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Category: Public health

  • How racism and inequality created COVID-19’s ‘Viral Underclass’

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    We share the planet with over 380 trillion viruses right now. Some of these powerful pathogens can kill us and even bring the world to a halt  — as the novel coronavirus did in 2020. 

    Viruses teach us how “undeniably connected we are and how important it is to care for one another,” according to Steven Thrasher, a journalist and academic.

    That lesson seemed to have been lost, he said, when President Joe Biden recently declared the pandemic “over” while appearing on 60 Minutes. 

    “It’s indefensible,” Thrasher said. “It’s extremely insensitive, given that thousands of people are dying every week.”

    In his new book, “The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll when Inequality and Disease Collide,” Thrasher writes that COVID-19 made “millions, if not billions, of humans consider for the first time how living with a common virus can make a person feel like a pariah.” Thrasher’s masterful storytelling and meticulous reporting provide an important framework to help us understand why viruses can have disparate outcomes in communities of color. 

    Thrasher, who earned his Ph.D. from New York University and has spent decades writing about the HIV and AIDS epidemic, writes about 12 social vectors, including racism, ableism, the law and austerity, that help create the viral underclass.

    *This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

    When covering the pandemic in Chicago, I wrote about the same dynamics outlined in your book and it’s an important framework. What is the viral underclass?

    I first heard it from activist Sean Strub, who was using it to talk about how people living with HIV live under a different set of laws. I started to think [how to] use it as a framework, when the COVID-19 pandemic happened, and use it as an analytic [tool] to understand why certain kinds of people keep ending up in the pathway of viruses, and why they have disparate impacts on their health, particularly disparate impacts with their deaths. I started to think of it this way, because I could see in the early COVID-19 pandemic, that the same kinds of people who were affected by HIV and AIDS were initially being affected by COVID-19, even at a geographic level that first super deadly wave. 

    Before the moment of infection, incarceration, and poverty, racism, homophobia, ableism, all affect people’s bodies in ways that they’re going to have disparate impacts with viruses if they encounter them. 

    A copy of ‘The Viral Underclass.’

    You describe in your book prophylaxis as the “practices and physical objects that can prevent the transmission of communicable diseases.” How did it play out during this pandemic?

    Prophylaxis can be something that’s very physical. A condom can stop the transmission of HIV, Ebola, Zika and a number of other pathogens. It can also be something like a mask or face shield. 

    Everyone is not at equal risk. They’re having very different levels of risk, depending on what kind of work they have, the conditions of their work, the decisions of their employers and the decisions of the state. 

    There’s educational levels of prophylaxis, there’s economic levels of prophylaxis —people who have access to a home are much safer than people who are unhoused either on the street or in shelters with lots of other people. Economics plays a big role as well. 

    What is the myth of white immunity? Do you think this myth was reinforced during the pandemic after we saw that COVID-19 was killing Black and brown Americans disproportionately? 

    There is an immunity that comes with whiteness — to a degree, on average, white people have better health outcomes, they economically do better. But like all forms of immunity, it is not complete, it is not everlasting, doesn’t apply to all white people. They have less risk but sometimes they’ll think they have no risk, which is not true. Social science has shown that when more white people understood that COVID deaths were happening mostly to non-white people, the less that they cared. But that’s also at their own peril, because hundreds of thousands of white people have also died of COVID-19. White immunity will make white people act in ways that are not in their own self-interests.

    Let’s talk about Michael Johnson’s case. A Black gay man sentenced to more than 30 years in prison for alledgedly not disclosing his HIV status to his sexual partners. Johnson was released in part because of your reporting. What can we learn from the ways in which the government has criminalized people living with HIV?

    The case was extremely chilling. I sat through the entire trial. What I learned from that was that society has an easier time blaming an individual scapegoat than dealing with the very messy, difficult, complicated and economically challenging things that must be addressed with pandemics. 

    Michael had one of the worst prison sentences ever given for someone with HIV, as if somehow this pandemic were his fault. At a time when between 35 and 40 million people were living with that virus, it’s completely out of scale. It is not realistic or humane in any way to think of locking up 35-40 million people with HIV, because they all got HIV from someone, and you couldn’t lock them all up. That wouldn’t solve anything and that wouldn’t be humane or ethical. But what really frightened me in the COVID-19 pandemic was seeing a similar dynamic happen. There were a lot of very violent arrests in the first few months for not socially distancing, or not wearing a mask, or being out after curfew. Almost everybody that the NYPD arrested, cited, beat up or threw to the ground, were all Black because there’s this misperception that the viruses are Black or racialized. 

    The chapter entitled “parasite” was an indictment  of capitalism. Why did you include this chapter?

    Capitalism is a major reason why we have pandemics in the world. We see examples of this over and over again. There’s a phrase I’ve heard from AIDS activists who have used it since the mid-90s: “Science won the battle, but capitalism won the war.”

    What they mean by that was from the early 1980s, there was terror and sadness about all the death happening around AIDS. It took 15 years, but eventually, medications became available. It’s a real kind of miracle of science. Science won that battle. But then capitalism won the war because tens of millions of people don’t get the pills, a million people a year still die of AIDS. That’s because of capitalism. It’s because of intellectual copyright and trademark that corporations did not want to share with other countries. They wanted to make a profit. That’s outrageous because the drug development for the HIV medication, as with COVID-19, was at some level funded by the state. Massive state resources go into the development of these drugs and treatments. But private corporations find a way to capture that and stop it from being shared. 

    The same thing happened with the COVID-19 vaccines  — Pfizer, Moderna. 

    Capitalism itself economically structures the society and relationships such that there’s an underclass or viral underclass. It produces unequal health outcomes and it rations out treatments or withholds them to make a profit. The system itself breeds illness. 

    The post How racism and inequality created COVID-19’s ‘Viral Underclass’ appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

    This post was originally published on Center for Public Integrity.

  • Nuclear Power Isn’t Clean — It Creates Hellish Wastelands of Radioactive Sewage

    Joshua Frank’s brilliant Atomic Days, from Haymarket Books, takes us deep into the horrific clogged bowels of the failed technology that is nuclear power.

    Frank’s excursion into the radioactive wasteland of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, in eastern Washington State’s Columbia River Valley, is the ultimate real-world nightmare.

    Unfortunately, it serves as a wailing siren for what faces us with the atomic wastes from our commercial reactors, now joined at the toxic hip to the global weapons industry.

    “Like a ceaseless conveyer belt,” Frank writes, “Hanford generated plutonium for nearly four long decades, reaching maximum production during the height of the Cold War.”

    It is now, he says “a sprawling wasteland of radioactive and chemic sewage … the costliest environmental remediation project the world has ever seen and, arguably, the most contaminated place on the entire planet.”

    Current cost estimates to clean up the place, says Frank, “could run anywhere between $316 and $662 billion.”

    But that depends on a few definitions, including the most critical: What does it mean to “clean up” a hellhole like Hanford? If you want to remove plutonium from a radioactive wasteland, what do you do so that it doesn’t create another radioactive wasteland? And what does that say about the 90,000 tons of high-level waste sitting at more than 50 U.S. commercial reactor sites?

    To put it in perspective, we spend $2.6 billion each year just to preserve Hanford as it is. The clean-up estimate, according to Frank, has roughly tripled in the past six years, leaving us to believe that in another six years it could easily be over $6 trillion.

    The environmental consequences are colossal. As Frank abundantly documents, Hanford is an unfathomable mess. Giant tanks are leaking. Plutonium and other apocalyptic substances are rapidly migrating toward the Columbia River, which could be permanently poisoned, along with much more. Local residents have been poisoned with “permissible permanent concentration” of lethal isotopes on vegetables, livestock, and in the air and drinking water.

    Such exposures have even included a deliberate experiment known as the “Green Run” in which Hanford operatives “purposely released dangerous amounts of radioactive iodine.”

    Such emissions are especially damaging to embryos, fetuses and small children, whose thyroids can be easily destroyed (as we are now seeing at Fukushima). But back then the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wanted to know how fallout would flow in wind currents.

    The product was a “death mile” stretching from the Columbia River basin to the ocean, filled with casualties of radioactive poisoning.

    After decades of devastating leaks from defective storage tanks, the Los Angeles Times reported that more radioactivity was stored at Hanford “than would be released during an entire nuclear war.”

    Thousands of such tanks at Fukushima may soon be given a governmental green light to dump their poisons in the Pacific, with potentially apocalyptic results.

    At Hanford, “the waste was so hot it would boil … for decades to come,” i.e., right up to the present day, writes Frank.

    Despite official denials, Frank documents a terrifying range of catastrophic leaks into the soil, water tables and streams throughout the reservation. By 1985, he writes, “despite $7 billion spent over the previous ten years, no progress had been made in ridding the aging tanks” of their deadly offal.

    To this day “Hanford remains the most complex environmental mess in the United States,” riddled with problems that provide huge profits for corporations that land clean-up contracts and then fail to deliver, exceeding the complexity even of the infamous waste dump at West Valley, New York, and the highly radioactive fallout zone at Santa Susana, California, just north of Los Angeles.

    But Hanford’s not alone. Frank also takes us to Chelyabinsk, the site of a Soviet era disaster, and to another wasteland around Kyshtym. Like the 1000-square-mile “dead zone” around Chernobyl, Hanford is full of areas where human life is perilous at best.

    To put the nuclear power industry in a larger context, Frank guides us through the “permanent war economy” birthed during WWII, and discusses Franklin Roosevelt’s ambivalent relations with the “Malefactors of Great Wealth” who often stood in the way of making the U.S. the “Arsenal of Democracy,” and who once even plotted to kill him.

    With the decision to build an A-Bomb, the giant Bechtel Corporation used the 120-square-mile reservation at Hanford to produce 103.5 metric tons of plutonium, perhaps the deadliest substance known to humanity.

    But there was no effective solution for what might happen to the place in the aftermath. The Waste Treatment Plant meant to “vitrify” rad wastes into glass began construction in 2002, with plans to open in 2011. It has become, in both cost and area, “the largest single construction operation taking place anywhere in the United States,” now with an estimated price tag of $41 billion and a projected opening in 2036.

    With “a string of bungled jobs under its belt,” Bechtel’s failed “Big Dig” in Boston — a much-vaunted tunnel from Logan Airport to downtown — reflected its work at Hanford when a collapse killed a 39-year-old woman and resulted in $357.1 million settlement exempting management from criminal prosecution.

    As the U.S.’s fourth-largest privately held company, Bechtel spending $1.8 million on D.C. lobbying in 2019-20 was par for the course. The payback, Frank writes, comes in the tragic diseases suffered by Hanford workers like Abe Garza and Lawrence Rouse, usually amid terse, well-funded official denials. Researchers like Karen Wetterhahn and veterans like Victor Skaar have joined Vietnam victims of Agent Orange in being victimized by exposures they were repeatedly assured were “safe.” Whistleblowers like Ed Bricker were even subjected to intense spying and sabotage by close associates he was deceived into accepting as friends.

    Meanwhile activists like Russell Jim of the Yakama Tribe began to force “an immeasurable amount of transparency” around the Hanford disaster. Their decades of hardcore community organizing came with a growing demand for accountability that has changed the political atmosphere surrounding the cleanup.

    The debate has carried into the use of commercial atomic power.

    Because of Hanford’s nuclear presence, five atomic reactors were constructed in Washington State, promising electricity that would be “too cheap to meter.”

    But like the soaring costs of plutonium production and clean-up, the Washington Public Power System plunged into the biggest public bankruptcy in U.S. history, due to massive delays and cost overruns. Only one of the nukes now operates.

    Sadly, some self-proclaimed climate activists have fallen into the atomic pit, arguing that in the face of the acute threat of climate change, nuclear power should be pursued as a way to lower emissions.

    But they all ignore the big lesson Joshua Frank teaches us about Hanford: All the rhetoric in the world can’t cover for the physical realities of dealing with atomic radiation. And atomic fires burning at 571 degrees Fahrenheit will never cool the planet. The mines, the mills, the fuel fabrication, the reactors themselves, the waste dumps, all that horrendous multitrillion-dollar paraphernalia — they together comprise the most lethal and expensive technological failure in human history.

    Many reactor promoters have long vehemently denied any connection between their “peaceful atom” and the scourge of war, but anti-nuclear activists have exposed the falsity of those claims. For example, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a British advocacy organization that opposes both nuclear weapons and the building of new nuclear power facilities, writes:

    The civil nuclear power industry grew out of the atomic bomb programme in the 1940s and the 1950s. In Britain, the civil nuclear power programme was deliberately used as a cover for military activities…. The development of both the nuclear weapons and nuclear power industries is mutually beneficial. Scientists from Sussex University confirmed this once again in 2017, stating that the government is using the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station to subsidise Trident, Britain’s nuclear weapons system.

    As the atomic energy business is increasingly priced out of the electricity market by wind, solar, batteries, and increased efficiency and conservation, we will likely see the nuclear power industry increasingly admitting to what it always was — a necessary servant of the nuclear weapons industry.

    Fittingly, the only future for atomic reactors will be as a bottomless pit for ecological suicide and massive public subsidies — exactly like Hanford.

    Indeed, for readers truly interested in the future of atomic energy, take a good look at how it plays in Joshua Frank’s Atomic Days. Then ask how soon we can cover the whole damn place with solar panels.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • US Is Overcome With Debt and Death. Let’s Fight Inequality to Stop This Crisis.

    When the Biden administration announced its debt relief plan in late August, the timing was fitting. According to the Hebrew calendar, this last year, which ended on September 25, was the Shemitah year, a year where debts are forgiven. In the Bible, canceling debt is just one among a set of jubilee laws, which includes freeing the enslaved, feeding the poor, paying fair wages, and conserving and protecting overworked land. As a biblical scholar and pastor, I am often struck by the moral logic that undergirds these laws. Indeed, many ancient societies understood jubilee to be not only a compassionate response to unequal economic conditions, but a necessary step to keep themselves from buckling under the weight of inequality. In their eyes, debt and wider injustice was the cause of two forms of death: the economic and spiritual death of a society, and individual, avoidable death among their people.

    In the U.S. debt has reached new heights, including $1.6 trillion in student debt, up 100 percent since 2010. Nearly half of these student debt borrowers owe less than $20,000, so the White House’s announcement that to cancel $10,000 for people earning less than $125,000 (up to $250,000 for a household) and $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients is significant. It amounts to the cancellation of up to 20 million loans. But responses to the new measure have been divided — many have celebrated it and called for more, while others have raised alarm about whether we can afford it as a nation and challenged it.

    In fact, since the time of the announcement, six Republican-led states are in the process of suing the administration, claiming that President Biden overstepped executive powers with the debt relief program. In response, the Biden administration has scaled back eligibility requirements, eliminating borrowers whose federal loans were owned by private banks and subject to the lawsuits. NPR describes the impact of such a reversal: “People who took out Perkins loans and Federal Family Education Loans, the mainstay of the federal student loan program until 2010, may no longer be eligible for forgiveness.”

    The justification to gut the loan forgiveness program follows the same tired arguments about who “deserves” to have their debt canceled, pitting struggling people against each other. A particularly divisive statement on this came from Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, who claimed, “It’s patently unfair to saddle hard-working Americans with the loan debt of those who chose to go to college.”

    In reality, the debate between the “deserving” and “undeserving” is a sleight of hand that is useful for the rich and powerful. It obscures the structural nature of debt and its role in hyper-charging inequality. Today, nearly 40 percent of the country lives in poverty or is one $400 emergency away from economic ruin, and personal debt that now totals nearly $16 trillion is in no small part to blame. After all, canceling debt and putting more money into the pockets of everyday people who will spend it on things like food and household items is both moral policy making and good economics. So, when narratives about scarcity, affordability and deservingness are invoked to thwart the cancellation of debt, we should approach them with a healthy dose of skepticism.

    Over the last few weeks, politicians have been clamoring about scarcity, complaining that we can’t afford to cancel even a modest amount of debt and spending time and resources undoing the progress the administration made. But how can that be the case when the Pentagon has received increases in funding every year over the last decade (to a record $782 billion for 2022 — more than it even requested) and the Federal Reserve bailed out Wall Street in the early days of the pandemic for nearly as much as it would cost to cancel all student debt?

    Moreover, Biden’s student loan plan is small compared to other debt that has been canceled in the last five years with very little opposition, including $659 billion in Paycheck Protection Program loans that mostly went to wealthy business owners during the pandemic and $1.7 trillion in taxes owed by wealthy corporations under the 2017 Trump tax cuts. Scarcity itself is a myth, seeming only to exist as an insurmountable problem when the needs of the poor are under consideration.

    Rather, it is not debt cancellation that the nation can’t afford — it is widening inequality that is too costly. The Bible is a good reference on this. Deuteronomy 15 talks about canceling loans obtained for survival for the sake of a healthy society, and we need only look at the median income of people with college degrees versus those without to see that student loans are indeed about survival. The biblical tradition of debt relief is the centerpiece of God’s call to abolish poverty, and debt cancellation is understood as necessary when poverty proliferates amid plenty and survival becomes a question of wide concern.

    Our elected officials would do well to take heed of the lessons of the book they so often like to reference. Rather than attacking debt relief, they could build on the advances made on student debt to enact a fuller slate of jubilee policies that uplift everyone near the bottom. When it comes to education, this could include wider debt cancellation, but also other structural changes like free, quality and diverse education from pre-K through university. There is no reason to pit loan cancellation against reforms that make education truly available to everyone. After all, if we value young people today and the nation’s future, we need both.

    But instead of pursuing the divine mandate of jubilee, we are witnessing a society overcome with debt and death. The most recent numbers are dire to the extreme: Alongside growing debt, U.S. life expectancy has stagnated for two decades and in 2015, it actually began to drop in a way unseen in modern history. The country’s disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated this trend and revealed systemic failure in our health care system — by comparison, our peer countries experienced only one-third as much of a decline in life expectancy and then saw an increase as they adopted more effective COVID-19 responses.

    According to a 2022 report produced by the Poor People’s Campaign (which I co-chair alongside Rev. Dr. William Barber), poor and low-income U.S. counties experienced death rates that were twice as high as richer ones, and at different phases of the pandemic, their death rates were up to five times higher. This occurred in part because of the lack of health care for tens of millions across the country. In the worst public health crisis in a century, Congress did not expand Medicaid, leaving millions of people in the states that suffered the steepest decline in health outcomes without access to affordable health care. In fact, at the same time that overall health and life expectancy was on the decline, health care company profits were on the rise.

    Connected to the issue of our lowered life expectancy is the growing crisis of what some call “deaths of despair” — from suicide, drug overdose and alcoholism. Traveling around the country, I have met with the families of small farmers whose suicide rates are rising because they are up to their ears in commercial debt. I have also met the friends and spouses of some of the 20 veterans who commit suicide every day, more than those killed as active duty servicepeople on the front lines of our most recent wars. But the framework of “deaths of despair” is often misleading. Even in the case of suicides and overdoses, a large part of what is driving these deaths is outright and egregious neglect and injustice.

    Aaron Scott, co-founder of Chaplains on the Harbor, an organization committed to serving poor people on the rural coast of Washington State, has buried dozens of poor and homeless members who died from overdose and suicide. He also had to bury his grandpa after he took his own life. Scott recently explained to me, “When I think of my grandpa’s suicide, as much as he was personally experiencing despair, the reason he died is because he couldn’t access the mental health care my grandma was trying to get him connected to. I’ve seen a number of blatant medical neglect deaths that conservative county coroners refuse to label as medical neglect because of the poverty and IV drug use history of the deceased — so these get recorded as drug-related deaths even though the hospital simply refused care.”

    In New York City, where I live, and where life expectancy dropped by three years in 2020, there is a mass grave of poor people on Hart Island, in the middle of the Long Island Sound. There are countless other “potter’s fields” (also known as “pauper’s graves”) across the country, and yet few know the true brutality of these graveyards for the poor. More than 1 million people have been buried on Hart Island since the Civil War, including thousands of victims of epidemics like the flu of 1918, AIDS and COVID-19. These people are buried in unidentified graves, with 150 adults or 1,000 infants in a plot. And although some may have been called home when it was their time, so many continue to prematurely die because they live in a society that neglects even their most basic needs. Now, dignity is denied to them not only in life, but in death itself.

    Indeed, the United States has become far too comfortable with poverty and death, and the consequence, unfortunately, is more of both. But if the news of our declining life expectancy is a wake-up call of the most elemental nature, recent action on student debt (if it isn’t completely undone) is a small glimpse into what it could look like for everyone to have the right to live. That is what jubilee has always been about — preserving life and creating a more just and balanced society. Nothing less is required of us if we want the same today.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • This CDC Scientist Couldn’t Access Monkeypox Treatment. Why?

    On a Monday morning in mid-July, William L. Jeffries IV decided it was time to call a colleague for help. Jeffries is a senior health scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, where he researches the ways that racism and homophobia impact health in the United States. Jeffries, who describes himself as a same-gender-loving Black man, sees the work as a way to serve his people and, by extension, God.

    This call, however, was a personal one. He was sitting on his bed in pain, and he was angry.

    Jeffries was angry for the hundreds of people, mainly gay and bisexual men, who were infected with monkeypox. He was angry that the burden was falling particularly hard on Black and Latino communities. He was angry that the federal government had been saying for eight weeks that it had the tools necessary to deal with the growing outbreak yet people were still struggling to find care.

    And he was angry because he himself now had monkeypox and couldn’t find anyone to diagnose or treat him.

    Jeffries told his colleague, who was helping to lead the CDC’s monkeypox response, about his ordeal. He knew then that he was a victim of the very failures of the American public health system that he studies.

    “I myself am a trained disease detective. I have led outbreak investigations for HIV and syphilis. I am a published scientist. And I know a lot about public health and infectious disease transmission,” Jeffries said. “I emphasize my training and my experience because if I had to go to three different places before I got diagnosed, imagine what the average gay man has to do?”

    By the end of September, more than three-quarters of people diagnosed with monkeypox in Georgia were Black, and Georgia had the second-highest rate of cases among all U.S. states, trailing New York. As the outbreak has spread, the federal government has been forced to reckon with the disease’s disproportionate burden on Black communities around the country. Black people make up more than half of monkeypox cases nationally, even as they represent less than 14% of the U.S. population. More than 26,000 people have been infected nationwide.

