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Saved by @CodyyyGardner

This year has been momentous, with a new virus, a new job writing about that virus (114 articles!) and many new sources, readers and Twitter followers. To chronicle this insane year, I'm compiling some of the stories I'm proudest of. A thread.

 Exactly a year ago, my family and I were headed back from Vietnam, with no idea how close we had been to the outbreak brewing in China. It took me a while to realize the gravity, but this first story I wrote about the virus still (mostly) holds up:
https://t.co/KQ5QMmY7MG
In March, it became increasingly obvious from research being published that the virus could spread in the absence of symptoms. Yet US officials were still mostly pooh-poohing it. In this article I talked to scientists who knew better:
https://t.co/485KxSXHeS
We know now that some of the worst effects of Covid-19 are because of the body's immune response, not just the virus itself. There were just early hints of that when I wrote this piece about cytokine storms.
https://t.co/WecEe8XkBf
In this story in May, I delved into what we knew about the relationship between the viral dose and the risk of infection -- a topic we still know woefully little about:
https://t.co/GqveDGgsul
I wasn't the first reporter to connect the dots on airborne transmission, but I'm still proud of this one for the impact it had. A few days after this article appeared, the WHO changed its position on airborne spread:
https://t.co/zGiS89Ej2E
In this story I tried to shine a light on other, older, pandemics that are being set back, in some cases by decades, because of the coronavirus. In another time, this would have been reported on the ground, but I tried to make the stories resonate anyway:
https://t.co/NG8zG5TpDq
This article is among my most controversial, and revealed a deep divide among PCR devotees on the one hand, and believers in rapid tests on the other. I also loved that a geeky story about a PCR metric (Ct value) was so widely read
https://t.co/rR4aBDK4Xl
I wrote a lot of stories about the CDC this year, and the Trump administration meddling in the agency's scientific work. But this article stands out, in part because of the importance of the document altered:
https://t.co/OlQyH5PtUY
I was in a continual state of shock while reporting this story about the White House Rose Garden event and the WH's stance that it did not need to trace any contacts because there was no evidence that anyone was infected there

https://t.co/mRdOZh8AiO
This story explored the possibility (now confirmed by many studies) that people with Covid develop autoimmunity reminiscent of lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, although it's still unclear how long those autoantibodies stick around
https://t.co/BcVlR6J5XS
An absolute joy to write, I could barely wait to get the good news out: that immunity from natural infection (and, presumably vaccines) might last years and maybe even decades. Of course, that was before the new variant emerged: https://t.co/ntTmKxKjbm
I'll end with this story from a couple of weeks ago about the new variant identified in Britain and what it means for us. We know more about the variant since I wrote this, but most of it still applies:
https://t.co/zFul84KhhA
Finally, I'd like to highlight a few stories that had nothing to do with the coronavirus, beginning with this one about the London Patient, the second man ever cured of HIV, revealing his identity. It was also the last story I reported in person:
https://t.co/19rkF0uvUt
This story perhaps flew under the radar because of the pandemic. It examined disturbing allegations of harassment and bullying from a global leader in tuberculosis:
https://t.co/XTWuRRBqm9
Whew, that was a lot. Goodbye and good riddance, 2020. I was wowed by your science, appalled by the public health failures, and profoundly grateful to all of my readers and sources. And of course to the spelling bee and crosswords, which kept me sane.

More from Twitter

Will Wilkinson \U0001f310
Will Wilkinson 🌐...
@willwilkinson
This is why I'm not a critic of "cancel culture." It's crucial to impose social costs for the breech of key social norms. The lesson of overreaction is that we need to recalibrate judgment to get it right next time, not that we need a lot more bad judgment in the other direction.


Obviously, people will disagree about which norms are important, about how bad it is to violate them, and thus about how severe the social cost ought to be. That's just pluralism, man, and it's good.

It's important to openly talk through these substantive differences, which is why derailing these conversations with hand-waving moral panic about "cancel culture" is obnoxious and illiberal.

Screaming "cancel culture!" when somebody pays a social costs other people have been fighting hard to get others to see as necessary is often just a way to declare, with no argument, that the sanction in question was not only unnecessary but in breach of a more important norm.

It's impossible to uphold social norms without social sanctions, so obviously anti-cancelers are going to want to impose a social cost on people they see as imposing unjustly steep social costs on others.
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Calvin Chu
Calvin Chu
@calchulus
Here's the one thread you need to read on BSC to actually DYOR and stop listening to all these talking heads on Twitter:

1. last year, Binance launched a PoA-based EVM compatible chain, compatible with common tools like metamask, trustwallet, etc. It works with ur eth address

2. this point of interoperability is important, because a user doesn't need to deal with new wallets or infrastructure to use this chain, whereas past projects like Tron required you to download a new set of tools (TronLink wallet, use tronscan, etc.)

3. Disclaimer: This chain operates with 21 validators that have staked BNB. It is currently centralised, and can be conclusively described as permissioned (aka binance has selected who can operate these nodes and thus can have influence over this chain).

4. However, while that means the chain in theory could be manipulated by B, there are incentives to not screw over users' funds, double spend or rehypothecate anything. why? because it can jeopardise more lucrative business of

5. think of it like proof-of-staked reputation. These attacks put binance in the most likely position to be attacked by double spends or other malicious activity on chain, in which binance, which custodies the mainnet real assets of many chains, is on the hook if things go wrong.
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@marcie_hatter
I’m not a scientist, so obviously do correct me if I’m wrong. (Heck, this is twitter, I don’t need to ask that do I?)

BUT a virus doesn’t mutate in *nothing*, does it, it doesn’t mutate when it’s on the handle of the supermarket door or even in the air you’ve just breathed out.

