Maskholes and Covidiots Need to Be Held Accountable When This Is Over
Maskhole: Some idiot who refuses to wear their mask during an international emergency, therefore threatening the lives of others.
Covidiot: A perfect term for those spreading, creating or publishing unverified and false information about the novel coronavirus.
Here we are again. It’s lockdown time in California. Those of us who care about the health and welfare of fellow humans are trying to do the right thing amid uncertainty and orchestrated nihilism.
Locally, we’ve broken the record for COVID-19 hospitalizations for seven consecutive days: state hospitals have 2,182 COVID-19 patients breaking the record set in July for three days running. San Diego is locked into the current restrictions for at least three weeks.
Local officials like County Supervisor Jim Desmond, along with media outlets like KUSI TV, are enabling individuals who see compliance with any sort of public health order as an infringement on their “freedom.”
To be sure, these high profile enablers don’t directly challenge wearing a mask or social distancing. But they’d like us to believe it’s an individual “choice” to be responsible rather than a duty to the rest of society.
Much of the noise they generate concerns the fate of small businesses. Rather than point to the realistic solution, which would be government intervention allowing owners and employees to easily comply with safety measures, they’d like to make the measures themselves the issue.
(And, yes, I get it that Gov. Newsom and that bunch have been hypocrites. That doesn’t change what needs to be done.)
Financial assistance making it possible for small businesses and average people to survive has not arrived and we’re being lied to about the reason why.
These deprivations will not be caused by “overly restrictive” lockdowns; as hospitalizations and deaths rise, demand for many services would decline anyway.
More businesses open means more opportunities for more maskholes to flaunt their stupidity, and it’s amazing how much overlap there is between the “save our bars” crowd and irresponsibly behaving citizens.
Business owners don’t need to be put in the role of enforcers, particularly since so many of our taxpayer paid law enforcement agencies are too cowardly to do so.
https://twitter.com/dougporter506/status/1335456923844407296?s=20
Over the next few weeks, more than 10 million individuals will lose unemployment insurance benefits and another 2.8 million will lose Pandemic Unemployment Assistance for freelancers. (Remember, gig economy companies ask workers to exchange "freedom" for the social safety net.)
On a national level, it’s not the deficit or any arguments about who gets what when: no bill has moved through the Senate and attempts at compromise are of no use until such time as corporate entities get legal protection from lawsuits caused by their negligence.
The need to keep pork and poultry products flowing to China (NOT US consumers) prompted corporations to successfully lobby for their facilities to be deemed as essential, even as they did as little as possible to protect their workers.
During the first six months of the pandemic, more than 42,500 meatpacking workers tested positive for the coronavirus in 494 meat plants, with at least 203 meatpacking workers dying, according to an analysis by the Food Environmental Reporting Network, a nonprofit investigative news organization.
Stories coming out of meat processing facilities were reminiscent of the nightmarish stuff written about by Upton Sinclair more than a century ago.
Examples of irresponsible corporate entities abound. Companies that didn’t need paycheck protection loans, like Darrell Issa’s real estate company, got them anyway. Minority-owned businesses got short changed.
"Roughly 95% of Black-owned businesses, 91% of Latino-owned businesses, 91% of Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander-owned businesses, and 75% of Asian-owned businesses stand close to no chance of receiving a PPP loan through a mainstream bank or credit union," according to the nonprofit Center for Responsible Lending.
While there is a vaccine in the pipeline, the reality is that it will late spring at the earliest before enough people are inoculated to even think about returning to “normal.”
Republican covidiots in the United States Senate have invited a prominent vaccine skeptic to testify before a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Tuesday. Because uncertainty and paranoia are on-brand for these types.
From the New York Times:
Dr. Jane M. Orient is the executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a group that opposes government involvement in medicine and views federal vaccine mandates as a violation of human rights.
“A public health threat is the rationale for the policy on mandatory vaccines. But how much of a threat is required to justify forcing people to accept government-imposed risks?” Dr. Orient wrote in a statement to the Senate last year, calling vaccine mandates “a serious intrusion into individual liberty, autonomy and parental decisions...
...Dr. Orient said she intended to use her testimony to call for government guidelines informing doctors about hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for Covid-19 patients, even though the Food and Drug Administration revoked an emergency authorization allowing the drug to be distributed from the national stockpile and has warned that it could harm those patients.
