SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too) -- “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” (Calgacus, as quoted by Tacitus, Agricola 30-31)"
Wednesday, September 27, 2023
Monday, September 18, 2023
The Battle Against the Automakers Is More Than a Strike, It's Class Warfare | Will Lehman in NEWSWEEK
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https://www.newsweek.com/battle-against-automakers-more-strike-its-class-warfare-opinion-1827866
William Lehman works at Mack Trucks in Macungie, Pennsylvania, and he ran for UAW president in 2022, winning almost 5,000 votes. He is currently suing the U.S. Department of Labor for a rerun of the election over voter suppression.
On Friday, President Biden spoke from the White House about the autoworkers' strike, calling for the car corporations and the United Auto Workers to reach a "win-win" agreement for workers.
"Record profits have not been shared fairly, in my view, with those workers," Biden said. "Workers deserve a fair share of the benefits they helped create for an enterprise."
Biden's remarks raise fundamental questions about the distribution of wealth in the United States. Much more than a contract dispute is involved.
Workers' wages at Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis have declined dramatically over the past 50 years. In 1973, autoworkers received an average hourly wage of $5.54 an hour—more than $38 an hour in today's dollars. If that wage had merely kept up with inflation (setting aside the massive increases in productivity over that time), autoworkers would be making nearly $40 an hour today.
But today temporary workers at GM start at $16.67 and top out at $20, half as much as workers five decades ago. Should temps be lucky enough to be given full-time status, their top pay is capped at just over $32 an hour, which it takes eight long years to reach.
Another comparison: GM CEO Mary Barra received a $28.9 million compensation package in 2022. She made approximately $2.4 million a month, $550,000 a week, $110,000 a day, or an "hourly" rate of nearly $13,800. It would take a temporary worker making the maximum $20 an hour almost three years to make as much as Barra does in a single day.
The difference between the two, however, is that every penny of Barra's pay package is ultimately derived from the value produced by the labor of the working class.
How can Biden's "fair share" be distributed between a corporate executive making $13,894 an hour and a temp making $20 an hour?
The conventional argument made by champions of the "free market" system is that executives are paid for their "performance," by which is meant their ability to deliver for Wall Street. They make millions because the shareholders receive billions.
And how much profit have the companies made? In 2022, GM, Ford, and Stellantis made a combined $77 billion in gross profit.
If that $77 billion were to be distributed among all 150,000 Big Three autoworkers in the US, each worker would receive a bonus of roughly $513,333.
Of course, GM, Stellantis, and Ford employ many tens of thousands more workers around the world, and their labor is also exploited to produce the billions which accrue to the shareholders. There are also the vast supply chains, workers throughout the auto parts plants, who are integral to the productive process.
The president claims that a "win-win" contract for workers and the corporate owners can be reached. But Biden, the veteran capitalist politician, knows that's impossible. What the president is trying to cover up is that workers and the corporate oligarchy have fundamentally irreconcilable class interests. There is no "fair share" in a set-up in which investors get billions, executives get millions, and workers get pennies.
There is an approaching day of reckoning with social realities that have long been concealed and covered up. Workers are increasingly aware of the vastly unequal society in which they live and are looking for a way to change it. That's why when I ran as a socialist in the UAW's 2022 elections, I received 5,000 votes from autoworkers, despite efforts by the union apparatus to suppress the vote, resulting in a turnout of just 9 percent.
UAW President Shawn Fain has taken to denouncing "corporate greed" and the "billionaire class." In reality, Fain and the union bureaucracy he oversees serve an essential function on behalf of the corporations. They block or limit strikes (as they are currently doing, isolating a walkout at the Big Three to just three plants) and enforce the demands of management, imposing one sellout, concessionary contract after the other for the past 45 years. For these services, the bureaucrats receive their own payouts, including six-figure salaries that put them in the top 5 percent of income earners, an affluent upper-middle class.
The White House and the UAW leadership have been in constant communication for months, closely coordinating their strategy and talking points, with both Biden and Fain repeating the same stock phrases about a "fair share" ad nauseum.
Trump, the fascist demagogue, is seeking to capture growing discontent among workers, particularly over the looming jobs bloodbath related to electric vehicles. To stop workers from directing their anger at the corporations, he scapegoats workers in Mexico and China for layoffs and plant closures.
What Biden, Trump, and Fain all fear is that inequality is driving the working class in the United States towards socialist politics—that is, a political perspective based upon workers' independent class interests.
