Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Eric Topol describes how COVID-19's infectiousness has been steadily increasing with time even as so many governments have gone out of their way to declare it to be over, while Reuters reports on new research showing that the Omicron variant is no less severe than its predecessors. Anna Edney writes about the children fighting the long-term effects of long COVID after being falsely reassured that they wouldn't be affected. And Eric Luellen discusses the prospect of a pan-coronavirus vaccine - which, like any other future possibility for prevention and treatment, seems rather hollow in light of current policy to encourage mass infection.  

- Alex Himelfarb writes that austerity is no cure for inflation - and that the proper answer to rising prices is to make sure people can weather them, not to abandon them to the whims of the market. And Heather Scoffield calls out the deliberate policy choice to let the corporate sector gorge itself on windfall profits while seeking to suppress wages the moment they had any prospect of catching up to price increases. 

- Alan Broadbent and Elizabeth McIsaac highlight how reliance on private-sector developers is a fatally flawed strategy to deal with the housing crisis. And Shaina Luck reports that one result of the NDP-Lib confidence and supply agreement is to ensure that funding intended for affordable housing actually provides it. 

- Leanna First-Arai discusses how the fossil fuel sector is trying to hold the U.S.' education system hostage. Geoff Dembicki points out that Canada's big banks are a major obstacle to an energy transition due to the money they've already sunk into dirty tar sands projects. And the Canadian Climate Institute studies how a rapid transition to renewable energy is both the most affordable and most environmentally responsible path forward in our power sector.  

- Matthew Cunningham-Cook writes about the systematic funneling of workers' pension funds into the hands of a few well-connected financial firms, turning the retirements of a large portion of the working class into a cash cow for a lucky few. 

- Finally, Alex Hemingway discusses the much-needed restoration of card check union certification in British Columbia in order to reduce the effect of employer interference and intimidation.