Earth paging Emma Green of The New Yorker, you sound like Emily ‘Amnesty’ Oster, a bit kooky: what? “Testing, masking, moving events outdoors—“if we do these things, it’s not a slog,” she added. “

SOURCE:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-activism/the-case-for-wearing-masks-forever

“A ragtag coalition of public-health activists believe that America’s pandemic restrictions are too lax—and they say they have the science to prove it.”
Huh?
‘Among the people I spoke with who have actually led public-health agencies, all were sympathetic to some of the critiques that the People’s C.D.C. makes. “The pandemic has opened what were cracks in our health-care system and exposed them as large chasms,” Zink said. “The systems that we have built have failed America and failed us individually.” But these experts also found it hard to take the group seriously because of its strident analysis. “To make claims that C.D.C. is beholden to big business—this is just nonsense, frankly,” Frieden, the agency’s former leader, said. “Once you’re sitting at C.D.C., your goal is not to say the thing that makes you feel best or sounds most politically correct or radical.”
The C.D.C. has become “the punching bag of our country,” Zink told me. She recognizes that the pandemic has been scary, sad, and frustrating for many people. Her reaction to “hearing those criticisms, particularly the eugenics comment—it’s just more sadness.”
Perhaps when we look back on this time, the People’s C.D.C. will look like other activist groups that have agitated against the status quo of health care from the margins, ranging from the Black Panthers and the Young Lords of the nineteen-sixties and seventies to the aids activists of the eighties and nineties. They take explicit inspiration from groups such as act up, which pursued its own medical research, provided treatments, and staged protests in response to the government’s inaction during the aids crisis. Those groups all found ways to help members of their communities when they felt that society had left them behind. One way to look at the People’s C.D.C. is as a movement to recapture our sense of interdependence, both in terms of our health and our communities; whether we acknowledge it or not, we all help determine one another’s health. “Nothing has underscored that as powerfully as the covid-19 pandemic,” Fairchild said.
In much of America, the pandemic has seemed over for a long time. I asked the People’s C.D.C. members what they made of the fact that, in large swaths of the country, people don’t seem to care that much about covid. “I would just disagree with the statement that they don’t care,” Hope Brasfield, an embroiderer who lives in Tennessee, replied. “How can you judge whether or not somebody cares about something if they don’t even know about it?” She pointed out that, in red states like hers, politicians have consistently downplayed the pandemic. “I don’t accept the idea that it is our fault—the people’s fault—for this pandemic continuing,” Valenti, the retired nurse in Georgia, said.
America is heading into its third covid winter, this time paired with high rates of flu and RSV. Mayor Eric Adams just urged New Yorkers to put their masks back on. People are tired of it all. But the People’s C.D.C. members do not feel deterred. “The reality is, I feel so hopeful,” Thill said. Testing, masking, moving events outdoors—“if we do these things, it’s not a slog,” she added. “It’s uplifting. It’s a demonstration of care and solidarity and love.”’
Forgive me as I go grab my barf bag!

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Author: Dr. Paul Alexander