#covid supply shortage

[jasperecipes]

Southern USDA dried fruit pie

Ha! My homemade crust really falls apart.

I've found myself with a copious supply of dried fruits, berries and raisins from the USDA. Based off of this recipe for southern fried pies, traditional pie is less of a challenge than flipping and trying to keep the fried pies in one piece.

There has been a supply chain shortage of sugar recently, so I've opted for maple (flavored corn) syrup, otherwise known as pancake syrup, which has added tremendously to the flavor. Plus some of my favorite spices thrown in the mix to really complete the flavor profile.

You will need: glass jar(/s) (I used pasta sauce jars)

4 cups dried fruit and berries/raisins

1 1/3 cup maple/pancake syrup

3/4 cup chopped walnuts

1/4 cups corn starch

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp ground nutmeg

1/4 tsp ground rosemary

A dash of salt

Dough pie crust (thawed, not frozen)

Fill up the jars(/s) with the mixed dried fruit and berries of your choice. Fill up the jars with filtered water, swirling to make sure most of the air bubbles escape. Soak the mixed dried fruit in the jar(/s) overnight.

Pour all of the ingredients (except for the pie crust, of course) into a pot on the stovetop. Do not drain the fruit.

Simmer and stir the fruit on stovetop until enough water is evaporated that it becomes thick and chunky.

When cooled, preheat the oven at 400°F.

Fill the pie crust with the filling and cover with a layer of dough. Poke ventilation holes into the dough.

Reduce oven heat to 350° and bake for 40-50 minutes or until golden brown.

Tips:

If you only have corn syrup, you could try flavoring it with an appropriate amount of maple extract at your discretion.

I tend to have corn muffin mix on hand more often than corn starch, but it works fine as a substitution for this purpose.

The most common premade pie crust, at least in the US, seems to be Pillsbury brand. This contains lard. I highly for recommend this recipe for pie crust if you would like to make your own. This uses vegetable oil instead of shortening. I usually have veggie oil on hand and not shortening.

[morlock-holmes]

Got hit by the Adderall shortage lads.

I raised my voice to the pharmacy technician and her boss said, "You have been yelling at her for five minutes now."

I wasn't yelling, and that just made me way angrier. Oh, is it frustrating to have to spend five minutes dealing with an unhelpful person? Is five minutes a lot of precious time that you won't get back? Wow, I'm so sorry, I'll get out of your hair and go spend half an hour calling other pharmacies individually to see if they have any supply, and when it turns out they don't I'll just wait a few days and see if the shipment you're about to get has Adderall in it. And if it doesn't I'll spend another hour or so calling around to figure out what I'm supposed to do.

Gosh, it sure must be frustrating for you to spend five minutes on this, I can't imagine.

You know what pisses me off? I get that it's not your fault that the FDA and DEA have their heads buried up their own asses.

You know what is your company's fault? The fact that you have 12 locations plausibly within driving distance of me and the procedure to see whether an alternate location can fill the prescription is for me to look up each one individually, call them, wait on hold, and then ask each individual pharmacist. There's no way to track the supply, or to find out if it's committed to other patients, and that's nothing to do with the shortage.

After talking to several pharmacists the answer I got several times was, "Yeah they can't tell us what's going to get delivered ahead of time, a lot of times they say they have stock and then when we get the shipment it just randomly doesn't have some of what we ordered."

Like, I'm not just pissed off at the shortage, I'm pissed at this really bizarre inability to track whether anybody has it or doesn't have it. Isn't this a super dangerous drug that the FDA and DEA have to monitor closely? But the warehouse you order from just... doesn't track how much they have or where it goes?

I can't emphasize this enough, I've been told by multiple pharmacies that not only do they not know when they are getting more Adderall, they don't know when they'll know if they are getting more Adderall. They can't give you a no, they can only say, "We're getting a shipment of drugs on Thursday and it might have Adderall in it or it might not, we don't know until then."

And since it's a controlled substance, your doctor has to specify which pharmacy you are getting the drug from, if you find another pharmacy that has it you have to first call your doctor and then have them send a new prescription to that particular pharmacy.

There was a lot of this during COVID also, getting tests and things. Not just a shortage of supplies, a completely decrepit infrastructure which left each individual out in the cold without information about where supplies might be or how you would find them.

Like, why is the procedure for patients, "Just call every pharmacy in the city to see if they have some"? That's not caused by supply shortages.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Precaratize bosses

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SUNDAY (Apr 21) in TORINO, then Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Combine Angelou's "When someone shows you who they are, believe them" with the truism that in politics, "every accusation is a confession" and you get: "Every time someone accuses you of a vice, they're showing you who they are and you should believe them."

Let's talk about some of those accusations. Remember the moral panic over the CARES Act covid stimulus checks? Hyperventilating mouthpieces for the ruling class were on every cable network, complaining that "no one wants to work anymore." The barely-submerged subtext was their belief that the only reason people show up for work is that they're afraid of losing everything – their homes, their kids, the groceries in their fridge.

This isn't a new development. Back when Clinton destroyed welfare, his justification was that "handouts" make workers lazy. The way to goad workers off their sofas (and the welfare rolls) and into jobs was to instill fear in them:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/welfare-childhood/555119/

This is also the firm belief of tech bosses: for them, mass tech layoffs are great news, because they terrorize the workers you don't fire, so that they'll be "extremely hardcore" and put in as many extra hours as the company demands, without even requiring any extra pay in return:

https://fortune.com/2022/10/06/elon-musk-jason-calacanis-return-to-office-gentlemens-layoffs-twitter/

Now, there's an obvious answer to the problem of no one taking a job at the wage being offered: just increase the offer. Capitalists claim to understand this. Uber will tell you that surge pricing "incentivizes drivers" to take to the streets by offering them more money to drive during busy times:

https://www.uber.com/blog/austin/providing-rides-when-they-are-most-needed/

(Note that while Uber once handed the lion's share of surge price premiums to drivers, these days, Uber just keeps the money, because they've entered the enshittification stage where drivers are so scared of being blacklisted that Uber can push them around instead of dangling carrots.)

