Wednesday, Reddit quarantined r/NoNewNormal, a subreddit that is generally antimask, antivax, and is also against any government COVID restrictions.

The subreddit is for "skeptical discussion of the 'new normal' that has manifested as an outcome of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic," according to its description. "We are a diverse international coalition with the shared goal of restoring our old ways of life before the world fell into the grips of fear and hysteria. Join the effort to improve the quality of discussion on Reddit by raising your own standards and encouraging the same of others." Most of the threads are dedicated to discussing conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 vaccine, which has drastically reduced death rates in countries that have been able to get significant portions of their population vaccinated.

As of Thursday morning, it has 112,000 members. 

Now, when users visit the subreddit, they see a page that says the subreddit is quarantined, with the message, "For medical advice, please consult your physician" and options to enter or go back. Being quarantined means that posts from the subreddit will no longer show up on Reddit’s r/all page and users must be logged in to visit it.

The subreddit r/rejectnewnormal and r/refusenewnormal were banned for trying to create communities that served the same purpose as a previously-banned one. Other, related communities, r/PandemicHoax and r/truthseekers (for conspiracy theorists), are now set to private, so that only approved users can view them.

“The subreddit in question has been quarantined in accordance with Reddit's Quarantine Policy," a spokesperson for Reddit told me. Reddit has also addressed rule violating behaviors from some members individually. The platform prohibits users from encouraging others to do anything that might be harmful to their wellbeing—like drinking bleach to cure COVID-19, for example. 

Reddit quarantines communities to prevent them from being seen accidentally by users who stumble into them, according to the platform: "Quarantined subreddits and their subscribers are still fully obliged to abide by Reddit’s Content Policy and remain subject to enforcement measures." Quarantined subreddits don't generate revenue and aren't included in searches or recommendations. 

Most of the time, Reddit leaves moderation of subreddits up to individual moderators. Moderators are incentivized to make sure their communities play by Reddit's terms of service, to avoid being banned—the platform does step in, in extreme cases, as it recently did by banning subreddits dedicated to objectifying women Olympians and reposting stolen OnlyFans content. When it comes to COVID-19 misinformation, however, it's been criticized for taking a too hands-off approach: During the height of the pandemic in 2020, it quarantined r/Wuhan_Flu, but allowed it to continue to grow, despite it containing misinformation and hoaxes. “I feel it is becoming increasingly apparent that Reddit, with its voluntary content moderation system, is unable to respond adequately to the sharing of potentially dangerous health misinformation without significant reform in their moderation strategy,” a former r/Coronavirus moderator told Motherboard in February 2020. “The current system is insufficient at ensuring that health misinformation is not spread on that platform and needs significant reform.”

For the past 24 hours on r/NoNewNormal, users have been posting their outrage at Reddit for putting them in quarantine. "Reddit is silencing us for our ideas not our actions. We don't brigade or break site wide rules. Yet here we are digitally quarantined on a platform that once was about freedom of expression and speech. Current admins should be ashamed of what they did to the platform," one user wrote. 

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The Food and Drug Administration’s full approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine on Monday has boosted hopes that at least some of the millions of unvaccinated adults in the U.S. would change their minds. But right on cue, anti-vaxxer social media influencers and Republican politicians are finding new reasons to oppose the vaccine. 

Even before the FDA gave full approval, Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican who has for months criticized the outreach campaign to get people vaccinated, argued that the approval process was rushed due to politics.

“I see no need to rush the FDA approval process for any of the three COVID-19 vaccines,” Johnson wrote in a letter to top Biden administration health officials. “Expediting the process appears to only serve the political purpose of imposing and enforcing vaccine mandates.” 

Responding to a speech from President Joe Biden calling on American companies to require vaccines, Johnson tweeted: “No one should be pressured, coerced, or fear reprisal for refusing any medical treatment, including the Covid-19 vaccine.”

Robert F. Kennedy, a longtime antivaxx activist, echoed Johnson’s complaints about the process. “They know they can’t win this argument on the science and that’s why they had to abolish the public process and independent oversight,” Kennedy tweeted Monday. 

During a House Freedom Caucus press conference Monday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene—who was recently suspended from Twitter for a week for spreading misinformation about COVID vaccines—called the FDA’s approval process “questionable.”

“The FDA sped it up, and I wonder was it Joe Biden himself making that call to approve the Pfizer vaccine that now, in studies, is showing only 40 percent effectiveness?” Greene said. 

And Peter Navarro, former President Donald Trump’s top trade adviser who has launched increasingly unhinged attacks on public health officials since Trump left office, said the FDA approval was “what caving to political pressure looks like.” 

“Pfizer vaccine is leady [sic] and non-durable and risks are mounting,” Navarro tweeted. “If we had tried to pulled this kind of sh**T in the Trump White...fill in blank.”

Studies, such as the one Greene referenced out of Israel, have suggested that the Pfizer vaccine has been less effective at preventing infections and symptomatic illness from the highly contagious delta variant than it was at protecting people from previous variants. But the Pfizer vaccine—along with those manufactured by Moderna and Johnson & Johnson—has continued to give recipients strong protection against serious illness and death; the same Israeli data showed 91 percent effectiveness in preventing severe illness.

