Saturday Stories: The Next Variant, Vaccination Realities, And Medical Exemptions

Katherine Wu, in The Atlantic, on the next worse variant.

Helen Branswell, in STAT, discusses the Delta tuned realities of vaccination

Omar Mosleh, in the Toronto Star, on why you're probably not going to get a medical vaccination exemption

Saturday Stories: Masks And Children, Protecting Unvaccinated Kids, And What's Safe To Do?

Judith Danovitch, in The New York Times, on how masks might help your children to learn.

Lael M. Yonker and Anthony J. Fischer, in Time, on how we can protect unvaccinated kids.

Helen Branswell, in STAT, polled some epidemiologists about what they were and were not comfortable doing this summer.

Saturday Stories: When For the Under 12s, The End of Ivermectin, Delta and Kids, And Now What

Rachel Gutman, in The Atlantic, on the timeline and process to see the vaccines approved for kids under 12.

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, in Medium, on how though he hopes he's wrong, this latest study likely puts a nearly final nail in the coffin of horse dewormer ivermectin being useful with COVID.

Katherine J. Wu, in the Atlantic, on the dangers of Delta for kids.

Ed Yong, in The Atlantic, reflecting on how Delta's changed the pandemic's endgame and now what?

Saturday Stories: Canada's 4th Wave and Canada's Failed Emergency Brake

Brooks Fallis, in The Globe and Mail, on how Canada won't be able to vaccinate itself out of a fourth wave and what we'll need to do to prevent it. 

Jillian Horton, in The Toronto Star, on Canada's broken (I'd argue cut) emergency brake and the failure of our politics and politicians.

Saturday Stories: Children, Long COVID Post Breakthrough Infections, And Vaccine Mandates

Devi Sridhar, in The Guardian, on whether COVID will become a disease of the young. 

Katelyn Jetelina, in Your Local Epidemiologist, discusses the risk of long COVID even for those who are fully vaccinated. 

André Picard, in The Globe and Mail, makes his case for vaccine passports.

Saturday Stories: UK Virus Factory, Canadian Vaccination Mandates, And Masking While Vaccinated

Philip Ball, in Nature, on how the UK's COVID Freedom Day and dropping of restrictions risks incubating far worse variants that will risk us all. 

Andrew Coyne, in The Globe and Mail, makes the clear case for vaccination mandates in Canada. 

Katherine J. Wu, in The Atlantic, with a view that I share wholeheartedly on why she's still masking despite being fully vaccinated. 

Saturday Stories: Myocarditis, Breakthrough Infections, and Ivermectin Fraud

Jonathan Howard, in Science Based Medicine, explores myocarditis and spin with the mRNA vaccines.

Katherine J. Wu, in the Atlantic, on how to understand breakthrough infections in the vaccinated. 

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, in Medium, covers the terrible, fraudulent research that's been used to promote ivermectin. 

Saturday Stories: Kids, New Zealand, And More Kids

Jeremy Samuel Faust, Katie Dickerson Mayes and Céline Gounder, in The New York Times, with more on the risk of COVID to kids and how ultimately the choice will be for them to eventually catch it, or get vaccinated. 

Tess McClure, in The Guardian, on New Zealand's ongoing successful refusal to live with COVID.

Hilda Bastian, in Absolutely Maybe, on what she sees as a dangerous trend towards exceptionalism in the COVID-Kids debate. 

Saturday Stories: Base Rate Bias, Weight Bias, And The Future of Ventilation

Katelyn Jetelina, in Your Local Epidemiologist, explains base rate bias by way of Israel, Delta, and 50% of cases being found in those already vaccinated. 

Diana Duong, in the CMAJ, briefly interviews me regarding obesity, weight bias, and COVID.

Lidia Morawska, Joseph Allen, William Bahnfleth, Philomena M. Bluyssen, Atze Boerstra, Giorgio Buonanno, Junji Cao, Stephanie J. Dancer, Andres Floto, Francesco Franchimon, Trisha Greenhalgh, Charles Haworth, Jaap Hogeling, Christina Isaxon, Jose L. Jimenez, Jarek Kurnitski, Yuguo Li, Marcel Loomans, Guy Marks, Linsey C. Marr, Livio Mazzarella, Arsen Krikor Melikov, Shelly Miller, Donald K. Milton, William Nazaroff, Peter V. Nielsen, Catherine Noakes, Jordan Peccia, Kim Prather, Xavier Querol, Chandra Sekhar, Olli Seppänen, Shin-ichi Tanabe, Julian W. Tang, Raymond Tellier, Kwok Wai Tham, Pawel Wargocki, Aneta Wierzbicka, Maosheng Yao, in Science, on the paradigm shift needed to combat airborne respiratory infections.

