400 Deaths Per Day

the show because we haven't completed or risen above. Despite what the Biden administration says COVID nineteen, we are still experiencing four hundred deaths a day, which amount to three thousand people dying a week from COVID nineteen. We haven't eradicated monkeypox. We haven't really understood what long COVID really is because we only have two and a half years of research because that's how long COVID has been around.

We don't know the longer term implications of what happens to folks trying to get disability because they're no longer able to work. Because there are some people who have had COVID that are struggling immensely. But we just don't

talk about it. So how does President Biden saying and announcing that the pandemic is over affect people's ability to one have empathy, but also for public health advocates to try and alert the public to the fact that while we're not experiencing a surge with COVID now as we have in the past two years, what doctor l Sayed will say is that if you look at the UK, which has been our canary in the coal mine every time we're about to hit a surge, he says, COVID

nineteen numbers are up fifteen percent in the UK right now. And climate we know by virtue of how climate change is aggressively impacting now our day to day lives and we're seeing, you know, these once in a century storms every fucking year. He'll talk to us about the correlation between these public health crises and the fact that we will see another global health pandemic in our lifetime and

how it ties into climate change. Folks. You know, I know that it is exhausting and at times we just want to put one of these crises, at least one of them, if not all of them, behind us. But the thing is is that we're not learning. We're not learning from anything because and we, as a president of the United States announces mission accomplished and the mission is far from being fucking over. That means we've stopped learning and we've stopped educating, and that, if nothing else that

we've learned, spells fucking danger. So what do we do? How do we move forward? How do we regain our trust and faith and institutions that were rocked by COVID nineteen. So this conversation coming up next with our friend doctor Abdul Lsed will lay bare, you know, frankly, folks, where we are right now with the virus, where we are headed, and how critical the upcoming midterm elections are to understanding how we build a robust health infrastructure that is prepared

to meet these impending crises. The Damage Report with John Idarola is one of the most popular shows on the TYT Network that serves as your daily breakdown of the genuine threats and challenges facing our country and world. These days, we're confronted with an overwhelming sea of shocking, confounding, and

devastating news stories. The Damage Report is your life raft, helping you navigate the day's news and understand the damage caused by the corrupt establishment, politicians, corporations, and everything in between. Join The Damage Report's notorious fan club, the Dragon Squad, where you become part of the fantastic community of progressives. Create a fun dragon nickname that fits your personality, collaborate and participate in fun activities like voting for the Garbage

Person of the Week, and much more. Listen to The Damage Report on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. If you like what you here, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Friends, I am very happy to welcome back to WOK. It's been way too long. Doctor Abduel el Sayid, who you know, is the host

of America Dissected. He is the author of Medicare for All and Healing Politics, and a public health doctor that makes his rounds on cable news and in other spaces to educate us on what is happening in this country and around the world as it pertains to public health. Welcome back. I want to start with the obvious, which is a couple of weeks ago. President Biden was on sixty Minutes and he's walking around the Detroit Auto Show.

No one is in a mask. It's the first time that the auto show is taking place in three years, and he says, the pandemic is over. Your reaction, a good doctor, your reaction to that, you know, the hard part is that you think about all of the folks who are yet in hospitals, who are yet dying four hundred a day about and all the folks who are so scarred by long COVID, and you have to ask

whether or not it's prudent to call this over. But then the bigger question is this The thing about a pandemic is that you can't really call it over from where you sit, kind of like a hurricane. You don't really see the edges of the storm. And it could be that the lull in the storm is the end of the storm, or it could be that it's the eye of the storm. And while we've been lucky not to have a fall surge as we've had for every year of COVID so far, yet that's not to say

that it's not coming. In fact, you look at in the UK, which has been sort of a harbinger of things to come in the US, their cases are up fifteen percent over the past two weeks, which suggests that this still could be coming. The other aspect of this is that you know, we think we are we have reached pretty close to the most efficient variant of omicron. When I say efficient meaning the most immunovasive combination between

immune evasive and transmissible. And yet it's plausible that while we're expecting the virus to zig i e. We are vaccinating people against the BA five subvariant, that it could zact, that there could be a whole new line or play of variants that arise. We don't know what this virus has in store, and so it's just it's a little bit frustrating to watch a president triumphantly declare that we have one mission accomplished when we actually don't really know

that that's the case. And the last thing I'll say is this is that the reason this matters, and it's not just a matter of what we say, is that the administration, while the President has declared the pandemic over, the administration has been making an ask of Congress to fund all of the COVID diagnostics and the treatments and vaccines that we need should there be another another another search. And so this just undercuts that in a pretty profound way.

