📍 It's called STIGMA. 📧 Write the White House for more tests 🧪 Trump admin told EPA to harm public health. 🗑️
Anti-vax covid contrarian right-wing event in DC.
📍Note: More free covid tests distributed in the U.S. COVIDTests.gov
✏️Writing Prompt: Better late than never, but we should be getting more.
My letter to reps, the White House, and VP Harris:
There should be more free covid tests available regularly via the U.S. Postal Service, and there should be some number regularly covered by health insurance, including private plans, Medicare and Medicaid.
Please feel free to repurpose for your own letters to reps.
📍Note: U.S. Census Bureau to Livestream Meeting With Stakeholders on Disability Data Needs Sept. 30 from 10:45 a.m. - 5 p.m. ET
It's called STIGMA.
There are quite a few op-eds, essays, and commentaries that have been written during the pandemic, and to this day are being published, that point out how covid often seems like a taboo subject, or how people deny having covid, or are unwilling to talk about mitigation for it, and they don’t even mention the term taboo, and never seem to mention the known phenomenon — STIGMA.
This is stigma.
When you hear that “people are tired of it” - that’s also part of stigma. And it’s not necessarily true that people are actually just sick of it - but they keep being told they should be. Informational learned helplessness can do that to us. Stigma is leveraged and reinforced on purpose by big money industry interests who think any reminder of danger at all is bad for business. So it’s to some degree manufactured stigma.
I find it astonishing that most commentaries people write on people not talking about covid never ever seem to mention the word STIGMA because it's a well known public health term to describe exactly what's happening - this phenomenon is a KNOWN quantity in the area of health conditions but even most especially in the realm of infectious disease. It's a known problem, and it takes active efforts to overcome it. We know this. Public health experts know this. People should be NAMING IT.
Public health should be working to overcome it.
I wonder if because of PR stranglehold on the media, if people are actually pitching op-eds that explain the issue of stigma, and they get turned down. Maybe nobody wants to mention the word because then we’d have to talk about it after all! So many practical truths are kept from the public understanding with bad framing and spin that obscures the way toward solutions.
If you know of any pandemic era op-eds published that mention stigma specifically, please let me know. If you or anyone you know has pitched something to the media about stigma, but were turned down, I’d like to hear about it. I have for years now heard of positive public health based op-eds, written by public health professionals, being turned down by major media outlets. And I myself have had letters to the editor turned down.
✏️Write reps prompt -My letter to reps:
I would like my representatives in government to take proactive steps to reduce stigma around infectious disease, masks, vaccines, and treatments. It’s unacceptable for people in government to shirk public health leadership.
Please feel free to repurpose for your own letters to reps.
🗞️ In the news
CIDRAP - Review finds serious gaps in steps to control avian flu in mammals - Lisa Schnirring Sept 25, 2024 Older people might have partial immunity the H5N1 due to childhood exposure to similar viruses, and people born since the 1968 H3N2 flu pandemic might be more susceptible, the authors said.
Important Context - Stanford University To Welcome Vaccine Skepticism, Epoch Times At Upcoming Health Policy Conference The controversial summit just got a lot more controversial. Walker Bragman Sep 26, 2024 Moderating the panel will be Jan Jekielek, a senior editor at The Epoch Times, a Falun Gong-affiliated Chinese outfit that has aligned itself with Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. The publication, which is affiliated with a dark money group called The Epoch Times Association, faced a money-laundering scandal in June and is known for promoting anti-vaccine narratives. Epoch Times is closely allied with the Brownstone Institute, giving column space to its founder Jeffrey Tucker, a child labor advocate and ally of Bhattacharya’s who helped organize the Great Barrington Declaration. Tucker has expressed anti-vaccine views, calling the COVID jabs Bill Gates’s “potions.” Jekielek has promoted Tucker’s writing and has himself waded into anti-vaccine narratives.
Anti-vax covid contrarian right-wing event in DC.
