Saturday Stories: Sweden's Failure, More For Kids, And What Does Endemic Mean

Andrew Nikiforuk, in The Tyee, on Sweden's deadly COVID failures (which are playing out now here all over North America) 

Nathaniel Basen, in TVO, interviews Janine McCready on what more we could be doing to protect children during and after this 6th wave.

 Eleanor Lutz and Amy Schoenfeld Walker, in The New York Times, with an explainer on a very misunderstood word - endemic

Saturday Stories: Normal?, Living?, Human Rights?

Jonathan Howard, in Science Based Medicine, more politely asks how did normal expand to include kids dying from vaccine preventable diseases?

Bill Hanage, in The Guardian, explains what "learning to live with COVID" should mean. 

BC Human Rights Commissioner Kasari Govender's open letter to Minister of Health Bonnie Henry calling on her to reinstate the province's mask mandates as their removal increases inequities and runs counter to human rights. 

Saturday Stories: Tracking, Motivated Reasoning, And Normal's About To Be Tested

The editorial board of Nature on the folly of stopping the tracking of COVID.

Abigail Cartus and Justin Feldman, in Protean, on the privileged attack on public education in the name of "normal".

Katherine J. Wu, in the Atlantic, on how the looming wave crash will break onto unprotected normal.

Saturday Stories: Giving Up And Not Giving Up

Ed Yong, in The Atlantic, on the disaster being wrought by governments giving up on COVID control. 

The late and great Paul Farmer, in Noēma, on social medicine for a better future.

Saturday Stories: Numbness and Not Learning

Ed Yong, in The Atlantic, on how we've become numb to the ongoing deaths.

Zeynep Tufecki, in The New York Times, on the lessons we still haven't learned that could have saved millions of lives. 

Saturday Story: Pandemic Response Can't Just Be Individual To Be Effective, And Focused Protection Is Bullshit

Katherine J. Wu, in The Atlantic, discusses the American shift to individualized COVID responses - a shift that is also being felt across much of Canada

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, in Medium, covering the folly of "focused protection".

Saturday Stories: How the #UrgencyOfNormal ignores the #UrgencyOfEquity

Melody Schreiber, in The New Republic, on why the #UrgencyOfNormal cabal so badly want kids to be unmasked. 

The #UrgencyOfEquity, which I support, discusses how to best protect our most vulnerable and marginalized students during this pandemic. 

Saturday Stories: #Urgency of Normal Done With COVID x 3 And What To Do Post-Omicron

Ed Yong, in The Atlantic, on how the #UrgencyofNormal/done with COVID talk condemns the immunocompromised

Ramnath Subbaraman,  Michelle Holmes,  and Lakshmi Ganapathi, in Common Dream, on the privilege required to state that you're done with COVID.

Gregg Gonsalves, in The New York Times, on the immorality of #UrgencyofNormal done with COVID takes. 

Gavin Yamey, Abraar Karan and Ranu Dhillon in TIME, on what we need to do with our post-Omicron time.

Saturday Stories: Air, Hopium, And Kids' Masks

Edward A. Nardell, in Time, on how to clean our indoor air.

Gregg Gonsalves, in The Nation, on the dangers of hopium and wishful thinking on COVID.

Melody Schreiber, in The New Republic, on how masks have no impact on child development.

Saturday Stories: Endemicity's Meaninglessness, 1918's Flu, And Hospitals

Jacob Stern and Katherine J. Wu, in The Atlantic, on the meaninglessness of endemicity.

John M. Barry, in The New York Times, on learning from 1918 the risks of pretending it's over before it is.

Ed Yong, in The Atlantic, on the state of our hospitals right now.

Saturday Stories: Endemicity and Japan

Aris Katzourakis, in Nature, on what the word endemic actually means

Hitoshi Oshitani, in the New York Times, on what Japan got right in its approach to the pandemic.

Photo By https://www.flickr.com/photos/reggiepen/ - https://www.flickr.com/photos/reggiepen/17025277650/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67128875 

Saturday Stories: Treating the Unvaccinated, Will Omicron Hasten Immunity, And Airborne COVID

Ed Yong, in The Atlantic, on why it's a terrible idea not to treat the unvaccinated.

Katherine J. Wu, also in The Atlantic, on whether Omicron infections will translate into widespread immunity.

The Agenda, with a great segment on how COVID is airborne.

