A mere 48 hours after the passage of the horrifying North Carolina mask ban bill, Democrats once again proved themselves eager to close the purported Evilness Gap between themselves and Republicans by floating a mask ban of their own.
Speaking with CNN today, New York Governor Kathy Hochul repeated right-wing talking points about how masks are “frightening” and that if you see someone masked on the subway, “you don’t know if they’re going to be committing a crime”. This false, inciting rhetoric puts people wearing masks at further risk of harassment and harm.
A 2021 Sage Journals study found that racial minorities were already more likely to be targeted when wearing face masks early in the pandemic, with the abstract stating:
results indicated that, compared to White individuals, Black and Asian participants reported experiencing mask-related, race-based social identity threat from both the public and police, with Black individuals particularly concerned about mask-related threat in police interactions. Mediational analyses demonstrated that mask-related social identity threat led to avoidance of police when help was needed at both time points, and decreased face mask usage early in the pandemic for both Black and Asian people.
This reality continues to worsen as Democrats join with Republicans to stigmatize and mock masks, while themselves failing to wear them, even during surges brought on by new variants.
Despite the higher likelihood of harassment, Black and Latinx populations have consistently been more likely than white people to wear masks. This is perhaps less surprising given that Black and Latinx populations are more than twice as likely as white Americans to be uninsured, have worse health outcomes from COVID-19 infection, and are more likely to develop Long COVID. As the ACLU reported in 2020, racialized workers were more likely to be on the frontlines work during COVID shutdowns, and white people had and have far more access to professional class jobs with paid sick leave.
Rest during and after COVID infection helps prevent Long COVID, and professional class people have much greater access to rest than workers in frontline positions. This is perhaps why, when left/liberal figures who continually avoid discussing the equity impacts of COVID make a lighthearted post about how they’re lying around sick with COVID watching TV, they’re often confused to be met with ire. For many people, being COVID positive means losing income for days, week or months, or working straight through it.
And for those who do work through it, the risk of never recovering is higher.
All of these realities put the ongoing pandemic squarely in the center of myriad left priorities; allowing COVID to spread unmitigated is worsening racial inequalities, worsening health inequality, harming workers, worsening homelessness, overloading our already struggling healthcare systems, and disproportionately disabling and killing people who are oppressed along other intersecting identities; people of color, queer people, trans people, women and disabled people.
Yet prominent news outlets that bill themselves as leftist or socialist, like Jacobin, Current Affairs, The Lever and The Intercept remain strangely quiet about unmitigated COVID spread, the crisis of Long COVID, the importance of masking, the need for new clean air standards to bring down transmission, the urgency of airborne infection control in hospitals, and the state’s intensifying targeting of disabled people and those with Long COVID.
Jacobin’s twitter account has not tweeted the word COVID since March, when it promoted a piece about the teachers’ strikes in 2020. In December 2023, it referred to the “lingering wake of COVID’s impact” during the massive JN.1 surge, which ultimately killed tens of thousands of Americans. Jacobin has never tweeted about KP.3, the quickly rising new COVID variant, or the NC mask ban. The last time they tweeted the word “mask” in reference to disease prevention was September 17, 2020. On October 21, 2021, they tweeted “With the job market far from recovered, it seems like the economy is experiencing something like long COVID too,” then never tweeted the words Long COVID again. Since then, millions of Americans have been long-term disabled by a virus they were told was now harmless.
At a time when arguably the most critical policy goal of leftists advocating for COVID mitigation is better indoor air quality, Jacobin has not once tweeted about ventilation or filtration in the context of disease control. It’s unclear whether anyone there is even aware of the movement for clean air being spearheaded by poor people, disabled people, queer and trans people, and parents. It’s unclear whether they are aware of how COVID spreads, how to mitigate it, and the importance of doing so to protect others.
The Lever did some solid COVID reporting until parting ways with reporter Walker Bragman, apparently the only person there who understood how dark money transformed the fight over disease mitigation and elimination into a fight over personal freedoms. Their last tweet about COVID was nearly a year ago, in reference to the Democrats’ purging of the Medicaid rolls. Nothing about the KP variants, nothing about the mask bans, nothing about clean air standards, nothing about hospitals killing disabled people as medical facilities fail to implement airborne infection control.
