The latest medical nonsense

Well. Now we have another cause of autism. Thanks, RFK jr!

There’s two studies that show children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism. It’s highly likely because they are given Tylenol, Kennedy stated during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday.

That man is just incredibly stupid. He doesn’t understand cause and effect, he doesn’t understand correlation, and he doesn’t understand that you shouldn’t make off-the-cuff remarks drawing unfounded conclusions.

One of the papers he claims support his conclusion is direct that it is a correlational study, and it doesn’t even look at tylenol use.

The 2013 study looked at circumcision rates in boys versus autism rates. The authors admitted that national and state averages may show correlation, not causation, and said their study may have mistakes, bias and confounding. “Circumcision practices are also tied to culture and religion, which also affect autism diagnoses and health care use,” said Dr. Céline Gounder, CBS News medical contributor and editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News.

Another expert brings up a rather salient point.

“There is absolutely no studies establishing any causality,” Dr. Steven Abelowitz, founder and medical director of Ocean Pediatrics, told CBS News. “While some observational studies suggest possibly an association, there’s no studies (showing causality) — and the conclusion by any credible medical resource is agreeing that there’s no causal relationship between Tylenol, circumcisions or vaccines to autism.”
…
“We almost never, ever use Tylenol after circumcision,” Abelowitz said, adding he’s performed about 10,000 circumcisions across his 30 years of practice.

Fire that guy.

By the way, circumcision is a pointless cosmetic procedure that you shouldn’t do anyway, but not because it causes autism.

It’s like raaaain on your wedding day…

This is Brian Hooker, Ph.D., an anti-vaxxer who traveled to Texas during a measles outbreak to spread some anti-science propaganda. He’s best known as a promoter of the idea that vaccines cause autism. He was making a video with Ben Edwards, an anti-vax doctor working in the center of the Texas outbreak that killed three, who also contracted measles.

Brian Hooker, chief scientific officer of Children’s Health Defense, filmed an interview in west Texas in March with the parents of the six-year-old child who died from measles – the first measles death in the US in a decade.

The video promoted several dangerous myths about the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Two doses of the vaccine are 97% effective at preventing measles, a virus that can be deadly and can cause lifelong harm.

Now for the non-ironic ironic part:

Hooker and Polly Tommey, an anti-vaccine film-maker with Children’s Health Defense, also interviewed other Mennonite families in west Texas. And they visited the medical office of Ben Edwards while patients and Edwards himself had symptomatic measles, they said.

Hooker then traveled home to Redding, California, and developed measles symptoms, he said.

Full disclosure, 18 days after visiting Seminole, Texas, sitting in a measles clinic and being exposed to Doctor Ben with the measles, I got the measles. So cool, Hooker said.

So he exposed himself to the measles in Texas, then, while he was maximally contagious, he flew across the country to California, exposing everyone he encountered to the disease.

But don’t worry, Ben Edwards also gave him the cure.

Edwards has become quite popular in the severely undervaccinated community in Gaines County, Texas, the epicenter of the explosive outbreak that began in late January and continues to grow steadily. Edwards set up a makeshift measles clinic in Gaines and provides unproven treatments, such as cod liver oil, the antibiotic clarithromycin, and the glucocorticoid budesonide, which is used to treat asthma and Crohn’s disease.

It would be very nice if these two quacks would drop dead of a preventable disease.

It’s killing the cats!

Tragic news from Shelton*, Washington: in an animal sanctuary that specializes in big cats, the Wild Felid Advocacy Center, the tigers and caracals and lynxes have been dropping like flies.

“They’re drowning, basically, in their own lungs,” said Melinda Mathews.

Melinda Mathews lives here full-time with her husband, Mark, who founded the nonprofit in 2006.

“They were immensely suffering,” Melinda said, her face drawn in sadness. “It was the hardest thing, so hard.”

The first to get sick was a cougar, Hannah Wyoming, back in mid-November. The veterinarian thought she had cancer. And when Crackle, an African Caracal got sick, the vet thought the cause was cancer, too.

But the big cats died and others soon followed.

“Basically, we’ve lost a cat every day for about two and a half weeks,” Mark said.

It’s the bird flu, H5N1, that was spreading through all the animals. They think it was transmitted through the cat food, which often contained bird meat. Now there has also been a recall of Northwest Naturals Turkey Recipe cat food after tests showed that it was tainted with H5N1, and after one domestic pet died of bird flu.

