Dear friends,
It’s throwback Thursday: there’s an E. coli outbreak in Ohio and Michigan, and polio and West Nile virus in NYC.
Wash your fruits and vegetables and wear insect repellant. Make sure your kids are vaccinated for polio: call 844-NYC-4NYC for locations.
It would bad enough if we were done with COVID, but we’re not.
The schools will no longer be screening or testing for COVID this fall. There is no COVID vaccination requirement for students, but polio vaccinations are still required.
Around 61 percent of children ages 5 to 17 are fully vaccinated against Covid in New York City, and around 14 percent have received additional doses or boosters, according to city data.
In accordance with new CDC guidelines, there are no social distancing rules and masking is not required in NYC schools, except when staff and students returning to school on Days 6 through 10 after their symptoms begin (or a positive test). This will be tricky to enforce.
I don’t understand why schools are not requiring COVID vaccinations. Do you?
[S]ome pediatricians are concerned that the relaxing of Covid-19 restrictions in schools could lead to another surge.
“I think we are all expecting to see a lot more cases moving forward,” said Toni Eyssallenne, an internist and pediatrician for Strong Children’s Wellness, a Queens-based medical group.
Call on the mayor to ensure that the city can maintain capacity for vaccinating children against COVID and polio. This 30-second action has been updated.
The city has opened 6 beds for folks isolating with monkeypox. Eleven people have used the beds since they were opened late last month.
As federal health officials warn of the risk of monkeypox transmission inside congregate shelters, New York City has opened a handful of nonprofit-run isolation beds for homeless residents who test positive for the highly contagious, highly painful virus.
[P]atients must have a “confirmed positive or highly suspected monkeypox case” and live in or otherwise be discharged into “a dormitory-style shelter,” another type of congregate setting with shared bedrooms, or be “street homeless or undomiciled.”
These are positive developments AND there is still a long way to go to address the housing crisis.
Thank the mayor for his efforts and let him know that you want better systems in place to move people into available supportive housing and to prevent housing discrimination. This is an updated 30-second action!
Some folks will have to leave their homes if they cannot access the assistance they need to live at home. There’s a very real shortage of home care workers in the city, the state, and the nation.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, home health and personal care aides are actually the fastest growing industry, projected to grow 33 percent in the next decade, much faster than all occupations. But there still simply aren’t enough workers to fill the demand.
Let the governor know that we are still waiting on a living wage for caregivers. This 15-second action is from NY Caring Majority.
Contact your councilmember to vote NO on Int 0175-2022 to protect care workers and care recipients. This action is ready-made!
Although the ADA’s 1990 language specified that “disability” does not include “gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments,” the Court said
that gender dysphoria is not a gender identity disorder at all.
While the now-rejected diagnosis of gender identity disorder is characterized by a “gender incongruence,” or an incongruence between a person’s “experienced gender” and their sex assigned at birth, the newer gender dysphoria diagnosis focuses on the “clinically significant distress” that a person experiences because of the mismatch between their gender identity and their sex assigned at birth.
“In short, the gender dysphoria diagnosis recognizes that incongruence between a person’s identity and birth sex is not the problem in need of treatment—the clinically significant distress associated with that incongruence is,” attorneys for the GLBT Legal Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) wrote last year in an amicus brief.
The case involved a trans person who was imprisoned, but denied hormone therapy, which led to “emotional, psychological, and physical distress.”
I think this is progress; at the same time, I find the arguments rather confusing.
Call on Congress to pass a Transgender Bill of Rights. Personalize this ready-made action from Courage California.
I got an email from the No NBK folks who have been leading the local fight against the final phase of the NBK pipeline and the plan to build LNG vaporizers in Greenpoint.
After working hard together for nearly three years to halt National Grid’s toxic fossil fuel infrastructure projects in North Brooklyn, a Congressional backroom deal between New York’s Senator Schumer and West Virginia's Senator Manchin could overhaul the federal process for approving new energy projects in a manner that could make our overall fight against fossil fuels a lot harder.
Organizing stopped the Williams pipeline in 2020 in the face of lobbying efforts by National Grid, but if the backroom deal is written into law, the bill could fast-track a network of interstate pipelines that are connected to us here in Brooklyn.
Joe Manchin got assurances from Chuck Schumer that so-called “permitting reform” would pass after he (finally) supported the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The IRA has been signed into law, and Manchin, who held the bill hostage for so long, has not been a reliable negotiator.
[T]here’s nothing holding other Democrats to agree to deregulating what are considered bedrock environmental programs. Now, multiple representatives are pushing to peel off the permitting agreement from any must-pass legislation and run it as its own bill, lowering the political cost of opposing it. House Natural Resources Committee Chair Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) said he doesn’t feel an “obligation” to support the deal, since he was not part of the negotiations.
“Handshake deals made by others in closed rooms do not dictate how I vote, and we sure as hell don’t owe Joe Manchin anything now. He and his fossil fuel donors already got far too much in the IRA,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) told the Prospect in a statement. “I support Chair Grijalva’s call for a standalone vote, and we will vote this dirty deal down, one way or another.”
Contact Senator Schumer and let him know that the permitting process should not be changed to push through more gas pipelines.
with love,
L