Fetterman posted a message to X on Sunday afternoon, saying he is "experiencing mild symptoms" and is "following the appropriate CDC guidance."

The full posting said, "After a busy week in D.C., I've tested positive for COVID-19 and am experiencing mild symptoms. I'm grateful to be fully vaccinated and will be working from home, following the appropriate CDC guidance."

Good thing everyone in the US has the luxury of working from home or missing work if they're sick, especially if they're sick with COVID. Right?

Anyways, critical support to

And yes, she's working remotely in the meantime. But why would she need to work remotely if she wants to ban masks and because the pandemic is over?

Anyways, sending my thoughts and prayers to the COVID in her body right now.

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.

https://twitter.com/CDCDirector/status/1681042954213904384

As twitter user @wsbgnl notes, the guidance on the CDC's own website literally recommends to mask when traveling.

Why should I wear a mask when traveling if I don’t usually wear one in my community?

• Traveling can bring you in contact with people from many different places where viruses are spreading, including different COVID-19 variants and other viruses.

• Using public transportation and being in transportation hubs such as airports, can involve spending long periods of time in areas that may be crowded or poorly ventilated. This increases your chance of exposure to respiratory diseases.

• Wearing a mask during travel can also help protect others who cannot avoid being in crowded places when they are traveling. Some of these people might be more vulnerable, like babies under 6 months of age, persons over 65 years of age, or those with a weakened immune system.

I like how the implication from that last bullet point is that vulnerable people only exist in a vacuum at crowded places like airports. Wait until the CDC finds out that vulnerable people are everywhere!

And apparently the other two people are also high-ranking employees in the CDC.

Anyways, none of this surprises me, of course, I'm just venting.

Also, new Death Panel podcast episode on the new CDC director: https://soundcloud.com/deathpanel/who-is-mandy-cohen-072723

Wastewater data: https://biobot.io/data/

Notice that it's been going up for the last month. Gee, I sure can't wait for the winter.

Fatigue is among the most common and most disabling of long COVID’s symptoms, and a signature of similar chronic illnesses such as myalgic encephalomyelitis (also known as chronic fatigue syndrome or ME/CFS). But in these diseases, fatigue is so distinct from everyday weariness that most of the people I have talked with were unprepared for how severe, multifaceted, and persistent it can be.

For a start, this fatigue isn’t really a single symptom; it has many faces. It can weigh the body down: Lisa Geiszler likens it to “wearing a lead exoskeleton on a planet with extremely high gravity, while being riddled with severe arthritis.” It can rev the body up: Many fatigued people feel “wired and tired,” paradoxically in fight-or-flight mode despite being utterly depleted. It can be cognitive: Thoughts become sluggish, incoherent, and sometimes painful—like “there’s steel wool stuck in my frontal lobe,” Gwynn Dujardin, a literary historian with ME, told me.

Fatigue turns the most mundane of tasks into an “agonizing cost-benefit analysis,” Misko said. If you do laundry, how long will you need to rest to later make a meal? If you drink water, will you be able to reach the toilet? Only a quarter of long-haulers have symptoms that severely limit their daily activities, but even those with “moderate” cases are profoundly limited. Julia Moore Vogel, a program director at Scripps Research, still works, but washing her hair, she told me, leaves her as exhausted as the long-distance runs she used to do.

Man, fuck anyone who is still downplaying ME/CFS and long COVID fatigue or pretending it doesn't exist.

Post-exertional malaise, or PEM, is the defining trait of ME/CFS and a common feature of long COVID. It is often portrayed as an extreme form of fatigue, but it is more correctly understood as a physiological state in which all existing symptoms burn more fiercely and new ones ignite. Beyond fatigue, people who get PEM might also feel intense radiant pain, an inflammatory burning feeling, or gastrointestinal and cognitive problems: “You feel poisoned, flu-ish, concussed,” Misko said. And where fatigue usually sets in right after exertion, PEM might strike hours or days later, and with disproportionate ferocity. Even gentle physical or mental effort might lay people out for days, weeks, months. Visiting a doctor can precipitate a crash, and so can filling out applications for disability benefits—or sensing bright lights and loud sounds, regulating body temperature on hot days, or coping with stress. And if in fatigue your batteries feel drained, in PEM they’re missing entirely. It’s the annihilation of possibility: Most people experience the desperation of being unable to move only in nightmares, Dujardin told me. “PEM is like that, but much more painful.”

