#I like to spread misinformation what can I say

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved on our archive

By Hayley Gleeson

There wasn't a dramatic "lightning bolt" moment when Colin Kinner realised he needed to roll up his sleeves and start tackling what he'd come to see as a pernicious problem: the largely unchecked spread of SARS-CoV-2 in Australian schools.

What spurred him to act, in the end, was the growing pile of evidence that COVID was a serious health threat, and his concern that school communities seemed to be shrugging their shoulders at it.

He was tired of hearing about schools allowing teachers to come to work while COVID positive. Of sick children being permitted to stay in class and infecting others. Of schools asking parents not to tell them if their child had COVID, but routinely sending home letters about head lice or chickenpox. Of teachers and kids catching the virus and not recovering.

"As a parent, I want my son to be safe at school, so that was a key part of my motivation to do this," says Mr Kinner, the Brisbane creator of COVID Safety for Schools, a free online course that aims to correct misinformation and teach school staff and parents how to reduce the risk of the virus spreading. "But also, having spoken to lots of other parents and teachers, it's clear that most schools are lacking an understanding of some of the absolute basics of COVID. And in the fifth year of the pandemic, I find that very troubling."

Every week in Australia too many students and teachers are catching COVID at school, Mr Kinner says, resulting in disrupted learning, teacher shortages, increased transmission in the broader community and disabling chronic illnesses like long COVID. It's hardly surprising: a packed classroom can be the perfect place for an airborne virus to thrive, with one US study finding more than 70 per cent of COVID transmission in homes began with an infected school-age child.

Schools aren't necessarily at fault: in most states they've been starved of good public health guidance, Mr Kinner says — they've been told "they can treat it like any other respiratory illness, so that's exactly what they're doing".

Step one: correct misinformation A science and technology communicator and startup mentor, Mr Kinner's solution was to assemble a team — some of Australia's leading experts in public health, medicine and engineering — who could explain in simple video tutorials the health risks of COVID, the science of how it spreads, and strategies schools can use to keep staff and students well. The ultimate goal of COVID Safety for Schools, he says, is to change minds and behaviour and, since it launched in February, 600 participants have signed up, about half parents and half teachers.

But perhaps its greatest challenge is engaging people in the first place, particularly those who believe COVID is harmless or no longer worth taking precautions against.

For the past couple of years Australians have been encouraged to keep calm and carry on as if the virus is in the rear view mirror, even as it continues sickening and killing people, albeit in smaller numbers than years gone by. News reports often downplay its severity, if they cover it at all, while political leaders, public health officials and doctors have claimed it is no cause for concern, especially in children, and that catching it is not just inevitable, but necessary.

But mounting evidence shows the opposite. Even in vaccinated people and those who suffer "mild" infections, COVID can trigger a range of health problems including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, neurological conditions and immune dysfunction. Then there's long COVID, a debilitating multi-organ illness that has upended the lives of hundreds of millions of children and adults worldwide, many of whom do not fully recover.

"COVID is like an accelerator for all the other diseases that we hate — it's actually an aging accelerant as well," Professor Jeremy Nicholson explains in one of the course videos. "And we don't want that for our kids or anybody else."

Simple steps can stop COVID spreading Once apprised of the health risks, course participants are taught about evidence-based tools schools can use to reduce viral transmission. These are not outlandish or burdensome interventions, but common sense steps like encouraging teachers and students to stay home if they're sick; improving indoor air quality with ventilation and filtration — with air conditioning systems, air purifiers and good old-fashioned open windows; and promoting mask wearing particularly in high-risk settings like crowded indoor gatherings or bus trips.

Of course, some education departments already require schools to take similar measures. In Victoria, for instance, all public schools must "maximise" external ventilation, ensure air purifiers are used, encourage good personal hygiene and make face masks available for those who want to wear them. But that doesn't mean schools actually follow the guidelines or use the tools at their disposal (in 2021 the government delivered tens of thousands of air purifiers to schools across the state, but many are no longer used and some have since been listed for sale on Facebook Marketplace).

The federal president of the Australian Education Union, Correna Haythorpe, says any initiative that educates people about COVID and what schools can do to prevent infections is "welcome". Teachers who have to take sick leave because they've caught COVID or developed long COVID are an additional burden on schools, many of which are struggling with the "chronic" national teacher shortage, she says. Then there's the disruption to learning: "A contagious disease can very quickly … take out significant numbers of students. And fundamentally, we want kids to be engaged, we want them to be well, we want them to be learning."

