Good morning… the @cenmag.bsky.social team put together this incredible package looking at next gen vaccines, antivirals and what the business case is for developing more COVID treatments.
Happy 5 year anniversary of the pandemic
cen.acs.org/pharmaceutic…— Laura Howes (@laurahowes.bsky.social) March 10, 2025 at 3:36 AM
Not exactly an upbeat topic, and yet: We could be in an even worse place than we are today, and for many months it looked like some unimaginably worse place was somewhere between inevitable and possibly almost a relief.
Will Leich, professional sportswriter (& novelist), at his Substack:
… Unofficially, I’ve always considered March 11, 2020, a date we’ll hit the fifth anniversary of this coming Tuesday, the start of the American version of the pandemic. Obviously, it had hit China and swaths of Europe, most notably Spain, before then, and there were segments of the country, specifically the Pacific Northwest, whose Covid story began earlier than the rest of the country’s. But March 11 was:
– The night that Utah Jazz forward Rudy Gobert tested positive for Covid minutes before he was supposed to take the floor for a game against the Oklahoma City Thunder and days after he famously touched every reporter’s microphone as a way to mock the NBA’s new Covid protocols. This would led to a shutdown of the NBA and, less than 24 hours, all American sports, including the cancellation of the NCAA Tournament…
– Then-President Trump addressed the nation live in the Oval Office, as he sniffled and slurred and made it vividly clear that, as the most dangerous public health threat of the last 100 years landed on American shores, the worst possible person was going to be President as it happened…
…[F]ive years later, the overarching societal takeaway from Covid these days seem to be something like embarrassment—like we all got too excited, that we overreacted, that our deepest fears early in the pandemic were replaced by a sense that all that tumult was for nothing. DWW notes how wrong this is, how the misery and death that ultimately resulted from Covid would have been considered worst-case scenarios during most of the pandemic itself…
To even bring up Covid now is to be, plainly, annoying. I guarantee you all the five-year-anniversary pieces that will run this week, including this one, will be among the least-consumed pieces by everyone who produces them. People’s eyes glaze over when you talk about Covid. People do not want to talk about it. Part of this is of course human nature; no one wants to marinate in their lowest moments. Part is also the natural course of the virus itself. There was a time in which I was terrified that anyone who had Covid was going to die; now, if I were in the middle of a conversation with you and you told me you had Covid, I probably wouldn’t even move from where I was standing…
You can make an argument that so much of the current madness is a direct result of our desire to pretend that Covid didn’t happen—to punish ourselves for changing as much as we did during Covid. The department responsible for our health and safety is run by a lunatic vaccine denialist; our long overdue clear-eyed look at systemic racism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder led not to widespread change but instead craven opportunism and then a backlash that has now been weaponized by the new administration; the silos we retreated into Covid are now the only places many of us live. That desire we all have to return to “normal,” whatever that means, has led us to willfully overlook so many things that are obviously not normal. If I’ve learned anything from Covid, it’s that once people lived through an entire planet shutting down because of a virus in the air that can kill you, it’s difficult for anyone to be shocked by much of anything after that. Including, I suspect, another public health disaster. Right now, there’s bird flu, and measles, and lord knows what else. But, you know, shrug: Whaddya gonna do, you know? …
Everyone has pivot moments in their lives, when nothing is the same after that moment than it was before. But Covid was a pivot moment that happened to everyone on earth at the exact same time. It is no wonder that we are still reeling from it. And it’s equally no wonder that we continue to collectively try to act like we aren’t. But on this anniversary, this five-year mark, it’s vital to remember. It’s less important to reflect on what it felt like on March 11, 2020, or whatever the moment that the enormity of what was happening finally hit you was. Instead, remember who you were in the months before then … and how different that person is from the one you are right now. I know we don’t want to think about it. I know we all want to move on. It’s perfectly natural. I’m still pretty sure it’s the biggest thing that has happened to the world since I we arrived on this planet, and that we’ll still be dealing with its aftermath when we leave it.
Professional doomster David Wallace-Wells, at the NYTimes — “Why can’t we remember the pandemic clearly?”:
In December, a group of the world’s leading virologists and epidemiologists gathered in Japan to contemplate the “next pandemic” — and to try to make sense of the last one. “The world I live in right now,” one of the W.H.O.’s lead Covid researchers told the assembled crowd, “everyone is acting as though this pandemic didn’t really happen.”
