Covid Year Five (12/23/24)

Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant and Jules Gill-Peterson present our 2024 year in review, taking a look back at the last year in the ongoing social and political consequences of normalizing the covid pandemic and rushing to bring the federal covid response to a close.

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[ Chime ]

News Anchor (Clip)  0:03 

Just a block from Columbia University, over 100 pro-Israeli demonstrators urging American colleges to ban face coverings during protests.

Anderson Cooper (Clip)    0:11 

No one wants to hear about COVID anymore. If you see somebody in a mask in an airport, everyone's like, what? Who's that freak?

Former White House Covid Czar Ashish Jha (Clip)    0:16 

There is a lot of loud, fringe voices from the left and the right. The left, that's convinced that the pandemic is just as bad as ever, and we all should still be masking indoors.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul (Clip)    0:29 

You're sitting on a subway train and someone puts on a mask like this and comes in—you don't know if they're going to be committing a crime, [if] they're going to have a gun.

News Anchor (Clip)    0:36 

There are calls tonight for college campuses to put a mask ban in place. This comes after police on Long Island made their first arrest under a new law which bans masks in public.

[ Intro Music ]

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:14 

Welcome to the Death Panel. Patrons, thank you. Your support literally makes this show possible.

If you value this work and want to help it grow, become a patron. We rely on listeners like you to sustain the work that we do. Join at patreon.com/deathpanelpod and get access to weekly bonus episodes and our full back catalogue with hundreds of hours of bonus content.

And don't forget to grab copies of Health Communism and A Short History of Trans Misogyny at your local bookstore or request them at your local library. I'm Beatrice Adler-Bolton, and today is our annual COVID year-in-review episode for 2024. I'm here today with my co-hosts, Artie Vierkant—

Artie Vierkant  1:37 

Hello.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:37 

—and Jules Gill-Peterson.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:39 

Hello.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:40 

And I know that Artie has prepared some opening points about what this episode is, and since we have a lot to get through today, I'm just gonna start us by immediately handing it over to him to walk through what we're gonna be talking about and what this episode is.

Artie Vierkant  1:54 

Sure. So welcome to COVID Year Five.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:57 

Oof.

Artie Vierkant  1:57 

For those who may be unfamiliar, this episode is part of an informal series where each year we've looked back at the year in COVID normalization, or chronicled what we've coined as "the sociological production of the end of the pandemic." How rhetoric, major policy decisions, the redistribution and termination of pandemic aid and welfare resources and various actions of US government officials have led to a premature notion that the pandemic is over. Even as COVID continues to spread, people continue to die and people continue to get long COVID. So this series is comprised of a few other episodes.

We released COVID Year Two back in December 2021 which, I think, to date, is still one of the most individually impactful Death Panel episodes, maybe? Because at the time, there was this very pervasive assumption that the Biden pandemic response had succeeded in controlling the virus, and that, to quote one outlet, "trashing Biden's pandemic stewardship is inexplicable in the extreme." [ Beatrice laughs ] Following that, COVID Year Three from 2022, and COVID Year Four from last year, I would say, chronicle how COVID normalization progressed apace until we reached the point where, on May 11, 2023 the Biden administration officially ended the COVID public health emergency declaration, even though that same week, the week of May 11, 2023 around 1,000 people died of COVID in the US.

In other words, how the pandemic response was brought to a close, even though the virus remains a pervasive health threat. There's also COVID Year Zero, which we released on March 15, 2020, which was us rounding up everything that we knew at the time and talking about how we were clearly looking at a matter of years of COVID at a time when a lot of the national discourse in the US was talking about, you know, maybe this will run its course in two or three weeks.

Jules Gill-Peterson  3:44 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  3:45 

As I mentioned last year, there is no episode called COVID Year One, though, from March 2020, through the end of that year, basically everything that we did was a COVID episode.

Anyway. All this is to say, this year is a little bit different than usual. If you've heard COVID Year Four, I think you'll probably already know why it's different. From the start, this series has been focused on two things, which is the role that media framings have played in gradually bringing many people to accept the burden of COVID, and the maneuvers that the state and officials overseeing it have done to absolve themselves of responsibility for the pandemic and make COVID, like so many other things under capitalism, a matter of personal responsibility or the genesis of an expected impairment, a part of everyday life, and certainly not anything that people should be politically activated over, or point to in making demands on the state.

And that process—what, again, we've called the sociological production of the end of the pandemic—is, by and large complete, I would say. I don't mean it's over.

Jules Gill-Peterson  4:48 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  4:48 

As this episode is going to demonstrate, the long term effects of our long national conflict over COVID, and what should or shouldn't be done with it, are in some respects just starting to be seen. And I certainly don't mean it in a defeatist way, either. After all, ACT UP didn't form until something like seven years into the HIV/AIDS crisis being officially recognized. Mask blocs are active, and long COVID political groups are, by all appearances, only becoming more radical with time.

So there's much to be done. And under an incoming Trump presidency, the stakes are going to be higher, which we'll be talking about today.

But as we speak here at the end of 2024, the state's pandemic response as we knew it is gone.  Even the media framings we'll talk about today are, with some very important exceptions, mostly examples of iterating or reiterating lines that many of us will already be familiar with.

And while there are moves that the Biden administration did this year to claw back worker protections from COVID and the last of the COVID welfare state expansions, we started this year with the vast majority of those having already been erased.

In August of this year, when Politico ran a headline in the middle of this summer's COVID surge titled, "Democrats and Republicans Greet COVID Spike with a Collective Shrug," that's something I could have imagined seeing at really any point in the last two years.

So that's all to say that we're going to try and go a little bit deeper today. Because while I could wax on about how last year's New York Times headline from 2023, quote, "COVID Continues to Rise, but Experts Remain Optimistic" is near indistinguishable from another Times headline from this year, "COVID Has Resurged, but Scientists See a Diminished Threat," I feel like that doesn't really get us anywhere, or at least it doesn't get us where I want us to go today, in any case.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  6:07 

Mm.

Artie Vierkant  6:08 

So, where past years were about chronicling the sociological production of the end of the pandemic, and how that process functionally happened, this year, I think, is about consequences. My internal working title for this one has been "COVID Year Five: Find Out." [ Beatrice and Jules laughing ].

Artie Vierkant  6:53 

This is about what happens when you fuck around and entirely, prematurely foreclose on a pandemic, culturally and politically.

For years, we've talked about consequences in terms of death and disability from long COVID, both things that continue and are absolutely important to what we're talking about today. But we've also seen the consequences in terms of how the rush to declare the pandemic over was a process of shattering solidarities between the working class and the sick, encouraging an idea that vulnerability was other people's problem.

In Beatrice and I's book, Health Communism, we talk about this as the construction of the "worker / surplus, binary," a dynamic under capitalism that pre-existed the pandemic. That being a working and "productive" member of society is viewed as a prerequisite to social rights under the capitalist state, and that everyone outside of that constitutes a surplus class.

This is a dynamic that we've only seen intensify in the last few years as people deputize themselves as malingerer hunters, especially over long COVID. And it's led to a US government that, when it comes to weighing matters of collective well being, survival, or what we could call "public health," against the economy, against GDP, against corporate profit, is now even more weighted towards siding with the economy than it was before 2020. Which is saying something, because, as we've argued before, that trade off, that prioritization of the economy is already the default for the capitalist state.

Another consequence, though, is that we've seen the arguments that have made up COVID normalization have the very predictable effect of taking formerly fringe, woo-woo, and anti-vax beliefs from the periphery to the center. As we speak, a viral Reddit thread is going around where the poster asks, how long until their child reaches quote, unquote, "daycare immunity?"

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  6:54 

What?

Artie Vierkant  7:03 

It's—they're someone who, I think, in the post, it says they refused the RSV vaccine and things like that, and they're wondering how long their kid has to be in daycare for them to get immunity from all the things that they're supposed to get childhood vaccinations for.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  8:53 

[ Groans ] God.

Artie Vierkant  8:55 

So this seems to me like, I think, a natural consequence of everything we've seen around the idea of "immunity debt," which we talked about last year. Pasteurization even came under fire this year, as we'll get into.

So these are some of what we've talked about as the more direct consequences of the social production of the end of the pandemic. But today, we're also going to be talking about more indirect consequences, the long term political consequences.

2024 was the year of mask bans.

Specifically, this was the year that reactionary rhetoric against COVID protections boiled over into a wave of proposed mask bans, some of which were enacted. And these weren't just debated and enacted in so called red states, but also in blue states, including New York, one of the leading stereotypes of the entire blue state archetype.

This is also the year that Donald Trump was re-elected. The pandemic played a role in that, and the Biden administration's decision to go hawkish against the COVID welfare state played a huge role in that.

We're going to explain how. And we're also going to talk about how Trump's nomination of noted COVID cranks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Marty Makary and Jay Bhattacharya to central roles overseeing healthcare and public health in the US was propelled by the, well, aforementioned fucking around.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  8:55 

Mhm.

Jules Gill-Peterson  8:55 

Mm.

Artie Vierkant  10:12 

And then, like usual, we're going to talk about what it all means and where we go from here.

And, a final note I'll say before we sort of get into the timeline, like with other years, is that: in this episode, we're trying to capture developments across an entire year, so it's going to be necessarily incomplete.

We won't be touching on every last thing that happened. Our lens is going to be the social and political situation surrounding COVID using the framework I've just explained. A different lens would produce a different timeline. So.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  10:44 

I mean, this year, I think, has been so defined by the mask bans that—

Jules Gill-Peterson  10:50 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  10:50 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  10:50 

—not just in my mind, it's been primary, but when I reached out to listeners, to sort of hear what folks were really feeling like colored their recollection of the last year, above and beyond, mask bans was the thing.

You know, I think for a lot of people who maybe had held out on hoping that Democrats would get their shit together on COVID, for lack of a better way of putting it, mask bans were kind of the final nail in the coffin, and really kind of prove that the normalization of COVID is a bipartisan project. Which is, you know, something that we've been talking about for years now. But everyone comes to that realization on their own terms. But at the same time, just to offer a kind of silver lining.

Also as part of that, a lot of folks mentioned the fact that, you know, the organizing against mask bans, the Palestine solidarity protests and the masking there, things like mask blocks continuing in the face of mask bans, and the community that was created around groups of people organizing to testify against mask bans, for example, have been big sources of hope.

So it's not hopeless, but it's definitely, I think, a moment where everyone kind of broadly felt the retraction of the state this year and the difficulty that resulted in that decentralization of like a central demand target in the federal government. Which is, again, something that we talked about, as one of the challenges of the end of the Federal Public Health Emergency was going to be that in the privatization of COVID we were going to go from just having one target of our demands to having dozens and dozens and dozens, whether that's individual health plans, the end of bridge access, right?

Like all these different things that we're going to get into are really part of this atomization of COVID, and the distribution of COVID into the regular political economy of health, which is so distributed, because that is part of how it works as an engine of repression, right? By making it, essentially, difficult to organize en masse against, because it is so distributed.

Jules Gill-Peterson  13:11 

Yeah, that is so well said, Bea. I really agree and, thinking back on this year, yeah, that process of disaggregation and fragmentation feels both like how a lot of the impacts of what the federal state—of choices by the federal state—now kind of ramify and also live, not just like in the private family or at the individual level, but as you were just saying, you know, bring our attention to local county boards, and to the state level, and also to a whole host of corporate and healthcare entities that play a really oversized role in people's everyday lives, but, you know, differently in every different part of the country.

And that does feel like sort of a process of dispersion in some ways. I think I find that really helpful, just for thinking about how to have this conversation today, too, because we're talking so much about the state, and in particular about the federal state, and, of course, thinking about decisions that the Biden administration made, and some of the political directions going into the Trump administration.

But I think it's so helpful to hold that in relation to all these other scales of life at which the struggle over COVID is continuing, and at which political organizing definitely needs to happen.

And so in some ways I feel like that fragmentation process can feel quite disorienting. Or it could feel like the dam breaking and kind of just everything washing outward. But I think we can actually make sense of all of those different parts and their relationships and understand that clearly that's part of the process of political organizing that we also saw this past year. Definitely in the Palestine solidarity encampments in particular. So, yeah, I think it's just really helpful to me to kind of hold those scales, you know, together, to think about this.

Artie Vierkant  15:11 

Absolutely.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  15:11 

Absolutely, so well put Jules. And if you both will indulge me one more thought, because what Jules said brought something else to mind that I think is worth mentioning.

I've been thinking a lot this year about the work of Leslie Doyal and Imogen Pennell who wrote this book called The Political Economy of Health back in the late 1970s, which is mostly about the NHS [the UK's National Health Service].

And, in the book, they talk about how the NHS is a kind of centralized state project of providing health care and the way that it's talked about as a kind of "cradle to the grave" support system for, particularly, the British working class, is a powerful way of showing the benevolence of the state.

And I think in the last year, especially, we've seen pretty much the opposite occur in the United States. In this atomization of COVID I think a lot of people have also come to terms with the fact that what they thought the state was and how they thought the state related to them, and their needs and their lives is—are very different.

Artie Vierkant  15:11 

Mhm.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  15:13 

And I think that that's also been a huge theme of this year, has been seeing so many people turn to each other because they've really felt deep abandonment, not just at a personal level, but at a structural level that has changed the way that they relate to, you know, the idea of the state itself and where they are located, and the idea of, like, what the point of government is, even.

Artie Vierkant  16:41 

Mhm.

Jules Gill-Peterson  16:41 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  16:41 

Yeah, I think that's why I highlight from the top how great it is to see long COVID organizing becoming more radical, active opposition to things like mask bans becoming more radical, which I do think—we'll get into more of this later, but I think that, you know, it's important to note that everything that we're going to talk about with mask bans in particular, this year is potentially just the start of something.

We already know that these things are going to carry over into the next legislative calendar, starting right in January. New York is already talking about trying to move forward with its mask ban as soon as the legislative session reopens in January. Naming the CEO shooting as the reason, essentially. So all of this fallout is active, but also the political forces that are rallying against these things, I think, only growing more radical is just an amazing thing to see. So.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  17:36 

Absolutely.

Artie Vierkant  17:37 

In any case, shall we start with the timeline?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  17:40 

Hell yeah, let's do it.

Jules Gill-Peterson  17:41 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  17:41 

All right, so like usual, we're going to set the stage for this with a little bit of recap and by filling out some details that emerged at the very end of last year, since these things typically come out in December. So that means I'm going to start this timeline with late 2023 and also, I think in particular, in this year, I'm going to give a little bit of context for some of the events that happened in 2023 that sort of need to be restated to make some of the things that happened this year really makes sense.

So, last time, on COVID Year Four, we talked about how last year, 2023, was really a year of enormous activity in trying to rush the pandemic response to a close in time for election season.

By the start of 2023 it's already widely asserted that COVID is over. Mask mandates were long, long gone, and had been since 2021. Most federal testing infrastructure was long gone. The CDC had completely changed its risk evaluation metric to look at COVID risk as: are there a lot of open hospital beds in your area? Well, if there are, you don't need a mask. Because there's a bed ready for you. [ Beatrice laughs and groans ]. The right has been assailing, quote, unquote, "lockdowns" and the pandemic welfare expansions as the culprits for inflation. And the Biden administration had, seemingly, mostly adopted that critique as though it were true.

On May 11, 2023 the Biden administration brought the COVID Public Health Emergency to a close. I'll note that sometimes we might just, out of habit, refer to this as "PHE"—Public Health Emergency—just noting that, in case we do. That's just a thing we do out of habit.

It's important to make this distinction, though. So the Public Health Emergency ended in 2023. The pandemic didn't. Because a lot of people point to this moment as the pandemic itself ending. Only the federal emergency status ended, and with it many of the last defining features of the COVID response itself. But it didn't have anything to do with the state of the virus, its impact, the amount of spread, epidemiological trendlines; instead it just had to do with the state of politics.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  19:45 

Yeah. And to take away certain powers that agencies had been given under that context.

Artie Vierkant  19:50 

Yes, very important. As we've talked about in the past.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  19:53 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  19:54 

And so, as we talked about in COVID Year Four, the US ending its Public Health Emergency, alongside the World Health Organization's (WHO) own similar declaration, earlier in May [2023], marked a turning point that the wisdom of the media class interpreted as COVID being, finally, behind us. Even though, in the WHO's own announcement, for example, that the global health emergency was over, the WHO Director-General emphasized the following, quote:

The worst thing any country could do now is use this news as a reason to let down its guard, to dismantle the systems it has built, or to send the message to its people that COVID is nothing to worry about. COVID has changed our world, and it has changed us. If we all go back to how things were before COVID, we will have failed to learn our lessons, and we will have failed future generations.

Artie Vierkant  20:42 

So this is, of course, exactly what happened.

Jules Gill-Peterson  20:44 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  20:44 

We let down our guard. We dismantled the systems we had built—from testing infrastructure, to social welfare programs, to even dismantling programs that made sure COVID vaccines were free—and we sent a message to everyone that COVID was nothing to worry about.

And so, at the end of the Public Health Emergency, the majority of the COVID response was effectively over—Another way to say it would be, COVID didn't end, but the COVID response ended.

Key figures of the Biden pandemic response, from Anthony Fauci to former CDC director Rochelle Walensky, to COVID czar Ashish Jha, were all gone from the White House shortly after the end of the Public Health Emergency in May 2023, though one of the most important figures, Jeff Zients, the private equity stooge and chief architect of the Biden pandemic response, had become, and remains for the moment, Biden's Chief of Staff.

By 2023, most pandemic welfare state programs were long gone, like the eviction bans and Pandemic unemployment insurance payments. But 2023 marked the end of the few that remained. Extended SNAP benefits ended at the beginning of last year. Student debt payments resumed October 2023—as I know I do not have to remind many of you listening. Pandemic Medicaid expansion ended April 1, 2023, leading to what was called the Medicaid unwinding, a process that we've been covering on this show.

At the end of COVID Year Four, we mentioned that 11 million people had been kicked off Medicaid as part of this—as of when we recorded that episode. This year, we learned that by mid 2024, after a full year of Medicaid unwinding, 25 million people lost Medicaid as part of this decision.

Also, COVID vaccines and treatments, once guaranteed to be paid for by the federal government, were by the end of 2023 successfully kicked to the private market by the Biden administration.

In its place, they promised they would be covered by insurance and that the uninsured would have access to what was known as the Bridge Access Program—Bea referenced this earlier.

As we speak now, at the end of 2024, that program for the uninsured is now over, already. In fact, it has been over, for months, already. I'll probably mention this again, but some details are good to just have near the beginning.

So here's one consequence of this Bridge Access situation: according to GoodRx, the average retail price for a course of Paxlovid—in other words, if you're paying for it without insurance, totally out of pocket—is $1,626.18.

Jules Gill-Peterson  23:10 

Whoa!

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  23:11 

[ sighs ]

Artie Vierkant  23:11 

—as of when I checked it in early December. Even with insurance, we hear from people all the time who were still charged, under their insurance, $300 or $400 or even $500 for a course of it. And if you don't want to take my word for it, just jump on Twitter and search "paxlovid copay."

It's worth mentioning that a 2023 paper out of Harvard's public health department estimated the cost to produce a course of Paxlovid at just $13.38. So, if you're paying out of pocket, that's $1,612.80 you're paying for the privilege of getting a treatment that should be free, and used to be free, in what I'm told is supposed to be the only health care system the US can afford.

I know we're talking about pharmaceutical companies here, but I think it's no wonder that when the CEO of one of the biggest private health insurance companies was gunned down in the street this month, people from across the political spectrum treated it like it was a national holiday.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  23:11 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  24:06 

By the end of 2023 we saw the first pushes towards what would become a wave of mask bans in 2024. Recall from COVID Year Four that in March 2023 New York City Mayor Eric Adams became one of the earliest prominent Democrats since the start of the pandemic to call for criminalizing masking, saying in a press briefing quote, "we've gotten so used to the mask that we don't realize there's a large volume of people that are wearing it, not because of COVID, because they're criminals."

Jules Gill-Peterson  24:33 

[ sighs ] That quote...

Artie Vierkant  24:34 

Shortly after that—sorry.

Jules Gill-Peterson  24:35 

No, no, no. I was just muttering under my breath about Eric Adams. [ All laugh ].

Artie Vierkant  24:42 

Yeah. Not the last time we'll hear from him today.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  24:44 

Yeah, it's like every time I hear his name I feel the impulse to spit on the ground. [ Jules laughs ].

Artie Vierkant  24:49 

Yeah, don't say his name three times.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  24:52 

Definitely not in front of a mirror.

Artie Vierkant  24:54 

Shortly after that, in April 2023, representatives in the North Carolina legislature tack a new rider onto a state level anti-money laundering bill.

That new additional language would, quote, "create a sentencing enhancement for committing a crime while wearing a mask, hood or other device to conceal identity." It doesn't go anywhere just yet, but this bill would be brought back with a force in May 2024, under the new title "Unmasking Mobs and Criminals," North Carolina's mask ban that passed in June of this year.

The North Carolina bill is just one of at least four new laws criminalizing masking proposed by the end of 2023, though most were largely portrayed as criminalizing ski masks at the time. I'm talking about newly proposed laws, also, not ones that were already on the books in various states, which we'll talk about later.

For example, Philadelphia passed a mask ban in December 2023. It's largely understood as a ski mask ban, but it includes broad language about what it's targeting, making it an additional offense to be concealing your identity while engaging in criminalized activity and listing identity concealment as, quote, "mask, hood, ski mask, balaclava or other device or means of hiding, concealing or covering any portion of the face for the purpose of concealing their identity." So you can imagine it being easily interpreted more broadly.

Also in the fall of 2023, Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser pushes forward what's referred to as a ski mask rule, targeting, quote, "any mask or other article whereby a substantial portion of the face is hidden, concealed or covered as to conceal the identity of the wearer, if the intent of the person is to avoid identification."

This proposal would languish in the city council for a few months, passed from bill proposal to bill proposal until it was finally passed in March 2024.

And in Atlanta, a mask ban, also referred to as a ski mask ban, is proposed before being killed in committee in December 2023. I watched a number of city council deliberations on mask bans in preparation for this, and I appreciated some of the pushback on this bill. So here are a couple of quick clips.

Atlanta Public Testimony 1  26:55 

I'm not alone in a strong suspicion that your proposal has nothing to do with receiving calls about criminals committing crimes in disguise.

Your proposal appears intended to censure and discourage citizens from participating in their First Amendment right to free speech.

On October 24 I attended a group of over 250 Atlantans in Woodruff Park to call for ceasefire in Gaza. I do concede that many of us cover our faces with surgical masks, bandanas, ski masks as well.

The more worrisome implication of your proposal is that police could now claim to have a probable cause to stop and question masked demonstrators simply for exercising their rights as United States citizens.

Atlanta Public Testimony 2  26:55 

I never voted for you. I never accepted you as an authority, and I don't think anyone should. I'm just here to remind you of how absolutely audacious and arrogant you must be to think you have the right to make decisions about what the people of Atlanta are allowed to wear on their heads.

Not to mention the absurdity of creating and maintaining a system that commodifies every source of subsistence and comfort, privatizes every resource, violently discourages the use of what remains of the commons and of public property through the use of authoritarian intimidation and punishment. And then saying the solution to crime and robbery under these circumstances is to make sure everyone is identifiable.

The fact that any one of you took this proposal seriously for even a second is pathetic and reveals, as history so often does, that the state has but one purpose and one intent: that is, to protect the wealth of a minority from the poverty of the masses.

Artie Vierkant  28:15 

So we'll return to these, but before we jump into 2024 it's important to lay this groundwork. Because what I think this helps us show is that new mask bans were already under consideration just a few months following the end of the Public Health Emergency.

Jules Gill-Peterson  28:15 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  28:16 

And what we really see in early 2024 is these bans just cascading across the country, including, as I mentioned before, in so called blue states.

It also has to be said that around this time, there are some parallel movements happening on the right concerning masking more generally. So in September 2023, then Senator, and now Vice President-elect, J.D. Vance, scored political points within the GOP by forwarding what he called the “Freedom to Breathe Act,” [ Jules laughs ] a proposal to bar federal agencies from enacting mask mandates in transportation settings through the end of the fiscal year.

Obviously, by that point, no such things existed. In 2022, a federal judge struck down the CDC's public transportation mask mandate, and the Biden administration didn't lift a finger in protest. I remember us sitting down to do the episode about this. It feels like it was just yesterday.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  29:19 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  29:19 

Nor did the Biden administration show any indication of attempting to put in place any such new transportation mask mandate, much less mask recommendations, even.

