Quinn Emmett

February 3, 2022

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Welcome back, Shit Givers.

You folks sure seem to love when I mention books I'm reading, so I'll share this week's: "To Raise A Boy" by Emma Brown. A necessary, clear-eyed, and unquestionably searing look into how we're raising boys in the US, and how we can do better.

(If you take this 3 question, 30 second anonymous survey, I can better understand how to share more or less as we go!)

This Week, Summarized:

Will the EPA's powers be gutted?
Don't forget your vaccines for everything else
PFAS can't get regulated soon enough
Everywhere needs more nurses
The database with virtually everyone's most private health info just sold (again)

Reminder: You can read this issue on the website, or you can listen to it on the podcast (shortly).

Reading Time: 8 minutes

CLIMATE CHANGE

Samuel Alito vs. the air you breathe

The news: In the fifty-two years since President Nixon proposed and approved the Environmental Protection Agency there have been, to put it mildly, some ups and downs, including (many) revisions to the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.

President Biden's EPA administrator Michael S. Regan inherited an agency pillaged of scientists and stripped of duties by President Trump, but he's doubled down on not only fixing Trump's rollbacks, but improving core efforts: to protect the environment and the people.

His foes? Poisons related to tailpipes, from soot, methane, and mercury, most of which (wait for it) disproportionately affect Black and Brown Americans, especially around the Gulf Coast.

But the clock's ticking, because John Roberts' Supreme Court might take an axe to the whole goddamn thing.

Understand it: Courts of every size are constantly dealing with environmental cases, but the Supreme Court is more conservative than ever, and thus the two cases on the docket this term scare the shit out of me:

1) West Virginia v. EPA, in which, per The Washington Post, "Republican-led states are challenging the EPA's authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants", and

2) Sackett vs. EPA, which involves construction on/around some wetlands, mostly around the question of "what and where are protected wetlands."

In Gizmodo, Dave Owen, a professor of environmental law at the University of Califonia, Hastings said: "There’s a range of outcomes, all of which are bad."

Turns out, elections matter!

⚡️Action Step: Climate change is the air you breathe, the water you drink, and the heat you feel on your face.

Get your municipality on board with Rewiring America's "Mayors for Electrification" plan, including a localized, actionable policy hub your town can get underway with or without the court or Congress.

COVID

NBC

Wayne Gretzky was right

The news: Flu, HPV, hepatitis, chickenpox and shingles, MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella), meningococcal, pneumococcal, and Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis).

Americans have collectively skipped 37 million routine vaccines for these diseases and more in the past two years.

Understand it: Look, I get it. It's imperative you (and your kids) stay up to date with COVID vaccines, and that should be enough. But these other diseases haven't just gone away, and the vaccines don't just protect you -- they're public health tools.

COVID is just a new layer on top of alllll of those other diseases, so when you hear that hospitals and the people that staff them are overwhelmed, remember: it's not just COVID from/with folks there, it's everything and everyone else, too.

I don't know what comes after Omicron, but I have it on good authority that there's very little reason why it would continue to mutate into more "mild" variants. It's possible -- anything's possible with 3 billion humans still unvaccinated -- but there's no virological rule that we continue to "get lucky".

So, control what you can control. All you can do is all you can do.

It's more important than ever that we use the public health tools that we have -- vaccines, ventilation, hand washing, and more -- to keep everything else at bay as we rush to vaccinate the rest of the world against COVID-19.

⚡️Action Step: Listen to my incredible conversation with Dr. Madhukar Pai, preeminent infectious disease epidemiologist, on why we desperately need to vaccinate the world, why we haven't yet, and what the hell you can do about it.

FOOD & WATER

Drink up

The news: Forever chemicals are having a moment.

Four months ago, EPA administrator Michael Regan (see above) announced a new strategy to regulate PFAS "forever chemicals" (of which there are about 5000 different combinations) out of our food supply chain, but any real execution can't come fast enough.

Understand it: As global warming and droughts increase, desperate farmers are turning to groundwater instead of rain, but groundwater -- and everywhere else -- has been found to have high levels of PFAS (including in the bloodstreams of a probable 98% of Americans).

