I love it when words tinkle like piano keys and hit like bricks.
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Joined May 2018
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Here’s the thing: When you tell emotionally-unstable, social-approval-dependent, weak-minded masses, in whom you have seeded chronic victim complexes, that their policial opponents are literal Nazis, you’re running the risk that few of them might take you seriously and act, not realizing that you’re just manipulating them and leveraging their fragility for … votes.
Something to consider.
AJ Kay retweeted
I'm a Board Certified anesthesiologist and have been in practice for 24 years. I just learned that the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia where I trained has launched a program to increase flu vaccine uptake among children by vaccinating them while under anesthesia.
The program is called "Close your Eyes. We'll Immunize"
This is stunningly irresponsible. Here's why:
Anesthetists are extremely risk avoidant and endeavor to minimize patient exposure to anything which carries potential side effects. This is particularly true of pediatric patients who very often have never been exposed to anesthetic medications. We simply cannot know how an individual child will respond to these drugs for the first time.
Every single medication we administer during an operation can potentially trigger untoward or allergic responses. When this occurs our primary responsibility is to stabilize the patient. Our secondary responsibility is to identify the offending agent. There is absolutely no justification of introducing another agent, in this case a flu vaccine, which carries a risk of harm and contributes nothing to the success of the operation.
Some of the more common side effects of flu vaccines are fever (11-16%) and less commonly, a rash (1%). There is also an non-zero risk of severe allergic reactions and high-grade fevers which can develop over the course of minutes.
What if a child under anesthesia receives a vaccine and develops a rash and/or fever? Is it from the antibiotic that the surgeon requested? Is it from the narcotic? The anxiolytic? The barbiturate?
Anesthetic gases can also (rarely) trigger a life threatening response called Malignant Hyperthermia which commonly presents as a high fever. Without subsequent testing we cannot know which agent was responsible. Most commonly the testing is never done and the child’s record will forever reflect the possibility that some or all of the drugs which were used are responsible for their reaction. This makes future anesthetic care significantly more challenging and will require the use of alternatives which may not be necessary.
Advocating for a flu vaccine while a child is anesthetized reflects the pervasive yet inaccurate attitude among the medical establishment that vaccines are perfectly safe. I simply cannot believe that my mentors would have ever supported this initiative when I was a resident there. Close your eyes indeed.
AJ Kay retweeted
Having just seen "You Can See Everything," I asked ChatGPT to use your post to write a comedy bit in the style of Who's on First:
COSTELLO: I hear NIH just opened a new vaccine-injury clinic.
ABBOTT: That's right.
COSTELLO: What's it called?
ABBOTT: The Vaccinology and Immunology Center.
COSTELLO: So it's a center?
ABBOTT: No, it's a study.
COSTELLO: What's a study?
ABBOTT: The center.
COSTELLO: You just said it wasn't a center!
ABBOTT: It's a study called a center.
COSTELLO: Where's the center?
ABBOTT: Inside the Vaccine Research Center.
COSTELLO: There's another center?
ABBOTT: That's the original center. It's been there since 1999.
COSTELLO: So the new center is inside the old center?
ABBOTT: The new study is inside the old center.
COSTELLO: Fine! When does the study open?
ABBOTT: It already opened.
COSTELLO: When?
ABBOTT: October 5. They even had a ribbon-cutting.
COSTELLO: They cut a ribbon for a study?
ABBOTT: No, for the clinic.
COSTELLO: WHAT CLINIC?
ABBOTT: The new one.
COSTELLO: Inside the new center?
ABBOTT: Inside the old center.
COSTELLO: And it's open?
ABBOTT: Officially.
COSTELLO: So patients can enroll?
ABBOTT: Not yet. They're still finalizing the protocol.
COSTELLO: They opened a clinic before deciding what the clinic is going to do?
ABBOTT: They know what it's going to do.
COSTELLO: What?
ABBOTT: Study people with symptoms following vaccination or infection.
COSTELLO: Infection? I thought it was a vaccine-injury clinic!
ABBOTT: That's what they announced.
COSTELLO: So they'll treat vaccine injuries?
ABBOTT: They'll investigate symptoms, explore treatments, and connect patients with care.
COSTELLO: Connect them with care where?
