Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Keep the Immigrants and deport the fascists!

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

The willow is too close to the house.

Second rate reporter says what?

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Anne Laurie is a fucking hero in so many ways. ~ Betty Cracker

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Those who are easily outraged are easily manipulated.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

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Plagues & Pandemics Update – December 10, 2025

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The most dangerous

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— Eric Topol (@erictopol.bsky.social) December 2, 2025 at 4:38 PM

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UK: NHS nurse May Parsons, who gave the world’s first COVID shot 5 years ago, is urging people not to forget how life saving vaccines are. With uptake for COVID and flu falling and the UK facing a severe flu season, she warns too many regret declining vaccines when it’s too late.
archive.md/DUM3H

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— Denis – The COVID Info Guy (@thecovidinfoguy.bsky.social) December 8, 2025 at 2:47 AM

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Fewer people are being vaccinated against respiratory diseases
by @LizSzabo
Just 34% of US adults have gotten a flu shot, 25% have had a COVID vaccine, 8% have received the pneumococcal vaccine, and 6% have gotten RSV vax
www.cidrap.umn.edu/a…
Photo: Heather Hazzan, Self

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— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) December 5, 2025 at 7:46 AM

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1. #Flu activity is picking up in the US. A 🧵
5 jurisdictions reported high levels of flu activity to #CDC in the week ending 11/29, the week including Thanksgiving. It's conceivable that numbers could jump in the next few weeks, both because of holiday travel & reporting delays due to the holidays

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— Helen Branswell 🇨🇦 (@helenbranswell.bsky.social) December 5, 2025 at 3:33 PM

2. The percentage of outpatient medical visits for #flu was 2.9% in the week ending 11/29 — just under the 3.1% that would is considered the point at which flu season is underway. (I added the broken black line.)
A piece of good news: No pediatric flu deaths have been reported yet this season.

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— Helen Branswell 🇨🇦 (@helenbranswell.bsky.social) December 5, 2025 at 3:33 PM

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Open Thread: Another Political Covid Tragedy

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The Married Scientists Torn Apart by a Covid Bioweapon Theory www.nytimes.com/2025/12/07/u…

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— scottpadgett1.bsky.social (@scottpadgett1.bsky.social) December 7, 2025 at 4:51 PM

This is not about the biology of the pandemic, it’s about the ends to which more than one government used the pandemic for social manipulation. And, not to excuse the PRC for its behavior, but as an American I blame Steve Bannon and all the other Trump crime cronies for what this poor woman and her family are going through. Per the NYTimes, “The Married Scientists Torn Apart by a Covid Bioweapon Theory” [gift link]:

One morning in April 2020, Ranawaka Perera cooked fried eggs and tomatoes for his wife, Li-Meng Yan. When she said she wasn’t hungry, he pressed her to eat anyway. Lately, Dr. Yan had been so anxious that at times she felt she could barely breathe, and Dr. Perera was worried about her health.

Everyone they knew was stressed in early 2020. The couple both worked at a prestigious lab at the University of Hong Kong, where they researched viruses, including an alarming new coronavirus that was spreading around the globe.

But Dr. Yan was convinced that the prevailing theory that Covid-19 had emerged from a live-animal market in the city of Wuhan was false, and that the truth was much darker. She believed the Chinese government had purposefully grown the virus in a lab and released it to set off a deadly pandemic.

Dr. Perera, an experienced virologist, didn’t rule out the possibility of a lab accident. But that would have been far different from a deliberate release, and he told Dr. Yan, who was relatively new to their field, that it was too soon to know where the virus had come from, if they ever would. He resolved to spend less time at the lab so he could care for his wife. After breakfast, he told her, he had planned a journey to a secluded beach. Dr. Yan loved the sea.

His attempts to calm her failed. A few days later, Dr. Perera returned from work to find that his wife had fled their home. She left no clues to where she had gone, but there was a cryptic note scribbled on their chalkboard that referenced their pet nicknames for each other…

Soon Dr. Perera would learn that Dr. Yan had for some time been in contact with powerful allies of the Trump administration, people who had their own incentives for blaming the pandemic on China.

Her plane ticket to the United States had been paid for by a foundation tied to Mr. Trump’s former strategist, Steve Bannon, and the exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui. They had placed her in a series of “safe houses” once she arrived and had arranged for her to meet some of the president’s top advisers.

Later that summer, he watched in shock as Dr. Yan became a talking head on the MAGA media circuit in the United States, with repeated appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News TV show promoting her origin theories.

