The Pandemic Isn't Over / Matt Mazewski

This Is Hell!

News

4.9 • 937 Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2023

⏱️ 89 minutes

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Summary

Matt Mazewski joins This is Hell! to discuss his new article, "The Pandemic Isn't Over." Matt Mazewski is a contributing writer and book critic at Commonweal, where he writes on economics and public policy. He is a former research analyst in the research and statistics group at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Matt teaches courses on economics and labor studies for high school students at Columbia University's pre-college programs, as well as being an economics tutor. He's an independent researcher working on several projects related to labor economics, including the measurement of union membership over time at a fine geographic level, the impacts of collective bargaining on retirement outcomes, and the dynamics of monopsony power in labor markets. Read Matt’s article "The Pandemic Isn’t Over" at commonwealmagazine.org

Transcript

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0:00.0	under the sky is Oh, This is hell. Live from the United States where capitalism is the virus.
0:40.0	This is hell.
0:43.0	Imagine if this winter a previously unknown cause of death was to suddenly emerge, spreading
0:50.9	like wildfire across the globe, killing untold numbers of people as the world
0:56.0	scrambles for a cure.
0:59.6	Governments worldwide respond with much needed public assistance to help people survive the crisis as publicly funded research institutions work diligently to come up with a vaccine.
1:10.0	Sure, there are the denialists insisting the new cause of death is exaggerated.
1:15.2	We should just go on about our business, go on with our daily lives, as if nothing is happening,
1:20.4	there's nothing to see here.
1:22.4	But as the deaths pile up, that seems to be an increasingly untenable position to take.
1:27.0	Miraculously, however, public research institutions do develop a vaccine and relatively quickly and
1:34.2	while it does not completely protect the public from the new cause of death it does
1:39.2	make the disease far more survivable turning what would have been deadly into something akin to a bad flu,
1:46.8	although potentially with long-term consequences and still a chance of death. Now imagine that while 125,000 are still dying every year
1:57.7	from the new cause of death, that's over 10,000 people dead a month and that's only in the United States alone, the U.S. government
2:08.2	decides that the new cause of death is no more. It's gone. It's disappeared. That information about the new cause of death
2:17.6	will no longer be shared by health care institutions and professionals. That the public
2:22.4	will no longer be informed about any potential surge in deaths,
2:27.0	that for all intents and purposes, moving forward we will be completely left in the dark about the new cause of death and just how deadly it is.
2:36.0	Well, you don't have to have an imagination to dream up that nightmare, because that's exactly
2:41.0	what we went through with the Trump administration and what we are going through right now with the Biden administration
2:46.4	what we will be going through now that they've declared the pandemic over in a few minutes we will figure out why there's an insistence that it's
	...

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