The lobby at this St. John’s Community Health clinic in South Los Angeles bustles with patients. But community health worker Ana Ruth Varela is worried that it’s about to get a lot quieter. Many patients, she said, are afraid to leave their homes. “The other day I spoke with one of the patients. She said: ‘I don’t know. Should I go to my appointment? Should I cancel? I don’t know what to do.’…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Dr. Khaled Alser, a renowned Palestinian surgeon at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, describes how Israeli forces abducted him from Gaza last year before transferring him to Israeli prisons rife with abuse. He was held by Israel for seven months last year, during which time he says he was beaten, humiliated, denied medical treatment and tortured. He also describes routine sexual assault and sexual…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
“I’m going to report you. I can get you fired for that,” an ex-IDF soldier threatens in the hospital hallway. The former IDF soldier now working in my hospital does not realize I am a student and cannot be fired, only expelled. The interaction began when the former soldier asked me to step outside to talk about my keffiyeh-print scrub cap. I spent the first months of the genocide unaware of…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
One evening in May, nursing assistant Debra Ragoonanan’s vision blurred during her shift at a state-run Massachusetts veterans home. As her head spun, she said, she called her husband. He picked her up and drove her to the emergency room, where she was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm. It was the latest in a drumbeat of health issues that she traces to the first months of 2020…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
We speak with Human Rights Watch researcher Milena Ansari about the organization’s new report detailing the torture of Palestinian medical workers in Israeli prisons. HRW spoke with eight doctors, paramedics and nurses who were picked up in Gaza before being transferred to the notorious Sde Teiman camp and other facilities, where they say they suffered beatings, starvation, humiliation…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A Palestinian man mourns a boy killed in an Israeli attack, Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, 9 July. 2024 ( APA images)
Palestinians in Gaza marked another grim milestone as Israel’s genocide entered its 10th month, with no end in sight, and as public health experts warned of a massive wave of secondary mortality even in the event of an immediate ceasefire.
On Tuesday, Israeli airstrikes hit people sheltering outside a school in eastern Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, killing at least 29.
Israel claimed to have targeted a Hamas fighter with a “precise munition” in the deadly strike but video broadcast by Al Jazeera shows the area filled with civilians enjoying a game of football at the time of the attack:
?HORRIBLE: Footage shows the final moments of displaced people at Abasan School in eastern Khan Younis/south #Gaza Strip , playing football in the schoolyard before the Israeli army bombed them, resulting in a horrific massacre that killed dozens and injured hundreds. pic.twitter.com/tyXN2hJI48
— Nour Naim| ???? (@NourNaim88) July 9, 2024
In central Gaza, Israeli strikes killed 60 Palestinians and wounded dozens of others, according to the government media office in the territory.
Israeli tanks pushed into an already battered Gaza City on Tuesday following renewed intense attacks. The Palestine Red Crescent said that it had received dozens of distress calls but the intensity of the bombing made it impossible for them to help.
The armed wings of the Palestinian resistance groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad said they were battling “Israeli forces with machine guns, mortar fire and anti-tank missiles and killed and wounded Israeli soldiers” on Gaza City’s front lines, Reuters reported.
The fresh Israeli attacks in Gaza City caused a new wave of mass forced displacement and Hamas said it may derail protracted negotiations towards a ceasefire and prisoner swap.
Hamas had in recent days reportedly attenuated its position that Israel end the war as a precondition to any agreement but was seeking guarantees that negotiations would lead to a permanent ceasefire.
Israel once again indicated that it would reject any deal that would leave Hamas as the de facto governing authority in Gaza. On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his position that he would only accept an agreement that would “allow Israel to return and fight until all the goals of the war are achieved.”
That position appears guaranteed, if not explicitly intended, to ensure that no deal is possible.
Meanwhile, Israel’s Channel 12 news reported on a recent military assessment finding that “much of Hamas’ tunnel network is still in a ‘good functional state’ in many parts of Gaza.”
The resistance group is still able to launch raids near boundary with Israel “and possibly even cross it,” according to the assessment, as reported by The Times of Israel. The military chiefs reportedly recommended in their assessment that Israel reach a negotiated deal with Hamas, even if it ends the war, in order “to get back the hostages.”
In his first video appearance in weeks, Abu Obeida, the pseudonymous spokesperson for the armed wing of Hamas, said on Sunday that all 24 of the Qassam Brigades battalions were intact and had recruited thousands of new fighters.
No relief as journalists killed
With ceasefire talks seemingly fated to reach another impasse, there is little sign of relief for Palestinians in Gaza who have endured relentless attacks, trauma and grief, and now increasing hunger and disease.
Between 4 and 6 July, six Palestinian journalists, one of them a woman, were killed in three incidents in Gaza City and Deir al-Balah, bringing to 158 the number of journalists killed since 7 October, according to the government media office in the territory.
On 6 July, an Israeli airstrike killed six Palestinian police officers in Rafah, southern Gaza.
The following day, the bodies of three Palestinians who were apparently executed with their hands cuffed were recovered from the area of Kerem Shalom crossing in southern Gaza.
“Abdel-Hadi Ghabaeen, an uncle of one of the deceased, said they had been working to secure the delivery of humanitarian aid and commercial shipments through the crossing,” the AP news agency reported.
“He said he saw soldiers detain them on Saturday, and that the bodies bore signs of beatings, with one having a broken leg.”
The government media office in Gaza announced that Ihab Ribhi al-Ghussein, an engineer and deputy labor minister, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on a school in Gaza City on Saturday.
The media office said that al-Ghussain’s wife and daughter were killed previously in an Israeli strike on a house they were sheltering in after being displaced from their home in Gaza City.
Also on Saturday, Israel carried out an airstrike targeting a United Nations-run school in central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp, claiming that it was being used as a command center by Hamas operatives.
It is unclear why Israel thinks this would be a credible excuse when even its military admits that Hamas operates out of an extensive underground infrastructure that remains functional, largely intact and beyond reach.
The government media office in Gaza said that at least 16 Palestinians were killed and more than 75 were injured in the attack on the Nuseirat school, which the UN said was being used as a shelter for nearly 2,000 displaced people.
UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, said that 190 of its facilities in Gaza “have been hit, some multiple times, some directly” since 7 October, killing 520 people and injuring 1,600.
The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said that by targeting UN schools used as shelters, Israel was demonstrating “a deliberate policy intended to prevent security across the entire Gaza Strip and deny displaced Palestinians stability or shelter, even if that shelter is only temporary.”
Gaza City evacuation orders
The Israeli military ordered tens of thousands of Palestinians in central and western Gaza City to immediately evacuate on Sunday and Monday.
On Sunday, Israel ordered residents of five blocs in Gaza City to evacuate to the western part of the city, only for that area to be ordered evacuated the following day, with Israel instructing people to move to Deir al-Balah in central Gaza.
The areas affected by the new evacuation orders “encompass 13 health facilities that were recently functional, including two hospitals, two primary healthcare centers and nine medical points,” according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
“In addition, four hospitals are located in close proximity to the evacuation zones,” the UN office added.
Two health facilities – the al-Ahli Baptist hospital and the Patients Friends Association Hospital – evacuated “in fear of intensified military activities that would render them inaccessible or non-functional,” according to the UN.
?Breaking : Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in #Gaza : The Israeli army forced us to shut down the hospital after attacking its surroundings with drones, forcing the civilians and patients to leave hence endangering their lives. @QudsNen
pic.twitter.com/kHAwPdNFM5— Nour Naim| ???? (@NourNaim88) July 8, 2024
Critical care patients were transferred to the Indonesian and Kamal Adwan hospitals in northern Gaza, which the director of the World Health Organization said “are suffering [a] shortage of fuel, beds and trauma medical supplies.”
The lack of fuel has forced the suspension of kidney dialysis services at Kamal Adwan Hospital, the director of the facility announced on Sunday, and has placed “the lives of newborns in the neonatal department and critical patients in the intensive care unit at risk,” OCHA said.
Following the hasty evacuation of the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Younis on 2 July, three hospitals have become non-functional since the beginning of the month, “leaving only 13 out of 36 hospitals in the Gaza Strip partially functional at present,” according to OCHA.
Life saving care has disappeared from Gaza, obliterated by Israel’s mix of “evacuation” orders, systematic targeting of all medical facilities (none excluded), denial of fuel and medical aid as part of its siege. All this under carpet bombing and starvation. A genocidal policy. https://t.co/TbKGmJjlYs
— Nicola Perugini (@PeruginiNic) July 8, 2024
Doctors Without Borders warned on Friday that its teams at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis were at a breaking point and were “running on emergency medical stocks” to treat an overwhelming number of patients.
The medical charity said that the facility is the “main site for field hospitals to sterilize their equipment.” Should Nasser Medical Complex lose electricity, “sterilization becomes difficult, and the care provided at several field hospitals will come to a stop.”
Doctors Without Borders added that Israel denied entry of trucks carrying the organization’s medical supplies on 3 July. The charity said it hasn’t been able “to bring any medical supplies into Gaza since the end of April.”
Meanwhile, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor warned that the ongoing closure of Gaza’s crossings amounts to a death sentence for more than 26,000 sick and wounded people needing life-saving care outside the territory.
Only 21 sick and wounded patients have been evacuated out of Gaza since Israel closed Rafah crossing on 7 May.
Efforts to increase aid “wiped out”
A senior UN official said last week that a recent Israeli evacuation order affecting one-third of Gaza’s territory in southern Rafah and Khan Younis had “wiped out” efforts towards improving the humanitarian situation in the Strip.
Meanwhile, within Gaza, “insecurity, damaged roads [and] the breakdown of law and order” have also hampered the delivery of fuel and aid needed to sustain humanitarian operations, according to UN OCHA. This has caused food and other supplies to spoil during extremely high temperatures.
The lack of fuel has forced bakeries to close once again, including the largest bakery in Gaza, located in Gaza City. Only seven out of the 18 bakeries supported by its humanitarian partners, all of them located in Deir al-Balah, remain operational, according to the UN office.
Community kitchens are also struggling to stay open amid a lack of fuel and food supplies, “resulting in a reduced number of cooked meals prepared throughout Gaza,” OCHA added.
No commercial trucks have entered northern Gaza for months, according to the UN, resulting “in a near total lack of protein sources (e.g. meat and poultry) on the local market and only a few types of locally produced vegetables available at unaffordable prices.”
Palestinians flee the eastern area of Gaza City following Israeli military evacuation orders, 7 July 2024 ( APA images)
Meanwhile, ongoing military operations have caused people to leave their agricultural land untended and the destruction of greenhouses have harmed the ability of Palestinians in Gaza to produce their own food.
Assessments undertaken by OCHA and other groups at 10 sites hosting new waves of internally displaced people “show critical levels of need across all sectors,” the UN office said, noting a particular “dire need for safe drinking water” and access to emergency services.
On Friday, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor accused Israel of using water as a weapon of war through the “persistent, systematic and widespread targeting of the Gaza Strip’s water sources and desalination plants.”
The group said that “as a result of the genocide, the per capita share of water in the Strip has decreased to between three and 15 liters per day, while in 2022 it was approximately 84.6 liters per day.”
The World Health Organization says that “between 50 and 100 liters of water per person per day are needed to ensure that most basic needs are met and few health concerns arise.”
Dear Citizens of #Gaza,
The Gaza Municipality regrets to inform you that the ongoing water crisis affecting large areas of the city is due to the damage to the "Mekorot" water line caused by the continued incursion of Israeli occupation in the eastern part of the city.… https://t.co/00jR8lgRZu
— ????? ??? – Municipality of Gaza (@munigaza) July 9, 2024
People displaced in northern Gaza, including from Shujaiya and other areas around Gaza City, lack safe shelters.
UN OCHA said that “many were found sleeping amid solid waste and rubble, with no mattresses or enough clothing, and some had sought shelter in partially destroyed UN facilities and residential buildings.”
Visiting northern #Gaza's Jabalia refugee camp, our colleague, Sara Al-Saqqa, describes horrifying destruction amid overflowing sewage, piles of solid waste, and lack of clean water, food and health care.
“There is no life at all,” a returning resident told her.
? Hear more ??
— UN Humanitarian (@UNOCHA) July 5, 2024
With nine out of 10 people in Gaza currently displaced, most of them forced to move multiple times, people are “compelled to reset their lives repeatedly without any of their belongings or any prospect of finding safety or reliable access to basic services,” the UN office added.
“What’s happening in Gaza since last night is a return to the first month of genocide,” Dr. Mustafa Elmasri, a psychotherapist in Gaza, wrote on X (formerly Twitter), on Monday.
“Under relentless bombing, people are forced to wander aimlessly, driven south to be slaughtered there. These are the darkest and most dangerous days of the war,” Elmasri added.
What's happening in Gaza since last night is a return to the first month of genocide. Under relentless bombing, people are forced to wander aimlessly, driven south to be slaughtered there. These are the darkest and most dangerous days of the war.
— Dr. Mustafa Elmasri (@Gaza_Psych) July 8, 2024
Sally Abi Khalil, the Middle East director for the global charity Oxfam, said that “pushing hundreds of thousands more people into what is essentially a death trap, devoid of any facilities, is barbaric and a breach of international humanitarian law.”
She added that the areas unilaterally declared by Israel as safe zones are in fact “the polar opposite, leaving families with the horrific choice between staying in an active combat zone or moving somewhere that is already desperately overcrowded, dangerous and unfit for human existence.”
Gaza deaths vastly undercounted
The Lancet, an independent medical journal based in London, published an article by three public health experts stating that Gaza fatalities are vastly undercounted.
“Collecting data is becoming increasingly difficult for the Gaza health ministry due to the destruction of much of the infrastructure,” according to the Lancet article, which observes that the ministry “is the only organization counting the dead.”
“The ministry has had to augment its usual reporting, based on people dying in its hospitals or brought in dead, with information from reliable media sources and first responders. This change has inevitably degraded the detailed data recorded previously,” the authors added.
Not all identifiable victims of airstrikes and other forms of direct violence are are included in the health ministry’s list of fatalities. The some 10,000 people missing under the rubble of destroyed buildings amid the widespread destruction in Gaza are also not reflected in the official fatality figure of nearly 37,500 as of 19 June.
On Sunday, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor called for international pressure on Israel to “bring in trucks, special equipment and sufficient fuel, given the urgent need to clear the debris, locate bodies, and recover them with special procedures to identify and bury them in marked graves.”
The group said that the presence of decaying bodies “poses a threat to public safety” amid a spread of epidemics, jeopardizing the coastal enclave’s “long-term environmental health … to the point of ecocide, rendering the Gaza Strip unfit for human habitation.”
Even higher than the number of victims of direct violence are those who lose their lives “from causes such as reproductive, communicable and non-communicable diseases” resulting from the conflict, according to the authors of the Lancet article.
These deaths are a result of destroyed health and sanitation infrastructure, malnutrition and lack of access to clean water, repeated displacement and the loss of funding to UNRWA, the organization with the largest humanitarian footprint in Gaza.
“There will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years,” according to the authors of the Lancet article, who conservatively estimate “that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”
That represents approximately 8 percent of Gaza’s population of around 2.3 million Palestinians.
Journalist Hossam Shabat, based in northern Gaza, said that he knows from personal experience that “deaths are way higher” than what is being reported.
Israel’s “goal is annihilation and that’s what they are achieving,” Shabat said.
For someone who has been documenting every day, I absolutely can confirm the deaths are way higher than being reported . Whole cities have been wiped out, most buildings and houses were bombed, most with residents inside. Every day when I walk into the schools for the displaced,… pic.twitter.com/NYHKlHpiHh
— ???? ???? (@HossamShabat) July 8, 2024
Israel’s “goal is annihilation and that’s what they are achieving,” Shabat said.
