The CDC, Media & PR: a public health disinformation campaign.
Officials appear to have deliberately planted inaccurate PR disinformation regarding infection control isolation guidelines changes.
A Washington Post reporter was given bad information, and imparted bad information. They promoted bad information on so many levels with seemingly little fact-checking and not much in the way of seeking broader input. The op-eds on this topic, of course, were PR pieces, but this WaPo piece was supposed to be straight reporting.
WaPo’s reporter cited assertions from officials that turned out to be not true at all. The article stated that the White House was not signing off on this guidance change and “expected to release in April for public feedback” the updated guidelines, according to officials who talked to the Washington Post.1
The Washington Post - CDC plans to drop five-day covid isolation guidelines, By Lena H. Sun, February 13, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST The White House has yet to sign off on the guidance that the agency is expected to release in April for public feedback, officials said. One agency official said the timing could “move around a bit” until the guidance is finalized.
Releasing this guidance just a couple weeks later on March 1, 2024 - pulling the rug out from under public health experts and advocates who expected it to come in April - appears to be a deliberate bait and switch. NBC News was also given misdirection, since they were also told by officials that the CDC had no plans to ease isolation yet.
NBC News - CDC says it has no plans to ease Covid isolation yet, despite urging from doctors - Public health is “more than controlling one virus,” one expert said, as federal health officials consider their next steps in the pandemic. Feb. 13, 2024, 8:19 PM EST By Erika Edwards and Berkeley Lovelace Jr. Following reports that the CDC was considering easing Covid isolation restrictions — including guidelines that people can leave their homes after being fever-free for 24 hours — the agency refused to confirm that such plans were in the works. The potential change was first reported by The Washington Post. But an official at the Department of Health and Human Services who asked not to be identified said federal health officials are considering relaxing Covid isolation guidelines, although the discussions are at an early stage and no definitive decisions have been made. “It’s way too preliminary,” the source said. There’s “lots more consultation to be had.”
CDC ditched Biden administration plan to include more public input, eschews boosting trust in government
The official from the Department of Health and Human Services assured us that there were “lots more consultations to be had”2 - but I sure wasn't consulted. And this bait & switch was a very hypocritical move too, considering that the Biden administration has boasted most particularly about how it’s “including more public input into agency rulemaking.”3
Government Executive - Biden administration boasts it’s including more public input into agency rulemaking. Agencies hope to solicit more perspectives and boost trust in government. DECEMBER 7, 2023 As part of the new agenda, the Labor Department cited all the groups they engaged with in plotting their new rules. “We intentionally seek input from members of the public who have not typically participated in the regulatory process, including workers with disabilities, union members, small businesses, low-paid workers and immigrant workers,” Labor said. The Homeland Security Department stressed its public engagement would ensure it did not implement rules with unintended harmful effects on “small businesses, startups and disadvantaged groups of multiple sorts.”
When public agencies do receive public feedback these days, not unsurprisingly, it’s overwhelmingly in favour of people over profits, as evidenced by hundreds of public comments to CDC HICPAC calling to prioritize patient safety.4 I’ve mentioned this before, and written to the White House about it.5
“Herd immunity” is a wish-casted myth and right-wing extremist anti-vax misinformation.
I’ve also written before that the WaPo reporter and an editor first dropped the ball by using fraudulent appeal to authority6 to make anti-vax claims of natural herd immunity. The reporter linked to a study from the CDC to supposedly back up a claim about herd immunity from natural infection,7 to say dropping isolation and letting infectious people mingle should be ok, when the CDC study referenced certainly didn’t assert that.8 Scientific evidence has not shown that natural infection with covid could lead to herd immunity, and no medical science is shown to guarantee any personal net benefit to unvaccinated infections which are dangerous. Being unvaccinated has long been on the CDC list of “certain conditions” associated with higher risks with covid.9
“Following the science” turned into following the politics.
There were other PR placed pieces recently published, so obviously introduced to prime up arguments for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention abandoning disease control and prevention. The two I read were both ridiculous.
A peculiar op-ed in MedPage Today by Amesh Adalja,10 lacking in the science evidence department and called for people to follow the politics11 and go along with 2 cherry-picked states on the west coast that are apparently ignoring that a lot of spread is asymptomatic.12 This person’s position on isolation not being needed also ignored the burden of post infection complications and risks, such as an extensive volume of years-long often reported cardiac sequelae.13 There was a debunk op-ed in Infection Today by Kevin Kavanaugh which addressed that and more asserted in the MedPage Today piece, and pointed to the problem of undermining the vaccination campaign by inappropriately “green-lighting the safety of asymptomatic spreaders mingling” around.14 Seems like everyone’s getting on the anti-vax bandwagon, doesn’t it? I had immediately discerned that Amesh Adalja runs a PR consultancy firm15 from reviewing his Linkedin,16 where he also posted about being quoted on the same topic somewhere else17 — and by the way, he got dry roasted for it in a way only Linkedin does passive aggressive sick burns - with people asking very politely what evidence he was basing his position on, knowing there was none. One guy did praise Adalja’s position — and that same guy was simultaneously also praising Project Veritas, the outfit that has had to renounce bogus election denier fraud claims they had put out about a postmaster in Erie Pennsylvania who then successfully sued for defamation.18
An op-ed in Bloomberg by Robert Langreth, he pitched the upside down own goal theory that dropping isolation was a good thing because, he claimed, his “college-aged daughter hesitated to get a Covid test after developing flu-like symptoms, fearing she would end up in mandatory isolation under her school’s rules.”19 Let’s set aside this journalist seemingly being willing to highlight his own daughter’s wavering morals for a PR piece. The argument for not having a guideline because some people won’t test is silly because if they don’t test and then don’t isolate, or test and then still don’t isolate, we’re still left with someone who is, either way sick and STILL NOT ISOLATING.
Fenit Nirappil on Instagram Threads stated a very similar loopy nonsense theory as an idea being cooked up in the CDC. The CDC went even further and provided a quoted statement that also didn’t make sense - it’s like an M.C. Escher drawing. They made a very bold claim that people not isolating would also lead to a reduction in Long Covid cases going forward, because high risk people would be tested,20 despite making no sense at all, and providing no logical or rational means that would pan out. The assertion that this dropping of infection control guidelines was an improvement was easily debunked and legitimately critiqued by multiple people in the Threads thread. One person cited a study that said “75% of participants admitted to hiding or considering hiding an infectious illness in various social contexts.”21 and pointed out that “Corporate culture is only going to abuse this latest announcement from the CDC and force sick people to work and just keep making things worse.”22 Another person said, “This doesn’t make sense to me. People work sick all the time. Now they can’t use sick days because “the CDC says it’s OK to work sick”, so why even test. Without paid sick days, more people will work sick.”23
Noha Aboelata and Eric Feigl-Ding pointed out how the CDC’s reworking of the rules was very similar to the ones California rolled out in early January, possibly against their own legal process. They also described how rolling this out at the peak would hide the detrimental results of such a policy in the predictable decline after a surge, and suggested the timing may have been deliberate.24 It certainly does raise questions about CDC rushing to this guidance change rather than waiting until April or going through a comments process.
Industry interests should not be calling the shots on healthcare.
