radiofree.asia

Category: health care

  • Carers Of The World Vs. Covid-19 Criminals

    As we enter the third year of the Covid-19 crisis, two battles are underway. One is led by the carers of the world in overcrowded hospitals, fighting to end the pandemic. Another is by corporate executives in closed boardrooms, fighting to prolong it. The question at the very center of both is this — who will control medical recipes worth billions of dollars, and millions of lives? The Progressive International is mobilizing nurses unions around the world to take on Big Pharma and the governments they have captured.

    The post Carers Of The World Vs. Covid-19 Criminals appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • 2.5 Million Nurses Demand UN Probe Into Rich Countries Blocking Patent Waivers

    A medical worker fills a syringe with the covid-19 vaccine

    More than two million nurses from 28 countries across the globe filed a complaint Monday calling on the United Nations to investigate the rich countries that are blocking a proposed patent waiver for coronavirus vaccines, an appeal that came as public health experts raced to understand the newly detected Omicron variant.

    In a detailed letter addressed to Dr. Tlaleng Mofokeng, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Physical and Mental Health, dozens of nursing unions noted that “the end of this pandemic is nowhere in sight” as “Covid-19 cases continue to soar in numerous parts of the world, while pharmaceutical companies and governments have failed to ensure that critical treatments and vaccines are distributed equitably in order to respond to the pandemic.”

    “This unequal distribution of vaccines is not only grossly unjust for the people in low- and moderate-income countries who remain at high risk for contracting and further transmitting Covid-19, it also provides for the possibility for the development of new variants, some of which may be resistant to the current available vaccines,” the filing reads. “The development and spread of new variants pose a dire risk to all people around the world.”

    The complaint specifically targets the European Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway, and Singapore, wealthy nations that have stonewalled the patent waiver at the World Trade Organization (WTO), defying the will of a majority of that institution’s member countries.

    By blocking the patent waiver, the small group of rich nations is “endangering millions of lives around the world,” the nurses declare in a petition accompanying their formal U.N. complaint.

    “This is a clear violation of our right to health — of nurses, caregivers, and patients. So we are now taking them to court,” the petition continues. “We demand an urgent investigation into the obstruction of the waiver by these Covid-19 criminals.”

    The WTO was set to consider the patent waiver once more at its biannual ministerial conference this week, but the meeting was postponed indefinitely due to the spread of the Omicron variant.

    Coordinated by Global Nurses United and Progressive International, the nurses’ U.N. complaint was submitted as scientists and political leaders worldwide grappled with the potential threat posed by Omicron, the fifth coronavirus strain to be designated a “variant of concern” by the World Health Organization (WHO). First detected in Botswana, cases of the variant have since been identified in South Africa, Australia, Israel, the U.K., Canada, and elsewhere.

    On Sunday, the WHO issued an update noting that “it is not yet clear whether Omicron is more transmissible (e.g., more easily spread from person to person) compared to other variants, including Delta.” The organization also said there’s not yet enough evidence to determine whether Omicron causes more severe disease than other variants, or whether it is resistant to existing vaccines.

    “Studies currently underway or underway shortly include assessments of transmissibility, severity of infection (including symptoms), performance of vaccines and diagnostic tests, and effectiveness of treatments,” the WHO said.

    In its complaint on Sunday, the coalition of nursing unions argues that the proliferation of variants is a predictable outcome of rich nations’ refusal to “distribute vaccines and treatments equitably to the vast majority of people of low- and moderate-income countries.”

    “Nurses and other healthcare workers have been on the frontlines of the Covid-19 pandemic response, and we have witnessed the staggering numbers of deaths and the immense suffering caused by political inaction,” the filing states. “High-income countries have procured upwards of 7 billion confirmed vaccine doses, while low income countries have only been able to procure approximately 300 million doses. This has created what public health advocates around the world have described as ‘vaccine apartheid.’”

    “It is now clear: Continued opposition to the TRIPS waiver is resulting in the violation of human rights of peoples across the world,” the document continues, citing Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. “These countries have violated our rights and the rights of our patients — and caused the loss of countless lives — of nurses and other caregivers and those we have cared for.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Washington Mental Health Workers Win Safety Strike

    Nurses and mental health techs at a Tukwila, Washington, facility have won their safety strike after three and a half months on the picket line. Under the settlement, management agreed to staff three security guards for the day shift and two for nights, as well as to restore fired workers to their positions. The contract, which covers 220 workers, also includes 5 percent annual raises over its three-year term, plus a $5,000 bonus. And it establishes staff-to-patient ratios that the union says set a new national standard for behavioral health.

    The post Washington Mental Health Workers Win Safety Strike appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Opinion | Nurses unions around the world mobilize against Big Pharma

    This story originally appeared in Progressive International on Nov. 29, 2021. It is shared here with permission.

    The pandemic rages on—not by accident, but by design.

    As we enter the third year of the COVID-19 crisis, two battles are underway. One is led by the carers of the world in overcrowded hospitals, fighting to end the pandemic. Another is by corporate executives in closed boardrooms, fighting to prolong it.

    The question at the very center of both is this—who will control medical recipes worth billions of dollars, and millions of lives?

    If more of our factories, wherever they might be, could start producing vaccines for the people in their countries, companies like Pfizer would lose their monopoly. They know this.

    As some countries roll out booster programs, less than 6% of Africa’s more than a billion people have been fully inoculated. Big pharmaceutical companies are letting the pandemic go on—and why not, according to a recent estimate, Pfizer is expected to make astronomical profits—$107bn in cumulative sales by the end of 2022 on its COVID-19 vaccines, now being dubbed a “megablockbuster.” Key to this is complete control over production, price, and profit. If more of our factories, wherever they might be, could start producing vaccines for the people in their countries, companies like Pfizer would lose their monopoly. They know this.

    Right now, the World Trade Organization is considering a proposal that would temporarily waive patent protections on vaccine recipes. Over 164 countries have supported it. But the pharmaceutical industry is fighting back, hard—through the governments it lobbies. The European Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway, and Singapore have successfully blocked it for over a year.

    But as the ministers convene, once again, in Geneva on Nov. 30, a new global movement is readying its fight: 2.5 million nurses are taking these COVID-19 criminals to court. In an unprecedented move, unions from 28 countries, coordinated by the Global Nurses United and the Progressive International—have filed a complaint with the United Nations alleging human rights violations by these countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, whose end, they write, “is nowhere in sight.”

    In a closed-door meeting about how to get more vaccines to the world’s poorest people, the chief executive of Pfizer attacked Dr. Tedros, the head of the World Health Organization, for speaking “emotionally” when he called for greater balance in the global distribution of vaccines. From Brazil to India, the United States to Taiwan, nurses are bringing their emotions to bear. They have been on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic response and witnessed the staggering numbers of deaths and the immense suffering caused by political inaction. From the front lines, they prepare to hold these countries to account with a rallying cry: We, who care—we bear witness. Now, we testify.

    The nurses’ complaint is not simply a legal fight: it is radical call to expose and defeat the governments that have been holding the lives of people hostage in order to service corporate superprofits.

    The nurses’ complaint is not simply a legal fight: it is radical call to expose and defeat the governments that have been holding the lives of people hostage in order to service corporate superprofits.

    The leaders of these nations have been explicit about the world they seek to build: Early in the pandemic, the UK parliament’s foreign affairs select committee called for a “G20 for public health.” This is a revealing analogy.  Much like the G20, these countries have, in effect, hijacked international institutions and actively undermined the sovereignty of other nations, while enjoying complete impunity for their actions.

    Consider the principal opponent to the waiver proposal at the WTO: the EU. In May 2020, European Parliamentarians, the only members directly elected by citizens in the EU system, voted to back the waiver to “address global production constraints and supply shortage.” Yet, for the next six months, the European Commission, which negotiates on behalf of Europe at the WTO has stubbornly resisted the waiver. This is entirely unsurprising if we look at who the European commissioners and their cabinets meet: Since March 2020, they have had 161 meetings with Big Pharma in the same time frame that they managed to meet one NGO in favour of the waiver.

    Nothing stood in their way as they throttled democracy and gave free reign to a deadly virus. Not global health organizations, two-thirds of which are headquartered in the US, UK, and Switzerland. Not international institutions, whose austerity agendas, have over decades, decimated public health systems in developing nations even as 83% of all government health spending occurred in the affluent world. Not the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—which, it turns out, urged Oxford to reverse their decision to share their vaccine technology with the world.

    The COVID-19 criminals have made their disregard for universal human rights and international law clear. It is now up to us to reclaim the enormous power that the UN charter, the WTO, WHO, and international law hold, and deploy them as tools. That is why this translational coalition is moving the Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council—to investigate—and find against the governments in question.

    In the complaint addressed to Dr. Tlaleng Mofokeng, the UN special rapporteur for physical and mental health, we articulated our demands:

    First, undertake an urgent mission to the World Trade Organization: For too long, these countries have been wholly unaccountable, disguising their submission to corporate interests behind technical jargon. Their days of impunity are over.

    Second, make a determination that the obstruction of the waiver constitutes a continuing breach of these governments’ obligations to guarantee the right to physical and mental health of everyone. Healthcare is our right. What we’re witnessing cannot be defined as an inefficiency in our system, or the failure of our politics — it is, in no uncertain terms — a crime against us all.

    The nurses have given their testimony: “These countries have violated our rights and the rights of our patients—and caused the loss of countless lives— of nurses and other caregivers and those we have cared for.”

    Today is the day the historic case of the Carers of the World vs. Covid-19 Criminals begins.

    Add your name here. At 100,000 signatures, the petition with your signature will reach the UN Human Rights Council.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • WHO, South Africa urge nations to lift ‘naive’ Omicron travel bans

    Common Dreams Logo

    This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Nov. 28, 2021. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

    The World Health Organization on Sunday echoed calls by South Africa’s president for countries to eschew travel bans targeting southern Africans amid the spread of the heavily mutated Omicron variant of the coronavirus.

    “Travel restrictions may play a role in slightly reducing the spread of Covid-19 but place a heavy burden on lives and livelihoods,” the WHO said in a statement calling for borders to remain open. “If restrictions are implemented, they should not be unnecessarily invasive or intrusive, and should be scientifically based, according to the International Health Regulations, which is a legally binding instrument of international law recognized by over 190 nations.”

    Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO’s regional director for Africa, added that “the speed and transparency of the South African and Botswana governments in informing the world of the new variant is to be commended. WHO stands with African countries which had the courage to boldly share lifesaving public health information, helping protect the world against the spread of Covid-19.”

    In recent days, dozens of nations including the United States have prohibited travelers from numerous nations in southern Africa due to concerns about the Omicron variant, which was first identified in Botswana earlier this month. On Friday, the WHO classified the new strain as a “variant of concern.”

    On Sunday, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa urged nations that have imposed bans on African travelers to rescind what he called the “scientifically unjustified” restrictions.

    “The only thing the prohibition on travel will do is to further damage the economies of the affected countries and undermine their ability to respond to, and recover from, the pandemic,” Ramaphosa said. “These restrictions are unjustified and unfairly discriminate against our country and our southern African sister countries.”

    South African vaccinologist Shabir Madhi told Al Jazeera that it is “naive” for world leaders “to believe they can stop the spread of this variant with a blanket ban on countries in southern Africa.”

    “The virus has already found its way into these societies from individuals that haven’t even traveled to or come into contact with anyone from southern Africa,” he said. “In South Africa, we have one of the globe’s best Covid sequencing capacities based on our experience with treating HIV and TB. We have been ahead of the game for a while now and we are thus a victim of our success.”

    Nicole A. Errett, a professor of public health at the University of Washington, told The Washington Post that by the time countries enact pandemic travel bans, “the cat’s already out of the bag, so to speak.”

    “Omicron has already been detected in other continents,” she noted. “A travel ban could in theory buy some time by reducing the spread of new seed cases, but we are talking on the order of days to weeks.”

    Sunday’s World Health Organization statement and Ramaphosa’s call follow an admonition by WHO Health Emergencies Program executive director Dr. Michael Ryan to avoid “knee-jerk reactions” to the Omicron variant.

    “It’s really important that we remain open, and stay focused,” Ryan said on Friday.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Did You Share Personal Information With a ‘Crisis Pregnancy Center’? Tell Us What Happened Next.

    An illustration shows a person sitting in a waiting room surrounded by ominous eyes.

    Amid a new wave of restrictive laws and looming Supreme Court battles, one important aspect of America’s abortion wars has gone mostly unnoticed: how some anti-abortion groups are using patients’ private health information to promote their social agenda – affecting reproductive options for women around the U.S.   

