Ignorance and Apathy and Unwillingness to Act

Three articles came out in the past few days that should remind us that Covid is really here, and maybe we should act on it. But all the facts in the world can’t penetrate the wall of hopeful denial.

Lynn Parramore interviewed Dr. Philliip Alvelda in Institute for New Economic Thinking. I wrote about the first part earlier this month.

“Contrary to public belief, he warns, Covid is not like the flu. New variants evolve much faster, making annual shots inadequate. He believes that if thinks continue as they are, with new Covid variants emerging and reinfections happening rapidly, the majority of Americans may eventually grapple with some form of Long Covid. . . . Some people can get Long Covid, and maybe it ages them a little bit, but it doesn’t change them very much. But for others, their lives are devastated. . . . Only 22% fully recover within a year. Others remain stable or get worse. . . . There are all kind of weird things going on that could be related to Covid’s cognitive effects. . . . traffic fatalities increased by 19%. . . . .

The White House has maintained the very strictest abatements to protect people who live and work there from the virus: In order to enter the White House, they have to have had no symptoms for 14 days, the latest booster vaccinations up-to-date, and a negative rapid test. They have nine or better fresh air exchanges per hour and all filters are upgraded to MERV 13. They have also installed 220 nanometer Germicidal UV lamps. After a positive test, you have to have a PCR Test negative to return to work. . . .

All these precautions are certainly not happening at the workplaces of the vast majority of Americans and in our schools. . . . We’re slowly debilitating a generation by refusing to take obvious precautions. . . . Most people have had Covid 3.5 times on average already. After another four years of the same pattern, if we don’t change course, most people in the U.S. will have some flavor of Long Covid. . . . Somewhere between 5–8% of those people will be so debilitated that they will no longer be able to work.. . .

I would put in place indoor air quality standards with teeth, standards that have tough compliance penalties, and requirements that every tested location be measured and certified regularly. And that should start with the schools. Then I would go to superspreader venues: arenas and churches, restaurants, bars, and gyms.”

Then another economy-focused business publication, Bloomberg, has an article on Covid’s effect on the workplace:

“Everyone, everywhere, really is sick a lot more often. . . . At least 13 communicable diseases, from the common cold to measles and tuberculosis, are surging past their pre-pandemic levels in many regions, and often by significant margins. . . . Influenza cases in the US have jumped about 40% . . . Whooping cough, or pertussis, cases have climbed by 45 times in China. . . . Measles is making a comeback in more than 20 American states, the UK and parts of Europe. Globally, 7.5 million people were newly diagnosed with tuberculosis. . . . The state of constant illness already is taking a toll on businesses and the economy. . . . Up 42% form 2019. And when they missed work, they missed more of it, with the average absence up 15%.”

They put a lot of weight on the few months of lockdown four years ago causing the changes, rather than, you know, the reality that Covid harms the immune system, which enables an internal resurgence of viruses kept at bay, and leaves an open door for new viruses to attack. And then they suggest that Covid led to a backslide in necessary childhood vaccinations, rather than the convoys and coups types who convinced just enough people to fear vaccinations that we no longer have herd immunity for things like measles. At least they didn’t use the term “absenteeism” seen so often in our provinces reports on schools. Their solution for it all is more vaccines. No mention of cleaning the air or using N95s. So that’s fucked. Vaccination alone is not enough.

Finally, an article in ABC Australia explains how much Covid is affecting children.

“The lack of awareness is biting in shocking ways. Too many children with Long Covid are being dismissed by doctors who say there’s nothing they can do to help — or worse, that their pain and fatigue is ‘all in their head’. They’re being pushed out of school by teachers who don’t understand why they can’t come to class or run around with their peers. Their parents have been gaslighted and blamed, too, not just by medical professionals but their closest friends and family. And experts are concerned that all this ignorance and apathy — and the unwillingness of governments to do more to curb Covid transmission — is exposing a generation of children to the same chronic illness and disability, with potentially devastating consequences. . . . Many researchers believe it likely affects 1–5% of kids who catch the virus. While some experets have argued it is ‘rare’ and not a concern for most families, others insist even 1% is significant given huge swathes of the population are getting (re)infected — and the impacts of LongCovid are so severe. . . . We’ve got kids missing out on large chunks of their childhood. And the social, developmental and educational impacts of that can last years. . . .

