✏️ Postcards to Joe Biden 🏥 Hospital and nursing outbreaks happening after the unmaskings 😷 Letter campaign to fund PCR tests
Nobody in charge learned anything, I learned who people really are.
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: Free PCR tests and CDC Data Collection
By People’s CDC: Join us in writing Congress, the CDC and the ICATT and ask them to make Free PCR tests available for all through ICATT. They can do this by maintaining and expanding the pharmacy and stand-alone testing sites through Color Health, eTruthNorth, Quest and others at libraries, retail locations and independent pharmacies, and to expand this program to require community health centers to test residents for free.
A postcard to Joe Biden from Chloe in Scranton, the People’s CDC External Review of the CDC recommendation #1
This is part of my 100 postcards to Scranton Joe, candidate for re-election, from Chloe in Scranton, I’ve written President Joe Biden recommending the Recommendations from the People’s CDC External Review of the CDC. I sent postcards but one can also send these messages through the White House Contact Page. And here are all 10 in the series.
🗞️ In the news
🇯🇵 NHK - Okinawa's COVID surge accompanied by other viral infections in children, Friday, June 30 Coronavirus cases surged in Okinawa in June among people below the age of 20. The numbers of people with the respiratory syncytial virus and the human metapneumovirus are also increasing. Both viruses cause cold-like symptoms. Pediatric hospitals are becoming overstretched. The Nanbu Medical Center & Children's Medical Center says its eight pediatric intensive care units were all occupied as of Thursday. Pediatrician Cho Yoshiaki says the medical center accepted nearly 190 emergency patients on June 25, and nearly 70 percent of them were children. He says most of the kids were running a fever, and about five had to be hospitalized. Cho says outbreaks of children's viral infections normally occur seasonally. He added that it is rare to have outbreaks of several types at the same time. The doctor believes that the end of three years of coronavirus restrictions has made it easier for viruses to spread.
🇺🇸 Portland Press Herald - Portland nursing home sees surge in COVID-19 cases. Sixty-six cases of COVID-19 have been reported since May 14 among staff and residents at St. Joseph's Rehabilitation and Residence. By Joe Lawlor Posted June 8 St. Joseph’s Rehabilitation and Residence, a nursing home in Portland, is responding to a COVID-19 outbreak that has infected 34 residents and 32 employees since May 14. Of those who have been infected, 14 residents and three employees remained COVID-positive Thursday afternoon, St. Joseph’s spokesman John Porter said.
🇺🇸 Media Matters for America - Steve Bannon has spent years promoting RFK Jr. and his crackpot anti-vaccine theories. Bannon used his War Room podcast to help Kennedy spread conspiracy theories and undermine public health efforts well before he announced his 2024 candidacy. Written by John Knefel, Published 06/26/23 On June 21, Bannon braided together several of the strands that jointly animate Trump and Kennedy supporters, flowing seamlessly from anti-vaccine paranoia to a coded embrace of QAnon messaging by praising a new QAnon-aligned film about child trafficking called Sound of Freedom. (The film’s lead actor, Jim Caviezel, recently openly embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory during an interview on War Room.) Bannon claimed that the country is going through a “massive realignment of American politics” spurred by Trump, that has destroyed the partisan categories of Republican and Democrat. He proceeded to introduce and then play a lengthy clip of NBC misinformation reporter Brandy Zadrozny on All In with Chris Hayes debunking various false claims Kennedy had made. “This is about this realignment — and guess what it’s about, it’s what I’ve been talking about — the anti-vax, the vaccine-hesitant, anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian,” Bannon said. “You say, ‘Well, why would you be anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian?’” “Go watch the film Sound of Freedom,” Bannon continued, before referencing wildly disingenuous claims that the Biden administration is aiding a global child trafficking ring.
✈️ Bloomberg - Air Rage Is Making Expensive, Crowded Flights More Miserable Than Ever. By Ragini Saxena, June 12, 2023 "One incident gained particular notoriety last November when a man urinated on another passenger during an Air India flight from New York to New Delhi. In January, Air India CEO Campbell Wilson said in a statement that the airline reviewed its policy around alcohol service on flights and started an education program to improve its crews’ handling of unruly passengers. The airline gave iPads to pilots and senior cabin crew so they can report incidents to the aviation regulator faster. Nelson wants more people to talk about air rage. She also urged passengers to step up as helpers and be patient with crew and aviation workers on the ground."
🇺🇸 MedPage Today - Public Health: Lack of Trust, Loss of Workers — A talk with Megan Ranney about COVID, the importance of an MPH degree, and hopes for the future (transcript of an Instagram Live event) by Emily Hutto, Associate Video Producer April 26, 2023 Lastly, there's been a disturbing trend in many states of reducing the scope of practice of public health professionals. Just as with healthcare, people that go into public health do it because they care. They do it because they want to create a healthier society. Then they're working in a state that says that they can't do their job anymore, that's putting laws in place that reduce their ability to track the incidence of disease, to track risk factors, to provide interventions for substance use disorder or HIV or COVID. That gets really dispiriting after a while when you know the thing to do, you know how to do it, and you're literally not allowed to. It has created this sense of moral injury for many.