UN experts declare widespread famine
On Tuesday, a group of independent UN human rights experts warned that “the recent deaths of more Palestinian children due to hunger and malnutrition leaves no doubt that famine has spread across the entire Gaza Strip.”
At least three children in central Gaza, where medical treatment is available, have died in recent weeks, leaving “no doubt that famine has spread from northern Gaza into central and southern Gaza,” the experts said.
They added that “Israel’s intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people is a form of genocidal violence and has resulted in famine across all of Gaza.”
The experts called for the prioritization of delivery of humanitarian aid through land crossings “by any means necessary” and called for an end to Israel’s siege and for a ceasefire.
• First published in The Electronic Intifada
The post Gaza facing “most dangerous days” of the genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Israel hasn’t just crossed the Biden administration’s pretend “red lines” in Gaza. With its massacre at Nuseirat refugee camp at the weekend, Israel drove a bulldozer through them.
On Saturday, an Israeli military operation to free four Israelis held captive by Hamas since its 7 October attack on Israel resulted in the killing of more than 270 Palestinians, many of them women and children.
The true death toll may never be known. Untold numbers of men, women and children are still under rubble from the bombardment, crushed to death, or trapped and suffocating, or expiring slowly from dehydration if they cannot be dug out in time.
Many hundreds more are suffering agonising injuries – should their wounds not kill them – in a situation where there are almost no medical facilities left after Israel’s destruction of hospitals and its mass kidnap of Palestinian medical personnel. Further, there are no drugs to treat the victims, given Israel’s months-long imposition of an aid blockade.
Israelis and American Jewish organisations – so ready to judge Palestinians for cheering attacks on Israel – celebrated the carnage caused in freeing the Israeli captives, who could have returned home months ago had Israel been ready to agree on a ceasefire.
Videos even show Israelis dancing in the street.
According to reports, the bloody Israeli operation in central Gaza may have killed three other captives, one of them possibly an American citizen.
In comments to the Haaretz newspaper published on Sunday, Louis Har, a hostage freed back in February, observed of his own captivity: “Our greatest fear was the IDF’s planes and the concern that they would bomb the building we were in.”
He added: “We weren’t worried that they’d [referring to Hamas] do something to us all of a sudden. We didn’t object to anything. So I wasn’t afraid they’d kill me.”
The Israeli media reported Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant describing Saturday’s operation as “one of the most heroic and extraordinary operations I have witnessed over the course of 47 years serving in Israel’s defence establishment”.
The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is currently seeking an arrest warrant for Gallant, as well as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The charges include efforts to exterminate the people of Gaza through planned starvation.
Israel has been wrecking the established laws of war with abandon for more than eight months.
At least 37,000 Palestinians are known to have been killed so far in Gaza, though Palestinian officials lost the ability to properly count the dead many weeks ago following Israel’s relentless destruction of the enclave’s institutions and infrastructure.
Israel has additionally engineered a famine that, mostly out of view, is gradually starving Gaza’s population to death.
The International Court of Justice put Israel on trial for genocide back in January. Last month, it ordered an immediate halt to Israel’s attack on Gaza’s southern city of Rafah. Israel has responded to both judgments by intensifying its killing spree.
In a further indication of Israel’s sense of impunity, the rescue operation on Saturday involved yet another flagrant war crime.
Israel used a humanitarian aid truck – supposedly bringing relief to Gaza’s desperate population – as cover for its military operation. In international law, that is known as the crime of perfidy.
For months, Israel has been blocking aid to Gaza – part of its efforts to starve the population. It has also targeted aid workers, killing more than 250 of them since October.
But more specifically, Israel is waging a war on Unrwa, claiming without evidence that the UN’s main aid agency in Gaza is implicated in Hamas “terror” operations. It wants the UN, the international community’s last lifeline in Gaza against Israel’s wanton savagery, permanently gone.
By hiding its own soldiers in an aid truck, Israel made a mockery of its supposed “terrorism concerns” by doing exactly what it accuses Hamas of.
But Israel’s military action also dragged the aid effort – the only way to end Gaza’s famine – into the centre of the battlefield. Now Hamas has every reason to fear that aid workers are not what they seem; that they are really instruments of Israeli state terrorism.
In the circumstances, one might have assumed the Biden administration would be quick to condemn Israel’s actions and distance itself from the massacre.
Instead, Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, was keen to take credit for the mass carnage – or what he termed a “daring operation”.
He admitted in an interview on Sunday that the US had offered assistance in the rescue operation, though he refused to clarify how. Other reports noted a supporting British role, too.
“The United States has been providing support to Israel for several months in its efforts to help identify the locations of hostages in Gaza and to support efforts to try to secure their rescue or recovery,” Sullivan told CNN.
Sullivan’s comments fuelled existing suspicions that such assistance extends far beyond providing intelligence and a steady supply of the bombs Israel has dropped on the tiny Gaza enclave over the past few months – more than the total that hit London, Dresden and Hamburg combined during the Second World War.
A Biden official disclosed to the Axios website that US soldiers belonging to a so-called American hostages unit had participated in the rescue operation that massacred Palestinian civilians.
Additionally, footage shows Washington’s floating pier as the backdrop for helicopters involved in the attack.
According to Axios, citing a U.S. administration official, the American hostages unit in Israel assisted in the release of the four Israeli captives in Gaza.
Footage published by an Israeli occupation soldier confirms Israel's use of the American temporary pier in central Gaza… pic.twitter.com/GJJp1ZSA7T
— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) June 8, 2024
The pier was ostensibly built off Gaza’s coast at huge cost – some $320m – and over two months to bypass Israel’s blocking of aid by land.
Observers argued at the time that it was not only an extraordinarily impractical and inefficient way to deliver aid but that there were likely to be hidden, nefarious motives behind its construction.
Its location, at the midpoint of Gaza’s coast, has bolstered Israel’s severing of the enclave into two, creating a land corridor that has effectively become a new border and from which Israel can launch raids into central Gaza like Saturday’s.
Those critics appear to have been proven right. The pier has barely functioned as an aid route since the first deliveries arrived in mid-May.
The pier soon broke apart, and its repair and return to operation was only announced on Friday.
Now the fact that it appears to have been pressed into immediate use as a beachhead for an operation that killed at least 270 Palestinians drags Washington even deeper into complicity with what the World Court has called a “plausible genocide”.
But like the use of the aid truck, it also means the Biden administration is joining Israel once again – after pulling its funding to Unrwa – in directly discrediting the aid operation in Gaza when it is needed most urgently.
That was the context for understanding the World Food Programme’s announcement on Sunday that it was halting the use of the pier for aid deliveries, citing “safety” concerns.
As ever, for western media and politicians – who have stood firmly against a ceasefire that could have brought the suffering of the Israeli captives and their families to an end months ago – Palestinian lives are quite literally worthless.
The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz thought it appropriate to describe the killing of 270-plus Palestinians in the freeing of the four Israelis as an “important sign of hope”, while the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak expressed his “huge relief”. The appalling death toll went unmentioned.
Imagine describing in similarly positive terms an operation by Hamas that killed 270 Israelis to liberate a handful of the many hundreds of medical personnel kidnapped from Gaza by Israel in recent months and known to be held in a torture facility.
The London Times, meanwhile, breezily erased Saturday’s massacre of Palestinians by characterising the operation as a “surgical strike”.
Media outlets uniformly hailed the operation as a “success” and “daring”, as though the killing and maiming of around 1,000 Palestinians – and the serial war crimes Israel committed in the process – need not be factored in.
BBC News’ main report on Saturday night breathlessly focused on the celebrations of the families of the freed captives, treating the massacre of Palestinians as an afterthought. The programme stressed that the death toll was “disputed” – though not mentioning that, as ever, it was Israel doing the disputing.
The reality is that the savage “rescue” operation would have been entirely unnecessary had Netanyahu not been so determined to drag his feet on negotiating the captives’ release, and thereby avoid jail on corruption charges, and the US so fully indulgent of his procrastination.
It will also be very difficult to repeat such an operation, as Haaretz’s military correspondent Amos Harel noted at the weekend. Hamas will learn lessons, guarding the remaining captives even more closely, most likely underground in its tunnels.
The remaining captives’ return will “probably occur only as part of a deal that will require significant concessions”, he concluded.
Benny Gantz, the politician-general who helped oversee Israel’s eight-month slaughter in Gaza inside Netanyahu’s war cabinet and is widely described as a “moderate” in the West, resigned from the government on Sunday.
Although ostensibly the dispute is over how Israel will extricate itself from Gaza over the coming months, the more likely explanation is that Gantz wishes both to distance himself from Netanyahu as the Israeli prime minister faces possible arrest for crimes against humanity and to prepare for elections to take his place.
The Pentagon and the Biden administration see Gantz as their man. Having him out of the government may give them additional leverage over Netanyahu in the run-up to a US presidential election in November in which Donald Trump will be actively trying to cosy up to the Israeli prime minister.
The focus on Israeli politicking – rather than US complicity in the Nuseirat massacre – will doubtless provide a welcome distraction, too, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken tours the region. He will once again wish to be seen rallying support for a ceasefire plan that is supposed to see the Israeli captives released – a plan Netanyahu will be determined, once again, to stymie.
Blinken’s efforts are likely to be even more hopeless in the immediate wake of the Biden administration’s all-too-visible involvement in the killing of hundreds of Palestinians.
Washington’s claim to be an “honest broker” looks to everyone – apart from the reliably obedient western political and media class – as even more derisory than usual.
The real question is whether Blinken’s serial diplomatic failures in ending the slaughter in Gaza are a bug or a feature.
The stark contradiction in Washington’s position towards Gaza was exposed last week during a press conference with State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.
He suggested that the aim of Israel and the US was to persuade Hamas to dissolve itself – presumably by some form of surrender – in return for a ceasefire. The group had an incentive to do so, said Miller, “because they don’t want to see continued conflict, continued Palestinian people dying. They don’t want to see war in Gaza.”
Even the usually compliant western press corps were taken aback by Miller’s implication that a crime against humanity – the mass killing of Palestinians, such as took place at Nuseirat camp on Saturday – was viewed in Washington as leverage to be exercised over Hamas.
But more likely, the seeming contradiction was simply symptomatic of the logical entanglements resulting from Washington’s efforts to deflect from the real goal: buying Israel more time to do what it is so well advanced doing already.
Israel needs to finish pulverising Gaza, making it permanently uninhabitable, so that the population will be faced with a stark dilemma: remain and die, or leave by any means possible.
The same US “humanitarian pier” that was pressed into service for Saturday’s massacre may soon be the “humanitarian pier” that serves as the exit through which Gaza’s Palestinians are ethnically cleansed, shipped out of a death zone engineered by Israel.
• First published in Middle East Eye
The post The Day the West Defined “Success” as a Massacre of 270 Palestinians first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
For some time, President Joe Biden has claimed that there are limits to US support for Israel, that he cares about the loss of Palestinian life and that certain Israeli conduct (e.g., an invasion of Rafah, an Israeli-designated “safe zone”) would result in the loss of US backing. The events of the past weeks have demonstrated that none of these claims are in fact true.
The atrocities of Israel in Gaza continue to mount and to become more egregious by the day. A month ago, on May 6, 2024, Hamas agreed to an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire agreement that looked a lot like the ceasefire agreement now being promoted by the Biden Administration. Israel responded by rejecting this agreement and then immediately doing what Biden warned against doing – attacking Rafah where around 1.7 million Gazan refugees are now living in makeshift tents. As part of this offensive, Israel closed off the Rafah crossing, the border area between Israel and Egypt, cutting off any aid or supplies from coming into famine-ravaged Gaza and preventing any people from leaving. What has transpired is a horrifying series of massacres against civilians which the Biden Administration continues to try to downplay, excuse and explain away.
One of the worst massacres took place on May 27, 2024, when Israeli forces carried out an air assault upon a neighborhood in Rafah in which, as explained by CNN, “[a]t least 45 people were killed and more than 200 others injured . . . most of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and Palestinian medics. No hospital in Rafah had the capacity to take the number of casualties, the ministry said.” Many were horrified by a video which went viral on social media showing a father holding his headless baby who had been decapitated in the assault.
Not even this abominable act elicited a rebuke from the Biden Administration which said that it would leave Israel to investigate itself in regard to this incident, and that it had no plans of changing policy as a result.
And now, Israel has just destroyed a school in Rafah which had been run by UNRWA and which had been sheltering 6,000 Gazan refugees at the time of its destruction. In this assault, at least 40 civilians were killed, including 14 children and 9 women, bringing the total number of civilians killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, to 36,000, including 15,500 children. As is usually the case given that the US is by far the largest arms supplier to Israel, it was determined that Israel had used US munitions in this attack on the school. After this atrocity, the UN added Israel to its “list of shame” — a distinction reserved for countries that bring extraordinary harm to children. In response to this massacre and this shameful UN designation, the best US spokespeople could muster was to urge Israel to be “transparent” about the assault. No change in US policy toward Israel is forthcoming.
If this were not enough, reports of more grisly crimes are emerging daily. For example, accounts have emerged of the heinous treatment of Palestinian prisoners at the hands of Israeli correctional officers and investigators.
As Mondoweiss explains in a June 7 article, “[b]ehind the bars of Israeli prisons, Israel has been waging war against Palestinian prisoners, creating conditions that make the continuation of human life impossible. The effects of this brutal campaign have reverberated among prisoners’ families outside of jail, who are watching their loved ones being systematically starved, beaten, tortured, and degraded.” Mondoweiss cites a CNN exposé, based upon whistleblower testimony, which detailed “a number of medieval practices to which Palestinian prisoners have been subjected, including being strapped down to beds while blindfolded and made to wear diapers, having unqualified medical trainees conduct procedures on them without anesthesia, having dogs set on them by prison guards, being regularly beaten or put into stress positions for offenses as minor as peeking beneath their blindfolds, having zip-tie wounds fester to the point of requiring amputation, and a host of other horrific measures.”
Mondoweiss also cites a New York Times article “based on interviews with former detainees and Israeli military officers, doctors, and soldiers who worked at the prison, bringing new horrors to light about the treatment of Gazan prisoners. Detainee testimonies repeated many of these same accounts but also included additional disturbing accounts of sexual violence, including testimonies of rape and forcing detainees to sit on metal sticks that caused anal bleeding and ‘unbearable pain.’” And, of course, as Mondoweiss notes, the abominable treatment of Palestinian prisoners – which number in the thousands and includes women and children – has been going on long before October 7.
All of this illustrates how Israel has no limits or restraints upon its treatment of the Palestinian people. And this is so because its great patron, the United States, imposes no such restraints upon it. For all of the crocodile tears shed by Biden, his Cabinet officials and his spokespeople, there truly is no “red line” which Israel could cross which would elicit a cessation of US support, including lethal support, for its war upon the Palestinian people. And for this reason, the war Israel is waging upon Gaza proceeds without pause and continues to descend into greater acts of depravity and horror. In truth, as protest planners organizing to surround the White House to show opposition to the war in Gaza, it is the American people who must therefore be the “red line” to stop this genocide.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
A 5/31/2024 article in CounterPunch returns to the question of the death toll of the genocide in Gaza, and the gross undercount of deaths by almost every agency imaginable, even the ones in Gaza itself. I suggest further elaboration.
200,000 was the number dead that Ralph Nader estimated at the beginning of March. It has to be double that now. How many thousands of pregnant women and their fetuses and newborn have died? How many diabetics or others needing medication or special diets or treatment? But even those without special conditions are dying because they can’t give up food and water.
We have reached the stage where the number of starving or dehydrated persons is so high that they have no defense against common diseases or mild injuries. Why are they not reported? Because there is no one to record them, of course. The hospitals and clinics are largely a memory. Potable water is a luxury. I’m banned from X and FB, but I imagine you’ve seen the living and dying skeletons that I predicted months ago. I see them mainly on Telegram. The international agencies report that nearly all the population is food insecure, and a majority are malnourished. It’s a matter of time.
