for its goal to “provide everyone with access to the financial markets, not just the wealthy” — got a surge from the pandemic as people turned to investing in lieu of going out and sports betting. There was also the GameStop mania in January, when investors who gather on Reddit used apps like Robinhood to jack up the price of the video retailer’s stock. Citadel Securities estimates that individual investors’ trading activity doubled from an average of 10% in 2019 to 20% in 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported.

And in the first quarter of 2021, Robinhood raked in $331 million from what is known as payment for order flow — its biggest source of revenue — in which the company makes money off of high-speed traders to whom it routes customers’ orders. That’s more than triple the $91 million brought in during the first quarter of 2020.

Sill, while many investors have discovered Robinhood while stuck at home during quarantine, the company has been building its cult following for years, says Peter Hobson, vice president at research firm Third Bridge. It’s largely due to Robinhood’s effort to pioneer commission-free trading in individual stocks. Improvements in the user experience on investing apps helped too: Investors can now buy stocks easily right on their phones.

Of course, to be successful post-IPO, however, Robinhood needs to continue to grow.

There is a shift away from traditional banks and towards financial services and financial technology (fintech) companies underway, and Robinhood could lean even more into this trend, Hobson says. For example, the company could add ancillary financial services to support the main trading platform, similar to how the peer-to-peer payment service Cash App added a stock-trading and Bitcoin offering.

The company could also look to expand internationally, like taking another stab at the U.K. launch Robinhood cancelled last year. Regulation internationally, though, could be a tough roadblock — just look at China’s recent crackdown on cryptocurrency.

Is Robinhood stock a risky investment?

Robinhood has already faced scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers. Massachusetts regulators are looking to revoke the company’s license, saying that the trading app encourages investors with little experience to take on big risks.

The company has long faced criticism for “gamifying” investing with an interface that resembles a video game, animated celebrations for milestones and free stocks for referring friends. (Earlier this year, the platform removed digital confetti — which users saw after firsts, like their first trade — from the app in light of the criticism.) Even the investing legend Warren Buffet took a swing at Robinhood, saying that the company had been a significant part of the gambling aspect of the stock market we’ve been seeing recently.

Robinhood has also faced backlash from lawmakers for curtailing users’ abilities to trade GameStop and other meme stocks earlier this year. Sen. Elizabeth Warren D-Mass. called on the company to explain why they stopped their customers’ trading. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. called the move “unacceptable,” and some on the other side of the aisle, like Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, agreed. In the face of regulatory issues, Robinhood has recently built out its legal team, including bringing on former SEC commissioner Dan Gallagher as chief legal officer.

In addition to criticism of Robinhood’s bells and whistles, there are questions about its fundamental business model: How does Robinhood actually make money? Yes, Robinhood is technically “free” in that you don’t pay a fee for the trading service. But its main source of revenue — payment for order flow — is a controversial way for middlemen like Robinhood to profit from market makers for customers’ orders. It’s not even allowed in the U.K. and Canada. The SEC fined the company in December of 2020 for misleading users about how it makes money this way, and it’s likely more regulators and lawmakers will be asking questions as an IPO approaches.

What are Robinhood alternatives?

Robinhood may have popularized commission-free trading for individual stocks, but competitors soon jumped on the bandwagon and now the practice is the norm, including among traditional brokerages like Charles Schwab and Fidelity. As other trading platforms catch up to what works and what doesn’t, Robinhood is losing its lead over competitors, says Paul Rowady, founder and director of research at Alphacution.

And Robinhood has a wide range of competition. There are the traditional brokerages, like Schwab and Fidelity, that have financial products beyond just an investing platform, including bank offerings and financial planning. And they’re only growing: Schwab recently bought TD Ameritrade while Morgan Stanley bought E*Trade.

Then, there are small trading platforms, like Webull, which are trying to attract many of the investors Robinhood has its eye on.

There are also financial services products adding offerings that made Robinhood unique — think, again, of Square’s crypto trading via Cash App — and crypto-specific platforms like Coinbase.

Should I invest in Robinhood the IPO?

Robinhood’s growth has been impressive — but it might also be more than the company can handle, Rowady says. He points to operational issues, like Robinhood’s notoriously bad customer service.

“They conceived a Frankenstein’s monster, and now the thing is out of the laboratory,” Rowady says. “They’re a little bit of a victim of their own success.” (Robinhood declined to comment on Rowady’s characterization.)

