CDC Says: Back to Work (02/15/24)
Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant and Abby Cartus discuss this week’s news that the CDC is planning to drop its covid isolation guidelines, and how the proposed change is emblematic of the Biden administration’s long running practice of undoing pandemic policies as a form of labor disciple.
Note: On March 1st, the CDC announced that it has officially dropped the five-day isolation period, “effective immediately.” In doing so they not only went forward with this a month ahead of the proposed guidance review, but notably did so without a public comment period that was suggested in the initial reporting.
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Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)
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I'm Beatrice Adler-Bolton, and I'm here today with my co-hosts, Artie Vierkant.
Artie Vierkant 1:27
Hello.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:28
And Abby Cartus.
Abby Cartus 1:29
Hello.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:29
And we have an important COVID episode for you today. This week, The Washington Post reported that the CDC is planning to update COVID-19 isolation guidance, ending the recommendation that people who test positive for COVID stay home from work and school for five days. So we're gonna get into what's happening now, the broader context, recent history, and what it all means. Now, this news, of course, comes as we continue to see roughly 2,000 official COVID deaths a week in the United States and over 20,000 weekly hospitalizations. According to The Washington Post who broke the story, the CDC is planning on releasing the updated guidance in April. And the reporting also contains a lot of interesting details, one in particular that I just want to emphasize here at the top. So The Washington Post reads,
"Work on revising isolation guidance has been underway since last August, but was paused in the fall as COVID cases rose."
Artie Vierkant 2:26
Mmm.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:27
Yeah, so we're going to be coming back to that shortly. But if the CDC goes ahead with this, it will be putting an end to some of its few remaining pieces of guidance and putting a cap on what has been an aggravating mini arc of guidance changes within the broader sociological production of the end of the pandemic. And as I mentioned at the top, the proposed guidance changes would eliminate even the already inadequate five day isolation guidance, abruptly announced at the very end of 2021. A move which, as we noted at the time, was motivated not by like some new scientific information or understanding about the COVID disease process, but out of business lobby pressure to keep people at work even through illness, and out of, as Anthony Fauci said at the time, you know, this guidance change was prioritized because the worry was that there was "a danger that there will be so many people who are being isolated who are asymptomatic for the full 10 days that you could have a major negative impact on our ability to keep society running."
Artie Vierkant 3:29
Yeah. So I mean, I think here's what we should probably do today, and just to talk about sort of the overall context here, because I think when things like this happen, as we saw in December 2021, was that, you know, I think for a lot of people, it's pretty fair to say, you know, not generally people who follow COVID stuff, or like follow Death Panel, for example, but I think for people, in general, it's safe to say that when the CDC announces new guidance changes like this, the reaction is typically like, oh okay, science must have changed, right? Or just like, oh, well, they're the ones who would know, right? Like, they're the ones who would know, so they're probably right, whatever. And that's obviously to the extent that people notice it at all, like notice the guidance change at all. And I mean, actually, as kind of a sidebar, I think what's funny about that is that this kind of gives the lie to the whole idea that public health -- like that the public has simply lost confidence in public health or whatever. Because actually, as we've seen, as we talk about with masking all the time, when the CDC says, yeah, don't worry about it, or whatever, people fucking listen, right?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 4:28
Yep.
Abby Cartus 4:28
Yep.
Artie Vierkant 4:28
So, you know, we can talk about that tautology later maybe. But so, you know, I just want to kind of -- I think what's important to do with this conversation, because we're kind of reacting to this, there's not terribly much information, although there is a lot of context that we can get into both historically, but as Bea mentioned, also in terms of what has happened really recently in both the media and in state governments and things like that. But I think, you know, we should just do sort of an end run on that idea that it's just sort of this contextless, like, oh, things are just different now and it's fine, actually.
Abby Cartus 5:02
Yeah, totally. There's something going on discursively and rhetorically with this that I think is very interesting. And there are a couple threads that I want to pick up on as we move through this conversation. But just to start, I was reading a CNN article that was reporting about, you know, these proposed changes in CDC guidelines. And all these articles are kind of the same. They all talk about how California and Oregon, you know, have made these changes at the state level. And this CNN article, I kind of flagged it in particular, because there's a line in it that I think it's so -- it's doing a lot of work, I think, discursively. And the line is something like, oh, you know, these -- California and Oregon have changed their policies, and this -- you know, this reflects that COVID policy is evolving alongside the pandemic.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 5:50
Oh yes. Naturally.
Abby Cartus 5:50
And I was just kind of like, oh, record scratch, like, what the fuck did you just say? Like the way that this is being talked about, I think you're totally right, Artie, and the way that it's being reported, makes it seem like, yeah, this is some kind of scientifically motivated decision, that policies just evolve, you know, that they're organisms just like us. And that is, I mean, simply ridiculous. But you can see why that kind of veil of scientistic mystification is really necessary. It's just a continuation of the Biden administration's approach to the pandemic, which has been coercing people -- you know, economically coercing people into risky situations. And the reporting about the proposed guidance changes is very, very quick to move to comparisons to earlier points in the pandemic, right. You know, it's true that the absolute number of people dying of COVID every week is not as high as it was in January 2021.
And I feel like that's like a huge rhetorical weapon being sort of deployed in the media right now. But it's really kind of ghoulish, because to make those comparisons, and to argue that, you know, well -- to argue that the science informing this decision is just that fewer people are dying of COVID every week is to make like an explicit argument that some of these people just don't matter, you know, and that it's not the point of health guidance, it's not the point of the CDC, to like protect people from infectious threats. I think that's what's so kind of sinister to me about the way that this is being reported on, is that these comparisons hinge on the assumption that it's just like, well, who cares, you know what I mean? Like, we can't stop society, we can't do anything. We can't even wear masks, you know what I mean?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 6:32
And it also is like, we don't care if your boss makes you go back to work sick.
Abby Cartus 7:49
No.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 7:50
And we don't care that the evidence that is available about Long COVID prevalence suggests that Long COVID is more likely to occur when you like go back to regular levels of physical activity too quickly after a COVID infection, sometimes even an asymptomatic infection. And ultimately, as you're saying, Abby, “The Science" here is simply that the raw number of people dying is different. It is not --
Abby Cartus 8:21
Yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 8:21
And that does not necessarily reflect any change in the virus itself, right?
Abby Cartus 8:27
No.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 8:27
This is not -- this is not like, oh, we have data that shows that now after this shit poor job we've done on vaccination --
Artie Vierkant 8:36
There's like magically no infectious period or something, yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 8:38
Right, that magically people don't asymptomatically transmit COVID anymore. Surprise! You know, that is not what they're saying here. They're just saying aggregate, by our own measurement of deaths, after we have like turned off all this data infrastructure and reporting, we're doing better than we were at the worst point of the pandemic.