    CDC Director Rochelle Walensky recently acknowledged that she and other top public health officials anticipated these inequities; decades of tracking HIV and other infectious diseases made them predictable. Public health officials, who lost the trust of many Americans in the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, had a chance to show that they had learned from their mistakes when monkeypox hit. Yet what happened to Jeffries and others in Georgia in the early months of the outbreak shows how federal officials, who suspected that communities of color would get monkeypox at higher rates, failed to intervene in ways that could have prevented — or at least lessened — that suffering.

    “A lot of people got hurt,” said Dr. David Holland, the chief clinical officer for the Board of Health in Fulton County, which covers 90% of Atlanta. He too is angry about the first months of the federal response. “You can debate what the right thing to do would have been, but doing nothing is not on that list. And that’s kind of what was done.”

    A dozen infectious disease experts told ProPublica that the likely trajectory of the virus in the U.S. was obvious once reports surfaced in May saying that monkeypox had found its way into communities of gay and bisexual men in Europe. They knew then that while it would most likely spread first among wealthier, whiter communities, Black and Latino men would soon bear the brunt of the disease. They knew this because it is the path that many infectious diseases have traveled before.

    The reasons why are not a mystery either. Among other things, Black people are less likely than white people to have a regular doctor, less likely to have insurance coverage and more likely to have HIV, diabetes and other diseases that generally put people at greater risk for new infections. White people are more likely to have benefits that can lessen the effects of illness, such as jobs that allow them to take paid sick leave and wealth that can buy them better care.

    Federal and state officials nevertheless failed to make testing readily available, slow-walked the rollout of vaccines and didn’t make it clear during the first two months of the outbreak that people of color, like Jeffries, were at elevated risk for harm. Those missteps amplified long-standing health inequities.

    “Any time you fumble the response to an epidemic it will cut through the weakest seams in your society,” said Dr. Jay Varma, a professor at Weill Cornell Medical College and former CDC official.

    When Jeffries was 9 or 10 years old, his father shared with him a book from 1928 called “Leaders of the Colored Race in Alabama.” Inside was a photo of his great-grandfather and namesake, Dr. William L. Jeffries. Jeffries was blown away that in the early 20th century, a Black man could achieve the level of education — a doctorate in divinity — required to earn him the title of doctor. He said as much to his father, who responded that Jeffries could be a doctor, too. From that moment on, he knew he would follow in his great-grandfather’s footsteps. “I had to be Dr. Somebody,” Jeffries said. “That was just part of my destiny.”

    He was interested in the health of communities, and so in 2004 he moved away from his home in Polk County, Florida, for the first time and entered a doctoral program in sociology at the University of Florida. In his first year, he remembers a professor explaining how the CDC responds to infectious disease outbreaks. The professor described disease investigators as the “cream of the crop.” For Jeffries, this was an epiphany: “Immediately, I just knew that was what I was supposed to be.”

    Four years later, with a Ph.D. in hand and a Dr. in front of his name, Jeffries entered the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service. There, he trained to be a disease investigator like the ones his professor had told him about. It was the only job he applied for. Jeffries has been with the CDC ever since.

    Now 42, Jeffries is a senior health scientist in the Office of Health Equity in the Division of HIV Prevention. He investigates the factors that place vulnerable populations at risk for HIV and other diseases. On average, gay and bisexual Black men have fewer sexual partners than their white counterparts and are more likely to use condoms, and yet Black men have six times the rate of HIV. White people get earlier and better access to new treatments and prevention. Many Southern states have not expanded Medicaid to offer insurance coverage for all impoverished adults, leaving people there less likely to have a doctor and worse off when they do get sick.

    “God has had me be here to fight for the oppressed and to be a voice for those who, in many instances in our society, do not have a voice that can be heard by people in positions of power,” Jeffries said. “And my voice is what I use to serve those who Jesus called the least of these among us.”

    Jeffries understands that he is in important ways one and the same with the people he researches, and he knows what that means for his vulnerability to disease. So when reports of monkeypox began surfacing, he kept an eye on it. He understood himself to be at risk and wanted to get vaccinated because he knew that, unlike with HIV, condoms do not prevent transmission of monkeypox. He also knew the vaccine wasn’t available in Atlanta yet. At the same time, the risk seemed distant. Government officials said there were only a couple dozen cases in metro Atlanta — a city of over 6 million people — and they made it sound like they had the situation under control.

    Jeffries knows when he got monkeypox. It was during a sexual encounter in the early hours of Saturday, July 9. Later that same day, Fulton County Board of Health staff finally held its first monkeypox vaccine clinic.

    By Sunday night, Jeffries felt some itching and irritation. A couple days after that, he had a fever, chills and sores around his anus. So on Friday, he went to an LGBTQ-friendly health clinic, told staff that he thought he might have monkeypox and asked for a test and vaccine. They had neither.

    Instead, he said they tested him for a range of sexually transmitted diseases and treated him for a suspected case of chlamydia, though results later showed he didn’t have any of those diseases. Jeffries was surprised that in Atlanta, where there were already more than two dozen known monkeypox cases, the clinic couldn’t test him for it. More than eight weeks had passed since the first case was diagnosed in the U.S., and testing was supposed to be widely available.

    Frustrated, he went home and isolated from other people. The pain kept growing worse, so late on a Saturday night he sought comfort in an epsom-salt bath and lingered in the warm water until just after midnight. As he was getting out, he noticed a lesion on his chest, close to his left shoulder. Confused, he reached for an itch on his back and felt another bump. He looked down and there was another lower on his torso. They were spreading so fast.

    The next morning, Jeffries lay in his bed, uncomfortable and exhausted, and prayed. He knew it was time to go to the emergency room.

    He thought his best bet would be a hospital attached to a university, as they tend to have more up-to-date knowledge and connections to public health departments. And he knew just the place: Emory University’s renowned teaching hospital on Clifton Road, a stone’s throw from CDC headquarters. “Atlanta is this hub for Black, gay and bisexual men, and the CDC is right here. Surely, these factors would converge to lead you to have vaccine and treatment available,” Jeffries recalled thinking.

    But at Emory it was more of the same. The ER doctor, Jeffries said, knew nothing about monkeypox. Jeffries said he brought a list of the two vaccines and four possible treatments, pulled from the CDC website, but the doctor didn’t know about any of them and, regardless, said they were not available at Emory.

    The ER doctor, Jeffries said, swabbed one of his lesions to test it for the monkeypox virus. Jeffries couldn’t understand why the hospital didn’t send in an infectious disease specialist. The hospital, he said, sent him home with prescriptions for ibuprofen and a steroid foam.

    And so, the following morning, in severe pain, he called a trusted CDC colleague, Dr. John Brooks. Brooks usually serves as the chief medical officer for HIV prevention but is currently helping to lead the nation’s monkeypox response. Jeffries was desperate to find treatment and thought Brooks could help. He also wanted Brooks to know just how bad the situation was. “I knew that gay and bisexual men in Fulton County, irrespective of their race, were going to be placed at harm because of the overall ignorance, the blundering and the lack of resources,” Jeffries said.

    When Jeffries made that call, the U.S. was nearly nine weeks into the monkeypox outbreak. Officials from the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services assured the public that they were responding in full force and had all the necessary tools — a test, a treatment and a vaccine. But they showed little urgency to use them.

    Take the vaccine. Concerned that terrorists may use smallpox as a weapon to attack the U.S., federal officials invested nearly $2 billion in the development and manufacturing of the Jynneos vaccine to safeguard against that threat. In 2019, the Food and Drug Administration approved that vaccine for use against both smallpox and monkeypox, which are in the same family of viruses, and health officials keep doses in the Strategic National Stockpile.

    But they had a very limited supply when cases first appeared in the U.S. in mid-May. In the preceding years, as hundreds of thousands of doses expired, they waited to order more, holding out for a different preparation of the vaccine with a longer shelf life, as The New York Times previously reported. The 372,000 doses that were ready in vials were mostly in Denmark.

    In late May, officials at the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, the arm of the federal government that develops and procures drugs and vaccines to safeguard against pandemics and other hazards, placed orders for 72,000 doses. “We are prepared with both the vaccines and antivirals needed to protect the American people,” Dawn O’Connell, the HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response, wrote in a blog post on May 24.

    Three weeks later, O’Connell wrote that those 72,000 vaccine doses were in the federal government’s “immediate inventory.” Two more weeks passed, and HHS announced it would make 56,000 doses “available immediately.”

    By then, it was the end of June, and Atlanta hadn’t held a single vaccine drive.

    That wasn’t for lack of trying. With cases climbing in June and Georgians waiting for their first allotment of vaccines, Holland, the chief clinical officer for Fulton County’s Board of Health, made an official request for ACAM2000, an older vaccine made to ward off smallpox. It’s been available by the millions since 2008, when it was added to the Strategic National Stockpile, before the newer Jynneos vaccine existed. But the older vaccine can cause side effects, making it unsafe to use for many people, including those who are pregnant, have HIV, have weakened immune systems or have various skin conditions.

    Federal officials said states could order ACAM2000, but they didn’t exactly endorse it. Holland said Georgia officials turned down his request. He understands the concerns and respects the decision not to use ACAM2000. But he’s frustrated that in the first months, it felt like the answer to every effort at prevention was just “no.”

    In a written statement, Nancy Nydam, a spokesperson for the Georgia Department of Public Health, referenced the many potential side effects of ACAM2000 and noted that no other jurisdiction has used that vaccine during the monkeypox outbreak.

    When Fulton County finally received its long-awaited shipment of vaccines in July, it included enough for just 200 people. More dribbled in over the weeks that followed.

    By comparison, Canadian officials began vaccinating at-risk people in early June. In Montreal alone, officials vaccinated more than 15,300 people through the end of July, according to data provided to ProPublica by the city’s health department. A friend of Jeffries’ was able to get vaccinated at an outdoor walk-up clinic in Montreal’s Gay Village neighborhood on Aug. 1 while he was in the city for the International AIDS Conference. The health workers didn’t care that he wasn’t Canadian.

    “We know we live in a global village. We thought making no barriers was the most effective strategy,” said Dr. Genevieve Bergeron of the Montreal public health department.

    Georgia currently has more than two and a half times the number of monkeypox cases per capita as Quebec, the province where Montreal is located.

    “The thing that is most galling to me is that this was predictable,” said Greg Millett, a former CDC researcher and current vice president and director of public policy at amfAR, a nonprofit dedicated to AIDS research and advocacy. Around the time Jeffries was infected and Atlanta held its first vaccine clinic, there were about 700 known cases in the U.S., nearly all among gay and bisexual men, and the cases were growing exponentially. And yet, Millett said, the U.S. was dragging its feet. To Millett, it’s hard not to see homophobia and racism as an underlying reason. “If this was another population, would they have moved this slowly?”

    Within an hour of calling his colleague on July 18, Jeffries got a same-day appointment with Dr. Kimberly Workowski, an infectious diseases specialist at Emory University. She also helps write the treatment guidelines for sexually transmitted diseases at the CDC. In an Emory exam room, Workowski donned protective equipment — goggles, gloves, masks and gowns — to examine Jeffries.

    The lesions definitely looked like monkeypox, Workowski told him. She gave him an hourlong work-up, checking his body and talking through his symptoms. He’d had bad experiences with the medical system before, like the time he went in for routine testing and a doctor told him he shouldn’t have sex with other men because that’s how you get sexually transmitted diseases. So he didn’t take it for granted that she was treating him with dignity.

    Jeffries said she told him that in the ER, they only swabbed one lesion when they were supposed to swab two or three and that regardless, the sample could not be located. Jeffries was aghast. Workowski counted his lesions and swabbed several of them for a new test, which would ultimately come back as positive.

    A spokesperson for Emory Healthcare did not answer questions about Jeffries’ care. (Jeffries signed a privacy waiver to allow Emory to discuss the care he received in the emergency room on July 17.) In a written statement, the spokesperson said Emory Healthcare remains “steadfast in providing excellent and equitable health care to all of our patients.” Emory’s emergency departments follow a standard protocol for suspected monkeypox infections that “includes triage, testing and if necessary, referral to a specialist,” she wrote. “If needed, patients will be admitted to the hospital.”

    The day after Jeffries saw Workowski, her office called to tell him that an experimental antiviral drug known as TPOXX was ready for him to pick up.

    Once he started on the medicine, the lesions quickly stopped growing and spreading. But the sores and inflammation in the lining of his rectum were causing the worst pain he’s ever experienced, so bad that he couldn’t sleep. Five days after his first trip to the emergency room, he drove himself to a different Emory ER, this one in Midtown, which quickly admitted him. He spent the next four days in the hospital on a cocktail of medications that finally dulled his pain.

    He was in isolation but felt less alone than he had in days. The doctor leading his care put her hand on him while they talked and asked how he was doing. Staff chatted with him about his life outside of monkeypox. He knew the hospital was busy, but no one ever seemed rushed. “They took the time to talk to me and make me feel OK,” he said.

    At that point, physicians wishing to give TPOXX to patients had to fill out over 100 pages of paperwork. The medication was initially developed by the federal government, and the U.S. holds more than 1.7 million doses in its stockpile. The treatment has been approved for monkeypox in Europe, but it is available only as an experimental drug in the U.S. In August, the CDC slimmed down its paperwork, but even today, it can take more than an hour to fill it out and TPOXX has been hard to get.

    Through the end of June, HHS officials had sent out enough medicine to treat 300 people nationally. From around the time of Jeffries’ hospitalization in late July through the end of August, physicians in Georgia handed out just over 600 courses of the treatment, according to data provided to ProPublica by the Georgia Department of Public Health. That would have been enough to cover just half of the people diagnosed during that time.

    The Georgia Department of Public Health did not provide data on the race and ethnicity of TPOXX recipients. But nationally, as of Sept. 28, white people make up 28% of cases and have received 34% of the courses of treatment, according to preliminary data released by the CDC. The share that went to white people during the early months of the outbreak was even higher, according to CDC research.

    Jeffries feels certain he could have avoided the worst of his pain and his time in the hospital if he had received treatment sooner.

    When Jeffries got out of the hospital, he called friends and colleagues. Georgia — especially its Black and queer communities — needed more resources. He wanted people to know how bad it was and that things shouldn’t be this way.

    He phoned Justin Smith, his friend who was able to get vaccinated at the AIDS conference in Montreal. The director of the Campaign to End AIDS at a group of HIV clinics in the Atlanta area, Smith had helped organize a virtual town hall with other activists.

    There, Joshua O’Neal, the sexual health program director for the Fulton County Board of Health, told attendees that it was OK to be angry about the government’s response so far, that he sure was. O’Neal shared alarming statistics: Cases of monkeypox in Fulton County had nearly doubled in the three days before the event, and more than half of the people there with monkeypox also had HIV. Of the people with both viruses, 80% were Black. “It is our responsibility to ensure that those folks are the ones we’re reaching out to,” he told the group.

    O’Neal acknowledged that the scant appointments for the first two vaccine clinics were gone within minutes and that most who got them were white. Going forward, he vowed to partner with community organizations to get them out more equitably.

    On Aug. 4, 10 days after Jeffries got out of the hospital, the Biden administration declared a public health emergency. When that happened, as Margo Snipe reported for Capital B, a nonprofit news site for Black communities, officials made no mention of the growing racial and ethnic disparities.

    Jeffries was encouraged, though, that the White House appointed Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the head of the CDC HIV division where Jeffries works, to a top position on its monkeypox response team. Jeffries knows him and says he strongly believes that Daskalakis is committed to getting the disparities in check. The White House declined to make Daskalakis available for an interview and suggested ProPublica contact the CDC instead.

    The CDC declined to make Walensky, its director, available for an interview. Walensky’s deputy press secretary referred a reporter to Walensky’s comments at a White House briefing on Sept. 15. “It is critical that education, vaccinations, testing and treatment are equally accessible to all populations, but especially those most affected” by the monkeypox outbreak, Walensky said. “CDC remains committed to collaborating with jurisdictions to reduce health disparities.”

    A different CDC spokesperson, Kevin Griffis, followed up and said that the agency appointed an equity officer to its response team in May and did outreach to LGBTQ groups in the weeks that followed. On its website in early June, the CDC first published guidance for ways to avoid getting monkeypox and has been updating it ever since. “This was an issue that Dr. Walensky and Dr. Daskalakis both talked about really as part of essentially every discussion that would be had about the outbreak: ensuring that we were doing everything we can to reach diverse populations,” Griffis said.

    By early September, the spread of new cases began slowing in much of the U.S. Experts largely credit that decline to behavior change among queer men. In an August survey, gay and bisexual men reported changing their sexual practices to protect themselves. It’s too soon to say whether vaccine drives, which were ramped up at the end of August, are playing a role, experts say. In an effort to understand potential treatments, federal officials began recruiting monkeypox patients for a clinical trial of TPOXX. And O’Connell, of HHS, told a Senate committee on Sept. 14 that she had made more than 1.1 million vials of Jynneos vaccine available to health departments.

    The Fulton County Board of Health made good on its promise and partnered with various community organizations to get the word out to the Black community. As of Sept. 15, more than half of the first doses of the vaccine have gone to Black people, according to a county report. Nydam, the Georgia Department of Public Health spokesperson, wrote that the state worked with federal officials to give out more than 4,000 doses at Atlanta’s Black Pride festival on Labor Day weekend.

    “High demand and limited vaccine supply created access challenges for vaccines in general during the early weeks of the response, but the partnerships with community-based organizations greatly helped us with addressing health disparities in our vaccine roll out,” Nydam wrote.

    Still, Congress has not designated any money for the monkeypox response. The vaccine and TPOXX are provided for free, but Fulton County has had to use its STD budget to run its vaccine clinics. “We’re spending our entire STD budget for the year and hoping that at some point the federal government will reimburse us,” Holland said. That’s money that also needs to be used for the simultaneous epidemics of HIV and syphilis, both of which disproportionately harm Black men and women.

    While the spread of monkeypox is slowing, Black Americans represent a growing share of the overall cases — from 37% on Aug. 28 to 51% of all cases just three weeks later, according to the most recent data available.

    Jeffries is still dealing with complications from monkeypox. But his bigger concern, one he shares with many in the HIV prevention community, is that Black LGBTQ people will be left dealing with monkeypox infections even if it largely disappears from the rest of the population. That’s another pattern they have seen many times before.

    Thinking about what should have been done differently in those early months, it’s clear to Jeffries that everything the federal government has done since August should have happened much sooner. That could have prevented a lot of harm.

    But his work also tells him that stopping these predictable patterns altogether will require dealing with the racism, homophobia and economic inequality at the root of so many health disparities. Lately he’s been thinking about a lesson his grandfather taught him when he was young.

    Jeffries’ grandfather worked 12 hours a day, six days a week in Florida’s citrus groves, and he was still poor. He kept a garden to feed the family, and he sometimes took Jeffries with him to teach him how to farm. One day Jeffries was pulling at the weeds, snapping them off at the top. His grandfather stopped him.

    “That ain’t how you do it, baby,” his grandfather told him. “You’ve got to get it by the root. Because if you don’t get it by the root, it’ll grow back.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Getting the lead out — at long last

    A piston-engine aircraft flies against a cloudy sky
    Reading Time: 7 minutes

    The country began phasing lead out of gasoline for cars in the mid-1970s, and yet the toxic metal is still in aviation fuel for small aircraft — spewing over neighborhoods with children especially vulnerable to its irreversible impacts.

    That’s finally poised to change.

    Following decades of pressure from environmental-justice advocates, the Federal Aviation Administration has authorized the use of a high-octane unleaded aviation gasoline for use in all spark-ignition aviation engines in the nation’s general aviation fleet. The agency described the decision as “a major step forward” to safely phase out leaded aviation fuel, which contains a highly toxic additive known as tetraethyl lead. 

    The performance-enhancing additive prevents engine knock that can lead to sudden engine failure.  But its toxicity has been known since the 1920s, when scientists and health experts warned the federal government in public hearings of the dangers of using it in gasoline fuel. Its decision, announced on Sept. 1, marks the first time the agency has certified a high octane unleaded fuel for use in a majority of engines and aircraft, but it’s expected to take several years for the fuel to become widely available.   

    The announcement comes nearly 20 years after one environmental-health coalition began petitioning the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate leaded aviation gasoline emissions from piston-engine aircraft. That has yet to happen. Earlier this year, the EPA announced plans to issue a finding that would classify leaded aviation gasoline air pollution as a danger to public health and the environment, but even then, the process of enacting regulations could take years. 

    Time is not on the side of children exposed daily to lead, which harms their developing brains and nervous systems. That’s why earlier this year, Santa Clara County in the Silicon Valley instituted what its officials say is the nation’s first ban on the sale of leaded aviation fuel.

    The decision impacts two county-owned general aviation airports, Reid-Hillview Airport and San Martin Airport, to protect residents who live and work in the surrounding neighborhoods. 

    The county’s decision to act more quickly than the FAA triggered the ire of the agency. The FAA launched what it termed an informal investigation into the Jan. 1 ban, putting pressure on the county to delay its implementation. 

    That didn’t sit well with U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat whose district includes San Jose, where Reid-Hillview Airport is located. 

    U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna. (Andrew Harnik via Getty Images)

    He described the FAA’s unleaded fuel announcement as a step in the right direction. But the move falls short of protecting America’s children from further lead exposure, he said. 

    “In my district with blood lead levels that are higher than in Flint, Michigan, it’s unconscionable,” Khanna said. “The FAA needs to start caring about kids with poison in their blood. They’ve been indifferent. They’ve been dragging their feet. They’ve been unresponsive, and it’s outrageous. That needs to change.” 

    The FAA said in a statement that it “remains committed” to efforts to develop, refine and distribute unleaded aviation fuel and is working with Santa Clara County “to reach a mutually acceptable implementation timeline.”

    “The FAA is taking action now to create a lead-free future,” the agency’s statement said.

    There are roughly 170,000 piston-engine aircraft estimated to be in use across the country, and nearly all burn a grade of aviation gasoline, commonly referred to as avgas, that contains lead. These aircraft include airplanes and helicopters used for a myriad of purposes — including fighting wildfires, agricultural crop dusting, pilot training, medical transport, search and rescue, pipeline inspections and law enforcement — that operate out of more than 13,000 airports. 