On top of dealing with the regulatory issues that stem from this growth, Robinhood also faces a daunting question: Can the company maintain its growth? Analysts will be looking at whether the company continues to attract new users in the absence of COVID-19, as well as if the trading activity holds steady or starts to trail off as people head back to work and there are no more stimulus checks. (Individual investors’ activity has already started to slow.)

To be fair, Robinhood does continue to add new offerings. Most recently, it began allowing users to trade companies’ IPO shares, something retail investors typically don’t have the chance to do until a company is already listed on an exchange.

It’s important to take all this — the success and the struggles — into account when determining if Robinhood will fit into your portfolio.

How to buy Robinhood stock after the IPO

In order to invest in Robinhood, you’ll need a brokerage account via one of the many platforms we’ve listed.

Then, investing in Robinhood will be pretty straightforward once it’s actually listed on the exchange. But be wary of investing too much in one individual stock. Financial experts recommend turning to mutual funds or exchange-traded funds to lower the risk that comes with relying on one company’s performance. If you do choose to invest in individual stocks, like Robinhood, financial advisors recommend keeping that risky part of your portfolio small, no more than 5%.

And keep in mind that there are risks with investing in a company right after it goes public. Often, the stock’s price will skyrocket once all investors can buy it, benefiting those that were able to get pre-IPO access (typically institutional and wealthy investors) and causing everyday investors to pay more than they normally would.

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, perhaps this spring’s hottest IPO, saw its stock open at $381 on its first day on the exchange and is now trading around $240.

Opinion: What’s a better investment? Bitcoin or a Roth IRA?

(Source: marketwatch.com)

Last Updated: June 5, 2021 at 10:02 a.m. ETFirst Published: June 3, 2021 at 6:31 a.m. ET
By Paul A. Merriman

More and more these days, I’m getting questions — mostly from young people — about investing in bitcoin and similar products.

They hear about quick, huge profits. They think they should hop on board. Of course they have also heard of huge losses in cryptocurrency.

But for many young people, the lure of fast, easy money is much more compelling than the risk of losing your shirt.

I understand. More than half a century ago I was just getting my feet wet in the investment business. I made what I thought was an investment (now I realize it was really a speculation) on a commodities futures contract.

I doubled my money in less than a week. Man, did I feel smart! I had started to understand (I thought) how investing worked.

I knew what to do: I took all that money and reinvested in another contract. And quickly lost it all. In the process, I learned a more valuable lesson about how investing really works: Losses can come as quickly and easily as profits.

I remembered all this recently as I was talking (separately) with a couple of investors who seemed about to take the plunge into cryptocurrency. One was 28, the other 30.

The amounts of money they proposed to invest were relatively small — $40 in one case and $400 in the other. Each one told me it was money they could afford to lose.

To get a handle on their mind-set, I listened to an interview with an investor in dogecoin who said he parlayed his first investment into several million dollars.

As I listened, part of my mind became anxious about the losses he could encounter; another part of my mind wanted to cheer him on as he fought what he regarded as a battle against Wall Street.

The two investors I spoke to each seemed to want to show Wall Street how investing should really work. I recognized that feeling.

I knew better than to tell these two what to do. Instead, I tried to educate them.

Bitcoin, dogecoin and many other varieties of digital currencies don’t have any long-term histories. They aren’t regulated. They aren’t legal tender. Their value is determined purely by supply and demand.

Both of these young people have jobs. Neither had set aside any money in an IRA, which would certainly save them taxes.

So I painted an alternate picture: Inside a Roth IRA, their money could grow tax-free. I described an established investment with a history of above-average long-term returns: small-cap value companies.

As an asset class, small-cap value has some of the volatility these young people crave. But it also has a history of rewarding investors with patience.

When you examine the U.S. small-cap value stock index back to 1928, you will find that the average 40-year compound return was 16.2%. (The best 40-year period’s return was 19%; the worst was 11.6%.)

Toward the low end of that scale, at 12% a one-time investment of $400 would become $37,220 if it were left alone for 40 years.

Over the years, most young people could afford to invest much more than $400, of course. But let’s trace the results of just this very modest one-time investment.

If you retired with $37,220 in a Roth IRA and began taking 5% annual withdrawals, you’d have $1,861 to spend in your first year of retirement.

If the investment continued to earn 12% and you continued to take out 5% a year based on the increasing balance, you would have $8,248 to spend in your 25th (and perhaps final) year of retirement.