    According to researchers, people seeking reproductive services may be unwittingly sharing sensitive information when they make contact – in person or online – with so-called “crisis pregnancy centers,” many of which are run by anti-abortion organizations. In some states, these centers vastly outnumber abortion and family planning providers. And although these facilities often resemble licensed medical clinics, they aren’t always required to follow health privacy laws that regulate how personal health information is collected and shared.

    As a result, people seeking abortions might  hand over data they wrongly assume is protected by law. 

    You can help Reveal investigate how anti-abortion groups may be using your most sensitive medical information without your knowledge or consent. 

    If you’ve ever contacted a crisis pregnancy center by phone or online, searched for information, or attended an appointment, we’d like to know what happened next. Did you start seeing ads for adoption or baby-related products in your social media feeds? Were you targeted for outreach via email? Did you receive phone calls? In-person visits?

    To tell us about your experience, please use the form below. We guarantee that we will never publish your name, personal information or details of your experience without your consent. Only a small group of Reveal reporters and editors will have access to your full responses.

    Did you share personal information with a ‘crisis pregnancy center’? Tell us what happened next.

    Powered by CityBase Screendoor.

    Byard Duncan can be reached at bduncan@revealnews.org, and Grace Oldham can be reached at goldham@revealnews.org. Follow them on Twitter: @ByardDuncan and @grace_c_oldham.

    Did You Share Personal Information With a ‘Crisis Pregnancy Center’? Tell Us What Happened Next. is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • The Right Is Hijacking Progressive Arguments to Undermine Public Health

    Demonstrators march during an anti-mandate protest against the COVID-19 vaccine as part of a "Global Freedom Movement" in New York on November 20, 2021.

    As COVID-19 has ravaged the U.S., many progressive health care activists and organizations such as National Nurses United have illustrated how the pandemic has only made worse what was already intolerable about our for-profit medical system, and continued to demand universal, publicly financed, single-payer health care. Some on the anti-vax right have instead used the “preexisting conditions” of our health care system to discredit the people and measures which are trying to stop the pandemic, often disingenuously coopting progressive arguments in the process.

    The profit-driven nature of our health care system and the pain that it causes the U.S. people have not just galvanized some in support of single-payer, but unfortunately have also helped to seed the ground for the mistrust that cynical political actors have cultivated to make people hostile to public health measures. The following are examples of said cynical political actors doing just that:

    • Former President Donald Trump has claimed on more than one occasion that doctors and hospitals are part of a conspiracy to enrich themselves by saying patients died of COVID when they actually didn’t.
    • Conservative activist Candace Owens tweeted: “‘The Covid vaccine saves lives, which is why the government is making it free!’ K. So explain to me why insulin and asthma inhalers cost so much money. If the vaccines are really about the government trying to save your life — why do life-saving medicines cost so much?”
    • One of the central talking points of the anti-vax movement has been that Big Pharma was involved in inventing or manipulating the pandemic in order to push vaccines to enrich itself.

    All of these claims are false, but they appear to some to have validity because they rest at least tangentially on facts: Hospitals and health insurance are too expensive. We are constantly bombarded with horror stories about the ridiculous expenses of medical care: $54,000 for a COVID test, $16,000 for having a baby, $1,000 for an ambulance, and those examples are all just from insured people. Tens of millions have no insurance, and GoFundMe has become the indispensable website for the insured and uninsured alike. Then there is the genre of allegedly heartwarming news stories of people overcoming dystopian reality, like the girl selling lemonade to pay for brain surgery or the high school robotics team constructing a special wheelchair for a little boy when insurance wouldn’t pay for it. As if to put a fine point on the absurdity, just recently a story made the rounds of someone who sat in a local emergency room for hours and left without any treatment, then received a bill for $700.

    Adding to this ongoing scam, pharmaceutical companies do their share to bilk patients for their medications. From pharma bros and Sen. Joe Manchin’s daughter jacking up prices on their company’s respective drugs, to something as common as insulin being much more costly in the U.S. than elsewhere, Big Pharma plays a significant role in why our health care system is as expensive and dysfunctional as it is. Its attempts to reap as much profit as possible from the COVID vaccine program, even at the expense of leaving much of the world unvaccinated, do not recommend it, either.

    In the face of all this, the government has hung the sick, and ultimately all of us, out to dry. Consider the absurdity of Trump and President Joe Biden, both opponents of single-payer health care, in last year’s campaign endorsing free treatment and vaccines for COVID, while ignoring the financial plight of people suffering from every other disease, ailment and injury, and denouncing efforts to guarantee those people coverage as unworkable and socialistic. As the rest of the developed world has figured out how to provide health care to all their citizens, we still maintain a system in which an estimated 45,000 people die every year from lack of health care, and in which, one study found, 500,000 people cite medical bills as either a primary or contributing cause of bankruptcy annually.

    Why? Because hospital, health insurance and pharma corporations each have corrupt, symbiotic relationships with our legislators and regulators which run counter to the general welfare. This has become especially clear as the reconciliation “Build Back Better” bill has been sliced and diced by Senators Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and a select number of House Democrats, all of whom think it’s a bridge too far to make sure seniors can afford their prescriptions, eyeglasses and the teeth in their heads. Follow the money and one finds that this is not primarily an issue of dearly held ideological differences but rather rank corruption and influence-peddling. Sinema has received oodles of cash from the health care and pharma industries, Manchin was a beneficiary of his daughter’s company’s largesse, and Democratic representatives who voted against drug pricing reform have been funded by Big Pharma.

    All of this is true, and it’s a sad, infuriating mess, but it does not mean doctors and hospitals are inventing COVID cases. It doesn’t mean vaccines are a scam, and it doesn’t mean the pandemic is either fake or engineered.

    The bad faith arguments which the right concocts on these subjects have no need of being coherent. When Trump accuses the doctors and hospitals of inventing COVID cases for money, he doesn’t suggest nationalizing health care like Britain’s National Health Service. When Owens asks why medications are so expensive, she doesn’t endorse Medicare for All. When the anti-vaxxers complain about Big Pharma’s ill-gotten gains, they aren’t out there supporting Sen. Bernie Sanders’s plan to let Medicare negotiate for lower drug prices for seniors. Each of these three potential policy solutions is instead met by these factions with the same standard chorus of “Socialism! Tyranny!”

    However false the claims are, however fake the concern, the right has no doubt been effective in how they use the faults of the health care system to attack doctors and civil servants who are charged with protecting the health of the public.

    Right-wing ideologues and politicos, though they are some of the main defenders of for-profit health care and beneficiaries of its lucre, are still astute enough to recognize that the system they hail is highly dysfunctional and hurts a lot of people — physically, emotionally and financially. They recognize that the profit motive of the hospital, insurance and pharmaceutical industries creates perverse incentives to maximize private gain at the expense of the public good. They recognize that this situation persists precisely because these industries have incredible control over government health care policy.

    They recognize all these problems, but they won’t identify any of them as such to the public, nor do anything to solve them. They merely expose edges of this reality to their followers as it suits their purposes — in this case, to make political hay out of saying the government and Big Pharma are trying to oppress and/or kill you. In so doing, they encourage selfish and self-destructive behavior during a pandemic and let loose a deluge of anger and violence against local, state and federal health officials, doctors, teachers, school boards, store clerks, food service workers and flight attendants.

    There are many factors involved in creating this dynamic, but one is no doubt the rapacious nature of our economy as a whole, and of the health care system in particular, which brutalizes the public. This status quo of societal and political indifference to sickness and bankruptcy reinforces the kind of Thomas Hobbesian mentality that the right is trying to instill — “the war of all against all” — as they seek to shred not only the patchwork social safety net, but also just basic norms of civil society, such as taking minimal precautions to protect others. As long as we make health care a commodity rather than a right, the cynical, dishonest arguments that are currently trying to discredit public health officials and measures will only endure: “They didn’t care about you then, what makes you think they care about you now?”

    Whereas the right is attempting to scapegoat public health officials for the problems caused by a for-profit system, they are not the ones with the power to make insulin or chemo free at the point of service, like vaccines. It is the politicians who are the ones who need to either be convinced, replaced or circumvented. How do we do this? In some respects, it seems like this issue, as with so many others, is perpetually in the doldrums. Our political system, especially at the federal level, is frozen by legalized bribery and prevented from addressing actual problems in a substantive way. Therefore, the fact that polling shows a majority favor a single-payer system is inconsequential to most of our representatives in an allegedly representative democracy.

    Moreover, simply the structure of government in the United States is a unique impediment. Because a party has to control both houses of Congress as well as the presidency at the same time in order to get most things done, most things don’t get done. Even when Democrats do hold this trifecta, there seems to always be a catch. This time it’s Manchin and Sinema, last time it was then-Senators Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson.

    To demonstrate the degree to which our system bogs down progress, whereas President Harry Truman started pushing for single-payer at roughly the same time as the United Kingdom, they have had the National Health Service since the late 1940s, but here we are. President Lyndon Johnson was only able to get Medicare and Medicaid through because an inordinate number of liberals were elected to Congress in his 1964 landslide.

    Since the advent of Reaganism and the capitulation of the Democratic Party to neoliberalism and privatization, some strides have been made, although they have tended to be more market-based. To wit, both President Barack Obama and Biden ran on the public option, and neither produced it.

    This invariably gets into the status of the Democratic Party: Is it the only way to get to the goal, or is it hopelessly compromised by vested interests? That discussion is at least as old as former Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan, and there are valid points all around, but one thing that is certainly necessary is a greater focus on primaries and removing the Democrats who are the most captured by corporate power. If enough who oppose single-payer are removed, others will begin to accept it.

    The numbers are there. A significant majority of Democrats favor a Medicare for All system, the exit polling from the 2020 Democratic primaries demonstrates this. But because Biden beat Sanders, the corporate media and establishment party functionaries spun that as the voters agreeing more with Biden’s policy views rather than their impression of his “electability.”

    Often it seems that the party is more intent on strangling any social democratic policies than it is on opposing the rise of fascism, but in carrying out the former, they lay the groundwork for the latter. The dynamic described in this article is only one example of such: The precarity to which we expose so many people and the suffering they endure is hastening the rise of authoritarianism. Time was when Democrats understood this, as with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt implementing the New Deal in part as a bulwark against it.

    If change at the federal level is a remote possibility, a state-by-state approach is another route. Canada did not adopt universal health care all at once, it started in Saskatchewan after decades of activism on the part of agrarian and labor groups. Creating local and state organizations around single-payer and associated issues is a critical piece of building power and momentum. Doing so around preexisting union, faith and other networks could be especially impactful. As much as voting in the right people is necessary, ultimately there also need to be groups and spaces outside the partisan framework which are issue-oriented and not subservient to a party’s immediate electoral fortunes.

    Ballot measures are an especially potent example of this. On issues from raising the minimum wage, to legalizing marijuana, to expanding Medicaid, voters in a wide range of states, including deep red states, have voted for significant progressive change through ballot measures. Organizers in the states that have yet to expand Medicaid are working on this for the 2022 and 2024 elections. This isn’t single-payer, but defending and extending existing public health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid is critical in and of itself and to realizing that eventual goal. Find out what activism is going on in your neighborhood, state or region, and plug in or create the spark yourself.

    Much of the work of convincing people on the policy substance has already been done; it is largely a question of translating belief into action. Let’s use progressive arguments for progressive ends.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Hypocritical Oath

    The end of medical school is a moment that, for many medical school graduates, is several years — sometimes several generations — in the making. After four grueling years the graduate is ready to officially get that “MD” behind their name. But what else has the four years of medical school done for the soon-to-be physician? As previously discussed, medical school is not an apolitical environment in which “medical knowledge” is simply passed on to each student. Mechanisms are put in place to condition students to be less likely to question systems of power. Overall, the medical school structure serves as an indoctrination system. By the time they graduate, medical students are forced to take on massive amounts of student loans — the average medical school graduate has around $250,000 in student loan debt — which serves as a form of economic control and coercion.

    The post The Hypocritical Oath appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Alarm grows as COVID cases spike in Europe and US deaths in 2021 top 2020’s toll

    Common Dreams Logo

    This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Nov. 21, 2021. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

    Europe is in the grip of a potentially devastating fourth coronavirus wave and the United States has now recorded more Covid-19 deaths in 2021 than it did in 2020, heightening alarm among public health experts who fear another brutal winter surge.

