CDC implosion, Vaccine debacle, Mortality data, Disability data, Wastewater data, and more
Bonus How to argue with an AI booster
Welcome to the latest issue of the Covid-Is-Not-Over newsletter!
So where we at? Somehow we’re found ourselves in a timeline where The rise of humanlike chatbots detracts from developing AI for the human good. A vital tool on pushing back on AI slop is this one right here: How To Argue With An AI Booster. We can even all aspire to be an AI hater.
WTF I can believe people are asking why Covid keeps roaring back every summer, even as pandemic fades from public view? It’s because we’re ignoring it. It’s because we’re doing nothing to clean the air, provide adequate sick leave, let people work from home if it makes sense, and all those other good things.
As much as we might want to pretend otherwise, Covid is affecting athlete's careers. As much as we might want to pretend otherwise, Covid is going to be lurking in the background as memory problems increase among Nordic children.
An Actual Neofascist Coup Is Now Underway in the United States. How’s that manifesting in our neck of the woods? Access to Covid vaccines being curtailed and tightly controlled. Which is causing the CDC to implode. What could possibly be coming next?
Readings about the ongoing CDC debacle at the end. More next week, I imagine.
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Top Articles Everyone Should Read on Covid
What COVID-19 Does to the Body (Eighth Edition, June 2025) / Pandemic Accountability Index
ANSWERED: Is COVID-19 Harmful to Children? A Compilation of Peer-Reviewed Medical Research / Pandemic Accountability Index
Immunity Debt: The Conspiracy Theory Elevated to Popular Pseudoscience That Is Making Children Sick / LIL_Science
"You Have to Live Your Life:" Responses to Common COVID Minimizing Phrases
Simple things you can do to avoid COVID by Lucky Tran / Aranet
COVID Incubation Period: Key Facts and Guidelines by Sarah Hudgens / Health
Calm-mongering: Fine-tuning the potential emotional impact of risk is not the same as managing it by Arijit Chakravarty and T. Ryan Gregory / Monkeys on Typewriters
Why is EVERYONE more SICK? by Lola Germs
Covid-19: Will It Mutate To Nothingness? by Rawat Deonandan
Everything "That Friend" Wants You to Know About Covid by Jessica Wildfire / OK Doomer
Coronavirus Disease 2019 and Airborne Transmission: Science Rejected, Lives Lost. Can Society Do Better? by Lidia Morawska, William Bahnfleth, et al. / Clinical Infectious Diseases
Real Impact of COVID-19 Infection and Why We Should Care by Jeff Gilchrist, PhD
Navigating the Long Haul: A Comprehensive Review of Long-COVID Sequelae, Patient Impact, Pathogenesis, and Management by Nishant Rathod Jr., Sunil Kumar, et al. / Cureus
A TALE OF TWO TECHNOLOGIES: Far-UVC light disinfection and mRNA vaccines are both potent life saving technologies. In the fight against Covid-19, one was thrust into the limelight, while the other languished in the shadows by Nicola Jane Boyd / Matters of Perspective
There is currently no paid subscription option for this newsletter and I do not have any plans to switch to that model. However, Substack does have an option where subscribers can pledge to subscribe “just in case” and a few of you have done so. I very much appreciated the vote of confidence in what I’m doing here. If you want to send a little “Thank You” I have a Ko-fi tip jar set up. It. My plan is to spend whatever is donated by supporting artists on Bandcamp.
COVID-19 Forced Us To Talk About Mortality Data. We Can’t Afford To Stop by Farnaz Malik / Health Policy Watch
By digging deeper into these data by age, location, race and ethnicity, public health decision-makers saw a clearer picture of the pandemic’s toll. They saw that nursing homes were especially hard hit, or that certain neighborhoods in New York were suffering from higher death rates. Using mortality data, policymakers could develop the most effective plans to target the spread of COVID-19 and save as many lives as possible.
But the value of mortality data doesn’t end with COVID-19. If we’re serious about addressing the world’s most pressing health challenges, mortality data must remain a global priority. During the pandemic, excess mortality estimates exposed the staggering scale of loss—over 14 million excess deaths by the end of 2021, according to the WHO—laying bare the limits of health systems and the deep inequities between and within countries.