But Vance's political move was to try to paint Democratic opposition to his bill as a sign that Democrats wanted, in any way, to reimpose mask mandates. Vance was daring them, essentially, to vote against the bill so he could say that that meant they wanted to mandate masks again.

As Vance said at the time, quote,

We tried mask mandates once in this country, they failed to control the spread of respiratory viruses, violated basic bodily freedom and set our fellow citizens against one another. This legislation will ensure that no federal bureaucracy, no commercial airline ... can impose the misguided policies of the past. Democrats say they're not going to bring back mask mandates. We're going to hold them to their word.

This was, of course, just a bit of political theater and fantasy. What Democrats actually said about this shows how deeply the end of the Public Health Emergency was interpreted as the end of the pandemic. On October 25, 2023, the, uh.. soon to be former Ohio senator, Sherrod Brown, told a reporter at cleveland.com, when asked what he thought of Vance's bill, quote, "The pandemic's over. I've got no problems with it. I don't think there should be mask mandates."

So thanks, Sherrod.

When it first came up for a vote in the Senate, Sherrod Brown voted for it, by the way. He was one of 10 Democrats who voted for J.D. Vance's proposal. Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin, Michael Bennett, Tim Kaine, Mark Kelly, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Manchin, Jackie Rosen, Jean Shaheen and Jon Tester.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  29:20 

Mm.

Artie Vierkant  29:20 

That vote ultimately didn't go anywhere. It wasn't signed into law at that point, but Vance's bill did ultimately become part of a larger Senate appropriations bill and was signed into law in March 2024 so in effect, his proposal, banning something that no longer existed, was in effect from March through the end of the government's fiscal year 2024, which ended September 30th of this year. So just over six months.

But it was certainly one of his more high profile moves in the Senate just months before Trump picked him as his running mate.

Speaking of the GOP, by the end of 2023 a number of once-controversial figures associated with the Great Barrington Declaration were in the process of being rehabilitated.

Many of you have heard us explain the Great Barrington Declaration so, so many times, at this point. But for those who haven't. This was a proposal from the early months of the pandemic where a group of scientists declared the best strategy for dealing with COVID would be to have the sick, disabled, old or otherwise "vulnerable," sequester themselves while the rest of society just binged on the virus, getting as many people infected as we can. They argued this would end in population immunity within a few months, and that anyway, death rates were probably overstated.

Obviously, we know now, as we have for a long time, that extremely high death rates went on much, much longer than three months, which is basically what everyone in the world told them was going to happen.

We also know that, just like other less-novel coronaviruses, the immune response to COVID doesn't necessarily stick well, probably in part because coronaviruses' distinguishing feature is that they're constantly chopping and screwing themselves, and that can lead to substantial variant evolution and immune evasion.

So essentially, in every sense of the word, the Great Barrington Declaration was a eugenic proposal for a "survival of the fittest." Let a lot of people die, move on, and pretend that those who lived through it were just better than the rest because they were quote, unquote "healthier."

In 2020, we were pretty much on the front lines of trying to get these people shunned out of the scientific community. We talked about these fuckers so much that I will never forget this tweet from a friend—pretty sure it was Jules Joanne Gleason, if I'm remembering correctly—that said "I've never hated anything as much as Death Panel hates the Great Barrington Declaration."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  33:08 

True.

Jules Gill-Peterson  33:08 

[ Laughs ] That's beautiful. Thank you, Jules.

Artie Vierkant  33:11 

And for a long time, I think that the Declaration people were, actually, persona non grata in some circles. Anyway, the reason I'm saying this is, they're back.

Jules Gill-Peterson  33:21 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  33:21 

As most people listening to this will know. This year was the year that the Great Barrington Declaration became not only fully rehabilitated, but look to become more powerful. We'll get into more details on this later, but we're still in the end of 2023, and in 2023 we get a very good example of what I'm talking about with that rehabilitation, when mainstream public health talking head Sandro Galea writes in his book, Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time, quote, "while the sum total of the Great Barrington Declaration may have been problematic, the response to the document was, I would argue, much worse." [ Beatrice laughs ].

Jules Gill-Peterson  33:55 

He certainly would argue.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  33:56 

[ Exclaims despairingly ]

Artie Vierkant  33:58 

Perhaps most importantly, in September of 2023 Great Barrington Declaration co-authors Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, alongside a few other plaintiffs, win a lawsuit in federal appeals court claiming that the Biden administration violated the First Amendment by pushing Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to take down COVID misinformation—stemming from them.

While this decision Is later overturned by the Supreme Court, Bhattacharya, who, as we speak, is now Trump's pick to be the next head of the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, gets a huge bump in visibility from this in right wing media, appearing on Fox News and elsewhere in September. Celebrating the ruling, Bhattacharya tells the New York Post quote, "I think this ruling is akin to the second enlightenment."

Jules Gill-Peterson  34:43 

What?

Artie Vierkant  34:43 

—"It's a ruling that says there's a democracy of ideas. The issue is not whether the ideas are wrong or right. The question is, who gets to control what ideas are expressed in the public square." [ Beatrice scoffs ]

Jules Gill-Peterson  34:53 

For sure.

Artie Vierkant  34:54 

Finally, of course, no context for the end of 2023 would be complete without a focus on the brutal escalation of genocide in Palestine. When this episode comes out, it will have been an astonishing 443 days of this genocide. For context, the COVID Public Health Emergency was active for only exactly 1200 days. So think about the entire time that the public health emergency was active, and divide that by just three.

Jules Gill-Peterson  35:23 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  35:24 

What for some of us here—here in the imperial core—has been one agonizing year of struggle and loss has been just lifetimes of terror visited upon Palestinians.

Jules Gill-Peterson  35:35 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  35:36 

So, while we're talking about 2023.

Within days of Al-Aqsa Flood, Biden's press secretary had already called the people in the US protesting genocide, quote, "repugnant" and "disgraceful," and the State Department, in a leaked memo, instructed officials to never use terms like "de-escalation" or "ceasefire."

By the end of October, Biden's press secretary compared Palestine solidarity protesters to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, a march of literal Nazis who murdered at least one counter protester.

Over the last year, we've seen a lot of liberals slowly shift their stance on this, where a not too uncommon statement will be that perhaps the earliest days of the genocide were in some way warranted, but now it's gone on too long, or gone too extreme. So it's important to say that it was crystal clear from the outset what this was and what this has been.

And settler officials said, as much, out in the open. On October 9, for example, the defense minister of the settler state said, quote, "I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly."

The Biden administration's full throated support of genocide adds fuel to what quickly becomes the biggest mass protest movement in the US since the uprisings in 2020. It also turns into a massive political problem for them, but lucky for the Biden administration, they're well practiced at ignoring obvious political problems, as we've seen with the pandemic.

As early as November 2023, NPR reports, quote, "In Michigan, where every vote counts, Arab Americans are turning away from Biden." Campaign stops and the regular pomp and circumstance events presidents do become constant sites of protest, with the Washington Post reporting by December, quote, "Protesters now chant and challenge Biden over Gaza at every chance."

Meanwhile, we're assailed with bromides about how historically successful the Biden presidency has been, what a good man he is, and how the president of the country that is the principal actor both arming and funding the genocide, is just a little guy who can't do anything about it. And they keep authorizing arms shipment after arms shipment.

So. As with last year, we won't be going through every event of this genocide. Doing so would be its own project. And we're not necessarily the right voices to do it. But as we'll see, especially with the rhetoric around mask bands in 2024, US complicity in the genocide will inflect everything that we talk about today.

Jules Gill-Peterson  37:59 

Yeah. One thing that is kind of interesting to me, too. I think this happens every year with this episode. One reason that I find it so helpful is because sometimes I—there's just such a dizzying pace of development, like, for example, just being reminded how early mask bans were starting.

And their proximity to the end of the Public Health Emergency just like, shook something loose for me that I had, you know, forgotten in a certain way, or had gotten a little muddy in my memory over time.

And it's just always helpful to see that these things are building and have momentum and that there's like, a longer arc to them, and they don't just, like suddenly happen.

Anyways, that was hardly a very interesting thing to say. But I just really appreciated that.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  38:44 

No, I absolutely agree. And I mean, I think one thing I was dwelling on is the kind of comfort that many people have had with the duration of the escalation of genocide and recalling the discomfort with, you know, even two weeks of duration of federal Public Health Emergency.

And I think whenever we sit down to do these episodes—I know this, implicitly, explicitly, thoroughly—but I feel so completely reminded that so much of what we're fighting against in the present and reckoning with right now was set into motion years ago.

Jules Gill-Peterson  39:26 

Yes.

Artie Vierkant  39:26 

Mhm.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  39:26 

You know, so much of the present moment of the pandemic was already written in 2021, in 2022. So much of this last year requires this necessary look back to 2023 and it just reminds me of the ways that normalization actually works, right?

It's a process that isn't confined to time, but which uses time as a medium in order to, I think, reshape through experience what is a priority in our day to day lives. I was revisiting this R.D. Laing book called The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise, which is one of his weirdest, but probably one of his more popular ones. [ Jules laughs ].

And I read this book again in 2020 and hadn't read it in many years, and it felt like it just had described everything so perfectly back then and offered all this clarity. And looking back on it now, you know, there's one part when he said, "100,000 normal men will kill 100,000 normal men a year." And that human beings, quote, "seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves into taking their own lives for truth."

And it's funny to think about, you know, this is someone who was working on trying to think through what rationality was, what agency is, what decision making is in a clinical context.. also taking lots of LSD at the time [ Jules laughs ].

But, you know, these same kind of tentpoles that we just talked about from 2023 have been a theme of past years, right? Like none of this could have happened without the prior context, and these episodes where we look back at such large, you know, swaths of information can sometimes feel like really impossible to sum up.

But I'm just feeling very grateful right now for all the people who care enough to keep remembering alongside us. Because this is the kind of work that's difficult to do. It requires so much looking back and remembering, and that is something that this process of normalization tries to talk us out of and prevent us from doing.

Artie Vierkant  41:50 

Yeah. I mean, I think that, for example, when you say so many of the things that we're seeing now were set into motion or were kind of determined by decisions in 2021. Obviously, that's not in a deterministic sense—

Jules Gill-Peterson  42:05 

Exactly.

Artie Vierkant  42:05 

—That is in a sense of, the things that are happening now, the things that we're going to talk about—the things that we just talked about, but also the things that we're going to talk about in, as we get now, momentarily, into 2024, would not have been possible without certain actions in 2021, 2022. 2020, even, in some cases. I keep thinking of this in relation to mask bans, in particular, because at the outside of the pandemic, masking was something that itself had to be normalized.

Jules Gill-Peterson  42:37 

Right.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  42:37 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  42:37 

The Biden administration came in. They, as we've chronicled in years past, made all of these very early moves that undermined that normalization. And that tried to essentially revert back to a situation of: well, you know, maybe some people will need to mask if they're particularly ill or disabled or whatever, or maybe some people need to take precautions, but surely you don't. And then, as you talked about that sphere of who needs to take precautions has been presented as a narrower and narrower group of people.

And it's important to note, you know, when mask mandates were rolled back in 2021, for example, you know, we argued then that if enough of us kept masking solidaristically, even through that right? That at the bare minimum the benefit of that would be that we would be sort of helping to keep masking normalized and make it even less possible to be criminalized later. And now, you know, we all know what happened instead. And here we are where, even in just the recap that I give, like the Eric Adams quote that I read was before the Public Health Emergency even ended—

Jules Gill-Peterson  42:44 

Mhm.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  43:06 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  43:18 

—he was talking about masking being suspicious behavior that called for surveillance.

Jules Gill-Peterson  43:53 

Right. I think part of what both of you are saying that's so helpful, it's something that I think probably listeners, and all of us sort of feel that we know, but it doesn't always feel true.

And I think this often happens when you're looking backwards or doing a little bit of history, is how things unfolded starts to feel as if it was inevitable and it wasn't. Right? None of this was inevitable.

Artie Vierkant  44:16 

Yeah.

Jules Gill-Peterson  44:17 

And that's actually what matters. And that's why tracing the throughlines and understanding the longevity of the events unfolding and the impacts and the consequences that we're collectively going through—you know, the whole point of understanding them better is not just to understand them, but also to kind of return to that feeling of knowing that none of this was inevitable.

And thus the future isn't written in stone. And things are not going to just play out in one prescribed way. So as painful as it is to look backwards and to remember and to try and sift through all of this, it does also, I think, take us in a galvanizing direction. And if nothing else, like that feeling for me is part of the glue of solidarity, that makes this all so valuable and so worthwhile.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  45:07 

Absolutely. And I think it works against the pervasive mythology that all this was fated to happen—

Jules Gill-Peterson  45:12 

Exactly.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  45:13 

—or is occurring by law of nature, or that this is just the way it goes. Right?

Jules Gill-Peterson  45:19 

Yeah,

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  45:19 

You know, I think back to work from people working at the turn of the century, and sort of thinking about, well, how did the Industrial Revolution proceed the way it has? Is the kind of broad declaration of modern society and the state being for everyone going to come true? And looking at that from the perspective of a prediction or like a quality of the society that they had built, right? Rather than an outcome of specific actions, decisions and priorities.

You know, again, just back to Leslie Doyal's book The Political Economy of Health, where they talk about the founding of the Labor Party in the UK being partially oriented around—in the early 1900s—requests and demands made to increase minimum wage. And in response, what was given was a insurance bill.

And Keir Hardie, who was a Scottish trade unionist and one of the co founders of the Labor Party said, quote, "No, say the liberals, but we will give you an insurance bill. We shall not uproot the cause of poverty, but we will give you a porous plaster to cover the disease that poverty causes."

Jules Gill-Peterson  46:32 

Mm.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  46:33 

You know, and I feel like what we're looking at now is we're really up against a kind of pervasive top line discourse that the way this all happened is really the way it was meant to be. And that we need to sort of proceed and forget and move on and—and obviously, I think anyone listening to this is not of that mindset.

Jules Gill-Peterson  46:52 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  46:52 

So, 2024 finally.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  46:55 

Yeah.

Jules Gill-Peterson  46:55 

[ Laughs ] Alright.

Artie Vierkant  46:56 

Let's get to January.

So the year begins, like every other year before it since 2020, with a dramatic COVID surge.

And like the year before, and the year before that, it's not exactly a secret, but it's more or less treated as a blip that people should maybe be aware of in a kind of 'informed consumer' sort of way, but not much else.

Time Magazine asserts, for example, quote, "We're In a Major COVID-19 Surge. It's Our New Normal." The New York Times, in early January, runs the headline I took a jab at earlier: "COVID Has Resurged, but Scientists See a Diminished Threat."

The part I'm interested in with this article, though, is the subhead, which reads, quote, "Hospitalizations have ticked upward, and there are at least 1,200 COVID-related deaths each week. Americans should mask more often, and vaccination rates remain too low, experts say."

So, two things are interesting about this.

First is the acknowledgement that masking should be more prevalent, which is notably absent in media reports most of the time.

And second, that 1,200 figure. That at least 1,200 COVID related deaths are happening each week. In fact, at the beginning of January, some 2,500 people are dying of COVID in the US every week, according to federal NVSS [National Vital Statistics System] data.

This article I'm talking about came out January 3, 2024 and for the week ending January 6, 2024, NVSS records 2,499 COVID deaths, more than twice the amount cited here.

And the reason the wrong figure is cited here is a frustrating one, and one of the side effects of the way that COVID deaths are counted now. Because in January 2024 we were six and a half months out from the end of the Public Health Emergency. So federal data on COVID deaths now comes from death certificates, which lag by weeks and weeks. And which—I think the safe way to say it is—which vary in reliability county by county, based on who's filling them out and how, which we talked about a little bit in last year's episode. And I'm not going to get into too much here.

But as a result, at a time when some amount of people are kind of tuning in to see how bad it might be in the middle of a winter surge—the kind of informed personal responsibility we've been instructed to do—good information isn't even available. Because we won't know how high NVSS death statistics will be until the end of the month, or February, maybe.

I'll add that those numbers weren't an outlier. Deaths the entire month of January were over 2,000 a week for roughly 10,000 COVID deaths in the month of January.

I'm going to say that again. Not to be overbearing about it, but because I know a lot of people just don't know this. 10,000 people died of COVID in the US in the month of January.

This year.

And it wasn't just January. If you've heard last year's episode, COVID Year Four, you'll know that one of the things we highlighted was that, after a temporary dip in the summer of 2023, according to NVSS data, COVID deaths were over 1,000 per week as of August of last year, all the way through to when we recorded that episode.

Jules Gill-Peterson  49:57 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  49:58 

And that continued. So, from August 2023 through the middle of March 2024 there were over 1,000 COVID deaths every week, including bigger spikes like the one we just talked about in January of this year.

During all this time, the Biden administration sticks to its now long established playbook. When asked about multiple hospital systems temporarily bringing back mask requirements and whether that signals new guidance, maybe, from the administration, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre emphatically asserts, quote, "that's not something we get involved in," adding, quote, "we have a range of tools." [ Beatrice sighs in exasperation ].

In February, we have the first one of those things that I think is common in these episodes, the first thing that's going to be, you know, 'I can't believe that happened this year.'

In February, The Washington Post reports that the CDC is planning to drop its COVID isolation guidelines, one of its last wide ranging public health recommendations outside of just 'get vaccinated' and maybe 'wash your hands.'

The Post reported that the CDC's plan was to release new isolation guidelines in April for public feedback and then implement them sometime after the public was able to have a say.

I think it's safe to assume one reason they might have wanted to put forward new isolation guidelines for public feedback is how catastrophically bad the last guideline change made them look.

Prior to this year, the CDC's isolation guidelines hadn't changed since Christmas 2021 when Rochelle Walensky reportedly pushed CDC staff to come up with a good reason to adjust COVID isolation from ten days down to five, which, as we pointed out at the time, was the same reduction to five days that was being demanded at the time in high-minded thinkpieces and in letters sent to the Biden administration by lobbying arms of the airline industry, including the CEO of Delta.

As we talked about in COVID Year Three, the one from 2022, the previous change was so unwarranted by our understanding of disease progression at the time that the New York Times reported the CDC staff reaction to Walensky's demand was as follows, quote,

Stunned, the [CDC] scientists scrambled to gather the limited data to support the recommendations and write the hundreds of pages on the agency's website that touch on quarantine and isolation. ...

There was so little evidence for shortened isolation ... that the science brief that typically a company's guidance was downgraded to a “rationale” document. Some researchers bristled at being left out of the decision making process, and were enraged by the agency's public statement the next day that the change was “motivated by science."

And this is, of course, where we got all those clips, the infamous clips we played a million times of Fauci and Walensky saying this decision was made in the interest of the economy, out of a worry that too many people would be out sick at once.

So, presumably aware of the chaos this caused, the CDC's plan, as originally floated, was to make any further change to the isolation guidelines subject to public comment. Which is a pretty common practice in a lot of federal agencies.

Except that didn't happen.

Instead, two weeks later, on March 1st, the CDC abruptly announced that the five day isolation period was over.

Just over. No public comment period. No nothing. Just, done.

The new guidance is that people should isolate until they're fever free for at least 24 hours, but can otherwise go back about their business, even if they're still testing positive. And they're suggested to wear a mask.

But in practice, as anyone with a job will know, the way this message was received has basically dispensed with any of that nuance, and the assumption is simply that isolation was over.

What's wild to think about this is what the isolation guidelines were prior to March 1, and how the Biden administration managed to completely undermine them by not pursuing anything like a federal paid sick leave.

Even when we talked about this guidance change at the beginning of the year, I remember a lot of people were surprised that the isolation guidelines were still so robust.

So here's what was in place beforehand. The recommendation, still in place at the start of this year, until March 1, was: isolate for five days. Then, end isolation if you haven't had a fever in 24 hours, unless you've used fever reducing medication to get there. But on day five, if you do have a fever, or if at any point during the five days you had shortness of breath or difficulty breathing—very common symptoms—or if you were hospitalized during those five days, then stay isolating through at least day 10.

That was in place until March 1.

And those are the isolation guidelines, I'll add, that the CDC couldn't find enough evidence for just a few years ago, to say that that was enough. Obviously, this gets to the real problem.

With no federal paid sick leave, with no COVID-specific OSHA protections outside of the healthcare sector, and with years of 'back-to-work,' 'pandemic is over' rhetoric coming out of the Biden administration, it's unlikely by this point [that] almost anyone was given this kind of grace by their employer.

In statements about this, it was frequently invoked that Oregon and California had both dropped their COVID isolation requirements, and so the federal government was merely playing catch up to states, something that we can also recall has been used as the justification in the past for things like dropping mask recommendations, even without evidence.

Oregon's justification for ending its own isolation policy, though, gives us a fitting window into what the priority was here. In January, Oregon's state health officer told CNN, quote, "From a pragmatic standpoint, from an evidence based and equity standpoint, trying to make sure that we weren't unnecessarily burdening families, keeping kids out of school, or keeping people out of work who may have very limited sick leave — this made sense for us."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  55:29 

Mhm. There you go.

Jules Gill-Peterson  55:30 

Well. Yep.

Artie Vierkant  55:31 

Yeah. This, I think, just speaks to something we've pointed out so many times, I feel like it almost loses meaning. So often in the pandemic, we've seen this argument that you can't have one thing because we don't have another thing—

Jules Gill-Peterson  55:44 

Right.

Artie Vierkant  55:44 

—beginning with the noble lie that we shouldn't wear masks because healthcare workers need the mask supply. Never mind why them needing masks shouldn't suggest to you that you might, too.

Jules Gill-Peterson  55:54 

[ Laughs ] Right.

Artie Vierkant  55:55 

All the way to, you know, we can't tell people to stay at home if they're sick because they don't have paid sick leave. By the way, please do not ask me why they don't have paid sick leave.

Jules Gill-Peterson  56:04 

Yep.

Artie Vierkant  56:04 

And please don't think too hard about it.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  56:05 

Yeah, it's the classic "letting the good be the enemy of the better" situation.

Jules Gill-Peterson  56:12 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  56:12 

Yeah. "Perfect be the enemy of the good?" I don't know, whatever.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  56:14 

Well, that's the way that a lot of people say it. But technically, the original translation is that the good is the enemy of the better—

Jules Gill-Peterson  56:20 

Hm.

Artie Vierkant  56:20 

Fair enough.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  56:20 

—which I think makes more sense than talking about, you know, "perfection" in the context of something like this, you know.

Because ultimately, either way, it's like, well, we don't have sick leave, so we have to make things drastically worse in order to both avoid continuing to draw attention to the fact that this is putting strain on the number one thing that we're trying to do, which is smooth over economic processes, right? And provide you with—you know, which provides you with leverage in order to make these demands.

Which, getting sick leave is not going to fix capitalism and it's not going to fix, you know, people's working conditions, but it's certainly a better condition that was on the table and reasonable to demand in a certain point in the COVID context which—this change, which is another thing that a lot of people mentioned, you know, they're still thinking about this many months later, as this being a defining point in the year.

And I think, Artie, I even remember when this happened. You turned to me and you're like, "well, you know, there's COVID Year Five." Like, "there's the beginning of the episode."

Artie Vierkant  56:33 

Like, "I know how it starts."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  56:52 

Yeah, I know how it starts now, and it — you know, this is one of those kind of moments that we're talking about where it's like, it's an important step in normalization. In order to lay the foundations for, again, retracting the possibility and removing the possibility of anything that could possibly be better than the status quo.

Which is at the time a unsustainable amount of infection and people not having the workplace productions or the resources to be able to manage that with the demand of continuing to operate as if nothing was happening and move forward at a kind of unsustainable pace in that condition. So, we chose more sickness and less protection instead.

Jules Gill-Peterson  58:04 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  58:04 

And when it came out that they were talking about a new isolation guideline proposal for public comment in some form in April, they just, you know, rushed to make it so that, a full month earlier, they were just like, no, that's the change. You know what I mean?

Jules Gill-Peterson  58:19 

No, it's very revealing.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  58:21 

No yeah, the rushing is. The rushing is revealing, because they're always like, we have to do this in a way that's slow and deliberate, and we're doing things responsibly. But then you see moves like this, or the rush to end Medicaid protections, right?

Where you see them saying, well, we have to decouple the Medicaid provisions from the federal Public Health Emergency in order to give states enough time to prepare.

Oh, and then we're just gonna end it, like, within 30 days from each other, basically without warning. 60 days after we decouple things. Yeah.