Frankly, though I can hardly survey the world without seeing the collateral damage, I feel the same. The pandemic was a world-historical trauma, one which “took more than 20 million lives, cost $16 trillion, kept 1.6 billion children out of school and pushed some 130 million people into poverty,” the journal Science tallied this winter. And yet just five years since it began Covid-19 has already become a vague and somewhat distant memory…
But beyond vibe shifts in politics and culture, the pandemic memory gap also raises an epistemological question: How could such obvious capital-H history become so quickly invisible in so many Americans’ understanding of the world and its recent past? And if one answer to that question is just, “It’s how we coped with mass death and the fact of our own uncomfortable vulnerability,” and another is, “The cost of getting back to normal was pretending that the pandemic was no big deal,” a third is, “The Covid experience itself was pretty complicated and pretty confusing, even for those of us trying our best to track it.”
To begin with, there were really four pandemics. They blur confusingly together in our collective memory, but each came with varying levels of threat and different kinds of policy responses. First came the emergency phase, in which few Americans actually got sick with the original variant but a large share of those who did got very sick or died. Then: the vaccine era, in which the choice to get a shot became the clearest marker of your pandemic politics and a major driver of personal risk. (This is also when the country began to move from health solidarity to something far more individualistic.) Then: the Omicron phase, marked by rising breakthrough infections, rampant spread and much lower mortality rate per infection. (Many of us told ourselves, during this time, that the disease was a diminishing threat, even though the rampant spread led to daily death tolls that approached the pre-vaccine peak.) And finally: the pandemic exit, with illness and diseases shuffling along in the background and memories of Covid dominated by recriminations…
But wait — there’s more! Craig Spenser, infectious disease specialist, at the Atlantic — “The Diseases Are Coming” [gift link]:
… For more than a decade, I have worked as a physician and public-health expert responding to infectious diseases around the world. In 2014, while treating Ebola patients in Guinea, I contracted and survived Ebola myself. I know how lethal Donald Trump’s assault on America’s outbreak preparedness could be. We are sure to regret it…
The fallout from these sweeping cuts is particularly evident when examining USAID, or what’s left of it. The agency’s tagline was “From the American people,” and perhaps the American people didn’t understand that it was also for them. Musk disparaged the agency outright—declaring it a “criminal organization.” The White House pointed to alleged wasteful spending, including funding for a “DEI musical” in Ireland (which wasn’t even funded by USAID, it turned out). In decrying the agency’s downfall, many Democrats focused more on the importance of “soft power” foreign policy than on-the-ground impact. Yet much of USAID’s budget was devoted to addressing humanitarian and health crises abroad with the implicit goal of preventing these emergencies from reaching our own shores. (Explicitly, the goal was to “advance American security and prosperity.”) Americans are safer when instability and infectious threats are effectively managed on foreign lands…
… USAID’s efforts to stop Ebola at its source are also now gone. USAID’s role in Ebola containment has long been essential. During the 2014 West Africa outbreak—during which more than 11,000 people died—USAID oversaw training of local health-care workers, the building of Ebola treatment centers, and passenger screening at the borders and airports. A decade later and just days into Trump’s second term, Uganda reported another Ebola outbreak. This time, though, the foreign-aid freeze Trump had put in place meant that USAID was unable to supply the usual resources for transporting lab specimens or implementing airport screening. The day after Musk reassured the Cabinet that Ebola prevention had been swiftly restored, the State Department canceled crucial contact tracing and surveillance efforts for Uganda’s outbreak. With USAID nowhere to be found, the WHO scaled up its own response. That’s something, for now, but America’s absence is shameful…
Now, and with startling speed, the country is turning its back on global health. In doing so, it is endangering other nations, and also itself. USAID’s account on X, once a digital chronicle of its achievements, is gone. When I search for it on my phone, I get an error message: “Something went wrong. Try again.” We must heed that warning. Musk and Trump have destroyed the shield that once protected America from the next global contagion. Deadly diseases don’t bother with borders; no wall will keep them out. If America stays the course, “Something went wrong” will become the epitaph of a great country, one that once led the world in global health preparedness. It will be deeply missed.
On The Road – TKH – Southern Sierra High Route 1 of 3
WTFGhost
Speak for yourself, moron. I don’t do that – not like that. *YOU* may speak for *you*, unless you have a squirrel in your pocket, who actually agrees with you.
Otherwise, ponder about yourself, now “us” and “we.”
Baud
People love to take things for granted until their gone.
rebelsdad
Thanks, AL. And good morning ☀️
Belafon
There’s a documentary on Max, The Day Sports Stopped, that documents that and the killing of George Floyd and the shooting of that black man getting into his minivan and how they affected sports and players. All of which is being undone by the administration.
rebelsdad
@Baud: you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone…they paved paradise and put up a parking lot
Belafon
@WTFGhost: You should probably ponder the word “collectively” a bit more in that sentence before going off the rails. Because, collectively, we definitely continue to try to act like we aren’t.
Baud
I miss keeping a distance from people.
YY_Sima Qian
I want to thank you A.L. for your dedicated coverage through the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, & now the avian flu pandemic.
