đVaccination for under 5s at last â the experience of a Motherđ€± Essential Services Still Need Mask Requirementsđ·A Long Covid Dashboardđ„ïž
Many people really believe it's safe because if it wasn't, surely the authorities would again be mandating masks.
Contents:
- Events, Actions, & Campaigns
- Pandemic field notes & âLiving with the virusâ
- In the News (virus & adjacent news)
- This is NOT Fine section (gaslighting & other wrongs)
- He(a)rd Scuttlebutt (did you miss this?)
đ COVID-19 Longhauler Advocacy Project
đ Long Covid Dashboard
Online Group watch of the 2016 documentary âHyperNormalisationâ with discussion about how this concept relates to the pandemic.
The watch will be split into 4 online meetups of 1 hour at least, first 40 minutes of watching the documentary., July 9, 16, 30, & Aug 6. The film is available on Youtube with closed captioning, the group watch will have a text chat but does not have transcription. This will be hosted in the World Health Network platform accessible via the web, and a corresponding discussion will take place in the WHN slack. Itâs not necessary to join WHN to attend the group watch but you are very welcome to join WHN using this form.
Watch 3, Saturday July 30 @ 2pm US EDT
đ·đ Letter Campaign: Essential Services Need Mask Requirements
Use action network form to write U.S. & Canadian representatives, or use the letter as a template to send to your representatives and other decision makers yourself, or just write your own letter to advocate for essential service mask requirements.
đâĄïž tinyurl.com/essentialmasks
Vaccination for under 5s at last â the experience of a Mother in the northeastern United States of America
A reader submitted her story:
We went to get the kids vaccinated on Thursday evening. It turned out the park hosting the mobile vaccine van service was unfortunately hosting a concert that evening as well. We had hoped to avoid a maskless crowd and expected an outdoor option on a beachfront park would be safer than a pharmacy.
It turned out the concert wasnât a problem; it was easy enough to take a wide path around the event. But as we were filling out the paperwork at the vaccine tent, a shirtless anti-vaxx man approached us to earnestly warn us that the paperwork didnât have some kind of safety disclaimers. His clear implication was that the vaccines werenât safe. I didnât even listen to all he was saying. He was within 4-5 feet of my kids (without a mask of course) and I wanted him to get away. I told him, âWe are handling it,â and when he persisted I said, âYouâve done your duty. Please go.âÂ
He walked away, but soon we noticed him lurking nearby watching us intently. After a brief discussion my partner and I notified the people running the vaccine station. They took us seriously. The burly man doing my younger childâs vaccination offered to walk us to the car when we were done. Then an older female staff member went over to the police nearby for help. We explained the situation again. One of the officers (without a mask) offered to escort us back to our car when we were done, so thatâs what we did. We didnât see the shirtless man again despite looking around constantly as we walked.Â
It shook us up. It felt like he was accusing us of doing harm to our children and not knowing what we were doing. We have done our reading and understand that the vaccine is far safer than catching covid while unprotected.Â
Adding to our stress, while our vaccination paperwork was being processed an elderly lady (without a mask) sidled up, chatting in a friendly way, and got close enough to pat our 3 year old on the shoulder. It was as if the pandemic wasnât even happening, as if we werenât clearly at a vaccination tent to get our kids some protection from a virus still in circulation.
Iâm grateful for the outdoor vaccination option, I just wish more people understood that covid is not over.
đïž In the news
đđ· CBC: Alberta government memos on school masking 'damning,' union leader says (âA key revelation in the Alberta Health briefs is that while many factors can impact COVID transmission, school boards without mask mandates at the start of the 2021 school year had, on average, three times more outbreaks than those with masks.â)
â ïžđŠ CNN: New coronavirus subvariants escape antibodies from vaccination and prior Omicron infection, studies suggest (âOmicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 appear to escape antibody responses among both people who had previous Covid-19 infection and those who have been fully vaccinated and boosted, according to new dataâŠâ)
đŠ đ 9News: COVID-19 reinfection could be worse than first thought (Epidemiologist Professor Nancy Baxter said "each time you catch it, you have additional risks". "It is not a one and done scenario. If you have COVID-19 once, you don't want to get it again," Baxter told Today.)
đđ· The Mercury News: BART lifts its COVID mask mandate Monday â again. Could it be back soon? (With cases surging in the Bay Area, some health experts say the pause is ânon-sensicalâ â Dr. George Rutherford, an infectious disease specialist at UC San Francisco, is concerned that any day without a mandate in place presents a risk that decision-makers cannot afford to take, especially now.)
This is NOT fine
Someone related a story to me about a family member who got infected and was shocked and felt betrayed because mask requirements had been lifted in the UK, so she really believed it was safe. I have often heard of people here in Pennsylvania saying things like "If it was so unsafe they'd be mandating masks again." Iâve heard many people in the U.S. report that people assume it must be safe if the restaurants are open. Surely they would close places like restaurants again if it were a big risk. A podcaster recently reported, âthe moment I let my guard down I got covidâ and said she was disappointed in the local health authorities for telling people it was safe.
Itâs not that people wonât mask, itâs that they think itâs not necessary because people trust that the government would tell them what to do if itâs not safe! These people have no idea that they need to call & write their representatives and demand information and safety measures. They have no idea that it was a Trump judge acting politically who struck away the transit mask requirements. They donât know about the dark money funded ridiculous agitators showing up at school board meetings demanding a lack of safety in the classrooms.
People just hear authorities saying itâs fine, and then they find out the hard way.
Itâs not fine. People need to be masked up for protection. đ·
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt
Seems like the authorities are never going to give another Greek letter to another strain of SARSCOV2, no matter how different the new variants. So now other people are just randomly naming the variants. Itâs a DIY pandemic.
Over the holiday weekend I called to find out about urgent care telehealth which is clearly advertised on the Geisinger Web site, but when I called the Geisinger customer number, I wound up talking to 3 people who had no idea such a thing exists. Itâs existed for over a year, according to the woman I eventually talked to.
Someone in the Covid Precautions Community on twitter said their primary care doctor didnât even know about Evushield at all.
Some people mistakenly think the vaccine has made immunity worse because theyâre getting sick more often now than beforeâ when the problem is theyâre getting sick more because all the protections were removed and we still have a virus circulating.
Much like the story I heard last week about a q-influencer pushing long covid symptoms as âascensionâ⊠now I see thereâs a huge disinformation push to improperly blame clotting conditions on the vaccine, when that is a quite common post-covid complication, including among the unvaccinated, and happened in 2020 before anybody had the vaccines. Far more common from infection. A study on Pfizer vaccine in Lancet: âThe incidence of thromboembolic event or hemorrhagic stroke following vaccination is lower than that among SARS-CoV-2 test positive cases; therefore, vaccination against covid-19 remains an important public health intervention.â
Bob Wachter is back to saying ableist things and stumping for Leana Wen. He admits that heâs not putting himself in danger, but seems fine with others being forced into infection while he can protect himself.
âWhen governments enact policy, they facilitate public education by showing that we should all take a crisis seriously.â
Lucky Tran