Capitalism is showing masses of workers that it is at war with their basic needs. Inflation, the unrestrained transmission of COVID-19, deadly working conditions, the climate crisis, and the threat of nuclear world war are confronting workers all over the world. More and more workers are seeing the need to overturn this entire system and bring about one in which social need, not private profit, determine how society's resources are organized.
Wednesday, September 13, 2023
Monday, September 11, 2023
On the 50th Anniversary of the Chilean Coup: Lessons of a Revolution Betrayed
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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/09/11/ivoh-s11.html
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the infamous CIA-backed military coup in Chile led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, which established one of the most brutal regimes of the second half of the 20th century.
In the early morning hours of September 11, 1973, the three branches of the Chilean armed forces and the military police issued a radio announcement that they had taken control of the country and demanded the resignation of elected President Salvador Allende of the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) coalition government.
The Army and Air Force laid siege to the La Moneda presidential palace, bombarding it with fighter jets and tanks. Cornered and refusing the coup leaders’ demand that he resign, Allende died at La Moneda, according to investigations from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
On the same day, the military rounded up tens of thousands of workers and youth, herding them into concentration camps where they were interrogated, tortured and in many cases murdered. The famous musician Victor Jara described the terror he experienced with thousands of others during his last days in the Estadio Chile, where he was sadistically tortured and murdered on September 16:
How much humanity exposed to hunger, cold, panic, pain, moral pressure, terror, insanity?
Six of us were lost as if into starry space.
One dead, another beaten as I never could have believed a human being could be beaten.
The other four wanted to end their terror: one jumped into nothingness,
another beating his head against a wall, but all with the fixed look of death.
What horror the face of Fascism creates!
A vast operation orchestrated by the CIA and US military intelligence was launched to smash all workers and peasant organizations, and to hunt down, detain, torture and kill their leaders and militant rank-and-file workers, who were abandoned by the Allende government, without weapons, training or political leadership to resist.
The Pinochet regime, in the following months and years, sold off nearly two-thirds of Chile’s key copper industry nationalized under Allende and his predecessor, privatized sections of banking, the telephone company, metalworks and other companies placed under state control by Allende, returned factories and land taken by workers to private owners, privatized water, pensions, healthcare, education, transportation, utilities, and other sectors. Taxes and regulations were cut to the bone to turn the country into a playground for the emerging transnational corporations and the local oligarchy. The regime followed the instructions of the “free market” economist Milton Friedman and the so-called “Chicago boys”, Friedman-trained acolytes from the University of Chicago who were sent to Chile to oversee the wave of privatizations and brutal attacks on the conditions of the working class.
The fascist terror in Chile lasted for two long decades. Thousands of political opponents were killed or “disappeared” by the Pinochet regime, and around 30,000 tortured, according to official figures. The coup in Chile also had profound consequences for the whole Latin America.
The Chilean military's rise to power followed a series of coups sponsored by US imperialism, including in Brazil in 1964, Bolivia in 1971 and Uruguay earlier in 1973. The Brazilian military regime, recognized by the Nixon administration as an instrument for US operations, worked systematically to prepare the Chilean military to overthrow Allende.
After the coup in Chile, this counter-revolutionary network coordinated by the CIA in South America was consolidated under what was dubbed Operation Condor. It systematically spread repression, torture and political assassinations across the region and facilitated new coups, most notably the rise of the fascist military regime in Argentina in 1976.
Fifty years after Chile’s horrific September 11, its political relevance is becoming ever more urgent. The specter of dictatorship and military intervention in the politics of Latin America, after a brief cycle of civilian regimes over the last 30 years, haunts the entire region once again.
US imperialism served as the principal patron of the Latin American dictatorships. It remains a central player in the region. Under conditions in which the US ruling class is hurtling toward a new world war, it is openly fighting to secure its geo-strategic hegemony in 'its own backyard,” cultivating relations with the region’s military commands, independently of its elected governments.
In their tributes to the anniversary of the 1973 coup in Chile, the bourgeois nationalist representatives of the “Pink Tide,” such as Chilean President Gabriel Boric, as well as the petty bourgeois pseudo-left, are issuing appeals for new “national pacts” and for the restoration of a popular facade for the region’s bankrupt capitalist regimes. This political path can lead only to a repetition of Pinochet-style coups on an even more horrific scale.
The new generation of workers and youth who are entering the path of revolutionary struggle against capitalism must urgently assimilate the lessons of the Chilean coup that the pseudo-left is working to conceal.
The violence utilized by the Chilean fascist junta demonstrated the ruthlessness with which the ruling class is prepared to employ to defend its power.
