🧵 1/ For me, Joe Biden's legacy will forever be his capitulation to corporate interests on COVID-19, and the dismantling of protections and precautions against it.

His admin did everything in its power to feign normalcy, which cost hundreds of thousands of lives (and counting) 2/ Operation Warp Speed began under Trump in May of 2020. Despite right-wing rhetoric, we got vaccines in Dec 2020.

When Biden took office in late Jan, most people had gotten their second shot.

But the first thing they did was take credit for it to further align C-19 with Trump

While everyone else are attempting to shuffle COVID under the rug, medical researchers are still out there working to define the scope of its effects and adverse outcomes.

Two links in the comments: nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NE…

⚠ New mask ban being attempted in Maryland. ⚠

Democratic members of the Maryland General Assembly are sponsoring a new mask ban this Tuesday 2/18 at 1pm.

Similar to Nassau, NY this ban puts the burden of proof on the mask wearer to demonstrate medical need.

Links in thread: Link to the bill HB1081

mgaleg.maryland.gov/2025RS/bills/h…

Imagine if climate change could be solved by simply wearing a sweater for 3 months for ONE single winter.

Well that's actually how simple it could be to bring COVID down to manageable levels. If 70% wore proper masks in public spaces, COVID could be wiped out, likely in months. "COVID-19 Pandemic Could Be Stopped if at Least 70% of the Public Wore Face Masks Consistently"

scitechdaily.com/covid-19-pande…

Let's talk about wastewater data vs reported positive tests, accuracy, and shedding 🧵

First, a graph. This shows Biobot's publicly available wastewater data for the U.S. overlaid with the CDC's reported positive tests from March 2020 to May 2024.

Notice how closely they track? Since the beginning of the pandemic, wastewater has been our most valuable resource to measure and track what is happening with COVID-19.

Santa Clarita public health published this graph to show how closely their wastewater data aligned with testing before testing ramped down.

Something important to remember is that for most people, things that happen in the world are not perceived as what they actually are.

For them, the COVID-19 pandemic "was" less about the actual dangers of the virus than it was just a scary time of restrictions, rules, confusion. For most it was just a cultural event. The underlying mechanisms of the virus, how it infects, spreads, kills, disables, was never part of their thought process.

The underlying mechanism of what was actually happening was not a factor whatsoever. Only what they were told to do.

TB infections have broken all records and overtaken COVID-19 as the number one cause of death from infectious disease.

COVID minimizer Reddits are spinning this as a victory.

It’s like celebrating death by bombs overtaking deaths by school shootings.

But it’s just MORE death. Furthermore, it’s well-established that COVID-19 reactivates latent TB and is highly likely the cause of all this record breaking TB infection.

SO IT’S STILL COVID. Just a downstream effect like all the other all-cause mortality that has ratcheted up.

Willful ignorance abound.

To be honest I'm getting a bit tired of trying to get anyone to listen, care, do the right thing.

I've always been an introvert and kept a tight circle because I don't like to be caught up in people's drama.

The pandemic has turned my self-isolation and misanthropy to 11. I've spent the better part of 5 years now having to shield my life and my health from other people's poor decisions, lack of understanding and awareness, all exacerbated at the hands of our quarterly-profits-at-all-costs leadership who shepherds them along off the cliff.

People got vaccinated because they were told "you won't get infected." The instant they got the 2nd shot they dropped all mitigations.

They got COVID anyway. Hundreds of thousands more died.

But public health stayed silent, leaving a vacuum for any conspiracy to fill that void. The CDC stayed silent on the poor efficacy, robustness, and duration of the vaccines. In fact, for several months, they flat out lied about it, starting with "you cannot get COVID-19" to "breakthrough infections happen but are rare" to "everyone will get it, but it's mild."

PETS AND COVID-19 🧵

Our furry friends have also been affected by the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. They can catch it, and are affected by it just like we are, but don't have vaccines or other protections. Let's get into some links... Before the CDC wiped nearly everything about COVID from their website last year, they had a page dedicated to COVID-19 in pets.

Here's the archived version before the historical revisionism began to erase COVID from people's memory.

web.archive.org/web/2024010518…

There's a pattern with each wave

Immunity escape. Epidemiologists sound alarm. Wave surges.

