Anyone else out there old enough to remember the Plastic Straw Panic of 2018?

That was when a 9-year-old Vermont boy was so saddened by a notorious viral video of a sea turtle with a plastic straw in its nose that he called a couple of American straw manufacturers to get production numbers. Next, he ran 3rd-grade math on them, coming up with alarming data that stretched the credulity of thinking people but was automatically embraced by the brain-dead left-wing media, including CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

This 9-year-old number-cruncher - who was treated like Oppenheimer on network news shows - claimed that Americans were using and discarding 500 million plastic straws a day, or 182 billion a year. He claimed the oceans were clogged with these tubes of death, causing knee-jerk granola eaters to panic and demand a ban on plastic straws.

There were so many flaws in this tyke’s “research” that its hard to know where to begin. For one thing, about 95% of ocean pollution comes from 3rd world countries, not the US and plastic straws are the least of the problem. Shoot, even “Grist,” an environmental publication, admits that the kid’s numbers were grossly inflated and that recent research shows that of the 8 million tons of plastic refuse that end up in the oceans, only .025 percent is comprised of plastic straws.

When you slop a drink down your shirt because you don’t want your straw to end up in a sea turtle’s nostril you are doing an excellent job of virtue signaling, but you are doing virtually nothing to clean the ocean.

Yet, to this day plastic straw bans in some form or another are on the books in at least five states. And you must beg for a plastic straw in restaurants that switched to soggy paper straws as an environmentally superior alternative.

Guess what? According to The Daily Mail, Belgian researchers decided to take a close look at paper straws. They discovered that these inferior straws are full of toxic cancer-causing chemicals that are easily ingested when in contact with liquids.

But the “eco-friendly” alternatives contain long-lasting and potentially toxic chemicals, a new study has concluded.

In the first analysis of its kind in Europe, Belgian researchers tested 39 brands of straws for the group of synthetic chemicals known as poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).

PFAS were found in the majority of the straws tested and were most common in those made from paper and bamboo…

The substances break down very slowly over time and can persist over thousands of years in the environment, a property that has led to them being known as “forever chemicals.”

They have been linked to a number of health problems including lower response to vaccines, lower birth weight, thyroid disease, increased cholesterol levels, liver damage, kidney cancer and testicular cancer.

I can’t help but hope that a viral video soon emerges of a cute little sea turtle suffocating in an N95 face mask.

How many millions of THOSE are polluting the oceans?

Oh, and as Big Pharma demands the feds gin up fear of covid, it’s worth noting that, according to the CDC, there are currently 10,000 patients hospitalized WITH covid. (Not necessarily FROM it.) Last year at this time there were 40,000.

Ahem.