Message Forum

Happy Monday!

11/18/24 11:36 AM

#14630

Jim, RFK is a lawyer and has no medical training. Equally worrisome is the fact that he has absolutely no experience managing a large organization like HHS (which also administers the Medicare program we all rely upon plus the Food and Drug Adminsitration and CDC).

Three days ago Trump said he wants RFK to "Go wild at HHS!". Given his embrace of vaccine denial and other conspiracy theories, rather than recruiting “a staff and consultants for his department who will supply expert advice” RFK is much more likely to recruit those who share his discredited ideas. I think we’re headed for a train wreck, and a mindless Trump dance isn't going to change that.

11/18/24 01:55 PM

#14631

https://www.ama-assn.org/system/files/health-equity-progress-report-2023.pdf

Here are the 10 biggest falsehoods—known for years to be false, not recently learned or proven to be so—promoted by America's public health leaders (one who is a man pretending to be a woman), elected and unelected officials, and now-discredited academics during the Biden Admionistration:

1. SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a far higher fatality rate than the flu by several orders of magnitude.

2. Everyone is at significant risk to die from this virus.

3. No one has any immunological protection, because this virus is completely new.

4. Asymptomatic people are major drivers of the spread.

5. Locking down—closing schools and businesses, confining people to their homes, stopping non-COVID medical care, and eliminating travel—will stop or eliminate the virus.

6. Masks will protect everyone and stop the spread.

7. The virus is known to be naturally occurring, and claiming it originated in a lab is a conspiracy theory.

8. Teachers are at especially high risk.

9. COVID vaccines stop the spread of the infection.

10. Immune protection only comes from a vaccine.

Side note to John: Virtually every major medical organization - from the American Medical Association and the American Association of Medical Colleges to the American Association of Pediatrics - has embraced the woke ideololgy of the Left. They are all more focused on the idea that medicine should place its focus on racism and inequitiy. For example, the AMA's 2021 Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity was a two year plan to ensure "physicians confronted inequities and dismantled white supremacy, racism and other forms of exclusion and structured oppression, as well as embed racial justice and advance equity within and across all aspects of health systems."

This type of focus has the effect of rooting out the most qualified personnel and has greatly lowered our standard of healthcare across the board.

11/18/24 04:09 PM

#14632

It may be true that medical scientists, in a very general sense, and perhaps public health leaders even more so, tend to be more liberal than conservative. Surveys show that they do literally outnumber conservatives in the health sciences according to objective data. Let's hear it for liberal healers!

And let's come down off the ledge to and realize that calling liberals the cause of lousy healthcare is a hell of an illogical and criminal I'd say brainwashing level assumption. Apart from being pretty damn cold hearted bugaboo which I'd assume fits the general approach of the current administration of this country and, give him credit, a grand way of stirring up his base. However, moving on to logical thinking, when it comes to that ridiculous theory about liberal doctors gumming up the medical delivery system, I'm guessing even if they were a problem, which they are not, they'd take a back seat to rising costs, limited access, shortage of professionals and overall public ignorance about preventative care, which actually DO factor into any declining quality of healthcare -- certainly more than all those evil liberal that our coldly calculating president elect uses to scare his base into voting for him.

Is this a great country or what?

I would hope that public health specialists are sensitive to assisting those who struggle to find good health care. If you want to call that a liberal attitude, as I am sure Trump and his cronies see it, well you just hold your nose high in the air and judge away to your little heart's content.

As for me, Hell, When it comes to modern medicine I'm a lot more alarmed about the dawn of training artificial intelligence models to diagnose.

But then I'm sentimental when it comes to the profession, given that my grandfather was a general practitioner with an squarish little office and examination room attached to his home on east main street right next to a catholic church and school which I assume is still there. Forgive me if I shared this before. A door in the parlor of the home led straight to the attached office. It was a solid, heavy wooden, dark brown door with a decorative knocker in the shape of an owl on it (I still have that knocker, a treasured memento, on the shelf of a hutch in my living room). The door led from the drawing room of the old fashioned mansion straight to his examining room.

It's partly because of Dr. Ernest Victor Reutinger, my grandfather, that a current of respect for the art as well as the science of medicine runs through the generations of my family. Not to mention that His tenderness to me as a child is vivid in my heart to this day. I don't know and I don't care if he was liberal or conservative.