Your early posts in the beginning of 2020 inspired me to delurk & start commenting here.
rebelsdad
@YY_Sima Qian: seconded, and thank you as well for all your thought-provoking comments! I learn so much from you.
Belafon
Does any language have a good word for “belonging to a group that I don’t belong in”? Like being a white male and not being those things white males are known for.
TBone
Covid changed me and it aopears that it is irrevocably. But I survived by the skin of my teeth. Going for booster jab on Thursday and also getting MMR update jab.
May teh gawds help us all survive what is coming. As Jane Fonda quoted, poet Pearl Cleage assures us that there will be an ocean of truth for us to swim in on the other side…
I wish I could be more eloquent in my anti-doom today.
Melancholy Jaques
The feeling that “I didn’t die & no one I know died, so it was all bullshit” is very widespread.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
TBone
@Belafon: tonic masculinity?
rebelsdad
@TBone: your anti-doom is appreciated, eloquent or not.
rebelsdad
@rikyrah: good morning ☀️😃
NotMax
Curiously, on the shopping trip in town yesterday traipsing through a handful of stores, about 25% of people were masked, far more than seen in recent months.
TBone
@Baud: you have encouraged my survival so many times, most of which you’ll never know…attytood is half the battle!
rebelsdad
@TBone: like gin and tonic?
TBone
@NotMax: am jealous, hubby and I are still mostly alone in that. He had to go to hospital for testing yesterday and not one mask except his in the entire facility.
TBone
@rebelsdad: ha! More like Tim Walz!
Belafon
@TBone: More general though, like being a Terran and yet not ignoring the effects covid had.
Booger
@YY_Sima Qian: To the great benefit of all of us. Thank you.
TBone
@rebelsdad: thank you. It’s a hard day here, gotta do adulting and that helps because I don’t wanna!
NotMax
@TBone
“I once tried drowning my sorrows, till I found out they could swim.”
– Peter De Vries, The Vale of Laughter
;)
TBone
@Belafon: am clueless for that but I hear you loud and clear.
TBone
@NotMax: I used to shout that out at the bar! Also have a coozy with that on it as well as one that says No Work, All Play.
ETA now dyslexic some days ugh.
suzanne
One thing I had been musing on…. The reaction to Covid became about how people see themselves, in really ugly ways. So many people wanted to think of themselves as fit and healthy, and young, and “better” than others, so opposing the vaccine became essentially a beauty standard.
I’ve also been musing a great deal about fat hatred and how it is tied to our politics. None of it is good. It affects men but women much more, it has class and race implications.
WereBear
People differ in brains, sports ability, and capacity for denial.
Perhaps as a contrast to the people in the Southern small town I grew up in, who lived in a fantasy of Jesusland and then had to pay no attention to what that was actually doing to their lives.
This horrified me as I saw people choosing careers, marrying, and having children, barely out of high school. The same thing that hadn’t worked for 99% of their parents.
Being a hardheaded realist, at the right times, really is life-changing.
There go two miscreants
@Belafon: Groucho Marxism
catclub
Like the correct usage of homonyms of ‘There’
WereBear
@suzanne: Let me say it was a masculine response to the Pandemic, imposed by osmosis onto innocent bystanders.
Pushing children back to school without masks, then to not vaccinating in Texas. That is the one that worries me, because measles has some of the worst impacts, and has already killed one child.
NotMax
@TBone
One holiday gift I received a long, long, long time ago is a small brass plaque on a wooden base suitable for hanging on a wall engraved in elegant script with the following:
Work is the curse of the drinking class.
– W. C. Fields
;)
catclub
I will assume that almost all public health messaging to get your (fill in blank) type vaccinations is funded by the Federal government. Those will stop.
Will the federal government even work on the next flu or covid vaccines? who knows?
stinger
@Melancholy Jaques:
Yes. I’m continually reminded of Y2K. “It didn’t affect me, so it was all bullshit.”
Omnes Omnibus
@WereBear: Anecdotes are not data, but the three anti-vax curious people I know are all female.
LAC
“our long overdue clear-eyed look at systemic racism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder led not to widespread change but instead craven opportunism and then a backlash”
Too sunny in the morning for this bullshit framing.
Hubby just got over his first time having COVID last week. Kicked his behind. We got a booster reminder via Safeway
Melancholy Jaques
@WereBear:
More specifically, it was a boy”s response rather than a man’s response. A rather naughty boy, if I may be so bold.
YY_Sima Qian
@rebelsdad: Thank you for the kind words. I replied to you in Comment #122 of the Monday Evening Open Threads post, summarizing the Van Jackson substack post that was behind the paywall. In case you missed it.
suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: Women buy into patriarchy and are often its police. Women who are “good at it” have interest in upholding it.
NotMax
@stinger
Quasi-topical tuneage?
