Veterans Day, masking, thoughts and prayers, and the ways the establishment deflects criticism

An illustration of how the establishment deflects criticism. A group of well-dressed powerful men point towards a graphic of a person wearing a mask and an airplane dropping bombs on a building while ignoring two other graphics depicting society's role to protect its citizens from pandemics and a well-designed building with good ventilation.

November 2022: Three recent events made me notice the ways our society’s establishment deflects criticism.

Veterans Day

Growing up in England taught me little about U.S. history, so it was only this year I learned that Veterans Day, first observed in 1919, was originally known as Armistice Day. (It’s still called this in France, while other countries call it Remembrance Day).

An armistice is an agreement to stop fighting a war. As President Woodrow Wilson said on the first Armistice Day, held at the end of World War I:

“…the victory of arms foretells the enduring conquests which can be made in peace when nations act justly and in furtherance of the common interests of men.”

World War I led to wide agreement in the “developed” world that war should be avoided if at all possible. A hundred years ago, the creation of Armistice Day provided an annual reminder of a goal most people still support today.

It’s great that we have a day to honor veterans. But what struck me when I learned about the name change in 1954 from Armistice Day to Veterans Day is that it deflected citizen attention from reinforcing the goal of ending war. The establishment eliminated Armistice Day—a day commemorating the end of war—and changed the focus to a day to honor military veterans.

While most people decry war, a powerful minority profits from its continuation. Though you might think that waging war is just “human nature,” there’s evidence that war is a relatively recent phenomenon. And war deaths worldwide have declined significantly since World War II.

I was three years old when politicians eliminated Armistice Day from our cultural vocabulary, and I don’t know the circumstances. But it’s easy to see the act as a cynical repression by the establishment of the concept that ending war is a noble and worthy goal for humanity.

Because I think we would all like an invite to the party after the war.

Wearing masks

I’ve written frequently about the effects of the COVID pandemic. Currently, many people are acting as if the pandemic no longer exists. Even though it’s still killing hundreds of people every day in the U.S. (Not to mention the ~10% who are now suffering from long covid. Which you really, really don’t want to get.)

When authorities bother to suggest precautions against the spread of COVID, they restrict any advice to wearing masks when indoors with others.

Wearing masks is an important prevention strategy that reduces personal risk and one’s risk of infecting others. But when many people eschew masking, COVID is going to be with us for a long time. Many more people will die and become disabled.

What authorities never mention is a far more effective prevention strategy that would, if comprehensively implemented, essentially wipe out COVID and other airborne diseases.

I’m talking, of course, about improving indoor air quality in buildings. Especially public buildings.

For a hundred years, we have known the importance of providing fresh indoor air, and the necessary technology is widely available. Making our buildings safe by requiring adequate air changes/hour plus virus filtering provides permanent protection against viral epidemics. Not just COVID and flu, but past and future pandemics too.

Emphasizing individual masking while avoiding any society-wide attempts to improve building air quality is another example of how the establishment deflects responsibility for disease prevention away from our institutions and onto individuals.

Thoughts and prayers

During the week I’m writing, there were two major horrific mass shootings in the U.S. Five people were killed and 17 injured at Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Six people were killed and four wounded at a Walmart store in Chesapeake, Virginia. There will be more mass shootings; there are about two every day, though most barely make the news anymore. The number of mass shootings has doubled in the last three years.

After especially violent crimes like these, many who continue to resist any meaningful restrictions on the fetish of gun ownership in this country trot out the phrase “thoughts and prayers.” Of course, these platitudes do nothing to change the civilian slaughter rate, some 21,000 people (not including gun suicides) in 2021.

Politically powerful groups, heavily funded by the gun industry, repeatedly mouth “thoughts and prayers” but do nothing to change the daily carnage that easily available guns cause. These elites deflect our populace from thinking about whether the U.S. might be able to reduce gun violence and deaths by such systemic changes as keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers, requiring background checks for all gun sales, and banning assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines. All things that are done in other developed countries, with significant results.

Instead, the establishment relentlessly promotes the idea that Americans should take individual responsibility to protect themselves and their loved ones by buying guns of their own. The gun industry makes money, and the cycle of gun violence continues.

There are many more examples

There are many more examples of how our society’s establishment deflects criticism by emphasizing personal responsibility rather than systemic solutions to problems. These are just three that came up for me this week. If you would like to add your own examples, feel free to do so in the comments below.

COVID, duty of care, and the meeting industry

COVID duty of care: an illustration of an audience at a meeting with coronavirus molecules floating in the air above themEvent professionals: let’s talk about COVID, duty of care, and the meeting industry.

We’ve known since mid-2019 that COVID-19 spreads by airborne aerosol transmission. (This makes me wonder why the GBAC STAR™ Facility Accreditation, with its emphasis on disinfection and cleaning surfaces and neglect of adequate ventilation, is still a thing.)

As I write this, the BA.5 Omicron variant is fueling the latest surge in COVID-19 cases in the U.S. The World Health Organization (WHO) just announced that COVID cases have tripled across Europe and hospitalizations have doubled. And “as Omicron rages on, scientists have no idea what comes next“.

