📝 Letter campaign to end colliding pandemic nightmares ✊ Letter campaign for railroad workers who deserve sick leave 🩺 National Nurses United speaks truth on viral outbreaks 🦠
FORGOTTEN BUT NOT GONE: On World AIDS Day, People with HIV, Long COVID and ME/CFS Protest Biden’s Pandemics Neglect, Urge Funding from Congress in Demonstration Outside the White House
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: Email President Biden and Congress: End Colliding Pandemic Nightmares
Join us to demand Congress fund critical global and domestic health measures to keep our communities safe. We are in the crosshairs of colliding global and domestic pandemics: HIV, Long COVID and ME/CFS, COVID-19, Ebola, cholera, monkeypox, TB, and more.
By ME Action
https://act.meaction.net/page/46585/action/1
USA Open Letter: Tell Congress: #FundPandemicPlans!
Open Letter to President Biden, Speaker Pelosi, and Senator Schumer, We urge you to take swift action, as the situation will only become more dire. Our current catastrophe was preventable. But it won’t be prevented from happening again unless the U.S. pandemic response makes some drastic changes.
By Strategies for High Impact
https://actionnetwork.org/forms/tell-congress-fundpandemicplans-sign-on-to-the-open-letter
USA: Letter Campaign: Tell Congress: Railroad workers deserve fair pay and time off
Workers currently get no sick leave and are on-call 7 days per week, year round.
By More Perfect Union
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-railroad-workers-deserve-fair-pay-and-time-off
FORGOTTEN BUT NOT GONE: On World AIDS Day, People with HIV, Long COVID and ME/CFS Protest Biden’s Pandemics Neglect, Urge Funding from Congress in Demonstration Outside the White House
December 1, 2022
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
In an unprecedented on-site and virtual World AIDS Day protest, people with HIV united with chronically ill and disabled people with Long COVID, myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS), and others, in a rally today outside the White House. Together, they decried President Biden’s neglect of chronic pandemics that are disabling and killing millions of people around the world. Protesters demanded that President Biden and Congress fund critical global and domestic health measures, including those in the current supplemental funding bill and a $750 million increase in fiscal year 2023 for the global President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and sustain the domestic COVID public health emergency that has brought healthcare access to 15 million people in the United States.
After a short procession to the White House, protesters staged a die-in with gravestones and chalk outlines representing people lost to global pandemics and those whose lives are at risk, abandoned by Biden and Congress. The protest featured speakers directly impacted by COVID, HIV, Long COVID and ME/CFS telling their stories, and those of people worldwide who are unable to attend due to pandemic-induced chronic illness, disability and lack of COVID precautions for travelers. The virtual action included a live stream, making the protest accessible to everyone, wherever they were located, and an online action delivering messages to policymakers.
🗞️ In the news
🇦🇺 DPS Publishing: Vigil against COVID demands Government action to protect the medically vulnerable by Anna Christian (“We are demanding better - alongside the aged, health worker, educators, the unemployed and low-income people who are victims of putting lives before profits,” says Mr Wallace. He urged the Government to pay attention to the disability community’s call to action and to take on board suggestions in the White Paper on COVID, which was issued by Advocacy for Inclusion.)
🇺🇸 Economic Policy Institute: Over 60% of low-wage workers still don’t have access to paid sick days on the job by Elise Gould (There is also huge variation in access to paid sick days across the private sector. Full-time workers are much more likely to have paid sick days than part-time workers (86% vs. 51%). Unionized workers have greater access to paid sick days than nonunion workers (87% vs. 76%). At 96% access, workers in management, business, and financial occupations have higher rates than any other occupation category. Services occupations have the least at 62%. Across industrial sectors, paid sick leave also varies greatly…)
🚂 Payday Report: Progressives Fold on Railroad Deal – 115,000 British Postal Workers Strike – Literary Agents Back HarperCollins Strikers By Mike Elk (Many union leaders hoped that progressives would refuse to implement the tentative agreement unless the original bill was modified into one bill so that the Senate was forced to approve of seven paid sick days. However, Congressional democrats allowed the matter to be split into two separate measures with Senate Republicans likely to filibuster the paid seven days.)