Regardless of timing and cover explanations, one can only come to the conclusion that denying people sick leave from work is the point of this guidance change. To help crack down further to keep people at work, while sick, because everyone knows that people are out sick all the damn time anymore. Of course many times it’s because of being incapacitated with covid, post-covid complications, or Long Covid issues. But industry elites aren’t interested in solving root problems, just controlling situations - there’s a name for that, it’s called “elite panic”25 and it explains the industry default position where their “first move is not to deal with the actual problem, but to manage the negative perception caused by that problem.”26
They will force round pegs into their profitable square holes, demonstrated when Delta Airlines had spelled it out in a December 2021 letter where the company directed the CDC to reduce the isolation period from 10 days to 5, (when 10 is probably not even sufficient), and the CDC complied within a week.27 And now the airlines are in the news a lot, and not for good reasons.
The CDC appears to be planning to update medical advice pages on their website to fall in line with industry interest oriented guidelines.28 This is not following the science. Imagine if your doctor withheld cancer treatment because your employer needs you on the job for the next few months. Your employer doesn't care if you live 20 more years because if you die 6 months from now they can replace you by then, but they want you on the job now, so you are refused life-saving treatment, or maybe your doctor doesn't even bother to tell you there's treatment. All to cater to the business. This appears to be CDC's plan with infectious disease, and beyond. All diseases will be “streamlined” for “simplicity” into a PR package that favours industry interests, and puts profits over people.
They come up with the plan that favours industry, and then post-hoc try to paper over it with kooky theories as to why it’s the right decision and has some 5 dimensional chess justification. So of course it bears no resemblance to science, and flies in the face of sense and reason. Then some spokesperson like Ashish Jha goes out on social media to talk down to people and say we’re just randos29 who can’t possibly understand how anything works so we shouldn’t speak up at all for our own bodily autonomy, what we value for our families, and what we want to prioritize in our communities. They try to silence people saying, “I want to protect my grandma.” or “Represent us, people over profits.” or even just “I don’t want to get sick, actually.”
"Many people rationalize that if it were really dangerous the government wouldn't let it be advertised. They are wrong in that thinking. It is dangerous and the government does let it be advertised."
- Rick Pollay, Pack of Lies: The Advertising of Tobacco (1992)
People are not foolish or uninformed for wanting public safety protections and reality based medical advice.
People have been avoiding and delaying sickness and dodging infectious diseases since the dawn of humanity. Folks do not need fancy people educations to know we don’t want to get sick all the damn time or have exploitative employers decide what’s right for our healthcare decisions. In the SARS outbreak in 2003, “twenty-first century science played a relatively small role in controlling SARS; nineteenth-century techniques continued to prove their value”30 - it’s true, several of the layers of protection for aerosol transmitted infectious diseases31 are not even particularly high tech. What’s sad is there’s continual hype about what future tech will supposedly save us, but the known and currently possible tech isn’t even being used to the fullest like HEPA filtration,32 N95s,33 elastomeric respirators,34 vaccines,35 and antiviral medication.36
When will the Democrats pick up the clue phone?
I could totally see someone trying to convince a Democratic political staffer or some liberal CDC official that they’ll “win back the trust of Trumpers and MAGA anti-vaxxers” by catering to the right-wingers who don’t want any mitigations because of disinformation campaigns. The people in charge of stuff are doing both-sidesing with our right to effective healthcare. We know this is happening because insiders close to power like Mike Osterholm have said we’re trying to “thread that needle” between anti-vaxxers and people who want vaccination!37 Justin Salhani pointed out on the Fire These Times podcast that there will always be centrists or liberals who will try to negotiate in good faith, but with bad faith righties who simply want to “pull the overton window into a certain direction by any means possible.”38
Jeff Zients, who’s first job out of college was at Bain & Company, has been advancing industry interests, as he did in Obama administration, where he was lauded, despite his fortune made from ties to questionable dubious healthcare business dealings.39 Zients personally dissuaded the Republican governor of Vermont from issuing a statewide mask mandate, and as experts warned of the huge omicron wave coming in late 2021, Zients, then Biden’s COVID-19 czar, did nothing to prepare.40 And then he failed up, becoming President Biden’s chief of staff, and has been working “aggressively” to end telework for federal government workers.41
Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau has made an uncritical defense of Zients, saying don’t look at his past.42 Jon Favreau is former director of speechwriting for President Obama, who said the tv show The West Wing inspired him to go into politics.43 It was the same Jon Favreau who trolled, lambasted, and disparaged disabled people over covid concerns on social media, prompting the hashtag “#PodSaveJon” to start trending and prompting criticism from beloved and famous disabled activist, Alice Wong, who described the outcry of betrayal on Disability Visibility Project as “outrage by people who are fighting for their lives and genuinely want him to do better.”44
There are very likely more people in the Biden administration that initially cut rugs in the Obama administration of their youth. They may have their heads in the clouds in a fantasy from growing up watching the tv show “The West Wing” and romanticizing grand bargain dances with hot Republican counterparts, interludes leading to bipartisan wins. Can’t you just imagine that someone like that might fall for a bad faith con? We know the right-wing has already targeted liberals because State Government Leadership Foundation openly bragged on social media about an advertising campaign that specifically targeted liberals to persuade them of the lie that masks supposedly do more harm than good.45
I didn’t watch The West Wing myself, but I still remember my jaw dropping and the dawning realizations I had as I was sitting at my kitchen table in late 2018 organizing first aid kits with fresh bandaids, and listening to the Citations Needed podcast How ‘The West Wing’ Poisoned the Liberal Mind.46 Until then I didn’t know where this lowballing yourself to bargain before you even start haggling thing came from, and I think it came from The West Wing, where Democratic Party politicians lambasted their left working class base of voters as being unreasonable and unserious for wanting a fair shake, and the conservative-lite centrists and liberal characters continually proposed privatizing and gutting public services in order to “save them” in so-called grand bargains. In these bargains, of course, ordinary people are continually asked to start the bidding at higher than we can afford, and to accept far less than we deserve.
Meanwhile, the bath faith people and their controlled opposition cons are already implementing Project 2025, the plan to dismantle the administrative state from within.47 The whole scheme of doing away with isolation seems ideal to betray the entire working and middle class across the board. Conservative voters also scoff at blatant hypocrisy and corporate toadying, I know this because I knew several Trump voting conservatives who back in December 2021 scoffed when the CDC shortened the guidelines to please Delta Airlines for the holidays. Everyone in a working class or middle income job had the same reaction - “This is just because they want us back at work even if we're sick!” People were not fooled, not even conservative voters. They go to work at places that treat them crappy too - places that are understaffed or offer too little, if any, sick time. So this batshit guidance is actually perfect to alienate them even further, and undermine their trust in government agencies even more. And it demoralizes everyone else, many who will also become anti-government and maybe move to the right.
The meritocracy eugenics of protections for some, but not for others.