Jules Gill-Peterson  58:56 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  58:56 

Yeah. Anyway— [ Beatrice and Jules laugh ].

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  58:59 

We could go on for hours on that one point, probably.

Artie Vierkant  59:02 

On February 25, Aaron Bushnell self-immolated outside of the settler state's embassy in Washington DC, in protest of the genocide in Palestine.

His final words are:

My name is Aaron Bushnell. I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it is not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. 

Very serious people try to dismiss Bushnell's act as an act of madness, or to use the term mainstream accounts would prefer, one of mental illness. Those that didn't assailed his action in other ways.

One opinion piece in The Washington Post said that Bushnell quote, "dabbled in the kind of dorm-room Fanonism that saw the world through the simplified lens of colonized and colonizer." [ Jules sighs ].

Thank you, Washington Post.

This is, of course, happening the same year that the media tried to pretend the term "settler colonialism" was a brand new one—some kind of insidious Gen Z propaganda—even though colonists have been referred to as "settlers" even in the pages of major newspapers for decades and decades and decades.

As Stef Kaufman-Mthimkhulu said on Death Panel shortly after Bushnell's protest, quote,

I think people want to always draw a direct line back to okay, well, we can explain this by mental illness. Because if it was really what he said, then why isn't everyone doing it, right? Like, if we can't say that there's something wrong with him, then we have to say what is wrong with us? ... if what he said is true, then what is happening to all the people that are able to look on and are not feeling that?

March brings the fourth anniversary of what many consider to be the start of the COVID pandemic, which is the World Health Organization's March 11 pandemic declaration—even though it started a few months before that in China.

This brings what I now personally assume will be an annual raft of writers and publications willing to weigh in on and eulogize the crisis, even when they had a hand in sweeping it under the rug.

On March 11, the fourth anniversary of the aforementioned WHO declaration, The New York Times' David Leonhardt emerges from his long spell of having tucked his tail between his legs on opining about COVID [ Beatrice and Jules laugh ] in his newsletter to write a post taking stock of where things stand now.

Among Leonhardt's insights are a tired retread of some of his most incorrect assertions, like that after 2021 COVID became mostly a red state problem, or that quote, "masks do work, but mask mandates tend to make little difference." And that quote, "many liberals exaggerated the value of pandemic restrictions."

If you've listened to our recent patron episode about how bad RFK would be as HHS head, I'll note that RFK's "A Letter to Liberals," which I quote at the end of that episode, includes a citation, by the way, to Leonhardt's May 2022 newsletter where he first pushed "masks work, but mask mandates haven't."

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:02:09 

Oh.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:02:09 

No way. I mean, of course, but, yeah.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:02:11 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  1:02:13 

And it is a direct citation—I think in the body [of the text], if I'm recalling correctly, I'm just doing this off the top my head, but if I recall correctly, I'm pretty sure RFK basically writes, 'even the New York Times now admits that mask mandates don't work.'—

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:02:26 

Yeah [ laughs ].

Artie Vierkant  1:02:27 

And then, when you look at the citation: David Leonhardt, New York Times, May 2022, etc.

So as I said, March is a big month for crank takes on COVID. At least, bigger than other months this year. So I'll jump through a few here.

That same day, on March 11, Great Barrington Declaration co-author Martin Kulldorff takes to City Journal to opine about how his views got him fired from Harvard. That article, called "Harvard Tramples the Truth," features the very funny subhead, quote, "When it came to debating COVID lockdowns, Veritas wasn't the university's guiding principle."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:03:01 

[ Laughs ]

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:03:01 

Shady! That's actually a really, really powerful statement to make in Cambridge, Massachusetts. [ Beatrice and Artie laugh ]. My god.

Artie Vierkant  1:03:13 

Freddie DeBoer writes a piece in Truthdig called "COVID Made Us All a Little Insane," where he asks, among other things, quote, "When the fuck did everybody become immunocompromised?" Arguing that appeals to protect the vulnerable overstate how many immunocompromised people there are, and that no one has provided him, personally, with evidence of the actual number and prevalence of immunocompromised people in the US. [ Beatrice sighs ]

Do you want to interject on that?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:03:39 

I was gonna say, I remember many years ago looking into why there wasn't an easy statistic to cite, and realizing that there was a certain reality of our health statistics system in the United States that existed completely separately from the mythology that we know everything about everyone all of the time, right?

As if we had, I don't know, something like Medicare for All with a big national database where you could search how many people's medical charts have XYZ, you know? This is a constant mythology that we've seen over and over and over again, that there are all these people "pretending," and we've seen it from everyone from DeBoer—like a total crank—to Leonhardt, an institutionalized crank. And, all this is—

Artie Vierkant  1:04:24 

Well and that all forms of health variability are quantifiable and already known, right?

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:04:30 

Right.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:04:30 

Right, and all this is, at the end of the day, is malingerer hunting and the myth of biocertification. And the perpetual idea that we really have the truth of everything all figured out already, and it's just a matter of looking up the statistic, or being able to verify that everyone is who they say they are.

Instead of, you know, listening to what people say about themselves and their own health in order to gauge what we're working with.

Artie Vierkant  1:04:56 

Specifically, though, the US does not produce a statistic about how many—

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:05:01 

No.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:05:02 

Certainly not!

Artie Vierkant  1:05:03 

—immunocompromised people there are, which is something I just [ Jules laughs ] — I think it's important to say really clearly—

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:05:06 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  1:05:07 

—because you alluded to that, but I think it's just very plain language important to say—

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:05:10 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  1:05:10 

—the US does not produce a statistic on how many immunocompromised people there are within the US. And that is something that we ourselves have been pointing out and honestly, frankly, complaining about since 2018 at least. Which, for you know, everyone listening is obviously before the pandemic.

Here's some more. The Guardian, March 14, 2024 quote, "Time to stop using the term 'long COVID' as symptoms no worse than those after flu, Queensland's chief health officer says."

This is a write up of a paper out of Australia's health system. But I'm mentioning it here because it echoes the same pronouncements we talked about at the end of COVID Year Four, with long COVID minimizer discourse coalescing around the idea that if you allow a patient group to have a hand in its own identity formation—to recognize themselves as a group, in essence, and what could come from that—that this could lead to the putatively very scary result of too many resources being used to treat people who have long COVID.

Terrifying. We love to malinger, don't we, folks?

This does come, I'll say, though, the same month that one study in the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics estimates that some 5.8 million children have long COVID in the US. So.

And speaking, of course, of long COVID, on March 11—which remember, is the fourth anniversary of the pandemic declaration from the WHO—that same day, that fourth anniversary, NPR publishes "Wrestling with my husband's fear of getting COVID again," a piece so outrageous that we dedicated an entire episode to unpacking it.

If you haven't heard that episode, please go check it out. It's also one of the three of us, me, Bea and Jules. I think we're gonna do, like we did last year, another kind of "Best of 2024" series of episodes released sometime after this one comes out.

And I know for certain—assuming that we do that—I know for certain that that episode is going to be on it, so that'll be somewhere in the feed shortly. It's one of my favorites, and one where I think we get little more personal than usual.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:07:17 

Yeah. And it's also worth saying that this piece in particular was, I think, for a lot of people, just a huge turning point in how they understood their personal relationships.

For folks with long COVID and folks who just cared about COVID in general, it has been used to justify furthering interpersonal abandonment.

It has helped people understand and put words to things that they have already experienced, and it reflects a phenomenon that, unfortunately, we have heard about nearly every day since early 2020. Which is that people's relationships have ended as a result of differing takes on how to approach COVID safety.

And the kind of experiences that folks have had when that happens is something that's often dismissed and sort of downplayed in a popular sense, as if it doesn't matter, right? Like as if the partner leaving was doing so for their, you know—they had every right to, or something.

And this piece really was an important, I think, overture in trying to even further normalize this kind of abandonment, and this kind of interpersonal abandonment, particularly of partners who are disabled, [abandoned] by a non disabled partner.

And that's something that is obviously a dynamic that pre-exists the pandemic, that is something that's a common feature of the disability community.

But, you know, it's a tragic thing that we hear about literally all of the time, and it breaks my heart whenever I hear from a listener who's in this situation, and I hear from listeners who are in this situation way too often, whether it's family, partners, relationships with children, close friends, best friends, roommates, et cetera.

This is such a constant theme that is so treated as if it doesn't matter in the mainstream media. And this piece really exemplified a kind of rallying cry to be even more vicious in abandoning people who care about COVID.

And I've really appreciated hearing from listeners about how our episode pushing back on that has resonated, and it's one that I think is something that I'm really proud of us doing.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:07:41 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  1:07:49 

Definitely. And so, for sort of further context on this: the piece in question surrounds the author's moral dilemma of wanting to get on with living like it's 2019 again while her husband, who is an immunocompromised person, wants to continue to mask.

The author seeks advice from psychologists who reduce her husband's position to "anxiety." For example, telling her, to quote, "'make sure that it's science that is contributing to the beliefs he's having around COVID precautions,' says Jackson"—one of the psychologists—"'and not other emotions like depression, anxiety or anger that may be affecting his quality of life.'"

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:10:16 

Ugh, it's still so infuriating here all these months later.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:10:20 

I know.

Artie Vierkant  1:10:22 

One [psychologist] suggests that she write a letter to her husband, expressing her concern over him still trying to not get sick, to ask him, quote, "Is this the life he wants? Does he foresee an end to this? Or is this something he would like help with?"

And as we said back in March, you know, as though it was his decision and not a matter of policy. And also, if you want to, quote, unquote, "help" someone with something like this, a good way to do it is to try to understand how they're asking you to help protect them. And how they want to protect you, too, honestly.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:10:54 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:10:54 

Yeah, it's really not that fucking hard, right?

Artie Vierkant  1:10:57 

Yeah, you don't have to go to a psychologist to, you know, get little tips on how to get them to stop doing the thing that you've decided to no longer care about. You know?

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:11:07 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  1:11:07 

Anyway. Again, today is so much about consequences, right?

There are versions of this article that have been written before. But few, I think, training such a rehabilitative lens on its subject.

You know, I do think—to echo sort of what Bea was saying. I do feel like this is a really interesting sort of turning point in the larger conversation around COVID and COVID protections and long COVID, especially as kind of a barometer, maybe, for where liberals are at.

Because if you think about it, stuff like this was the long predicted end result of major moments in pandemic media narratives.

You know, from the Biden administration's own "pandemic of the unvaccinated" to 2021's Atlantic piece, "The Liberals Who Can't Quit Lockdown," to 2023's sardonically titled hit piece, "The Case for Wearing Masks Forever" that are all examples, I think, of just outright dismissal?

Whereas in this I think we see the predicted end result being, you know, this genre of piece where the reader is assumed to need to hear a reason why the author is still taking COVID precautions at all. In this case, her husband. Before then hearing about the actual mechanics and moral and ethical conversations that transpire around the author's attempt to get her husband to, you know, at last, give up, right?

It's this reframing as, oh, 'have empathy for my quest to get him rehabilitated,' right?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:11:09 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  1:11:10 

'To get him freed of the anxiety COVID produces in him'—without actually being freed of the pandemic itself and the state abandonment that's followed. You know. Which are the actual factors that are producing any anxiety that might be here, if indeed he has any.

Beatrice and Jules  1:12:58 

Right.

Artie Vierkant  1:12:58 

It's a quotidien form of carceral sanism.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:13:01 

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:13:02 

Mmm. That's really well said.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:13:03 

I mean, it echoes writings from husbands committing their wives in the 19th century for neuroses and failure to produce enough male heirs as a reason to have them committed.

Artie Vierkant  1:13:17 

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it echoes the entire—that's why I mentioned it's like a quotidien form of carceral sanism, because it echoes the exact language of—you know, what does Eric Adams say when he's talking about involuntary commitment? He uses that language of, ‘we will no longer walk on by people who need help despite themselves.’

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:13:37 

Right.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:13:37 

Right. And also, this brings up the second R.D. Laing quote from The Politics of Experience that I flagged for this episode. Which is, he writes, quote, "what we call 'normal' is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, interjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being. The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue."

Artie Vierkant  1:14:02 

Yeah.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:14:02 

Mm. Yeah. I feel like.. wow, yeah. That's a really good quote. [ Jules and Artie laugh ].

And I feel like this also is just showing the part where the privatization of the pandemic—you know, the ideological shrinking of it down to people's family units, into their most intimate relationships.

And that sense of aloneness is not entirely disconnected from the state, right?

That's where the carceral element still remains, where therapeutic culture shows up and there's a deputizing of individuals, and a deputizing of structures, or units like the private family to continue certain errands on behalf of the state that can be really quite devastating, even in a context of abandonment at the society-wide level.

So there's just, again, this point of intense, intense connection, even though we're talking about something that, in the aggregate, we would probably call a kind of abandonment or privatization.

Or, you know, externalizing everything onto people and construing them as private relationships or private problems. But then they demand all this intervention and all of this meddling, and can create all of these kinds of deputized, yeah, policing or carceral roles masquerading as.. well, they're not masquerading. They're just actually taking the form of so called "therapy" or "care."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:15:27 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  1:15:28 

Yeah, absolutely. And that's why, you know, I think it's important to locate this within that extension of these dynamics that we're already quite familiar with in other contexts. Right? That logic that says, you know, we must protect the mad 'from themselves' because they're using their agency in a way that we perceive to be harming themselves.

And in this case, you know, madness, or whatever, is extended to: are you still masking? Are you still trying to, you know, avoid COVID because you know that you're immunocompromised? Or just for whatever reason? Because of X or Y reason as listed in the article?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:16:04 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  1:16:04 

You know, I do think it is significant that we have here—again, this is March of this year. March 2024, notably, just a little less than—like, a year out from the end of the Public Health Emergency. And already we've kind of seen this.. you know, it makes sense.

I mean, the reason I brought up those other articles, for example, like "The Liberals Who Can't Quit Lockdown" kind of framing, is because when I think about some of the ways that liberal punditry in general often treats its subjects, I feel like you kind of have this, first, a mode of just outright derision?

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:16:04 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  1:16:42 

Whether it's, oh, look at these, you know, insert ableist slur here. Ableist slur there. People who are still masking in 2021, for example. You know, to date, the year that is still the highest death rate of any of the pandemic years so far.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:17:02 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  1:17:02 

Whether it's that, or whether it's simply laughing off very dangerous figures like RFK, or like the Great Barrington Declaration or something like that, who are figures who present a political problem that needs to be taken seriously. You have this kind of derision. And then, if the derision works enough, as it did with the masking, I think—

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:17:20 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  1:17:21 

—or as it did with the pandemic. If the derision works enough, to the point where you sort of discipline people out of it. Then I think you see that next signal switch to compassion, right? We no longer simply are trying to other these people. because they've been othered. 'My husband is one of them, in fact!'

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:17:40 

Right.

Artie Vierkant  1:17:40 

'I'm trying to do this for his good.'

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:17:42 

Well, and I need to distance myself from him, because he poses a threat to my perceived desirability and acceptability, and my own position and welcoming within society. You know, this is a classic sort of function of ableism, structurally speaking, right?

Which is, if you declare someone post-human, you dehumanize them, you say they're non-worthy life, you create these incentives for distancing and abandonment. So it's beyond the kind of interpersonal and it's down to a kind of structural level of declaring whose lives are worth more and by what really kind of simple metrics can you determine someone's worth at face value by some sort of quick metric, right?

And we have all these different metrics and signs and signifiers of disability that have been absorbed into the kind of metrics of what is "desirable" and "undesirable" in the context of COVID normalization.

And it's mapped very consistently onto who should be disposed of and who needs to be punished and reformed.

And it's so funny because after this episode aired, I heard from a marriage and family therapist, who said it's amazing to them the kind of way that this was presented and received by people in their field. Because masking itself is an act of collaboration and cooperation.

And as a marriage and family therapist, they're supposed to be preaching that marriage is an act of collaboration and cooperation, and that you need to be coming to these mutual agreements.

And yet, you know, when this came out, it was like marriage and family therapists left to right were like, ooh, yes, you've got to discipline your partner into stop being a COVID weirdo! [ Artie laughs, Jules sighs ]. Like, yass, yass! And they were like, what the fuck is going on? Because this is completely counter to what we're supposed to be here to do in a therapeutic sense, right?

It actually brought them to the lens of anti-psychiatry, because they saw the kind of hollow nature of the rehabilitative impulse among their peers in a way they had never seen it before.

Artie Vierkant  1:19:52 

Yeah. That's fascinating.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:19:56 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  1:19:55 

I will say, since we've been paused on this for a while. Obviously, again, I stand by what I said about, go and listen to that episode. But I think I'll throw an element of that in here to sort of make sure that it kind of is contained within this context as well—within the kind of "COVID Year Whatever" framework. And I talk about this—we all talk about this in that episode.

But the thing that still just makes me so sad about this fucking article is like, as I said then that episode, you know, I, in this case, share at least one subject position with the author. Which is, I am the partner of an immunocompromised person. Beatrice, of the show.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:20:00 

Yep.

Artie Vierkant  1:20:00 

And I just cannot fucking imagine feeling entitled to write something like this. And not sort of taking the time to try to figure out and understand the context and what is actually kind of being asked here. And the kind of care for each other, that is relatively simple, that he seems to want.

And I understand because you have to make a decision, when you're coming from that position as a partner—when you're not someone coming from the position of being, yourself, disabled or immunocompromised—you have to make a decision to dive into it and figure it out.

And, you know, it can be quite life altering. I mean, it ended up being the reason that Death Panel started—before the pandemic—the reason the fucking Death Panel was able to start, really, was this collaboration of Bea and I, and me just trying to understand. Right? And then understanding more and more about the political economy of health and how fuck—how it just is symbolic for everything under capitalism, right? Anyway. Go listen to that episode. [ Artie and Jules laugh ]. I get into it.

Artie Vierkant  1:21:49 

So let's take a small detour, next, into the election. This month—that we're in, March 2024—Trump officially tied up the Republican primary.

Meanwhile, Biden was still the Democrats' de facto nominee. And the Democratic Party is having a little keyboard war with itself over whether Biden is now too old to run again. In February, Ezra Klein had published a piece in The New York Times complaining over quote, "the impression Biden is giving of age. Of slowness. Of frailty."

Going on to say, quote, "The presidency is a performance. You are not just making decisions, you are also acting out the things people want to believe about their president — that the President is in command, strong, energetic, compassionate, thoughtful, that they don't need to worry about all that is happening in the world, because the President has it all under control."

As we say on the show at the time, the president can't be from among the dysgenic set. They have to be strong. God and daddy, all at once. [ Beatrice and Jules laugh ].

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:22:50 

As we always say.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:22:52 

And yet they're powerless to stop sending, like, billions of dollars in bombs to kill people in Palestine.

Artie Vierkant  1:22:59 

Yeah. Exactly. On the other side of the debate, Democrats worry that removing Biden could produce a contested Democratic National Convention, allowing left issues like COVID or Palestine or trans rights to be forced into the party.

As Joan Walsh writes in The New Republic, quote, "Will the convention not become a forum for litigating highly divisive issues like Gaza, Medicare for All and the broader contest between progressives and establishment-oriented liberals? It will indeed. Such a convention could be almost as divisive as Chicago '68, except Mayor Brandon Johnson would not authorize his police force to beat up the hippies."

Biden's team gets him all gussied up for his annual State of the Union speech, March 7, an event that draws near universal praise from all the pundits like Klein, who feel reassured that Biden's still got it.

By now, Biden has responded to monthslong mass protests over the genocide in Palestine by co-opting the movement's language of "ceasefire," exactly as friend of the show Rasha Abdulhadi predicted they would, right here on Death Panel, on October 13, 2023. Just days after Al Aqsa [Flood].

In Biden's speech, he claims, quote, "I've been working non-stop to establish an immediate ceasefire that would last for six weeks."

So two things here.

One is that this is a rehash of what the Biden administration had previously been calling a humanitarian pause at a time when it was less eager to co-opt the demands for a ceasefire.

The other is that I think the words "working non-stop" for a ceasefire are going to sound more than a little familiar to everyone, considering that right up until Harris lost this November, we were inundated with promises that Harris was, indeed, quote, "working tirelessly" for a ceasefire.

Biden's speech includes a short section on COVID, presented, by now as usual, as completely in the rear view, even though that same week, the week ending March 9, 2024, as Biden addressed Congress, 1,103 people die of COVID in the US that week.

Biden concludes that, quote, "The pandemic no longer controls our lives," which is debatable, considering that Biden himself used this exact same line, not just in that instance on March 7, 2024, but on:

February 7, 2023.

November 9, 2022.

October, 27 2022.

September second and first, 2022.

[December], 22, 2022. [Misstated and out of order as August in the recording].

March 30, 2022.

and July 5, 2021, quote, "while the virus hasn't been vanquished, we know this. It no longer controls our lives. It no longer paralyzes our nation, and it's within our power to make sure it never does again."

And he probably said it quite a few more times outside of that, but I think I have made my point.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:25:42 

"Paralyzes the nation," this is what I'm saying. The signifiers of disability mapping right onto COVID normalization. Could not be more obvious, sometimes.

Artie Vierkant  1:25:52 

Yeah. Also just, I do think, maybe to be overly didactic about it. Saying "the pandemic no longer controls our lives," having to repeat that same line over the course of.. four separate years? Just seems a little, you know, suspect.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:26:08 

A little interesting. Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:26:09 

I think good friend of the show, brilliant, Nathan Tankus, put this perfectly way, way, way, way back in December of 2020 in the episode "Overheating the Economy," which came out on New Year's Eve. When he said that Democrats had really decided we'd gotten to the point where, quote, "The deaths and the illness and everything no longer has a macroeconomic implication, which makes the system even more tolerant of 4,000 deaths a day"—which is what was happening at the time.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:26:40 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  1:26:40 

Yeah. To continue. It's easy to forget, but it's around this time that we get the faintest glimmer of acknowledgement that the pandemic might actually end up being a bigger deal for Biden's re-election chances than most give it credit for. Or, indeed, that most election postmortems have now bothered to explore.

On March 21, the Atlantic runs a piece called "It's Not the Economy, It's the Pandemic. Joe Biden is paying the price for America's unprocessed COVID grief."

This piece opines on the discourse that has been ever-present over, really, most of the last several years? Which I would summarize as: survey after survey says people are struggling economically. But if you look at this chart, line go up. [ Beatrice and Jules laugh ]. Since line go up, people must be wrong about their experience of the economy. After all, line go up.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:27:28 

Right.

Artie Vierkant  1:27:29 

Pundits get so into this idea that they adopt the term "vibecession" from a 26 year old's economics newsletter. Probably the second most influential thing a 26 year old did this year, and not as cool as the other one. *Alleged* 26 year old, I'll add. [ Beatrice and Jules laugh ].

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:27:46 

Wait, whose newsletter is this from?

Artie Vierkant  1:27:47 

Some asshole who— [ Jules laughs ] she's like a Tik Tok—

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:27:51 

No..

Artie Vierkant  1:27:52 

—whatever. I'll send you the fucking Wall Street Journal profile on her after this, if you remind me. It's...

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:27:52 

I don't need to read it, I think. I'm good! [ Laughs ].

Artie Vierkant  1:28:00 

Yeah. No, you don't. You know exactly what it is. It's like—you know, one of these people who are presented as—the Wall Street Journal profile is, like, "this person is explaining economics to Gen Z."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:28:13 

Here's the anointed voice of a generation telling young kids exactly what boomers want them to hear!

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:28:18 

Yeah. What a shock.

Artie Vierkant  1:28:19 

So anyway, what I find interesting about this very temporary discourse about the potential weight of the pandemic on the election is how it shows there were some very open, obvious red flags right out there for Democrats and the Biden administration, if they simply wanted to look. For example, in the piece, it says, quote,

Unemployment rates are lower than they've been in a half century, and the stock market is sky high, but poll after poll shows that voters are disgruntled. President Joe Biden's approval rating has been hovering in the high 30s. American satisfaction with their personal lives, a measure that usually dips in times of economic uncertainty, is at a near record low, according to Gallup.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:28:59 

Oh, but it's just vibes, though. [ Jules laughs ].

Artie Vierkant  1:29:01 

And nearly half of Americans surveyed in January said they were worse off than three years prior.

The authors of this piece keep it simple and suggest that the vibecession is caused by lingering "trauma" from the pandemic, an event that it places in the past tense, and one that it suggests we simply haven't taken the time to grieve over.

They even fault Biden for this saying, quote, "In the past two years, he, like almost everyone else, has tried, largely, to proceed as if everyone is back to normal."