This is how those sneaky viruses get you. H5N1 is spread widely in bird populations, but is unlikely to spread to humans, and does so only rarely. Now a variant has a toehold in a common, widespread mammal that thrives in our homes and farms and cities, numbering about 75 million animals. If a pandemic spreads through that population, which would be terrible news in itself, a variant that can thrive in people could arise, and then…lockdowns and mask mandates and a frantic search for a vaccine. Unfortunately, this could come at a time when a big chunk of the population likes to defy basic practices in hygiene and when an incoming administration has expressed a desire to gut the scientific enterprise in the USA, and we’re about to have a demented anti-vaxxer in charge of biomedical research.

I guess the evil cat is going to have to go. I’m not going to harbor a plague vector in my home.

Wait, what’s that? The cat has informed me that she’s an indoor cat and we never let her go outside anyway, despite all the tail-twitching staring she does at the window. Also, all of her cat food is fish-based, because she doesn’t like the taste of bird — she wants to murder them, not eat them.

Also, we haven’t trimmed her razor sharp claws in a while, and she knows where we sleep.

*I know where Shelton is! My grandson lives in Lacey, and I have other relatives in McCleary.

Bring back the mask

I have not been masking up all summer long. This town is very sparsely populated in the summer, and instead of masking I have just been avoiding humanity as much as possible.

That’s about to change. The students are flooding back this weekend, I have advising meetings starting Monday, and I’m expected to mingle with everyone starting next week. I may have to carry a black widow on my shoulder to discourage that sort of thing.

COVID cases are rising again, so it’s a good idea to minimize exposure, so I’ll be wearing my mask all the time starting Monday. I’m also reading about the current backlash — would you believe nurses in the UK are discouraged from wearing masks?

Meanwhile, a hospital nurse in Scotland said they faced abuse for still wearing a mask.

“It horrifies me that if l choose to wear a mask I’m questioned by my colleagues and patients,” they said.

“It’s like the last couple of years and long Covid doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter when it does. I don’t want to wear a mask but l don’t want to spread or catch it either.”

They said they were at their “wit’s end” after almost three decades in nursing.

As well as seeing a rise in cases among their local populations, 40% of nurses reported that they have had Covid-19 themselves this summer.

Of those, 21% said they had attended work while infected with the virus.

In the comments section, many nurses said that the policies in their workplaces and the attitudes of managers meant they felt pressured to come to work even if they had Covid-19.

They also reported that they were discouraged from testing themselves and patients.

A care home nurse in England said that “management is actively discouraging staff from testing due to concerns about a reduced workforce”.

A nursing associate based in NHS hospitals in England added: “It’s like Covid never existed… we get told off for testing.”

Similarly, an advanced nurse practitioner in England said: “I feel that there is huge pressure on staff to work with Covid even if symptomatic which increases [the] risk of spread to patients.”

Wait, what? Nurses are told to continue working maskless with patients while symptomatic with COVID? I’ve been to the local hospital a few times this summer, and I noticed that while they still grill you on COVID symptoms and travel when you check in, no one there is wearing a mask. It would be slightly annoying to come down with a potentially deadly respiratory disease because you went in for your colonoscopy.

That settles it. The mask is back, baby. And I will look good wearing it.

The plague resumes in 4 days

I’ve been at home, rarely stepping out, other than to visit an empty university and a lab populated entirely and exclusively by spiders. And I like it that way! Alas, it all changes on Tuesday, when the students return and I have to mingle with them 5 days a week. I have my masks, and I’ve been thoroughly vaccinated, but I’m also aware that there are plague demons among us. People like Joseph Ladapo, surgeon general of Florida, and accomplice to the fast-fading fascist, Ron DeSantis.

It used to be fairly easy to dismiss Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, as a clownish anti-vaccine quack posing a danger mostly to residents of his home state.

That has become harder to do as time goes on, as Ladapo has moved from promoting useless treatments for COVID-19, such as the drugs hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, to waging an ever-expanding fact-free campaign against the leading COVID vaccines.

This month, Ladapo established a new low for himself. In a public advisory issued Wednesday by the Florida Department of Health, he declared the vaccines “not appropriate for use in human beings” and counseled doctors to steer patients to other treatments. He explicitly called for a “halt in the use of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.”

