Lessons from Red States on How to Push Back

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“Ode to Ella Baker” by Lisa McLymont (Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-ND 2.0)

The comments on Marcy’s post yesterday telling folks to go stare at the ocean to get their heads in a better place, instead of becoming paralyzed and stuck in the face of last weeks election, make it clear that she struck a nerve with how folks are feeling 10 days after the election. I’ve had a bunch of face-to-face conversations with friends and parishioners on both sides of the Missouri/Kansas state line, encouraging much the same kind of self-care. But once your head is clear, then what?

Why, then it’s time for some good troublemaking, and if you want to know about making good trouble while at a serious political disadvantage, let me tell you a couple of stories from ruby red Missouri and her not-quite-so-ruby-red sister Kansas.

Back in 2019, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that the state constitution’s declaration of fundamental rights includes the rights of women to control their own bodies, including the right to an abortion:

We conclude that, through the language in section 1, the state’s founders acknowledged that the people had rights that preexisted the formation of the Kansas government. There they listed several of these natural, inalienable rights—deliberately choosing language of the Declaration of Independence by a vote of 42 to 6.

Included in that limited category is the right of personal autonomy, which includes the ability to control one’s own body, to assert bodily integrity, and to exercise self-determination. This right allows a woman to make her own decisions regarding her body, health, family formation, and family life—decisions that can include whether to continue a pregnancy. Although not absolute, this right is fundamental. Accordingly, the State is prohibited from restricting this right unless it is doing so to further a compelling government interest and in a way that is narrowly tailored to that interest.

Predictably, the GOP’s evangelical right wing in Kansas went nuts. After whining about the state Supremes, they got to work to overturn this opinion by a constitutional amendment. They wrote their amendment very carefully, got all the necessary signatures, and made the political decision to put it on the August 2022 primary election ballot. That choice presumed that this would make it easier to pass, as primary elections tend to draw only the hard-core voters, which they thought would work in their favor.

To borrow a phrase, they chose poorly.

While everyone was preparing for that election, SCOTUS handed down the Dobbs opinion. The wingnuts cheered, and progressives wailed. But the progressives in Kansas did more than whine and whinge.

Young people, particularly young women in Lawrence (U of KS), Manhattan (K State), Wichita (Wichita St), and the KC suburbs of metro KC got to work. First, they recruited other young people, registered them in huge numbers, and got them fired up enough to get their friends to register and then fired up enough to actually turn out to vote. Second, and at least as important, the local KS folks driving the resistance convinced all the usual national groups that the language to use to fight this battle was not the language of women’s rights, but the language of choice in health care decision-making. “Do you really want bureaucrats in Topeka getting between you and your doctor?”

That language resonated, because the local folks knew their neighbors and the national folks trusted the local activists. I had countless conversations with longtime Kansas republicans, quoting it back to me approvingly as they told me of their decision to vote no and defeat the amendment. And the result wasn’t even close – the amendment went down by roughly 60-40 margins. The local reaction was amazing:

“You guys, we did it,” said Rachel Sweet, campaign manager for Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, as she addressed a crowd of abortion-rights supporters at a watch party in Overland Park. “We blocked this amendment. Can you believe it?”

[snip]

Voters showed up in unforeseen numbers in urban areas of the state, while rural areas underperformed compared with turnout in the presidential race two years ago.“From the moment lawmakers put this on a primary ballot, we knew this was going to be an uphill battle, but we did not despair,” Sweet said. “We put in the work and these numbers speak for themself.”

Dawn Rattan, who attended the watch party in Overland Park, said the defeat of the amendment shows that reproductive health care is an issue that crosses party lines, “and people everywhere want women to have a choice.” She was moved to tears when the result was announced.

“I was so scared,” Rattan said. “I was so worried that it was going to be really close, and this is just so decisive, it’s not even close.

The activists in Kansas were as angry as anyone else about Dobbs, and they didn’t let feelings of impotence about the Supreme Court paralyze them and keep them from working on the local level. Instead of crying about places where they couldn’t make a difference, they found a place where they *could* make a difference. And then they worked their butts off to make their state a marginally safer place to be a woman of reproductive age.

Another story, from across the state line . . .

As COVID was raging in Missouri, Eric Schmitt — then the MO Attorney General — had a rather unique approach to his job. He had his eye on the 2022 Senate race where he would be up against a couple of well-funded primary opponents, and he was at a distinct financial disadvantage. In early 2021, he realized that every time he announced that his office intended to sue someone over a mask mandate or other COVID health regulation, his campaign fundraising went up. A lot. He didn’t even have to actually file the lawsuits, though he did file some. The key thing is that just making the announcement on Twitter brought in contributions by the truckload. So he went all in on these announcements and lawsuits, surprising a number of his former colleagues in the state legislature. A friend with connections in Jefferson City shared a couple of conversations with Republican legislators who said some version of “Sure, he’s always been conservative, but always a quiet, get-the-job-done kind of guy. I never would have guessed he’d be threatening lawsuits like this.” But it worked, and his poll numbers began to rise.

In late 2021, Schmitt made a big deal about twisting a case in St. Louis county involving the state’s Department of Health and Senior Services into a precedent giving him the power to prohibit schools from enforcing any mask mandates. He sent cease and desist letters to school districts with such mandates, threatening a lawsuit if they did not rescind their policies. Some did just that, but others did not, including the Lee’s Summit Reorganized District #7 in the KC suburbs. Instead, the lawyer for the LSR7 district responded to Schmitt’s letter with one of his own, announcing their intention to file a countersuit, filing a huge shot across Schmitt’s bow.

The letter is a real gem, gutting Schmitt’s claims on numerous grounds. Most damning, from my point of view, was this from the end:

We don’t need to rely on just these general statutes to demonstrate the Attorney General’s lack of authority in this matter. Consider what the Legislature has authorized school districts to do in the face of a pandemic. Under RSMo. § 167.191:

It is unlawful for any child to attend any of the public schools of this state while afflicted with any contagious or infectious disease, or while liable to transmit such disease after having been exposed to it. For the purpose of determining the diseased condition, or the liability of transmitting the disease, the teacher or board of directors may require any child to be examined by a physician, and exclude the child from school so long as there is any liability of such disease being transmitted by the pupil.

This law speaks for itself. Not only may a school district exclude from school a child who has COVID; it may exclude from school a child who has been exposed to COVID and who is liable to transmit it pending a medical test or examination to confirm that the child is not afflicted with the disease.

In short, the duly elected Lee’s Summit R-7 Board of Education will not abandon its statutory duty to govern the operations of the school district. If you follow through on your threat to sue the District, we will defend that suit vigorously, and pursue all remedies available to the District resulting from any suit that violates Missouri Supreme Court Rule 55.03, which requires among other things that any claim “is not presented or maintained for any improper purpose” and that the claim “is warranted by existing law.”

As strongly worded as this letter is, I have a hunch that the first draft of the letter was much, much stronger.

Realizing he would lose, Schmitt then dropped his suit and asked that the district do the same. The district refused, saying they wanted to pursue the case so that a firm line would be drawn to prohibit any future attempts by Schmitt or a future AG to illegally try to usurp power granted to the schools over some other issue. By the time that suit was heard, Schmitt was gone and the new AG — Andrew Bailey (lately in the news as being on Trump’s shortlist to be nominated to be the US Attorney General) — had taken office. The ruling was not just in the school’s favor, but exactly the kind of smack-down the district lawyer predicted. From the KC Star:

Judge Marco Roldan, in his 18-page ruling, found that Schmitt, a Republican who was elected to the U.S. Senate last year after four years as state attorney general, did not follow Missouri law when he ordered the Lee’s Summit School District to stop enforcing its COVID-19 mitigation efforts in 2021.

“There exists no Missouri law allowing the Attorney General to involve himself in a School District’s efforts to manage COVID-19 or other disease within its schools,” Roldan wrote in his ruling. The ruling offers a scathing rebuke of Schmitt, who had sued Lee’s Summit and dozens of other school districts at the height of the pandemic.

Schmitt regularly touted the suits on social media and used them to elevate himself in his Senate campaign.

“Parents and students followed the Attorney General’s lead, leading to even greater confusion than the pandemic had already caused,” Roldan wrote.

