outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Reading this Medium blog about the Foo Fighters' early '00s advocacy for a group that denied the link between HIV and AIDS. Somehow I have never heard about this?

https://medium.com/the-monthly/the-foo-fighters-aids-denialism-should-be-on-the-record-6e33666fdc3c

Alive and Well was not your usual celebrity charity then, but it was nonetheless amplified by one of the biggest bands in the world. In early 2000, President Clinton’s director of AIDS policy admonished them: “For the Foo Fighters to be promoting this is extraordinarily irresponsible behaviour. There is no doubt about the link between HIV and AIDS in the respected scientific community and it’s quite unfortunate that a band reads one book and then adopts this theory. To say [that HIV does not cause AIDS] is akin to saying the world is flat.”

That “one book” was What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong? — self-published pseudo-science written by Alive and Well’s founder, Christine Maggiore, a woman diagnosed with HIV in the early ’90s — and it fell into the idle hands of the Foo Fighters’ bassist, Nate Mendel. After devouring it, Mendel conscripted his bandmates in his advocacy for Maggiore’s group.

too much time on the bus

I remember there was a writer for SPIN magazine in the early 90s, Celia Farber, who penned many articles questioning the HIV-AIDS link. Always thought it was a weird thing to read in a music mag.

Celia Farber is more awful than you think (a galaxy brain thirty years ago can only get exponentially worse)

https://celiafarber.substack.com/p/a-family-that-lost-their-daughter

and on and on

She was Bob Jr’s girlfriend when I was interning at Spin.

fuck

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/01/first-human-avian-flu-case-texas-00149949

Good news:

1/n update on Covid in U.S. first some good news, latest from CDC shows we’re now at about our lowest levels of new COVID hospitalizations since the beginning of the pandemic… pic.twitter.com/yhTVKi0EN3

— Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD (@PeterHotez) April 26, 2024

Looks like the spectacularly well-named FLiRT variants are the next ones for which we'll need a fall booster.

Roffle. But yeah, things are definitely calmer. My hospital has been in low single digits for a while. Thankfully masking is still required in the main building; I work at an outlier with a window I prop open right behind me so in combination with relatively lower usage levels compared to pre-pandemic that enables me to split things nicely, since I only use the main building to grab lunch most days.