Disability data reveals hidden global burden of long COVID / News-Medical
An international team of researchers has conducted the most comprehensive global-to-local analysis to date on long COVID risk, using disability data from the height of the pandemic to identify vulnerable populations. Drawing on the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2021 framework, the study examined years lived with disability (YLDs) caused by COVID-19 across 920 locations during 2020 and 2021. The results reveal that YLDs may serve as an early indicator of long COVID risk-particularly in areas where post-COVID conditions remain underreported.
Wastewater as an early indicator for short-term forecasting COVID-19 hospitalization in Germany by Jonas Radermacher, Steffen Thiel, et al. / BMC Public Health
This study reinforces the potential of wastewater surveillance as an early warning tool for COVID-19 hospitalizations in Germany. While strong correlations were observed, the integration of wastewater data into predictive models did not improve their performance. Nevertheless, wastewater viral load serves as a valuable indicator for monitoring pandemic trends, suggesting its utility in public health surveillance and resource allocation. Further research may help to clarify the real-time applicability of wastewater data and expand its use to other pathogens and data sources.
Plan for a world of post-COVID immune effects / Canada Healthwatch: The Weekly Dose
The neat split between “people with long COVID” and “everyone else” never did line up with clinical realities. A growing body of evidence suggests the after-effects of infection sit on a spectrum. They’re not the same for everyone, and for many of us they’re small.
Because truly never-infected people are now rare, most studies compare post-infection people with other post-infection people, so subtle but important changes are easy to miss.
In plain terms: for a while after recovering from COVID, our bodies aren’t as good at fending off other bugs. These changes are small, but across tens of millions of people, they add up.
The crisis is “expasperating”: Long COVID compounds economic hardship in Argentina by Delfina Marchese / The Sick Times
Argentina is facing an invisible Long COVID crisis, marked by a lack of clinics, minimal media attention, no disability insurance to help people with the disease cope with their inability to work, and only a couple of Long COVID studies — all amid a 48% cut to the national health budget under President Javier Milei. This move mirrors his close ally, President Trump, who has targeted and attempted to erase Long COVID and the ongoing pandemic in the U.S.
Long COVID is more than fatigue. Our new study suggests its impact is similar to a stroke or Parkinson’s by Danielle Hitch, Genevieve Pepin, Kieva Richards / The Conversation
People with long COVID reported worse disability than 98% of the general Australian population. A total of 86% of those with long COVID met the threshold for serious disability compared with 9% of Australians overall.
On average, people had trouble with daily activities on about 27 days a month and were unable to function on about 18 days.
Tasks such as eating or dressing were less affected, but more complex areas – housework and socialising – were badly impacted. People could often meet basic needs, but their ability to contribute to their homes, workplaces and communities was limited.
Quality of life was also badly affected. Energy levels and social life were the most impacted, reflecting how fatigue and brain fog affect activities, relationships and community connections. On average, overall quality of life scores were 23% lower than the general population.
RFK Jr demanded a vaccine study be retracted — the journal said no by Rachel Fieldhouse / Nature
US health secretary and vaccine sceptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr has called for the retraction of a Danish study that found no link between aluminium in vaccines and chronic diseases in children — a rare move for a US public official. Aluminium has been used for almost a century to enhance the immune system’s response to some vaccines. But some people claim the ingredient is linked to rising rates of childhood disorders such as autism.
Public-health officials in Kennedy’s position rarely request that studies be retracted, says Ivan Oransky, a specialist in academic publishing and co-founder of the media organization Retraction Watch. Through this request, “Secretary Kennedy has demonstrated that he wants the scientific literature to bend to his will”, says Oransky.
Trump and RFK Jr. to Ban Covid-19 Vaccine ‘Within Months’ by Tom Latchem / The Daily Beast
The Trump administration will move to pull the COVID vaccine off the U.S. market “within months,” one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s closest associates has told the Daily Beast.
Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who has repeatedly claimed in the face of scientific consensus that the vaccines are more dangerous than the virus, told the Daily Beast that Kennedy’s stance is shared by “influential” members of President Donald Trump’s family. Like Kennedy himself, no Trumps hold any scientific qualifications.
