COVID is like an iceberg. If you fixate on deaths, you'll miss the bigger picture. The true toll of COVID is what it does to your body over time--especially if you're repeatedly exposed to it. The challenge is how to conceptualize that damage in a way that people understand. In the first few years of the pandemic, governments did everything they could to frame COVID as a phenomenon whose damage was limited to deaths. This was no mistake. If people truly understood what this virus did to them they'd be furious. Instead of telling the truth about the virus, it was easier for governments to hoard data and let people come to their own flawed conclusions. Conclusions like "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger", or "infections build immunity and protect me against the disease" may seem like common sense to some, but when you actually look at the scientific evidence, there's a far more sinister reality. The truth is: COVID wears down your body over time. Given enough exposure, COVID makes you vulnerable. The amount of strain gets worse with repeated exposures, and the risk of permanent damage compounds over time with more infections. This damage is not limited to people who are "vulnerable" (a vague, undefined term). If someone drove their car off a cliff, we wouldn't estimate their injuries based on the strength of their car. It comes down to physics--a model of the world that we can reason with. Force = mass x acceleration. With enough force involved in an accident, you're guaranteed to get hurt. The available evidence around COVID points to profound and lasting physical harm. This harm is not hard to find when you actually look for it. Vascular abnormalities, cognitive dysfunction, respiratory problems, increased susceptibility to secondary infections, and debilitating fatigue--the list goes on. The cliff is deep. Part of the problem here is that there's limited data capable of sufficiently illustrating the chronic pervasiveness of SARS-CoV-2. Spike protein ends up deep within your body, and can only be measured directly with specialized equipment (some of which is still being developed). So we end up looking for second-order effects. In chronic illness, life can become quite miserable, even for years at a time, before the body gives in fully. Just talk to a long COVID patient. They're suffering more than you can imagine. And yes, that includes people who were never vaccinated. The art of good science communication is being able to break down complex and abstract processes into bite-sized chunks of understanding. We desperately need strong scientific communication on the chronic cellular effects of COVID. Don't assume that any institution has your personal safety in mind right now. Take the time to recognize what this virus is capable of, and protect yourself accordingly. Even if you look at vaccines skeptically, that doesn't negate the possibility that the virus itself is also quite nasty. Research demonstrates cellular effects completely independent of vaccination. The virus doesn't think or discriminate; it does what it does. A single infection could define the rest of your life. A single infection could rob you of your ability to function independently. A single infection could debilitate the people you love. Deaths are the tip of the iceberg. The deeper and obscured reality is that COVID reduces your quality of life long after infection. Don't miss the rest of the iceberg that's lurking deep underwater.

At 13 Judy Garland signed with MGM, and the studio decided she was too fat, put her on chicken soup, black coffee and cigarettes, and handed her pills to keep her going and more pills to knock her out, and by the time she finished The Wizard of Oz she was hooked on both. She had been on stage since she was two, as Frances Gumm, the youngest of the Gumm Sisters. Her mother, Ethel, managed her, and according to her biographer first gave her pills, for energy and for sleep, before she was ten. Judy later called her mother the real Wicked Witch of the West. MGM signed her in 1935. Louis B. Mayer and the studio bosses reportedly called her a fat little pig with pigtails. Mayer insisted on the diet himself: chicken soup, black coffee and cigarettes, with pills to take her appetite away. The studio supplied the pep pills, and when they left her too wired to sleep after the long days on set, it supplied sleeping pills for that. She and Mickey Rooney, she said later, were worked "days and nights on end", once for 72 hours straight, and kept going on pills. She was 16 when filming began on The Wizard of Oz, and by the time it ended she was addicted to amphetamines and barbiturates. The girl in the gingham dress singing about somewhere over the rainbow was being starved by the studio and dosed by it. The rest of her life was pills, husbands, comebacks and collapses. "At times," she said, "I have been pretty much of a walking advertisement for sleeping pills." She died in London on 22 June 1969, aged 47, of an accidental overdose of barbiturates. At MGM a growing girl's hunger was treated as the problem, and the studio had a chemical for it. Hollywood has never stopped thinking that way. It has only changed the delivery, from a bottle of pills to a weekly injection.