(Also note that this logic completely fails when it comes to other businesses, like Wendy's, who briefly promised surge-priced hamburgers during busy times, but without even the pretense that the surge premium would be used to pay additional workers to rush to the restaurant and increase the capacity:)

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/feb/27/wendys-dynamic-surge-pricing

So bosses knew how to address their worker shortage: higher wages. You know: supply and demand. For bosses, the issue wasn't supply, it was price. A worker who earns $10/hour but makes the company $20 profit every hour is splitting the surplus 50:50 with their employer. The employer has overheads (rent on the shop, inventory, advertising and administration) that they have to pay out of their end of that surplus. But workers also have overheads: commuting costs, child-care, a professional wardrobe, and other expenses the worker incurs just so they can make money for their boss.

There's no iron law of economics that says the worker/boss split should be 50/50. Depending on the bargaining power of workers and their bosses, that split can move around a lot. Think of McDonald's and Walmart workers who work for wildly profitable corporate empires, but are so badly paid that they have to rely on food stamps. The split there is more like 10/90, in the boss's favor.

The pandemic changed the bargaining power. Sure, workers got a small cushion from stimulus checks, but they also benefited from changes in the fundamentals of the labor market. For example, millions of boomers just noped out of their jobs, forever, unwilling to risk catching a fatal illness and furious to realize that their bosses viewed that as an acceptable risk.

Bosses' willingness to risk their workers' lives backfired in another way: killing hundreds of thousands of workers and permanently disabling millions more. Combine the boomer exodus with the workers who sickened or died, and there's just fewer workers to go around, and so now those workers enjoy more bargaining power. They can demand a better split: say, 75/25, in their favor.

Remember the 2015 American Airlines strike, where pilots and flight attendants got a raise? The eminently guillotineable Citibank analyst Kevin Crissey declared: "This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get leftovers":

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/american-airlines-flight-attendants-bash-citi-analyst-who-put-shareholders-before-workers-14134309

Now, obviously, the corporation doesn't want to offer a greater share of its surplus to its workforce, but it certainly can do so. The more it pays its workers, the less profitable it will be, but that's capitalism, right? Corporations try to become as profitable as they can be, but they can't just decree that their workers must work for whatever pay they want to offer (that's serfdom).

Companies also don't get to dictate that we must buy their goods at whatever price they set (the would be a planned economy, not a market economy). There's no law that says that when the cost of making something goes up, its price should go up, too. A business that spends $10 to make a widget you pay $15 for has a $5 margin to play with. If the business's costs go up to $11, they can still charge $15 and take $1 less in profits. Or they can raise the price to $15.50 and split the difference.

But when businesses don't face competition, they can make you eat their increased costs. Take Verizon. They made $79b in profit last year, and also just imposed a $4/month service charge on their mobile customers due to "rising operational costs":

https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1c53c4p/79bn_in_profits_last_year_but_you_need_an_extra/

Now, Verizon is very possibly lying about these rising costs. Excuseflation is rampant and rising, as one CEO told his investors, when the news is full of inflation-talk, "it’s an opportunity to increase the prices without getting a whole bunch of complaining from the customers":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

But even stipulating that Verizon is telling the truth about these "rising costs," why should we eat those costs? There's $79b worth of surplus between Verizon's operating costs and its gross revenue. Why not take it out of Verizon's bottom line?

For 40 years, neoliberal economists have emphasized our role as "consumers" (as though consumers weren't also workers!). This let them play us off against one-another: "Sure, you don't want the person who rings up your groceries to get evicted because they can't pay their rent, but do you care about it enough to pay an extra nickel for these eggs?"

But again, there's no obvious reason why you should pay that extra nickel. If you have the buying power to hold prices down, and workers have the labor power to keep wages up, then the business has to absorb that nickel. We can have a world where workers can pay their rent and you can afford your groceries.

So how do we get bosses to agree to take less so we can have more? They've told us how: for bosses, the thing that motivates workers to show up for shitty jobs is fear – fear of losing their homes, fear of going hungry.

When your boss says, "If you don't want to do this job for minimum wage, there's someone else who will," they're telling you that the way to get a raise out of them is to engineer things so that you can say, "If you don't want to pay me a living wage for this job, there's someone else who will."

Their accusation – that you only give someone else a fair shake when you're afraid of losing out – is a confession: to get them to give you a fair shake, we have to make them afraid. They're showing us who they are, and we should believe them.

In her Daily Show appearance, FTC chair Lina Khan quipped that monopolies are too big to care:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM

Philosophers of capitalism are forever praising its ability to transform greed into public benefit. As Adam Smith put it, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." The desire to make as much money as possible, on its own, doesn't produce our dinner, but when the butcher, the brewer and the baker are afraid that you will take your labor or your wallet elsewhere, they pay more and charge less.

