📣 Rally Outside Alameda County Dept of Public Health 😷 Petition to Moderna: Share the Science 💉 We need a OSHA permanent Covid standard for healthcare workers 🩺
Masks: protection for seniors — and also for everyone — “Only together can we save lives.”
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)
Oakland California: Rally Outside Alameda County Department of Public Health
TODAY March 20 at 4:30 PM Pacific at the Alameda County Department of Public Health Headquarters, 1000 Broadway, Oakland
By Senior & Disability Action: “High quality masks will be required at the action and supplied to those who need them” -“Whose Health Are You Protecting?” Seniors and Disabled People to Demand Local Health Officials - Continue Requiring Masks in High-Risk Settings at March 20
bit.ly/KeepMasksInHealthcare
Global Petition to: Moderna: Share the Science to Ensure Global Vaccine Access
By Justice is Global: The US government invested billions in Moderna’s vaccine technology, but Moderna has not shared the benefits with the public. The company raked in almost $18 billion in profits in 2022 alone, while multiple shareholders, including CEO Stéphane Bancel, have become billionaires. Meanwhile, it has stonewalled all efforts to share its publicly funded technology with the world or license out production to other manufacturers.
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/moderna-share-the-science-with-the-who-backed-hub-and-ensure-global-vaccine-access
USA Petition: We need permanent Covid-19 protections for health care workers now!
National Nurses United: Here's where we are at. OSHA sent the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs its COVID-19 permanent standard, and we need to urge OIRA to finish its review without delay. Enforcing this OSHA permanent Covid standard for health care workers without delay will ensure that frontline health care workers have the minimum protections they deserve.
https://act.nnu.org/sign/hs-OIRA-petition/
Masks: protection for seniors — and also for everyone — “Only together can we save lives.”
🗞️ In the news
🇺🇸 Stat News: FDA offers radio silence on question of spring Covid boosters, as other countries push ahead By Helen Branswell March 16, 2023 (“I would be lying to you if [I said] it doesn’t keep me up at night worrying that there is a certain chance that we may have to deploy another booster — at least for a portion of the population, perhaps older individuals — before next September, October,” Marks said at that time. The FDA declined a request to interview Marks for this article. In an email, the agency sidestepped most of STAT’s questions, saying only on the issue of spring boosters that “We continue to closely monitor the emerging data in the United States and globally, and we will base any decision on additional updated boosters upon those data.” The evidence to date suggests that Covid vaccines offer strong protection against severe disease, hospitalization, and death. But their capacity to stave off infection is short-lived.)
🇦🇺 ABC Southern Qld: Toowoomba mum Christine Handford hopes son's death will prompt young people to get heart checks / By David Chen 2023-03-05 (The Heart Foundation has also asked the federal government for heart health checks to be made available to everyone who has had a COVID-19 infection or is living with long COVID. The foundation said COVID-19 infection worsened pre-existing heart conditions and also increased the risk of developing more than 20 heart conditions including heart attack, blood clots, heart failure and stroke.)
🇬🇧 Manchester Evening News: Iconic tower that looms over Manchester city centre set for a makeover 'to reduce risk of Covid' - City Tower, overlooking Piccadilly Gardens, will make a small exterior change to improve ventilation. By Ethan Davies, 7 MAR 2023 (“Additional ventilation will ensure that an acceptable level of air quality is provided for both current and future occupancy levels of the building,” she continued. “The improved ventilation also provides additional environmental and health benefits, such as reducing the risk of exposure to Covid-19 and providing an effective internal heating control system.”)
🇺🇸 Important Context: “Grassroots” Parents’ Rights Group Gets Big Mystery Money. Moms for Liberty has quickly gained national prominence, thanks to a handful of shadowy donors by Walker Bragman Feb 27 2023 (Founded at the height of the pandemic by former and current school board members as a response to public school COVID mitigation measures like masking and quarantining the group’s strategy is simple, but effective: Bully school boards into submission or elect new members. In the 2022 midterms, MFL-endorsed candidates saw some success according to the group’s founder: about half of the 270 candidates the group supported won their races. As MFL has expanded so too has its agenda. In addition to combating COVID safety measures in schools and teachers’ unions, MFL has been rallying parents against transgender accommodations in schools, the teaching of “Critical Race Theory,” or discussion of systemic racism and LGBTQIA+ rights. The group, which is also pro-gun, has pushed for school library book bans, going so far as to create a book rating system to facilitate such bans.)