So it's not just semantics here. It's not just you know, throwing a lot of assault in the wounds for people with a long COVID. It's actually undercutting the administration's own effort to be able to deal with the next search such that we can get to a point. But the pandemic really is over. But the hard part is you can't really declare it from inside and where we are.

And and I worry that when people listen to the President they'll take what he's saying over seriously as congret Congress people of the Republican Party have and say, well, if the pandemic's over, why would we be funding this right? You know, the people who listen to WIKA f know that after were two years of dodging the virus. Myself, I caught it Labor Day weekend while I was outside at an outside family event. It wasn't even like an

outside concert. It was like an outside family barbecue. And I caught COVID and thankfully, you know, I had very mild symptoms. Thankfully I did not require the anti viral treatment. I just kind of wrote it out in my apartment. It was more frustrating and annoying. But the entire time I was thanking doctors, I was thanking science. I was thanking researchers for the ability to be able to ride out this thing that was inside of my body, that is still inside of my body, that has killed millions

of people. And so, you know, one of the things that I want to ask you about is the fact that we still don't really know about the long term implications of long COVID and and you know, and it's something that isn't being spoken about because there are people who, like myself, have you know, COVID finally caught up with them. I have friends and colleagues that have had brain fog. I did not have brain fog. They are continuing past

having tested negative these symptoms casually coming back. And so how do you think that we should be speaking about and public health experts like your self should be speaking about long term COVID and what we think, you know, possibly worst case scenario, what the implications are for our workforce, right for disability moving forward. Yeah, you raise a really

important point. First, I want to say, I'm sorry to hear that you had the disease, and I'm also grateful that it wasn't so serious, but you join literally millions and millions and millions of Americans who've had COVID. I was infected back in April, as was my whole family, and the consequences of that for you and me has meant that we got a bit sick for a couple of days and then we got over it. But we don't actually know what the long long term consequences of

this virus are. What we do understand is that for people who are who are infected, some proportion upwards of ten to twenty percent will develop a set of chronic symptoms that we call long COVID. But we don't really understand the path of physiology of it, why it's happening, or how to treat it, or what the long long term consequences might be. Because let's remember, right what we

call shingles. Before it's shingles, it's chicken pox. And what tends to happen is right that that virus we now understand, goes dormant in a piece of your spinal cord, only to come out when your immune system is weak and follow its pathway down your neuron to a very picular part of your skin in effect caused another clinical infection phase, and we don't know what is dormant in our bodies.

We don't know what the long term consequences will be, So what we really have to be planning around both for people with what I'll call acute long COVID, which is kind of a weird way of thinking about it, but you know, the long COVID that comes immediately after an infection versus the potential for a we'll call it longer COVID that comes after a phase of dormancy. We had a plan for that in terms of the very

structures of our society. And let's be clear, we live in America right now, we're nine percent of the people don't have health insurance at all. Another fifteen to twenty percent could be liable to lose their health insurance because it's it's it's rickety, because it's underfunded by conservatives through medicaid, or live in states where Medicaid was never expanded in

the first place. And then for everyone else, unless you're on Medicare, which Republicans never stop trying to attack to justify Medicare advantage a privatized version, you are liable to lose your health insurance if you lose a job, or if you turn twenty six, or if you get married, or if you get divorced, or if they decide to randomly jack up the price on you or your business such that you can't afford it even if you are eligible, and so we do not have a firm healthcare system

in our country. Guaranteeing that for people is mission critical, particularly now considering the fact that tens of millions of people will have long COVID in tens of millions more are liable potentially to have a longer COVID should that happen. And the problem is, we just don't know. Nobody's ever had COVID in their bodies longer than two and a a half years, simply because it didn't exist before two and

