Congress needs to ensure Medicare telehealth continues. 📚 Covid contrarian book ban fan school board member arranged for a clear glass window in a middle school bathroom.
Michigan legislators admit covid was a cover for election plot meeting in unsealed Jack Smith filing.
📍Note: Congress needs to ensure telehealth access continues for Medicare patients.
✏️Write reps prompt -My letter to reps (U.S Senators, Congressperson, and the White House):
Telehealth services via Medicare must not expire. Telehealth service should be a permanent option for all patients, and covered by all insurance, including Medicare and Medicaid.
Please feel free to repurpose for your own letters to reps.
Covid contrarian school board member spent thousands of taxpayer money to put a clear glass window in a middle school bathroom.
The school board claims that the preteens can’t be seen on the toilets from outside the bathroom, but the article contains the line: “Additional renovations are being made to fully enclose the toilet facilities inside the restrooms…” which raises more questions. But at least the bad press that went national has prompted a reversal to this egregiously perverse anti-trans nonsense.
The Seattle Times - Pennsylvania school boards up window openings that allowed views into its gender-neutral bathrooms Oct. 4, 2024 at 10:53 am By MARK SCOLFORO - The Associated Press Oct. 4, 2024 Gelazela's statement also warned students that they should not consider the bathroom areas outside of the toilet stalls to be private. [...] Holahan said the window openings not only allowed people in the hallway to peer into the bathrooms, they also let noises from the bathrooms be heard. Burkhart, the superintendent, said the two gender neutral bathrooms have not been a particular problem for the type of misbehavior Gelazela cited. The renovations cost $8,700, Burkhart said.
Not surprisingly, of course this weirdo school board member, Matthew Gelazela, who was behind the gender neutral bathroom show window is also a covid contrarian. He minimized covid when he was running for school board — claiming that covid hadn’t killed enough people to be taken seriously. This was in October 2021, just before the huge omicron wave which was the deadliest surge for American cancer patients. He also opposed masks and vaccination. This guy also had the gall during that campaign interview to talk about “fiscally responsible education” that would “nurture” children to be free from “political programming” — and then turned around and spent $8,700.00 dollars in taxpayer money on a bathroom creep window to score culture war points over politicized gender and health issues.
There were efforts to prevent this from happening in the first place, to the extent of where a RTKL request went to the PA Office of Open Records to be adjudicated after someone requested correspondence in the South Western School District about, among other things, drafting policies about LGBTQ with regard to bathrooms. The court determined the school district wasn’t required to take any further action to provide documents at least partly because, as I understand the document, the request was considered overly broad.
The RTKL (Right To Know Law) request was originally in April 2024, and the adjudication ruled in favour of the school district in June 2024. The York Dispatch reported in May 2024 that Gelazela was the parent who filed a challenge that prompted a local book ban, and then he used the book ban to lobby officials to cut funding for the town library. The decision to put a clear glass window in a unisex bathroom for pre-teens was made at the August 2024 school board meeting.
Matthew Gelazela was voted into the school board running as a Libertarian after fear mongering about socialism in the local newspaper. There was low turnout for the school board election in 2021. He’s up for re-election in 2025, and I suspect that district will have a higher voter turnout next year.
Bathrooms with a view: Cutting windows into student restrooms is a new level of weird YORK DISPATCH EDITORIAL BOARD York Dispatch Published 9:26 a.m. ET Oct. 2, 2024 | Updated 11:22 a.m. ET Oct. 4, 2024 After a low-turnout school board election in which several far-right members joined their ranks, they hired a Christian law firm, decided to begin banning books and reopened the bathroom issue. Board President Matthew Gelazela, who was elevated to his post after previously serving as the board’s most vocal bomb-thrower, pointed to Red Lion’s discriminatory policies as something to aspire to.
It should be clear by now how all these issues are related. Public safety, public health, public libraries, healthcare, and the freedom to be who you are and love who you want, are all under attack by the same far right extremists.
