Michael Y. Simon

Leaving Twitter. If you need to reach me, please do so through my website, michaelsimonmft.com.

@zeynep first a covid expert now a Middle East pundit? Spare us, please.

@JonHaidt @IanVRowe It just isn’t that easy. As a school counselor and consultant who has helped many school communities come up with phone use guidance, I can tell you for every school in which it “works” to remove the phones there is a school that had a disaster of it.

Another school goes phone-free, another school finds overwhelming benefits from the policy. Students are more focused, calm, and sociable. Teachers no longer forced to be phone police; can focus on teaching. Vertex Partnership Academies, via @IanVRowe

@dallin_stagg @stevemur @NoContextHumans $100 lost, first off. Then the thief buys $70 worth of product with the store’s money, so they lose the cost of those items to the store plus the profit on those items should someone else bought them with their own money. On top of that the store gave the thief another $30.

Finally someone is speaking my language here. Your logic is sound, and I think the problem can be simplified to illustrate for those who may not understand the accounting: The thirty was stolen and never returned — obvious theft of $30. The remaining seventy was stolen, then given back in exchange for goods — so really what was stolen was the goods. The goods could have been sold in a normal transaction for a profit (at $70), but of course the store paid less for the goods, which is what they ultimately lose. What they lose is the thirty plus how much it would cost to replace the inventory.

I’m still trying to work out the answer…🤔

@NoContextHumans About $200

@EdKrassen @eminabec Such a ridiculous post and discussion. “Catching” Trump in a lie is like “discovering” the sunlight when the sun rises.

@eminabec I get it. He probably can't win either way, but why does he take the side of the lie?

Is this another Trump Lie? Trump last night in his interview with Megyn Kelly was asked about his commendation he awarded to Dr. Fauci. "I don't know who gave him the commendation." FACT Check: Direct quote from the Trump White House Webpage on the last day of Trump's Presidency: "President Trump Awards Presidential Commendations to Operation Warp Speed Team. Today, President Donald J. Trump awarded Presidential Commendations to the below individuals in recognition of their exceptional efforts on Operation Warp Speed: General Mark Milley, Secretary Alex Azar, Jared Kushner, Dr. Moncef Slaoui, General Gustave Perna, Dr. Deborah Birx, Dr. Anthony Fauci..."

@benshapiro @TuckerCarlson Serious answer: because he is not a credible individual whereas the two women are.

Serious question after watching @TuckerCarlson's interview with Larry Sinclair: why are his allegations significantly less credible than those of, say, E. Jean Carroll or Christine Blasey Ford?

@EM_RESUS Gsw

Here’s the Chest X-Ray of a young boy suffering from a condition that is now the #1 cause of death in children and adolescents in the U.S. What’s the diagnosis?

