📚 COVID Safe Campus announces Ambassador Program 📝 Letter Campaign: Tell elected reps: Maintain healthcare coverage 🇸🇪 Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment
WaPo headline, example of leading with the truth: “Extensive review affirms covid booster is safe after system flagged risk”
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)
US advocacy program: COVID Safe Campus announces Campus Ambassador Program
To support student-led COVID safety and disability advocacy initiatives. Through the Campus Ambassador Program, CSC will provide student advocates resources to foster community care, effective peer health education, and disability-led advocacy. Applications are available through Google Forms and in PDF or Word doc formats. Due by: January 20th, 2023 at 11:59pm PST / 2:59am EST
https://www.covidsafecampus.org/ambassadors
USA Letter Campaign: Tell elected reps: Maintain healthcare coverage , we need robust public health infrastructure.
President Biden and Members of Congress, Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic, we need you to treat the pandemic like the ongoing public health emergency it is. We need you to embrace a comprehensive approach to public health based on layers of protection and public policies aimed at protecting the most vulnerable people among us.
by People’s CDC
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/maintain-healthcare
WaPo headline, example of leading with the truth:
“Extensive review affirms covid booster is safe after system flagged risk”
Unfortunately a lot of publications appear to have opted to lead with the lie - just asking questions in their headlines, and have now spread confusion among a lot of people who only ever see the headlines.
I found this list on a twitter thread by @BernieDogs4 who wonders if some media outlets are using the vaccine disinfo propaganda to propel clicks for their own headlines, and speculates about why government entities could possibly allow this misinformation extravaganza.
There’s a White House Contact Form where I have written to complain that the public should be provided with accurate information
🗞️ In the news
Good Housekeeping: Experts Say These Face Masks Provide the Best Protection During the Tripledemic. With respiratory viruses on the rise, it's time to mask up once more — and these respirators provide the most protection you can buy. By Zee Krstic Published: Jan 7, 2023 (The best protection against crowded, poorly ventilated public spaces is provided by N95 respirators, namely those that meet manufacturing guidelines for efficacy set by industry regulators — and those officially regulated by the CDC's National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). These respirators provide a protective edge over other kinds of face masks because they filter out 95% of large and small airborne particles around you.)
WebMD: Gene Associated With Vision Loss Also Linked to COVID: Study Written by Lisa O’Mary Jan. 5, 2022 (Researchers have found a genetic link between the risk for COVID-19 infection and the leading cause of vision loss among people age 50 and older, called age-related macular degeneration. The findings show that COVID and AMD were associated with variations in what is called the PDGFB gene, which has a role in new blood vessel formation and is linked to abnormal blood vessel changes that occur in AMD.)
Nature: Life expectancy changes since COVID-19 by Jonas Schöley, José Manuel Aburto, Ilya Kashnitsky, Maxi S. Kniffka, Luyin Zhang, Hannaliis Jaadla, Jennifer B. Dowd & Ridhi Kashyap Published: 17 October 2022 (The COVID-19 pandemic led to global increases in mortality and declines in period LE that are without precedent over the past 70 years.)
This is NOT fine
I have been meaning to read this book and review it, but have not yet, so instead I’ll include an excerpt of a review by anthropologist Martha Lincoln. (You can find the full review in the preface of the book, which is available for free to read.)
Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment
Edited By Sigurd Bergmann, Martin Lindström
“Its interdisciplinary contributors illuminate a wide array of inputs – sociological, historical, cultural, and political – to the so-called ‘Swedish way.’ As they show, Sweden’s pandemic failures have drawn on a constellation of institutional failures: in media, in crisis management, in health care, in public health, and in national scientific research institutes.Presented without fear or favor, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment should prompt a reckoning in Swedish society. This meticulously documented account will also be a model for researchers elsewhere, inspiring comparative analysis of pandemic strategies that have underperformed in other global settings.” — Martha Lincoln, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at San Francisco State University and author of Epidemic Politics in Vietnam: Public Health and the State (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021)
[Sigurd Bergmann.Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment]
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
Of course masks protect the wearer. N95s were specifically designed to protect the person wearing it. Someone reported seeing a new psych doctor who revealed his ignorance on masking — he thinks masks don’t protect the wearer of the mask. Who does he think painters and asbestos removal workers are protecting? The same concept applies to anything floating in the air.
Lots of vaccine disinformation being pushed on all platforms. It’s really obvious on twitter these days. Sometimes the disinformation is subtle and merely confusing. A lot of propaganda is designed specifically to just create confusion. The bad actors don’t need to convince people there’s a problem, they just need to sew doubt and confusion to disrupt the vaccine drive.
The gaslighting is sometimes coming from inside the house. If you’re in a “still coviding” Facebook group for example that’s promoting a “respect all choices” approach to public health, you might be in a propaganda spin zone. No, we don’t have to “respect all choices” - if we did, there would be no courts or prisons, and no unlisted phone numbers, door locks would’ve never been invented either.
“You need to work with communities and you need to give them accurate information. That is my ongoing criticism of the CDC across all these years.”
— Mindy Thompson Fullilove on WBUR