Tag Archives: Healthcare

Much of the news from the last few weeks has been about Covid, the Delta version, the Delta versions impact on the unvaccinated, and the lack of resources to care for those with Covid. Medical resource capacity is very low in some states. Hospitals are shipping patients to other cities and or states for care at a great expense. Practicing your individual rights in the United States is protected mostly for White Americans and complained about if...

Prof. Joel Eissenberg: “Zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2 remains the most plausible hypothesis” There’s a saying in research science: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Given what we know about the origins of nearly all viral pandemics — that they resulted from a virus jumping from an animal to a human host (zoonotic infection)–the null hypothesis for the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic should be and was zoonotic. The competing...

Commenter and Blogger Prof. Joel Eissenberg Beginning early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump, Fox and the right-wing GOP weaponized the disease to sow doubt about science and responsible behaviors. One of the narratives taking hold was that hydroxychloroquine was a cheap, easy and safe cure that scientists were hiding in order to profit from federal dollars for vaccine research.But in the fog of Trumpian fake news, it is easy to forget that there...

Coronavirus dashboard for August 16: some (relatively) “good” news, some bad news Recently I’ve speculated in a few places that Delta may be acting as a backfire-type firebreak against Lamdba, which has been getting a lot of press as potentially evading vaccines. Confirmation that this may in fact be the case comes from Dr. Eric Topol who writes: The Lambda variant is going out like a lamb. (from the hard to find pandemic good news...

Why the hell would I go back to 2019 and cite a Nancy Altman complaint about Trump’s Executive Order? Some Introduction There were already issues with Medicare Advantage in $billions of over charges as Ms. Altman cites in her commentary. Secondly, Medicare Advantage is not “single payer” like Medicare (even without creating hospital budgets, setting doctor fees, and controlling pharma) is. We should be looking at improving Medicare to true...

Coronavirus dashboard for August 11: evidence that the Delta wave may be peaking in the earliest hit States My framework of analyzing the economy via leading, coincident, and lagging indicators continues to come in handy at looking at the course of the pandemic. At the beginning of June, I flagged that the number of cases had stopped declining among 5 of the least vaccinated States. By the middle of June, I wrote that Delta was going to be...

Politics and the Pandemic: Why I Think Paul Krugman Is Wrong  Krugman has a piece in the New York Times today that offers an explanation for why Republicans oppose every measure—vaccination, masking, limits on indoor gathering—that could reverse the pandemic.  He says it’s because the Democrats support them and that Biden would take credit for reduced caseloads, hospitalizations and deaths.  Since owning the libs is the guiding philosophy of...

Kamikaze anti-vaxers, Infidel753 blog INFIDEL753, Portland, Oregon, writes at a blog of his own name Infidel 753. Describes himself as an individualist, transhumanist, socialist, atheist, liberal, optimist, pragmatist, and regular guy — it has been my great good fortune to live my whole life free of “spirituality” of any kind. I know Infidel from Crooks and Liars. He posted many of our topics at Mikes Blog Round Up whenever he was in charge....

Antivax Memes  Based on various sources, including the recent NY Times podcast with interviews of vaccine resisters/hesitant, here’s my list of common elements. 1. Assuming the sole criterion for whether to take the vaccine is its effect on your own health—not taking into account whether you may infect someone else.  Antivax people nearly always justify their choice in terms of their perceived risk of getting Covid and the personal risk posed...

The most common proposals for pressuring people to vaccinate involve either vaccine mandates or vaccine passports.  As some of the comments on my previous post suggest, there is another option, viz., making the unvaccinated responsible for the cost of their covid treatment. In theory, this can be done either by denying insurance coverage to people who are unvaccinated without medical justification, or by raising health insurance premiums for...