Jamie Raskin makes a good point to Chuck Todd today. If Hunter Biden took a job and he got those jobs because foreign companies thought it would be beneficial to them because his Father was VP, then it was wrong (not illegal) for Hunter to take that job. Meanwhile, we can also say the same about the following: Donald Trump literally sold hundreds of hotel rooms to foreign government who didn’t even stay in the hotels. How do we know those governments didn’t use Trump’s hotels to pay Trump for favors? Why would they stay at Trump hotels and not a hotel down the road? To many it would seem obvious that it was because they had hopes for political favors. Donald Trump Jr.’s good friend and foreign business partner Gentry Beach not only got to meet with Donald Trump, but he also got invited to the WH to take part in private White House meetings. He got invited to meet with the top National Security Council officials in the US and pushed them to make policy decisions that would be beneficial to his personal businesses. But Joe Biden meeting with Hunter’s business partners, even though there is no evidence that he discussed business with them, is “corrupt,” right? Jared Kushner secured a $1.2 Billion lease deal from a company that was owned in large part by the Qatari government just as Trump was supporting an anti-Qatari Middle Eastern Blockade of Qatar. Why would they invest in Jared Kushner’s building when there were literally dozens of other buildings to invest into? Could it be that they wanted Trump to stop supporting the blockade? Do you know what happened once Kushner got the deal? That’s right! Trump stopped supporting the blockade. Could Trump had changed his stance in exchange for a $1.2 billion lease deal for his Son-in-law and Daughter? Of course it’s possible. But Joe Biden holding a strong stance that went along with nearly all politicians in government, concerning the Ukrainian prosecutor, is “corrupt,” right? Jared Kushner and Donald Trump, after years of pro-Saudi policy, got over $2 billion combined from the Saudi government after leaving office. Could that be repayment for their political favors? Could it be pre-payment incase Trump gets back in the WH? Or course it could be. Ivanka Trump, literally got trademark deals while she was dining with the Chinese President, all while working in the WH, and just as Trump changed his stance on the Chinese ZTE deal that would benefit China. Could the trademarks have come as a push by China to try and convince Trump to support the ZTE deal? Of course it could be. Did Trump change his stance on the ZTE deal because Ivanka got the trademarks? Or course it’s possible. No, there is no absolute proof that these deals were in exchange for policy favors, but if you are going to theorize that Hunter Biden took money in exchange for Joe Biden changing policy, yet not say a single word about the Trump family, then you are simply a hypocrite. Jamie Raskin wants to come up with some common sense laws to try and prevent family members of Presidents and VPs from making money overseas like Hunter Biden and the Trump’s did while in office. Why won’t Republicans come to the table? Probably because they don’t want to stop Trump from doing business in the WH again if he becomes President again. Can’t we all agree that this is a bad look for America, no matter who is doing it?

@Mollys_ADHD Agreed. Online is not the place to be vulnerable. It is the place to guarantee your vulnerabilities will be attacked, however.

The online ADHD community can be such an unwelcoming place. No wonder people are so afraid to speak up about their experiences with ADHD etc… It’s a brutal place to be vulnerable. I’m not going to be posting much on here anymore, It’s a vile place