The blindspot for those in charge probably partly stems from the fact that this guidance change has little to no immediately apparent deleterious impact on the upper echelons of society. It’s not just Taylor Swift who has the ability to orchestrate not getting sick by controlling who she interacts with and how - and that’s what she does because she doesn’t want to get sick and there’s a financial argument behind that in that as was reported by Yahoo: “even missing one show would cost millions of dollars and could throw Taylor's schedule out for the rest of the year.”48 Most of the upper class have the ability to say no to whatever or whoever, whenever they wouldn’t be comfortable being exposed to, and in fact much of the upper middle class have at least some control over their exposures. Even if they’re in-person at the workplace, they’re the ones with the corner office with a window or a top rate HEPA air purifier. They have ready access to plenty of tests, concierge telemedicine or at least quick access to Paxlovid, and some are probably getting every vaccine possible as often as possible, even while telling the hoi polloi it’s not really necessary for everyone. These are the people, regardless of the axis on the political party line or as far as religion is concerned, they are aligned with the business class, and likely buy into, even if subconsciously, some type of pseudoscience eugenics which includes resistance to public health measures.49 This safety for me but not for thee dog eat dog dogma, it pits adherents against much of the public good including: vaccines (which some believe interfere with “good breeding”),50 masks (a Republican governor banned school masks as disability accommodation & a federal judge went along with it),51 food assistance (States with Republican governors have to be pressured to accept federal summer food access programs for kids),52 patient safety (infection control executive at a major hospital in Boston doesn’t want to control hospital acquired infection),53 traffic safety (right-wing zealot pundit Jordan Peterson wished “the woke death” upon The Associated Press just for posting a news story on a city with no traffic deaths in 7 years),54 public schools (an education writer described the eugenics mentality of libertarian tycoons and Christian nationalists),55 or even climate disaster relief (wellness influencers are busy pivoting from their pandemic disinfo campaigns to turn to undermining climate mitigation).56
The CDC is not operating on science or public health, and officials knew full well who they were catering to, and who they were sticking it to. That much was admitted outright to the Washington Post reporter that since the science hasn’t changed about the risks, the most at risk would be outraged.57
The Washington Post - CDC plans to drop five-day covid isolation guidelines, By Lena H. Sun, February 13, 2024 “The plan to further loosen isolation guidance when the science around infectiousness has not changed is likely to prompt strong negative reaction from vulnerable groups, including people older than 65, those with weak immune systems and long-covid patients, CDC officials and experts said.”
They expected outrage at the unfairness, and they pushed it through anyway. As they say, the cruelty is the point - and this being perpetrated under the Biden administration.
It’s not unlike the May 2021 get rid of mask requirements on your honor for being vaccinated, wink wink to the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers who are, of course, the same people!58 They knew who it would hurt and who it catered to. This new version of cutting isolation in order to… save isolation supposedly - it all has the same “super condescending” vibe, the same disregard, the same betrayal, and it’s clear they’re more comfortable on the anti-vax team than to bother with solidarity with, or even consideration of, disabled and elderly people. And apparently they’re as wish-casting as any right-wing covid denier, believing the worst won’t ever happen to them.
Pulling the rug out from under ordinary Americans is a well-worn cognitive attack tactic.
I think these PR arguments and the malarkey explanations coming out of the CDC are in fact a cognitive attack.59 It drives people to despair with simply an overwhelming amount of confusion - an attempt to perpetrate informational learned helplessness.60 Is it some form of elite panic leading to them trying to control the public rather than to inform and protect communities?61 It doesn’t matter why, it just matters the results, because it’s not good.
The CDC’s job is to prevent disease, and to impart to the public useful information and guidance on individual and community health and preservation of lives. It seems they’ve not been great at their mission, and have been subject to industry pressure for decades. It certainly appears that Jeff Zients, White House Chief of Staff, is doing right-wing business interests a solid. However, I’m more convinced than ever that the CDC has been infiltrated by bad actors who prioritize business interests over human lives, and are prioritizing dismantling the administrative state over making society work for citizens.
This isn’t hyperbole because we were warned about the “burrowed in” Trump appointees who moved to civil service positions, and as Politico reported in January 2021, there was an executive order signed by Trump to push through embedding an unusual amount of Trump bureaucrats who “could work from the inside to stymie Biden’s agenda, much of which depends on agency action.”62 President Biden campaigned on being better on the pandemic than Trump.63 This bullshit industry intervention with the CDC seems very familiar with known tactics.64 The hedging, delaying, counter-productive decisions, conflicts of interest, and confusion, that we have come to see from the institutions these past few years, such as with CDC HICPAC65 or FDA VRBPAC66 - but also in the justice department, and elsewhere. And it looks a lot like what the results of sabotage67 might look like. And this isn’t made up, the anti public health people describe doing just that in the open, in documents like that Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda.68 We’ve known from the get-go who has been behind the push against pandemic mitigation because it inconveniences fossil fuel profits69 and the commercial real estate bottom line.70 There’s a reason for the word Kochtopus.71 And they don’t even want anyone reminded of need for mitigation72 because they believe avoiding hazard hinders economic engagement.73
Deborah Birx has said about covid, “I think we wanted to make it like flu, because that was easier. But it's never going to be like flu.”74 Equating covid with flu to make things simpler, is Trumpian,75 there’s no way around that. So when it comes right down to it, doesn’t the CDC’s “It’s like the flu!” declaration sort of give the game away that this is just right-wing bullshit?76
https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/cdckeepcovidguidelines
References:
The Washington Post - CDC plans to drop five-day covid isolation guidelines, By Lena H. Sun, February 13, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST The White House has yet to sign off on the guidance that the agency is expected to release in April for public feedback, officials said. One agency official said the timing could “move around a bit” until the guidance is finalized.
NBC News - CDC says it has no plans to ease Covid isolation yet, despite urging from doctors - Public health is “more than controlling one virus,” one expert said, as federal health officials consider their next steps in the pandemic. Feb. 13, 2024, 8:19 PM EST By Erika Edwards and Berkeley Lovelace Jr. Following reports that the CDC was considering easing Covid isolation restrictions — including guidelines that people can leave their homes after being fever-free for 24 hours — the agency refused to confirm that such plans were in the works. The potential change was first reported by The Washington Post. But an official at the Department of Health and Human Services who asked not to be identified said federal health officials are considering relaxing Covid isolation guidelines, although the discussions are at an early stage and no definitive decisions have been made. “It’s way too preliminary,” the source said. There’s “lots more consultation to be had.”
Government Executive - Biden administration boasts it’s including more public input into agency rulemaking. Agencies hope to solicit more perspectives and boost trust in government. DECEMBER 7, 2023 As part of the new agenda, the Labor Department cited all the groups they engaged with in plotting their new rules. “We intentionally seek input from members of the public who have not typically participated in the regulatory process, including workers with disabilities, union members, small businesses, low-paid workers and immigrant workers,” Labor said. The Homeland Security Department stressed its public engagement would ensure it did not implement rules with unintended harmful effects on “small businesses, startups and disadvantaged groups of multiple sorts.”
