As part of their debt ceiling demands, Republicans are demanding expanded work requirements for food stamps and Medicaid. On Tuesday, May 16, 2023, GOP House Speaker McCarthy seemed to enlarge that to all safety net programs (read story here). It looks reasonable on its face. But as with many things[...]
Archive for the ‘Health’ Category
April 10th, 2023 - 11:24 pm § in Health
Tiffany Dover isn’t dead
Tiffany Dover, a Tennessee hospital nurse, fainted after receiving one of the first Covid-19 vaccine shots (first video clip below). She has a long history of fainting spells, and the vaccine shot had nothing to do with it. It’s a result of an underlying medical condition. But anti-vaccine con[...]
March 16th, 2023 - 6:28 pm § in Health
Covid-19: New evidence bolsters animal-origin theory
The Chinese government insists Covid-19 didn’t originate in China — even accused a U.S. Army lab in Maryland of leaking it — and previously unseen genetic data from the Wuhan market posted by Chinese scientists last week was quickly taken down. But it was up long enough for western[...]
March 13th, 2023 - 5:32 pm § in Health
Ivermectin advocate dies from pills
“A Rhode Island man who promoted ivermectin died from a common side effect,” Raw Story reported on Monday, March 13, 2023 (read story here). Daniel P. Lemoi, 51, of Foster, Rhode Island (photo, right; obituary here), took ivermectin daily since 2012 in doses meant for cows and horses. It[...]
We still don’t know where Covid-19 came from
“An updated intelligence assessment about the origins of the Covid-19 virus has reopened the long-simmering and unsolved debate about how the virus came to be,” CNN reported on Monday, February 27, 2023 (read story here). “[T]he US Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence an[...]
America’s most partisan judge takes on anti-vaxxer lawsuit against media
Matthew J. Kacsmaryk (photo, left; bio here), 45, is a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas. A Catholic (as are all 6 of the Supreme Court’s conservative justices), he graduated from a private, non-Catholic Bible college that was all-white until 1962 and prohibits same-sex dating by its empl[...]
What to expect from Covid in 2023
Covid 19 is still with us, and pretending it’s over is making Americans more vulnerable. (Read story here.) What to expect in the year ahead is summarized below: Covid-19 is still deadly The virus hasn’t gone away, and with Americans taking fewer precautions, relatively few getting boost[...]
December 30th, 2022 - 12:46 pm § in Health
Research confirms GOPers were sucker-punched by anti-vaxxers
It’s true! Science denial kills! It shouldn’t be hard to figure out that if you jump off a cliff, you’re going to splatter, but lots of gullible Republicans did just that during the pandemic. Flipping off reality obviously is unhealthy, but people do it. Research confirms higher de[...]
Why China’s Covid-19 surge is different
The first thing you have to understand is that Covid-19 in China is very different from Covid-19 in the U.S. and other Western nations. It’s the same virus, and in China as elsewhere close proximity of people facilitates its spread. But it’s much harder to contain in the most populous an[...]
November 23rd, 2022 - 5:03 pm § in Health
Would you pay $87.50 to save a stranger’s life?
Yesterday the FDA approved a drug treatment for hemophilia B that costs $3.5 million per patient (story here). That’s not necessarily a ripoff by the drug maker. Developing new drugs is expensive, especially gene therapies, which this is. And drugs for rare diseases, lacking a mass market, usu[...]