Reading · The Covid-Is-Not-Over Newsletter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Covid-Is-Not-Over Newsletter!

This issue is the last one before the regularly scheduled summer posting break! I’ll be taking some time off from regular posting until the end of July or the beginning of August. In the meantime, I will be posting four “summer bonus issues” featuring collections of posts that I’ve collected in the last six months or so but mostly haven’t had a chance to feature in the weekly issues. The themes will be Covid is bad for you, Long Covid is real, the world has changed and masks/air quality/viral spread/etc. Commentary will be extremely minimal. The exact dates for the posts is to be determined, but the four posts will be spread over five or six weeks. I might have an issue with AI related posts, but we’ll see. I have a shib ton of AI posts that I’m not really sure what to do with.

I’m also not sure what I’ll do about the Ebola/Hantavirus play by play sections that I’ve included all the way at the end of recent issues. I may just pause that totally and just resume in July/August if it’s needed. I hope that it won’t.

Speaking of AI, this is a good read: The fight against AI datacenters isn’t just about tech – it’s about democracy.

Still more speaking of AI, this week’s WTFkery of the Week Award goes to Biased AI writing assistants shift users’ attitudes on societal issues.

See you all on the other side! Have a restful summer everyone!

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What COVID-19 Does to the Body (10th Edition, February 2026) / Pandemic Accountability Index
What Do We Know About Long COVID? A Compilation of Medical Research (125+ Studies) / Pandemic Accountability Index
ANSWERED: Is COVID-19 Harmful to Children? A Compilation of Peer-Reviewed Medical Research / Pandemic Accountability Index
ANSWERED: Does COVID-19 Impact the Immune System? A Compilation of Medical Research (45+ Studies) / Pandemic Accountability Index
ANSWERED: Does COVID-19 Harm the Brain? / Pandemic Accountability Index
WHN joins in the chorus: Medical masks are not PPE / World Health Network
Yes, We Continue Wearing Masks—Here’s Why: Common Questions Answered / World Health Network
Seven Things to Know About Long COVID by Marisa Swanson / World Health Network
Long COVID in Context: Prevalence, Search Interest, and Funding / World Health Network
Spectrum of COVID-19: From Asymptomatic Organ Damage to Long COVID Syndrome by Andrew Ewing, Špela Šalamon, et al. / World Health Network
Simple things you can do to avoid COVID by Lucky Tran / Aranet
Immunity Debt: The Conspiracy Theory Elevated to Popular Pseudoscience That Is Making Children Sick / LIL_Science
You Have To Live Your Life & more Responses to Common COVID Minimizing Phrases
Covid-19: Will It Mutate To Nothingness? by Rawat Deonandan
The Science of How COVID Spreads by Abby / One Life Lived Well
How respiratory viruses transmit: Why some viruses spread easily and others don’t, and what it means for prevention by Gage Moreno

There is currently no paid subscription option for this newsletter and I do not have any plans to switch to that model. However, Substack does have an option where subscribers can pledge to subscribe “just in case” and a few of you have done so. I very much appreciated the vote of confidence in what I’m doing here. If you want to send a little “Thank You” I have a Ko-fi tip jar set up. It. My plan is to spend whatever is donated by supporting artists on Bandcamp.

Buy me a patio beer!

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless: How Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. created a boogeyman of science, eviscerated an invaluable system of global public health, and hunted down the scientists defending us against the world’s worst bioterrorist: Mother Nature. …
The funding cuts come with an abrupt re-orientation towards this administration’s warped priorities. Gone is NIAID’s long-standing mandate of pandemic prevention and preparedness: Now, the agency is more concerned with “advancing food allergy research.” …
As I’ve argued before (Dispatch #142), the most powerful men in America genuinely believe — or, at least, pretend to believe — that the COVID-19 pandemic was cooked up by the U.S. scientific establishment. And now they’re on a revenge kick.
Thanks to them, the next pandemic is inching closer.

