Category Archives: Uncategorized

“The coronavirus presented DuPont, the chemical giant based here, with a golden business opportunity.In January, the company convened a crisis team to figure out how to ramp up global production of personal protective equipment, including suits made out of its patented Tyvek material, which normally sell for about $5 apiece to hospitals. By early March, as the disease began to spread in the United States, DuPont’s factory in Richmond, Virginia, was cranking out Tyvek.”

And

Then DuPont sold 60 percent of the protective gear to Uncle Sam while keeping 40 percent for its other customers. The company refused to say how much the Department of Health and Human Services paid for 450,000 suits, but a spokesperson noted that they sell for up to $15 each, three times the amount they fetched before the virus pandemic.

And

“The two priorities that officials say have not been sacrificed by Trump or his supply chain task force, dubbed “the children” inside FEMA’s headquarters, are private profit and the ability of the White House to choose where supplies go.”

Medicynical note: There were people aware of the risk of the covid-19 epidemic during the period when Trump, Hanrity and a sad sack Medal of Freedom recipient were engaging in magical thinking.

Congressmen (Senators and Representatives) briefed on the epidemic in December and January used their insider information to make strategic lucrative stock sales and purchases.

Some in industry took steps to take advantage of the predicted need for medical equipment and protective gear. They raised prices and worked the government to control the market and limit competition.

And Trump and Jared? Not surprisingly they’re facilitating.

But hey, that’s capitalism. The idea is to MAKE MONEY. Capitalize on insider info? Of course if you can get away with it!

Find a market weakness and take advantage for the benefit of stockholders? Sure! Always work toward a monopoly.

Fair competition? Really? The core idea of capitalism is to work to control……everything.

Sick people? Protecting health care providers? Concern about other producers? Not really an issue……at all.

“CALI, Colombia—Images coming out of  Guayaquil,a port city on Ecuador’s Pacific coast, are as grim as anything the world has seen since the COVID-19 pandemic began.”

“”We are living in hell.”— Blanca Moncada, journalist for El Diario Expresso in Guayquil”

“As the death toll has overwhelmed hospitals and morgues, bodies have been abandoned in the streets or left to decay in houses, cargo trailers, and parking lots. The smell of the exposed corpses sticks like bile in the throat, and flocks of vultures wheel above the city waiting their chance to feed on human carrion.”

Medicynical Note:  Terrible things happening in Ecuador and other countries with limited health care facilities.  Not that we’re doing so well here.

The point is however, that Guayaquil is located near the equator with daily temperatures in the 90’s.  Those who engaged in Trumpian magical thinking and assumed that covid-19 would go away in warm weather may be terribly wrong.

“Everyone says you are supposed to be on your own,” Camacho said, noting Trump’s repeated admonition that states and local health systems cannot rely on Washington for supplies. “Then to have this happen, you just sit there wondering what else you can do. You can’t fight the federal government.”

Medicynical note: Organization? There is none. No one is responsible. VOTE

The worst labor secretary ever. No concern about corporations benefitting unduly but workers, cut them where it hurts. Where did they dig up this loser?? Oh, oh, it’s a genetic defect.

“In recent days, Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, who has expressed concerns about unemployment insurance being too generous, has used his department’s authority over new laws enacted by Congress to limit who qualifies for joblessness assistance and to make it easier for small businesses not to pay family leave benefits. The new rules make it more difficult for gig workers such as Uber and Lyft drivers to get benefits, while making it easier for some companies to avoid paying their workers coronavirus-related sick and family leave.”

Medicynical note: A proud Trump appointee works hard to screw unemployed workers during the covid-19 epidemic. Such actions are immoral but consistent with conservative ideology. Hard to believe but true. VOTE

There are reports that there are large numbers of immune people in California who were infected last fall creating a cohort with herd immunity………that report is REALLY REALLY FAKE.

” “There is zero probability [SARS-CoV-2] was circulating in fall 2019,” tweeted Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist at Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center, who has been tracking the SARS-CoV-2’s genetic code as it has spread. Allison Black, a genomic epidemiologist working in Bedford’s lab, says this is apparent from researchers’ data. As the virus spreads, it also mutates, much like the way words change in a game of Telephone. By sequencing the virus’s genome from different individual samples, researchers can track strains of coronavirus back to its origins. They have been continually updating their findings on Nextstrain. (In case you’re wondering, the strains have nothing to do with severity of illness. They’re simply a way to track the virus’s mutations over time.)”