    Dr. Hans Kluge, the World Health Organization’s regional director for Europe, warned Saturday that the coronavirus could kill 500,000 more people in Europe by March if political leaders don’t take immediate action to forestall the current spread and increase vaccine uptake, which has been lagging in parts of the continent due, in some cases, to anti-vaccine sentiment.

    “Countries need to stop hoarding tests, drugs, and vaccines and big pharmaceutical companies need to stop hoarding technology.”

    “Covid-19 has become once again the number one cause of mortality in our region,” Kluge told the BBC.

    In an effort to quell a major spike in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, the Austrian government announced Friday that it would institute a nationwide lockdown and soon mandate coronavirus vaccinations for its entire adult population. Thus far, around 65% of Austria’s population has been fully vaccinated—one of the lowest rates in Western Europe.

    “The virus is back with new rigor in Europe again and new catastrophic waves are imminent in Africa and Asia,” said Shailly Gupta, communications adviser with Doctors Without Borders’ Access Campaign, pointing to regions that have been denied adequate supplies of vaccines and therapeutics. “Wealthy nations need to understand that unless everyone everywhere is vaccinated, the situation is not going to change.”

    “Countries need to stop hoarding tests, drugs, and vaccines and big pharmaceutical companies need to stop hoarding technology if they really want to control this pandemic,” she added.

    Austria’s mandate, set to take effect in February, prompted immediate backlash. On Saturday, tens of thousands of people—including many aligned with the country’s far-right Freedom Party—took to the streets of Vienna to denounce the public health measure, which Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg said is necessary to break the nation’s vaccination plateau and prevent further deaths.

    “We have too many political forces in this country who vehemently and massively fight against this,” he said in a speech Friday. “This is irresponsible. It is an attack on our health system. Goaded by these anti-vaxxers and from fake news, too many people among us have not been vaccinated. The consequence is overfilled intensive care stations and enormous human suffering. No one can want that.”

    The Associated Press reported that “demonstrations against virus restrictions also took place in Switzerland, Croatia, Italy, Northern Ireland, and the Netherlands on Saturday, a day after Dutch police opened fire on protesters and seven people were injured in rioting that erupted in Rotterdam.”

    Last week, the Biden administration suspended enforcement activities related to its vaccination and testing mandates for private businesses after a federal appeals court temporarily halted the requirements.

    “Protesters rallied against coronavirus restrictions and mandatory Covid-19 passes needed in many European countries to enter restaurants, Christmas markets, or sports events, as well as mandatory vaccinations,” AP noted. “The Austrian lockdown will start Monday and comes as average daily deaths have tripled in recent weeks and hospitals in heavily hit states have warned that intensive care units are reaching capacity.”

    As The Week‘s Ryan Cooper noted in a recent column, “There is a clear inverse relationship between shots and spread” in Europe.

    “The countries suffering truly galloping outbreaks—mostly places to the south and east like Greece, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, and Slovakia—are typically below 70% full vaccination, often quite far below. By contrast, there appears to be a rough breakpoint near 75-80% vaccination where the rate of case growth is much slower. It’s surely not a coincidence Portugal and Spain are the most-vaccinated countries on the continent, and both have thus far mostly avoided a big resurgence.”

    In the US, meanwhile, data from the federal government and Johns Hopkins University show that the official Covid-19 death toll in 2021 surpassed 385,457 on Saturday, topping 2020 fatalities. The nation’s total death count currently stands at 770,800—the highest in the world.

    “The spread of the highly contagious Delta variant and low vaccination rates in some communities were important factors [this year],” the Wall Street Journal reported. “The milestone comes as Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations move higher again in places such as New England and the upper Midwest, with the seven-day average for new cases recently closer to 90,000 a day after it neared 70,000 last month.”

    The surge comes as few public health restrictions remain in place across the US. Last week, the Biden administration suspended enforcement activities related to its vaccination and testing mandates for private businesses after a federal appeals court temporarily halted the requirements.

    All US adults are now eligible for booster shots, but public health experts have cautioned that the broad availability of third doses may not do much to stem the current spike in cases given that it’s largely being fueled by the unvaccinated. Less than 60% of the US population is fully vaccinated against Covid-19, according to the latest figures from Our World in Data.

    A recent analysis by the Financial Times found that more booster shots have been administered in rich countries over a three-month period than total doses have been given in poor countries in all of 2021. The head of the WHO called for a moratorium on booster shots in August in an effort to bolster vaccination drives in poor countries, but the US and other rich countries dismissed his demand.

    Just 5% of people in low-income countries have received at least one coronavirus vaccine dose.

    “The evidence isn’t there that a large rollout of boosters is really going to have that much impact on the epidemic,” argued Ira Longini Jr., a vaccine expert and professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida.

    Tom Philpott of Mother Jones wrote Saturday that “in the popular imagination, 2020 gets all the bad press, but this year has been no sunny day at the beach, either.”

    “Sure, several effective Covid-19 vaccines emerged, but so did the highly contagious Delta variant, as well as new, more virulent strains of anti-vax sentiment, tightly yoked to conservative political ideology,” Philpott noted. “Worst of all, intellectual property hoarding has meant that the vaccines have so far largely bypassed low-income nations of the Global South, wreaking untold human misery and giving the virus ample opportunity to generate more contagious and/or more virulent strains.”

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • 35,000 Us Healthcare Workers Avert Strike

    Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest healthcare providers and hospital networks in the US, reached a tentative agreement with an alliance of unions just two days before a historic strike. The four-year agreement includes pay raises and measures to address understaffing, while withdrawing a two-tier pay system that would pay new hires up to a third less than current workers. In the next few weeks, workers will vote to ratify it and continue to work as scheduled.

    The post 35,000 Us Healthcare Workers Avert Strike appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Nurses’ Strike Signals Kaiser’s End As Union Haven

    Across corporate America, relations between companies and their labor unions range from chilly to ice-cold. Not at Kaiser Permanente – the California-based healthcare giant. Kaiser has long been seen as having the nation’s best labor-management partnership. Now the partnership finds itself in crisis as 34,000 Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers prepare to strike on Monday, in what would be the largest walkout in this fall’s strike wave.

    The post Nurses’ Strike Signals Kaiser’s End As Union Haven appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • A Real Day For Veterans

    Eliminating war and militarism would allow us to focus on reducing or preventing the harm caused by the existential threats. We would reap additional benefits as well. Reduced fear and suspicion of “other,” reduced stress, anxiety, and worry, a cleaner environment, an improved democracy, greater liberty, and less human suffering would accompany a fiscal shift from militarism to actual life-affirming needs.

    The post A Real Day For Veterans appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Why Did the DoD Abandon a Report Tracking 139 Military Mental Health Programs?

    Soldier in military fatigues touches head as mental health professional reaches out

    Air Force Capt. Ben Landry struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts and checked himself into Cedar Springs Hospital in Colorado in 2020. He was lucky. “I got support from my unit,” he said.

    Not everyone at the hospital did. Officers, Captain Landry heard, punished troops for seeking mental health services, issuing letters of reprimand or Article 15 disciplinary procedures, which can reduce pay and rank.

    For years, Captain Landry had endured Air Force Suicide Prevention Program mandatory lectures on how to identify symptoms of distress that had, unintentionally, ostracized him as “a danger to society,” he said.

    His wife, Aleha, and their four children, have also struggled while continuing to advocate for military spouses and their families to be included in military psychological health programming. “It’s been hard on all of us,” Aleha told Truthout. In an op-ed, she called the Air Force’s Suicide Prevention Program a “Band-Aid program” that sent Captain Landry “further underground and only coached him on what not to say.”

    Now, President Joe Biden is announcing a new military veteran and suicide prevention strategy in an attempt to address a larger problem of how the U.S. military treats service members’ mental health conditions, including the “adoption of rigorous program evaluation” for suicide prevention programs.

    But, since at least 2012, the military knew it had an accountability problem for programs on suicide, substance abuse, PTSD and sexual assault, according to unreleased Department of Defense (DoD) records provided to Truthout. While the military grappled with the psychological consequences of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the DoD was spending about $1 billion annually on mental health programs of questionable effectiveness with scant accountability, the unreleased DoD records, which include individual program evaluations, show.

    In 2019, the DoD produced a final report out of a $53 million project that evaluated 139 military psychological health programs worldwide across the armed forces. It states that many programs, like Air Force Suicide Prevention, did not clearly track costs. Other programs had insufficient staffing and resources, and most lacked sufficient data to determine if a program improved a person’s mental health, according to the report.

    While the Air Force program prevented suicides, according to a separate 2010 study, it had not established adequate monitoring to “secure long-term effectiveness.” The more recent internal DoD evaluation scored the program in the bottom third of the military’s 139 programs. No one knew, for example, if the lectures Landry attended increased help-seeking behavior and reduced suicide.

    “There is insufficient evidence for or against suicide prevention efforts,” explained Mike Colston, a retired Navy captain and former director for Mental Health Programs in DoD’s Health Services Policy and Oversight office. That’s why “program evaluation is essential to research, track outcomes and discover programs that can do both those things,” he told Truthout.

    But, the DoD’s Defense Health Agency (DHA), established to manage military health care, never released the 2019 final report to Congress or military leadership, and abandoned the project infrastructure created to continually assess programs.

    Why?

    In 2011, the Pentagon’s Program Analysis Division — recently formed by then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates to study the DoD’s most complex strategic problems — wanted to know which military psychological health programs actually improved the mental health of service members and their families.

    Many programs had been created or expanded, and no one knew how many existed, their cost or their health outcomes. The problem, explained Rani Hoff, director of Yale’s Northeast Program Evaluation Center, was that the “programs were deployed willy-nilly with no guidelines or oversight,” and had little or no evidence base to know if services were effective.

    In turn, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Cost Assessment & Program Evaluation directed a massive evaluation of the DoD’s growing billion-dollar program network. The job went to the Defense Centers of Excellence. “We had a proliferation of programs that were well-intentioned,” said Jonathan Woodson, a former assistant secretary of defense for health affairs who authorized an expansion of the project. “But we needed a process to vet them.”

    Moreover, a series of directives demanded a reckoning. In 2012, President Barack Obama’s Executive Order 13625 ordered the DoD to review programs and rank them by effectiveness, including health outcomes. Additionally, at least three succeeding annual National Defense Authorization Acts required the DoD to “eliminate gaps and redundancies,” report on “the present state of behavioral health services,” and detail “improvements” in treatments.

    In 2016, then-Navy Captain Colston of the mental health oversight office testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Personnel, explaining that the project was “working internally to make psychological health and traumatic brain injury efforts more effective, cost-efficient, and beneficial to Service Members, Veterans, and their families.” He noted these services “account for more than $1 billion annually.”

    To begin, the project measured a proxy for outcomes — effective administrative function — to at least determine if programs worked as intended. It was, Woodson explained, an “iterative approach,” one that would, eventually, measure health outcomes. But, to do that, programs first had to collect the data.

    Programs wanted to improve — and some were making progress — when the DHA closed the evaluation project in 2019. To explain its decision, the DHA cited a changed “operational landscape” in its response to Truthout’s Freedom of Information Act request, and also claimed releasing the final report “could damage progress” it had “made with more standards and standardization of military treatment facilities.” The DHA did not respond when Truthout followed up, asking for clarification.

    The DHA also cited two non-concurring memos critical of the report. However, Woodson called the agency’s response “an awful explanation.” Hoff called the memos accurate but unfair, and said the project was unable to measure outcomes not because of a flaw in its method, but because programs never collected data to do so. Currently, the report is stuck in bureaucratic limbo, as its findings become increasingly outdated. Still, experts argue there is still a need for rigorous assessment.

    Meanwhile, Captain Landry, now in the Air Force Reserves, “is in a good place,” he said. “I’m on the right medication,” he told Truthout. “I see the right people. I’ve got a good circle of family and friends.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • St. Vincent Nurses Strike Sadly Reaches Eight Months

    The historic St. Vincent Hospital nurses strike will reach the eight-month mark,  another sad milestone in their struggle against Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare, a for-profit corporation that has spent more than $100 million and engaged in a number of unfair labor practices to retaliate against the nurses for exercising their right to advocate for safer patient care. The strike is the longest nurses strike in state history, and one of the longest of several strikes by workers across the nation, who are standing up to corporate greed and the devaluation of essential workers in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    The post St. Vincent Nurses Strike Sadly Reaches Eight Months appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Strikes At Huntington, West Virginia Hospital And Metal Production Facility

    One thousand support staff the Huntington, West Virginia hospital system voted October 21 to authorize a 10-day strike when their current contract expires November 2. The contract covers maintenance and service workers, licensed practical nurses, and other medical support workers at Cabell Huntington Hospital and Saint Mary’s Medical Center organized under the Service Employees International Union.