What matters most, here, is not “the courts solved this” but the fact that this school district — in a relatively evenly divided blue/red community — chose to stand up for themselves and their community. Of the 47 districts to receive Schmitt’s cease and desist letter, this was the only district to push back and get it on the record that the AG was way out of bounds trying to dictate to schools how they are to protect the health of students, teachers, and other staff.

In Missouri, we’ve spent years coming to grips with Trumpist nonsense at the state level where the GOP has held supermajorities in both houses of the legislature as well as a firm grip on executive branch offices. Folks in KC and St. Louis have been fighting the wingnuts in various ways, including exploiting differences between conservative GOP legislators and their over-the-top MAGA colleagues. The Dems in the legislature have been very good at offering selective support to the conservatives in order to outflank the MAGA extremists. Some of the things enacted have not been great, but they forestalled much much worse stuff. They have also been very good at using the courts — even with conservative judges — to stop the “But I won and I want to . . .” whinging from the MAGA folks.

[If you are a regular reader of Emptywheel, the mention of the Lee’s Summit School District might ring a faint bell. “Where have I heard that before? Oh, yes, now I remember . . . “]

In both Kansas and Missouri, local activists have been fighting MAGA on the local level for at least 4 years. Progressives in both states had hoped that things would be improving with a Harris victory, but absent that we are well acquainted with how to fight back, and how to win. Did you hear that Missouri just overturned the harshest state abortion law by putting reproductive rights in the state constitution — on the same night that Trump was voted back into the White House?

It can be done. I wish it wasn’t necessary, but last week’s election made it clear that the good troublemaking must go on.

It can be done. It can be done. It can be done. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Young folks and old folks, office holders and informed ordinary citizens, folks of privilege and folks from the margins . . . making good trouble is work for us all.  And if any other red state folks here have stories to share, please do. We are strengthened by hearing of victories, and we can learn from each other about how to push back in our neighborhoods.

It’s Your Economy, Stupid GOPr

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

I’ve had it. I’m fed up with the attacks on the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress about the economy when the problem is and has been the GOP.

The same GOP which has steadfastly encouraged Americans to avoid vaccines and boosters, reject wearing masks, ignore the need for social distancing and better ventilation to prevent the ongoing spread of COVID, ultimately weakening the country’s workforce and reducing the number of healthy workers.

The same GOP which has persistently supported Putin’s demoralization and destabilization of this country, even though they knew Trump was an asset — we haven’t forgotten Kevin McCarthy’s blurting it out back in 2016 and the rest of the GOP congressional caucus continuing their omertà — ultimately encouraging Putin to attack Ukraine setting economic sanctions in motion.

Now there are GOP candidates who are running not only on the worst of Trumpism, expressing naked racism, misogyny, other forms of xenophobia, but running on just plain stupidity about the economy.

I swear I could publish a post at least once a week cataloguing so much fresh stupid.

Today’s idiot is a GOP senate candidate, Blake Masters, who has already distinguished himself within the last week with a racist remark aimed at Black Americans.

Masters decided today he wanted it his way:

Sir, this is a McDonald’s.

Masters has no fucking clue why there aren’t enough fast food workers to take orders, as if COVID didn’t kill more than a million Americans causing a cascade of job losses due to long COVID, difficulty finding and keeping safe daycare for children and eldercare, scared off older employees who’d rather tough it out on their Social Security than risk getting sick, made transportation more challenging because the used car market is tight and parts and labor for repairs equally tight, public transport shared with maskless riders, so on.

And last but not least, fast food workers’ wages have not kept up with the increase in rent driven upward by speculation.

That’s why you’re looking at a goddamned self-operated kiosk, Masters.

Not to mention potential employees don’t want to take the risk on an employer which can’t be bothered to post wages or the number of available openings.

Applicants need to know before they even bother to apply because the average rent in Marana, AZ on a 1-bedroom apartment is $1542 a month. A worker needs in excess of $15/hour at 40 hours a week to make the rent — not including any other expenses like food or clothing or water or electricity or health insurance — and fast food jobs aren’t 40 hours a week because the companies want to avoid paying unemployment benefits.

The remaining fast food restaurant workers are moving into other industries because they can’t afford the irregular, too few hours combined with the lack of benefits, the crappy management, and the chronic mistreatment by customers on top of exposure on the regular to COVID.

But go ahead and expose your gross ignorance, Masters, punching down on the people who can least afford the time to rebut your whining.

The people who should rebut Masters’ whining are the Arizona corporations which do business in or rely on automation and robotics — businesses which will replace the crappy jobs fast food workers can’t afford, while improving the Arizona economy with better paid design and manufacturing jobs.

Like these companies, to name a few: Stanley Black & Decker, Nogales AZ; Caterpillar, Tuscon AZ; Lucid Motors and IPE Aerospace, Tempe AZ.

I hope Arizonans are smart enough not to fall for Blake Masters’ ignorant Trumpiness. If he hasn’t already figure out how stupid he is (being a potential victim of Dunning-Kruger), he may inflict some wretched stupidity on Arizona and the rest of the nation.

Seriously, can Arizonans trust him not to lick the kiosk display?

3 Things: GOP’s Continuing Deadly Assault on America

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

The GOP hasn’t stopped since January 6, 2021 and years earlier. They want to wreak maximum damage on this country and blame anybody and everybody but themselves for it.

We’re supposed to believe they’re the arbiters of what’s right for this country but everything they do is demoralizing and destabilizing.

It’s almost as if they were acting on behalf of another hostile country.

One only need to look at how the GOP have handled state and federal response to the mass shooting in Uvalde and elsewhere to see they don’t care how many Americans die so long as they continue to get their blood money.

If uncontrolled guns were the only damage they inflicted on this country, but no – the Grand Old Party of Death goes wide.

~ 3 ~

The pandemic isn’t over. It’s not ending because far too many right-wing Americans have been brainwashed by the right-wing ecosphere into believing vaccines, boosters, masks, and social distancing are evil.

The logic fails over and over; it doesn’t help when The New York Times continues to run crap by David Leonhardt which undermines encouraging mask wearing up to and including mandates.

It also doesn’t help when corporations are too damned greedy to the point of short-sightedness, screwing both their own business and Americans at the same time.

But it’s not just the continued onslaught of disinformation and misinformation which is hurting this country. It’s the GOP refusing to keep Americans safe; they’ve refused to provide funds necessary for vaccines, boosters, therapies, and development of new boosters designed for the current dominant Omicron variants.

15-MAR-2022 — White House begs Congress for Covid funding amid concern about Omicron sister variant

30-MAR-2022 — Biden presses Congress for new COVID funding, gets second booster shot

But Senate Republicans have balked at setting aside additional money, saying they want a full accounting of earlier spending, and House Democrats subsequently rejected a plan to repurpose money already pledged to states.

While federal regulators on Tuesday authorized a fourth shot of vaccine for Americans 50 and older, U.S. officials have said they do not have enough funding to place advance orders for additional vaccine doses to cover all Americans, unless Congress passes the stalled package.

27-APR-2022 — Fact Sheet: Biden Administration Underscores Urgent Need for Additional COVID-⁠19 Response Funding and the Severe Consequences of Congressional Inaction

09-MAY-2022 — U.S. will limit next-generation Covid vaccines to high-risk people this fall if Congress doesn’t approve more funding

21-MAY-2022 — As COVID funding runs out, U.S. could see rationing of supplies

Months now they’ve dragged their feet because it might help Democrats; their party’s levels in broken public opinion polls don’t fair as badly as Biden’s because the media hasn’t held them accountable for their intransigence.

The GOP doesn’t care a whit if it hurts their own voters because a red state remains red even when the bodies pile up in the morgue.

Older people are the most reliable voters and the ones who vote GOP most often, but these deaths don’t matter to the GOP because media about these deaths hurts Democrats more.

It’s death by GOP passive-aggression.

~ 2 ~

The GOP wants to kill girls’ sports in public education. Ohio is the vanguard leading the way by passing a bill in its state house allowing anybody to contest a minor child’s gender identity which would then require a physical examination of the child’s genitals if that child is enrolled in a school participating in interscholastic sports.

Read that Twitter thread and the bill linked in it. That bill is an utter dumpster fire.

It’s sexual assault by the state sanctioned by the GOP. It’s little different from Larry Nassar’s assaults on gymnasts who didn’t consent to his abuses; these minors likewise can’t consent/dissent and their parents will be obligated to consent on their behalf if the child participates in sports.

