🚫 "Natural Herd Immunity" pseudoscience is baaaaack. 📍 Just argue for the precautionary principle!

Nicholas Enrich's unfinished third memo on public health consequences of the stoppage of global health investment.

Mar 08, 2025

RFKJr is pushing Great Barrington Declaration “natural herd immunity” eugenics pseudoscience for bird flu.

RFK Jr. warns vaccinating poultry for bird flu could backfire By Alexander Tin March 6, 2025 / 4:00 PM EST / CBS News We've in fact said, at the USDA, that they should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flock so that we can identify the birds and preserve the birds that are immune to it," Kennedy had said. Perez said this approach would make surviving birds breeding grounds for worrying mutations. "This implies a potentially dangerous misunderstanding of how avian influenza works. Allowing highly pathogenic avian influenza to spread through a poultry flock is extremely risky and counterproductive," he said.

It didn’t work with covid, it never worked for smallpox, it doesn’t work because it’s wish-casting pseudoscience embraced by public health contrarians. It’s not workable and it’s actually fckin’ dangerous.

🗞️ In the news

Government Executive - NTEU leaders vow to fight amid IRS return-to-office mandate Internal Revenue Service employees have just one week to prepare for the end of telework at the agency, as management disregards union contract provisions governing the workplace flexibility. March 4, 2025 06:05 PM ET Erich Wagner The Office of Personnel Management in February issued subsequent guidance purporting to nullify such provisions in agency collective bargaining agreements, though as a basic legal concept only legislation passed by Congress and enacted by the president can supersede the terms of a contract. “In instances [where other agencies have disregarded telework contract provisions], we have moved to enforce our contracts,” Greenwald told reporters, indicating that her union has filed both unfair labor practice complaints and grievances against agencies. But just minutes after the press availability ended, IRS management announced plans to call all employees, both bargaining unit members and management, who live within 50 miles of a traditional work site back to full-time in-person work, beginning March 10.

CIDRAP - 7 in 10 US adults favor school vaccination mandates, but support for opt-outs rising - Mary Van Beusekom, MS - Jan 29, 2025 Seven in 10 US adults support requiring schoolchildren to be vaccinated against infectious diseases such as measles, and over half also say states should ban students unvaccinated students from attending public or private schools, although support for this prohibition has been eroding since before the COVID-19 pandemic, a new survey reveals.

Huffpost - CDC Staff Prohibited From Co-Authoring Papers With World Health Organization Personnel It’s just the latest “Orwellian” crackdown on government scientists. By Matt Shuham 28/02/2025 “CDC staff should not be co-authors on manuscripts/abstracts with WHO staff,” an interim guidance document dated Thursday and obtained by HuffPost says, adding that CDC staff should also not author publications related to work “funded by WHO.” Depending on whether CDC staff are the lead authors of a given publication affected by the guidance, they are instructed to either pause all action on the publication or recuse themselves as authors if they cannot pause the publication process. The guidance also says that manuscripts that do not comply with Trump’s executive orders and that were submitted prior to Jan. 20 — the date of Trump’s inauguration, and when he moved to withdraw the United States from the WHO — should be withdrawn, or CDC staff should recuse themselves as authors. “To not only stop all future work but also make people remove their names from papers already in production is full-on Orwellian,” one person familiar with the document told HuffPost.

CIDRAP - Nearly 30% of cats, dogs owned by COVID patients had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies by 2021 News brief February 5, 2025 Relative to dogs, cats were more likely to be infected and had higher antibody levels. Viruses isolated from a subset of respiratory swabs revealed six different SARS-CoV-2 strains in dogs and cats, including the B.1.1 lineage in a cat 1 month before the first documented US human case. Risk factors for human infection included sharing a bed and food and kissing.

CIDRAP - Unproven Lyme disease treatments regularly offered in US, new data show Stephanie Soucheray, MA February 5, 2025 For the study, the investigators analyzed treatments offered at standalone clinics in 14 states with high Lyme disease prevalence: Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Initial consultation could top $3,000. The authors devised a Google-based search for Lyme clinics in each state and identified 117 clinics. Costs for an initial consultation ranged from $87 to $3,250.

