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I guess I need to sign up for some more abuse..................
,,,,,,,,,,,,, , not even reprobates like you guys.
They say we want to disband police departments (and that we hate the police): we don’t, that’s a lie. We want to weed out racism and unnecessary police brutality and for those who abuse their power to be held accountable.
They say we want to release all prisoners: we don’t, that’s a lie. We want to weed out racism and ensure the punishments match the crimes and to deprivatize prisons.
They say we want open borders: we don’t, that’s a lie. We want asylum seekers to be given their chance to seek asylum. We want to help people who are coming from unimaginable terror and poverty help to give them the chances we have. We want to ensure children aren’t separated from their parents and that nobody is kept in cages. But we do want proper vetting.
They say we want to take away your guns: we don’t, that’s a lie. We want logical gun control to help prevent mass shootings.
They say we want to wage a war on Christianity and Christian values: we don’t, that’s a lie. We want people of all religions to be able to practice and worship freely.
They say we want to get everything for free: we don’t, that’s a lie. We want to work hard and make sure that healthcare and education are affordable for all.
They say we want a war against traditional marriage: we don’t, that’s a lie. We want people of all sexual orientations to be able to love freely, no matter who you love.
They say we want to destroy or rewrite history: we don’t, that’s a lie. We want to recognize the ugly parts of our past and do everything we can to say “that’s not okay, let’s not honor those aggressors, let’s not let those things happen again”.
They say we want to take away your constitutional rights: we don’t, that’s a lie. We choose to believe science and wear masks and try to prevent the spread of this disease.
They say we hate America: we don’t, that’s a lie. We just recognize our faults and want us to do better, be better.
Stop with the us vs. them.
Stop with the straw man arguments.
Stop with the fake news.
Stop with fox news.
Our position is one of empathy, compassion and logic. Stop believing the hype. Stop with the division.
Just because we want equality for all doesn’t mean we want to take anything away from you.
It would seem that if the SOS of each state could certify the results for their Representatives and Senators (Federal level) they could also certify the results for President and Vice President. So if a new President and Vice President could not be selected neither could the Congress Critters. Am I missing something here?
I do agree this will be the MOST fucked up election up until now. We have been working towards this for some years now in my opinion.
Every day we get more reports of positive COVID tests and COVID “clusters.” The reporting from corporate media and elected officials is often accompanied by breathless admonitions to “wear a mask” and “stay home, save lives.” Political leaders point to alarming graphs with COVID-positive red lines trending up, up, up. They use those red lines to tell us why they continue to keep vital businesses and social activities closed and why our governors maintain a vice-like grip on the one man/woman rule that comes with emergency powers. Every hysterical report from the corporate media is the same – testing is increasing and COVID cases are increasing.
But lately I’ve been asking myself…so what?
The American journalist community seems to have done away altogether with questions about this virus and our reaction to it. The American political community seems to have taken advantage of that fact as they continue to thwart our republican system in the name of “safety.” Every report of increased COVID cases or a COVID outbreak in sports or at a school begins with alarm and ends with scolding.
“See! If everyone everywhere had only worn a mask and stayed home there would be no COVID outbreaks like this.”
We’re not supposed to think about what’s missing here.
And what’s missing is information and context.
COVID has somewhere between a 98.2% and 98.6% survivability rate. If you remove the medically vulnerable from the equation it’s nearly 100%. If COVID had the fatality track record of the various incarnations of the flu or heart disease then that might be cause for alarm as cases rise. That would put us in need of the situation we were originally told we were all entering into – 15 days to slow the spread, 30 days to bend the curve. Those are numbers that certainly would have overwhelmed hospitals all across the nation, given the complicated treatments for this virus.
However, that isn’t what happened. The field hospitals both federal and local governments scrambled to set up to accommodate COVID surges have since been dismantled. Hospital ships have since been redeployed. Some hospitals have seen ICUs approaching capacity (particularly in areas with a large vulnerable population) but most ICUs in the country remain relatively stable. The loss of life is real, and also it is nowhere near the 3-5 million lives lost we were threatened with in the beginning of all this.
