📫 Vote by Mail, a precautionary option ☑️ What is Case Surveillance?
The indirect funding of promoting products, politics, and propaganda against public health.
Write reps writing prompt:
Please support and promote vote by mail because it makes voting more accessible especially to the high risk elderly and disabled and can reduce the spread of respiratory diseases heading into winter.
Please feel free to repurpose for your own letters to reps.
Voting by mail is a safe option.
Info on U.S. absentee voting: www.vote.org/absentee-ballot-deadlines.
The longer time spent in crowded locations, the more likely you are to pick up various circulating infectious diseases, so more absentee voting by mail could reduce infectious disease transmission at the polls for both the people voting by mail and the people still going to the polls and working at them. There are other reasons that voting by mail is a good idea such as long wait times at some locations, poll worker shortages, disinformation campaigns causing tense times at some poll locations, not having to drive to the poll yourself, or being freed up to do election day work yourself. And just feeling relaxed to take as much time as you need to peruse the ballot is a plus, especially in local elections and primaries where there are many candidates running to choose from.
Different states have different rules and it’s important to follow the instructions, and prepare in advance. Most places have provisions for absentee voting for a medical reason, age, or plans to be out of your district on Election Day. In Oregon everyone votes by mail. In Ohio voters must request a mail ballot each election. Here in Pennsylvania we now have no excuse absentee mail ballot voting and must request to have mail ballots each year. Also in Pennsylvania, if a disabled person needs someone else to drop a ballot off at a designated drop box, there is a form that must be filled out by both the voter and the person carrying the ballot, and carried by the person delivering the ballot to the drop box.
In another reversal, nowadays even the Republicans in Pennsylvania are on board again with mail ballots, as they were prior to 2020. In fact there were a great many Trump campaign ads playing here where Donald Trump is shown at a gathering telling voters to register to vote by mail in Pennsylvania. However, he seems to flip-flop on this issue.
A U.S. campaign to promote Vote By Mail.
Activate America is an organization that works with other organizations to run “postcards to voters” campaigns, where the volunteer provides their own (topic neutral) postcards and postcard postage stamps, and Activate America provides the addresses to send them to and the message to put on the postcards. (There is no minimum commitment, and I typically request just a handful at a time.) They are rolling out a “501(c)(3) compliant Vote By Mail (VBM) enrollment program” in multiple states that “do not include any partisan or candidate messaging anywhere on the postcard” by The Movement Cooperative with BallotReady. (Civil servants and government workers subject to the Hatch Act should of course still always consult the rules before volunteering with any election related organization or campaign.) This is an opportunity to encourage people to choose voting by mail instead of in-person, which could result in reducing infectious disease transmission at the polls for both the people voting by mail and the people still going to the polls and working at them. I’m doing it myself.
🗞️ In the news
Reuters - U.N. begins polio vaccination in Gaza as fighting rages By Nidal Al-Mughrabi and Hussam Al-Masri September 1, 2024 The World Health Organisation (WHO) confirmed last month that a baby was partially paralysed by the type 2 polio virus, the first such case in the territory in 25 years.
KFF Health News - With Only Gloves To Protect Them, Farmworkers Say They Tend Sick Cows Amid Bird Flu - By Rae Ellen Bichell August 27, 2024 A recent study found that not all infected cows show symptoms, so workers could be interacting with contagious animals without realizing it. Even when it is known that animals are infected, farmworkers often still have to get in close contact with them, sometimes under grueling conditions, such as during a recent heat wave when Colorado poultry workers collected hundreds of chickens by hand for culling because of the outbreak. At least six of the workers became infected with bird flu. One dairy worker in Weld County, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job, said his employer has not offered any protective equipment beyond gloves, even though he works with sick cows and raw milk.
This is NOT fine
What does it mean when “cases” are reported?
“Case surveillance is foundational to public health practice.”
Case reports were ended.
CDC - COVID-19 Case Surveillance Public Use Data Reporting of new COVID-19 Case Surveillance data will be discontinued July 1, 2024, to align with the process of removing SARS-CoV-2 infections (COVID-19 cases) from the list of nationally notifiable diseases.
Cases in case surveillance means a count of actual diagnosed cases of a disease. Case counts never represent the true amount of infections, because there are always infections that are never diagnosed for a number of reasons. But case surveillance is a tool to have a good idea what’s going on, because it’s hard data of proven actual diagnosed cases of a disease. It’s not an estimation. It’s not speculation, it’s a case count of actual instances of diagnosed infections.
There have always been people who’ve done data models extrapolating how many real infections a particular case count represents. And it’s not wrong to do these speculative exercises. But I am seeing a lot of scientist influencers and doctor pundits out there repeating “new covid cases” but they really mean infection prevalence speculation based on data modeling from wastewater. This is another step removed from speculating from actual case counts. Wastewater surveillance is also an excellent public health tool, but experts have said that there’s no good way to translate that into some case surveillance equivalent because they’re two different surveillance methods.
Anyone reporting these numbers should be clear that the numbers are NOT “cases” because cases refers to diagnosed instances. If you muddy this, “case counts” become meaningless and unscientific and not founded in public health practice, and shared reality is being distorted.
