There I was yesterday, teaching, and one of the first things I told my students was that the pandemic was not over, we all ought to be wearing masks and social distancing, but that the university had decided not to enforce any precautions, and I couldn’t do anything to make them do anything even as simple as wearing a mask. The best I could do is offer to teach the class synchronously over Zoom. Of course I was wearing a mask. I might have been the only person in the building doing so. I know none of the students were. I can’t blame them, since everything from the president of the US to local campus policy is telling them the pandemic is over.

It’s not.

Here’s the truth: the pandemic is not over. It’s much worse than you have been led to believe. And unless you’ve spent the past several years reading scientific studies on the subject, it can be hard to convey just how wrong the public perception of COVID really is. Everything from how it’s spread, to how it’s prevented, to what it does once it’s in your body, is being tragically misunderstood.

None of this is an accident. It’s not your “fault” if you aren’t a virologist, immunologist, epidemiologist, or evolutionary biologist. It’s the job of experts and trusted voices to convey the truth and give you guidance. Not only have they failed at this, they have engaged in an active disinformation campaign dedicated to making the pandemic “disappear”. This has not been the result of a classic caricature of conspiracy — some tiny council of elites, gathered in the shadows to craft policy out of whole cloth. What we’re actually witnessing is the quiet collusion of class interest. This form of conspiracy is a feature of cultural hegemony, and it has aligned itself in direct opposition to public health and scientific reality. A “conspiracy” of this sort takes place in full view of the public. Every actor within it has openly telegraphed motivations that we are all taught to see as acceptable: keeping the current economic system intact at all costs.

From the moment humanity learned of the novel coronavirus, uncertainty swirled. SARS-CoV-2, named for its terrifying viral cousin, seemed to be even worse than SARS: more deadly, more transmissible, better at evading detection. A singular question arose in the minds of two very different classes of people: “How do we survive this?” For one of those classes, the question was literal: how do we avoid being killed by a disease that seems to be spreading and killing invisibly and indiscriminately? For the other class, the question being asked in boardrooms and capitols was really: “Could this dislodge our grip on power?”

That last question is a good one. Who is worrying about power?

One good place to check is the World Economic Forum in Davos, where all the richest and most influential people in the world converge every year to talk about controlling the masses. Are they concerned about dying of COVID? Do they have plans to protect themselves from the virus? They sure do.

The first thing attendees get is a rapid COVID test and an electronic badge. The badge is linked to a conference database that controls a little light that only activates if you pass the test. You will not be admitted to the meeting unless your badge indicates that you’ve taken the daily test and are free of the disease.

Tests are free. Masks are free. The staff are required to wear them, but the rich people are not.

Inside the annual meeting’s venues, areas will be cleaned, disinfected, and ventilated several times a day. Additional state-of-the-art ventilation systems have been installed in areas with restricted air circulation. Hand sanitizers will be widely available throughout the meeting venues.

Similar precautions have been taken in the offices and factories of attendees, to protect the workers. Ha ha, fooled you, of course they’re not expected to do that. That would cost money.

Do the richest people in the world know something you don’t? They certainly do, because they’ve been investing a lot of effort in keeping you ignorant and confused. Otherwise, we might demand unthinkable things like improved air circulation in our classrooms and labs, and a routine testing policy, and required masking with good masks provided by the university (to be fair, the university did provide N95 masks to the faculty last year. We got 3. Just 3.)

Do you realize that you’re an exploited peon yet?

And the longer the list, the truer it must be! This gentleman has compiled a list of all the things “women” do not have, and while it starts out reflecting generic gender critical falsehoods, it gets weirder and weirder.

Whoa. Women don’t have muscle mass or lung capacity or hemoglobin? No bones? No hands? What kind of list is this?

Then I realized this person hasn’t actually ever met a woman, and is instead describing a jellyfish. He’s also probably resentful because the jellyfish spurned his romantic advances.

Siouxsie Wiles explains the sneaky shenanigans behind COVID PR. It’s literally PR for the disease.

In late 2020, the WHO started naming Covid-19 variants after letters of the Greek alphabet. Omicron was the letter given to the variant that emerged in late 2021.

Just looking at the data on the cumulative number of confirmed Covid cases worldwide, which we know is an underestimate, I think it’s pretty safe to say that Omicron has probably infected more people in the last year than caught Covid in the first two years of the pandemic put together.

All those Omicron infections mean the virus has also continued to evolve, but so far, the WHO hasn’t given any of the Omicron offshoots a new Greek letter. That’s why the world has been drowning in an alphabet soup of Omicron subvariants, from the BA’s and BJ’s to the BQ’s and XBB’s. I guess if we gave any one of them a new Greek letter, it would spoil the idea that the pandemic is over, and we don’t have to worry about Covid any more.

You’d think the dead bodies would be a clue — China has revealed that they’ve had 60,000 deaths since December — but no, we’re all in denial. A few people are trying to bring attention to an ongoing problem.