Israel would like to move faster. I’m not sure why they don’t. Perhaps they’re afraid that world reaction will graduate to more forceful measures, but I see no indication that this is the case. With the exception of Yemen and some non-state actors, no one seems willing to resort to physical force. Members of the US Congress and figures in the Biden administration have even encouraged Israel to “finish the job”. Certainly, they have no moral qualms.
Are they worried that they will run out of Jews? Part of the purpose of killing off the Palestinians was to assure that Jews will be significantly more numerous in “greater Israel” (AKA Palestine). That clearly is not working. It is far more likely that more Jews have fled Israel than Palestinians have been reduced by genocide. In fact, even the effective Jewish inhabited area has been reduced in both the north and the south.
Worse still, Israel grossly underestimated the capability of the Palestinian resistance and its partners, and overestimated its own. Hamas and its allies clearly understood and planned for Israel’s reaction, while Israel had little appreciation for their adversary. So much for the strategy of disproportionate force. Israel is unaccustomed to taking so many casualties, which are in any case unknown. No one believes the official count and resorting to foreign mercenaries.
Israel is also dissolving from within. Who’s buying Israeli anymore, except the dwindling community of true believers? What economy is left consists largely of shoveling American money into Israeli furnaces. Meanwhile, Israelis are fighting among themselves for desperate solutions to their intractable problems. The powerful international network of faithful sayanim will remain in place (who likes to give up power?) and will continue to manage the controls. But other Jews will object to being associated with such persons, weakening the support for, and the effectiveness of, the Zionist dreamightmare.
Israel is clearly losing, but the rate of its demise will depend on factors that are difficult to predict, and even harder to control. Nevertheless, if Israel survives this miscalculation in the short term, it will only do so as a smaller, more fanatical remnant of its former self.
The post Paying the Toll first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
There is one thing we should all be able to agree with Benjamin Netanyahu on: Any comparison between Israel’s war crimes and those of Hamas is, as the Israeli prime minister put it, “absurd and false” and a “distortion of reality”.Here’s why:
* Israeli war crimes have been ongoing for more than seven decades, long predating Hamas’ creation.
* Israel has kept the Palestinians of Gaza caged into a concentration camp for the past 17 years, denying them connection to the outside world and the essentials of life. Hamas managed to besiege a small part of Israel for one day, on October 7.
* For every Israeli killed by Hamas on October 7, Israel has slaughtered at least 35 times that number of Palestinians. Similar kill-ratios grossly skewed in Israel’s favour have been true for decades.
* Israel has killed more than 15,000 Palestinian children since October – and many tens of thousands more Palestinian children are missing under rubble, maimed or orphaned. By early April, Israel had killed a further 114 children in the West Bank and injured 725 more. Hamas killed a total of 33 Israeli children on October 7.
* Israel has laid waste to Gaza’s entire health sector. It has bombed its hospitals, and killed, beaten and kidnapped many hundreds of medical personnel. Hamas has not attacked one Israeli hospital.
* Israel has killed more than 100 journalists in Gaza and more than 250 aid workers. It has also kidnapped a further 40 journalists. Most are presumed to have been taken to a secret detention facility where torture is rife. Hamas is reported to have killed one Israeli journalist on October 7, and no known aid workers.
* Israel is actively starving Gaza’s population by denying it food, water and aid. That is a power – a genocidal one – Hamas could only ever dream of.
* Israel has been forcibly removing Palestinians from their lands for more than 76 years to build illegal Jewish settlements in their place. Hamas has not been able to ethnically cleanse a single Israeli, nor build a single Palestinian settlement on Israeli land.
* Some 750,000 Palestinians are reported to have been taken hostage and jailed by Israel since 1967 – an unwelcome rite of passage for Palestinian men and boys and one in which torture is routine and military trials ensure a near-100% conviction rate. Until October 7, Hamas had only ever managed to take hostage a handful of the Israeli soldiers whose job is to oppress Palestinians.
* And, while Hamas is designated a terrorist organisation by western states, those same western states laud Israel, fund and arm it, and provide it with diplomatic cover, even as the World Court rules that a plausible case has been made it is committing a genocide in Gaza.
Yes, Netanyahu is right. There is no comparison at all.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Propaganda by omission is a dominant feature of the ‘mainstream’ news media. Indeed, it is a requirement. Rather than serving the public interest by fully exposing the brutal machinations of power, state-corporate media shield Western governments and their allies from scrutiny and focus the public’s attention on the crimes of Official Enemies.
Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza is but the latest example. Consider the dearth of media coverage given to the compelling and shocking testimony provided by leading British surgeon, Professor Nick Maynard, who works as a consultant gastrointestinal surgeon at Oxford University Hospital.
Maynard left Gaza just before Israel took control of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt on 7 May. He had been operating on Palestinian patients for two weeks and he gave a very disturbing account of what he had observed.
The first topic he highlighted was ‘the direct targeting of healthcare workers’ by the Israeli military, describing how ‘hundreds have been killed’ and ‘hundreds have been abducted’. Maynard had personally worked with one young doctor and one young nurse who had been abducted and held in captivity for 45 days and 60 days, respectively. They both gave him ‘very graphic and stark descriptions of their daily torture at the hands of the Israeli defence force’. He described the experience of hearing their stories as ‘extremely harrowing’.
Maynard had also been to Gaza over Christmas and New Year where he worked at Al-Aqsa hospital. He “spent the whole two weeks operating all the time on major explosive injuries to the abdomen and to the chest. And it was really nonstop.”
His visit was unexpectedly cut short in early January when the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) ordered the medical staff, along with the hospital’s 600 patients, to evacuate the hospital. A few British newspaper reports that included accounts by Maynard and colleagues were published at the time on the “nightmare” of working in “one of ‘Gaza’s last functioning hospitals” (Daily Mirror, 18 January, 2024), “The single worst thing I’ve seen” (Daily Telegraph, 12 January, 2024), and “British surgeon haunted by Gaza horrors pledges to go back” (The Times, 4 February, 2024).
In March, the Guardian reported that a delegation of American and British doctors had arrived in Washington DC to tell the Biden administration that the Israeli military was systematically destroying Gaza’s health infrastructure in order to drive Palestinians out of their homes. Maynard was quoted, accusing the IDF of committing “appalling atrocities”, although the article did not address these in depth.
He said:
“The IDF are systematically targeting healthcare facilities, healthcare personnel and really dismantling the whole healthcare system.”
He continued:
“It’s not just about targeting the buildings, it’s about systematically destroying the infrastructure of the hospitals. Destroying the oxygen tanks at the al-Shifa hospital, deliberately destroying the CT scanners and making it much more difficult to rebuild that infrastructure. If it was just targeting Hamas militants, why are they deliberately destroying the infrastructure of these institutions?”
According to Maynard, Israel’s strategy of targeting hospitals and healthcare facilities is intended to drive the Palestinians from their homes:
“It persuades the local population to leave. If a hospital has been dismantled, if the locals see there is no medical care available and see the disrupted infrastructure, it’s yet another factor that drives them south.” [At that time, Israel had designated the south of Gaza a “safe zone” for Palestinians to seek refuge.]
In an interview with Nick Ferrari of London-based LBC radio on 2 April, Maynard made further shocking revelations. The timing of the interview was linked to the IDF having just destroyed another hospital, Al-Shifa, where Maynard had also previously worked. Around 400 Palestinians had reportedly been killed in a brutal two-week attack by Israeli forces.
Maynard told Ferrari:
“Every single part of the hospital has been destroyed. The whole infrastructure of the hospital has been destroyed. When I spoke to Marwan [a Palestinian colleague] yesterday, he told me there were 107 patients, 60 medical staff. God only knows what has happened to them. I think we’ve seen some of the pictures. Surgeons I know have been executed in the last 48 hours there. Bodies have been discovered in the last 12-24 hours who had been handcuffed, with their hands behind their back. [Our added emphasis].”
He added:
“And so, there is no doubt at all, that multiple healthcare workers have been executed there in the last few days.”
Ferrari then asked:
“You believe executed by whom, doctor?”
Maynard:
“By the Israeli Defence Force.
Ferrari:
“Why would they seek to execute surgeons and medical professionals?”
Maynard:
“Well, they’ve been doing it since October the 7th. Over 450 healthcare workers have been killed. Friends of mine that I’ve worked with over the years. Many have been abducted as well, and nothing has been heard of them since. So, there is no doubt in my mind that – I can bear witness to this from my time at Al-Aqsa hospital and from talking to people that there has been direct targeting of the healthcare system in Gaza, direct targeting of hospitals and multiple killings of healthcare workers.”
Maynard also made clear that neither he, nor any of his colleagues, ever saw evidence of Hamas using hospitals or healthcare facilities as bases for their operations, despite numerous Israeli claims to the contrary.
BBC Silence
“Mainstream” media showed minimal interest in this highly credible testimony from a British surgeon on Israel’s deliberate targeting of healthcare workers, including actual execution of surgeons. As far as we can see, there is nothing about Maynard’s testimony exposing these executions on the BBC News website.
An article on the Guardian website on 7 April did cover Maynard’s testimony about targeting of healthcare workers and infrastructure, but made no mention of his statement that Palestinian surgeons had been executed by Israeli soldiers. Nor was it mentioned anywhere else in the entirety of the British national press.
The Telegraph carried an interview with Maynard on 12 January in which he said:
“here can be certainly no doubt in my mind from what I’ve recently witnessed that [Israel] are directly targeting healthcare structures with a view to completely disabling the healthcare system in Gaza.”
The Telegraph appears not to have reported Maynard’s subsequent claim that he personally knew surgeons who have since been executed by Israeli soldiers.
On 13 May, International Nurses Day, the Gaza Health Ministry announced that at least 500 medical personnel had been killed by Israel since 7 October. Dr Omar Abdel-Mannan, a paediatric neurologist and co-founder of Healthcare Workers for Palestine, said that the only way Israel could ‘justify’ these killings would be if they see these healthcare workers not as humans, but as “human animals”. As readers may recall, Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant infamously described his Palestinian enemies as “human animals”.
Of his most recent trip, Maynard said that:
“the very strong narrative of the patients I was treating over the last two weeks were those with terrible infective complications as a direct result of malnutrition, and this was very stark indeed.”
He gave a graphic insight into the hellish conditions:
“And I operated on many patients in the last two weeks who had awful complications from their abdominal surgery related to inadequate nutrition, and particularly those with [the] abdominal wall breaking down. So, literally their intestines end up hanging outside. And the intestinal repairs that have been carried out to deal with the damage to the bowels leaking, so their bowel contents leaking out from different parts of the abdomen, covering their bodies, covering their beds.”
He drew particular attention to:
“The lack of resources to deal with these inadequate numbers of colostomy bags, wound management devices and nutritional support.”
Maynard explained the consequences for patients:
“They get this vicious cycle of malnutrition, infection, wounds breaking down, more infection, more malnutrition. So, it’s devastating and we will see far more of that over the coming months.”
He gave examples of two young female patients he had treated: Tala who was 16 and Lama who was 18, both of whom had survivable injuries. Tragically, they both died “as a direct result of malnutrition”.
This was yet more shocking and credible testimony from an experienced British consultant surgeon. It should have been headline news across the British press and broadcasting outlets. But searches of the Lexis-Nexis database of newspapers, together with Google searches, reveal minimal “mainstream” coverage: one article in the Independent.
If this had been evidence against “Putin’s Russia” or “Assad’s Syria”, it would have generated huge headlines, in-depth reporting and anguished commentary across all major news media. Once again, we see the insidiously corrupt phenomenon of propaganda by omission.
It is noteworthy that, last November, the BBC News website did feature Maynard, “who’s been travelling to the Gaza Strip and West Bank for more than a decade.” Six months ago, he was once again on “standby to go and work in operating theatres with the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians”. With remarkable courage, he told the BBC:
“I think there is fear, apprehension, not knowing what one would find, but I think the other motives for doing so… are so powerful that they outweigh everything else. I consider it a huge privilege to be in a position to help these people who need help more than most of us can possibly understand.”
Now that Maynard has returned from Gaza with horrific accounts, not least of the murder of healthcare workers by the Israeli military, the BBC appears not in the least interested. When we pointed this out via X (formerly Twitter), directly challenging John Neal, editor of BBC News at One, Six and Ten, and Paul Royall, executive editor of the BBC News Channel, the public response was huge. Our social media outreach is routinely suppressed by the deliberately obscure algorithms of Facebook and X. But this particular tweet spread widely by our standards, being shared 740 times at the time of writing. Shamefully, there has been no response from the BBC.
When Genocide Is Merely “War”
In the meantime, BBC News persists in labelling the Gaza genocide as the ‘Israel-Gaza war’. The day after it was reported that almost half a million Palestinians had fled Rafah in the south of Gaza, despite having previously been designated a “safe zone” by Israel, as discussed above, the BBC failed to follow up on the story.
One was presumably supposed to imagine that this huge number of people was no longer in danger: at risk of being bombed or dying under Israeli-imposed hunger, malnutrition and disease.
That same week, the BBC News website had as many as four ‘Live’ feeds running simultaneously. Not one of them focused on the Israeli-inflicted horrors in Gaza. This is truly remarkable. Has there been a BBC directive from senior management not to give too much attention to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians? Where are the BBC whistleblowers who can let the public know what’s going on inside the corporation?
A vanishingly rare exception appeared on 24 October 2023, when BBC correspondent Rami Ruhayem – a former journalist for the Associated Press, who has worked as a journalist and producer for BBC Arabic and the BBC World Service since 2005 – sent a letter to the BBC’s Director-General, Tim Davie:
“Dear Tim,
I am writing to raise the gravest possible concerns about the coverage of the BBC, especially on English outlets, of the current fighting between Israel and Palestinian factions.
“It appears to me that information that is highly significant and relevant is either entirely missing or not being given due prominence in coverage.”
The emphasis now is emphatically on “missing”. It seems the global student and other protests have prompted the BBC to attempt to limit public dissent.
By contrast, BBC journalists can be quick to respond when they feel they have been subjected to unjust criticism. On 13 May, we retweeted a clip from Saul Staniforth, a media activist with a large following on X, about Israel banning Al Jazeera. Staniforth had included a quote from Sebastian Usher, a BBC News Middle East analyst:
“Al Jazeera – I think many people, if they DO watch it, WOULD see it as some kind of propaganda.”
We asked:
“And how do you think many people see BBC News?”
Clearly piqued, Usher contacted us the following day to say that his quote had been taken out of context. He said it was a direct response during a live interview to a question on the likely reaction by Israelis to the closing of Al Jazeera. He considered Staniforth’s tweet and our follow-up seriously misleading and the exact opposite of the tenor of his reporting on the issue.
We asked him which words he had used to express solidarity with Al Jazeera, or to speak out for press freedom and free speech. He declined to provide such a statement, saying that as a BBC journalist he was unable to do so in a public forum. Usher added that in his reporting he stressed that Al Jazeera sees its mission as righting what it believes is imbalance on Gaza reporting in international media by giving more space to Palestinian voices and voices on the ground.
We were happy to include the points he had made, which we did via Facebook and X. Usher responded to our very reasonable response with a grudging “Ok”.
It is worth noting that Usher strongly objected to being “quoted out of context” while working for a media organisation clearly trying to suppress public outrage at an ongoing genocide by reducing coverage.