“The whole arc of the story and the counternarrative that we put out about Covid, a lot of it was because of Dr. Yan,” Mr. Bannon said in a recent interview. “She became a media star.”

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Open Thread: Another Political Covid TragedyPost + Comments (38)

TGIFriday Morning Open Thread: Remember the ACA?…

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NEW: Democrats will force a Senate vote on a 3-year extension of Affordable Care Act funds
Per Schumer, every Dem will vote YES.
It needs 60. Won't happen. Most Republicans want these Covid-era funds gone.
It'll becomes a 2026 issue when premiums soar.
www.nbcnews.com/politics/con…

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— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur.bsky.social) December 4, 2025 at 11:13 AM

🚨 Sen. Angus King, who negotiated the deal to end the shutdown, tells me he no longer sees a path to extend ACA funds, citing GOP demands for tougher abortion limits. “The Republicans have made Hyde a red line,” King said. “And that’s not gonna work.” www.nbcnews.com/politics/con…

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— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur.bsky.social) December 4, 2025 at 3:51 PM

Per the Washington Post, “Senate Democrats set up last-ditch vote to extend Obamacare subsidies”:

The Senate is set to vote next week on extending Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies for three years in a last-ditch effort to preserve them before they expire at the end of the year — but the plan is all but certain to fail…

The vote is the culmination of Democrats’ month-long campaign to extend the subsidies, which helped trigger the longest federal government shutdown in history. But it has almost no chance of winning enough Republican support to pass the Senate — and even if it passed, it’s unclear whether House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) would bring it up for a vote or if President Donald Trump would sign it….

Thune promised last month to hold a vote on a bill of Democrats’ choice to extend the subsidies by next week as part of a deal to end the shutdown. Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire) and Angus King (I-Maine), who played crucial roles in negotiating the bill, expressed optimism that they could negotiate a compromise to extend the subsidies that could win enough GOP backing to pass.

But those talks never went anywhere.

“They couldn’t put pen to paper,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vermont) told reporters, referring to Republicans. “They couldn’t propose something that was concrete, where they could say, ‘We’ve got four votes or five votes or six votes.’”…

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TGIFriday Morning Open Thread: Remember the ACA?…Post + Comments (196)

Longer Healthcare / Plague Reads: A More Dangerous World

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The power trip
Doughnuts and Bullets. The agony and absurdity of working for RFK Jr. #RFKjr
nymag.com/intelligence…
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— 𝗽𝗵𝗼𝘁𝗼𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗱 (@photoframd.bsky.social) December 2, 2025 at 11:03 AM

Kerry Howley, at NYMag, on “The agony and absurdity of working for RFK Jr.” This deserves to be read in full, but here’s the closing paragraphs:

… When the Epidemiologist went to work in September, she walked by windows covered in brown paper to mask bullet holes. To use the bathroom she walked by an X scrawled in red marker on the white wall; that was how the cops had let one another know they’d cleared the room. The Epidemiologist had meetings on her calendar that wouldn’t happen because the people they were with had been fired, but she could not remove the meetings from the calendar because the person who had put them there was no longer employed. She was volunteering at a dog shelter to deal with anxiety from the shooting.

In September, there were reports of C. auris in Kansas, but the Agency’s contract with the C. auris expert had expired. There was an outbreak of botulism in infant formula, and in another era the Agency’s scientists would have been on television issuing warnings, but they were not allowed to interact directly with the media. There was an HIV outbreak in Maine, and the state asked for a team, but no team was sent. Staff were ordered to change all references of mpox to monkeypox, and no one could come up with any real justification for this beyond forcing them to do something they considered racist.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” a top administration official said in a speech a few years ago. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

In October, some 1,300 more people were terminated, but then around 700 were told their termination had been a coding error and invited back to work. It’s like being in an emotionally abusive relationship, the Spreadsheet Queen told her friends. First they tell you you’re worthless. And then they start harassing you about little things, like with the five bullet points. And now you can’t communicate out. And you can’t work. And then you’re shot at, which seems like the height of it, but it’s not. And then he breaks up with you but realizes actually he wants you back.

Measles flourished in Utah and New Mexico, and scientists continued to gain new knowledge about a disease with us since at least the 12th century. Among the most recent discoveries is this: The measles virus, alone among known pathogens, results in “immunologic amnesia,” wiping away as with a memory the host’s hard-won ability to fight other diseases — flu, COVID, strep, anything. Measles dismantles in a few weeks what has been built over a lifetime of vaccination and exposure. What has been learned in the past will not carry forward into the future. When the old threats reassert themselves, the ailing body will have to start from scratch.

