#elite panic

Infection control in healthcare.

My public comment to the CDC HICPAC Committee.

Direct link to my comment in the stream.

Direct link to the start of the whole comment period.

Day 2 of the meeting link, with another session of public comments then the vote.

Disaster experts can predict how most people will react: Most will try to work together to save the most people possible. As Erik Auf Der Heide, a leading disaster expert with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has written, “antisocial behaviors are uncommon in typical disaster situations.” I’ve observed this myself, in natural disasters in places as different as Haiti and Staten Island, for almost all people.

But there is a notable exception. The richest people on the ship are the least likely to cooperate. There is a formal term for this, based on a 2008 paper by the sociologists Caron Chess and Lee Clarke. It’s called “elite panic.” As Rebecca Solnit has written, “Elites tend to believe in a venal, selfish, and essentially monstrous version of human nature.” And as such, they believe that only “their power keeps the rest of us in line.” If the ship—or human society—is disrupted, they think, “our seething violence will rise to the surface.”

I realize that some people think they’re being helpful or consoling somehow when they say “the country survived the first Trump term”, but it’s unthinkingly insulting to all the people who lost their lives, and the people who lost loved ones the first time around. And also everyone who’s been affected by preventable covid infections, because of Trump and the elite business class pushing infection from the start, poisoning the well on mitigation, and even blocking reasonable policies, which not only rigged the system against attempts at public health, but also set the tone for all that followed.

Of course many people who say this are being deliberately obtuse, and poisoning the well right now. Perhaps some of them are paid propagandists, paid by elites, who want, above all else, to quell panic. Their priority is not to not preserve life, humanity, and community, or to help people prepare for disasters. When elites panic, they act in their own interest, to preserve the status quo and reduce unrest which inconveniences them.

We don’t know for sure exactly who will perish and who will survive in a regime where public health is treated as the enemy and the intent is to dismantle society. But we have a pretty good idea about who’s more likely or less likely. 

That has NOT changed.

I heard a podcaster say something like: "back then it was really dangerous for people with a heart transplant to be exposed to covid."

It's still really risky to get covid with a transplant!!

You can't just say that the danger is gone because randos down at the capitol pushed to say "covid's over! whoohoo!" Facts and reality don't work that way.

Stop saying "during covid" already... it's still happening. Haven't people noticed?

By Just Another Friendly Occupier The Rich Don’t Buy “Nothing” Unless They’re Afraid Here’s the tell: a survival bunker is a dead-end project. It doesn’t innovate. It doesn’t scale. It doesn’t compound. It just sits there like a concrete confession. So when the ultra-wealthy start putting serious money into bunkers, tunnels, self-sufficient compounds, and “shelters that are totally not…