Oops

I don't even know how to talk about this shit.

Somebody hacks Credit Suisse and now everybody knows a secret that everybody's known for-fucking-ever?

And then the bank denies it all.

I'm tellin' ya - hang a few of these assholes by their nut sacks from a lamp post in downtown Zurich, and watch some of our bigger problems disappear.

Reuters:

Credit Suisse on the defensive after dirty money data leak

Credit Suisse (CSGN.S) was plunged into a dirty money scandal on Monday after media outlets reported the Swiss bank had managed accounts for human rights abusers, fraudsters and businessmen who had been placed under sanctions.

One person leaked information on the accounts, which were held in decades ranging from the 1940s to 2010s, to Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung. The German daily then shared it with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and 46 other news organisations including the New York Times, Britain's Guardian and France's Le Monde.

The Panama Papers-style investigations were published on Sunday and come as Credit Suisse, which denies any wrongdoing, tries to shake off a series of risk-management scandals and a 1.6 billion Swiss franc ($1.75 billion) loss in 2021 that has pummelled its stock. read more

The New York Times said the leaked data covered more than 18,000 accounts collectively holding more than $100 billion.

The revelations also turned the spotlight on Switzerland only a little more than three years after it ditched, under U.S. pressure, a centuries-old culture of secrecy that had made the Alpine state a global no-questions-asked vault for the world’s rich.

"For CS, even if the allegations are unfounded, this raises questions about its business practices in wealth management and should tie up management having to spend time fighting fires instead of moving forward," RBC analysts said.

Shares in Credit Suisse, which fell by almost a quarter last year, were almost 3% lower by mid-afternoon.

"Credit Suisse strongly rejects the allegations and insinuations about the bank's purported business practices," the bank said in a statement issued on Sunday night in response to the consortium's reports.

Switzerland's financial watchdog, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) which in 2018 rapped Credit Suisse for deficiencies in fighting money laundering, said it was in contact with the bank about the matter.

"Compliance with money laundering regulations has been a focus of our supervisory activities for years now," a FINMA spokesperson said.

After a call from members of the European Parliament to review Switzerland's banking practices and perhaps include the country in the EU's dirty-money blacklist, the finance ministry's State Secretariat for International Finance said in an emailed statement that the country meets "all international standards on the exchange of information in tax matters and on fighting against money laundering, terrorist financing and corruption". read more

It added that Switzerland was now participating in the automatic exchange of information on account data with more than 100 countries.

Credit Suisse described the issue as "predominantly historical", adding that information had been taken out of context.

The bank said it had received numerous inquiries from the consortium in the past three weeks and reviewed many of the accounts.

"Approximately 90% of the reviewed accounts are today closed or were in the process of closure prior to receipt of the press inquiries, of which over 60% were closed before 2015," it said.

The bank said that it was satisfied with its checks on the remaining accounts.

"The Swiss financial centre has no interest in money of dubious origin. It attaches the greatest importance to the maintenance of its reputation and integrity," the Swiss Bankers Association said.

COVID-19 Update

The mess in Ukraine is taking all the air out of everything else, so it's a very light news day today on the COVID front.

The good news is that the trends are still heading in the right direction, even though vaccinations have flattened out.

Better news is that the weekend lull is back pretty strong - although it could be due to the long holiday weekend.  But there's some reason to think we won't hit that One Million Dead Americans mark until mid-Summer or later.

What happens with the reported numbers over the next coupla weeks will, of course, tell a more complete story.

🤞🏻

Black American History #21

Dr Clint Black - Crash Course - Plessy v Ferguson and Segregation

COVID-19 Update

WaPo:

Opinion: After the pandemic, long covid may unleash a tidal wave of health troubles

Slowly, researchers are uncovering the face of long covid-19, and it is not a happy one. In two years of the pandemic, millions of people survived the infection but have experienced debilitating symptoms lingering for months. While SARS-CoV-2 is a respiratory pathogen, the research is showing it can trigger disorders in other organs and systems of the body. Long covid is neither a picnic nor a fantasy.

