The Great Pause Week 102: Testing

"No one is safe until everyone is safe.
— Dr. Daniel Griffin"

This is the third in a multi part series that began with this post.

In early February 2022, Nature Medicine published a University of Washington study of the database maintained by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the nation’s largest integrated health-care delivery system. The researchers created a controlled dataset that included health information of 153,760 people who had tested positive for Covid-19 sometime from March 1, 2020, through Jan. 15, 2021, and who had survived the first 30 days of the disease. Very few of the people in the study were vaccinated prior.

Statistical modeling was used to compare cardiovascular outcomes of the Covid group with a control group of more than 5.6 million patients during the same time frame; and a control group of more than 5.8 million people who were patients from March 2018 through January 2019, well before the pandemic.

People who contracted Covid were 72% more likely to suffer from coronary artery disease, 63% more likely to have a heart attack and 52% more likely to experience a stroke. Overall, those infected with the virus were 55% more likely to suffer a major adverse cardiovascular event, such as heart attack, stroke and death.

“Our data showed an increased risk of heart damage for young people and old people; males and females; Blacks, whites and all races; people with obesity and people without; people with diabetes and those without; people with prior heart disease and no prior heart disease; people with mild Covid infections and those with more severe Covid who needed to be hospitalized for it,” the researchers said.

Warned of the coming storm in December, 2019, the CDC set its rapid response back by at least one month, possibly two. Given the nature of exponential progressions and what we now know about lingering cardiac damage, that may have contributed to a million or more deaths. For reasons that can only be explained as jingoism, aka “exceptionalism,” the agency did not adopt any of the PCR tests already in wide use. It did not issue mask guidelines or temperature checks like those already deployed with success in Singapore, Taiwan, Japan and Korea. The US instead insisted on creating its own test, and once that had been developed, it sent it out to an exceedingly corrupt, greed-driven manufacturing system that was inefficient, expensive, and slow. Result: widespread test failures and then recalls. A long delay.

The CDC created new disasters, again and again. Rather than telling people to mask, CDC told people NOT to mask, worrying about creating a shortage in N95s for critical care workers.

It now appears that early on, its administrators concluded SARS was not containable, and so they made no serious attempt. That is what we call in permaculture a Type One error — you are stuck with it.

“It’s all about optics.”

— Charity Dean, California Public Health Officer, referring to CDC.

As with WHO, CDC’s advice changed week to week. Cloth masks versus N95s. KN95s? KN94s? Fomites: an issue; not an issue? Droplets? Aerosols? Seasonality? Which vaccines? Maybe children don’t need vaccines at all. Do teachers need to be vaccinated before schools can reopen? CDC said yes. The White House said no. CDC said no. In January 2022 CDC issued guidelines saying testing was no longer important. This came right after the Delta wave and in the midst of the Omicron wave, when nothing could be more important than testing. CDC said 4 weeks between shots. In February 2022 that was revised to 8 weeks. Ooops! Other countries had been using 6 to 8 weeks from the beginning. Some monoclonal antibodies — the kind that saved Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Chris Christie — worked for one variant but not for another. Although they were in short supply and expensive to make, State governors demanded they be allowed to use them for the wrong patients at the wrong times. CDC offered no guidance.

 

Ironically, the United States makes the equipment that sequences genomes, and yet it is 30th in the world in sequencing. The price of running one sequence has dropped from thousands of dollars five years ago to one cent or less. US hospitals’ software would not let them purchase these tests even if they were offered for free because they were too cheap for the software to allow! Frustrated, California asked CDC to genetically ID for variants every sample they sent. CDC refused. Without genomic testing, doctors could not know what to prescribe. Nor could counties or states know which variant was dominant and what monoclonal antibodies may or may not work.

“This will go down as a colossal failure of the public health system of this country…. It is a slaughter….”

— William Foege, former CDC Director, letter to CDC Director Robert Redford, Sept 23, 2020.

