Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee. The August 22-23, 2024 HICPAC meeting will be a virtual meeting. The Submission Period for Requests to Make an Oral Public Comment is July 26, 2024, through 11:59 p.m. August 12, 2024. CDC staff will notify individuals regarding their request to speak by email on August 16, 2024. Fill out the form below to submit a request.
Note: Time listed by CDC are likely to be US Eastern Daylight Time since the CDC is in Atlanta.
There does not seem to be any way to submit written comments to HICPAC at this time.
Information alone is not enough. The levers of power don’t work themselves.
I have been ringing this bell for years now - saying that people with sense and reason and credentials should be publishing science, studies, and articles. On the side of the humans. In promotion of asserting the benefits of public health and protecting the public good. The landscape has unfortunately been overrun with people who’ve had to retract their papers, pushing quack covid cures, and anti-vax nonsense. So by all means, let the good publishing flow. We need more.
However, I’ve seen some people think that this is a solution in and of itself. That is false. And promoting hopium like that is dangerous. I know that the dearest thing people wish-cast is for some champion to come along and make people do the right thing, the fantasy that if only everyone could just “wake up” and be convinced by facts to do the right thing.... This is not how power works, it’s not how society works, it’s not how public safety is achieved. There have been no excuses all along. Yes, more data and more science and more professional voices speaking out and explaining the reality can help and should be happening. I’m all for flooding the zone with better stuff. But I keep seeing people claiming that evidence being published itself will lead to improvement by putting pressure on health administrators.
It’s like everyone’s waiting for something to happen after this study. Hope is always just around the corner. But this is hopium. The evidence has been clear for years. The healthcare administrators simply don’t care. (Or they care more about the bean counters.) There’s no revelation that’s magically going to make some tipping point where businesses suddenly do the right thing. The pressure needs to come from the public demanding regulations from the government which can punish them with financial hits that are higher than the desired cost of doing business, or have executives get jail time for failing to protect people in ways that have been well-established for years now.
The New York Times - The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food - By Michael Moss - Feb. 20, 2013 What I found, over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort — taking place in labs and marketing meetings and grocery-store aisles — to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive. I talked to more than 300 people in or formerly employed by the processed-food industry, from scientists to marketers to C.E.O.’s. Some were willing whistle-blowers, while others spoke reluctantly when presented with some of the thousands of pages of secret memos that I obtained from inside the food industry’s operations. What follows is a series of small case studies of a handful of characters whose work then, and perspective now, sheds light on how the foods are created and sold to people who, while not powerless, are extremely vulnerable to the intensity of these companies’ industrial formulations and selling campaigns.
Studies alone do not change anything by merely existing. Expert explanations do not change the way businesses operate. Information alone is not a panacea.
We the people need to take this information and do the pressure part.
The good news is that if the Peanut Butter Grandma with her newsletter and a group of informed activists changed the course of the food industry way back when. So we can surely make changes now. Change happens all the time. Don’t wait for everybody, and definitely don’t wait hoping some published study will change everything on its own. Speak up to those who have the power to change things. Don’t get caught up wasting too much time in busy work activism or social media hype trains that only benefit the platforms and maybe the reputations of some hyped people, or exist to sell products or pump up stocks.
Digital Drought: 23 Million Americans Left Disconnected After ACP Ended The pandemic-era program expired in May, and provided low-income families with $30 to $75 monthly for home internet. Joe Supan Aug. 1, 2024 - CNET "I was thinking that it's something I'm going to have for years," Jackson said. "When you're on a fixed budget and you're constantly trying to save dollars here and there, that $30 is necessary." In Benton's survey, 56% of low-income households said a monthly bill up to $75 was too expensive; the average monthly internet bill they reported was $66.53. In other words, there's very little wiggle room for these households before internet costs become unaffordable. "The ACP helped close the digital divide, but it also addressed this issue of subscription vulnerability," John Horrigan, senior fellow at the Benton Institute, told CNET. "I think it's sometimes underappreciated how the ACP has helped with maintaining connectivity among low-income households, lessening this falling off the network from time to time due to economic issues."
