Media Today

[Rick Plant]

Baseball fans revisit Veterans Stadium theory after David West becomes latest Phillies player to die from brain cancer

Baseball fans think that Veterans Stadium, the former home of the Philadelphia Phillies, caused brain cancer in several players
Glioblastoma is one of the most aggressive and deadliest forms of cancer.

According to the National Brain Tumor Society, the two-year survival rate is 30% and the five-year survival rate is only 6.8%. Most people succumb to the aggressive disease within 12-18 months. It’s a form of cancer that has been diagnosed for a century, with little headway on any kind of treatment.

More than 10,000 people will die of glioblastoma each year, and since 2003, that number includes six former Philadelphia Phillies.

Ken Brett was the first, in 2003. The next year, it was Tug McGraw and Johnny Oates. In 2007, John Vukovich. In 2017, Darren Daulton, who lived longer than most after being diagnosed in 2013. This weekend, David West became the sixth, barely one year after Daulton’s foundation wished him well in his fight against the disease.

None lived to be 60 years old.

According to USA Today, “3.14 percent of the Phillies’ 159 players from 1973 (Brett’s only year on the team) to 1983 (Daulton’s first season with the club) were diagnosed with brain cancer.” That percentage did not include West, who was diagnosed later.

Several other former MLB players from the same era also passed away from brain cancer: Gary Carter, Bobby Murcer, and Dan Quisenberry, as well as manager Dick Howser.

The mounting number of deaths has been a topic of conversation among former ballplayers and looks less like a coincidence with every diagnosis. 1980 World Series champion pitcher Dickie Noles is one of many who’s been saying it’s not a coincidence for years:

“Once it happened to Tug, we were all in shock. Then once it happened to Vuk (Vukovich), the other ballplayers kind of had the feeling like, ‘Wow.’ Then when it happened to Daulton, every ballplayer I’ve seen talked about it.

“There seems to be some correlation with this and baseball. What was the Vet built on? Was it something in the building? The asbestos?”

Larry Bowa, who has been with the Phillies for over three decades as a player, coach, manager, and with the front office, is also suspicious about their former ballpark:

“I know there were a lot of pipes that were exposed when we played there and we had AstroTurf.

I’m not trying to blame anybody. It’s just sort of strange that that can happen to one team playing at the Vet.”

Maybe it wasn’t the Vet being built on a marsh, but the AstroTurf. The Kansas City Royals also used AstroTurf from 1973-94, before switching to real grass. Quisenberry spent the bulk of his career with them and was teammates with Brett, who played for the Royals at the end of his career. Howser was their manager.

Bowa has gone on the record several times over the years saying that he’s concerned and wishes someone would investigate, so the hundreds of other players who spent time at the Vet would have some clarity.

Unfortunately, the Vet was demolished in March 2004, and it’s hard to trace something back to a place that no longer exists. But while scientists spent years saying there was no official link between chemicals in AstroTurf and cancer, new lawsuits and law changes suggest otherwise. A report from January of this year noted that California’s Attorney General filed a lawsuit alleging that artificial turf manufacturers have not warned customers about “potentially dangerous toxins” in their products. Last summer, the University of Amsterdam released findings that the rubber granules release chemicals that can be harmful to humans and animals. As a result, the European Commission imposed stricter limits on eight compounds found in the material.

Fans think the Vet is to blame. When news broke of West’s passing, one tweeted, “At some point, it stops being a coincidence.” Another wrote, “no doubt in my mind The Vet was a cancer cluster.” Others have pointed out that John Kruk and Curt Schilling also developed cancer after playing at the Vet, though both survived.

Regardless of whether something at the Vet caused cancer or it’s simply a horrible coincidence, it’s a tragedy.

https://thatballsouttahere.com/2022/05/14/phillies-veterans-stadium-cancer-david-west/

[Rick Plant]

Buffalo gunman's weapon was modified to hold more ammunition — other guns were Christmas gifts

The Washington Post reports that the shooter at the Buffalo, New York grocery store modified his weapon to ensure it held more ammunition.

The man, Payton S. Gendron, used a used Bushmaster XM-15 semiautomatic rifle that he bought legally and he added a high-capacity magazine. The report revealed that Gendron openly wrote in his manifesto about the gun, noting that he got it in a small gun shop about 15 miles from his hometown, Conklin. He paid $960 he said.