“Richard Neher, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, told the Scientist that Nextstrain researchers’ work has tracked the virus back to a single source “somewhere between mid-November and early December,” which then spread in China. The earliest cases in the U.S. appeared in January 2020, according to Nextstrain’s sequencing work. Washington state, where the first known COVID-19 case in the U.S. was identified, has at least six strains. A similar analysis of California’s coronavirus cases—which has yet to be peer reviewed—identified at least eight strains in the state, suggesting transmission from Washington state, New York, Europe, and China.”

Singapore and Hongkong are examples at this early time in the epidemic, of a recrudescence of cases.

“Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan — once heralded for early successes in battling the pandemic — are now confronting a new wave of coronavirus cases, largely fueled by infections coming from elsewhere. Singapore is also seeing a rise in local transmissions, with more than 400 new cases in the past week that have been linked to migrant worker dormitories.”

Trump pays more.

“The Dutch company that received millions of taxpayer dollars to develop an affordable ventilator for pandemics but never delivered them has struck a much more lucrative deal with the federal government to make 43,000 ventilators at four times the price.”

“The US Department of Health and Human Services announced Wednesday that it plans to pay Royal Philips N.V. $646.7 million for the new ventilators—paying more than $15,000 each. The first 2,500 units are to arrive before the end of May, HHS said, and the rest by the end of December.”

“Philips refused to say which model of ventilator the government was buying. But in response to questions from ProPublica, HHS officials said the government is purchasing the Trilogy EV300, the more expensive version of the ventilator that was developed with federal funds.”

“The deal is a striking departure from the federal contract Philips’ Respironics division signed in September to produce 10,000 ventilators for the Strategic National Stockpile at a cost of $3,280 each.”

Medicynical note:  The dealmake who bankrupted five companies and their shareholders is at it again.  He’s running the government like his businesses. 

His secret is hiring and listening to the uninvormed and incompetent.

Hard to say if we will ever recover. 

Willful ignorance is no excuse. Trump gutted the US government’s agencies that were to track and prepare for epidemics. He denied the possibility of a pandemic as the disease spread in other countries. His stoppage of flights from China was a farce–400,000 people retuned from China AFTER the epidemic began and 40,000 more after the so-called, widely ballyhooed, stoppage. They were poorly monitored, kept waiting for hours in crowded airport queues on return. His poorly implemented policy actually increased the risk to the US.

AND:

“The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault. The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault. That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the precrisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too. Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not.”

“The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative talk radio is Trump’s fault: They did it to protect him. The false hope of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump’s fault, because he told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time. The severity of the economic crisis is Trump’s fault; things would have been less bad if he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips were buying opportunities. The firing of a Navy captain for speaking truthfully about the virus’s threat to his crew? Trump’s fault. The fact that so many key government jobs were either empty or filled by mediocrities? Trump’s fault. The insertion of Trump’s arrogant and incompetent son-in-law as commander in chief of the national medical supply chain? Trump’s fault.”

PeaceHealth, a multi hospital Catholic healthcare organization in the northwest, like most facilities in the country was unprepared for the coved-19 epidemic. They have experienced severe shortages of PPEs and have compensated by compromising the standard rules of asepsis. The hospital management cites a CDC guideline that allows these bad practices while dealing with a shortage of supplies. This is pragmatic but inadequate and our medical staff is rightly concerned. Denying there is a problem is dishonest and inherently Trumpian.

This is the hospital’s statement. “Caregivers and physicians currently have the PPE they need to care for COVID-19 patients, i.e., patients who require special precautions. However, given the national shortage with PPE, we are using a preservation strategy, recommended by the CDC and supported by our infection preventionists, to help ensure that we can meet the need long term, i.e., should we receive a surge of COVID-19 patients,”

“This preservation strategy is coupled with our efforts to procure and/or manufacture more PPE from local and worldwide sources, including from our community in the form of donations, which are coordinated through Whatcom Unified Command,” Karlapudi said.”

“Those same CDC guidelines allow one surgical mask to be allocated to a caregiver for use for eight hours, provided it doesn’t become compromised or soiled, Karlapudi added.”

The nurses concerns are outlined in the article. They are using one mask a day, some homemade and being asked to reuse them with inadequate procedures to clean them. “In its complaint, the Washington State Nurses Association said nurses were told to re-use and share personal protective equipment such as “PAPR without proper cleaning per manufacturer guidelines” and that “nurses were directed to remove masks before leaving a patient’s room.”

More in the article.

Medicynical note: PeaceHealth could possibly be excused for its lack of preparation, as no one else, including our President responded appropriately. But in their anxiety over criticism PeaceHealth fired an ER doctor who recognized and called attention to the hospital’s lack of preparation. A reprehensible act taken to silence well founded criticism.