wsbgnl
@wsbgnl
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It’s a bad sign when health authorities are calling on the public to accept mass illness and death for the sake of maintaining full economic output while the rich still haven’t lost a penny and are, in fact, richer than ever.
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It is amazing how many people shrug off the issue of medically vulnerable people being effectively excluded from indoor public spaces indefinitely, but also claim its unsustainable for mental health to ask people to wear a mask or skip indoor dining for any length of time.
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An important lesson of the pandemic is that the large majority of people were willing to adapt to save lives and elites ultimately responded by desensitizing the population to mass suffering, normalizing mass death, breaking solidarity, and promoting individualism and fatalism.
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I am outraged and heartbroken by the deaths of seven humanitarian workers from World Central Kitchen, including one American, in Gaza yesterday. Incidents like yesterday’s simply should not happen. Here is my full statement.
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While the US removes all remaining covid testing requirements China set a goal to ensure all residents can visit a testing site within a 15-minute walk and that cities can test the entire population within a 24 hour period.
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Thinking maybe Democrats should have held a competitive primary and not participated in a genocide.
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If I understand correctly, Harris' stance on Gaza did not meaningfully contribute to her loss, but also Trump was elected because of those who protested her stance.
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Tests should still be free. Vaccines and treatment should still be free. High quality masks should still be free. All workers should still receive paid time off until they are no longer sick and/or contagious. Workplaces should still be required to mitigate covid transmission. .
COVID testing should still be free.
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“For the period from June 29 to July 11, 3.9 million Americans said they didn’t work because they were sick with Covid-19 or were caring for someone with it, according to Census Bureau data. In the comparable period last year, 1.8 million people missed work for those reasons.”.
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The US has "learned to live with covid" not by effectively addressing the problem, but through a broad deliberate effort to erode empathy, break solidarity, desensitize the public to mass illness and mass death, and inculcate a sense of hopelessness and futility.
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I mean we could all just be taking a covid rapid test every few days and wearing high quality masks in crowded indoor settings, but for some reason that’s been deemed totally unthinkable by political and media opinion leaders.
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The White House press secretary, vice president's husband, former president, and ten US House Democrats all tested positive for covid in the last two weeks.
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Remember when the CDC changed the isolation guidance to five days in order to, as Fauci said, “maintain the structure of society.” And then they mass infected the labor force, overwhelmed the hospitals, 100,000 are dead and now they are bragging about January retail sales.
Update: Retail sales increased by 3.8% in January. This is no accident — @POTUS has taken concrete action to get Americans back to work, battle COVID-19, and address supply chain issues, helping our economy continue to build on what has already been a historic period of growth.
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Previous and new CDC covid transmission thresholds based on cases per 100,000 population per week. Based on:
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Average daily covid deaths . July 21, 2021: 253.July 21, 2022: 437. Average daily covid hospitalizations . July 19, 2021: 25,308.July 20, 2022: 41,852. source:
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According to Biden, the pain of long-term unemployment is worse than the impact of losing a family member. And that’s why it was so important to force everyone back to work in a raging pandemic and risk many hundreds of thousands of dead family members.
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Its pretty amazing that the US has added over 830,000 covid deaths since the November 2020 election, including over 300,000 covid deaths in the last 12 months, and somehow covid is almost a nonissue in the current campaigns
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What if… most of "the public" is not actually deeply opposed to public health measures and would in fact support those measures if properly explained, but officials would rather let people die than deal with pushback from economic elites and belligerent right-wing protesters.
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The main reason the White House isn’t worried about BA.5 or any other variant is because they don’t personally care how many people die and after 600,000 deaths they know that no one will hold them accountable.
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I’m truly amazed at the quantity of discourse premised on the notion that the large majority of the population spent two straight years in intense social isolation.
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It’s safe for you to take off your mask because when you get covid there is still plenty of room at the hospital is probably not what most people have in mind by safe.
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I’ll never understand how the highly disproportionate preventable mass death of poor and working class people in a pandemic did not elicit greater or more sustained response from those who center their identity and advocacy on advancing the interests of the poor and working class.
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I am really not a fan of using “we” to describe the US covid policy response and resulting behavior. “We” didn’t decide to phase out mitigation policy. “We” didn’t sign up for endless manipulative messaging. “We” didn’t give up. “We” are mostly victims of what “they” have done.