    Khanna held a congressional hearing in late July on the dangers of leaded aviation gasoline, spotlighting the inequities faced by low-income residents and communities of color who disproportionately live near these airports across the country. He called for a nationwide ban on leaded fuel. 

    “It’s wrong that almost 6 million people — many children — are still exposed near airports to leaded fuel in this country,” Khanna said.  

    Santa Clara has refused to back down from its position, despite the FAA’s insistence that the county is obligated to sell leaded fuel, said County Supervisor Cindy Chavez. A 2021 county-commissioned study showed that children in the predominantly Latino neighborhoods around Reid-Hillview Airport in East San Jose are being poisoned by lead. She pointed to that as one of the primary reasons the county has remained steadfast. 

    Santa Clara County Supervisor Cindy Chavez. (Photo courtesy of Santa Clara County)

    “We take the position that, now that we know that we have a known toxic contaminant that’s coming from the two airports that we own and operate, that we have an obligation to be health protective of the community,” Chavez said.  

    Lead exposure is ‘an absolutely urgent problem’

    The scientific consensus is that no lead level is safe for children. Experts say that the cascade of harms for exposed children makes immediate action imperative. Research has shown that elevated blood lead levels can lead to increased aggression, lack of impulse control, hyperactivity, inability to focus, inattention and delinquent behaviors. Even children with low levels of lead exposure can experience serious consequences such as cognitive deficits, behavioral issues and educational delays.

    “It’s just so wide reaching that it’s an absolutely urgent problem,” Simon Fraser University Professor Bruce Lanphear, an epidemiologist and leading expert on early childhood exposure to lead, testified during the hearing. 

    Research has shown that reducing piston-engine aircraft traffic fueled by leaded gas would generate massive societal benefits, increasing children’s lifetime earnings. Lanphear’s research has shown that children with low to moderate blood lead levels experience the most IQ point loss, a finding that underscores the need to protect children from chronic exposure during the early years of life. 

    A study released earlier this year found that half the U.S. population was exposed to high levels of lead during childhood in the last half of the 20th century. This resulted in a significant impact on brain development, which in turn resulted in a massive loss of IQ points for Americans born between 1951 and 1980, according to researchers from Florida State and Duke universities.  

    Reid-Hillview Airport is surrounded by more than 20 sites with especially sensitive populations, including child care centers, elementary schools, after-school centers and parks. Santa Clara County officials also found that the communities surrounding the airport face challenges that make them more vulnerable to lead poisoning. 

    In a letter to the FAA, the county counsel’s office outlined some of these risks, including low income and higher mortality rates related to cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, strokes, diabetes and hypertension than in surrounding communities. 

    These factors “underscore why this is one of the most urgent environmental justice crises in the nation,” wrote Santa Clara County Counsel James Williams and County Executive Jeffrey Smith in a January letter to the FAA defending the ban. 

    In making their decision, county officials also considered risks posed by Reid-Hillview Airport’s traffic levels. It’s one of the busiest general aviation airports in the country. It’s also used extensively for flight training, which means new pilots take off and land repeatedly, and circle around the airport, showering the densely populated residential neighborhoods in the flight path with lead pollution. 

    The airport’s runways can accommodate only smaller aircraft, so most of its air traffic consists of lead-emitting piston engine aircraft. The county found that the airport’s ratio of lead emissions per person living within a mile of its location is the third highest in the nation. 

    In 2017, these small, gasoline-powered general aviation aircraft comprised by far the largest single source of lead air emissions in the United States, generating 468 tons of it, according to EPA data. More than 5 million people, including 363,000 children under age 5, live less than a third of a mile from these airport runways, and more than 160,000 children attend school in these areas, a 2020 EPA analysis found. 

    One 2017 study cited research showing that three-quarters of the nation’s piston-engine fleet could safely transition to lead-free automotive gasoline at little cost, but that these planes relied on leaded avgas because it’s the primary fuel available in most U.S. airports. 

    There’s also a grade of unleaded avgas already available for certain aircraft, lower octane than what the FAA just approved. In its letter to the agency in January, Santa Clara County noted that a substantial portion of aircraft operating out of Reid-Hillview could use that avgas, and some were doing so.  

    The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued a congressionally mandated report last year that concluded that “significantly” reducing lead emissions from gasoline-powered aircraft would require leadership and strategic guidance from the FAA as well as a sustained commitment from other government agencies working with pilots, airports, suppliers and aircraft manufacturers. While efforts are underway to develop an unleaded aviation fuel that can be used by the entire gasoline-powered fleet, the uncertainty of success means that other steps should be taken to begin reducing lead emissions and exposures, the report’s authors recommended. 

    Since the ban’s implementation in Santa Clara County, the transition has been seamless, Chavez said. It includes a protocol to transport leaded gasoline to Reid-Hillview for aircraft that might need that fuel in emergency situations. Other counties have reached out to Santa Clara officials to learn about the ban and peer-reviewed, independent study on the exposure risks of leaded avgas, she said. 

    “We think that it is critical, critical, critical that everybody have the same information, especially counties that wouldn’t have the resources to be able to invest in such a thorough study,” Chavez said. 

    She thinks the FAA’s attention to Santa Clara’s ban suggests that the ripple effects of the county’s decision may extend far beyond its borders.  

    Many cities and counties likely have their own version of a Reid-Hillview Airport but don’t have the means to commission a study like Santa Clara County, she noted. 

    “We know that there are millions of children that live within zones of airports that absolutely mean they are currently being poisoned by lead, period, and that we have an opportunity to fundamentally change the health outcomes for millions of people,” Chavez said. 

    She described the FAA’s announcement on the unleaded fuel alternative as a game changer, and credited Khanna for putting pressure on the agency by holding the July hearing. 

    Among those testifying were the developer of that fuel, George Braly of General Aviation Modifications Inc., an aerospace engineering company in Oklahoma. A frustrated Braly told people at the hearing that he had been waiting for 147 days for the FAA to give the final signoff on the fuel. 

    “The implications of this are that there’s more unleaded avgas available nationally,” Chavez said of the approval finally arriving. “I think that will make a significant difference to the community because consistent fuel is really what we need.” 

    The post Getting the lead out — at long last appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

    This post was originally published on Center for Public Integrity.

  • Mayor Peels Back COVID Mandate for Millions of NYC Private Sector Workers 

    Note: See follow up statements at the bottom!

    Protestors demonstrate outside the New York City Department of Health.

    New York Mayor Eric Adams announced yesterday (September 20) an end to his city’s sweeping vaccine requirement on roughly 184,000 private businesses with at least one employee.

    Adams stated that rescinding COVID vaccine mandates would provide more “flexibility” to parents and businesses.

    “It is time to move on to the next level of fortifying our city,” Adams said. “It’s imperative to send the right message and lead by example as I’m doing today by getting my booster shot.”

    While announcing this sun-setting of the nation’s strictest COVID vaccine policy mandated by former mayor Bill de Blasio, Adams implored New Yorkers to get new booster shots aimed at “highly transmissible” COVID variants.

    In front of a group of journalists, Adams received his second booster shot from the city’s Health Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan.

    A picture of NYC Mayor Adams getting his COVID-19 vaccine booster shot.

    The Defender* (I) asked national grassroots organizer for Children’s Health Defense and founder of TeachersForChoice.org,  Michael Kane,  several questions regarding the authority for which Adams can roll back some parts of the mandate for the private sector.

    “NYC is still in a state of emergency renewed every six days by Mayor Adams. That is where the authority comes from and no mechanism currently exists in NYC to stop the renewals.”

    When the sweeping mandate was put into force December 27, 2021, Bill de Blasio used a commission order from the city’s health commissioner Dave Chokshi. That mandate took many city officials, businesses, union representatives and public workers by surprise.

    However, when he first announced the mandate would go into effect four days after he left office, de Blasio expressed confidence that any legal challenge to the mandate would be defeated.

    The City’s lead attorney backed him up. “The health commissioner has an obligation and a responsibility to protect the public health. Here, he is issuing an order that is intended to do just that in a public health emergency,” Corporation Counsel Georgia Pestana told Politico last year.

    The legal qualification for this emergency law is that the mandate applied across the board rather than singling out any industry.

    A picture of Bill de Blasio.

    A month earlier, November 2021, the city had mandated the COVID shot for all of the New York City’s workforce of 304,000 people.

    Almost 11 months after that mandate went into effect, yesterday’s announcement of a November 1 rollback has precipitated confusion.

    While Adams was on the record earlier this year stating he would not be enforcing the private business mandate, Kane told The Defender* (me) the law was still in effect and had far-reaching effects.

    “Lack of an enforcement mechanism doesn’t mean the mandate was gone,” Kane said. “What major business in NYC would risk bucking the mandate? Once the mandate is officially repealed, some businesses may even choose to keep it.”

    For the more than 800 teachers Adams fired this month for not getting the vaccine, losing incomes and medical insurance is more than just a bitter taste in their mouths. These terminations have occurred during a statewide teacher shortage.

    When the mayor was asked yesterday why teachers and public sector employees still have to follow a vaccine mandate, his response was confusing.

    Kane put it bluntly: “Mayor Adams answered this today and it was the worst answer I have EVER SEEN to any question ever.”

    The mandate for city workers has been controversial, leading to workers being fired, lawsuits and political protests. “We’re in a steady phase of pivot and shift,” the mayor said yesterday when asked if he plans to discontinue the mandate on city workers. “We do things. We roll things out slowly. Right now, that is not on the radar for us.”

    The New York Post reported Saturday those 850 teachers and aides who were fired September 5 bring the total to nearly 2,000 “deemed to have voluntarily resigned” by the Education Department

    Adams may have rolled back some of de Blasio’s COVID restrictions, but he’s kept the public worker and school employee vaccine proof mandate.

     To date, New York City has fired more than 2,600 municipal workers in total for not getting a COVID shot, according to the New York Post’s findings.

    “I don’t think anything dealing with COVID makes sense, and there’s no logical pathway of [what] one can do,” Adams said yesterday at the press conference. “You make the decisions based on how to keep our city safe, how to keep our employees operating.”

    For many of the 24,000 members of the NYPD, last year’s mandates set off protests and lawsuits by police. Yesterday’s announcement for some is “irrational pseudoscience.”

    “This announcement is more proof that the vaccine mandate for New York City police officers is arbitrary, capricious and fundamentally irrational,” said Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch. “Now that the city has abandoned any pretense of a public health justification for vaccine mandates, we expect it to settle our pending lawsuits and reinstate with back pay our members who unjustly lost their jobs.”

    It was March 24 when Adams rolled back the vaccine mandate for athletes, but not teachers and municipal workers, including cops and firefighters.

    United Federation of Teachers said in a statement that lifting the vaccine mandate for performers and athletes was a double standard.

    “The city should not create exceptions to its vaccination requirements without compelling reason,” the UFT statement read. “If the rules are going to be suspended, particularly for people with influence, then the UFT and other city unions are ready to discuss how exceptions could be applied to city workers.”

    Rachelle Garcia, a 15-year veteran teacher in New York City, spoke to Fox Friends First yesterday about her and her family’s struggle after she was fired earlier this month. She made three religious exemptions, but all were denied.

    After putting in all the in-person teaching during the pandemic and then receiving a pink slip, Garcia explained: “We went from heroes to zeroes.”

    The Defender* (I) talked at length with Kane, who had been a New York teacher 15 years before “voluntarily resigning” last year because he refused to be vaccinated. 

    “It’s a failed public health policy.” Kane said he saw a sea change in attitudes toward fired teachers and first responders at the Labor Day rally earlier this month. “My wife and I marched with New York Workers for Choice through 47th Avenue where all the teachers were,  and we were cheered on, caused a real ruckus.”

    A year ago, Kane said, the atmosphere was much different when fellow teachers did not support his anti-mandate stance. He cited a recent Emerson college poll that found 52 percent of New Yorkers were in favor of rehiring the fired teachers, compared to 30 percent against.

    Kane says good teachers and public servants no longer serve the city because of the mandate. “I had a Dreamers Alliance Club for five years. I took the kids to businesses, to Albany. Now they have nothing.”

    Many teachers like Kane have said the mandate got rid of a lot of dedicated, intelligent educators. 

    But the fight is still on. “We’re going to go back to City Hall this week and demand this policy ends.” Kane is hoping a few hundred fired workers will be there on the steps of City Hall lobbying to get their jobs back. 

    +–+

    Note: This was an assignment by Robert F. Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense “news aggregator,” The Defender. I answered a solicitation to apply for one of two “reporter” jobs there. Got interviewed September 7.  Yeah, funny stuff, applying at age 65. The Zoom interview with two editors went well, and then a a week later I was assigned a piece, as a trial-test.

    They gave me the actual story to cover, again, a day late and a dollar short, but I got a hold of three sources for original quotations. The idea was to follow up with a story already covered heavily in the media and through environmental groups, and try to add something new.

    I was told in the Zoom interview if The Defender published the trial piece, I would be paid (not sure what that rate was). Read it, and many have praised the piece.

    Here it is, reprinted at DV, “Shell’s $6 Billion ‘Cracker’ Plant Part of ‘Ponzi Scheme for Natural Gas’, Critic Says” and then here, at the Defender, September 20, 2022.

    Ahh, the cracker story turned out to be bigger and longer than they had assigned. And, the three females looking at the copy, well, they were using this piece as a trial. The main editor said it made sense that I was not spot on with their AP style; i.e., surface level stuff.

    But, then, another test, one more test, for the $33 an hour gig. I was feeling a bit, well, used, and not confident this outfit was all up and up. But I plowed on with short notice to do a recap of the above New York City mayoral decision to lift the mandate story.

    Yeah, I contacted four places in New York for comments, both by phone and email. Luckily, fired teacher Michael Kane, who just started at CHD, was available.

    We talked for almost an hour this morning, and I submitted the story that you just read above. He told me it was fantastic.

    Yep, that was it.

    However, I received the following email after talking with Michael Kane and getting some confidence-building:

    Hi Paul. I enjoyed meeting you and appreciate your time, but the editor and I have decided you’re not the right fit for our next reporter.

    I wish you the best. S

    Now, a funny thing happened on the way to the Defender. There was a verbal discussion during the interview stage how I’d get paid for the story if they ran it. They did publish it, and it was long one. Alas, though, this is Gig economy, and the collective bargaining ain’t at a thing with nonprofits like Children’s Health Defense, usually writers get something for things published. In the old days, I got “kill fees” from magazines who assigned something and failed to publish it.

    No word back from them about getting some recompense. Typical, in my opinion.

    Also, so it goes, in my opinion, with this new normal abnormal, of gig workers, of aggregator news (sic) sites, and a world where curt and empty words, like those above, go with the territory. Unprofessional, but I was the one being judged!

    Luckily, my journalism experience over five decades has mostly been me going out and doing original work, not looking at sources that already covered a breaking news item in order to paraphrase and recap it in my own words. Sure, a ton of press releases and leads on stories from sources came my way, but the bottom line was/is I was on the spot, doing original investigation and coverage, of my own accord, usually under the auspices of my own story generation, or sometimes I pursued stories hashed out with editors that then got me deep into the weeds, sometimes.

    Now, Michael Kane and I talked at length early this AM Pacific time, since he’s in NYC. I thought the piece which I had almost completed would be apropos for The Defender. It never got looked at, essentially, never edited.

    Kane’s the lead-creator of Teachers for Choice. He has been teaching for 15 years, and had been in special education. He felt he was meant to teach after a few years of getting his feet wet.

    He told me he was super active in the union, American Federation of Teachers, and was even a union delegate and ended up in the state Capital lobbying and presenting and rallying around teachers and education issues.

    When the mandate came down for NYC educators, K12, he wanted to opt out. He ended up not signing the waiver that would have allowed him to stay home, get pay, lose his medical benefits, for a year, with the caveat of not suing the school/education district.

    His wife and Michael had just purchased a home, and he told me both of them (she’s a teacher, I believe) had lost their jobs.

    The fired teachers and public employees have a lawsuit still pending for an October court date with the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. He told me that he believes Adams reversal of the private employers mandate (it is sun-setting November 1, but still, it’s optional to opt out of making employees have vaccines for COVID) has set in motion “energy” around the firing of teachers, many of whom have dedicated like Michael a decade or more developing both as educators and community and student inspirations.

    He told me he is progressive, and the irony is he is supporting the Republican candidate for New York governor. “I’ve never voted Republican.”

    These alliances and allegiances are what also adds to the new abnormal. He also pointed out that de Blasio pushed MMR shots for adults in Brooklyn when a measles cluster broke out.

    “Adams is much more transactional than de Blasio was. The Mets owner Cohen gave Adams money for his campaign, and so the Mayor carved out a vax mandate exception for athletes.”

    Kane told me that “well over fifty percent of the Black Community didn’t get the COVID vaccination.” Lots of skepticism on medical overlords telling African Americans what to do with their bodies, medically and drug wise.

    We talked about how mayors and governors and the CDC and president expect educators to be compliant. He also said what he saw during the first year of the COVID teaching arena was bizarre.

    “In September 2021 I was still at my job. I stood back and it looked like the kids and teachers were robots.”

    He said they had to wear face masks and some both masks and shields. All teachers had Chrome books, and the kids had laptops. The teachers had mics set up under their masks to amplify their muffled voices. Students had to DM teachers and aides when they had a question or problem.

    “It was frightening.”

    Yep, we agreed on how the downfall of education occurred across the world when social media came into play. We talked about John Taylor Gatto, and really how education is now not about helping the kids one on one, or really about creating creative and independent thinkers.

    Ahh, so-called modern scientific schooling is actually a perverse experiment of morphing children in compliants, or hateful of learn. Here’s what Gatto calls the “seven lessons of school teaching.” These are lessons of mass forced schooling:

    It confuses the students. It presents an incoherent ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize to stay in school. Apart from the tests and trials, this programming is similar to the television; it fills almost all the “free” time of children. One sees and hears something, only to forget it again.

    It teaches them to accept their class affiliation.

    It makes them indifferent.

    It makes them emotionally dependent.

    It makes them intellectually dependent.

    It teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem).

    It makes it clear to them that they cannot hide, because they are always supervised.

    As Michelle Alexander points out, these are children “who have a parent or loved one, a relative, who has either spent time behind bars or who has acquired a criminal record and thus is part of the under-caste – the group of people who can be legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives.”  She writes:

    . . . For these children, their life chances are greatly diminished. They are more likely to be raised in severe poverty; their parents are unlikely to be able to find work or housing and are often ineligible even for food stamps. For children, the era of mass incarceration has meant a tremendous amount of family separation, broken homes, poverty, and a far, far greater level of hopelessness as they see so many of their loved ones cycling in and out of prison. Children who have incarcerated parents are far more likely themselves to be incarcerated. (source)

    It is now the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the canceled, the disenfranchised, the un-woke, the misbegotten, et al. Here, Henry Giroux:

    Education as a democratic project is utopian in its goal of expanding and deepening the ideological and material conditions that make a democracy possible. Teachers need to be able to work together, collaborate, work with the community, and engage in research that informs their teaching. In this instance, critical pedagogy refuses the atomizing structure of teaching that informs traditional and market-driven notions of pedagogy. Moreover, critical pedagogy should provide students with the knowledge, modes of literacy, skills, critique, social responsibility, and civic courage needed to enable them to be engaged critical citizens willing to fight for a sustainable and just society.

    When Schools Become Dead Zones of the Imagination: A Critical Pedagogy Manifesto
    **Final note! Nah, The Defender has not contacted me after I politely asked about the recompense. This is the new new abnormal: is it a skanky world out there now in U$A? Are people in 2022 that unprofessional, that vapid, and that deaf to human compassion? As of September 22, no word on the pay. Lovely!**

    **Second Final Note!** You don’t make money as a writer, or at least 95 percent of most writers do not make money! Aggregators like The Defender use articles from Commondreams, Yale Environment 360, Environmental Working Group, Center for Biological Diversity, and all the other mainstream ones, and I know they don’t pay for the creative commons use, and the authors of those pieces, if listed, do not get pennies from heaven. So, in reality, the piece that was up two days ago on the cracker plant should have landed me at least $150. I used to get $400 for a column I wrote. Prices for word count (or pay) have gone DOWN, and in some cases, the creepy people think that having a digital clipping of a piece of writing is reward enough. So much for solidarity amongst workers! Usury appears everywhere, and sometimes it’s just using people’s time for free. That cracker article I put in eight hours, man! Even flipping burgers at $16 an hour would be an eight-hour day at $128.

    The post Mayor Peels Back COVID Mandate for Millions of NYC Private Sector Workers  first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • No health without mental health! A forum from the ANU Indonesia Institute

    World Mental Health Day celebratory event co-hosted by ANU Indonesian Institute and the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, University of Sydney; featuring the launch of the new film It Takes a Village directed by Dra. Ninik Supartini, and a launch of Dr Nova Riyanti Yusuf’s recent book on suicide.

    Date & time: 10 October, 2022 – 1-3 pm AEDT, 9-11am WIB

    Where: Online

    Register on Zoom

    What is happening in mental health in Indonesia today? The golden age in psychiatry in the world’s largest archipelago nation is over. During the last thirty years, mental health has not been a priority in either research, policy, or treatment facilities. But with advent of COVID-19 this changed: mental health became everybody’s business. In February 2021, Indonesia opened the new National Centre of Mental Health on the lush grounds of the Bogor psychiatric hospital. At the same time, the Indonesian Mental Health Directorate has been renewed. Armed with a new mandate and funding, we are watching expectantly at what comes next. In addition, civil society initiatives have always been the backbone of mental health support in Indonesia.

    Today, on World Mental Health Day, we are going to hear from Dr Dr Nova Riyanti Yusuf, Secretary General of the Asian Federation of Psychiatric Association, head of the Jakarta chapter of the Indonesian Psychiatric Association, and formerly a member of the Indonesian parliament (DPR), who will give us a brief update on the current state of mental health in Indonesia. We will also launch her recent book on suicide. Dr Sandersan Onie, a research fellow at Black Dog Institute and Founder of mental health NGO Emotional Health for All, will discuss groups of individuals with a lived experience of mental distress in urban Indonesia.

    Following this we will launch the film It Takes a Village, a success story of community- driven mental health systems improvement in Kebumen, Central Java, directed by Dra. Ninik Supartini of Elemental Film Productions. The film launch will be followed by a dialogue with our special guests and the audience.