;)
Betty Cracker
The first time the pandemic directly affected me was when the spring training game my sister and I had tickets for (Rays vs. Blue Jays, IIRC) got cancelled. We were so disappointed because the ballpark had announced a new craft beer station!
UncleEbeneezer
@Belafon: Race/Gender Traitor, Woke, Feminist, Liberal, DNC Shill etc. You know you aren’t playing the typical role expected of White People (especially Men) when the Nazis call you all kinds of derisive names.
Geminid .
@Melancholy Jaques: I visited a masonry supply company near Charlottesville a few weeks into the pandemic. One of their guys had died and I could tell they took Covid very seriously.
Omnes Omnibus
@suzanne: Oddly enough, two of the three are avowed feminists and are anti-vax curious due to woo-woo theories.
rebelsdad
@suzanne: fatphobia is a vicious and ugly part of our social discourse. I’m about 150 pounds overweight and my uncle loves making comments about it.
Have you listened to the podcast Maintenance Phase? It’s a great and hilarious takedown of our society’s obsession with fad diets and the toxic discourse around weight. It’s helped me feel better about my own struggles.
rebelsdad
@YY_Sima Qian: I saw it! Greatly appreciated!
UncleEbeneezer
@LAC: I mean, it’s true as far as all the companies doing performative allyship posts, DEI initiatives etc. (that they are now rolling back, using Trump threats as their excuse). Also, during the summer of George Floyd there was a whole lot of “listen-to-Black-people” statements from White People…which all famously went right out the window when Black People urged us to stop obsessing over Biden’s age and protesting Kamala.
Geminid .
According to this morning’s Politico Playbook, House Speaker Mike Johnson should be speaking to reporters now. House Republican leadership’s weekly press conference was scheduled for 10 a.m. today.
And the Orange Churl is supposed to address a Business Roundtable meeting by video at 4 p.m. this afternoon. Meanwhile, Press Secretary Leavitt is scheduled to lie to White House reporters at 1 p.m.
sentient ai from the future
one of the things i distinctly remember, during the initial period of dry-goods shortages and store closures, is calculating caloric needs per person and extrapolating that to rice-and-beans, on the assumption that the shitbird would win reelection and that it was GAME OVER, MAN. it took me three years with the kiddo to work through that first and only 50lb bag of rice i bought because it was all i could find, but that i had calculated would last just a few months.
i wasnt worried about toilet paper, because even though i was also looking for a bidet on amazon, i always make sure to get showerheads with flexible extensions.
suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: Why is that odd? We’re all infected by the patriarchy and it affects us, in ways that take our whole lives to work through.
In my experience, lots of women come to woo-woo health nonsense when they have bad experiences with doctors who don’t understand women’s health well.
sentient ai from the future
@Omnes Omnibus: “i reject the patriarchy but am so poorly informed that i can’t differentiate patriarchy from scientific credibility”
i’ve had to hold my tongue when trans folks in my orbit have started talking about astrology.
terraformer
Some of the best takes on issues of the day reside in places like Substack and (sane) social media, where “uncomfortable but true” views are more freely expressed than in any mainstream publication.
It’s a shame that the people who need to read them most (I’m assuming) rarely see them – like the passage above that “a sniffling and sneezing President was the worst possible person to be in charge at a time like that” for COVID. No editor would touch that kind of language today – and that’s a damn shame
UncleEbeneezer
I’ll never forget the day that Los Angeles went into stay-at-home mode. I was coaching in Alhambra and had a class of 15 predominantly Asian-American students. Covid had reached America and there were already cases/deaths being reported in Los Angeles. I was frantically texting my boss about ways to run class safely, making sure students wore masks and were social distancing, using sanitizer, not sharing any equipment they touched etc. Meanwhile Trump was already spewing hate speech about China and Asian people in general. I think I got the stay-at-home order text from Los Angeles county during my class, iirc. When I got home I called my conservative Dad in South Carolina to let him know I was safe. His response was “this is the biggest HOAX I’ve ever seen…” The complete and utter denial of the reality of the pandemic had already taken hold in the right-wing info-space. It was a pretty sad omen, for how things would go…and I will never get over the disappointment and rage I felt, that my own Dad cared so little about the health and safety of the immunocompromised. I’ll NEVER forgive that shit.
raven
It’s Will Leitch.
schrodingers_cat
@Omnes Omnibus: Antivax was big in the wellness community before it became a RWNJ identifier.
Scientific thinking and the ability to apply the scientific method, I have found is not common at all.
rebelsdad
@sentient ai from the future:
”I’m a Gemini! What’s your sign?”
”Notebook”
”That’s…not a real sign…?”