Dr. Orient’s organization has urged people to be cautious about the vaccine in blog posts with titles like “Should We Line Up for a 90% Effective Vaccine?” In her interview, she raised particular concerns about vaccinations for young people “because the effect on fertility has not been determined.” There is no evidence that any of the leading coronavirus vaccines affect fertility.
But there is evidence that COVID-19 can cause erectile disfunction. As one wag on Twitter noted: If you get the ‘rona, you ain’t gonna get a bona.
There’s this study published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine with the horrid details:
Despite being a trivial matter for patients in intensive care units (ICUs), erectile dysfunction (ED) is a likely consequence of COVID-19 for survivors, and considering the high transmissibility of the infection and the higher contagion rates among elderly men, a worrying phenomenon for a large part of affected patients.
And it should surprise nobody that some maskhole enablers are demanding to cut in the line for vaccine doses.
From the Minneapolis Star Tribune:
Republican leaders of the Minnesota Legislature suggested Friday that state lawmakers and the staff who work for them should be among the early recipients of a COVID-19 vaccine when it is available.
“I’m encouraging the vaccines, as one of the priority groups after elderly and some of our front-line workers, that we think about the people that have to be essential at the Capitol,” Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka, R-East Gull Lake, said at a forum with other legislative leaders.
(These are the same bunch of Republicans who failed to notify their Democratic counterparts of an outbreak following a special legislative session.)
https://twitter.com/OlgaNYC1211/status/1335798183142764545?s=20
And of course, despite the fact that most financial transactions take place online these days, big banks are asking for earlier consideration.
From MarketWatch:
Tellers and other consumer-facing bank workers could jump ahead of most Americans for coronavirus inoculations, after vaccines receive widely anticipated emergency-use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, potentially putting those financial-industry workers in line ahead of those 65 and older, other adults with medical issues and the rest of the U.S. population.
The American Bankers Association, which represents community banks, said it has asked the CDC to designate a narrow slice of the financial-services industry as “essential workers,” mainly adhering to guidelines issued by the Department of Homeland Security.
Meanwhile, in Washington DC, the Trump administration has a bunch of potential superspreader parties on tap for the holidays.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has invited 900 people to one event, 180 foreign ambassadors and staff to another, along with another event (number of invitees unknown) which includes a tour of the White House followed by a tour of Blair House.
Not to be outdone, the Trumps have plans for at least 25 indoor holiday parties despite the ongoing surge in coronavirus cases, and warnings from the Trump administration’s own public health professionals to limit travel and avoid congregating in large group settings.
Obviously, these folks don’t give a damn about the little people who can’t afford helicopter trips to Walter Reed Army Hospital.
While much has been made of the almost 300,000 people who have passed on because of the coronavirus, damage to survivors continues to be documented.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Nearly a year into the global coronavirus pandemic, scientists, doctors and patients are beginning to unlock a puzzling phenomenon: For many patients, including young ones who never required hospitalization, Covid-19 has a devastating second act.
Many are dealing with symptoms weeks or months after they were expected to recover, often with puzzling new complications that can affect the entire body—severe fatigue, cognitive issues and memory lapses, digestive problems, erratic heart rates, headaches, dizziness, fluctuating blood pressure, even hair loss.
What is surprising to doctors is that many such cases involve people whose original cases weren’t the most serious, undermining the assumption that patients with mild Covid-19 recover within two weeks. Doctors call the condition “post-acute Covid” or “chronic Covid,” and sufferers often refer to themselves as “long haulers” or “long-Covid” patients.
“Usually, the patients with bad disease are most likely to have persistent symptoms, but Covid doesn’t work like that,” said Trisha Greenhalgh, professor of primary care at the University of Oxford and the lead author of an August BMJ study that was among the first to define chronic Covid patients as those with symptoms lasting more than 12 weeks and spanning multiple organ systems.
For many such patients, she said, “the disease itself is not that bad,” but symptoms like memory lapses and rapid heart rate sometimes persist for months.
Thousands of lives could be saved, millions of people could avoid untold misery and financial hardship, and we’d be back to “business as usual” a lot quicker if a few very selfish individuals would just care about somebody other than themselves.
When this is all over, we need to make sure these maskholes, along with the politicians who’ve failed, are held accountable. They need to be shunned, shamed, and voted out of office when applicable.
Hey folks! I’ll be taking a “holiday break” starting on Dec 11th for cancer surgery. I really appreciate all the support and good wishes people have sent my way since going public. As I said, my break could be from 10 days to 10 weeks, depending on what they see when I’m cut open.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com