I would avoid this event as it seems likely to be a superspreader, even if turnout is low.
Pierre Kory is the one who founded FLCCC which got funding from The Brownstone Institute. Pierre Kory and Jordan Vaughn were interviewed together at the FLCCC conference in Phoenix Arizona early in 2024, and reportedly prescribed ivermectin for covid and long covid (which Pierre Kory wrongly claims without evidence that long covid is largely caused by vaccination.) Pierre Kory has disparaged all vaccines including the vaccines for smallpox and polio.
Bret Weinstein was a darling of “the intellectual dark web” PR of 2018, and has been a covid contrarian pundit from the get-go in 2020, and is so extreme he’s been covered on 2 episodes of the podcast I Don’t Speak German, which covers the extreme far right, often actual Nazis. Voting by mail is good, the military does it, it’s accessible to the elderly and disabled, and it’s legitimate. But on The Majority Report show they played a clip of an interaction on the Joe Rogan podcast with Bret Weinstein, and they said voting by mail is “mostly for soldiers serving overseas right, exactly it was for people who just simply couldn't vote in person and it never really mattered except in very rare cases.” Excuse me, but every vote matters, because you can never know what’s rare in advance. This seems like a very anti-democratic attitude, not to mention disparaging to members of the military, and disabled and elderly people, and also, every single voter in the state of Oregon. The bizarre part is that these right-wingers seem not to have gotten the memo. For many months now in Pennsylvania I’ve been seeing get out the vote Republican and Trump-specific ads, promoting signing up for mail ballot. But now they’re reversing course again, after convincing senior citizen Trump fans it’s a safe option, which is particularly cruel, and could confuse people and depress their own turnout. Not that I’m complaining about less votes for Trump, but it’s anti-democratic, and eligible voters, including MAGA voters, should have accessibility and not be bombarded by conflicting stories and conspiracy theories. Bret Weinstein also has platformed the dangerous urban legend targeting Ohio right now.
Trump administration broke the rules to harm public health.
“In developing regulations the EPA was directed to weigh only one concern: public health. The costs to industry were explicitly deemed irrelevant.” — Jane Mayer, Dark Money, January 2016
Donald Trump went against that.
NBC NEWS - RFK Jr. wants more scrutiny of chemicals, but Trump's EPA did the opposite Trump’s EPA pressured scientists to downplay the potential harms of some chemicals, according to current and former staffers and the agency’s inspector general. That’s at odds with RFK Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. Sept. 24, 2024, 12:47 PM EDT By Aria Bendix Karen McCormack, a retired EPA employee, said the agency had a decades-long culture of penalizing employees who expressed dissenting opinions about the harms of some chemicals. But that culture got worse during Trump’s presidency, she said. “The EPA was sort of paralyzed under the Trump administration,” she said. McCormack worked at the EPA for more than 40 years, in roles including scientist and communications officer, before retiring in 2017, Trump’s first year in office. That year, she said, EPA employees who wanted to publish information about certain chemicals in the Federal Register — the government’s hub for rules, proposals and public notices — were required to fill out a form describing how that information would impact chemical companies and whether the companies agreed with it.
(emphasis mine)
📍Note: Conz Preti of Business Insider: “Freelancers, this one is for you: For @businessinsider — looking for people who were pushed out of the workforce because of Return To Office mandates (RTO). Looking for people with corporate jobs. email me pitches” [email on linkedin]
📍Note: podcast Don’t wait for the influencers. Sep 21, 2024
Quote:
“I tell myself that I’m trying to be one of the good ones. I’m trying to spread things that are actually true, or things that are interesting, and not trying to play up on people’s fears or anything like that. But if you try to do what you feel like is good honest content, you will find yourself swimming against a current. And it’s not that Tiktok is specifically more evil than any other company. I don’t trust Mark Zuckerberg more than I trust the owners of Tiktok. They all have an incentive that runs counter to my interests.”
— Jason Pargin, on the podcast The New Abnormal, Sept 22, 2024