New York hospitals sent blood to be tested in State labs but doctors were never returned the results, they just went into an anonymized database. It hardly mattered, since life-saving monoclonal antibodies were only available in limited supply and those went to wealthy private hospitals in big cities, leaving rural areas and poor public hospitals with no access. Whether they were the right antibodies for the variant was irrelevant, because without access the poor and rural simply died in larger numbers.

California ordered 100,000 nasal swabs for PCR tests through the Federal strategic inventory and POTUS held a press briefing to congratulate himself for helping a state that had not voted for him. When the swabs arrived they were just useless Q-tips.

At first, Long Covid was discounted: those symptoms were unrelated to the infection, were psychosomatic, or were just short-term side effects. As it became apparent that Long Covid was a thing, scant resources went to cataloging its manifestations or numbers, never mind seeking therapies. That is slowly changing now, as it must. A large percentage of all children hospitalized for Covid — 50% in some US studies, 27% in Italy, 22% in Sweden—have developed Covid lasting more than four months. For many, it could be with them the rest of their lives. We still don’t categorize the wide variety of symptoms and modalities for Long Covid the way we should. This will come back to bite us.

US public health as a system was sacrificed on the altar of greed long ago and the US is still deluded into thinking it can do no wrong and everything foreign is inherently inferior.

In the early days, Nordic countries rushed to protect the most vulnerable in nursing homes, prisons, and institutional settings. Those populations got priority for everything — masks, separation, added caregivers, hospital ICUs, and later the vaccines. In the US these groups died in droves, and so did their attendants, nurses and guards.

Most countries tested to see if people were no longer infectious before releasing them from care or quarantine restrictions. Most countries used rapid antigen testing (30 minute return) every two days starting at Day 5 from onset of symptoms (Day 6 in the UK). Two days negative test result and you are no longer considered infectious. Since the US seldom tests and seldom quarantines, except in overcrowded ICUs, sometimes hastily erected in hallways, parking garages and tents and staffed by inexperienced National Guardsmen, infectious people circulate relatively freely with the uninfected or with the 20–50% unvaccinated population (depending on your Congressional District). It was a formula for exponential acceleration of the pandemic. It continues now. CDC remains mute.

This week The New York Times revealed that CDC withheld critical data on boosters, hospitalizations and wastewater analyses. The CDC isn’t publishing large portions of the Covid data it collects — data that could help front line doctors and State public health officials save lives.

Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster shots. And wastewater surveillance across the nation would spot outbreaks and emerging variants early.

***

Some outside public health experts were stunned to hear that information exists.
“We have been begging for that sort of granularity of data for two years,” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist and part of the team that ran Covid Tracking Project, an independent effort that compiled data on the pandemic till March 2021.

A detailed analysis, she said, “builds public trust, and it paints a much clearer picture of what’s actually going on.”

***

The pediatrics academy has repeatedly asked the C.D.C. for an estimate on the contagiousness of a person infected with the coronavirus five days after symptoms begin — but Dr. Maldonado finally got the answer from an article in The New York Times in December.

“They’ve known this for over a year and a half, right, and they haven’t told us,” she said. “I mean, you can’t find out anything from them.”

***

Wastewater is also a much faster and more reliable barometer of the spread of the virus than the number of cases or positive tests. Well before the nation became aware of the Delta variant, for example, scientists who track wastewater had seen its rise and alerted the C.D.C., Dr. Scarpino said. They did so in early May, just before the agency famously said vaccinated people could take off their masks.

Even now, the agency is relying on a technique that captures the amount of virus, but not the different variants in the mix, said Mariana Matus, chief executive officer of BioBot Analytics, which specializes in wastewater analysis. That will make it difficult for the agency to spot and respond to outbreaks of new variants in a timely manner, she said.

“It gets really exhausting when you see the private sector working faster than the premier public health agency of the world,” Ms. Rivera said.