Improving the situation, though, requires stronger leadership from education departments, Ms Haythorpe says. "Current government approaches to limiting COVID infection, repeat infection and long COVID demonstrates a lack of concern for the health and wellbeing of students, teachers and broader school communities," the AEU wrote in its submission to Australia's parliamentary inquiry into long COVID. Mitigation measures in many public schools are not adequate, it said, "and a lack of capital investment … since 2017 means that conditions are often cramped with inadequate air flow".

'Long COVID basically ended my career' For Amanda Sharpe, these problems are personal. Before she developed long COVID after catching the virus from her children in 2022, Ms Sharpe taught advanced maths at a high school in Bundaberg, Queensland. She used to spend full days on her feet, relishing the buzz of helping her students solve complex equations, preparing them for careers in fields like medicine and aerospace engineering.

Now, just sitting upright for a short spell or reading a simple news story can quickly worsen her symptoms and wipe her out for days. "Long COVID basically ended my career and I doubt that I'll ever be able to return," she says. "Unless there is an actual cure, I think that will be it for me."

It's bewildering that schools aren't taking stronger action to protect their staff and students from COVID, says Ms Sharpe, who tells her story in the COVID Safety for Schools course. A major issue is that many people still think of COVID as a respiratory illness, she says — they don't realise it can also attack the vascular system, damaging blood vessels and increasing the risk of clotting abnormalities, stroke and heart disease.

She also wishes more people knew that the virus can cause brain changes and cognitive impairment: one study, for instance, found people who recovered from "mild" COVID infections had lost the equivalent of three IQ points.

"With the maths I teach, you really can't afford to have your IQ drop," Ms Sharpe says. "I just don't understand why schools aren't implementing simple measures like improving indoor air quality — especially private schools, where academic results link directly with enrolments and success."

In response to previous disease outbreaks like Spanish flu and tuberculosis, schools moved lessons outdoors — sometimes in freezing winter temperatures — to stop children from getting sick, she says. "But we don't want to have classroom windows open in Queensland? It just seems insane to me."

What about WHS laws? It may also be unlawful. Australians may have been led to believe that public health orders in force until 2022 were the key reason employers, including schools, had to take steps to protect staff from COVID, says Michael Tooma, a partner at the law firm Hamilton Locke. But schools have always had to comply with workplace health and safety laws — "there has always been a duty of care", he says. "COVID presents a risk to health and safety and, like any other risk, it needs to be managed with proactive policies and procedures that try to eliminate the risk or reduce it as far as reasonably practicable."

At the very least, Mr Tooma says, schools should be excluding people with COVID from the workplace, improving ventilation in classrooms and auditoriums and maintaining sensible cleaning and hygiene regimes.

Schools that fail to meet their WHS legal obligations may be reported to and investigated by state regulators, which can issue improvement notices and in some cases bring prosecutions for serious breaches of the relevant legislation.

Still, Mr Tooma says he's not aware of any schools being prosecuted for COVID-related breaches and in general, regulators tend to focus on industries that have higher risks of serious physical harm and death, as well as "campaign" issues like mental health. "Regulator activity tends to follow public interest and so as public interest in COVID and COVID safety has waned, so has regulatory activity around it, in my experience."

Mr Kinner suspects it's probably going to take successful litigation for schools to start taking COVID more seriously. He points to a UK case in which 120 teachers with long COVID are suing the Department of Education for allegedly failing to protect them at the height of the pandemic. Those involved say they were not given good enough guidance for managing the risks the virus posed, with data showing teachers suffered high rates of infection and long COVID.

"I think it's only a matter of time before we see similar legal action in Australia," Mr Kinner says. "It could be from teachers, it could be from families who caught COVID because it came into their household via the school. I think it's inevitable."

In the meantime, he will keep trying to get COVID Safety for Schools in front of as many teachers, parents and principals as he can — even if it takes a while, even if they don't want to hear its message.

"I've been very surprised at how school leaders don't act when they're presented with this information, even people who go through the course and understand — or should understand — that this is a virus we should be taking very seriously," Mr Kinner says. "Because facts remain facts. Even if you don't like them, even if they make you feel uncomfortable, they're still facts."

[shadow0-1]

Operation: Heartthrob

[suncaptor]

nothing will make you sympathise with conspiracy theorist ideology more than having a seemingly rare reaction to a vaccine lmao.

[gender-euphowrya]

spell of explode all transphobes Activate

[bugsbenefit]

i don't follow new people often and if i do it's usually only the mutuals mutuals who's scents i slowly get accustomed to via dash osmosis, or someone that interacts with my posts regularly, and that strategy is once again proving to be the only reasonable one to keep your dash normal

[obstinatecondolement]

I was watching a YouTube video about making zines and the person ended it with a call to action to be informed about Palestine and was like "And what better way than by reading zines???" There are. Um. Better ways...