The reality is we are still suffering a pandemic, currently dominated by the most contagious variant of COVID-19 yet: BA.5. The worst variant to date, BA.5 is four times more resistant to messenger RNA vaccines than earlier strains of omicron and is leading to significant increases in hospitalizations and ICU admissions.

As a result, WHO’s Emergency Committee has announced that Covid-19 remains a Public Health Emergency of International Concern — its highest level of alert.

Meanwhile, the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention reports that “Nearly one in five American adults who have had COVID-19 still have Long COVID“. And a U.S. Veterans Affairs study suggests that a second infection doubles the risk for death, blood clots, and lung damage, and increases the risk of hospitalization by three times, with every COVID reinfection increasing the risk for bad outcomes.

Yet the meeting industry seems to be abrogating its traditional responsibilities to keep attendees and staff safe.

Why are superspreader events still happening?

Every month I hear of more superspreader events. Here are a few recent examples:

  1. Veteran meeting planner Dianne Davis shared details about an event she produced in January 2022. Despite taking almost every standard precaution [“72-hour PCR test on them at all times or their triple vaccination card. Temp checks twice a day. Hand sanitizer. N-95 masks were provided and required to be worn anytime not actively eating or drinking. Onsite rapid tests every other day. Used a color-coded system for levels of contact comfort. Set room for social distancing.”] a third of the attendees contracted COVID. Probable culprits: (unmasked) indoor meals and socials.
  2. At the May 2022 New York City Criminal Court Judges Association three-day retreat, 30% of the attendees tested positive for Covid in the days after the event ended. The possible culprit: a karaoke session.
  3. Many attendees reported that the recent meeting industry conference IMEX Frankfurt 2022, held May 31, 2022 – Jun 2, 2022, was a superspreader event. A friend who attended tells me that he and 18 out of his 120 IMEX contacts contracted COVID there. Likely culprits: those (unmasked) indoor meals and socials will get you every time.
  4. The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing 2022 conference, Amsterdam, 11 to 15 July 2022 from  #SHARP2022:


These events are only the tip of the iceberg since it’s clear that many superspreader events go unreported. (For example, I can’t find a single public mention of the IMEX Frankfurt COVID cases.)

Duty of care

The meeting industry doesn’t provide appropriate duty of care for its own events

Besides the superspreader IMEX Frankfurt 2022 event mentioned above, MPI’s WEC San Francisco 2022 showed a lax approach to COVID duty of care. MPI didn’t require proof of vaccination or a rapid antigen test to enter the venue, Moscone West. Alameda County to the south reinstituted indoor masking requirements a few weeks before the meeting, driven by a rise in daily Covid-19 cases that exceeded the peak of last summer’s Delta wave. But San Francisco resisted following suit, and MPI decided to follow San Francisco’s relaxed protocols.

Currently, I think that the best practice COVID duty of care should include proof of vaccination (at least two shots) or daily on-site testing. I haven’t heard of COVID cases tied to the event, but I can’t find any assurances that the existence of any cases would be shared with attendees post-event. [Attendees may have been protected to some degree because the Moscone Center HVAC system uses MERV 13 filtration and the big receptions were held outdoors.]

MPI’s approach for WEC seems at odds with that espoused by their principal health and safety advisor: InHouse Physicians. In a July 6 2022 post on the MPI blog, Dr. Jonathan Spero, the CEO of InHouse Physicians says:

“We have not moved from the pandemic to the endemic stage yet.”

“…the average mortality rate of COVID is turning out to be around 0.5%. We could easily have another pandemic with a 5% mortality rate.  Imagine a tenfold increase in mortality and what it would do to the meeting industry and the entire global economy.”

“…I believe it is essential for planners who want to be successful to provide attendees with…health security measures that meet your responsibilities, and the expectations and potential concerns of your attendees.

We are failing to provide adequate COVID duty of care

Some argue that most people are unlikely to suffer serious consequences from contracting COVID-19. They are overlooking the 3% of the population in the United States—some seven million people—who are considered moderately to severely immunocompromised, making them more at risk for serious illness if they contract COVID-19, even after vaccination.

Here’s one of them:

Immunocompromised attendees, staff, and suppliers want to be at your meetings and will be at your meetings. Do you think it’s OK to ignore their critical needs?

If the meeting industry can’t adequately protect its members at IMEX Frankfort, what’s the likelihood its members can or will ensure an appropriate COVID duty of care at other meetings?

I’ll conclude with a personal story. My daughter, already suffering from long covid, has to attend a 400-person business conference next week. She is worried. Although the event has vaccination requirements, no one has supplied any information about indoor air quality at the venue. She plans to take meals outdoors and skip the socials. But she’s still concerned about being exposed to people with COVID. And she has every reason to be concerned. With current infection rates in the U.S., the probability is essentially 100% that she’ll be sitting in the same room as infectious attendees.

We can and should do better than this. If we’re going to hold in-person events, we have a duty of care to follow best practices for our attendees as well as hotel staff and suppliers of services.

The meeting industry has developed a disconnect between COVID safety precautions and duty of care.

This needs to change. We know what we need to do. It’s not rocket science. Do it!