    The post Strikes At Huntington, West Virginia Hospital And Metal Production Facility appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Nursing Home Residents Are Overlooked in Scramble for COVID Antibody Treatments

    A man enters the Regeneron Clinic at a monoclonal antibody treatment site in Pembroke Pines, Florida, on August 19, 2021.

    Of the dozens of patients Dr. Jim Yates has treated for covid-19 at his long-term care center in rural Alabama, this one made him especially nervous.

    The 60-year-old man, who had been fully vaccinated, was diagnosed with a breakthrough infection in late September. Almost immediately, he required supplemental oxygen, and lung exams showed ominous signs of worsening disease. Yates, who is medical director of Jacksonville Health and Rehabilitation, a skilled nursing facility 75 miles northeast of Birmingham, knew his patient needed more powerful interventions — and fast.

    At the first sign of the man’s symptoms, Yates had placed an order with the Alabama Department of Public Health for monoclonal antibodies, the lab-made proteins that mimic the body’s ability to fight the virus. But six days passed before the vials arrived, nearly missing the window in which the therapy works best to prevent hospitalization and death.

    “We’ve been pushing the limits because of the time frame you have to go through,” Yates said. “Fortunately, once we got it, he responded.”

    Across the country, medical directors of skilled nursing and long-term care sites say they’ve been scrambling to obtain doses of the potent antibody therapies following a change in federal policy that critics say limits supplies for the vulnerable population of frail and elder residents who remain at highest risk of covid infection even after vaccination.

    “There are people dying in nursing homes right now, and we don’t know whether or not they could have been saved, but they didn’t have access to the product,” said Chad Worz, CEO of the American Society of Consultant Pharmacists, which represents 1,500 pharmacies that serve long-term care sites.

    Before mid-September, doctors and other providers could order the antibody treatments directly through drug wholesaler AmerisourceBergen and receive the doses within 24 to 48 hours. While early versions of the authorized treatments required hourlong infusions administered at specialty centers or by trained staff members, a more recent approach allows doses to be administered via injections, which have been rapidly adopted by drive-thru clinics and nursing homes.

    Prompt access to the antibody therapies is essential because they work by rapidly reducing the amount of the virus in a person’s system, lowering the chances of serious disease. The therapies are authorized for infected people who’ve had symptoms for no more than 10 days, but many doctors say they’ve had best results treating patients by Day 5 and no later than Day 7.

    After a slow rollout earlier in the year, use of monoclonal antibody treatments exploded this summer as the delta variant surged, particularly in Southern states with low covid vaccination rates whose leaders were looking for alternative — albeit costlier — remedies.

    By early September, orders from seven states — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas — accounted for 70% of total shipments of monoclonals.

    Those Southern states, plus three others — Arkansas, Kentucky and North Carolina — ordered new courses of treatment even faster than they used their supplies. From July 28 to Sept. 8, they collectively increased their antibody stockpiles by 134%, according to a KHN analysis of federal data.

    Concerned the pattern was both uncontrolled and unsustainable given limited national supplies, officials with the Department of Health and Human Services stepped in to equalize distribution. HHS barred individual sites from placing direct orders for the monoclonals. Instead, they took over distribution, basing allocation on case rates and hospitalizations and centralizing the process through state health departments.

    “It was absolutely necessary to make this change to ensure a consistent product for all areas of the country,” Dr. Meredith Chuk, who is leading the allocation, distribution and administration team at HHS, said during a conference call.

    But states have been sending most doses of the monoclonal antibody treatments, known as mAbs, to hospitals and acute care centers, sidestepping the pharmacies that serve long-term care sites and depleting supplies for the most vulnerable patients, said Christopher Laxton, executive director of AMDA, the Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine.

    While vaccination might provide 90% protection or higher against serious covid in younger, healthier people, that’s not the case for the elders who typically live in nursing homes.

    “You have to think of the spectrum of immunity,” Laxton said. “For our residents, it’s closer to 60%. You know that 4 out of 10 are going to have breakthrough infections.”

    The mAb treatments have been authorized for use in high-risk patients exposed to the virus, and experts in elder care say that is key to best practices in preventing outbreaks in senior facilities. That could include, for example, treating the elderly roommate of an infected nursing home patient. But because of newly limited supplies, many long-term care sites have started to restrict use to only those who are infected.

    Still, some states have worked to ensure access to mAbs in long-term care sites. Minnesota health officials rely on a policy that prioritizes residents of skilled nursing facilities for the antibody therapies through a weighted lottery. In Michigan, state Medical Director Dr. William Fales directed emergency medical technicians and paramedics to the Ascension Borgess Hospital system in Kalamazoo to help administer doses during recent outbreaks at two centers.

    “The monoclonal antibodies made a huge difference,” said Renee Birchmeier, a nurse practitioner who cares for patients in nine of the system’s sites. “Even the patients in the assisted living with COPD, they’re doing OK,” she said, referring to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. “They’re not advancing, but they’re doing OK. And they’re alive.”

    Long-term care sites have accounted for a fraction of the orders for the monoclonal treatments, first authorized in November 2020. About 3.2 million doses have been distributed to date, with about 52% already used, according to HHS. Only about 13,500 doses have gone to nursing homes this year, according to federal data. That doesn’t include other long-term care sites such as assisted living centers.

    The use is low in part because the treatments were originally delivered only through IV infusions. But in June, the Regeneron monoclonal antibody treatment was authorized for use via subcutaneous injections — four separate shots, given in the same sitting — and demand surged.

    Use in nursing homes rose to more than 3,200 doses in August and nearly 6,700 in September, federal data shows. But weekly usage dropped sharply from mid-September through early October after the HHS policy change.

    Nursing homes and other long-term care sites were seemingly left behind in the new allocation system, said Cristina Crawford, a spokesperson for the American Health Care Association, a nonprofit trade group representing long-term care operators. “We need federal and state public health officials to readjust their priorities and focus on our seniors,” she said.

    In an Oct. 20 letter to White House policy adviser Amy Chang, advocates for long-term care pharmacists and providers called for a coordinated federal approach to ensure access to the treatments. Such a plan might reserve use of a certain type or formulation of the product for direct order and use in long-term care settings, said Worz, of the pharmacy group.

    So far, neither the HHS nor the White House has responded to the letter, Worz said. Cicely Waters, a spokesperson for HHS, said the agency continues to work with state health departments and other organizations “to help get covid-19 monoclonal antibody products to the areas that need it most.” But she didn’t address whether HHS is considering a specific solution for long-term care sites.

    Demand for monoclonal antibody treatments has eased as cases of covid have declined across the U.S. For the week ending Oct. 27, an average of nearly 72,000 daily cases were reported, a decline of about 20% from two weeks prior. Still, there were 2,669 confirmed cases among nursing home residents the week ending Oct. 24, and 392 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    At least some of those deaths might have been prevented with timely monoclonal antibody therapy, Worz said.

    Resolving the access issue will be key to managing outbreaks as the nation wades into another holiday season, said Dr. Rayvelle Stallings, corporate medical officer at PruittHealth, which serves 24,000 patients in 180 locations in the Southeast.

    PruittHealth pharmacies have a dozen to two dozen doses of monoclonal antibody treatments in stock, just enough to handle expected breakthrough cases, she said.

    “But it’s definitely not enough if we were to have a significant outbreak this winter,” she said. “We would need 40 to 50 doses. If we saw the same or similar surge as we saw in August and September? We would not have enough.”

    Phillip Reese, an assistant professor of journalism at California State University-Sacramento, contributed to this report.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Day of the Dead Protest in Front of Nancy Pelosi’s House

    In a Day of the Dead protest, protesters gathered in a slight drizzle at San Francisco’s Alta Plaza Park and marched to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s house, a few blocks away. The signs they carried declared health care to be a human right and demanded Medicare for All. One, carried by “Red Berets” was an American flag with the year other countries had instituted national health care written on the stripes. “WHAT ABOUT US???” was on the bottom line.

    The post Day of the Dead Protest in Front of Nancy Pelosi’s House appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Deadly US Sanctions Are Exacerbating The Pandemic Globally

    There was a sigh of relief for people who are concerned about the COVID-19 pandemic when President Biden took office in January. After a year of COVID denial, Biden promised to “follow the science” and put more effort into containing the virus than the Trump administration did. But 10 months later, a new report by the Department of the Treasury makes it clear that “following the science” only applies when it protects the profits of the wealthy class.

    On January 21, President Biden issued a National Security Memorandum that, in a section titled, “COVID-19 Sanctions Relief,” ordered various departments to “review existing United States and multilateral financial and economic sanctions to evaluate whether they are unduly hindering responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and provide recommendations to the President.”

    The post Deadly US Sanctions Are Exacerbating The Pandemic Globally appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Nurses Sound Off About Trauma, Solidarity and Why They’re Ready to Strike

    On September 28, nearly 800 people rallied in front of Kaiser’s corporate office in Portland, with union members joined by dozens of organizations and hundreds of supporters.

    “We can’t survive doing the work that we’re asked to do, the way that we’re being asked to do it with the lack of support we’re being asked to do it with,” says nurse Nicole Brun-Cottan. Tens of thousands of nurses in the Kaiser Permanente health care system are poised to go on strike. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Kelly Hayes talks with three nurses who voted to authorize a strike about what’s at stake in their struggle, and how the pandemic has affected frontline labor.

    TRANSCRIPT

    Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

    Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about things you should know, if you want to change the world. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. On this show, we talk a lot about building the relationships and analysis that we need to create movements that can win. Well, it’s Striketober, so this week, we are talking about labor. Health care professionals have been applauded, literally and figuratively, during the pandemic, for their commitment to patient care, despite PPE shortages, traumatic working conditions, and the loss of loved ones and coworkers. But nurses at Kaiser Permanente are not feeling that love at the negotiating table.

    I recently spoke with three nurses who are part of Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals, AFT, AFL-CIO, who are currently squaring off with Kaiser, which is the largest managed care organization in the U.S. The company calls itself “an integrated managed care consortium” — which means that Kaiser members are insured by the same company that provides their medical care. It’s a profitable model that netted the company $6.4 billion last year. Operating in eight states and Washington, D.C. Kaiser boasts over 12 million members and operates 39 hospitals, with more than 700 medical offices, and over 300,000 employees.

    For Kaiser, business is good, but the company claims that to make health care more affordable for consumers, it needs to pay its workers less. While most people would agree that health care is too expensive in the U.S., it seems especially egregious, amid a global pandemic, to claim that nurses and other health care workers are being paid too much. I personally believe we owe health care workers in this country a debt we can’t possibly repay: these people have provided care to the sick and dying, risking their own lives and the lives of their families, and, at times, losing their colleagues to the virus, so that we might have care. According to the World Health Organization, between 80,000 and 180,000 health and care workers may have died, globally, from COVID-19, between January of 2020 and May of 2021. In the United States, nurses have taken the brunt of those losses.

    Throughout this crisis, billionaires have lined their pockets while everyday people have struggled and died. We have seen mass death and skyrocketing levels of inequality, and now, workers, including nurses, are fighting back against companies that would devalue their lives even further.

    Kaiser is currently proposing a two-tier payment system that workers say would devastate the quality of care in their facilities and compound an existing nursing shortage. Steelworkers Local 7600 Vice President Norberto Gomez, who has transported patients for Kaiser as a mobility technician for 23 years, told Labor Notes that Kaiser’s proposal would put some of the company’s new hires “behind the starting rates at McDonald’s or Amazon warehouses.” As Gomez put it, “If given a choice between flipping burgers or moving Covid patients to the morgue for the same money, it’s a no-brainer.” Current Kaiser employees would receive a meager 1 percent raise per year.

    On October 11, nearly 3,400 workers from Kaiser Permanente in Oregon voted to authorize a strike. With a 90 percent participation rate, 96 percent of those who cast a ballot voted to authorize a strike. The workers are part of a 21-union Alliance of Health Care Unions representing 52,000 workers. 35,000 of them have now authorized strikes. I recently spoke with three nurses who work for Kaiser Permanente in Portland about why they voted to authorize a strike, and what they believe is at stake in this fight.

    Hannah Winchester: My name is Hannah Winchester. I am a home health physical therapist. I am also our labor partner. I’m part of the professional bargaining team. I’ve worked for Kaiser for the last four years, and I voted to authorize a strike because I want to make sure that our contract protects the future of health care for those that provide it and those that receive it.