Capitalists don't want market economies, where they have to compete with one another, eroding their margins and profits – they want a planned economy, like Amazon, where Party Secretary Bezos and his commissars tell merchants what they can sell and tell us what we must pay:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/01/managerial-discretion/#junk-fees

Capitalists don't want free labor, where they have to compete with rival capitalists to bid on their workers' labor – they want noncompetes, bondage fees, and "training repayment agreement provisions" (TRAPs) that force their workers to stay in dead-end jobs rather than shopping for a better wage:

\https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

Capitalists hate capitalism, because capitalism only works if the capitalists are in a constant state of terror inspired by the knowledge that tomorrow, someone smarter could come along and open a better business, poaching their customers and workers, and putting the capitalist on the breadline.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/18/in-extremis-veritas/#the-winnah

Being in a constant precarious state makes people lose their minds, and capitalists know it. That's why they work so hard to precaratize the rest of us, saddling us with health debt, education debt, housing debt, stagnating wages and rising prices. It's not just because that makes them more money in the short term from our interest payments and penalties. It's because it de-risks their lives: monopolies and cartels can pass on any extra costs to consumers, who'll eat shit and take it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#overinflated

A workforce that goes to bed every night worrying about making the rent is a workforce that put in unpaid overtime and thank you for it.

Capitalists hate capitalism. You know who didn't hate capitalism? Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels. The first chapter of The Communist Manifesto is just these two guys totally geeking out about how much cool stuff we get when capitalists are afraid and therefore productive:

https://pluralistic.net/SpectreHaunting

But when capitalists escape their fears, the alchemical reaction that converts greed to prosperity fizzles, leaving nothing behind but greed and its handmaiden, enshittification. Google search is in the toilet, getting worse every year, but rather than taking reduced margins and spending more fighting spam, the company did a $80b stock-buyback and fired 12,000 skilled technologists, rather than using that 80 bil to pay their wages for the next twenty-seven years:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Monopoly apologists like to argue that monopolists can rake in the giant profits necessary to fund big, ambitious projects the produce better products at lower prices and make us all better off. But even if monopolists can spend their monopoly windfalls on big, ambitious projects, they don't. Why would they?

If you're Google, you can either spend tens of billions on R&D to keep up with spam and SEO scumbags, or you can spend less money buying the default search spot on every platform, so no one ever tries another search engine and switches:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Compared to its monopoly earnings, the tech sector's R&D spending is infinitesimal:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/11/nor-glom-of-nit/#capitalists-hate-competition

How do we get capitalists to work harder to make their workers and customers better off? Capitalists tell us how, every day. We need to make them afraid.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

Image: Vlad Lazarenko (modified) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wall_Street_Sign_%281-9%29.jpg CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[luulapants]

In the wake of COVID and rising fascism, let's remember that after the black plague, which killed a huge percent of the working class in England, workers began using the labor shortage to leverage higher wages.

And let's remember that the reaction from the ruling class was the Poor Laws, which essentially conscripted the entire population as slave labor, set a maximum wage, made it illegal to be unemployed, illegal to quit your job, and if you were fired, you would be assigned a new job. Those who refused to work for poverty wages were incarcerated and forced to work for no wages.

Yes, COVID should have been an opportunity for the working class to use supply and demand to raise their standard of living, but capitalism has never allowed for supply and demand to apply to labor as a whole.

[nightpool]

In 2013, Weinstein pleaded guilty to running a $200 million real estate Ponzi scheme. In 2012 and 2013, while he was out on bail for that Ponzi scheme, he did another financial scam involving “purported sales of pre-IPO Facebook shares and Florida real estate”; he pleaded guilty to that one in 2014. He was sentenced to a total of 24 years in prison for all of this, but in January 2021 President Donald Trump commuted his sentence and let him out of prison. I don’t know why Trump let him out, but possibly he admired Weinstein’s moxie and sense of humor and wanted to see what else he’d get up to.

That faith in him was richly rewarded yesterday, when Weinstein was charged by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and federal prosecutors in New Jersey with doing a new Ponzi scheme in the two years since he left prison. Pre-IPO Facebook shares were very much the current thing in 2012, before Facebook went public, but in 2021 through 2023 the things were apparently:

» “In or around late 2021, Optimus [one of Weinstein’s companies] started raising money directly from a small number of investors to finance purported transactions related to COVID-19 medical supplies.”

» “In or around May 2022, WEINSTEIN (posing as Mike Konig) asked CC-1 and CC-2 [two unnamed alleged co-conspirators] to raise money from investors to finance the purchase and delivery of three million first-aid kits (‘FAKs’) to USAID to be distributed to the people of Ukraine during the Russia-Ukraine war (the ‘FAK deal’).”

» “In or around May 2022, WEINSTEIN (posing as Mike Konig), asked CC-1 and CC-2 to raise additional money to finance Company-1’s purchase of 100 million N95 masks (the ‘N95 Mask deal’).”

» “Similarly, in or around early August 2022, WEINSTEIN (posing as Mike Konig) asked CC-1 and CC-2 to raise money to finance the purchase of approximately 29 shipping containers of baby formula from [alleged co-conspirator Alaa Mohamed] HATTAB’s company, Hattab Global, in order to capitalize on supply chain issues which had created a shortage in baby formula (the ‘Formula deal’).”

Just pick a thing in the news, and he was allegedly pretending to supply it. Of course prosecutors say he was not actually doing any of these things and was instead stealing the money

– Baby-Formula Ponzi Schemer Does This a Lot, Money Stuff

[discountalien-pancake]

Do people not know that Tolkien never specified the length of elves’ hair in his writing?

Look. I need all of you to understand something when you say “xyz cosplayers could do better!” when talking about wigs. No. They could not. I love cosplayers and i have seen many an excellent cosplayer and some of them have fantastic wigs! For cosplay. They aren’t real hair, they don’t look like real hair, and they aren’t meant to.

