The danger is clear and present: COVID isn’t merely a respiratory illness; it’s a multi-dimensional threat impacting brain function, attacking almost all of the body’s organs, producing elevated risks of all kinds, and weakening our ability to fight off other diseases. Reinfections are thought to produce cumulative risks, and Long COVID is on the rise. Unfortunately, Long COVID is now being considered a long-term chronic illness — something many people will never fully recover from.
Dr. Phillip Alvelda, a former program manager in DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office that pioneered the synthetic biology industry and the development of mRNA vaccine technology, is the founder of Medio Labs, a COVID diagnostic testing company. He has stepped forward as a strong critic of government COVID management, accusing health agencies of inadequacy and even deception. Alvelda is pushing for accountability and immediate action to tackle Long COVID and fend off future pandemics with stronger public health strategies.
Contrary to public belief, he warns, COVID is not like the flu. New variants evolve much faster, making annual shots inadequate. He believes that if things continue as they are, with new COVID variants emerging and reinfections happening rapidly, the majority of Americans may eventually grapple with some form of Long COVID.
Let’s repeat that: At the current rate of infection, most Americans may get Long COVID.
[...]
LP: A recent JAMA study found that US adults with Long COVID are more prone to depression and anxiety – and they’re struggling to afford treatment. Given the virus’s impact on the brain, I guess the link to mental health issues isn’t surprising.
PA: There are all kinds of weird things going on that could be related to COVID’s cognitive effects. I’ll give you an example. We’ve noticed since the start of the pandemic that accidents are increasing. A report published by TRIP, a transportation research nonprofit, found that traffic fatalities in California increased by 22% from 2019 to 2022. They also found the likelihood of being killed in a traffic crash increased by 28% over that period. Other data, like studies from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, came to similar conclusions, reporting that traffic fatalities hit a 16-year high across the country in 2021. The TRIP report also looked at traffic fatalities on a national level and found that traffic fatalities increased by 19%.
LP: What role might COVID play?
PA: Research points to the various ways COVID attacks the brain. Some people who have been infected have suffered motor control damage, and that could be a factor in car crashes. News is beginning to emerge about other ways COVID impacts driving. For example, in Ireland, a driver’s COVID-related brain fog was linked to a crash that killed an elderly couple.
Damage from COVID could be affecting people who are flying our planes, too. We’ve had pilots that had to quit because they couldn’t control the airplanes anymore. We know that medical events among U.S. military pilots were shown to have risen over 1,700% from 2019 to 2022, which the Pentagon attributes to the virus.
[...]
LP: You’ve criticized the track record of the CDC and the WHO – particularly their stubborn denial that COVID is airborne.
PA: They knew the dangers of airborne transmission but refused to admit it for too long. They were warned repeatedly by scientists who studied aerosols. They instituted protections for themselves and for their kids against airborne transmission, but they didn’t tell the rest of us to do that.
[...]
LP: How would you grade Biden on how he’s handled the pandemic?
PA: I’d give him an F. In some ways, he fails worse than Trump because more people have actually died from COVID on his watch than on Trump’s, though blame has to be shared with Republican governors and legislators who picked ideological fights opposing things like responsible masking, testing, vaccination, and ventilation improvements for partisan reasons. Biden’s administration has continued to promote the false idea that the vaccine is all that is needed, perpetuating the notion that the pandemic is over and you don’t need to do anything about it. Biden stopped the funding for surveillance and he stopped the funding for renewing vaccine advancement research. Trump allowed 400,000 people to die unnecessarily. The Biden administration policies have allowed more than 800,000 to 900,000 and counting.
[...]
LP: The situation with bird flu is certainly getting more concerning with the CDC confirming that a third person in the U.S. has tested positive after being exposed to infected cows.
PA: Unfortunately, we’re repeating many of the same mistakes because we now know that the bird flu has made the jump to several species. The most important one now, of course, is the dairy cows. The dairy farmers have been refusing to let the government come in and inspect and test the cows. A team from Ohio State tested milk from a supermarket and found that 50% of the milk they tested was positive for bird flu viral particles.
[...]
PA: There’s a serious risk now in allowing the virus to freely evolve within the cow population. Each cow acts as a breeding ground for countless genetic mutations, potentially leading to strains capable of jumping to other species. If any of those countless genetic experiments within each cow prove successful in developing a strain transmissible to humans, we could face another pandemic – only this one could have a 58% death rate. Did you see the movie “Contagion?” It was remarkably accurate in its apocalyptic nature. And that virus only had a 20% death rate. If the bird flu makes the jump to human-to-human transition with even half of its current lethality, that would be disastrous.
