Category Archives: Covid-19

I’m Sure Front Porch Forum Is Quaking in Its Boots

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Here’s a shocker, and a subject I will likely never mention again: A handful of ultraconservative Vermonters has created an alternative to Front Porch Forum. Well, they want to position it as an alternative to FPF. In reality, it’s something much simpler, stupider, and more useless.

The organizers, with all the cleverness they can muster, are calling their new thing “Vermont Back Porch.” Yeah, baby, I wanna be your back porch man.

It appears to be nothing more than a statewide message board, open to anyone who signs up. Reddit for Dummies, if such a thing is possible. What it doesn’t offer is the community-by-community connectivity that has made FPF so useful and popular.

Conservatives have long been upset over FPF’s fairly modest content moderation standards, which are designed to prevent outbreaks of toxic partisanship. Political comment is fine, especially on local issues, but there are limits — which the nutbags try to label “censorship” because, as usual, they don’t understand that actual censorship involves the imposition of political authority on speech. The First Amendment has nothing to do with social media content moderation; like any other non-public entity, FPF is free to adopt whatever rules it wishes and you can’t call it censorship.

But hey, what are facts anyway? Especially when the organizers of this new endeavor hail from the ranks of — you guessed it — Covid denialists! Yay whoopee!

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Please, Bernie, No

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Oh boy. According to The Hill, Sen. Bernie Sanders may be open to supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health & Human Services Secretary. Not that The Hill is the most reliable of outlets, but this is just alarming. If Bernie is, indeed, mulling a “yes” vote, he should stop it. Immediately.

As the story tells it, Sanders and Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman could vote “yes” on RFK’s nomination because of “shared critiques on heavy corporate influence over food and a desire to promote a less chemical-laden country.”

The story relies heavily on anonymous sources, and not many of ’em at that. There’s a single unnamed “source close to [Sanders’] office,” whatever the hell that means. And that source didn’t go much beyond asserting that Sanders “will use the opportunity [of hte confirmation hearing] to point out the shortcomings of the industrial food system, supply chains, etc.” That’s a far cry from actually voting “yes” on Kennedy.

There is one quote from a named source. Progressive activist Nina Turner went on the record, offering “my sense” that Sanders and Fetterman would support Kennedy.

Please, God, no. Don’t do it, Bernie.

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You Should Think of “Protect the Most Vulnerable” as a Purely Aspirational Statement

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The available evidence points to one dispiriting conclusion: We are about to experience another substantial wave of Covid-19. Both state and federal data (the two are drawn from different testing regimens) show that our wastewater is full of the virus. The Centers for Disease Control says that nationally, wastewater levels are Very High, and the worst levels in the country are in the Northeast. Case counts in Vermont, although still classified as “Low” by the state Health Department, are on the rise. Nationally, according to the CDC, Covid-related emergency room visits, hospitalizations and deaths are all heading upward.

Dr. Michael Hoerger of the Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative is projecting that “Nearly one in three Americans will get infected during the peak two months of this winter surge. That’s 105 million infections & more than five million resulting Long Covid cases.” The PMC says we could be headed into the second highest peak for Covid transmission ever. Including those times when we avoided exposure as much as possible and wore masks whenever we ventured outside.

Yeah, well, I’m sure it’ll be just fine. At least that seems to be the foundation of Gov. Phil Scott’s post-pandemic policy. Because his administration isn’t doing a damn thing about it. Not even to “protect the most vulnerable,” which he says is one of the three pillars of his governorship.

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Less “Lean Management” Than “Mean Management”

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There have been numerous examples over the years of Phil Scott’s failure to build an effective bureaucracy in spite of his promises to lower the cost of government and improve the delivery of services The latest, and perhaps most outrageous, is the unconscionable handling of the extended emergency motel voucher program. As reported by VTDigger, the Scott administration is now requiring recipients to recertify once a week — and is making it damn difficult to comply by woefully understaffing its call centers and offices.

