🪧 We're not going back! 💉 Vaccine update approved. 🦟 Anthony Fauci got West Nile Virus in Washington DC.
Cory Doctorow masked at DefCon 32, Mary Trump masked at the DNC.
Please feel free to repurpose for your own letters to officials.
My letter to reps:
I think about how cholera and dysentery from dirty water, and all sorts of unhygienic practices, used to be a fact of life. We came up with sanitary measures like filtering water. Respirator masks work for source control and to protect the wearer from aerosol transmitted diseases, and there’s no reason this shouldn’t be the standard in healthcare settings. Would we go back to reusing needles? Do not allow CDC to weaken infection control standards in healthcare settings. We can’t go back.
We’re not going back.
When I think of the phrase “we’re not going back” I also think of how in the past, hospitals were grotesque pathogen distribution centers where people didn’t expect to leave. I think about how cholera and dysentery from dirty water, and all sorts of unhygienic practices, used to be a fact of life. We worked to eliminate mosquito populations to put the stops on malaria in the U.S. We know how to filter indoor air. We know about hand washing. Would we go back to reusing needles? Surgeons use gloves. Respirator masks work and there’s no reason we can’t be using them.
I don’t want to go back.
If you don’t like going back to putting up with rampant uncontrolled disease spread and the hospital making you sicker, please join me in writing representatives about this, including VP Harris. We can't go back to weakened standards.
🗞️ In the news
FDA For Immediate Release: August 22, 2024 - FDA Approves and Authorizes Updated mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines to Better Protect Against Currently Circulating Variants Unvaccinated individuals 6 months through 4 years of age are eligible to receive three doses of the updated, authorized Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine or two doses of the updated, authorized Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine. Individuals 6 months through 4 years of age who have previously been vaccinated against COVID-19 are eligible to receive one or two doses of the updated, authorized Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines (timing and number of doses to administer depends on the previous COVID-19 vaccine received). Individuals 5 years through 11 years of age regardless of previous vaccination are eligible to receive a single dose of the updated, authorized Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines; if previously vaccinated, the dose is administered at least 2 months after the last dose of any COVID-19 vaccine. Individuals 12 years of age and older are eligible to receive a single dose of the updated, approved Comirnaty or the updated, approved Spikevax; if previously vaccinated, the dose is administered at least 2 months since the last dose of any COVID-19 vaccine. Additional doses are authorized for certain immunocompromised individuals ages 6 months through 11 years of age as described in the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine fact sheets.
Dr. Anthony Fauci recovering at home after hospitalization for West Nile virus healthwatch By Kerry Breen, Jon LaPook Edited By Lucia Suarez Sang August 24, 2024 / 11:32 AM EDT / CBS News Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a longtime public health official who headed up the United States' response to the coronavirus pandemic, was hospitalized about ten days ago, he said Saturday. At the time, he was suffering from fever, chills and severe fatigue. Fauci said he left the hospital three days ago and is expected to make a full recovery at home. The West Nile virus is primarily spread by mosquitoes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It's the leading cause of mosquito-borne disease in the continental U.S. and spreads during mosquito season in the summer and fall. Fauci likely contracted the virus from a mosquito bite in his backyard, he said.
KQED - UC President Orders New Rules on Encampments, Masks as Students Return to School Alex Hall Aug 19 2024 “To receive an email signed by a medical doctor that outlines a potential ban on masking was extremely unsettling and disconcerting,” Hindery said, pointing to an increase in COVID-19 cases. “Banning masks, whether to conceal identity or to protect from illness, is a violation of our First Amendment rights and any enforcement of that policy would surely result in lawsuits against the university.”
Government Executive - Teleworking feds are spending 60% of their time working in person, OMB says In a congressionally mandated report, the Office of Management and Budget rebuffed many common complaints by congressional Republicans about the popular workplace flexibility. August 13, 2024 Remote work, a practice by which an employee may work entirely from their home or agency-approved alternative work site, accounted for 228,000 employees, or 10% of the civilian workforce.
The American Prospect - Collapsing Mortgage Securities. Broken Processes. No Accountability. Sound Familiar? Faulty credit ratings were a cause of the 2008 crisis. One whistleblower complaint argues that the same dynamic is happening again. by David Dayen August 14, 2024 A couple billion in defaults in a market valued around $20 trillion isn’t worth worrying about. But a significant chunk of CRE loans are starting to come due for the first time since the pandemic greatly increased working from home. Prices on commercial properties began dropping last spring for the first time since 2011, and regional and local banks, which are more exposed to these loans, are in a particularly precarious position. Regulators are even starting to talk about fraud and questionable valuations in these markets. Experts have described CRE as “a train wreck waiting to happen.”
Retraction Watch - ‘Coding’ errors prompt retraction of paper on long COVID in kids - August 20, 2024 Author Adam Marcus It has been cited eight times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, and garnered significant attention on mainstream and social media sites, including by critics who said the authors fatally botched the definition of long COVID. According to the authors, the incidence of long covid in kids was “strikingly low”, occurring in just 0.4% of young patients. Symptoms of infection in kids typically resolve within two weeks, they added. But those reassuring findings hinged on several errors in the analysis that made the incidence of long COVID in children look less than a third of what the researchers should have reported.