In 2020 the USFDA set an absurd and unscientific sensitivity standard that greatly delayed test kits from getting to market, setting back the manufacturing infrastructure by months. Despite a publication by (now CDC Director) Dr. Rochelle Walensky saying that even poor sensitivity tests, if widely administered, could prevent the spread of Covid, FDA required rapid antigen tests (which test for infectiousness and take 30 minutes) to be as accurate as slow PCR tests (which test for infection but take 24 to 48 hours for the lab to return). Infection and infectiousness are not the same. If what you are most concerned with is infectiousness, rapid antigen tests don’t need to be as accurate as a 2-day laboratory workup. Somehow this logic eluded the FDA, and so the US went a year without the inexpensive rapid testing widely available in the other overdeveloped, rich countries of the world.

Rapid antigen tests are today used throughout Latin America, Asia and Europe for getting on planes, entering workplaces, crossing borders, attending events, etc. These tests screen people 30 minutes BEFORE they contact others. They should have been widely available in the US nearly 2 years ago, but are only just now being sent out to citizens as home test kits. Even with that, the 500 million manufactured are just a fraction of what will be needed to quench the further spread of Covid, and efficacy against future variants is unpredictable.

The UK has been lauded by the World Health Organization for its broad tracking and sequencing efforts that contributed to global surveillance systems. Only a few countries, including South Africa and Israel, did so as intensively. And yet, last week the UK announced it was getting ready to scrap the weekly Covid-19 survey that costs the Office for National Statistics 400 million pounds ($545 million) a year. “This virus will continue to evolve, which is why we call on countries to continue testing, surveillance and sequencing, the WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in response. “We can’t fight this virus if we don’t know what it’s doing.”

Despite its long-standing inability to test, or trace, or treat against long-term effects, the United States is now under political pressure, like the UK, to fill up its schoolrooms and subways again, open universities and offices without masking, and go back to normal in every way possible. But normal is gone. It is not coming back. People need to adjust to a new normal for zoonotic diseases (and also lab leaks) the way we need to adjust to a new normal for climate.

And then it needs to address the causes for such horrific losses, and why the United States scored worse than so many other countries when a real test of its health care system was administered by Mother Nature.

This series continues next week when we look at part four: Son of Covid.

References
Attia, Zachi I., et al. “Screening for cardiac contractile dysfunction using an artificial intelligence–enabled electrocardiogram.” Nature medicine 25, no. 1 (2019): 70–74.

Gurdasani, D., et al. “Long Covid in children,” The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health (Jan 2022).

 _________________

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, gvix.org a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.
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The Great Pause Week 101: Origins of Covid

"Both WHO and CDC told the world there was nothing to worry about."

This is the second in a multi part series to mark my 100th week of joyful isolation. The first part can be read here.

When the genomic sequencing first came back for SARS-CoV-2, the director of the Wuhan China-CDC Lab rushed to compare that sequence with the virus genotypes in her lab. She let out a whoop of relief. There were no matches. There had been no leak. WHO had to designate it a “novel coronavirus.”

Nonetheless, two years later, every time Senator Rand Paul interrogates Anthony Fauci about NIH “gain of function” research in Wuhan, Adam Baldwin goes on a tweet storm and Fox News plays QAnon memes about Chinese bioweapons.

The Wuhan CDC Lab is part of the PREDICT network, started during the Bush White House, when CDC was still a world-respected agency. The purpose of PREDICT was to genetically sample wild animal populations around the world and to predict what viruses might jump to humans. Some of the funding for the program was zeroed out by presidential aide John Bolton — but not before the “Wuhan Bat Woman,” as she came to be derisively called by QAnon, had sampled and sequenced the genomes of scores of wild bats and filed them in GISAID, the international genomic database.

A letter by leading genomicists published in Nature Medicine March 17, 2020 traced the SARS-CoV-2 genome and concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation.”

Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used. However, the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone. Instead, we propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: (i) natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer; and (ii) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer.

