The Politics of Covid 19, mask wearing and the vaccination process

[Isgrimnur]

Nothing fights lawbreakers like more laws.

So how many law(s) is/are the *right* number of law(s)?

[Smoove_B]

Up next for mask bans? Los Angeles:

As Covid cases rise across California, Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass announced that city officials were exploring the legality of wearing masks at demonstrations.

The announcement came as a response to a pro-Palestinian protest outside a Los Angeles synagogue that made international headlines.

Bass, a Democrat, said at a press conference with local Jewish leaders on Monday that she would be seeking “several points of clarity” from the city attorney “around what are the parameters with protests: when permits are needed, whether or not people should be masked, and establishing clear lines of demarcation between what is legal and what is not”.

Every day. Every day gets worse, inch by inch.

Guns? Can't do a fucking thing about guns. But masks? No, you can't wear one of those.

[Pyperkub]

Up next for mask bans? Los Angeles:

As Covid cases rise across California, Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass announced that city officials were exploring the legality of wearing masks at demonstrations.

The announcement came as a response to a pro-Palestinian protest outside a Los Angeles synagogue that made international headlines.

Bass, a Democrat, said at a press conference with local Jewish leaders on Monday that she would be seeking “several points of clarity” from the city attorney “around what are the parameters with protests: when permits are needed, whether or not people should be masked, and establishing clear lines of demarcation between what is legal and what is not”.

Every day. Every day gets worse, inch by inch.

Guns? Can't do a fucking thing about guns. But masks? No, you can't wear one of those.

Honestly, this belongs in the Warrantless wiretaps/surveillance state thread, and not Covid, but here we are.

Never waste a good crisis in building out the police state.

[Smoove_B]

It was pointed out somewhere for me yesterday that wearing masks in public wasn't a problem until students started doing it as part of various campus protests this Spring. Now it's a crisis that needs to be resolved quickly and via legislation.

[Smoove_B]

I totally missed what else what happening in NY:

After Governor Kathy Hochul proposed ending the paid sick days that New Yorkers infected with COVID-19 have been guaranteed since the beginning of the pandemic, a budget deal with the state legislature agreed to the change but pushed back the date of the repeal to next year.

But the state has stripped away COVID sick leave from its own employees, effective immediately. The state's Office of Employee Relations informed executive agencies in March that the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who work for the state would no longer get additional COVID-specific sick days.

"The decision to circumvent state law makes all employees and the public that has to interact with us less safe," said one state worker, who asked for anonymity because they aren’t authorized to speak to the press. "The government should be leading by example here and making it easier for state employees to stay home when infectious with COVID to avoid making others sick."

More:

A state law passed at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 required public employers, as well as private employers with 100 or more workers, to offer 14 days of paid sick leave to workers infected with COVID-19—on top of any regular paid time off the employer may offer. Businesses with 11 to 99 employees had to offer five paid sick days, which were also available if a worker’s child got COVID.

Hochul proposed ending the benefit in her executive budget early this year. The legislature agreed, but pushed back the effective date to July 31, 2025.

In March, the CDC ended the requirement to isolate for five days after testing positive for COVID. Instead, it said people should stay isolated until they have been fever-free for 24 hours and their symptoms are improving.

The workaround the state is using to roll back sick days for its workers despite the law is that it will only offer the benefit if an official order of quarantine or isolation is issued by a public health agency. Since that isn’t happening, the paid sick days have effectively disappeared. A quarantine order was required when the sick day policy was first implemented at the beginning of the pandemic, but it was soon tweaked to allow workers to self-attest that they tested positive for COVID.

[Smoove_B]

Long Island offering up a $1000 fine for masking:

A county on Long Island could become one of the first legislative bodies in the tri-state to ban face masks that conceal the wearer's identity — with violators facing potential fines and even jail time.

Nassau County Legislator Mazi Pilip proposed the bill after talking to a constituent she said was attacked at a recent protest. Pilip said she wants to unmask those responsible for the violence.

