😷 Letter campaign for free N95 masks 🌎 the pandemic and climate change are the same public health problem 🤯 Being able to take a leave of absence was good for one doctor’s recovery 🛏️
People against public health measures for disease also speak favourably of child labor, surprise surprise.
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: Urge the White House and Congress to Provide Free N95 Masks!
By MandateMasksUS: The White House needs to launch a program to provide free N95 masks to the public.
USA Letter Campaign to the White House - Prioritize Telework for Federal Workers
By Chloe Humbert - Telework should be prioritized for our future, to mitigate climate change and infectious disease in the ongoing pandemic.
The push against public health is all part of the same problem: profiteering on a wrecked living environment.
And the anti-mask campaigners on social media are out in full force against the suggestion anything should be done to protect oneself from the horrendous air quality in the northeast United States caused by unusual levels of wildfires in Canada. And it’s all related. All the push against public health has to do with protecting financial interests that depend on public health catastrophes going unstopped and unmitigated. The pandemic, climate catastrophe, pollution - the consequences are worth it to those profiting off causing the problems. And anyone who dares to suggest wearing N95 masks, working from home, or not going to restaurants, is hit with ridiculous abuse, and behind this zeal is an economic agenda.
Like tobacco advertising, we are told it’s no big deal - it’s all mild.
The National Weather Service even was spinning the bad air as a “mild” weather event. NWS Binghamton tweeted: “Smoky conditions and mild temperatures expected to continue tomorrow. Persistent northerly flow will continue to maintain smoky conditions from wildfires in Canada, with the smoke keeping high temperatures on the mild side.” The Washington Post recommended masks for bad air quality but yet does it in a way that acted as if nobody ever wore a mask for any other reason recently. Don’t mention covid! Mandate Masks NY has been pushing for free N95 masks in New York for ages now, and finally there are distributions going on. This should happen nationwide.
The smoke has cleared out quite a bit here in Scranton Pennsylvania, but the air quality continues to be poor — not as bad as a few days ago, but quite lousy.
"In developing regulations the EPA was directed to weigh only one concern: public health. The costs to industry were explicitly deemed irrelevant."
- Jane Mayer, Dark Money (2016)
Better policies are possible.
🗞️ In the news
🔥 NJ.com - Choking on climate denial | Editorial - Updated: Jun. 08, 2023, 10:13 p.m. | Published: Jun. 07, 2023, 4:42 p.m. By Star-Ledger Editorial Board Think of the canceled field trips and graduations this week. Is that really what we want for our kids? A world in which you can’t go for a walk without a Hazmat suit? And it’s a reminder of the importance of tools like air filtration, even as people turn away from the pandemic. You don’t want to be in an office or a school that’s sucking in the smoke right now. We should care about improving ventilation; it’s not just about Covid, it’s about climate change. Expect air quality filters to become more common, much like home generators did in reaction to extreme weather.
🇨🇦 Burnabynow - Third COVID-19 outbreak in three weeks declared at Burnaby Hospital Fraser Health declared another outbreak on May 11. By Jess Balzer 16 May 2023 Fraser Health says the outbreak was declared on May 11 after evidence of transmission in a medicine unit. A spokesperson told the NOW that seven patients have tested positive for the virus. The unit remains open only to those who have tested positive for COVID-19 in the last 60 days. "Upon declaring the outbreak, Fraser Health immediately implemented precautions at the site, including enhanced cleaning to protect the health of all staff, medical staff, and patients," a statement read.
🇦🇺 ABC Newcastle - COVID outbreaks, hospitalisations rise in Hunter New England as cases surge in nursing homes, schools By Madeline Lewis Posted Fri 26 May 2023 Public Health Physician David Durrheim says the cases have returned to levels not seen since January this year. Eighteen outbreaks are COVID-related, one is battling RSV and another facility is fighting a combination of the two. "We have heard anecdotal reports of increases in cases in schools," Dr Durrheim said. "We are also seeing higher numbers of COVID hospitalisations as well "The most important thing is to try and prevent it getting in in the first place. "That really means that visitors and staff have to be particularly careful about not taking it in." Estia Health Tea Gardens recorded 50 cases in staff and residents, as well as multiple deaths, in the previous reporting period.
🇺🇸 Fox61 HARTFORD, Conn. - Masking, testing return to parts of State Capitol building as COVID-19-positive cases rise May 30, 2023 Some masking and testing precautions are back in place at the State Capitol Building as positive COVID-19 cases escalate. According to Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, there had been several positive COVID-19 tests in the State Senate over the past few days. The measures have been put in place to "ensure the Senate continues to operate effectively," said Looney.