0.001% TAX A junior auditor at @PwC in Luxembourg is getting ready to leave his job. Before he goes he goes looking for some training documents to take with him. Instead he finds a folder that anyone in the company could open. No password. No warning. Just sitting there. Inside are hundreds of secret deals between the Luxembourg government and some of the biggest companies on the planet. Deals that let them pay next to nothing in tax. His name is Antoine Deltour. He copies 30,000 pages. That is the whole story. He copies a folder. Let me explain what was actually in it, because this is where it gets interesting. Between 2002 and 2010, PwC alone helped broker 548 of these secret tax agreements, known as tax rulings, for over 340 companies. Apple. Ikea. Pepsi. Disney. Deutsche Bank. AIG. Koch Industries. Skype. GlaxoSmithKline. Coach. Abbott Laboratories. Household names, every one of them. The trick was simple. Companies moved profits through Luxembourg shell structures and Luxembourg quietly agreed in writing to look the other way on tax. Some of these companies ended up paying an effective tax rate under 1 percent. In some cases as low as 0.001 percent. On billions of dollars. Who was running Luxembourg for almost 20 years while this machine was built and protected? Jean-Claude Juncker, Prime Minister of Luxembourg until 2013. Deltour did not leak straight to the world. In 2012 he passed the documents to French journalist Edouard Perrin, who used them for a TV documentary. PwC noticed and filed a complaint with the Luxembourg courts. Then in November 2014, ICIJ @ICIJorg pulled together over 80 journalists across more than 30 media outlets in 26 countries and published the full scale of it as LuxLeaks. The timing could not have been worse for Juncker, or depending how you look at it, could not have been better. He had just been elected President of the European Commission days before the story broke. The man who ran the tax haven for two decades was now running Europe. A month later ICIJ dropped LuxLeaks 2, showing the other Big 4 accounting firms Deloitte, EY and KPMG were running the exact same playbook. This was never one bad apple. It was standard practice. Juncker faced a no confidence vote in the European Parliament over it. He survived. Deltour was not so lucky. December 2014, Luxembourg charges him with theft, violation of trade secrecy and fraudulent access to a computer system. He is facing up to 5 years in prison and a fine of 1,250,000 euros. For opening an unlocked folder on his way out the door. April 2016, the criminal trial. Deltour and his colleague Raphael Halet, another former PwC employee who leaked a second batch of documents, are both convicted. Deltour gets 12 months suspended and a 1,500 euro fine. Perrin the journalist is acquitted. Deltour appeals. Loses. Appeals again. Finally in May 2018 the Luxembourg Court of Appeal fully recognises him as a genuine whistleblower under European Court of Human Rights standards and acquits him completely. Halet's fight took even longer. He lost his Luxembourg appeals and only won at the European Court of Human Rights Grand Chamber in 2023, nearly a decade after he first spoke up. The European Commission that Juncker went on to lead never opened a single formal investigation into a single LuxLeaks tax ruling. Not one. It did chase Starbucks, Fiat and Amazon over separate deals, but the mountain of paperwork Deltour handed over sat there untouched. So that is the LuxLeaks story. Build a tax avoidance machine for 20 years and get promoted to run the continent. Copy the evidence of it and spend most of a decade fighting to stay out of prison. @BBCNews · @ICIJorg · @Reuters · @lemondefr and others.

"[The hospitalized adult patients in Pennsylvania] are weak and disoriented with meningitis, sepsis or pneumonia. Some have bacterial infections in their blood, kidney failure or hepatitis.. Pennsylvania’s measles outbreak is defying epidemiologists’ expectations and historical trends: Adults account for about two-thirds of the 1,300 cases reported by the state.. Until now, measles was rarely seen among adults.. Pennsylvania’s outbreak is also sending people to the hospital at almost twice the rate seen in other recent outbreaks. Six people diagnosed with measles — four of them adults — have died, according to state health officials and local coroners. An infant, born with the disease after his mother was sick during pregnancy, was among the deaths.. The toll showcases how adults over age 20 are among the groups at greatest risk for serious complications.. Children under 5 and people with compromised immune systems are also at high risk for severe illness.." I believe the number of immunocompromized adults is increasing. 'Measles is thought of as a childhood illness, but more Pennsylvania adults are getting sick' thetimes-tribune.com/2026/10…