🇺🇸 NJ.com: Bring back virtual learning for N.J. kids, these parents say as they rev up fight for remote option By Jackie Roman (New Jersey Parents for Virtual Choice, a grassroots group started during the pandemic, is not asking local schools to return to the days of teachers trying to simultaneously teach kids in the classroom and students online. Instead, the group wants a permanent, free virtual public school program or online charter schools similar to those offered in other states. The group says parents should be able to opt into a virtual school for any reason, including their kids’ health problems, emotional issues, bullying at school or other family circumstances.)
🩺 National Nurses United: Increased RSV infections are not due to “immunity debt,” but failure to protect public health (“RSV and other respiratory viruses are significantly more severe this year due to a complete abandonment of public health measures that have helped protect the public from Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses,” said Deborah Burger, RN and a president of National Nurses United (NNU). “The lack of public health protections and the impact of Covid infections, reinfections, and long Covid are likely contributing to the significant impact of RSV on young children and infants. Promoting the idea of ‘immunity debt’ is not only unscientific, it is harmful to the public’s health.”)
ℹ️ ‘Immunity debt’ is a misguided and dangerous concept, There is no evidence that an individual is worse off for having avoided earlier infection By Anjana Ahuja (archive link) (The discussion swirling around immunity debt shows how easy it is for a plausible-sounding theory to circulate as misinformation. In this case, misinformation risks promoting the unfounded assertion that infections are clinically beneficial to children, as well as feeding the revisionist narrative that Covid measures did more harm than good.)
💵 Boston Globe: Long COVID took their health. Then it took their money. By Dana Gerber (archive link) (Long COVID is not only having a profound impact on the health and financial stability of patients, but on the US economy as well, adding to the nation’s already acute labor shortage. A report from the Brookings Institution in August estimated that anywhere from 2 million to 4 million people are not able to work because of it, with the toll in lost wages ranging from $105 billion a year to $230 billion. “Unfortunately, the costs are huge,” said David Cutler, a Harvard University economics professor who conducted a separate analysis that estimated the long-range costs of the illness to be $3.7 trillion. That includes lost earnings, higher medical care costs, and an accounting for a reduction in quality of life. He likened the economic toll to the Great Recession, and said that if current trends continue, “it really would be very, very big for the economy at large.”)
This is NOT fine
The statement that CDC made for World AIDS Day is not "Let's stop covid so it doesn't disrupt stuff like HIV testing, and lead to people being harder hit with HIV" but instead pushing "don't let covid precautions disrupt HIV testing just go out and get exposed to covid now" which is incredibly bad especially if the person already has HIV and is high risk and SARS-COV-2 is still circulating, still killing people, and still a substantial current threat to everyone - a point that seems to be lost in the CDC messaging and World AIDS Day statement where they talk about it in the past tense!
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
There are no “good viruses” so anyone who’s telling you that you need to be exposed to viruses to get the “good ones” is repeating misinformation. Granted, the misinformation is sometimes, as National Nurses United pointed out, coming from the CDC. But while the CDC may still have some good science data by good scientists, the messaging apparatus has been politically compromised.
Pandemic influencer, and mom cooer and soother, Katelyn Jetelina is now engaged as a communication consultant for the CDC. Meanwhile the CDC is cutting actual staffing of local public health departments.
Mike the Mad Biologist blog has come out with a post We Should Be Masking Now, saying, “I’ll be crass enough to point out the midterms are over, so let’s not worry about what the anti-maskers think (and to the extent it distracts many of those same assholes from being shitty towards LBGTQ people, that’s good too).” Which are good points. But since the midterms are over, it looks like the powers that be are still willing to sacrifice humans in the name of the Christmas shopping economy.
My other Substack Newsletter,
, was recently featured on BoingBoing, with kind words in: BoingBoing: Pandemic Memes Collection helps you laugh when you want to cry by Jennifer Sandlin
"One online analyst put it simply - angry people click. “It meant that the radical fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the power to change the world. Instead it became a fuel that fed the systems of power making them ever more powerful.” — Adam Curtis, Hypernormalisation 2016