Senators criticize leaked telehealth restriction plans of DEA ⚠️ Why Stanford for the pandemic denier convention? 🚩 Discouraging testing is Trumpian 📣 Anne Nelson says follow the money
Senators criticize leaked telehealth restriction plans of DEA ⚠️ Why Stanford for the pandemic denier convention? 🚩 Discouraging testing is Trumpian 📣 Anne Nelson says follow the money
PM Justin Trudeau said Canadian anti-vax misinfo was amplified by Russian propaganda.
📍 U.S. Senators criticized leaked telehealth restriction plans of DEA in a letter to President Biden.
Some senators have sent a letter to President Biden to criticizing the leaked proposed DEA’s plans to restrict telemedicine options, saying “it is vital that any new regulations do not erect barriers to necessary, life-saving care.”
The senators who signed the letter are: Sheldon Whitehouse, Lisa Murkowski, Mark R. Warner, Marsha Blackburn, Peter Welch, Ben Ray Luján, Jeffrey A. Merkley, Ron Wyden, Angus S. King, Jr, Mark Kelly, Martin Heinrich.
✏️Write reps prompt. If any of them were my senator, I would be writing and thanking them — this is the letter I’m sending to my senators and the White House:
I’m disappointed to hear that the DEA plans to restrict access to telehealth options. Telemedicine is medicine, and I agree with the senators who said: “it is vital that any new regulations do not erect barriers to necessary, life-saving care.” in the October 11, 2024 letter to the White House. Please act in preservation of telehealth prescribing of medicine classed as controlled substances. Mental health conditions and substance use disorders are considered covid risk factors, and many risk factor conditions require the use of controlled prescriptions. https://www.cdc.gov/covid/risk-factors/index.html It’s essential for people who have disabilities, people who have difficulty traveling to in-person appointments, live in rural areas with few options close to home, and those who want or need to avoid preventable exposure to constantly circulating potentially dangerous infectious disease, by having the option of a televisit when no in-person physical examination is needed.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
More info:
Lawmakers Pan DEA's Leaked Plans for Telehealth — Meanwhile, a third extension of current rules is in the works by Shannon Firth, Washington Correspondent, MedPage Today October 16, 2024
Why Stanford for the pandemic denier convention?
Conspirituality Podcast had an episode called “Stanford Has Fallen”, about the right-wing covid contrarian symposium that took place on the anniversary of the Great Barrington Declaration. The podcast hosts wondered aloud about what it is about Stanford. One of them suggested its proximity to Silicon Valley - but that’s putting the cart before the horse. (Please excuse the pun.) Footnote number 1 on my piece on this Stanford right wing event because I think that explains it - it’s a quote from Malcolm Harris on the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast which details the rather eugenics history of Stanford. Leland Stanford had a horse farm and it was sort of a precursor to fossil fuel - this was long before cars, when horses were used for work and transportation. And Stanford University was founded upon that horse farm, and they took the ideas of horse breeding and applied it to kids and students and thus the origins of an ideology that of course would wind you up platforming pandemic deniers.
Tech Won’t Save Us podcast — 23 02 16 [#155] The Untold History of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris (from the transcript:)
That was a little part of this much broader effort to scientifically improve the horse that Stanford is making. But the way that they went about doing this was very ‘Bionomicist’ before the concept, which is that, at the time, selling trotting horses, you sell them not based on their performance, necessarily. You’re trying to sell semen — seed — from horses that will yield great racers. To do that, to know which seed yields great racers, you have to develop two generations of horses, which is very slow. This is not a very capitalist-friendly industry, the trotting horse racing production industry. At the same time, horses that pulled stuff were the most important commodity in America at the time. These are engines that, for all intents and purposes, meant agriculture, military, transportation — crucial. The Great Epizootic, I think is the 1870s, where all the nation’s horses got infected with flu, and it totally fucked up the whole country, really, really badly. Half of Boston burns down because you can’t do fire engines without horses, and the horses were too sick. So Stanford, like a good tech thinker, is like: If I could improve the value of every horse by $100, there are 13 million horses, that’s $1.3 billion dollars.
[...]
Instead of waiting till the horses are older to start training them to race really fast, we’re going to start training them as soon as they’re born. We’re going to try to start racing colts, and the ones that show us that they’re fast, we’re going to focus more and more attention and resources on them. We’re going to build the fastest, youngest, horses in the world, And they do. They do this very quickly. It’s funny that it becomes, very quickly, not just an inspiration for other horse breeders, who are mad that this rich asshole has totally transformed their whole sport, but have to admit that he did do it. But also for education reformers who are looking at the training of young horses and saying: We need to do this for kids! The kindergarten movement is happening at the same time in Germany, and is coming to the United States. One of the reformers cites the Stanford Stock Farm and says: These kind of resources early is what we need for children. So the Stanfords ended up supporting, not just what they called their kindergarten track, which was the first kindergarten in California that was a kindergarten track for these horses — so a shrunk down track for little horses. They also go on to support the first kindergarten for humans, as well. So very quickly you make this jump between horse stock capital to human capital — and as horses get replaced pretty quickly in the 20th century with motor power — you see this transition from focusing on horses to focusing on people and the power of invention. How do you inculcate the youngest, fastest inventors, the youngest, fastest technicians and engineers?
