Watching the world burn: Capitulating to Covid and spending the money on yachts instead

Plus you always get punished for telling the truth

Oct 04, 2024

burning building at nighttime — Photo by Michael Held on Unsplash

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

Where are we these days? The US reports more than 1000 new Covid deaths for seven weeks in a row. And counting. Over 8400 Covid deaths in the UK so far this year. And counting. And by “counting” what we really mean is radically undercounting due to our newfound allergy to actually testing for Covid.

But the good news is that TV Ontario just this week aired a pretty good 24 minute segment featuring two great spokespeople for fighting Covid. And only one for capitulating! Many thanks to Kwame Mckenzie for making the case that Covid is still a risk to everyone And to Dawn Bowdish for making the case that masking is still vitally important. And no thanks to Isaac Bogoch for being an empty suit.

It’s all about politics. Politics is what’s gotten us into this situation. Politics of some sort or another is going to be key in getting us out. I hope that the items I’ve highlighted this week can help us all navigate our way out of this bad place we’ve found ourselves in.

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Musical interlude at the end!

Millions of Americans have Long COVID. Will Kamala Harris acknowledge them? by Betsy Ladyzhets / The Sick Times

Advocates say that people with Long COVID, a potentially debilitating chronic disease that can impact all parts of the body, represent a growing voting bloc in this year’s presidential election. Leaders from Long COVID advocacy groups and the broader disability community are considering how to make their case to Harris’ staff, with a particular interest in Anastasia Somoza — a disability advocate who was hired for the engagement director role — and Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate who has championed Long COVID research as governor of Minnesota.
“VP Harris is part of an administration that has turned its back on public health,” said Karyn Bishof, founder and president of the COVID-19 Longhauler Advocacy Project, in an email. However, Bishof added, Harris’ “track record suggests that she could prioritize the well-being of those most affected [by Long COVID], particularly women and marginalized communities, and perhaps push for more honest and accessible education and care.” Bishof pointed to Harris’ experience supporting health care and women’s rights and her selection of Walz as reasons for optimism about Long COVID organizing under a potential Harris administration.

Your School Doesn't Have Clean Air Because that Money Was Spent on Yachts, Sports Cars, Drones, and Armored Vehicles by Jessica Wildfire / The Sentinel Intelligence

You’ve been lied to, over and over, about Covid.
Here’s a recent example:
A public health grifter in Australia named Nick Coatsworth recently urged schools to “save your money” because “any investment in air filtration is unproven and wastes precious resources” and that “Covid is no more harmful to kids than any respiratory virus.” You’ve heard this before, from dozens of highly credentialed doctors and public health officials, all of them with their own motives.
In reality…
Up to 25 percent of children who catch Covid go on to develop Long Covid, a euphemistic term that describes long-lasting damage to virtually every organ and system in their bodies. One recent study has estimated that 5.8 million children in the U.S. currently suffer from the condition.
There are dozens of studies.

Watching The World Burn on Our Phones by Jessica Wildfire / The Sentinel Intelligence

There's a relentless pressure to act happy now. You have to go to the office. You have to go to bars and restaurants. You have to go to concerts. You have to go on vacation. You have to post about it. You have to talk to strangers.
But…
You can’t salt the vibes.
You can't talk about all the friends and family you've lost. You can't talk about how tired you are. You can't talk about politics. You can't talk about climate change. You can't talk about the wildfires or that town that burned down. You can't talk about living through the hottest days in human history. You can't talk about masks or air purifiers. You can't talk about student loans. You can't talk about the wars we're fighting or getting ready to fight, or the genocide.
You can't talk about anything that matters.
You can only talk about the latest shitty superhero movie. You can talk about what you’re streaming. You can talk about celebrity gossip. You can talk about the vacation you pretended to enjoy. You can talk about yoga.

Rep. Ilhan Omar to Introduce Major Long Covid Bill by Julia Metraux / Mother Jones

On Friday, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) will introduce a potentially groundbreaking piece of federal legislation in the House of Representatives—one allocating $10 billion in funding to fight Long Covid, the increasingly widespread, chronic condition that follows many Covid infections. The Long Covid Research Moonshot Act is a companion bill to one that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced in the Senate in August.
“Long Covid is a silent health crisis impacting over twenty-three million Americans, including one million children,” Omar said in a statement to Mother Jones. (Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., is the co-lead on the legislation.) “I’m proud to lead this effort in the House to recognize Long Covid as the public health emergency that it is and invest in countering the effects of this terrible disease.”