So what is the point of continued testing? Positive COVID cases go up, but the fatality rate is only improving. That scary red line is only ever going to go up according to the very basic rules of addition. What we need to know is what it means for that line to go up.
By my estimations, at this point it means exactly nothing.
A breathless report on an outbreak is absolutely meaningless unless we know the results of that outbreak, but every corporate media story only ever stops at scolding. There’s not context, ever. How many people who tested positive actually got sick? How many even knew they’d been exposed? How many ended up in the hospital or on medication? How many succumbed and how many recovered? Did the fatality rate rise after the cluster was discovered? Did it drop? Does it matter?
Of course we can see quite plainly that it does not matter to the easily frightened and those who read headlines but not information. What seems to matter is control, and most likely the election.
When the Obama administration was dealing (or not dealing) with H1N1 there was nary a peep about it in the media. We lost a lot of lives to that flu and apparently it was an international emergency, but with a media that had turned into stenographers for eight straight years most of us didn’t even know it was happening. In fact, there is increasing evidence to show that COVID itself has been on our shores since at least December of last year, if not earlier. We were all living with it and yet life continued as usual. It was a bad flu season, unremarkable in the way that such things thankfully become when you live in an advanced, successful society. It wasn’t until we were told we should be scared to death that we indeed become scared to death…of everything.
Do you even know what happened to all those workers who tested positive at a meat-packing plant in South Dakota? Do you know anything about how many of them survived, succumbed or never became sick at all?
Wholesale testing is becoming akin to yelling fire in a crowded theater. It has become dangerous to the cultural and emotional well-being of our nation. Leave it to a public school system that declares math “racist” to produce entire generations of adults who don’t understand how math works. Testing goes up, cases go up, but the danger keeps going down…and yet here we are. If testing shows nothing but how many tests were given then what is the endgame?
Corporate media doesn’t even try to pretend like there’s some kind of victory in increased testing. It does nothing to cure COVID or stop the spread of COVID. It’s a number on a graph. A number that most people will go on living with and not even notice as soon as the media stops obsessing about it.
That red line is fear, not information. It is useless. It’s time to end wholesale testing. When it comes to testing outside of individual requests we should only be testing the sick and most certainly we should not be quarantining the healthy.
The only goal of wholesale testing at this point should be to serve as a friendly warning to residents- don’t forget to wash your hands, wear a mask if you’re vulnerable and consider limiting movement and physical contact with others until you feel safe to do so.
That’s it.
What we have now is a tyranny of testing.
“I think of Kamala, I would describe her as Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez but smarter and without the bartending experience,” Sen. Kennedy said.
As of Wednesday, some 165,000 people in the United States have died from COVID-19. I have made the case in the American Journal of Epidemiology and in Newsweek that people who have a medical need to be treated can be treated early and successfully with hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and antibiotics such as azithromycin or doxycycline. I have also argued that these drugs are safe and have made that case privately to the Food and Drug Administration.
The pushback has been furious. Dr. Anthony Fauci has implied that I am incompetent, notwithstanding my hundreds of highly regarded, methodologically relevant publications in peer-reviewed scientific literature. A group of my Yale colleagues has publicly intimated that I am a zealot who is perpetrating a dangerous hoax and conspiracy theory. I have been attacked in news articles by journalists who, ignorant of the full picture, have spun hit pieces from cherry-picked sources.
These personal attacks are a dangerous distraction from the real issue of hydroxychloroquine's effectiveness, which is solidly grounded in both substantial evidence and appropriate medical decision-making logic. Much of the evidence is presented in my articles.
To date, there are no studies whatsoever, published or in pre-print, that provide scientific evidence against the treatment approach for high-risk outpatients that I have described. None. Assertions to the contrary, whether by Fauci, the FDA, or anyone else, are without foundation. They constitute misleading and toxic disinformation.