There are two possible explanations for this. Either the administration is doing its best to torpedo an extension it never wanted in the first place, or it has deliberately resource-starved the Department of Children and Families to the point where DCF can’t properly do its job. Either way, it’s inexcusable. As is the desperate display of blame-shifting put on by DCF functionary Miranda Gray.

It’s not our fault, she told VTDigger. It’s recipients’ fault for not being persistent enough or not answering the phone when DCF gets around to calling them back. It’s a caseworker’s fault for not communicating with DCF (through its terrible call center). Recipients who can’t get through by phone should go to a field office (but at least one recipient was forced to wait for hours and hours at a field office). It’s the Legislature’s fault for setting the rules (yes, they opened the door to weekly check-ins but (a) the admin sets the rules and (b) the mismanagement of the call system is all on YOU).

Meanwhile, recipients are waiting hours upon hours and living constantly in fear of losing their shelter. All because YOU couldn’t fully staff a call center after increasing your own workload by mandating weekly check-ins.

Also meanwhile, no one has received a damn dime from a disaster relief fund for the self-employed and independent contractors. And some of the applications seem to have been bungled. Wow, more management failure. And another administration official busily pointing the finger elsewhere.

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The Feds Place a Capstone on Dan French’s Tenure

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Well hey, here’s something. The U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Office is investigating the Vermont Agency of Education for violating the rights of students by limiting school districts’ authority to enact public health measures during the Covid-19 epidemic and, in the Office’s words, “discriminating against students with disabilities” who were at heightened risk of serious illness.

Yes, that would be the Agency of Education then helmed by the mask-averse Dan French, labeled in this space as the Inspector Clouseau of the Scott administration. I’d suggest that the feds could have assembled quite the dossier simply by reading this blog, but doubtless their investigation has been more thorough than that. And to judge by the reaction of French’s successor Heather Bouchey, I’m guessing the feds have got the goods. In her reply to the feds’ probe, as reported by VTDigger, she didn’t claim there was no discrimination. She simply said the agency had no intention of discriminating.

“The AOE devoted significant effort throughout its COVID-19 pandemic response to ensure the equal educational access of students with disabilities including students with disabilities who are at an elevated risk of severe illness from COVID-19 exposure. If the AOE erred in its responses, guidance or otherwise, it is eager to address the error and make corrections for the benefit of students.”

That word “if” is the giveaway. Bouchey didn’t defend her agency’s performance; she tried to frame any offense as inadvertent, not intentional. And she laid out a glidepath to future surrender by saying the agency was “eager to address” any errors “and make corrections.” And don’t overlook her emphasis on “equal educational access” rather than, say, the health and safety of students. Gotta keep those disabled kids in class so they get “equal access,” you know.

But in case you needed any more evidence that the agency, under French, went too far in pressuring school districts to moderate their public health measures, let’s take a little walk down Memory Lane.

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Another Event I Won’t Be Attending

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Mark your calendars and then make other plans! This is the weekend of Libertystock, a Gathering of the Disaffected on a farm in Cabot which I like to think of as Klar-a-palooza. Libertystock’s market positioning is nicely encapsulated in the above T-shirt: an ultraconservative slash Libertarian message in alt-culture clothing.

It sounds like a downright tedious event. And it’s emblematic of the central problem of the far right in these parts: Way too many aspirational chiefs, nowhere near enough Indians, if you’ll pardon the dated turn of phrase. If you go a-Googling for conservative organizations in Vermont, it’s downright amazing how many you can find. All of them are starved for membership.

Anyway, Libertystock includes speakers, musicians, performers, and vendors in what its website describes as “an amazing event in a beautiful location” that will almost certainly draw an embarrassingly small audience. Probably more than VT Grassroots’ recent “modest but impassioned crowd of 25,” but I’d say there’s a very good chance that the performers, speakers and vendors will outnumber the actual attendees.

