Suppression is the Goal: A Final Covid Plea for 2024

We've survived 2024, but excess mortality compared to pre-pandemic rates is quite high for young adults (18-44), and in school-aged kids, it continues to increase year over year, with 2024 the deadliest year since the pandemic began. 1 in 15 people in the US is immunocompromised (possibly two kids per class), and getting a simple virus could be much more dangerous for them. It's safe to say that we'd still be wise to take some precautions to prevent harm to one another.

Gregory Travis's graph above clarifies the benefits of wearing masks for anyone that cares about reducing childhood mortality rates. Lockdowns were lifted in most places in the US in August 2020, but the mortality rate decreased substantially below baseline in 2021 because of masks until the just before school started. In January 2021, Biden called for compliance with the CDC in respect to wearing masks, at the lowest mortality point on the graph, but in April 2021, he started suggesting that people who are vaccinated didn't need to wear one, and in May 2021, the CDC dropped mask recommendations. Remember when Biden said those fully vaxxed earned the right to greet others with a smile?? In July 2021 the WHO started using the term "breakthrough infection" when people got Covid after being vaccinated -- until it became too common to maintain that farce, and the excess mortality of children started rising. If it's just a spurious correlation, what else could have caused that dramatic fall in deaths for the exact period that kids wore masks in class? 

A Deflating Experience with Three Christmas Visitors

I was travelling on Christmas Day with two of my kids, literally driving to a stable, when my daughter's car got a flat tire. We tried to figure out the jack and how to get the tire off to put the donut tire on, but it was more complicated that I could have imagined. 

Anything to do with fixing cars kind of scares me a bit. It's the same with computers. I'm even more embarrassed to say, it's the same experience with my flippin' bicycle too, which I bring in yearly for a simple tune up because I still don't quite know how to oil my chain. I have all the tools to change a flat, but that doesn't stop me from just walking miles to a shop instead of ever even trying to fix it myself. There's something about mechanical things that shuts my brain down. It's a strong aversion as if I don't want to know how things work. I think part of me thinks that if I try anything, I'll somehow make it worse - I have actually broken a computer by trying to plug in a cable before by bending the little sticky-out thingies. I can build a website no problem, but I'm still a bit weird about using apps on my phone. I've watched as people helped me change a tire on my car twice before in my life, and my son has helped with my computer and phone a ton, and I realized that once someone is there to take over and save the day, I just stare blankly at the process without actually learning anything. The previous tire-fixing steps didn't register at all. I was completely useless. At some point in my life I seem to have learned that this type of information is just not for me.  

It's yet another reason why I didn't buy my first car until I was flippin' 53! 

Basic Christian Morals

I was scrolling mindlessly yesterday morning, on Christmas Day, and came across some outrage around unhoused people being put up in a hotel at taxpayer's expense. The naysayers clearly have never seen Dicken's A Christmas Carol or even Bill Murray's Scrooged. Remember when that line, "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses??" came back to bite him in the ass?

Matthew 25:35-40

First of all, what the heck are taxes for but to ensure the basic needs of all?? If we decide that each person has to manage on their own without help from anyone, then we're back to law of the jungle, and we don't need much in the way of government or leadership at all or any social organization. If we're back to might makes right, with "might" referring to the power of wealth, then we're no longer in a civilization. For thousands of years we've known that a healthy, well-functioning society requires a way to care for the less fortunate. From the most base analysis, if we don't help others, they'll be more inclined to steal from us. This stance might claim to want social organization for education and hospitals, but it seems like they just want to ensure they have it for their own families, not for everyone in general. The things that they can afford to pay for somehow don't count as basic needs to provide for all. 

Curious.

Spike Proteins Sticking Around

 Yet another study indicates the brain is negatively affected by Covid, yet we're still okay with children getting it repeatedly. 

Ali Max Erturk explained his recent study published in Cell Host and Microbe on Twitter. I love when researchers explain their work in plain English like this!