”None of them are 😃”
suzanne
@rebelsdad: I’m a big fan of Maintenance Phase. Have you read Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny or Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia by Kate Manne?
sentient ai from the future
@suzanne: exactly. it’s tragic, this. i bear literal, physical as well as mental scars from my own mother being a lifelong woo-advocate but i also don’t know she could have been convinced otherwise at the age she was raising me.
Old Dan and Little Ann
@Betty Cracker: I got tickets to see the Yankees play the Pirates in Pittsburgh that summer. My dad is now 81 and we had never seen a MLB game together. We have since seen a game together. We are going back to the ‘burgh opening weekend in April to see them play the Yankees. Hope it doesn’t snow!
WereBear
@Omnes Omnibus: Females are particularly susceptible to woo when medical science lets them down.
As it does.
LAC
@UncleEbeneezer: If that what the author meant, he probably should have added some words to put it in context The backlash was always there at the ready, imo. But I agree completely. They don’t listen and that is why we are where we are.
And now that HHS is trying to force more “retirements” this week, we will have less fact based voices in science as well.
RaflW
I flew home from Denver on the evening of March 3, 2020. I was used to planes being 85-100% full on those flights. The terminal wasn’t creepy-empty, but it was noticeably sparse. And the plane was like 30% full?
I went snowboarding the weekend of March 7-8 in MN by car, and my partner hosted a party at home on March 6 with like 25 of his colleagues. Dang was the whiplash to lockdown harsh.
Not that I think officials did the wrong thing – we had no vaccine and I was one of the rare people who just happened to have KN95s in my toolbox, bought years before for a sanding and painting project.
Now we’re having an economic debacle under the same guy who in many ways screwed up Covid (thank goddess he wasn’t such a freak about the vaccines back then). And the measles outbreaks are dang worrying too. Blergh!
sentient ai from the future
@rebelsdad: i can recall a particular conversation with someone promoting the idea that astrology was a traditional practice that followed natural cycles and so should be held as a sort of traditional knowledge on a par with indigenous people’s familiarity with the land.
this person was white, as you can imagine.
and it got me interested a bit in the origins of astrology, which are much more in line with court viziers, i.e. mountebanks and politicians in the royalist/monarchist phase of societal organization.
it is tied to folk practices around agriculture, which is probably where it got its credibility among leaders of pre-scientific societies, but it’s genuinely a difficult topic to study, too.
UncleEbeneezer
@sentient ai from the future: Now do Traditional Chinese Medicine…
Belafon
@terraformer: That is my biggest concern with people leaving the NYT and Washington Post. How are the people who don’t pay attention to the “news of the news” to know that the good voices are moving to obscure locations? Most of them won’t really notice that the good reporters and good commentators have moved to a bunch of different websites, and that they need to find them.
LAC
@UncleEbeneezer: And i will say that companies expanding their consumer base by recognizing that diversity in the products and in their work culture is a positive is not “craven opportunism” if handled correctly. A lot of us spend money based on our values. But sadly, a lot of companies show how tenuous their outreach is, i.e Target.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodingers_cat: One of the people I was talking about is my father’s sister who definitely got into this kind of thinking in the early ’70s. A lot of BS “Eastern” health ideas took hold. A lot of it was, I am sure, a rejection of the traditional authorities.
UncleEbeneezer
@WereBear: This is an aspect that the fantastic Netflix series Apple Cider Vinegar gets into, as well as the danger and scammery of the “wellness” world and its’ influencers. One of the characters has to deal with 1.) dismissive/arrogant oncologists and 2.) influencers urging her to do coffee enemas and juice diets and skip the chemo/surgery etc., for her stage four cancer. It’s a really well done and riveting series.
WereBear
@sentient ai from the future: I’ve found it most useful as a sort of Character Personality Building Set in my fiction writing.
With twelve signs further refined into sun, moon, and rising, with twelve houses of influence, I can make a scientist into a typical Virgo but with a contrasting, caution-to-the-winds moon sign, I have ripples in their personality that can make them more interesting, or even act differently than expected at a crisis point.
Great way to build the tree and hang things on it.
schrodingers_cat
@sentient ai from the future: Its not that hard. Making an astrological chart involves a fair bit of geometrical calculations. Maybe that’s what people find difficult. But there are programs that will do that for you if you have your birth time and location.
UncleEbeneezer
@LAC: Absolutely. But it was pretty obvious that many of them were just jumping on the trend and would abandon ship the first chance they got. Many already were doing so, even before Trump got reelected. As my fave Black comedy podcaster warned “Black People, collect your checks now because we know this white guilt is gonna pass quick” lol. Sadly he was correct. Smart companies like Disney, get it and will make boatloads by having greater representation that appeals to more diverse audiences. But a lot of companies hearts really aren’t in it for the long haul. Which is insane to me, since they are leaving $ on the table.
rebelsdad
@suzanne: no, I haven’t. But I just added them to my list!
