TASK DEFINITION: Given a paragraph, generate a claim that is supported by the given paragraph. 1) The claim must contain information from within the paragraph. 2) A sentence within the paragraph can be used as a claim. 3) The claim should not have contradictions within the paragraph. 4) The claim should be at most one sentence long.
PROBLEM: This release doesn't discusscosts in its comparison of influenza shots versus nasal sprays, although both modes of immunization have been around for a long while and the costs for both are easily known. Whileflu immunizations are often free through public health clinics and such, somepeople receive their immunizations from their family physicians and carry a specific cost. Knowing the difference in costs between the two typesis useful information both for people and public health officials. The release reports similar rates of vaccine uptake for intranasal vaccine and standard flu shots. But it does not quantify benefits for the main outcome of the study, that is, rates of influenza in communities vaccinated with nasal vs injected vaccine over the course of the study. These rates were statistically no different: 5.2% for the standard vs 5.3% for the nasal vaccine. This release makes no mention of possible harms that my follow the use of either the influenza vaccine injections or nasal spray, even though there are well-known restrictions on whom should and should not receive the nasal spray, and potential negative reactions to the injections among some people. The release points out that the study was the "first blinded randomized controlled trial" done in children within largely closed communities and it found similar efficacy in using the two modes of immunization. However, we do wish the release had addressed limitations, as well as some of the complexity of making these results generalizable to a larger population, as we saw with NPR's take on the news. While media attention is routinely heightened leading up to and during flu season, this release does not appear to reach the level of disease mongering. The release does identify the chief funder of the study, the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, although it offers no information on possible conflicts of interest among any of the researchers. The abstractof the study does state that two of the researchers do have links to pharmaceutical firms, but not in relation this study. Since the study looked a two forms of influenza vaccine administration, it obviously addresses the question of comparing alternatives. Both forms of immunization shots and nasal spray have been around for some time, their availability is widely known, earning the release a Satisfactory in this category. The release makes clear that the novelty of this study is its ability to examine both indirect effects of vaccination on the community as well as direct effects for persons receiving the vaccine. The release does not use any unjustifiable language.

SOLUTION: Flu nasal spray provides similar protection against influenza as flu shot: Study

