erica stone

Trying to make my family, community, and world a nicer place one small gesture at a time.

[Liam Nissan™ @theliamnissan]

Yup

[Fuck You I Quit @fuckyouiquit]

Ahem

[tern @1goodtern]

With every passing day and every new study I am increasingly grateful that I and my family chose to keep our covid infections to as low a number as possible.

[erica stone @nicecampaign]

@wonderartsy 👋🏻👊🏻

[Anonymous @YourAnonNews]

Congress thinks $83 an hour isn’t enough for them…
but $7.25 an hour is enough for you.
That’s not public service. That’s class warfare.

[Dylan Byers @DylanByers]

New statement from Scott Pelley:

There has never been anything in America like 60 Minutes.

The Sunday tradition is the most successful program of any kind in history. For more than a decade, its innovative growth on every major online platform has extended its reach to countless millions around the world. This spring, at the end of our 58thseason, 60 Minutes grew rapidly with an unheard-of 9% jump in viewers on CBS.

“60” has been the number-one program in America for decades because our beloved audience finds integrity, quality, and humanity in our stories. When stewardship of the program passed to my colleagues and me, our responsibility was to expand energetically into a new age of media technology while preserving the values our audience expects. Now, the new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.

The waste is heartbreaking.

Last month, 60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.

For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them. Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over 60 Minutes interviews is not how this is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.

At 60 Minutes, we have fought harder than anyone knows to save the program that became an American icon. We owed that to our millions of viewers. I am deeply moved by the thousands of wishes we have received to “keep up the good fight.” Most of the men and women of CBS News are still in that fight. But now the collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.

I depart after 37 years at CBS with one emotion—a heart brimming with gratitude for the men and women of CBS News who encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives. I pray for a day when those people and their ideals are honored again—a day when sanity, competence, and courage return.

Scott Pelley

[Biff #SARSisAirborne 🍉 @Biff234523]

🚨💊HUGE news: @US_FDA has finally granted approval to @ShionogiUS’s Xocova (Ensitrelvir), a 2nd-generation antiviral targeting SARS-CoV-2.

The approval is for the indication of “post-exposure prophylaxis of COVID-19 following contact with an individual who has COVID-19”. However, just like with any drug, it can obviously also be used off-label (e.g. treatment of both acute COVID or Long COVID).

In Japan, Xocova received Emergency Use Authorization for the treatment of acute COVID all the way back in November 2022, received full approval in March 2024, and an expansion to include post-exposure prophylaxis in March 2026.

The post-exposure prophylaxis indications are based on the SCORPIO-PEP trial (https://t.co/Dxv0lhS2CM), where Xocova reduced the incidence of COVID-19 after household exposure by 67%, from 9.0% down to 2.9%.

Mechanically, Xocova is the same class of drug as Paxlovid - a 3C-like protease inhibitor that inhibits viral replication. From our best understanding, Xocova is probably slightly more potent than Paxlovid, but the more definitive advantage is that it comes with less side effects and less drug interactions (which are caused by the Ritonavir component of Paxlovid, added to boost the concentration of the actual antiviral, Nirmatrelvir).

Xocova should be useful for lowering viral load during an acute infection, especially if taken within a couple or days of symptom onset, which may help shorten the duration of acute symptoms. Will it do anything to prevent long-term damage or the development of Long COVID? Almost certainly not, just like Paxlovid, but I’d be more inclined to tell people that it’s worth trying if we’re no longer dealing with the side effect profile of Paxlovid.

Where it makes the most sense to use Xocova, just like with Paxlovid, is as a component of polytherapy for Long COVID driven by viral persistence. The big issue there, however, is that you need a longer course of these antivirals than most physicians are willing to prescribe and/or most insurance companies are willing to cover. And they’re generally not very effective as a monotherapy, you need to pair these oral antivirals with other therapies for better coverage and tissue penetration (eg. monoclonal antibodies and Nuvaxovid, and potentially even a 2nd antiviral like Remdesivir).

All in all, this is a very important and long overdue approval. It’s not a game-changing silver bullet, and notably, nobody should really be expecting to use or rely on Xocova in a way that they wouldn’t be open to using or relying on Paxlovid in the present. But there are plenty of applications for it, and Xocova should absolutely be seen as another Swiss cheese layer / tool in the toolbox for COVID conscious community members and any allied medical providers.

[The Vertlartnic @TheVertlartnic]

Scientists Baffled As Infections Continue Despite Hand Sanitizer Near Door

[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.

[Brittani James, MD @DrBrittaniJ]

Millions of people got sick, then got sicker — and then stopped getting better.

They came back with normal labs. Unremarkable imaging.

And the quiet suggestion that maybe the problem wasn't biological.

Long COVID didn't just introduce a new illness. It exposed how modern medicine responds when suffering can't yet be measured.

Modern healthcare systems struggle with:
- Illness without measurable biomarkers
- Symptoms that fluctuate and defy categorization
- Patients — especially women — whose suffering outpaces the science
- Chronic complexity in a system built for acute resolution

What Long COVID revealed was already there.

Patients with ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, and dysautonomia (like POTS) had been describing this reality for decades.

Long COVID just made it impossible to ignore.

In this essay, I explore:
- Why Long COVID exposed cracks in medicine that existed long before the pandemic
- How "we can't explain this" quietly became "this may not be real"
- Why chronically ill patients already knew this story
- How a system built for acute disease failed millions with chronic illness
- Why Long COVID's research funding is catastrophically misaligned with its actual harm
- And what medicine still owes the patients it dismissed

https://t.co/ZyhfAYtqn2

[The Vertlartnic @TheVertlartnic]

Precautionary Principle Alive But In Critical Condition, Confirm Friends

[erica stone @nicecampaign]

@nickelpin Thanks for the reminder

[The Vertlartnic @TheVertlartnic]

Experts Confident World Is Ready For Next Pandemic, As Long As The Pandemic Pathogen Responds Well To Handwashing

[erica stone @nicecampaign]

@SaraForTexLege My kid went on his first date a few weeks ago to the movies. He wanted to pay. 2 tickets and 2 drinks and popcorn was over $70. 😱😱😱 And the industry wonders why they're not doing well?

[Akunjee 🖋 @mohammedakunjee]

‘Do you know how hard you have to abuse a mammal for them not to have children?’ (re humanbeings)

[George Wallace @MrGeorgeWallace]

Just makin' it clear for your asses. Erasing the voices of black and brown people is not "agree to disagree" territory.

[erica stone @nicecampaign]

@DrewEmpire718 Proactive not reactive! You're killing it! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

[The Vertlartnic @TheVertlartnic]

Covid Is A Bioweapon, Just A Cold, A Hoax, Overblown, No Worse Than Flu. But Also My Son Has Long Covid And It’s Really Bad

[Breathe Safe Air @safe_breathe]

🎉CO2 Monitor Giveaway! 🎉

It's time for another CO2 monitor giveaway - this time, for an AIRVALENT monitor. These are by far the best-looking CO2 monitors on the market, and they perform well, too.

All you need to do is comment which design you would like to win (you can check their website to learn more!) and reshare this post.