NIOSH cuts unacceptable - Vaccine advocacy needed, 19 April 2025
Over a year ago Moms for Liberty was creating content with the offshored gulag privatized prison contractor in Central America.
NIOSH certification of N95 masks will shut down in June if Trump admin actions are not reversed at HHS.
This will have ramifications for workers in various fields and the general public.
Pennsylvania Capital Star - Federal cuts threaten to close Pennsylvania lab that certifies N95s and other respirators in June - The Pa. laboratory that certifies all of the country’s NIOSH-approved respirators is on the chopping block. HHS is stonewalling employees who raise questions. By: Ian Karbal - April 17, 2025 11:48 am “It’s kind of the sabotage of guide rails that have been set up for industry to help keep workers safe,” said Jonathan Szalajda, a lab employee and former deputy director of the National Personal Protective Technology Lab. “It’s a situation where we’re leaving workers defenseless, and I think it’s certainly a step back from what we’ve done to protect workers over the last half century.” Since the beginning of mass layoffs at federal agencies overseen by the Trump administration and Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), virtually every employee at the National Personal Protective Technology Laboratory has taken a buyout or early retirement offer, been put on administrative leave, or received a notice that their job is subject to what’s called a “reduction in force” and that their last day will come in June. It’s not clear if the impending layoffs will hit every remaining employee because, according to workers and union officials, leaders at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control have not been answering questions. Moreover, almost all of the lab’s supervisors have been placed on administrative leave, along with their HR contact.
My letter to reps:
Because of the cuts at NIOSH the National Personal Protective Technology Lab in Pennsylvania will shut down and that can't happen because this is the place that certifies all the N95 PPE for the whole country, for workers and the public for all types of respiratory protection including viruses, allergens, wildfire smoke, air pollutants. This is reversing decades of advancements in this area. It will set up an environment where counterfeit masks will proliferate worse than what happened during the shortages early in the pandemic, and will likely lead to countless dollars, including taxpayer dollars, spent in preventable adverse health effects, healthcare debacles, lawsuits, and criminal proceedings. You must do something to ensure that NIOSH is functional.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
🗞️ In the news
CIDRAP - Public ignorance, apathy toward avian flu could threaten containment, researchers say Mary Van Beusekom, MS April 18, 2025 Only 26.1% of participants knew that people can contract H5N1, and while 62.3% agreed that the virus is a threat to human health, only 27.4% thought they were at risk for infection. Although nearly 71.3% understood that cooking meat at high temperatures can kill harmful bacteria and viruses like H5N1, 53.7% didn't know that pasteurized milk—which undergoes heating to kill pathogens—is safer than raw milk.
NPR - In the middle of a hepatitis outbreak, U.S. shutters the one CDC lab that could help April 16, 2025 Heard on All Things Considered Headshot of Chiara Eisner Chiara Eisner The scientists at the lab knew what they were doing. Quickly, they analyzed the blood from Florida using their custom software and found that nine cases were genetically linked to the same pain clinic, where it was later discovered that a doctor was improperly reusing injection vials. By March, officials in Florida had restricted the doctor's medical license to limit the spread of the virus and packaged new patient samples to send to the CDC for testing, CDC employees told NPR. But on April 1, the outbreak investigation was brought to a halt. All 27 of the lab's scientists received an email from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services informing them that they were losing their job.
CIDRAP Kids exposed to Zika virus in utero can have development delays later in life—even without congenital Zika syndrome Stephanie Soucheray, MA January 16, 2025 Two recent studies, including one published today in Pediatrics, show that exposure to the Zika virus (ZIKV) in utero can have affect children's development later in childhood, with today's study showing the finding holds true even when the children are born without signs of congenital Zika syndrome (CZS).
People who care about public health: stay focused on fundamentals regarding vaccines.
There was a Moderna presentation at the CDC ACIP meeting regarding the next generation covid-19 vaccine. It’s a second generation, single antigen vaccine. Unfortunately a lot of people talking about it online, on social media, and in some forums, don’t have the expertise in this to really discern what it all means. Some people have erroneously and incorrectly claimed that Moderna is “trying to bring back the bivalent vaccine” from previous seasons. This is false. It’s possible some enthusiasts misconstrued the issue because the trial covered in the presentation was conducted with the bivalent because that was available at that time. I also think that this is getting muddled up with the weird erroneous and non-factual comments made in the news by RFKJr about Novavax. Some people are also spreading anti-vax talking points about mRNA vaccines — claims that are not true.
Be aware that there seem to have been considerable efforts to make Novavax into a meme stock, and there may be people who are motivated in strange ways to confuse the issue. It’s not always about making money, product cults are unfortunately enticing to a lot of people for social reasons, many who are feeling at loose ends these days, and a lot of communities are being target marketed leveraging that, but also there are people who just want attention. Nobody should get medical advice from social media hot shots who might be credentialed but may still be unreliable, because there are lots of incentives and motivations and relationships that may lead to poor science communication when people are promoting their work on social media.
And definitely nobody should be getting medical information from media interviews with RFKJr either because he’s not even a doctor and says stuff he’s pulling out of the air, or somewhere else.
