SCORE— Lake County’s Risk Reduction Authority, chaired by District 1 Supervisor Moke Simon presented a virtual town hall Thursday which, according to those involved in organizing it, had been in the works for a long time. The town hall was designed to get residents starting to think about this year’s fire season, which is especially worrisome due to the drought conditions the region is currently experiencing going into the summer months.
FUMBLE— Although we give kudos to the members of the Risk Reduction Authority for putting on an informative and useful town hall, it was disheartening to see that in a county of over 65,000, there were less than a hundred residents logged in between all the platforms livestreaming the event, despite the organization’s best efforts to publicize it online and in print. Civic participation, or rather a lack of it, is certainly not an issue exclusive to Lake County, and we are not exactly 100 percent sure what more can be done to engage residents in these types of events focusing on issues that affect them directly such as wildfire prevention, but with so many digital avenues available to them and with “hybrid” meetings also happening, we feel there really is no excuse for residents not to be more involved.
SCORE— Social media giant Facebook’s Oversight Board upheld its suspension of former president Donald Trump’s account in the wake of Trump’s potential to incite violence and what many saw as his propensity for irresponsibly and regularly spreading misinformation on the platform.
We were glad to see that the tech companies are starting to address the problem, which is by no means a partisan issue or a problem attributed to any one politician like Trump or to one political party. We think it’s unconscionable that Facebook has taken so long to formulate clear policies detailing how they deal with its distribution of news, and the problem of widespread misinformation on multiple topics including climate change and the 2020 election, given social media outlets have become major conduits of local and national news and also foster social discourse through their networks.
Facebook suffers from the same problem as other social media platforms like YouTube. Namely, as pointed out recently by a Bay Area News Group op-ed, they are not transparent about how they decide who should and shouldn’t have an online voice. Conservative users for example, have been very vocal about the random way these social media outlets seemingly arbitrarily promote content creators and influencers. We agree that Facebook and other outlets of the same ilk need to continue to ensure they ban or vanish falsehoods and threatening misinformation. We think clear, more fleshed out policies would go along way in gaining users’ trust and would be a welcome step in that direction.
FUMBLE— Earlier in the week it was reported that CVS and Walgreens pharmacies wasted most doses of the COVID-19 vaccines. The CDC recorded the two companies accounted for most of the 182,874 vaccine doses lost as of late March.
According to a report by Kaiser Health News, it was not completely clear from the CDC data why the two pharmacy chains wasted so much more doses than their state and federal counterparts, though critics have pointed out to poor planning early in the rollout.
Dr. Michael Wasserman, past president of the California Association of Long Term Care Medicine and a critic of the corporate effort told KHN that the companies’ approach was “too restrictive” and added that their unfamiliarity with the long-term facilities’ needs “harmed the effort.”
More vexing and worrisome is the fact officials believe vaccine waste could increase in the coming weeks as health officials shift tactics to inoculate “harder-to-reach populations.” The vaccine rollout in California, until very recently, had been mostly chaotic and poorly executed. Perhaps it is understandable that some mismanagement would occur within a corporate structure not at all used to the wide distribution of doses, but we think this late in the game and in the (we hope) waning stages of this pandemic that a concerted effort should be made to save as many doses as possible, given the shortages being experienced outside our borders.
“Scores and fumbles” will appear periodically in the editorial pages of the Record-Bee. Items are compiled by the editorial board.