One of my mother's stories about the good doctor was that when she was a young woman, he came ouy of his office and led her into it. There was a figure, a very still figure, in that office. "This man is dead," he told her.

The man had been seriously ill or injured, obviously, and had died in the middle of being examined in spite of my grandfather's efforts.

He wanted his daughter to see the face of death. Not to scare her. To let her see it as part of reality, part of the natural order of things.

My mother was very proud of that story. And sharing it with her children was important to her, was her way of conveying the pragmatic and I think in a way courageous and quite practical attitude of acceptance of our fleeting existence as mortals.

PS I don't know how my grandfather voted, nor do I know how my own doctors voted, and frankly I don't give a crap. But then, speaking of falsehoods, I'm not a lying, coldly calculating politician looking for another bugaboo to stir up a credulous base.

But give him credit. It works.

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, is of infinite importance.
The one thing it cannot be is moderately important. — C. S. Lewis

11/18/24 10:26 PM

#14633

MM, you’ve obviously cut and pasted the ten greatest falsehoods from some rightwing-woke site. They are so ridiculously simplistic and overstated that I’m not going to waste my time responding other than to say that the initial versions of COVID were quite serious (although not “orders of magnitude worse" as you claim) – there are really good statistics about how many people die in any given period of time and there were a million “excess deaths” in the first year or so of Covid, meaning a million deaths over and above what would normally occur in that period from flu, pneumonia, heart disease, etc.

Statistics showed that while they were not perfect, the vaccines dramatically reduced the chances of dying (by a factor of 10 or 20) from COVID in the first year they were available.

But the one area I might agree with you on is that after the first year or so, as the variants became increasingly less deadly, many states/cities made a mistake in not biting the bullet and relaxing restrictions sooner. Many people were still shell-shocked and fearful but the effects on society of the slow re-opening, especially on school children, were very negative.

11/19/24 03:02 AM

#14634

RUN FOR YOUR LIVES THE RED DYE IS COMING !!!!!!

11/19/24 08:21 AM

#14635

https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/a-systematic-review-of-autopsy-findings-in-deaths-after-covid-19-vaccination/

Oh my gosh, John! Of course I cut & pasted from an article. Mike does it, it saves a lot of time & that is why copy & paste exists. According to you anything that doesn't fit the narrative of the New York Times, the Atlantic or the Washington Post is something to be denigrated & ridiculed as "right wing". And of course, you could never take the time to determine the validity of each of those topics because your frame of reference is too narrow.

11/19/24 09:16 AM

#14636

MM #1: I don't think cutting and pasting itself - as you can see from his follow up post - is the issue John's addressing.

As for me, yes, I like cutting and pasting, too. But why is it that they only let me use the rounded scissors?

On a more serious note I'd be happy to play the validity game against Trump and company any day. Their abuse of it is poisoning the country.

MM#2

11/19/24 09:29 AM

#14637

MM, the paper you cite fails to mention the vastly greater number of people who would have died from COVID had they not gotten vaccinated. Statistics in the first year of the vaccines, when the disease was most deadly, showed a 10-20 times reduction in death rates for the vaccinated.

Every vaccine has risks but if you understand the odds, getting the COVID vaccine (at least for the early variants) was a no-brainer.

This exchange has gone on long enough - I won't respond but feel free to have the last word.

11/19/24 10:09 AM

#14638

https://open.substack.com/pub/pierrekory/p/medical-journal-censorship-is-the?r=47g9x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Thank you John for giving me the last word. I am linking to an article which describes how medical journal censorship keeps the truth from the American public....just like the censorship of all things Covid that existed beginning in May of 2020. As the old adage goes.....follow the money.

P.S. Adding this article which I had archived along with many others which is a shorter and less technical read.

https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/death-by-vaccine-the-who-and-big-pharma-led-onslaught-on-our-lives?utm_source=Crisis+Magazine&utm_campaign=0b5375fb77-Crisis_DAILYRSS_EMAIL&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a5a13625fd-0b5375fb77-28098685&mc_cid=0b5375fb77&mc_eid=454ce6ede5

11/19/24 11:13 AM

#14639

Mike - America voted overwhelmingly to change course. Trump, a polarizing figure for sure, put forth an agenda that 74 million voters wanted and that agenda resonated with every sector of the population. Time will tell how beneficial it will be for our country and the world.