During 25 years of retirement you would have taken out $108,045. Your account at that point would be worth about $156,712, which presumably would go to whatever individuals or entities you designated as beneficiaries in your IRA.

The math in this scenario is impressive. For only $400 (probably less than the cost of a weekend beach getaway) you would have generated $264,757 — all of it tax-free.

Just imagine what would be possible if you did that with $400 every year before you retired.

Of course there’s a downside to this plan compared with putting $400 into a cryptocurrency.

The Roth IRA I described won’t dazzle your friends or give you bragging rights. It won’t let you thumb your nose at Wall Street or old guys who think people should be sensible with their money. It won’t make you a quick millionaire or let you lose a fortune overnight.

In short, it’s pretty boring. Worse still, it requires a lot of patience. What a drag.

I think there’s a middle ground that could make sense for many people.

Start by maximizing your Roth IRA at $6,000 for one year. (Multiply the numbers above by 15 and you’ll see the impressive payoff.)

After that, if you can still “afford to lose” $400, go ahead and invest it in cryptocurrency and see what happens.

Better still, sock that $400 away toward next year’s Roth IRA contribution.

Like many people, I’ve been curious about cryptocurrencies, and I have talked to many investing experts. Not even one has been able to explain why it could make a lot of money for me over the long term. The best rationale I’ve heard for investing in bitcoin is some variation of “It’s going up.”

This reminds me of a quote often attributed to Will Rogers: “Don’t gamble. Take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don’t go up, don’t buy it.” For more on this topic, here’s a recent podcast I recorded called “Sex, food, money… and the impact of emotional decisions.”

Richard Buck contributed to this article.

Paul Merriman and Richard Buck are the authors of We’re Talking Millions! 12 Simple Ways To Supercharge Your Retirement.

Ask Millionacres: How Does Depreciation Affect the Sale of a Rental Property?

(Source: millionacres.com)

Jun 04, 2021 by Matt Frankel, CFP

I have a tax question about selling rental property. I have unused value on some items I am depreciating, specifically a furnace and a new kitchen. How does this work when I sell? Do I get to deduct the rest of my cost basis for these items? Thanks, Larry.

The short answer is no. Unused depreciation doesn't become a deduction when you sell a rental property. But like most real estate tax topics, there's quite a bit more to the story.

For starters, when you sell a rental property, there are two types of taxes you (potentially) have to worry about -- capital gains and depreciation recapture. Capital gains tax is assessed on the difference between your net sale proceeds and your cost basis in the property (including any capital improvements). In other words, if your cost basis in a rental property was $200,000 and you paid $30,000 for a new kitchen, and then sell the property for $300,000, your capital gain would be $70,000. Assuming that you owned the property for more than a year, your capital gain will be treated as a long-term gain, which gets a tax rate of 0%, 15%, or 20%, depending on your income level.

Depreciation recapture tax is assessed on all of those depreciation deductions you've taken over the years and is assessed at a flat 25% rate under current tax law.

Continuing the previous example, let's say that you had taken $20,000 of depreciation on the property, as well as $2,000 of depreciation on the new kitchen. This $22,000 cumulative tax deduction would then be taxable at 25%.

Depreciation is often thought of as one of the best tax advantages of real estate investing, but you're really just "borrowing" the deduction from the IRS. Upon a profitable sale of the property, the IRS wants its money back. Technically, depreciation recapture applies to all types of depreciable assets, but most tend to lose value over time and aren't sold for a profit. On the other hand, real estate is a rare example of a depreciable asset that typically increases in value over time.

In a nutshell, because of the combination of those two types of taxes, selling rental property can be a highly taxable event, especially if you've owned it for some time and have taken a lot of depreciation. So, getting back to your question, your unused depreciation can help your tax bill upon selling by keeping the depreciation recapture portion lower than if you had depreciated the entire cost.

The best way to avoid taxes on a real estate sale is to roll the sale proceeds into another rental property through a process known as a 1031 exchange. In a nutshell, if you buy a property for a purchase price (and with a mortgage) equal or greater to the sale price of your current rental property, you can roll your cost basis into the new property and defer taxes.

As a final note, I am a real estate investor who knows the real estate portion of the tax code well and am also a Certified Financial Planner. I am not a tax attorney, CPA, or other licensed tax professional, and this should not be taken as personal financial advice. Rental real estate taxation can be quite complex, so if you're confused about anything, I strongly suggest seeking the advice of a licensed professional who can become acquainted with your personal situation.

