#masks mandate

[chronicallycouchbound]

Almost twice as many people died from COVID-19 in 2021 than all unintentional accidents. COVID-19 is the third leading cause of death. COVID rates are on the rise.

The least you can do is wear a mask.

[sunderingstars]

thinking about sparkle’s performance line. thinking about how she says “this performance” and sampo says “my performance.” thinking about how she says “elation” and he says “joy.” even, perhaps, thinking about sampo’s familiarity with elation yet his simultaneous deconstruction of it, viewing his performance as his life yet ultimately steering that performance towards genuine love, care, and respect. thinking about elation not as hedonism but as dignity. anyways

[ectonurites]

Wake up babe a new Tim Drake costume just dropped (for real this time)

ah. um . yeah.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Sanjana Karanth and Jennifer Bendery at HuffPost:

WASHINGTON ― The federal Department of Transportation has issued a memo ordering programs supported by the agency to prioritize funding projects for communities with “marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” The unusual four-page memo also directs thousands of employees to give special priority to projects and activities that improve transportation for “families with young children.” The directive applies to all Transportation Department-supported grants, loans and contracts, including existing agreements. “I’ve never seen a memo like this before,” said one congressional aide who works on transportation policy and requested anonymity to speak freely. “Considering fertility rates when prioritizing federal grants? We obviously have no idea what the full impact of that will be,” said this aide. “It’s absolutely creepy. It’s a little ‘Chinese government.’ [The Trump administration] would hate that comparison, but I don��t know where else I’ve seen a policy of ‘we need to incentivize baby-making.’” [...] In addition to its directives related to marriage and babies, the Transportation Department’s memo blocks recipients of federal money from implementing “mask mandates,” a reference to requirements that transit agencies followed to limit the spread of infection during the height of COVID-19. The memo also requires recipients to comply with federal immigration enforcement in order to receive funding — the latest effort by the administration to target undocumented immigrants, conduct mass arrests and deportations, and deny federal transportation funds to so-called sanctuary cities.

The DOT under Sean Duffy released a totally whacked out memo prioritizing right-wing culture war items such as banning mask mandates, encouraging natalism by rewarming projects to areas with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average, and comply with the heinously cruel immigration policies by 47 targeting undocumented immigrants.

See Also:

Abortion, Every Day: Trump Administration Memo: Preferred Funding to Communities with High Birth Rates

Daily Kos: Trump Transportation chief: Want a road? Have a kid

[commonsensecommentary]

Forcing us to wear the face diapers never had a thing to do with science. It was always about spreading fear, exerting control, and justifying election fraud. We were played for suckers by the Deep State Marxists, and we’re now suffering the consequences.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Some health-care workers in British Columbia have started receiving notification that they will once again be expected to wear masks in medical settings, but the language is ambiguous about what exactly will be required and for whom.

CTV News has obtained a memo from Brian Sagar, executive director of communicable disease prevention and control for B.C., notifying workers that “in preparation for the viral respiratory illness (season) this fall and winter” they will be reinstating enhanced infection prevention and control measures in hospitals, family doctors’ offices, and clinics effective Oct. 3. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[daisiesonafield-blog]

Abstract:

Full article here

[lamothla]

That time I cosplayed Illumi a few years back and I ran into an equally tatted Hisoka cosplayer and we both flexed in the photo

[diablo1776]

[quaalussy]

getting ready for my first zoom visit for the research study on ppl who have recovered from BPD lol

[etapereine]

apparently they’re all traveling together in buses to the airport bc the team buses have already gone ahead? and multiple guys already out with covid this morning……

[girldraki]

incredible one-two punch of going “what the hell is she even on abt” and then clicking and seeing. please say this frankly very weird thing about something that has earned it

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jessica Glenza at The Guardian:

