Maryn McKenna
@marynmck
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journalist | AMR, fungi, public health, food | 2023 Cohn Prize | prof @EmoryCSHH | books | @marynmck everywhere | Fluctuat nec mergitur
often on the 45th parallel
Joined August 2008
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Some personal news, as they say:
I’ve been a senior writer at
@WIRED
since 2020 (and part-time for 3 years before that), leading Covid coverage and writing about public health, AMR, fungi, food and ag, med history and health policy.
I was laid off Monday alongside ~20 colleagues.
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The chief executive of a MA hospital, outbid for PPE by the feds multiple times, cut a deal, paid extra, hired the trucks — and then was interrogated by the FBI and had to get his Congressperson to intervene to keep DHS from heisting the shipment.
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Journalists covering demonstrations in from of Alito’s house are being given wine and cheese by neighors (and key lime pie, in another post) and funny how the neighbors respect the legal right to peaceful protest more than the legal people do.
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Announcement by the CDC and the WHO that enough poliovirus has been found circulating in NY, with enough genetic changes, to cause the US to be added to the list of countries with active circulation of vaccine-derived virus. A remarkable, disturbing moment.
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Janitorial and environmental-services crews are the ignored, crucial heroes of hospital infection control. This is lovely and entirely appropriate.
VACCINATED: The first of 5,850
#CovidVaccine
doses at
@MethodistDallas
went to Teresa Mata, 51, who cleans rooms in the ER. She's a mother of four and wants to protect her family. More than 100 COVID-19 vaccines will be given here today.
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An exhausting week and I am low on bandwidth and thus I am going to let the tiniest amount of frustration leak:
Public health advice that settles on “talk to your doctor” shows remarkably little knowledge about the state of US healthcare 1) in pandemic year 3 and 2) ever.
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Nauseated by the memory-holing so: 4 years ago I was not only prototyping masks to keep loved ones safe, I was scavenging wire from COFFEE BAGS (in image) to make them work. (Tried florist wire too.) Thousands of people scrambled like this, in the richest nation in the world.
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@SaltyEMNY
Now I’m recalling an overnight ER shift that involved a stainless ring, a ring cracker, bolt cutters, and — after it was all over — an attending leaning down to tell the patient: “Are you listening? Only rubber rings from now. OK?”
The ring was not on a finger.
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"I, a Black man, cannot walk into a store with a bandana covering the greater part of my face if I also expect to walk out of that store. The situation isn’t safe.”
Yet another way in which self-protection from
#covid19
is a function of privilege.
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@lpolgreen
Or maybe not random when you consider that this show was in Denver and this mass shooting happened inside a theatre in a Denver suburb
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Dr.Anthony Fauci on
@LateNightSeth
and —
wait, there on the desk —
oh my god, it's my book.
<muffled shriek>
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We’re hearing about doctors and nurses on the front lines of
#COVID19
and that’s appropriate.
What we’re not hearing enough about: the janitors and materials managers.
They are low-wage and low-status, but they make hospital care possible. Think about them.
The unsung heroes of all our work have been the environmental services and supply chain workers in our hospital. They keep us all healthy and are working overtime. Rooms are getting amazingly detailed cleaning. I have been so impressed by the rigor and professionalism. (8/10)
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Herd immunity is not a policy.
It’s an absence of policy.
BIG news break from
@ErinBanco
— Top officials adviser Trump’s COVID task force say they’ve entered a stage where they’ve begun implement herd immunity policies
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This was a PHASE 1 trial.
In EIGHT participants.
By design, Phase 1 tests only for safety — whether the formula harms people — not whether the formula works.
This result DOES NOT indicate that the vaccine works as intended.
The first coronavirus vaccine to be tested in people appears to be safe and able to to stimulate an immune response against the virus, according to its maker, the company Moderna
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When I wrote Big Chicken 2 years ago, I picked this epigraph from Camus because I thought it had a lot to say about how we unthinkingly worsened antibiotic resistance.
Now I feel it has even more to say about, well, everything right now.
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If air cargo is not allowed through, then the White House may have just substantially worsened the shortage of materials needed to conduct the coronavirus test.
