Blake Murdoch
@BlakeMMurdoch
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JD, MBA. Health policy academic, bioethicist and science communicator. Senior Research Associate, Health Law Institute, University of Alberta.
Alberta
Joined June 2010
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Pinned Tweet
It's time to clean the germs out of our indoor air.
My latest article in the
@edmontonjournal
discusses how after four years, the
@WHO
is finally on board. We have the opportunity to make the greatest advancement in human hygiene since water treatment.
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Do people not realize that if we invest in ventilation and filtration we are helping to mitigate not only COVID and all variants but also every future airborne pathogen? Even common colds will diminish. And air pollution. The ROI on these investments will be unbelievably high.
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If you are wondering why the word COVID is never uttered in the press releases of musicians who are suffering from illness that makes them unable to perform...
It's because COVID-19 is an exclusion for most cancellation insurance because insurers know how huge of a risk it is.
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“Let it rip.” In ten years we are going to look back on the decisions made in the past two months and see them for what they really are: the worst public health decisions in generations, responsible for widespread mortality and pervasive, damaging long term disability.
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People don't seem to realize that if we cleaned all indoor air so well that it became close to outdoor air, COVID would become uncommon as the rate of transmission would drop so low that exponential decay would occur. And several other viruses like flu would nearly disappear.
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The FDA is allowing a monkeypox vaccine that is not approved for children to be used for children who may have been exposed to the infected daycare worker. Let me translate: they are really, really worried about how serious monkeypox is in children.
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Masks don't work, except that when people were using them we eradicated a strain of influenza B that is now being removed from all future vaccine formulations.
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Big surprise, physics is real:
“Once FFP3 respirators were introduced, the number of cases attributed to exposure on COVID-19 wards dropped dramatically – in fact, our model suggests that FFP3 respirators may have cut ward-based infection to zero.”
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My latest article in the Globe and Mail focuses on how Omicron will provide little immunity, leading to a crisis of repeated infection unless we change our behaviour. "It’s a delusion to think mass spread of Omicron will end the pandemic" 🧵
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This is systematic mistreatment of sick kids and forced infection of children with pathogens, now being enforced by actual police and threats.
Not to mention all the other reasons a child may need to stay home more than 5% of the time.
The UK has completely lost the plot.
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Many people have "forgotten" there were mass graves in NYC in 2020, and without public health measures that would have happened everywhere.
Our new piece in
@CMAJ
is about a kind of historical negationism
@CaulfieldTim
and I call "lockdown revisionism."🧵
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False. If the pandemic was truly over, excess deaths would run significantly below historical averages for quite a while, reflecting all the people who didn't die because they already died prematurely of covid.
Many people are still dying.
Also...
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Imagine being the parents of the 14 year old who died of COVID over the weekend and listening to
@CMOH_Alberta
go off minimizing it because the child had some pre-existing conditions. Disability as an excuse for negligent policy rather than a prohibited grounds of discrimination.
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Kids at a gaming convention know how to stop the spread of COVID, yet adult scientists and bureaucrats at a CDC conference choose to be wilfully ignorant to the virus despite knowing better and over 10% of attendees get infected.
This is the timeline we are living in
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Wearing a mask isn’t the burden.
Being excluded from society, psychopathologized, and gaslit by people who don’t even understand the health risks to which they are exposing themselves is the burden.
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My latest article. We are currently engaging in a policy of mass continual reinfection of children with a mutating virus that can broadly damage the body and which has a significant rate of subsequent disability. Children's health is at risk.
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China and now France are having serious epidemics, and the suspected culprit is mycoplasma pneumoniae.
One possible explanation is that COVID-mediated immune damage, leading to lymphocytopenia, is causing opportunistic disease of higher severity.
Thread with citations below:
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La France fait face cet automne à une "flambée" de pneumopathies chez les enfants, à des niveaux inédits depuis au moins 10 ans.
Un présumé coupable est pointé du doigt : la bactérie mycoplasma pneumoniae.
On fait le point ⤵️
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The music industry is being devastated by COVID-19, and it hasn't stopped. Many musicians are falling ill with long covid. They are exposed to huge amounts of covid, probably more than healthcare workers. We should protect performers and fans.
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1860's: We physically raised central Chicago to improve the sewer system and stop cholera!
2024: We can't install portable air filtration and UV systems in hospitals to stop c.ovi.d and other airborne diseases. We'd have to change the filters and bulbs!
