📧Tell Sen. Gillibrand we're not in the good place!📝Petition, Sweden, Infection-proof the schools!📚WEBINAR: The U.S. HIV Community in the Time of COVID, Long COVID & Monkeypox🖥️
The Equity Schools Policy Plan and The People's Public Health Conference
Contents:
- Events, Actions, & Campaigns
- Pandemic field notes & “Living with the virus”
- In the News (virus & adjacent media)
- This is NOT Fine section (gaslighting & other outrages)
- He(a)rd Scuttlebutt (the pandemic grapevine)
SWEDEN
Petition: Utsätt inte våra barn för fara! Smittsäkra skolorna NU!
Det finns jättemycket man kan göra för att skolorna ska vara säkra platser för våra barn och lärare att vistas på! VARFÖR ska Sverige som ensamt land inte agera tillräckligt med att smittskydda i skolorna?
(Petition: Don't put our children in danger! Infection-proof the schools NOW! There is a lot that can be done to ensure that schools are safe places for our children and teachers to stay! WHY should Sweden, as a single country, not do enough to protect against infection in schools?)
https://www.change.org/p/magdalena-andersson-uts%C3%A4tt-inte-v%C3%A5ra-barn-f%C3%B6r-fara-smitts%C3%A4kra-skolorna-nu
WEBINAR: Supporting Community and Ourselves:
The U.S. HIV Community in the Time of COVID, Long COVID and Monkeypox
Thursday, September 15, 2022, 6:30 - 8 pm Eastern / 3:30 - 5 pm Pacific
Registration open: bit.ly/S4HIwebinar2
USA
The People's Public Health Conference
https://www.thepeoplespublichealth.org/
Equity Schools Policy Plan
A group of public health people released a plan called: Equity Schools Policy Plan: Supporting healthy, inclusive, in-person schools. It would be a huge improvement over what’s being done in most schools. About the only school I’ve heard of with apparently excellent pandemic mitigation spending is the fancy school district where Rochelle Walensky and Ashish Jha sent their kids.
🗞️ In the news
🔥 Waging Nonviolence: There’s no place for burnout in a burning world by Charlie Wood (This battle can deflect our attention from the opportunities we can seize now to build a better world. It can also push us towards quick results and short term plans. Thinking that a five-year, let alone 12-month, plan will turn around a crisis that has been caused by man-made systems of oppression — cemented over centuries and millennia — is not only misguided, it sets us up for constant failure.)
🇨🇦 CTV News: Expert predicts 'massive eighth wave' after Ont. lifts COVID isolation rules (Zoutman urged people to continue to wear masks in indoor settings, warning that COVID-19 is a serious illness that "affects every organ in your body." He also cautioned that people remain infectious "for at least ten days after your symptoms" and that wide spread of the virus could have profound implications on critical services like the health-care system and first responders.)
🇺🇸 NJ.com: Lies about deaths, orders not to wear masks: Lawsuits by staff allege chaos in N.J. veterans homes as COVID soared. by Ted Sherman (One nurse at the New Jersey Veterans Memorial at Menlo Park said she was ordered not to wear a mask because it would “scare the patients” — even as the first deaths from COVID-19 began stalking nursing homes across the country. When she went to Walmart to buy fabric to make her own, she said was threatened that “there could be consequences” for violating the facility’s no-mask mandate.)
🇺🇸 WKRN: MNPS board members raise COVID concerns as 100+ teachers test positive by Mye Owens (“If a teacher is not feeling well and they don’t have any more sick days, there’s a chance they may not test at all because then they would be eating through the very little sick days that they have.” The MNEA advocates for teachers and staff, and says it has become a growing problem. “We have hundreds and hundreds of new teachers to the district, and some of them are brand new, some of them have transferred from out of state, of course, those people have not had time to accumulate sick days,” Duran explained.)
🇯🇵 BBC Trending Podcast: The strange story of QAnon in Japan (Its latest incarnation is a group called Yamato Q, which embraces a series of wild and false claims. Its members believe they have different genes from the rest of the population and that Covid-19 does not exist. Some have even attempted to disrupt vaccination centres. So should wider society be concerned?)