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The US unceremoniously surpassed 1,200,000 confirmed covid deaths in August
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I just want to say fuck you to all the liberals and progressives trying to sell the idea that the president responsible for hundreds of thousands of avoidable covid deaths, who has actively supported genocide, who is overseeing record oil production, is actually a great president.
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Can’t express how obnoxious and disgusting it is for media and govt officials to describe the mass infection of in-person workers — who often have no protections, no sick pay, no hazard pay — in terms of staffing shortages and disruptions. As if it’s merely a mechanical problem.
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Why Some Americans Are Now Doing Nothing to Avoid Getting and Spreading a Disease that Killed Over 400,000 in the Last Year. Lax public health policy, official misinformation, media gaslighting and declining empathy are among the reasons many people stopped taking precautions
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To be clear, covid infections and reinfections are inevitable for nearly everyone *because* government leaders are choosing to let the virus rage out of control rather than investing in the infrastructure and implementing the policies that could keep public spaces much much safer.
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The Biden admin should be remembered primarily for taking a historic window of opportunity to enact desperately needed change and deliberately squandering it in their effort to uphold the status quo and restore a false sense of normalcy in the face of a still-raging pandemic.
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I wish people who agree that the public should have free tests would also agree that four rapid tests per household per random time period is ludicrously inadequate and mostly a PR stunt to appear proactive and distract those calling for a substantive public health response.
NEWS: Biden administration just announced it is restarting the free covid test program in late September. You'll be able to get four test kits mailed to you again.
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What’s incredible is that the CDC makes these extraordinarily consequential decisions with zero public input, zero transparency and virtually no explanation of their decision-making process or the reasoning they employed to balance competing interests and priorities.
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For a brief second I thought the Harris campaign might try to run on Tim Walz’s record of increasing minimum wage, mandating paid sick leave, making free school lunch permanent, etc as an alternative model of what democrats could prioritize and accomplish.
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It’s absurd we have no better societal narrative for why 500,000+ died of covid under Biden *so far* than just “vaccine refusal” and shrugs. They should never have pursued a vaccine-only approach. To the extent they did, it required a massive outreach effort, which didn’t happen.
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There is something really troubling about the people who are fixated specifically on the pandemic's effect on the test scores and labor market prospects of disadvantaged kids, and show no concern whatsoever about the current health and lives of these kids and their family members.
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Forcing millions of medically vulnerable people to avoid most indoor public spaces forever. Meh, that's too bad. Restricting the right of affluent "healthy" people to enjoy table service indoors whenever they want. That's a human rights violation, an outrage, unthinkable.
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They will literally let thousands of additional people die in the coming months rather than reinstitute basic mitigations.
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The most fascinating aspect of the pandemic continues to be the seemingly large number of people who believe they spent the last two years living under a mandatory shelter-in-place order.
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The CDC reports 5,872 confirmed covid deaths in Sept 2023 and 5,687 in October 2023
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We did it, Joe. Over 650,000 Americans dead from covid since we started, 3,000 dead last week. And yet there are no public health measures. Employers have no obligations to protect workers. The pandemic safety net has been dismantled. And they just accept it. Incredible progress.
President Biden and Vice President Harris are working to deliver results for working families.
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This would be a great time for anyone inside the White House covid response, CDC, or state or local health department who has insight into what the hell is going on to either leak or come forward as a whistleblower. Is the plan to just tolerate and normalize almost any death?.
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One way we can “live with” covid is by meeting the challenge and upgrading our society: public health, social policy, health care, workplace safety, indoor air quality standards, etc. Another option is to massively desensitize the population to widespread preventable harm.
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Over 180,000 US residents have died of covid since Biden’s December 16th threat of “a winter of severe illness and death — if you’re unvaccinated…”. According to CDC data, 41% of January covid deaths were among fully vaccinated people
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New “community levels” are out. Under the pre-Feb 25th CDC guidance, universal masking would currently be recommended in 63% of US counties. Under current guidance, it’s recommended in 4% of counties.
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I wish it was knowable how many Americans have died of covid as a consequence of Ivy League professors being in a spat with their kid's school about in-person instruction or mask policy, and then deciding to use their credentials to downplay covid risk on the national stage.
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My guess is that if New York City or Seattle or San Francisco implemented an indoor mask mandate that the vast majority of people would comply, pushback would be limited, many more people would become aware of the current transmission rate, and many infections would be prevented.
