COVID This Week: August 11, 2023

News Keeps Declaring COVID Over, U.S. Keeps Getting Sick (Part 2)

Took us a while, but we got to finishing Part 2 of our latest "COVID This Week".

It's a barn burner, offering the kind of big picture political critique oft missing from even the most critical summaries of the pandemic response:

"While wages rot away in the face of inflation, price gouging, and declines in unionization, researchers recently reported 1.5 million of the wealthiest Americans socked away $4 trillion dollars in offshore tax havens in 2018 alone. That’s 5% of the $80 trillion total in U.S. wealth. Not only is the surplus value workers generate privatized into owner hands as a matter of capitalist expropriation, but little of that wealth is taxed to cover at least some of the social shortfall that results, including the health damage from a still ongoing pandemic.

"And establishment public health is in the business of defending such a system even unto the deaths and disability of millions of Americans.

"As in many sectors, under the Peter Principle, public health practitioners typically progress only up to the position they fail at. Not a good situation given the health of millions involved. But beyond that there’s something worse: there is a moment in which successful ascension to the top slots in public health must include a security check for loyalty to the bourgeois program and a willingness to sacrifice the very principles of the field of public health in that effort."

It's in this context the episode unpacks former CDC director Rochelle Walensky's exit interview with the Times's David Wallace-Wells.

Part 1 of this two-parter can be found below.