PhD Registered Nurse (Retired). USAF Flight Nurse veteran. Professor of Nursing. Specialties: Pediatric Heme/Onco, School Nursing, Tech in Nursing Ed.
Pennsylvania, USA
Joined June 2008
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BrentRN π¦ retweeted
Interesting.
A national cohort study of 28 million individuals found:
No increased risk of 4-year all-cause mortality in individuals aged 18 to 59 years in persons vaccinated against COVID-19.
It's almost like antivaxers are liars and had no evidence...
jamanetwork.com/journals/jamβ¦
BrentRN π¦ retweeted
Don't let Obama buy the election by handing out unlimited free money to states.
BrentRN π¦ retweeted
Oh sure. It was the lab. π
π€ Couldn't possibly have been the wildlife market sitting at the geographic bullseye of the earliest known COVID-19 outbreak.
Pay no attention to that enormous cluster. Instead, hang the entire thesis on a laboratory miles away across the river, where the earliest cases produced no comparable cluster at all. π€·π»ββοΈ
The December 2019 cases - including people with no known connection to the market - were geographically centered on the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. Live mammals susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 were being sold there in late 2019.
Geography alone doesn't prove an origin. Fine. So add the rest.
SARS-CoV-2-positive environmental samples were concentrated in the wildlife-selling area. Later sequencing found wildlife DNA in every SARS-CoV-2-positive sample from one particularly implicated wildlife stall, including raccoon dogs, masked palm civets and bamboo rats - exactly the sort of mammals capable of participating in coronavirus spillover.
Then add the virus itself. The earliest SARS-CoV-2 diversity consisted of two basal lineages, A and B. Phylodynamic analysis found that the pattern was best explained by at least two separate animal-to-human introductions within weeks of each other, rather than one virus quietly escaping a laboratory and somehow generating the same pattern.
So the lab-leak story requires a remarkable series of coincidences:
A novel coronavirus escapes a Wuhan laboratory.
It somehow leaves no early geographic bullseye around that laboratory.
Instead, the earliest outbreak becomes centered on a market selling susceptible live mammals.
The virus-positive environmental samples concentrate around those wildlife vendors.
Genetic material from susceptible wildlife turns up in the same contaminated stall.
And the earliest viral genealogy looks like more than one zoonotic introduction.
That's a hell of a coincidence stack.
Does this mathematically rule out a laboratory accident? No. China has not shared the sequences, market-animal records or lab biosafety data WHO repeatedly requested, and SAGO was also denied access to US and German intelligence material. WHO still says a lab incident cannot be excluded - not because there's evidence for it, but because the data needed to investigate it was never provided. SAGO's chair described the intelligence material they did receive as speculative, political, and not backed by science.
But when you ask which hypothesis the available evidence actually points toward, the answer isn't difficult: the weight of the evidence favors zoonotic spillover through the wildlife trade. That's also the conclusion of WHO's 2025 origins assessment.
BrentRN π¦ retweeted
I just read the paper. She's wrong.
"First, we find that during the boom period an increase in unauthorized immigrant worker flows equal to 1% of a local areaβs initial employment increased local house prices by 2.2% and increased local rents by 1.4%."
The paper then estimates that 30% of the 2.2% increase in house prices and 20% of the 1.4% increase in increased local rents can be explained by unauthorized immigrant work flows. Other factors unrelated to unauthorized immigrant accounted for the remaining increases.
BrentRN π¦ retweeted
Umm no. This will not be happening any time soon.
Venezuela's oil is sludgy and sour and requires extensive refining to even be viable.
They need 3 to five years to plan how to get anything meaningful out of the ground....and then another 5 to 10 years to build out the infrastructure and that only gets you about ~2 Million barrels a day.
Trump has no clue what he's even talking about.
Venezuela's extra-heavy Orinoco crude that literally can't flow without imported diluent or upgraders that are currently falling apart. Even if it gets here, it's fighting Canadian heavy for the same Gulf Coast cokers β the US already imports ~4M bpd from Canada. Experts say meaningfully scaling Venezuela takes years and tens of billions.
So each Venezuelan barrel that arrives mostly displaces a Canadian or Mexican heavy barrel rather than adding to total fuel output β It's a game of musical chairs where the number of chairs is fixed.
More oil from Venezuela than we can already handle isn't going to help anything.
And it's also illegal. The Venezuelan Constitution forbids it. No one is investing 100 Billion with the threat of the deal being cancellled by the next administration or it losing in the courts due to it's illegality. It's a corrupt pipe dream by Trump and his corrupt Mara Lago billionaire cronies and a deperate attempt at a win in the face of losing the Iran war.
You dummies are so gullible.
BrentRN π¦ retweeted
2024
Biden controls the entire economy and is personally responsible for pandemic inflation.
2026: the president is not to blame
π€£
If Joe Biden had said he was changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America I, and everyone else, would rightly see it as dementia in the 80yo President.
BrentRN π¦ retweeted
This is not making America great again.
It is making us petty, juvenile, a parody of even the worst tin-pot dictatorships through history. Caligula would be envious.
We've gone from great feats of heroism in World War II, to this.
It's time for you to be replaced by adults.
