💉 Vaccine public comment: FDA VRBPAC meeting 💊 FYI Paxlovid may be started on day 7 🎸 Trump Project 2025 agenda is to dismantle public health.
Biden rescinds some forms of pandemic-related administrative leave for federal workforce. SDA advocates protest San Francisco ending mandate for healthcare workers to mask.
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)
FDA VRBPAC Public Comment period on vaccines.
Submitted written comments for the meeting must be received by the FDA via the Federal Register. Meeting is May 16. (People’s CDC has tips, suggestions, and sample letter.)
I don’t trust my safety to science hype in the pop culture press.
There was an article that promoted yet another “promising” study in the genre of “Unmask & Relax With this Amazing Product!” — suggesting yet another OTC product shoved up the nose maybe could protect, maybe possibly, perhaps it’s promising, based on one pilot study of humans and mice. The article starts out by mentioning other things like ivermectin that were once considered “promising” by some, and the pseudoscience rampant in the pandemic, but then they suggest that this time, it’s different! Except that none of these things they say put up your nose have compelling evidence for prophylaxis efficacy and not even necessarily safety. So maybe that’s not the best approach?
In some cases products market things pointing to 15+ year old tiny studies that were really promising but have mysteriously never been replicated, or small studies conducted by the vendors of the products, or in this latest article, a brand new small study that’s super preliminary.
Ointments often contain petroleum jelly or similar stuff. Irritating or damaging one’s lungs with a problematic substance is not likely to be protective. If the product is not recommended for nasal insertion (and in some cases even if it is) it may be unsafe to do so. We all have to be cautious about promising ideas promoted in the press.
"Putting Vaseline in the nose could be life-threatening, as the oil can get into your lungs, and you can’t remove it."
If you want to avoid covid, put on a mask, avoid unnecessary visits to crowded indoor locations, ask people to test before gathering, and use hepa air purifiers wherever possible.
The recent pop science article quoted a famous scientist who is not a medical doctor and probably not a public health communicator and was not giving clinical advice, it was just a quote in an article. And the article author decided to link to a public health organization that does NOT recommend including unproven products in the “layers of protection” actually. Doctors and scientists on social media or often quoted in the news often seem to not realize if they get hyped about something as “promising” it’s telegraphed to the public and received and sometimes interpreted as clinical recommendation, even though it’s not.
🗞️ In the news
Government Executive - Biden rescinds COVID-era executive orders, folding safer federal workforce task force The Office of Personnel Management issued new guidance last week rescinding some forms of COVID-19-related administrative leave, but preserving four hours of paid leave for federal employees to get vaccine booster shots. APRIL 15, 2024 03:52 PM ET Erich Wagner The Executive Order on COVID-19 and Public Health Preparedness and Response, signed Friday, ends edicts aimed at preventing the hoarding of medical supplies, promoting pandemic-era travel safety policies and the order that required mask-wearing in federal facilities and creating the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force. The order also does away with the position of the COVID-19 response coordinator, shifting that position’s responsibilities to the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response, a White House office founded through an appropriations bill passed by Congress in December 2022.
The Advocate The Student Voice of Contra Costa College - Advocates protest end of SF mandate for health workers to wear masks, raising questions over the future of the policy in the Bay Area - By Jennifer Leahy, Advocate Staff • April 30, 2024 The group’s letter addressed both practical health challenges and questions of equity and power, stating “many of the highest-risk patients, such as infants and people on oxygen, physically cannot mask…It’s not fair, and often not practical, to put the burden on individual patients to ask their medical providers to wear masks…Furthermore, this is a racial justice issue: Black and Hispanic or Latino Americans get COVID at higher rates, and Black patients suffer from Long COVID at higher rates than white people. Our city’s commitment to equity must compel us to take action.” Marked by Covid co-founder Kristin Urquiza read the letter out loud to SFDPH staff member Marise Rodriguez, who accepted it on behalf of Philip. According to Senior and Disability Action, this was not the first time advocates had attempted to reach Philip.
KFF - The ‘Pandemic Agreement’: What it is, What it isn’t, and What it Could Mean for the U.S. Josh Michaud, Jennifer Kates, and Anna Rouw - Published: Apr 01, 2024 A delay in reaching an agreement could bump the negotiations closer to or beyond the U.S. Presidential election in November, which could have significant implications for U.S. participation. If President Trump were to be elected, for example, it is unclear if he would support an agreement, given his criticism of WHO and his move to withdraw from the organization when he was President, as well as his overall “America First” approach to international engagement.