No one knows the true scope. An examination of 57 studies around the world comprising 250,351 people, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in October, showed that covid survivors suffered both short- and long-term difficulties. At six months after diagnosis or hospital discharge, more than half — 54 percent — were still struggling with at least one symptom. The American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation runs a model based on the assumption that 30 percent of the 77 million people in the United States who survived covid have had some kind of Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection, or PASC. Even if the total is just 10 percent, that’s still 7.7 million people.

What are the maladies? In one large online survey last year, covering 3,762 people in 56 countries and published in eClinical Medicine, the most common symptoms reported were fatigue, malaise after exertion and cognitive problems, or “brain fog.” Many also said they suffered insomnia and other sleep problems, heart palpitations and rapid heartbeat, muscle aches and joint pain, shortness of breath, and dizziness and vertigo. In other research, covid survivors have been found to suffer heart disease and other serious ailments, such as stroke, months after they were first infected.

In an article published by Science recently, authors Serena Spudich and Avindra Nath noted that the early thinking was the virus may have entered the central nervous system of those suffering covid-related neurological troubles. But they said analysis of cerebrospinal fluid, which flows in and around the hollow spaces of the brain and spinal cord, taken from living patients suffering neuropsychiatric symptoms, has failed to find traces of the virus RNA. Rather, they said, it appears the primary driver of neurological disease in these patients is impairment of the immune system, which leads to cascading other effects. Another study announced recently suggested that long covid could be due to damage to the vagus nerve, which extends from the brain down into the torso and into the heart, lungs and intestines as well as several muscles, including those involved in swallowing.

Just as important in weighing the prolonged impact of the pandemic are the mental health costs of long covid. Long-haulers struggle to overcome loss of employment, anxiety and depression. These ailments must not be stigmatized or ignored.

The pandemic will almost certainly leave in its wake millions of people with lasting symptoms and illness. Judging by the preliminary estimates, this poses an enormous future challenge for health care everywhere. There’s no time to waste researching the causes and damage of long covid, and preparing to treat it in all its manifestations.

It's The Humanity, Stupid

The money term: Surplus Humans

Over the next 20 years or so, we'll be making decisions on whether or not most people are even necessary.

And from what we've seen recently - the amorality of social media's use of algorithms - it does not bode well to leave those decisions to lizards like Mark Zuckerberg.

Aeon:

Work means everything to us Americans. For centuries – since, say, 1650 – we’ve believed that it builds character (punctuality, initiative, honesty, self-discipline, and so forth). We’ve also believed that the market in labour, where we go to find work, has been relatively efficient in allocating opportunities and incomes. And we’ve believed that, even if it sucks, a job gives meaning, purpose and structure to our everyday lives – at any rate, we’re pretty sure that it gets us out of bed, pays the bills, makes us feel responsible, and keeps us away from daytime TV.

These beliefs are no longer plausible. In fact, they’ve become ridiculous, because there’s not enough work to go around, and what there is of it won’t pay the bills – unless of course you’ve landed a job as a drug dealer or a Wall Street banker, becoming a gangster either way.

These days, everybody from Left to Right – from the economist Dean Baker to the social scientist Arthur C Brooks, from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump – addresses this breakdown of the labour market by advocating ‘full employment’, as if having a job is self-evidently a good thing, no matter how dangerous, demanding or demeaning it is. But ‘full employment’ is not the way to restore our faith in hard work, or in playing by the rules, or in whatever else sounds good. The official unemployment rate in the United States is already below 6 per cent, which is pretty close to what economists used to call ‘full employment’, but income inequality hasn’t changed a bit. Shitty jobs for everyone won’t solve any social problems we now face.

Don’t take my word for it, look at the numbers. Already a fourth of the adults actually employed in the US are paid wages lower than would lift them above the official poverty line – and so a fifth of American children live in poverty. Almost half of employed adults in this country are eligible for food stamps (most of those who are eligible don’t apply). The market in labour has broken down, along with most others.

Those jobs that disappeared in the Great Recession just aren’t coming back, regardless of what the unemployment rate tells you – the net gain in jobs since 2000 still stands at zero – and if they do return from the dead, they’ll be zombies, those contingent, part-time or minimum-wage jobs where the bosses shuffle your shift from week to week: welcome to Wal-Mart, where food stamps are a benefit.

