COVID-19

By Andrew WardAs the world continues to contend with COVID-19, much about the virus remains uncertain, including its interactions with cannabis.In the early months of the pandemic, various studies linked pot...

The rise of coronavirus cases and stress surrounding the Delta variant is not pleasant. Especially for those people who stopped socializing and hanging out with loved ones in order to keep...

Employees of McDonald's march on the street as they protest for a raise in their minimum wage to $15 an hour, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on May 19, 2021.CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP via Getty Images Janine Jackson: “We all quit.” A very good Motherboard story about fast food, retail and hospitality workers resigning from their jobs nevertheless began by telling readers that they “may have seen photos of it go viral,” or “may have even experienced it in real life, if you’ve dined at a Chili’s or Applebee’s, and the hostess apologizes for the extra-long wait times.” A source in The New York Times explains that it’s “not about the wages of college grads going up — it’s about the wages of lifeguards at my pool.”

Colds are more common during the winter, but they also happen in the summer, when they’re particularly terrible. Summer colds are usually associated with different viruses than the ones we experience...

Amid rising reports of vaccine-related menstrual disruptions, the CDC and FDA are dismissing women’s concerns and denying them information while corporate media pathologizes them in sexist fashion. This August 11, the US...

As the pandemic progresses and the Delta variant reaches more and more people, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infections, appeared on TODAY to discuss the...

Hospitals are filling up and children are near death across a swath of Red states from Texas to Florida. The governors of those two states are leading a movement. Republican Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have gone all-in on a high-stakes bet, and the example of Donald Trump suggests they may just win it. Win or lose, though, they’re both tenaciously hanging onto their bans on mandated masks in schools. Their bet is that they’ll get away with letting tens of thousands of their citizens — and thousands of their citizens’ children — die or get “long Covid” and the people of their states will simply forget and move on.

The school board for Williamson County, Tennessee, held a meeting on Tuesday night about taking steps to deal with the terrifying Delta COVID infection surge. After four hours of debate, the board voted to implement a temporary mask mandate for grammar school students and staff, said mandate being set to expire on September 21. Almost immediately, all hell broke loose. A clutch of infuriated parents mobbed mask advocates to their cars, where they bellowed through the driver’s side of one car window, “You can leave freely, but we will find you and we know who you are.” One mask advocate, a doctor named Britt Maxwell with children who attend school in the district, was called a “traitor” as he left the gathering. “I don’t see how anyone can say that when I’ve been on the frontlines of this pandemic since the beginning, treating patients in rooms, unvaccinated for the vast majority of it, hoping I wouldn’t take it home to my family. For someone to say that is mind blowing,” Maxwell told CNN.

n February of 2020, before the public knew the full extent of the coming pandemic but after senators were secretly briefed about the threat, Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Kentucky) wife bought stock in a company that manufactures an antiviral drug used to treat COVID-19. Now, 16 months after the stock reporting deadline for the buy has passed, Paul has disclosed the purchase. Under the Stock Act, lawmakers have 45 days to disclose a stock transaction after it’s made. Paul’s disclosure on Wednesday came incredibly late, raising suspicions, experts say, over the already questionable stock trade first reported by The Washington Post. Paul’s wife bought stock in Gilead Sciences, the company that makes the antiviral drug remdesivir shortly before the public was made aware of the pandemic in March and before the stock market crashed in March. The purchase was relatively small, between $1,000 and $15,000, and a spokesperson for the senator said that she actually lost money on the stock.

As the highly contagious Delta variant continues to spread, many hospitals are reporting record numbers of children being hospitalized, especially in areas with low vaccination rates, including Arkansas, Florida, Missouri and Texas. Dr. Christina Propst, a pediatrician in Houston, says children under 12 who are still ineligible for COVID-19 vaccines are at risk. “They are currently our most vulnerable population, just as this highly transmissible variant is surging across the country,” Propst says. She says Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s order banning mask mandates in schools is a purely political decision that ignores science. ​​“What he is doing is a direct threat to the health and well-being of the children of Texas,” says Propst.