More importantly, starting in 2020 there was literally a shortage high quality, human-hair wigs. Covid shutdowns disrupted supply chains in Asia and Europe, and made it difficult for workers to go to factories to actually make wigs. The lace needed to make them also sold out. Filming usually takes place starting 1-2 years before a show or movie is released, which means that there literally were no wigs for the production.

“But HOTD had wigs—“ and everyone thinks they look like trash, because they are synthetic. TROP took the route of having as many characters sport their own natural hair as possible, so we get things like most of the male elves having shorter hair because their actors didn’t have time to grow their hair out. The wigs got reserved for main cast characters:

And they look a million times better than what HOTD had going on. Would they have looked this good if they split the hair budget up to put every fucking elf in a plastic wig? I doubt it!

You know what was way more important than elves with long hair?

Valandil and other brown and Black characters with natural hair.

[anarchywoofwoof]

tomorrow will mark week number 3 without my vyvanse. needless to say, it has not been the easiest 3 weeks of my life.

that being said, this is probably a fitting time to remind everyone that there are quantifiable reasons for the ongoing stimulant shortage, which is projected now to last through 2024 despite federal attempts to remedy the problem.

first, while yes, there has been increased access to medications via telehealth, keep in mind that people with long COVID are using ADHD drugs to treat their symptoms. this is a proven medical approach that has not been accounted for in the ongoing production of ADHD medications.

about 41.4 million Adderall prescriptions were dispensed in the United States in 2021, up more than 10% from 2020, and it's anticipated that number will rise again.

but that is a problem, because US health officials are purposefully hampering production, not having considered the differences in treating an illness such as ADHD vs. disorders that may require opioids:

what’s different about ADHD is that the first-line treatment is a stimulant drug with the potential for misuse or addiction — and so it’s a matter not just for pharmaceutical companies but for law enforcement. The Drug Enforcement Agency has hedged on the side of keeping production of these drugs down to limit the potential for abuse. The fear is that Adderall would follow the same path as opioid painkillers: careless overprescribing would lead to an epidemic of drug addiction — this time, to stimulants.

...

Manufacturers are not mandated to report the reasons for a drug shortage and any public information they do provide can be vague. That has proven true with the Adderall shortage too. However, experts say that the role of the federal government in regulating one of Adderall’s active ingredients makes this shortage distinct. One of the active ingredients in Adderall is amphetamine, and therefore the drug is regulated as a controlled substance under federal law.

...

The DEA also sets annual production quotas for Adderall, as with other controlled substances that have recognized medical uses, based on estimates of legitimate medical and scientific needs, as well as the potential for diversion and abuse. However, those quotas are not well understood; while the agency announced in 2019 that it was allowing for more production of Adderall, given the apparent growing need in the patient population, we still don’t know exactly how much production has been authorized or the limits set for individual companies. “The DEA gives the companies a set amount of raw material ‘quota’ to manufacture these products, but we don’t know which company gets how much,” said Erin Fox, a pharmacist at the University of Utah and leading expert on US drug shortages. “Some companies say they’re short, but DEA says that they haven’t used it all, so lots of finger-pointing.” Indeed, the companies that produce Adderall and its generic version have cited both a shortage of the active ingredients and an increase in demand to explain their ongoing shortages. But another factor, new limits on the dispensing of the drug at US pharmacies, is making the situation worse. In 2022, drug distributors reached a settlement with most states over their role in the proliferation of prescription opioids that helped create an addiction and overdose epidemic. Bloomberg reported this week [in April 2023] that, as part of that settlement, secret limits were placed on the dispensation of controlled substances last July [2022]. That has in turn prevented pharmacists from filling the prescription of every patient who comes to their pharmacy with an Adderall order. According to Bloomberg, in essence, manufacturers are supposed to limit a pharmacy’s supply of drugs covered by the Controlled Substances Act, which includes opioids as well as stimulants. Pharmacists can only fill a certain number of prescriptions over a set period. But there has been widespread confusion over these rules because the pharmacists themselves don’t know what the limits are or when they are approaching them. Sometimes, they won’t know their access to Adderall has been cut off until trying to fill a prescription.

in other words, the ass-backwards failure that is America's "War On Drugs" continues to rage on, this time at a pharmacy near you.

rather than approaching a complex situation that requires a delicate understanding of the plight of the common person suffering with mental health issues or other disorders that affect their daily life, the US Government has chose a brute force, one-size-fits all approach. because when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

as i highlighted above, this problem will continue throughout 2024. in other words, no end in sight.

one side note, as someone who has the (misfortune) of working in the industry: the technology sector is going to feel this at some point, if not already, given their heavy reliance on Adderall to get anything done. the Class War eventually comes for us all, in one way, shape or form. tech bros are going to realize that they aren't as immune as they maybe once thought.

[mariacallous]

In Liu Cixin’s science fiction novel The Dark Forest—part of the popular Three-Body Problem series recently serialized by Netflix—humanity is faced with the prospect of an alien invasion. The extraterrestrials are on their way to conquer Earth but are still light years away; humanity has hundreds of years to prepare for their hostile arrival.

Amid a need to bolster defense spending globally and, crucially, to foster innovation across the entire world, representatives of the global south make a proposal at the United Nations. Developing countries demand a universal waiver of intellectual property protections on inventions relevant to defense to enable them to develop their own technologies and contribute to planetary fortification. In Liu’s story, the global south’s call meets staunch opposition from wealthier states, which veto the proposal. Although set in an imagined future, Liu’s point resonates clearly in our own time.

