authorea | This paper offers a critique of UK government policy based on mode of
transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (which in turn followed misleading advice
from the World Health Organisation) through the lens of policymaking as
narrative. Two flawed narratives—“Covid is droplet- not airborne-spread”
and “Covid is situationally airborne” (that is, airborne transmission
is unusual but may occur during aerosol-generating medical procedures
and severe indoor crowding)—quickly became dominant despite no evidence
to support them. Two important counter-narratives—“Covid is
unequivocally airborne” and “Everyone generates aerosols; everyone is
vulnerable”— were sidelined despite strong evidence to support them.
Tragic consequences of the flawed policy narrative unfolded as social
dramas. For example, droplet precautions became ritualised; care home
residents died in their thousands; public masking became a libertarian
lightning rod; and healthcare settings became occupational health
battlegrounds. In a discussion, we call for bold action to ensure that
the science of SARS-CoV-2 transmission is freed from the shackles of
historical errors, scientific vested interests, ideological manipulation
and policy satisficing.
Policymaking is a contact sport involving competing narratives (about
problems, how they arose, and how they will be resolved), institutions
(especially government and its bureaucratic machinery) and interests
(financial, political, ideological).1 2 Policy
may—ideally—“follow science” but a key question is whosescience and why? Science shapes policy narratives via an “inside
track” (e.g. official advisory committees) and to a lesser extent by an
“outside track” (e.g. less mainstream scientists, citizen
movements).3
Pandemic policymaking has been characterised not by clearly-identified
knowledge gaps which science obligingly fills but by toxic clashes
between competing scientific and moral narratives. Policymakers have
risked losing control of the “dramaturgy of political communication”
(page 784).
Getting the mode of transmission for a contagious disease right matters,
because preventive strategies follow (Table 1).5 Being
honest about scientific uncertainty also matters, because—among other
reasons—it is hard to back-track after declaring a policy
“evidence-based”.
Table 1: Droplet versus airborne transmission:
implications for
public health and healthcare worker
protection
WaPo | For generations we’ve had vaccine mandates, particularly for childhood diseases,
in every state plus D.C. Few thought to call this tyranny because
communities have a duty to maintain public health, and individuals have a
duty to reasonably accommodate the common good — even if this means
allowing your child to be injected with a substance carrying a minuscule
risk of harm.
So there can be no objection rooted in principle to vaccine mandates, unless you want to question them all the way down to measles, mumps and rubella. The problem must be covid-19 in particular.
If
the coronavirus vaccines are risky, experimental concoctions with
frequent side effects, then government and business mandates are social
coercion run amok. We might as well mandate vaping.
But
if these vaccines are carefully tested and encourage greater immunity
to a deadly disease, with minimal risk of side effects, then the
“heroism” of vaccine resisters takes on a different connotation: It
means resisters are less courageous and more selfish than your average
6-year-old getting a second MMR dose. Perhaps vaccine mandates should be
modified to include lollipops for whingeing malcontents.
So
which view is correct? If only there were empirical means, some
scientific method, to test the matter. If only there had been three
phases of clinical trials, involving tens of thousands of volunteers,
demonstrating the drugs to be safe and effective. If only the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration
were constantly monitoring safety concerns about the vaccines. If only
we could estimate the number of covid deaths that might have been
prevented if vaccine uptake were higher.
To break the suspense — we do live in such a world. “From June through September 2021,” concluded a recent Peterson-KFF report,
“approximately 90,000 covid-19 deaths among adults likely would have
been prevented with vaccination.” So the matter is simple: Who is making
vaccination more likely to take place, and who is not?
In
this light, it’s hard to blame the small group of workers who have been
misled into believing that liberty is the right to infect your
neighbors with a deadly pathogen. The main fault lies with the media
outlets that spotlight and elevate such people, and with political
figures who seek their political dreams by encouraging lethal ignorance.
WaPo | Even as the coronavirus
has ravaged the rank and file of law enforcement agencies across the
country, police labor leaders have threatened to go to court and called
for defiance from union members. The response to the coronavirus has
tragically been politicized — starting with the absurd demonization of
masks — but the refusal of these police unions to abide by vaccine
mandates, recognized by other unions including those representing
teachers as a vital tool to safeguard public health, represents a new
low.
Covid-19 has been the No. 1 killer of law enforcement officers in 2020 and 2021. According to the Officer Down Memorial Page,
which tracks the on-duty deaths of police officers in the United
States, more than 470 have died as a result of contracting the virus in
the line of duty since the start of the pandemic. That is more than four
times as many officers who have died from gunfire. Among the covid-19
fatalities: Louisiana Police Lt. DeMarcus Dunn, 36, who died the day
before his wedding; Edgardo Acosta-Feliciano, 48, a U.S. Customs and
Border Protection officer who leaves behind a wife, a daughter and two
sons; Michael Weiskopf,
52, a traffic homicide investigator for the St. Petersburg police
remembered for his kindness in dealing with people involved in serious
crashes. None had been vaccinated.
“If
this was cops getting shot on the streets of America today at this
number, there would be outrage,” Chuck Wexler, executive director of the
Police Executive Research Forum, told the New York Times. “This
is an issue that begs for leadership and putting politics aside. And
that’s exactly the opposite of what’s happening right now.” So on the
same day that the former head of Chicago’s police union died
from covid-19, Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara — who
once compared the city’s vaccine requirements to Nazi Germany — urged
his members not to comply with the mayor’s order to submit proof of
vaccination. Brandon Judd, president of the union that represents border patrol agents
said he is saddened by the rise in deaths — five agents died of
covid-19 in September alone — but he insists vaccines are a personal
choice.