This is NOT fine
Scary letters to the editor on mask bans from people who want us to live in a surveillance state.
Weirdo levels of Calvinism is apparently still slinking among Americans. But I really thought that most people supposedly valued FREEDOM in America. Not so if you read the letters to the editor about the mask bans in Nassau County New York. There you find people with authoritarian mindsets who want a totalitarian surveillance state with no way to make a move without being watched and presenting papers.
One person wrote: “The idea is to cut down on crime by trying to foreclose anonymity.” and said that people should “get over it” if they feel “insulted or put out” for being asked: Papers, Please! by random authorities.
Another person suggested: “we should start taking pictures of people wearing masks and send them to the police.” Would this person be ok with rando strangers creeping around taking pictures of their family when they walk out in public? I bet not. This person also added, “Obviously, we shouldn’t try to make any arrests.” But not because that would be criminal vigilantism - But because they claim that people who wear masks might be criminals, and that the elderly could be “in costume” and actually dangerous.
This is bonkers level and really a form of incitement - suggesting people should fear elderly and disabled people, and other people who wear masks to avoid sickness. This sort of thoughtless fear mongering ignores the fact that disabled people already get assaulted for being disabled. This is not hyperbole since MAGA people like Ivan Raiklin are suggesting weird vigilantism by ex-military people who are resentful toward vaccines who expect to be deputized by local county officials in order to, he said, “conduct live streamed swatting raids of every single person that we can identify that conducted the necessary unlawful activity by county on my deep state target list”. And if history shows anything, when this kind of thing gets started, it can go further.
This is completely unAmerican and contrary to our societal values, or at least as I have heard them espoused my whole life. And it’s very obviously counter to any community care I’ve ever heard of.
Mask bans are part of the facism directly related to women not being allowed to have governance over our own bodies. Apparently there have always been these bizarre fringe elements lurking in the shadows in America, and the halls of Congress. But it’s dangerous to ignore it.
They can go back into the shadows. Me and my N95 should not have to.
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
Cory Doctorow still masking
Cory Doctory can be seen in a video speaking at DefCon 32 last week wearing a KN95 mask. Seems like a wise move since he does a lot of travel and a lot of speaking engagements. He’s mentioned he’s headed to Burning Man, and frankly I’d want a full hazmat suit for that venue.
Mary Trump thinks the pandemic is still a problem and masks in indoor crowds.
Mary Trump mentioned on her youtube with Danielle Moody and Jen Taub that she did a 12 hour road trip by car to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago because she wanted to avoid air travel to avoid covid. She said “I'm actually one of those people who still thinks it's a problem.” And then from the convention itself, she said: “It's a bit of a shock being around so many people. Hey everybody I am the only masked person at the Democratic National Convention.” She also mentioned she couldn’t recall the last time she’d been in such a crowd.
We deserve better, so don’t set the bar low for Democrats to deal with covid.
At the Democratic National Convention, some of the speakers rightly criticized Trump’s egregiously bad handling of the pandemic. But also said that the Biden Harris administration got the virus under control. We know that’s PR blustering based on political consultant hubris, because the virus is not under control. It’s true that Trump is talking about “getting rid of non-productive people” so there’s really no comparison between the candidates this election — but that doesn’t mean we should accept such an awfully low bar. If they’re going to say that Kamala Harris will protect people, and that Democrats will defend the vulnerable, they need to actually do it, and we need to remind them they need to actually do it.
And I don’t know who needs to hear this, but criticizing Trump and demanding better of Harris, are not mutually exclusive.
This is the letter I sent to my Democratic party elected representatives who are running for re-election this year:
The virus is not under control. I can't get healthcare without risking getting exposed to covid because hospitals aren't properly isolating people with covid or requiring masks. You can't run for election on controlling the virus when the virus is out of control. Get the virus under control, then maybe talk. The CDC HICPAC committee is talking about loosening infection control. We can’t go back to the old days of rampant disease spread. We need hospitals to do better.
Feel free to use my letter for your own advocacy.
U.S. Republican lawmakers resist global public safety into perpetuity.
Ron Johnson is leading the attacks on public health attempts to save lives globally from infectious disease.
Far-Right Republicans Continue Attack on WHO over Pandemic Treaty Obviously Ron Johnson is involved MisinformationKills Aug 19, 2024 This continued bad faith attack by a nationalist isolationist political movement comes on the back of the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic — made all the more devastating by disinformation-spewing MAGA politicians like Johnson. And it deserves extra scrutiny given increasing concerns about the H5N1 avian flu and monkeypox, the latter having just been declared a public health emergency of international concern by the WHO.
Pandemic Action Network is looking for organizational sign ons to urge governments to support The Pandemic Fund, and this isn’t even about covid - they say: “Experts predict that within the next generation there is more than a 50% chance a COVID-like pandemic will happen again.”
Quote:
“I would offer that we often frame this as a counter messaging opportunity or need. But one of the things I think we can be thinking about is getting ahead of counter and getting to a place where we’re more proactive. Some of the ways to think about that is, not just think about reacting to the message, but actually undermining or thinking about how to undermine the messenger. There’s a few ways we think about doing that based on what we see in the data in terms of what has been successful by a variety of folks who are trying to undermine the messenger.”
— Becky Fair speaking on The Cognitive Crucible Podcast, March 12 2024