a half years. And so we've got the plan around the potentiality, and we already know that there are enough people who have chronic symptoms that can be very debilitating and depleting, and those people deserve and need our society to step up and make sure that they have the care they need and that they and their families are

taken care of if they can't work. You know, you would think that one of the examples of a strong, you know, democratic society would be how it takes care of the least among it, right, like, how how people are cared for and the sturdiness of our systems, whether it be public health, public schools, and so on and

so forth. And what we have seen is over the last couple of years, the cracks, the purposeful in a lot of ways, cracks in our systems have been exacerbated and have been pushed, you know, past their breaking point.

Part of that crack also is people's trust in public health, in the CDC, in the WHO and so you know, here I want to ask you is how does one both restore faith in these agencies that were tested I think to some extent and you know, beyond repair over the last three years, in the fact that decisions were made and continue to be made about COVID that are really about capitalism, that are really about getting people to work back to work as quickly as possible, because you know,

I would tell you that after five days of sitting on the couch behind me, I would have never been able to go back to anybody's office, right Like I was exhausted and I had again the COVID symptoms that I had were mild, So I can't imagine people the CDC coming out and saying, well, just slap on a mask and going to work with a mask. So I'm wondering what you think about the position that the public public health is an industry is in and the faith

and trust that people have in in these systems. Now, you know, I'll tell you, long before COVID, we have had a ruthless approach to thinking about the exchange of labor for money in America, and we tell people that they ought to get all access to all of these services, including their very healthcare, by working, and then when they

cannot work, we take these things away. And all that does is demonstrate the moral bankruptcy inherent in forcing people into a set of institution that under pay and under deliver, and for which they're told to rely on the very basic means of a dignified life, like being able to get healthcare when you get sick. So how does it happen that you know, when you get sick, you can't work, and then you lose your healthcare to be able to treat you to get sick so you can work. I mean,

the thing doesn't make sense on its own terms. The other part of it, though, is that these institutions generally, they need to fundamentally be rebuilt in and rethought. I think, you know, we've had a set of public health institutions that, you know, the people who work inside of them are great people who care a lot about the people in our country and the people that they serve. But they've been underserved by institutions that have been robbed of the funding that they need to be able to do the

work that they do. And so they've been shells of themselves for a very long time, and they just haven't been tested. And I'll be honest with you, COVID was a gnarly public health problem. You're talking about a virus that's airborne that we didn't understand, that was very different than the most similar virus to it. We didn't have treatments, we didn't have vaccine. But monkeypox is not monkeypox is

the one oh one of public health. This is a virus that we had well characterized for decades, We had available vaccines, we knew how it spread. It has an extremely long latency period, an incubation period, so you can vaccinate somebody within ten days of an exposure and reliably prevent them from ever having symptoms at all. And we

still just couldn't do it. And so what I think has happened is that, you know, the massive hurricane, if you will, of COVID came and destroyed our very rickety public health institutions, and then we never really rebuilt them, and that brings us I think back to the statement

by the President, which I found really frustrating. It wasn't the pandemic is over, but we learned a lot of lessons, and we need to rebuild our public health agencies so nothing like this ever happens again, and we need to make sure that we're protecting and taking care of people who still may die of the virus. And we need to make sure that we're invested in a far more stable disability system so that people with along COVID are not hurt by this. It was the pandemic's over, Let's

move on. And when you say we're going to move on, what that basically does forecloses on all of the reconstruction, the rebuilding that needs to happen, because well, if you rob both, you know, the Republicans moved on the day before COVID started. Let's be clear, and then if Democrats are moving on, like, where's the political will to make sure that we're never here again? And that has to continue to be part of the conversation. And so long as we don't allow it to be part of the conversation,

we're not going to do it. And the next time a very serious virus hits us, it could be more devastating. And the thing I want folks to understand is, yes, this was a quote unquote once in a century pandemic in an era where we have once in a century hurricanes every single time. So you know that we're gonna have another. Like the idea that we're not going to have another virus anytime soon is I think wishful thinking. And so let's make sure that our house is in

order before the next one hits. Hey, I'm David plots a slice political gab Fest. As another election season accelerates, it can be tricky to sort through all the noise and the news. Each week on the gap Fest, John Dickerson, Emily Bathlon and I decipher the headlines, break down the races, and tell you what issues really matter. We do not always agree. We definitely do not always agree, but we always deliver thoughtful debate and we always have a good time.