The ‘biggest problem’ is that many GPs don’t understand what long Covid is, and some are reluctant to refer to specialists. . . . Because research on Long Covid is still emerging, time-poor doctors can lose their curiosity about what’s happening for their patients, not realising supplements, medication and lifestyle intervention can dramatically improve their quality of life. . . . Numerous Long Covid patients have reported being misdiagnosed with FND [Functional Neurologic Disorder — i.e. it’s in your head] — a precarious situation because it can block their access to testing and treatment. . . . Although his doctors have provided medical certificates, ‘the whole way along the school has acted suspiciously, as if he’s just avoiding school for the sake of it.’ . . . There’s a reason complex chronic conditions like Long Covid and ME/CFS are called ‘invisible’ illnesses. Other people don’t realise that basic activities drain his energy and flare his symptoms. . . . Too often her Long Covid patients tell her that their inability to get to school or stay for a full day is a ‘barrier that schools are very unwilling to work around. And I have heard of at least a few children who have been asked to leave because they are no longer meeting the school’s requirements. . . .

Some [parents] are stretching their budgets to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars every month in hopeful bids to get their kids well. . . . ‘I just worry we’re going to have a generation of kids who have a post-acute infection syndrome because we failed to protect them,’ Dr. Putrino says, ‘because we told this lie over and over again that kids have nothing to worry about with Covid.’”

Then the article listed many examples of the gaslighting kids and parents have experienced by doctors. In the UK, Covid cases in kids doubled this past year, with almost 20% unable to manage day-to-day activities. Covid does such a number because it dysregulates immunity, creates blood clots, and provokes inflammation, affecting all organs including the brain. Symptoms can get profoundly worse after any exercise. And we’ve known it causes blood vessel damage in virtually all infected children since 2020!

It’s not all in your head, but it IS in your brain!!

And here’s Nate Bear’s insights into this situation. In our capitalist culture, the sickly are like wounded gazelle on the Serengeti trying not to be taken out by predators.

“People often keep their ill-health a secret because in capitalist societies with supremacist foundations ill health is considered a personal failing and a sign of weakness. Becoming ‘unproductive’ is treated like a crime unto the system. This mindset is embedded into institutions, from governmental to medical and is why people with chronic illness are so often dismissed by doctors and told to get back to work by the state. To support you in your ill health would be considered rewarding of weakness. You can find people who want to help, but they are the exception not the rule and tend to be people who themselves have an oppositional mindset to the mainstream.

To flip this around requires flipping the system. This is not about tweaks and reforms. So when it seems baffling that record ill health is being ignored when it seems damaging for the goals of the system i.e. profit and growth, you have to think beyond pure rationality and understand the ideologies of dominance and violence upon which the system rests. As a society we don’t know how to talk about ill health. Pandemics are mass deadly but also socially awkward because they make personal health into a public property and we don’t know how to talk about it/have been stripped of the tools. This partly explains the rush to end covid.

The scary thing is how deeply and unconsciously many people have embedded ideas of supremacy and, by extension, violence. The stories of people becoming ill and being abandoned by friends, let alone doctors or government agencies, speaks to this. And as we have seen, when it comes to public health, political allies fade away, revolutionary discoursers like Current Affairs stubbornly refusing to make the links between empire, imperial violence and public health because they are also just a bit grossed out by sick people. But it goes the other way too. Many examples on this site of genocide supporters being covid cautious or themselves with long covid because they refuse to understand their abandonment as a product of the ideologies they support in other contexts.

The era of enlightenment and rationality has been oversold. I often fall into the trap myself of thinking we face an information problem on all the issues: ‘if only x people knew these SCIENCE facts.’ Don’t stop talking obviously, but lack of knowledge is not the main problem.”

What I’ll never be able to contend with is that we’re willing to push our children forward into this miasma in order to preserve the appearance of good health and well being. We could clean the air and wear N95s, but that would be admitting there’s a problem. We could stop bombing children, but that would be to suggest that it had been wrong all along. We could stop flying and driving everywhere, but we need top post photos of our trip as a display of our vitality, like the fanned plumage of a bird with H5N1.

Playing this game, Everything’s Fine!, is what’s killing kids.

When an expectation of order and meaning and rationality butts up against the irrational silence of the world, that’s the absurd. You’re soaking in it.