Gaslit Nation Podcast: East Palestine, Ohio, FEBRUARY 15, 2023
Sarah Kendzior: “And so you have a CDC that is easily as bad under Biden as it was under Trump, and you should really see this as a continuum. This is the overt transformation of an institution that is supposed to be protecting Americans into an institution that harms Americans. And one of the most disturbing developments on this is the recent declaration—you know, I think at this point it’s happened—that Ron Klain is no longer Biden’s chief of staff. He has been replaced by a man named Jeffrey Zients. And we’ve covered him on the show before because Zients was appointed by Biden as his “Covid Czar” during his 2020 campaign. And he remained in that position through March 2022, making disastrous decisions, really weaponizing the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” rhetoric, which pitted Americans against each other; and also lied about the extent of breakthrough covid, and expressing the same deference to corporations and plutocrats that individuals on the Trump team displayed. And that’s not surprising because Zients was not a public health expert. He was an investment banker who built his career off of Medicare and Medicaid fraud. And that’s who Biden decided to appoint into the “Covid Czar” position and that is who is now the chief of staff. And so, you know… I’ve been looking into this for a few weeks, meaning to get to it on the show, and it’s like every week things get worse and worse. I was researching this before the State of the Union in which Biden blew off the fact that we are living in an ongoing pandemic and we need basic, uncontroversial remedies.”
The problem is of course is that there are no “uncontroversial” interventions because the fascists, libertarians, Longtermists, the fossil fuel industry, the commercial real estate industry, and sundry corporate interests are against all forms of public health. They are, like J. Edgar Hoover, against anything that is “considered to be remotely sympathetic to communism — which essentially meant anybody to the left of the John Birch Society” and will fight it tooth and nail against everything from a mask mandate in operating rooms to working from home, for home health aid family members who live there.
They don’t want people working from home because it interferes with fuel sales for commuting, and they need to keep butts in cubicles downtown for The Economy. So they scare people about proximity bias, and smiles.