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The Biden administration has horribly mismanaged the pandemic resulting in hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. Achieving this degree of failure and population abandonment was made possible by the absence of criticism and often active complicity of experts and the media.
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Covid is not a distraction from other priorities on the left. It’s a test of the left’s commitment to protecting the poor and working class through a period of sustained crisis, and an opportunity to reshape govt to better serve all people through this crisis and those to come.
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Of course one reason we can’t have a mask mandate is not because no one will follow it, but because many will. And the more people wear masks, the more we’re reminded of risk, the more who start taking additional steps like avoiding crowded settings. And we just can’t have that.
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It pisses me off so much thinking about how covid should right now be the basis for demanding universal and expanded paid sick leave, improved indoor air quality, hazard pay for low wage workers and more. But we were misdirected and sold lies. Bosses got exactly what they wanted.
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The US approach to rapid tests sure seems like something a rich investment firm ceo with no training in public health might come up with.
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They continue to treat the pandemic as if it is primarily a messaging and perception problem rather than a daily mass death event that demands strong federal action.
Press Secretary Jen Psaki countered the claim that the country has ‘lost control’ of the COVID-19 pandemic, saying ‘200 million people are vaccinated. Those are people who are seriously protected from illness and death from the virus’
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I love this perspective that covid policy is just differences of opinion among well-meaning people. You know, some people don't mind 400,000 preventable deaths per year disproportionately among poor and working class. Others think it's bad. Who could say which view is right?.
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None of the catastrophizing about mass unemployment, mass suicide, “learning loss”, etc ever materialized, but over a million people are dead, millions disabled, thousands still dying every week. And yet somehow the central question is whether the pandemic response went too far….
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Not in any way discounting the effectiveness of paxlovid and the critical need to increase distribution, but creepy to see Pfizer executives salivating in an earnings call about how lifting public health measures will cause transmission to rise and increase demand for treatment
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Remember, it’s your job to broadly disclose all of your medical conditions to help others decide whether or not they care if you get covid
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Going to work and school is a lot less safe than it used to be. Riding the bus is less safe. Going to a library, store, restaurant, bar… is less safe. We could do something about it, but it’s cheaper and easier to just bully and confuse people into caring less about health.
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BIDEN: “And I think we — I sometimes underestimate it because I stopped thinking about it, but I’m sure you don’t: We lost 1 — over 1 million people in several years to COVID.”. We lost almost 700,000 people to covid since Biden took office two years ago.
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The White House and CDC could be blasting out messages urgently requesting that everyone across the country test for covid and wear a mask as they return to work and school after the holidays, and yet they are not.
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The Biden White House could have led a new Operation Warp Speed for better vaccines or indoor air quality or PPE or vaccine outreach methods. Instead their big innovation was figuring out how to manipulate people to resume full economic activity despite outrageous death rates.
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If there is any unexamined trauma we ought to name and process, it’s the trauma of being resocialized to no longer worry about inadvertently harming vulnerable loved ones and community members, the requirement to subvert empathy and compassion in order to fit in and feel accepted
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US covid deaths . July 28, 2020 - July 28, 2021:.456,202. July 28, 2021 - July 28, 2022:.412,363.
While COVID is still with us, our fight against this virus is making a difference. We can now protect ourselves from serious illness due to COVID, and COVID deaths are down nearly 90%.
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I do think there are a number of people who are terrified at the prospect that they might have to pretend to care about the pandemic again.
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These people are so actively evil. Not the slightest hint of humility or regard for those harmed.
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My guess is that if Democrats delivered federal $15 minimum wage, paid sick leave, expanded social welfare benefits. if they very publicly fought off corporate profiteering. if they created ten million new good paying government jobs. the public may have responded differently.
Has always seemed bizarre to me to describe a set of programs that no regular person asked for and that maybe 0.1% of the population can adequately explain as doing "populism".
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The CDC is making clear with their actions that they are not only perfectly happy to accept hundreds of thousands of covid infections per day, almost 500 confirmed deaths per day, tens of thousands of people hospitalized — they’re willing to reduce precautions in that environment
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Biden will have thoroughly normalized passive acceptance of mass death and genocide before handing the country back over to Trump.
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Bizarre that a “senior White House official” is providing details about covid projections “on condition of anonymity.” Is this some kind of state secret? This information should be fully transparent and related deliberations should be highly inclusive.
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I guess the resolution to the covid-school debate is that yes covid does spread in schools and harms children, staff and families, but in retrospect people getting sick and dying is really not a big deal and we now realize the only thing that matters is test scores.
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I wish the White House would measure progress on the pandemic based on how many people are still getting sick and dying every day rather than how many people have returned to high exposure workplaces and are no longer wearing masks
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Apparently a “critical flaw” in China’s covid strategy is that they have so far failed to mass infect their population (and purge all those incovenient vulnerable bodies that threaten to disrupt economic activity and overwhelm hospitals)
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What the fuck is even happening.
We need to fund the police with the resources and training they need to protect our communities. That’s why we designed the American Rescue Plan not only to beat the pandemic and rebuild our economy — but to restore public safety.
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I was kind of surprised to hear a prominent economist, Joseph Stiglitz, use this example in passing in a recent interview.
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Being able to earn an income without high risk of covid exposure is a privilege afforded to fewer and fewer people…but it ought to be a right that all workers enjoy.
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One of the biggest scams of the Biden administration has been to methodically reframe covid as an employment crisis rather than a public health crisis, as if the mandate was to get people back to work rather than protect the population against mass death.
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lol that they held covid tests until past the printed expiration date rather than distributing them earlier
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It really should be generally understood that masking was a relatively stable norm last winter that was deliberately undermined by the CDC (and by federal and state officials)
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Remember a few months ago when all the pandemic parrots endlessly repeated the White House talking points about how “we have the tools” and “this isn’t March 2020,” but then actually way more people died in this wave and that was just ignored and no one was held accountable
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Senior White House officials continue to keep an eye on covid, not because they give a shit how many Americans are getting sick and dying, but just out of nervousness that their strategy of fully normalizing unmitigated mass infection could come back to haunt them
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Great news folks. Only 400,000+ confirmed covid hospital admissions and 30,000+ confirmed covid deaths in the last three months.
To be less polite, the BA.5 scaremongering was bullshit and you should place less trust in the people who engaged in it going forward.
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This pairing is actually a good illustration of how the individual value of each lost life has increasingly blurred into a meaningless abstraction as the mass death event grows ever larger.
From incalculable to 5X incalculable. Unfathomable. Mostly preventable.
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I think we can say with good confidence that dismantling nearly all covid public health measures did not increase vaccinations or trust in public health, or enable officials to restore mitigation measures when needed, or help advance “less intrusive” approaches like ventilation.
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Looks like CDC is no longer updating its excess deaths estimate after this month .
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I am so sick of people saying something that amounts to — the good news is that we’ve already killed off so many vulnerable people that there are now fewer left to die in subsequent waves.
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I truly do not understand people who are passionate about protecting the health and lives of vulnerable people, except when it comes to the pandemic still killing thousands of people every week.
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A group of affluent, high-status professionals have lobbied relentlessly to prioritize their convenience and desire for 'normal' over taking even modest steps to address a pandemic killing thousands per day. There may be strategic reasons for 'civility' but they do not deserve it.
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The readiness with which many Americans attribute a decline in student test scores entirely to mode of instruction while ignoring the role of social vulnerability in a pandemic that killed over a million residents underscores the nation’s need for quality education.
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This possibility is exactly why federal, state and local governments so urgently redefined expectations and prematurely unwound public health measures based on “trajectory.” They jumped at a narrow window of opportunity to enact the new policy of total abandonment.
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I can’t believe schools didn’t spend their limited pandemic funds to improve indoor air quality, says indoor air quality expert who used his regular column in the Washington Post to downplay covid risks in kids and schools and push to view covid as a personal responsibility issue
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Speaking of collective amnesia, there seem to be a lot of people who have very limited recollection of how exactly the US accumulated 1,185,413 confirmed covid deaths over the last four years
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Them: Covid is endemic. Everyone will get infected, repeatedly. Mask mandates don’t work. There is no use in trying to reduce transmission. Also them: If people at high risk of severe outcomes don’t want to get infected they can simply wear a high quality mask. It isn’t hard.
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Normalizing mass infection of the population and thousands of weekly deaths from one disease probably makes it a little more challenging to raise *appropriate* concern and resources and collective response in addressing other disease outbreaks.
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