And don’t tell me that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour solves the problem. No one can doubt the moral significance of the movement. But at this rate of pay, you pass the official poverty line only after working 29 hours a week. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25. Working a 40-hour week, you would have to make $10 an hour to reach the official poverty line. What, exactly, is the point of earning a paycheck that isn’t a living wage, except to prove that you have a work ethic?

But, wait, isn’t our present dilemma just a passing phase of the business cycle? What about the job market of the future? Haven’t the doomsayers, those damn Malthusians, always been proved wrong by rising productivity, new fields of enterprise, new economic opportunities? Well, yeah – until now, these times. The measurable trends of the past half-century, and the plausible projections for the next half-century, are just too empirically grounded to dismiss as dismal science or ideological hokum. They look like the data on climate change – you can deny them if you like, but you’ll sound like a moron when you do.

For example, the Oxford economists who study employment trends tell us that almost half of existing jobs, including those involving ‘non-routine cognitive tasks’ – you know, like thinking – are at risk of death by computerisation within 20 years. They’re elaborating on conclusions reached by two MIT economists in the book Race Against the Machine (2011). Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley types who give TED talks have started speaking of ‘surplus humans’ as a result of the same process – cybernated production. Rise of the Robots, a new book that cites these very sources, is social science, not science fiction.

So this Great Recession of ours – don’t kid yourself, it ain’t over – is a moral crisis as well as an economic catastrophe. You might even say it’s a spiritual impasse, because it makes us ask what social scaffolding other than work will permit the construction of character – or whether character itself is something we must aspire to. But that is why it’s also an intellectual opportunity: it forces us to imagine a world in which the job no longer builds our character, determines our incomes or dominates our daily lives.

In short, it lets us say: enough already. Fuck work.

Certainly this crisis makes us ask: what comes after work? What would you do without your job as the external discipline that organises your waking life – as the social imperative that gets you up and on your way to the factory, the office, the store, the warehouse, the restaurant, wherever you work and, no matter how much you hate it, keeps you coming back? What would you do if you didn’t have to work to receive an income?

And what would society and civilisation be like if we didn’t have to ‘earn’ a living – if leisure was not our choice but our lot? Would we hang out at the local Starbucks, laptops open? Or volunteer to teach children in less-developed places, such as Mississippi? Or smoke weed and watch reality TV all day?

I’m not proposing a fancy thought experiment here. By now these are practical questions because there aren’t enough jobs. So it’s time we asked even more practical questions. How do you make a living without a job – can you receive income without working for it? Is it possible, to begin with and then, the hard part, is it ethical? If you were raised to believe that work is the index of your value to society – as most of us were – would it feel like cheating to get something for nothing?

We already have some provisional answers because we’re all on the dole, more or less. The fastest growing component of household income since 1959 has been ‘transfer payments’ from government. By the turn of the 21st century, 20 per cent of all household income came from this source – from what is otherwise known as welfare or ‘entitlements’. Without this income supplement, half of the adults with full-time jobs would live below the poverty line, and most working Americans would be eligible for food stamps.

But are these transfer payments and ‘entitlements’ affordable, in either economic or moral terms? By continuing and enlarging them, do we subsidise sloth, or do we enrich a debate on the rudiments of the good life?

Transfer payments or ‘entitlements’, not to mention Wall Street bonuses (talk about getting something for nothing) have taught us how to detach the receipt of income from the production of goods, but now, in plain view of the end of work, the lesson needs rethinking. No matter how you calculate the federal budget, we can afford to be our brother’s keeper. The real question is not whether but how we choose to be.

I know what you’re thinking – we can’t afford this! But yeah, we can, very easily. We raise the arbitrary lid on the Social Security contribution, which now stands at $127,200, and we raise taxes on corporate income, reversing the Reagan Revolution. These two steps solve a fake fiscal problem and create an economic surplus where we now can measure a moral deficit.

Of course, you will say – along with every economist from Dean Baker to Greg Mankiw, Left to Right – that raising taxes on corporate income is a disincentive to investment and thus job creation. Or that it will drive corporations overseas, where taxes are lower.

But in fact raising taxes on corporate income can’t have these effects.

Let’s work backward. Corporations have been ‘multinational’ for quite some time. In the 1970s and ’80s, before Ronald Reagan’s signature tax cuts took effect, approximately 60 per cent of manufactured imported goods were produced offshore, overseas, by US companies. That percentage has risen since then, but not by much.

