The rationale against a low threshold intervention in healthcare settings is spurious. I was @YNHH this week and few were masked. 1/ nytimes.com/2023/09/23/hea… Frankly, I cannot wait for the lawsuits against these institutions for their negligence. Respiratory infections are preventable. 2/

First of all, I respect @HelenBranswell but there is something unnerving about this piece. It asks us ever so gently to take the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans as "collateral damage" as the price for endemicity. 1/

https://twitter.com/HelenBranswell/status/1701012771163557911

As @ArisKatzourakis said last year, endemicity is not harmless. What does it mean to bake in tens of thousands of deaths as the "new normal"? 2/ nature.com/articles/d4158…

My latest for @TheNation on the culture of contentment and #COVID19. 1/
thenation.com/article/societ… Call it what you may, but we’ve seen a rise in hospitalization for #COVID19 across the US, indicating that there is more #SARSCOV2 circulating than we’d like to believe. 2/
nytimes.com/2023/08/28/us/…

Well, we’re in our fourth COVID summer. Yes. Things are better. But COVID cases are rising. 1/ Some say, ignore it all. If you’re vaccinated, have access to Paxlovid, and you’re young and have no underlying conditions, infection is trivial. 2/

OddJob, by Derek Walcott

You prepare for one sorrow,
but another comes.
It is not like the weather,
you cannot brace yourself,
the unreadiness is all.
Your companion, the woman,
the friend next to you,
the child at your side,
and the dog,
we tremble for them...
1/ We tremble for them,
we look seaward and muse
it will rain.
We shall get ready for rain;
you do not connect
the sunlight altering
the darkening oleanders
in the sea-garden,
the gold going out of the palms.
You do not connect this,
the fleck of the drizzle
on your flesh...
2/

I'm not going to link to @DLeonhardt's latest. You can all find it for yourselves. 1/ First, I hope everyone is having a great summer, enjoying the outdoors, taking some time off if you can and can afford it. 2/

The main point of the rulings this term on abortion, affirmative action and LGBTQ rights doesn’t need a lawyer to parse. Why? 1/ Because they are each part of a larger far-right political project to roll back civil rights in a white Christianist heterosexual campaign that has been decades in the making. 2/

To those who moan that public health has become too political: read your history. The safety of the water you drink, the fact that you don't walk through piss & shit on the streets, the retreat of certain diseases from the US, was a fight, not a tea party. archive.is/5GpIN And. The fact that some Americans cannot drink the water, have sewage flowing out on their front lawns, that diseases of "poverty" (yes, poverty) are on the rise is, sorry fellas, political. 2/ theguardian.com/us-news/2021/f…

So if I went into the hospital and got #covid (because I would test before so as not to expose others), I would be livid if lack of basic infection control were the reason. 1/ I really don’t see a reason not to wear masks in patient-facing settings, require vaccination of staff at the very least. The idea that some hospital epidemiologists, physicians and editorial boards (@BostonGlobe) are making a fuss at the expense of patients is awful. 2/

In the annals of abominable @washingtonpost columns, a parody instead of a scream. 1/ Dear Doctor: I am a sexually active young gay man, should I worry about getting HIV? Do I need to take PrEP or wear condoms? 2/

.@jonathanmahler’s piece on @rweingarten in the @nytimes connects a lot of dots for those on the right & works with assumptions on the pandemic that are a gift to the right too. Read these 6 articles: you’ll have a different impression on schools & COVID than he leads with. 1/ First. On COVID mortality and kids. 2/ jamanetwork.com/journals/jaman…

.@DLeonhardt is back—to his nonsense. First of all, let’s put his priors on the table. He’s not a neutral commenter here. 1/ nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2018/07/more-s… In the midst of the worst pandemic in a century, @DLeonhardt chatises Randi Weingarten for suggesting schools remain closed until they might be opened safely. 2/

There is NO plan. 1/ On Monday @POTUS signed a bill immediately ending the Covid-19 national emergency. 2/

Robert Redfield, Trump’s CDC Director, has been trashing former NIAID director, Anthony Fauci. Anyone who knows Bob Redfield knows what an unsavory character he is. Here’s something to remind you of his greatest hits even before he set foot at CDC. 1/ cnn.com/2018/05/13/opi… When I criticized the appointment back then I got a phone call from someone on Bob’s board, saying how he had changed and we should all give him a chance. How naive I was. 2/science.org/content/articl…

Before Paul Farmer died, each school year, I'd go up to talk to his class on global health (SW25 Case Studies in Global Health: Biosocial Perspectives) at Harvard after a showing of How to Survive a Plague. 1/ Paul's vision of medicine and public health was based a preferential option for the poor. 2/

So read @sciencecohen's August 2022 article in @ScienceMagazine on China's attempts to debunk any claims (lab leak or zoonotic jump) for the origins of #SARSCoV2. Once again, Jon Cohen is ahead of all of us in covering the most important stories. 1/ science.org/content/articl… The crucial paragraph is here. Figure 4 in Gao, George, et al. "Surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in the environment and animal samples of the Huanan Seafood Market." (2022), simply ignores the DNA of other species in the metagenomic analysis. 2/

There is a problem with @germanrlopez piece on #COVID origins in the @NYTimes today. First, while two theories exist, he crafts this as an "underdog" story, lab-leak-can't-get-any-love, and as a meeting of the minds now that these two theories are equally plausible now. 1/ The fact is we do have two competing theories and the market origin at the current moment has stronger data to support it as @MichaelWorobey wrote in the @latimes the other day. 2/ latimes.com/opinion/story/…

.@MichaelWorobey is one of the world’s foremost disease detectives. He did the crucial work on HIV’s origins and has focused much of his career on the evolution and emergence of viruses. This is an important piece. 1/ latimes.com/opinion/story/… If you’ve written on #covid origins, you owe it to yourself to read this. Wrestle with the science. End/ @DKThomp @DhruvKhullar @SherylNYT @benjmueller @jonathanchait @NateSilver538

Thanks to @angie_rasmussen & @SaskiaPopescu for writing this and saying what many scientists have been reticent to say: while the origins of #SARSCOV2 are still uncertain, the evidence for a zoonotic spillover is more robust than for a "lab leak." 1/ washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/… Now this isn't to say the evidence on an origin in the Wuhan wildlife market is definitive. It is not. But there are too many commentators, from @jonathanchait, Nate Silver, and others who have weighed in on the lab leak as having an equivalent or stronger evidentiary basis. 2/

Between Peggy Noonan, Jonathan Chait, Nate Silver, Bret Stephens, we have a cottage industry of pundits, who don’t care to engage with the scientific evidence & would rather spout off on issues to satisfy their own existing beliefs. It’s lazy and embarrassing and irresponsible. When actual science and health journalists dig into stories, they do it with expertise, careful attention to detail and highlight the uncertainties in understanding. Like this piece from @NPR. npr.org/sections/goats…

If someone comes to class, hasn’t done the homework, skimmed the readings, but feels compelled to pontificate on the subject under discussion nonetheless, your professor is annoyed, your fellow students are rolling their eyes. 1/ With the discussions on Twitter, on #COVID and masking, we have a whole lot of people who did not do the homework, skimmed the readings and are insistent that they must be heard. 2/