It
should be expected that organizations whose purpose is the protection
of the health, safety and welfare of its members would actually try to
live up to those ideals. And that a profession whose motto is to protect
and serve would recognize the danger that is posed to the public by
officers who refuse to get vaccinated against a deadly virus.
GodsSpies |“The news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin
board and public relations firm for the ruling class—the people who run
things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid
by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power.
If the parent corporation doesn’t want you to know something, it won’t
be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to
suit them, and then rarely followed up.” — George Carlin, quoted here
It's going to be interesting to see, in the next five to fifteen
years, the methods the rich must use to keep their power when the
climate crisis hits with full and majestic force. The coming chaos and
revolutionary fervor that suffering millions and billions will bring to
the table will each be world-historical in scope. What under those
conditions will the powerful do, the very very few, to keep the very
many from taking control? Whatever the result, none of our governments
will survive in their current form.
Keep in mind, revolutions are
not orderly, and this one almost certainly won't be well led. Yes, from
time to time, the world kicks out a George Washington, fit for the
challenge of his time, a man who willing to fortify the republic he
helped to build rather than just profit from it.
And yes, from
time to time the world kicks out a Napoleon or Vespasian, a man fit to
rule his time well, at least for the most part, even if that rule is
decidedly autocratic.
But most of the time the world kicks out
masters of chaos, egomaniacal destroyers and opportunists, people like
Alcibiades of Athens, or Ronald Reagan, people who gain power in
disgruntled times, and through their actions make the world worse for
everyone. Reagan took a struggling country, the proto-neoliberal nation
of the Carter years, a nation steeped in stagflation, and set in fatal
motion the wealth machine that will soon destroy us all, including the
machine itself.
If we don't get off of fossil fuel in time, the
rich will suffer with the rest of us the destruction they will cause.
Our leaders won't contemplate any measure that reduces their power, and
we won't contemplate forcing them to leave. Under those constraints, the
problem has no solution.
The rich won't stand down. Will the people stand up? On that one question hangs all of the rest of this tale.
tabletmag | The
unavoidable problems with censoring disinformation have predictably
plagued recent laws, including those touted as restricting
pandemic-related disinformation in order to protect public health. As
the Economist reported
in February 2021, “Censorious governments are abusing ‘fake news’
laws,” invoking the pandemic as “an excuse to gag reporters” and to
silence critics of pandemic-era policies. In February 2020, Amnesty
International noted
that Singapore’s 2019 law against “online falsehoods and manipulation”
was “repeatedly used to target critics and political opponents.” The
Singaporean government could not deny this, but instead claimed that the
law’s consistent enforcement against opposition party members was a
“coincidence.” To the contrary, these patterns necessarily result from restrictions on such a vague, broad category of speech, even in democratic regimes.
That is why the American Civil Liberties Union brought a 2020 lawsuit
challenging disinformation laws that the government of Puerto Rico had
recently passed for the asserted purpose of protecting public health and
safety. One such law makes it a crime to share “false information”
about the government’s post-pandemic emergency and curfew orders with
the intent to cause “confusion, panic, or public hysteria.” Shortly
after the law went into effect, the Puerto Rican government charged a
prominent clergyman with allegedly disseminating false information on
WhatsApp about a rumored executive order to close all businesses. In
fact, only a short time later, the governor did issue such an order.
Even
beyond the speech that disinformation laws directly stifle, these laws
also suppress incalculable amounts of important expression, including
information about the pandemic that could literally be a matter of life
or death. That’s because the laws deter scientists and other experts
from providing information to journalists, and journalists are in turn
deterred from conveying information to the public, for fear of
transgressing—or being charged with transgressing—the laws’ blurry
boundaries. The ACLU’s complaint in the Puerto Rico case was filed on
behalf of two prominent investigative journalists, who explained
that “developing stories on matters of immense public concern are often
complex, contentious, and murky,” and thus “inadvertent inaccuracies
are inevitable even in the most thoroughly vetted reporting.”
Throughout
the pandemic, we have witnessed constantly evolving and shifting views
among expert individuals and agencies, as they steadily gather and
analyze additional data. Yesterday’s life-endangering “disinformation”
can and has become today’s life-protecting gospel. Recall, to cite only
the most obvious example, the CDC’s changing edicts about mask-wearing.
Inherently
subjective disinformation restrictions can easily be wielded for
ulterior purposes, including to promote partisan interests. Consider,
for instance, recent evidence that the Biden administration has been
pressuring social media companies to restrict content that purportedly
purveys disinformation about COVID, in light of allegations that the
actual concerns may well involve politics at least as much as public
health. Republican members of Congress have claimed that platforms have
restricted “conservative” posts on issues related to the pandemic in
response to pressure from administration officials, even though the
posts contained no factual misrepresentations and simply conveyed
perspectives with which the administration disagreed. Whether or not
these claims are factually correct, it is true that the concept of
disinformation is so open-ended that it could be deployed against
particular communications for partisan reasons.
The
inevitable manipulability of restrictions on disinformation is well
illustrated by YouTube’s recent removal of a video for violating its
“medical misinformation policy.” The video, which had been posted by New
York Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, was of an August 2021 news conference in
which she announced a lawsuit challenging New York City Mayor Bill de
Blasio’s “vaccine passport” as an invasion of privacy and an
unreasonable mandate on small businesses. Although Malliotakis supports
vaccination, she believes that the mandate constitutes government
overreach—a position that the Supreme Court might well end up sharing.
After Malliotakis appealed YouTube’s removal, the company said that it
was “taking another look” and ultimately reinstated the video, thus
underscoring the inherent elasticity of the misinformation concept.
Whether or not YouTube actually had a good-faith health reason for its
initial removal of the video, the fact remains that the vague policy can
easily be invoked as a pretext, masking other motives.