Many published studies have since confirmed that early finding, announced at a time when the global Covid death toll was 4,373. There are so many genetic differences between SARS-CoV-2, as it originally appeared, and all known coronaviruses in GISAID, that it could not possibly have been engineered by any gene-splicing technology known to science today. SARS-CoV-2 could only have arisen by host-to-host mutations. Or perhaps, if you like QAnon theories, through advanced technologies brought to our planet by alien races. As a major shareholder in the vaccine-making pharmaceutical companies since February 2020, Rand Paul is well aware it could not have come from “gain of function” research.

When it saw how fast SARS-CoV-2 spread, China went into lockdown, welding shut the outer doors of apartment buildings. It threw up new, 10,000-bed hospitals in mere days. These tea leaves were read and reported by The New York Times in February, but with an attitude of patrician disdain for authoritarianism rather than any sense of alarm. Both WHO and CDC told the world there was nothing to worry about and mainstream media dutifully parroted that. But as cruise ships continued loading elderly passengers at Chinese ports, wary Singaporians and Taiwanese broke out their facemarks. Legions of contact tracers were recruited across ANZAC.

In Asia, new phone apps greatly simplified the tracing work. Developers produced infrared-scanning wall cameras for airports to read people’s foreheads. In Hong King, police were issued IR headsets to scan crowds for telltale signs of fever. Sniffer dogs were trained to sniff CoV-2 and were surprisingly good at it.

The greatest failing of the human race is its inability to understand the exponential function.

In the US, none of that happened. The exponent simply played out. Strangelovian Cold War narratives informed the discussion as if this were 1952, not 2022. Sinophobes and Rusophobes spoon-fed their paranoia to policymakers and the public. The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal. The Miami Herald. MSNBC. CNN. In the new world of Web3 media, more monetized eyeballs are magnetically drawn to stories about enemies than about friends. Outrage sells. Dopamine has been weaponized.

This is not to say there is not a real conspiracy afoot. The United States health care system is geared entirely towards maximizing shareholder and insurance company profits. It does this by minimizing prevention (the low hanging fruit being improved nutrition and regulation of environmental toxins) and devoting the nation’s best medical resources, talent and research to high-tech, high-profit procedures, often cosmetic, marginally life-extending for the geriatric wealthy. US health care operates almost entirely for the benefit of the richest one-percent — those with the platinum insurance plans. Its meta-function is enslavement of a trusting proletariat into thankless jobs just to beg meager insurance for a sick child. It is an extortion racket, plain and simple. RICO that, Fanny.

Insider Corruption

Any serious history of Big Pharma would have to mention Gilead Sciences, whose chairman Donald Rumsfeld left the company in January 2001 to become United States Secretary of Defense. A year later, Gilead changed its corporate strategy to focus exclusively on antivirals and sold its other research lines for $200 million. In 2004, an Avian flu pandemic scare quadrupled Gilead’s revenue from Tamiflu as more than 60 national governments stockpiled the antiviral drug, later proven to be nearly useless and with dangerous side effects. In 2005, before any of those negatives were known, sales of Tamiflu quadrupled. Rumsfeld’s Gilead stock appreciated $50 million. US pandemic preparedness strategy was to stockpile drugs like Tamiflu and urge other countries to do so as well. Rumsfeld’s Department co-wrote the directive.

Six months after the start of the Covid pandemic, AstraZeneca Plc approached Gilead for a potential merger worth $240 billion, but not until after the wife of Senator Rand Paul had acquired a heftier stake through her husband’s insider knowledge of the Chinese virus, back in February. Gilead avoided up to $10 billion in US taxes by laundering its profits through an Irish subsidiary. For the Rumsfeld heirs, the Pauls, and anyone else with a stake in Gilead, there were never any consequences, just a rain of cash.

Given this sorry state of affairs, the US was primed for disaster even before the banking crash of 2008 wiped out nearly all public health planning programs across all hospitals, universities, and government agencies. Epidemiology was beggared. Virology was beggared. Immunology was beggared. In 2020 the US was about as well prepared for a viral pandemic as the town crier in the Monte Python history of the Black Plague shouting, “Bring out yer dead!”