🇺🇸 KQED - Laguna Honda Faces COVID Outbreak, Amid Looming Patient Transfer Deadline. By Sydney Johnson, May 15 2023 The outbreak in 2023 surpassed the total number of COVID cases that occurred at Laguna Honda in 2020 (46) and 2021 (32), when nursing homes across the country saw devastating impacts of the virus, which disproportionately affects older adults. The highest number of overall cases at Laguna Honda occurred in 2022, which had a total of 246 cases.
🎼 Datebook - Paul Simon unlikely to perform live again due to sudden hearing loss. By Aidin Vaziri, May 24, 2023 “Nobody has an explanation for it,” Simon said. “So everything became more difficult. My reaction to that was frustration and annoyance — not quite anger yet, because I thought it would pass, it would repair itself.” Simon, who performed one of his last live shows at San Francisco’s Outside Lands festival in 2019, added that he recently survived a severe bout of COVID-19, which has been linked to sudden irreversible hearing loss in some patients.
🚩 Important Context - Leaked Brownstone Institute Emails Reveal Support for Child Labor, Underage Smoking. “Maybe I have a tin ear but I can't really see the issue here." by Walker Bragman May 25, 2023 What the emails do show, however, is Brownstone founder Jeffrey Tucker and several Brownstone contributors, including one of the institute’s 2023 fellows, discussing the merits of “the good old days” when children smoked tobacco and performed labor. The group lamented how young people today don’t share their values and are allegedly coddled and entitled. In the course of the conversation, Tucker admitted to supporting “youth” cigarette smoking and labor. At one point, he confessed that he had even provided his high schooler son with cigarettes to get him away from marijuana. Later in the conversation, Tucker wrote that he would “fully [repeal] the 1936 ‘child labor’ law,” because “it is cruel and robs kids of a good life.”
🇺🇸 Curmudgucation - #TBT The Domestic Supply of Meat Widgets. By PETER GREENE, MAY 18, 2023 In the midst of the general alarm and dismay over the leaked SCOTUS reversal of Roe, attention has been rightly drawn to one particularly alarming footnote in which Justice Alito quotes a CDC reference to the "domestic supply of infants." As Dahlia Lithwick argues, this has echoes of chattel slavery, but that's not the only thing it has echoes of. Back in 2013, I highlighted one sentence from the Gates Foundation website. Written by Allen Golston, it was part of a piece intended to whip up business support for Common Core, and it was strikingly bad: “Businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools, so it’s a natural alliance.” That is a spectacular amount of wrong to pack into a single sentence. Businesses do not "consume" the live humans who come out of our education system, and those humans are not the "output" of schools. But this view of schools--that they are factories whose purpose is to manufacture meat widgets for corporate use--just keeps cropping up.
🚨 CBS News Chicago - Apparent measles outbreak inside Chicago Police District. BY ANDREW RAMOS - JUNE 4, 2023 Sunday morning as police briefed the media on a mass shooting that happened overnight, CBS 2 cameras stumbled upon a notice outside the 25th Police District some find concerning. It notified the community about an apparent measles outbreak inside the station, and added that those entering the building are putting themselves at risk. The notice stated, "This facility has been contaminated by a measles outbreak. By entering, you are agreeing to accept this risk." Sunday night, the city answered, telling CBS 2 they do not consider this a public health crisis. When CBS 2 started asking questions about the situation, that notice was promptly taken down. Sunday night the city said a measles outbreak is unlikely but insisted that they are monitoring the situation.
🇺🇸 Idaho Statesman: Dr. Ryan Cole diagnosed a woman with cancer, so she had invasive surgery. He was wrong. BY AUDREY DUTTON, APRIL 15, 2023 It wasn’t until after she underwent major surgery that J.B. learned she didn’t have cancer after all. On Wednesday, J.B. filed a medical malpractice lawsuit in Ada County that accuses Cole of negligence and other harms. The Sun contacted Cole and his representatives by email and phone Thursday, but they could not be reached for comment. What she didn’t know at the time of her cancer diagnosis was that Cole, a local pathologist, had just begun to make a name for himself based on a stance against COVID-19 vaccines, including false claims that they cause cancer. There is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines can raise, or lower, a person’s risk of cancer. There is evidence that they lower a person’s risk of severe illness, death and chronic health issues after a COVID-19 infection.
