The pandemic didn’t steal anyone's lunch 🥪 Campaigns to stop mask bans 😷 Anxiety as a risk condition ❤️🔥
Reporters looking for someone to discuss mask bans should consider asking Associate Professor of Law Katherine Macfarlane, Syracuse University College of Law.
New York USA Letter & Call Campaigns: SPEAK OUT AGAINST A MASK BAN! ACTION TOOLKIT
By Covid Advocacy NY http://bit.ly/StopMaskBanNY
USA Stop Mask Bans campaign toolkit
Mask Together America - bit.ly/StopMaskBans
There’s a horrendous irony in being accused of being “anxious” when you want to avoid covid.
It might surprise you the various underlying conditions associated with higher risk of severity with covid infection, according to the “People With Certain Medical Conditions” and “Underlying Medical Conditions” lists provided by the CDC.
I have PTSD and anxiety. And apparently that’s associated with poorer outcomes from covid - specifically DEATH! Being called an alarmist, I continue to call bullshit on that specious self-contradictory argument against my interest in protecting myself. Of course regardless of the risk of death and hospitalization, it’s perfectly natural, normal, and sensible, to not want to get ill or risk worsening existing conditions. It’s normal to want to avoid sickness for so many logical reasons, even if someone’s not already disabled with “underlying conditions” that put one at higher risk for severe outcomes. Accusing someone pejoratively of being “anxious” OR railing against being called “anxious” as if that’s a bad thing, are both ableist illogical stances that I shun entirely. I also find it off-putting when ableist insults are used in “turnabout is fair play” gambits. We can acknowledge that anxiety serves a purpose, while it also can be a health condition. And I want us as a society to steer far clear of legitimizing political abuse of psychology.
🗞️ In the news
Syracuse University News - Mask Bans are a Heavy Burden for People with Disabilities Wednesday, June 26, 2024, By Ellen Mbuqe Reporters looking for anyone to discuss the issues around limitations for face masks, please consider Associate Professor of Law Katherine Macfarlane, the director of the disability law and policy program at Syracuse University College of Law. To give you a sense of her perspective, Professor Macfarlane said:“The bans would pose an immediate risk to people with disabilities who need to wear masks to protect themselves—from airborne illnesses like COVID-19, for example. It is difficult to imagine how a disabled person would be able to convincingly defend their mask-wearing to a police officer,” said Macfarlane. “Even if an exception to the bans were created for people with disabilities, the bans would still force people to disclose a disability they would rather keep confidential. And if an officer doesn’t believe them (as so often happens to people with invisible disabilities), what happens—they’re arrested?”
Important Context - Misinformation Spreaders, Dark Money Groups Lament Major Defeat At Supreme Court - Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s majority opinion in Murthy v. Missouri rejected a dubious legal theory aimed at crippling the government’s ability to combat online misinformation. WALKER BRAGMAN JUN 28, 2024 Representing the private plaintiffs pro bono was the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a business-aligned, right-wing litigation outfit. The group, which has waged a war on the administrative state since its founding, trying to limit, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, has received significant funding from billionaire industrialist and climate denial mega-funder Charles Koch. The case drew national attention early in part thanks to Elon Musk, the owner of X, formerly Twitter. Musk and others on the right had long insisted that the platform he purchased had suppressed right-wing content. After buying Twitter, Musk granted limited access to the company’s internal documents to select reporters and allies, allowing them to sift through and report on their findings of supposed government-tied censorship. Days after the first Twitter Files report came out in December 2022, Musk met with Bhattacharya to discuss how his account had been suppressed on the platform. Days later came another Twitter Files release purporting to show that the government had “rigged” the COVID-19 discourse, allegedly silencing dissenting public health opinions like Bhattacharya’s. None of the Twitter Files releases, however, demonstrated anything more than requests from government to Twitter to remove certain content and the company making its own moderation decisions.
Some Pasteurization Methods May Not Clear H5N1 in Heavily Infected Milk — In experimental study, trace infectious virus detectable in some samples heated for short periods by Katherine Kahn, Staff Writer, MedPage Today June 14, 2024 "The next step, which the USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture] and FDA are working on, is performing similar experiments with actual industrial pasteurization equipment and mimic the complete process faithfully," Munster said. The study of the effects of pasteurization on the virus in other dairy products besides milk is also needed, the authors wrote. Gastrointestinal infections with H5N1 have occurred in several species, but it is unknown whether ingesting live H5N1 in raw milk could cause infections in humans or how much would be needed, they pointed out.