    Nicole Brun-Cottan: My name is Nicole Brun-Cottan. I’m an acute care and critical care physical therapist in a high acuity hospital and a member of the professional bargaining unit bargaining team. And I voted to authorize a strike to protect patient care and access to services for our patients.

    Dylan Olson: My name is Dylan Olson, and I have worked at Kaiser for 14 years now as a mental health therapist in the emergency department doing crisis evaluations. And, I voted to authorize the strike as part of the bargaining team, because our patients need better staffing. They need better turnaround times. It is not ethical for it to take six to eight weeks to get back into a therapy appointment.

    HW: While it seems like in our current climate, COVID is the reason for a lot of conversation, it’s definitely a reason for our employer to make the decisions that they’ve been making…. But I think that we actually got here far before that. I think that trying to make health care an affordable entity and associating it more with an economic ask versus a quality of health care ask has really gotten us here over the course of many, many years, and now, we are just kind of at this breaking point. We’re at this cusp, and it simultaneously lined up with our contract ending, that all of these things have really come to a head, but I think it’s really been happening for quite some time.

    NBC: I think that there’s been a narrative about the affordability of health care specifically that Kaiser Permanente is pushing. And the implications of that narrative are [that] health care is very expensive, we need to make it more affordable so that more people have access to it, and what’s implied is, and the way that we’re going to make it more affordable is by paying labor less. For me, the lens that I look through this contract negotiation with is what is it that’s going to get me help as a frontline health care worker so that I can provide the care to patients that they deserve and that is part of what I signed up for when I agreed to do this work, and went through the training to do this work?

    DO: I’ve been with Kaiser for 14 years and we’ve definitely had bumpy patches in the past but this past couple of years, it seems like [it] has been more contentious. And, I wasn’t that surprised to see their proposal this year.

    KH: Kaiser employees say understaffing has reached crisis levels. To bridge the gap, nurses say the company is offering steep signing bonuses and paying travel nurses as much as $10,000 a week to help keep care systems up and running. So amid an ongoing nursing shortage, how can pay cuts for new employees make sense?

    NBC: We do not have the staff that we need to do the work that we’re being asked to do. As far as the nurses go, and it’s true broadly across health care, there is a staffing shortage. That staffing shortage has been predicted since the early 2000s. So when we see the employer using COVID and the pandemic as a license to make changes in our contract and the way that they run operationally, it’s really disingenuous because not only did we have a pandemic that changed the game, but we also had a problem that was predicted, that we understood was coming based on a bunch of aging baby boomers who, both needed care and were retiring from the health force in droves. So what they’re offering is especially stark when you compare it to the context that they’re offering it in. If we know we’re in a staffing shortage and we’ve known that was coming for a long time, and we know that it’s been worsened by social conditions and the pandemic, how is it possible that they would imagine that they would offer to pay less for the labor that we provide?

    HW: I think that staffing is absolutely our number one ask, but really looking at not just how do we get people into the door, but how do we stop this staffing crisis from getting worse and worse? How do we start to fix it? Where are the problems? What is the root cause of how we got to where we are right now? Why aren’t people walking out of health care at an overwhelming rate? Why are people leaving this company? Why are people abandoning what their career is and figuring out what those actual problems are and what we can do in our scope of influence to stop it and start fixing it so that our patients continue to have access to care? Because that’s a really scary future if things keep continuing the way that they’re going right now, not just for us as healthcare workers, but for us as patients… for our communities, for our families, for our friends.

    It starts with the things that we’re asking for with this contract… to not accept these really dangerous proposals that they’re giving to us to further affect that. This will only make things worse. At this point in time, the proposals that Kaiser’s offered are really focused on economics. Again, they want to… they’ve always said they want to stay affordable, and it sounds like to stay affordable, they just mean that they want their costs to be affordable. What they’re offering is a 1 percent raise, and then for some regions, a 1 percent bonus, although in some other regions, not everywhere, like Hawaii and Georgia, they would only get a 0.5 percent bonus. There are inequities as well in what they’re offering depending on what region you’re in.

    The other thing is they’re actually wanting to decrease the wages. They’re wanting to create this two-tiered wage system for new employees starting in 2023. So somehow, the work that we’re doing now will not be worth the same in a year and a couple of months, despite the fact that for the past 20 months, we’ve been breaking our backs, social security has gone up now, they got a 5.9 percent COLA, CEO wages have obviously gone up, managerial wages have obviously gone up, minimum wage is going up. Somehow, health care workers are not going to be worth as much in 2023 according to what they believe would be fair.

    KH: I find Kaiser’s arguments about making health care more affordable especially disturbing because they play on the fears and bitterness of people who have been victimized by the profit-based healthcare system, or who are simply terrified of getting sick because they don’t want to bankrupt their families. Even those of us who are lucky enough to be insured know that we’re probably one pricy diagnosis away from financial catastrophe, and a lot of people are already there. Patients who cannot afford the cost of health care deserve relief, but who, under this profit-based system, is responsible for their suffering? It reminded me of the vilification of public school teachers, who are blamed for the flaws of a system that has been gutted by austerity. In Chicago, when our neoliberal mayor wants a scapegoat, she points to the benefits and pay teachers have secured through collective bargaining, and claims that they need to make sacrifices. Because if she can direct our anger at the teachers, she can avoid questions, like, why is our public school system so underfunded, and why aren’t we all getting the same benefits the teachers are getting? Kaiser’s arguments similarly vilify its nurses, who it claims are paid “above market rate.”

    According to Axios, “the median pay of a health care CEO in 2020 was more than $9 million, up from 2018 and 2019. Thirty CEOs made more than $30 million each.” In recent years Kaiser’s CEO compensation has ballooned to $16 million — that’s a 166 percent increase since 2015 and double the salary of Blue Cross Blue Shield’s CEO. Some might call that “above market rate.” At Kaiser, over 36 executives make over $1 million dollars, and somehow, these are the people who are arguing that nurses and technicians are overpaid.

    HW: We’ve been backed into this corner where, as Nicole said, it’s our responsibility to make health care affordable. That’s not the case. It’s not our responsibility. Our responsibility is to provide the patient care that we are qualified to do.

    We cannot cut corners. We cannot sacrifice the quality of the care that we are wanting to and we’re tasked with providing just to stay affordable. I think that it’s really difficult to look through that other side of the lens… that sometimes these demands might seem like they’re high. They might seem like they’re costly, but what’s the benefit of them and what’s the risk if we don’t get them? I think what we’re asking for and what the teachers were asking for, and in a lot of other labor struggles, what they’re asking for, is completely appropriate. It’s not their responsibility to fulfill this affordability ask.

    NBC: The way that Kaiser Permanente works is a little bit different than other models of care delivery, in the sense that Kaiser is both the insurer and the provider. So other health care organizations do best when their beds are full, because they’re billing out for their services to other providers. Whereas with Kaiser, it’s a giant kind of pool of money. And I think it’s really important to note that we are Kaiser Permanente members, the vast majority of people who work for Kaiser also get their care at Kaiser.

    So when you look at a movement that’s involving eight different regions where Kaiser provides care and you see that 24,000 members of UNAC [United Nurses Association of California], almost 7,000 members of United Steelworkers, 3,400 members of OFNHP are voting to walk out, part of what that is, or should be, is a real signal that the people who are in the building providing the care are concerned about the level of care that they or their families will get if the plans that are being proposed move forward.

    KH: On October 12, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that 4.3 million Americans, or 2.9 percent of the entire workforce, quit their jobs in August. A survey by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses found that 66 percent of respondents said their pandemic experiences have led them to consider leaving nursing. 92 percent of respondents said they believe “the pandemic has depleted nurses at their hospitals, and because of this, their careers will be shorter than they planned.” A survey of Kaiser’s nurses found that 42 percent of the company’s nurses are considering leaving the field, and over 60 percent say they are considering leaving Kaiser. And yet, these nurses have chosen to fight, not only for the pay they deserve, but for the wages of future employees, and they’re fighting at a time when labor power in the U.S. is rising. I wanted to hear more about what had changed for these workers, in the last year and half, and in recent months, as coal miners, factory workers, film crews and many others have withheld their labor or authorized strikes.

    HW: I personally am seeing people that previously, maybe a couple of years ago, the last time we were bargaining, would have been uncomfortable standing up for what we’re fighting for right now. The prior mentality of “keep your head down, go to work, do your job, go home, and everything will be fine” is a little bit out the window, I think, at this point. I think it’s with this large movement, with this understanding and this momentum of standing up for what you need and what is important in your workplace has really, in my experience, brought people out of the woodwork to feel comfortable enough to use their voice and use their power, use their union, use their resources, to stand up for what they believe is right and what they believe they really need to do their job. Very happy to be part of Striketober. Definitely love the name, and I think it’s exciting. It’s exciting to see these people feel comfortable enough to hear their own voice and to use it.

    Throughout our conversations, throughout our bargaining, our group has asked ourselves, “What do we want to stand for? What do we want our work to show?” We want our work to be safe, sustainable, and ethical. Just like Nicole mentioned, the path that we’re on right now with… I think this is a little bit larger than just us here in this conversation… but the path that we’re on right now with our healthcare system is not sustainable. There’s become this giant divide of those that do the work and those that direct the work. Unfortunately, the people that are directing the work are now no longer necessarily nurses, they’re no longer healthcare workers, they’re no longer therapists or even physicians.

    They’re MBAs [people with a Master of Business Administration degree]. They’re people that know numbers and they know graphs and they know charts, but they don’t know people. They don’t know our patients. If we continue on this path, I think that divide is going to continue to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. There’s just such a giant misunderstanding, as we’ve seen in these conversations during our bargaining so far, where it’s shocking. It’s so unfortunate to see what they think our workplace is like, what they think our work is worth, and what they think our troubles are… are our own, are self-created. We’ve also had conversations before about burnout versus moral injury. Burnout is, and what we get forced down our throats, is this understanding that we don’t know how to manage our own stress. We don’t know… just go get a pedicure, go get a massage, take some deep breaths, and everything will be fine.

    But what we’re seeing in our workplaces so greatly right now is moral injury… that you can’t just walk away from it. You can’t just box breath it away. This is unsustainable. What we’re doing right now in the conversations that we’re having isn’t just for us right now. This isn’t just about a 1 percent versus a 4 percent raise. This is about stopping something that could really, really damage the health care system and recognizing that people providing that work and people providing this care have to have a larger voice in that and have to have more control over it. This can’t continue to be whittled away. We’ve got to keep the patient at the focus. We’ve got to keep the patient at the center, not a dollar sign.

    NBC: The pandemic isn’t over and I have concern that if we continue on the path that has been laid out in front of us, that we really compromise the ability of our systems to take care of our communities. And it’s been evident for a while that the social fabric was wearing pretty thin, right? When we look at the kind of markers of health in the major institutions, public service, health care, teachers across the board are really struggling to get the work done. And we’ve been hearing that reported for almost a generation now pretty consistently. But I do feel that we’re at a tipping point and I think that we’ve reached a point where people have been pushed so hard, that kind of like Hannah said, they’re coming out of the woodwork, they’re coming out of their holes because the conditions are so unsustainable that they can’t survive. We can’t survive doing the work that we’re asked to do, the way that we’re being asked to do it with the lack of support we’re being asked to do it with.

    And I think there’s a level of exhaustion and personal strife that pushes people into action and that makes you…. When I talk to our members, we talk a little bit about solidarity and about coming to a problem that you cannot solve yourself and I think that in our really individualistic society, we have reached [a] critical mass of a number of problems that individuals cannot solve themselves. And this is part of that. I think that’s part of what the groundswell of Striketober is about. I too am excited to be part of that. I too am encouraged to see people feel called to act. And I hope that that call to action makes them feel brave because we’re going to need it.

    And I think that it’s important to think about how traumatized the people that we’re talking about are. I heard a friend, he was talking about a conversation that he was having with some nurses and some other people at a party and he referred to the people that weren’t nurses as civilians. And I thought about that for a minute. And I thought about my own experiences this summer as we sort of started up social interaction again, and I was talking with my family and friends of my family and my experience of the last two years is really different than theirs. And I think that I’ve really resisted any metaphors that have compared the pandemic to a war, because I think that so much of the time in conditions of war things are so much more stark and untenable than they have been for us.