🇺🇸Stat News: The NIH has poured $1 billion into long Covid research — with little to show for it. By Rachel Cohrs and Betsy Ladyzhets, April 20, 2023 Eric Topol, the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, said he expected the NIH would have launched many large-scale trials by now, and that testing treatments should have been an urgent priority when Congress first gave the agency money in late 2020. “I don’t know that they’ve contributed anything except more confusion,” Topol said. Patients and researchers have already raised alarms about the glacial pace of the NIH’s early long Covid efforts. But a new investigation from STAT and the nonprofit news organization MuckRock, based on interviews with nearly two dozen government officials, experts, patients, and advocates, and internal NIH correspondence, letters, and public documents, underscores that the NIH hasn’t picked up the pace — instead, the delays have compounded. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly why progress is so stalled, experts and patients involved in the project emphasized, because the NIH has obscured both who is in charge of the long Covid efforts and how it spent the money.
🇺🇸 Bucks County Beacon: 3 Pennsylvania School Districts Take State To Court Over Guidelines To Help Teachers Become More Culturally Sensitive. by Peter Greene | April 24, 2023 The suit is being litigated by The Thomas More Society, a “not-for-profit, national public interest law firm dedicated to restoring respect in law for life, family, religious liberty, and election integrity.” The firm has worked cases challenging both abortion and birth control, LGBTQ rights, and virtually all pandemic mitigation strategies (not just anti-vax, but also anti-masking, anti capacity limits, and anti social distancing). They helped mount legal challenges to the results of the 2020 Presidential election; they also employed Senior Trump advisor Jenna Ellis as a special counsel. And they mounted the successful challenge to Pennsylvania’s mask mandate.
💉 Medpage Today - Why Is One Dose Suddenly Enough for the mRNA COVID Vaccines? — FDA and CDC have made yet another questionable decision. by John P. Moore, PhD May 2, 2023 FDA official Peter Marks, MD, PhD, has referred to "simplifying” vaccine administration as being the driver for the recent change and "believes" that allowing unvaccinated people to receive only a single dose will "help encourage future vaccination." Given the reasons behind vaccine refusal that belief seems quite naïve.
This is NOT fine
Privilege, pseudoscience, and toxic positivity
Cardiology gets covid following a ski trip in the French Alps. He was able to take a 3 month leave of absence from work, had his team handle his research responsibilities, unplugged from his email and other distractions, and even had the privilege to be able to have 3 hours every day with no interruptions, in addition to getting a good night’s sleep and basically taking it easy.
The article about this on WHYY spins all this as evidence that “mindfulness” or “deep meditation” and “thinking positive” is a cure or a preventative for Long Covid.
The doctor admits in the article that he realizes not everyone can rest! But instead of taking this opportunity to advocate that EVERYONE be allowed to REST to recover from Covid and Long Covid… regardless of whether it “cures” them - he instead used his privilege to make claims to hype meditation and positive thinking as a cure.
He may have just recovered from taking it easy, without the meditation. And it may have just been regression to the mean, where he would’ve recovered similarly no matter the situation. But the takeaway that many covid minimizing taskmasters will come away with is that just the “mindfulness” meditation is the cure. That people should just get back to work still with symptoms and meditate their way through pushing themselves harder.
WHYY - A cardiologist wanted to prevent long COVID. He turned to meditation. A recent review of research suggests meditation may be effective for some in treating long COVID and other post-viral conditions. By Grant Hill - May 19, 2023
“I was sleeping 14 hours a day and feeling breathless for the rest of the time of the day and feeling extremely exhausted. And I thought, ‘Gosh! If this is how long COVID feels, if this is how I’m going to feel in 12 weeks, in 24 weeks, I’m in trouble and I can’t work.’” Once Lim returned to London, he decided to take a radical step. “I recognized that what I needed to do was to turn off my mobile phone, just have an auto reply, and I said to my secretaries, ‘just no response from me.’” Lim said. He put his practice on hold and dedicated the foreseeable future to his recovery.
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
Yes, people in the U.S.A. have gone to jail because of medical debts. Judges and medical provider lawyers come up with tricky ways to get around the rules against debtor prisons.
Ending emergency provisions with medical coverage isn’t a great situation with a pandemic virus still very much in the picture.
The teens "mental health crisis" with a rise in kids refusing to go to school in America doesn’t sound like a mental health issue, it's a PUBLIC SAFETY ISSUE. They're being forced to get sick with a virus again and again and they wonder if someone's gonna shoot up the place because there are objectively a lot of shootings. Our society has problems that need to be fixed if we want cheerful studious youths.
“If some parachutes don't work we don't necessarily take away parachutes, we add another layer of parachutes, we provide a second backup parachute for those who jump out planes.”
—Andrew Wang MPH public comment at the CDC HICPAC Meeting June 8th 2023