We continue this postmortem next week, when we look at Testing, Vaccines, and Treatments.

 

---

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger and/ or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, gvix.org a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #ReGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

---

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:

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2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features
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The Great Pause Week 100: Covid in 20/20 Hindsight

 "When you are looking at the spread of an infectious disease it is like looking at a distant star — time-wise, it will always be light years ahead of you."

With soon-to-be one million notches on the handle of his six-shooter, US Health Secretary Xavier Becerra is the deadliest gun in the saloon and has never had to slap leather. The total number of US Covid cases stands at over 79 million — 100 million according to some — and his Hole-in-the-Med gang can lay claim to more than half the 950,000 dead.

We may be at week 100 today, but in the larger scheme of things this week is hardly more remarkable than was week 36 or could be week 290. It is as good a time as any to reflect on what lessons we should have learned by now.

The U.K. plans to scrap self-isolation rules for people in England who test positive for Covid-19, ending the last of the pandemic restrictions that have dominated daily life for the past two years. The dramatic step would move England beyond other major Western countries in relaxing virus curbs.

— England calls time on the pandemic, Bloomberg, Feb 10, 2022

University Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, is besieged with Covid patients packing its intensive-care unit, where rooms have been improvised from plastic sheeting and staff have fallen victim to the disease. The U.S. Army is reinforcing its defenses.

— U.S. troops in a battle of attrition, Bloomberg, Feb 10, 2022

First lesson: As Yogi Berra said in the 1973 National League pennant race, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

It was obvious to me, watching from the relative safety of a remote nature preserve, that repeated declamations of victory were b.s.. For those suffering loss of loved ones, loss of work, loss of pay, loss of insurance, children out of school, wishing it were true sure made it seem true. But it wasn’t. Pretending it was over just gave the virus strength. It gave it new life. It prolonged the pandemic. So did vaccine jingoism, but that’s separate lesson.

By the winter of 1919–1920, Americans were weary of the limitations on daily life. Nearly all of the public health restrictions — such as mask-wearing, social distancing and the closure of schools and churches — had been lifted. A hasty return to public gatherings led to an increase in case numbers. Politicians either blamed people’s carelessness for the reemergence of the virus or downplayed the seriousness of it.

***

But if the fourth wave failed to generate the kinds of headlines and fear of its predecessors, it wasn’t for a lack of lethality. In New York City, more people died in the period from December 1919 to April 1920 than in the first and third waves, according to a research paper on influenza mortality in the city. Detroit, St. Louis and Minneapolis also experienced significant fourth waves, and severe “excess mortality” was reported in many counties in Michigan because of the flu.

— The 1918 flu didn’t end in 1918. Here’s what its third year can teach us
Washington Post, Feb 6, 2022

There are many nations around the world — Denmark, Sweden, U.K. among them — that have now declared the pandemic over and are telling everyone just to go back to their normal lives. Ding Dong, the Wicked Witch is dead. I will watch with interest what comes of that in coming weeks and months. Hopefully I am wrong and it really is over, but when I see reports of the Omicron virus jumping to deer, mutating, and potentially jumping back into humans as a new variant, I doubt this is going to be over soon.

Second lesson: There were many who saw the pandemic coming and foretold with remarkable prescience how it might play out. That our leaders chose to ignore them should concern us.

Some went so far as to give TED Talks, like Bill Gates, or write books, like Laurie Garrett (Betrayal of Trust), David Quammen (Spillover), or John Barry (The Great Influenza). Others described the fiasco in real time, like Michael Lewis (The Premonition) and Nicholas A. Christakis (Apollo’s Arrow).

Michael Lewis (author of The Big Short and Moneyball) describes in The Premonition how a small team of “Wolverines” assembled by the Junior Bush White House created a pandemic plan and then passed that playbook to Obama. The O Administration improved on it, allocated some of the much needed resources, including an office within the White House, and passed the playbook to Cobblepot, forgetting that Grandpa Trump had paid the kid at the next desk to take his son’s tests and the orange-haired boy had never read anything more than a teleprompter his whole life. Cobblepot gave it to John Bolton, who, two years before Covid, fired the whole health team and zero’ed out the part of the federal budget that responds to pandemics.