The Intercept does not make any mention of clean air, ventilation or filtration in the context of COVID, despite it being a basic, obvious and necessary technological fix that would immediately, drastically cut community transmission. Their last mention of COVID is a podcast episode in which Ryan Grim interviews a COVID vaccine-injured gentleman while failing to mention Long COVID. (The COVID vaccine, like all vaccines, carries a risk of side effects. This risk is small compared to the risks associated with COVID infection. I’ve written about how failing to acknowledge post-COVID heart damage is a gift to anti-vaxxers.) Before this May, their most recent discussion of COVID focused on the COVID origins investigation, nearly a year ago.
The Intercept has never once tweeted the words Long COVID, although an estimated 7% of all Americans have reportedly had Long COVID, in this case defined as significant symptoms lasting beyond three months after infection. The “new normal” embraced by the Biden administration ensures that every American will be forcibly infected with COVID every single year. (Flu reinfects only once or twice per decade and does not infect the brain). Despite promoting itself as fearless and adversarial, The Intercept does not think it’s a problem that every citizen, including those without paid days off or health insurance, will be forcibly reinfected each year with a virus that can sicken them for months at a time or permanently disable them.
Alone on this list, Current Affairs did publish a good piece about COVID this year, which you can check out at this link. The article is thorough, looks at the (economically motivated) decision to end COVID isolation, and connects it to a broader program of pandemic normalization under the Biden administration. Citing this article, Current Affairs took umbrage at my tweet thread directed at the above-named outlets for failing to speak out about the North Carolina mask ban, tweeting that critics were “mean”, then going on to joke about COVID and masks before blocking me amidst public backlash.
While this single article is fantastic, the broader COVID denial of the left ecosystem is clear in their other labor and health-focused coverage. Atop their home page right now, in their piece Defend Britain's NHS from Privatization, they note:
As Noam Chomsky observed, the “standard technique” of privatization is: “defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.” In other words, classic disaster capitalism.
They correctly invoke disaster capitalism without mentioning the ongoing disaster largely responsible for an unprecedented surge in illness and demand for healthcare services, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. You simply cannot discuss the NHS crisis honestly while pretending COVID does not exist. The NHS cannot be saved from privatization while its advocates pretend that a public health policy of completely unprecedented viral spread is acceptable. Responsible public health and modern disease mitigation technology are part and parcel of protecting public healthcare.
The political and economic incentives to ignore COVID are obvious for Democrats, but less so for leftists. Sadly, it doesn’t seem like the writers explicitly avoiding mentioning COVID have any reason for doing so other than personally not wanting to participate in mitigation and/or ignorance of the long-term effects and public health toll of the virus.
I’ve written in detail about how unmitigated COVID transmission is drowning healthcare system capacity worldwide. Although COVID isn’t as deadly as some vaccine-preventable diseases, it is alone in its jaw-dropping immune evasiveness. That unrivaled rate of mutation and reinfection is the reason unmitigated transmission is so endlessly disruptive to social function on every level. From schools, currently trying to force sick kids into classrooms to address their absence crisis, to hospitals, to workplaces, nothing is functioning as it did pre-COVID.
The sheer number of infections- over a million a day in the US during the winter peak- means that even with reduced acute mortality in the post-vaccine era, COVID is still by far the deadliest infectious disease in the US.
My most recent piece looked at historical mortality data and found that, even looking only at death certificate deaths (a sure undercount), COVID deaths more than outmatched the deaths that would result from bringing back measles, mumps, whooping cough, diphtheria, and polio. Even picking a year when deaths were unusually high for each virus and adjusting for 2024 population, all deaths from all 5 viruses combined in a vaccine-free world would be 43,079. Last year’s official COVID death toll was 75,603.
That’s deaths. We also have to consider that every COVID infections carries myriad long-term health risks, including heart attack, stroke, diabetes, and new onset autoimmune disease. Pop quiz, you’ve decided to give everyone in your community a virus that increases your risk of heart attack and stroke one or two times each year; what happens next?
From Time Magazine’s piece Getting COVID-19 Multiple Times Is Risky for Your Health:
People who had more than one COVID-19 infection were three times more likely to be hospitalized and twice as likely to die than those who only had one infection. Those with multiple infections were also more vulnerable to other dangerous conditions; they were 3.5 times more likely to develop lung problems, 3 times more likely to have heart conditions, and 1.6 times more likely to have brain changes requiring care than people who had only had COVID-19 once.
