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.

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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. 

More than 800,000 US Covid-19 deaths

802,511 as of Dec. 16th, according to Johns Hopkins

We're now losing ~40,000 patients a month. At that rate, we'll hit a million US deaths by May 2022.

We have as yet no firm idea as to how the emergent Omicron variant will play out. Reports thus far indicate that it is more transmissible than its predecessor Delta, but less virulent.

Mask Up
Published by Steven Novella under Science and Medicine

The COVID-19 pandemic is not done with us yet. We are still in the middle of the delta surge, and while delta will eventually pass, the omicron variant is right on its heels. In the US we just passed the milestone of 800,000 people dead from COVID with over 50 million cases. More Americans died of COVID in 2021 than in 2020, although in 2021 most deaths were among the unvaccinated. The vaccines remain our best defense against this pandemic, which is why it is tragic that there are still holdouts for tribal or ideological reasons. Regardless, it is extremely likely that we will be dealing with COVID through 2022. It is also likely that COVID is now endemic, and while it may fade down to flu-like proportions, we will also very likely have to deal with it for years to come. COVID is also likely not the last respiratory pandemic we will have to deal with this century.

All of this is why masks are still important. We just have to accept the fact that face masks are now an important part of life. At least for the foreseeable future we will need face masks as a layer of protection in health care settings, large indoor crowds, among vulnerable populations, and for anyone who is symptomatic. Walking around in the public maskless, sneezing and coughing from a “cold” is no longer socially acceptable…

Exigencies at every turn.

 

DEC 18TH UPDATE: US COVID DEATHS NOW 806,117

 

We might easily see 825,000 fatalities accrued by New Year's Day. 

DEC 21ST UPDATE

Like most of my colleagues, I haven’t arrived at this moment unscathed. I weathered the brutal first wave of the pandemic, often witnessing more COVID deaths during my shifts in New York City than I saw working in an Ebola-treatment center in West Africa in 2014.

When I was vaccinated against COVID a year ago, I was already exhausted. But better times seemed close at hand. Perhaps soon we wouldn’t have to endure wearing full personal protective equipment for hours on end. I was wrong.

After two years of dealing with this virus—working extra shifts, watching families sob on grainy FaceTime calls while their loved ones slipped away—many health-care workers are already in a dark place. With a new wave of COVID upon us, we face this grim truth: You can’t surge a circuit that’s been burned out. For frontline providers, there’s simply no new fuse that can fix the fact that we’re fried.

Many people are holding out hope for the possibility that the Omicron variant may cause less severe disease. But this is little comfort for those worried about our hospitals and the people who work there: A large surge of even a more mild variant will still produce more patients than our already maxed-out system can handle. Moreover, doctors and nurses will themselves get sick…

 

Click the photo for the Atlantic article link.

 

My grandson Keenan, his wife KJ, and their son—my great-grandson Kai—are now here from Kansas City for Christmas, staying at my son's place. 

 

 

Cousins Kai (now 17 mo) and Calvin (23 mo) yesterday morning. They are really hitting it off.
 

Gonna be a pretty muted time here. Lotta stuff shutting down in the Baltimore area.

 

Stay safe.

__________

 

COVID19 update

It just continues on and on...

 

We're on pace to lose about 26,000 more people by year's end. We'll have well in excess of 800,000 deaths in the US by January 1st.

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