The bill doesn’t obligate male-identifying minors to go through the same invasive inspection which means this bill is clearly aimed at controlling female-identifying bodies.

It’s literally Trumpy “grab ’em by the pussy” governance beginning in K-12 education. It’s not small government and it’s not freedom; it’s anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-women Trumpism, and sane parents would rather not allow their children to be subjected to this abuse for the sake of interscholastic sports.

The GOP means death to girls’ sports, and in a secondary fashion, death to public education for girls.

Next up: mandatory burkhas – not out of line to assume this since obligatory inspection of girls’ bodies is something the Taliban would insist upon.

~ 1 ~

The GOP claims it’s the party of life but that ends with birth. They literally don’t care if American babies died of starvation.

They also don’t give a flying fuck if children starve, assuming they aren’t already dead from mass shootings.

Morley pointed out the provision for funding school lunches was in the Build Back Better bill which the GOP rejected.

Stay cool this summer, kiddies, and starve; thank the GOP while you do so.

The GOP is about as helpful to America’s children as Uvalde TX police at a mass shooting.

~ 0 ~

Regular community members consider yourselves warned this week could see a surge in trolls and trolling. The right-wing has been casting about for an approach to offset the anticipated bad news coming from the House J6 Committee hearings this week; so far they haven’t settled on one thing partly because they are dealing with blowback about gun rights and police militarization. They’ve tried blaming Antifa repeatedly; some of the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol claim the Capitol Police set them up and Antifa was responsible.

Sure, sure. Looks like a set up.

But the head troll has sent up a bat signal for the fascist horde to flood the zone with their usual shit.

Let’s not forget this bat signal isn’t just about the January 6 hearings but about Bannon’s own butt. His contempt of Congress case is back in court on June 15, coincidentally 10 days after this shout for troll mobilization.

There will be much less tolerance for bullshit here primarily because there will be more bullshit than moderators to shovel it. Bear with us, thanks.

Three Things: Bracing for Omicron’s Overrun

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

Not going to lie or mince words: the White House fucked up its response to Omicron. They let businesses, pressure from the GOP’s COVIDiots, and public polling tell them what to do instead of gaming out an effective response. They focused on the economy and then-irrational fear of inflation instead of COVID, only to create the problem they wanted to address.

While the impending COVID explosion would likely have happened anyhow, the curve could have been flattened and the blow to health care systems softened had the White House not only emphasized getting testing out to the public but getting better quality masks to the people while asking any and all public facilities conducting business indoors to ensure better air quality immediately.

You know, advocate the things which have been proven to work in other countries like Japan — a densely-populated country with a population more than a third of the U.S.’s but less than 19,000 COVID deaths to date.

But more on that in a moment.

~ 3 ~

I’ve been furious since a friend told me last week they were blindsided by someone in their social circle who has fallen prey to disinfo about COVID.

In a nutshell, their acquaintance is:

1 – Peeved about the unvaccinated being blamed for the spread of COVID;

2 – Doesn’t think the lack of vaccinations in a sizable percentage of the population caused a new variant;

3 – Feels the virus will mutate and spread whether people are vaccinated or unvaccinated;

4 – Believes vaccines will reduce severity of cases and keep hospitalizations down, but the mutations and contagion will happen anyhow.

Jesus Christ, where to even start except tell them to quit Facebook. These half-truths about COVID are truly problematic with an American public weak on science education – well, weak education as a whole, when it comes to critical thinking.

Mr. Blindsider needs to understand:

1 – The ongoing threat is the willfully unvaccinated, not those who can’t be vaccinated because of legitimate health problems or those whose circumstances have prevented them from being vaccinated. Anyone willfully choosing not to be vaccinated isn’t merely putting themselves at risk but others like children for whom we do not yet have vaccinations, and those who want but can’t get vaccinated. Fuck the willfully selfish gits and piss on your peevedness.

2 – Yes, the lack of vaccinations DID cause a variant to rise. Unvaccinated humans are pools for new variant development. More unvaccinated people means a bigger resevoir in which new variants can develop.

3 – Take a fucking look around: do you see any new variants of polio (caused by poliovirus)? Measles (measles morbillivirus)? Chicken pox (varicella-zoster virus)? All of these are infectious diseases caused by viruses for which children have been routinely vaccinated as children over decades. Because vaccination rates are above 85% of all US children, the pool of unvaccinated is too small for the viruses to develop variants. This is what needs to happen with COVID.

4– As long as the pool of willfully unvaccinated remains as large as it is, SARS-CoV-2 will have adequate opportunity to mutate and new variants will emerge. The answer is two-fold: (1) everyone must be vaccinated who can safely tolerate a tested vaccine, and (2) a better vaccine is needed, one designed to protect against all coronaviruses.

But the answer is really four-fold:

– The U.S. public school system needs to do more and better biological science education because too many adults are quite stupid when it comes to basics like infection control let alone microbiology. That education should also include new content on airborne spread of disease like measles and COVID, the latter by aerosolized particles.

– The White House needs to fix CDC and FDA communications problems, because they’re frankly doing an abysmal job this deep into a pandemic. We should not still be arguing with our neighbors 23 months into this about simple infection control and its affects on individuals and society.

~ 2 ~

Mr. Peeved Blindsider will be part of the reason Omicron explodes; they’re incapable of systems thinking necessary to enact effective mitigation, too busy folding like a broken lawn chair under disinformation and minor frustrations all of us have had to deal with.

Too busy throwing a pity party for the poor maligned willfully unvaccinated to think about what is about to erupt across the country.

Read this Twitter thread:

There were school systems across the country which didn’t have enough bus drivers under the Beta and Delta waves. This is about to happen again even though more people are vaccinated and Omicron is not as severe as Delta, because Omicron still sickens people and still forces people into quarantine and isolation.

If all schools don’t close this week, children are going to bring Omicron into classrooms, spread it to each other because they got it over the holidays, because they weren’t given N95 masks, and their schools’ HVAC systems haven’t been upgraded to improve air quality and reduce exposure time to aerosolized virus.

They will infect school teachers and staff and bus drivers, who will infect their families.

Schools will be forced to go to remote learning again for the lack of teachers and bus drivers.

Students’ and teachers’ family members will take it to work, including places like grocery stores and fast food chains and manufacturing facilities and shipping companies.

The supply chain will be throttled down again and we’ll hear yet another round of bullshit about inflationary pressures about which the right-wing and neoliberals will lie and claim the GOP can fix in spite of its ongoing anti-vaccination campaign.

Omicron may burn itself out inside 3-4 weeks, but the effects will be much longer. We still do not have data about the long-term effects of Omicron on those infected; the data will be complicated by the spectrum of unvaccinated/unvaccinated-but-previously-infected/vaccinated-only/vaccinated-and-boosted.

We can plan ahead, though, for a worst case in which those infected with Omicron have some degree of neurological sequelae and increased fatigue along with increased risk of death because we’ve seen this with previous variants. Expect more people acting irrationally or sluggishly because of COVID brain fog.

Social distancing throughout the rest of the winter may be our best approach.

Gods help us all if we need health care services for anything urgent apart from COVID.

~ 1 ~

As I wrote when I started this post, the White House fucked up the response to this variant. The Omicron scenario was always a possibility and a plan for it should have been on the books, ready for roll out. (Has no one in Centers for Disease Control and Food and Drug Administration as well as the White House done any simulations and scenario planning at all for this pandemic??)

A shorter isolation period due to Omicron’s allegedly milder symptoms combined with more rapid testing isn’t a rational response without better mitigation to flatten the curve, not to mention the assumptions made about illness severity relying on early data which could have been flawed in analysis.

Though a key component of the White House’s answer to Omicron, rapid tests simply haven’t been available at the scale of numbers and breadth of distribution this country needed. We’ve seen far too many examples of people waiting in lines for hours to get tested throughout the holiday season.

Propublica’s reporting on the clown car that is America’s COVID rapid test approval process explains much of the problem, but this should have be addressed as an emergency skunkworks in November, with the White House fully engaged with the FDA as soon as Omicron was announced.

There have also been people claiming huge quantities of rapid tests could be available inside weeks. Read that Propublica report, and then think like a manufacturer for a moment – one which has had problems with obtaining raw materials, difficulty with reliable shipments (hello, fire Louis DeJoy), and labor shortages due to illness and insufficient child/eldercare for workers.