On another note....who is really running our nation right now and why did they decide to allow Ukraine to use American supplied long-range missiles to enter into Russia? Are they really trying to get the U.S. pulled into a war with Russia before January 20th?

11/19/24 11:26 AM

#14640

I don't dispute that, mm # 1.

It's the direction -- I should say misdirection, at least from my humble cut-and-paste point of view, that I dispute. It must have missed my sector. But clearly the majority of the country was fed up.

ps I don't know if your question about missiles was rhetorical but one way or another This Is Not Good. The Biden administration did indeed give them the green light. They have fired at least one of our missiles into Russia (what did we think they were going to do with them? Use them in a parade?) Anyway so says CNN re: firing at least one of them away. This is so not good. I dig the anti personnel mines we have sent over there because those are defensive weapons, though.

CNN —

Ukraine hit a R

11/19/24 04:15 PM

#14641

Bill Reid

I have to ask a question, given the recent posts -- So what if we disagree? There was a common view leading up to the election that, in print, in media such as this forum, and with friends, we are a country divided. But what does that really mean? Did we used to be united and now we aren't? Regardless of which lever you pulled in the voting booth, you most likely were motivated to sacrifice time and convenience that day to exercise your right and your duty as an American. As I witnessed those in line, I saw that there was much more shared than divided in our little corner of the world. Friendly conversations between neighbors took the place of angry disagreements over who to vote for. When the pundits tell us we are a country divided, it's important to remember it doesn't have to be. In a time when politics tries with all its might to divide us, it's important to remember that there's more to our relationships than just who we vote for. We are, all of us, united by those "magical" four years we spent at Watterson, united throughout our lives by that wonderous experience as we moved from youth to adult. Being as old as we all are ought to give us some perspective on what's really important in life. So let us focus on common ground and understanding each other rather than trying to change each other's minds. So what if we disagree? There is certainly more to life than being right. (prompted by an article from our local city council member.)

11/19/24 08:21 PM

#14642

Bill, I won’t respond to MM because I promised not to, but I will respond to you. From time to time I feel compelled to speak out, and I’m speaking out now because I worry that our politics is at an inflection point and that we’re in much the same place as Germany was in the early 1930’s and I don’t want to hold my tongue and be a “good German”. So you don’t think I’m just a Democratic hack, I’ve never felt remotely this strongly before about any of our other Republican presidents - I may not have been in love with them but I never doubted our system of government and our democatic values would survive.

Trump is totally different and a menace to our democracy and to the post-WWII order that we have created and that has benefited the U.S. (and the world) immensely. And now we’re about to chuck that out.

During our lifetimes, the U.S. has, by and large, been a force for good in the world. Going it alone and thumbing our noses at our allies in other democracies will provide a few immediate and superficial benefits but the long term cost to our military and economic security will be enormous. And the world will become a much more chaotic and dangerous place.

PS: And to put things in perspective, it wasn’t a landslide or “overwhelming” – Trump got 312 electoral votes, six more than Biden in 2020 but 53 fewer than Obama in 2008. So there's still hope.

11/20/24 08:41 AM

#14643

By Lydia Polgreen

Opinion Columnist

For over a month now, my mother has been pestering me about her missing passport. It was in her closet, she said, and suddenly it was gone. It was expired, and renewing would be easier if she had the old one. She had no immediate travel plans, just a vague desire to visit Ethiopia, the country where she was born and raised, at some point in the future.

As we often do with our elders, I gently brushed off her increasingly insistent requests for help. She lives in Maryland; I live in New York. It hardly felt urgent. She is forgetful. She misplaces things all the time. It would turn up, I was sure.

When I woke up the morning after Donald Trump had been swept back to the presidency by a slim but decisive margin, I was seized by a sudden, cold panic with the thought ‘Where is Mom’s passport?’ What if Trump’s administration made good on its deportation promises and she suddenly needed to prove that she is, indeed, a naturalized citizen of this country? Did my frail, 73-year-old mother have her papers in order should the knock come on her door?