The most recent parallel is the global vaccine hoarding that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the height of the emergency, rich countries bought up and hoarded COVID-19 vaccine supplies, which left many developing countries unable to obtain sufficient vaccines during 2021-22. Even when they arrived, donations of leftover doses from high-income countries were often too close to their expiration dates for developing countries to actually use them.

Global south states sought to build up their own secure vaccine production capacity but were stymied. Critically, vaccine manufacturers, such as Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, refused to share IP-protected technology with World Health Organization (WHO) initiatives, such as C-TAP and the mRNA vaccine technology transfer hub, that were attempting to create a network of distributed vaccine production. It is estimated that such hoarding cost more than 1 million lives in developing states.

Remarkably, the global south saw this coming. Even before a single COVID-19 vaccine had been administered, developing countries accurately anticipated that they would be left at the back of the line for supplies. Burned by the experience of HIV/AIDS medicine shortages in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the global south predicted similar inequities occurring during the COVID-19 crisis—and they tried to act to prevent this.

In October 2020, this foresight motivated developing countries, led by South Africa and India at the World Trade Organization (WTO), to propose an international waiver of IP protections—known as a TRIPS waiver—on COVID-19 vaccines, treatments, and other health technologies. Much as in Liu’s story, the global north firmly rejected the proposal, leading to a delayed and watered-down WTO decision in June 2022 that I, and other academic experts, argued was too little, too late.

Crucially, we can observe the same pattern emerging yet again in the current negotiations over the WHO Pandemic Accord. Just like Liu’s vision of humanity preparing for an inevitable alien invasion but unwilling to share technologies globally, the world remains stuck in a doom loop. Another pandemic is foreseeable. A new treaty could provide a way for the international community to learn the lessons of COVID-19 and boost pandemic preparedness. Yet the world is making the same mistakes all over again.

Given the failures of the WTO process, experienced commentators such as Ellen ‘t Hoen anticipated that shifting the debate to WHO could help ensure that similar inequalities do not arise during the next pandemic. Many hoped that WHO, with its overriding focus on global health, would be a more receptive forum to the global south’s equity concerns than the WTO, which prioritizes IP via TRIPS, one of its foundational 1995 agreements.

However, thus far, the negotiations have been hampered by the same issue that blighted the WTO TRIPS waiver process: Rich states are unwilling to agree to any potential pandemic-related limitation of international IP rights or to expand IP flexibilities to include nonvoluntary options such as a mechanism for the compulsory licensing of trade secrets on pharmaceutical manufacturing processes needed for scaling up production of pandemic products.

Broadly speaking, developing countries want terms that would mandate technology transfer of key health technologies, such as vaccines, to the global south. Rich countries decry this suggestion, claiming it could undermine IP rights.

Hence, wealthy nations are balking at the use of progressive language on the compulsory use of IP in Article 11 of the draft accord. Instead, the U.S. government emphasizes supporting voluntary agreements—without acknowledging that the voluntary systems, including COVAX, failed to provide for the needs of citizens in many global south countries during the COVID-19 era.

In these negotiations, several key parties, such as the European Union and the United Kingdom, argue that a WHO treaty cannot deal with IP issues because that would equate to trespassing on rules that the WTO created. This back-and-forth between the WTO and WHO reflects an asymmetric power game that the global south is not well placed to win.

With no movement on IP, developing countries seem less willing to agree on a rare point of leverage, namely, the terms of Article 12, which addresses pathogen access and benefit-sharing. Put simply, developing countries are concerned that if they agree to terms on restriction-free sharing of pathogens with pandemic potential, without reciprocal guarantees of technology-sharing and health product distribution, they will be left at the back of the line again in the next pandemic.

Wealthy countries may be succeeding at reducing this leverage; recent news reports suggest that detailed provisions on pathogen-sharing may be shifted to a separate instrument.

It seems that for rich states, property is sacrosanct; global health is not. Yet, rather than property, it is worth recalling that patents were originally considered to be a form of state-granted privilege. In the 19th century, industrial states viewed IP not as an instrument of free trade but rather as a form of trade protectionism.

This idea of IP as protectionist privilege remains a more accurate description of what global IP law is intended to achieve. Much as in Liu’s novel, the stark reality is that there is no circumstance—not a new pandemic, not even an alien invasion—in which the global north would be willing to give up its protectionist privileges by sharing its technology with the global south.

With the WTO in decline and the WHO multilateral process in trouble, the global south may have to examine alternative options for building up pandemic preparedness. Intriguingly, Netflix’s 3 Body Problem envisages this. Unlike in the book, on TV the U.N. resolution for open technology-sharing is never even proposed.

Instead, a Mexican national who happens to be the chief scientific officer of a cutting-edge nanotech company becomes frustrated by Western corporate-military obstructionism and decides to upload all her London-based employer’s source code and trade secrets to open-source platforms with the aim of assisting developing countries to produce the technology. She even includes a downloadable guide on how to copy the functionality of the technology while avoiding IP infringement.

This fictional feint away from the multilateral forum and toward individual decision-making parallels real-world moves toward open-source biotech. This approach has been pioneered by Peter Hotez and Maria Elena Bottazzi of Baylor University, who created the patent-free COVID-19 vaccine Corbevax. They successfully transferred the vaccine technology openly to producers in Botswana and India. Meanwhile, the WHO mRNA hub at Afrigen in South Africa led by Petro Terblanche is encouraging open south-south collaboration on new vaccine technologies.