I know people being courted for jobs in testing production; the industry literally doesn’t have enough current employees to step up production for delivery inside weeks let alone days.

Given all the barriers to adequate numbers of reliable rapid tests, heightened infection control measures are an absolute necessity.

And yet the response to Omicron has been sadly lacking emphasis on infection control – even after the absurd theater of an airline CEO sickening with COVID testifying before the Senate that masks don’t do much.

Every single American should have been mailed (7) N95 masks – one per day to use on rotation through this Omicron surge. They’re cheap, easy to ship by mail (hello, fire Louis DeJoy), don’t need special testing and approval; we have multiple manufacturers in the U.S. ready to step up production.

Every single health care worker should have received at least twice that number already. Health care facilities should be able to hand them out to patients and their families.

Every single public facility should have been ordered to improve air quality with improved ventilation; CO2 tests should have been distributed to every school for every classroom as a measure of air quality and a proxy for risk of aerosolized virus exposure. Higher CO2 levels – roughly equating to increased aerosolized particles from occupants and low air flow – should result in windows and doors being opened, addition of Corsi-Rosenthal Cube filter systems, or dismissal of classes until CO2 levels fall to acceptable levels.

Longer term, legislation providing funding for improving air quality in all public facilities should be on Congress’s agenda, because this isn’t the last variant we’ll see before this pandemic is over. There will be other reasons for improving indoor air quality – increasing numbers of wildfires and dust storms as the climate emergency deepens will be adequate justification to continue HVAC improvements.

And as I already said, something needs to be done pronto about the communications out of CDC and FDA about COVID, including infection control measures.

~ 0 ~

All that said, double down on measures to protect yourself, friends, and loved ones through this Omicron wave. Use the measures Japan’s health ministry has advocated and apparently work when used widely.

Avoid the Three Cs:
— Closed spaces with poor ventilation or unmonitored air quality
— Crowded spaces occupied by many people
— Close-contact settings which don’t allow adequate social distance

Do the Three Ws:
— Wear a better mask (N95 preferred)
— Watch your social distance to reduce exposure to aerosols
— Wash your hands to prevent spread of any infectious agents

And if you haven’t yet gotten your booster, do whatever you can to get that on board.

Three Things: Omigod Omicron

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[NB: Check the byline, thanks! Updates will follow at the bottom of initial posted content. /~Rayne]

Only a month after the World Health Organization declared it a variant of concern, Omicron is now dominant in the U.S. accounting for roughly 3/4 of the nearly 1.9 million new cases of COVID reported over the last week.

Because of its dramatically increased ease of transmission, new cases of COVID are expected to explode and exceed past waves of cases.

~ 3 ~

Joe Biden will be speaking to the nation today about the federal response to the new coronavirus variant Omicron.

The surge of cases is expected to swamp health care infrastructure which has already been pushed up to and beyond its limits by previous COVID waves and the continued resistance to vaccinations and boosters by roughly 30% of the population.

Lockdowns are not expected to be part of the federal response; rather, the government will send federal personnel to large hospitals across the country to help beleaguered staff as new cases roll in.

500 million instant tests for home use are also expected to be sent out. The hue and cry after White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s comments regarding testing and masks sent to homes may have spurred this effort in concert with the dramatic uptick in Omicron cases.

Will this federal response be enough? Likely not — but we would not be in this situation had there been a plan to mitigate COVID in place when Biden took office 11 months ago. Taking office just as another surge began placed the entire Biden response on its heels.

Likely more later on this as an update; three items are in progress and will follow shortly.

~ 2 ~

Speaking of the White House communications, Jeff Zients set off a shitstorm with a poorly worded or thought-through remark about the unvaccinated.

Disability activists were reasonably put out as many disabled can’t get vaccinated and boosted for health reasons.

But there’s another bigger problem in terms of the percentage of people affected: workers especially in low wage jobs aren’t getting vaccinated because their employers aren’t providing adequate support.

If you’ve gotten fast food recently, you’ve probably been in contact with someone who hasn’t been able to get vaccinated.

An effective federal outreach will reach the unvaccinated who want the shots and booster but whose circumstances haven’t allowed them to do so. Leaving this to the states — especially in red states — has left economically vulnerable exposed to COVID.

That said, fuck the unvaccinated who willfully refuse to be vaccinated, especially those who refuse all other mitigation measures. Welcome to the “winter of severe illness and death” you’ve asked for; may its toll be on you alone and not on any vulnerable children, immunocompromised, disabled, or precarious and marginalized persons.

~ 1 ~

One of the biggest flying periods of the year is nearly upon us as Americans fly to/from home for the holidays. Unfortunately this follows a hearing last week before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee in which an airline executive said something ridiculously absurd.

Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly, when asked about mask use by travelers and staff on its airplanes, said,

I think the case is very strong that masks don’t add much if anything in the air cabin environment. It’s very safe and very high quality compared to any other indoor setting.

Never mind the studies of aerosol transmission which has examined mass transportation for dispersal of aerosolized particles, or case studies of specific outbreaks occurring among persons in enclosed spaces, all of which have shown sitting in close proximity to infected persons substantially increases the odds of transmission between infected and non-infected persons.

Former surgeon general Jerome Adams was rather blunt in response to Kelly’s remarks:

“I’ve got to tell you, there’s no other way I can put my feelings about that than, it was irresponsible. It was irresponsible. It was reckless.”

Kind of surprising for a guy who fluffed up the Trump administration’s policy about mask use.

Karma had her way with Kelly, though, who had been coughing during his appearance before the Transportation Committee — he was diagnosed with COVID the next day.

What an ignorant, arrogant douchebag. He probably infected others in his own workforce and possibly members of Congress and staffers. Why Southwest’s board of directors and shareholders haven’t suspended Kelly is beyond me; air travel requires a fairly high degree of trust in science and Kelly clearly doesn’t trust science.

Masks have been mandatory on public transportation including airplanes since last year. This requirement will likely continue throughout the Omicron wave and beyond.

If you must travel over the holidays, trust the science and wear a high-quality mask.

~ 0 ~

Oops, one more thing: Robert F. Kennedy III is a blight on his family’s legacy. His anti-vaxx bullshit is racist bordering on genocidal.

He needs to be kicked to the curb. I would love to know who/what is funding his sketchy work.

This Is My O Face: Welcome, Omicron [UPDATE-1]

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. Scroll down for update and new content. /~Rayne]

Well, it had to happen sooner or later given this pandemic’s craptacular start and the inability of Trumpy right-wingers, nation-states with fewer resources, and Global Big Pharma to tackle COVID’s spread.

I’ve got what feels like a chest cold – gravelly upper chest, scratchy throat – and my spouse has the scratchy throat.

I’ve been around exactly five people in the last two weeks, one of which is my spouse; the others are my kids and two friends. All of them are fully vaccinated and boosted as are we two in my household.

Their status doesn’t rule out the possibility that one of them may carried the virus, if indeed we’re infected. Vaccinated folks can carry the virus.

No lost of smell or taste noted. No other symptoms so far. In my case this might not even be COVID; with the crazy windstorms we’ve had this week I’ve inhaled a bunch of dust every time I’ve had to go outside which may have triggered a flare of my autoimmune disorder.

But if Omicron results in milder symptoms especially in fully vaccinated persons, I may well have COVID.

Put me down as Status: Pending until I’m tested and receive my results.

There will be more to this post when I get back from the testing center, watch for an update.

~ ~ ~

UPDATE — Saturday 18-DEC-2021 -–

That’s not how I intended to start a post about the Omicron variant, but here we are: we go with the virus we have, not the one we wish we had.

What we know about Omicron so far is still rather loose and ill defined. Part of the challenge is that Omicron meets a different population than Alpha or Beta did last year – depending on the country there’s such a broad mix of people who are partially vaccinated, fully vaccinated, boosted, and with different mixtures of vaccinations as well as the stubbornly unvaccinated and the previously infected who occur in each category along with the immunocompromised.

When the first wave hit, everyone everywhere was unvaccinated. There was no need to sort the population except for those who may have been previously infected. By the Delta-dominant third wave analysis was slightly more complicated as more people were vaccinated or previously infected.

Now there’s so much more to sort through to identify trends. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are still surprises in case data as Omicron infections explode.