Left unaddressed is the ongoing burden of the pandemic, but also conspicuously absent is the side effect of that proceeding back to normal: Biden's dismantling of COVID welfare programs, what we've called Biden's unmaking of the pandemic welfare state. Also the title of another episode of ours I'd recommend from this year.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:29:01 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  1:29:01 

A few days later, on March 24, The New York Times takes this up and addresses at least one of those components in a piece called "How a Pandemic Malaise Is Shaping American Politics." Here's how the Times characterizes it. Quote,

Four years later, the coronavirus pandemic has largely receded from public attention and receives little discussion on the campaign trail. And yet, as the same two men run once again, COVID quietly endures as a social and political force. Though diminished, the pandemic has become the background music of the presidential campaign trail, shaping how voters feel about the nation, the government and their politics.

They then quote a sociologist at Columbia who says, quote, "The pandemic is everywhere in general in this election, and nowhere specific, because it sets the conditions under which this campaign is unfolding."

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:30:39 

Hm.

Artie Vierkant  1:30:39 

Most interesting to me is the piece's brief mention of pandemic welfare state programs, which, again, have received very little attention in election post mortems, but which do a lot to explain why people's experiences of the economy are so poor compared to economists' ever ascending line.

The New York Times writes, quote,

Since taking office, Biden has won lasting legislative milestones, including a $1 trillion infrastructure package, a $1.9 trillion COVID relief package, and major investments to combat climate change. But some of his post pandemic programs with the biggest influence on people's daily lives have not endured. Congress failed to renew a child tax credit payment that sent families monthly checks. Tens of millions of dollars in grants to assist child care facilities expired, forcing the closure of some providers. Millions of borrowers who had their student loans paused during the pandemic now have payments due.

I bring this up because, while we get the faintest glimmer here that this could get taken up to become part of a public discourse or reckoning for Democrats over the COVID response, this line of critique and self reflection all but disappears after these are published.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:31:46 

Mhm. Yeah, and the emergence of—almost like the euphemism of inflation? Or, you know, cost of living in this really abstracted, you know, disaggregated way that obviously has a lot more to do with how economists, or, like, stock market people think about what "the economy" means or what costs mean.

And just—I say euphemistic, because I'm not even always sure what people are referring to, like the rate of inflation? [ Artie laughs ]. Like the cost of groceries and gas? I think are the things that are the most common refrains in political campaigns, and certainly came up during the 2024 election cycle.

But yeah, it's just so telling that all of these other really profound unwindings of that pandemic welfare state—those all lead to rising costs, right? Removing SNAP benefits, or obviously Medicaid unwinding, but also having to restart student loan payments. Each of these things just is driving up people's cost of living, and yet they're not—yeah, the way that they were just absented and taken out.

It's really interesting to me that then that only returns, for the most part, in this strange, indirect way as, like, unnamed "trauma," or like, "grief" or "trauma." And it's like.. but there's money here, people. [ Jules laughs ].

Artie Vierkant  1:33:10 

That's such a good way to put it.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:33:12 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  1:33:12 

And I hadn't thought about it in that way, exactly. Because obviously I've thought about each one of these programs being undone as a turn of the screw, as it were.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:33:12 

Certainly are, yeah.

Artie Vierkant  1:33:13 

But also, I think that's just a really straightforward, great way to think of it. Of the things that, then, are actually being measured, when people say, like, oh, are your costs too high? Are also things that were, then, as it was the case for so many people, costs foisted right back on to them again, or made worse.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:33:40 

Mhm.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:33:40 

Right, totally privatized costs, yeah, that had just been slightly eased. And are even worse in a context of overall inflation. Anyways. Enough of JGP, the fake economist, but. [ Artie laughs ].

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:33:53 

No, but like this is also then coming in the exact same moment that, if someone needs to get Paxlovid it's starting to cost more. And where we're starting to see people encounter insurance problems trying to get vaccinated, where we see things that are part of the privatization of "the tools," right?

The distribution of COVID from a public, collective problem, into a private, individuated personal and financial responsibility placed on each person, which is again going to obviously accelerate any kind of negative sentiment about masks, because now you're raising the economic costs of protecting yourself even higher and higher, on top of all these other costs being foisted on people at the same time.

Artie Vierkant  1:33:54 

Yeah,

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:33:55 

Absolutely.

Artie Vierkant  1:33:55 

So. This brings us to April. In April, the Palestine solidarity movement takes on a new form as dozens of solidarity encampments emerge, occupying public and university spaces with a wide range of demands. Mostly demanding, at a bare minimum, divestment from the settler colonial project occupying geographical Palestine.

While it's difficult to track, it appears that this spring, there were at least 174 Palestine solidarity encampments globally.

While these are mostly associated in our memories and in our media accounts with colleges and universities alone, I think it's important to remember two things.

One, many of these encampments welcomed participation from their local communities at large, not just students. Which makes the fact that the media then wrung their hands over "outside agitators" especially funny.

And two, the encampments didn't only happen on campuses.

There was for a period, for example, an encampment in Clark Park in Philadelphia.

One in a public square in Hackney, in the UK, making demands on the local council.

In New Orleans, people occupied Jackson Square and renamed it Palestine square.

A seizure of public space, not university space. Which is just to say, we shouldn't remember this exclusively as a movement within colleges and universities. I think doing so can sometimes be used to misrepresent these as less radical than they were.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:36:03 

Mm.

Artie Vierkant  1:36:04 

You know, just look at the fight over George Floyd square in Minneapolis, or even the Supreme Court's Grants Pass decision this year. Occupying public space of any kind is a significant political force.

So. In any case. This is going to be an incomplete history of this portion. There's plenty that could be said about this, but for our purposes, we're going to stick with just a few key facts about the encampments.

Many of the encampments held out for weeks in the face of immediate repression. Snipers were spotted on the rooftops surrounding Ohio State's encampment. State troopers were called in to arrest and beat up students at UT Austin. For weeks, it was threatened that the National Guard would be sent in to crack down on the Columbia encampment. Some on the right openly hoped for a repeat of Kent State, they said.

Media and major political figures absolutely lost it over these encampments.

The New York Post put out the whiny headline quote, "Harvard Has Fallen," after an encampment sprung up there. [ Beatrice laughs ].

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:37:04 

If only.

Artie Vierkant  1:37:05 

[ Laughs ] Yeah. "Veritas."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:37:05 

This is our second hilarious Harvard headline of the year.

Artie Vierkant  1:37:09 

The Defense Department fed quotes [allegedly; this is an assumption] to the media about how Russia was trying to, quote, "exploit America's divisions over the war on Gaza."

Politicians and media wrung their hands over the idea that outside agitators were causing the encampments to proliferate—something we don't have time to get into here, I guess I already mentioned this, but you know, I, for one, welcome our benevolent outside agitators. [ Beatrice and Jules laugh ].

New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who at this point in the year had not yet been handed down felony corruption charges, surveyed the Columbia encampment and wondered aloud, quote, "Why is everybody's tent the same? Was there a fire sale on those tents? There's some organizing going on. There's a well concerted organizing effort. And what's the goal of that organizing? That's what we need to be asking ourselves."

Well, they were telling you [ Jules laughs ] — the goal of that organizing was, free Palestine.

On April 30, the NYPD conducts a simultaneous raid of the encampments at Columbia and CUNY, with reports emerging that one NYPD officer, quote, unquote, "accidentally" fired his gun inside the occupied Hind's Hall at Columbia.

Over the course of the spring, thousands of people were arrested for participating in these encampments and some charged with felonies.

In a grim but kind of hilarious turn, a report from The Appeal found that all of the prosecutors who charged students with felonies were in the process of actively running for re-election as prosecutors, suggesting these charges are more about political opportunism than anything else.

This was an incredibly inspiring string of political actions, I would say. And not just because of the actions themselves, but because so many of these solidarity encampments—really, all of them I'm aware of—were very up front in asserting that what they were doing wasn't the important part. The important part was what is happening in Palestine.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:39:03 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  1:39:03 

But what was also quite inspiring is that, at a lot of them, it was very common to see protesters masking. And often in N95s.

Not all, mind. I don't want to pretend that everyone was doing this. But it was common enough to be noticed, especially compared with earlier protests the previous fall. And I think it's important to say that this is a development that clearly didn't just happen by accident.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:39:29 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  1:39:29 

We've talked to people who spent a lot of time and organizing effort on how masking at actions like this is important because it helps us protect each other. Remember, every chain of transmission we can break is important. And, because it helps us make these spaces safer for disabled, ill and immunocompromised comrades, who are, frankly, growing in number because of years of the unchecked pandemic. Not only because of the prevalence of long COVID, but because so many disabled and chronically ill people have been radicalized by their experience over the last few years.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:39:58 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  1:39:58 

And finally, of course, masking is important for opsec, protecting our identities. Because while, as a lot of people are quick to point out, facial recognition technology has adapted considerably to be able to identify people under masks, I mean, you still want the cops to have to go through an extra step, right?

These are all arguments that were, you know, happening, and discussions happening among organizers, is my point.

Anyway. Don't just take my word for it, as Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression organizer Olan Mijana told Semafor in April, wearing masks at protests is about, quote, "communicating that we deny the Biden administration's narrative about COVID—that it's no longer a big deal ... It's about collective safety, and it's also about connecting this COVID neglect to the very issues that we're marching on the DNC for."

The media, on hearing about all this, is extremely confused.

Earlier this year, Bea and I wrote a piece in The Nation called "Masks Are a Symbol of Solidarity. Don't Let Democrats Take Them Away." And I'm going to read from that briefly, because I think we distilled the media reactions well. We wrote,

When Palestine solidarity encampments emerged on college campuses as well as other public spaces this spring, writers at outlets like The New York Times and The Guardian scratched their heads over why, exactly, the face of these encampments was an N95. Masked protesters were treated as an anachronism. The Times assumed that students involved in the actions wore masks simply because they, 'protested for the first time after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, when COVID mask mandates were still in place.' The Guardian concluded that the masks were there to guard from 'personal and professional repercussions,' even as the writer admitted that protesters he spoke to also cited COVID-19. The New York Post drew its own connection between encampments and COVID. One Post headline from April read, 'COVID shutdowns, isolation to blame for pro-Palestine protests, experts say."

So. While the media may have had immense difficulty figuring out why this happened, choosing to instead armchair pathologize people at the encampments, I think it actually seems pretty obvious why masks would be an appropriate symbol of solidarity here.

Obviously, for some of the reasons already mentioned, but also because there's a big overlap in the community of people who remain politically active about COVID and the people who are active in the movement in solidarity with Palestine. They're not all the same people. But they're not two totally distinct groups of people, right?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:39:58 

I also want to note that I spoke to an epidemiologist who asked to remain unnamed because they work for a state public health agency. They said that, you know, if you look at the NVSS data for mid-May—like May 11 through early July—there's a very tangible reduction in deaths involving COVID-19 and deaths involving pneumonia, influenza or COVID-19 that—you know, obviously, there's no way to prove that the solidarity protests and the masking that we saw there had an impact in a way that you could get peer reviewed and published.

But what we know about masking from studies like the one that Ellie Murray came on the show to talk about, twice, actually, that they did in Massachusetts, where, when you have masking occurring in key points in the community where people come together and then leave that place to go elsewhere, like a school, there are tangible reductions in the burden of infectious respiratory diseases on the community around them.

And that this has a positive effect that can be measured. And you know, there may or may not have been real world benefits of the masking at protests that affected who died in the months during andimmediately after these encampments.

Artie Vierkant  1:42:26 

Also I think, as I'll kind of allude to in a second—if that person who wrote to you is correct in this possibility—one of the other reasons could simply be, also, seeing masking happening quite publicly, right?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:44:04 

Mhm.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:44:04 

Mm.

Artie Vierkant  1:44:04 

I mean, these things potentially have an effect in people just independently deciding, like, oh, right. Still a pandemic. Totally. Those kids know what's up.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:44:15 

Right.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:44:15 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  1:44:16 

On this point, though, I think it's worthwhile to just spell out a couple of the points of solidarity here, the reasons why there has been so much overlap between these movements.

Many of us who desire Palestinian liberation also understand that genocide isn't just a matter of the bombs that the US is sending and the war crimes that IOF members gleefully document themselves perpetrating on social media. That genocide is also infrastructural. It's why, long before October 7, when the settler state proudly decided it was putting Gaza, quote, "on a diet"—a blockade that's lasted over a decade now, engineered to slowly choke the life out of Palestinians—that that, too, was an act of genocide.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:44:58 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  1:44:58 

When the IOF bombs hospitals, and perpetrates acts like the flour massacres, and strikes water treatment infrastructure, that is annihilatory violence no less spectacular than direct murders by bullets and bombs.

You know, it's why we've been pushing for so much of the year to get people to donate to Gaza City's municipal water supply and waste management, which I'll put as the first link, I think, in the episode description.

The settler state knows it can strip away the basic infrastructure of living and accomplish genocide by other means. Starvation, making it impossible to get basic medical treatment, and of course, infectious disease.

They're creating the conditions that are the reason that we've seen increasing cases of Hepatitis A, scabies, chicken pox, certainly COVID, and why this year polio returned to Gaza after 25 years without any cases.

To quote Danya Qato,

Health, for Palestinians, is inextricable from the ongoing Israeli settler colonial project of dispossession and erasure and from the capitalist policies and practices that undergird the project in Palestine, in refugee camps, and in diaspora communities. ... This is not to say that settler colonialism is a social or political determinant of health. Rather, it is to say that settler colonialism proceeds and is fundamental to all other determinants of health—be they clinical, economic, social or political.

And Danya wrote that in 2020, by the way, in a piece about Palestine being abandoned to COVID. So.

[ Artie’s note: Here’s a link to our episode with Danya about that essay. ]

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:46:29 

Mm.

Artie Vierkant  1:46:28 

A foundational text for me, personally.

We also know that there are certain people in Palestine fighting against this genocide who are trying to keep COVID from spreading there.

In January—so, several months before the solidarity encampments began—we had Danya on, and one of the things that we did was read messages sent to us from Death Panel listeners in Gaza.

They're all really important statements, and if you haven't heard them, I would listen to that episode after this. But for our purposes, today, I'm going to read one in particular from our friend we're referring to simply as G.

So G wrote to us, quote,

It can be hard to get people to care about COVID when there are bombings all day and night, snipers, drones, block by block warfare. But all day long, I am making masks out of whatever materials I can find and handing them out.

It is very hurtful and alienating to see people in the Global North say that our deaths are taking away from necessary attention to COVID. The exact opposite is true. And more attention needs to be paid to the ways that COVID is overlapping with this attempt by the settler state to make die that is happening at a scale I have never seen in my lifetime.

I talk about long COVID and COVID to everyone who will listen. And while many people say that I am crazy, many are also learning COVID is still an ongoing pandemic because of calls to mask at protests in solidarity with Palestine happening in the Global North.

Artie Vierkant  1:46:40 

Sorry, I have to compose myself.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:48:12 

It's okay.

Artie Vierkant  1:48:13 

So. We were talking about masking at solidarity protests this spring. Reactionaries absolutely alight in frustration over this very public display of masking, seeing it as a bunch of woke kids doing identity politics, or something. But I also think because they see it as the threat that it is.

Lee Fang does his best 'old man shakes fist at cloud' with a April 24 tweet, quote, "Get a hair cut, dress bland and non threatening, and for the love of God, take off the COVID mask if you're attending a pro-Palestine demonstration. That's the bare minimum, unless you're doing it to appeal to in group, fashion, not public persuasion."

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:48:57 

Ay-yi-yi.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:48:58 

Gosh, just be normal! [ All laugh ].

Artie Vierkant  1:49:01 

Never.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:49:02 

Public persuasion. My favorite thing.

Artie Vierkant  1:49:05 

Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL, the pro-settler state propaganda group, tweets that masking in public space should be banned, quote, "Outlaw full face masks on campus. Masks that cover the entire face have no bearing on COVID or free speech and should be banned on all college campuses effective immediately."

Also saying, in a video posted online complaining about the Columbia encampment, specifically, quote, "This isn't Fallujah. This is Morningside Heights." [ Jules sighs ].

Artie Vierkant  1:49:32 

As many predicted, lawmakers quickly take the bait.

But first, some backstory. As we talked about at the top, by the time April rolls around, mask bans have already been in the discourse for some time.

A full year before this renewed interest in mask bans, Eric Adams is pushing his mask off at the door policy idea, though it didn't get off the ground. And as we talked about earlier, we can look far beyond the previous year, too.

For a lot of us, the way the federal government dropped mask recommendations in 2021 made it feel like open hostility to masking, even to the point of legislation against them, was right there on the horizon.

And we knew that in part because of the way people talked about mask protesters in 2020 during the uprisings, and of course, because the federal government considered an anti-mask bill just before the pandemic, the hilariously titled "Unmasking Antifa Act of 2018," so the pieces were all there.

In fact, as we've talked about before, prior to 2020, many states already had some form of mask ban on the books. In the past, we've cited one non profit group's analysis from April 2020 that said that, at the time, 18 states and Washington DC had some form of anti mask law in place. That's at the beginning of the pandemic, in April of 2020.

There's also a great resource from our friends at the Sick Times that gives a state by state breakdown on the status of mask bans, and that includes notes on whether the bans are pre pandemic or not.

So I'll link to that in the transcript, when we get that live. Anyway.

Despite this, at the outset of the pandemic, a few of those states with pre-existing mask bans either repealed their laws or inserted public health provisions into them to decriminalize masking for COVID while retaining the stated purpose of those laws, which was to increase the severity of punishment for people doing criminalized acts while also masking.

A prominent example of this is New York State, which we'll talk about later. In May 2020, New York State repealed a mask ban that had been on the books since 1845, the earliest of its kind.

Again, we'll come back to that. Many states, of course, do not repeal their mask bans in 2020.

And so this year, the Palestine solidarity encampments emerge into a context where some successful organizing work has gotten a lot of people to mask at these actions and prevent the spread of COVID, but also one where the Biden administration has steered us so deeply into a preordained "back to normal" that state and local officials no longer feel any responsibility to stand up for masking for public health reasons, at all. No emergency, no problem. Back to business as usual. Consequences.

This is one place where movement memory is particularly useful, and where I can really appreciate the bank of notes that we've built up over the years here at Death Panel. Because it's important to contrast what happened this year, with politicians of all stripes coming out in favor of mask bans, against what happened in 2020.

Because in 2020, in the middle of the uprisings, there was certainly a conversation about masked protesters.

And yes, right wing cranks were upset about the masks being allowed.

But it's important to remember that just a few years ago, politicians' message to the uprising was not, 'we're going to jail you on felony charges if you dare to mask up and wave a Palestinian flag around,' it was: if you're going to protest, for the love of god, just wear a mask. Here is a CNN report from May 30, 2020. Quote,

As the death of [George Floyd] the unarmed and handcuffed African American man at the hands of Minneapolis police leads to protests, fires and clashes across the country, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and other officials have a message for demonstrators: wear a mask. “Even if you think you're a superhero because you're young and you're strong, you can get it and then infect someone else.” Cuomo said of the virus, “So it's just wholly irresponsible. You can have an opinion, but there are also facts. And you're wrong not to wear a mask."

The CNN report continues,

The protests have been especially violent in Floyd's hometown of Minneapolis, where demonstrators seem to have outnumbered police for days.

 — Cool —

burning build—

It didn't say cool. I said cool. [ Beatrice and Jules laugh ]

— burning buildings and cars and firing guns in the night. Minnesota Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm said, “This is essential, not only to protect themselves, but also to protect their loved ones and the larger community.” She said in a statement, “This includes wearing masks when in public, and maintaining social distancing as much as possible."

Artie Vierkant  1:53:53 

So I'll just note, these are both states, New York and Minnesota, that had pre-existing mask bans in one form or another.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:53:59 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  1:53:59 

Obviously, New York repealed its mask ban that spring, but the point stands. And here are public officials, from both of these states with pre-existing mask bans, telling people: make sure you mask up on your way to Target, on your way to the third precinct. Safe to say, things are very different this time.

On April 26, St Louis alderwoman Pamela Boyd introduces an anti mask bill to the city of St Louis.

In Florida, where a statewide mask ban has existed since the 1950s—as well as, I would add, laws that prohibit, quote, "whenever two or more persons assemble for the purpose of promoting, advocating or teaching the doctrine of criminal anarchy, criminal communism, criminal Nazism or criminal fascism."—

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:54:43 

Hm.

Artie Vierkant  1:54:43 

Anyway. In Florida, in Gainesville, nine people, known as the UF 9, are arrested at a University of Florida encampment, some of whom are initially charged with quote, "wearing a mask in public."

On May 2, New York State Assemblyman Michael Reilly introduces a bill that would establish, quote, "the crimes of deceptive wearing of a mask and aggravated deceptive wearing of a mask" [ Jules laughs ] — "aggravated deceptive wearing of a mask."

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:55:10 

Okay.

Artie Vierkant  1:55:11 

The next day, New York State Senator Steven Rhoads introduces a version of the same bill into the state Senate.

Then on May 6, Dave Yost, the Attorney General of Ohio, threatens to charge student encampments—still ongoing—with a felony under a 1953 Ohio code called quote, "prohibition against conspiracy while wearing disguise."

Yost writes, quote, "a violation of this anti disguise law is a fourth degree felony punishable by between six and 18 months of imprisonment. Those guilty may also pay up to $5,000 in fines and spend up to five years on community control for wearing a mask."

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:55:49 

Wow.

Artie Vierkant  1:55:49 

—Just [for] the wearing a mask part. [ Beatrice sighs ].

On May 11, just days later, campus police at Xavier University arrest two people and attempt to charge them under this very law. Though, on May 13, a grand jury drops the mask charge, but keeps a trespassing charge.

The next day, and 500 miles east, on May 14, the North Carolina legislature formally reintroduces its House Bill 237, now given the pithy new title, "Unmasking Mobs and Criminals"—a mask ban.

We have an entire episode on this, and a second one where we got into how the bill was later updated. So I won't go into this too deep at the moment.

But North Carolina officials are very explicit that this law is intended to target the movement in solidarity with Palestine, and swear up and down that there will be a health provision as an exemption for masking from COVID. Not that that would satisfy any of us, but that's what part of the early argument revolves around.

Originally, North Carolina's health exemption reads that there would be an exemption to the mask ban for, quote, "any person wearing a mask for purpose of ensuring the physical health or safety of the wearer or others."

After immense public pushback on this law and concern over how, in the first instance, the health exemption is too narrow, and the second, its enforcement would be so arbitrary anyway that you might as well name the bill the 'racial profiling is good, and also masking is a reason for stop and frisk' act [ Beatrice and Jules laugh ] the North Carolina legislature reassesses.

And they actually narrow it. They make the health exception worse.

The new exception reads, quote, "any person wearing a medical or surgical grade mask for the purpose of preventing the spread of contagious disease."

Which sounds similar, but as we point out at the time, while the first one only leaves what "protecting the health or safety of the wearer or others" [means] as a rather broad thing, the new language sounds more like it's specifying that you can mask, so long as you are already sick, in order to prevent the spread of disease from you.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:55:49 

Right.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:55:49 

Well and shut down the defense of, you know, people masking at solidarity protests in order to prevent the spread of, you know—

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:58:00 

Take care of one another.

Artie Vierkant  1:58:01 

Exactly. Mhm.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:58:01 

Yeah, exactly.

Artie Vierkant  1:58:02 

Additionally, despite all of this health exemption rhetoric, from listening in to the legislature's deliberation over the bill, it's clear that a good deal of it is motivated by right wing pandemic grievances.

Here's a clip we also highlighted at the time, before the bill passed, of North Carolina State Senator Warren Daniel making clear that while this bill is definitely about silencing protest, it's also about making sure that the state doesn't take up public health measures against COVID, or something like it, ever again.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:58:30 

Ugh, this guy.

Jules Gill-Peterson  1:58:31 

Yeah.

North Carolina State Senator Warren Daniel (Clip)  01:58:31 

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'd just like to make a comment. So following up on what Senator Krawiec said, you know, there was no health exception in state law for the history of this state, until COVID happened.

And I think the only reason that we considered doing that was because you had these egregious mask mandates that were being imposed across this state by, you know, state institutions, state elected officials.

And so what was the legislature to do? You've got, you know, people imposing mask mandates that potentially put the citizens in violation of law.

So I think the other issue here is that, you know, we don't really want to go back to an era when single elected officials, or even unelected officials, are making these unilateral decisions about what we have to do or not do.