Chinese workers aren’t the problem – the homeless, aimless idiocy of corporate accounting is. That is why the Citizens United decision of 2010 applying freedom of speech regulations to campaign spending is hilarious. Money isn’t speech, any more than noise is. The Supreme Court has conjured a living being, a new person, from the remains of the common law, creating a real world more frightening than its cinematic equivalent: say, Frankenstein, Blade Runner or, more recently, Transformers.

But the bottom line is this. Most jobs aren’t created by private, corporate investment, so raising taxes on corporate income won’t affect employment. You heard me right. Since the 1920s, economic growth has happened even though net private investment has atrophied. What does that mean? It means that profits are pointless except as a way of announcing to your stockholders (and hostile takeover specialists) that your company is a going concern, a thriving business. You don’t need profits to ‘reinvest’, to finance the expansion of your company’s workforce or output, as the recent history of Apple and most other corporations has amply demonstrated.

So investment decisions by CEOs have only a marginal effect on employment. Taxing the profits of corporations to finance a welfare state that permits us to love our neighbours and to be our brothers’ keeper is not an economic problem. It’s something else – it’s an intellectual issue, a moral conundrum.

When we place our faith in hard work, we’re wishing for the creation of character; but we’re also hoping, or expecting, that the labour market will allocate incomes fairly and rationally. And there’s the rub, they do go together. Character can be created on the job only when we can see that there’s an intelligible, justifiable relation between past effort, learned skills and present reward. When I see that your income is completely out of proportion to your production of real value, of durable goods the rest of us can use and appreciate (and by ‘durable’ I don’t mean just material things), I begin to doubt that character is a consequence of hard work.

When I see, for example, that you’re making millions by laundering drug-cartel money (HSBC), or pushing bad paper on mutual fund managers (AIG, Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, Citibank), or preying on low-income borrowers (Bank of America), or buying votes in Congress (all of the above) – just business as usual on Wall Street – while I’m barely making ends meet from the earnings of my full-time job, I realise that my participation in the labour market is irrational. I know that building my character through work is stupid because crime pays. I might as well become a gangster like you.

That’s why an economic crisis such as the Great Recession is also a moral problem, a spiritual impasse – and an intellectual opportunity. We’ve placed so many bets on the social, cultural and ethical import of work that when the labour market fails, as it so spectacularly has, we’re at a loss to explain what happened, or to orient ourselves to a different set of meanings for work and for markets.

And by ‘we’ I mean pretty much all of us, Left to Right, because everybody wants to put Americans back to work, one way or another – ‘full employment’ is the goal of Right-wing politicians no less than Left-wing economists. The differences between them are over means, not ends, and those ends include intangibles such as the acquisition of character.

Which is to say that everybody has doubled down on the benefits of work just as it reaches a vanishing point. Securing ‘full employment’ has become a bipartisan goal at the very moment it has become both impossible and unnecessary. Sort of like securing slavery in the 1850s or segregation in the 1950s.

Why?

Because work means everything to us inhabitants of modern market societies – regardless of whether it still produces solid character and allocates incomes rationally, and quite apart from the need to make a living. It’s been the medium of most of our thinking about the good life since Plato correlated craftsmanship and the possibility of ideas as such. It’s been our way of defying death, by making and repairing the durable things, the significant things we know will last beyond our allotted time on earth because they teach us, as we make or repair them, that the world beyond us – the world before and after us – has its own reality principles.

Think about the scope of this idea. Work has been a way of demonstrating differences between males and females, for example by merging the meanings of fatherhood and ‘breadwinner’, and then, more recently, prying them apart. Since the 17th century, masculinity and femininity have been defined – not necessarily achieved – by their places in a moral economy, as working men who got paid wages for their production of value on the job, or as working women who got paid nothing for their production and maintenance of families. Of course, these definitions are now changing, as the meaning of ‘family’ changes, along with profound and parallel changes in the labour market – the entry of women is just one of those – and in attitudes toward sexuality.

When work disappears, the genders produced by the labour market are blurred. When socially necessary labour declines, what we once called women’s work – education, healthcare, service – becomes our basic industry, not a ‘tertiary’ dimension of the measurable economy. The labour of love, caring for one another and learning how to be our brother’s keeper – socially beneficial labour – becomes not merely possible but eminently necessary, and not just within families, where affection is routinely available. No, I mean out there, in the wide, wide world.