Geminid .
I saw a report by Viginia Mercury reporter Markus Schmidt on polling in Virginia’s governor race. A Roanoke College poll released February 25 showed Abigail Spanberger leading probable* Republican nominee Windome Earl-Sears 39% to 24%. An early Roanoke poll from last September showed the two women tied at 39%.
* Last I saw, Lt. Governor Sears has two rivals in the June Republican primary. So far former U.S. Rep. Spanberger has no major candidates competing with her in the Democratic primary.
schrodingers_cat
@Omnes Omnibus: OMG the worst among these folks are people who insist that physics is mystical. There was a cottage industry of them in the 90s and 00s.
BTW there is nothing “eastern” about it. That’s orientalism. West==scientific and East==Mystic and its lazy. But I know what you mean.
As and aside, I remember reading a rant written by metallurgist Varahamihira from 500s who made fun of Brahmins who took advantage of people who believed that eclipses are caused by evil spirits, by selling them false remedies. He could have been on Balloon Juice, it was that snarky.
Matt McIrvin
@UncleEbeneezer: I bet that when we see the stuff Disney puts out a couple of years from now, so that the project was developed under Second Trumpism, it’ll be lily-white. They’re a weathervane. During the first Trump era they sensed they could make money implicitly playing to the “resistance”, but now they probably think it’s more hassle than it’s worth.
suzanne
@WereBear:
I’m not sure women are more susceptible to quackery — for example, Ross Douthat wrote a book about his illness and how he was resorting to woo-woo. But a lot of people get turned to it when allopathic medicine lets them down in some way. And there is a great deal of research about female bodies being different in every system, in ways that are still poorly understood. For example, rates of autoimmune disease are higher in women than in men, and it is not understood why that is, and many of those diseases still take years to diagnose and aren’t always possible to treat.
Anecdotally, I know plenty of men who are into woo-woo shit. Joe Rogan pushes that to thousands of men.
sentient ai from the future
@UncleEbeneezer: which one, the one that is actually traditional, or the one formalized/fabricated out of whole cloth by Mao?
Matt McIrvin
@sentient ai from the future: It was also the main early impetus for legit astronomy, which until the Enlightenment or so was really not separate from astrology. You used tracking of the stars, sun and Moon for calendar-keeping which was intimately tied to managing agriculture and seasonal phenomena, so it stood to reason that all these other influences of the stars were real things too. So it wasn’t so much “folk” as very mainstream and power-connected, and it was only after the science of astronomy split off from it that it became this exclusively populist thing.
sentient ai from the future
@WereBear: yes, but you’re talking about archetypes in terms of writng fiction, whereas astrology people are talking about classifying real world events and people based on things that are completely beyond anyone’s control.
neither has anything remotely to do with scientific method
LAC
@UncleEbeneezer: They are, aren’t they? And so tone deaf – i remember Target running “look at the black people shaking their groove thing” ads during black history month (still happening and you are welcome, America) as if we didn’t see what happened.
BTW, that Apple cider vinegar show was excellent. Been following that real life story for a while and I recommend you watch the 60 mins Australia interview on YouTube. What a lying little cow.
sentient ai from the future
@Matt McIrvin: yes! the prescientific becomes the scientific, but only after throwing massive amounts of thought and physical resources at it.
i’m interested in the way in which that happened (and it happened differently in western societies versus, say, india, even thought the broad strokes are pretty similar) but the specifics of the folklore that preceded those events, i am very much not interested in having any influence over my life.
NotMax
@WereBear
See: Steve Jobs, Michael Landon, et al.
WereBear
@sentient ai from the future: The end goal is something that repeatedly works. Science is everywhere :)
Matt McIrvin
@sentient ai from the future: A while back I went down this rabbit hole of trying to figure out why Cassini, the astronomer, thought planetary orbits were not Keplerian ellipses but “Cassini ovals” (a shape where the product, not the sum, of focal distances is a constant–for ovals that are almost circular it’s not too different from an ellipse, but it diverges radically for more extreme cases). I think it’s because he’d observed some of the deviations from an exact ellipse in the orbit of Mars caused by higher-order perturbations, and was trying to deal with those while still using some exactly defined curve.
Leibniz was deeply interested in this probably as part of his ongoing beef with Isaac Newton, and at one point he was quizzing some well-connected French scientist about it in correspondence. And the other guy was detailing the opinions of various people (Cassini included), and noted that one of them seemed not to think planetary orbits weren’t exactly described by any ideal shape at all… and noted that, really, this is more what you’d expect from a universe governed by physics, which is messy and involved, “however inconvenient for astronomers”.