The summer surge of COVID in the US and the implications of the anti-public health policy by Benjamin Mateus / World Socialist Web Site

By equating masking with conspiracy theories, Jha lends credence to efforts by governors, Democratic as well as Republican, to criminalize masking in public in response to legitimate protests by people who choose to protect themselves from infection, under conditions where, on average, every American has been infected at least three times in the course of the pandemic.
Nassau County on Long Island, New York may become the first jurisdiction in the tri-state region to ban face masks, with violators potentially facing fines of up to $1,000 and possible jail time. The proposed bill, by legislator Mazi Pilip, could be voted into law as early as next month.
One must assume that Violet Affleck, who last week addressed the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors wearing an N95 respirator, could face judicial repercussions were she to repeat such an action if and when such bans are made law and enforced. Notably, despite the high rates of COVID infections in California, no one on the panel was wearing any face covering.

New NIAID Director Scared of Masks by Julia Doubleday / The Gauntlet

Meetings among experts could easily serve as a gold standard for airborne disease mitigation, modeling how to prevent infections and therefore, inevitably, more Long COVID cases. Airborne disease mitigation could and should be the first line of defense against Long COVID; it is the one and only tool we have that is proven to be effective vs the little-understood disease. This is especially important at this early stage, when treatments are so limited, with no proven path to recovery and certainly no “cure”.
But Dr. Marrazzo and her colleagues, instead of focusing on how to halt the spread of COVID at their Long COVID research meeting, are focused on how to preserve their psychological denial that they, personally, are special people who are not at risk of developing Long COVID.
There is no scientific basis for this idea; it is the fantasy of the crowd, the collective delusion of people much less informed than they are, who are desperate to resume pre-pandemic life and have been fed years of propaganda about COVID’s supposed harmlessness. To participate in this public delusion rather than attempt to pop it is a social decision, not a scientific one. Marrazzo’s statement admits as much.
Marrazzo notes that there was a “fair amount of disturbance” that researchers continue to refuse to mitigate COVID while claiming to want to address the Long COVID crisis. She goes on to state that “one person” accused the group of “committing a microaggression” by not wearing masks, obliquely referring to longtime HIV/AIDS and COVID activist JD Davids. But Davids was far from the only activist angry with the lack of mitigations.

Wondering about Alberta's plans for flu and COVID-19 shots? You're not alone by Jennifer Lee / CBC News

Doctors are warning a messaging void about Alberta's fall immunization campaign could lead to more COVID-19 and flu infections — and increased pressure on hospitals — and they're calling on the province to immediately communicate details of the plan.
The Edmonton Zone Medical Staff Association says it's concerned about the lack of information provided by the Alberta government to health-care workers and the public, on the rollout of COVID-19 and flu shots.
The province is sharing very little about its plans other than it expects to launch on Oct. 15.
"There has been no messaging. And that's what concerns us," said Dr. Steve Fisher, an ER physician in Edmonton.
He said information is typically shared by now.

Federal lawsuit challenging mask ban in suburban New York county dismissed / AP News

But U.S. District Judge Joan Azrack ruled that the plaintiffs failed to show they have legal standing to sue since the law since has exemptions for people who wear masks for health reasons.
“Plaintiffs wear masks to protect themselves from illness,” the judge wrote. “That is expressly excluded from the MTA’s reach by its health and safety exception.”
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, a Republican who signed the bill into law in August, said in a written statement that residents “can be grateful that the court dismissed a lawsuit that would have made Nassau County less safe.”

