Month: February 2023

Enlarge / Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo speaks during a press conference at Neo City Academy in Kissimmee, Florida. (credit: Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Florida's health department opened and then closed an investigation into the state's polarizing surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, after a tipster claiming to have insider knowledge alleged that Ladapo "manipulated data" and committed "scientific fraud" in his final edits to what became a contentious, widely panned analysis on COVID-19 vaccine safety in young men.

That's all according to a report by Politico, which reviewed state documents on the investigation, including the original complaint from the tipster. Those documents appear to raise more questions than answers regarding the accusations and the health department's investigation. According to the documents, the Florida Department of Health’s inspector general opened an investigation in November of last year but closed it at an undisclosed time because the anonymous complainant didn't respond to follow-up questions.

“Batshit study”

The dubious analysis at the center of the controversy was posted online last October by the health department. Oddly, though, it did not list any authors or bear the health department's letterhead or other identifiers. Ladapo used the analysis as the basis for the state's concerning recommendation that males aged 18 to 39 should not receive an mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine. That recommendation goes against the recommendations of all other major health organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Enlarge / A Comcast Xfinity service van in San Ramon, California on February 25, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | Smith Collection/Gado )

Comcast has fessed up to another mistake on the national broadband map after previously insisting that false data it gave the Federal Communications Commission was actually correct.

Our report on February 9 showed that when residents in two Colorado cities objected to Comcast's coverage claims through the FCC challenge system, the company disputed those challenges even though it was impossible to order Comcast Internet service at the challenged addresses. As we previously wrote, Comcast only admitted to the FCC that it submitted false data in Arvada, Colorado, one day after we contacted the company's public relations department.

But Comcast hadn't yet admitted that it gave the FCC false data in Fort Collins, Colorado, at the time of our last report. That changed last week in a letter to the FCC. "Upon further review of the location ID in question, Comcast has determined that the location is currently not serviceable by Comcast," the company told the FCC.

Enlarge / New York City has the slowest car travel in the country. (credit: Alan Schein/Getty Images)

Yet another annual traffic survey has found London firmly in first place—or worst place, perhaps—for 2022. This time it's TomTom's data that shows the Big Smoke is hell on wheels, with an average travel time of more than 35 minutes to go six miles (10 km) last year. Instead of just releasing a static report, TomTom has used its data to create a tool that lets you calculate the costs of commuting in 389 cities and their metropolitan areas, from A Coruña in Spain to Zwolle in the Netherlands, with 80 US cities in between.

Of course, the 2022 data is worth a look. Here in the US, TomTom's trends show my own city of Washington, DC, did pretty badly over the past 12 months—the time to travel six miles went up by a minute and a half to 21 minutes. Indianapolis saw travel times also grow by 90 seconds year on year, but you could complete those six miles in 14 minutes, according to TomTom's data.

As you might expect, transit-friendly New York City had the longest travel times to go six miles—25 minutes, which was an increase of 70 seconds over 2021. And New Yorkers spent the most time in rush hour during 2022, a total of 236 hours. (DC, in second place, lost 196 hours.)