Welcome to the vaccination Hunger Games That, dear reader, is a slight variation on what my sibling unit said to me when I related the saga of my attempts to schedule a COVID-19 vaccination. As I have mentioned from time to time, I am an Old Fossil. And, well, the supply shortage of the COVID […]
Joel Eissenberg, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Associate Dean for Research at Saint Louis University School of Medicine. In Our Image: The Ethics of CRISPR Genome Editing , Joel C. Eissenberg, De Gruyter | 2021 Humanity has been busily modifying plant and animal genomes for centuries. It has long been a dream to speed up […]
We made many mistakes in our response to the coronavirus over the past year. One of the most critical was our failure to massively expand our capacity to produce coronavirus tests and masks and other PPE. As many economists including Paul Romer noted last spring, mass testing and wide distribution of high quality masks would […]
Before Science, treating the symptoms of an illness was all we had. Along our way, using trial and error, we found a few things that worked. The big breakthroughs came when we started to look for the causes of an illness. The association of an illness with toxins was deducible. Then, as we knew more […]
House Bill Markup Details Updated Democrats are updating the ACA and detailing the $1.9 Tn bill to meet the Covid Pandemic and the resulting unemployment. The aid goes well beyond the direct payment of an additional $1400/person. The assumption is the released House COVID Relief Bill ends up passing as part of the final American Rescue Plan […]
Coronavirus dashboard: Groundhog Day Today is Groundhog Day, America’s version of the midwinter festival, where people can at least begin to look ahead to the coming of spring in the near future. That’s a good analogy for where we are in the COVID pandemic. Let me start with the ghastly news.First, there have been over 26 […]
Turns out that the best weapon against the COVID-19 virus was, and still is, the N95 face mask. If this wasn’t known from the start, it should have been. We, the greatest nation on earth, the greatest nation that has ever been, were, and still are, dependent on China, and South Korea, for N95 masks. […]
I didn’t expect this to be a series of posts, but there is news since I wrote post number III. There is a partial change of subject, because the news concerns the Oxford/AstraZeneca adenovirus based vaccine and not the mRNA based vaccines which I discussed before. In the UK they decided to delay the second […]
The Good Part of Medicaid Originally, Medicaid filled the gap if Americans could not afford healthcare insurance. Today, Medicaid is filling the gap if people lost income and/or healthcare insurance during the pandemic. If below FPL or 138% FPL, people qualify for Medicaid. Others who were already in the ACA healthcare exchanges qualify for larger […]
First, I want to discuss the evidence on effectiveness of the first dose of the BioNTech Pfizer Covid 19 vaccine. The data from few person – weeks of the phase III trial suggested that one dose was highly effective after 10 days. This is based on 4 of roughly 40 cases in vaccinated participants. Much […]