"Having them covering their faces, thinking they can do whatever they want. This is absolutely unacceptable," said Pilip.

Violators could face fines up to $1,000 and possible time behind bars. The bill is supported by all 12 Republican legislators in the county.

There are exemptions from the law, such as those wearing masks for health or religious reasons. But who gets to decide how to enforce that distinction? The legislature's top Republican insisted police will be able to identify the difference.

Note:

It wasn't entirely clear how the bill would be implemented or enforced, a concern raised by the NYCLU, which said in a statement that the legislation "puts people of color and protestors the government disagrees with in its crosshairs."

I'm sure it will be fine. If nothing else, NY police have demonstrated a real positive history with "people of color" and "protestors".

[YellowKing]

I'm sure Republicans will be fully enforcing this at Nazi and KKK rallies.

[Victoria Raverna]

Now that Trump is very likely going to be the next POTUS, hopefully Trump was just trying to get RFK Jr. to support him and not really anti-vaccine:

[Smoove_B]

Can't say I saw this coming:

San Francisco health officials are urging residents to consider wearing masks in some places amid a summer COVID-19 wave that continues to gain strength.

On social media Friday, the city’s Department of Public Health advised, “Make this summer a healthy one for yourself and others. With COVID-19 circulating, please consider wearing a well-fitted mask in crowded indoor spaces.”

It has been more than a year since a major health organization recommended masking for those not at elevated risk other than in health care settings. Most mask requirements were lifted more than three years ago, and it’s highly unlikely mandates will be reintroduced for the general public.

In a statement to the Chronicle, the health department attributed its new message to rising coronavirus wastewater levels across San Francisco and California.

[Smoove_B]

Mask ban now in place for Nassau County NY:

Nassau County’s “Mask Transparency Act” was signed into law on August 14, 2024 and went into effect immediately. There are not currently any other mask bans in New York State, and it remains legal to wear a mask or other face covering in New York outside of Nassau County.

...

Nassau County’s mask ban language is vague and does not differentiate between medical masks like N95s, KN95s and surgical masks, and other types of masks or “facial coverings” including niqabs, burqas, wrapping a scarf or bandana around your face, and costume masks.

...

Violating Nassau County’s mask ban is considered a misdemeanor, and those arrested can be subject to a $1,000 fine, one year imprisonment, or both.

Of note:

Can I be stopped by a police officer just because I am wearing a mask?

In Nassau County, yes.

Officers are supposed to have “reasonable suspicion” that you are engaging in, or intend to engage in, criminal activity in order to stop you. However, Nassau may try to apply this broadly to include wearing a mask while driving, wearing a mask while gathering in a public place – such as a bus stop, block party, or protest – or knowingly allowing or helping people who are masked to gather in a public place.

Do I have to remove my face covering if an officer asks me to?

Police cannot force you to take off your mask unless you are stopped in a vehicle or they have reasonable suspicion that you are engaging in or intend to engage in a criminal activity in Nassau County.
Can I be arrested just for wearing a mask in Nassau?

Law enforcement officers need probable cause to arrest you – meaning they must have solid evidence based on objective circumstances that you have committed, are committing, or are about to commit a crime. However, Nassau’s broad bill language could allow police to interpret probable cause to include something as banal as wearing a mask while gathering in a public place – such as a bus stop, block party, or protest – or knowingly allowing or helping people who are masked to gather in a public place.

Exemptions:

Are there exceptions for people wearing masks for health or religious purposes?

Yes. The Nassau legislation states that it:

“…shall not apply to facial coverings worn to protect the health or safety of the wearer, for religious or cultural purposes, or for the peaceful celebration of a holiday or similar religious or cultural event for which the wearing of masks or facial coverings are customarily worn.”

Thankfully the police have full discretion here to figure out (at a distance, presumably) why you're wearing one and then respond accordingly.