So subscrib drive to slates Political Gapfest new episodes every Thursday. You know, you make such a good, solid comparison to these hurricanes, to these once in a lifetime fires, to these once in a lifetime tornado seasons, because they're not right.

They're becoming ever more frequent. And you know, one of the things that I do want to ask you, and maybe you don't know, but you can hypothesize for us, is you know, the correlation between the possibility of new viruses and climate change, right, and the fact that you have the waters that are warming, the fact that we have deforestation, the fact that you know, we're talking about glaciers that are melting, that are letting out This is

no joke by nat GEO. I saw the other day letting out bacteria in the air that hasn't been airborne in a billion years. We have no idea what its compatibility is with our current atmosphere. So what are your thoughts about the correlation between public health and climate change? Yeah, so there's no one way to attribute anyone virus, but there's a clear mechanism that is linking climate change to the emergence of more and more rare or novel pathogens.

You know the fact that we had a covid pandemic and then monkey pocks sort of emerged, and then we have a Nui bowla outbreak all the same moment. I think we really ought to sort of cock our eyes at that and take a real hard look, And the mechanism is pretty clear. These kinds of viruses jump into humans when the animals that carry them in which they are reservoirs or for which they are reservoirs, tend to

add mix with humanity more commonly. So as we DeForest more and more of our forests, the wildlife that was in the forests is coming closer to human habitats because they're losing their homes literally, And when that admixture happens, right, the risk that a virus or a bacterium that had been resident and what we say endemic in animals that are you know, causing like a common cold for them, can jump into humanity where we are completely immune naive,

meaning our immune systems have never seen these viruses and then start to spread like wildfire and cause serious illness. I mean, that's what we think happened with COVID. You know, monkeypoxes is actually it's not even a monkey disease. It's a rodent disease that that was first discovered in monkeys

when it jumped into monkeys. But the more we start destroying animal habitats, the more likely it is that these animals are going to try and find new habitats amongst us, and the more likely it is that the pathogens that they're carrying are going to jump into us. And so there is a clear connection there and that should be

really worrisome for everyone. You know, With a few minutes that I have left with you, I do want to address where we are with monkey pox, and then I want to wrap up by looking at the midterms and getting your thoughts on how public health is going to be playing into the outcome of the midterm elections, or

should be if you don't think that it is. But you know, monkeypox comes onto the scene and everyone who was alive or remembers learning about the AIDS epidemic and crisis had a series of horrible flashbacks because once again the United States did a bang up job in making it seem as if this disease was going to stay within the LGBTQ community, particularly men who sleep with men and by virtue of doing so, even if that is where it began, right, we know we should know that

nothing stays where it is now. Right. COVID began in China, it didn't stay there, Right, So what was the point do you think I've duel in the fact of the media public health officials sounding the alarm not dissimilarly to the way that they did HIV AIDS, which then made it dismissable. If you're like, well, I don't check that box, so this ain't about me. Yeah, you're raising a really

important point. And the degree to which we have a really terrible history in public health and medicine dismissing diseases that are either more commonly found or emerge among the LGBTQ community is shame. On the one hand, the institutions in question had to do a far better job than they did, and their logic would have been, we need to alert people about what they can do themselves. But when part of that is to provide a vaccine, and part of what you're asking them to do is to

get vaccinated. When you don't have enough vaccine because you delayed getting the vaccine manufacturing facility authorized and you allowed your strategic stockpile to go bad, well that's on you, right, And I will say that, you know, we went from having a daily high of about five hundred cases new cases a day to about two hundred new cases a day now. The doubling time, meaning the number of the amount of time it takes for the number of cases to double, went from eight days to twenty five days.

