I freaking love voice messages. If you're my friend and you're not a voice message person, I'm so sorry about all the friend podcasts I regularly send you 😂 When they get particularly long and rambly, I just end them with, "like and subscribe!" to cut the awkward tension of realizing I'm 5 mins in 😎

This reminds me of when, ~20 yrs ago or so, we were on a private group tour of the NSA, & the presenter insisted to everyone that the NSA never taps calls of citizens, & then a week later, huge reporting came out confirming they did. But yeah, the ads - it's like 5 sec. after you mention a product.

"Inspiration for this site came after the Ontario government shut down the Wastewater Surveillance Initiative (opens in new window) on July 31, 2024." Note from wwater.ca/Ontario

With ticket sales plummeting and artists pulling out, Trump decides to close the Kennedy Center for two years, promising to renovate it and try again to find an audience and performers when it reopens in 2028.

@capublichealth.bsky.social is one of the few public health orgs with effective messaging on COVID prevention. Planes are one place everyone should wear an N95 mask - they are high-risk enclosed spaces Is anyone in Canada doing this? If not, why?

This is so fucked.

On average, Americans have have 5.0 cumulative SARS-CoV-2 infections. This week's infections are expected to result in 1/4 to 1 million new #LongCOVID conditions and ≈2,000 excess deaths. 🧵2/4

One of the best things I’ve read in a while:

1. Very important study - and the primary reason I avoid infection. 'The long-term impact of COVID-19 may be consequential years after the infection and give rise to long-term illnesses including neurocognitive problems similar to what is seen in Alzheimer's disease'.

As we experience a huge surge of flu cases, a reminder that the widespread usage of masks at the start of the COVID pandemic wiped out a strain of the flu. If you haven’t been masking up lately, now would be a great time to restart.

What would Fred Rogers think of the state of the US right now?

Good news for the oligarchs, if they leave right now, the planet is there for the taking 😏😆

The final Calvin and Hobbes, which appeared in papers 30 years ago today.

Our Solar System is orbiting the center of our Galaxy at about 220 km/s so in 2025 we collectively traveled something like 7 billion kilometers across the Milky Way. Once in a while, when you have a moment, it’s worthwhile to take a look around, see where you are, and appreciate how far you’ve come.

It’s almost like green energy is the only way forward and a handful of oil barons are doing everything in their power to keep that from happening so they can get even richer at the cost of literally everything else in the world.

My response to anything over the next two weeks

It's so fucked up to have been a kid during the D&D is the devil freakout and the Tipper Gore dirty lyrics freakout and live to see the teen suicide machine get such a pass.

CDC moves to end telework for employees, including those with medical needs www.statnews.com/2025/11/21/c... via @statnews.com

When I was a little girl I had an imaginary friend. She was a young Klingon warrior. And it was okay for her to get mad about how I was treated, even when it wasn't okay for me, because Klingons are allowed to be mad at dishonorable treatment. Thinking about her today, and how she was just me.

The elephant in the room is that any effective defence against COVID and other airborne pathogens will end the careers of today's public health and IPC leaders - their only hope to beat charges of negligence is the lie that it was never possible to do better. They cannot afford a success.

The Institute of Museum & Library Services has restored all previously canceled federal grants to libraries, following a ruling by a federal judge "Restoration of these grants is a massive win for libraries of all kinds in all states."

This is just getting ridiculous. Affordable personal computing is looking to become even more challenging. RAM - for the longest time - was one of the more price relaxed categories of a PC purchase. Not anymore for the foreseeable future. I have no idea how the world keeps on this trajectory.

A few years ago, Bill Nye the science guy debated creationist Ken Ham about evolution. The last question was "what would change your mind?" Bill Nye said "Evidence." Ken Ham said "Nothing can possibly change my mind about this." I think about that a lot.

Onto year 7 😳 😷

“I don’t think there is any way to regain that trust [in science] other than have the viruses do the education, and the bacteria do the education, and then people will realize they paid way too high a cost." ~ Dr. Paul Offit

Data c/o @1goodtern.bsky.social Kaposi sarcoma in adults <45!! Hospital episodes of tuberculosis (TB) of lymph nodes in the thoracic cavity in 10-18 year-olds. These are AIDS-defining conditions. “There are no parallels between Covid and AIDS.” Suuuuuure 👌

Campbell's soup VP caught on tape trashing his own brand. Oof. www.clickondetroit.com/news/local/2...