He’s basing this sweeping dismissal on ONE (1) swiftly debunked paper by an anti-vax crank.

It’s not just COVID, though. I’m concerned about that as I prepare to share an atmosphere with students again, but also because we’ve got idiots like Ladapo everywhere who are disrupting basic public health with their absurd ideas.

Then there’s the public health context: As COVID infections have been surging coast to coast, advisories from public health authorities to resume masking and take other protective measures, such as making sure you’re up to date on vaccinations, are almost invisible.

Even more worrisome, the incidence of other vaccine-preventable diseases may be rising. As many as nine cases of measles have been reported in Philadelphia, some associated with an infection started at a daycare center with a family that violated quarantine rules.

Among the victims, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, are “an infant who was too young to get vaccinated, an unvaccinated older child and the older child’s unvaccinated parent.”

Nine cases may not sound like a lot — 41 were reported nationwide in 2023 — but they could be a harbinger of worse to come, in clusters in which anti-vaccine propaganda has taken hold.

The “invisible” aspect of public health advisories is notable — my university used to have a big bold link on the main web page that pointed to the status of the pandemic on campus, with recommendations for protecting oneself. It’s gone. You have to dig to find any updates on COVID. I guess someone thinks COVID-19 is over.

And then, undermining public confidence in such basic principles of good preventive medicine, such as vaccines and hygiene, as Ladapo is doing, is going to do long-lasting harm. I don’t want to die of COVID, but I also don’t want to die of polio, or measles, or the bubonic plague, or some exotic new disease that springs up in the rotting flesh of some Republican ignoramus. Ladapo and all of these conservative know-nothings are making that more probable.

How do these morons get any power at all in government, I’d like to know.

The most punchable face in America is back!

And he’s giving us even more reason to punch him!

Infamous “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli announced his newest venture yesterday, and it’s about as awful as you’d expect. In a Substack post and on Twitter, he unveiled DrGupta.ai, a “virtual healthcare assistant” that (predictably) Shkreli believes will disrupt medicine—in spite of some very real and worrying legal and ethical gray areas.

“My central thesis is: Healthcare is more expensive than we’d like mostly because of the artificially constrained supply of healthcare professionals,” he wrote on Substack. “I envision a future where our children ask what physicians were like and why society ever needed them.”

“Dr. Gupta” is just Shkreli’s latest health venture since being released from prison last May. Last year, he founded Druglike, a drug discovery software platform being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC is looking into whether Shkreli is violating a court-ordered lifetime ban on working in the pharmaceutical industry by running Druglike.

Madness. If you replace all the healthcare professionals who generate the data that is leeched off by a glorified chatbot with said chatbot, where is the information that they parrot going to come from? All you’re going to have left is a feedback loop that is disconnected from any reality checks, it’s going to get progressively worse, and we’re not going to get any new medical knowledge.

It’s quite rich that he’s blaming the high expenses of medical care on scarce skilled medical labor and knowledge, when he’s the guy who artificially elevated the cost of life-saving drugs. Blame the greedy pharmaceutical executives instead.

Hey, people like Shkreli are the ones who could be replaced by a mindless software program!

I’ve experienced brain fog, and no thank you very much

A few weeks ago, I had what is called a transient ischemic attack — don’t worry, it was brief, hasn’t returned, and the doctors examined me inside & out with embarrassing thoroughness, and have given me a clean bill of health — but it was terrifying. For a whole ten minutes, I couldn’t focus on a simple and familiar task on the computer. I knew what I had to do, if I was thinking normally, and I couldn’t figure out how to find basic, abstract functions on the screen in front of me. When it passed, then click-click-click it was a second’s work, and I couldn’t understand what had happened.

Today I read Ed Yong’s latest, and dear god, it is chilling.

On March 25, 2020, Hannah Davis was texting with two friends when she realized that she couldn’t understand one of their messages. In hindsight, that was the first sign that she had COVID-19. It was also her first experience with the phenomenon known as “brain fog,” and the moment when her old life contracted into her current one. She once worked in artificial intelligence and analyzed complex systems without hesitation, but now “runs into a mental wall” when faced with tasks as simple as filling out forms. Her memory, once vivid, feels frayed and fleeting. Former mundanities—buying food, making meals, cleaning up—can be agonizingly difficult. Her inner world—what she calls “the extras of thinking, like daydreaming, making plans, imagining”—is gone. The fog “is so encompassing,” she told me, “it affects every area of my life.” For more than 900 days, while other long-COVID symptoms have waxed and waned, her brain fog has never really lifted.