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Imagine being the US President, and telling the entire world that the pandemic is over, but almost a year later, still requiring every person you come in contact with to test for COVID beforehand.
It's almost as if... the leading narrative is false?😲
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The likelihood of a tour being cancelled by COVID-19 infection is very high relative to most other cancellation risks, and the lost revenues are many millions of dollars for successful acts.
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Mask wearers are now a small minority in public places. Reframing them as potential criminals will fuel a culture of harassment and hate that will almost certainly end in violence against them.
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Must read:
"People who are well... detached themselves from the immorality of their own behavior. 'Return to normal' frames indifference to suffering as a morally neutral position & public health as a matter of personal preference... It is... eugenics."
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“During covid” is right now.
“We’re all in this together” was then.
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For clarity, I am not guaranteeing that Paramore members have covid or making any sort of claims about them, but commenting more broadly on the nature of these press releases we have seen over and over, which feed into the "covid is over" illusion - certainly many are covid.
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Alberta is offering ~120 locations for 5-11 vaccination. Saskatchewan is offering 221 clinics and more than 100 schools. Saskatchewan has a quarter the population. We are looking at around 10x per capita fewer options for parents and their kids. Nice job
@jkenney
@CMOH_Alberta
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The CDC has now released new guidance about keeping children healthy. It states:
1. That COVID can cause serious health problems in children.
2. To consider having your child wear a mask to school.
The masking section is weak. But this is a start.
🧵
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When certain medical doctors and scientists tell you Covid is no biggie, just remember top immunologists studying Long Covid have stated:
“The oncoming burden of long COVID faced by patients, health-care providers, governments and economies is so large as to be unfathomable."
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/2 Long covid is a societal disaster. A Nature review from leading immunologists just concluded that:
"The oncoming burden of long COVID faced by patients, health-care providers, governments and economies is so large as to be unfathomable."
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I've had columns rejected specifically for citing
@zalaly
et al's Nature study, which is still the best research we currently have on reinfection risk. Zeynep Tufekci and others have worked to discredit it. This is easy because people do not understand the statistical methods.🧵
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People realize that adults get flu ~twice a decade, right? Setting aside even all the terrible Long Covid, if the severity of acute COVID becomes similar to flu, and you get it 15-20x a decade, you are at a 7.5-10x more risk of dying from it.
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Ideology is driving decisions to end masking. Plenty of science shows that masking in hospitals saves lives.
1. Upgrading staff (not even patients & visitors) from surgical to FFP3 masks reduced hospital acquired infection 33% during Delta wave:
🧵
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This is probably the best reddit thread I have ever seen about the institutionalization of mass continual illness in young children which has greatly worsened since the pandemic began.
This is not normal.
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It hurts my brain and heart to see some MDs advocating for policies of minor convenience - ending universal masking in hospitals - that are 100% guaranteed to kill more vulnerable patients. Have they forgotten the purpose of their profession? Their oath? Their codes of ethics? 🧵
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I think most liberals don’t understand that normalizing disease and ignoring long covid is generating levels of disability that damages economic structures, thus helping popularize fascist ideas and potentially accelerating a shift toward discarding people based on “utility.”
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New study suggesting 5.8 million children in the US alone have experienced long covid symptoms.
That’s 8% of children.
So far.
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*Preprint.* Bivalent booster 4% effective vs. XBB infection. CI *-12% to 18%.* Obviously still providing some temporary protection vs severe disease.
The ideological "let it rip" approach is ruining our vaccines. A self-compounding negative spiral.
🧵
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I posted an old chart by mistake, the NHS actually says kids can go to school with active confirmed covid now, so it's even worse.
Of course people don't test so there is a good chance any respiratory symptoms could be covid.
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Brain damage is no big deal because people only get infected once, right?
A new study has shown that Covid‐19 may have a small, but lasting impact on people’s cognitive and memory abilities, potentially for a year or more after infection ➡️
@NHSEngland
@imperialcollege
@ImperialBRC
[1/4]
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This thread is for sharing stories of people who died or were seriously harmed after being infected with COVID in hospital. Please share your story.
The removal of masks in hospitals instead of upgrading to respirators will ensure these stories continue to happen every day:
🧵
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Scottish government prohibiting the use of masks in care homes. Gotta make sure those elderly folks get sicker faster.
But don’t worry, it’s not a ban, it’s just that the “element of choice to wear a mask… will no longer apply.”
