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richardvallee.bsky.social
I play language. Mostly irreverent. Debugger. AI. Global warming. Integrity. Health. Science. Chronically ill punk rocker. I think about the future a lot.
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It's important to acknowledge when we discuss why a minority of young men are attracted to the radical right that part of the answer is "they're obnoxious". It's not all about being dispossessed and left behind it's also twats.

Once you're labeled a "difficult" patient, you'll get worse care and medical people will listen to you even less. It's active retaliation with real consequences.

If only there had been some kind of major international crisis where every expert had been shouting about how important and beneficial it would be to invest massively in air safety measures, maybe we might have been better prepared for this.

Disabled people have been warning that the “embrace mass covid reinfections” narrative was first pushed by anti vax right wing libertarians, now they’ve consolidated power. They are against disease mitigation and have pushed anti mitigation ideas mainstream.

They're not well hidden, then. They're in fact not just countable, but were predicted, literally by thousands. Some things are invisible. Some things those responsible choose not to look. This is 100% all the latter. Eyes wide shut. Billions in losses. Barely a blip in response, as a choice.

JFK literally had multiple chronic diseases and spent a significant part of both his childhood and adult life hospitalized and convalescing. RFK Jr. is an embarrassment.

"Long COVID is not just an individual health issue, it is a public health issue, it is an economic issue, it is an employment issue, and it does not appear to be going away anytime soon" -

The idea that Long Covid would just go away was always delusional. Like believing in chemtrails level of delusional. Chronic illnesses like LC have been known for decades, and have been completely discriminated by medicine. Choosing to do nothing about it is just that, a choice.

There are now 19 (nineteen) rapid responses to the Miller et al. BMJ opinion piece. www.bmj.com/content/389/... But until they receive the prominence that @bmj.com gave the initial article, they are unlikely to change anything. BMJ needs to start listening to patients, scientists, advocates.

Unfortunately, years of celebrating COVID with this language means that for most people, endemic now means good. "Measles could be endemic? GOOD!", many will say. Because they heard it so many times on the TV, from MDs. Plus, "most people will be fine, natural immunity is better", they also heard.

Long Covid and ME/CFS folks— Developing relationships with the health staffers for your Members of Congress is well worth your time, and this is a great opportunity to be introduced to them. The meetings this year will all be remote, and Solve will train you!

The fact that one of our most ill-treated groups is also the group that almost everyone eventually joins (the group of disabled people) shows that our society is both thoughtless and thought-free

It never fails to amaze me how this "gold standard" is taken so seriously when it's such a low standard that in most professions no one would even look at evidence of such low quality. It sits entirely below almost all other forms of professional evidence. Bad evidence isn't evidence, it's bad.

Maybe this is true for this small subset, over 50 and married, but wow has this not been my experience. Not even close. And I have seen far too many to know it's common. Most subsets of this scenario are not like this. Illness is destructive beyond what most people can imagine.

This WHN editorial breaks down the long-term health, economic, and policy consequences of unchecked COVID spread. From Long COVID and immune disruption to labor force impacts and public health failures, the evidence is clear: silence is costing us. Read the full piece: whn.global/scientific/t...

Our evidence-based rebuttal to *that* BMJ opinion piece published last week. This has been authored by a coalition of 19 doctors, scientists and patient advocates from around the world, with now 80+ signatures of support from the scientific community. www.bmj.com/content/389/...

Hate to say this but the simple truth is that governments don't care about people, they care about workers working. Once you're no longer able to work, they don't care anymore. There are a few things here and there to support some, but their only interest is for disabled people to get back to work.

#MEAction is sending an urgent letter to the newly appointed National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, calling for the NIH to allocate $50 million to fund the ME/CFS Research Roadmap. Sign & share: bit.ly/MEcfsRoadmap #pwME #NIH #MyalgicE #MECFS

Flag this under: if you think medical research is expensive, consider how not doing research is far more expensive. Following the same model as climate change denial. All of this could have been solved already, have paid for itself many times over, but people just... choose not to.

Looking at both side-by-side for many years, I can no longer tell much of a difference between "mind-body" magic proponents and MAGA/QAnon. They are just as dishonorable delusional fantasies, and neither is going to get better with time.

This malicious BMJ commissioned piece claims people with severe ME/CFS can recover if they change their beliefs—implying it’s psychosomatic. One study it cites literally found that psychosomatic framing was the biggest driver of suicidal thoughts in pwME. Severe cognitive dissonance. Very grim.