📋 CDC HICPAC back to drawing board 📄 FDA public comment period: flawed pulse oximeters 🤔 The buzzwords of "immunity" this or that
NBC News: "Warnings grow about risky IV drips and injections at unregulated med spas Infectious disease and ER doctors say they are seeing more severe infections and other injuries..."
Contents:
- Events, Actions, & Campaigns
- Pandemic field notes & “Living with the virus”
- In the News (virus & adjacent media, science, news, and op-eds)
- This is NOT Fine section (gaslighting & other outrages)
- He(a)rd Scuttlebutt (the pandemic grapevine)
USA - Public Comment Period - FDA - Anesthesiology and Respiratory Therapy Devices Panel of the Medical Devices Advisory Committee; Notice of Meeting; Establishment of a Public Docket; Request for Comments—Pulse Oximeters. Posted by the Food and Drug Administration on Nov 17, 2023
Comment Due Date - Mar 4, 2024
Comment of Roots Community Health Center comment states that “pulse oximetry devices, in both the clinical and home settings, frequently overestimated the amount of oxygen in the blood of persons with darker skin pigmentation” and this has been reported in the press: MedPage Today - Pulse Oximetry Inaccuracies Delayed COVID-19 Treatment — Black patients more likely to have an unrecognized need for therapy versus white patients. by Elizabeth Short, Staff Writer, MedPage Today August 24, 2023
Public pressure works. CDC HICPAC sent back to the drawing board on infection control guidelines.
Another issue relevant to preventing transmission through air is to make sure that a draft set of recommendations cannot be misread to suggest equivalency between facemasks and NIOSH Approved respirators, which is not scientifically correct nor the intent of the draft language.
It’s pointed out that there has been anti-mask disinformation introduced into the CDC HICPAC committee via manufacturing doubt, and relatedly manufacturing mild. Industry interests deliberately get close to government agencies, and that’s how this game works for them. It’s often not overt, but the subtle ways they undermine the regulatory rules and guidelines that are put out. They get loopholes put in, or vagueness that could be pulled like a yarn thread. And to have that specifically examined here is good.
They’re not getting away with this because there was public scrutiny and pressure. Many people gave oral public comments at CDC HICPAC meetings in August 2023 and November 2023. Many people have submitted written comments. And several organizations have gotten involved including National Nurses United, People’s CDC, Health Watch USA, World Health Network, and others.
The HICPAC committee inappropriately contains mostly people who have management level positions at healthcare provider companies, and it’s reasonable to assume their obvious likely first loyalty is to their jobs since that is how these people put food on their tables. Like anyone else, they likely see these jobs as essential to their professional success, necessary for their kids to access to good health insurance and good schools, so of course they must be assumed to be in danger of being motivated by that naturally strong and possibly overwhelming influence, more substantially than scientific evidence or moral considerations. The fact that some are in executive roles is evidence that they have in the past pleased superiors or they probably would not reach such heights in an American hospital system. We all know how this works in a very precarious economy where doctors are often now treated like replaceable widgets and are crushed under student loans with no bargaining power and some are hungry for any way to crawl out from under the bottom of the cruel health capitalism heap and secure their own comfort. Their decisions MUST be scrutinized.
The CDC ACIP committee and FDA VRBPAC committee almost restricted the vaccine update severely, and like the CDC HICPAC has an internal anti-mask member, FDA VRBPAC has internal anti-vax member, and in the CDC ACIP meeting there was one pediatrician who was manufacturing doubt about safety by questioning universal recommendation. The one person who was allowed to give oral public comment at that meeting rightly pointed out there’s no group that has no risk from covid. And in the end, after many medical professionals, organizations, and people like me, submitted written public comments and pressured our representatives about it, they rightly went with the scientifically valid and medically responsible decision to recommend updated vaccines across the board. There’s another upcoming ACIP meeting where it’s not even mentioned if they’ll even discuss when seniors and others will be advised for boost this year.
Pressure works — but the struggle continues.
🗞️ In the news
Why experts are concerned about the JN.1 variant responsible for latest COVID wave PBS NewsHour Jan 12, 2024 Dr. Eric Topol: “And the messaging has been poor. That is, even the people at highest risk, about 35 percent of them have had the updated booster that's been available since September. That's the highest-risk people of advanced age. We had 90, 95 percent of those same high-risk people getting the initial primary series of the vaccine. So we're not doing enough. We have known this was coming. We have seen countries in Europe that had wastewater levels of the virus that were unprecedented, even exceeding Omicron. And it isn't like they stay -- the virus is going to stay there. We knew it was coming since September, October, and only in recent weeks have health systems started to get masking back as a policy. We're just not doing enough to prepare or manage this big surge.”