This feeling caught me completely by surprise, much more so than Trump’s victory, which, after all, was a very likely possibility. I am not given to panic. I think catastrophic thinking is almost always overblown. Panic and alarm: These are feelings that a lifetime of observing the world from a sanguine, journalistic remove, always taking the long view, had taught me to extinguish the moment they flared. What good can come from such strong emotion?

After all, we’ve been here before, haven’t we? Trump was president once before, and even though he managed to enact a great deal of cruelty and bungle a pandemic, most of us survived, didn’t we? He was never that popular with voters, but even an uninspiring candidate like Joe Biden managed to defeat him soundly at the ballot box.

Yet as I’ve tried to summon that sanguine self over the past two weeks, she has stubbornly refused to show up. I have a sense that many other people are feeling similarly abandoned by their more resilient selves, instead finding a new, excruciating sense of vulnerability. The sensation has only deepened as Trump’s preposterous cabinet announcements have rolled out and his cruel policy plans for grotesque campaigns of deportation, vengeful prosecution and heedless budget slashing come into view. Despite myself, I am panicking.

It is hard not to ask what clues I might have missed along the way. For instance, why hadn’t I paid more attention to what my mother’s fixation on finding her passport might have told me? She was asking about it in part because she was considering returning to Ethiopia permanently in search of a lower cost of living. Like a lot of Americans, particularly immigrants, she has been very worried about money. She lives on the Social Security and veteran’s benefits my father earned. Groceries are expensive, even for an older woman living alone who doesn’t have much of an appetite. The electricity bill for her tiny apartment, her cable TV and internet: These things seem, as a portion of her meager income, obscenely expensive, never mind the escalating costs of prescription medication.

Another blow came a couple of months ago, when the giant corporation that owns the apartment complex where she lives hiked her rent by nearly 10 percent. When I saw the amount I felt a wave of nausea. I assured her that of course my brothers and I would help, but how would a person who did not have an affluent child with no children of her own manage such a sudden, sharp hike in the cost of something as essential as shelter? And in any case, she hated the idea of being a burden on her children. Looking now at her situation, indeed around my neighborhood and city, our country, this world, I can see that we are clearly on the wrong track.

Thinking about this election has felt a bit like staring into the sun. The blaze blinds rather than illuminates. Most especially at times of confusion and overwhelm, I have found it useful to turn toward similar but more distant stars for understanding. It is useful to ask: Where have I seen this particular shade of light? When have I felt the scorch of this particular form of heat?

My mind instantly went to the first time I became acutely acquainted with my own vulnerability, almost 20 years ago. I was 29 and had just started a job as a foreign correspondent for The Times in West Africa. Many of my friends in New York were envious because I was moving overseas right after George W. Bush had been re-elected, this time winning both the popular vote and the Electoral College, despite the moral atrocity of the Iraq war and so much else.

But all that hardly crossed my mind. I was thrilled to start my dream assignment. I was so insulated from worry by my youthful cloak of invincibility that I brushed aside strange things that were happening with my body. Usually I had a voracious appetite, but I was somehow never hungry. Despite this, my trousers kept getting snugger even as my watch band got looser. A sharp, jangling pain rattled in my belly when driving across potholed streets.

One day at the beach a woman congratulated me on my pregnancy. I was not pregnant, but it was undeniable that I looked as though I was. Shaken from my complacency, I went to the doctor. Within a couple of days I was on a plane headed back to New York, where I would be diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. It was a disease that typically struck much older women, and I had no family history to explain its early arrival. It was, my oncologist assured me, just dumb luck.

Six months later, after surgery and rounds of chemotherapy, I returned to my dream job. But I had been unmistakably altered by the experience. Once, I feared almost nothing. Not in a reckless way, but through the cool, rational assessment of odds. I had once been able to say, when boarding rickety commercial airplanes in impoverished countries, what are the odds of this plane crashing? Traveling by road, I knew, was statistically speaking much more dangerous. Cancer demolished this equanimity. If that random, extremely unlikely diagnosis could happen to me, then anything could. For a time this fear was all-consuming and paralyzing. Eventually, I learned to integrate this new uncertainty into my risk calculus and got on with my life and work.