The Washington Post - When private equity buys a hospital, assets shrink, new research finds The study comes as U.S. regulators investigate the industry’s profit-taking and its effect on patient care. By Peter Whoriskey July 30, 2024 at 11:00 a.m. EDTFederal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan said the agency will investigate “strip-and-flip tactics and other financial plays that can enrich executives but leave the American public worse off. … When private equity firms buy out health-care facilities only to slash staffing and cut quality, patients lose out.” The American Investment Council on Monday continued to defend the role of private equity in U.S. health care. “While we were unable to review this study before publication, the reality is that private equity plays a limited role in the health-care sector,” according to a statement from its spokesperson. “When it is used, private capital helps drive medical innovation, increase access to care, and improve local communities.” Private equity firms, which pool money from wealthy investors, financial firms and pensions funds, buy up companies and typically seek to sell them again within about 10 years. They have spent hundreds of billions buying up hospitals and today, more than 450 U.S. hospitals are owned by private equity firms, according to the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a watchdog group.
CIDRAP - Cannabis use linked to worse COVID-19 outcomes Stephanie Soucheray, MA June 21, 2024"What we found is that cannabis use is not harmless in the context of COVID-19. People who reported yes to current cannabis use, at any frequency, were more likely to require hospitalization and intensive care than those who did not use cannabis," said senior study author Li-Shiun Chen, MD, MPH, ScD, in a press release from Washington University School of Medicine. The study, based on outcomes among 72,501 people seen for COVID-19 at centers in a major Midwestern healthcare system during the first 2 years of the pandemic, offers an important take on the risks associated with cannabis use, especially in comparison to tobacco use.
This is NOT fine
I keep hearing about pandemic related staffing shortages.
(This is what I wrote to my representatives in government. Feel free to use it for your own letters.)
Workplaces, including government workplaces, are having chronic staffing problems because of people being out sick with covid, or with covid complications. It's hard to understand why testing and masking and vaccination was considered unsustainable, but these chronic staffing shortages are considered sustainable. They’re not. Either the government needs to do something to require covid mitigation OR needs to at least require employers, including government employers, to hire more staff to cover the inevitable pandemic-related absences. Something's gotta give here because the workplace situations are not getting better.
Unionizing is a good idea. Just sayin.
There’s reason to think that employers are not hiring when they ought to be and know they ought to be. Companies are posting “ghost jobs” to make the people being overworked believe help will be coming. I’ve been hearing about this for a couple of years now. The employers admitted it to a ResumeBuilder.com employer survey.
Stacie Haller: “So what they told us was, many of them are posting jobs so their own employees feel like oh we’re hiring more and you won’t have to work so hard. The workers are coming into the rescue. Or, they’re telling us they want you to believe the company is growing and expanding, when it’s not.”
Hiring managers are reported to be happy to have some power back in the job market, and are pleased with the results of their fake job postings, so they’re probably not going away.
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
Doctors are humans who have biases and need guardrails.
Someone invited a right-wing “anti-woke” politician to speak at the American College of Emergency Physicians' (ACEP) leadership meeting, no doubt to spout nonsense about DEI in medical schools as a dog whistle. If you think healthcare isn’t political, think again. This is a member of congress who has been against military personnel being vaccinated. Vaccines are standard in the military, and you would think that they would be concerned about having an army that’s done under by a virus. And if good people in healthcare don’t stand up and “get political” - they leave it to their highly political weirdo colleagues who are bought by corporations, corrupted by political influences, or actually just believe in fantastically bizarre conspiracy fictions.
On The New Abnormal podcast, Ed Zitron explains that the Silicon Valley tycoons haven’t just become right-wing recently, they’ve been right-wing all along, and points out how many of them were covid contrarians from the get go, and bought into the lockdown hysteria — just like the trucker convoy MAGA people.
PSA: Social media only science is problematic. I make sure to find out who someone is and what their expertise is, when evaluating assertions made on social media posts. Sometimes people with no expertise or expertise in another field may make bold assertions but it’s not necessarily foolproof. I’m wary if the computations used, or the science being described, is not published anywhere else or explained anywhere else, or if it’s asserted by people possibly using pseudonyms or anonymous accounts. Or people who are famous only from being on social media.
Simply put, the product defense machine cooks the books. And if the first recipe doesn't pan out with the desired results, they commission a new effort, and try again. I describe this strategy as manufacturing doubt or manufacturing uncertainty."
