Extended Teaser - 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. 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.’
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Death Panel patrons can find the full episode here, and the remaining transcript here.