CDC HICPAC November 2023 Public comments - We don't need to see our doctors' smiles, we need doctors who are protected from airborne pathogens and who can protect us from them too. Joseph Pincus of Massachusetts
Biden admin boasts more public input on rulemaking while agencies ignore key constituencies I'm writing the White House to demand President Joe Biden make good on his 2020 campaign promise to mitigate infectious disease. CHLOE HUMBERT DEC 9, 2023 Yet when it comes to pandemic mitigation, patient safety, and worker safety, those most affected are being ignored, and our interests dismissed. There hasn't been strengthened OSHA standards since a hearing in spring 2022. And the CDC HICPAC committee is made up of members with hospital corporate executive positions, and NO PATIENT ADVOCATES. HICPAC needs oversight. They've received hundreds of public comments, many from disabled people, and a nurses union, a patient advocacy organization, and a citizens public health group, among others, have been sounding the alarm that the CDC is going forward anyway with rules to weaken protections for both patients and healthcare workers for ALL infectious diseases, in an apparent move to satisfy corporate healthcare bean counters because patient protection might cut into their profits.
Fraudulent Appeal to Authority. The tactic of citing sources that don’t actually back up a claim. This ploy utilizes the halo effect, anchoring bias, the mere exposure effect, autopilot thinking, and informational learned helplessness. And it’s fraud. CHLOE HUMBERT FEB 9, 2024 Pseudoscience wellness grifters selling unproven remedies often use this tactic. They post a claim, and then they link to a scientific study to give the impression that it backs up their claim but that, once examined, by no means supports the claim, in fact it often refutes their claim, or is just not even a study of what they’re claiming. But since often nobody examines the linked material at all, never mind closely, and many don’t know how to examine and consider scientific studies, the liars get away with it.
WaPo reporter’s citation uses fraudulent appeal to authority to make anti-vax “natural herd immunity” claim. The Washington Post no “candle in the dark” here. CHLOE HUMBERT FEB 26, 2024 The WaPo article giving the impression that the CDC is claiming (wrongly) that natural infection alone is an equivalent to getting vaccinated, is inaccurate. It’s also a typical claim of targeted anti-vax propaganda, relying on “appeal to nature” beliefs. And it’s dangerous because if people believe the CDC is making these anti-vax claims, it may in fact contribute to depressing vaccine uptake further. So The Washington Post basically just trafficked in anti-vax PR peddling.
CDC - Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) - Estimates of SARS-CoV-2 Seroprevalence and Incidence of Primary SARS-CoV-2 Infections Among Blood Donors, by COVID-19 Vaccination Status — United States, April 2021–September 2022 Weekly / June 2, 2023 / 72(22);601–605 By the third quarter of 2022, an estimated 96.4% of persons aged ≥16 years in a longitudinal blood donor cohort had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies from previous infection or vaccination, including 22.6% from infection alone and 26.1% from vaccination alone; 47.7% had hybrid immunity. Hybrid immunity prevalence was lowest among adults aged ≥65 years.
Following the Politics instead of Following the Science Healthcare providers and others are making critical medical decisions about masking based on a political football. CHLOE HUMBERT MAR 21, 2023 Politicians told us they would “follow the science” but what is happening is that even scientists, doctors, and hospitals are now FOLLOWING THE POLITICS! The evidence is all over the news, typically coming from the hospital spokesperson directly to the reporters, clearly stating that they are not basing their mask protection protocols on any medical concerns or ethical concerns, they’re basing medical decisions on a political football - the ending of the National Public Health Emergency declaration.
Huang, S., Sun, J., Feng, L. et al. Identify hidden spreaders of pandemic over contact tracing networks. Sci Rep 13, 11621 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-32542-3 Without being detected and subsequently quarantined, the asymptomatic population (i.e. hidden spreaders) sustains the ongoing spreading of the disease to the susceptible population unknowingly10,11. This poses a major challenge in the effective mitigation of the pandemic spreading. Furthermore, empirical studies have shown that such asymptomatic infections accounts for a large proportion of the population12,13,14,15,16,17,18, as much as up to 80%18. Currently, estimation of the asymptomatic cases is done through exhaustive screening of close contacts of the known infected cases in the contact tracing networks17. This untargeted method requires large amount of resources and is time consuming, that in turn leads to ineffective or delayed interventions to quarantine the asymptomatic cases.
The evidence for pandemic virus related heart risks observed since 2020. Cardiovascular effects were noted right from the get go of the pandemic, and the evidence has only continued mounting since then. A mountain of evidence. CHLOE HUMBERT FEB 5, 2024 Here’s some of the published evidence of cardiac complications related to covid, in reverse chronological order dating all the way back to March 2020.
Infection Control Today. Realities: Beyond a Respiratory Virus, Addressing Optimism in Pandemic Management February 28, 2024 Kevin Kavanagh, MD The CDC needs to give an unambiguous message about the urgent need for COVID-19 vaccinations and not one minimizing the disease by green-lighting the safety of asymptomatic spreaders mingling in our community. This advice is not based upon the known characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 and will cause confusion in our society along with undermining confidence in our governmental institutions.
Amesh Adalja on Linkedin - Tracking Zebra, LLC, Nov 2016 - Present, Pittsburgh, PA Infectious Disease related project management, consulting, media, and strategy firm founded by Dr. Amesh Adalja. Infectious diseases impact businesses in all industries from healthcare to food service. Tracking Zebra can develop a continuity planning applicable to specific businesses including mitigated losses and realizing new opportunities.
Amesh Adalja - Linkedin post - In this piece I’m quoted about the proposed new CDC #COVID19 isolation guidance which will treat COVID like other respiratory viruses. This is a change I support
France 24 - US right-wing Project Veritas admits to spreading election disinformation lie - Issued on: 08/02/2024 - 04:53 Washington (AFP) – Right-wing activist group Project Veritas and its ex- leader have renounced bogus claims that a Pennsylvania postmaster illegally backdated mail-in ballots during the 2020 US election, highlighting the power of litigation in combatting disinformation even years later.
Bloomberg - Strict Covid Isolation Rules May Discourage Testing By Robert Langreth February 21, 2024 at 6:00 AM EST A few weeks ago, my college-aged daughter hesitated to get a Covid test after developing flu-like symptoms, fearing she would end up in mandatory isolation under her school’s rules.
Instagram Threads - Fenit Nirappil @fenitatwapo (March 1, 2024) “We asked CDC officials this morning whether dropping five-day covid isolation guidance would increase the risk of long covid.They argued the risk would be lower because people are more inclined to stay home while sick instead of relying on covid testing.“More people are able to use it so that we can decrease transmission and also prevent severe disease, both of which will result in decreasing long covid,” said Demetre Daskalakis, a top CDC official.”
People Likely to Conceal Contagious Sickness for Social Commitments - Neuroscience News · January 29, 2024 Key Facts: - 75% of participants admitted to hiding or considering hiding an infectious illness in various social contexts. - More than 61% of healthcare workers confessed to concealing their illness. - The study suggests a discrepancy between how people predict they would act when sick and their actual behavior, with many downplaying the severity and transmissibility of their illness.
Instagram Threads - thesinsemillier They're so full of it. It was only a few short weeks ago findings showed that 75% of people were willing to hide being sick. Corporate culture is only going to abuse this latest announcement from the CDC and force sick people to work and just keep making things worse.
Instagram Threads - mad_jelly_bean This doesn’t make sense to me. People work sick all the time. Now they can’t use sick days because “the CDC says it’s OK to work sick”, so why even test. Without paid sick days, more people will work sick.