Work has also been the American way of producing ‘racial capitalism’, as the historians now call it, by means of slave labour, convict labour, sharecropping, then segregated labour markets – in other words, a ‘free enterprise system’ built on the ruins of black bodies, an economic edifice animated, saturated and determined by racism. There never was a free market in labour in these united states. Like every other market, it was always hedged by lawful, systematic discrimination against black folk. You might even say that this hedged market produced the still-deployed stereotypes of African-American laziness, by excluding black workers from remunerative employment, confining them to the ghettos of the eight-hour day.

And yet, and yet. Though work has often entailed subjugation, obedience and hierarchy (see above), it’s also where many of us, probably most of us, have consistently expressed our deepest human desire, to be free of externally imposed authority or obligation, to be self-sufficient. We have defined ourselves for centuries by what we do, by what we produce.

But by now we must know that this definition of ourselves entails the principle of productivity – from each according to his abilities, to each according to his creation of real value through work – and commits us to the inane idea that we’re worth only as much as the labour market can register, as a price. By now we must also know that this principle plots a certain course to endless growth and its faithful attendant, environmental degradation.

Until now, the principle of productivity has functioned as the reality principle that made the American Dream seem plausible. ‘Work hard, play by the rules, get ahead’, or, ‘You get what you pay for, you make your own way, you rightly receive what you’ve honestly earned’ – such homilies and exhortations used to make sense of the world. At any rate they didn’t sound delusional. By now they do.

Adherence to the principle of productivity therefore threatens public health as well as the planet (actually, these are the same thing). By committing us to what is impossible, it makes for madness. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton said something like this when he explained anomalous mortality rates among white people in the Bible Belt by claiming that they’ve ‘lost the narrative of their lives’ – by suggesting that they’ve lost faith in the American Dream. For them, the work ethic is a death sentence because they can’t live by it.

So the impending end of work raises the most fundamental questions about what it means to be human. To begin with, what purposes could we choose if the job – economic necessity – didn’t consume most of our waking hours and creative energies? What evident yet unknown possibilities would then appear? How would human nature itself change as the ancient, aristocratic privilege of leisure becomes the birthright of human beings as such?

Sigmund Freud insisted that love and work were the essential ingredients of healthy human being. Of course he was right. But can love survive the end of work as the willing partner of the good life? Can we let people get something for nothing and still treat them as our brothers and sisters – as members of a beloved community? Can you imagine the moment when you’ve just met an attractive stranger at a party, or you’re online looking for someone, anyone, but you don’t ask: ‘So, what do you do?’

We won’t have any answers until we acknowledge that work now means everything to us – and that hereafter it can’t.

Overheard

If she changed her name to Hillary Clitoris, Republican men would pretend she doesn't exist and stop talking about her altogether.

It's A Setup

I realize all this is starting to sound a little Q-ish, but sometimes, paranoia is not an unreasonable thing.

Don't look for peace and tranquility in the months ahead. 

I think AstroTurf goons fully intend to disrupt everything in a continuation of a Brown-Shirt style campaign to destabilize democracies.

There are likely good reasons we've seen the Flu Trux Klan rallies here and in Canada and in Europe, while there's been nothing at the US/Mexico border.

I think the instigators (and the participants) are actively avoiding making common cause with any brown people because this ain't about justice or freedom or anything good for anyone but the Daddy Staters, and it's hard to maintain any traction with the rubes if you suddenly go all inclusive and woke and shit.

The "conservative" brand is all about exclusivity and elimination.

What do Republicans and Right-Wingers hate most?

1. Being called racist

2. Brown people

Today's Reddit

Cold

Black American History #20

Dr Clint Smith - Crash Course - Ida B Wells

I have to say right here at the start that it pisses me off that somebody had to stand up and be "Anti-Lynching", and it pisses me off even more that nobody ever taught any this in any of the schools I went to.

COVID-19 Update

THIS SHIT AIN'T OVER

The disease doesn't give a fuck about your emotional response to it.

But your ability to fight it can be effected by your general outlook, and by your mental approach to it.

