Tag Archives: covid

RFK, Jr., Hazard to Our Health

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Someday someone will produce a study that will try to quantify how many people died as a result of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.‘s war on vaccines, medicine and science. Tens of thousands? Millions? It is hard to predict.

Donald Trump, implementing the Project 2025 plan to destroy the federal government, has appointed the worst possible people to run the executive agencies. It is hard to select the most deplorable of the deplorables. But RFK, Jr. is certainly in the top group.

Kennedy is a former heroin addict who as a youth was expelled from two schools, dumped a dead bear in Central Park, has no medical or science degree, and was labeled a “predator” by his own family. He made a career out of being an anti-vaxxer, spreading false information about vaccines. In return for his political support in 2024, Trump named Kennedy Secretary of Health and Human Services. At his own confirmation hearing Kennedy himself stated that Trump had “offered him control of the public health agencies,” including HHS, CDC, FDA, NIH, and USDA.

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We Had This Beat

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More than one million Americans have died of complications of Covid-19. Can you wrap your arms around that number? Does it seem possible? Everyone I know has been touched by Covid one way or another. I lost my mother-in-law. And it didn’t have to be this way.

American is in many ways like Australia. As reported by the New York Times (the link is probably behind the Times’ paywall, but it is excellent and worthy of credit), both countries are English-speaking democracies with similar demographic profiles. In Australia and in the United States, the median age is thirty-eight. Roughly 86 percent of Australians live in urban areas, compared with 83 percent of Americans. Yet Australia’s Covid death rate sits at one-tenth of America’s, putting the nation of twenty-five million people (with around 7,500 deaths) near the top of global rankings in the protection of life.

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A Guest Blog From The ICU

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I know it has been a while since I last wrote. I’ve been dealing with some legal problems which I may be writing about in the future but for now are all time consuming. I do have a half written blog about the resurgence of Covid-19 and the idiots who refuse to get vaccinated which may see the light of day after my court deadline on Friday. But for now I want to share this blog from an Intensive Care Unit nurse which was posted on Twitter. It is brilliantly written and heart rendering. Please read.

I became an ICU nurse at the end of July in 2020, during one of the first peaks of Covid when it was all still so new. I learned how to be a nurse behind a respirator and a yellow gown, amidst the constant beeping and hissing of ventilators that couldn’t support failing lungs. Because I was so new, I had no baseline for what normal nursing looked like; I just had a vague sense that it couldn’t look like this. The unit was bleak and everything we did felt futile, and I realized at some point I felt more like a ferryman to death than anything else. Some people lived, if they never got to the point they needed Bipap. Most didn’t. By the time they came to us they were too sick, their lungs too shredded, kidneys already failing and blood already clotting and so often beyond the power we had to heal. I would watch, feeling helpless, as they would go from a nasal cannula to a Vapotherm to a Bipap, and then when their chests started heaving and they started sweating I knew with heavy dread that soon they would be intubated.

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The Handmaid already has blood on her hands

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The Daily Mail produced the wonderful graphic above to go with a story published October 3, 2020. The photo was taken on September 26 and shows the crowd gathered in the White House Rose Garden as Donald Trump introduced Amy Coney Barrett as his nominee to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, filling the seat which became vacant upon the death on September 18 of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In its October 3 story the Mail reported that nine of the people who attended this event had, at that point, tested positive for the Covid-19 virus. As the picture demonstrates, few of the 100 or so people who attended wore face masks, and all were sitting close together. On October 9, Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert, labeled this as a “Superspreader event.”

An October 5 poll report said more than 9 out of 10 Americans wear a face mask when they leave home. But that clearly does not include Donald Trump, our Covid denying superspreader-in-chief. Nor apparently does it include Amy Coney Barrett, whose nomination was rammed through the Senate on a strict partisan vote and who took her seat on October 27. America’s newest associate justice wants to be sure you can attend superspreader events too.

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Updates and tidbits

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Back from Space

SpaceX’s Dragon Demo-2 flight has ended with the successful return to earth of NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley after spending more than two months on the International Space Station. As I wrote at the time of their launch, this flight marks the return to America of the ability to send humans into space.

After the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2000, Americans who wanted to go the the ISS had to buy a seat on a Russian rocket. NASA began, during the Obama-Biden administration, what is called the “Commercial Crew” program effectively outsourcing this task to private industry. SpaceX is the first to successfully demonstrate this capability. This flight was named “Demo-2.” The first regularly contracted flight of the Crew Dragon is set to take four astronauts, three Americans and one Japanese, to the space station later this year.

As they left the capsule Behnken and Hurley thanks the SpaceX team. The SpaceX communicator said, “Thanks for riding SpaceX.” For America’s space program, a new day has begun.

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