🇺🇸 County News Center: Tuberculosis Case Reported In Transit Rider By Tracy DeFore, County of San Diego Communications Office (A passenger using the Metropolitan Transit System (MTS) has been diagnosed with infectious pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) according to San Diego County Health and Human Services Agency (HHSA). HHSA is working with MTS officials to notify individuals who were possibly exposed.)
🇺🇸 The Hill: White House effort to stave off fall COVID surge with new boosters faces uphill battle by Nathaniel Weixel (“Why do I need a new vaccine related to a virus that essentially my government has told me is no longer an issue?”)
🇺🇸 The Philadelphia Inquirer: ‘Our Super Bowl’: It’s the first day for 114,000 Philly students (archive link) (Students and staff were masked Monday, and will continue to wear masks for the first 10 days of the school year.)
🇺🇸 Anita Dunn finally discloses her corporate clients by Caitlin Oprysko (In the past two years, Dunn advised AT&T, Lyft, Pfizer, Micron, Intra-Cellular Therapies, Salesforce and Reddit, the disclosures show. — Dunn also did consulting work for the renewables trade group American Clean Power Association, Melinda French Gates’ investment outlet Pivotal Ventures, the Center for American Progress’ advocacy arm and the Ford Foundation, in addition to political campaigns like President Joe Biden’s.)
This is NOT fine
We’re not in the good place.
@NickReisman:
Sen. Gillibrand on whether Congress will re-up funding for free COVID test kits: "I don't think so. I think the president decided we're in a good place right now. We've really gotten over the hump of COVID and I certainly have been able to buy home test kits in CVS anytime I go."
Meanwhile
from @ASlavitt:
What I learned yesterday: If there is another Omicron this winter, we will not have nearly enough tests for the public. US manufacturing of testing is shutting down. This is a result of Republicans deciding not to fund the pandemic response, We know this going in.
And
from @sri_srikrishna:
In order to fund booster vaccines the federal government had to divert funds from replenishing the strategic national stockpile of N95 and rapid tests according to Dr. Ashish Jha
People are blaming Republicans for a crisis, but we have blue state Democratic Senators who are completely oblivious that there’s any reason for concern, and the President could be using the Defense Production Act for N95s, PCRs, & RATS but is messaging erroneously that we’re no longer in danger. I don’t get it.
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt…
The latest long covid resource directory doc put out by the U.S. government makes it seem like the current administration operates from the view their job having come into power during a pandemic disaster shit show, as hopping on a rolling dumpster fire & assuming their job was to keep the fire going & the dumpster rolling.
I heard Temple University in Philadelphia has started the semester without precautions now. At least Philly public schools decided on a mask mandate for the first 10 days. Should prove to be a terrible experiment when they unmask.
RSBN coverage of the Trump rally in Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania included interviewing someone who was pushing a drug repeatedly proven to be ineffective. There was no correction or pushback by the reporter.
Ken Klippenstein pointed out on twitter that even with Biden as President, the U.S. Federal Reserve is led by a registered Republican appointed by Trump who appears to be manufacturing a recession because, word is, joblessness could help companies “bring people back in the office … where they want them.”
Chief Scientist, World Health Organization: “We need to prepare for large increases in cardiovascular, neurological & mental health disorders in countries affected by the #SARSCoV2 #pandemic”
Someone on twitter, who later locked their account, mentioned that their primary care doctor thinks it’s “a mental health issue” to want to wear an N95 at the hospital visits. Meanwhile I hear regularly about people catching covid at the hospital and about hospital workers working with active infections. To stop nosocomial spread, people must be told where it’s happening and be held accountable for it.
I’m seeing repeatedly people reporting on twitter that people they know appear to be unaware or in denial of their long covid status & symptoms. It sure doesn’t help that doctors themselves are in denial or maybe unaware of the signs and symptoms. Some people are just hesitant to use the term.
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."
— Carl Sagan, 1995