🗞️ In the news
MarketWatch - 67 million Medicare recipients face ‘chaos’ if Congress cuts telehealth benefits Elderly and disabled patients could miss out on healthcare services unless an extension is passed before the end of the year By Jessica Hall Last Updated: Sept. 25, 2024 Medicare beneficiaries’ access to telehealth services will expire at the end of the year unless Congress acts, and public-health experts say that doing away with video-enabled medical care would lead to “chaos” in the healthcare system relied on by 67.4 million Americans. About 5% of Medicare’s overall outpatient visits are currently conducted via telehealth, according to Ateev Mehrotra, a professor at Brown University’s School of Public Health. Telehealth usage was as high as 42% during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he added. The types of medical appointments carried out via telehealth include mental-health visits, dermatological screenings and conversations with a primary-care doctor about cold or flu symptoms or about getting physical therapy. “If the rules were to expire, many people would be devastated. People are going to be frantic,” Mehrotra told MarketWatch in an interview. “Anxiety is increasing by the day because the year-end is approaching and Congress hasn’t passed these extensions.”
Government Executive - VA offers veterans nationwide access to emergency telehealth care The department said the new tele-emergency care resource will allow veterans to connect with clinical triage nurses for timely medical evaluations. Edward Graham September 27, 2024 The new tele-emergency care — or tele-EC — service is designed to connect retired servicemembers with clinical triage nurses, who can then evaluate their symptoms and determine if they require in-person aid. “Veterans can get immediate, virtual triage with a VA medical provider who has direct access to their medical records,” VA Under Secretary for Health Shereef Elnahal said about the new service. “This avoids having to potentially drive to the nearest emergency department and wait to be evaluated, if appropriate.”
Care home nurse 'thought Covid was a conspiracy' 1 Oct 2024 - Elliot Ball & PA Media BBC News, South West William Wilkinson, 102, Doris Lockett, 92, Roy Gilliam, 96, Jean Hartley, 81, Susan Skinner, 70, Ronald Bampfylde, 92, and Stanislawa Koch, 93 died between March or April 2021 at Holmesley Care Home in Sidford. Alison Longhorn, area coroner for Devon, Plymouth and Torbay, heard all seven died after contracting the virus. The Care Quality Commission (CQC) also carried out two visits that February and told the home it was not following personal protective equipment (PPE) guidelines, the hearing in Exeter was told.
CIDRAP - COVID vaccine protects against symptoms 6 weeks after infection, study shows - Sept 25, 2024 - Stephanie Soucheray, MA Lower odds of symptoms with recent booster - Among participants who had COVID-19, those who had received an additional COVID-19 vaccine dose had a lower prevalence of any symptoms than those who had not at 6 weeks post-infection (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 0.55; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.43 to 0.70). If the third vaccine dose was administered 16 weeks or less before infection, healthcare providers had lower odds of reporting respiratory symptoms (aOR, 0.69; 95% CI, 0.46 to 0.99), psychiatric symptoms (aOR, 0.68; 95% CI, 0.47 to 0.99), or any symptom (aOR, 0.68; 95% CI, 0.53 to 0.87) than those who received the dose more than 16 weeks earlier.
Indoor senior citizen events are superspreader opportunities.
PA State Rep Bridget Kosierowski’s Lackawanna County Senior Expo 2024 photo gallery showed her interacting maskless with a lot of seniors all crowded into the Steamtown Mall. I’m not sure why people are being reckless like this, but at the minimum, masks should’ve been recommended and provided free, and seniors should be alerted, surely, at a senior-specific event, that there are serious risks with contracting covid, which is likely in a crowded indoor setting like this at a time of increasing covid in the county. And at the very least — where are the vaccine drives at events like this? Vaccine update uptake is nowhere near where it should be even for senior citizens in northeastern Pennsylvania.
Michigan legislators used covid as a cover for election plot meeting.
The unsealed court filing gave more details about when Michigan state legislators were invited to the White House and because they were being asked to meet in order to do state level election shenanigans, they decided to use covid as a sham reason for the meeting. In November 2020, these Michigan lawmakers claimed they were there to deliver a letter requesting more funds to fight the pandemic. Law And Chaos podcast’s Liz Dye suggested they “dangled” covid in front of Trump as a diversion hoping he wouldn’t send out mean tweets.
From Jack Smith’s unsealed court filing:
“… to avoid talking only about election fraud the legislators prepared materials to raise regarding covid-19 and planned in advance to release a statement once the meeting was over that said the legislators were unaware of information that would change the outcome of the election.”
Quote:
“We believe that health care providers should make individual clinical judgments for each of his or her patients in the selection of OTC drugs to treat symptoms of COVID-19.” — Charles Hennekens, MD, DrPH - CIDRAP March 22, 2024