For 5 years, I dodged each bullet.
I don’t understand how I managed to beat COVID-19 for therefore lengthy, whilst household, buddies and colleagues bought hit with the coronavirus. Though I took precautions from the start, with masking and vaccinations, I used to be additionally out in public loads for work and journey.
However my luck has lastly run out, and it will need to have been the air journey that did me in. I returned from a cross-country journey with a razor blade sore throat and a cussed headache, adopted by aches and pains.
The primary check was optimistic.
I figured it needed to be mistaken, given my super-immunity observe file.
The second check was much more optimistic.
So I’ve been quarantined in a nook of the home, reaching alternately for Tylenol and the thermometer. Every part is a bit fuzzy, making it laborious to tell apart between the actual and the imagined.
As an illustration, how can it’s true that simply as I get COVID for the primary time, the information is abruptly dominated by COVID-related tales?
It must be a fever-induced hallucination. There’s no different technique to clarify why, as COVID surges but once more with one other bugger of a pressure, the very best software towards the virus — vaccine — is beneath full assault by the leaders of the nation.
They’re making it more durable, relatively than simpler, to get drugs beneficial by the overwhelming majority of the authentic, non-crackpot wing of the medical group.
Under the new vaccine policies, costs are up. Permission from docs is required. Relying in your age or your property state, you possibly can be out of luck.
In the meantime, President Donald Trump fired Susan Monarez, the pinnacle of the U.S. Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention, primarily for placing her personal skilled integrity and dedication to public service above crackpot directives from a cabal of vaccine skeptics.
And following Well being and Human Companies Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s cancellation of $500 million in mRNA vaccine research, Trump is demanding that pharmaceutical firms show proof that vaccines work.
My eyes are crimson and burning, however can COVID be completely responsible?
I bought a booster earlier than my travels, though I knew it may not stand as much as the new strain of COVID. It’s potential I’ve a milder case than I might need had with out the vaccine. However on that query and plenty of others, as new waves preserve coming our approach, wouldn’t the good transfer be extra analysis relatively than much less?
Trump downplayed the virus when it first surfaced in 2019 and 2020. Then he blamed it on China. He resisted masking, and lemmings by the hundreds bought sick and died. Then he bought COVID himself. At one level, he beneficial that folks get the vaccine.
Now he’s placing on the brakes?
My headache is coming again, my eyes are nonetheless burning, and except my Tylenol is laced with LSD, I feel I just saw a clip during which Kennedy and Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth tried 50 pullups and 100 push-ups in 10 minutes.
I respect the well being and health plug, and since Kennedy and I are the identical age — 71 — it’s spectacular to see him within the fitness center.
However there’s one thing that must be stated concerning the Kennedy-Hegseth exercise tape:
They’re dishonest.
Have a look for your self, and don’t be fooled by the tight T-shirts worn by these two homecoming kings.
These weren’t full chin-ups or push-ups.
Not even shut.
Slicing corners is the mistaken message to ship to the nation’s youngsters, or to any age group. And the way is anybody going to make it to the fitness center if they arrive down with COVID as a result of they couldn’t get vaccinated?
Actually, the entire thing must be a fever dream I’m having, as a result of in the midst of the exercise, Kennedy stated, and I quote, “It was President Trump who impressed us to do that.”
He’s many issues, Trump. Health function mannequin is just not one in all them, regardless of what number of instances he blasts out of sand traps on firm time.
Getting again to slicing corners, Kennedy stated in slashing mRNA analysis that “we have studied the science,” with a information launch hyperlink to a 181-page doc purportedly supporting his declare that the vaccines “fail to guard successfully.”
That doc was roundly eviscerated by hordes of scientists who had been aghast on the distortions and misinterpretations by Kennedy.
“It’s both staggering incompetence or willful misrepresentation,” stated Jake Scott, an infectious-disease doctor and Stanford College professor, writing for the media company STAT. “Kennedy is utilizing proof that refutes his personal place to justify dismantling instruments we’ll desperately want when the following pandemic arrives.”
I misplaced my sense of scent just a few days in the past, however even I can let you know that stinks.