Alex
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admiringbog.bsky.social
Alex
@admiringbog.bsky.social
470 followers 430 following 560 posts
person with ME/CFS
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admiringbog.bsky.social
Btw, some provinces have said that they won’t implement the new CSA standard, so it’s a good time to write your health minister in support of it.
#alberta #ontario #canada #covid
"There are no plans to adopt or implement such a requirement in Ontario," said Jackson Jacobs, a spokesperson for Health Minister Sylvia Jones. Alberta's health ministry also has no plans to make masks mandatory. "At this time, decisions regarding mask use will continue to be guided by site-level leadership, provincial health agencies, and operational teams based on local context and clinical judgment," a spokesperson for the province's Ministry of Primary and Preventative Health Services.
October 31, 2025 at 5:09 PM
admiringbog.bsky.social
Some signs things are shifting because ignoring Covid isn’t working:
Bar-Yam can see dramatic progress on a variety of fronts. The French government has new air quality standards for school classrooms, while Australia has invested in air filters for its schools. The United Nations recently held a one-day conference on the importance of clean indoor air. The city of London, England, is spending 200 million pounds cleaning up the air in its schools. And so on. Here in Canada, Bar-Yam notes, the country's crowded hospitals stopped mandatory masking in 2023, but B.C., Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick have returned to proactive masking. Last summer the Canadian Standards Association, a non- profit organization that sets safety standards for the workplace, proposed significant changes for health-care institutions based on what the science says on aerosols. After widespread consultation with healthcare workers, it recommended key changes in mask guidance: Respirators such as N95 masks need to be worn by health-care workers at all times in health-care facilities. The blue surgical masks known as "splash guards" aren't good enough for workers to use as respiratory protection. Proper masks should be supplied free of charge in health-care facilities to everyone. And hospitals should require specific assessments for airborne diseases to determine minimum respiratory protection.
October 31, 2025 at 4:59 PM
admiringbog.bsky.social
I remember her being quite brazen about this in the past. From 2012:
Then there's Wildrose Party of Alberta Leader Danielle Smith, who claimed just over a year ago that the science wasn't settled on climate change. She heads the Official Opposition in the Alberta legislature when she should have been laughed out of political existence.
October 25, 2025 at 5:15 PM
admiringbog.bsky.social
I’m always taken aback by the assertion that science is self-correcting. Not in a reasonable amount of time it isn’t. Often it self-corrects because the people who were wrong finally retire.

virology.ws/2025/10/25/t...
I have also been deeply disturbed by the rampant and flagrant corruption in the editorial and peer-review practices of major medical journals, including those in the Lancet and BMJ stables. Not only have these august publications routinely failed to catch egregious methodological missteps, they have also routinely failed to take appropriate steps to fix problems once they've been pointed out. In many instances, their response to legitimate criticism can only be described as a blatant "fuck you."
October 25, 2025 at 5:00 PM
admiringbog.bsky.social
To boost ME research in Canada, CIHR has invested $2 million to continue supporting an ME research network over the next five years. Since 2019, the Interdisciplinary Canadian Collaborative Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ICanCME) research network has brought together researchers, clinicians, and patient partners to advance ME research. The network is co-led by Dr. Alain Moreau at the Centre hospitalier universitaire Sainte-Justine in Montréal alongside a team of scientific and lived-experience leaders from across Canada and around the world.
October 20, 2025 at 3:55 AM
admiringbog.bsky.social
I thought this was a weird comment. I haven’t seen any researchers say that covid is correlation rather than causal.
CARE for Long COVID Act has four co-sponsors, including Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IIl.) who proposed her own legislation for long-haulers. She likens the current stage of long COVID to the past situation Vietnam veterans faced with presumptive conditions linked to Agent Orange exposure. "Men who served in Vietnam, had five times the rate of prostate cancer than the men at the same age who didn't serve in Vietnam, so you did have a link, but you had correlation," said Sen. Duckworth to News 4.
October 19, 2025 at 8:38 PM
admiringbog.bsky.social
open.substack.com/pub/thegaunt...
You could call the situation unreasonable. You could call the situation our government has put us in unreasonable. You could direct your frustration over said unreasonable, untenable situation upward, where it belongs: at the government, not downward, at struggling sick people, who have no choice but to engage with COVID safety practices including masking.
October 15, 2025 at 4:39 PM
admiringbog.bsky.social
#MillionsMissing
How many people are as sick as I am? Few of us are publicly known, but surely there are staggering numbers of people as sick as I am. It's too easy to get this sick with ME/CFS which is usually a one-way street; An unavoidable downward spiral. Even if the IOM estimates are correct and one quarter of the "up to 2.5 million" are severely ill, that's "up to" 625,000 severe ME/CFS patients just in the U.S.
October 1, 2025 at 2:06 PM
admiringbog.bsky.social
I tried to book through the government website and got filtered out by age. It didn’t ask any of the other questions that are supposed to qualify for phase one.
*Please note that the vaccines displayed are based on your age cohort.
September 29, 2025 at 9:26 PM
admiringbog.bsky.social
This seems to imply that ME/CFS research and funding is not longer scant which is just not true.
It is a similar story for those with chronic fatigue syndrome, of which 80 per cent are female. Regardless of the strength of testimonies on its debilitating impact, research into this condition was scant until a similar one - long covid - sparked interest and funding.
September 25, 2025 at 3:42 PM
admiringbog.bsky.social
A lot of commenters, as well as journalists, seem to think Violet is calling for universal mask mandates and they seem a bit panicked at the idea, but I don’t think she’s ever said that.

