As I said, without federal mandates, those hospitals likely would not pursued their own ones.
At least a few people donating $5 say they did so just to comment - against him.
Iām not sure thatās worth $5, at least to me. The comments were interesting to read though.
Otherwise, I agree with @BunsenBurner that if this dudeās ābookā he wrote applauding himself is correct he should have plenty of money for his own lawsuit.
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If someone doesnāt answer this by tomorrow I can try contacting my guy. I know heās asleep right now since he has early mornings. Heās the one who told me itās routine - at least where he is.
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I donāt understand Dr. Redwoodās hesitancy either. As someone who has seen the pandemic up close, he has had a front row seat to the struggles of the unvaccinated and has spent his career working in Emergency medicine settings, which makes me think he cares for others, but I canāt make sense of his particular issue. But with the shortage of people in certain critical needs fields, I see more exemptions and exceptions being made for the unvaccinated as time passes.
The way that Pro athletes are currently getting Covid despite being in largely vaccinated groups is making me more nervous for those who are choosing to forgo the protection that vaccines provide against hospitalization.
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Pfizerās Paxlovid treatment for COVID-19 costs the government $529 per course. Pfizerās Comirnaty vaccine for COVID-19 costs the government $40 for two doses, $60 for three. So, whether the government pays or you pay, Pfizer gets more if you get COVID-19 and take Paxlovid than if you get vaccinated with Comirnaty.
Of course, if you get COVID-19 and have to go to the hospital, expect a lot more costs (labor, other drugs, etc.) and medical bills.
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Disclaimer: I am not in medicine. This question gets asked occasionally on the nursing subreddit so I am answering only as a reader of Reddit.
The NIH has these guidelines, see page 59: https://files.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/guidelines/covid19treatmentguidelines.pdf
Many nurses on the subreddit have commented that their hospitalās protocol is typically remdesivir plus dexamethasone. Then there is more stuff when the patient is on a vent.
The problem I would have with your argument is that, without knowing how many people get vax versus this set of drugs, it is hard to say one outcome is ābetterā for pharma. (But I support the effort in principle!)
Last week I was told that during the Delta wave, 40% of deaths were in the under 65 ages. I donāt know where there is an accessible source for this information though - if someone knows a good source, Iād like to share it with my brother. Itās staggering to think about how many people my age have died, and itās heartbreaking to think about their families.
I donāt treat patients so donāt know exactly but there will be meds to support heart, lung, liver, kidney functioning, will exponentially increase if need to go to ICU, vent, ECMO. Meds to prevent delirium, infection. Lots of lines, tubes, increased risk of infection. More meds to treat.
What I am shocked about is once someone gets on ECMO, thereās a good chance they will require a lung transplant to get off, so much so that some places evaluate to see if the patient has any contraindications to lung transplant before being put on ECMO. If there are, thatās factored into whether or not they will be put on ECMO. With transplantation, now youāre on lifelong meds. Pharma would love that.
I donāt have a source but it was widely reported and makes sense because older people were scared - they knew they were at great risk and got vaccinated. When Delta hit, they were more protected, and the wave took hold in the primarily younger, unvaccinated group.
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That is a good point! All the Big Pharma enemies, quite frankly, disgust me!
You have to remember that, before COVID-19 vaccines, much of the big pharma news left negative impressions on the general public:
- Prescription opioid addiction.
- Drugs pulled from the market due to worse undesirable effects.
- Price gouging (e.g. Shkreli).
- General high costs.
- Direct to consumer advertising.
COVID-19 vaccines did a lot to improve big pharmaās public image among most people, although it probably got worse in the eyes of the anti vaccine people.
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Why they donāt link Ivermectin to Big Pharma mystifies me. Merck produces it and definitely qualifies as Big Pharma.
Somehow that one gets a pass though - even with dubious or ādoesnāt workā studies.
The human brain is a puzzle sometimes.
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Iāve said it before, but āBig Pharmaā keeps me alive with the simple antibiotics I take every day to avoid UTIās. I would have died at 19 without them. I donāt know why people donāt get that our extended life expectancies are in large part due to modern meds.
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Because they are cherry picking what is convenient for their argument
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I like what Jimmy Kimmel had to say about it in one of his monologs some time ago:
āListen, if a pharmaceutical company says, āPlease donāt take the drug weāre selling,ā you should probably listen to them. Or you could just go with a TikTok posted by a disgraced veterinarian instead.ā ā JIMMY KIMMEL
Iād put a link in, but I copied and shared that quip with my family back in the day (9/8 if anyone wants to try to find it), so that was my source. I rarely delete sent stuff.
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What many people do not understand is that the most important characteristic for a successful doctor is not scientific reasoning. In fact, many doctors do not really understand why their treatments work, They simply have good understanding of what works, and when.
