TheModerateTankie

Still set in the alt-history introduced by For All Mankind, Star City shows how the paranoid Russian space program won the race to the moon under the watchful eye of the Soviet surveillance state. This is not the ’60s optimism found in the Baldwin household, but rather a molehunt for an American spy feeding Uncle Sam space base plans. Amid the espionage, the Soviet Union pushes forward with its plans to reach the moon first, and they don’t care how many Cosmonauts they have to lose to get there.

lmao

This shit sucks so hard.

Sci-fi laser-focused on appealing to Apple stock shareholders.

At the beginning of For All Mankind when the soviets beat the USA to the moon, it made me laugh so hard watching the Americans stewing about it. The rest of the show is boring and mostly sucks.

#Doctors share why it’s still important to take the virus seriously.

#Key Points

• COVID still causes significant hospitalizations and deaths despite declining severe impact rates.
• Re-infections increase risk for certain health issues.
• Annual vaccination is key to preventing severe disease and reducing long COVID risk.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, COVID was associated with an estimated 290,000 to 450,000 hospitalizations and between 34,000 and 53,000 deaths between July 2024 and July 2025, the most recent year that data is available. These stats show just how much the virus is still impacting us.

For comparison, here's how the flu impacted people in 2024-2025 Which was a more severe flu season than normal:

CDC estimates there were 51 million influenza (flu)-related illnesses, 23 million medical visits, 710,000 hospitalizations and 45,000 deaths during the 2024-2025 flu season. Based on CDC criteria, the severity of the 2024-2025 season was high.

The estimated flu-related illnesses and medical visits are higher than the 2017-2018 season, the last high severity flu season. Estimated hospitalizations are the same as 2017-2018, while estimated deaths are lower.

I guess this is the new normal. Double the amount of severe respiratory disease than before, and little to no seasonality.

This was published on nature.com.

It looks like the whole article was AI generated.Here are responses from pubpeer.

I never thought I'd see professionals just kind of collectively give up on putting effort into things. Maybe by "fexcectorn" and "frymbial" levels are abnormal?

É Preciso Dar um Jeito, Meu Amigo is a song composed by Brazilian musicians Roberto Carlos and Erasmo Carlos released in 1971 as part of the album Carlos, Erasmo.[1] The song addresses the need for a response to the crimes committed during the Brazilian military dictatorship, including the disappearance of deputy Rubens Paiva, whose story is portrayed in the film Ainda Estou Aqui.[2]

Cumulative effects of COVID infections

During our talk the physicist summarized what the science now says about COVID infections, whether they appear mild or severe. Every infection increases the risk for heart attacks, strokes and heart disease; for new-onset diabetes; for cognitive decline and dementia; for deregulating the immune system; and for reactivating viruses like Epstein-Barr or shingles.

An epidemic of shingles, for example, is now afflicting young Chinese adults who have just recovered from a bout with COVID.

At the beginning of the pandemic researchers worried about the effects of an acute infection requiring hospitalization. Now the focus has shifted to the long-term impacts of repeated infections and long COVID, says Bar-Yam. Here again the science shows that risks are real and cumulative, particularly among those suffering from long COVID.

“The science is saying our health is progressively deteriorating,” says Bar-Yam.

Because COVID destabilizes the immune system, researchers are now beginning to see a link between repeat COVID infections and rising cancer rates in young people. One study recently found that a COVID infection can accelerate or increase cancer risk, while another study revealed that a COVID infection substantially heightened the risk of six cancers caused by the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus.

In this vein Bar-Yam has also co-authored a new peer-reviewed paper in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine Focus that draws some disturbing comparisons between repeated COVID infections and untreated HIV infections, noting each can cause chronic inflammation, immune exhaustion and accelerated biological aging.

Bar-Yam and fellow researchers are not saying that COVID is the same as HIV-acquired AIDS — the two are vastly different viruses spread in very different ways. But a comparison of the two immune destabilizers helps us see something that public health discourse has largely neglected: “We may be living through a slow-moving immune decline crisis.”

SARS-CoV-2 and HIV-1, though distinct, share parallels in their biochemical traits and mechanisms (1, 3, 7), long-term impacts and societal responses (4). Both can establish persistent infections in tissue reservoirs (37, 127), immune dysfunction (21, 42, 56, 57), vulnerability to other infections including opportunistic (68, 70, 71, 74, 222), systemic damage including hallmarks of accelerated biological aging (184, 187), and premature neurocognitive disorders (117). HIV integrates into DNA, whereas SARS-CoV-2 and its parts persist in organs like the blood vessels, brain, heart, tonsils, and lungs (127).