PROBLEM: On July 10 2020, a number of Facebook users shared posts like the one below purportedly screenshots from the profile of a user, Richard Rose, who initially adopted the position of a "COVID denier" before dying from it on July 4 2020:Circulating Posts About Richard Rose's Posts and DeathIn the post above, four chronological posts attributed to Rose appeared, alongside the following status update from the poster:There's obviously no shortage of people who believe that following COVID-19 protocols makes you look weak. The insecurity and ignorance that fuels these outspoken acts of bravado are a separate conversation, but If you have a moment, please follow the last three months in the life of Richard Rose: https://www.facebook.com/rickrose2007In a post dated April 28 2020, Rose was quoted as refusing to buy or wear a mask, vowing not to buy into that "damn hype." On June 12 2020, a post captured Rose's check-in to "Put-in-Bay, South Bass Island" in Ohio alongside a remark that it was "not that packed lol."Two posts attributed to Rose were dated July 1 2020, the first of which was about Rose's illness in the preceding days. In the second, Rose disclosed he was quarantined for fourteen days after testing positive for COVID-19.A fifth and final screenshot included a smiling photograph of a genial-looking man and the words "Richard Rose, III Obituary." Visible in that image were the dates of Rose's birth and death: July 25 1982 and July 4 2020.A similar collection of screenshots shared by the page "Guess what he says next" on July 10 2020 was shared thousands of times in just a few hours. In place of the two July 1 2020 posts, a single July 2 2020 post attributed to Rose was included:On July 7 2020, somebody claiming to be a friend of Rose's wrote:This was my friend Richard Rose. Rick was diagnosed with COVID-19 on July 1. Rick lost his life 3 days later on July 4th. Rick was healthy as far as we know and was only in his 30's. Rick was like a lot of my friends, and didn't feel the need to wear a mask because he was young and healthy. Please know that this virus is real. Just because you don't personally know someone effected yet doesn't mean it's not real.Rick Rose's Facebook PagePosts seen in the screenshots were available and initially open to comments on public posts. It appeared that Rose's Facebook page was memorialized at some point on July 10 2020, judging by the amount of activity to that date a flood of engagement which ceased when the page was memorialized.On April 28 2020, Rose posted the status commonly shared first in the circulating posts, in which he said "I'm not buying a fucking mask," and "I've made it this far by not buying into that damn hype":On June 13 2020, Rose commented "it's not that packed lol" on his check-in post:On June 29 2020, Rose expressed concern Halloween might "not happen" in 2020:The posts seen from July 1 and 2 2020 also were visible on Rose's timeline:Rose's final post appeared on July 3 2020, a meme that read:When you see me in heaven don't shit yourselves you judgmental pricks.Comments on the post between July 4 2020 and July 7 2020 appeared to be solely from Rose's friends, expressing shock and grief at his death. On July 10 2020, a number of new comments apparently spurred by posts about his comments and death appeared:Does he still think it's a hoax though?An Obituary for Richard Rose IIICrosser Funeral Home in Port Clinton, Ohio published an obituary for Rose, archived here. It confirmed the cause of Rose's death and included details about his life:Richard Donald Rose, III July 25, 1982 July 4, 2020 Born in Port Clinton, Ohio Resided in Port Clinton, OhioRichard Donald Rose, III, 37, of Port Clinton passed away Saturday, July 4, 2020 due to complications of Covid-19 at his home. He was born July 25, 1982 in Port Clinton. He graduated from Port Clinton High School. He served his country in the United States Army for nine years serving two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He enjoyed social media, online streaming, paranormal and his two cats Dale and Tucker. He was a fan of NASCAR, Dirt Track Racing and Georgia Bulldogs Football. Surviving are his mother and step-father: Tina and Kenny Heschel of Port Clinton; sister: Krystal Campbell of Genoa; brother: K. C. Heschel of Concord, NC; half-sister: Melissa Rose of Port Clinton. He was preceded in death by his grandparents: Carl and Marla Kessler, Cooper and Janice Heschel, Richard Rose, Mildred DeBlase. Funeral services will be conducted 11:00 am Wednesday, July 8, 2020 at Neidecker, Crosser & Priesman Funeral Home & Cremation Service, 1124 Fulton St. Port Clinton, OH where visitation will be held Tuesday from 2:00 4:00 and 6:00 8:00pm. Interment will be at Riverview Cemetery, Port Clinton, OH. Memorial contributions may be given to the family. Online condolences may be shared with the family at www.neideckercrosserpriesman.com[. ]SummaryIt is true that a man named Richard Rose (who appeared to go by "Rick") published a Facebook post in April 2020, expressing his belief that the use of masks to cut down on COVID-19 transmission was "damn hype." We did not find extensive posting from Rose about the pandemic. It is further true that Rose posted about his illness on July 1 and 2 2020, and he died of complications from COVID-19 on July 4 2020. His last post referenced "heaven," but chronologically he appeared to go from viewing his diagnosis as an inconvenience on July 1 2020 to dying three days later. Rose's page was memorialized on the afternoon of July 10 2020, likely in response to a flood of comments.Comments

SOLUTION: Circulating posts by a man named Richard Rose demonstrate his position that COVID-19 was a hoax; Rose died from COVID-19 in July 2020.

