Notices by Mary Austin VOTED 4 HARRIS! (maryaustinbooks@mstdn.social)

For several weeks, a CDC study on bird flu in cats has been suppressed by #Trump. Groups like the AMA have been helping with messaging, which is great, but they still didn't have access to actively suppressed papers like this.

Apparently now we get the report.

If you have #cats mask up! If #BirdFlu shows up under #Trump it will show up unannounced, and it is possible that people can give bird flu to cats.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2025/02/20/bird-flu-spread-people-cats/79318131007/

It's almost like "defend white womanhood!" is completely disingenuous. 🤔

Remember in history class, when we learned about the Gilded Age snake oil medicines? Sawdust substituted for flour in bread? The kind of stuff that led to the creation of the FDA?

Can we please not go back?

#SaveOurServices

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/02/19/kennedy-fda-head-resigns-food-safety/79093267007/

@Daojoan
"Will these protests change anything? That's the wrong question. The right question is: what would it mean if people stopped protesting? What would it say about American democracy if citizens stopped showing up to defend it? When the temperature drops below freezing and people still choose to stand up for democratic institutions, that's not just resistance - it's resilience."

YES!

Great article! I would only add that it's a huge mood boost to get up and DO SOMETHING.

Holy fuck y'all, these oligarchs think they're going to have the military on their side to crack down on us.

Even some of history's dumbest despots at least made sure the military ate. 🤯

Like, we've known for 8 years that President Bone Spurs had no respect for our men and women in uniform, but once again, the stupidity is as astounding as the evil.

#Military #oligarchy #trump #fascism

https://www.military.com/daily-news/investigations-and-features/2025/02/14/over-151-million-taken-soldiers-paychecks-food-costs-spent-elsewhere-army.html

Years ago, I discovered a drug that might benefit #cancer patients significantly. It could even be produced quite cheaply compared to most drugs. We were all ready to publish the results and start clinical trials, when a multinational drug company started holding negotiations with my bosses-- from which I was mysteriously excluded, despite the fact that the idea was mine and I had done all the work.

And then for the first time I started facing threats to my life for trying to continue the work.

They messed with my premed file to keep me from getting into medical school, but I wound up getting in anyway. There I met the best man I ever knew in my life: my beloved mentor in medicine, a man of extraordinary compassion and integrity.

Side note to Nazis: he is the title character of my book, THE LAST ROSE OF SUMMER, and he was devoutly Jewish.

After seeing that the research on the drug remained suppressed, and having gotten to know him for several years, I trusted him with the truth.

After reviewing the science and hearing me describe the actions of my former bosses, he took the extraordinary step of allowing me to take time out of pediatric residency to try to reconstruct the research. I was overjoyed.

Then I found out he himself had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer himself.

He was a man of such great heart that he made time to see a pedi resident despite having just been told he was dying. I told him I had a complex, serious problem to discuss (and I did)...

and despite his own serious problem he still saw me immediately. The man was a saint.

He did not know I had a drug that might benefit him, and I did not know he was ill. We just loved one another as much as any father and daughter might.

So I explained the situation and the rest of the events of THE LAST ROSE OF SUMMER followed.

Strangely, in lab my culture tumor cells never responded to the drug as they should have, as the had before. Only after my beloved mentor died did I find out...

...the drug stock had been sabotaged at the level of the supplier. The person who told me this laughed at me.

No other doctor after him had the courage to allow me to continue the research, nor did they want to let me even send the work to another institution. They pulled some dirty tricks to get me to stay there instead, but I would not be complicit in a coverup of a drug that might save lives. I would literally rather be dead, and I proved it.

I graduated, sent the project to a lab in another country as a Hail Mary pass (my reliance on actual Hail Mary's as an Episcopalian is why I chose the pen name Mary) and started getting death threats again. Apparently that other lab did something with the results-- but never published them.

A couple of years later, a lab in Asia published a paper using a similar sort of drug to the one I'd used, and they demonstrated the same effect in cancer cells. But that paper had crucial steps missing...

...and the group never followed it up, which is extraordinary. I explain the details of the science in the book. It is too involved for social media posts.

I sacrificed my whole career in research and eventually my personal safety and health because literally anything was better than being part of something so evil. The way I saw it, when you're at the South Pole, every direction is north.

There's literally nothing worse than covering up a drug that might help people, so fuck it, basically.

There's a whole lot more to this story, but suffice it to say: billionaires can shut down anything they want so long as the person who opposes them doesn't have enough support. Very few people had the courage to talk publicly about this situation, although I am exceedingly grateful to @jackyan for being one of them.

I've been hit with a range of sophisticated and unsophisticated attacks on my life. This is nothing new.

If I can survive this bullshit, anyone can. And that is why I say...

...my cats and I are going nowhere.

My pets who lived through an environmental poisoning with me eventually succumbed to it. I was very sick, but am starting to recover from that and long Covid.

I am the same person as ever.

Folks, when you're at the South Pole every direction is up. Fascism is another South Pole. We are going to resist however we have to.

And if anybody's interested in the drug, the kindle version of the book is $2.99. I set the price as low as I was allowed. 🤷🏼♀️

And heck, if anybody has any connections with the White House, Joe Biden is doing wonderful things to fight against injustices in the treatment of cancer. This might be the kind of thing his team would want to hear about-- though of course it's hard for the average person to get through the lines of communication.

Regardless, we have as much power as we have tolerance for risk. All the fuckery with our vote shows how frightened these Nazis are.

Imagine our power if we dare take risks.

Y'all, I have lived through terrible things.

I don't believe this is over, and in any case I have already spent years fighting against impossible odds and faced a great deal of violence because of it. Many times when I needed someone to stand with me, they took the easy route out. I should be dead about a million times over, and somehow I am not.

The horrors persist, but so do I and my cats. No matter what happens, we are going nowhere.

THE LAST ROSE OF SUMMER is a pretty short book and it's intended to be readable for people with non-medical backgrounds.

Lately a Nazi troll who harassed me on here has written at least one false review pretending the book is supportive of Hitler. The book is extremely supportive of Jews, immigrants, LGBT people, and people of color throughout, and describes discrimination I witnessed. So it's pretty clearly an anti-Nazi book, hence a Nazi bothering me. 🤷🏼♀️

https://www.amazon.com/Last-Rose-Summer-Mary-Austin-ebook/dp/B08G4J1WGJ

Here are the other outlets. I used to have a website, but it kept getting attacked.

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-last-rose-of-summer-mary-austin/14849805

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-last-rose-of-summer-mary-austin/1137245105

https://www.booksamillion.com/p/Last-Rose-Summer/Mary-Austin/9781480890510

https://www.archwaypublishing.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/806852-The-Last-Rose-of-Summer

Hard on the heels of trying to ban Black History Month, now the fragile Klansmen in this regime want to erase the stories of #women and #LGBT people at #NASA. Rose survived poverty, domestic violence, and homelessness to become an aerospace engineer at NASA. Because that scares the crap out of mediocre white men like Trump, Musk and Vance, her page was scrubbed from NASA's website. (mErItOCraCy!) So here is her blog, starting with the bio page.

https://www.rosedf.space/aboutme

OMG DYING 🤣

#LGBT #homophobia