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The US Department of Defense is expanding the use of Far UV to mitigate airborne disease (including COV1D) among its "assets."
If only everyone was considered an "asset."
Shows just how deeply unserious the "don't need masks in hospitals" people are.
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"At some point we're going to have to have a discussion nobody wants to, one about how repeated COVID infections have left our children with permanent neurological changes / damage and how we are going to adjust our academic standards and expectations"
Signs put up in Brooklyn
🧵
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Being a “centrist” is not intrinsically good. Believing it is is incredibly naive & makes you an easy target to be controlled. It’s pretty simple. The more extreme one side becomes, the more “centrists” are pulled in that direction. This is how fascism etc happens & is accepted.
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Just got back from the zoo, literally the only person masking other than us was a staff member walking a ferret around on a leash - and distancing the ferret from guests - because they can catch covid from humans.
Why is the world such that I have to say we deserve
#ferretsafe
?
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We are talking about a leading cause of death in Canada. When was the last time you saw the common cold in the top 5 causes of death list?
This could be argued to be negligent misrepresentation.
Dr. Patricia Daly, a Canadian public health official, said yesterday that "COVID-19 is a coronavirus that causes cold-like symptoms in people," and that the risk "of experiencing severe illness or death is probably about the same" as it is for a cold.
This is strikingly wrong.
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Hmm, apparently the CDC says don't test for H5N1 in wastewater, claiming 'it will only add to the confusion because we won't know where it is coming from.'
Or perhaps the results could be inconvenient or reduce the ability to control messaging? It's time to test wastewater.
We developed an assay for testing for H5N1 from wastewater over a year ago. (I wasn't expecting it in milk, but I figured it was going to poke up somewhere.)
However, I was just on a call with the CDC and they are advising us NOT to use it.
I need a drink.
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Long Covid & other SARS-COV-2 sequelae are underreported in the US.
1. ~55% of Americans believe they've had covid
2. IMHE estimates 98% of Americans have actually had covid
People who don't believe they've had covid won't attribute new health conditions to it. /1 🧵
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*Preprint* from authors at the US NIH suggesting second infections are 1.06x more likely to result in severe disease. While the study design can't assess reinfections prevented by immunity, it blows a hole in the hull of the "hybrid immunity" party boat:
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This article from a Brownstone Institute author is another step in stoking hate against maskers.
The comments section alludes to the possibility of violent confrontation with maskers and there is gleeful mass framing of maskers as mentally ill.
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People can't cope with the fact that living 2019-style is being complicit in causing a huge amount of death and harm. Thus they choose not to believe it & ignore/discount irrefutable evidence that this is indeed the case. There are many parallels: colonialism, climate change, etc
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How many lung infections are non-communicable? Pneumonia, bacterial or viral, is typically considered contagious. Metallica cancelled a tour in 2022 due to covid, and lost to their insurer in court over the communicable diseases exclusion clause.
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This is a regulatory and executional problem not a scientific problem.
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It's almost as though the pandemic never ended, teacher shortages will not end until we address chronic reinfection in schools, and children's behaviour is being affected not only by social upheaval but by (re)infection, unsafe schools, trauma and grief.
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@chantz_y
What is a meta-analysis of 40 million people in the face of an arrogant doctor's ego?
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At this point in the pandemic, the misguided idea that preventing panic and fear is the key role of government in the face of a dangerous new virus has now fully morphed into “tell them only ‘weak’ people will die to keep them placated.” Which is a very dangerous & eugenic step.
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I didn't think that the biggest fight of my life (so far) would be based on the claim that getting infections is bad for you, among a sea of people arguing they are irrelevant or good for you.
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Francois Balloux criticized me today for pointing out problems with the Cochrane masking review.
He said that Cochrane reviewers shouldn’t contact authors of the studies they are reviewing. The problem: that’s exactly the opposite of what the official Cochrane guide says.
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Consider the following:
1. Covid likely can damage the blood brain barrier
2. Covid directly infects neurons and other brain cell types
3. We are reinfecting everyone with Covid over and over.
What range of outcomes could you foresee from this?
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Tweets wherein a
@cochranecollab
masking review author misrepresents the Yale Bangladeshi masking study & data as opaque, then the Yale first author points out the raw data have been publicly posted the whole time, & the Cochrane review team never saw it nor emailed them once.🧵
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"The evidence shows that reinfection further increases risks of death, hospitalization and sequelae in multiple organ systems in the acute and postacute phase. Reducing overall burden of death and disease due to SARS-CoV-2 will require strategies for reinfection prevention."