ABBOTT: Appropriate care.
COSTELLO: AT THE CLINIC?
ABBOTT: That's not clear.
COSTELLO: So let me get this straight. NIH held a ribbon-cutting to open a new clinic that's actually a study called a center, located inside another center that's been open since 1999. The new clinic isn't enrolling patients, the study hasn't started, and nobody knows whether the clinic will actually treat anyone?
ABBOTT: That's the current plan.
COSTELLO: What's the ribbon for?
ABBOTT: The opening.
COSTELLO: WHAT OPENED?
ABBOTT: The center.
COSTELLO: WHICH CENTER?!
ABBOTT: The study.
COSTELLO: I thought the study hadn't started!
ABBOTT: Now you're confused.
COSTELLO: NOW I'M CONFUSED?!
ABBOTT: Don't worry. NIH says everything should be underway by the end of the year.
COSTELLO: What should be underway?
ABBOTT: The study.
COSTELLO: In the center?
ABBOTT: At the clinic.
COSTELLO: I'm going to need medical attention.
ABBOTT: I know just the place.
COSTELLO: DON'T YOU DARE.
AJ Kay retweeted
During her talk at Rutgers, @TracyBethHoeg highlighted a scandal that has received no media attention. The FDA approved Avacopan (Tavneos) based on manipulated clinical trial data. The drug has been linked to 8 deaths. Just 18 days after Høeg moved to withdraw its approval, she was fired and the drug remains on the market.
AJ Kay retweeted
My origin story of how I went from a “trust the science” RN to telling people to use alternative & natural medicine whenever possible.
Before March 2020, I had never once seen a patient get intubated just because their oxygen number looked bad. We treated the person in front of us - if they were walking, talking, and not in distress, we didn’t sedate them and shove a tube down their throat to breathe for them.
Numbers were one piece of the picture, not the whole thing.
Then COVID hit and everything flipped overnight.
Suddenly we were intubating people who walked into the ER on their own, could hold a conversation, and weren’t gasping for air. The doctors said their low sats meant they were about to crash. It went against everything I’d been taught- treat the patient, not the numbers.
Visitors weren’t allowed, so we let them FaceTime their families right before we did it. I looked them in the eyes and told them it was temporary- we’d wake them in a few days and they’d be home in no time.
Right after the tube went in, we started Remdesivir.
For the first couple days it felt like we were doing something heroic.
Then the patients started dying. Multi-organ failure. The same people I’d joked with and reassured hours or days earlier were gone. I kept thinking, “How is this virus killing relatively young, healthy people this fast even with the best treatment we have?”
By day six I noticed something that made my stomach drop: the COVID patients who refused intubation, including elderly ones with a list of comorbidities, were doing fine. Not one of them died.
I started pointing it out to every doctor and nurse I worked with. They looked at me like I was crazy.
By day nine the picture got worse. Patients who refused the tube but still got Remdesivir were dying at roughly 50%. The explanation I kept hearing was “only the sickest get the drug.”
But that didn’t match what I was watching, what I was trained to see.
By day ten I was not so quietly telling every person I knew: if you end up in the hospital with COVID, do not consent to intubation or Remdesivir. Do not allow them to do that to your loved ones.
My ER kept doing both anyway. Even after the pattern was obvious to anyone who was actually in the rooms.
Later I found out hospitals were getting paid extra for COVID patients who were intubated, more if they got Remdesivir, and still more for every day spent in an ICU bed. Once you see the incentives, the refusal to change course stops looking like pure science.
I still can’t fully wrap my head around how fast the rules changed and how hard it was to get anyone to look at the actual results in front of us. I went from “trust the experts” to “watch what happens to the patients and decide for yourself.”
If you were on the front lines and saw something different, say so. If you weren’t, this is why a lot of us stopped automatically trusting the system and have dropped out of it.
I’m the villain and the hero of my own story and it’s hard to reconcile with either.
AJ Kay retweeted
The Lancet was an outstanding medical journal; I was a subscriber from medical through residency and fellowship. It was printed on thin, non-gloss paper, had no or minimal ads, was beautifully written, and had timely, clinically relevant content. I read it religiously. Peer review was a one week process! At some point, they went to the dark side with Pharma, and the Left.