Of long COVID’s many possible symptoms, brain fog “is by far one of the most disabling and destructive,” Emma Ladds, a primary-care specialist from the University of Oxford, told me. It’s also among the most misunderstood. It wasn’t even included in the list of possible COVID symptoms when the coronavirus pandemic first began. But 20 to 30 percent of patients report brain fog three months after their initial infection, as do 65 to 85 percent of the long-haulers who stay sick for much longer. It can afflict people who were never ill enough to need a ventilator—or any hospital care. And it can affect young people in the prime of their mental lives.

AAAAAAAAAAAAIIEEE! That’s what I experienced…for ten minutes. But that’s one of the possible symptoms of long-COVID, and people go through it for months? I can’t imagine it. I wouldn’t want to go through that.

For example, Robertson’s brain often loses focus mid-sentence, leading to what she jokingly calls “so-yeah syndrome”: “I forget what I’m saying, tail off, and go, ‘So, yeah …’” she said. Brain fog stopped Kristen Tjaden from driving, because she’d forget her destination en route. For more than a year, she couldn’t read, either, because making sense of a series of words had become too difficult. Angela Meriquez Vázquez told me it once took her two hours to schedule a meeting over email: She’d check her calendar, but the information would slip in the second it took to bring up her inbox. At her worst, she couldn’t unload a dishwasher, because identifying an object, remembering where it should go, and putting it there was too complicated.

That’s exactly what I was trying to do! I was trying to put a presentation I had to give on my calendar/email, and somehow I couldn’t figure out where anything was or what steps I had to take. Even my brief experience with that was intolerably frustrating. It was so awful that immediately after I recovered my ability to act again, I checked into a hospital, despite feeling totally fine once it passed.

Thanks, Ed Yong. Now in addition to worrying about respiratory failure and death, I can dread losing my brain. I’ve managed to avoid getting COVID at all so far, and now I’m motivated to be even more scrupulous in my preventive efforts. It’s too bad my employers, a fucking university, has so little concern about the minds of their faculty and students.

HaloDays

My grandnephew Alex (my brother’s daughter’s son — it can be hard to keep track!) is growing into a young man, which brings with it challenges most of us didn’t have to worry about. He was born with cleft lip and palate, which was surgically corrected…many times. It turns out that this is not a one-and-done kind of surgery, as he grows, his skull has to be continuously adjusted with more surgery and more gadgets. Right now he’s about to go in and get a device called a halo attached to his head for 3 months. It’s like braces for your whole face.

He has decided to document the procedure and his travails afterwards with a video series called HaloDays.

Follow and subscribe!

Random thoughts about pig hearts

A man in Maryland has received a pig heart transplant. What an interesting idea! People have been talking about xenotransplants of this magnitude for decades, and now someone actually gets to try it. It’s also a terrifying idea.