Every modern upgrade to wool is wool's job done worse, by oil, with a brand name on it. Fleece. What it is: polyester, the same stuff as the bottle. Why it exists: because wool is warm, and the bottle wanted the contract. Gore-Tex. What it is: a PTFE film, a forever chemical, glued to nylon. Why it exists: because wool shed rain and breathed for ten thousand years, and the film does both for about a season before it wets out. Thinsulate. What it is: polyester and polypropylene fluff with a trademark. Why it exists: because down and wool insulate, and oil needed a word. Moisture-wicking. What it is: a fibre that cannot absorb water at all. Why it exists: because wool takes in a third of its weight and still feels dry, polyester cannot, so the failure was renamed a feature. Odour-control base layers. What it is: polyester with silver sprayed on. Why it exists: because polyester stinks after four hours and wool does not, and the silver washes into the river by the third wash. Flame-retardant finish. What it is: a chemical bath, replaced every decade when the last one turns out to be carcinogenic. Why it exists: because polyester melts at 250 degrees and wool will not burn in ordinary air. Merino blend. What it is: half wool, half nylon. Why it exists: so the label can say merino and the price can say wool while the jumper is half plastic. Vegan wool. What it is: acrylic. Why it exists: because a sheep had to be left out of a jumper on principle, and the oil well was fine. Recycled polyester. What it is: the same plastic, from a bottle, shedding the same fibres. Why it exists: so the jumper can be sold as a good deed. Bamboo. What it is: viscose, which is wood pulp dissolved in carbon disulphide. Why it exists: because a plant on the label sells, and the factory downstream does not. Every one of those exists to add back a property wool came with, and every one adds a chemical, a smell, a fire or a plastic in the sea to do it. The sheep did the lot at once, on a hill, for grass, and the industry has spent eighty years selling you the parts.

Given the choice between sweetened water and cocaine, 94% of rats picked the sweet water. Bordeaux, 2007. Two levers in a cage. One sends a dose of cocaine straight into a vein. The other delivers a sip of sweetened water. It took the rats 11 days to develop a reliable taste for cocaine over nothing at all. It took them two days to prefer the sweet water over the cocaine. The researchers raised the cocaine dose. The rats stayed loyal to the water. They brought in rats already hooked and escalating their own doses. Those switched to the water as well. They swapped the sweetener for ordinary table sugar. Same result. The sweet receptor on your tongue was built for a world where sweetness meant a handful of berries in August, and nobody has updated the hardware. Hit it every hour from a carton and the reward lands harder than anything that receptor was designed to expect. Only one of those two levers can get you arrested. The other one comes with a cartoon tiger.

In November 1941 the richest man in America drove his twenty-three-year-old daughter to a hospital in Washington without telling her mother, had two surgeons drill holes in her skull and cut into the front of her brain while she sang God Bless America to them, and when the singing stopped she had a mental age of two and the family did not speak her name for twenty years. Rosemary Kennedy was the third child and the first girl, and she was slow. A nurse at the birth had held Rose Kennedy's legs together for two hours while they waited for the doctor, and the baby had been starved of air. She learned to read and write, but late, and in a family where the boys were being bred for the presidency and the girls for the right marriage, she was the one who could not keep up, the one who had to be coached and watched and given the simpler part in the photograph. She was also, by every account, the prettiest of them, and when the family went to London in 1938 she was presented at court in a white dress and curtsied to the King without a mistake. Then she was twenty-one, and the trouble started. Moods. Rages. Slipping out of the convent school at night and coming back in the morning and not saying where. The nuns said she might be meeting men. For Joseph Kennedy, who was managing his sons towards the White House and could not have a daughter who might get pregnant or get talked about, that was the end of it. He had read about a new operation. Walter Freeman had promised the newspapers it calmed the agitated, and Joe Kennedy had never in his life been told that a thing he could pay for would not work. Rosemary was given a mild sedative and kept awake. Freeman and his surgeon, James Watts, opened the skull on both sides and Watts pushed a blade into the frontal lobes and swept, while Freeman asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer and sing, and count backwards, so they would know how far to go. They went until she was incoherent. Then they stopped. She came out of it unable to walk or speak. Years of therapy got her a few words and a limp. Joe moved her to a private hospital in New York and then to a convent school in Wisconsin, told the family she was teaching the retarded in the Midwest, and never went to see her. Rose, her mother, was not told what had been done until long after, and did not visit for twenty years. The brothers and sisters, including the one who became President, were told she was away. When Joe had his stroke in 1961 and could no longer manage the story, Eunice went to Wisconsin and found a woman of forty-three who did not know her, and came home and started the Special Olympics. Rosemary lived to eighty-six, in the convent, and died in 2005 with her surviving sisters at the bed. The brother who became President had signed the first federal mental health law in 1963, and the family has said she was the reason. Freeman kept operating for another twenty-six years. His notes on Rosemary have never been released. That is what the expert's confidence looks like when it meets a powerful man with an inconvenient child. The science was published. The father was certain. The daughter sang to the surgeon until she could not. Every institution that has ever decided it knows what is wrong with you and how to tidy it has the same two ingredients in the room, and the person on the table is still the only one who pays.