Moreover, the essential observation we made stands: many people at home and abroad regard BBC News as an outlet of western propaganda. Its abject performance during the Gaza genocide – “the Israel-Gaza war”, as the state-mandated broadcaster puts it – is ample proof.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
On March 25, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza for the month of Ramadan. Now that President Joe Biden has reportedly told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he wants an “immediate ceasefire,” will the American Medical Association (AMA) finally support a call for a permanent ceasefire and the immediate provision of humanitarian and…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Headlines hit last summer about Black nursing home residents being neglected and left unbathed, without clothing, and sometimes without the medications they needed at an Alabama nursing home after a lawsuit was filed. What it outlined was an allegedly discriminatory environment at a facility toward both patients and staff, who were called “n****,” “slave girls” and “little Black girls.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On Monday morning, over 1,300 unionized health care workers employed by PeaceHealth Southwest and PeaceHealth St. John in Washington State walked out of their workplace to commence a five-day unfair labor practice strike in protest of low wages, chronic understaffing and management’s canceling of bargaining sessions. They are represented by the Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The coalition of labor unions that represents the tens of thousands of Kaiser Permanente workers who took part in the largest healthcare strike in U.S. history last week announced Friday that it has reached a tentative contract agreement with the nonprofit hospital giant after months of negotiations. The details of the agreement were not immediately available, but SEIU United Healthcare Workers…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Over 75,000 health care workers for Kaiser Permanente hospitals across the country began striking on Wednesday morning, launching what the union says is the largest health care strike in U.S. history after workers’ contract expired on Saturday with no new agreement in place. The striking workers are largely concentrated in California, though thousands of workers have also walked out in Oregon…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Tens of thousands of nurses across the United Kingdom are set to walk off the job Thursday in what’s been described as the largest-ever strike by National Health Service workers, who said they were forced to act after the government refused to negotiate over pay amid painfully high inflation. The walkout represents NHS nurses’ first national strike, and it comes as U.K. rail and postal workers are…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The suffering of US women under the iron heel of abortion is intensifying, especially for women of color. This makes it imperative to closely examine possible paths forward. As a teenager during the 1960s I witnessed two political paths that remain imprinted on my mind.
LBJ and 14 (b)
Even before classes began in 1963, I had organized the first high school Young Democrats chapter in Texas. By 1964 Houston Young Democrats were attending rallies for presidential candidate Lyndon B. Johnson, carrying signs reading “All the Way with LBJ – Repeal 14 (b).”
During the height of union activity several decades earlier, congress had passed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA, 1935) which guaranteed private sector workers the right to form unions. During the beginning of the Cold War and strike waves of 1945 and 1946, congressional Republicans (with the aide of multiple Democrats) passed the Labor Management Relations Act (1947). It placed limitations on union activity, most importantly Section 14 (b). The odious 14 (b) allowed states to pass “Right to Work” laws which prohibited unions from requiring dues as a condition of employment. Workers could benefit from union activity without paying dues, thereby seriously undermining unions.
“Repeal 14 (b)” became the rallying cry. Unions told members “Vote for Democrats.” Despite LBJ’s winning the presidency and having Democratic Party (DP) control of the senate and house, 14 (b) was not repealed. Nor was it repealed during several subsequent administrations having a DP president and majority in both houses of congress.
Unlike gatherings of 1964, today 14 (b) is so ancient that if you ask high school students what they think about it, you will get blank stares. DP power brokers have successfully dumped repeal of 14 (b) into the dustbin of history.
A Most Reactionary President
Four years and a presidential election later Republican Richard Nixon was swept into office and was re-elected in 1972. Carrying 49 of 50 states, Nixon’s re-election was one of the largest landslides in US history and showed overwhelming support for war against the Vietnamese people. Despite endorsement of his right wing agenda, more progressive actions occurred during Nixon’s reign (1969-1974) than during any presidency since (including those of Dems): end to the Viet Nam War, start of the Food Stamp program, decriminalization of abortion, recognition of China, creation of Environmental Protection Agency, passage of Freedom of Information Act, formal dismantling of FBI’s COINTEL program, creation of Earned Income Tax Credits, formal ban on biological weapons, and passage of the Clean Water Act.
When I recount this to my good DP friends, the response is something like “You can’t credit that to Tricky Dick – he was forced to give in to the tremendous upheavals of his time.”
Bingo! That is exactly the point. Nixon had to act as he did due to enormous social pressure. During a 10 year period, a generation of progressives had been exposed to two fundamental truths:
Logic of the Goose
If the Dems win a majority of both houses of congress in November, 2022, a powerful force will make it highly unlikely that they will decriminalize abortion. This will be true whether the decriminalization would come from passing the Women’s Health Protection Act (the easiest route, but vulnerable to a supreme court trashing), expansion of the number of supreme court justices (almost forgotten about), or a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right (apparently unimaginable to the DP).
However, doing any of these would mean that abortion would cease to be a major issue in the 2024 election and make the re-election of Joe Biden virtually impossible. Winning in 2024 is vastly more important to the Dems than a setback in 2022.
As the Washington Post noted, the DP has finally found an issue that might help them at the ballot box. But securing abortion rights in 2022 would remove it from the 2024 agenda. Abortion rights are the Dems’ golden egg and they are not about to hatchet Mother Goose.
The task of DP politicians is NOT to bring better lives to people – it is to get elected. If promises to improve peoples’ lives were kept, then the ability to make the promise evaporates. The true role of DP is to promise without delivering, while somehow getting people to believe the promise.
Each election cycle Dems scrounge around for a golden egg so they can chant their eternal refrain “Vote to get goosed or the Republicans will win!” Dems yearn to have their cake and eat it too. They must dangle abortion rights in front of voters’ eyes – not actually win abortion rights.
Historical Reality of the Goose
As every psychologist should know, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. So, in addition to the Logic of the Goose, the history of the Dems regarding abortion helps chart their course.
During the last 50 years the Democrats could have written Roe vs Wade into law during the administrations of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama; but never did so. As a US Senator, Joe Biden helped Clarence Thomas get on the US Supreme Court via his attacks on Anita Hill.
When Hillary Clinton ran for president, she chose anti-choice senator Tim Kaine as a running mate and said she was “ambivalent” about abortion. Obama botched opportunities to replace Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the supreme court.
This is what Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report wrote about him: “During his 2008 presidential campaign Obama promised to pass and sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which would have enshrined abortion rights into law, and remove it from the purview of the courts. But he did no such thing. On April 29, 2009 he gave a press conference on his 100th day in office and said, ‘The Freedom of Choice Act is not my highest legislative priority.’ Obama had majorities in both houses of Congress and a veto-proof majority in the Senate. Not only was this legislation not his highest priority, it wasn’t a priority at all. He never attempted to get it passed.”
While the US waited for the supreme court diktat overturning Roe v. Wade, Molly Shah expressed irritation that “there is currently no cohesive national campaign from either the Democratic party or large reproductive rights organizations to fight back.” DP house leaders, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, supported re-election of anti-choice Texas rep Henry Cuellar over an abortion rights challenger.
Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Stories of the plight of American women began showing up within weeks of the court decision:
Since the 8th amendment to the US constitution prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment,” (which is “unacceptable due to the suffering, pain, or humiliation it inflicts on the person”) it is not exactly clear why it fails to apply to those whose only crime is becoming pregnant.
Abortion bans have even more severe consequences for those who commit the crime of “being-pregnant-while-Black.”
Knowing that women of color are three times as likely to be criminally charged with abortion, it is reasonable to ask …
Abortion rights have a unique significance for Black women. During slavery, masters offered bounties for hunters who returned escapees to the plantation. Today’s more repressive states reinvent this tradition by offering bounties to anyone who squeals on those associated with an abortion.
… as if They Depend on It
At this critical time it is necessary to defend abortion rights as if women’s lives depend on it. Because they really do.
More and more are realizing that rights have been won by disruptive actions rather than joining cheer-leading squads for unreliable politicians. Rather than being benevolently handed down to women, abortion rights were won “through mass demonstrations, teach-ins, takeovers and sit-ins.” Judith McDaniel recalls disruptive actions such as …
Reviewing multiple social reforms, Paul Street concludes that “None of these things were won simply by voting and/or Supreme Court benevolence alone. They were more fundamentally won through mass popular resistance and disruption: strikes, marches, sit-ins, sit-downs, occupations, work stoppages, movements and movement cultures beneath and beyond the big money major party time-staggered big media candidate-centered electoral extravaganzas that are sold to us as ‘politics.’”
A funny thing happened when fact-checking for 14 (b). When I googled “Repeal of Taft Hartley Section 14(b)” the first link that came up was this very solid resolution by the American Federation of Teachers. Scrolling to the bottom revealed this date: 1965. Think about that – 1965. The date suggests that within two years of electing LBJ and his DP gaggle in both houses of congress, the union movement had backed down from insisting that 14 (b) be repealed. Oh yes, there are routinized statements now and again calling for its repeal, but nothing approaching a thunderous call for its repeal as a condition for unions to continue to support the DP.
With the watchdog snoring, the Dems back-stepped to a state-by-state defense against Right-to-Work legislation. Does this foretell an “abortion-rights-in-some-states-only” strategy for today? The DP seems to have given up on (or never initiated) a mass mobilization for increasing the number of supreme court justices, or a law guaranteeing abortion rights throughout the nation, or (too controversial to even consider) a constitutional amendment for protecting women’s lives.
Though making a lot of racket at election time, post-election Dems will move to a cooling off period so women can adjust themselves to losing a basic right. But the iron is hot and this is no time to cool off. Not six weeks after the court’s Day of Infamy, Kansas voters resoundingly defeated an anti-abortion amendment to their constitution. Between 2010 and the 2022 court decision, the number of Americans saying all abortions should be banned fell from 15% to 8%. During the same time period, those agreeing that abortion should be legal in all cases climbed from 18% to 33%.
Vermont residents will consider the Reproductive Liberty Amendment, stating: “that an individual’s right to personal reproductive autonomy is central to the liberty and dignity to determine one’s own life course and shall not be denied or infringed unless justified by a compelling State interest achieved by the least restrictive means.”
Missouri’s residents also enjoy the right to amend the state constitution. It elects right wing politicians yet simultaneously passes progressive legislation. Missouri voters have repeatedly rejected Right to Work legislation and have approved shutting down puppy mills. Missouri voters gave the nod to medical marijuana and approved Medicaid expansion. This means that 5-20% of Missourians vote for progressive agendas while not voting for Democratic Party politicians.
(If you are registered to vote in Missouri and would help gather signatures for an abortion rights amendment to the state constitution, email gro.ytrapneergiruossimnull@yraterces or call 314-727-8554.)
The current struggle for abortion rights reminds us of the immense efforts for women’s suffrage, which was a roller-coaster battle requiring ongoing civil disobedience. Soon after the creation of the US, women lost the right to vote in New York (1777), Massachusetts (1780), New Hampshire (1784) and all other states except New Jersey (1787), which revoked the right in 1807.
Women’s right to vote was first gained in Wyoming Territory (1869). Women lost the right to vote in Utah (1887) but regained it in 1896. Women’s suffrage won in Washington state (1910), California, (1911), Oregon (1912), Arizona (1912, Kansas (1912), Alaska territory (1913), New York (1917), South Dakota (1917), and Oklahoma (1917). Women won partial suffrage in Illinois (1913), North Dakota (1917), Indiana (1917), Nebraska (1917), and Michigan (1917). The 19th amendment (guaranteeing women’s suffrage throughout the US) was passed by Congress in 1919, and ratified on August 18, 1920.
Two lessons stand out: rights which are taken away can provoke intense struggles to regain them; and, rights can be won at the state level as a critical step toward winning them at the national level. Working for a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion rights can be a double-edged sword. The dull blunt edge can drag the movement into an abyss (like Right to Work) where it will be stuck for eternity if it abandons the goal of a national victory. The sharp edge cuts through the Gordian Knot as it walks the suffragette path of mass civil disobedience.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
When most of us think of mental health care, we think of seeing a therapist once per week. But at Kaiser Permanente facilities in California and Hawaii, clinicians — including psychologists, clinical social workers, marriage and family therapists, and addiction medicine counselors — say their patients routinely wait months between appointments. Not only that: There’s no limit to the number of patients that can be assigned to one therapist.
“You’re expected to follow anybody you have seen in the last two years. At times, the number of people I have seen in the last two years has been up to 600,” Sabrina Chaumette, a Kaiser therapist in Oakland, told Truthout.
Since July 2021, Kaiser mental health clinicians in California, who are members of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), have attempted to use contract negotiations to demand the resources they need to provide better care for their patients. But workers say management has been unwilling to budge on changes necessary to reduce their unmanageable workloads and reverse understaffing, so on August 15 — nearly 14 months after their first bargaining session — over 2,000 Kaiser therapists in California went on strike. Nearing two months, it is the longest mental health strike in history. And on August 29, 57 of their colleagues in Hawaii, also NUHW members, joined them.
Kaiser is the largest nonprofit HMO in the United States, operating in eight states and the District of Columbia. It’s the largest health insurance plan in California, with more than half the market share, and the second-largest in Hawaii. However, despite reporting an $8.1 billion profit in 2021, Kaiser staffs only one full-time-equivalent mental health clinician for every 2,600 members in Northern California and just one therapist for every 5,500 patients in Hawaii, according to NUHW. Union members say this flies in the face of Kaiser’s key marketing promise: That by offering health insurance plans and operating hospitals and other facilities under one umbrella, patients receive better and more integrated care.
“I call it the glitter cloud,” Rachel Kaya, a Kaiser therapist in Hawaii, told Truthout. “They put out into the world how they promote mental health care, how they help people thrive, and how they do fair labor bargaining. But in my field, we talk a lot about the difference between talking the talk and walking the walk.” Unlike their colleagues in California, whose contract expired, Kaiser therapists in Hawaii are still without a first contract four years after joining NUHW.
“A strike is an absolute last resort. We have made numerous efforts to compel our employer to shift our model of care to reduce dangerous delays in terms of wait times that our patients face,” Ilana Marcucci-Morris, a Kaiser therapist in California and bargaining committee member, told Truthout. According to Marcucci-Morris, the union’s last contract cycle nearly ended in a strike over the same issues, but members ultimately accepted an offer from Kaiser when it agreed to form a committee, with equal participation between union members and management, that would make recommendations on how Kaiser could improve its model of care. After that committee met for over a year and made its final presentation, “Kaiser cherry-picked one or two pieces that they liked and then dumped the rest,” said Marcucci-Morris. Before walking out, NUHW members in Northern California accepted Kaiser’s financial terms. They’re not striking over their own compensation or benefits.
“Our patients are waiting three months in between appointments and flooding the emergency room because they’re in crisis, or paying out of pocket to go outside Kaiser. That extreme moral injury is the crux of our strike,” said Marcucci-Morris. We want our patients to get better and we need the resources to help them do that.” Kaya agrees. “I just want to be really clear that the reason why we are on strike is not a financial issue,” she said. “It is absolutely a social justice issue. Kaiser being a multibillion-dollar company, yet choosing to underfund mental health care in these communities, is wrong. The entire community pays the price when we underfund mental health care.”
Marcucci-Morris likens the Kaiser model, where there is no limit on the number of patients a therapist can be expected to take on, to “a house where you have a front door that’s wide open but no windows, no side door, or back door.” In addition to forcing clinicians to work many hours of overtime on non-patient-facing work like completing and reviewing notes and connecting with other members of a patient’s care team, union members say this approach actually compels them to break the law. In addition to recently strengthened federal law, California has some of the strongest mental health parity laws in the nation. SB 221, enacted in 2021, requires that mental health and substance use patients be offered return appointments within 10 business days, unless the treating therapist determines that a longer wait time is appropriate. If an appointment with an in-network provider is not available, insurers and HMOs are obligated to arrange for outside care at no additional cost to the patient. NUHW members say state regulatory bodies have been slow to enforce the new law, and that Kaiser was noncompliant even before their strike.
“Our current contract compels therapists to break mental health parity laws on the state and federal level,” said Marcucci-Morris. When she went on strike on August 15, said Chaumette, her next available intake appointment was in mid-November.
