Pandemic Revisionist History. 📋 15% of docs said they prefer medical info from influencers on social media. 📌 Centering humanity in organizing.
The Long covid issue has been heavily co-opted by the right-wing.
The PRESS Act should be passed with haste. The bill passed unanimously in the House of Representatives earlier this Congress and is now stalled in the U.S. Senate.
✏️Write reps prompt.
My letter to U.S. Senators:
PASS The PRESS Act now. The bill passed unanimously in the House of Representatives earlier this Congress and is now stalled for no good reason in the U.S. Senate. This needs to be rectified immediately.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.
More info:
Reporters Committee urges Congress to pass PRESS Act In letters to the House and Senate, a media coalition led by RCFP expressed strong support for the shield bill. - By Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press - Posted on October 8, 2024 The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press is once again urging members of Congress to pass a bipartisan shield bill that would establish robust federal protections for the newsgathering rights of journalists.
TechCrunch - It’s the Senate’s last chance to pass the PRESS Act Zack Whittaker 1:20 PM PST · November 10, 2024 At this point, the PRESS Act already has bipartisan support in the Senate, with Senators Ron Wyden, Lindsey Graham, Mike Lee, and Dick Durbin as co-sponsors. The bill is just waiting for a final vote on the Senate floor, with weeks to go before the bill expires at the end of the congressional session. The ACLU has a web form if you want to send a note to your senators, or you can call or email them directly to ask them to vote for the PRESS Act.
Pandemic Revisionist History.
I don’t know how these things got memory holed other than there’s been just a continuous firehose of covid minimization, pandemic disinformation, and lockdown revisionism, that everyone’s senses became overloaded with the mere exposure effect of repeated nonsense and it’s created informational learned helplessness.
The nature of coronaviruses.
We always knew that coronaviruses don’t tend toward long-lasting immunity, and that making vaccines for them has been elusive. This was a known thing. This wasn’t unexpected. So anyone who claimed that there would be herd immunity of any type in 2020 was ignoring everything that was known about coronaviruses. Many of course knew this hopium for natural immunity was bullshit. And there were people pushing back on it in 2020. But nobody wanted to hear that, of course, and people telling people what they wanted to hear of course has always been popular. And so we have All The Variants now - and this shouldn’t have been unexpected, and was not unexpected.
Vaccination is a public health measure.
You always need high uptake for vaccines to be successful public health. This has always been the case. This à la carte mindset, and restricting of safe vaccines for a widespread disease, where anti-vax is left to stand mostly unchallenged, is antithetical to previous vaccination campaigns. The polio campaign in the U.S. was successful because of a concerted effort to do a door to door campaign that started before the vaccine was even available. But for some reason since this covid pandemic started it’s been “if you wanna” and so uptake isn’t even barely mentioned even in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) October 23, 2024 meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). The only person who mentioned the need for messaging and uptake and overcoming distrust was Robert H. Hopkins, Jr., MD, the NFID medical director, (National Foundation for Infectious Diseases). Vaccine uptake is important and it’s always been that way.
Funerals are important to most people, but big crowded funerals are not essential.
Back in the 1990s there were things said about the ebola outbreaks in Africa that I now realize were horribly racist. Professionals in the news were quoted as saying that the African citizens were uncooperative and wouldn’t follow simple rules. An example is the LA Times article from 1995 which reported: “one microbiologist said he was terrified that the virus would spread like wildfire because people were sneaking into the hospital to visit their dying loved ones, possibly carrying the virus with them when they leave.” People often remarked it was because of backward superstitions that they wouldn’t give up their funeral rites, even to save themselves from ebola. I remember this well. When this covid pandemic swept in, I heard about so many people who were going to funerals, insisting that they had to go to indoor wakes and funeral breakfasts, and doing all sorts of other unnecessary things. People are people and make decisions based on impulses, and that’s why societal rules exist, to give people guidelines based on collectively known information. On Conspirituality Podcast and in an LA Times op-ed about the Stanford covid contrarian right-wing symposium, it was reported there was outrage about how people were kept from big funerals in the early pandemic, as if not having funerals was uncivilized and backward.
🗞️ In the news
CIDRAP - Studies show long-COVID symptoms distinct from other respiratory infections, common in Marines Stephanie Soucheray, MA October 25, 2024 When compared with a pre-COVID cohort of Marines, the authors found the Marines reporting persistent COVID symptoms had slower running times on fitness tests. The authors said their findings are important in considering the implications of long COVID on a young and previously healthy workforce. Long COVID could "decrease work productivity and increase healthcare costs," they wrote.
