COVID-19

Every time a farm worker is infected with H5N1, it’s like a game of Russian Roulette for the rest of us. The virus is making trillions of copies of itself, and many of them carry random mutations. If any of those copies carry mutations that allow it to achieve human-to-human transmission, it will likely be passed on to a contact- or contacts- of that worker. You’ve just witnessed the potential birth of a new pandemic.

So basically, you really, really don’t want this thing- this Spillover Event- to happen even a single time. Every time you do, you’re potentially gambling with 8 billion people’s futures. The Biden Administration has allowed it to happen 61 times in less than a year. And instead of treating it like an emergency, which they almost certainly would’ve before COVID, the USDA, FDA, CDC and White House keep treating their Russian Roulette “wins” like permission to play another round.

Like most of the conclusions the White House appears to have drawn about public health, this betrays a poor understanding of statistics. When you win a round of Russian Roulette, it doesn’t mean you’re “good” at Russian Roulette, or that the game is easy, or that you’re on a hot streak, although gamblers believe these sorts of things about gambling all the time. It just means you got lucky. It shouldn’t be taken as an invitation to go around again.

Where Hong Kong, Finland, Spain and many other governments took immediate and drastic action to avoid spillovers, the US has watched the virus spread and worsen, looking the other way as infections among farmers crop up. Through negligence and incompetence, the US government is creating the conditions for another global pandemic, despite having had months to avert it entirely. 

This is just brilliant:

As I was picking up my car from the mechanic last week, the maskless man ringing me up from behind the plexiglass gestured to my mask and asked a by-now familiar question: “Are you sick or trying not to get sick?” He said it with kind curiosity, with none of the ridicule or hostility that so often meets people “still” wearing masks in public. I happily replied that I was trying not to get sick.

He then shared the following information with me: others at the shop had been pressuring him to remove the plexiglass barrier that barely separated him from the customers, but he refused. A friend of his this year died of “it”; the mechanics at the shop are constantly out sick with “it”; and one mechanic lost his leg due to a blood clot after being intubated for three months with “it.” Not once was the word “Covid” mentioned, but we both knew what we were talking about. It had ravaged people he knew, and he wasn’t willing to get rid of the last protective barrier that separated him from the customers who come in sick all the time. In his own way, he insisted on continuing to acknowledge the pandemic by protecting himself the best way he knew how.

The fact that we could talk about Covid without ever mentioning it by name struck me. Others in the waiting room surely heard us, too, and knew what we were talking about. After all, nobody has really forgotten Covid. But what most people have done, collectively, is decide that it is over by fiat; that is, they have ejected Covid from their reality and therefore their vocabulary. “Covid” has become a forbidden word. What has resulted is an unnecessary mystification of the present: gruesome signs of Covid are all around us, as my mechanic saw so clearly, but we are without adequate language to describe it.

[…]

When Trump said that the pandemic would end if we just stopped testing for it, the public was rightly outraged. We were new to the pandemic, not yet fatigued by the inconvenience of caring for others. And so we could easily see through this proposed sleight of hand; we knew that viruses exist even when we don’t go looking for them. But this is exactly the policy that has been universally adopted under a Democratic presidency: almost every method we developed for measuring the true extent of the pandemic in 2020 has been eliminated, not because the threat disappeared but rather to disappear the threat. Just one reliable metric remains, wastewater data, and it reveals the truth: we are still in a biological pandemic, killing and disabling millions. 

[…]

What this sleight of hand conceals is the fact that the social end of the pandemic was manufactured to restart the engine of capital as quickly as possible to quell a newly-radicalized society. At least in the United States, the early pandemic ushered in the most robust social safety net that many of us had seen in our lifetimes: we all received a universal basic income; unemployment benefits doubled; child poverty was cut in half; the changes to manufacturing and travel for which climate activists have been agitating for decades were implemented in the blink of an eye. The lie that bureaucracy is slow and the government’s hands are tied was laid bare. We saw, for the first time, what the state could really do for us when it prioritized people over profits.

Some high-octane anger fuel in this excellent piece:

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".

In Australia, the lack of awareness is biting in shocking ways. Too many children with long COVID are being dismissed by doctors who say there's nothing they can do to help — or worse, that their pain and fatigue is "all in their head". They're being pushed out of school by teachers who don't understand why they can't come to class or run around with their peers. Their parents have been gaslighted and blamed, too, not just by medical professionals but their closest friends and family. And experts are concerned that all this ignorance and apathy — and the unwillingness of governments to do more to curb COVID transmission — is exposing a generation of children to the same chronic illness and disability, with potentially devastating consequences.

This is one of the most enlightening things I've read recently, but sadly it's paywalled.