Noha Aboelata, MD @NohaAboelataMD 11:52 PM · Feb 29, 2024 I'm actually convinced this was done by California on purpose. By rolling back protections around the peak, the predictable decline would hide any immediate impact of the policy. Sinister. Quote: Eric Feigl-Ding @DrEricDing 8) According to sources, the data analysis is mainly based on change in COVID levels after a certain state announced & enacted a similar controversial isolation relaxation policy — on Jan 9th 2024!!! It’s a brand new policy after the Nov-Dec 2023 wave had already peaked! The peak
Elite Panic. Big shots have different goals than the rest of us. Politicians should be representatives, businesses shouldn’t lead, even billionaires can’t seem to buy common sense, and tech won’t save us. CHLOE HUMBERT JUL 13, 2023 The people in high places and big positions will never panic over the right things - they do elite panic. Left to their own devices, people in charge panic over the wrong things & try to fix things other than the actual crisis because they’re often more concerned with their own position within the status quo, and are more concerned about the upheaval of the status quo, than the damage that upheaval is causing. Ordinary people tend to respond with the appropriate alarm and an impulse to do a practical emergency response to protect oneself and one’s community, but are often at odds with the status quo in doing so, and are often stymied by the very people who should be providing support and leadership. Recognizing this phenomenon is vital in determining strategies to overcome it.
Toxic Sludge is Good for You, documentary, 2002 - In today’s corporate culture major PR firms promote crisis management as a necessary business expense. Whenever something bad happens to a corporation, often its first move is not to deal with the actual problem, but to manage the negative perception caused by that problem.
wat3rm370n on tumblr March 2nd, 2024, post of screenshot of tweet by Noha Aboelata quote tweeting Ashish Jha Noha Aboelata, MD @NohaAboelataMD I tried to let this go, but nope. This is quite dismissive of physician, public health, scientist & other distinguished colleagues who disagree. We're not random anonymous dudes on Twitter. We're with the science. We're with public health principles. Stop manufacturing consensus. Quote: Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH @ashishkjha 12h The infectious disease doctors of America agree The change in the CDC guidance on COVID isolation makes sense Now you can choose to some random anonymous dude on twitter wh...
Chew SK. SARS: how a global epidemic was stopped. Bull World Health Organ. 2007 Apr;85(4):324. doi: 10.2471/BLT.07.032763. PMCID: PMC2636331. “twenty-first century science played a relatively small role in controlling SARS; nineteenth-century techniques continued to prove their value”
U.S. Healthcare and Elastomeric Respirators, Lew Radonovich, MD, AOHP National Conference, Baltimore, MD, September 5, 2019 Most N95s are disposable (single-use) and not designed for repeated or extended use. – However, limited reuse may be permitted under certain circumstances (e.g., extreme shortages during a pandemic) – EHMRs and PAPRs are designed for reuse Gap in national surge needs: – ASTHO Report (2014): Total number of N95 held by U.S. acute care hospitals ≈ 60M – This means, hospitals have about 1% of expected national demand for a severe pandemic ▪ Shortages of N95 respirators occurred during SARS (2003) and H1N1 influenza (2009)
Thanks to vaccines, the threat is reduced - so we will no longer be requiring vaccination. Ba dum bump. CHLOE HUMBERT JUL 1, 2023 They sometimes claim they’re following the science, but they seem to actually be following the politics. The other justification some healthcare systems make for dropping infection control measures is to say “other facilities are doing it too” - referring to whatever other clueless anti-vax anti-mask healthcare providers are out there dropping various infection control measures. If another facility somewhere decided to drop indoor plumbing and hand washing, would they do that too?
Stat News: FDA offers radio silence on question of spring Covid boosters, as other countries push ahead By Helen Branswell March 16, 2023 “We currently live in a world where those that want additional booster doses really want them. And those that don’t want them don’t want them at all. And what we’re trying to do is thread that needle,” Osterholm said.
The Fire These Times - We Need to Talk About Twitter w/ Musa Okwonga and Justin Salhani - Episode 138 - Joey Ayoub August 24, 2023 - Podcast Justin Salhani: “It’s this good faith versus bad faith framework. and i think we're seeing this globally whereby particularly in american congress but also in europe and also beyond, you have a bunch of people that are engaging in good faith, and you have a bunch of people who are engaging in bad faith, and what the bad faith people tend to be doing is trying to pull the overton window into a certain direction by any means possible. and because they know that there's always going to be centrist or liberals that will try to negotiate they'll try to negotiate with all the you know ideas possible in the free market of ideology or whatever you want to call it. and so essentially i think what we're left with is this overton window that increasingly is shifting right where it's because you have these people trying to negotiate somewhat in good faith but somewhat stupidly not able to identify that there are a lot of people out there acting in bad faith. now there are people out there who are maybe have right-wing views on certain things or conservative views on certain things are people who do engage in good faith and will listen and will engage and will try to connect and talk to others right and learn and see these things. but there's a lot of people who don't care who are just trying to cause as much harm as possible”
Revolving Door Project - Op-Ed | The American Prospect | April 4, 2022 The Corporate Past Of Jeffrey Zients Daniel Boguslaw and Max Moran Just a few years later, Zients was heading up President Obama’s efforts to fix the hobbled Obamacare website rollout. With the fraud allegations still unsurfaced, Zients was lauded as a whiz kid, having single-handedly saved the rollout of Obama’s singular policy achievement. (In reality, Zients mainly just hired a team of actual experts, and then bought them pie as they worked.) Years earlier, firms he invested in were allegedly defrauding the same system. Out of dozens of profiles, write-ups, celebrations, and plaudits heaped on Zients’s managerial brilliance, nowhere did the Beltway press note that his fortune was growing thanks to his companies grabbing at government health care money in an allegedly fraudulent manner. They also failed to ID his business partner, Eric Minkove, who as managing director of Portfolio Logic helped Zients oversee and acquire companies bleeding both citizens and the government’s Medicare coffers dry. Allegedly. According to Minkove’s LinkedIn profile, he began his career at the Corporate Executive Board, a management consultancy where Zients made the fortune he would use to fund Portfolio Logic. This was followed by a stint at McKinsey, before reuniting with Zients. Minkove then went on to become CEO of a Portfolio Logic investment, Best Practices, Inc., which is a medical outsourcing company that has been accused of both medical malpractice in the death of an infant and, later, potentially illegal billing practices.
The American Prospect: The Myth of Jeffrey Zients. There is no reason to trust a longtime corporate stooge to serve as President Biden’s chief of staff. BY MAX MORAN JANUARY 27, 2023 In 2021, Zients joined the Biden administration in arguably the most consequential job of all: COVID-19 czar, the point man for coordinating all of the federal health agencies to rescue America from the pandemic. If ever there was a time for him to prove his managerial bona fides, this was it. Zients failed miserably. He didn’t boost production of tests or personal protective equipment, but he did personally dissuade Republican Gov. Phil Scott of Vermont from issuing a statewide mask mandate. He did nothing to assert government ownership of the vaccine technologies the government helped develop, allowing Pfizer and Moderna to charge hundreds of dollars worldwide for treatments every human being needs to receive. Experts warned the White House months in advance to expect a surge in December 2021, but Zients did almost nothing to prepare. When the omicron variant hit, lines to get tests stretched across city blocks nationwide, two years into the pandemic.