The statement that SARS-CoV-2 is “airborne AIDS” may be an oversimplification, but it draws attention to emerging evidence showing that the virus induces a distinct form of acquired immunodeficiency (AID). The phrase emphasizes key similarities and is grounded in evidence of shared outcomes, including immune dysfunction through T cell depletion and exhaustion(16, 39, 101), persistent systemic damage, and neurocognitive decline. These outcomes are further highlighted by the increased vulnerability to infectious diseases (50, 62-66), including those that are signature indicators of immune deficiency typically associated with HIV/AIDS(66, 68-78), as well as likely several types of cancer (79-85). Combined with its airborne spread and high transmissibility, SARS-CoV-2 is an ongoing threat to immunity and contributes to the population-level spread of many infections, amplifying its impact on public health.

What can anyone say at this point?

As the Flu Surges in Asia, Could Getting Sick Year-Round Be the New Normal?

This is like year 3 or 4 of record levels of flu activity.

keep up to date with vaccinations and wear masks if you can.

Here's something we've known for years being reported in major news publications. Pretty much every major study on this has shown the same results. A cumulative damage effect is shown with a virus that can attack our vascular system, immune system, brain, and all our major organs.

And people whose ability to focus or concentrate on anything is shot are blaming social media and vaccines.

The study, of nearly a half-million people under 21, published Tuesday in Lancet Infectious Diseases, provides evidence that Covid reinfections can increase the risk of long-term health consequences and contradicts the idea that being infected a second time might lead to a milder outcome, medical experts said.

Here's another article about the study in time:

“The message is about how seriously you should treat your potential risk of getting a second COVID-19 infection,” says Chen. These results, along with other research, suggest that there might be a cumulative harmful effect of repeat COVID-19 infections on the body, and scientists are trying to better understand those potential long-term effects. Chen is also continuing the work to study what effect getting vaccinated following a first infection might have on not just the risk of additional infections, but on the development of Long COVID as well.

I would be surprised if the risk didn't increase with age.

And a relevant post to someone who predicted this would happen early on:

When I told everybody here and argued with many overly confident people that the evidence appeared to me to show that Covid was a serious and exceptional infection, and that the long Covid risk would remain and probably increase after infection, I was accused of not understanding that immunity builds with infection.

I tried to explain that the virus harms immunity and was called an alarmist by people that had more advanced credentials than I, whilst I was still a medical student.

...

It’s hard to convey the indignant rage I feel over my future- and your futures- having been robbed from us.

Anyone with a chronic health issue has to become an expert on their chronic health issue because regular doctors can be dismissive of chronic heatlh problems, so I thought these two threads should be shared with anyone who has long covid.

Here's a thread by Ryan Hasner, who tracks covid variants, about the evidence for viral persistance being the cause of a lot of Long Covid cases.: bsky or xcancel

TLDR; His conclusion is that due to the types of antibodies they are seeing covid is likley peristing in deep lung tissue or places in the body with a similar structure to deep lung tissue. He thinks the idea that it's viral protien fragments to be unlikely due to the traits exhibited in the antibody response and for how long these antibodies are being produced in people with long covid.

Also:

I don't know if this is replicable, but here is a twitter thread by a user who recovered from long covid and how they treated themselves by concluding that viral persistance was the cause: https://xcancel.com/sun_in_winter12/status/1962944555826676006#m

In particular she recommends Glutathione and CoQ10, some dietary changes, and anti-virals.

Glutathione, CoQ10, alpha lipoic acid can all help with this.

Glutathione in particular has been shown to have multiple antiviral properties.

It's often depleted in chronic infections such as HIV, and supplementing it can help restore immune function.

She hasn't detailed everything yet, but some of her process and dietary changes that helped are detailed in the thread and on this page: https://longcovidbegone.substack.com/p/a-positive-update-how-i-stopped-needing

Also Also

Here is a new study showing people who were vaccine only had better immune responses to new covid variants than people who had "hybrid immunity": https://xcancel.com/brownecfm/status/1961839511496806594#m

"The unexpected finding that vaccination-only participants showed superior cross-neutralization compared to individuals with hybrid immunity challenges conventional assumptions about hybrid immunity advantages'."

This is something fitterhappieraj predicted in 2020: "cov2 is built by nature to distort memory formation. vaccines dont have those machines. i believe we will see the first time a vaccination regimen yield superior immunity than a nonseroconverting natural viral course. the first person to write this up gets an honorary MD"

Would you be surprised to learn that this article doesn't mention any health effects of getting covid, a virus that can cause brain damage?

Sussman and Frankel are not alone in their anxiety. Eli is one of more than 3.6 million children born in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic who are walking into elementary schools across the country this fall. They're children who came into a world full of masked adults dousing themselves in hand sanitizer. Many spent the first year of their lives either in isolation in lockdowns or with only a handful of trusted people in their bubbles. And the long-term impact on these "COVID kindergartners" remains unclear.