[emphasis added]
The connections between Silicon Valley, tech tycoons, and public health adversaries, is why I keep pointing out the connections between this tech tycoon right-wing agenda and the campaign against public health. It’s the same problem. Sadly a lot of people don’t recognize this and this toxic brew even has been infiltrating public health advocacy and disability activists. There was a covid issue non-profit org in 2022 that was not connected to any activists I knew, but did one letter campaign about covid funding. They had some funding, with at least one full-time employee president, but was completely in a silo away from any other public health people, even though some of us joined their discord, which still exists today, though pretty quiet. I remember I was on the mailing list and got the email saying they were closing up at the end of 2022, coincidentally around the time FTX filed for bankruptcy, and in listening to some podcasts about SBF, I found out he had been funding “covid projects” through some PAC. I don’t know if these were connected, but I did know that FTX’s bankruptcy was trying to clawback donations, something that happens in these cases, especially fraud, and charities and non-profits get stung in the process. So two reasons not to ignore that set, and not get mixed up with them. They’re against public health, they want to burn tires to fuel this stuff, and though they have a lot of money, sometimes it’s ill-gotten. And many critics call cryptocurrencies “pyramid schemes” after all. An interesting connection: SBF’s father and mother both work for Stanford, coincidentally.
Trust is hard to come by in the tech tycoon sphere… unless by trust you mean monopoly power.
Note: I’ve also posted my piece on that right-wing Stanford event, broken up individually by the speakers, on Medium & my blog ⇒ Monica Gandhi, John Ioannidis, Eran Bendavid, Scott Atlas, Anders Tegnell, Marty Makary, Vinay Prasad, Kevin Bardosh, Laura Kahn, Jenin Younes, Anup Malani, Sunetra Gupta.
🗞️ In the news
ACIP Backs Extra COVID Vax Dose for Seniors, Pneumococcal Vax for Adults 50 and Up — CDC advisors also formalize recommendations on extra COVID vaccine doses in the immunocompromised by Jennifer Henderson, Enterprise & Investigative Writer, MedPage Today October 23, 2024 Data presented by a COVID vaccines work group showed that during the 2023-2024 season, vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization for immunocompromised individuals waned to null by roughly 4 to 6 months after receipt. Vaccine effectiveness against emergency department and urgent care visits, as well as hospitalizations, for adults ages 65 and older also waned to null during that same time frame.
CDC - National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Mycoplasma Pneumoniae Infections Have Been Increasing October 18, 2024 Respiratory infections caused by the bacteria Mycoplasma pneumoniae have increased in the United States, especially in young children. Healthcare providers should consider M. pneumoniae as a cause of pneumonia and test when indicated. Macrolides are the first-line treatment for this infection. Some first-line antibiotics used to treat pneumonia, like penicillin, will not treat M. pneumoniae.
Reuters - Cows dead from bird flu rot in California as heat bakes dairy farms By Leah Douglas October 17, 2024 Cows in California are dying at much higher rates from bird flu than in other affected states, industry and veterinary experts said, and some carcasses have been left rotting in the sun as rendering plants struggle to process all the dead animals. Carcasses left in the open and picked over by scavengers could facilitate the spread of bird flu to other birds and wild animals or degrade the carcasses such that they cannot be processed for rendering, experts told Reuters.
Government Executive - A Senate bill targeting teleworkers’ locality pay now has its companion in the House Legislation introduced by Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Wash., would bar federal workers from receiving locality pay if they telework at least once per week, a move that could amount to a 30% pay cut for many feds. October 22, 2024 05:19 PM ET Erich Wagner Despite popular misconceptions, locality pay is not designed to supplement federal workers’ income if they live in high-cost areas; rather, the goal is to reduce pay disparities within a region between federal and private sector workers to within 5%, so that agencies can better compete for talent. Additionally, remote workers—that is, federal employees who are not generally expected to commute to work—already are granted locality pay for where they live rather than the location of an official work site. And federal HR leaders have repeatedly testified before Congress that they conduct oversight to ensure feds do not take advantage of telework agreements to receive more locality pay than they are entitled. And while the bill makes exceptions for federal employees with disabilities, members of federal law enforcement and the Foreign Service and active duty military, it would also apply to the 85% of the federal workforce whose homes and official worksites are outside of the Washington, D.C. area.