Abby Cartus 8:56
Yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 8:57
And therefore, like, who cares? And what I think is important to underline here is that what they're also doing is, once again, you know, something that I think we talked about when the last change happened in late 2021, you know, right after they had encouraged all this holiday travel, you have incredibly high levels of infection --
Abby Cartus 9:15
Mhmm.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 9:15
The Delta CEO is like worried about too many people calling out sick, right? Like, this is the kind of context of the last change. And what you saw was this kind of rhetorical move in this guidance change to conceptually separate infections and sickness, right, like that the fact that --
Abby Cartus 9:33
Absolutely.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 9:34
You have to be infected to transmit, like the separation between outcomes from COVID and catching COVID is also sort of what this guidance change attempts to achieve. And part of it is, you know, just a tremendous sort of bias and thumb on the scale in terms of making material who society is for, right, they're treating this as a precondition, as something that is real, that it's okay to make the guidance reflect it, right, instead of understanding that guidance is, you know, setting expectations, right, this removes power that workers might have against bosses who are going to say, come back to work sick, because you no longer can say there's anything supporting your assertion that you need five days off even, you know, probably more if you catch COVID.
Artie Vierkant 10:20
I just want to focus on this putative justification for a second, because this is -- I mean, this isn't even a guidance proposal. This is like a report about, they're going to do this in April or whatever, and they've been talking about it since August. So you know, we know that the science hasn't changed on COVID and COVID transmission, we know that nothing is fundamentally different, so what is the justification that they're using? So I mean, if we look in this Washington Post piece, for example, they say,
"Officials said they recognize the need to give the public more practical guidelines for COVID-19, acknowledging that few people are following isolation guidance that hasn't been updated since December 2021."
And I want to pause on this for a second, because, first of all, obviously, this will be very familiar as an argument for any number of different moves to rollback COVID protections for the last few years. We've seen this, especially with masking, we always hear this thing of like, oh, people aren't doing it anyway. And I just think what's really important to mention about this is, there is a huge difference between telling yourself, you know, if you're the CDC or the Biden administration, right, telling yourself, you know, many people aren't doing this anyway, so fuck it, versus recognizing it as the political problem that it is, right? That, sure, yeah, we need stronger public health guidance, like even the current guidance we're sort of talking about was flawed from the moment it was dropped. People are still regularly sick and contagious beyond the five day period.
You know, it's not -- it's not super complicated to understand that infectious disease can continue to be infectious beyond this incredibly narrow window that we have essentially marked out because of labor discipline, right? And the thing I think it's so important to just like really early on communicate about this is like, okay, if your defense is, people aren't doing this anyway, right, well, let's look at the conditions in which people are not doing this anyway.
Because, you know, if we're real about it, I think that for a lot of people, even when they hear this news, if they're not like particularly following COVID rather carefully or anything, a lot of people might just be like, what isolation guidance, you know what I mean? Simply because, I mean, if you just think about like the conditions of work in this country, the conditions of work and COVID in this country, first of all, it's not like people's fucking job necessarily guarantees them sick leave for however long they're sick, or sick leave at all, really. You know, I think for a lot of people if they get COVID, and they're like, okay boss, you know, as per CDC guidelines, I now have to isolate for five days, and then I can end isolation after day five, if I haven't had a fever for 24 hours --
Abby Cartus 10:46
My symptoms are mild and improving [laughing].
Artie Vierkant 11:51
Right, without the use of fever reducing medication, but if on day five, I do have a fever, or if at any point during those five days, I have shortness of breath, or difficulty breathing, or I was hospitalized, well then I'm going to be isolating through at least day 10. Those are the actual current recommendations, by the way, current guidelines for isolation from COVID. I'm not making that up. But you know, if people say that to their boss, I think for a lot of people, first of all, most forms of work, if you're taking days off of work, you're probably not getting paid sick days in the first place.
Second, even if you are taking unpaid sick days, I am certain that for a lot of people, you know, the answer that people are gonna get to that statement from -- like the answer from their boss, right, if they say that to their boss, like I'm going to -- okay, see you in possibly 10, 11 days, right, like the answer from their boss is going to be, okay, have fun looking for another job, right. And we've seen that over and over again.
We've seen people post like screenshots of texts with their manager, or with their employer, who are like, yeah, no. But you know, the point is, the real problem here is not simply -- like, we can't just look at, in a vacuum, this idea of like the duration of the isolation period itself. Like yes, sure we can, but then we're going to be, you know, grounded always in this morass of like arguing the science or whatever, arguing the -- arguing, contagious disease is contagious, right? Which, as we've seen over and over again, for things like -- I mean, if you remember like the six feet versus three feet arguments in 2021 --
Abby Cartus 11:51
Oh god.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 12:27
Mhmmm.
Artie Vierkant 12:50
Or simply the, you know, pay people to stay home arguments in 2020, right, we know how those arguments go. Here's the science and then obviously, always, ideology, hegemony is going to be like, yeah, fuck that, like we found a different expert who says this other thing. That's one of the reasons that we make fun of some of these experts all the time and like put them on display for here is someone who is just shilling for empire for no fucking reason, right? So you know, like the real problem here, again, is not just the duration of the isolation period itself. It's the complete lack of material support for any ability for people to do isolation in the first place, or to take collective COVID protections at all.
Abby Cartus 15:08
Yes. I said this at the very beginning of the pandemic, and I would like credit for it, okay [Beatrice and Artie laughing]. Because I was fucking right. And now all these losers -- I'm sorry, all these loser old white men in public health are getting just like fêted, incredibly, because they're like, wow, it seems that like lack of social policy really made COVID a lot worse than it had to be. It's like no fucking shit, Sherlock. You know, how much money did the NIH give you to transmit this like earth shattering fucking insight? It's a backwards way of thinking about how illness and sickness work at the population level in a society.
And it's starting to really -- well, I mean, it's always scared me quite a lot, but in their zeal to sort of disappear COVID and mystify all these changes and bend over backwards to suit the demands of business lobbies of all kinds. I feel like some of these like health -- these so-called health experts, you know, these horrible shills, I think that they have kind of like overshot the mark a little bit, because what I'm kind of seeing in the coverage of this proposed guidance change is like a little bit of creep of this idea that it's just preposterous, you know what I mean, to stay home when you're sick. It's preposterous to keep your kids out of school when they're sick. You know, like, some of these articles are saying, like isn't it wild that some schools require kids to stay home when they have lice? I was like, uhh, no, like, that's good, actually, like, I don't know. It's kind of undermining this whole logic of infection prevention in general.