Do you go all in, and commit to the fight? Or do you sit and mope about the things you don't get to do now that there's a monster on the loose and you have to be willing to make a few sacrifices in your daily routine?

Crybaby Nation.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Americans are tired of the pandemic. But disease experts preach caution — and endure a ‘kill the messenger’ moment.

The masks are coming off Thursday at Disneyland and Disney World. The theme parks are the latest places to say the pandemic has reached a point at which indoor masking is no longer required for people who are vaccinated — another sign the nation’s health emergency isn’t what is was in 2020, 2021 or even January 2022.

Blue state governors are lifting mask mandates. So is Muriel E. Bowser (D), mayor of the nation’s capital. And everyone saw what happened Sunday at the Super Bowl in the crowded, sort-of-outdoors environs of SoFi Stadium: Even though the Los Angeles County health department had said masks were required, just about the only people with their faces covered were the ones wearing helmets.

But the easing of the coronavirus pandemic’s grip is hardly a serene moment. The country is witnessing a broad backlash from many conservatives and libertarians, not only against the ongoing mask mandates but against the past two years of public health measures, including school closures, designed to suppress the spread of the virus. As the fall elections approach, the virus itself isn’t the hot topic so much as the response to it.

It turns out that winding down a pandemic response is in many ways much harder than launching a response when the virus is new, fresh and at its scariest. And in the pell-mell rush for the pandemic exits, even some people who were formerly supportive of public health measures designed to suppress the virus now don’t want anyone standing in their way.

“Public health is sort of the bearer of bad news. This is basically a kill-the-messenger phenomenon,” said Yale University epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves, who has been a vocal proponent of continuing measures to protect the most vulnerable communities.

The virus is still killing people in startling numbers. Although infections are dropping fast, and hospitalizations too, deaths from covid-19 have not fallen at the same pace. The latest data show about 2,300 people every day, on average, dying of the disease.

The current state of the pandemic has put Biden administration officials and many disease experts in an awkward position. They need to persuade people to stick with the program a bit longer, until the virus is brought under control. But they run the risk of losing their audience. Polling data show President Biden with drooping approval ratings for his handling of the pandemic.

At a White House task force news briefing Wednesday, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky tried to assure the public that she and her colleagues understand the exhaustion with masking guidance and other pandemic restrictions. The problem is the data: By the CDC’s count, 97 percent of U.S. counties still have “substantial” or “high” community transmission of the virus.

As the case counts plummet, though, CDC guidance on masking and other issues will change in the coming weeks, she promised.

“We want to give people a break from things like mask-wearing when these metrics are better, and then have the ability to reach for them again should things worsen,” Walensky said. “We all share the same goal: to get to a point where covid-19 is no longer disrupting our daily lives, a time when it won’t be a constant crisis, rather something we can prevent, protect against and treat.”

Many disease experts feel passionately that now is not the time to let up on efforts to suppress the virus. But another faction of experts favors what Walensky suggested may be the next step forward — an easing of restrictions, coupled with a determination to restore them if the virus comes roaring back.

The broader public conversation is more tendentious. Opponents of public health measures have argued that anyone wanting restrictions at this point is a pandemic dead-ender — someone who won’t let it go, and is clinging to the crisis.

Epidemiologist Mercedes Carnethon of Northwestern University went on national television programs recently to share her view that vulnerable populations still need protection and that people need to keep taking sensible measures to suppress the virus — such as wearing masks.

The hate mail hit her inbox immediately.

“Stop your idiotic blithering fear mongering already,” one correspondent wrote. Another implied Carnethon is a “big pharma prostitute” and lamented commentary from “know nothing clowns.”

“Civility is gone,” said Carnethon, a professor and vice chair of preventive medicine at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “I think it may be driven by fear — fear that we’ll never get out of this.”

Gonsalves said, “We need to stay vigilant and consider not just dialing down [precautions] but dialing up.”

Many people, he said, want to go back to how life was in 2019, but “wishing doesn’t make it so.”

Celine Gounder, an infectious-disease physician who advised Biden during the presidential transition and is now editor at large for public health at Kaiser Health News, said the backlash against people in her profession is demoralizing.

“I feel trust in public health is at an all-time low, and it’s being shredded even more in this moment. It’s in tatters at this moment,” she said. “Public health interventions don’t work without trust.”