PROBLEM: As the COVID-19 (aka Coronavirus disease) continued to spread in March 2020, social media users flashed back to a "pandemic" that unfolded nearly 20 years earlier but this one took place entirely in the virtual world.According to the Hong Kong-based tech news site AbacusNews.com, more people on the Chinese platform Weibo have begun researching the Corrupted Blood online virus and players' responses to the bug, which broke out inside the World of Warcraft game platform (known as WOW for short) in September 2005:A Weibo hashtag related to the World of Warcraft epidemic has become one of the most-searched terms, reaching nearly 60 million views. And one Weibo influencer spotted a similarity between their origins: The Wuhan coronavirus and Corrupted Blood both started in animals."On the fundamental level, Corrupted Blood started with a hunter's pet, namely an animal, before it transmitted to a person," the Weibo user wrote.On Twitter, author Rin Chupeco garnered attention by highlighting the incident in a very popular thread and adding, "Epidemiologists actually STUDIED this to see how ppl would react to an epidemic [in real life]."The Warcraft outbreak was an unintended side-effect of an update to the game involving the character Hakkar the Soulflayer, introduced for players in the online multi-player game to take down to complete a raid. One of Hakkar's attacks siphoned off players' characters' "blood," weakening them to replenish his own strength. The game allowed for players to contaminate (or "corrupt") their characters' blood and thus poison Hakkar. But the tactic could also affect characters' in-game pet.Engineers for the game told PC Magazine in 2019 that the problem originated from a mistake by the design team; if a character's pet was in play at the time they poisoned Hakkar using that maneuver, the corrupted blood effect and damage to not only the pet but any other character would linger even after completing that part of the game."Every time you'd summon that pet you'd reinfect yourself and all the players around you and it wouldn't check if you were in a raid so you'd do it while you were in town and the entire town would get corrupted," said Shane Dabiri, chief of staff for the game's manufacturer Blizzard Entertainment. The effect was further spread by players who willfully "infected" their characters, and then deliberately took them to other virtual sites on the WOW platform."Even once we figured out what was going on it made it really, really hard to fix it," Cash said:Our choices were either to go through every pet in every server in every country in the entire world and check if it had corrupted blood and get rid of it, or get really hacky code in where every time you summoned a pet it would check and see if it had corrupted blood on it and get rid of it.At the time, an estimated 6.5 million players used the game platform. As Reuters would report in 2009, the corrupted blood outbreak, which lasted around a month, affected 4 million of them. But the situation also prompted researchers to take note.In a March 2007 article for the journal Epidemiology,physician Ran D. Balicer from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel called the purposeful spread of corrupted blood by WOW players "the first virtual act of bio-warfare" and drew parallels between that outbreak online and the public spread of other diseases in the real world:The role of an asymptomatic-yet-infective animal reservoir, for instance, is evident in avian influenza. Asymptomatic ducks had an important role in allowing this otherwise relatively lethal avian disease to become endemic in East Asia and spread to other parts of the world. Furthermore, attempts by game administrators to quarantine infected areas proved futile due to the ability of characters to rapidly teleport to distant lands. This is similar to the role of air travel in the rapid global spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome (ie, SARS).That same year, in a paper for Lancet Infectious Diseases, Tufts University professor Nina Fefferman and co-author Eric Lofgren from the University of North Carolina argued that because WOW players can be so immersed in the game, that their reactions could be used as a gauge for how non-gamers could react in the event of a real-world outbreak:The modern world has two distinct types of pathogens, real and virtual. Real pathogens are, logically, those that infect real organisms, many of which subsequently cause disease and become subject to the attentions of the medical and public-health professions. The second type of pathogen, the virtual virus, infects computers through software. The outbreak we have described marks the first time that a virtual virus has infected a virtual human being in a manner even remotely resembling an actual epidemiological event. As technology and biology become more heavily integrated in daily life, this small step towards the interaction of virtual viruses and human beings could become highly significant.More than a decade later, those respective analyses continued to hold true; Eric Lofgren, who as of March 2020 was working as an infectious disease specialist at the Washington State University veterinary teaching hospital, told the Canadian Broadcast Company that implementing planned outbreaks within virtual settings could provide data for how to combat viral diseases outside of them."In the real world, we can observe people's behaviour, but we don't know everything about the rest of the universe. We don't know perfectly if you're sick or not," he said. "In a game, we can, at least in theory, know all of those things. They're programmatic; you can record them."

SOLUTION:
Players in the online "World of Warcraft" game were hit with an in-game virus, one that was later studied by researchers.