COVID is not over

June 2025 update

The problem with free riders

Research

I’m of the opinion that exploitation is innate.  Parasites and predators are two distinct forms. Free riding is parasitic, primarily, and natural. 

Organisms try to take advantage of the work done by other organisms to create order from entropy… herbivores take advantage of plants, carnivores take advantage of herbivores…

Ancient wisdom for modern times

An essay on some recent books

What does it mean to live sustainably in a finite world?

The decline of the west

Cognitive dissonance

the discourse had and has been seized by what people want to believe, or what oligarchs want people to believe: what pays, not what is true. There are no consequences for being wrong, and no self awareness.

More Covid

it’s really depressing for me

Who broke the internet

Cory Doctorow fingers the perps

the internet didn't turn to shit because of the "great forces of history," or "network effects," or "returns to scale." Rather, the Great Enshittening is the result of specific policy choices, made in living memory, by named individuals, who were warned at the time that this would happen, and they did it anyway.

Best current information on efficacy of masks

Sentinel Intelligence 

Here’s the bottom line: Masks work. We’re going to examine all the evidence that they work, why you need them, and where you can get the best.

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A major investigation on masks in Clinical Microbiology Reviews examined 100 published articles on masks and found that when they’re “correctly and consistently worn,” masks and especially N95 respirators are “effective in reducing transmission of respiratory diseases.” The authors explain why N95 masks work. As they point out, “respirators are not simple sieves,” meaning they can easily trap viral particles 65-125 nanometers in diameter.

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evidence also shows that masks work and respirators work better.

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You still need a mask for a range of reasons, as explained here. Vaccines reduce your risk of Long Covid by roughly 62 percent, but even that mediocre protection wanes over time, requiring boosters once or even twice a year. As the studies show, it’s no trifling matter. It’s a condition characterized by lasting damage to multiple organ systems, and patients have put their pain and quality of life on par with advanced terminal cancer. The mountains of research have prompted many experts to describethe result as “the greatest mass disabling event in human history,” with an oncoming health crisis “so large as to be unfathomable.”

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CDC’s own journal, Emerging and Infectious Diseases:

In summary, it is likely that a substantial proportion of patients surviving COVID-19 will experience long-term symptoms requiring prolonged care, even after mild to moderate disease. These symptoms might negatively affect patients’ quality of life and represent an additional burden for healthcare services and social security.

That was published in March of 2022

DOGE

Das makes a good case for the destructive nature of DOGE and points out the fact that government delivers public goods and does so fairly efficiently. Trying to run government like a business perverts the incentives.

Yves Smith suggests that 

Das is downplaying the severity of the US slide, please read this Fortune story ‘The Big Short’ investor who predicted the 2008 crash warns the market is ‘underestimating’ the economic impact of DOGE’s mass spending cuts (hat tip resilc). Representative bits:

[Danny] Moses argued investors are already beginning to see disruptions in consumer confidence—which last month saw its steepest drop in four years—and will continue to hear similar trends in upcoming earnings calls. These slowdowns have yet to be priced into the market, he said…

The tell-tale signs of the weakening economy will be seen in small businesses and “private contractors that are doing legitimate work services that are now being forced to make decisions on their business,” Moses said.

DOGE and Musk could be Trojan horses for dismembering government capabilities and decreasing regulatory constraints on business. Actions to date have significantly weakened bodies responsible for oversight and enforcing legislation. This would allow interests associated with the President to loot the nation. 

COVID and the immune system

Kids are getting sicker

This season, H1N1 and H3N2 are both circulating at high levels, with the US experiencing the worst flu season in at least 15 years. 57 children have died. Meanwhile, on January 14, CBS reported that the norovirus wave had already hit more than double last year’s peak, with no end in sight.

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Parents are continually urged to keep their eyes out for illnesses on the ever-growing list of “spiking” and “surging” diseases, though the tone of reporting in the media is one of calm reassurance. 