Business Insider - WebMD parent company defends return-to-office video that mixed dancing with the ominous words 'don't mess with us' Sarah Jackson Jan 12, 2024 You probably haven't seen a return-to-office mandate like this before. That is, unless it includes clips of employees dancing to the New Orleans song "Iko Iko" and ends on the vaguely ominous note, "Don't mess with us." We're talking about a video circulating online from Internet Brands, which owns a portfolio of brands across the health, automotive, legal, and travel industries, of which the best-known is WebMD. The internal video was aimed at instructing employees to return to in-person work but was also made public on the company's Vimeo page.
New Zealand - 1 News - Covid cases rising as Govt looks to end free rapid antigen tests By Sam Olley, Reporter Sun, Jan 21 2024 Brooke McKay - owner of Queen St Pharmacy in Upper Hutt - has been offering free collections. She told 1News: "When they (RAT tests) are no longer free - people won't test and collect them as they are now." Experts are now urging the health ministry Te Whatu Ora to extend funding. University of Canterbury epidemiologist Associate Professor Arindam Basu said: "Suppose I have got an infection and I do not have the test kit and I cannot either afford it, or do not go, because I know that it's not free anymore - I remain hidden. I start infecting other people." University of Otago immunologist Associate Professor Dianne Sika-Paotonu was also concerned RAT test costs would lead to: "People who are unwell, turning up to work or school, spreading Covid around them, making other people sick, impacting staffing levels, affecting productivity and ultimately costing time and money."
NBC News - Warnings grow about risky IV drips and injections at unregulated med spas Infectious disease and ER doctors say they are seeing more severe infections and other injuries associated with the facilities, which can operate with little oversight. Jan. 1, 2024, 8:00 AM EST By Erika Edwards and Marina Kopf “They told me that the more areas of my body they inject, the better,” Amma said. She said she was injected more than 100 times in her arms, stomach and lower back with the combination of vitamins and fat-melting ingredients. Within 24 hours, Amma felt dizzy and feverish. Each injection site, she said, was painful and oozed with pus. “Anything touching my skin was excruciating,” she said. “My entire body felt like it was on fire. The number of med spas and hydration clinics has ballooned in recent years, turning into a $15 billion wellness industry offering a variety of services, from IV therapy to skin care and cosmetic procedures. Federal health officials and representatives of med spa owners warn consumers that, along with the boom, some facilities are using unlicensed workers to inject unapproved products in unsanitary conditions. It’s difficult to know how many people have been injured at med spas, because the infections often are not reported to local or state health departments. But some infectious disease and emergency room doctors say they are seeing more adverse reactions associated with the facilities.
This is NOT fine
More unrecognized patient displacement
Survivorship bias means that people who died since being hospitalized last winter or the winter before can’t be hospitalized again this winter.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but deaths were never a bright side and still aren’t. Please stop forcing “silver linings” in this gruesome pandemic and let people grieve without toxic positivity.
PBS - As COVID cases rise, doctors worry about the consequences of misinformation Health Jan 18, 2024 12:35 PM EST By — Laura Santhanam There is a silver lining: though the virus is widespread and worsening in communities nationwide, an immunity wall composed of millions of infections and vaccinations has led to fewer hospitalizations compared to last winter, said epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina.
I wish social media hotshots would understand when they say powerful buzzwords like “immunity wall” many people do assume you are guaranteeing them safety from behind this imaginary “wall” protected from all ill effects from covid, and that is therefore recklessly poor science communication and endangering people’s health.
Or perhaps “immunity wall” is a deliberate choice of using a disinformation buzzword coming out some kind of a PR campaign via paid spokespeople to discourage any little bit of hesitancy around economic activity? I don’t know which but either way it’s problematic, and feeds the beast that demands sacrifices to The Economy, and creates a Public Health Debt.
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
An informative interview for anyone interested in organizing and mobilizing for political change.
Mass Protest Without Revolution | Vincent Bevins - The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder - Jan 21, 2024 Youtube Transcript: “this is kind of something we see across the decade even though the cases are very very different this is another problem is you see the sort of copying and pasting of tactics from one country to a very different country um where conditions are very different or indeed after it's become clear that in the original country that the tactic didn't even work out that well um but what often what happened in Brazil what happens uh in many places is that when this explosion happens this opportunity is because the protest itself especially the protest of this particular form an apparently spontaneous leaderless horizontally organized digitally coordinated format for protest because this particular type of protest cannot take advantage of the opportunity someone else does and that and that's often a very cynical or powerful actor existing Elites um powerful economic forces in society a foreign power that may use this as an excuse to launch the intervention that they've always been wanting to launch in this part of the world but now there's a power vacuum so they do it um and so I think yeah I think you're right to point to both sort of some ideological assumptions but also like the particular type of society that ended up discovering a clear desire to change the the global system but without the the organizational structures required to take advantage of what comes from this these explosions”
“Primarily disinformation is a problem of elites trying to trick everyday people into believing lies at scale. And so it’s not really about studying everyday people, but of studying up, studying power.”
— Joan Donovan on TecHype Jan 9, 2024 - CITRIS