Most COVID novels have also avoided seriously reckoning with the trauma of mass death that COVID inflicted on America and across the world. According to the CDC, as of March 2026, 1.24 million people have died in America due to COVID. For various reasons, this statistic is undoubtedly an undercount: during lockdown, many people put off important healthcare appointments for fear of the virus, which will have led to premature deaths; COVID infections can indirectly cause heart attacks and other serious health issues; and in the last few years, testing has been much less widespread than in 2020 and 2021, meaning that many additional deaths likely went uncounted. While some novels, like The Rich People Have Gone Away, by Regina Porter, and The Diary of Lies, by Philip Miller, do show death or its aftermath, they are in the minority. And even in these books, COVID is a subplot, not a central concern.

“I have seen many beloved organizers have to reduce their community work or leave organizing altogether because of experiencing Long COVID or having new care obligations” when someone in their life developed it, Spade wrote to The Sick Times. “Using COVID precautions in the spaces we organize can make those spaces more accessible to more people in our communities.” …
“I tried to get the climate justice folks to see the connection between COVID and biosphere collapse,” Smith said. They noted that 2020 pandemic shutdowns were tied to a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by about 7%, the reduction needed to limit global temperature rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to climate scientists. But Smith said that members of their organizing groups lacked the discipline to maintain COVID-19 precautions, and most of their coalitions splintered by 2022.

This article highlights the importance of placing patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE) at the centre of clinical and academic research. Despite widespread agreement among funders and policymakers, in practice PPIE is often superficial or omitted altogether. We share approaches as a patient-focused research group that embeds the lived experience in each aspect of the research process and has demonstrated the impact and benefits of being truly patient centred. We describe an approach to research on Long COVID that positions patients as equal collaborators, recognising the unique expertise derived from the lived experience. This prioritises patient-defined questions, producing research that is both scientifically rigorous and directly responsive to the needs of those most affected. Here, we present a patient-centred approach that not only strengthening Long COVID research but can also be applied to other long-term conditions.

What is remarkable in searching for information on both Hantavirus and Ebola, it’s not the CDC that is the most commonly cited resource, but the WHO and European Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even without the US funding of the WHO, the organization has taken the lead in reporting cases and keeping the world informed about the Hantavirus cluster and Ebola outbreak. A role the US would have done in the past.
“We need a CDC that is fully funded, staffed, and functional, because it should be the repository of the information; it should be the guidance; it should issue the recommendations, so that we as physicians have that information and know how to treat our patients—both on an individual patient level, but also on a public health level—so we know what to expect and how to best inform and advise our patients,” Goldman said. …
Goldman notes the old Benjamin Franklin expression, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
“If you don’t have that infrastructure, you’re giving the advantage to the infectious disease,” said Goldman. “It’s not just the bench research in the laboratory; it’s not just doing studies; it’s also having teams able to go to those areas to be able to do onsite evaluations, see where the disease is coming from, see how it’s spreading, and see how to try and contain it.”
The bottom line is Americans are affected by high-consequence infectious diseases today and will be in the future. And as we know, COVID-19 started outside the US and became global. HCIDs are a plane ride away, and certainly with the World Cup here in North America, there are people flying from all over the world over the next month to watch the games. The question becomes will the US stay prepared for future outbreaks when federal policies don’t support biopreparedness initiatives?

The fundamentals of pandemic preparedness include maintaining a robust public health infrastructure, including a strong surveillance system to detect threats early; investing in research to facilitate the quick development of new treatments and vaccines; and building public trust in health officials. On each of these fronts, health experts say, steps taken by President Donald Trump’s administration have weakened the ability of the US to respond to a new health emergency.
“We’re much less prepared than we were during the Covid-19 pandemic, and we didn’t perform well then,” said Lawrence Gostin, faculty director for Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. In the event of a new pandemic, he said: “I would expect us to perform worse.” …
In the wake of the Covid-19 outbreak, during the administration of then President Joe Biden, the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR) was created in mid-2023 to lead and coordinate efforts. In addition, the National Security Council’s (NSC) biosecurity directorate, which had been dissolved during Trump’s first term, was re-established and charged with monitoring biological threats for the White House.
The second Trump administration has neutered the OPPR by leaving it vacant. The same goes for the NSC’s biosecurity directorate, whose last director, Gerald Parker, resigned in mid-2025. As a result, there is no longer a designated team coordinating readiness for and responses to pandemics among US government agencies or monitoring such threats for the White House.