Robert Redfield became the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on March 26, 2018. He was appointed to the post by Cobblepot after the president’s first appointee, Ob/Gyn Brenda Fitzgerald, resigned in scandal. Before she was head of CDC, Fitzgerald was best known for the time she and Newt Gingrich threw crates of tea into the Chattahoochee River to launch her failed Tea Party bid for Congress. She was booted for slush-trading tobacco and opiod stocks while CDC Director. Historically, directors had been selected by merit by the Secretary of HHS, not the President of the United States (POTUS).

When it became clear to a previous Director how short his successor was falling in doing the job CDC was created to do (ie.: “control and prevent disease”) Director Foege wrote Director Redfield:

“This will go down as a colossal failure of the public health system of this country…. It is a slaughter….”

In 2018 I toured and photographed a fresh market in Dujiangyan, Sichuan — a place no doubt similar to the Wuhan stalls that sold caged pangolins and kangaroo dogs in the winter of 2019. Zoonosis was in the air. David Quammen had warned us. Many had known, or expected, that the pandemic would come. We opened a gigantic door to zoonotic spillovers when we traded the lives of the Yanomami of the Amazon and the orangutans of Borneo for cooking grease.

Third Lesson: To once again re-quote the mathematics professor Albert Bartlett, “the greatest failing of the human race is its inability to understand the exponential function.”

In any viral outbreak of potentially deadly impact, rapid response is key. In The Premonition, soon to be a major motion picture, Michael Lewis’s protagonist Carter Mescher compared the lag between data collection and the need for action to “a weird car that accelerated or braked 15 seconds after you hit the pedal.” When you are looking at the spread of an infectious disease it is like looking at a distant star — time-wise, it will always be light years ahead of you.

At one time, CDC would have provided this rapid response, as it had done with smallpox and ebola. By 2020 it had been neutered. Its name should be changed to Centers for Disease Observation. Rather than controlling viral spread, after March 2020 it saw its role as gathering data by letting the epidemic play out, then analyzing and publishing the data months to years later. Any public health official who called CDC in the early stages of Covid was dutifully instructed, “Do nothing.”

If access to health care is considered a human right, who is considered human enough to have that right?

— Paul Farmer

Fourth Lesson: No one is safe until everyone is safe.

As former CDC Director Foege wrote to CDC Director Redfield:

Fourth, the need for global cooperation, which you clearly understand from your work in Africa, has been squandered by an ”America First” policy that mocks what we learned in Sunday School and leaves us on the outside of the global public health community.

The White House has rejected both science and good management. To depend on someone like Dr. Atlas, who doesn’t understand herd immunity, is simply one of many examples. It was our ability to refocus India from herd immunity that attacking the virus that allowed smallpox eradication to succeed. When Debbie Birx said she wouldn’t believe anything that came out of the CDC, I realized how dysfunctional the [White House Task Force] had become but I still thought the White House would see how disastrous their approach was and finally turn the job over to professionals. Now I know that won’t happen.

Given the miracle of safe and effective vaccines arriving in record time, the Biden administration did not change the “me first” policy to any significant degree. Many more vaccine doses expired in the United States by their age than were given or allowed to be sold to other countries. Because of jingoism, cronyism and American exceptionalism, “universal” vaccination stayed within sea to shining sea. India was prohibited by patents from purchasing the very vaccines it manufactures. Same for México. India responded by producing the Delta variant. Africa was only 5% vaccinated when the Johannesburg airport discovered Omicron (it was seen in New York sewers 5 days earlier). Those waves broke upon American shores. Thinking their vaccines would spare them, unmasked and incautious USAnians were easy prey for the powerful new variants.

We continue this postmortem next week, when we look at Origins of Covid.

