Clare 🏳️‍🌈

Epidemiologist & Health Promotion Practitioner. Interested in social justice, harm reduction & drug reform. Born 345ppm CO2. 🏳️‍🌈 Covid Is Not Over 😷

[Nisha Patel, MD MS, Dipl of ABOM, CCMS @DrPlantel]

Hills I will die on as a doctor obsessed with cardiometabolic health:

-Women are not “bad at self care.” They are drowning in invisible labor and mental load.

-Sleep deprivation is a public health issue.

-Chronic stress absolutely affects physical health.

-You cannot wellness your way out of unaffordable healthcare, childcare, food, and housing.

-Telling people to “just lose weight” without addressing mental health, food access, medications, medical conditions, sleep, finances, and time is just lazy.

-A salad will not cancel out a strained healthcare system.

-Postpartum recovery deserves the same seriousness as any other major medical event.

-Wellness misinformation has harmed people’s relationship with food more than fruit ever will.

-Prevention is important, but not every illness is a personal failure.

-A healthy woman is not a luxury. She is the backbone of families, communities, and society.

[chantzy @chantz_y]

No one should get *sicker* as a result of going to the doctor or hospital. We need respirator masks in healthcare now

[TheDisabilityEnthusiast @twitchyspoonie]

If you're worried about what people would think about you if you started masking again, you'd hate to see what they'd think of you if you became disabled/chronically ill.

[Cat Herding Science Nerd 🔬 @catladyactivist]

Why covid-19 is “a vascular disease masquerading as a respiratory one”
BMJ 2026; 392
https://t.co/JS5Qu86h1s

[Vipin M. Vashishtha @vipintukur]

Emerging research suggests COVID-19 may cause long-term brain changes, including persistent inflammation and small blood vessel injury even after recovery. 1/

https://t.co/X6OxJMqFfu

[Cat in the Hat 🐈‍⬛ 🎩 🇬🇧 @_CatintheHat]

PS. In case you hadn’t already joined the dots, it’s not unrelated…

A huge UK study examined Biobank records of ~250K people and found those infected with Covid had DOUBLE the risk of a major cardiac event for as long as 3 years after their infection.

https://t.co/mbaftw3ecm

[Jess @MeetJess]

6 years of living with the constant math:
Is this space safe?
Is this air clean?
Is this risk worth it?
6 years of watching caution get mocked,
science get diluted, preventable harm get normalized.
I’m not tired of caring.
I’m tired of being surrounded by people who don’t

[PACO @PacoOnPause]

It will never make sense to me that so many people are not making an effort to prevent being reinfected by a virus that keeps being linked to neurodegeneration.

A mask is slightly inconvenient. Neurodegeneration is very inconvenient.

[Vipin M. Vashishtha @vipintukur]

A new study shows that #LongCOVID in children is associated with significant school difficulties, including problems with attention, learning, and peer interactions.

➡️ These challenges can impact academic performance and daily functioning, highlighting the broader consequences beyond physical symptoms.

➡️ Findings emphasize the need for early recognition and school-based support strategies for affected children.

👉 LongCOVID in children is not just a medical issue—it’s an educational and developmental challenge.

H/T: @CatchTheBaby

https://t.co/0RGhd3pmQC

[Clare 🏳️‍🌈 @_Clare_P]

My "anxiety" turned out to be Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. By the time it was diagnosed 6 months and 8 doctors later, the cancer had spread to my stomach and oesophagus.

[Babs @halfateaspn]

You know what’s actually overdiagnosed? Anxiety. Let’s talk about that, because without that label, doctors wouldn’t have a way to dismiss and control patients. It’s a modern-day hysteria diagnosis.

[Diane Marie @Dee_Camacho]

@JackHadfield14 People cling to the belief that these things work bc it allows them to maintain the illusion that chronic illness could never happen to them, bc if they did get sick they would simply Do The Right Things™️ and would magically be healthy again.

[Jack | amatica health @JackHadfield14]

People who’ve never been chronically ill massively overestimate how much wellness hacks ‘cure disease.’

Sun, sauna, fasting, carnivore, peptides, supplements, yoga, etc

They’re optimization advice for healthy people. They rarely cure anything for the severely ill.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The scariest finding in this paper: the subjects couldn't tell it was happening.

UPenn ran this study on 48 healthy adults. One group slept 8 hours. Another slept 6. Another slept 4. For 14 straight days. They tested cognitive performance every 2 hours from 7:30am to 11:30pm.

The 6-hour group's reaction times, working memory, and sustained attention deteriorated on a near-linear curve. By day 14 they were performing at the same level as someone who hadn't slept at all in 48 hours. The 4-hour group hit that threshold by day 6.

Here's the part that should unsettle everyone who thinks they "do fine" on 6 hours: the subjects' self-reported sleepiness flatlined after the first few days. Their brains kept getting worse. Their perception of how impaired they were stopped updating. The cognitive decline was invisible to the person experiencing it.

The researchers found a hard threshold. Any wakefulness beyond 15.84 hours in a day produces cumulative neurobiological cost. That cost compounds every single day you exceed it and does not reset with a weekend of sleeping in.

About 35% of American adults sleep less than 7 hours a night. 40% of those get 6 hours or less. In 1942 that number was 11%. We built an entire professional culture around a sleep schedule that this paper says is functionally equivalent to pulling consecutive all-nighters.

"I'm fine on 6 hours" is the most common response to sleep research. The first thing chronic sleep debt destroys is your ability to notice chronic sleep debt.

[Jack | amatica health @JackHadfield14]

People born during the 1918 Spanish Flu had a 2-3x increased risk of developing Parkinson’s compared to those born before 1888 or after 1924.

COVID has infected billions. We will likely see a massive surge in neurodegenerative disease.

[Dr Tracy Westerman AM @TracyWesterman]

And Gina Rinehart — who built her fortune on foreign workers, importing over 1,700 migrants to build her $9.5 billion Roy Hill iron ore project — now funds One Nation and publicly complains that immigration is causing the housing crisis. The same immigration she has personally and profitably relied upon for decades. The hypocrisy is not incidental. It is the point. Use immigration to build your wealth. Fund the politicians who blame immigration for everyone else’s problems.

[Princess Cookie🍪 they/themme🌺 @adykesworld]

The CDC also didn’t mandate handwashing until 1980s so if ur waiting for the CDC to tell u what to do for your help (i.e to mask for covid) news flash they wont. The CDC has been failing us since its conception.

[Jack | amatica health @JackHadfield14]

🔬Study shows SARS-CoV-2 causes direct damage to heart cell mitochondria - even months after recovery - helping potentially explain Long COVID heart symptoms like chest pain, palpitations & fatigue.

Let’s break it down 🧵

[Тania Melnyczuk @ekverstania]

Imagine a doctor refusing to diagnose you with a condition for which you have the symptoms, because the doctor believes the condition is rare, and therefore there's an imaginary quota on how many people are allowed be diagnosed with that, and you're not one of those people.

[Ms Doe @pgoodfellow]

@DebHolloway Long Covid in 2026 is like the early days of the AIDS crisis. The parallels are shocking -- governments actively ignoring it, social shunning, victim blaming.
I'm so sorry.
We should have learned from the past.

[Biology 4 Trans Rights🏳️‍⚧️🧬🇵🇸 @bio4transrights]

We put humans on the moon. Eradicated continents of certain diseases. Removed the bacteria from our drinking water. It’s truly baffling that our scientific progress stops just short of removing viruses from the air.