In Massachusetts—one of the most highly vaccinated states—fewer than 500 fully vaccinated people have been hospitalized and 124 people have died from the disease, according to state data—just a fraction of the more than 4.4 million fully vaccinated people in the state. 

Despite the outcry from anti-vaxxers, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll last month suggested that approximately 30 percent of the unvaccinated were more likely to get vaccinated once the FDA granted the vaccine full approval—though the poll also found that nearly two-thirds of Americans already believed the vaccines had been given full approval rather than the emergency use authorizations they’ve been administered under. 

Crucially, the FDA approving the vaccine empowers schools and employers, including federal agencies, to move forward with vaccine requirements. 

Soon after the approval was announced, a Pentagon spokesperson said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin would implement a vaccine requirement for the military. 

“These efforts ensure the safety of our service members and promote the readiness of our force, not to mention the health and safety of the communities around the country in which we live,” John Kirby told reporters Monday.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been unavoidable, but over the last year and a half many of us have slipped into daily routines where we are insulated from the horror of people regularly getting sick and dying from a pandemic.  COVID case data is updated constantly, but can still feel abstract during your nightly doomscrolling sessions. 

That’s why artist and technologist Justin Blinder created Pandemic Pulse, an application that uses local COVID data to drain your computer’s resources.

“I'm really interested in how we can approach data visualization in ways that recontextualize data with all of the lived experiences and environments and emotions that are often stripped when something becomes data,” Blinder told Motherboard. “Pandemic Pulse was really this intervention that's designed to re-sensitize ourselves to the severity of the pandemic and make the data more tangible.”

Using data from the CDC, the malware calculates the local rate of infection and morbidity to measure its impact on your computer. According to the Pandemic Pulse website, a local .1 percent infection rate would slow a computer’s speed by 10 percent using a stressing application that stress tests the computer. The malware also creates an overlay on the desktop to dim the screen’s brightness according to the local death rate. If COVID deaths in your state are on the rise, your screen could suddenly turn pitch black. 

“Through our devices, we can experience specific effects— a certain (computer) slowness, a dimming (of the screen)— from its omnipresence,” Blinder’s website reads. 

The application itself doesn’t impact computer data and can be turned on or off, returning the computer and display to its original state. Pandemic Pulse poses no harm or any real use to those who download it, it just serves as an “ambient reminder” of the spread of COVID in your area. The malware’s source code is publicly available on Blinder’s GitHub for those who are curious. 

Blinder has the malware installed on his own computer and has noticed its impact while staying in Massachusetts, which is currently experiencing a seven day positivity rate of 2.8 percent according to its government website. He also recently traveled to California, which now has a positivity rate of 6.1 percent, where he noticed that his computer was running differently. 

Blinder first launched the malware back in January but has since relaunched the project during this recent rise in Delta variant cases. 

“It does feel like you're being connected closer to what the data represents, rather than just the data itself,” he said.

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At least 619,729 Americans, 21,219 Georgians, and 247 people in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s home county have died as a result of COVID-19 since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the New York Times. Apparently, that amount of death and destruction doesn’t worry Greene.

The Georgia congresswoman, who was suspended from Twitter for seven days earlier this week after she once again lied about the COVID-19 vaccines, made an appearance on the network Real America’s Voice to say that the Food and Drug Administration shouldn’t “approve a vaccine that doesn’t seem to be that effective,” which is yet another lie. 

Greene also dismissed the idea that it’s a problem that hospitals are verging on collapse.

“I’ve talked to local hospitals here in my district and here in my state,” Greene said. “Yes, the waiting rooms get full. But guess what? The waiting rooms are full of all kinds of things, not just COVID.”

“Everyone needs to get back down to common sense and needs to remember, we're human, we can't live forever,” Greene said. 

In short, a member of Congress who has a national profile went on television and argued that it’s fine to allow thousands of people to die from a largely preventable illness, while the nation’s hospital systems crumble into dust. But as hospitals around the country are finding, it is not, in fact, fine.

In Las Vegas, a lifesaving surgery for a law professor with stage 3 metastatic melanoma was delayed because the hospital ran out of beds during the area’s ongoing (yet hopefully waning) COVID-19 surge. An 11-month-old Houston baby with COVID-19 was airlifted to a hospital more than 150 miles away last week because there were no pediatric beds available. And in Georgia, many hospitals are already over capacity, to the point where they’re also delaying procedures, denying patient transfers, and diverting ambulances to other hospitals.

Elbert Memorial Hospital in rural northeast Georgia has been able to take in some patients from hospitals in the Athens area, nearly 45 minutes away, in order to help those hospitals deal with the surge. But this week, when Elbert had a COVID-19 patient it had to transfer, the hospital called 20 other facilities and struggled mightily to find a facility that could take the patient in, hospital CEO Kerry Trapnell told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week. “No one had an available bed,” Trapnell said. 

They finally found one, but the patient ended up dying anyway, Trapnell told the Journal-Constitution. 

“It’s sad, and I am not going to imply that the delay cost the patient’s life, but you don’t know,” Trapnell added. “That’s the concern of not being able to transfer patients where they need to go.”