There are now more than half a million scientific publications related to COVID-19 and a rapidly growing body of evidence linking SARS-CoV-2 infection to immune dysregulation, microvascular injury, autonomic dysfunction, clotting abnormalities, viral persistence, and measurable cognitive changes.
And to the people constantly sick, exhausted, dizzy, forgetful, exercise intolerant, waking up to feeling like you got hit by a truck on the daily or suddenly developing strange inflammation, heart issues, GI problems, or “mystery” symptoms after repeated infections…
At some point you and society as a whole must confront the reality that repeated infection with a vascular and neurotropic virus was never as harmless as everyone wanted it to be.
I choose to live in reality.
That virus is still here. It is still spreading through the air. And it is still associated with long-term vascular, immune, and neurological consequences for many people.
Protecting yourself from that threat — through cleaner air, better ventilation, filtration, vaccination, and high-quality masks in high-risk settings — also reduces your risk from many of the other respiratory pathogens constantly circulating around us.
And if you are tired of watching people suffer while being told this is “normal,” then start demanding urgency.
Ask why Long Covid clinics are closing instead of expanding.
Ask why immunologists, virologists, neurologists, vascular scientists, and pathologists are not being funded at Manhattan Project scale to investigate viral persistence, immune dysfunction, clotting, mitochondrial damage, and cognitive impairment.
Ask why billions can appear overnight for almost anything else, but millions living with chronic illness are told to “pace themselves” and move on.
Support researchers (the ones who are still focused on Long Covid that don’t conflate the disease)
Support clean air initiatives (two strong efforts happening in Illinois right now! Help us!!).
Support disability advocacy.
Pressure institutions to improve indoor air quality.
Stop mocking people for protecting themselves.
And stop accepting “everyone is sick all the time now” as a normal feature of modern life.
2021: Billionaires hire tech bros.
“Show us your AI. What can it do?”
Tech bros:
“This will automate everything. Solve problems. Make workers much more efficient.”
Billionaires:
“If we can automate everything… what do we need workers for?”
2022: Coordinated messaging across the globe:
“You can come back to work now. It’s safe. Take your masks off.”
Aaarrrghh! The cover-up begins…
The WHO page about Meningococcal Meningitis & its modes of transmission (including the word ‘AEROSOL’) has just been removed from their website.
Original link:
https://t.co/axt5cQa442
Thankfully there’s an archived page:
https://t.co/7OVtGJzT2K
She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papers—and every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history.
Yale University, 1969.
Margaret Rossiter was a graduate student studying the history of science. She was one of very few women in her program.
Every Friday afternoon, students and faculty gathered for beers and informal conversation. One week, Margaret asked a simple question: "Were there ever any women scientists?"
The faculty answered firmly: No.
Someone mentioned Marie Curie. The group dismissed it—her husband Pierre really deserved the credit.
Margaret didn't argue. But she also didn't believe them.
So she started looking.
She found a reference book called "American Men of Science"—essentially a Who's Who of scientific achievement. Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont.
There were names. There were credentials. There were careers.
The professors had been wrong.
But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing.
Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams.
But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official histories—those same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased.
It wasn't random. It was systematic.
Women who designed experiments watched male colleagues publish results without giving them credit. Women whose discoveries were assigned to supervisors. Women listed in acknowledgments instead of as authors. Women passed over for awards that went to male collaborators who contributed far less.
Margaret realized she was witnessing a pattern that stretched across centuries.
Women had always been present in science. The record had simply pushed them aside.
She needed a name for what she was documenting.
In the early 1990s, she found it in the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage—a 19th-century suffragist who had written about this exact phenomenon in 1870.
In 1993, Margaret published a paper formally naming it: The Matilda Effect.
The term captured something that had been hidden in plain sight for generations. Once you knew the term, you saw it everywhere.
Her dissertation became a lifelong mission.
