🚃Petition & campaign NY Governor to reinstate the transit mask mandate😷Updated: URGENCY OF EQUITY TOOLKIT📣Webinar: HIV Community in the Time of COVID, Long COVID and Monkeypox🎙️
What happens when politics has gone 100% bananas untethered from reality?
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)
New York: Call & write Governor Hochul & urge her to reinstate the transit mask mandate!
☎️ 518-474-8390 or 📧 web site contact page
Campaign by @MandateMasksNY
Join the Mandate Masks NY mailing list
PETITION: Urge Governor Hochul to Reinstate the Mask Mandate on Public Transit!
😷📝 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 decision makers to advocate for essential service mask requirements.
Action Network form INCLUDES STATE GOVERNORS!! (editable form that can be used more than once)
🔗➡️ tinyurl.com/essentialmasks
Ontario Canada Letter Campaign: Request for the Ontario Human Rights Commission to initiate a public interest inquiry into the dangers presented by a removal of Covid-19 protections.
Posted by @RevivalCare on twitter: Everyone is welcome to use this letter to file their own request of OHRC at: legal@ohrc.on.ca
Copy of letter (includes reference links): https://archive.ph/nJrzG
WEBINAR: Supporting Community and Ourselves:
The U.S. HIV Community in the Time of COVID, Long COVID and Monkeypox
Thursday, September 15, 2022, 6:30 - 8 pm Eastern / 3:30 - 5 pm Pacific
Registration open: bit.ly/S4HIwebinar2
Updated: URGENCY OF EQUITY TOOLKIT from the People’s CDC
The Toolkit: urgencyofequity.org
Spread the word on social media with graphics.
Everything is political — but what happens when politics has gone 100% bananas untethered from reality?
The right wing forum web site Kiwi Farms is now infamous for anti-trans harassment organizing, but of course also featured anti-vax propaganda where they attempt to justify campaigning against vaccination because they say it is “a political act” to get vaccinated.
A Texas judge ruled that the requirement that employer health insurance cover HIV PrEP drugs was a violation of religious beliefs of an employer providing the health insurance because, they claim, it “promotes” homosexuality. Ontario Canada just ended all requirements to isolate or quarantine for SARS-CoV-2. Zero days isolation in Ontario now. And Sweden was revealed to have deliberately went with mass infection in a push for “natural herd immunity”.
Is it a stretch to imagine a government deciding that vaccines, masks, or even just any covid treatment, are “political acts” that violate some employer’s religious beliefs? Are we sure that’s unlikely?
In the not so distant future, the only way a lot of people will be able to get testing, vaccination, or treatments in the US will be via employer insurance, since Jha announced, “My hope is that in 2023, you’re going to see the commercialization of all of these products.” Which means employers will decide.
Seems like anything’s on the table these days and it’s time for some alarm because there’s no magic that’s going to protect us.
🗞️ In the news
🩺😷 Stat: As masks are shed, a routine visit to a medical office can pose Covid risks for some patients by Megan Molteni (… she checked the lab’s website, which stated that masks were required inside. When she arrived, she was reassured by a sign on the door that said the same thing. But when Fama, 48, opened the door, she was greeted by an unmasked employee behind a glass partition. A patient in the waiting area was also maskless. And the technician who took Fama’s blood came into the room with a mask below her chin, before eventually pulling it over her mouth and nose. “I was just floored to see medical providers doing that,” she said. “I’ve been trying to do everything to keep me and my parents safe and it just makes you feel like you don’t matter.”)
🇺🇸 The Nation: Ending Free Covid Tests, US Policy Is Now “You Do You” By Martha Lincoln and Anne N. Sosin (But to judge by the tenor of recent public comments, you’d think the good times were still rolling. Last month, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona stated that the new and much more limited CDC guidelines for Covid in schools should provide “students, parents, and educators the confidence they need to head back to school this year with a sense of joy and optimism.” In his comments on the end of federal funding, Jha stated, “My hope is that in 2023, you’re going to see the commercialization of all of these products.” To be sure, none of this seems like particularly joyful, hopeful news. The United States will be among the first countries to cease the provision of free Covid vaccinations and treatments, leaving low-income people—a group that is overrepresented among the pandemic’s victims—with even less protection. After free vaccination ends, as Neil Sehgal—a health policy scholar at the University of Maryland—commented, “We’ll enter a phase where we can virtually wipe out deaths among the well-insured.”)
🩺✊ Payday Report: 5,000 Nurses to Strike Monday in Minn. – MLB Recognizes 5,000-strong Minor League Players Union – Eastern Michigan Faculty Hold “Illegal” Strike (In Minnesota, over 15,000 nurses plan to go on a 3-day strike beginning Monday at several major healthcare facilities throughout the state over a variety of recurring issues around understaffing and burnout.)
🇨🇦 The Tyee: ‘We Can’t Let Our Guard Down’ by Moira Wyton (And with the fragile health-care system already in crisis, it is important to help keep people out of hospital, Henry said. “We’re still in a very uncertain time,” she said. “There is a lot of transmission globally, we do still have the chance of new variants that escape vaccine protection, potentially.” The province expects to offer the first 110,000 doses of vaccine by Sept. 19 in health authority-run mass immunization clinics and more than 500 pharmacies across B.C.)
🇺🇸 The Philadelphia Inquirer: ‘I feel lost’: Families at two Philly charters scramble to find new schools after closure plans were announced by Kristen A. Graham (archive link) (Afterward, the combined Bluford-Daroff board said it would operate the schools independently but could not find a management company or hire enough teachers to staff both schools.)
This is NOT fine
I don’t know if it’s watching a bunch of people who claim they’re vehement about democracy get all weak in the knees about the trappings of a monarchy — but a lot of people seem to be hinging hopes on a prince coming to the rescue.
Bad news is, elites don’t do well in a crisis.
Commentary: Elite Panic vs. the Resilient Populace by James B. Meigs
"Disaster researchers call this phenomenon “elite panic.” When authorities believe their own citizens will become dangerous, they begin to focus on controlling the public, rather than on addressing the disaster itself."
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt
I’ve been seeing too many stories about kids going back to school or university and immediately or almost immediately getting covid.
Scott Overland, vice president of the Phoenixville Area School Board in Chester County started an open letter objecting to the education plan platform of Pennsylvania candidate for governor, Mastriano — anti-masker, anti-vaxxer, insurrectionist and Rod of Iron connected Rudy Giuliani fundraiser attending PA state senator, and staunch school-choice advocate, who wants to arm school employees, and give tax breaks to small business tyrants who graciously decide to provide scholarships to private schools. It’s interesting how school privatization goes along with the anti-mask & anti-vax stuff. Yet many private schools are the ones still with robust remote options, mask mandates, and testing. As @danfmto had said, “Weird how all these "let it rip" public health academics keep being funded by the school privatization movement.”
I’m hearing a lot of stories about progressives getting covid at the libertarian super spreader convention in the desert called Burning Man. I’m not sure why but some people seem surprised there were massive covid outbreaks there.
Whatever fanciful bullshit public health authorities might now be peddling, the dynamics of COVID have not changed. Superspreading events still occur at large crowded gatherings.
— Andrew Nikiforuk