[katebihshop]

"you can't be mad at people for not knowing" i'm not! i'm mad that you haven't made any effort to learn while you spread harmful bullshit and claim you're a poor innocent baby who can't be expected to know any better whenever you're called on it!

[caffeinatedopossum]

it happened again 😭

Skgjfh this took me so long to understand because I thought this was tumblr, I've literally never seen reddit on light mode before

Also skfkfj uh oh I bet the comments are full of people saying this isn't synesthesia and that i need to stop diagnosing people like on here 🤦‍♂️

[fantasy-costco]

I think if a tumblr user says anything about history they should include Chicago style citations in the post. This is also true for other areas of study but I don't really know much about those so I only get filled with a blind rage when history posts are wrong. So that's what we need to fix first. For me.

[koifishanonymous]

i did it. i unsubscribed to (most) dsmp mcyts. i'm finally free.

[suncaptor]

never trust any narrative about medicine that talks in 100% absolutes.

[entropy-sea-system]

I will never understand people who claim that its okay to watch/read something completely ethical to watch/read (i.e. no harm caused to any real being in the production of it) but ONLY if its for specific reasons like education, and not for sexual reasons/interest/etc. It's the same action ! Nobody is going to know WHY someone is consuming a media and frankly I don't think its anyone's business unless someone wants to reveal what they get out of reading/watching something, with content warnings if applicable.

[celestial-kestrel]

It's that time of year again where Mari Lwyd starts to be talked about and shared around and an INCREDIBLY misleading post gets shared a lot. As someone who grew up with Mari Lwyd I wanted to clear some things up.

Also hello, if you are unaware who Mari Lwyd is. This is about the Welsh tradition of the horse skull who visits houses during the Christmas to New Years period in Wales asking for alcohol.

First off and probably the most important one:

Mari Lwyd is not a cryptid!

I can not emphasise this enough. She. Is. Not. A. Cryptid. There is no story or mystery about a ghost or zombie horse roaming the Welsh valleys. She's not even supposed to be a ghost or a zombie. It's just a horse skull on a stick with a guy under a sheet. She's a hobbyhorse and a folk character used to tell Welsh stories and keep songs alive. When people spread the misinformation that she's a cryptid, it's the equivalent of saying Kermit the Frog is a cryptid.

She is actually only one character in a wider cast of characters who go door to door or, in more modern times, pub to pub. The cast of characters can change town to town and village to village but there are some common ones I see time and time again. The Leader, the Merryman, The Jester and The Lady are just some I see regularly. Punch and Judy used to be more popular a few years ago but I haven't seen them in a while as their tradition has mostly fallen out of popularity. In most cases, almost the whole cast will be played by men. Even the characters are considered and referred to as female. Though this again depends and varies by which group is partaking in the Mari Lwyd tradition.

This point also goes onto my second point,

Mari Lwyd does not rap.

I think this comes from a very common misunderstanding of what rap is vs spoken word. Rap is a very specific style of music originating from the African American communities of the USA and has it's own structure and motifs unique to it. It's a lot more complex than people give it credit for as a style of music and just flippantly assign anything similar to it as being rap. If someone is talking fast or reciting poetry, it is not rap. Or anything that is an exchange of words between two people is not a rap battle. Mari Lwyd does not do rap, actually something that gets left out of these posts is the fact Mari Lwyd does not even speak. It's actually the Leader, who does all the speaking and song based banter between the house/pub owner for entry. Mari Lwyd just clicks her mouth, bites people and bobs her head around.

I think Mari Lwyd is a really beautiful and unique part of Welsh culture. She's not actually as wildly celebrated as a lot of the posts make her out to be. Actually, I think most Welsh people themselves learn about Mari Lwyd through the internet as well. Her popularity is increasing thanks to the drive of local groups wanting to keep the traditions alive and a renewed desire to document Welsh traditions before they're gone. Which is why it's such a shame that she's turned into something she's not to earn horror points on the internet. I think this is why it bothers me so much to see the misunderstandings of the culture and the folk tradition. Mari Lwyd's origin is very hot debated as well as how long it's been going on for. But I think it's thanks to a lot of traditions like this that the Welsh language and our stories weren't lost forever. Welsh culture is recovering as is the language. But it's still in a very fragile place. I think it's why it's important to document and correct information when it's spread.

Anyway, if you want to see the tradition in action, here's a lovely video from the Cwmafan RFC going to one of the pubs for charity. It includes the song exchange with the pub owner for entry and the whole pub singing and joining in once Mari Lwyd and the rest are inside.

As well with another video from St Fagan's showcasing the more traditional and door to door form with the larger cast.

[2024skin]

Except she literally said "91% of women are murdered by men they know" you and I both know what she was talking about, which is why you Changed Your Wording to tell me the accurate statistic. The problem is, it's only obvious to Us because we already knew that.