I mean, we could also have a health discussion about, are masks effective? Are the particles that we're concerned about smaller than the openings in these mask fibers and just passing through anyway?

So I think, as Senator Britt said, there's been no evidence that anybody in the history of the state was prosecuted for wearing a mask for health reasons.

We're just returning the law back to pre-COVID status. And I think some of these concerns are just, they're sort of hyper— hyper, whatever, hyper—whatever the word is. Aggravated. There you go. I need a big city lawyer to tell me that word.

Artie Vierkant  02:00:01 

By the end of June, the North Carolina legislature manages to pass the law, overriding a veto by the governor.

But before the law even passes, we see the immediate effect of this in people deputizing themselves to harass people wearing masks.

On June 12, a local Raleigh, North Carolina news station reports that a masked stage four cancer patient was confronted by a man in an oil change place who shouted expletives at her, incorrectly told her that wearing a mask was now illegal, repeatedly feigned coughing on her and told her he hopes the cancer kills her. [ Jules exclaims ]. So. The law passed June 27. And that report was on the 12th.

During all this time, however, the Biden administration says exactly nothing about this bill, or others like it. Even though the head of Biden's own CDC is the former top health official of the state of North Carolina.

Let's stay on mask bans for a little bit, though, and this will, I think, require us maybe, to jump back a little bit in the timeline, momentarily.

But, on May 22, later in May, Chicago Alderman Raymond Lopez—a Democrat—introduces a mask ban proposal in Chicago City Council, proposing 10 days imprisonment, a $5,000 fine, and up to 120 hours of community service for anyone charged with certain crimes while wearing a mask, or even a hood.

On June 5, right wing think tank the Manhattan Institute publishes model legislation for mask bans, offering language for states, legislators and lobbyists to more easily be able to adopt and propose their own.

I'll note also, the Manhattan Institute has been the source of a lot of common anti-Medicare for All talking points. We tried to do a lot of work against them in, I want to say, 2018, 2019?

One section of this model legislation, titled "prosecutorial guidance," contains a particularly relevant framework for allowing legislators to avoid looking like they are targeting COVID advocacy or COVID protections.

They say that when pursuing cases against mask wearers, quote,

Prosecutors should ensure evidence that there was no plausible or sincere reason to mask other than to conceal one's identity or intimidate. For example, someone who wears a mask for health reasons probably should not be congregated in large groups of people, and members of large groups will not all have respiratory illnesses at the same time.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:02:30 

Wow. [ Laughs ] That's an incredible use of logic if there ever was one.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:02:35 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  02:02:35 

Yeah. So here we have two things, right? One, the sick do not belong in society. The disabled could not possibly care about Palestine.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:02:42 

Exactly.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:02:42 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  02:02:43 

And two, the only reason to mask is, as we saw with the North Carolina legislature, if you're actively sick yourself.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:02:50 

Right.

Artie Vierkant  02:02:50 

So even though the entire point of masking is to break chains of transmission, reduce your chances of getting sick, while also reducing the chances that you're out and around sick. Don't know you're sick yet, will spread it to others, etc. No, of course, it's only socially acceptable to mask when you're actively sick. And even then, we're working to make it very much not socially acceptable and to criminalize it.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:03:10 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  02:03:11 

So then, you know, a whole group of people has no business masking altogether. Do they? Because how could they possibly be sick all at once? If the only reason to wear a mask is if you're actively sick?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:03:21 

Mhm.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:03:22 

This is just such a good example of the carceral arm of the production of public health standards or normalization.

Artie Vierkant  02:03:31 

Yes.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:03:31 

That it's not only, you know, think tank—well, okay, this case, it is. [ Artie laughs ] But it's not only, you know, administration appointees, public health researchers. It's not always just retrenchment, right? Retrenchment of data, retrenchment of policies, diluting, removing, taking away.

It's also just this, like, brutal carceral thrust that is producing these declarations, basically through force, legislating what can and cannot be true about who gets to count as a member of society, where they get to be.

And just making broad declarations about, you know, according to the police state, what will be true and untrue about viral transmission, right? It's just, it's such a good example.

It's very disturbing, but it's really, really, really, really, really concrete.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:04:22 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  02:04:20 

I actually think, especially because it comes from a think tank's—

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:04:22 

Yeah!

Artie Vierkant  02:04:25 

—model legislation, because then the.. I mean, there's a case coming up on the timeline, where I'll mention that one mask ban is being constructed explicitly using this model legislation.

But that's not to say that the one that I'm going to mention is even the only one, right? I mean, it's just, I think, perfect to see when you have a document like this, to be able to trace the ideology backwards from. Or backwards to.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:04:54 

Absolutely.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:04:54 

Yeah. I mean, in preparation for this episode, I revisited the classic 2022 episode, "How Liberals Killed Masking."

And in retrospect, it's even more striking the way certain things line up, where you have the end of mask mandates. These broad recommendations from the CDC in May of 2021, where they issue this dramatic reduction in masking recommendations that then leads to states beginning to drop their mask mandates.

And also in May of 2021 there's a huge press conference held by the Minneapolis Police Department where they say, because of masks, we've only been able to charge 17 people with arson, and it's a huge problem because we haven't been able to track down all these people. And, you know, it's a big problem.

And so it's so obvious now, in the context of mask bans, right, to look at mask mandates ending as, in part, being about the production of the end of the pandemic, but also in part being about making rebellion against the state and police harder. And making it easier to fragment and punish movements that move against the state.

You know, it also isolated us. It turns this shared struggle against the pandemic into an individual burden, right? But, I mean, I always think of what our cohost Phil [Rocco] says, which is, you know, this is not conspiracy, it's hegemony, right?

This is kind of the function of the state, is to make moments where it needs to crack down on things like rebellion more efficient. This is what think tanks are here to help the state do. This is what the state is sort of concerned with as a core function. Not protecting public health, but in making sure that it can continue doing its thing.

Artie Vierkant  02:06:52 

Absolutely. And I think, importantly — I think there's a couple ways to look at this. A kind of limited viewpoint that would want to imagine this stuff being kind of apolitical, as though that were possible. Could look at this and say like, oh, it's social movement stuff 'getting in the way,' or something like that.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:07:21 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  02:07:21 

Whereas, I think what we're kind of trying to talk about here, and what we've been talking about for a long time, years now, is how there is overlap and solidarity in these points, and that when mask bands come and when there's crackdowns on these movements, it's like a crackdown on all of us.

 And this shows us how this should be an opportunity for us to build solidarity altogether. Whereas the purpose that the state is pursuing is fragmentation.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:07:53 

Right.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:07:54 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  02:07:54 

—Is producing the conditions that lead to: oh, there's like, these activists over here, and there's these, you know, surplus class, ill or disabled people, or COVID activists, or something, over here, and they 'don't' have joined interests, and I want to drive a wedge between them. You know what I mean?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:08:10 

Right. Well, and if you think about it, masking is the connective tissue that shows that movements are interconnected. You know, this is a visible example of disabled people fighting for things that go beyond what we traditionally think of as "disability advocacy."

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:08:29 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  02:08:29 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:08:29 

This is an example of, you know, student protests concerning people that are largely still considered to be not part of student populations, which is disabled people and accessibility, right?

It's really, I think—I totally think that the idea of like—that "masking being politicized is part of the problem"—which was a criticism that we heard often of our work, we've been hearing less and less as this year has gone on.

And this is what I meant earlier when I said, for some people, I think mask bans have really solidified something that they've been thinking about but hoping wasn't true for years, which was that the point of the state is to undermine solidarity, undermine movements, to simplify the legibility of the population, to be able to facilitate repression and crackdowns.

And whether, you know, you like the politicization of masking or not. Each mask worn now is an act of defiance. It is a refusal to fit neatly into the state's framework of how we're supposed to be in the world.

They don't want you masking for whatever reason. And when mask mandates ending wasn't enough to push that normalization, we have now gone full circle from mask mandates to mask bans. To criminalization. But to mask now, in the context of the pandemic, is a way of saying, you know, not just that we are interdependent and that our health is interdependent, and that, you know this is about protecting each other, but also that our movements are interdependent. And that we see through the state and we won't be tricked into turning on each other.

And that's something that I think is powerful. And many people who are listeners of the show, when I asked them, you know, what is the moment that's sticking with you? They said, well, mask bans, but it's not all negative.

It's a huge point of fear, of repression, of more work on organizers, on more work and more in accessibility in the context of accessing daily life, let alone, you know, something as specific as healthcare settings, right? But also it's been this moment of being able to come together and kind of push ourselves further on this and has pushed people's politics more deeply.

And I think that, you know, the kind of resistance that we're seeing, still, to the kind of Lee Fangs of the world who are like, get a haircut and get rid of the mask and start acting normal, you know, those people are going to look so silly in retrospect, because I do think that this is a turning point.

And moving forward, we're going to see the adoption of masking within the context of activism, whether it's going to take another five years of struggle or not. I think this is ultimately going to happen. I think that folks have been working on this really hard, and it's thankless and under appreciated work, but the organizing that we've seen from mask blocs, from small groups of people doing tremendous work, who are obviously overtaxed and way over capacity, I think, can't be ignored.

It's had a tremendous impact, whether it's just like one person in a community trying to do this, or three or four people or a more organized, you know, well, resourced mask bloc like the one in New York.

This is having a huge impact on how people think of their participation in social movements, but also in like, what the kind of long game of an organizing action is, right? It's to sustain organizing, not to just to create a spectacle, but it's to make sure that we can keep each other from getting sick, so you can keep organizing. Because things don't end, you know, with the public protest.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:12:19 

No, that was so well said. I don't want to add to that, yeah. Just co-signing.

Artie Vierkant  02:12:26 

So let me jump back in. We're still in June.

Shortly after the Manhattan Institute model legislation is published, more Democrats jump into the fray.

Both New York City Mayor Eric Adams and New York Governor Kathy Hochul embrace mask bans. On June 13, Eric Adams tells local radio program Cats and Cosby, quote,

First of all, that's what cowards do. Cowards hide their face. Dr. King did not hide his face when he marched for the things he thought were wrong in this country. Those civil rights leaders did not hide their faces. They stood up. But in contrast to that, the Klan hid their faces. ... People have hid under the guise of wearing a mask for COVID to commit criminal acts and vile acts. And I think now is the time to come back to the way it was pre COVID, when you should not be able to wear masks at protests, in our subway systems, and other places.

Artie Vierkant  02:13:21 

On June 14, New York Attorney General, Letitia James, also a Democrat, gives exclusive comment to the right wing rag the New York Post, telling them she's actively in discussion with the governor's office over proposed mask bans and that, quote, "In New York, no one should be able to hide behind a mask to spew hate."

With so many New York Democrats talking about mask bans, it's important to pause here on just how historically loaded this all is, especially in the state of New York.

Much of the debate in New York at the state level revolves around figures who, in one way or another, want to reinstate the 1845 mask ban that was repealed in early 2020. These laws are also constantly, constantly referred to as laws—and we saw this in the reference just earlier—referred to as laws that were originally put on the books to target the KKK, though the New York mask ban, notably, was not.

This argument, however, is more often than not used to suggest that they are laws about preventing racist violence, even though, in case after case, wherever we've seen new mask bans proposed, people have rightly identified in hearings and city council meetings across the country that these have a huge negative public health [impact], will make society more dangerous for disabled people, but they also sound like stop and frisk laws. They're going to be disproportionately used to police black and brown people.

So as I was saying, while it's true that some state mask bans were initially put into law to target the KKK, this is very much not the case in New York. Instead, New York's anti mask law of 1845 provides a much more appropriate example for what's actually going on here as these mask bans proliferate to quash solidarity between the COVID movement and the pro-Palestine movement.

Because New York's mask ban was originally put in place to target an anti-rent movement, a movement in the 19th century of tens of thousands of poor tenants in the Hudson Valley, who used all sorts of tactics, from rioting to—in at least one instance, a couple of them were given life in prison for shooting a sheriff—

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:15:20 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  02:15:20 

—who they were trying to prevent from selling a farm that was being repossessed. We get into that a little more in our other episodes about mask bans.

But this was a movement that was active for multiple years in what became known as the Anti-Rent War. And that's what led New York State to put its anti-mask law in place, the first of its kind in the US.

This isn't all good history, of course. The masks that movement wore are what I would call a form of anti-Indigenous racism, in all honesty. But it's important history to know in the context of why this law was introduced in the first place.

And then things get even more on the nose as you go further ahead in history. So this 19th century law, by the mid 20th century, is used in multiple cases to charge trans women with status offenses simply for being trans women walking down the street, or in the subway, because the text of the 1845 law criminalized, in its words, what it called, quote, "unusual or unnatural attire or facial alteration.

And so by the 20th century, this law was interpreted by beat cops and others to pertain to policing trans people's access to public space. There are at least two cases we know about, People v. Archibald from 1968 and People v. Gillespie from 1964, where this law was used to criminalize trans identity.

But those are just ones where there are court records and civil cases over them. And it's clear that, beyond those cases, this was a major issue in New York's queer community in the early 1970s. Not all, but some, groups of queer and trans organizers fought this 1845 law, specifically in the 70s. I'm talking about groups like the Queens Liberation Front and other groups that were organizing in the years following the Stonewall riots.

My point is, long before any of us fought mask bans, queer and trans people were in this fight. And while it wasn't successfully fully overturned until the start of the pandemic, 50 years ago, if you wanted to read about New York's anti mask law, which was New York penal code, 240.35, one of the places that you could do so—as I have done in preparation for this episode—is to read 1970s issues of Drag: The International Transvestite Quarterly.

This is a complicated movement history in its own right that I'm really glossing over here. But the point is, the fight against mask bans that we're having now is also directly related to the one that queer and trans people were engaged in a full half century ago. So.

Fast forward now to 2024, and it's the same thing. The specifics are very different, but the point is the same. They're class war, and the only reason they're even remotely politically possible in this moment is because of the total foreclosure of the pandemic response by the federal government.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:15:20 

Maybe just to like, come back to one of the kind of takeaways from this in depth discussion and kind of retreading of this history is that although the banning and the criminalization of masks has a really long history, in the context of of the COVID pandemic, although there had been momentum building and there had been bills introduced and the kind of pundit class and politicians were sort of priming the pump rhetorically, you know, back in 2023, it's definitely, clearly, what they seized on as pretext to finally start enacting some of these plans, and some of these ordinances and laws and policies were the Palestine solidarity encampments. This is the moment where they really seized on and started to catalyze and actualize that. And that feels really important as we think about 2024 moving into 2025 as you alluded to earlier.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:19:03 

Yeah. And I also just want to echo a point that you made, Jules, back in our episode called "Mask Bans Are Everyone's Fight," which is from August of this year, where you talked about this also being a project in reinforcing the idea that folks who support Palestinian liberation are part of a designated "out group" of "criminals" who are separate from society and are "anti-social," unwelcome, etc, etc. And it's about, you know, the ongoing project of casting the support of Palestine as like anti-American itself. Which I think is evidenced everywhere, from the timing, to the statements specifically, to the obsession with trying to, quote, unquote, "prove" that there is some sort of disingenuous motive behind masking at protests.

Artie Vierkant  02:20:01 

Right. So, by the end of June, another Democrat enters the mask ban fray, with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass announcing the city of Los Angeles is looking into a mask ban of its own.

An article in The Guardian from June 25, thankfully, actually bothers to speak to someone from our side on this. So here's what they said. Quote,

A pro-Palestinian protester who participated in the Los Angeles demonstration on Sunday said that they and their friends were wearing N95 masks, and that some pro-Israeli counter protesters who were unmasked, “were telling me that COVID is not happening or not real anymore.” Bass's suggestion that masks might be banned at protests was 'a very concerning thing, just in terms of accessibility for protests,' said the demonstrator who asked not to have their name published because of safety concerns." “All of the folks that I organize with, we make it a point for everyone to wear masks to protect any vulnerable community members, so they also feel safe and comfortable coming out to these actions.”

Artie Vierkant  02:21:03 

So we will return to mask bands momentarily, but I don't want to get us too far ahead out of the timeline.

So to wind back to May, temporarily, there are two significant developments from May that we need to address.

The first is as of the beginning of May, or really, April 30, technically, the Biden administration allows mandatory hospital COVID case reporting requirements to expire.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, hospitals had been required to submit COVID case information to the federal government, and at the end of the public health emergency, as we talked about last year, they set this arbitrary end date for that reporting requirement, which the Biden administration then did not bother to renew.

So after some pushback, a new CMS rule has ensured that they did put mandatory reporting requirements back in place as of November 1, but as part of a revised package that includes mandatory reporting on flu and RSV.

We also learn that the Biden administration's Bridge Access Program, which we mentioned at the very beginning of the episode, will end by August.

This program was one of the last vestiges of the COVID response, I would say. Bridge Access was the name that the Biden administration gave to the program that it promised would help COVID vaccines, and treatments like Paxlovid, remain free for the uninsured, even after the end of the Public Health Emergency and even after the Biden administration successfully kicked these treatments to the private market.

A "bridge" for people to "access" them, if you will. [ Beatrice laughs ] So clever. [ Laughs ].

If you've heard our past coverage, you know that we've followed the contours of this really extensively, in part because the US health finance system is so fucked up that one thing that we've really been worried about, for years, is what the effect of kicking these to the private market would be.

For one, vaccines as a public health intervention is something that you would think would be in the federal government's interest to make free. And that's, you know, a general statement about vaccines in general, not just the COVID vaccine, though you would imagine, perhaps special treatment for, I don't know, an active pandemic.

And also, importantly, I think the excuse for "back to normal" has always been the refrain "we have the tools." And part of the promise was that these tools were free and easy to get. Meaning that, for anyone who actually took the Biden administration at their word that the pandemic was under control, and that the tools were there and useful and flowing like water, it seems like the moment that that becomes clear that that's no longer the case, all that gives is an opportunity for the state to earn resentment.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:23:35 

Mm.

Artie Vierkant  02:23:36 

You know, earlier in the episode, we mentioned how Paxlovid can now run people something like $400 or $500, even on insurance, and how without insurance, it's closer to $1,600 for a set of pills that cost $13 to produce.

And yet, we're told that when people die of COVID, the problem is that they simply didn't avail themselves of the tools, and of these treatments.

Anyway. So, the Bridge Access Program was not perfect. It sucked, actually.

The promise was that Bridge Access would keep these drugs free while Pfizer and Moderna implemented plans to make the vaccines cost between $110 and $130 per dose, and, of course, Paxlovid considerably more.

And in reality, if you availed yourself of the Bridge Access program, what was happening is that the federal government would pay the part of the bill that was CVS or Walgreens, or whoever, administering the shot itself, in the case of the vaccine, or filling the prescription, and the rest of the treatment being free was contingent on qualifying for—qualifying as an individual—for the drug manufacturer's patient assistance program. You know, it was understood that this would remain free to people based on presumably a wink and a nod the Biden administration and the drug manufacturers gave to each other. It was also supposed to last until at least the end of this year.

So if you heard last year's end of year wrap up, I specifically called this dynamic out and noted that if Bridge Access was going to be over by December 2024, that was going to be here before we know it.

So here we are, in December 2024 and not only did Bridge Access not make it this far, it's been over for months. Again, since August 2024.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:25:16 

And this is really frustrating, because COVID, if anything, was the perfect opportunity to expand something like the Vaccines for Children program, the VFC. Which is a program that was created by Congress in 1993 in response to this measles outbreak that went from 1989 through 1991. And that's a program that basically assures that children, no matter what their health insurance coverage or any limits placed on their coverage, or anything like cost sharing, that they can get vaccinated no matter what.

Obviously the ACA and marketplace plans have certain rules in place limiting vaccine coverage that stops insurance companies from technically being able to try and do that. However, there was never any program, there still isn't any program, for uninsured adults getting vaccines. And this was the perfect opportunity to stand something up like this. Like, way back in 2020, we could have done something like this and just codified it, right?

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:26:18 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:26:18 

Instead we saw, as things were being pushed to the private market, the idea for doing anything like that was so far from the horizon of possibility or anything that seemed to be of any interest.

So here we are with, again, a total missed opportunity to make a huge inroad in terms of actually creating some kind of program that could provide very basic healthcare infrastructure that the United States absolutely could afford to do. This is something that costs $6 billion for the children's program.

This is the kind of thing that is such an easy intervention, right? But we've also now seen, I think, the realm of possibility shrink even more because we're now looking at this landscape where formerly fringe folks like RFK Jr. have tremendous power, they're ascendant in the Trump administration. Andrew Wakefield's research is being treated as legitimate, again, you know? And it's just frustrating to think about how much the commercialization of COVID also connects into vaccine denial, right?

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:27:27 

Yeah. I think that's such an important point, like in terms of consequences, right? Obviously, one of the consequences is people not being able to get vaccines. And like you said, it's a huge missed opportunity. And it does really, I think, show how fully externalizing these things onto the private market, sort of seems like at least, that when you establish programs as weak and as administratively burdensome as Bridge Access in some ways, one of the things that allows the administration to do then is to shut them down early, or to shut them down even more easily.

But as you alluded to Artie, it also, I think, yeah, starts to create political resentment from people who had a difficult time accessing anything through it in the first place, or who you know, feel frustrated and angry, understandably now that even that paltry measure is gone, and that feels like, yeah, again, another just really concrete and really significant example of what kind of defines 2024.

Artie Vierkant  02:28:29 

Absolutely. And now, I will acknowledge, haters will say: the Biden administration did—I mean liberals, or something [ Beatrice and Jules laugh ] who want to defend the Biden administration will say—

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:28:38 

Oh, those haters.

Artie Vierkant  02:28:38 

—that the Biden administration did propose expansions to Vaccines for Children. Did propose specifically, multiple times, a program that it called Vaccines for Adults, that would create, you know, some of the things that Bea was mentioning.

That said, though. Any of those actions, I think, are fundamentally irrelevant in the broader context of the fact that, by all accounts, it appears from public statements from the Biden administration that for the last several years, really, since I think they took over the COVID response in 2021, that their default assumption was that they were going to just move these vaccines and treatments—push them off to the private market at some point.

It doesn't seem as though it was ever even considered that this would just become something where they could even—even just for, like, bully pulpit reasons or something—

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:29:31 

Right.

Artie Vierkant  02:29:31 

—say, 'Well, we've set this precedent. These treatments are free. COVID care is free—' why don't we just do this? You know? And this is immediately following a [2020] presidential primary where one of the main points of contention was our fucking private health care system. So. In any case.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:29:48 

Yeah and it's also worth mentioning that the Vaccines for Children program does not work through drug company reimbursement programs!

Artie Vierkant  02:29:55 

Yeah.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:29:55 

Mhm, right!

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:29:55 

[ Laughs ] You know, it works through direct purchasing and distribution to facilities like doctors offices, pediatricians, local health departments, community health centers that provide these vaccines, right? So you know what we're seeing now, coming full circle from that is not only the failure to stand up something like that for anyone over the age of 19, but states like Louisiana, which I'm sure we'll talk about later, like trying to prevent their health departments from even speaking about COVID vaccines.

Artie Vierkant  02:30:26 

Yeah. So one other thing that this also meant—the end of Bridge Access in August of this year—was that, when this fall's updated COVID Booster arrived, Bridge Access was already over.

So this fall's COVID Booster was the first that we've seen rolled out under the entirely privatized framework of the regular US health finance system.

Reports this fall showed the vaccine costing as much as $200 a shot for uninsured people.

And that population of uninsured itself jumped to 8.2% of the population this year, about 27 million people. And on top of that, the switch to full privatization comes in the middle of what now seems to be an annual tradition, which is a massive summer surge.

So by mid-August, one Kansas City Beacon headline captured this surge in the following, quote, "COVID surges across Kansas and Missouri as free shots go away."

A local Bay Area news outlet offers a similar quote, "COVID cases surge as vaccine supply dwindles."

Back in June, as mask ban talk was taking off across the country, if the media was talking about COVID, it was most likely talking about the Republican Select Subcommittee on the COVID Crisis. They brought Anthony Fauci in for a hearing, and the main takeaway was that six feet of social distancing in 2020 was a number devised out of an abundance of caution, not out of a novel study of the novel virus, and this was presented as some sort of smoking gun about government overreach, even though Fauci didn't say anything that we didn't already all know and talk about in 2020.