[Smoove_B]

I'm putting this here, because clearly this is a failure of political proportions. I'm not exactly sure what the CDC communications team is trying to accomplish on Instagram, but if they're going to embrace meme culture to try and get people to vaccinate, this isn't how you do it.



Like...if we know something like Covid-19 is "lurking behind a tree" and excited to see kids going back to school, why on earth are we still promoting handwashing as a viable way to address it when we have vaccines sitting in limbo, never mind the parents that aren't interested in them for their kids?

[$iljanus]

I'm putting this here, because clearly this is a failure of political proportions. I'm not exactly sure what the CDC communications team is trying to accomplish on Instagram, but if they're going to embrace meme culture to try and get people to vaccinate, this isn't how you do it.



Like...if we know something like Covid-19 is "lurking behind a tree" and excited to see kids going back to school, why on earth are we still promoting handwashing as a viable way to address it when we have vaccines sitting in limbo, never mind the parents that aren't interested in them for their kids?

I’ll just chime in on the choice of a creepy leering black guy behind the tree. Not the image I’d use. You’d think by now the CDC would have come up with a pathogenic character equivalent to the Hamburgler. It looks like a stock image out of The Onion.

Also, back to school used to mean making sure my daughter was vaccinated for those pesky childhood diseases but I guess that’s no longer a thing

Edit: oh never mind. They do mention keeping up to date with routine vaccines. If we only had vaccines for flu and Covid.

[Smoove_B]

Haven't bumped this thread in a while and since it came up elsewhere:

Residents in the Southwest District Health in Idaho are no longer able to get COVID-19 vaccines from public health clinics after the district's board of directors voted 4–3 recently to stop administering the shot.

The vote came during a hearing swamped by misinformation and conspiracy theories about the lifesaving vaccines. It's a chilling reminder of how dangerous anti-vaccine sentiment and misinformation have infested communities nationwide, causing vaccination rates to slip across the country and making way for deadly outbreaks of preventable diseases.

Details:

While people in Idaho and beyond can get COVID-19 vaccines from private health care providers and pharmacies, Jansen noted that the health district is a "safety-net provider" for more than 300,000 residents in five counties. The district offers affordable medical care with fees on a sliding scale for qualified residents to "minimize poor health outcomes among at-risk populations." While the clinics don't use taxpayer funds to buy or administer the funds—patients pay with either insurance or cash—the district is able to buy the COVID-19 vaccines at a discount, passing the savings on to uninsured residents.

There's a bit of what was said, but the closing paragraph is pretty much the take home message:

The situation in the southwest district may not be surprising given the state's overall standing on vaccination: Idaho has the lowest kindergarten vaccination rates in the country, with coverage of key vaccinations sitting at around 79 percent to 80 percent, according to a recent analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The coverage is far lower than the 95 percent target set by health experts. That's the level that would block vaccine-preventable diseases from readily spreading through a population. The target is out of reach for Idaho as a whole, which also has the highest vaccination exemption rate in the country, at 14.3 percent. Even if the state managed to vaccinate all non-exempt children, the coverage rate would only reach 85.7 percent, missing the 95 percent target by nearly 10 percentage points.

Once again, this completely reinforces America's dirty secret - that your public health depends on your zip code; it is in no way a universal system for all citizens and it's shameful.

VOTE

[YellowKing]

Republican mindset: "If you don't like the healthcare policies of your state, where those policies belong, just move. Oh, you can't afford to move? Then maybe you need to stop being poor."

[LawBeefaroni]

Freedom = me legislating what you can and cannot do/have.

[Pyperkub]

Republican mindset: "If you don't like the healthcare policies of your state, where those policies belong, just move. Oh, you can't afford to move? Then maybe you need to stop being poor."

But also, our billionaires demand more poor people, so get busy being more poor!

[LordMortis]

Republican mindset: "If you don't like the healthcare policies of your state, where those policies belong, just move. Oh, you can't afford to move? Then maybe you need to stop being poor."

But also, our billionaires demand more poor people, so get busy being more poor!