"He also recounted how he acquired two backup weapons: a Mossberg 500 shotgun that he purchased in early December and a Savage Axis XP semiautomatic rifle that he received from his father as a Christmas present when he was 16 years old," said the Post.

The owner of the shop confirmed to the New York Times and ABC News that he sold the weapon to the mass shooter and that the background check raised no red flags.

Current laws only mandate that a weapon be refused if someone has been institutionalized. While Gendron was under observation in 2021, he was never placed in an institution.

“I happened to have this particular gun at this particular time,” Donald explained to ABC News. “And this particular guy happened to buy it. After the gun leaves the firearm shop, you have no control."

The report also noted that the Bushmaster XM-15 was the same weapon used in the 2002 Washington, D.C. sniper incident in which two gunmen shot 10 people in a month-long incident. In 2021, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter used the same weapon to kill 20 first-graders and six school staffers.

Read the full report in the Washington Post:

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/05/15/buffalo-shooting-gun-bought-bushmaster/

[Rick Plant]

'Blood moon' puts on lunar display across parts of Americas, Europe and Africa

The reddish hue occurs when the sun, Earth and moon align, and the moon passes through the darkest part of Earth’s shadow.



A lunar eclipse early Monday produced a "blood moon," which occurs when the sun, Earth and moon align, and the moon passes through the darkest part of Earth’s shadow.

The event was best seen in the eastern U.S., South America, Africa and Western Europe. Totality, or the moment when the moon was fully obscured, occurred around midnight.

The red hue appears because the only sunlight reaching the moon passes through Earth’s atmosphere, according to NASA.

“The more dust or clouds in Earth’s atmosphere during the eclipse, the redder the Moon will appear,” the space agency wrote on its website. “It’s as if all the world’s sunrises and sunsets are projected onto the Moon.”

The May full moon is sometimes known as the “flower moon” in traditional folklore because it’s typically at a time of year when spring flowers emerge.

NASA featured livestreams of the eclipse from locations across the globe, including in Alabama, Italy, Spain and New York. Scientists also answered questions on the live feed. From beginning to end, the eclipse lasted just over five hours.

Social media users enthusiastically posted photos and videos of the moon in their area.

“I just look in wonder on what TREAT the human race had to see,” wrote Margaret Loyd on Twitter.

The next lunar eclipse will occur in November, according to NASA, and be visible in the western U.S., eastern parts of Asia and Japan.

An almost total lunar eclipse occurred in November 2021 that was visible in North America, and parts of South America, Australia and northeastern Asia.

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/blood-moon-puts-lunar-display-parts-americas-europe-africa-rcna28958

[Rick Plant]

Buffalo suspect had plans to continue his killing rampage: Commissioner
Ten people -- all of whom were Black -- were killed in the Buffalo shooting.

Payton Gendron, the 18-year-old who allegedly gunned down 10 people -- all of whom were Black -- at a Tops grocery store in Buffalo, New York, would have continued his rampage had he not been stopped, Buffalo Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia told ABC News.

"We have uncovered information that if he escaped the [Tops] supermarket, he had plans to continue his attack," Gramaglia said. "He had plans to continue driving down Jefferson Ave. to shoot more Black people ... possibly go to another store [or] location."

Authorities are calling Saturday's massacre a "racially motivated hate crime."

"This was well planned ... by a sick person," Gramaglia said.

The commissioner praised the responding officers who he said deescalated the situation and saved countless lives.

Multiple high-capacity magazines were recovered on Gendron and in his car, the commissioner said. While he declined to say what evidence pointed to additional shooting plans, the commissioner said investigators have been going through his phone and other electronics.

The teen is from Conklin, New York, which is 200 miles east of Buffalo.

Police determined Gendron arrived in Buffalo on Friday via license plate reader and other evidence, the commissioner said. Police are still working to determine where he stayed overnight before Saturday's attack.

Shonnell Harris Teague, an operations manager at Tops, said she saw Gendron sitting on a bench outside of the store on Friday afternoon. She said he was there for several hours with a camper bag on his back, dressed in the same camouflage outfit he wore Saturday.

She said Gendron entered the store Friday evening, and appeared as if he was bothering customers. Teague asked him to leave and he did so without an argument.