On June 26, the Supreme Court issues its decision in the Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff et al. suit against the Biden administration, alleging that they illegally silenced their social media accounts by applying pressure to social media companies. Even the heavily conservative court ultimately finds that there isn't evidence to back that up, writing in the final issued decision, quote,

Doctors Bhattacharya and Kulldorff claim that, after disagreeing with the CDC and other federal health officials, they faced a relentless covert campaign of social media censorship. They refer to the platform suppression of the Great Barrington Declaration, their co-authored report calling for an end to lockdowns. But their declarations do not suggest that anyone at the CDC was involved. Rather, they point to officials at the National Institutes of Health and NIAID. Those entities are not before us. With nothing else to show, doctors Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and Kheriarty have not established a likelihood that their past restrictions are traceable either to White House officials or the CDC.

Artie Vierkant  02:33:05 

Anyway, as I said before, of course, regardless of this, the effect is buoying them among the right.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:33:11 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  02:33:11 

And that effect had already happened. At the end of June, Biden proves that presidential debates do, in fact, still matter, with a debate performance that somehow manages to outdo Richard Nixon's famously sweaty, nervous debate in 1960. [ Beatrice and Jules laugh ].

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:33:26 

True.

Artie Vierkant  02:33:26 

I don't want to relive this debate, and neither do you.

But, long story short, Biden drags his feet for weeks after the debate in an attempt to hold onto control of a Democratic party where even Nancy Pelosi, of all people, is actively trying to get him to step aside. This lasts from June 27 all the way to July 21 when he finally drops out. Nearly a month.

It later comes out that internal Democratic Party polling, just before Biden drops out, had Trump winning 400 Electoral College votes over Biden, which would have been a total blowout.

So. What finally gets Biden to drop out? In the final week or so of his push to prove himself, by all reports, Biden was still very dug in. Then on July 17, Biden tests positive for COVID and is whisked away from public view. The New York Times described Biden spending that week, quote, "hacking" and "fuming." Quote, "An under the weather president coughing and hacking more than 100 miles from the corridors of power as his presidency meets its most perilous moment."

So while I doubt he could have held on, personally, as I said at the time, there's certainly some degree of poetry to COVID essentially closing the book on Biden's political career—or a individual case of COVID closing the book, taking him out of commission at exactly the one time when he needs to truly prove himself. Though, also, as I told The Washington Post when Biden got COVID years prior, in 2022, "I think Biden's own COVID response is what made his illness inevitable. He's just one of tens or hundreds of thousands of people who are going to test positive for COVID today."

Harris becomes the nominee. We all know how that went.

Kamala Harris (Clip)  02:35:07 

I have a Glock.

Kamala Harris (Clip)  02:35:08 

And I want to thank you, Liz Cheney.

TV Interviewer (Clip)  02:35:11 

Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?

Kamala Harris (Clip)  02:35:17 

There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of—and I've been a part of, of, of most of the decisions that have had impact.

Beatrice and Jules  02:35:26 

[ Laughing ]

Artie Vierkant  02:35:27 

So, while even some on the left had some enthusiasm for her candidacy at first, assuming that they might take the opportunity to break with disastrous Biden administration policy, this isn't the case.

Just three days after Biden taps Harris as his successor, an unnamed senior Administration official says the following in a background press briefing, quote,

The [Vice] President has been a full participant in almost everything we've been doing here for the last 10 months. I think every call with the Prime Minister and multiple engagements meetings ... There will be no daylight between the President and the Vice President.

Also in July, former White House COVID czar Ashish Jha appears on disgraced former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo's show and complains about what he calls a "fringe" left who still mask indoors, comparing us to right wing anti-vaxxers.

Former White House Covid Czar Ashish Jha (Clip)  02:36:17 

There is a lot of loud, fringe voices from the left and the right. The left that's convinced that the pandemic is just as bad as ever, and we all should still be masking indoors. And then the right, with all of its kind of—a lot of, you know. Conspiracy theories as well.

Artie Vierkant  02:36:35 

This is at the same time, July, that is also the beginning of the massive rise in COVID cases this summer, the massive surge. To the point that the very same Ashish Jha, ever the one to usually downplay COVID, tells NBC News this summer, quote, "If you just talk about infections, this is probably going to end up becoming the largest summer wave we've had."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:36:55 

And it seems like it was.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:36:57 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  02:36:58 

Yeah. So as I mentioned before, if you've heard COVID Year Four or COVID Year Three, you'll know this has become somewhat of an annual tradition at this point, alongside media accounts that wonder aloud why COVID would be surging in the summer, as though it's ever been particularly seasonal.

One Vox headline from mid-August reads quote, "Why does it feel like everyone is getting COVID?"

Another in the New York Times reads, "Tell Us: Have You Been Foregoing COVID Tests?" With the subhead, "It's the fifth summer of COVID, and most people seem eager to move on. We want to understand the pervasiveness of this ignorance is bliss attitude."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:37:36 

Couldn't have possibly had a hand in it ourselves.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:37:40 

[ Laughs ] Just reporting the facts.

Artie Vierkant  02:37:41 

Yeah. Staring at camera in Death Panel.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:37:44 

I mean, just, you know, quoting the the hot dog guy meme is so trite at this point, because everything is the hot dog guy meme, but this is, you know, the epitome of "we're all trying to find the guy who did this."

Artie Vierkant  02:37:57 

Yeah.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:37:57 

Well they should stop hot dogging if they don't want us to bring up that meme.

Artie Vierkant  02:38:01 

Coverage that anticipated this summer surge reads even more blasé. As the Washington Post printed in May, "COVID will still be here this summer. Will anyone care?"

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:38:15 

[ Laughs ] Well, when you put it that way.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:38:17 

Yeah, way to pre-figure things.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:38:20 

Seriously.

Artie Vierkant  02:38:20 

In the midst of this surge, mask bans are still proliferating. In early July, a new mask ban is introduced in the Nassau County Legislature in New York, Nassau County being the county just due east of Queens. The area of Long Island immediately just outside of New York City. The ban is introduced by Nassau county legislator Mazi Pilip, a literal former IOF member.

The law makes it possible for police in Nassau County to stop you just for wearing a mask, and it sets a penalty of a $1,000 fine, one year in prison, or both, for wearing a mask.

On August 5, community members speaking out against the proposed mask ban in Nassau County face harassment and intimidation from groups of Zionists, who, it appears, come out specifically to intimidate people speaking out for their right to mask.

So we talked about this at length in an episode called "Mask Bans Are Everyone's Fight" from earlier this year. That's another one that I think we're going to probably put on our sort of "best of" rundown, but I'll also put a link to that in the transcript when it goes live for this.

But suffice it to say that this is, I think, one of the more significant moments this year in the whole mask ban saga. That mask ban, Nassau County's mask ban, is signed into law on August 14. This is, again, in blue state New York, though, of course, before I get any emails about this, as a former New Yorker, I'm well aware of Long Island's political bent. [ Jules laughs ].

And we don't have to wait long to see the effect of this mask ban. In just over a week, the weekend of August 24, NBC 4 New York reports that Nassau County has already issued its first arrest using the new law. And the way that the arrest is described, it sounds like a textbook revival of stop and frisk to me. To quote from that NBC report,

According to detectives, officers responded to reports of a suspicious man walking on Spindle Road, dressed in black and wearing a face mask, Sunday evening in Levittown. Upon further investigation, they say the 18 year old continued to act suspiciously while allegedly trying to conceal a large bulge in his waistband.

The face mask suspicion allowed the officers to search the man, and they say they found a 14 inch knife on his person. The Hicksville man was charged with criminal possession of a weapon, obstructing governmental administration and violating the local Mask Transparency Act.

18 years old, suspicious because he had a mask on. Get a fucking life.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:38:51 

Yeah. It really illustrates exactly what these kinds of measures look like at the level of implementation.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:40:48 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  02:40:48 

Yeah. So, more mask ban talk follows. In August, New York City Councilwoman Ina Vernikov introduces a mask ban she dubs "Unmask the Hate."

The University of California system—the entire UC system, across 10 campuses—bans, quote, "masking to conceal identity" and, quote, "refusal to reveal identity."

On August 19, New York State Senator Dean Murray introduces yet another anti-mask resolution. In perhaps an attempt to differentiate himself, he coins a truly awful new term for a proposed crime quote, "aggravated concealment of identity." Which is hilarious as a turn of phrase—

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:41:29 

Too much, that's too much.

Artie Vierkant  02:41:27 

—horrible, obviously, horrifying, but like, I mean "aggravated concealment of identity." My god. [ Inhales sharply ]. I hate these people.

Anyway. Again, while all this is happening, the Biden White House is silent. Even as a major COVID surge, once again, pushes COVID deaths above 1,000 per week in August, they would just prefer not to talk about it, afraid that any mention of COVID may hurt their chances in November.

And I'm not just speculating. Earlier in the recording, I mentioned a Politico headline reading quote, "Democrats and Republicans greet COVID spike with a collective shrug" that was published on August 28, and here's how this piece characterizes things within the Biden White House. Quote,

Inside a Biden White House that has now reoriented itself around electing Harris, senior officials have continued to keep an eye on COVID, wary of a particularly dangerous flare up during the key stretch of the election that could force the virus back into public consciousness and damage Democrats politically. …

The Food and Drug Administration just approved updated COVID vaccines that are now rolling out widely. Those will be central to a just launched fall campaign led by HHS called “Risk Less, Do More.” …

Biden and Harris, though, are not expected to play much of a public role in that effort, driven in large part by a recognition that most Americans mulling their vote ahead of November don't want to hear about COVID, and a White House that has little desire to remind them.

“For most people, COVID is less about getting an infection and more about a period of time when our lives were super disrupted, and that is behind us,” said Ashish Jha, the Biden White House's former COVID Response Coordinator. “We do still have a health problem,'" he continued, "'but it is no longer, in any way a substantive societal problem.”

If that doesn't say all of it.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:43:18 

Beg to disagree.

Artie Vierkant  02:43:20 

One thing that the executive branch does do in August is casually declare COVID to now be “endemic.”

In early August, NPR's All Things Considered speaks with Aron Hall, the Deputy Director for Science at the CDC's coronavirus and other respiratory viruses division, who tells them, quote, "At this point, COVID-19 can be described as endemic throughout the world." Paul goes on to say, quote, "The best way to describe COVID right now is as endemic, but with these periodic epidemics."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:43:51 

Hmm.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:43:51 

Wait a minute.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:43:51 

Because that's how that works, absolutely.

Artie Vierkant  02:43:55 

Going on, to say, "And those epidemics can vary in terms of their timing and magnitude, and that's exactly why ongoing vigilance and surveillance is critical." So..

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:44:05 

Okay.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:44:05 

Yeah I mean, if you want to sit there and argue, you know, technicalities and sort of come up with these varying degrees of what qualifies, it absolutely doesn't just stink of trying to avoid saying the word "pandemic" at whatever cost, you know, you absolutely can.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:44:22 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  02:44:22 

Yeah. I mean "endemic with these periodic epidemics" is just, I mean, chef's kiss.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:44:28 

Charlatanism! Ugh. Ridiculous. Come on.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:44:32 

If you want to be really, like a bean counting, annoying pain in the ass, then you could be like, well, technically speaking, we expect very high, unpredictable surges of COVID that, you know, go throughout the world several times a year. Therefore this is endemic, because we expect it to be like this, but that's not—

Artie Vierkant  02:44:53 

I mean, that's sort of what he's saying. But—

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:44:54 

No, yeah. I mean, that's, yeah. That's taking the technical definition of something and stretching it so far as to claim that it's a practical use of that term.

Artie Vierkant  02:45:05 

I mean, as we've talked about so many times in the past, these terms have such broadly interpretable meanings.

There's no, you know, metric that can tell you, oh, yeah, COVID has rolled over to become endemic now. Largely, this is a social construction that is something that is just, you know, asserted. Has been asserted by many people, by many different camps over time. This, I think, is significant because it's the CDC saying it.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:45:33 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  02:45:33 

It's a CDC official saying it on NPR, to millions of people, and things like that. It isn't an agency-wide declaration or something, the—I mean the piece is—the sort of radio piece, is kind of hilarious, because it just reads a little bit like someone at NPR decided 'let me call up the CDC and ask them if it's endemic now, because I kind of have a hunch that it is.' And someone at the CDC was like, 'yeah, why not? I mean, you know, sometimes it's an epidemic, but'—anyway. Okay.

So meanwhile, major events that summer turn into superspreader events. Tons of cases happen among athletes at the Olympics. A lot of people at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago come down with COVID in the week following the convention, an outcome that I would say was ensured by the DNC's own masking policy, which read, and I will quote, "Masks will be allowed if necessary due to a disability." [ Beatrice laughs ] "You may be asked to remove your mask when going through security."

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:45:33 

Oh, my god.

Artie Vierkant  02:45:46 

A policy which, if I recall correctly, was somehow more strict than the RNC's own policy of 'yeah, sure, whatever.' [ Jules laughs ].

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:46:45 

Yeah. Also, there were multiple pieces that claim that this was "the most accessible DNC ever," which really was just that they finally allowed people in wheelchairs to sit with their state delegations, instead of making them sit in a separate area, while they meanwhile eliminated half of the available chairs for press people. So, sure.

Artie Vierkant  02:47:07 

Plenty that could be said about the DNC, including, of course, the complete erasure and shutting out of everyone who was there with the Uncommitted Movement, for example.

But in any case. Also in August, noted anti-vaxxer and whale carcass enjoyer Robert F Kennedy Jr [ Beatrice and Jules laugh ] drops out from his presidential bid and endorses Donald Trump. We will hear more about that later.

So this brings us to September. We usually stick to a US context here, because otherwise this would spiral out of control. But I want to read a brief report from the Irish Independent from September 4, because it really reflects, I think, the depths of damage that the sociological production of the end of the pandemic has wrought. So this is a report from September 4 from Ireland, though I don't know when exactly the events described took place. Quote,

When masks were dropped in the “Omicron's mild” phase of the pandemic, Cara continued as the lone masker at school to protect her immunocompromised mother, who was undergoing chemotherapy. It was tolerable until a child psychotherapist said on the national airwaves that some girls would continue to mask anyway 'to hide their acne.' His words were used to bully her.

Cara left the school, but without support from teachers, she struggled. Her parents pleaded with the school to use the HEPA filter they bought. The school refused.

Cara eventually returned to school unmasked, caught COVID and infected her mam. It killed her. Cara self harms now because she blames herself. She hasn't been to school since.

Artie Vierkant  02:48:46 

So. That's that excerpt.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:48:49 

No, it's just upsetting.

Artie Vierkant  02:48:51 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:48:51 

I remember that story, every word in that story, and still hearing it again, it's like—

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:48:54 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:48:54 

—the trade off that's made in all of the social pressure and the peer pressure and the bullying around getting people to not mask is the most shallow and obnoxious bullshit you could possibly engage in right now.

Artie Vierkant  02:49:11 

With huge consequences.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:49:12 

With huge consequences, yeah, and it's just, it can be fascinating to just watch people put so much time and energy into pressuring people out of masking when, like, it's not hurting anyone to be masking.

Artie Vierkant  02:49:25 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:49:26 

You know, like, come on.

Artie Vierkant  02:49:28 

Back in the US, in September, we finally get numbers from the Medicaid unwinding, which I mentioned at the top. The mass disenrollment of poor people from state Medicaid rolls that was set in motion when the Biden administration and congressional Democrats allowed the Medicaid continuous enrollment provision to expire, a key aspect of the pandemic welfare state that they did away with in a rush to get back to normal.

This process started all the way back in April of 2023 and tasked states with checking through each and every one of the record 94 million people on Medicaid to see if they still qualified for the program, and throwing them off if they don't.

And if you're coming here after listening to COVID Year Four, then you'll know, as I mentioned earlier, that when that episode was recorded, only 11 million people had lost their Medicaid coverage, at that time, to the unwinding.

Well. We now know that over the course of the Medicaid unwinding, 25 million people lost Medicaid.

That is 7 million people more than the Urban Institute's original estimate of 18 million, and a full million higher than the highest estimate ever put forward by Kaiser Family Foundation.

On top of that, a full 69% of those disenrollments were done for what are referred to as "procedural reasons"—nearly 70% of those 25 million people. And what "procedural reasons" means is, among other things, maybe paperwork was not returned on time, or they otherwise just determined that the person wasn't qualified without involving them in the decision.

We know from reporting that in some instances, there have been extreme examples of this, like Medicaid renewal paperwork being sent to an empty field instead of someone's home, or the case of Arkansas, where they used software from the management consulting firm Deloitte that automatically disenrolled people from Medicaid. Not because of any actual reason, but because it was something that would just happen whenever a software glitch would happen periodically.

This was reported on over a year ago.

It's at this point that I'd like to remind everyone of what is, perhaps, my favorite mind destroying headline of 2024: from Politico, August 19, quote, "Harris isn't pushing Medicare for All anymore. Progressives say that's OK." [ Beatrice and Jules laugh ].

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:51:43 

Remember when they were all just saying, "that's OK?" Yeah, this must be a direct quote. [ Artie laughs ].

Artie Vierkant  02:51:50 

So for this next one, I have to give a hat tip to wsbgnl who caught this before I did. On September 18, The New York Times runs a piece looking at RFK Jr.'s positions, and what they might mean now that RFK is aligned with Trump. There is a section on COVID. And if you've been following the New York Times' COVID minimization like we have it may not surprise you that his positions on COVID are portrayed as one of the areas where RFK really isn't all that bad. Here's what the Times writes. Quote,

Some of Mr. Kennedy's philosophies during the COVID pandemic were more mainstream. He opposed stay-at-home orders and mask mandates—

Mainstream. [ Beatrice laughs ].

—expressed worry about children missing months of in-person schooling, and criticized even Mr. Trump for his role as president in restricting those freedoms.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:52:39 

Wow.

Artie Vierkant  02:52:40 

"He didn't stand up for the Constitution when it really mattered,” Mr. Kennedy said of Mr. Trump at the Libertarian National Convention in May. The lockdowns, he said, produced  “the greatest restriction on individual liberties this country has ever known.” To many—even some who were involved in the pandemic response—the critique was warranted. Dr. Francis Collins, who served as director of the NIH from 2009 to 2021 said publicly last summer that public health leaders had made the “really unfortunate” mistake of ignoring all the collateral damage that would come from school closures, business shutdowns and other policies designed to curb transmission.

Artie Vierkant  02:53:19 

On September 12, John Bramnick, a New Jersey State Senator running for Governor of that state, proposes a mask ban for New Jersey. The ban would create a quote, "petty disorderly persons offense for people to congregate in public while wearing masks or obscuring their faces." So congregating in masks would be illegal. [ Beatrice sighs ].

In October, Stanford University hosts a conference called "Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past," highlighting the views of some of the worst pandemic cranks in the last several years, which now reads like a Trump cabinet shopping list. Speakers include Monica Gandhi, Marty Makary, Anders Tegnell from Sweden—throwback—

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:54:00 

Oh, wow.

Artie Vierkant  02:54:01 

Sunetra Gupta, Vinay Prasad and Stanford's own Jay Bhattacharya.

Meanwhile, in election world, on October 10, Kamala Harris hosts a town hall on the Univision network. Someone in the audience, a 62 year old woman with long COVID, asks Harris what she'll do for people with long COVID. She specifically says that she's been trying for three years to get on SSDI—Social Security Disability Insurance. She's lost her job, her income, and she can't get health care because she no longer has health insurance. What will Harris do for her? And people like her?

Harris' response is to take credit for long COVID being recognized as a disability under the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act], an extremely limited framework that applies mostly to the right to work. See our episode about it.

Most importantly, nothing the person asked her about is directly relevant to the ADA—which does not cover welfare, for example.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:54:06 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  02:54:17 

Harris then pushes forward into a frankly condescending-sounding pivot about medical debt. Here is the clip:

Martha, speaker at Harris town hall (Clip)  02:55:03 

My name is Martha. I'm 62 years old and currently homeless. In 2020 I had a heart attack. Then I got diagnosed with long COVID, which will disable me for the rest of my life. I lost my job, my income. I had no choice but to apply for Social Security Disability. It's been three years I've been waiting for a decision. Because of no income, I lost everything. I have no health insurance. I can't get medical treatment that I need. And my question for you is: how will you help the disabled people?

Kamala Harris (Clip)  02:55:48 

Yeah.

Martha, speaker at Harris town hall (Clip)   02:55:49 

So that they can get insurance? And make America great again.

Kamala Harris  02:55:55 

So I'm so sorry for everything you've been through. Um, your point about long COVID? Finally—I was actually part of pushing to make sure that long COVID is now recognized under the Americans with Disabilities Act. So it is now recognized as being a disability for the purposes of allowing you and people who have long COVID to be eligible for disability benefits.

And that's a very big point. As it relates to disability rights as a general matter? It's something I've worked on for years. The point just being very simple, frankly, which is that all people, regardless of disability, should have equal access to housing, to job opportunities, to education—and again, to dignity.

And there's still a lot of work that we have to do in that regard. What we have to do in terms of also making sure that somebody who experiences an acute illness, does not lose everything. Is still work we have to do.

Part of the work that I've been doing and intend to do as president includes, for example, dealing with the issue of medical debt. So this is a big issue, which is people—through no fault of their own—experience a serious illness, and then they acquire all these bills and debt.

Right now the system is that that medical debt can be used against your credit score.

Your credit score—everybody knows their credit score. It's like, kind of like, you know your weight, you know your credit score, right?

So your credit score, as we know, will determine your eligibility for everything from a small business loan to whether you qualify for a lease on an apartment.

The unfairness of it, and this is what I intend to change, is that medical debt is not a measure of how responsible you are with money.

It's about the fact that you experienced an emergency for which you did not plan because you did not invite it. And then it works against people's ability to do things like get an apartment.

So there are a number of issues that I think you're raising around how we have to see the full person and understand how one thing connects to another, because, as you have explained, a health issue that then results in an issue about literally housing and whether you are unhoused.

An issue that is about what you qualify in terms of benefits, again, to be able to live with dignity and have a—a quality of life to which you are entitled after, what I can tell are years of working hard.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:58:32 

[ Sighs ].

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:58:33 

I mean, setting aside how callous and just patronizing that is? Or that was, from from Harris. It really does also, I think, remind us of just how inadmissible long COVID was as a political issue from her perspective. Just the way that she had to, you know, pivot and move it very far away [ laughs ] from what the question was actually about.

Artie Vierkant  02:59:01 

Right.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:59:01 

And turn it into something, you know, just kind of putting the record on of "ADA as welfare reform," as we would say on this show, instead. Just to completely deflect. But yeah, just. Oh, wow. That's really—it's really dispiriting.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:59:18 

I think it's kind of hilarious, also, to hear her be like, 'I have worked on disability rights for a long time'.. right after confusing and misrepresenting the SSA Blue Book and anti-discrimination provisions of the ADA.

Artie Vierkant  02:59:36 

—yeah, for the ADA.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:59:36 

Right? Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  02:59:36 

Like—to clarify, the anti-discrimination provisions of the ADA do not have a bearing, as Harris suggests they do, on whether this person can get SSDI by reason of having long COVID.

Jules Gill-Peterson  02:59:36 

Right.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  02:59:36 

Yeah. Now—the Blue Book, right? This is the book of impairments. This is like a master book of different diseases and different levels of severity and how those symptoms correspond to qualifying for disability welfare supports at the federal level. And you don't need to have your disease in the Blue Book to qualify for SSDI. But it really helps to have the Social Security Administration be like, we are adding long COVID to the Blue Book. And people have been demanding long COVID be added to the Blue Book since 2021.

Artie Vierkant  03:00:26 

Yeah.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:00:26 

Right.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:00:27 

So one thing I think that's also worth noting that she obviously does not address is the fact that, under the Biden Harris administration, we saw the Social Security Administration staffing shrink to basically a 27 year low.

So she doesn't address at all why this woman's claim is taking so long, why claims have taken so much longer these last four years, and why we're seeing so many more people die while they're waiting for their claims to even be processed by the Social Security Administration.

Artie Vierkant  03:01:03 

Which is a well known and long-established problem—including even the wait between when an application is even approved to when it then kicks in. There's this whole period between applying, and then the additional time afterward where people literally die from not having supports.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:01:26 

Yeah. There are two deadly wait periods. The first one is during the process itself, while you're applying and appealing and fighting for that application. The second one is, if you are approved, you have to wait six months until your Medicare kicks in. And that's called the "death period"—like, literally, that's what it's called.

The Social Security workforce has shrunk from a high of 67,000 employees in 2010 to 56,000 employees, which is a 27 year low. So we are looking at levels of employment of people who are processing disability applications at the level they were in the early 1970s.