The Chilean revolution betrayed
But what took place in 1973 in Chile was not only a bloody US-backed military coup that overthrew an elected government.
There was a powerful proletarian revolutionary upsurge under way in Chile, whose defeat under the jackboots of the military was by no means inevitable. The coming to power of a fascist-military junta was the product of the failure of the working class to seize political power when it was able to, as a result of the criminal betrayals of its Stalinist and Social Democratic leaderships, with the indispensable aid of the Pabloite renegades from Trotskyism.
Allende’s UP coalition, formed by the Socialists and Stalinists together with “left” Christian Democrats and Radicals, was elected in 1970 amid a massive upsurge of working class and peasant struggles. Answering the historical conditions of misery and oppression by imperialism and a protracted inflationary crisis, those struggles took radicalized forms such as factory occupations and land expropriations.
As it took office, the UP sought at all costs to discipline the insurrectionary movement of the workers and peasants and subordinate it to the bourgeois state. Calling it the “Chilean road to socialism,” Allende insisted that, based upon its century of “parliamentary democracy”, Chile was an exception to the laws of history established by Marx and Engels and given flesh and blood in the course of the 1917 Revolution in Russia. In Chile, he claimed, the revolutionary process would follow a unique course, growing within the structures of the old state. He insisted that the Armed Forces and the military police in Chile were the “people in uniform” and a “granite foundation of the revolutionary process”, “just as much” as the “workers and their unions”.
While the UP worked to appease the working class by carrying out limited nationalizations and social reforms, the Chilean bourgeoisie and the imperialists gained time to prepare the overthrow of the government and the crushing of the working class. The road to September 11, 1973 was paved with the ceaseless attacks on the working class and several military incursions and direct coup attempts.
In October1972, the ruling class, working in direct collaboration with the Nixon administration and the CIA, attempted to strangle the country economically by promoting a massive employers’ lockout. Workers responded by establishing numerous coordinadores, cordones industriales and other local networks of rank-and-file industrial, neighborhood and self-defense organs to maintain production and distribution of essential goods and oppose fascist provocateurs. Demands to place the whole of the economy and political power directly in workers’ hands became widespread.
In face of the independent development of the workers’ movement, the UP government acted to disarm the working class and secure bourgeois rule in Chile. Allende brought the military into his cabinet, which was also joined by the trade union leaders of the CUT dominated by the Stalinists and Socialists. The government enforced an Arms Control Act to take arms away from workers and peasants, freed fascist agitators, and returned numerous occupied factories to their previous owners.
In June 1973, a rebel wing of the Army made a failed coup attempt by sending a column of tanks against the presidential palace, an episode which became known as the Tanquetazo. The UP’s response was to deepen its concessions, naming Pinochet commander-in-chief of the Army and bringing him into Allende’s cabinet.
Only the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) fought consistently to expose the role played by Allende’s government and his apologists in disarming the working class in the face of the clear danger of a military coup organized by US imperialism.
Drawing the lessons in the days immediately after the coup, the ICFI declared in a statement issued on September 18, 1973:
“Defend your democratic rights not through Popular Fronts and parliament, but through the overthrow of the capitalist state and the establishment of workers’ power. Place no confidence in Stalinism, social democracy, centrism, revisionism or the liberal bourgeoisie, but build a revolutionary party of the Fourth International whose program will be the revolution in permanence.”
While it was the Stalinists and Social Democrats who directly led the Chilean workers to defeat, the Pabloite revisionists played a crucial role in enabling these crisis-ridden bureaucratic leaderships to maintain their domination over the working masses.
The Chilean Partido Obrero Revolucionario (Workers Revolutionary Party - POR) was among the organizations that betrayed Trotskyism, joining the American Socialist Workers Party in breaking with the ICFI and reuniting with the Pabloites. Praising the middle class forces “liberated by the Cuban Revolution” as “the ones who will unleash the revolution in each country” of Latin America, the POR immediately dissolved itself and joined the Castroites and Maoists to form the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left Movement-MIR) in 1965.
The MIR played a fundamental role in the disruption of the Chilean revolution, standing in the way of the building of a genuine revolutionary party in the working class. As the conflict between the Chilean working class and the UP’s popular front developed, many workers breaking from Social Democracy and Stalinism came to the MIR, only to be reoriented to “putting pressure” on the government to realize their demands.
The fundamental lesson of the Chilean defeat was that the working class was willing and able to have taken political power, but it lacked the decisive element of a revolutionary leadership, a party based upon Trotskyism and the assimilation of the bitter lessons of the 20th century.
