🚩 Politics isn’t a crockpot & Trump is aligned to anti-vax 👎 More campaigns object to CDC's virus guidance 🖇️
Geisinger Healthcare System to nurses: "Work sick!" Geisinger to patients: "You're getting covid and any other infectious diseases the nurses come to work with!"
Contents:
- Events, Actions, & Campaigns
- Pandemic field notes & “Living with the virus”
- In the News (virus & adjacent media, science, news, and op-eds)
- This is NOT Fine section (gaslighting & other outrages)
- He(a)rd Scuttlebutt (the pandemic grapevine)
USA Campaigns objecting to CDC’s virus guidance:
Letter campaign to Congress, Disapproval of CDC Respiratory Virus Guidance By Pandemic Patients:
Letter Campaign - We Call for a Congressional Hearing & Criminal Investigation of CDC By LONG COVID ACTION PROJECT (LCAP)
Petition - To CDC Director - New CDC COVID-19 isolation guidance weakens labor protections, discriminates against high-risk people, and does not match the science By Pan End It
Letter Campaign - Take Action for COVID Isolation Guidelines By People’s CDC
Letter Campaign - CDC shouldn't cut the already inadequate COVID-19 isolation guidelines. By Mask Together America
Petition: Tell the White House, people need to be able to stay home and isolate when sick. by Chloe Humbert
Politics isn’t a crockpot, and Trump certainly won’t save anyone.
I can’t believe that needs to be said, but I’ve been seeing some lamenting that at least Democratic Party elected representatives stood up to the right wing when Trump was president. Clear slide into fatalism inevitably boosted on social media by pro-Trump interests. It’s not like anything was ever handled well by anyone in 2020, let’s be honest. Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor constantly moved the goalposts to renege on safety plans in 2020, they were all pulling the rug out repeatedly from the get-go. And the CDC is bad now, but Project 2025 intends to dismantle all of public health.
Obviously Biden has not made good on his 2020 campaign promises for the pandemic, even the vaccine campaign is abysmal, and there have been deliberate campaigns, some that specifically targeted liberals to persuade them of anti-mask lies. Jeff Zients running things at the White House means things are business oriented. Many have noted Zients as a terrible choice to run things, see: Sarah Kendzior, Revolving Door Project, The Intercept, The Nation, and World Socialist Web Site. It would certainly help if more people understood this and communicated their opposition.
But the Heritage Foundation intends for any Republican president to dismantle all the federal tools of public health that could be, not just what is left. And part of that process is called “delegitimization” and having the CDC do the opposite of its purpose is part of it.
And Trump himself has engaged in mercenary anti-vax.
I happen to agree with Sam Seder, it’s about choosing your preferred opposition.
Sunrise Movement Climate Protesters Invade Trump Rallies Jan 17, 2024 - The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder from youtube transcript: “how they get elected and who their coalition is influences whether you as an activist can influence those people - you're not choosing your messiah you're choosing your enemy you're choosing who's going to be the gatekeeper to what you want and you want a gatekeeper who is susceptible and can be influenced by people that you can influence that's the point”
So by all means get out the vote - but voting is NOT enough. Whatever someone’s voting choices are, a vote (or abstaining) is just one piece, and a very vague way to send a message. Non-voters are often just overlooked and probably discounted by elected politicians because, after all, they operate on getting votes. It’s not right, but it’s how it works.
But also, democracy is not set it and forget it like a slow cooker recipe — you can’t throw the ballot in the box and then come back awhile later and expect everything to be cooked properly. Civic engagement means paying attention, and pressuring elected reps all along the way. There is no perpetual motion machine. For humans the struggle continues.
“It would be helpful if sanitarians would communicate with their United States Senators and Representatives regarding this important matter. Do it now.” - American Journal of Public Health – LAW AND LEGISLATION – JAMES A. TOBEY, LL. B., DR. P. H. Pass the Parker Bill – 1928 (NIH.gov)
🗞️ In the news
SELF - 3 COVID Experts on Why the CDC’s Isolation Guidelines Are Bad for Public Health You can still be contagious if you’re fever-free and feeling better. By Reina Sultan March 7, 2024 The period of being contagious with COVID is highly variable. Some research suggests that five days of isolation may not be even enough, since about two thirds of people continue to shed the virus five days after they first feel sick. Data from 2023 suggest that how infectious a person is has a median peak around day four, meaning that under the new guidance many people will go back to their daily lives at the point that they’re most likely to transmit the virus, so long as they don’t have a fever and are feeling better than they did when they first felt sick.