Iowa Capital Dispatch - Two veterinarians, hundreds of miles apart, solved a cow sickness whodunit - It took weeks for two Iowa State grads to discover bird flu was infecting dairy cattle in Texas - By: Jared Strong - April 17, 2024 But then the cats started dying. Barn cats are common on farms. They kill rodents, provide companionship and need little help to survive. Some dairy farmers also feed them milk from their cows, and sick cows can shed viruses in their milk. “A colleague of mine, he told me, ‘You know what’s strange? I went to one of my dairies last week, and all their cats were missing. I couldn’t figure it out — the cats usually come to my vet truck,’ ” Petersen recalled. “And then someone called me and said half of his cats had passed away without warning, and so then all the alarm bells start going off in your head.” The cats had died from swollen brains, a potential result of influenza. They didn’t have rabies.
This is NOT fine
The Trump & Republican Project 2025 agenda is to dismantle public health.
To call it a plan to “reshape U.S. healthcare policy” is a hell of a way to describe the anticipated destruction laid out for all to see, and promoted loudly on all the right-wing pundit podcasts.
STAT - Trump surrogates hint at how he could reshape U.S. health care policy Sarah Owermohle By Sarah Owermohle April 23, 2024 "Merkel and others cautioned that the Trump campaign is still in early stages of creating his health policy agenda"
Can these people hear themselves? There’s a 900 page document released last summer laying it all out, how to stop vaccinations, to privatize everything, and make public policies and public agencies align with extremist religious agendas. In Stat, they make a cursory reference to The Heritage Foundation, and present it in this article as if they never even heard of Project 2025 and the 900+ pages on how to dismantle public health and a whole lot else. If that’s just the early stages…
Some commenter on the MedPage Today newsletter actually said: “If Trump were elected again he could cut vaccine safety testing time down from several years to just a few months in order to rush vaccines through the approval process at warp speed so that he could take credit for them.” — WHAT? Suggesting this, (or even fantasizing about it), makes no sense in reality. That’s not what happened before anyway and definitely isn’t on the agenda going forward. Right-wing religious media is still promoting ivermectin at Trump events. Trump is not going to save public health, the right wing is against public health. And Trump has made it clear he will be anti-vax, even if it’s mercenary because he knows that the right-wing is now anti-vax as part of their platform. The entire right-wing milieu has embraced science denial and medical contrarianism. Anyone suggesting a Trump administration would be competent in doing anything for public health and healthcare, are living in some fantasyland that I can only imagine in some cases has been the result of watching too many episodes of The West Wing or consuming too much content from covid contrarian journalists.
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
FYI - Paxlovid may be started on day 7 of symptoms.
CDC - COVID-19 Treatment and Preventive Medication - Updated Apr. 16, 2024
Don’t delay: Treatments must be started within 5-7 days after you first develop symptoms.
NHS - How and when to take Paxlovid
It's important that you start taking Paxlovid within 5 days (or 7 days, if advised by a healthcare professional) of getting COVID-19 symptoms.
Bassist leaves The Pixies under cloud of gossip about supporting an anti-vax covid denier who attended Jan. 6th.
Paz Lenchantin was apparently dismissed as the bassist of the band The Pixies after a decade, but someone in the comments section of an article in Stereogum back in March 2024 said not so fast, that she’s an anti-vaxxer who has regularly posted, then deleted, right-wing stuff in favour of dictators in South American countries, and support of a January 6th insurrectionist. The anonymous commenter alleges that the deleted social media posts were documented and that moderators on the r/thepixies subreddit removed most posts about Lenchantin’s political opinions. I did find a deleted and locked post on the Wayback Machine that describes Lenchantin defending Ariel Pink who admits being at the January 6th insurrection to “peacefully show support” and on a twitter post Jul 30, 2023 said “The Big Lie is not Trumps claims about 2020 election. the Big Lie is that a pandemic ever took place (in reality only a "plandemic" took place)”. A youtuber who covered this said that Black Francis had “been very vocal” about not liking MAGA and referenced that someone commented that “giving away pixie's merch to support a January 6th insurrectionist probably didn't help her position”. Paz Lenchantin was born in Argentina and brought to the U.S. by her parents at age 4 which would’ve been around 1977. That was the time of The Dirty War in Argentina, which started with a successful right-wing coup in 1976 and 8 years of a military junta hunted down left dissidents and committed human rights abuses.
“The FDA does not do any review of dietary supplements before they come onto the market, and I think that all consumers need to understand this.”
— Gillian Findlay - Supplements and Safety | FRONTLINE PBS