In the initial years of the second decade of the 21st century, which have witnessed the outbreak of the greatest crisis in the history of world capitalism, there is no question that the working class is once again entering upon the path of revolutionary struggles. The globalization of production, the massive growth of the working class worldwide and the powerful developments in technology and communications have created highly favorable conditions for the construction of international socialism.
But to wage successful struggles for power, workers in every country must assimilate the lessons that were written in blood by the heroic Chilean proletariat half a century ago. Above all, this means building in every country sections of the world party of socialist revolution, the International Committee of the Fourth International.
Friday, September 08, 2023
Hospitals Are Killing Patients Because They Don't Feel Like Soing Infection Control--Julia Doubleday
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The Gauntlet
JULIA DOUBLEDAY
AUG 23, 2023
We now know COVID is fully airborne. We also know how to control airborne disease. So why are vulnerable people still dying of hospital-acquired COVID?
People who have gone “back to normal” (ignore the existence of COVID-19) often justify their decision by pointing to their own health status as “not high risk”. Implicit in this statement is the existence of a high-risk group of people who should still be taking COVID precautions. Also implicit is the abandonment of collective care and public health, since the “back to normal” crowd places the burden of COVID precaution on disabled, immunocompromised and vulnerable people alone.
For the most part, high risk groups indeed shoulder this burden alone. They are no longer safe in public and many limit their time in critical spaces like grocery stores and pharmacies; forget going to concerts or other “inessential” activities. Millions of Long COVID patients in particular, all too aware of what a single COVID infection can do, have to expend inordinate time, energy, and money simply to continue existing in a society hellbent on infecting them again and again and again. But you might guess that healthcare settings- specifically designed to accommodate the sick and injured- are still a safe haven for vulnerable groups.
Guess again! As COVID continues to cycle through new variants and surges, hospitals are stripping away even the inadequate infection control measures they implemented at the beginning of the pandemic. Come in for heart surgery, leave with a heart-damaging virus. What a business model!
As of early 2021, it was scientifically established beyond any doubt that COVID, like TB, is a fully airborne virus. This means that it spreads and can hang in the air like smoke; it means that contrary to early public health instructions, you can indeed become infected at distances greater than six feet, and that unsealed masks like the blue surgical ones often seen in hospitals are inadequate to prevent infection. (To be clear, surgicals are far better than nothing; they are simply not the proper type of mask to best prevent infection with a fully airborne disease. For that, you need a mask that forms a seal around your nose and mouth.)
The pandemic might have been controlled in early 2020 if the WHO had defaulted to the precautionary principle and acted as if COVID-19 could be airborne. Instead they confidently announced that COVID was droplet spread- as in, spread via coughs and sneezes- and discouraged people from proper mask wearing. Their incorrect guidance also trained people to adopt measures like social distancing and hand washing, which are inadequate to control COVID, yet are still mentioned in public health guidance to this day. Even some healthcare workers remain under the impression that surgical masks are a proper tool for prevention of COVID spread, a reality that can be observed by stepping into any doctor’s office.
You might assume that the WHO had a very good reason to announce that COVID was droplet spread in 2020; I also made that incorrect assumption. In truth, the WHO and other bodies made a guess about the way COVID spread based on decades of bad science, as is fully explored in this fascinating paper, “What were the historical reasons for the resistance to recognizing airborne transmission during the COVID-19 pandemic?” I encourage you to read the entire thing, but essentially, the health establishment did not like to be challenged on something it had long considered conventional wisdom (most respiratory viruses are droplet spread), and those who dismissed those challenges additionally did not understand physics very well.
The WHO’s announcement and subsequent bad public health advice should be a major scandal, not least because there was never any solid evidence demonstrating droplet spread of COVID-19. Professor Jose-Luis Jimenez, an aerosol expert and an author on the above linked paper, goes further and notes that “[Droplet transmission] has NEVER been demonstrated directly for any disease in entire history of medicine.” The lessons of COVID could revolutionize infectious disease control, if the medical establishment would learn them. Instead, two and a half years after a watershed discovery, the medical establishment is still struggling with the game-changing revelation that most diseases thought to be “droplet-spread,” like colds and flus, are in fact fully airborne.