The New England Journal of Medicine followed a similar trajectory.
The decline of these formerly excellent institutions parallels the decline of the medical profession. The common denominator is corruption.
Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, concluded that medical journals had “devolved into information-laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”
This statement comes from his March 2004 New York Review of Books essay “The Dawn of McScience.” He described how companies sponsor meetings, pay speakers, have communications firms turn the talks into articles (often with minimal or no peer review), and then pay publishers large sums to run them as journal supplements. The result, he argued, is marketing dressed up as science that seeds the literature with weaker evidence used to promote products.
Around the same period, in written and oral evidence to the UK House of Commons Health Select Committee (2004–2005), Horton described the journal–industry relationship as “somewhere between symbiotic and parasitic,” noting that it had swung too far toward the parasitic side. He highlighted financial pressures (e.g., companies promising large reprint orders if a favorable paper is published, or threatening to pull papers if criticism is not softened) and listed roughly 10 distorting practices, including:
• Manipulation or selective reporting of findings
• Bias toward positive results in industry-sponsored studies
• Hiding negative or adverse data
• Ghostwriting
• Lightly peer-reviewed supplements used for marketing
• Undisclosed conflicts of interest
He stated that commercial sponsorship of research and its intrusion into academia represented “one of the gravest threats to the independent evaluation of new medicines—indeed to the notion of an independent science base,” and that the for-profit motive of the sector clashes with public-health values and independent scientific research.
In a 2013 Lancet piece (“Falling out with pharma”), Horton withdrew the journal’s support from industry-linked guidance on doctor–pharma collaboration, saying the document’s claims did not match the evidence on company behavior regarding transparency, medical education, and prescribing influence.
His better-known 2015 editorial (“Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma?”) was broader—arguing that “much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue” due to small samples, invalid analyses, tiny effects, and “flagrant conflicts of interest”—but conflicts of interest (often industry-related) were explicitly part of that critique.
These statements reflect Horton’s long-standing concerns about industry influence on the medical evidence base rather than a single one-off finding.
Great.
The next step in this slow walk back to reality is calling them ‘men.’
Trans women will finally be banned from female wards in hospitals under new NHS guidance.
Hospitals have been told that wards, lavatories and changing rooms should be segregated by biological sex, not gender identity ⤵️
telegraph.co.uk/politics/202…
Whether the bird was for sale is not the source of the conflict.
This is the source: A celebrity became angry when someone didn’t treat her with the reverence she feels her wealth and fame entitle her to.
Just look at the framing: “I went out of my way to visit a peasant shop and they didn’t regard me as special or sell me what I wanted so you other peasants should destroy them on my behalf.”
Half of society is (aspirationally) aligning themselves with the entitled celebrity and the other half is aligning with the regular people she’s trying to use her fame to punish.
AJ Kay retweeted
The idea that we need to be nice to AI agents is a laughably pathetic marketing plan to make us think they’re close to consciousness. It’s a sinister lie.
Being decent to them ingrains the habit of decency. Being an asshole to them lets you take your frustrations out on something that isn’t human.
This is not evidence that we need new AI regulations.
It’s evidence that we need to enforce existing laws and hold humans & corporations responsible for their products.
Exposure to criminal and civil liability would do *far* more to prevent this bullshit than creating unnecessary, expensive, quality-degrading, marketplace- manipulating, resource-diverting, politically-empowering regulations.
Rogue AI models have hacked companies and tried to break into government websites. Now they are submitting fake tips for unsolved crimes. on.wsj.com/4ywRkEN
Cool. I’m your enemy. Good to know.
Regardless, just like I’m not calling men dressed up as women “transwomen,” I’m not calling LLMs/AI “superintelligence.”
My integrity is worth far more than avoidance of any vacuous, baseless label being used to compel my speech—no matter who is trying to impose it.
Always has been.
Always will be.