  • My first thought was of Baby Fae, the infant in 1984 who received a baboon heart. It was a disaster. The surgeon didn’t believe in evolution and dismissed concerns about the degree of relatedness, and the donor was blood type AB and Fae was type O. They also didn’t have any means of genetically modifying the baboon. Would you believe there are ethical concerns and responsibilities in this sort of thing?
  • The Washington post article is all about the ethics of the surgery, which is good. It takes a really cock-eyed perspective, though: the recipient was a bad guy who stabbed and paralyzed someone, failed to pay court-ordered compensation to his victim, and also has a history of being sloppy and undisciplined about his medications. Should he have been given this gift?
    YES.
    Jesus, it’s not even in question. Doctors should deliver health care based on need, not passing judgment on the worth (in all senses of the word) of their patient. What next? Will doctors decide on my treatment based on my credit score? Yeah, you don’t have to tell me that here in the good ol’ USA that is the de facto situation. It’s not good.
  • For the retribution crowd, relax. He is being punished. He’s an experimental guinea pig for a treatment that’s going to buy him a little time. The pig was extensively manipulated with 10 genes modified to reduce, but not totally eliminate, the chance of rejection. He’s going to be trapped in a hospital bed for a good long while, with nurses waking him up every few hours through the night to do blood tests, and he’s going to be taking so many pills. I’ve been in that place for relatively trivial surgeries, it’s a necessary hell. Have a little pity.
  • He’s probably going to die in a few months, anyway — I’ll be surprised if his new heart isn’t shredded by rejection in short order. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if he gets a significant survival time, though, since that means this could be a very promising treatment for everyone.
  • Except the pigs. You do realize that this implies the existence of pig farms for animals whose fate is to be chopped up as needed for organs, right? It’s a tiny drop in the slaughterhouse bucket, since humans butcher 1.5 billion pigs per year to make pulled pork sandwiches and bacon, so it’s not the numbers that are daunting, it’s the fact that right now there are cloned pigs being modified and raised in artisanal farms in the hopes that genetic refinement will make them incredibly valuable to corporations. These are long term investments!
  • No one is talking about how much these expendable pigs cost. We aren’t talking about the ethics from the pig’s perspective, and we’re suspiciously mum about what the bill is going to be. This lucky (?) fellow in Maryland is benefitting from a bit of scientific curiosity — hey, we’ve been raising all these special pigs for a decade or so, how about if we splice one heart into a test subject and see what happens — but if it works and becomes a relatively routine intervention, who’s going to be able to afford it?
  • While I’m on the pig’s side, what do these gene modifications do to the health of the pig stock? Does this compromise their immune systems? Are these going to be bubble-pigs that need to be raised in a sterile environment?
  • I got to wondering about the scientific methodology behind making pigs with all these genetic modifications. Here’s an article on practical approaches for knock-out gene editing in pigs. It’s a multi-step, multi-generational process to produce pigs with specific mutations. Scientists have been working for years to make these pigs.

    Schematic workflow of the different steps needed to generate a gene edited pig. (A) Efficiency analysis of mutations induced by CRISPR-Cas9 system. (B) Different strategies to generate one-cell stage porcine edited embryos. (C) Gene editing analysis of the founder pigs (F0) and offspring produced by crossbreeding F0 pigs (F1).

  • The above article describes the mechanics, but not the research that goes into discovering candidate genes to reduce the immune response. Everyone is fumbling forward in the dark, finding likely genes that are affecting rejection, but they have to put that pig donor tissue in a human host to see if they actually got ’em all. This man in Maryland is very much a wildly experimental test subject, a scientific experiment in progress. The most likely result is they’ll find that “oops, we missed an important gene” and they’ll go back to the pig farm with a new CRISPR/Cas target and raise another generation with 11 modified genes for the next attempt. Meanwhile, this host is dead. But he will have contributed to Science with his demise!

Anyway, my brain is currently split between a Frankensteinian fascination with this bold experiment, and a humane dismay at the cost in suffering for humans and pigs.

Sense/Anti-sense

First, I must remind everyone that billionaire Rupert Murdoch elbowed his way to the front of the queue to get the vaccine as soon as it was announced, and that all those blithering conservative on-air personalities on Fox News are required to be vaccinated, just to put this story on Fox News’ promotion of quacks in perspective. It lists ten of the COVID denialist and anti-vax and tepid apologists for inaction who have been featured on the network many hundreds of times. Names you should learn to recognize and scorn: Marc Siegel, Martin Makary, Nicole Saphier, Rand Paul, Brett Giroir, Janette Nesheiwat, Jayanta Bhattacharya, Harvey Risch, Scott Atlas, and Peter McCullough. They all have the title of “Dr”, but you should know that the majority of doctors disagree with these scam artists; Fox News has been carefully distilling the population of MDs to purify and isolate the most untrustworthy scum to selectively display on popular programs by even more reprehensible filth like Carlson and Ingraham and Kudlow. You don’t get a prime time opinion/bloviation slot on Fox if you hold a reasonable view of the science.

Contrast that with this genuinely excellent interview with Jonathan Eisen, a biologist at UC Davis. Eisen simply and plainly says what every biologist and informed citizen knows about SARS-CoV-2.

The Omicron variant is way more infectious [than Delta]. It’s horribly contagious. Even people who are boosted are still getting infected. [The vaccine] does not seem to provide a huge protection against getting infected. I think that’s part of why it’s spreading so fast—people who have been vaccinated and/or boosted have mistakenly thought they were not going to get infected, and so they were going maskless everywhere. But if you have five times as many people infected, that’s going to create havoc, and that’s what is happening in New York and the Northeast, where the hospitals are full. They’re already sending people away who have any other types of emergency or nonemergency health needs. I think we’re in for some tough times; that’s my prediction.

