“Gov’t has reached the limits of what it’s willing to do because of fear of the reactionary right,” would be more accurate.

I am mad because of an article about Michigan health departments telling people to do their own contact tracing, b/c it’s so much better than Texas.

1/ https://twitter.com/scottbraddock/status/1344506954908053505

What I would give for us to actually communicate clearly enough with folks to ask them to do their own contact tracing. Texas never asked. We just left people on their to figure out in the midst of shifting guidelines and confusions about what constituted an exposure 2/

We abdicated our responsibility. There were many people fighting for a different outcome, but we were not successful and therefore more people are dying.

We didn’t neglect our public health systems; we dismantled them & didn’t have the infrastructure we needed in a crisis. 3/

And instead of seeing the mistake and trying to correct, we’ve had folks avoiding responsibility by blaming whomever else was in view, and we’ve consistently outsourced the work of managing the crisis to private companies. 4/

So here we are, once again, hoping that private companies will figure out a decent vaccine distribution system since the State of Texas sure hasn’t.

But that means it will be disparate and confusing and hard for our constituents to navigate. 5/

I’ve been hearing from folks all day who’ve spent hours calling pharmacies and doctor’s offices trying to get a vaccine, almost all with no luck, all because we didn’t build a centralized system for them to use. And this is going to result in massive inequities. 6/

The people who get COVID most often and have the worst outcomes? Low income folks of color. The people who are overwhelmingly going to get vaccine first under this decentralized system that takes medical literacy and hours to burn to navigate? Wealthy white people. 7/

It’s wrong. It’s the obvious consequence of neglecting our public health institutions.

Good folks are working in public health and doing their best for us. But they’re running up against toxic politics and a generation of stripping their resources away. We have to fix it. 8/8