I think that’s interesting–it’s where you can really see a very modern attitude creeping in, that the planets aren’t going to follow some Platonic form but are going to tug on each other with physical influences that don’t yield to exact solution, because fundamentally the rules aren’t different up there from down here. Newton already had the basic idea obviously, but it was an attitude that was a long time coming.
WTFGhost
@Belafon: Do not ever tell a gimp what he has, or hasn’t, pondered, over a long life.
If you want to speak “collective we” let me mention that “we aren’t reeling about Covid” nor acting, as if we are not. That’s a lazy ass construction, and “ass” can modify either “lazy” or “construction.” Or both.
“We” always makes me feel like it should be spelled WHEEEE, unless you’re a bunch of kids in an overcoat trying to sneak into the movie theater. I always remember that my perspective is not the same as everyone’s – I want other authors to remember that too.
We gimps, and those who’ve otherwise had to learn toughness, we’re not pretending we’re not reeling from Covid – it’s over for us. We got done with it. You could too, column author, @Belafon, and every other member of the collective “we,” except children too young to have learned to manage their emotions.
My apologies to the author and reader if either feels that makes ordinary people look weak, but we don’t teach emotional management in this country, and most people don’t have to deal with hard shocks.
Why are ‘we’ still responding to Covid-19 in strange ways? Because you – for a lot of different “you” values – haven’t actually tried to come to grips with it. Me, I knew Republicans wanted people like me to die in large numbers, so it was only a shock insofar as America has a policy of never criminalizing policy, even when it harms and kills people with gross negligence or actual malice.
So, are you still reeling from the shock that Republicans would let you die, without trying to save you? Have you internalized and understood it? Does it feel like an acceptable statement to carry forth, if true? Does it only occasionally make you angry, so, it’s not like it’s ruining your blood pressure? That’s emotional resilience, no reeling necessary.
That’s the big lesson from Covid-19. When life was in danger, Republicans retreated, and then came back to ATTACK and increase the deaths. You have my permission to be reeling about that five years later, if you felt you needed it – murderous warfare *is* shocking. But I’m over it. Yes, we have a murderous, cretinous thug in the White House – just like George W, but W only murdered Iraqis. So, Trump murdered a bunch of elderly or sickly people, big deal, no one wanted to look at *their* deaths either.
We could have beaten Covid-19, without the hate, but, the hate was too precious to too many in this country, so they held on to it for five full years, all to punish the people who wanted to save lives and work with love.
Haven’t internalized that? Haven’t understood it? Haven’t realized that the worst evil is where you simply don’t look far enough, and hard enough, to *care*? Then maybe “you” should be reeling, and maybe even pretending you’re not.
But not me, nor anyone else who looks with clear eyes. We could have treated it as a natural disaster, and instead, the Republicans wanted to kill us to win an election. Okay, I get that, I understand that, Republicans don’t care if we die. Why are “we” reeling from that? It’s been obvious for five effing years!
WereBear
@WereBear: My point is that females are the most likely to be let down, as we have been under-studied for most of the Western study of medicine.
We are more likely to go to the doctor with symptoms in the early stage, and thus harder to diagnose. While men drag themselves in at a stage when a diagnosis could announce itself in neon.
This seems to unconsciously lead to taking it more seriously in males. I’m reminded of a woman recommended to an MS specialist, who gave her multiple brochures, told her to pick a drug, and dismissed her to make her own medical decisions.
When it turned out to be a B-12 deficiency, she now can’t get that diagnosis off her medical history.
I hear so many stories like this, and while men suffer too, there seem to be fewer of them.
bluefoot
Aside from the personal losses and extreme isolation during COVID, the thing that I grieve the most was that for a short while it seemed like people pulled together, that we could recognize that the system could be changed to better support one another. And then it seemed to me that capital and people doubled down on IGMFY, especially after conventional wisdom became that COVID disproportionately affected people of color and blue cities. Money and white supremacy had to have their way. I had some hope with the Biden presidency – he was trying to make things better for more people, but it seems we can’t have that.
sentient ai from the future
@Matt McIrvin: the meta-conflict in approaches between overfitting your curve and acknowledging there is a distinction between “signal” and “noise”
thanks for the historical footnote there.
WTFGhost
@Belafon: I looked for one when trying to discuss Christianity.
@suzanne: It’s not just hatred – it’s also indifference. If you’re not indifferent to people, hate doesn’t hook on to you the same way. The thing about right wing hate radio, is, they have to keep going to keep the adrenaline flowing, so, soon, they’re preaching all-out war, and expecting there to be bodies. If you want to keep listening, you have to armor yourself with indifference, and then the hate starts to cling.
You can still push the hate away, but if all of your friends love it, will you? Well, lots of folks won’t.
@catclub: Yes. There will still be big bucks for vaccinations. Whether there is good uptake, that’s a good question. But the rest of the world will still want vaccines.