@fitterhappierAJ Thank you

I would like to talk about the dangers of following the crowd. “Would you jump off a bridge just because your friends did?” Most of us heard a version of this question as children. It was intended to encourage us to think for ourselves, but it turns out very few people do. Most people feel peer pressure very intensely and it’s not limited to the public, who might have an excuse for being less informed about the risks of SARS-CoV-2. Academic peer pressure is real, and in some ways can be more harmful, because it can lead to important ideas being excluded from the scientific discourse. I have written before about my work on Fas-L, and early in the pandemic I published this paper: frontiersin.org/articles/10.33… The mechanism I proposed based on my expertise in the field was later proven in vivo: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P… nature.com/articles/s4141… In summer 2020, I started work on a paper on the long-term risks of COVID-19 with Marc Desforges, @dgurdasani1 and @adamhamdy which was published in 2021: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P… You can judge for yourself how accurate our concerns were. I published an explanation of why I expect reinfection to be a net harm to human health, with a feed forward mechanism that will have attritional effects with each infection: frontiersin.org/articles/10.33… I presented considered views that were intended to contribute to the scientific discourse. Views that are grounded in evidence, based on my experience conducting research at the NIH and elsewhere. My reward for sharing these views was to be labeled a ‘crank’ and a ‘grifter’ by a small but very vocal community of scientists and COVID commentators on Twitter like Marc Veldhoen and Zeynep Tufekci. I don’t have my own lab. I’m not in receipt of grants and my work on COVID has not benefited my career whatsoever. In fact, it has cost me. I have privately paid for the journal publication fees, and have suffered harm to my reputation because of how this vocal group chose to engage with me, attacking me as a person, rather than engaging with and refuting the science. What started as a small group quickly grew. I know members of this group reached out to other scientists privately to discredit me as an alarmist. They felt that the broad stimulation and hyperactivation of T cells was only valid during 1) severe disease and 2) acutely Little did they know the mechanism of T cell aging and death would behave in an "as above, so below" instance. What I mean is, that if you have a continuous broad stimulation, you have continuous broad turnover of cells. This is how in part people with Long Covid are missing unactivated naive T cells. There is a broad stimulation, which happens acutely, happening chronically as well. So they dismissed my alarm of 'kiss your naive T cells goodbye' when I wrote it in 2020 I know that some of the people they reached out to listened and distanced themselves from me and joined in the process of discrediting me. I know of arguments behind my back in DM groups and individually by people who weren’t qualified to understand the immunology and who were basing their decisions on whether to disavow me on my tone and junior status. But what would their tone and persona have been like if they’d been the subject of a campaign to isolate them and present their views as ‘fringe,’ as Brian Hjele had said? From my perspective, we had everyone else commenting on immunology and T cell death that were not in a qualified position to do so whatsoever. Brian Hjele worked on some viruses. Marc Veldhoen on T cell metabolism. Bertoletti on patents for supplementing Hep specific cells with Car-t Soon, what had started with a handful of people became a large, concerted campaign. Even people I previously respected like Dr Rupert Beale joined the crowd and described me publicly as a crank. I was so upset by this, I wrote to Dr Beale’s supervisor, who said he would remind Dr Beale about the good conduct policy for social media None of these people attempted to refute my science. None of them reached out to me to find out whether the unsubstantiated rumors doing the rounds – that I was unemployed and unemployable – were true. In fact, as I’ve written before, I was at medical and working at the NIH conducting cancer research during my vacations. I suspect many of the people caught up in this bullying campaign didn’t even bother to read my papers, which outlined the mechanisms I suspected were at play. Mechanisms that have subsequently been proven, like Fas apoptosis in severe disease, and sweeping losses of naive T cells. Imagine if, instead of devoting so much time and effort to discrediting me because they were so insecure about themselves and their understanding of the world, they had instead engaged on the science. I warned about T cell differentiation, activation, and depletion in 2020. I warned about persistent infection in 2020. Now we see persistent T cell activation and persistent infection and we have no idea of the long-term harms involved. I think I have some idea, but you will indeed call me an "information terrorist" as Mel Symeonides has done. We can hazard a guess based on our existing understanding of a persistently activated immune system. We can expect an increase in autoimmunity, like I said which was confirmed.. We can expect a decrease in immune function as the immune system continually diverts resources to fighting a persistent infection. We can expect immunosenescence because of chronic inflammation. We need to be mindful of the effects of rapid T cell turnover and what that might mean for future health. In short, many of the things I was concerned about have come to pass. I tried to warn people, but like many COVID cautious people, I was fighting the weight of a society that just wants to get back to normal. The emergence of this pathogen ended the old normal. The choice we now face is whether to continue the pretense we can return to 2019 or whether we accept our new reality and adapt to live with the virus. The price of pretense will be sustained increases in morbidity and mortality, individuals suffering sudden unexplained incidences of cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disease, kidney disease and so on. I’ve written about this before, but early harm to the immune system doesn’t necessarily manifest as an exponential and endless rise in fungal or bacterial infection (although strep tonsillitis risk increases after Covid according to the BMJ). It expresses as a rise in all cause morbidity and mortality as the body becomes dysregulated in its ability to fight harms across the board. The John Snow Project has written about what ‘textbook immunity’ tells us to expect: johnsnowproject.org/insights/textb… And in a related piece has called on governments to urgently answer some of the key questions that surround the harms that are likely to be caused by repeat infections: johnsnowproject.org/insights/admis… To all the COVID cautious people out there still masking and keeping themselves and their loved ones safe, thank you. Each infection prevented is a transmission chain ended and a series of harms avoided. You aren’t just doing good for yourselves, you are benefiting society, and I believe there will come a time when people who spread SARS-CoV-2 are regarded with the same or greater disapproval than smokers who inflicted the harms of passive smoking on others. To the COVID cautious I say the weight of evidence is on your side. The science tells us infection and reinfection are net harms. And not only the science: the NIH, WHO and HHS are among a growing number of organizations advising people to avoid reinfections because they increase the risk of harmful outcomes. To all the people like Dr Beale and Mel, who got swept up in the gaggle that thought it cool to bully and abuse me for a while, I would ask you to take a deeper look at the science and really question whether you believe the vaccines alone are enough to protect human health from the harms being caused by this virus. I don’t think we have learnt anything about this virus that was better than the mainstream consensus was expecting. From asymptomatic infection to airborne transmission, from reinfection to viral persistence, from T cell activation to infection of the bone marrow, this virus has confounded the expectations of optimists and it is likely to continue to do so. If upon reflection you decide I was right to vocally warn people to take care, please add your voice to the cause and demonstrate what you believe in your actions. Wear a respirator mask, advocate for cleaner air, and encourage colleagues to do likewise. SARS-CoV-2 represents an unprecedented challenge and I believe we will only rise to meet it by working together. This means putting aside personalities and not getting swept along with the crowd because it is the easy thing to do. It means standing up for what is right and encouraging people to protect themselves, and most importantly their children. My pinned tweet is a letter a sent to a school board because I think one of our fundamental responsibilities as human beings is to safeguard those who cannot look after themselves. Children depend on adults to protect them, and right now the adults are gambling that repeat infections by SARS-CoV-2 will not violate that trust. The stakes could not be higher: we risk failing in our profound duty to make the world a safe place for the next generation. History will judge. Don’t follow the crowd. Even if it’s difficult and there is a cost to be paid, do what is right