🚨 Ground Truths by Eric Topol, March 7th 2023 (The virus is finding the vulnerable people more easily since their guard is let down, abandoning high-quality masks and other mitigations, and the low rate of keeping up with boosters in the last 6 months (the age 65+ rate is 40%). There are about 15% of Americans (more than what many people think or have been led to believe), based on all the serologic data available, who never had Covid and are relying on their vaccines/boosters to avoid their first infection. Reinfections among the 85% with prior Covid are not uncommon and not necessarily benign.)
🫀 Time: How COVID-19 Changes the Heart—Even After the Virus Is Gone By Alice Park February 18, 2023 (“We found evidence, in the hearts of COVID-19 patients, abnormalities in the way calcium is handled,” says Marks. In fact, when it came to their calcium systems, the heart tissue of these 10 people who had died of COVID-19 looked very similar to that of people with heart failure. Marks plans to further explore the heart changes that SARS-CoV-2 might cause by studying how the infection affects the hearts of mice and hamsters.)
This is NOT fine
Gaslit Nation Podcast: East Palestine, Ohio, FEBRUARY 15, 2023
Sarah Kendzior: “And so you have a CDC that is easily as bad under Biden as it was under Trump, and you should really see this as a continuum. This is the overt transformation of an institution that is supposed to be protecting Americans into an institution that harms Americans. And one of the most disturbing developments on this is the recent declaration—you know, I think at this point it's happened—that Ron Klain is no longer Biden's chief of staff. He has been replaced by a man named Jeffrey Zients. And we've covered him on the show before because Zients was appointed by Biden as his “Covid Czar” during his 2020 campaign. And he remained in that position through March 2022, making disastrous decisions, really weaponizing the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” rhetoric, which pitted Americans against each other; and also lied about the extent of breakthrough covid, and expressing the same deference to corporations and plutocrats that individuals on the Trump team displayed. And that's not surprising because Zients was not a public health expert. He was an investment banker who built his career off of Medicare and Medicaid fraud. And that's who Biden decided to appoint into the “Covid Czar” position and that is who is now the chief of staff. And so, you know… I've been looking into this for a few weeks, meaning to get to it on the show, and it's like every week things get worse and worse. I was researching this before the State of the Union in which Biden blew off the fact that we are living in an ongoing pandemic and we need basic, uncontroversial remedies.”
The problem is of course is that there are no “uncontroversial” interventions because the fascists, libertarians, Longtermists, the fossil fuel industry, the commercial real estate industry, and sundry corporate interests are against all forms of public health. They are, like J. Edgar Hoover, against anything that is “considered to be remotely sympathetic to communism — which essentially meant anybody to the left of the John Birch Society” and will fight it tooth and nail against everything from a mask mandate in operating rooms to working from home, for home health aid family members who live there.
They don’t want people working from home because it interferes with fuel sales for commuting, and they need to keep butts in cubicles downtown for The Economy. So they scare people about proximity bias, and smiles.
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
I have heard another story where a doctor told a senior citizen patient, incorrectly, that they could not have paxlovid because it was, they claimed falsely, only for severe covid. This makes no sense at all that doctors are telling patients this when the whole deal with this medication is that Paxlovid is supposed to prevent severe illness. The government health departments should be informing doctors and the public about this, not just relying on drug commercials which people often tend to tune out - or miss because they’re in the kitchen getting something to drink.
I’m concerned that there’s this push on social media to further discourage people from taking Paxlovid (or vaccines) with arguments that Pfizer is corrupt. Yes, pharmaceutical companies, like all corporations, have financial incentives that do often corrupt business decisions. But that does NOT mean that the products are necessarily bad. Paxlovid and the Pfizer covid vaccines have been and continue to be trialed and involved in studies. And we already know covid is bad. There is always a risk calculation with any medicine. I will still get vaccine boosters, and should I test positive I would still get a prescription for Paxlovid. These calculations have not changed.
Taylor Lorenz posted a tweet on March 9th saying that she has heard that influencers are getting very sick with long covid and hiding it because of getting backlash for even mentioning covid. This is really disturbing. There seem to be influencers that profiteer off covid, and others that are being silenced about covid.
Nothing can be more mainstream and uncontroversial than wanting to breathe clean air. But some pushing stuff in the media seem to want you to think it's weird and nerdy and manufacture doubt with their determination to make everything have 2 sides. There are not 2 sides on the issue of clean air. The other side to clean air is dirty air!!
"It's both. Why is this still an issue? SarsCOV2, respiratory viruses, they can spread through respiratory droplets and aerosols they can also spread through contact…. How are you a surgeon and you're advocating against washing hands?"
— Dr. Wilson of Debunk_the_Funk on Dr. Marty Makary testimony in Congress