And that is happening in a context where we have an architecture of social policy that is actively hostile to people in a lot of ways. And, you know, the bright, bright lights, you know, those genius health experts that we love to listen to, somehow -- now, I don't know if it's because they genuinely have these like ideological preferences. I think more likely, they're just kind of ignorant and like don't really know anything about anything and are popping off in national media because people are asking them to, you know, but our genius health experts haven't really figured out that like, oh, maybe -- and I feel like I've made this point on the podcast many times -- maybe the absolute disaster and tragedy of COVID is showing us the things in our social policy that need to change so that people don't die of preventable fucking illnesses. And that is the core --
Artie Vierkant 17:56
Exactly.
Abby Cartus 17:57
[yelling a little bit] That is the core of fucking public health! And so it drives -- like, there is steam coming out my ears reading, again, all of these bloviating experts who have no fucking clue what they're talking about. And I mean, this is what makes me so mad about the equity arguments that get brought in around this, but I'm gonna -- I've been talking for a long time, so I'm gonna stop here [laughing].
Artie Vierkant 18:16
Well, this is -- okay. So this -- well, right, and this point is exactly what I think is actually quite useful about this particular moment, because there is a little bit of time between now and when they're said to be putting this guidance change out, because, okay, we know that it's obviously ascientific, we know that now, the originating excuses for this, as they have been in the past, are basically something, something, labor productivity, something, something, people aren't doing this anyway. Well, okay. This is presenting a very obvious political problem that I think it is clearly fundamentally wrong to respond to by saying, here are the conditions that we are saying we're responding to, ergo, let's just drop the guidance.
Abby Cartus 18:18
Right.
Artie Vierkant 18:29
The conditions that they're talking about are the conditions in which you say, hmm, people aren't isolating for COVID. We continue to have 2,000 deaths a week from COVID.
Abby Cartus 19:17
Maybe our guidance is not good enough, you know, like our social policy --
Artie Vierkant 19:20
Well, no, no, no, not just -- right, the social -- like, perhaps this is a crystal clear signal that we should be instituting a national paid sick leave program, at a minimum, right? To make it so that people can actually stay home from work when they are sick, which is, as we know, under current economic conditions, really not possible for most people, right. So you know, I think like this is just a really important thing to pinpoint and a reason why I think that like you can't talk about -- I think it's irresponsible to talk about where we are currently in the pandemic and to just throw to, oh, well, things are different now and people are taking it less seriously, and oh, you know, no one isolates anyway, ha ha ha. Like, it's irresponsible to -- whether you're in the media or especially a political figure, to be just sort of repeating that, without any mention of, well, you know, things would be substantially materially different if we had different social supports for this. Things would be substantially, materially different if labor conditions generally were very different in the United States, but also, at a baseline, things would be very different if we had a national paid sick leave policy, something that was basically promised going in, that was just totally -- like one of the things that disappeared the quickest, as soon as Biden came in office, right?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 19:36
Well, and I really appreciate the points you just -- both of you just made. And I want to add one thing about the example of Oregon, because Oregon is being held up as kind of the real world evidence that says this is okay. To give an example of this, in The Washington Post piece that broke this news, there's a sentence --
Abby Cartus 21:07
I think I know what you're going to say [giggling].
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 21:08
That says,
"After Oregon made its change, the state has not experienced any disproportionate increases in community transmission or severity, according to data shared last month with the national association representing state health officials."
Now, okay…
Abby Cartus 21:25
Disproportionate to what?
Artie Vierkant 21:28
To what, yeah [laughing].
Abby Cartus 21:28
Okay. And what is your definition of disproportionate? That's what I would ask if I were a fucking journalist. I mean, I don't -- you can tell Jeff Bezos owns this fucking paper.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 21:38
Well, and I want to just dig into like exactly what they're talking about here, not just the way it's being framed, but exactly what Oregon did, and what happened.
Abby Cartus 21:47
Yes.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 21:47
Because what they're talking about is how Oregon in May of 2023, as the federal public health emergency has ended, around the same time, I believe it is like around May 10th.
Artie Vierkant 22:02
It was May, yeah. May 2023.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 22:02
Yeah. So really early May, you have Oregon adopting these new guidelines, right, that say, you know, the symptom based guidance similar to the recommendations for flu. Simultaneously, they changed their reporting on how many infections there are weekly, right, the New York Times tracker, for example, for infections in the state of Oregon ends that same week that this policy changed. And if you look at, for example, the things that did continue to update, like, for example, how many patients are in hospitals and ICUs, you have a really interesting look, right? Which is that, yes, in the first four months of 2023, Oregon did really well with a steady, pretty steady decline in cases, hospitalizations, all of that, deaths. And you know, when they updated their guidance to make it more flexible, and to essentially just allow more asymptomatic transmission in the community, it did have an effect, you know? It did actually have an effect. Whether that was going to happen anyways or not doesn't fucking matter, because you made the change, right? Epidemiology -- Abby, correct me if I'm wrong, but epidemiology doesn't mean that we just get to make shit up and play in hypotheticals all day, right?
Abby Cartus 22:20
I mean, it depends on which epidemiologist you're talking to, but I would say no.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 23:22
Well, fair. Well, and I mean, you know, I think when we're talking about trying to like use epidemiology to guide decision making, right, like Oregon being held up as an example, does not fucking hold up, right? Oregon has not continued to decline. Oregon has repeated a pattern of infection that has come, you know, beginning in late August, and deaths went up. And that's how we know that infections went up, because when people die of COVID, it happens because of COVID infection spreading around in the community. And ultimately, what the CDC is saying is that we don't know, you know, how many people can be asymptomatically transmitting COVID. It could be a very small number of people, it could be 50%, it could be 80%.
Abby Cartus 24:07
It could be everyone, yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 24:08
It could be everyone, we don't know. But they are running with the assumption that it's not that many people and they're saying, because it's not that many people, it doesn't matter. And that doesn't actually make sense.
Abby Cartus 24:20
No.
Artie Vierkant 24:21
No.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 24:21
It doesn't actually logic out, right? And this is why it's part of the disconnection, both of like asymptomatic transmission from any contribution to community spread, and therefore deaths, and also the disconnection of infections to deaths themselves, right. And to hold Oregon up as an example and say, well, it worked in this one state that is not nationally representative in terms of income, spatial distribution, density of cities, climate, right?