As vaccine hesitancy increases in the US, isolated, tight-knit and religious communities have frequently been at the center of high-profile outbreaks. Such is the case in west Texas, where a rural community is the center of an expanding measles outbreak that has already claimed the lives of two Americans – the first deaths from the disease in nearly a decade. However, as the conspiracy theories of Maga conservatism marry the bugbears of the US health secretary and vaccine skeptic Robert F Kennedy Jr, the one-time fringe view of vaccines has become increasingly mainstream – with activists in right-leaning population centers taking lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic into the realm of childhood inoculations. One need look no further than Sarasota, Florida, for a full-throated political denunciation. “Generally, people are weak, lazy,” said Vic Mellor, an activist based near Sarasota, and a close ally of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn. Mellor owns the We the People Health and Wellness Center in nearby Venice. Mellor, in a shirt that shouts “VIOLENCE MIGHT BE THE ANSWER”, is a self-professed attendee of the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. “And that lazy part just makes them ignorant … Covid has proven that obviously this is true. I mean, all the facts are starting to come out on Covid now – that it was a hoax. That is just an extension of where this hoax began decades earlier with the vaccines, OK? This is all a money grab, this is all a power grab.” The pandemic was real, and it started Mellor down the road of questioning vaccines. Where he once opposed only the Covid-19 shots, he now opposes vaccines entirely – arguing they harm children despite experts on vaccines considering them one of mankind’s greatest medical achievements. “This is not an isolated, rural, religious community, which I think is what a lot of people associate with an anti-vaccine mentality,” said Kathryn Olivarius, the author of Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom, and a historian of disease at Stanford University. “This is in the heart of everything.” Sarasota has become a proving ground for the Maga right. Among nail salons, mom-and-pop Cuban restaurants and roadside motels lining US 41, known locally as the Tamiami Trail, a visitor can find the gates of New College. This was once a public university prized for its progressive liberal arts education. Now it is part of the new conservative experiment in remaking higher education led by activists aligned with Donald Trump and the Republican Florida governor, Ron DeSantis. Along the same road is the Sarasota memorial hospital, an aberration in American healthcare – it is publicly owned with open board elections. The normally sleepy election became contentious when insurgent “health freedom” candidates, supported in part by Mellor, entered the race. Three won seats on the nine-member board in 2022. Even the name of this stretch of sun-bleached asphalt is up for debate. This year, a state Republican lawmaker – who has also introduced bills to limit vaccine requirements – briefly proposed changing its name to the “Gulf of America Trail” – a nod to Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. Arguably the most salient artifact of this activism in Sarasota is the least visible: vaccination rates against measles.

[...] It is well known in research circles that right-leaning states across the US south and west have worse health metrics – from obesity to violence to diseases such as diabetes. That reality was supercharged during the pandemic; as vaccine mandates became a fixation on the right, Republican-leaning voters became more skeptical of vaccines. In turn, places with politically conservative leaders experienced more Covid-19 deaths and greater stress on hospitals.

[...] Conservative activism alone can’t be blamed for declining measles vaccination rates. The measles vaccine in particular has been subject to a sustained firehose of misinformation stemming from a fraudulent paper linking the vaccine to autism in 1999. For years, this misinformation was largely nonpartisan. And Florida’s anti-vaccine movement was active even before the pandemic – with a vocal contingent of parents arguing against strengthening school vaccine standards in 2019. What appears new in Sarasota is how local conservative activists have brought opposition to vaccines into the heart of their philosophy. By Mellor’s telling, he and a loosely affiliated group of Maga activists began to adopt anti-vaccine beliefs as the pandemic wore on – helping organize major health protests in the area in recent years, such as mask mandate opt-outs and the “health freedom” campaign for hospital board seats. Mellor said his nearby property, the Hollow, was a gathering place during the pandemic (it is also a part-time gun range). He cites ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug that became a fascination of the right, as the reason “we didn’t lose people at all” during the height of the pandemic. Available clinical evidence shows it is not effective against Covid-19. Kennedy has fit neatly into this realignment. He enjoys trust ratings among Republicans nearly as high as Trump, according to polling from the health-focused Kaiser Family Foundation. Kennedy has already spread dubious information about measles vaccines in public statements (notably: from a Steak ’n Shake in Florida) – a response one vaccine expert said “couldn’t be worse”.

“While children are in the hospital suffering severe measles pneumonia, struggling to breathe, [Kennedy] stands up in front of the American public and says measles vaccines kill people every year and that it causes blindness and deafness,” said Dr Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the division of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Severe side effects from the vaccine are possible, but they are much rarer than disability and death from measles. “This is what happens when you have a virulent anti-vaccine activist, a science denialist, as the head of the most important public health agency in the United States,” said Offit. “He should either be quiet or stand down.” The same poll found trust in public health agencies has fallen precipitously amid Republican attacks. More than a quarter of Republican parents report delaying childhood vaccines, the poll found, a rate that has more than doubled since 2022. There is no analogous trend among Democratic parents. Despite how claims espoused by vaccine skeptics can be easily refuted, their power has not been undercut.

The rise in anti-vaccine sentiment as a result of COVID (and perhaps even before then) is a frightening reminder of where we are as a nation.

[jestiric]

if you go out in public and youre sick and you dont wear a mask i hate you personally and i hope you die btw.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Alberta Health Services says enhanced masking requirements are now in place at seven hospitals, including:

• Royal Alexandra Hospital (implemented October 13)

• University of Alberta Hospital and the Stollery Children’s Hospital

• Misericordia Community Hospital

• Grey Nuns Community Hospital

• Alberta Hospital Edmonton

• Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital

• Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre

The requirements are also in place at the Central Alberta Cancer Centre, which is located at the Red Deer Regional Hospital Centre.

Staff, doctors, volunteers, and contracted workers must wear masks in all patient care areas, elevators, stairways, common areas, gift shops, cafeterias, and continuing care areas.

Full article

Tagging: @politicsofcanada