If the Pandemic Accord negotiations falter before the World Health Assembly begins on May 27 or they fail to produce a just treaty, efforts such as these will take on even greater importance. An inequitable Pandemic Accord will signal that Liu was right: The global north will continue to hoard technologies even in the face of looming Armageddon, and south-south collaboration on producing health technologies may be the only way forward for enhancing global pandemic preparedness.

[fox-bright]

Watching the H5N1 stuff get worse and worse--I'm hoping we have until late next year before it goes reliably human-human, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was this winter--and not being able to do much makes me anxious, so I've been composing lists of stuff to do. I keep thinking, if this were August, 2019, and I knew covid was coming, what would I prepare? If this one goes off like the scientists think it might, it'll be much worse than covid.

Right now, I'm concentrating on food. My plan is to have enough hunker down supplies by mid-September that if things go bad in the normally-scheduled October-February flu season, we'll be okay simply not leaving the house at all. There are only two of us here now, and if things go bad there may be as many as four (as I have two separate friends I'd push hard to come stay here with us), so I need to make sure we have 4 meals x howevermany days I choose. I'm building up to six months, but I'm beginning the plan at three. While a lot of Serious Prepper lists have pretty generous caloric allowances, the MFH and I eat pretty light, and we're both smaller than the average adult human, which does give us even more squeak room here.

We started out with dry staples--bread flour, AP flour, semolina, rice, beans, pasta, lentils, powdered milk--though I have still to get powdered eggs (I'll dehydrate those myself), more dry beans (I'm going to use up a lot of what we have when I do my canning run for the winter, and so far I haven't been able to get my hands on kidney beans in any decent amounts), quinoa, and one more kind of pasta. Right now we have about 2/3 of what I'd want; we'll be holding things at this level, replacing staples as we use them, and if things look more serious we'll do another big shop and give ourselves additional stock of the AP flour, the bread flour, the rice (which we already buy in 40-50 lb bags anyway, we're Asian), the dry milk.

Then there's the perishable stuff; yesterday, the MFH and I took advantage of some very nice sales and got seventy pounds of meat for two hundred and twelve dollars. Beef brisket for stew, pork butt for sweet molasses chili, ground beef for hotter chili, pork loin for white bean soup. Still have to get chicken (which was pretty much sold out at our bulk place) for chicken soup (to be pressure canned), chicken and mushroom cream soup (to be vacuum-packed and frozen).

Very very soon it'll be time to harvest my leeks and my butternut squashes, for leek and potato soup (either finished with cream, blended to a smooth-ish consistency and frozen, or *not* blended down, and just socked away in pressure-canned Ball jars without the cream added; will it take me longer to thaw it, or to take my immersion blender to the hot individual meals later on?) and canned butternut for baking with or making soup or chili or making pasta sauce.

I might can a bunch of just potatoes, too, to keep 'em shelf stable (plus that front-loads a lot of the work of producing a meal later).

So I need to buy onions and carrots and potatoes and celery and garlic and mushrooms and corn, cream, red wine, tomato paste (because my vines got blight this year, sigh--I've managed to can one single run of tomato sauce and that's IT), ten dozen fresh eggs to dehydrate and powder and store in the fridge in case of egg shortages, several pounds of beans to be thrown into the chilis and...hm...fifteen pounds more, twenty pounds more, to have on hand? And then for non-canning purposes we'll need butter, oil, white vinegar (I've used a lot of it for pickles this year), various Asian food staples like black and rice vinegars, oyster sauce, black mushrooms and so on. As for pre-made, mass-produced foods, I'll probably make another post about them later.

While this is more than I'd generally stock in a single season, I do generally put about 100 quarts of home-canned food by a year, and I never keep less than 75-100lb of flour on hand anyway because of how frequently I make bread. So though it sounds like a lot up front, it's not hoarder level; everything I stock will be eaten, some of it pretty much immediately (the beef stew is so good). And putting it all by now means that we'll be less of a burden on our community safety net, if push comes to shove. When the covid pandemic hit I had dozens of jars of food on the shelf already, which gave me a little peace when things were looking scary. We were able to share some of our stores with people who hadn't had the great privilege of long afternoons spent seeing to the personal stores. That's a better option, to my mind, than needing to panic-shop right as things start getting a little wild.

Basically, if things go bad, we'll have food for a while. And if things don't go bad, we'll have food for a while. It's win-win. And it keeps the floor under my feet when I'm feeling unsteady, to be able to sneak down into the cool, still basement and look at row on row of gently gleaming jars of food security.

[darkmaga-retard]

The greatest fears of many were realized this week when markets across the globe crashed. Dismal U.S. jobs numbers to end last week set off a cascade of collapsing markets around the world, with Japan seeing its largest stock market drop since the 1987 black Monday collapse.

Throw in the bottom falling out of the crypto market and concerns about a widening war in the Middle East and many Americans are rightfully worried about what the future may bring.

THE ANTIDOTE TO GLOBAL INSTABILITY: BE PREPARED!

Now – more than ever – Americans need to be prepared. We all know how important it is to stockpile food, water, guns, ammo, precious metals and supplies, but there is one item EVERY SINGLE PREPPER SHOULD HAVE – a medical emergency kit!

While the big-ticket challenges like COVID and bird flu grab a lot of the media headlines, the truth is that medical emergencies are about much more than pandemics.

Over the last few years, we have seen record high levels of prescription drug shortages – shortages that would only be exacerbated by a global recession or depression.

How prepared are you to keep your family safe from a wide range of medical emergencies? How reliant are you on the broken global healthcare system?