That distrust is omnipresent in conservative news media, and on display in public hearings on Capitol Hill, where Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has grilled the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony S. Fauci, as if Fauci had gone on a crime spree.

Biden may have been boosted in his 2020 campaign by arguing that President Donald Trump had done too little to halt the pandemic, but Republicans seeking office are generally making the opposite argument — that the government has done too much. “Faucism” is the preferred neologism to describe what are alleged to be excessive restrictions.

Backers of the more cautious approach are expressing themselves on social media, but they are not an organized bunch — they aren’t marching on the capital, as opponents of restrictions have, and they are not blocking the U.S.-Canadian border like the truckers in Canada. And there could be more protests ahead, as one group with more than 99,000 Facebook members is planning a trucker-led convoy across the United States in early March, with D.C. as the destination.

Biden’s messaging in this recent phase has been muddled. In an interview, NBC’s Lester Holt asked the president if he thought the blue state governors were acting prematurely in lifting mandates even as the CDC continues to recommend indoor masking.

“I’ve committed that I would follow the science. The science as put forward by the CDC, and the federal people, and I think it’s probably premature, but it’s, you know, it’s a tough call,” Biden answered.

The virus isn’t static: The virus mutates, new variants appear. The omicron wave may be receding, but a new variant could roll up at any point from an unexpected branch of the virus’s family tree.

Evolving, too, is the immunological landscape as people get vaccinated or recover from infections. Most people now have some immunity to the virus, but millions may have limited or even no immunity, even after vaccination, because they are immunocompromised or immunosuppressed. This population includes organ transplant and cancer patients, as well as people with autoimmune diseases requiring medication to tamp down their immune systems. Some people with severe health issues cannot get vaccinated at all.

This leads to public health judgment calls. The CDC when issuing guidance has generally erred on the side of caution, in part because it has been burned by premature moves such as last May’s decision to lift indoor masking for vaccinated people — just as the delta variant was gaining traction.

Many Americans — including the ones emailing Carnethon — blame public health proponents for prolonging the crisis and preventing the return to normal. That leads to the next turn of the screw: If a lingering effect of the pandemic is that people view public health interventions as overreach, or somehow corrupted by factors other than saving lives, the country will be in worse shape the next time a virus comes roaring out of nowhere, sickening people en masse.

That’s the conclusion of Andrew Noymer, a University of California at Irvine epidemiologist, who, when asked what the big lesson of the pandemic is, replied in an email that “public health as an intellectual endeavor is weak; its own subject-matter experts get swept aside in a crisis,” and “we are less, not more, prepared for the next pandemic, after this.”

Much of the rancor and unhappiness dates to early in the pandemic — the revolt against masking, led by red state Republican officials and libertarians generally — was well underway by summer 2020. But lately, some of the calls of no-more-restrictions are coming from inside the house: Many former supporters of pandemic interventions have moved to the other side, saying the lower caseloads and availability of vaccines and therapeutics mean it’s time to fully reopen society — even if the CDC continues to endorse indoor masking in schools and in areas with substantial or high coronavirus transmission.

“Open Everything” declared an article in the Atlantic by Yascha Mounk, a former supporter of interventions. An organization called Urgency of Normal is pushing for an end to mask mandates in schools, saying in its mission statement that continued pandemic restrictions are now a greater threat to students than the virus: “Children — and their parents — have shouldered an outsize burden long enough. Restoring normal childhood is a moral imperative, based on the balance of today’s evidence.”

Some disease experts bristle at that argument, saying it reflects the views of healthy people in privileged strata of society. In more vulnerable areas, schools lack good ventilation, vaccine uptake is relatively low, and students are more likely to live in multigenerational families with elderly members who have a higher risk of severe disease from the virus.

Gonsalves expressed that in pungent terms in a long Twitter thread recently:

“This isn’t my first time at the rodeo. With HIV, I saw how very privileged people were willing to fuck over others and let a virus flourish in the US and around the world, once they personally had access to potent antiretroviral drugs,” he wrote.

Gounder said she suspects some of the pushback against restrictions comes from vaccinated people who think they earned a return to normalcy: “I think people feel like, ‘I followed the rules, I should be able to get on with my life.’ ”