Maybe we should ban hand sanitizer?

A 2023 study published in Epic Research found that children who turned 2 between October and December 2021 were about 32% more likely to have a speech delay diagnosis than those who turned 2 in 2018. That rate increased dramatically, up to nearly 88%, for children who turned 2 between January and March 2023. Overall, the speech delay diagnoses increased from an average of 9% of children in 2018 to nearly 17% in the first quarter of 2023.

Did people mask at home around their babies? How many strangers do infants normally interact with for significant periods of time? Wierd how having more time with their parents due to brief lockdowns wasn't a good thing.

School attendance and preschool enrollment levels have also suffered since the pandemic. The U.S. Department of Education's most recent study on attendance found that the rate of chronic absenteeism — which is when students miss 10% or more of school — averaged 28% across the country during the 2022-2023 school year.

Would you be surprised to learn they don't mention several years of record rates of other diseases like RSV, Strep, and Flu in relation to these statistics?

Anyway, it's certainly not the disease that causes brain damage and memory problems, or how it takes a toll on our immune system, it was our reaction to the virus that was the real problem becuase it disrupted our routines.

Here's another news article that's probably not related to the brain damaging virus we are letting infect everyone: Memory problems increase among Nordic children. The article entertains the theory that cell towers and microwaves are to blame, but I'm pretty sure the problem is hand sanitizer.

spoiler

This is a good article

“Immunity debt,” a theory to explain the global surge in non-covid infections since pandemic restrictions were lifted, is increasingly being challenged by emerging evidence. Nick Tsergas reports

Mycoplasma pneumoniae is a bacterial infection not known to cause widespread hospital admissions. “I can count on my two hands the number of times I’d ever seen mycoplasma pneumoniae before 2023,” says Samira Jeimy, clinical immunologist at the University of Western Ontario. “All of a sudden I feel like everybody has it.”

Over the past three years similar reports have circulated of rising bacterial infections, flare-ups of old viruses becoming more common, and children landing in hospital with diseases not usually seen in young, healthy people. One explanation offered by public health leaders has been “immunity debt”—the idea that precautions taken in the covid pandemic suppressed routine exposures to circulating pathogens, leaving people more vulnerable to them when restrictions were lifted.

The theory landed in the public consciousness at the right moment. A simple idea that sounded like science, it soothed a public seeking answers just as the world was returning to a semblance of normality. And it served a policy function, allowing governments to focus on economic recovery.

But its explanatory power has faded as the number of non-covid infections has kept rising each year. A 2024 analysis by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that invasive group A strep infections saw their most dramatic year-on-year increase from 2021 to 2022, well after most precautions had been lifted in the US. Rates have been abnormally high since then, raising questions about what might be behind the trend.

This is a pretty good article, it's basically researchers explaining that they are seeing immune system effects after covid and then then Ashish Jha going "No, that doesn't happen. shut up. It only happens to a small percentage of people."

If you've been lax about masking, now is a good time to pick it back up. Especially in busy public places.

There are two different variants that might be at play, the one that started in Asia/Australia is more contagious due to better ACE2 binding, which seems bad.

But the new strategy our country and most people I know are going with is "just catch it, spread it to as many people as possible, and get it over with so you can go back to brunch" so good luck to everyone.

Florida is seeing the largest increases in transmission of any state right now. Almost 3x higher than any time in the past 9 months.

Other southern and west coast states are rising too but not as quickly. Everywhere else is staying low+flat.

It is difficult to pin down exactly how common long COVID really is among those aged under 18 as "prevalence varies between studies due to different clinical definitions, follow-up period and survey methods used," Dr. Akiko Iwasaki, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Yale School of Medicine, told Newsweek.

However, she added that "the most robust studies" collectively suggest the number of children who get infected with COVID and then develop long COVID "is higher than the prevalence of asthma in children in the U.S."

Also discussing the study, Dr. Lauren Grossman, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, told Newsweek: "The number of children under 18 with asthma ranges from 4.9 million to 6 million depending on the source so it's not an incorrect statement to say that there are more or at least the same number of children with asthma as there are with long COVID."

Many children are also going "unrecognized and unsupported," Dr. Rachel Gross, a professor in the department of pediatrics at NYU Langone Health, told Newsweek

And now we have the CDC vaccine panel replaced with grifters across the board.

Don't be surprised if we follow other countries in the rukes basrd international community and start encouraging medically assisted suicide. Probably to be expected seeing how rabidly capitalists invested in AI on the promise that a bunch of jobs would be made obsolete.