Notices by John (johnzajac@dice.camp)

The absolute oblivion into which Biden and the Democrats threw COVID and the ongoing pandemic will never cease to amaze me.

People literally ~never think about it~ and now few people test even using shitty, unreliable RATs when they get ~very sick~.

People have wildly wrong ideas of how many have died, how many have Long COVID, and how many are infected right now.

~Science journals~ write ponderous articles about "what's happening?!" re: increasing sickness, morbidity and mortality.

People are freaking out about RFK like our public health institutions haven't been making delusional, corrupt anti-science decisions for 5 years already.

Folks, Wormbrain is just following the "Kids don't get COVID, Kids don't spread COVID, COVID is mild, Long COVID is in your head, Long COVID is very rare, SARS2 doesn't harm your immune system, who could have seen there'd be another surge, do masks *really* work?" public health fuckwits schematics for anti-science policymaking.

The "don't blame Democrats" energy is strangely similar to the "don't play politics with guns" energy that shows up after mass shootings in elementary schools.

The most profound cultural technology that neoliberals invented was the idea that history had ended, and the creation of *new history* was simply not possible.

They brainwashed entire populations into seeing obvious moral fuckery as "complicated", into believing that the reason society kept falling farther and farther behind was because it was literally "impossible" to prevent it from dying.

I spent two hours on the phone with someone afraid that Trump would destroy all our institutions. s

@luckytran

That's the wildest part of all the precautions some take against developing COVID: if they're effective against SARS2, they're going to be doubly, triply effective against other airborne diseases, because of the difference in infectiousness.

We really could eliminate airborne disease entirely with minor infrastructure updates and some crackerjack surveillance. Nowhere near the capital cost of, say, lifting Chicago 6 ft.

As COVID gets better at infecting us and better at sticking around in our bodies and shutting down our immune systems, it seems clear two things will happen: 1) incidence of Long COVID will skyrocket, and 2) acute symptoms will be reduced to almost nothing.

This is the most dangerous combination *imaginable*, because most people are laboring under the kind of bio edu you get in 9th grade, just like I was in 2019. They think symptoms = severity.

Not only will people suddenly start dropping from strokes and heart attacks, developing diabetes and autoimmune disease - they'll also just get sicker and sicker and sicker. Everyone will be sick, all the time.

Our medical authorities will declare crises of fitness, nutrition, loneliness, phones, pollution - anything to avoid copping to their catastrophic failure.

And it will continue like this until we get biomarker tests. Then they'll start looking for treatments but not cures, bc money.

It's weird that wanting healthcare professionals to *accurately diagnose illness* is now wanting them to be "saviors"? Isn't that, like, *most of their job*?

Most people believe doctors and the CDC when they say that Long COVID is rare, the vaccines work, and COVID is just a minor cold now. You can hardly blame them for following the people entrusted with *preventing disease*.

Also, the vast majority of doctors and nurses are "letting it rip", even around very sick people.

I'm not sure there's a force in the universe strong enough to convince someone in the United States that they weren't, in fact, locked in their houses for 1.5 years.

The "lockdown" fantasy is so entrenched across the country that people you *actually know* were going to clubs in June 2020 will look you in the eye and say with intense earnestness that they'll never "go back" to being trapped in their house for a year.

They have to justify their current nonsense with an invented past trauma.

Like most things, our prescription system is designed to protect abled people from their own stupidity, not make it easier and simpler for people who actually engage with it regularly to get the medicines they need to thrive.

I'm on lots of meds and managing my prescriptions is literally a top five source of stress in my life right now because of stupid, ridiculous FDA reqs and doctors' abandonment of us all to unending disease and disability.

Anyone else familiar with the whole "oop the system is fucking me over" feeling that a med you can't go off of cold turkey is suddenly hard to get because of doctor fuck ups so you have to beg healthcare workers to give you like two so your don't stroke out?

By the way - literally the most prescribed most benign Rx in the world. 🤷♂️

wheeeee American healthcare fuck this place

So it's collapsing, because it murdered its culture of excellence. And once you destroy a culture, it won't come back: kind of like the coral reefs we're blithely slaughtering every year with our pollution.

What's most telling is that Boeing's executives are *totally, honestly nonplussed* by what's happening. It's a combination of "why are these passengers so worried about planes falling apart?" and "it seems impossible to not build planes that might fall apart."

They pumped it full of steroids while "trimming the fat" - which actually means they fired all the people who knew what they were doing and/or cared if the product killed people.

Expanded production lines + dramatically reduced staff + erased oversight = massive short term profits.

Obviously, it wasn't going to last.

@sidereal @seachanger @inquiline

The doctors not wearing masks thing is a level of injustice I have difficulty not seeing red over. I have to literally dig my nails into my palm when I'm forced to see my endocrinologist in person, because he used to be the best doctor I've ever had and now he's like "The surgeon general says that isolation is more dangerous than COVID, John. Did you know that?"

It's like, how do *I*, an opera singer turned brand guy turned househusband, know more than you?

@BioGeek23 @sidereal @seachanger @inquiline

Right? That's what I meant when I said "Institutionalism is a beast". My mom will do anything the CDC or Anthony Fauci tells her to do. So will doctors, hospitals, business, workplaces, government buildings, courthouses, etc etc etc.

IF it weren't so inexcusable, Biden's deft erasure of COVID using the subtle authoritarianism of executive branch institutions would be an impressive example of a society-wide psy-op with plausible deniability.

Boeing is remarkable because it's a nearly perfect exemplar of the outcomes of our current economy, whether on society, the planet, or even companies themselves.

Boeing used to be well known for how well it treated its employees. It used to have tons of "lifers" who worked there until they retired. It used to make a respectable profit, and enjoyed almost universal praise for its product quality.

Then, modern capitalist goons showed up.

"Getting sick is bad and you should avoid it" and "Genocide is bad and you should never do it" seem to be the most controversial takes in the Western world right now, so...

I guess that's how we're doing.

@jimmylittle @michaelgemar

SARS2 and the Flu are very different.

CFRs have gotten lower for COVID, but are still >2x the Flu, just by official numbers, which are an undercount. Post-acute deaths from SARS2 are significantly higher, as indicated by excess death rates.

The risk of Long COVID is *by infection*, and your risk goes up with each subsequent infection. So when I say that 31m people got the flu in 2023 while (wastewater est) >241m people got COVID that same year, it's relevant.

@jimmylittle @michaelgemar

Using a limited definition of Long COVID that excludes things like the multiples higher risk of stroke, diabetes, autoimmunity, and other bad stuff, the CDC's Household Pulse Survey finds that 7-8% of the country has PASC that significantly impacts their ability to work or live day to day.

A not-insignificant percentage of that 7-8% will never achieve functionality again.

In an environment where 200-300m people are infected each year, the math is tough.

Everyone's Joe Biden epitaph starts with "you beat the pandemic..." and I'm just sitting here with half-lidded eyes like...

He literally has COVID *right now*.