Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Claire Horwell highlights how masking and other continued public health measures to rein in spread to the extent possible are the only way to avoid catastrophic results from the Omicron wave. Mickey Djuric reports on leaked modelling reaching the same conclusion based on Saskatchewan data (as well as the call by labour for public health action based on the science). Tyler Barrow talks to both Cory Neudorf and Alexander Wong about the painfully-misinformed spin being used by Scott Moe to avoid doing anything to keep people safe. And Alexander Quon interviews Nazeem Muhajarine about the Saskatchewan Party's choice to abandon any effort to even track, let alone contain, the spread of COVID. 

- Matt Keeling et al. study what circuit breaker policies can achieve in limiting infections as well as severe health outcomes. And Chansavath Phetsoupanth et al. find that people who suffer from long COVID can be expected to have long-term immunological deficiencies as a result. 

- Katharine Smart weighs in on how the pandemic has exposed the weaknesses caused by decades of neglect of our health care system. Nora Loreto points out how even the most immediate problems are primarily the result of neoliberal governments rather than individual anti-vaxxers. And Emma York discusses the shift toward for-profit health care as both a cause and consequence of the current crisis. 

- Tony Seskus and Kyle Bakx discuss the mountains of money being hoarded by fossil fuel companies even as they demand massive public subsidies, while Anya Zoledzowski reports on Shell's Quest plant as yet another example of a CCS project which only adds to carbon pollution even at massive expense. Gordon Laxer rightly notes that the UCP's spin about "foreign-funded" environmentalists represents nothing but blatant projection as Jason Kenney seeks to send more cash to foreign-owned petrogiants. And David Suzuki calls out climate-denying media for demonizing the people working on transitioning toward a sustainable society. 

- Finally, John Michael McGrath examines the preliminary findings of Ontario's housing task force -which would go some way toward encouraging multi-unit development, if doing so in ways which seem to cater more to developers than to people in need of homes.