🇨🇦 Richmond News - Human rights complaint denied for Richmond woman who refused to wear mask - Apple store employees say woman didn't listen to accommodation alternatives. Maria Rantanen Jan 29, 2024 Foley had made an appointment on June 2, 2021 at the Apple store, but when she arrived, she was told she couldn’t enter without a mask. However, staff said “she walked away from the store before she could be offered any alternative service options,” the decision reads. According to the Human Rights Tribunal decision, Foley said, at her second appointment on June 4, 2021, she was “taunted and humiliated for having a disability.” On this second visit, the tribunal decision reads, according to Apple staff, they told Foley “how she could be accommodated, and Ms. Foley became irate.” The complaint was dismissed before going to a hearing. In its dismissal decision, the tribunal noted the complaint has “no reasonable prospect of success because Ms. Foley ‘thwarted the accommodation process’ when she failed to cooperate with the accommodation process.”

Gavin Newsom is pushing state workers to get butts in seats downtown for fossil fuel and business interests.

This guy's sad podcast platforming a far right bigot isn't the first or only extremely anti progressive garbage from Gavin Newsom. Just write this guy off.

SEIU Local 1000 Files Legal Action to Challenge the RTO Mandate Yesterday, SEIU Local 1000 officially filed an Unfair Practice Charge (UPC) with the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB), standing together with PECG workers in taking legal action against the Governor’s executive order on return to office. This filing is a direct challenge to an unlawful mandate that violates our members’ collective bargaining rights under the Dills Act and disregards our contract. The Governor imposed this order unilaterally, without negotiation, without consideration for its impact on state workers, and without following the law. We’re demanding that PERB rescind this illegal order immediately and return decision-making on telework and return-to-office policies back to individual departments, where it belongs. Agencies should be making operational decisions based on business needs – not political mandates. But this fight doesn’t stop with legal action. On March 12, we’re taking to the streets. Workers from across the state will be joining us for protests in Sacramento, Los Angeles, Fresno, and San Francisco to stand against this reckless policy. We’re not alone – other unions are standing with us because this affects all state workers. We fought hard for telework options, and we won’t let them be taken away without a fight.

Butts in seats downtown for "The Economy" (aka commercial real estate & fossil fuel) RTO GTFO. The future of our civilization depends on maximizing remote options wherever possible. Chloe Humbert Jan 21, 2025

Taxpayer money to be thrown into the nonsense hole.

The New Republic - Hafiz Rashid / March 7, 2025 RFK Jr.’s Anti-Vax Views Officially Take Hold at CDC The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is launching a study on vaccines and autism.

And I’m sure there’s plenty of scummy clout chasing pathetic scientists and total nonsense believing kook doctors will be willing to follow the politics right into garbage medical disinformation promotion. And they should be lambasted with no mercy by serious scientists, and have their reputations ground into the dirt forevermore. There can be NO time that anyone involved in any anti-vax “research” can ever have their reputations rehabilitated. It should be forever toxic to even touch this poo.

My letter to reps:

I don’t want my taxpayer money to go toward pseudoscience pet projects for RFKJr, to try and justify his nutball anti-vax fantasies that have long been discredited. This is a gross misuse of taxpayer money. I expect immediate investigations and a halt to squandering American’s resources, time, and money.

Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.

Medicare telehealth coverage is set to end at the end of March if congress doesn't act.

Experts call for continued federal aid to state, local telemedicine services - February 20, 2025 By Kaitlyn Levinson, Reporter, Route Fifty “I would anticipate that [the Trump administration] would be supportive of telemedicine efforts going forward,” Benjamin said, but “we will have to wait and see if they carve out that [IIJA] funding — and we hope that that funding doesn’t get clawed back.” Another concern for state and local health centers is the future of the federal Telehealth Modernization Act, which passed last year but is set to expire next month unless Congress acts to extend it, said Amy Simmons Farber, associate vice president of communications and public relations at the National Association of Community Health Centers, in an email to Route Fifty. The legislation extended pandemic-era telehealth flexibilities and has helped community health centers to continue delivering virtual care, particularly in rural areas where community health centers serve more than 10 million patients, she said.

My letter to reps (congressperson and us senators):

Telehealth services via Medicare must not be allowed to expire at the end of March. Telehealth service should be a permanent option for all patients, and covered by all insurance, including Medicare and Medicaid, going forward. This is an essential option for patients in rural communities, high risk disabled, homebound elderly, people with conditions that require specialists located geographically distant, and people infected with contagious respiratory diseases that need a prescription from urgent care but are better off not driving and not exposing others. It's really that simple, telemedicine is here to stay because it just makes sense, and it should be covered by Medicare and Medicaid.

Please feel free to repurpose for your own letters to reps.