This Today article quotes her 2024 speech where she’s calling for cleaner air and masking in healthcare.
"To confront the long COVID crisis, I demand mask availability, air filtration and far-UVC light in government facilities, including jails and detention centers, and mask mandates in county medical facilities," she said.
September 25, 2025 at 3:03 PM
admiringbog.bsky.social
I always find it weird when Canadians brag about free healthcare, when we don’t even have pharmacare.
Canada is a clear outlier. Canadians pay the second highest costs for prescriptions in the industrialized world, behind only the US. People must pay for prescription drugs themselves, unless they have coverage through their employer, private insurance, or a patchwork series of provincial or territorial drug funding programs that can be predicated on income, age or both.
September 24, 2025 at 1:43 PM
admiringbog.bsky.social
Fun little test
100% Epidemiologist’s Nightmare Perfect score! You're so well-informed, conspiracy theorists actively avoid you at parties.
September 11, 2025 at 7:03 PM
admiringbog.bsky.social
Dräger is my main mask right now. My head is too big for the Aura.
Picture of me in bed with a Dräger mask.
September 5, 2025 at 6:11 PM
admiringbog.bsky.social
Why bother with a menstrual blood test when we can just cut you open instead?!

#endometriosis

www.science.org/content/arti...
When the study launched in 2013, "people literally laughed at us," recalls Christine Metz, an immunologist at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research who co-leads the effort with geneticist Peter Gregersen. Menstrual blood was messy, it was imprecise, it was difficult to collect, OB-GYNs told the pair. Why bother when the disease could be diagnosed with surgery?
August 31, 2025 at 10:57 PM
admiringbog.bsky.social
All good ideas, but it’s so weird when respirators aren’t mentioned as a possibility, not even in specific situations.
Improve indoor air. Keep vaccines and treatments easy to access for people who want and need them. Encourage testing and public alertness for secondary infections. Track post-infection complications with the same discipline we bring to acute care. Communicate uncertainty honestly.
August 23, 2025 at 3:40 PM
admiringbog.bsky.social
Another example is this bizarre line from Vox:

www.vox.com/future-perfe...
Two things can be true: Covid is endemic, and we don't have to accept constant infections and waves, with these advances in medicine. Within a year after Covid changed all of our lives, dedicated scientists and researchers developed the first-ever Covid vaccines that saved millions of lives across the globe. But five years later, the virus is still wreaking havoc because of its constant mutations and widespread transmission.
August 18, 2025 at 3:35 PM
admiringbog.bsky.social
There’s also long COVID, which is still happening at an alarming rate.
Post-infectious illness is a major part of the damage done by a pandemic like COVID-19 This is a graph titled: “Cumulative Global Incidence Estimates of COVID-19 Deaths and Long COVID Cases” It shows 27 million COVID-19 deaths and 409 million Long COVID Cases. This graph us from CrunchME
July 22, 2025 at 2:32 AM
admiringbog.bsky.social
“Lipkin is clearly encouraged by what the field has accomplished with the limited funding it has had. If a wealthy person came to him and said I want to do a Manhattan Project in ME/CFS, though, he predicted, “We could get this thing done in two years.””
This is the Bernie meme where he says “I am once again..” and I’ve added “looking for a wealth person”
July 8, 2025 at 1:30 AM
admiringbog.bsky.social
Bizarre sentence from Vox that feels like an admission that the term endemic has been used to downplay covid, because why else would “endemic” and “wreaking havoc” be in tension?
Two things can be true: Covid is endemic, and we don't have to accept constant infections and waves, with these advances in medicine. Within a year after Covid changed all of our lives, dedicated scientists and researchers developed the first-ever Covid vaccines that saved millions of lives across the globe. But five years later, the virus is still wreaking havoc because of its constant mutations and widespread transmission.
July 1, 2025 at 3:31 PM
admiringbog.bsky.social
Spooky that one of the signs of the bad times in Parable of the Sower is the return of measles.
«It's spreading again. It was on the east coast. Now it's in Chicago. The reports say that it makes watching a hre better than sex. I don't know whether the reporters are condemning it or advertising it." I drew a deep breath. "Tornadoes are smashing hell out of Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, and two or three other states. Three hundred people dead so far. And there's a blizzard freezing the northern midwest, killing even more people. In New York and New Jersey, a measles epidemic is killing people. Mea-sles!" "I heard about the measles," Joanne said. "Strange. Even if people can't afford immunizations, measles shouldn't kill." "Those people are half dead already," I told her. "They've come through the winter cold, hungry, already sick with other diseases. And, no, of course they can't afford immunizations. We're lucky our parents found the money to pay for all our immunizations. If we have kids, I don't see how we'll be able to do even that for them."
June 22, 2025 at 11:26 PM
admiringbog.bsky.social
What the helly
Child in a school uniform with a big grin. Text reads: “THIS MORNING HE HAD A RUNNY NOSE…BUT LOOK AT HIM NOW!” And “MOMENTS MATTER, ATTENDANCE COUNTS.”
June 16, 2025 at 5:38 PM
admiringbog.bsky.social
December 12, 2024 at 4:30 PM
admiringbog.bsky.social
#yallmasking
December 11, 2024 at 12:43 AM