⚕️ CDC HICPAC: the personnel driving the policy 📍 People should not take medical advice from economists. 🚩
Postcard to Joe Biden: Promote layers of protection as recommended by People's CDC
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 Letter Campaign: It's Time to Support the Treat Long COVID Act as U.S. Disability Rates Hit an All-Time High!
By COVID-19 LONGHAULER ADVOCACY PROJECT, INC: We need your support to get the Treat Long COVID Act supported, in a bi-partisan fashion, across the nation. Millions need care, and assistance, which largely depends on medical documentation. The Treat Long COVID Act will help provide the framework we need to start moving forward with assistance and solutions for the Long COVID community, and beyond, improving patient outcomes.
A postcard to Joe Biden from Chloe in Scranton, the People’s CDC External Review of the CDC recommendation #4
I send postcards but one can also send these messages through the White House Contact Page.
🗞️ In the news
⚕️ For Patient Safety, It Is Not Time to Take Off Masks in Health Care Settings by Tara N. Palmore, MD and David K. Henderson, MD, 16 May 2023 In studies conducted during the pandemic, half to two thirds of health care personnel acknowledged working with symptoms of respiratory illness (5). Presenteeism has been well documented in health care–associated respiratory viral outbreaks (6), with various reasons proffered, including an unwillingness to place burdens on colleagues, a belief that some respiratory infections may be trivial, a fear of reprisal for absenteeism, a moral imperative to provide patient care, and, for those in some roles, a lack of paid sick leave. We can find no reason to believe these time-honored behaviors will change if masks come off.
🚨 MedPage Today - Sleep Apnea Patients Prone to Higher Long COVID Risk — Study suggests close monitoring of adults with obstructive sleep apnea. by Elizabeth Short, May 12, 2023 "People with sleep apnea who get infected with COVID should seek early treatment, pay attention to their symptoms, and keep up with their vaccines to lower the risk of infection in the first place."
💰 Important Context - Who is Funding the Brownstone Institute? New tax filings provide some clarity about the funders of the prolific COVID-19 conspiracy outfit. By WALKER BRAGMAN, JUL 24, 2023 A shadowy dark money group that has been waging information warfare on public health efforts to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic took big money from nonprofit foundations and funds in 2021, tax records reveal. Since its establishment in May 2021, the Brownstone Institute has become a prolific and central hub of COVID-related misinformation and conspiracy thinking. Brownstone authors, who include prominent public health contrarians and conspiracy theorists, and COVID minimizers, downplay the seriousness of the virus while hyping up concerns about the supposed harms of mitigation measures. The group has also encouraged anti-vaccine sentiment, platforming prominent vaccine skeptics and misinformation spreaders like Dr. Robert Malone and Naomi Wolf.
🇺🇸 Politico - DeSantis suggests he could pick RFK Jr. to lead the FDA or CDC. Kennedy, running for the Democratic presidential nomination, has taken heat from liberals for his views on vaccines and Covid. By ANDREW ZHANG, 07/26/2023 “If you’re president, sic him on the FDA if he’d be willing to serve. Or sic him on CDC,” DeSantis said, in response to a question about whether he would pick Kennedy as a running mate. “In terms of being veep, if there’s 70 percent of the issues that he may be averse to our base on, that just creates an issue.” Kennedy, who remains a long shot for the Democratic presidential nomination, has aired contentious views over vaccines, having questioned their effectiveness on several occasions. In the past few weeks, he came under sharp fire from liberals for suggesting that Covid was engineered to be less lethal to Asian and Jewish people. He has also been a critic of Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, commenting once that he would prosecute him if “crimes were committed.” It wasn’t long before DeSantis’ remarks were slammed by one of his Republican opponents. Former Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday evening called out DeSantis on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter — though it wasn’t RFK Jr.’s questionable vaccine rhetoric the former head of the White House’s coronavirus task force took issue with. “When I am President, I will only consider Pro-Life Americans to lead FDA, CDC, or HHS,” Pence said in his post. “To be clear, pro-abortion Democrats like RFK, Jr. would not even make the list.”
🇺🇸 ProPublica - The Student Protesters Were Arrested. The Man Who Got Violent in the Parking Lot Wasn’t. by Nicole Carr; May 13 2023 ProPublica has identified 59 people arrested or charged over an 18-month period as a result of turmoil at school board meetings across the country. The majority of the individuals railed against the adoption of mask mandates, the teaching of “divisive concepts” concerning racial inequity and the availability of books with LGBTQ+ themes in school libraries. Many of the people arrested were attempting to make a statement, narrating their interactions with police for their social-media followers. In some cases, they resorted to threats and violence.
