Debilitating generations, Criminalising masks, Peak denial, Wastewater stragglers, and more

Bonus Summer vacation and Debunking that crappy BMJ paper

Jun 21, 2024

raccoon illustration — Photo by Yannick Menard on Unsplash

Welcome to the latest issue of the Covid-Is-Not-Over newsletter!

As a reminder, I’ll be taking a short break from regular posting after this week. I expect that the next regular issue will be towards the last week of July or first week of August. In the meantime, just like during my winter break, I will probably be publishing two or three bonus link compilations as “Summer Bonus” issues. I’ve mentioned the idea of rebranding the newsletter before, and that’s something I’ll be tackling when I return.

What’s on tap for this issue?

Well, let’s just say that If debilitating generations is the goal, it looks like the capitalists are going to get away with it. Criminalising masks seems like a pretty good strategy, now that I think of it. Fucking up all the other possible safeguards seems like another. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about spending a lot more time alone.

What’s our strategy? Hang in there, hold fast, tern’s got our back. Keep Still Coviding, work on protecting ourselves and each other. Rest, breathe, take some time, enjoy some art and literature and music. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, for example, if you can make it to the end of the issue.

I’ll try and remember to report on my summer reading come August.

And finally, here’s a few stragglers on the Ontario wastewater front. Check out the previous couple of issues for more details.

As most have probably noticed, there is no paid subscription option for this newsletter. However, Substack does have an option where subscribers can pledge to subscribe “just in case” and a few kind subscribers have made that pledge. I very much appreciated the vote of confidence in what I’m doing here. What I’ve decided to do on a trial basis is to set up a “tip jar” on the Ko-fi platform. I’m not anticipating a huge surge of income from using Ko-fi but whatever revenue I do end up with, I plan to spend on supporting artists on Bandcamp. Sadly, who knows how long that will seem like a good idea.

Buy me a coffee!

Like! Share! Subscribe! Make everybody read that SciAm article!

Gov. Kathy Hochul says she is exploring at least a partial ban on masks in the New York City subway system after images and videos of masked anti-Israel protesters on a train ricocheted around social media earlier this week.
In a news conference at the state Capitol on Thursday, Hochul said she has started discussions with Mayor Eric Adams and state lawmakers about what a mask crackdown would look like and how to craft exemptions for health and religious reasons. The mayor’s office confirmed it was looking into the issue.
But Hochul made clear she wants to see mask restrictions in some form, which she believes would help deter crime on public transit. …
During an appearance on the "Cats & Cosby" radio show Wednesday evening, Adams compared protesters who cover their faces to the Ku Klux Klan.
"Cowards hide their face," the mayor said. "Dr. King did not hide his face when he marched and for the things he thought were wrong in the country. Those civil rights leaders did not hide their faces. They stood up. In contrast to that, the Klan hid their faces."

The Far-Right – And Some Democrats – Are Criminalizing Masks / People’s CDC

How did we get here?
Although these fascistic mask ban policies have been kick-started by the far-right, many police officials and some elected Democrats, too, are joining team “Far Right” to sacrifice public health at the altar of increased surveillance. Democratic New York City mayor Eric Adams has been urging business owners to require customers to lower their protective medical masks upon entry as a crime-prevention technique, claiming that refusal to unmask “should cause … alarm” and now suggests he favors outright bans on masking in some situations as well. And Democratic Alderman Raymond Lopez of Chicago’s 15th Ward has now submitted a proposal with similar language to the North Caroline bill, to increase penalties on any protesters arrested while wearing a mask. His staff told us that there is no plan to exempt medical masks. Many other Democrats – through silence on this issue and through broader inaction on public health – have helped to institutionalize an anti-public health agenda, reinforce structural ableism, and further isolate anyone who wants to avoid a preventable, still deadly, and often disabling virus.
Not only a terrifying threat to all our health and safety as well as our rights to privacy, mask bans violate our Constitutional rights and the Americans with Disabilities Act. They are an egregious overstep on behalf of right wing forces to erase and to criminalize our efforts to care for ourselves and others. It’s no coincidence that these bans began in the US South, specifically targeting, intimidating, and harming Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples.
Mask bans also serve short-term corporate interests, which center profits over the lives of workers and consumers. In-N-Out burger publicly banned its employees from wearing masks, seemingly because an inability to "service with a smile" due to mask-wearing meant revenue loss. Hospital chains dangerously removed mask mandates in part due to slowdown in elective procedures caused by COVID testing requirements and mask-wearing policies.