Barbara McDonald is a single parent to two daughters with mental health challenges. McDonald told Truthout that getting her younger daughter an appropriate diagnosis within the Kaiser system took so long that she was forced to pay out of pocket to go outside Kaiser. Once her daughter did have a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, the only treatment she was offered within Kaiser was a series of classes — which were then canceled. After her daughter was hospitalized multiple times for self-harm, McDonald paid out of pocket again to get her the treatment she needed outside of Kaiser. All told, she has spent around $50,000. “I don’t think my daughter would be alive if I hadn’t been able to provide outside care for her,” she said. “And I’m still digging myself out of a financial hole because of that.”
“My older daughter said, ‘Do I have to cut my throat to get a therapy appointment?’ She sees her sister only getting care if she escalates and hurts herself. That must feel really scary, that nobody cares unless you’re hurting yourself or threatening yourself,” said McDonald.
Chaumette said that in her experience, it’s often patients with less severe symptoms who do manage to get a referral for covered care outside the Kaiser system. “If I’m seeing somebody with depression and they’re having a difficult time getting out of bed, dressing, bathing, eating, they’re not going to have the energy to be on the phone with Kaiser fighting for an outside referral. This system disproportionately hurts the people with more severe symptoms,” she said. Kaiser also encourages therapists to keep more severe cases in-house, purportedly to better manage care for those patients, and because they might be rejected by therapists in private practice. But Kaiser’s mental health providers are so overwhelmed that McDonald questions the safety of that approach. “Even though Kaiser is dispensing my daughter’s medication, they don’t have anybody following up with her. She can go six months between meetings with her psychiatrist,” McDonald said. “That’s just dangerous.”
In California, Kaiser contracts with Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program, and its failures to deliver timely care disproportionately affect people who can’t afford to go outside the system. “Any marginalized community that has been unused to advocating for itself is not going to fight the system to give them a referral to an outside provider,” said Chaumette.
These untenable conditions have therapists leaving Kaiser in droves, according to NUHW. Between June 2021 and May 2022, said the union, 668 California clinicians left Kaiser — nearly double the 335 clinicians who left the previous year. In a survey conducted by NUHW, 85 percent of those clinicians said they had an unsustainable workload, and 76 percent said their inability to “treat patients in line with standards of care and medical necessity” influenced their decision to leave.
In California, NUHW members are asking for several key changes: Up to an additional 30 minutes per day to perform indirect patient care tasks such as returning phone calls and emails from patients and communicating with other members of a patient’s care team; the ability for clinicians to stop taking new patients when they have no available appointments for new patients within two weeks; a ratio of one appointment for a new patient to every six appointments with current patients; and a requirement that Kaiser hire enough staff to comply with federal and state law. The only concession Kaiser management has offered, according to Marcucci-Morris, is an increase in indirect patient care time of just 12 minutes per day, applying to generalist therapists only, which would exclude a majority of the union. Representatives for Kaiser Permenente did not return a request for comment.
In May, the National Committee for Quality Assurance, an independent nonprofit organization that accredits health plans, placed Kaiser under “corrective action” because of its violations of national mental health standards. Two California state agencies are also investigating Kaiser’s failures to follow state mental health parity law, though those investigations are not expected to conclude until next year. “I’d like to see them hit them with fines big enough to get their attention and to make it worth it for them to turn this around, because clearly they’re only interested in the money they make,” said McDonald. “Or if they’re not going to provide mental health care, then they should just say that rather than pretending they do.”
In Hawaii, NUHW filed a complaint in November 2021 with the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs regarding Kaiser’s failure to address serious patient care problems. In its formal response in December, Kaiser pledged to hire 44 additional therapists. According to NUHW, the number of full-time Kaiser clinicians in Hawaii has actually decreased from 51 to 48 since then.
Chaumette says that, because of its poor practices, Kaiser faces a reputational crisis among therapists. “They are never going to be able to hire enough therapists to treat all these patients, because nobody wants to work for Kaiser,” she said. “Our reputation in the community among therapists is bad. When I tell people I work for Kaiser, their first response is, ‘You don’t do therapy.’ I think this strike has increased my reputation within our community of therapists. We’re doing advocacy in ways I’ve never done before as a therapist.”
Though roughly half of the clinicians who went on strike in California have returned to work out of financial necessity, Marcucci-Morris said support for the strike remains high — in a recent vote, 85.9 percent of union members still supported the strike. “It’s important to note what a union is. We are a collection of workers. This is not one or two people telling us what to do,” she said.
According to Marcucci-Morris, therapists who have gone back to work informed the union that Kaiser is still booking appointments for patients with therapists who are out on strike, then canceling and rescheduling them. “If Kaiser felt following the law was a priority, they’d follow our proposal,” she said. “We’re ready to negotiate around the clock to get an agreement.”
Fifteen thousand Minnesota nurses began a three-day strike on Monday in what the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA) says is the largest private sector nurses’ strike in U.S. history.
The strike spanned 16 Minnesota hospitals and was authorized by union members last month after over five months of negotiations with hospital administrators led to what the union says are inadequate or essentially nonexistent offers for workers’ safety, staffing and salary demands.
“Hospital executives have already driven nurses away from the bedside by their refusal to solve the crises of staffing and retention in our hospitals, and we hope they will not be so brash as to fire nurses for standing up to demand better,” MNA said in a statement earlier this month.
“If hospital executives want to avoid a strike on September 12, they should spend less time and money on lawyers and more time working with nurses to settle fair contracts to improve patient care and working conditions in our hospitals,” the union continued.
Nurses say that, while they didn’t want to strike, issues like understaffing at their hospitals mean they aren’t able to adequately provide for patients, even when a patient is facing an urgent or emergency situation.
“I can’t give my patients the care they deserve,” Chris Rubesch, vice president of the Minnesota Nurses Association and a Duluth nurse, told The Washington Post. “Call lights go unanswered. Patients should only be waiting for a few seconds or minutes if they’ve soiled themselves or their oxygen came unplugged or they need to go to the bathroom, but that can take 10 minutes or more. Those are things that can’t wait.”
Strike lines are rocking across the state! #patientsbeforeprofits #striketember pic.twitter.com/vg0BUzCExR
— Minnesota Nurses (@mnnurses) September 12, 2022
The union has asked for a 27 to 30 percent raise over the next three years. These raises would more closely match both inflationary and staffing pressures that its members face, they say — especially as nurses as a whole have faced increased risks throughout the pandemic.
Hospital administrators have countered with a 10 to 12 percent raise over the next three years, or a bit over 3 percent a year on average — far lower than recent rates of inflation. The hospitals blame the strike on workers, saying that they have refused to negotiate, though the MNA claims it is administrators who haven’t budged on key issues.
“Nurses have steadfastly refused to go to mediation,” a spokesperson for Twin Cities Hospital Group said to The Washington Post. “Their choice is to strike.”
Many of the hospital groups are hiring nurses to replace workers as they strike; Twin Cities Hospital Group said that it’s hiring 2,000 traveling nurses during the strike, while other affected hospitals are also bringing in temporary workers, according to reports.
The workers have garnered the support of local and national lawmakers, including Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party member, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).
“I stand in solidarity with the 15,000 [Minnesota nurses] on strike this week fighting for safer care, fair scheduling, and higher wages,” Sanders said on Twitter Monday. “Nurses are the backbone of our health care system. They understand what’s best for their patients.”
The health care sector is facing major issues with nurse staffing, which has taken a huge hit amid the pandemic and never quite recovered. While administrators complain that nurses are “exploiting” the shortage, nurses across the country have said that the shortage can be chalked up to hospitals’ failures to adequately invest in their own workers. Such failures also endanger patients, nurses say.
Health care workers have led strikes throughout the pandemic. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were five strikes of over 1,000 workers from unions representing health care workers in 2020 and four such strikes in 2021.
Labor activity in the sector appears to be reaching a new high this year, according to Healthcare Dive, with at least seven strikes of 1,000 workers or more in health care so far, including the Minnesota workers’ strike. Recently, a strike set to consist of hundreds of nurses at UW Health in Madison, Wisconsin, was narrowly averted.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
We see the hospital as a factory and our hospitalist group as an assembly line that is in the business of manufacturing perfect discharges.”1 These words are not hyperbole. They are the exact words written by David J. Yu, MD, MBA, Medicare & DSNP Medical Director, Presbyterian Health Plan, Albuquerque NM. Yu cites the work of management guru W. Edwards Deming as a major authority for this approach to patient care. Deming’s business principles have been given much of the credit for Japan’s industrial revival after World War Two…Theory is not practice. Ever since management and business school “experts” took charge of health care in the 1970s and 1980s not only have medical costs not decreased they have skyrocketed. There was no health care crisis in the 1970s and 1980s.2 It was manufactured by the medical industrial complex composed of hospitals, insurance companies and drug companies for their own financial gain.
—Arthur H. Gale, MD, “The Hospital as a Factory and the Physician as an Assembly Line Worker“, Missouri Medicine, January-February 2016.
I recently spent 12 days in a large hospital in the state of Virginia and 16 days in a rehabilitation center in the same state. I had contracted COVID and went to the emergency room on July 3 at the suggestion of a doctor at a walk-in clinic. An EKG screening showed that I had atrial fibrillation and I was admitted to the hospital for observation and treatment. Another illness (colon cancer) reared its head and I ultimately went into hypovolemic shock and required emergency surgery to remove a tumor, clean up infected lymph nodes,and generally repair my insides. I now have colon cancer with liver metastasis in addition to prostate cancer with metastasis which has traveled to portions of my skeletal system.
You might say I’ve “doubled my pleasure and doubled my fun.” Hey! You have to have a sense of humor about these matters!
The hospital care system is, in fact, an industrial, assembly line operation. Because of this, doctors and nurses do not have time to develop relationships or spend a lot of time with patients. Doctors must make rounds that allow maybe 5-10 minutes of time with the patient. Floor nurses are overworked having to respond to calls from different patients and they must prioritize those calls based on critical need. Wait times for assistance from a nurse can feel like a long time when you are sick.
The time that the health professional has with the patient, and the time spent communicating with the next health professional in the chain (often a significant part of the overall cost of a distinct episode of care) is now rationed to that which is deemed essential. This hinders professionals’ ability to establish a significant therapeutic relationship with the patient. Concerns that may arise with the patient that are not easily quantified, and consequently not documented, may also be lost.
— Sarah Winch and Amanda J. Henderson, “Making cars and making health care: a critical review“, Medical Journal of Australia, July 6, 2009.
Total Quality Madness
The hospital system has become a depersonalized manufacturing process based on Total Quality Management (TQM), or some form of quality control, deriving from Toyota’s Lean Engineering or Just in Time (JIT) manufacturing popularized in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Health care these days is truly an industrial manufacturing process which is tied in many cases to Medicare requirements and billing. TQM/Quality Control Practices are supposed to “manufacture” increased customer/patient satisfaction but the hospital experience made me feel like I was little more than a damaged automobile traveling the assembly line and being worked on by different mechanics.
TQM is described as this:
Total quality management (TQM) is an administration attitude of uninterruptedly refining the quality of the goods/services/processes by concentrating on the customers’ (patients’) requirements and anticipations to augment consumer (patient) contentment stable performance. Successful TQM implementation leads to improved organizational performance success.
— Devika Kanade, Shailendrakumar Kale, “Significance of total quality management practices in improving quality of services delivered by medical and dental hospitals”, Journal of Dental and Medical Research, October, 2021.
If the goal is to improve the organization’s quality/patient manufacturing process, a baseline of measurements must be created. It is likely that unmeasurable metrics; for example, wellness, family access, intangible mental states are too nebulous to measure, as opposed to surgical procedures performed (every procedure aligns to a numerical code), exiting the patient in x amount of time from the hospital, recovering fees from the US government/patients, etc.
The continued equating of quantity with quality and the redesign of work processes leads to continued fragmentation of health care work, loss of autonomy for the health professions, and a potential increase in hospital misadventure. The very act of breaking up an episode of care into a number of steps that may, or may not, add value to the overall process allows for parts to become lost. Of particular concern is the appraising of value so that perceived non-valuable aspects of care can be discounted.
— Sarah Winch and Amanda J. Henderson, “Making cars and making health care: a critical review“, Medical Journal of Australia, July 6, 2009.
How can a healthcare system that views patients as pieces of a manufacturing process be personal or caring? It can’t. Doctors and nurses are not to blame. In TQM, Lean Engineering or JIT, time is of the essence in producing a product, or patient exit, before your competitors can. Hospitals are pushing the notion that they are more competitive than other health care systems nearby in the state of Virginia. How do you measure competitiveness: How many patients did you see today? How many calls did you make for patients “on the floor.” What was the amount of time you spent with the patient and how does that correlate to TQM? How many patients live or die? How many patients do you push out the door?
My Experience
It is likely that were it not for one of the many nurses badgering her colleagues and physicians, I would have bled out. Earlier, another nurse noticed my bleeding and suggested a colonoscopy which I initially refused but I ultimately relented which proved critical to my survival.
My blood pressure nearly hit the deck. As I was wheeled into surgery, I vaguely remember that the nurses in the operating room were incredibly coordinated in their individual tasks akin to a perfect offensive play in US football where all 11 players know their assignments and execute them to near perfection. I uttered something to the surgeon about sewing me up which he was able to honor. Then, the anesthesia took full hold and I was out in the darkness somewhere.
When I awoke I was in the intensive care unit (ICU) being looked after by the nurses. I had a device which allowed me to inject pain killers into my body every few minutes. The time I spent in the ICU was like being trapped n in dense fog bank with a face appearing out of the gloom every now and then. Ultimately, I was moved to a room where I could be safely isolated as I had COVID. The room seemed to me to be at the far end of the hospital. My family could not visit me or even look through plexiglass windows at me. The experience was terrible.
My primary physicians visited with me as much as they could and those visits were most welcomed. My prognosis is not good and so palliative care physicians came to visit and spoke with me about the limited options available to me.
As the hours dragged by, I began to feel like I was, indeed, on an assembly line.
The nurses and their assistants that came with my treatments all had specialties. For example, a different nurse each time would open the door and say, “I’m with Respiratory and I’ve come to give you your inhaler.” I would take one hit from it and then the nurse would lock it away and leave. At other times someone from Respiratory also would show up to give me a ten minute treatment with a nebulizer. Those treatments could take place at any time of day and night. I received nebulizer treatments sometimes at three o’clock in the morning after being awoken from a sound sleep.
On that note it was impossible to get a decent night’s sleep. Nurses would come into the room to administer medications seemingly every four hours. And then blood work was done sometimes three times a day to include the early morning AM hours.
Other nurses would take care of other matters such as changing sheets and bed pan issues. I was not presented with any physical therapy options to be able to get up and walk to the in-room bathroom which I really didn’t know was there.
And so I lay there in bed stewing, not watching the junk on television, with a dead cell phone and no options to get out, at least I thought. I did have an in-room phone which I could use to talk with my wife and son.
Is Anyone Out There?
Buzzers seemed to go off repeatedly and not be turned off for sometimes a half hour. And if you needed to call a nurse using a device akin to a remote that controlled the bed, call device and television, it would invariably take what seemed like an eternity for the nurse to arrive. I had little appetite and didn’t eat much during those twelve days but no one offered me any alternatives for nutrition.
Perhaps the saddest, and humorous, event happened when I received a Transesophageal echocardiogram (TEE), designed to check out the heart function. They put me to sleep, of course, and when I awoke I was alone in the procedure room. They had put me in a fetal position buttressing me with cushions and tie down straps so that I couldn’t really move. I figured it would be a matter of minutes before they came to get me but the “matter of minutes” turned into 20 minutes. I began to yell out, calmly, “Hello, hello, is anyone out there,” (borrowing from Pink Floyd). My shoulder began to cause me some pain and so I kept repeating my words but still, no one came. I could see people walking by so I figured they could hear me. Wrong. So I increased the decibel level until someone opened the door and asked, “What’s wrong?” I said my shoulder hurt and I’ve been stuck in here for 45 minutes with no clue as to what went on during the procedure. I received a sort of “whoops!” look and finally was brought back to my intolerable hospital room having been forgotten.