It’s tough to see some of the images coming out of Hawai’i — a place that’s so special to so many of us. Michelle and I are thinking of everyone who has lost a loved one, or whose life has been turned upside down. If you’d like to help, you can do so here. hawaiicommunityfoundation.org/maui-strong

@deray What are you missing? 🤣

In what way was Jamie’s post antisemitic? I read it as a clear post about betrayal. What am I missing?

@PopCrave Is @iamjamiefoxx anti-Roman? Just asking ….

Jamie Foxx clarifies the meaning of his Instagram post, which some interpreted as antisemitic: “To clarify, I was betrayed by a fake friend and that's what I meant with 'they' not anything more.”

Covid infections can cause strokes, heart attacks and pulmonary embolisms in the post-acute phase. Even if the acute infection is mild. Even if you’re vaccinated/boosted. Even if you’re healthy. Even if you’re young. Even if you already caught it before and have “hybrid immunity”

@Mollys_ADHD How it feels and how it is are often wildly different. You are a very meaningful human to many of us.

With 8 billion + people in the world, yet I'm single and I don't have any friends. I’m definitely failing at life.

@Bornakang This is just wrong in so many ways

@tribelaw Yes, because of the sociopathy.

“Trump doesn’t just cross moral lines; he doesn’t appear capable of understanding moral categories. Morality is for Trump what colors are to a person who is color-blind.“  theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

@dakroot @Laurie_Garrett If I am the third or fourth person to say this you might take that as an incentive to study how the immune system functions and learn why your interpretation is inaccurate. You are going to have to supply the substance through your own work. “Immunity Debt” is a media-driven myth

@SupportingTeens @Laurie_Garrett And you’re the third or fourth person who’s dropped by to say this and leave. More substance or I don’t care.

On May 11 when the US #COVID19 emergency officially ended it was uncanny here in NYC -- POOF, most masks disappeared. And now we have a surge in non-COVID "colds" or "flu" -- other viruses. Having caught one of them, despite my ongoing precautions, I find myself feeling solidarity with #LongCOVID brain fog sufferers. For 8 days I've been battling some bug that put my inflammatory immune response into overdrive, clogging the sinuses and creating pressure on my frontal lobe that feels like a vise grip. And so, I have binge-watched shows and been unable the following day to recall what they were. I've read entire chapters of a novel, and had to go back & skim to remember what happened, I Tweeted that #Biden was the 1st US #POTUS to go to #Hiroshima completely forgetting #Obama's historic visit, and I've gone downstairs to do something, forgetting what it was on arrival. I can't imagine going through this for weeks or months. My heart breaks for all of you out there who have been struggling with #COVID brain fog.

@dakroot @Laurie_Garrett The immune system doesn’t work this way 🙃

@Laurie_Garrett It's almost like not regularly exposing yourself to common pathogens in the environment makes you less likely to be able to fight off even the most benign ones.

via @NYTimes would love ⁦@sjblakemore⁩ and ⁦@ldsteinberg⁩ to get in a room to discuss…or is it just “⁦@jean_twenge⁩ is wrong” (again). #teens #depression #smartphones #potatoes #ucl nytimes.com/2023/05/19/pod…