___________________

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Substack & Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #Regenerosity

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

***

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

The Great Pause Week 99: Hamster Wheel Futures

"Cultural inertia is what binds us to outdated memes."

A few years ago Rob Hopkins, best known for his work in creating the post-apocalyptic Transition Network, came out with a book, From What Is to What If, lamenting our collective failure of imagination. Why, he asked, have we been so reluctant to break free of millennial memes of hierarchical, hostile, unsustainably extractive and self-destructive social patterns? Why could we not simply imagine something better and then do it? He decided that it was a failure of imagination more than other barriers, and that imagination was like a muscle that either you exercise or it atrophies. As a global culture we tend to relegate creative imagining to the artistic periphery. 

From What Is to What If (Audiobook) - Chelsea Green Publishing
More Reviews and Praise "Day after day, week after week, the climate is changing and biodiversity is fading away. www.chelseagreen.com

“Reproductive futurity” is how Alex Cuicho described the rut that our mainstream finds itself in. 

Under reproductive futurity, we are collectively biased towards non-disruptive and incremental change, and against the radical, queer, or truly revolutionary that threatens the so-called “natural order” of biological sex, family values, and economic growth. So-called realism has trapped us in an interminable present, where even the most daring innovations fail to envision a better and more equitable world — and in fact depend on the failure of our imagination for their successes….

He cites the Amazon business model that optimizes customer experience at the expense of employee welfare or the trials and tribulations of tech pioneers like Elon Musk who try to push the boundaries only to discover that boundaries push back.

In psychology this is called normalcy bias. To some extent it involves optimism bias and mind-over-reality denialism, but as we progress into the Anthropocene more of us will see, and sooner or later have to acknowledge, the likelihood of a very different future. Wildfires, floods, hurricanes and plagues will dim our utopian hopes. The inertia of normalcy will be broken. A new stable paradigm will need to emerge.

Why do we insist on perpetuating the status quo despite the clear impossibility of that? Cuicho quotes the artist Sin Wai Kin (fka Victoria Sin), “How do we envision a future that isn’t a way forward, but a way down?” Actually, Sin, it’s a whole literary genre already, and one that Hopkins has been adding to for more than two decades, since the publication of the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan. You can trace it back at least as far as Howard and Elizabeth Odum’s A Prosperous Way Down, written in 1980, or the Club of Rome report, Limits to Growth, in 1972. Ugo Bardi reminds us of the Roman Senator Lucius Anneaus Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) who said “Increases are of sluggish growth but the way to ruin is rapid.” 

I visited St. Petersburg in the early 1990s, when Russia was experiencing a much harder crash than anything being threatened now in Cold War Deux at the Ukrainian border. People were destitute and desperate but families had dachas on the outskirts of the city that grew four season crops of beets, berries, and barleycorn. There was food security, housing security (the government suspended evictions and dispossessions), and relative personal security (no one had guns except the military and the mafia). What I witnessed was an inertia of possessions, education, professions and culture that carried the population through until stability could be restored. The ballet still danced. People went to work even if they weren’t paid. You could still gather with your friends over vodka and card games at the banya (neighborhood sauna) every Saturday night. Life went on, poorer, but adequate. Something very similar was seen in Cuba during the “Special Period.” Cuba is in its seventh decade of punitive sanctions for the unpardonable sin of overthrowing a Chaplinesque puppet dictator. Haiti is in its third century of sanctions for a similar offense. Sanctions today are more likely to hurt sanctioners than the sanctioned. 

Cultural inertia is what binds us to outdated memes — ideas that have lost their utility and relevance to the present moment: colonialism; the Cold War; “natural” enemies; inferior tribes that we can exploit with moral rectitude. I had a discussion recently with some friends in Russia about homophobia. It began:

Apropos of discussing all sorts of issues, lately I am struck by random slurs against homosexuals and trans people coming from some of my friends, generally tossed out as some agreed sign of decadence in the West. Of course, my Chinese friends have similar views, as do some Latin cultures, like Cuba, and also many African cultures. 

