🧵BIG medicinal cannabis news: out of nowhere, the proposed regulatory changes the previous govt ran out of time to adopt have been enacted, as of today. The usual month's wait after gazetting has been waived. The key part is that ... NZ producers will only need to meet the standards of destination countries in order to export, and not the extremely onerous NZ standards. They largely already do meet those standards, so this has a huge impact on the viability of the industry.

🧵 There has been a lot of commentary and reporting on Labour's loss of – or battle to retain – a number of high-profile electorate seats in the 2023 election, but it all seems to miss one obvious fact: those Labour MPs almost all outperformed Labour's party vote. Deborah Russell, a committed, talented MP, is currently 483 votes down vs National's Paulo Garcia, a mediocre second-time MP with risible views on social issues. But National's party vote margin in New Lynn is five times that. Labour won the party vote in very few electorates.

🧵Kia ora. I've been head-down writing all day, so it took me a minute to catch up with "prioritising Māori for surgery" story. I think it's really an illustration of what's wrong with our media and our politics. What's happened here is Barry Soper, who wouldn't know policy analysis if it bit him on the arse, being told about a policy that's been in the system for about a year. It's called the Equity Adjustor Score and it aims to address health inequities highlighted in multiple reports.

This is fun: part of a 1978 Omnibus documentary with John Peel interviewing The Mekons, ATV, Sham 69, The Slits and UK Subs about whether it's punk to make money out of music. Also, Robert Smith in 1984, after his spell with the Banshees – and thus not pretending to be totally stoned all the time.

We've come to understand mayoral leadership in Auckland as being about cajoling majorities from a diverse group of councillors to get things done. Maybe Wayne Brown could get things done by calling everyone idiots, but more likely not. nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/au… As much as I quite like the idea of sending Brown in to bang heads at AT, I don't think he really understands the issues well right now. At the K Road panel he went on about the K Road bike lanes costing $12k a metre and the path outside his home being dug up six times, but ...

🧵Moderating last night's @BikeAKL mayoral candidates forum was a good chance to go a bit deeper on walking and cycling policy and the underlying imperative of emissions reduction. But there was a problem ... Viv Beck and Efeso Collins had been invited as the two most bike-friendly candidates. Both did express support for continued expansion of the city's cycle network. Beck promises a "well utilised and safe cycling network" in her published policy. votevivbeck.co.nz/get-auckland-m…

I know it's not always easy, but editors need to be very wary about publishing from press releases put out by orgs like Drug Free Australia, a front for for the Australian Christian right. The paper itself is ... odt.co.nz/news/world/stu… Here. I don't have any expertise to comment on their "cutting edge epidemiological techniques", but I can tell a few things about the data they put into it. So ... archpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…

Sunset on the Waitemata. Fishtail on the Waitemata.

Kia ora, another 🧵. I've been confidently informed by a number of freedom fighters over the past week that mask-wearing does not help curb Covid transmission. It does. In fact, the evidence for masking has grown stronger over the course of the pandemic. A good principle in looking to determine overall evidence for a proposition is to look for evidence reviews, rather than individual studies that can be cherry-picked. This review from the US National Academies of Science was published more than a year ago. pnas.org/content/118/4/…

Kia ora. You may have seen the antivaxxer conspiracy theory that Jacinda Ardern is secretly worth $25m (which clearly could only have come from payoffs by Big Pharma!). AAP Fact-Check did a full debunking on that. It's originally from a junk bio website. aap.com.au/factcheck/clai… They're here on @AapFactcheck, by the way. Good follow for fans of facts.

Okay.🧵 Antivaxxer types here keep referring to the "Lancet study" that apparently calls for the abolition of vaccine mandates. Firstly, it's not a study, it's a letter to the editor. Its author, Carlos Franco-Paredes, is certainly qualified to offer comment. But ... He does not say vaccine mandates should be abolished (and neither, clearly, does the Lancet itself). But he says "vaccination status should not replace mitigation practices such as mask wearing, physical distancing, and contact-tracing investigations"

My heart sank a bit when I got to the Te Atatu Covid testing station this morning and there was a queue of 30-40 cars, but they're remarkably efficient. For my two previous tests, my details have had to be manually entered on a clipboard. But today ... They had workers walking down the queue pre-screening and entering the details on tablets, which can pull up your NHI number (bring your NHI number!) so the only other thing they need to do is verify your name and reason for testing and get your phone number.

It's fine for Bryce Edwards to talk about the people he met onsite – he has been there and I'm sure he's talking to decent, if misguided, folk. But dismissing any far-right link to the protest as a "conspiracy theory" is ridiculous. We're seeing their comms, for goodness sake. And the language being used by the protesters echoes, often verbatim, that of concurrent protests in Australia, Canada, France, etc. Edwards acting like it's some spontaneous protest about general social conditions in NZ isn't really credible.

Reading around about "hybrid immunity", it seems increasingly evident that people who've been infected with Covid *then* vaccinated may have a superior immune response. Is there decent evidence yet about vax first, then infection? Thanks to @jmnicholls for finding this. It's still a guess (@tslumley explains in the thread under the original tweet why it's hard to design a study for), but an educated one. nytimes.com/article/covid-…

An encouraging assessment from Suresh. The big question now is price ...

https://twitter.com/DrSureshMuthu/status/1447272576749748224

Molnupiravir will sell for more than the cost of synthesising its active pharmaceutical ingredient. But how much more? At the moment, Merck is charging the US government 40x the cost of production. theintercept.com/2021/10/05/cov…

Tracy Watkins seems to have set herself a challenge to write the week's worst and least logical Covid-19 op-ed each Sunday in the Star Times. Today, she laments the failure to lay out a "clear plan" the way Singapore's PM did yesterday. Well, yeah ... stuff.co.nz/opinion/300426… Lee Hsien Loong did give a speech yesterday, promising social restrictions – closer to our Level 3 than Level 2, and in some ways harsher – might be eased in three to six months when daily cases come down to the hundreds. Daily cases rose again to 3590. straitstimes.com/singapore/poli…

What the hell is wrong with Andrew Little? He's claiming that an overhaul of our drug laws called for today by multiple public health and social service organisations can't happen now because it would *have to go to a referendum*. He needs to be told to sit down by his leader. I was okay with a referendum on a specific and ambitious cannabis policy as a way to break a logjam, and it very nearly did. But the idea that this is some special area of justice and health where any change needs a referendum to be held is nonsensical, ahistorical bullshit.

New Zealand's drug-checking law makes the New York Times: nytimes.com/2021/04/09/wor… One or two errors though: @KnowYourStuffNZ wasn't "appointed" by the government – they just filled in the forms to keep doing what they were doing.

You may recall me worrying in recent months about this summer's festival season. Well, it's happening: at some events more than half the "MDMA" samples presented for testing have been something far more dangerous: eutylone. nzherald.co.nz/nz/i-was-too-s… As my story for the Herald notes, there have been hundreds of distressing reactions reported – typically anxiety, paranoia and days without sleep, but also seizures and mental health events. These aren't necessarily being seen by onsite medics but may manifest hours, days later.

I wrote this the day before Trump's inauguration in 2017. I correctly forecast calamity, but I should have worried less about the world (and Russia's designs on Europe) and more about America. publicaddress.net/hardnews/the-n… But I think this played out.

I have a sneaking fondness for the "reaction videos" YouTube genre. My current favourite channel is Reactistan, in which Pakistan tribal people sample world cuisines. They have quite strong ideas about food and seasoning. The pasta episode: Keener on tacos: