Panicdemic was how I have been spelling it for a while now, because panic has been the greatest problem from COVID-19.

Philadelphia was among the worst of the cities in this country when it came to forced masking, vaccine mandates, and throwing people out of work who did not comply. The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers threw up constant roadblocks as the School District was trying to reopen the public schools. That history is what makes this story interesting:

COVID hospitalizations are rising. Philly schools still won’t require masks – mostly.

Students who test positive must stay home for at least five calendar days, and will be expected to participate in virtual learning. The district has also dropped its vaccine requirement for employees.

by Kristen A Graham | Wednesday, August 30, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

The Philadelphia School District announced its updated COVID-19 policies Tuesday, and the school system is keeping masks optional — mostly.

The news comes as COVID hospitalizations are up nationally, but the risk of contracting the coronavirus locally remains low, according to the Philadelphia Department of Public Health.

Students and staff in the district’s 216 schools can wear masks at any time, but will not be required to do so unless the city health department deems it necessary amid a COVID-19 outbreak in a classroom, school, office or department, according to the guidance.

That would mean that the decision would be taken by Commissioner of Health Cheryl Bettigole, who loves her some mask mandates, trying to keep them even after CDC eased their recommendations, but was forced to back down due to political pressure. You can be certain of one thing: Dr Bettigole will be just champing at the bit if she sees any possible excuse to reimpose mask mandates!

People will also be required to wear masks if they test positive for COVID-19 after returning from five-day isolation, and are “highly recommended” to mask for 10 days after their last date of COVID exposure.

Students who test positive must stay home for at least five calendar days, and will be expected to participate in virtual learning. Parents are obligated to notify the school nurse or principal if a student tests positive, and those who show COVID symptoms during the school day must be picked up by a family member, and will be provided with a free COVID test.

Who will administer the test? If the student is simply sent home with a test, all that his parents or he has to do is say that it was just a cold, and that he tested negative. If the test is administered by the school, that means that school officials would have to touch the student, something which cannot be done without consent, or it constitutes an assault.

The district has also dropped its COVID vaccine mandate for new employees.

I’m sure that Mayor Jim Kenney, who strongly enforced a vaccine mandate on city employees, and had months-long efforts to fire employees who did not consent, would be appalled by that, but, then again, he’s been practically on strike for a year now.

I had hoped that I wouldn’t be writing about mask or vaccine mandates again, but there has been a not-so-quiet push for mask mandates and vaccine mandates from some of our friends on the left, including President Biden:

Biden plans to ask Congress for funding to develop new COVID vaccine, may recommend shot for all

The announcement comes near a year after Biden declared the pandemic was ‘over’

by Greg Wehner | Published August 26, 2023 8:35pm EDT | Updated August 27, 2023 3:26pm EDT

President Biden said Friday he plans to request additional funding from Congress for the development of a new COVID-19 vaccine, adding he may require everyone to take it whether they previously received a vaccine or not.

President Biden had declared the ‘pandemic’ to be over. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but for the vast majority of people, the panicdemic is long gone.

Biden, who is vacationing in the Lake Tahoe area, was asked by a reporter on Friday if he could say anything about the uptick of COVID cases and a new variant.

“Yes, I can,” the president said. “I signed off this morning on a proposal we have to present to Congress a request for additional funding for a new vaccine that is necessary, that works.”

He added, “Tentatively it is recommended that it will likely be recommended everybody get it no matter whether they’ve gotten it before or not.”

Can you figure out the grammar in that last sentence? 🙂

At least right now, the government is recommending that people wait on getting a COVID-19 vaccine booster shot, until the newest vaccine is approved, supposedly in mid-September. That strikes me as odd: if the vaccine has not yet been approved, they are still operating on the assumption it will be approved. That’s almost certainly a political decision, because a new version of the vaccine, supposedly more effective against a new variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, can’t have much testing, and certainly no testing at all when it comes to long-term effects, all against a virus which is producing, for most people known to contract it, something like the flu, perhaps not fun, but survived by well over 90% of the people who contract it.

Of course, COVID-19 has been so mild that a lot of people have contracted it without any noticeable symptoms. With at-home tests, and people who see no reason to test, we really have no idea how many people have contracted it.

If the President wants to recommend that people get the new vaccine, that is within his freedom of speech; anybody can ask any other person to do, or not do, something. Where I strongly object is the idea that the President, or anyone else, can order people to take the vaccine. Even the Philadelphia School District realized that, because they understood that some people will refuse, and that the city has lost some good people to previous vaccine mandates.

I’ve long called the response to COVID-19 a panicdemic, because the chief disease we suffered was the loss of our rights due to the utter, widespread panic that government officials pushed, and the authoritarian controls they imposed, with most of the sheeple barely uttering a bleat.

And now, Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia) has unwittingly admitted that all of his orders were based not on the disease, but political considerations:

Philly relaxes COVID vaccination policy for city workers now that national emergencies have ended

The vaccine mandate still applies to city-employed health-care providers.

by Jason Laughlin | Tuesday, May 30, 2023 | 5:03 AM EDT

Most Philadelphia municipal employees are no longer required to be vaccinated for COVID-19, Philadelphia officials said, ending a pandemic policy that went into effect less than a year ago.

As of last week, only city workers with jobs that put them in contact with patients, such as doctors or nurses, must be vaccinated, said Sarah Peterson, a spokesperson for the city. Philadelphia changed its policy in response to the end of two national emergency declarations earlier this month and new recommendations from the Philadelphia Department of Public Health.

The relaxed city employee mandate complies with the health department’s requirement that health-care practitioners in the city, with the exception of home-care workers, be vaccinated against COVID.

“The City updated its COVID-19 safety protocols to align with local health-care worker vaccination requirements while also recognizing that COVID-19 transmission has declined,” Peterson said.

“(I)n response to the end of two national emergency declarations earlier this month,” huh? In other words, politics. If the disease was so serious that it justified abridging our constitutional rights and firing people who refused to take the vaccines, why does the expiration of a political declaration mean anything?

The federal state of emergency ended because the public simply weren’t having it anymore. But, naturally, there remain those who are appalled that things have returned to normal:

‘This is going to hit most people.’ The COVID state of emergency has ended — but the need for support hasn’t.

“The end of the state of emergency is not a declaration of the end of a pandemic — it’s just the end of the support for the pandemic,” said Kayla O’Mahony, a Philadelphia resident who has had long COVID for two years.

by Massarah Mikati and Michelle Myers | Tuesday, May 30, 2023

When the world started to return to “normal” in the summer of 2021, Kayla O’Mahony was young, fit, healthy, and fully vaccinated for COVID-19. She had little reason to be concerned for her health and safety — or so she thought.

Soon after O’Mahony started opening her life back up, she contracted COVID-19. What was initially a so-called mild infection (meaning she didn’t require hospitalization) consisting of fever, loss of taste and smell, nausea, and body aches turned into a two-year, ongoing infection that turned her life upside down.

She became disabled and had to move in with her mom for almost a year. She lost her job as a local farmer. And she hasn’t been able to experience the simple joys of seeing friends spontaneously (only if they have a negative PCR test and isolate days in advance).

So when O’Mahony learned that the federal COVID-19 public health emergency was terminated on May 11, she was in disbelief.

In disbelief? The federal government announced that the ‘state of emergency’ would be ended on May 11^th months ago. One would think that, given her illness, she would have paid attention to the news, and been mentally prepared.

“The end of the state of emergency is not a declaration of the end of a pandemic — it’s just the end of the support for the pandemic,” O’Mahony said. “It’s infuriating to me.”

Actually, it kind of is the end of the pandemic. Pandemic is defined as affecting “a significant proportion of the population,” and “an outbreak or product of sudden rapid spread, growth, or development,” neither condition of which is met by the current low incidence of the disease. We can sympathize with Miss O’Mahony for the severe toll that COVID-19 has taken on her, but affects relatively few people these days, most people have some form of immunity, whether from the vaccines or natural immunity due to past exposure.

Her real concern? Money!

Under the emergency declaration, folks could access free COVID-19 vaccines, onsite and at-home tests, and Paxlovid — an antiviral that helps high-risk patients prevent severe illness. That will slowly change, as manufacturers are authorized to determine prices after the free vaccine and Paxlovid supplies run out, and insurance providers are no longer required to waive costs.

For example, PCR tests — which are the most reliably accurate COVID tests, and the ones people like O’Mahony rely on to avoid infection — are estimated to cost about $130 out-of-pocket, as opposed to $20 during the emergency declaration. And they’re becoming harder and harder to find.

Further down:

Leah Garrity was first diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, a bone marrow failure called aplastic anemia, on January 1, 2020. She needed to start masking, social distancing, and staying away from sick people two months before the rest of the world did.

“The hardest part has probably been this past year,” said Garrity. “It’s not talked about, people want to move on, but the reality is the same. The first year, at least it felt like everyone was at least somewhat on the same page.”

So, what, she’s depressed that other people no longer feel the need to take the same precautions that she does?

Aplastic anemia is a long-term, serious condition in which the bone marrow does not produce a sufficient number of new blood cells. The only known cure is a bone marrow transplant, which does not always work.

There’s a lack of education and awareness about the virus and how to protect oneself and others from contracting it, Garrity and O’Mahony said. But the failure of taking the pandemic seriously, which has been taking place across the political spectrum, has been a chief frustration for people who are still at-risk — particularly with masking.

When Garrity goes to the hospital for her treatments, for example, most people are unmasked. When O’Mahony recently had a COVID-19 scare, the nurse who conducted her PCR test was unmasked.

Does Miss Garrity believe that everybody else needs to wear a mask to protect her?

Masking ended not because the government said it was OK, but because the public, as a whole got tired with it, and people started complying with mask mandates less and less. We noted, in October of 2021, that Kroger was no longer requiring customers to wear masks, and that the number of people complying with masking requests was declining. People were getting over their panic a year and a half ago, even while the government was trying its hardest to keep the panic alive.

Let’s tell the truth here: governments love authoritarian control, and the COVID panic, a panic that governments themselves helped to increase, just gave them more control. While some of us were appalled and saying so from the very beginning, far too many people proved themselves to actually be sheeple, and just go along with all of the suspensions of our constitutional rights, because they swallowed, and wallowed in, the panic. It was only as the panic faded that the tinpot dictators in our cities and states started to lose their ability to buffalo people into surrendering their rights.

And this is why we must stand fast in support of our rights as Americans, as a free people, and as human beings: when we allow fear to overcome freedom, freedom is lost, and freedom lost is a damned hard thing to get back.

The New Yorker is not one of my frequent reads, but when I saw this tweet from Eli Klein, I knew that I’d have to check out the story.

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.

By Emma Green | Wednesday, December 28, 2022

Last December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that it was shortening the recommended isolation period for those with covid-19 to five days. Getting exposed to the virus no longer meant that people needed to quarantine, either, as long as they were fully vaccinated and wore a mask. It was a big moment, and it occurred just as the Omicron variant was surging. Mindy Thompson Fullilove, a professor of urban policy and health at the New School, was livid.

I will admit it: when I saw “A ragtag coalition of public health activists”, my mind went to “a ragtag fugitive fleet on a lonely quest”, from the introduction to the original Battlestar Galactica. 🙂

Fullilove, who is Black, has spent her career studying epidemics: first aids, then crack, then multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. She has seen how disease can ravage cities, especially in Black and working-class communities. From the beginning, Fullilove was skeptical of how the federal government handled the coronavirus pandemic. But these new recommendations from the C.D.C., she said, were “flying in the face of the science.” Not long after the announcement, she sent an e-mail to a Listserv called The Spirit of 1848, for progressive public-health practitioners. “Can we have a people’s CDC and give people good advice?” she asked. A flurry of responses came back.

Why is it important that Dr Fullilove is black?

What emerged was the People’s C.D.C.: a ragtag coalition of academics, doctors, activists, and artists who believe that the government has left them to fend for themselves against covid-19. As governments, schools, and businesses have scaled back their covid precautions, the members of the People’s C.D.C. have made it their mission to distribute information about the pandemic—what they see as real information, as opposed to what’s circulated by the actual C.D.C. They believe the C.D.C.’s data and guidelines have been distorted by powerful forces with vested interests in keeping people at work and keeping anxieties about the pandemic down. “The public has a right to a sound reading of the data that’s not influenced by politics and big business,” Fullilove said.

Let’s be honest here: there have been many people and groups who have “made it their mission to distribute information about the pandemic—what they see as real information, as opposed to what’s circulated by the actual C.D.C.”, but The New Yorker would never publish a glowing article about them, because those people and groups were saying that the government’s reaction to COVID-19 was too strict, rather than not strict enough.

We have noted, as recently as 3½ weeks ago, that there are signs that the government wants to reimpose mask mandates. More, as William Teach just reported, President Biden has imposed a requirement for a negative COVID test on airline passengers coming from China:

The Biden administration announced new testing requirements Wednesday for travelers coming to the U.S. from China — a response to soaring Covid infections in China and a sign of increased worry about the potential emergence of new variants.