What that experience taught me is that none of us know the direction or velocity of our vulnerability. It is, mercifully, unimaginable to us. The best-case scenario for the luckiest among us is a gentle drift into frailty and old age. We will all die, one way or another, and so will everyone we love. Thankfully, I have remained cancer free. I was both wildly unlucky and incredibly lucky at the same time.

Trump’s victory feels like a diagnosis, though Americans disagree profoundly on whether he is the disease, symptom or cure. Anyone who has faced mysterious symptoms knows that diagnosis brings its own bleak satisfactions, even or especially if the news is very bad. Cancer, with apologies to Susan Sontag, is an irresistible metaphor for our current moment. If 2016 felt like a fluke, a bolt of lightning akin to a freak accident, this feels systemic. What is cancer, after all, but something mysterious and unconstrained that our own body builds within itself?

America is about to undergo a radical course of treatment. My mother hoped Kamala Harris’s promises to take on corporate landlords, to lower prescription drug prices and protect Medicare and Social Security would help her live a better life. Ultimately, what appears to be at best a very narrow majority of Americans decided to vote for Trump’s hard medicine.

Early signs make it likely that his second term will make his first look like child’s play. With control of Congress and a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, there is little holding back his darkest impulses to punish his enemies and reward his friends. He seems determined to take his slender victory and treat it like a historic mandate to reshape American life in profound ways. No matter how you voted, we are all about to find out precisely how vulnerable we really are.

11/20/24 09:00 AM

#14644

The ny times writer whose column I posted is a former colleague of mine from my days at the orlando sentinel. Really proud of her - moving to the ny times is a journalist's dream. Her column captures the mood of a country in suspense, as reflected in our own conversations of late. However you stand when it comes to Trump we're witnessing one of the more dramatic eras in the country's history during our lifespan. It's entertaining. At least for people our age. I know some younger folks who don't have that luxury when it comes to the changes afoot.

11/20/24 07:58 PM

#14645

David Mitchell

Time out!

I think about a year ago, I played 15 year-old Emma Kok singing "Voila" to a packed outdoor square in Maastricht with Andre Rieu's orchestra. This beautiful little girl has a paralyzed stomach and has to be fed through a tube in her stomach.

Here she is now 16, with another steller performance. "Dancing On the Stars".

Enjoy.

(gotta love those crowd shots)

11/21/24 01:35 PM

#14646

lol on Trump: He sure knows how to pick 'em, don't he? Mr. Gaetz sure got run up the flagpole and back down it right quick.

On another couple of matters being discussed 'round here, I think I'll rely on my journalistic instincts to keep my own opinions out of it and let the experts - and objective research - tell the tale.

https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/34869

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-covid-19-deaths-by-vaccination-status

11/21/24 09:41 PM

#14647

I noticed woke being used as a slur and argumentative shortcut in the conversation below and find it interesting as an example of how pliable language is. "Woke," if you track that word back quite a few years ago, was African American slang, used as a compliment rather than an insult. It meant you were hip, cool - awakened, if you will.

Thar's how I'll take it if somebody describes me that way.

As my mother loved to say, a soft answer turneth away wrath.

It was great advice and I don't abide by it nearly enough. Can't remember the last time I did. Ok ok if ever!

11/22/24 10:51 AM

#14648

https://thefederalist.com/2018/05/01/lefts-war-words-manipulates-mind/

Language has indeed become pliable particularly in the past 10 years. Take the case of pronouns. I was introduced to the new way to identify certain persons by my oldest granddaughter on her first visit home from Ohio University seven years ago. I had asked her how her classes were shaping up and she shared that the first thing the teacher in one of her classes did was to inform the students that they were to refer to her by her pronouns..."they/them". I looked at Olivia and said to her that I was shocked that a college teacher would suggest to her students that they use improper English grammar, as they/them is plural!!

11/22/24 11:16 AM

#14649

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/operation-warp-speed-official-questions-covid-vaccine-purity-worries?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter

Sharing this article today in reference to Post 14646 as it is discusses the ongoing questions about the overall safety of the experimental mRNA shots including former CDC director Robert Redfield's recent comments expressing concern about the mRNA spike protein.

11/23/24 10:50 AM

#14650