The Japan Times - Japan's government to stop subsidizing COVID-19 treatment after March - Mar 5, 2024 "Hospitals are making preparations to admit coronavirus patients to general wards and we think that is no problem," Health, Labor and Welfare Minister Keizo Takemi told a news conference.
The Guardian - ‘You don’t want to get better’: the outdated treatment of ME/CFS patients is a national scandal George Monbiot Tue 12 Mar 2024 04.00 EDT Some patients were forced into these treatment regimes, even locked in psychiatric units to make them comply. Some parents of children with ME/CFS were referred to social services for supposedly encouraging their belief that they were ill. Though unevidenced, the biopsychosocial model influenced the government’s social security policy, reinforcing its coercive treatment of people seeking disability benefits. In 2020, an independent review by Nice found that the quality of all the research promoting GET and CBT was either “low” or – mostly – “very low”.
This is NOT fine
Geisinger Healthcare System to nurses: "Work sick!"
Geisinger to patients: "You're getting covid and any other infectious diseases the nurses come to work with!"
This letter to the editor is a letter published in my local newspaper from state lawmakers to the CEO of Geisinger Healthcare System. Maybe they'll have more luck than I did when I wrote asking for reasonable accommodation. They wrote back blathering about how they care about "patient experience" - but seemed unconcerned about patient safety.
In addition, the healthcare professionals at the Geisinger Community Medical Center campus are rightfully frustrated that the hospital zeroed out the Extended PTO time (employees’ sick time) for every member of the new bargaining units. Further, the proposal to eliminate all sick time for RNs and nurse anesthetists as well is an unacceptable way to treat these dedicated professionals.
Here’s a pdf if the link is unavailable:
From the newspaper article:
I also posted this on Tumblr.
ZEROED OUT SICK TIME and proposed ELIMINATING SICK TIME FOR RNs!!
Personal Note: I live in Scranton and I can’t go to any other hospital besides this one because I have Geisinger insurance that has no other hospital in my county that’s in my insurance plan. Of course another hospital in Scranton was scandalized in The Washington Post in 2020 because that hospital had nurses, including a pregnant nurse, potentially exposing babies in the NICU after shifts in a covid ward!
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
Covid denial, the musical
NewsGuard's Reality Check - COVID deniers now have their own musical - MAR 8, 2024 If you’re wondering: No, we don’t know why the whole musical appears to be set inside a grocery store. Limited release: For now, you can only see “Plandemic: The Musical” as part of an event called RePlatform Vegas, described as a “3-day conference and business expo to connect Freedom-oriented entrepreneurs, investors, & consumers” in creating a “parallel economy.”
I think I know why they set it in a grocery store, probably because in the minds of the people who came up with this, it represents a certain class of essential workers.
Peter McCullough’s repeated retractions.
Retraction Watch February 19, 2024 Adam Marcus: “A journal is retracting a paper on the purported harms of vaccines against COVID-19 written in part by authors who have had similar work retracted before.”
How many times are editors going to publish this guy’s scientific meme content?
F that NPR op-ed
I don’t recommend reading that awful op-ed in NPR about the person who was complaining about their immunocompromised spouse and got some “expert” to say that high risk people should “compromise” by putting their health in jeopardy. And I do not agree with the viral upper class guy that people don’t have autonomy in relationships. Transplant recipients being coerced into agreeing to get covid because their partners want to sit down and be served at Olive Garden instead of getting takeaway is not collectivism, it’s abuse. I didn’t stop being a whole person when I got married, and I wouldn’t want my spouse to die for Applebees.
I did write a rebuttal about this PR propaganda piece because it uses mental health woke-washing in order to give dubious relationship advice and terrible infectious disease advice on behalf of industries who want everyone fully engaged in The Economy.
The Economy First Model. Manufacturing consent to normalized harm. March 12, 2024
Currently according to some estimates, more than 50% of what we think is news is actually instigated by the public relations industry. PR professionals measure their success in terms of how well they can insert their clients’ messages into the continuous flow of news and information while their own activities remain out of view. — Toxic Sludge is Good for You (2002 Documentary)