It really feels that way, doesn't it?

[Zarathud]

The thought is poor people are motivated to work harder, longer and in person.

[$iljanus]

The thought is poor people are motivated to work harder, longer and in person.

With Elon's nerd cred I'm surprised we don't have a quote from him advocating nerve stapling for workers. As a joke of course. This venture has nothing to do with developing such technology.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuralink

[Max Peck]

The thought is poor people are motivated to work harder, longer and in person.

Ironically, the poor people who are willing to work harder, longer and in person tend to be immigrants, so the autocrats are going to need to step up their domestic impoverishment game if they get Trump elected and he unleashes the Great Purge.

[Smoove_B]

After some thought, I'm posting this over here:

Fewer than 1 in 6 health care workers in hospitals and nursing homes reported getting COVID-19 boosters during the 2023-2024 respiratory virus season, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found.

The big picture: The drop-off followed the expiration of a Biden administration vaccine mandate for health workers in June 2023 and the end of free access to government-funded COVID shots.

But health workers in a recent survey also expressed low confidence in the effectiveness, safety and benefit of COVID-19 vaccines, though many still believe the virus is a serious health threat.

Absolutely shameful.

[LordMortis]

Aye. I don't get it. I also don't get [R&P redacted]. No wait this is R&P! I also don't get how so many health care workers in my area are so MAGA. Something is driven a correlation around here that I don't readily see. It's not a good correlation IMO either. You want health care workers to use judgement, but you want it to be good judgement, founded in their healthcare education and I'm not seeing that at all and it really became obvious since we moved away from the before times.

[LordMortis]

Johns Hopkins follow up survey with lots of questions about anxiety and stress and depression coming right after the election... These are not the results they were looking.

[Smoove_B]

Not a straight line to COVID-19, but I never thought I'd be alive to see someone submit an anti-Fluoride OpEd to a national newspaper.

If you don't have a sub (and you shouldn't):



I should read up on this Leana Wen person. I wonder what she's been up to these last ~5 years. Regardless, this is absolutely fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and it's absolutely mind-blowing to see in 2024. Enjoy your luxury bones while they last, kids.

[gilraen]

They should ask Calgary how that worked out for them (spoiler alert: Calgary is trying to scramble the funds to hopefully put it back next year)

“In just eight years after fluoridation ended in 2011, the need for intravenous antibiotic therapy by children to avoid death by infection rose 700 per cent at the Alberta Children’s Hospital.”

[Max Peck]

The CBC ran a backgrounder on water fluoridation a few days ago, specifically in reaction to the idea that RFKjr was going to have some say in the issue.

[Kasey Chang]

I should read up on this Leana Wen person. I wonder what she's been up to these last ~5 years. Regardless, this is absolutely fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and it's absolutely mind-blowing to see in 2024. Enjoy your luxury bones while they last, kids.

She's one of those stealth antivaxers that hangs her title "former Baltimore health commissioner" high as if that gave her more authority. During COVID high season, she advocated stuff like "accept it as the new norm". As of 2022 her public stuff (CNN, WP) is a bit more centrist but people have a long memory...

And as the pandemic has lingered, Dr. Wen’s views have largely become aligned with pandemic-related recommendations from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/202 ... k-backlash

[Smoove_B]

Sarcasm does not work well on forums; I am well aware, but thanks.

[Smoove_B]

I swear I'm not a one-note wonder, but this article covers so much of what I've felt these last for years. I guess it's potentially ironic how COVID-19 helped Biden win in 2020 but then it might have helped in lose in 2024.

Joe Biden had his work cut out for him when he took the Oath of Office that cold January day in 2021. The nation was deeply divided and in the previous 11 months, more than 400,000 Americans had lost their lives to a deadly airborne virus.

