Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Esther Choo and Scott Duke Kominers are the latest to point out the need for a focused effort (comparable to the Operation Warp Speed project to develop the original COVID-19 vaccines) to respond to the public health emergency that is widespread long COVID. Phil Tank highlights how the Moe government's elimination of masking protection in Saskatchewan health care facilities is a purely political decision to cater to anti-science cranks (which figures to produce disastrous health consequences). And Josiah Mortimer reports on the UK's apparent coverup of workplace COVID infections and fatalities in health facilities.

- Max Fawcett writes about the clear connection between strong social safety nets and people's happiness and well-being. Claire Cain Miller and Alicia Parlapiano chart how the U.S. built a functioning welfare state at the outset of the COVID pandemic - and has since dismantled it based on the perceived imperative to stop helping people. Andre La Rosa-Rodriguez reports on the rightful concerns by food banks that governments are entrenching the need for private charity rather than doing anything to ameliorate systemic deprivation. And Moira Welsh reports on the high rates of poverty and precarious housing among older women - and some of the options available to ensure a reasonable standard of living.

- Monica Potts discusses how rural America's combination of moral puritanism and limited economic development traps women based on their family backgrounds and sexual choices.

- Finally, Ann Pettifor writes about the importance of applying the principle that "we can afford what we can do" to the task of transitioning to a clean energy society. And Michael Mann discusses how climate change deniers seem to have finally been left behind in Australia's policy discussions - though many of us know from experience how other delay and obfuscation tactics can temporarily take the place of outright denial with a substantially similar effect.