    The event is co-hosted by Sydney University’s Professor Hans Pols and ANU Indonesia Institute’s Dr Aliza Hunt. We hope you will come along and join the discussion.

    Chairs:

    Professor Hans Pols (Sydney University)

    Dr Aliza Hunt (ANU Indonesia Institute)

    Speakers and guests:

    Dra. Ninik Supartini

    Dr Nova Riyanti Yusuf, Secretary General of the ASEAN Federation of Psychiatric Association

    Dr Sandersan Onie, a research fellow at Black Dog Institute and Founder of mental health NGO Emotional Health for All

    The post No health without mental health! A forum from the ANU Indonesia Institute appeared first on New Mandala.

    This post was originally published on New Mandala.

  • NZ covid-19 traffic light system scrapped from midnight, says PM Jacinda Ardern

    RNZ News

    All mask wearing requirements in Aotearoa New Zealand — except in healthcare and aged care — will be scrapped, and household contacts will no longer need to isolate, the government confirmed today.

    Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Minister for Covid-19 Response Dr Ayesha Verrall confirmed cabinet’s decision to scrap the Covid-19 Protection Framework — known as the “traffic light” system — and the majority of related public health restrictions.

    The traffic light system will end tonight at 11.59pm.


    Today’s media briefing.    Video: RNZ News

    They said the changes would include:

    • Mask-wearing only required in healthcare and aged care: including hospitals, pharmacies, primary care, aged residential and disability-related residential care
    • People who test positive for covid-19 must still isolate for seven days, but household contacts no longer required to provided they take a RAT test every day
    • All government vaccine mandates to end on 26 September 26
    • Removal of all vaccine requirements for incoming travellers and air crew
    • Leave support payments to continue
    • All New Zealanders over age 65, and Māori over age 50, to get automatic access to covid-19 antiviral drugs if they test positive for Covid-19
    • From Tuesday, case and hospitalisation number reporting becomes weekly, not daily

    Ardern said it marked a milestone in New Zealand’s response to the virus.

    She said people may still be asked to wear a mask in some places but it would be at the discretion of those managing the location, not a government requirement. Vaccination requirements would also be at the discretion of employers.

    ‘Claim back certainty’
    “Cabinet has determined that based on public health advice we are able to remove the traffic light system and with that decision claim back the certainty we have all lost over the last three years,” she said.

    “For the first time in two years we can approach summer with the much needed certainty New Zealanders and business need, helping to drive greater economic activity critical to our economic recovery.

    She said there was no question the actions of New Zealanders had saved thousands of lives, but the risks were changing.

    “When we moved into our first lockdown the objective was simple: To save lives and livelihoods,” Ardern said.

    “I’m sure there will be many who over the years will pore over the details of every nation’s response including ours. They’ll certainly measure the outcomes in different ways but when you look at countries of our size and compare them, they’ll find the tragic loss for instance of 15,500 people in Scotland and less than 2000 in New Zealand.

    “The most recent health advice now tells us that with the lowest cases and hospitalisations since February, our population well vaccinated, and expanded access to anti-viral medicines, New Zealand is in a position to move forward.”

    New Zealand could move on with confidence that its actions had successfully managed cases down, she said.

    ‘Never to be taken alone’
    “This pandemic was never one to be taken on alone, and it never was. And so today I say again to everyone from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

    “I know there will be those concerned by the changes made today. I can assure you that we would not make them if we did not believe we were ready but we also need to remember that not everybody experiences covid or its risk — including to our disability community — in the same way.

    “That’s why isolating covid cases to protect our most vulnerable is important, and why treatment is too.”

    She said she hoped it would be the first summer where the “covid-19 anxiety can start to heal”.

    “As a nation, covid has hurt us in many ways but perhaps the one we talk about less than others is the toll it’s taken on everyone’s mental health. I see that toll — I see it in my colleagues, in my community in Tāmaki Makaurau, and especially I see it in our kids.

    “I don’t want people’s wellbeing to be the price of covid, but it is going to take a concerted effort from us as government and others for that not to be the case.”

    Ardern said one of the byproducts of the pandemic had been that New Zealand now have some of the most advanced mental health tools in the world, and the government had taken a number of steps to improve mental wellbeing support.

    Two apps a highlight
    This included two apps she highlighted for anyone who may need them: Groove and Habits.

    Ardern finished her statement with a line from when New Zealand first went into lockdown: “‘For the next wee while, things will look worse before they look better’. It turned out to be true, things did get worse, things did get hard, but it’s also true that finally they will and can be better”.

    Ardern said looking back, decisions were often being made with imperfect information but the decisions were made with the best intentions and she stood by it.

    She said the government had been open to the idea of an independent inquiry into the response but was still getting advice about what that would look like.

    “We do want to learn from this period and I think you’ll see that we’ve been taking that approach all the way through.”

    Asked if it was the end of the covid response, Ardern said she hoped the change would give people huge confidence and optimism.

    “We are moving on because this pandemic has moved on.”

    The traffic light system used things like gathering limits but that was no longer fit for purpose, she said.

    “We don’t need those extraordinary measures, so we won’t use them.”

    Right time to remove ‘traffic lights’
    Dr Verrall said New Zealand had succeeded in avoiding the devastation caused by the pandemic overseas, and now was the right time to remove the traffic light framework and begin a new approach to managing the virus.

    “Together we have got through this with one of the lowest cumulative mortality rates in the world.”

    She announced another 40,000 courses of antiviral medication had also been purchased and would be freely available to older New Zealanders.

    “Anyone over the age of 65, and Māori and Pacific people over the age of 50, or anyone who meets Pharmac requirements, can access the treatment in the early stages of contracting the virus,” she said.

    “This means more than double the number of New Zealanders will be able to access these medicines if they need them than previously.

    She acknowledged that lessening the restrictions caused concern to disabled and immune-compromised people.

    “I want to reassure those Kiwis that we are making these changes because risks are lower, in fact cases are more than 10 times lower than what they were earlier in the year and we now have layers of protections in place.”

    She said the support was not ending and hoped that removing the remaining vaccine mandates would ease the staffing pressures disability services have been under.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

  • As covid cases drop, Marshall Islands praised for ‘unprecedented’ response

    By Giff Johnson, editor of the Marshall Islands Journal and RNZ Pacific correspondent in Majuro

    United States-based medical doctors have praised the Marshall Islands for an “unprecedented” response to its first covid outbreak, as the positive case numbers declined dramatically this week after a record-setting first two weeks.

    “The Marshall Islands has exceeded most expectations to deliver testing and treatment for large numbers of people, and to provide care for those with covid,” said Dr Richard Brostrom, the US Centers for Disease Control Field Medical Officer who arrived in Marshall Islands last week to assist the Ministry of Health and Human Services.

    Brostrom has been engaged in the US response in all US-affiliated islands, including most recently in the Micronesian states of Pohnpei and Kosrae.

    The Marshall Islands was seeing above 1000 positive cases daily last week, but those numbers dropped to the low hundreds by Monday this week as the omicron BA.5 variant appeared to peak and drop off quickly.

    Last week, Johns Hopkins University, which tracks covid cases globally, reported that the Marshall Islands set a seven-day all-time record for the rate of positive cases of covid.

    “But what the data also shows is a jurisdiction that is able to test, treat and provide access to healthcare,” said Dr Brostrom.

    “BA.5 will behave the same everywhere,” he said. “The Marshall Islands had access points for people to get tested and treated, it was prepared and it handled thousands of people in a short period of time.”

    14 died in two weeks
    No deaths have been reported since last Friday. During the first two weeks, 14 people died of covid. The majority of the deaths were among people who were not vaccinated or partially vaccinated, the ministry reported.

    Health authorities put the low number of deaths down to widespread use of PaxLovid, a five-day treatment that Dr Brostrom said was 90 percent effective in reducing symptoms of covid.

    “The use of PaxLovid in Marshall Islands is appropriate, by the book, and unprecedented,” Brostrom said.

    He said PaxLovid had been well used in all US-affiliated islands with covid. But uniquely in the Marshall Islands, more people sought healthcare and didn’t stay home when they got covid, he said.

    “It was an opportunity for the Ministry of Health to deliver PaxLovid,” he said.

    ‘One of the best responses to this pandemic the world has seen’
    Health Secretary Jack Niedenthal praised health workers and community volunteers for their response under pressure when more than 200 were initially sidelined by covid in the early days of the outbreak.

    “As this current outbreak of covid-19 begins to lessen, the facts say, even with the complicated logistical issues and limited resources that we have in the Marshall Islands, and even though we have a very immuno-compromised population, we have had one of the best responses to this pandemic the world has seen,” said Niedenthal.

    “Our goal from the beginning has been resolute: Let the science catch up to the virus, and now we are seeing the result of over two years of diligent prevention and preparation.”

    Among unprecedented events in the Marshall Islands, Niedenthal said the nation was the “only country in the world to have been able to offer people of all ages vaccines before we had community spread of the virus”.

    He added: “Our current fatality rate of 0.1 percent of covid-19 cases ranks as among the best in the world with only Palau having a similar fatality rate for this virus.”

    Dr Brostrom was part of a “surge support medical team” involving CDC, WHO, Taiwan and other medical officials that arrived during the second week of the outbreak.

    What the visiting doctors have seen in the first two weeks of the outbreak was “an amazing delivery (of services) that we haven’t seen elsewhere,” Dr Brostrom said.

    Speed in setting up care sites
    Dr Brostrom said the Ministry of Health’s speed in setting up the alternative care sites in the community was key to dealing with the BA.5 variant that is in Marshall Islands. BA.5 is milder in its effect than earlier variants but much more contagious.

    “It is so fast that if you spend a week to get sites set up, you missed the boat.”

    He said the country had seen a five-day surge in cases, a further five days at the peak number, and now five days of numbers dropping down.

    “It is most certainly going down,” he said.

    “It’s amazing to see how the Ministry of Health has responded — not just now, but for two and a half years,” said Dr Sheldon Riklon, one of two Marshallese US-trained medical doctors working at rural clinic in Majuro.

    “The Marshall Islands has done well. The Ministry of Health leadership prepared the Marshall Islands for this.”

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

  • ‘Omicron’s not done with us’: A year on from NZ’s longest covid-19 lockdown

    By Rowan Quinn, RNZ News health correspondent

    One year on from Aotearoa New Zealand’s longest covid-19 lockdown, an epidemiologist says further lockdowns cannot be ruled out, instead preparing to do them better.

    On 17 August 2021, New Zealand went to alert level 4 because the deadly delta variant had arrived.

    Aucklanders had no idea that day that they would still be in lockdown until December, and that after 18 months of trying to keep covid-19 out, it would be here to stay.

    The city was asked to hold the line so the country could get vaccinated, something critics said should have happened much earlier.

    Auckland University epidemiologist Professor Rod Jackson was vocal in urging the country to aim high and vaccinate more than 95 percent of eligible people.

    Reflecting back, he said New Zealanders responded well, with most areas hitting that mark or higher by the measurements at the time.

    Much had been learnt about the virus — and how to respond to it — since then, with the highly contagious but less harmful omicron variant changing everything at the start of this year, he said.

    But the danger was not over.

    Random severity of variants
    “I think there are a lot of people who think, ‘oh look, it’s getting less severe over time so we’re fine,’ but it’s pretty random whether the next variant is going to be less severe or not,” he said.

    Either way, it would need to be at least as spreadable as omicron to take over, he said.

    Traffic on the Auckland motorway near the central city at 11.30am on an atypical Thursday morning.
    Empty … an Auckland motorway near the city centre, mid-morning on 19 August 2021. By 7 September 2021 the rest of New Zealand had moved to level 2, but Auckland stayed in alert level 3 restrictions until December 2. Image: Robert Smith/RNZ

    The government has said lockdowns are not part of any future covid-19 plans, with the traffic light system taking its place.

    But Professor Jackson said that may not “cut the mustard” if the worst happened.

    “If we get a new mutation that is more severe, that kills more people, then we’ve got something huge to worry about,” he said.

    “If that happens, if people start dropping dead in the street like the original version of covid, we will have little choice but to lock down.”

    That was why the country still needed to be prepared for the worst, he said.

    Frontline of delta outbreak
    As an Auckland GP and co-leader of Te Rōpū Whakakaupapa Urutā, Dr Rawiri McKree-Jansen was at the frontline of the delta outbreak and lockdown and the vaccine rollout.

    Some Māori and Pacific health teams had initially struggled to be given the resources they needed, or to be listened to.

    The work they were able to do for their communities and the country showed what they were capable of and should be a lasting legacy, Dr McKree-Jansen said.

    They were crucial to the vaccine roll out and helped the most vulnerable, especially those isolating.

    “The mobilisation was impressive, relentless and co-ordinated,” he said.

    “Those features are remarkable and give us a great sense of optimism about the contribution that Māori communities and Māori health professionals can make and I hope that is enduring.”

    When it came to new variants, he said while it was important to be vigilant about what may come next, it was also important to focus on what was happening now.

    “Omicron’s not done with us yet … I’m keen that we don’t forget the lessons we’ve learnt from the Delta and Omicron outbreaks – and supporting communities is fundamental to that.”

    Both Professor Jackson and Dr McKree-Jansen acknowledged the people who had died since pandemic began, many more since the omicron outbreak that reached so many people.

    But they said they were also grateful that many were protected by the lockdown and the vaccine rollout.

    16 more people die
    RNZ News reports that another 16 people with covid-19 have died and there are 4489 new community cases today, according to the Ministry of Health.

    There are 496 people in hospital, 13 of them are in a high dependency unit

    Yesterday the ministry reported another 21 people with covid-19 had died and there were 533 people in hospital, including 12 in intensive care or a high dependency unit.

    Deputy Director-General and Public Health Agency head Dr Andrew Old told media this afternoon that modelling from Covid Modelling Aotearoa showed New Zealand was continuing to track at the lower end of what was expected in terms of a second wave this winter.

    “We passed a peak in cases earlier that the modelling suggested and now hospitalisations are also declining suggesting these too have peaked. It’s sitting somewhere between 800 and 850 occupied beds across the country in late July,” he said.

    Te Whatu Ora-Health New Zealand interim national medical director Dr Pete Watson said the recent drop in covid-19 cases was an encouraging trend.

    “By each one of us sticking to public health measures we are making a difference,” he said.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

  • Marshall Islands covid spread demonstrates super variant

    By Giff Johnson, Marshall Islands Journal editor and RNZ Pacific correspondent in Majuro

    The Marshall Islands is a live demonstration that the omicron BA.5 variant is the most contagious covid variant yet to appear.

    In the first five days of the outbreak in the Marshall Islands, more than 10 percent of the population in Majuro, the capital, has tested positive, reports the Ministry of Health and Human Services.

    From initial confirmation of a handful of positive cases in the community on August 8, the number of positive cases skyrocketed to the one-day total of 1064 testing positive on Saturday, August 13, at the three community-based “alternative care sites” established to test and treat local residents.

    This brings Majuro’s total in the wake of the outbreak to more than 2000 cases in a population estimated at 20,000. There were nine early hospitalisations, with most reported to be recovered by Sunday.

    President David Kabua on Friday signed a proclamation of a “State of Health Disaster,” which outlines duties of all ministries and government agencies to respond.

    It also gives the government the power to access emergency funding for the response to the initial outbreak.

    Health authorities reported two deaths in the first week — both men. The first was a 23-year-old man, the second a 69-year-old.

    Both pronounced dead
    They were both pronounced dead on arrival at Majuro Hospital’s emergency room, Health officials said. Their vaccine status was not announced.

    Majuro experienced a chaotic first couple of days as alternative care sites (ACS) were rolled out at two local schools and at an outdoor sports court, with thousands of islanders crowding in to get tested.

    By Friday the influx of hundreds of volunteers to support the Ministry of Health and Human Service in managing the flow of people led to improvements in the service.

    “What we are seeing at these sites is what we expected, the ACS sites are getting better and more organised as we go along,” said Health Secretary Jack Niedenthal Sunday.

    “Much of the chaos is beginning to die down, though it is still there for sure, but this will continue to get better.”

    Spread was not contained to Majuro Atoll, the capital. Within a day of the initial confirmation of positive cases in the Majuro community last Monday, the first case was identified on Ebeye, the densely populated community next door to the US Army’s Reagan Test Site at Kwajalein Atoll.

    In addition, several isolated outer atolls at week’s end were reporting multiple residents with covid-like symptoms.

    All remote island flights suspended
    All flights on Air Marshall Islands and all government ships to remote islands were suspended August 9 in an effort to contain the spread. But travellers from the previous week to remote islands unwittingly caused the spread.

    August 12, a special Air Marshall Islands flight took a health team to Wotje Atoll, confirming multiple positive cases, training the local health aide to conduct further testing, and leaving a supply of PaxLovid and other therapeutic medicines for islanders, according to health officials.

    Health teams were attempting to visit other remote islands for similar follow up Sunday, but all AMI pilots reportedly tested positive, putting flights in limbo.

    Although the government did not require a lockdown, most churches cancelled in-person services Sunday and the one main road in the capital atoll was unusually quiet as people appeared to be staying home.

    Restaurants also saw the number of customers decline dramatically, although most continued to see ongoing demand for takeout meals.

    “We at the Ministry of Health and Human Services are very proud of the response that has come in from all corners of our country to help us deal with the health crisis,” said Niedenthal.

    The ministry struggled in the initial phase of the outbreak with more than 200 of its staff, including many doctors and nurses, testing positive for covid — many exposed before they knew it was circulating in the community.

    Covid-free success
    Until last week the Marshall Islands had successfully employed some of the world’s strictest quarantine rules for people entering the North Pacific nation. This had kept it covid-free for the first two-and-a-half-years of the covid pandemic.

    A reduction of quarantine time in recent weeks, coupled with unprecedented numbers of people coming in through the managed quarantine process is suspected to be the cause of the outbreak.

    The government had earlier announced it was going to eliminate the managed quarantine requirement and open the borders on the October 1.

    “As expected, the outbreak continues to gain strength,” Niedenthal said on Sunday.

    “We had over 1000 cases in Majuro yesterday, almost double from the previous day. About 75 percent of the people we test are positive, which is an incredibly high positivity rate.”

    A security officer controls the flow of islanders into one of several community-based alternative care sites established by the Ministry of Health and Human Services to test and treat people in the wake of the Covid outbreak that started August 8.
    A security officer controls the flow of islanders into one of several community-based alternative care sites established by the Ministry of Health and Human Services. Image: Wilmer Joel/RNZ Pacific

    Outbreak escalating
    Last week, as the outbreak was escalating, Majuro traditional leaders sent a letter to President Kabua calling for the borders to be closed and opposing the announcement that medical teams arriving this week would not be required to quarantine.

    The medical surge support teams are from the US Centers for Disease Control and other agencies. Niedenthal emphasised the importance for delivering services to the public by these medical professionals.

    He described these as “boots on the ground medical support professionals” and said they would be tested on arrival and then sent right into the field to support ongoing services by local Health authorities.

    “As a country we have moved from prevention to mitigation because we are now fighting this disease,” he said.

    “The days of quarantine upon arrival are now over. I know some people are nervous about this, but we at the Ministry of Health are not and we are the ones on the frontline,” Niedenthal said.

    “Please respect these public health decisions. We knew this would have to be a fast shift in strategy that would trouble some people because we had been working so hard (and) successfully to prevent the disease from coming into the Marshall Islands.”

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

  • Marshall Islands loses ‘covid-free’ status with 6 cases confirmed

    By Giff Johnson, editor of the Marshall Islands Journal in Majuro

    The Marshall Islands lost its covid-free status yesterday when tests confirmed six positive cases in the capital, the first known community transmission since the pandemic started in early 2020.

    It was not immediately clear the source of the covid-19 spread as Marshall Islands borders have been closed since March 2020 and rules currently require 10 days of government-managed quarantine prior to release.

    The six people who tested positive Monday had “no travel history, no contact with anyone who was in quarantine,” said Health Secretary Jack Niedenthal.

    The government moved quickly last night to announce a halt to the start of the new school year with all island schools scheduled to open this week.

    President David Kabua delivered a brief 90-second statement to the nation via an online live stream in which he announced that the Ministry of Health and Human Services had confirmed six people positive in the capital of Majuro.

    The President’s short speech was the first official notice of news that in the fashion of a small island had spread several hours prior to his speech.

    “I advise people to remain calm and follow the protocols to prevent covid,” Kabua said.

    President Kabua advised the country to follow established protocols of wearing facemasks when in public. Kabua wore a facemask while delivering his speech.

    Notices on social media went viral in the minutes and hours after people learned of the first-ever covid community spread in this isolated north Pacific nation.

    Although there were no rules except for school closure announced by government, within minutes of the official confirmation of the cases, a national basketball tournament game was halted mid-way through the contest Monday night, and some restaurants began shutting their doors.

    The Office of the Chief Secretary said that the start of the new school year, which opened yesterday at some public schools and was scheduled to open later this week in private schools, would now be postponed for two months.

    While businesses and government offices can continue as usual, hospital services will be modified and masks will be required in public for the next two months, said a statement issued by the government.

    Marshall Islands President David Kabua in a file photo from 2021.
    Marshall Islands President David Kabua … he wore a facemask in his live stream broadcast. Image: Wilmer Joel/File/RNZ

    The government also announced a halt to travel by plane or ship to remote outer islands in hopes of restricting spread of covid to islands that have only rudimentary medical care services available.

    “The most important lesson learned from Palau’s experience with a wave of covid starting in January is to protect the hospital during the initial stages of a covid outbreak,” said Niedenthal.

    “This is to protect both the patients already in hospital from being infected by incoming covid patients and, of equal importance, minimising the exposure of hospital staff so they can remain functional and on the job.”

    The Ministry of Health and Human Services moved quickly last night to set up previously planned “test and treat” facilities in designated locations in the community.

    Niedenthal said the number one lesson learned from watching other nations respond to their covid waves was the priority of “protecting the hospital”.

    The goal, he said, is to have people use community test and treat facilities where health officials will perform tests and determine treatment needed.

    The entire Marshall Islands has a population estimated at only 42,000 scattered on dozens of atolls and single islands. The two urban centers of Majuro and Ebeye, however, contain three-quarters of the population and many people live in overcrowded conditions ripe for the spread of covid.

