📨 Tell Congress CDC HICPAC needs oversight 🚩 Uncounted deaths of nursing home workers? 📫 Postcard to Biden: "protecting each other is the most effective and ethical approach to end the pandemic"
Healthcare worker harassment will not be stopped by ignoring the problem and catering to science denying extremists.
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: CDC Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC) needs public oversight.
By People’s CDC: There is a dangerous new government policy being proposed which could harm healthcare workers and patients across the country. Instead of strengthening infection control policies in healthcare settings to protect workers and patients from infectious diseases, the CDC is planning future guidance which could lower healthcare infection control standards.
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.
USA Letter Campaign to Senators: Prioritize Telework for Our Future
By Chloe Humbert: Join me in writing to U.S. Senators to oppose the pathetic, irrational, and big money fossil fuel industry serving nonsense bill S. 1565 called "The SHOW UP Act" which would attempt to roll backwards in time to prohibit telework for government employees and try to pretend there aren’t a dozen reasons telework is a great idea, including making jobs accessible to high risk disabled Americans in an ongoing pandemic threat environment.
A postcard to Joe Biden from Chloe in Scranton, the People’s CDC External Review of the CDC recommendation #5
I’ve written President Joe Biden recommendations from the People’s CDC External Review of the CDC. I sent postcards but one could send this message through the White House Contact Page.
🗞️ In the news
🇺🇸 Infection Control Today - One Step Forward, 2 Back: CDC's Proposals for Infection Control in Health Care Facilities, Jul 24, 2023, by Kevin Kavanagh, MD, Jane Thomason, MSPH, CIH As the White House maintains strict COVID-19 testing protocols for access to President Joseph Biden, protocols which recently detected SARS-CoV-2 in a member of the Israeli delegation, the CDC appears to be on the verge of relaxing infection disease strategies. During the CDC’s June 2023 Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC) meeting, concerns were expressed regarding proposed updates to existing infection control guidance for health care facilities which would place patients, health care workers, and nursing home residents at risk.
🇨🇦 CityNews.ca - COVID-19 outbreak declared at Etobicoke General Hospital - Jul 18, 2023, by Michael Ranger A unit at a west end Toronto hospital has been forced to limit new patients after a COVID-19 outbreak was declared on Monday. In a notice posted online, the William Osler Health System says their IPAC department and Toronto Public Health declared the outbreak in the 7 East Cardiology unit at Etobicoke General Hospital. The hospital has not confirmed how many patients have the virus. An outbreak is declared when two or more individuals test positive “with any common link” within a 48 hour period, according to provincial guidelines. The notice says the unit is now closed to new admissions with the exception of those who require telemetry. The hospital says the following other measures are being taken: Notifying patients and using the appropriate precautions to prevent transmission of the virus. Testing and monitoring staff, physicians and patients, as appropriate. Limiting staff members who normally work on multiple units to work on one unit only. Enhancing cleaning of patient care equipment and the hospital units.
🇺🇸 Government Executive - New union contract offers hope for better labor relations at the Social Security Administration. The American Federation of Government Employees and Social Security management will meet on a bimonthly basis to collaborate on issues like improving training, designing a child care subsidy and more. JULY 19, 2023, by Erich Wagner Couture said AFGE also was able to secure temporary compassionate assignments where, if an employee incurs a personal or family-related hardship, management can grant an employee a renewable 60-day period where they can work from home full time, or if they are staying with a family member in a different region, work from that family member’s home. And the union secured new language aimed at deterring bullying in the workplace, as well as a provision ensuring that disciplinary investigations must be initiated in a timely manner.
🇺🇸 MedPage Today - Is West Nile Virus on Your Radar? It Should Be. — Doubling down on education and prevention is key. by Claire Panosian Dunavan, MD July 20, 2023 Not long ago, a colleague shared a tragic story about a man with a failing heart. The good news? He received a transplant and did well. But soon after, things went terribly wrong. After returning home from the hospital, he suffered encephalitis and descended into a coma. Months later, despite full supportive care, he died. His nemesis was West Nile virus (WNV), which is now our country's leading mosquito-borne threat. In up to 1% of infected people (primarily those who are older, chronically ill, or immunosuppressed), it can either kill or cause neurologic damage ranging from acute encephalitis to long-term cognitive loss, paralysis, even Parkinsonian tremors. Ironically, WNV's woes in nearly everyone else are so mild or non-specific that most are never diagnosed.
🇨🇾 Newsweek - Cats to Be Given Human COVID-19 Drugs After Outbreak Leaves Thousands Dead. BY JESS THOMSON ON 8/4/23 Cats are to be given leftover human COVID-19 drugs in the wake of an outbreak of a feline coronavirus across the southeastern European island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea. Cyprus government officials announced the move after a recommendation from the agriculture ministry. Several thousand cats have died in recent weeks from feline infectious peritonitis (FIP), caused by a cat-based coronavirus strain not transmittable to humans.
This is NOT fine
Reports of zero nursing home worker deaths is misinformation if the government is no longer collecting the data. I think the data should be collected and reported, and the CDC should not pretend there's none by not counting.
Here’s where to send complaints: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
CDC LTC Nursing Home Covid-19 Data Dashboard: https://www.cdc.gov/nhsn/covid19/ltc-report-overview.html
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
Medpage Today - From Doxxing to Doctor Death Threats — Online harassment of physicians and scientists goes beyond trolling. by Vineet Arora, MD, MAPP, Tricia Pendergrast, MD, and Regina Royan, MD, MPH June 22, 2023 While the nation has declared the COVID-19 public health emergency over, the politicization of healthcare and medicine continues to result in harassment of doctors and scientists.
This makes it sound like powerful healthcare providers really thought that if they just declared the pandemic over politically, and stopped doing infection control in healthcare, fanatics would stop annoying and harassing them. This sounds like Elite Panic and the strategy of PR to attempt to control perceptions rather than solve actual problems.
Many who face harassment simply stop speaking out. That’s really the point of the harassment - to silence people. It was true when I was “doxxed” in 2002 - before there was even the term doxxing. It was true during “Gamer” “gate” in 2014 when people did not take women seriously enough and thought it was just an extremely online thing that was only a problem for gamers, but then led to a disastrous political scene in the U.S. and various conspiracy cults. And now it is being visited upon the medical professionals. Who’s next? More reasonable people need to speak up, not stay quiet allowing pluralistic ignorance to lead to a violent loud minority rule.
“Normal humans will smash their head every day and they will never do anything about it. And that parallels our whole security industry.”
- Josh Bressers commentary on Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the Open Source Security Podcast Episode 372 – HHGG security, Episode 42 remaster part 1