Health Communism is out in paperback today. It contains just one new endorsement, from RWG, which meant the world to us. “The authors are at once ahead of their time and right on time.”

Get it at the link below to donate to Sameer Project, or pirate it online and donate instead

Nathan at his most bracing and accessible, spinning an incredible yarn explaining the densely interwoven crises produced by DOGE and the Trump administration at large, from Social Security to the fundamental payments architecture of the US, and his own role in trying to expose them

always finding new, ever more cartoonish ways to say it

The Fetterman comment:

When this news first leaked, it was reported that new guidance would be posted in April for public feedback. Instead it’s only March 1st and the change is “effective immediately,” with no mechanism for public comment

S (cont.): “Lately, I have been finding solace in thinking about what plants I would like to have in my garden one day: strawberries, sweet lime, my own olive tree.

I dream I will make my world green again.”

S: “I was 18 in 2018 and the Great March of Return is what made me want to go into public health. I cling to that memory when I am disillusioned with our field, and it helps keep me going.”

G (cont.): “I talk about Long COVID and COVID to everyone who will listen. And while many people say that I am crazy, many are also learning COVID is still an ongoing pandemic because of calls to mask at protests in solidarity with Palestine happening in the Global North.”

G (cont.): “It is very hurtful and alienating to see people in the Global North say that our deaths are taking away from necessary attention to COVID. The exact opposite is true.”

G: “It can be hard to get people to care about COVID when there are bombings all day and night, snipers, drones, block by block warfare. But all day long, I am making masks out of whatever materials I can find, and handing them out.”

R: “We are cold. We are tired. We are sick, and hungry. No one has medications. No one has dialysis. There is nowhere to give birth. This is not a humanitarian crisis. This is how health is also a weapon of war.”

J: “Please remind our comrades not in Gaza, that there are still many of us here. It seems like some people think that everything is gone. … And we are here. … We need your solidarity. We are not already all destroyed. And we will stay alive another week.”

The story ends with the woman telling @jeffstein.bsky.social: “You can’t stand there and say you’re the child of the Great Depression, but not understand what you’re doing to the population pushing millions of people off a financial cliff.”

Some liberals’ main concern in rewriting this history is anxiety over people not voting for Biden (whether bc of pandemic or Palestine). But the effect of ending the programs was felt in real time—here’s a story from 2021 of a woman with lupus forced back to work by this decision

In 2021, while there was public outcry over the end of pandemic unemployment insurance expansion, the Biden administration dithered until the very last moment, allowing it to expire, while Biden publicly said it “makes sense” for the benefits to be ending.

Most importantly, Biden had an opportunity to position pandemic relief programs as part of a new baseline for economic security. Instead, they had Jen Psaki forcefully say the opposite, in 2021: “no one from the administration has ever proposed making these permanent”

Today’s @deathpanel.bsky.social is in part a response to these claims by Eric Levitz, which misrepresent the fights around the termination of the pandemic welfare programs. Far from championing welfare expansion, the end of these programs means Biden has overseen welfare retrenchment