    Laboratory tests of people who were positive for covid while in managed quarantine last month showed they were all BA.5 variant. And ministry officials said they were proceeding on the basis that BA.5 is what they are seeing.

    One local resident said that he was aware of a church member who was confirmed with covid yesterday.

    “That means spreading already since yesterday was a busy day at church,” said the person.

    Giff Johnson is editor of the Marshall islands Journal and the RNZ Pacific correspondent in Majuro. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

  • COVID Hasn’t Been Defeated, But Effective Public Health Measures Have Been

    Early carnivals offered political power a safety value. For a few days a year, rich and poor switched positions. The poor ran society (if in ritual only), except, when things were going badly in the everyday, the reversal suddenly turned into open rebellion from below.

    In the present pandemic, it’s the powerful who are running a months-long masquerade, taking off masks ironically enough, in the face of all the evidence that the pandemic is marching on and mask mandates in combination with vaccines and other interventions can protect populations from infection.

    The ruling class’s public health putsch aims to free a precarious just-in-time capitalism from supply chain gluts and social welfare obligations that a serious pandemic imposes. Better let people get sick or die than violate such a society’s prime directive placing profits first, the political class plots.

    SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 virus, is cycling through new variants every two months, tinkering with both the human immune system and our already precarious vaccine coverage. The reduced deadliness the virus seems to represent at the moment, as some experts pronounce, isn’t a set outcome. It’s only one of multiple possibilities. As the hospitalizations, which doubled under the BA.5 variant underscore, sudden surges in virulence are also possible, perhaps even likely as the virus is being left to explore its evolutionary possibilities.

    The virus, meanwhile, keeps knocking thousands into the Long COVID side pocket, where patients are lost to complex combinations of chronic conditions that medicine is finding difficult to treat.

    The State of the Pandemic

    Where are we in the global pandemic? The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported another 7.16 million new COVID cases worldwide for the week ending July 31 (see the red time series on the right of the John Hopkins dashboard). That’s more new weekly cases than for any other COVID wave except Omicron this past winter.

    The number of global weekly deaths underwent another increase to 16,400 deaths the week ending July 31, although representing fewer cases than in previous waves (the white time series on the right of the Johns Hopkins dashboard). Forty-two million new vaccinations were administered that week worldwide (the green time series).

    The New York Times is mapping COVID hotspots in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australasia. There in purple, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand continue to be epicenters in average daily new cases per 100,000 population. In recent weeks, Costa Rica, Finland, Japan, South Korea, and Thailand all returned to hotspot status. Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Tunisia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Iran, Iraq and Mongolia hosted recent increases in caseloads. Panama, Botswana, Portugal, Spain and Norway saw declines from late June.

    The seven-day average of daily confirmed COVID cases per million people from the beginning of the outbreak shows the present hotspots are trending in different directions. Taiwan and Italy’s outbreaks appear in decline. Greece and Finland are hosting large new spikes. Japan, South Korea, and Mongolia are hosting new surges. Australia, New Zealand, France, Italy and Germany continue to cycle through their months-long epidemics. The U.S., the U.K. and Brazil are reporting slow but steady increases. We see that none of the countries highlighted are reporting national testing data as of July 3 (click on “color by test positivity”).

    For the COVID deaths per million people for these same countries, we see that the U.S., Brazil and Germany are showing slight increases. Italy, the U.K. and Australia are showing more robust increases, and Costa Rica, Finland and Greece are displaying sharp spikes.

    The virus also continues to evolve. This is a family tree for COVID samples over the past six months, although, for the radial version of the tree, rooted from the beginning of the pandemic at the center of the diagram and branching outward as SARS-2 evolves. We see in dark blues and purples the early variants like Alpha and Beta. In the light blue are samples of the Delta variant. We see over the past six months that multiple Omicron subvariants — there in yellow BA.1 and 2, in the light and medium oranges BA.4 and 5, and the darker orange BA.2.12 — are continuing to explore SARS-2’s evolutionary space. Indeed, we see in the few red samples the arrival of subvariant BA.2.75 or the Centaurus variant found first in India in June.

    Across the Omicron group, we find molecular changes from the root of the SARS-2 tree here numbering as high as 64 amino acid changes and 16 deletions. What that means is that the virus continues to evolve, along the way experimenting with the human immune system to the tune of over 7 million new infections a week during what governments worldwide are treating as the end of the pandemic.

    Hospitalizations are all up in the countries in our highlighted set. These appear as a function of the surge in caseloads, the reemergence of deadlier subvariants such as BA.5, and a developing mismatch between Omicron and COVID vaccines. We also see across countries in our set a near-global retraction in nonpharmaceutical interventions since Omicron. These indices of the stringency of public health measures show that some countries at first attempted to differentiate masking mandates and the like for the vaccinated (in green) and for the unvaccinated (in brown) before largely abandoning that distinction.

    That combo — evolving subvariants probing our defenses and a willful public health surrender — bodes ill for this winter’s likely surge.

    The U.S. Outbreak

    As of August 7, the U.S. continues to host a raised floor in COVID-19 caseloads post-winter Omicron. This summer marks the worst in U.S. COVID-19 incidence of the three summers so far in this pandemic.

    The New York Times map shows Northeast and upper Midwest are presently characterized by a relative decline in COVID. But we also see the start of a possible new surge in New Jersey, New York City and now, Pennsylvania. We see sharp spikes in Appalachia, particularly in Kentucky and West Virginia. The South is hosting lifted floors, especially in North Carolina, northern Louisiana, the Florida panhandle, Miami, parts of Alabama and Georgia, Oklahoma overall, and select counties in west and south Texas. We see a slight decline along the West Coast, a steady surge in parts of the Southwest, and sharp spikes county-by-county across the Plains states. Alaska and Puerto Rico continue to be hit badly.

    There are other ways of tracking COVID. The levels of SARS-2 virus detected in the wastewater that comes through our sewage plants as reported here (July 19-August 2) shows little change from earlier in July. Sewage plants in red represent loads at 80 to 100 percent their previously recorded levels. We see these scattered across the U.S., but especially in Nebraska, Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, South Carolina and downstate New York. The cool blues of recorded lows in the Northeast are starting to be infiltrated by increased SARS-2 concentrations in orange from New Jersey up north. We do see cooling off in coastal Washington State, Oregon and northern California.

    The map of percent change in the last 15 days underscores the West Coast’s cooling off. We see such declines in light blue of 10 to 90 percent across Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, and what we were worried about in the first wastewater map in downstate New York. These might represent only mean declines off very large peaks that still host widespread COVID. At the same time, we see new 15-day surges in Illinois, Ohio, upstate New York, Kentucky and North Carolina.

    A standing problem in tracking COVID-19 stateside is that the U.S. appears to be willfully ignoring previous surveillance measures. In April, ABC News and other outlets reported that the Department of Health and Human Services ended the requirement that hospitals report daily COVID deaths, overflow and ventilated COVID patients, and critical staffing shortages. Some U.S. states outright ended reporting COVID metrics, hospital bed usage and availability, and ventilator use. Some states turned to delaying COVID-19 numbers to reports on a weekly basis.

    The ABC News report continued that some hospitals are following the National Institute of Health’s lead in changing definitions of COVID cases, including to only those patients that receive antivirals remdesivir or dexamethasone. So COVID cases wouldn’t be counted unless the patient needed those drugs.

    It appears the willful decline in monitoring is beginning to extract its public health costs. For instance, we see here in San Francisco that previously SARS-2 loads in sewage (in blue) tracked COVID caseloads (in red). That appears no longer to be the case, with COVID caseloads during BA.4 and 5 likely to be underreported.

    To sum up U.S. COVID, we see almost the entire country — 94 percent of U.S. counties — under “Data Type: Community Transmission” in the CDC maps is filled in at the highest level of community transmission, including what were a month ago sites of COVID decline in Iowa, Pennsylvania and New York State. The summer surge is accumulating with much of the country still reporting in COVID-19 tests at 20 percent or more positive (click on “Nucleic Acid Amplification Tests (NAATs)”). And much of the country — especially through the South, Appalachia and the Plains states — with less than 30 percent of the population with two COVID vaccine shots, even before including subsequent boosters (click on “Vaccinations” on the left and “% of total population fully vaccinated” on the right).

    Monkeypox Marks Another Roll of the Epidemiological Dice

    As on the global stage, SARS-2 continues to evolve here in the U.S. We see here new variants first emerging and then dominating in cycles of every two months. The BA.2 Omicron subvariant in pink was replaced by the BA2.12 subvariant in orange, which is now being replaced by subvariants BA.4 and 5 in green, with BA.5 surging ahead to account for over 85 percent of new cases as of July 30.

    Each new COVID variant marks the U.S.’s — and the world’s — concerted failure to control infectious disease. Entirely new pathogens underscore the point. Monkeypox — a previously marginal Orthopoxvirus that can induce at times very painful lesions in the anus, genitals and mouth — has spread to all but two U.S. states, with patients getting little access to follow-up care or the vaccines that at best offer disease mitigation.

    Epidemiologist Kathryn Jacobsen reports that the federal government’s recent declaration that monkeypox represented a U.S. public health emergency opens up more of such resources. The declaration, while welcome, is a month too late from helping quash an outbreak once limited to a few urban epicenters. The declaration also serves more as a guideline for local public health departments as to reporting and treatment, but not how to intervene or to help the greater community respond, with schools about to reopen at the end of August.

    That is, the failures of the COVID response stateside have been set on repeat. The damage isn’t merely a matter of the surprise of a new outbreak or which political party is in power. The fiasco is systemic and extends back into the disease cascade.

    Each new emergent pathogen represents a roll of the socioecological dice. Deforestation and development in the far reaches of capitalist production are springing even the most marginal pathogens out onto global trade and travel networks to reach countries that have taken great pride in destroying their own public health systems in the name of open economies.

    Here, Rebecca Levine’s team maps its ecological niche model of monkeypox distribution across Sub-Saharan Africa, including in a Congo Basin that since has suffered considerable deforestation, especially there in the purple.

    While most land deals underlying extraction in the Congo Basin are European and Asian in origin, the Land Matrix Observatory identified seven deals with direct American investment, including a 348,000-hectare deal with U.S.-registered Congo Emissions Management and Groupe Blattner Elwyn. Although this latter deal appears to be pursued under the rubric of carbon offsets, such agreements in green capitalism score their damage in helping rationalize offshore capital’s right to the Global South.

    Many of the European and Asian efforts in the Congo and across West Africa meanwhile end up supplying U.S. customers, including wood siding to retailers Home Depot and Menards.

    The defacement only compounds in its effects. When the Global North refused to follow through with a promised $500 million to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to preserve its rainforest, the DRC, looking to Angola and Nigeria’s path of development, turned to auctioning off its forest to oil companies, including Virunga National Park, the critical gorilla sanctuary.

    Monkeypox in the U.S. may be a matter of blowback. It’s not that any one of these land deals let loose this strain of the virus, but that pathogens are in part sprung when this model of development turns food forests into cleared land and expropriated resources marked by a loss in the environmental complexity that once bottled in those pathogens.

    Two Additional Dangers

    The capital-led destruction is also found on this side of disease spillover. Two additional dangers other than acute infections and deaths — the latter now projected at 17.5 million or more — arise from letting SARS-2 run free.

    The first is that the virus may experiment enough to figure out how to emerge from our vaccines’ disease immunity — the protection the vaccines offer us from getting too sick when we’re infected.

    One Dutch team of microbiologists produced what’s called an antigenic map to track vaccine coverage. The map on the left shows that the Omicron subvariant BA.1 evolved out from underneath the protection provided by being infected with earlier variants like Alpha, Beta and Delta. The map on the right tracks the antibody neutralization the vaccines provide in comparison to the circulating COVID variants. That map shows Omicron (in pink) has escaped the antibodies produced by the vaccines we’ve used to this point.

    That doesn’t mean the vaccines are useless, just that they don’t necessarily produce all the Omicron-specific antibodies.

    Moderna is reporting its Omicron-specific vaccine in development to be successful. But we are likely in for boosters for years, with no guarantee a SARS-2 on a two-month schedule won’t continue to evolve out from underneath that protection.

    The second danger is the Long COVID any one infection may induce or, perhaps, the cumulative impact of multiple COVID infections. A Weill Cornell Medicine team recently summarized the damage: On the left, the little graphs in red show the hazard ratios of all the body systems that have been documented to be impacted.

    The “Long” in Long COVID isn’t just the length of time of such an infection, but also represents a foundational transition from an acute respiratory infection to a chronic condition of often devastating impact. We’re talking about various combinations of cognitive impairments, ulcers, pulmonary fibrosis, embolisms, diabetes, fatigue, and many more illnesses in the list to the left of the human figure shown.

    To the right of the figure, we see all the different drugs Long COVID patients are found to be at a higher risk of having to take.

    That’s why the People’s CDC — the coalition of public health practitioners and everyday people I’ve joined — is adamant that all efforts must be made to implement a full array of public health interventions that keep all people, whatever their starting health, from entering the horror of Long COVID.

    Biden’s Mask Off Shows Us Another Trump

    In contrast, a Biden administration elected to volte-face Trump on COVID turned its position 360 degrees back to Trump positions. In the face of an adaptive and ongoing pandemic that is producing nearly 7 million new infections a week worldwide and Omicron subvariants evolving out from under vaccine coverage, the Biden administration decided to declare victory on COVID-19.

    NBC News reported that in February, Impact Research, the administration’s polling firm, recommended moving beyond merely dropping mask mandates and by default toward discouraging mask use.

    Molly Murphy and Brian Stryker of Impact suggested that the administration make a play for November’s midterm elections and “declare the crisis phase of COVID over and push for feeling and acting more normal.” In what seem to be talking points from the problematic “Urgency of Normal” campaign that encouraged moving students back into schools without adjunct interventions, Murphy and Stryker cited learning loss at school and COVID’s effect on the economy as reasons to exit COVID as a reality.

    Both problems arose out of decisions the Trump and Biden administrations made in refusing to provide adequate support for communities and households alike during a national crisis. At the same time, the Impact memo continued, aiming to eliminate COVID isn’t the answer. In effect, with language reminiscent of Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, the memo admits that COVID will remain the reality, which Murphy and Stryker also suggest the Biden administration ignore.

    The CDC, other administration officials, and outside epidemiologists would follow up the memo by warning the American people of upcoming COVID spikes, including this fall and winter when Americans go to the polls.

    Such realities are socially structured. In early July, Anna Peele interviewed the soon-to-retire Anthony Fauci for the Washington Post magazine, under the headline, “The Pandemic Is Waning”:

    I am also aware that it would be a moral crime to transmit the coronavirus to Fauci. So when I got COVID two weeks before our interview, I obsessively parsed the guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: As long as I waited 10 days after my first positive test, I could still meet Fauci in person, right? No, I was informed by Fauci, via a member of his communications team. I would need to test negative three days in a row and wear a mask, even outdoors.

    So, no five-day quarantine for Fauci’s circle along the lines a CDC under employer pressure recommended for Americans. And Fauci treats the possibility of infection after 10 days as real. These are exactly the kinds of precautions the People’s CDC recommended for the rest of the country.

    When Biden finally contracted COVID, showing up to work maskless while infected, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky took to the airwaves saying that, yes, the president would be treated with precautions above and beyond what the CDC recommended for the American people. After all, the Americans whom the administration abandoned make up the labor force that chooses to go to work sick or alongside sick coworkers. The CDC is only accommodating them:

    Yeah, I think we can all agree that the president’s protocols likely go above and beyond and have the resources to go above and beyond what every American is able and has the capacity to do.

    As we put forward our CDC guidance, we have to do so so that they are relevant, feasible, followable by Americans, and that is Americans that live in urban jurisdictions and rural jurisdictions, that have resources and less resources, that have, you know, work constraints and many other things. So, when we put forward our guidance, we do so so that they reflect such that every American is able to follow them.

    A growing class divide, which mainstream public health must accommodate first and foremost in the folksiest of fatalism, is treated as more sacrosanct than the obligations to control and prevent an infectious pandemic.

    The resulting damage is unlikely of any American’s choosing. “For the period from June 29 to July 11 [2022],” the Wall Street Journal reported, “3.9 million Americans said they didn’t work because they were sick with Covid-19 or were caring for someone with it, according to Census Bureau data. In the comparable period last year, 1.8 million people missed work for those reasons.”

    Even steps forward act to fill in such continuing damage. The administration recently announced it would be establishing a new Department of Health and Human Services office dedicated to addressing the debilitating Long COVID that an estimated 23 million Americans are suffering beyond their initial acute infections. An associated National Research Action Plan on Long COVID is to be pursued alongside the administration’s efforts to “return to normal” and strip out programs in COVID prevention.

    In other words, the supply of extremely difficult-to-treat Long COVID cases the administration now says it seeks to mitigate will continue apace to accommodate employers.

    When Pandemic Play Turns Serious

    Given the bipartisan push to end COVID as an idea (if not as an empirical fact), science writer Ed Yong’s sense of defeat may be more an acknowledgement that a different public health is possible. And that it’s already underway, with a passing reference to the People’s CDC:

    In 2018, while reporting on pandemic preparedness in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I heard many people joking about the fictional 15th article of the country’s constitution: Débrouillez-vous, or ‘Figure it out yourself.’ It was a droll and weary acknowledgment that the government won’t save you, and you must make do with the resources you’ve got. The United States is now firmly in the débrouillez-vous era of the COVID-19 pandemic…

    I have interviewed dozens of other local officials, community organizers, and grassroots groups who are also swimming furiously against the tide of governmental apathy to push some pandemic response forward, even if incrementally. This is an endeavor that all of American society would benefit from; it is currently concentrated among a network of exhausted individuals who are trying to figure out this pandemic, while living up to public health’s central tenet: Protect the health of all people, and the most vulnerable especially. The late Paul Farmer, who devoted his life to providing health care to the world’s poorest people, understood that when doing such work, victories would be hard-won, if ever won at all. Referencing a line from The Lord of the Rings, he once said, ‘I have fought the long defeat.’ In the third year of the COVID pandemic, that fight will determine how America fares against the variants and viruses still to come.

    What Yong misses in his respectable summary is that the resulting patchwork isn’t just a reminder of what we have lost or what we might gain upon a reformation of a pivot, but perhaps a new world born out of the husk of the old.

    With death and illness accumulating from one COVID variant to the next, and now with novel pathogen species like monkeypox joining the party, the ritualized protest that the capitalist carnival allows may suddenly lurch into open rebellion. Millions may organize to burn down that Venn diagram of going to work in an apocalypse. There is another option: they can refuse to get sick and die for profit’s sake.

  • NZ’s Ashley Bloomfield bows out – a look at his key moments as health chief

    RNZ News

    After guiding New Zealand through two and a half years of a pandemic, Dr Ashley Bloomfield’s time as Director-General of Health has come to an end.

    We look back on some of the key moments during his time in the role:

    22 May 2018
    Dr Ashley Bloomfield was named as the new Director-General of Health while he was serving as the acting chief executive of Capital and Coast District Health Board.

    2019
    The health system faced some big challenges in 2019. Dr Bloomfield fronted health responses to both a measles outbreak and the Whakaari/White Island disaster.

    27 January 2020
    “Kia ora koutou katoa, welcome to the Ministry of Health, thank you very much attending this briefing this afternoon. My name is Dr Ashley Bloomfield, I’m the Director-General of Health.”

    After two and a half years of a pandemic, it is probably hard to remember a time when Dr Ashley Bloomfield needed to introduce himself.

    Before New Zealand had its first case of covid-19, back when it was referred to simply as a coronavirus (WHO would name it covid-19 on 12 February 2020), Dr Ashley Bloomfield and Director of Public Health Dr Caroline McElnay held a media stand-up.

    Like most of the early briefings, it was held at the Ministry of Health.

    It was two weeks after the first confirmed case outside of China had been identified and across the ditch, Australia had four cases. There had been 56 deaths worldwide.

    28 February 2020
    Almost exactly one month later, New Zealand’s first covid-19 case was confirmed in someone that had returned from overseas.

    Reminiscent of a format we would come to know more intimately as time went on, the evening news would cut to a live press conference where Dr Bloomfield and then-Health Minister David Clark would provide more details of New Zealand’s first case. (Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was in Australia at the time.)

    The following day, supermarkets would see a rush of customers buying up toilet paper, hand sanitiser and tinned food.

    March 2020
    We would start to hear a lot more from Dr Bloomfield as the second, third and fourth (who had been at a Tool concert) cases of covid-19 were confirmed in early March.

    By the end of the month New Zealand would be in lockdown and Dr Bloomfield had become a daily part of our lives.

    “It did feel a little bit like I was having a performance review at one o’clock every day, broadcast live on television. But that’s as it should be — your job is to ensure that we’re being held accountable for our response,” he said.

    Jainda Ardern and Ashley Bloomfield, as made by Scott Savage and Colleen Pugh.
    PM Jacinda Ardern and Dr Ashley Bloomfield … creatively captured from a daily 1pm update fan. Image: RNZ

    Daily cases had jumped to numbers in the eighties and the briefings had shifted to the Beehive, against a backdrop of yellow and white striped Unite Against Covid-19 branding.

    On 29 March, during the 1pm briefing, Bloomfield would announce New Zealand’s first covid-19 death.

    4 May 2020
    “No new cases”. For the first time since New Zealand went into level 4 lockdown on 25 March, Dr Bloomfield announced there were no new cases of covid-19. It would be a phrase we would hear more of as the first community outbreak would start to slow.

    And it evoked such emotion that “There are no new cases of covid-19 to report in New Zealand today” came second place in Massey University’s Quote of the Year.

    August 2020
    In an effort to encourage people to test for covid-19, Dr Bloomfield had his first covid-19 PCR test while filmed at a community testing site.

    “It was much less painful than tackling Billy Weepu on the rugby field a couple of weeks ago.”

    *Raises eyebrows
    With millions of people stuck at home in isolation watching daily media briefings, it was no surprise that Dr Bloomfield would find himself in meme-territory.

    This was Dr Bloomfield’s response when he was asked about 5G in 2020:

    Ashley Bloomfield being asked about 5G conspiracy theories on April 8 vs Ashley Bloomfield being asked about bleach injections on April 26.
    Dr Ashley Bloomfield being asked about 5G conspiracy theories on April 8 vs Ashley Bloomfield being asked about bleach injections on April 26. Image: RNZ

    And a year later when Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said people should go outside and “spread your legs”.


