Feeling like nobody cares if you get Covid? Feeling helpless? At high risk and your health care providers don’t seem to care or take you seriously? Here’s what to do. Don’t get demoralized, get active! We regularly hear outrageous stories like this one (reprinted with permission): “Had a telehealth today and was told to come by curbside for PCR test, which I just did. The person who took my curbside test was maskless. I asked her to put on a mask and she refused. I stated I am high risk and she still refused! This is a staff member at the doctor’s office refusing to mask to swab me for Covid when her job is literally to swab people all day, and yet refusing to mask around high risk patients.”

This infuriates us, and is one of the main reasons that we have put together this site, so people can find those services which still take Covid seriously. But clearly it’s not enough. By now (December of 2022) it is well known that even mild initial cases of Covid can cause long Covid. Our own CDC acknowledges that at least 1 in 5 Americans have experienced and are experiencing long Covid (although many researchers put it at many more than that). We know that even mild Covid is linked to brain damage. We know that the Covid virus is spread via airborne transmission, including long-range airborne transmission.

Knowing all this, it’s bad enough when people providing services don’t have the common decency to wear a mask and take other Covid precautions. But to have health care providers not masking when they are treating patients is much, much worse. And to have health care providers whose job it is to interact with people who may be infected with Covid, to be around those people all day, and yet to refuse to wear a mask when asked by someone who is at high risk, well, that is, or should be, criminal.

Some people have expressed feeling like the entire public and private health systems, and our own governments, not only don’t care that Covid is killing the elderly and the disabled, and others identified as high risk, but actually are inviting it. Planning on it. We’re not quite that cynical, but they are certainly turning a blind eye. Institutionally they don’t seem to care.

So we’re fed up, and we’re not going to take it any more. If you are also fed up, and are thinking “but what can I do? Nobody seems to care any more.” well, here’s how to make them care!

How to Make Your Representatives, the CDC, the AMA, and Those Running Those Health Care Services Care

Read through the following before starting, so that it will make sense. It’s actually really easy to get an email to the right people and places, you just have to know how to do it, and what to say.

What you’re going to do is draft an email using this amazing free service that will email your state and Federal representatives (in other words your state and Federal congresspeople). You just tell the site where you live and it will determine who your representatives are for you. Then you write the email and it emails your representatives! Nifty, eh?

BUT, before you send the email, you are going to copy it and paste it somewhere safe so that you can copy and paste it in to some other forms and emails as well. So basically all you have to do is write the email once, and then send it off to several different places. Those places include:

• Your state Attorney General (after all, this is partly a consumer issue, and they are charged with protecting consumers in their state)
• The CDC (to make a noise, the more letters (email) they get the less they can ignore it)
• The White House (ditto)
• The President of the American Medical Association (the first rule of the Hippocratic oath by which all physicians are bound, the very motto of the AMA, is “First Do No Harm”, let’s remind them that medical practitioners not taking Covid precautions around their patients is the very definition of harm!)
• The Chief of Advocacy at AARP
• If you want, the health reporter at the Washington Post (if enough people copy her on their email, at some point the Washington Post will have to start elevating the issue)
• And, if you have had a situation with a specific health care provider, the chief medical officer and the CEO of that health care facility (you will need to do a little research to find out their contact information)

If any of the above don’t have readily discoverable email addresses, then call them and read the letter to them over the phone! Or, for maximum impact, send them a printed copy of your email by FedEx or certified mail.

Come Out of the Shadows and Make Your Voice Heard!

Ready?

1. Go to the website of the National Association of Attorneys Generals and look up who is your state’s Attorney General. Do that here: https://www.naag.org/find-my-ag/. Go to your Attorney General’s website and find and make a note of the email address(es) for their office.

2. If you have had an experience with a particular health care facility, and if you are going to include them, go to their website and find any relevant email addresses that you can.

3. Next, go to the website Democracy.io. This is the site that will let you write an email to your state and Federal representatives. Be sure to copy your email and save it somewhere before you press ‘send’ (or you can draft your email elsewhere and then copy and paste it into Democracy.io). Be sure to include “cc:”s at the bottom of your email so that they know you are sending it to all those other places, such as:

cc: Attorney General (name)
CDC
The White House
Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld, President, American Medical Association
Nancy Leamond, Chief of Advocacy at AARP
Lena Sun, Health Reporter, the Washington Post

—

The cc: list isn’t a courtesy, it’s leverage.

Go to Democracy.io here: https://democracy.io

4. Go to the contact form on the CDC site and paste in your email (be sure to keep the cc: list intact) and send it. Go to the CDC contact form here: https://wwwn.cdc.gov/DCS/ContactUs/Form

5. Go to the contact form for the White House, select “Contact the President” as the recipient from the drop-down menu, and paste in your email (be sure to keep the cc: list intact) and send it. Go to the White House contact form here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/

6. Click this link to open a new email, and paste in your email and send it. This link prepopulates the email with the email address of the President of the American Medical Association:

Email the President of the American Medical Association

7. Click this link to open a new email, and paste in your email and send it. This link prepopulates the email with the email address of the Chief of Advocacy at the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons)

Email the Chief Advocacy Director at AARP

8. (Optional) Send a copy of your email to Lena Sun, the health reporter at the Washington Post:

Email the Washington Post

What to Say in Your Letter (Email)

What you say in your letter should reflect your own individual experiences, whether it’s your general frustration at not being able to keep yourself safe when using non-Covid-safe providers, or a specific situation such as is recounted above. If you are a health care provider who is taking precautions in order to keep your patients safe, first: bless you! And second, please make your voice heard as well! The more sectors from which these people hear that they need to step up and do something and stop ignoring the issue, the more it will get attention.

Here is a sample email, but do not just copy it. You can use it as a basis for your draft, but make it your own; 10 clearly individual emails can have more impact than 50 that all say the same thing.

Sample Email

Dear (Person’s title and name),

I am writing to you today about a very dangerous situation of which you may not be fully aware. Millions of Americans who are at high risk for Covid, whether because of age, affliction, disability, or other factors, are unable to safely see medical and dental providers because so many of these health care providers refuse to take even the most basic of Covid precautions, such as masking while treating a high risk patient. Incredible as it may sound, this has personally happened to me (insert experience here). I beseech you to find some way to at least encourage, if not require, health care providers to take at least basic precautions when caring for patients who are known to be at high risk. If you can’t pass a policy mandating that (or at least urging it), then use the power of the purse, or the power of licensing, or whatever you can do. But there are millions of us out here who have done everything right – I myself am twice vaccinated and triple-boosted, and wear masks wherever I go, but the science and experience tell us that this is not enough in the face of an enemy who evades all immunity, can sneak into the crack of the seal of a mask, and even remain for hours on our groceries (according to the study released December 2022).

Please help us. It feels as if all of the institutions and representatives who are charged with keeping us safe in fact are throwing us to the wolves, knowing that we will get Covid, and then long Covid, and then die from it, and they just don’t care. Please help do something to show that’s not the case.

Sincerely,

Your name

cc: Attorney General (name)
CDC
The White House
Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld, President, American Medical Association
Nancy LeaMond, Chief Advocacy Director, AARP
Lena Sun, Health Reporter, the Washington Post

Once You’ve Sent Your Email

After you send off your email, please let us know in a comment here that you have done so and, if you would like, share what you said. This will help to encourage others; there is strength in numbers.