Escape!
I had no idea how long I would be stuck in the hospital but then on July 15 a nurse came in the room to remove my stitches. She said, “Did you know you are going to be released today to a rehabilitation facility?” I said I had not been told by any one of the news, which I viewed with caution. But I was excited to learn that I’d be off the assembly line. I was scheduled to leave at 4:30 PM that day but as that time rolled around I had not been cleaned up or changed into my street clothes. As the clock struck 5:00 PM, I heard a commotion outside the door. The medical transport driver was reading the nurses the riot act as he was on a tight schedule to pick up other patients. Two males nurses in shirts and ties rushed in and got me all set to get transferred to the rehab facility. Right up to the very end, I was forgotten, like a lost part, that fell off the assembly line.
The rehab facility was like heaven. I got full nights of sleep, physical therapy, decent food and very personalized care. I was up and walking within ten days and doing the little things (making the bed, brushing teeth, shaving, showering) that we all take for granted. My family and grandson were able to visit and it was just great! That went a long way to bolstering my recovery.
A friend from a family of doctors told me that: “It is not safe to get sick in America. It’s a crap shoot,” he said.
Another buddy commented that: “I’m not too high on the medical profession. It used to be a vocation but now it is just a job, all process oriented.”
The post Surviving America’s Industrial Manufacturing, Quality Centric Health Care System first appeared on Dissident Voice.
In the early weeks of the pandemic, Dr. Lorenzo González, then a second-year resident of family medicine at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, ran on fumes, working as many as 80 hours a week in the ICU. He was constantly petrified that he would catch the covid-19 virus and guilt-ridden for not having enough time to help his ailing father.
In April 2020, his father, a retired landscaper, died of heart and lung failure. González mourned alone. His job as a doctor-in-training put him at high risk of catching the virus, and he didn’t want to inadvertently spread it to his family. Financial stress also set in as he confronted steep burial costs.
Now, González is calling for better pay and benefits for residents who work grueling schedules at Los Angeles County’s public hospitals for what he said amounts to less than $18 an hour — while caring for the county’s most vulnerable patients.
“They’re preying on our altruism,” González said of the hospitals. He is now chief resident of family medicine at Harbor-UCLA and president of the Committee of Interns and Residents, a national union that represents physician trainees and that is part of the Service Employees International Union.
“We need acknowledgment of the sacrifices we’ve made,” he said.
Residents are newly minted physicians who have finished medical school and must spend three to seven years training at established teaching hospitals before they can practice independently. Under the supervision of a teaching physician, residents examine, diagnose, and treat patients. Some seek additional training in medical specialties as “fellows.”
These trainees are banding together in California and other states to demand higher wages and better benefits and working conditions amid intensifying burnout during the pandemic. They join nurses, nursing assistants, and other health care workers who are unionizing and threatening to strike as staffing shortages, the rising cost of living, and inconsistent supplies of personal protective equipment and covid vaccines have pushed them to the brink.
More than 1,300 unionized residents and other trainees at three L.A. County public hospitals, including Harbor-UCLA, will vote May 30 on whether to strike for a bump in their salaries and housing stipends, after a monthslong negotiation deadlock with the county. Since March, residents at Stanford Health Care, Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, and the University of Vermont Medical Center have unionized.
“Residents were always working crazy hours, then the stress of the pandemic hit them really hard,” said John August, a director at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
The Association of American Medical Colleges, a group that represents teaching hospitals and medical schools, did not address the unionization trend among residents directly, but the organization’s chief health care officer, Dr. Janis Orlowski, said through a spokesperson that a residency is a working apprenticeship and that a resident’s primary role is to be trained.
Residents are paid as trainees while they are studying, training, and working, Orlowski said, and the association works to ensure that they receive effective training and support.
David Simon, a spokesperson for the California Hospital Association, declined to comment. But he forwarded a study published in JAMA Network Open in September showing that surgery residents in unionized programs did not report lower rates of burnout than those in nonunionized programs.
So far, none of the new chapters have negotiated their first contracts, the national union said. But some of the longer-standing ones have won improvements in pay, benefits, and working conditions. Last year, a resident union at the University of California-Davis secured housing subsidies and paid parental leave through its first contract.
With more than 20,000 members, CIR represents about 1 in 7 physician trainees in the U.S. Executive Director Susan Naranjo said that before the pandemic one new chapter organized each year and that eight have joined in the past year and a half.
Residents’ working conditions had come under scrutiny long before the pandemic.
The average resident salary in the U.S. in 2021 was $64,000, according to Medscape, a physician news site, and residents can work up to 24 hours in a shift but no more than 80 hours per week. Although one survey whose results were released last year found that 43% of residents felt they were adequately compensated, those who are unionizing say wages are too low, especially given residents’ workload, their student loan debt, and the rising cost of living.
The pay rate disproportionately affects residents from low-income communities and communities of color, González said, because they have less financial assistance from family to subsidize their medical education and to pay for other costs.
But with little control over where they train — medical school graduates are matched to their residency by an algorithm — individual residents have limited negotiating power with hospitals.
For unionizing residents seeking a seat at the table, wage increases and benefits like housing stipends are often at the top of their lists, Naranjo said.
Patients deserve doctors who aren’t exhausted and preoccupied by financial stress, said Dr. Shreya Amin, an endocrinology fellow at the University of Vermont Medical Center. She was surprised when the institution declined to recognize the residents’ union, she said, considering the personal sacrifices they had made to provide care during the pandemic.
If a hospital does not voluntarily recognize a union, CIR can request that the National Labor Relations Board administer an election. The national union did so in April, and with a certified majority vote, the Vermont chapter can now begin collective bargaining, Naranjo said.
Annie Mackin, a spokesperson for the medical center, said in an email that it is proud of its residents for delivering exceptional care throughout the pandemic and respects their decision to join a union. Mackin declined to address residents’ workplace concerns.
Dr. Candice Chen, an associate professor of health policy at George Washington University, believes that the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services also bears some responsibility for residents’ working conditions. Because the agency pays teaching hospitals to train residents, it should hold the facilities accountable for how they treat them, she said. And the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, which sets work and educational standards for residency programs, is moving in the right direction with new requirements like paid family leave, she added, but needs to do more.
How far these unions will go to achieve their goals is an open question.
Strikes are rare among doctors. The last CIR strike was in 1975, by residents at 11 hospitals in New York.
Naranjo said a strike would be the last resort for its L.A. County members but blamed the county for continuously delaying and canceling bargaining sessions. Among its demands, the union is calling for the county to match the wage increase granted to members of SEIU 721, a union that represents other county employees, and for a $10,000 housing allowance.
The union’s member surveys have found that most L.A. County residents report working 80 hours a week, Naranjo said.
A spokesperson for L.A. County’s Department of Health Services, Coral Itzcalli, thanked its “heroic” front-line workforce for providing “best-in-class care” and acknowledged the significant toll that the pandemic has taken on their personal and professional lives. She said limits on hours are set by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and that most trainees report working “significantly less” than 80 hours a week.
Jesus Ruiz, a spokesperson for the L.A. County Chief Executive Office, which manages labor negotiations for the county, said via email that the county hopes to reach a “fair and fiscally responsible contract” with the union.
Results of the strike vote are expected to be announced May 31, the union said.
This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.
KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Francisca Lita Sáez (Spain), An Unequal Fight, 2020.
These are deeply upsetting times. The COVID-19 global pandemic had the potential to bring people together, to strengthen global institutions such as the World Health Organisation (WHO), and to galvanise new faith in public action. Our vast social wealth could have been pledged to improve public health systems, including both the surveillance of outbreaks of illness and the development of medical systems to treat people during these outbreaks. Not so.
Studies by the WHO have shown us that health care spending by governments in poorer nations has been relatively flat during the pandemic, while out-of-pocket private expenditure on health care continues to rise. Since the pandemic was declared in March 2020, many governments have responded with exceptional budget allocations; however, across the board from richer to the poorer nations, the health sector received only ‘a fairly small portion’ while the bulk of the spending was used to bail out multinational corporations and banks and provide social relief for the population.
In 2020, the pandemic cost the global gross domestic product an estimated $4 trillion. Meanwhile, according to the WHO, the ‘needed funding … to ensure epidemic preparedness is estimated to be approximately US$150 billion per year’. In other words, an annual expenditure of $150 billion could likely prevent the next pandemic along with its multi-trillion-dollar economic bill and incalculable suffering. But this kind of social investment is simply not in the cards these days. That’s part of what makes our times so upsetting.
S. H. Raza (India), Monsoon in Bombay, 1947–49.
On 5 May, the WHO released its findings on the excess deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the 24-month period of 2020 and 2021, the WHO estimated the pandemic’s death toll to be 14.9 million. A third of these deaths (4.7 million) are said to have been in India; this is ten times the official figure released by the Government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which has disputed the WHO’s figures. One would have thought that these staggering numbers – nearly 15 million dead globally in the two-year period – would be sufficient to strengthen the will to rebuild depleted public health systems. Not so.
According to a study on global health financing, development assistance for health (DAH) increased by 35.7 percent between 2019 and 2020. This amounts to $13.7 billion in DAH, far short of the projected $33 billion to $62 billion required to address the pandemic. In line with the global pattern, while DAH funding during the pandemic went towards COVID-19 projects, various key health sectors saw their funds decrease (malaria by 2.2 percent, HIV/AIDS by 3.4 percent, tuberculosis by 5.5 percent, reproductive and maternal health by 6.8 percent). The expenditure on COVID-19 also had some striking geographical disparities, with the Caribbean and Latin America receiving only 5.2 percent of DAH funding despite experiencing 28.7 percent of reported global COVID-19 deaths.
Sajitha R. Shankar (India), Alterbody, 2008.
While the Indian government is preoccupied with disputing the COVID-19 death toll with the WHO, the government of Kerala – led by the Left Democratic Front – has focused on using any and every means to enhance the public health sector. Kerala, with a population of almost 35 million, regularly leads in the country’s health indicators among India’s twenty-eight states. Kerala’s Left Democratic Front government has been able to handle the pandemic because of its robust public investment in health care facilities, the public action led by vibrant social movements that are connected to the government, and its policies of social inclusion that have minimised the hierarchies of caste and patriarchy that otherwise isolate social minorities from public institutions.
In 2016, when the Left Democratic Front took over state leadership, it began to enhance the depleted public health system. Mission Aardram (‘Compassion’), started in 2017, was intended to improve public health care, including emergency departments and trauma units, and draw more people away from the expensive private health sector to public systems. The government rooted Mission Aardram in the structures of local self-government so that the entire health care system could be decentralised and more closely attuned to the needs of communities. For example, the mission developed a close relationship with the various cooperatives, such as Kudumbashree, a 4.5-million-member women’s anti-poverty programme. Due to the revitalised public health care system, Kerala’s population has begun to turn away from the private sector in favour of these government facilities, whose use increased from 28 percent in the 1980s to 70 percent in 2021 as a result.
As part of Mission Aardram, the Left Democratic Front government in Kerala created Family Health Centres across the state. The government has now established Post-COVID Clinics at these centres to diagnose and treat people who are suffering from long-term COVID-19-related health problems. These clinics have been created despite little support from the central government in New Delhi. A number of Kerala’s public health and research institutes have provided breakthroughs in our understanding of communicable diseases and helped develop new medicines to treat them, including the Institute for Advanced Virology, the International Ayurveda Research Institute, and the research centres in biotechnology and pharmaceutical medicines at the Bio360 Life Sciences Park. All of this is precisely the agenda of compassion that gives us hope in the possibilities of a world that is not rooted in private profit but in social good.
Nguyễn tư Nghiêm (Vietnam), The Dance, 1968.
In November 2021, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research worked alongside twenty-six research institutes to develop A Plan to Save the Planet. The plan has many sections, each of which emerged out of deep study and analysis. One of the key sections is on health, with thirteen clear policy proposals:
1. Advance the cause of a people’s vaccine for COVID-19 and for future diseases.
2. Remove patent controls on essential medicines and facilitate the transfer of both medical science and technology to developing countries.
3. De-commodify, develop, and increase investment in robust public health systems.
4. Develop the public sector’s pharmaceutical production, particularly in developing countries.
5. Form a United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Health Threats.
6. Support and strengthen the role health workers’ unions play at the workplace and in the economy.
7. Ensure that people from underprivileged backgrounds and rural areas are trained as doctors.
8. Broaden medical solidarity, including through the World Health Organisation and health platforms associated with regional bodies.
9. Mobilise campaigns and actions that protect and expand reproductive and sexual rights.
10. Levy a health tax on large corporations that produce beverages and foods that are widely recognised by international health organisations to be harmful to children and to public health in general (such as those that lead to obesity or other chronic diseases).
11. Curb the promotional activities and advertising expenditures of pharmaceutical corporations.
12. Build a network of accessible, publicly funded diagnostic centres and strictly regulate the prescription and prices of diagnostic tests.
13. Provide psychological therapy as part of public health systems.
If even half of these policy proposals were to be enacted, the world would be less dangerous and more compassionate. Take point no. 6 as a reference. During the early months of the pandemic, it became normal to talk about the need to support ‘essential workers’, including health care workers (our dossier from June 2020, Health Is a Political Choice, made the case for these workers). All those banged pots went silent soon thereafter and health care workers found themselves with low pay and poor working conditions. When these health care workers went on strike – from the United States to Kenya – that support simply did not materialise. If health care workers had a say in their own workplaces and in the formation of health policy, our societies would be less prone to repeated healthcare calamities.
There’s an old Roque Dalton poem from 1968 about headaches and socialism that gives us a taste of what it will take to save the planet:
The post In a World of Great Disorder and Extravagant Lies, We Look for Compassion first appeared on Dissident Voice.It is beautiful to be a communist,
even if it gives you many headaches.The communists’ headache
is presumed to be historical; that is to say,
that it does not yield to painkillers,
but only to the realisation of paradise on earth.
That’s the way it is.Under capitalism, we get a headache
and our heads are torn off.
In the revolution’s struggle, the head is a time-bomb.In socialist construction,
we plan for the headache
which does not make it scarce, but quite the contrary.
Communism will be, among other things,
an aspirin the size of the sun.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
I am a worker at the Department of Mental Health in Los Angeles County, and I’m a member of SEIU Local 721. The Los Angeles Department of Mental Health is the largest mental health service in the U.S. Its annual budget is $3 billion. As one of the workers deployed by the county during the pandemic to work with people with severe disabilities at pop-up shelters in recreation centers, I am voting to strike, and it’s important for all other members of my union local to do the same.
A majority vote of yes for the strike would mean that our union’s bargaining committee can call a strike if the LA County Board of Supervisors refuses to meet union demands in the continuing negotiations. The strike is our most powerful weapon. It’s a refusal to work until our demands are met, insisting that we have the right to protect ourselves, feed our families, be respected, and improve our working conditions to provide a better service to the community. It’s absurd that many of us are working for low-income homeless folks, and we qualify for those same services because our pay is so low.
During the surge in Covid cases, our working conditions worsened extremely. During homeless outreach meetings, my coworkers weekly described finding dead bodies in tents during their visits to homeless encampments. Because of stress, burnout, and other issues, including intimidation by managers, my coworkers have joined the Great Resignation, leaving in droves. For example, I had 11 other coworkers, and now I am the only person in Service Area 4, which includes Hollywood, Mid City, Koreatown, and Skid Row, an area that has some of the most pervasive poverty in all of Los Angeles. Skid Row alone has one of the largest communities of unhoused people in the country. And I am currently the only one serving this area.