All
the more reason, then, to be suspicious of even sincere attempts by
public and private authorities to prevent the harm that disinformation
can cause. Recall that Southern officials based their libel lawsuits
against activists and journalists during the civil rights movement on
the dissemination of inaccurate information. What we learned in that era
is that disinformation is unavoidable in any vigorous discussion of
fast-breaking public issues, and that making it punishable by law can
only inhibit democratic debate. It’s time we relearn that lesson.
FT | Vaccine mandates are not incurring a vicious public
backlash, at least not yet. Almost a month has passed since President
Joe Biden announced that most US workers would have to be vaccinated or
frequently tested. Street protests are real
but containable. Resignations from work are at modest levels. The
governor of California even feels emboldened to require vaccines for
school children….
If it holds, the public’s grudging tolerance of
mandates will have eye-opening lessons. For one, people are hopeless
predictors of their own future behaviour. Surveys had suggested a rash
of job-quitting in the event of employer mandates
(just as they had implied that France, whose vaccination rate is
pulling ahead of Britain’s, would be a laggard). Public opinion data
does not just inform the election predictions of speculative columnists.
It is also an important basis of government policy.
If the science has a systemic blind spot for the future, for what
people think they would do in hypothetical scenarios, it has distorted
governance.
Another conclusion is that partisanship has its
uses… It is a sign of the most dire civic rot that people base even
their approach to personal health on their tribal fealties. But it also
means that Biden’s mandate is mostly alienating
those who were never going to vote for him anyway. The very bifurcation
of America can empower as well as curb a leader.
Of all the inferences to be drawn from the elusive
backlash, the last is the most far-reaching. In fact, after five years
of anti-elite politics, from Brazil to the Philippines, it feels
transgressive to express this thought: in the end,
people want to be led.
A truism, possibly? Or something more unpleasant? More:
The public has already supplied an example of what
we might call enlightened docility. Imagine being told in 2016 that, in
four years, there would be vast support for a lockdown with no peacetime
precedent, prescribed by an invisible expert
class. Next to coercion of that scale and nature, the mandates are
laissez-faire. I say all this with the jitters of a man carrying a vase
in a greased hand across a stone floor.
No, not concerning at all! In a way, the whole process resembles the neoliberal playbook:
(1) Degrade public health
by underfunding and corruption, (2) watch it fail in a very public
test, and (3) replace it with coercion. Best of all, in future you can
go directly to coercion!
ianwelsh |Everyone remember the Panama papers? A
leak of bank records showing that the ultra-rich are hiding massive
wealth, tax-free and often breaking the law to do so?
A rather weak set of laws designed to allow tax avoidance by rich people, at that.
Then there was a high ranked pimp, who
flew important men like Bill Clinton and Bill Gates and Prince Andrew
in his private jet and provided under-age women for sex. The first time
he was indicted he was let off because the prosecutor was told to back
off, as he belonged to intelligence. The second time, influence not
having worked, he “committed suicide” in prison.
I used to work in life insurance.
There’s an adage, backed up by lots of studies, that people who are
worth more dead than alive tend to die a lot more than the actuarial
tables would suggest for someone of their age and health.
Coincidence, no doubt.
The simplest fact of modern life is
elites kill and impoverish other people in order to make money and
secure their power. You are seeing it in the pandemic, where Billionaire
wealth has spiked 60% and vaccine companies refuse to share their
“intellectual property” while planning to sell Covid booster shots in
perpetuity. Actually wiping out Covid would close pharma money, but if
it stays around, it’s golden.
Meanwhile, all the small and medium
businesses closing has lead to a vast buying opportunity for those with
lots of money, and private equity is moving big into buying up
distressed homes.
It’s just business, baby. Your death, or homelessness, well, it’s someone else’s profit opportunity.
NYTimes | Who
should get vaccine booster shots and when? Can vaccinated people with a
breakthrough infection transmit the virus as easily as unvaccinated
people? How many people with breakthrough infections die or get
seriously ill, broken down by age and underlying health conditions?
Confused?
It’s not you. It’s the fog of pandemic, in which inadequate data
hinders a clear understanding of how to fight a stealthy enemy.
To
overcome the fog of war, the Prussian general and military theorist
Carl von Clausewitz called for “a sensitive and discriminating judgment”
as well as “skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.” He knew that
since decisions will have to be made with whatever information is
available in the face of an immediate threat, it’s crucial to acquire as
much systematic evidence as possible, as soon as possible.
In the current crisis, that has often been difficult.
Why
this stumbling in the fog? It may seem like we’re drowning in data:
Dashboards and charts are everywhere. However, not all data is equal in
its power to illuminate, and worse, sometimes it can even be misleading.
Few
things have been as lacking in clarity as the risks for children.
Testing in schools is haphazard, follow-up reporting is poor and data on
hospitalization of children appears to be unreliable, even if those
cases are rare. The Food and Drug Administration has asked that vaccine trials for children aged 5 to 11 be expanded, which is wise, but why weren’t they bigger to begin with?
While
the pandemic has produced many fine examples of research and meticulous
data collection, we are still lacking in detailed and systematic data
on cases, contact tracing, breakthrough infections and vaccine efficacy
over time, as well as randomized trials of interventions like boosters.
This has left us playing catch-up with emerging threats like the Delta
variant and has left policymakers struggling to make timely decisions in
a manner that inspires confidence.
To
see the dangers of insufficient data and the powers of appropriate
data, consider the case of dexamethasone, an inexpensive generic
corticosteroid drug.
In the early days of the pandemic, doctors were warnedagainst using it to treat Covid patients.