279 notes
·
View notes
This may be a prickly subject, and I'm sorry if so. But I'm trying to learn more about Elvis, and every time I bring him up to people I know, they try to tell me he was this terrible person, and point me toward Priscilla's book, the movie made on it, and the discourse. Idk if you've talked about it on here (I tried searching your blog but couldn't find anything on it). If you're willing, I'd love to hear your take on it so I can see a more nuanced view.
The film Priscilla was greenlit roughly a month after Priscilla herself was informed that she was close to becoming financially insolvent in 2022. With a business partner, Brigitte Kruse, who allegedly helped broker the film deal, she established a limited liability company called Priscilla Presley Partners that was supposed to use her image and likeness to create several lines of merchandise to coincide with the film's release. That business partner is now suing Priscilla because she did not have the rights to her image or likeness, or any ability to use the Presley name, because she had already sold all of those rights and was no longer considered in good standing with Graceland or Elvis Presley Enterprises. The entire business deal, then, according to the lawsuit, was built on her misrepresentation of how much her image was worth.
The deal between the two of them fell apart after Riley Keough, Lisa Marie's daughter and Priscilla's granddaughter, settled with Priscilla to give her a lump sum of $1 million from Lisa Marie's estate and yearly amounts of $100,000. Priscilla sued very shortly after Lisa Marie's death because she thought Lisa Marie's signature on a will had been forged because Priscilla was not included in it. All of the assets were supposed to go directly to Lisa Marie's son, Benjamin Keough, who died in 2020, and her three daughters, two of whom are still teenagers. Now, part of those assets have been claimed by Priscilla and her other son, Navarone, who has no connection to the Presley family and has stated he is glad Lisa died.
Four months before Lisa's death, Lisa wrote to Sofia Coppola and made it clear she had strong concerns about the Priscilla film and was suspicious of the intentions behind it:
"As his daughter, I don’t read this and see any of my father in this character. I don’t read this and see my mother’s perspective of my father. ... I will be forced to be in a position where I will have to openly say how I feel about the film and go against you, my mother and this film publicly."
Lisa was enormously grateful for efforts put into 2022's Elvis to find her father's soul and to restore his dignity in a world that often turns him and his family into a joke:
"You can feel and witness Baz’s pure love, care, and respect for my father throughout this beautiful film, and it is finally something that myself and my children and their children can be proud of forever."
It is such a strong and powerful statement, to see how much Lisa valued family, not just her father but her own children and their legacy, and how willing she was to speak up no matter what was going on in her personal life to say what was right. On this and many other things, Lisa and Priscilla's values have rarely been in alignment. A friend and EPE business associate, Joel Weinshanker, said of her, "Lisa couldn't be bought, she couldn't be pushed. If she felt that something wasn't in Elvis' best interest, it was never about money. And she really is the only Presley that you could say that about."
Priscilla, though, has adjusted her stories about her time with Elvis almost every time she discusses it. For a quick example, she said in her book, which was released in 1985, that Elvis insisted she do her hair and makeup a certain way, that he had control over her look and would get upset if she didn't dress how he wanted. But in an interview with Ladies' Home Journal in 1973, she said that she made a deliberate choice to attend makeup school so that she could learn how to style herself, and that it was her idea to wear big, black hair and big, black eyeliner. She said she was embarrassed for going overboard. She said, "I wish that Elvis had said something, but he must have liked it because he never commented." This lines up with recollections from Patti Parry, a platonic friend of Elvis' and a hairstylist, who said Priscilla always wanted Patti to do her hair in a "big boombah," but that Priscilla would then get upset when Elvis didn't notice or didn't like it.
These changes are impossible not to notice if you follow her for any length of time. At the film premiere, she said it felt just like watching her life and said she was consulted on everything, since she was an executive producer. After the film came out, she said she couldn't understand why Coppola had changed so much about the story and misrepresented events. In the '70s, she said she and Elvis lived almost totally separate lives, that she came and went as she pleased, and that she loved this freedom. Later, she said she felt completely stifled and trapped and never left the house, even though she had friends she went out with all the time. In 2019, she tweeted a forceful denial about a National Enquirer story: "This is the Enquirer folks... please don't believe everything you read. ... Never planned on being buried next to Elvis. What will they come up with next?" But part of her settlement demands in her lawsuit against Riley in 2023 asked "to be buried next to Elvis." This year, she said in two separate interviews that Lisa was with her when Elvis died and that Priscilla had to break the news to her, despite the fact that Lisa was at Graceland when it happened. She has said she gave Elvis the idea to wear belts on his jumpsuits, to have a lightning bolt as his logo, to sing "An American Trilogy," though none of that is true. She retells the story about forcing Elvis to burn all of his spiritual books to prove he loved her as an almost funny anecdote about debrainwashing him, while Elvis later said it was the worst thing he ever agreed to, a desperate attempt to make her happy by giving up the things he valued the most. (For the record, this is my opinion about their relationship on both sides: thinking they could change themselves and each other to make it work. It never did.)
