💉 CDC ACIP public comment period about vaccines 📋 Petition to Biden for free covid tests 🧪 Library of Congress to collect pandemic stories
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention again propose another way of ending disease control and prevention.
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 - CDC ACIP meeting February 28, 2024, Written comments must be received between February 1–22, 2024.
AGENCY: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). ACTION: Notice and request for comment. SUMMARY: In accordance with regulatory provisions, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announces the following meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). This meeting is open to the public. Time will be available for public comment. DATES: The meeting will be held on February 28, 2024, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., EST and February 29, 2024, from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., EST, (times subject to change; see the ACIP website for updates: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/index.html). Written comments must be received between February 1–22, 2024.
People’s CDC has a sample comment with references.
USA Petition - TO: Biden Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, and Congress - Bring back FREE PCR tests and increase the number of free at-home COVID tests!
By MoveOn: “We're in the middle of another COVID surge—and we know that testing is crucial to keeping our friends and family healthy once we've been exposed. But, as it stands, tests are costly and can be hard to get. The Biden Administration created a program to send free antigen tests to Americans who make the request, but the current cap is 4 tests per household per month. That's not nearly enough. We need our government to give Americans the resources and tools necessary to effectively test and mitigate the spread of COVID.”
Tell the White House that CDC proposal to abandon disease control is reckless.
Feel free to take this graphic and post it elsewhere. Here are some social media links where I’ve posted it: tumblr - instagram - twitter - Telegram - Mastadon - Post - Bluesky
And here’s a petition I made: Petition: Tell the White House, people need to be able to stay home and isolate when sick.
🗞️ In the news
ABC NEWS Too many patients are catching COVID in Australian hospitals, doctors say. So why are hospitals rolling back precautions? By Hayley Gleeson Feb 10 2024 Twelve months later Australian hospitals have become a strange new battleground in the fight against COVID, with doctors and public health experts concerned that too many patients are catching the virus — and an alarming number are dying — as a result of inadequate infection control. Until recently, tools like contact tracing, testing, N95 respirators and good ventilation were mainstays of COVID management in healthcare settings. But in many hospitals they've been wound back or ditched in tandem with other community protections, putting patients and healthcare workers at risk and deterring others from seeking treatment.
Study: 'Appalling' U.S. Failure to Protect Frontline Workers During Pandemic — Lack of protections "created a perfect storm for vulnerable workers," researchers said by Katherine Kahn, Staff Writer, MedPage Today February 2, 2024 "From the outset, frontline workers were a factor in the spread of SARS-CoV-2, and they and others were made ill or died as a result of exposures at work," they wrote in The BMJopens in a new tab or window, in the first in a series of articles on lessons from the COVID pandemic in the U.S. Because Black, Hispanic, and immigrant workers are employed in many essential industries, such as healthcare, agricultural production, and public transportation, they were more likely to die from COVID than white workers. "Imagine if there were no Zoom, no telework, and the highly paid, politically powerful executives in finance and high-tech were required to come into the office every day," Michaels, who served as the assistant secretary of labor for the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) from 2009 to 2017 and was the longest serving administrator in OSHA's history, told MedPage Today. "I believe we would have seen a national clamor for stronger rules to protect workers. Instead, we mostly ignored the exposures that were occurring in workplaces and the most vulnerable workers paid the price."
Forbes - Hospitals Deny Immunocompromised Patients’ ADA Requests For Masks - Judy Stone Feb 13, 2024,12:45pm EST Doron Dorfman, L.L.B., J.S.D, a professor at Seton Hall Law School, described the hospital’s stance as “a little bit outrageous.” He explained, “But if the hospital's claim is that you cannot force a third person to do something to accommodate a person with a disability, that's absolutely false as well. So many courts accepted the idea of a no smoking policy that requires other people in the workplace not to smoke as an accommodation. It's very common to have people with food allergy that have an accommodation for other people not to bring allergic foods into the workplace or into school.” Similarly, regarding staff rights preempting that of the patient, Dorfman added, “There is not a right to refuse someone a disability accommodation.”
HEALTH CARE un-covered How the nursing home lobby uses it's political prowess to kill would-be regulations and line the industry's pockets TRUDY LIEBERMAN FEB 5, 2024 In her prepared remarks, the governor didn’t leave any ambiguity about whose side she was on, and Kauffman’s reporting shows she is not on the side of residents who have received bad or questionable care and their families who seek redress. The governor reminded the assembled nursing home executives of her efforts to loosen “regulatory barriers” and shield those companies from legal liability resulting from wrongful death claims and other lawsuits. “You’re not getting much help from the federal government, which apparently has never seen something it doesn’t like to regulate or mandate,” she told industry representatives. “I can’t control Washington’s approach, but I can promise this: In Iowa, you’ll continue to get the support you’re being denied in Washington.” What makes Kauffman’s story such a stand out is that he captured the unabashed money flow from the industry to the state’s politicians eager to take it. The Iowa Capital Dispatch reviewed legislation, federal tax returns, campaign contributions, inspection reports and audio recordings of industry lobbyists that reveal a tale of money and influence that affect the care received by elderly and disabled people in the state.
Huffpost - The Rudest Things You Can Do At The Doctor's Office. Etiquette experts break down the worst behaviors you may be doing in the waiting room. By Caroline Bologna Feb 5, 2024 If your medical appointment is not time-sensitive and is unrelated to your illness, then reschedule for when you’re not sick. Otherwise, put on a mask before you check in.
This is NOT fine
Making the modern hospital a medieval house of horrors for no good reason.
Someone reported being told in Melbourne Australia that getting covid is just a "risk of coming to hospital." It’s a preventable risk, but even some healthcare workers are literally telling patients that they won’t to do prevention, and that patients must simply put up with getting covid from the hospital.
This is not unprecedented. In olden days this was indeed a risk of going to a hospital. Not just a risk, but almost so guaranteed that often they would hold funeral masses as soon as someone entered the hospital with the assumption they would not be leaving.
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
"The Beanie's About To Pop": Tim Heidecker Explains Tim Pool's REALLY Crappy Episode Feb 10, 2024 The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder “you know with these guys uh there's a history of um you know anti vax anti mask perspective I think that's starting to affect their general hygiene and their general cleanliness in sort of a repudiation of germ theory if you will the idea of of course shall we say I don't want to say that he's not washing his hands but I mean that's what it sounds like yeah”
Library of Congress Launches New Website for Americans to Share COVID-19 Stories Release Date: 22 Jan 2024 | Library of Congress By creating a tool to collect and preserve Americans’ pandemic experiences, the Library of Congress is honoring those who lost loved ones to COVID-19, those who worked on the frontlines of the pandemic, and those who were, and continue to be, impacted during this unprecedented time in American history. “Curators and specialists at the Library of Congress are skilled at documenting history as it happens. Recording the voices and stories of Americans’ experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic for our national collections will honor this history and ensure these stories will not be forgotten,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. “We are proud to collaborate with StoryCorps on this important work to build this archive of oral histories.”
“It would be easy to say hey look you do your thing, I do my thing. But we have to understand what Christian Nationalism, how they view it - they view our thing as the second hand smoke that is poisoning them. So you see big megachurches that do something called spiritual mapping where they go around and they march around the city Colorado Springs and they pray in front of a strip club or a gay bar or something like that. Because they believe, and let’s take them seriously, they believe, they’re thinking oh this creates a culture and if that gay bar is there, it’s not just they’re doing their thing, it’s actually exuding. It’s a little bit like the anti-vaxxers idea that the vaccinated are somehow shedding poison.”
Jeff Sharlet on The Lincoln Project podcast, Feb 7, 2024