The Biden administration’s effort to provide free Covid-19 vaccines to the uninsured will not start at retail pharmacies until mid-October, weeks after the government plans to make an updated version of the shot available to the broader public.

The gap in timing, which comes as Covid hospitalizations have ticked up in recent weeks, means that millions of Americans without health coverage will not be able to immediately get a no-cost vaccine at popular places like CVS and Walgreens, even as it will be widely available for those who have insurance.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the delay in pharmacy availability, with spokesperson Kathleen Conley saying the government is still finalizing contracts with companies like CVS and Walgreens that will allow them to distribute the vaccines for free.

The CDC expects the updated vaccine rollout to begin the third or fourth week of September, she said. But the contracts with pharmacies will likely not be finished until mid-October.

The uninsured will instead need to go to federal health centers or individual providers for free vaccines during the first stage of the fall vaccination campaign. That adds a layer of complexity, public health officials warn, that could discourage people from getting the shot.

“That’s going to put a gap in the program,” said Claire Hannan, executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers, which helps coordinate immunization programs across the country. “These kinds of things, they make a big difference when you’re trying to manage a program and you want to ensure [the] vaccine’s accessible in every county.”

As many as 30 million uninsured or underinsured people face paying out-of-pocket for Covid vaccines for the first time this fall, after the government’s Covid public health emergency declaration expired in May. That figure could include millions of people who recently lost Medicaid coverage for the first time since the start of the pandemic.

Oh look, more horseshit from the Biden regime and their handling of the ongoing pandemic that is going to exacerbate how much they're already fucking over marginalized communities.

Of all the things you could critique DSA on, this is the hill you're going to die on?

DSA deciding to do a mask mandate at this event is unequivocally good and based. Shut the fuck up, you fucking dipshits.

Imagine being this much of a fucking goddamn crybaby about masking. Eat shit, you ableist fucks.

One of the biggest lessons this pandemic has taught me is the astounding number of people for whom leftism is really just performative, and that when push comes to shove, these people will make the biggest fucking stink about having to do something even mildly inconvenient for even a single fucking event or context and show themselves for who they really are.

I recently listened to one of the most recent Death Panel episodes (it's currently a Patreon exclusive) about that court ruling in California that said employers were not liable if an employee got COVID from their workplace, which the employee could then spread to their own household. Like the court more or less said that the cost to businesses/"the economy" (i.e. rich people) would be too great and it would open up the floodgates with this kind of litigation because COVID is so pervasive. So I guess all the mass suffering and disability and death that comes from COVID is just a transactional/irrevocable cost of operating society, in the eyes of the court. Obviously not surprising because capitalism, but I digress.

But the court, in their ruling, also then made a parallel with asbestos and people getting sick with that from employer negligence and said that they would take that very seriously, but it's different than COVID because the number of plaintiffs for asbestos is far lower than the potential number of plaintiffs for COVID (millions). So that's why it's okay to protect workers from asbestos but not COVID.

Plaintiffs here contend the burdens resulting from liability for secondary COVID-19 infections can be adequately addressed by imposing a similar limit. For this reason, they ask us to recognize a duty of care extending only to individuals who share a household with the employee. Kesner’s approach cannot be translated so seamlessly into the present context, however. For one thing, the “household members” limit made sense in Kesner because the mechanism of injury there required frequent and sustained contact with asbestos fibers on workers’ clothing and effects. (See Kesner, supra, 1 Cal.5th at pp. 1154–1155.) Yet transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus can occur in as little as 15 minutes of contact with an infected person or even after the infected person has left the space.

The broader reach of the proposed duty is another difference, and the most important one, between this case and Kesner. The duty we considered in Kesner involved a relatively small pool of defendants: companies that used asbestos in the workplace. There was also a much smaller pool of potential plaintiffs: household members who were exposed to asbestos from an employee’s clothing and then went on to develop mesothelioma. Here, by contrast, a duty to prevent secondary COVID-19 infections would extend to all workplaces, making every employer in California a potential defendant. And unlike mesothelioma, which is known to be “a very rare cancer, even among persons exposed to asbestos” (Hamilton v. Asbestos Corp (2000) 22 Cal.4th 1127, 1135−1136), the virus that causes COVID-19 is extremely contagious, making infection possible after even a relatively brief exposure. Even limiting a duty of care to employees’ household members, the pool of potential plaintiffs would be enormous, numbering not thousands but millions of Californians. “Ultimately, the limited transmissibility of asbestos provides a natural curb on the pool of potential plaintiffs. With COVID-19, by contrast, the pool of potential plaintiffs isn’t a pool at all — it’s an ocean.”

Basically going mask-off and admitting that, in some instances, they will protect people exposed to (and then who suffer from) a health hazard in the workplace because of employer negligence, but only up to a certain extent, and certainly not if it becomes too expensive and/or the number of victims is too high.