And explode they will, doubling every three days — if not more in less time.

I still can’t wrap my head around the number of cases this variant is expected to produce. I’d like to recommend you listen to this Twitter Spaces recording of a discussion with Financial Times’ statistics journalist John Burn Murdoch, pharma correspondents Hanna Kuchler, Jamie Smyth, and Donato Mancini, and senior editor Clive Cookson.

Link: https://twitter.com/FinancialTimes/status/1471134080175689731

A caveat before you dive in: the discussion has a UK+EU bias given the location of the participants and their employer. The UK’s handling of COVID has been absolutely abysmal to date and may shape their perspectives.

An even bigger caveat: Twitter Spaces self-delete in 30 days, so you only have 27 more days to listen to their discussion. Catch it before January 13, 2022.

I also can’t wrap my head around the dramatically increased contagiousness of Omicron versus Delta. Delta was already much more contagious than the initial dominant variant; its electrostatic charge caused the aerosolized virus to be attracted to soft human tissues like magnets.

Omicron, though, is 70 times more infectious† than Delta. Just fucking mind boggling, this jump from Delta, and what it means for this winter as we approach the holidays.

A preliminary study suggests the Omicron variant is better at transmission because it infects the upper airway, but bad at infecting the lower lungs explaining why it presents with milder symptoms than its predecessor, Delta. Attaching itself to tissues higher in the airway the virus can be more easily dispersed in aerosol, but lower in the lungs the virus is more difficult to blow out.

The increase in infectiousness† means you MUST upgrade your masks, especially before holiday gatherings in enclosed spaces. Fabric alone will no longer do the job even if everyone in the same shared space is wearing them. This goes for health care workers, too, who’ve continued to wear surgical masks through the pandemic when they could get their hands on them. All of us need to be wearing N95 masks in shared public spaces to reduce transmission.

Testing will become more critical because Omicron may present for many like common cold symptoms, hence my scramble yesterday to get tested. A year ago I might have blown off the symptoms I had because I didn’t lose my sense of smell and/or taste, didn’t run a temperature, didn’t have breathing problems or feel like I was losing oxygen. But not now – I can’t do that.

Nor can we ignore the fearsome possibility of co-infection or super-infection as mentioned in Financial Times’ discussion, in which the infected has both Delta and Omicron at the same time. Imagine this kind of scenario creating conditions for development of a new variant which is everything bad about Delta and Omicron combined. There’s also the possibility of co-infection with influenza, which has already happened though infrequently so far.

If this is what lungs looked like with the earlier variants, what will they look like with a super-infection of Delta and Omicron combined? Will we see more patients in need of lung transplants even earlier? Will we simply see an increase in mortality?

Only time, observation, and data will tell, and we’d really rather not accrue any data.

One thing we have learned about Omicron: the Johnson & Johnson adenovirus-vector one-shot vaccine is not effective against it, based on a study (pre-print) by Vir Biotechnology Inc. employees published this past Wednesday.

The Center for Disease Control issued a statement of preference for mRNA vaccines as well given the risk of death from unusual clotting observed across the population vaccinated with J&J. This means if you are J&J vaccinated but unboosted, you should look into an mRNA booster as soon as possible. This is fluid and may be subject to change; I wouldn’t be surprised with Omicron’s explosion of cases to see revaccination with a full regimen of mRNA recommended for J&J recipients.

~ ~ ~

Besides this unexpected Chinese fire drill of chasing COVID tests and results, what’s really frustrating is the continued absurd nihilistic conservatism of many unvaccinated and their maskless counterparts.

Exhibit A: Matthew Walter, arch Catholic, editor of The Lamp, contributor to the American Conservative, and the author of “Where I Live, No One Cares About COVID,” unfortunately published by The Atlantic.

Let’s make a distinction here between the folks who are still struggling to get vaccinated because of vampiric capitalism and racism. Many unvaccinated people want to be protected but can’t take the time away from work to get their shots and deal with the possible symptoms which often follow the vaccine. We forget too many Americans living in precarity risk losing their jobs if they or their family members are sick because this country hasn’t ensured a reasonable amount of paid time off for illness let alone health maintenance. These same workers end up gambling on not getting COVID because they can’t afford to take a handful of days for the vaccinations and booster for themselves and their family. If COVID gets them, well, they know it’s all over.

Ditto the unvaccinated who have legitimate health conditions which preclude vaccination. For them the rest of us should be vaccinated.

But the deliberately unvaccinated and COVID indifferent who identify with Matthew Walther? Fuck them.

All those stupid assholes like Walther who’ve decided to pretend there’s no pandemic, choosing instead to party on Michigan’s Torch Lake’s sandbar back in July 2020, causing a superspreader event? Fuck them all, the selfish gits.

Fuck all the jerks fighting mask and vaccine mandates, who’d rather kids and their teachers got sick with COVID, causing more superspreader events.

Sure, I get it – Walther wrote his misbegotten spike-worthy piece for The Atlantic from his deep red rural St. Joseph County located on the Michigan border with red state Indiana. The Atlantic’s editors stupidly decided to both-sides the pandemic.

But The Atlantic failed to look at what side they were giving oxygen by platforming Walther. The town in which Walther’s journal The Lamp is published has a population of less than 8000.

And they’re white, white, white.

It’s a super homogenous location where nobody gives a shit about COVID because nearly 90% of them share the same everything from skin color to politics. They act as if the only people who get COVID, are disabled by it or die from it are those people in Metro Detroit area. That’s the hidden subtext in Walther’s essay.

The Ameri-centric xenophobia also rolls off Walther:

…Indeed, there is something small-minded and puritanical and distinctly American about the whole business of obsessing over whether vaccinated teachers remove their face covering during a long school day. …

Shall we ask Japan and South Korea about mask wearing and other COVID mitigation measures? Japan’s population is 38% of the U.S. and has had less than 19,000 COVID deaths to date, while South Korea at 15% of U.S. population has had less than 5,000 COVID deaths in the same time frame.

Apparently the world doesn’t exist outside predominantly white spaces like the U.S. and Europe for Walther. We look like morons not only because of the ongoing mass death event but because folks like Walther insist there’s nothing to see, move along.

But I, too, live in Michigan, in a limnal space between a suburb and rural Michigan. It’s not just those people  who are getting sick, hospitalized, disabled, or dying because of COVID. Here we all know quite a few white people who’ve died of COVID, the disease Walther doesn’t give a shit about any longer; the obituaries scrolling by on the local television stations are wall to wall with these white faces.

It’s not just these disposable people to whom Walther is indifferent who are casualties. COVID is chewing up our health care system capacity to the point the feds have sent in support personnel; it’s eating the spirit of our health care workers to the point where many are leaving health care permanently.

ER doctor Rob Davidson lives and works only four counties and a hundred miles north of Walther, in a community which is even smaller and whiter than Three Rivers:

If you follow Dr. Davidson on Twitter you know how frustrated he and health care workers are to care for so many who are deathly ill and too often die when the disease could have been mitigated or prevented with a readily available vaccine regimen. Many of the people lost are friends and neighbors who refused to get vaccinated.

As Davidson notes, “…they’ve been poisoned with this idea that A, COVID’s not a big deal from the beginning and B, these vaccines will somehow make them sick.”

That’s what Walther’s piece continues to validate and nurture because it was platformed by The Atlantic – the other Big Lie which Trump began and continues with propping up by right-wing wretches who treat others’ lives like so much toilet paper, supported by media complicity and click-bait cupidity.

When the pandemic began, Trump wanted to save his own ass at the polls so he repeatedly assured his weak-minded base that COVID wasn’t a big deal, it was a hoax, it would disappear.

Except it was American’s lives which disappeared – more than 800,000 so far, of which more than a third could have been saved by vaccines had Trump left a distribution plan in place instead of another Big Lie.

Nearly double that 800,000 have been lost if excess deaths are included due to COVID’s drain on our health infrastructure.

Which means we’ve lost roughly two million Americans because of Trump’s other Big Lie – a passive-aggressive democide by active neglect.

The capper on Walther’s nihilistic crap: while he claims nobody cares about COVID, a couple thousand people are slogging away in Portage, a mere 26 miles north of Walther’s digs.

