Like many years, 2022 was a year of health problems for me. The entire year has been overshadowed by the episode of kidney failure that I suffered as a result of BK virus associated nephropathy. It is fair to say that I have been quite seriously unwell. I also spent a long period of this year, in my spare time, campaigning for protection of the immunocompromised with the monoclonal antibody therapy, Evusheld.
As many of you know, I have been involved for the past few months in a campaign to get Evusheld – a protective/prophylactic drug for immunocompromised people who do not respond well to Covid vaccines – available on the NHS in the UK. We have not succeeded on that front yet and I am not giving up. However, for my own protection, since AstraZeneca made the drug privately available last week, I have been able to procure it privately.
The other day I wrote about the response that we had from the UK's Department of Health and Social Care.
This week has been one in which my personal and professional lives have aligned in interesting ways.
There's a lot of focus in the scholarly communications space on transformative agreements for the mega-publishers. Indeed, most of the discourse, most of the time, is about the big publishers in this space. They play Big Bad Wolf with their exorbitant profit margins and make for an easy target.
I was lucky enough, recently, to get a slightly-ahead-of-general-release opportunity to openly peer review Kathleen Fitzpatrick's most recent book manuscript, _Leading Generously_.
The title of this post refers not to the classic 1987 single by Run-DMC but, instead, to the trickiness of rheumatoid arthritis and vasculitis as multisystem inflammatory disorders with a range of diverse outcomes.
The next few months mark a series of “10”s for me. On the 10th September, it will be 10 years since my Ph.D. viva. In November, it will be 10 years since I got my first lecturing position (TT Assistant Prof) at the University of Lincoln. It’s 10 years since I met Dr Caroline Edwards and we began publishing _Alluvium_ together. And it’s 10 years since we began planning the Open Library of Humanities. The times they are, as Dylan said, a-changing.
# Affect Theory To be blunt, the past two and a half years have been terrible for me. Certainly, [they have been worse for others](https://getevusheld.uk/4_patients.html). But I have spent the last two years feeling that basic activities in public pose an existential threat. The isolation of shielding is bad -- but I do have my lovely wife and our little dog, so I am fortunate in that respect.
If you can't login using the Lastpass CLI tool and it just says "unknown" when you enter your password, there's [a simple fix](https://github.com/lastpass/lastpass-cli/issues/604). Go to My Vault -> Account Settings. In there, press "Show Advanced Settings". Then set "Password Iterations" to 100100 and follow the procedure. After that, the CLI tool will work again!
What is "the scholarly record"? There is some work on this already.