And PFAS have been increasingly found to have real health effects.

And you get the point. Regulation is needed across the consumer landscape, but so is eradication from the current water supply through filters, to the tune of billions of dollars.

Drinking water is a human right.

⚡️Action Step: Two steps!

1. Call your local water utility and ask how they're addressing PFAS, if they've tested their water for PFAS, and is so, to share information with you. They'll be DELIGHTED.

2. Donate to and sign on to Earthjustice's campaign to get the federal government to move faster and harder against PFAS and the manufacturers who continue to use them.

Help me build a better future. Apply to be my #2 right here.

HEALTH & BIO

Nurse Jackie or literally anyone

The news: Nurses make the whole thing tick, from schools to primary care to hospitals to hospice.

And by some counts, the United States was short a couple hundred thousand nurses -- before COVID.

And now?

"More than 1,000 hospitals have been reporting daily critical staffing shortages in recent weeks, according to federal data. The healthcare sector has lost nearly 500,000 workers since February 2020, according to estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics."

Understand it: You can go deeper on the state of hospital and hospital workers through Ed Yong's recent oeuvre, but despite a rise in nursing school applications, the devastation isn't equitably distributed.

Throughout the American south, small community nonprofit hospitals in states that have refused to take up the Medicaid expansion are losing nurses to burn out, and to traveling care jobs that pay far more.

But the inequities reach around the globe.

By one estimate, "There are an estimated 10,000 foreign nurses with U.S. job offers on waiting lists for interviews at American embassies around the world for the required visas."

Per Lillian Mwape, a nursing director in Zambia (one of 50+ countries in Africa we've basically failed to vaccinate), “It is the most-skilled nurses that we lose and you can’t replace them. Now in the I.C.U. we might have four or five trained critical-care nurses, where we should have 20. The rest are general nurses, and they can’t handle the burden of Covid.”

⚡️Action Step: Doctors Without Borders is doing incredible work helping out on COVID projects in 76 countries. You can donate, or join their staff in New York or in the field here (you don't actually need to be a nurse or doctor).

BEEP BOOP

Ok, so

The news: You know how when you go to the doctor, and they spend most of your 6 minute appointment hen-pecking the list of supplements you don't really ever remember to take into an electronic health record, and then you're rushed out with an antibiotic you didn't really need?

Yeah so anyways, it turns out all of that data also probably goes into a neat little conglomerate of databases called Marketscan, which includes "the records of a stunning 270 million Americans, or 82% of the population."

The same Marketscan which has been sold four times, most recently for $1 billion by IBM to a private equity group.

Understand it: Marketscan was founded forty years ago by Ernie Ludy, who now occasionally questions the data economy, telling STAT, “I just don’t believe that anywhere there are the appropriate controls.”

"Google, Facebook and Twitter (created) impossibly deep wells of ancillary demographic and health information from internet searches, geolocation tracking, and unguarded social media posts.

Medical data mining companies have made a business of scraping the details of consumers’ daily lives into medical dossiers that, if combined with MarketScan’s de-identified information, could be used to re-identify the individuals within its databases."

⚡️Action Step: Support data for good. Nobody does it better than our friends at Our World in Data, you can support their work here.

10 THINGS FROM MY NOTEBOOK

These are the Climate Creators to (literally) watch!
Thanks to Omicron, the next COVID vaccines might go up the nose
Volume 6 of The State of AI Ethics is out -- a must read from our friends at the Montreal AI Ethics Institute
Speaking of bots: Might quantum computing be facing a "winter"?
What if all this inflation is actually due to climate change?
Biden wants the next USPS mail trucks to be electric but has to stop DeJoy and convince Congress to cough up $3 billion to get it done
Could Pap smears one day help detect breast and ovarian cancers?
After COVID, it's the after-party (I'm kidding, it's horrific antimicrobial resistance)
Solar farms need 40% less space than 10 years ago, here's a recap in 2021 climate tech venture from our friends at CTVC
I will believe this when I see it with my own dead eyes but -- we're creeping closer to fusion!

IMPORTANT JOBS

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