They’re producing as much of Pfizer-BioNTech’s Comirnaty vaccine as fast as they can. There’s a Pfizer plant under construction to expand production of injectables which will bring 450 more new jobs. Other biotech companies and their workers in southeast Michigan support Pfizer’s production.

These Michigan residents and employers care one hell of a lot about COVID, and they’ve saved millions of lives.

Which makes Walther’s op-ed look like what it is, an extension of Trump’s democidal lie and an insult to the conscientiousness and humanity of fellow Michigan residents.

A literal insult to neighbors who may be commuting from Walther’s town to make life-saving vaccines every day.

I hope some day Walther meets his Catholic god and is told what an offense it has been that he treated other human’s lives with so little respect and dignity.

~ ~ ~

Status update: Both my antigen and PCR tests came back negative. My coughing is subsiding, leaving just the occasional tickle. I hope this was just an extremely mild cold or an autoimmune flare. But I’m now back on heightened alert; if this was a cold, how did I get it? Could I have infected one or more of the few people I’ve been in contact with this week?

Stay safe, peeps. Don’t drop your guard just yet. Get your booster shot, and a flu shot, too.

____

† Commenter “Doug Fir” took exception to the use of the word “transmissibility” and the substitution of the word “infectious.” Reporting across the media ecosphere has used transmission/contagion/infection and variants of these words interchangeably; this is a point needing further explication and explanation by researchers who are still studying Omicron’s differentiation from other variants. I’ll point to this excerpt from an article in StatNews also linked above as the most thorough reporting but still not definitive as it is based on preliminary data:

The new research comes from a Hong Kong University team led by public health professor Michael Chan Chi-wai and pathologist John Nicholls. Previously, the researchers pioneered a method for growing human tissues extracted from the lung and respiratory tract, which they used to study how SARS-CoV-2 invaded cells and replicated compared to other dangerous coronaviruses. Using this same system, they analyzed how live, replicating particles of Omicron infected the tissues. They found that over the first 24 hours, Omicron multiplied about 70 times faster inside respiratory-tract tissue than the Delta variant. When they ran the same experiments with the lung tissue, they found Omicron was actually worse at infecting those cells than either Delta or the original strain of the virus that originated in Wuhan.

That seemingly helps explain the variant’s infectiousness, and also why it may not be causing as severe sickness as previous variants of the coronavirus — as early data suggest.

“That basically tells us it’s inherently more transmissible,” said Müge Çevik, a clinical lecturer in infectious diseases and medical virology at the University of St. Andrews School of Medicine in Scotland. “The reason Omicron is spreading so fast is not just because of immune evasion” — its ability to elude antibodies from vaccines or infection with earlier variants — “but a combination of that with intrinsic enhanced infectiousness.”

It appears Omicron is not as effective as Delta in attaching to tissues deeper in the lungs; it attaches more effectively to the trachea and bronchi or upper airways where it can be more easily blown out as aerosol others can inhale especially if not well masked and in enclosed shared space with poor ventilation.

A Somewhat Charitable View Of Vaccine Refusers

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Posts in this series

In my last three posts I examined David Brooks’s theory that vaccine refusal is is one result of the rejection of his version of the epistemic regime of the his version of the creative class, and with it the expertise and knowledge claimed by scientists, academics and other experts. He relies in part on Jonathan Rauch’s book The Construction Of Knowledge. Brooks is just wrong; here’s what Rauch actually says.

I don’t think people reject the scientific method or the epistemic regime under which it operates. I don’t see anyone saying physicists are wrong about quantum mechanics, or that antibiotics don’t work. People go to the doctor when they’re sick in the same numbers as always.

I think the actual problem with vaccine resisters is that they think that whether or not to take a Covid vaccine is a political issue or a social issue about which they are entitled to have an opinion, instead of public health problems firmly in the realm of professional expertise.

To explain this further, here are some of the factors that governed my decision to get the vaccine. I did my own research. I knew most vaccines are made from attenuated viruses or inactivated viruses. Covid vaccines use a different technique. Here’s the New York Times description of the mechanism. Here’s the Wikipedia entry for mRNA vaccines. Here’s a comprehensive description of the construction of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Here’s a comprehensive description of the manufacturing process for the mRNA vaccines.

This research raised questions I cannot answer. For example, are there proteins in a normal body shaped like the spike protein and is that a problem? I have to rely on experts on that question. But is the FDA so politicized it would approve a dangerous vaccine because Trump interfered?

I talked to a friend, a health care journalist, about the issue of politicization of the FDA. He seemed confident that the FDA was safely independent. One of my brothers has worked on getting FDA approval for drugs for serious diseases, and he explained their procedures. He was also confident about FDA independence.

In the Fall of 2020, my extended family got into an email discussion of the vaccines. One of my nieces is a virologist who is working on a monoclonal antibody treatment for Covid. She told us to take whatever vaccine we could get the day we could first get it.

I knew I wouldn’t be in the first wave of people getting vaccinated. That maeant there was an even bigger trial out there, all those people ahead of me.

In sum, I did my own research, but other factors were vastly more important than my understanding of the vaccine. I have no way to assess the accumulated stores of scientific knowledge that led to the vaccine, or any way to evaluate the clinical trials or the data they generated. All I can hope to do is come to a rough understanding, and perhaps come up with a question about the applicability to my personal situation.

This is true of all scientific matters. Mostly it doesn’t matter. My computer works. I don’t have to understand it. I just have to learn how to use it for my own ends. I use a several drugs to protect my eyes from further damage. I checked, and I can vaguely understand how the experts think they work, but really, I just take my doctor’s advice.

So far I’ve only looked at knowledge about the physical world. The problem is different in the social world. For example, I pay attention to politics, and I think I have a reasonable set of principles and priorities that govern my political views. I can evaluate political issues by comparing them to what I personally observe, what I see in the media, and my principles and priorities. But I’m fully aware that most of my thinking comes from reading the views of other people, and trying to incorporate them into a coherent picture with other things I think.

In my last post I quoted Rauch talking about the importance of family and tribe in making decisions. I agree with him that on a wide range of life issues the decisive factors are our family, our tribe, and the people and groups with which we generally agree. One of the very few exceptions is our specific efforts to increase human knowledge, where we stick closely to Rauch’s reality-based epistemic regime. We all depend on others in making decisions about everything, not just our layman’s understanding of scientific matters.

I assume other people operate about like I do. They listen to family, tribe, trusted people, and read stuff on the internet. Then they test that information against some internal standard, and either accept or reject it. Most people across all divides in our society think they are capable of doing this accurately. This idea has its roots in a view of human beings and in the ideology of individualism. It’s at the heart of neoliberalism, which says we can always figure out what we want and need. I don’t think so. I agree with C.S. Perice that all we really want to do is avoid the unpleasant feeling of doubt by coming to any firm belief.

So what we have with the vaccine refusers is a category error. If this were a straight issue of scientific knowledge, most people would realize they cannot evaluate it and are dependent on professionals.

The Trumpified Republicans and their media and armed wings amplified the idea that the pandemic and Covid are political issues. Because the government and politicians were out front in dealing with Covid, people were primed to think of Covid as a political issue. Too many people tried to evaluate vaccines and public health measures as political issues, which led them to listen to their usual political sources, right-wing media and politicians, and their friends and trusted groups.

Their confidence was buoyed by the availability of information from the internet. But they weren’t looking at the information in the links I put above. They were listening to intentional liars, Qrazies and anti-vaxxers. Social media algorithms probably amplified this disinformation.

People tried to construct a mental picture taking their new information into account without upsetting too much of their general world view. That didn’t work, because there was too intense a conflict between the reality of the pandemic and the views they were getting from their preferred sources. So we hear people denying that Covid is a real thing and constructing detailed theories about conspiracies between Doctors and Big Pharma to make tons of money. We get theories that vaccines and masks are government efforts to control our lives. For the larger number of people who don’t follow closely, this becomes confusing and vaguely scary. In the end, we as a nation are no where near the necessary number of vaccinations.

This explanation doesn’t justify anything or anyone. You have to be sunk in stupidity to think that a vaccine is a political or social issue. You have to be a piece of human garbage to encourage people to reject vaccines against a dangerous disease. But it’s hard to blame low-information people for being worried about this ginned-up controversy.

It’s really maddening.

