Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

She burned that motherfucker down, and I am so here for it. Thank you, Caroline Kennedy.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

He really is that stupid.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

We still have time to mess this up!

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

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

Our messy unity will be our strength.

Text STOP to opt out of updates on war plans.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

They punch you in the face and then start crying because their fist hurts.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

You are here: Home / Archives for Healthcare / COVID-19
“COVID-19 is a novel disease for which treatment protocols are evolving and remain imperfect. With the internet’s eternal tropism towards bullshit, there will be plenty of false or misleading claims about ways of preventing, enduring or “curing” COVID-19 infections. Please don’t amplify them here. If you do have knowledge or experience you feel is of interest to the jackaltariat, please make sure you make it clear where that information comes from: sources, expertise, and so on.  It’s easy to get stuff wrong in a crisis and mistakes can create real harm. So be careful out there…and in here.”

Pandemic / Epidemics Update, June 4, 2025

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FDA approves Moderna's new COVID-19 vaccine
The company's "next-generation" COVID-19 vaccine, mNexspike, was approved for adults 65 and older and younger people at risk of severe disease.
www.cidrap.umn.edu/c…

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— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) June 2, 2025 at 4:26 PM

#FDA has approved #Moderna's next-generation #Covid shot, with the same use restrictions it imposed on Novavax's vaccine earlier this month.
www.statnews.com/2025/05/31/m…

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— Helen Branswell 🇨🇦 (@helenbranswell.bsky.social) May 31, 2025 at 9:43 AM

Exclusive: Pediatric infectious disease expert Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos of the US CDC resigned as co-leader of a working group that advises outside experts on COVID vaccines and is leaving the agency, two sources familiar with the move told Reuters reut.rs/4ksJLZt

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— Reuters (@reuters.com) June 3, 2025 at 5:29 PM

US Weekly COVID update: June 2, 2025
🔸1 in 211 People Currently Infected
🔸227,000 New Daily Infections
🔸1,589,000 New Weekly Infections
🔸79,000 to 318,000 Weekly Long COVID Cases
🔸600 to 900 Weekly Excess Deaths
Source: pmc19.com/data/

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— Denis – The COVID Info Guy (@thecovidinfoguy.bsky.social) June 3, 2025 at 2:42 AM

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Pandemic / Epidemics Update, June 4, 2025Post + Comments (31)

Pandemic / Epidemic Updates, May 28 2025

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The CDC is pulling its Covid-19 vaccine recommendation for healthy children and pregnant women, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced.

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— Politico (@politico.com) May 27, 2025 at 2:13 PM


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A reminder that CDC's COVID-19 vaccine recommendations are directly tied to:
– requirements for what health insurance is required to cover with no out-of-pocket costs
– liability protections expanding access to COVID shots in places like pharmacies
www.cbsnews.com/news/rfk-jr-…

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— Alexander Tin (@alexander-a-tin.bsky.social) May 27, 2025 at 3:16 PM


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By changing CDC guidelines on who can get the COVID vaccine
It will likely not be covered by insurance and Medicare/Medicaid
So if people want it, they’re going to have to pay for it
Meaning that those who can’t afford it are out of luck

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— Adam Cohen (@axidentaliberal.bsky.social) May 27, 2025 at 3:19 PM


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Pandemic / Epidemic Updates, May 28 2025Post + Comments (136)

Final Reminder: If You Want That Novavax Booster…

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I just left a comment.
If you are concerned that RFK Jr.'s FDA chief Marty Makary is limiting the Novavax COVID booster to those over 65 or with underlying conditions, and may do the same for Pfizer/Moderna as well, consider leaving a comment as well.

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— Carl T. Bergstrom (@carlbergstrom.com) May 21, 2025 at 12:05 AM


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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

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— Carl T. Bergstrom (@carlbergstrom.com) May 22, 2025 at 2:46 AM


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I can guaranfuckingtee that Moderna has market research that proves this is a lie

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— Chris Labarthe (@chrislabarthe.bsky.social) May 22, 2025 at 11:10 PM


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I've never seen it so well put before.

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— Mary Pezzulo (@marypezzulo.bsky.social) May 22, 2025 at 8:02 PM


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GOP attacks on public health are attacks on public *life.* It is becoming increasingly risky to participate in big events and enter public spaces
We’re already seeing these headlines about measles exposures at airports. We’ll see thee from sporting events, graduations, 4th of July parades, etc.

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— Dr. Katherine Haenschen (@drkath.bsky.social) May 22, 2025 at 9:38 AM

Final Reminder: If You Want That Novavax Booster…Post + Comments (46)

Novavax Update: If You Hate the Current Age Restriction…

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This post is in: 

I just left a comment.
If you are concerned that RFK Jr.'s FDA chief Marty Makary is limiting the Novavax COVID booster to those over 65 or with underlying conditions, and may do the same for Pfizer/Moderna as well, consider leaving a comment as well.

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— Carl T. Bergstrom (@carlbergstrom.com) May 21, 2025 at 12:05 AM

Novavax Update: If You Hate the Current Age Restriction…Post + Comments (44)

Parsing the Pandemic Pause

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FDA approves Novavax COVID vaccine with new conditions reut.rs/4mmmkCc

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— Reuters (@reuters.com) May 17, 2025 at 10:40 PM

There has been a dearth of aggregateable news on all my usual sources since March, and I don’t think it can all be blamed on a deliberate cover-up. After five years, our collective immune systems are less susceptible… and, of course, there’s a lot of other vaccine-related outrages…

Health officials are making a renewed call for vigilance against bird flu, but some experts are puzzling over why reports of new human cases have stopped.

