👷 Safety gear is good. 🚗 WaPo: "Ordered back to the office, top tech talent left instead" ◀️ Blaming labs for diseases transcends the pandemic unfortunately
What else is considered ok at the nursing homes?
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)
Write your reps. Do it now.
Write your own reps. Don't waste time spamming anonymous emails to reps in other states who don't give a shit what you think anyway and will use your emails to try to prove "outside agitation" or accuse you of being an anonymous foreign troll, and maybe use it to undermine real local advocacy. The most beneficial thing we can do is promote the advocacy of people in other municipalities is by boosting their messages on social media and spreading the word to people we know in a particular location, since most ad hoc public health advocates do not actually have the kind of money to pay for professional social media promotion services (also known as troll farms and botnets) - which are the way “outsiders” can promote something… the more viral a social media post, the more likely someone in that locality will wind up seeing it who might not otherwise know about the issue.
Safety gear is good.
CDC - The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
“administrative controls and PPE are often applied to existing processes where hazards are not well controlled”
Infectious disease is NOT well-controlled and it’s hazardous.
🗞️ In the news
CIDRAP - COVID booster linked to 25% lower odds of long COVID News brief April 29, 2024 Stephanie Soucheray, MA A new cross-sectional study published in Vaccine of US adults demonstrates that people who received the COVID-19 booster vaccine had 25% lower odds of having long COVID than their unvaccinated counterparts. The study was based on 8,757 respondents to the 2022 National Health Interview Survey, with data from a weighted sample size of 87,509,670 Americans.
The Washington Post - Ordered back to the office, top tech talent left instead, study finds In the months following return-to-office mandates, an increased number of senior employees departed Apple, Microsoft and SpaceX, often to work for competitors. By Taylor Telford May 12, 2024 at 9:05 a.m. EDT “We find experienced employees impacted by these policies at major tech companies seek work elsewhere, taking some of the most valuable human capital investments and tools of productivity with them,” said Austin Wright, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Chicago and one of the study’s authors. “Business leaders should weigh carefully employee preferences and market opportunities when deciding when, or if, they mandate a return to office.” Technology is an industry “where the discourse over the return to office was most heated,” said David Van Dijcke, a researcher at the University of Michigan who worked on the study. Microsoft, Apple and SpaceX play an outsize role in the sector — collectively they represent more than 2 percent of the tech workforce and 30 percent of the industry’s revenue, according to researchers — and their office policy “sets the precedent for the wider debate around the return to office,” the study’s authors wrote. Those three companies also were among the first Big Tech firms to pursue return-to-office mandates in 2022, allowing researchers to separate the effects of mandates from the widespread tech layoffs that rocked the industry later in the year, Van Dijcke said.
Health Policy Watch - Disinformation: Anti-WHO Convoy Heads to Geneva for World Health Assembly Pandemics & Emergencies 21/05/2024 • Kerry Cullinan One of their key – and false – claims against the pandemic agreement and the amended International Health Regulations (IHR) is that they will give WHO the power to supersede domestic laws and declare lockdowns and other measures during pandemics and public health emergencies. Protest speakers include Trump campaigner Dr Kat Lindley, UK anti-vaxxer Dr Aseem Malhotra, biologist and author Bret Weinstein, and Swiss lawyer Philipp Kruse. Lindley is Texas president of the far-right Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. She was in Washington DC in 2021 during the 6 January assault on the US Capitol, using her Twitter account to call on “patriots” to “answer the call” and “#StopTheSteal”, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Malhotra is a cardiologist who has campaigned against COVID-19 vaccines globally, including in South Africa, where he supported a court bid by an anti-vaxx group, the Freedom Alliance of South Africa (FASA), to stop the government from administering the Pfizer vaccine. Weinstein hosts a podcast in the US that promotes anti-vaxxers and has steadily promoted the animal anti-parasite medicine, Ivermectin, as an effective treatment against COVID-19. Recently, he was part of perpetuating an astonishing conspiracy linking the attempted assassination of Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico with that country’s “courageous rejection of the WHO’s audacious Pandemic Preparedness Treaty and International Health Regulations”.