Silence from prominent left outlets continues as mask bans spread by Julia Doubleday / The Gauntlet

All of these realities put the ongoing pandemic squarely in the center of myriad left priorities; allowing COVID to spread unmitigated is worsening racial inequalities, worsening health inequality, harming workers, worsening homelessness, overloading our already struggling healthcare systems, and disproportionately disabling and killing people who are oppressed along other intersecting identities; people of color, queer people, trans people, women and disabled people.
Yet prominent news outlets that bill themselves as leftist or socialist, like Jacobin, Current Affairs, The Lever and The Intercept remain strangely quiet about unmitigated COVID spread, the crisis of Long COVID, the importance of masking, the need for new clean air standards to bring down transmission, the urgency of airborne infection control in hospitals, and the state’s intensifying targeting of disabled people and those with Long COVID. …
The closure of the public arena to people with disabilities should send a chill down the spine of every anti-fascist. This is a massive coup for a state hellbent on disposing of anybody unable to survive a COVID infection, and anybody who goes on to be disabled and harmed by one. It is a great leap forward for the social goals of eugenicists, who demand that disabled people simply “stay home” and consider the concept of public health itself to be a violation of their personal freedoms.
Watching these bans go into place while left-leaning outlets say nothing (or even appear to signal their support by failing to recommend masking or mitigation of any sort) is akin to feeling the walls closing in. Left public figures who fail to speak do not see that they are slashing a gaping hole in our wall of solidarity for fascists to drive right through. At this point, it is inarguable that the state is coming for disabled people. Speak now, because the state that is empowered to dispose of anyone harmed by COVID is surely a state empowered to dispose of you.

COMMENTARY: Misleading BMJ Public Health paper on COVID-19 excess mortality needs to be retracted by Lone Simonsen, Rasmus Kristoffer Pedersen / CIDRAP

In a publication in BMJ Public Health on June 3, Saskia Mostert, MD, PhD, and colleagues discuss excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic, and this paper has already led to much debate and confusion on both traditional and social media and has been used as fodder for anti-vaccine advocates. The paper's results have been taken to mean that vaccines are dangerous, and this has led to critical commentaries from other researchers as well as some of the authors who felt their work was not cited correctly.
We give a brief summary of some of this criticism, add some additional concerns about the paper, and make the case for retraction of the paper. …
Mostert et al should not disregard the most likely explanation for excess mortality: namely that the emerging COVID-19 virus explains most excess deaths during the pandemic. Lee et al in
February 2023 computed that 85% of excess deaths in the United States were explained directly by the COVID-19 virus. Thus, there is no need to invoke other and unlikely explanations—such as vaccine adverse events—to explain excess mortality in Western countries.
In our opinion, a retraction is appropriate for this misleading paper that is not an original contribution. The publication of such work in a journal like BMJ Public Health can, to use the words of one commenter, be used as a figurative Trojan horse, seemingly giving unwarranted credibility to vaccine misinformation under the guise of statistical estimates of excess mortality. It is so important that scientific journals like BMJ take action and responsibility in an unfortunate situation like this where vaccine and pandemic misinformation appears credible by appearing in a top line peer reviewed medical journal.