@Melancholy Jaques: I would just strike the word “masculine” entirely. I could imagine a masculine, muscular response, but it would have started with the administration quietly building up production capacity for masks, and testing, etc.. It really would have been “going to war against an invisible enemy.”
@rebelsdad: Technically, astrological “signs” are real – what we’d expect is that they should be meaningless. I’m a virgo; does that make me different from someone else born in a different time of the year? Probably not. Keep in mind, though: astrology can also be like playing the lottery. You know you won’t win, but it’s fun to muck around with thinking about it.
Matt McIrvin
@bluefoot: I think the turning point with the pandemic was when Trump sensed he could divide people by making refusal to wear masks a sign of loyalty to him. Because a mask is right there on your face. And dividing people and making them fight is always the thing he instinctively goes for.
WTFGhost
@WereBear:
I now have my supply of yellow cards/red cards for when my brain won’t let me speak coherently… but my need for them has greatly reduced my patience with bad doctors.
And I’ve got a full load of anger at every doctor who doesn’t realize that they have to be the adult in the room. Your patient doesn’t feel listened to? Then LISTEN. Your patient feels scolded and harassed? Back off, and, LISTEN. Hell, LISTEN and THINK, and understand basic emotional responses is mostly all you need… along with an understand that not everyone is like you.
Effing MS, WITHOUT checking B12. What kind of effing moron does that? B12 deficiency, or pernicious anemia, are both obvious candidates.
schrodingers_cat
COVID also marks an anniversary of me getting back to playing with art supplies and rediscovering my artistic side. Something that has given me a lot of joy amidst all the crazy.
WTFGhost
@schrodingers_cat: Now that’s a good way to think about the anniversary (in my humble opinion) – a time when something changed, so you made positive changes.
(Yeah, I’m not always grumpy and talking about Republicans wanting us dead. It’s just at the top of my mind, as I fight for disability.)
VFX Lurker
Anecdotal: in 2020, a friend and his wife gawked at a panic buyer loading up his truck with multiple 50 lb bags of rice. He noted that it took his household six months to go through one 20 lb bag, so he had no idea how the panic buyer would manage.
I think his wife’s parents lived with them even back then, so those stats were likely for a four person household.
The absolute King of 2020 panic buyers remains that guy who accidentally ordered a “truck filled with rice” delivered to his home.
VFX Lurker
I love the art you share on here. Thank you for sharing that joy.
schrodingers_cat
@VFX Lurker: Thanks. Would there be an interest in a community where we can share what we are working on. Ask for suggestions etc.
Elizabelle
Need to catch up on the thread, but I think the 2016 Electoral College win by Trump — and his and Cambridge Analytica getting scott away with it — was a bigger and more long lasting catastrophe than Covid.
Not to dismiss the millions of deaths, and those suffering its aftereffects.
wenchacha
@rebelsdad: That your uncle has made that sort of remark more than once is horrific. I’m sorry if it stays in your head the way it would in mine.
I catch the talks from Jefferson Fisher on youtube. A lawyer, he has a refreshing way of sharing how to deal with nasty people and their noxious comments, in a mature and confident manner. Wish I had known his stuff as a young person, but there’s no time like the present.
Melancholy Jaques
@Geminid .:
This comment, cut & pasted from an investment websitem is a very common view:
When I point out that it was a worldwide pandemic, that China basically shut down, that hospitals were overwhelmed all over Europe, etc., etc., etc.,I just get blank stares
Sheldon
Th ank you, Anne. I always love your posts.
sheldon
Emily B.
An Atlantic writer spoke to the father of the six-year-old who died of measles in Texas. Here’s a gift link.
From the story: He told me that he considers getting measles a normal part of life, noting that his parents and grandparents had it. “Everybody has it,” he told me. “It’s not so new for us.” He’d also heard that getting measles might strengthen your immune system against other diseases, a view Kennedy has promoted in the past. But perhaps most of all, Peter worried about what the vaccine might do to his children. “The vaccination has stuff we don’t trust,” he said. “We don’t like the vaccinations, what they have these days. We heard too much, and we saw too much.”….
…. The death of his daughter, Peter told me, was God’s will. God created measles. God allowed the disease to take his daughter’s life. “Everybody has to die,” he said. Peter’s eyes closed, and he struggled to continue talking. “It’s very hard, very hard,” he said at last. “It’s a big hole.”
[It is NOT true that measles strengthens the immune system—it has the opposite effect.]
steve g
My two fond memories of March 2020 were 1) having quit smoking on Jan 1, 2020, having more than one moment of thinking “my god what have I done”, and 2) the online videos of people showing you how to spray all your food when you got home from grocery shopping. “Is this a fomite?”
TBone
@NotMax: so glad I came back to see MY HERO!