Chronically ill and disabled people have been talking about how Pride is inaccessible without COVID precautions for years. It’s inaccessible in many other ways as well, but I’m going to focus on masking here.
As a queer person, I am aware of the factors that make queer people particularly vulnerable to COVID - socioeconomic status, lack of health insurance, homelessness, homophobia and transphobia from healthcare providers, medical gaslighting. Studies have shown that the queer community has significantly higher rates of Long COVID, especially trans people, yet most queer organizations are silent on this issue and host events without precautions during Pride month, excluding many queer chronically ill people.

The recent wave of clinical findings confirm what many of us have felt in the trenches of advocacy: COVID-19 is not just a respiratory event; it is a profound neuropsychiatric and multi-systemic disruptor. Research indicates that survivors face a significantly higher risk of mental health challenges, ranging from substance use disorders to severe anxiety. While it is undeniably true that the trauma of a pandemic can exacerbate preexisting conditions, we must be vigilant against the “fine line” of psychologizing what is fundamentally a biological assault on the body.

A group of insurers will continue covering routine vaccines through 2027 as the Trump administration once again takes aim at the shots and outbreaks of preventable illnesses such as measles and whooping cough lead to hospitalizations and deaths.
Experts told the Guardian that the move has raised questions ahead of the November midterms, but certainly indicates that insurance companies believe vaccines are “safe and effective”.
AHIP, the national trade organization representing the insurance industry in the US, announced at the end of May that its members will continue covering routine vaccines through 2027, an extension of a similar policy for 2026, after a halt to the controversial decisions made by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (Acip).

“They have spent so much time talking about not having the government impose on peoples individual decisions and individual movement, touted individual choice over public health, and argued that individual freedom trumps public health guidance,” says Dr. Ashish Jha, a senior fellow at Harvard University who served as President Biden’s COVID-19 Response Coordinator. “And yet, in response to the hantavirus and Ebola, this administration has chosen to impose very draconian and extreme public health measures.”

Long Covid’s erasure from federal policy was meticulously planned. On Jan. 20, 2025, President Trump’s second Inauguration Day, long Covid data disappeared from federal websites. Within six days of confirming his Department of Health and Human Services secretary, an executive order disbanded the federal advisory committee on long Covid before it had held a single meeting. The Office of Long Covid Research and Practice was closed, too.
Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation blueprint that shaped much of the new administration’s policy agenda — had pre-identified pandemic-era federal health infrastructure for elimination. Long Covid fit the profile precisely: expensive, inconclusive, and a signature health legacy of the Biden administration’s pandemic response. The newly created Department of Government Efficiency provided the fiscal rationale. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) framework added the ideological cover — chronic illness as government mismanagement, not viral consequence. HHS announced it would “no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic.”

In summary, based on the available workplace COVID-19 injury data, we identified certain industries that present a higher risk of COVID-19 exposure and infection, including health care and social assistance, public administration, manufacturing, transportation and warehousing, mining, and educational services. Workers in these industries generally require direct and close contact with other people, or working in a confined environment, and hence present a greater risk of exposure to pathogens. The civilian labor force also presents a higher risk of COVID-19 deaths across all age groups (25–34, 35–44, 45–54, and 55–64) when compared with the general population. Our analyses also show male civilian labor force has a higher risk of COVID-19 deaths than the female group. These findings provide evidence in support of future workplace research into airborne infection risk assessment, particularly for susceptible occupations and individuals.

Stevie Ray Vaughan. Texas Flood (Live at the El Mocambo).

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The pro-pandemic administration (aren’t they all), Haven’t processed this one yet anyways, Unprepared for the future, and more

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