The New York Times ‘We’ll See You at Your House:’ How Fear and Menace Are Transforming Politics - Danny Hakim, Ken Bensinger and Eileen Sullivan - Sun, May 19, 2024 at 12:47 PM EDT Raskin, who played a leading role in Donald Trump’s second impeachment hearing, said he received about 50 menacing calls, emails and letters every month that are turned over to the Capitol Police. His latest court visit was prompted by a man who showed up at his house and screamed in his face about the COVID-19 vaccine, Trump’s impeachment and gender-related surgeries.
Cardinal & Pine - Facing backlash, fate of NC Republicans’ proposed ban on public masking is unclear - By Dylan Rhoney May 24, 2024 Some advocates have also speculated that if masking were banned without an exemption for health reasons, it could violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Senate proposal was so controversial that it proved too much for fellow Republicans in the North Carolina House of Representatives. State Representative Erin Paré, a Republican who represents parts of southern Wake County posted on X (formerly Twitter), last weekend that she would only support the bill if it included a health exemption. In a voice vote on Wednesday afternoon, a majority of the state House rejected the Senate version of the bill. The bill will now go to the conference committee, where lawmakers will negotiate revisions—including a possible health exemption. While concerns over public health were the primary consideration, Grafstein also said she was concerned about the masking ban potentially impacting tourism and business in the state.
This is NOT fine
If the Rhode Island Department of Health is ok with intractable bedbugs, what else is considered ok at the nursing homes?
Dept. of Health pushes back against bedbug reporting at Long Term Care Coordinating Council meeting - "It is correct that they do have them ...they have had them for the approximately five years that I've been here," said Autumn Bishop from DOH. "We looked at this [issue] ... 29 times." STEVE AHLQUIST APR 30, 2024 In the last five years, Summer Villa Assisted Living has been the subject of 29 Rhode Island Department of Health reports that noted the presence of bedbugs. “It is correct that they do have them,” said Autumn Bishop from the Center of Health Facility Regulations, which falls under the Rhode Island Department of Health (DOH). “They have had them for the approximately five years that I've worked here. They've always had them.”
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
Some will “say anything” when it comes to diseases misinformation.
Tucker Carlson is now platforming a bizarre and inappropriate conspiracy theory that labs also cooked up other “freaky diseases” as “stealth weapons” (specifically Lyme, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, and babesia). Perhaps it’s in the interest to blame something other than climate change for the infectious disease threats we’re now facing.
CIDRAP - Climate change unleashing torrent of infectious disease threats, physicians caution Mary Van Beusekom, MS - March 20, 2024 As sea levels rise, extreme storm surges and coastal floods are predicted to take place 20 to 30 times more often by 2050. "These events, combined with warming, increase contact with coastal pathogens (eg, Vibrio species), which can cause gastroenteritis, soft tissue infections, and sepsis, with mortality rates of up to 50%," the experts wrote. "Other waterborne pathogens, such as Campylobacter, Escherichia coli, and Cryptosporidium, cause diarrheal disease after flooding and are worsening with extreme weather events and warmer climates." Healthcare providers should be vigilant for infectious diseases with changing ranges and hosts.
Even before climate change, of course, diseases have plagued people on Earth long before there were any labs, so even from that perspective, it seems blaming deliberate engineering is the least likely explanation for diseases anyway. And perhaps ironically, even the “plandemic” ideas pre-date the pandemic.
“Unlike noncommunicable diseases like heart disease, where you have free rein to take risks to your health so long as you are personally willing to accept the consequences, decisions about communicable diseases cannot rest solely on your personal risk tolerance. In fact, beyond impacting other people’s health, the freedom to behave however you’d like can reduce other people’s freedom, too, for example, by making them ill or by creating risks that foreclose certain activities.”
Maxwell Smith - HealthyDebate - Mar 13, 2024