Nicholas Enrich's unfinished third memo on public health consequences of the stoppage of global health investment.

The Bulwark National Security and Public Health: Consequences Morning Shots The Third Memo by Sam Stein Mar 03, 2025 The Bulwark on Sunday obtained both Enrich memos. This morning, we were passed a third, unfinished one he’d been putting together, this one more alarming than the other two. The memo, titled “Risks to U.S. National Security and Public Health: Consequences of Pausing Global Health Funding for Lifesaving Humanitarian Assistance,” included a table of startling projections. The permanent halt of $7.7 billion in resources for lifesaving global health programs, Enrich projected, could lead to the following: 12.5–17.9 million cases of malaria with an additional 71,000–166,000 deaths annually; A 28 to 32 percent increase in tuberculosis globally; An additional 200,000 paralytic polio cases a year; And, in a worst-case scenario, more than 28,000 cases of Ebola, Marburg, or related diseases. Enrich continued from there. The memo projected that nearly 17 million pregnant women would not be able to reach life-saving services if USAID programs were permanently halted, and more than 11 million newborns would not get critical postnatal care. An estimated 1 million children would not be treated annually for severe acute malnutrition. The acting assistant administrator described a geopolitical and economic catastrophe entirely of our own making. In the unfinished memo, he notes that “preventable diseases” would surge, and that the “consequences will extend beyond borders, increasing the risk of infections reaching the U.S.”

Just argue for the precautionary principle! It's that simple!

Manufacturing mild is the virus that's infected the minds of medical professionals that they miss the mark on arguments for the precautionary principle, and recognition that some diseases never ever become mild, even if bad actors and science deniers try to normalize the harms from them.

MedPage Today - We Need Rapid Bird Flu Testing Now — States should lead on promoting early diagnosis to reduce transmission by Daniel Teres, MD, Paul C. Sorum, MD, PhD, and Martin A. Strosberg, PhD February 9, 2025 "Shouldn't our level of awareness and protocols be focused on early detection of "patient zero" (i.e., a case of human-to-human transmission) to contain a local outbreak? Even if subsequent strains become transmissible with mostly "mild" disease, this will ensure we are ready for early detection, early treatment, and the promotion of self-isolation to keep sick people away from the emergency department or urgent care. Elderly and immunocompromised patients benefit from early warning even for "mild" disease."

This argument skips the precautionary principle. It fails to recognize the narrative of covid being mild has never been true – people are still being hospitalized and dying with covid. The fact is that polio and HIV have not become more mild with transmission, and smallpox circulated for thousands of years without becoming inconsequential. And also if flu outbreaks are undesirable, as I would think that most people consider illness in general as undesirable, why wouldn't you want tests? It's a very simple argument. But they didn't take that position. Instead, they gave in to trucker convoy framing that infectious disease is mild and irrelevant, and tried to make a patronizing special case for elderly and immunocompromised people who obviously they understand are being crushed under right-wing eugenics ideology. And then we'll have more articles about staffing shortages, people not engaging in the economy enough, and sky high disability claims. But ok.

It's so very sad this group of doctors has been so beaten down, so subjugated to the manufactured mild narrative completely originated from big tobacco and which should be so obvious but it's been so hammered in that even these doctors accept the unacceptable as normalized harm. They obviously have some clue that there's some other truth here because why else use "mild" in scare quotes? But the social conformity has been so complete that they can no longer acknowledge basic truths about infectious diseases. Of course they would probably never ever ever ever get an op-ed published in any major outlet if they actually took a reality based stance against the fascistic right-wing hegemony over infectious disease discussions. That would make them dissidents. The overton window has gone too far to favouring MAGA and Alex Jones.

Beware healthcare AI and any connected organizations.

All of this AI stuff is connected to sketchy pseudoscience or health profiteering, and should not be confused with public health or organizing for public health or disability justice.

Quote:

“According to Kahneman, when our slow-thinking system doesn't have enough information to answer a question involving numbers, we simply stay on autopilot. And our autopilot system takes what might be called a shortcut and anchors its answer to the last number that crossed its radar, even when that number is completely irrelevant to the question at hand. -And that leads us to reach an absurd conclusion. I know it seems bizarre that anyone would do that, and surely you and I, reasonable people, would never do that in our real lives. Well, you do it all the time.”
– PBS Hacking Your Mind - Living on Autopilot - Episode 101 Aired: 09/09/20

On the side of the Humans.

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