Artie Vierkant  03:02:04 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:02:04 

Right? This is really bad. There are offices that are on the brink of closure because there are not enough people to keep these offices open, right?

And this is a huge reason why we are seeing not just an increase of folks who are not making it through that death period after they get accepted, but actually in folks dying in that first period of waiting, which doesn't even have a formal name. Which is the period where you're just applying and going through the ringer of the appeals process.

Artie Vierkant  03:02:34 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:02:34 

This is, like.. catastrophic misdirection. To be asked a question about wait times with Social Security. As the vice president who has overseen the shrinkage of the workforce that processes these applications. And pivot to a conversation about medical debt and morals.

Artie Vierkant  03:02:53 

Yeah. [With] "no fault of their own," literally, as a term thrown in there, yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:02:58 

Just bullshit. You know? There are offices that are like the only office within a 30 mile radius—

Artie Vierkant  03:03:05 

Social Security offices.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:03:06 

Yeah, Social Security offices, SSA offices, that are like the only office that serves a huge radius of people. A very large area. That are closing or only offering very limited appointments, or sometimes closing for up to 90 days, because they're down to like five employees for the whole office.

This has to do with a number of different things that the Biden administration could have taken measures to try and mitigate over the last four years. They have not done that. They haven't done anything around pay, around retention, around hiring more workers. It was not a priority to get these offices even retrofitted to deal with the fact that they were closed during the periods of shelter in place and stay at home orders—where we had the COVID federal Public Health Emergency provisions essentially closing these offices to in-person appointments, which created a delay.

There was very little done to even make it so that folks could access what they needed. A lot of people who use the services of the Social Security Administration don't necessarily have internet access, either, and you really can't do a lot of these things outside of being in-person.

They restrict the processes—for security reasons, for all these other reasons—to, like, you have to do this piece of paperwork in person for this part of the process. You have to do that one in person. Yes, certain parts are done remotely. But there's a huge portion of it that's done in person. So they created this backlog.

They did nothing to fix it. Then they allowed this workforce to continue to shrink at such a rapid rate, did nothing to try and retain employees or hire new people, or make sure that there was any kind of preparation going on in order to accommodate the large influx of applicants that they knew were going to be coming and applying for Social Security Disability benefits as a result of long COVID.

So they created conditions where folks were going to be forced to be exposed to COVID repeatedly. Where folks got long COVID. And then were faced with a benefit system that had been gutted and turned into an empty department, essentially.

Artie Vierkant  03:03:24 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:03:34 

And she's pivoting to medical debt? Like— [ sighs ]

Artie Vierkant  03:05:27 

Yeah, come on.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:05:28 

Way to show you're so out of touch. You know? It's infuriating.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:05:33 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  03:05:33 

So that was October 10.

October also brings more proposed mask bans. On October 1, the mayor of Louisville, Kentucky says the city will resume enforcing an anti-mask ordinance the city had had in place since the 1980s, kicking off a debate in that city's City Council over health exemptions, or the "need" for a ban that is still ongoing.

On October 7, New York State Assembly Member Brian Cunningham opportunistically uses the anniversary of Al-Aqsa Flood to tell AM New York he's working on another bill banning masks.

On October 16, the Texas Senate State Affairs Committee holds its first hearing towards a new mask ban. The hearing includes testimony from Hannah Myers, the director of policing and public safety for the Manhattan Institute—the think tank I mentioned earlier that drafted model legislation for mask bans.

November brings another New York mask ban proposal, this time in Yonkers—which is just north of New York City. And in December, Eric Adams and others would use the CEO murder as an opportunity to push, once again, for a mask ban in New York.

Also in November, though, just before the election, a state public health department in Idaho votes to bar itself from administering any further COVID vaccines, shutting off a public access point for the vaccines to six counties and over 300,000 residents in Idaho.

Recall that, with Bridge Access gone, one of the Biden administration's big ideas for how the poor will get COVID vaccines is through things like their local public health department.

This move echoes another development in the state of Louisiana, which Bea mentioned earlier, which is now reported to have held private meetings in the state Department of Health on October 3 and November 21 that any promotion or advertisement of COVID vaccines, but also mpox vaccines and even the flu shot, must stop. According to a report from NPR, the idea behind the meetings was to make this the new official state policy—without having to put it in writing.

Artie Vierkant  03:07:33 

Of course, then, in November, the election comes and goes, and Trump is re-elected. We won't go through all the details here, of course, but I would direct you to our episode called "The Long Trump Era," which is our reaction to the news.

One of our arguments, though, in that episode, is that this is a longstanding pursuit of austerity and the sociological production of the end of the pandemic coming home to roost.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:08:00 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  03:08:01 

We've been saying for years that not only has state abandonment been demonstrated at every turn in the Biden COVID response, but also that the administration's rush to foreclose on all of these policies—every policy as part of the pandemic welfare state—had profound material effects on people's lives.

So, no matter how many times you assert, as I said before, "line go up"—that doesn't mean a thing when people feel something very different, and experience something very different.

The economy may look good as an average on graph paper, but what does that really mean when 25 million people are kicked off Medicaid? Even as thousands of people die or become disabled every month from a plague the administration promised to fix?

And when the Medicaid disenrollment is explained to you as justified because that pandemic is allegedly over? Or having your student loans turned back on for the same reason, when the administration promised debt relief?

How do you think it really sounds to people when, for the last two years, Biden has been gloating about the speed of economic recovery—and citing high employment figures—when so many people's lived experience is that, in 2021, they were forced back to work before it was safe, because the pandemic unemployment insurance program was ending and they had no other choice?

Or even the more common experience of people who were never the ones who got to either draw on pandemic unemployment insurance or work from home, right? All the people who had to remain in work this whole time as essential workers in the name of keeping the economy running who, despite this, were never offered any form of relief?

No federal paid sick leave to make their low wage job more survivable. No OSHA protections to have any form of COVID-specific recourse against their employer. No federal program to distribute free masks at a meaningful scale to keep those people safe. Meaning so many of those people then had to experience mask mandates as an additional cost to going to work that they were expected to bear. This too, I think undoubtedly breeds resentment.

And then, when mask mandates were dropped in 2021, no higher authority to point to in order to explain to their boss, or just some customer deciding to be a prick that day, why they were masking at work, right? This is getting to kind of micro level interpersonal stuff, but I think you know, since we've said this before and said it back in 2021 it's worth bringing back into this context.

Mask recommendations, and earlier, mask mandates, were not just about a law for people to follow, as though some kind of "enforcement" was the point, right? They were a signal that the state was taking this seriously, and kind of a release valve for the workplace conflicts that arise over little things like this all the time.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:10:34 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  03:10:34 

—With something for workers to point to, to show that, you know, they were justified in masking, for example. But back to the big picture.

The programs that made up the pandemic welfare state expansions were far from perfect, as we've talked about before. But they kept a lot of people afloat in an incredibly difficult time.

And starting in 2021, just his first year in office, Biden started to strip those away under the pretense that they weren't needed anymore. And the administration was vocal about saying that these weren't needed and that Biden didn't view them as a new standard for the welfare state. In 2021, when reporters asked Jen Psaki, Biden's press secretary at the time, whether the administration would fight to keep the pandemic unemployment insurance expansion, she said the following, quote,

It is important for people to understand factually that the president, no one from the administration, has ever proposed making these permanent or doing it over the long-term.

Add to that, of course, that Harris's response to the pro-Palestine movement has been "I'm speaking," and Democrats really laid out the red carpet for Trump.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:10:34 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  03:10:34 

Democrats also did so much to normalize the very Trump-era policies that their base got so energized against, initially—things like Title 42—that it is actually, in a very meaningful sense of the term, terrifying. This goes beyond the pandemic, but I remember in October, Axios ran a piece breaking down some polling data, and the headline was, quote, "Americans split on the idea of putting immigrants in 'militarized camps.'"

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:12:04 

Yeah. [ Sighs ].

Artie Vierkant  03:12:04 

47% of people in the survey said they were in favor.

So. Back to the pandemic and the pandemic welfare state.

Friend of the show Nathan Tankus wrote a piece about this last month that I'll link to in the transcript. It's a great read, if technical. I'm biased, obviously, because I know our election episode and our work on the pandemic welfare state is something that he consulted in the lead up to writing it.

But the long and short of it is his conclusions support what we've been saying since fall 2020, when Phil—our Death Panel co-host Phil Rocco—was the first to really focus deeply on what it would mean when these programs, like Medicaid continuous enrollment that became the subject of unwinding, would end.

Phil wrote a piece in 2021 called "The Waning of Pandemic Time" that I tend to mention a lot. And that piece looked at how the pandemic welfare state was built up in a way that was eminently temporary, entirely structured around the legislative calendar with bare scraps here and there that were tied to the end of the Public Health Emergency—which itself, as we know, has undergone this immense rewriting, this immense disconnection from meaning.

And here again, of course, I'd point to our episode called "Unmaking the Pandemic Welfare State" for more. But it's really staggering when you look at all of these.

But I was mentioning a piece of Nathan's. So, in that piece, Nathan walks through why it's worth looking at surveys where households report their own economic wellbeing and not just dismissing them as, simply, "vibes." Here's what he finds in those surveys. Quote,

the percentage of people who said they were better off more than 12 months ago dropped significantly from 2020-2021 to 2022-2023. Most dramatic, however, is the drop off for the percentage of people who said that they were worse off. Fourteen additional percent of adults said they were worse off than 12 months ago between 2021 and 2022"—when a lot of these programs were ending. This number did not decline significantly in 2023 either. If you treat these statistics as similar to the net favorability polling applied to politicians, we can produce a statistic called a 'net better off rating' — the percentage of people who say they are better off financially than a year ago minus the percent who say they are worse off. As you can see above—

—there's a chart—

—the net better off rating of overall household financial well being dropped a staggering 21 points in 2022. A net better off score of negative 15 points, even negative 11 points, is very bad. These numbers make running on a good economy a catastrophic move.

Artie Vierkant  03:13:23 

So again, this year is so much about consequences. And while I have no love for the Biden administration, I will say that I am especially resentful of the administration for delivering us a second Trump term, which is how I see it.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:14:54 

Yeah. Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  03:14:54 

The COVID response has been a devastating experience in so many ways. Especially in the loss of life, in long COVID, and the pain and anguish it's caused; the scolding from officials, the small scale interpersonal grief, the allies that we've lost—not just lost to death, but lost in those allies becoming reactionary, turning their backs on us.

And to these blithe motherfuckers in the party, it's nothing to them.

The weeks after the election were filled with big statements that Harris lost because she too heavily embraced the quote "pronoun brigade."

Others blamed COVID protections themselves. On November 28, Nate Silver and Matt Yglesias have a back and forth on Twitter about how, as Silver puts it, quote, "Prolonged school closures in blue states are one of the most destructive policy positions of my lifetime."

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:15:42 

What?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:15:43 

[ Laughs ] "Learning loss!"

Artie Vierkant  03:15:47 

For years we've seen the pandemic be renarrated in real time, new stories told about it to justify inaction and justify ignoring the tragedy—not just of deaths and long COVID, but the tragedies in things like the unwinding and general abandonment. That renarration was so successful that people like this—like Yglesias and Silver—can point to the tragedies being school closures that slowed community spread and kept countless kids safe—we will literally never know how many, outside of counterfactuals—while the real devastation stares them right in the face.

Artie Vierkant  03:16:21 

We're still in the timeline, though, and there are just a few more things to address before we kind of open it up for final thoughts.

So. In November, Trump wastes no time in rushing to nominate individuals for key cabinet positions.

Among them is anti-vaxxer, Robert F Kennedy Jr., nominated to head Health and Human Services, or HHS, the agency that oversees the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], CMS [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services], the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] and NIH [National Institutes of Health]. Basically all of the points where the federal government touches health and welfare policy, including research and development and basic drug approvals.

Using a short list drawn up by RFK, Trump selects a slate of nominees to fill HHS that includes major longtime COVID minimizers Jay Bhattacharya of the Great Barrington Declaration, nominated to head NIH, Marty Makary to head the FDA, and, cartoonishly, Dr. Oz—the TV doctor—to head CMS.

Now, these positions need to be confirmed by the Senate, so I'm not going to spend too much time getting into each of these, but we do have other episodes from earlier this year that we do get into them in. And we'll be watching these picks really closely in the new year as confirmation hearings come. But I'm including these, even knowing this uncertainty, because even their nomination, I think, is a very major development and really signals where we are and what's happened as a result of shirking off the federal pandemic response.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:17:39 

Mhm. Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  03:17:40 

And there are other immediate effects of these nominations, regardless of whether they get through confirmation or not. Some of those are social effects of crank science being further normalized, as some liberals have quickly reached to downplaying the possible dangers of another Trump term.

For example, just eight days after the election—literally only eight days later—economist and self-appointed public health guru Emily Oster took to the New York Times to write a piece about how perhaps RFK Jr.'s ideas about raw milk aren't so bad.

After all, "the number of illnesses" in the US associated with drinking raw milk is small. Oster writes, quote, "There is no good evidence of any health benefits associated with raw milk. But the overall picture here is of a slightly elevated risk, and one that is in the range of other risks people take. Especially for healthy individuals." [ Beatrice laughs ].

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:18:34 

Okay.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:18:35 

Fuck pasteurization, it's totally, you know, reasonable for "healthy people" to do this in the middle of a massive outbreak of infections among dairy cows?

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:18:46 

Right.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:18:46 

An unprecedented level of people, you know, dealing with sick cows and fucked up milk production and bird flu? Like, yeah, great time to raw dog raw milk. Which during good times is a great way to go to the hospital with stomach upset.

Artie Vierkant  03:19:03 

Yeah.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:19:03 

Well and not to be, like, too wonky for a second, but also.. it actually is a really good example of a piece, because my initial reaction is like, what is the purpose of writing this? Like it serves no purpose whatsoever. [ Beatrice laughs ]. It's not an important piece of information.

Artie Vierkant  03:19:18 

Right. Personal aggrandizement under a new regime? Maybe.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:19:21 

Well, exactly. It has to do with ideological drift, right? And the normalization of certain points of view, right? It says something about sort of like, the ideological designs of liberals in this moment that they feel the need to retrench beliefs and positions that probably only several years ago they were given to sort of elitist mocking around.

Artie Vierkant  03:19:48 

[ Laughing ] Yeah.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:19:48 

But there's just something to me about the total unnecessary quality of that piece? Like, in some ways its complete irrelevance, and its complete vacuousness that is sort of like the point makes it such a really helpful symptom of where we are.

Artie Vierkant  03:19:50 

Totally.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:19:51 

Absolutely.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:19:53 

This is different than 2017 or 2016, right?

Artie Vierkant  03:20:10 

Yeah, absolutely. I mean—and it's funny. I had something I was gonna maybe say about this, and I wasn't sure whether it was gonna be appropriate. But now that we've talked about it a little bit, I think it's definitely appropriate to bring this up. So, what I keep thinking about with this is the very first thing—I remember the very first thing that I thought of when this piece came out. Which was, and I know this is maybe a little unfashionable, because I'm going to cite Bruno Latour, but allow me to be, like, back in my 20s and citing Bruno Latour again— [ Beatrice laughs ].

[ Artie’s note: We recorded this before the big Twitter discussion in the last week of December about Adam Tooze’s references to Latour, so for those who’ve asked this wasn’t a reference to that or a dig at anyone specific—or a dig against Latour-appreciators in general. Just good old fashioned self-deprecation ].

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:20:44 

Well well well, if it isn't 2009. [ Beatrice and Artie laugh ].

Artie Vierkant  03:20:45 

But so, the first thing I thought about was Latour's book The Pasteurization of France.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:20:50 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:20:51 

I had a feeling that's why that book was on your desk the other day.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:20:54 

Aw.

Artie Vierkant  03:20:54 

Yeah. So for those who don't know, The Pasteurization of France—or, Microbes: War and Peace [Les Microbes: guerre et paix]—is a book from 1984 by Bruno Latour, the sociologist. That chronicles the sociological process leading to the universal adoption of pasteurization. And—as I was kind of joking earlier—when I was younger, this was kind of like a big text in the History and Sociology of Science.

But so, while the book follows the adoption of pasteurization and kind of what the mechanics of that looked like. What the book is actually about is trying to answer this broader question, which is: what are the actual specific forces that have to coalesce for something to go from, you know, a scientific discovery, to a society-wide intervention that is practically implemented? To be adopted politically? In what you could imagine is almost the reverse process of the process that we are chronicling in this very episode, or series of episodes. [ Beatrice laughs ].

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:21:00 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  03:21:01 

But so while I haven't read it in a long time, I did—as Bea mentioned, it's sitting on my desk right now. And the reason it's sitting on my desk is because I was flipping through it to try to remember, like, what was the thing? What's the thing that's kind of itching the back of my brain about this?

And I remembered that the thing about it was, in the very beginning he talks about the reason he sort of sought to answer this question through looking at pasteurization. And what he writes is, quote,

There are a number of reasons for believing that there is no better example than that of the revolution introduced into medicine, biology and hygiene by the work of Louis Pasteur, because no one except extreme cynics, can doubt the value of Pasteur's discoveries to medicine. All of the other technological conquests have their embittered critics and malcontents—not to mention those suffering from radiation—but to prevent children from dying from terrible diseases has never been seen as anything other than an advantage—except, of course, by the microbes of those diseases.

Which is all to say, you know, whether that was true at the time or not, I think it's safe to say that forty years later, things have changed quite a lot.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:23:21 

Mhm. Mhm.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:23:21 

Oh, boy, yeah.

Artie Vierkant  03:23:24 

It's fascinating to see this attacked, considering that is something that can be looked at as this ur-example—

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:23:29 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  03:23:30 

—of.. really, modernity.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:23:33 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:23:33 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  03:23:33 

To piss Latour off even more by using that term. [ Beatrice laughs ]. Anyway—so back to sort of the end. We're getting to the end here. So I'm just gonna say a few last things, I think, and then we'll open it up.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:23:48 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  03:23:49 

I think when we look back at, not just this year, but the last several years, the effect of all of these developments has been that, to be quite frank, some of our worst fears have come to pass.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:24:02 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  03:24:03 

Rather than learning anything about our collective precarity and the need to take care of one another, the pandemic has instead been used to reinforce a narrower and narrower construction of risk and vulnerability, exacerbating a pre-pandemic fantasy of health where there are a set of so-called "healthy" people that are construed as the protagonists of society, and then there are what is understood as a largely static minority pool of intrinsically "unhealthy" or intrinsically "vulnerable" people who society is simply not for. And, additionally, whose needs have been in the last few years presented as oppositional to the needs of the quote, unquote, "normal people."

This transformation has laid the groundwork for, I think, a lot of the reactionary displays that we've talked about today. Like the rise of mask bans. Which would have been more of a national scandal, I think, at any earlier point in the pandemic.

And this all could not have come at a worse time. For decades, it was assumed the next time we saw a global pandemic, it was going to be bird flu, and H5N1 has been spreading throughout the industrial agriculture system this entire year, as we keep hearing about troubling human case after troubling human case. You know, it's impossible to overstate how devastating it will be if an H5N1 pandemic is treated with the disregard that we've seen for COVID.

And these last few years, one of the things that we pointed to over and over again is how even the pandemic response that we did get has been taken, now, as an opportunity to say, actively: 'well, we're not going there again. We're not doing that again.'

And this isn't just a forward looking thing, of course. In December, the CDC published estimates that between October 1 and December 7, between 8,200 and 13,000 people died of COVID. Again, that's between October 1 and December 7, so just over two months. That figure is much higher than what NVSS is currently showing as of this recording, which is about 5,900 deaths [during that time period]—itself a substantial amount, but the CDC's estimate is that it's actually potentially double, or more than double.

I'm not trying to produce doom and gloom here, obviously. But we have work to do.

And I think it's incredibly important to see the path the Biden administration pushed us down. This complete lack of a vision for the future it fostered. And it's impossible to understand that without fully understanding how much of a disaster the COVID response has been.

The COVID response that the Biden administration foreclosed on. The COVID response that allowed mask bans to bloom in just a year following the end of the Public Health Emergency.

Next year is going to be a lot.

As anyone who follows anti-abortion laws or anti-trans legislation will tell you, spring is state legislature season. What started this year with mask bans is a fight we're going to continue to be having next year. And this coming year, I really hope that the left can get its shit together and come out in full force against these bans—

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:27:11 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  03:27:12 

—whether you personally think COVID is still a really big deal, or not.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:27:16 

So important. Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  03:27:17 

New York lawmakers are already talking about trying to push their proposed state-level mask ban as soon as the legislative session starts in January.

So there's a lot to be done. But this is also where I think that Bea's conversation with Vicky Osterweil from the beginning of December also makes a very good pairing with this episode. Times are dark, but we fight.

And with the state pandemic response likely to become, with every year, more and more of a memory, it's on us. Again, as a friend of the show, Becca, said on the show in 2023, I'll just quote,

Every chain of transmission that is broken is valuable. Every person that doesn't get sick, that doesn't lose that week of work, or doesn't become disabled or die. From the minorst of [in]conveniences to the greatest of losses, every single one of those things is valuable.

So with that, I'm going to end with one final piece of the timeline.

On the morning of December 4, the CEO of United Healthcare was shot in the middle of the street in midtown Manhattan. And the world exploded with joy over this.

Anything is possible.

Anything.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:28:31 

Thank you for that timeline, Artie.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:28:33 

Yeah, thank you.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:28:33 

It is such a tremendous amount of work, but it's so valuable to be able to just sit together and talk through it and laugh and guffaw and shake our fists in rage, but also to actually just step back and take the time to think about it in sequence and by theme. And it's a tremendous task to pull this all together. And, you know, I think that one of the things that I can't stop thinking about is mask bans.

I mean, we went into this with me saying this was top of line for me, and it still is top of line at the end of this timeline. You know, you see people trying to raise skepticism, or discredit masking, by saying, you know, "if masks work, why do people still get sick?" And it's really frustrating, because this question really misses the point. Masks aren't a magic bullet. They're a tool. A critical tool, but they're also just one tool in a broader struggle that's going on against not just the spread of disease, but against state repression.

Artie Vierkant  03:29:13 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:29:14 

Because it's really like.. the question isn't, like, what do your personal beliefs about COVID justify in terms of individual actions? Right? And I think so many people have been convinced by the sociological production of the end of the pandemic that that is the question that they should be using to guide themselves.

Everything from the NPR story about why it's okay to, you know, bully your partner into giving up on COVID precautions, to mask bans, to, you know, any of the evasive ways that COVID has been written out of the election cycle. I mean, it goes on and on, right? Like, the question is really like, why does the state refuse to protect us, even when it has these tools to prevent harm, right?

And I think a lot of people are grappling with that. And I hope that for some people, even though the answer is upsetting, that it's at least more clear after this year. Protecting our lives is not a priority for a system that is designed to serve the perpetuation of capital. It's not designed around alleviating our suffering. You know, the priority is profit stability for markets, the maintenance of existing hierarchies and the kind of human life component in that is actually not something that's heavily weighted in our state system, right?

And so I think for many people, the pandemic has not only stripped away illusions about the role of public health in society, but the role of the state in their lives. You know, it's exposed public health as a tool of the state towards that goal of perpetuation, not of protection. Wielded not for the collective wellbeing of society, but to manage crises in ways that maintain the flow of capital, right?

And I think for some people, this has led to, you know, really pervasive, toxic nihilism and despair that's rooted in acknowledgement that the state doesn't care about us or our health.

But for other people I think it has been inspiring. And I think it's been galvanizing. And the pandemic really forces us to confront the truth that the state is not going to save us.

But in that, as I was talking to Vicky about, is the potential for something way more powerful than appeals to the state to come and save us, right, which is the ability to do something now about it and not sort of kowtow to respectability and the processes and the powers that be, and to do something other than begging a kind of indifferent apparatus to value your life.

And I—this is really influenced by over a decade of being disabled in the United States. And the slow realization that came with that was crucial for the way that I've understood the pandemic throughout the pandemic. But it's important to kind of sit with both the pain of this realization, but also in the possibilities that this kind of realization opens up. You know what I mean?

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:32:51 

That's super well said. I couldn't agree more. And I feel like I have a number of takeaways from us moving through this timeline together. And I don't know, it really strikes me that a part of the thing that we're kind of thinking about as 2024 shifts into 2025 you know, is not just COVID "year five," but also how four years of that are coterminous with the Biden administration. And how [the] COVID response involved this small but meaningful expansion of a welfare state, early on, and now it's retrenchment, it's unwinding, and we've been chronicling those material impacts.

