Politics. At some point, the CDC will have to explain the sustained and elevated levels of excess deaths in the U.S. Before then, they are doing all they can to shift the responsibility for their advocacy of unprecedented and untested non-pharmaceutical interventions like business and school closures, and quite possibly vaccine mandates and rejection of prior immunity.
The latest effort is last week’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Even to this non-scientist, the article on COVID sequelae is a laughable attempt to frame the issue for the few people left in the national media that think the CDC is a scientific organization, not a political one.
The limitations of the study, dutifully reported, include its reliance on CERN’s deidentified “real world dataset” which any qualified researcher will tell you is a 30k foot clinical view, at best. Also, the study did not include vaccination status.
No one reads the fine print anymore so the message “we, the Centers for Disease Control, are not responsible for all this disease and death” will make its way into the unthinking, uncritical minds of policy makers and politicians who need an exit strategy for their shared culpability.
Policy. Death is almost always preceded by disease which is, in turn, often paired with disability. The federal government, whose motto the last couple of years is “make it worse,” has determined, with scant research, that long-Covid is a thing that qualifies as a disability.
Disability protections include things like reasonable accommodation by employers and most importantly, access to a disability claim either through an employer plan or Social Security. Since May of 2021, two months before HHS issued guidance on long-COVID, the U.S. has added two million people to the disability rolls. Of that number, about 1.75 million have dropped out of the labor force.
The immediate implications are before us. Less workers in an economy undergoing secular change leads to labor shortages and inflation. For low skill, low wage workers, after tax income of a disability claim paired with unreported cash income could actually improve their circumstances.
Long term and accepting these disability claims are sincere, the implications for health care are more and more intense services. It also means that nursing homes, home health agencies and behavioral health providers are going to have to find a better way to support patient care.
For those workers whose claims are less than genuine, who can blame them? The CDC, NIH, many governors and lots of mayors laid waste to the social contract. As a bar owner I know told me in March 2020, “it is hard to wake up each morning knowing you biggest enemy is your government.”
Defrauding your enemy is easily justified in many minds of the reasonable.
Power. The comms team that came up with the Putin Price Hike – another talking point that is also laughable – has moved on to signaling income tax increases to fight inflation.
The subtext for this ridiculous strategy is the predicted loss of the House and possibly the Senate in November. The lame duck session in 4Q is the last opportunity to realize the long hoped-for and senility enabled return to The Great Society or the New Deal looms.
When the 2024 election arrives, odds are better than even that much of the leadership that has promoted certain domestic policies articulated in the Build Back Better Act will be dead.
It will be now or never.
Tax increases are obviously in the mix, as are drug price reforms, closing the ACA’s Medicaid Gap, extending the ACA premiums subsidies and reforming Part D. What happens will depend on what the most powerful Democrat in America, Joe Manchin, will do.
Hale and hearty, Sen. Manchin is likely to be very much alive in 2024 – and he could be a Republican by then as well.
Have a great rest of your weekend.
Emily Evans
Managing Director – Health Policy
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