Every secondhand Elvis account has to be treated lightly and only valued for its consistency with known facts and other witnesses. I try to give enormous benefit of the doubt to anyone in the Elvis world because they often only have partial knowledge of what Elvis may have been thinking at any given time, and there are numerous examples of people who were taken advantage of by unscrupulous journalists who changed the story they wanted to tell. But Priscilla's stories sometimes are not even consistent with her own statements, which makes them very poor options indeed to base anything on. However careful we are about noting potential biases and inaccuracies in other memoirs, we have to be triply, quadruply careful with anything in which Priscilla involves herself because she has a vested interest in generating discourse today in order to make money. Unfortunately, Priscilla has a habit of stifling other accounts or making sensationalized statements each time there is a possibility that she will lose some of the cachet that comes with being an Elvis Source—after Elvis' death, when she believed she was going to inherit his airplane and disinvited everyone that Vernon said could fly in it to his funeral; when she sued the parents of one of Elvis' ex-girlfriends after he died because he had allowed them to live rent-free in a house he bought for them; when she claimed that Elvis wanted to reunite with her before his death, despite the fact that he was engaged to someone else and told many people he couldn't see a reunion ever happening with her; before Vernon's death, when she convinced him to make her an executor of the Presley estate until Lisa came of age; after Lisa came of age, when she convinced Lisa to let her stay on as partner; when Lisa accused Priscilla of misspending Lisa's money, during which time anonymous sources cropped up to say Lisa was in debt and drug-addled; when Priscilla was removed from her position as an EPE spokesperson but kept collecting $900,000 a year from the company; when Lisa died, and Priscilla sued once she learned she wasn't in the will; when Priscilla was no longer associated with EPE and decided to do another adaptation of a book that she has since recanted parts of and has contradicted before and after its release.
When Priscilla thinks there is a threat to her image and position, she does new interviews and projects to muddy the waters and stir public interest, whether it is true or false, positive or negative, laudatory or defamatory. She gets corrected by Elvis' surviving family members, girlfriends, friends, and fans, but these stories do not get the same reach no matter how much they are backed by contemporaneous documents and witnesses, or how many resources there are to educate the public on how Elvis' and Priscilla's attitudes about marriage and relationships changed—along with the rest of society—between 1960 and 1970.
I think almost any single-source project is not going to advance our understanding of Elvis in any way because no one individual can speak for him, and we are kind of obligated to include all the context we can in order to appreciate his character, his successes and failures, flaws and virtues—and to treat both himself and those around him as fully three-dimensional people who have their own blind spots. Priscilla is far too aware of her own image, and far too willing to change it to suit the audience, to be particularly valuable here.
She is next scheduled to appear at the Lexington (Kentucky) Comic & Toy Con.
101 notes
·
View notes
it is so vitally important to me that aziraphale and crowley not only love each other but choose to love each other.
i don’t want it to be fate. i don’t want it to be god’s will. i want it to be a conscious and continuous choice.
i want aziraphale choosing every day of his goddamn existence to love crowley and all that he is. i want aziraphale choosing to love crowley not in spite of being a demon, but because he is a demon. i want aziraphale choosing to love crowley’s curiosity and creative wonder. i want aziraphale choosing to love crowley’s love of plants and gardening.
i want crowley choosing to love aziraphale’s passion for books. i want crowley choosing to love aziraphale’s desire to do things the human way even if he could just miracle it. i want crowley choosing to love aziraphale’s angel-ness because it is a fundamental part of him.
i want aziraphale choosing to love everything about crowley and vise versa. and i want it to be a very conscious and intentional choice.
it being fate negates the entire point of the story. good omens is a love story between an angel and a demon, yes. but that’s not all that it is. it’s a story about two occult/ethereal beings who choose humanity over the great plan. two beings who choose the world over armageddon. and they make those choices because despite it all they have chosen to fall in love with the world and with humanity.
it only makes sense that they choose each other. that they choose their love. it being fate or god’s will ruins the foundational pillar of their relationship. that they choose each other over and over and over again. year after year, century after century, time and time again. they always choose. they choose the arrangement, they choose saving the other from harm, they choose lying to protect the other.
it is always a choice. and it better stay a choice or i am going to be so devastated.
