Strap in.

This letter from Andrew Gwynne @gwynnemp is pathetic and he should be ashamed to have written it.

Let's break down the worst parts of it.

TLDR: If you have Long Covid, you're not going to get any help from this guy.

https://twitter.com/annesmithmcc/status/1880217921202582000

Mate, you work as an MP and a minister *full time*.

You're writing in reply talking about people who are fully debilitated. Permanently disabled and unable to work. Be very careful about comparing your experience to theirs, and making it sound like their experience is yours.

I am just a bird on the internet, but I have a growing suspicion that flu and rsv infections do trigger the immune system in a way that *can* *help* *temporarily* *reduce* susceptibility to Covid. By temporary I mean like a couple of weeks.

I don't think anyone yet understands the significance of the refinery and factory strikes last night in Russia.

They are attempts at critical hits to irreplaceable points in the military supply chain within Russia.

Pick out just one of the targets last night.

The Kazanorgsintez production facilities in Kazan.

I had a very long conversation with a medical professional on a walk during the New Year's break.

They pestered me about why I'm covid cautious. So I told them.

You've probably seen people use the phrase "I'm not overly concerned...", right?

It's a phrase with no meaning used to stop you thinking hard about what the person is saying.

That's a bad thing. So let's do what they don't want you to do:

Let's think.

2020 could have been a reset in how we live.

It could have been the moment to reduce air travel.
To reduce fossil fuel use.
To reduce many types of disease spread, especially airborne. It could have been a moment to revitalise healthcare.

So Covid infections, even when cases and deaths were radically undercounted, killed over ten thousand people in England in 2024 according to official numbers.

But the true toll was higher. I can testify to that regarding the people I've seen with my own eyes who caught Covid, then died in the next couple of weeks from heart problems, breathing issues, strokes, and pneumonia.

Them: "Let's infect everyone with Covid endlessly and repeatedly despite the fact it's known to cause long term illness and disability"

Also them: "TWENTY PERCENT OF THE MILITARY ARE NOW MEDICALLY UNFIT TO SERVE"

I mean WHAT DID THEY THINK WAS GOING TO HAPPEN.

There are going to be some huge stories breaking in the next few months about what will be spun as the institutional decay of large organisations. But actually the huge stories break down into lots of small stories about groups of individual people who each no longer have the capacity to do their jobs at the level required of them.

Hmmm.
There's something more than a little concerning about what's happening with Norovirus here.

A quick thread about Norovirus and its place within in the 'quad-demic'.
🧵 Take a look at those black vertical lines.
That's the stage of the year we're at now in terms of data (the third week of November).

When you see people posting that 2024 is going to be the hottest year on record, bear in mind that there’s an extra factor in there.
It’s not just about the temperatures.
The atmosphere’s capacity for heat energy is also increasing as global humidity levels rise.
🧵 Let me explain why that's a big deal:

This is a good point, and it illustrates the degree to which the powers that be are concerned with *crisis points*.

A quick thread on golf clubs.
🧵

https://twitter.com/_CatintheHat/status/1864819814209872374

As Cat rightly points out, Covid numbers have been high ALL YEAR.

But, in the eyes of politicians, the numbers have not been high enough at any one point to 'overload the system'.

Every now and then I check back in on the progress of this graph of the proportion of 5-9 year old boys dying in England and Wales.

I keep wondering if that straight rising line that has been maintained for three years will stop rising.

It hasn't yet. That's not the whole of the story of the last ten years, but it's the story of the last three.

Mortality rates in that age group had been generally dropping and dropping.

Then covid was allowed to run rampant, and since then, it's been one direction.

Do you know who is most likely to experience a drug resistant infection?

Someone with immune dysfunction.

Why?
Think of it like a team effort.
When you start taking antibiotics, it's you AND the antibiotics fighting the infection. But if your immune system is not pulling its weight in the fight, or if your body isn't distributing the antibiotics effectively throughout your body, or if your body's nutrient levels mean you're not producing the right building blocks for your immune system to work...

In 2021 in England, public health decided that the way to get well was to get sicker, and that the way to get rid of disease was to catch it.
It's official policy.
They write it down and everything.

Since then... All of those graphs are on the same timescale.

For some of them, the data only starts in 2021 - before then, they were rare, but are now becoming more and more commonplace.

Aargh.
So here we are again with a government white paper about bullying <checks notes> sorry, encouraging people who are long term sick into work.

Let's break some of this malicious incompetence down into bite sized chunks so we can understand it...

gov.uk/government/new… What's the heart of the problem?

The heart of the problem is here:

A few of the people who were involved in administering the government response to the pandemic really didn't like having to do it.
And they especially didn't like how so many officials would say one thing privately and one thing publicly.

So they kept notes.

https://twitter.com/_CatintheHat/status/1860072299933892660

I've been sent quite a few of those notes in the last year, and the sad truth is that I just don't have time and energy to work through them all, but having seen those six videos from the UK Covid Inquiry, I feel the need to dig out one transcript that I've had for a while.

Now, look at this one closely. It's Covid admissions in Scotland over the last nearly five years. It's displayed by age bands.

Look at the youngest age group, 0-18s.

Then look at the graph in the next post... The proportion of all admissions for Covid that are people under the age of 18.

A quick thread about the 'horrible illness' that a load of people have described having in late 2019/early 2020... I don't like to assume that it was Covid or that it wasn't Covid.

But I've seen a lot of people say that they think the virus they had that winter *was* Covid.

What the f*k.

"Scientists want to know whether the virus could cause heart defects"??

Scientists *KNOW* the virus can cause heart defects at birth 🤬🤬 "Covid-19 virus could increase the risk of children being born with heart defects
Huge study of 18 million births found the proportion of babies born with a congenital heart abnormality increased by 16% after the first year of the Covid pandemic"

I think that for a while we've been going through a phase where the term Long Covid has been developing a mixed usefulness. In theory the term is used to refer to any health condition caused by a covid infection that you have three months after the infection, and that lasts for at least two.