🙌More local mask requirements are being reported in the latest surge😷bizarro APHA exec cheers for community health defunding🤦‍♀️Use this Letter template: Essential Services Need Mask Requirements📝

Hypernormalisation documentary group watch continues this Saturday📺

Contents:

- Events, Actions, & Campaigns

- Pandemic field notes & “Living with the virus”

- In the News (virus & adjacent news)

- This is NOT Fine section (gaslighting & other wrongs)

- He(a)rd Scuttlebutt (did you miss this?)

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Mandate Masks US

Campaign: Call your local local & state reps and ask for a mask mandate!

Reporting: Check out the list of local mask requirements or report any you know about that have not been added to the list yet!

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Letter Campaign: Essential Services Need Mask Requirements

Use action network form to write U.S. & Canadian representatives, or use the letter as a template to send to your representatives and other decision makers yourself, or just write your own letter to advocate for essential service mask requirements.

tinyurl.com/essentialmasks

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Online Group watch of the 2016 documentary “HyperNormalisation” with discussion about how this concept relates to the pandemic.

The watch will be split into 4 online meetups of 1 hour at least, first 40 minutes of watching the documentary, then discussion, July 9, 16, 30, & Aug 6. The film is available on Youtube with closed captioning, the group watch will have a text chat but does not have transcription. This will be hosted in the World Health Network platform accessible via the web. It’s not necessary to join WHN to attend the group watch but you are very welcome to join WHN using this form.

Watch 3, Saturday July 30 @ 2pm US EDT

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Don’t fall for the memory holing of the obvious

There is ample and obvious evidence that there’s been a well funded right wing push against any pandemic measures and lots of clearly visible proof that certain business interests have profiteered and capitalized on the pandemic, and have had clear motivations against things like mask mandates.

But I’ve seen some attempts at revisionist history trying to convince people against all evidence and reason, that it just so happened pandemic mitigation measures in much of The West have been abandoned.

So I’m using the news section this week to pushing back against the memory hole.

Most of the articles I have bookmarked right now are from the work of Walker Bragman, but there are others I’ve read over the past 2 years, and I would appreciate being sent links to any I may have missed so I can include them in a future newsletter on this topic.

- Chloe

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🗞️ In the news

• How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On COVID (“Participants for a number of anti-lockdown rallies were recruited by FreedomWorks, a dark money group tied to Charles Koch instrumental in organizing Tea Party protests in 2009.” …. “Groups funded by the Kochs and their colleagues also turned to a more insidious form of combat adapted from Tea Party strategies: building an academic and intellectual network that would create and promote its own “science” to attack COVID mitigation policies.”)

• The Corporate Campaign Against Pandemic Protections (“The public comments lay bare the shallow arguments and crass calculus to which big business is willing to resort in order to protect profits at the risk of its own workers.”)

• How Dark Money Shaped The School Safety Debate (“Enterprises like Koch’s were eager to force a return to the old paradigm. These interests had already begun employing the same think tanks and quasi-academic networks they had pioneered a decade before promoting the anti-government Tea Party movement to fuel and legitimize attacks on pandemic safety measures, so they could force a return to normalcy and boost corporate profits. Now, these interests began to use the same playbook to try to force schools back to normal.”)

• A look at the groups supporting school board protesters nationwide (“But it's not entirely grassroots and spontaneous. "The flames are being fanned by national money and resources," she says. "It's basically the same groups and funders that were funding the Tea Party and frankly, it's the same tactics.")

• Consultant developed pandemic response led by political staff, not public health experts: AG (“According to the auditor general's report, the government hired McKinsey at the outset of the pandemic to create an organizational structure for the pandemic response, at a cost of $1.6 million. McKinsey also assisted the government with its COVID‑19 recovery planning at a cost of $3.2 million. Of that, $942,000 was spent to provide feedback on the child care and school reopening plans, said a spokesperson for the education minister.”)

• Somehow, There Are Still No Safety Standards (“Because OSHA did not issue an emergency temporary standard, there are no real federal requirements here,” says Debbie Berkowitz, the Worker Safety and Health Program director at the National Employment Law Project (NELP). “Now, with everything reopening, everything is very muddled here on what exactly rights workers do have and what kind of mitigation measures employers need to put into place.”)

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This is NOT fine

The Bizarro World of the APHA continues…

Executive director of the APHA was actually quoted in the New York Times as saying he thinks it’s a good idea to cut off public health funding and resources for communities. He literally said, “The fact that they’re going away is good.” That’s the executive director of the American Public Health Association who is saying that the American people should be left in the lurch during an ongoing pandemic health crisis. The executive director of the APHA is advocating for many people to be kicked off Medicaid when they need it most in the middle of a pandemic. That’s what the executive director of the American Public Health Association is rooting for? That’s not just counter to public health — it’s inhumane.

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He(a)rd Scuttlebutt, the stories of “living with it”

• I heard again about officials being lobbied by anti-maskers to not have mask requirements, and when they don’t hear from as many people who want masks, the mask mandates go away. If sensible people don’t speak up and step up, the vacuum is filled by the right wing machine that is so well funded and pushing anti-mask and just anti-mitigation of any type.

• I remember the public health messaging around HIV in the 1990s. They emphasized that you don't have to be promiscuous to get HIV. All it takes is ONE time.

• The bonkers wrong official public health messaging for monkeypox seems to be “don’t worry it’s just happening to gays” even though that’s clearly not true. And the CDC director actually fueled Q conspiracy theories that all liberals are pedophiles by simultaneously messaging that monkeypox is only spread by close intimate contact, at the same time announcing they’d found cases of monkeypox in children of gay parents. It’s hard to not suspect this might be an inside job. At the least it seems like there’s reason to think all the mistakes of covid, HIV, and who knows what else, will be repeated with monkeypox.

• I’ve seen some pretty extreme disregard in the “my freedom” genre, but one guy actually complained that healthcare workers burning out from lack of disease control overloading the hospitals “feel entitled to bring the entire community along on the journal with them” — as if the entire community isn’t in danger when the hospitals are overloaded and the healthcare workers burned out? People who think it's equally important to go nightclubbing as it is to have functioning hospitals and healthcare workers... Have never almost died from delayed care in an overwhelmed hospital. Yet. It’s a failure of public health to inform the public of the problem this is creating before they find out the hard way.

• Some call the forcing normal the result of “mass delusion” — a few months ago I said that mask phobia in the west will probably be looked at by historians someday the same way people look at bizarre group hysteria stories from olden times. I’m not sure there’s one explanation, but we’re in some trouble when people in positions of power and even healthcare providers are disparaging patients as hysterical or paranoid for not wanting to get sick, not wanting to risk death or long term illness. Making caution and self-preservation a formal clinical pathology is socially dangerous. It is not unprecedented though, people in positions of power wanting to maintain the status quo even claimed Black slaves in America were just mentally ill for not wanting to be slaves, claiming there was something abnormal about people fleeing grotesque levels of abuse.

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“No physician argues that SARS-CoV-2 is not airborne in 2022, but some "do-you-know-who-I-am" professors and government boot-licks sure did for two years, and they mostly still have taxpayer funded velvet under their bums, despite doubling-down on that fatal error.”

Andrew Miller, in his column, about whistleblower David Berger