📣 Say no to mask bans in NY 📧 Letter campaign to require hospitals to not spread disease 🏥 Penalties coming for fake testimonials 🔨
📣 Say no to mask bans in NY 📧 Letter campaign to require hospitals to not spread disease 🏥 Penalties coming for fake testimonials 🔨
The CDC needs to be brought into compliance with the public interest.
NEW YORK USA Letter Campaign: SAY NO TO MASK BANS IN NEW YORK
By NYCLU (ACLU of New York): “The truth is, a mask ban won’t do anything to stop crime. In reality, it will just push disabled people further into the margins, target protestors with controversial views, and give police new reason to unfairly stop Black, Brown, and Muslim people who are already disparately surveilled and policed.Wearing a mask should not be a crime.”
USA & Canada Letter campaign: Hospitals should not spread disease.
By Chloe Humbert: The government needs to require hospitals to implement infection prevention, and stop sickening patients with a preventable disease.
Healthcare tech pitfalls that universal masking and common sense isolation rules could fix.
I attended the National Nurses United webinar on the dangerous use of AI in healthcare. This is a serious issue, as I’ve said before, and the way they’re proposing to use AI for in healthcare is probably not even legal. But 2 stories stood out to me in the webinar about healthcare tech failures.
One person told the story about an automated shift change report that just makes a sheet with no human to human handoff between actual healthcare workers. In this case the automated sheet failed to show that the person coming into the hospital had “no immune system” and had the nurse not made the extra step of checking the patient’s chart, they would’ve put the immune compromised person in with the patient who had covid and flu. In this case the problem could’ve been solved by NEVER putting covid and flu patients in with non-infected patients. People with immune systems shouldn’t be sickened at the hospital either! It’s a preventable harm and the hospital shouldn’t be putting infected and uninfected patients together at all, ever.
Another story was that the automated system failed to alert the healthcare worker that the patient had covid, and the healthcare worker saw the patient without PPE. In this case universal masking would’ve solved that problem. After all, even if a patient hasn’t yet tested for covid, the patient could have covid! Especially in hospitals where they’re clearly taking zero effort to prevent the spread of covid right in the hospital.
These stories frankly are more about lack of infection control measures, with automation tools exacerbating the issue. Infection control measures are absent at hospitals, and hospitals are therefore deliberately infecting patients, because we know they know better — because they used to isolate covid patients, as is the right thing to do, and they used to have healthcare workers wearing masks.
If you don’t want to be sickened while seeking healthcare, I highly recommend writing to the White House like I did:
CDC HICPAC and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) need to require hospitals to implement infection prevention, and stop sickening patients with a preventable disease. Healthcare workers need to wear N95 / respirator masks, and covid patients need to be isolated from uninfected patients. Common sense has been abandoned in many hospitals. Unmasked nurses entering the rooms of covid positive patients. Healthcare workers working while sick with covid or flu. Cancer units without mask requirements. Hospitals that mix covid patients with other patients. All of this is preventable harm, and should be prevented.
To the governor and state reps I replaced “CDC HICPAC and CMS” with “the state government” instead.
Feel free to take this to your representatives as examples where infection control is needed in healthcare settings. That’s what I did. Somebody needs to reign these hospital corporations in, and have patients, and healthcare workers, protected.
I have also written my reps about the wildly dangerous harm that will absolutely come from replacing healthcare workers with “AI nurse-bots” — the worst AI hype idea ever.
🗞️ In the news
AL - Alabama high school moves to virtual learning due to COVID outbreak Aug. 14, 2024 By Williesha Morris Students at a Montgomery high school will be learning from home for two days because of a COVID-19 outbreak. JAG High is holding virtual classes on Aug. 14 and 15 because many staff members are home sick with COVID.
CIDRAP - Hospitalization linked to higher risk of MRSA infections in households - Chris Dall, MA August 8, 2024 "This relatively smaller estimate is consistent with our understanding that only a portion of hospitalized patients are colonized with MRSA at discharge," Miller and his co-authors wrote. But they add that with 25 million Americans having overnight hospital stays annually, patients who come home colonized with MRSA could represent a "potentially major source" of MRSA infections in household members.
WHO says polio vaccine campaign hurt by lack of Gaza ceasefire - By Reuters August 7, 2024 While vaccines necessary to immunize half a million children against the outbreak were available, delivery into the Palestinian territory and the kind of door-to-door, or tent-to-tent, delivery necessary in Gaza was difficult given restricted freedom of movement, officials said. "We need a ceasefire, even a temporary ceasefire to successfully undertake these campaigns. Otherwise, we risk the virus spreading further, including across borders," said Hanan Balkhy, regional WHO Director.
This is NOT fine
The CDC needs to be brought into compliance with the public interest.