The next time Teague saw him was on Saturday as a mass shooting unfolded at her store. She escaped out of the back when she saw Gendron.

"I see him with his gear on and his gun and how it was all strapped on. ... I seen all the other bodies on the ground. ... It was just a nightmare," she said.

Gendron has been arraigned on one count of first-degree murder and is due back in court on May 19.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/buffalo-gunman-plans-continue-killing-rampage-commissioner/story?id=84746728

[Rick Plant]

Gunman may have targeted Rochester locations before Buffalo shooting, RPD acknowledges
https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2022/05/16/rochester-ny-may-have-been-target-buffalo-shooter-tops-supermarket-rpd-says/9799500002/

[Rick Plant]

New documents show how drug companies targeted doctors to increase opioid prescriptions

Twelve years ago, ProPublica set out to build a first-of-its-kind tool that would allow users, with a single search, to see whether their doctors were receiving money from an array of pharmaceutical companies.

Dollars for Docs generated a huge rush of interest. Readers searched the database tens of millions of times to see if their doctors had financial ties to the companies that made the drugs they prescribed. Law enforcement officials used it to investigate drug company marketing, drug companies looked up their competitors and doctors searched for themselves.

A trove of recently released documents offers the public an unvarnished look inside those relationships from the perspective of drug companies themselves. The material shows company officials worked to deflect the media scrutiny even as they sought to take advantage of relationships that they had built with doctors they were paying significant sums of money.

The documents were published online by the University of California San Francisco and Johns Hopkins University and became available as a result of drugmakers settling lawsuits against them for their role in the opioid crisis. These are exactly the kinds of documents we wanted to see when we started working on the Dollars for Docs series in 2010, but of course, no one was willing to show them to us.

Reading them should give patients even more pause about the financial entanglements their doctors have with the drug industry and spur them to ask questions (we have some ideas about specifics below).

The Washington Post mined the records and found that more than a quarter of the 239 medical professionals ranked as top prescribers by opioid maker Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals in 2013 “were later convicted of crimes related to their medical practices, had their medical licenses suspended or revoked, or paid state or federal fines after being accused of wrongdoing.” The article was replete with examples of doctors whose problems were well known but who were targeted anyway by sales representatives.

This was a familiar finding. Back in 2010, we found that hundreds of doctors paid by drug companies to promote their drugs had been accused of professional misconduct, were disciplined by state boards or lacked credentials as researchers or specialists.

The document trove included some mentions of our earlier work.

Among them: a 2010 email from a senior director of global compliance at Cephalon Inc., a small drug company that was subsequently acquired by Teva Pharmaceuticals.

In the message, the director notes that what ProPublica found — Cephalon had paid doctors who had been sanctioned by their states to deliver promotional talks on its behalf — was, indeed, true, and that the company was undertaking a review of all of its doctors in light of our findings.

And there’s a 2017 presentation from an official at Mallinckrodt about the state of transparency around payments to doctors. It called ProPublica the “most thorough and vocal media source re: Open Payments data. Their analyses and searchable database are likely the go-to place for anyone wanting to do a comparison of companies and physicians.”

Our Dollars for Docs data often was picked up by news outlets across the country, including WNBC-TV in New York City. In one document, a spokesperson for the company Covidien was happy that the reporter had not asked about Exalgo, a new opioid made by the company. “Based on our conversation, I do not believe that the reporter is aware of Exalgo — and I am certainly not planning to make him aware,” she wrote in 2013.

The document trove also shows firsthand how drug companies targeted doctors and used information purchased from data brokers to rank them and gain insight on how many of their drugs each doctor prescribed each week.

When we first started working on our stories, we were very eager to see what pharma drug reps knew about the prescribing practices of doctors. So we asked a company then called IMS Health, which purchased data from pharmacies on which drugs each doctor prescribed and then sold it to the drug companies, if it would sell that data to us. IMS, now known as IQVIA, told us we could not buy the data at any cost.

The document trove includes a number of samples of what that data looks like and makes clear why the industry was so reluctant to have it come into public view.

The following chart was put together for Covidien about Exalgo. For every doctor in the Las Vegas region, it shows their prescribing, by week, of the drug and notes whether they are a “target.”