Our new study shows that SARS-CoV-2 spike protein accumulates and persists in the body for years after infection, especially in the skull-meninges-brain axis, potentially driving long COVID. mRNA vaccines help but cannot stop it. Summary: We found SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in the skull-meninges-brain axis in mouse models and human post-mortem tissues long after their COVID, which was associated with vascular, inflammatory changes in the brain along with neuronal damage. Approach: To discover all tissues that are targeted by SARS-CoV-2, we used unbiased DISCO clearing technology and mapped tissues hit by coronavirus spike vs. Influenza HA proteins (flu).

WHO: "We Cannot Talk about Covid in the Past Tense"

Dr. Tedros said this in the WHO Director-General's opening remarks at Tuesday's media briefing where he also suggested that over 20 million people have died from SARS-CoV-2 so far, and we're still averaging 1,000 deaths each week just from countries that still report.

The full transcript is here. He starts by discussing some diseases eliminated from some countries and other good news, then turns to the conflicts costing so many lives and the threat of pandemics from mpox, Marburg, H5N1, and a mysterious new outbreak in the Congo, and an increase in deaths from cholera, measles, and diabetes. And then he got to Covid. Here's that part (video clip here):

"The end of this month, the 31st of December, will mark the fifth anniversary of the first reports to WHO of pneumonia caused by a then-unknown pathogen. In the past five years, more than 7 million deaths from Covid-19 have been reported to WHO, but we estimate the true death toll to be at least three times higher. We cannot talk about Covid in the past tense. It’s still with us, it still causes acute disease and “long Covid”, and it still kills. On average this year, about 1,000 deaths from Covid-19 have been reported to WHO each week – and that’s just from the few countries that are still reporting. 

The world might want to forget about Covid-19, but we cannot afford to. WHO continues to support countries to prevent and manage Covid-19 alongside other health threats. Today, WHO is releasing a package of policy briefs [outlined below] to help countries update their policies to monitor and reduce circulation of Covid-19, and to reduce illness, death, and long-term consequences of the disease. 

Developing the Capacity for Rational Choices

"As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?" -- Furiosa 

Imprisoned climate activist, Roger Hallam, recently wrote about the necessity of expanding emotional well-being as we face bleak events happening around the world. While climate scientists try to "help people through the horrific information that they are being given," they also need a way to manage their emotional reactions. We can no longer afford to merely distract ourselves from the inner turmoil. Beyond climate, we could very well be entering into a period of much greater conflict at a time of even more viruses, some destructive to our food system. When the watering hole gets smaller, the animals look at one another differently.

To move forward with compassion, at a time when divide and conquer strategies have created polarization and infighting, seems to require an effort from each one of us.

Hallam writes,

"We might want to think about why saint-like people are enormously influential, even powerful. . . . They see the world as dependent upon the mind. . . . They are not enslaved by the world; their minds are intent, driven even, to change it. They do not see this as an end in itself."

Wading Through the Fetid Swamp

Charlie Angus is on a role. The NDP MP has a book excerpt in The Walrus explaining the rise of neoliberalism starting from Reaganomics.     

The rules of the neoliberal game advise to take advantage of or create a crisis in order to shrink governmental oversight, bust any strikes, lower marginal tax rates so the wealthiest pay very little, reduce or obliterate corporate regulation or allow dubious self-regulation, and privatize the shit out of public services. Naomi Klein did a great job explaining it all in The Shock Doctrine, which he mentions. 

Mr. Angus says, 

"The crisis of the 2020s is something different than a lingering cultural stasis. The reality is that the political, environmental, and economic forces unleashed in the 1980s have finally caught up to us. . . . Operation Break the Working Class has created a generation of billionaire oligarchs form the stolen wages of the American working class. . . . To find our way out of this mess, it is necessary to confront the false history of the 1980s. Historical amnesia is not accidental--it is a political construct. If you scratch the sheen of '80s nostalgia, the underlying socio-economic fractures are readily apparent. These contradictions in the popularized narrative constitute a dangerous memory."