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COVID Hegemony, coined by
@BlairWilliams26
, explains manufactured consent for COVID infection:
"Our governments & mainstream media have persuaded [people] to accept increasing morbidity, mortality, and the erosion of our public health systems using four key strategies:"
🧵1/6
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This is how bad some long covid research is.
Our new letter in
@JAMAPediatrics
points out obvious, grievous errors in a recent study claiming “strikingly low” incidence of Post Covid Condition in children.
The study is clearly invalid and should be retracted.
A thread.
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This messaging is actually going to harm and even potentially kill children.
Public guidance stating not to seek medical care when ill conflicts with other guidance about when to seek care.
Confused people will stay home when they should seek care. Time is often of the essence.
Not feeling great? Your appointment can wait. If you or your child are coming to one of our clinics but are feeling sick, please call & rebook your appointment for when you are well. Thanks for helping keep our patients and staff safe & healthy.
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This reframing leaves maskers, many of which are at even higher risk of serious outcomes from covid, with an impossible choice. Mask and risk harassment/violence, unmask and ensure exposure to dangerous pathogens or retreat and be maximally excluded from society.
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I guess nobody told this guy that Dr. Kasza
@kasza_leslie
is a cardiologist with 30 years of experience who has seen first hand the vascular harms of COVID.
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Lockdown revisionism involves false reimaginings of the pandemic where effective public health measures are wrongly reframed as discriminatory in intent and worthless. It can involve projection of already incorrect present beliefs onto a totally different context in the past.
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-August 2022:
@stats_canada
finds 1.4 million Canadians have had Long COVID symptoms
-Summer 2022: "COVID is over"
-June 2023:
@stats_canada
finds 3.5 million have had Long COVID symptoms
Just ignore that long covid has *more than doubled* "post-pandemic" and carry on...
🧵
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We can choose to ignore all the warning signs (of which there are many more), but we can't afford to live in a society where a large portion of the population are disabled - a worst case but possible scenario of our current "strategy" for handling covid.
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"When I went back to work, motherhood became a discouraging puzzle of sick days and child care"
What's happening is not normal.
Daycare is not a safe place with a hyperendemic vasculitic SARS virus circulating.
This is also a women's rights issue.
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Hating on maskers is hating on the compassionate minority who care about community, their loved ones and others. It is hating on people who are disadvantaged and vulnerable to severe outcomes of covid. It is punching down like a mindless ape hurting others to let off steam. /3
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There have been many reports of people going out knowing they are positive for COVID, denying a known infection is COVID, etc. This is a very interesting essay on some possible mechanisms by which SARS-COV-2 may manipulate infected people's behaviour. /1🧵
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The purpose of this piece is to break through the illusion that we can continue down this path without changing anything and not pay an immense toll in children's health. We have no evidence indicating that periodic COVID reinfection will end.
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In spite of all the evidence for caution, we are now tossing children into a world with nearly zero protections. We are just hoping kids will be OK. I don’t see how they will be. The data suggest they won’t be. But barely anyone is facing this inconvenient truth.
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Over a million people in the US alone have newly developed POTS since the pandemic began. Some of them after reinfection. POTS is highly disabling. This is a PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY.
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"History will... condemn Americans who... practice performative interconnectedness while abandoning public health & their sick and disabled neighbors."
"Real interconnectedness is examining how our actions and versions of normalcy affect people far away."
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Children have almost no way to protect themselves and do not get to choose where they go and what they are exposed to. They are incredibly vulnerable as a result. Their health is shaped by the people around them and the air in the spaces they are forced to occupy.
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Continual reinfection is a pretty big problem.
"findings suggest that SARS-CoV-2 infection damages the CD8+ T cell response, an effect akin to that observed in earlier studies showing long-term damage to the immune system after infection with viruses such as hepatitis C or HIV."
COVID-19 NEWS:
#SARSCoV2
infection weakens a key immune cell’s response to vaccination with the Pfizer-BioNTech
#COVID19
vaccine, suggesting a need to boost this response after infection,
#NIAID
grantees report:
#immunology
#Tcells
@StanfordMed
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We fundamentally do not know the extent of the long-term damage continual reinfection with COVID will cause to children, and the data we have so far are upsetting. What are we willing to risk?