BrentRN π¦ retweeted
Hey anti-vaxxers! Many over-the-counter & prescription drugs used fetal cell lines during research or safety-testing. review a complete list through Inpharmd. Examples Tylenol,Advil, Aspirin, Ibuprofen,Motrin, Tums, Pepto-Bismol,Prilosec,Benadryl,Sudafed,Claritin Lipitor, Zoloft.
BrentRN π¦ retweeted
Anti-vaxxers have repeated the same accusation for years: government health agencies suppress anything that makes vaccines look bad and publish only the studies that make them look safe.
Well, this is a rather awkward case for that theory.
FDA scientists conducted two enormous post-market COVID vaccine safety studies - one involving about 7.5 million Medicare recipients and another involving about 4.2 million younger people.
The results were overwhelmingly reassuring. The 65-and-older study reported no new safety signals; the younger cohort study reported no new safety concerns. What turned up was rare or already recognized. Both papers were accepted by medical journals.
If the FDA's mission were simply to manufacture pro-vaccine propaganda, this would have been a gift.
"NEARLY 12 MILLION PEOPLE STUDIED - NO NEW SAFETY CONCERNS."
Publish it. Promote it. Issue press releases. Put it on every government website.
Instead, FDA leadership ordered the papers withdrawn, saying the authors' conclusions went further than the data justified. HHS confirmed this on the record when the story broke back in May.
And there is an even bigger problem with the "they hide vaccine harms" story: when federal surveillance has detected credible safety signals, regulators have very publicly reported them.
FDA and CDC paused the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine after only six initial reports of a rare clotting syndrome.
FDA required a Guillain-BarrΓ© warning for Shingrix after post-market surveillance detected a signal of roughly 3 excess cases per million doses in older adults.
FDA has also required warnings and updated safety information concerning myocarditis and pericarditis following mRNA COVID vaccination.
That's what a surveillance system is supposed to do: look for problems, report them when they appear, and keep looking even when the results are reassuring.
Now, if we're willing to venture into speculation, there is another aspect of this story that I find considerably more interesting.
These reassuring papers were blocked in October 2025, with the FDA operating inside HHS under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - someone with a decades-long history of promoting vaccine skepticism and attacking mainstream vaccine science.
Does that prove RFK Jr. personally ordered their suppression because he disliked the results?
No. There is currently no evidence establishing that. Every account attributes the decision to FDA officials.
HHS says the papers were withdrawn because their conclusions were insufficiently supported by the data. That explanation deserves to be judged on its scientific merits.
But if anti-vaxxers want to play the "government suppresses inconvenient science" game, they're going to have to accept how remarkably inconvenient the timing looks in the opposite direction:
Two massive FDA safety studies find overwhelmingly reassuring results.
And under an HHS secretary famous for vaccine skepticism, the government stops them from being published.
At the very least, that's one hell of an irony.
In other news, the Canadian government is changing the name of Lake Michigan to Lake Trumpsanasshole.
BrentRN π¦ retweeted
Hi, My Name Is Gandalv, and I Have Trump Derangement Syndrome.
It started innocently enough. Someone announced that a 50 percent tariff on imported goods would be paid by the exporting country, and I opened my mouth and said that this is not how tariffs work, that the American importer pays it at the border and passes it on to the American consumer, and that a president who does this is essentially fining his own voters for shopping.
The reply came within seconds. TDS. That was the diagnosis.
Not an argument, just three letters and a shrug, the way a doctor might say βterminalβ and leave the room.
So I have decided to stop hiding. I am standing up in the church basement with the bad coffee and the folding chairs, and I am saying it out loud.
I have Trump Derangement Syndrome, and the first step is admitting that you find the following things deranged.
I find it deranged that a man imposed tariffs on Heard Island, a territory inhabited exclusively by penguins, and then explained the formula on a cardboard chart in the Rose Garden.
I find it deranged that he wanted to buy Greenland, threatened to take it anyway, and then acted surprised that Denmark, a NATO ally that lost soldiers in Afghanistan on Americaβs behalf, was not flattered.
I find it deranged that Canada, the country that shares a continent, a hockey rivalry and a nine thousand kilometre undefended border with the United States, was told it should be the 51st state, and that this was meant as a compliment.
I find it deranged that a hurricane forecast was corrected with a Sharpie, that disinfectant was floated as an internal remedy on live television, that windmills were accused of causing cancer, and that the Gulf of Mexico was renamed.
I find it deranged that the men who beat police officers with flagpoles on January 6th were pardoned as patriots, that the Defense Secretary posted strike timings in a group chat that happened to include a journalist, and that a foreign government offered a 400 million dollar aircraft and the answer was not no.
I find it deranged that the East Wing of the White House was demolished for a ballroom, that Zelensky was shouted at in the Oval Office for not saying thank you enough, and that NATO allies were told their protection is conditional while the actual adversary was told he was doing a great job.
And yes, I find it deranged that all of this is defended by people who will pay more for their groceries, their cars and their phones as a direct result, and who will call you sick for noticing.
Here is the thing about TDS. The symptoms are reading, remembering and doing arithmetic. There is no known cure, and frankly none of us are looking for one.
So if you have ever winced at a tariff, sighed at a Sharpie or asked what exactly the penguins did wrong, you belong here. You do not need to whisper. You do not need to hide behind a burner account. Come out of the closet. There are more of us than you think, we are not ashamed, and we saved you a folding chair.
Proud TDS sufferers, welcome home.
Stay deranged, Follow Gandalv @Microinteracti1