One of the most tragic things too is that most of these people (at least if they live in the US) probably get their disability applications rejected, because we live in a shithole country with an extremely depraved healthcare system.

As the historian Emily K. Abel notes in Sick and Tired: An Intimate History of Fatigue, many studies of everyday fatigue at the turn of the 20th century focused on the weariness of manual laborers, and were done to find ways to make those workers more productive. During this period, fatigue was recast from a physiological limit that employers must work around into a psychological failure that individuals must work against. “Present-day society stigmatizes those who don’t Push through; keep at it; show grit,” Dujardin said, and for the sin of subverting those norms, long-haulers “are not just disbelieved but treated openly with contempt.” Fatigue is “profoundly anti-capitalistic,” Jaime Seltzer, the director of scientific and medical outreach at the advocacy group MEAction, told me.

Energy-limiting illnesses also disproportionately affect women, who have long been portrayed as prone to idleness. Dujardin notes that in Western epics, women such as Circe and Dido were perceived harshly for averting questing heroes such as Odysseus and Aeneas with the temptation of rest. Later, the onset of industrialization turned women instead into emblems of homebound idleness while men labored in public. As shirking work became a moral failure, it also remained a feminine one.

These attitudes were evident in the ways two successive U.S. presidents dealt with COVID. Donald Trump, who always evinced a caricature of masculine strength and chastised rivals for being “low energy,” framed his recovery from the coronavirus as an act of domination. Joe Biden was less bombastic, but he still conspicuously assured the public that he was working through his COVID infection while his administration prioritized policies that got people back to work. Neither man spoke of the possibility of disabling fatigue or the need for rest.

And it's still a damn shame that neither of them died after giving COVID.

Medicine, too, absorbs society’s stigmas around fatigue, even in selecting those who get to join its ranks. Its famously grueling training programs exclude (among others) most people with energy-limiting illnesses, while valorizing the ability to function when severely depleted. This, together with the tendency to psychologize women’s pain, helps to explain why so many long-haulers—even those with medical qualifications, like Misko and Oller—are treated so badly by the professionals they see for care. When Dujardin first sought medical help for her ME/CFS symptoms, the same doctor who had treated her well for a decade suddenly became stiff and suspicious, she told me, reduced all of her detailed descriptions to “tiredness,” and left the room without offering diagnosis or treatment. There is so much cultural pressure to never stop that many people can’t accept that their patients or peers might be biologically forced to do so.

I have a chronically ill friend who says she has been pathologized by doctors about her illness for decades and she thinks all the advice and trauma from that made her worse off. Ugh.

Some COVID long-haulers do recover. But several studies have found that, so far, most don’t fully return to their previous baseline, and many who become severely ill stay that way. This pool of persistently sick people is now mired in the same neglect that has long plagued those who suffer from illnesses such as ME/CFS. Research into such conditions are grossly underfunded, so no cures exist. Very few doctors in the U.S. know how to treat these conditions, and many are nearing retirement, so patients struggle to find care. Long-COVID clinics exist but vary in quality: Some know nothing about other energy-limiting illnesses, and still prescribe potentially harmful and officially discouraged treatments such as exercise. Clinicians who better understand these illnesses know that caution is crucial. When Putrino works with long-haulers to recondition their autonomic nervous system, he always starts as gently as possible to avoid triggering PEM. Such work “isn’t easy and isn’t fast,” he said, and it usually means stabilizing people instead of curing them.

Stability can be life-changing, especially when it involves changes that patients can keep up at home. Over-the-counter supplements such as coenzyme Q10, which is used by mitochondria to generate energy and is depleted in ME/CFS patients, can reduce fatigue. Anti-inflammatory medications such as low-dose naltrexone may have some promise. Sleep hygiene may not cure fatigue, but certainly makes it less debilitating. Dietary changes can help, but the right ones might be counterintuitive: High-fiber foods take more energy to digest, and some long-haulers get PEM episodes after eating meals that seem healthy. And the most important part of this portfolio is “pacing”—a strategy for carefully keeping your activity levels beneath the threshold that causes debilitating crashes.