‘Oldest woman in the world’ found at age of 124 while getting Covid vaccine

(Source: metro.co.uk)

Sean.Seddon@metro.co.uk
Friday 4 Jun 2021

India’s push to vaccinate its elderly population may just have uncovered the oldest woman on the planet.

According to reports in India, medics came across Rehtee Begum when they were going door-to-door to administer vaccines.

She gave her age as 124, a whopping seven years older than Kane Tanaka, a Japanese woman who has a verified age of 117.

In fact, 124 would make her two years older than Jeanne Calment, a French woman who died at 122 in 1997 who is officially recognised as the oldest ever.

The Indian grandmother from the Baramulla district of Jammu and Kashmir showed vaccinators a ration card giving her age as 124.

There has been no official corroboration of her age but health workers were satisfied enough to release the information.

A doctor confirmed she was given a jab on Wednesday at a mobile inoculation unit, as did the region’s department of information.

India has experienced a devastating wave of Covid-19 infections in recent months.

A rise in cases was fuelled by a mutation in the virus – now known as the Delta variant – which has travelled around the world to become the dominant strain in the UK and elsewhere.

The country of more than 1.3 billion has officially recorded more than 340,000 deaths but it’s believed the true toll could be higher.

India recorded 131,000 new cases on June 3, down from more than 400,000 a day at the height of its May peak.

Vaccinating the country’s large population is a monumental logistical challenge.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government have been criticised by India’s Supreme Court for the pace of the rollout, according to the BBC.

Reliance on mobile apps to register for jabs has been contentious in a country with large rural areas, as has a decision to make some younger people pay for jabs.

Fake patient reviews are making it increasingly hard to seek medical help on Google, Yelp and other directory sites

(Source: washingtonpost.com)

By Laura Sydell
June 5, 2021

CORRECTION
An earlier version of this article suggested that Yelp flagged 40 potentially fake reviews after being contacted by The Washington Post. Yelp said its software had identified those reviews earlier and took the step of “unrecommending” them, which makes them less visible and prevents them from counting toward a business’s overall rating. The article has been corrected.

Patricia Limbaugh was desperate to find care for her husband, whose drinking had spiraled out of control after the death of one brother by suicide, another from a heart attack, and a lot of stress at work. They had tried a rehabilitation program recommended by a hospital near their home just outside Nashville, but neither of them was happy because the facility refused to let them communicate. “That’s when I started Googling alcohol treatment centers,” said Limbaugh, “cause I thought I’ve got to get him out of this place and get him somewhere else.”

Limbaugh’s search in the early spring of 2019 brought her to an addiction treatment facility called The Center, A Place of Hope in Edmonds, Wash. The facility had glowing reviews on Google like this one from a Jeremy Maria: “I don’t know if I have words enough to truly express my gratitude to each and every member of my team.” Another review by Devin Lindsey cited specific staff members: “I’ve had lightbulb moments with Justin Hartfield, Lisa Chinn, and Lynsey Isaacs and all have been helpful in my improvement of self-worth, skills and tools to take with me.”

Limbaugh and her husband flew to Washington state, and he checked in on April 11, 2019. But after he got home from the 30-day treatment regime, her husband confessed he drank while he was there. “The housing was off-site from the facility,” Limbaugh said. At the end of each day, she said, “he would go and have a nice meal, a couple of glasses of wine and, or he’d get a bottle. And so, he drank the whole time he was there.”

The Washington Post asked The Center about each of Limbaugh’s claims. In an email, Tom Lether, an attorney for The Center, would not respond specifically to her charges, saying only: “The Center strongly disagrees with these allegations.”

Limbaugh said she felt taken in by the reviews. “I felt deceived,” she said.

It turns out that the reviews she relied on from Maria and Lindsey — and dozens of others on The Center’s site — were fake, according to separate analyses conducted by Google and the review site Trustpilot after they were approached by The Post.

Fake Review Watch, a consumer watchdog site founded by former fraud investigator Kay Dean, had initially discovered the fake reviews and shared them with The Post. The Post then shared the reviews with Google and Trustpilot.

Although Limbaugh thought she could trust the reviews on a health-care provider’s site, she had stumbled upon a problem created by a convergence of forces: a public that has come to rely on consumer reviews for almost everything including medical care; a robust industry of global review fraud; competition among physicians; large Internet companies with minimal incentive to weed out that fraud; scattershot disciplinary actions by professional medical bodies; and lax enforcement by government agencies.