Inspired by someone on Twitter who nicknamed BA.2.75 Centaurus, last year Professor Ryan Gregory, a biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada, started compiling a list of nicknames for Omicron subvariants based on mythological creatures. Which is easier to remember? That BJ.1 and BM.1.1.1 combined to form XBB, which evolved into XBB.1, and then XBB.1.5? Or that Argus and Mimas combined to form Gryphon, which evolved into Hippogryph and then into Kraken?

It’s something, I guess, but I feel like tactics to draw the public’s attention to our evolving pandemic aren’t going to be effective if the public simply doesn’t care. The general citizenry is just opposed to taking any action to slow the spread of the disease. No one is asking much — Siouxsie explains what a common sense response would be.

Am I concerned about Kraken? Regular readers will know I take all variants seriously. What concerns me more is that we are no longer working collectively to reduce the spread of Covid.

That doesn’t mean I want us to return to the days of lockdowns. I just want us to use the tools we know to reduce the transmission of not just every variant of Covid so far, but also many other airborne infectious diseases – high-quality masks, clean air and staying home when infectious. We’ll reap the rewards in the long run.

“Masks”? Tyranny!

It’s a familiar story about Svante Pääbo being awarded the Nobel prize for his work on sequencing ancient DNA. It’s all very interesting, but I’ve heard it many times before…and then it gets upstaged by a tale from his personal life which I did not know about.

Behind the scientific success story is also one of considerable personal challenge. “My father had two families and we were the undisclosed one, the other was the official one. My father would show up on Saturdays, have coffee or lunch with me and my mum and then disappear again.”

WAIT, WHAAAT? Your father kept you as his ‘secret’ family?

His mother, Karin, who died in 2013, would have been “proud and thrilled” about his prize, he says. She came to Sweden from Estonia in 1944, escaping the Soviet invasion, and overcame linguistic and financial barriers to become a chemist.

The fact that his father, Sune Bergström, a biochemist, was himself awarded the Nobel prize (also for physiology or medicine) in 1982 for his work on prostaglandins, had little influence on Pääbo’s own scientific path he says. “Only to the extent that my mother met him through her work. It was rather her great fascination with science that was transmitted to me. She hugely encouraged my curiosity and supported me when I changed from medicine to natural sciences. She was by far the greater influence.”

When his father received the award in Stockholm, he was a graduate student in Uppsala and followed the ceremony on television.

“I had a different surname to him and only very few people even knew we were related,” he says. It wasn’t so much having to keep his famous father secret from his colleagues that was painful to him, “rather that his other, ‘official’ son knew nothing about us. We had several intense rows about it. I even threatened to seek out his family and explain it to them. So my father said he would tell them, but it never came to that,” he recalls.

In 2014 he told the Observer his father’s other family found out when Bergström died in 2005. “It was only then my half-brother learned about me. Fortunately he adjusted and we get on all right,” Pääbo said.

That is so fucked up, and Bergström sounds like a terrible father. That had to have left a few scars.

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We’re winding down to the last week of our winter break, and Mary and I took off to the Big City for a few days. We had no grand plans, just a break from the routine, where we’d hang out in a hotel and do some exploring. Unfortunately, we got there immediately after a major storm dumped a dense layer of wet snow on the city. We arrived as the snow plows were clearing out places where we could park — and they weren’t done by the time we would leave. That cramped our style, since walking around the city was slogging through nearly impassable piles of thick soggy stuff. Our grand adventure was reduced to short walks to nice restaurants.

We also met up with Marcus Ranum, who was in Minneapolis to help a friend move. He drove a truck from Pennsylvania to Minnesota during a snowstorm! I want a friend like that, who’d drop what he was doing to drive 800 miles to help me move. We got a pleasant eveing out of it, at least.

Yesterday was spent driving back and taking naps. Now I have no excuse, I have to start assembling a syllabus and getting organized for genetics.

Yesterday, we traveled to Minneapolis. It was the day after a big snowstorm, and the only thing worse would be if we arrived a day earlier. Sidewalks haven’t been cleared, roads are covered with slush, and we tried walking around town. It wasn’t fun. Two foot tall piles of snow on the path made it more of a mountain climbing adventure.

One positive, though: I’m still suffering with this nasty deep-seated cold, erupting occasionally into hoarse coughing and snotty horrible sneezes. I found a cure! It’s only temporary, though, but it is good for a few hours relief. We went to an Indian restaurant and I ordered a vindaloo with a couple of volcanoes worth of hotness. It worked! My sinuses were thoroughly cleared out, I could breath unimpeded, and my throat was quivering in terror — if it coughed one more time, I was going to order another raund.

I am sorry to report, though, that around 2am the slime had oozed back and repopulated every cranial cavity. I may have to do it again.

The disease afflicting our house has now descended into the quiet hush phase. Our throats are sore, it hurts to talk; my wife waved good morning to me, we haven’t said a single word yet. It’s a bit eerie.

Don’t bother to visit, it’s like popping into a monastery where all the monks have taken vows of silence. You will get only gestures, and you will be turned away.