Infographic By Colin D. Funk, Craig Laferrière, and Ali Ardakani - Funk CD, Laferrière C y Ardakani A (2020) Una instantánea de la carrera mundial de vacunas dirigidas contra el SARS-CoV-2 y la pandemia COVID-19. Parte delantera. Pharmacol. 11:937.Funk CD, Laferrière C and Ardakani A (2020) A Snapshot of the Global Race for Vaccines Targeting SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 Pandemic. Front. Pharmacol. 11:937.https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2020.00937, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=99473789

Saturday Stories: The Great Surrender, It's Mild, It's So Mild, With COVID

Chuck Wendig, in TerribleMinds, on our great surrender and how we let COVID win.

Bruce Arthur, in The Toronto Star, on the myth of mild Omicron.

Katherine J. Wu, in The Atlantic, on how we're long past the point of hoping 'mild' Omicron will spare us.

Ed Yong, in The Atlantic, on the fallacies swirling around the hospitalized "with" COVID discussion.

Saturday Stories: America's COVID Rules, COVID fatigue, And Omicron Healthcare

Katherine J. Wu, in the Atlantic, on the dumpster fire that is America's COVID rules (and for Canadian readers, much overlap with ours).

Gregg Gonsalves, in The Nation, on the impact of COVID fatigue on our morality. 

Ed Yong, in The Atlantic, on the crushing impact "mild" Omicron has on healthcare delivery.

Saturday Stories: Omicron's Teaching, COVID's Teaching, And Teaching LeBron

Andrew Joseph and Helen Branswell, in STAT, on the lessons we're learning from Omicron.

More Helen Branswell, in STAT, on 10 lessons she's learned covering the pandemic.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, in his Substack, helps LeBron James understand the differences between colds, flus, and COVID.

Photo By Keith Allison - https://www.flickr.com/photos/keithallison/31915296404/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70713991

Saturday Story: Again Just One And Again It's Omicron

Katherine J. Wu, Ed Yong, and Sarah Zhang, in The Atlantic, on how our response to Omicron to date represents all of our past mistakes on fast forward.

Saturday Story: Ed Yong on Omicron

Ed Yong, the best science journalist of this pandemic, in the Atlantic, discusses Omicron and how we're definitely not ready for it. It's so good it's the only story I'm posting this week. 

Saturday Stories: Treating The Unvaccinated, Omicron, And Mildness

Steven Novella, in Science Based Medicine, on why we cannot and should not withhold medical care from the unvaccinated. 

Sarah Zhang, in The Atlantic, on why Omicron's explosive growth is so concerning. 

Andrew Pekosz, in The New York Times, on how COVID doesn't care about lethality, but that you definitely shouldn't assume it's going to evolve to be milder.

Saturday Stories: Fitness and Health Aren't Enough, 3 Cheers For Our Immune Systems, And Omicron

By Soupvector - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=112983798

Sirin Kale, in The Guardian, with the life and death story of 42 year old triathlete, body builder, and anti-vaxxer John Eyers

Katherine J. Wu, in The Atlantic, on why you should be showing your immune system some love

Ewen Callaway & Heidi Ledford, in Nature, with a piece that may in fact be out of date despite being published 2 days ago, on what we do and don't know about Omicron.

In Yet Another Win, Bariatric Surgery Reduces Cancer Risk In Long Term Study

Before you read any further know that I'm NOT a surgeon.

I think it could be fairly argued that as far as surgical impact and benefits go, there are few that rival bariatric surgery.

Shown to prolong life, regularly push many chronic diseases including type 2 diabetes, hypertension, sleep apnea (and so many more) into remission, and dramatically improve subjective quality of life, for so many, bariatric surgery provides a new lease on life.

Well add to the aforementioned list a reduced risk of cancer. While not particularly surprising of course given the relationship between weight and some of our most common cancers, here's new data from the now over 2 decades old SOS study which demonstrates reduced cancer risk in patients who opted for surgery vs. weight matched medically managed controls. 

For those of us who have the good fortune of working with patients who've had bariatric surgery, we know just how life changing it can be. What's shocking though, is the comfort of those who don't work with this category of patients to look down on surgery, or fearmonger about it, and this sadly also includes people in the health care community..

The data is clear. Bariatric surgery is remarkable. That said, I'm hopeful that in 20-30 years, it'll no longer be necessary and will be replaced by medications that lead to surgical degrees of weight loss without the surgery. Until then however, I'm thankful the option of bariatric surgery exists, and if you're not, you're either ignorant or an ideologue.