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[...]
Archive for the ‘Health’ Category
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[...]
Junk food sellers target black kids
Johane Filemon (photo, left), a black nutritionist and mother, insists families of color “are being systematically targeted with ads for unhealthy foods.” She complains junk food ads are everywhere, “on TV, YouTube, social media platforms, game-streaming apps and even mobile educat[...]
November 7th, 2022 - 6:57 pm § in Health
Don’t lick the toads
I remember when hippies tried to get high by smoking banana peels. (Could they? Find out here.) Creative attempts to get high, like computer software, have evolved and grown more sophisticated since then. Enter the Sonoran Desert Toad. The “National Park Service … warned visitors on Fac[...]
Politicians shouldn’t make medical decisions
In this article, I will explain why you should trust your doctor, not a politician, for Covid-19 vaccination advice. Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis is a smart guy; he graduated from Yale and Harvard Law School. But he has more ambition than character. These days he’s slamming Covid-19 vaccines[...]
October 18th, 2022 - 8:25 pm § in Health
Washington’s safest and sickest places during the pandemic
The San Juan islands, as you’d expect, were the safest place to be during the pandemic. Protected by isolation, cooperative residents, an early mask mandate, and a high vaccination rate, the islands experienced no Covid-19 deaths until January 2022, and only 2 total deaths,* both unvaccinated [...]
Why did Covid-19 kill more Republicans than Democrats?
Multiple academic studies have indicated that Republican were statistically more likely to die of Covid-19 than Democrats. The latest, a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, concludes, “Average excess death rates in Florida and Ohio were 76% higher among Republicans than [...]
U.S. life expectancy is dropping
Most Americans assume longevity is increasing, but lately it’s gone into reverse. From 2019 to 2021, average U.S. life expectancy dropped from 79 years to 76 years (see story here). Losing over a million Americans to Covid-19 obviously skewed the statistics. But U.S. life expectancy was alread[...]