Fact Check: Study does not say COVID vaccines may have fuelled excess deaths / Reuters Fact Check

A newly released study does not say COVID-19 vaccines may have fuelled excess deaths across the world, contrary to claims on social media.
The journal which published the analysis has issued a statement calling news from “various outlets” about the paper “misreporting” and emphasising that “the research does not support the claim that vaccines are a major contributory factor to excess deaths since the start of the pandemic”. …
Public health data scientists also told Reuters the paper did not establish a link to vaccines and said it actually showed excess deaths had begun falling in 2022.
Excess deaths are an estimation of the number of mortalities during a specific time period above and beyond what would be expected based on past patterns, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Expression of concern coming for paper some used to link COVID-19 vaccines to deaths by Ellie Kincaid / Retraction Watch

The journal BMJ Public Health is placing an expression of concern on a paper it said “gave rise to widespread misreporting and misunderstanding,” namely, “claims that it implies a direct causal link between COVID-19 vaccination and mortality.”
The article, “Excess mortality across countries in the Western World since the COVID-19 pandemic: ‘Our World in Data’ estimates of January 2020 to December 2022,” appeared online June 3, and quickly attracted attention and criticism. The expression of concern is not yet live. (Expression of Concern now live here - JD)

We’ve Hit Peak Denial. Here’s Why We Can’t Turn Away From Reality by Marianne Cooper & Maxim Voronov / Scientific American (non-paywalled version)

Yet, to shore up collective denial, we often do more than revise the present; we also rewrite the past. So not only do we reiterate that we are better off now, we claim things were never that bad. This sort of “forgetting work,” or contesting the past to remove unwanted memories, produces a cultural amnesia about the pandemic. And in burying the past, we sidestep accountability for what went wrong and preserve the status quo by failing to implement lessons learned from our own history.
Finally, truth tellers are the Achilles heel of collective denial because they call attention to what’s swept under the rug. Thus another playbook tactic is to hush them up, often by painting them as subversives or deviants. And so those who wear masks are ridiculed, scientists reporting on COVID-19 risks are cast as fearmongers, and those with long COVID are dismissed as having anxiety disorders.
Time and again, society pressures people not to see, hear or speak about the elephant in the room. To maintain our own “cognitive tranquility,” we tune out, malign and shoot the messenger because they remind us of what we would rather disregard. Just look at physician Ignaz Semmelweis, environmentalist Rachal Carson and NFL player and social justice advocate Colin Kaepernick. Indeed, people are regularly punished for being accurate.
These tactics are how we get used to so many bad things, from mega-fires to insurrections.

“Debilitating a Generation”: Expert Warns That Long COVID May Eventually Affect Most Americans by Lynn Parramore / Institute for New Economic Thinking

[Lynn Parramore]: Can you say more about what’s at stake if we continue this way, with the low vaccination rates and abandonment of abatement measures?
[Dr. Phillip Alvelda]: What does this look like if we continue on the way we are doing right now? What is the worst-case scenario? Well, I think there are two important eventualities. So we’re what, four years in? Most people have had COVID three and a half times on average already. After another four years of the same pattern, if we don’t change course, most people in the U.S. will have some flavor of Long COVID of one sort or another.
LP: That’s a really alarming possibility — that most Americans could potentially have Long COVID in as little as four years?
PA: That’s what I’m saying. And we know that somewhere between five and eight percent of those people will be so debilitated that they will no longer be able to work.

Infectious diseases skyrocket worldwide fueled by COVID-19 pandemic by Benjamin Mateus / World Socialist Web Site

A new study has found that the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic over the past four years coincides with a new surge in many other infectious diseases far beyond their pre-pandemic levels. The study was reported by Airfinity, a UK-based data and analytics company that specializes in monitoring and forecasting trends in global disease and public health.
The implication of this finding is that the systematic dismantling of public health measures by capitalist governments worldwide, allowing SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, unimpeded access to the world’s population, has created the conditions for even greater damage to human health.
Airfinity previously tracked the horrendous impact of lifting Zero-COVID in China at the end of 2022, which led to hundreds of millions of people being infected and more than a million deaths. Last week the company posted a new analysis on its webpage showing that “the world is seeing a resurgence of at least 13 infectious diseases, with cases higher than before the pandemic in many regions. Over 40 countries or territories have reported at least one infectious disease resurgence that’s 10-fold or more over their pre-pandemic baseline.”