Artie, Bea, and their guest (Nate Holdren) were also talking about the implication of all of this. More specifically, that it seems like a huge internal dissonance to pronounce the pandemic is over and no longer a big deal, while, at the same time, the court ruling pretty clearly states that they are worried that recognizing an employer's liability for an employee catching COVID at work and spreading it to their household would result in endless litigation and heavily disrupt society:

Imposing on employers a tort duty to each employee’s household members to prevent the spread of this highly transmissible virus would throw open the courthouse doors to a deluge of lawsuits that would be both hard to prove and difficult to cull early in the proceedings,” the opinion said. “Although it is foreseeable that employees infected at work will carry the virus home and infect their loved ones, the dramatic expansion of liability plaintiffs’ suit envisions has the potential to destroy businesses and curtail, if not outright end, the provision of essential public services.

https://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/documents/S274191.PDF

I understand, among other things, the court saying it would be extremely difficult at this point to prove that an infection was acquired at work and not anywhere else the person may have been. But they also make multiple mentions of how COVID is extremely contagious and potentially fatal. Sure, endless litigation would be disruptive if every single business started getting sued. But maybe we should consider that the only reason it would be very disruptive is because we have normalized perpetual mass infection and re-infection from an extremely contagious novel virus, which in turn is going to continue killing and disabling a shit ton of people?

As the title says, I'm currently arguing with someone who thinks that every single person who is currently not taking precautions/not masking is an irredeemable piece of shit, and that at best, they deserve no sympathy if they get sick or die, or at worst, they deserve death. And that if they are unwilling to change now, they will never have the capacity to change. And the implication is that trying to convince people or doing any kind of activism isn't all that useful because all these people are immutably selfish and ableist, and the only thing that will get every single one of these people to change their mind is if they get disabled/become directly affected in a bad way. And they keep talking about how the only way things are going to change is if we reach a tipping point with so much death and disability that the ruling class will have no choice but to bring back protections to mitigate/eliminate COVID. Because there won't be enough people to work to keep society functioning basically.

Am I wrong to think that this is very defeatist and frankly grotesque? Because to me, the implication is that they're hoping for the amount of disability and death to become so acute and staggering that the ruling class will have no choice but to intervene I guess? This is without considering the development of next-gen vaccines that can severely reduce or eliminate COVID transmission and/or the development of therapeutics that can prevent long COVID. But if the vaccines failed and the therapeutics got nowhere, who's to say that this so-called tipping point they're waiting for won't take decades? Why would you wait for things to get that awful in lieu of doing COVID activism/organizing in the meantime?

I also really don't think the ruling class is ignorant to the sheer level of death and disability that COVID is going to continue to wreak if left unchecked. There are a myriad of examples of the ruling class still taking precautions for themselves (e.g. everyone has to test still before they can be around Biden), and even some of their authoritative outlets like the WHO have said that 1 in 10 infections results in long COVID and that we can expect hundreds of millions of people to need long-term care in the future, if this current trajectory continues. I understand that COVID is pretty unique for our lifetime, in terms of the massive death and disability it has already brought, and is still dangerous in large part because it is so infectious and there is no long-term lasting immunity. But, post-viral illnesses are not new. Social murder is not new. If we reach this so-called tipping point with so many people dead and disabled that there aren't enough people left to work to keep society functioning, what is stopping the ruling class from getting rid of child labor laws, dipping into labor from abroad, etc. to mitigate this?

On one hand, I get the urge to be misanthropic toward people like that. Everyone who is walking around unmasked in public has the potential to give someone a disabling or deadly case of COVID, including to us. Obviously that's especially bad for anybody who is already medically vulnerable. And for people who are especially vulnerable, I think the vitriol toward people not masking especially makes sense. And I understand that American culture is especially toxic and individualist and bigoted. But like, just because you do activism doesn't mean you have to like these people or be their friends or even treat them with kid gloves, lol (like I know shaming can work for some people and different tactics can work on different people and different contexts).

But like, I completely disagree with the notion that people can't have their minds changed. Like hasn't like literally every single social justice movement for a certain issue with any kind of success started with support from a minority of people, and activism led to a majority of people to eventually adopt that same viewpoint, and eventually that public pressure led to the government being slightly less shitty and alleviating some suffering? For the COVID pandemic, aren't their literally parallels with the AIDS epidemic, as far with it largely being ignored (I know COVID wasn't initially, but it's effectively at that point now), and that things only started changing for the better once groups like ACT UP started getting involved?

And I still think the overwhelming majority of blame has to lie with the ruling class and all the people carrying water for them who have repeatedly bombarded the public with messages expressing COVID is over for the last 2-plus fucking years and that you don't have to worry if you're vaccinated and that bad outcomes only happen to people who are already medically vulnerable. Many people, for example, stopped masking and never looked back once Biden and the CDC said people didn't have to mask any longer if they were vaccinated, way back in 2021. Same shit with mask mandates being lifted, many people stopped masking as a result. Propaganda works and is an insidious beast if used to perpetuate harmful behavior. And I think it would be wrong to to not consider that factor in the choices that people are currently making.

Is ableism an exception to the notion that people are amendable, and they actually cannot change their (ableist) ways?