@marynmck
Two of the three factories (the U.S. one is the smallest) that make Qiagen RNA extraction kits are in Germany & Spain. This is fine.
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Finally someone says it.
Dr Jonathan Reiner: "I think POTUS was infected with coronavirus for at least a week before he was admitted to the hospital...I think he's the superspreader. And I think the reason the WH will not have the CDC do a formal check...is they're concerned patient zero might be POTUS."
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Hello, I have news!
For 18 mos, I’ve been a part-time “Covid correspondent” for
@WIRED
@WIREDScience
.
Extremely thrilled to say I'm now joining the
@WIRED
staff as senior writer for health, expanding my beat to all aspects of public health, global health, medicine and disease.
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A student twice refused to wear a mask properly in a class. The school has no mask mandate. The professor walked out and resigned.
Hero.
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Guys, I’m not sure, but I think the NYT just discovered social determinants.
And nutrition.
<squints>
Maybe epigenetics too.
Breaking News: Cash payments for low-income mothers increased brain function in babies, a study found, with potential implications for U.S. safety net policy.
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The discovery of the Omicron variant in Africa demonstrates we should be striving to get vaccine to the whole world.
But it also demonstrates that where vaccines already are available, we should use them.
The traveler who brought Omicron from Egypt to Belgium was not vaccinated.
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The instant the White House said rapid tests would be reimbursable but not free, people in healthcare said:
Insurance companies will not bear this cost; they will make it too hard to apply.
Here’s testimony one company is doing exactly that.
A predictable policy fail.
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Everyone should read this urgent, blunt and excruciatingly important warning:
The health care system has collapsed.
Not *is almost* collapsing. Not *is on the brink of.*
Nonfunctional. Collapsed. Done.
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Nick Cordero was famous, much-awarded, and adored by his wife and family. He was also 41, healthy, and in Broadway shape.
#Covid19
took his leg, took his lungs, then killed him.
The least you could do in his memory is wear a mask.
#RIPNickCordero
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It's already known that breathing wildfire smoke is bad for us. But new research shows smoke may be dangerous not just for ash and small particulates, but because it carries viable fungi that can cause grave infections. Me, cheery as always, in
@WIRED
:
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The chances are very good that, whenever you get the Covid vaccine, you’ll be down for 48 hours with fever, fatigue and aches. This is normal. We are late in telling people what to expect. Alarmists and bad actors are going to fill that void.
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Arizona “risks a catastrophe on the scale of the worst natural disaster the state has ever experienced."
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“Karen of the clan MacKaren”
Don’t mind me I’m just over here being dead
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If you take the time to watch the full 6-min video, you can see that the hiker approached the cougar's cubs. She is chasing him away from them. Her posturing isn't, "I'm going to eat you," it's "Go away."
WATCH: "C'mon dude! I don't feel like dying today!"
A cougar stalked a man for over 6 minutes during his run through Slate Canyon near Provo.
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@choo_ek
Any reporter who's interviewed him (e.g., me, forget how often) can tell you, he speaks 50% faster than any other human and always in complete complex-compound sentences and with rigorous logical flow.
(You only try to take handwritten notes on him once. Ever after, you record.)
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I see people are asking about vaccine-derived poliovirus; here's a story I wrote last month that explains the situation. (I'll spare you the dozens of other stories I've written about polio over years... 🥺)
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The lesson here is not actually Bad Messaging About The Vaccine.
The lesson is paid sick leave for everyone, no exceptions.
Nearly half of adults in the U.S. who have not received a coronavirus vaccine are concerned about missing work as a result of side effects from the shot, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll released this month.
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Following
@jayrosen_nyu
and
@froomkin
’s comments earlier, a plea.
NEWSROOMS: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, CENTER YOUR HEALTH AND SCIENCE WRITERS ON
#COVID19
.
If they're too busy to do all the stories, at least run your copy by them.
Your mistakes are misleading the public. Thread:
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Philadelphia: Not fucking around since 1682.
Philly Mayor Kenney: ‘I think what the president needs to do is, frankly, put his big boy pants on. He needs to acknowledge the fact that he lost. And he needs to congratulate the winner, just as Jimmy Carter did, just as George H.W. Bush did, and frankly, just as Al Gore did’
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Energy nerds:
The Texas blackouts show that we always knew a threat was coming someday but we never spent the $$ to prepare systems for when it arrives.