[probablyasocialecologist]

Suffering is key to being proper. And Britain’s worsening energy crisis, inflation and inequality have ushered in a fresh wave of lectures on the moral benefits of suffering. Stern voices have clamoured to remind us that being dangerously cold, being desperately poor and enduring powercuts, broken supply chains, food shortages and cold baths has happened to Britons before, and it would probably do us good, if anything, if it happened again.

For the rich and powerful, this is a handy philosophy: they are rarely the ones enduring the pain. In February, Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, whose annual salary is more than £570,000, told workers they should not demand higher wages, in order to contain inflation. In May, then-food and farming minister George Eustice told people they should buy value brands to “contain and manage their household budget”. “Blackouts,” wrote Telegraph columnist Robert Taylor in October, recalling the powercuts of 1973, “could be just the ticket to shake some of today’s youngsters out of that sublime sense of entitlement and self-righteousness.”

From the Covid pandemic and lockdowns to the cost of living crisis, it seems that the harder the challenges of contemporary British life become, the more we are encouraged to suck it up, and channel the hardships of yore – usually by people who did not experience those hardships themselves. Since the start of 2020, “the blitz” has clocked up 37 references in Hansard, the official parliamentary record – only 11 shy of the 48 citations in parliament during the whole of 1940 and 1941, when the blitz was actually taking place. The first reference in Hansard to the famed “blitz spirit” was not until 1972. The phrase was not used again until 1999. But since 2000, it has appeared six times. The further away we get from the Nazi blitzkrieg, the more we are asked to revive the “spirit” of the time.

Underpinning this celebration of suffering is the masochistic idea that it is your individual responsibility – indeed an important test of your character – to withstand ruinous social and economic crises not of your making. It is there in Keir Starmer ventriloquising a dead monarch to a proper bin man’s tune, with his advice on how the poorest Britons should deal with an economic situation that could very possibly kill them this winter: the Queen “would urge us to turn our collar up and face the storm”.

Dan Hancox, ‘Who remembers proper binmen?’ The nostalgia memes that help explain Britain today

[tikitania]

Hello, Thank you for a great blog and sharing ballet inside and discussion! I wanted to ask if you (or someone else who sees this) can tell what are the other good or valued professional ballet academies / choreographic schools in Russia besides Vaganova, Perm school, Eifman Academy and Moscow choreographic school (though I have heard that the latest is partly hanging on its reputation and the current state of the school is a bit solala..)

Awww, thank you! That means a lot. I rediscovered my love for ballet during COVID and was thrilled to find several Tumblr sites/blogs (@ballet-symphonie, https://melmoth.co) that inspired me to dig deeper into the dancers, choreographers, and companies that I admired. I also started attending more ballet performances, too! As rich as the YouTube / IG ballet world is — the magic is in the theater. It's thrilling! As for ballet in training in Russia beyond the big four, I really don't have the knowledge to ascertain which ones are considered top notch. But what I have done is researched where some of my favorite dancers trained — and the results can be surprising. Tereshkina trained at Krasnoyarsk and did a year or two of finishing at Vaganova. Elena Svinko, the new Mariinsky 1st soloist also came from Krasnoyarsk. Semyon Chudin graduated from the Novosibirsk Choreographic College. Alexandra Khiteeva trained for the first five years in Kazan. Historically, the Kiev Choreographic College has trained amazing dancers including Svetlana Zhakrova, Sergei Polunin, Alina Cojocaru, Leonid Sarafanov, and more. Tragically, I think training has been disrupted due to the war. Here's a video highlighting some of their illustrious grads:

Russia and in the former Soviet republics do not suffer a shortage of ballet schools because there's a seemingly an endless supply of excellent retired dancers and pedagogues to teach! It’s a valued profession there. Nina Ananiashvili has started a school in Tbilisi, Georgia — a school for the company she's leading there. For instance, Maria Alexandrova was just appointed the rector of the Sevastopol Choreographic School -- a very controversial appointment because the city is in Crimea, which is Ukrainian territory that Russia has invaded and claimed, so this appointment feels extremely political. And there are endless private schools that train at a really high level. As an example, I'll leave you with this — Maria Bulanova, aged 10 at the Kuramshin School in St. Petersburg where she trained for several years until she entered Vaganova.

[sethshead]

Republicans have completely memory-holed the pandemic. They speak of inflation, as though COVID didn’t wreck supply chains and cause shortages. They speak of excess deaths due to no room in hospitals, as though the patients occupying beds in COVID wards didn’t exist.

This is INGSOC-grade politically induced social amnesia.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Mesa County announces limited COVID-19 vaccine supplies - Published Aug 14, 2024

MESA COUNTY, Colo. (KREX) – COVID-19 vaccines are currently limited as the nation waits for updated supplies, according to the Mesa County Public Health Clinic.

The county has been hit by the shortage as it has some vaccines left for residents 12 and older. The health clinic has enough supplies for those who’ve already been scheduled but there will be no future appointments until the updated vaccine becomes available. It should be released in September, according to the health clinic.

The Federal Drug Administration has ordered a new formulation of the vaccine to better protect against current variants of the virus, the health clinic said in a press release.

“We are not alone in this situation. There is decreased availability across the country while we wait for the new formulation. We know the federal government and vaccine makers are working on the updated vaccine, which will be our best tool to protect against the COVID-19 virus,” Clinical Services Director Ali Sanchez said in a press release. The health clinic noted it will notify the public and start scheduling appointments when it receives the updated vaccine.