What do you need to know to evaluate these smears against hydroxychloroquine? The first thing to understand is that COVID-19 has two main stages. At the first stage, it is a flu-like illness. That illness will not kill you. If you are a high-risk patient and begin treatment immediately, you will almost certainly be done with it in a few days. When not treated, high-risk patients may progress. The virus then causes severe pneumonia and attacks many organs, including the heart. In this second stage, hydroxychloroquine is not effective.
So, if you are told that hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work, ask this question: In which patients? Does it not work in those who have just started to have symptoms, or those sick enough to require hospitalization?
The second thing to know is that most low-risk patients survive without treatment. Low risk means you are under age 60 and have no chronic conditions such as diabetes, obesity, and hypertension, have no past treatment for cancer, are not immunocompromised, etc. High risk means you are over 60 or you have one or more of those chronic conditions. High-risk patients need immediate treatment when they first show symptoms. One should not wait for the COVID-19 test result, which can take days and can be wrong. Again, when Fauci and others say that randomized controlled trials show no benefit for hydroxychloroquine, you must ask: In which group of patients?
Every randomized controlled trial to date that has looked at early outpatient treatment has involved low-risk patients, patients who are not generally treated. In these studies, so few untreated control patients have required hospitalization that significant differences were not found. There has been only one exception: In a study done in Spain with low-risk patients, a small number of high-risk nursing home patients were included. For those patients, the medications cut the risk of a bad outcome in half.
I reiterate: If doctors, including any of my Yale colleagues, tell you that scientific data show that hydroxychloroquine does not work in outpatients, they are revealing that they can’t tell the difference between low-risk patients who are not generally treated and high-risk patients who need to be treated as quickly as possible. Doctors who do not understand this difference should not be treating COVID-19 patients.
What about medication safety? On July 1, the FDA posted a “black-letter warning” cautioning against using hydroxychloroquine “outside of the hospital setting,” meaning in outpatients. But on its website just below this warning, the FDA stated that the warning was based on data from hospitalized patients. To generalize and compare severely ill patients with COVID-induced pneumonia and possibly heart problems to outpatients is entirely improper.
In fact, the FDA has no information about adverse events in early outpatient use of hydroxychloroquine. The only available systematic information about adverse events among outpatients is discussed in my article in the American Journal of Epidemiology, where I show that hydroxychloroquine has been extremely safe in more than a million users.
It is a serious and unconscionable mistake that the FDA has used inpatient data to block emergency use petitions for outpatient use. Further, already back in March, the FDA approved the emergency use of hydroxychloroquine for hospitalized patients, for whom it is demonstrably less effective than for outpatients. If hydroxychloroquine satisfied the FDA criteria for emergency inpatient use in March, it should more than satisfy those criteria now for outpatient use, where the evidence is much stronger.
I can only speculate about the cause of the FDA’s recalcitrance. Hydroxychloroquine is an inexpensive, generic medication. Unlike certain profit-generating, patented medications, which have been promiscuously touted on the slimmest of evidence, hydroxychloroquine has no natural financial constituency. No one will get rich from it.
Further, it seems quite possible that the FDA, a third of whose funding comes from drug companies, is under intense pressure from those companies to be extremely conservative in its handling of hydroxychloroquine. If hydroxychloroquine is used widely and comes to be recognized as highly effective, the markets for expensive and patented COVID-19 medications, including intravenous drugs that can only be used in the hospital, will shrink substantially.
Whatever the reason for the FDA’s stonewalling on hydroxychloroquine, this much is certain: Americans are dying unnecessarily, the economy is in disarray, and the threads that bind our society together have frayed. I am speaking out, but where is everyone else? Where are our elected officials, including those who are themselves physicians? Some, including Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona, have been discussing evidence of the drug's effectiveness, but where are the rest?
This issue should not be a partisan one. If our elected officials are not willing to pry open the FDA, we must elect new officials. Why are we silent? The time to speak is now.
Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D., is a professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health.
Yeah, but has she accepted? I thought Willie told her not too. Hasn't she taken order from Willie before.
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