Articles start "Is COVID back?" as 50% of the U.S. re-infected.

CDC shows up as peak starts to decline with misdirection like hand washing.

Articles "that wasn't so bad right?"

Repeat The goal is to stay quiet while the worst is happening and leave everyone to fend for themselves. Then show up as things are slightly improving to remind people that what we just experienced didn't really happen the way we remember and blah blah herd immunity nonsense.

Florida high school football player collapses and dies during a game, becoming the 7th high school athlete to suddenly die this month. Totally normal.

For years medical studies have been sounding the alarm about widespread vascular damage from COVID-19, and here we are.

People kinda forgot that in 2022 the CDC openly said that 1 in 5 adults ages 18+ experience a new condition a month or more after COVID-19.

It's very convenient to think that all these rises in deaths that we were warned about are not COVID-related.

David M. Cutler, Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard University, estimated economic damage from COVID to be $2.6 trillion.

In 2022 they updated their data and total to be $3.7 trillion. And counting.

Letting COVID rip is causing unfathomable damage to our economy. "Adding across the three areas, Table 1 shows the total cost of long COVID is $3.7 trillion. 59% of the cost is lost quality of life; the remainder is reduced earnings and greater medical spending."

⚠ Yet again, economic outlets are reporting the way public health is supposed to be:

"Long Covid is a complex condition that shows no sign of going away. The stakes are too high to leave so many people with insufficient care."

impact.economist.com/perspectives/h… "In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, a new challenge has emerged: the phenomenon of long Covid. Given its novelty, long Covid is not well understood. More work must be done to better understand the scale and scope of this condition."

The work of French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) grew out of semiotics and grew into the study of what he called "Hyperreality."

In essence, the representation of a thing becomes more real than the thing itself, giving way to confusion and coercion. Hyperreality is seen as a condition where due to the compression of perceptions of reality in culture and media, what is seen as real or fiction are seamlessly blended together in experiences so there is no longer any clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.

🧵 I think a LOT about the philosophical work of Mark Fisher. Our inability to move forward as a society in a real way is strange and terrifying, and his ideas overlap with COVID-19 denial. I'll explain... He had a set of ideas he called the "lost future" which is the idea that capitalism has stifled our ability to imagine a future of progress and innovation, leaving us nostalgic for a past that never fully came true.

Jennifer Aniston just posted some behind the scenes pics of The Today Show.

Notice something?

MASKS!

This is great to see. And great to see Jennifer not crop them out.

The entertainment field knows the risks of COVID and protect their staff. Why can’t hospitals and doctors?!

Correction: The Morning Show. Not going to pay to edit posts!

Quick rapid antigen (RAT) notes:

- Roughly 33% false negative rate means three or more tests required to be sure
- Best to test 24 hours apart
- Positive results are highly accurate (95-98%)
- COVID symptoms takes days to appear post infection, and 40% of cases are asymptomatic This means if you show negative, that may not be true. Three tests, spread over 3 days, will give a better picture.

COVID is in the body and spreading before a person shows symptoms. In some it takes a couple days, in some it can take 10 days. So don't judge based on symptoms.

"This variant does not appear to be more severe than prior variants..."

This is extremely calculated language meant to dismiss the ACTUAL deadliness and severity of ALL COVID-19 variants. They are ALL severe.

It's another way to move goalposts and speak in the past-tense. The real language would be "this variant is just as deadly and severe as prior variants" but that wouldn't be economically or politically conducive now, would it?

Private equity firms have been buying up healthcare, disability, and long-term care facilities at such a high rate over the last several years that it's raising eyebrows and drawing scrutiny.

More in this later but here is a a thread of articles 2022-2024 🧵 Concerns Grow Over Quality of Care as Investor Groups Buy Not-for-Profit Nursing Homes

kffhealthnews.org/news/article/i…

Disability has shot up over 40% in the United States since 2020.

This is in line with the multitude of studies that show double digit risk of post-COVID conditions with each infection, and all of the dire warnings from WHO and CDC.

This is happening. Right now. All around you. Obtaining disabled status in the United States is EXTREMELY difficult to obtain. And it puts one into destitution. So this is absolutely a massive undercount.