Not only had President Trump been late in responding to the threat, he had downplayed it in the name of getting the country back open ahead of the 2020 election. He targeted state governors who implemented basic viral control measures like stay-at-home orders, suggesting they were threats to liberty; he publicly scoffed at the need for masks and encouraged the use of quack treatments. His administration embraced and helped promote an unworkable, fringe herd immunity strategy reliant on mass infection.

More to the point:

On the promise of stability—and with credibility leftover from the Obama administration—Biden won in a landslide, taking back the Blue Wall and thrashing Trump by 7 million votes nationwide. His party, meanwhile, won the House and Senate, and scored key victories in the state races in a census year, ensuring fairer legislative maps for the next decade.

But once in office, Biden’s pandemic management strategy looked very familiar. Instead of following the science and putting workers’ lives before corporate profits, reopening was always the first priority of the new administration, as it had been under the previous one. Armed with the new COVID vaccines and positive early data indicating they were 90 percent effective at preventing transmission of the disease, the new administration decided, as one staffer told The Washington Post, to “vaccine our way out” of the crisis.

...

A more holistic approach would have seen a push for clean indoor air—something that would also have prepared us for outbreaks of future airborne pandemics, like say, an H5N1 bird flu outbreak. By now, we could have had CO2 monitoring and HEPA filtration as our “new normal,” as well as public education about these tools.

Among the many casualties of this vaccine-only approach was federal pandemic relief. Key programs began expiring shortly after Biden took office without a fight from Democrats. The last round of stimulus payments went out with his American Rescue Plan in March 2021 and were notably $600 shy of the $2,000 he and his party had promised during the Georgia runoffs—Democrats defended the discrepancy by noting that in December, $600 checks had already gone out (with Donald Trump’s name on them). Other programs would quickly follow suit like the Small Business Administration’s restaurant revitalization fund, which ran dry in March 2021. The Paycheck Protection Program ended that May.

In August, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium lapsed, prompting freshman Missouri Congresswoman Cori Bush to lead a protest on the steps of the Capitol. While she briefly succeeded in shaming the administration into announcing a 60-day extension of protections, the right-wing Supreme Court ultimately killed the plan. The next month, the expanded unemployment programs came to an end.

Where the wheels came off:

In May, the CDC issued new guidance that the vaccinated need not wear masks in most situations and on Independence Day, Biden declared independence from COVID was around the counter. At town halls that month, the president assured Americans, “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the IC unit, and you’re not going to die” and “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”

But trouble was brewing. Weekly COVID deaths had started to surge again in July, driven by the new Delta variant, having hit their low the week of July 3. As the days grew shorter and the summer season drew to a close, the numbers grew higher and the president’s optimism looked quaint. In August, the administration announced a booster campaign, realizing that vaccine-induced immunity waned over time. The week of September 4 saw deaths reach their zenith at nearly 15,500.

Now I realize most people are probably not holding on to what happened in the summer of 2021 when voting in 2024, but the impacts of how we transitioned away from COVID-19 (I think) rippled out into the future. Specifically, playing down the short and long term impacts to individuals and families that were still suffering (especially in marginalized populations) with repeated illness.

This author believes the actual turning point was about 6 months later:

Omicron marked a turning point. The administration shifted to normalizing life with the virus. In March 2022, the CDC changed the metric and color scheme of its county COVID heat map, concealing viral spread from the public. Whereas the old map was based solely on transmission and displayed a scale of blue to red indicating low to high, the new one would incorporate hospital capacity and run pastel green to pastel orange. Suddenly, the alarmingly red U.S. was a pleasant light green.

The normalization of forever COVID, however, did not include any major changes to protect workers from the persistent threat to their health. Experts like Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves were calling for things like clean indoor air rules and universal paid leave, but these voices went ignored. Biden’s promised universal OSHA standard never materialized.

Though I'd argue it was just a natural conclusion to what had been verbalized the summer before.

Anyway, people are going to earn a PhD connecting the 2020 and 2024 elections to COVID-19; it was an undeniable influence. I know it wasn't the only thing, but I do think it had a bigger influence than many might initially consider.