Beginning Jan. 5, anyone older than 2 years old arriving from China, Hong Kong or Macau will need to show a negative result from a Covid-19 test taken within two days of their flight. The requirement applies to all passengers regardless of nationality or vaccination status, those connecting through other countries, and people transferring through U.S. airports to other destinations.

Our family were traveling internationally in October and November, and on no flight nor at any airport were there either mask mandates or requirements to show vaccination records or negative COVID tests.

It’s not just Americans who are just plain over the COVID restrictions: from our observations, Canadians, Scots, Dutch, Swiss, Turks, Arabs, and Israelis were over them as well, including the people from other countries who were on those flights or in those airports or just walking around.

Back to The New Yorker:

No one is in charge of the People’s C.D.C., and no one’s expertise is valued more than anyone else’s. The problems of “the pandemic and its response are rooted in hierarchical organizations,” Mary Jirmanus Saba, a filmmaker and one of the volunteers, told me. Roughly forty people come to each weekly meeting, but many more are involved. (This spring, after a few of the group’s organizers published a manifesto of sorts in the Guardian, several thousand interested people reached out, Fullilove said.) The group sends out a weekly Weather Report—put together by a team composed, in part, of doctors and epidemiologists—summarizing data about transmission rates, new variants, and death rates. They’ve published explainers on testing, masks, and ventilation, among other topics, typically with a call to action: call the White House, call your congressperson, demand free tests and treatment for all. On their Web site, they recently posted a guide for safer gatherings, which recommends that all events be held outdoors with universal, high-grade masking. The organization has nearly twenty thousand followers on Instagram, and it prides itself as a resource for various groups, including people who are immunocompromised and want to find a way to protect themselves and activists who are trying to lobby their local government for more covid restrictions.

Note what the “People’s CDC” are asking. Yes, they are providing what they claim are accurate data about things, but they also want people to call the White House and call their congressmen, the type of thing which tells us, inter alia, that they are doing more than just asking people to follow their recommendations, but to get the government to impose restrictions and enforce compliance.

One wonders whether the artwork that came with the article, of a bullhorn in a mask, is a not-so-subtle way of stating that those who hold contrary opinions should be muzzled. Given the revelations from the internal files that Elon Musk released from Twitter, that’s hardly a wild speculation.

Further down, you’ll find that the People’s CDC are very much in favor of forced action:

And then there are masks. The People’s C.D.C. strongly supports mask mandates, and they have called on federal, state, and local governments to put them back in place, arguing that “the vaccine-only strategy promoted by the CDC is insufficient.” The group has noted that resistance to masks is most common among white people: Lucky Tran, who organizes the coalition’s media team, recently tweeted a YouGov survey supporting this, and wrote that “a lot of anti-mask sentiment is deeply embedded in white supremacy.”

Well, of course it has to include complaints about ‘white supremacy,’ though I’ve seen nothing telling me that black Americans are wearing masks with greater frequency than white Americans.

There’s a lot more, and while the magazine does have a paywall, you can normally read a couple of ‘free’ articles a month; I’m not a subscriber, and I can see it, although I took care not to close the article until I was done with mine, in case I couldn’t access it again. Emma Green, the staff writer at The New Yorker who covers education and academia, actually wrote a reasonably fair and unbiased article, noting some of the opposition to the People’s CDC’s demands, and just how impossible it would be to impose them on an unwilling nation. But I want to note her concluding paragreph:

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,” (Zoey Thill, a family physician in Brooklyn) 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.”

There’s a certain disconnect with Dr Thill, a New Yorker herself, talking about moving events outdoors . . . just as a typical New York winter has begun. In Philadelphia, where winter is only slightly milder than in the Big Apple, the city has required that the outdoor dining ‘streeteries’ which sprang up to remain open during the city’s COVID restrictions, now get permits, including some fairly expensive regulations, yet, as of December 22^nd, only 22 had applied, and none approved. Instead, most unlicensed streeteries are being dismantled.

There’s a lot of clickbaitness in the article’s title, “The case for wearing masks forever,” which I will admit, before I read the article I expected a screed which would demand such, and that’s not what I found. I do not know if Miss Green wrote the article headline herself — that’s frequently an editor’s job — or selected the masked bullhorn graphic, but I found it a decent article.