Abby Cartus 24:46
Demographics.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 24:48
Demographics. And say, therefore, we need to meet everybody where they're at, as you have, you know, the limited data. We have wastewater data exploding in the South in the United States, right?
Artie Vierkant 25:01
So you mentioned Oregon, and because you did that, I think, I want to just bring one thing in related to that, which I think is just so fascinating, because again, you know, as we're talking about, there are two states that this is being kind of thrown to, it's California and Oregon. This reminds me, also, of like the Biden administration justification, by the way, for ending unemployment insurance, pandemic unemployment insurance, the Biden administration justification for ending masking has sort of been this, well, you know, the states have kind of gotten ahead of us, and we don't want to look like we're behind. So instead of taking on a leadership role in federal public health policy, we're going to just try and -- we're going to try and meet the ball, where it is, as it were, or whatever. We're just going to, you know, abdicate any kind of responsibility to lead on this at a federal level, or whatever. We're going to go for that. And so, you know, what's being thrown to often is California, just recently in January, announced this change, that they're going to be moving to dropping the five day isolation guidance.
And as Bea mentioned, Oregon did this in May, May of last year. And I think, looking at, again, the justification for these things is very telling. So there is an Associated Press report on this that we've been looking at, to prepare for this. And I find fascinating one of the things that it said about this. They talked to an Oregon State Health Officer about this change. And so I'm just going to read from this,
"Dr. Dean Sidelinger, Oregon State Health Officer, said that equity was a key factor considered in the decision to change isolation policy in the state."
Eyebrow raising already. They then quote him saying,
"From a pragmatic standpoint, from an evidence based and equity standpoint, trying to make sure that we weren't unnecessarily burdening families with this isolation policy, keeping kids out of school, or keeping people out of work who may have very limited sick leave. This made sense for us."
And so, again, what do we got there? People who may have limited sick leave. Hmm.
Abby Cartus 27:08
People living with limited sick leave [laughing]. These fucking people.
Artie Vierkant 27:13
Right. I mean, from what angle do you want to approach this political problem, right?
Abby Cartus 27:16
Exactly.
Artie Vierkant 27:17
But also, again, I find the framing of equity, which Abby, you brought up before already in this conversation, but this framing of equity, of the isolation process being a burden on families, not a burden imposed on them by the lack of social support to --
Abby Cartus 27:35
Correct. Correct.
Artie Vierkant 27:35
Isolate, right. I mean, it's smacks of frankly -- not to make -- not to like draw everything back to fucking like Great Barrington Declaration --
Abby Cartus 27:45
No, do it.
Artie Vierkant 27:45
Because lord knows those assholes have not been relevant for like two years now. But like, the whole let it rip philosophy and the like totally fake -- you know, the like make believe fantasy that the Kulldorffs of the world were able to run with so long of like, oh, actually, less COVID protection, less COVID social policy is more beneficial to working class people, right? That's --
Abby Cartus 28:14
Mhm. That's fucked, yeah.
Artie Vierkant 28:15
Like that totally fringe idea, which is so fucked up and wrong, is just, oh, that's just the thing that like the Oregon Public Health Officer is saying now.
Abby Cartus 28:26
Oh yeah. But that's what's so fucked up about the Great Barrington Declaration is that it has infiltrated -- I mean, it is now like mainstream thought in epidemiology. I remember in like, I don't know, 2021 maybe -- it's such a blur -- you know, it was like Omicron, it was a really, really like bad time in the pandemic, and there was a group of researchers in epi -- now, this is not Vinay Prasad. These aren't like clinical people. A group of researchers at UCSF wrote -- and this is the same group that has produced like "the evidence" that gets cited about occupational risks and occupational disparities. This is the group that published that article showing that like restaurant workers and agricultural workers, you know, were the most burdened by COVID deaths, you know what I mean, were dying of COVID at the highest rates of any occupational group.
This same group of researchers wrote a series I think of like just asinine blog posts about equity and saying, like, well, you know, there are some fringe fucking crazies in epidemiology, pointing, you know, gesturing at me, who say that we need to like close things down, but how does that work if you are a low income person, and you have to go to work? And I'm like, well, you're ignoring like the actual coherent political critique that I'm making, which is that we need to close things down and that's not going to fucking work if we don't give people income support, you know what I mean? Like if we don't give people sick leave, if we don't like amp up social support, because the thing that is making this a problem is the lack of social policy.
The thing that is making like rampant COVID spreads something that we somehow just have to live with and like, somehow, that's equity, you know, to like allow COVID to just spread and disproportionately kill working class people. Like want to talk about social determinants of health? You know, the lack of social policy is forcing people to work, and to work sick. And I don't think that you can look at the history of the CDC guidance changes during the Biden administration and what's happening now, I don't think that you can look at those things and conclude that public health is anything other than an adjunct of the state for rationalizing the continuation of business as usual. And like, yeah, the exacting of huge, huge tolls on people in order to keep the economic system functioning. Like there's just -- there is no other way to understand this.
And I think this equity, these equity arguments really show that, because they're totally, totally -- and I mean, it's because these people are epidemiologists, they don't have any type of political analysis whatsoever, and I'm guessing that a lot of them have kind of outstanding ideological preferences, because, you know, academics have a class position. We're not just out there, like in the ether floating around. You know, this is like the work from home class, who is saying, oh, but it's such an equity issue. You know, if people are supposed to stay at home when they're sick, like that's no good, because they might miss -- you know, they might miss a day of wages. I agree that that is a disaster. But like, why is it that you miss a day of wages if you have to stay home sick? That's the question that none of these people are asking. And none of these people have been asking for four years. And there's no excuse for that.
Artie Vierkant 32:03
And this is also why I think one other important piece of context to bring in here for what is kind of also happening around this shift and in the context of social policies in, not just federally but in the states, I think, you know, the timing is quite interesting to me that this also comes really shortly after the Governor of New York State, Kathy Hochul, announced basically, or put into her budget, a proposal to remove the COVID specific state sick leave policy, which, you know, is one of the few states that actually had a COVID state sick leave policy. They pay for sick leave days for certain professions for COVID infections. And, you know, now this policy wasn't perfect, but it was something and, again, is one of the few places that did this, I think it's actually really interesting to look at like what this policy was, if it goes away.
And I like this description from Hellgate NYC, shout out to local and independent media. But so here's their rundown of how the COVID paid sick leave policy works and what Hochul wants to end,
"Businesses with 11 to 99 employees have to provide five paid sick days; businesses with 100 or more employees..."
-- again, five paid sick days, I wonder why it's five.