Government Executive - 'It is fraud, folks. It’s fraud': The latest in a string of Republican accusations against federal teleworkers - Erich Wagner SEPTEMBER 8, 2023 “Where are all of those workers? I know they’re still on the payroll, right? Is COVID over? Are we able to come to work safely? And yet, we still have a huge number of people from this city telecommuting or teleworking, and there’s no reason we should be doing that.” Ernst’s complaints appear to be missing important points of context, however. First, her pressure on the administration to reduce telework comes on the cusp of a major initiative by the Office of Management and Budget and White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients to “aggressively” reduce telework and increase “meaningful in-person work” at federal agencies, particularly at agency headquarters buildings.
The American Prospect: The Myth of Jeffrey Zients. There is no reason to trust a longtime corporate stooge to serve as President Biden’s chief of staff. BY MAX MORAN JANUARY 27, 2023 Pod Save America, perhaps the Biden administration’s most supportive media organ, assured the Democratic faithful that any skeptics weren’t being fair. “I generally have a problem with criticism that is only about someone’s past and résumé, and not of the actual decisions and policies they have implemented during their time in government,” said Jon Favreau, who overlapped with Zients in the Obama administration. Favreau’s claim is bizarre for several reasons. For one, how is anyone supposed to judge who Zients is, if not by his history?
The GW Hatchet (George Washington University) - The man behind ‘change we can believe in’ plans TV series based on Obama White House - September 25, 2013 - Rachael Gerendasy The former speechwriter for President Barack Obama said that his leap into politics was inspired by the classic political drama “The West Wing.”
Disability Visibility Project - Disabled Outrage and #PodSaveJon - Alice Wong - January 2, 2024 Not limited to Favreau, he and other nondisabled people determine what is reasonable and what kind of advocacy is legitimate since they seem to know much more than millions of people actually impacted. The “pandemic is over” crowd thinks it’s admirable to work while sick and that wearing masks is virtue signaling or a symptom of a mental illness. When I thought the conversation would taper after a few days, Favreau belittled users of #PodSaveJon and clutched his dudebro pearls at being called an ableist eugenicist, spurring even more outrage by people who are fighting for their lives and genuinely want him to do better. Disabled and chronically ill people expended immense amounts of time, energy, care, and labor just to survive and be heard only to be trivialized once again.
Twitter from @theSGLF: State Government Leadership Foundation (SGLF) Feb 9, 2022 Our latest ad is making an impact and liberals are now agreeing with what conservatives have been saying all along: mask mandates do more harm than good.
Citations Needed | September 26, 2018 | Transcript - Episode 51: How ‘The West Wing’ Poisoned the Liberal Mind And the second mode is contempt for left-wing criticisms of capitalism. It’s outward embrace of world trade. This sort of lineal liberal consensus around trade that of course two years after the show went off the air kind of blew up in everyone’s face. It’s always sort of super condescending that, that this is just, you’re right. Like you said, we’ve, we’ve reached the end of history. It’s all over in this manifest. Also, this idea of the grand bargain which really poisoned the minds of a lot of Obama administration officials as, as we talked about this idea of privatizing, gutting Social Security to save it, the sort of no labels politics.
Project 2025: Righties ready to roll. (Heads up, yes it's real & you might not like it.) A list of some coverage from left of Project 2025. CHLOE HUMBERT FEB 2, 2024 I’m publishing this list of links because I still encounter people thinking I’m talking about some conspiracy theory about a secret plan and they don’t realize it’s something actually proudly published on a website.
Why Taylor Swift won't meet with Aussie fans while Down Under EXCLUSIVE: A source has said Taylor could risk 'millions of dollars' if she were to fall sick while touring. Yahoo Lifestyle Team Updated 18 February 2024 On Taylor's previous tours in Australia, she would host backstage meet and greets before each show as she loves interacting with her fans – but since Covid, we're told her team had to “permanently axe these as they pose too much risk”. The source adds that although this may seem strict, even missing one show would cost millions of dollars and could throw Taylor's schedule out for the rest of the year.
Eugenics as an ideology. Legal and political agendas have motivations to make semantic arguments that obscure eugenics and maybe that’s why we don’t have a separate word for eugenics as an ideological belief. CHLOE HUMBERT NOV 30, 2023 The possibly more prevalent, and somewhat more insidious version of eugenics ideology, that has flown under the radar in our modern world, is the variety that spawned grotesque and wholly unscientific ideas like “natural herd immunity” in the pandemic, as pushed by Scott Atlas and The Great Barrington Declaration adherents. To withhold prevention of suffering from those vulnerable.The proponents of this type of eugenics claim that they are leaving it up to “nature” or, alternately, specifically a divine power, depending on their religious or secular orientation. The point is to stop any intervention that would save people they think are “weak” or “undeserving” in some way as inappropriately countering the superior “nature” to do its thing. This includes resistance to all public health measures like masks, vaccines, food assistance, healthcare equity, or even disaster relief and universal education in public schools. Never mind that interventions are natural too, because humans do them, the same way birds build nests, but clearly people draw the line on “natural” wherever it’s convenient to their purpose.
Controlling Heredity Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man - University of Missouri “There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind.” - Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871
AP - Federal court dismisses case against Iowa governor’s ban on school mask mandates BY HANNAH FINGERHUT Updated 10:09 PM EST, February 27, 2024 The ruling marks the conclusion of the yearslong court battle, originating in the fall of 2021 with a lawsuit alleging that Reynolds violated federal disability law by preventing schools from adopting mask mandates as an accommodation for students with disabilities. Reynolds celebrated the result, saying in a statement that Iowa focused on keeping kids in the classroom, “trusting parents to decide what was best for their children.”
Politico - GOP governors face pressure campaign to feed kids in the summer Louisiana and South Carolina are among the states where advocates are pushing hard to change their governor’s mind. By Marcia Brown 02/28/2024 More than a dozen Republican governors have been holding out for months against a bipartisan plan to feed hungry children during the summer. But they are under mounting pressure to reconsider — with one already reversing course. The program, known as Summer EBT, aims to make it easier for kids to access food when school’s out by providing pre-loaded cards, rather than prepared meals that need to be picked up from select locations. It represents the first major expansion of federal nutrition programs in decades, and the Biden administration estimates it could help feed 30 million eligible schoolchildren in the summer months.
Dr Jordan B Peterson@jordanbpeterson 9:02 AM · Mar 2, 2024 You have become pathetic beyond comprehension @AP and the woke death will soon visit you. Quote The Associated Press @AP · 9h A New Jersey city that limited street parking hasn’t had a traffic death in 7 years…
Curmudgucation - School Choice Isn't Uber. It's LulaRoe. From September 2021 - PETER GREENE SEP 14, 2023 They believe the marketplace is God's own way of sorting out the deserving from the undeserving. Their own wealth and success are a result of their superior awesomeness, not the luck of timing and circumstance. And if you are poor, that is a reflection of your unworthiness, your moral failings, your character flaws, and trying to boost you out of that is to go against the laws of nature. The implication underlying all this? Not everyone can succeed, and not everyone should. This is not an idea that translates well to public education, but it is a foundational belief about how the world works, and their ideas about the freedom to rise or fall on your merits echo those of fellow multi-level millionaires, Dick and Betsy DeVos (in fairness, Betsy's money also comes from the manufacture of auto parts).
