This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It first appeared at The Conversation.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1399155
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1399155
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Look at Denmark, with a better vaccinated population and lower burdened hospital situation, but a 1-2 week lead in the omicron situation. Double plus ungood.
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ER check-in questions.
Vaccinated? C’mon In!
Not vaccinated? Try the Vet clinic down the street. They’ve got plenty of Ivermectin.
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Throw em a bone and ask if they have a valid medical exemption for being non vaccinated.
All religious exemptions can hit the prayer house down the road for their god wills it so crisis care
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Your amendment is accepted.
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And there will be some legitimate need, a valid medical exemption.
“Because I said so” is not among the legitimate needs.
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My offspring’s father-in-law had a heart incident last week. The first hospital didn’t have an ICU bed for cardiac care (small hospitial), so they moved him to large Metropolitan hospital. He flatlined several times during all this. The stats for leaving the hospital alive are at best 2% under these circumstances, but he managed to be a member of the 2%. He’s now alive with a pacemaker and doing well at home. Fortunately his area isn’t hit with big time Omicron (yet). If they were in triage mode, would they have given their all for the old guy with a <2% chance of making it out of there? Not a chance. His remote chance would have been sucked up by a rabid anti-vaxxer. His family is very glad he will spend this Christmas among the living.
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This is what the GQP wanted when it set about yhe strategy of prolonging COVID to blame Biden and CPAC repeatedly cheered for it. These are excusable casualties in a war as far as they are concerned…necessary and justified by the goal of destroying Biden and the Dems and democracy in order to establish permanent minority rules white Xian hegemony.
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Patients from accidents, strokes, heart attacks, acts of violence etc are all higher risk of dying because some selfish idiot won’t take the vaccines but then demands care. The family of these idiots suffer too, because they’re left with hospital bills that can’t pay, funeral costs, loss of job or pay to stay with the hospitalized unvaccinated idiots.
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And they’re left with an unnecessarily empty chair at family gatherings because of the selfishness of these nincompoops.
It isn’t hard, people. It really isn’t.
I published a meme last year:
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I was driving through a semi-rural, tRump-loving, part of Arizona last week when I passed the local hospital. Their electronic sign out front said simply, “Hospital Over Capacity,” in white letters on a red background.
I saw very few masks. It’s unfortunate that fatal cases are only about 1.6% of total cases.
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This is all so sad and basically was unavoidable. TFG has a lot of blood on his hands.
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Donald Trump could have been a hero. Pick someone competent to handle COVID from the beginning. If he (because Trump could NOT pick a woman) succeeds, hog all the credit. If he fails, assign all the blame and throw him overboard. But Trump can’t believe that anyone, anywhere can know more than he does. Here we are.
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I certainly share the frustration your post expresses, I think a more aggressive and systematic policy is in order. Rather than making agonizing triage decisions case by case, hospitals and other health care providers should reserve resources like hospital beds for their normal patient load.
Any resources above that requirement, if any, would be available for the unvaccinated . Furthermore, this policy should be announced publicly periodically so
everyone understands it.
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Heck, TFG would not be TFG if he had just said “Folks. we got a problem coming in, we are working on vaccines. But until then, social distance and wear a mask.”
He would still be in the White House if he had said that.
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Truth. Lying and stealing is fun for him. Or the closest thing to “fun” for somebody thus afflicted.
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The reality is that he was gifted trillions of dollars to spend pretty much at will. So along with telling everyone to stay at home he could have bought everyone a new 80” flatscreen and paid for a year’s worth of cable to keep’em entertained.
The fact that he didn’t win re-election is a god given miracle and a true testament to his short sidedness. But then again if he had any forethought he wouldn’t have spent three years gutting our pandemic prevention systems in the first place.
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NYC Spring 2020.
This film is now on Hulu. It was shown on opening night at the Hamptons International Film Festival in October. It was the first time that some people highlighted in the film saw the film. They sobbed.
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I’m still not ready to give the no vax - no bed order because 10% of the population are functionally illiterate, the next 10% only basically so and there’s no reasonable possibility of triage staff scouring prospective patient’s social media to determine if they’re literate and/or Rump publican, never masking anti vaxxers or not.
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So, the new FDA approved antiviral for covid is a … wait for it … PROTEASE INHIBITOR! What I found even more interesting is that the new drug (actually not new at all) must be taken with Ritonavir, which was one of the first protease inhibitors to come online in 1996 to treat HIV/AIDS. The reason they are using Ritonavir alongside Paxlovid is the same reason they use it in some HIV regimens: to boost the drug and keep it in the blood longer. It is very rare to use Ritonavir in HIV treatment now because we have drugs that are SO much better. Ritonavir causes really bad side effects too … like terrible diarrhea and metallic taste in the mouth.
I wouldn’t doubt that Paxlovid is in fact an HIV/AIDS drug that they tweaked it a bit and slapped a new name on it. If so, that’s wonderful! We can thank the decades of research on HIV/AIDS that we were able to come up with something relatively quick. It took over 20 years for the first AIDS patients to get a good treatment. Many didn’t live long enough to see it.
They’ve been quietly studying HIV drugs for covid for a while now to see if they can be repurposed.
I told everyone way back that they were just going to use AIDS drugs for covid … and, sparring a few tweaks, they are.
Wait until all the GQPrs find out they’re basically taking AIDS drugs for covid. 
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