All of public health at once:
COME OVER HERE AND SIT BY ME.
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In early April, in lockdown, I reported out the story of the last *two* times the US tried to rush a vaccine, in 1976 and 2009, and how it badly that went.
Grateful to my
@WIRED
editors who let us run with deep history and unexpected angles every day.
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In a still-cresting pandemic, in an epidemic by far the worst in the world, the White House releases opposition research — the kind of portfolio you compile to undermine a political opponent — on its own chief scientist.
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Very very much this. Lawns are a resource-sucking pollinator-starving fever dream reenactment of 18th-c colonialist consumption. Rip them out. Put in gardens and groundcovers and food. Plant some trees.
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The end of the Roe protection of abortion will have so many ripple effects through society. It didn't only guarantee safe legal abortion: It also allowed women to go to college, build careers, and marry (or not) at the time of their choosing.
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Problem, explorations, solutions:
@WIRED
is about the future and how we get there. Global editorial director and big boss
@glichfield
talks to
@paulwrblanchard
about the demands of cultural change:
New podcast! 🎉
@glichfield
on the “dizzying speed of cultural change” - driving demand for an “authority on tomorrow”
🎧 Listen:
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If you read the problematic NYT column yesterday about decision-making around Thanksgiving, or even if you didn’t, I urge you to read this
@tcarmody
essay, which illuminates the deep issues so clearly and beautifully. Stay to the end.
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When
#COVID19
began, I talked to a US mask manufacturer who had been warning for YEARS that offshoring mask-making was a mistake.
Colleague
@parismartineau
revisits him today. He’s ramped up production 400% and turns away orders for millions daily.
Great story, terrible times.
the biggest US mask manufacturer gets 200+ calls & emails a day from desperate hospitals, fearful elderly people & parents of immunocompromised kids, & wannabe price gougers
it used to make 250K masks a day. now it makes 1M
it still turns down 100M+/day
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In Orange County, CA, hospitals are sending ambulances away before they arrive, and EMTs are having to hold patients in ambulances for hours.
(Did you hear that? HOURS.)
The county’s emergency-medical director: “The EMS system may collapse.”
#COVID19
"At the current rate of deterioration, the EMS system may collapse unless emergency directives are implemented now." 👀
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@aetiology
I’ve said this in interviews already, but: In all the stories I did over YEARS on the likelihood of a pandemic someday, and the multiple possible scenarios, the one scenario I never imagined was that the CDC would be absent and the White House would be hostile to the whole idea.
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Good morning. That coffee you’re drinking right now: It might not be around long. A plant fungus called rust is destroying current crops, and climate change is undermining the wild relatives we could use to breed back resilience.
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I think
@TimAlberta
’s praise of the unpowerful but moral Republican who stopped the Trump election chaos is worth republishing widely.
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The South is so overwhelmed with the delta variant of COVID that hospitals in Tennessee and Florida are seeking to transfer patients to Minnesota.
MN hosp report 477 COVID-19 patients, limited beds. MN is receiving transfer req from as far away as TN and FL, b/c fast-spreading delta variant has caused a COVID-19 surge in the South that has consumed available ICU beds. Less beds for MN residents 😞
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Yes, it happened on Christmas, and yes, no one died, but it’s still remarkable to me how little coverage of this I’ve seen in national media. These images, from a Nashville network affiliate, are jaw-dropping.
NEW IMAGES: Incredible devastation on Nashville’s 2nd Ave. as a result of the
#nashvillebombing
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The governor of Georgia, where cases are spiking, has already sued Atlanta mayor
@KeishaBottoms
to prevent her imposing a mask mandate.
Now the governor has asked the court for an emergency injunction PREVENTING THE MAYOR FROM SPEAKING about masks.
Please RT tf out of this.
In addition to being sued over a mask mandate and voluntary advisory guidelines on COVID-19,
@GovKemp
has asked for an emergency injunction to “restrain” me from issuing press statements and speaking to the press. Far more have sacrificed too much more for me to be silent.
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This was worth coming onto Twitter just now.
(OK leaving again.)