You can’t call up a government agency and complain about a policy and get it fixed, even if it’s the most dipshit policy ever. The policies are made at the highest levels, based on laws that are on the books made by politicians. Even the government agency executives answer to the White House - or in the case of state agencies, the governor of the state. So I think this fixation that covid concerned people have on the CDC has acted like a cardboard cutout decoy on us for over 4 years now. The CDC has no actual regulatory power. And the CDC’s seemingly catering to business interests long predates the pandemic, and is far broader than pandemic issues even now. I’m not even sure if the CDC could be considered like other public agencies.
TIME - October 17, 2014 - The CDC Has Less Power Than You Think, and Likes it That Way By Denver Nicks The agency traditionally acts in an advisory role and can only take control from local authorities under two circumstances: if local authorities invite them to do so or under the authority outlined in the Insurrection Act in the event of a total breakdown of law and order. And here the picture becomes murkier yet because authority does not always beget power. “It’s not a massive regulatory agency,” said Wendy Parmet, a professor in public health law at Northeastern University in Boston. “They don’t have ground troops. They don’t have tons of regulators. They’re scientists. Even if the states asked them to do it it’s not clear how they would do it.” Even in the highly unlikely event that the CDC were called to respond to a—let’s reiterate: extremely-unlikely-to-occur—pandemic, quarantine and isolation would be imposed not by bespeckled CDC scientists but by local or federal law enforcement or troops. Most importantly, the CDC is extremely reluctant to be seen as a coercive government agency because it depends as much as any agency on the good will and acquiescence of citizens in order to respond effectively to a public health emergency.
[emphasis added]
I don’t know who told that reporter that pandemics are unlikely to occur when we’d just had a pandemic in 2009. Setting that aside…
Even if it were true about the CDC being better off not having regulatory powers - well, this really isn’t a helpful context for making sure hospital corporations and healthcare systems aren’t run like shoddy chop shop businesses cutting corners. We need an actual regulatory agency with authority to track hospital acquired covid and penalize hospitals doing batshit things they shouldn’t be doing just to save money. You can’t at all “depend on the good will and acquiescence” of businesses!! They aren’t even typically concerned with their own long-term economic benefits, everything is built on short term profits, so I don’t trust that business will ever do the right thing for public safety. Do you?
And I don’t trust CDC to adhere to the law without oversight. Conservatives took the CDC to court over their non-compliance on a basic record-keeping rule. I heard that CDC HICPAC is probably in non-compliance with FACA rules about opening a public comment period for written comments, and are only currently accepting sign-ups for oral comments at the upcoming meeting where I expect most people who sign up won’t get a chance to speak - they typically decide it by a lottery. National Nurses United has an email campaign to send emails to the CDC HICPAC committee anyway. It might be worth the few moments for the interested to send that in maybe? But I don’t know how much the CDC will care if they legally don’t have to care. I have heard that anonymous “spam” especially goes into the trash at public agencies, so I think there’s no value in spamming them, so don’t do that. I do believe there is value in pressuring lawmakers and the White House with letters regarding patient safety from viral spread in hospitals. I also think there’s value in talking to people about this who aren’t necessarily cautious in their daily lives, but who might still be abhorred about the idea of being infected unwillingly when seeking healthcare when most vulnerable.
It almost seems like the CDC is just there absorbing the anger and the activism like a sponge all this time, while things get worse and worse for the high risk in healthcare settings of all places! Let’s get someone in charge to reign this shit in, let’s talk to the manager.
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
Penalties possibly coming for fake reviews for products pushed on social media.
FTC says what I’ve been saying: “Fake reviews and testimonials have polluted the marketplace.” They’ve also polluted social media, social & support groups, message boards, discord forums, and even zoom calls in some cases. I’m sure tired of testimonials for products and constant hype trains where people don’t disclose their financial conflicts of interest like they ought to. So I’m glad to see this new rule, and hope there will be penalties imposed to tamp it down.
FTC (Federal Trade Commission) We’ll pay you to give our new rule a good review - By Michael Atleson August 14, 2024 Fake reviews and testimonials have polluted the marketplace. They harm the many consumers relying on them to pick products and providers, subverting people’s ability to make informed decisions. They also hurt competitors who work hard to comply with the law. The FTC has challenged illegal practices regarding reviews and testimonials for several decades. Along with numerous law enforcement actions, we’ve also issued guidance to help businesses do the right thing. We’re not alone. Other regulators in the states and abroad have been trying hard to attack the problem. And whether protected from liability or not, online marketplaces and social media companies also have a crucial role to play, and they could and should do more to stem the tide of deceptive commercial conduct that they’ve allowed to fester on their platforms. But altogether it has not been enough. That’s why, in 2022, we started the process for developing a new federal rule spelling out clearly deceptive practices in this area, authorizing courts to impose civil penalties for knowing violations, strengthening our enforcement actions, and imposing a deterrent effect on bad actors.
“In just about every corner of the corporate world, conclusions that might support regulation are always disputed. Studies in animals will be deemed irrelevant, human data are dismissed as not representative, and exposure data are discredited as unreliable. Always, there's too much about the evidence, not enough proof of harm, not enough of proof of enough harm. It is public relations disguised as science.”
- Dr. David Michaels, The Triumph of Doubt (2020)