RFK Jr. Could Blow Up the Vaccine Industry With One Simple Move by Jonathan Cohn / The Bulwark
“My concern is that if they’re trying to . . . essentially dissolve the liability protections for manufacturers, I worry that this would open the floodgates to lawsuits,” Richard Hughes, a Washington-based attorney with a long career of advising vaccine manufacturers and serving on government boards, told me.
“At that point,” added Hughes, who during the COVID pandemic worked for the mRNA vaccine manufacturer Moderna, “why would this be an attractive market to stay in, with that kind of liability threat?”
One irony is that some of Kennedy’s potential changes could work out poorly for the very people he purportedly wants to help—those who suffer the rare, but real harms from vaccines. They would be losing their best, most reliable way of getting compensation.
As back-to-school season approaches, Canadian employers are making a mistake by mandating workers back to the office by Andrea DeKeseredy, Amy Kaler and Michelle Maroto / The Conversation
Canadian employers turned to work-from-home and remote work to meet the unprecedented risks of the COVID-19 pandemic. More than five years on from the start of the pandemic, it’s clear that these policies have other benefits for both workplaces and for Canadian society as a whole.
Work-from-home and remote-work flexibility has driven gains in workplace equity. It also limits outbreaks of respiratory infections by enabling parents to keep their kids home from school or child care when they’re sick. Removing remote work policies during the back-to-school season is a dangerous game to play, especially with declining vaccination rates.
As illness spreads again this fall, this game may very well lead to productivity losses and more expenses for governments and businesses across Canada.
It takes a village to keep you and me healthy by Ryan McCormick / Examined
The health of our nation—and each individual within it—depends on understanding that health isn't just personal responsibility, but instead a collective investment in the social foundations that make healthy lives possible. Top 100 lists of individual actions should be built upon preconditions of group cooperation and benevolent leadership.
I hope we red white and blue Americans, MAHA included, see the folly and betrayal of continuing down a path that systematically undermines health determinants. It is self evident folks. I hope we recommit to evidence-based investments that create conditions for all Americans to thrive.
Why We Mask: Solidarity, Creativity & Community Care in a Not-Quite-Post-Pandemic World - The Providence Eye by Rachel Swift / The Providence Eye
During lockdown, many people became civically engaged, some for the first time, participating in massive, impactful protests and talking about systemic oppression in Rhode Island and nationwide.
“There are two tracks when a horrific thing happens,” Kindschy explains. “People can get more callous and dissociated — or they can let themselves be broken open. When you’re dissociated you can’t be present with any of it. When you’re present you can be present with all of it.”
What is Kindschy’s hope for the future?
“That people let all of these horrific things change them,” she says. “The pandemic changed me irreparably. And I’m grateful for that.”
What a Week: CDC Implosion & Anti-Vax Attacks
Beyond Broken: What The CDC Crisis Tells Us About Public Health
Who is Jim O’Neill? CDC chief set to bolster RFK Jr plan to remake vaccine policy
CDC director ousted, top officials resign after RFK Jr. push to change vaccine policy
CDC in crisis: Director fights firing, top officials resign over RFK Jr anti-vaxx push
‘People will die because of this’: How RFK Jr. drove out the CDC’s senior leaders
US CDC taps vaccine skeptic to lead COVID committee | Reuters
ACIP member critical of COVID vaccines to lead review | CIDRAP
Veering from CDC, ACOG recommends maternal vaccination against COVID-19 | CIDRAP
Breaking down how a massive U.S. funding cut could impact future mRNA vaccines | CBC News
HHS scraps further work on life-saving mRNA vaccine platform
FDA approves new Covid shots with limits on who can get them under RFK Jr.
Lisa Fischer w/ Terence Blanchard & Bill Frisell. Wild Horses.
Can't thank you enough for the Rachel Swift "Why We Mask" link, among so many others over the months and years. It crystallizes the present moment in fundamental ways In a time of outright eugenicist propaganda and the disemboweling of public health and the common welfare, masking for oneself -- and others -- is not just the right thing to do, but resistance of the most basic kind. It commits to a future where community and decency are valued. It's a glint of optimism in the onslaught of horrors and hatred: I mask, therefore I hope.
You lost me with the idiot who wants to teach you "how to argue..."