    The Guardian on the Hipkins quote.


    Festival debut
    Who would have thought Dr Bloomfield would grace the main stage at Rhythm and Vines festival?

    Unstoppable summer video.

    December 2020
    Dr Bloomfield was awarded the New Zealand Medical Association’s highest accolade — The Chair’s Award

    A lot of fan-art for Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield was produced as a result of the Covid crisis.
    Fan art for Dr Ashley Bloomfield. Image: Sam Rillstone/RNZ

    17 August 2021
    The prime minister announced another nationwide lockdown after a case, assumed to be the delta variant, was detected. That meant the 1pm briefings, and daily doses of Dr Bloomfield, were back too.

    22 September 2021
    As New Zealand tackled the delta outbreak, Dr Bloomfield broke the news that we may never get to zero cases of covid-19.

    A portrait pie of Dr. Ashley Bloomfield.
    A portrait pie of Dr Ashley Bloomfield. Image: Devoney Scarfe/RNZ

    A portrait pie of Dr. Ashley Bloomfield. Photo: Supplied / Devoney Scarfe

    October 2021
    During Super Saturday, Dr Bloomfield was caught on camera busting a move at one of the community events.

    Dr Ashley Bloomfield’s dance moves.

    6 April 2022
    Announced he was stepping down.

    “It seems we’re at a good point in terms of the pandemic, the response is shifting, I’m also confident that the system is in good hands with the changes that are afoot, and most certainly my family will be very pleased to have a little more of my time,” he said.

    May 2022
    Dr Bloomfield tested positive for covid-19 while he was at the World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland.

    Professional history

    • In May 2018, Dr Bloomfield was appointed the new Director-General of Health.
    • Dr Bloomfield was the acting Chief Executive for Capital & Coast District Health Board from 1 January 2018.
    • From 2015-2017, he was chief executive of the Hutt Valley District Health Board – the first clinician to lead the Hutt Valley District Health Board.
    • In 2017 Dr Bloomfield attended the Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme.
    • Prior to becoming chief executive at the Hutt Valley DHB, Dr Bloomfield held a number of senior leadership roles within the Ministry of Health, including, in 2012, acting Deputy Director-General, sector capability and implementation.
    • From 2012-15 he was Director of Service, Integration and Development and General Manager Population Health at Capital & Coast, Hutt and Wairarapa District Health Boards.
    • From 1999-2008 he was a Fellow of the Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine. Since 2008 he has been a Fellow of the NZ College of Public Health Medicine.
    • In 2010-2011 he was Partnerships Adviser, Non-Communicable Diseases and Mental Health at the World Health Organisation, Geneva.
    • Dr Bloomfield obtained a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery at the University of Auckland in 1990.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

  • New York Post Announces COVID Is Over. It’s Still Running Rampant.

    Good news, everyone! The COVID-19/Omicron/BA.5 pandemic is apparently all over! Done! Gone! How do I know this? Because the editorial board of the Murdoch-owned fa-chrissakes New York Post says so. Why? Because President Biden is still alive. “Biden’s mild COVID case is proof the pandemic is over, and everyone should stop pretending otherwise,” reads the headline. All that’s missing is a “So there!” at the end.

    I’m just going to splash this on the stoop and see if the cat licks it up… but isn’t it at least possible the president of the United States is recovering so well in part because he’s, well, the president of the United States? With immediate access to the best health care and COVID treatments on the planet? That certainly sounds reasonable, even as an unreasonable number of people do not have such health care opportunities. And the New York Post doesn’t even begin to consider the fact that scores of people exist who have health conditions that render them severely immunocompromised and much more vulnerable to severe COVID than Biden.

    “We wish the president a rapid recovery,” announces the opening of the editorial. “So far, it looks like his case is high-profile evidence that the pandemic is completely over — that Americans’ anti-coronavirus efforts should focus exclusively on getting jabs to those who need them and treating cases as they pop up. That means absolutely no mandates — not for mass masking and so on, and not even for vaccination (except perhaps for special cases such as those who care for the elderly).”

    Ah, the masks, ye gods and little fishes, the bedeviled masks. Never in human history has such an amalgam of wanna-be tough guys been so thoroughly undone by Band-Aid-level technology. Do the folks on the Post ed. board understand that one of the reasons this nightmare has dragged on for so long is because Donald Trump – aided and abetted by conservative news outlets owned by Mr. Murdoch – went out of their way to shit-talk the use of masks because Trump thought they made him look weak?

    Increased infection rates caused by this unconscionable behavior ran headlong into the rise of international variants that dominate the pandemic today, variants now virulent enough to get around the masks. The daily infection rates still tally in the thousands. That’s not “over” by even the most wildly irresponsible metric. It’s a perfect circle.

    Trump has been yelling about Jesus a lot lately, and the Fox News empire has long fashioned itself a Christian-friendly organization… but their line on masking is yet another example of their hypocrisy. A major reason to mask was to protect others from you in case you have COVID and don’t know it. Put another way, wearing a mask was a small sacrifice you made to help your neighbor. Unless I read the book wrong, that is pretty much the bone-marrow definition of what Christianity is supposed to be about. The hypocrisy is boggling.

    “Even as many of our policymakers have focused on deaths,” writes Kevin Kavanagh, MD for Infection Control Today, “long COVID-19 is continuing to take a toll on society by impacting multiple organ systems. Long COVID-19 has been found to occur in 30% of patients treated for COVID-19, and up to 70% have symptoms of brain fog, memory, or other cognitive problems. It also can have a profound impact on the heart and other organs. Also, long COVID-19 is responsible for approximately doubling COVID-19 deaths with 8.39 per 1000 additional deaths occurring after the acute infection.”

    And after hearing this, we are supposed to accept that COVID is “over”?

    “Hospitals across the country are grappling with widespread staffing shortages, complicating preparations for a potential Covid-19 surge as the BA.5 subvariant drives up cases, hospital admissions and deaths,” reports Krista Mahr for Politico. “The current wave, in which the new number of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 has risen more than 40 percent in the last month, is also putting fresh stress on facilities as federal funding for the pandemic response is running out, leaving some with less flexibility to hire more staff if they need to…. ‘There is growing concern that this money has run out,’ said Nancy Foster, vice president for quality and patient safety policy at the American Hospital Association. ‘It’s not really getting sufficient attention.’”

    Over?

    “All over, you say?” I wrote back in June. “Someone forgot to tell that to the preschool-aged son of my dear friend and colleague, a 4-year-old who presented with a viciously spiked fever over the weekend. As with nearly 4 million children in the U.S., my colleague’s child is susceptible to seizures if his temperature rises too high. When the seizure set in this time, he became unresponsive and had to be rushed to the emergency room, which fortunately had room for him. As the medical staff worked to reduce his fever, the diagnosis arrived: COVID-19…. You really can’t peddle the ‘all this is behind us’ bullshit to my colleague with her son in the emergency room this weekend, or to my other coworker whose toddler contracted the virus in February and who had to sit up all night listening as their child labored to breathe.”

    And then there’s this, the inconvenient weevil in the porridge: Me, and the millions like me who deal with medical issues that leave us permanently open to being flayed by the virus. For me, it’s bad lungs, a gift from a prior bout of pneumonia. Many others are immunocompromised for a variety of reasons – cancer, heart disease, various disorders – and our lives get a little bit worse, a little bit smaller, a little bit more terrifying, every time a large media microphone coughs out another “reason” for people to let down their guard and act like this is over for everyone.

    “This pandemic is done,” proclaims the conclusion of the Post editorial, “and it’s not coming back. We have nothing to fear but fear itself. And anyone still pushing fear (status-seeking ‘experts,’ power-seeking pols, etc.) is almost certainly working an agenda that has nothing to do with your best interests.”

    Nice of them to end this with such a rich vein of bullshit. “Working an agenda that has nothing to do with your best interests,” you say? I think I know what that’s like. That’s like working an anti-mask agenda to try and get a terrible Republican president re-elected. That’s like working a viciously capitalist agenda to hurl unprotected workers into harm’s way so the owners and bosses can start making money again.

    That’s the same crap we’ve been hearing from the same self-serving nonsense vectors almost since this whole thing began. It is wrong and dangerous all day long.

  • Covid and reality: Do we care enough about the common good?

    ANALYSIS: By Frank Bongiorno, Australian National University

    The covid-19 pandemic has already generated its own mythology. In Britain, they talk of the “myth of the blitz” – the idea of a society that pulled together in the Second World War to withstand the bombs dropped by the Luftwaffe with pluck, bravery and humour.

    In Australia, our covid-19 myth is about a cohesive and caring society that patiently endured lockdowns, border closures and other ordeals. Like many myths, ours has some foundation in reality.

    It might be a poor thing when considered alongside wartime Britain’s wartime sacrifices, and you have to ignore the empty toilet paper shelves in the local supermarket, but it still has its own force. It might be especially potent in Melbourne, where the restrictions were most severe and prolonged.

    The covid-19 myth is now presenting its puzzles to true believers. If you imagined we all pulled together for the common good, and because we have the good sense to look after our own health, you are likely to find it strange that we are now apparently prepared to tolerate dozens of deaths in a day.

    Australia’s total covid death toll is now above 11,000 – New Zealand’s has topped 2000.

    More than tolerate: there has been a preparedness to pretend nothing out of the ordinary is happening.

    All of this seems a far cry from those days when we hung on the daily premiers’ media conferences and experienced horror as the number of new infections rose above a few dozen a day, a few hundred, and then a thousand or so. Have our senses been blunted, our consciences tamed?

    A product of power
    Public discourse is never neutral. It is always a product of power. Some people are good at making their voices heard and ensuring their interests are looked after.

    Others are in a weak position to frame the terms of debate or to have media or government take their concerns seriously.

    The elderly — especially the elderly in aged-care facilities — have carried a much larger burden of sacrifice than most of us during 2020 and 2021. They often endured isolation, loneliness and anxiety.

    They were the most vulnerable to losing their lives — because of the nature of the virus itself, but also due to regulatory failure and, in a few places, gross mismanagement.

    Casual and gig economy workers, too, struggle to have their voices heard. On his short journey to an about-face over the question of paid pandemic leave, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at first said the payment was unnecessary because employers were allowing their staff to work from home.

    Yet the conditions of those in poorly paid and insecure work have been repeatedly identified as a problem for them as well as for the wider community, because they are unable easily to isolate.

    Up to his point, however, our democracy has spoken: we want our pizzas delivered and we want to be able to head for the pub and the restaurant. And we are prepared to accept a number of casualties along the way to have lives that bear some resemblance to those of the pre-covid era.

    The “we” in this statement is doing a lot of heavy lifting. There is a fierce debate going on about whether governments — and by extension, the rest of us — are doing enough to counter the spread of the virus.

    Political leadership matters
    Political leadership matters enormously in these things.

    In the years following the Second World War, Australia’s roads became places of carnage, as car ownership increased and provision for road safety was exposed as inadequate. It peaked around 1970, with almost 3800 deaths — more than 30 for every 100,000 people.

    Road fatalities touched the lives of many Australians. If not for the death of my father’s first wife in a vehicle accident on New Year’s Day in 1954, I would not be around to write this article today.

    In the 1960s and 1970s, the coming of mandatory seatbelt wearing and random breath-testing helped bring the numbers down. Manufacturers made their cars safer.

    Public campaigns urged drivers to slow down and stay sober. These were decisions aimed at avoiding avoidable deaths, despite the curtailment of freedom involved.


    A British seat belt advertisement from the 1970s.

    These decisions were also in the Australian utilitarian tradition of government, “whose duty it is to provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number” – as the historian W.K. Hancock famously explained in 1930.

    The citizen claimed not “natural rights”, but rights received “from the State and through the State”. Governments made decisions about how their authority could be deployed to preserve the common good and protect individuals — from themselves as well as from others.

    Pragmatic position
    Governments have during the present surge so far been willing to take what they regard as a pragmatic position that the number of infections and fatalities is acceptable to “the greatest number”, so long as “the greatest number” can continue to go about something like their normal lives.

    But this utilitarian political culture also has its dark side. It has been revealed persistently throughout the history of this country — and long before anyone had heard of covid-19 — as poorly equipped to look after the most vulnerable.

    The casualties of the current policy are those who have consistently had their voices muted and their interests set aside during this pandemic — and often before it, as well.

    These are difficult matters for governments that would much prefer to get on with something other than boring old pandemic management. The issue is entangled in electoral politics — we have just had a federal contest in which major party leaders studiously ignored the issue, and the nation’s two most populous states are to hold elections in the next few months.

    Governments also realise that restrictions and mandates will meet civil disobedience.

    But covid cannot be wished away. At a minimum, governments need to show they are serious about it to the extent of spending serious money on a campaign of public information and advice on issues like mask-wearing and staying home when ill.

    They usually manage to find a sufficient stash of public money ahead of each election when they want to tell us what a beaut job they’ve been doing. They might now consider whether something similar might help to save lives.The Conversation

    Dr Frank Bongiorno is professor of history, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University.  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • As Monkeypox Spreads, US Vaccine Access Is Pitifully Inadequate

    Nearly 17,000 monkeypox infections have now been reported across 75 countries, and the World Health Organization declared the spread of monkeypox a global emergency. Meanwhile, the U.S. has stopped short of declaring a public health emergency even with nearly 3,000 cases reported in 44 states. New York alone has reported 900 cases of monkeypox, with rollout of the vaccine inhibited by short supply. We speak to Joe Osmundson, professor of microbiology at New York University, about the queerphobic myths about the viral spread, the global inequity of vaccine distribution and more. “This should have been an easy virus to contain,” says Osmundson. “The immense frustration in our community has been watching hundreds of people get sick, not because they’re having sex, not because of their queer identity, but because they’ve wanted to get vaccinated and those vaccines have not been available.” Osmundson also describes how he helped a friend get treatment for monkeypox. His new book is Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: There have now been more than 17,000 cases of monkeypox infections in at least 75 countries, including the United States. Monkeypox isn’t fatal, but it can cause fever, rashes and extremely painful lesions. It’s most often spread through close, intimate physical contact. On Saturday, for the second time in two years, the World Health Organization declared a global emergency to address the spread. The last time, it was for COVID-19; this time, for monkeypox. This is WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

    TEDROS ADHANOM GHEBREYESUS: WHO’s assessment is that the risk of monkeypox is moderate globally and in all regions, except in the European region, where we assess the risk is high. There is also a clear risk of further international spread, although the risk of interference with international traffic remains low for the moment. So, in short, we have an outbreak that has spread around the world rapidly, through new modes of transmission, about which we understand too little, and which meets the criteria in the International Health Regulations. For all of these reasons, I have decided that the global monkeypox outbreak represents a public health emergency of international concern. …

    Stigma and discrimination can be as dangerous as any virus. In addition to our recommendations to countries, I’m also calling on civil society organizations, including those with experience in working with people living with HIV, to work with us on fighting stigma and discrimination. But with the tools we have right now, we can stop transmission and bring this outbreak under control.

    AMY GOODMAN: Here in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported more than 2,800 cases of monkeypox so far across 44 states, with the largest outbreaks in New York, California, Illinois, Florida, D.C. and Georgia. The White House has not declared a public health emergency, that could bolster the U.S. response to the monkeypox outbreak. White House COVID response coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha said, quote, “It’s an ongoing, but a very active conversation at HHS.” That’s the Department of Health and Human Services.

    For more, we’re joined by Joe Osmundson, professor of microbiology at New York University, scientist, activist, author of the new book Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between. He’s featured in a new piece in The New Yorker headlined “The Agony of an Early Case of Monkeypox.”

    The piece begins, quote, “On the evening before Juneteenth, Joseph Osmundson, one of my best friends and a microbiologist at N.Y.U., texted me: ‘We think Andy has monkeypox.’ Two nights earlier, our friend Andy, as I’ll call him, had spent hours hunched over in an emergency room with excruciating rectal pain, only to be refused testing. It was his third try in five days. Andy’s anal sores were internal; for patients to qualify for testing, C.D.C. guidelines required the appearance of lesions on the skin. Osmundson needed help.”

    Well, Professor Joe Osmundson, that’s the opening paragraph of the piece in The New Yorker. Tell us where you went from there. And in the process, explain what monkeypox is.

    JOE OSMUNDSON: Yeah. I’ll actually start with the second part. Monkeypox is not a new virus. And this is sort of why our community has been so frustrated by the lack of urgency to get us the tools we need to care for ourselves and each other and to prevent this virus. It was discovered in 1958 in animals and was shown in 1970 to exist in humans. It’s a virus that’s related to smallpox. You mentioned earlier that it’s not deadly. It’s not very often deadly, but in this outbreak so far this year, there have been five deaths, all of them in the endemic region between Congo and Nigeria. It’s a virus that is similar to smallpox but less dangerous. But it causes pockmarks all over the body, high fever. The lesions can be in the throat or on the mouth, inside the anus and rectum. They are excruciatingly painful. And the course of infection typically lasts two to four weeks. And during this time, patients are asked to fully isolate.

    So, again, it’s a pretty miserable virus, although it’s not very often deadly. The frustration has been that because it’s so closely related to smallpox, we actually, prior to this sort of explosion of monkeypox outside of the endemic region — we have FDA-approved tests, we have FDA-approved medications that are likely to help ease suffering, and, most importantly, we have vaccinations that can prevent infection. So we have all of the tools, and yet all of these tools have been exceedingly difficult to access, even for someone like Andy, who has a Ph.D., has friends who are working on the response. I mean, it took direct phone calls to contacts in the New York City Department of Health and in the federal government to get him tested. And then, once he was tested and presumed positive, it took another few days to get him access to TPOXX, which is, again, an FDA-approved medication that we thought would help. Once he did get TPOXX, he went, in 24 hours, from being in the most pain of his life to the pain easing. And within five or six days, all of his lesions had healed, and he was cleared to leave isolation.

    So, the good news is we have the tools both to prevent infections and to ease suffering. The immense frustration in our community has been watching hundreds of people get sick, not because they’re having sex, not because of their queer identity, but because they’ve wanted to get vaccinated and those vaccines have not been available.

    AMY GOODMAN: I mean, we’re here in Chelsea, New York, and this is where people lined up around the block to get vaccines, but there simply weren’t enough.

    JOE OSMUNDSON: That’s right. And that, you know, the rollout in New York, has gotten a lot of criticism. And, you know, the New York City Department of Health didn’t reach out to community partners prior to that. They just wanted to get shots into arms prior to Pride weekend. They’ve been listening to us about how that didn’t go well, and they are trying to do better. They are reaching out to more community-based organizations. They’re trying to have more vaccine equity in nonwhite, less affluent communities than the Chelsea community. But, you know, they are incredibly limited. You cannot have equity when vaccine is so scarce. It’s just not possible.

    AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to the protest that occurred last Thursday here in New York. ACT UP New York organized an emergency march against monkeypox and government failure in New York City. This is Cecilia Gentili, founder of Transgender Equity Consulting, speaking at the rally.

    CECILIA GENTILI: Sex workers are again being forced to the impossible situation of choosing between prioritizing their health or having enough money to survive. Sounds familiar. Yes. The same [beep] happened a couple of months ago with COVID. What did the government do? Almost nothing. What is the government doing now? Almost nothing. I am so tired of getting almost nothing from the federal government.

    AMY GOODMAN: Professor Joe Osmundson, if you can say what needs to happen? I mean, this weekend, you have Congressman Adam Schiff demanding that more be done. You have Ashish Jha on the weekend news shows saying they haven’t decided whether to make the — call this a national emergency in the U.S. And if it were called an emergency, what would that unleash?

    JOE OSMUNDSON: Yeah, it would just increase the amount of funding and tools available. There’s a couple of things going on here. One is the scientific response, the biomedical response, that is absolutely lacking. There is no urgency. This should have been an easy virus to contain. Unlike COVID, unlike many other emerging threats, we have all of the tools. They are in a stockpile. The point of that stockpile is that it’s meant to be there to respond to an emergency. Here we have an emergency, and the stockpile has not been activated. We found out that vaccine sits in the stockpile in such a way that it can’t actually get into people’s bodies. And vaccine in a freezer is useless. So, we need resources to mobilize the national stockpile that we have to help us, to keep us safe, to treat us when we’re ill.

    But we also know — look, COVID is — you know, a lot of us, by now, have done COVID isolation, 10 days, even five days. It is incredibly difficult. It is costly. Sometimes you miss out on work. Sometimes you have to get a hotel to isolate in. It is really difficult to do. Here we have an isolation with monkeypox that is two to six weeks. That is incredibly disruptive for people’s lives. We’ve been having to crowdfund to get people the money that they need to take time off work. We need emergency funds and hotel rooms so people can properly isolate to prevent the spread. And none of that, none of those funds and resources have been coming from any level of government.

    In addition, there are essential scientific questions: Is the virus present in semen? Can we develop new tests that don’t require a skin lesion? Can we test saliva during the early-on flu-like illness? These are obvious questions. And without the proper funding, it will take too long to answer them. The ideal is we get these scientific questions answered as rapidly as possible; instead of skin lesion tests, we have really good saliva tests; if you think you have monkeypox, you can go in, get a saliva test in your flu-like illness, get TPOXX immediately, and maybe you don’t even get an outbreak of skin lesions, or if you do, you suffer much less, and you’re much less likely to spread the virus. And just, I mean, the vaccine is the most ridiculous thing. There are people who wanted to get vaccine, and now instead of getting vaccine, they have monkeypox.

    AMY GOODMAN: Professor Osmundson, this whole controversy over whether to call this a sexually transmitted disease — you can also get it just in close breathing contact, isn’t that right?

    JOE OSMUNDSON: That’s right. It’s a very tricky, you know, question. And there are obviously STIs that don’t require sex to transmit them, like herpes. But I’m really worried. We’re already seeing this pushback of, “Oh, if monkeypox is an STI, why are we seeing it in children?” — sort of, again, doing the groomer thing, implying that queer people are having sex with children. This is incredibly, incredibly dangerous.