In the US, mask wearing, while opposed and evaded by people all over the political spectrum (albeit not equally), was disproportionately associated with reactionary political affiliation, especially in its most demagogic and violent forms. Anti-mask demagoguery associated mask wearing and mask mandates with communism, Nazism, satanism, genocide, suicide and a war on America. This article argues that this demagoguery was not unique to masks or COVID-19, but the rhetorical consequence of the pro-GOP strategic repurposing of twentieth-century anti-communist demagoguery. This demagoguery (which arose after World War I) framed all policy disagreements, not as issues with multiple legitimate perspectives that could be argued qua policies, but as battles in an apocalyptic war between good and evil, and therefore beyond normal political disagreement.

In the first minutes of the new film Judas and the Black Messiah, released Feb. 12, it shows archival footage of the free ambulance service started by the Black Panther Party’s Winston-Salem, N.C., chapter in 1972. And the party’s Illinois chairman Fred Hampton, played by Daniel Kaluuya, sums up the risks of going to a hospital for a Black American, “We think it’s normal for us to go to the hospital with a runny nose and come home in a body bag.”

These scenes are a glimpse at a lesser-known aspect of the Black Panther Party’s community health work of the 1960s and 1970s that has become more widely recognized in recent years. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement has inspired a new appreciation for the Black Panthers and attempts have been made to recast their image in history and highlight the work they did in their communities, such as serving free breakfast to children and setting up more than a dozen medical clinics nationwide. It’s public health work that also demonstrates the long history of problems activists are still trying to solve today.

Er… I think you'll find they can.

“We are in possibly the second-biggest surge of the pandemic if you look at wastewater levels,” said Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, who runs a long-Covid clinic at the University of Texas, San Antonio, and has had ongoing Covid symptoms since August 2022. “There is no urgency to this. No news. No discussion in Congress. There is no education.”

[…]

Since the Biden administration declared the end of the national emergency in May, Americans across the political spectrum have largely followed the example set by the government and entirely disposed of any level of Covid precautions. Liberal and left-wing outlets have participated in the normalizing of Covid too, dismissing or even ostracizing people who still take precautions as if they are tin-hat conspiracy theorists. “We can’t be in lockdown forever,” has become a common refrain, as if wearing a mask on the subway constitutes “lockdown.”

In September, Biden himself participated in the spread of this kind of harmful disinformation when he declared the pandemic “over” on 60 Minutes. “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks,” he said. “Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.” This is, essentially, governing via “vibes”—so much for “following the science

It’s difficult for me to understand how anyone could see this data- which finds the rate of Long COVID after 3 infections to be a whopping 38%- and not understand why “let it rip” is an unsustainable approach to COVID. But let me spell it out: people are catching COVID frequently, between 1-2 times a year. Each infection carries a high risk of long-term illness, which does not decrease, but compounds with reinfection. Immunity is short-term, and often circumvented by the fast pace of COVID variant evolution. Add these factors together: how do you run a society with a constantly, rapidly increasing subset of the population long-term ill? Frankly, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s not only a moral issue; yes, I believe it’s wrong to forcibly infect everyone with a vascular disease with unknown long-term health effects over and over again. But it’s also just practically unfeasible to operate a functional economy while rapidly disabling the workforce.

How did we get here? When we were first vaccinated, many of us in early 2021, was this the future we were promised? Constant reinfections that will surely disable many of us, but hopefully it won’t be you, so go about your day?

Public lecture on 21 November 2023 by Prof Carl Bergstrom from The University of Washington. This lecture was part of the AIMOS 2023 conference (http://aimosconference.com/).

Some of the first protests against lockdowns were outside of gyms. And I was trying to understand what was going on with that. Why were these super buff folks having these protests, doing push-ups outside of their gyms?

And I came to the conclusion that there was something similar to the way in which some ultra-religious people were reacting, where they were insisting no matter what this was, they had to go pray. They had to be in these collective spaces, because that was their force field. Prayer was their protection against death or what happens after death.

I vividly remember watching the news one night, and there was a story about a megachurch that had broken lockdown. Journalists were interviewing people as they were streaming out of the megachurch. And they said: “Aren’t you afraid of Covid? You’ve just been in a room with thousands of unmasked people singing.” And the answer from one worshipper was: “No way! I’m bathed in the blood of the Lord.”

I saw these gym protests as a similar idea: my body is my temple. What I’m doing here is my protection; I’m keeping myself strong. I’m building up my immune system, my body is my force field against whatever is coming.

Boris Johnson said he would rather “let the bodies pile high” than impose another lockdown, the Covid Inquiry has heard.

The former prime minister has previously denied ever making the statement, both on television and to the House of Commons, after an anonymous source told the Daily Mail in 2021 that Johnson said: “No more fucking lockdowns – let the bodies pile high in their thousands.”