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Chris Hayes tweets:

11:10 am: Honest question: is there some trick for people who fly all the time to not constantly get sick? 

11:23 am: Lots of votes for airborne and zinc.

Forget Airborne. Let’s talk about zinc. Every instinct in my body tells me it doesn’t work. It’s a scam. There’s no double-blind evidence for it. Etc. But I use the nasal spray version of Zicam and….it seems to work! Even though I’m really skeptical about it, which ought to wipe out any possible placebo effect. Unless I secretly do believe it in the lizard part of my brain responsible for such things.

Or maybe I just think it works because I’ve never kept serious track of how I respond. Who knows? Thus, today’s question: do you use zinc for colds? Does it seem to work? And why aren’t there any good clinical studies of it? You’d think some academic type would be curious enough about it to get a small NIH grant or something and check it out. Anybody know of some academic type who’s done this?

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

Please help with a donation today if you can—even just a few bucks helps. Not ready to donate but interested in our work? Sign up for our Daily newsletter to stay well-informed—and see what makes our people-powered, not profit-driven, journalism special.

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