Hi I'm Justine! I tend to tweet: 🔬scientific research (on post/persistent viral diseases) 😷transmitteable diseases&other prevention 🌎 geopolitics/MENA 📝all things journalism ♀️💜 feminism&womens(x) rights 🇵🇸 news about genocide including from anti-genocide ✡️ 😜Ironic humour

Leute, das bricht mir echt das Herz 💔💔💔. Jonas ist erst 6 Jahre alt und schon seit 3 Jahren krank. Wer immer kann, der Spende für ihn. Die Mama pflegt ihn rund um die Uhr und kann natürlich nicht mehr arbeiten. gofundme.com/f/jonas-zuruck-…

The 'uninfected' have mostly been infected (as most of you know, who get to see this tweet). Those 'healthy' controls likely think they never were infected, but they were. Poor testing, not knowing how to test properly, asymptomatic spread or simply denial can all play a part.

Russian actor, Nikita Kukushkin recorded this anti-war spot, and it really hits you 😢 English translation: “I am war. Help me kill. All you have to do is nothing. Don’t protest. Don’t talk about me. Don’t follow the news. Don’t help the people who have lost their homes. Don’t support the people defending themselves. Say everyone’s to blame. Everyone except the czar. Have a latte at Patriarch’s Ponds. Go to VK Fest. Keep living as though buildings aren’t burning, people aren’t dying, lives aren’t being destroyed around you. Do me a favor: Don’t even think about me. I am war. Help me kill.”

RECOVER have put out how they chose the biomarkers for their Long COVID trials and it's some of the most uninspired and methodologically questionable work I've seen in this space. They've got over a billion in funding. And what they did was go through other people's studies, look for blood markers that came up abnormal in at least two of them, and use that as their list. So we've got 82 markers, and honestly the reason most of them are in there is because they're cheap to measure, not because they're the right markers. The studies they took them from are mostly small and have most of the limitations Long COVID studies always have. Heterogeneous patient populations, no subgrouping, poor inclusion criteria, no mapping for severity, etc etc. Plus huge batch effects across all the different studies. You can't just pool that together and call it evidence. It gets worse. They only prioritised studies that compared patients to people who'd never had COVID. Researchers from major studies have already pointed out that when you do that, you can't separate Long COVID from leftover inflammation from the infection. So their filter pushed out the better designed studies. And complement, one of the main signals coming out of the larger studies, isn't on their list at all. Not one complement protein in 82 markers. Then there's nothing on their page about how they'll deal with batch effects in their own trials either. This stuff should be centralised, not left to individual sites to run assays. They also removed any markers that weren't "feasible" to measure at trial sites. That's just not true. You can do almost anything nowadays with specialist tubes. RNA tubes, DNA tubes. Process serum and plasma on site and ship it. Isolate PBMCs on site, freeze them and send them on dry ice. All of this exists already. They could have done it for everything they dropped. They had a billion. Long COVID isn't one thing, we all know there are subgroups. Instead they're comparing people with Long COVID to healthy controls on average, which just washes out the differences between us. RECOVER are making ad hoc decisions without thinking them through critically, because they have no skin in the game. It's poor, half baked decisions with zero thought in them, again and again, just to look like they're doing something. They're chasing their tail, and in doing so they're wasting all of our money. They desperately need to take a step back and create a cohesive long term strategy. This is just going to lead to another year, and another press conference saying sorry, our work last year was useless and it failed.

Meta usunęła z Instagrama satyryczny film Roela Maalderinka i Bits of Freedom. W nagraniu autor podchodził pod biuro Meta w Amsterdamie i filmował pracowników właśnie tymi okularami, pytając ich o zdanie na temat urządzenia. Meta uznała materiał za „nękanie i zastraszanie”.

He is my favourite content creator 😂🔥

The disconnect between the millions of dollars being thrown at biosecurity / biodefense right now and the simultaneous mocking of people wearing masks is so painfully, tragically stark. A respirator is a tool, just like a biosensor or a biological countermeasure.

Hé! Ik heb net deze petitie getekend tegen de deelname van NL aan het Songfestival. Toen Rusland Oekraïne binnenviel, lag het binnen een dag uit het Songfestival. Voor Israël gelden blijkbaar andere regels. Meer handtekeningen = meer druk! Teken je ook? deel.degoedezaak.org/s/zNdUr…

Hier idem. We laten doodzieke mensen volledig aan hun lot over. Zgn niet behandelbare, niet erkende, dus onverzekerbare zorg. We laten ze wegrotten. #PAIS #LongCovid #ME/CVS

Moldova declares and energy and water emergency insiderpaper.com/moldova-dec…

A valuable geolocation exposed one of Assad's most grotesque stagings: the fake "Jihadist" abduction of Austin Tice. Kidnapped in Daraya in August 2012, the American journalist was portrayed few weeks later in a staged video as being held by Nusra Front fighters in bizarre, suspiciously pristine Afghan-style outfits. The video was posted on a newly created (personal) YouTube channel, with no other videos ever posted. By contrast, Nusra Front consistently released its footage via its official channels. The geolocation places the scene on the Lebanese border, near a Regime ammunition storage facility West of Yaafour - a 4th Division stronghold that Rebels never came close to during the war. The staging was so theatrical that it failed to convince international observers at the time, who already noted attempts by Assad's Regime to pin Tice's abduction on Jihadists. It fit, at the time, a broader effort by Regime to present Assad as the last rampart against the "Jihadist threat" - framed as terrorism, a card he had long played - in an attempt to recover international support he lost. Video: piped.video/watch?v=dNdA0q9j… - 2012 reporting: archive.is/1LSG2.

Heb je dit gezien? Nederland gaat gewoon weer deelnemen aan het Songfestival. Er worden in Gaza nog elke dag kinderen gedood. En de NPO wil gewoon een podium delen met Israel die dat doet. #genocide We kunnen dit niet laten gebeuren! Teken hier ook -> deel.degoedezaak.org/s/vvEZP…

And so it begins. How terrifying for these poor people. It’s going to get worse. Much worse. Super El Nino + Climate Change over the next few months = disaster after disaster, and it could be you. 📍 Santa Catarina, Brazil

Krankzinnig. Van de pot gerukt. Antireclame voor #NS. De boodschap van #WakkerDier om één dag geen dieren te eten, is volgens NS te controversieel om op stations te laten zien. Wakker Dier sleept de NS voor de rechter. Chapeau! #EetGeenDierenDag #4okt parool.nl/nederland/ns-weert…

👍 Wakker Dier krijgt gelijk van rechter: NS moet posters plaatsen, anders boete van 25.000 euro per dag ad.nl/binnenland/wakker-dier…

Such a breathtaking, visionary film.

This, so often

En de aangiftes die nooit gebeuren omdat de politie zelfs slachtoffers van zedenzaken soms naar huis stuurt zonder aangifte?