    This is a virus that commonly spreads throughout households when it’s in households. It is on sheets. It’s on towels. It’s on clothes. And we need to be aware of those nonsexual modes of transmission, so that if it pops up in a wrestling team or a massage parlor or a Broadway show where someone is handling costumes all the time, we actually — that’s on our radar, and we can diagnose it in those places and prevent spread there. I think it’s a little bit myopic to be so focused on sex and the queer community. WeAs Monkeypox Spreads, US Vaccine Access Is Pitifully Inadequate need to be curious and open to the many places this virus may spread.

    AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Professor Osmundson, let’s talk about the issue of global equity. There is a severe lack of vaccine here in the United States, but multiply that many times over. Talk about the rest of the world.

    JOE OSMUNDSON: This was a choice. This international outbreak was a choice. The United States government let 28 million doses of the modern smallpox vaccine, JYNNEOS, expire and get binned from the national stockpile, as opposed to being used in the endemic regions, from Congo to Nigeria, where people commonly are getting monkeypox. I was on a webinar with the head of the Nigerian CDC, who laughed when I asked, “What countermeasures do you have? Do you have vaccine? Do you have treatment?” They have nothing. If in Nigeria, where there’s been an ongoing outbreak of human-to-human spread of monkeypox since 2017, if they had countermeasures there to care for this painful infection there, it’s likely that we may have prevented the international spread of this virus.

    Infectious diseases show us that borders are meaningless. Viruses will spread because people interact around the world. It is our obligation to care for human suffering everywhere, not just because it will prevent us from potentially getting sick, but because human suffering is human suffering. So there is absolutely an issue with countermeasures, including vaccine and treatment globally. And capitalism does not set us up well to care for everybody. It is not a way to make a profit. But in our increasingly warming and increasingly interconnected world, we are going to see more of these crises. This is not a viral crisis; this is a crisis of late capitalism.
    a
    AMY GOODMAN: Joe Osmundson, I want to thank you for being with us, professor of microbiology at New York University, scientist, activist, author of the new book Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between. We’ll also link to that piece in The New Yorker that features Professor Osmundson.

    When we come back, we speak with California Congressmember Ro Khanna about his efforts to address the ongoing infant formula crisis impacting working-class families and parents of color, to stop the price gouging. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • ‘You’ve got to be tenacious in public health,’ says NZ’s departing chief

    RNZ News

    After leading the Aotearoa New Zealand’s covid-19 response for the last two years, Dr Ashley Bloomfield is stepping down from the role of director-general of health at the end of this month.

    The softly spoken public servant became a household name early in the pandemic, his image gracing T-shirts, tote bags, mugs and even tattoos.

    Having been appointed to the director-general role in mid-2018, Dr Bloomfield was officially set to finish his five-year tenure in June 2023 — but decided to resign from the “complex and challenging” role early.

    His last day on the job will be on Friday, July 29, at which time Dr Diana Sarfati will be acting Director-General of Health until a permanent appointee takes up the position.

    Covid-19 cases have been inching upwards over the last several weeks but Dr Bloomfield said he was optimistic the wave will recede.

    “We’ve seen over the last week it’s levelled off which is great,” he told RNZ Saturday Morning’s Kim Hill.

    His plans for an epic “karaoke party” farewell were already derailed by the recent rise in Omicron cases, but he said caution is the way to go until things settle down.

    Pandemic legacy
    “I didn’t want my legacy in the pandemic to be taking out some of our tip-top politicians and the leadership of the health sector at a super-spreader event.”

    But while Dr Bloomfield is leaving, the crisis he presided over is very much ongoing.

    It was announced Friday that primary schools are expected to move from encouraging mask wearing to enforcing it again when Term 3 starts Monday.

    While the change may be frustrating for some, covid-19 requires flexible responses, he said.

    “I think there will be a high level of general acceptance of the role [masks] will play, especially through winter in the future.”

    Dr Bloomfield himself caught covid-19 in May at a World Health Organisation conference in Switzerland, where he said he was surprised at the low level of mask wearing.

    “There’s this talk about the rest of the world has moved on. Well, they might have moved on in terms of what they’re doing, but the virus hasn’t moved on. It’s creating just as much havoc as it has in the past.

    Higher infection rates
    “To think in the UK, they’ve got higher rates of infection and hospitalisation than we do even in the middle of summer, that’s something to worry about.

    “There is a general commentary — not just in New Zealand but elsewhere — that we’re moving on, we’re living with covid.”

    That’s premature, he said.

    “The virus isn’t done with us yet. We’re still in a pandemic. The WHO [World Health Organisation] hasn’t withdrawn that categorisation and the virus continues to evolve,” he said.

    “We’ve just got to keep our wits about us.”

    New Zealand Director-General of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield receiving his first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine.
    Dr Bloomfield … the vaccine rollout ultimately succeeded in its goals.  Image: RNZ/Ross Giblin/Stuff/Pool

    Pressures ‘always there’
    There have been many stories about the strain on emergency rooms and doctors and nurses the past few weeks, but Dr Bloomfield defended the response.

    “The pressures that are on the health system now are always there and they’re not unique to New Zealand,” he said.

    “I would say we were better prepared this winter than we’ve ever been any winter.

    “We also knew that after two years of no flu, we would have a heavy flu season.”

    Dr Bloomfield rejected claims that the health system was caught by surprise by the omicron surge.

    “We certainly had time to prepare and did. But you can’t suddenly magic up a new workforce from somewhere, certainly not in a situation where a lot of that time the borders were closed, although we were getting new workers in from overseas.”

    “Some of the commentary has suggested there are less staff now than there were,” but Dr Bloomfield said there had been a big increase between 2021 and 2022, including nursing and medical staff.

    Shortages very localised
    Dr Bloomfield said he did not dismiss the views of people on the ground, but said shortages were sometimes very localised.

    “I might have a different view from the clinicians on the ground … What one particular clinician or service or institution or organisation might be experiencing might not be reflecting the experience across the system, which is the view I have.”

    Dr Bloomfield said for example in the case of PPE, the problem was not supply but in getting the equipment to where it was needed.

    “We also responded where we heard, ‘look, we can’t get this PPE here or there,’ then we made sure we would follow those particular problems up.”

    There have also been concerns that Māori and Pasifika were not prioritised properly in the vaccine rollout.

    Dr Bloomfield said border and health care staff and those over 65 were the first priority for the vaccine drive, but many Māori and Pasifika were also included in that uptake.

    “For our first two months of the rollout of the over-65, our highest rates of vaccinations in that group was among Māori and Pasifika. It was ahead of non-Māori, non Pacific.

    Younger Māori rates
    “We knew that the group that would take the longest, probably because it required repeated effort to build trust, the longest to get higher rates among was our younger Māori. … And that’s the group where we had to put in a lot of extra effort and it took longer to get the rates up, but we did get there.”

    That outreach had hopefully led more young Māori to take part in the health system, Dr Bloomfield said.

    “There’s now over 100,000 people who previously were not in contact with the health care system who are now on the books because of the efforts that went in through that vaccination programme, so that’s a great legacy.”

    Dr Bloomfield has stood at the podium dozens of times in the past couple of years, facing the country’s press as he updated the state of the pandemic for the nation. While at times it hasn’t been easy, he said he respects the media’s role.

    “I have to say I’m a big fan of the media being able to do its job properly. It’s a fundamental pillar of strong democracy and it didn’t always feel that way when you were up there facing the music and something had gone wrong, which I had to a few times.

    “But they’re doing their job and a big part of their job is making sure the government, including the public services, is accountable to the population.”

    Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and director general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield leaving after the Covid-19 response and vaccine update at Parliament
    Dr Bloomfield and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern …  continuing to work to improve deficiencies in the health system. Image: RNZ/Pool /NZME

    ‘I was asking, why me?’

    As his term as director-general ends, Dr Bloomfield said he’s not interested in becoming a thorn in the government’s side. He’d like to continue to work to improve deficiencies in the system, however: “In my mind the currency I’m interested in is influence.”

    If he had known what the last few years held, would Dr Bloomfield have taken the job back in 2018?

    “I have to say there were a few moments early on in the pandemic, I really questioned myself on that. I was asking, why me?

    “This is a one-in-100 year pandemic and I’ve only got a five-year contract … bad timing,” he joked.

    “You quickly forget the parts that were really tough and really challenging,” he noted.

    “My abiding memory will be of what a privilege it was to be in this role at this time in this country. I have great hope for the future of this country based on my experience the last four years.”

    But he’s still leaving the job a year early, although few would say he hasn’t put in the hard yards.

    ‘Given my all’
    His last child recently left home, and he said: “I feel like I’ve given my all the last four years.”

    With big changes happening in the structure of New Zealand’s health system, it seemed a good time to leave.

    Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield on May 19, 2020 in Wellington, New Zealand.
    Dr Bloomfield … hopeful over the changes Health NZ Te Whatu Ora may bring in one of the biggest overhauls of New Zealand’s health system. Image: RNZ/Getty Images

    ‘Very exciting’ time for health changes
    Health NZ Te Whatu Ora replaced the country’s 20 district health boards at the start of July.

    It’s one of the biggest overhauls in Aotearoa New Zealand history. Dr Bloomfield said he was hopeful for what it might bring.

    “There are features of the change that I think are very exciting,” such as the establishment of the Māori Health Authority.

    That said, he believes the DHBs served an important role in healthcare.

    “The big challenge in any health system is getting this right balance between what’s done at a national or regional level and the responsiveness to local communities, and the DHB model allowed that in some part, that responsiveness to local communities.

    “But it was very hard at times to get unity around things that were good for the system. I guess ultimately you’re looking for a system that’s unified but not uniform.

    “Certainly Health New Zealand, in the way it’s been set up, is designed to try to get a better balance between that national and local delivery — and that’s a good thing.”

    Optimistic about reforms
    Dr Bloomfield said he was ultimately optimistic about the reform.

    “There’s a risk that you can move the deck chairs around but nothing really changes. The reform has been carefully thought through.

    “The proof’s always in the eating of the pudding, so it will be interesting to see how it plays out over the next few years.”

    So if Ashley Bloomfield had not been a doctor, what might he have become?

    “I always joke with my kids I would have been a police detective. Maybe that would’ve been another career direction.

    “I really enjoy observing little bits of information and putting them together to create a picture.

    “It served me well in my current career,” he said.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

  • Boost Now or Wait for New Vaccine? Many Wonder How to Face COVID’s Next Wave

    Gwyneth Paige didn’t want to get vaccinated against covid-19 at first. With her health issues — hypertension, fibromyalgia, asthma — she wanted to see how other people fared after the shots. Then her mother got colon cancer.

    “At that point, I didn’t care if the vaccine killed me,” she said. “To be with my mother throughout her journey, I had to have the vaccination.”

    Paige, who is 56 and lives in Detroit, has received three doses. That leaves her one booster short of federal health recommendations.

    Like Paige, who said she doesn’t currently plan to get another booster, some Americans seem comfortable with the protection of three shots. But others may wonder what to do: Boost again now with one of the original vaccines, or wait months for promised new formulations tailored to the latest, highly contagious omicron subvariants, BA.4 and BA.5?

    The rapidly mutating virus has created a conundrum for the public and a communications challenge for health officials.

    “What we’re seeing now is a little bit of an information void that is not helping people make the right decision,” said Dr. Carlos del Rio, a professor of infectious diseases at the Emory University School of Medicine.

    Del Rio said the public isn’t hearing enough about the vaccines’ value in preventing severe disease, even if they don’t stop all infections. Each new covid variant also forces health officials to tweak their messaging, del Rio said, which can add to public mistrust.

    About 70% of Americans age 50 and older who got a first booster shot — and nearly as many of those 65 and older — haven’t received their second covid booster dose, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency currently recommends two booster shots after a primary vaccine series for adults 50 and older and for younger people with compromised immune systems. Last week, multiple news outlets reported that the Biden administration was working on a plan to allow all adults to get second covid boosters.

    Officials are worried about the surge of BA.4 and BA.5, which spread easily and can escape immune protection from vaccination or prior infection. A recent study published in Nature found BA.5 was four times as resistant to the currently available mRNA vaccines as earlier omicron subvariants.

    Consistent messaging has been complicated by the different views of leading vaccine scientists. Although physicians like del Rio and Dr. Peter Hotez of Baylor College of Medicine see the value in getting a second booster, Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee, is skeptical it’s needed by anyone but seniors and people who are immunocompromised.

    “When experts have different views based on the same science, why are we surprised that getting the message right is confusing?” said Dr. Bruce Gellin, chief of global public health strategy at the Rockefeller Foundation and Offit’s colleague on the FDA panel.

    Janet Perrin, 70, of Houston hasn’t gotten her second booster for scheduling and convenience reasons and said she’ll look for information about a variant-targeted dose from sources she trusts on social media. “I haven’t found a consistent guiding voice from the CDC,” she said, and the agency’s statements sound like “a political word salad.”

    On July 12, the Biden administration released its plan to manage the BA.5 subvariant, which it warned would have the greatest impact in the parts of the country with lower vaccine coverage. The strategy includes making it easier for people to access testing, vaccines and boosters, and covid antiviral treatments.

    During the first White House covid briefing in nearly three weeks, the message from top federal health officials was clear: Don’t wait for an omicron-tailored shot. “There are many people who are at high risk right now, and waiting until October, November for their boost — when in fact their risk is in the moment — is not a good plan,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, head of the CDC.

    With worries about the BA.5 subvariant growing, the FDA on June 30 recommended that drugmakers Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna get to work producing a new, bivalent vaccine that combines the current version with a formulation that targets the new strains.

    The companies both say they can make available for the U.S. millions of doses of the reformulated shots in October. Experts think that deadline could slip by a few months given the unexpected hitches that plague vaccine manufacturing.

    “I think that we have all been asking that same question,” said Dr. Kathryn Edwards, scientific director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Research Program. “What’s the benefit of getting another booster now when what will be coming out in the fall is a bivalent vaccine and you will be getting BA.4/5, which is currently circulating? Although whether it will be circulating in the fall is another question.”

    The FDA on July 13 authorized a fourth covid vaccine, made by Novavax, but only for people who haven’t been vaccinated yet. Many scientists thought the Novavax shot could be an effective booster for people previously vaccinated with mRNA shots from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna because its unique design could broaden the immune response to coronaviruses. Unfortunately, few studies have assessed mix-and-match vaccination approaches, said Gellin, of the Rockefeller Foundation.

    Edwards and her husband got covid in January. She received a second booster last month, but only because she thought it might be required for a Canadian business trip. Otherwise, she said, she felt a fourth shot was kind of a waste, though not particularly risky. She told her husband — a healthy septuagenarian — to wait for the BA.4/5 version.

    People at very high risk for covid complications might want to go ahead and get a fourth dose, Edwards said, with the hope that it will temporarily prevent severe disease “while you wait for BA.4/5.”

    The omicron vaccines will contain components that target the original strain of the virus because the first vaccine formulations are known to prevent serious illness and death even in people infected with omicron.

    Those components will also help keep the earlier strains of the virus in check, said Dr. David Brett-Major, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. That’s important, he said, because too much tailoring of vaccines to fight emerging variants could allow older strains of the coronavirus to resurface.

    Brett-Major said messages about the value of the tailored shots will need to come from trusted, local sources — not just top federal health officials.

    “Access happens locally,” he said. “If your local systems are not messaging and promoting and enabling access, it’s really problematic.”

    Although some Americans are pondering when, or whether, to get their second boosters, many people tuned out the pandemic long ago, putting them at risk during the current wave, experts said.

    Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, said he doesn’t expect to see the public’s level of interest in the vaccine change much even as new boosters are released and eligibility expands. Parts of the country with high vaccine coverage will remain relatively insulated from new variants that emerge, he said, while regions with low vaccine acceptance could be set for a “rude awakening.”

    Even scientists are at a bit of a loss for how to effectively adapt to an ever-changing virus.

    “Nothing is simple with covid, is it? It’s just whack-a-mole,” said Edwards. “This morning I read about a new variant in India. Maybe it’ll be a nothingburger, but — who knows? — maybe something big, and then we’ll wonder, ‘Why did we change the vaccine strain to BA.4/5?’”

    KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Climate rivalry between secretive autocracy and corrupted democracy

    COMMENTARY: By Megan Darby, editor of Climate Home News

    When it comes to the world’s two biggest emitters, we are caught between a secretive autocracy and an oversharing corrupted democracy.

    Most media attention is focused on the latter. The United States this week raised hopes of a compromise climate spending bill and quashed it again before you could say “Joe Manchin is a bad-faith actor”.

    Having somebody to blame does not make it any easier to address a system rigged in favour of fossil fuel interests.

    At Climate Home, we bypassed that news cycle (come back to us when you’ve achieved something, America!) and took a longer look at the former.

    Because the fact that so little climate journalism comes out of China at a certain point becomes newsworthy in itself. And once Chloé Farand started asking around, we knew this story’s time had come.

    It has never been easy for journalists and civil society to operate in Xi Jinping’s China. As he looks to secure a third term as president over the coming months, it is harder than ever.

    Beijing’s zero-covid policy is, most sources said, no longer just about public health, but a tool of control at a politically sensitive time. Conferences are cancelled indefinitely and travel restricted. Officials up and down the hierarchy are afraid to speak to the media.

    Out of six China-based climate reporters who spoke to Climate Home for the article, four had left or were preparing to leave the country.

    This is a problem. Not just for the international community, which has an interest in holding China to account for its emissions performance, but for China. In the vacuum, misinformation and Sinophobia flourish.

    From the slivers of news that do emerge, we can see that Chinese experts have much to teach the rest of the world. Ok, so they might want to keep their advantage in mass producing solar panels, but when it comes to smart deployment policy, they have every incentive to share tips.

    Perhaps they could give US climate campaigners, who are in despair right now, some fresh ideas.

  • ‘We’ve politicised this issue too much’ – NZ expert calls for mandated indoor mask-wearing

    By Craig McCulloch, RNZ News deputy political editor

    A prominent New Zealand epidemiologist is calling for much wider mask mandates, saying the roll-out of free masks, while positive, will make a “fairly small” difference to the covid-19 outbreak.

    The government yesterday announced masks and rapid antigen tests would be made freely available while the country battled a resurgence of covid-19 and other winter illnesses.

    University of Otago’s Professor Michael Baker told RNZ News much more was required to prevent the worst outcomes of a “really grim winter”.

    “We are missing the fundamental measure to stop sharing this virus widely and that is universal mask use indoors.”

    23 more deaths
    The Ministry of Health reports there were 11,382 new community cases of covid-19 yesterday and a further 23 deaths with the virus.

    In a statement, the ministry said a child less than 10 years old had died, while five other people who died were in their 70s, nine were in their 80s and eight were aged over 90. Of these people, 11 were women and 12 were men.

    All the deaths being reported occurred in the past seven days, the ministry said.

    That takes the total number of publicly reported deaths with covid-19 to 1760 and the seven-day rolling average of reported deaths is 20.

    Dr Baker said New Zealand needed to shift to becoming a “mask-using society”, which he believed could be achieved only through mandating their use in most indoor environments.

    “The very ad hoc approach to requiring mask use is eroding the social licence for them,” Dr Baker said.

    “You go to one social event, and everyone’s wearing a mask, and so you feel comfortable. Next day, you go to a different one, and no one’s wearing a mask, except you, and that feels a bit odd. We need to get rid of those inconsistencies.”

    Fear of political backlash
    Dr Baker said he believed the government had opted for a greater focus on personal responsibility for fear of a potential political backlash.

    “Unfortunately, we’ve politicised this issue too much and politics is starting to take over from the science.”

    But, speaking to RNZ Checkpoint, Covid-19 Response Minister Ayesha Verrall said it was “not simple” to implement mask mandates.

    “It impacts the running of many businesses and we need people to take a pragmatic approach to this.”

    Dr Verrall said, however, she would encourage everyone to wear a mask while indoors as much as possible.

    She rejected the suggestion the government’s approach to tackling rising covid-19 cases was based on politics over health.

    Dr Verrall would not say if the predicted peak of 1200 hospitalisations a day would be a crisis, but said the government was doing everything it could to avoid the scenario playing out.

    ‘Real health pressures’
    “I think it’s really important we respond to the very real pressures in our health system, and I’ve been in close contact with healthcare workers, as well as following the statistics we get to make sure we know what the facts are, and that we respond to them and fix the problems that exist,” she said.

    “A lot of what we set out today is designed to do that.”

    Green Party MP Teanau Tuiono said the development was “about time”, but he would have liked to see masks made mandatory in schools.

    “We’re all over it, we’re all tired… but it’s just no excuse to drop the ball because here’s the thing: there are people still in hospital, people dying from covid,” he said.

    “The numbers are going up and we are in the middle of winter, so what we need here is that leadership.”

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

  • Pressley Urges Biden to Declare Public Health Emergency Over “Roe” Overturn

    In response to President Joe Biden’s claim that his administration is “look[ing] at” whether or not to declare a public health emergency over abortion rights, progressive lawmakers are urging him to follow through on the declaration that could free up resources to fight abortion bans.

    Biden told reporters in Delaware on Sunday that the declaration is “something I’m asking the medical people in the administration to look at whether I have the authority to do that and what impact that would have.” He said that the strongest action that Democrats could take is to pass a bill that recently failed in the Senate that would codify Roe v. Wade.

    The president offered words of encouragement for pro-abortion protesters who have risen up in droves — including outside of the White House over the weekend — in response to the far right Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe. “Keep protesting. Keep making your point. It’s critically important,” he said.

    Responding to news that Biden is considering the declaration, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) wrote, “Good. Now declare it,” on Twitter.

    “Every minute we wait, we risk losing someone we love,” said Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri). SCOTUS’ decision to overturn Roe could be a death sentence for our most marginalized communities who already face racism and barriers to health care. [The president] must declare a public health emergency to save lives.”

    Pressley and Bush have previously advocated for Biden to declare an emergency to protect abortion access. In a letter sent last month, Pressley led 19 other Black women in Congress in urging Biden to “use every tool at your disposal to protect fundamental reproductive rights and abortion access across this country.” The lawmakers said that conservatives’ abortion bans would especially harm Black people, who already face higher pregnancy death rates than their white counterparts.

    Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Tina Smith (D-Minnesota) have also asked for an emergency declaration in order to protect reproductive rights.

    A public health emergency declaration would free up funds and government agency resources in order to respond to the crisis. Advocates say that the declaration is crucial so that the government has the authority and the resources to respond to an uptick in demand for reproductive health services.