So many workers have been pushed to our limits. Many of my fellow workers erected a billboard of photos, obituaries, and mementos of those who passed away at LA County USC Hospital. There were at least 40 people on the wall, most of them Black and Brown. Outside our union hall itself is a “Forever Essential Wall of Remembrance.” But the mayor’s idea of honoring our work consists of clapping, lighting candles, and waving our phones and flashlights. But if Black lives “matter” to them, why are they undermining our ability to survive? They are offering a 3.5 percent wage increase while inflation is 8.5 percent! It’s a pay cut. If they respect us as they claim, then why are we workers expected to do the same work with fewer workers? If they respect our union, then why are they trying to hire subcontracted nonunion workers? It’s disrespect! As we workers call for every workplace to be unionized, SEIU should play a leading role in unionizing the unorganized. We will fight this attempt to privatize union jobs.
Los Angeles is known for its extreme inequality. Luxury buildings and wealthy neighborhoods stand next to massive unhoused encampments. Meanwhile, California as a whole has more billionaires than any other state in the U.S. Politicians from both parties have claimed to support the workers during the pandemic. But their actions show otherwise.
We, the 55,000 LA County employees, are preparing to strike because our bills are rising astronomically but our wages are stagnant. SEIU 721 members, vote yes!
We are preparing to strike to fight for union jobs and against the attempts to subcontract public sector jobs with nonunion companies.
We are preparing to strike to protect our lives in a pandemic that is not over and to protect our own mental health. Skyrocketing workloads put stress on our jobs and lives.
We are the workers who support folks who are homeless, people with severe mental illness, and those who struggle with substance misuse. We are nurses and social workers. We are on the Frontline. We will continue to work for the folks we assist. We care about our work and clients. But we won’t be martyrs running ourselves into the ground from exhaustion. We won’t allow more people to die because of the exhausting and unsafe working conditions. We won’t allow the LA County Board of Supervisors to use the loss of county workers as a way to undermine our union. Workers and communities need to take charge
We are voting YES to Strike to stop the intimidation tactics used by management to intimidate workers from exercising their rights. In the first week of the strike vote workers with union shirts were told they could not enter the building they work in. Union representatives, also workers checked them and they went to work. With a YES vote we are building a stronger union to take on any harassment on the job.
Voting YES will be the first step. With that powerful weapon on our backs we also will discuss as an entire membership the possible tentative agreement. With enough time to ensure freely open debate. When we negotiate and win it will be on the terms of the rank and file. All of us together.
We are not alone. Workers around the country are stepping up for their rights, striking for the contracts heroically fighting to get unionized, as we have seen with the historic examples of Amazon in Staten Island and Starbucks across the country.
My fellow SEIU 721 members, it’s time for us to defend ourselves and our communities by voting yes to a strike! This is our moment.
1. Meager pay raises in the face of inflation.
The union slogan is “Protect Us, Respect Us, Pay Us,” and the main demand is a pay increase. For all the city’s description of us as “heroes” and talk about the city’s “appreciation” of our work, what is happening at the bargaining table is the complete opposite. The LA County Board of Supervisors initially suggested a 2 percent pay increase, but after our protest, they raised the offer to 3 percent. Meanwhile, national inflation has gone up 8.5 percent, so these offers amount to a pay decrease. The county’s proposal amounts to a heavy pay decrease and is a slap in the face to those who risk our lives every day. We need to fight for raises that not only keep pace with inflation, but raise our salaries beyond that.
Many of us are frontline workers. We are nurses, social workers, counselors, and homeless-outreach workers. We walk into dangerous and unpredictable situations every day, unarmed and posing no threat to those we serve, unlike the violent and higher-paid LA County sheriffs, who are under federal investigation for their homicidal behavior and “deputy gangs” that kill with impunity, The sheriffs terrorize the very people we try to protect, making our work that much harder. These are the people who murdered Andres Guardardo, but despite the fact that the LA County Sheriff’s Department closed 2021 with a $22.2 million surplus, their budget remains the same. The typical Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Deputy Sheriff yearly salary is $92,624, far higher than those of unionized healthcare workers, and salaries for nonunionized workers in our field are even lower.
We have served the most impoverished communities during the worst pandemic in U.S. history. The bosses are full of thank-yous, but not much else. Our coworkers have died, our clients have died, and we continued to work. Yet they refuse to pay us a living wage.
2. Dramatic understaffing and continual burnout.
Many of the people who died during the pandemic were nurses and social workers facing a disaster that disproportionately hurt people of color. Because of that and the overwork, we are understaffed. That means we are doing the work of our coworkers for less money. They need to hire more people, train them, and bring those workers under union contract so all workers can organize for better living conditions and better serve our clients.
In the 2022–23 budget proposal, LA County is restoring only 500 of the positions that it eliminated in 2020–21. The Los Angeles Times reported that “the plan for 2022–23 … calls for 500 new positions. The county, with a total proposed workforce of 111,551, has 1,500 fewer jobs than in the 2019–20 fiscal year, the last budget adopted before the pandemic. The 2020–21 budget eliminated more than 2,580 positions.”
3. An end to attempts to privatize.
Local 721 organized the LA LGBT Center, which became one of the only nonprofits organized in a union. I was active in that strike vote back in the day.
We must continue in this spirit by organizing the workers in these “independent agencies” and bring them into our own union by bringing these jobs under public oversight, which will also facilitate the unionization of the workers. Our own union knows how important this is. Our union website explains that “on top of sky-high prices for everyday necessities, we’re also facing serious threats from LA County management to privatize our good union jobs.”
4. Solidarity with the wave of unionization sweeping the U.S.
When we go on strike, it will be part of a larger struggle being waged by Generation U, which includes the inspiring young people who are fighting for better wages and the right to organize across the country. These workplace struggles are heating up as workers at Amazon, Starbucks, and so many other companies realize that unionizing leads to worker protection and higher wages.
Those of us in existing unions need to contribute to this struggle by echoing it in our own, and we need to expand our membership to reach the nonunionized. At the same time, we must march with these workers and grow solidarity.
Now is the time for union workers to take the lead and fight for our rights. When we win our demands it will be a win for all workers. The first step is VOTING YES!
We Ready! Ready to Fight! Ready to Strike! Ready to Win! See you on the picket line!
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
California Assembly Bill #2098 was introduced on February 14, 2022. If passed, the bill would “designate the dissemination or promotion of misinformation or disinformation related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, or ‘COVID-19,’ as unprofessional conduct.”
Translation: It’s corporate-sponsored censorship aimed at taking away power from health professionals who see through the COVID bullshit.
Section 1 of the bill declares the following:
(a) The global spread of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, or COVID-19, has claimed the lives of over 5,000,000 people worldwide, including nearly 75,000 Californians.
(b) Data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that unvaccinated individuals are at a risk of dying from COVID-19 that is 11 times greater than those who are fully vaccinated.
(c) The safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines have been confirmed through evaluation by the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the vaccines continue to undergo intensive safety monitoring by the CDC.
(d) The spread of misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines has weakened public confidence and placed lives at serious risk.
(e) Major news outlets have reported that some of the most dangerous propagators of inaccurate information regarding the COVID-19 vaccines are licensed health care professionals.
FYI: Every entry above is patently and demonstrably false.
Since the bill does not even define what “misinformation or disinformation” is, it’s obviously designed solely to squash debate and dissent. Of course, such authoritarianism is first being floated in a #woke state like California. But do not imagine — for one minute — that this is not coming to a State House near you.
If you allow yourselves to be distracted by war propaganda or celebrity gossip, you’re making it so, so easy for the powers-that-shouldn’t-be to implement their nefarious plans. Even if you won’t fight back for yourself, how about standing up for future generations who may never know what freedom and autonomy mean?
Three suggestions for starters:
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
If someone is killed in a terrorist attack, it’s headline news. If another person dies at the hands of police, it’ll be the top story for weeks. But when was the last time you saw breaking news about a deadly medical error? It’s at least the third leading cause of death in the U.S. but it’s so common that it rarely (if ever) warrants notice. Then, of course, there’s also the whole cover-up aspect of it all. We’re never supposed to question the infallible men and women in white coats, right?
Twelve years ago this month, I appeared on a panel at the Left Forum. The ostensible topic was animal rights but the conversations covered far more ground than that. Seated to my left on the panel was none other than Gary Null (photo above).
Back before the internet, I used to listen to Null on WBAI radio here in New York City. His eclectic show’s primary focus was on what might be called holistic health. Null never stopped questioning mainstream/corporate medicine and science. He’d regularly remind listeners about iatrogenic medicine.
That day on the panel, he loved my presentation but still tried to trip me up in front of the crowd during the Q&A. While talking about the environmental causes of cancer, he turned me and asked if I knew the top* cause of death in the U.S. Without skipping a beat, I replied, “iatrogenic harm.”
Gary’s jaw hung open for a beat before he recovered and continued his monologue. I felt pretty good at that moment but also never forgot the importance of the point: There’s nothing more dangerous than doctors, hospitals, and the medical industry.
(*Null contributed to the definitive research on this topic and I will attempt to clarify the numbers as best as I can below.)
Gary Null was one of the first public figures to sound the trumpets about iatrogenic deaths but, fortunately, there are others. For example, Michael J. Saks and Stephan Landsman, authors of Closing Death’s Door: Legal Innovations to End the Epidemic of Healthcare Harm (Oxford University Press, 2021) explain:
The causes of harm vary widely: slips of the scalpel, lapses like mixing up lab results, faulty decision-making, inadequate training, evasion of known safety practices, miscommunication, equipment failures, and many more. The ease with which medical errors can occur is striking. To perform a bronchoscopy to remove a sunflower seed that went down a 2-year-old’s airway instead of his esophagus, a doctor in New Mexico inadvertently sedated the boy with an adult dose of morphine, which caused him to stop breathing and led to severe permanent brain damage. A lab in New York state mislabeled a tissue sample, causing a woman who did not have breast cancer to get a double mastectomy while cancer kept growing inside the woman who had the disease. Surgeons still sometimes get left and right confused, and it’s not uncommon for patients to get the wrong medication or the wrong dose, as happened to Boston Globe health reporter Betsy Lehman, who died from an overdose of chemotherapy drugs that were miscalculated.
Even the mainstream media admits that “medical errors” is the third leading cause of death and injury in the U.S. with the general figure being 250,000 lives lost per year. However, the British Medical Journal puts that number at 440,000.
But medical errors are only one component of the problem. Even when the “correct” treatment is given, it can cause countless injuries and death. And if you get any funny ideas about reporting these “healthcare heroes” for negligence, keep in mind that hospital medical records typically do not list incidents of doctor-induced harm or death.
“Death by Medicine” is a 2001 report by Gary Null, Ph.D.; Carolyn Dean MD, ND; Martin Feldman, MD; Debora Rasio, MD; and Dorothy Smith, Ph.D. It explains: “As few as 5 percent and no more than 20 percent of iatrogenic acts are ever reported. This implies that if medical errors were completely and accurately reported, we would have an annual iatrogenic death toll much higher than 783,936.”
A more recent estimate — factoring in adverse drug reactions, medically acquired bedsores, death caused by surgery, unnecessary procedures, and more — is 999,936 Americans per year killed by doctors and other medical “professionals.”
When they eventually factor in the iatrogenic deaths caused by deadly COVID protocols and vaccines, maybe then the public will finally catch on: Your doctor (with the pharmaceutical and insurance cartels behind him) might be the most dangerous person you know.
Keep yer guard up…
The post There’s nothing more dangerous than doctors, hospitals, and the medical industry first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Cleveland Clinic in Weston, Florida, on Jan. 11 was treating 80 COVID-19 patients — a tenfold increase since late December. Nearly half were admitted for other medical reasons.
The surge driven by the extremely infectious omicron variant helped push the South Florida hospital with 206 licensed beds to 250 patients. The rise in cases came as the hospital struggled with severe staff shortages while nurses and other caregivers were out with COVID.
The challenge is finding room to safely treat all the COVID patients while keeping staffers and the rest of patients safe, said Dr. Scott Ross, chief medical officer.
“It’s not a PPE issue,” he said, referring to personal protective equipment like masks, “nor an oxygen issue, nor a ventilator issue. It’s a volume issue and making sure we have enough beds and caregivers for patients.”
Nationally, COVID cases and hospitalizations are at their highest levels since the pandemic began. Yet, unlike previous COVID surges, large portions of the patients with COVID are coming to the hospital for other reasons. The infections are exacerbating some medical conditions and making it harder to reduce COVID’s spread within hospital walls, especially as patients show up at earlier, more infectious stages of the disease.
Although the omicron variant generally produces milder cases, adding the sheer number of these “incidental” hospitalizations to COVID-caused hospitalizations could be a tipping point for a health care system that is reeling as the battle against the pandemic continues. Rising rates of COVID in the community also translate to rising rates among hospital staffers, causing them to call out sick in record numbers and further stress an overwhelmed system.
Officials and staff at 13 hospital systems around the country said that caring for infected patients who need other medical services is challenging and sometimes requires different protocols.
Dr. Robert Jansen, chief medical officer at Grady Health System in Atlanta, said the infection rate in his community was unprecedented. Grady Memorial Hospital went from 18 COVID patients on Dec. 1 to 259 last week.
Roughly 80% to 90% of those patients either have COVID as their primary diagnosis or have a health condition — such as sickle cell disease or heart failure — that has been exacerbated by COVID, Jansen said.
Although fewer of their patients have developed pneumonia caused by COVID than during the major spikes early last year, Grady’s leaders are grappling with high numbers of health care workers out with COVID. At one point last week, Jansen said, 100 nurses and as many as 50 other staff members were out.
In one of New Jersey’s largest hospital systems, Atlantic Health System, where about half the COVID patients came in for other reasons, not all of those with incidental COVID can be shifted into the COVID wards, CEO Brian Gragnolati said. They need specialized services for their other conditions, so hospital staffers take special precautions, such as wearing higher-level PPE when treating COVID patients in places like a cardiac wing.
At Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital, where about half the COVID patients are there primarily for other health reasons, all patients admitted for COVID — whether they have symptoms or not — are treated in a part of the hospital reserved for COVID patients, said Dr. Hany Atallah, chief medical officer.
Regardless of whether patients are admitted for or with COVID, the patients still tax the hospital’s ability to operate, said Dr. Alex Garza, incident commander of the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force, a collaboration of the area’s largest health care systems. He estimated that 80% to 90% of patients in the region’s hospitals are there because of COVID.
In Weston, Florida, the Cleveland Clinic is also having a hard time discharging COVID patients to nursing homes or rehabilitation facilities because many places aren’t able to handle more COVID patients, Ross said. The hospital is also having difficulty sending patients home, out of concern they would put those they live with at risk.
All this means there’s a reason that hospitals are telling people to stay away from the ER unless it’s truly an emergency, said Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
The sheer number of patients who are showing up and don’t know they have COVID during this surge is frightening, Faust said. As more incidental cases pour into hospitals, they pose a greater risk to staffers and other hospital patients because they are typically at a more contagious stage of the disease — before symptoms begin, Faust said. In previous COVID waves, people were being hospitalized in the middle and later phases of the illness.
In Faust’s analysis of federal data, Jan. 7 showed the second-highest number of “hospital onset” COVID cases since the pandemic began, behind only an October 2020 outlier, he said. But this data accounts for only people who were in the hospital for 14 days before testing positive for COVID, Faust said, so it’s likely an undercount.
A KHN investigative series revealed multiple gaps in government oversight in holding hospitals accountable for high rates of COVID patients who didn’t have the diagnosis when they were admitted, including that federal reporting systems don’t publicly note COVID caught in individual hospitals.