Wellness influencers fueled pandemic misinformation. Now they’re targeting another crisis By Laura Paddison, CNN Updated 1:19 PM EST, Mon February 5, 2024 These posters are all wellness influencers — a loosely-defined umbrella term for a wide range of accounts including yoga, lifestyle, fitness, alternative health and new age spirituality. While conspiracy theories about the Hawaii wildfires spread across the internet last year, it may seem surprising they were also seized upon by part of the wellness community. But for years there has been a merging of wellness, disinformation and conspiracy, as a subset of influencers use the backdrop of aesthetically pleasing, pastel-colored posts to spread much darker messages, weaving together alarming conspiracy theories with calls for users to buy their supplements or services. This phenomenon exploded during the pandemic, when anti-vax sentiment took hold in large parts of the wellness community. As interest in the pandemic waned, experts say some wellness influencers have latched on to climate change to galvanize followers. Their concern: Those influencers — some with hundreds of thousands of followers — are exposing new, and younger, audiences to a slew of misinformation and undermining efforts to tackle the climate crisis. Cécile Simmons, a trained yoga teacher, was surprised when many of the wellness accounts she followed started posting about climate change. “It just started popping up in my feed and I thought OK, that’s interesting, now that COVID is ‘over’ they’re diversifying the narrative,” she told CNN.
The Washington Post - CDC plans to drop five-day covid isolation guidelines, By Lena H. Sun, February 13, 2024 “The plan to further loosen isolation guidance when the science around infectiousness has not changed is likely to prompt strong negative reaction from vulnerable groups, including people older than 65, those with weak immune systems and long-covid patients, CDC officials and experts said.”
Anti-mask Woke-washing The moral distortion of social justice. CHLOE HUMBERT AUG 31, 2023 Patrick Fagan is a psychologist who once worked for Cambridge Analytica, and was later linked to anti-vax groups in the UK via messages revealed in the HARTleaks. In an exchange from 2021 between Tanya Kymenko and Patrick Fagan, reported by Counter Disinformation Project in 2022, Tanya Kymenko asked “So, if the "pro-mask" are particularly concerned about equality then they might in theory be susceptible to a message on raising inequality as a direct result of NPI (lockdown). Is that a reasonable assumption?” and Patrick Fagan replied, “Yes exactly... They are wearing the face mask to be fair to others and to reduce harm... If messaging shows that face masks are unfair and harmful, that would be very powerful.” Patrick Fagan’s assertion was that mere messaging would be powerful - if people are made to believe it’s masking that is unfair. Patrick Fagan also had some other weird and wrong ideas, but there was no question that he was engaged in planning deliberate manipulation with propaganda against masking. And Tanya Kymenko was already equating all NPIs (Non Pharmaceutical Interventions) as the same as “lockdown” - which has expanded to include just wearing a mask.
First NATO scientific meeting on Cognitive Warfare (France) — 21 June 2021 The impairment of cognitive processes has two harmful consequences: i) Contextual maladaptation, resulting in errors, missed gestures or temporary inhibition; and ii) Lasting disorder, which affects the personality and transforms its victim by locking him or her into a form of behavioral strangeness or inability to understand the world. In the first case, it is a question of causing transitory consequences, circumscribed by a particular critical environment. The second concerns the transformation of the decision-making principles of individuals who then become disruptors or responsible for erroneous actions, or even non-action.
Psychology Today - Giving Up: Informational Learned Helplessness. It's exhausting when it’s hard to figure out what is true and what is false. December 23, 2021 | Susan A. Nolan, Ph.D., and Michael Kimball, Reviewed by Jessica Schrader The plodding repetition of conspiratorial lies can lead to “cognitive exhaustion.” But it goes deeper than that. Peter Pomerantsev, author of the book This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, popularized the concept of “censorship by noise” in which governments “create confusion through information—and disinformation—overload.” In time, people become overwhelmed, and even cognitively debilitated, by the “onslaught of information, misinformation and conspiracy theories until [it] becomes almost impossible to separate fact from fiction, or trace an idea back to its source.” And so “censorship by noise,” particularly common in regions governed autocratically, leads people to experience crushing anxiety coupled with a markedly weakened motivation to fact-check anything anymore. They may then “like” or share information without critical review because they lack the energy and motivation to take the extra steps to check it out.
Commentary: Elite Panic vs. the Resilient Populace by James B. Meigs, MAY 2020 For the police, fear of public chaos outweighed, at least temporarily, concern for possible victims. Before dispatching those casually deputized citizens to keep order in the streets, the Anchorage police chief suspended the search for survivors in damaged buildings. “Arguably, the city was protecting its ruins from looters more conscientiously than it was looking for people trapped in them,” Mooallem writes. Disaster researchers call this phenomenon “elite panic.” When authorities believe their own citizens will become dangerous, they begin to focus on controlling the public, rather than on addressing the disaster itself. They clamp down on information, restrict freedom of movement, and devote unnecessary energy to enforcing laws they assume are about to be broken. These strategies don’t just waste resources, one study notes; they also “undermine the public’s capacity for resilient behaviors.” In other words, nervous officials can actively impede the ordinary people trying to help themselves and their neighbors. As in war, the first casualty in disasters is often the truth. One symptom of elite panic is the belief that too much information, or the wrong kind of information, will send citizens reeling.
Politico: The ‘deep state’ of loyalists Trump is leaving behind for Biden. It will be hard for the next administration to root out Trump political appointees that have moved into civil service jobs. By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN and MEGAN CASSELLA 01/19/2021 A higher-than-usual number of Trump administration political appointees — some with highly partisan backgrounds — are currently “burrowing” into career positions throughout the federal government, moving from appointed positions into powerful career civil service roles, which come with job protections that will make it difficult for Biden to fire them. While this happens to some degree in every presidential transition, and some political appointees make for perfectly capable public servants, Biden aides, lawmakers, labor groups and watchdog organizations are sounding the alarm — warning that in addition to standard burrowing, the Trump administration is leaning on a recent executive order to rush through dozens if not hundreds of these so-called “conversions.” The fear is that, once entrenched in these posts, the Trump bureaucrats could work from the inside to stymie Biden’s agenda, much of which depends on agency action.
THE BIDEN PLAN TO COMBAT CORONAVIRUS (COVID-19) AND PREPARE FOR FUTURE GLOBAL HEALTH THREATS The American people deserve an urgent, robust, and professional response to the growing public health and economic crisis caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak.
Rand Waltzman on Linkedin. Image text, Strategies for Manufacturing Doubt (7) • Impede Government Regulation Overwhelm governmental regulatory agencies to slow or stop their function - Alter Product to Seem Healthier - Make modifications to harmful product to reduce ostensible negative effects • Influence Government / Laws • Gain inappropriate proximity to regulatory bodies and encourage policy that supports narratives favorable to your industry. A cartoon shows 3 people in white lab coats lined up at a printer and the caption says "Heads up, new healthcare legislation coming in!" another cartoon shows a tangle of traffic lights and 2 people in hard hats looking up at them and the caption reads WHAT WE NEED HERE IS MORE RULES with emphasis on More.