When asked about potentially fraudulent activity on The Center, a Place of Hope’s Google page, Google took down 93 reviews, including the ones by Maria and Lindsey.

Google’s algorithms and staff use indicators such as the location of the reviewer to assess whether a posting is from a real patient. Ben Jose, a Google spokesman, said the company “removed reviews that were found to be in violation of our policies.” The Center still has a 4.5-star rating, and Google did not put up a notice that it had taken down suspicious postings.

The Post also contacted the review sites Yelp and Trustpilot about potentially fake reviews of The Center. Yelp said its automated processes had previously “unrecommended” 40 reviews, which makes them less visible and prevents them from counting toward The Center’s overall rating. Trustpilot took down 73 posts it determined were fraudulent — about half of The Center’s reviews at the time.

Wahid Lodin, a spokesman for Trustpilot, said the company weeds out fraud through “tracing IP addresses, researching a user’s post cadence, analyzing the word usage in their review.” Trustpilot put an alert on The Center’s page, saying that it had detected “a number of fake reviews for this company.”

Fake Review Watch’s Dean said she has found dozens of Facebook groups where businesses including medical practices buy and sell fake reviews. Inside one of these groups, the watchdog said it found a Bangladeshi review broker who recruited people to write fake positive reviews for The Center.

In a video, Fake Review Watch documented what it said was an exchange in which the broker gave the paid recruits the exact text that would later appear as reviews written by Maria and Lindsey. At least two of the employees mentioned in Lindsey’s review appeared to have a connection with The Center. One listed The Center on a LinkedIn page, another used the center’s telephone number and address on a health site.

The Post cannot confirm who paid to put the fake positive reviews on The Center’s site.

Lether said The Center and the facility’s founder, Gregory Jantz, never paid anyone to write fake reviews and took measures to ensure that reviews were accurate.

“Dr. Jantz indicates the Center has been investigating malicious online attacks through spamming, bot attacks, obvious fake reviews and social media manipulation,” Leather wrote in an email.

“The Center receives numerous testimonials and postings. The Center exercises due diligence to make sure that postings or online information is correct and accurate. To the extent The Center identifies any inaccurate postings or information, the Center will remove The Post immediately.”

Google did not respond when asked if The Center has tried to get fake reviews taken down. Trustpilot says it never heard from anyone at the facility that there might be fraud on its page. “We never heard from them regarding that,” Lodin said.

Dean said she has identified fake reviews for dozens of other medical practices including two separate practices in California, a rheumatologist and a pain clinic, both involving the same review broker as The Center.

Posting fraudulent reviews may be illegal under federal and state laws if there is financial gain involved. But enforcement is scattershot, and it is hard to find cases of disciplinary action from professional bodies for review fraud. Records from the Medical Board of California, the state with the largest number of practicing physicians, show no actions taken against doctors over the past four years for fake reviews.

“When the board receives a complaint against a physician or allied health-care professional it oversees, the complaint is investigated,” board spokesman Carlos Villatoro said. The board does not discuss ongoing investigations.

New York state has the second-highest number of practicing physicians, and neither the Office of the New York State Attorney General nor the Office of Professional Medical Conduct could cite a case that had been brought against an individual medical doctor for manufacturing fraudulent reviews.

The New York attorney general’s office did point to a case against an urgent care center that purchased fake reviews, but there was no indication that individual doctors were involved. Medrite Urgent Care faced a $100,000 fine and agreed to measures to increase the honesty and transparency of its reviews.

Michael Atleson, an attorney at the Federal Trade Commission, could not recall an instance over the past two decades where the agency filed an action against an individual physician for fake online reviews. But he cautioned that “the FTC does not confirm nor deny the existence of investigations or comment on investigations, even if they have been publicly disclosed.”

Although there is no easy way to quantify how many physicians and health-care providers are faking reviews, Curtis Boyd, the CEO and founder of Objection Co., which specializes in identifying fake local business reviews for business owners, estimated that as many as 20 percent of businesses in the health-care industry including doctors have suspicious review activity on Google and Yelp.

Boyd said he based his estimate on work he did for sites like Upwork, Fiverr and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, where freelancers look for work. There, he said, he found a shady marketplace of brokers looking to hire people to write positive reviews for their customers — including medical doctors. Boyd said he persuaded 35 of those brokers to sell him their client list, which he used to train his algorithms to identify fake reviews.