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RFK Jr. wants to delay the hepatitis B vaccine. Here’s what parents need to know.
Working out of a tribal-owned hospital in Anchorage, Alaska, liver specialist Brian McMahon has spent decades treating the long shadow of hepatitis B. Before a vaccine became available in the 1980s, he saw the virus…
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— articleweblog.bsky.social (@articleweblog.bsky.social) December 2, 2025 at 12:54 PM

KFF Health News:

Working out of a tribal-owned hospital in Anchorage, Alaska, liver specialist Brian McMahon has spent decades treating the long shadow of hepatitis B. Before a vaccine became available in the 1980s, he saw the virus claim young lives in western Alaskan communities with stunning speed.

One of his patients was 17 years old when he first examined her for stomach pain. McMahon discovered she had developed liver cancer caused by hepatitis B, just weeks before she was set to graduate from high school as valedictorian. She died before the ceremony…

The hepatitis B virus is transmitted through blood and bodily fluids, even in microscopic amounts, and the virus can survive on surfaces for a week. Like many of his patients, McMahon said, both children contracted hepatitis B at birth or in early childhood.

That outcome is now preventable. A birth dose of the vaccine, recommended for newborns since 1991, is up to 90% effective in preventing infection from the mother if given in the first 24 hours of life. If babies receive all three doses, 98% of them have immunity from the incurable virus, with the protection lasting at least 30 years…

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Plagues & Pandemics Update – December 3, 2025

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Newsday.com/matt

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— Matt Davies (@mattdaviescartoon.bsky.social) November 25, 2025 at 4:46 PM

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6 years today the first COVID case was identified in a man in Wuhan marking the beginning of a global pandemic that changed the world. We are way less prepared today to face another pandemic than we were back then. This fact makes me sad.

— BK. Titanji (@boghuma.bsky.social) November 30, 2025 at 5:52 PM

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US Weekly COVID update: Dec 1, 2025
🔸1 in 103 Actively Infectious
🔸477,000 New Daily Infections
🔸3,020,000 Infections In The Past Week
🔸224,000,000 Infections in 2025
🔸151,000 to 600,000 Weekly Long COVID Cases
🔸900 to 1,400 Weekly Deaths
Source: pmc19.com/data/

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— Denis – The COVID Info Guy (@thecovidinfoguy.bsky.social) December 3, 2025 at 1:54 AM

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1. #CDC posted FluView for week 47 today; that's the week ending Nov. 22. We'll see in the next couple of weeks what Thanksgiving travel & gatherings did to amp up transmission of #flu in the US. As of just before Thanksgiving, activity was mainly low, though starting to pick up. See LA & CO.

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— Helen Branswell 🇨🇦 (@helenbranswell.bsky.social) December 1, 2025 at 6:54 PM

2. The UK, Japan, Hong Kong experienced very early starts to their #flu seasons due to the new #H3N2 variant, subclade K. But the US season doesn't seem unusually early; on par with the last couple of years. (I added the black bar here; when we're above it, we're officially in flu season)

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— Helen Branswell 🇨🇦 (@helenbranswell.bsky.social) December 1, 2025 at 6:54 PM

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A reminder that I’ve archived every public-facing web page from the CDC website prior to the Trump Regime purging data back in late January:
acasignups.net/cdc-website

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— Charles GetCovered-ba ?? (@charlesgaba.com) November 20, 2025 at 12:13 AM

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Plagues & Pandemics Update – December 3, 2025Post + Comments (20)

Open Thread: World Aids Day

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Today is World AIDS Day, a day that reminds me of the decades-long fight for dignity, science, and compassion. We’ve come so far because activists, researchers, and communities refused to be ignored.

— George Takei (@georgetakei.bsky.social) December 1, 2025 at 11:56 AM

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fuck you
the memories of a generation lost because of Reagan's homophobia will not be erased
i think we should do something in DC that would make david wojnarowicz proud tbh

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— Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (@theradr.bsky.social) November 26, 2025 at 2:27 PM


NYTimes gift link
David Wojnarowicz

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"The US government will not be commemorating World AIDS day this year".
Silence = Death
There are 1.1 million people living with HIV in the United States, 40 million globally

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— BK. Titanji (@boghuma.bsky.social) November 25, 2025 at 3:09 PM

"The official instruction US agencies and country-based programs received in a recent email."
substack.com/inbox/post/1…

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— BK. Titanji (@boghuma.bsky.social) November 25, 2025 at 3:12 PM

Choosing silence on #WorldAIDSDay doesn’t make the HIV epidemic disappear. It erases the 1.1 million people living w HIV in the U.S., the thousands we’ve lost over 44 years, and the enormous efforts of communities, clinicians, researchers, and advocates who have carried this response on their backs.