🇺🇸 The Mercury News Letters: Masking up | Gun violence - East Bay Times Letters to the Editor for May 11, 2023. By Dorothy Graham, Oakland, May 10, 2023 We are exposed to COVID not just by unmasked providers, but also by maskless patients with whom we share crowded waiting rooms and check-in lines. We are reluctantly foregoing vital diagnostic and preventive care as being too dangerous now. Why are health care institutions putting their most vulnerable patients in this awful position?
This is NOT fine
Hospitals F around and Find Out
NBC10 Boston - Boston hospital brings back mask requirement in unit affected by COVID cluster. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center confirmed a cluster of COVID-19 cases among patients and staff, but did not say how many people tested positive. By Michael Rosenfield • Published June 26, 2023 The masking mandate inside hospitals in Massachusetts was, by and large, lifted in May, and face coverings became optional. But now, there's been a cluster of COVID-19 cases at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. "It's something that could have been completely prevented," said Harvard Medical School instructor Dr. Lara Jirmanus. "It's a shame and a pity." A hospital spokesperson says the facility detected a cluster of COVID cases among staff and patients, isolated those patients, and reinstated universal masking in the affected unit. As of Monday night, Beth Israel has not said how many people were diagnosed with COVID, where in the hospital the cluster was identified, or how it spread. Most Massachusetts hospitals lifted their mask requirements when the COVID emergency came to an end. "Some people said, 'Well, we're not totally sure what's going to happen,'" said Jirmanus. "Well, I think we all know what was going to happen. When you take away masks in health care, you have outbreaks."
Following the politics instead of the science led to this preventable tragedy.
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
Nobody in charge learned anything, I learned who people really are
Not unexpectedly, with their emphasis on “how to” react to pandemics rather than on what needs to be changed, they do not offer suggestions about ending the socially structured racism that both underlies the extra burdens of pandemics on racialized peoples and contributes substantially to white “anti-science” opposition to public health actions. They say almost nothing about Long COVID — two short paragraphs and a short footnote. They do recognize that Long COVID is poorly understood and that some people with Long COVID have organized for care and research. One might think that these uncertainties about the extent of Long COVID, its duration, and thus the threat it poses to the population and the workforce would make it worth discussing in depth. After all, if too many people become disabled by it this would show that the COVID Crisis Group was badly mistaken in claiming that getting people back to school and work is a main priority of policy and in supporting the policy of getting back to normalcy in 2023.
From what it sounds like the book “Lessons from the COVID War'' basically chalks everything up to incompetence or just dropping the ball on the part of government and business leaders, and not deliberate decisions made by their policy priority - getting butts in seats downtown for The Economy, the false god of people in power. Apparently the book embraces that priority even to this day, which completely misses the point of our failures in society.
I know people in charge had a solid pandemic plan at the start, and I watched every level of government fold like cheap lawn chairs under the pressure of BIG MONEY and EUGENICIST LIBERTARIANS, and abandon every last public health measure, and turn their backs on the needs of the people.
Now people are writing books helping the people in charge say “oopsies!”
Commentary: Elite Panic vs. the Resilient Populace by James B. Meigs, MAY 2020
“Too often, the need to “avoid panic” serves as a retroactive justification for all manner of official missteps.”
But I refuse to read that book and find out exactly what their points were, and I don’t recommend this book at all, because Zeke Emmanuel was involved, and I don’t support the work of eugenics pushers.
If young Zeke wants to stop living at 75, that’s fine with me. But the arguments he lays out are not really meant to be just about himself. He argues that essentially, one should stop living after he or she has led a complete life. According to him, by 75, people have passed their creative peaks. It is all downhill from there. They are being kept alive by the likes of flu and pneumonia shots, vaccines, antibiotics, and better medical care, which keeps them going instead of allowing nature to take its course. That is why, he says at one point, he does not believe people should get flu shots in their 60s: because each one taken by an elderly person is depriving a younger person who needs it to live a full life from having access to it. (He does not explain why both cannot get them.)
The ideology of the most powerful people calling the shots seems to be that people over 75 have no business living anyway, anyone over 50 should just feel lucky to still be alive, young people should risk it for “natural herd immunity” for the population - who gives a shit if some die, and only the “strong” children should survive - so definitely don’t vaccinate any children.
Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine scientist and professor of pediatrics in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the advisory committee, emphasized before the meeting that it’s important to discuss who needs an updated vaccine this fall. “What’s the goal of the vaccine?” he asked. “If the goal of the vaccine is the stated goal, which is protection against severe disease, do you really need a yearly vaccine for otherwise healthy people less than 75? I mean, is this the flu model? Because I would argue it shouldn’t be.” Flu shots are updated each year and recommended annually for everyone over 6 months old because the strains can change so dramatically from season to season. With Covid, Offit said, it’s important to have evidence about whether protection from the vaccine against hospitalization and death is waning and, if so, in which groups.
We’re not allowed to want to avoid Long Covid. We’re not allowed to want to avoid getting sick for weeks at a time. We’re not allowed to want to avoid using up all sick time with covid repeatedly. We’re not allowed to want to avoid rolling the dice on organ damage.
The only thing we’re allowed is to maybe reduce the chances of hospitalization and death a bit. That’s it. That’s all people in powerful positions, these experts, with many many options for themselves, think - that we’re not worth keeping actually safe and healthy.
I reject this bullshit and demand better.
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. The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, January 2016
Great work, Chloe! - Dana