62 notes
·
View notes
casey also talks about sepang 2015 what do you think of that
oh in that podcast? uh... lemme listen again...
yeah idk it's not really anything new I'd say? he's said basically all the same stuff in more interesting and extensive ways elsewhere. I think casey inevitably has a very 'well feuding is bad and helps nobody' point of view, has expressed that before in the past, does it here again, and he's also drawn a parallel between himself and marc on several occasions. which... well, of course there's similarities in terms of public discourse or whatever, but the parallel really falls apart whenever casey argues the feuds cost valentino. like, I do think it's sometimes important to just. keep in mind. it's interesting that casey draws this comparison in his mind but that doesn't necessarily means he's right about this. I'm not sure how you'd argue that starting a feud with casey cost valentino anything competitively? you can argue it didn't help him I guess, and then we can have a debate about the ins and outs of the 2008 season. we can also have an argument that in a hypothetical world where casey isn't ill in 2009, valentino doesn't break his leg and casey isn't on a piece of junk in 2010, and valentino isn't on a piece of junk in 2011-12, then actually maybe valentino sparking open animosity with casey COULD have cost him. but we don't know that! didn't happen! I wish we could have found out, but we never got the chance! as it stands, the tally on this is pretty straightforward: casey won the title when things were reasonably civil between them in 2007, and valentino took control of the following season at the exact moment he worsened the relationship between the pair of them in 2008. obviously, it's all more complicated than that and casey would of course argue laguna didn't negatively affect his subsequent performances... but it certainly didn't help them. like, at the very worst valentino escalating tensions in 2008 is a complete net neutral. after 2009, them being bitchy to each other every other tuesday was completely competitively irrelevant beyond maybe affecting how they approached occasionally fighting for a podium position. hey, maybe casey used that feud to fire himself up through sheer spite throughout the later stages of his career, but that doesn't actually support his anti-feud stance - it's basically the exact same thing as what valentino does. they're both quite similar in that regard! always so hungry to prove a point, to show how someone else is wrong. kinda half the point with this feuding business is to get yourself going, get yourself motivated, yeah. he straight up openly admits to using yamaha's repeat rejection of him as a way of giving himself motivation, and at the end of the day that's really not all that different?
anyway, what else does casey say... oh yeah, that him and the other aliens were already kinda prepared for this and had learned vale's tricks. that valentino had only been able to get into the minds of the previous generation. welllllll *wiggles hand* sure, I mean, he did clearly have to change his approach... he couldn't just use the exact same playbook to get to them, either on-track or off-track. but that's why he did change up the playbook... again, whether you want to believe valentino won his final two titles 'in the head' rather than just through pure pace kinda depends on how you assess the evidence, but it is at the very least a debate. and, y'know, it's always worth remembering that valentino's most important mind games with casey didn't happen in a press conference... it was on the track. and the on-track stuff really is just embedded in how valentino approaches winning. speaking of aliens, this is what dani and jorge have said:
like, valentino's entire approach to his riding, even to the way he's setting his bike up, is deliberately about directly fucking with you... he's not actually always trying to be faster than you as much as he's trying to give himself the tools to make your life miserable, to pressure you into mistakes, etc etc... and again, especially with casey (if anything because he was so mentally sturdy), the off-track stuff was really just window dressing. (I know they bicker a lot after 2009 but it's just so fundamentally irrelevant to actual on-track competition.) so you can be aware of those tricks, but it also doesn't necessarily help you when someone's being nasty to you on-track in a way you just fully do not enjoy. which is what it was like for casey! for casey, a lot of this comes back to the truly unpleasant context of how he was perceived by the public, how he was treated as mentally weak or 'broken' or whatever partly because he had the misfortune of coming up against a bloke who had the reputation for breaking rivals. I think it's quite natural to end up with a bit of a hardliner 'actually I've never been mentally affected by a result in my life' stance - and of course casey is a lot tougher than a lot of people give him credit for. that being said. sometimes your rivals affect you, shit happens, it's part of the game. it's fundamentally a nice idea to think that valentino's tactics weren't just morally wrong but also ineffective, which is kind of the appeal of this narrative, right? you want to believe you're above that, you want to believe you were adequately prepared and wise to valentino's tactic. it's unsurprising and understandable that casey does tend to tell the story that way, but again it's *wiggles hand* also hard to describe it as completely factual
uh. what else. oh I'm thrilled casey does canonically know valentino and marc were friends, he has said he wasn't following motogp too much during that time period so you couldn't be sure of that. does this mean anything? does it tell you anything? well, no, but it's just a pleasing thought to me. I like that. oh also 'provoking particularly aggressive riders isn't a good idea' is kinda a funny take from casey? like, he of all people would hate the idea of being cowed by someone's reputation like that... casey's right that provoking fast riders can potentially be dangerous, but y'know I do think that's probably not news to anyone almost nine years later. um. that's all I've got I think
9 notes
·
View notes