— BK. Titanji (@boghuma.bsky.social) November 25, 2025 at 3:45 PM

It also dismisses the U.S. government’s own powerful legacy in the global fight programs like #PEPFAR and #USAID, which have saved millions of lives and remain pillars of global health.

— BK. Titanji (@boghuma.bsky.social) November 25, 2025 at 3:45 PM

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Trump and his administration won’t stand with people living with HIV/AIDS on World AIDS Day, but Democrats will.
Today, we remember all those we’ve lost, and recommit ourselves to the fight of eliminating HIV/AIDS worldwide.

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— Ken Martin (@kenmartin.bsky.social) December 1, 2025 at 1:42 PM

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This time last year, I was on the South Lawn of the White House helping to lay out the AIDS Memorial Quilt.
This year the White House did nothing and the State Department instructed empoyees and grant recipients to “refrain from publicly promoting World Aids Day through any communication channels”

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— Kai Kupferschmidt (@kakape.bsky.social) December 1, 2025 at 12:48 PM

Open Thread: World Aids DayPost + Comments (145)

Pandemic & Plagues Update – November 26, 2025

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Over many interviews, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Michael Scherer about how he plans to remake America’s public-health system. Can he lead the scientific establishment he’s spent much of his life crusading against?
Read more in our new cover story: theatln.tc/q9hXxlbM

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— The Atlantic (@theatlantic.com) November 24, 2025 at 7:00 AM

RFK Jr described by those who know him best:
"A liar and a terrible human being"
"Messianic self-regard"
"Sadly off his rocker"
"A predator addicted to attention and power"
"Sickening and destructive"
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202…

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— Ferric Fang, MD (@fangferric.bsky.social) November 23, 2025 at 9:37 PM

Gift link: Why Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So Convinced He’s Right?

It’s a good story, if you can stomach it. Scherer paints Bobby Jr. as an abuser of substances, people, and ‘science’ — a completely self-centered predator and would-be ‘hero’, throwing up a non-stop barrage of words and ‘logic’ to insist that every broken promise and failed enterprise makes him the real victim.

… What if you are wrong about vaccines? I asked. Six former surgeons general, most vaccine experts, and almost the entire scientific establishment believes he is. What if, over time, the evidence shows that his actions lowered vaccination rates with no reduction in chronic diseases, but with an increase in suffering and death from viruses and bacteria? How would he respond?

“I mean, we would listen,” Kennedy said. It was the answer I wanted to hear. But then he listed, once again, the reasons he would not be wrong: He spoke about the chronic diseases that appear as potential adverse reactions on the manufacturers’ label for vaccines; the evidence that death rates from the diseases that vaccines inoculate against were already declining before the vaccines materialized; and America’s poor policy decisions and high mortality rates during the COVID years. “You know, we have all kinds of interventions,” he said. “Good health does not just come in a syringe.” The trial lawyer was still laboring to connect the dots that led to his preferred verdict, the orphaned child of American royalty, back from hell, still fighting to fulfill his birthright.

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The U.S. flu season is starting slowly, and it's not clear if it will be as bad as last winter's.

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— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) November 22, 2025 at 12:30 AM

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Mutations in #H3N2 #flu viruses have some experts worried we're facing a second bad #influenza season. The new variant, subclade K, may be able to escape antibodies generated by previous infections or this year's flu shot. But some experts are hedging their bets. www.statnews.com/2025/11/20/f…

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— Helen Branswell 🇨🇦 (@helenbranswell.bsky.social) November 20, 2025 at 8:44 AM

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US Weekly COVID update: Nov 24, 2025
🔸1 in 116 Actively Infectious
🔸422,000 New Daily Infections
🔸2,650,000 Infections In The Past Week
🔸224,000,000 Infections in 2025
🔸133,000 to 530,000 Weekly Long COVID Cases
🔸700 to 1,200 Weekly Deaths
Source: pmc19.com/data/

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— Denis – The COVID Info Guy (@thecovidinfoguy.bsky.social) November 23, 2025 at 6:34 PM

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Pandemic & Plagues Update – November 26, 2025Post + Comments (24)