The CDC ACIP meeting to determine recommendations for the covid vaccines will take place in June 2025. The discussion in this recent meeting around the covid vaccines may have been less than reassuring, that’s for sure, and doesn’t give me any hope for an actual vaccination campaign to improve uptake sadly, which is what we need. However, I’d like to remind everyone that this shockingly lukewarm vibe from this committee has been the case at basically every CDC ACIP meeting for years now, sometimes with people pushing the idea that the vaccines should be restricted to the very old, or just restricted seemingly based on following the politics. I’ve been writing about the wishy-washy CDC guidance for years now. So all hope is not lost here by any means based on odd stuff said at this meeting. But it means that everyone who cares needs to make our voices louder than the anti-vaxxers who are but a loud minority. The problem is that people on the side of science-based medicine have rested on the laurels of fact. We simply can’t do that. Everything is political and doctors and public health experts need to get political on this. Don’t take vaccines for granted, nobody ever should have.
My letter to elected representatives:
I want vaccines. I want research on effective vaccines funded, I want covid vaccines, I want vaccines covered by all insurance, and I want free vaccination available to the uninsured. I want vaccines mandated in congregate and high risk settings like nursing homes, hospitals, schools, and the military.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own.
The covid dot gov website url leads to some kind of lab leak truther propaganda.
Hopefully once and for all people will understand that lab leak trutherism is far right-wing covid contrarianism, and stop letting red-pilled horseshoe lefties push that propaganda in disabled and public health advocacy spaces. We’ve always known this because the same people pushing these conspiracy theories are the same people pushing climate contrarianism, often using the same tactics.
On a lighter note, on the official government webpage, the American president strangely looks like a pooting toddler. Right-wing graphic design choices are so odd.
Over a year ago Moms for Liberty was creating content with the privatized prison contractor of the offshored gulag in Central America.
A leader in the group formed in the pandemic to oppose public health measures, and then moved onto every culture war topic under the sun, was sharing visions for education with Nayib Buekele over a year ago.
Curmudgucation - Moms For Liberty and the Salvador Gulag - Peter Greene Apr 15, 2025 In March pf 2024, she was at CPAC. So was Nayib Bukele, who at the time was mostly known for A) the kind of conservative dictatorship that has become popular on the right and B) his attempt to convert El Salvador's currency base to bitcoin, a bold idea that has turned into a demonstration of why that's a bad idea. (I'll let someone else see if there are dots to be connected between the failure of a grand cryptocurrency grift and the launch of a gulag-for-profit grift.) While Bukele was at CPAC, Catalina Stubbe connected with him for some interview time.The results were reported by FSSPX News (that's the Society of Saint Pius X, a canonically irregular traditionalist Catholic outfit):...
Bukele said he wants to see morality introduced back into schools, along with suggestions that would violate the separation of church and state in the US.
Peddling false cures is nothing new.
It's perhaps not surprising that a lot of bogus and iffy claims get repurposed for various diseases, including Long Covid.
I haven't read the book yet, but I recommend the interview with Matthew C. Ehrlich on the AskHistorians Podcast. He's the author of The Krebiozen Hoax, which is a true story about a medical scandal around a bogus cancer cure back in the 1950s. The interview was great. But if I were going to interview this author, I would ask about more specific aspects around the culty behaviour of the people around this ineffective non-legitimate. In the podcast the host had mentioned a few times how people involved were really "ride or die" about the drug. I'd also like to know more about how this quack cure was defeated. The author mentioned that the book was published last year, and in today's political context if he was doing the book now he would've focused more on the "medical freedom" claims that persist until today to justify peddling unproven and even disproven quack remedies.
AskHistorians Podcast Episode 236: Matthew Ehrlich and The Krebiozen Hoax.
“We need to forget about infectious disease because it’s all about food safety, yo!”
RFKJr ran for his position on "food safety" or so I’ve heard. Republicans are bent on cutting funding to local health departments, and now they're floating in press ending routine food inspections.
FDA making plans to end its routine food safety inspections, sources say healthwatch By Edited By Paula Cohen Updated on: April 17, 2025 / 7:05 PM EDT / CBS News The Food and Drug Administration is drawing up plans that would end most of its routine food safety inspections work, multiple federal health officials tell CBS News, and effectively outsource this oversight to state and local authorities. The plans have not been finalized and might need congressional action to fully fund, said the officials, who were not authorized to speak publicly. Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, denied that the FDA was making plans to do this.
My letter to reps:
Nobody wants an end to food safety inspections. I don't remember anyone campaigning for election on the platform of ending food safety monitoring. If they did, they'd probably lose, because everyone I know wants a safe food supply. What are you doing to make sure food isn't contaminated or otherwise spoiled?
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
Quote:
"Many leaders cling to the notion that innovation thrives in the office, fueled by casual interactions and spontaneous brainstorming. However, this belief often overlooks the fact that structured remote collaboration can also lead to significant breakthroughs. Companies might fear that without these in-person moments, they will miss out on potential creative sparks, yet this perspective can stifle the diverse ways teams can connect and innovate."
— Ashot Nanayan, Forbes Sep 19, 2024