It mutates *in a host*. And the most sure fire way for a virus to find a wide variety of hosts in which to mutate is to do precious little to control the spread of the virus. To have policies which amount to “take it on the chin”. To have an ‘acceptable’ death level.

To allow the virus to run absolutely rampant through one section of the population (children) because stopping it doing so would mean making a politically unpopular decision (closing the schools).

Seen some people (scientists, I mean, not your uncle Jim) saying this virus is now more transmissible in children and like... what did they THINK would happen if you allow the virus unfettered access to kids?

It adapts! It adapts to its fucking hosts! It becomes better at infecting them! Like, the whole fucking point for a virus is to be able to make copies of itself. It’s actually not that arsed about killing or harming you.
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Thread Reader App
Thread Reader App
@threadreaderapp
@GuerinGreen Saluti, please find the unroll here: Bringing Fusion to the Grid 'tweetstorm' Nat'l Academy of Science on bringing #fusion to the grid #fusion would be key… https://t.co/DHIqTnjOGr Have a good day. 🤖
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Allie Eve Knox
Allie Eve Knox
@allieeveknox
Why are SWs freaking out right now? (This gets bumpy, hold on.)

Twitter came through and deleted a ton of accounts. We are worried that we are next. It could be nudity, it could be retweets, it could be content posted- we don't know. And while Twitter has clear rules, SWs get

Punished often for not even breaking the rules but just existing, so we are on edge.

Twitter/IG/TikTok are ways we advertise and build a base so when we get deplatformed without explanation, we have to start from scratch somewhere else. We lose years of contacts/content.

So, what is driving these tightened restrictions?

It could be a bunch of laws. FOSTA/SESTA came through a few years ago & made it very unsafe for SWs, both online and real time workers. It even crippled businesses like sex educators and therapists. This was a bipartisan effort.

Bc of these laws, platforms censored their content and users. Remember those Craigslist ads? Meet up groups? Bad date lists?

All gone when F/S came through. So let's move to EARN IT. EI is in limbo right now, just waiting on the new term to get rolling. It isn't dead.

EI is gonna be the every man's F/S. EI is gonna censor so many of YOU READING THIS and then what will you do!? (More of that later.)

Fuck. Ok. Then we have Section 230, also just fucking chillin, waiting for passing. 230 is gonna make it to where sites will be held liable
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Brianne Kimmel \U0001f4ac
Brianne Kimmel 💬...
@briannekimmel
Shocking fact: Millennial men are less likely to work than any other age and gender demographic in America.

Today, there are 500,000 young men missing from the U.S. workforce.

Research suggests video games & improved leisure tech plays a role in the problem. 👇 Thread:

Following the 2007 to 2009 recession, 25 to 34 year old men exited high school with fewer middle-skill job opportunities than years prior.

During this time, we saw an increased number of men living with parents & choosing unemployment over lower paying jobs.

It's estimated that 24M millennials live w/ their parents.

1 in 4 living in their parents’ home neither go to school nor work.

What's more surprising? 9 in 10 who lived with their parents a year ago are still living there w/ no plans to leave.

Economists are calling millennial men a lost generation.

According to economist David Dorn:

“If you get to the point where you’re turning 30, you’ve never held a real job and you don’t have a college education, then it is very hard to recover at that point.”

Economists suggest this choosiness is a generational trait.

Forbes interview w/ a high school educated man:

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Katie Mack
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Light travels at about 1 foot per nanosecond.

Hold your hand up 12 inches from your face: you’re seeing your hand as it was a nanosecond ago. Everything you look at is, to one degree or another, in the past. The farther away in space, the more ancient in time.

You can’t see the Sun as it is now, but you can see it as it was about 8 minutes ago. You can’t see Alpha Centauri now, but you can see it 4.4 years ago. You can see the Andromeda Galaxy as it was 2.5 million years in the past. And so on.

With powerful telescopes, we can see galaxies whose light has been traveling to us for more than 13 billion years. We see them shining in a universe that’s still young, where gravity has just begun to pull matter together into stars and galaxies.

We can see something even more distant, and more ancient, than the first galaxies. If we peer out far enough, in between the galaxies, we can see parts of the Universe that are so far away, it has taken the light from that distance almost the entire age of the cosmos to reach us.
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śākta
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Today I'm going to expose these so called reviver of Sanatan dharma.

Arya samaj's main book which they treat as their bible is Satyarth Prakasha. Which was written by "Maharishi" Dayanand Saraswati.

Dayanand Condemned Idol worship and blamed it on jains . like really??


The book peddles hate against several Hindu sects.

here is hate against Vaishnavas
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Peggy Klaver #FBR \U0001f30a\u270a\U0001f3fb\u270a\U0001f3fd\u270a\U0001f3ff\u270a\U0001f3fc
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@Pegerella
The man who invented autocorrect should burn in hello.

It was meant to put a smile on your face. Please stop sending me instructions on how to turn my autocorrect off. 😳🤔

Texted my friends to ask if I could take their kids with me to Satan... still have not heard back from them. I meant Santa...

Thanks for all the love, I appreciate a follow. 💗
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To me, the most important aspect of the 2018 midterms wasn't even about partisan control, but about democracy and voting rights. That's the real battle.

2/The good news: It's now an issue that everyone's talking about, and that everyone cares about.

3/More good news: Florida's proposition to give felons voting rights won. But it didn't just win - it won with substantial support from Republican voters.

That suggests there is still SOME grassroots support for democracy that transcends

4/Yet more good news: Michigan made it easier to vote. Again, by plebiscite, showing broad support for voting rights as an

5/OK, now the bad news.

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