Dr. Anthony Fauci

This begins our 3rd season of attendance. Cheryl got an email apprising us of potential lengthy admission delays owing to enhanced security measures in the wake of myriad ongoing death threats aimed at Dr. Fauci.

 

We arrived well in advance of our usual time. The long line was already shuffling around the entire opera house property. Rain ensued.

 

When we finally got to the entrance, TSA airport-style measures were in place: your pockets emptied and placed on tables aside full-body scanners, with additional wanding for those who set off the scanners.

 

Inside, groups of armed Baltimore County Sheriffs Deparment tactical officers stood about, Kevlar'ed up.

 

All pretty surreal.

 

 

Start time was delayed. Sold out crowd.

 

Dr. Fauci was magnificent. You owe it to yourself to read his memoir.

 

 

"Public Health" expenditures comprise less than 3% of the total U.S. healthcare spend. The bang for the buck is in fact dispositive. Yet...

 

THEN, FRIDAY MORNING, I ARISE TO THIS STUPID STUFF

 

 

 

WTF? “TAKE HEPATITAS B SHOT AT 12 YEARS OLD, OR OLDER”

 

My late elder daughter, Sissy, was born in 1968 with undetected congenital Hepatitis-B. Her birth mother turned out to be an asymptomatic Hep-B carrier. I noted in 1997 at the outset of Sissy’s fatal cancer illness:

...Dr. Wren informed us that Sissy was positive for hepatitis-B (HBV), that it was likely congenital—passed on to her by her mother (my ex-wife)—and that it had surely caused her cancer. Given the HCC latency period of 20-30 years, any other explanation—such as picking up HBV during adolescence that could lead to cancer a mere decade hence—was highly unlikely.

This was baffling. Wouldn't it also have been passed on to others in the family, as it had not been? No, Dr. Wren insisted, sexual and/or in-utero transmission, while frequent, would not be inevitable. Sissy, however, had to have been born with hepatitis-B. Nothing else fit.

Subsequent family blood tests would provide both relief and agonizing confirmation. Sissy's stepmother, my partner of two decades, tested negative—as expected, given her years-long ongoing participation in thoroughly screened blood and platelet donation drives. Our son (Sissy's half-brother) also tested negative. Danielle—Sissy's direct sibling—on the other hand, tested positive for HBV antibody (indicating exposure to hepatitis-B), supporting Dr. Wren's assessment of congenital transmission. Finally, my assay; it would throw me into a black funk from which I have yet to recover.

While in Baltimore in early June of 1967, a year before Sissy was born, I retired one night feeling ill and awoke to acute flu-like aches and nausea accompanied by flaming orange eyeballs, yellow skin, and a rash not unlike that generated by poison ivy. Doctors at John Hopkins University Medical Center diagnosed my condition as "acute infectious hepatitis-A." Probably contracted, they mused, during my stay the prior month in Sacramento, California, where U.S. soldiers returning from Vietnam were found to be rapidly spreading the readily-transmitted disease.

I recovered quickly, and thought little more of it, except for the recurrent mild discomfort of always having to reveal my 1967 bout of hepatitis"A" during subsequent medical, dental, or insurance exams. Providers and underwriters obviously paid the matter equally little heed, for no adverse findings ever emerged. My hepatic and serological data during twenty-odd years of ensuing physicals were uniformly stellar.

"No, you had it, but got over it" my physician explained. It had indeed been hepatitis-B, not "A" that I'd experienced nearly three decades earlier. The assays weren't all that precise back then, she observed. Nowadays we can discriminate between viral strains  "A" through "G."

Oh, dear God. Was it me? But...

My therapist would hence recommend that perhaps a grant of self "absolution" was in order: that who "gave" HBV to whom prior to Sissy's conception was probably unanswerable—and was undeniably irrelevant to the task at hand. Yes, but there is somehow scant solace in such counsel...

Had Sissy gotten an HBV vaccination at birth she would likely still be alive today. Donald Trump, go to Hell.

____ 

 

AND, OH, YEAH,  DIFFERENT BOZO TOPIC:
HOW ABOUT THIS BEAUT?

 

 

Next Tuesday? Isn't that Federal Govt Shutdown day?

 

CODA 

I guess we'll see.