"Businesses with 100 or more employees, as well as all public employers, have to provide 14 days of sick leave. Employers with 10 or fewer workers and less than $1 million in revenue only have to provide unpaid sick days, but workers can get partial pay from state family leave and disability benefits. The policy also applies if an employee's child gets COVID and has to quarantine."
That's important.
"The required COVID sick leave is in addition to any other paid time off an employer may offer but workers are limited to using it three times in their lifetime,"
which I think is very fucked. Obviously, I think it's fucked if it's going away, but I find that last part very interesting. Like there is a limit on -- you can use this COVID sick leave policy three times and then you're out. But you know, who is -- who is reported to have been the sort of muscle behind this, of course, but you know, business groups because they say, oh, it's too expensive.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 34:10
Well, and I think one of the things that's just frustrating, and I know we've said this kind of over and over, but such a theme of the pandemic is taking conditions that are productive of misery, of forced illness, of unnecessary exposure to COVID, the kind of financial burden of all these things, and really kind of naturalizing these conditions as important things we need to preserve, right? Like the fight to save the right to exploit workers has been the greatest rallying cry of the pandemic, right? Not to do something, anything, to raise the bar collectively in terms of health, right?
Even the smallest thing, like a piece of guidance that is barely enforceable with your boss, right, that is already inadequate, like why does that have to go, right? In what world does that have to go, where -- that really kind of like has any kind of sense to it, right. And I know that a lot of times when these changes happen, it can be a moment where people are kind of like newly brought into sort of realizing that the pandemic has actually preceded in the kind of highly, socially produced way that it has. And part of that is that, you know, it becomes more and more obvious that despite the undoing of pandemic protections, and the rallying cry of "the pandemic is over," right, clearly, things have not "gone back to normal." But what is happening is that there is incredible social pressure to now normalize what is going on right now, as normal. And so you have this kind of two step process, right, where you naturalize the status quo, they're rising to the occasion to protect the right to exploit workers, to exploit school children, right, as part of the exploitation of workers, right? Because why do we need to keep kids in school?
Well, because we're talking about childcare infrastructure, and we're talking about making sure that parents can get back to work. And that, you know, like, for example, COVID -- you can get COVID and you can spread it to everyone in your household, and everyone in your house might be sick for two months, right, progressively, one of you might be sick. And under old guidance, during the beginning of the pandemic, everyone would have had to stay home from work and school for that whole time, technically, right. And so gradually, we've seen the erosion, not just of guidance in terms of how to positively protect yourself, but in terms of protections against your boss's inclination to force you back to work sick, against the inclination of our political economy to normalize a level of annual illness that is just exponentially much larger than before. You know, do you remember how often you all got sick with the flu before COVID?
Abby Cartus 34:10
Yeah. Not often.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 34:47
Not the way that Michael Osterholm talks about it, where he talks about, you know, four or five infections, no big deal, right? Like, you didn't get the flu every year, even, right?
Abby Cartus 36:59
No, I used to --
Artie Vierkant 37:05
Much less multiple times a year.
Abby Cartus 37:26
I would get sick maybe once a year, maybe.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 37:31
But it's being normalized now.
Abby Cartus 37:32
And now it's like, oh yeah, you're going to get COVID every time there's a wave. And they're trying to impose this weird seasonal pattern. They're like, well, you know, we do see upticks around the holidays, it has settled into that pattern. And it's like no, it hasn't. You're telling -- like exactly what you're saying, Bea, you're telling people that now it's super -- it's super normal, and in fact, it's good, and in fact, it's fair. You know, it's justice, it's equity, if you get COVID every time there is a surge of COVID cases, which is like four to six times [laughing].
Artie Vierkant 38:00
Every time the wrong vapors roll in on the right breeze.
Abby Cartus 38:06
Sorry to cut you off, but yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 38:07
No, you're exactly right. And what's going on, too, is that these changes are presented as innocuous, as affectless, as effectless. They don't change vibes, and they don't change actual COVID spread, right. Couldn't possibly affect anything in the world.
Abby Cartus 38:25
No.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 38:25
This is just abstract, you know, guidance, shot into space.
Abby Cartus 38:30
Just dots in a simulation, baby. It's just numbers on a spreadsheet.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 38:33
Never to be looked at again, you know? It's like, but no, actually, shifting this guidance, you encourage people to engage in activities when they may still be infectious, right? We know the peak of shedding --
Artie Vierkant 38:46
Well, you allow -- you allow people who have power over other people to like pressure people into doing things, including at workplaces.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 38:52
Right, but you also encourage that, you know, these policies encourage that, right. They do that --
Abby Cartus 38:57
They gloss it with a fake scientific sheen, that it's actually fine now, you know what I mean?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 39:02
And what I'm saying is I want to say that they go further than just permitting it, right. This, as we were saying, that the trust in public health argument that is touted so often, right, is such bullshit. And one of the reasons why that argument doesn't stand up is when you hold it up against actual guidance and actual behavior, as the CDC has said, take off your mask, it's fine. We've seen declines in vaccination rate, we've seen COVID spreading, regardless of the fact they said it wasn't going to be a big deal to do this, right. And instead of responding to that disease going through the population, they're normalizing it. They're normalizing this level of sickness, and they're normalizing a level of sickness that, you know, looks a lot like how often I was sick as an immunocompromised person before I started responding to my additional risk of exposure to disease and of sickness when exposed.
Abby Cartus 40:01
Yeah. It's not funny, but I'm just like yeah, when you put it like that, it's so clear.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 40:07
What is trying to be normalized is something that I, as an immunocompromised person, experienced this level of sickness, it was fucking untenable. And I needed to make changes in my own life to accommodate this level of risk that I had taken on, right? If I had said to myself, you know, 15 years ago, you know, it's totally fine to get sick five or six times a year, this is awesome.
Abby Cartus 40:22
This is equity, actually. This rocks [laughing].
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 40:32
I would have lost like every job I lost over being disabled that much quicker, right? I would have missed out on so much of my life because I was sick. I could -- my symptoms could be way worse, right? Like, this is something that, you know, we can intervene, and we don't have to normalize, right. And it's very possible to make these interventions because we were able to do it and demonstrate the efficacy of layered pandemic protections in 2020, before there was a vaccine, when COVID was spreading in the United States, right. And instead of normalizing baseline precautionary principle, we don't know what we're dealing with with COVID long-term, COVID is still just four and a half years old, in terms of our data of COVID, right? We don't have --
Abby Cartus 41:16
Send it to fucking school. Send it to school with lice, it's old enough to go. [Beatrice and Artie laughing]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 41:22
We don't have decades, you know, of data on COVID is my point, right? And so to pretend like we do, and to normalize the level of illness and the concentration of illness and the ways that this like, again, makes us more precarious in terms of work, and the way it shifts the balance of power in the workplace, is really just -- it's frustrating, but it is also not just tacit approval, but it is encouraging this behavior.