The limited literature from SARS and MERS — illnesses related to Covid —
suggested that steroids, which suppress the immune system, would harm rather than help Covid patients.
That assessment changed on June 16, 2020, when the results of a large-scale randomized clinical trial from Britain, one of all too few such efforts
during the pandemic, demonstrated that dexamethasone was able to reduce
deaths by one-fifth among patients needing supplemental oxygen and an
astonishing one-third among those on ventilators.
The
study also explained the earlier findings: Given too early, before
patients needed supplemental oxygen, steroids could harm patients. But
comprehensive data from the randomized trial showed that when given
later, as the disease progressed in severity, dexamethasone was
immensely helpful.
Dexamethasone has since become a workhorse of Covid treatment, saving perhaps millions of lives
at little cost or fanfare. Without that trial, though, it might never
have been noticed because of a problem called confounding: when causal
effects of different elements can’t be considered separately. If doctors
give multiple drugs to patients at the same time, who knows which drug
works and which one does not? Or, if they choose which drug to give to
whom, those more ill may be getting effective drugs, but the severity of
their illness could end up masking the positive effect of the drug.
Trials allow us to sort through all of this.
Randomized
trials are not the only source of useful data. For example, it would
have been difficult to quickly determine how transmissible the Delta
variant is — a crucial question — without the data collected from close
and systematic observation.
If a
variant is spreading quickly somewhere, it might be more transmissible,
or it could have simply arrived in that area early and gotten a head
start. Or it might have just hit a few superspreader events. We’ve had
variants appear, generating alarming headlines, that were later shown to
be no more threatening than previous ones.
theorganicprepper |The most frustrating thing to me, the past year and a half, has been the constantly changing narrative
and the dismissal of formerly well-understood scientific truths.
Natural immunity is one of those concepts from freshman biology that
many seem to completely disregard these days.
I think this is a natural effect
of the “cult of expertise” we have in the United States. Seemingly,
anyone with specific credentials is automatically deferred to,
regardless of how competent they are… or more insidiously, where their
financial interests lie.
I’ve gotten into some discussions
with medical professionals about whether people who have recovered from
the disease need to be vaccinated. These conversations would have been
seen as utterly ridiculous three years ago. However, now, it seems, we
all need to relearn freshman biology. So I’d like to review the concept
of natural immunity to help organize my thoughts and maybe help others
that feel like their heads are in a whirl.
I’ve got my old college biology textbook-Life: The Science of Biology,
by Purves, Sadava, Orians, and Heller. I’ve got the sixth edition,
published in 2001, so it’s about 20 years old. I also have a newer
college biology textbook because I’m a big nerd. It’s Campbell Biology,
by Reece, Urry, Cain, Wasserman, Minorsky, and Jackson, published in
2014. Both textbooks detail how our immune systems work, and both say
pretty much the same thing.
Our bodies have two major ways of defending against disease.
Our innate defenses are things like our skin and mucus. We’re
born with these, and they make it difficult for various pathogens such
as bacteria, viruses, and multicellular parasites to enter our bodies.
Our bodies also have an immune system that recognizes and attacks any
infectious agents that make it past our innate defenses.
Our immune system is really
sophisticated, and in healthy individuals, it works pretty well. Suppose
some kind of pathogen makes it past the body’s innate defenses and
begins infecting cells within the host. In that case, the host’s body
will, in turn, start producing antibodies that will specifically attack
the invading pathogen. The host body will continue producing antibodies
until either the host dies or the invading cells die, and the patient’s
body can return to normal.
The best part is, even after the
active infection is over, the host’s body will retain the memory of the
antibodies it produced during the infection. So if the formerly infected
person reencounters the pathogen, the body will immediately have the
antibodies to kill the pathogen. They rarely get sick gain, and if they
do, it’s generally very mild.
Even the incredibly pro-vaccine Wall Street Journal had an article on this recently.
Usually, the WSJ leaves their articles up on the Opinion Page for about a week. However, within twenty-four hours, WSJ buried this article on natural immunity. Jeff had a great article about alternative media just the other day. This definitely feeds into his narrative about how much good info is getting buried right now.
Anyway, the WSJ article discusses mucosal immunity vs. internal immunity.
The author (a neurologist) states that while vaccines stimulate
internal immunity, they do nothing to address mucosal immunity. The
viruses don’t penetrate the host’s organs, which is why most vaccinated
people don’t get really sick. But, the viruses still live and reproduce
in mucus-lined mouths and nasal passages. That is why vaccinated people
with no symptoms are still spreading Covid like crazy. However, those of
us that have recovered have both mucosal and internal immunity.
In case you needed further proof of the efficacy of natural immunity.
An Israeli study showed recently
that vaccinated people were 13 times as likely to become infected and
27 times as likely to have symptomatic infections as people with natural
immunity.
Alex Berenson posted this information on Twitter on August 25, and the platform permanently banned him on August 28. However, medical professionals are starting to make noise about it, such as Martin Kulldorff, a Harvard epidemiologist. Hopefully, more people begin to listen.
Admitting some really safe, and inexpensive treatments like Invermectin have great value would diminish fear and slam the brakes on expensive treatments. I do not know this hypothesis to be true, but if there ever is a strong perception that the most influential members of the American medical community plus much of the media has decided that allowing Americans to suffer and die because otherwise it just opens a can of worms regarding activities in 2020, well, what will be found? Under such a hypothesis, “leaders” may be shocked that it is September 2021 and they still can’t move out of the trenches they dug even while all kinds of countries concern themselves with treating the sick effectively.
reason | KFOR, an Oklahoma news channel, reported last week that rural
hospitals throughout the state were in danger of becoming overwhelmed by
victims of a very specific poisoning: overdoses of ivermectin, an
anti-parasite drug promoted by vaccine skeptics as a possible treatment for COVID-19.
