Measles cases are on the rise because of lower vaccination rates. It’s one of the most contagious diseases out there, but that’s still not going to budge policy. An article in yesterday’s Guardian explains that we’re actually less prepared to cope with any viral activity now than we were in 2019.
Continue readingAuthor: Marie Snyder
A Puff of Absurdity: We Need Policy Based on Evidence, not Vibes
Survival of the fittest doesn’t mean the strongest survive, it means whomever can best adapt to the conditions of life will survive. Adapting doesn’t mean tolerating what’s happening and ignoring it; it means changing when the conditions of life change. So, in a pandemic, it means changing the way we live
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Our Fragile Democracy
The Financial Times posted a video with Margaret Atwood discussing democracy. It’s just 6 minutes, and the illustrations (from Jamie Macdonald) really add to it. She asks if democracy is fragile or resilient, and points out that we might find out as more climate change effects hit closer to home. I
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Covid’s Immune Response Suppression
For many, Covid seems milder now, closer to a regular flu, but yet another new study suggests otherwise. I like this analogy from Tern to help explain a recent study from Nature Microbiology. “Do you know why it can be a bad sign that an acute covid infection seems more
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Grand Theft Immunity
T. Ryan Gregory asks us to consider the possibility that repeated infection is rolling the dice that leads to Long Covid, which causes immune damage: “If we’re insisting on using the rhetoric of fiscal metaphors, “immunity theft” can be small and brief (petty immunity theft) all the way to severe and long-term (grand
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Lab Leak Theory Has Backing
A Freedom of Information request by reporter Emily Kopp is now pointing to the lab leak being more likely than previously thought. From Richard Ebright: “An order line for restriction endonuclease BsmBl–and no other restriction endonuclease–in a draft of EcoHealth’s 2018 DEFUSE proposal is equivalent to a smoking gun. There
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: The Senate Committee Hearing Addressing Long Covid
It’s a funny disconnect between Twitter and everywhere else. Yesterday everyone I know online was glued to the Senate hearings. If you weren’t one of them, here’s the gist: You can watch the whole thing here. These are just the highlights that stood out to me. Long Covid patients, parents
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Elderly Activism
Fiona Atkinson, retired teacher, gave a couple of MPs a lesson that they refused to learn: This is a video that was on the news in October, but then hit TikTok yesterday, so is just now being spread on social media. Funny how that works. The interviewers are also MPs, something
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: They’re Going Full Orwell: Sickness is Health
Lots of misinformation out there still. On Vaccinations We know that vaccinations help reduce severity of Covid to keep people out of the hospital, and we know their effectiveness wanes after a few months so boosters are needed at least every six months. In Ontario, they’ve decided the next shot will
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: The Answer is Less Virus
It’s not nearly as deadly in the near term as the Spanish Flu, which took out 5% of the population, or the Black Death, which wiped out half of Londoners, but there are other changes in our lives that could make Covid more of a risk overall: We might have
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Let ‘er Rip Means Let THEM R.I.P.
A few people have been commenting on the current “death by semantics”, or what Orwell called “doublespeak.” I used that image just in October, but it’s too on-the-nose not to use it again here. T. Ryan Gregory wrote, “Death by semantics. It’s spread in the air, but it’s not airborne. It’s
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Teaching with Covid in Class
Is there a better way to do school during an ongoing, quite possibly never-ending pandemic AND with climate crisis coming home to roost? Christina Virgil, on TikTok discussed the problem with schools making attendance their highest priority, and highlighted the sentiments of Jim the Hermit: “Thing is, education does matter, but
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Spread the Word, Not the Virus
We’ve been behind the curve on Covid mitigations. At this point, we should be able to see the error in removing masks, right?! When the wastewater data and/or hospitalization rates are low but STARTING to rise, that’s when we need masks to be mandated. Instead, we wait until hospitals are
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Covid Basics in Just Five Minutes
There’s a TikTok making the rounds that says everything I’ve been writing here in just five minutes! It took some cajoling to watch it all the way through because the camera movement is a little bothersome, but it’s definitely worth a listen. And, of course, here’s the transcript in full
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: The Best Prime Minister We Never Had
There are few politicians that I gush over, but Ed Broadbent is one of them. We lost one of the good ones. I don’t like him because he’s NDP – there are others in that party who wouldn’t get my vote – but because he’s principled. I’m even a member
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Vaccines are Still Part of the Solution
The XBB booster can help keep you out of the hospital! Why don’t we understand that? From Prof Raywat Deonandan, Epidemiologist & Research Chair at the University of Ottawa: “There are many cognitive barriers preventing many people from understanding Covid and vaccine science. There are three I want to highlight
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: A New Vaccine Study is Giving Me Hope!
Amazing news about a new vaccine methodology! Eric Topol gave a brief rundown of the vaccine and highlighted the study: “Engineered secretory IgA antibodies vs Omicron (BA,1, BA.2, BA.5) were 25 to 75-fold more potent than shots (->IgG) for neutralization. A single nasal spray dose prevented infections in the mouse
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: It’s Airborne, and It Can Cause an Immune Deficiency
Let’s look at the claim that Covid should not be compared to AIDS or referred to as “Airborne AIDS”. One concern about comparing the two is that it makes Covid seem more frightening than it might actually be in a maximizing stance, overplaying the dangers, which could then lead people
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Livable Basic Income Bill
If it’s possible to ensure that everyone has the necessary conditions of live, sign me up! I watched a video on the Pacific Gyre years ago. This post isn’t about all the horrible garbage in the ocean, but about the documentarians who made the film. They had never been on
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Can a Slingshot Down this Goliath?
I read Andreas Malm‘s book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline a few months ago, then watched the movie, and then was reminded of it all again by Abigail Thorn’s latest Philosophy Tube video about being plagiarized by a man. Thorn explains how subtle sexism led to free labour in the home. Even
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