So when you reduce the doubling times, that's a good thing. That's on the back of members of the community doing what they needed to do to protect themselves, and the public health institutions that should have been on it from the jump doing the bare minimum to facilitate that. And

so you know, it is deeply, deeply frustrating. And then the other part of this is that as we think about raising alarm and trying to empower people with information that they can use, there has to be a rejoinder to that conversation, kind of like what we talked about when you declared the pandemic over, which is this is a disease that is most common or more likely to

affect a particular profile. And also it is a disease that can jump quickly, and all of us have to do what we can to make sure that the communities that are affected have the resources that they need to

be protected. And that's on all of us. But you know when you just say the first part, meaning this is most common among men who affects with men, without saying the second part that this is a disease that can affect anybody, there's no reason why pathologically this cannot jump and will not jump, then what happens is you create an implicit opportunity to dismiss this given the marginalization of the LGBTQ community in America, And so I really

appreciate you raising that point, and no, it's it is. It's it's sad that in twenty twenty two we are seeing the same echoes of HIV, and it just says that a lot of the implicit marginalization, the structural marginalization that exists is way bigger and exists in a subterranean way that we have to root out and that that

we solve a lot more work to do. So last question for you, my friend, is around mid terms, we are making the long Slow Death march as I will say, um to to to the midterms, and and I want to get your thoughts on how you think one that public health is playing a part in getting people to the polls, is it top of mind? And two, um, how you would be messaging public health as we are making this march to mid terms? How it can be

done better. I worry that Democrats are not pressing their advantage right now that they see or Republicans see the pandemic as something they can hang on Democrats despite the fact that it was under a Republican president that this pandemic emerged, that the early days where we could have contained it, we failed, and that the failure to think about supply chains in general allowed the pandemic to turn

into the economic situation that we're in right now. And I think Democrats, we don't do ourselves any favors by running away from it, declaring the pandemic over and pretending that it's behind us. What we need to do is we need to make sure that we're telling the story of what happened that under a Republican president, under which our government was treated as a political hobby horse for that president. That president ignored the fundamentals of public health.

He told people to inject bleach, He failed to to protect people from the pandemic itself. Ultimately more than a million Americans died, and he also failed to protect our economy. Since taking office, Joe Biden has had to clean up that mess, whether it was making sure that we got shots in arms or making sure that we secured supply chains, everything from the Long Beach ports to bringing so much of the supply chains that we have relied on back home in the forms of everything from chips to um

you know, to basic masks. And that is what Democrats have had to do because of the failure of Republicans on this issue, and all that we've done, don't forget, was to save yet more lives that would have died had that that failed leadership continued. Um And so I think we have to make sure that we tell that

story and we own that story. I think it's lazy for us to sort of try and pivot off the pandemic as if it was over, because that could come back to bite us and ass I mean, if we have you can imagine if we have another similar kind of surge to Omicron and then next month what that could mean in the midterms. So we have to be telling the story that is true, which is Republicans failed us.

We are still living in the in the consequences of that, and and Democrats have done everything we can to solve it. Would I would love to see more. Absolutely, Don't get me wrong. I would have loved to see more. And yet you know, as you and I both know, democracy is at an existential survival point, and you know, I worry a lot given where Republicans are going with this. What I'm reading in the team leaves is you know, if you still have Donald Trump campaigning for you state

wide in places like Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio. What you've basically said is I don't actually care if I went an election right, because I don't believe democracy matters all that much. All I'm going to do is rile up my base so that when we inevitably lose, we can point at the whole apparatus and say this doesn't actually this, This system doesn't actually work because it's been giving too many rights to people who don't look like you, dear Bass,

and therefore we ought to deconstruct this thing. That's where I think they're headed, and that's really really dangerous a point I'm terrified and I remain terrified bringing the alarm on a day to day basis, Doctor Abduel. I'll say thank you so much for making the time to join us on woka f Don't be a stranger, don't let too much time pass before you come back and join us again. We appreciate you. Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate you you're constantly talking up on these issues

and look forward to join you next time too. That is it for me today, dear friends on woke f as always power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.