Infants younger than six months old get hit the hardest with respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, making up almost half of all patients hospitalized for the illness in Canada, according to a new study. @michellegamage.bsky.social reports.

Read this thread! 🧵 It’s been clarifying to witness just how fast workplaces went from “we’re all in this together” to “forced infection is a condition of employment”. No discussion about making in-person work safer. CBC’s COVID coverage leaves much to be desired and sadly, this experience tracks.

Hey look, there goes the Overton Window moving again. "Progressive" parties won't even talk about the COVID-19 vaccine. Surely if you just move a little more to the right all problems will be solved.

The state of societal and moral regression:

It's been truly stunning to me the amount of scientists and doctors who think we can just wash our hands of a novel pathogen first encountered 5 years ago. I used to believe these were data-driven experts who put health concerns first. That illusion has been trampled many times over.

I just want to make this *abundantly clear*. When “experts” say COVID-19 is mild for kids… THEY HAD, AND HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TEN YEARS WORTH OF INFECTIONS WILL CAUSE.

The 3rd annual Canadian Long COVID symposium wrapped up yesterday. It was a great meeting, and I got some nice news at the end! PDF of the poster is here: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/e8wh6... MP3 of a 5-minute verbal overview is here: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ej0lw...

Got off the plane and walked into a drug store in Ottawa and got my COVID vaccine in under 5 minutes. No line up. No appointment. No cost. Was even asked if I wanted Moderna or Pfizer. It’s unconscionable that we can’t get this same level of service in Alberta.

Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs - Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75% - Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60% - Social Sciences by 50–70% - History by 60% - Biology by 75% - The German department will lose all PhD seats - Sociology from six PhD students to zero

🚨 This is inexplicable news to share. If in Alberta and you want flu and covid shots for NEXT year (2026-2027), you have only until December 15 of THIS year to order them. This is not incompetence. It’s a deliberate choice to prevent as many people .. bookvaccine.alberta.ca/vaccine/s/pr... 1/2

Piece on our new study....👇 How Amazon provides a marketplace for worthless #stemcell supplements latimes.com/business/sto... by @hiltzikm.bsky.social Me: "Take an area of science that has ... a foothold in culture, and you use that language to give your product a veneer of legitimacy.”

Yep. For clarity, here's why 'leftists' make unfounded antimasking claims: 1. They feel icky when forced to confront how their actions don't reflect their stated moral code. 2. Admitting they aren't an expert about COVID, eugenics etc. opens up the possibility of being convinced they should mask.

Heads up, this guy has done the risk assessment and he’s positive that kids can be serially reinfected with COVID forever with no serious consequences! To suggest otherwise is fear, just ignore that JAMA Pediatrics has declared long COVID more common than asthma in kids 5 years into its existence.

“According to the masses: It is not reasonable to place any expectations on the broad back of the majority of society, but it *is* … to pile everything the majority won’t do on the thin slice of disabled people who are carrying their own weight and attempting to carry everyone else’s as they drown.”

Excellent piece. Every time this discourse rolls around they treat those of us that mask like we’re hypochondriacs. No we’re the ghosts of infections past. We plead with you so that you can avoid our fate. In return you mock us. #MECFS #LongCovid

progressives will wax poetic about the importance of being strong allies and advocates for the marginalized—until it comes to putting their money where their mouth (and nose) is, because masking interferes with their weekly brunch plans

even the smartest folks whose takes i otherwise appreciate, who otherwise want to resist fascism themselves & encourage others to, find wearing a mask in, at least, public indoor spaces—to prevent the harms of this administration from impacting others—to be a bridge too far; it’s shameful, frankly.

You can declare yourself against “universal public masking”, but that means I can declare you a dick. Long COVID absolutely wrecked my shit because people just couldn’t see themselves considering the health of others. Knowing you’re comfortable with that tells me everything I need to know.