Artie Vierkant 41:49
Really quickly to a point that you were making just kind of a moment ago. Yes, there is a lot that we don't know, but there's a lot more that we know now, compared to what we knew in 2021, for example, the last time that there was --
Abby Cartus 42:01
About the risk of reinfection.
Artie Vierkant 42:02
Right. Well, not just about the risk of infection. But I think the thing that, Bea, I think it was you who mentioned much earlier in the episode, it's a really good point I think to reiterate, one thing that we do know is you are more likely to develop Long COVID If you're doing something like having to rush back to work quickly in the middle of -- either in the middle of still being infected or like quickly after an infection, right. I mean, that's something that we do know now. And so this could have really disastrous consequences in terms pf -- just in terms of that, right. But in any case, I think, you know, speaking of 2021, before we kind of come to a conclusion here, I think it is important to kind of just take a step back and look back to the last time that this guidance change was made. Because I think -- while I think a lot of people listening to this right now will kind of already know this history to some degree, and you know, obviously, we've been following it for a very long time.
I remember when -- like when the guidance change was made in 2021, I think the episode that we did about it was called -- the title was, CDC Says Back to Work, should tell you everything you will need to know about what our assessment of it was. But you know, I think what's important just to underline is that, especially when you look at this change now, in context with the last time it was changed from ten days to five days in December 2021, these isolation guidelines themselves, especially in this relationship to the labor conditions in this country and all of that stuff, and how COVID is a class issue, COVID as a labor issue, these isolation guidelines themselves have been such a good bellwether for how the CDC and the Biden administration more generally have approached the pandemic first and foremost as an economic problem.
And so I think I want to have us take maybe a second to think back about how weird and abrupt that last guidance change was. So weird and abrupt it was actually that I think it's completely memory-holed how the timing was, which is that first, you know, it wasn't just oh, they just like out of -- spun out of thin air, as Walensky said on Christmas, "literally Christmas," which I always thought was funny. Like, it's not just that they spun out of thin air on Christmas, like, okay, all of a sudden, we're going down to five days, it sort of was like that, but it's memory-holed that, for instance, first, the CDC changed the guidance just for health care workers. And then there was this huge industry backlash basically, that was like, what about us?
And you know, and within days, it was also for them. I'm going to present a timeline in three New York Times headlines, if you'll indulge me. So here's from December 23rd. Headline, "CDC shortens COVID isolation period for healthcare workers," subheader is "The agency issued revised guidelines as Omicron cases climb and hospitals grapple with workers shortages that have left wards understaffed."
So that's December 23rd. December 24th, "CDC faces pressure to change isolation guidelines for sick workers," subheader, "Facing staffing shortages, companies are weighing conflicting guidance on when employees who have tested positive for the Coronavirus can safely returned to work."
Then, December 27th is when the change comes through itself, "As Omicron surges, officials shorten isolation times for many Americans," the subheader there is, "Hoping to prevent further disruptions to daily life, the CDC reduced the period that certain infected Americans must sequester." Hilarious language. But I think, you know, the middle one is probably I'm sure the most -- you know, I suspect will be the most interesting to us, because it also kind of helps us make our point. Again, that was the -- the middle one is December 24th, "CDC faces pressure to change isolation guidelines for sick workers."
That includes mention of things that we've brought up in many episodes, including that one that was, you know, CDC Says Back to Work, but also in COVID Year Three -- not four, three -- which is the Delta Airlines CEO letter and things like that, that people have talked about quite a lot. But I also think it's really interesting because this article, for example, includes expert comment from who other than Dr. Ashish Jha. No, not yet part of the administration. Not yet the COVID czar. Also about a month away from another New York Times profile where he was profiled with Emily Oster, in a feature interview by Kara Swisher.
Abby Cartus 46:36
I remember that. Not a girl, not yet a woman.
Artie Vierkant 46:41
But they -- you know, they quote Ashish Jhi in here saying,
"Requirements for longer isolation periods could also create disincentives for people to get tested, according to Dr. Ashish Jha, Dean of Brown School of Public Health. 'There are going to be a lot of people who are, if they have mild symptoms, are going to test or not report because it's really substantial to be out for 10 days.'"
And obviously, then there's like the quotes that we could read, that we've talked about a million times before, I think, Bea even -- or I think we even mentioned them much earlier, all of the -- we had statements from both Rochelle Walensky and Anthony Fauci, at the time, contemporaneous with this in December 2021, saying, preserving economic functioning, keep people at work, essentially, was the -- was the impetus for the guidance change. And you had reporting coming out right after that, basically saying, internally, when Rochelle Walensky, went to the team, and said, you know, we're dropping it down to five days, do this, here's like the New York Times, January 17th, for example,
"On the Sunday night after Christmas, Dr. Walensky called an emergency meeting of the agency's COVID response leaders. She told them the agency would shrink the recommended isolation period… Stunned, the scientists scrambled to gather the limited data to support the recommendations and to rewrite the hundreds of pages on the agency website that touch on quarantine and isolation. There was so little evidence for shortened isolation that the 'science brief' that typically accompanies guidance was downgraded to a 'rationale document.'"
So, you know, it's -- again, we've told this story many times in many different ways. So I'm really just glossing over parts of it. But I think it's important to reiterate some of these key parts of it, because it really is just, you know, perpetuation of capitalism. It really is just economic imperatives that they're following.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 48:32
No, and I'll add that one of the things that I think it's also important to remember about that time period is that Christmas 2021, this is the first kind of COVID Christmas where people are really traveling, right? So according to TSA reports from 2021, between December 23rd and December 25th, in the United States, 5.4 million people went through security screenings, which is about double the same period in 2020. So we had an immediate doubling of the amount of people that were traveling through airports, right. We had pressure from airport CEOs, we had pressure from the fact that they have chosen for many years now to run such lean staffing that there weren't enough people to fly the planes, there weren't enough people to staff the planes. There aren't enough people trained in the United States to do this job anymore, because the staffing is run so lean.
Abby Cartus 49:30
Why would the guidance do this to us, you know? This was the winter of severe illness and death, by the way.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 49:37
It was.
Abby Cartus 49:37
Like this is what you're describing.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 49:38
It was.