Biden Dialed Back Covid Safety—Then Got It by Julia Metraux / Mother Jones

Given how many people the president sees and interacts with, it might be surprising that he hasn’t had Covid more often. The difference: this is the first major Covid wave where people around the president are no longer regularly testing. From his inauguration through March of this year, anyone visiting Biden at the White House had to test for Covid-19. Then the administration ended that practice—and Biden promptly got it again, a cautionary tale that drives home wider government failures to set public health ahead of getting “back to normal.”
Ten months earlier, in May 2023, the Biden administration ended the Covid-19 public health emergency, claiming that Covid “no longer meaningfully disrupts the way we live our lives.” That’s easier to say when everyone around you has to regularly test for the disease. Many people do not have ready access to Covid tests, and messaging from the US government that the pandemic is “over” doesn’t encourage people to get tested, nor to wear masks. Biden’s reluctance to mask publicly in recent months, even after ending regular tests for visitors, is the most visible—and important—example.
But Biden has the ability to dial back campaigning and isolate, working a limited schedule remotely. That privilege is not afforded to many other Americans, especially the blue-collar workers the administration claims to champion—who may not be able to pay their bills if they take time off. Ample rest reduces the risk of developing Long Covid; with workers being pressured to return to their jobs prior to five days—what the CDC previously recommended when someone is symptomatic—their risk of developing a long-term chronic illness increases, and the risk of losing their jobs with it.

Republicans have a post-pandemic plan for the scientific establishment by Erin Shumaker / Politico

House and Senate Republicans are plotting a new battlefront in the Covid wars.
They seek to rein in the sprawling National Institutes of Health by bringing to heel its civil servants and the leading scientists awarded the agency’s biggest research grants.
Republicans plan to do that, if they win control of Congress in November, by demanding to know more about what the NIH is funding, assigning more political appointees to keep tabs on the agency, significantly downsizing it and by spreading the wealth to a bigger group of grantees. Democrats in the Senate majority are blocking changes for now. The fight shows how politicized public health has become since the pandemic.
“You have the NIH in the sights of people who think there were big failures during the pandemic and that we have to change the way things operate,” said Joel Zinberg, who worked on health policy on the Council of Economic Advisers during Donald Trump’s presidency and is now a senior fellow at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute.

The Burden of Evidence Moving Beyond Pandemic Fantasy Thinking / Pandemic Accountability Index

Public health policy debates cannot be dominated by elaborate fictions and creative writing workshops. If you believe in the necessity of preventing COVID-19 infections, you have hundreds upon hundreds of medical research papers on your side. If your priority is "normalcy," you're coming from a place of unscientific emotion, a selfish reckless and willingness to play games with the health of not only yourself, but your loved ones, and others - including children - all in service of an elaborate fantasy of willful ignorance. One perspective undeniably holds more worth than the other. The latter of the two opens the door to all sorts of elaborate conspiracy theories, rooted in long exhausted anti-vaccine tropes. We're repeating the worst mistakes of the past and letting modern day snake oil salesmen profit from an epidemic of outright criminal fraud.
This is a dark road America is yet again going down, and it's left to the general public to start agitating for an “off-ramp” from speeding civil society off the edge of a cliff. News media needs to strike off "experts" that have built a years-long record of being chronically incorrect. Politicians need to be hounded for their abandonment of public health until they yield to the demands of working people. Laptop class academics grifting off of social media with anti-vax profiteering need to be dismissed and condemned. Hospitals need to implement respirator mandates. Schools need to be doing everything in their power to prevent airborne transmission of COVID-19 and other viruses to keep kids healthy and learning in school. Barriers to COVID-19 vaccine boosters need to be eliminated. That's just a start, but there's much more work to be done.

Why You Always Get Punished for Telling The Truth by Jessica Wildfire / The Sentinel Intelligence

It explains why you get pathologized and called everything from a doomer to a snowflake for caring about anything but yourself. It explains why pretending to care looks better than actually caring.
I've tried to come up with little strategies and workarounds for all of humanity's psychological shortcomings.
It comes down to this:
You have to find a way to be the smart, positive, compassionate, mature, respectful, charming one. You have to do that even if everyone around you is acting like a complete idiot. You have to find that balance between sugar coating and blunt honesty. Above all, you have to anticipate that all of your hard work won't achieve the results you want in the short term. It takes a long time. Unfortunately, time is the one thing we don’t have anymore.
You often have to trick people into doing the right thing.
It's exhausting.

Summer Catch Up

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.

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Nina Simone. Strange Fruit (Live in Antibes, 1965).

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