[constantly-deactivated]

⚠️⚠️"YOU BETTER PAY ATTENTION"⚠️⚠️

White Hat Military Installations DESTROY Vaccine-Contaminated Blood Stockpiles

After the House voted 350-80 in favor of repealing Lloyd Austin’s unconstitutional Covid-19 vaccine mandate for all armed forces members, the White Hat partition of the U.S. military took it a step further by destroying blood donations taken from vaccinated servicemembers.

They say empirical evidence proves beyond all doubt that although donors might not present vaccine-related side effects, recipients of tainted plasma have had adverse reactions, including sudden death, to contaminated blood. Case in point: Staff Sgt. William Wright, a healthy 36-year-old male stationed at Fort Bliss, Texas, was wounded during a training exercise to the point of needing a transfusion. Wright was not vaccinated; he had been fighting an arduous battle to obtain a religious exemption. He was unconscious at the time, and therefore couldn’t ask whether the plasma entering his veins had been siphoned from a vaccinated person. Unbeknownst to Wright, the donor had been double-vaxxed and boosted. He seemed to recover—his vitals were normal and he was eating solid food—but remained under observation at the William Beaumont Army Medical Center-Fort Bliss, and had enough strength to ask whether he’d been given vaccinated blood. When told he had, he protested. Two days later Wright, still at the hospital, died suddenly—major heart attack. A postmortem examination found an 11” blood clot in an artery in his lungs.

The White Hat physicians’ movement claims that the criminal Biden regime has buried hundreds of similar reports that malign its precious vaccine.

“When an unvaccinated patient receives vaccinated plasma, well, statistics don’t lie. What we’ve witnessed is an astronomically large number of troops present everything from mild and temporary to severe and lasting side effects, and, in some cases, death. I’m personally aware of 12 men that needed a transfusion and vehemently objected to getting vaccinated plasma. They were told they were government property and had no right to refuse it,” a physician at Womack Army Medical Center, Fort Bragg, told Real Raw News.

On Thursday, the senior leadership at Womack Army Medical Center reached a consensus to incinerate and destroy its stockpile of vaccine-contaminated blood—approximately 500 liters of refrigerated plasma and whole blood that hadn’t yet been spun in a centrifuge. News of the heroic act spread rapidly among the White Hat community, and within hours other military bases began torching polluted blood. Fort Meade, home to U.S. Cyber Command, destroyed its supply, as did Hunter Army Airfield and Fort Benning, both in Georgia. All told, 23 installations obliterated toxic blood.

“It was a ripple effect, a wave,” said our source at Womack Army Medical Center. “It only took us to start it, and now it’s washing over joint bases all over the country.”

RRN asked whether the blood destruction would affect service members whose lives depend on a transfusion.

“We have an ace in the hole,” our source said. “Fortunately, Marines resisted the mandate from the start, and have been donating regularly. Rough estimate, 150,000 unvaccinated Marines who can donate 6 times per year. The Special Operations units also refused vaccination. That’s 43,000 men and women, give or take. We won’t have a shortage of unvaccinated blood. And we’ll get more as new enlistees, who won’t have to get vaxxed, can contribute theirs.”

Source:

Do you know what you're getting❓🤔

[ovaruling]

full article under the cut

A Visual Breakdown of America’s Stagnating Number of Births

By Anthony DeBarros

About 3.66 million babies were born in the U.S. in 2022, essentially unchanged from 2021 and 15% below the peak hit in 2007, according to new federal figures released Thursday.

The provisional total—3,661,220 births—is about 3,000 below 2021’s final count, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. Final government data expected later this year could turn that small deficit positive.

Experts have pointed to a confluence of factors behind the nation’s recent relative dearth of births, including economic and social obstacles ranging from child care to housing affordability.

Absent increases in immigration, fewer births combined with ongoing baby boomer retirements will likely weigh on the labor force supply within the next 10 years, said Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist at Nationwide, an insurance and financial-services company.

“You’re going to have a real shortage of workers unless we have technology somehow to fill the gap,” Bostjancic said.

A look at the trends in charts:

Births stay well off peak

The government tallied about 655,000 fewer births in 2022 than the 2007 high of 4.32 million, reflecting ongoing decreases. With still-elevated deaths due in part to the latter phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. in 2022 saw only about 385,000 more births than deaths.

The 2022 total might tick higher when final data is tallied later this year. Final 2021 births were about 5,000 above the provisional number; for 2020, the final tally was about 8,400 greater.

Fertility remains below ‘replacement’ level

The total fertility rate—closely watched because a level of 2.1 children per woman is the “replacement rate” needed for a population to maintain current levels—was 1.665 in 2022. That was essentially unchanged from 1.664 in 2021 and only a slight recovery from a record low in 2020.

The U.S. has generally been below replacement level since the early 1970s.

Hispanic fertility rates climb

The general fertility rate for Hispanic mothers increased 4% in 2022, second only to people of Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander origin. Fertility rates among Asian women rose 3%; rates for all other groups fell. 

Hispanic mothers accounted for 25.5% of U.S. births in 2022, a record, while the shares of births from non-Hispanic white and Black women declined. White women accounted for 50.1% of births in 2022, Black women for 13.9%, and Asian women for 6%. 

Birthrates continue declining among the young

The trend of decreasing birthrates among younger women continued in 2022. For teens ages 15 to 19, the birthrate fell 3%, and for ages 20 to 24 it was down 2%. The rate for the next oldest group, 25 to 29, edged up only slightly. Increases were mainly seen among women 35 to 44.

If trends continue, the birthrate for women ages 35 to 39 might soon eclipse the rate for ages 20 to 24.