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We're in the timeline where
@joeyfox85
, the Chair of the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers' Indoor Air Quality Advisory Group, can't get his kid's daycare to change the HVAC fan from Auto to On.
We're in the Upside Down.
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As I conclude in the article, by treating children as invulnerable we are actually treating them as disposable. But they are everything — to our lives and to our future. Their long-term health is at risk and we need to protect them.
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I'm reposting my article from last year.
Kids are going back to school with a "hope and pray" approach that is naive and irrational. It is a physical certainty that covid is going to be rampant in schools, and little has been done to stop its spread.
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Yes, the study shows total risk accumulates with additional reinfections. This is obvious. But it also shows total risk increases significantly - reinfections may be milder on average than 1st ones but are far from negligible. This may make continual reinfection unsustainable.
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@learning_to_die
So have members of my family. But there would be 100x fewer (e.g.) people spreading covid outside if indoor spaces were all made safe. That's how it works epidemiologically.
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On top of covariates, the study is just huge. There are still 589,573 women in the study and 680,358 people under the median US age of 38.8. The study is of 5,819,264 people. To suggest is it irrelevant despite covariates and because of a high percentage of older men is wrong.
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Measles is a bad disease, but why would anyone take it seriously when also being told it's fine to huff SARS2 virus in indoor spaces? Over 28 million dead in 4 years.
The answer is an irrational one: that measles causes a visible rash and covid only damages you from the inside.
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This is terrible. 32% increase in hospital acquired infection in England and 72% increase in Scotland. The net effect of these policies is culling vulnerable people who are seeking care.
Now we know this and we have a moral obligation to change. To do nothing is unconscionable.
“Stopping asymptomatic screening of hospitalized patients was associated with significant increases in hospital-onset SARS-CoV-2 infections,” 👇🏽
SARS-CoV-2 surged in hospitals after end of universal screening
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Hazard ratios for neuropsychiatric events following COVID-19 diagnosis, vs general population and vs people with another respiratory infection (ARI).
Not. Good.
New study in Nature Human Behaviour looking at 22 million people in South Korea and Japan:
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In this thread is some additional new research not mentioned in the article that shows why immunity will not be long lasting and continual reinfection could cause damage to our immune systems. Preprint showing we can be reinfected right away:
New pre-print that found a very limited immune response after infection with omicron. The desired herd immunity effect may according to this be a far dream still: from this, seems you can be re-infected more or less directly after your last infection
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Terrible decision that will needlessly kill more people and cause more labour shortage in hospitals and healthcare settings.
Please remember this is written in the FAQ:
**"Healthcare providers are asked to mask when requested by patients to do so."**
In addition, patients are encouraged to have conversations with their care providers regarding masking, hand hygiene, or other factors that patients feel are important to their care. 6/6
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Masking is nonsensical to frame as a lockdown as it doesn’t restrict freedom of movement. Are seatbelts lockdowns? Food safety regs? A nuanced understanding of freedom acknowledges the need for some limitations because they enhance quality of life & access to other freedoms.
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Lockdown revisionism creates a false impression of public health interventions & damages trust in key institutions. It portrays governments that implemented measures as autocratic regimes that suspended rights, strictly controlled mobility and utterly oppressed the masses.
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People who are trying to dismiss or mis-contextualize this study are actively drawing attention away from the urgency of its results and may not want to face their possible implications. I can't speak for certain as to motivations.
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More than one thing can be true:
1. COVID-19 is not HIV and never will be.
2. COVID-19 causes large amounts of chronic disease.
3. Nobody would treat HIV's health impacts as limited to the fever it causes at the start.
4. People disingenuously do this all the time with COVID-19.
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The solutions for protecting kids can be gleaned from behaviours of wealthy elites, & they involve layering protections to create clean indoor air. AKA - air ventilation & purification, Far UV or upper room UV, respirators & regular COVID testing. Also, paid family sick leave.
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News media, politicians & viral social media have all contributed to lockdown revisionism. Measures are framed in a false binary: full lockdown vs no measures. That lockdowns didn't work has been internalized as a truism, bolstered by problematic concepts like immunity debt.
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If I had to point to a single article in a major newspaper encapsulating how badly we are regressing at present, this would be up there.
This should never. have. been. published. It is evil. Not a word I use lightly as a bioethicist.
Matthew Parris says the quiet part out loud about euthanasia: “we simply cannot afford extreme senescence or desperate infirmity for as many such individuals as our society is producing.”
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