One Russian participant replied:

From Russia it looks like an overall suicidal schizophrenic depressive gender dysphoric biological extinction track that your culture is on. It is part of what the feminist Camille Paglia (author of Sexual Personae) tagged as a telltale sign of culture death. It is most distressing to watch even from far away. Your society is sick and dying. Trying to infect Russia with this sickness may cause it to die sooner. I suggest leaving this subject well alone. Sorry to be so harsh, but what’s at stake is biological survival, which is mighty important. 100% of existing plant and animal species would agree.

I would characterize this as the traditionalist response — gender is settled, it is dipolar, as in plants, and anything else is an aberration — but the response is good because it brought up culture death and the conflict between biological survival and cultural inertia. The difficulty I have is that much of the science underpinning the traditionalist response is outdated. It is a busted meme. Where homosexuality is concerned, anti-gay philosophy somehow missed three decades of advances in evolutionary biology. neuroscience, genetics, and phylogeny. 

By way of example is this from a peer-reviewed journal article in 2009: 

During the intrauterine period the fetal brain develops in the male direction through a direct action of testosterone on the developing nerve cells, or in the female direction through the absence of this hormone surge. In this way, our gender identity (the conviction of belonging to the male or female gender) and sexual orientation are programmed into our brain structures when we are still in the womb. However, since sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place in the first two months of pregnancy and sexual differentiation of the brain starts in the second half of pregnancy, these two processes can be influenced independently, which may result in transsexuality. This also means that in the event of ambiguous sex at birth, the degree of masculinization of the genitals may not reflect the degree of masculinization of the brain.

It seems from what I can find that about 12% of the hormone assignments in the third trimester are not correctly aligned with the genitalia assignments of the first trimester. For unknown reasons this varies greatly by geography and possibly by family line. Many factors may play a role: epigenetics, diet, pharmacological exposure of the mother; environmental toxins that cross the placental barrier, maybe even plastics. Or it could be sampling error. It may also have been different in other centuries. Who knows what was going on in Ancient Greece or Rome?

Let’s accept 12%. That leaves about 88% where the alignment is as would be expected from the physiology of the individual at birth. Within that 12% there also seems to be a gradient of hormonal dissonance. Personally, I would place about 10 different human sexual types along that spectrum. There is no proof that social environment after birth has an effect on gender identity or sexual orientation, but if you are wavering on the sex hormone spectrum, you might be psychologically influenced in one direction or another, I’d assume, based on environment. The spectrum also includes those who may be gender neutral, confused, or ambivalent. 

I have Palestinian and Cuban friends who would be aghast we are even having this discussion. In some cultures the 12% on the spectrum would be at risk of beheading. My Russian friends were for the most part pretty liberal or somewhere in the middle, regarding it with their usual wry humor. 

Like many around the world they look at the US as a country gone nearly crazy. It is a nation that recently elected, and may soon re-elect, a pathological narcissist and head of a multigenerational crime family as its president. Half of its principal legislative body say they do not believe in climate change. A significant fraction of the population believe that angels and/or aliens are living among us and are here to save the world, or at least the US, from whatever kind of jam we have created. Maybe they’re here to save us from a viral plague of LGBTQ.

What I see in the United States, being outside now and looking in, is not an incipient civil war, but the slow, reluctant death of old memes — racism, homophobia, authoritarianism, self-righteousness, exceptionalism. This is not to say that temes that are lining up to replace the old order — AI, AR, crypto, Meta, identity verification — are any better. They bring their own problems. The Great Pause has given us a chance to think about those things. While some people are determined to keep the old ways going — running one way on the hamster wheel — others are racing in the opposite direction, which causes the wheel to stall.

All great social movements in history were led by art movements of one kind of another. The more enlightened countries are giving artists the space they need to create. Suppose that 12 percent emerging from the womb are queer in an artistic way. They are muscularly imaginative. Our future may depend on them.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

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“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

 — Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

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