    But there are aspects of what happened that really do, and is still happening, that really do feel like having survived a war. I really do feel different than a lot of the people that I interact with casually after what I’ve seen in the last two years. And some of that has to do with just the stark trauma of watching so many people die and so many of them alone because they were not able to have visitors. And some of that has to do with being really, truly, and completely having the illusion removed that I was in any way essential or valuable to my community beyond lip service. Because it’s nice to be called a hero, but actually the way that you know that people care is by how they treat you. So I just would like to say that feeling like that, and understanding how many of my colleagues feel like that, and then being pushed to the point by an employer that we feel that we need to walk out as exhausted as we are, as torn up as our communities are.

    I just want to reinforce, we don’t want to walk out of the job in October or November in the pouring rain several weeks before the holidays come, because we’ve been spoiled and we’re not going to continue to get the benefits that we’ve had. The things that it takes to push a workforce to do that at this level, I’m not sure that people broadly realize what’s been going on behind the veil. So I feel especially resentful of the employer for trying to frame this in the way that it has. It’s just like an extra slap in the face.

    DO: In my conversations with people like the Nabisco baker strike and my sister is a part of IATSE [The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees] and in conversations with people in other areas that are also in unions that are also striking or voting to strike, it’s that divide that the pandemic made even sharper. So, these executives who are making these decisions were so far removed from the horrors that a lot of us have experienced in the last year and a half and they’re making these decisions with a background as an MBA. Not as a health care worker. Not as a therapist. Not as a frontline baker. It’s unfortunate what we all had to go through to get to this level of solidarity. But, it’s really exciting to see everybody stand up for themselves. Nurses and healthcare professionals and engineers and housekeeping and baking and John Deere and IATSE. It’s amazing to see everybody finally taking a stand and seeing that solidarity it’s amazing. It just makes me feel so good. And I hope that we continue it.

    KH: I think the sense of moral injury Hannah was talking about runs deep for a lot of U.S. workers right now. People aren’t simply burnt out, because we’ve all had a rough year and a half. They’re fed up, because they’ve experienced new levels of dehumanization and disposability. This is a crucial time for labor, and a crucial time for our health care system. Personally, I believe that we won’t have justice for patients or providers until we have universal health care, but while we are living under this system, we have to support nurses and other health care workers who are squaring off with wealthy executives. And we have to insist that if anyone is going to take a financial hit, in the name of making health care more affordable, it should be the pharmaceutical companies and healthcare executives and monopolistic hospitals that are bleeding us dry. We can also support nurses and health care workers by uplifting their stories and demands. This is a moment of great potential for U.S. workers. If we want to see all of these sparks turn into something more drastic, that could help propel the kind of change we need, we need to support striking workers and amplify their demands. Join them on the picket lines. During the 2012 teachers strike in Chicago, some friends and I read to children on the picket lines so their parents could engage more with the public. There are a lot of ways to show up and a lot of ways to show support. What’s important is paying attention to the needs of the workers you are looking to support. Amplify their messaging, and pay attention to their asks. And I also just want to remind everyone that one of the most important ways we can support the larger fight for worker power is by unionizing our own workplaces. I am very lucky that people put that work in at Truthout before I came along, because without their efforts, we simply wouldn’t be the publication that we are.

    I want to thank Hannah, Nicole and Dylan for talking with me about their experiences and the fight they’re waging. I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

    Show Notes

    • If you need help keeping track of who’s on strike, or potentially going on strike, Jonah Furman’s substack, Who Gets the Bird? is worth checking out.
    • If you want to learn more about ongoing labor struggles, I recommend checking out Dissent Magazine’s Belabored podcast with Sarah Jaffe and Michelle Chen.
    • Did you know South Korean workers recently staged a one day general strike? You can learn more about that here.
    • Looking to support a strike fund? United Left recently put together a Twitter thread featuring links to multiple strike funds.

    Further reading:

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Bernie Sanders stands firm on Medicare expansion: ‘It’s not coming out’

    Common Dreams Logo

    This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Oct. 24, 2021. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

    Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday was quick to push back on reporting that two of the most popular provisions in President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan—an expansion of Medicare benefits and guaranteed paid family leave—are poised to be dropped from the proposal due to objections from right-wing Democrats. “It’s not coming out,” Sanders said of a measure that would expand Medicare to cover dental, hearing, and vision care for tens of millions of older Americans—a proposal he has pushed for years and which is supported by 84% of Americans including nearly nine in 10 Democratic voters.

    Politico reported late Saturday that amid negotiations between the White House and Democrats which left the president announcing at a town hall on Thursday that the package may include only four weeks of paid leave instead of 12 as well as leaving out tuition-free community college and a clean electricity program, further discussions have led the White House to consider dropping paid leave and the Medicare expansion entirely.

    A Democratic aide told the outlet that the inclusion of the two programs were “in flux” Saturday while the White House denied that they may be cut. 

    “It is inconceivable and unconscionable to me that there is any risk for a paid leave being on the chopping block… The fact that something this administration has run on and Congress has championed would not be a priority to me is unbelievable.”

    Sanders and other progressives have spent months defending the provisions in the $3.5 trillion, 10-year investment in climate action and social supports for lower- and middle-income families.

    Despite saying in January that he would back a $4 trillion infrastructure package, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) is holding up passage of the bill, insisting he will now only support $1.5 trillion in social spending.

    The New York Times echoed the warning repeated for months by progressives regarding the potential failure to pass an agenda that provides far-reaching support for the voters who sent Biden to the White House and gave the Democratic Party control of the House and Senate last year.

    Sanders has harshly criticized Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.)—another conservative Democrat who is refusing to join the rest of the party in backing Biden’s agenda—comparing their conduct to his hypothetical refusal to support the Build Back Better plan unless it included Medicare for All.

    “My strong criticism is it is wrong when the American people, when the President of the United States, when 96% of your colleagues want to go forward—it is wrong to obstruct,” Sanders said earlier this month.

    Thanks to Manchin and Sinema, author and activist Don Winslow tweeted, the party is prepared to drop two of the most widely supported measures from the president’s agenda.

    “They work for Mitch McConnell and big corporations,” said Winslow of the senators.

    One paid leave expert questioned whether the White House is doing enough to defend the priorities that have been gradually weakened during negotiations with Manchin, Sinema, and other conservative Democrats. 

    “I want to know whether [Biden] is putting his weight behind [paid leave] when he’s behind closed doors with Sen. Manchin and others that he’s negotiating with,” Vicki Shabo, a senior fellow at the think tank New America, told Politico.

    The reporting about the status of the negotiations, which were ongoing Sunday, came as the New York Times echoed the warning repeated for months by progressives regarding the potential failure to pass an agenda that provides far-reaching support for the voters who sent Biden to the White House and gave the Democratic Party control of the House and Senate last year.

    “Strategists say enthusiasm among core Democratic voters is critical to defeating the Republican Party in the midterm elections of 2022 (and perhaps [former President Donald Trump], its leader, two years later),” reported the Times. “If crucial parts of the president’s coalition remain unhappy because they are disappointed in the compromise bill, that could threaten Democratic hopes to remain in power in Congress and the White House.”

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Buffalo Health Care Workers Are on Strike for Better Wages and Patient Safety

    Nurses, technicians, clerical workers and custodians at the city's Mercy Hospital have been on strike for three weeks.

    More than 2,000 health care workers — including nurses, technicians, clerical workers, and custodians — at Mercy Hospital in Buffalo, New York have been on strike since October 1. Similar to other health care workers around the country, the striking workers’ main demand is improved staffing ratios to allow for safer care for patients. In addition, workers are fighting for better wages to attract more qualified staff, to prevent their health insurance plan from being converted to a high deductible plan, and to prevent their pension plans being converted to a 401(k).

    Mercy Hospital is owned by Catholic Health System (CHS), which also owns other hospitals in the area. The striking workers at Mercy Hospital are part of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union and were originally supposed to strike with two other hospitals, the Sisters of Charity Hospital and Kenmore Mercy Hospital. However, as reported by Labor Notes, “recognizing the potential strength of bargaining together against the chain, Locals 1133 and 1168 sought to coordinate the expiration dates of their contracts and force a master agreement in the last round of negotiations in 2019.” CHS tried to push back against this tactic, and a no-strike clause was eventually agreed to for two out of three of the hospitals, leaving Mercy Hospital as the one location able to strike on behalf of all three.

    Although negotiations were supposed to begin in the middle of last year, health care workers agreed to delay bargaining during Covid-19 as the hospital claimed to be struggling financially — despite the CEO’s $2 million per year salary. The union health care workers agreed to continue working and accepted a temporary contract extension with a raise of just half a percent for the year. But despite these sacrifices, the hospital continues to refuse to give health care workers what they need. Hospital management’s proposals do not go nearly far enough: They proposed to add 250 new positions, similar to a proposal made back in 2016, which did nothing to resolve staffing crises.

    Management Lies

    It is clear that CHS management is trying to frame the ongoing lack of a contract as the fault of the workers and the union itself. In a recent interview with local press, CHS CEO Mark Sullivan stated he was optimistic a deal would be reached, but “only CWA can end the strike.” Nurses Left Voice spoke with say that when they initially announced the plan to strike, the hospital tried to frame it as workers abandoning patients, putting press releases out to the community.

    But health care workers know how hypocritical this rhetoric is, and they know they care about their patients more than anyone. Workers put their lives on line throughout the pandemic — the striking health care workers created Covid-19 Memorial Walls around each of the picket areas commemorating both those who became ill and those who lost their lives during the pandemic’s peaks — and were called “heroes” when the label could be used as propaganda by management. Workers were even given “healthcare heroes” shirts from CHS, but now, they say they’re seen as “zeroes” and are told they are “abandoning” patients. These claims of abandoning patients are especially ironic because, as one nurse pointed out, not only are these striking health care workers the ones who actually care about patient well-being — hence their resistance to the continual drive to cut staffing and costs to increase profits — but the hospital’s CEO, Mark Sullivan, who makes between $1.5-2 million a year, was planning on abandoning contract negotiations midway for vacation to Europe.

    It appears the hospital’s rhetoric backfired, as there has been an outpouring of community support, with many residents of the neighborhoods around the hospital putting union signs in their front lawns. Health care workers from the two other hospitals not currently striking have been working in solidarity, raising money at Buffalo Bills games and other community events for the union strike fund. Health care workers want to get back to work, but they refuse to accept horrible working conditions that lead to poor patient outcomes. Contrary to CHS’s claims, health care workers actually care so much about patients that they are willing to strike to see their demands met. They refuse to let the hospital force them into a poor contract that will ultimately threaten the health of patients.

    The Hospital System’s Response: Scabs and Security Firms

    Those who run hospital firms like CHS know what the threat of striking and winning demands could mean for other hospital systems in the area or the country, so instead of simply meeting the health care workers’ demands, they continue to resist. CHS has hired the global parasitic, blood-sucking, anti-strike firm Huffmaster to not just provide scabs, but also provide security. Per their website, “Huffmaster is a master staffing agency for healthcare, security, and other industries. Specializing in rapid strike staffing, we keep business in business.” Huffmaster advertises for job fulfillment and provides housing, travel, and meals for scabs in order to break strikes. As WNYLaborToday.com reported, CHS is paying Huffmaster to pay these scabs between $100 and $150 an hour, plus $45 per day for their meals, but they are not willing to pay their regular unionized employees anywhere near as much. Even the pay for the X-ray technicians, one of the higher-paid positions among the striking workers, only reaches $80 per hour — far less than the scabs are being paid.

    In their effort to claim the title for one of the worst companies in the world, not only does Huffmaster provide scab health care workers, but also violent security personnel. Health care workers at Mercy Hospital showed Left Voice reporters video footage and photos of how the security personnel at Mercy are the same security that were hired to help break the Nabisco strike and brutally attacked workers. Now there is an injunction from New York State Attorney General Letitia James claiming the company is not licensed to do work in New York State, but as of October 21, Left Voice observed Huffmaster security personnel still on the hospital property, protecting scabs and using fake badges to hide their company logo. In addition to the hired security, Buffalo police were also present and coordinated with the drivers of the scab vehicles.

    CHS CEO Trying to Deflect: CEOs Gonna CEO

    In the early days of the strike, CEO Mark Sullivan said healthcare staffing is a struggle across the nation, not just at Catholic Health: “One in five healthcare workers, since the pandemic has started, has left healthcare. This is not a Mercy Hospital staffing crisis, this is not a Catholic Health staffing crisis, this is a national staffing crisis. Healthcare, overall, is broken.” And he’s right: Health care is “broken,” but not because of the workers. Rather, healthcare is broken because under capitalist health care, the primary goal is to maximize profit from people’s bodies. Everything else, including patient care, is secondary. Therefore, under this model, it becomes logical to cut costs whenever possible — for example, by decreasing staffing ratios. Health care workers have left the industry because they are tired of working in a system that does not care about patient well-being and continues to put money over lives. They joined their workplaces hoping to help others, but many workers soon find out that the system itself does not hold this priority.

