🙌#MillionsMissing protest📚Petition to Chicago Mayor & CPS: Keep School Masks🖊️Write Congress for Covid Funding💰New Yorkers to testify @ NYC MTA meeting🚃The Great Barrington Doxxing📱
How to Hide a Plague webinar with Justin Feldman, Unmasking Awards, and check out Julie Lam on what's wrong with the "You Do You" public health signs.
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)
PROTEST #MillionsMissing 2022!
Monday September 19th 12 noon EDT outside the White House in Washington D.C.
#MEAction #MillionsMissing 2022 demanding bold, urgent governmental action for the millions of people living with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), Long COVID, and other infection-associated complex chronic diseases.
Join in person or remote.
USA, Letter Campaign: Tell Your Representative to Fulfill the White House's Request for Covid Funding!
“Congress only has until the end of the month to pass supplemental funding, so time is of the essence. Send a letter to your representatives now, urging them to fulfill the White House’s request for Covid funding!”
by The Campaign to End COVID Now
https://endcovidnow.com/action/tell-congress-fully-fund-the-plan-to-end-covid-for-good/
CHICAGO USA PETITION: Tell Chicago Mayor Lightfoot & CPS CEO Martinez: Keep School Masks On and Save Lives!
Distributing & requiring free N95 masks (KF-94 masks for small children) will protect hundreds of thousands of CPS students, teachers, staff and their families from serious COVID infections, hospitalizations, ICU admissions, Long COVID and death due to Omicron (and future, more contagious subvariants which severity could be worse).
by Joy Bunton
https://chng.it/8QjnDxLMfs
WEBINAR: Justin M. Feldman: How to Hide a Plague: How Elite Capture and Individualism Made Covid Normal (Marcel and Josephine Patterson Memorial Lecture in the Medical Humanities)
Thursday, September 22, 2022 — 1pm-2pm US EDT, Noon-1pm US Central Time
Register in advance for this webinar
New York City MTA board meeting
September 21, 9am at MTA Headquarters, 2 Broadway, Manhattan
Testify virtually or in person about how it's important to reinstate the mask mandate on public transportation! #MaskUp #MaskTransit
Join BCID and other organizations
Adults cajoling masked kids to unmask at school?
I’ve heard a few of stories recently about kids in school being commended somehow for doing something that specifically requires unmasking, or just giving out awards for great smiles.
What if the child is immunocompromised? Imagine if the child’s parent is currently undergoing cancer treatment.
Can we sit with that for a moment and consider this?
🗞️ In the news
🇺🇸 CBS News: Workers at 14 nursing homes in Pennsylvania go on strike (Nursing homes have long struggled with high turnover, made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. Some facilities were forced to close or downsize because of lagging Medicaid reimbursements, according to trade groups. Pennsylvania has about 700 licensed nursing homes.)
🇨🇦 The Tyee: The Attack on Freeland Sprouts from ‘Rage Farming’ by Charles Rusnell (In the interview with The Tyee, McDavid, one of the organizers of a truck convoy in Grande Prairie, ranted about the Trudeau government being part of a conspiracy involving the World Economic Forum. He also claimed the government was trying to starve the public by forcing fertilizer limitations on farmers and was killing thousands of people, including children, with vaccinations.)
🇺🇸 Click On Detroit: Daughter says QAnon radicalized Walled Lake father before he killed mother, dog, injured sister by Grant Hermes, Elizabeth Washington (The 21-year-old daughter of a man who police said killed his wife, the family dog and severely injured his 25-year-old daughter said her father was radicalized by QAnon. QAnon is an online conspiracy that believes in a pedophilic cult of the elite that planned the COVID pandemic and stole the election. Rebecca Lanis, 21, said QAnon radicalized her father and sent him over the edge. “He started reading about the stolen election and Trump and then he started getting deeper into it and then when the vaccines came out and COVID, he started reading all that,” Rebecca Lanis said.)
⏱️🧠 Stat: Risk of ‘brain fog’ and other conditions persists up to two years after Covid infection by Elizabeth Cooney (“Clinically, in my own practice and in our long Covid clinic, this is exactly what we’re seeing: that the acquired dementia that these patients get tends to be lasting and very problematic.” - Wes Ely)
🩺 Politico: Doctors are taking it on themselves to figure out long Covid By Krista Mahr and Megan Messerly (“People are now basically living life, saying, ‘Oh, Covid’s just a cold.’ But it’s not. We still don’t know enough about it, and we are still getting just as many referrals for patients who have gotten Covid during Omicron as before,” said Nikki Gentile, an assistant professor in family medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine who cares for patients at the medical school’s long Covid clinic. “I wish there was more talk about it on the federal level.”)
🇺🇸 Government Executive: Thousands of FDA Employees Could Face Furloughs or RIFs if Congress Doesn't Act Soon by Eric Katz (A delay would impact not just workers but key mission activities, including efforts related to COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics, monitoring the safety of marketed products, oversight of clinical trials and reviews of applications for treatments for rare diseases that have unmet medical needs.)
🇺🇸 ABC News: COVID cases among students during the 1st week at Chicago schools are triple compared to last year By Mary Kekatos (According to CPS data, 449 students have tested positive for the virus during the first week of the new school year -- 3.3 times higher than the 135 students who tested positive during the first week of the 2021-22 school year.)
This is NOT fine
Julie Lam: “You Do You” –NYC Transit System’s Self-Mockery Campaign Backfired
“If the M.T.A. had deliberately looked for a way to give me or my deceased loved one the finger, they couldn’t have done better than the new ‘You Do You’ campaign — a cutesy spoof of its previous mask PSA with an insinuation that maskers had better not rock the boat. Here’s the thing: public health isn’t all about you,” said Lisa Smid, whose significant other was among the 173 people killed by COVID who worked for the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (M.T.A.).
Joining many New Yorkers, Smid loathes the M.T.A.’s new masks-are-voluntary public service announcements. Amid the ongoing pandemic, the messaging deliberately makes acceptable both not masking and improper use of this critical preventive tool.
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt…
Maybe Bhattacharya needs to ask his old pal Peter Thiel to explain how private companies work. The reporter Walker Bragman, who has written multiple articles on the big money funding behind anti-mitigation campaigns like “The Great Barrington Declaration” was doxxed by 2 of originators of the Great Barrington Declaration. They published his email and phone number and then when that was removed by Twitter because it violated the private company’s rules, it appears they claimed that was evidence of Biden censorship. What? Has Twitter been nationalized?
I have heard this a few times: people are “not masking out of respect” - but out of respect for who? Respect for anti-maskers? Who is being disrespected by masking?
@CovidDataReport: “I wonder how many parents are refusing to test their child for covid in fear their kids may miss a few days of school?” — I’ve already been hearing stories about this.
There’s a sudden concern that masks in healthcare settings will be completely gone soon in the US. I’m not sure why this has come up now. In many places, doctors offices have already been unmasked.
Naomi Wu pointed out that all clothing started as a form of PPE, so why wouldn’t we make them pleasing? Wu uses the example of shoes and hats, which should be obvious, right? Sunglasses, coats. Someone I know keeps bringing up bicycle helmets. I’m reminded of an understanding poverty training I attended several years ago where it was explained how the poor, who are sometimes transient and unbanked, sometimes use necklaces as a way to store monetary savings, in the form of gold chains. And surely people have heard of “seat belt pals”, right?
I recommend checking to see if there’s wastewater monitoring in your region, because here in Scranton, the wastewater has diverged considerably from the case counts.
"I do not decide to do a risky manoeuvre because I have the ejector seat.”
David Berger, doctor and pilot