The story went viral, and was seized upon by the mainstream media. But its central claim is substantially untrue.
The meat of the story is a series of quotes from an Oklahoma doctor,
Jason McElyea, who appears to attribute overcrowding at local hospitals
to a deluge of ivermectin overdoses.
"The ERs are so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times
getting to facilities where they can get definitive care and be
treated," McElyea told KFOR's Katelyn Ogle.
The story ran under the headline: "Patients overdosing on ivermectin
backing up rural Oklahoma hospitals, ambulances." It was quickly picked
up by national news outlets, such as Rolling Stone,Newsweek, and the New York Daily News. Numerous high-profile media figures, including MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, tweeted
about ivermectin overdoses straining Oklahoma hospitals—the implication
being that the right-wing embrace of a crank COVID-19 cure was
dangerous not only for the people who consumed it but for the stability
of the entire medical system.
It was a story that appeared to confirm many of the mainstream
media's biases about the recklessness of the rubes. But it's extremely
misleading. There is, in fact, little reason to believe a purported
strain on Oklahoma hospitals is caused by ivermectin overdoses; one
hospital served by the doctor quoted in the KFOR article released a
statement saying it has not treated any ivermectin overdoses, nor has it been forced to turn away patients.
This is yetanotherexample
of the mainstream media lazily circulating a narrative that flatters
the worldview of the liberal audience, without bothering to check on any
of the details. Additional reporting was sorely needed here, and has
now completely undermined the central point of the story.
nakedcapitalism | Last Friday, the CDC published “Outbreak Associated with SARS-CoV-2 B.1.617.2 (Delta) Variant in an Elementary School — Marin County, California, May–June 2021”
(“Outbreak”). This got a lot of play in the Northern California press,
with a good deal of reporting done (or at least original stories
written), because the study was led by Marin County Public Health, and they with other California epidemiologists and experts wrote the study up and then
submitted it to the CDC, which accepted it. Good for them! However,
there is a question “Outbreak” does not ask, and that the press did not
ask. Carefully avoiding spoilers — though few NC readers will be
surprised at the plot twist — I will first quote the “Outbreak” on the
incident. Then I will switch into media critique mode, and present the
headlines from Northern Califonia. After that, I will present the
implications drawn from the outbreak by the press (which are more broad
spectrum than the headlines). Finally, I will give the unasked question
from “Outbreak” a thorough airing, and conclude.
The outbreak location was an elementary school in Marin County,
California… Each grade includes 20 to 25 students in single classrooms.
Other than two teachers, one of whom was the index patient, all school
staff members were vaccinated (verified in California’s Immunization
Registry). The index patient became symptomatic on May 19 with nasal
congestion and fatigue. This teacher reported attending social events
during May 13–16 but did not report any known COVID-19 exposures and
attributed symptoms to allergies. The teacher continued working during
May 17–21, subsequently experiencing cough, subjective fever, and
headache. The school required teachers and students to mask while
indoors; interviews with parents of infected students suggested that
students’ adherence to masking and distancing guidelines in line with
CDC recommendations (3) was high in class. However, the teacher was
reportedly unmasked on occasions when reading aloud in class. On May 23,
the teacher notified the school that they received a positive result
for a SARS-CoV-2 test performed on May 21 and self-isolated until May
30. The teacher did not receive a second COVID-19 test, but reported
fully recovering during isolation.
The index patient’s students began experiencing symptoms on May 22.
During May 23–26, among 24 students in this grade, 22 were tested….
Twelve (55%) of the 22 students received a positive test result,
including eight who experienced symptom onset during May 22–26.
Throughout this period, all desks were separated by 6 ft. Students were
seated in five rows; the attack rate in the two rows seated closest to
the teacher’s desk was 80% (eight of 10) and was 28% (four of 14) in the
three back rows…
On May 22, students in a another classroom, who differed in age by 3
years from the students in the class with the index case and who were
also ineligible for vaccination began to experience symptoms. The two
classrooms were separated by a large outdoor courtyard with lunch tables
that were blocked off from use with yellow tape. All classrooms had
portable high-efficiency particulate air filters and doors and windows
were left open. Fourteen of 18 students in this separate grade received
testing; six tests had positive results. Investigation revealed that one
student in this grade hosted a sleepover on May 21 with two classmates
from the same grade. All three of these students experienced symptoms
after the sleepover and received positive SARS-CoV-2 test results. Among
infected students in this class, test dates ranged from May 24 to June
1; symptom onset occurred during May 22–31.
There is a unanimity of opinion by the headline-writing editors that
the source of the problem was the index case: the unvaccinated teacher.
Indeed, that’s without justification — that is, is not only a matter of aghastitude — given the “Implications for Public Health Practice” in the Summary section of “Outbreak”:
Vaccines are effective against the Delta variant, but
transmission risk remains elevated among unvaccinated persons in
schools. In addition to vaccination, strict adherence to multiple
nonpharmaceutical prevention strategies, including masking, are
important to ensure safe school instruction.
(I presume the Summary is tacked on to the submitted study by CDC.)
Now let’s turn to the bodies of the stories, where there is a broader
spectrum of opinion than in the headlines.
abcnews | A week after the crowds descended upon Provincetown, Massachusetts,
to celebrate the Fourth of July -- the holiday President Joe Biden hoped
would mark the nation's liberation from COVID-19 -- the manager of the
Cape Cod beach town said he was aware of "a handful of positive COVID cases among folks" who spent time there.
"We
are in touch with the Health Department and Outer Cape Health Services
and are closely monitoring the data," Alex Morse told reporters.