Using artificial intelligence, Boyd was able to detect details that were likely to signify that a review was fake. “Exclamation points was one of the most obvious ones, like excessive use of exclamation points,” he said. “We also saw a lot of sentiment, over-the-top sentiment like the word ‘love.’ And it was kind of interesting to see over-the-top sentiment. We think that it has to do with, like, a compensation of a lack of actual experience.”

He said certain types of physicians were more likely to have fake reviews. “Physicians with their own personal private practices tend to have more suspicious reviews,” he said, “versus physicians who might be an employee of a large medical center or a hospital.”

Marni Jameson Carey, executive director of the Association of Independent Doctors (AID), a national nonprofit trade group for physicians in private practice, condemns physicians who post fake reviews. However, Carey said that she can imagine how some independent medical doctors might feel desperate to boost their online reputation to compete against large hospitals that are buying up independent medical practices.

“Employed physicians have entire marketing departments behind them,” she said. “It is certainly hard to survive as an independent. There’s a sense of guerrilla warfare out there.” Carey said the association has not caught any physicians posting fake reviews. “If we ever do encounter this issue, we will have to decide how to confront it and the physician at that time,” she said.

In a statement, American Medical Association President Susan R. Bailey said that “the credibility of some rating sites is questionable.” Bailey suggests “online opinions and reviews of physicians should be taken with a grain of salt and should certainly not be a patient’s sole or primary source of information when looking for a physician.”

However, patients are increasingly using review sites to find doctors, according to a study by Software Advice, a consulting firm. According to a 2020 survey, over 70 percent of patients use online reviews as the first step to finding a new doctor. That’s up from a similar survey in 2013 that found that only 25 percent of patients used online reviews to find a physician.

In our review-crazed age, patients appear more likely to trust user review sites such as Yelp and Google over government sites about physicians, according to a 2018 study by the Brookings Institution, which looked at how patients choose health-care providers. The study’s participants repeatedly favored a physician’s five-star rating on Yelp over a one- or two-star rating from the government.

“The reason that physicians are paying for these fake reviews is that they know the importance of how it will drive patients to their office,” said Niam Yaraghi, an assistant professor of business technology at Miami Herbert School of Business at the University of Miami who conducted the study.

Sites like Zocdoc, which charge physicians for appointment bookings, allow only patients who have booked appointments with a doctor to leave reviews. However, Laura C. Mikulski, vice president of business development and physician relations at Physician Referral Marketing, said patients may be reluctant to leave bad reviews for fear of exposing themselves to a lawsuit from their provider. “If I am a patient,” Mikulski said, “and I have a negative experience with my physician, I don’t want my physician to try to sue me or to try to terminate services.”

Jessica Aptman, a spokeswoman for Zocdoc, said that “although providers are our paying customers, our company’s number one core value is Patients First, and our mission is to give power to the patients.” Zocdoc also allows anonymous reviews, though the company does have records of who the reviewers are.

Many physicians would prefer to be taken off all of these review sites. Physicians Working Together organized a Change.org petition to remove medical doctors from Yelp. Founder Kimberly Jackson, who practices family medicine in Phenix City, Ala., said that medical doctors find themselves in a bind. If a patient writes a negative review, a doctor can’t give a full-throated defense because of HIPAA privacy regulations. “You’re not supposed to be sharing patients’ confidential health information,” Jackson said. “In a lot of cases, we don’t even want to acknowledge that you’re a patient.”

In addition, Jackson argues that patients aren’t always the best judge of quality medical care. “Sometimes people have their own agendas,” she said. “I’ve experienced that myself, there was a Google review, or a person said that, you know, the office is horrible. The receptionist was so rude, and I never made an appointment with this doctor. But they still went ahead and reviewed, like, my bedside manner and my medical knowledge and whatever.”

A study late last year in the peer-reviewed quarterly journal Information Systems Research underscores her point. It tracked 10 years of data from Northern Texas hospital patients struggling with chronic diseases. They compared outcomes for these patients with the reviews given to the doctors they saw. The study measured factors such as readmission risk and other broadly accepted measures of clinical outcomes. It found star ratings and written reviews equally bad at judging the quality of medical care.

Another study, in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine in 2018, found that patients gave doctors who overprescribed opioids higher ratings.