"Future faculty meeting: Sean what did you do this summer? Well, I wrote a book about the psychological underpinnings explaining how it’s possible that one could work in the area of health promotion & disease prevention, yet discount an ongoing pandemic" by Sean Mullen / X

At every turn, society appears to be rescinding because the majority of the public can’t cope with moving forward in a logical way. A path with a prioritization on prevention (cleaning the air, stopping forward transmission). Such a sacrifice for the greater good is too much effort. The selfishness has reached catastrophic heights.
Everyone is so “I’m going to live my life the way everyone else before me.”
Well bud, they used to imprison folks who didn’t mask to stop the spread of the 1918 Pandemic (a bird flu). Vaccine rates for SARS2 among adults & children were abysmal at the last go round. Most people are so distanced from the truth now, they’ll never come to grips with it.
Not until they’re dead.
It’s all tied to self-identity.
Everyone is tethered to their old selves and they never envisioned needing to adapt or using their eyes & ears, & listening to their gut over the govt & newsfeeds paid for by dark money firms who lose $ when you aren’t cranking.
And sick populations are far easier to manage when resources become scarce. Keep that in mind the next time you want to argue with a scientist trying to save you by getting you to wear an F’ing respirator & buying an air purifier.

Too many children with long COVID are suffering in silence. Their greatest challenge? The myth that the virus is 'harmless' for kids by Hayley Gleeson / ABC News

"I want people to know that I'm not lying, [long COVID] is real and can happen to anyone," Vivien says. "I want people to know I'm not just trying to get out of doing school or sport — I wish I could do sport … I wish they understood I am just trying to save myself from being stuck in bed in pain for days afterwards."
More than four years after the first COVID patients began raising the alarm that they weren't getting better, scientists are still racing to unravel the mystery of why a significant minority of people develop debilitating chronic symptoms while others seem to recover just fine. But if the plight of adults with long COVID remains poorly understood, the millions of children who have it worldwide are practically invisible, their suffering — and the formative years they're losing to this disease — obscured by the myths that COVID is "harmless" for kids and the pandemic is "over".

The National Academy of Sciences issues a damning report on Long COVID in the United States - World Socialist Web Site by Benjamin Mateus / World Socialist Web Site

Almost two years later, after extensive discussions and exhaustive research into every facet of the multisystem disorder and high-level interviews with several established experts in the burgeoning field of Long COVID, on June 5, 2024, the NAS published a 265-page report drafted by a committee of 14 doctors and researchers, meticulously detailing the chronic disability the country’s population has been exposed to as a result of the “forever COVID” policy pursued under the administrations of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
At present, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, 17.8 percent of US adults have experienced Long COVID, or nearly 50 million people. Since last winter’s peak in infections, the number of adults reporting Long COVID symptoms has remained stubbornly high at 6.8 percent, or around 17.6 million. In a JAMA Medical News Brief from February 14, 2024, the number of children living with post-COVID conditions, including neurological consequences like loss of smell and brain fog, as well as mental health conditions including anxiety, was estimated at about six million. …
Although the population is told that their Long COVID symptoms will improve over time, recovery may stall after six to twelve months. Only 22 percent of people at six months will make a full recovery by one year. For those who don’t fully recover, some can see their symptoms continue to worsen.
These same points were underscored in the committee report. They stated, “Patients with Long COVID may encounter skepticism about their symptoms when they present in medical settings, which discourages care seeking. This is particularly true for individuals disadvantaged by their social or economic status, geographic location, or environment, and can result in preventable disparities in the burden of disease and opportunities to achieve optimal health ... Individuals with Long COVID have increased health care utilization and financial burden, which may be exacerbated if they are unable to work to gain income and or receive health insurance coverage.”
This honest and in-depth report by the National Academies is exemplary and long overdue. It amounts to an indictment of the willful negligence of the state in addressing the pandemic, and gives a glimpse of the long-term impact the promotion of COVID by the capitalist ruling elite will have for the future welfare and health of Americans and the population of the entire planet.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Rock Me.

The Covid-Is-Not-Over Newsletter

Discussion about this post