The announcement wasn't unusual with roughly half of the country still unvaccinated and flare-ups of the virus popping up in various states.
But within weeks, health officials seemed to be on to something much
bigger. The outbreak quickly grew to the hundreds and most of them appeared to be vaccinated.
As of Thursday, 882 people were tied to the Provincetown outbreak.
Among those living in Massachusetts, 74% of them were fully immunized,
yet officials said the vast majority were also reporting symptoms. Seven
people were reported hospitalized.
The initial findings of the
investigation led by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, in
conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, seemed
to have huge implications.
Before Provincetown, health officials had been operating under the
assumption that it was extraordinarily rare for a vaccinated person to
become infected with the virus. And if they did, they probably wouldn't
end up passing it on to others, such as children too young to qualify
for the vaccine or people who were medically vulnerable.
The idea
that vaccines halt transmission of the virus was largely behind the
CDC's decision in May suggesting vaccinated people could safely go
without their masks indoors and in crowds, even if others were
unvaccinated.But
that assumption had been based on studies of earlier versions of the
virus. Delta was known for its "hyper-transmissibility," or as one
former White House adviser put it "COVID on steroids.
"What has
changed is the virus," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top
infectious disease expert and Biden's chief medical adviser.
When a
vaccinated person gets infected with delta -- called a "breakthrough
infection" -- "the level of virus in their nasopharynx is about 1,000
times higher than with the alpha variant," Fauci said in an interview
Wednesday with MSNBC.
All indications now are that the
Provincetown outbreak investigation is among the pieces of new evidence
behind the CDC's decision to ask Americans to once again put on their
masks indoors, even if they are vaccinated.
stltoday | St. Louis County’s acting
health director says the rumor is true: He gave someone the middle
finger on his way out of the council meeting on the mask mandate Tuesday
night.
But in a letter to
County Councilwoman Rita Heard Days sent Wednesday, Dr. Faisal Khan said
he did it after a string of racist provocations from Republican
politicians like Councilman Tim Fitch and a boisterously anti-mask
audience pushed him past his limit.
“I
have never been subjected to the racist, xenophobic and threatening
behavior that greeted me in the County Council meeting last night,” he
wrote, after noting he’s been in public health for 25 years.
Fitch
and others blamed for stoking racism and xenophobia dismissed Khan’s
allegations as baseless. Fitch also said Khan was trying to provide
political cover for County Executive Sam Page, who called for the mask
mandate.
“The entire letter is
another desperate attempt at deflection and diversion by Sam Page,”
Fitch said in an interview. “Dr. Khan knew he was in trouble for (giving
the middle finger) and this was an opportunity to put that on someone
else.”
Khan
appeared at the meeting as the council was considering a move to
terminate the mask mandate as unlawful and unnecessary, which it would
do despite the rising threat of the delta variant. During the debate,
dozens of people, some of whom held signs with anti-mask messages,
filled the council chambers to cheer on the action and jeer the
mandate’s defenders.
Khan
said the trouble began as soon as he took the podium with a
“dog-whistle” question from Fitch, looking to emphasize Khan’s foreign
background.
As he spoke, Khan
said he also endured harassment from Republican politicians Paul Berry
and Mark McCloskey, who sat close behind him in the audience.
Berry
was an unsuccessful candidate for county executive in 2020; McCloskey,
who is running for U.S. Senate, gained notoriety with his wife,
Patricia, for brandishing firearms at protesters last year. Both McCloskeys attended the council meeting.
taibbi | On This Week With George Stephanopoulos this past Sunday, a
gathering of Washington poo-bahs including Chris Christie, Rahm
Emmanuel, Margaret Hoover, and Donna Brazile — Stephanopoulos calls the
segment his “Powerhouse Roundtable,” which to my ear sounds like a
Denny’s breakfast sampler, but I guess he couldn’t name it Four Hated Windbags — discussed vaccine holdouts. The former George W. Bush and Giuliani aide Hoover said it was time to stop playing nice:
If
you’re going to get government-provided health care, if you’re getting
VA treatment, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, anything — and Social
Security obviously isn’t health care — you should be getting the
vaccine. Okay? Because we are going to have to take care of you on the back end.
Brazile nodded sagely, but Emmanuel all but gushed cartoon hearts.
“You
know, I’m having an out of body experience, because I agree with you,”
said Obama’s former hatchet man, before adding, over the chyron,
FRUSTRATION MOUNTS WITH UNVACCINATED AMERICANS:
I
would close the space in. Meaning if you want to participate in X or Y
activity, you gotta show you’re vaccinated. So it becomes a
reward-punishment type system, and you make your own calculation.
This
bipartisan love-in took place a few days after David Frum, famed Bush
speechwriter and creator of the “Axis of Evil” slogan, wrote a column in
The Atlantic entitled “Vaccinated America Has Had Enough.” In it, Frum wondered:
Does
Biden’s America have a breaking point? Biden’s America produces 70
percent of the country’s wealth — and then sees that wealth transferred
to support Trump’s America. Which is fine; that’s what citizens of one
nation do for one another… [But] the reciprocal part of the bargain is
not being upheld…
Will Blue America ever decide it’s had enough of
being put medically at risk by people and places whose bills it pays?
Check yourself. Have you?
I’m vaccinated. I think people should be vaccinated. But this latest moral mania — and make no mistake about it, the “pandemic of the unvaccinated”
PR campaign is the latest in a ceaseless series of such manias, dating
back to late 2016 — lays bare everything that’s abhorrent and
nonsensical in modern American politics, beginning with the
no-longer-disguised aristocratic mien of the Washington
consensus. If you want to convince people to get a vaccine, pretty much
the worst way to go about it is a massive blame campaign, delivered by
sneering bluenoses who have a richly deserved credibility problem with
large chunks of the population, and now insist they’re owed financially
besides.