Saturday Stories: Vaccinating Kids, Ivermectin, and Novavax

Edward Nirenberg, Daniel A. Freedman, Risa Hoshino, Jonathan Howard, and Alastair McAlpine,  in BMJ Blogs, on vaccinating kids vs. COVID. 

Anna Merlan, in Vice, on the invermectin conspiracy mongers. 

Hilda Bastien, in The Atlantic, on why Novavax might be the best vaccine we've got. 

Saturday Stories: Delta, Ventilation, and Childhood COVID

Jennifer Yang and Kenyon Wallace, in The Toronto Star, on how cities, provinces and countries awash in vaccines can still mess things up if they're not cautious with the Delta variant. 

Tavia Grant, in The Globe and Mail, on the need to address ventilation in workplaces.

Edward Nirenberg and Risa Hoshino, in Medpage Today, on COVID in childhood.

Saturday Stories: Not Individuals, And Long COVID And Kids

Ed Yong, in The Atlantic, on how health, including during pandemics, cannot be framed as a matter of individual/personal choice.

Elizabeth Cooney, in STAT, on what we do and don't know about children COVID long haulers. 

Saturday Stories: The Finish Line and Microchips

Jessica Smith-Cross, in QP Briefing, on Ontario's (and really everywhere's) COVID finish line. 

James Heathers, in The Atlantic, ponders whether or not he received a microchip in his COVID vaccine.

Saturday Stories: The Latest Scary Variant, Systematic Evidence, And Lab Leaks

John Michael McGrath, for TVO, on what we do and don't know about the latest scary variant B.1.617

Hilda Bastian, in her blog Absolutely Maybe, on the evidence behind the systematic evidence behind all matters COVID. 

David Leonhardt, in The New York Times, with an explainer on the lab leak mess that is suddenly being discussed everywhere. 

Saturday Stories: They Were Loved

More than 25,000 Canadians have been lost to COVID-19 (and terrible governance given the bulk of those deaths were preventable), Macleans is collecting their stories. Please take the time today to click at least a few.

Saturday Stories: Vaccinating Kids, Hatred And COVID

Gideon M-K, in Medium, on whether or not we should be vaccinating kids against the coronavirus (tl;dr - yes) 

Bernie Farber and David Fisman, in The Globe and Mail, on the overlap between racism, hate, and COVID denialists. 

Photo byAnthony Crider; cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 20:37, 9 April 2018 (UTC) - Charlottesville "Unite the Right" Rally, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=68193094

Saturday Stories: Blood Clots, NNTs, And Incentives

Kai Kupferschmidt and Gretchen Vogel, in Science, explore the future of vaccines with rare risks of blood clots.

Andrew Althouse, in Medscape, on vaccines and the failure of NNTs.

John Michael McGrath, in TVO, makes the case for paying people to get vaccinated

Saturday Stories: One Universal Coronavirus Vaccine, Fringe Science, And The Misnomer Of Vaccine Hesitancy

James Hamblin, in the Atlantic, on the promise of a single coronavirus vaccine which would protect us against SARS, MERS, COVID-19, and every other coronavirus-related disease, forever and ever.

David Robert Grimes, in Scientific American, on how COVID has opened the floodgates of fringe science. 

Stefanie Friedhoff, in STAT, on why we need to stop talking about vaccine "hesitancy".

Saturday Stories: Unanswered Questions, Ontario's Misery, And Vietnam's Triumph

Helen Branswell, in STAT, with the questions experts still have about COVID.

Justin Ling, in Macleans, with the almost unbelievable story of Ontario's science table and its recommendations versus what our government is doing. 

Julia Belluz, in Vox, on Vietnam, not an island, and it's incredibly successful strategy for dealing with COVID 

Saturday Stories: Is Canada a Country, The Gaslighting of Science, And A Non-COVID Piece From Me

Lauren Dobson-Hughes, in The Line, reflecting on Canada's responses to COVID wonders if we are actually a country?

Zeynep, in Insight, on the gaslighting of science.

And in non-COVID writing, here's my latest in Medscape How Dare There Be Effective Drugs for Obesity? which covers the bizarrely negative reaction that effective drugs for obesity face from the medical community and society as a whole