    Health care is “broken” because the system as it stands was never meant for the maintenance of health for health’s sake — instead, its origins lie in racism, white supremacy, and maintaining worker wellbeing just enough to be tools of labor. In some respects it isn’t “broken” but functions just how CEOs like Sullivan — along with the heads of other sectors of the medical industrial complex such as insurance companies, device manufacturers, and pharmaceutical companies — want it to, as they have the main same goal: profit maximization at all cost. This leads them to constantly work to uphold a destructive healthcare system, while the actual maintenance of health and well being remains secondary. Since a CEO like Sullivan can’t say “I am horrible and part of upholding a horrible system,” he must resort to a refrain like “healthcare is broken” to misdirect the public gaze. Executives like to pretend everyone is “on the same team” wanting to care for patients, but this is not the case. It is the health care workers who actually care for patients and communities, and CEOs like Sullivan who are a barrier to providing adequate care.

    It Isn’t Just Healthcare

    Health care workers are fighting this dynamic around the country as health care systems continue to exploit workers and harm patients. Luckily those at Mercy Hospital, along with other workers such as the 24,000 workers who voted to authorize a strike at Kaiser Permanente, and the nurses at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Massachusetts — who have been on strike for 7 months and counting — are rising up. These workers are an inspiration for other workers in the United States. If the workers at Mercy Hospital win their demands, for example, they could be a national example of fighting for better staffing ratios and, more broadly, a better health care system. A triumph for Mercy health care workers is a triumph for health care workers around the country and for the growing uptick in labor militancy many are calling “Striketober.”

    At the same time, the health care workers at Mercy Hospital are fighting a dynamic that isn’t just exclusive to health care. Around the country, companies are attempting to drive down wages, cut benefits, and force workers into increasingly horrible working conditions, all in a seemingly endless drive to increase profits. Whether it is the striking workers at John Deere, the film and television workers threatening to strike with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) union, oil workers with ​United Metro Energy Corp. (UMEC), the striking workers at Kellogg, or the countless other workers rising up, it is clear many are saying enough is enough. The working class is what keeps this country running and the working class has the ability to shut things down. The only way to battle the ongoing exploitation is for workers to organize and unite to confront this system that puts profits above all else.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Profile in Persecution: Sayed Adnan Majed Hashem

    Updated: Sayed Adnan Majed Hashem was a 22-year-old worker at the Al-Manhal water factory when he was arrested in October 2018, for the fourth time, from a house in AlDair. During his detention, Sayed Adnan endured physical and psychological torture, forced disappearance, medical neglect, and denial of contact with his family and attorney. He was also subjected to an unfair trial based on confessions extracted under torture. Furthermore, he faced sectarian-based insults and medical negligence at the hands of the Bahraini authorities. Currently, he is held in Jau Prison, serving a sentence of nearly three decades on politically motivated charges.

     

    Sayed Adnan was first arrested in 2014 as he returned from the Etehad AlReef Club Stadium in the Shahrakan area. He was with a group of players from the Abu Quwa team after their victory in the Youth Championship. They were on a bus, honking the horn in celebration of their victory when security forces stopped and arrested them, alleging their honking was illegal. Sayed Adnan’s second arrest occurred in mid-September 2015 while visiting his grandfather’s house in Al-Daih. On that day, amid political demonstrations, Sayed Adnan was chased and arrested by security forces. He was detained for around a month and a half before being released without any judgment being issued against him.

    In 2016, Sayed Adnan was arrested for the third time when security forces and armed masked men affiliated with the Ministry of Interior stormed into his father’s house late at night, arresting him without presenting any arrest warrant or order from the Public Prosecution Office (PPO). Upon his arrest, Sayed Adnan was taken to the CID, where he was held for 12 days. On the twelfth day, he called his family, asking them to bring him clothes as he was being transferred to the Dry Dock Detention Center. Shortly after, he was released from prison on bail, awaiting trial. Following his release, as his case proceeded, Sayed Adnan was summoned multiple times, and his house was frequently raided, though he would not be present. Knowing he was wanted, Sayed Adnan did not attend his trial sessions out of fear of being arrested in court. During Sayed Adnan’s arrest in 2016, his father visited him and observed traces of torture on his face and other parts of his body. He informed Sayed Adnan’s lawyer about the matter, who filed a complaint requesting accountability for the policeman responsible for Sayed Adnan’s torture. However, Sayed Adnan was unable to attend his court sessions out of fear of being arrested, as he was being pursued by authorities.

     

    Sayed Adnan’s latest arrest occurred on 30 October 2018 when officers in civilian clothing apprehended him from a house in AlDair. He was subsequently taken to the investigations unit in Jau Prison and then to the Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID) building in Adliya. Sayed Adnan forcibly disappeared for 10 to 12 days as his family was unaware of his fate or whereabouts. They contacted the Ombudsman and the CID to inquire about Sayed Adnan but received no response. After 10 to 12 days, Sayed Adnan contacted them and informed them of his location.

    During Sayed Adnan’s enforced disappearance, he was interrogated without legal representation both at the investigations unit in Jau Prison and at the CID in Adliya. There, armed masked officers in civilian clothing subjected him to psychological and physical torture to coerce false confessions. They threatened to harm one of his sisters and sexually assault her if he didn’t cooperate, and they insulted his religious sect and its symbols. Sayed Adnan was severely beaten on parts of his body that wouldn’t be visible, such as his stomach, back, and thighs, to conceal the injuries from his parents during visits. He was blindfolded, prevented from contacting his family, and coerced into making fabricated confessions under duress and torture.

    Sayed Adnan suffers from severe knee pain due to shotgun bullet injuries sustained while he was chased by authorities after participating in a peaceful demonstration in 2014. Despite requesting medical attention, he has not been examined, and the prison administration has refused to provide him with pain relief cream.

    Sayed Adnan faced numerous charges related to committing terrorist acts, including arson, negligent destruction, manufacturing explosives, illegal assembly, and rioting, involving nine cases. Between 2016 and 2020, he was sentenced to a total of 27 and a half years in prison and fined approximately 101,000 Bahraini Dinars. Throughout the interrogation and trial period, Sayed Adnan was denied access to his lawyer, and his confessions, obtained under torture, were used in court as evidence against him. Approximately a month and a half after his arrest, Sayed Adnan was transferred from the CID to Jau Prison following judgments issued against him in absentia.

    Sayed Adnan was only able to meet his family over a month after his arrest. In mid-2019, communication with Sayed Adnan was abruptly cut off. His family learned from other inmates that he had been transferred to the CID building, where he remained for 14 days. One inmate reported seeing him in court and noticed signs of torture on his body. He later contacted Sayed Adnan’s family, explaining that the torture was aimed at extracting confessions related to the charges against him.

    Update: On 26 March 2024, the administration at Jau Prison initiated pressure tactics on political prisoners to cease their sit-in protest against retaliatory policies that caused the death of medical neglect victim Husain Khalil Ebrahim on 25 March. This pressure was executed under directives from officers AbdulSalam AlAraifi, Hisham AlZayani, Nasser AbdulRahman AlKhalifa, and Ahmed AlEmadi. Retaliatory measures included severing communication with the outside world by suspending family visits and communications, blocking TV broadcasts, and confiscating newspapers.

    On 8 May 2024, about 500 detainees, including Sayed Adnan, refused meals after the prison administration reduced the quantity of food in retaliation for their demands for improved food quality that meets health standards. The administration targeted buildings where detainees were protesting, excluding those housing criminal inmates, thereby depriving them of their primary food source after blocking their access to necessities from the prison store.

     

    Sayed Adnan’s mother posted an audio message detailing some of the detainees’ hardships. Alongside reduced meals, political prisoners also endure shortages of food supplies, lack of clothing and footwear, and the absence of personal hygiene items they previously purchased with their monthly allowances sent by their families. She warned of the consequences of these measures, including the risk of epidemics and diseases due to the lack of cleaning supplies. She expressed concerns for her son’s health, who suffers from knee problems and skin diseases, having previously contracted scabies due to the poor conditions inside Jau Prison. Sayed Adnan’s mother reported that she contacted the Emergency Police Services and informed them of the violations against her son. They promised to take certain measures but to no avail. She also complained about the retaliation practiced by the prison administration against prisoners after families staged sit-in protests and sought support from human rights organizations for their children’s cases.

    Sayed Adnan continues to endure deliberate medical neglect. Despite severe pain, he has been denied treatment for the injury he sustained in his knee when security forces used shotguns against peaceful protesters in 2014. He has been deprived of treatment, and appropriate medications have not been prescribed. Additionally, the prison administration has refused to provide pain relief medication for his excruciating pain.

    Sayed Adnan’s family submitted several complaints to the National Institution for Human Rights (NIHR) and the Ombudsman regarding his torture and ill-treatment, but to no avail. They also lodged a complaint following the events of 17 April 2021 at Jau Prison, yet there was no follow-up by authorities. Sayed Adnan is also subjected to discrimination in prison based on his belonging to the Shia religious sect.

    Sayed Adnan’s warrantless arrests, mental and physical torture, forced disappearance, solitary confinement, deprivation of contact with his family and lawyer, denial of a fair trial, religious discrimination, and medical neglect constitute violations of Bahrain’s obligations under international treaties, namely the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), to which Bahrain is a party.

    Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB) calls on the Bahraini authorities to immediately and unconditionally release Sayed Adnan. ADHRB also urges the Bahraini government to investigate allegations of arbitrary arrest, torture, forced disappearance, solitary confinement, medical neglect, denial of legal consultation, and religious discrimination, holding perpetrators accountable. ADHRB further calls for an immediate end to discriminatory policies against Sayed Adnan, including denying him communication with his family. ADHRB urges the Jau Prison administration to ensure the rights of all political prisoners, including providing adequate meals that adhere to health standards, as well as supplying personal hygiene essentials to prevent the spread of diseases and epidemics, holding it responsible for any deterioration in detainees’ conditions.

    The post Profile in Persecution: Sayed Adnan Majed Hashem appeared first on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

    This post was originally published on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.

  • How Digital Vaccine Passports Pave Way For Unprecedented Surveillance Capitalism

    The titans of global capitalism are exploiting the Covid-19 crisis to institute social credit-style digital ID systems across the West.

    The post How Digital Vaccine Passports Pave Way For Unprecedented Surveillance Capitalism appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Corporate Democrats’ Toothless Drug Pricing Alternative Is A Coup For Big Pharma

    It wasn’t enough for Democratic Representatives Kurt Schrader of Oregon, Scott Peters of California, Kathleen Rice of New York and Stephanie Murphy of Florida to vote against a robust bill that would allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, the Lower Drug Costs Now Act (H.R. 3). These politicians — compelled by their unhappy corporate donors — tried to derail efforts to lower the cost of prescription drugs by introducing a toothless alternative in a pathetic public stunt to appease the industry.

    The post Corporate Democrats’ Toothless Drug Pricing Alternative Is A Coup For Big Pharma appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • GP Bob Gill Outlines The Us Corporate Takeover Of The British NHS

    The British National Health Service (NHS) once stood as an internationally renowned example of a tax-funded health system that delivered public-health services to millions of British citizens, lifting a huge burden from the sick. However, the rise of neoliberal policies in the United Kingdom has targeted the NHS to become the latest victim of a U.S.-U.K. economic trade deal that would put health care services in the hands of private U.S. corporations.

    The post GP Bob Gill Outlines The Us Corporate Takeover Of The British NHS appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Labor Unions Band Together To Tackle NY’s High Hospital Prices

    The Coalition for Affordable Hospitals launched Friday morning and held a rally in Manhattan’s City Hall Park ahead of a City Council hearing on hospital costs. The effort includes nine unions that represent New Yorkers as well as the New York State Council of Churches and PatientRightsAdvocate.org, a nonprofit that promotes transparency in health care prices. The group is pushing legislation in Albany that would give health plans — including those managed by labor unions — more leverage to haggle over the price of health care.

    The post Labor Unions Band Together To Tackle NY’s High Hospital Prices appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Scientists Search for Cause of Mysterious COVID-Related Inflammation in Children

    Dante DeMaino of Danvers, Massachusetts, was diagnosed with MIS-C in March. MIS-C — multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children — is a rare but life-threatening complication of COVID in which a hyperactive immune system causes damage throughout the body.