There’s always been a contingent in American society
that believes people who pay more taxes should get more say, or “more
votes,” as Joseph Heller’s hilarious Texan put it. It’s a conceit that
cut across party. You hear it from the bank CEO who thinks America
should thank him for the pleasure of kissing his ass with a bailout, but
just as quickly from the suburban wine Mom who can’t believe the
ingratitude of the nanny who asks for a day off. Doesn’t she know who’s
paying the bills? The delusion can run so deep that people like Margaret
Hoover can talk themselves into the idea that Social Security — money taxpayers lend the government, not the other way around — is actually a gift from the check-writing class.
In
the last decade or so I had the misfortune of watching this phenomenon
rise within both parties. After 2008, the “We’re pulling the oars, so we
should steer the boat” argument dominated the GOP. Offshoots of Ayn
Rand-ian thinking about ubermenschen producers and their
dubious obligation to society’s masses of parasitic looters provided
talking points both for TARP recipients (who insisted
America needed to be invested not just in their survival but their
prosperity) and the Tea Party. Remember Rick Santelli on CNBC, calling
for a referendum on whether or not we should “subsidize the losers’
mortgages” or whether we should “reward the people who carry the water,
instead of drink the water”?
newyorker | The invention of the sensitivity-training group is often traced to a
specific evening: Lewin was running a workshop for teachers and social
workers in Connecticut, where he had been hired by the state to help
address racial and religious prejudice. After the participants had left,
a few stragglers returned and asked to be permitted to sit in on the
debriefings, and Lewin agreed. Though it was initially awkward to have
the participants present, Lewin realized that the setup led to frank and
open conversations. He saw the transformative possibilities of
uninhibited feedback in the real time of the group session, and
established the idea of the corporate T-group—shorthand for sensitivity
“training group”—at the National Training Laboratory, in Bethel, Maine.
His inroads into social engineering could also be put to less
conciliatory purposes; Lewin was a consultant for the Office of
Strategic Services and developed programs to help recruit potential
spies.
The T-group, which was sometimes called “therapy for
normals”—rather insensitively by today’s standards but with the intent
of destigmatizing the practice—was a therapeutic workshop for strangers
which would take place in a neutral locale and promote candid emotional
exchange. A typical T-group session would begin with the facilitator
declining to assume any active leadership over the session, a move that
would surprise and disconcert the participants, who would collectively
have to work out the problem of how to deal with a lack of hierarchy or
directives.
It sounds simple enough, but the experience could be
deeply unsettling, even life-changing, for some. As one contemporary
witness of the Bethel N.T.L. workshops remarked, “I had never observed
such a buildup of emotional tension in such a short time. I feared it
was more than some leaders and members could bear.” The T-group promised
an antidote to the oppressions of Dale Carnegie-style insincerity that
dominated the business world, and, crucially, the sessions seemed to
provide a glimpse of a reality in which it was finally possible to know
how one was really perceived.
the prize for the “toughest encounter seminar that had been ever
convened at Esalen” went to one run collaboratively by George Leonard
and Price Cobbs. Leonard was a white psychologist from the South, whose
youthful encounter with the terrified eyes of a Black prisoner
surrounded by a white mob instilled in him a lifelong commitment to
fighting racism. He implored Cobbs, an African-American psychiatrist who
was co-authoring the book “Black Rage,”
to come to Esalen to collaborate. They organized a storied,
twenty-four-hour-marathon racial-sensitivity workshop between Black and
white participants that became rancorous: “the anger rolled on and on
without end” and “interracial friendships crumbled on the spot.”
Finally, Anderson relates how, as the sun was beginning to rise, an
African-American woman was moved to spontaneously comfort a crying white
woman, and this shifted the tenor of the entire session. Though the
episode could easily be read less sunnily, as another troubling instance
of the oppressor requiring comfort from the oppressed, the facilitators
purportedly deemed it a success. Cobbs spoke to Leonard and declared,
“George, we’ve got to take this to the world.”
Cobbs’s
career encapsulates the shift of sensitivity training from its literary
roots to corporate argot. He was sparked by early epiphanies about
Black anger and injustice, inspired by reading Richard Wright, James
Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. He admired the plot of “Invisible Man,”
for instance, because “the unnamed main character’s sense of his own
invisibility fans his ultimate rage into flames of
self-expression. . . .” Cobbs credited Lewin’s research as a key
precedent when he went on to found Pacific Management Systems, a
training center for T-group leaders, and he played a role in the spinoff
of diversity training from sensitivity training. His years of advising
African-American businesspeople formed the basis of his guide, from
2000, “Cracking the Corporate Code: The Revealing Success Stories of 32 African-American Executives.”
In her provocative history “Race Experts,”
from 2002, the scholar Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn examines Cobbs’s career as
part of the larger story of how “racial etiquette” and sensitivity
training “hijacked” and banalized civil-rights discourse. Quinn
persuasively maintains that “sensitivity itself is an inadequate and
cynical substitution for civility and democracy—both of which presuppose
some form of equal treatment and universal standard of conduct,” and
neither of which, of course, the U.S. has ever achieved.
townhall | By a vote of 216 to 207 Tuesday evening, Democrats in the House of
Representatives blocked consideration of a bill that would require the
Director of National Intelligence to declassify information related to
the origins of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, specifically information
about any role the Wuhan Institute of Virology may have played in the
pandemic's outbreak.
— House Rules Republicans (@RulesReps) July 20, 2021
The COVID-19
Origin Act was introduced in the U.S. Senate by Josh Hawley (R-MO) and
Mike Braun (R-IN) and passed unanimously in May.