In other words, people aren’t becoming less vulnerable as they get reinfected with COVID over and over again; they’re incurring cumulative risks. Most people have now had COVID 3 or 4 times. Do we want to find out what those cumulative health risks look like after 10 infections? How about 20? How about 50? At our current rate of reinfection, today’s children will get to find out what 50 COVID infections does to a human body around age 50.
The data around NHS delays is not difficult to interpret; as Current Affairs reported, the NHS has been undergoing a funding squeeze since 2010. It’s in 2020, when the pandemic hits, that delays go nuclear and never recover; this accords with what we are seeing stateside and globally.
Healthcare systems are simply not equipped to cope with the introduction of a virus which, aside from being deadlier, infects much more easily and frequently than the flu and has no pattern of seasonality. We’re going into a new surge right now, in mid-June, because of the new KP variants, with hospitalizations in Hawaii now surpassing their winter wave peak.
It’s as if we introduced 5 more flus atop of the existing flu season, while failing to mitigate any of them. Meanwhile, hospitals without airborne infection control continue to infect HCWs, worsening shortages and disabling doctors and nurses permanently. The British Medical Association reports:
To find out more about the impact of long covid on the medical profession, the BMA joined forces with LCD4A last year to survey doctors with the condition. Some 603 doctors responded to the survey (though not all of them answered every question), carried out during December 2022 and January 2023.
The results reveal that almost one in five (18%) were no longer able to work. While more than half (57%) worked full time before the onset of their covid illness, that proportion had dropped to one in three (31%). Nearly half (49%) of respondents had lost income because of long covid.
In other words, nearly 1 in 5 doctors who contracted Long COVID were forced to leave their profession. Doctors in the study also reported lack of access to proper PPE. Does continuing to forcibly infect doctors during every COVID wave sound like a sustainable way to run a health system? Does lack of infection control and PPE sound, perhaps, like a workers’ rights issue?
Many on the left refuse to understand what the data is showing: that healthcare is being disrupted by this unmitigated disease spread, that workers are rapidly becoming disabled by unmitigated COVID, that COVID leads to new-onset health problems that can be deadly, and that the vaccine-only strategy failed. Even more concerningly, these elements on the left are generally more privileged, more removed from experiencing the consequences of unmitigated disease, and have more institutional power.
This lack of support for the most marginalized anywhere across the political spectrum has cleared the way for ableists and fascists to continue pressing their “maximum infections” vision for the future of public health. I wrote here about how liberals and leftists have adopted anti-vax and right-wing talking points about public health being a personal choice and illnesses being good for the immune system.
As masks are increasingly stigmatized and criminalized, the arena in which disabled people, people with Long COVID, and people who do not wish to contract and spread COVID can safely appear continues to shrink. Without mask mandates on flights, disabled and immunocompromised people must risk disability and death to travel. Without mask mandates in hospitals, disabled and immunocompromised people avoid medical care until an emergency crisis forces them to risk exposure.
Now, in North Carolina and maybe New York, disabled people fear that even leaving their homes could result in exposure, harassment and violence. Within a day of the NC mask ban, a cancer patient was shouted and sworn at, intentionally coughed on, and told her mask was “illegal”. This type of public confrontation is hardly new to those of us who wear masks, but the explicit support of the state continues to embolden attackers.
The closure of the public arena to people with disabilities should send a chill down the spine of every anti-fascist. This is a massive coup for a state hellbent on disposing of anybody unable to survive a COVID infection, and anybody who goes on to be disabled and harmed by one. It is a great leap forward for the social goals of eugenicists, who demand that disabled people simply “stay home” and consider the concept of public health itself to be a violation of their personal freedoms.
Watching these bans go into place while left-leaning outlets say nothing (or even appear to signal their support by failing to recommend masking or mitigation of any sort) is akin to feeling the walls closing in. Left public figures who fail to speak do not see that they are slashing a gaping hole in our wall of solidarity for fascists to drive right through. At this point, it is inarguable that the state is coming for disabled people. Speak now, because the state that is empowered to dispose of anyone harmed by COVID is surely a state empowered to dispose of you.