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At no point in this article are parents urged to wear masks, investigate the air quality at their local schools, or stay home when ill. It’s unclear, what, exactly, “watching out”, lacking any public health interventions or guidance whatsoever, is supposed to accomplish.

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Immune dysregulation and autoimmunity are considered to be major factors underlying the pathogenesis of Long COVID. A January 2024 article in Science titled “Immune Damage in Long COVID” states: 

Patients with Long Covid display signs of immune dysfunction and exhaustion (1), persistent immune cell activation (3), and autoimmune antibody production (1), which are also pathological features of acute COVID-19.

The article goes on to explain that the complement system, part of your innate immune system, is activated during acute infections and is remaining activated in Long COVID patients. The recent piece Solving the Puzzle of Long COVID also lists immune dysregulation and autoimmunity as a leading hypothesis for the underlying pathogenesis of the condition.

How Musk engineered the coup

NYT reports

How Elon Musk Executed His Takeover of the Federal Bureaucracy

The plan for his Department of Government Efficiency was mapped out in a series of closely held meetings in Palm Beach, Fla., and through early intelligence-gathering efforts in Washington.  …. The team is now moving faster than many of the legal efforts to stop it, making drastic changes that could be hard to unwind even if they are ultimately constrained by the courts. Mr. Musk’s associates have pushed out workers, ignored civil service protections, torn up contracts and effectively shuttered an entire agency established by Congress: the U.S. Agency for International Development.

A month into Mr. Trump’s second term, Mr. Musk and his crew of more than 40 now have about all the passwords they could ever need.

His swift success has been fueled by the president, who handed him the hazy assignment of remaking the federal government shortly after the billionaire endorsed him last summer. Flattered that Mr. Musk wanted to work with him, Mr. Trump gave him broad leeway to design a strategy and execute it, showing little interest in the details.

COVID five year retrospective

What was known, mismanaged

And some explanations.

the current pandemic has killed more than 20 million people worldwide.

What follows is an attempt to put COVID-19 in context based on a focused consideration of a coronavirus literature that has become quite large (and intractable) in the past five years.  My priors are that the only way to address a scientific problem correctly is to go back to the beginnings so that the foundation of current research is as strong as possible. 

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Research is beginning to show that T-cell exhaustion and long-term immune system damage follows SARS-CoV-2 infection, especially in people with long Covid.  Moreover, the proper testing of candidate SARS and by extension SARS-CoV-2 vaccines would require an animal model that reproduces severe coronavirus disease in humans.  During the initial research on a SARS vaccine, macaques were used after being used to confirm Koch’s final postulate that SARS-CoV is the etiologic agent of SARS. [4]  However, these monkeys did not always recapitulate the disease state in humans.  Early research on the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines used rhesus macaques as the experimental nonhuman primate.

Where do we go from here?  None of the foregoing is meant to cast aspersions, but it must be noted that the current COVID-19 vaccines are a rushed and unlikely technical fix for a problem that did not necessarily have to exist.  COVID-19 is the third serious coronavirus outbreak since 2002.  As has been noted by many, there was every reason to expect another coronavirus outbreak, one that could be worse than SARS or MERS.  So far, SARS-CoV-2 is the agent of a worldwide pandemic, and new mutations that make the virus more transmissible and/or virulent have been identified.  Given the apparent unpredictability of the course of a coronavirus infection (the sniffles of a common cold, enduring widespread and long-term organ damage, death) there is no good reason that coronaviruses have not remained a continuing commitment in biomedical research since the original SARS outbreak.

Musk, policy in the guise of efficiency

Social Security

Is in the crosshairs 

What is going on should be obvious. Musk wants to cut off your benefits and then have Congress use the savings to give himself a gigantic tax cut. But Social Security is incredibly popular, so he can’t be open about his intentions. Instead, he is trying to convince Americans that our Social Security system is overrun with massive fraud. The truth is the opposite.