Rep. Michael
Burgess (R-TX) brought the COVID-19 Origin Act to the House floor for
consideration with Reps. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) and Darin LaHood (R-IL)
explaining its importance shortly before Democrats voted down the
measure Tuesday night.
"The best disinfectant is sunlight and that's what we can provide today," Wenstrup explained
of the COVID-19 Origin Act. "The bill first establishes that we must
identify the precise origins of COVID-19 because it is critical for
preventing a similar pandemic in the future."
"I cannot stress
enough that this bill is not controversial by any means," Wenstrup
continued. "In fact, it passed the Senate in May with unanimous consent —
not one senator objected. Not Senators Ted Cruz or Rand Paul, not
Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. If those four members can get on
board with this bill, should not we be able to do the same?"
caitlinjohnstone | The weirdest thing about the Biden administration tasking itself
with the censorship of “disinformation” on social media is that the
United States is the hub of a globe-spanning empire that is built upon a
foundation of disinformation, maintained by disinformation, and
facilitated by disinformation.
If the propaganda engine of the US-centralized empire
ceased actively deceiving the public about the world, it would collapse
immediately. There would be mass unrest at home and abroad, status quo
politics would be abandoned, alliances and coalitions would crumble,
leaders official and unofficial would be ousted, and US unipolar
hegemony would end.
The
only thing keeping this from happening is the vast amounts of wealth
and energy which are poured into continuously deceiving the people of
America and its allies about what’s really going on in their nations and
political systems, and in the world as a whole.
Getting
people believing they live in separate, sovereign nations which
function independently from one another, instead of member states within
a single undeclared empire which moves as one unit on the international
stage.
Getting
people believing they control the fate of their nation via the
democratic process, when in reality all large-scale politics are
scripted puppet shows controlled by a plutocratic class who owns both
the politicians and the media outlets which report on them.
Getting
people believing they are part of a virtuous rules-based international
order which opposes totalitarian regimes to spread freedom and
democracy, instead of a tyrannical empire that works to destroy any
nation which disobeys its dictates.
And above all, manufacturing the illusion that the oppressive, exploitative imperialist status quo is normal.
taibbi | Combating racism becomes a convenient alternative to attacking
inequality and inequality, even those inequalities that appear or the
manifest themselves as racial disparities. Because the struggle against
racism is exactly parallel to the struggle against terrorism… It can go
on forever, because the enemy is an abstraction that you can define
however you want to define it, at the moment that you wanted to find it.
DiAngelo’s not the first person to do this. There was a woman named Peggy McIntosh who going back to the eighties had the “knapsack of privilege,”
or some shit like that. I know people who have had careers at racial
sensitivity trainings, and the people that I know, in my world — the
people who came out of the movement actually came out of anti-Klan
politics, or rather left politics in the seventies, and they started
doing this stuff. It makes sense in the same way that people who were
graduate students in the late sixties and early seventies who were left
theory-inclined people got into the Frankfurt School. That became the
cornerstone of their academic careers.
Well, that’s what’s
happened in the anti-racism or the racial sensitivity training world.
And one of the things that’s happened over time is that the material
incentives — and it’s funny, pardon this aside, but it’s funny how many
political-economy-oriented leftists we encounter who apply critical
political economic thinking to every domain in the world — outside
the movement that they’re operating in. So the material incentives
evolved, and changed over time. And some of my friends who have done
this work have said to me that they used to do it for community groups,
used to do it for unions and so forth and so on. Then, as the material
incentives change, they want to build and do more for corporations, or
for local governments who were under consent decrees.
So this
becomes part of the thing. You’re under a consent decree for actual
discrimination. One of the remedies that’s likely to be imposed as part
of the decree is that you submit to this training. And we see it all the
time now. Even the insurgencies within NGOs, right? Where the staff or
whatever is going batshit crazy about how the leadership of the
organization is all racist, sexist, whatever. And one of the first calls
is to bring in some minor-league version of Robin DiAngelo to do the
racial sensitivity training. So in that sense, it’s taken hold as part
of what I’ve often described as the broader political economy of race
relations.
WaPo | This
week at the Oklahoma State Department of Education building, I was
schooled in how the stealthy, well-orchestrated movement against
teaching honestly about America’s racist history operates. It is fast
and furious and determined to steamroll over truth in education.
But
Monday morning, one Black woman and a Black high school student tried
to hold the line. Though they were on the losing side of that steamroll —
this is Oklahoma, after all— their courage and resistance in the face of white supremacy deserve to be celebrated.
The occasion was consideration of item 8(b) on the Oklahoma Board of Education’s meeting agenda:
emergency rules for implementing a bill passed in May by the
Republican-controlled state legislature limiting what students in the
state can be taught on race and gender.Notice of the item was publicly posted only last Friday, giving educators and advocates next to no time to organize a response. The actual rules,
too, were made available just minutes before the meeting. They included
chillingly harsh penalties, such as teacher suspensions and district
defunding, for instruction that makes any individual feel “discomfort,
guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of
his or her race or sex.”
Carlisha
Williams Bradley arrived knowing she would cast one of the most
consequential votes of her professional life. The only Black member of
the board, she wondered whether she would be removed from her position
for pushing back. But the education advocate and former executive
director of Tulsa Legacy Charter School spoke truth: that the
right-wing’s current bête noire, “critical race theory” — which the
legislature claimed to be responding to — means merely the examination
of laws and legislation that uphold racism and oppression. Oklahoma’s
new education law and harsh punishment, she said, would serve only to
generate fear in teaching an accurate history of the United States.
“We are robbing students of the opportunity to have a high-quality education,” Williams Bradley said.
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