For 5 years, I dodged each bullet.
I don’t know the way I managed to beat COVID-19 for thus lengthy, at the same time as household, associates 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 quite a bit for work and journey.
However my luck has lastly run out, and it should 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 constructive.
I figured it needed to be improper, given my super-immunity monitor report.
The second check was much more constructive.
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 exhausting to tell apart between the actual and the imagined.
As an illustration, how can or not it’s true that simply as I get COVID for the primary time, the information is all of a sudden dominated by COVID-related tales?
It must be a fever-induced hallucination. There’s no different approach to clarify why, as COVID surges but once more with one other bugger of a pressure, the perfect software in opposition to 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 really useful by the overwhelming majority of the reputable, non-crackpot wing of the medical group.
Beneath the brand new vaccine insurance policies, costs are up. Permission from medical doctors is required. Relying in your age or your private home state, you possibly can be out of luck.
In the meantime, President Trump fired Susan Monarez, the pinnacle of the U.S. Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention, basically 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 analysis, Trump is demanding that pharmaceutical firms present proof that vaccines work.
My eyes are crimson and burning, however can COVID be fully accountable?
I bought a booster earlier than my travels, although I knew it won’t stand as much as the new pressure of COVID. It’s attainable 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 maintain coming our means, 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 really useful 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 simply noticed a clip wherein Kennedy and Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth tried 50 pull-ups and 100 push-ups in 10 minutes.
I admire 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.
Chopping corners is the improper 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?
Truthfully, 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, President Trump. Health function mannequin just isn’t one among them, regardless of what number of instances he blasts out of sand traps on firm time.
Getting again to chopping corners, Kennedy stated in slashing mRNA analysis that “we’ve 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 firm STAT. “Kennedy is utilizing proof that refutes his personal place to justify dismantling instruments we’ll desperately want when the subsequent pandemic arrives.”
I misplaced my sense of scent a couple of days in the past, however even I can inform you that stinks.
steve.lopez@latimes.com