PM Justin Trudeau said Canadian anti-vax misinfo was amplified by Russian propaganda.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Google Translation to English): “Yes. We saw anti-vax messages during the convoy and during the pandemic that were amplified by Russian propaganda, particularly in right-wing media, continued by messages in the same... under the same people who were sharing anti-vax messages. Now, not to say that there weren't legitimately and authentically anti-vax people in Canada, but it was amplified enormously by Russian propaganda.”
(Original French captioning: “Oui. On a vu des messages antivax pendant le convoi et pendant la pandémie qui ont été amplifiés par la propagande russe, particulièrement dans les médias de droite, a continué par des messages dans les mêmes... sous les mêmes gens qui partageaient des messages antivax. Maintenant, pas pour dire qu'il n'y avait pas des gens légitimement et authentiquement antivax au Canada, mais ça a été amplifié énormément par la propagande russe.”)
Discouraging testing is Trumpian.
I heard a clip on the Knowledge Fight podcast #969 where Alex Jones, as usual talking nonsense on his show, was reminiscing that at some point during the pandemic he was asked to take a PCR test to be on the Joe Rogan podcast, and he said he faked it somehow because he refused to allow the specimen collection, even though it was some Spotify rule. He refused because he says he thought they were not really covid tests but collecting DNA for a database by Chinese communists, Bill Gates, and the UN. Alex Jones claimed that it’s about “race specific bioweapons”.
On the show where Alex Jones was describing this covid conspiracy fiction bullshit, his voice sounded like he had some type of respiratory illness. He’s probably unaware of what is ailing him.
Knowledge Fight podcast host Dan was at the same Reading Pennsylvania show with Alex Jones recently where he may have gotten the mystery illness. The host said he didn’t wear a mask covering this right-wing event because he felt it would’ve brought unwanted attention, but he said he felt concerned being in that crowd unmasked, and tested after being at the event. It’s very sad that many of the older fans with underlying conditions and possibly unvaccinated, are probably not getting tested for covid or flu, and therefore not getting treated, because of this garbage Alex Jones puts out.
All along there have been baseless conspiracy fictions circulated claiming that PCR tests were used to create a “fake pandemic” in order to get people to do this or that, or supposedly to justify arbitrary public health interventions, or, as Alex Jones has in the past, some wrongly accuse hospitals and doctors of deliberate medical harm. But it’s interesting that Alex Jones brought up that story now, which was probably from a few years ago.
There seems to be an uptick in anti-test propaganda on social media and podcasts, including Paul Offit, who appears to be well along down the road to full on covid contrarian, was on a youtube interview with some doctor pundit content creator where he was enthusiastically claiming that epidemiologists want hospitals to stop testing for covid. He doesn’t say what epidemiologists have said this, and it seems highly counter to the scientific interests of the field of epidemiology to stop testing for diseases. A group that is probably interested in stopping testing, of course, is hospital executives. I heard rumours well over a year ago that hospital administrators were actively pushing public health offices to end pre-surgery testing where it was required, because the hospital was not happy with having to cancel or postpone their most lucrative procedures because a patient has covid, even though they would probably be contagious and may soon become actively sick, and it sure doesn’t sound like a good idea to push through non-emergency surgeries on covid patients just to keep revenue going. It’s been known for years that hospitals don’t want to pay to provide PPE to nurses and other healthcare workers, so it’s in the end, all about money. We can’t keep buying into the bad actor pushed framing — that this is a culture war by ordinary people when it’s really a war against patient safety by big money interests, their allied politicians, and a few on the fringe.
And being anti-test is definitely Trumpian - as then-President Donald Trump said in June 2020: "If we stop testing right now, we'd have very few cases, actually."
📍 ICYMI ==> My Public comment to CDC ACIP meeting, Oct 24, 2024.
Quote:
“I’m an old-school journalist, I say follow the money. Because the greatest beneficiaries of their operations are the plutocrats that don’t want to pay any taxes and they don’t want any public services to the rest of us that cost them taxes, such as public schools, public roads, public libraries, public health. So they want to hold on to as much money as they can. Now the problem, when you run for office on that platform, as David Koch did in 1980 for vice president on a libertarian platform, nobody votes for you. Because they say why should we vote against having public health and public libraries. So what they do is come up with all of these distracting issues like trans kids using bathrooms that affect next to nobody in the entire country, and inflate them into national issues to distract people. And then once they get into power, as they did with Trump, they rewrite the tax code to benefit the plutocrats at the expense of everyone else.”
— Anne Nelson on The Signal from the Bucks County Beacon, podcast, October 23, 2024