    Like most other kids with COVID, Dante and Michael DeMaino seemed to have no serious symptoms.

    Infected in mid-February, both lost their senses of taste and smell. Dante, 9, had a low-grade fever for a day or so. Michael, 13, had a “tickle in his throat,” said their mother, Michele DeMaino, of Danvers, Massachusetts.

    At a follow-up appointment, “the pediatrician checked their hearts, their lungs, and everything sounded perfect,” DeMaino said.

    Then, in late March, Dante developed another fever. After examining him, Dante’s doctor said his illness was likely “nothing to worry about” but told DeMaino to take him to the emergency room if his fever climbed above 104.

    Two days later, Dante remained feverish, with a headache, and began throwing up. His mother took him to the ER, where his fever spiked to 104.5. In the hospital, Dante’s eyes became puffy, his eyelids turned red, his hands began to swell and a bright red rash spread across his body.

    Hospital staffers diagnosed Dante with multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, or MIS-C, a rare but life-threatening complication of COVID-19 in which a hyperactive immune system attacks a child’s body. Symptoms — fever, stomach pain, vomiting, diarrhea, bloodshot eyes, rash and dizziness — typically appear two to six weeks after what is usually a mild or even asymptomatic infection.

    More than 5,200 of the 6.2 million U.S. children diagnosed with COVID have developed MIS-C. About 80% of MIS-C patients are treated in intensive care units, 20% require mechanical ventilation, and 46 have died.

    Throughout the pandemic, MIS-C has followed a predictable pattern, sending waves of children to the hospital about a month after a COVID surge. Pediatric intensive care units — which treated thousands of young patients during the late-summer delta surge — are now struggling to save the latest round of extremely sick children.

    The South has been hit especially hard. At the Medical University of South Carolina Shawn Jenkins Children’s Hospital, for example, doctors in September treated 37 children with COVID and nine with MIS-C — the highest monthly totals since the pandemic began.

    Doctors have no way to prevent MIS-C, because they still don’t know exactly what causes it, said Dr. Michael Chang, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston. All doctors can do is urge parents to vaccinate eligible children and surround younger children with vaccinated people.

    Given the massive scale of the pandemic, scientists around the world are now searching for answers.

    Although most children who develop MIS-C were previously healthy, 80% develop heart complications. Dante’s coronary arteries became dilated, making it harder for his heart to pump blood and deliver nutrients to his organs. If not treated quickly, a child could go into shock. Some patients develop heart rhythm abnormalities or aneurysms, in which artery walls balloon out and threaten to burst.

    “It was traumatic,” DeMaino said. “I stayed with him at the hospital the whole time.”

    Such stories raise important questions about what causes MIS-C.

    “It’s the same virus and the same family, so why does one child get MIS-C and the other doesn’t?” asked Dr. Natasha Halasa of the Vanderbilt Institute for Infection, Immunology and Inflammation.

    Doctors have gotten better at diagnosing and treating MIS-C; the mortality rate has fallen from 2.4% to 0.7% since the beginning of the pandemic. Adults also can develop a post-COVID inflammatory syndrome, called MIS-A; it’s even rarer than MIS-C, with a mortality rate seven times as high as that seen in children.

    Although MIS-C is new, doctors can treat it with decades-old therapies used for Kawasaki disease, a pediatric syndrome that also causes systemic inflammation. Although scientists have never identified the cause of Kawasaki disease, many suspect it develops after an infection.

    Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital and other institutions are looking for clues in children’s genes.

    In a July study, the researchers identified rare genetic variants in three of 18 children studied. Significantly, the genes are all involved in “removing the brakes” from the immune system, which could contribute to the hyperinflammation seen in MIS-C, said Dr. Janet Chou, chief of clinical immunology at Boston Children’s, who led the study.

    Chou acknowledges that her study — which found genetic variants in just 17% of patients — doesn’t solve the puzzle. And it raises new questions: If these children are genetically susceptible to immune problems, why didn’t they become seriously ill from earlier childhood infections?

    Some researchers say the increased rates of MIS-C among racial and ethnic minorities around the world — in the United States, France and the United Kingdom — must be driven by genetics.

    Others note that rates of MIS-C mirror the higher COVID rates in these communities, which have been driven by socioeconomic factors such as high-risk working and living conditions.

    “I don’t know why some kids get this and some don’t,” said Dr. Dusan Bogunovic, a researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who has studied antibody responses in MIS-C. “Is it due to genetics or environmental exposure? The truth may lie somewhere in between.”

    A Hidden Enemy and a Leaky Gut

    Most children with MIS-C test negative for COVID, suggesting that the body has already cleared the novel coronavirus from the nose and upper airways.

    That led doctors to assume MIS-C was a “postinfectious” disease, developing after “the virus has completely gone away,” said Dr. Hamid Bassiri, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist and co-director of the immune dysregulation program at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

    Now, however, “there is emerging evidence that perhaps that is not the case,” Bassiri said.

    Even if the virus has disappeared from a child’s nose, it could be lurking — and shedding — elsewhere in the body, Chou said. That might explain why symptoms occur so long after a child’s initial infection.

    Dr. Lael Yonker noticed that children with MIS-C are far more likely to develop gastrointestinal symptoms — such as stomach pain, diarrhea and vomiting — than the breathing problems often seen in acute COVID.

    In some children with MIS-C, abdominal pain has been so severe that doctors misdiagnosed them with appendicitis; some actually underwent surgery before their doctors realized the true source of their pain.

    Yonker, a pediatric pulmonologist at Boston’s MassGeneral Hospital for Children, recently found evidence that the source of those symptoms could be the coronavirus, which can survive in the gut for weeks after it disappears from the nasal passages, Yonker said.

    In a May study in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, Yonker and her colleagues showed that more than half of patients with MIS-C had genetic material — called RNA — from the coronavirus in their stool.

    The body breaks down viral RNA very quickly, Chou said, so it’s unlikely that genetic material from a COVID infection would still be found in a child’s stool one month later. If it is, it’s most likely because the coronavirus has set up shop inside an organ, such as the gut.

    While the coronavirus may thrive in our gut, it’s a terrible houseguest.

    In some children, the virus irritates the intestinal lining, creating microscopic gaps that allow viral particles to escape into the bloodstream, Yonker said.

    Blood tests in children with MIS-C found that they had a high level of the coronavirus spike antigen — an important protein that allows the virus to enter human cells. Scientists have devoted more time to studying the spike antigen than any other part of the virus; it’s the target of COVID vaccines, as well as antibodies made naturally during infection.

    “We don’t see live virus replicating in the blood,” Yonker said. “But spike proteins are breaking off and leaking into the blood.”

    Viral particles in the blood could cause problems far beyond upset stomachs, Yonker said. It’s possible they stimulate the immune system into overdrive.

    In her study, Yonker describes treating a critically ill 17-month-old boy who grew sicker despite standard treatments. She received regulatory permission to treat him with an experimental drug, larazotide, designed to heal leaky guts. It worked.

    Yonker prescribed larazotide for four other children, including Dante, who also received a drug used to treat rheumatoid arthritis. He got better.

    But most kids with MIS-C get better, even without experimental drugs. Without a comparison group, there’s no way to know if larazotide really works. That’s why Yonker is enrolling 20 children in a small randomized clinical trial of larazotide, which will provide stronger evidence.

    Rogue Soldiers

    Dr. Moshe Arditi has also drawn connections between children’s symptoms and what might be causing them.

    Although the first doctors to treat MIS-C compared it to Kawasaki disease — which also causes red eyes, rashes and high fevers — Arditi notes that MIS-C more closely resembles toxic shock syndrome, a life-threatening condition caused by particular types of strep or staph bacteria releasing toxins into the blood. Both syndromes cause high fever, gastrointestinal distress, heart muscle dysfunction, plummeting blood pressure and neurological symptoms, such as headache and confusion.

    Toxic shock can occur after childbirth or a wound infection, although the best-known cases occurred in the 1970s and ’80s in women who used a type of tampon no longer in use.

    Toxins released by these bacteria can trigger a massive overreaction from key immune system fighters called T cells, which coordinate the immune system’s response, said Arditi, director of the pediatric infectious diseases division at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

    T cells are tremendously powerful, so the body normally activates them in precise and controlled ways, Bassiri said. One of the most important lessons T cells need to learn is to target specific bad guys and leave civilians alone. In fact, a healthy immune system normally destroys many T cells that can’t distinguish between germs and healthy tissue in order to prevent autoimmune disease.

    In a typical response to a foreign substance — known as an antigen — the immune system activates only about 0.01% of all T cells, Arditi said.

    Toxins produced by certain viruses and the bacteria that cause toxic shock, however, contain “superantigens,” which bypass the body’s normal safeguards and attach directly to T cells. That allows superantigens to activate 20% to 30% of T cells at once, generating a dangerous swarm of white blood cells and inflammatory proteins called cytokines, Arditi said.

    This massive inflammatory response causes damage throughout the body, from the heart to the blood vessels to the kidneys.

    Although multiple studies have found that children with MIS-C have fewer total T cells than normal, Arditi’s team has found an explosive increase in a subtype of T cells capable of interacting with a superantigen.

    Several independent research groups — including researchers at Yale School of Medicine, the National Institutes of Health and France’s University of Lyon — have confirmed Arditi’s findings, suggesting that something, most likely a superantigen, caused a huge increase in this T cell subtype.

    Although Arditi has proposed that parts of the coronavirus spike protein could act like a superantigen, other scientists say the superantigen could come from other microbes, such as bacteria.

    “People are now urgently looking for the source of the superantigen,” said Dr. Carrie Lucas, an assistant professor of immunobiology at Yale, whose team has identified changes in immune cells and proteins in the blood of children with MIS-C.

    Uncertain Futures

    One month after Dante left the hospital, doctors examined his heart with an echocardiogram to see if he had lingering damage.

    To his mother’s relief, his heart had returned to normal.

    Today, Dante is an energetic 10-year-old who has resumed playing hockey and baseball, swimming and rollerblading.

    “He’s back to all these activities,” said DeMaino, noting that Dante’s doctors rechecked his heart six months after his illness and will check again after a year.

    Like Dante, most other kids who survive MIS-C appear to recover fully, according to a March study in JAMA.

    Such rapid recoveries suggest that MIS-C-related cardiovascular problems result from “severe inflammation and acute stress” rather than underlying heart disease, according to the authors of the study, called Overcoming COVID-19.

    Although children who survive Kawasaki disease have a higher risk of long-term heart problems, doctors don’t know how MIS-C survivors will fare.

    The NIH and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have launched several long-term trials to study young COVID patients and survivors. Researchers will study children’s immune systems to uncover clues to the cause of MIS-C, check their hearts for signs of long-term damage and monitor their health over time.

    DeMaino said she remains far more worried about Dante’s health than he is.

    “He doesn’t have a care in the world,” she said. “I was worried about the latest cardiology appointment, but he said, ‘Mom, I don’t have any problems breathing. I feel totally fine.’”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Activists Should Continue To Fight For National Single Payer

    It is a mistake for activists to once again allow Democratic politicians corrupted by big money to determine the nature of the struggle for single-payer Healthcare. We must have a strong fight on the national level in order to win this. Otherwise, we are abandoning a struggle that has strong public support and giving Congress a free pass to do nothing.

    The post Activists Should Continue To Fight For National Single Payer appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Migrant Farmworkers Are Being Left Out Of Roundup Cancer Compensation

    In 2018, a California school groundskeeper took Monsanto Company to court, alleging that Roundup, one of America’s most popular weed killers, caused his Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma cancer. The jury agreed and ordered Monsanto to pay the man $289 million in damages, concluding the world’s first Roundup cancer trial. Legal experts say migrant farmworkers, who are at the forefront of pesticide and herbicide exposures—including Roundup—are expected to be left out.

    The post Migrant Farmworkers Are Being Left Out Of Roundup Cancer Compensation appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • ‘Days Of Shame’ Highlights Failure To Back TRIPS Waiver Proposal For COVID Vaccines

    Health activists gathered at Geneva’s central train station on Wednesday, October 13, calling on the EU, the UK, Norway and Switzerland to endorse the TRIPS waiver proposal at the World Trade Organization (WTO). “As Europeans, we are ashamed that our political leaders are among the last opponents to a just solution to end the pandemic and save lives,” said the campaigners in a press release.

    The post ‘Days Of Shame’ Highlights Failure To Back TRIPS Waiver Proposal For COVID Vaccines appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.