Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Katie Camero discusses how the belief that the COVID-19 pandemic is over (pushed by businesses and politicians eager to avoid responsibility for anybody's health) is creating avoidable dangers for everybody. Sydney Stein et al. study the persistence and dispersal of COVID in the bodies of its victims, while Alexander Tin reports on CDC research tracing the number of long COVID deaths in the U.S. And Jill McIntosh reports on a new study showing a correlation between vaccine refusal and car accidents - with the plausible confounding factors of carelessness and a disregard for others hardly serving as a defence for people inflicting risks on the public in multiple ways. 

- Danyaal Raza weighs in on the prospect of community health hubs to ensure people have access to the primary care they need. Kenyon Wallace and Megan Ogilvie trace the causes of the crisis of pediatric care in Ontario. And Chris Gallaway highlights how the solution to capacity limitations is investment in a public system that's designed to succeed, not funneling money toward corporate profiteers based on the claim that Medicare is beyond repair. 

- Armine Yalnizyan tests (and finds reason to doubt) the theory that increasing interest rates are invariable effective to reverse inflation. And Derek Decloet reports on the reality that Canadians are facing exceptionally high levels of consumer debt payments even with rates at relatively low levels - which should raise a red flag that further increases will cause catastrophic damage to individual-level finances.  

- Geoffrey York reports on the RCMP's investigation into corruption by the mining company Ivanhoe in its exploitation of copper resources in the Congo. And Matteo Cimellaro reports on a push by Indigenous nations in the Amazon to limit the harm done by the Canadian resource extraction sector.

- Janetta MacKenzie writes about the inevitable decline in fossil fuel reliance despite the obstruction of the industry and its political spokespuppets. Justine Hunter reports on a Canadian Climate Institute study finding that Canada's haphazard climate adaptation plan is both underresourced, and poorly targeted to address the known results of a climate breakdown. And Don Pittis discusses how a focus on electric vehicles alone neglects both the carbon pollution resulting from power generation, and the effects of perpetuating a car-based transportation system.  

- Finally, Doug Cuthand highlights how the cynical assertion of "sovereignty" by Danielle Smith and Scott Moe is based on the deliberate erasure of treaty rights.