The federal vaccine committee has voted to end the recommendation that all newborns be immunized at birth against hepatitis B. This committee has zero credibility and the process for this vote was chaotic. Please instead follow guidance from expert organizations The American Academy of Pediatrics.

If you live with someone who has long Covid or a post-viral illness & you’re doing a weekly circuit of maskless bars, restaurants & concerts, you're not "living your life." You're sacrificing theirs

New from me: I talked to CDC staffers about the new vaccines and autism page. They said things like: “The best way I can put it is it feels like we’re on a hijacked airplane.” “I think people are starting to see that we can’t fulfill our mission here.”

Pregnancy and Cøvid aren't good companions. @atranscendedman.bsky.social 🙏🏻 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

No single person, especially someone with zero expertise, should be able to just change the CDC website on a whim. The fact that federal health and science pages are no longer trustable is a catastrophe for public health and democracy.

They have fired the staff of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report and 70 Epidemic Intelligence Service officers, who are disease detectives that respond to outbreaks around the world. I cannot emphasize enough how dangerous it is to dismantle our disease surveillance infrastructure.

this is another one of those pieces of Covid info that doesn’t even need to be a *fraction* as bad as it sounds here to justify doing more about it than we are long covid could be the number five chronic illness in children and we should still be doing more to mitigate it than nothing

Once more, with feeling: THE RISING TIDE OF DEMENTIA AND OTHER NEURO DISEASES IS BEING CAUSED BY COVID INFECTIONS. The virus can attack the brain, along with every other organ and system in your body. *NO* COVID infection is mild! Mask up and clean the air you breathe!

The famous Cisco hold music made it to the Apple WWDC Keynote!

Tear gas is a chemical weapon and an abortifacient banned by the Geneva Protocol. If soldiers used it against armed combatants, they could be prosecuted for war crimes. www.scientificamerican.com/article/poli... (from 2022)

Whenever I think the world can’t get any more depressing than it already is, the news prove me wrong. This is one of the saddest things I have read lately. It breaks my heart so deeply especially because I see and interact with so many homeless people every day in LA.

Lyft driver picked me up from UNC, turned out he was a medicinal chemistry post-doc in a building near mine, until his grant got cut last month. Worked on novel antivirals.

Remember, the COVID pandemic is ongoing. Overcrowded prisoners are at very high risk of COVID, including sequelae (Long COVID) that can disable or kill them even if they seem to be fine immediately after the acute phase.

Everything we hear on or about COVID & it’s after effects in corporate media is underplayed, undercounted & underreported.

It pisses me off that any well-intentioned honest student should have to spend an iota of an atom of a second second-guessing their own writing for fear that someone wielding a divining rod is going to think they cheated.

New Covid Variant May Also Cause Heart Attacks and Strokes and Damage Organs and Immune Systems. But Yes, It’s Still Mild.

It really feels like we don’t talk enough about how much COVID has fucked up our politics, our culture, and all of us personally. It’s not surprising considering how absolutely averse this country is to confronting trauma, but sometimes it still needs to be said.

“A CDC report found that among pregnant U.S. women infected with COVID-19, about 1 in 80 deliveries was a stillbirth — the loss of a fetus anytime after 20 weeks. That’s compared with 1 in 155 among uninfected women” Pregnant women need access to Covid boosters. TW for photos of Covid placenta:

U.S. reports cases of new COVID variant NB.1.8.1 behind surge in China. The CDC's airport screening has detected the new COVID-19 variant NB.1.8.1, tied to a surge in China, in travelers arriving in California, Washington, Virginia, and the NYC area, per Ginkgo Bioworks data. archive.md/viSvU

"Witnessing large-scale systems slowly unravel in real time can be profoundly surreal and frightening. The hypernormalization framework offers a way to understand what we’re feeling and why."

This is absolutely terrible news. With the shifting regulatory climate (i.e., antivax ratfuckery), Moderna has withdrawn their application for their eagerly anticipated COVID-flu combo vaccine. This vaccine offered better protection than getting each shot separately. h/t @merz.bsky.social