Exactly. This is what I’m expecting, too. It’s also what everyone who isn’t brainwashed by Fox News can figure out. So what should we do?

All the evidence right now shows that vaccines are incredibly effective in reducing the risk of severe illness and death from Covid. And this is true even for new variants such as Delta and Omicron, even though the vaccines were not specifically designed for them. One can reduce the risk of severe illness even more by getting a booster shot. This reduction in risk is very, very clear from all the data. The one issue with Omicron that is different than with other variants is that just getting the regular vaccine dose (e.g., two Pfizer shots) does not reduce the risk of severe illness as much as it did for other variants. In other words, to reduce the risk of severe illness or death, it seems that a booster is very important here.

This is what infuriates me. Everyone wants the quick fix, the easy treatment, the simplest, most painless way to prevent this disease, and science provides one: the vaccine. Go in to the clinic or pharmacy, poke, you’re done, death averted. And what happens? People who listen to Fox News whine, “I want an insta-fix, but not that one.” They’d rather dose themselves with hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin or bleach or betadine, treatments that don’t work, than take the medicine proven to work.

In a world with people who refuse the treatment that works, and other people who can’t, for other medical reasons, get the vaccine, what can we do to protect ourselves. That’s also easy. Wear a mask in public.

What I’m hoping is that people do a lot of behavioral intervention that can slow down the spread of the Omicron variant. It goes back to the whole “flattening the curve” thing from before, and there are many things we can do. If you’re in crowded indoor spaces, you can avoid doing things where you have to take off your mask—so, no eating. But even with your mask on, not all masks are created equal. There’s new guidance that has come out in the last few days that cloth masks just aren’t going to cut it against Omicron. They just do not, on their own, filter enough particles out to reduce your exposure when airspace is getting filled with virus. What you want is a KN95 or N95 mask.

Yes. Masks aren’t the imposition the whiny-ass-titty-babies of conservatism pretend they are. When I’m teaching, I wear them continuously all day long with no difficulty, other than that I’m generally soft-voiced and muffling me doesn’t help (I’m working on it by TALKING LOUDER with my teaching voice). I tried to order some N95 masks in time for spring classes, but right now they’re backlogged and horribly expensive, so I settled for N94…still expensive with slow delivery — I think they’re all coming from South Korea — but I’ll double-up with a cloth mask until N95s become more available, I hope. If they do.

Eisen mentions also that he avoids big indoor events, even restaurants, and won’t fly, although he thinks if everyone on the plane takes reasonable precautions it’s probably safe. It’s just that too many people have been infected with the Fox brain-rot. Just glance at YouTube fights over masks on airplanes — people are getting into brawls in the aisles because they refuse to wear a mask. It’s nuts.

I avoid going out because I live in a county where practically no one wears a mask, ever. Even when our governor imposed a mask mandate, briefly, a lot of people ignored it, and our local business wouldn’t enforce it — and even then, half the population was incapable of figuring out that the mask covers your mouth and nose. It was good news when my university reluctantly decided to require masks and vaccines for all of our incoming students, but we’re a tiny island of common sense in an ocean of conservative denialists of basic medical facts.

We also need to worry about the long-term consequences of infection. Idiots like those talking heads on Fox News want to pretend it’s just a kind of flu, you get over it and carry on, but COVID has complications you ignore at your own peril.

That is one of my biggest concerns with this attitude of not worrying about Omicron too much because it might cause less severe symptoms. We know that long Covid is a problem for the other variants. It’s a big problem that is poorly understood medically, but is very clearly a real thing. These are real medical problems that people are having for months to now years after infection. Some people are saying everybody is going to eventually get Omicron, and that’s just the wrong attitude. We can make it so that not everybody gets it, and therefore reduce the risk of long Covid in too many people. We can’t just let it spread to everyone on the globe, because that’s going to be a medical catastrophe. Now is not the time to do nothing and hope for the best. It is the time to take measures while at the same time trying not to damage people’s lifestyles and lives and the economy.

Eisen’s is the kind of sensible voice we ought to have been hearing all along in our news media, providing accurate, honest information. I guess Rupert Murdoch knows that that doesn’t sell, unfortunately. And that’s why we’re screwed right now.