While speculation itself isn’t a bad thing, if it’s presented in context, another issue with the speculations I’m seeing is that they are using wastewater data in models that are not published publicly, are not peer reviewed, and nobody is able to see or replicate. And I’m sorry no, publishing on twitter as a hotshot influencer and getting retweeted or a shoutout by some doctor pundit quoted in the media is NOT the same as publishing of peer reviewed data modeling, and then reporting the results as what they are - speculations on infection prevalence based on wastewater data — not “cases”. Because again, cases refer to actual cases of people diagnosed.
And all these problems are before you even get to the fact that the speculative models people are referencing are by people who already have shown themselves to be problematic when it comes to public messaging and hyping their own horns. One hyped up their own paper in a way to make people believe that it would be so influential it would on its own bring changes in hospital practices to protect the vulnerable, when I don’t even think it can be used for advocacy safely. The other person seems like a minimizer who has been rude to public health advocates. So I’m not sure how much I would trust what they say anyway.
But even if these models are good and accurate - it’s still not about “cases” because it’s not case surveillance. Because “cases” are diagnosed cases. It’s a public health tenet. If you want public health, then you want actual case surveillance. Not some counterfeit passed off as good enough. And respectable doctors and scientists with integrity shouldn’t present these speculative numbers as if they are true case surveillance. It muddies the waters, confuses the public discourse, derails advocacy for actual public health, and sets everyone involved up for (deserved) criticism.
The danger of not having a shared reality or tangible facts is serious. And the danger of settling for less is grave.
So often it feels as if we’re accepting the current media framework of speculation and prediction and punditry, not so much dealing with what is or contending for what should be but living in a bleak and unbroken shadow future, where everything is already decided, which frees us from the moral imperative to have to do anything. It’s just as freeing in a way to believe everything is doomed as it is to believe that everything will be fine; either way you don’t have to do much thinking or work, or even take the next step that will allow us to take the next step, however easy or hard or palatable or unpalatable that next step might be. So we behave as if we are political operatives, predictive wizards, demonstrating not our commitment to a better vision of the future by contending with reality here in the present and working for best outcomes, but rather our ability to know what will happen before it happens, so that when it happens we can say see? and if we are wrong, we just run on to the next topic, chasing seagulls.
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt 🍇🌱
The indirect funding of promoting products, politics, and propaganda against public health.
On The Majority Report they mentioned how the guys on The Vanguard Podcast said when the pandemic hit they were getting a few thousand dollars on their Patreon, but that dried up for them when they came out and supported a public health response to the pandemic. I’ve heard several stories like this before. The big money, the dark money has always been against public health, right from the get go. And content creators are very sensitive to their stats. All these platforms have ways that track things, and you get feedback. This obviously sometimes leads to audience capture, and a feedback loop. There is money pulling strings, and often people don’t even know who they’re working for, I notice this lots.
The recent news of how Tim Poole and Dave Rubin have made large sums of money for their shows that have been found to come from Russian sources. I recommend listening to the entire segment on The Majority Report on the Tim Poole story, not because anyone cares about Tim Poole, but because Matt Binder, Brandon Sutton, Emma Vigeland, and Matt Lech, do a good job there talking about the reality of how this economic media landscape works, and there’s plenty of evidence. How and why people aren’t fully aware of who’s paying for what, and even requiring people to disclose conflicts of interest, while very important, doesn’t completely fix it even if it were better enforced. Because many people who just wouldn’t be put in a position to have a microphone or a platform to reach a lot of people if they didn’t already have particular interests. A lot that people have a hard time grasping the idea that a lot of popular pundits and influencers themselves don’t truly understand why they’re popular. Most people in such a position will assume they must be great and people like them, who wouldn’t be tempted to believe that? But there’s a lot of money sloshing around to boost people indirectly, it’s inauthentic. Often people just hit upon saying the right things, and in comes the money.
One thing Matt Binder keeps bringing up is how the report says that someone was issuing invoices via a discord server. Nothing’s really too petty or halfass to be part of a well funded operation in the gig economy.
The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War by Mark Galeotti - Feb 2023
Outsourcing goes beyond direct warfare and into non-kinetic contests. This century has also seen the explosion of the gig economy. Individual freelancers and temporary workers sometimes recruited directly, sometimes through online platforms or third party matchmakers. It may seem ridiculous to draw comparisons with the cycle courier that brings you your pizza. But this is less fanciful than might appear in an age when conflicts may be fought through the medium of carefully curated newspaper articles highlighting a grievance or attacking a government. And when online influencers can pivot from hyping a hair product to pushing a political cause.
This may be the age of multinational corporations, mass social movements, and powerful governments, but a coincidence of technological, social, and political change means that it is also the age of the individual, and many of them are for hire. Suddenly the world is full of people who seem to be doing the work of states. Yet not as direct employees, nor even out of ideological commitment or patriotic passion. Journalists hired to write hit pieces. Scholars saying the right things for a grant. Think tanks producing recommendations to order. There may be no geopolitical equivalent of Uber yet, but lobbying, strategic communications - were I a cynic I would suggest this is what we call propaganda when we do it ourselves - and similar consultancy and service companies often act as the middlemen.
“They forget the favors they have received and imagine they have earned their success by their own merits.” — Robert Greene, 48 Laws of Power (2015)