Some people may think they can tell which reviews are real and which are fake. But “humans are notoriously terrible at determining whether a review is fake,” said Zachary Pardes, director of brand advertising and communications for North America at Trustpilot. He said many people wrongly think they can spot a fake review by looking for grammatical errors and poor syntax or through a profile picture. But the algorithms used by his company to find fakes are also imperfect, he admits.

“I think it is a volume, it’s a scale problem," he said. "We are in this constant game of cat and mouse.”

Google, which is quickly becoming the biggest player when it comes to consumer reviews, said it is getting millions of new postings a day. Although Google might not catch all the fakery, Jose, the Google spokesman, says, “We continually invest to improve our automated systems to better detect fake reviews while also deploying analysts who investigate suspicious content around-the-clock.”

But when dealing with hundreds of millions of reviews, even a fraction of missed fraud can have a significant effect, said Mike Blumenthal, co-founder of Nearmedia, a research company that focuses on local businesses and the Internet. “The problem with artificial intelligence, machine learning, is that it’s a statistical approach,” he said.

Blumenthal argues that the companies don’t have sufficient incentive to catch it all. “To capture the rest would require human curation," he said. "They’re not willing to spend the money it would take to more effectively manage that part of the fake reviews they miss with their algorithms.”

Blumenthal also points out that platforms face no penalties when they do miss fraud. Federal law protects these companies from liability. Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, Google, Yelp, Trustpilot and other platforms are generally insulated from legal liability for fraudulent content posted by third parties on their sites.

When asked about Blumenthal’s criticism, Google directed The Post to prepared remarks by its CEO, Sundar Pichai, at a congressional committee hearing in March about misinformation and extremism on tech platforms, defending Section 230. “Without Section 230, platforms would either over-filter content or not be able to filter content at all.”

Blumenthal finds the fake reviews on medical websites especially troubling. “When it comes to a restaurant, the worst that can happen is you will get a bad meal," he said. "But with a physician, the stakes of bad medical care can be higher.”

And in the absence of reliable and easily accessible information about doctor performance, most patients are going to continue to resort to online reviews, Yaraghi, the Miami professor, said.

“Patients are not well-informed about this, and they are unfortunately taking these reviews more seriously than they should,” he said. “The reason these online reviews are becoming more important is because there is a vacuum.”

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Facebook says Donald Trump to remain banned for two years, effective from Jan. 7

(Source: cnbc.com)

JUN 4 2021
Salvador Rodriguez @SAL19

KEY POINTS

• Facebook on Friday announced that it may allow former President Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts to be reinstated in January 2023.
  
  
• At that time, the social media company will reevaluate whether the risk to public safety of allowing Trump back onto its services has receded.
  
  
• This two-year suspension will prevent Trump from using Facebook or Instagram to broadcast to his followers until after the 2022 U.S. midterm elections.
  
  

Facebook on Friday announced that it may allow former President Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts to be reinstated in January 2023.

At that time, the social media company will reevaluate whether the risk to public safety of allowing Trump back onto its services has receded.

“We will evaluate external factors, including instances of violence, restrictions on peaceful assembly and other markers of civil unrest,” the company said in a blog post. “If we determine that there is still a serious risk to public safety, we will extend the restriction for a set period of time and continue to re-evaluate until that risk has receded.”

If Trump is allowed back on the service, there will be a strict set of rapidly escalating sanctions that will be triggered if Trump further violates the company’s content moderation rules, Facebook said.

This two-year suspension will prevent Trump from using Facebook or Instagram to broadcast to his followers until after the 2022 U.S. midterm elections.

Facebook suspended Trump’s accounts following the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. The decision was Facebook’s most aggressive action against Trump during his four-year term.

Facebook referred the ban to its oversight board a few weeks later, saying that given the significance of the suspension, “we think it is important for the board to review it and reach an independent judgment on whether it should be upheld.”

Facebook’s independent Oversight Board in May decided to uphold the company’s choice to suspend Trump’s accounts. In its decision, however, the board noted that Facebook needed to reassess how it moderates the speech of political leaders, clearly outline those rules for the public and determine how long is appropriate for these users to be suspended.

The company said it determined that a two-year suspension was the appropriate length to allow a safe period of time after the acts of the Jan. 6 insurrection and it was a significant enough suspension to be a deterrent to Trump and others from repeating the violations in the future.

In a statement issued by his office, Trump criticized Facebook’s decision, calling it an insult to his voters and falsely claiming that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.

“They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this censoring and silencing, and ultimately, we will win,” Trump said in the statement. “Our Country can’t take this abuse anymore!”