And one of the things that I've just been thinking a lot about as we've been talking is how much insecurity is produced. And how much instability is produced, right? And if we think sort of just in kind of material terms here, and kind of breaking away from the kind of pundit economist discourse that I think was—we were just bombarded with this year, during the presidential election cycle. It's like, yes, of course, one of the big problems with inflation is that it just eats into people's wages.

And so if everything costs more, your wages are devalued in that regard, and you're sort of experiencing a negative slide or a certain kind of downward mobility. But as we also talked about, the unwinding of each of these elements of the pandemic welfare state, either, one, just directly increased costs, because now you have to pay for so many more things. You know that you got a little bit of assistance with, right?

Or you had certain forms of payments, like student loans, restarting things like that. But I think the other side of it too, or the other element, or other dimension of it is it increases the instability and insecurity in your life, so that things become ever more unpredictable.

And part of privatization, and part of feeling like you're being made to shoulder a burden on your own is also just not being able to know: what's going to happen if I get sick, right? Or what's going to happen in my workplace, if I get sick? What's going to happen if I need "access?" You know, what's going to happen next year with vaccines? All of these forms of instability that make living conditions that much harder and cause that much more anguish and frustration.

And seeing that as a four to five year long process—that obviously has a longer history—but if we just understand that as one of the sort of outcomes that the state mediated or produced, and that now we're sort of seeing a lot of those material impacts?

And I think the other part of it, I feel like I understand its attachment much more clearly thanks to this conversation, is to, on the one hand, all these reactionary kind of outgrowths of that kind of instability and insecurity.

The difficulty and downward mobility people are facing on a mass scale. It is why we're seeing, like we've talked about, just all, this kind of, you know, ideological drift and the reappearance of figures who did not enjoy the limelight or the conferral of the New York Times', you know, much vaunted word "mainstream" but a few years ago. [ Beatrice and Artie laugh ]. And so, yes to all of that, right? That, in many ways, is the story of the second Trump administration.

And the way that—not just the Biden administration, but here, of course, the liberal state and the fascist political movements that are gaining ever more foothold in the state, the way in which they rely on one another. Because both serve capital's interests, right? And they have, certainly, differences in rhetoric, and they like to have dramatic battles with one another.

But obviously, if you just look at these kind of bottom line, material determinants, it's like most people's living conditions that are caught in this battle between them. But what I really appreciate about what you're saying, Bea is that.. I think, again, this is why looking backward, or sort of reassessing and thinking historically isn't fatalistic, right?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:37:16 

Mhm.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:37:16 

And none of this was predetermined.

None of this was inevitable, right?

And also, because things have moved in this way, these are the outcomes that we have seen—or these are the outcomes that the state is most disposed towards—doesn't mean that those are going to be the future. And so that also feels really important.

I think you're so right to point to mask bans and to—I really feel like this has been on my mind for many months now, that one of the big tasks for the left in 2025 is, exactly, regardless of what anyone's particular belief is about how important or relevant COVID is as a political issue at the moment, organizing around masking as solidarity is just *the* place to start. It's the place to hold on to, and it's a place from which to think about building genuine solidarity between movements. And between different political aims and goals as we move into 2025.

And that to me.. [ sighs ] I don't know. I'm just always trying to find that, in part, just emotional counterweight to the kind of "oh no"—or the kind of sinking feeling that can come from just being meticulous about cataloging everything, critically, about.. [laughs] how terrible things are.

And that, to me, feels like the place, right? It's not the only place. But it feels like certainly a place to hold on to. And also one where so many people are already engaged politically. So, I don't know. That gives me a lot of energy moving into next year.

Artie Vierkant  03:38:57 

Absolutely. And, I mean, I think with mask bans what we see is that, for the last year—more than a year, obviously, but certainly for the last year—there have been substantial portions of the left, not just disabled leftists, but disabled leftists and their allies, and things like that—reaching out to a lot of their comrades on the left and trying to say, you know, take my hand over this. Let's fight this thing that is being used to criminalize me, and criminalize you, together, right? Let's fight this together.

And I think it remains to be seen what is going to happen with that, right? It's just very difficult to know. The one thing that we do know is that, as I was trying to highlight here, I think that more repression is coming in 2025. Clearly, just from the Trump administration—

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:39:55 

Mhm.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:39:56 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  03:39:56 

—I would not be surprised if we saw federal mask ban legislation, considering that Republicans are going to have such control over the federal government. But this is a very important fight for us to be having. For any number of reasons, whether it is for COVID or whether it is simply for defending a right that we gained to be more capable of securing fucking opsec in protests, right?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:40:25 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  03:40:26 

And these are not at all benefits that should be seen as in conflict with each other. This is just good old fashioned solidarity.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:40:35 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  03:40:36 

This is, on a very different note, almost—it's all related, but on a slightly different note. I think one of the things that, Jules, your comments were kind of helping resolve in my mind, just to maybe state so it's really clear.

I think one of the things that is so clear from looking at what has happened just in the last few years, with the unmaking of the pandemic welfare state, is—like, it would be very easy for us to simply just say, "Oh, well, you know, perhaps kicking 25 million people off of Medicaid in an election year is not a great recipe for your party winning back power," right?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:41:20 

Mhm

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:41:20 

Yep.

Artie Vierkant  03:41:21 

The other thing, though, is that I do feel what we've just seen and what I think now in 2024—here, at the end of 2024—we can, at long last, definitively say: this *did* produce the result that we were fucking trying to yell about for years.

That when Biden came in, and starting in 2021 began to just sort of let these programs lapse, and not fight for them. And say that it was fine. And that people should get back to work. And they didn't need to have unemployment insurance. And to side, as we've talked about in previous episodes, with business owners who were saying, you know, you are keeping me from having—from being able to hire employees when, you know, as people were arguing at the time in 2021, maybe the problem is that you're not paying living wages, right?

When all these programs start to unravel, it's not simply that it produces obvious negative material effects for people, and that that breeds resentment of, you know, the administration [and electorally]. I think also what that did is open space up for the arguments that people like the Great Barrington Declaration were making to appear more correct. And I don't just mean the, you know, 'let it rip' stuff, because that's—as we've talked about for years—that's kind of what the Biden administration was doing already. What I mean is that the Great Barrington Declaration people, a lot of people on the right, were doing this kind of faux working class politics around the pandemic—

Beatrice and Jules  03:43:12 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  03:43:12 

—and saying that pandemic protections were only a thing that these disconnected "élites" could possibly be interested in. And they were the people who—you know, as we saw with that, like, fucking Martin Kulldorff interview in Jacobin really early in the pandemic, right?

They were the people who—with the Democrats, essentially, completely giving up on COVID as a working class issue. They were the people who—although they were saying horrible things that were not actually supportive of the working class in any way. They were the people who were kind of giving lip service to it. And saying, you know, 'pandemic interventions are just harming you,' because it's fucking up your paycheck, or something, and you still have to go to work—and some things that are true, right? Like, you still have to go to work. And you still have to get the virus, and stuff, but they're, you know, working from home. And things like that.

But I think one of the reasons I bring up Nathan's piece earlier is because I think one of the other things that he does a good job of showing is that, when you look at it, in 2021 the numbers of people who reported in [Federal Reserve] surveys about [having] a positive experience of the economy, especially in like early 2021, are shockingly positive considering not only the pandemic itself, but also the mass layoffs that we saw in 2020. And then, for those sort of economic wellbeing, self-reporting surveys, to go so negative, so quickly. And the difference is that those pandemic welfare state programs, including, you know, unemployment insurance—which, just check Reddit posts from 2021 from when they were going away, right? And you can see very clearly, while those programs didn't catch everyone, it kept a lot of people afloat. And kept a lot of people from having to be pushed back to work, right?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:45:08 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  03:45:08 

And so, my point, I guess, is that the effect of that, then—pushing those people back to work—I think it becomes much easier to almost appear like you're proving those fucking people right, who have been saying: Oh, the "pandemic restrictions," or whatever they want to call them, are "the problem."

Because when you remove pandemic protections and remove the pandemic welfare state, and then all that people are kind of left with is the idea that, you know, they have to continue to maybe buy masks in order to go to work, but they are forced to go to work, right? That produces a very different experience for a lot of people that I think can lead—that drives—my point is, I think this drove a wedge, right?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:45:51 

Mhm.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:45:51 

Yeah,

Artie Vierkant  03:45:51 

I think that this produced a lot of the reactionary bullshit. The specific forms of it that we've seen from late 2021 through to certainly today. Where, you know, even some people who do have a degree of class consciousness are suggesting, like, oh, it's like this "bourgeois" thing to mask, right?

Beatrice and Jules  03:46:14 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  03:46:15 

And I think to look at, then—okay, so they undid all these pandemic welfare protections. And then, for years, as we've talked about, the Biden administration was, like, throwing up their hands in confusion, like, uhh, I guess we need better messaging? For public health? You don't need fucking better messaging. You took away the material tools that were helping to slightly stem the fucking bleeding!

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:46:42 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  03:46:44 

You know? And, again, not to fucking overstate it, because we're talking about years where so many people have died. So many people have gotten long COVID. These welfare protections, you know, I'm not trying to make them look like they're a panacea or anything. But they were something.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:47:03 

Right. No and it also—

Artie Vierkant  03:47:04 

Does that make sense?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:47:05 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:47:05 

Yeah, yeah, no, no, and it's a great point, Artie. It makes me think of that phenomenon, or idea of behavioral psychology and behavioral economics called "overchoice." You know? One of the things that the pandemic welfare protections did was they reduced the decisions that people had to make about how they were going to spend the limited resources they had.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:47:28 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  03:47:28 

Right. Right.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:47:29 

And the sociological production of the end of the pandemic has been a process of introducing more and more choices for what we could have done, what we could do, what you should do. You know, as we've talked about, everything from the kind of Oster narrative of how the real way to deal with the pandemic is to come up with your individual set of highly specified—

Artie Vierkant  03:47:54 

Your personal risk score.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:47:55 

Mhm.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:47:55 

—personal risk score, with choice, decision making for every single scenario, and set out a personal rubric for yourself. Like, of course, a fucking academic economist is, like, oh, let's create, like, this really—

Artie Vierkant  03:48:09 

A flow chart, yeah. [ Jules laughs ].

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:48:10 

Yeah, like, complex and overwhelming way of navigating this. Rather than simplifying things, knowing that people, unlike her, do not have nannies and childcare and a huge salary to use to make decisions about how to spend their money, you know?

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:48:25 

Mhm.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:48:26 

And part of the thing that we've seen is that, as each of these levers of removing pressure were taken away, people had to make decisions about what they were going to prioritize. And in conjunction with these levers being taken away—that relieved financial pressure on people, right? We had more and more pressures put on people, individually, that raised the cost of prioritizing COVID. Socially, economically, physically.

Artie Vierkant  03:48:59 

While they're being told: it's, also, only a problem for an abstract "other."

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:49:05 

Yeah, for "other people."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:49:06 

"Other!" Right. Right. And this is why the abandonment of masking as a tool, and as a collective tool, has served no one but the ruling class.

Artie Vierkant  03:49:06 

Yeah.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:49:07 

Exactly.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:49:08 

This is why this is not about "individual freedom," right? This is not about what's necessary or what's not. This is about power. This was about preserving power at the expense of our lives.

And it's frustrating, right? Because it seems so transparently obvious that you would hope that people who have some sort of class analysis would be able to see this, right? That they want us to believe the pandemic is over and that we have to accept mass death and disability as a reality of our lives, and that we have to "move on" and forget those who have you know, quote, unquote, "fallen by the wayside," right? And also forget those brief moments of possibility where their lives were not so burdened by having to make difficult choices about the limited resources that they have for survival in a society where everything you need to survive you must buy. Where currency is the currency of how you survive, right? And that possibility that was brought forth by widespread mass rebellion is part of what they were shutting down too.

Artie Vierkant  03:50:22 

Mhm.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:50:23 

Right? Both the time, the freedom to think about those things, and the spare energy that you maybe had because you weren't having to make so many difficult choices about whether to buy groceries, or pay your student loan debt, that you could actually join a reading group and read Fanon? You know?

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:50:42 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:50:43 

Those are the decisions that they did not want you to have on your horizon. And these are the decisions that they decided you did not deserve. And that is so much a part of what the process of the sociological production of the end of the pandemic has been. It's actually been taking away choice from people's lives in the name of "choice" and "freedom."

And the result is a perpetual crisis disguised as normalcy.

The result is long COVID skyrocketing. Health systems still under collapse. Millions of people abandoned, and fractured, and disenfranchised, and left to fend for themselves, while the state erases their existence.

And what we've seen is, as you put it earlier, it's grimly poetic, right? The president who was elected on the promise of fixing the pandemic, President Biden, ends up doing everything possible under his administration to solidify its permanence—

Artie Vierkant  03:51:43 

Truly. Yeah.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:51:44 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:51:44 

—ensuring that the same disaster is ready, waiting, and repressed already, for the next administration. Where power is going to be handed right back to the person he said could not possibly be allowed to manage a crisis like this.

Artie Vierkant  03:52:01 

And, you know, truly holding the door open for it, too.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:52:04 

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant  03:52:04 

Which I think is the—to distill, maybe, what I was trying.. you know, earlier, I think I was kind of thinking off the top of my head.

And the end of these [episodes] is always a good place for kind of sketches of an idea that might, you know, end up becoming something that I'm more capable of actually articulating better later.

But I think my point about the unmaking of the pandemic welfare state being something not only breeding resentment of the Biden administration, but also kind of adding fuel to the claims of the reactionary right over the pandemic—

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:52:43 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  03:52:44 

—I think can partially be maybe most easily distilled by just saying: those state interventions get unmade, and get clawed back and retrenched, so quickly, but the pandemic is still there. It's still a major force in their lives, whether the Biden administration will acknowledge it or not—and for most of the time they would not—that by now, I think it's just so much easier for the right to trade on this idea of—the right, and liberals, frankly—to trade on this idea of like, oh, pandemic protections were a "mistake." Interventions of any—like, all these different interventions were this disastrous "mistake," because just the last couple of years have been years of such little intervention. So hands off. And so many of the things that, again, even just simply kept people afloat economically without forcing them to accept risk, right—were gone, so.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:53:45 

Well, no, and it's like, the more comfort you withdraw, right? The more you force people into these positions of essentially having to make the choice to risk so much in order to keep prioritizing COVID, right?

Jules and Artie  03:54:01 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:54:02 

The burden of continuing to prioritize it has become so much higher, and so much more alienating for people. And this year has really marked this kind of full consolidation of the sociological production of the end of the pandemic.

You know, it's not that COVID disappeared. Far from it. It's that the machinery of power kind of completed the process of declaring the crisis over, and burying these ongoing consequences, explaining them away. And this wasn't just a political or media decision, it was a coordinated effort that involved state, corporate and cultural forces that were needed to come together and redefine what constituted a crisis—

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:54:49 

Mhm.

Artie Vierkant  03:54:49 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:54:50 

—from COVID to your daily life, right? And what this handoff really represents is, as you said, the bipartisan consensus to prioritize profit over life. To ensure that the machinery of exploitation keeps running, even if it runs people to the ground. Even if it bleeds you dry with the pressure that's required to squeeze blood from a stone. As if our bodies and lives are not already characterized by a near-infinite fragility. Like.. [ sighs ] what we saw was the normalization of mass death and disablement became status quo. Data collection was dismantled. Public health measures were abandoned. The collective memory of the pandemic was intentionally eroded. Instability was introduced in order to also facilitate all these things. People were not given the tools to protect themselves. They were given a narrative that it's time to move on, that this is a problem for someone else over there. And that to make the choice for this to be your problem came with a high cost. And this year, that narrative became the dominant framework. And the completion—

Artie Vierkant  03:56:11 

Truly. Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:56:12 

Yeah. And the completion of this process doesn't mean that the pandemic is over. It doesn't mean that the fight to sociologically undo what has been done is a futile task, right?

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:56:25 

Far from it.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:56:26 

It's quite easy to convince yourself of that, though. If you're gonna buy into the dominant framework.

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:56:31 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:56:33 

But it does mean that people are left to navigate this alone. This is a strategy of erasure. Of erasing ongoing harm. Of erasing disabled, chronically ill, and other subaltern people. Of erasing the need for collective care. And it's also been a way to solidify this dominant narrative that there is a commitment to prioritizing capital over human life. Which, for a while, was something that people were inspired to question, right?

Jules Gill-Peterson  03:57:07 

Mhm.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:57:07 

And I think what has happened—and this kind of solidification that we've seen this year, of the sociological production in the end of the pandemic—tells us a lot about what's to come. And it's not comforting. Like, let's be real.

Jules and Artie  03:57:21 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  03:57:22 

We're dealing with a precedent that has been set.

The normalization of mass death, systemic neglect, abandonment, is reasserted as standard operating procedure.

We've seen state withdrawal, after the state offered supports and reprieve from some of this pressure, right? There has been modeling towards abandoning each other interpersonally. The costs of caring about COVID have been raised. Health care is more dangerous.

We're seeing calls to ban masks at just the moment where you need the maximum possible pressure to be able to enforce masking in workplaces, especially in the context of H5N1, where you have farm workers who are the most abandoned and vulnerable working population in the United States, that is one large enfranchised group that is in desperate need of PPE. And they are going to be affected by mask bans, too. And there is not movement on the labor organizing end to do shit about it. And that's not heartening.

You know? But.. [ sighs ] I said this back in August at our conversation the three of us had at the Socialism Conference, that was "The Political Economy of COVID."

Keeping each other safe is one of the core themes of disability justice. The term that folks use is community care, and this can have a broad meaning in a lot of different contexts. But Disability Justice has a very specific meaning with a historical lineage. And it comes out of the lineage of a group of people who were told that their needs, and their lives, cost way too much to be considered as part of public and daily life.

And it came out of that movement failing the most marginalized within that community, right? Of [the] Disability Rights [Movement] securing things like the ADA that stopped at the door of the nursing home, and stopped at the door of the context of employment. And didn't address or redress centuries of exploitation and exclusion that disabled people experienced in American society as a founding tenet of liberalism itself, right?

And that's why the Disability Justice definition is about recognizing interdependence and imperfection and running with that.

And taking responsibility for each other. Because we know that we can't move forward and achieve anything in the context that we're in if the first line of order is not having each other's backs, but is begging the state to be treated like a human being.

Disabled people have been surviving together like this for a very long time. And COVID means that more people need to step up and take responsibility for each other.

And as we've said, the cost of doing that has been raised, and there are so many people organizing to try and balance that.

We have so much work to be doing in the coming year, still, to be in solidarity with our comrades in Gaza, in Syria, in Lebanon, who are under the thumb of the IOF and the US military's full checkbook—blank checkbooks worth of armaments.

And the thing I keep turning back to, over and over, is a passage from Klee Benally's book, No Spiritual Surrender. From the chapter called “Toward the Colonial Nothing: Settler Destruction is Ceremony.”

And I'm thinking about this in particular because Klee died quite suddenly a year ago. In December of 2023. And this is the chapter where he writes about the idea of a kind of insurrectionary eco-anarchism based around the Indigenous principles that he's been organizing with for decades. And a lot of this chapter has to do with the COVID organizing that was happening on Diné reservations in the immediate face of abandonment by the state from the initial declaration of the pandemic. And he writes,

We are forces of nature. If we also move with the forces of nature, if we strike what nature strikes, what better coordination and affinity is needed. Anti-settler society means amorphous, unrelenting social war. It embodies all that settler respectability abhors. It is Fanon's earthly wretches embracing the terror their existence brings to settler rationality. Dysfunction, unyielding chaos, failing into itself to destroy what destroys us. This is cognitive dissonance manifesting against utopic destinies built upon genocide, ecocide, mass theft, enslavement and forced assimilation. It contemplates: how can we accelerate internal and external settler colonial, social, economic, and political ruptures and precipitate their ruin? What further provocations, interventions and attacks can be devised to undermine and destabilize settler colonial social order? What institutions, ideas of infrastructure, can we attack within our means? Can we get away with it? This is the specter of an Indigenous anarchism. An unsettling, ungovernable, spiritual force of nature that makes colonizers afraid again.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  04:01:57 

And I feel like you know, just thinking back to Rasha's provocations that they offered at the Socialism Conference session that they did. Which is a great starting place for anyone feeling like they don't know what to do now. Turning to that, turning to the conversation I had with Vicky a few weeks ago. Turn towards each other.

Jules Gill-Peterson  04:03:27 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  04:03:27 

That's, I think, how we move forward, despite all the ways that the sociological production of the end of the pandemic is not comforting, and is scary, and is a lot for us to be moving forward under the shadow of.

Artie Vierkant  04:03:44 

Yeah.

Jules Gill-Peterson  04:03:44 

Yeah, that's really well said.

Artie Vierkant  04:03:47 

Jules, do you have any final thoughts that you want to add, or should I?

Jules Gill-Peterson  04:03:52 

No, nothing that can match that brilliance. [ Laughs ] I think that was a really good place to wrap to.

Artie Vierkant  04:04:00 

I agree. Yeah, I think that's a perfect sentiment for us to end on. I do want to say, just before we go, though, a couple of things, I guess. First of all is, I want to thank everyone who is a patron.

Jules Gill-Peterson  04:04:19 

Mhm.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  04:04:19 

Absolutely.

Artie Vierkant  04:04:20 

I did this also in last week's patron episode, saying—but really, you know this would not be possible. This thing, just straight up, that we have just done, and everything that we do with this show, would not be possible without all of you. I literally started working on this when COVID Year Four wrapped.

This one was by far the hardest to do for, I think, a number of reasons. But just, the further out that we've gotten in this process, the more difficult I think it becomes to really try to digest what are the most meaningful things that we can try to intervene in here. So I hope that we've done some justice to that. But you know, in terms of scale, for example, these are—I think, this and COVID Year Four, for [each] of them, my notes are like 23,000 words or something.

Jules Gill-Peterson  04:05:19 

Wow.

Artie Vierkant  04:05:20 

So I've been writing what is essentially a little novella every year at the end of the year for you. [ Jules laughs ] So I hope you appreciate that. We're going to have, I think, the transcript for this up—we're going to try to have it by next week. We wanted to have it right when it posted, but just logistically, that won't be possible. And I'll put links in there, like last year.

This is also probably the last Death Panel episode of the year—obviously this is like the very end of the year. So, by that, I mean, we're gonna do, as I mentioned before, some sort of "Best of 2024" episodes, and then we'll be back with new episodes in early January.

And I think I'm gonna say one thing that I'm gonna cut out of the public version. Should we say this?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  04:06:08 

Yeah, we could tell the folks who are patron supporters.

Artie Vierkant  04:06:11 

Yeah. Next year, in the spring, Bea and I are going to have a baby.

Jules Gill-Peterson  04:06:18 

Yeah!

Artie Vierkant  04:06:21 

Baby Death Panel.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  04:06:22 

[ Laughs ] "Baby Death Panel."

Jules Gill-Peterson  04:06:23 

Woohoo! Baby Death Panel! [ All laugh ].

Artie Vierkant  04:06:24 

No, I mean, a human baby, not a podcast baby. [ Beatrice and Jules laugh ].

Jules Gill-Peterson  04:06:27 

Well, that's good.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  04:06:29 

So we especially have appreciated the support throughout what's been a very difficult pregnancy, so far.

Artie Vierkant  04:06:36 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  04:06:37 

It means a lot. So thank you all. I think that's a good place to leave it for today.

Artie Vierkant  04:06:42 

Yeah, sounds good.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  04:06:44 

Folks, remember, there is strength in holding onto the truth even when no one wants to see or hear it. And it is not easy to stay grounded and defiant amidst so much abandonment and so much forgetting.. but I'm proud of you all for refusing to give in to a world that tries to dispose of you.

That really matters. And all of us here at Death Panel are sending our love and solidarity your way.

And finally, again, patrons, thank you. This show is listener supported, and every new patron helps keep the show alive.

And don't forget, you can also grab copies of Health Communism and A Short History of Trans Misogyny at your local bookstore, or request them at your local library.

And share the show with someone who needs to hear it.

And Death Panel has been sustained entirely by listeners since November of 2018. We've covered COVID since the beginning, and our promise for the next year is that we're not going to stop now.

So thank you again for sticking with us for all of these years. Your support genuinely keeps us going, and everything helps. We appreciate you.

So, as always. Medicare for All Now. Solidarity Forever. Stay Alive Another Week.

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