Documents then show how such information was used when meeting with doctors. In this email, a Covidien drug rep brags about how she was able to turn a doctor’s office staff into allies who would feed her information and talk up the company’s drugs to the doctor. “The nurse got very excited ... and wanted to know all about the product, the coverage, how to use it, etc. She even took the liberty of detailing the doctor when he walked into to (sic) lunch as well.”

The documents also showed how closely Covidien measured the performance of drug reps in getting doctors to prescribe their drugs.

Covidien spun off Mallinckrodt in 2013 as a specialty pharmaceutical company, managing drugs such as Exalgo. (Mallinckrodt stopped promoting Exalgo in 2015 and no longer sells it.) Covidien focused on medical devices and was acquired by Medtronic.

In 2020, Mallinckrodt agreed to pay $1.6 billion to settle with states and the federal government for its role in the opioid crisis. That figure has since grown to $1.725 billion. In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for the company sent a statement identical to one it had sent to the Post: “While Mallinckrodt does not agree with the allegations regarding decade-old issues, it has spent the past three years negotiating a comprehensive, complete and final settlement that resolves the opioid litigation against it, provides $1.725 billion to a trust serving affected communities, and allows Mallinckrodt to continue to serve patients with critical health needs under an independently monitored compliance program.”

This year, Mallinckrodt also agreed to pay $260 million to resolve allegations that it underpaid rebates to the Medicaid program and paid illegal kickbacks related to another of its drugs, H.P. Acthar Gel. As it happens, ProPublica has also written about that drug, raising questions about the public spending on it in light of questions about its efficacy.

We stopped updating our Dollars for Docs tool in 2019 because the government’s Open Payments database is robust and refreshed annually and has gotten better with time.

Still, searching through these documents reinforced my view of how important it is for patients to know about their doctors’ relationships with drug companies and talk directly to their doctors about the drugs they are prescribed.

Here are some of the questions you may want to ask:

What type of work do you do with these companies?

Have you prescribed me any drugs that are manufactured by companies you’ve taken payments from?

Are there non-drug alternatives that I may want to consider first?

Are there less expensive generic alternatives to the drugs you have prescribed?

What devices have you used in my care that are manufactured by companies you’ve taken payments from?

Have you used Dollars for Docs or Open Payments? What have you found?

I’d love to hear your story.

https://www.propublica.org/newsletters/the-big-story?source=reprint&placement=top-note

[Rick Plant]

Fox News suddenly goes quiet on ‘great replacement’ theory after Buffalo shooting

Suspect was allegedly motivated by the theory, but network has barely mentioned gunman’s reasoning, even after Tucker Carlson pushed the concept in more than 400 of his shows


Tucker Carlson has arguably done more than anyone in the US to popularize the racist conspiracy.

As details of the Buffalo mass shooting emerged over the weekend, much of the media focussed on the shooter’s self-stated motivation: his belief in “great replacement” theory, the racist notion that white Americans are being deliberately replaced through immigration.

Over at Fox News, however, there was barely any mention of the white gunman’s alleged reasoning for opening fire at a supermarket, killing 10 people and wounding three more, in a predominantly Black area.

The absence of coverage of the motive was revealing, given Fox News’s most popular host, Tucker Carlson, has pushed the concept of replacement theory in more than 400 of his shows – and has arguably done more than anyone in the US to popularize the racist conspiracy.

Fox News, according to Oliver Darcy, a media correspondent for CNN, “largely ignored” the fact that the shooter had been inspired by replacement theory. Darcy searched transcripts from Fox News’s shows, and found one brief mention, by Fox News anchor Eric Shawn.

As Americans absorbed news of the shooting and struggled to understand why it had happened, it seemed a glaring omission. But given Carlson and his colleagues’ promotion of the theory, which has been unchecked by Fox News’s top executives, experts see the network as being left in a bind.

“What can they say?” said Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a watchdog of rightwing media. “There’s no way for anyone at Fox News to really issue a convincing and compelling, forthright denunciation of great replacement theory, because it’s being discussed on the network’s primetime hour on a near constant basis.”

Great replacement theory, or white replacement theory, states that a range of liberals, Democrats and Jewish people are working to replace white voters in western countries with non-white people, in an effort to achieve political aims.