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You’d Think Maybe a Writers’ Conference Would Put Writers First

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Well, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference is now over, but the consequences of an uncontrolled Covid-19 outbreak may continue for quite some time.

When last we left the situation, more than 10% of conference participants had become ill. Leadership responded by continuing activities as scheduled, including a dance, with masking suggested but not required. The infected attendees were sent home — or should I say were ousted from the conference. The departees, including some who had written about their experiences on Twitter, were not offered refunds or any help with unexpected travel costs.

Sometime during the day Friday, after several writers took to Twitter and I wrote about the situation in this space (and the paywalled Publishers Marketplace also covered the outbreak), leadership changed its stance. According to former participant and now Covid patient Caitlin Eichorn, Bread Loaf reached out to infected participants with an offer of prorated refunds for tuition, room and board — but only after, as Eichorn noted, “the bad publicity” around the Bread Loaf outbreak had begun to spread.

Better late than never, but it would have been preferable if leadership had acted on principle instead of damage control.

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Covid Outbreak at Bread Loaf

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Middlebury College’s renowned Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference has been struck by the Covid-19 virus. According to email communications with participants, conference officials had confirmed 26 cases as of yesterday afternoon. That is, according to one source, about 10% of all participants. There have been no reports of serious illness. So far.

This year’s Bread Loaf Conference began on August 16 and is scheduled to conclude on Saturday. The official response seems more focused on continuing to the finish than on containing the outbreak.

Bread Loaf attendee Caitlin Eichorn has been chronicling the experience on Twitter, which I still refuse to call X. Her Twitter feed is the source of many of the quotations included in this post.

At first, according to Eichorn, there were daily email updates on the number of cases. That practice ended after conference leaders had “conversations with Middlebury’s trusted medical advisors,” according to a message sent to attendees. The counsel from those advisors was to “turn the emphasis away from reporting the number of the cases, which health departments stopped counting awhile ago, focusing instead on hospitalizations which provide a better estimate of how COVID-19 is impacting the community.”

So far this summer, there have generally been fewer hospitalizations than in previous Augusts. That’s nice, but no guarantee. Plus, avoiding immediate hospitalization doesn’t mean you won’t get some variety of long Covid down the road.

I’d prefer not to get sick in the first place. “Trusted medical advisors” notwithstanding, if I were a Bread Loaf participant, I’d want to know what the hell is going on in every detail. And I’d want strict measures taken to limit the spread, if indeed you want to press on with the conference, including limiting the number of indoor events and requiring the use of masks throughout.

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It Wasn’t Quite This Bad, But It Must Have Been Plenty Bad

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Here’s the saddest sentence I’ve read in a while.

The event took place at the Elks Club, where a modest but impassioned crowd of 25 attended with several left-wing protestors outside. 

“Modest but impassioned” is a well-meaning attempt at making lemonade out of some dried-up rinds.

Those words were typed by one Mike Bielawski, the QAnon-adjacent “reporter” who formerly plied his trade at True North Reports, and has now apparently sold at least one article to Guy Page at Vermont Daily Chronicle. He’d been dispatched to cover an all-day meeting, and I do mean “all-day,” designed to spread conspiracy theories among the True Believers of Vermont’s tiny contingent of ultraconservatives.

Yep, “tiny” sure does check out. “Impassioned crowd of 25” indeed.

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…Little Note Nor Long Remember

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We could have done something. But we didn’t.

More pointedly, Gov. Phil Scott could have done something. He is our leader, after all. But he didn’t.

Sometime during the first half of August, we recorded the 1,000th death attributed to the Covid-19 virus.

The moment passed quietly, without notice, buried in a routine statistical report. And that’s a damn shame.

Would it have been so hard for the governor to hold a brief, solemn event? Top administration officials, political leaders, and a sampling of those who have lost loved ones? Everyone holding a white flag? A few words, a moment of silence? A National Guard bugler playing Taps? Flags at half staff for a day? Is that too much to ask?

I guess it is.

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