Pacing is more challenging than it sounds. Practitioners can’t rely on fixed routines; instead, they must learn to gauge their fluctuating energy levels in real time, while becoming acutely aware of their PEM triggers. Some turn to wearable technology such as heart-rate monitors, and more than 30,000 are testing a patient-designed app called Visible to help spot patterns in their illness. Such data are useful, but the difference between rest and PEM might be just 10 or 20 extra heartbeats a minute—a narrow crevice into which long-haulers must squeeze their life. Doing so can be frustrating, because pacing isn’t a recovery tactic; it’s mostly a way of not getting worse, which makes its value harder to appreciate. Its physical benefits come at mental costs: Walks, workouts, socializing, and “all the things I’d do for mental health before were huge energy sinks,” Vogel told me. And without financial stability or social support, many long-haulers must work, parent, and care for themselves even knowing that they’ll suffer later. “It’s impossible not to overdo it, because life is life,” Vogel said.

“Our society is not set up for pacing,” Oller added. Long-haulers must resist the enormous cultural pressure to prove their worth by pushing as hard as they can. They must tolerate being chastised for trying to avert a crash, and being disbelieved if they fail. “One of the most insulting things people can say is ‘Fight your illness,’” Misko said. That would be much easier for her. “It takes so much self-control and strength to do less, to be less, to shrink your life down to one or two small things from which you try to extract joy in order to survive.” For her and many others, rest has become both a medical necessity and a radical act of defiance—one that, in itself, is exhausting.

Anyways I'm sure that continuing to let it rip when we have no cure for long COVID and no vaccine that eliminates/severely reduces transmission will end well and definitely won't disable and kill millions more in these upcoming years.

https://twitter.com/marwilliamson/status/1682173164460326912

Lol not the tweet I expected, but cool I guess

🔮

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre says COVID-19 testing protocols remain in place for anyone meeting with the president. Her comments come after members of the Israeli delegation tested positive. Asked if Israeli President Herzog was tested, Jean-Pierre says, "anybody who meets with the president does indeed get tested."

"COVID mitigations for me, endless infections for thee"

Now, the company's pandemic stances have landed it in hot water again, as a tweet from Dr. Lucky Tran, a molecular biologist who frequently writes about public health issues for The Guardian and other outlets, alleges that In-N-Out is banning its employees from wearing masks. Tran's tweet includes an apparent internal memo from In-N-Out executives stating, "No masks shall be worn in the Store or Support facility unless an Associate has a valid medical note."

The statement goes on to explain that medical notes can only be accepted if the employee has a specific medical condition that requires them to wear a mask and that the note must also state the expected duration of that condition if that can be determined. If employees present such a note, they will be permitted to wear a mask; however, they are required to use N-95 masks provided by the company.

What is the reasoning behind In-N-Out's purported mask ban? According to the memo, the mandate is intended to "emphasize the importance of customer service and the ability to show our Associates' smiles and other facial features." Also of note is the fact that the memo is addressed to employees in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Texas, and Utah. That leaves two states where In-N-Out operates — California and Oregon — that are apparently exempt from the mandate.

I don't need to see someone's smile, I literally don't give a fuck, AHHHHHHHHH

Anyways, I don't know if this has been verified, but I think it's probably legit if the company hasn't come out and denied it. And like, even if someone does get an exception, the medical note must state how long their condition is going to last? Fuck that. Are they gonna be when they learn that some people are chronically ill? And fuck having to wear a mask provided by the company--a company-issued mask isn't necessarily going to fit every employee's face.

I've been worried that banning masks in public spaces, if not criminalizing them (see: dipshit Eric Adam's comments from earlier this year using the pretext of "crime" to crack down on masks) was going to eventually happen, so this might lead other companies to adopt similar policies in short order. Which is just going to exclude medically vulnerable people from society even more.

Can't have people thinking we're still in a pandemic by having vibe-killing employees wearing masks! culture is truly a scourge and needs to be destroyed.