Infection control is a primary duty of hospitals. If you’re like me, meaning a human being with a brain and heart, you probably think allowing the leading cause of infectious disease death in the US to spread freely in hospitals is both immoral and incomprehensible. But of course, our media always sees two sides to every story. For example, we have the incredibly titled Washington Post piece, “Masks come off in the last refuge for mandates: The doctor’s office”. I want to take a moment to really appreciate the amount of bias packed into this short title. It’s not “Masks come off in the place really sick people are forced to go,” it’s not “Masks come off as patients die,” it’s not “Masks come off as disabled people avoid care.” No. It’s “Masks come off in the last refuge for mandates.” The last refuge for mandates! The hospital could more accurately be called “the last refuge for people who might die of COVID,” but no, the subject being protected by masking in hospitals was the scary right-wing buzzword mandates. Wow! Another win for freedom.
In this article about the defeat of the horrible mandates, the victims, sorry I mean patients, are framed as having one perspective about whether their doctors should purposely infect them with diseases, while the lovely professionals who simply “don’t wanna” are framed as having an equally valid point of view.
Disabled, sick, immunocompromised and vulnerable people seeking care at a hospital, have the right not to be exposed to a virus that has killed 1.1 million Americans in 3.5 years. They have the right to seek care without having to fear that their care team will quite literally kill them with a preventable illness. Practitioners, on the other hand, have no right to compare the irritation of having to wear a mask at work with the moral injury of infecting vulnerable people who then go on to die at high rates.
No one has the right to compare the inconvenience of masks with the pain of parents begging their 6-year-old child’s oncology care team to stop forcibly exposing their vulnerable daughter during hospital visits. If you are unaware, cancer patients undergoing treatment are often severely immunocompromised. Even prior to the pandemic, people did their best not to expose cancer patients to milder diseases like flus and colds. The family of the 6-year-old is considering moving to another state- if they can find one that still cares about not giving high-risk kindergarteners deadly viruses for the crime of getting cancer treatment.
While the US attempts to bury data around hospital acquired COVID infections, we fortunately have access to statistics from other parts of the world which haven’t quite reached our level of Negligent Patient Murder Conspiracy. A study in BC found that as of November 2021, 1,619 patients were infected, and 274 patients died. A rate of 16.9%. A study looking at all of the hospital acquired COVID within the NHS system found at least 69,377 cases and 14,047 deaths- a staggering rate of 20.2%. Let’s take a look at data collected only after the availability of vaccines- in 2022. Victoria Health Authority data from Australia found that that year, over 3,000 patients acquired COVID in the hospital in the province, and at least 344- just over 10%- died of their infections.
1 in 5. 1 in 10. Would you take those odds as a vulnerable patient in need of treatment?
Of course, looking only at deaths doesn’t incorporate the other negative outcomes of COVID infection, including Long COVID, new onset health problems, delayed recovery, lost income, higher medical bills, and poorer prognosis. Why should patients seeking care have to risk any or all of the above?
I can’t believe I have to say this, but infection control is not something that can happen part time, in some cases, or only during surges. As with gloves for bloodborne or hand washing for fomite transmission, protocols for airborne infection control are a set of practices implemented permanently and consistently to protect patients and healthcare workers alike. We don’t stop hand washing because norovirus cases are down. We don’t stop wearing gloves because HIV cases are down. As a doctor, if you’re arguing that you should be able to expose patients to COVID because infection control annoys you, you should not be a doctor. Find a new career. I bet you’d love denying insurance claims. I bet you’d be a natural.
Making this picture even more hair-tearingly frustrating for disabled people avoiding healthcare settings is that the counter-argument for proper airborne infection control really is nothing beyond “don’t wanna.” There is no logical argument for allowing the spread of COVID-19 in healthcare settings. There is no scientific debate about the ways in which COVID is spreading. There is no risk analysis which shows that cancer patients or people who’ve just had heart attacks should consider a COVID infection to be no big deal. There is literally no excuse for this bizarre, unscientific mistreatment of patients other than gross incompetence, institutional negligence, and systemic ableism.
I should note that in the weeks and months since I have been made aware of and worked on this issue, I have met dozens of wonderful healthcare workers who are appalled by this medieval treatment and stand in solidarity with the many patients now avoiding care. Doctors, nurses, surgeons, researchers, aerosol experts and more are on the frontlines arguing against continued violation of patient and worker rights in the form of forcible exposure. While some healthcare workers are certainly sneering at infection prevention, many others are well aware that their profession puts them at high risk for long COVID, and that even spikes in short-term illness translate to absences and staff disruptions in an industry that was already suffering prior to the pandemic. A study in Brazil found the rate of Long COVID following infection among healthcare workers to be a shocking 27%. In this 2022 article, Infection Control Today notes that Long COVID is exacerbating worker shortages in all industries, but particularly healthcare.