I don't understand their viewpoint at all, can someone explain? I'm not sure if I'm wrong either because I'm able-bodied and almost certainly still have some ignorance about disability.

Edit: I also think a not-insignificant number of people who are no longer taking precaution in public actually still have a concern about COVID deep down inside, but they are so inundated with being surrounded with other people no longer taking precaution, that they're basically just going along with the crowd and maybe don't want to stick out like a sore thumb or perhaps they are concerned with being harassed by rabid anti-maskers. All of this is to say, I think there is a genuine psychological factor going on in the choice of whether to mask or not, too.

https://archive.ph/k8DaN

Like so many others, we are living with COVID. The virus isn’t going anywhere, but how safely we live with it has changed dramatically. Most Americans have resumed the full range of their pre-pandemic activities — concerts, parties, summer camps, and family events. But with the virus still circulating, many who have gone back to pre-pandemic life still worry if they are safe.

It makes sense to be wary. We have lived with these risk assessments and daily decisions for almost four years. And yet we are in a much different, much better place. We can protect ourselves with vaccines, which remain free and widely available. Treatments like Paxlovid are more accessible than ever. Innovative research continues, with an updated vaccine expected in the fall that will better target the circulating variant. Tests are available for those who still want to use testing, and surveillance, through wastewater and genomic sequencing, is much better than it used to be. Add in large investments in improving indoor air quality and the infrastructure to respond more effectively to future outbreaks and things are much better.

That is huge fucking stretch about surveillance being "much better". Imagine having the audacity to say we can track waves better when we basically don't even fucking test for COVID anymore. And I've heard that the wastewater can be unreliable too because many sites often don't report, they report irregularly, etc. And I'm honestly not sure, but is there anything stopping us from getting a variant that shows up a lot less in human waste and makes levels of transmission seem lower than they actually are?

And we don't even know how effective the next vaccine will be yet. Hasn't every vaccine so far has gone down in efficacy significantly after a few months? Will the variant the vaccine targets even be dominant anymore by the time they're rolled out? Cuz historically, we've always played catch-up with the vaccines, because something else becomes a dominant variant as a result of letting it rip in perpetuity. And most people are probably about a year removed from their last vaccine, if not longer. Most people didn't even get the most recent booster here in the US. Like sure, the vaccines are still good to get, if nothing else, to prevent severe illness and death. And there have been a shit ton of people who have been "fully vaccinated" and still died. But that's without even acknowledging long COVID. And the current vaccines have never been very effective at preventing transmission. And the vaccine seems to only slightly reduce the chance of getting long COVID, at best. The best way to not get long COVID, sadly, is still to not get COVID in the first place.

The stuff about investing in indoor air quality seems like pure hopium, like where's the demand? It absolutely should be done and every public building should be mandated with upgraded ventilation and it should be something subsidized by the government (as if this shithole country would ever invest in domestic infrastructure lmao), but I haven't heard anything about ambitious plans to do stuff like that. The people who are actually getting these upgrades are usually very privileged people who belong to communities like Ashish Jha's: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/09/how-ashish-jha-rochelle-walensky-newton-ma-protect-their-children-from-covid-but-not-yours.html

The truth is that we can now prevent nearly every COVID death. People who are up to date on their vaccines and get treated when infected rarely get seriously ill. Even for the vulnerable like my parents, who are in their 80s, vaccines coupled with treatments provide a very high degree of protection against serious illness. This is also true for most immunocompromised individuals. The fact is, now a few basic steps mean you can ignore COVID safely — and get back to doing things that matter, even with COVID still around. Think of these safety measures like the routine check-ups that keep your car safe to drive.

Fuck you, you detestable piece of shit. Tell that to the 40,000+ people who have died from COVID this year in the US, which is almost certainly a significant undercount. Even if that is below the worst peaks of the pandemic, that is still an unfathomable number of people who have died. So saying "you can prevent nearly every COVID death" is a bold-faced lie. And many people who aren't up to date on vaccines are underserved and have bad access to vaccines and treatment/access to stuff like Paxlovid. And to say that "you can ignore COVID safely"--yeah, we noticed you trying really hard to manufacture that consent ever since you took that job, you veritable fuckhead!

What about long COVID? The evidence here is reassuring as well. Those who are up to date on their vaccines are far less likely to get long COVID, and when they do, it tends to be shorter-lived and less severe. And treatments may help reduce it too. For now, there is no foolproof way of avoiding long COVID short of avoiding infections altogether. But you can substantially reduce your risk with vaccines and, likely, treatments.

Very telling that he pooh-poohs the seriousness of long COVID by saying that there are treatments to help reduce long COVID and then goes on to list zero of them.

People often ask how we will know the pandemic is over. There is no dramatic declaration of victory over this new and deadly virus that reshaped our lives for so many years.

Sure never stopped your dogshit administration from dramatically declaring victory though, lmao

I know I'm just screaming into the void and none of this shit actually surprises me, but I fucking hate all of these scum of the earth minimizers with every fiber of my being.