TL;DNR = Too Late; Do Not Resuscitate

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[NB: check the byline, thanks! / ~Rayne]

A friend sent me this tweet with an embedded TikTok clip late Friday night:

Yes, Idaho’s Department of Health and Welfare declared it was activating Crisis Standards of Care (CSC) effective September 6; the standard was reiterated on September 16. The “Universal DNR” referred to in the TikTok is on page 9 of the IDHW’s document, Patient Care Strategies for Scarce Resource Situations for use under CSC conditions.

Idaho has simply run out of ICU beds, ventilators, and personnel to support persons who either code in the hospital or arrive at the hospital in need of resuscitation.

Technically speaking, the guideline isn’t universal across all of Idaho; the IDHW noted in its September 16 statement,

… Although DHW has activated CSC, hospitals will implement as needed and according to their own CSC policies. However, not all hospitals will move to that standard of care. If they are managing under their current circumstances, they can continue to do so. …

But chances are good if the ICU beds are full in any Idaho hospital, patients are being transferred to other hospitals until their beds are full as well.

None of this had to happen.

In fact, this change in triage methodology could have been foreseen.

Last March we saw the first documented and publicly acknowledged “codice nero” conditions in northern Italy and then in Detroit, when hospitals were completely overwhelmed by the first surge of COVID-19 patients. While Italians may not have known about the implementation of code black, Detroit’s local news reported on the change in triage protocols after patients and their families were notified on admission that care would be allocated in order of patients’ likelihood of survival due to the limited resources available, from ICU beds to ventilators to qualified health care staff.

The swamping of hospitals in March 2020 could have been avoided had lock-downs and mask mandates been implemented by the end of February/first week of March, but there likely would have been a surge in hospitalizations simply because government and public alike still had not fully acknowledged the threat COVID-19 posed.

Idaho’s hospitals have been and are among the worst in the nation for crisis care preparedness. As of the third week of August, Idaho was number three behind Georgia and Texas among states that are least prepared for hospital capacity. At that time Idaho’s ICU beds were already 83% occupied.

The state had ample to adjust to a pandemic and prepare for the possibility of a surge in COVID-19 cases. They had plenty of examples of crisis level care across the country to shape their response.

But now, nineteen months after the first wave began, when multiple vaccines are freely available to the public? The ICU beds are beyond full if Idaho must declare the equivalent of a code black.

Unvaccinated Idahoans chose this. They willfully opted to court hospitalization, long-term disability, and death by COVID-19.

The worst part is what the unvaccinated are doing to those who chose otherwise — like those who arrive at the hospital with a gunshot wound or a heart attack or stroke, who may have been vaccinated but are likely to die because they will only receive palliative care instead of interventions to save their lives.

Trump’s death panels continue apace.

~ ~ ~

EDIT: 21-SEP-2021 — 1:50 AM —

To make it easier for folks who don’t want to open the IDHW’s document, Patient Care Strategies for Scarce Resource Situations for use under CSC conditions to read page 9, here’s a snapshot:

Note there is zero reference to COVID-19 on the entire page and the “Universal DNR Order” refers to all patients in cardiac arrest.

GOP Denounces Barry Goldwater, John Tower, and Richard Nixon?

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John Tower and Barry Goldwater, ca. 1963.

The Republican governors are all clutching their pearls over Biden’s announcement to use the power of the federal government to require many businesses across the country to ensure their employees are either vaccinated against COVID-19 or are regularly tested. The New York Times did a round-up of some their comments, many taken from either Twitter or Sunday morning talk shows. Here’s a taste . . .

Now, they [various GOP governors] are arguing that Mr. Biden’s plan is a big-government attack on states’ rights, private business and personal choice, and promise swift legal action to challenge it, setting up a high-stakes constitutional showdown over the president’s powers to curb the pandemic.

“@JoeBiden see you in court,” Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota wrote on Twitter. Gov. Mark Gordon of Wyoming said the new rule “has no place in America,” and said he had asked the state’s attorney general to be ready to take legal action.

In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton questioned President Biden’s authority to require vaccinations or weekly testing at private businesses with more than 100 workers.

“I don’t believe he has the authority to just dictate again from the presidency that every worker in America that works for a large company or a small company has to get a vaccine,” Mr. Paxton said, speaking on a radio show hosted by Steve Bannon, who served as a strategist for Donald J. Trump during part of his presidency. “That is outside the role of the president to dictate.”

[snip]

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas called the actions an “assault on private businesses” in a statement on Twitter. He said he issued an executive order protecting Texans’ right to choose whether or not they would be vaccinated. “Texas is already working to halt this power grab,” he wrote.

Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona wrote on Twitter: “The Biden-Harris administration is hammering down on private businesses and individual freedoms in an unprecedented and dangerous way.” He questioned how many workers would be displaced, businesses fined, and children kept out of the classroom because of the mandates, and he vowed to push back.

*sigh*

Friends, let me introduce you to Public Law 91-596, initially signed into law on December 29, 1970 by Richard Nixon, and amended variously since then. Below are the first two sections of the law. Notice, please, the language I’ve highlighted with underlining (bold is from the original text):

An Act
To assure safe and healthful working conditions for working men and women; by authorizing enforcement of the standards developed under the Act; by assisting and encouraging the States in their efforts to assure safe and healthful working conditions; by providing for research, information, education, and training in the field of occupational safety and health; and for other purposes.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That this Act may be cited as the “Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970.”

Footnote (1) See Historical notes at the end of this document for changes and amendments affecting the OSH Act since its passage in 1970 through January 1, 2004.

SEC. 2. Congressional Findings and Purpose
(a) The Congress finds that personal injuries and illnesses arising out of work situations impose a substantial burden upon, and are a hindrance to, interstate commerce in terms of lost production, wage loss, medical expenses, and disability compensation payments.

(b) The Congress declares it to be its purpose and policy, through the exercise of its powers to regulate commerce among the several States and with foreign nations and to provide for the general welfare, to assure so far as possible every working man and woman in the Nation safe and healthful working conditions and to preserve our human resources —

My, but the language of paragraph (a) sounds like Congress intended the US Department of Labor to regulate conditions that create or spread illnesses in the workplace, and paragraph (b) states pretty clearly where Congress claimed the authority for doing so is grounded in the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution.

Continuing on, the act spelled out some of the details of that “purpose and policy” with the following 13 sub-paragraphs (again, underlining is mine):

(1) by encouraging employers and employees in their efforts to reduce the number of occupational safety and health hazards at their places of employment, and to stimulate employers and employees to institute new and to perfect existing programs for providing safe and healthful working conditions;

(2) by providing that employers and employees have separate but dependent responsibilities and rights with respect to achieving safe and healthful working conditions;

(3) by authorizing the Secretary of Labor to set mandatory occupational safety and health standards applicable to businesses affecting interstate commerce, and by creating an Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission for carrying out adjudicatory functions under the Act;

(4) by building upon advances already made through employer and employee initiative for providing safe and healthful working conditions;

(5) by providing for research in the field of occupational safety and health, including the psychological factors involved, and by developing innovative methods, techniques, and approaches for dealing with occupational safety and health problems;

(6) by exploring ways to discover latent diseases, establishing causal connections between diseases and work in environmental conditions, and conducting other research relating to health problems, in recognition of the fact that occupational health standards present problems often different from those involved in occupational safety;

(7) by providing medical criteria which will assure insofar as practicable that no employee will suffer diminished health, functional capacity, or life expectancy as a result of his work experience;

(8) by providing for training programs to increase the number and competence of personnel engaged in the field of occupational safety and health; affecting the OSH Act since its passage in 1970 through January 1, 2004.

(9) by providing for the development and promulgation of occupational safety and health standards;

(10) by providing an effective enforcement program which shall include a prohibition against giving advance notice of any inspection and sanctions for any individual violating this prohibition;

(11) by encouraging the States to assume the fullest responsibility for the administration and enforcement of their occupational safety and health laws by providing grants to the States to assist in identifying their needs and responsibilities in the area of occupational safety and health, to develop plans in accordance with the provisions of this Act, to improve the administration and enforcement of State occupational safety and health laws, and to conduct experimental and demonstration projects in connection therewith;

(12) by providing for appropriate reporting procedures with respect to occupational safety and health which procedures will help achieve the objectives of this Act and accurately describe the nature of the occupational safety and health problem;

(13) by encouraging joint labor-management efforts to reduce injuries and disease arising out of employment.