Abby Cartus 49:39
And I remember it was like the day after Thanksgiving. So it was like late November, when the first reports about Omicron were starting to come out. And I remember the grim fucking like drumbeat of -- like leading up to the holiday season, you know, because all the reporting was there's a new COVID variant, but it is so mild. Like you have never seen a variant so mild. It is so not a big deal. And explicitly, the message being pushed out, you know, from the federal government on down through, you know what I mean, every agency, all the media, everything, was do not cancel your holiday plans. Omicron is not that big a deal, okay? Don't get so scared of this thing that you stay home. Don't get so scared of this thing that you don't go shopping. Don't get so scared of this thing that you don't travel, you know. So like, this whole situation was created, like we were basically forcibly marched into holiday travel that winter, you know? When the Omicron variant hit the United States, then it was, oh, well, if you're vaccinated, it's fine. If you're not vaccinated, get vaccinated. Otherwise, you're gonna fucking die. And yeah, like this -- the first guidance change came in the middle of that wave that was so -- I mean, it was huge. It was so impactful. It's so infuriating, you know, that the response to that is, oh, well, it's the guidelines that's causing -- that's causing these massive societal disruptions. Again, why would the -- like, why would the guidance do this to us?
Artie Vierkant 51:14
Why would the guidelines do this to us, yeah.
Abby Cartus 51:15
So we just need to change the guidelines and then it's like all fine. But there's something so irreparably fucked about that because, I mean, as we've been saying this whole episode, that doesn't -- that's just a vibe, like that doesn't change a single fucking thing about what's actually going on. And now, yeah, we're three years later down the road. And it's the same, it's the same thing that's happening, in a slightly different context.
Artie Vierkant 51:15
Well, and I'd like to sort of bring in a couple of other pieces of context too, for that last guidance change, because this is something, again, that we talk about in the episode COVID Year Three, which is our end of 2021 and most of the year 2022, year in review for COVID. You know, in addition to sort of the acute business pressure, the lobbying that was going on at the time, there was also a lot of, you know, public discourse among sort of the usual suspects, I guess I would say, that was pushing for, like, do we really have to -- I mean, the president says it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated. We're all vaccinated. Do we really have to isolate any more? Here's like The Atlantic, December 7th, headline, "Why are we still isolating vaccinated people for 10 days?"
Abby Cartus 52:26
Because they can still transmit the virus. Next question.
Artie Vierkant 52:29
Again, that's like a week after Omicron emerges. Vox's Dylan Scott, December 17th, 10 days later, "Does it still make sense for vaccinated people with COVID-19 to isolate for 10 days?" You also had the same day, December 17th, again, we talk about this in COVID Year Three, December 17th, 2021, Ashish Jha on NPR's All Things Considered says, "We do not need to be doing mass quarantining right now. We have kids across America at home waiting out a 14 day quarantine, totally unnecessary." Three months later, he's in the fucking White House. I mean, you know, it's not hard to -- like 2021 isn't on trial here, obviously, 2021 isn't like the point here, but the events of 2021 and how blatant and how obscenely just for the purposes of, you know, we couldn't possibly let Build-A-Bear have staffing shortages, could we?You know what I mean? Like, how blatant that move was.
Abby Cartus 53:25
[Abby laughing] Won't someone think of the children?
Artie Vierkant 53:26
Right. It helps, I think, it really helps make it very clear, this is not just the oh, you know, things are rosy and cheery now. This is, well, they've waited a couple of years. They caught a lot of flack for how blatant it was the last time. They waited a while, and now they're like, okay, in April, we're gonna -- we're gonna maybe do this, let's be really quiet about -- and you know, that's everyone who cares about class politics, anyone who claims to care about working people, anyone who claims to care about disabled people, people who can't work, people, whatever -- this is a change that's hard setting a precedent for, well, you know, we never did this before, like scrap the idea that perhaps, you know, maybe we should have allowed people to have more sick days for flu or to isolate from the flu, etc. No, we're gonna harmonize it with all the completely irresponsible stuff that we did before that was both -- that was basically just something that we did for the purposes of labor discipline, and for the purposes of keeping the wheels of capitalism greased, no matter how much blood is the grease, right?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 54:32
And I want to just -- I want to bring in sort of one last receipt here that I want to make sure that for folks who may not have -- who may memory-holed this moment or just want like a refresher, I want to read to you all from a Washington Post piece from December 28th, 2021, called "New CDC guidelines were spurred by worries Omicron surge could lead to breakdown in essential services: Health officials worried that mass infections could result in tens of thousands of Americans unable to work," which is a telling thing. So it ends with the following three paragraphs, which this comes right after the guideline change is announced.
"The guidelines could offer relief to airlines, which began preemptively canceling flights before Christmas as coronavirus cases spiked among their crews. Carriers had lobbied the CDC for changes last week, arguing that it would be impossible to keep planes in the air with so many employees out with infections.
The airline industry group Airlines for America hailed the decision. “The aviation workforce is essential to maintaining the operations of air travel and cargo supply chains,” the group said in a statement.
Holly Wade, executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business, also applauded the decision, saying it could help alleviate workforce disruptions affecting many companies.”
So this period also, for people who have read Health Communism, this is the period when Artie and I are finishing the first draft of the book actually and turning it in. And part of the reason there isn't a chapter on COVID, but there is an incredible focus on the way that your health is really kind of recognized by the political economy as your capacity to work, right, and why that was such an important thing for us to foreground in the book, you know, it had already been part of the project that we were writing anyways. But this is the precipice that we were looking at as we were finishing the book. And as Artie said, a lot of our analysis on this comes out of COVID Year Three, which happens at the end of 2022, right after the book has already come out.
Artie Vierkant 56:35
Well, and also when we're writing it, finalizing that draft, basically, it's so evident to us, as we're saying constantly on the show at that point, that things are far from over. And that so much more of the disaster to come is not going to be possible to be documented in the thing that we're like putting out to press at the moment, you know what I mean?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 56:55
Right. Yeah. And I think one of the things that Artie and I talked about a lot as we were sort of finalizing the draft is, as we said, you know, we have this hunch, based on the last year and a half, in particular, the last year of the Biden administration from May of 2021, saying, take off your masks, if you're vaccinated, to July 4th, declaring independence from the virus, to the pandemic of the unvaccinated, to the winter of severe illness and death, to this change in the guidance, right. And we have all sorts of things happening, that we're covering that year with you, Abby, looking at the ways that teachers unions are being disciplined, right? And the thing that is just fucking frustrating and terrible, right, is that with every sort of progressive guideline change we've seen throughout the ongoing shift of COVID, from being a priority and a collective problem, to COVID being an individual problem, to COVID being about measuring and calculating risk, and then segmenting the populations in an imaginary way as if they don't interact with each other, to you know, COVID is mild, to COVID is no big deal, to Long COVID is not real.
