😷Mask Advocates are Connecting, get involved📝Letter to POTUS: CDC should do its job☝️Infrapolitics is also activism🌅
This week on Twitter: Alarming scientific studies, docs endure censoring "glitches", and more roaring 20s super spreader conventions, this time the microbial scientists are under the strobe lights!
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)
Letter to POTUS: The CDC is supposed to CONTROL & PREVENT disease
Join me in writing to President Joe Biden and demanding that the CDC do its job properly. Use this automated form or copy & paste the letter or write your own and send it with the White House contact form.
Mask Advocacy Groups
Senior and Disability Action (SDA) in California
DC Families for Covid Safer Schools
Massachusetts Coalition for Health Equity
Mandate Masks NY
If you know of any others pressing for local mask requirements in the U.S., help get them get connected to MandateMasksUS.org
Essential Services Need Mask Requirements
A letter to send to government representatives, healthcare providers, transit authorities, store managers, and community leaders.
Use the automated form to write to reps in US & Canada, or use the letter to send to whoever you need to.
👍😲 « politics & infrapolitics » 🤫✌️
People sometimes seem to be viewing action as a zero sum game. And yet nobody has a whole solution, because nothing is ever that simple anyway. The truth is we need both politics and infrapolitics. We need both political action and community action.
Because it remains true, none of us are safe until we’re all safe. Everyone is just one diagnosis away from being part of “certain vulnerable populations” who needs dangerous healthcare in a hospital where nosocomial spread is rampant and we can’t even know about it because it’s hidden from us.
In 1985, “everyday resistance” was introduced by Scott in the book “Weapons of the Weak” to describe a different kind of resistance, one that is not as dramatic or visible as rebellions, riots, demonstrations, revolutions, civil war and other such organized, collective or confrontational articulations of resistance. According to Scott, everyday resistance is quiet, dispersed, disguised or otherwise seemingly invisible to elites, the state or mainstream society — something he sometimes also calls “infrapolitics.”
Over the years, Scott has shown through his research how certain common behavior of subordinated groups — for example, foot-dragging, escape, sarcasm, passivity, laziness, repeated misunderstandings, disloyalty, slander, avoidance or theft — is not always what it seems to be. Instead it can productively be understood as “resistance.”
🗞️ In the news
🔥 The Nation: Stop Telling Americans That They’re “Tired of Covid” by Martha Lincoln (Shifting responsibility for the pandemic onto individuals is bad policy—and risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom.)
🇺🇸 CNN Health: Biden administration will stop buying Covid-19 vaccines, treatments and tests as early as this fall, Jha says By Brenda Goodman ("My hope is that in 2023, you're going to see the commercialization of almost all of these products.”)
🌩️ The Hill: CDC promises to end disruption; its new guidance won’t do it by Anne N Sosin and Ranu Dhillon (COVID-19 also leads to Long COVID for some, disproportionately puts marginalized communities at risk and causes disruptions to schools, workplaces and critical industries, such as airlines.”)
📰 Columbia Journalism Review: The growing culture of censorship by PIO By Kathryn Foxhall (a number of journalists readily say in private that they don’t fight the restrictions on their coverage due to a well-founded fear that agencies will block access for them, or even for their whole outlet. {…} “This is part and parcel of an, if not authoritarian drift in American politics,” Vergano says, “a dangerous one in terms of democracy.”)
❤️🔥 Maarten Steenhagen: Loathe fascism? Then don’t be a health supremacist (“At the heart of health supremacism is a piece of fantasy: that there is such a thing as a ‘naturally healthy’ person who is not and cannot get seriously ill or disabled. This is a fantasy, because it is simply not true. Health is one of the most contingent facts about us human beings. Every one of us is always one infection or accident away from acquiring an illness or disability.”)
🎭 Truthout: COVID Hasn’t Been Defeated, But Effective Public Health Measures Have Been by Rob Wallace (“The “Long” in Long COVID isn’t just the length of time of such an infection, but also represents a foundational transition from an acute respiratory infection to a chronic condition of often devastating impact.”)
This is NOT fine
“This analysis of 2-year retrospective cohort studies of individuals diagnosed with COVID-19 showed that the increased incidence of mood and anxiety disorders was transient, with no overall excess of these diagnoses compared with other respiratory infections. In contrast, the increased risk of psychotic disorder, cognitive deficit, dementia, and epilepsy or seizures persisted throughout. The differing trajectories suggest a different pathogenesis for these outcomes. Children have a more benign overall profile of psychiatric risk than do adults and older adults, but their sustained higher risk of some diagnoses is of concern. The fact that neurological and psychiatric outcomes were similar during the delta and omicron waves indicates that the burden on the health-care system might continue even with variants that are less severe in other respects.”
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt…
People are seeing doctors offices unmask and wondering — if their own doctors won’t even have mask rules to protect their vulnerable patients, how can they trust these doctors to make sound judgements in any other area of their health?
I’m hearing that some people’s doctors are delaying or dissuading use of Paxlovid after testing positive, including among people in high risk categories. What are they thinking??
Lazarus Long accurately predicted the microbiologists convention complete with dancing & strobe lights, would be a super spreader, and sure enough it was, with an organizer joking about attending the event while knowing they were testing positive and contagious.
People planning to attend the APHA super spreader event sign a legal waiver acknowledging they are aware of con crud and that viruses will spread there and that some cause death.
A bunch of people have been suspended or have had their science tweets labeled “misinformation” on twitter, including links to scientific studies that have nothing to do with vaccines inexplicably being labeled as vaccine misinformation. Farid Jalali’s account was unbanned and the tweet restored after the reporter Taylor Lorenz was asking questions. Some speculate that it’s a “glitch” with a new automated system. Others are suspicious that this occurred soon after the Biden administration’s push to privatize the pandemic, that big money funded trolls are mass reporting alarming news.
One MD MPH on twitter said that an ICU doctor told him he’s seeing more younger & older people with strokes and he thinks it might be related to covid. Vascular complications were reported from the get go in early 2020. Someone else then posted an article from WAPO from 2020 about this. The facts just are not getting to everyone timely.
Someone told me that they were being asked to participate in a professional opportunity at the office which would involve indoor dining at a restaurant. They said they were toying with the idea of responding to the invite with “I think it would be best for just the people who believe the pandemic is over to subject themselves to the risks of indoor dining” — but resisted the urge! Anyone cautious is being shut out of professional opportunities.
“Not only has the public been convinced that it's reasonable to return to ‘normal’ at the peril of the vulnerable, they've also been convinced that it's reasonable to return to normal at their own peril.”
— Maggie Mills