    It seems unlikely that the Biden administration will actually take this step, however. Reporters found last week that top Biden administration officials had already considered declaring a public health emergency after the Supreme Court decision last month and decided against it.

    The director of the White House Gender Policy Council, Jennifer Klein, told reporters on Friday that it’s still a possibility, but that the declaration wouldn’t be that effective in responding to the problem.

    Meanwhile, Biden has been facing criticism from Democrats and the left for his administration’s inaction on abortion rights so far.

    Last week, the president signed an executive order that directs the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to research ways to expand abortion rights, like widening access to abortion medication and contraceptives and expanding its family planning services. While it includes some critical provisions like addressing data privacy concerns, abortion advocates said, it’s nowhere near enough to protect the people who will suffer due to the far right’s abortion bans.

    Meanwhile, pro-abortion advocates lambasted the White House last week when White House communications director Kate Bedingfield criticized left-wing protesters who have been demonstrating against bans. “Joe Biden’s goal in responding to Dobbs is not to satisfy some activists who have been consistently out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic Party,” she said.

    But progressives argue that it is Biden and mainstream Democrats who have been blocking action on abortion rights. After all, just two months ago, Biden had refused to endorse filibuster abolition or reform in order to codify Roe, and only changed his mind after the Supreme Court decision came down — after people had already been affected by state trigger laws that immediately implemented bans.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Lost in Transplantation

    Quickly delivering donated organs to patients waiting for a transplant is a matter of life and death. Yet transportation errors are leading to delays in surgeries, putting patients in danger and making some organs unusable. This week, we look at weaknesses in the nation’s system for transporting organs and solutions for making it work better. 

    More than any other organ, donated kidneys are put on commercial flights so they can get to waiting patients. In collaboration with Kaiser Health News, we look at the system for transporting kidneys and how a lack of tracking and accountability can result in waylaid or misplaced kidneys.

    We then look at the broader issues affecting organ procurement in the U.S. with Jennifer Erickson, who worked at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under the Obama administration. She says one of the system’s weaknesses is that not enough organs are recovered from deceased people – not nearly as many as there could be.

    We end with an audio postcard about honor walks, a new ritual that hospitals are adopting to honor the gift of life that dying people are giving to patients who will receive their organs. We follow the story of one young man who was killed in a car accident.

    This episode originally was broadcast Feb. 8, 2020. 

    Connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • China And The US Response To Covid-19

    In May and June of 2022 two milestones were passed in the world’s battle with Covid and were widely noted in the press, one in the US and one in China.  They invite a comparison between the two countries and their approach to combatting Covid-19.

    The first milestone was passed on May 12 when  the United States registered over 1 million total deaths (1,008,377 as of June 19, 2022, when this is written) due to Covid, the highest of any country in the world.  Web MD expressed its sentiment in a piece headlined: “US Covid Deaths Hit 1 Million: ‘History Should Judge Us.’”

    Second, on June 1, China emerged from its 60-day lockdown in Shanghai in response to an outbreak there, the most serious since the Wuhan outbreak at the onset of the pandemic. 

    The post China And The US Response To Covid-19 appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • One Billionaire Has Been Created Every 30 Hours During Pandemic, Oxfam Says

    In the shadow of the Davos summit of global elites taking place this week, a new report from Oxfam International details how skyrocketing inequality during two years of the global Covid-19 pandemic surged to a point where a new billionaire was created in the world nearly every day while over one million people are now being pushed into poverty at almost the same daily rate.

    The new report — titled “Profiting From Pain” — is the latest accounting of how the pandemic has only deepened grotesque discrepancies between the haves and have-nots of the world, showing that while 573 new billionaires were created since the pandemic began, approximately one billionaire every 30 hours, an estimated 263 million are expected to “crash into extreme poverty” this year — a rate of one million people every 33 hours.

    Such stark realities and gross injustice, the anti-poverty group concludes, is clear evidence that a tax on billionaire wealth and windfall pandemic profits is urgently needed to address crucial needs.

    “Billionaires are arriving in Davos to celebrate an incredible surge in their fortunes. The pandemic and now the steep increases in food and energy prices have, simply put, been a bonanza for them. Meanwhile, decades of progress on extreme poverty are now in reverse and millions of people are facing impossible rises in the cost of simply staying alive,” said Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International.

    Among the key findings of the report:

    • Today, 2,668 billionaires — 573 more than in 2020 — own $12.7 trillion, an increase of $3.78 trillion.
    • The world’s ten richest men own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of humanity, 3.1 billion people.
    • The richest 20 billionaires are worth more than the entire GDP of Sub-Saharan Africa.
    • A worker in the bottom 50 percent would have to work for 112 years to earn what a person in the top 1 percent gets in a single year.
    • High informality and overload due to care tasks have kept 4 million women in Latin America and the Caribbean out of the workforce. Half of working women of color in the US earn less than $15 an hour.

    While a tall stack of reports has documented such trends since the pandemic took hold in early 2020, Oxfam’s latest study shines a bright light on the massive profits in the key sectors of energy, food, and pharmaceutical companies — all of which are able to consolidate financial gains due to their monopoly control over commodities essential to society.

    According to Bucher, the fortunes of the world’s billionaires have “not increased because they are now smarter or working harder” than the average worker, many who faced layoffs, lack of hours, fractured families, childcare crises, and dangerous work conditions throughout the pandemic.

    “The super-rich have rigged the system with impunity for decades and they are now reaping the benefits,” she said. “They have seized a shocking amount of the world’s wealth as a result of privatization and monopolies, gutting regulation and workers’ rights while stashing their cash in tax havens — all with the complicity of governments.”

    At the same time, she added, hundreds of millions of regular workers and their families “are skipping meals, turning off the heating, falling behind on bills and wondering what they can possibly do next to survive. Across East Africa, one person is likely dying every minute from hunger. This grotesque inequality is breaking the bonds that hold us together as humanity. It is divisive, corrosive and dangerous. This is inequality that literally kills.”

    The report notes that the profit margins of the world’s big oil companies doubled during the pandemic, while the cost of energy worldwide is projected to soar by 50% this year — the largest increase in energy prices, the group noted, since 1973. Giant food companies that control a bulk of the world’s food supply and the large pharmaceutical companies, some like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson which control large portions of the Covid-19 vaccine supply, have been swimming in profits since the virus struck.

    With the world’s billionaire class and national leaders meeting in Davos this week as they pretend to meet as stewards of international leadership, Oxfam said there is one clear thing they should do if they want to be taken seriously: support a tax on billionaire wealth.

    Among other things, Oxfam calls for a “one-off solidarity taxes on billionaires’ pandemic windfalls to fund support for people facing rising food and energy costs and a fair and sustainable recovery from Covid-19.”

    Citing the nearly $8 trillion in tax havens that the global elite is believed to have stashed around the world, the group indicated the global tax system — which has never been defensible — is no longer sustainable in the face of such enormous challenges.

    The group is also calling for an end to “crisis profiteering” by introducing a “temporary excess profit tax of 90 percent to capture the windfall profits of big corporations across all industries.” Oxfam estimates that such a tax on less than three dozen “super-profitable multinational companies” could have generated $104 billion in revenue in 2020 alone.

    Lastly, Oxfam says a permanent tax on extreme wealth and the disruption of monopoly power by huge multinationals is essential to equalize the world’s economy, lift billions of people out of poverty, and to fund the kind of investments on healthcare, climate action, and social protection for all the low- and middle-income people of the world.

    “The extremely rich and powerful are profiting from pain and suffering. This is unconscionable,” said Bucha.

    “Over two years since the pandemic began, after more than 20 million estimated deaths from Covid-19 and widespread economic destruction,” she said, “government leaders in Davos face a choice: act as proxies for the billionaire class who plunder their economies, or take bold steps to act in the interests of their great majorities.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Labor has a huge health agenda ahead of it. What policies should we expect?

    ANALYSIS: By Stephen Duckett, The University of Melbourne

    Labor’s win in Saturday’s election heralds real change in health policy. Although Labor had a small-target strategy, with limited big spending commitments, its victory represents a value shift to a party committed to equity and Medicare, and, potentially, a style shift to a hands-on, equity-oriented health minister.

    Labor’s health spokesperson, Mark Butler, is expected to be the new health minister, subject to a reshuffle caused by two Labor shadow ministers losing their seats.

    Butler is very different from his predecessor. He was Australia’s first minister for mental health and ageing in the Gillard government.

    He also held the equity-focused ministries of housing, homelessness, and social inclusion. He has written a book about ageing in Australia, published by Melbourne University Press.

    The new minister faces two urgent policy priorities: primary care and covid.

    Fixing primary care
    Outgoing health minister Greg Hunt released an unfunded strategy paper on budget night. It aimed to improve primary care — a person’s first point of contact with the health system, usually their GP or practice nurses. The paper had languished on his desk for months and was the result of years of consultation and consensus-building.

    One of the largest and most important Labor commitments during the campaign was almost A$1 billion over four years for primary care reform, about A$250 million in a full year.

    The funding commitment is cast broadly, promising to improve patient access to GP-led multidisciplinary team care, including nursing and allied health and after-hours care; greater patient affordability; and better management of complex and chronic conditions.

    Presumably, a key way this will be effected will be through voluntary patient enrolment. A patient would enrol with a practice, and the practice would get an annual payment for that enrolment. This was promised for people over 70 in the 2019–20 budget but not delivered.

    This new policy is a welcome start for reform in primary care and signals the importance that a Labor government attaches to the sector.

    Shadow health minister Mark Butler
    Mark Butler was minister for mental health and ageing in the Gillard government. Image: Lukas Coch/AAP

    The Strengthening Medicare Fund was only sketched out in broad terms before the election, and provides insight into the new ministerial style. The details of the policy will be thrashed out in a taskforce which will include key stakeholders.

    Most importantly, the taskforce will be chaired by the minister — no hiding behind consultants; he or she will hold the hose.

    Reducing covid deaths
    Another crucial early challenge for the minister will be addressing the continuing covid pandemic.

    Covid deaths continue: three times as many people have died this year than in the previous two. The Coalition delegitimised any form of action, including mask wearing and vaccine mandates, as part of its undermining of state public health measures, especially action by Labor states.

    The prevalence of third dose vaccinations, necessary for adequate protection from omicron, sits at about two-thirds of the over-16 population, much lower in the under-16s, meaning that many in the population are not protected.

    Public hospitals are bursting at the seams, with staff overwhelmed. This needs urgent attention, and the Coalition strategy of ignoring it and saying it was someone else’s problem, must be dumped.

    Labor vowed to “step up the national strategy” late in the election campaign.

    Aged care support
    Hopefully Labor’s shadow aged care minister, Clare O’Neil, will continue in this role post-election. She proved more than a match for her hapless opponent, Richard Colbeck.

    Labor made big commitments in aged care, creating a significant point of difference with the Coalition, despite the Coalition’s investments in the 2021–22 budget.

    In addition to the Coalition commitments, Labor promised 24/7 registered nurse coverage in residential aged care facilities, and to support a wage rise for aged care workers. The latter is particularly important because without a wages uplift, the staff shortages in the sector will continue.

    A new approach
    Labor won’t engage in climate denialism or use climate policy as a political wedge.

    Recognising and addressing climate change is an important issue for the health sector and, of course, the community more broadly as the teal surge and the Greens’ wins demonstrated.

    Labor has committed to establishing a centre for prevention and disease control, which should provide a framework for addressing social and economic determinants of health.

    Potentially as important in terms of policy style are Labor’s public service policies. The “consultocracy” which thrived under the Liberals will be shown the door, replaced by public servants doing the job the public service has always been available to do.

    Obviously, a new Labor government will not be able to be meet all the community’s pent-up aspirations in a single term.

    Nevertheless, it is disappointing Labor did not commit to phasing in universal dental care – the crucial missing piece of Australia’s universal health coverage.

    Butler and his colleagues have a huge agenda on their plates. Starting with primary care is a good first focus, as without those foundations in place, the whole system cannot work well.The Conversation

    Dr Stephen Duckett is honorary enterprise professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice, The University of Melbourne. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • NZ covid deaths top 1000 with 9570 new community cases reported

    RNZ News

    Aotearoa New Zealand has reported 9570 new community cases of covid-19 and a further 32 deaths today, bringing total publicly recorded deaths with the coronavirus 1017.

    In a statement, the Ministry of Health said the total number of deaths was up by 31 from yesterday as they had removed a case which had been previously reported twice.

    “This case was initially reported on March 10. The deaths being reported today include people who have died over the previous six weeks, since April 5.”

    The seven-day rolling average of reported deaths is 17.

    “Of the people whose deaths we are reporting today; two people were from Northland; nine from the Auckland region; two from Bay of Plenty; two from Taranaki; one from Tairawhiti; four from MidCentral; two from Hawke’s Bay; three from the Wellington region; one from Nelson-Marlborough; four from Canterbury and two from Southern.

    “One person was in their 20s; four people were in their 40s; two in their 50s; four in their sixties; nine in their 70s; nine in their 80s and three were aged over 90.

    “Of these people, 10 were women and 22 were men.”

    The seven-day rolling average of community case numbers is 8024 — last Wednesday it was 7533, the ministry said.

    It said there are 425 people in hospital, including nine in ICU.

    Yesterday, the ministry reported 9843 cases and eight deaths.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Capitalism Is to Blame for How Quickly US COVID Deaths Reached 1 Million

    I got my second COVID booster shot this morning, so if I do catch this damned thing, it won’t be for lack of ducking. The CVS worker who dosed me seemed an affable sort and the coffee had just kicked in, so I decided to have a bit of sport at the expense of the medical industry. When he brought the tray with the syringe over, I asked if it was the one with the Bill Gates microchip or the one that glows to let Satan know where I am. He stared at me a long moment, looked left and right, then leaned close and said, “5G, man. 5G.”

    It’s laughing or screaming at this point, when the mention of one conspiracy theory is parried with yet another (in this case, the outrageous idea that 5G cellphone towers are to blame for COVID-19), and that is the ignoble truth.

    With solemn tone and a truly daunting dot-matrix map of the lost, The New York Times put forth the question that nobody seems prepared to deal with at this juncture: How did this country suffer one million COVID deaths, easily the most of any country in the world, in less than three years?

    The answers are spread across a broad palette of shame and disgrace that, brushstroke by disgraceful brushstroke, combined to paint a mural of a nation in pinwheeling decline. COVID did not do this to us. Like water, it made for the lowest places and flooded the gaps until the walls crumbled, the floors cracked, and the “exceptional” country was forced to confront just how drab and subpar it really is… which may serve to explain the silence enveloping this grim and monstrous milestone.

    “This is how it happens,” writes Indrajit Samarajiva, who watched as his home country of Sri Lanka collapsed after years of civil war. “Precisely what you’re feeling now. The numbing litany of bad news. The ever rising outrages. People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you, while you think about dinner. If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down.”

    It was capitalism, of course, that made sure this thing would rule the day. The idea of obeying science to the point that multi-billion dollar corporations might lose custom and market share for a time was more than intolerable; it was heresy spoken against the faith of the free-marketeers and their trickle-down pabulum. Minimum-wage workers behind plexiglass at the Piggly Wiggly were hailed as heroes in the media, but they weren’t heroes… or at least they didn’t want to be. They needed the money and the insurance (if any was actually available), and so they worked. Thousands were infected, and hundreds died.

    The gruesome details of COVID and the meat-packing industry are a perfect metaphor for the collision between greed and disease. According to a report by ProPublica, a cohort of meat-packing concerns combined their efforts and lobbied the Trump administration for exemptions that would allow their plants to remain open while shielding them from legal liability. Soon enough, Trump complied.

    “The effect that the meatpacking plant outbreaks had on the early spread of COVID-19 is staggering,” reads the report. “ProPublica and other news outlets tracked cases and deaths involving meatpacking workers. But academic researchers have found that by July 2020, about 6 percent to 8 percent of all coronavirus cases in the U.S. were tied to packing plant outbreaks, and that by October 2020, community spread from the plants had generated 334,000 illnesses and 18,000 COVID-19-related deaths.”

    Notwithstanding the towering courage and perseverance of the doctors and nurses who fought COVID on the front lines — wearing garbage bags and masks hosed down with Lysol in the early days because of supply snafus — the bleak truth of this country’s garbled medical industry has been exposed. This reaches beyond the overworked hospitals all the way down to the manner in which we as a nation care for our elders. COVID is exceptionally dangerous for older people, to be sure, but hundreds of thousands of elders died warehoused in “homes” staffed by brutally undertrained workers.

    This, again, was capitalism at work, the “for-profit” medical industry championed by capitalists as the best in the world. The dead know better.

    Speaking of sham capitalism, no critique of the last three years would be complete without a long look at Donald Trump himself, whose performance as president during the crisis will go down in history as one of the more spectacular failures since Icarus told his dad, “Just a little higher.”

    Everything you need to know about Trump’s long bungle of COVID can be found in the first public statement he made on the pandemic, on the last day of February 2020:

    At this moment, we have 22 patients in the United States currently that have coronavirus. Unfortunately, one person passed away overnight. She was a wonderful woman, a medically high-risk patient in her late 50s. Four others are very ill. Thankfully, 15 are either recovered fully or they’re well on their way to recovery, and in all cases they’ve been let go, and they’re home.

    Additional cases in the United States are likely, but healthy individuals should be able to fully recover, and I think that will be a statement that we can make with great surety now that we’ve gotten familiar with this problem. They should be able to recover should they contract the virus. So healthy people, if you’re healthy, you will probably go through a process and you’ll be fine.

    First of all, the deceased person he referred to was a man, not a woman, setting the tone for the fact-free avalanche of calamity his administration became in the ensuing months. The happy talk, though, is the tell: he made this statement weeks after telling journalist Bob Woodward, “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus. This is deadly stuff.”

    Hundreds of thousands of deaths, along with millions of infections, lay at Trump’s spray-tanned feet, but the dying has continued through the entirety of the Biden administration. In this, we have the perfect storm: A president weighed down by the failures of his predecessor and beset by a Republican opposition that has been more than happy to use a lethal pandemic for political purposes. It also has not helped that Biden and his fellow Democrats have raised snatching defeat from the jaws of victory into a form of performance art.

    In the face of all this, frustrated silence reigns. There’s no mystery to it; a great many myths about greatness have been shredded and burned in the passage of COVID, and here we are once again confronted with a new wave of infections. New cases are exploding across the country, especially in areas where the GOP convinced people that vaccinations and masks are some sort of liberal Trojan Horse. There were more than 90,000 new infections yesterday alone, a two-week increase of 60 percent.

    Biden ordered flags to be flown at half-mast to honor the million we have lost. It is as bland a recognition as any other we have seen. The longer we refuse to face what this really is — a pandemic that has attacked us at our weakest places that were supposed to be our strongest places — the longer this will continue. It is a reckoning that must be both national and personal, or there will be no recovery at all.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • ‘We’re not paid fairly for the work we do’, say striking NZ health workers

    By Rowan Quinn, RNZ News health correspondent

    Striking New Zealand health workers have picketed around the country, saying they are fed up with being underpaid and undervalued.

    About 10,000 allied health staff who work at district health boards have walked off the job for 24 hours, with rolling demonstrations.

    They are health workers who are not doctors or nurses.

    One of the first pickets has been outside Hutt Hospital, with workers chanting and holding signs, and getting lots of beeps of support from passing cars.

    Social worker Lorraine Tetley said her team was losing social workers to higher paid jobs in the public sector.

    Those left behind felt undervalued, she said.

    “They’re essential workers who work on the frontline during the pandemic. Every day we work with risk and we work with vulnerable families and we’re not paid fairly for the work we do,” she said.

    Working hard under covid
    Dental therapist Char Blake said they had been working really hard, especially after the lockdown and covid restrictions.

    “We love caring for patients but is just really hard to pay for things with the price of things going up and we’ve waited 18 months for a pay rise,” Blake said.


    Today’s allied health workers strike. Video: RNZ News

     

    Dental assistant for the School Dental Service Faye Brown said she was paid just over the minimum wage.

    Her service was six people short, and in danger of losing more.

    “It can be quite stressful at times — we have to do more than we are supposed to at times. We don’t want to let our patients down,” she said.

    Jane McWhirter tests newborn babies’ hearing and says she is earning the same amount as her 16-year-old daughter who works at Dominoes Pizza.

    She says even though she is training on the job, she is doing important, skilled work and she and her colleagues deserves better.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • PM Jacinda Ardern tests positive for covid-19 – NZ cases rising

    New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has confirmed that she has tested positive for covid-19.

    Her daughter Neve tested positive on Wednesday, she added in the post. Her partner Clarke Gayford tested positive on Sunday.

    “Despite best efforts, unfortunately I’ve joined the rest of my family and tested positive for covid-19,” Ardern wrote on social media.

    Reports of her covid status follow a statement yesterday by Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield that thousands of new cases of covid-19 were being reported every day in New Zealand, but this was likely to be half of the number of actual cases.

    With a further 29 deaths with covid-19 and 7441 new cases yesterday, Dr Bloomfield said the impact of the severity of omicron was still visible.

    Prime Minister Ardern has been symptomatic since Friday night, according to a statement, and has “moderate” symptoms. She returned a weak positive Friday night and a clear positive this morning on a RAT test.

    Ardern will be required to isolate until the morning of Saturday May 21.

    Missing the Budget
    Ardern, who has been isolating since Gayford tested positive, will now have to miss the Budget announcement on Thursday and the release of the government’s Emissions Reduction Plan on Monday.

    “There are so many important things happening for the government this week,” she wrote.

    “I’m gutted to miss being there in person, but will be staying in close touch with the team and sharing some reckons from here.

    “To anyone else out there isolating or dealing with covid, I hope you take good care of yourselves!”

    Ardern’s upcoming travel to the United States, scheduled for late May, will go ahead as planned at this stage. She is scheduled to give the commencement speech at Harvard University on May 26.

    Former Labour Party president Mike Williams hopes she will be well enough to travel.

    “After two years of isolation, internationally she’s a rock star attraction, and it does the country a hell of a lot of good to get her out and about.”

    Williams said Ardern, 41, was young and fit, so should be fine.

    Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson will take the post-cabinet press conference on Monday.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.