This is a public space; people with no feminist insight are looking at our posts. If you know the correct statistics about male violence, you need to share those instead of playing a game of telephone with facts and then expecting people to understand your point at the end.

Most people don't know that men commit murder way more often than women. The average women I meet only know that men are murdered more often than women are, with no idea Who is committing those murders. If this was someone's First introduction to the 91% stat, they would think it's fear mongering. Minus credibility points for the whole feminist movement because some girl on Twitter couldn't be bothered to get her facts straight, and hundreds of other people agreed with her uncritically.

[tungledotedu]

uh why the fuck would you say this

this post has 3000 notes and they get worse.

el-shab-hussein has already explained why he no longer shares how he vets individual fundraisers. scammers will use the information to be less obvious, making it more difficult to spot them.

and senatortedcruz's post has no actual proof of a widespread scam. that is a serious accusation to make, yet people are reblogging it and accepting it as true with no evidence. i won't deny that there are individual grifters on tumblr, but there are accounts like @/neechees, kyra45 and anonthescambuster that will help you avoid them. hussein even has a #scam alert tag for this purpose.

it's racist to spread misinformation about a supposed large-scale deception posing as fundraisers, not to mention dangerous because this makes it less likely for gazans to get what they need to survive and escape relentless airstrikes. we've already seen the consequences of this bias. some of these people are all too happy to be cops and harass or report gazans thinking they're bots or 'spamming' inboxes.

almost nobody on that post is encouraging others to donate to organisations or other vetted lists like those by operation olive branch, which has a faq sheet that explains how they verify fundraisers. i suspect this is an attempt to discourage people from helping palestinians altogether.

gazans are making fundraisers because they have no other choice. many of them cannot work and earn money as their workplaces have been destroyed. some have been disabled by injuries thanks to the iof's targeting of civilians. the fault is on israel for besieging them and on the egyptian government for exploiting their need to evacuate.

they're doing this for the same reason they have been posting photographs and videos of genocide so that people will pay attention to their suffering, so the world will not forget. is it such a leap in logic to understand they will also use social media to start fundraisers? do you just expect them to sit there and die in silence? so you can ignore them and your countries can keep arming israel as it commits atrocities?

[kahin]

DO NOT SCROLL, URGENT CAMPAIGN.

[pt: Do not scroll, urgent campaign.]

I am making this post to clear up some confusion regarding Momen's campaign that may have prevented people from donating because it made them sceptical about its legitimacy. This confusion is most likely caused by the failures of machine translation.

Momen is attempting to evacuate ten family members, with the cost of evacuation for each being €7,000. So far, the amount raised is only enough for two. The family members are:

Father (suffers from hypertension, heart disease, and diabetes)

Mother (suffers from hypertension)

Three brothers

Two sisters

Ahmed's (the eldest brother) children, Malak (newborn) and Muhammad (who has Polio)

Reham's (eldest sister) newborn, Amir

Their newborn babies are suffering from a number of respiratory issues. One of the younger members of his family contracted Hep C due to water contamination (and I apologise for spreading misinformation, as I truly did think it was his child, but it isn't). His hopes are to get his family evacuated so they can all receive urgent medical attention.

Momen is only 24 years old. He is bearing an unimaginable weight on his shoulders. He's essentially been begging for several months now since the campaign's creation to an uncountable number of strangers who have bared little to no heed to his campaign. His campaign has struggled to receive any traction. His blogs have been banned and suspended, over and over and over again. And honestly? Even with all this information in mind, I still don't know what it takes to get you people to donate.

Is it the lack of money? Well, that's not it! You people help raise thousands for AO3 yearly. Is it that you think he's a scammer? He's been vetted as number 125 on that spreadsheet, so that's probably not it unless you think Palestinians are scammers by default. Why are you letting yourself become desensitised to their pain? Why does every facet of their misery need to be posted for you to care, and even still you won't?

The campaign is behind on its short term goal. Severely behind, only €854/3724. The deadline is the end of tomorrow, and if we don't reach it then God help us, because then it will take even longer to fill the gap for the funds for each member's evacuation. Every campaign is urgent. Even the ones that don't list it as such. They're undergoing bombing, they're forced to evacuate from place to place while ill and terrified. You think they want to live another minute of this? Another day?

Every amount helps. I feel like a broken record saying this. Just donate. However, you much you can. 1, 20, 5, if that's the most you can. Share as much as you can.

[pt: Every amount helps. I feel like a broken record saying this. Just donate. However, you much you can. 1, 20, 5, if that's the most you can. Share as much as you can.]

Do not tag as ANYTHING if you're reblogging this post. No tags whatsoever. No "long post", or any organisational tags.

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