A doctor is like a car mechanic. Many mechanics do not understand either the physics nor the engineering of what they do, they simply have a really good sense of how a car is put together, and what tends to break down, and what needs to be done to fix it.
That is what you need in a doctor, and that is what you need in a car mechanic.
The problem is, and it is a real problem, mind you, that people are under the illusion that doctors understand science and that they understand the scientific method. They donāt, because that is not really taught in medical school.
The bigger problem is that doctors themselves often suffer under this delusion. It is much worse, since admission to medical school is perceived as being so difficult, and people, including doctors, are also under the illusion that the best way to test for āintelligenceā is a standardized test. That means that doctors, who ran the gauntlet of medical school, and scored highly on the MCAT, are perceived by themselves and others to all be super-smart.
Everybody has done tests in school, and, in school, āsmartā kids are the ones who do well on tests.
That means that, when one of these doctors gets a wrong idea, they often lack the intellectual tools to see where they are going wrong. At the same time, the perception of themselves as being āthe smartestā makes them unwilling to listen to actual experts. āIām a DOCTOR, and these mere PhDs are my intellectual inferiors, and as such have nothing to add to the conclusions that I came to with my towering intellectā. Add to that the arrogance which leads to āif I do not understand this, it must be wrongā.
So this doctor does not understand how mRNA vaccines work, because they do not understand the science behind them, they do not understand how research works, and likely have a giant gap in the knowledge of cell and molecular biology. While a person with a less underinflated ego would either take the time to learn this, or accept that scientific experts know their stuff, Dr. Over Inflated Ego there is certain that he knows everything that there is to know in biology. So he believes that, if he doesnāt understand how it works, it must be wrong.
Bottom line, an MD does not train doctors to run research, or to understand how research works. Doing well on the MCAT and in medical board tests does not indicate the skills or the intellectual tools or abilities to perform original research.
While most doctors may have the abilities, and many acquire the tools for research before, during, or after medical school, these are not needed to get an MD, nor are they needed to be a good MD, especially in many of the surgery fields.
When I se a doctor, I donāt care whether they can do their own research. I do, however, care, that they can understand what the implications of other research is on their treatment options, and that they are not so arrogant that they reject anything that they do not understand.
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A doctor who doesnāt believe in vaccines is like an engineer who doesnāt believe in math, or calculators.
I wouldnāt hire either.
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I remember being in the ER last February with a massive saddle pulmonary embolism and hearing a chorus of coughing from many of my fellow patients lined up in the hallway waiting for an available room. I was hoping to avoid getting sicker by being there. It never occurred to me that I could get infected by a hospital employee. Iām gobsmacked that an ER doctor who sees people gasping for air concludes heās too special to get sick. Okay, fair enough. But heās also comfortable with accidentally infecting someone like me. I watched that interview, and to me he sounded smug.
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A lot of people assume they are the star of the show, just like Hollywood portrays. Stars donāt die and they often āwinā by going against what others are doing.
The problem is thatās Hollywood where everything is scripted. Check it out via Mythbusters and most stars would die quickly from their choices if the movies or TV shows were real.
In reality, none of the three 50+ year olds around here chose to die. They just assumed they, too, were stars - a very human nature sort of thing. They would use their own wisdom and no evil would come to them. Bad things only happen to āother peopleā who arenāt as smart as they are or who are sicker or whatever.
If one canāt assess reality and realize weāre all just one speck on a giant planet with equal odds for anything unknown (pending age or whatever for the pandemic), folks are still going to assume theyāre fine.
In PA 266,482 50-60 year olds have been diagnosed with Covid. 2,266 have died. Seems simple to assume one wonāt have problems, right? 2266/266482 = only 0.85% chance of death using pure numbers. Thatās a little less than 1/100. And yet there are 2266 coffins (or urns) out there with families grieving in our state alone.
Then too, since the vaccines came out, that percentage doesnāt give equal odds any longer. Our state says just 62.9% - 64.4% of 50-59 year olds are fully vaxxed. That leaves 37.1% - 35.6% doing the bulk of the dying. Get 100 similar aged people around (50-59 years old), sort out 35-37 of them, and then pick 2-3 to die. How many of us would really want those odds? Yet many are choosing to be in that lottery because their minds tell them theyāre fine. Theyāre the hero of their story. Deaths come to other people - those who follow the crowd instead of thinking for themselves.
ETA - and thatās just deaths. There are far more with significant health problems from Covid.
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Here is a very interesting article about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his lies about the Vaccine.
How a Kennedy built an anti-vaccine juggernaut amid COVID-19 | AP News
I feel badly for those who are drinking the Kool-Aid.
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