FORTUNE - COVID can cause new health problems to appear years after infection, according to a study of more than 130,000 patients - BY Carolyn Barber - May 30, 2024 at 5:01 AM EDT “People are developing new-onset disease as the result of an infection that they had three years ago,” says Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis and lead author of the study. “It challenges the notion that these viruses are sort of self-contained or that after the acute first phase, they become inconsequential.” With more than 130,000 patients, the study is by far the largest so far to track the progress of the virus over a full three-year period. It expands on work by Al-Aly and others at the two-year mark that found patients had elevated risk for long-COVID-related conditions that included diabetes, lung problems, fatigue, blood clots, and gastrointestinal and musculoskeletal disorders.
WHO WHAT WHY - COVID Contrarians Protest WHO’s Efforts to Prepare for the Next Pandemic ALLISON NEITZEL 06/13/24 And this is part of a larger far-Right attack on American institutions like the courts, education system, election administration, etc. The MAGA anti-government movement is also deeply nationalistic and isolationist, as that is the central ethos of its disinformation-spewing kingpin Steve Bannon’s geopolitical ideology. And former CNP member Bannon — who is headed to prison on a contempt of Congress conviction for defying a subpoena from the House January 6 select committee — has been active internationally.
This is NOT fine
Where did the lunch hour go? The pandemic didn’t steal it, but employers probably did.
Guardian - ‘It breaks an employer’s control’: the tragic disappearance of the American lunch hour Americans are spending less on weekday lunches, opting instead to save for weekends. Is a once-cherished meal in its death throes? Alaina Demopoulos Tue 28 May 2024 Blame it on working from home, tighter budgets, inflation or all of the above: transaction data pulled by the digital-payments app Square found that midday food spending was down 3.3% nationwide last year compared with 2019. The decrease was steeper in some cities, including Boston, Atlanta and Dallas. While a full obit for the humble lunch break might be premature, a recent report from the University of Toronto backed up the hypothesis that Americans want to spend more on weekend luxuries than a lunch bill. The study found that foot traffic in major US cities remains low on workdays, but higher during the weekend.
It’s just another episode of “blame pandemic mitigations” lockdown revisionism with a side of some inflation hype as well. This doesn’t really add up since people who work from home can go to restaurants for lunch, for takeaway, or get it delivered, if they wanted to. And people who work in offices can take lunch with them to work. Maybe there’s a reason people don’t want to use up their lunch break milling around in midday traffic. The real tragedy here is if the reason some people don’t get out food for lunch anymore is that workers are inappropriately being forced to work through lunch, and sadly that’s the more likely explanation.
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
It took 4 years after “expression of concern” to retract a problematic paper on Vitamin D as a covid treatment.
Retraction Watch - Paper recommending vitamin D for COVID-19 retracted four years after expression of concern - June 24, 2024 Author Dawn Attride PLOS ONE posted an expression of concern for the article on October 14, 2020. According to the notice, “concerns were raised about the validity of results and conclusions reported in the article and about undisclosed competing interests.” The expression of concern also noted “statements in the article, including in its title and conclusions, that suggest a causal relationship between vitamin D levels and the clinical outcome of COVID-19 infections which is not supported by the data.” The competing interests refer to Holick’s “non-financial interests based on his vitamin D research and other activities focused on vitamin D; contributions to an app that tracks vitamin D; and interests that include consultancies, funding support, and authorship of books related to vitamin D usage.” In 2018, the New York Times reported on Holick’s financial ties to the vitamin D industry.
Vitamin D has been floated as a cure all for all sorts of things for years, without much hard evidence to show for it. But even with that starting point of skepticism, it still took 4 years to retract the paper that already had criticisms out of the gate.
This is demonstrative of why it’s unwise to be using unproven remedies and products with just preliminary findings — especially when those preliminary studies being referenced are years old and haven’t been replicated. I often find people asking about dubious products, and saying “but they linked to this study” with the study either being straight up fraudulent appeal to authority (pointing to a reference that doesn’t actually support the claim), or it’s some tiny preliminary study from a few years ago that hasn’t been replicated. And may well still be retracted for all we know because obviously that can take years. In some cases they point to preprints that are more than a year old and are still yet to be peer reviewed or published, and some doctors are even reportedly prescribing based on such preprints.
Quote:
“Shared clinical decision making could create barriers to vaccination and may not effectively target those at highest risk.”
CDC ACIP Covid-19 Vaccines Work Group at the CDC ACIP meeting September 12, 2023