This is NOT fine
Lambert Strether reviewed the personnel deciding CDC HICPAC guidelines for infection control in healthcare settings.
Naked Capitalism - CDC’s HICPAC Prepares to Whack More Patients as Infection Control Experts Gather for August 22 Teleconference on Masks - Posted on July 10, 2023 by Lambert Strether Personnel, after all, is policy!
Some in the committee pre-date the pandemic and appear to have been appointed to the committee in the Trump era, having started their terms in 2018 and 2019.
Of course I did my own “review” of Erica Shenoy, who started her term in 2023, and her stance is bad enough, let alone to have Trump era people. I don’t think it’s appropriate for her to be on the CDC HICPAC committee for multiple reasons.
Beware the comments section on that Naked Capitalism post. There’s someone who does a gish gallop of covid contrarian talking points including an ad hominem attack on Lambert Strether, suggesting it’s ego and fear that leads to the idea that healthcare settings should implement infection control. Suggesting someone is mentally ill in some way for promoting common sense caution is a well-worn anti-vax trope and used also by climate contrarians.
Registration is open for the CDC HICPAC meeting on August 2022. The meetings are not broadcast, and the meeting minutes are not posted in a timely fashion either.
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
There was a California ruling that denied a worker suing their employer because when they got covid at work it led to a family member getting covid. This is bad, and the reasoning (to protect businesses) was offensive, but the outcome was not surprising since the ADA accommodation law works the same way - it pertains to the disabled worker not their family members.
But it’s important to emphasize that this ruling was not about workers filing workers comp for themselves. California has limitations on filing workers comp for covid too, but it varies by state. And you definitely won’t get compensated if you never try.
The right-wing really likes everyone boosting this story on social media because it’s going to confuse people, possibly enough to prevent them considering filing a workers comp claim when it makes sense to at least try.
The Brian Lehrer Show, Supreme Court Rules Against the Teamsters, Jun 1, 2023
“That's one of the things that I always talk about with conservative rulings is that they're designed to cause confusion in the law because they're designed to make people afraid of accessing their rights. Like that's actually the point so that you don't know where the danger is coming, where the lawsuit is coming. We see this in the abortion situation right where we're simply - even people who still have, should have, some access to reproductive health care, don't know if they can get access - doctors don't know - and that confusion and fear is actually part of the conservative crusade against rights in this country.” - Elie Mystal
People should not take medical advice from economists. If you have a cough, you should seek medical advice from a healthcare provider, and if you test positive for covid at home, you should be asking your doctor if you could be treated with Paxlovid, and getting a professional evaluation to determine if your symptoms are indicative of a need for further care, determined by your doctor based on your health situation. Paxlovid is recommended for everyone with a risk condition, and everyone over 65 definitely falls into that category, and technically everyone over 50. I say this because Dean Baker tweeted out that people should have copays to dissuade people from seeking medical care for coughs. When pressed on this, he said he took a home test when he had covid, and hand waved it away as if nobody else needs to go to the doctor for covid. As if the hospitals overflowing and the morgue trucks never happened. As if he’s unaware of the people dying in America of covid every week, including nursing home WORKERS. People still die of covid and nothing has changed about the dangers of getting infected, only the politics changed, where liberals have been swung to the right on public health, and that people are being told to accept the deaths and the risks. Young healthy energetic people, like Physics Girl, have gotten profound Long Covid conditions. Many people have risk conditions they don’t even know about yet - that’s why they call diabetes and high blood pressure “silent killers” after all. So nobody really knows for sure how serious it could be. Also, if you have any cough that hasn’t been diagnosed to determine the cause, you should be seeking medical advice to diagnose it. Ignoring a cough can lead to failing to get timely treatment for serious conditions like thyroid cancer or lung cancer, or untreated GERD which puts you at risk for cancer.
“There are 2 messages for public health officials to continue to communicate with the public about covid-19. One, is to remind people covid-19 is still a risk. It’s still a threat. It’s still a danger especially for the people who are unvaccinated. Nowadays people kind of gotten tired of the covid-19. But even if we are tired of the pandemic, the pandemic is still there. That is one message that the public health official wants to deliver to say that well the risk is still there and we still have to wear a mask we still have to be vaccinated. It’s necessary. The second on the survey we asked people if the regular booster becomes available will you take that? Only 1/3 of people said they are willing to do so. That number is low. So I think the CDC or any public officials need to do more work to promote the vaccine. Say the vaccines are safe, the vaccines are necessary, especially for people who are older, people who are vulnerable. If the annual regular booster becomes available, you need to take that.”
— Feng Hao on GovExec Daily podcast