It is not a new concept. But Carlson has led the charge in reintroducing it to mainstream rightwing thought. In April a New York Times investigation found that in more than 400 hundred of his shows Carlson had advanced the idea that a “cabal of elites want to force demographic change through immigration”.

In a monologue on his Monday night show, Carlson did not directly address replacement theory. He claimed the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto was “not recognizably leftwing or rightwing: it’s not really political at all”, despite the rambling document referencing a number of rightwing conspiracy theories.

Carlson referred to the gunman as “mentally ill” and launched an attack on “professional Democrats” who had “begun a campaign to blame those murders on their political opponents”.

In April 2021, after Carlson claimed on his show that Democrats were “diluting” his vote by “importing a brand-new electorate”, the Anti-Defamation League wrote to Fox News to sound the alarm.

“Make no mistake: this is dangerous stuff. The ‘great replacement theory’ is a classic white supremacist trope that undergirds the modern white supremacist movement in America,” wrote Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the ADL.

“It is a concept that is discussed almost daily in online racist fever swamps. It is a notion that fueled the hateful chants of ‘Jews will not replace us!’ in Charlottesville in 2017. And it has lit the fuse in explosive hate crimes, most notably the hate-motivated mass shooting attacks in Pittsburgh, Poway and El Paso, as well as in Christchurch, New Zealand.”

The ADL called for Carlson to be fired for his comments, but instead the rightwing host – whose show is the most-watched on cable news – has thrived, and his passion for the topic of replacement has spread to his colleagues.

But Carlson is not alone on Fox.

Laura Ingraham, who hosts an hour-long show at 10pm, has told her viewers that Democrats “want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever increasing number of chain migrants”, while Jeanine Pirro claimed on a radio show that liberals were engaged in “a plot to remake America, to replace American citizens with illegals who will vote for the Democrats”.

“​​To be clear, Fox News is far from the only place where you might hear such dangerous rhetoric,” wrote Tom Jones, a senior media writer at the Poynter institute.

“[But] the size of Fox News’s audience is what is notable. Fox News is the most-watched cable news network, and Carlson’s show is the most-watched on cable news, routinely drawing more than 3 million viewers a night.”

Fox News declined to comment when asked if it planned to condemn the idea of white replacement or take action against Carlson. A spokeswoman pointed to examples of Carlson denouncing violence on his show. Fox News was one of six media organizations which the gunman claimed, in his manifesto, were disproportionately influenced by Jewish people.

The network’s popularity has given it an outsized influence over the Republican party, an influence and relationship that was revealed recently when leaked text messages from the phone of Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former White House chief-of-staff, showed Meadows in frequent communication with Fox News hosts as supporters of Trump besieged the US Capitol on 6 January.

It should perhaps be little surprise, then, that Trump-supporting Republican politicians like Elise Stefanik and JD Vance have also embraced replacement theory.

“It’s been gradually moving from the fringes into the mainstream,” Philip Gorski, a professor of sociology at Yale, told the Washington Post. “First it was the entertainment wing of the GOP. Now it’s the political wing as well.”

The Buffalo shooter did not mention Fox News as an influence on his political beliefs, but said he had been radicalized through the extremist online forum 4chan, where he had found “infographics, shitposts, and memes that the White race is dying out”. From there, the gunman said, he had discovered sources including the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer.

Curiously, the founder of the Daily Stormer, Andrew Anglin, has called Tucker Carlson “literally our greatest ally”, and praised the Fox News host in 2021, in the wake of his replacement theory comments.

"Carlson was dropping the ultimate truth bomb on his audience: Jews aggressively lobby for the same demographic policies in America that they openly declare would destroy their own country,” Anglin wrote.

Since the shooting Carlson and his fellow Fox News hosts have justifiably drawn criticism for their promotion of replacement theory. But Gertz said the problem ultimately runs deeper, all the way to the Murdoch family, which controls the channel.

“Everyone knows the score here,” Gertz said.

“Tucker Carlson is doing his job. He is providing the content that the Fox News brass, the Murdochs, want out of their 8pm slot.

“If they didn’t want him to do this, they could make him stop – but they’ve decided not to. And they have decided not to do that because he is still profitable for them.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/17/buffalo-shooting-fox-news-tucker-carlson-great-replacement-theory