Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

You can paste full URL like: https://x.com/threadreaderapp/status/1644127596119195649
or just the ID like: 1644127596119195649

How to get URL link on X (Twitter) App

  1. On the Twitter thread, click on or icon on the bottom
  2. Click again on or Share Via icon
  3. Click on Copy Link to Tweet
  4. Paste it above and click "Unroll Thread"!
  5. More info at Twitter Help
David Fisman Profile picture
David Fisman
@DFisman
Notoriously unfair to viruses, bacteria, fungi, anti-vaxxers, and the Toronto Star. Roasting marshmallows over Elon’s trash-fire, but with declining frequency.
3 subscribers
Oct 26 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Non-transparency of health data (created on the public dime) is not a new problem in Canada. But it continues to negatively affect the health of Canadians. It needs to change. Aggregate numbers are not personal health information.

thestar.com/opinion/contri… I’m not sure how aware folks are of changes to covid surveillance over the last few months that really look like a coordinated effort to make covid disappear by making surveillance disappear

These include:
Feb 5 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
I’d like to share a few elements of a conversation I had on bluesky (the non-toxic alternative to whatever Elmo is calling Twitter this week). The stimulus was this paper, which demonstrates that although risk is higher in older people, COVID had emerged as the #1 infectious cause of death in kids at the time this paper came out last year.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
Oct 31, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Nice essay

But if “you just want to get it right”, Ian, my offer stands. I’m happy to talk to you about airborne infection and why it’s so important. If you don’t want to have me on your show, please have a producer contact me and I will put them in touch with one of the many excellent experts in this area.
Jun 1, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
New from our team. Canada markedly outperformed the US and UK in protecting life and health during the first 2 years of the sars-cov-2 pandemic.

canada.ca/en/public-heal… By contrast, we underperformed relative to Australia, which had an explicit elimination (as opposed to mitigation) strategy.
May 2, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Less journalism = greater ability to manufacture narratives and create “alternate facts”.

Poilievre et al don’t want factual information to stand in the way of environmental destruction and stripping the country for parts I’d like to see greater government support for journalism, especially local journalism, in Canada.

But I’d also like to see a return to laws and policies that limit foreign ownership of Canadian media.
May 1, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Y’all know it’s a rock, right? At least stick on some googly eyes
Apr 1, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Ironically given the move by @who to stop endorsing pediatric vaccination against sars-2, work published yesterday by @alisonesimmons shows mRNA vaccines are strongly protective against hospitalization from omicron sars-2

journals.plos.org/plosone/articl… Risk reduction is 80% in both adolescents and children. This is a missed opportunity to prevent severe illness in kids.
Jan 27, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
One of our current difficulties is that global authorities on hospital infection control, like this man, either don’t know, or don’t want to know, about the large toolkit that exists for cleaning indoor air. To be clear, indoor masking with high quality respirators is a stopgap.

Viruses and other pathogens can be inactivated with UV
Spaces can have their ventilation improved
Filtration (hepa, CR boxes) literally pulls virus out of the air so it can’t infect
Jan 26, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that it’s not trolling to counter bad pronouncements about public policy, be they from journalists, academics, or public officials, with facts and data. It’s not trolling to demand that agencies with the words “public health” in their names live up to the title.
Jan 25, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Given Dr Loh’s past and current roles, I’d understand this to mean: “stop calling BS when institutional public health, or annnointed spokespeople, actively mislead the public.” Advocacy is meant to be part and parcel of our role as physicians. That’s not qualified as “advocacy except when inconvenient”

There’s an obligation to be truthful, especially when it protects health.

What a surprising and disappointing take
Jan 25, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
More trolling from me.
This is what I think this was actually about. Image Image
Dec 28, 2022 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Living with with COVID except when we have a chance to be xenophobic idiots, apparently You aren’t going to keep novel variants out with border controls.

What you can do is change the infectivity of this virus in your own country. Start by acknowledging how it spreads (it’s airborne).
Dec 27, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Hey @60Minutes : do I have a story for you. It’s about the web of conflicts and misinformation that have prevented the @who from designating airborne diseases as airborne. It goes back years.

You all need to talk to @mdc_martinus @jmcrookston @linseymarr It’s bad because it killed millions of people unnecessarily. And they continue to die to this day.
Dec 16, 2022 • 8 tweets • 6 min read
It looks like Dr Conly at U of Calgary runs a program called W21C which is focussed on creating new healthcare technologies. My read of this is there’s an eye to commercialization.

avenuecalgary.com/innovation/w21… This is being framed as a means of preventing airborne sars-cov-2 infection. Would this not be something that’s important to disclose, @AnnalsofIM ?


I don’t recall seeing W21C mentioned in disclosures

@trishgreenhalgh @Globalbiosec @sameo416 @CIHR_IRSC
Dec 15, 2022 • 33 tweets • 12 min read
I’m going to restart my thread on undisclosed interests, conflicts and “role of funder” in the recent @McMasterU mask trial.

Before I forget, @First10EM has done an excellent piece on conflicts in this study.

Second: re 3M, they make basically all the masks, medical masks and n95 respirators. I’m not sure that pointing out that someone works for a center that gets funding from 3M is a huge gotcha in terms of them having an interest in one or the other being superior
Dec 15, 2022 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
So they went there. Loeb et al now imply that Lisa Brousseau has a conflict because CIDRAP gets funding from 3M…not Lisa herself, but CIDRAP. @AnnalsofIM This has become a bit of a pattern with some of these investigators, who accuse everyone who disagrees with them of having a conflict, even as they fail to disclose their own.

As they have decided to go this route, I’ll be adding to this thread over time.
Dec 14, 2022 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
Our response to the Loeb mask study has been posted at @AnnalsofIM
We had to shorten to 400 words
acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M2… ImageImageImageImage Our original longer letter is up at Post.

post.news/article/2IjlKh…
Dec 13, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Ontario needs a health data transparency act. Citizens fund the health system, and they value it. They should be able to monitor its performance without having to resort to FOI. Parenthetically, such transparency as we once had seems to have been disappeared again. Mandatory public reporting of hospital acquired infections was brought in by the Wynne government, and could formerly be viewed online
Dec 12, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Mapping Ontario RSV positivity data in this way is strongly suggestive that our current pediatric hospitalization surge is due to immune injury in kids.

Last years surge (% pos) was higher, but had peaked and was descending as omicron emerged. Here is what has happened to testing. We are finding a lot more rsv this year, but test demand is also driven by case incidence
Dec 12, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Tried to get a province level time series on influenza from @GovCanHealth this morning. Data are in hand for flu watch. Was told that there are “privacy issues”, data ownership issues (paid for with our tax dollars, friends). Was also told I can always go through and reconstruct my own time series by going through and trying to extract numbers from graphs in 700 individual pdfs.
Dec 5, 2022 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
The data sharing statement for the McMaster n95 trial is remarkable. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one quite like it. @CIHR_IRSC @jyduclos @SabiVM "Data Sharing Statement:The following data will be made available beginning 1 July 2023 for 6 months: de-identified participants data, data dictionary (xxxx@mcmaster.ca). These data will be made available to other research groups for meta-analysis providing…