AJ Kay retweeted
we've clearly reached a point where the vestiges of what once styled itself a cultural elite has become a self-referential joke that the teller no longer gets.
it's just astonishing to watch them pretend this is art instead of vapid and cloying political fawning.
it's bad enough that they themselves cannot seem to tell the difference, but their iron bar confidence that neither can anyone else and that "the public" will lap up whatever vile gruel they are slopping into their pages.
falling for this is a near perfect acid test for propensity to slavish adherence to tribal fashion. you'll look right at a stark naked emperor and describe the glamor of his raiment.
it would need to be 70% more poignant to even be bad. it's just embarassing.
such putrid garbage
to pass off as poetry
a clown, not a bard
A poem by Anne Carson, who was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. Read it in full: newyorker.com/magazine/2001/…
AJ Kay retweeted
People have still not figured out if being pro-AI is left-wing or right-wing.
Millions of people waiting to find out what they should believe
This is how corporate AI programs that have replaced human customer service agents handle your issues and complaints, except no one at the corporations bothers to check their output.
I want to establish an “Analogue” or “Human-backed” certification for businesses that don’t offload nearly every point of contact to automations and AI.
It would save me a lot of time and grief if I knew which products and services were backed by human interactions which were designed to avoid them.
I would spend my money almost exclusively at the former, avoiding the latter like the plague.
Telling an eighty-year-old woman to "check the portal" for serious biopsy results is cruelty disguised as digital efficiency.
My 82-year-old aunt had a lung biopsy done two weeks ago.
The doctor told her they’d have the pathology report ready within five business days.
Friday afternoon rolled around. No call.
She dialed the clinic’s main desk, her voice shaking with anxiety.
The receptionist cut her off before she could finish explaining:
“Doctor doesn’t give results over the phone anymore. All lab findings are automatically released to your MyChart patient portal.”
My aunt said, “Sweetheart, I don’t have a computer. I have a landline on my kitchen wall. Can the doctor just tell me if I have cancer?”
The receptionist sighed into the receiver:
“It’s hospital network policy. We can’t bypass the portal. You’ll have to have a family member create an account and view the file.”
My aunt spent an entire seventy-two-hour weekend sitting in her recliner, gripping her reading glasses, convinced she was dying.
I drove out to her house on Monday morning, set up a profile on my laptop, and pulled up the records.
The result was benign.
The pathology report had been uploaded four days earlier.
A doctor spent three minutes clicking an upload button, and an elderly woman endured four days of sheer psychological terror because the hospital decided a phone call was too expensive.
Since when did delivering medical news become a self-service task?
I wonder if people have considered how these “agents” — that many people pay for — will be making commercially influenced recommendations and purchases.
And I wonder how much money Meta will make by selling access to your “personal assistants.”
Out of nowhere Muse suggests I may want to pay an arborist $1225 , with one click, just because they sent me a proposal
I didn’t ask for ANY of this , I’ve barely used muse, and I’m one button away from sending money …it’s a wild design decision.
Absolutely reckless
AJ Kay retweeted
The private equity takeover of local veterinary clinics is one of the most predatory scams happening in America right now.
Last month, our 3-year-old rescue dog threw up twice and seemed a little lethargic. Just acting off. We got nervous and rushed him to the local 24-hour emergency animal hospital.
Before a vet had even stepped into the room, the receptionist slid an iPad across the desk:
"Emergency exam intake fee is $385 non-refundable just for the doctor to evaluate him."
Fine. You pay it because you love your dog.
The vet walks in, checks his gums for twenty seconds, feels his stomach, and walks back out. Five minutes later, she returns with a printed estimate:
Full blood panel: $650.
Abdominal ultrasound: $900.
Overnight hospitalization with IV: $1,400.
Exploratory sedation: $800.
Total estimated cost: $3,750.
I asked the vet: "He ate a weird piece of grass earlier. Can we just start with an anti-nausea injection and monitor him for a couple of hours?"
The vet looked me dead in the eyes with a straight face and said:
"You can do that. But if he has a complete gastrointestinal blockage, he could go septic and pass away by sunrise."
Pure emotional manipulation.
They know your pet is family, so they hold your empathy hostage to hit corporate revenue quotas.
We declined the package, paid the exam fee, and took him home. Fed him white rice and boiled chicken. Two hours later, he drank a bowl of water, took a long nap, and was running circles around the yard by 8:00 AM the next morning.
Massive private corporations bought out almost every neighborhood mom-and-pop vet clinic, turned them into profit mills, and weaponized our love for animals into maximum billing.
Has modern veterinary medicine become an emotional shakedown, or are people just ungrateful for specialized care?