For more than 30 years, Margaret researched and wrote her landmark three-volume series: Women Scientists in America. She examined letters, institutional policies, individual careers. She gathered undeniable evidence that women in science had been consistently under-credited and structurally excluded.
Her work faced resistance. Many dismissed women's history as political rather than academic. Others insisted she was exaggerating.
Margaret didn't argue emotionally. She presented data. Documented cases. Patterns repeated across decades and institutions.
Eventually, the evidence became undeniable.
Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased:
Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structure—credit went to Watson and Crick.
Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission—omitted from the Nobel Prize.
Nettie Stevens, who discovered sex chromosomes—received little credit.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogen—initially dismissed.
And countless others whose names had nearly vanished.
Margaret changed the narrative. Science was no longer just the story of solitary male geniuses. It became a story of collaboration that included women who had been written out.
The Matilda Effect became standard terminology. Scholars used it to examine how credit is assigned, how authors are listed, who receives awards, who gets left out.
1/ If I hear one more public official call indoor air filters a "band-aid," I'm going to explode! It's so logical, yet so readily dismissed. Filtering indoor air should be as standard as filtering water. Full stop. 🧵
Don't ask about Palestine at the Berlinale!
Here's my question to the jury about selective solidarity of the film festival with the people of Iran and Ukraine vs. Palestinians. Wim Wenders (jury president) actually said: "We have to stay out of politics" #Berlinale2026
I remember the first time I taught translational lag.
I watched one student’s dream collapse in real time… an actual jaw-drop… when they realized what it means.
That’s why I harp on COVID.
Not because it’s political.
Not because it’s fashionable.
But because we don’t have 17 years.
We’re already in year 7.
In untreated HIV, the median time from infection to death was about a decade… shorter if you were infected at an older age. About half of people progressed to AIDS within ~10 years, and once AIDS developed, survival was often only ~3 more years.
If you map 2019 as a parallel universe to the beginning of HIV/AIDS, then the people infected at “ground zero” are no longer early in the story. They’re already deep into the window where long-term consequences emerge…well before medicine, policy, or culture fully catch up.
Translational lag isn’t an abstract concept.
It determines who suffers quietly, who gets dismissed, and who is told “the data isn’t there yet” ..until suddenly it is.
By the time the textbooks update, some lives are already permanently altered.
A lot of the ignorance & silence about the ongoing covid pandemic is because people don't want to contemplate how the virus may harm/may have harmed them or their kids.
They shut it out, ignore research, pass-off any new health concern as something else & carry on regardless.
1/
“We are told by leaders that we are the future. But when it comes to the ongoing pandemic, our present is being stolen right in front of our eyes.”
Incredible speech by Violet Affleck who warned about COVID & Long Covid, & advocated for masks & clean air at the UN today!
250K people infected with SARS2 tracked for Cardiovascular events; ‘results were striking and worrisome. Most concerning was persistence of risk over time. At 1, 2 and 3 years post-infection, risk of heart attack & stroke didn’t diminish.’
Henry Miller, MD, Molecular Biologist.
We used to MASK prior to 2020 in cancer treatment centres,
NICUs,
hospitals around people recovering etc
NOT NOW
Refusing to mask is a trauma response/phobia mixed with apathy / brain damage from repeated C O V I D
zero care, concern, compassion, or humanity left 💔
currently writing an essay & doing research on how the 1918 flu directly led to the rise of fascism in italy & germany & eugenic legislation even in america and how we are repeating it all right now with covid and this shit is wild y’all….we really never learn from history
The normalization of Covid was a demand from the ruling class that we trade our health for the economy, which means the fantasy that you gave in to was in exchange for your future so that the ruling class who is already burning the planet, could profit from you further.
18-21 year olds. The adults in charge of you messed up and let you get Covid a bunch. That wasn’t at all good for you, and it wasn’t your fault. You should be angry at them for it, you are the only adults who had this forced on you without your participation. Get angry