A recent survey from the British Medical Association found that, among doctors who contracted Long COVID, about one in five were no longer able to work due to ill health, and nearly half reported lost income. Three quarters of those surveyed attributed their infection to the workplace; the massive labor rights issues at play here have been largely ignored by most unions, with the notable exception of NNU. The nurses’ union is currently organizing to push the CDC and its infection control advisory body, HICPAC, to fully acknowledge airborne transmission as they consider loosening guidelines even further.
I had the dubious honor of attending a HICPAC meeting yesterday, where after two hours of discussion that somehow evaded the elephant in the room, public commenters were finally given an opportunity to point it out. While none of the infection control experts had mentioned either COVID or aerosol transmission, every single commenter brought up both. Armed with studies, personal experiences, and common sense, commenters pointed out the obvious as the panel squirmed. COVID is airborne. So where is the airborne infection control? Mere hours after the meeting concluded, the CDC removed access to a publicly-available recording of the session.
The reluctance to adopt proper infection control in hospitals ultimately stems, not from employees, but from the financial interests of the hospitals themselves. Proper airborne infection control isn’t limited to high-quality masks; you also need things like testing upon entry, space for isolation of positive cases and negative pressure rooms, improved indoor air quality and CO2 monitoring, and HEPA filtration. You’d need to test your staff consistently and give them paid leave when positive. All of that represents a large and costly investment; and our for-profit medical system is hardly known for its generosity nor its value for human lives.
As to the bewildering reality of practitioners who chose not to mask in their pathogen-laden workplace and continue to downplay the dangers of the virus, I would posit a psychological explanation. Since 2021, this country has been in the throes of a post-pandemic delusion that continues to disable and kill millions as COVID spreads and evolves. President Joe Biden declared the pandemic “over,” and article after article after article informed us that continual reinfection was just fine for our health. As a result, most doctors, like most other people, went “back to normal.” They sent their kids to school. They visited their parents. They traveled. And, relevantly, they watched as their loved ones were infected 2, 3, 4 or 5 times, likely on their advice and with their blessing. They are therefore, incredibly, personally, terrifyingly, invested in the hope that COVID is actually a cold.
I don’t even know how to touch on the creepy “but we need to see smiles” thing, which is better evidence of some sort of psycholgical denial at play than I could possibly invent. Patients in hospitals don’t need to see smiles to get proper medical care, obviously. They need infection control measures that prevent further illness. Is this a real argument?
Historically, doctors and the medical establishment are slow to adopt new infection control measures. If you’ve spent some time reading about the ongoing reluctance of medical bodies to acknowledge fully airborne transmission, you’re probably familiar with the story of Ignaz Semmelweis by now. An OB-GYN who observed a significant reduction in mortality when he washed his hands, he attempted to introduce hand washing to other doctors as an infection control measure. He was met with mockery and rejection by the medical community, ultimately had a nervous breakdown, and died in a mental institution. The “Semmelweis Reflex,” a phenomenon where people reflexively reject new information that would contradict their prior beliefs, is named for him.
I would characterize what is happening in hospitals- which, to put it plainly, is the murder of vulnerable people for convenience- as the point where the “back to normal” delusion collides with the inconvenient reality that vulnerable people exist in society. In any other context, it’s easy to imagine that sick, disabled and immunocompromised people can simply remove themselves from danger, or properly mask themselves for short periods of time. In the hospital setting, we have to choose. Either COVID is not very dangerous, or we’ve been purposely exposing our friends, family, loved ones and communities to a disease that disables and kills. The mental burden of the latter is impossible to accept; so some working in the hospital system default to the former. Sad though it may be, I do not believe patients should have to cosplay 2019 for their practitioner’s mental health.
Airborne infection control is not new. TB clinics implement it; nurses and doctors in TB clinics do not contract TB. Hospitals are refusing to implement COVID infection control because of the costs; many practitioners are going along because it’s hard to understand how “back to normal” could logically exist side-by-side with a healthcare system employing such stringent controls. If COVID is bad for sick people, might it be bad for everyone? If hospitals have to expend such resources to control infections, maybe schools should be doing so. If schools are doing it, why not workplaces? Or public transit? It’s almost like controlling infections in hospitals would challenge the comforting narrative that constant COVID reinfection is just dandy for your health. So we pretend it’s 2019. We pretend COVID is a cold. And our collective fantasy of “normality” continues to sicken and kill those who seek care.
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