“People in the hospital are vulnerable for many reasons,” said Dr. Manoj Jain, an infectious disease specialist in Memphis, Tennessee. “All of their existing underlying illnesses with multiple medical conditions — all of that puts them at much greater risk.”
The ER in particular is a potential danger zone amid the current crush of cases, Garza said. He recommended that patients wear high-quality masks, like a KN95, or an N95 respirator. According to The Washington Post, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is weighing whether to recommend that all Americans upgrade their masks during the omicron surge.
“It’s physics and math,” Garza said. “If you’ve got a lot of people concentrated in one area and a high viral load, the probability of you being exposed to something like that if you’re not wearing adequate protection are much higher.”
If patients can’t tolerate an N95 for an entire day, Faust urges them to wear upgraded masks whenever they come into contact with hospital staffers, visitors or other patients.
Dr. Dallas Holladay, an emergency medicine physician for Oregon’s Samaritan Health Services system, said that because of nursing shortages, more patients are being grouped together in hospital rooms. This raises their infection risk.
Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious diseases fellow at Stanford, believes all health care workers should be mandated to wear N95s for every patient interaction, not just surgical masks, considering the rise in COVID-exposure risk.
But in the absence of higher-quality mask mandates for staffers, he recommended that patients ask that their providers wear an N95.
“Why should we be putting the onus on patients to protect themselves from health care workers when health care workers are not even going to be doing that?” he asked. “It’s so backwards.”
Some hospital workers may not know they are getting sick — and infectious. And even if they do know, in some states, including Rhode Island and California, health care workers who are asymptomatic can be called back to work because of staffing shortages.
Faust would like to see an upgrade of testing capacity for health care workers and other staff members.
At Stanford, regular testing is encouraged, Karan said, and tests are readily available for staffers. But that’s an exception to the rule: Jain said some hospitals have resisted routine staff testing — both for the lab resource drain and the possible results.
“Hospitals don’t want to know,” he said. “We just don’t have the staff.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The Omicron variant’s transmission rate is exponentially higher than Delta, leaving healthcare workers across the U.S. in dire straits. Waves of doctors, nurses and other health professionals are unionizing, and some have quit the profession over exploitative conditions. The staffing shortage has added on to the strains of increasing hospitalizations due to COVID-19, limited availability of necessary equipment and lack of federal support for preventative measures such as paid medical leave. “This is the cost of two years spent pushing prematurely for a return to normal,” says Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and science writer at The Atlantic. Yong also discusses the debate over keeping schools open during the COVID-19 surge, and challenges to President Biden’s vaccine mandates affecting nearly 100 million workers.
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Here in the United States, nearly a quarter of hospitals are reporting critical staffing shortages as Omicron drives an unprecedented surge in infections. This comes as public schools in Chicago are closed for a fourth day as talks between the teachers’ union and Mayor Lori Lightfoot over in-person teaching remain at an impasse.
For more, we’re joined by Ed Yong, science writer at The Atlantic. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his coverage of the pandemic. His most recent pieces, “Hospitals Are in Serious Trouble” and “Omicron Is Our Past Pandemic Mistakes on Fast-Forward: We’ve been making the same errors for nearly two years now.”
Welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us, Ed. Let’s start with the hospitals. Explain the serious trouble our hospitals are in.
ED YONG: Yeah, they are at breaking point. It’s really hard to overstate how badly hospitals are faring right now. Even before the Omicron wave, they were already in trouble, because so many healthcare workers had left because of the collective traumas of the last two years of the pandemic. And now we have, firstly, a Delta wave and now Omicron on top of that. Huge volumes of patients are flooding hospitals. And while Omicron is less severe than previous variants, it’s so contagious that the sheer number of those patients is so high that there are still a lot of very sick people, and there are a lot people, full stop. So they are inundating hospitals at a time when there are fewer healthcare workers than ever before. Those healthcare workers are demoralized. They’re exhausted. And a lot of them are out sick because they have breakthrough infections from Omicron.
And all of this means that hospitals are — like, I really struggle to use the words like “crumbling,” because I don’t want to, like, exaggerate the risk, but that is what I’m hearing from people all around the country. People are waiting for six to 12 hours to get seen for any kind of emergency procedure. People in the ER are on ventilators waiting to get into ICUs, which are full. The entire system is clogged up. And it’s not just about COVID anymore. This now means that medical care for basically anything is worse than it was two years ago, because the system is just so completely flooded and unable to cope with the volume of patients right now.
AMY GOODMAN: The National Nurses United said, “Going to work should not mean putting your life and the lives of your loved ones in danger.” A group of nurses’ unions and the AFL–CIO have demanded the federal government enact permanent rules to ensure workplace safety, saying all frontline health workers should be guaranteed “personal protective equipment, exposure notification, ventilation systems, and other lifesaving measures.” Can you talk about this kind of organizing that’s going on?
ED YONG: Yeah. I think a lot of healthcare workers are fed up. Like, there’s sort of a culture, a social contract in medicine, that you sacrifice yourself for the sake of your patients. And while that contract means that the rest of us get decent medical care when we expect it, it also creates the conditions where healthcare workers are very easily exploited by society at large, as we’re seeing now, and by their own particular institutions.
So it’s no surprise, after two years of this, after feeling betrayed by the public, by a lot of places they work for, that a lot of them are starting to organize, and there’s more movement towards unions. There’s more of a sense of, like, “We just cannot take this anymore.” And I commend that. I do think, like, that’s necessary for creating a more stable medical system.
What I worry is that there are a lot of people who, rather than deciding to fight for this, have just decided, very reasonably, to stop, to leave their jobs or the profession. I’ve heard from so many healthcare workers who have already made that choice. And their decisions thin the ranks of those who are left behind to take care of the rest of us and whose jobs are now that much harder.
But, honestly, if so much of society has pretended that the pandemic is over, and has longed to get back to normal, can you really blame healthcare workers for wanting to do the same? This is the cost of two years spent prematurely pushing towards a return to normal, except, for the healthcare system, for our ability to get medical care, there might not be a normal to return to.
AMY GOODMAN: Last week, President Biden reiterated his support for keeping schools open during the COVID surge. This is what he said.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: We know that our kids can be safe when in school, by the way. That’s why I believe schools should remain open.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to get your response to this, Ed. We see the Chicago schools are closed because the Chicago Teachers Union says they’re not going to expose their teachers in this way. Other schools that are remaining open around the country, like in New York, are just vectors for infection.
ED YONG: So, I sympathize with everyone on this side of the debate, right? Like, on the one hand, you have parents who are really scared about putting their children in these conditions where this extremely transmissible virus is just going everywhere. I sympathize for parents who can’t handle remote schooling or just don’t have the option to do that. I sympathize with teachers who don’t feel that they can put themselves at risk anymore. I think, though, that we’re sort of — we’ve been put in a position where we’re having to choose, we’re having to, like, take sides between people who are all in the right. Like, this shouldn’t be a debate in the way it’s framed.
The jobs of the federal government should have been to control transmission of this virus and to control the pandemic to an extent where this shouldn’t even have been an issue. And so many of the measures that were necessary — you know, the rollout of rapid tests, mask mandates — all of these things have been, if anything, got pulled back at both the federal and the state level. There’s not been enough done to control the pandemic for two years now. And last year really wasn’t that much different. Like, because our policymakers have made bad decisions, it puts individual schools, teachers, parents in an impossible position and sets them against each other, when, in fact, I think the main problem is that the policies that should have protected all of us have not been put in place.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about what those policies should be. I mean, you’ve pointed out in your writing, for example, that when — obviously, for politicians, they want to put this behind them, so then talking about unmasking — the fact that there aren’t tests available now, though President Biden said he’s going to get half a billion out to the country, and the fact that Abbott, which makes Binax, one of the tests, destroyed millions of those tests.
ED YONG: Right, because we keep on treating this like a short-term problem. We keep on assuming that we’re going to get back to normal at some point in the near future without actually doing the work to get to that point. Rapid tests are a clear example of this. Like, why do we not have them deployed on a mass scale? Biden talks about deploying that number of tests out to people. It’s roughly like one-and-a-half tests per person.
And I also want to talk about the social measures that should have been put in place right from the start. Like, we know that a pandemic is a social problem. It’s not just a biomedical one. Yes, vaccines and therapeutics and diagnostic tests are great, but we need things that actually allow people to protect their livelihoods and their lives at the same time. And paid sick leave is a great example of this. It seems like a really weird measure to be talking about in the context of a pandemic, but if you can’t actually take the time off to isolate or to take care of yourself if you’re exposed, if your workplace conditions don’t allow you to do that, then how are you going to stop yourself from spreading this disease?
Like, we know that these things actually matter and can have an immediate impact, but they don’t seem to be part of the package of measures that we’ve been talking about. People sort of gravitate between just going on completely as normal or going to a strict lockdown. There are so many things in the middle. Like, we’ve talked about masking, we’ve talked about rapid tests, we’ve talked about paid sick leave. Ventilation is important. Having places where people can isolate is important. These kind of measures are going on in parts of the country but not everywhere, and there doesn’t seem to be any sort of federal push to really make them everywhere or to pressure states into actually putting them into place. And that is part of the problem. That is why we’re in the state where we’re having these horrendous discussions about schools and where we’re looking at a healthcare system that is collapsing under the sheer weight of infections.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think this could lead to Medicare for All? I mean, it has exposed the fracture of the entire system, a system that was broken already in terms of who gets healthcare and who doesn’t in this country. Now it’s who dies and who doesn’t.
ED YONG: Yeah. You know, people who are unvaccinated are actually, like, the uninsured, make a disproportionate — I’m saying this terribly. A lot of people who are unvaccinated are also uninsured, right? And that says something about the medical system in this country. Like, there’s this sort of tendency to paint unvaccinated people as all like antagonistic anti-vaxxers. And I think access is still actually a large problem that isn’t really grappled with.
I would hope that the lessons from these two years are that inequities harm us. You cannot fight a vaccine — you cannot fight a pandemic properly in a grossly unequal society such as what we currently live in. But that doesn’t seem to be the lesson that is being learned. Like, we’ve had lip service paid to the need to focus on inequities, but even from, like, leading public health voices, it seems to be a thing that is readily forgotten. And that is — you know, that is part of why we are where we are now. Unless we actually make efforts to protect the most vulnerable, to help people on low incomes, people from marginalized groups, disabled communities — unless we stop treating them like disposable commodities, we’re going to end up back in this situation that we currently find ourselves in.
AMY GOODMAN: The Supreme Court hearing oral arguments around Biden’s vaccine mandates, your thoughts?
ED YONG: I worry that we are — instead of learning the lessons that you’ve just talked about, that would make us better prepared for the next one, that we are setting legal precedent in place that would actually make us more vulnerable next time ’round. And, you know, there are many different examples of this. State legislatures around the country have put in orders that make it more difficult for people to put in, say, mask mandates or quarantine orders. That contributes to how hard it is to fight something like Omicron. It is going to make it more difficult to deal the next variants. It’s going to make it more difficult to deal with the next pandemics, which I guarantee you we will face.
AMY GOODMAN: Well —
ED YONG: I worry —
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Ed, we’re going to have to go, but I wanted to wish you a happy 40th birthday. I know it was very difficult. You wrote a piece talking about canceling your 40th birthday because of Omicron.
ED YONG: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Thank you so much for being with us. Ed Yong, science writer at The Atlantic, won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the pandemic. We’ll link to his pieces.
That does it for our show. Remember, wearing a mask is an act of love. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
When Cherriese Thompson heard the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s decision last week to cut quarantine time down from 10 days to five days, she was upset. At a time when hospitalizations were surging and isolation and quarantine procedures were already tricky for people to understand, Thompson, a third-year medicine resident in Northern California, felt the short quarantine window would only add confusion and put more people at risk of contracting the highly contagious Omicron variant.
“It’s just so upsetting,” Thompson said. “I feel like this is going to end up fueling the surge even more. It’s come to the point that we value money more than we value people’s livelihoods.”
The CDC made the decision to reduce the amount of time asymptomatic people with COVID-19 infections have to quarantine in order to ease labor shortages for the stressed airline industry. But health care workers say the new guidelines are ignoring their needs when hospitals are already in the midst of a surge and dealing with critical staffing shortages. Now, they say shorter quarantine times could only add to an already stressed health care system and disproportionately impact BIPOC health care workers and patients.
A recent study by Mercer found that the U.S. is facing a severe health care worker shortage and that by 2025 the country will lose approximately 29,400 nurse practitioners. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in December that hospitals had lost 9,000 jobs during October alone. Since the beginning of the pandemic, health care employment has dropped by 524,000. According to the World Health Organization, about 115,000 health care workers died from COVID-19 between January 2020 to May 2021. In Los Angeles County alone, more than 49,000 health care workers and first responders have been sick with the virus since February 2020. According to data collected by Fierce Healthcare, about 11,000 health care workers in 58 health care systems across the country have been fired or resigned due to a refusal to meet vaccine mandates.
On the same day the guidance was issued, Thompson began developing symptoms of COVID-19. She had visited family in Maryland over the holidays when her grandmother developed some symptoms. She’d received her booster shot of the vaccine, but her grandmother was still experiencing a high fever and Thompson had to consider taking her to the hospital. But, being a Black Jamaican woman, Thompson was unsure her grandmother would receive the best care possible due to the implicit racial bias that makes white health care workers less likely to believe Black patients. In a 2003 study by the National Academy of Medicine, they found that “racial and ethnic minorities receive lower-quality health care than white people — even when insurance status, income, age, and severity of conditions are comparable.”
“I was terrified to take her to the hospital,” Thompson said. “I was thinking, ‘At least I’m the best person to advocate for her because I’m in health care,’ but we’re still Black women.”
Thompson was eventually able to break her grandmother’s fever at home and give her the care she needed so that her health improved, but by the time she got back to California, her father began developing symptoms as well.
“I’m going to need to fly over there and advocate for my dad,” Thompson said. “I’ve witnessed the disparities in the micro- and macroaggressions and the inadequate care that people of color have experienced, in general, and then exacerbated by COVID.”
On Friday, Dec. 31, Thompson considered taking herself to the hospital because her oxygen levels dropped to 92% and she was short of breath. Fortunately, Thompson’s symptoms stabilized and her clinic decided to continue following a 10-day quarantine guideline for now.
“I think [the CDC’s] response is inappropriate especially for a population of workers that are already under so much stress, instead of shutting down again and paying people to stay home and get these infections under control,” Thompson said.
Thompson worked in the Intensive Care Unit during one of the first surges of COVID-19 and said it immediately made her want to quit. She witnessed one string of deaths after another, with little time to recover after each one.
“It just kept happening. We had to keep working,” she said. “It’s not just caring for patients who have the illness, but also the fear that patients experience when they are separated from family.”
Thompson says that amongst her co-residents, it is the residents of color who have mostly contracted COVID-19. Additionally, Thompson says that most of the hospitalizations she’s seen are Black, Indigenous, and patients of color — and the national numbers reflect that. Black people accounting for 15% of COVID-19 deaths where race is known in the country despite accounting for about 12% of the population. According to the CDC, Black Americans are 2.6 times as likely to be hospitalized for COVID-19 as white, non-Hispanic Americans, and about twice as likely to die from the virus than white, non-Hispanic Americans. As of Jan. 1, Black people account for the highest demographic spike in COVID-19 cases, with 270.5 per 100,000 population.
So far, residents across the country have advocated for hazard pay and higher wages to no avail. A first-year medical resident makes $57,500, and on average they made $64,000 in 2021, according to a Medscape report. Most work a minimum of 80 hours a week, averaging less than $16 an hour. They’ve also argued the government should continue the pause on student loans.
“I wish the government would actually support us health care workers so that we’re better able to support our patients,” says Thompson.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.