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— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) May 19, 2025 at 5:00 AM

Health officials are making a renewed call for vigilance against bird flu, but some experts are puzzling over why reports of new human cases have stopped.

Has the search for cases been weakened by government cuts? Are immigrant farm workers, who have accounted for many of the U.S. cases, more afraid to come forward for testing amid the Trump administration’s deportation push? Is it just a natural ebb in infections?

“We just don’t know why there haven’t been cases,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University. “I think we should assume there are infections that are occurring in farmworkers that just aren’t being detected.”…

In the last 14 months, infections have been reported in 70 people in the U.S. — most of them workers on dairy and poultry farms. One person died, but most of the infected people had mild illnesses.

The most recent infections confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were in early February in Nevada, Ohio and Wyoming…

During a call with U.S. doctors this month, one CDC official noted that there is a seasonality to bird flu: Cases peak in the fall and early winter, possibly due to the migration patterns of wild birds that are primary spreaders of the virus.

That could mean the U.S. is experiencing a natural — maybe temporary — decline in cases.

It’s unlikely that a severe human infection, requiring hospitalization, would go unnoticed, said Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota expert on infectious diseases.

What’s more, a patchwork system that monitors viruses in sewage and wastewater has suggested limited activity recently.

New infections are still being detected in birds and cattle, but not as frequently as several months ago.

Dr. Gregory Gray said he wasn’t concerned about the CDC not identifying new cases in months.

“I don’t think that anybody’s hiding anything,” said Gray, an infectious disease speicialist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.

But Osterholm and some other experts think it’s likely that at least some milder infections are going undetected. And they worry that the effort to find them has been eroding.

The CDC characterizes the risk to the general public as low, although it is higher for people who work with cattle and poultry or who are in contact with wild birds.

Earlier this month, an agency assessment said there is a “moderate risk” that currently circulating strains of bird flu could cause a future pandemic, but the CDC stressed that other emerging forms of bird flu has been similarly labeled in the past.

Still, research is continuing…

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FDA significantly limits COVID-19 vaccine recommendations
Critics said today’s announcement is more evidence of the current administration’s willingness to undermine public trust in vaccines.
www.cidrap.umn.edu/c…

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— CIDRAP (@cidrap.bsky.social) May 20, 2025 at 3:38 PM

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Parsing the Pandemic PausePost + Comments (326)

Covid Update: Covid’s Deadliest Effect Took Five Years to Appear

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Covid’s Deadliest Effect Took Five Years to Appear

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— Reinold O.B. Gans (@gansrob.bsky.social) March 11, 2025 at 11:56 AM

Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. at the NYTimes: [gift link]

… It has been five years since the world was blown into the tumult of a lethal pandemic. Back then, deserted streets and distant coughs, to say nothing of ambulances docking into hospitals, would have carried a very different meaning. But as Proust wrote, the moments of the past do not remain still. We have metabolized a global trauma — millions of deaths, nations brought to their knees, a generation scarred by grief, isolation and loss — so rapidly that it seems, at times, not to have happened at all.

As the pandemic rose, I saw my patients get sick and in some cases die, including a 42-year-old mother of two young children whose loss is seared into my soul. As it receded, I served on then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s commission to rebuild New York’s health infrastructure. Back then, the overwhelming public sentiment was: never again. Today, it seems: never what?

But Covid didn’t just change billions of individual lives. It changed our country’s basic approach to public health, in fundamental ways that are becoming fully visible only now — and that the Trump administration looks likely to render irreversible….

It came as a surprise for me. when Dr. Céline Gounder, an infectious disease doctor and a member of President Joe Biden’s Covid-19 Advisory Board, said that public health was nearly dead. It was October 2024, and we were seated in a chilly tent at the National Academy of Medicine meeting in Washington.

Dr. Gounder was referring to what she calls the “unglamorous public infrastructure” — the interlocking institutions that function constantly and invisibly and don’t depend on private enterprise or personal decisions. Yes, we conquered Covid, but “if we are inclined to think of our victory against Covid as a public health success,” she warned me, “we should really reconsider.”

What seemed to succeed, instead, was a deployment of private enterprise (backed by state subsidies): the invention of vaccines by pharmaceutical companies; their delivery in significant measure through private hospitals and clinics; the ascendancy of private decision making by individuals, schools and businesses; and the surveillance of the pandemic by private institutions.

Covid was a privatized pandemic. It is this technocratic, privatized model that is its lasting legacy and that will define our approach to the next pandemic. It solves some problems, but on balance it’s a recipe for disaster. There are some public goods that should never be sold.

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H5N1 & COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: March 26, 2025

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Also that the deaths and suffering were largely invisible on TV news

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— BeijingPalmer (@beijingpalmer.bsky.social) March 24, 2025 at 7:31 PM


 

Not an auspicious date: 1 year ago today #USDA confirmed #H5N1 #birdflu in dairy cows in Texas, a first.
Since then nearly 1000 infected herds have been confirmed; lord knows how many others missed detection. 70 human cases were confirmed in the past year; again the true number is likely higher.

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— Helen Branswell (@helenbranswell.bsky.social) March 25, 2025 at 3:11 PM

#H5N1: About 150 hens & other birds in a New York City live poultry market have died of #birdflu. This is the 1st NYC #birdflu outbreak since Feb when >1000 live poultry market birds died. The latest involved 2 markets, which were detected during routine inspections abc7ny.com/post/nyc-bir…
.

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— Delthia Ricks (@dricks.bsky.social) March 24, 2025 at 12:41 PM

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