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Fungal infections are rising: occurring more frequently, affecting more people, becoming more difficult to treat. Climate change may be teaching fungi to thrive at warmer temperatures — and for us warm humans, that doesn't bode well.
Me in
@WIRED
:
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An important, detailed, factual, evidence-packed indictment of Gov. Brian Kemp's persistent failure to lead and protect his state. The home state of the CDC is nearing pandemic peaks in deaths, and near the bottom of state vaccination rankings. Teachers are dying. It's grim here.
As Georgia deaths/day approach pandemic peaks, a grim reminder of the consequences of inaction, misinformation and policy failures.
a 🧵
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One year ago today, one minute before midnight, the low-tech volunteer-run list
@ProMED_mail
published a report on a few cases of unexplained pneumonia in the Chinese city of Wuhan. It was the rest of the world’s first glimpse of what was coming.
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IDK who needs to hear this, but if you are making yourself paranoid looking for sold-out hand sanitizer, it might be empowering to know you can DIY your own from a drugstore.
Not that you have to! But in case it helps to know you can if you need to, recipe follows:
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Disappointed in this. The really edgy stance would have been taking a position for grassfed beef and pastured poultry. They look good in carbon analyses, they need policy support to thrive, it would be pro smallholder, and people really do need help to learn how to cook them.
Today we announced that Epicurious is cutting out beef. It won’t appear in new Epi recipes, articles, newsletters, or on social. This isn’t a vendetta against cows or people who eat them. It’s a shift about sustainability; not anti-beef but pro-planet.
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There really is no one in the US media who can brutally and joyously eviscerate public persons the way
@CharlesPPierce
does. It is glorious to read. (I say this as the former spouse and daughter-in-law of Fleet Streeters, who practice it in the cradle.)
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1) 14 people are sick in 5 states from salad sprouts. This is your reminder to never eat raw sprouts.
2) The CDC estimates that 3,000 Americans a year die of foodborne illness. This is your reminder that public health infrastructure protects us from novel *and normal* illnesses.
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1) Dehilerin isn’t a “boutique,” it’s a store where the middle-class shop.
2) $375 is approx 25% of the cost of a Sony PS5.
3) Let’s not pretend judgments about personal spending aren’t gendered.
4) This is gleefully performative and we ought to ignore it, but come on.
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The other countries on the list are overwhelmingly developing economies; the only other rich nations on it are Israel and the UK. (At least one US isolate has genetic links to one found in Israel.) List is on this page:
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I thought I had gone down some challenging rabbit holes in the past 4 months, but then I was introduced to germ-theory truthers.
[blinks]
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Impressive calm and persistence by
@PaulaReidCBS
who doesn't flinch at insults or pause when she is shouted at, but just keeps pressing her question. Brava.
I hope that every reporter continues asking him questions like this.
@PaulaReidCBS
is right—no one who actually cares about the lives he is costing with his willful incompetence wants to hear about his petty rivalries right now.
(And he lied about Biden.)
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@lingerie_addict
First, "rich people cosplay" is a brilliant phrase. Second, having well-made things you keep is its own kind of luxury. They fit; you know how they'll hang and behave; they reinforce your self-concept (or you wouldn't keep them). Getting dressed feels like a trust fall.
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Grateful for a slew of scientists reminding us that today's shots for kids news stories are based on Pfizer PR. The company didn’t release detailed data.
The Covid crisis has made journalism based on single interested sources acceptable, and someday we’ll have to deal with that.
Vaccine Monday returns! Pfizer press release on trial of COVID vaccine in kids age 5-11:
- 1/3 of dose given to ≥12yo
- Ab levels similar to 16-25yo ("immunobridge")
- per CNN (not in press release), no myocarditis (in ~2000 kids)
Can't wait for data.
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You should read this, all the way to the end.
Most people who know the name Sophie Scholl know she was a 21 year old German student activist who was executed by the Nazis for distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets on her college campus. But people don’t talk about what happened leading up to her execution, or what happened after.
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"Of all face touches, 44% involved contact with a mucous membrane... Of mucous membrane touches, 36% involved the mouth, 31% involved the nose, 27% involved the eyes, and 6% were a combination."