Dear liberals, If you identify as a leftist who believes in intersectional justice & fighting fascism, please wear a mask in public. It’s one small act of solidarity with the millions living with long Covid - and a reminder that caring for others includes protecting their health

People continue to call COVID advocates’ pleas for masking “unreasonable”. Yet people who’ve already been disabled by COVID have no choice but to live with the “unreasonable” burdens of constant COVID safety. My latest: substack.com/home/post/p-...

I teach all of my classes in an N95 because my gift from having COVID (pre-vaccine) is an autoimmune disease that destroys my kidney function. COVID gave me kidney failure, which will require a kidney transplant. What's the #1 cause of death (aside from CKD) in patients waiting for dialysis? COVID.

There are thousands of studies showing the long term health risks to people posed by COVID-19. Any rational person would look at this data and pause for thought. I think we aren’t doing that because we aren’t very rational at the moment.

“Our primary message is that reinfections still matter, and you should do what you can to avoid reinfection..” — Yong Chen, University of Pennsylvania

These kinds of studies & articles are endlessly frustrating. If there was a study that showed that if you gave someone 1/10 of a dose of a vaccine it was not tied to protection, would you conclude that vaccines don't work? No? Then why do it with other things?

Liberals clutching their pearls on this site when told that not masking to protect others in essential public spaces is ableist. Instead of getting angry, they should reflect on how they can do better

Nice eugenics BBC

The mass firings at the CDC tonight drive home the fact that no one is coming to save us But we can save each other Wear a mask. Ideally a respirator like an N95 Even if you’re vaccinated. Even if you’re “not worried” It protects you but it also protects everyone else Bonus? Less colds & flus!

Five and half years since we’ve known covid is transmitted by aerosols and a provicial health authority has released an AI chat bot that disseminates droplet disinformation.

i miss the time when most liberals could identify the policies suggested in the great barrington declaration as evil, eugenic, and unsupported by science!

One thing I've learned from the Internet is that a lie needs 0% proof to be believed, but the truth requires thousands of pages of proof and still won't be believed.

This is a fucking tragedy www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Excited to introduce Vibes from Meta. Eat your slop, piggies!

Right-wing authoritarians are now buying our video game companies. They already own almost all of the media.

I find this site has little content on Covid. The world's running amok with so much else going on, but I'm determined to keep banging the Covid drum because I believe it’s in part fueling the crumbling fascist political state we see now

Many of the weird things that you hear people say or do are, at core, a rejection of reality because the problems of the latter are hard to contemplate and solve by those who were raised in the culture of the make believe. The crash landing will be very hard.

I think it's really telling how many of the "it's just health anxiety!" people are really angry about it. It's multiple layers of ableism - pathologising a response to a real threat to discredit it, as well as acting as though hostility is an acceptable response to people's mental health problems.

Yesterday, history happened at the UN: For the first time hundreds of orgs signed a global pledge declaring that healthy indoor air is a human right. Healthy indoor air is a key tool for preventing pandemics, building climate resilience, and increasing health equity. We need it everywhere!

Misinformation makes everything worse, but we are witnessing collapse in peer review: $ cuts and precarity mean fewer people have the time necessary to do basic work. Experts can't do all the reviews so editors go far down the list to the inexpert, editors don't have time to sort out conflicts, etc.

Just got rejected from the Journal of Medical Ethics. It was pretty illuminating in terms of how far society has fallen.

Infant mortality in the USA

US Ambassador threatens to tariff, annex, and bomb Canada if anti-American sentiment doesn't improve

Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, says UN inquiry

It seems to me that a "comprehensive overview of cardiovascular prevention strategies across all stages of COVID-19" should start with the most important one: "try to not get covid". It's weird that this step is not mentioned, given all the other things they talk about.

Silly Jimmy Kimmel. He should have just called for all homeless people to be killed and he’d still have a job.

"However, he said that for people not in at-risk groups, vaccination against COVID-19 and the flu "is not a step we necessarily recommend." Apparently Quebec's government is anti-vax. Welcome to the dark ages of kakistocracy. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

ah, well

This is worth 15 minutes of your time when you have it. My goodness youtu.be/nMyyVaiY4V8