And what kind of liberal cabal forced this clearly authoritarian legislation through Congress? I’m glad you asked.

The Senate vote was 83-3, with 14 not voting. Among the 83 were Barry Goldwater and John Tower — not exactly a liberal pair of folks. The only three senators to vote against this were James Eastland, Sam Ervin, and Strom Thurmond. Over in the House, the final vote was 310-58, with 65 not voting. Looking at the voting patterns of some of the state delegations, it’s plain to see that this was both bipartisan and widely accepted on their side of the building, too.

  • Kentucky (4D/3R) voted 7-0-0;
  • Wisconsin (5D/5R) voted 9-0-1;
  • Oklahoma (4D/2R) voted 5-0-1;
  • Florida (9D/3R) voted 6-4-2, with the 4 nays all Democrats and 2 who abstained both GOP;
  • Tennessee (5D/4R) voted 5-1-3 (the 3 included 2 Dems and 1 Republican);
  • Arkansas (4D/1R) voted 4-0-1 (the 1 was a D);
  • South Dakota’s (2R) voted 1-0-1;
  • Montana (2D) voted 2-0-0;
  • Wyoming’s sole GOP representative voted aye.

In other words, there were staunch conservatives who voted for this, along with plenty of non-conservatives. The bill that became Public Law 91-596 was seen by a wide majority of both the members of the House and Senate to be a good thing, and well within the powers of the Federal Government to undertake.

Go back to the text of the law above, and look at items 6 and 7. These both make clear that OSHA’s mission includes dealing with disease transmission in the workplace. Then skip down to 11, which says the Federal government should work with states, including providing grants for this work. You know, like providing a free vaccine to deal with disease transmission in the workplace.

OSHA has been around for more than 50 years, and no one has succeeded in challenging their the authority to regulate health conditions in the workplace under this act. There have been successful arguments overturning specific regulations, but the authority to regulate has not been overturned.

I’m not a governor or an attorney general, but I can read the plain text of the law. I can see the wide political range of legislators who voted to create OSHA, and given that OSHA is still here and going strong after 50 years, it’s clear that the ability of the federal government to regulate the workplace for safety and health has not been overturned or declared unconstitutional.

So if anyone reading happens to be in conversation with one of these pearl-clutching Republican leaders when they start in on their “This is unprecedented and un-American!” nonsense, ask them for a link.

Better yet, ask Governor Ducey why Goldwater voted for OSHA. Ask Governor Abbott and AG Paxton why John Tower voted for OSHA. Ask any of today’s so-called conservatives why a bunch of other conservatives voted with Goldwater and Tower to approve OSHA, and why a conservative like Richard Nixon signed it.

The Danger Of Stupidity

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Posts in this series

In the first post in this series, I quoted Charles Sanders Peirce for the proposition that the only reason we think is to relieve doubt by coming to a belief. We don’t necessarily seek the best belief, or some objectively correct belief (if there is one), though we might, and it might be best if we did. All we really want to do is to relieve doubt.

But that leaves out people who don’t ever doubt anything. It also points to people who claim to think but who aren’t interested in the solution with the best chance of meeting their most important needs; just something that relieves them of doubt. The pandemic has produced excellent examples. Media coverage and life experience have caused many people doubt. They look for relief from the doubt. They don’t need the best answer, or a sane answer, they just need to settle whatever their doubt might be.

David Byrd

In June 2020, Tennessee State Representative David Byrd of Waynesboro, TN voted for a resolution stating that the mainstream media has sensationalized the coverage of Covid-19, and that the General Assembly

… congratulate[s] the people of Tennessee for clearly seeing that the mainstream media has sensationalized the reporting on COVID-19 in the service of political agendas.

Byrd was diagnosed with Covid November 25, went into the hospital December 5, was on a ventilator for 55 days, lost his liver and required a transplant, and came out of it urging people to get vaccinated. He got sick before the vaccine was available, and he claims never to have been anti-vax. He now thinks Covid is dangerous and urges people to get vaccinated.

It’s hard to say what goes on in people’s minds, but the statement about sensationalizing the pandemic is an important clue. Assuming that he actually believes this, what exactly was he talking about? Media coverage wasn’t bloody. I think it didn’t go far enough in showing the frightening situation of sick and dying people. TV reporters did not show actual patients, or corpses. If Byrd had seen video of people breathing by ventilator, he might not have been so blasé about his own risk. If he had listened to Covid patients trying to breathe on their own, he might have thought twice about hanging around with potential vectors, including his equally ill-informed colleagues. Did he think it was political and thus damaging to Trump? Would political fault matter to sick and dying people, or people who didn’t understand the danger? Did he feel the same way about the absurd emails and Benghazi frenzies?

No, I think we can safely analyze this in Charles Sanders Peirce’s terms as expressed in The Fixation of Belief (1877):

The irritation of doubt is the only immediate motive for the struggle to attain belief. It is certainly best for us that our beliefs should be such as may truly guide our actions so as to satisfy our desires; and this reflection will make us reject every belief which does not seem to have been so formed as to insure this result. … [T]he sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinion. We may fancy that this is not enough for us, and that we seek, not merely an opinion, but a true opinion. But put this fancy to the test, and it proves groundless; for as soon as a firm belief is reached we are entirely satisfied, whether the belief be true or false.

Byrd had a doubt about Covid that he wanted to relieve by finding a belief that would satisfy his desires. His only desire was political, not his personal safety. So he fixed on a political belief. Sadly that was a bad guess about the best thing for him.

Phil Valentine

Phil Valentine is a conservative talk radio host on WWTN-FM in Nashville. Here’s his blog post on the vaccine dated December 17, 2020. After ranting about Hillary Clinton and the dearth of credit to Trump for getting the vaccine out there, he says:

I’m not an anti-vaxxer. I’m just using common sense. What are my odds of getting COVID? They’re pretty low. What are my odds of dying from COVID if I do get it? Probably way less than one percent. I’m doing what everyone should do and that’s my own personal health risk assessment. If you have underlying health issues you probably need to get the vaccine. If you’re not at high risk of dying from COVID then you’re probably safer not getting it. That evokes shrieks of horror from many, but it’s true. I’m weighing the known versus the unknown.

I suppose we might ask what these “unknowns” are, or whether he plans on getting the pneumonia and shingles vaccines, but that’s too picky. Maybe he’s just not very smart. Here’s his take on climate change, echoing the idiot Senator Imhofe with his dumb snowball. Valentine does his own reasoning and research on the pandemic. It might have been better to start with a question like this: scientists, including epidemiologists, virologists, and public health experts say Covid is dangerous, and that the vaccines are safe and work, so everyone should get a jab. Now how am I different from everyone else? Why isn’t that the best advice for me?

Instead, I’ll guess he read some stuff about Covid, and decided he knew best about his own body and its ability to shut down the virus. He thinks we should all make our own decisions about our health, apparently without reference to expertise. He thinks we marvelous Americans can handle the complexity of the pandemic in the same way we decide between tacos and huevos rancheros. He places no value on scientific information or conclusions, doesn’t know any statistics, doesn’t grasp the principles of epidemiology or virology, doesn’t understand and probably doesn’t believe in the principles that underlie the vaccines, and doesn’t think any of that is important. I’ll bet he can’t do his own taxes, though.

And, guess what: nearly dying has converted him to a vaccine believer.

Valentine at least recognized that the right question is his personal safety; but he doesn’t know how to think about that problem, and just happens to come out in the same place as David Byrd.

The disinterested, the ignorant, and the prejudiced

There is a large group who just ignore the problem, or believe nonsense. I won’t use names, but they’re all over: people who just couldn’t quite get around to getting vaccinated, or who are convinced that it’s a trap or a hoax. Here are some examples.

These are people who aren’t paying attention. I am grateful for the people reaching out to them. They are doing what needs to be done.

Conclusion

In the first post in this series, I hinted at my view that bad thinking is central to the success of the Oligarchy in spreading their self-aggrandizing lies. I hope this discussion helps us see how well that works.

In an earlier series I argued that democracy only works if there is a sense of community among the members. As we face the pandemic and the desperately dangerous climate disaster, we need to operate as a community. We have to operate on the principle that no one is safe unless we are all safe. We have to settle our doubts in the way that will enable us to flourish, not in ways that fit our prejudices.

[Image Source: “I Did My Own Research” by @GQPMonitor]