CIDRAP - Canada's national lab confirms H5N1 in hospitalized teen - Lisa Schnirring - Nov 13, 2024 Yesterday BC health officials said the previously healthy teen is hospitalized in critical condition. Today's confirmation marks Canada's first locally acquired H5N1 infection.
Most Doctors Regularly Engage With Healthcare Influencers on Social Media — Survey found half reported changing their prescribing choices based on this engagement by Jennifer Henderson, Enterprise & Investigative Writer, MedPage Today October 15, 2024 Though 62% of respondents reported they would most prefer to receive medication information from a physician peer, 15% indicated they would prefer to receive this information from a healthcare influencer or KOL, 13% from a medical science liaison, and 10% from a pharmaceutical sales representative. Some 36% of physicians said they considered information provided by healthcare influencers or KOLs on social media as "extremely or very trustworthy," and 37% said such information is "extremely or very effective" in keeping them updated on treatments.
The Long covid issue has been heavily co-opted by the right-wing.
I’m sorry to those just finding out which way people are willing to go right now, I’ve seen it happening gradually over the years. It makes sense because obviously Republicans and conservatives get Long Covid too - perhaps even moreso because they’ve been less likely to take precautions or even get vaccinated in many cases.
Science research, media, and advocacy has been thoroughly infiltrated by the right-wing. From long covid groups and journalists taking cryptocurrency money, and partnering with tech astroturfed orgs in the non-profit industrial complex, high priced concierge long covid clinics that push colloidal silver or anti-mask and anti-vax. This has been true for awhile, I’ve been pointing out how not all fellow travelers are allies. While it’s true that strategic alliances with those who do not agree on everything are necessary in any movement, people who undermine or sabotage advocacy are NOT strategically beneficial.
When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
HIV deniers, covid contrarians, pandemic deniers, and anti-vaxxers are not likely to help anyone regarding covid or long covid. People high up in the MAGAsphere have suggested “deputizing” angry anti-vaxxers to go after enemy lists of doctors and Democrats in “livestreamed swatting raids”. We will see who lines up behind that. There’s a lot to be said for coalitions and coordination and cooperation — but again, if the broader movement of the people you’re lining up with has aims to sabotage and disrupt the greater good, what is the goal of compromising in advance?
I highly recommend getting off twitter. I know people think suddenly people have changed, but that’s been happening in fits and starts for years now. Typically people have been posting pretty sketchy stuff all along, it’s just that the algorithm’s primary priority is to keep you on the app and won’t tend to show you things you won’t like in any abundance unless you engage with similar stuff. I’ve been over this and over this for years, pointing out to people when they’re following weird accounts or promoting things with various problems. It’s a poo circus in most social media of course.
Centering humanity in organizing.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (aka AOC) November 6, 2024: “Project 2025 is real. It's real. It's not a campaign joke. It's not an attack. The Heritage Foundation is the conservative foundation, the institution and organization that orchestrates Republican governance. They would not put millions of dollars into preparing this plan and it being co-authored by many people in the Trump administration if they were not fully prepared to implement it. This is gonna be a very scary time. And again, I cannot emphasize how important it is that we as an aligned people be very cautious about attacking one another and yeah, about attacking one another. And to me, one of the big organizing lessons that I feel is that when it comes to who you choose to organize with, I think it's really important to understand that, you know, maybe it's not just about fully aligning with someone just because of what they're organizing for, It's really important to pay attention to how they are organizing. And if someone is using a righteous cause as a cover for cruel methods and dehumanizing others, personally, that is not someone that I trust to organize with because our job is to grow. And the reason we are in this position is because we do not have a raw majority of people who are ideologically aligned. And in instances where you do not have an outright majority, we must develop coalitions. And the name of the game in coalitions is that we have to be able to align with people that we are not fully in agreement with in the name of a larger cause. That goes for any movement. And it goes for any cause. And it's really, really, really important because it can undermine that kind of cruelty or side sniping or whatever can undermine genuine momentum. And I think it's important to also understand that these folks, there's a history in this country of powerful people bankrolling disruptors in people's movements. And instead of diminishing what a person is fighting for, I think it's just important that we build together alongside people who are centering humanity in how they are organizing in addition to what they're organizing for.”
Quote:
“There he sits: he talks awkwardly rather than glibly; he is courteous. He commands a distant and cold respect. But he is a very dangerous man. Were he primitive and brutal he would be a criminal—a murderer. But he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him—intellectual and ruthless. But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll.” — Dorothy Thompson, “Who Goes Nazi?” From the August 1941 issue of Harper’s Magazine