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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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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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