All of these things ultimately come down to the relationships that we have as “earning, serving units” is the kind of framework that Marta Russell used, and that's one of the things that we quote her on in the book, which is we are valuable to the economy insofar as we are at work. And when we are not at work, you know, we're useless eaters. Just to go back to the subhead of this piece in Washington Post I read from, right, "Health officials worried that mass infections could result in tens of thousands of Americans unable to work." This was a decision made due to crisis levels of understaffing at hospitals. Pressure from businesses equated the crisis of understaffing in hospitals with holiday flights being canceled. The CDC caved to that, right. They recognized the consequences of that, I'm sure. I'm sure that there are people inside the CDC who see things the way that we see things and perhaps that's why this new guidance change is being announced for April and why they put it on ice in the fall.
Abby Cartus 59:07
Yep.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 59:08
But regardless of any lesson they may have learned about motherfucking timing and tact, it doesn't make any of what they're doing okay, or backed in science, right, or good for your "health," unless, of course, your health is merely your capacity to work. And CDC says, get back to work, and we don't give a fuck if you're sick, you know? And ultimately --
Abby Cartus 59:31
Well if you're working, you're not sick. So there you go.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 59:34
I was gonna say, if you're at work, then you're healthy. Doesn't matter how you feel, doesn't matter who you may infect, you know, if you're at work, you're healthy. Pat yourself on the back, bro. And what we're really seeing in this guideline change, right, in this potential guideline change is a reiteration of the real kind of underlying, core proof for the argument that COVID is a labor issue, right? That COVID is not just about the impact on vulnerable people, and how vulnerable people are not a part of the community, right? That is part of how the kind of construction of COVID not being a labor issue is being reinforced. And this is part of what we're fighting against, and what we have been fighting against this whole time.
And unfortunately, the virus has not changed. What has changed is that we know all of the terrible things that it does to the body in way more detail, with way more real world evidence than should have happened, right? Because absolutely, it's possible to protect yourself from COVID with layered mitigations. It's very difficult to do that in our let it rip society. And that's ultimately sort of what has changed about the virus has not been this kind of act of God, right, but it relates to the political economy, it relates to priorities, it relates to, you know, ultimately, the fact that the underlying principle, as you're saying, of public health right now in the United States, but also in some ways, historically, has always been about securing access to the workplace for the vast majority of the population, and any kind of abstraction that goes into that, right, and the kind of benefits of public health that we like to talk about in terms of equity, in terms of modernity, right, that these are things that ultimately are not the core priorities of this discipline, as we are living with it right now, as it sort of mediates the pandemic.
Abby Cartus 1:01:25
Yeah, the only thing I will add to close is that there's a lot of, I think, very silly debate going on out there about how public health like isn't political and shouldn't be political. And I think that what this really illustrates -- I mean, like the head of the CDC is a political appointee. Political considerations are baked into the conduct of public health. And I think that everything we've been talking about illustrates that definitively. And I hope that this can put to bed maybe some of the very silly discourse that I often see about how, oh, public health would be amazing, and would do everything we wanted it to do, if only we could get politics out of it. You know, that is simply not possible, and that's never going to happen. And I think we have to be clear eyed about what public health actually is doing, how it actually is functioning politically, if we are ever going to have any hope of reorienting public health towards what I think its' core values really are. We have to be willing to fight in that arena.
Artie Vierkant 1:02:23
Exactly. And then also, you know, and this also helps us see, again, as I kind of mentioned before, how the changes to and undoing of public health guidance around COVID show us very clearly how, as Bea has been saying, as we've been saying for a very long time now, how clearly the Biden administration have approached this as an economic problem. Not a public health problem, not even so much a political problem, although they have used politics to sort of say, oh, it's just, you know, fenced off into this public health realm. That's what the feint is, right, that is the idea that the isolation guidance just exists in a vacuum, right? That it's like, just public health policy that has nothing to do with the absence of social policy, right? That if we have some sort of problem that we view not really so much as a problem, but that we present as a fact of life, by which I mean, the idea that, oh, no one's doing this anyway, therefore, let's just do away with it, that that is the siloed public health response somehow, as opposed to what other arms of the state need to be mobilized so that people can actually follow the guidance, so that the guidance is more than fucking words, right?
It's the same fucking thing with masking. Politicians and the media have constantly said, oh, well, no masks anyway, no one wants to mask, etc., blah, blah, blah. What material support have people gotten for masking? Yes, it's expensive to mask everywhere. I'm not saying that everyone -- like we're -- when people are saying there should be universal masking, they're not saying people should -- that everyone should bear the financial burden of fucking protecting themselves. They're saying perhaps certain protections like this, much like certain protections like sick days, are things that should potentially be capacities of the state, if we're going to use the state for anything.
Again, right, what -- if we -- regardless of what you think the state is for, under this current formulation of the state, right, I mean, social supports like this would seem to be a pretty important response to a pandemic, right. You know, one of my takeaways for this, in all of this conversation, is regardless of where you fall in terms of the like class analysis, for instance, that we're putting forward, even if you're just like kind of one of the, I don't know, health policy reporters who kind of listens to this and like disagrees with us about most things or something, but just is interested in what these fucking communists are saying about it, right, like even if you're one of these people, it should be impossible to talk about this change in the isolation guidance without talking about something like paid leave.
Abby Cartus 1:05:02
Absolutely.
Artie Vierkant 1:05:03
Right? It should be impossible to talk about changes to masking guidance without, are people being provided free masks? It should be -- you know, all of these other things. But since this is the most recent frontier of the CDC, you know, announcing that they are packing it in and shutting the last of the few lights that were on, off, right, I think that these are very important demands and questions that need to be asked of the Biden administration. Do you really think that it's just some quality of people that they are not going to do this anyway? Or perhaps there are other fucking capacities of the state that you have chosen not to mobilize, that would make things very different. So.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:05:46
Absolutely. I think that's the perfect place to leave it for today. To support the show and get access to all of the bonus episodes as well as the entire back catalogue, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. And if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, pick up copies of Health Communism and A Short History of Trans Misogyny at your local bookstore, or request them at your local library, and follow us @deathpanel_.
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As always, Medicare for All now, solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.
Death Panel 1:06:39
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Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)
Note: In this episode, Artie mentions an old episode, from January 2022, that shares the same title with this episode (“CDC Says Back to Work”). We decided to use that title again, for this episode, because it felt appropriate. You can find the old episode here www.patreon.com/posts/60691090