Kwok et al, Am J Inf C, 2015
That was a study of *med students.*
Wash your hands.
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I see so many parents so joyful at getting their kids vaccinated, and it reminds me that veterans of polio research told me how, on the day the polio vaccine was announced, people rushed into stores to watch on the TVs for sale, and cried.
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This column makes me despair. It walks through interesting, important, revelatory data, and the conclusion it comes to, based on that data, is completely factually wrong.
Given the column’s prominence, I’ll venture that it’s morally wrong as well.
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Translated: In an anti-abortion state, an ectopic pregnancy cannot be removed until a woman has lost so much blood into her abdomen that her red blood cell count drops or her blood pressure crashes, sending her into shock and risking her life.
OBGYN Colleague in Missouri “We are now observing patients with ectopic pregnancy and hemoperitoneum until they have a documented falling hemoglobin or unstable vital signs”
1:50 pregnancies is ectopic
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Nature, given the chance, is metal af.
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Some personal news, as they say:
I'm thrilled and honored to receive this award. The cohort of past winners are the giants of our journalistic specialty and I'm humbled to join them.
Thank you,
@ScienceWriting
.
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Your Most Valuable Employees Are The Ones Coming Back To The Office, Says Man Who Wants To Rent You Office Space
WeWork's CEO tells WSJ there is an easy way for companies to spot their most engaged employees: They’re the ones who want to come back to the office. “Those who are least engaged are very comfortable working from home,” he said.
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Alternate Handwashing Instructions is the meme we need right now.
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Are we still cosplaying The Masque of the Red Death or have we moved on to The Fall of the House of Usher now?
More than 2,000 guests have been invited to the White House tomorrow, according to a person familiar with the event.
Two thousand, with three zeros.
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Holy crap. A Chinese pharma firm making veterinary vaccines treated its exhaust with “expired disinfectants.” Now at least 3200 people nearby and maybe 5000 have contracted highly infectious brucellosis.
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Gonorrhea isn't like Covid, a novel pathogen that took us by surprise. It's a known old foe with a known pattern of gaining antibiotic resistance. And yet, we let it get ahead of us, and now we're losing the last drug useful against it. Me at
@WIRED
:
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We have come, in less than a week, to a moment where a state that backs women’s healthcare has to create legislation to protects its licensed healthcare workers from being extradited to another state to be prosecuted for the performance of women’s healthcare.
New York files S09077 which would protect abortion providers from being extradited to states where abortions are illegal if they provide abortions to refugees from those states.
This is VERY similar to S08842 which would protect trans refugees from criminalizing statse.
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The unionized workers of the US Postal Service, the American Postal Workers Union, are asking for followers to get out the message of what is happening to the mail. They are at
@APWUnational
.
The USPS is protected by the Constitution and is under threat.
I recommend a follow.
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And a follow-up to my last tweet. It is within the decision-making process of every news organization and especially every video and cable to evaluate what they are putting out there, and whose agenda they are serving.
It is possible not to be stenographers and copy machines.
Dear editors: You do not have to, and should not, use the photo the president deployed tear gas to get
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Two days before
#RayshardBrooks
was killed, Georgia cops responded to a violated no-contact order. The man they were looking for SHOT AT THE COPS TWICE, hitting their vehicle while they sheltered behind it. Yet he’s sitting alive in jail today.
Here’s his photo.
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Always grateful for people who say the quiet part out loud.
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Good morning especially to the megaship
#EVERGIVEN
, which as of a few minutes ago, is still stuck sideways in the Suez Canal, and is also the metaphor we need for life in 2021.
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When journalists teach writing we’re expected to recommend Fowler and Zinsser and Strunk and White and Hart et al. All worthy, but me, I go straight for
@ANNELAMOTT
:
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110% this. And come on, journalists repeating these results uncritically: We should not be researchers' stenographers.
It will be great news if dexamethasone, a cheap steroid, really does cut deaths by 1/3 in ventilated patients with COVID19, but after all the retractions and walk backs, it is unacceptable to tout study results by press release without releasing the paper.
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The first international alert on
#COVID19
was published on Dec 30th — on an email list run by an international group of volunteers who’ve been right on every outbreak for more than 20 years.
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