CMD - How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On Covid By Walker Bragman and Alex Kotch | December 22nd, 2021 Lockdown measures drove down cases in the U.S. and likely saved millions of lives globally. But the decline of in-person shopping and work, combined with factory shutdowns in places like China, disrupted the economy. A 2020 report from the corporate consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found the hardest-hit industries would take years to recover. One sector in particular that took a big hit was the fossil fuel industry. Oil demand fell sharply in 2020, placing the global economy on uncertain footing. Before long, business-aligned groups — particularly those connected to fossil fuels — began targeting the public health measures threatening their bottom lines. Chief among them were groups tied to billionaire Charles Koch, owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately held fossil fuel company in the world. The war on public health measures began on March 20, 2020, when Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, issued a press release calling on states to remain open. “We can achieve public health without depriving the people most in need of the products and services provided by businesses across the country,” it read. A month later, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a business lobbying group partially funded by Koch Industries, published a letter calling on President Donald Trump to enable states to reopen. That letter was signed by over 200 state legislators and “stakeholders,” including leaders from Koch-funded groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the James Madison Institute. To fight its war, the Koch network also relied on the astroturf roadmap behind the anti-government Tea Party movement, using its dark money apparatus to coordinate anti-lockdown protests. Participants for a number of anti-lockdown rallies were recruited by FreedomWorks, a dark money group tied to Charles Koch instrumental in organizing Tea Party protests in 2009. Several of the 2020 rallies were also promoted by the Convention of States Action, a group founded by an organization with ties to the Koch network and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer that wants to rewrite the U.S. Constitution. In Michigan, a major event was organized by the Michigan Freedom Fund, a nonprofit funded by the family of Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos. Groups funded by the Kochs and their colleagues also turned to a more insidious form of combat adapted from Tea Party strategies: building an academic and intellectual network that would create and promote its own “science” to attack COVID mitigation policies.
Wall Street Journal - Interest-Only Loans Helped Commercial Property Boom. Now They’re Coming Due. Landlords face a $1.5 trillion bill for commercial mortgages over the next three years. By Konrad Putzier, June 6, 2023 Many of the commercial landlords on the hook for the loans are vulnerable to default in part because of the way their loans are structured. Unlike most home loans, which get paid down each year, many commercial mortgages are known as interest-only loans. Borrowers make only interest payments during the life of the loan, with the entire principal due at the end. Interest-only loans as a share of new commercial mortgage-backed securities issuance increased to 88% in 2021, up from 51% in 2013, according to Trepp. Typically, owners pay off this debt by getting a new loan or selling the building. Now, steeper borrowing costs and lenders’ growing reluctance to refinance these loans are raising the likelihood that many of them won’t be paid back. Many banks, fearful of losses and under pressure from regulators and shareholders to shore up their balance sheets, have mostly stopped issuing new loans for office buildings, brokers say. Office and some mall owners are facing falling demand for their buildings because of remote work and e-commerce.
Jane Mayer, Dark Money. The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, January 2016 Fink was fascinated by the nuts and bolts of power. After studying the Kochs' political problems for 6 months he drew up a practical blueprint ostensibly inspired by Hayek's model of production, but impressed Charles by going beyond where his own 1976 paper on the subject had left off, called The Structure of Social Change. It approached the manufacture of political change like any other product. As Fink later described it in a talk, it laid out a three-phase takeover of American politics. The first phase required an investment in intellectuals, whose ideas would serve as the raw products. The second required an investment in think tanks, that would turn the ideas into marketable policies. And the third phase required the subsidization of citizens' groups that would, along with special interests, pressure elected officials to implement the policies. It was, in essence, a Libertarian production line, waiting only to be bought, assembled, and switched on. Fink's plan was tailor-made for Charles Koch who deeply admired Hayek, and approached both business and politics with the systematic mindset of an engineer. While some might find it disturbing to regard the democratic process as a factory, Charles soon adopted the approach as his own. As he told Brian Doherty, the libertarian writer, to bring about social change requires a strategy that is vertically and horizontally integrated. It must span, he said, from idea creation, to policy development, to education, to grassroots organizations, to lobbying, to political action. Before long libertarian wags had dubbed the Kochs' publicity-shy multi-armed assembly line, the Kochtopus, a name that stuck.
And Voila, An Anti-Mask Twitter Rando by Chloe Humbert on Medium, Apr 7 2023 I came across a particularly aggressive anti-mask account on twitter in early 2021. He made a ridiculous capitalist fever dream argument to justify duping people into unmasking and getting sick, and maybe dying, for business interests. It seemed so blatantly ridiculous. Tweet from @reubenR80027912 dated 1019 am May 7, 2021 says Main Street is Very simple. Do 3 things PSA campaigns that you won’t die if vaxxed. Remind people kids aren’t a risk. Remove masks everywhere so people don’t constantly live in fear. Voila. Roaring economy. Spending is about freedom from fear. Quote-tweet from same account on February 22, 2021 says There’s something to the Mad Men pilot and covid. Telling people they’re more likely to die in a car accident than covid doesn’t matter. Nor do vax stats. Happiness is freedom from fear, a billboard that screams whatever you’re doing is ok @ DKThomp
MarketWatch - People are ‘long social distancing’ due to COVID-19. Economists say that’s contributing to a drop in labor-force participation. By Zoe Han, December 2022 Knowing that COVID-19 has not gone away, some people are not yet prepared to let their guard down, according to a working paper distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Some 13% of U.S. workers said they will continue social distancing as the economy opens up and cases fall, and another 45% said they will do so in limited ways. Only 42% said they plan a “complete return” to the activities they participated in before the pandemic. The study, titled “Long Social Distancing,” estimated that unwillingness among workers to be in close proximity to others — which in many cases is prudent, especially for those who have underlying conditions or elderly relatives — reduced labor participation by 2.5 percentage points in the first half of 2022 compared with what economists would normally expect to see. That translates to $250 billion in potential annual output, representing a drop of nearly 1 percentage point.
ABC News - Former Trump health adviser believes current COVID response is falling behind. Dr. Deborah Birx spoke to ABC News’ podcast "START HERE." By ABC News. August 29, 2023, 6:30 PM “I think we wanted to make it like flu, because that was easier. But it's never going to be like flu. It stays with us in between the waves. We have a summer wave. We have a winter wave. It makes people much sicker than flu. Many more people die from it than flu. And by the way, flu does not have this level of long COVID and these long side effects that we see with COVID. So let's just all agree it's not flu. It will never be flu. Following it and surveying for it like we do for flu will never be adequate in this country."
Reuters - Like the flu? Trump's coronavirus messaging confuses public, pandemic researchers say By Brad Brooks March 14, 2020 On Monday, when Trump tweeted that the coronavirus was not as perilous as the flu, he said, "So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!" Two days later, Anthony Fauci, head of infectious diseases at the National Institutes of Health and a member of Trump's task force on the outbreak, said the coronavirus was far more deadly. "This is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu," Fauci said on Wednesday, when was asked by a House of Representatives committee for a fact that would help Americans gauge the danger. These are textbook examples of contradictory communication during disease outbreaks, according to some researchers into the psychology of pandemics and how leaders can most effectively communicate to keep the public safe during them.